Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 65

Story Sale: Of War and Wings

Very cool that the Table of Contents has gone public now, so I can announce this one – I had a piece accepted into the anthology Clockwork Universe: Steampunk Vs Aliens, which will be the inaugural book coming out from start up publisher Zombies Need Brains. They raised the money for this book via Kickstarter last year, and it’s now all coming together!

I’m really proud of my story, one of two history + aliens pieces that I wrote last year – in this case, Victorian lady soldiers, genderqueer aliens and of course (because it’s me) the occasional frock.

I’m so looking forward to seeing the finished product in a couple of months!

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Patricia Bray

“The Cavorite Job” by Ian Tregillis

“Gracie’s Fire” by Leah Cutter

“Quinta Essentia” by Bradley P. Beaulieu

“When Comrade Ekaterina Died for the Motherland” by J.R. Hargenrader

“A Clockwork Alien” by Gini Koch

“Heart of the Empire” by Jason Palmatier

“The Red Queen and the White” by C.B. Pratt

“The Wizard of Woodrow Park” by Jean Marie Ward

“Of War and Wings” by Tansy Rayner Roberts

“Airship Down: A Sound and Fury Adventure” by Gail Z. Martin & Larry N. Martin

“Steamsuit” by David J. Fortier

“Fingers of Steam, Veins of Gold” by Brad Hafford

“Heart of Clockwork” by S.C. Butler

“Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare” by Seanan McGuire

Slow Cooker Sunday: Sweet Apple Pork

As a writer and a mum, the most important piece of technology in my life (apart from my laptop, my phone, Tunelink in the car and oh yes, my kettle) is my beloved slow cooker. I have had it nearly a year and have thus far managed not to give it a cutesy name. Which is frankly something of a miracle in our family, given that our new heat pump/air conditioner goes by the moniker of Svent. (We got it just after watching Frozen for the first time)

Ahem. Anyway. The slow cooker has been something of a life saver this year, as it enables me to make grown up meals that actually taste like something, as opposed to the simpler fare that our children prefer to eat. It’s much easier to find the energy to feed them something healthy-ish that they actually like in the evenings (even if it’s DULL) if I know that our dinner has been cooking away all by itself since ten in the morning…

I’ve even been firing it up over summer, largely because I hate the way the oven heats up the kitchen so fast in the hot months, but my lovely slow cooker turns out curries and roasts that can be paired with salads, without filling the house with hot air.

All this, and it’s basically a magic cauldron that matches my personal cooking style, which is ‘throw everything in the pot and rely on the luck that seems to pretty much work for you most of the time.’

I don’t do recipes. Not at all. I cook the way I sew (and let’s face it, the way I write), madly and without measure. This is why dressmaking is never going to be for me.

Here, however, is a delicious dinner I seem to have invented, having cooked it almost the same way twice.

SWEET APPLE PORK (for the slow cooker)

Ingredients:

2 x good-sized pork steaks (or chops)

2 x leeks

2 x Granny Smith apples.

250 mls Vegie Stock

Cut the meat up into rough & largeish pieces – basically quartering a steak or chop should do it. Or leave them whole if you want fancy presentation later. Core & chop the apples into large pieces. Slice the leek into big pieces.

Put it all in the slow cooker, with the stock. Add a pinch of salt if you like that sort of thing. Cook all day. If you haven’t got around to putting it in until lunch time, put it on high instead of low.

Serve with mashed potato, rice, or those wedges you cooked for the children’s dinner.

No picture because home food photography is pretty gross (plus we already ate it), but you should ideally end up with pork soft enough you can pull it apart with the fork, leeks that are barely holding together, and apples that mysteriously disappeared into the sauce.

Serves 2 hungry grown ups. To increase the recipe for 4 hungry grownups, add more pork.

This recipe is brought to you by Tansy’s slow cooker philosophy: add meat, a bit of stock, and two delicious ingredients you think want to be friends with the meat.

