Angela Slatter's Blog, page 15

Tartarus Press at 30

I’m absolutely delighted to have a story in the new anthology, Strange Tales: Tartarus Press at 30!

The ToC:

Rebecca Lloyd, Mark Valentine, Andrew Michael Hurley, N.A. Sulway, Stephen Volk, Inna Effress, Ibrahim R. Ineke, Eric Stener Carlson, Jonathan Preece, Tom Heaton, J.M. Walsh, Angela Slatter, John Gaskin, D.P. Watt, Karen Heuler, John Linwood Grant, Reggie Oliver and Carly Holmes.

These eighteen entirely new stories have been brought together to  celebrate the thirtieth year of Tartarus Press. Representing the best contemporary writing in the fields of the literary strange, supernatural, fantasy and horror, they range from the wry comic fantasy of Jonathan Preece’s ‘Great Dead American Authors Alive and Living in Cwmbran’, to the atmospheric horror of Andrew Michael Hurley’s ‘Hunger’.

In ‘Grassman’ by Rebecca Lloyd, two sisters come of age during a village ceremony, while in ‘Meiko’ by J.M. Walsh, a mysterious guest upsets the equilibrium of a country house party. Mark Valentine’s ‘Other Things’ documents the romance and strangeness of private lore, while the search for a missing girl leads to a sinister discovery in D.P. Watt’s ‘The Wardian Case’. Dark family secrets are gradually uncovered in Angela Slatter’s ‘The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne’.

Founded in 1990, Tartarus Press has become known for championing both classic and contemporary writers. The stories in this volume sit proudly within that tradition.

You can pre-order here.

Cut, Shape, Polish – New AWC Course

So, the editing course I wrote for the Australian Writers’ Centre is now live – on sale until 6 Sept 2020.

It’s self-directed (does what it says on the can), so you can start at any time and you’ve got twelve (12) months access to the online course – you just don’t get the mentoring experience. BUT you do get some of the more useful contents of my brain, along with additional Very Useful Stuff from the marvellous Pamela Freeman. It’s a really good place to start your manuscript polishing journey.

Ze blurb:

Your editing framework for a masterful manuscript

This online course is ideal for: People who have finished (or nearly finished) a draft of their manuscript.

You will:

Gain editing skills that will improve your story

Understand what you need to cut – and add – to your story

Know which characters need fleshing out

Easily identify plot holes and structural issues

Polish your manuscript into a publishable piece of work

Go here to enrol.

Shadow in the Empire of Light: Jane Routley

Photo by Trudi Canavan

What do readers need to know about you?

I’m a Melbourne novelist though I spent 7 years living in Denmark which turned me into a rampant democratic socialist. I love prose that’s light and rich and rollicking. I have two Aurealis awards for Best Australian Fantasy novel. I find short form works really hard to write so I admire people who write short stories. I love creating interesting characters as much as I like world building.

What was the inspiration for Shadow in the Empire of Light?

Georgette Heyer’s regency books really. I wanted to put a family of eccentric characters together and see how they muddled through. But I didn’t want to set it in regency romance land because that’s so tediously limiting to the female characters – all those double standards, all that need to guard reputation, all that lack of independence. So I created a world with none of these problems – wiped out a huge number of plot drivers doing it too, which was a nuisance. But if you’re not fighting sexism, you still have classism and racisim to fight. People do create worlds in which woman are equal without being exceptional, but in fantasy they don’t do it nearly often enough.

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

Since I could read. I still remember waiting on the school library steps at 5 thinking I want another book and I want to live in a story. Stories have been important to me ever since. I actually think that’s how I how I see people. As walking stories waiting to be told.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

Not really, but I do remember one I wrote in primary school called “The Magic Telephone Box”. It took off into the air when people vandalised it. I liked a strong moral message in those days. The teacher told me I should be a writer. But I was always taking my dolls for jungle adventures in the long grass so it probably started much earlier.

Who are your main literary influences?

Jane Austen, Angela Carter, Georgette Heyer and P.G. Wodehouse. I love good unself-conscious prose and strong storytelling. I’ve just discovered Frances Hardinge and am looking forward to devouring all her books.

Which five books would you take to a Desert Island with you?

I always find this question hard as I always want a new story and I love so many different books. The Collected Works of Shakespeare always has something fresh to offer and you can always enjoy rolling the delicious words over in your mind. Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales for the same reason. A book about the plants of the Desert Island. A book of bushcraft for Desert Islands. A good solid poetry collection of some kind. Because if you love words, poetry is great but mostly you don’t have the time to take it in properly.

Who’s your favourite villain?

