Angela Slatter's Blog, page 20

Winter’s Tale

Winter’s Tale is the flagship title from Twelfth Planet Press’s new imprint, Titania. Written by Nike Sulway  and illustrated by Shauna O’Meara, the Kickstarter is on right now and has some excellent rewards – go here and support it! Get an awesome book and other stuffs!

Today, TPP publisher Alisa Krasnostein talks about the new imprint and Winter’s Tale.

What was the inspiration behind Titania?

My dear friends Kate Gordon and Deb Kalin approached me with the idea several years ago now. They had been working together developing the idea of the imprint and its focus. Both Kate and Deb have early readers in their house and had spent several years reading to their young ones. Out of that experience, they both felt that there is a very real need for more diversity and choice within children’s books. That obviously sits well within the Twelfth Planet Press mission and thus was born Titania.

How did Winter’s Tale come together?

Kate and Deb fleshed out the imprint – naming it and approaching Kathleen Jennings to draw the Titania logo. They formulated the goals and objectives and once they knew what would be a Titania project, they then went ahead and approaching Nike Sulway about being involved. Nike wrote us Winter’s Tale.

Did you match Nike Sulway up with Shauna O’Meara or did they come along as a package deal?

I matched Shauna O’Meara with Nike Sulway. As a publisher, I liked the freedom of choosing who the artist would be. I’d been wanting to work with Shauna for a long while and then this project came along and I realised she would really be the perfect fit for it. And she is!

How do you feel it differs from a lot of children’s books already in the market?

Our focus is on offering children positive narratives with diverse characters. Winter’s Tale features an agender protagonist, gay adoptive parents, girls being awesome at skateboarding and sports, and a diverse ensemble cast of supporting characters. It’s a long book for a picture book and it’s aimed at an older child-aged audience. That said, my three year old has loved it since the first copies hit my house so I think Nike is right in saying it will have broad age appeal and the narrative will deepen to the age of the audience.

What’s next for Twelfth Planet Press? 

Just around the corner we have a second Kickstarter crowdfunding project! We will be publishing a sequel to a really popular Defying Doomsday anthology which featured disabled and chronically ill protagonists and heroes surviving the apocalypse. Editor Tsana Dolichva is coming on board again and bringing along Katharine Stubbs to coedit Rebuilding Tomorrow which will  be set further in post-apocalyptic futures when societies are working towards a new normal. Rebuilding Tomorrow will be an anthology of post-apocalyptic hope, and again centred on disabled and/or chronically ill protagonists. Writers will want to know that there will be an open reading period in January for stories. Because Defying Doomsday was so warmly received and so important to so many readers, I’m so looking forward to this sequel.

A

Meg Caddy: Devil’s Ballast

And today the truly delightful and piratical Meg Caddy takes over the blog to talk about Devil’s Ballast, Lambert Simnel as a dinner guest, and witch trials. Oh, and cats.

1. What do new readers need to know about Meg Caddy?

I am a cat-loving, tea-drinking, D&D-playing, cardigan-wearing, asexual, nerdy writer of YA adventure novels. New readers should probably know that my books sit right in the middle of the Venn diagram of feminism, history, and fantasy. I started writing my first book, Waer(a fantasy novel), when I was fourteen, and it was finally released by Text Publishing the year I turned twenty-four. I did an Honours thesis on pirates and piracy, and my second book Devil’s Ballast was published this May, also with Text.

2. What was the inspiration behind Devil’s Ballast?

Devil’s Ballast is historical fiction, but it focuses on the life and crimes of Anne Bonny, a real pirate who helped terrorise the Caribbean in the early 18th For some time she worked under the guise of being a boy, but eventually she was openly a woman pirate. No one knows for sure the fate of Anne Bonny, but while I was doing research for my Honours thesis I came across numerous suggestions that she settled down, married a friend of her father’s, had numerous children (one website suggested eighteen) and faded into history. These rumours have little historical evidence to support them, and they made me heartsick. It felt like the wrong end to the story. So I decided to rewrite it.

3. Is this part of an enduring love of pirates in general or a particular pirate?

I am mad for pirates. I have photos of myself every year since Year 12 dressed as a pirate for some occasion or another. There’s something incredibly alluring about the micro-societies pirates formed, maintained, and worked within, and it’s particularly interesting when you throw a female pirate into what was very much a male space. I love pirate stories in general, and I started researching generally for a pirate novel in 2010, but it was only in the last five or so years that I honed in on Anne.

4. In general, who and/or what are your writing influences, classic and modern?

I’m very lucky to be living in a time full of female fantasy writers. I grew up on Juliet Marillier (who has also been my mentor twice, and whose work I adore), Emily Rodda, Tamora Pierce, and Glenda Larke, among others. At the moment, I’ve been devouring books by VE Schwab, Leigh Bardugo, AJ Betts, Holly Black, and Anne Bishop. The focus on female fantasy protagonists, as well as men who do not necessarily model traditional masculinity, really shaped my writing. I’m also a die-hard Tolkien fan, and I love Dickens and Shakespeare. In terms of nonfiction, I draw heavily on the works of world-leading pirateologists, David Cordingly, who was kind enough to meet with me in London to chat about Anne Bonny. In a real-world, very present sense, I’m also very fortunate to live in Perth, where the Fantasy and YA/Children’s writing communities are so supportive and kind.

