My Flappers with Swords blog tour continues – I have a piece up at Kate Elliott’s blog on Looking For The Women (in Ancient Rome) which is a response and sequel to her own excellent Looking For Women in Historically-Based Fantasy Worlds.

“If a story starts with a maiden, let’s not assume that she has to get locked in a tower.”

I haven’t been blogging about writing much lately, meanwhile. I am writing a lot. I’ve started something new while I wait to hear about a whole bunch of irons which may or may not be in the fire. It’s exciting me a lot. I’m also writing a bunch of short fic and trying to get myself Out There. The tiny time windows I have to write in are starting to squeeze tighter and tighter, but there’s nothing I can do about that except breathe deep and carry on. I’m nearly at 50K total fiction words for the year, which would be more exciting if the year wasn’t nearly half over.

The Clarion Write-a-thon just swung past my radar again. I had completely forgotten about it and yet, checking back over my blog, it’s the thing that made the difference in building writing momentum for me last year, and helped me get to the halfway point of my Nancy Napoleon novel. 37,000 words in six weeks, not shabby at all.

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It was a lovely weekend, involving much catching with distant friends in person, a rare treat for me. It did mean that I fell down somewhat on my social media duties, but I don’t think I was the only one! I not only barely tweeted the whole time I was away, but I only took one picture on my phone (of strawberries, not of PEOPLE) and despite sharing a suite with Alex and Alisa entirely failed to record anything for Galactic Suburbia.

Instead, we mostly took part in that classic social medium of talking each other’s ears off before, during and after the awards ceremony, and then again over the longest breakfast in the world with many friends and colleagues the next morning. Bliss!

Some good updates I have seen are from Zena (who I met while lurking outside the theatre waiting to be let in!) and from Sean the Blogonaut, who proved that the best event reporting can come from someone who wasn’t even there.

Apologies for lack of tweetage and podcasting! It’s not that I forgot you all, I was just giddy with child-freedom and the lack of oxygen to my feet after walking in my heels to the theatre…

While I gracefully lost to three very talented women (Sue Isle, Pamela Freeman and Lisa Hannett, hard to argue with that!) in my categories, I was delighted at so many of the wins (including several works/authors I have championed over the last year) that it felt like a very successful night. No one will be surprised at how delighted I was to see The Courier’s New Bicycle honoured. And of course there was the one that hadn’t been mentioned on the shortlist at all…

Galactic Suburbia won the Peter McNamara Convenor’s Award! We are very grateful and happy about that, it was lovely to be able to acknowledge our little podcast’s success on a literal stage in front of our peers. Plus we won actual cash money thanks to the CAL copyright fund, one of the sponsors. We haven’t decided yet what to do with the money once we’ve covered a year or two’s podcast hosting costs (WISCON FUND!) but look forward to wrangling about that decision, possibly even on air.

In the meantime, congratulations to all the other winners, and three cheers for Spec Faction who worked tirelessly to put on another great night for the Australian spec fic community. I am very grateful for their efforts!

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My daughter Raeli brought home a mother’s day gift for me today from school, and was determined that I open it on the spot, since I’ll be away for the Aurealis Awards on the morning of Mother’s Day itself.

The gift was a box with a poem and some marvellous little treasures inside, but that’s not the bit that had me tearing up and hugging her to bits.

It was what was drawn (and written) on the box. My girl, she has such a thoughtful attention to detail.

Another entry in my Flappers with Swords blog tour: I talk about how my love of costume drama has fed my fantasy fiction in Where Costumes Collide over at Fangtastic Fiction

This one slayed me – I had seen hints of the Normal Girl/Other Girls phenomenon on Tumblr, but it made no sense to me out of context. Enter the Mary Sue to explain it to me – hooray! I love the way that this story documents the way that one person’s attempt to parody the representation of women was misunderstood, then reclaimed, and had a massive fandom build around it, all in about 48 hours. Inspector Spacetime, eat your heart out.

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In which the boob window is explained. Don’t say we’re not educational! You can download the new episode through iTunes or here on our website.

News

Drink Tank loves us! Download their Hugo shortlist commentary here.

Mondy loves us too! He makes us go awww.

James Tiptree Jr finally in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and about time too.

Talking to Alistair Reynolds: he defends the idea that science fiction has a limited number of plots

Locus Award Finalists

Clarke Award

Women in (Japanese) Comics: Cheryl Morgan reports; Anime News Network

Some kickstarter stuff:
Feminist Historical Anthology from Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Scalzi on Amanda Palmer and how she worked hard for 10 years to get her “overnight success”

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Two new DC comics launched in the last week or so, and they were the ones I had been hanging out for: World’s Finest, in which Huntress and Power Girl are refugees from an alternate version of reality, trying to get home; and Earth 2, the story of what happened in that alternate reality after a war that wiped out Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (and the loss at the same time of Robin and Supergirl, who of course… are busy in their own comic, calling themselves Huntress and Power Girl).

So how did they stack up?

