Full Retreat

I should probably have mentioned  that I’m currently on a fortnight-long writers’ retreat, at the little town of Berry near the Shoalhaven River.  The collective blog run by the Retreaters is over here, should you need some extra reading.

There are some new posts for this thing racked up in my brain which may or may not reach the front of the queue while I’m here, but in the meantime I’ve added to the blogroll someone I only know by his RPGNet handle of Geza Echs.  I’m consistently impressed with his intelligence and erudition on that board, and was very pleased to see he’s begun blogging at No Rest Words.

When you’re done reading all those things, go get yourself a copy of Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World.  I want to review this here in greater depth at some point, but in short: it blew me away, I’m recommending it to all the readers I know, and two other people I recommended it to have already reacted to it pretty much as I have.  Well worth the buy.

Black’n'Blue’n’solid gold: an afternoon at the Roller Derby

Da-na-na-naaah-nah-nah-naaah, bow-wooowaaaahhhh…

Oh, hi, I was just playing some loud surfie guitar in my head to get myself in the mood to write this up.  The Southern Cross Stadium was full of such good noises when we arrived there last Saturday.  It was hot, crowded, loud, and things just got better from there.

Hold on, I’ll back up a step.

My Life as a Rubbernecker

So, then.

The evening started out quietly enough.  D came into Civic from her own work and was patient while I faffed about wrapping up the work day.  We adjourned to Tosolini’s, an excellent place for writing dates on account of nice armchairs and a counter at a good height for laptopping, and dined before we got the computers out and went to work.

So far so good.  Chicken salad, excellent antipasto, coffee, watching the rain, getting a little bit of writing mojo on for a story I need to finish.  Then we get a siren, and a cop car comes down London Circuit, flashers going.  Normally they’re falling in behind some hapless, pimply young sort unwise enough to be speeding, but tonight it swerved down into the East Row interchange.  Peering around the corner (we were sitting outside) I could still see its flashers.  A minute or two later, there went another one, and I cuuld hear sirens from further afield.

ENFORCER – The Shira Calpurnia Omnibus

Blogging’s been a bit light on lately on account of work and travel and life, but I really have no business not posting this up sooner.

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Tomas for spotting this and mentioning in the previous post’s comments.  I see the cover’s already getting a lot of cool feedback on the BL’s Facebook, and I have to say I’m very pleased with it myself.  It’s a different style to Clint’s art but just as eye-grabbing.

The omnibus, of the three Calpurnia novels plus some extras I’ve just put the finishing touches to, will be out next year.

Gotta go, errands.  Back soon with more stuff.

The Battle of Mount Ainslie, or, “Warlock? Moi?”

So, a little background.  A little while ago one Pastor Danny Nalliah, the leader of a pack of zealots from Victoria who go by the handle of Catch The Fire Ministries, put out a call for his congregation as well as any fellow-travellers, “prayer warriors and prophetic intercessors”, to travel up to Canberra to break the hold of witchcraft and occult manipulation on our nation’s leadership.  Pastor Danny, we should note, has specific evidence for said hold.  He no longer has to rely on generalities like the fact that a proportion of Federal Parliamentarians have marriage problems in their past – the idea for the Canberra expedition seemed to kick off when evidence came to light that the concrete base of the aviation beacon was being used as a witches’ altar, stained forever with the blood of the innocents sacrificed on it.

That was it.  It was on.  The call went out and a bus was arranged, and at two o’clock last Saturday afternoon Pastor Danny and his congregation had rolled up to the Mount Ainslie lookout ready to go to work.

TRIUMFF – Her Majesty’s Hero

I received my copy of Triumff during my WorldCon travels, got properly into it after my arrival home, and had written a review of it with the intention of putting it up here.  Instead, however, I’ve contributed it as a guest post over on Dan’s own blog.  In summary: it’s great fun, buy it.  In full… well, off you go and read the review yourselves.  And read the book after that.  After that, well, I’ll think of something.

