deborahb

Not so shiny: Plenty of drama for Buffy creator Joss Whedon
– Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2010

More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.

“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”

[snip]

“You have to have a certain naivety, almost Memento-like, and get bitch-slapped over and over. You’ve got to go in with an enormous amount of confidence because everyone is going to question everything you do. You have to be the person who believes when nobody else does.”

It seems that rather than the five stages of grief, for writers there is just one stage: wiping your memory and starting again, like the characters in Dollhouse.

“Yeah, pretty much. Anger, anger, anger. Anger. Bargaining,” he deadpans.

How cool, A BOOK OF ENDINGS has made the shortlist for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award!

I’m assured the readers are ‘very picky’, so a heartfelt *hug* and congratulations to fellow short-listers, Kari Sperring (LIVING WITH GHOSTS), and Ali Shaw (THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET — wow, I love this title) and an even bigger *hug* for Jedediah Berry. Not just for his passionate guitar-playing at the annual WFC cheese party. But also for winning the Crawford Award with his book, THE MANUAL OF DETECTION.

Been meaning to read THE MANUAL for a year — many rave reviews have been directed its way.

Many thanks to Gary K. Wolfe & the whole crew for taking the time to consider my book. Very cheered!

Plus: gotta love an award where the winner is announced at the same time as the shortlist-ees. Really takes the stress outta the thing when the race is run before you realise you’ve even been running. Thank-you, sophisticated Crawford-ites!

Look at that, two of the new stories from A Book of Endings (now available, etc) are on the nomination list for the British SF Awards. Woot! *Not* the shortlist, I hasten to add. It simply means, I think, that some kind member(s) of the British SF Association has (er, have) nominated ‘Diamond Shell’ and ‘Problems of Light and Dark’ for best short story — putting me in the same list as Cat Valente, Peter Watts, Bruce Sterling & Eugie Foster, to name a few.

NOT a shortlist: let’s not go overboard.

But as fuel for my ongoing love affair with the British, this is cool. I am much cheered, & find myself wanting to use such archetypal British phrases as ‘geezer’ and ‘hows yer farva’, and to name my firstborn Ebenezer, which I think is a British name.

If you are a kind British person &/or a member of BSFA & you’d like to read these stories, feel free to drop me a line (deborahb AT livejournal DOT com) & I will cheerfully — very cheerfully — forward you an electronic copy of said stories. I may get a bit carried away & send you more than those two, but you’ll at least get those two stories & you can read ‘em or use ‘em for your electronic bird cages as is your wont.

Go to it, kind British people!

Edit: someone mentioned they couldn’t get through on that email address. I tested it & didn’t get a bounce message, but I didn’t get the test message either! Instead, then, try rous AT deborahbiancotti DOT net for all your correspondence needs.

One of the opportunities A Book of Endings created was the chance to get my writing in front of a wider audience. To see what the rest of the world might think. The Australian genre scene is so warm & welcoming that I’d grown suspicious of the kind words occasionally attributed to my work in reviews & conversations.

So I pinged a couple of wider-stream review sources to see if, well, if the Emperor really was wearing any clothes.

The Syd Uni Alumni review came out first & said: “These are unnerving and elliptical, in the main, and tread a fine line between the everyday mundaneity that never is and overblown literary style that can be tiresome when too self-conscious. Mostly they stay on the right side of the line and intrigue more than irritate.”

Yes, I spotted it, too. “Mostly”. But that’s cool. Given the book is largely retrospective I could even entertain the idea that maybe the irritating ones were the early ones, and the new ones are better. Hell, I’m occasionally optimistic that way.

The Short Review is a site dedicated to short story writing, & is definitely worth checking out. Of my book, reviewer Mario Guslandi said, “Deborah Biancotti’s debut collection left me both hopeful and frustrated. Here we have a writer with a great potential, able to produce some outstanding stories, who, unfortunately, often wastes her talent writing tasteless pieces with implausible plots and nondescript characters. When inspired, Biancotti is a top notch author. When uninspired, the author of mediocre tales can irritate, in view of what she can do when at the top of her game.”

I know, I know. Now you, like me, want to know which are the tasteless stories!

