Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 97

Galactic Suburbia 72 Show Notes

New Episode available for download now from Podbean or iTunes!

In which a new listener is born, Canada gets a Stella too, and we review a bunch of great stuff including Black Widow, Infidel, Swordspoint and Big Finish’s special releases.

News

Baby Announcement: Daniel Wessely is born!

WFA winners announced

Genrecon!

Tansy talks Genrecon on the Voyager blog

And again on her own blog

Jason Nahrung on what he got out of Genrecon

Neil Gaiman’s new Doctor Who episode will feature the Cybermen, Warwick Davis & Tamzin Outhwaite.

Boing Boing

io9

Canada is getting a Stella too – theirs is the Rosalind!

Women in Horror article

Galactic Chat – Rowena Cory Daniells

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alex: Infidel, Kameron Hurley; The Deep (BBC series) (http://randomalex.net/2012/11/06/the-... Black Widow, Marjorie Liu; and books on women’s suffrage… (I might have lied about the free ebooks! Sad)

Tansy: Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner; Big Finish Specials: UNIT Dominion, Love and War by Jacqueline Rayner & Paul Cornell; Voyage to Venus; Dorian Gray

Getting Serious with Genrecon

I was so impressed by Genrecon this weekend, a Sydney writing conference run by the Queensland Writers Centre. It’s rare in SF/Fantasy to get a convention so completely devoted to industry and the professional side of genre that this felt more intensely useful to me than any other event I’ve been to in years. (Conflux is probably the one that has come closest)

Useful, insightful, inspiring, depressing and terrifying. All of those things!

But while many of the discussion panels about the state of the industry, the disappearance of the midlist and the author advance, and how authors simply can’t afford to ignore the twin monoliths of Amazon and Facebook even if they loathe everything they stand for, and so on, left me and many of my peers slumped in our chairs stabbing ourselves with imaginary knives, what I have taken away from Genrecon is actually inspiring.

Not inspired about my writing, which is ticking along pretty well okay on its own, but about writing as a business, which is something we authors often get embarrassed or squeamish about, to our own detriment.

So I now have a much clearer idea of what I need from an agent, and how hard it is going to be to get one, of various potential income streams I can try to set up as an experienced writer, and why I’m going to need to do that rather than hoping my fiction ship will come in on a regular basis. Most of all, I came away with the stunning realisation all over again that I am not alone.

I met more people, and did more effective ‘networking’ than I think I ever have before. Mostly the new people I met were from other genres (and holy hell, we even speak different languages, a good thing we’re all so nice and the only turf war was between all of us and the drunken racegoers in their shiny suits and fascinators) or other corners of the industry that the internet hadn’t yet tugged me towards.

And while the TansyRR in me was taking in a lot, plotting diabolically with friends, and cementing old acquaintances, I do think it was Livia Day who got the most out of the event. *hugs the Sisters in Crime people*. I got to see so many writers who do exactly what I am trying to do – balancing more than one writer identities – and that allowed me to make some informed choices about how to do that.

All this, plus the extraordinary Ginger Clark keynote speech, plus Sarah Wendell’s ‘let me take you on a tour on how you may be doing the internet wrong.’

Kim Wilkins speaking for the ‘Plotters’ in the Great Debate: Plotters vs. Pantsers. “This is not a glass of water, it’s an unplanned ice sculpture.”

I regret not signing up for pitches because that was an exciting and vibrant aspect of the convention, and I enjoyed talking to people before and after their experience – both those pitching and those pitched to. Most of all, I loved the format of the con – not only was the program reasonably leisurely and very balanced, the catering of morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea (and ok the relative isolation of the hotel) meant that we all socialised together, in the same place, talking shop and allowing greater excuse to introduce ourselves to more new people instead of all disappearing off to different cafes with our mates.

For old hands like me it was good to break old habits (and oh didn’t you feel silly when everyone disappeared to the actual program, leaving you to pick a workshop or drink tea on your own!), to get out of my squishy comfort zone, and to interact with a whole bunch of amazing friendly people who had new and different experiences to share in this crazy changing industry of ours. But I got the impression it was also awesome for newbies, whether they were aspiring authors, self published authors or recently signed authors who haven’t done the convention thing before, simply because everything was set up to make introductions.

