Speculative Fiction – Page 20

Australian Women Writers’ challenge 2013

The 2012 Australian Women Writers’ Challenge was an outstanding experience for me. The cause was worthy – challenging the lack of critical attention for Australian women authors. The personal benefits were fantastic – providing the impetus to expand my exposure to interesting authors I hadn’t had the chance to experience

As you can see from my “Mission Accomplished?” post from earlier in the year, I was able to meet the challenge goal of reading and reviewing at least 10 books by Australian women writers. I stuck to the speculative fiction genre. That’s how I roll.

I enjoyed the challenge so much, I’ve decided to give it a go again in 2013. The AWWC website has been revamped and the subscription process much fancier as a result. Inspired by this sophisticated example of web-based renewal I have decided to stretch myself and undertake exactly the same challenge as 2012.

You heard me. Exactly. The. Same.

So I’ll be undertaking the Franklin challenge (read 10 books, review at least 6) and all those books will be in the speculative fiction field. Some may call me stale and unable to embrace change. I view myself as a man on a quest for perfection, willing to put in the hard yards to refine my reviewing art to its most pure and potent form.

If you are inspired by my willingness to scale new heights of reviewing goodness, you should head over to the AWWC 2013 sign up page and join me in another year of spreading the word about some of the great writing by Australian women authors.

Edit 5/1/2014:

My current intended reading list (and status):

Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott – complete: review here
A Trifle Dead by Livia Day – complete: review here
Bluegrass Symphony by Lisa L. Hannett
The Ambassador’s Mission by Trudi Canavan
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth
Suited by Jo Anderton – complete: review here
Dark Space by Marianne de Pierres – complete: review here
Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina – complete: review here
Black Glass by Meg Mundell – complete: review here
The Accidental Sorcerer by K. E. Mills – complete: review here
Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer – complete: review here
New Ceres Nights edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely – complete: review here
Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott – complete: review here
Witches Incorporated by K. E. Mills – complete: review here
Wizard Squared by K. E. Mills – complete: review here
Wizard Undercover by K. E. Mills – complete: review here

Aurealis #56 (November 2012) – review

Issue #56 from November 2012 of the Aurealis magazine is a monthly magazine showcasing Australian speculative fiction and with an emphasis on Australian content and news. This edition was edited by Dirk Strasser. This month is a second “Award Winners” editions, with two short stories that won Aurealis Awards this year. This is really the last edition of Aurealis for 2012 (I know, I mistakenly said that last month!), with the publication kicking off again in 2013.

Fittingly, Strasser’s editorial focuses on summing up the 2012 publishing year for Aurealis, including their focus on turning around submissions quickly and highlighting their campaign to become recognised as a professional market by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. If they get to 1,000 subscribers they will increase their payments to 5c a word. Go on, you know you want to.

This month’s first award winning story is The Fruit of the Pipal Tree by Thoraiya Dyer, which won the Best Fantasy Short Story award at this year’s Aurealis Awards. The Fruit of the Pipal Tree originally was published in the After the Rain anthology which I have unfortunately not had the pleasure of reading. It is a beautifully written story, with some lovely imagery and well developed characters. My hopefully non spoiler description of the plot is “A scientist travels to a research camp on the Geruwa River in Nepal to attempt to save the suss dolphin from extinction”.

The supernatural elements are kept to the last part in this story, with a very effective build up and skilfully inserted back story combining to make the ending quite powerful.

The second award winner in this month’s edition was The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt by Paul Haines, which was part of his collection The Last Days of Kali Yuga (which I have reviewed here) and won the Best Horror Short Story category. Paul Haines sadly passed away from cancer earlier this year before winning the Aurealis. If you are interested in horror then I can’t recommend The Last Days of Kali Yuga strongly enough – it is an extremely powerful collection with writing skill I could only dream of possessing.

Both stories were very worthy of award, and together they make a great edition of Aurealis (as I mentioned last month, purchasing this and issue #55 is a very cost effective way to get exposed to some excellent Australian short fiction).

Crisetta Macleod tantalises us with the thought that we may indeed not be real, using the vehicle of Philip K Dick’s tales to illustrate her points. I have decided, on mature reflection, to proceed as if I am real in my day to day life but I must admit it was touch and go for a while.

There are the normal array of reviews of books. Robert N Stephenson is concerned that North Americans tend to replace decent genre TV shows with mindless crap in his Rants and Raves segment. Rob Parnell calls for more strong roles for women on the big screen in Surfing the Dark Side. And Robert Jenkins both swash and buckles his way through a review of the US TV series Revolution in his The Couch Potato Speaks article (I’ve been giving Revolution a go, but I agree with Rob’s assessment – I just can’t warm to the Gen Y protagonist. Which probably officially makes me old).

