Angela Slatter's Blog, page 95

Over at StarShipSofa …

… my story “I Love You Like Water” (which first appeared in the anthology 2012 from Twelfth Planet Press) has been podcasterised. It’s a word. It was also reprinted over at Cosmos Online.

There’s also a terrific tale by Matthew Sanborn Smith.

Go here for listening pleasure!

The Female Factory: wrap!

And here’s the full wrap-around of the cover. Available for pre-order here.

Twelfth Planet Press: Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction 2013

I’m very happy to announce that my story “Flight”, which first appeared in Paula Guran’s Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, has been selected for the new TPP Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction for 2013.

Huzzah!

Table of Contents

Selkie Stories Are For Losers  –  Sofia Samatar

By Bone-Light  –  Juliet Marillier

The Myriad Dangers  –  Lavie Tidhar

Carpet  –  Nnedi Okorafor

I Gave You My Love by the Light of the Moon  –  Sarah Rees Brennan

57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides  –  Sam J. Miller

The Minotaur Girls  –  Tansy Rayner Roberts

Not With You, But With You  –  Miri Kim

Ghost Town  –  Malinda Lo

December  –  Neil Gaiman

An Echo in the Shell  –  Beth Cato

Dan’s Dreams  –  Eliza Victoria

As Large As Alone  –  Alena McNamara

Random Play All and the League of Awesome  –  Shane Halbach

Mah Song  –  Joanne Anderton

What We Ourselves Are Not  –  Leah Cypess

The City of Chrysanthemum  –  Ken Liu

Megumi’s Quest  –  Joyce Chng

Persimmon, Teeth, and Boys  –  Steve Berman

Flight  –  Angela Slatter

We Have Always Lived on Mars  –  Cecil Castellucci

Available for pre-order here.

WFC Ticonderoga Meet and Greet

Sorry for the late notice, but there will be a meet and greet at WFC for Ticonderoga Publications authors and illustrators: Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, myself and Kathleen Jennings.

Scheduled for Friday at 3 p.m in  Regency 1, please come along and enjoy some readings and chat!

I’ll be reading from Black-Winged Angels and Kathleen and I will talk about collaborating on the art-meets-words side of things.

The Bitterwood Bible in the Shock Room

The lovely S.P. Miskowski interviews me over at The Shock Room.

Angela Slatter is the talented, prolific and acclaimed author of Sourdough and Other Stories, The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels, and The Female Factory (with Lisa L. Hannett) (Forthcoming 2014). In this exclusive Shock Room interview, she talks about her most recently published collection, The Bitterwood Bible, her writing process, and some of her influences.


 
Where did you grow up, and how has the place where you lived as a child influenced your writing?




I grew up in several places. My Dad was a cop and so we moved around with his job. My sister and I were born in Cairns (in Tropical North Queensland); moved to Ipswich (a mining town in the south of the state) when we were three and one respectively; then out to Longreach (in the Australian outback) at nine and seven; back to Cairns at eleven and nine; and then back to Ipswich at fourteen and twelve. I’ve spent most of my adult life in Brisbane (capital city of Queensland), apart from a four year stint in Sydney.




What this gives me, I guess, is a really strong sense of home not being about a place necessarily, but about the people you’re with. One of my favourite Clive James quotes, which I shall paraphrase very poorly, is that like all those who’ve left home, I know it immediately when I find it again, no matter where that may happen to be. I think I’ve carried that idea around inside me for a very long time, and I think it’s an idea that comes through in my fiction, especially where I deal with characters who’ve been sundered from their homes and families. 

The rest is here.

Cover Reveal: The Female Factory

And here is the cover for our Twelve Planets, The Female Factory.

By the talented Amanda Rainey.

‘Tis available for pre-order from the Twelfth Planet Press Store, here.

World Fantasy 2014!

On Monday I head off to the US for WFC in Washington DC! My first time on the east coast.

I’ve not been to the US since 2006 when I did the Tin House Summer Workshop and spent a couple of weeks in LA. I’ve got one panel at WFC, about which I’m very excited. My plan this year is to Not Get Sick and enjoy myself! Catching up with friends will be wonderful and I’ll get to do some Smithsonian’ing!

How Graphic is Your Novel? 

Time:  11 p.m. – 12 a.m., Friday, Conference Theatre

Panelists:  Marsheila (Marcy) Rockwell (M), James Chambers, Daryl Gregory, Jeff Mariotte, Angela Slatter

Description:  Popular literature tends to be much more graphic than it was a few decades ago, and yet many of the older books are still worth reading.  What does graphic sex or violence add to a story?  Would the George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones be the same without the blood wedding scene?  Is there a danger of the sensational value of the graphic events replacing good plotting and storytelling?  Are there matters so horrible they should not be written about, or are there no limits?  Which books handle their graphic scenes well, and which ones cross the line and fail to be entertaining will be the focus of the discussion.

