Angela Slatter's Blog, page 50

Summer Wigmore: Back When the River Had No Name

Summer Wigmore has written many books and published one, so far: The Wind City, published by Steam Press. This is their first foray into sending out short stories, and shows the excellent rewards of foraying. Lately Summer has also taken up a bewildering variety of crafts, from candle-making to drying their own ingredients for tea. A living experiment in gentle pretension.

 1. What inspired your story/novelette?

What made me choose it for this was all the brilliant post-apocalyptic media going around at the moment, so, thank you Mad Max. I’ve had the idea for a long time, though. As a teenager I was biking along the riverpaths by my house, and wondered what it would be like if they were completely deserted, the tarmac cracked. I stood by the busy bridge very early in the morning one day and got a hint of that desolation. From that I played around with the idea of a post-apocalyptic version of the city I grew up in, and here we are.

Initially I never managed to write it because I thought it was a novel! I’m glad I’ve come far enough to delight in other forms, and that I finished it eventually.

2. What appealed to you about this project?

Literally eveeeeerything.

Liminality and well-liked peers. The edges of things. Most of all, being able to contribute or participate in a project that sounded so exciting! I love everything done by the creative team involved, Dan and Lee, Marie. I wanted to appear beside our best and brightest and I’m so grateful and delighted that I got to!

3. What do you love about short stories?

Every word needs to be there. You don’t get the chance to waste anything.

Also, they can hit like a hammer to the chest, or sneak up on you ages later and linger around. A powerful effect for a small thing.

4. Can you remember the first thing you ever read that made you want to write?

Yes, but as it was a picture book about ants where I was mostly just enamoured with knowing what punctuation marks were, I might answer this with what made me take my lifelong idle wish to be a writer and actually work to make it a reality, which is Pat Rothfuss’s book The Name of the Wind. Reading it I was struck immensely by its beauty. It was the first book I stayed up after one for. (Back BEFORE that was my routine.) I vowed to one day make something even a quarter as beautiful. I can recognise it as being a work made by a human and possessing flaws, these days, but I’m still deeply grateful for the fire it lit in me.

5. What’s next for you?

I’m still tinkering away at a novel that seems to have taken me a long time, and have high hopes for this one, cautiously. And will always be writing books! I will dive more often into short stories as a form, now, though. It’s exciting to see what can be done with them.

 

Supanova in Brisneyland!!!

Well, you might not be three exclamation marks’ worth of excited but I am!!!

It’s my first Supanova and it’s in my hometown. Pretty happy about that. Also pretty darned excited that I’ll be there with mates such as Alan Baxter, Kim Wilkins and Maria Lewis.

I’ll be doing panels and signing books in Authors Alley, and I’ll have a few Corpselight  chapbooks for the first twenty-five folks who bring a copy of Vigil for me to sign.

I’ll also have a buttload of Vigil badges for anyone who asks nicely right up until I run out of them.

Details are here.

Alan Baxter’s Crow Shine

Alan Baxter is an award-winning author of dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi and an international master of kung fu. He runs the Illawarra Kung Fu Academy and writes novels, novellas and short stories full of magic, monsters and, quite often, martial arts. He rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. You can find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter, Facebook and Instagram: @warrior_scribe.

His debut short story collection is Crow Shine (links for pre-order can be found here), and he is the author of the kick-ass (or kick-arse for those of you in The Commonwealth) Alex Caine trilogy, Bound, Obsidian, and Abduction.

1. How did the Crow Shine collection come about?

After 70-something short story publications my agent and I started nosing around publishers for interest. I’ve always wanted a collection and Ticonderoga were pretty much my first pick as they always make such fantastic books. Thankfully they liked my work and jumped on board. They’ve published a number of my stories before in various anthologies, so we had a working relationship already.

2. What sorts of tales will readers encounter?

While I write across horror, fantasy and sci-fi, this is a collection of the cream of my dark fantasy and horror stories. Stuff I usually refer to as the dark weird fantastic. There’s magic and monsters, there’s revenge and consequences, there’s wonder and darkness. And hopefully a few thrills along the way.

3. Which is your absolute favourite story in the whole collection?

What!? I can’t pick a favourite child! Honestly, I love different stories for different reasons and genuinely couldn’t pick a favourite. I’m immensely proud of every single story in this book.

4. Who are your favourite short story writers?

So many people! Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Roald Dahl… You know what? I recently wrote a blog post that was exactly this – a long list of short story writers I love. So maybe just check that out here: http://www.alanbaxteronline.com/short-story-writers-recommend/ All the people included there are absolute masters of the craft.

5. What’s next for Team Alan Baxter?

I’m in open water productively at the moment. I’m about to start work on a couple of new big projects, but in the meantime I’m waiting for the release of Bound: Alex Caine Book 1 in the US in December and then Primordial, a monster novel I co-wrote with David Wood, is coming out from Cohesion Press in February. Sometime next year a mystery/cosmic horror/modern noir novella called The Book Club is coming out from PS Publishing. Exciting times!

