From time to time I receive emails through my website, on a range of topics. One I found interesting, from a correspondent who shall remain anonymous (and no, in all likelihood you wouldn’t know him/her anyway) wrote: ” … a few years ago …  I spoke with some NZ publishers and asked them for their opinion of non-YA SFF* publishing in NZ. They told me they doubted there would ever be much activity in that area.”

* (scifi-fantasy/ speculative fiction)

Humph, thought I—and then, but is it true? Is it really true that there’s not much adult SFF worthy of publication being produced in NZ?

My observation and anecdotal evidence suggest  that it isn’t true and that there are in fact a large number of people out there now who are either writing or aspiring to write SFF—far more than I realised when I started down this road myself. So has something changed dramatically over the past few years, or has an enduring reality of New Zealanders reading and writing SFF simply become more visible?

I would be interested to know your thoughts, but my feeling is that the latter is probably the case and that recent phenomena like the Harry Potter and Twilight books, and the Lord of the Rings films, have simply made SFF more, well, respectable. (I certainly received the impression that it wasn’t respectable when I first started writing in earnest, eleven years ago!) I was  intrigued, for example, when Interactive Press brought out Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones) in 2009, to see how many mainstream New Zealand poets had written poetry, over  a considerable period of years, that qualified for inclusion in a “science fiction” anthology.

In terms of some of that activity out there now, the newly formed SpecFicNZ—which is for writers (and editors et al) as opposed to readers—has gotten off to a flying start.  And the recently published A Foreign Country: NZ Speculative Fiction (edited by Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan, Random Static, 2010) contains twenty two short stories by New Zealand authors, some as well established as Juliet Marillier and James Norcliffe, while also featuring newer voices such as Ripley Patton and Miriam Hurst. So plenty of activity there!

You may also recall, from my January 13 post about the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, that I could readily list 5 Adult and 4 YA titles from 2010—so again, no shortage of activity by New Zealand writers in the speculative fiction field.

But of those 5 Adult titles, all five were published overseas, four in the USA and one in Australia, which does rather make it seem as though the lack of activity arises,  not from a lack  of publishable material being produced in New Zealand, but rather from a  lack of interest in publishing it … To make my point, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand was published by an Australian press.

Which does rather beg the question: why?

So waddya reckon? Why do you think NZ publishers aren’t interested in NZ speculative fiction?  And are those reasons valid?

Yesterday was Tuesday Poem day and that always gets me thinking about “the best words in their best order”, which was what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834; he of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Xanadu fame) said about poetry.

I suppose poets and prose writers, if they so choose, may argue forever about which group may lay claim to the best words and better order, but there is no doubt in my mind that poetry often provides very apt words.

Shortly before Christmas I was (legitimately, I hasten to add) sent a series of black and white images of Scott’s last and ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. Wonderful photographs of the stark, white world that is Antarctica and of the men, and also the ponies and the dog teams brought to the frozen continent for the expedition.

Coming right on the celebration of Christmas, which is traditionally a festival of life and renewal—and of course in NZ is all about light and summer, as well—these photographs struck me hard. Perhaps because the last, ill-fated Scott expedition left from New Zealand—and Christchurch, in fact—I had grown up with the sad and terribly moving story, which is mainly about death in that white, unforgiving world. I knew, for example, that the ponies had died and the dogs been shot, and that many of the men in those beautiful photographs would also have died.

So to me, the photos, despite their austere beauty, spoke of sorrow and loss and death—and sent me to poetry for the ‘apt words’ that could encompass those emotions.  In this case, the “best words in their best order” came from poems in Bernadette Hall’s 2007 collection The Ponies (Victoria University Press), produced in part from her time in Antarctica as the 2004 Antarctic Arts Award recipient:

“That’s when the blizzard struck. Now it’s white-out.
Our faces grow black from burning blubber, our eyes
weep, our lips split. Jofe says we have to keep calm,
keep on talking to each other. Our rations run low.

Outside, the ponies lying dead in the snow.”

[from the title poem, The Ponies, pp 23-4.]

and

“When there is white only,
when everything is coloured white,
the land, the sky, the ice and the horizon,

the heroes as they walk away
you’d say were climbing a white wall to heaven.”