My Female Heroes: Guest Post by Marianne De Pierres

Marianne is one of my longest serving friends and mentors in the publishing industry – I have learned so much from her over the years, and she is still one of the first people I go to when I have a career dilemma.

It’s been so exciting to see her own career rise over the last decade and a half, through cyberpunk, space opera and vampire YA to her current western-inspired science fiction novel Peacemaker, with a protagonist who first saw the light of day in the Australian small presses.

When Marianne asked to contribute something to my blog as part of her tour for Peacemaker, the topic I asked for seemed obvious, as it’s one close to both of our hearts.

My Female Heroes

by Marianne De Pierres

It’s hard to know where to start on this, but I guess the beginning is a good a place as any. Some of you may know that I grew up on a diet of boys own adventure stories – Tom Swift and the like. At the same time, I was devouring Westerns and inhaling James Bond. So it would be right to say, that my desire to create female heroes, stemmed simply from me wanting to do all the good stuff that the boy heroes got to do. It never, ever occurred to me that I couldn’t or shouldn’t. My first novel attempt at age ten was modelled on the Famous Five but featured a resourceful girl who caught a bunch of sheep stealers. Danger, action, intrigue, and female heroes existed in my stories right away.

Life happened. I grew up, had my share of encounters being marginalised because of my gender and had my eyes opened to the world. By the time I began write with true purpose, in my thirties, the desire to present female heroes through the novel form had grown even stronger. Now, however, the desire was tempered with the knowledge that I did not want to simply swap genitalia i.e. write an ostensibly male hero and just give him a female name and appearance, but that I truly was in love with the idea that women could be as competent, heroic, charismatic and flawed as their male hero counterparts.

Before my first novel, Nylon Angel, was published, I was urged to send the raw manuscript to a male colleague who had a sterling reputation for knowing what was what about science fiction. Indeed, he was an author as well. His (paraphrased here) response was to tell me that my female hero was a “vulva-swaggering, cardboard cut-out” without any redeeming qualities.

As an emerging author and emerging feminist, this was a shattering blow to my writing dream. Where could I go now? What could I do? These were the kind of women I wanted to write about. My life was over.

Dramatic, I know.

I cried for a bit. A week at least. Back then, I had no toughened critiquing skin to shelter beneath. Eventually though, I got back to writing, where I limped along for a while until time help the wound heal, and I began to gather writing momentum again.

On reflection, cruel as it felt at the time, that harsh critique was quite a defining moment for me. It didn’t stop me. I marched forward despite the warning that female heroes like mine were worthless. But I definitely kept a weather eye on them, to make sure that they retained their individuality. Personality, not gender, is what I focussed on. You could argue that personality is defined by gender, and you would be right to an extent. But it’s in the space left over that we truly know who are characters are.

That is where I dwell now, and the only limits to what my female heroes do, are the ones that they place on themselves.



Peacemaker by Marianne De Pierres will be published by Angry Robot Books later this month. You can check out the other posts, interviews and podcasts in Marianne’s Peacemaker blog tour over at her website.

Galactic Suburbia Episode 97: Spoilerific Special – Veronica Mars

In which a long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven’t heard from you lately at all – come on now, sugah, bring it on, bring it on. Just remember me when

Stream or download the new episode now!

It’s the Kickstarted Veronica Mars Movie Squeeful Spoilerific Special! With Alex away stargazing, Alisa and Tansy dig into the nitty gritty of the recent release movie we had been waiting YEARS for. We talk about the history of the show (SPOILERS FOR ALL OF VERONICA MARS, NOT JUST THE MOVIE), the writing, the characters, the love stories, the murders, the stars and the in-jokes.

We also talk about the Kickstarter campaign and its ramifications for a TV industry teetering on the brink of a total rebirth.

Are you Team Logan, Team Piz, Team Mac or (most importantly of all) Team Veronica? Does a soundbyte of a certain Dandy Warhols song make you break into a smile? Were you so disheartened at the end of Season 3 that you watched all of Party Down to get over the sad? Come on down to Galactic Suburbia.

People say we’re a marshmallow.