Well, I guess taste is a matter of … erm, taste. So I can’t fault Guslandi for his passionate chastisement of my choice of writing subjects. Though I am curious about it. Maybe I’ll email him to find out what he means. Since he also reviews for SF Site, infinity plus, Horrorworld and Alien Online, it’s certainly not that he’s NOT a genre reader — which would be the easiest out.

Guslandi then go on to discuss the “five sparkling gems” of the book — and this is the really interesting stuff, I find: I love finding out what stories *worked* for people. There’s no predicting it, and here again I’m surprised to find what he enjoyed the most. If I’d had to choose my 5 best stories, would I have chosen these? … Hmmm. Maybe not.

If you’ve read the book, I’d love to know what stories worked for you — & what you found positively TASTELESS! Comment or email as is your will, noble readers.

… turns out you can still buy Redsine #7, edited by Trent Jamieson & Garry Nurrish, from about 2002.

I loved Redsine and always wished it had continued for longer. It was a classy zine, and short (a good characteristic for a zine, imho: one-sitting-reading always scores well with me).

And I love it not only because it was the home of my second-ever published (and first-ever completed) story, Silicon Cast — which is, ahem, *also* still available thanks to GoogleBooks. Well, in part.

Not sure how I feel about that. *pauses to reflect* Well, pretty relaxed.

Silicon Cast feels very young to me now, but still has a relatively straight-forward horror narrative that makes me grin. I do love a bit of ‘ew’ in my reading. Terry Dowling, my first teacher, read this over for me when I was struggling and it was certainly in part because of his encouragement that I ever continued with writing. And yes, you can read a hardcopy version in A Book of Endings if you’re so inclined.

Anyhow. If you read the full version, let me know what you think of the story!

Honestly? I got into short stories because it seemed like a good way to learn to write. It’s become much more than that, of course, but I’ve not paused very often to think about what place they do have for me, and further what place they have for readers.

I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest in A Book of Endings, for example, and overwhelmed by the response of readers. Enough of my friends not only bought the book but *read* it to make me think people actually are interested in the short form. When challenged, plenty of my friends were adamant that yes, they really did like reading short stories even before my book came along and yes, they weren’t just buying it out of sympathy (though I suspect some of them were!) that I thought I’d overlooked something.

I admit I always thought short stories were rather esoteric, enjoyed more by writers than readers. Short stories are often a harder read than novels, I think. Because you have to pay attention the whole way through. Novels you can drift in and out, doze off on a daybed, miss a few words because the hammock is swinging too hard — all those hiccups that occur in perfect reading fantasies. But overall it’s easier to keep track of a novel because even if you miss bits the narrative spine will hopefully pull you through.

So I was still surprised when I read this in the Syd Uni Alumni magazine review of A Book of Endings: “Biancotti is further proof of why readers enjoy the short story, even though publishers prefer to pretend we don’t.”

And over here at the Guardian, some discussion about why women, in particular, are being recognised in the short story field (are they? well, isn’t that good news).

Short stories, on the other hand, are famously uncommercial; that, coupled with the perceived exactingness of the form and its heavyweight literary lineage, means that short stories by women are taken seriously – and awarded accordingly.

That would be ironic if true: women gain more recognition in short stories because short stories aren’t coveted by publishers either.

I made it. With the emailing of the full draft of my 21st Century Gothic essay on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I’m done. That’s it. I’ve met my deadlines for 2009. Which is remarkable because for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to make it.

(I think I made it by going a little crazy for a while.)

Of course, a lot of those deadlines were for A BOOK OF ENDINGS (six new stories, yours now via Twelfth Planet Press!), but the timetable of 2009 work made it all the way into December. Now I’ve got to start thinking about my timetable for (*gulp*) 2010. Something a little calmer, I hope, though I maybe have just signed up for another Gilgamesh project. And there’s editing for the contemporary Ishtar story soon, most likely.

Anyhoooo, the essay. It’s in & it may or may not coherently argue that the battle of good (Sheriff Bell) and evil (Anton Chigurh) for the soul of one man (Llewellyn Moss), the elements of the supernatural, the voice of despair, the struggle to believe in a God who seems less involved in the world than Satan are all Gothic elements of this modern novel. There’s other stuff, too. I refer to Anne Radcliffe and Terminator in about equal measures, and naturally I mention MELMOTH THE WANDERER more than once.