[from the poem Heaven, p 30]

spring rain
a rat laps
the Sumida river

Kobayashi Issa 1763-1827

—

Last week Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posted another haiku by Issa, one of the great Japanese haijin, while Janis Freegard shared a poem by Japanese poet, Taigyu Ryokan: “You Do Not Need Many Things.”  They put me in the mode for more haiku and this one, by Issa, is one of my favorites.  For me, it epitomises the juxtaposition of images that “cut” each other and (and in so doing create something greater), that is the essence of haiku.

As with all the best haiku, it can also be read equally well in reverse order:

the Sumida river
a rat laps
spring rain

But read either way, I love the simplicity and power of the image: the freshness of the rain juxtaposed with the rat, which is vermin—and yet the rat, too, laps the river/spring rain: it is part of the whole, with no judgement as to merit.

Head on over to The Realm if you have a moment, where my guest post on finishing The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two, and looking at the year ahead has just posted.

And if you have any questions or queries about the new book, feel free to leave a comment. 😉

A few new reviews have come through for The Heir of Night, from the USA, UK and Australia respectively:

—The newest, as of 17 January, from the USA here

—from The Bookbag Blog, UK, here; and

—a little older, from 10 November 2010 on The Road Well Travelled blog in Australia, here.

Enjoy—and I should have a guest post featuring on The Realm later today; I’ll post again when it’s “live.”

In terms of what’s coming up over the next few weeks-to-months, both here on “… Anything, Really” and in other places, I’ve got a few things on the go.

Blog Interviews:

On 1 February I’ll be interviewing my friend and debut Romance author, Beth Anne Miller, on the Supernatural Underground and discussing her about-to-be released first novel, Into the Scottish Mist, with a follow-up interview here on 4 February.

On 15 February, I’ll be doing another “… on Anything, Really” author interview with Mary Victoria, discussing (the again soon-to-be-released) Samiha’s Song, which is the second in her Chronicles of the Tree series, which started with Tymon’s Flight.

When I started blogging, interviews with other authors was one of the things I was keen to do, so it’s good to be kicking off the new year with a few.

—

Guest Blog Post

As part of the celebrations around the launch of Samiha’s Song, Mary Victoria has asked a some fellow SFF authors to guest post on her blog in a series on the theme of “Writing Strong Female Characters.” (Just as a ‘sneak preview’, I am currently reading Samiha’s Song and can tell you that Mary has an impressive representation of strong female characters in her story! 😉 )

My fellow guests will be (in alphabetical order, not necessarily order of appearance):

Saladin Ahmed; Blake Charlton; Kim Falconer; Tim Jones; Glenda Larke; Nicole Murphy; Gillian Polack and Karon Warren

I’ll also have a series of guest posts coming up on the Orbit blog, ahead of the UK launch of The Heir of Night on 11 March.

—

NZ Book Month—Dan Davin Literary Foundation Guest:

I have been invited to present a series of workshops for high school students and an evening event as the NZ Book Month guest of the Dan Davin Literary Foundation, during the week of 21-27 March. The workshops will be held in Queenstown, Gore and Invercargill; the evening event will also be in Invercargill. I have long-standing ties to the Southland region and am delighted to be going back and to have the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with aspiring writers there. I will post more details as these are finalised, both here and on the News page on my website.

—

Last But Never Least–UK Launch of The Heir of Night on 11 March!

Yup, it’s finally almost here, the UK launch of the The Heir of Night (Orbit) on 11 March—so watch this space for more details of celebratory fun and goodness! 🙂

Over on the Supernatural Underground, my fellow Supe Nicole Murphy has just posted about her two week writing retreat with fellow Fantasy writers in Australia (although New Zealander Russell Kirkpatrick is mentioned in dispatches, so we know there was at least one Kiwi there.) It sounds divine, two uninterrupted weeks just to focus on writing—and I’m not surprised that Nicole’s usual weekly word count doubled during her time there.

On January 18, fellow Tuesday Poet, Janis Freegard, posted Taigyu Ryokan’s (1758-1831) wonderful poem, You Do Not need Many Things, which begins with the line:

My house is buried in the deepest recess of the forest …

and concludes with:

… To enjoy life’s immensity, you do not need many things.”

Perhaps, in order to enjoy an immensity of writing, or any creative endeavour, we do not need many things either, except the space in which to create. Virginia Woolf famously said that in order to write one needed “a room of one’s own” and the Finnish composer, Sibelius, is said to have built his country home, Ainola–which was also “buried in the … recess of the forest” in order to compose more productively. And I know that the thing I felt most in need of this past year while writing The Gathering of the Lost was uninterrupted time.