Mud rain and other weathers

There was a dust storm somewhere last night.  By the time I left for work there was a flat look to the daylight and an odd colourless haze across any line of sight that went more than a few kilometres.  By midmorning the haze had thickened so that Black Mountain was barely visible from Civic and there was a noticeable film over any building more than a block or so away.  The sky to the south was the colour of antique paper or the once-white wall of a heavy smoker’s house: by that stage it was obviously dirt hanging up there in the sky, not fog or cloud, and it was so visible that it was actually surprising to walk outside and feel clear air in my mouth and nose.  I’d been bracing myself to be inhaling grit.  It diffused the sunlight down to a strangely-coloured, suffusing glare so that nothing cast any shadow and the thick grass on the oval where I went for lunchtime exercise was an almost indecently rich green.

It must have rained somewhere, too, because I saw a lot of cars with mud crusted across their roofs where rain must have fallen out of the dust cloud onto them.  We had that in Queanbeyan some years ago.  I still think of it as the Filthstorm.  The rain fell as a grimy reddish slurry that was still changing the colour of the light coming through my windows months after the fact (I live high up, the kitchen and living room windows aren’t really accessible for cleaning).  The rain kicked in in the middle of town as I was walking to the car but I got lucky on two fronts: it was clean rain, for the most part, not splattering mud-rain, and it only really cranked up after I was inside and driving.

The night’s more or less quiet as I type this.  There’s a little speckling of rain on the roof every so often, and the thunder seems to have dozed off and only faintly rumbles once in a while as it turns over in its sleep.  But for a couple of hours there it absolutely shaped and ruled the evening, the rain roaring on the roof and blasting in against the windows at acute angles from the wind, the lightning turning the black sky into a sudden expanse of purple-white texture on the long flashes and simply jarring the eye on the short ones, and the thunder cracking like concussion or booming hard enough to set the window-glass buzzing for a moment.  I feel as spent as the storm.

GenCon Oz

It’s the second Australian GenCon this weekend in Brisbane, and here’s my movements as it currently stands.

Friday

• Hot Tips for Fiction Writers (Seminar Room 1, 2pm): Join Karen Miller, David Conyers, and Matt Farrer as they give away the hot tips that all aspiring writers should know.
• Writing for Warhammer (Seminar Room 1, 5 pm): Join game designer Steve Darlington and Black Library author Matt Farrer as they discus their past, present and future when it comes to working in the Warhammer universe

Saturday

• From Fan to Fiction (Seminar Room 3, 11 am) Join authors Karen Miller, Keith Baker and Matt Farrer as they discuss their journey from fans to fiction authors in the worlds of Eberron, Star Wars, Star Gate, and Warhammer.
• Mass Signing: We’ve currently left an open space between 1 pm and 3 pm in the Saturday schedule to do a mass signing by all authors in Author’s alley.

• The Habits of Highly Effective Writers (Seminar Room 1, 3 pm) What can you do right now to help your writing career? Matt Farrer, Marianne De Pierres and Kylie Chan talk about the habits good writers develop in order to succeed.

Sunday

• How to Make a Really Good Bad Guy (Seminar Room 1, 2 pm): What makes the perfect bad guy? Join authors Matt Farrer and David Conyers as they discuss the very best of the very worst.
• Gaming and Writing (Seminar Room 1, 4 pm) How do you make the jump from playing games to becoming a writer? Join Matt Farrer, David Conyers, and Ryan Naylor as they talk about how they made the jump from gamer to author.

Drop by, say hello, join in the conversations.  I promise to try to have something interesting to say.

Anticipation – the panels – part I

More after-the-fact blogging, even further after the fact in, er, fact.  I wrote this on the train back down to New York, and post it as I wrote it but for the addition of links.  The panel stuff filled more than one posts’ worth so I’ll break the rest into another post, hopefully soon.

The September Proposal

I took August as a break from the proposal/acquittal cycle because so much of it was going to be spent travelling, and because I was having a bit of angst about how to actually get this whole methodology working – no matter how doable each proposal at the start of each month seemed, each acquittal was turning out a mess of self-immolation and excuses.  Have I clicked to the secret of workable and regular goal lists while I was away?  I have not, at least not that I’m conscious of.  Am I going to have a stab at it anyway?  I am.  Will I try to modify my approach at all?  Given that I subscribe to that saying that defines insanity as doing the same thing but expecting a different result, then yes, I am.