But here’s the thing: I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about gothic literature. Turns out I’m not that knowledgeable at all. It impresses me how much trust esteemed editor Danel Olson has placed in his extensive contributor list (2 volumes!).

Plus, essays. Wow, I’d forgotten how hard they can be.

For now, though, the next steps are to return to the fun stuff. My stuff. The BROKEN novel. I’d left off with John Eiger about to — well, let’s just say he could be making a big mistake.

Man, I love when characters make big mistakes. I love sitting alongside them thinking, ‘oooooohhh, buddy, you’re in trouble now….’.

But tonight some rest and something new to read that *isn’t* NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I’m thinking it’s time to return to some Michael Robotham.

Over at Terra Incognita, my story Hush is now online as a podcast — AND coming soon to iTunes. Double the Hush!

This time we don’t get the whiskey tones of Nick Evans, I’m afraid. The author has to read her own stories at Terra Incognita. Must be part of that whole global economic crisis thing. I’ve tried to remember what I learned watching Dorothy Porter read one of her stories at Stanton Library years back. What I liked most was that she made it sound like a conversation. No Grahnd Poh-etry Rahding Voice for Dorothy Porter. I loved her more for that.

But heck, I never even shook her hand. So you can be assured that all flaws and shortcomings in this reading (well, this story, too) are mine.

Hush is one of the six new stories in A Book of Endings. It’s a little bit steampunk, a little bit revenge tale. And it features a dog and a talking horse. What more could you want?

—–
A Book of Endings, go on, buy it via Twelfth Planet Press.

I’ve had some shitty day jobs.

There was the mortgage-processing job, where the boss was at great pains on day 1 to tell me about the culture of ‘no blame, only teamwork’. And two months in when I uncovered an error that had been made with some mortgage cheques, he tried to guilt-trip me about the costly solution he’d have to implement — apparently assuming that because I’d uncovered the error, I’d also made it. (I hadn’t.)

There was the workplace I refer to as the Toxic Avenger, where my last defiant act was to act as a witness in a formal complaint of corporate bullying. I hadn’t really considered the aggressive, ignorant behaviour of my superiors to be bullying until I went to HR for something else & they showed me a copy of the Anti-Bullying Policy. Which was about when I realised that no one had ever described my exec director as accurately as that document. He was also a liar, but the policy didn’t cover that.

There was the Narcissism Is Me workplace, where the MD was prone to sending self-pitying emails to all staff about stuff he’d decided to take personally: staff leaving, staff not filling in their timesheets, staff calling him a moron (oh, wait, no one told him that, right?). He also had a nifty way of firing people or downsizing a role without ever actually having to pay out a redundancy. He wasn’t so much a liar as a man living in a land of complete make-believe, fantasising about his own efficacy in the chaotic organisation he’d fostered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those at greatest geographical distance from him reported being the most happy in their jobs.

Reading back over this list I can see the truth of the idea that people don’t leave bad workplaces, they leave bad bosses.

And of course, we must note the good jobs. The State Library job was a lot of fun. I loved working in a ‘cultural institution’, loved the events, loved the Library’s mission, loved the history, the building, loved a bunch of the people. The casual jobs I had while at or just after uni were great. I worked on campus in a bunch of roles: stuffing envelopes, staffing the info centre, admin-ing at the careers centre. None of it taxing, all of it cheering. The multimedia job I had (right before the internet ate all the multimedia technologies that weren’t net-specific) was also awesome for the 3 months it took the company to go bust.

But the caveat on each day job is that it must feed the writing. Occasionally this has felt like the inevitable failure to serve two masters. Sometimes — less often — it’s worked.

The multimedia fed the writing because it was both creative AND structured (I was a Macromedia Director author, in case anyone recognises that terminology) – but because I loved it I also worked a bunch of extra hours on it, which limited my writing time. In contrast, the Toxic Avenger allowed me a helluva lot of time (these were the years when I was most active in the blogosphere) but made me feel dead on the inside. It’s hard to write when you’re dead. Not so hard to blog, oddly.