Yet, although the drive to produce a creative work may push toward withdrawal and retreat, I believe that the heart and fire of writing is also very much about being involved in life and “Mankind” (to paraphrase John Donne.)  So it may be that the essential nature of the writing life must always be to teeter on the tightrope between total immersion in life’s  hustle and bustle  (where little or nothing gets written), and total seclusion, which if maintained or long enough, will also result in nothing being written …

Not always a comfortable tightrope on which to try and maintain one’s balance. But what do my fellow writers say: Do you agree? Disagree? What is your most productive writing environment?

I had a post up on HarperVoyager over last weekend, in which I asked readers to “… let me know both your favorite book of the past decade and/or your top picks for 2011 Hugo Award nominations (from books published in 2010.)”

It turned more into a list of reader’s favourites generally (which is just fine!), but here’s the books posted (in alphabetical order by author’s surname.) I’ve done YA as a separate list, but using the same format:

‘The Long Price’ quartet by Daniel Abraham

‘The Windup Girl’ by Paolo Bacigalupi

‘Surface Detail’ by Iain M Banks

‘The Imago Sequence and Other Stories’ by Laird Barron

‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ by Michael Chabon

‘Spellwright’ by Blake Charlton

‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel’ by Susanna Clarke

‘The Malazan Book of the Fallen’ series, by Steven Erikson

‘The Court of the Air’ by Stephen Hunt

‘The Last Page’ by Anthony Huso

‘Thunderer’ by Felix Gilman

‘Bright of the Sky’ by Kay Kenyon

‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series by George RR Martin

‘The City and the City’ by China Mieville

‘Lavinia’, by Ursula Le Guin

‘The Heir of Night’ by Helen Lowe

‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell

‘The Shadows of the Apt’ series by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Bitter Seeds’ by Ian Tregillis

—

Young Adult:

‘Feed’ by M T Anderson

‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins

‘Verdigris Deep’  by Francis Hardinge

‘The Graveyard Book’ by Neil Gaiman

‘Dreamhunter’ & ‘Dreamquake’ by Elizabeth Knox

‘Tales from Earthsea’ by Urusla  K Le Guin

‘Thornspell’ by Helen Lowe

‘Wicked Lovely’ by Melissa Marr

‘Abhorsen’ by Garth Nix

‘The Amulet of Samarkand’ by Jonathan Stroud

‘The Stone Crown’ by Malcolm Walker

—

And with honorable mentions (because they’re outside our 2000-2011 decade) for:

The ‘Empire’ trilogy by Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts

‘It’ by Stephen King

Of Lulls …

On Monday I posted about the mish-mash of things I’ve been up to since completing work on the ms of The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night, Book Two)—the first round that is. I know the second round is already rolling my way, not unlike the wave front of a tsunami—have I mentioned that it is quite a big book? Well it is, around 200,000 words, which clocks in at just over 700 pages on my file setup, so Round 2 will also be a major writing campaign. (Note the use of military language, also continued on from Monday when I talked about my garden in terms of “stealth” weeds, “camouflage” foliage, spring “surges” and “rampages”—not to mention the recent writing experience being a “big push.” 😉 )

Catch-ups and Eating Out …

This I could not have done better! Fine fare at Te Whau

So we take the lulls when we can and make the most of ’em! One big aspect of a post-writing lull is taking the opportunity to catch up with friends who may—ok, always will!– have been neglected during the writing furore. And although gardens may be patient (as my friend Rae says), people tend to be a little less so … They want their share in your life, you see, given that they are your friends. So the last couple of weeks have involved a fair few coffee, lunch, and evening engagements where—I am not at all sorry to say—both caffeinated and vinous beverages have been consumed, as well as food of varying standards. I say “varying” because although prices remain consistently high, the accompanying food is by no means always of comparable quality. 🙁

Fun with food!

You’ve probably gathered by now that I am a foodie, so it’s likely that my standards are on the high side. Being a writer I also tend towards parsimony—or as I prefer to put it: I like to get value for money when I consume food that I’ve paid someone else to prepare. So it pains me, gentle readers, when something is put in front of me that I know I could have made much better at home—for flavour if not for presentation. Especially when the pricing thereof is so not at the cheap and cheerful end of the eat-out spectrum (in which case, imho anyway, you take your cheapskate chances and remain cheerful no matter what the outcome!)

