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.

 - The weekend was long and only about 30% pleasant. I’m running short on sleep and planning on turning in early tonight. Hopefully today’s writing-induced adrenaline spike won’t keep me awake. I may take the laptop to bed and try to nail down 300 words of the lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft.

- Tomorrow there is write-club and going through more proofs. February is odly busy on the writing-and-getting-stuff-out front.

All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how serious things are and how much worse they could have been. I, on the other hand, have irrational flashbacks to episodes of the Gilmore Girls in which not-a-heart-attack heart problems were a plot point, which is both totally inappropriate and oddly comforting at the same time.

I am going to be on the Gold Coast for the next week, for obvious reasons. I’ve tried to contact people and cancel all the things that need to be canceled, but I’m putting this up here as a safety net. If we’re meant to be catching up, or if I owe you an e-mail, or if you’re counting on me to do something for the next four or five days…well, it’s probably not happening. Much of my time is going to be spent at the hospital. The rest of my time will be spent working on Claw and doing the things that absolutely need to be done. Everything else has kind of dropped off the bottom of the list.

2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website.

3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that.

4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at a somewhat impressive pile of credit card debt that I’m not happy about. This is complicated by the fact that I didn’t actually use my credit card for much at Worldcon – I just have various leaks in my budget that tend to add up over time. After spending yesterday going through a year of statements and bank records, the three biggest leaks are: certain kinds of grocery shopping; fuel; books. The first two are mostly a problem because I’m very bad at saying “no, I can’t afford that” when, in truth, I truly can’t afford to do things. The latter is a problem because, well, books are my comfort zone. And it’s really hard to say “no” when I’m in a bookshop. I have a plan for paying off my credit card. Given that I’m unemployed and live alone, it’s a two year plan. Part of it involves saying “no” a lot more than I currently do.

Sadly, the first thing I’ve taken off of my list of things I’d like to do, despite the fact that I can barely afford them is any form of Con or travel until the credit card debt is defeated.

The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t blog about ’cause they aren’t much fun. Actually articulating these things was a weird experience for me, since my usual approach is to ignore them as best I can and get on with things, but since that approach has been less and less effective over the last three years I was willing to try something new.

Somewhere along the line we got into the topic of my coffee consumption, and the fact that drinking a cup of coffee is generally my response to stress, boredom, anxiety, being around other people, and those moments in the writing process where you aren’t really sure what happens next. We talked about the various merits and flaws of that much caffeine consumption – some of which I knew (too much coffee in short succession actually makes you tired, but stops you from getting good REM sleep) and some of which I didn’t (it’s entirely possible that the consumption of three cups of coffee before breakfast were having an adverse affect on my concentration). Afterwards I did the math on how much coffee I’m generally drinking a day, and even I was willing to admit it was probably a few cups too many. And since limiting myself to two or three cups a day was only going to give me the space to slowly rationalise my way upwards, I’m sticking with one cup a day and calling it done.

Cthulhu knows how long this will last – I am, after all, a geek and if there’s one thing I know about hanging out with other geeks its that coffee is omnipresent – but the plan is to stay on one coffee a day until the end of October and revisit things.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to stare at the coffee machine and pine for a while. ‘Cause while I seem to be okay with cutting back physically, I really miss the routine of making the next cup…

* basically, for the next ten days, I’ll be running at speeds that make me envy people on dial-up for their swift and decisive internet access. This means that certain things can still be accessed and used (gmail, the back-end of the website, livejournal on days when people don’t post big images), some things are pretty patchy in terms of access (facebook), and some things just outright don’t work (twitter, hotmail).**

** Or I can just do the sensible thing and upgrade my account, get a boat-load more bandwidth, and save $10 a month on the bill.

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.
________________________________________________
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 )

Spokesbear: Time to work.
Peter: Fuck off.
Spokesbear: You’re not sick anymore.
Peter: I feel like someone’s taken a razor blade to the inside of my oesophagus.
Spokesbear: Yes, but you can *stare at a screen without bleeding from the eyes*. That means it’s time to work.
Peter: You’re mean.
Spokesbear: It’s what you pay me for.
Peter: I pay you?
Spokesbear: Yes.
Peter: You’re an anthropomorphised fraction of my own subconscious guilt, why do you get paid?
The Spokesbear punches Peter in the throat with a padded paw.
Spokesbear: That’s why. Next time you ask a stupid question, I’m going after a kneecap.
Peter: I kill you.
The Spokesbear makes a cute face.
Peter: Okay, I don’t kill you.
Spokesbear: I don’t do this for free, dude. Time to work.
Peter: Sadist.
Spokesbear: Wuss.
Peter: Crazy bear.
Spokesbear: Slacker.
Peter: Tyrant.
Spokesbear: Slug.
Peter: How long are we going to do this?
Spokesbear: We’re done the moment you start writing.
Peter: I hate you.
Spokesbear: Fair enough. Consider it payback for all the times you made me listen to your rants about Avatar.

Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 0
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 15/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning.

In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

Needless to say, this presents problems with e-mail (it takes an hour for gmail to load, longer to actually get into a specific e-mail message). If you’re waiting on something, I’ll get back to you whenever the powers that govern such things fix whatever’s wrong or I visit my parents over the weekend and use their computer.

1) Anger

2) Absurdity

3) An Ill-defined longing for longing