Every now and then it’s good to try something new, especially in the creative field—so recently I signed up for a wreath making evening with local floral artist, Kim Chan.

I was a little diffident, because manual dexterity is not my strongest suite, but in the end I was quite pleased with my creation for the evening.

But what do you think—will my wreath pass muster?

Here it is in all its splendour. 🙂

“Write quickly and you will never write well. Write well, and you will soon write quickly.”

~ Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, 65 A.D.

—

Needless to say, I take great comfort from this quote. 😀

Yesterday I said in my “Just Arrived” post on Courtney Schafer’s novels The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City,  that one of the great things about the internet is the way it enables me to connect with other writers internationally.

While that reamins true, I also think the internet and social media are as much a curse to writers as they are a boon. I saw this article by Carl Wilkinson in The Telegraph and the thrust of it really resonated, as I feel that creativity requires concentrated time and energy, and the internet and social media are all about distraction and fragmented energy.

Here’s a snippet to give you a feel for the full article, which I feel would repay a read:

“Shutting out a world of digital distraction

Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith are among a growing group of novelists who struggle with internet-addiction. Carl Wilkinson investigates the powerful effect of the web on the creative mind…

…

I feel Franzen may well be right—but to read the rest of the article, click Here.

One of the great things about the internet is that it facilitates communication with fellow authors, even those on the far side of the world. As a new author myself, I particularly enjoy getting to meet other new authors in the same field—and someone I have gotten to know recently via Twitter, FantasyReddit and Abhinav Jain’s “Names: A New Perspective” guest author series, is Courtney Schafer.

Courtney and I enjoyed each other’s posts in the “Names: A New Perspective” series, and then discovered that we are both fans of Peter Helprin’s magic realism novel, Winter’s Tale—and so we decided to do an author exchange of our respective Fantasy novels. 😉

So today I am absolutely delighted to tell you that The White Fire Crossing and The Tainted City, Books 1 and 2 in Courtney’s “The Shattered Sigil” (Nightshade Books) series are here—and I am very much looking forward to reading them both!

.

Ask Me Anything Thursday 8, CST:

Before I give you the back cover information, I also thought I’d let you know that Courtney will be doing an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on FantasyReddit this Thursday at 8 pm, (US) Central Standard Time.

For NZ readers, that’s not actually today—it will be our 3 pm tomorrow,  Friday 9 November; and 1 pm (also on Friday) for Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

So if you are free at that time, consider participating with a question for Courtney—I hope to drop by myself. 🙂

And if you want to check out Courtney’s post in the “Names: A New Perspective Series”—which I recommend—it’s here: “Building Fantasy Worlds One Day At A Time.”

.

From the Back Cover:

OK, now onto what the back cover for The Whitefre Crossing says (I’ll only do that one because it’s first up):

“Dev is a smuggler with the perfect cover…”

He’s in high demand as a guide for the caravans that carry legitimate goods from the city of Ninavel into the country of Alathia. The route through the Whitefire Mountains is treacherous, and Dev is one of the few climbers who knows how to cross them safely. With his skill and connections, it’s easy enough to slip contraband charms from Ninavel – where any magic is fair game, no matter how dark – into Alathia, where most magic is outlawed.

But smuggling a few charms is one thing; smuggling a person through the warded Alathian border is near suicidal. Having made a promise to a dying friend, Dev is forced to take on a singularly dangerous cargo: Kiran. A young apprentice on the run from one of the most powerful mages in Ninavel, Kiran is desperate enough to pay a fortune to sneak into a country where discovery means certain execution – and he’ll do whatever it takes to prevent Dev from finding out the terrible truth behind his getaway.

Yet Kiran isn’t the only one harboring a deadly secret. Caught up in a web of subterfuge and dark magic, Dev and Kiran must find a way to trust each other – or face not only their own destruction, but that of the entire city of Ninavel.”

For any more information at this stage, check out Courtney’s website, here.

