SpecFic Christchurch Does the Long Lunch

On June 24 I blogged about the first meeting of a small group of Christchurch Spec Fic writers after we had all attended an event with Elizabeth Knox—and how we  agreed to meet again “soon” over the traditional long lunch. Such was the level of enthusiasm, that “soon” turned out to be yesterday, where the original “gang of eight” became a “gang of nine” around the long tabe at Cafe NG. The lunch was indeed satisfyingly long and many subjects were traversed, including the forthcoming launch of SpecFicNZ at Au Contraire (the New Zealand Science Fiction-Fantasy Convention in Wellington on 27-29 August), as well as short fiction, flash fiction, poetry, novellas and the midnight screening of Eclipse, the latest Twilight film . . . We all agreed that we wanted to keep the get-togethers and conviviality a regular event, so a monthly reprise of the lunch is planned. So if you write speculative fiction and either live in the Christchurch area, or are visting Christchurch on the first Saturday of the month, contact me via the “contact” button above and I will let you know when and where.

Foreign Country Anthology 2010 (Random Static)

A couple of writers around the table, namely Janine and Ripley, have short fiction in the newly available anthology Foreign Country from Random Static. To learn more, check out Ripley’s blog or preorder here.

Locus Fun!

Well, this bit’s fun for me, anyway.  Earlier this year, Writers House negotiated the sale of the UK/Australia & New Zealand rights to The Wall of Night quartet to Orbit (Little, Brown & Co, UK) and in May the news appeared in Locus. Cool, huh?! I’ve only just got my hands on the hard copy, so I thought I’d share it with you. 🙂

And here’s the actual words …

from Locus May 2010: People & Publishers

And The Giveaway Results for the 2 x Signed Copies of the All-New Paperback Edition of Thornspell are (Ta dum! Ta dum!):

Gryffindor and Ravenclaw! Oops!  I meant to say:

Wen Baragrey; and

Jan Butterworth.

Congratulations, Wen and Jan–if you email me at contact@helenlowe.info I will arrange to get the books to you.

Congratulations also to both BarbaraE and Rachel who also commented here but were winners in the Supernatural Underground Draw: BarbaraE got one of the Heir AREs from Kate at Eos, and Rachel won one of the 2 x Thornspell editions there.

To everyone else who posted and participated: thank you so much and there will be plenty more happening around both Thornspell and Heir into the future, so stay tuned.

Oh, what’s that? Ok, the “sorting hat” is shouting out that it’s contractually entitled to have its mugshot included, so here it is folks:

The Sorting Hat

Well, it’s not Friday, but because of the paperback release of Thornspell yesterday and the giveaway, I thought we’d leave the weekly wrap up for today, which here in NZ is officially July 3.

OK, on to the wrap-up.  Firstly, the giveaway: the “sorting hat” has been grumbling this morning because of having to deal with both the Supernatural Underground and Anything, Really giveaway draws”, with lots of comments along the lines of “I’m going to put them all in Slytherin!”—mutter, mutter—and  “Any more of this malarkey and I’m calling in the shop steward for the Union of Magical Accessories”—mumble, mumble … But I am confident that the hat will come through soon and I should have a result for you some time this afternoon. 🙂

As I said earlier in the week, there’s been a lot going on.  I wrapped up the second part of The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night, part 2), which I believe puts me at slightly over halfway to finishing the manuscript. And although I have a synopsis of Parts 3 and 4 (of course!), there’s a few interesting ways of getting into Part 3 “playing” in my mind right now. I guess you might say the fingers are twitching to get typing!

But I couldn’t leap into it straight away because this was another big blog week—in this case, making my debut on the Supernatural Underground on July 1 and celebrating the release of Thornspell in paperback yesterday. Busy, busy—but fun, too. I loved sharing my love of fantasy and fantastic worlds with all the posters on the Supernatural Underground.

On the poetry and radio station side of life, I had the privilege of interviewing Sarah Broom about her first collection, Tigers at Awhitu (2010: Auckland University Press, New Zealand; Carcanet, UK.) All part of making July poetry month on Women on Air, ahead of National Poetry Day on Friday July 30.  In my opinion, Tigers at Awhitu is distinguished by its balance of intellectual and emotional depth, strength of poetic form and sheer richness of language so I felt privileged to have the opportunity to speak with Sarah on air. Perhaps the more so because Sarah completed writing Tigers at Awhitu while going through ongoing treatment for lung cancer—no small ask.  The interview will play shortly on Women on Air and for those who can’t pick up Plains 96.9FM, I will be putting the interview on podcast later this week.

