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.

Anish Kapoor’s art is beautiful, but he doesn’t set out to make it beautiful. Some pieces smack of spirituality, but he doesn’t set out to make it spiritual. What he does is design a space for the viewer, to allow the viewer to insert themselves into the art. Like with his giant Chicago piece, Cloud Gate: it reflects the sky and the people around it.

I love the generosity of his view: that art is there to draw expression out of the viewer, not to impose the view of the artist.

It’s a reversal typical of Kapoor: his Space as Object looks like a box full of emptiness; Turning the World Inside Out II does exactly what it promises to the viewer’s gaze. And works such as Yellow feature a hollow at the centre that Kapoor repeats and updates over and over. An absence at the centre and yet a place that fixes the gaze and makes us think of infinity and mortality. Another trademark is the deep blood-red found in pieces like Her Blood, with saucers of giant reflective material that look both convex and concave all at once: an over-sized visual illusion brought to life. And also Mother as a Mountain, where shape and colour are impossible to divide.

Just beautiful.

There’s a weird bitter sweetness to this event which I’m kinda dreading. It’s making me look back and look forward in equal measure, at where I’ve come to since then and also at the changes I’ve made in recent years (both personal & in teh writing), and it’s consolidating my ambition re. what I want to do in the coming years, but with attendant nervousness about whether I can achieve all that.

So, I shall be in a weird and funky mood.

Unless I’m on Official Business, in which case I shall be cheerful! Here is my Official Business calendar:

Eneit Press BAGGAGE launch
Thursday 1300, Borders Southbank, h20 Convention Centre Place

(At which there will be cake! I love cake.)

Signing, Room 201-202, Sunday 1400
(Kim Stanley Robinson will be at this!)

(No, I don’t mean in the queue, I mean also signing. It’s not his only signing, but I predict several hundred people will flow through the room for Kim during this hour, while surely I’ve signed every A BOOK OF ENDINGS in existence already, so, er, one does wonder how I’ll fill my time. Cheerfully, though, of course.)

(Oh, there *is* a second print-run of A BOOK OF ENDINGS, though. Yay!! Plus BAGGAGE and SPRAWL anthologies to sign. So if you do acquire a copy of any of these, then firstly I thank you. And secondly, feel free to come along Sunday 2-3pm to have ‘em cheerfully signed.)

And panels:

Great women of science fiction
Who are the great women of speculative fiction? A historical look at the female authors who helped shape science fiction and fantasy, those
who are well-remembered and some who have been forgotten, and a celebration of their collected achievements.
Andrew M. Butler, Lucy Sussex, Claire Brialey, Deborah Biancotti
Sunday 1300 Room 212

(I haven’t been confirmed on this one yet.)

The eternal border
Are there taboos in dark fantasy? At what point does the fantasy stop and the psychosis begin?
Deborah Biancotti, Terry Dowling, Richard Harland, Jason Nahrung, Catherynne M Valente
Monday 1300 Room 211

(Hmmm, my name is first on this one, I wonder if that means I’m meant to be chairing?)

Maybe I am too normal to enjoy this book…
Horror authors share the worst things ever said about their work and discuss the context of the outburst. Audience members are invited to share their own worst “critiques”.
Scott Edelman, Will Elliott, Deborah Biancotti, Rob Hood, Martin Livings
Monday 1500 Room 212

(Go on, bring something snarky to read out. Share your pain with the world.)

Looking forward to seeing y’all there.

A Book of Endings makes the DITMAR shortlist!
‘Six Suicides’ makes the DITMAR shortlist!

Many thank-yous to the peoople who nominated aBoE and Six Suicides. Thank-you, thank-you. DITMAR winners will be announced September 3 at Aussiecon, the 68th World SF Convention, this year in Melbourne.

‘Hush’ sells to the YEAR’S BEST AUSTRALIAN FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION!
‘Diamond Shell’ page proofs are in for the Prime YEAR’S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR!
Gilgamesh’s Ishtar novella anthology has been pushed back in the publications line-up (awww!), with my story ‘And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living’ (working title).

(No exclamation mark for that one.)

As of end-November, my day-job contract is DONE! At which point the money and the time-for-writing will switch places, and I’ll be hoarding my coins while addressing some unfinished projects (the novel will hopefully be with an alpha reader by then).

All in all, 2010, what a year, eh? More of the same, thanks! (Exclamation mark.)

The Situation is …. (the fish, it has the boss’s face, but that was done on purpose, part of the project to build the fish).

The Situation is … (the ceiling is a giant black manta that spies on you).

The Situation is … (the boss, she keeps asking, ‘do you love me?’, I mean, how do you answer that? Honestly? Or not?).

