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February 22nd, 2010
04:33 pm - Belated Snapshot2010: Ian McHugh
Ian McHugh is a graduate of Clarion West and the 2008 grand prize winner in the Writers of the Future contest. He is an intermittently active member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. In 2009, his stories appeared in markets including Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Andromeda Spaceways and Clockwork Phoenix 2. He also won his first Aurealis Award, for best fantasy short story. Most of his short-fiction publications are available to read at http://ianmchugh.wordpress.com.
1. You've written a short story set in a fantastical Australia, and you're working on a novel and other shorts set in the same world. Do you think it's difficult for Australian writers to write recognisably Australian fantasy? Do you think Australian fantasy is accepted, locally and overseas? And what convinced you that an Australian setting was the direction you wanted to take?
Is it difficult to write recognisable Australian fantasy? Nope. Doesn't mean an Australian writer always has to, of course - I don't.
But it's not hard to make "Australianness" an ingredient. For example, the thing that particularly strikes me is the Australian landscape. It has this amazing, unforgiving presence, which you don't have to go out to the red bit to find. A Canadian writer friend on seeing his first stand of gum trees just up the street from my house, with all their branches twisted and bark hanging off, said, "Man, those trees are ANGRY!" That kind of powerful, threatening sense of place really feeds a story, I find. I think a lot of Australian readers like to see Australian-influenced settings that are authentic and unselfconscious, and that show a real passion and respect for *this* place - think of Sean Williams's Books of the Change series, Terry Dowling's Rynosserros books. In my experience overseas audiences are really taken with a sense of place that's different from what they're used to.
My story "Bitter Dreams" that won at WOTF a couple of years ago was the first thing I wrote at Clarion West in 2006. I'd had a notion to ease my way into the workshop with a bit of all-balls-and-no-brains zombie-western schlock. But then Paul Park read us all these amazing stories in the first week, one of which was Tony Daniel's "A Dry, Quiet War", which blew my mind (go here:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/quietwar.htm). After that I thought, "If I'm going to write a Western, I'm going to have to reach a bit higher than I thought." So the first thing I did was moved it to Australia. It changed everything about both the "western" and the "zombie" parts of the story. It totally changed what the characters needed to be. The land didn't seem to support the larger than life archetypes that the American monumental landscape sustains, so the characters had to become smaller, worn down, closer to the brink of just quietly failing and fading away, in order to fit in. Working through all that for the first time, and then getting such an overwhelming response from a non-Australia audience in my classmates and teachers, absolutely rocked. I was pretty much hooked on it from then.
2. 2006 saw you attend Clarion West - and survive. What was that like, as an experience? What were the major benefits for you?
Clarion West wasn't about survival for me. We had a really closeknit group, most of whom have stayed in contact since. *Leaving* was the survival challenge, I felt like an imposter in my own life when I landed back in Canberra.
CW was a once in a lifetime, life-changing experience. There's things I could have done better or got more out of, and some things I frankly f***ed up, but so much that had a profoundly positive impact on me, too. It certainly improved my writing (although I'm still a crap judge of how good or bad what I've written is). One big benefit of CW for me has been establishing a group of friends and peers in North America - ie, in the market you want to crack as a writer. The downside of that, compared to attending Clarion South - and it's a big downside - is that I'm now on the wrong side of a very, very big ocean from them, and I've managed to see just over half of my classmates again only once in nearly four years. Sucks. A lot.
3. To date you've sold a number of short stories to a range of outlets, including Asimov's and </i>Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine</i>. What direction do you see your work taking in the future? More short stories, novels?
I doubt that I'll ever stop writing short stories - the ideas keep wanting to get out. The trick is making the time and space to write and edit the damn things and then send them off to markets. Life kind of fell in a heap for me over the second half of last year - or I fell in a heap, one of the two - and my writing pretty much stalled while I crawled into my cave to sort myself out, but I have a couple of larger projects staggering along as well. I finished the first, massively bloated draft of a novel set in the same fantasy Australia as a couple of my short stories in April 2009, and nearly a year later have just recently started reading it. I've been kicking around a graphic novel version of "Bitter Dreams" since I went to WOTF, and in January finally got the first half of the story off to the artist in script format. And I've received a grant for this year from artsACT to turn the same story into a screenplay. Generally, my direction this year is to build writing stuff back into my day-to-day, so: write, read, try and pick up the connections with people I've let lapse over the past months, get back to the CSFG crit circle, submit some stories, dammit! I'm in my second year of eligibility for the John W Campbell award this year, so getting a few more stories out there in some decent
markets wouldn't hurt.
4. Aussiecon4 is coming up this year; there's been a lot of buzz about Australians getting nominated for Hugo awards. Which Australians do you think have put out work over the last year that ought to be nominated?
Mm, reading pretty much went the same way as writing for me last year, so I have to guiltily confess that I've read bugger all fiction while digging out from under my heap, let alone Australian fiction. I think the only new books I read in 2009 were Alain De Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and Voyages of the Pacific Ancestors: Vaka Moana. I certainly haven't paid any attention at all to whatever Hugo news there might've been. Kaaron Warren's a writer who's work I've loved since I read an abridged version of "The Glass Woman" in the CSFG Gastronomicon. Although I suspect her novel Slights is probably something to look out for more with the Stokers than the Hugos.
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
I'm certainly planning to, I've got my membership. There'll be at least some friends and acquaintances from overseas there (not to mention around the country) that I want to see. Yeah, although probably the thing I'm really looking forward to most will be being in Melbourne for the start of the footy finals. I've never been to a game at the G, so that'd definitely be on the itinerary.
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February 21st, 2010
05:17 pm - Snapshot 2010: Dirk Flinthart
Dirk Flinthart is somewhere on the wrong side of 40. He started out writing in Brisbane, doing crime fiction with Duffy & Snellgrove. That led to backpacker's guides, and then to "How To Be A Man" with John Birmingham. But just about then, Mr Flinthart acquired a family, and since then he's been mostly involved in short fiction. He's been well represented in the agog! series of books, and has popped up in a range of recent Australian anthologies, as well as places like Andromeda Spaceways and Darwin's Evolutions. He's edited an issue of ASIM, and was responsible for the editing of the Canterbury 2100 collection, released through agog! press in 2008. In 2009, he shared the Short Story Ditmar with Margo Lanagan for his piece "This Is Not My Story" which appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. He's currently working on more short stories, a couple of novels, and is giving serious consideration to a Master's Degree. Flinthart holds a first dan black belt in ju-jitsu, and is studying up on his iaido. He cooks, gardens, takes interesting photographs, raises dangerous children, and plays traditional Irish music on the whistle and the flute. If you meet him, he is best pacified with the following: 1 part gin, 1/2 part blue curacao, dash of lime juice, two parts tonic water -- over ice. (If it's summer. In winter, just use Irish whiskey.)