I wonder also if the whole thing of blending different genres, meaning that EVERYONE had whole crowds of people they didn’t know at the event, maybe made the “power balance” a bit different to most cons? We’ve never had anything like this before so we were all out of our comfort zone, and more likely to confide in strangers!

Well done to the QWC, good show and all that. So glad they are planning to make this a regular event.

Red and White and Linked All Over

I feel ridiculously guilty about missing out on my Friday links post last week thanks to miscalculating how long it would take me to pack and get ready for Genrecon (which was amaaaazing and has turned my brain inside out, more on that later).

I have a ‘to do’ list a mile long from the convention, with publishers I need to query, social media wrongs I have to right (or write), and empires I want to build. Writing, you are a business, let’s get on that! One of the big takeaway messages I had from the con (many of which were a bit depressing and negative I will admit) is that there is totally a built in, fairly mainstreamy audience for my Livia Day books. So while all my illusions about making a living from just writing have been well and truly punctured, I have come away hugely excited about A Trifle Dead and the potential for getting that book into the hands of readers next year.

Livia now has a website! That’s item one of my long and sprawling Genrecon Plots list ticked off. I will be running an occasional post over there and have some subject headings to write about, but I deliberately have made it ‘not a blog’ on the front page so I’m not killing myself trying to keep up anything as actively as I do this one, which is always going to be my Front and Centre web presence. (guiltily sweeps away tumbleweeds) Still, if you want to keep an eye on what my scarlet alter ego is up to, there is a RSS feed.

The nice thing about having a Livia website now of course is that I can stop pretending that my Tumblr is all Livia and go back to mostly posting Doctor Who and Downton Abbey gifs, as is only right and proper.

The Friday Links have been stacking up, as I’m about 700 posts behind my RSS reader. So here are a few to be going on with, before they become completely untopical:

The Penguin and Random House merger, in case anyone missed it – how awesome of a terrifyingly major game changing book industry event to happen immediately before a convention weekend so we all had something to talk about.

Too soon for jokes about Hurricane Sandy? Storm of the X-Men doesn’t think so.

Wendy Harmer talks about the media, politics and Maxine McKew, the latest in a long line of capable and professional women to be completely disillusioned about our political process.

The World Fantasy Award winners, which I read while waiting at Redfern Station for @Capshuns to pick me up to go watch the Downton finale together before I left Sydney.



Angriest provides a measured response to all the Disney-Lucasfilms freakouts (I’m with Warren from Radio Free Skaro on this one, after the Star Wars prequels, what on earth do we all have to be scared of?) by looking at which directors might be in line to direct the new Star Wars movie, and which are most likely to actually get the job.

Briony Kidd of the Women in Horror Film Festival talks about the changing voice in her field, and how women are starting to become noticed as more than just the victim in horror movies. Some of them even hold cameras! I’m excited to see that Little Lamb, one of the scripts from this year’s festival (which I helped to judge), is now being produced as a real short film. I am soooo entering next year.

DC Comics announces two new titles beginning early next year: Katana (awesome!) and, um, Vibe. Cue all the Stephanie Brown and Cass Cain fans going, “No, SERIOUSLY?”

In closing, my favourite revelation of the week was the one about Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Derek Jacobi starring together in a sitcom (I know, right?) playing an elderly gay couple (I KNOW, right?) which is actually called “Vicious Old Queens.” Chalk that up to TV concepts that the 1980′s never saw coming! I hope madly that as many Sirs and Dames as possible are given brief walk on parts so we have the royalty of British theatre & cinema all in the same kitchen. Sadly the updated news suggests that the title has been made a touch more discreet and will now be simply ‘Vicious.’ It’s still pretty damned awesome. The Brits are so good at cranky old person sitcoms…

Gone to Genrecon!

