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 Karen Healy (Allen & Unwin)
• Under Stones by Bob Franklin (Affirm Press)
• Bleed by Peter M. Ball (Twelfth Planet Press)

EDITED PUBLICATION

• Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears, edited by Angela Challis & Marty Young (Brimstone Press)
• Scenes From The Second Storey, edited by Amanda Pillar & Pete Kempshall (Morrigan Books)
• Dark Pages 1, edited by Brenton Tomlinson (Blade Red Press)
• Scary Kisses, edited by Liz Gryzb (Ticonderoga Publications)
• Midnight Echo #4, edited by Lee Battersby (AHWA)

SHORT FICTION

• “Bread and Circuses” by Felicity Dowker (Scary Kisses)
• “Brisneyland by Night” by Angela Slatter (Sprawl)
• “She Said” by Kirstyn McDermott (Scenes from the Second Storey)
• “All The Clowns In Clowntown” by Andrew J. McKiernan (Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears)
• “Dream Machine” by David Conyers (Scenes from the Second Storey)

The winners of the Australian Shadows Award will be announced on 15 April 2011.

#

Next week I start tutoring for one of the University of Queensland’s writing subjects. It’ll be the first time I’ll have stepped into a university for about two years, and the nerves have already set in. I can tell because I keep having nightmares and waking up in the middle of the night, unsure of what’s going on but unable to get back to sleep.

This isn’t unusual. I always have nightmares the week before I start teaching. Occasionally they involve teaching Hamlet being performed by Gnolls, and being unable to explain exactly why this is brilliantly post-modern to a group of students. Thankfully, they  goes away once the classes actually start.

- 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 than any other editor.

- The teaser page for Electric Velocipede 21/22 is live, complete with the opening teaser for my story Memories of Chalice in addition to the works of such fine writers as LL Hannett.  The issue is just $12 US and features a small horde of writers I’m excited to be sharing a table of contents with.

- There are also reports that we’re about a week away from one of my short stories making an appearance in Daily Science Fiction, a magazine that delivers short stories to your inbox every workday. This stuff keeps me sane at the day-job, giving me something to read over my mid-morning coffee, and it’s FREE TO SUBSCRIBE. There should be a web-version of the story eventaully, should you prefer to keep your inbox free of fiction, but that usually comes after the email version is out. If you’re on the fence, I recommend taking a look at the February line-up which includes folks such as Cat Rambo and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

- The February issue of Locus is out with its recommended reading list for 2011, which named a whole host of Australian SF work including TPP’s Sprawl anthology in the best original anthologies section and stories by me, Angela Slatter (twice!), and Cat Sparks in the short-stories list.

- Bleed scored itself an 8 out of 10 stars in a review over on Scary Minds. To quote: Bleed rocks along at a fair pace, Ball doesn’t allow the narrative to lag at any stage, and you will be dragged into the shenanigans unfolding. There’s a mystery to be solved, plenty of plot twists, and the sort of conclusion that no doubt bodes well for another book in the series. Be careful here Ball’s series is habit forming and I’m already looking at getting my grubby mits on Horn sooner rather than later. And let’s keep our minds out of the gutter here okay!

Which, lets face it, is more or less what I was aiming for. The full text is available over on the Scary Minds review site, and I recommend checking out their review of Eeek! (which features work by my comrade in gauntleting, Jason Fischer) as well. Bonus sidenote: The Bleed review does mention some confusion with finding the book over at the Twelfth Planet site, which is mostly because they’re an older link (Twelthplanet.wordpress.com) that connects to an earlier edition of the site. Twelfthplanetpress.com should make your life easier, should you be, you know, inclined to go order yourself a copy.

- Back in December I did an interview with Dan Abnett for the Auscon podcast. Actually, I did two interviews, largely because the first one didn’t record properly and Dan Abnett was nice enough to come back and re-record things. Not really February pimpery, I know, but since it happened during the blog haitus of December it’d largely forgotten to mention it before now.

Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine is out

This is always a source of joy, largely ’cause Shimmer is one of the magazine I consistently subscribe too regardless of financial circumstances. And to quote from their webpage: Issue 12 contains wonders and marvels, from Peter M. Ball‘s punk-not-emo teenage werewolf story, to Josh Storey‘s gorgeous take on the tale of Orpheus, to Monica Byrne‘s story of stigmata in a colony on a distant planet. We’ve got an imaginative reinterpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wizard of Oz, and a sweet little zombie love story. And more! We packed 9 stories into this issue.

What they don’t actually mention in that excerpt is that Issue 12 also contains the inimitable Ben Francisco’s Crepuscular, which takes the concept of a firefly and a magical snowman and goes off in a totally unexpected and heartbreaking direction and may well be one of my favourite stories Ben’s written over the last couple of year.

Pick it up for $6 an issue in hardcopy and $4 an issue in PDF

Or, if you’re still wondering if Shimmer is your thing, hie yourself over here and check out the free bonus story for this issue.

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.

And since we’re talking Apex, I’m going to take the opportunity to re-post something that the Apex Chief Alien Jason Sizemore put up on their blog recently. It interests me for two reasons: firstly, because Apex has been pretty good to me as a writer. This is the third of my stories they’ve published, and the first two have managed to sneak onto the occasional recommended reading list and awards shortlist, but I was a fan of the magazine long before I was published there. I subscribed, back when they were a semi-pro hardcopy magazine, and I’ve signed up to be a minion now that they’re a pro-level online market.