I figure by now I’ve tried just about everything I can think of. I’ve tried the dead-end, dull job, I’ve tried the all-in, exhaustive job, & a bunch of patterns in between. I’ve tried a day-job in writing & several well outside. I’ve tried part-time & full-time work. I’ve learned what -– for want of a better word — works. I’ve tried my darnedest to maximise that stuff & minimise the rest.

And I think Eden Robins’ post over at Ecstatic Days is the picture-perfect day-job description. If you’re a similar kinda writer as me, that is.

For anyone waiting on a copy of A Book of Endings from last week’s launch (where we ran out of books), the box has arrived! Distribution is imminent.

I’m off to the World Fantasy Con in a little over a week, though, so we might have to make this quick. May have to be a pub gathering next weekend. ;p (Note to developer friends: ever done a soft launch AFTER the real launch?)

A huge thank-you to the people who came to the launch of A Book of Endings yesterday. NG Gallery put on a damn classy show (the catering was so artfully done most people actually *mistook* it for art), & the crowd was cheerful & kind & wonderful. I was blown away by the number of attendees. Among the crowd were many friends & family I hadn’t seen in years. (One relative commented that the last time he’d seen me I’d measured up to his waist.)

I was overwhelmed.

Margo Lanagan gave me the most gracious, convincing write-up I’ve ever had (thanks Margo!), & I believe my family was duly impressed. Especially when I burst into tears. (We shall speak no more of that.)

Alas, we sold out of every book I had! Some of you put your names on the order list, but if you haven’t done that & you’d still like to order a book, please just let me know via the comments, or email me at deborahb AT-diddy-AT livejournal.com. I shall post ‘em off when ‘the publisher’ sends more.

Special thanks has to go to my sister, Rachel, whose up-selling skills were something to behold. Instead of offering people change, she’d ask them if they wanted to purchase a second book. Some did fall for her charms — & I just love that my good buddy Sue rocked up to the head of the signing queue with no less than FOUR books in her hand! They do make great Xmas gifts.

Also there was a rather special family photo taken of the Biancotti-Wegert-Reganzani-Miller family which I intend to frame for the wall.

Thanks again to everyone. I’m just blown away.

More photos at Flickr here & at Cat Sparks’ photo stream, or feel free to forward your own!

A reminder for anyone who’s free this Saturday afternoon (and also, in the vicinity of Sydney), that A Book of Endings will be launching locally:

3pm Saturday 10 October
NG Art Gallery
Upstairs at 3 Little Queen St
Chippendale NSW 2008
(about 2 bus stops from Central Station or a 10-minute walk)

Launch MC: Margo Lanagan

Champagne & OJ provided, or feel free to purchase a drink at the bar downstairs.

$25 on the day (cash sales only on the day, or order online)

And in honour of the event, I’m giving away a FREE! copy of A Book of Endings to the person who has the wackiest answer to the question:

What would be YOUR favourite ending?

(Feel free to interpret that any way you like).

Best answer chosen by Friday this week. Postage anywhere in the world!

I’ve been checking back in with Angel Zapata’s blog for more news of our plagiarist friend, Richard Ridyard, & by now I’ve learned:

* Richard Ridyard is the name of a deceased journalist, who — if he had any kind of professional integrity — must be rolling in his grave to see his reputation sullied by some petty thief.

* Editor after editor is coming forward to express their horror at being duped by a guy that would steal the words of STEPHEN KING, fer goodness sake (there’s some speculation this one was a cry for help — after all, someone will eventually twig to what you’re doing if you’re stealing from Stephen freaking King, kiddo).

* ‘Ridyard’ also approached Infinite Windows with his “The Tyburg Jig”, with my stolen paragraph in it. Infinite Windows has removed all his work.

* ‘Ridyard’ has also been publishing under the name RM Valentine — & “The Tyburg Jig” has been shopped under that name as well over at StoryWrite (who have now taken all RM’s stories down)

* I didn’t know this, but the Tyburg Jig is the dance of a hanged body. How … apt.

* The Facebook pages for Valentine Publications & co-founder Matthew Shackleton (who professed to knowing his buddy Ridyard ‘for ten years’) have both disappeared, and the website has also disappeared.

* Brimstone Press has a little something to say about ANOTHER theft.