The World Fantasy Awards were announced at the conclusion of the World Fantasy Convention on Sunday evening in Toronto (that’s our Monday morning, NZ and Australian time.)

Probably the most interesting aspect of the result from my point of view was that this must be almost the first major international award Jo Walton’s Amongst Others was nominated for that it did not win.

I am fairly certain, too, that the “Best Novel” category winner, Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is a smaller press publication–not that a smaller, specialist press publication winning is unprecedented, but it is nice to see it happening.

.

Novel:
Winner: • Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
• Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman (Ace)
• 11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton as 11.22.63)
• A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam; Harper Voyager UK)
• Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Novella

Winner: “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” K.J. Parker (Subterranean Winter 2011)
• “Near Zennor,” Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors)
• “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet,” Robert Shearman (A Book of Horrors)
• “Rose Street Attractors,” Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight)
•  “Silently and Very Fast,” Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA Press; Clarkesworld)

Short Fiction:
Winner:  “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (F&SF 3-4/11)
• “X for Demetrious,” Steve Duffy (Blood and Other Cravings)
• “Younger Women,” Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean Summer 2011)
• “A Journey of Only Two Paces,” Tim Powers (The Bible Repairman and Other Stories)
• “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld 4/11)

Anthology:
Winner: The Weird, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Corvus; Tor, published May 2012)
• Blood and Other Cravings, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Tor)
• A Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones, ed. (Jo Fletcher Books)
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (Harper Voyager US)
• Gutshot, Conrad Williams, ed. (PS Publishing)

Collection:
Winner: The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, Tim Powers (Tachyon)
•  Bluegrass Symphony, Lisa L. Hannett (Ticonderoga)
• Two Worlds and In Between, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean Press)
•  After the Apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer)
• Mrs Midnight and Other Stories, Reggie Oliver (Tartarus)

Artist:
Winner: John Coulthart
•  Julie Dillon
•  Jon Foster
•  Kathleen Jennings
•  John Picacio

Special Award Professional:
Winner: Eric Lane, for publishing in translation – Dedalus books
•  John Joseph Adams, for editing – anthology and magazine
•  Jo Fletcher, for editing – Jo Fletcher Books
•  Brett Alexander Savory & Sandra Kasturi, for ChiZine Publications
•  Jeff VanderMeer & S.J. Chambers, for The Steampunk Bible

Special Award Non-Professional:
Winner: Raymond Russell & Rosalie Parker, for Tartarus Press
•  Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan & Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld
•  Cat Rambo, for Fantasy
•  Charles Tan, for Bibliophile Stalker blog
•  Mark Valentine, for Wormwood

—

The winners of this year’s Lifetime Achievement award were authors:

Alan Garner and

George R.R. Martin.

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

(Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
………………………‘Du lieber Gott!’

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten’s not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

.

by Rupert Brooke

—

I chose this poem mainly because I adapted the first two lines to accompany my wisteria photos over the weekend, here and here, and it ocurred to me that for a poem to stick in one’s memory and supply the mot juste that illustrates a photo or an event, is a real test of its endurance.

At any rate, I had not read the poem since high school but I hope you will share my enjoyment in re-reading it now.

Since it is also exactly a century since the poem was written—in the northern hemisphere spring of that year, just as it is our southern hemisphere spring now—I felt it was doubly appropriate to feature it as a Tuesday Poem.

For a full bio of Rupert Brooke, his brief life and poetry, the Poetry Foundation’s profile is available Here.

—

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub—and link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Last week—wearing my book blogger’s hat—I received advance publicity that the nomination period for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards would be opening on 1 January and running through until 8 pm on 31 March 2013.

Just to get in the spirit and for those of you who may not know, here’s a little background about the awards:

About the Sir Julius Vogel Awards:

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are a reader-voted award made annually under the auspices of SFFANZ, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Association of New Zealand, to recognise achievement in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by New Zealanders or New Zealand residents. Like other science fiction and fantasy awards around the globe, the Sir Julius Vogels include both professional and fan categories for various forms of writing, artwork, dramatic presentation, and editing.

