Angela Slatter's Blog, page 41

New Interview

Art by Kathleen Jennings

The lovely Dr Nin Harris interviewed me over at Mythopoetic!

Thanks for letting me come and play!

What’s the best way for an author to start her day, according to Angela Slatter?

Coffee! Or the beverage of choice. And of course, this is all just how I start my day; everyone is different, but I try to start in a way that sets me up to go on in a productive manner. So: wake up, have breakfast, do 20 mins of yoga or a walk around the block. Come back, shower, put on real clothes so it feels like you’re going to do a job (not just sit at home in your PJs), then check your email and the internet for a mandated amount of time. Deal with the work emails, save the personal ones for later, don’t spend too much time on Facebook or Twitter for that way lies madness. Check your to-do list and start on the next project in order of deadlines proximity.

Don’t forget to stand up and walk around every half an hour or so to keep blood flowing, muscles moving and your back from seizing up. Make sure you have a lunch break, take it away from your desk and, again, have a mandated period of something not writing-related (like bad tv). Set an alarm so you get up and go back to work. Be wary of time as it’s a slippery thing!

The rest is here.

Locus Awards Finalists

I’m delighted to see that Vigil has made the list of finalists for the 2017 Locus Awards! Great to see so many friends with wonderful books there too!

FIRST NOVEL

The Reader , Traci Chee (Putnam)
Waypoint Kangaroo , Curtis Chen (Dunne)
The Star-Touched Queen , Roshani Chokshi (St. Martin’s)
The Girl from Everywhere , Heidi Heilig (Greenwillow; Hot Key)
Roses and Rot , Kat Howard (Saga)
Ninefox Gambit , Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
Arabella of Mars , David D. Levine (Tor)
Infomocracy , Malka Older (Tor.com Publishing)
Everfair , Nisi Shawl (Tor)
Vigil , Angela Slatter (Jo Fletcher)

Check out the rest of the list, there’s some excellent company there.

Shadows & Tall Trees 7: Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem’s last novel, Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014) won the Bram Stoker Award. His next novel, UBO (Solaris, Febuary 2017) is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler. He is also a past winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. A handbook on writing, Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Fiction, written with his late wife Melanie, will appear soon from Apex Books. Visit the Tem home  on the web at: www.m-s-tem.com

1.  What inspired your story in Shadows & Tall Trees 7?

“The Erased” began, as many of my stories do, with a vague, real-world perception of strangeness, which I then pursued into fiction. When friends my age (I turned 66 a few months ago)get together their conversations sometimes devolve into a small set of obsessional topics. It doesn’t seem to matter the level of education or sophistication, we find ourselves talking about our illnesses, acquaintances of similar age who have died recently, or recent changes in our environment: stores remodeled, streets altered, houses and businesses torn down, and the structures which have replaced them (for better or worse). You would think we would have become accustomed to these changes by this point in our lives, but often we seem surprised, sometimes even shocked. Something in our part of the world suddenly disappears, and we have to make the effort to readjust. Sometimes the adjustment doesn’t come without a struggle. Sometimes the weight of change feels like almost too much to bear. It reminds us how strange it is to be so mortal, so impermanent, while our minds seem capable of imagining “the forever.” An older friend and I were having one of those conversations about the neighborhood where I lived up until seven years ago (and the big old house where I raised my kids, built in 1898). When I moved away the newest house in the neighborhood was from the 1940s. Now, because of the recent huge demand for housing in Denver, they’re turning every garden lot and side yard into a housing lot, as well as tearing down older homes on big lots and replacing them with three or four units. All the new houses are in this “urban industrial” style—plain boxes with metal or wood panels attached in various configurations. The juxtaposition of these structures with those from the 40s, 30s, 20s, 1890s, feels, well, strange. And that’s the feeling I started with when I began “The Erased.”

2. Can you recall the first story you ever read that made you think “I want to be a writer!”?

It was a combination of two things really. In junior high I was reading my way through Jules Verne, and was especially taken with The Mysterious Island and its Robinson Crusoe-like ingenuity. I was also reading a huge volume of fairytales and fables—I don’t remember which one. But the combination of the two kindled an excitement in me about writing and telling stories.

3. What scares you?

Of the big, usual phobias, I’ve always been scared of heights. When I was young and had to go up a big staircase I was always afraid I’d trip, or do something crazy like leap off the side. It terrified me. When I became an adult, my biggest fear became the death of someone I love, and that remains my biggest fear today.

4. You can take five books to a desert island: which ones do you choose?

Two of the books would be by Cormac McCarthy: Sutree and Blood Meridian. After that, maybe Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Collected Stories of MR James, and the Vandemeers’ giant anthology The Weird.

5. What’s next for you? 

I’m working on an odd scattering of projects, but my two books coming out this year are probably the things that excite me most. Apex Publications is bringing out Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art and Practice of Writing, the last project I wrote with my late wife Melanie. It’s a handbook on writing fiction containing almost everything we’d learned about writing over the years. The other book is Ubo, my novel coming out from Solaris in February. Another decades-long project, Ubo is a blend of science fiction and horror, a meditation on violence utilizing such viewpoint characters as Stalin, Himmler, Charles Whitman, Jack the Ripper and Gilles de Raiis. I began it in the early 80s, and it was the most challenging thing I’d ever attempted. More problematic, however, was the fact that I had a 5- and an 8-year-old at home, and working on Ubo during the day and then playing with my children and reading them bedtime stories proved to be a wrenching experience. I put the manuscript aside. Over the years I’d pick it up again, until finally I felt sufficiently equipped emotionally and technically to complete it.