1. Having had numerous short stories published in various venues (including ASIM and New Ceres Nights, plus the novella Angel Rising), apparently you are working on a couple of novels at the moment. Care to share about those? Do you have a preference for short stories, or novels?
I grew up on short stories. Loved 'em. Still love 'em. But the form is very challenging, and the freedom and scope of longer forms is tempting. There is a richness and depth you can build in a novel which will never be encompassed by even the greatest short stories. You can play with longer short stories as a compromise. You can build novellae and novelettes. But sooner or later, I think one has to try the long form. Hopefully, I'll get to print within a few years. But the publishing industry works slowly, and there's no certainties. Wish me luck!
2. A little while ago you turned your hand to editing, and produced the anthology Canterbury 2100, which I loved. What was it like, being at the meddling end of editing rather than the receiving end? Was the end product all that you hoped for, and did it get a good reception?
That was the single most challenging work I've ever undertaken. I was initially more than a little nervous about editing people like Geoff Maloney, Angela Slatter, Kaaron Warren and the others, but I have to say that the community of Australian SF writers is not only professional as hell, but dedicated, passionate, and supportive. I had no grief from anybody at all in the editing process -- and believe me, the structure of that book meant that some of the stories got very sincerely edited indeed.
But the farther I got into the project, the more I realised I'd bitten off something much bigger than I'd thought. My models were Boccaccio and of course Chaucer, both of whom created collections of short stories that purported to be tales from a range of storytellers. The thing is that both Boccaccio and Chaucer were showcasing only their own work, so the metanarrative -- the story which supports the stories, the tale of the storytellers -- is sketchy at best. Chaucer's people are a bunch of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. They have a bit of individual character, and a bit of byplay, and yes, their stories reveal much of their nature. But the actual tale of the pilgrimage is just a sketch designed to provide a framework for the rich Canterbury Tales.
Boccaccio is even less concerned about his metanarrative. A hundred youths and maidens flee a plague-stricken city and take refuge in an abandoned villa in the hills. They tell stories to pass the time. And that's about all you ever learn about them. The stories are cool as hell, but the metanarrative is just fluff.
Anyway, when I was editing all those lovely stories, I suddenly realised I didn't have the luxury that Chaucer and Boccaccio did. If I wrote a piss-weak piece of fluff to support those stories, not only would it fail to show off the stories well, but the contrast would be glaringly obvious and painful to the modern reader. So somehow, I had to come up with a metanarrative that not only wove the stories into place, but supported them, and provided a kind of satisfying story of its own -- just so it didn't look like a complete piece of crap next to the stories I was given. And of course, on top of that this metanarrative story absolutely could not be more important or compelling than the stories themselves, because they were the point of the whole collection... so the metanarrative had to be interesting and entertaining, but not so vital that you were more interested in it than the stories of the travellers.
In the end, I was quite pleased by the outcome. We didn't do a big print run -- couldn't afford it, of course! -- but in general, the critical responses were good. Of course, there was at least one reader who complained that it wasn't a proper "future history", but at the same time neither was it a "themed anthology". I kind of shook my head at that -- I mean, that was the point, right? I was trying to create a sense of a possible future by exploring the popular fiction of that future. And in that sense, yes: I think we succeeded. For me, the most interesting aspect of the critical response was its variety. Most anthologies, you'll find the reviewers pick mostly the same set of stories to enthuse over. In Canterbury 2100, I recall that pretty much every review I read picked different favourite -- and that was exactly what I'd hope for.
I could talk at length about that project, but there really isn't the space. All I'll say is this: I'd like to see the concept taken up by someone with the money to really do justice. What would a collection of the fiction of the 'Firefly' universe look like? What kind of stories do people in the 'Star Trek' future tell each other? What are the popular entertainments and fictions of the 'Star Wars' universe? We keep writing books about these imaginary futures, but nobody ever seems to consider how the people of these imagined times and places view themselves and their history. How better to discover that than through their fiction?
3. What sorts of ideas do you have for future publications? Are there topics or themes that you think are undeveloped or poorly done that need the Flinthart Treatment?
I'm a bit grumpy at the moment 'cos I took what I thought was a Red Priest novel to the ROR group, and they promptly -- and very correctly -- pointed out that it was two novels. That irritated the hell out of me, because I really wanted to stay away from the Big Trilogy format. I like stand-alone books. Sure, I like persistent characters and universes, but I like character-driven tales, and the Grand Epic Trilogy Plotlines rarely seem to hinge on the kind of textured, fascinating character work of my favourite genre writers.
In any case, there's one for you: not one, but two Red Priest novels. They'll stand alone, but as a matter of course, the first will lead directly to the events of the second. After that? Ah, hell -- ideas are cheap. Time is expensive. I'll see what I can put together, eh?
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up, there‚s a lot of buzz about nominating Australians for Hugo awards. Which Australians have put out work over the last year that you‚d like to see get up?
Oh, I'm terrible about keeping up with the current stuff. I live in rural Tasmania. Most of what I get to read comes from the one or two Cons I can attend each year, and from my favourite secondhand bookstore in Launceston. But I gotta say that yeah, there are quite a few writers from Oz overdue for recognition on the broader stage. I don't know if Hugodom is the likely way to go, but I want Cat Sparks and Angela Slatter up in lights, thanks. Also Alisa Krasnostein for her editing work. And have they given Sean Williams a Hugo yet? If not, why not? The rate he writes, you'd think they'd give him the award just out of a sense of self-preservation, 'cos you just know he's gonna keep throwing newer and more exciting stuff at 'em until they give up. Who else? Well, hell -- Paul Haines' "Slice of Life" gave me the creeps the way horror collections simply never do. And Deb Biancotti's 'Book of Endings' isn't "just" speculative fiction: it's goddam literature, and it should be rec
ognised as such.
There's plenty more. But I've had half a bottle of Tamar Ridge Pinot Noir tonight, and my memory wants to go to bed...
