Things on My Shelf

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

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A book, a book, a spokesbear, a bed

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish.

This doesn’t mean I don’t do it.

And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash.

I’d also point out that aspiring writers could do worse than ordering a copy of Stephen Dedman’s The Lady of Situations, which is the book I reach for when I contemplate short story collections and how they should be put together. The writer David Jauss once put together an essay, Standing Stones, on the various ways short story collections become a unified whole, a brilliant read in and of itself, and every single thing he identified is at work in The Lady of Situations; the hand-offs from one story and the next are beautifully coherent without being obvious, there are liaisons between the stories in the form of words and image being reworked from different angles, there are contrasts and mirrors and occasionally there are motifs rise to the surface without becoming heavy-handed. Stephen Dedman as a short story writer is brilliant – the story From Whom All Blessings Flow alone is testament to that – but the collection as a whole…

Well, as a whole, it’s something to aspire too. Reading Dedman’s collection with Jauss essay (available in the collection Alone with All That Could Happen) may have been one of the most educational things I ever did as a writer. If you’ve got the cash to purchase both and you’re interested in the short story collection as a form, I highly recommend it.

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As we amble towards my thirty-fourth birthday, I’m slowly discovering things I should no longer do.

Order prawns on a pizza, for example.

Stay up all night working on a story when I need to go to work at 8 AM the next day.

Guess which of these I did last night, and exactly how much I’m paying for it today? It would be nice to say I regret nothing, but mostly I regret the pizza.

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Over on twitter Tansy Rayner Roberts noted that the current explosion of Australian SF podcasts doesn’t actually include a podcast that interviews Australian writers, and the general consensus seems to be that everyone thinks this is a very good idea, but no-one really has the time to do it. Or they have the time, but lack the technical know-how.

It’s a good enough idea that I expect someone will break eventually. Had I an adequate microphone for the task of recording, a fiendish partner in crime, and the free time to edit audio files into listenable form, it probably would have been me.

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I’ve started reading the unabridged Moby Dick, mostly because of Jeff Smith’s Bone comics. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be, but mostly in a good way. Mostly, when I pick up copies of Moby Dick, I read the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale and read it aloud for the pleasure of reading it aloud and then put it away again.

I blame Bone for my tendency to do all these things, right down to the choice of chapter, for it’s mentioned (in the introduction, I think) of the same collected volume that contains the Great Cow Race, which is really the volume of Bone you want to own if you’re only going to own the one, if only so you can figure out why comic book people laugh at the phrase stupid, stupid rat creatures. And occasionally giggle at quiche.

Moby Dick is a stranger book than you’re expecting, if you’ve never picked it up before. It’s also intimidatingly large, should you find yourself pressed for reading time. I like it, though. It’s the product of a time when the concept of the novel wasn’t quite so formed, and it’s a massive  tangle of words, but it’s intriguing in its bizarreness.

Ditmar, Etc

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So about six months ago I won the Best New Talent Ditmar, and I have to admit that I’m rather fond of the trophy. It’s a clean design and it’s got a nice weight to it, and it makes for a nigh-perfect book-end on the brag shelf in my living room. Plus its not made of glass like the Aurealis Award, so it’s somewhat easier to photograph with the camera in my mobile phone.

I didn’t really expect to win it, so it was rather nice when it happened, even if I was so convinced I wouldn’t win that I wandered off to have dinner with friends instead of going to the ceremony. At the time my name was announced, I was tucking into a particularly good hamburger at a nearby restaurant.

Oops.

On the plus side, at least I was surprised.

I mention this for two reasons. The first is that my dad’s health problems hit not long after Worldcon last year, which means I’m not entirely sure I got around to thanking all the people who actually put me on the ballot to begin with and then voted for me. It’s further complicated by the fact that I have no idea who they might have been, ’cause I was quietly believing that no-one actually read what I wrote at the time.

To those people, whoever you were, thank you. The trophy is both shiny and useful and it’s always rather nice when someone says “hey, good job.”

The other reason is so I can mention that the Ditmar awards are fan-run, fan-voted, and fan-nominated and the online nomination forms are over here, plus instructions for doing things the old fashioned way if you’re so inclined.

Should you be stuck on some categories, allow me to throw out some names.

  • Best New Writer: Christopher Green, L. L. Hannett, Thoraiya Dyer
  • Best Collected Work: Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories
  • Best Fan Writer: Robert Hood for the Undead Backbrain.

There’s more, of course, but that’s a taste of where my nominations are going. Three brilliant writers, one absolutely gorgeous short fiction collection, and a blog that feeds my love of giant monsters and zombies. You are, of course, encouraged to make up your own mind. Just close your eyes, ask yourself what work you’ve read in 2010 that truly blew your mind, then put the answer in the appropriate spot. It’s actually pretty easy.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t regret the hamburger. It really was amazing.

