Fi Michell's Blog, page 2

Christmas Pudding

I confess, this is a cheat blog post, linking to my sister’s blog without her permission – hi, Corinne! While I negotiate with my kids to get the house ready for Christmas, and have even given up my precious writing room to our Christmas tree and gifts – resulting in my children’s constant presence and undoing my ability to write – she is preparing the Christmas pudding she will bring for us to share on Christmas Day.

When I first saw she’d posted the recipe on her blog, I was horrified. Oh no! Our secret family recipe is now out in the public domain! What would our great-grandmother think? It has been handed down for generations, and the thought of sharing it widely at first felt somehow sacrilegious.

It is a pudding that in my childhood came filled with pennies, usually extracted from my Great Uncle John’s mouth. They would mysteriously appear from the slices distributed amongst the adult members of my family, and I’d hunt through my own slice amongst the brandy-cream and custard, hoping to find old coins that had been saved for this purpose somewhere amongst the nuts. I remember, once, finding a sixpence. But the real excitement was watching my Great Uncle’s face slowly turn red and his eyebrows rise and his eyes widen until they were ready to pop, as my cousins and I began shrieking, and then, seeing him reach into his mouth and recover a folded ten dollar note from his cheek.

Christmas is a time for giving. So, if you click on the picture above or the following link, you will arrive at my sister’s blog, where you are more than welcome to share our traditional family recipe.

This pudding is delicious. It has a fine, crumbly yet silky texture surrounding the nuts and fruit that no bought Christmas pudding I’ve yet tried has replicated, because it uses suet. It must be presented traditionally, flaming with lit brandy.

Happy Holidays!

No Cigar…

(Image from Uncharted Wikia)

Well, that was close. However, my finalist for Writers of the Future, Volume 30, Quarter 4, did not place in the end. I am still genuinely thrilled to have been a finalist.

Congratulations to the winners, and may you thoroughly enjoy the workshop and the awards night!

I can’t complain, since I did so much better than I expected with a story that, had I originally written it for the competition in the first place, would likely have been completely different. What this tells me, is that if I enter again, I probably shouldn’t try to guess what the judges want, but just continue to focus on improving my writing. I’d also say to anyone out there thinking of entering but put off by the apparent impossibility of getting a result in such a large field: enter anyway!

No cigar…

Well, that was close. However, my finalist for Writers of the Future, Volume 30, Quarter 4, did not place in the end. I am still genuinely thrilled to have been a finalist.

Congratulations to the winners, and may you thoroughly enjoy the workshop and the awards night!

I can’t complain, since I did so much better than I expected with a story that, had I originally written it for the competition in the first place, would likely have been completely different. What this tells me, is that if I enter again, I probably shouldn’t try to guess what the judges want, but just continue to focus on improving my writing. I’d also say to anyone out there thinking of entering but put off by the apparent impossibility of getting a result in such a large field: enter anyway!

A Shock in my Email

Yesterday, when I was collecting my kids from school, I missed a phone call. In the rush to get them to their swimming lessons, I only found out when I checked my email and found a congratulatory header from Contest Admin at Writers of the Future. I assumed, since it was an email, that it must be congratulating me for achieving an Honourable Mention or maybe a Semi-Finalist. But… I am a Finalist! Joni, the contest administrator, had been unable to contact me by phone.

It didn’t feel real. I had to concentrate hard to drive my kids to their lesson safely, and when I got there I read the email on my cell phone again several times over. No mistake. When I got home, I checked my answering machine, and sure enough, there was Joni’s message.

The thing is, this is the biggest contest for writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dark Fantasy in the world. It has been running for thirty years. Many winners have gone on to forge successful writing careers. Anyone can enter so long as they have not yet made three qualifying professional sales. There are thousands of entries. This was my first ever entry. Being a finalist this quarter means my story has made it to the top eight.

Those eight stories are sent to four more judges, who will choose the first, second and third place winners. Even if I don’t win a place in the end, I already feel as though I’ve won to have got so far!

 

 

 

“The Tiny Man” accepted by Stupefying Stories

Happy Christmas news: woke to another acceptance email this morning – this time for “The Tiny Man” from Stupefying Stories. It’s my second acceptance from Bruce Bethke, and this one will be published mid-2014 as part of a themed anthology. I don’ t yet know what the theme will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out. This story is a fairy tale in a contemporary village that still contains the remnants of yesterday.

It is the time of year when family and social events begin to take over – the kids on holidays, various end-of-year celebrations. It can be difficult to quarantine time to write undisturbed. I have so many ideas for stories, I can’t keep up, and I keep on revising the ones I’ve already written, hopefully resulting in their improvement. It’s all good – without life, there would be no writing, and I can’t complain about the difficulty of choosing between ideas. So – I have set a goal for the holidays of completing a rewrite I have in mind, which I can hopefully work on even while the kids are around.

And… in a few days The New Gothic will be published. Can’t wait! The stories I’ve read in the galley so far are fabulous. More on that to come.

A Chilling New Release…

I’m avidly anticipating the release of Stone Skin Press‘s latest anthology, The New Gothic, this month. It will include my story, “The Debt Collector”.