5. Finally, are you going to Aussiecon4? If so, what are you most looking forward to?
With three young kids and a wife working as a rural GP, taking time away is a big deal for me. Literally: I have to kind of set it all up months in advance, make sure the kids are covered, make sure the medical hours are covered, and so forth. I can't just pack a bag and zip off. As a result, I get to maybe two Cons a year, and I really, really savour them.
I'm going to Aussicon4, yeah. What am I most looking forward to? Same as always: spending time in the company of other writers and editors who think about the same sort of wild shit that I think about. I adore SF dinner conversations. I like being able to ask about the lightspeed delay in communcations between here and Pluto, and get not a bunch of blank faces, but nods and answers. I like being able to say 'what if zombies were really a kind of chrysalis stage of humankind? What kind of butterflies would they be?' and have people actually think about it, instead of dismissing me with a pained expression. I love my family, and I like the local community... but I'm alone out here, dammit. I don't care if I don't see a single goddam panel at Aussiecon 4. I'm bringing a couple bottles of wine to share with Ellen Datlow. I've promised Angela Slatter a decent sample of my grandmother's chocolate fudge. I'm looking forward to sharing drinks with Rowena and Marianne and the others from the Brisbane days... four whole days in which I get to uncoil the entirety of my mind, and use it without fear of scaring anybody. I don't think I can convey what a relief and a privilege that is.
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This is my last Snapshot interview! They will all be archived over at ASif!, or you can catch up with them at their original homes:
Tansy
Random Alex
Kathryn
EditorMum
Girlie Jones
Rachel
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February 20th, 2010
11:22 am - Snapshot 2010: Ben Payne
Ben Payne was born in a cinema near you. He has been the queen of several books, such as Potato Monkey, Andromeda Spaceways, Aurealis, Shiny, 2012, Dog versus Sandwich, Moonlight Tuba (sic) and virtually every other thing you can think of that you enjoyed, well he did that too, just don’t ask him for details. In his spare tire he writes fictional stories, one of which received an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror, and several other which received dishonourable discharges from anonymous sources. He has a small dog named Mitchell which solves puzzles of no great import.
1. For the last few years you’ve been involved in the Last Short Story project, attempting to read all the speculative fiction short stories published in professional, and semi-professional, outlets across the English-speaking world. Aside from the sheer insanity of it, what have you learnt from the process? Was it ultimately worthwhile for you, as an investment of time?
It's something I'd recommend to anyone wanting to get a sense of the field, of what's out there. I've always been attracted to broad views, and to puzzling how everything fits together, so I guess I found it satisfying to get a context for how the SF/F/H field interacts and interweaves with itself. There are just so many different venues, all with different vibes. I've watched writers trying to piece together clues from guidelines, or rejection slips. But there's really no substitute for reading the books/ezines/magazines.
On top of that, I got to read a lot of really awesome stories I'd never have happened across on my own.
Eventually, though, it gets to the point where you need to stop the excessive input, and take stock of where you stand amid it. At least that's how I feel right now. Just as with any project, I suppose, at some point you need to force yourself to stop researching and start acting.
I also think it's easy, if you do it too long, to become jaded and overly critical. Which isn't really a mindset conducive to creating.
2. You’ve published some whacky, offbeat stories in your various webzines, especially Dog vs Sandwich. What attracts you to a story? What makes you buy one?
Dog vs Sandwich was the first solo editing project I'd done since my first magazine, Potato Monkey. And part of the experiment of that project, for me, was to learn to unthink the whole story selecting process. I tried to let go of a lot of the baggage that I had about what makes a good story, and reduce it to its simplest terms: a story is a good story if something about it
makes me enjoy reading it. Part of the experience for me was learning not to sand off the rough edges of work. I think it's the mark of an insecure early-career editor to feel the need to see that you've "made your mark" on a story. But I think there's just as much skill involved in learning when to leave a story's "imperfections" alone. I've tried to carry that philosophy across to my new zine, Moonlight Tuber. I hope the stories I select and publish present my taste, but not my ego.
I'm attracted to what might be dubbed weird fiction because it seems the most free and uninhibited genre, if it could be dubbed a genre. Less dictated by the regulations of plotting, consistency and linearity. Weird fiction is able to capture the fragmented, the contradictory, the confusing, the absurd. It also feels relatively untapped. I realise of course that there is a rich history of experimental and anti-realist literatures. But it feels to me like there are a lot of authors out there who are just beginning
to explore the things they can do, the places they can take a story, and the ways they can break out of the expectations of more traditional notions of "story". I think it's a potential we've barely skimmed the surface of.
If that all sounds a bit pretentious, then there's also this: I like weird fiction because it's fun. A lot of the time, it makes me smile.
3. You’ve recently left the Last Short Story project in order to devote more time to your own creative pursuits. What are you working on at the moment? Will there be more webzines from you in the future, or is it mostly about the writing?
I have a couple of ideas that I'm stirring on the cracked, leaning hot-plate of my creative palette, just waiting to gestate their way into the embryo of my canvas and into the public's steaming mouths. You're correct; that mixed metaphor masks an inner uncertainty.
Truth be told, I've spent a lot of the last year asking myself why I write, in the same way that I've asked why I edit. Like a lot of writers, I think as a younger man, which I almost certainly was, I wrote largely because I had some idea of being a writer. I was never sure exactly what that meant, other than perhaps being allowed to wear a particularly large and fancy hat. I was going to say Important Things, of course, but if I look at my younger self honestly, clear-sightedly, he was, though devilishly handsome, mostly in it for the ego. Like many artists, I grew up painfully insecure and desired fame as a form or internal validation.
I've grown used to the fact that there is an infinitesimally small chance that I may never be "that writer" I imagined, the one surrounded by fame and lilos and cute librarian-type women and a mansion made of jellies and a dog that barks my favourite novel at me as I go to sleep. I've grown used to the fact that maybe, and none of us ever like to believe this, maybe I'm not...
extraordinary?
So where does that leave artistic dreams? Why write? Why spew more words out into the cacophony of noise (what a useful phrase), into the endless parade of ego and self-congratulation that is artistic recognition? What do you think you have that can possibly make any difference to anyone? What effect do you even want to have on other peoples' lives?
(I'm not asking you, dear Alex, I'm being me, in my past self-head, in a form of playacting I stole from an unsuspecting vagabond.)
