Angela Slatter's Blog, page 71

Focus 2014 Interviews: Faith Mudge

Today, Brisbane writer Faith Mudge talks about her Focus 2014 tale.

What was the inspiration for your story, Signature?

I was annoyed! I’d been reading a book about books, generally one of my favourite things, but this one took quite a judgmental approach to people’s reading and it made me consider what story about books I wanted to read instead: a shop that’s friendly and inclusive, staff who love books as much as the customers and create a sense of community, a safe niche where you can be yourself. The beloved bookshops of my childhood are gone but finding a new one is always a small homecoming. It also seems to me a common misconception about bibliophiles that a book highly admired in one circle should please everyone, literary works or classics in particular. I don’t agree! It depends so much on what you’re looking for, what you need at a particular time, and that varies wildly from person to person – from mood to mood, even. The story started with Priya and Rieke arguing pretty much that exact point and their characters developed very quickly from there. Priya is her own self, of course, but I drew some inspiration from a couple of people in my family who have similarly widespread reading interests and one of them has the indomitable cheerfulness that Priya weaponises, because I’ve always seen that as a bit of a superpower.

What should new readers know about you?

I am fascinated by fairy tales, folklore and mythology, and blog about all those things extensively at beyondthedreamline.wordpress.com. I write mostly spec fic but range all over the place within that, from fantasy and urban fantasy to steampunk and science fiction. History is another of my oldest loves and this year I published a purely historical story about Elizabeth I in FableCroft’s anthology Cranky Ladies of History – I may write more in that genre, we’ll see. And I am always interested to hear what people think of my work!

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

The first book I can remember reading is The Hobbit, and it was certainly a powerful influence. My earliest writing attempts involved a lot of quests, the ambitious kind that demanded I draw enormous maps to match and were punctuated by really terrible poetry. I tried to make picture books too, which I at least usually finished. The first time I actually thought ‘I will write a proper novel’ was…well, I’m not entirely sure how old I was, probably around eight? After I drew some very detailed, vaguely mythic women – personifications of Empress Time and her daughters the Seasons, I think – my mother said I should write a story about it. Which I did. (It was AWFUL). Drawing was always a huge part of writing for me and still is, I often get ideas about characters by sketching them. Other books that had a strong influence on the way I write include Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s Bitterbynde trilogy, Patricia A. McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow and Jane Austen’s everything.

Name your top five favourite authors.

This is a much better question than my top five favourite books – I can’t answer that one and cheat if I’m expected to. My favourite authors tend to change depending on mood, but five I can’t do without on my shelf are Patricia A. McKillip, Douglas Adams, Margaret Mahy, Jane Austen and Diana Wynne Jones.

The future of Australian spec fic is…

… exciting! I’m mainly involved in the small press scene right now and there’s been such a fantastic range of anthologies opening up in the past few years as publishers seek out more diverse stories. There should be space for everyone in the world we live in, but there’s absolutely no excuse for not making space in the worlds we imagine. From what I’ve seen, Australian spec fic is heading in a very positive direction and I’m so happy to be a part of it.

Faith Mudge is a Queensland writer with a passion for fantasy, folk tales and mythology from all over the world – in fact, almost anything with a glimmer of the fantastical. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Kaleidoscope, Phantazein and Hear Me Roar. She posts reviews and articles at beyondthedreamline.wordpress.com. Somewhere in the overcrowded menagerie of her mind, there are novels. She is even writing some of them.

Focus 2014 Interviews: Dirk Flinthart

Today’s Focus 2014 victim, errr, author, is the redoubtable Dirk Flinthart.

What was the inspiration for your story, “Vanilla”?

The inspiration for “Vanilla”? I have to give credit to the editors of Twelfth Planet. They set the parameters. I just… found a space. And quite honestly, I don’t know what ‘inspired’ the piece at all. Like all half-decent stories, of course, a strong part is personal. The goal of the anthology was to write characters and voices which fall outside the usual paradigm. Currently in Australia we have social problems which revolve around incoming refugees, so I felt that was a good place to begin.

“Vanilla” revolves around the interaction between a teenage girl of Somali extraction and a number of alien refugees who have been assigned to her high school. It might have been fun trying to write from the alien perspective… but to me, that felt far too ‘science fiction.’ We’ve had plenty of ‘alien perspective’ stories in the past, but not too many from the point of view of a smart, confused and culturally alienated Somali girl. More to the point, she represented a greater challenge for me. Creating a believable but wholly alien viewpoint is bread-and-butter for a science fiction writer, and it’s relatively easy because who is going to disagree with you? Get your alien physiology and culture more or less consistent, and the character POV follows as a matter of course. A teenage Somali girl in an Australian private school, though — that’s a real-world idea. Portraying someone like that; someone completely foreign to my own experience, but grounded in the world we all know — that felt like a challenge.

