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.

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.”

NOT an official part of this blog tour, I also turned up at Cheryl Morgan’s blog this week, finally answering a question she asked me to write about some time ago, on the topic of Is Australian Fantasy Dominated By Women?. It has pie charts (courtesy of the awesome Tsana) and everything – I couldn’t organise a pie chart in a pie factory! I hesitated over how to write this one because I know some people are quite sensitive over the issue, and because I don’t think it’s a good idea to fuel any arguments along the lines of ‘well sexism is over then, so make me a sandwich.’ But stats are fascinating, always. And people will make of it what they will.

“The truth is that as long as Australia has had an active professional science fiction and fantasy publishing industry, female authors and readers have been a massive part of its success. While Australia has also had successful male authors in science fiction and in fantasy, we have never lacked for female role models; living proof that a) fantasy by women can sell in high numbers and b) fantasy doesn’t necessarily become less epic because of a female byline.”

If you live in the Sydney area and you love SF/Fantasy, come along to the Aurealis Awards this Saturday! I’m excited to be going again, rocking my Success Frock, and hanging out with friends, meeting new people in the industry, and so on. The M.C. is Kate Forsyth, it’s in a gorgeous little theatre, and you can still buy tickets!

Aurealis Awards, Sat 12 May at the Independent Theatre, North Sydney. Doors open 7.30pm.

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.

But the cover image I most longed for to represent the books as a whole was one of my flappers with a sword. I angled for this with every volume, and was very excited to finally get one with Book Three, Reign of Beasts. But while I love my covers, none of them quite have the ‘1920’s’ vibe that I crave. So when I decided to commission a piece of artwork from Kathleen Jennings (the queen of nostalgic fashion plates) to illustrate this blog tour, and promote the availability of the Creature Court books outside (HOORAY!) Australia, this was the first and only image that came to mind.

Kathleen was slightly evil and sketched me a whole bunch of gorgeous, glorious and quite different flappers with swords, only one of which I could take for this particular project, but which she is holding in reserve for me (EVIL, I TELL YOU) should they be necessary at a later date. Of course they will be. Flappers are essential!

Myself, this particular flapper and her sword will be visiting a few different blogs this week, to talk about all manner of topics including fantasy fiction, history, Batman and frocks. I hope you enjoy coming along for the ride! I’ll put up link updates every few days, and do one big fancy round up at the end.

If you want to get into the spirit of promoting the Creature Court with me this week (and none of you should feel in anyway obliged – just reading my blog is more than enough support, and I appreciate it!) then the best way would be to put up a review of one of my books on Amazon/the Kindle store. Just a few extra reviews can make all the difference.

My library (with me in it) was a centrefold in today’s Hobart Mercury, along with a great article by Bec Fitzgibbon on genre, gender and publishing. Is gender equality the next big thing in literature?

This pic courtesy of @beesncheese who achieved something I never have, by capturing a picture of my mother smiling at the camera, rather than diving behind the nearest rosebush to avoid it. All my other pics of her smiling have only been achieved by the judicious application of grandchildren and stealth.

The Creature Court trilogy is now available in the UK & US (& Canada too!) on the Kindle. This is hugely exciting for me, because it’s very hard for people outside Australia to access books that are only published here – bless the handful of you who utilised carrier pigeons, magic carpets and bricks-and-mortar to get hold of hard copies.

Hopefully HarperCollins will make the books available in other e-formats as well, later in the year. In the meantime, if Kindle is your e-reader of choice, go forth and explore the Creature Court!

I’d also appreciate any signal boosting my existing readers feel comfortable with – trying to promote the wider availability of books that have been out for some time is a tricky thing. I’m planning some fun promotional stuff over the next few weeks but in the mean time – if you have read the Creature Court and you liked it a lot, now would be a great time to tell others about it!

Book One – Power and Majesty
Book Two – The Shattered City
Book Three – Reign of Beasts

Sorry overseas people, this one is specifically an Australian giveaway. Meanwhile, apparently Reign of Beasts is available on the Kindle stores in the US and UK, but I still haven’t heard when the first two books will be likewise available. Hopefully I can make an announcement on that soon! I know not everyone has access to Kindle e-books but it’s a start!

UPDATE: Have been given an ETA on 10 days for the whole trilogy to be available internationally in Kindle store. Will report when I hear about other platforms. In the mean time, if you come across Power and Majesty or Shattered City in an international e-book store, please let me know!

