I have my regular Supernatural Underground blog post up today titled:

1 Year On: Plus An Award for The Heir of Night, More Earthquakes & Delivering The Gathering of the Lost

Yes, I’ve been blogging on the Supernatural Underground on the first day of every month for a year now . Hard to believe where all that time’s flown away to!

Today’s post is a wrap-up of the past month—just getting through it mainly! Do head on over and check it out.:)

And as always, feel free to leave a comment if the spirit so moves you! 😉

The “Happy Birthday to ‘ … on Anything, Really’, grand book giveaway competition has now closed. (The official cut-off was midnight Thursday 30 so no comments dated after that will be included—apologies if this catches anyone out! 🙁 )

Just a reminder of what the giveaways being announced on Saturday 2nd comprise:

• The Grand Epic Fantasy Giveaway Set, comprising:
  • a signed UK, trade format first edition of The Heir of Night;
    
  • a hardback, anniversary edition of Sara Douglas’s Battle Axe
  • Trudi Canavan’s The Ambassador’s Mission
  • Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia
  • Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
    

• The Grand YA Fantasy Giveaway Set Comprising:
  • a signed hardback copy of Thornspell
  • Cassandra Clare’s complete Mortal Instruments trilogy: City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass
  • Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief
  • Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan

• The Grand NZ Poetry Giveaway Comprising:
  • AUP New Poets: Harry Jones, Erin Scudder & Chris Tse
  • Ingrid Horrocks’ Mapping the Distance
  • Anna Livesey’s the moonmen
  • Kerry Popplewell’s Leaving the Tableland

Completed Today:

Well, I’ve done it.

Today I revised and rewrote those last 25 pages and got to the final line of the GR (Great Revision) of The Gathering of the Lost. Tomorrow I’ll review the final two chapters that comprise Part 5 again and polish them up, but effectively the job is done and—allowing tomorrow for tidy up—with a day to spare on the 1 July deadline. Woot!

So, just to do today’s stats package properly :

• 25 pages revised and rewritten
• 2 final chapters completed
• Part 5 completed
• Total Pages Until Completion: 0 plus Glossary.

(Pssst: But really, I’ve been doing the glossary as I go along so there’s only a little bit of tidy up there to do, too.)

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Videos of the ConText “Preview” Reading from The Gathering of the Lost

To celebrate completion of The Gathering of the Lost by the 1 July deadline, I feel it is only fitting to bring you the ConText “preview” reading from The Gathering of the Lost today rather than Friday. The reading—even more fittingly 😉 —is taken from the prologue of the book.

Enjoy!

The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Book Two) is to be published in March 2012 in the US, UK, Australia & New Zealand.

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Final Competition Reminder:

Today is the final week of the month-long “Birthday of the Blog”  competition for 3 sets of grand book giveways: Epic Fantasy, YA Fantasy, & NZ Poetry.

You can read the full details here. The competition closes tonight  at midnight, NZ time. The results will be announced here on the blog on Saturday 2 (before midnight, again—NZ time.)

Completed Today:

OK, we haven’t had a completed today since Sunday so here goes:

• Part 4 is now completed—yahoo! This means that I am now in the “endgame”, which is Part 5! (There is no Part 6 and will be no Part 6.)
• Today I have revised and rewritten a further 28 pages.
• Total Pages Until Completion: 25 plus Glossary.

So yes, there will still be reviewing and polishing of today’s work—but we’re close to the 1 July deadline, baby, we’re close! So all digits crossed!!

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Videos of the ConText Readings from The Heir of Night; & Samihas’s Song, by Mary Victoria

On Monday, when I featured the Context reading from Mary Victoria’s Tymon’s Flight and my own Thornspell, I promised to bring you the subsequent clips for Samiha’s Song and The Heir of Night to you today. (The Gathering of the Lost preview reading will still be Friday.)

