Hard Heroes on Voyager

I've just had the pleasure of contributing to a useful blog post, the brainchild of Kim Falconer, author and astrologer extraordinaire, on factors essential to the creation of strong, kick-arse type characters, .

Kim has written a few of these characters herself, as have most of the other contributors, who include K J Taylor, Tracey O’Hara, Stacia Kane, Jennifer Fallon, Mary Victoria, Duncan Lay and Nicole Murphy. I'm not sure what I'm doing in such august company, but I'm pleased to have contributed to such a well-thought-out and helpful article.

Being the Voyager blog, these are, of course, all Harper Collins authors, but if we cast the net wider you'll soon think of more. Marianne de Pierres's Parrish Plessis springs to mind, as do several characters from the pens of Joe Abercrombie and George R. R. Martin, another - and perhaps the most famous - of Voyager's authors.

The post has two parts. Part one, which went up on 20 December, is here and part two is here. In the intervening posts, you can check out Kim's delightful horoscopes and the trailer for the film of GRRM's marvellous A Game of Thrones.

Who is your favourite kick-arse character? Leave a comment and let us know.

Tools In The Toolbox

Here's some very useful links for any one working on learning how to write:

http://thesaurus.com/

Favourite parts: Synonym and antonyms! Related searches! Visual thesaurus! Lots of useful information all in one place.

http://dictionary.reference.com/

Sister site to Thesaurus.com, the Dictionary has heaps of information and a similar format.

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Sarah

Superstars of Writing Seminar

Kevin J Anderson is arranging another Superstars of Writing Seminar in Utah early next year. In support of this, he is publishing a series of posts of tips for writers.

I was a bit hesitant of anything that's a seminar for Superstars, but then I actually read the pedigree of the instructors, I was a lot more impressed, and a lot more interested in going!

Brandon Sanderson, Dave Wolverton, Rebecca Moesta, Eric Flint, and special guest instructor Sherrilyn Kenyon as well as Kevin J Anderson too. That's an awful lot of talent to listen to for three days!

So if any one happens to be in Utah at the right time and right place, send us a report please? Please please please with a pretty on top? 

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Sarah

News from The Specusphere

A new issue of The Specusphere is now available: http://www.specusphere.com/joomla

This issue is something of a special one for The Specusphere. The editorial briefly outlines plans for a publishing enterprise and the team announces the opening of submissions for The Specusphere's first ever fiction anthology! You'll find some guidelines in the Publishing section, and more information on the theme can be found in the article "Myths and Legends".

The anthology will showcase stories that encapsulate the idea of the myth or the legend, or something that plays creatively with the form. It may be the re-telling of an existing myth, or it may be a new slant on an old myth — Jason commanding the Starship Argo, for instance.

The editorial team - Stephen Thompson, Amanda Greenslade, Satima Flavell and Astrid Cooper - will be looking for stories that entertain, are layered with meaning and which bring a new and speculative insight to the theme - stories that can replace current myths and legends, or can be passed off as one of them. Original stories, strong characters, speculative plots.

Elsewhere in the issue, Benjamin Solah investigates torture porn and AA Bell (whose most recent book, Diamond Eyes, is fresh out from Harper Collins) gives us some good advice about formatting manuscripts. Stephen Turner continues his hero's journey and Brian Armour wonders about art and science.

As usual there are plenty of book reviews, and there is a comic review by John Fitch. The fiction section continues the Bomoh series and Bill Pine regales us with a teasing atmospheric piece.

Go check it out at http://www.specusphere.com/joomla - and sharpen those keyboards for your anthology submission!

Joanna Fay wins KSP Poetry Award

Congratulations to Joanna Fay whose poem, 'Persephone', has won first prize in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Karen W Treanor Poetry Award, judged by Kevin Gillam.

Useful Con Information

While researching - okay surfing the net (I have procrastination down to a fine art these days), I discovered several blog posts on Worldcon 2010. As I still haven't managed to get my own thoughts down here are some links that may be useful. They come from a few of my favourite speculative fiction bloggers - apart from my fellow Egoboo writers - Christopher Green, Graham Clements, Laura E. Goodin, Michele Cashmore, Patty Jansen and Tansy Rayner Roberts. Tansy's is particularly useful because she gives her own list as well which expands the number of bloggers way beyond mine.

They don't all blog every day or even every week but when they do it's interesting and thought provoking. I'm sure there are many more so please feel free to add the details of any Worldcon blogs you have found useful in the comments. Because the entries relating to Worldcon are often scattered through the blogs I haven't given links to specific posts but don't let that put you off. You can go to their archives if those posts are all you want to look at.

Call My Agent Open to Critique Queries

Sydney based Call My Agent Blog has put up a call for queries. They aim to critique a few for general consumption, to help us all learn how to send the best query letters possible.

Go and check it out, and if you have something you're working on, send it today! Offer closes on 30th November.

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Sarah

The Latest Australian Speculative Fiction Blog Carnival

is up at Nicole R. Murphy's blog. As usual it's full of interesting blog and writing information and well worth taking a look.

Writing the Image-ination

A while ago, I mused in this space about connections between writing and music. Now I'd like to turn to images. For me, there is no separation between story and image, and I would go further and say that image precedes words in my writing. I know we all have our different starting points, our different 'windows in' to story, character, setting, action; in my case pictures are always the way in which an idea initially presents itself, and have been for as long as I can remember. I cannot recall the first thing I ever wrote, but do have a strong recollection of drawings, paintings, clay modelling from about the age of three. And from much younger (and having been born in the tropics), tantalizing expanses of colour, vivid, deep greens and saturated blues, blobs of red that were possibly flowers or crabs.

The storyworld I'm writing in now, obsessively, took shape over a very long period of time and started in pictures at around the age of twelve. Pictures of people, of landscapes and buildings, their forms and colours, maps of a vast world, diagrams of the structure of wings and feathers, pictures of flowers, trees and strange or mythical creatures. The imagery of this world and its characters was quite firmly established in my head before pen ever hit paper to do anything more than thumbnail sketches. Next, moments in scenes started to emerge, like frozen tableaus. Then I would look at them and feel curious. Who were the people in them? What was happening? What brought them to this moment, and how might it play out? Words started to flow from the questions asked of the image, and suddenly I would have a scene, a chapter, a story. The process seemed quite magical at that young age - and still does.

This writing mode has changed very little over time (although I hope the writing craft has); a few months ago, for example, I decided to try writing a short story with a specific themed anthology in mind. The catalyst for the story was, true to form, an image - a picture lifted from a novella which was visually memorable to me. A winged man lying dead on a beach under a blue-grey sky, and woman who could be elvish finding him. The man, his skin white, hair and feathers black, amber-coloured blood soaking into the sand. The woman kneeling beside him, shivering, visibly conflicted in her feelings. Then the questions.....What if the man isn't dead? And what if he's an elf? And following on from that, Who is this woman? Why am I seeing in her fear, repulsion, distrust, desire...even an odd sense of kinship?

When the image has been interrogated, the fascination is then in watching a new story begin to unfold from that single point into its own past and future, crystallizing it into words that not only tumble the image into a whole new shape, but give it a life that moves through time and space. I love this process, every time.

Thinking now of that expression, 'the art of words', I realise how literally true it can be. :-)

World Fantasy Awards

Congratulations to all World Fantasy Award winners with special congratulations to the Australian contingent: Margo Lanagan, Best Novella for Sea-Hearts, and Jonathan Strahan, Special Award - Professional category for editing anthologies, among them. Full winners list is here.