But the second reason this interests me is simple: the internet is changing the way people read and consume, and all too often it’s easy to forget this. The internet increasingly makes us passive in our consumption – these days I rarely even go looking for specific websites, since the combination of Twitter, Facebook, and my RSS feed pushes more information at me on a daily basis than I can process. And as a reader of short fiction, I’m acutely aware that passive consumption without thinking about the means of production will inevitably lead to less short fiction for me to enjoy. When I first read Jason’s post it immediately make me think about the relationship I have to many of the short fiction venues I enjoy, and hopefully it’ll give you a moment to pause and reflect as well.

And if you choose to drift over to the website and click on the big alien headed “become a minion” on the bottom of the page , well, that’d just be icing on the cake.

Becoming an Apex Magazine Minion
(Originally posted on the Apex Blog by Jason Sizemore)

One of the most common questions I receive has to do with Apex Magazine and where do I find the money to keep it operating. They see that we pay five cents a word. They see that we buy great art each issue. They see that the published products are polished and edited. You’ll find few typos in our stories (and if you do, feel free to call us out on it, I’d prefer fixing it than leaving it for the world to see like some ugly cold sore). They want to know how do I fund Apex Magazine.

The answer is simple. Straight from my pocket.

How much is this exactly?

It doesn’t take a math wizard to get a close estimate of how much money is spent running Apex Magazine. Copy and pasting Nick’s story into Word gives us a value of approximately 2100 words. Doing the same for Theodora’s story and you’ll get around 7200 words. That alone is $465 in author expenses. The poem was $5 and we paid $25 for the VanderMeer reprint. All told, $495 in author expenses.

I’m not going to divulge what we paid the artist, but I can give an honest estimate of $50 per issue for the art.

Each issue costs on average $500-$600 to produce.

Even with my prior post asking our readers to consider becoming a minion, the magazine has earned $122.36 this month through donations, minion memberships, and digital copy sales. And this is an exceptional month. Most months the amount is $40-$60.

I love financing and producing Apex Magazine. But I sure could use an assist. Even if the amount earned was just half the cost to produce it would be a great help.

I don’t ever foresee me ending Apex Magazine. I love working with writers, artists, and editors too much for that to happen. Yet, painful concessions would have to be made eventually. Our word limit would decrease. Pay would drop below the professional rate. No more beautiful art to adorn each issue. Fewer reprints. No poetry.

This isn’t one of those patented Internet ultimatums: ya unappreciative bastards pony up or I close the show. This is me asking for some financial aid to help Apex Magazine remain a top-notch pro publication. I know it can be done because I know our site visit numbers. Since June, 2009, they have doubled. Over a 30 day span, a single story on Apex Magazine receives an average of 2000 unique visitors (and draws about 10 a day as long as it’s available).

Being a minion grants you benefits and rewards. You will receive each issue (in seven different eBook formats) a week before the content is posted online. You get a discount code for the Apex Store. There are a number of other benefits, as well. Check them out here.

If you’ve made it this far, well, thank you for your kind attention. But shouldn’t you be clicking the link above to become a minion? Get to it, already!

Other good things:

- I met Rob Shearman early in the con and he misheard my name. This, in and of itself, isn’t the stuff that squee is made of, but when I later bought a copy of his short story collection and he was doing the signing I was given the opportunity to tell him I was a Peter, not a Paul. Still not squee-worthy? Bare with me, for the next thing that happened was awesome. Rob Shearman glanced at my namebadge and was all “Wait, Peter M Ball? The unicorn porn guy? I really liked Horn” (actual wordage may be slightly different due to the vagaries of memory, but this was close). Rob then drew a picture of a Dalek on the inside cover of his book, and I was filled with nerdy joy.

- I won the Best New Talent category at the Ditmar Awards. I also managed to miss the ceremony, so there were several confusing conversations with people afterwards where they tried to explain what’d happened and I was all like, “wait, what? You’re kidding, right?”

- Bleed is out, and apparently selling well. People actually game to my reading yesterday, some of whom went and bought copies of the book afterwards.

- Met a whole slew of new folks, including the awesome Narelle Harris (who was recruited to my first panel early in the convention), Jennifer Brozek (who fished my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens out of the slush for Apex), and Will McIntosh(who I got to chat too early in the con, and was such a nice guy that I was really, really pleased when he won a Hugo last night). Caught up with lots of old friends too, and spent part of a dinner conversation convincing Dirk Flinthart to get his act together and make an e-book version of Brotherly Love available (or, at least, take steps to get it reprinted).

More to come when I get home. Or not, as the case may be.

- If you’re not following the Drive-By Interviewsover at Angela Slatter’s blog, well, you really should.

- Ditto The Coode Street Podcastfeaturing Jonothan Stahan and Gary K. Wolfe. There’s something immeasurably pleasurable about getting to hear two very knowledgeable people talk about the history of SF, publishing, reviewing, and (perhaps most importantly) the BOOKS YOU DON’T NEED TO READ in order to understand out field. After listening to one of their earlier episodes, I feel myself utterly absolved of having to finish the rather dire Princess of Mars.

- And, hell, lets throw out the rather fine fortnightly podcast from the Galactic Suburbia crew, for I’m a fan of that too.

- Also, if you’re interested in scoring a free copy of the rather fine zombie novella, After the World: Gravesend, you might try the zombie haiku contest that author Jason Fischer is running at the moment. Entries close this Thursday.

- Right, okay, so I’ve got the pimp hat firmly on at the moment. What can I say – the internet is full of peeps doing interesting things of late.

On the plus side, I was apparently shortlisted for some Ditmar awards while I was away, which is kind of cool. Plus there’s a seemingly endless parade of friends on the short-list as well, which is always a good thing.
________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 14/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

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 you.

Bleed will be available at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, September 2010 and is now available for preorder.

There might have been squee about that around these parts. The spokesbear gets excitable. You know how it is.