Episode 97: Spoilerific Special – Veronica Mars

In which a long time ago, we used to be friends, but I haven’t heard from you lately at all – come on now, sugah, bring it on, bring it on. Just remember me when

Stream or download the new episode now!

It’s the Kickstarted Veronica Mars Movie Squeeful Spoilerific Special! With Alex away stargazing, Alisa and Tansy dig into the nitty gritty of the recent release movie we had been waiting YEARS for. We talk about the history of the show (SPOILERS FOR ALL OF VERONICA MARS, NOT JUST THE MOVIE), the writing, the characters, the love stories, the murders, the stars and the in-jokes.

We also talk about the Kickstarter campaign and its ramifications for a TV industry teetering on the brink of a total rebirth.

Are you Team Logan, Team Piz, Team Mac or (most importantly of all) Team Veronica? Does a soundbyte of a certain Dandy Warhols song make you break into a smile? Were you so disheartened at the end of Season 3 that you watched all of Party Down to get over the sad? Come on down to Galactic Suburbia.

People say we’re a marshmallow.

Sunday Links is not Friday Links

It was the Aurealis Awards last night! Congrats to all the winners, and to Nicole Murphy and her team for putting on what sounded like a great night. Here’s a Storify of how it all looked on social media, thanks to Sean the Blogonaut.

The Mary Sue reports on the King Joffrey statue that has been erected in New Zealand, which will be slowly toppled via social media hashtags. Does anyone else think it is SUPER CREEPY to be publicly desecrating the image of a real live teenage boy in public to promote a TV show? I don’t mean Joffrey – like anyone else who has read the books and watched the show up to this point, I am happy to see the kid bumped off as gruesomely as possible. But the statue depicts an ACTUAL teen actor, and surely he has enough trouble walking down the street without having rocks thrown at him without literally being destroyed in effigy in a public square.

Justine Larbalestier and Kate Elliott began their new book club, discussing bestselling fiction by women from other eras. First up: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. (I read it for the first time in my early twenties after finding it in the uni library and was startled to discover it wasn’t an H Rider Haggard style lost world epic but a grim tale of failed glamour and pill-popping in Hollywood.)

Nisi Shawl writes about Reviewing the Other, with some fascinating insights into the ways that reviewers can help promote diversity but also the limitations placed upon them.

Cheryl Morgan responds to Nisi’s article with a thoughtful piece about how there is no such thing as an impersonal, objective review (nor should there be).

SL Huang asks the vital question – who chooses our recommended reading?

Foz Meadows has an important point to make about why the focus on losing weight in our culture is so insidious, and how the skewed images we get from media make it difficult for most people to tell what ‘overweight’ actually looks like, especially when it comes to female bodies.

The Verity Podcast bid farewell this week to Kate O’Mara, the actress who (among many other parts in her career) created the role of the Rani back in the 1980′s. Here’s a flashback link to my essay about The Mark of the Rani during my WHO50 project.

Saladin Ahmed talks about the badass female superheroes of pre-code comics.

Cranky Ladies, One Last Push

Here we are on the final run! With sixteen hours to go, we have funded our project by 130%, not to mention the Arts Tasmania grant that we also receive for reaching our funding goal.

Tehani and I have been blown away by the wonderful support so many of you (just short of 200!) have shown for our book idea that just kept getting bigger and bigger. It’s nothing short of inspiring to have so many people eagerly awaiting the anthology, and to have so many more gearing up to create something wonderful for it.

The wonderfully talented Kathleen Jennings has been practicing her Cranky Ladies drawing skills, and I’m so excited to see what she comes up with for the front cover. If you’ve been on the fence about ordering one of our gorgeous reward options involving prints, tote bags, umbrellas etc., do go along to her Tanaudel site to see a sneak peek of the kind of artwork we can look forward to.

And of course, this is your very VERY last chance to order the hardback edition of Cranky Ladies of History.

We’re just under $1000 away from our last stretch goal, to increase the number of stories in the book. With only 16 hours to go, can we do it? Can we? WATCH THIS SPACE.

