Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 14

Falling out with Flying

Keith Miller’s The Book of Flying (2004) seemed like the language-focused, flighty (ha!) novel I was in the mood for, complete with a glowing blurb from Ursula K. Le Guin splashed on the cover. And it was that, to a certain extent: it read easily, evoking a dream-like, metaphor-heavy world devoted entirely to artistic creation, fully of lovely imagery and wonderfully weird landscapes. Still, there were aspects that grew more and more irritating as I read on, causing eye-rolls and muttering t...

Short Fiction News

Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fictionwas releasedtoday and received a fantastic review on Tor.com from Haralambi Markov, with some attention given to my story “Strange Things Done.” Get the anthology fromExile Editions,Amazon.ca,Amazon.com,andChapters-Indigo.

I’m also appearing in another Exile Editions anthology later this year, Those Who Make Us: Canadian Monsters, Creatures and Myths. You can view the table of contents here.“A New Bestiary” transplants medieval ideas on monstrosity into a c...

Episode 27 – No matter how I look at it, it’s you guys’ fault this podcast isn’t popular!

We’re back! This time, we’re talking about adolescence, isolation and social anxiety in the anime series No Matter How I look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m not Popular! AKA,WataMote. Includes verbatim readings of entries from theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disordersand plenty of cringing.

https://ia601507.us.archive.org/2/items/OLSP27Watamote/OLSP27_Watamote.mp3

Download the Podcast(archive.org page)

Marie’s blog

“Anxiety, Anger and Porn” – Alasdair Czyrnyj’s review ofWata...

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Re-learning Art

AAs you might have guessed from the title, this blog started as a place to showcase artwork. Specifically, I was planning to delete my Facebook account after graduating from the University of Alberta and wanted an online place friends could still follow my antics, as well as a better spot to upload all the stupid comics I drew over my last two years in Edmonton. Well, that’s not at all what happened—I stayed on Facebook and even fell to the lure of Twitter (though, to be frank, I still have n...

Writing Home

I didn’t write a story set in the Yukon until last year.

The why of it is difficult to explain. The why of it became something to ponder after reading Thomas Wharton’s old blog post “I hate it here”, a reflection on why students in his creative writing class at the University of Alberta never seemed to write about Edmonton:

But I also shouldn’t have been surprised that this student never writes about Edmonton. It seems to be the attitude of most beginning writers here that only New York, Lond...

Animating Fairy Tales

This is going to be a looser post than I usually write on this blog, mostly because I’ve had a hard time concentrating on any one thing so far this year. Call it a combination of seasonal affective disorder and ennui. What I have been doing is watching a lot of animated films and, of course, reading, and I’ve been mixing the subject matter from both in my brain a lot lately.

These thoughts were precipitated by reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber for the first time, a very short collec...

Cyborgs with Attitude

I lost part of December and all of January to absorbing as much anime and manga as I possibly could. I’m still not entirely sure why, but coming to the tale end of that obsession I’ve found myself thinking back to the first Japanese comic book I ever read, Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell(1989-1990).

Ghost in the Shell is one of the few pieces of anime/manga, alongside Studio Ghibli films, that fall into the category “can freely talk about in public in North America without feeling embar...

Clockwork Canada up for pre-order

You can now pre-orderClockwork Canada: Steampunk Fictionfrom the links below, for release in May. The anthology contains my story “Strange Things Done”, a science fiction secret history set during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Exile Editions Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters-Indigo

Questions Answered

I was tagged by Fraser Shermanto answer some questions, so without further ado:

1)Name a book it surprised you that you liked.

We readLittle Womenin one of my undergrad university courses on American Literature. It was not a good class. But I did find myself growing invested in the lives of the March sisters, which is not something I thought would ever happen based on my sole experience with the novel previously consisting of “this is a book my sister liked in high school.” The ending, howeve...

THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS VAMPIRES

Let’s review a vampire novel! Albeit a slightly unusual one.

From my Cold, Undead Hand (or, Chevonne Kusnetsov vs. the Sharp Teeth Krew) has vampires prowling near-future New York, infiltrating all levels of society in a well-worn vampire conspiracy. Chevonne Kusnetsov and a cell of clandestine vampire-hunting resistance fighters are out to stop them by any means.

I listed Marshall’s first novel, Lupa, as one of my favourite reads of 2014 for giving a penetrating look at how history can pers...