Some days I think I am learning what it means to move my ego out of the way of my own writing. Or maybe that's just what I *want* you to think!
Maybe I won't ever write anything of much importance. And I am surprisingly okay about that.
4. With the enormous amount of reading you did last year as part of the Last Short Story project, you must have come across some good Australian work. With Aussiecon4 coming up this September, which Australians do you think should be on the Hugos shortlist of 2010?
I'm torn on the Hugo issue. On the one hand, raising awareness of good writers is a valuable and worthwhile aim. On the other hand, am I the only one who finds the notion of an Australian Worldcon full of Hugo noms for Aussie writers faintly embarrassing? Like all those old Ditmar lists where you can tell by glancing at the shortlists whether the Natcon was held in
Perth or Melbourne.
I think the real goal for any local writer should be to appear on the Hugo shortlist when Worldcon is held in the US.
But you know, not to rain on the whole parade, people should definitely nominate the works by Australian writers which they think are world class. I won't repeat the names everyone else is listing, because I'm getting tired of hearing their names already and I'd hate to contribute to anyone else's ennui. So I will mention a couple of names I haven't heard mentioned: A.M. Muffaz, Penni Russon, Miranda Siemienowicz, Grace Dugan. I'm not saying you should vote for them, just go read their shite, and tell me how right I was when they're famous and I'm old and infirm and need a chat, y'all!
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4?
No.
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Snapshot2010: a day and a half to go! To see the final glorious interviews, keep checking here and these blogs:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
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11:05 am - Snapshot 2010: Christopher Green
Christopher Green was born in the United States. After moving to Australia at the age of 20, he attended Clarion South in 2007 and has been published in Dreaming Again, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution. His work has won an Aurealis Award and been shortlisted for the Australian Shadows Award. When he isn’t writing, he’s thinking about writing, unless he’s talking to his wife, at which point he is most certainly listening to what she has to say. Honest. He maintains a blog here.
1. You have a story, "Darwin's Daughter," in the recently-released anthology The Tangled Bank, which marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. It's a dark story, I must say, although not without hope. What inspired you to write it? And what caught your eye about the theme of the anthology in the first place?
Darwin is one of those men who you hear about before you actually “learn” about him. I can clearly remember being nine or ten and finding out that someone else (Alfred Russel Wallace) had a hand in the “single best idea anyone has ever had”. That’s always fascinated me. Who was this man, and how did he feel about the shadow Darwin cast? Questions like that always get me thinking, so I decided I wanted to write a story where Wallace was happy to be out of the limelight…
As far as The Tangled Bank anthology catching my eye, it was just too different not to. I loved the challenge of writing something to so specific and demanding a theme. I thought about that anthology so much that I’d have days where everything was evolution, and other days where nothing was. I’ve since recovered.
2. 2007 saw you attend, and survive, Clarion South. What was that like, as an experience? Was it as overwhelming as it's always sounded? (Well, it sounds overwhelming to me, anyway.)
Clarion South is a crucible. It strips all the nonsense that other people call “real life” away and says to you, “Fine, then. You want to write? Let’s see what you got.” And write you do, for the next six weeks, and if you stop it’s because you’re reading something someone else in that prison paradise wrote a couple of days prior. It was an amazing experience that I don’t go a day without remembering fondly. If it was overwhelming, it was overwhelming by design. If you want to show people they can fly, sometimes you have to toss them off a few cliffs, I guess.
3. You have several short stories in forthcoming anthologies and issues of magazines. What other plans do you have up your sleeve? Are you one of those writers who always has ideas swimming in the head, or does imagination let you take a break sometimes?
I’m writing the dreaded First Novel at the moment, the completion of which is a goal that’s always eluded me. I “write” every day, although to me that means critiquing colleagues’ stories, editing my own work, or hell, even re-submitting stories that have been rejected elsewhere. As far as the ideas are concerned, they know their place in all this. Usually, they want out of my head just as badly as I do.
In light of all that, though, I don’t mind taking the odd break. Taking two or three days off between the end of one story and the beginning of the next is an excellent way of making sure your stories don’t start bleeding together.
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this September, there's been a bit of buzz about nominating Australians for the Hugo awards. Which Australians would you like to see nominated this year?
I admit to not having caught up with all the new works the spec fic scene has produced, of late, but if Paul Haines (come on, the man tied with himself for an Aurealis Award, for Pete’s sake) and Peter M. Ball (possibly the most with-it, professionally minded writer friend I know) aren’t both on the ballot, it’ll be a crime against nature.
5. Finally, will you be attending Aussiecon4? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
I’ll certainly be there. It’ll be my first Convention, so I have no idea what to expect. I’m looking forward to finding that oft mention yet still ethereal bar where editors line up and wait patiently for me to buy them drinks, but the highlight for me will be seeing so many members of my Clarion hive mind. Can’t wait!
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Yesterday, on Snapshot: Russell Blackford, Paul Haines, Simon Petrie, Alison Goodman, Christopher Lynch, Stuart Mayne, Stephanie Campisi, Karen Healey, Gabrielle Wang, Kim Wilkins, Kim Falconer, and Deborah Biancotti.
Just today and tomorrow (Sunday) left for Snapshot 2010! Will we beat 2007's 83? Check these blogs for the last exciting interviews:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
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February 19th, 2010
04:12 pm - Snapshot 2010: Gabrielle Wang
Gabrielle Wang is an award winning author and illustrator of junior fiction and Young Adult novels. She was born in Melbourne of Chinese heritage. Her great grandfather came to Australia during the Victorian Gold Rush in 1853. As a result, Gabrielle’s books are a blend of both Australian and Chinese culture with a touch of fantasy. Her first novel The Garden of Empress Cassia won the 2002 Aurealis Award, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and was a CBCA Notable Book. Her second novel The Pearl of Tiger Bay was shortlisted for the 2004 Aurealis Award. Her other novels include The Hidden Monastery and The Lion Drummer which has been named a Notable Book in the 2009 CBCA Book of the Year Awards. Gabrielle’s latest junior novel, A Ghost in My Suitcase, won the 2009 Aurealis Award Best Children’s Novel. Her latest books in 2010 are a picture book, The Race For the Chinese Zodiac, and a young adult novel, Little Paradise.
For more detailed information visit Gabrielle’s website.
