Margo Lanagan's Blog, page 11

From the Twilight zone

Well, what do you know, here I am in Forks, Washington. I'm not even a Twilight fan, but it's fascinating to see how the books have invaded the town. I'm staying in the hotel that says "Edward Cullen did not sleep here!" so I should be pretty safe from infection/attack. We arrived yesterday, and explored the Hoh Rain Forest and Second Beach at La Push today. Tomorrow we'll move on south.All this

To Clarion West and beyond!

Very soon, I'll be flying out to the US to begin ambling slowly towards Seattle, where from July 4-8 I'll be teaching a week of the six-week Clarion West workshop, which is an honour and a thrill—this is the workshop I attended back in 1999 (an age and just a minute ago), and I'll be coming after Paul Park, whose A Princess of Roumania series I am in awe of, and Nancy Kress, who taught the first

Selkies have swum orf

Last night in a fit of insomnia, I finished the last tweaks to the selkies-novel manuscript, entered the corrections to the second half, and sent it off—yes, even though all the editors and the agent had closed up shop for the weekend. Now, because the applications I was supposed to be reading haven't turned up (this does not bode well for next week, as I work Mon-Wed and the assessment meeting

So, May...

...came and now is all but gone. The rest of Auckland Festival (nice ambitious blog post below—what about Days 2 and 3 and the rest, Margo?) was fantastic. The school session went really well, and on the weekend I talked on stage with Meg Rosoff and Paula Morris, and then Paula wrangled me again, along with Elizabeth Knox (whose The Vintner's Luck and Dreamhunter I ate up while I was away, whose

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Margo's Day 1

First session in Auckland today: "Margo talks about the exhilarating ride that is short story writing, and how it's different from the long but glorious [well...] slog involved in completing a novel. She invites you into some of the weird, wonderful and sometimes slightly icky worlds she's created, and lets you in on a few secrets of writing, and of living the writer's life." For Years 10–13 (

Final assault in progress

Please, God, let it be final.

April is the coolest month!

Actually, April's kind of a slog, I have to say. Brilliant autumn days that I mostly can't go out in, except to the dayjob.Here I am on the third day of my Easter-weekend all-but-final-assault on the novel revisions. Have had one ordinary day, one good day and one very faffy morning. You, dear blog readers, are being faffed at right now. I am boring (yes, that's the operative word) through to the

Also,

the zombies won. Less said the better about that, don't you think?

'...the pleasure of storytelling is palpable.'

So says Delia Falconer in the Australian this morning, of Yellowcake....the overwhelming strength of Lanagan's writing is its pungent physicality. Like good animation, these stories are feats of magical imagining that live through their precise feel for objects' movement and weight. In 'Night of the Firstlings'...the mephitic wind that kills the unprotected first-born brings death with all its

Pawing the ground

This coming Thursday night, if you're in Sydney and feeling like a good tussle, come along and watch Justine Larbalestier, editor (with Holly Black) of the YA anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns, and three of her contributors (Scott Westerfeld on the zombie side, Garth Nix and me for the unicorns) 'in a short-story feud that pits horned beasts against the shuffling undead', as the SMH's Planner column