The Situation is … (friends aren’t friends in the office, some of them are faking it and some of them aren’t strong enough and some, some are turning into animals).

The Situation is … (the company will ask of you many strange things, and you can do these things to the best of your ability or the best of your cunning self-interest, and the outcomes of your efforts will not be met with justice. Or am I reading too much into this situation?).

The Situation is … (to quote Jeff VanderMeer, “If I just concentrated hard enough on these images, I believe I thought I could survive all of it.)

The Situation is … (as crazed, as surreal as this story is, it’s the most honest story of workplace relations I’ve read in a long time. It makes my situation look if not sane, then normal, almost predictable).

The Situation is … (you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps).

The Situation is … (part of The Third Bear Carnival to celebrate Jeff VanderMeer’s short story collection, The Third Bear).

The Situation is … I accidentally ended up with two copies of Jeff Vandermeer’s marvellous new collection, THE THIRD BEAR. If you live in Australia and would like a copy, tell me your situation. Weirdest, most convincing situation wins.

– John le Carre, December 1989, introduction to THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, Sceptre, 2009

There’s more. le Carre talks about writing the novel in a rush over 5 weeks, he talks about watching the Berlin wall go up. And he says — and at this point I bought the book — “I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job.”

I had been poor too long. I was drinking a lot. I was beginning to doubt…

Well, if that’s part of the formula for success, then raise a cheer, my friends, I swear I’m part way there!

Anyhoo, I’ve been thinking about this book and you know? It really shouldn’t work. I mean, really. It’s a spy drama but the most action that’s happened so far is that one guy was riding a bike. Riding a bike while being shot at, sure, but still what it boils down to is a dude on a bike. Oh, and then there was one guy who got punched in the face, but really that’s **it**!!

Apart from that it’s all men in cars, men in rooms, men back in their cars on their ways to other rooms. Men talking. Mostly men, but my point isn’t about gender. It’s about activity. There isn’t much of it. It’s a book about talking. Talking about spying, sure. But mostly, it’s just a book with men sitting across the room from one another, talking. And I picture all of them in neat brown suits and narrow ties, perched on chairs in British drawing rooms, talking like Hugh Laurie used to talk back when he was British.

So, all this talking about spying and this driving around and the drawing rooms and the ‘I say, old chap!’ (this from the German guy) AND THEN there’s a couple of paragraphs telling the reader — not showing the reader — how difficult it is to be a spy, living a lie and trying to keep the lie straight in your head, oh how terribly wretched, fie! And so on.

See? This damn book breaks all the rules.

It shouldn’t work.

So why am I enjoying it so much?

Next post I will contrast this book with a recent Neil Cross novel I read. THEN we’ll talk about action.

Still, year of the tiger & all that. Meant to be very auspicious.

In news: WorldCon is coming & plans are being made. Travel & accommodation is booked, & we’re deliberating on which nights will be best for dinners at our fave Melbourne restaurants, & which nights might be best left free to go with the flow & — hopefully — catch up with friends. I seriously want more Melbourne Greek food!

In MORE news: the Baggage antho tour is in full swing. There’ll be a launch on the WorldCon Thursday afternoon (I think that’s confirmed now, right, Gillian?). But to whet your appetite in the meantime, there’s blog tours a-plenty. Alan Baxter cornered a bunch of us on his blog today (Kaaron Warren, Laura E. Goodin, editor Gillian Polack and myself) to ask us about our baggage. And yesterday the fabulous Angela Slatter interviewed me on her blog & gave me an undeserved but excellent introduction. Which I probably marred slightly with random comments on heartlessness to refugees & the downside of multiculturalism.

Considering how much hot water I got myself into on the Poe’s Deadly Daughters blog when I admitted to a deep horror of the Australian landscape (I think I’m supposed to find it pretty), this may well be another of my public miscalculations.

Well, onward & upward, I say!

In Sprawl (ed. Alisa Krasnostein, cover Amanda Rainey) you’ll find my story No Going Home.

In Baggage (ed. Gillian Polack, cover Andrew McKiernan) I have the story Home Turf.

(I should point out the ‘home’ theme you might see happening above is on purpose, & is a sign of the theme of the *market*, since both anthos will be ready for WorldCon — the international convention coming to Australia in September — which appears to be making people think about Australia & the rest of the world.)

(I should also point out that I love what’s going on with local genre covers lately. No sign of spaceships, but a heck of a lot of sophistication & modernity. It’s awesome. Please keep it up, cover artists.)

In 21st Century Gothic (ed. Danel Olsen, cover… um, not sure!), I have an essay on No Country for Old Men as gothic literature.