You can see me here:

VILLAINS, MONSTERS, AND CADS

Location: Lovecraft Room (Saturday, 2-3pm)

There are certain veins of myth, history, and archetypes that genre writers turn to time and again in order to create their antagonists. Vampires, Hitler, werewolves, and royalty have long filled the antagonists’ role in genre fiction – but what more can history and mythology offer us? Our panellists look at some of the lesser-used creatures and historical characters that are ripe for inclusion in your next novel.



Chair: Peta Freestone

Participants: Tansy Rayner Roberts, Kim Wilkins, Christina Brooke

Or just come over and say hi if you see me at the convention!

49 Glorious Years

It’s November! And that means that we are only one year away from the massive 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Yes, a weird little science fiction show that started in 1963 is Still A Thing!

News is starting to trickle in here and there about what plans the BBC and others have for the anniversary. Thanks to Doctor Who Magazine (or rather, Panini Comics) stuffing up my subscription repeatedly, I have to wait for an eBay copy to wing its way to me before I can read the full details about the Big Finish-AudioGo team up of Eleven Doctor Audio adventures, but I’m quite keen to see those even if it doesn’t feel especially different to the sort of thing they always do. Still, any precedent for Big Finish getting their hands on New Who is a good thing.

In other news, the Official Doctor Who Monopoly set apparently has Doctor Who themed pieces now, unlike the version we bought last year which only had standard Monopoly bits and ONE Tardis piece. We supplemented with spare Character Options figures which works fine, but glad to see they spotted that massive gaffe in their original design.

BBC Books are reissuing novels for the anniversary, one (of course) for each Doctor. It’s a disparate collection, mixing up early BBC releases (of course no New Adventures, sad!), recent tie in novels and in one case a TV novelisation. I’m sad not to see any Kate Orman titles there as she is still my favourite Doctor Who writer of books, and I think that Blue Box would have been a great Colin Baker title. The covers are awesome, in any case, and I might be tempted to pick a few of them up, especially Earthworld by Jacqueline Rayner which comes from the era where I had retired exhausted from following the BBC Books range.

Oh and being me I have a blog-related plan myself for this year, in the countdown leading up to the anniversary month. My scheme is to write a post either reviewing, critting, re-examining or generally thinking about an aspect of each year of Doctor Who, every week, starting in a fortnight.

I don’t want to go season by season, but year by year, including the Wilderness Years (that time when there was more Doctor Who product then at any other time, except maybe this decade), and I will be picking my subjects entirely based on whim and personal squee factor. But it does involve the occasional experiment of making-my-21st-century-children-watch-black-and-white-telly, so that is something to look forward to.

There’s at least one other involving-me exciting Doctor Who related project coming up this year as well, which I hope will be announceable at some point in the next month or so.

In the mean time, don’t forget about Chicks Unravel Time, the book of essays from Mad Norwegian Press which is released this month. You *know* you want to read about my opinions on the treatment of Peri in Trial of a Time Lord, don’t you??

EDIT: Just realised I wrote this whole post without speculating at all at what the REAL television will do for the show. I think my brain was stuck momentarily in 1999. Obviously there’s the Gatiss-scripted TV special about the making of Doctor Who back in 1963, but otherwise… we still don’t know. I’m happy to be surprised, but I have no doubt this year will be full of fans (not to mention the bloody Sun) plashing their foreheads and freaking out about every tidbit of information released by the BBC. It’s going to be quite a ride!

Nano No (sigh)

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, which feels very strange indeed. I’ve delved into the passionate obsessive NaNo mindset with such glee in previous years, even when deadlines and other commitments have made it tricky for me.

There will be writing, have no fear of that. But as I discovered back when I was working on this particular novel-in-progress for the Clarion Write-a-thon, this particular project (yes, still the steampunk YA) is not one that benefits from being written fast. I could do something completely new for NaNo, of course, but that would mean giving up on the hope that I could finish my novel this year.

There are a bunch of other excuses of course, such as GENRECON! and one of my twice yearly “fortnights of gainful employment” at the university, but those things wouldn’t actually matter if I was in a writing-my-fingers-off frame of mind. And I’m not. This has been a year of stopping and starting, of career decisions, and of taking every weird and wonderful opportunity tossed my way, regardless of what my plans were before. Some of this will come to naught, and some may change my life. Eventually.

