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EPISODE 24

In which we flit over the first shortlist of the year and some charitable links, sweep though a fortnight of culture consumed, and then leap with both feet into the pet subject of Inside Indie Press.

News

BSFA Awards Shortlists

http://vectoreditors.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/2010-bsfa-awards-shortlists-2/

QLD Flood fundraisers for writers & readers:
After the Rain: http://bit.ly/AtRFloods
Authors for Queensland auction http://authorsforqueensland.wordpress.com
QWC appeal launches Saturday, on Twitter at @writersonrafts

What Culture Have we Consumed?
Tansy: no books for me, shockingly! More Big Finish audio plays. (http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/no-end-in-sight-for-big-finish/

http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/science-fiction-on-the-radio/)

Alex: Agatha H and the Airship City, Phil and Kaja Foglio (http://randomalex.net/2011/01/14/smellink-verra-nize-indeed/); Transformation Space, Marianne de Pierres; Dust, Elizabeth Bear (http://randomalex.net/2011/01/18/dust-by-elizabeth-bear/); two stories from James Tiptree’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (spoilery discussion at http://dreamsandspeculation.com/2011/01/15/january-tiptree-discussion/); The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (http://randomalex.net/2011/01/19/the-name-of-the-wind/). Also begun a rewatch of BSG…
Alisa: No Ordinary Family, Dexter season 5

(diversion on the subject of Whether Alisa Should Watch Doctor Who)

Pet Subject: Inside Indie Press
Big news in TPP space is the closure of Speakeasy.

Is there an obvious point at which a project becomes a non-viable project?
How do you know that you’re ditching a project just because the stories don’t fit your particular idea/viewpoint?

The older books are harder to use as examples because lots of things about them were learning.
Horn – first to break even BUT i got caught on the selling to bookstores so i ended up having to sell 80% of the print run after review and buzz copies (1/4 of the print run) to break even.

Pay scales, writing contracts, competing with the US indies…

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

So that was November, then…

I was pleased that I managed to make the month so productive, despite the urge to collapse in a heap in the wake of finally, finally, finally finishing the draft of book 3 (which it appears is most likely to be titled Reign of Beasts). Thanks to my List of Doom, I kept writing, putting together a draft of a publishing proposal for Fury to be polished up in the New Year, I started editing Blueberry again, which is going to be my summer project, I read books which had been archived on my shelves far too long, and I sewed – bookmarks for a friend’s commission, finishing the top of a baby quilt, and the beginnings of a new crazy quilt.

And you know, in the midst of all that I pushed through my copy edits for The Shattered City (Book 2), and prepared for & taught a one day course on writing fantasy novels.

One of the items on my list was to write a short story. Originally I had another plan for that, but then Alisa went and rejected two stories from a project we were doing together, which left me having to start from scratch! (In a good way. I am hugely excited now about what I’m doing, and she was totally right to kick those stories to the curb. Good enough is totally not good enough.) One of those stories is now done thanks to the List of Doom, and I have to write the other as soon as I can. I’m in a weird in-between-professional-deadlines space right now, where I don’t know where the next deadline is coming from. I will receive proofs for Book 2 and structural edits for Book 3 at SOME point, and everything will have to be dropped to do them, but I don’t know when. All the more reason to polish off my other necessary jobs ASAP, especially as I only have another fortnight or so before the school holidays hit, and there’s no such thing as a truly productive work day until late February.

But in any case, I did my not-Nano November, and while I never got up the high energy equivalent to writing 50K (as it turned out, writing about 5-6000 words as part of smaller projects was my limit) I managed to complete 34/35 items, and that last one was a crazy quilt square that I could have polished off at the last day if I’d dropped everything to do it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to prioritise that way.

Once I get this last story done, which I have been plotting and replotting in my head so it’s just about ready to burn up the page, I am officially free of commitments, and I would love to have a little of that freedom before I get publisher deadlines again – one thing I have learned this year is that you can’t use ALL the time you have until the end of a deadline, as other things are always turning up to compete, usually in the last two weeks. I’ve always been one to start slowly and build up momentum to rip through the work at a high pace in those last couple of weeks, and so the stop-start-stop-start work pace this year has thrown me for a loop more than once.

I honestly thought I would never get to the end of Book 3. I seemed to be constantly one month from getting it done, and every time I had to stop and start again, I lost momentum and had to “waste” time scrabbling around and getting my zone back, only to be interrupted with a new urgent task as soon as I got up a decent head of steam.

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This week has been a frenzy of podcasting. We’ve put up a whole bunch of Galactic Suburbia episodes that we recorded during Aussiecon in Melbourne, and then this morning Jonathan Strahan called Alisa and I in to guest on his podcast as The Coode St Feminist Advisory Committee.

Check it out:

Galactic Suburbia 15.0 – “Live” at Aussiecon
Galactic Suburbia 15.1 – Ditmar Special and Girl Genius Interview
Galactic Suburbia 15.2 – Hugo Special
Galactic Suburbia 15.3 – Worldcon Wrap Up

Coode St Episode 17 – featuring Tansy & Alisa from Galactic Suburbia

And of course you can also find these by searching for Galactic Suburbia or Notes From Coode Street on iTunes.

