While we’re talking awards news, the winners of the Australian Shadows Award have been announced, and I was very pleased to see Kaaron Warren win Best Long Fiction for Slights, which I still think was the best novel of the year despite being a deeply unpleasant reading experience (in, you know, a good way). Deborah Biancotti also took out Best Short Fiction for “Six Suicides” from A Book of Endings (Twelfth Planet Press), which is exciting – while the reader feedback for this book as a whole was very positive, the individual stories didn’t receive much attention in the early days so it’s lovely to see a bit of happy awardness going to it now.

Grants Pass edited by Jennifer Brozek & Amanda Pillar (Morrigan Books) took the third Shadows Award for Best Edited Publication which means 100% female recipients this year.

The words “no women in horror my arse” come to mind, somehow.

Congratulations to all the winners. I’d add my hope that the winner statues this year are less offensively sexist than in previous years, but I suspect this won’t be the case. I suppose someone could always knit a few sensible jumpers for the poor lasses, though trenchcoats might be more appropriate, somehow.

Deborah Biancotti has written a gorgeous essay about how creepy, horrific, threatening and generally unfriendly she finds the Australian landscape. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, undercutting and at the same time contributing to a couple of centuries of problematic attempts by writers and artists to describe, capture and define something that is pretty damn alien.

I remember hearing a story of a “genius” English painter who came out to Australia to capture the landscape, only to discover that we had the wrong kind of green. Not in paint, you understand. The trees were the wrong kind of green. Traditionally, most 19th century Australian painters approached our landscape as if it was – well, England, only without the hedgehogs.

I’m sure every country and culture has an idealised literary tradition to rail against. (Have you read a Beatrix Potter lately? Jemima Puddleduck, for example, rivals Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a place on the list of “books that make you want to kill yourself.”) But there’s something about Australia – the combination of fear and dread and danger and shame… the fact that even someone my age was so swamped with British culture that I have struggled to understand or appreciate any of the Great Australian Authors.

I live in Tasmania, which is completely unlike most of the rest of Australia. The thing, though, about Australia, is that just about everywhere is unlike most of the rest of Australia. The idea of some kind of collective identity seems strange. I remember when I and the other ROR writers were putting our series bible and pitch for the Lost Shimmaron series – we all lived in different parts of Australia, but we needed a town to base all the stories in. For the sake of appealing to as wide a range of Australian kids as possible, we needed somewhere generic, but you know, there is no generic Australian town, or generic Australian experience. There’s a big difference between living in Queensland, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, and that’s even before you get to the great divide between the eastern and western states.

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Deborah Biancotti’s first short story won an Aurealis Award in 2001, and her first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS, was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award 2010. She is now working on her first novel, working title BROKEN, and has new fiction launching at WorldCon in September.

1. A Book of Endings has been building steam, with many people locally and overseas singling it out as a great collection. Did you achieve everything you hoped to with this book? What did you learn from the experience of putting the collection together with Twelfth Planet Press?

I learned to write under pressure and to forever put aside any hopes I had of being one of those ‘precious’ writers. Editors and friends will just not let me get away with it.

The book-delivery process was incredibly bloody useful, actually, and transformative. I went in a lot more fearful than I’ve come out. I no longer fear deadlines, for example. Though I may occasionally still screw them up. But if I’d had any outstanding issues with the idea of myself as a working writer, those are settled now.

Not sure I achieved everything I hoped to. The world domination still seems a ways off. Editor & publisher Alisa Krasnostein suggested I see the book as a bridge between the writing I’ve done & the writing I want to do next, & for me the book definitely achieves that. There’s a bit of experimentation in the collection, in an attempt to see what would happen if I put some of my more out-there stuff in front of people. The response has been mostly pretty positive, or at least not negative enough that I’ve noticed.

2. Your short stories have always leaned towards the experimental, and you could certainly find an audience among mainstream literary readers – what is it about speculative fiction that draws you in? What does genre have to offer you as a writer?

Well, I hate being bored. That’s really what keeps me reading & writing in genre. I don’t think I’ve ever even really considered working in the mainstream, & my few early forays into mainstream lit (either by reading books from award lists, or joining a non-genre workshop/writing group, or going to poetry readings, etc) all left me feeling like I had a sharp attack of dry-mouth. Maybe I accidentally kept bumping into the pointy, pretentious end of mainstream & missed finding the soft, gooey centre that I’m sure exists.

Nowdays I’m actually reading a lot of crime & thriller writing, & LOVING it! But there’ll always be something genre-like about my writing. The world is too weird NOT to write weirdly about it.