As always Carissa’s Weblog provides a round up of some of the more interesting articles around on the web in the area of Australian speculative fiction, mostly in the form of audio interviews and video.

And I said it last time and I’ll say it again – I’ve really enjoyed the Aurealis series of publications through 2012, and I’m looking forward to 2013.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson – review

I read this novella on the basis that it was a) by Brandon Sanderson, a writer whose work I have enjoyed b) the subject of a recent episode of the Writing Excuses podcast (which features Sanderson) where they deconstructed the structure and writing choices and c) short.

Sanderson is famous for the rigour and inventiveness of his magic systems and this book is no different. Practitioners in this world are able to adjust the history of an item by the creation of a complicated stamp, and this gives rise to less than scrupulous people being able to create forgeries of famous and/or valuable items.

The story itself is quite engaging although (as is often the case in shorter works) based around a single theme. A master forger is forced to work to forge the soul of the Emperor who has been left as an alive but mindless shell after a botched assassination attempt. The motivations of the Forger as well as the political machinations of the people trying to restore the Emperor made for good context.

The pace was good and combined with the short length made for a quick read.

If you are an aspiring writer, I’d recommend listening to the podcast referenced above after reading. There is an excellent discussion on the technicalities of how the story was constructed, well worth the 15 minutes or so investment (Writing Excuses is a very short weekly podcast, see my Podcasts page for more detail).

A fun, short read. Recommended.

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Scrivener to Smashwords

I recently collected up the flash fiction pieces I have had published in Antipodean SF through 2012 and published them in a single eBook at Smashwords. It was an interesting experience and I thought I’d note down some of the things I encountered while it was still fresh.

Firstly, some background. I write on a Macbook Air using the writing software Scrivener. I have found Scrivener to be an excellent way of keeping my stories together and structured, and the product itself is very workman like. I use Dropbox to backup my working stories (and so I can work across other computers if I need to). I have been using Scrivener to create an ePub version of the Antipodean SF online magazine each month for the last few months, and it always seems to work out OK.

Smashwords doesn’t take ePub submissions directly. You have to create a Microsoft Word document according to their specifications, submit that Word document and they use their own product (the charmingly named Meatgrinder) to churn out versions of your book in lots of different formats.

If that sounds a bit complicated, the first resource I’ll point you to is the Smashwords style guide. Pay particular attention to the suggestions around the licensing statements. When you get to the point of submitting your file, incorrect licensing statements can be one of the things that stops the submission going ahead. It also has excellent discussions on formatting etc, but it is a fairly long document, and if you’re anything like me you’ll probably be too impatient to read the instructions.

Turns out that Scrivener creates a pretty good first cut at a well formatted Word document. This isn’t a tutorial on using Scrivener (frankly, there are so many features in it that I haven’t even come close to mastering that I’d be the wrong person to give a tutorial anyway). But, a few pointers when generating the document:

Don’t create section breaks between parts of your document, create page breaks. Section breaks do weird things in the Meatgrinder process, including inserting superfluous blank pages. Page breaks seem to work fine.
Switch your line spacing to single space (mine was set at 1.2 by default). While the line spacing won’t get caught in your initial submission, anything other than single spacing seems to get flagged as a problem that won’t allow your book to achieve “Premium” status (i.e. distributed to places like Apple etc).
I overrode my font to be Times New Roman (Smashwords prefers the basic fonts)

When creating the Antipodean SF ePub files, I let Scrivener create a table of contents and it was all good. Because of the Smashwords Word document process, this doesn’t work. I achieved a pretty good manual TOC by inserting a TOC page into my Scrivener manuscript and using Scrivener links to connect each line item in the TOC to the appropriate title in the document. When the Word document is generated, this seems to create all the appropriate links and TOC information that Meatgrinder needs.

I had a few of the normal issues you might expect getting the paragraph formatting correct, setting to single space, indenting, no gaps between paragraphs etc. The main issue I faced here was that the layout in the Word document (which all seemed fine) didn’t seem to translate into the right format for the ePub version. In particular, the first line indenting (which was absolutely fine in the Word document) seemed to randomly not work in the ePub version generated by Smashwords.

I noticed in particular that paragraphs that started off with speech seemed to always be effected. The first thing I needed to do was make sure that the autocorrect settings in Word weren’t attempting to switch normal quotes into “smart quotes”. That seemed to have an impact. The other thing I did was go into Word and open the “Normal” paragraph style and modify it so that the underlying style had all the right formatting elements (single space, no gaps between paragraphs etc), then reapply that style to the text. This was a little manual and time consuming but it did the trick. I think sometimes paragraph formatting from Scrivener might be applied to text without changing the underlying Word paragraph style, and Smashwords seems to take some of its cues from the underlying style.