And doncha just love the dark, authoritative cover art for this tome? I would totally buy this book. In fact, I probably will, since there are 2 volumes & I’m not sure authors get a copy of either.

No sign yet of the cover for Ishtar from Gilgamesh Press. I’m hoping for white text on a white background, but I am getting a tad minimalist in my old age.

I always figured if there was a day in honour of Douglas Adams, it’d be a Thursday. Never could get the hang of Thursdays.

She sure could do with a sandwich, though. The camera batteries died before I could work out how to re-dress her (not that the scythe & the horned cape aren’t resplendent), but rest assured it’s a-coming!

In other news, very chuffed to see Diamond Shell make it into the Prime Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran! Yes, there’s my name between Bear & Black (can’t wait to read Coldest Girl in Cold Town again). Also got a Lanagan & a Link & wow, a bunch of pretty fabulous authors. I’m pleased as all hell, frankly.

Also on interwebs, tastemaker Tansy Rayner Roberts admits she didn’t actually get around to reading A Book of Endings before (it’s all in the purchasing, people, you don’t have to actually READ it), but now she has, & she’s made some very flattering comments. Which includes a description of reading A Book of Endings as calming. Calming! You heard it here first. Or, there first, because I’m a few days behind.

See? I am calming. Not depressing at all.

(If I could afford it, I would employ Tansy to do ALL my marketing.)

And finally, A Book of Endings first editions are not long for this world, with stocks running low. Do you REALLY want to wait for copies to turn up on eBay?

Excelsior.

Plenty of art at the Finders Keepers Market, much of it wearable. I found pressed metal is in, & so are teapots. I bought some $6 origami flowers & a stunning leather laptop bag that makes me WANT to be an author on the run. And now, too soon, the weekend is over.

In writing news: 32 scenes into what I’m calling the Colossal Re-Write. Slowly sloooowly … catchee … storee.

Lately I’ve been working full-time, alas, but one of the silver linings of full-time work (apart from cold hard cash) is commuting. But only because commuting grants reading time. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

Identity, Milan Kundera: heartbreaking. The story of a couple who go away for the weekend. I know, doesn’t sound heartbreaking. But the gentle exploration of self & other, about isolation in the midst of togetherness, was haunting. So much so that I immediately ordered The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I’m too scared to read it right now, though. There’s only so much loneliness I can bear in my prose. From here I moved onto:

Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller. Is this the perfect, funny, sweet, accepting, feminist book ever written? I think it might be. ‘Difference with equality’ *can* be done, that’s what this book showed me. Randomly, then, I moved from this book to:

The Clocks, Agatha Christie. Christie really is a master of the finely-observed character study. This is a wonderful book, though I admit I find Hercule Poirot oddly overblown compared to the subtle reality of the other characters. I suspect he was always this discordant & I just never noticed it when I was reading my way through all the Christies as a teenager. It was such a satisfying read I took a gamble & picked up a book I bought at City Lights in San Francisco last year:

Beauty Salon, Mario Bellatin. I didn’t love this. Actually, I didn’t even get this. But on the plus side: it’s short. I needed a much more narrative-driven book after this one, so I turned to:

The Straw Men, Michael Marshall. A great romp with a disturbing serial killer and weird, spooky clues on video tapes. Modern, energetic & creepy. Just the way I like ‘em. Almost as good as:

Bad Things, Michael Marshall. Now *this* was brilliant. I thought this was an almost-perfect book. The friend I pressed it upon didn’t quite agree & he instead made me read:

Last Man Standing, David Baldacci. Very well-plotted book from the author of Absolute Power. Occasionally a bit obvious, occasionally surprising, & very thick. Not as thick, though, as:

A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin. OK, THIS was thick. I was told in no uncertain terms I had to read it. *Obviously* I was never going to enjoy it. The book’s about 800 pages long & it has a dragon on the cover. The bf asked me once how I was going reading such a thick book & I said, ‘The dwarf-type character has just mentioned that dragons don’t exist anymore. Which, of course, means this book is going to have dragons in it.’ The bf looked at me. “Well, that & the fact it has a DRAGON on the COVER.” Thereafter he would occasionally recite, “It has a DRAGON on the COVER” whenever he caught me reading it.

This is a bloody good book. GRRM is such a master of character and plot and event that I rushed through this book, surrendering entire weekends to it. And then I bought the second one. Which is only 600 pages long, but printed in a font so tiny as to be illegal in some countries.

Next time I’m off sick, I’ll go check the bookshelves & let you know what ELSE I’ve been reading.

Speaking of. Lately I’ve been busy working full time and writing. The full-time work — though not to be in any way encouraged (whoever thought 5 days/week was a good idea for a day job was, to put it mildly, a complete fucking idiot) — it has come at a useful time. Not just for my bank account, though that’s been very, VERY useful, but also for my writing. I know. It doesn’t make sense, does it. But I cling to this perverse logic.

