A.C. Buchanan's Blog, page 6

Toronto! Readercon! The Future!

Niagara Gorge

This post comes to you from a train car just heading in to Buffalo, New York. I treated myself to a business class ticket for the all-day ride from Toronto to New York City, and it was $25 very well spent *leans back in comfy chair, takes full advantage of free wifi*. I might be staying in some pretty scratty accommodation, but my train journeys are going to be done right!

I had an annoyingly rough start to this trip – ailments including but not limited to: recurrent nosebleed...

Away for a bit

6.5 hours and I’ll be in a taxi, another 26 or so and I’ll be arriving in Toronto. I have 3.5 weeks of no work and hanging out in Toronto, New York, various places in Massachusetts and Washington DC lined up. I’m looking forward to catching up with friends, spending way too much time in art galleries and eating pizza, and am really excited to be attending my first Readercon(I’m seeing snippets of the schedule from various people and wow, this is basically a convention with nothing I don’t wan...

Not an update (nor a crayfish)

I’m super busy right now, trying to meet a whole bunch of deadlines, trying to prepare for a trip to North America (how many socks do I need? how the fuck does tipping work?). By the time of my next post, I hope to be somewhere that has vaguely seen the sun in the past few months with a bunch of stories submitted.

In the meantime, here’s a gender-non-conforming lobster (source) (people who say this is a crayfish are PEDANTIC LIARS and should STOP HATING) and that’s pretty much all that matter...

Novelettes and other news

First up, my noveletteBree’s Dinosaur, part of Paper Road Press’SHORTCUTS series, is out now. You can subscribe to the series at Gumroad or purchaseit on Kindle. It’s a story about friendship, trauma, belonging and, of course, a dinosaur! There’s a free excerptavailable, and I definitely recommend checking out the rest of the series as I’m in excellent company.

Aaaand, Invisible City, the novelette I released earlier this year is currently FREE on Amazon as part of a time limited promotion. S...

Ice Flight – a preview

With Liquid City released (I’m still quite excited!) I’m working hard on the sequel,Ice Flight. I don’t have a release date as yet, but I’m hoping it will be out before the end of the year. But in the meantime I thought I’d give you a brief preview. Here’s the opening:

As the day draws close to night, a single motor car makes its way through the mountain range that borders the southern edge of the planet’s only continent. The girl, sitting up front with the driver, is calculating speed and di...

Liquid City is here!

It’s been a while – a lot of words written and deleted, conversations, doubts, excitement, more doubts, but Liquid City has finally been released and is available on Kindle and Kobo.

It started with a childhood obsession: I read and reread Noel Streatfeild’sThursdays Child. It’s about children who run away from an abusive orphanage, and for a time live on a canal boat. There’s a really vivid description of legging – the difficult and dangerous task of manoeuvring the boat through a tunnel usi...

Projects, Projects, Conventions, Projects

I got back from Reconnaissance last night (with much gratitude to the kind people who saved me from the overnight bus) and am feeling a bit twitchy and all over the place and very glad I don’t have to be at work today (unions! they’re good things! join them!). Despite some messy aspects to the weekend, it was lovely to catch up and hang out with people, there were some interesting and very useful events (especially Elizabeth Heritage‘s talk on publicising speculative fiction in NZ and Fiona B...

LexiCon 2017

Ok, time to announce the project I’ve been frantically working on for the past couple of weeks. Together with my partner in crimelargeand stressful projectsCassie HartI’m chairinga bid for the 38th New Zealand National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in 2017. The bid (and hopeful convention) is named LexiCon (our natcons generally change names from year to year).

We have a fantastic team of eleven with huge amounts of skill and experience (and yes, opinions, always opinions) and I thin...

SHORTCUTS open to subscriptions

Picture from http://karkemish00.deviantart.com/gal...

I mentioned a little while back that my novella, Bree’s Dinosaur, will be published as part of Paper Road Press’s SHORTCUTS series. That series is now available for subscriptions, with six “stories of the future, the past, and the uncanny, all of which wind in some way back to the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand” released direct to your inbox over six months.

Bree’s Dinosaur will be the second of these, available next month. It’s a stor...

Notes on Reconnaissance and the need for harassment policies at SF Conventions

[Note about screenshots: I’ve added text versions of these where it’s been easy for me to do, and where it hasn’t I’ve summarised the main points. If anyone needs full transcription please let me know and I’ll see what I can work out, but please understand I’m running pretty low on resources right now. The screenshots were taken at various times, so please don’t read anything in to the timing on them.]

Introduction

This is one of those posts I’d rather not have to write. It’s about requesting...