Angela Slatter's Blog, page 13

OMG! All the Murmuring Bones artwork

When you’re an author sometimes you get the most amazing gifts from fans, friends, clients, and students.

In the category of OMG!!! My friend and student Carina Bissett sent this exquisite piece – her husband Richard Lorenzen custom-made it. This is a design inspired by the front cover of All the Murmuring Bones!!! Utterly glorious!!!

Wondering if you can hear the screams of delight in Australia.

Here’s the cover from Titan Books.

Free Fiction!

So, in the lead up to the release of The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales (Tartarus Press) this month (fingers crossed) and All the Murmuring Bones (Titan Books) next month, here is a little Sourdough world origin story, beautifully designed by Brain Jar Press. Isobel Lawrence is the ancestress of Cordelia and Bethany Lawrence of The Tallow-Wife, and Bethany makes an appearance in All the Murmuring Bones. Plus, there is a chronology of the Sourdough stories … also, did we mention it’s free?

Here’s the Brain Jar spiel:

**Puts on straw hat and adopts a snappy patter**

The Tallow-Wife art by Kathleen Jennings

Do you like Angela Slatter’s storytelling?

Do you like vengeance-driven ghosts and unfortunate acts of attempted murder?

More importantly, do you like getting stuff for free?

Today we’re launching Angela Slatter’s “No Good Deed”, a dark fantasy tale of magic, ghosts, and marriage set in her World Fantasy Award-winning Sourdough universe.

Isobel assumed her wedding would be the grandest day of her life, but when she wakes in a ghost-filled tomb still wearing her bridal veil, it’s clear events have taken an unexpected turn.

With the assistance of a vengeful spirit Isobel escapes her imprisonment, but her new husband Adolphus will not be pleased to discover his wife is alive. As Isobel comes to understand her husband’s darkest secret, the newlyweds begin a deadly dance that only one will survive.

This chapbook presents a stand-alone Sourdough story that does not appear in any of the three mosaic collections devoted to Slatter’s world of myth and magic, plus a chronology for all the publications that have appeared thus far.
https://www.brainjarpress.com/…/no-good-deed-a…/

New Service at The Flensing Factory

New Service: Read and Report

The “read and report” option is just that: instead of editing your work, I’ll read your short story and write you a report about what works and what doesn’t.

What you’ll get: I will read your story and write you a report of approximately 3 pages, identifying what works, and what doesn’t. If the story works and I know of a specific suitable market, then I will advise. This is a broad overview of a short story (the equivalent of a “manuscript assessment report” for a novel or novella).

What it isn’t: I won’t edit your work or correct your spelling or suggest specific fixes to individual problems. But the report will give you the information you need to work out how to do that. For this reason, the service is likely best suited to (a) experienced writers with a strong grasp of writing craft who need an objective report, and (b) to new writers eager to take their own independent steps to learn writing skills, and who want to be pointed in the right direction.

Short Story “read and report” (flat fee):

up to 2,500 words      = $100
2,501 to 6,000 words = $150
6,001 to 7,500 words = $200

Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

I’m delighted to have a story in this new anthology edited by Aiki Flinthart! Relics, Wrecks and Ruins has an amazing ToC and can be purchased here.

Futures and Pasts, Fearless and Frightening. This is a must-read collection for all fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. A celebration of legacy and endurance. •Bizarre remains of a lost civilisation emerge from the ice. •The ghosts of a drowned town wait to be awakened. •A witch with a dragon problem. •What Elvis will do to protect his fellow artists from annihilation. •An ancient spaceship carries the last, fragmented memories of Earth. •Broken souls of the dead are passed on to the new-born. •…These and many more tales showcase the hopes, remnants, and fears of humanity. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Aiki Flinthart reached out for works from as many of her favourite authors as would answer the call. And many did. Between these pages you’ll find stories by some of the world’s best science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. Find new favourite authors and re-join old friends.