3. You’ve been working on The Novel for some time – how are you finding the transition between writing short and writing long? Are novels where you see your future? What can you tell us about the novel you are working on?

The Novel is 3 years & 1 month old! It’s a near-future psychological thriller – if you’re a mainstream reader. If you’re a genre reader it’s a good ol’ parallel universe urban fantasy — with a Minotaur. It’s getting close to done now, too. This draft is as much fun as the first one was, & a heck of a lot more fun than some of the drafts in-between were.

The transition is tough as hell and advice from novelists is conflicting if it exists at all. Every author has to learn the process for themselves, what works, what doesn’t. It’s bloody hard & you wish there was just one right way to do it so you could get on with the writing.

The best thing I did was stop reading novels I thought I should be reading & start reading novels I enjoy. ‘Cos if you’re going to spend 3 years & a month writing a novel, it really should be one you enjoy reading, right? Right.

It’s so obvious in hindsight.

Yes, I’d love to keep doing novels. They are a bunch of fun! It’s like having invisible friends. You can make up an entire world and live there for a while. Who wouldn’t want that?

I also plan to get faster at it.

4. Which Australian writers or work would you like to see on the Hugo shortlists this year?

All of them!

5. Are you planning to go to Aussiecon 4 in September? If so, what are you most looking forward to?

If I mention ‘the bar’ again people will think I’m an alcoholic. I’m one of the babes born of the 1999 WorldCon in Melbourne, so for me this’ll be a bit of a coming of age. I think what I’m looking forward to is going in as an adult this time, with a bunch of achievements I can point to as ‘this is what I’ve been doing since then’, rather than that really difficult full-of-hope-but-otherwise-untested state pre-published writers have to endure as a first step. Maybe it’s time to do some paying forward.

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Previously in Snapshot: Marianne De Pierres, Richard Harland, Karen Miller, Margo Lanagan, Ben Peek, Narelle Harris, Paul Collins, Damien Broderick, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Angela Slatter, Dion Hamill, Garth Nix, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trudi Canavan, Thoraiya Dyer, Keith Stevenson, Juliet Marillier, Gillian Polack, Jason Fischer, Alisa Krasnostein, Tehani Wessely, Amanda Rainey, Justine Larbalestier, Rowena Cory Daniells, Glenda Larke, Adrian (K.A.) Bedford, Kaaron Warren, Nicole Murphy, D.M. Cornish, Deborah Kalin, Jonathan Strahan, Alan Baxter, Gary Kemble, Lezli Robyn, Kate Eltham, Robert Hoge, Will Elliott, Trent Jamieson, Felicity Dowker, Jack Dann, Lee Battersby, Peter M Ball, Nyssa Pascoe, Lucy Sussex, Andrew McKiernan, Amanda Pillar

Snapshot interviews will be blogged from Monday 15th until Sunday 22nd Feb.

To read them hot off the press, check these blogs daily:
http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
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.

Shiny #6 is out! With, among other things, the latest Dirk Flinthart short story within.

This is sadly the final issue of Shiny, a labour of love for those of us involved. I was very pleased with the issues I had editorial input in (1-3), enjoyed reading issue 4 as a civilian, and was very proud to be published in issue 5 with “Like Us,” one of the two Shiny stories that scored an Aurealis Award nomination last year.

Back issues of the ezine are available here.

Elsewhere on the internet, Connie Willis talks about Blackout and All Clear.

The always smart and eloquent Kate Harding talks about the problematic aspects of Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.

Jim C Hines, who impresses me more and more each time I read his blog, has some valuable thoughts on the representation of masculinity and men in our society.

Charles Tan did a great post about some of the misconceptions about the Amazon v. Macmillan situation.

Deb Biancotti’s A Book of Endings received an awesome review at Strange Horizons.

Ticonderoga will be publishing collections by two great Australian writers in time for Aussiecon 4: Kaaron Warren and Angela Slatter.

Oh, and that reminds me that we are hosting the Australian Speculative Carnival at Ripping Ozzie Reads on the 15th – drop me a line or a comment if you have any blog posts to rec!

In honour of it being awards season, Twelfth Planet Press is offering free e-copies of Horn, A Book of Endings and SIREN BEAT through the month of February.

If you’re eligible to nominate in the Hugos or the Ditmars, obviously we’d love it if you thought any of the above works were worthy of your nomination. (not sure when the Ditmars are opening for nominations but it’s sure to happen eventually)

Even better, if you enjoy reading your free e-copies, consider buying a hard copy of your favourite Twelfth Planet Press book. Indie press appreciates your support!