Angela Slatter's Blog, page 137

BFA Acceptance Speech

If I can get this technology to work, and for those who are a bit bored, here’s my acceptance speech for the British Fantasy Award. Those who saw me accept two Aurealis Awards a couple of years ago, will be pleased to note that I was again barefoot.

‘Tis
Read more...

One loves the smell of British Fantasy Awards in the morning

Much to my delighted surprise and suprised delight, “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” won the BFA for Best Short Story. This is especially nice when you consider the other short-listed works.

The full list of winners is available here and a sample of my story is here.

Thanks
Read more...

Mini-review: Nowhere Hall

When Publishers Weekly describes someone as “…a rising purveyor of high literary strangeness…” a reader can justifiably hope for more than a touch of awesome in a chapbook called Nowhere Hall written by a writer known only as Cate Gardner.

Ron is a faded man,
Read more...

Mini-review: What Gets Left Behind

To celebrate FantasyCon in Brighton, here’s a review of Spectral’s newest chapbook, Mark West’s good old-fashioned scary What Gets Left Behind.

The blurb is as follows:

In 1981, Gaffney was terrorised by the Rainy Day Abductor.

Local girls went missing.

And two boys made a terrifying discovery.

Now one
Read more...

Super Useful

Yes, from the man who brought you Unicorns Doing Horrible, Horrible Things comes a most useful post about Plot. Thanks, Peter M. Ball.

I am currently printing this out and sticking it on my wall.

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT!

Most plots
Read more...

Yes, I know I should be working on the novel, but …

Rackham’s Bertalda

… “The Burnt Moon”, which is part of The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings collection is coming through quite insistently this morning, so I am going with that.

Here is the first snippet:

Three days after Hafwen was turned to ash, the rats invaded Southarp.

They started at the Burnt
Read more...

Over at Mania.com …

… A Book of Horrors gets a great review from Tim Janson.

How’s the US cover?

Go here to read the review.

How the cover came to be …

Over at Kathleen’s place, she talks about how the Midnight and  Moonshine cover came into being … and a painful birth it was too!

From this … to this.

Re-post

A bit like re-gifting, yes. Here’s a re-post of my piece on Place as Person, which  originally appeared over at the lovely Mary Victoria’s place.

Place as person: Location, Location, Location!

An essential ingredient of story is the setting, the location, the place. It’s the first, best way to keep
Read more...

There is no secret handshake

When people ask me for advice about approaching literary agents I find there is always a  continuing theme, a deeply embedded belief: that there exists a secret handshake.

Everyone is convinced there is a great arcane mystery to getting an agent and it must surely involve a secret handshake.
Read more...