Angela Slatter's Blog, page 58

Vigil Launch is go, go, go!!

Okay! The Brisbane City Library now has the Vigil launch on their calendar. It’s a free event, but you do need to call and book to attend (yes, even those of you who are related to me). And, go!

Or, for those of you like me who like their clickery more obvious, click here for details.

The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria: Carlos Hernandez

The best way to introduce Carlos Hernandez is to steal (with love, grace, and credit) from Haralambi Markov’s review of his short story collection over at Tor.com.

The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria comes out of nowhere, blindsides you with its witty play on language, and steers you into a realm of delightful science fiction which blurs present and future with fingers steady on the pulse of modern culture as it is now. Carlos Hernandez, in this one collection, has managed to convince me he belongs in my heart as a favorite. He has shown me how to boldly contort structure in short fiction without taking any hostages and in the instances he succeeds, the payoff is significant and rewarding, leaving the reader a beast contented after a feast.

Or for something a little more official, Rosarium’s author’s bio: Carlos Hernandez is the author of over 30 works of fiction, poetry, prose and drama. By day, he is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches English courses at BMCC and is a member of the doctoral faculty at The CUNY Graduate Center. Carlos is also a game designer, currently serving as lead writer on Meriwether, a CRPG about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He lives in Queens, which is most famous for not being Brooklyn.  

If that does not convince you, then you are simply obdurate and I’ll have nothing further to do with you.

1. What do readers need to know about Carlos Hernandez?

I am constitutionally built for optimism. I like to make friends, laugh with strangers, invite people to play. I’m no Pollyanna, I promise! I have a pretty nihilistic worldview in the macroscope. But in the day-to-day, I am awash in people who want to do right, who show mercy and give generously, who try to do their duty even in the face of a merry-go-sorry life that redefines duty even as it’s being carried out. These are the people who deserve laughter and knotty thought experiments to ponder and VIP access into the magic circle that is another person’s imagination. I love to write for this audience.

More practically, I write, I teach college, I play games and I make them.

2. Can you remember the first story you read that made you think “I want to write!”?

I had a bilingual edition of Ferdinand the Bull when I was a wee Carlito. Read it until it became sweaty confetti in my hands. I now own a translation of that story—in Latin.

3. What was the inspiration for The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria?

The collection is 12 stories! Each had its own inspiration!

“The Aphotic Ghost”: Werewolves? Bah! Where are the were-jellyfish stories?
“Homeostasis”: We already have zero idea whether anyone else exists. I will prove it once and for all. Also: faith feels nice.
“Entanglements”: If the Many Worlds Theory is correct, there are an infinite number of yous who are better at life than you are.
“The International Studbook of the Giant Panda”: There is literally a book in the world called The International Studbook of the Giant Panda that documents every known sexual encounter between pandas tagged and in captivity. Really, if you need any more inspiration than that, don’t be a writer.
“The Macrobe Conservation Project”: No one’s going to believe this, but the direct inspiration for this story was Junot Díaz’s collection Drown. Yunior on a space station dealing with Dad.
“Los Simpáticos”: a legend Mami told me about women using the hydrogen cyanide in tropical stone fruit to induce abortions led me to imagine a reality T.V. show in which people hire fake hitmen and then are interviewed by a reporter as to why.
“More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give”: Conducting research into the Cuban Revolution disabused me of simplistic notions of The Left (though, full disclosure, I remain quite Left) and of politics in general. So I wrote a story in which a Cuban spiritualist sucks ghosts out of the bullet holes left in the walls where they were executed by firing squad.
“Bone of My Bone”: Cuckolding is such bullshit: your partner cheats on you, and so you grow horns? Not on my watch.
“The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory”: I hate how animals are slaughtered for ivory. I also don’t always think it’s wrong to lie to children.
“American Moat”: The problem with patrolling the U.S./Mexico to keep aliens out of America is that some aliens have stuff you want. Like superpowers.
“Fantaisie Impromptu #4 in C#min, Op. 66”: Catholics aren’t looking forward to The Singularity nearly as much as the rest of us. Here’s why.
“The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria”: What any Latinx can tell you: magical realism is actually realism. More or less creative nonfiction.

4. Which is your favourite Assimilated Cuban story and why?

You can’t pick favorites among your children! Well, of course you can. You just don’t do it out loud.

What I’d say to readers is that:

if you take your sarcasm black with lots of sugar, read “Los Simpáticos,” “Bone of My Bone,” and “American Moat.”
if you like Big SF Ideas, you might enjoy “The Aphotic Ghost,” “Homeostasis,” “The Macrobe Conservation Project,” and “”
if you want a more “novelly”-type reading experience, a lot of readers really seem to like my recurring narrator Gabby Reál, a reporter on the fringes of science and magic; the three stories that feature her are “The International Studbook of the Giant Panda,” “The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory,” and “Fantaisie Impromptu #4 in C#min, Op. 66.”
if your tastes run more toward fantasy, magical realism, and questions of cultural ethnicity, try “More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give” and “The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria.” (“Entanglements” also fits here.)

