Some personal links first: I made a reprint sale to Beyond Binary, an anthology of genderqueer SF, edited by Brit Mandelo for Lethe Press. I’m super excited about it, not only to be a Lethe Press author now, but also to share a TOC with such amazing writers as Nalo Hopkinson, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Catherynne Valente and Sandra McDonald. The story in question is “Prosperine When It Sizzles,” which first appeared in shared world anthology New Ceres Nights. I have a soft spot for M. Pepin and La Duchesse, so delighted to see that story get a wider audience.

Also I’ve been meaning to link for ages that my story, “Taking Leaves,” which was one of the winners of the Love2Read competition of fiction about reading disabilities, now has an audio version available. You can listen by streaming it from the site.

A new Hark, a Vagrant! is always cause for celebration, but this one is especially pertinent and awesome this week because it’s all about Wonder Woman. Kate Beaton is a cynical genius.

Bluemilk often writes wonderfully about parenthood and feminism, and this post about crying babies on aeroplanes struck a chord with me. There really are two kinds of people, those who have empathy for parents struggling with noisy children/babies in public, and those who don’t. Often, sadly, that empathy can depend on how personally close you are to the experience of trying to function with small children in public.

This essay about the growing phenomenon of women cosplaying femme versions of the Doctor is fascinating, with some great pics. I find this particular aspect of fandom close to my heart because my daughter came up with it independently, playing Matt Smith’s Doctor in the playground (sometimes with male friends as companions and the Master, though on one notable occasion she had corralled four other girls to play River Song, Melody Pond, Amy Pond & young Amelia OH HELL YES that’s my girl) and back in July kept her bedroom tidy for a whole month in order to earn a red bowtie for herself.

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New episode up! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.

EPISODE FORTY

In which we hug the Hugos, plug the Stella, lament the loss of the Weird Tales team, and contemplate (briefly) our podcasterly mid-life crisis. Alex delves into the wonderful world of classic cyberpunk, and Tansy demands to know why on earth Alisa is still watching Doctor Who if she doesn’t actually like it?

News

Weird Tales Sold, Editorial Staff Kicked Out

Strange Horizons Fundraising Drive

The Stella: new Australian novel prize for women

Galactic Chat
Kelley Armstrong
Ben Peek

Tansy’s win

What Culture Have we Consumed?
Alisa: Doctor Who Season 2, Outer Alliance Podcast
Alex: Trouble and her Friends, Melissa Scott; Only Ever Always, Penni Russon; Synners, Pat Cadigan; Blake’s 7.
Tansy: SF Squeecast #3, Panel2Panel, Among Others by Jo Walton, Alcestis by Katherine Beukner, Stormlord’s Exile by Glenda Larke, AM KINDLED WILL TRAVEL

Pet Subject: Hugoriffic!
Were you there for the Hugo Twitter party? Or did you have to resort to sitting in the live audience?
The stats
The results
Hugos commentary round up

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!

Some extra lovely news today – that I can finally reveal, in any case! I was selected as one of the winners of the “Never Too Late… To Learn To Read” competition which is kicking off Adult Learning Week, and launching 2012 as the National Year of Reading.

If you follow the link, you can see the whole list of winners (twelve previously published writers and eight previously unpublished), and download the winning stories. They will also be available as podcasts at a later date. There’s a write up about the three Tasmanians who won prizes here.

In a moment of rare Being A Writer In Public this evening, I ditched the kids at my honey’s office and zoomed down to the office of the Hobart Mercury, to meet the other Tassie winners, Philomena and Mark, and have some pics taken for (I think) tomorrow’s paper. It was faintly surreal, as I had to negotiate a mostly locked and security sealed building, only to be thrust physically against two complete strangers, and hold each other in a disturbingly intimate embrace for several minutes, before going our separate ways. We feel a little bonded now, like those people who get trapped together during earthquakes and have an emotional connection for the rest of our life.

By the end of it we were all giggling hysterically, as the photographer lined us up at stranger and stranger angles. The funniest part was his bemusement when he asked for the book and we told him there wasn’t one (knew I should have taken some books in!) because it was a short story competition. He racked his brain for about five seconds to consider whether there was some other possible visual representation of a short story competition, then handed us a book about football, which we had to contemplate with great attention.

Only to realise as we finally broke free of our mutual artificial and ever-so-slightly-diagonal embrace to discover that the cover of said book was upside down. Really hope that doesn’t come up in the pictures!