The writing-and-publishing life though is a slow and unsteady one, where seeds sometimes don’t flower for months or years. In the mean time, I am on track to hitting a word count total of 150,000 for the year – not the 200,000 I aimed for, but on the other hand I actually did some housework this year, and those hours mount up.

I’m doing okay. I plan to spend the weekend with my people, being inspired and kickstarted into the next phase of my writing life. I have a new novel coming out early next year, thanks to Ms Livia Day (a seed sown so many years ago I can’t tell you). Oh, and it’s my last year before little Jem starts kindergarten, and I don’t want to wish a minute of that away.

November will be, for me, a month of writing and writing and writing. I hope those of you doing NaNoWriMo have a blast as I toddle along behind you, enjoying the vicarious buzz.

Marriages and Stopped Clocks

I was excited this week that the new Ood Cast album was released.

The Ood Cast are one of my favourite Doctor Who podcasts – you may remember me talking about them before! They not only discuss the show with a positive & upbeat attitude (which is something I find essential in first-week-reviews these days, with so much complaining and browbeating filling the airwaves within only hours of each episode being released.

The Oods also have a tendency to discuss Doctor Who through comedy sketches, which is a far more fun way to express dissent or poke plot holes in an episode, and thanks to the astounding, chameleonic skills of Laura Sigma, they also produce a high quality song parody with every episode. (including when the show isn’t actually on which is why there were about four songs about the Gallifrey convention last year, one of which, Dirty Little Geeks, is one of my absolute favourites) Raeli isn’t quite the avid listener that she used to be, but she still loves the songs, and it’s great whenever a new album turns up so they can be enjoyed as separate files.

Which is my way of saying – much though I liked the Dinosaurs on a Spaceship review episode, I’m quite relieved not to have to listen to it AGAIN just so Raeli can hear the ‘Flirts Like an Egyptian’ song in the car. Yes, she is getting my half of her musical education largely through Doctor Who parodies. That’s okay, right?

You can download the album for free here.

Friday Links is a Little Stir Crazy

As ever, the Hobart Show Weekend has settled on one of our two favourite weather extremes: it’s been chucking it down, and one day into a four day weekend, the children are climbing the walls. Pity me!

A cute reminder from Shakesville of what the original remit of Sesame Street was, and what it continues to do now for generations of children.

Hoyden About Town looks at the media response to the Gillard ‘sexism’ speech, and provides a little context. Funnily enough, not the kind of context we’ve been provided by the mainstream media. Annabel Crabbe, meanwhile, talks about the problematic idea that we are supposed to accept Abbott is either misogynist or stupid, and also that politicians are only just starting to realise that sexism is now considered a negative thing. It’s kind of embarrassing how long our society took to get to this point, you know.

My Cheesecake Fantasy Art post has attracted an awful lot of readers. Thanks for stopping by! If you haven’t had a chance to check out the discussion in the comments, a couple of great links were passed on: Skepchick on why Pin Up Calendars are always a bad idea, no matter how ironic; and NK Jemisin talks about her rationale behind joining the project, and shares the decidedly un-pin-uppy art based on her own character.

Big Finish has made one of their old freebie giveaway stories available again through Sound Cloud – Cuddlesome is one of my favourites, a silly but creepy tale about an 80′s toy sensation turning evil and trying to kill everyone. Yep, imagine if Teddy Ruxpin teamed up with the Care Bears to climb out of your cupboard and attics and get their revenge…

Bitch Magazine look at the new “Latina” “Disney Princess” and how Disney have failed to deliver what many where hoping for.

Speaking of Disney Princesses, the awesome Ming Na has been cast as a regular character (a pilot!) in Joss Whedon’s SHIELD. Too much to hope that she’s secretly Carol Danvers, I suppose?

A sobering post on Tumblr by Mandy on her experiences cosplaying as The Black Cat at Comicon, and the way that geek men often treat women in costumes.

Cassandra Clare talks to Racebending about the importance of casting Magnus as Asian in the Mortal Instruments movies.