I did enjoy World’s Finest greatly – the concept of the comic is fantastic, the pacing and dialogue are excellent, and there’s nothing in there yet that makes my inner feminist want to set fire to things. As with many fans of Power Girl and Huntress, I found the reading experience a bit unsettling, because of having to get used to these different versions of the characters, who are now all that we get. But this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do that.

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And we’re off!

First, I turned up at Lynne M Thomas’ Confessions of a Curator blog. Lynne is a big comics reader like I am and so I wrote her a piece based on some ideas that have been churning around in my head lately, as to whether I write epic fantasy, and whether you can have epic fantasy that doesn’t travel anywhere… and I decided that Batman and the near-destruction of Gotham City has a lot to teach epic fantasy about how to do exactly this:

“Everything happens in cities. Some of the best sieges, invasions, tragic love stories and disasters have occurred in urban environments, going right back to the Trojan War. The only reason that fantasy writers generally get hung up about all that mountain trekking is because of being imprinted with Tolkien at an early age. And I’m not saying that wading through all the bracken with your questing party of dwarves is an invalid approach…

But CITIES. Where you can have your crazy magical invasions, your prophets of doom, your dark lords and battles and deadly, world-coming-to-an-end high stakes, and still be able to order dumplings at 2 in the morning.”

Then, over at Karen Healey’s place, she asked me to write about Classics Nerdery in honour of the heroine of her novel Guardian of the Dead, and funnily enough that was something I was perfectly capable of rolling out!

I also bounced with merriment at Karen’s intro to the piece, because I love pretty much everything about her blogging voice.

“We all have favourite historical characters, right? You hear about them in some book, or see a great TV show or movie and start getting interested in the real person, and somehow they take hold of your brain, and you start shipping them with other historical characters, and maybe there’s fanfic, and you have Opinions about, for instance, that person who killed them, or divorced them, or whatever.”

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My favourite fictional device is the odd juxtaposition. Putting two unexpected things together can not only help to bust cliches where possible, but also to keep the poor writer entertained as she drills out her daily word count. So in The Creature Court trilogy, my most powerful character has the little brown mouse as her totem creature, my most dangerous character (yes, really, that one) plays a prancing clown in his day job, and I provided my flappers with swords.

The flappers and indeed the swords are not in any way the most important part of my story. But in my head, that image sums up exactly what the books mean to me. The 1920’s elements in the world building are jammed up against Victoriana, Edwardiana, Roman festivals, and there’s even a cameo appearance of steampunk in the final volume. There are shape-changers and court politics, there is the sky opening up and raining death upon cities below, or even swallowing cities whole. There is love and death and smut and horror and hatred and fear and blood and quite a lot of people arguing in public instead of (or um as well as) ripping each other’s clothes off.

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We would like to thank everyone who nominated our “New Who in Conversation” series for the William Atheling Jr Award – it’s a great honour to be on the ballot! Voting for the annual Ditmar Awards (which the Atheling is included in) is open to all members of Swancon 36 (2011 Natcon – Perth) and Craftinomicon (2012 Natcon – Melbourne), and can be done online.

The Doctor – David Tennant
Martha Jones – Freema Agyeman
Joan Redfern – Jessica Hynes

Script by Paul Cornell
Director: Charles Palmer

TEHANI:
Before we wriggle on to some of the best eps yet, a quick look at those we’ve skipped…

“Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks” – over the top, quite offensively horrible in some places, and really not at all engaging. Oh, and another “last Daleks eva” storyline, with the Cult of Skaro back again. I pretty much skimmed this on the rewatch and didn’t feel I’d missed anything at all. In fact, I wish I hadn’t bothered at all and never reminded myself of the horrible pig-men. And I REALLY wish this hadn’t been dragged out to two episodes – perhaps in one it would have been a bit better. I think I know what it was aiming to say, but for me, it was definitely a low of New Who.

DAVID:
Wow, you really didn’t like it! I actually quite enjoyed it, and my inner romantic was very happy that Laszlo and Tallulah ended up together at the end. My only real issue, and I am afraid that it really did bug me, was the way that the human hybrid version of Dalek Sec talked, it was atrocious.

TANSY:
I think this is one of my long-term least favourite, and nothing much has changed! The concept of the Daleks in 1930s New York is brilliant, and I liked the idea that they are the only reason the Empire State Building got built, but there isn’t much for me to love here.

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Aliette DeBodard talks about female protagonists in historical fantasy, and Kate Elliott responds by talking about female protagonists in fantasy-inspired-by-history. Between the two of them and the comments section there is some great, crunchy discussion.

Kate also appears on the Fantasy Cafe as part of their Women in SFF Month with a marvellous essay about learning that you don’t have to despise being a girl in order to play with the cool toys.

Kirstyn McDermott provides a counterpoint to the ‘women on urban fantasy book covers’ discussion by pointing out an example of getting it right. She is also interviewed by Dr Lisa & Dr Angela with Oops Your Psychosis is Showing. Later (Kirstyn is on FIRE this week!) she blogs about the consequences of being a girl, and the way we are socialised to view the world.

A lovely essay on the Mary Sue talks about having a four year old daughter who loves superheroes. I think you all know how much this resonates with me!

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