5. What was the first story you ever wrote?

Look, the first story I ever wrote was written on purple paper and it was about an egg named Eggelina, and my younger brother tore it in half and pinned it to my bedroom door like some sort of book serial killer, but I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen and instead talk about the LOTR knockoff I wrote when I was ten. It was called Rilla of Riddonan, and featured a small, bad-tempered woman with red hair, so I guess I was planning in advance for Anne even then. Actually, the villain was a woman named Milana, and I realised recently that an anti-hero in Waer, named Melana, matches the exact same physical description. It’s amazing how we write in echoes of ourselves sometimes. My parents told me if I edited the book, typed it up, and approached it professionally, they would have it properly bound and we could have a book launch – so my twelfth birthday party was a book-launch party, and I made everyone dress up as characters from Lord of the Rings. My younger brother built a catapult and we literally launched the book – just as we did for Devil’s Ballast in May.At that first book launch when I was twelve, I realised I wanted to make a living as a writer.

6. What scares you?

It’s a little banal and probably funny to people who have read Devil’s Ballast, but I’m terrified of sharks, octopi, and any number of other beasties that live in the ocean. But I also have anxiety, which means that on any given day I might be very frightened of being late, of choosing the wrong thing to eat for lunch, of dying alone, or of leaving the oven on accidentally. Fear is a close friend of mine, and though it might make me show up for a book talk three hours early it also drives me to be punctual, hard-working, and polite. I’m learning to find a good balance where fear is concerned, because it’s not always a bad thing to be afraid.

7. Who is your favourite fictional villain?

My favourite fictional villain swaps and changes a lot, but Javere from Les Miserables is always a constant. I like his rigidity, his desperate belief that he is in the right, and his inability to compromise his ideals with reality. His black-and-white thinking is his own undoing, as well as a danger to the protagonists, and I think that rings true. I tried to capture a little of his spirit for Jonathan Barnett, the antagonist in Devil’s Ballast.

8. You can invite five people, living or dead, to dinner ? who makes the cut?

If I’m inviting five people to dinner, it’s probably either my five family members or my D&D group, so I’m going to cut them out of the running for the sake of this question. I’m also not inviting Anne Bonny, because you know that girl is going to get drunk and start a fight, or dance on the table and break all the plates. So I’d invite people I want to write about. Jennet Device. Grace O’Malley. Nathaniel Mist. Lambert Simnel. Anne Brontë.

9. Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte? Explain your choice.

I love Austen and Brontë, don’t get me wrong, but I’m going to have to add an option here and go for Mary Shelley, Queen Spooky Bitch.

10. What is next for Meg Caddy?

I’m working on a book set in early 17th century England, about two bizarre witch trials and a young girl named Jennet Device. It’s a historical fantasy. It’s early stages yet, but so far it is Spooky and full of demons, so I’m having a lot of fun.

Blackwater

As always art by Kathleen Jennings coz wolves and candlesticks and pouffy skirts …

So, I spent most of last year and the first few months of this year working on a novel called Blackwater. It’s a gothic fantasy set in the same world as the Sourdough and Bitterwood mosaics, and I thought I would share the first chapter with you. Hopefully more news on this next week …

Chapter One

See this house perched not so far from the granite cliffs? Not so far from the promontory where once a church was built? It’s very fine, the house. It’s been here a long time (far longer than the church, both before and after), and it’s less a house really than a sort of castle now. Perhaps “fortified mansion” describes it best, an agglomeration of buildings of various vintages: the oldest is a square tower from when the family first made enough money to better their circumstances. Four storeys, an attic and a cellar in the middle of which is a deep, broad well. You might think it to supply the house in times of siege, but the liquid is salty and part way down, below the water level, you can see (if you squint hard by the light of a lantern) the silver crisscross of a grid to keep things out or in. It’s always been off-limits to the children of the house, no matter that its wall is high, far higher than a child could accidentally tip over.

The tower’s stone – sometimes grey, sometimes gold, sometimes white, depending on the time of year, time of day and how much sun is about – is covered by ivy of a strangely bright green, winter and summer. To the left and right are wings added later, suites and bedrooms to accommodate the increasingly large family. The birth date of the stables is anyone’s guess, but they’re a tumbledown affair, their state perhaps a nod to lately decaying fortunes.

Embedded in the walls are swathes of glass both clear and coloured from when the O’Malleys could afford the best of everything. It lets the light in, but cannot keep the cold out, so the hearths throughout are enormous, big enough for a man to stand upright or an ox to roast in. Mostly now, however, the fireplaces remain unlit and the dormitory wings are empty of all but dust and memories; only three suites remain inhabited, and one attic room.

