Angela Slatter's Blog, page 69

Horrorology in my hot little hands!

It’s arrived! Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear, Stephen Jones’ new anthology, out via the delightful Jo Fletcher Books, with artwork (and a new story!) by Clive Barker. Look at that ToC!

Flight collateral

Kathleen and I will be taking some of these Flight coasters and postcards with us to WFC! Thanks to Sue of Tiny Owl Workshop.

Powerful What-ifs: Kim Newman’s Red Reign

Over at Tor.com I talk about Kim Newman’s Red Reign and all the things I learned from it.

As both a writer and reader I think it’s safe to say that I’ve always learned the most from the books I’ve hated on first reading. Sometimes that lesson has been to avoid a particular author ever after. Other times—and these are the more valuable incidents—I’ve realised I must go back to certain books and read them again. Something, some internal voice far wiser than I, insists, nagging at me until I obey.

These books invariably have one thing in common: they leave a trace in my brain, a hook I simply can’t forget or remove. Something that makes me return to try to figure out what it was that annoyed me so much in the first place. Invariably, again, what I discover is that these books have challenged what I think I know; they shake my long-held beliefs about writing, about history, about literature, about the things I consider to be set in stone. They are tomes that buck the system, flip the bird to my preconceptions, and make me ponder more deeply. They crack open my skull and let light in, they change the way I think—and change is always painful and difficult to accept.

And yet…

The rest is here.

GenreCon 2015 – You Really, Really Need To Be There

There are still a few registrations left for GenreCon – they do close on 25 October, however, so if you’ve been wavering might I suggest you get your butt into gear?

Now, let me be clear: this isn’t a ‘con’ in the sense of a fan-run event. The point isn’t to discuss how much we love Doctor Who (even though we do) or to discuss the finer points of an Astro Boy-meets-Wolverine cosplay (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

No, the point is to come along and be a professional, or learn how to be a professional writer. Or, as it says in the brochure: From the catered meals through to discussion panels through to the the Glamour and Grunge Banquet, GenreCon is designed to give attendees the chance to meet and make real connections with other writers, editors, and established professionals.

If you’ve been wondering what you’ve been doing wrong all these years, how you can possibly translate your love of writing into something that might one day resemble a career, then this is the place to be. I cannot recommend this professional gathering highly enough.

Details are here.

Bitterwood cards!

We used some of Kathleen’s beautiful illustrations for Bitterwood to make these lovely cards. Thanks, Moo.com for the lovely finished product!

WFC Schedule updates

A few updates to my WFC schedule: the Thursday panel is now at 4pm, and Helen Marshall has been added to the Friday panel – Helen Marshall should always be added to everything!! The whole thing is here.

My appearances:

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5 @ 4.00pm in CC2B

Monsters as Devourers

Our cherished monsters, be they vampire, werewolf, or zombie, are driven by an insatiable appetite to devour what they once were, namely us. Is there a sacrificial/sacramental aspect to this hunger or is it firmly rooted in a psycho-sexual fixation. Perhaps it is simply the yearning to recover a lost humanity?

Nina K. Hoffman (mod.), Frederic Durbin, Nancy Kilpatrick, Angela Slatter, John Wiswell

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6 @ 2.00pm in CC2B

Darkened Rooms, Newly Tenanted

Over the past decade or so, the ghost novel has returned to the literary mainstream with a vigor not seen in nearly a century. Consider such fine works as Dennis McFarland’s A Face at the Window, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, and Arthur Phillips’ Angelica, to name but a few. Is this a passing shadow, or a renewed presence?

Sandra Kasturi (mod.), Ramsey Campbell, Stephanie Feldman, Helen Marshall, Kit Reed, Angela Slatter

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 @ 1.30 in Broadway 1

Reading

• Angela Slatter (right after Charles de Lint! Eeeek!)

Focus 2014 Interviews: Kaaron Warren

Photo credit Andrew Sikorski

Today the wonderful Kaaron Warren talks Focus 2014 from Fablecroft.

What was the inspiration for your story, “Death’s Door Cafe”?

This story was inspired a visit to the National Museum, where they had an exhibit of items relating to Ben Hall and his gang. There was a large door in the middle of the room, filled with bullet-holes. This was where one of the men was shot; you could probably remove DNA samples from the holes if you wanted to. It struck me that many doors have deaths behind or in front of them, and I wondered what it would be like to gather a lot of these doors in one place.