My favourite at the moment is Penguin from the TV series Gotham. Such a sociopath but so elegant too. Always unintentionally comical yet he has strong motivations and some sad back story. Gotham is full of outrageous characters, that’s the fun of it. It knows it’s from a comic book and works it.

What’s next for Jane Routley?

The ebook and the audio book of Shadow in the Empire of Light came out in early August and I’m working hard on book two. I’m hoping the hard copy of the book will be coming out in January 2021 and that we will all be out of Quarantine then so I can have a book launch at my favourite local pub. (Drop me a line if you want an invite) I’m also working at trying to learn how to do short stories better so I’m reading more at the moment. But it’s a tough gig.

Bio:

Fantasy and Science Fiction writer Jane Routley’s 7th book “Shadow in the Empire of Light” is due out now in epub and audiobook.  She has published 6 books, 5 as herself and one as Rebecca Locksley, and won two Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel for the novels Fire Angels and Aramaya respectively.  Her short stories have been widely anthologized and read on the ABC.

Jane was a judge for the recent Australian Role Playing Industry Awards. She has had a variety of careers, including fruit picker and occult librarian and she lived in Germany and Denmark for a decade. Now she works on the railways in Melbourne and is a keen climate activist.

www.janeroutley.com

Top Ten Tips for Curing Writer’s Block 2020 Redux

Art by Kathleen Jennings

We’ve all been there, had those moments when even cleaning the toilet seems better than writing. Some days the words are not interested in you at all and you reciprocate in kind. However, you’ve got to finish this piece for the sake of your sanity/self-esteem/bill-paying/deadlines/professional reputation. Writer’s block is a condition some folk don’t believe in, but which unfortunately and most definitely believes in you.

Myself, I think it’s just fear.

Fear of the words not being good enough, fear of what everyone else will say, fear of someone reading what you’ve produced and shouting “Emperor’s new clothes!!!” Fear of writing something that is a brown best described as “fecal” and thoroughly unsalvageable.

The hard fact of the matter is that you need to overcome this feeling if you’re going to be a professional. So, here’s my range of techniques for defeating writer’s block ? a range, because every writer, just like every snowflake, is different … and even more delicate.

 

Turn off the computer. Go and sit in another room. Revert to paper and pen. Jot notes. Sometimes re-establishing the connection between brain and hand and pen can work wonders ? and you don’t have the twin temptations of the backspace and delete keys.
Find your favourite book, open a page at random and re-type it. When you get to the bottom of said page, keep going ? but write your own story. Obviously you won’t be able to publish that, but you’ll find that the typing is like working with clay: you’re getting a feel for the words, the rhythm of the sentences, and while you’re re-typing someone else’s tale you’re not responsible for it. Not responsible for the quality of the work or the technical aspects of it, no one will see it and judge it, but you can learn by doing – and maybe unlock or unblock your own story.
Try a brief new project. I’m not advocating becoming one of those folk with four thousand new projects ? because the new beckoning project is always sexier than the old project demanding to be finished – but if you can give your creative brain a break from being banged against the wall of the thing that doesn’t want to work, it can sometimes help. Don’t start something huge; try a 500-word micro-fiction. That’s your entire story space; if you go over that 500 words, then you must edit it down (which is also good practice for your editing skills).
Again, step away from the computer. Don’t just step away, but turn it off. Go into another room otherwise you’ll feel it’s sitting there, mocking you. Pick up a book, find a comfy chair, pour the beverage of your choice, then read. An old favourite or something new. Anything but your current work. Or substitute “book” with “movie” (good or bad).
Leave the house. Go for a walk. Around the park, down the street. Make it longer than five minutes (and make sure you’ve got a small notebook and pen with you, or your phone with a note-taking app, just in case inspiration strikes) and just walk. You can think about the story more freely when you’re not in a Stockholm Syndrome situation with your computer. Or, even don’t actively think about the story; sometimes it will just work on itself in the back of your brain and present you with a surprise solution to whatever’s been bothering you. Not always, but sometimes; it works for me.
Write a foundation document for your story world – culture, characters, how long a period does the action of the story cover, setting, personal histories of your characters. As with anything, put a time limit on it or you will get lost in a time sink. I only suggest this, not as a procrastination technique, but as a way of getting to know your story better. You’ll realise pretty quickly if you’re writing a tale in which you don’t know how the magic/relationships/technology works, that you’re just applying “handwavium” to everything as a solution to plot problems. Then you’ll know where to start fixing things.
Write a haiku (3 lines: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables). Why? Because I like torturing you. No, not really. Well, yes really, but the point is to make you focus, think about words and meaning and how to pack as much as possible into a small space. Choosing the right word, rather than a series of almost-right ones.
Walk around the park with a voice recorder and talk to yourself about your tale; sometimes hearing it aloud will show you where the potholes are and, conversely, the hidden paths through the story forest. You might realise you’re using the wrong narrator, wrong tense, wrong point of view, wrong setting. Sometimes you just need to hear it. I do this at the local park, arms waving, talking to myself, nodding, shaking my head, occasionally shouting “Oh, of course!” and generally terrifying the other park-goers (bonus!).
Turn off the internal critic and just write; write utter rubbish and keep writing – because to paraphrase Kevin J. Anderson, you can edit crap but you can’t edit nothing! Yes, this one is the “Have a teaspoon of cement in a glass of water and harden up” option.
Read something you normally wouldn’t read. Choose something outside of your preferred genre because you just never know: you might find a new technique in someone else’s work that will help you get over the hurdles in your own. Read with an open mind, don’t spend your time thinking “OMG, I hate science fiction/literary fiction/romance fiction/epic fantasy”; just read.