In the end, I found common ground with Kylie (the Somali girl.) I think I had to. I don’t know if I’m good enough to create a strongly believable character with whom I have no shared mindspace. (I’ll have to try someday.) The common ground in question: loneliness and isolation, of course.

What should new readers know about you?

What should new readers know about me? Huh. You know, I have no idea. As a reader, I’ve always cared more about the stories and the ideas than the people that create them. Once a story is out there in the wild, it doesn’t belong to the writer any more. It belongs to the people who read it, recreate it in their heads, and bring it to life. I guess, though, that it might be worth saying: don’t necessarily take this story as representative of what I do. I’m glad it came out well. I enjoyed the challenge, and I’m pretty happy with the evocation of Kylie and her dilemma. But I’m also known for swashbuckling fantasy adventure stories, explodey horror/thrillers, and off-beat comedy. It’s probably to my detriment as a marketable commodity that I shift between genres and tones, and to an extent that does bother me. On the other hand, if somebody wants to offer me real money to produce works in a particular style and genre, I’ll give it a shot. Until then, I will continue to write exactly what I enjoy… and that is a very broad spectrum indeed.

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

Can I remember the first story I read that made me want to be a writer? You must be joking! I never wanted to be a writer. I just wrote stuff.

My parents tell me I was reading when I was two years old. I can certainly remember reading adult-level retellings of the Labours of Heracles and the Elder Edda when I was five, and I loved those tales even more than I loved the Batman comics I was also reading. There never came a moment when I read a particular story and said: “Why yes! I shall become…. a WRITER!”. They asked me to write stories in primary school, so I did, and it was fun. And I played all kinds of table-top RPGs throughout my teens and twenties, and that was no end of creative fun. I wrote pieces for the university newspaper — including the odd piece of fiction  — and that was PAID fun. So, you know: the outcome was inevitable.

Honestly, I have been a storyteller in one form or another for all of my life that I can recall. When you’re stuck with a habit like that, you can either hide it and treat it as a shameful addiction… or you can get it out in the open and try to do something useful with it. I picked the latter, obviously.

Name your top five favourite authors.

Top five favourite authors, in no particular order: Cordwainer Smith, Ursula K LeGuin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Dylan Thomas, Michael Moorcock.

Understand that at least three of those five names are likely to vary on any given day of the week. And no; you don’t get to ask me why these are favoured. Go read some of their stuff and work it out for yourself. If you catch up with me at a convention or a launch or something, we can sit down and argue about it over a drink.

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

The future of Australian spec-fic is dark and confused. The paradigm shift in the publishing industry brought about by the rise of digital technologies is changing everything. It’s easier than ever to get published, harder than ever to command an audience. Genre lines blur and run together. (They were never distinct in the first place!). ‘Literature’ with a capital ‘L’ backs itself into a corner becoming increasingly irrelevant to anything outside its own narcissistic, self-referential prose. The day is very close at hand when broad genres are largely dead, as traditional spaces such as crime, romances, science fiction and fantasy acquire more market share, and utilise ever more sophisticated and effective literary techniques. At the same time, micro-genres are already beginning to blossom. Readers are choosing very particular genre-spaces that can’t be summed up by single-word descriptors: western steampunk romance; futuristic crime procedural thriller; non-supernatural splatter horror, and so forth.

The Patreon model and other forms of crowdfunding strike me as a likely future. I suspect that as authors, we’ll write directly to an audience. We’ll build our online spaces to show off our abilities. We’ll publish short pieces and a few longer ones to acquire status and push our way into the audience. And then… we’ll write a set of tantalising pitches for new works, and hang them up in a crowd-funding space, and once the financial rewards are high enough to meet our particular requirements, we’ll write the actual books and release them to our supporters first, then to a broader market.

In other words, it’s not too far off what’s going on right now. Except that the role of big publishers is going to continue to decline, other than in the area of the MegaBlockBuster… which is a pity, really. I don’t tend to like This Week’s Bestseller, and without a decent-sized firm with reasonable cash flow, it’s very difficult for good editors to get paid properly. (And if you don’t think we need good editors, you are desperately ignorant!

