Angela Slatter's Blog, page 62

The Writer and the Critic goes Patreon …

dtct books
Stack of books
CREDIT: PHOTODISC

… which basically means you can pay Mondy to sing a song every podcast.

You know you want it.  Go here, give money.

My point?

One of my fave podcasts, run by the award-winning and thoroughly superb Kirstyn McDermott (hereinafter referred to as “The Writer”) and Ian Mond (hereinafter referred to as “The Critic”), has started a Patreon page. There’s a range of excellent rewards, which do indeed include the vocal stylings of Mondy and Kirstyn’s crafty craftness (handmade voodoo dolls! Oh, no, wait. That was just my wishful thinking. *SIGH*), so you should go and fling some shekels at them.

They are smart, they are funny, they are well-informed, and they’re often angry and profane, which makes them funnier still. You can listen to them here, for free.

Give The Writer and the Critic money, you know it makes sense and will enrich your karma. I did – and it’s going straight to Mondy singing … also a voodoo doll, if I can persuade Kirstyn.

Aurealis Shortlists

The Aurealis Awards shortlists have been announced. Happy to note that “Ripper” and “Of Sorrow and Such” are both finalists (for Horror novella and Fantasy novella respectively). Sad to see the Horror Novel category apparently continues to be problematic. Not sure why. Happy to share the lists with a bunch of talented writer friends!

Here is the full listing.

Kickstarter: The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror #6

For the last five years, Ticonderoga Publications has produced a most excellent tome, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, an annual compendium of some of the finest short stories in Oz.

For #6, they could use a little help, so if you’ve got some spare shekels, please consider throwing them at the The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror #6 Kickstarter campaign.

Horrorology: Robert Shearman

Remember back last year when I ran a series of interviews with the contributors to the latest Stephen Jones-Jo Fletcher Books Item of Magnificence, Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear?

Of course you do. You pay attention and that’s one of the things I like most about you.

Well, belatedly but no less delightfully, here is the Rob Shearman interview. Why is it late? I hear you ask. Because Rob knows how to make an entrance! He waits until you’re all lulled into a false sense of security, then very politely steps on stage and says “Oh, hello.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Robert Shearman!

What was the inspiration for my tale, ‘Accursed’?

I suppose I’m rather bothered by the way some of us get born with a natural talent for something, and the unfairness of that – the worry that the talent is just a genetic anomaly and has really nothing to do with me! A lot of writers feel the same way, I think – we worry that since we did nothing to deserve it, the talent might fade away. I’m just lucky that I have some sort of ability to put down words on a piece of paper in a certain order that works – just as others have the ability to draw, or play music, or play sports. In a way, having a talent is a curse, because it means you only have the potential to be good – the talent only takes you a little of the way, the rest of it is down to hard graft and regular practice. You feel this responsibility not to let the talent go to waste, and you still know you’re squandering it somehow – you’re never as good as you ought to be.

I was playing around with this idea, of how finding out you have a special gift is rather like a curse – and I thought what would be truly funny would be if the gift you were born with were not only essentially useless, but bloodcurdlingly unpleasant. I’ve never liked clowns. No one really likes clowns, do they? I thought it would be a sensationally awkward gift to be born with, to find out what whenever you went to a circus, a clown would always die during their act. There wouldn’t be much value to having such a talent, and the more it was practised, the gorier the talent would be – but still, in a strange way, it’d be your talent, it’d define you, and it’d be something you could be secretly proud of. Curse or gift? Aren’t they two sides of the same coin? And so my weird tale began!

Can you remember the first story you read that made you think, ‘I want to write!’

Oddly enough, it wasn’t so much a specific story, as a specific environment. My father owned a lot of books – enough that he built his own library as an extension to the house. And as an infant a treat for me would be to go in there, and look at all those books, and wish I could add to their number. I didn’t really care what those books would be about – so long as they had my name on the spine. When I was five years old I used to take down encyclopaedias and copy out entries (about anything, really anything, it was almost random), fold over the page so that it was a little like a book, and write a name and title on the cover. I was a plagiarist back then. And because for work my father collected foreign language dictionaries, I’d then translate those so-called books I’d pretended to write into French, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish – anything I could lay my hands on. (Of course, I had no idea about conjugations and declensions or that sort of thing – I wasn’t translating anything for real, just looking up all the words and replacing them with a foreign equivalent – but it meant I could turn the very same book into multiple editions! And it gave me an interest that stood me in good stead when I did become a translator, for a little and wholly unsuccessful while, in my late teens.)

It took me years to realise the greater pleasure with my father’s books would have been to try reading the things. Who knew?

Is horror a sort of natural home for you or do you lean more towards another part of speculative fiction?