I mention the names of the zines because I think they deserve kudos for reacting so quickly to the discovery of plagiarism. Thanks, guys! Ridyard appears to be disappearing into a vortex of his own making.

What baffles me, though, is how prolific this guy’s been with his stolen stories. Hell, he’s published “The Tyburg Jig” at least 3 times. I only sold that story once!

Clearly I have been slack.

But just think, if he’d poured all that effort into original work, instead of cutting & pasting & emailing that sucker out so many times (and all the other stolen stories, of course), he’d probably *be* Stephen King by now.

In today’s exciting news, apparently I’ve been plagiarised.

A man called Angel has alerted me to the theft by a man called Ridyard who apparently is a co-founder of a business called Valentine Publications.

Proving that reality can confer upon you the need to write sentences that are more bizarre than any fiction.

Angel Zapata emailed me about the plagiarism of my story, The First and Final Game (excerpt available online, which is obviously what made the theft possible) & the plagiarism of several other writers’ works, & directed me to his well-researched piece on his blog, A Rage of Angel.

Word for word, these lines were stolen from this, my first published story (& I’m repeating them here in a way of stealing them back, I think):

“Electricity is irregular here, and so are phones, but the privacy is absolute. You could kill every single person in every single house and hardly anyone would disturb you. It’s that kind of place.”

MicroHorror, the site where my own theft occurred, reacted instantly & removed the offending story & sent me an apology. Full kudos to MicroHorror for their committment & care, & to Mr Zapata for putting in the time to expose all this in the first place!

(I feel like I’ve fallen into some kinda odd film noir reality.)

So if you’re approached by someone claiming to be Richard Ridyard, look out! He seems to be a well-established plagiarist and editor of Valentine Publications: ‘Home of British Flash Fiction’, currently closed for ‘administrative reasons’. (If you google it, you’ll find a cached version.) You can also join Valentine Publications’ Facebook group, where you’ll find, oddly, no mention of Mr Ridyard, who is described over at Valentine Publications like this:

Undoubtedly a man of many talents, he has lived his short twenty-one years with a vivacity and boldness, which few could achieve in a lifetime.

A-ha.

I’m only mildly taken aback by the event itself, but I’m rather appalled by Ridyard/Shackleton/Whoever-it-is’ unethical abuse of other writers. Mostly I find this behaviour … odd. What exactly has the owner of the sock puppet gained? How much effort has been put into the plagiarism that COULD have been used to do real writing, real work that might have resulted in real gains?

So I won’t be deleting my online excerpts. But I won’t stop short of exposing plagiarists, either!

Spring is a crazy time. Not just because of odd things like dust storms, but also because spring is when I want to do EVERYTHING at once. I want to write and read and paint and sing and watch great cinema and scour my brain of all the ideas it has spinning around inside.

Today the air is crystal clear again, sky is blue, the ‘red menace’ (as the media is calling it) has retreated & if it wasn’t for the photos, you’d swear it never happened. Flickr has an entire project dedicated to yesterday in Sydney: it’s called the Red Sydney Project, unsurprisingly. Some of my photos are there, too. And members of the Red Sydney Project have been asked to contribute to a print-on-demand project called Dust Storm. As you see, we in Sydney are obsessed with the whole red dust event.

And, of course, we still have the dust. Anything that was outside yesterday is now covered in a layer of red dust. Apparently car wash firms are having a field day.

But none of this is what I wanted to discuss today. I wanted to say that due to an unforeseen double-booking, Garth Nix won’t be able to make the Sydney launch of A Book of Endings on Saturday 10-October. Garth is a tough act to follow, of course, and with his absence the question became, ‘what brave, thoughtful soul will step unto the breach? what noble, wise, etc?’

But in excellent news, Margo Lanagan has promised to don the mantle — or the cape, as it were (I haven’t told her about that bit) — for the role of ‘making me look good to my family’. Margo promises my fam will be impressed. Though there was an element of ‘mwhahahahaa’ to her words, I’m pretty sure.

A Book of Endings. Launching Saturday 10-October, 3pm at NG Gallery, Little Queen St, Chippendale. Now with extra Margo Lanagan!

