Tag: Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

News & Upcoming Events

Un-Moroccan Chicken and Un Lun Dun

It’s Monday morning here, but due to the vagaries of international timezones I suspect there will not be much of Monday left by the time Say Zucchini, and Mean It arrives in my in-box. Such are the drawbacks of living on the other side of the world, I suspect. Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan. It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline. # There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog,

Works in Progress

Shadows

So there’s a  shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by

Journal

Sunday Morning

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life. If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form.  It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel. The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at

News & Upcoming Events

Blatant Self Promotion: February

Okay, since February is deveoted to the Gauntlet, I’m just going to cram a whole months worth of blatant self promotion into the one post. Strap yourselves in, ’cause it looks like February is a busy one: – Descended from Darkness volume II is out, collecting another twelve months of short fiction originally published in Apex Magazine (including my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament). For a limited time you can pick this up with the first Descended from Darkness collection (which included my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) for only $25US. – My story Briar Day is live over at the Moonlight Tuber site, as part of the line-up of the “Moonlight Tuber #2 – Captain Homonculous Dines with ‘That Irascible Mizzen Mast’ – Part Three” issue of the zine that’s available for online reading or as a downloadable PDF. I think this officially marks editor Ben Payne as the man whose acquired more of my short fiction

News & Upcoming Events

Reviews and Other Stuff

Today has been long and slightly odd and overburdened with irritating moments and it involves me cutting back on coffee (which is somewhat akin to saying “flee, mortals, for I will lay waste to your world”), so for obvious reasons there will not be much by way of bloggage this evening. So instead I’m going to point you towards Narelle Harris’s review of Bleed and another review of the same over on Averagely Inadequate. And if you remember the mysterious squee and snoopy-dance of acceptance that I was being very vague about just prior to Worldcon, there might be a clue as to what I was freaking out in the last paragraph of today’s post on Jonothan Strahan’s Coode Street blog.

News & Upcoming Events

Portrait of an Author with a Shiny New Book

It’s the wee hours of the morning on the second day of Aussiecon 4 and I’ve had far to little sleep, so I’m going to limit myself to firing up the laptop webcam and posting this: New Book! Wooo! It Exists! Now I’m off to shower and prepare for another day of geeky awesomeness.

News & Upcoming Events

2 Days ‘Til Worldcon

And by this time tomorrow I’ll be happily ensconced in our Melbourne digs, surrounded by a bunch of my writerly peeps. This promises to be awesome – hail to the peeps. 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,

Journal

7 Days ’til Worldcon

Man, I’ve been all over the place for the last week. Good stuff happened and bad stuff happened and my emotional state bounced around like one of those 20-cent rubber crazy balls you used buy from the machines out the front of the grocery store, but there was rarely a moment where stuff happened all on its own and demanded no real engagement on my part. Fortunately the last three or four days have trended towards the good rather than the bad, but I suspect any seven day period that starts with your parents ringing from the other side of the world and saying “we were almost killed in a car crash” is going to struggle to come out ahead on points. 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

News & Upcoming Events

Bugger subtlety – buy my new book!

So this morning my phone beeped away to remind me that there’s but three weeks to Worldcon, which triggers a metric buttload of anxiety in me because I’m so not ready for Worldcon to be three weeks away yet. Especially since it marks the imminent arrival of house-guests in two weeks, my parents return to the country in one week, and the attendance of the most excellent Trent Jameison’s book launch in twenty-four hours. The hours, they are running away from me, and it is only be checking the calender twice daily that I remember what I’m meant to be doing at any given time. In any case, today’s entry on the calender demands I remind of two things you may wish to swing by the dealer’s room and pick up at Worldcon (if you’re in attendance) or pre-order for the home-delivery goodness (if you’re not). Item the First: Bleed So that unicorn book I wrote? A bunch of people were

News & Upcoming Events

Bleed available for pre-order

So yesterday the various forms of mail brought in my contributor copies of the new Horn layout, my ninth rejection of the year, and the following news: Bleed by Peter M Ball Cover art by Dion Hamill, design by Amanda For ten years ex-cop Miriam Aster has been living with her one big mistake – agreeing to kill three men for the exiled Queen of Faerie. But when an old case comes back to haunt her it brings a spectre of the past with it, forcing Aster to ally herself with a stunt-woman and a magic cat in order to rescue a kidnapped TV star from the land of Faerie and stop the half-breed sorcerer who needs Aster’s blood. Ten years ago Miriam Aster learnt a simple lesson: when a faerie asks you to kill someone, the worst thing you can say is sure. Today she’s about to learn that worse things can happen when the past refuses to stay behind

Works in Progress

July Plans

And lo, the edits are sent back to the editor and the novella once titled Cold Cases is going through the various transmogrifications it goes through to become a book titled Bleed instead. Various things contribute to the feeling of done-ness – seeing concept sketches for the cover art, finally settling on the new title, hearing that the ISBN-type stuff is being put into motion. There will still be work to go, presumably edits and proofs, but this book has officially evacuated the portion of my brain that requires tinkering and subconscious thought. It’s no longer a project. Which means it’s time to get started on what comes next: rewriting Black Candy. And since I’m house-sitting this month, taking care of the cats and chickens that belong to some friends who have dissappeared into the wilds of Europe, I’m going to try and pack the bulk of the rewrite into July. Once more into the breach and all that.

Works in Progress

Almost Done

I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected. Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it. But it appears it’s very close to