Kickstarters and a new Not-a-Hugo Award

In the absence of writing news from me – I’m still on a break, though I am tinkering with some small projects – I just wanted to draw some last minute attention to a few bits of attention-worthy news.

Winter’s Tale Kickstarter

Twelfth Planet Press are in the final hours of a kickstarter for their first illustrated children’s book – Winter’s Tale, written by Nike Sulway and illustrated by Shauna O’Meara. This is a middle-grade suburban fantasy about a magical journey of self-discovery for Winter, a non-binary child.

I love the idea of showing kids different expressions of selfhood through the lens of fantasy stories, which was the genre I always paid the most attention to when I was growing up. I believe it helps kids to know that there are gender expressions beyond the binary out in the world, and this is a beautiful way to show that.

And it doesn’t hurt that the book is gorgeously illustrated by my good mate Shauna O’Meara, whose playing card image accompanied my story in A Hand of Knaves last year. I had the privilege of looking over Shauna’s shoulder while she was working on the pencils for some of these pictures – she never mentioned exactly what they were for until after the book’s announcement – and I know how fabulous they are.

The Kickstarter is about to finish and could use a few more patrons. If this sounds like something you’d be interested for in the new reader in your life, you’ve got just a short time to help them get across the line.

 

Unnatural Order Kickstarter

CSFG’s upcoming anthology Unnatural Order has already funded on Kickstarter, but the team are hard at work trying to secure stretch goals of extra payments for the contributors.There’s one week left to run and I would encourage you to support the project to give Australian writers a boost.

As you know, I’m a huge fan of the CSFG anthologies. Apart from the fact that I’ve been published in two previous volumes, I love that they are a wild showcase of new and emerging Australian speculative fiction writers. In any given volume, you’ll get science fiction, weird fantasy, alternate history, horror and even (very occasionally) poetry.

In the hands of editors Alis Franklin and Lyss Wickramasinghe, this collection of tales about monsters, aliens and other decidedly inhuman entities is a guaranteed good time. If you have any doubts about what to expect, this great interview with the editors should give you a clear picture of their tastes.

Just a reminder too, that contributions to the anthology are now open to all Australian residents and Australians living overseas (as well as CSFG members anywhere). The deadline for stories is 31 October.

 

Out with the Campbells, in with the Astounding Award

For any of you not steeped in the politics of the international speculative fiction scene, Best New Writer Award-winning author Jeannette Ng gave a blistering acceptance speech at the 2019 Hugo Awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago, in which she correctly denounced the man for whom the award is named, John W. Campbell, as a fascist.

The speech is short, blunt, and long overdue: I encourage you to read it here.

In light of the speech, and the conversation that has followed in its wake, the award’s sponsors at Analog Magazine have today announced that in future, the prize will be renamed to the Astounding Award.

I’m very pleased this has happened. As was the case with the bust of the notoriously racist H P Lovecraft being replaced a few years ago as the prize for the World Fantasy Award, no person should have to have recognition of their contribution to their chosen field marred by association with someone who would done their best to keep them from that field, as Campbell most certainly did to women and writers of colour back during his editorial heyday of the 1950’s.

If you’re wondering exactly what it was that Campbell did, this essay by Alis Franklin covers the main points. (None of these are in particular dispute, by the way. Campbell really was a good old-fashioned white supremacist, eugenics-loving fascist, and the field is far better for taking overt steps away from the direction in which he steered it).

(For full disclosure, I have in the past declared myself a bit of a fan of Campbell, based on my fondness for his short story ‘Who Goes There?’ I didn’t know a thing about the man himself  at the time, and am perfectly content to shun his memory henceforth. Besides which, I’m more a fan of John Carpenter’s film interpretation of the story, The Thing (1982), which is one of my favourite movies of all time. So Campbell himself can get bent).

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A shifting perspective

I may have been going about this the wrong way.

https://pixabay.com/photos/maze-graphic-render-labyrinth-2264/

Having attributed my recent writing slump to illness, I believed that all I had to do to get back to full steam was to build up a daily habit, making small incremental gains every day. It’s one of the more reasonable and credible pieces of productivity advice around, and one that’s served me well in the past.

But I’m not convinced it’s the right approach for me at the moment.