This is a mighty, mighty cop-out on my part. I am totally okay with that.

5. You get to invite five fictional characters to dinner ? who do you choose and why?

Gargantua—because he suggests the very best way to wipe one’s butt is to use the neck of a goose. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
Oly Binewski (from Geek Love)—This book gave me the same “oh you can do this shit in literature?” epiphany that Gárcia Márquez had when reading Kafka, and Oly’s the narrator who payed out that revelation, metaphor by lightning-strike metaphor. I would love to say “thank you” in person and give her a hearty, soul-comforting stew to eat.
Ivan Karamazov, because boy is he beautiful and boy is he broken. We’ll perhaps avoid the topic of religion. (I’ve limited myself to one choice from Brothers K. here, because I could imagine a separate party where it was just the whole cast from the novel. Would lock the liquor cabinet up tight, though.)
The Wife of Bath—Feminist before it was cool! Hilarious, knows how to tell a story, and might be able to talk some sense into Ivan.
The Pied Piper, as represented by C. S. E. Cooney in her Nebula-nominated novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale.” That story broke me. Beauty is terrible and hurtful and may I have another? That’s her Pied Piper in a sentence.

6. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

Going to stick to the mostly dead or apotheosized-whilst-alive here. And I’m guessing everyone tells you the same thing: “too many to mention!” etc.

That said: Dostoyevsky. Flannery O’Connor. Alice Munro. Piers Anthony (as a young man). Katherine Dunn (for one book, but what a book!). John Barth, Asimov, Gárcia Márquez, William Gibson, Laurence Sterne, Kathy Acker. Rabelais!!!

Oh God oh God. Too many to mention. Bradbury, Heinlein (yes, I know, but shut up), C.L. Moore (“Shambleau”!), metric tons of delicious Pulp, OCTAVIA BUTLER. Please, denizens of sky and underworld, let me once write something a third as artistically complete as Kindred.

Frankenstein. Wallace Stevens. The Satanic Verses. Who has ever written better sentences than Elizabeth Bishop? Raymond Carver, especially the stories in Cathedral.

Don Quixote is required reading! And as soon as you’re done, read Pedro Juan Guiterrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy—a book more profound than profane, and holy shit is it profane—and you’ll understand my sense of humor completely.

Bless me, Ultima: please read this right now if you haven’t read it, and if you have read it, it’s been too long and you should reread it. Everyone should take a semester to study James Baldwin and another to study Toni Morrison. And Gogol. Minor in Gogol!

Too many. I have a Ph.D. in English mostly to have an excuse to read for six years. I love so many books. I am reading genre works these days mostly by living authors and can tell you I truly believe we’re living through an SFF Renaissance. Going to stop now.

Wait, not yet! Isabel Allende! Wang in Love and Bondage. Emily Dickinson. The Master and Margarita!

7. How did you link up with Rosarium Publishing?

Bill Campbell, Rosarium’s soul, asked me if I would contribute a story to the press’s anthology Mothership. Of course I would! And then he asked if I had a manuscript. I hadn’t been thinking about a collection of stories previously, but I can tell you truly, I had a pitch ready before I had finished reading that sentence he wrote me!

8. Which book, either fictional or otherwise, would you say taught you the most about writing?

The most honest answer I could give is “whatever the last book I read is,” because that is one fundamental reason writers read. But though true, I know that sounds glib. I’ve also expressed a lot of this answer above, so let me add something new to the interview by saying this: the unpublished, unindited book of Mami’s stories and Papi’s wrecking-ball décimas served as my introduction to the creation of an ontology via the medium of language. Actually, two languages, Spanish and English.

9. The future of the short story is …?

… shitty, in terms of payment; spectacular, in terms of quality of the work being published in SFF; meh, in terms of the so-called “literary” short story; meh again in terms of readership. One of the things that has always confused me about modern life is that people are busier than ever, and electronic formats are constantly reducing the number of words we get to read online. Yet it’s novels that sell. Why u no like short stories, readers? Dunno.

10. What’s next for Carlos Hernandez?

Two big projects:

My novel, Planet Havana, imagines a world where the U.S. invades Cuba and finally restores it to its “destined” role as American playground for the rich or credit-worthy. The Cuban Communist hardliners that remain shoot what’s left of the Cuban Revolution up into space and invade an orbiting theme park, which they rename Planet Havana. This incenses the well-heeled paramilitary social club Granma Nueva (made up of Cubans who will never let go of their hatred of Communism) to clone Fidel Castro, but train the clone to be a neoliberal capitalist. It’s this clone-Castro’s mission to become Planet Havana’s new dictator and destroy the Cuban Revolution once and for all. On the fourth draft now, and maybe a few months more?


