Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 179

Holiday Daze

Last night I ended up in hospital – a severe and sudden bout of gastro left me suddenly without enough fluids to stay upright and, it seemed, without enough blood pressure for the paramedics to be able to get a drip into me. Their original plan was to just do that and be on their way – but instead I ended up strapped to a stretcher, taken into hospital, and put on a drip there.

It was an awful, scary few hours, but I got home by about 2am feeling a lot more okay. My honey had called my Mum t...

New Skool K9 – the verdict

Okay, we were skeptical. How could we not be? Our beloved K9 was coming back after so many years in his own show rather than an official Doctor Who or Sarah Jane Adventures episode – completely redesigned as a CGI creation. Nooooo.  godiyeva and I were very much attached to classic K9, and this looked like a hideous disaster waiting to happen.

But I'd read the recent article by Jonathan Blum in DWM, and I was cautiously optimistic. It looked like one in a long line of quite decent...

Galactic Suburbia Episode 3 Show Notes

Episode 3 is available for download/live play here, or subscribe to us through iTunes. I'm posting the show notes here as well as some versions of Firefox struggle to load them on the GS page…



Galactic Suburbia Episode 3 – 2 April

News:

Alisa's live report from Swancon!

Tiptree winners & Honours List including Wives Wives Wives

Arthur C Clarke shortlist

Hugos – largest number of votes ever received. Shortlist out Easter Sunday, UK time:

Launch of new Asif website

Stephenie Meyer to release a...

Intergalactic Planetary

We've just recorded the new Galactic Suburbia podcast (it's not up yet, don't go looking) and I'm feeling bouncy as always after a nice long booky chat with Alex & Alisa. I'm kicking myself though because I did this whole thing pre-promoting the K9 premiere tomorrow morning on Channel 10 in Australia and the podcast won't be out until after that! Drat drat drat it.

I am having a horde of small boys come around tomorrow at 9:30 am to watch the show with Raeli. I have a vague feeling like I...

April Day One

51588 / 120000

So, April has arrived. That means that Saturnalia: Creature Court Book Three needs to be well underway. My current plan is to write 20,000 words per month, which is my favourite sustainable level of writing – unlike Nano's 50,000, it allows me to do some other things at the same time!

20,000 words a month means 1000 words a day on weekdays only. Factoring in weekends is still a new concept to me – it's a little counter-intuitive when you have kids because your first...

Farewell to March Tansy

It's the end of my 'holiday' March and I'm exhausted – between our big room swap and a family emergency which has led to many visitors, I've basically been cleaning house for a week. Seriously. How do real housewives do it? How did housewives cope before podcasts? And will I ever be able to listen to Radio Free Skaro again without getting mild asthma?

We have some lovely friends who have pitched in and helped, and while all this was going on, the baby learned to creep (like crawling but...

On Reading Bad Books

Over at Justine Larbalestier's blog, she asks the question: What do you think of the frequently mounted defence of Twilight and some other popular YA titles that no matter what you think of the writing style or content it's intended for teens so that's okay. Or at least it gets teens reading?

There have been some wonderful, inventive comments, not overly hamstrung by Justine's insistence that the relative merits of Twilight not be under discussion in the thread (and fair enough too, it's one o...

Last of the Paperwork

I have spent most of the day cleaning and sorting my old study, which has long since become 'room which you do not enter unless you need somewhere to stack huge piles of crap'. It's a long hard slog, filling garbage bags and boxes, excavating through the heaps of sheer rubbish I've managed to accumulate.

Then there's the stuff that's not rubbish but really I no longer need to hang on to. Scrabbling through an old box of treasures, I found maybe a handful of old jewellery to keep, and a few s...

Lifelode, by Jo Walton

This one was recommended to me as 'domestic fantasy,' which was intriguing from the start. Also, it was Jo Walton. Say no more. Jo Walton has this amazing knack of writing novels that feel like they would have been written a century ago, if our current genre traditions existed then.

What I wasn't expecting was a marvellous, complex narrative that entirely messed with my head. Walton uses omniscient narration beautifully, weaving in and out of her characters' heads, shifting perspective...

Entitlement to Books

One of the things I wanted to get done this March was a big clean & organise of the house – particularly swapping my study with the old master bedroom so Jem can have her own room and all our bedrooms will be at the same end of the house. Today, I planned to spend some serious time in my study throwing things away while listening to Doctor Who podcasts, but was derailed when I spotted some little bookshelf sets in Chickenfeed.

$50 and one awkward car-wrangle later, I was setting up real...