[direct from the iPad: a drawing by Raeli of Alisa at the TPP dealer's table]

memorable moment: Mondy staring at Aifin after about 10 minutes intense conversation about iPad sleeves and suddenly announcing, “Hang on, are you THE PRODUCER?”

many other memorable moments: Alex, expecting to be completely anonymous at this con, being faced by various people saying “are you ALEX FROM MELBOURNE?”

drink of the convention: the purple daiquiris at the Voyager 15 party.

frocks of the convention: Alex, Alisa & Terri at the Hugos.

book of the convention: THE LITTLE PINK ONE.

You can find a video here of Tony C Smith’s live broadcast of his reaction to the Hugo awards. About 40 mins in, he finds out he won the Best Fanzine for Starship Sofa and explodes with joy. It’s also a nice little visual of what it’s like to be following award ceremonies (as I usually am) via the internet.

Blindmouse’s con report (including a well thought out response to my disastrous female superhero panel)
Random Tangent has some great, detailed reports about panels attended. My favourite of course is Day 3 which refers to my feminism in fantasy panel!
Megan with glorious enthusiasm about her first ever lit panel.
Catherynne Valente documents how it feels to lose a Hugo.
Gary Kemble has gathered some links.
Voyager on the inaugural winner of the Norma K Hemming Award (THE NORMA!!!), Maria Quinn.

Tehani’s con report.
Flinthart’s con report
Mondy on life after Worldcon.

Thanks to Jonathan Strahan for pointing me towards this shortlist on the Capclave blog. Being nominated for an award like this, outside my own country, is super exciting. I really do love Siren Beat, and Alisa, Dion and Amanda did such a fantastic job of producing a beautiful book for it to live in.

Also, how fantastic is it to have an award especially for stories published by small presses?

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The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2010 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction (published in 2009):

“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, published in Clockwork Phoenix 2, edited by Mike Allen, Norilana Books (July 2009).

“Images of Anna” by Nancy Kress, published in Fantasy Magazine, edited by Cat Rambo (September 2009).

“James and the Dark Grimoire” by Kevin Lauderdale, published in Cthulhu Unbound, edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri, Permuted Press, (March 2009).

“Race to the Moon” by Kyell Gold, published in New Fables, Summer 2009, edited by Tim Susman, Sofawolf Press (July 2009).

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster, published in Interzone (January 2009) / Apex Magazine (August 2009), edited by Andy Cox (Interzone)/ Catherynne M. Valente (Apex).

“Siren Beat” by Tansy Rayner Roberts, published in Twelfth Planet Press, edited by Alisa Krasnostein (October 2009).

“The Pirate Captain’s Daughter” by Yoon Ha Lee, published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #27, 10/08/2009, edited Scott H. Andrews.

“The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” by Jeff Soesbe, published in DayBreak Magazine, edited by Jetse de Vries (October 2009).

The award honors the efforts of small press publishers in providing a critical venue for short fiction in the area of speculative fiction. The award showcases the best original short fiction published by small presses in the previous year (2009). An unusual feature of the selection process is that all voting is done with the identity of the author (and publisher) hidden so that the final choice is based solely on the quality of the story.

The winner is chosen by the members of the Washington Science Fiction Association (www.wsfa.org) and will be presented at their annual convention, Capclave (www.capclave.org), held this year on October 22-24th in Rockville, Maryland.

So there’s a new Galactic Suburbia podcast due to be recorded this week, and I have some homework left over from last time! That is:

Dear Tansy,

Alisa

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Angela Slatter includes me in her drive-by interview series.

New Power and Majesty reviews at ASiF and Fangtastic Fiction.

The recently relaunched Galaxy Bookshop blog asks me some crunchy questions about books and hosts a guest post from me about the writing of Power and Majesty.

I also wrote a post for the Voyager blog, about how I created the place names for my fantasy city.

One last reminder about the Tansy podcast goodness for this month: I read “Fleshy” for TISF, Tehani Wessely reads my story “Relentless Adaptations” from the upcoming suburban fantasy anthology “Sprawl,” and I chat with Alisa and Alex about boots and many many et ceteras over at Galactic Suburbia Episode 12.

I linked yesterday to Tehani Wessely’s reading of my story “Relentless Adaptations” from the upcoming Twelfth Planet Press anthology Sprawl. Only commented on it in passing, because I hadn’t actually listened to it yet! But I did today, on my way to and from a baby playgroup (very appropriate) and it was so lovely to hear it!

This is a story I am especially proud of because it’s the first piece of new writing I produced after Jem was born, and like my story “The Scent of Milk” was for Raeli, it’s a story that sums up the very specific feelings of having a new baby in your life. In both cases I deliberately tried to infuse the story with as much of the crazy that was whirling in my head at the time, in order to capture the moment.