The video game on which I’ve served as a designer and the lead writer—Meriwether—is going gold very very soon! It’s a 1st-Person CRPG where you play as Meriwether Lewis and try to guide the Lewis and Clark expedition across North America and back to St. Louis, making as many allies of the First People nations as you can and filling your journals with as many descriptions of the flora and fauna new to Western science as possible. Think Oregon Trail with A. Noire-style dialogue and historical rigor like you’ve probably never seen in a video game.

And over at Ventureadlaxre …

… Vigil scores some big love! The highlights:

(tl;dr version is I LOVED IT, NEED MORE!)

I also really hope that the caramel marshmallow log is real.

The rest is here.

Of Laments, Bluegrass Symphonies, and Deep-Minded Vikings: Lisa L. Hannett

Lisa L. Hannett has had over 60 short stories appear in venues, including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published in 2015. You can find her online at http://lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

1. What do new readers need to know about Lisa L. Hannett?

Born and raised in Canada, I now live in Adelaide, South Australia — city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. I write dark, weird, sometimes hard to categorise stories: fantasy, horror, magical realism all mashed together, and for reasons only my subconscious knows, lots of pieces about cowboys, Vikings, and seaside dwellers. I’ve had over 60 short stories published, some of which appeared in my first collection, Bluegrass Symphony, which was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and won the Aurealis Award for ‘Best Collection’; two other collections co-authored with a fabulous, award-winning author, Angela Slatter; and my debut novel, Lament for the Afterlife, won the Ditmar for ‘Best Novel’ this year.

Outside of writing (is there such a thing, really?) I’ve got a PhD in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, an Honours degree in medieval lit and fantasy fiction, and a Fine Arts degree in painting and photography. I’m alecturer in English and Creative Writing here in Adelaide, a gym junkie, and an Instagram devotee. I spend way too much time thinking about or taking pictures of food.

2. Did you always want to write and can you remember the first story you ever told?

Photo by Lisa!

So, here’s the thing: I didn’t start writing until I was a few months shy of turning thirty. That doesn’t mean I didn’t always want to write, only I didn’t think I could. Sure, I scribbled crappy poetry in highschool (who doesn’t) and I have clear memories of being in Grade Five, reading a story I’d composedin front of the class — it was set in Russia, and my aunt had been teaching my sister and I Russian so, basically, I’d just wanted an excuse to show off the very few words I’d learned. But as I got older, I avoided any creative writing assignments at school because I was afraid I’d suck.

Plots? Characters? Sub-plots? My own worlds? Nope, nope, nope. Couldn’t do it, I thought.

However, I loved reading with a burning passion. I devoured novels, picture books, poems, comics — stories of all lengths, all genres. I didn’t really care what I was reading, so long as I was reading, but I was most obsessed with Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reading, I know without a doubt, is what taught me how to be a writer.

Meanwhile, I was channelling this obsession with fantasy into visual modes of storytelling — I drew constantly (fairies, elves, dragons, weird woodland creatures), which evolved into painting, which led me to a Fine Arts degree. Throughout all of my schooling — elementary, high school, university — I thought I was going to be an illustrator. I was going capture fantasy worlds and characters and tales in paint and pencil and mixed media. So the first story I told — in paint — took place in a secret grove in the deep-dark woods, and a magical deer was being chased out of the shadows into a shaft of golden light… Then came my elf version of ‘The Blue Boy’ (Thomas Gainsborough) and ‘Pinkie’ (Thomas Lawrence). And dragon mosaics. And paintings of drowning, Ophelia-like girls (for which my poor little sister modelled, submerged in the bathtub with her eyes open until she was bloodshot and pruned). I did a series of photos of a reluctant bride in a junkyard. Another series based on Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Long story short(er), life happened, and in its circuitous way, led me to writing. I kept reading but painted less, took more photographs. I moved from Canada to Taiwan to Korea to Australia. I went back to university for literature-focused degrees. And then, only once I’d started my PhD in medieval Icelandic literature, I decided I’d give creative writing a shot. After spending a couple of years doing nothing but “serious”research, I found myself desperately missing speculative fiction — and thinking for the first time,Yeah, I’ve got some stuff to say now. So I sat at my computer, looked up venues to which I might submit a story (because, foolishly, I thought writing short stories would be easier than writing novels), and told myself I’d give it a shot — in secret — so that if I failed, nobody would know but me.