Dirk Flinthart writes from north-eastern Tasmania, where he raises his three kids and  tries to look after his long-suffering wife. While he thinks of himself as a writer and indeed, has a history of turning out stories in science fiction, fantasy and horror which pick up the odd award and regularly make the Australian best-of compilations, he also teaches martial arts, maintains a fifty-acre properly (haphazardly!) and is still waiting to hear from the marking panel on the outcome of his Masters degree. His story in the Focus anthology came from Twelfth Planet’s “Kaleidoscope” collection, and received an Aurealis Award. Flinthart has just released a collection of short works through Fablecroft, called “Striking Fire”. He’s currently working on two novels, a screenplay, and a raft of short works.

 

 

Focus 2014 Interviews: Tansy Rayner Roberts

This is the third year that indie press Fablecroft has produced a Focus volume, a series that collects an elite selection of work which has received acclaim via national and international Awards recognition. So, naturally, I have subjected the ToCers to a series of questions.

First writer off the rank is the de-lovely Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts.

What was the inspiration for your story, “Cookie Cutter Superhero”?

It was written for Kaleidoscope (which was looking for diverse teen protagonists) and I knew I wanted to write a story about disability from the point of view of a teenager. I was really interested in the downside of prosthetics, and how for some users working around a missing limb is preferable to using an artificial one – as an able-bodied person, it’s a hard idea to wrap your head around, that the medical “fix” isn’t going to work for everyone.

I wrote about superheroes because it’s a topic I know well, and it gave me a chance to address many of the things that drive me nuts about super team books – the ‘only one girl’ tradition (that the films are replicating long after comics stopped doing it), the way that female superheroes are often treated as afterthoughts and fashion plates, and the spinoff tradition around so many of our more iconic female superheroes, where they’re a legacy of a more famous male hero and get dismissed as part of his story. 

Combining these two ideas also allowed me to address the pervasive (and often problematic) trope of disability in comics, where becoming a superhero is either a magical cure, or the disability itself is expressed as a superpower. The question of whether my protagonist will be “cured” of her amputated arm by becoming a superhero is central to the story, and the answer isn’t (cannot be) a simple one.

What should new readers know about you?

I write fiction, blog and podcast about SFF with a particular focus on feminist issues. I love superheroes. I recently finished a web serial on my blog which is a gender-swapped space opera take on The Three Musketeers, which you can read for free. If readers like “Cookie Cutter Superhero”, they’ll probably also like my novelette Fake Geek Girl, which was published at Review of Australian Fiction. One of the podcasts I co-host, Galactic Suburbia, recently won a Hugo. Oh, and I’m going to be doing an episode by episode review of upcoming Netflix series Jessica Jones (about a failed superhero playing noir detective) for Tor.com in November!

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

Probably the Little House on the Prairie series – I read them because a friend I played with at school adored them, and was always insisting that we played that at lunchtime. Yes, I was live action RPing at the age of 9! (I was Laura) I was definitely drawing book covers of the books I planned to write at that age (so much quicker than writing them) and pretty much every time I read a new genre or style of story, I planned to write a book along the same lines. My lack of followthrough before Grade 8 means the universe was deprived of my French Ballet epic, my prairie romances, my Anne of Green Gables style family sagas, my British high school prankfests, and so on.

Name your top five favourite authors.

This is a terrible question to ask a person whose social life is 80% other authors! Mary Wesley, Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, Eva Ibbotson, Alexandre Dumas.

The future of Australian spec-fic is …?

Small press. They’re the reason we have such a thriving short fiction scene, and it’s not just a place where new writers cut their teeth any more – it’s for established writers to bring their experiments, their out-of-the-box fringe writing, as the big publisher lists shrink. My own experience is that the small presses aren’t just supportive and dynamic in response to the changing book industry, but that they’re also great on international distribution – not to mention nurturing writers, fragile honeybees that we are, into creating innovative work with a distinctive Australian voice.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of the Creature Court trilogy, Ink Black Magic and Love & Romanpunk, among many other SFF books. She is a Hugo-award winning blogger and podcaster, living in Tasmania with her family. You can find Tansy at her blog http://tansyrr.com/ and on Twitter @tansyrr. Tansy also writes cozy culinary murder mysteries under the name Livia Day.

A New Experiment …

… with Kathleen Jennings … a series of cards with some of the Bitterwood illustrations on them (my favourites) … we’ll see how they go …

“I herewith attach a badger for your approval.”

Beyond the Woods: Retold Fairy Tales

Beyond the Woods: Retold Fairy Tales is a new reprint anthology from the lovely Paula Guran and Night Shade Books.

It will be out in July 2016, and I’m delighted to say that my story “The Bone Mother” is contained therein, along with tales by the likes of Kelly Link, Jane Yolen, Tanith Lee, Kirstyn McDermott, Neil Gaiman, Jeff VanderMeer, and Peter S, Beagle.