1. A Ghost in my Suitcase won the Aurealis for best Children's Novel for 2009 - congratulations! It's a prequel to The Pearl of Tiger Bay, this time focussing more on the grandma character. Do you think the two books will appeal to the same readership? Do you often get the itch to explore secondary characters in more detail, or was it a surprise to revisit this character?
Both A Ghost in My Suitcase and The Pearl of Tiger Bay are for the same readership ie 8 -12 year olds. Often while writing a story you discover a character that is too good to remain in the background. The character of Por Por, or Chinese grandma, was so strong in The Pearl of Tiger that she cried out to be the centre of her own story. I used her therefore as a major character in A Ghost in My Suitcase. Characters are funny creatures. You think they come out of your own imagination, but I’m not so sure anymore. While I was writing A Ghost in My Suitcase, Ting Ting began life as a male university student called Kai. But there wasn’t any tension between him and Little Cloud, my main character. As soon as I turned ‘him’ into ‘her’ – a sullen fifteen-year old girl - the story suddenly took off because she was so feisty. And again in my new Young Adult novel, Little Paradise, one of the characters told me he had to die, so I killed him off which later became a major plot point.
2. You're Chinese Australian, and grew up in Melbourne at a time when there weren't many Asian faces around. How has your childhood affected your writing and your art? Do you think that having that two cultures to draw from has been an advantage, creatively speaking?
Initially it was very hard being the only Asian in my school, and hardly seeing an Asian face in the street except in Chinatown. It took me a long time to realize that having two cultures was something to be proud of. But then again, if I hadn’t had those experiences of alienation, I probably would not be a writer now. A common theme that runs through all my books is the search for one’s identity. The other is creativity because I was an artist before I became a writer. My attitude towards being Chinese changed when I went to RMIT where I studied graphic design. We were all art students and we all wanted to be different, so we celebrated our differences. Later I went on to study Chinese language, then painting and calligraphy at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou for two years, and again I was the outsider, but that’s another story.
3. You have two new books out now, or very soon - Race for the Chinese Zodiac (for which the pictures look incredible!) and Little Paradise. Will we see more picture books from you in the future? What ideas or settings are you thinking about at the moment, for new stories?
I would like to write another picture book and this time illustrate it myself. Sally Rippin and Regine Arbos did a fantastic job with the illustrations of The Race for the Chinese Zodiac. Illustrating takes time so I create small pencil drawings and insert them amongst the text in my novels. At the moment I’m working on a series of four novels but they are not in the speculative fiction genre, they are historical fiction for 8- 10year olds. I’m longing to get back to speculative fiction though because that’s what I love writing.
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this year, there has been a lot of buzz about nominating Australians for the Hugo awards. Do you read much within the Australian speculative fiction scene?
Not as much as I would like to. I read mostly children’s or YA.
Are there Australians you would like to see nominated for a Hugo this year?
We have so many great authors, but for this year, how about Margo Lanagan?
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4 in September? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
I am planning on going. It will be a break from this series of four novels I’m working on: one novel every three months during this year.
What I am looking forward to there? Of course, besides the great program, what I really like to see are all the fantastic costumes worn by the attendees!
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Yesterday, on Snapshot 2010: Kate Eltham, Will Elliot, Trent Jamieson, Jack Dann, Lee Battersby, Peter M Ball, Amanda Pillar, Andrew McKiernan, Felicity Dowker and Nyssa Pascoe.
To read all the 2010 Snapshot Interviews hot off the press, check these blogs until this Sunday:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
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09:11 am - Snapshot 2010: Kim Falconer
Kim Falconer lives in Byron Bay with two gorgeous black cats. As well as her author website, she runs an astrology forum and alternative science site, trains with a sword and is completing a Masters Degree in writing through Open Universities Australia. Her novel writing is done early every morning, seven days a week. Currently she’s working on her second series, Quantum Encryption, due out Spring 2010.
1. The third book in your Quantum Enchantment series, Strange Attractors, has just come out - congratulations! The main character, Rosette, is described as a 'child of two worlds': one of magic, the other an Earth of failing technology. What inspired you to create such a character, and imagine such an intersection of worlds? What do you hope readers will take away from the series?
I juxtaposed the magical hegemony of Gaela with a futuristic Earth to explore Arthur C. Clarke’s notion: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I wanted to see how that could be true, and to explore ideas of consciousness and sentience. Rosette blossomed from an essay about a girl who came home to find her family murdered—once she hit the pages, she had a whole lot more story to tell!
My readers will recreate the work in ways that are meaningful to them. They complete the act of writing—each in their own way. I aim to provide immersion, imagination, optimism and of course, enchantment.
2. Your website, http://www.falconastrology.com/, reflects your diverse interests - your writing, of course, but also Iaido, of which you are a practitioner, and astrology. Do you see your writing influencing or being influenced by the sword and the stars?
Iaido—the art of the samurai sword—started out as research for the first book, The Spell of Rosette. I’d watched Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon numerous times but I still didn’t know how to write a good sword scene. I took up Iaido to improve my authenticity and loved it! Now I not only wield a samurai sword in real life, I use it to choreograph all my action scenes. It was the first thing my publisher, Stephanie Smith, noticed. She said, ‘It’s like the sword fights are real,’ and they are!
My father was an astrologer too so I grew up with ‘the stars’ as a strong reference in my life. It’s woven into my books—basic sun sign traits, transits and even ancient methods of divination. But I’ve made a point to keep the jargon down. It’s not ‘hard work’ to read, but there are some handy hints for the keen astrology student.
3. It seems a somewhat cruel question to pose a fortnight after your last book's publication, but - what's next? Do you have ideas up your sleeve for new novels, or short stories?
Not a cruel question at all! I’m delighted to say I have another three book contract with HarperVoyager and am very excited about this next work—the Quantum Encryption series. It begins as a prequel to Quantum Enchantment, exploring the genetic engineering of the Lupins on Earth and Gaela before the temple wars. Over the three books it eclipse where Strange Attractors ends, telling the finer details of one of my most popular characters, the fabled Kreshkali. Book one comes out Spring 2010 and is called The Path of the Stray. I’m doing the copy edits as we speak!
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this year, there's been a lot of buzz about nominating Australians for Hugos. Which Australians do you think ought to be nominated this year?
