Angela Slatter's Blog, page 29

AWC: Creative Writing Stage 1

My fellow Brisneylanders,

I’ll be teaching a weekend workshop for the Australian Writers’ Centre in Brisbane on 12-13 May.

It’s Creative Writing Stage 1 and for bookings and further info, go here!

There are a couple of spots left.

 

HARK!

As we can’t show the cover yet, here are my knees, in a pool, whilst I’m house-sitting. You’re welcome.

Just to say that I’m delighted to announce that I’ve got a new story in Christopher Golden’s HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SCREAM, due out in October from Knopf Doubelday. “Honor Thy Mother” is a tale of unappreciated mothers and disappointing sons at Christmas.

Eighteen stories of Christmas horror from bestselling, acclaimed authors including Scott Smith, Seanan McGuire, Josh Malerman, Michael Koryta, Sarah Pinborough, and many more.

That there is darkness at the heart of the Yuletide season should not surprise. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is filled with scenes that are unsettling. Marley untying the bandage that holds his jaws together. The hideous children–Want and Ignorance–beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The heavy ledgers Marley drags by his chains. In the finest versions of this story, the best parts are the terrifying parts.

Bestselling author and editor Christopher Golden shares his love for Christmas horror stories with this anthology of all-new short fiction from some of the most talented and original writers of horror today.

ToC:

Absinthe & Angels – Kelley Armstrong

Christmas in Barcelona – Scott Smith

Fresh as the New-Fallen Snow – Seanan McGuire

Love Me – Thomas E. Sniegoski

Not Just for Christmas – Sarah Lotz

Tenets – Josh Malerman

Good Deeds – Jeff Strand

It’s a Wonderful Knife – Christopher Golden

Mistletoe and Holly – James A. Moore

Snake’s Tail – Sarah Langan

The Second Floor of the Christmas Hotel – Joe R. Lansdale

Farrow Street – Elizabeth Hand

Doctor Velocity: A Story of the Fire Zone – Jonathan Maberry

Yankee Swap – John M. McIlveen

Honor Thy Mother – Angela Slatter

Home – Tim Lebbon

Hiking Through – Michael Koryta

The Hangman’s Bride – Sarah Pinborough

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF HALLOWEEN STORIES

Edited by Mr Stephen Jones and published by Skyhorse, The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories will be released at Halloween (well, does what it says on the can!). You can pre-order here.

Check out the ToC:

“Introduction: When Churchyards Yawn”

“October in the Chair” – Neil Gaiman

“Reflections in Black” – Steve Rasnic Tem

“The Halloween Monster” – Alison Littlewood

“The Phénakisticope of Decay” – James Ebersole

“Memories of Día de los Muertos” – Nancy Kilpatrick

“Fragile Masks” – Richard Gavin

“Bone Fire” – Storm Constantine

“Queen of the Hunt” – Adrian Cole

“The October Widow” – Angela Slatter

“Before the Parade Passes By” – Marie O’Regan

“Her Face” – Ramsey Campbell

“A Man Totally Alone” – Robert Hood

“Bleed” – Richard Christian Matheson

“The Ultimate Halloween Party App” – Lisa Morton

“The Folding Man” – Joe R. Lansdale

“I Wait for You” – Eygló Karlsdóttir

“Dust Upon a Paper Eye” – Cate Gardner

“Not Our Brother” – Robert Silverberg

“The Scariest Thing in the World” – Michael Marshall Smith

“The Nature of the Beast” – Sharon Gosling

“The Beautiful Feast of the Valley” – Stephen Gallagher

“In the Year of Omens” – Helen Marshall

“The Millennial’s Guide to Death” – Scott Bradfield

“White Mare” – Thana Niveau

“Pumpkin Kids” – Robert Shearman

“Lantern Jack” – Christopher Fowler

“Halloween Treats” – Jane Yolen

Over at Amazon

The following stories and collections are currently .99 cents …

Ripper (novella)

Four Horrifying Tales (mini-collection)

Four Dark Tales (mini-collection)

Home and Hearth (short story)

Black-Winged Angels (collection)

The Burning Circus (short story)

 

The Dublin Literary Award Noms

I’m utterly delighted to learn that Vigil has become a nominated work for the Dublin Literary Award, along with other fine Aussie works by Anita Heiss, Hannah Kent and Jane Harper!

