Jason Fischer

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

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Very random attack of insomnia last night, especially since there wasn’t any of the usual triggers that set off my sleeplessness. In the old days I used to welcome such things, since I could just wander off and do other things and sleep in the day afterwards, but I am now a working man with a dayjob that starts in the wee hours, and insomnia has become a thing that I no longer care fore.

Things I should post about today, and would do so in more detail were I not yawning:

– Jason Fischer’s short story collection, Everything is a Graveyard, scheduled for release by Ticonderoga Publications in October 2013. The collection’s slated to revolve around Jason’s post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed work, which is the kind of news that makes me extremely happy, if only because it’d be damn handy to have all those stories in the one place.

– The May issue of the Edge of Propinquity is up, including Sabbath, the fifth story in the Flotsam series. I suspect I’ll do a “what I’ve learnt from six months of Flotsam” post sometime in July, whereupon I’ll try and nail down exactly why writing a serial short story series on a monthly deadline is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and this story may well be the poster-child for both why it’s hard and why it’s been worthwhile.

– Un Lun Dun, which has slowly re-insinuated itself into my readerly affections after the hiccup I mentioned yesterday and become, more or less, the kind of book I was hoping it would become when I started reading it a few months ago. Really, you should read it, especially if you’re unlikely to get as caught up in the concept of the binja as I did.

– Getting the dates wrong on my Daily SF story in yesterday’s post, since it’s coming out on the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth. So, yes, sometime tonight there will be a new story in the world, and it will be my last non-Flotsam story in a while.

– Something else, I’m sure, although I can’t really remember it. Oh, wait, I know: starting a new draft of Claw, the third Miriam Aster novella, that throws out a large chunk of what I’d written in the period known as last-year-before-my-life-exploded and substitutes something, well, good instead. I found myself unexpected scribbling notes for this last night, and suddenly the beginnings of an entire scene fell out of my head, and I looked at it for a long time and thought, “okay, sure, we’re going with this.”

Mmm, BBQ

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S0 yesterday was pretty good day.

There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep.

Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o’clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?).

So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it’ll redeem today in much the same way.

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The Aurealis Awards short-lists came out yesterday, which includes all sorts of awesome news such as: Jason Fischer making the final list of the Best Horror Novel for Gravesend (and really, it’s about time the Fisch made an Aurealis Shortlist); four nominations for the inimitable Angela Slatter (both her collections were shortlisted, as was the story Sister, Sister and her collaboration with LL Hannett, The February Dragon ); Trent Jamieson making the shortlist with Death Most Definite; Dirk Flinthart making the list  YA Short Story; all sorts of love for Twelfth Planet Press up and down the shortlist.

I’m inevitably forgetting to congratulate *someone* in the list above, for which I apologise and offer a blanket congratulations go out to everyone. Full details of the list can be found over at the Aurealis Awards website.

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I read Ian McEwen’s Solar over the weekend, which quickly became one of those books that I’m ish-ish about. It was my first McEwen book and I found myself intrigued by the idea of the book after it was featured on First Tuesday Book Club last year, and while it’s got some beautiful writing and characterization it left me feeling utterly unsatisfied at the end.

Basically it’s one of those comic tragedies where you follow the life of an utterly appalling human being who’s rarely punished for their follies until the end, only when it comes the tragedy is so utterly weak that I found myself shrugging and thinking “really? That’s it?”

I mean, I would have been more satisfied if he’d gotten away with everything, which isn’t really really the kind of thing tragedy should strive for. Still, it’s an interesting read, and the narrative POV  is so hands-off and telling-oriented that I’m fascinated by the fact that it seems to work.

It just doesn’t inspire me to read more McEwen, which seems a shame.

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I keep forgetting to mention this and it should probably be something that gets a blog post of its own, but the latest installment of Flotsam is out over at the Edge of Propinquity website.

Storms & Minotaurs & OMG, Sleep

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You know how you're writing a story about the end of the world?

On the evening of my dad’s sixtieth birthday we were all sitting on the thirteenth floor balcony while a storm rolled in. If we were in a movie the rapidly moving sheet of clouds would have been the special effect that signified the end of the world is nigh, so we all unearthed our mobile phones and digital cameras to take photographs.

About fifteen minutes before I took the  shaky, blurred mobile photo featured in this post the view from the thirteenth floor was all clear skies and blue ocean, and it was pretty enough that even my jaded-towards-beaches approach to life acknowledged that it was a pretty good place to celebrate someone turning sixty.

I gave my dad a book – the Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marques, ’cause everyone should read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings – and a CD/DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 tour ’cause we were meant to go to Cohen’s show last year, but dad’s heart-attack derailed those plans. Then the family collaborated to get him a kindle, ’cause it seems the thing to get a man whose using retirement to catch up on reading. Given my dad’s taste in fiction, and the existence of Project Gutenberg, he may never have to buy a book again.

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The inimitable Jason Fischer released a free ebook version of his story House of the Nameless, which won one of the quarterly contests in the Writers of the Future competition and scored him both publication and a trip to California to further workshop his writing skills.

A dinner at a minotaur’s house brings an unwelcome intruder. Raoul Mithras, a godling both old and new, is forced to pursue an old foe across a surreal landscape, hoping to prevent the awakening of the One-Way-World – if he is not destroyed first.

So yes, free e-book goodness, distributed to familiarize people with his work prior to the Ditmar vote closing since the Writers of the Future anthologies are hard to find in the Land of Oz. Hopefully, if enough people download it, he’ll put the rest of his Raoul stories online as well.

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Last night was a particularly low-key kind of night. I arrived home from work late, I did some paperwork for the second job I’ll be taking up in March, then I proceeded to rearrange my trip to  Swancon due to the fact that the money I’d earn for working the new job that day far outweighs the costs of messing about with re-booking flights and accommodation.

So I’ll be hitting Perth on Friday afternoon  rather than Thursday afternoon, and missing the first eight hours or so of the con, and hopefully I’ll still have the time to catch up with all the people I’d like to catch up with.

After that it was nine o’clock, so I went to bed with a notepad and scribbled Flotsam-y things for a bit, and then I fell asleep. This wasn’t what I’d planned, but tired writer is tired and all that, and I’m trying to get better about managing my sleeping patterns these days.

This afternoon I’ll probably add some more things to the big list of novels I’d like to write, a document that is already far to long given that I’m still working on the first entry, and I’ll rethink my stance on this sleep thing all over again.