To take a step back and get all real with you, it’s not only a ridiculously protracted cold I’ve been getting over. The thing that really laid me up is a classic triple-whammy of depression, anxiety and stress. I’ve always been prone to the latter two, but over the past year or so (or maybe much, much longer) the symptoms escalated to the point where I was basically paralysed by self-doubt, indecision and generally being tense as a barbed-wire fence.

It came to a crisis point – not one involving harm, I should note, rather than near complete incapacity – and I sought medical help. Long story short – therapy and medication was obtained.

This happened around the same time I decided that I would wrap up the Friday Flash Fiction project when I hit the hundred-story mark. It would be reasonable to suppose my dismal emotional state influenced the decision to quit, and maybe it did. But maybe not. Looking back on it with a couple of months’ hindsight and less-blinkered vision, I think I’d probably have called time on the project anyway.

Since then, I’ve wanted to focus on a new story. There’s also a backup old story I’ve kept hanging in the wings waiting for attention.

I haven’t advanced either of them so much as one word.

I want to write – but I also don’t want to write. Which is nothing new – sitting down for a writing session is always work for me, even when I’m in the zone and the words are flowing. What seems to be happening right now – something that hasn’t happened to me for a while – is that I’m feeling no urgency to have new words out in the world.

Am I done? Is my creativity broken? Have I medicated myself out of being a writer?

I don’t completely discount the possibility, but I don’t think it’s that serious. I think instead that my brain has seized this moment as a great opportunity for a holiday.

It wants to do some more reading. It wants to play video games. It’s coming to grips with a change of day job. It’s wrestling with family responsibilities, catching up on household chores and dealing with the occasional crisis. Most of all, it’s coming down from a constant state of near-panic that might stretch back as much as a few years. It’s been dealing with a whole lot.

It’s a tired, tired brain. It needs to recuperate, and it’s decided that creative fiction is what it can afford to sacrifice for the moment.

I’ve said it like that, like the decision was taken out of my hands, because honestly that’s how it feels. I want to write, but I don’t think I’m going to. Not for a while. What I know is, when I’m ready to get back to it, the work will be there, waiting.

I hope you will be too.

 

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CSFG Anthology – Unnatural Order

The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG) has just announced its 2019 anthology theme: Unnatural Order.

A weird cutie courtesy of editor Alis Franklin.

This is an anthology of monsters – proper ones, with horns and tentacles and dread designs. The alien, the inhuman and the just plain sinister (or are they?), whether bent on the destruction of human life, fleeing the Scourge of Man, or just wanting to be left alone with their treasure hoard.

Long time readers will know I hold the CSFG anthology series in high esteem. My first ever published story was in Next, which I’ve since followed up with last year’s A Hand of Knaves. These anthologies are a great showcase of new and emerging Australian speculative fiction talent. I’d urge anyone with an interest in writing in the field to take a shot at this open call.

I have every faith that the powerhouse editorial team of Alis Franklin, Lyss Wickramasinghe (editors) and Rivqa Rafael (publicity officer) will deliver an excellent entry in the series. I’ll certainly be doing my best to come up with something that will fit the bill.

The call for contributions is out now for stories up to 5000 words, with a deadline of the end of October. There will be a crowdfunding campaign kicking off in August to fund preorders (as well as pump up the rates for contributors and score cool extras).

For all the author guidelines and the submission portal, check out the Unnatural Order homepage.

 

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Managing expectations

I remember being better at this.

Warming up for exercise

https://pixabay.com/photos/run-runner-athlete-fitness-1749410/

Now that I’m not doing weekly flash fiction posts, I’ve slumped back into old bad writing habits. Or just the one bad habit really: doing anything but attending to my work-in-progress. I’ve been pretty good at sitting down at the keyboard, but the next step – writing coherent sentences that describe the setting, illustrate the characters and advance the plot – is a bit more of a challenge.

What I keep forgetting is to manage my expectations. I’ve been used to being able to meet a weekly word target without having to struggle. The structure of the Friday deadline was easy to work with, and I got into a rhythm I could maintain with minimal hiccups.

Abandoning that routine has thrown me for a loop. Over the last two years I’ve become used to being able to hit the ground running and pour out a few hundred words of usable writing in a half hour sprint session. I’ve developed my writer brain to be able to hit a handful of story beats and deliver a conclusion (more or less) in a thousand words. When I decided to go back to longer-form writing, I didn’t think to take into account how specific was that conditioning.

