New Book! Wooo! It Exists!

Now I’m off to shower and prepare for another day of geeky awesomeness.

And tomorrow there is Worldcon.

My publisher’s twitter stream also informs me that they’ll be bringing the last of their Horn stocks to Worldcon. I have no idea how many books this may be, but should they run out of stock at the con it means the second print run has completely sold through. This is pretty good news, unless you happen to be at worldcon, in which case I may find myself clutching people by the lapels and asking “do *you* own a copy of Horn yet? Do ya? You should totally buy one!” in a slightly manic voice.

I shall try to retrain myself, really I shall, but I make no promises. I was barely able to contain myself when the goal was “convince lots of people to buy copies of Bleed, for it is new and shiny and avialble for the first time at Worldcon”. While I’m usually pretty good at restraining my default level of writerly craziness in public, something may well come loose in my head when I finally see both books sitting next to each other in the dealer’s room.

See you in Melbourne, should you be coming along.

Victory was mine, however, for after five weeks of hammering my head against the brick wall I finally found the problem with the opening chapters of Black Candy. It’s involved much deleting and rewriting, but I suspect that this will be the final rewrite I do before launching into the (much easier to write) middle of the book.

In other news, I suspect updates will be scarce for the next two weeks (’cause, like, Worldcon, yo!). See everyone on the other side and all.

I’m in a vaguely half-asleep state this morning, largely because I started reading Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue just before going to bed last night and it’s one of those books where the temptation to read just one more chapter is terribly, terribly strong. 

Were I a less lazy blogger there would be a whole post here about yesterday’s adventure to Pulp Fiction, whereupon my plan to buy just one or two books quickly fell apart. Fortunately, I am a lazy blogger today. That’s what Sunday’s a for.

Today there is writing. And write-club. And bugging the inimitable Ben Francisco about co-writing a YA novel, ’cause there are some writerly shenanigans that work better when they’re shared with other people.

And lo, when I opened my PO Box, my faith in the postal system was rewarded with this:

Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories in all its fabulous, hard-covery glory. And it is freakin’ glorious – a hardcover and with a placeholder ribbon that’s packed to the gills with stories that rock the freakin’ casbah. Plus it’s one of those books that looks just as good without the dust-jacket:

And, as with all good books that enter the house, it was in my hand all of six minutes before the Spokesbear clamoured to start reading:

Personally, I suggest you head head over to  Tartarus Press and snag one of the remaining copies before the limited run of 300 are gone. ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m just going to torment you with my copy for the rest of your days.

Still, among the cool stuff:

- Doing edits and contracts for my short story, L’esprit de L’escalier, which will be coming up at Apex Magazine in the future. Astute readers may put two-and-two together and realise this was the source of much post-acceptance dancing two weeks back.

- Kicked off a whole new round of snoopy dancing, for it appears that I’ve sold a third story for the year. Once again I err on the side of vagueness until details firm up, but suffice to say that this one is rated pretty damn high on the awesomesauce scale.

- Had the yearly rejection count climb to a tantalising 19 rejections, which has spurred me to get back into the wordmines and get some new stories done.

- Picked up the inimitable Ben Francisco from the airport, whereupon there was nattering about writing and the eating of cassoulet and the planning of literary hi-jinx in the lead-up to the con.

In other news I’m still prodding my brain and saying “yo, you ready to acknowledge that there’s a book with our name on it coming out next week” and the brain continues to respond with a surly growl and a denial. I suspect I’m saving my “ZOMG…BOOK!” type squee until there’s a copy in my hands, whereupon nearby dogs will probably register my joy. I also have to figure out what I’m going to read in my reading slot at the con (logically it should be Bleed, but there’s always something a tad iffy about me reading Aster’s interior monologue); I was tempted to go with the aforementioned L’esprit de L’escalier, but then I realised I had no idea how to pronounce the title without mangling the French and thus it was shelved for another time.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 19/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August )

Finding the difference: Australian SF vs the rest of the World
Australia has a strong and vibrant speculative fiction industry and community – but how does it differ from the SF produced in the USA, the UK, or other nations around the world? Is there a unique cultural identity to Australian SF – and if there is, what are the most common elements?
Lucy Sussex, Peter M. Ball, Tehani Wessely, Jack Dann
Thursday 1700 Room 217

What can the mystery teach science fiction?
Mysteries and crime novels remain overwhelmingly popular, and boast a literary history at least as rich as that of science fiction. What can the mystery genre teach writers of speculative fiction? How can the two genres intersect? In an imagined world of high technology or powerful magic, are the conventional narrative tricks and twists of the mystery story even possible?
Don A. Timm, Alastair Reynolds, Sean Williams, Peter M. Ball, Jack Bell
Friday 1700 Room 204

Novellas: The perfect format
Shorter than the novel, longer than the short story: the novella (also the novelette) is one of the more difficult lengths of fiction to write and certainly to sell – but it just might be the best format for science fiction there is. A look at the novella, the sorts of stories you can tell within the form, and how it straddles the line between the short story and the novel.
Robert Silverberg, Peter M. Ball, Alan Baxter, Keith Stevenson
Sunday 1200 Room 203

Sun 1400 Rm 207: Reading

Of course, the real answer to “where will I find Peter during the con” is almost always going to be “he’s at the bar,” so when in doubt look there.

Elections are always a time of fear for me. I’m a fairly moderate lefty whose spent most of my adult life enduring the seemingly endless reign of the Howard Years when the country routinely decided they preferred a very different ideology at work running the country. And I’ll be honest here – in most of those years I could at least respect the country’s choice on some level. One of the things that always struck about Howard was that he was the kind of idealist that people seem to think of as the exclusive domain of the left; he just idealised a very conservative viewpoint. Even when I railed against him for being an evil fucking bastard, there was at least the belief that there was some kind of thought and passion happening there.

I can take no such comfort should the Coalition win this election. There’s a visceral dislike there, but with the number of people on my blog roll banging on about Bret Easton Ellis’ trip to Australia recently I’ve finally put my finger on why he bothers me so much – I can’t shake the feeling that the main difference between Tony Abbot and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is that one of them bangs on about Huey Lewis and the News quite a bit and the other has a 50% chance of being PM of Australia by tomorrow morning.

I could live with a Right-wing idealist. I could live with a ring-wing idiot being managed by folks in the background. For a few months last year I was actually looking forward to an election that pitted Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull against each other, which was possibly one of the few combinations of major party candidates that meant I’d go into the election with a feeling of excitement rather than reticence. It’s the prospect of a national leader whose using a veneer of civility to cover a heart of grade-A, whack-a-mole crazy that’s filling me with fear at the moment, and I suspect that the traditional Election Night drinking will start any minute now.