Anyway, I think it’s time I went and had another chat with the hat …

The paperback edition of Thornspell is finally out in New Zealand today—up until now, it’s only been available in the hardback edition. I really like the hardback edition, it’s a wonderful book, but since the NZ book market is almost exclusively paperback, I think it will be helpful to have Thornspell available in that format. And as I mentioned a few weeks back, the paperback edition has kept the wonderful cover art by Antonio Xavier Caparo, but also includes excerpts from some of the very good professional reviews Thornspell received in the United States.  All in all, it’s a very nice book—and the one typo that a reader picked up for me in the hardcover edition has now been corrected.

Thornspell has its own website here, where you can read excerpts from the book. Chapter 1 is there in PDF format, but if you click on all the individual images from the cover (did I say “wonderful” and “Antonio Xavier Caparo?” OK, moving on then …) you should get a relevant quote from the book.

I’d love to know which quote or image is your favourite, if you’d like to leave a comment here.

(The Thornspell website also has a lot more reviews, some from online blog reviewers if you want to check them out.)

But in brief, Thornspell is a retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the prince destined to break the spell of the 100-year sleep—if he lives to do so and can learn to find his way through the layers of magic that surround the sleeping castle. And in order to do that he’s going to have to take on the powerful faie who cast the original death spell and is not only still around, but waiting to have another go … Thornspell has been described as “swashbuckling” and “romantic”,”mysterious”, “adventurous” and “magical”—but why not find out for yourself?

To celebrate the paperback release and also my debut post on the Supernatural Underground blog, I will be giving away a signed copy of the new paperback edition to two readers (again with names to be drawn from the “sorting hat”) who post a comment here before midnight, July 2, New Zealand time.

The Supernatural Underground is a blog for writers of speculative fiction published by HarperCollinsUSA and I’ll be blogging there on the first of every month—and my inaugural post has just gone live.

Do go over over and have a look. And to make it worth your while :-), you’ll see there’s 2 signed copies of Thornspell up for grabs for international readers (the AREs of Heir are for North American readers only at this stage, sorry!)

And to celebrate the release of Thornspell in paperback here in NZ tomorrow, I am also giving away a further two signed copies of the new paperback edition to readers (again to be drawn from the “sorting hat”) who post a comment here before midnight, July 2, New Zealand time.

I finished that second draft revision of Part 2 of The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Series, Book Two—it’s all about the 2-s, clearly:-)) yesterday—yahoo! And am all fired up to race into Parts 3 and 4! (Rubs hands together briskly.)

On the rest of the agenda for today—I’ll be writing my very first blog post for the Supernatural Underground, which should be posted sometime after 4 pm today, NZ time. (It won’t be 1 July in the States until then as their time zone closest to ours is still 16 hours behind us, currently—first in the world to see the sun and all that jazz!)

… over the next few days!

Poetry on Women on Air: National Poetry Day—And Month!

July 30 is National Poetry Day here in New Zealand, so by way of celebrating poems and poets we are making July Poetry Month at Women on Air. We’ll be interviewing at least one poet on every show from now until July 31, which means five weeks of amazing poetry and poetic voices coming to listeners every Saturday.  The poets will also be featured on the Women on Air website here, together with one of their poems for you to read and enjoy.

Our poet for Saturday 3 is Sarah Broom, whose first collection Tigers at Awhitu (2010), was published simultaneously by Auckland University Press, here in NZ, and Carcanet in the UK.  When I first read this collection earlier in the year it absolutely blew me away with its combination of wonderful use of language, poetic control, reflective intelligence and emotional power. During much of the writing of Tigers, Sarah was going through treatment for lung cancer (no, she has never smoked), treatment which is ongoing, which is another reason I am grateful for the opportunity to have her on Women on Air this Saturday and to help bring her voice to a wider audience.

Excerpt From Three Birds ii

…

You sit in the bush before dawn,
listening to the seep of the soil, feeling
the rags of the night air on your skin.
You wait until the kokako starts to sing
in the still-dark trees, until slowly
you start to make out its ash-grey form
against the greying light. Eyes black
as the rotting leaves, and at its throat
a hurtled scarp of sky.

© Sarah Broom

—

And I Join the Supernatural Underground Blog—I July

The Supernatural Underground is a blog of speculative fiction authors published by HarperCollins USA, and I will be blogging on the Underground for the first time tomorrow, 1 July—and the first of every month thereafter. And no, I haven’t finally decided what I am going to blog about yet. But yes, there will be giveaways. At least two copies of the ARE of The Heir of Night for within North America only, and a couple of copies of Thornspell (given its paperback release on July 2) for international readers.

On Friday 2, actual paperback release day, I’ll also be giving away a further 2 copies of Thornspell right here on this blog. So keep watching this space.

Between

I
Close in and distant, you had me
kite on the cord of your touch,
whichever way you moved
I was swept, arrested,
twin to your anthem.

II
Between question
and response, between poise
and disarray

in slants of London light
in the autumn voice of Joni Mitchell
mid-passage, on our walks
across Brooklyn Bridge

between one country and another
two zones to every hour
body in to body, that fit,

between the letting go and hold,
your hand all night upon my hip.

