Stress

Shadows

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , , , ,

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.

Fists of Steel: The snooze button edition.

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,

– Gauntlet, an update: distractions, distractions, distractions. One Flotsam story is down, which means there’s three to go ‘fore the Gauntlet is done. I lost much of the afternoon catching up on things that needed doing (deadlines, proofs, contracts)

 – The weekend was long and only about 30% pleasant. I’m running short on sleep and planning on turning in early tonight. Hopefully today’s writing-induced adrenaline spike won’t keep me awake. I may take the laptop to bed and try to nail down 300 words of the lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft.

– Tomorrow there is write-club and going through more proofs. February is odly busy on the writing-and-getting-stuff-out front.

Bad News

PETERMBALL Journal

I’m going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father went to hospital with what we’re not technically calling a heart attack (he has blocked arteries, but the “heart episode” didn’t result in damage to the heart muscle), and we’re currently waiting to find out when the bypass surgery is going to happen. Presumably it’ll be some time this week, after the blood thinners they gave him when he was first admitted have started to wear off.

All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how serious things are and how much worse they could have been. I, on the other hand, have irrational flashbacks to episodes of the Gilmore Girls in which not-a-heart-attack heart problems were a plot point, which is both totally inappropriate and oddly comforting at the same time.

I am going to be on the Gold Coast for the next week, for obvious reasons. I’ve tried to contact people and cancel all the things that need to be canceled, but I’m putting this up here as a safety net. If we’re meant to be catching up, or if I owe you an e-mail, or if you’re counting on me to do something for the next four or five days…well, it’s probably not happening. Much of my time is going to be spent at the hospital. The rest of my time will be spent working on Claw and doing the things that absolutely need to be done. Everything else has kind of dropped off the bottom of the list.