Now, when it comes to covers you upload the cover to Smashwords separately from the Word document, so you don’t have to worry about inserting it into Scrivener. I need to be clear here – I have no artist ability whatsoever. My sense of aesthetics seems to be entirely out of kilter with mainstream society. I have no advice to give you re: an artistic creation that will draw the punters in.

I will say that relatively recently the pixel dimension requirements changed to take into account higher resolution screens. Smashwords wants rectangles with the width at least 1400 pixels and the height greater than the width. I went to the online cover designer site (My eCover Maker) and created my cover for about $5. Yes, I know it shows. I don’t really warrant or recommend that site in particular – I just registered for free for the “pay as you go” option and made sure I paid using PayPal to keep it all at arms length. Also, if you do go that way make sure you are 100% happy with the cover before you “generate” it – if you find you need to make a couple of small adjustments once you’ve seen the final product, that’s another $5.

Once you’ve uploaded the book and it passes the automatic checks, it is available through Smashwords. However, Smashwords has a second level of publishing, the “Premium Catalogue”, which requires a more precise adherence to the Smashwords style guidelines. This was the spot where some of my line spacing and paragraph formatting issues were tagged. It takes several days for them to review a book, so don’t expect instant turn around. Once your book is approved for the Premium Catalogue, it is also shipped to other online distributors such as Apple, Barnes and Noble etc. This isn’t quite as important to me, the point of publishing A Flash in the Pan? was to collect my flash fiction in one place for 2012 and to try out the Smashwords process. If you were self publishing a full novel, getting this status would be much more important.

At the time of writing my book is available on Smashwords and I’ve made the adjustments that Smashwords requires for the Premium Catalogue (although it hasn’t been reassessed as yet).

I used the Smashwords ISBN manager to assign my work an ISBN. Not really much more to say on this, of course if you’re managing your own publishing house you probably will bring your own ISBN number to the party, but for a simple self publishing job the Smashwords process seems fine.

When checking the ePub output from Meatgrinder, I found the Adobe Digital Editions provided the most convenient option (as recommended on the Smashwords site). Short of loading it onto the iPad of course (which is just a bit fiddly – download the ePub, move it over to iTunes, plug in the iPad, sync it and repeat every time you make a change). For the mobi version, it was pretty much check it on the Kindle.

Finally, I thought it might be useful if I attached three documents:

The Scrivener file for A Flash in the Pan? (A Flash in the Pan.scriv)
The Word document that Scrivener compiles (A Flash in the Pan – Scrivener)
The Word document that I finally uploaded to Smashwords after adjustments (A Flash in the Pan – uploaded)

All three documents remain copyright me etc, but hopefully they will help show the process I’ve been through.

So, there are some of my thoughts on the Scrivener to Smashwords process. What about you? I’d love to hear some stories, hints and tricks in the comments section.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – April/May 2012 – review

I have been very lax with my short fiction reading of late, and Asimov’s has suffered accordingly. I finally got back to reading this month, and the April/May 2012 edition was next on my catchup list. The editorial (by Sheila Williams) discussed reader reaction to the digital reading experience and Robert Silverberg’s Reflections talks about the interesting case of a music concert that is not expected to end until 2640. Intrigued? You’ll have to have a read to find out more.

The Last Judgement by James Patrick Kelly is a very interesting novella based on the premise that aliens have removed all men from the planet, leaving only the women. This allows the author to undertake a very interesting exploration of gender, amid a detective noir style setting. I enjoyed the story, it was very readable.

The other novella in this edition was Living in the Eighties by David Ira Cleary which had a different take on time travel. There were the usual paradox hijinks that you’d expect from a time travel story, but the method of travel was somewhat different and it referenced a lot of 80s music etc which I found amusing.

Being a double issue, this edition also contained a novelette Something Real by Rick Wilber. I liked the premise and the characters in this story, set in a series of parallel worlds. The author does a good job creating a character that is very sympathetic and I liked the sense of disorientation around the descriptions of worlds that weren’t quite like ours.

Bonding with Morry by Tom Purdom was a good short piece. I especially liked the protagonist’s reaction to the world around him. The story is a little sentimental in parts (and the author clearly likes engineers, but then who doesn’t?) but hey, I can handle a little sentiment now and then.