So again, enjoy—and without further ado:

Clip 1, Samiha’s Song (5.21)

Clip 2, The Heir of Night (4.23)

The Heir of Night recently won the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011 for Best Novel (jointly with Lyn McConchie’s The Questing Road) and a Catanetwork Reviewers’ Choice Award in 2010

Allow me to say …

Allow me to say
that in the midst
of earthshaking, plus
associated mud
and dust both inside
and out, as well
as queueing
for the portaloo —
I would like the lid
to stay on my electric
kettle so that boiling
water to safe drinking
level becomes less
of an exercise
in burned fingertips
and frustration …

This kettle, I feel,
is no good: one day
when the world
becomes safer,
I shall buy myself
a better kettle.

For now though,
I am grateful:
the god of small things
is reminding me
that I am alive.
.
© Helen Lowe, 2011
.
Note: I wish to acknowledge the allusion to Anna Livesey’s poem, “Next Time” (the moonmen, Victoria University Press, 2010) in stanza 2.

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On June 14, I talked about my wariness of the “diary entry” poem in the context of the Canterbury earthquake—and in fact any of the major “situations” we all face at some time or other in our lives, whether natural or human-made disasters, or the loss of those we are close, too. Those remarks still hold …

… Yet sometimes there is a place for the diary-entry poem and this is unashamedly one of those days and those poems—although I hope you will agree that the leaven of humour lifts “Allow me to say …” above the straightout ‘diary entry.’ I have, however, listed it under “Earthquake Reports” as well as “Poetry”, because in its own way, I feel that it is a report from the “suburban rear lines.” 😉

Enjoy! And yes, feedback welcome.

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To read today’s featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog hub—and to link to other Tuesday Poets posting around the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Apologies, because I know this has taken a wee while, but as promised here are the initial video clips from my reading session at ConText, where I read from the first two books in Mary Victoria’s Chronicles of the Tree series, Tymon’s Flight & Samiha’s Song, as well as my own books: Thornspell and The Heir of Night. And yes, there was even a sneak preview from The Gathering of the Lost. 😉

Today I am featuring the reading from Mary Victoria’s Tymon’s Flight and my own Thornspell.

.

I will bring the subsequent clips to you on Wednesday, for Samiha’s Song and The Heir of Night, and the Gathering preview reading will be Friday.

Enjoy!

—

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Clip 1, Tymon’s Flight: (5:23)

Tymon’s Flight recently won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Artwork, for the cover design by Frank Victoria.

—

Clip 2, Thornspell: (2.33)

Thornspell won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel, Young Adult in 2009 and was a Storylines Notable Book in the same year.

Completed Today

The good news is that there’s been quite a bit of movement again today on ‘pages to completion’, so definitely coming out of that phoney war! So here’s the update on “Completed Today”—

• a further 4020 words completed—75% new words written, 25%  revised material incorporated with the new;
• 1 further chapter completed (and a further chapter begun);
• Total Pages Until Completion: 62 plus Glossary.

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Fun with Friends:

If you haven’t seen it already, my friend Mary Victoria has just been gifted a fabulous book trailer for her Chronicles of the Tree series. You can check it out here. So much fun!

And if you “like”, do click through to Mary’s site here and tell her so!

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My friend and fellow Supernatural Underground author, Nicole Murphy, is about to host a guest blog series in July on Dreams and Fulfillment to celebrate the release of Rogue Gadda, the third and final novel in her Dreams of Asarlai trilogy. I shall be contributing a guest post and although I haven’t decided exactly what I’ll be writing about yet I am looking forward to coming up with an angle that will do justice to the topic—and contribute to the auspicious launch of Rogue Gadda!

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Competition Reminder:

Don’t forget that this is the final week of the month-long “Birthday of the Blog”  competition for 3 sets of grand book giveways: Epic Fantasy, YA Fantasy, & NZ Poetry.

You can read the full details here. The competition closes this Thursday 30 June at midnight, NZ time. The results will be announced here on the blog on Saturday 2.

Following on from Wednesday 22nd’s post I am still very much in “crunch” phase but just starting to come out of the “phony war”, i.e. where work was going on but the ‘pages to completion’ did not appear to reduce at all.