Kane’s Scary Tales Vol. 1

Paul Kane’s latest, Scary Tales, will soon be available. I read it and liked it so much I wrote the Introduction.

Beware: the writing style is deceptive, conversational: you’re just having a drink with an old friend … who suddenly pulls a gun on you and tells you to get in the van, there’s no time to explain, you just need to trust him. So you do, then he doesn’t stay on the blacktop, does he? Nooooo, he pulls off onto a dirt road that winds through a dark forest and pulls up outside, you guessed it, a fairy tale castle. Next he tells you you’re going to crash a fairy tale wedding so get your sword and shield, get your magic dust, and watch out for the unicorns because they’re temperamental little mongrels. Right: you’re going in.  

All of which is a long way of saying Paul Kane’s scary tales will take you (along with your worst wishes and darkest wants) down shadowy paths. Oh, you’ll find the happily-ever-afters are true, although not entirely happy ? so perhaps they are all the truer for that. Three things to keep in mind: be careful what you wish for because you just might get it; listen to your fear because it might just keep you alive; and salvation – when it comes, if it comes – might just originate from a most unexpected place, so keep your eyes peeled.

Five stories, all modern re-tellings of well-loved (and feared!) fairy tales from the UK’s master of scary tales, Paul Kane (Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell, Before, Hellbound Hearts, Monsters, The Hellraiser films and their legacy)! With cover artwork by the legendary Les Edwards!

Locus Interview Extract

There’s an extract of my interview with Locus Magazine over at Locus online.

“I worked with intent. My thought was, I’m 37, and I want to give this a real go to do it as a career. I don’t want to get to 50 and not have tried it, and I certainly don’t want to get to my death bed and think, ‘I wish.’ That was 13 years ago.”

Ze rest is in ze mag.

Tales to Terrify #316

Over at the Tales to Terrify podcast, my gothic ghost story “The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners” (read by Drew Sebesteny; originally published in Murder Ballads by Egaeus Press), is awaiting your ears!

And there is also Randall Garrett’s “Time Fuze” as read by Steven Thomas Howell, just to sweeten the deal.

 

Locus March 2018 Issue

The March issue features interviews with James Gunn and Angela Slatter, appreciations for Ursula K. Le Guin, a column by Cory Doctorow, the 2017 Nebula Awards Ballot, Stoker Awards Final Ballot, and BSFA Shortlist, plus much more! http://locusmag.com/2018/03/issue-686-table-of-contents-march-2018/ …

City of Lies: Sam Hawke

A black belt in jujitsu, Sam Hawke lives with her husband and children in Australia. City of Lies is her first novel. She also has the shortest bio to ever appear on this blog.

1. What do new readers need to know about Sam Hawke?

Hmm, depends for what purpose. If it’s so they can send me gifts, they need to know that dark chocolate > milk, Ten is the best Doctor, and you can’t go wrong with a book voucher

Oh, you mean as a writer? Fine. *crumples up gift list*

You might like to give my fiction a look in if you like secondary world epic fantasy with non-medieval-European settings and elements of mystery/suspense. Or if you prefer instructional blog posts on how to defeat a cheese hangover or wasting time productively* you might enjoy my considerably sillier online presence.

* Not productively

2. What was the inspiration for City of Lies?

Fantasy is full of assassins and warriors and magicians and heroes, and don’t get me wrong, I love these staples of our genre as much as anyone. But I’ve always been very interested in the characters working behind the scenes – the advisers and sidekicks and friends – and I also enjoy reading characters who play outside the usual gamut of professions and skill sets. Perhaps because I’m obsessed with food, the idea that eventually became City of Lies began with the profession of poison tasting.