 

So, give you inner critic some whiskey and chocolate and send them off to sit in a corner. Mostly the above advice is about taking a break from the project, but as with anything, set a time limit so that a one day break doesn’t become a one month, one year, one decade break. Conversely, don’t sit there watching the clock while you’re supposed to be taking a break. Set an alarm. Forget the alarm, it will go off when it needs to. Let it go. The words will come if you stop following them, stalking them, telling them you’re really nice and they should go out with you. No stalking. Not just a good rule for writing, but also for life.

And remember: writer’s block isn’t an incurable disease, it’s just a fear.

 

Red New Day & Other Microfictions

So this happened.

I’ve got a new collection of microfictions out today from Brain Jar Press.

Now, if you have queries about availability, etc, please direct them to the publisher, Brain Jar Press – coz I will just tell you to do that anyway. All good?

Oh! And also the cover art is by Thailand-based artist named Tithi Luadthong. Amazing work.

RED NEW DAY & OTHER MICROFICTIONS is a chapbook collection of 16 vignettes and microfictions. Preorder your copy at your favourite bookstore, or order direct from Brain Jar Press and get $4.99 off the print book price.

Red New Day & Other Microfictions (PREORDER)

Chapbook, Ebook

Out 7 September 2020

Mechanised monkeys, betrayed brides, irritable gorgons, harpists playing instruments of bone, acts of vengeance, and furies eager to feast. 

Red New Day and Other Microfictions is a collection of vignettes from World Fantasy Award winner Angela Slatter, collected together for the very first time. Known as one of Australia’s finest authors of dark fantasy and sinister horror, Slatter’s myth-inspired morsels and terrifying short tales will remind you of the uncanny, wild, and beautiful things that can be found in small packages.

Paperback • 48 pp • ISBN 978-0-9808274-0-8

$3.63 – $9.08

Preorder here.

The Norma 2020

I’m absolutely delighted to have a story on the Norma shortlist for 2020! The Norma K. Hemming Award, which is designed to recognise excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in a published speculative fiction work.

And I’m absolutely honoured to share this list with these amazing authors:

The finalists for the Short Fiction (stories up to 17,500 words) are:

“Like Ripples on a Blank Shore”, J S Breukelaar (Collision: Stories, Meerkat Press)

“The Mark”, Grace Chan (Verge 2019: Uncanny, Monash University Publishing)

“‘Scapes Made Diamond”, Shauna O’Meara (Interzone 280)

“The Promise of Saints”, Angela Slatter (A Miscellany of Death, Egaeus Press)

Winter’s Tale, Nike Sulway & Shauna O’Meara (Twelfth Planet Press)

“Rats”, Marlee Jane Ward (Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOZYA Stories, Walker Books Australia)

The finalists for the Long Work category are:

Collision: Stories, J S Breukelaar (Meerkat Press)

From Here On, Monsters, Elizabeth Bryer (Pan Macmillan Australia)

The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman (Hachette Australia)

Blackbirds Sing, Aiki Flinthart (CAT Press)

Ghost Bird, Lisa Fuller (University of Queensland Press)

Darkdawn, Jay Kristoff (HarperCollins Publishers)

The Trespassers, Meg Mundell (University of Queensland Press)

The Attic Tragedy: J. Ashley-Smith

1. What do new readers need to know about J. Ashley-Smith?

I’m a British–Australian writer of dark – often speculative – fiction.

I’m not in any way nationalistic or even particularly patriotic, either to my new or my old home country (fingers crossed that ASIO/MI5 aren’t reading this interview). Still, I always seem to lead my answer to that question with where I’ve come from and where I am now – perhaps because it gives some insight into my status as outsider, wherever I find myself. Even though I’ve lived in Australia for approaching 15 years, I still feel out of place, as though I stepped through a portal into some weird parallel universe. Now, even Old Blighty, when viewed through this lens, seems unrecognisable and unfamiliar.