What should new readers know about you?

I’m afraid of the dark, large crowds, mold spores, confined spaces, violence, unpredictability, loss, viciousness, a lack of kindness. I’m afraid of the world my children will have to live with.

Some people say to write about the dark side of life you need to be immune to it.

I say the opposite. It’s only by being deeply affected by the world around me that I can write stories that have any value.

Can you remember the first story you read that made you want to be a writer?

Two anthologies I read at the same time did this. I think I was about ten when I read them.

Ten Tales, edited by A.A. Phillips, had three stories that remain among my favourites.

“The Bottle Imp” R.L. Stevenson

“Exit” Harry Farjeon

“The Truth about Pyecraft” H.G. Wells.

Stories of Suspense, edited by Mary E. MacEwen

I could easily give you the whole table of contents; it’s a brilliant book. But there were two in particular that I read and re-read.

“The Birds” Daphne du Maurier

“Flowers for Algernon” Daniel Keyes

Name your top five favourite authors.

Yeah, too hard! I’ll give you some authors I love this week!

William Vollman

Lisa Tuttle

Norman Prentiss

And I’m going to cheat and name two non-fiction writers, because they inspire and inform my own fiction

David Grann

Rebecca Solnit

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

Brave.

Bram Stoker , twice-World Fantasy Award Nominee and Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She’s sold almost 200 short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and five short story collections including the multi-award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her latest short story collection is Cemetery Dance Select: Kaaron Warren. Kaaron is a guest at GenreCon this year.

 

You can find her at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and she Tweets @KaaronWarren

 

Midnight in Karachi

Last week I had a chat with the lovely Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi, who’s an excellent interviewer!

You can list to this Tor.com podcast here. Witches! Stevie Nicks! Kate Bush! Fairy tales! Genre ghetto!

Focus 2014 Interviews: Cat Sparks

Today, Cat Sparks talks “The Seventh Relice” for the Focus 2014 interviews.

What was the inspiration for your story, The Seventh Relic?

I was researching the history of Buddhism as background for another story when the idea for this one popped into my head. That happens so often – research leads to research leads to research and stories fall out of your head whether you want them or not.

Walking up and down the hills behind our house one day, I was struck by the view across low lying suburbs; a splash of light falling on the Nan Tien Buddhist temple, reputedly the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. I’d visited the temple a couple of times and been amused by the horrible gaudy statues scattered about the otherwise quite beautiful gardens.

Seventh Relic is a mishmash of many ideas and impressions. People I’ve interacted with, details I have parsed, particularly from 15 years ago when I lived in Sydney and worked in boring office jobs. I used to take a lot of classes — dance classes mostly. I used to meet a lot of women, some of them cool and interesting, others less so. Danielle is a pastiche of some of those women mixed in with some of me. I wanted to write a character so shallow, so vacuous and hollow that her lack of content almost becomes a transcendental force in itself.

What should new readers know about you?

A few things: that I do not write consolatory or comfortable fiction. That,one way or another, all of my stories are themed commentaries on society. That most of my stories are dark, although I do live in hope that this may not always prove to be the case. That studying climate change and climate fiction has utterly altered the way I see the world — and the world is reflected in every word I write.

Can you remember the first story you read that made you want to be a writer?

Not as such. The process didn’t work that way for me. Rather what happened was that I became so much of a fan, so serious about my love of particular genres that I wanted to crawl inside the fiction, to live inside of it. The only way to achieve this was to become a storyteller myself. Something like that anyway.

I do recall buying a collection of Patricia Highsmith short stories before embarking on a long and tedious coach trip nearly 20 years ago – I can’t remember when or where – only that the book cost one dollar and that the stories freaked me out completely and made me wonder how the hell do you do this? The stories were so unusual and clever. Tales Of Natural And Unnatural Catastrophes the collection was called. (I just Googled to make sure I got the title right but I didn’t need to – some things once embedded in your head remain there).

Name your top five favourite authors.

I’m not sure I can name my top five authors – such a list is in a constant state of flux but I can definitely name my top two of the moment. Kim Stanley Robinson and David Mitchell. Robinson for his deep concerns for our world, its future fate and continuing existence. The way he uses science to enhance and illuminate human condition(s), despite consistently referring to himself as ‘merely an arts major’. My love affair with his work began with Red Mars, a novel so detailed, so intricate, that I couldn’t help but believe every bit of it. When I am 100 years old and barking mad, I reckon I’ll remember myself as one of the first 100 Martian colonists, because it certainly feels like I was one of them. But Robinson didn’t stop at Mars. 2312 was the text that altered my perspective on gender fluidity forever and Aurora… Just go read it. Read all of his books.