This is one I meant to bring to the table at our recent recording of Galactic Suburbia (should be up tonight) but forgot: craft is at the top of the cultural activities performed by Australians, but our peak funding body for cultural activities has just defunded Craft Australia. (I didn’t even know there was a Craft Australia!) There’s plenty of gender & class privilege to unpack here, as there usually is when the line between craft and art is drawn.

Speaking of stuff I probably should have included in this week’s GS – Nicola Griffith talks about How To Fix Gender Bias in book journalism.

I have written a few posts in places other than here on the internet this week: I talk about fantasy words and names on the Voyager blog, in response to this lovely post by Natalie Costa Bir who talks about the vocab I use in the Creature Court books.

pic thanks to the Mary Sue

Speaking of all Doctor Who all the time, here’s a lovely standalone interlude to Girl on the Moon’s ongoing Tenth Doctor comic strip, in which the Doctor decides to wait until he’s Eleven (and has the Ponds along) to go visit guerilla Mickey and Martha at the end of The End of Time Part II. It’s lovely!

Jo Walton linked to this great Pinterest board of book covers from her heroine’s reading material in Among Others. If you liked the book, this should resonate with you – it feels like walking into a second hand bookshop! (also I’m starting to get a feel for what Pinterest is useful for. Don’t suppose someone wants to do a board of all the books Galactic Suburbia has recommended to people??)

On Tiger Beatdown, an angry and rather inspiring post about feeling discomfort with International Women’s Day, and the limited view of what a woman is, as shown in the international media.

Check out this extraordinary collaboration between singer/songwriter and Triple j Unearthed winner Yunyu, Aussie manga artist Queenie Chan, with animation by the Commonist: Twisted Tales Episode 1 – Dorothy. Has anyone else ever put Dorothy of Oz in space before? This is such a gorgeous piece of work, I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Steeles Island, a mostly-private peninsula out near Carlton Beach (on the eastern shore of the Derwent River), turned out to have all these things in spades. It was a lucky find, as it turned out to have so many benefits we hadn’t even hoped for.

This particular ROR (wRiters on the Road/Rise/Riesling) had a family theme to it. We’d only included family members once before, when little Raeli was too young for me to bear leaving her behind for a whole four days, and so she and my honey came along to a North West Coast Tasmanian ROR, staying nights with us at the Hawley Beach house we rented, and disappearing during the days to visit relatives. This time around, we planned to do something similar only with Jem along – and then Margo and Rowena decided to bring family members too!

The house was so decadently large that we were able to critique separately from the non-writers in our party, and had the benefit of getting to know each other’s families as well as the non-stop industry talk that characterises these retreats.

We tried the experiment of using an iPad and Skype to include a long-distance member, with our virtual Maxine sitting in on a couple of sessions, as well as getting to have one of her own. It worked a lot better than we suspected it would, and while you wouldn’t want to do it every time or for every session (the great value in these retreats is getting to hang out in person) it was certainly better than having no Maxine at all! Those who weren’t experienced with Skype found it quite distracting to be talking to a black panel, and we talked at one stage about decorating a boiled egg to represent our Maxine (a random apple core just didn’t have the right aura about it) but we coped valiantly with the technical challenge. A good precedent, I think. We had also meant to record podcasts while we were there, but totally forgot. Sorry!

We were right on the beach, so the girls (and grown ups) tracked sand everywhere, indulged in recreational sweeping (or as Jem put it: the Cleaning Game) and generally had a ball. The tennis courts, mini-golf, swings, kayaks, and especially the pool table were all utilised, and we were greatly entertained by the facilities we could never use to their full extent, like the six fridges, three ovens and gazillion beds – the house is usually used to cater family weddings and conventions, and can comfortably sleep 20, or feed 50. The non-writers also took the chance to go off adventuring, as we were close to historical sites like Port Arthur, and tourist attractions like the berry farm.

And oh, everywhere we looked there was water, sand or greenery. A beautiful place, inspiring and (mostly) secluded. The mud crabs delighted the girls, as did the ocean in their back yard, and I only regret that the changeable Hobart weather only created two perfect swimming days – the one when we arrived and the one when we left, of course! The storm in between was marvellously atmospheric, though, and we only had one day so cold that the mainlanders started to look a bit grim and shivery. And yes, we let them have a wood fire.