They built close to the cliffs – but not too close for they were wise the first O’Malleys, they knew how voracious the sea could be, how it might eat even the rocks if given a chance – so there are broad lawns of green, a low wall almost at the edge to keep all but the most determined, the most stupid, from toppling over. Stand on the stoop of the tower’s iron-banded door (shaped and engraved to look like ropes and sailors’ knots). Look ahead and you can see straight out to sea; turn to right but a little and there’s Breakwater in the distance, seemingly so tiny from here. There’s a path, too, winding back and forth on itself, an easy trail down to a pebbled shingle that stretches in a crescent. At the furtherest end is a sea cave (or was before a collapse, the date of which no one can recall), a tidal thing you don’t want to be caught in at the wrong time. A place the unwary have gone looking for treasure as rumours abounded that the O’Malleys smuggled, committed piracy, hid their ill-gotten gains there until they could be safely shifted elsewhere and exchanged for gold to line the family’s already overflowing coffers.

They’ve been here a long time, the O’Malleys, and the truth is that no one knows where they were before. Equally no one can remember when they weren’t around, or at least spoken of. No one says “Before the O’Malleys” for good reason; their history is murky, and that’s not a little to do with their very own efforts. Local recounting claims they appeared in the vanguard of some lord or lady’s army, or one of those produced by the battle abbeys in the days of the Church’s more intense militancy, perhaps one marching to or from the cathedral-city of Lodellan when its monarchs fought for land and riches. Perhaps they were soldiers or perhaps they trailed along behind like camp-followers and scavengers, gathering what they could while no one noticed, until they had enough to make a reputation.

What is spoken of is that they were unusually tall even in a place where long-legged raiders from across the oceans had liberally scattered their seed. They were dark haired and dark eyed, yet with skin so terribly pale that on occasion it was muttered that the O’Malleys didn’t go about by day, but that wasn’t true.

They took the land by Hob’s Hallow and built their tower; they prospered quickly. They took more land, they gained tenants to work the land for them. There was always silver, too, in their coffers, the purest and brightest though they’d tell no one from whence it came. Next they built ships and began trading, then built more ships and traded more, roamed further. They grew rich from the seas and everyone heard tell of how the O’Malleys did not lose themselves to the water: their galleons and caravels, their barques and brigs did not sink. Their daughters and sons did not drown (or only those meant to) for they swam like seals, learned to do so from their first breath, first step, first stroke. They kept to themselves, seldom taking wives or husbands who weren’t of their extended families. They bred like rabbits, but the core of them remained tightly wound around a limited bloodline; those bearing the O’Malley name proper were prouder than all the rest.

They paid nought but a passing care for the opinion of the church and its princes, which was more than enough to set them apart from other fine families, and made them an object of unease and rumour. Yet they kept their position and their power. They were neither stupid nor fearful. They cultivated friends in the highest of high places, sowed favours and reaped the rewards of doing so, and they gathered secrets and lies from the lowest of low places. Oh! such a harvest. The O’Malleys knew the locations of all the inconvenient bodies that had been buried – sometimes purely because they’d put the bodies there themselves. They paid their own debts, made sure they collected what was theirs, and ensured all who dealt with them knew that what was owed would be returned to them one way or another.

They were careful and clever.

Even the greatest of the god-hounds found themselves, at one point and other, beholding to them. Sometimes an ecclesiastic of import required a favour only the O’Malleys could provide and so, hat in hand, he came. Under cover of darkness, of course, in a closed carriage with no regalia that might give him away, on the loneliest roads out of Breakwater to the mansion on Hob’s Hallow. He’d take a deep breath as he stepped from the conveyance, then another as he looked up at the lofty panes of glass lit from within so it seemed the interior of the tower was on fire. He’d clasp the golden crucifix suspended at his waist for fear that, upon crossing the threshold, he might find himself somewhere more infernal than expected.

More than one such man made visits over many years. Yet such men mislike owing favours to anyone – especially women and there was a time when females held the O’Malley family reins – and those very same priests offered all manner of excuses, threats and coercions trying to avoid their obligations. None of them worked, and the brethren found themselves brought to heel each and every time: an archbishop or other lordly cleric was unseated and moved on like some common mendicant, and the smile on the lips of the matriarch was wide and red.

It was the sort of loss – an outrage – that had never been forgotten, not in several hundred years, and it was unlikely to ever be. Indeed, the church’s memory is long and unsleeping, and in each successive generation one of its sons at least has sought a way to make the family pay. No matter that the O’Malleys had given a child to the church for as long as anyone could recall, that they paid more than their tithes required, and maintained several almshouses in the city. They even had a pew with their name on it in Breakwater’s cathedral where they sat every Sunday whenever in attendance at the townhouse they maintained in one of the fancier districts.