 

 

Over at Patreon …

… the May reward is up for my Monkshood supporters. The newsletter will go out to all my lovely patrons in the next day or so. Meanwhile, here’s a snippet, Monkshooders.

Got a few spare shekels? Consider throwing them my way! My Patreon reward levels are here.

eBookery

White fox by Kathleen Jennings

Have I mentioned lately that I’ve got some ebooks over at Amazon?

Samplers so you can see what I do if you don’t want to commit to an anthology or a collection or a novel …

“Home and Hearth”, eBook, on Amazon.
“Four Horrifying Tales”, mini-collection eBook on Amazon.
“Four Dark Tales”, mini-collection eBook on Amazon.
“The Burning Circus”, eBook on Amazon.

 

 

 

Aurora Australis

For the latest Australian spec-fic news, head over to Tor.com for Alexandra Pierce’s Aurora Australis column.

Awards! Films! Anthologies! Stuff!

Shadows & Tall Trees 7: Manish Melwani

Manish Melwani is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and currently lives in New York City, where he’s completing a masters thesis in creative writing, history and literature. His research focuses on the intersection of science fiction and postcolonial studies.

His story “The Tigers of Bengal” can be read in Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction #7. That tale, and “The Water Kings”, which will be published in Shadows and Tall Trees #7, are part of a forthcoming collection of Singapore ghost stories. You’ll find him where the waters are darkest, or online at www.manishmelwani.com.

1. What inspired your story in Shadows & Tall Trees 7?

This story was awful to write. It was inspired by a death in the family, and the writing (or grieving) process was essentially a waking nightmare filled with bizarre, occult coincidences.

It started late one night, when I saw an apparition in a neighbouring apartment: someone holding a giant green umbrella close to their head, so they looked like a crocodile-headed monstrosity. When I looked again, the person was gone. This became the opening image of the story, and was soon followed by a title: The Water Kings.

I’m not the sort of writer who starts with a title, so this was unusual. It didn’t make the story any easier to write, though.

Much of its grist comes from the politics and drama of multigenerational family businesses (a common occurrence in the Sindhi diaspora, to which I belong). There’s also a forgotten atrocity from WW2 that I learned about while researching my Singapore ghost story collection. I won’t give away any more, but I’m planning to publish an essay about these influences on my website after Shadows comes out.

2. Can you recall the first story you ever read that made you think “I want to be a writer!”?

Not specifically, but my Dad kept a huge collection of sci-fi paperbacks from his childhood, so I had the fortune of encountering books like The Hobbit, Foundation and Dune really early on.

My earliest writerly memory dates from Primary 2 (2nd grade). I was sitting at the back of the class, drawing a map of a fantasy kingdom in my exercise book. Our teacher told everyone to come sit on the floor at the front of the classroom, and I didn’t go, because I was so engrossed in my world-building. She confiscated the book and gave me detention. Traumatic for sure, but a clear sign that I was destined to write SFF.

3. What scares you?

When I’m up late at night, I fear that the visible world will turn out to be nothing but a facade, that it’ll be ripped away to reveal a nightmare universe; that demons or monsters might pry through reality’s fabric at any moment.

As a result, I really enjoy cosmic horror—the more coherent the cosmology, the scarier. Laird Barron’s Old Leech mythos and John Langan’s The Fisherman are recent favourites.

4. You can take five books to a desert island: which ones do you choose?

Oh god. I would bring “The Big Book of Five Books Brought To Desert Islands: An Anthology of Every Answer to This Question Ever”.

In all seriousness, though, I would bring books that are really long and/or re-readable, so they’d keep me busy for years.

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s massive short story anthologies The Weird and The Big Book of Science Fiction clock in at a total of 1.5 million words, which would keep me busy for at least the first three months. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy: I suspect it’s got enough hidden secrets that I could re-read it a couple more times. Ulysses, so I can force myself to finally finish it.

Lastly, I want to get fluent in Hindi, so I would like the most comprehensive Hindi primer ever written. Preferably with an appendix of short stories.

5. What’s next for you?

Finishing this collection of Singapore ghost stories in which The Water Kings will sit.

There’ll be ten stories total, taking place at various points in Singapore’s history between 1300 and 2300. They span a range of genre styles: magical realism, supernatural horror, spooky adventure story, science-fiction-but-with-ghost, etc.

After that, I’ve got a space opera novella, and another (completely unrelated) space opera novel in the works. So I’m slowly learning how to write stories that are longer and longer.

 

Review of Vigil

A lovely podcasty review of Vigil by Madeleine D’Este!

Merci mille fois, Madeleine – perfectly timed in the lead-up to Corpselight’s release.

Boonah Writers Festival: Short Stories

White fox by Kathleen Jennings

As promised to my classes this morning, here’s the list of short stories that have remained with me over many years and still give me nightmares on occasion – so, highly recommended!

It’s by no means definitive and entirely personal!

“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs

“The Tell-tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

“Wendigo’s Child” by Tom Monteleone

“The Chosen Vessel” by Barbara Bayton

“La Dame” by Tanith Lee

“The Tower” by Marghanita Laski

“Snow, Glass, Apples” by Neil Gaiman

Good solid classics and great learning tools.

Boonah Writers Festival

Art by Kathleen Jennings

Okay, this is where I’ll be this week: the Boonah Writers Festival, along with the likes of Nick Earls and Mary-Rose MacColl.

From 9.45am – 10.45am I’ll be talking about the psychology of horror writing and how to scare the pants off your readers. And if you miss that session, I’ll be repeating myself at 11.15!

Now, I’d best go and think up something smart to say …