You can pre-order it (at a super low price) here on the Fablecroft site.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
“A memory trapped in light” by Joanne Anderton
“Time and tide” by Lyn Battersby
“Fireflies” by Steve Cameron
“Sleeping Beauty” by Thoraiya Dyer
“The Fletcher Test” by Dirk Flinthart
“Ghosts” by Stephanie Gunn
“Sleepers” by Kaia Landelius
“Solitary” by Dave Luckett
“Cold comfort” by David McDonald
“The Mornington Ride” by Jason Nahrung
“What books survive” by Tansy Rayner Roberts
“The last good town” by Elizabeth Tan

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.

Speaking of adorable, Tiny Titans recently took on that mysterious purple woman who appears in the background of all the new 52 titles at DC – this interview with the men who write & draw Tiny Titans is fabulous and makes it clear why the comic is so damn good. They love what they are doing, they respect their kid & adult readers, and they are having SO MUCH FUN. I can highly recommend Tiny Titans trades as Christmas presents for the geek kids in your life.

Nicola Griffith talks about the ‘showrooming’ practice of online shoppers browsing real bookstores and then buying the product elsewhere – and about how this is something the bookselling industry should be using. I am reminded just a bit of a certain short story I wrote for Sprawl which depicts a possible future of bookselling for busy parents. Never mind the charming book professional who flatters you at the door and finds you the books you didn’t know you wanted to buy… if you want someone like me to browse books anywhere other than my laptop, you’re gonna have to provide entertainment for my kids.

Also, a very cute post on Tor about the history of the portrayal of futuristic books in science fiction.

Alan Moore vs. Frank Miller

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!

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.

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.

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.

As “Relentless Adaptations” opened, I posited a world not too far from right now, in which bookshops have morphed into cafes and entertainment centres with printers and book menus available – you can print exactly the text you want to read with your latte while the children play, and why limit yourself to original texts when you can choose a favourite variation? Pride and Prejudice can not only come with added zombies, but also with vampires, or with modern dress and slang, or with porny bits, or with a more comfortable racial/sexual diversity than the original. I thought it was a slightly scary but quite realistic portrayal of the future of publishing and bookselling (though to be fair later parts of the story are quite… unrealistic)

As a literature geek AND a slash fan, I was on the fence about whether or not such flexibility of text was a good thing, which is why it was handy to have several characters to deal with this near future of books – an academic who can’t stand the way that original text has collapsed under the weight of so much gimmickry, and a mum who quite likes her Sherlock Holmes to come with same sex couples.

The world of the story turned, however, into a revolution against the adulteration of text, one extreme replacing another. My protagonist finds herself rebelling against this world, though she accepts the limitations of the previous one. However galling it is to see literature taken apart and exploited for entertainment, how much worse is it to prevent that (or any) kind of art from being created?

I loathe Peter Pan sequels, just as an example. I love the original work, and I love the way it opens up a world of endless sequels that are best kept in the head of the reader. I hate the way that many writers have taken Peter Pan and Wendy in particular, and told their own version of a Pan story. The main reason I detest this, I think, is not only my respect for the original, but also because I have read so MANY stories that capitalise on the original text without actually adding anything new and special. To appropriate a classic work of literature is only worthwhile when, you know, you do it with panache and awesomeness.

I loved Lost Girls, the graphic novel which completely capitalised on the mythology of Wendy and Pan, but also Dorothy and Alice, but created stories so rich and different that I appreciated them while also being discomforted by what Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie had chosen to do. The problematic nature of turning these three prepubescent literary heroines into highly sexualised adult women was indeed part of the story, and acknowledged throughout. It’s an uncomfortable, thought-provoking read which gives far more than it takes away.

More recently, I read (THIS MORNING) Sarah Rees Brennan’s story “The Spy who Never Grew Up” which took my breath away by being a sequel to Peter Pan that is fascinating and brilliant. It relies upon archetypes from books every bit as much as the original, with Peter being recruited to be a spy right out of the James Bond novels and others of that genre, and a post-modern descendant of Wendy commenting on him even as she is charmed and swept away. The dialogue crackles, there are ninja fairies, and Brennan managed to comment on the gender problems of the original as well as the racial problems (without actually using the word ‘Redskins’ which is both clever and commendable. It’s a story rife with fan service, but the kind of fan service that actually works.