An insult once given to the church was never forgotten nor forgiven, and generations of godly men had devoted a good deal of their lives to ill-wishing the O’Malleys past, present, and future. Much effort and energy were consecrated to the cursing of the name, gossiping about the source of their prosperity, and plotting to take it from them. Many was the head shaken in rue that pyres and pokers were not options available as a means of enforcing conformity in this particular instance – the webs woven by the clan were too strong to be evaded or undermined.

It wasn’t only the more godly members of Breakwater society at odds with those who lived out on Hob’s Hallow. Those who took O’Malley charity or made good-faith bargains with them often found that the cost was much higher than could have been imagined. Some paid it willingly and were rewarded for their loyalty; those who complained or baulked were justly requited. As time went on business partners thought twice about joining O’Malley ventures, and the more cynical counted their fingers twice after shaking hands on a deal, just to make sure all digits remained. Those who married in – whether to the extended branches or the main – did so at their peril. More than a few husbands and wives were deemed untrustworthy or simply inconvenient when passion had run its course, and disposed of quietly.

There was something not quite right with the O’Malleys, they didn’t fear like others of their ilk. They, perhaps, put their faith elsewhere. Some said the O’Malleys had too much salt water in their veins to be good and god-fearing, or good anything else for that matter. But nothing could be proven, not ever.

Their dealings were discreet, but things done ill always leave echoes and stains behind. Because they’d been around for so very long, the O’Malleys’ sins built up, year upon year, decade upon decade, century upon century. Life upon life, death upon death.

The family was simply too influential to be easily destroyed but, as it turned out, they brought themselves down with neither aid nor agitation from either church or peers.

It was their bloodline that had faltered first – although no one but they knew – and their fortunes followed soon after. Fewer and fewer children were born to the O’Malleys proper, but for a while they’d not been bothered, or not overly so, for seemed like nothing more than a brief aberration. Besides, the extended families continued to multiply, and to prosper financially.

Then their ships began to sink or be taken by pirates; then investments, seemingly shrewd, were quickly proven unwise. The great fleet was whittled down to a couple of merchant vessels making desultory journeys across the seas. Almost all their affluence bled away, faster and faster until within a few generations there was just the grand mess of a home on Hob’s Hallow. There were rumours of jewellery, silver and gems buried beneath the rolling lawns – no one could believe it was all gone – but the O’Malleys had too many debts, too little capital, and their blood was running thin …

And so the family found itself much diminished in more ways than one. Unable to pay its creditors and investors, unable to give to the sea what it was owed, and with too few of other people’s secrets to use as currency, the O’Malleys were, at last, in danger of extinction.

The estate was once carefully tended by an army of gardeners and groundsmen, but now there’s only ancient Malachi – barely breathing, regularly farting dust – to take care of things. All the walled gardens are over-run, to enter them would be to risk having sleeves and skirts torn by thorns and branches with too much length and strength, and besides, their doors are sewn shut with brambles. All but one that is, the one the old woman – the last true O’Malley – uses when she seeks fresh air and solitude. In the house, Malachi’s sister, Maura – younger by a little and less given to farting – does what she can to keep the gilings and decay at bay, but she’s one woman, arthritic and tired and cross; it’s a losing battle, though she keeps her hand in with herb magic and rituals to keep the kitchen garden producing vegetables and the orchard fruiting. There are two horses to pull a rickety calash; three cows, all almost beyond giving milk; several chickens whose lives are likely to be short if they do not begin to take their duties more seriously. Once, there was an army of tenants who could be called upon to work the fields, but now they are few and the land has laid fallow for a very long time indeed. The great house is decaying and the great curved gates at the entrance to the estate have not been closed in a decade for fear any movement will tear them from their rusted hinges.

There’s just a single daughter left of the household, whose surname isn’t even O’Malley, her mother having committed the multiple sins of being an only child, a girl, insisting from sheer perversity on taking her husband’s name, and then dying without producing further offspring. Worse still: this husband had no O’Malley lineage – not a drop – so the daughter’s blood was thinned once again. She’s twenty-one, this girl, a woman really, raised mostly in isolation, taught to run a house as if this one isn’t a ruin waiting to fall, with a dying family (decreased yet again by a recent death), no fortune, and no prospects of which to speak.

There’s an old woman, though, with plans and plots of long gestation; and there’s the sea, which will have her due, come hell or high water; and there are secrets and lies which never stay buried forever.

***

Australian Writers’ Centre Courses

So, Brisneylanders, I’m teaching Creative Writing Stage 1 on Saturday 20-21 July 2019 10am–4pm for the Australian Writers’ Centre.


 


Then, Sydneysiders, I’m teaching it for you on


Saturday 10-11 August 2019 10am-4pm AND then I’m teaching Short Story in One Day on Sunday 8 September 2019 10am-4pm (as the title suggests, it’s a one-dayer). That also means I’m in Sydney for 5 weeks, which is irrelevant to most folk except friends who want to have coffee and cake.






