Just a reminder that you can hear me reading my story Fleshy at Terra Incognita SF.

TISF is a great monthly podcast which asks writers in the Australian spec fic scene to read one of their own stories aloud. The really cute thing is that Keith Stevenson, the mind behind TISF, actually posts a microphone and recording gear to each month’s author! Luckily I was able to assure him we have a microphone, which saved him the postage for one month…

Fleshy is a story I wrote for 2012, the first of the Twelfth Planet Press anthologies – a collection of near future stories. It’s one of the few stories I’ve ever written which I think of as “real” science fiction – it was even inspired by an issue of Cosmos magazine! I think it was two separate articles that sparked off the story – one about cloning technology and another about making art out of body organs. Possibly I am imagining that second article.

“Fleshy” is about a woman whose partner brings home an experiment in cloning technology – which she, living from home, has to live with. It’s a story about ethics in science and in relationships, with plenty of pop culture references in there cos I love them (plus, it being one of my story, tea and biscuits) and it’s kind of icky! It was also the first story I ever had shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards. I’m pretty proud of it, and it was fun to read aloud.

So go have a listen!

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.

Kelly Link has been blogging all around the internet, popping up in all kinds of places and discussing a variety of topics, ostensibly to promote the paperback release of Pretty Monsters (which has made it all the way to Kingston, Tasmania – I spotted it in a bookshop today!). Over at i09 she talks about using your obsessions as fuel for short story writing, a technique I used to be quite evangelical back in my years of teaching creative writing. I called it ‘the list of awesome’ and suggested students construct a list of their most obscure and passionate interests in order to write stories that were uniquely theirs.

At some point this year I’m going to be writing a bunch of stories about or inspired by: the Shelley-Byron circle, the deified Livia and Drusilla, Brideshead Revisited, Robotech, iPod playlists and Julius Caesar. I’m really looking forward to them, as my treat for finishing Book 3. Assuming that thing happens.

Ahhh, short stories, how I miss you.

Jemima is growing and developing and doing all those amazing things that make my heart hurt, because every new stage is the end of an old stage, which is never coming back. In the last couple of weeks she has developed an amazing sense of balance (she still needs to hold on to furniture to stay upright but only just), has developed babble into something very close to a recognisable code (aka language) and refuses to be spoon fed because she wants to do it all herself, thank you very much.

We’ve leaped from mushed vegetables to whole bananas, noodles and toast, seemingly overnight. It’s a shock to the system. Just as I was congratulating myself on no longer having to spend quite so much time spooning food patiently into my baby, I discovered that actually she’s not happy puddling around on the floor with toys any more, she wants stimulation and interaction. During my writing time.

Which means I basically have to rethink everything I’ve been assuming about my own working habits.

The weekend is another festival of birthdays – two parties for Raeli to attend, at least on different days, but both at 10am. I had to break it to my honey tonight that there would be no weekend sleep ins, for any of us. He gets to stay home on baby duty while I venture into the wide world of pinatas, cake and musical chairs. Why do children have better social lives than us? I am exerting my vengeance by making her sit sweat-shop-style to produce handmade birthday cards.

My first editing week of three is half done already. The clock is ticking. Or maybe that’s just the caffeine-induced heart palpitations.

I promised myself I would get to this one eventually. I had read most of the individual stories before the release of this, Deborah Biancotti’s first short story collection, and I read all of the new stories last year, as I read most original short stories, in electronic form and in a rush, in order to sift out the best ones for Last Short Story blogging.

But that’s the whole point of a short story collection. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the stories before. They are being presented anew, forming part of something else, and you haven’t actually read it as a collection unless you have sat down and read it, in order, turning all the pages.

I promised myself that one day I would lounge on a couch, with a box of chocolates or a tall jug of iced tea, and spend a whole afternoon taking in this particular book properly, instead of just waving my hands and telling other people to read it. Of course, my life doesn’t work that way. I consumed it in three parts – one part lying on the bed in my library, glaring at the various members of my family attempting to visit me in there and loudly announcing THIS IS MUMMY’S QUIET TIME, one part perched on my couch while the baby ran ever so slightly amok at my feet, and one part in an armchair today, while eyeing the workmen busily digging holes and swapping power poles outside my window.

Each time, despite my surroundings, I dipped into a source of calm while reading these stories. It’s hard to explain, if you haven’t read Deb’s work. She does creepy and weird and murderous and horrific (and someone *really* has to do a study one day on how many excellent Australian writers also do creepy, weird, murderous tales so very well, a Biancotti-Warren-Lanagan triptych anyone?) and very few of her stories make a complete amount of sense if you stare at them too hard (sometimes it’s better to sneak up on them from the side) but the language is so fluid and lovely, the characters regularly grab you by the throat and make you feel their pain/angst/confusion, and the overall reading experience is simply… well. Calming.

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Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you’d like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn’t just a great piece of fiction, it’s an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that he writes stories I hate, about people I hate (and I don’t mean mild revulsion, I mean actual HATE), and yet I can’t pull my eyes away. “Wives” is his best work to date, an utterly hideous vision of the near future, exploring issues that are already very relevant to many people – the lack of women sticking around in country Australia, the sociological effect of preferring male children to female and, oh yes, the ingrained misogyny that hovers just out of sight in our culture. Haines exposes the ugliest sides of human nature in this epic story of “Bridal Services,” rape and slavery, told through the eyes of a narrator so utterly screwed up by his circumstances that it’s hard to blame him for the despicable, thoughtless way that he speaks, lives and acts. This is post-apocalyptic fiction at its best and worse, because there is no apocalypse. There’s just us.

(in discussion with my fellow LSSers about “Wives,” I said “I don’t know whether I want to nominate it for the Tiptree or BURN IT TO THE GROUND.” Yeah, that. Just that.)

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I’ve really been enjoying Rachel Swirsky’s guest posts over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Her latest piece is a review of Cat Rambo’s collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Midnight (Paper Golem Press, 2009) which engages directly with another review of the collection from Publisher’s Weekly. Swirsky moves fluidly between defending Rambo from the scathing remarks of the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer to agreeing with aspects of what they say, and it makes for a very dynamic review.

One of the points Swirsky makes is that a collection can be weakened by extra material. Or, to be perhaps more accurate, a collection can be made stronger by leaving out some of the material. Her belief is that Rambo’s collection would have benefited from containing the twelve stories she considers excellent, and not the other eight stories she sees as less-excellent padding.

This is something that I’ve been harping on about for some time, whenever I can pin people down long enough to listen. There’s a tendency in small press (and not only in small press, it has to be said) to try to offer “value” for money through sheer quantity of words, or number of stories. But the older I get and the higher my reading pile teeters, the less interested I am in books that feel the need to be completionist, to pack in lots of material at the expense of the overall vibe.

I’ve read a lot of anthologies over the course of the last few years, thanks to Last Short Story as well as my own interest in short fiction. Apart from ‘best ofs’ which are another thing again, it’s hard to think of any that couldn’t have been improved by having fewer stories. This is particularly the case of theme anthologies, where 8-10 excellent stories exploring variations on a theme works much better than 20 stories that do the same. Even if the second 10 are *almost* as excellent as the best 10, the theme becomes diluted and well and can easily wear out its welcome.

I love it when publishers big and small go with a small, intense selection rather than an overpadded one. The Twelfth Planet Press books tend to do this. I also like the X6 novella anthology (yes I hear the book is huge, but it’s only 6 actual stories, which is a really good number of stopping and starting points). I’ve also been enjoying several anthos-packaged-for teens which include between three and six long-short stories from very recognisable name authors, and come in as slender volumes.

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