And as for Mitchell … Where do I even start? His wordsmithery is beyond compare. Crispin Hershey, aside from being a rollicking good read, contains some of the most sophisticated deep time wingnut fantasy conspiracy theory conceits that I have ever come across – plus the utterly adorable Crispin Hershey, the offensive writer to trump all offensive writers everywhere. Were I to write a novel as deeply layered and engaging as this one, I would probably lay down quietly and die when I got to the end, my work on this planet done. But not Mitchell. Oh no. Only one year on and he has already banged out another book. I’m too scared to read it in case my head explodes. I thought The Bone Clocks was better than Cloud Atlas. I want to go back and read again, even though it’s bigger than the Bible.

The future of Australian spec-ficis …?

We are definitely getting sharper and smarter. More of us are doing it better, transcending our borders and finding homes for our stories in big classy foreign publications. Our landscapes and cultures are becoming more familiar to overseas readers. I think the days of fictional cultural cringe are now firmly behind us.

Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning author, editor and artist whose former employment has included: media monitor, political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer and manager of Agog! Press amongst other (much less interesting) things. She’s currently fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine while simultaneously grappling with a PhD on YA climate change fiction.Her debut novel, Lotus Blue, is forthcoming from Skyhorse Publications.

 

 

Focus 2014 Interviews: Kathleen Jennings

Today our cover artist, Kathleen Jennings, weighs in on Focus 2014.

What was the inspiration for the cover art for Focus 2014?

Cranky Ladies! This was one of the early sketches for Cranky Ladies of History (Fablecroft). We hadn’t worked out yet which ladies would be in the book or on the cover, so I was trying out some of them in pen and ink, then messed around with it on the computer. The more I read history, the more I wonder whether there are any ladies in history who *weren’t* cranky in one way or another. Even the demure little wives seem to have weaponised that trait fairly consistently.

You’re a writer as well as an artist – what should new readers know about you?

I love pulling apart old stories and putting them back together at odd angles. Also, I’m rarely happy with my own illustrations for and of my own stories. I think they come from the same storytelling place but reach the world by different paths.

Can you remember the first story you read that made you want to be a writer, and the first piece of artwork that made you want to be an artist?

My initial thought is Narnia x 2 (Lewis and Baynes). But in fact it probably goes back to Little Red Riding Hood, which I made my father read 76 times before he broke and found Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books to read instead, and Garth Williams’ soft, rounded illustrations for those often harsh stories: the flowers on the cover of On The Banks of Plum Creek, perhaps, or the cousins’ boots in Little House in the Big Woods. Elements of both the fairytale and Wilder’s stories had a lot of resonance with parts of my childhood, and I do love to combine the terrible and strange with the beautiful and homely. However, Pauline Baynes’ illustrations for the Chronicles of Narnia definitely crystallised the narrative illustration style I love. And then I found Alan Lee’s window on Middle Earth. Lately I’ve been coming to appreciate more the artists who have a narrative/visual shorthand, e.g. Ardizzone and Blake and Oslo.

Name your top five favourite authors and top five artists.

Today it is:

Authors: Diana Wynne Jones. Dorothy Sayers. Georgette Heyer. Charles Dickens. G K Chesterton. (A more recent selection of people whose books I have clutched to my chest? Angela Slatter, Catherynne M Valente, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Kelly Link)

Illustrators: Pauline Baynes. M. M. Kaye. Margaret Horder. Thea Proctor. Arthur Rackham. (More recent: Rovina Cai, the Balbussos, Charles Vess, Shaun Tan, Kali Ciesemier, this is really hard)

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

Vigorous, beautiful and hopeful. Good directions are as important as dire warnings.

Kathleen Jennings is a World Fantasy Award nominated, Ditmar Award winning illustrator and writer from Queensland, Australia. Her latest illustrations are for the covers of Tremontaine[http://www.tor.com/2015/10/07/revealing-kathleen-jennings-cover-art-for-tremontaine/], the prequel to Ellen Kushner’s Riverside novels, from Serial Box Publishing, but very soon you will get to see her illustrations for Angela Slatter’s Flight. She is most frequently online at http://tanaudel.wordpress.com