Angela Slatter's Blog, page 70

Worldbuilding in the Sourdough Universe

So, today is the actual book day for Of Sorrow and Such in the US. I celebrated early, then while I was sleeping the book was born! Easiest. Birth. Ever.

Over at Tor.com I talk about the building of the world in the Sourdough stories. Kathleen Jennings beta read it for me, then turned in some illustrations just for fun coz she’s nice like that.

Amongst the sweetest phrases I’ve ever heard from my mother’s lips are “I love you,” “I’ve made lemon meringue pie” (those two meaning, essentially, the same thing), and “Once upon a time.” All three still fill me with roughly the same degree of happiness, but I don’t hear that last one anymore. It’s not for lack of trying; I do keep asking.

“Tell me a story?”

“You’re forty-eight years old.”

“And you’re seventy-one, so tell me a story before you forget how!”

So far no luck. Come to think of it, the lemon meringues have been a bit thin on the ground, too. Hmmm.

Nevertheless, the thrill of “Once upon a time” never leaves me, never dims. It’s the story addict’s equivalent of a ringing bell and the response is equally Pavlovian. I know, when I hear those words, that I will be transported. That the room or train carriage or café or bus in which I’m sitting is about to disappear; I will be elsewhere. It might be familiar, a beloved territory visited over and again, or a place unexpectedly remade and strange. It can be as static as my memory chooses or as mutable, sometimes with just small details tweaked or enlarged, a colour shaded from pale pink to blood red, with snow-white sequins or wings as black as ebony added in for good measure.

The once-upon-a-time world is one I’m (mostly) in charge of, so when I decided to write it should have been the easiest thing on the planet to do the worldbuilding, right?

Apparently not.

The rest is here.

Focus 2014 Interviews: Tehani Wessely

Our fearless editor, Tehani Wessely talks about Fablecroft and what on earth possessed her to start the Focus series.

What was the inspiration for the Focus volumes?

The inspiration lies squarely at the feet of Deborah Biancotti. Several of us were having a discussion about some ToCs that had been recently announced, and noting how few award winners were appearing in Year’s Best anthologies. Deb said something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be great if someone would put together 8 or 10 award winners in a well-priced ebook? I’d buy that.” And well, the rest is history…

What should new readers know about Fablecroft?

That the editor is sometimes really slow at responding to emails but will always, ALWAYS get back to you… Also that we work really hard to promote and showcase our contributors as far and wide as we can, whether they are novelists, short story writers, essayists, poets or artists. The charter of the press is always to support emerging and established Australian authors (though we love our international contributors equally!) – we’re extraordinarily proud of the work we publish and want as many readers as possible to get their hands on it too.

Can you remember the first story you read that really made an impression on  you?

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Truth! I think it’s the point when I feel in love with character-based storytelling as well, which is still my favourite type. I went through a long phase that lasted well into my teens reading almost exclusively horse books… Possibly also why I’m a big fan of dragons, it has been suggested!

Name your top five favourite authors.

Angela, that’s like asking me which is my favourite child! I am only going to name international authors, because I love too many Aussie ones to make so short a list.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Anne McCaffrey

Robin Hobb

Martha Wells

JD Robb

But if you asked me again tomorrow, I’d probably give you five different ones. And five more again the next day! In fact, that’s a good idea – maybe I’ll tweet that…

The future of Australian spec-fic is …

…full of possibility. We are able to do so many things now that we couldn’t do two, five, ten years ago. Who KNOWS where we’ll be in another two, five or ten years. I can’t wait to find out!

Tehani Wessely was a founding member of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine in 2001 and started her own boutique publishing house, FableCroft Publishing, in 2010. Now firmly entrenched in Australian speculative fiction and independent press, she has judged for several national literary awards and reads far more in one genre than is healthy. Find her online at fablecroft.com.au and @fablecroft or @editormum75 on Twitter.

 

 

Reading in New York City

So, on 4 November Lisa L. Hannett and I will be doing readings at the Kill Bar in NYC – inside the Times Scare Haunted House Attraction in Times Square New York (SQUEEEE!). Just like real writers!

It’s part of the Night Time Logic series and the details are here – if you’ve not already headed off to Saratoga Springs then come along. And if you have already headed off to WFC, we’re both giving readings there.

 

Showcasing Real, Fantastical Women: Angela Slatter’s Of Sorrow and Such

The lovely Melissa Ann Singer talks about the women in Of Sorrow and Such here.

I often complain about how rare it is to have a book, TV show, or film be driven by relationships between women. Stories seem to me to be primarily driven by relationships between men or between men and women. Often there’s only one woman in the story in the first place, or, if there’s more than one, they never meet. When relationships between women are seen, they are often framed in the context of each woman’s relationship to a man who knows them both (for instance, a wife and her mother-in-law); or the women are portrayed competitors.

To me, that doesn’t reflect the real world, where my relationships with women are as varied and complex as the women I know. Sometimes people say I’m reading the “wrong kind” of books, that there’s plenty of what I want in women’s fiction. While that’s true to a degree—I read women’s fiction too—I love category fiction. SF/F, horror/UF, mystery/suspense/thriller are my go-tos. And if there’s room in those stories for all kinds of male relationships, there’s room for all kinds of female relationships too.