(c) Rhian Gallagher

Published, Bravado 15

Rhian Gallagher attended the Original Composition course at Victoria University of Wellington, before moving to London where she completed a BA at London University, and Post-Graduate Diploma in Printing and Publishing at the London School of Printing. Her first collection, Salt Water Creek, published by Enitharmon (London) in June 2003, was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Rhian is currently living in her hometown of Timaru and working on a  second collection.

I read this poem in Bravado 15 and loved it; otherwise I will let the poem speak for itself, which I feel it does very well without any aid from me …

Last Friday, in “It’s Friday — But First, More from “Elizabeth Knox & SpecFic”, I wrote about loving books that absorb me when I’m reading, and how consideration of  “genre” isn’t something that comes into that equation.

Over the weekend, a friend asked me what were the three books I found most absorbing last year (why three—I don’t know, but I think it might just be that old magic number.) Well, I read just on 80 books last year but it was still an easy question, because there were in fact three that really stood out, both when I first read them and still when I think back.

These books were (with some, but by no means all, the reasons that I liked ’em):

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games has a very clever premise: a post-apocalyptic world in which a take on the old, old story of Theseus and the Minotaur (i.e. the tribute of young people, chosen by lot, who must compete in the arena for their conquerors) is combined with the current craze for reality tv. You also have the compelling character of Katniss, the young “survivor”, who like Theseus, is also a volunteer. But as with all fiction that works, every character who steps onto the stage of this book, however briefly, is compelling; all have a story, whether sad—and for the conquered, this is not a happy world—or brutal, or superficial (yes, there’s some of those, too, but no spoilers.) Collins made the world, the people and the situation believable and real—I was one with Katniss throughout and stayed with her and the story, all disbelief suspended, until the end.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

The Slap is set in contemporary urban Australia and I know a lot of people dislike this book, for all sorts of reasons (search the title on line and you’ll find the discussion.) The story centres around an incident that occurs at a suburban bbq of friends and family, where an adult slaps a child who has been consistently misbehaving—and the consequeces ripple out, from that incident, into the lives of the people present. But I wouldn’t say it’s about that precisely, it’s more about the people and their lives and incidentally, as part of that, all the permutations of how they react and don’t react to the slap incident. Fallout. Or how the incident falls in to what is already going on. So why did I love the book? Because it’s so real. And the people are so real, so human, with all their motivations and agendas and backstories. They’re not necessarily particularly nice or comfortable people to spend time with between the covers of a book, but to me that’s because they are real. This is us, the human tribe, warts and all. And there’s definitely no authorial voice to provide a safe compass for readers to steer by: there’s just all these polyglot characters and their different voices. I loved it.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars by Max Brook

I also loved World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (although again, I know people who just couldn’t get into it.) Like The Hunger Games, World War Z is post-apocalyptic, although more immediately so than THG: this is our world as we know it, just 10 years on and post the zombie apocalypse. Interestingly, I think the reasons I loved WWZ were very similar to the reasons I loved The Slap: it felt so real. In WWZ, zombieism is effectively a virus and as I was reading it I was always thinking yes: yes. This is how it would spread; this is how people would behave, as individuals, as groups, as governments. This is real; these people—every voice recounting his or her own personal history of the events (although there are also threads pulling the whole together)—are real. Also human, fallible, unheroic, sometimes venal, but occasionally heroic, too. Interestingly, Tor.com also ran an interesting series of articles a while back, on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in contemporary SF-F, which suggested that World War Z provides one of the few authentic depictions of PTSD in fiction. There’s 3 instalments, starting here.

Definitely three very different stories, but at the end of each one I put the book down and I felt satisfied. And they’ve stuck with me.

As you know, I do interviews with poets and writers for the Women on Air show on Plains 96.9 FM locally, and I also load the podcasts for the show—for which I recently won an award, which was kind of cool. And here’s a picture of the “gong.” 🙂

And here’s some of my more recent interviews: feel free to check them out.

To listen, click on the name then either press the “play” icon or download the mp3 (it’s free).

Novelists:

Jennifer Fallon: A long time resident of Alice Springs, international SciFi-Fantasy author, Jennifer Fallon, has recently moved to Oxford, Canterbury. She talks about the reasons for her move, her plans for living in Oxford and her latest book.

Andrea Levy: The Orange and Whitbread Award winning author of Small Island discusses her new novel, The Long Song and why she wanted to write about slavery

Nalini Singh: New York Times best selling author Nalini Singh talks about her love of Paranormal Romance and the Guild Hunter & Psy-Changeling series.

Poets:

Victoria Broome: Poet, Victoria Broome, talks about her writing.

Mary McCallum: Award winning writer, Mary McCallum, chats about her new creative initiative, the Tuesday Poem Blog.

Children’s Fiction

Helen McKinley:Helen McKinley talks about her new children’s book, “Grandma Meets the Queen”