I think I can’t stop myself tipping towards horror. I’ve just got that sort of imagination. For years I thought I was really a comedy writer – it was my bread and butter for such a long time, I wrote a couple of dozen comic plays for the theatre and the radio before I even thought to write horror prose – but when I read them back, I realise the jokes I tell are so black, and the situations so strange and absurd, that it’s really horror by another name. Comedy and horror are so close to each other anyway – in both, the writer is trying to shock the audience into giving an audible response. And my sense of humour has always been of the grisly kind – it just leaks into everything.

You’ve offered the chance to visit the Library of the Damned. Do you accept?

There’ll be books there, yes? Lots and lots of books? How could I ever refuse? I have a weird relationship with horror, inasmuch as that although I enjoy writing it, I’m very easily frightened by it. Not the horrors of my own imagination, which is easy and funny and safe in my head, but the horrors of other people’s. I can only watch horror movies at home, because I’m too afraid to see them in public – I know I’ll put my hand in front of my eyes and squeak, and that never looks good. But horror in book form is another matter – I go to them wanting to be unnerved, wanting to feel my imagination is being twisted and expanded. That’s the great joy of good horror, the way it seems to refresh the entire world. Library of the Damned? I’d never want to leave!

The future of horror is…

We live in a world now where we’re almost numbed to the idea of global catastrophe, where you can turn on the computer and catch videos of atrocities. I love vampires and werewolves and ghosts, but partly because they now seem so likeable and so quaint – there’s a wonderful and terribly moving nostalgia to them. I think horror’s future is more an acknowledgement that we are barraged by insanity on all sides – that there is a growing dissonance between the way we expect people to behave and the way they really do. In all horror, old or new, there’s nothing I find as unnerving as the realisation that life has just gone a little askew and nothing can make sense any longer. I think we’re living in the world of the uncanny, and all we writers can do is try to keep up.

Rob’s hobbies include collecting World Fantasy Awards, Sony Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, British Fantasy Awards, as well as multiple shortlistings. He deserves them all. He is the author of the collections Tiny Deaths, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special, Remember Why You Fear Me, and They Do The Same Things Different Here. He’s written for stage, radio and TV (yes, including Doctor Who) to much acclaim.

The Times Literary Supplement called him (or his work, at least): “Wildly inventive and chilling. Shearman proves himself a master at transforming our deepest fears into new and wholly unexpected forms.” Mark Gatiss called him “an addictive delight.” I just like to call him “Rob” because he answers to that.

Working on Corpselight

I’m working on Corpselight, the sequel to Vigil (out in July this year!), right now. All in the interests of making my hand-in deadline and not having to tell my beloved publisher than a dog ate my homework.

Sometimes you use your writing to talk to the people in your life whom you love, but who are in a bad place at the moment. They’ll hear eventually.

Here’s a wee snippet:

‘They told me your father was no good, that he’d lead me to a bad end ? and they were right, but who can see that when you’re young and think you’re in love? When you’re so drunk on that other person that you don’t notice what’s in front of you even though all you’ve got to do is look; you let them make a fool of you. You make a fool of yourself because you think this person, who doesn’t care about you, treats you like a convenience, is what love’s all about. You’re terrified the love will be taken away, that you’ll never get it back.’ She laughed and it wasn’t entirely a bitter thing. ‘You think that the love you get is all there is in the world, even if it’s just a tiny scrap, that it’s the only amount allotted to you and if you don’t do everything to keep it, accept every insult, every indignity, then you’ll never love or be loved again.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not true, you know.’

Black-Winged Angels as an eBook

And my Aurealis Award shortlisted collection, Black-Winged Angels, is now an eBook and can be purchased here. It has a lovely Introduction by the lovely Juliet Marillier, and a gorgeous cover by the gorgeous Kathleen Jennings (but none of the internal illustrations, I’m afraid).

And for those in love with touchy-feely artefacts, there are still a few limited edition hardcovers available from Ticonderoga Publications.

For the writers amongst you …

Artwork by Kathleen Jennings

… here‘s a really interesting and useful post on whether or not you do, or should, write every day. Thanks to A.M. Rycroft for this one.

Lady Helen and The Dark Days Club: Alison Goodman

Because no interview is complete without a Kathleen Jennings portrait.

The delightful and delovely Alison Goodman is not only one of my favourite writers, but also one of my favourite people – which is important because you don’t always enjoy meeting the writers you love to read. Yeah, I said it. It’s true. Alison Goodman is one of those rare gems.

She is also the author of the upcoming Lady Helen series, a trilogy of historical supernatural adventures set in the Regency. The first book – The Dark Days Club – has been released into the wild as of January 2016. Alison is best known for her New York Times bestselling fantasy duololgy EON and EONA. She is also a noted dancer of the English contra-dance (which I like to think of as Freestyle Disco Dancing – google “Mitchell and Webb Posh Dancing”). She also writes award winning science fiction and crime fiction, and lives with her lovely husband and their machiavellian Jack Russell Terrier in Melbourne, Australia.