With “Scent of Milk” I was overwhelmed by the closeness with my new baby, and how quickly she seemed to change day to day. I was late in my pregnancy when the “baby Montana” kidnapping hit the news, and while the story resolved happily, I found myself obsessing about what it must be like to miss out on a few days, let alone weeks, of your baby at that age. That turned of course into a story about changelings, and a mother’s hunt to get her baby back no matter what.

This time around, my thoughts were mostly about just coping with it all: with sleep deprivation, the great sibling balancing act, and trying to get back to work. There’s also that deep suspicion that everyone else is somehow doing better at the whole parenting gig than you are… and mixed in with that was books, writing, reading, and the business. I wanted to write a near future science fiction story that predicted what bookshops might look like in five years time, once the Espresso Book Machine and print-on-demand became more readily available, while at the same time “predicting” a rather alarming result from the current literary trend of mashing up classic books with supernatural movie tropes.

It was so lovely to hear the story read today and realise that actually, it’s exactly what I wanted to do with that story, and to top it off it’s read by Tehani, who is not only a good friend, but a suburban mum who, like me, had a new baby in the last year and understands a lot of what the story is trying to do.

Books and babies, babies and books. Luckily we were born with two arms, so we can juggle both.

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“Relentless Adaptations” can be heard here, and will be published in Sprawl, an anthology of suburban fantasy, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, due out in time for Aussiecon in September 2010.

I’ve spent the day ripping central chapters out by their roots and replacing a whole bunch of madeyuppy rubbish with saner, cleaner, sexier narrative. It hurts, my brain, it hurts.

So all I can offer in the way of useful bloggage are some good things that other people have been writing:

Tehani interviews Malindo Lo (check out the Fablecroft blog for some other great interviews this week)

Kaaron Warren talks about getting ideas for endings, while Catherynne Valente talks about the importance of the opening paragraph

Why the Dove Movement is bad for your daughters (via Copperbadge/Sam Storyteller)

Stephanie Gunn responds to our latest (tenth!!!) Galactic Suburbia podcast, talking about her early experiences in reading genre.

A powerful post about what it can be like bringing a second baby into your family.

And Alisa has posted her list of Twelfth Planet Press eligible works and eligible artwork for the Ditmars that are currently open for nominations. This is convenient for me because all my eligible stories were published by Twelfth Planet Press!

That is:

“Like Us,” Shiny Issue 5 – short story
“Prosperine When It Sizzles,” New Ceres Nights – short story
Siren Beat – novelette

When my brain is together enough to sift through old recs posts I will put up a list of Australian stuff I liked in 2009! It seems so very long ago, doesn’t it?

In closing, Tehani pointed me at this announcement that 69 year old Wonder Woman has finally been allowed to swap the flag-bearing minidress/shorts for some sensible threads. I’m dubious about the Superman-style alternate version of her backstory, but I do like the mature, Black Canary style costume. And Issue 600 of her monthly comic (amazing what people will do to hang on to a franchise) is definitely something to be celebrated.

Another episode of Galactic Suburbia! We talk about magazines, books, authors and conventions, as well as delving into the Hugo Packet. It’s on iTunes too!
EDIT: Mp3 download now available at the site.

News

The Realms of Fantasy Letter
And discussion on this as well as some less savoury comments on multicultural fantasy: http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1481350.html

http://mishellbaker.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/farewell-to-realms-of-fantasy-again/

http://io9.com/comment/23984576/

http://www.blackgate.com/2010/06/02/goodbye-realms-of-fantasy-again/#comments

Top 20 under 40 - a list of hot young literary authors with excellent gender & cultural balance

The Periodic Table of Women in Science Fiction

Tracy & Laura Hickman releasing a new novel by subscription format, with book provided at the end, to launch a new publishing venture.

Tansy’s Podcast for her new book

Reading

Alex: Hugo packet, graphic story: Girl Genius vol 9 (also vol 1-4); Fables vol 12: the Dark Ages; Schlock Mercenary; Batman: Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader; Captain Britain and MI13: vol 3, Vampire State.
Hugo packet, novellas: The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker; The God Engines, John Scalzi; Shambling towards Hiroshima, James Morrow; Vishnu at the Cat Circus, Ian McDonald.
Also: Blonde Bombshell, Tom Holt;
The Wind-up Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi; Steam Engine Time #11 and #12, ed. Bruce Gillespie and Jan Stinson.

Alisa: White Cat, Holly Black; listening to Bad Film Diaries – Grant Watson

Tansy: Hugo Packet: Girl Genius 09/Fables: The Dark Ages/Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader; also Changeless, by Gail Carriger; Perchance to Dream, Lisa Mantchev

Pet Topic
Worldcon and conventions – why we go and what to expect?
How is it different for work/industry/fan
What are panels all about? Any best/worst that we can talk about?
Book launches – like em? hate em? go for the free champagne?
What are room parties? how do you get invited?
Why does everything happen at the bar?
What’s the dealer’s room deal?
Art show?

Feedback to galacticsuburbia@gmail.com