Aaaaaaand I’ve also started teaching the online version of Creative Writing Stage 1 should you find that an easier way to “attend”.




More details are here.

Christopher Golden: The Pandora Room

One of my favourite humans/writers/editors is the delightful Christopher Golden. Today he’s chatting about his new novel The Pandora Room.

What do new readers need to know about Christopher Golden?

Hmm. I’ve been writing full time since 1992. Horror, fantasy, mystery … but I’m most at home with the supernatural thriller. It just fits my story sense perfectly. I also write comics and screenplays, and I’ve edited a bunch of fiction anthologies. What else should I say? I like ice cream a bit too much and got my first tattoo this year, at the age of 51.

What was the inspiration behind The Pandora Room?

I often get sparks of inspiration while doing research. I’ll be working on a project and come across something that inspires something completely different. A few years ago, I was reading about the Pandora myth and the variations on it, some of which say the box contained all the world’s blessings and some all its curses, and there’s a version in which Pandora is called by the name Anesidora. It just hit me -what if Pandora and Anesidora were sisters? What if there were two boxes, one with all the blessings and one with all the curses? One for each sister. And what if now, in the present day, an archaeologist found ONE of them…but didn’t  know which one it was. Everyone would want to lay claim to this thing…and though nobody in their right mind would open it, many would want to do exactly that, no matter the consequences.

How do you choose the anthology projects you do? What inspires them?

Most of the time it’s just something that hits me, some inkling or inclination. With THE NEW DEAD, I was actually approached by my editor at St. Martin’s. With SEIZE THE NIGHT, it was a frustration with people saying vampires weren’t scary anymore. With DARK CITIES, it was a panel at DragonCon about where the authors felt comfortable and where we felt anxious, in a dark alley or a dark country road. With HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SCREAM, it was actually a title I’d come up with years before. I so wanted to use it for something, and then I came up with the idea for a short story I called “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” but I didn’t have a Christmas anthology to sell it to. My friend Tom Sniegoski suggested I do a Christmas horror anthology and finally use that title, and I knew it was perfect. I made him promise to do a story for it. With the upcoming HEX LIFE, my co-editor Rachel Autumn Deering approached me to team up. Normally I would pass on something like that, but Rachel is incredibly talented and a real pro, and I liked the idea of that team up. My one caveat was that I wanted to do an all female anthology, just to say to the editors who have hardly any women in their anthologies that it’s not difficult to find fantastic horror and dark fiction by women, you just have to want to.

In general, who and/or what are your writing influences, classic and modern?

Such a huge question. Stephen King is and always will be number one for me. His narrative voice is the narrative voice of my youth. Other huge influences people may or may not see in my work include Jack London, Shirley Jackson, Charles de Lint, Carol O’Connell, James Lee Burke, John Irving, Mo Hayder, Dennis Lehane, Mike Mignola, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, John Wyndham, and comics writers like Marv Wolfman and J.M. DeMatteis. Right now I’m reading THE NIGHT SISTER by Jennifer McMahon and I’m taking a lot of wiring inspiration from that. Jennifer has a gift for timing and delivery, the way she metes out plot to create fantastic tension.

Can you remember the first story you read that made you think “I want to be a writer”?

I really can’t. I could lie to you, but I won’t.  What I do remember is the first time I thought, “hey, I could write a novel.” I was reading THE LIGHT AT THE END by John Skipp and Craig Spector and there was something about the tone of that novel, their storytelling voice, the fun they were having and the colloquial way they presented their characters that made me think I could actually do that. I started my first novel, OF SAINTS AND SHADOWS, shortly thereafter.

What scares you?

Are you kidding? I live in the United States of America in 2019. Everything is terrifying. We live in fear every single day that the ignorant piece of shit in the White House will destroy us all. Beyond that, we need immediate and radical action to ameliorate the climate disaster that is already underway. But, y’know, let’s talk about ghosts and demons instead. I’d much rather focus on the supernatural than on the children in cages and filth in concentration camps in my own country. (That’s sarcasm. I’m very vocal about all of this and I know it costs me readers but I couldn’t care less. Children are dying. People are suffering. I only pray we can get enough people out to vote in 2020 that we can overcome the election tampering that is absolutely, 100% going to happen.)

Your Baltimore series is quite amazing – how did you come to work with Mike Mignola on that?

Mike and I have been friends since I interviewed him for Flux Magazine way back when HELLBOY first hit comics shops. We’d worked on a number of projects already and we talked on a regular basis. Over the course of a few  years he kept telling me about this vampire graphic novel he planned to do, and one day he just said he’d realized he was never going to have the time to do it, and would I like to write it as a novel. That turned into the novel BALTIMORE, OR, THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER AND THE VAMPIRE, which led to us doing two other books together, and then to the comic book series BALTIMORE and JOE GOLEM: OCCULT DETECTIVE, and some other things I can’t talk about just yet.

You can take five books to a desert island with you: which ones make the cut?