It’s like getting into physical shape (or so I’m told). You can’t just exclusively do squats or quad curls or one-handed push-ups and call yourself fit. It needs balance. All you might care about is sculpting your shapely calves or washboard abs, but you need other muscles working in support of them. If your foundations aren’t up to scratch, expect uncomfortable cramps and worse.

(All right, I’ve tortured that analogy enough. I think my subconscious might be trying to remind me that I’m also kind of out of shape).

This will probably be of value to absolutely nobody else, but I plan to resume doing regular check-ins on or near the weekends, self-reporting on my progress. Brisbane writer Peter M Ball has just such a project – The Sunday Circle – in which he asks and answers (and invites other writers to do likewise) three questions: What are you working on this week? What’s inspiring you right now? What action do you really need to take?

I’m not committing to use that format every time I do a check-in, but it seems like a great place to start, so here goes:

What am I working on this week? I’ve started writing a new fantasy short story about a contest two very different types of magical bards. I’m frustrated by how slowly it’s going, but I think I need to trust myself that I’ll find its groove soon.

What’s inspiring me right now? Over the last couple of weeks, I binge-watched the first season of the “weird not-really-superheroes” live-action Doom Patrol, which is largely adapted from the Grant Morrison/Richard Case comic series I loved when it came out (gulp!) thirty years ago. The show taps the same vein of disorienting strangeness that drew me to the comic. In terms of inspiration, it’s a useful illustration of how plot and setting logic can be tossed into a tornado and still be anchored by consistent emotional character arcs.

What action do I really need to take? I really need to finish drafting this story. So the action I need to take is to keep working on rebuilding towards a daily writing habit. Small steps.

Speaking of small steps, I also need to get in shape, I guess.

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Dismantling the barriers

It’s been quiet here since I closed up shop on Friday Flash Fiction.

eel in sand

https://pixabay.com/photos/sand-eel-fish-ammodytes-hexapterus-60593/

I’m not going to go into details here, but I’ve been unwell for some time. Writing, along with almost everything else, was a constant and increasingly unmanageable struggle. It was only through sheer force of habit that the last few FFF’s made it out into the world, and writing them took just about everything I had. I hit a crisis point around the middle of May, when stress and a cold both hit at the same time.

(Sorry for anyone who needed anything from me around that time. I didn’t have anything to give).

Weeks have passed. I’m generally feeling better. The effects of the cold are still lingering, but I can walk ten steps without a coughing fit now, so I’m calling it a win.

I’ve started writing again. It’s slow, tentative, like I’m having to learn how to do it all over again. Years ago, I had a pretty minor motorcycle accident that left me with a broken wrist and various other ailments. It could have been much worse, something I contemplated a lot while I was recovering. The next time I rode – months later – I was so nervous and overcautious I almost caused another crash.

This feels like that. Not the agonising wrist pain, but the rest of it.

For a while, thanks to the Friday Flash commitment, I was in a writing state where I couldn’t afford the time to overthink what I was writing. If I was going to make my deadlines each week, I usually had to take the first idea that occurred to me and run with it. There was no space in the process for painful deliberation over details and nuances. The point of the project was to post a story, polished or otherwise.

By the end I’d gotten to the point where I could do that almost without thinking. Not quite, but I had learned to ignore the more pedantic objections of my inner editor – the guy who can’t let anyone see a single word until the story’s been filed down to as sharp a point as I can make it.

Now I’m learning all over again how to dig in and write without filters. It’s not easy. That natural tendency to avoid risks, to overthink every step, is back in force. I’m not going to get my authorial drive back if I stop every few seconds at an editorial roadblock, get out of the driver’s seat and walk over to inspect the barrier to work out how hard it is. I just have to keep going. Over, around or through.

At least now, I have enough fuel in my tank to make a good run at it.

Friday Flash Fiction will be back, by the way. I’m pondering whether to make it a monthly or fortnightly thing. I’ve also started work on collecting them, which means editing the stories, probably expanding some (especially the ones that really creak under the limits of the thousand-word format) and writing a few new ones for spice. More news as I work out the details.

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