Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Congratulations!

It's always good to see Australian authors doing well outside the small pond of their own country and there are several who have received recognition overseas recently and well deserved it is too.

On September 30, Brisbane writer, Angela Slatter, became the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award for her short story The Coffin-maker's Daughter which first appeared in A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones and published by Jo Fletcher Books. It has now been reprinted in The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011 edited by Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene and published by Ticonderoga Publications.

Then on October 14 it was announced that Tansy Rayner Roberts had won the 2012 Washington SF Association Small Press Award for her story The Patrician in Love and Romanpunk edited by Alisa Krasnostein, published by Twelfth Planet Press, and also reprinted in The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011.

Also on the shortlist for the Washington SF Association award was Joanne Anderton for her story Flowers in the Shadow of the Garden in the anthology Hope edited by Sasha Beattie published by Kayelle Press.

Congratulations to all.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Characters and How to Make Them Real

I was searching the internet for something else entirely when I came across this on io9.com. Memorable descriptions (taken from well known speculative fiction) are analysed so we can see just what makes them work so effectively. It sent me back to my latest work in progress where some of my characters, perfectly clear in my mind, were resisting going on to the page. They are not anymore. There's much more information on writing skills too, all well worth reading, I think.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

On Getting Published

There's an awful lot about it on the internet and the one consistent thing about it is that none seems to agree with any other so I was pleased to find this on Tansy Rayner Roberts blog where she links to Justine Larbelestier and Diana Peterfreund's blogs where they make it clear that everyone is different whether they be author, publisher or agent and so every experience of the process is different. Given I know writers who have obtained an agent by casually chatting to someone at a book stall at a convention, been published because they went to dinner with a group they had just met (also at a convention as it happens), by relentless querying of publishers or agents or by subbing once, it's clear that getting that first contact comes in many different ways. Some people work their way up by short story publications, some by competitions and others by writing a book that touches a particular editor or agent. They are all different. Why then would you assume that the actual publishing process of companies with different business models and different staff would be identical? But apparently people do. These links are very informative if only to shake those preconceptions.