The Award itself was designed by Weta Workshop, which has been involved with the making of a large number of major films, most famously The Lord of the Rings trilogy—and forthcoming—The Hobbit.

The reason why it’s called the Sir Julius Vogel Award, when Sir Julius was a nineteenth century NZ prime minister—is because he is also held to be NZ’s first speculative fiction author, publishing a novel called Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman’s Destiny in 1889. The premise of the book is one where women have achieved suffrage (which NZ actually enacted in 1893, just four years later) and gone on to hold major positions of authority in politics, law and industry. Given that shortly after 2000, NZ’s prime minister, as well as our governor general, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the chief executive of NZ’s largest private company, were all women, Sir Julius’s speculation is now held to be uncommonly prescient …

Looking ahead to 2013:

Looking ahead to 2013 and the nomination period opening on 1 January, one of the great things about the Sir Julius Vogel Awards is that the initial nomination round is open to everyone /anyone to nominate. So I hope that a lot of other readers, like me, are looking at the list of eligible novels put together by SFFANZ with a view to reading and nominating works they enjoy. SpecFicNZ may also put together a list of eligible works by its members that will also feature short fiction as well as novels.

So far I have read the following novels on the SFFANZ list:

• Fredrik Brounéus: The Prince Of Soul And The Lighthouse
• Adam Christopher: Seven Wonders
• Rachael King: Red Rocks
• Juliet Mariller: Shadowfell

And I hope to have read more by the time nominations close on 31 March.

(I also note that The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two is on the list of eligibles this year.)

I enjoyed the wisteria photo yesterday so much—just as I am enjoying ‘the real thing’ in my garden right now—that I thought I’d share a couple more pics with you. 🙂

"Just now the wisteria..."

"...is in bloom..."

'...all before my little room..."

Words: Adapted (very slightly) from Rupert Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, 1912

Photo credit:  J. Church

Just a reminder from yesterday that I currently have two interviews with fellow authors up and running, one on SF Signal, the other on the Supernatural Underground.

—

SF Signal & “Fun with Friends”: Adam Christopher

“Fun with Friends” is a monthly interview series with fellow SFF authors from Australia and New Zealand, focused around  5 questions  on “who they are” and “what they do” in writing terms.

This month’s interview is with Adam Christopher, an ex-pat Kiwi currently resident in the UK who has a predilection for full-on, Spandex-clad superhero fiction.

You can read the interview Here.

—

The Supernatural Underground: An interview with Merrie Destefano

The Supernatural Underground is a community of authors published by HarperCollins in the USA and Australia—and as it could be argued that no one understand books and writing better than another author, this month I’m chatting with my fellow “Supe”, Merrie Destefano, about exactly that: books, writing, inspiration, motivation and craft.

To check out the interview, click Here.

—

And the “just this”?

The other day I tweeted—paraphrasing, or perhaps even misquoting, Rupert Brooke’s The Old Vicarage, Grantchester—“It’s spring and ‘Just now the wisteria is in bloom, all before my little room.'”

So here you are, “just this”—the white wisteria:

The white wisteria in bloom

Firstly, thank you for all your fabulous support for the giveaway both through the comments and those who tweeted and retweeted.

I must admit, I agree that it’s a really good selection of stories and authors so it’s nice to see your enthusiasm as well. 🙂

But now to the important part (drum roll!)

The lucky winner is: GiadaM

Congratulations Giada!

And thank you again to all of you for participating. 🙂

—

The draw was made via Random.org.

Giada, if you get in touch with me via my website to confirm your postal address, then I’ll I get the books on their way to you asap! My webmail is: contact[at]helenlowe[dot] info

(Note: If I haven’t heard from Giada by 5 pm Wednesday 7th November NZ time, then I will redraw — in that case the re-draw result will be posted here on Thursday 8th.)