Secret confessions—sometimes it just pains me when the food is pricey, however good it may be, but that’s just the parsimony kicking in and I try to keep that within bounds!

Some years ago now, a friend of my brother’s who is a great home cook (I still remember his celery and walnut consomme with longing!) said that he had come to accept going out as being almost exclusively part of the social contract, i.e. something he did to be sociable, rather than for the food experience. And while I wouldn’t go that far, because I still have some very enjoyable eat-out experiences, they are by no means as frequent as I would like.

On the other hand, there’s the whole thing about not having to do the washing up. Sometimes that alone is worth the wails of outrage from the direction of my pocket! 😉

As for the catching up itself, that part is always good. And although sometimes the news is not so good, as in jobs lost and family members or cherished pets unwell, there has also been catching up on jobs and promotions gained, children married, novels nearly completed, first houses being bought and anniversaries being celebrated—all the everyday stuff of life that keeps the world spinning around. (OK, OK, “I know”,  it’s really the juxtaposition of centripetal acceleration and gravity that makes the world go round, but hey, I wanted to talk in cliches—all right?! Sheesh!)

And What I’m Reading …

Other things in the mish-mash—well, I have finally finished reading William Gibson’s Zero History, which I did enjoy, although maybe not as much as Spook Country. I felt Zero History was covering a lot of the same ground / material again and it wasn’t as much fun the second time around … I also really query those fellow readers on Tor.com who posted William Gibson’s loose trilogy—Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History—as speculative fiction picks for the decade. As a William Gibson fan from wa-a-y back, I would say these books are classic Gibson, but the speculative elements are slight to non-existant. To me, all three read far more as off-beat thrillers with Spook Country my pick of the three.

In terms of what I have on my TBR pile right now, Mary Victoria’s  Samiha’s Song is still top of the list, ahead of our blog interview mid-February. And Dark Unicorn, the second in Meredith Ann Pierce’s “Firebringer” trilogy, Justin Cronin’s The Crossing, and the 3-book set of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series, are still waiting from my last What I’m Reading post on January 7. My guilty secret though, is that Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods have just been added to the pile. Because you see, while walking home from one of those coffee/brunch/lunch catch-ups, I just happened (how did that happen?) to pass Scorpio Bookshop. And you know what, my wallet never howls in outrage when I open it up to buy books!

On January 14, John Scalzi posted the 6000th post on his Whatever blog and posted a photo of his cat.

I mean, 6000—how amazing is that! I celebrated when I passed the 250 mark on December 30 but this tells me what I long road I have yet to travel.

Here's a photo of my cat ...

I suspect the cat of being a Scalzi-esque in-joke (something to do with most blogs not getting past “hello world”, followed by “not much has been happening here lately” with the final post of desperation being “here’s a photo of my cat/dog/budgie”) but it made me realise that I have been remiss! Over 250 posts now, and closing on 300, and I have not yet posted a photo of my little cat buddy, aka “Ignatz”, “Iggy” or “the Igster” (plus a variety of other even more ridiculous ‘handles’, but these will do!)

Why “Ignatz”? Well, it’s a long story but the short version is that he is named for the mouse, Ignatz, in the cartoon “Krazy Kat”, first created by George Herriman in 1913.

Iggy-on-the-lawn

The slightly longer version expands on the shorter one by explaining that we found Ignatz when he was very small, about 5 weeks by my estimation, and brought him home when efforts to find out where he belonged failed. Needless to say, he had been dumped, and so the “bringing home” has lasted now for 18 years. But back then, I also had two other cats who were still quite young and disposed to be friendly. I had a chinese chest with lion dog feet, too, just high enough for a 5-week old kitten—who was not at all convinced of the friendliness of those overtures—to hide beneath and defend ferociously against all comers.

In the annals of my cats, I  like to call this the “saga of the growling chest”, although hissing and the brave swipe of tiny claws also featured. Suffice it to say that the other two cats—who really were just being friendly—were bemused and all other observers amused. If not familiar with the cartoon, I will let you click on the Krazy Kat link above to work out why, given this episode,  I might have chosen to name the kitten “Ignatz” …

The happy ending, in this case, was that even though I went off to work with some misgiving on the Monday, when I came home and looked into the outbuilding where the cats had their daytime basket, three heads popped up from above the rim and feline amity remained the norm thereafter. In fact, the phenomenon of the three in one basket, or together on the one rug or sofa, became so much the norm that it got its own name: the “catterole.”