I’ve been publishing a book every six months for the last year—and will continue to do so until 2012 so I haven’t kept up on the current releases, save mostly for a few of my fellow Voyager Authors. I would love to see Glenda Larke’s Stormlord Rising and Kylie Chan’s Hell to Earth listed, and also Trudi Canavan’s Aurealis winning Magician's Apprentice. It would be great to have Peter M. Ball in there for both novella (Horn) and his short story "Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens." In the pure SF realm, Sean Williams, The Grand Conjunction has my vote!
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4? If so, what are you most looking forward to?
I will be attending, yes! I look forward to immersing in all the buzz and talks and happenings of the event but mostly I’m excited to finally meet face to face with people from HarperVoyager, readers of Voyager Online Blog, and my many FaceBook and Twitter Spec Fic friends. I can’t wait!
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Snapshot interviews will be blogged until Sunday 22nd Feb.
To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.
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February 18th, 2010
03:51 pm - Jack Dann
Jack Dann is a multiple-award winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which was 1 on The Age Bestseller list, The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean, and The Silent, which Library Journal chose as one of their ‘Hot Picks’ and wrote: “This is narrative storytelling at its best… Most emphatically recommended.” He is the editor of the groundbreaking anthology Dreaming Down-Under (with Janeen Webb), which won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and Dreaming Again, which Bookseller+Publisher chose as their ‘Pick of the Week’. B+P gave it five stars and wrote: “Here are stories that engage with the building blocks of our culture and others that give shape to our shared darkness and light. Dreaming Again is at once quintessentially Australian and enticingly other. If you read short fiction you’ll want this collection. If you don’t, this is a reason to start.” Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York. His website is found here.
1. You've recently published The Dragon Book, an anthology with Gardner Dozois, which I really enjoyed - and I'll admit that at first I was unsure just how original a dragon anthology could manage to be in 2009. What attracted you to the idea? Were you ever concerned that the stories might end up being too similar to one another, and to previous stories?
Thanks for the good words about the book. Gardner and I have been very pleased with the result. Well, regarding originality, Gardner and I edited a reprint anthology in our Magic Tales series called Dragons in 1993. We were attracted in (and around) 2007 to the idea of an original anthology on the same theme for a young adult audience. I think it's a question of the authors you request to write stories for the volume. It turned out-happily, as we expected--that the stories would, indeed, be very different from one another, and that we would find ourselves surprised not only by diversity, but by the stories themselves. That's one of the joys of editing. Finding the authors who will write the stories that always feel new.
2. Gardner Dozois has been your partner in anthologizing for a long time - more than 30 years, with or so 40 anthologies, by my count. There's obviously something that works there, for the two of you. How did you two start working together? What is it that keeps a relationship like this going, over that period of time and that body of work?
Well, Gardner is one of my best friends. He and his wife Susan are family. Gardner and I were young Turks together in the halycon days of our youth--the 1970's. He brought me into the Guilford Writers Workshop, a workshop modeled on Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm's Milford Writers Workshop, and it was at those workshops--reading and work-shopping stories by Gardner, Joe and Jack Haldeman, George Alec Effinger, Michael Swanwick, and others--that I made lifetime friendships and started to make my bones as a writer. Even way back then, Gardner became my editor…or rather I pestered him into reading and editing everything I wrote. (In those days, I would visit Gardner and Susan and stay until Gardner had work-shopped my story or novel. (Of course, it never occurred to me that I could possibly be an imposition!) And then Gardner and I started writing stories together, and we also collaborated with Michael Swanwick and Susan. We laughingly called ourselves "The Fiction Factory" and during the 80's our stories were selling to the highest-paying markets of the time such as Playboy, Penthouse, and Omni. We were happily surprised… over and over again. I collected those stories in a collection titled (of course) The Fiction Factory. I always found collaborating with Gardner, well, easy. When we wrote together, I always felt liberated because if something was wrong with the copy I drafted, Gardner could 'fix' it. So my unconscious stayed out of my way, and I wrote fast and free. If I was working over later drafts, I'd feel as if I wasn't really writing--I was editing; and as I 'edited', the pages would somehow pile up on the desk as I typed away on an electric Selectric typewriter. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I would say that love and friendship have carried the days… and the years of collaboration.
3. What are your plans for 2010 and beyond? Can we expect more anthologies with Dozois - or, dare I ask, another complement to the Dreaming Down Under and Dreaming Again series of Australian short stories?
Yes, Gardner and I have more projects in the cooker. Regarding another Dreaming anthology…well, it's too early for that. Maybe in ten years or so the time might be right for a Last Dreaming Again. Takes time for new talent to appear and develop... and time to see the changes in style, genre, and content of our 'name' authors.
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this September, there's been some buzz about nominating Australians for the Hugo awards. Which Australians do you think have put out work this year that you'd like to see nominated?
Okay, confession and truth time-I've been knee-deep in a new novel, which means I haven't been reading widely in the genre for the past few months. I would suggest that Paul Haines and Margo Lanagan are getting a buzz for excellent work produced last year, but I dare not extrapolate further, lest I display foot-in-mouth-and-ignorance disease.
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
Yes, I'll be there. After all, how could I not be! Looking forward to seeing pals I haven't seen for a while, such as Stan Robinson, and basically hanging out. Oh, yeah, and I'll probably do panels, launches, and the like in the interstices.
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Snapshot 2010: until Sunday 22 Feb!
To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.
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07:28 am - Snapshot 2010: Kate Eltham
Kate is Chief Executive Officer of Queensland Writers Centre. She has previously worked as a small business consultant focusing on micro enterprises, non-profits and individual artists in the creative sectors. As a consultant for Creative Economy, she worked with indigenous creative businesses to develop sustainable enterprise and participated in the development of policy and industry strategy for creative industries in Australia. Her website can be found here.
1. So... a zombie love story? What is it with zombies at the moment? - they seem to be everywhere! Why zombies, and what will your story add to the zombie canon?
More like a love story with zombies. And yeah, zombies are a popular trope, along with zeppelins and steampunk, although surely not as all-consuming as vampires and shapeshifters. And watch out, because here come fallen angels, oh my!
When I started working on the story I'm developing at the moment, I was trying to capture a "Breakfast Club-meets-apocalypse" flavour. I was looking for a useful vehicle that would enable me to explore the death of a town. It could have been a storm or a fire, but after a while I realised I could have a lot more fun if it was the actual death of a town via a zombie plague.