Over at Those Who Run With Wolves …

… there’s a gorgeous review of Of Sorrow and Such by the lovely Vida Cruz.

One of the best compliments I can give any story is, “I read it in one sitting”. The same applies for Of Sorrow and Such–it’s got the steady pace of a horse at a clop and it had a vise-like grip on my attention. I won’t spoil the ending, but all I can say is that while it’s not exactly happy, it definitely feels right.

The rest is here.

Horrorology Interviews: Jo Fletcher

Jo and Steve, (c) Peter Colebron

Today’s final Horrorology post is from the lovely Jo Fletcher, our redoubtable publisher.

This is the third horror anthology you’ve published with Steve as editor – what was your first thought when he proposed   Horrorology ?

How the hell do you spell it? And then, How the hell do you spell it the same way every time . . . and then, We need a really good illustrator to go with that calibre of writer. And then, How the hell am I going to explain this to the acquisition committee? Whilst no one in the Quercus editorial team has any part in JFB, and vice versa, I think it’s important that within the company we all know what each other are doing, as I am often surprised – and in a good way – how suggestions and insights can come from the most apparently uninterested people. And in this case, Jon Riley, the Editor-in-Chief of Quercus, who’s an extremely and widely well-read and much lauded editor, said, ‘What a cool idea!’ before I’d even started my pitch! So huge thanks to Jon there. And in fact, once you stop to think about it, A Lexicon of Fear is a very cool idea, and it’s also much easier to explain to booksellers than some proposals I’ve seen . . .

Who have been your favourite horror authors over the years?

Gosh, that’s an impossible question, because it changes from day to day as names I’ve temporarily forgotten edge back up to the surface . . . I’ve always preferred quiet horror to splatter (which isn’t to say that there’s some very visceral horror writing out there which I think is completely brilliant) . . . I suppose the first horror story I ever read for myself was ‘The Snow Queen’, because my grandfather had this beautiful edition of his fairy tales illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and I always thought the pictures were as much a part of the experience as the stories . . . And the other book my grandfather used to read to me was a great tome of myths and legends of the world, also beautifully illustrated, and I particularly remember the eagle, pecking out Prometheus’ liver, stomach, intestines, and so on, only for them to regrow in time for the bird’s dinner the following day . . . I’m all for nurturing the avian population, as you know, but there are limits. Those ancient gods were not just about turning into flora or fauna to have their way with any pretty young thing that happened along; they did a fine line in eternal punishment and retribution too . . .

And then of course one moves seamlessly on to MR James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood and Mary Shelley and their ilk, not forgetting Keats, and Milton, and Blake, and Dante, and then we’re into the twentieth century, and the wonderful Edith Nesbit and Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling – there’s a Kipling story about a man trapped in a great horseshoe-shaped arena, where the people all live in coffin-shaped and -sized holes in the sides, but he cannot get out, because of the shifting sands . . . I had nightmares for months afterwards, and I have never been able to read it again, just in case . . . and of course HP Lovecraft led me to August Derleth and all the Arkham House writers, and thence to the young pretenders, like Ramsey Campbell and the of course, Charles L. Grant, the master of quiet horror, and I’m not even a quarter of the way through the first shelf of a very substantial bookcase and I am missing out so many astonishingly wonderful names, like Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner, and then there’s the even younger Young Turks . . . [voice fades away and three days later fades back in] . . . and Lisa Morton and Robert Shearman and Tom Fletcher and Nancy Holder and Alison Littlewood and Kim Wilkins, and of course I must end on the redoubtable Angela Slatter!

What made you want to publish an anthology of this sort?

It’s still very hard to publish horror in Britain. The whole genre crashed and burned at the start of the nineties, after two decades of being able to publish pretty well anything with a haunted house or psycho killer in the description . . . but publishers were so desperate to reap the rewards that editors who knew nothing whatsoever about the history of the genre and what’d gone before were just buying and publishing anything they could get their grubby little hands on – this, by the way, is not specific to horror; name any bandwagon and you won’t need me to point out those trying to hitch a ride without understanding the direction it’s headed (I’m now going to ditch this analogy before all the wheels come off!). So where were we? Oh yes, why? Well, I’m pleased to see that interest in the genre has been slowly creeping back – we’re not talking about Number One bestsellers (well, except for Stephen King, of course, although I think everyone will admit he’s paid his dues). What I mean is that we’re at that stage where if I bring a horror project into an acquisition meeting, we will all actively consider it, and as I’m not going to bother bringing forward anything but those books I truly believe to be magnificent, we might even agree to take it on. So I think my task is to start reintroducing horror into the country’s literary diet – as one of its five-a-day, along with fantasy, SF, crime, and historical fiction (romantic fiction for desert, obviously!), and what better way to do that than with Stephen Jones, one of the world’s most critically acclaimed anthology editors, collecting together some of the world’s best writers of short horror fiction, including Clive Barker, who is himself a legend . . . I think the better question is Why wouldn’t you?