Review of Vigil in The Age

The delightful Rjurik Davidson reviews Vigil in The Melbourne Age (and the Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times).

Vigil review: Angela Slatter creates a seriously weird version of Brisbane

Angela Slatter won the World Fantasy Award for The Bitterwood Bible and other Recountings, a collection of rich and dark fairytales. Since then readers have eagerly anticipated a novel. Slatter’s debut, Vigil, is a sidestep from fairytales into “urban fantasy”, a sub-genre often featuring sharp-tongued detectives operating in a paranormal world hidden in the interstices of the real one.

Descended from Victorian detective stories, this modern sub-genre usually involves some kind of magical murder that leads the detective into the shadowy fantasy world hidden beneath ours. Vigil reworks these urban fantasy tropes into an Australian setting.

The rest is here.

Keira McKenzie: In Sacrifice We Hope

Caution: might not actually be Keira McKenzie

Keira McKenzie resides in the desert lands far to the west across the Tasman ditch.  In the city by the sea, she spends her time torn between drawing/painting and writing.  She has sold illustrations, artwork, short stories and essays.  She doesn’t know which comes first: the painting or the words.  She has a PhD somehow, despite the cat, the would-be triffids of the courtyard, and the (mostly) invisible dragons of kitchen gardens and rain drops.

1. What inspired “ In Sacrifice We Hope” ?

This story is one of the ‘oldest’ of a series of linked short stories concerning the disintegration of Perth as global climate change and all its many *primary* consequences have taken effect.  The city is utterly isolated, though at the time of this story, there are still trees and there is still a sense of community.  It was also the only story that could be separated from all the others, the only one that would most easily stand on its feet.

It was inspired by a novel I was writing at the time that became my PhD project, by my own concerns about what is happening to the planet and the lack of any real effort to change the trajectory of the present into this imagined future.  It is therefore a mix of scientific research and letting my head loose to wreak what it will on the imagined world.

2. What appealed to you about this project?



I heard about it very late – only a few days before submissions closed.  I was trying to up my confidence and was spurred on by a friend to submit – they knew I had a complete and reasonably polished story that slotted into what you were asking for. I generally write stories with characters and/or settings at the ragged edges of sanity, existence, or meaning.  I was told by others that knew of yours & Dan’s previous work that if I was accepted it would be an extremely worthwhile endeavour.  So I worked my little butt off to polish the story and was astonished and thrilled to have had the story accepted. The payment, regardless of size, makes it a commercial sale.  I was thrilled!

New Review of Vigil

Many thanks to the delightful Maria Haskins for this great review of Vigil!

Angela Slatter’s ‘Vigil’ is a whodunnit wrapped up in a dark, urban fantasy world, and one of the many delightful things about this terrific page-turner of a book, is that both the murder mystery, and the fantasy part of the story work so well. The murder mystery kept me guessing until the very end, just the way it should, and the fantasy world Slatter introduces is rich and convincing, and peopled with a cast of odd, frightening, entertaining, and occasionally horrifying creatures – both human and…not so human.

For the rest, go here.

Hello, Hellboy

Soooo, one of the secrets I’ve been sitting on this year is the new Hellboy prose anthology, Hellboy: An Assortment of Horror, in which I haz a story.

Very excited about this, and very grateful to Mike Mignola and Chris Golden for asking me to contribute.

Awesome ToC includes (but might not be limited to): Chelsea Cain, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Richard Kadrey, Chris Roberson, Paul Tremblay, Delilah Dawson, Laird Barron, Angela Slatter, Chris Priestley, Michael Rowe, Rio Youers, Kealan Patrick Burke, E. Lily Yu, Weston Ochse.

Strange California: Kickstarter

Okay, a kickstarter for your attention: Strange California. Starring Oz’s very own, very talented, Suzanne Willis, as well as Elise Tobler and Spencer Ellsworth among others (equally talented but possibly less Australian). It’s edited by Jaym Gates and J. Daniel Batt.

From Hollywood to Santa Cruz to Tahoe, Strange California brings to life tales inspired by the complex mythologies of California.

Throw some shekels their way!

 

Unsung Stories Audio

When I was in the UK in August I was lucky enough to be invited to read at one of the Unsung Stories gigs with awesome talents Malcolm Devlin, Rob Boffard and Elie Lee.

The noise file is now available.

I’m reading a new story, “The Red Forest”, which will be out in my new short story collection from PS Publishing, Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales. Big thanks to Olivia at Jo Fletcher Books and the lads at Unsung Stories for organising this, and to Haralambi Markov for his excellent critting of the story.

Over at Tor.com: Five Mosaic Novels You Should Read

Art from Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station

Yay, my PhD didn’t entirely go to waste coz I got to write this article for Tor.com!

Five Mosaic Novels You Should Read

A mosaic novel, you say? What’s that when it’s at home? How’s it differ from a common or garden novel? Well, my favourite explanation is from the inimitable Jo Walton: “A normal novel tells a story by going straightforwardly at it, maybe with different points of view, maybe braided, but clearly going down one road of story. A mosaic novel builds up a picture of a world and a story obliquely, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

The rest is here.