Tim Jones's Blog, page 57
January 1, 2010
A Book A Week: What I Read In 2009
I kept track of my 2009 reading using LibraryThing. It turns out I read a book a week in 2009 - excluding the many books I consulted as part of research for my novel, and a few I read for work. With rough divisions by genre, they were:
1. Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel (cartoons)
2. The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Hershman (short stories)
3. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (novella)
4. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron's Daughter by Benjamin...
December 23, 2009
And The Winner Is ...
The winner of the signed copy of Nalini Singh's UK edition of her novel Angels' Blood is blog commenter Edna (see my interview with Nalini). Congratulations to Edna, and thanks to everyone who commented and tweeted in response to the interview and the competition - a special thanks to Nalini for her responses to comments.
That about wraps things up for 2009. Until about the end of January 2010, I'll drop down to my "summer schedule" of roughly one blog post per week. But I have already lined u...
December 20, 2009
Book Review: The Last Church, by Lee Pletzers
New Zealand horror writer Lee Pletzers' The Last Church does the job of a good horror novel (or, I suppose, any novel): it keeps you turning the pages, wanting to know what happens next, and hoping that at least some of the characters - not to mention the world - will make it out alive at the end of the story.
And the fate o...
December 16, 2009
An Interview with Nalini Singh
Nalini Singh is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Psy/Changeling and Guild Hunter series. Born in Fiji and raised in New Zealand, she spent three years living and working in Japan. Now back home in New Zealand, she is currently at work on her next Psy/Changeling novel.
You can see travel photos, read excerpts and find behind-the-scenes info on her books on her:
Website: www.nalinisingh.com
Blog: www.nalinisingh.blogspot.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/nalinisingh
Twitter:
December 9, 2009
Summoning, Revised
In 2006, I responded to a call for submissions to Poem, Revised, an anthology which, as Amazon puts it, is
An in-depth look at the writing processes of 54 poems, each by a different modern author, is provided, complete with early drafts, subsequent revised versions, and short essays from the poets themselves revealing how and why they made specific changes
I wrote my piece on the revision process for my poem "Summoning", first published in Strange Horizons in 2006 and subsequently collected in...
December 6, 2009
You Wanted The Best, You Got The Best!
Well, you got one of the best, anyway. The New Zealand Listener has included Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand in its list of the 100 Best Books of 2009.
This is good news not only because it is welcome recognition of science fiction poetry in general and this anthology's contributors in particular, but also because it should increase the public profile and the sales of the book. Plus, after five years' effort to get Voyagers published, this is a very welcome vindication!
You...
December 2, 2009
An Interview With Sally McLennan
Sally McLennan says she writes strange fairy tales and lives stranger ones. She was once the tooth fairy of a small mountain town and she has been the editor of two American health care newspapers (The Medicare Pathfinder and The Medicare Navigator). She has lived in Australia and Thailand. Her time in Thailand gave her the ability to speak passable Thai, carve a pumpkin into really interesting shapes, and she gained her parachuting wings with the Thai Royal Airforce. After living in Thailand...
November 29, 2009
The Pole
This 500 word short-short story appeared in my first collection, Extreme Weather Events (2001). It reflects my continuing fascination with the events of December 1911 and January 1912, when the Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen and the British expedition under Robert Falcon Scott contended, with their different methods and different personalities, to be the first in recorded history to reach the South Pole. It's an era and a competition about which there is still...
November 25, 2009
Genre Benders: How Interstitial Fiction Is Bringing Speculative Fiction and Literary Fiction Together
This is a lightly edited version of my article of the same name in the journal English in Aotearoa, Issue 67, April 2009. Keen readers of the genres I discuss will be aware that I have missed out much more than I have included!.
1. What is Interstitial Fiction?
What do you call a short story that incorporates the Soviet Politburo of the mid-1980s, the early science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, consensus decision-making techniques, matter transmitters, the KGB and emissaries from the Galactic...
November 22, 2009
Book Review: Watching For Smoke, by Helen Heath
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.
Paekakariki poet Helen Heath's chapbook Watching for Smoke, recently published by Seraph Press and available from Seraph Press or on Etsy, is a beautiful package both inside and out, with its card cover featuring an inserted knitting needle and its coloured and textured end-papers.
The epigraph to Watching for Smoke is:
Family is a waiting fuse
watching for smoke.
Family is the subject of these poems: partners, children, parents, seen from the point...