1. So, Lady Alison, tell us about your new novel, Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club!

Oz cover

When in a flippant mood, I call it Pride and Prejudice meets Buffy. When I have my serious author pants on, I call it a coming-of-age historical/supernatural adventure. It follows Lady Helen Wrexhall as she discovers that her opulent Regency world has quite a disturbing — and demonic — underbelly, and that the mysterious Lord Carlston has returned from exile to draw her into a deadly struggle against fiendish hidden predators.Not quite what a girl expects in her first London Season!

2. Can you recall the first story you read that made you want to be a writer?

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. I was about thirteen and had been dragged along to a dinner party by my parents. While the adults ate prawn cocktails, beef stroganoff and talked politics, I took refuge in the living room to finish The Outsiders. Ponyboy, Sodapop, and poor tragic Johnny. I ended up bawling my eyes out in my borrowed bean-bag, partly because of the sad ending but mainly due to the realization that a good deal of my devastation had been created by the terrible beauty of the book’s circular structure. That’s when I truly wanted to become a writer.

3. Lady Helen is a bit of a departure for you from your Eona days — and from Singing the Dogstar Blues — what can you tell us about the switch?

I don’t really think of it as much of a switch from the Eona books or Singing the Dogstar Blues. They are all stories about a young woman coming into her own power — that is what I love to write about.That is my passion.Having said that, there is one huge difference: Lady Helen is historically accurate and folds in real historical events — such as the assassination of the British Prime Minister in 1812 — whereas Eon and Eona are set in a fantasy world based on medieval China, and Dogstar is in a near future Melbourne.For the Lady Helen series, I set myself the challenge of creating an accurate and vivid Regency England, a task that is both enormous fun and a huge headache. For instance, it took me half a day of research to discover whether a lady would carry her reticule into Almacks and dance with it, or leave it in the retiring room! The answer is in Chapter Sixteen (she laughs evilly).

4. What appeals to you about the Regency period? Is it just an excuse to get dressed up (which is a perfectly acceptable answer)?

I cannot lie — dressing up is part of it. Who doesn’t love prancing around in a bonnet, white gown and spencer jacket? Also, I love the parallel between Regency society — a time of war, civic unrest, rampant consumerism, and celebrity gawking — and our own society. The Regency veneer of politeness is also a great playground for a writer.

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

My literary heroes and heroines are the wonderful teachers and mentors I have had through my writing career. Alan Maher, Gerald Murnane, Judy Duffy, Janet Turner Hospital, Robert McKee, Delia Falconer and Antoni Jach.

6. What was the most surprising thing you discovered in your research for Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club?

The level of violence; it was essential to be armed or accompanied by stout footmen when out and about in London.The three Lady Helen novels are all set in 1812, and England did not have a police force at that time. Violent crime was rampant. In fact, the first highly publicized serial killings — the Ratcliffe Highway murders — occurred at Christmas in 1811. The newspapers were full of the gory and brutal details — lovely festive reading. Brutality, however, seemed to be a part of everyday life. One ladies magazine even had a section titled “Incidents occurring in and near London, interesting marriages, &c”, which was basically a detailed list of gruesome crimes wedged in between the latest fashions.

7. Name five Regency folk you’d like to have dinner with — and who would you absolutely NOT invite.

UK cover

I’m going to use the extended Regency time span so that I can invite Mary Wollstonecraft, Napoleon, Beau Brummell, the Prince Regent (Prinny) and Jane Austen. Seating would be quite difficult as Miss Austen did not approve of Prinny, and he, in turn, was at war with Napoleon. Even so, I think the table conversation would be quite interesting. I would not invite Lord Byron — what a poser.

8. Who is your favourite villain in fiction?

Black Jack Randall in Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

9. What are the five novels that have influenced you the most?

1. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton. The first fantasy novel I ever read (I was in grade 1) and it blew me away.

2. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, for the aforesaid reasons.

3. These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer. My introduction to the 18th and 19th centuries and where my obsession with the Regency was born.

4. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The humour, the ideas, the weirdness. Just wow!

5. If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.A postmodern masterpiece and everything you ever want to know about creating poignant relationship triangles in fiction, all in beautiful prose.

By Ron Gallagher

10. What’s next for Ladies Helen and Alison?

I’ve just submitted Book 2 in the Lady Helen Series, which is set in Brighton during the summer social Season, and I’m about to embark upon Book 3, set in Bath during the winter Season. I’m also writing a short Regency adventure called “The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies” for a new anthology of adventure stories called And Then…The Great Big Book of Awesome Adventure Tales which will be published next year by Clan Destine Press.

Bitterwood Bible paperback!

The paperback edition of the World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings is now available!

Head over to Tartarus Press to purchase this lovely thing with illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, an Introduction by Stephen Jones, and an Afterword by Lisa L. Hannett.

 

Aaaaaannnnnd ….

… the Bitterwood giveaway is at last open! Spread the word

Go here.