Gemma Files's Blog, page 3

My Cup of Stars

So: as you may or may not have heard, Experimental Film won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. I also came home from Readercon to discover I'd made the Sunburst Award shortlist, in the Adult Fiction category. It's been a pretty good weekend, all told.;)

This is the text of my acceptance speech, which I scribbled down about five minutes into the ceremony:

"Somebody asked me last

Readercon!

...is where I'll be, as of tomorrow afternoon. My schedule, for those who might be attending:Thursday July 078:00 PM C The Works of Clark Ashton Smith. Michael Cisco, Gemma Files, Lila Garrott, Tim Powers, Darrell Schweitzer. It has been over a century since Clark Ashton Smith's first publications, when his first book of poetry appeared in 1912. He was something of a prodigy in those days,

New Review of Experimental Film!

John Langan reviews Experimental
Film, very favourably, in this month's Locus Magazine:




There's a cache of lost films at the
centre of Experimental Film, the fine, compelling novel by
Gemma Files. The movies were made in the early years of the 20th
century by a woman who herself went missing during what should have
been a routine train journey to Toronto. Shot on highly unstable
silver

Patreon Post #2: GHOST STORY and the Uncanny

I've been re-reading Peter Straub's Ghost Story and making notes about what I like to call the Haunted Mechanical Dollhouse method of horror: invent a small town full of characters with secrets like you're cobbling together some sort of spook-ride Rube Goldberg machine, lay in orbiting outliers (both threats and and potential protagonists), then make them converge to start the whole thing

THE INDEFENSIBLES, INSTALMENT #1: The Collection (2012, dir. Marcus Dunstan)

Ever since I finally signed up for
Netflix, my attitude towards movies I don't necessarily expect to
like has changed sharply; instead of waiting for them to present
themselves in a form I can financially rationalize (second-hand, on
sale, late-night TV), I can just search for them or stumble on them
randomly, load them, press a button and hey presto: instant
gratification. If I don't connect

Patreon Post #1: Clive Barker

Clive Barker's Books of Blood short story collections came out when I was sixteen and seventeen respectively (1984-85), thus beautifully coinciding with my high school years, ie the moment when I was still writing poetry but about to stop because of all the reasons adolescent girls usually stop writing poetry: mainly social embarrassment, coupled with the realization you couldn't make much money

Shirley Jackson Award Nomination

So now it can be told! The nominations for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Awards are finally out, here (http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/n...), and I'm very happy indeed to announce that Experimental Film has been nominated in the Best Novel category. As I told my Mom, if I had to ask for one award to be nominated for, this'd be it.;) So I am basically over the moon.

Naturally, I'll be

Patreon and On

For some time now, I've wanted to write a book of Horror Culture reviews and essays--my own theories about the genre, as filtered through a lens of personal experience. Yesterday, I created a Patreon campaign page for this project, which will be called Dark Comforts. If you're interested in getting in on the ground floor, patronage-wise, you'll find it here (https://www.patreon.com/gemmafiles?ty=

Late, O Miller: Experimental Film Review Round-Up

Because I suck, I've totally forgotten to link to Helen Marshall's amazingly flattering review of Experimental Film in the L.A. Review of Books, here (https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/th...). It's only the nicest thing anybody's said about my writing since Laird Barron called me a punk in Locus Magazine (November 2015), while reviewing the CZP

Review Round-Up

The dudes at Booked podcast take on Experimental Film (http://www.bookedpodcast.com/287-expe...). I must admit, I was a bit worried abut this in its initial phases...the part where they made fun of my name, basically. But then they really got goin', and guess what! It's a great review, check it out.;)