Tales by:

Neil Gaiman

Ken Liu

Juliet Marillier

Angela Slatter

Jan-Andrew (JA) Henderson

Garth Nix

Pamela Jeffs

Marianne de Pierres

Jasper Fforde

Mary Robinette Kowal

James (SA) Corey

Lee Murray

Sebastien de Castell

Ian Irvine

Robert Silverberg

Mark Lawrence

Kate Forsyth

Kylie Chan

Cat Sparks

David Farland

Jack Dann

Dirk Flinthart

Aiki Flinthart

Starred Review: All the Murmuring Bones

Over at Publishers Weekly, All the Murmuring Bones gets this gorgeous starred review!

All the Murmuring BonesA.G. Slatter. Titan, $15.95 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-78909-434-3Set in a fantasy world reminiscent of 19th-century Ireland, this stunning gothic adventure from Slatter (Sourdough and Other Stories) shimmers with fairy tale enchantment. Miren O’Malley has lived her 18 years under the thumb of her overbearing grandmother, Aoife, the matriarch of the once powerful O’Malley dynasty, now paupers in a crumbling coastal mansion. Miren grew up with stories of her family sacrificing children to the sea-queen in return for their prosperity. But their line has been diluted—Miren’s mother married an outsider and had only one child, leaving none to be sacrificed. To revive the family wealth, Aoife plans to marry Miren off to her rich and brutal cousin. But when Miren learns that her mother was a witch and that her supposedly long-dead parents are still alive, she finally takes control of her life and sets out to find them. While navigating the greed and arrogance of man and the magic of kelpies and merfolk, Miren vows to right her family’s generations of wrongs. In lyrical prose, Slatter evokes the decay and dread that surround her strong characters. Anyone who likes gutsy heroines, beautiful language, and well-wrought worlds won’t want to miss this. (Mar.)

2020 Roundup – or “What the Hell Happened??”

2020, hey?

What the hell was that? Well, it certainly put a crimp in things to say the least – no travel, no face-to-face teaching, projects delayed (including a super-exciting one that I still can’t announce), work drying up like a river in a drought, and oh yes, fear of death, and washing your hands like Lady Macbeth on some sort of drug.

It wasn’t all bad, however. I had a roof over my head, a safe place to shelter, good people and dogs for company, plenty of food and, apparently most importantly, an elegant sufficiency of toilet paper. My family and friends stayed safe. Online teaching for the Australian Writers’ Centre helped pay the bills and kept me engaged with people (as opposed to sitting under my desk, rocking back and forth). I also finished writing The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales (at long last), and I spent a chunk of the year doing the edits on All the Murmuring Bones – huge thanks to my editor Cath Trechman and all at Titan who’ve gotten right behind this book. I also worked on Morwood, my next novel for Titan (finishing it now, I promise). The editing course – Shape, Cut, Polish – I wrote for AWC was launched. Plus I got to work on some film and tv stuff with the wonderful Vicki Madden of Sweet Potato Films.

And I also had some work published, so huzzah! 

Collections:

The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners and Other Stories was published by the lovely PS Publishing in a limited edition hardcover. Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales was released as a paperback by Brain Jar Press – previously it was only in the form of 200 limited edition hardcovers from the lovely PS Publications (and there might still be some available for the completist). And my teeny-tiny collection of microfictions, Red New Day and Other Microfictions was published by Brain Jar Press.

Short Stories:

In terms of new short stories, I sold my first original piece to Nightmare Magazine, “The Wrong Girl”. “The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne” was published in Strange Tales: Tarartus Press at 30. “New Wine” appeared in the Cursed anthology edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane. “Same Time Next Year” was in Mark Morris’ Flame Tree Press anthology, After Sundown. And the two new stories in The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners were “Reading Off the Curriculum” and “But for an L”.

The 2020 reprints were, “Our Lady of Wicker Bridge”, “No Good Deed” and “Honor Thy Mother” all online at The Dark Magazine; and “Pale Tree House” and “The Living Book”, both of which were translated into Japanese and published in The Night Land Quarterly.