That kind of wrongness and disorientation, the sense of everyday things just out of true, is something that obsesses me. Another obsession is that inner dark from which the fantastic, the terrifying, and the impossible are born. The collision between the complexities of the modern day-to-day and the invisible or imagined world is another fixation, which I continually explore in my stories.

2. What was the inspiration for The Attic Tragedy?

The Attic Tragedy was born from three separate, inanimate ideas that rattled around inside me for two or three years before striking together and sparking a story. The first was the setting, the second was a dream, and the third was a rather cheap pun stolen from Nietzsche’s first book: The Birth of Tragedy.

Antique shops and attics hold a strange fascination for me – as I’m sure they do for many people. They are mysterious places, full of forgotten things, like storehouses for the discorporate memories of every object’s past owners. As a child I was obsessed with attics, my parents’ attic in particular, and always wanted to go up there to rummage around, certain I was going to discover some lost thing destined to lead me on a fantastic adventure (reading between the lines, you may be able to tell that I was a lonely, imaginative sort of boy). The Blue Mountains, where the story is set, is full of antique shops. We had just moved from the mountains when I started the story, so perhaps that was what triggered it.

I won’t go into the details of the dream – other people’s dreams are incredibly tedious, no matter how surreal or revelatory they were for the dreamer. This particular dream involved a girl who could speak with ghosts. She was going to a ‘specialist’ – a sort of medical exorcist – for an operation to cut off her connection to the spirit world.

Finally, the pun. I was reading The Birth of Tragedy as research for a novella I was writing at the time (Ariadne, I Love You, coming out from Meerkat Press next year). Throughout, Nietzsche refers to ‘Attic tragedy’, meaning Greek tragedy, but I loved the images that came to mind when I muddled the meaning and the title sort of stuck.

Of course, none of these elements on their own is much of a story. And even put together they were only a half-living thing. It was the character of George, who emerged in the process of writing, that really brought the story to life for me and made it the thing it is now.

3. When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I first started imagining myself as a writer around the age of ten or eleven. At that time, I hadn’t really made the connection between being a writer and actually writing.

I was a next-level daydreamer throughout my childhood (and, frankly, to this day), and a vivid night-dreamer. My head was always full of stories. Mostly, though, it was just wool gathering. I did write a few actual stories at that age, but I didn’t start identifying as a writer who writes until I was on my way to university. By then I was a card-carrying, chin-stroking, wannabe beatnik, hiding out in the corners of cafes hoping I looked deep. Scribbling mind-rubbish onto a legal pad, then, was de rigueur.

I didn’t learn to actually finish stories until about six years ago. That was around the same time the stories I wrote started getting published. (Doubtless a coincidence.)

4. Can you remember the first story you ever wrote?

Back when I was about ten or eleven, I had a hideout in what we called “the cellar,” which was really the foundations of our house. Underneath the downstairs floorboards an alternate version of the house was carved. A cramped space, with a floor of concrete dust and brick shards, somewhere between two and three feet from the ground to the floorboards. It was entirely dark and mimicked the layout of the rooms above, with crawl-spaces knocked into the brick walls. I had a camping mattress and some blankets down there, and used to lie about reading 80s Stephen King novels: Carrie, The Stand, Salem’s Lot.

I’m going in to all this (what some might argue is extraneous) detail, because the description of this den, the memory of it – close and dank, faintly redolent of mildew – is so intertwined with the first story I remember writing. I wrote it in a hardback A4 journal with a buff cover, the inside pages closely lined. The story itself was little more than a few paragraphs, and took up only about a third of one page, but it was extremely gory. It was about a woman who threw salt over her shoulder, so enraging the Devil that he dragged her straight to Hell and horribly disembowelled her. There wasn’t much in the way of a narrative arc. It was, however, VERY descriptive.

Not long after that, I heard what I thought was a body dragging itself across the rubble in the next ‘room’ of the under-house. I fled the den with my heart in my throat and have not been down there since.

5. Who are your main literary influences?

The answer to this question would be different depending on when you asked it. My influences have shifted over time and new inspirations emerge whenever I’m immersed in a project, trying to find a particular tone or approach. Rather than swamp you with my life story in literary heroes, I’ll go with the two most prominent and consistent for me recently, going back about the last five years or so.

