Some Awesomeness, Some Writing Advice, Some Help Needed, and Some Horn Spotting

1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome

The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here.

2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs

Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on puppetry, interestingly enough) into the space of fifteen minutes. I transcribed them and put them in the folder where my draft of Black Candy is waiting for me to start rewriting, just as a reminder that I need to think very clearly when I start replacing all my habitual non-verbal tags that get scattered through dialogue.

3) Help Needed/Gen Con Australia

Do you know someone who loves fantasy and SF authors and roleplaying games who doesn’t suffer from stage fright and will be in Brisbane between the 18th and the 20th of September? If so, get them to drop me an e-mail at peter.ball@genconoz.com because I’m in need of some volunteers who’d be willing to MC some panels at this year’s Gen Con Australia. This is your basic call for interested folks – e-mail me for more details.

Yes, I realise this is an odd way to go about it, but I’m short on time and the usual pool of folks I’d ask has gotten shallow in recent years, and I figure most of you who are reading this are SF and Fantasy fans who might know some folks. Given that we’ve had to do this fast and there were set-backs due to the computer-crash*, I’m going to go with odd-but-direct rather than time-consuming-but-standard. 🙂

*after all my gloating about my back-up plans, it was discovered that I’d failed to back-up the outlook files for the account used in this exercise.

4) Horn Spotting

Horn got a nice write-up from Narelle Harris on her blog. As always, there’s the excerpt:

Horn is a novella, a fast read at 80 pages – a short, sharp uppercut of a book. Parts of it are hard and ugly, as they need to be for this kind of story, but it’s also a ripping yarn. It may leave you desperate for whisky and a cigarette, but you’ll finish it knowing you’ve fought the good fight.

As usual, I’ll mention that copies of Horn are still available from Twelth Planet Press (Not *many* copies, sure, which still blows my mind, but there are still some there if you’re so inclined…)

And now I need to go figure out what’s happening with the sequel. And figure out something to cook for write-club tonight. And get some gen-connery organised. ‘Tis a busy day in the office for me, which is as it should be really.