The first story I told (and sold) was ‘The Evangelist’s Tale’ for Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100 anthology, and it got into print because Dirk was extremely generous with his time. He helped me narrow an 18,000 word draft into a 6,000 word piece — and in the process taught me what it meant to write short stories.

3. What was the inspiration for your debut novel Lament for the Afterlife?

Like the wordwinds whirling throughout Lament, the inspiration for this novel is a bit of a jumble. On the one hand, obviously, it’s about war: I’m fascinated and perplexed and horrified by the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ongoing devastation in the Middle East, and elements of World War I — all of which seem so hopeless and so dire and so confusing — so I wanted to explore those feelings of helplessness in a medium over which I have some control. On the other hand, it’s about the beauty and ugliness and power of language. Also, it’s about the desire I had as a kid to see the magical world — to really see fairies and elves — while also realising I’d never, ever get to (which is so unfair!). But mostly, it’s about regular people being born into extraordinary and awful situations, and their having to cope with extremes that are pretty much out of their control. This is something I’m perpetually interested in and inspired by — I often wish I could write adventure stories with feats of derring-do and fast-talking swashbucklers, but I always seem to come back to underdogs just trying to get their heads above the pack.

4. What kinds of research did you do for a book which has the nature and consequences of war at its heart?

Since the world and the war at the heart of Lament for the Afterlife are really reactions to many of the wars in our world, I started off by reading up on the conflicts I’ve just mentioned. Historical accounts, soldiers’ diaries, textbooks, good old Wikipedia — I soaked up whatever I could. I went to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, which filled many pages in my notebook. I read lots of novels set in WWI, Vietnam War, Korean War, as well as poems written by soldiers. I watched hours and hours of YouTube videos — the ones about WWI veterans with shellshock will haunt me for the rest of my life — and also watched more war movies than is probably healthy. The whole time, I wasn’t really trying to capture facts from real life about “big picture” things (as in: what started the Vietnam War? Why did it go on for so many years? Which countries were allied in WWI?) but on the individual human element. What the boys’ faces looked like in those faded photographs. What details they hid from their parents when writing letters home. What sorts of frivolous things they’d carry in their packs. What tricks of the mind, what games, what songs and stories they’d use to distract themselves from the horrors they faced, the horrors they caused.

5. Of all of your short stories, which is your favourite baby?

This is always a hard question! Not because I don’t have favourites — I always have favourites — but because I tend to favour the newest, shiniest baby. BUT, if the story retains a bit of glimmer once it’s aged, then I figure it must really be a favourite… So, in that respect, I still love ‘Down the Hollow’ from Bluegrass Symphony. Having said that, I also love ‘A Shot of Salt Water’, which was published in The Dark last year — I so want to live in that world. Or at least visit it frequently. Which is also probably why my newest, shiniest baby is my current favourite: ‘A Right Pretty Mate’, which is coming out this year in Jack Dann’s Dreaming in the Dark anthology, is also set in that strange seaside world, and when I read over the proofs the other day, I felt this yearning that was pretty much like love.

6. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

Let’s go with heroes because, realistically, probably every story I’ve ever read has influenced me in some way. Even the bad ones. So, heroes: Michael Crummey (guys: read Galore. Seriously!), Margaret Atwood (almost everything, especially up to Oryx and Crake), Margaret Laurence (The Diviners and The Stone Angel especially), Timothy Findley (especially The Last of the Crazy People), Patrick DeWitt (because The Sisters Brothers is so good I can’t even), Shirley Jackson, E. Annie Proulx, David Malouf.

7. Your debut collection Bluegrass Symphony created an astonishing rural/backwoods kind of world – where did you take your inspiration from?

My first instinct when asked this question is always to say, “I’ve got no idea.” How on earth did a Canadian girl, living in Australia, with a deep interest in medieval Scandinavia, come to write about a pseudo-American South, full of cowboys and farmers and poor country folk?

To be honest, I think it’s a patchwork of interests and memories that inspire the world in Bluegrass. I see many similarities between the honour-based societies of early medieval England and Scandinavia and that of small, rural towns where folk have to look out for one another, where everyone knows and is involved in everyone else’s business, where people are beholden to one another in a way that is less obvious or important in big cities, for example — and I still haven’t gotten sick of exploring these similarities. I’m also obsessed with isolation, harsh but often beautiful environments, and what people who rely on the land have to do to survive in dire circumstances (again, I think this is an interest from the Old Norse period that has spilled into the way I see downtrodden farmers suffering due to drought in Bluegrass’s world).