The first is – perhaps predictably – Shirley Jackson. I came very late to her work, but fell into it like a lover’s embrace. The first book of hers that I read was The Haunting of Hill House and, reading it, I felt I had come home – not to Hill House, of course, but to Jackson’s way of viewing the world, and particularly the supernatural. In all of her stories that I have read, what’s in the foreground is the people, all their psychological complexities painted with such a deft and subtle brush. The weirdness is everywhere, but it’s in the background, found only in the gestalt and not in any one or other element. The supernatural is ever present, but always uncertain. Throughout Hill House, the reader is never entirely sure whether the haunting is ‘real’ in any measurable sense – it is both real and, at the same time, only in the minds of those who perceive it. And the characters through all of her books and stories are just wonderfully unusual, wonderfully real: Eleanor and Theo; Merricat and Constance Blackwood, Uncle Julian; Eleanor, from my favourite of her short stories, The Intoxicated. I could go on, but will have to rein myself in, before I start to rave sycophantically…

The other author currently in the ‘Where have you been all my life?’ category is Patricia Highsmith. I was struggling to make sense of a novel I have been drafting and redrafting for several years, trying to understand what in the hell sort of book it even was. Reading Strangers on a Train blew me away, and made me see immediately what I was supposed to be trying to achieve with my own book – and all the ways in which I was nowhere near achieving it. The fact that Highsmith wrote Strangers in her late twenties never ceases to nauseate me. And that she then followed it up with so many unique and extraordinary classics: The Blunderer; Deep Water; This Sweet Sickness; and, of course, the books for which she is most famous, the five novels covering the life of Tom Ripley, affectionately known as ‘The Ripliad’. No author has held so transparent a lens to the horrors of suburban psychopathy, or portrayed the crimes of the everyday with such clarity and brutality. Finding Patricia Highsmith was, for me, like tripping down a bottomless well. Her work is so bleak, so searingly perceptive, and she is so damn prolific – it’s a deep well.

6. You get to take five books when you are exiled to a desert island: which ones are they?

I’ve thought about this one long and hard. If I was truly exiled, there are very few books that would bear a lifetime’s repeat reading. I’ve gone here for a mix of practicality and longevity – by which I mean, I’ve probably taken this question way too seriously!

The SAS Survival Handbook


Field Guide of Tropical Reef Fish
Complete Poems of Walt Whitman
The Odyssey (Ancient Greek version)
Ancient Greek to English dictionary

Books 4 and 5 could just as easily be: Crime & Punishment, and a Russian/English dictionary; or Journey to the West, and a Mandarin/English dictionary; or [insert very long book written in a language not my own, plus the means to slowly translate said book over many, many years].

I hope I’d be left some pens and paper, too. Or would I have to get handy with seagull quills, squid ink and dried palm leaves?

7. Who’s your favourite villain in fiction?

As a rule, I tend to be more interested in stories where the characters possess a certain moral ambiguity, rather than the cut and dry hero vs villain type of narratives. I like not being able to rely on characters to do what I want them to do – or for them to be doomed always to do the things they shouldn’t.

Having said that, there are certain antagonists who scare the willies off me. I was watching the new series of Dark recently, which has three villains who are particularly creepy. I’m not going to talk about them – this isn’t a question about TV – so no need to worry about spoilers. Rather, they are a jumping-off point for a particular kind of psychopath in fiction that I find most terrifying – they are embodiments of some archetypal darkness or violence, precisely because their motives are incomprehensible and somehow outside of reason.

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Outer Dark, there is a trio of ‘bad men’ who seem to embody the horror that lurks just beyond that borderline between civilisation and the seething chaos beneath. I get similarly freaked by the character Pozzo, in Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, who enters the play like some monstrosity from The Road, with his slave jester in tow.

And don’t get me started on …

8. Person you would most like to collaborate with?

I expect I’d be a terrible collaborator. One of the things that drew me to writing – after studying and making films at uni, followed by a decade or more in bands – was the degree to which I could have control over everything. I’m still coming to terms with my own way of doing things, so can’t imagine getting back into that collaborative mindset with this, my last bastion of creative control.

Having said that, I’m not opposed to it. But I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head.

9. What’s next for J. Ashley-Smith?

Did I mention I have another novella coming out from Meerkat Press in 2021? And there’s a short or two coming out this year, including a novelette, The Black Massive, about teenage ravers who fall in with an eldritch crowd. That’s coming out in October, in the final (sobs) issue of Dimension6.

I’m also on the home stretch of a suburban suspense novel I’ve been writing on and off for the last few years – imagine if Patricia Highsmith had written Lord of the Flies. It’s set on an Australian beach holiday and is about an eleven-year-old sociopath coming into her full power. I hope to have it wrapped by the end of the year – but I’ve been saying that every year since 2016, so…

Bio:

Ashley Smith is a British–Australian writer of dark fiction and other materials. His short stories have twice won national competitions and been shortlisted six times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror (Old Growth, 2017) and Best Fantasy (The Further Shore, 2018). His debut novelette, The Attic Tragedy, is out now from Meerkat Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.