THE STAND by Stephen King. A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving. LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry. THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson.  THE SEA WOLF by Jack London.

What attracts you to the darker side of fiction?

I’ve always loved the dark stuff. As a kid, I gravitated toward monster movies and comics, and when I started reading, to horror and dark fantasy. When I started writing, my mother asked “why can’t you write something good?” What she meant was something NICE. I explained that I’d written love stories, western stories, science-fiction stories, but that somebody always died. My work nearly always has romance in it, too, but I think the darkness is there to emphasize the light. It’s about having something to fight for. Heroes are only as interesting as their villains, protagonists only as courageous as the terrors they face are terrifying.

What is next for Christopher Golden?

I’m currently working on way too many projects at once. My next novel, RED HANDS, should be out next year. I’m writing the TV pilot for BEN WALKER, a series based on the main character from ARARAT and THE PANDORA ROOM.  I’m writing several comics I can’t announce yet.  October sees the release of two new anthologies, HEX LIFE and THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS.  My anthology with Tim Lebbon, TEN-WORD TRAGEDIES, inspired by the music of Frank Turner, comes out in two weeks! Thanks so much for asking, Angela, and for writing me some wonderful stories, including for HEX LIFE. I can’t wait for people to read it!

New Novel

So, I’ve started writing a new novel, Morwood.

Like Blackwater it’s a gothic fantasy set in the Sourdough/Bitterwood world, and I’m at the stage where I love it. It’s new and pretty and we’re in our honeymoon period.

Here’s a first draft sample (no comments required).

Just before I entered beneath the archway, I glanced over my shoulder, at the lawn and gardens across which I had come. Lightning flashed yet again and lit up the grounds, silvering a strange hunched silhouette back up on the curve of the drive, and I thought of … something. Something large but of indeterminate shape, something I could not quite place, nor did its colour even remain in my memory; there was only the recollection of red eyes. Resolute, though shivering with more than cold, I crossed the threshold.

‘Miss Todd,’ said the man with certainty; no surprise, really, unless the Hall was frequented by random young women on a daily basis. He waved his hands as if doing so might squeeze the moisture from my thin jacket and thick skirt. I caught sight of my reflection in the enormous mirror that was the centrepiece of a rosewood hall stand. My tiny green silk hat appeared to have melted, and I could feel the extra weight of the rain in the thick braided bun of my mousy hair. It would take hours to dry. My face was pale and I appeared, ghostly, although I’d never felt so triumphant in my life. I glanced away before I could examine too closely the look in my own eyes, and blinked, held the closure for a few moments to compose myself so the man could not see it either.

‘Yes,’ I say and it feels not enough. ‘I’m Asher Todd.’

Restoration in paperback form!

Well, guess what’s coming out in paperback!! Hello, Restoration, my last child.

So, if you’ve been waiting, arms crossed, grumping “I won’t buy it until all the trilogy is out, even though that might affect the chances of getting the last book published!” (yeah, I see you) then now’s your chance!

#restoration

#verityfassbinder

#lastveritybookever

#wholeseriesisout

#paperback

#supernaturalcrime

#urbanfantasy

Ten Things You Need to Know about Grants*:

Art by Kathleen Jennings

I’ve been fortunate enough to be awarded some grants during my career (by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and the Australia Council for the Arts). To balance things out, I have also not received many of the grants for which I’ve applied. As I am a writer, I’ll be specifically directing this towards getting grants for literature, but there’s enough general advice in here for anyone in the Arts to walk away with some useful information. I’m also Australian, so this applies specifically to the Australian system of public Arts funding (d’uh). As with anything, be a responsible self-directed author, and do your own research to fill in the blanks ? that’s the whole point of Google.

So, here are ten things you need to know about grants (*not an exhaustive list):

Many Hear the Call but Few Are Chosen

Grants.

Everyone wants one.

Everyone thinks they deserve one.

Everyone’s chances of getting one are very low indeed.

The sad fact is that there’s a limited pool of Arts funding to go around. Artists don’t tend to attract sponsorships the way sportsfolk do … and I think that’s a shame, because honestly, who’d be better adverts than writers for coffee, booze and yoga pants? Well, maybe not the yoga pants so much, lycra is very unforgiving and we’re not always given to activities involving movement or sweat.

My point? Have realistic expectations. What stage are you at in your career? What will you get out of this project/what will you produce? Is your project going to look like a good investment of public funds? I know that doesn’t sound very artistic or creative, but government funding bodies need to justify their expenditure. They need to be able to see some sort of return on investment, whether that be a new work written (although preferably written and published) or a skills development course undertaken to get you to the next level of your creative career.

Your Application Will Take a Few Weeks

That’s not the decision-making process (that will take months) – that’s the time it will take you to prepare and pull your application together. You’re going to need to discuss in a considered and articulate fashion the scope and aims of your project, how you’re going to do The Thing, and what you’ll get out of it (production  of a new work, career development, skills acquisition/development, market/audience development, etc).

