A.C. Buchanan's Blog, page 3

SJV Nominations

These are my Sir Julius Vogel Award nominations of works published in 2016. If you’d like to nominate them as well (nominations determine what ends up on the final ballot) you can do so here – there’s no cost, membership, or residency requirement to nominate, and you have a week! Standard disclaimer that these informed by personal preferences, I have made no attempt at objectivity, and my reading has been far from comprehensive. But these are things I liked, and I think you might like them to...

Interview with Rivqa Rafael

I’m delighted to be interviewing Rivqa Rafael today.

Rivqa is a queer Jewish writer and editor based in Sydney. She started writing speculative fiction well before earning degrees in science and writing, although they have probably helped. Her previous gig as subeditor and reviews editor for Cosmos magazine likewise fueled her imagination. Her short stories have appeared in Hear Me Roar (Ticonderoga Publications), The Never Never Land (CSFG Publishing), and Defying Doomsday (Twelfth Planet Pr...

2017 Plans

Happy New Year everyone! This new year means brand new novel for me: I’ve opened up a document, thought of a title (“Like Stars in Sea”) at the last minute, and written my first few hundred words. It’s a secondary-world university-based fantasy full of astronomy, magic, mysteries, and love. I’ve been worldbuilding in preparation for a while, but I think most of the plot will need to be figured out as I go, so I’m really excited to launch into it.

I’ve also given this website an overhaul for...

2016 in review

I think the world has agreed that 2016 was a bad year. I will not argue with the world; horrible stuff has happened this year, and whether it’s been objectively worse on a global scale or not, I know a lot of people have found it really hard and I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about friends who are scared or hurting, especially over the past few months.

But on a personal level, 2016 was, on balance, a good year. It wasn’t always an easy year; it was often fraught and uncertain, with a...

Three Updates

I have some updates. First up:

I'm not sure why I missed posting about this at the time (couldn't bring myself to write another word, probably) but for I think only the second time, I made it to the end of NaNoWriMo - and unlike the first time, I did so with a reasonably coherent, if somewhat messy, first draft.

NaNo hasn't worked out for me for a while - and I think it's inevitable it won't work for everyone every year - but this year was really good timing. I had a 50 000 word short novel...

NaNoWriMo 2016

I won NaNoWriMo once, back in 2008, finishing a YA Steampunk novel set in an alternative world Wellington; a novel that won't ever be published, but which I'm really glad I wrote. In the following few years, I made a couple more attempts; I didn't win, but I wrote 20 or 30 thousand words of a manuscript, good progress that made it worthwhile, and I completed some similar challenges over the years: the late SoCNoC, and Camp NaNoWriMo.

And then I failed miserably severaltimes; giving up in the...

Capricious: The Gender Diverse Pronouns issue

When I first launched Capricious, just over a year ago, I decided that if I made it to a year, I'd start shaking things up and doing some things a little differently, create some special projects or spin-offs.

Well, we made it to a year and that means there's a special issue in the works. I've just set up a crowdfunding campaign to try and make it happen. Here's a little more about what's planned:

Gender diverse pronouns - like the "ze" and "hir" used above, or singular they, or any of a numb...

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Ten Things

It's a post of ten things:

1. I've just got back from WORD Christchurch. I have a tendency to miss out on writers' festivals due to work and disorganisation, so this time I decided to do it properly: I bought a festival pass and some cheap flights and listened and laughed and cried and learned and I loved it all. AJ Fitzwater read "Gravity Well" which I've adored since I first read it. Ivan E. Coyote's work emotionally destroyed and rebuilt me multiple times over the course of the weekend (I'...