In the mail: Best New Horror #25

Much excitement to receive this – and extra excitement to see I’ve made it to the first ToC page and the back cover! “Slowly, Monty, climb the ladder.” *steeples fingers*

My story “The Burning Circus” was originally printed in the British Fantasy Society’s anthology of the same name, edited by Johnny Mains.

In the Light with S.P. Miskowski

The wonderful S.P. Miskowsi has released her latest instalment in the Skillute Cycle, In the Light. Knock, Knock, her debut novel, and Delphine Dodd, a novella, were both shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. Black Static’s Peter Tennant has described her as “one of the most interesting and original writers to emerge in recent years.” She is one of my favourite horror authors, and here she talks about tales of ambition and envy, what scares her, and disappointed women.

What do readers need to know about S.P. Miskowski?

I would be ecstatic if books could, in some magical way, sell themselves so that writers could stay in their caves and do the only thing we’re good at. I’d love to write books and stories for the rest of my life without having to charm, impress, seduce, or mislead anyone into thinking I’m a fascinating, sexy creature whose work they ought to read. I think my wish tells you something essential about me. So I’ll leave it at that.

What was the inspiration behind the Skillute Cycle?

A night of insomnia at my husband’s grandmother’s house, in Rose Valley, Washington. The sky was black. There was a cold breeze, and tree branches scraped against the outside walls of the house. Everyone else was asleep. I was thinking about childhood visits to my grandparents in the country. I thought how beautifully dark the woods were at night, yet alive with creatures we can’t see. I wondered what it was like for young girls who aspired to leave that place and failed to escape, for whatever reasons. Then I thought about all the things that might keep a woman tied to a town she didn’t like. And the book began to take shape.

What first made you want to write?

I can’t remember choosing to write, only filling notebooks with lines and loops at the age of three, before I knew how to read. Maybe it’s a nervous disorder. My sister taught me to read and I started writing stories in those notebooks. My eighth grade English teacher recognized my inclination and became my first mentor, supplementing the school reading list with books from her library. She was a huge influence. But I’ve always been a writer.

What can readers expect from In the Light?

More clues! More mysteries! Two characters with only a superficial social connection are about to collide. Their real relationship will make sense, I hope, within the novella. But to really understand its origin you have to read the four books and put all of the pieces together. My wish is for readers to find that process entertaining and challenging, rather than maddening. We’ll see.

You’ve also been a playwright – what did you learn from that experience that you put to work in your novel writing?

First: Revisions never end. You can always make another change for the better. There is no final, perfect draft, only the draft you consider ready for an editor’s judgment. Knowing this has kept me from treating my work as something too precious.

Second: No matter how many tricks we devise to make writing seem less solitary, ultimately it comes down to you, alone, with words. As a playwright I tried to be collaborative. It was interesting. Collaboration is beautiful when it occurs naturally. It’s rare. Not something you can expect when you’re jumping from one production to another, one group of collaborators after another. What I learned from playwriting, beyond anything technical, was to accept solitude.

What scares S.P. Miskowski?

The inevitability of causing harm simply by living day to day, causing harm without realizing it. We make decisions which cause damage to others, damage to the world, and we are barely aware, if at all. Arrogance. Self-regard. The inevitability of greed and the desire for power and control. People who think their ideas are so cool they should be imposed on everyone. Human nature, which doesn’t change, or changes so gradually the difference can’t be detected from one generation to the next, no matter how drastically our living conditions are altered. What scares me is my nature, our nature. Knowing how far we go to justify what we want and what we do to get it.

In the Light is the last part of the Skillute Cycle – how does it feel to be closing a loop?

I’d like a parade and a bottle of champagne, please. A writer comes to the end of a project that’s taken years to complete, and naturally it feels like there should be a celebration. But in fact there’s only more writing. I took a few minutes to congratulate myself for sticking with it, before I went back to my usual self-criticism. It’s good to stand on the ground I saw from a distance. Not that I achieved all I hoped to achieve, but making it to the end of a marathon feels good.

Who are your literary influences?

Flannery O’Connor, Janet Malcolm, Shirley Jackson, Joan Didion, Patricia Highsmith…

A message to your younger, more angsty self?

Don’t waste any time trying to fit in. You never will. Just keep writing.

What’s next for you? Can you ever really leave Skillute?

We will see. I don’t know. I never stop thinking of new stories and characters related to Skillute. Maybe the buried demons and disappointed women of Skillute will follow me to the city. The novel I’m working on is an urban tale of ambition and envy, with a supernatural twist. At its heart, the book is a murder mystery about social and personal identity. Another obsession, another story.

Bitterwood in Atlantis

The lovely Lily Childs sent me this photo, showing Bitterwood in the window of the Atlantis Occult Bookshop near the British Museum.

It’s cuddling up to another gorgeous Tartarus Press production, Robert Aickman’s The River Runs Uphill.

So, my baby is in excellent company!