Poison tasting was a job in ancient civilisations like Egypt and Rome but typically was the role of a servant, and to succeed at your job was to die, preferably quickly, before the intended victim ingested poisoned food. There’s not much of a story in that (flash fiction, maybe?), but I wondered (again: obsessed with food) in what circumstances it might instead have been a skilled profession. Could you learn to detect the tastes, smells and textures of toxins in food? Could it be a valued and honourable role to protect an important person? A hereditary duty, with one family protecting another? What kind of civilisation would develop the need for such a role? Perhaps one where open violence isn’t tolerated, but a subtle poisoning is part of political reality?

Suddenly I had characters introducing themselves to me – a poison taster unexpectedly thrust into the role when a new poison kills the previous taster; his older sister, whose chronic poor health prevented her from taking up the role that should have been hers; and the new Chancellor they’re now charged to protect, and who is also their oldest childhood friend… Then I set about making life extremely difficult for all of them, and City of Lies was born.

3. What were you favourite books as a child?

I don’t know how anyone answers that without taking up pages! I’m almost certainly forgetting important formative books but here are a sample of the ones I can remember being the most obsessed with/re-reading the most in my primary school years:

Anything by Enid Blyton, but especially the circus and adventure stories, and Roald Dahl (especially Matilda, The BFG, and The Witches)
When Marnie was There (Joan G. Robinson)
Megan’s Star (Allan Baillie)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
Quickhoney (Gary Hurle)
Black Belt / The Ice Mountain (Nicholas Walker)
The Callender Papers (Cynthia Voigt)
Space Demons (Gillian Rubenstein)
Gypsy and Nimblefoot (Sharon Wagner)
Fear is the Key (Alistair MacLean) (actually literally his entire back catalogue)

I know it’s quite a long list but I’ll have you know this question resulted in many hours of frantic texting with my siblings and difficult google searches to identify some of those titles (you try finding a book on google which was likely, possibly, called ‘Julie’ and had a purple cover, or ‘that one about the chess game, with the kids and the evil guys, and maybe time travel?’). Anyway you’ll see from that list that I was a suuuuuper weird kid with bizarre taste, but apparently my pre-teen brain liked adult spy thrillers exactly as much as stories about karate and ice skating and escaped elephants and plucky children saving the day from computer games that came to life. I suppose if I had to draw a connection between these books, though it’s an eclectic bunch, I always loved stories of magic and/or suspense, family, mystery and optimism.

Edited to add: Thanks to my amaaaazing mother doing late night bookshelf scouring, I can confirm that it IS called Julie and it was by Cora Taylor. Ha!

 4. Which writers have been your biggest influences?

There are probably two fantasy authors who have most inspired and influenced me. First, Robin Hobb, who writes the way I can only dream of writing – she tells stories that break my heart (in the best way) with characters whose lives feel complete, and in a style so effortless and elegant it just reads as perfection to me. She taught me that first person could be a thing of utter beauty and that the old beloved tropes of fantasy could be told in fresh and gorgeous ways. Second, Kate Elliott, whose catalogue is probably the most drop dead impressive array of fantasy I can think of from a single author – she has written dozens of books all over the SFF genre spectrum, and just knocks them all out of the park, each more thoughtfully and carefully crafted than the last, with the flat out consistent best worldbuilding I can think of. If I could produce work a tenth of the quality of Robin or Kate, I’d consider it career success.

In my teens and 20s in particular I always also took a lot of inspiration from the giants of the Australian fantasy scene – Sara Douglass, Trudi Canavan, Jennifer Fallon, Kate Forsyth, Isobelle Carmody, Garth Nix & Glenda Larke, to name a few – so many of them were these amazing women writing the sorts of books I wanted to write, and they lived right here in little ole Aus.