Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

by Lewis Carroll

from Through the Looking Glass

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I could pretend to all sorts of serious reasons for selecting Jabberwocky as my Tuesday Poem: for example, that it is regarded as one of the finest nonsense poems in the English language, in particular for its use of portmanteaux; or that some of the nonsense words, such as “chortled”, have subsequently entered main stream usage.

But in fact, I have chosen it because it was one of my favourite poems as a child and one of the first I was intrigued enough to learn, of my own volition, to memorise right through. I loved the rhythm and rhyme and nonsense of it that yet managed to tell a thoroughly—and satisfyingly—comprehensible story.

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

As you know, I am off to Worldcon in Melbourne early next month and my Australia/New Zealand publisher for The Heir of Night (and Wall of Night series), Orbit, have just released this poster celebrating their attending authors.  Cool, huh?!

I love the look and—ok, I’m human—the company my name is keeping! 🙂

Today is really wet—that grey old rain keeps coming down and lying in deep puddles throughout the garden which makes it a decidedly indoors sort of Sunday. There’s a lot of stuff to catch up on, too, besides reading those books mentioned yesterday; pretty much everything that I don’t want to put off until tomorrow otherwise it will cut into writing time.   And given that the last fews weeks have been crazily busy with other stuff intruding on that precious time, that’s something I really don’t want to do.

So what’s on today’s list? I have already signed and parcelled up 4 x copies of Thornspell to send out to the blog posters who won giveaways earlier in the week, plus another 1 to a reviewer in Finland (you may recall I talked about Finland a few weeks back in my second “Influences on Story” post); also 1 for fellow writer, Tracey O’Hara, in Australia.

Tracey is another Supernatural Underground blogger  and a while back she asked for Supe authors to donate books for  a Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer giveaway and also for a Romance Writers of Australia Convention workshop she will be running 12-14 August. But Tracey was so taken with the two giveaways of  Thornspell I sent over that I had to volunteer to send another for her very own—so as not to shortchange either of these very worthy giveaway causes—and of course I will be getting a couple of Tracey’s debut novel, Love’s Cold Kiss, to use as giveaways in return. (So watch this space, those of you who love paranormal urban fantasy!)

At any rate, there was a lot of bubble wrap, brown paper and string being expended in our household this morning. And then paper and printer ink as I also wrote and signed cover letters for Kate Nintzel, my Eos editor, to send out with AREs of The Heir of Night to North American bookblog reviewers (ones I have had contact with re Thornspell, hence the personalized covers from me) over the coming weeks. Yes, you’re right, that R-word does make me nervous. But it is also inevitable when a book gets published, i.e. that does mean the book being sent out into the world and folk out there are not only going to have opinions about it, they’re going to express ’em, too. Although I remind myself that the first responses have been positive, both getting the cover quote from the wonderful Robin Hobb, but also an enthusiastic report from Joanna Preston.

So that was my morning. After I’ve finished writing this post I will be turning my attention to voting for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which are given for achievement in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by SFFANZ. As I can’t attend Au Contraire, the national science fiction-fantasy convention being held at the end of the month, that means I have to get my postal or electronic vote in by August 20—and I still have a few short fiction finalists left to read.

Hugo Award 2009

Once that’s done and dusted I then have to write my final post on reading for the Hugo Awards—other, of course, than attending the actual awards ceremony in Melbourne next month—which should be posted on the Out of this Eos blog early next week. So I need to get that done today as well—and also start putting together the questions for a blog interview with the winner of last year’s Hugo Award for “Best Fan Writer”, Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl is the non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld and has recently commenced a new venture, Wizard’s Tower Press, a new small press publisher specializing in science fiction, fantasy and related literature. She will be attending both Au Contraire and Worldcon, so I look forward to talking with her about both her SF-F travels and the new venture.

I’ve got two books on the go this week, both from the early 1990s. The first is an old favourite, Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne (1992), which I have not re-read for some years—but which I am really enjoying all over again. It’s High Fantasy, set in a world based around the medieval Provence of the troubadors, i.e. think Aquitaine. Although Tigana is probably my favourite Guy Gavriel Kay novel, Arbonne comes a close second—I really like the mix of characters and the layers of plot and political manoeuverings/machinations to the story.  In the end though, it’s a story about people, their joys and sorrows and struggles, which is the kind of tale-telling that I enjoy.

The second book, and one I have been meaning to read for-ever (ok, exaggeration, for quite a few years now) is John Marsden’s classic YA tale  Tomorrow, When the War Began. Such a great title, isn’t it?  So far I’m only a few chapters in, but it’s reading really well. It’s also about to be a movie really soon, which is why I’m keen to get in and read the book right now.

So how about you? What are you reading this week and how are you finding it?

Tomorrow, Saturday 7 August, I’ll be interviewing Ripley Patton for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM.