My story, in any case, is called “Taking Leaves,” and as Tehani pointed out on Twitter, it’s totally a speculative fiction story. Literature, schmiterature! You can download it here.

[and just in case you thought I was going to write a whole blog entry without mentioning Doctor Who, this is the story which I was so busy trying to finish before the 5pm contest deadline that I let my six-year-old watch the episode "Doomsday" unsupervised, only to discover with ten minutes left to go before the deadline that she was in ABSOLUTE FLOODS OF TEARS because of the separation between Rose and the Doctor. One of those moments in life where being a good writer entails being a bad mummy. When I discovered I had won the competition, I must admit I felt at least partly relieved that, you know, it was worth it. I probably won't mention to her yet that my current intentions for the money are to fund a solo trip to World Fantasy Convention next year...]

It’s May, which means my gorgeous book Love & Romanpunk is officially released! Yes, there were copies of this floating around Swancon last weekend, but those were extra special early copies that were available thanks to my wonderful publisher, Alisa.

Words cannot express how proud I am of this book. It’s really only the last few years that I have started thinking of myself as a short story writer as well as a novelist, and finding my feet as far as the kind of short fiction I really want to write. When the Twelve Planets project gave me the opportunity to write four stories of any length I liked, I knew I wanted them to connect to my obsession with Roman history. Luckily for me, Alisa was hard-nosed enough to pick out the two stories I had written that she loved, and kick the others to the kerb. “More like this, please.”

Possibly she didn’t say please. *grins*

So I was pushed harder than I ever have been with my short fiction, to bring this collection together. And I love it to bits. It’s made up of so many things that I love: the history of the Caesars, unreliable and secret histories, manticores, lamia, historical recreationists, and snark. I am so glad I got to do something with the sneaking suspicion I had, all through my doctoral studies, that the sisters of Caligula might have been superheroes. My influences are as wide and varied as Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And I discovered an eternal truth: that if you put Livia and Agrippina in the same book, only one of them gets to be the hero.

Ah well, I’ll give Livia a book of her own, one of these days.

Nearly ten years ago, I went to Rome and spent a month walking on those old streets, hunting out statues of the imperial women of the Caesars, in research for my thesis. That one month of my life has probably proved more inspirational to my work than any other. It is present in every book of the Creature Court trilogy and it was present here, as I wrote these stories.

Did I mention there are manticores?

Let us begin with the issue of most interest to future historians: I did not poison my uncle and husband, the Emperor Claudius. Instead, I drove a stake through his heart. In my defence, several of my close relatives have been vampires, and I have had little occasion to kill any of them. Claudius was a special case.

Special thanks goes to Amanda Rainey, who created such a marvellous cover and did the layout etc. on a very short time frame, and also to Helen Merrick, who wrote an amazing introduction. And of course, the book would not have happened without the commitment, energy and vision of publisher Alisa Krasnostein, of Twelfth Planet Press. I am very fortunate to be friends with and supported by such amazing, intelligent and talented women.

You can order Love and Romanpunk from the TPP webstore, individually or as part of a subscription to the Twelve Planets series of collections.

Jonathan talks here about trying to come up with a suitably dramatic but inoffensive term for those of us who work from comfy armchairs trying to suddenly do quite a lot MORE than we usually do.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I have been trying to work on several short stories at once this month, which is surprisingly effective as compared to just trying to work on one – if one stalls, you move to the next, and so on – but is also a real drain on the creative energy. The thing about short stories is – they are actually just as hard as writing novels, but you can’t let your attention span waver, or get into a comfortable pace. There is no comfort in short stories! They’re constantly asking you questions like “but where is the story going?” and “but what is the THEME?” and “how are we going to wind this sucker up” rather than that nice ‘lalalala now you’ve done all the work at the top end we can just continue on under our own momentum for a few months” feeling you get from novels.

I’m going to be starting a new novel soon. I’m really quite excited about it. My brain is obviously very excited about it because it’s all “hey let’s listen to THIS music,” and “let’s daydream about THIS plot,” without actually acknowledging that there’s about another month’s work still to do on BOOK THREE of the Creature Court.

I am not by any means out of love with the Creature Court. But Book Threes are, it turns out, terribly hard and full of enormous pressures, and I am jumping out of my skin with excitement about the fact that I have a new Book One right around the corner.

Soon. Not yet. Soon.

Raeli is back at school, which is lovely for all of us, even if I do have to remember to pick her up at 2:30 every single day. Jem now has one and a half days of daycare a week, which is a profit to me of several hours.

