Save Money on The Birdcage Heart This Weekend (& some project updates)

The Birdcage Heart and Other Strange Tales is on sale over at Kobo.com this weekend, ostensibly part of their US based November Price Drop sale but the discount is extended to all other territories. It usually sells for $4.99, but Australians can pick it up for half that until Sunday.

With the money you save, you could nip out and pick up a copy of Alan Baxter’s new horror novel, Devouring Dark, which is not on sale but is newly released into the world and seems likely to scare me shitless by the time I finish it. We snuck off to the book’s Brisbane launch this week, where Alan and Angela Slatter were in conversation, and snapped a few shots of Al in full raconteur mode.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent most of my waking hours this week doing redrafts on Warhol Sleeping. About 30% of this involves updating old scenes that were part of the original draft, written back in 2001, and eliminating references to things that would seem incredibly dated now like television ratings and a reliance of telephone conversations in order to convey information.

The remaining 70% involves looking at the new scenes, which are sketchy and plot-focused, and adding in the world-building and little details that make the world feel like a place where people actually live.

It seems likely the book will get much larger when I’m done with this. It’s definitely moving past the phase where I squint at it, hedging my bets about whether it’ll work, and into the phase where I’m confident it’s the book I want it to be, even if it’s not going to please every reader.