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”

Diana Gill of Eos (HarperCollinsUSA), which is the US publisher for The Wall of Night series, has posted a piece on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on the Out of this Eos blog, here.

It’s a serious, thoughtful, and personal post on what may be the largest, human-induced environmental disaster to affect the planet. Other than that, please go there and read Diana’s post for yourself. And even if you normally don’t, please consider leaving a comment to show your support. Please also consider clicking on one of the ‘action’ links to see if there is anything that you can do.

If you haven’t got your head around the magnitude of this disaster yet, I’d also recommend clicking on the Bad Astronomy website and looking at the June 22 post that is simply titled “Damn”. The photo thereon tells you all you need to know.

When you go to Out of this Eos, you’ll also see my comment, but I’ll just re-post an abridged version here, by way of nailing my colours to the mast:

” . . . as the world’s desire for petroleum and petroluem byproducts continues unabated, this disaster could so easily be coming to an ecosystem near you. Because as I understand it, the risk of like events recurring is real and present for all ocean floor drilling.

So unless we as indiviudals and societies are willing to implement changes that reduce the demand that makes these kind of risks worthwhile for oil companies, this will occur again.

And by the way, even as we all write, this disaster is still going on. No one has actually stopped the oil flow, so this could get a lot worse yet …”

And the week has seen: 130 pages and 8 chapters tweaked for character continuity (and other stuff—of course!) with 4 chapters and ca. 60 pages left until we’re all done on part 2. So close folks, very close.

One interesting aspect of doing the re-read and the tweaks, apropos of another thing that Elizabeth Knox said in her ‘very interesting talk’ on Wednesday evening, which was that (I paraphrase here) the job of the writer is to write the story and the theme and subtext et al will take care of themselves (in a Jungian kind of way.)  It is kind of interesting to see that actually happening as you read back through …

And to celebrate another week of continuing to advance the story while also blogging every day, I have just spent a very pleasant couple of hours at my favourite local, Sweet Jane’s Jungle Bar (as in Jane and Tarzan, get it?), which is a bar of the “snug” variety and definitely a  place “where everybody knows your name.”

And what could be better than that of a Friday evening?

And I will give you the update on writing progress for the week—but at the end of the day, guys, not the beginning. (You gotta give a gal some breaks, right?)

But reading Tim Jones’s comment on yesterdays’s post on Elizabeth Knox and Spec Fic Christchurch, in particular the divide between “literary fiction”—which Knox indicated she felt was ‘just another genre’—and other literature, made me think: do I consciously consider “genre” when I choose a book to read. Do you?

For me, there are definitely certain kinds of stories that I like more than others (I don’t read much crime fiction for example; not none, but definitely not a lot): the full gamut of fantasy-scifi (ok, speculative fiction) is definitely right up there, but so, too, is historical fiction and historical non-fiction. And I do like contemporary realism in all its forms, from the lighter social comedy through to the big serious reads. And when I get to the last page, I usually say one of three things to myself: either, “that was a really good read, I really liked it”; or, “urgh, didn’t think much of that”; or, “it was ok, but it didn’t wow me.”

I don’t think I ever add the tag: “for a romance”, or “for scifi”, or “for contemporary fiction”.

There can be all sorts of things tied up in that final decision, such as: did I love the characters? Was I gripped by the story? Did the book contain great ideas? Did I connect with it deeply at an emotional level? Was it fun? (There are definitely always bonus points for laugh-out-loud funny.)

But probably the most important one for me as a writer is always: did the book absorb me sufficiently that I didn’t even notice the writing, let alone stop to think about how the author was doing what they were doing—what Owen Marshall calls “taking the back off the clock.”  And although it can be great to look at all those tiny cogs and wheels in a second reading, especially when I admire a work, I really like it when a book draws me in and wraps me up in itself so that —until that last full stop is reached—I don’t even think about anything except the world of the story.

Which is why I think (and I think from what she said), like Knox, that all this genre stuff is just so much @#!* (full in letters of choice), really!

But what do you think?

Elizabeth Knox: The Angel's Cut

Well known speculative fiction writer, Elizabeth Knox, author of the Vintner’s Luck and the Printz award winning  Dreamhunter/Dreamquake duology, was in Christchurch last night for an event sponsored by Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM (the radio station and programme for which I do interviews.)

The weather was agin the event, but  Elizabeth Knox has a dedicated following so the numbers, although smallish, were enthusiastic as Knox spoke of her love of the Fantasy genre; although, in fact, she describes her writing as “fantastic naturalism”—fantastic happenings (if I have this right) in worlds that are very real. For example, even though the world in the Dream- duology is not our world, the society described is realistically Edwardian. And in terms of topography and landscape, very like Nelson/Golden Bay in New Zealand. (You see, not just Middle-Earth.)

Knox also spoke of the current gulf that exists between so-called “literary” fiction and the rest of literature today, a gulf that led her to steer away from the “Fantasy” label with novels such as Vintner’s Luck, in order to be taken seriously as a writer. If I understood Knox correctly, she believes that the gulf is artifical and so-called “literary” fiction simply another genre that has cleverly managed to occupy the moral high ground of the literary world. She then went on to talk about what for her is the great attraction of writing ‘Fantastic Naturalism’, in that it enables the writer to step outside  the straitjacket of realism, e.g. how the world really is, and/or the constraint of how history really happened, and make one’s own rules.

The evening concluded with a reading from Knox’s latest book, The Angel’s Cut, which is the sequel to Vintner’s Luck and follows the fortunes of the angel Xas in 1930s Hollywood. Audience members also had the opportunity to talk informally with Knox afterward.

Amongst the audience were eight of the incipient SpecFicNZ, an umbrella organization for NZ writers of SpecFic (including Fantastic Naturalism), which will be launched in Wellington in August, as part of Au Contraire, the 2010 Science-Fiction Fantasy convention. (SciFi, Fantasy, SpecFic, Fantastic Naturalism—as you can see, we’re definitey spoiled for choice of terminology.) Once the Knox event—definitely what brought us all out!—was done, we repaired to a local coffee house (The Coffee House, in fact)  for refreshment and conviviality in what was definitely a first ‘meet in person’ for most of us.  Writers of Epic Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Speculative Short Fiction and Supernatural Horror were all represented. Most importantly, a good time was had by all—and we have  agreed to ‘do it again soon’ over the traditional long lunch.