So-o, since Wednesday 22 I have managed:

• a further 2643 completely new words written;
• 17 Pages rewritten/revised;
• 24 pages of new and/or previously rewritten ms reviewed and polished
• 3 further chapters completed;
• Total Pages Until Completion: 90 plus Glossary.

Is it scary? Yes, just a little (plus there’s ongoing earthquakiness for extra adrenalin goodness—only 1 dash to the study door today though 😉 ) Mainly I try and just ‘feel the deadline fear’ then put it to one side and carry on with whatever the next writing task at hand is: keeping going, one word at a time!

I was going to talk about the Mythopoeic Awards today, but then I realized that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards have just been announced, so I thought I’d bring those to you instead.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards are for “works of speculative fiction translated into English from other languages.” In other words, they’re about bringing great works of speculative fiction written in other languages to the attention of the English-reading world. Hands up like those like me who think this is a Good Thing, ie broadening the depth of story range and breadth of imagination for us all to enjoy? I am sure that the “ayes” absolutely have it!

Those of you who recall my interview with Cheryl Morgan from last August, may also recall that these awards were one of the new projects she was very enthusiastic about (when you click on the interview, check out question 13) through her work with Science Fiction Awards Watch.

The international jury for the Awards comprised: Terry Harpold, University of Florida, USA (Chair); Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University, India; and Dale Knickerbocker, East Carolina University, USA.

The Awards were announced at Eurocon in Stockholm on 18 June (a day after the Gemmells in London on June 17, so ’tis obviously the season of the award!) and here’s the results:

Long Form (i.e. Novel, Collection) Winner

A Life on Paper: Stories, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer Press). Original publication in French (1976­-2005).

Official Citation:

The stories in this collection — the first-ever English translations of Châteaureynaud’s work — are written with such delicacy and economy of prose that the reader may be unprepared for the marvelous — and often disquieting — irruptions of unreality that break into experiences of the narrators and characters. This is unapologetically fantastic fiction, but so subtly-crafted that even outrageous violations of reason — a man sprouts tiny wings, a siren swims ashore, a guillotined head complains of its decomposition, a mummy in a double-bass case sings beautifully in Breton — seem manifestly verisimilar; it all just fits together with cunning perfection. Edward Gauvin’s translations are models of the discipline, masterfully attuned to Châteaureynaud’s stylstic shifts, scrupulous ambiguity, and dark humor.

Long Form Honourable Mention:

The Golden Age, Michal Ajvaz, translated by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive Press). Original publication in Czech as Zlatý Věk (2001).

Official Citation:

A brilliant, ambitious work of utopian fiction and an extraordinary shaggy dog story, complexly and confidently told. The peculiar architecture of the unnamed island, the islanders’ strange language games and mutable writing system, knowing manipulations of would-be colonizers, and the method of the island’s sole, parodically hypertextual, historical novel — called simply the Book — are realized on so many registers and with such care that Ajvaz’s novel seems as much a shorthand encyclopedia of modern thought on language, mind, and fiction-making, as an entertaining, Swiftian travelogue. Andrew Oakland’s translation deftly crosses all of these fictional and nonfictional orders without a misstep, capturing the novelist’s wry humor and philosophical rigor.

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Short Form Winner (ie Short Story, Novelette)

Elegy for a Young Elk, Hannu Rajaniemi, translated by Hannu Rajaniemi (Subterranean Online, Spring 2010). Original publication in Finnish (Portti, 2007).

Official Citation:

A brilliant crossing of multiple sf and fantasy genres, marked by canny humor, melancholy, and a looming sense of menace, and shot through with beautiful and memorable images and exchanges. Rajaniemi’s evocative prose hints at a richly-conceived backstory of a technological apotheosis that has refashioned real and virtual worlds — many of the details of which are only hinted at but never seem underimagined. A rare work of short fiction that grows more complex on successive readings.

Short Form Honourable Mention:

Wagtail, Marketta Niemelä, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho (Usva International 2010, ed. Anne Leinonen). Original publication in Finnish as “Västäräkki” (Usva (The Mist), 2008).