You might need to ask for support letters from people with standing in the writing/publishing industry/community who know your work. These people need to be prepared to commit to paper that they believe you will (a) benefit from the grant, (b) will make the most of the opportunity, and (c) will move forward in your career as a result. Hint: do not ask them the night before, it’s the equivalent of telling your mum you need an asparagus costume for school the very next day.

If you’re applying for a grant to produce a new novel, you will also need to provide writing samples to show the grant body the standard of your work – so, not the micro-fiction you threw down one Saturday night after not much thought but rather a lot of cheap wine. An already published piece is generally better than an unpublished piece (shows a publication track record), and a piece that has won an award or had multiple reprintings is better again (again, showing some kind of achievement in your field helps). You might be required to submit a sample of the new work you’re hoping to get a grant to create, so make sure you polish it until it shines. A well-crafted short example is better than a weak overly-long extract.

The upshot of all this is: be prepared. It will take time to write and edit and proof your application (because a document filled with grammatical infelicities and spelling eccentricities is not going to help your cause). And again (I cannot emphasise this enough), it will take anyone who agrees to provide a support letter time to phrase that correctly, so don’t ask for these things at the last minute. They don’t get written quickly or easily: a good letter of support will not only mention your writing ability but also help to demonstrate how your proposed project will move you forward. Respect everyone’s time.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

There are several organisation to which you can apply for grants, but you cannot rely on getting one from any of them.

If you’re applying for a big grant to buy yourself time away from other forms of paid employment to write a novel/cycle of poems/short story collection, then do not plan on getting that grant. Don’t plan on that being your only source of income, with no safety net. If you do assume you’ll get it, trust me when I tell you that you are going to be devastated if/when it doesn’t come to fruition. I learned that the hard way so you don’t have to: never have only one plan. Nowadays, my back-up plans have back-up plans.

So: what is your Plan B if you don’t get your grant? It needs to be more detailed than just throwing yourself on the fainting couch and howling for a couple of days whilst living on nothing but whiskey and Pringles.

How are you going to keep writing? How are you going to complete this project whether you get a grant or not? Because that’s another thing a funding body will want to see: that you are going to do this project come hell or high water, grant or no. That you’re committed to your artistic career.

That you will commit art no matter what.

You will need to make sure that you prepare a realistic budget for your project. Check with the organisation to see what level of detail they will require for the grant budget (and also for the acquittal process at the end, if you need to keep receipts, etc). If you’re applying for a travel grant to go and do a course somewhere, make sure your budget takes in all the costs, then show what proportion you’re paying and what proportion you’re proposing a grant will cover.

A travel grant will mean airfares, course registration, ground transfers, accommodation, travel insurance, incidentals (like phone costs, printing costs), a per diem rate for meals (you can use the government travel rate charts for public servants as a guide – once again, Google is your friend), etc. A grant to take a significant period off other paid employment to produce a significant piece of literature will need to budget for your expenses during that time: rent/mortgage payments, health insurance, food and utilities bills, associated travel costs for research trips, etc. Again: you will need to figure out what portion is going to be met by you, and what portion by one or more grants.

Grant bodies are also going to want to know that you’re (a) not expecting them to fund 100% of your project, (b) that you’ve applied to other grant bodies to help bear the cost, and (c) that you’ve got other forms of income to put towards the project yourself.

Keep in mind that there are also fully funded fellowships and residencies out there that you can apply for. They should pay you a living stipend for the period of the fellowship/residency, and if they’re located overseas you’ll often get your airfare paid for as well by the administering body. The Aerogramme Writers’ Studio maintains a very useful list of such opportunities (again: not exhaustive, so do your own further research).

It Takes Persistence

You might not get the first grant you apply for. You might not get the second, or third, or tenth. But: keep doing what you’re doing. A grant body will note if you keep applying, they will note if you’ve kept doing your art in spite of everything, kept achieving. But there is no point in throwing a hissy fit because you didn’t get the grant you applied for, no point in flouncing off declaring you’re never applying again – who is that supposed to teach a lesson to?

It’s also particularly unwise to throw public hissy fits at or in the direction of the funding body. Or even private hissy fits directed at the employees of that body. Why? If only because you might one day decide to apply for another grant – do you really want someone to remember you and say “Oh, hells no.”

Persist in polite but bloody-minded fashion. Show a pattern of persistence, show a pattern of determination and application. Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll get a grant coz someone ends up feeling sorry for you. Pity is also a tool.

It’s Not All about You

The point of this is: what are you going to put back into your community?

If you do get this grant to help you advance your career, what are you going to do to put something back or pay something forward? If you teach writing or mentor newer writers then that’s your first means of transmitting useful info. Tell your classes about what you learned. If you made connections and new networks as part of your project, then share that information with your students who are likely to be newbies with not a lot of clues: help them learn how the systems work (because grants for newbies are very rare indeed). You can’t make someone into a decent kind generous human being, but you can at least be an example of how one functions. Being a good example of a generous networker is the least you can do. Like, literally.