The food as ever was epic, Dirk being delighted with the best kitchen we’d ever provided for one of these events – he offered up salmon, salads, baked chicken in damper crust, smashed potatoes, butter chicken, lemon cake with strawberries, pancakes and a truly luscious bread and butter pudding. Also fresh-baked bread, and for one especially memorable breakfast, petit pain au chocolat hot from the oven. The older kids often hung out with him in the kitchen, and he shared cooking tips and techniques with them. Raeli was especially excited to see bread made from scratch! We also ate our way through titanic quantities of fresh dark cherries and sweet greengages.

Being so close to Barilla Bay, we had to “do oysters” one night! We did have permission to raid the local oyster beds, but they were frighteningly large and mostly underwater, so we ended up playing it safe and not risking the wrath of the sea gods. We bought seven dozen and ate our way through them on the night of the official release dates of Margo’s and my books – particularly appropriate for Sea Hearts! Though no seal wives were harmed in the making of our dinner.

It wasn’t all eating and talking – though of course that is a huge part of our ROR weeks! There was work, too, and we critted up a storm, with quite intense working sessions that left us light headed and sleepy by the time evening came around. There is absolutely no price you could put on the benefit we get from having so many dedicated professionals giving feedback on your book-in-progress, and getting a window into their process at the same time. We had books that were fragment first drafts, books which were five minutes away from going to the publisher, and everything in between.

And of course, what is workshopped at ROR stays at ROR. But oh, I wish I could tell you about these fabulous books that are coming!

We talked a lot about worldbuilding as plot, one of my favourite writing techniques, because once it was raised in one session, it became relevant to all the others (of course!). We talked a bit about agents, ebooks and the changing marketplace, too. And, it being our anniversary ROR (we didn’t manage to have one for our ten year mark – this makes it eleven) we ended up looking back on our our careers had changed and developed since the original five of the group came together. Rowena has been archiving the goals we set every ROR, and it’s fascinating to see which of our past predictions came true, and which were heartlessly abandoned. Marianne and Trent (and Maxine, of course) we missed you MOST on that night!

I’m very pleased that I managed to time my book launch to fit with the last day of ROR (it involved some very precise timing and great goodwill on the part of my publisher!) and even more pleased that Margo was able to join me. It’s a rare thing to have so many of MY author people at one of my book launches, and it felt like an appropriately dramatic way to celebrate the end of a trilogy that began, as many of my books do, with a ROR manuscript. [more launch pics here]

It all feels a little flat now it’s over – and we keep thinking of other ways to use that magnificent house! It would be a fabulous site for a Clarion style writing workshop, or boutique professional conference. (Tehani and Terri, take note) The sign of a good ROR is that we start musing nostalgically about coming back to that particular place before we’ve even left… but of course, we never do. There are always new places to explore.

Rowena’s ROR report here, with a bunch of different pictures of different bits of the house and island!

Margo’s report on the ROR blog, talking about Formidable Energies – the very very early stage novel she brought to our workshop!

SERIOUSLY DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR REIGN OF BEASTS & THE CREATURE COURT BOOKS

Many bookloving folk in Hobart and from farther afield gathered last night to celebrate the double launch of two much-anticipated Australian fantasy novels: Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin) and Reign of Beasts: Creature Court Book Three by Tansy Rayner Roberts (HarperVoyager). Sea Hearts was launched by Richard Harland, and Reign of Beasts by Rowena Cory Daniells.

It was lovely to see so many family and friends gathered once again for what has become an annual tradition in recent years – long may it continue! – the launch of one of my books. Even more special was to share this with members of my writing group, who are normally scattered more widely across Australia when an event like this happens.

I began the Creature Court with ROR, who workshopped the first volume through a couple of early drafts, so it felt very appropriate to bring the trilogy to a close with many of them: Rowena Cory Daniells, Margo Lanagan, Dirk Flinthart and Richard Harland, in attendance. Sad of course that we couldn’t be joined by Marianne De Pierres, Trent Jamieson and Maxine McArthur! Their absence was felt.

The Hobart Bookshop put on an excellent launch, as they always do. I was delighted to welcome Tehani, new import to our shores, along with her family, and to finally meet Lian Tanner, another local writer whose path has never entirely crossed mine before.

And, of course, while books and launch speeches and wine are all terribly important things, the MOST important thing is that, yet again, my gorgeous daughters dressed for the occasion, as a lion and tiger respectively. Goodness only knows what I’ll do when I have a seamonster book to launch.

Thanks for coming, everyone who came!

Margo and I were both delighted to see our books hurled into the stratosphere with such panache, and of course those who weren’t able to make the event can assuage their disappointment by picking up copies in good (Australian and New Zealand only for now, sigh) bookshops.