But I think the seed that sprouted all of this, really, is country music. I didn’t realise how pervasive country music is in Canada until I’d been away for several years; going back home to visit, I was suddenly aware of all the country songs piped into grocery stores, used in commercials, played in malls, and regularly spun on the radio. My parents had a massive collection of country records when I was growing up, and memories of those fiddles and guitars have definitely fed into Bluegrass. I listened to country albums non-stop while writing Bluegrass Symphony (not during the actual writing of the stories, except once, when I wrote ‘Down the Hollow’; but in the car, on the bus, while making dinner, and so on, I surrounded myself with twang) and I learned a lot about the ethos behind these tunes, which inspired me to write even more stories. Also, and finally, I think the landscape inspires me: the wheat and cornfields, the barns, the woods, the lonesome houses. Even though there’s a definite American flavour to these stories, the settings (more often than not) come from my memories of growing up in Ontario and Alberta. Bluegrass is in many ways an homage to Canada — at least, to my imagined version of it. It’s a few hundred pages of homesickness.

8. Name your five eight favourite novels.

Galore by Michael Crummey

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (even better if read alongside The Hours by Michael Cunningham)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (lifelong favourite!)

9. You get to invite five fictional characters for drinks and general shenanigans: who’s on the guest list?

The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell because he is a tricksome, self-important, whimsical, well-dressed Faery king who will keep us entertained with his shenanigans; he can whisk the party away to other realms if he gets bored, or keep the sun from rising if we’re all having such a good time that we don’t want the night to end. Also, he’s a great dancer. Galadriel from Lord of the Rings because I LOVE HER. Plus, she’d be a good mediator if things with The Gentlemen got out of hand. The Fool from Robin Hobb’s Farseer books because s/he is mischievous and smart and sweet, and will have a trove of good stories to share with us all, even if s/he often speaks them in riddles. Tyrion Lannister because the man can talk! And drink. And will most likely be the sanest one there. Finally, since I’ve got so many fey folk at this shindig, we need a suitable venue… So instead of a fifth character, I want to nominate Tamson House as the location for the party: it’s a sprawling house in downtown Ottawa (according to several of Charles de Lint’s novels, that is), where worlds and spirit realms converge, where cool artsy people hang out, and where Magic Things Happen.

10. What’s next for Lisa L. Hannett?

As we speak, I’m finishing up my next collection: The Homesteaders is another book of short stories set in the world of Bluegrass Symphony. Backwoods witches, immortal soothsayers, bear-shaped child-stealers, raven-shaped miners, and lots of ghosts make up some of the characters in these tales, all tinged with a down-home country twang. I’m also in the process of editing / doing rewrites on my next novel, Ketill’s Daughter, which is the first in a two-book series, The Invisible Woman. Set in Viking Age Norway, this book tells the early story of Unn the Deep-Minded — wife of one king, mother to a second, and eventually a famous Viking herself — as she struggles to find her own fame and fate in this warrior world, all while her shape-shifting time-travelling fylgja (a kind of spirit guide) keeps butting in to mess things up for her… The second book in the series (called Deep-Minded) will follow Unn out of Norway into medieval Ireland, Scotland, and finally Iceland. She was quite the world-traveller! While working on these novels, I’ll also be fleshing out another short story collection: this one is a cycle of tales set in the same seaside world as ‘A Shot of Salt Water’ and ‘A Right Pretty Mate’. Along with a few commissioned short stories, I’ll be juggling these projects with lecturing full-time, so they’ll keep me busy for a while!

 

 

 

Australian Goodreads Giveaway: Vigil

There are twenty ARCs of Vigil up for grabs over at Goodreads!

So, go! Enter!

Waking in Winter: Deborah Biancotti

Deborah Biancotti is the author of A Book of Endings and Bad Power, and co-author of the New York Times bestselling novel, Zeroes.  She has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Her new novella, Waking in Winter, is now available from PS Publishing. Deborah lives in Sydney, Australia. You can find her online at deborahbiancotti.com and on Twitter @deborah_b.

1. What do new readers need to know about Deborah Biancotti?

Bloody hell, these questions are hard.

See, I always admire how actors can stand up and talk about themselves like they remember who they are, after all that time pretending to be someone else. I feel like I’ve spent so long being immersed in characters I’ve made up that I’m not sure there’s a core ‘me’ anymore. I’ve continued to shrug off writerly identities as the years go by. Like taking off a stage costume and putting on something new.

I’ve been more of an instinctual than intentional writer. I never really had a plan. I just went with whatever impulse I felt at the time. I started in short stories, apparently a lot of them were horror—though actually I always thought of them as tragedies. I drifted towards contemporary stories, but often still with a fantastical element. Waking in Winter, despite being set on an icy alien planet is still intended to feel like a contemporary story. It’s a mostly realistic setting (though an extreme one, and not one most of us have experienced if we haven’t been to the Arctic or Antarctic).