Which is part of why Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter made me so happy. In this slim volume of fantasy there are a wealth of women’s relationships, which both spoke to me and propelled the story.

World Fantasy 2015 Schedule

Got my WFC schedule all sorted! The whole thing is here.

My appearances:

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5 @ 6.00pm 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, Kit Reed, Angela Slatter

 

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 @ 1.30 in Broadway 1

Reading

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

 

 

Of Sorrow and Such … almost there!

So, Of Sorrow and Such launches on 13 October … due to the vagaries of time travel, it’s already 13 October in Oz … but not in the US … so still a few hours to go!

But you can read an excerpt here or listen to an excerpt from the audiobook here – read by Marisa Calin, who does such a superb job I’m never going to be able to do a public reading of this story! – or even go and pre-order it here.

I’ve been so lucky with this novella and with Tor.com and all the love they’ve heaped upon it!

To celebrate, I’ve eaten leftover lemon meringue pie for breakfast and torn up a piece of paper to give myself a ticker tape parade. Yes, authors are sad.

Focus 2014 Interviews: Charlotte Nash

Portrait of Author Charlotte Nash

Today, the multi-talented Charlotte Nash (brain the size of a planet) talks about her tale in Focus 2014.

What was the inspiration for your story “The Ghost of Hephaestus”?

A mash together of two things – firstly, what might have happened to all those Greek gods after the ancient era?; and secondly, a steampunk cyborg. I thought that could be cool.

What should new readers know about you?

I always like to read stories without knowing much about the writer first. But to give you an answer, I’d say that I’m still exploring around with genre, so my back-catalogue is somewhat … eclectic. A bit like my whole work career, really. I blame being a Gemini. And the rational part of my mind groaned when I wrote that.

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

Jurassic Park.

Name your top five favourite authors.

Neal Stephenson

Ted Chiang

Michael Crichton

Jilly Cooper

Liane Moriarty

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

Just around the corner.

Lament for the Afterlife – a reminder

Photo by Lisa!

A gentle reminder, my fellow Brisneylanders: on Oct 29 at 6pm, Lisa L. Hannett will be at Avid Reader launching her new book Lament for the Afterlife. Do you want to be there?

Of course you do, you’re all folk of exquisite taste. You need this book, you really do.

It’s the night before GenreCon, besides, so you’ll all be in town, right? Right!

It will be launched by the most excellent Robert Hoge.

So, go here and register.

A Ghostly Gathering

In the lead-up to Halloween, I feel I should mention this Kindle mini-collection from the Mammoth Books series.

A Ghostly Gathering contains four stories by Thana Niveau, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, and moi. Edited, as always, by the most excellent Stephen Jones.

It can be purchased here.

Focus 2014 Interviews: Thoraiya Dyer

Photo Credit – Cat Sparks

Today, the delightful Thoraiya Dyer talks about her Focus 2014 tale, “Wine, Women and Stars”.

What was the inspiration for this story ?

The inspiration for “Wine, Women and Stars” was reading journal articles about potentially using solid metal fuel in cars and me trying to work out if you could do it in a living organism, you know, replace the whole inefficient digestion thing we’ve got going on!

I was also interested in how being older can help or hinder in a career, and how criteria for a person’s usefulness can change right when you’ve reached the wrong side of the divide. My father was on the brink of being a qualified aeronautical engineer in the early 70s, but couldn’t get the flight hours he needed to graduate. In those days, there were no age discrimination laws, and the airlines didn’t hesitate to tell him, as they turned him away, that they could get someone ten years younger with twice the flight hours. End of dream.

What should new readers know about you?

Readers should know that I love individuals and their ecosystems, layers of history and disastrous futures, made-up pantheons and cramming too many ideas into small numbers of words. I hereby abandon all responsibility for consumer dissatisfaction.

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

The first story that I read which made me want to be a writer was The Witches by Roald Dahl.

Name your top five favourite authors.

Oh, cruel question! Top five favourite authors. You really mean I can pick five from Sydney, five from Perth, five from…no? How about my five favourite dead authors. They are Patricia Wrightson, Pat O’Shea, Rudyard Kipling, Frank Herbert and Michael Ende.

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

I just finished reading this month’s Locus and there’s a helluva lotta brilliant Australian work being reviewed in it these days. The future of Australian spec-fic shines brightly…until we’re all killed by radiation, a la “On The Beach” by Nevil Chute.

You were warned

Thoraiya Dyer is a four-time Aurealis Award-winning, three-time Ditmar Award-winning, Sydney-based Australian writer. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Nature, Cosmos and Analog and her collection of four original stories, “Asymmetry,” is available from Twelfth Planet Press. Dyer’s debut novel, “Crossroads of Canopy,” first in the Titan’s Forest trilogy, is forthcoming from Tor books in 2017.

Dyer is represented by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. She is a member of SFWA. A qualified veterinarian, her other interests include bushwalking, archery and travel. Find her online at Goodreads, Twitter (@ThoraiyaDyer) or www.thoraiyadyer.com .