Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 28

the zombie apocalypse: i'm ready

Yesterday involving some good news,1 last night required celebrating. Which is how I ended up at one of my favourite locals, a grungy pub with a grandiose name in direct contrast with the ubiquitous portraits of Arab sheiks and its decidedly less than grandiose couches and crazy wallpaper and praying mantis mural.

So, naturally, because I was with speculative fiction writers, and we like to discuss the important issues, the topic of zombies came up. LOTS.

And who cares whether it's already a m...

strange kind of day to discover

Right this very second, I'm supposed to be writing.

And my body is doing its damnedest to convince me we're not capable of sitting still1 or (horror of all horrors) dragging words out of the murky recesses of my consciousness and slapping them down in some laughable approximation of narrative order. My eyes are sagging in their sockets, my shoulders are starting to climb up around my ears, and my legs keep attempting mutiny by standing. Get up, my mind is whispering. Give it up. Do something e...

back in my day…

During the recent edits on Shadow Bound, I tripped over my outdated grammatical education. Namely: did you all know that the plural of roof is ROOFS?

(North Americans please to be looking away, since you have always known this, because for you this has always been true, and thus my perplexity may in turn perplex you.)

Okay, back to those of us who were taught that the plural is rooves, such as (apparently) Kiwis or Australian children pre-1980's,1 I have one thing to say about this new...

i'm not afraid of a little chemical reset

My circadian rhythms responded to Tuesday's punishment by waking me up at 5:29 both yesterday and this morning. Oh, circadian rhythms, this means war, and you're going down. (At least no one has greeted me this morning at work with a horrified expression and the diffident, "Are you OK? Do you need to go home?" which I normally earn after a day or so of interrupted sleep patterns.)

Today I am going to do something I don't often do: link to a review.1 Mainly because that bit down the bottom...

public holidays. i'm damn sure we need more of 'em

Today being a public holiday in Australia, I had exactly one thing planned: to sleep in.

You can imagine, then, that waking up at 6:22 did not thrill me, and waking up again at 7:18 after a valiant attempt to ignore my first foray into consciousness for the day wasn't any better.1

So I did the only thing I could possibly do, under the circumstances. I decided to punish myself. Once and for all, I would teach myself that on mornings when a sleep-in is planned, then by gosh and by golly...

shadow bound, the wordle

So, it's probably a touch mean of me to tease you all with a wordle of Shadow Bound, since it won't be published and available to read until much closer to the middle of the year.

But I'm going to do precisely that.

Gee, can you guess which two characters get mentioned an awful lot?

awake: not a patch on asleep

So I told myself, when I finished the edits, I would not write a word, not a single word, before Saturday. Five days off. Obligatory and compulsory and well-deserved.

But you know what my brain is? Contrary. Because I barely made it through two days before this girl spoke up inside my head with the first line of a novel. Yeah, I'll just tack that idea on to the list of the umpteen novels already waiting in line to be written, shall I?1

So instead I give you people a video I was sent today...

gotta tell you: liking this doing-nothing schtick

Today I bring you: a title!

Book 2 of The Binding — which I have previously been referring to by such monikers as Book 2, Pledged, the rest of Matilde's story, and "that effing car-crash of a narrative" (you know, when I'm feeling particularly affectionate) — shall henceforth be known as Shadow Bound.

I'm very happy with it, and not only because pretty much every title I could think of with Queen in it started to sound dreadfully, er, steamy. So going with Shadow for the linking element? Good t...

books happen

Lookit!

Just as I was saying that I was coming to the end of the deadline crunch, and thinking about how glorious it would be to read new stuff, I caught up with a friend for dinner the other night and she leant me:

BOOKS! (All my friends are enablers of the worst best kind.)

It is all part of her ploy to bring me to the YA scene, because I happened to express my love for the voice in YA books — if you're looking for whippy narrative tone, with sarcasm and cleverness and sly internal...

i swear, one day, i'm actually going to finish them

My Goodreads page shows me as being in the middle of a modest slew of books, which is not untrue: they're all books I've started and not yet finished.1 But whenever my workload gets intense, I have this habit of returning to familiar ground, reading-wise.

So lately I've been re-reading, and my books of choice for this Christmas are Jane Austen's — Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion to be precise. I never can tell which of the two I like best, and whenever I read one I inevitably read the other w...