Riding Red Ted and Breathing Fire by Carol Emshwiller is a very entertaining story about a man learning about his newly assigned dragon. The voice in this story is excellent, I’d love to try something like it myself. Very amusing but evocative at the same time. Easily my favourite story of the issue.

Also in this issue:

Sexy Robot Mom by Sandra McDonald
Sensitive, Compartmented by Gray Rinehart
Souvenirs by Ian Creasey
Greener by Josh Roseman

As usual, Asimov’s also contains some poetry including:

Book Wyrm by Robert Borski
The Music of Particle Physics by Bruce Boston
Tachyons by Geoffrey A. Landis
Apocalyptic Love Song by Megan Arkenberg

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan – review

This review forms part of my contribution to the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading Challenge. All my AWWC reviews can be found here.

Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan is one of the Twelve Planets series published by Twelfth Planet Press (12 boutique collections of stories by Australian women writers). It is made up of four shorter stories, including:

The Duchess Dresser
The Isles of the Sun
Bajazzle
Significant Dust

Cracklescape is a beautiful book, with the stylish writing that characterises Lanagan’s work. In some ways it is more literary than genre, where exploration of language and elegant passages and phrases are prioritised over plot. Despite its short length, I do not recommend coming to this book for a quick read. More than one of the stories that I read late at night before going to bed I found myself having to read again with a less sleep deprived brain to make sense of it. For this reason more than anything else, I appreciated and admired Crackescape without loving it.

I recognise that this loses me genre-cred.

The Duchess Dressor tells the story of a share house dweller who finds a duchess dresser by the side of the road. The dresser is cursed/haunted. This opening piece is filled with strong imagery, evoking sadness and quiet desperation with gorgeous prose. I was a little let down by the ending, the story just seemed to peter out.

The Isles of the Sun involves a Pied Piper style engagement of alien/other worldly creatures with a town’s children. The ring leading child Elric was particularly well drawn here, with a distinctive voice and an almost cultish vibe to his engagement with the other children. Switching perspective to the mother for the last part of the story was very effective, and there was an ambiguity to the end which I found very appealing.

Bajazzle was an uncomfortable read. The point of view character Don was very unsympathetic. In fact, all of the characters were unsympathetic but yet the story remained engaging. This story had a bit of raunch in it, which was vividly described and quite visceral.

Significant Dust was probably the least genre of the stories, going back to the early 80s to describe a young woman’s retreat into a lonely existence working in a roadside diner in the Western Australian outback. The backdrop of the story is a UFO encounter, but the story itself doesn’t really have any genre elements. I thought this story was structured very effectively, with interspaced flashbacks that effectively filled in the reason for the lead character’s despair.

I’ve been impressed with the whole Twelve Planets collection so far, and Cracklescape is a worthy addition to the series.

Recommended.

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Salvage by Jason Nahrung – review

I didn’t really know what to expect from Salvage by Jason Nahrung published by Twelfth Planet Press. I’ve read and enjoyed Nahrung’s short fiction in a variety of venues, so I knew enough about his preferred genre to assume this novella would be horror. I’d also picked up somewhere that there were vampires involved and it was set on Queensland island (a juxtaposition that sounded interesting), but beyond that nothing. I even avoided reviews from my usual sources so was able to come to the story pretty fresh.

After some of the raw imagery and violence of Nahrung’s other work, I was surprised at how understated and nuanced a story Salvage is. The main character, Melanie, is in a slowly disintegrating marriage. Melanie and her husband Richard have come to a holiday house reminiscent of happier days to work on their marriage. Things aren’t going so well when Melanie meets the mysterious Helena.

The description of a marriage on the rocks was extremely effective, making Melanie’s eventual attraction to Helena very believable. Indeed for a shorter form of fiction, the description of all the main characters was excellent, with Melanie’s development over the course of the story particularly well handled. While I wasn’t able to personally relate to some of the issues Melanie was dealing with, the exploration of the character left me feeling very sympathetic to her plight.

(There is a bit of raunch in the story – if that kind of thing isn’t your cup of tea there will be parts of Salvage that you won’t love).

The setting was richly described, really immersing the reader in isolated tropical splendour. I had wondered how the bright sunshine reputation of Queensland would mesh with dark loving creatures of the night, but the combination of humid heaviness and wild tropical storms was a surprisingly effective backdrop.

The take on the vampire was also unexpected and quite different from what I’ve seen from Nahrung previously. Indeed, I came away from Salvage with a deeper appreciation for Nahrung’s body of work in general. His range is quite excellent and he is rapidly cementing his place as one of my favourite authors.

Nahrung is releasing a novel soon called Blood and Dust, from Australian publisher Xoum. I’ll be virtually lining up for my electronic copy.

Highly recommended.