Don’t complain I never bring you cat stories! Roman archeological sites are rife with cats, but this time we have a cat finding a new ruin! You say archaeologist, I say grave robber…

The Misfits’ songs might be better, but Jem and the Holograms are back, baby, in a new run of dolls from Hasbro. Sadly no Pizzazz doll yet, but the Synergy one is pretty awesome. I’m a little sad that they are priced for collectors and not children, though, and as pointed out in the comments of this i09 post, don’t come with the equivalent of the 80′s music cassettes that were packaged with the original dolls.

Galactic Suburbia 71

In which Tansy & Alex talk sexism, steampunk, Samuel Delaney and tiny baby Avengers fighting tiny baby X-Men. Also, feedback from listeners!

You can download or stream the new episode directly, or access it through iTunes.

News

Pornokitch on the Mammoth Best New Horror introduction

Twelfth Planet Press announces Best YA SF anthology – Alisa & Tehani reading for this in 2013 and we hope it doesn’t break them.

The Fantasy Pin-Up Calendar Thing

The Calendar itself

Tansy’s post – when fantasy art embarrasses us all

Skepchick asks us to Please Stop Making Calendars

NK Jemisin on her involvement in the project

Sexism in the Skeptic Community – what happened after she spoke out

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alex: Edge of Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan; Babel-17, Samuel Delaney; The Contrary Gardener by Christopher Rowe in Eclipse Online

Tansy: Wilful Impropriety, Ekaterina Sedia (ed); Hawkeye #1-3, Matt Fraction, David Aja; “A-Babies Vs. X-Babies” one-shot written by Skottie Young with art by Guruhiru

FEEDBACK

Suzy McKee Charnas story at SnackReads

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!

Cheesecake Fantasy and Other Good Causes

Fantasy, as a genre, is often embarrassing. I like to tell myself that it’s not as bad as it used to be, in the days when Gor novels were sold unironically, and almost every book cover had some kind of gross, bizarre representation of the “female” form in chainmail/fur bikinis, regardless of the contents of the book itself. (Worse of course was when the books did reflect the art, but for every awful sexist fantasy novel you could almost guarantee the cover would be twice as bad)

And you know, fantasy art hasn’t left behind that old fashioned, male-gazey tradition any more than comics has, though I think you can certainly argue that fantasy art has generally improved in this area across the board, while comics have steadily got worse over the last several decades.

Still, I know plenty of women readers who wouldn’t touch “fantasy” with a bargepole, though they might have enjoyed books like Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games very much. Why is the genre tag still too blatant and embarrassing for these readers to contemplate? I suspect it’s very much because of things like this Charity Pin Up Calendar, and the art style it represents: Women as Sex Objects.

Yep, there’s nothing like a big old banner which says, hey you, female reader of fantasy? The genre actually is not for you. Look at all this male gaze, marking its territory.

I have no objection to sexy/sexual art, and I can even appreciate the retro value of cheesecake calendars. As a relic of the past. But seriously, now? Twelve very successful and iconic authors of our genre (or their estates) have okayed a sexist dinosaur of a project, in the name of charity. Well, that’s all right then, right? IF IT’S FOR CHARITY.

Personally it makes me wish I was one of those authors who provides a whacking great disclaimer that no, I don’t write fantasy, I write real books. Because fantasy, SOMETIMES YOU EMBARRASS ME.

The awful thing is, it could have been cute and funny. It could have been great. They’ve almost got the hang of putting together a project that doesn’t make me cringe and remember everything bad and embarrassing about my genre’s long history of degrading women. Female authors have been included, after all. And some of the art is quite good. I quite like the idea of a gender-switched Pratchett Wizard, for example, though I bet that Paul Kidby could have done it a) better and b) with greater political awareness of what he was doing. But…

Where are the male bodies, put on display? That’s what would have made this a truly contemporary, fun experience. Pose a few iconic male bodies just as provocatively, and devote an equal number of months to their images as to women. Not in a separate calendar, but alternated with the female images. Is there any reason why they couldn’t have done that, no matter how many people it might have made a little uncomfortable?

After all, it would have been for charity.