You can connect with J. at spooktapes.net, or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

How Long Does Stuff Take?

Art by Kathleen Jennings

And by “stuff” I mean a career as a writer.

To start off, remember this: it’s unlikely that the first thing you write – be it short story or novel or article – will be the first thing you publish. I can only talk about my own journey with any authority, so that’s what appears below. Also keep in mind: while you can study another writer’s career and learn from it, you can’t actually replicate it because (a) you’re not a Replicator, and (b) the conditions and influences that occurred during their journey aren’t going to be the same prevailing winds as when you’re writing.

I spent many years scribbling and not sending.

I then spent years scribbling and sending and getting rejections. I used all those rejections (sole-destroying as some were) as fuel, to either learn to write better or – and this one is important – to learn to ignore some opinions. If they weren’t helpful, if they didn’t make me learn about writing in a positive way, then I learned to ignore them. What they did teach me was that there are people in the writing and publishing community who are assholes, for a whole variety of reasons, but they are assholes nonetheless. I learned (a) not to be like them, and (b) to not engage with them – they’ve got their own issues that I can’t do anything about and don’t want to buy into. So, they are not on my radar – time spent worrying about their opinions is time I have wasted that I could have been using to write.

Then I spent a lot of years scribbling and sending and getting acceptances. And all the time in between I have spent improving my craft. Or trying to at least.

A lot of people seem to think I’ve been incredibly productive in a short space of time. I’m pretty productive, yes, but I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years now with intent. So, here’s a brief timeline to give an idea of how long the “with intent” part of my career has taken. This is my version of “How long does stuff take?”

2006: I had my first 2 stories accepted (1 by Shimmer and 1 by Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet). I also published 3 other stories. So, a total of 5 stories.

2007: I published 4 stories.

2008: I published 8 stories.

2009: I published 6 stories.

2010: I published 4 new stories (2 co-written with Lisa L. Hannett), 2 collections (one mostly new stories, the other mostly reprints), and 2 reprints.

2011: I published 3 new stories, and 2 reprints.

2012: I published 3 new stories (2 co-written with Lisa L. Hannett), 1 collection (co-written with Lisa L. Hannett), and 3 reprints.

2013: I published 7 new stories and (1 co-written with Lisa L. Hannett), and 7 reprints.

2014: I published 9 new stories, 3 collections (1 co-written with Lisa L. Hannett; 1 entirely new, 1 mostly new stories, 1 all reprints), and 5 reprints.

2015: I published 5 new stories, 1 novella and 11 reprints.

2016: I published 7 new stories, 2 collections (both mostly reprints), 1 novel and 3 reprints.

2017: I published 9 new stories, 1 novel and 9 reprints.

2018: I published 5 new stories, 1 novel, and 10 reprints.

2019: I published 5 new stories and 7 reprints.

2020: I published 5 new stories, 1 collection (mostly reprints) and with any luck another collection (mostly new fiction), and 3 reprints.

2021: I will publish one novel (All the Murmuring Bones), and maybe a collection of short stories (by mid-2021 there will be enough reprints for another collection and I’ll write two or three new shorts to go with that), and there will be 1 reprint story that I know of.

2022: If the world doesn’t end, I will publish 1 novel, Morwood.

So, you can see how many of those collections are mostly reprints – stories pulled together from several years before to sit with other newer ones and freshly written ones. Hopefully they all fit nicely.

In there are also some award nominations and some wins (two of those for works co-written with Lisa L. Hannett).

There are definitely more nominations than wins. Now, if I never win another award, I am perfectly okay with that because what I got from these awards (apart from the joy of some very nice trophies and the buzz of accepting awards whilst wearing no shoes) was attention from publishers and readers overseas. I was able to expand my reading audience, and it led to new publishing contracts and a bunch of translations (into Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, French and Romanian).

2017 Australian Shadows Award for Best Novel
2016 Aurealis Award for Best Collection
2015 Ditmar Award for Best Novella
2014 World Fantasy Award for Best Collections
2014 Aurealis Award for Best Collection
2014 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story
2014 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story
2012 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story
2010 Aurealis Award for Best Collection
2010 Aurealis Award Best Fantasy Short Story

What you don’t see from these lists (but should be able to extrapolate) is the amount of work done over a very long period of time. Consistent writing and polishing and submitting. Researching markets, attending cons, networking either for myself or others. All. The. Time.