(Disclaimer: I met Nahrung at a recent conference, and a nicer person you’re not ever likely to meet. I don’t think that fact has influenced my enjoyment of his work, but then again you never know).

I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

A Flash in the Pan? now available through Smashwords

I’ve recently put my flash fiction pieces together into one (very small) eBook mainly to have them in one place (and to try out the Smashwords process, which was very interesting in and of itself). I’ve called the collection A Flash in the Pan? and it is available through Smashwords. Just to remind you, the collection includes:

Beware Antipodean Shores (50 words)
Shipwrecked (500 words)
The Gloriously Cunning Plan (500 words)
Make Mine a Macchiato (500 words)
Striking Twice (500 words)
In the Service of the Public (500 words)
The Devil Wears Ugly Shapeless Garments Covered in Dog Hair (500 words)

I’ve also included a brief author’s note under each story just to give you a feel for what I was thinking when I was writing. It’s free, so if you missed any of my stories through the year (or just want to be able to enjoy them again and again!), feel free to go and download a copy in one of the myriad of formats that Smashwords supports.

I might write a separate post on the process of taking a manuscript on Scrivener and getting it published on Smashwords. It took me quite a few goes to get it right.

My thanks to “BluntChisel” who read and reviewed the collection within 12 hours of me publishing it! I’ve never met you BluntChisel, but seeing your review made my day.

Details of all my publications can be found at my bibliography.

The Devil Wears… narrated on the Beam Me Up radio show/podcast

One of my more recent flash fiction pieces, The Devil Wears Ugly Shapeless Garments Covered in Dog Hair, was narrated on the Beam Me Up podcast episode 336 (starts at around the 9 minute mark). Beam Me Up is a US based radio show which also comes out in podcast form, focusing on science news with a couple of stories thrown in each week.

My thanks to Paul Cole for his support of my work. He described The Devil Wears as the latest in my interstellar public service series. I better write another one!

A full listing of my flash fiction pieces can be found at my bibliography page.

Aurealis #55 (October 2012) – review

Issue #55 is the October 2012 issue of the Aurealis magazine, a monthly magazine showcasing Australian speculative fiction and with an emphasis on Australian content and news. This edition was edited by Dirk Strasser. This month is an “Award Winners” editions, with two short stories that won Aurealis Awards this year. This is the last edition of Aurealis for 2012, with the publication kicking off again in 2013.

Fittingly, Strasser’s editorial focuses on the history of the Aurealis awards and what drove the Aurealis publication to introduce a judged award into the Australian landscape in the first place.

The first award winning story is Rains of la Strange by Robert N. Stephenson. Rains of la Strange was released as a part of the excellent Anywhere But Earth anthology, edited by Keith Stevenson. I reviewed Anywhere But Earth here, where Rains of la Strange was one of the stories I highlighted, particularly for the world building.

The second award winner in this month’s edition was The Short Go: a Future in Eight Seconds by Lisa L. Hannett, from her World Fantasy Award nominated collection Bluegrass Symphony. Given its accolades, Bluegrass Symphony has been on my “to read” list for a while, so it was good to get a chance to “sample” one of the stories.

A fascinating tale, one of those ones that starts off hard to read (the dialect of the narrator is hard to engage with in the first page or so) but before you know it you’re completely enveloped by the story. The pacing was excellent as was the choice in language and imagery. The twist in the story was unexpected and well executed.

Both stories were very worthy of award, and together they make a great edition of Aurealis (if you haven’t read either this is a cost effective way to get exposed to some excellent Australian short fiction).

Crisetta Macleod lets us know what she hates about fantasy, in the appropriately titled article What I Hate About Fantasy. And man, there is a lot she doesn’t like! Some interesting discussion on issues as wide ranging as getting rid of the name “fantasy”, through to the need to give fantasy novels ratings where they deal with adult themes such as torture, through to the tendency to use magic as a deus ex machina (i.e. to solve a plot problem). Interesting comments from an experienced reviewer, well worth a read.

Crisetta Macleod also gave a run down on Conflux 2012, the Canberra speculative fiction convention. Sounds like a fantastic time was had by all – my lack of attendance has made me jealous.

There are the normal array of reviews of books. Robert N Stephenson decries the loss of quality in the writing field in his Rants and Raves segment. Rob Parnell decries the loss of originality in the superhero movie genre in Surfing the Dark Side. And Robert Jenkins decries the loss of quality in TV with his review of Sinbad (the UK TV series) in his The Couch Potato Speaks article. A poor quality trifecta!

I’ve really enjoyed the Aurealis series of publications through 2012, and I’m looking forward to 2013.

This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.