Day: March 17, 2009
Journal

The Tangled Bank

A very cool open-call for a fiction anthology, put together by clarion-peep Chris Lynch: This year marks 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species. To mark the anniversaries, submissions are invited for The Tangled Bank, an e-anthology of speculative fiction, artwork, poetry, and comics exploring the legacy of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. Illuminate — or obscure — the line between the real and the fantastic. The fiction may be of any speculative genre or cross-genre; demand to be included by the quality of your submission. Artwork and poetry need not be strictly speculative in nature, but must engage with Charles Darwin or evolution. Submissions for The Tangled Bank open May 1st and close June 30th, 2009. The Tangled Bank will be published by Tangled Bank Press in late 2009, and an advance on royalties of 20 per cent will be paid to all contributors. For

PeterMBall 17/03/2009
Journal

Morning

There is something about getting up early and writing that always makes me feel virtuous. I like the way it gets the guilt of not-writing out of the way early, the way it sets the tone for the rest of the day (in which I think about writing in moderation, rather than obsessing about the fact that I’m not writing to the exclusion of all else), and the excuse to drink inhuman amounts of coffee. If only I didn’t have to pay for these early starts later (say, around 3:30 when I crash out and need a nap) or actually wrote productively (this week, getting up at six and working for two and a half hours has netted me a paragraph of thesis work a day) it’d be an awesome habit to get into; sadly, I am not built for mornings and it’ll fall by the wayside once I have absolved myself of my latest bout of writer-guilt. Which I’m

PeterMBall 17/03/2009