Friday Links will Delete You

This is my favourite link of the week, for entirely selfish reasons: Jason Sanford is reading the new issue of the SFWA Bulletin and rather enjoying it.

“This is what we’ve all been wanting from SFWA—a member magazine which actually provides useful information to members.”

Still talking about my crazy projects, Cranky Ladies of History got some serious National press time this week, with an article in the Age as well as a bunch of other newspapers across the country, in print and online. It brought in way fewer pledges than did the ABC article a couple of weeks ago, but hey. We’ve funded, so there’s nothing but smiles over here. (Night Terrace on Kickstarter funded too! Hooray for crowdfunding!)

Over at the Verity Podcast, the hosts who are not me (AGAIN, sob!) discuss the Cybermen as quintessential Doctor Who villains. It’s a great ep, with every era mulled over and defended/championed by one or other of the Verities. Just when I was getting cross none of them had mentioned The Invasion, in came Liz on her white charger to remind everyone what we were missing. I also enjoyed Lynne championing Silver Nemesis, Erika squeeing about The Tenth Planet, and Deb being quite valiant about the New Who Cybermen. Liz then wrote up an almost completely wrong (but occasionally right) list of the best Cybermen stories in order.

Some more general reading links:

Celeste Liddle on being ‘black’ and fair-skin privilege.

Genevieve Valentine reviews Brooklyn Nine Nine, a show I haven’t watched, with particular attention to ‘The Nice Guy Who Won’t Say No’ trope in comedy and why it’s such a damaging idea.

Rob Hardy writes Out of Body – a great piece about the power of books, which looks at his experience of discovering and enjoying books by women thanks to Virago Modern Classics, and why these authors and their protagonists particularly appealed to him, as a stay at home Dad.

Galactic Suburbia 96

In which we announce the 2013 Galactic Suburbia Award for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction.

You can download the episode here, stream it direct from the computer, or pop over to iTunes.

[If you want to listen unspoilt to the episode discussing shortlist and winners of the GS Award, listen Noooooow without reading the rest of the show notes. Don't even glance at them! Move along, nothing to see here]

Culture Consumed:

Alex: Shadow Unit! Haven ep 1!

Alisa: Fringe, Haven S1, Game of Thrones S1 and S2, Veronica Mars Movie

Tansy: The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin; Dark Eyes 2 (Big Finish); Veronica Mars Movie

Shout out for Night Terrace.

Cranky Ladies of History funded!

Galactic Suburbia Award!!

for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction

Malinda Lo’s continuing statistics gathering on LGBT YA books

Foz Meadows for her blogging generally, but particularly “Old Men Yelling at Clouds.”

Anita Sarkeesian – Tropes vs Women in Video Games (Damsel in Distress 1 & 2, Ms Male Character)

Kameron Hurley, ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative,” at A Dribble of Ink.

The Doubleclicks – Nothing to Prove music video

Cheryl Morgan – The Rise & Fall of Grimpink

Deb Stanish for her essay in Apex magazine: “Fangirl isn’t a Dirty Word.”

Honorary shortlistee (the Julia Gillard Award):

Wendy Davis for her amazing filibuster

Joint Winners this Year!!!

(drum roll please)

NK Jemisin for her GoH speech from Continuum (link)

Elise Matthesen for her essay “How to Report Sexual Harassment at cons” (link)

Also discussed:

“Not Now, Not Ever” (Gillard Misogyny Speech) by Australian Voices

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Cranky Ladies Goes National

So we’re heading into our final week of the Cranky Ladies of History anthology crowdfunding project – we’re fully funded (113%!), and reached our first stretch goal to add more illustrations to the book, but there’s still a very tantalising stretch goal just out of reach!

And today we woke up to a fabulous article about our project in not only The Age, but a bunch of newspapers across Australia! Check out the Arts page in your local Sunday paper to see if we’re there.

Meanwhile, our Cranky Ladies of History blog tour is kind of massive now. Go and check what fantastic essays you might have missed!