From Nicole Murphy's Blog

Via Tansy Rayner Roberts blog, I've just discovered a fascinating series of guest blogs on Nicole Murphy's blog where various well known authors describe their writing habits and processes. The latest is by Tansy Rayner Roberts and you can find it here.

Check out this hilarious post by fantasy author Jim C. Hines, artfully posing himself as various 'men on covers' (following a previous session posed as women on covers) and looking at how women and men stack up in the objectification stakes. He proves the point, visibly. :) Men get it easier in cover poses. Although when it comes to 'form', I'd say men (especially on romance or heroic covers) are just as stereotyped and idealized:
http://www.jimchines.com/2012/04/posing-like-a-man/

Joanna Fay's Honourable Mention for Years Best Horror 2011

Congratulations to Joanna Fay!!

Her story, Black Heart, (in Dead Red Heart) has received an Honourable mention on Ellen Datlow's Years Best list for 2011 for horror. Well deserved.

Hugo Award Nominations 2012

The 2012 Hugo Award nominations have been announced. You can find them here. The winners will be announced at Chicon 7, the 2012 World Science fiction Convention to be held in Chicago from August 30 - September 3 2012.

Congratulations to all those nominated. It's a very impressive list to be part of.

The Suffering Artist

In catching up on what had accumulated in my inbox and on Facebook while I was gadding about at Swancon - which was a brilliant weekend by the way - I came across this article, linked to by my Clarion South mate, Peter M. Ball.

One of my peeves is the myth of the suffering artist. I'm of the opinion that if those artists - whether they were writers, composers, sculptors or involved in any other form of creative work - who were physically or mentally ill or starving or otherwise desperately trying to survive, had not had to contend with illnesses or other problems, they may well have produced more and possibly greater work. Looking around, just at artists I know personally - and I know quite a few in various parts of the art world, I can tell you that being ill, grief-stricken or struggling to feed yourself or your family means you don't produce what you would or could if those things didn't impinge on your life. All those things steal from your creativity and the time you can give to it.

I'm not saying that all the things that happen to us as we live and develop don't impact on our art. They certainly do and life experience is a great informer of art but dying of TB in a garret or something similar isn't an essential. The essential is living, so you grow and learn from it, then translating that into art.