Similarly, if you’ve got an online presence, then write an article about your experience and what you learned (hey, just like this article on my website distilling and sharing what I’ve learnt! Will you look at that?). Document the advantages and pitfalls. It’s not all about the successes either, so if you encountered problems that others might also find, then talk about them – I’m not saying have a whinge-fest, but just let folk know there were stumbling blocks.

And if you get a publication outcome of out this project, then make sure you acknowledge the help of the funding organisation on your website and in the front matter of your book. Achievements like that are important outcomes for the grant bodies and help keep them getting funded so we keep getting funded.

 

You Need to Acquit

If you do get a grant, then at the end of your project you will need to acquit it to the satisfaction of the funding body. This means you need to show that you spent the public funds you were given in the manner you promised – i.e. did not spend it in dive bars or on online shoe shopping binges.

That might take the form of keeping receipts, letters or certificates of completion, or simply writing a report that shows you achieved the goals set out in your original application. If there were things you were unable to do then document that as well and give reasons as to why not. If you did something over-and-above the stated goals then document that as well (international publication, optioning of film rights to the book, etc), and reiterate the places where you will acknowledge the assistance of the grant organisation.

 

Be Realistic about What You’re Going to Do

There’s no point in applying for funding for a project that’s so jam-packed that you’ve actually got no realistic hope of achieving everything. The people assessing grant applications will have a good idea of what is and is not achievable in a particular period amount of time. You need to find that fine balance between doing too much and too little, between a realistic workload (because a project is work) and throwing everything into the soup.

If You Change It, You Need Approval

If you do get a grant but the parameters of your project change before you start it (e.g. part of your professional development or one of your appearances falls through), then you need to alert the granting body as soon as possible. It might change the amount you get, but if you can undertake replacement activities, you should be fine. Just make sure you supply confirmation of the new activities, like enrolment or invitation to participate details. It’s better to catch this at the start rather than having to justify it after you return.

Remember That You Might Never Get One

I hate to be a Debbie Downer on this and remind you of Points 1 and 3, but it is a sad fact for which you need to be prepared. Don’t rely on getting a grant. Ever. Like awards, this is a crap shoot, a gamble, buying a lottery ticket. However, the advantage is that if you keep applying you show persistence, and you will (hopefully) get better at writing grant applications. Plus you will build up a suite of grant applications that you can adapt from one round to the next so you’re not always reinventing the wheel.

Don’t Be an Asshole

If someone else got a grant and you didn’t? That’s life. Not everything comes with fries. Don’t whine or bitch, don’t complain, don’t tell others that your project was better. Don’t be an asshole.

Your project might simply not have held up against a range of others: perhaps you didn’t adequately demonstrate how it would help your career, or there wasn’t enough clear benefit to the Arts community, or it simply wasn’t an appropriate fit (hint: if you’re at uni and you applied for an Arts grant in order to complete part of your post-graduate degree, then that won’t fly because there’s post-grad funding for that with your uni). Just be gracious; congratulate those folk who get a grant this round. Maybe even ask them about their application – maybe they’ll be good eggs and let you see it so you can take notes for your next attempt. They might even end up being people who’ll be willing to write you a support letter later on.

So, no matter what happens, just try to be a decent human being.

In conclusion: this isn’t everything you need to know. These are just the highlights that have occurred to my tired brain. Do your own research, and remember that your local writers’ centre should also maintain a list of funding bodies; some of them might even list upcoming opportunities in a weekly or monthly bulletin. Remember that there are websites to visit, but that you should also make a point to chat (yes, on the phone) with the lovely folk at the funding body just to get a better feel for what they’re looking for, if there are specifically things they won’t fund, etc.

Essentially, if you only take away two things from this article, let them be (a) persist and (b) don’t be an asshole.

Some Funding Bodies of Interest:

Arts Queensland (each state in Australia has some similar body, so do the Google).

The Australia Council for the Arts

The Copyright Council’s Cultural Fund

The Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund

On Writing and Finishing a Trilogy

Over at Always Trust in Books I talk about the agony and the ecstasy of finishing off my Verity Fassbinder supernatural crime/urban fantasy trilogy.

Write a trilogy, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

*sigh*

I should start by saying that the Verity Fassbinder series began as a standalone short story. ‘Brisneyland by Night’ was written at Clarion South in 2009 and caught the eye of someone who helpfully suggested it would make an excellent series if I could manage it.

Ignorance is not only bliss but also a kind of protective Teflon coating that blinds you to any real clue as to what you’re about to attempt. I had no idea what structure was, so turning ‘Brisneyland’ into Vigil took me roughly five years. Luckily for me, Jo Fletcher is patient.

Go here for the rest.

The Flensing Factory …

The Flensing Factory is open once again, operating at full capacity.

All the flensing, all the time.

Bring me your novels, your short stories, and pay me because I offer a very valuable service!

Contact me at me@angelaslatter.com