As a writer, I enjoy zombies more than other metaphor monsters. They can stand in for a variety of themes: consumerism, urban sloth, tribalism, conformity. Zombies are rooted in the fear of death, the inexorable slow shuffling towards decay, and hence tap pretty basic human fears. They are monsters made from completely ordinary people with no regard for race, class or morality so we identify with them - they could be us! - but that makes them all the more horrific. That's all great material for a writer to work with. I've certainly been enjoying much of the zombie pop culture of the last few years ("you've got red on you"), but especially Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead graphic novel series and Carrie Ryan's Forest of Hands and Teeth.
2. You've been heavily involved, over the last few years, with running the Aurealis Awards. What's that been like, as a process and an experience? How are you feeling about it now Fantastic Queensland is no longer the organising body?
I think it's great FQ has handed the Aurealis Awards back to Chimaera and that someone else will take up the challenge. When we started, we set out to raise the profile of the awards, particularly with publishers and booksellers, and to make the awards ceremony the celebration it deserved to be with so much fine spec fic literature being produced in Australia. I believe we achieved that and we were proud to be custodians for six years, but that's all we were, custodians. The Aurealis Awards weren't "ours" and we did have that in the back of our minds throughout that time that someone else would inherit them eventually. It was the driving reason for us to seek improvements in administration of entries, streamlining of the rules, and adherence to consistent standards. Some of our experiments failed, like the Golden Aurealis, but others have become new fixtures like the anthology/collection categories and recognition of illustrated works. We also deliberately expanded and diversified the judging panels and folded the judges' feedback into the process each year. As a result I think the AAs are in a strong position and that's what you'd want to inherit if you were taking them over. I look forward to attending them in future years!
For me personally, I'm proud I was involved in the Aurealis Awards but I'm hugely relieved to hand the workload to someone else, and I only had a fraction of the tasks involved! Ron Serdiuk and the other awards convenors that came before him - Ben Payne, Lea Greenaway and Jason Nahrung - were the heroes of the AAs over the last six years.
3. As CEO of the Queensland Writers Centre, and with your interest in the publishing industry as a whole, I know you're interested in digital publishing and future directions for publishing. Where do you think publishing will be at in, say, twenty years? Will things keep moving as quickly towards ebooks as they seem to be now - with Kindle, and iPad, and everything else - or do you think paper books will still be around for some time?
E-books and paper books are not binary opposites, so yes I think the market for ebooks will continue to grow rapidly and I also think paper books will be around for some time, certainly in 20 years. Whether paper books will be distributed and sold in the way they are now is a more nebulous question.
People buy ebooks because they deliver a different bundle of benefits to print: access, portability, convenience, connectivity. Kindle and the other dozen or so dedicated e-reader devices will help this market establish but, in 20 years, I think we'll look back on them as short-lived technology. Why will consumers invest $300 plus on a device that only reads books when mobile convergent devices - such as smartphones and tablets - will deliver that bundle of benefits more effectively. Team that with an effective online retail solution (like, say, an Apple iBook store) and the right ingredients are in place for the e-book market to really grow.
People who complain that they would never read a book on a tiny backlit screen are missing the point. When it comes to the digital future, the question for writers and publishers isn't whether people will read on screens. We already know they will. The question is whether authors and publishers will be able to migrate to the new business models that will earn them a living, before the current publishing business models break down.
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this year, there has been a lot of buzz about nominating Australians for Hugo awards. Which Australians do you think have put out work over the last year that you'd like to see nominated?
I'll be thrilled if some Clarion South graduates get a guernsey. So many of them, from across the years, are publishing stand-out fiction. And it will be a miscarriage of justice if Bill Wright isn't nominated for Best Fan Writer.
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
Yes! The bar.
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Yesterday, on Snapshot2010: Tehani Wessely, Adrian Bedford, Kaaron Warren, Glenda Larke, Nicole Murphy, D.M Cornish, Jonathan Strahan, Alan Baxter, Deborah Kalin, Gary Kemble, Lezli Robyn, and Robert Hoge.
To read them more interviews hot off the press until Sunday 21, check these blogs daily:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.
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February 17th, 2010
03:40 pm - Snapshot 2010: D.M Cornish
An illustrator by training and a deeply unrepentant word-nerd, D.M. Cornish is old enough to have seen the very first Star Wars (the now unhappily titled ‘Episode 4’). From such flights of delight and fancy he has developed an almost habitual outlet for his passion of word conjuring through the invention of secondary worlds. A fortuitous encounter with a children’s publisher, Omnibus, gave him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. A thousand words at a time, this has lead to the writing (and illustrating) of the Monster-Blood Tattoo series – Foundling, Lamplighter and Factotum (to be released, this year September 2010). Rumor persists that he possesses a life outside of this, but it is a vague and shadowy thing.
1. The third book in your Half-Continent series (begun with Monster Blood Tattoo and Lamplighter) is due out this year. Is it going to end as a trilogy, or will there be more stories about Rossamünd?
Well, as far as I can reckon it, Rossamünd's story ends here. For the enitre three books we only see things from his perspective, which whilst a great (and largely unconscious) method to keep things simple as I learn how to write books, leaves me really itching to get on and write about the Half-Continent from other people's perspective and from other locations. So, what there will be, Lord willing, is stories about other Half-Continent folk doing what it is they do. A good example/start to this is a novella length story I have written, The Corsers' Hinge, that will be appearing in the anthology Australia's Legends of Fantasy, published by Harper Collins, and coming out JUNE THIS YEAR (I really want folks to know about it, clearly...)
2. The Half-Continent stories have been a long-term project for you, and you’ve both written and illustrated the stories. What has that been like, as a process? And what’s it like when you see websites like Monster Blood Cult spring up around your creation?
I think it is more accurate to say the Half-Continent itself has been a long-term project, and that Rossamünd’s tale is not so much the Half-Continent story as a Half-Continent story, one of many. I make this disitinction because it so far has been a two part process.
Firstly there has been the steady, accretive invention of the Half-Continent as a place, done without stories but rather a conjuring, gathering and refining of ‘facts’ and details of how the world works, who is in it, why they are, why they use certain words, why certain words we use cannot exist in the Half-Continent, what they wear, oh, and monsters, lots of monsters. This process has happened quite naturally since uni days (early 1990s), almost like a tick or an addiction: I read something, see something, misspell something, mis-read something and POP! some part of me goes Oooh, that would be great as this in the Half-Continent!