I feel like I hit my stride when I began to combine crime narratives and contemporary stories with the supernatural. It took a lot of soul searching to get there, though, and already I can feel I’m moving more towards the crime side. But my favourite stories that I’ve written so far are largely these crime-supernatural stories (like the Bad Power stories, or my Ishtar novella).

2. Did you always want to write and can you remember the first story you ever told?

I did always want to write. I don’t know why. It had to do with loving reading more than anything else. Wanting to be in those imaginary worlds.

I can’t remember my first story, largely because I can’t articulate it anymore. My parents believe I was telling stories in baby language before I could speak. What gold! Stories straight from the womb. I wonder what strange, nascent tales I had to tell back then, eh? And … where did they come from?

3. What was the inspiration for your novella Waking in Winter from PS Publishing?

It started with just one image, which I spent years trying to interpret. I could see a bunch of desperate, alienated characters digging in the ground with such obsession that they worked through the night, lit by portable lights. I also remember a dream I had decades ago about a landslide that revealed a giant butterfly trapped in the mud, pristine like it was caught in amber. I think that image contributed, too.

And as my editor, Nick Gevers, noted when he bought the manuscript, there’s a certain aspect of my story that’s a feminist re-telling of John W. Campbell’s1938 novella Who Goes There?, or John Carpenter’s 1982 filmic adaptation The Thing. In those stories, scientists are confronted with forces so alien and unknowable that they’re forced to abandon their search for knowledge in order to survive. The alien ‘thing’ they confront takes over human form, human identity and human memory. In a way, the humans become aliens. They’re reborn.

It struck me how strange it was that you’d want to tell what is effectively a creationist or birth mythology and leave out female characters. I mean, I love those stories. But I wanted my story of barrenness and birth to feature, you know. Women.

So my main character is Fuyuko Muir, named for water and sea, a woman on the run from her life on Earth. She’s travelled to an unnamed, distant planet to hide from her past. Just like everyone else in Base Station Un, where she ends up.

Muir represents a different kind of birth. Not a physical birth, but a kind of spiritual renewal. An unwanted one. An enforced one. Brought about by an alien monster. In a way, the monster is Thanatos, the death instinct. The will to destroy. She may be a goddess. But if she is, then she’s a goddess of war and destruction.

4. What appealed to you about the novella format?

I really love this size of storytelling and I hope the digital age makes it much more accessible. It gives you the breadth to deal with a whole cast of characters, and the depth to discover a character’s journey in detail. I honestly feel like most novels sag between setting up the story and cashing in on the conclusion. There’s a whole middle section the story doesn’t often need. In novellas—dare I suggest—you can just leave out all that boring stuff. Also you can work with a sustained mood that sometimes might feel forced in a longer work. It’s basically all win in novellas.

5. You’ve been working with Margo Lanagan and Scott Westerfeld on the Zeroes series – how’s the experience of collaborating been?

Collaborating can be very tough and very rewarding. It’s exciting to have THREE minds working on a problem, it’s great to have a fellow aficionado who’s already up to date on your story and always available for brainstorming or playing sounding board. Also few ideas get lost because someone will remember the what or why of your scene, even if you’ve forgotten. Also it’s fascinating to get an early reader reaction to decisions you’ve made or characters you’ve created. Fascinating, surprising and occasionally rewarding.

Of course the pay-off is: working to other people’s timetables; having to share drafts before you want to; suffering through character developments you’d rather not write but you have to because they’re part of the overall story; watching what people do to YOUR characters when they end up in THEIR chapters, ugh!

But the gains exceed the pains. I’d love to do more collaborations.

6. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

I could write out a totally boring list of hundreds of names here, but instead I’m just going to share something I recently learned about Leslie Charteris. He was the British-Chinese author of The Saint books. Well, he authored the first several. Harry Harrison and several other authors also wrote The Saint books under the Charteris’ name.

Charteris was born in Singapore and raised in Britain. During his first year at college, he sold a novel and left college. His first Saint book was published before he was twenty, but he basically disowned that book and spent later years pretending the second book was first. Still with me?

There’s over fifty Saint books now, and they weave a meandering path through formats and authors. But the thing I really wanted to share was the fact that a whole bunch of those famous Saint books aren’t novels. Meet the Tiger (the disowned first book) is a novel, but the second and now more famous Enter the Saint is actually a collection of interlinked novellas.

Now. How liberating does that sound, eh?

7. Do you prefer to write fantasy, horror, or science fiction? Or a happy mix of all of them?

I suck at drawing lines, so I end up writing all of them, and more.

8. Name your five favourite novels.

Aaargh! Only five!