This morning a good morning on The Great Unsaleable. It’s coming together nicely on this draft. By taking a secondary character and making her more primary, I’ve — unexpectedly — added a layer of logic to the events. This is gratifying & confusing in equal measure. (I’m trying not to question it. Go with it, deborahb, goooooo with it.)

This afternoon, doesn’t bear discussion.

This evening, a glass of red to ease out of the afternoon, two episodes of Burn Notice, time spent staring at The Great Unsaleable, moving pieces about like shifting blocks back and forth on the floor. Perhaps not a lot achieved, but something consolidated. Perhaps that’s just in my head? Afraid to work too much on it in case, in my frustrated/red-wined way, I screw it up.

Watching Burn Notice makes me think it’s time for me to do one of my infamous (ie. not-famous-at-all) livejournal polls. Which you’ll find here.

I’ll start you off. I wish I’d written Burn Notice. Damn, it’s fun!

The lurgy is finally lifting, thankfully. For a while there it was impossible to sleep AND breathe simultaneously. Which can add a layer of difficulty to, oh, everything.

From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.

Years back, when I was clearly more of an optimist than I am now, I started collecting links on ‘promoting your book’. Just the links, not the articles, because I didn’t want to fill up my computer with useless words. And now that I have a book, of course all those links are out of date. I have text files full of links to broken pages! What, I wonder, did those pages say? And where are today’s pages?

My head is filled with questions!

So now I’m looking for good resources on promotion for writers. I understand there are such things as ‘press releases’ and ‘review venues’ & even ‘bookstores’, & I’m wondering how you write ‘em, contact ‘em, or convince ‘em to carry your book.

I’ve been wondering this for a couple weeks (since the launch, in fact), but today the questions were really brought to the fore when one gentle friend said to me, “I looked for your book in Borders AND Dymocks, and they both didn’t have it!” She even, apparently, convinced the helpful woman in one of these stores to put it on ‘the list’, whatever ‘the list’ is. I hope it’s a good list. I hope I get on it!

If you, gentle reader, have a link (that’s still active) to a place in the interwebby which addresses any or all of these questions, feel free to post that link here.

Conversely, if you are a marketing student looking to work for free for a good cause, well, you probably should be looking into the plight of native fruit bats or something, rather than wasting your time with my queries — but if you do have a term paper lying around that explains all these things, well, your work is welcome here.

Now I might do some recreational reading, for once, because my head is toast.

A quick update because I have to do some novel writing tonight, but wanted to say hurrah! and thanks! to all the people who came to the very first launch of my very first book, A Book of Endings at Cabinet Bar over the Continuum weekend in Melbourne. I’m not sure if it was the Lady Lara’s (ie. gin & champagne cocktails), the welcoming staff at Cabinet, the cheeriness of the crowd who were able to find their way out of the con hotel, down the road, around the corner, into the alley way (past the garbage bins) to brave the steep staircase into the bar, or whether, indeed, it was Mr Strahan’s compelling & convincing speech & Mz Krasnostein’s convivial catering — or indeed, whether it was ALL of these things — but the launch was a blast!

Thank-you to the peeps who came, the peeps who accosted me the next day in the corridors to say, ‘Sorry I missed your launch!’, & the peeps who couldn’t make it but thought about it, or are thinking of coming to the next one:

Sydney Launch of A Book of Endings
3pm Saturday 10 October
NG Art Gallery
Upstairs at 3 Little Queen St
Chippendale NSW 2008
(about 2 bus stops from Central Station or a 10-minute walk)

Launching by the inimitable Mr Garth Nix.

And if you stick around at the gallery (well, if you stick around until October 27), you can see Nick Stathopoulos’s gallery exhibition, Playtime. I had a preview of some of the new works recently & they’re fabulous.

It’s here.

Well, not here. It’s in Perth, but it’s also (hopefully) on its way to Melbourne for launch during the Continuum weekend.

It’s A Book of Endings & it looks like this (byo cute puppy).

So at 5:15pm on Saturday 15 August, it will (hopefully) be launched at Cabinet, 11 Rainbow Alley, a 3-minute walk from the convention hotel.

And many thanks to everyone who helped out with launch venue suggestions! Who knew Melbourne had so many funky little bars within a metre of a randomly chosen hotel?!

I love that city.

(Sydneysiders, stay tuned for confirmation of the local launch.)