The second part has been the arrival six years ago of the challenge to actually do more than start some short stories about the Half-Continent, and actually complete and entire tale set there. Phew! As I have been saying to myself all during the penning of the third MBT book, Factotum, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. This process has been a journey, mirrored in some bizarre way by Rossamünd’s own journey; his heading out into the Half-Continent was my heading out into the Half-Continent – it is one thing to spend all my time making stuff up from afar, entirely another to actually, as my publisher Dyan Blacklock (who gave me the opportunity in the first place) said, “put someone down in the Half-Continent and show what happens to them”…
As for websites and fan fic and costumes and fan art, I find it flattering and astonishing and, if I dare to admit it, kind of healing to have other folks join with me on this crazy Half-Continent adventure. As much as it is all very personal, to write books is to make something for others to enjoy, and when they do, and then I get to know about it by website of email or some other method, it is like finding a friend in a scary world.
3. Do you have plans for the Half-Continent, beyond the stories of Rossamünd? Do you have plans to write about different places?
I sure do (as per: answers to questions 1 & 2, and as in response to part one of this question)! As for different places, having spent 17 odd years growing the Half-Continent, I feel like I have bearly begun to explore it in story, so my desire is to continue to do so; I am not sure I have much to say beyond the H-c (as I call it) anyway. That being said, I do have the barest bones of a more sci-fi setting (actually, probably science fantasy), and certainly made starts of short stories (and even a screen play) set in the real world, so who knows. I am still finding my feet in this whole writing thing…
4. With Aussiecon4 coming up this September, there’s been buzz about getting Australians on the Hugos shortlist of 2010. Which Australians would you like to see on there?
Richard Harland, Worldshaker
(Is it bad of me to admit that I do not read a whole lot of speculative fiction, Australian or otherwise…?)
5. Will you be attending Aussiecon4? If you are, what are you most looking forward to?
I surely plan to (which reminds me, I still have to send my registration form in…!) and I am looking forward most to meeting other like-minded folks who like travelling to other worlds as much as I do (and to see again some of the fine folks I discovered at Conjecture here in Adelaide last year). I have never been to a World Con before, so I am thinking the whole darn thing will be pretty astonishing.
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Snapshot interviews will be blogged until Sunday 22nd Feb.
To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.
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06:37 am - Snapshot 2010: Tehani Wessely
Tehani has been active in the Aussie spec fic scene since 2001. She is currently focussed on editing an anthology for 9-13 year olds (Worlds Next Door, due out mid-2010) and enjoying her growing family!
1. You're currently working on an anthology of speculative fiction for children, which I think is really exciting. Do you think this is an untapped market? And how is the anthology itself shaping up, in terms of themes and ideas?
I'm not sure it's untapped, but I certainly think it's under-represented in the present publishing climate. As a Teacher Librarian, I'm always looking for ways to snag kids into reading (and as a fan and producer of it, particularly reading speculative fiction!). Very often, kids will tell you that books are too long, or too hard, so I wanted to produce something that was accessible to readers in that hard-to-catch age bracket, where they're growing out of reading. Hopefully, the range and length of stories will be appealing to these kids, as will the package as a whole, while at the same time still be filling for a "good" reader as well!
The anthology has come together beautifully. I'm delighted with the mix of new and established authors who contributed, and the variety of stories I received. There's everything from horror to humour, and wizards and monsters and moon-kids (and space dogs). With such an assortment, there's bound to be something for everyone! Additionally, there stories are just entertaining, but there's some really meaningful messages contained in them (well, perhaps not in ALL of them, but that's okay too!), which should strike a chord with readers of all ages.
2. In the past you were an integral part of the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine cooperative, which has a remarkably good track record of consistently producing six issues a year. What was it like to work with the cooperative? What did you learn about the Aussie scene from your time with ASIM?
I'll always consider my time with ASIM to be one of the best and most productive periods of my life. Without ASIM, I certainly wouldn't being able to do what I'm doing now - I wouldn't know the fans, authors, artists, publishers, editors and reviewers in the Australian and International scene who I love to work with, many of whom I count as friends as well. I think ASIM did some great things for not only the Australian scene, but for many international writers and illustrators as well. I look at bookstore shelves (both physical and virtual!) today and see a great many names who were published by ASIM over the years - some of these were already established authors when ASIM first saw them, but a goodly number got some very early publications in the pages of the little magazine that could, and I'm so proud and privileged to have been a part of that.
Part of what made ASIM great was the collective itself. The founding members worked so hard, ofttimes outside their comfort zones, learning new skills and creating opportunities where none existed before. It's amazing what can happen when people work together towards a common goal in this community. From her humble beginnings, ASIM is now consistently publishing quality fiction and being recognised for this.
3. Do you see yourself working in the publishing scene more in the future? Do you have big ideas for projects you'd like to get done?
I can't see myself NOT working in the spec fic publishing scene in some capacity or another! It's been such a big part of my life for so many years now (longer than my husband or kids!) that I can't imagine not being involved in some way. I'm not sure how that will manifest in the future, but I'm really looking forward to more challenges! I do have another project cooking that I hope to have at Aussiecon4, but I've not yet announced it :)
4. Aussiecon4 is coming up, and there's been a lot of buzz about nominating Australians for the Hugos. Which Australian writers or work would you like to see on the Hugo shortlists this year?
I would love to see Peter M Ball on multiple Hugos ballots this year - in such a short time he's published such a lot of quality work in so many publications, not the least being Horn (eligible for the Novella category), and various short stories in international publications. It would be great to have an Aussie on the John Campbell ballot for Aussiecon4, and Peter is my pick. It would also be fantastic to see Jonathan Strahan recognised for his short form editing work (no more being a bridesmaid...) and to see some Aussie fan writing (like, dare I say, Alisa Krasnostein's!) on the ballot too.
5. I know you're going to be at Aussiecon4; what are you most looking forward to about it?
Believe it or not, I'm most looking forward to catching up with friends! We're such a scattered bunch throughout Australia, and conventions are one of the only times in the year where people I communicate with online all the time are all together in the same place. It's the most marvellous opportunity for like-minded conversations, and for so many days! I'm also very excited about meeting some international visitors who I only know from the online world - great opportunity for new friendships, and also professional networking. It's going to be great!
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Snapshot interviews will be blogged until Sunday 22nd Feb.
To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/
Will we beat 83 this time? If you know of someone involved in the Scene with something to plug, then send us an email at 2010snapshot@gmail.com.
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