Okay, let me go with the novels that most often re-cur to me for no apparent reason, and so have apparently marked me in some permanent way:

The Birthgrave, Tanith Lee
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe (don’t ask me to explain this book – I have no idea)
Mrs Frisby & the Rats of Nimh, Robert C. O’Brien (yes, this just beats The Silver Brumby by Eleyn Mitchell AND Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White).

9. You get to invite five fictional characters for drinks and general shenanigans: who’s on the guest list?

Oooh, this is gonna be so much fun! I’m sorry, Oscar Wilde, but you’re not fictional, so even though you’re my regular literary date, you don’t get an invitation to this one. I’ll have to go with:

Shebat from Janet Morris’ deliciously perverse Dream Dancer. Yes, she’s a prostitute who exploits her trade via dreams and yes, we’ll all be AWAKE for this party so her services will not be required. But she has long fascinated me, even without the whole dream-whore thing.
The monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Could the guy get a little love, pls?
Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web. She’s just so freaking wise. But I bet the girl knows how to have a good time.
Alex Morrow from Denise Mina’s crime series. Morrow is my favourite of the crime-fighting lasses (‘tartan noir’ they call it: Scottish crime storytelling). She’s compassionate, real, complex, screwed-up but not in a stupid or predictable way, smart and sensitive. The End of the Wasp Season stands out for me in the Alex Morrow series (Morrow is pregnant in this one, which is just nerve wracking), but they’re all excellent.
Westley from William Goldman’s The Princess Bride because omg, adorable!

10. What’s next for Deborah Biancotti?

Well, we’re wrapping up the Zeroes trilogy in 2016-17, and I’m working on a couple of solo novels. I can never just work on one thing at a time anymore, so I’m being very strict with myself and trying to finish a first draft of one before I move onto another. I now have YA and adult story ideas, and I’ll probably have to choose one or the other direction at some stage. But for now, I’m just rolling with it. We’ll see which one naturally takes the lead in the next couple of years.

 

Random Alex on Vigil

Random Alex has some lovely things to say about Vigil!

A number of years ago, Angela Slatter wrote “Brisneyland by Night” for Twelfth Planet Press’ anthology Sprawl. It was excellent. Vigil is that story grown-up and turned into a novel, with at least two (I believe) more stories about Verity Fassbinder scheduled.

This novel was sent to me by the publisher, as an uncorrected bound proof. Also, I had the enormous privilege of reading it in draft form, which I just can’t tell you how awesome that was. I have re-read it now partly because I have a bad memory and I knew the details had escaped me but that I loved it; partly because it’s Angela Slatter and she always withstands re-reading; and partly because it was sent as a review copy, so of course I had to. It was mostly the first two, though.

The rest is here.

Tender Tales: Margo Lanagan

Photo by Adrian Cook

Margo Lanagan should need no introduction, but I’ll give her one anyway. Or rather, I’ll snurch this one from the Allen & Unwin website: Margo Lanagan is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Her collections of short stories have garnered many awards, nominations and shortlistings. Sea Hearts won the CBCA Book of the Year, WA Premier’s Literay Award, Aurealis Award and Barbara Jefferis Award, and was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature, NSW Premier Literay Awards, Queensland Literary Awards among others. Black Juice was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, won two World Fantasy Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Red Spikes won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Horn Book Fanfare title, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Margo lives in Sydney.

In short, she is awesome and she’s taken some time to chat.

1. What do new readers need to know about Margo Lanagan?

Going by the reaction of a couple of recent new readers, they need to know that Margo Lanagan stories are maybe not what you think of when you think of fantasy. (I don’t know any more if this means they have wider or narrower appeal! Probably narrower.) If you’re the sort of reader who races through a story, you might have to slow down a little. If you’re reading one of my collections first, read no more than one a day to properly enjoy them. Also, you’ll perhaps be more unsettled than enchanted.

2. How did your Zeroes collaboration with Deborah Biancotti and Scott Westerfeld come about?

Deb and Scott cooked it up, inspired by the TV writing-room model of collaboration. Then they realised that two people do not a writing-room make, so they asked me along, I’m guessing so that they could have someone to gang up on and laugh at (sob!). That’s not true, actually, the gangs constantly switch and change, and there’s more good laughter than bad. But fuelled by beer, we chewed over the teen-social-superpowers possibilities for a few months in 2013, then got seriously into writing book 1. We sent off sample chapters the following May, and we pretty much had a deal for the trilogy by the end of July.

3. Was it a strange experience switching from solo writer to an unholy trinity?

It was hugely relaxing not to be 100% responsible—I’ve tried and failed at solo series fiction before and I know for a fact that this head can’t hold an entire trilogy. It took a bit of getting used to, showing other people what were essentially first drafts, and getting back … well, the kind of critique you’d expect for a first draft. But the plotting meetings, which are 3-day away-from-home numbers, were a revelation—the ideas flow fast and furiously, there’s the aforementioned laughter (which is rare-to-nonexistent when I write on my own), and we speak almost a different language because we can assume so much about what the others know.