So, survival and writing. I’ll take it. 

The Tallow-Wife and All the Murmuring Bones will be launched this year, as will my contribution to Brain Jar’s Writer Chaps series, You Are Not Your Writing and Other Sage Advice. I’ll be writing a novella for PS Publishing’s Absinthe imprint, and editing Darker Angels for their Electric Dreamhouse imprint. With some more teaching and editing.

That’s all I know.

The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales

In theory, if all goes according to plan, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales will be published in February this year. I say “in theory” not because of a lack of faith, but because of the bruising experiences of 2020, when nothing went as planned, expected, or varied in any reasonable fashion from the projected path. 2020: Defying Physics and Everything Else.

But I digress.

The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales took me a horribly long time to write (started in 2013/14) as my Queensland Writers’ Fellowship project – thanks for your patience. It finishes off a lot of the arcs that have stretched over Sourdough (Tartarus Press) and Bitterwood (Tartarus Press) and the novella Of Sorrow and Such (Tor.com). It’s not the entire end, but it’s the end for some characters I’ve loved (and tortured) ever since 2010. It also spills over into the forthcoming novel All the Murmuring Bones (from Titan in March this year, under the name A.G. Slatter – and NOT YA, but can be read by YA readers).

What was my point? I know I had one …

Oh yes.

So, to celebrate, Brain Jar Press will be bringing out a little free chapbook treat in the form of “No Good Deed” in the coming weeks – that’s kind of an origin story for the family of Cordelia and Bethany Lawrence who are the mainstays of The Tallow-Wife (and there’s also a detailed Sourdough Chronology in there). (And that is a very long sentence.)

Also, you might want to go back and read everything from the beginning (in this order) to remind yourself of the bajillion characters: Bitterwood, Of Sorrow and Such, then Sourdough, then The Tallow-Wife, then All the Murmuring Bones.

Aaaaaand here is Dr Helen Marshall’s gorgeous “Introduction” to The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, just as another treat. I’m terribly fond of it.

When there’s a pre-order page I will let you know.

Introduction

By Helen Marshall

“Once upon a time on the far side of yesterday, in a land that never was, in a time that could never be, there lived girls who chose their own fate …”

So begins a story told by a spirit. The story will send Victoria Parsifal, the girl known to her clientele as the Nightingale, to the place of dreaming, the only place (it seems) she might truly be free.

Is the story true? Will it be enough to save her?

Like all good stories, the thread of this one—its truth—goes deeper than a single recitation. It repeats and recurs, flashing in and out of sight, woven deep into the fabric of this collection. What does it mean for a girl to choose her own fate?

Venture into the wondrous reaches of Lodellan, with its fine houses and cathedrals, its traveling shows, its solstice balls, its promises and its curses. Here, you will find a thousand dazzling sights, a tapestry of colour and strangeness—or rather a patchwork quilt, the kind worked on lovingly, the secrets of its patterns passed down from generation to generation. But look closer. There, below the glittering false front, you will find the dark thread knotted to the gold.

Trapped women. Women bound in marriage, bound in love, bound in service.

These witches and streetwalkers, songsters, holy women, heisters, wayfarers, child-bearers, child-thieves, murderers and matrons are cut from the oldest, richest cloth: dyed in heart’s blood, red with the pain of their making. Lis the innkeeper of The Silver Branch, who nurses an ill-fated love while she bides her time, waiting for redemption. Cordelia Parsifal, a mother who will learn from the tallow-wife the darkness at the heart of her path. Her sister Bethany Lawrence, she of the feral face, a woman well-versed in the binding of desire. For all their constrictions, are they truly powerless? Hardly.

The best fairy tales teach us lessons worth learning. That transformation means nothing if it is only skin-deep. That getting what you want is often more bitter than sweet. That hunger can drive you to terrible ends. If anything, the power of these stories comes from their insistence that even in the most desperate of positions, you can still make a choice. As long as you are willing to bear the cost of it.