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The latest issue of the Edge of Propinquity is out, including part 2 of the Flotsam series, Warnings. The brief goes something like this:

Keith Murphy needs information about his boss and the seer Bruce Mim is his best bet for getting it. Unfortunately Mim is one of the Other, native to the Gloom, and a deal must be struck before Keith learns what he needs to know.

Feel free to go read, or go back to the start of the series. Then send scholars who know what they’re talking about to scold me for my blatant mishandling of myth.

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Wait a second. I’m off to make coffee.

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If you haven’t been following Hark, A Vagrant lately I suggest you duck over and take a look at the Young Ada Lovelace comic and the Crazy Nancy Drew valentine’s day sketches. It remains the smartest webcomic I follow at the moment, and the most willing to make the audience work to get the joke. The Ada Lovelace wikipedia page may help, but if you’re anything like me you’re going to finish reading and wonder why no-one has yet done a steampunk story about the unrequited love between Lovelace and Babbage, their passion ultimately thwarted by her vampiric father, Lord Byron.

There’s a reason I don’t mess around with history much when I write. Leave me alone with a wiki for five minutes and I’ll have John Flamsteed prostituting himself to aliens before you know it.

And since I’m on a roll, another link – a while back I used the sneaky back-channel of email to convince my friend Laura Goodin to write a blog post about juggling in response to a post by Seth Godin about juggling. She’s also admitted I was right: A Princess of Mars is complete pants.

It’s also been pointed out that the youtube clip I put into yesterday’s post have some issues playing, so I’ll provide a directly link to the How to Be Alone video and trust you all to defy conventional netwriting wisdom and follow a link purely because I said it’s one of those beautiful pieces everyone should see. Rather than risk embedding a second non-functioning youtube clip I’m also going to post a direct link to a clip of Bad Wine and Lemon Cake, the Jane Austen Argument song that finally broke me and convinced me I could buy MP3s instead of CDs.

My neighbors, of course, have no need to follow the link. They’ve probably been hearing the song bleed through the walls for a week now.

Finally, there may be signs that I will achieve my teenage ambition to be notorious over in the final thirty seconds of the Salon Futura interview with Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer. My inner Oscar Wilde is greatly appeased.

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I really did make coffee, btw. I’m also really fond of this particular mug.

Coffee, Keyboard, Thumbtacks, Pizza Voucher

Credit Where Credit’s Due

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On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on).

Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently took up the position of fiction editor for Cosmos magazine. Should you come across them in bar, they may look remarkably like these two:

Trent Jamieson & Cat Sparks, Brisbane, Feb 2011. Documenting the fact that Cat drinks a glass of water.

Should you not know Ben, you will just have to imagine him, for he’s not among the photographs on my phone (such are the perils of being an elusive gentlemen). I can point out that he edits a zine with one of the quirkiest titles in Australia and he’s known for his damn fine taste in writers.

– ahem –

Er, sorry, the spokesbear gets snarky when I sneak that sort of thing into blog posts. He also points out that I should publicly thank Cat for coming up with the title Horn back in 2007, back when TPP and I were stumped in terms of possible titles that would work for the weird little noir novel about unicorns. My original title, and many of the replacement titles that followed, were awful and far less pointed than Cat’s suggestion.

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A friend of mine from uni pointed out that the Motel I was talking about in yesterday’s post is still in existence, although there’s no real reports on whether it’s still got its alien-abduction motif going or there’s a motley crew of long-term residents in addition to the visitors using it as an actual motel. The website does feature the graphics from the gloriously kitsch signs they used though. I lived in the one featured on the left-hand side of the header.

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I recently bought Amanda Palmer’s new album, and one of the surprises on the album was a duet she did with a member of the Jane Austen Argument on the song Bad Wine and Lemon Cake. After three or four days of listening to that song, over and over, in the car I finally broke down and went searching for the band’s website.

Turns out they have an EP out.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a story – roughly once a month I’ll find myself going to a band website and checking out their list of albums and such. I tend to listen to a lot of music, after all, and it’s really only the limitations of my budget and the rapid closure of CDs stores in all my favourite shopping centres that keeps me from spending as much money on music as I do books.

Despite these limitations, I’ve been highly resistant to buying music in electronic formats. I like the tactile pleasure of having something physical to play, and I like album art and liner notes, and I generally just like CDs and cassettes and LPs before them. Plus I have the kind of luck with computers that says backing up daily isn’t actually one of those things you ought to do; it’s a necessity that keeps me from wailing and gnashing my teeth. As a general rule, I don’t buy MP3s.

It would appear I can’t make that claim anymore. And, well, I’m not entirely sure how it happened, only that it did. It’s one of the things that always leaves me envious about music – it’s much better at beguiling us than fiction is, if only because it takes far less effort on the part of the audience on the receiving end.

I still miss the album art though. And the liner notes.