Good News

Shadows

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So there’s a  shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great.

So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story.

The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it.

LONG FICTION

  • Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia)
  • The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications)
  • Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healy (Allen & Unwin)
  • Under Stones by Bob Franklin (Affirm Press)
  • Bleed by Peter M. Ball (Twelfth Planet Press)

EDITED PUBLICATION

  • Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears, edited by Angela Challis & Marty Young (Brimstone Press)
  • Scenes From The Second Storey, edited by Amanda Pillar & Pete Kempshall (Morrigan Books)
  • Dark Pages 1, edited by Brenton Tomlinson (Blade Red Press)
  • Scary Kisses, edited by Liz Gryzb (Ticonderoga Publications)
  • Midnight Echo #4, edited by Lee Battersby (AHWA)

SHORT FICTION

  • “Bread and Circuses” by Felicity Dowker (Scary Kisses)
  • “Brisneyland by Night” by Angela Slatter (Sprawl)
  • “She Said” by Kirstyn McDermott (Scenes from the Second Storey)
  • “All The Clowns In Clowntown” by Andrew J. McKiernan (Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears)
  • “Dream Machine” by David Conyers (Scenes from the Second Storey)

The winners of the Australian Shadows Award will be announced on 15 April 2011.

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Next week I start tutoring for one of the University of Queensland’s writing subjects. It’ll be the first time I’ll have stepped into a university for about two years, and the nerves have already set in. I can tell because I keep having nightmares and waking up in the middle of the night, unsure of what’s going on but unable to get back to sleep.

This isn’t unusual. I always have nightmares the week before I start teaching. Occasionally they involve teaching Hamlet being performed by Gnolls, and being unable to explain exactly why this is brilliantly post-modern to a group of students. Thankfully, they  goes away once the classes actually start.

Blatant Self Promotion: February

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Okay, since February is deveoted to the Gauntlet, I’m just going to cram a whole months worth of blatant self promotion into the one post. Strap yourselves in, ’cause it looks like February is a busy one:

– Descended from Darkness volume II is out, collecting another twelve months of short fiction originally published in Apex Magazine (including my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament). For a limited time you can pick this up with the first Descended from Darkness collection (which included my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) for only $25US.

– My story Briar Day is live over at the Moonlight Tuber site, as part of the line-up of the “Moonlight Tuber #2 – Captain Homonculous Dines with ‘That Irascible Mizzen Mast’ – Part Three” issue of the zine that’s available for online reading or as a downloadable PDF. I think this officially marks editor Ben Payne as the man whose acquired more of my short fiction than any other editor.

– The teaser page for Electric Velocipede 21/22 is live, complete with the opening teaser for my story Memories of Chalice in addition to the works of such fine writers as LL Hannett.  The issue is just $12 US and features a small horde of writers I’m excited to be sharing a table of contents with.

– There are also reports that we’re about a week away from one of my short stories making an appearance in Daily Science Fiction, a magazine that delivers short stories to your inbox every workday. This stuff keeps me sane at the day-job, giving me something to read over my mid-morning coffee, and it’s FREE TO SUBSCRIBE. There should be a web-version of the story eventaully, should you prefer to keep your inbox free of fiction, but that usually comes after the email version is out. If you’re on the fence, I recommend taking a look at the February line-up which includes folks such as Cat Rambo and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

– The February issue of Locus is out with its recommended reading list for 2011, which named a whole host of Australian SF work including TPP’s Sprawl anthology in the best original anthologies section and stories by me, Angela Slatter (twice!), and Cat Sparks in the short-stories list.

– Bleed scored itself an 8 out of 10 stars in a review over on Scary Minds. To quote: Bleed rocks along at a fair pace, Ball doesn’t allow the narrative to lag at any stage, and you will be dragged into the shenanigans unfolding. There’s a mystery to be solved, plenty of plot twists, and the sort of conclusion that no doubt bodes well for another book in the series. Be careful here Ball’s series is habit forming and I’m already looking at getting my grubby mits on Horn sooner rather than later. And let’s keep our minds out of the gutter here okay!

Which, lets face it, is more or less what I was aiming for. The full text is available over on the Scary Minds review site, and I recommend checking out their review of Eeek! (which features work by my comrade in gauntleting, Jason Fischer) as well. Bonus sidenote: The Bleed review does mention some confusion with finding the book over at the Twelfth Planet site, which is mostly because they’re an older link (Twelthplanet.wordpress.com) that connects to an earlier edition of the site. Twelfthplanetpress.com should make your life easier, should you be, you know, inclined to go order yourself a copy.

– Back in December I did an interview with Dan Abnett for the Auscon podcast. Actually, I did two interviews, largely because the first one didn’t record properly and Dan Abnett was nice enough to come back and re-record things. Not really February pimpery, I know, but since it happened during the blog haitus of December it’d largely forgotten to mention it before now.

Things that Happened While I Was Otherwise Distracted

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I’ve been distracted of late – either by trying to get the latest version of Cold Cases ready or hole-in-my-head drama depending of the day –  and I somehow managed to miss a whole heap of stuff happening around the traps.

1) The latest edition of the Terra Incognita Podcast is up, featuring me reading my story Black Dog: A Biography that came out in the Interfictions II anthology last year. Unlike most of the previous podcasts of my work this one actually involved me recording the reading myself, an experience that forced me to realise exactly how inarticulate I am in the verbal form (seriously; apparently I drop the consonants out of words and rely on vowel sounds and inflections to get things right, and we do not speak of how many times I had to restart things in order to avoid this).

2) Angela Slatter’s Brisneyland by Night is the feature story over at the Twelth Planet Podcast at the moment, which pleases me greatly for reasons that may or may not become apparent if you’ve read Horn. Brisneyland is part of the forthcoming Sprawl anthology from TPP.

3) My sister returned live and well from her trek over the Kokoda Trail yesterday. Notable primarily because my parents didn’t send me crazy with phone-calls when there was news of trouble in the area, and because she returned bearing coffee beans ready for my caffeinated consumption.

4) My doctor continues to taunt me by having me come in for appointments where he doesn’t remove my stitches, thus prolonging the wait until I can finally *wash my damn hair again*. To be fair, this is largely because he took all the stitches out last week and I immediately started bleeding like a stuck pig, but my head itches dammit and the ease-of-care was half the reason I shaved my head a few weeks back.

5) The yearly rejection counts holds steady at 7; the yearly acceptance count rises to 1; the number of stories ready to go out into the world is about to rise by 2. These statistics do not support getting to 100 rejections by the end of the year, but I’m about to dissappear and house-sit for the month of July and I plan to get a *lot* of writing done while I’m there.