And oh yes, I’m reading, reading like a maniac, gathering great momentum for Last Short Story, catching up on the kind of novel you read in a day or less, ripping through my library stack, and so on.

None of this is in anyway procrastinatory about that last teeny bit of Book 3 that has to be written. Not at all. My brain wouldn’t have any reason for putting off the task I’ve been longing to get done all year, would it?

Bad, bad brain.

@Fangbooks tweeted today: bloggers… would love to see an opinion piece on whether the trend towards rewriting/adding to ‘classic’ works is good art or lazy writing

As it happens, I have very strong opinions on this topic, and my answer is: yes.

Of course it’s good art. Of course it’s lazy writing. Of course some of the works that have emerged from this trend are cynical, shallow texts. And of course some of them are pure brilliance. This is what books do, that is, EVERYTHING.

I wrote the story “Relentless Adaptations” (currently available from Aussie suburban fantasy anthology Sprawl, and podcasted here) in response to this topic. While writing the story, I realised that I didn’t come down squarely on one side or another – and ultimately when I did (my honey, critting the story for me, was absolutely right to tell me it wouldn’t work unless I picked a side) it was not the one I thought I was supporting when I started the story.

There are many reasons why the Classic-Work-and-Horror-Trope fad is exactly that, a fad, and many reasons why it is problematic. These mashups generally (to my mind) never get better than their concept, and once you’ve giggled at the title, or in the case of Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, the awesome booktrailer, it seems unnecessary to wade through the actual book.

I do believe that part of the reason these books have become such a hot trend in the last year or two is not because people want to read them, but because they want to HAVE them, or gift them to people, and sadly selling books to people who don’t really read or buy books that often is the key to becoming a bestseller.

When these literature-as-gimmick books first started, I thought it was a giggle, though I giggled rather less once someone smart (whom I no longer recall) pointed out that what was actually happening was modern male writers appropriating literary works by women, and once you’ve had your brain opened by a thought like that, it’s hard to put it back in the box. Also, and I appreciate that I haven’t read more than two pages of any of these books (S&S&S was in my opinion unreadable, a grave disappointment to me) the thing that it reminds me of most is that awful Red Dwarf episode in which Robert Llewellyn (who wrote it) thought he was parodying Jane Austen when in fact he was serving up an embarrassingly ignorant “parody” of what people who have never read or even watched a Jane Austen story think they are all about.

In contrast, as I mentioned recently, Mary Robinette Kowal’s Jane Austen-inspired Shades of Milk and Honey is a smooth and elegant novel of which only one facet is the subtle parody of Austen’s books, characters and tropes. It is a work that invites people who love Jane Austen to share the joke, rather than inviting people who think Jane Austen is stupid to laugh at how stupid she is. In Doctor Who terms, it’s the difference between Steven Moffatt’s sublime “The Curse of Fatal Death” and the rather awful Victoria Wood Doctor Who sketch from the 80′s.

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We have been back to real life for some days, though not really real life, because my honey was still off work, and we’ve returned in the middle of the school holidays, so basically we’ve all been in our pyjamas since Wednesday night.

I have short stories to write, many of them, and the only time I have to do it in is during Raeli’s school holiday, because that is non-novel time. Only a fool would try to write a novel during school holidays.

Do you see the fault in my short-story-writing plan?

I negotiated a chunk of writing time the other day and indeed managed to draft an entire short story in my 2 hours at the library, but while it is most excellent it is entirely not one of the short stories I was supposed to be writing. Also it was really quite short. Surely I have not forgotten how to write short stories!

Then there’s the reading. Immediately after Worldcon, my usually-teetering pile of books had turned into an exceptionally high teetering tower of books I DESPERATELY WANT TO READ RIGHT NOW. And at the same time I want to read nothing but books set in Ancient Rome this month. These two reading plans do not schedule.

My brain has kicked into domesticity gear, while all this is going on. It is planning decadent slow cooked meals involving pork chops and apples, and deciding that I really need to have a few new cakes in my repertoire, the kind you just whip up when the vicar comes to call, and did we remember all that quilting I have been building up towards, and promised myself I could do when I got home from Melbourne?

WTF, brain?

But wait, there’s more. If I was truly a good mother, I would have something better and more awesome planned for my daughter to do this holiday other than playing Angry Birds constantly on the iPad (we do it together, okay, it’s a shared mother-daughter activity!) and watching ABC2. (omg the lack of ABC2 in the Melbourne apartments almost killed us! Sweet sweet digital television, how we missed you)

Eh, she saw penguins this holiday. What more does she expect?

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.