You’re offered the chance to visit the Library of the Damned ? do you accept?

Damn straight!

The future of horror is . . . ?

Slow and steady, and most important, never let the quality drop. After all, people still love being scared – as long as they know they can turn the light back on at the end of the story . . .

Pre-order your copy of Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear here!

 

Over at The Book Smugglers …

… is an excerpt from Of Sorrow and Such!

Go! Enjoy! Here!

New Storybook Project

Carolyn Emerick’s lovely Selkie

Time to move forward! Kathleen Jennings and I have decided it’s time to start a new storybook. So, we’ll be working on “Skin” next week on our Avid Bookshop work day, which was one of my short stories. Originally published in The Lifted Brow in 2008, it feels like a perfect tale to have a new life. So: selkies and revenge.

 

Skin

I was sixteen when he plucked me from the sea.

Caught in his fisherman’s net, I thought I would drown until he lifted me into the too-small boat and began to hack at the rough fibres to release me. I should have known then how soft his heart was, to see him ruining a net so, but I was terrified. In his haste he cut me, split the skin down by my tail a good eight inches and saw the two fine-boned ankles lying within. He sat back, astonished, and I fought my way free of the pelt until I was naked and shivering in my human skin, huddled at the bottom of that little, little boat.

His family told him to throw me back, to return my other skin and send me home. He refused.

Horrorology Interviews: Nicola Budd

Art by Nicola Howell

The delightful Nicola Budd is not only an excellent artist, but also an editor with Jo Fletcher Books. Horrorology was a major new project for her and here she talks about the experience.

So this is the second book you’ve helmed for JFB – is this your first anthology?

It is the first anthology I have taken charge on, but not the first anthology I’ve worked on for JFB, as I’ve also worked on the other wonderful anthologies from Steve: A Book of Horrors, Curious Warnings and Fearie Tales. The anthologies have been some of my favourite titles to work on so far because you get a taste of different authors’ writing (though that does come with its own challenges!), and for me, at least, it also helps a lot to break the editing down into more manageable chunks and keep it interesting.

What are the challenges of editing such a diverse anthology?

This is a good question! Steve does most of the editing on these anthologies, so it comes to me in a pretty clean state. Having said that, I do find it a challenging when there isn’t just one style of writing, as you have to get into the flow of so many different ideas and consider every author’s opinion. It can also be hard to maintain consistency across the stories – JFB has a house style we like to adhere to, and there are certain words that can be spelled differently, but should be uniform across the book. Creating the style sheet is a nightmare.

However, any challenges are pretty much offset by how interesting a project like this is to work on!

How much input have you had into the selection of internals and cover art?

This one was something of a team effort. Clive Barker sent us the internals we could use, then Steve, Jo and I each picked our favourites separately. Then we had a very business-like meeting (in a pub) over a bottle (a few bottles) of wine, and it turned out Clive had sent over some further images – so we just dropped everything we were going to do and went with those. Then Steve showed us the amazing visuals that he wanted for the cover and after a couple of questions we all agreed on those, too. Then Patrick Carpenter turned them into the cover you see today. Et voila – team effort image picking.

As for the typesetting style and internal text (fonts etc.), I’m going to claim the credit for that myself (selfish I know, but if I’m going to claim anything, it’s going to be that!), but it’s the typesetters who make my vague ideas for ‘medieval texts’ and ‘stone-cut fonts’ look so good.

What’s it like working with JFB?

I love working for Jo Fletcher Books. I sometimes can’t believe I hit the jackpot so early on in my career – working on books I love with some of the best and loveliest authors out there. I find some people have a bit of a stigma when it comes to SF, Fantasy and Horror, but sometimes they still have an old idea of what these genres mean; they have moved on so much since the early days and it’s such a pleasure to work on everything from Fantasy/Crime and Mystery crossovers (Lisa Tuttle – you, Angela! Can’t wait to release Vigil next year) to SF romance (Karen Lord), to novels that just can’t be defined (City of Stairs). Jo has done a brilliant job of finding something for everyone and it certainly keeps me on my toes!

The future of the book is …?

Wow, if I knew I suspect I’d be being paid a lot more than I am . . . and possibly be a god of some sort.