Beth Lewis is editing this collection, and it promises a chilling atmosphere:

The New Gothic is a collection of short stories which revisits to the core archetypes of the Gothic, the rambling, secret-filled building, the stranger seeking answers, the black-hearted tyrant, and reminds us not to embrace but to fear the darkness. A dozen tales of terror fill this anthology including an original, never-before-seen story from the godfather of modern horror, Ramsey Campbell.

In case you didn’t notice, the anthology features a story by legendary horror writer, Ramsey Campbell. (I simply had to mention that again!) Plus, it’s packed with other fabulous writers, including Richard Dansky, Jesse Bullington and S J Chambers, Damien Kelly and Dmetri Kakmi just for starters – I’ve not yet seen the complete table of contents.

Previous Stone Skin Press anthologies have been well received, and I can’t wait to read this one. The stories will span diverse times and places (mine is set in 1936), and restore the original gothic flavour to the monster. No sparkles in sight.

We won Write-a-Book-in-a-Day 2013!

This morning, I opened an email from Zena Shapter to receive the wonderful news that our Northern Beaches Writers’ Group team entry, “Scribbles in the Dark” won the open category of the  KSP Write-a-Book-in-a-Day 2013 Competition!

Not only that, but we also won Best Illustrations and raised the most sponsorship money. Thank you, all of our wonderful sponsors!

Here is the official announcement. Zena organised our team, and here is her blog post about the win. And here is my earlier description of the competition day.

The judge, Dr Melissa O’Shea, made some wonderful comments:

“This is a lovely little book in its own right, and I believe a publishable story that should be widely read and enjoyed. Set in Winton with a token dinosaur, the main characters are foster brothers who are swept away in an adventure that will forever change their lives. The characters, setting and issue are creatively incorporated in a story which includes a good dose of both fantasy and reality. It balances necessary loss with a satisfying and happy ending, providing an emotionally charged yet ultimately hopeful reading experience. This is a book to be treasured, suitable for children in a hospital setting, and a more general reading audience.”

This was our team’s first attempt at entering the competition, but I suspect it won’t be the last. It was an amazing experience, and I want to thank everyone else on the team – it was great working with you!

Illustrations: Top, our ‘scribbles in the dark’. Right, our dinosaur! 

September Holidays

This is a well-known shipwreck we visited on Fraser Island. Descriptions of a shipwreck, rust, barnacles and sea squirts may show up in one of my stories at some stage.

The school holidays have ended and I am back to writing again. Not that I wanted to stop, but we had a fabulous family holiday in Hervey Bay where we went whale watching, swimming, cycling and visited Fraser Island. (Snapshots below.) Fortunately, I also managed to read a fair bit – unlike writing, I can turn straight back to reading a book after being interrupted.

I had no idea before we went that Hervey Bay was on the Australian route for many German and French tourists. It seemed to me to be an obscure part of a land far distant from Europe, but it’s the eco-tourism that draws people, and Fraser Island in particular is definitely worth exploring for that reason.  It’s the largest island composed purely of sand in the world and has a World Heritage listing.

This is a time of year when things mount up for me, with book-keeping, Christmas and the end of the school year looming and all the associated preparations and things to attend. Family must come before writing for me, or lives would become miserable. But I get a sense of withdrawal when I can’t write much, and I long to get back to it.

More Writing News:

Before I left, I had news that a story of mine was accepted for a UK gothic anthology – details when the contract has been signed. I’m excited about this, as there are some fabulous authors in their table-of-contents. I’m honoured to be included!

And a few snapshots from Fraser Island…

Whipping camels

Funny the things you learn when you are writing a story. I try not to get so distracted by research that I don’t write, but usually find details I need to check, even in a short story that is mostly fantasy.

My story concerned a caravan of slaves journeying through a desert. The slaves were on foot, but the guards travelled on camels. One of the guards whipped his camel on the camel’s side.

Rereading the finished draft, I wondered — is that how you whip a camel? I imagined the story being critiqued. Someone was sure to tell me, you don’t whip a camel on the side, but on its butt. Actually, I have no idea how you whip a camel. So I googled “how do you whip a camel”.

And that is how I learned about camel whipping robots.

I learned  that in the search for lower jockey weight, children as young as five were used as camel jockeys. This often resulted in their abuse and deaths, until the United Arab Emirates banned the practice. Now, thankfully, camel whipping robots are used.

I also discovered the story of French President Francois Hollande’s camels gifted to him by the people of Mali. The first was apparently eaten by the Timbuktu family looking after it. The replacement camel, a better-looking beast, was followed by claims that it had been stolen.

Camels and robots and politics. Who would have thought? Sadly, I never discovered exactly where to whip a camel.

‘Communion’ to be published by Stupefying Stories

I’m delighted to say Stupefying Stories will be publishing my short science fiction story, ‘Communion‘. It should be out some time within the next year.

This was a longer story for me, about 5500 words, set in Cairns, which is in Far North Queensland in Australia. I’ve spent a fair bit of time up there for both work and holidays, enjoying the rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef and a small bar at a local beach that fewer people know about.

All of those things helped inspire the setting. Much of the story takes place on the water. Despite many movies showing arriving in major cities, like New York or London, who said aliens can’t land off the coast of Australia?