And this is an age where such lessons are essential. Fantasy has always been a subversive kind of writing, one part warning, one part consolation. It reminds us that life is full of hardship and that its rewards are often priced in blood. Yet there can be beauty in it as well, like the rose whose thorn pricks the tender flesh that reaches for it. Try as some might to sanitise and soften this message, still it is passed down from every wise mother to every wise child. These are stories of resistance. These are stories of retaliation.

Behind every good fairy tale is the taleteller herself. Fear not: Angela Slatter is one of the best. She has woven the stories of Lodellan and its extraordinary inhabitants in two previous collections, Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings and one novella, Of Sorrow and Such, together winning the World Fantasy Award and the Ditmar Award which recognizes achievement in Australian science fiction. She draws her inspiration from folktales and myths, ecclesiastical history, legend. Like a magpie, she finds the glimmering nugget worth carrying over. Her stories have a surprising tenderness to them despite the dark places they venture.

Although Lodellan may lie on the far side of yesterday, a land that never was, in reading this book you may just discover something true about the world. And if you’re lucky—if you’re patient and wise and fair and fierce—maybe it will be enough to set you free.

Writer Chaps!

The latest project from Brain Jar Press is the Writer Chaps series, which is now up for pre-order. Season One contains writing advice from myself, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Kaaron Warren, Alan Baxter and Sean Williams. (Do I love this cover? Oh, yes, I do.)

Details below!

**Angela Slatter/Writer Chaps Pre-Order**



There’s been a few weeks of cover sneak peeks, but we’re pleased to announce that pre-orders for Angela Slatter’s You Are Not Your Writing & Other Sage Advice are now live!




The first book in the Brain Jar Press Writer Chaps series, this chapbook collects some of Angela’s insightful and direct advice about the relationship between writers, their work, and the publishing industry they inhabit.



You can pre-order your copy direct from Brain Jar Press, or from any of the stores listed down in the comments, but if you’re a fan of Australian speculative fiction you can get all six chapbooks in the first season of Writer Chaps for just $18 (ebook) or $60 (print) and get them delivered month-by-month as they’re released.




You Are Not Your Writing & Other Sage Advice: https://www.brainjarpress.com/…/you-are-not-your…/



Season 1 Subscription: https://www.brainjarpress.com/…/writer-chaps-season…/

All the Murmuring Bones: Reviewers!

Hi, All.

All the Murmuring Bones, my first novel for Titan Books, will be out on or about 9 March 2021 (in Aus, the UK and the US). It’s a gothic fantasy set in the world of the Sourdough and Bitterwood mosaic collections (from Tartarus Press).

Titan will have the novel up at NetGalley in the new year, so if you’re a genuine reviewer, please go here and register. The Titan team (as opposed to me)  will take care of your requests.

If we’ve already spoken about this, fear not, your request is in train but I’m trying to cut down on the number of things I need to juggle at the moment – and Titan has a gloriously magnificent publicity department designed to manage all of this stuff seamlessly. As opposed to me, who will manage it rather like a bear riding a bicycle that’s on fire on a tightrope over a ravine, whilst juggling knives.

If you want to do interviews, then please contact me on me@angelaslatter.com.

And here is the wraparound cover in all its glory!

Nightmare Magazine!

Issue 99 of Nightmare Magazine is up!

Or bits of it as it’s a staggered release kind of thing. But all sorts of goodies await, including my horror story “The Wrong Girl”, which is released into the wild on 23 of December 2020. Although you can buy the ebook edition and get everything immediately!

In This Issue
Fiction

The Book of Drowned Sisters

by Caspian Gray (available on 12/9)
The Ones Who Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones (available on 12/16)
The Wrong Girl

by Angela Slatter (available on 12/23)
The Obscure Bird

by Nicholas Royle (available on 12/30)

Nonfiction

Editorial: December 2020

by John Joseph Adams (available on 12/9)
The H Word: Perfect Possession

by J.B. Toner (available on 12/16)
Media Review: December 2020

by Adam-Troy Castro (available on 12/30)