Ripley Patton is an American speculative author living in Christchurch. Best known for her short fiction, Ripley has been widely published in both NZ and internationally and currently has both a short story and a novella short listed for New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which will be announced on August 27-29. Ripley is also the founder of SpecFicNZ, the first association for New Zealand writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which will be launched officially on August 28th, 2010 at Au Contraire, the 31st New Zealand National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in Wellington. I’ll be talking with Ripley about both her own success as an author and her drive to establish the first association for New Zealand speculative fiction writers, 120 years after Sir Julius Vogel published NZ’s first ‘officially’ speculative fiction novel, Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman’s Destiny. (Although I believe Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, 1872, may also have some claims in this respect.)

Solar explosion

Our very own G2V star is the sun, or Sol, by the way.  And as astronomers around the world are reporting, it’s getting kind of active with several large explosions of energy, called Coronal Mass Ejections, after a period of relative quiet. As Phil Plait says on his Bad Astronomy blog,  “NASA’s recently-launched Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action mid-eruption” and this photo is the result. Apparently there’s more Sol explode-y fun on the way over the next few years, as well.

If you want to find out more you can start here on Bad Astronomer, but there are also links to other astronomy sites blogging about the phenomenon, where you can also find good information. Myself, I’m just saying, “wow!’ And maybe, “awesome!”

Just an update on Sunday, when I got my first look at the Orbit (Little, Brown/Hachette) cover for the Australia/New Zealand editon of The Heir of Night. I got my second look today, at the “first visual with type” (i.e. the title and my name etc all together with the cover image) and it looks a-maz-ing!

I know, I know— I’m playing the tantalize game because I can’t show it to you yet—but I should be able to very soon and I’m very much looking forward to that moment.  I really do think you will like.

Someone asked how it compares with the USA cover (which you can see in the sidebar.) Mainly they are very different—even down to the colour schemes—but interestingly they both capture part of what I think is important to the “feel” of the book. The US cover is dark and brooding and mysterious, capturing that feel of what Robin Hobb calls “strange magic [and] dark treachery”, whereas the Australia/New Zealand cover still has the sense of darkness but focuses more on the powerful and adventurous aspects of the “richly told tale” (again—from Robin Hobb.)

But very soon I will have them both up here for you to see for yourself and decide whether you prefer one or t’other, or like them both equally. (I’m definitely in the latter camp—I really do like them both.)

Well, I’ve been hoping and planning and working toward going for some time, but yesterday I actually booked my plane tickets so you can’t get more ‘official’ than that.

I expect most people know—but just in case—Worldcon is the  World Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention (or more correctly, the convention of the World Science Fiction Society) and this year the 68th convention is being held in Melbourne, Australia—just a brief 1500 mile (2404 kilometre) hop across the Tasman from New Zealand. (But still, a lot closer than the 10,000 miles to North America, so I am impressed at how many attendees are coming from both the Americas and Europe.)

The guests of honour are Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaun Tan and Robin Johnson.

Worldcon is also where the winners of the Hugo Awards are announced.  The awards ceremony will be of particular interest to me this year, firstly because it’s the first time I have been eligible to vote and secondly because I have actually read and voted on all the fiction finalists: five short stories, and six each novelettes, novellas and novels respectively. I have also blogged twice about the process of “reading for the Hugos” on the Out of this Eos blog: both on 20 July and more recently on 30 July—just before voting closed on the 31st.

So, lots of books, lots of writers, lots of people from around the world interested in science, science fiction and fantasy, plus the Hugo Awards—and it’s all happening in Melbourne, which is one of my favourite cities.

North

homes
white timbered in the south
give way to brown-red
in mid and north –
avenues of birch trees
serried lakes

an elk
runs through deep winter
the night train flares
through cuttings –
inferno cast across jagged firs
frozen earth

rushes headlong
into spring – a pied crow
solitary
above a grey field

(c) Helen Lowe

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Published in Bravado 14

On July 19 I posted on my blog about Influences on Story and talked about two journeys into winter country during the time I lived in Sweden.  This poem arises out of one of those two journeys, made by train into the far north of Sweden which still lay gripped in the very heart of winter.

And The Giveaway Results for the 2 x Signed Copies of  Thornspell are (Ta dum! Ta dum!):

Nymfaux; and

Sullivan McPig.

Congratulations to you both–if you email me your postal addresses at contact@helenlowe.info I will arrange to get the books to you.

Congratulations also to Violet, who also commented here (and on Out of this Eos) but won one of the 2 x Thornspell editions in the Supernatural Underground Draw.

And thank you everyone for visiting and participating. There will be plenty more happening around both Thornspell and Heir into the future, so stay tuned.

PS And yes, I did use the Sorting Hat”. 🙂

The Sorting Hat