I believe – and this is the conclusion my short story also came down to – that an essential part of being human is building stories upon stories upon stories. The closing lines of the short story reflect a real experience I had, and have had many nights, when my daughter now 5 years old requests a story. When she was three and four she would often ask me to tell the story of a movie that had scared her (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, for example), over and over, only editing out the bits she didn’t like, until it was familiar enough that she could actually cope with hearing the Violet Beauregard scene.

When I read Enid Blyton to her, I will edit out particular words or terms, if I don’t feel like explaining them. Sometimes I will edit a boring fairy novel for length (there are some appalling ones out there) or when I am blindsided by a truly awful ending/moral that I don’t want her to hear – though the truth is, she can read now, and my editing days are over. When she was three, it was an important skill for me to have.

Kids are the world’s best and most active fans. They love to mix up stories, and to see the way they tangle together. They love to imagine superhero crossovers and mash ups. They will happily play Justice League and Astro Boy and X Men and Fairies all at once, in the playground. They soar over the borders and boundaries that adults put up around books.

There is a reason no one tries to divide kids books up into genres.

So yes, from very young, it is natural to think of stories having fluidity. That’s what happens when you have six completely different versions of Cinderella on the shelf – the Disney, the Rackham, the Sally Gardner, the one told entirely with Bunnies, the Kelly Link, etc.

I’ve always loved stories that grow out of other stories. For all my detestation of sequels to Peter Pan, or boring and pointless appropriative works, many of my favourite books are in some ways appropriations, whether they be inspired by fairy tales, Arthurian myth or Suetonius.

Also, you know, I’m a classicist. It just makes sense to me to have dozens of different versions of the same story, each offering something new. My favourite version of the Trojan Cycle is Euripides’ Helen, where she and Menelaus are reunited after 20 years, and it turns out she was in Egypt the whole time the Trojan War was going on (this play was intended to explain the oft-asked question of why the Trojans didn’t just give her back). My second favourite version of the Trojan Cycle is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand, which basically does to the story of Troy what Mists of Avalon did to the Arthurian legend – retells it from the point of view of women, making the story bridge the point when a matriarchal society gave way to patriarchal. Then there’s the fact that most of the more iconic parts of the story, such as the wooden horse, don’t actually appear in the Iliad at all. You have to look elsewhere for the money shots. There is no perfect version of mythology – the ancient world didn’t think that way, and I don’t really think it comes any more naturally in the 21st century to believe there is only one version of a story.

Some people do believe that, of course. Some people believe that a movie can really “wreck” a book, or that it’s a really big deal if the Dryad character appears to be three feet taller on the cover than in the text, or that fanfic in some way takes something away from the author, or that no one should be allowed to give away free knitting patterns of Adipose. Some people think that you should only read Alice in Wonderland with the original illustrations, in bound leather volumes. Obviously I am not those people. (though it’s hard to top the Tenniel illustrations, and the iPad version is, you have to admit, in some ways far superior to the original)

In short, I do think the trend of remixing classic works of literature is appropriating the work of others, and I do think it’s exploitative. And I completely support the right of writers to do that thing. Though obviously I prefer it when they come up with something that is truly awesome, and appears to have taken more than a week of frantic typing to come up with. Messing with the classics is potentially fabulous and potentially fraught with bibliographic dangers. Enter at your peril.

And, you know, they should only be allowed to charge money for it if those works are out of copyright.

In short, I am not particularly interested in reading a Jane Austen novel with movie monsters added for the laughs, because life is too short and I’d rather just, you know, reread a Jane Austen novel. But Spike Milligan’s version of Wuthering Heights in the late 90′s was a thing of genius. And I will totally be hanging out for Diana Peterfreund’s version of Persuasion retold as science fiction.

Because never mind zombies and vampires – Jane Austen novels IN SPACE!!!

[comic from Hark, A Vagrant]

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?

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!

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.

====

“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.