If I didn’t love writing so much, I’d call it grinding until I got my XP up. My point is that this career is cumulative. It doesn’t happen overnight.

You’re basically a duck: moving elegantly on the surface of a pond, while beneath you’re paddling like mad. Many’s the day when I’ve felt like a duck with its ballast incorrectly weighted, my head underwater, my feet in the air, very un-elegant and drowning. But I’ve kept going. I’ve learned from those further up the ladder, and I’ve done my best to help those lower down.

And I have kept moving.

And writing.

Because, in the end, everything adds up.

The Dead Girls Club: Damien Angelica Walters

1. What do new readers need to know about Damien Angelica Walters?

She is the author of The Dead Girls Club, Cry Your Way Home, Sing Me Your Scars, and Paper Tigers, which is no longer in print, although I think there are copies to be found online here and there. She likes writing about women and monsters and monstrous things and sometimes likes to write stories that make readers cry.

2. What was the inspiration for The Dead Girls Club?

It started with the image of a woman sitting at her desk, receiving a half heart necklace in the mail. At that point I had no idea what had happened but I knew something between two friends had gone horribly wrong. In the horror genre, there aren’t nearly as many coming of age stories centered around girls as there are boys and while The Dead Girls Club is a horror/suspense hybrid instead of outright horror, I kept the novel’s focus on the girls in the story, the women they become, and their interactions and friendship.

3. Can you remember the first thing you read that made you want to become a storyteller? 

When I was very small, my father used to take me to the library every Friday night and I’d emerge with a stack of books that I insisted on carrying. I’d have them all read by the end of the weekend, if not earlier and then reread my favorites until it was time to go back. My childhood is filled with the memory of books, and I still have many of mine from grade school on up, so I don’t think there was a giant leap into wanting to become a storyteller. Couple reading with a big imagination and it feels as though it may have been inevitable.

4. Can you remember the first story you ever wrote?

The first one I remember writing was when I was about eight. It was called “The Coughing Coffin,” written and illustrated in a stapled together construction paper book. I tried to sell it to my friends, but like most kids that age, they didn’t have any money. I’m not sure what it was about, but I can imagine and why I remember that title and none of the others I wrote around that age is beyond me.

5. Who are your main literary influences?

Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, Alice Hoffman, Agatha Christie, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, and I can’t forget Lois Duncan. Stephen King and Peter Straub have influenced me as well, but as time passes, I realize how much more of an impact the women I’ve read had on me.

6. What was the inspiration behind your novel Paper Tigers?

Like The Dead Girls Club, it started with an image. (In all honesty, most of my work does.) I saw a heavily scarred young woman out walking late at night and coming across an old photo album in a junk shop window, a junk shop that happened to be open despite the late hour. I wanted to know where the woman got her scars, why she was so afraid at being seen, and what drew her to the photo album.

7. Who’s your favourite villain in fiction?

I’d say Gilead and the patriarchy in The Handmaid’s Tale. How can you possible fight against something that big and pervasive? And if you do, how can you hope to win?

8. You get to take five foods to a desert island with you – what are they?

Peanut butter, yogurt, peaches, apples, and cottage cheese.

9. Person you would most like to collaborate with? 

Kristi DeMeester and I have written a story with Michael Wehunt and Richard Thomas (“Golden Sun” in Chiral Mad 4) but she and I have chatted about collaborating on one together. I’m sure it will be a grim, angry story with disturbing imagery. At least I hope so!

10. What’s next for Damien Angelica Walters?

I just finished the first draft of The Floating Girls: A Novel, the sequel to my 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominated short story “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” and now I’m working on the preliminary bits (outline, synopsis, characters sheets, etc.) of the next novel, tentatively titled Women of a Certain Age. Other than that, hopefully a story with Kristi and after all that, who knows.

Bio:

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of The Dead Girls Club, Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She lives in Maryland with her husband and a rescued pit bull named Ripley. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on her website at http://damienangelicawalters.com.

Claiming T-Mo: Eugen Bacon

What do new readers need to know about Eugen Bacon?

My writing is a curiosity, unconstrained by form or genre. I take on aspects of my characters, immerse myself into their worlds. The writing is a search, a coming through. It is also an invitation. Be at ease with my characters, with the places and languages I have shaped in ink.

What was the inspiration for  Claiming T-Mo ?

The original name of the novel was Outbreeds, a breed of others. The black speculative fiction intends to engage with difference, with ‘otherness’, with being between worlds.

As I crafted it, I also explored one of my PhD research questions:

‘Can a writer of short fiction productively apply a model of stories-within-a-story to build a novel?’

