Tag: Angela Slatter

Journal

Brain Jar 2.0: One Year On

A cold morning here in locked down Brisbane. The heater is definitely on and the cat has taken up residence in a conveninent patch of sunlight. The writing brain is protesting the return to work like a reluctant starter mower on the last dregs of fuel; it’s a “40% of optimal” day here, first thing in the AM. I’ll get things up and running, but it’s not going to be terribly smooth. … Many moons ago, at the 2016 Brisbane Natcon, I was on a panel with Cat Sparks and someone whose name eludes that turned to the character of Jack Reacher. Cat noted she didn’t think Jack Reacher would work as a woman — a thought that stuck in my head for a long while, and slowly evolved into a novella I’m working on for my thesis. I’ve got the big beats of the story more-or-less locked down at this point, so I’m into the interstitial scenes: negotiations; investigation;

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Talking Writing and Vigil with Angela Slatter

If you’ve been following me for any length of time longer than a week, you don’t need me to tell you who Angela Slatter is and why she’s awesome. She’s a friend, write-club buddy, and force of nature. For everyone else, here’s what you need to know: Angela Slatter is one of the smartest writers I know. Which would hurt less, were she not also one of the most talented and goddamnned hard-working authors you’re ever likely to come across. She’s one of those writers who pulled off the neat trick of having multiple books out before her first novel, courtesy of multiple short-story collections.  She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and five Aurealis Awards, and one can’t help but feel like that haul is just the warm-up. Her first novel, Vigil, was released a few weeks back. It’s outstanding, and you should buy it. Naturally, when I heard it was coming out, I jumped

News & Upcoming Events

Counting Down the Days Until Crusade

We’re two or three days away from the launch of Crusade, the third book in the Flotsam novella series. The following appeared on the Apocalypse Ink blog a few days back, along with the launch date and blurb: Damn, I like that cover. I’d be talking about this being the end of Flotsam and my time with Keith Murphy for a stretch, but I’ve got at least one more short-story to finish before the end of July, along with a handful of other deadlines which keep crowded together in my head, reminding me that they’re due very soon and perhaps I should be working on this other idea a little more, given it’s deadline is also very close. Work is another whole passel of deadlines coming due, thought fortunately they’re not all on my end. We’ve formally put out the call for people interested in being part of the GenreCon program in October, with the July 31 the deadline for expressions

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Networking Tips for Reclusive, Introverted Writer-Types

Thou shalt network, people used to tell me. Connections are how you get ahead in any business.  And me, I’d ignore them. Hell, I was all fuck that shit. Networking brought to mind visions of trading business cards and ruthlessly finding people to help you getting ahead that seemed…well, exceedingly eighties. Right up there with giant shoulder-pads and Duran-Duran. I didn’t see a place for it in the arts, and it sure as hell as wasn’t playing to my strengths as an introverted chap who dislikes meeting new people. Then I met my friend Angela Slatter, who is one of those networking dynamos who quietly sets about connecting the world together. She hooked me up with my first publisher, Twelfth Planet Press, after I told her about the weird-ass unicorn novella I’d written that I figured no-one would ever publish. She introduced me to a bunch of other writers, passed on opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have heard about, and generally taught me

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The First Rule of Write Club is Talk About Write Club; The Second Rule is Talk About The Things You Learned At Write Club

Five years ago, more or less, I was having coffee with my friend Angela Slatter and listening to her complain about the slow progress she was making on her latest draft. Shoot, I said, there’s an easy fix for that. At Clarion Kelly Link mentioned she and Holly Black get together in a coffee shop once a week, then yell at each other write until they run out of words. We could just do something similar and it’d get your work kick-started right quick. And since Angela allowed that this idea may have merit, we started meeting up once a week to talk about writing, eat ridiculous amounts of junk food, and write up a storm. Thus began Write Club, possibly the smartest idea I ever ripped off from another, far more successful writer and applied to my own life. Write Club’s evolved a bit over the years. We eat less junk-food these days. We meet up during the daylight hours,

