Angela Meyer's Blog, page 2

Readings Prize shortlist and A Superior Spectre out now in the UK

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‘Nothing Missed’ published in War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia

[image error]I’m at this extremely satisfying point in my writing career where I’m being asked to contribute to both literary and genre publications. May it go on forever!

Most recently, I have published a story, ‘Nothing Missed’, in the anthology War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia, edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira and Bryce Stevens. My story is a contemporary post-invasion/post-war story about a queer teen who finds an alien head, and becomes conflicted about the physical and emotion...

‘Joan Smokes’ wins the Mslexia Novella Competition (UK)

[image error]The novella I wrote after finishing A Superior Spectre has won a big prize! Joan Smokes is set in the early 1960s and centres on a woman who attempts to escape the past by travelling to Las Vegas. It tackles themes of reinvention, grief, trauma and love. Prize judge and Galley Beggar Press co-founder Eloise Millar praised the novella’s ‘pared-back, brittle language’.

‘The real magic is in how the author puts the reader so surely in the protagonist’s shoes,’ said Millar. ‘As an act of empathy,...

Online course: How to write your speculative fiction novel

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‘Micro’ in Kill Your Darlings‘ Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Showcase

Burned-out citizens have begun handing over their small-scale decisions to AI in the hope of making big decisions easier, in my new short story ‘Micro’, published in Kill Your Darlings’ Speculative Fiction and Fantasy Showcase, alongside such excellent writers as Jane Rawson, J.R. Hennessy, Claire Corbett, and J.A. Haigh.

I hope you enjoy it!

What I read in 2018

This was the most stressful year of my life!

And… the most successful.

I learnt so much – some hard lessons, but I learnt a lot about my own strength and capacity, too, which is a positive I’m sitting with at the end of the year.

I went through a company restructure and took on a great deal of responsibility (with all kinds of side effects including a return of panic attacks). I hung in there for the books and authors, and worked bloody hard through a time of uncertainty and loss (and simulta...

A Superior Spectre, my debut novel, is out now!

My debut novel, A Superior Spectre, was published this month in Aus/NZ by Peter Bishop Books/Ventura.

‘A book you’ll read in a thrilling rush and then think about for months’ – Emily Maguire

‘This is one of those rare books that penetrates deep into the reader’s most secret self. Read it and hold it close.’ – The Saturday Paper

‘This exquisite novel invites the reader to face the ghosts that haunt the dark corridors of the mind.’ – Justine Hyde, Kill Your Darlings

‘Unique, rich and incredibly sensual… Clever, convincing and unputdownable…’ – Karen Brooks

‘If you care about the future of Australian fiction, look no further.’ – Readings

‘A Superior Spectre [provides] an opportunity to acknowledge what reading does to us and for us.’ – Craig Hildebrand

The blurb:

Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice.

In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished.

But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known…

A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

‘A wild and risky novel, artfully darting between two people separated by centuries and connected by… you’ll see.’ – Steven Amsterdam

‘A beautiful and troubling novel that subtly explores how the past haunts the present.’ – Ceridwen Dovey

‘In this meta-possession, we are all complicit­.’ – The Australian

‘Meyer’s full-length debut is a brilliant, deeply unsettling work with the unapologetically feminist rage, passion and awareness of books such as The Natural Way of Things or Margaret Atwood’s seminal The Handmaid’s Tale. Meyer is bold and unafraid in her words, immersing the reader in a vividly imagined and realised world that meets questions of bodily autonomy, madness and disgust head on.’ – Books+Publishing

I hope you will add A Superior Spectre to your Goodreads to-read list! Thank you x

‘Running Away’ in Island #153

I have a personal-literary essay, about a complex fantasy I experience when I’m deeply anxious, in the latest Island mag. This one was very hard to write – I had to tackle some unexpected feelings of shame – but I’m glad I pushed myself to go deep into it. The essay actually ties in fairly well with some of the motivations behind writing my character, Jeff, who runs away to remote Scotland and proceeds to obliterate his own feelings by living as another. Jeff is living with shame, but does...

Carmen Maria Machado: Her Body and Other Parties [video]

‘Anxiety is a state of being tuned… like a hypersensitive nervous system, and that manifests in all sorts of terrible ways… but it also makes you very aware of what’s happening around you, which is a quality that writers and other artists benefit from.’

Books I read in 2017

[image error]I feel so inadequate, really. It’s not the number I would have liked, and honestly I think I bought more books than I read – so at least I am supporting the industry!

But… I have a great excuse. I make books. In 2018, at this stage, 16 books I have acquired or co-acquired are coming out (plus second formats of earlier books). I’ve spent countless hours with these books. Not to mention all the submitted manuscripts! Many, many words. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris, out here in Fe...