I’m most comfortable as a writer of short stories. In Claiming T-Mo, I created purposeful adaptations, embedded vignettes, where the arrangement of stories, themes and collective protagonists hold the text together. The story flows smoothly from one point to another, each in part bearing a concealed self-sufficiency interlinked and layered into the composite. I wrote story by story, creating in a discipline already familiar.

How did you come into contact with Meerkat Press?

This is how I do: I read something and love it—I look to see who published it. When I was in the Andromeda Spaceways Magazine editorial team, we ran a review of Keith Rosson’s Smoke City. I thought… this publisher is worth checking out. She was.

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer? 

My father was an eloquent writer. I still remember his letters, that beautiful scrawl. I’ve always been able to write from the core, to express, or find out, exactly how I feel. My lovers never had any doubts: passion or rage!

You’ve also got a PhD – do you find that you can use any of that experience in your creative writing?

The PhD soared my writing. I understood my voice, and my hunger. My commitment, and focus. I could look at a problem, or a curiosity, and interrogate it like it was life or death. I explored the nature of selfhood within myself and within my characters and understood to interlace my immersion equally between scholarly and creative work.

Who are your main literary influences?

I grew up on Enid Blyton, Margaret Ogola, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. Along the way I discovered theorist and critical thinker Roland Barthes and his notion of play in the language of writing. Toni Morrison and her aptitude of seeing narrative as radical, as creating the writer at the very moment the work is being created. Kate Greville (The Secret River), Octavia Butler, J. R.R Tolkien, Peter Temple (Truth), Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero), Sapphire (Push), George R. R. Martin (have you read ‘The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr’?)—all influential writers who offer me models to benchmark against.

What made you decide to write your non-fiction book,  Writing Speculative Fiction ?

Writing Speculative Fiction was the exegetical part of my doctorate. As I shaped the thesis, abandoning the language of ‘academia’, I saw potential in a book that spoke to the reader, and encouraged writing as play. Many publishers rejected it, including Macmillan, but I reworked it, reshaped it, resubmitted it, and was astonished when Macmillan said, yes.

You’ve done a few collaborations, the latest is Speculate with Dominique Hecq – how did that come about and what’s your approach to creative collaboration?

Collaboration is trust and respect. My love affair with Dominique started when she supervised my creative writing PhD at Swinburne University. In our first meeting, she looked at me and said, ‘Write, or perish.’ In the course of my candidature I published over 30 creative-writing-as-research stories and peer-reviewed articles, and presented papers in 10 international conferences. Dominique was the mother, the sister, the lover, the friend who brought out the scholar and writer in me. It was inevitable we’d work together on a project.

What can you tell us about your chapbook,  Her Bitch Dress , from Ginninderra Press? 

Prose poetry is the naughty child that refuses to be tamed. I love poeticity in text, musicality in words. I’m part of a prose poetry group run by the University of Canberra, led by Prof Paul Hetherington—its members are scholars across the world.

We respond to each other at random in a form of dialogue, words that cartwheel on a trigger: a word, a metaphor, a feeling. We attach and detach from the world in a safe and playful space, where we trial language across genres in its forms, and use text to disrupt or find meaning. Here’s the piece that inspired the chapbook’s title:

Her bitch dress

That long weekend, the jazz singer and her snippet of song full of scatting. The band with its clarinet and a guitar and a piano, and the man with a crimson shirt and an ebony bowtie behind the double bass shaped like a rowboat. She commanded the audience, so young—she’s only twenty—really captured you, my love, when she sang in that dress, her flowing, strapless dress the colour of burnt orange, ‘I’m so lucky to have loved you.’ You clutched my hand at her croon and gave her your soul.

What’s next for Eugen Bacon?

I want to read more, to write more black people stories. I’ve finished black speculative vignettes on climate change—what happens when the water runs dry. Before that was a short story about a water runner, a futuristic fiction about the price of water.

Luna Press Publishing invited me to participate in an academia lunare project  on worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction. My contribution studies worldbuilding in Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s The Perfect Nine: The Epic of G?k?y? and M?mbi – where he uses literary devices of worldbuilding through creation mythology, culture, nature and the otherworldly.

If all goes well, you’ll see new stories in upcoming anthologies. There’s also an afrofuturistic novel set in a socialist country.

Bio:

Eugen Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She is a board director of the Australian Society of Authors. Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Award, Australian Shadows Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans. Publications: Claiming T-Mo, Meerkat Press. Writing Speculative Fiction, Macmillan. In 2020: Her Bitch Dress, Ginninderra Press; The Road to Woop Woop & Other Stories, Meerkat Press; Hadithi, Luna Press Publishing; Inside the Dreaming, NewCon Press.