A.C. Buchanan's Blog, page 4

Finished!

Ice Flight. The second novel(la) in the Flux & Flight trilogy, and sequel (if not a very direct sequel) to Liquid City. I thought it wasn't going to be easy. I wrote and deleted and rewrote and restarted. I unwaveringly love my characters, but I fell out of love with the plot (to put it mildly) more than a few times. I found it hard to put my finger on why I found this story in particular so hard to write, but for whatever reason, it was.

About two weeks ago I re-started it for the final time...

This Other World

Back in 2012, the writers' group I was part of saw a call from Crossed Genres Publications for novellas featuring older women. A few of us challenged each other to write something. I'd been reading a couple of books by middle-aged and older autistic women about their experiences, and started idly thinking about what those experiences might look like in the future, in another world.

One thing led to another, and I ended up with a story which I titledThis Other World, about an autistic woman wh...

Stamp!

I love writing books. I love them being published. I really hate signing them.

That's not because I don't love being asked to sign - I mean, unless you're someone for whom it's an dailyoccurrence, I can't see it being anything less than exciting. Someone bought my book! And they like my work enough to want my signature!

But writing by hand is painful and difficult. When I had to do it regularly, I had chronic hand pain that I didn't really realise wasn't normal. Writing more than a couple of...

New Story: MAKET, or, Alternative Endings for Ivan Ivanovich

On the last full day of last year's North American trip, I visited the National Air and Space museum in Washington DC. It was a place that made my inner child-nerd very happy, but one thing in particular caught my eye: a Russian mannequin, named Ivan Ivanovich (which I understand to be the equivalent of John Doe) which was used to test the Vostok spacecraft.

Everything about this exhibit fascinated me, right down to the details like how a recording of a recipe for cabbage soup was included to...

At the Edge Launch

This weekend, I had the good fortune to be able to attend the launch ofAt The Edge, an anthology of Australasian speculative fiction from Paper Road Press.

(That's Marie Hodgkinson from Paper Road Press, speaking, authors Paul Mannering and AJ Fitzwater and editors Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray, along with shiny shiny copies of the book.)

The very last story is"And Still the Forests Grow though We Are Gone", by yours truly. I'm really proud to be a part of this: the editors and publishers did an...

Panel references (Disability and Gender Diversity & Sexuality in SFF)

I was on two panels at Au Contraire (more on the convention as a whole later) and mentioned I'd post details of the works I discussed (or meant to discuss but ran out of time). I didn't make full notes, so this won't be a lot of use to those who weren't there, sorry - although I understand at least part of each panel may be podcast and if so I'll post details here.

Disability in Science Fiction and Fantasy Accessing the Future anthology from FutureFire.net Defying Doomsday anthology from Twe...

Au Contraire Schedule

Au Contraire is next weekend. I'm dying my hair in preparation. The timetable is here and here's my schedule:

I'm on a few panels:

At 9am (ouch) on Saturday, I'll be talking about my pet topic, Disability in SFF. Yes, putting an autistic person on a panel related to their thesis topic.What could go wrong? But, more seriously,this is an amazing panel of cool and insightful people with varied experiences of disability, and I'm really excited about having a natter with them. At 10am (someone br...

More news…

A fewquick pieces of news:

I'm thrilled to announce that my short story "The Wasp-Keeper's Mother" placed second in the Au Contraire 2016 short story award.The deadline fell during my final week of bootcamp and somehow in an exhausted haze I fired off the best story I had available a couple of hours before the deadline. So to achieve this was a very welcome suprise. Congratulations to the other winning authors, and I'm looking forward to reading Robinne Weiss's story. I've also sold a flash...

Back to real life (and some writing news)

Yesterday I graduated from Enspiral Dev Academy. It was an incredible, amazing, intense, exhausting experience and I've learned so much. Everything else in my life has necessarily taken a back seat over those nine weeks as I grappled with late nights, fast-paced learning, deadline after deadline after deadline and some weirdly lucid coding dreams (apparently I can't actually console log results out of my brain, who knew?).

So now it's back to real life, organising my schedule, trying to find...

My SJV Award Nominations

Below are the works I've thus far nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel awards. I hope to sneak in another few before nominations close at the end of the month. Whether you'll be nominating/voting or not, all of them are excellent examples of NZ specfic writing and come highly recommended.

(Obligatory disclaimer: this isn't meant to be a list of the best eligible works or anything of that nature. It's shaped by my interests, time and book-budget, and I make no claims of objectivity. Works listed...