I actually think the solo-to-group transition has nothing on the returning-to-solo transition. What, I have to do everything myself again? So not fair.

4. What was the first story you read that made you want to be a writer?

I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I was one of a family of avid readers. Being a writer was like being a rock star; it wasn’t something an ordinary girl like me could grow up to do. I footled around at the edge of writing (i.e. wrote poetry) in my teens and twenties. Then I did some work as a freelance editor, mostly of non-fiction books. I saw the state in which some manuscripts came in. I did the work of hauling them back from the brink of incoherence. And then I realised that it might actually be more efficient for me to start writing a book myself, from scratch. Not to mention more fun. Maybe even more lucrative? So I had a go. You could say I was irritated into being a novelist.

5. What solo projects are waiting for you to come back to them?

I’ve just told my agent that I’m looking at the twitching corpses of two novels—one is selkies related, the other is convicts-and-goddesses. They’ve both been extensively revised many times. I hate, loathe and despise them both. I’m trying to be professional and regard them as just information about what went wrong, as Toni Morrison advises. Girding my loins to go in again. Meanwhile I’m working on some short stories to go in a best-of collection that will probably come out in May 2017.

6. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

Alan Garner, Helen Garner, Susan Cooper, Patricia Wrightson, Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Jo Walton (Among Others), George Saunders, Kelly Link. So many others. So many heroes. Anyone who has a novel to the submitting stage or beyond is my hero at the moment.

7. If we could overcome the twin annoyances of tempus fugit and distance, which authors would you invite to dinner tonight?

I’d recreate a lovely Sydney-Writers-Fest-related lunch Steven and I had down at the wharfs a few years ago with Tobin (M.T.) Anderson, Nicole Griffin, the late Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham.

8. Name your five favourite leading characters in literature?

OMG, Angela, these questions are hard. Only five? Okay.

Right now, I’m enjoying watching Karl Ove Knausgaard labour through vol. 3 of his My Struggle.

The character “Helen” in Helen Garner’s The Spare Room.

Serena, in Ron Rash’s Serena—now a movie, but ignore that and read the book.

Sabriel, in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy.

And whichever unhappy, ruminative German point of view W. G. Sebald chooses.

9. Which fairy tale/folk tale/myth/legend do you think holds the richest vein for your work?

I think I’m still trying to excavate myself from selkie stories. But also, anything Grimm, especially if it involves bleeding feet or animal transformations.

10. What’s next for Margo Lanagan?

Well, I’d better get back to those shorts I’m working on. Oh, and there’s the third volume of Zeroes to be whipped into shape—the second one’s pretty much done and dusted and we’re working on the big finale. As for a new novel, I’m trying not to frighten myself. Maybe after the shorts I’ll raise my sights as far as a novella. But I have no inkling what it would be about yet. If you see any good ideas running loose and unclaimed, send them my way!

 

Happy birthday to me …

… and I got a lovely present of an excellent review of Vigil by Dark Matter Zine.

Verity Fassbinder is a halfling: she’s half human and half Weyrd (fae). Her father was a kinderfresser, a man who killed human children to harvest them for nefarious purposes. After Verity’s father was caught, imprisoned and killed, her human grandparents raised her. The sins of the father are visited upon the children, especially when the child feels guilty; Verity keeps vigil over her hometown of Brisbane, Australia, as recompense.

Now children are going missing; another kinderfresser may be at work. Then a siren (winged woman) is murdered. Verity is called in as a consultant to the human police force in the hopes of capturing the killer and keeping the Weyrd secret.

Verity tangles with sirens, seers, Baba Yaga and many other faery creatures; Angela Slatter is, after all, a Doctor of Faery Tales. And a Master but, well, we all know who wins between the Master and the Doctor.

Many thanks, Nalini!

 

Talking about believable characters

Over at the Queensland Writers Centre WQ Magazine, I talk about my Top Five Tips for Believable Characters.

Characters: we love them, we hate them, sometimes we want to be them, but the most important thing is that, no matter how we feel about them, they are our guides through the stories we read. So, how do you ensure (and when I say ‘ensure’ I mean ‘do your level best’) that your characters are ones that readers will stay with? Even better, ones that will stay with readers long after they read The End? I mean, in a good way, not a nasty, stalkery kind of way.

When I’m writing I have five touchstones to which I always turn when creating characters, and to which I return when I feel I haven’t got things quite right. ‘What are these magical top five tips for creating believable characters?’ I hear you demand?

I’m so glad you asked! *gets on soapbox*

For the rest, go here.