Tiffani Angus's Blog, page 7

When Words Grow: Readers Are Listening

In spite of attempts to eradicate it, I have a bit of a Fb addiction. I take it off of my phone in hopes of leaving the world behind for a while, but it's only a matter of time before I re-load the app so I don't feel out of the loop for too long. 

ANYWAY, last week there was another terrorist attack here in the UK, this time in Manchester. It seems like not a week goes by without some new tragedy happening, and it is easy to let it become part of everyday life. The more I thought about it, th...

Eastercon 2017: My Panel Schedule

Tomorrow morning I run away to Birmingham for Eastercon. I'll be on four panels, talking about academia, workshops, literature & films & TV, and even art! Here is my schedule: 

Pedagogy and Speculative Fiction (Saturday from 1-2pm): Anglia Ruskin University, based in Chelmsford and Cambridge, is recruiting the first intake of students for their newly launched masters degree in science fiction and fantasy. In this session the centre director, Helen Marshall, along with colleagues and visiting l...

In Which I Learn NEVER to Go to a Conference During the Semester

My job is busy.
Strike that. 
My job is CRAZY busy.
And I thought I could leave for a week and go to an international conference (ICFA--the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, to be exact) in the middle of the semester.
I am an idiot.
Between the work I had to do to prep to leave, including setting up my classes for someone else to take over, the work I have to do on a daily basis anyway, the jetlag, the catching up with emails and admin after I got home, and the shitheap I fin...

2016: The Year in Books

I'm on holiday. I AM ON HOLIDAY!
Until January 9. But I don't feel like I'm on holiday yet--it's still sinking in. I know the end of it will be here too quickly, so I am going to try to enjoy it, to forget about work and stress and *stuff*. I plan to travel, eat, drink, sew, and READ. And on that topic, here is what I read (so far) in 2016:Diary of a Witchcraft Shop by Trevor Jones andLiz WilliamsMortal Love by Elizabeth Hand (a re-read because I assigned it to my students)Annihilation by Jef...

When the Work/Life Balance Isn't

It is nearly the end of term and I have hit that point when I have so much left to do that I am all but paralysed. So let's blog instead!

The past 3 months have been a blur. I've worked in some capacity nearly every day. A whole weekend off is a rarity. I like my job--I do--but I haven't yet figured out how to have a job that doesn't eat my life. Hence the total lack of posts here. This space is supposed to be about writing, but I have done pretty much none this autumn. And that's an important...

British FantasyCon: What I'm Up To

So the summer is over, and it went by way too quickly. But I spent much of it unable to walk well or sleep without pain or go down stairs like a grown-up. I sprained my knee at the beginning of July: leg-length brace, crutches, painkillers, etc. I only started physio a few weeks back and my appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon is in a couple more weeks. So, no, it's not been the best few months.

It's Welcome Week at uni, which means my schedule has ramped back up and the commute has begun...

Upate: A reprint, a con, and a blast from the past

My first ever short story sale, "If Wishes Were Horses," has been reprinted in the British Fantasy Society's journal BFS Horizons #3 .

Here it is, looking cool. Edited by Jared Shurin, the theme of this edition is British Fantasy, and the ToC includes stories by Rose Biggin, Den Patrick, and Sarah Lotz, among others.





In other news, I attended Nine Worlds GeekFest (it's 4th year and my 4th time attending) as a guest. Yesterday I gave an hour-long talk on doing a Creative Writing PhD, co...

Marking: the Contract

It's the end of the semester and I have started marking papers (that's grading for you USians). I think I an honestly say that it is the hardest part of my job: harder than writing new lectures, harder than encouraging very frustrated students to try again, harder than reading the end-of-term module evaluations where the students get to say what they want about me and about how the class went. Marking is both exciting and, well, not. I get to see where my students have ended up after 12 weeks...

Continuing Self-Pub Saga: Doing PR Without a Buffer

If you've been playing along at home, you'll remember the last post where I described what I went through to self-publish a pair of short stories on Amazon in order to learn the steps of actually doing the thing. What I didn't think about was what came after:

Selling the stories. To the public. Those people out there: the ones with money.

Following a set of physical steps to go from A to B is easy. It's the mental work that's difficult. Every other time I've sold fiction, I've done so in an ant...

Self-Publishing: A Tiny Saga

Because I am a lecturer in publishing and I teach creative writing, self-publishing often comes up in conversation in class. My only knowledge of it was from friends--their successes and failures--and from what I see on Twitter (that is, the constant spam from some writers). So I decided to try it out for myself, to get an idea of the steps required to go from manuscript to "book". I didn't do it with the idea of making any money; some things are done for the experience, not the results.

Firs...