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Peeps Doing Cool Stuff: February 2014 Edition

Somewhere along the line, I got out of the habit of posting about peeps releasing cool stuff into the world. I’m not sure why, ’cause I got some pretty awesome peeps and they’re doing some very cool stuff, but my blogging habits are arbitrary these days despite my best intentions. With that in mind, lets rectify this oversight, and allow me to recommend the following: Review of Australian Fiction, Volume Nine, Issue Three The concept behind the RAF is actually pretty cool – they grab an established writer, get them to pick an up-and-comer to work with, then produce an issue that features (generally) novella or novelette length work that would be hard to sell elsewhere. This issue features the always impeccable prose of Angela Slatter as the established author, paired with emerging Brisbane fantasist Linda Brucesmith. The upside of Angela publishing here is that I now know that RAF has finally abandoned the god-awful Book.ish ebook platform it used

Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Eight

Late start today. For reasons. Actually, no, I owe you a better explanation than that. So here’s the thing: I’m going to the Gold Coast tomorrow night for an awards ceremony. It’s a work thing, and I’m going as the work representative, and it wasn’t something I’d planned for. This is bugging me. Not in an “I don’t want to do this and work is stupid” kind of way, but in a “why can I not do the things that I want to do” kind of way. And this happened on the day that I realised my estimates for how long this book is going to be will be out by about 10,000 words. I can tell, ’cause I’m eight thousand words in and I haven’t yet hit the end of the forth chapter. The forth chapter is an anchor point. When I set out to write something like this, even if I’m pantsing it, I divide the word-count into

Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Seven

Really? A week in already? It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at this for a week. Two chapters down. Chapter three about two-thirds done now. By rough word count I’m about a quarter of the way through the book at the point I’m writing this (after session 7.1 below); but narrative points, I’m a little behind. Experience says this means the novella will be longer than 30,000 words in this draft and I’m going to spend some quality time with the flensing knife afterwards. I more or less decided to track the process of writing this novella after reading Dean Wesley Smith’s recent blog posts about writing a novel in ten days. I’m a pretty frequent reader of Smith’s blog – I don’t always agree with him, but I’m always interested in what he has to say. Plus I’m interested in gathering data about writing that’s immediately useful, and I really had no clue how I went about writing something or what

Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Six (Write Club Edition)

Today’s Monday, which is my regularly scheduled write-club day with the inimitable Angela Slatter. I’ve talked about this plenty of times on the blog before (as has Angela over at her virtual home), but for those who are new around these parts: Write Club is a once-a-week meet-up with Angela where we basically catch-up, drink coffee, write a bunch of words, eat lunch, and write another bunch of words. It’s enormously valuable because a) it gets a lot more words done than I would ordinarily do; b) it’s good for the psyche to regularly have conversations with another writer whose approach to having a career is similar to mine; and c) it means there’s someone I respect who will give me shit when I’m doing not-terribly-smart things with my writing career. Session 6.1 (12:10 PM – 1:26 PM) Word Count: 1,339 And this is the magic of write-club – a kind of sit-down-and-focus-on-writing that I rarely do when left to

Journal

The Writer in a Silly Hat

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame: Best. Present. Ever. The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.” The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met

Journal

As I drink my celebratory snifter of port…

It’s a cool winter evening and I’ve turned off most of the lights in the flat, shuffling around the study by dim glow of the desk lamp, swaying in a slightly dreamy manner to Bauhaus songs while I poke bits of Flotsam with a stick.  In theory I should be writing right now, but I figure if I don’t sneak off and blog now, I’ll get all caught up in drowning Keith Murphy in the demonic equivalent of a baptismal font and it’ll be another week before I post here again. I’m going to mention, first off, that Angela Slatter is in the process of delivering a very special series of Friday Drive-By interviews focusing on the contributors to the forthcoming Stephen Jones anthology A Book of Horrors. The first link takes you straight to the page she’s set up for it on her website, which means you miss out on the very charming otters that appeared on the post