Official Citation:

An intensely-told, unsettling parable of the family in an age of hyperreality and affective alienation. Rantalaiho’s precise translation of Niemelä’s spare, detached prose admirably captures the narrator’s anxiety and imperfect understanding of the bonds that join her to the daughters — and kinds of motherhood — between which she must choose.

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Special Award:

A special award was made to British author and translator Brian Stableford in recognition of the excellence of his translation work.

Official Citation:

Brian Stableford’s contributions to science fiction and fantasy in the roles of author, editor, and historian-scholar may well be unequalled; certainly, no other living writer has matched the variety and scope of his prodigious output of original fiction and scholarship. For the last decade, Stableford has devoted much of his considerable talents and energy to an unprecedented project of literary resurrection, translating more than sixty books of proto and classic sf, horror, and fantasy by French authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of the authors and titles are unknown to English-speaking readers; only a handful had been previously translated; many of these texts are now almost impossible to find in the original French. Yet they include among them more than a few of the most historically significant and influential works of modern imaginative fiction in that language. They are invaluable to our understanding of the sources and development of world science fiction and fantasy.

Despite their sheer, daunting number fully seventeen of the texts nominated for this years long form Award were translated by Stableford; his translations are complete and faithful. His critical introductions and annotations are models of discernment, and invaluable to the scholar and enthusiast alike. The intellectual sweep and literary success of this translation project are, in a word, astonishing; there is nothing comparable to it in the history of sf and fantasy translation, and it stands as a benchmark for the labor that these Awards aim to honor. Thus it is appropriate that with this Special Award in recognition of the excellence of his translation work, we congratulate and celebrate Brian Stableford’s ongoing service in support of world science fiction and fantasy.

As regular “… Anything, Really” blog readers will know, one of the projects I have been wholeheartedly plugging—I mean, supporting—lately is Tales for Canterbury.

Tales for Canterbury is an anthology of short fiction put together by Cassie Hart and Anna Caro, with a range of short fiction donated by both national and international authors, as a fundraiser for the Red Cross Christchurch Earthquake Appeal. (You know, nods significantly, the earthquake—plus 7500 or so!)

I know I keep saying how great Tales for Canterbury is—and it really is! You can read a bit more about the anthology and some of the authors included here––but I’ve also decided to not just tell you, but to start bringing you a peak inside some of the stories over the next wee while. Just the first paragraph or so (if the paras are very short) so it remains “fair use”—but I do hope it will encourage readers to not just take my word for Tales for Canterbury’s quality but also to buy, buy, buy—thereby supporting the cause!

‘Anyways’, I am starting with my own contribution, The Fountain, which appears in the “Hope” section of the anthology. I wrote The Fountain as part of two creative initiatives. In the first, I was trying to write a short fiction series in different genres and styles.  The “genre” of The Fountain is a ‘recent historical story with paranormal elements.’ The second inititative was a mini series of ANZAC short stories based around the experiences of civilians, nurses etc, as opposed to soldiers.  (Another of the completed stories, The Walk Home was broadcast on Radio New Zealand in July 2008 and re-broadcast on ANZAC Day this year. )

So here it is, the opening paragraph of The Fountain (Tales for Canterbury anthology):

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The Fountain

Helen Lowe

The only way to survive, Sarah found, was to shut out everything except
the immediate moment, the task at hand. She kept her whole being
focused on that one thing, because it was the only way to carry on, to
deal with the wrecks of human beings they kept putting in front of her:
the gaping wounds and burns, the suppurating tissue, exposed bone and
gore. Once, surfacing for a moment out of the intense focus that kept her
sane, she tried to remember who had said that war was hell. Someone
famous, whose name she should remember, except that she never had
paid much attention to history in school. Well, she realised her error
now. War was the maelstrom and there was only one way to survive it,
to focus on whatever came next, and then the next thing after that, and
leave others to debate effect and cause …

…

To read more, of both The Fountain and all the other wonderful stories comprising Tales for Canterbury, hie thee to Random Static and order your copy today, right here! 😉