Right now the writing I’m doing is all that heavy-lifting complicated ‘reflective’ stuff. This is where you go through your manuscript a dozen times & come up with new, better ideas for the bits that don’t work, new scenes, new dialogue, new — frankly — pages and pages of notes. Mostly what I do with the new, better ideas & scenes & notes & so on is record them in notebooks (then remind myself to amalgamate all the notes into one notebook rather than keeping them spread across various notebooks — the result of having ‘the handbag book’ and ‘the daypack book’ and ‘the bedside table book’ and so on. Too many to name. And now that moleskines come in pink, well, I have a lot of little pink notebooks lying about, looking like the kinds of cheerful little notebooks you want to write stuff in). This has been excellent fun, quite free of rules or my own frustrated ideas on ‘productiveness’. Or ideals on productiveness, more to the point.

I haven’t yet added any of this new stuff to the manuscript, because the next bloody time I start typing, I want all my new ideas & notes & scenes & dialogues & — yes, as much new stuff as this — characters to present something cohesive. Something related to the themes of loss & self & subterfuge that I realise I’m writing to. Something, you know, with a bloody narrative. A story like the story I have in my head.

Tackling this many words at once has left me feeling disjointed. So until I can approach the manuscript as one cohesive novel with a story and characters and a point, it waits on a shelf. The pages are becoming increasingly dog-eared from multiple searching & reading, but that’s a good look for a manuscript.

Last week I realised why the final 1/3 of the manuscript isn’t working. The setting is crap. Accidentally I keep tipping into the kind of character or place or story or — it now transpires — setting that feels like someone should be saying ‘Verily, doth sayest thou? Fie!’ This is not the kind of book I want to write. Or, indeed, read. Multiple times. So, coming up with a setting that will interest *me*, the writer, & hopefully by extension you, the reader, is the latest challenge. These things keep me away from the blogosphere pretty much conclusively. But I’m still over at Twitter. Probably because Twitter is NOT reflective & complicated.

I thought I’d let you know.

How you been, anyway?

I’m really chuffed to see Six Suicides take out an award. I figured of all the stories this was the least ‘genre’, & therefore the least likely to get any attention. (I had an entire scenario in my head where someone would point a finger & cry, “This story has no genre!” And all through the empire people would roar, “The child is right! This story is WITHOUT GENRE!” And there would be hell to pay. Thankfully, this hasn’t happened. If anything, it’s been pointed out to me now that I was wrong: the story had a fine genre all along!)

A Book of Endings was also mentioned by judge Martin Livings in the long fiction category — ably won by the excellent Kaaron Warren! — as “an absolute treat for anyone who likes their short fiction dark and unique, simultaneously intellectual and visceral, sometimes so opaque to be all but impenetrable, but always satisfying and enjoyable“.

And kudos to Jennifer Brozek & Amanda Pillar for their award-winning editorship of Grants Pass from Morrigan Books: an indie press we want to see more from!

A Book of Endings. Be part of the story, buy a copy now. Help me sell this sucker out!

(There is much to be said about the death of the mother, but let’s not say that here…)

We considered him, the man, to be someone who’d risen above his emotions. Someone who’d sublimated that overwhelming, chaotic, unbearable reaction to the world that we were experiencing. A man who did not feel victimised by the world or even by his own hormones, his body. We figured him for self-reliant, impenetrable. Liberated.

We wanted to be that man.

But when I found THE OUTSIDER (aka THE STRANGER) on my shelf a couple months back, I didn’t realise this was that book. Not until I started reading. And then I remembered being fifteen and on fire and I remembered the longing I’d felt to be someone who just — seriously — didn’t care.

I’m over twice that age now & I still felt that twinge of longing to overcome the self.

But I didn’t find that man, the one I was expecting. To say he doesn’t care implies he understands and overcomes. Which I’m not convinced he does. Instead he strikes me as … lacking. Lacking something I would define as ‘humanity’, I’m afraid, and I can feel that collective rolling of eyes as I dare to invoke something as old-hat as human values & ignore the minefield of definitions of what that might be.

Still, I was in thrall. I found myself muttering ‘the man and the machine’ over and over. But, see, what I meant by that was ‘the man and the machine were equally matched’. Here was a man as cold as the coldest workings of the justice system, a man who felt nothing except one time, when he felt hope at his own escape. His *own* escape. And the machine of society took one look at this machine of a man and gave him the thumbs down. Or the thumbs up. Whichever one it was that ancient Rome really bestowed on gladiators that were for the chop.

And the man felt nothing.

And neither did I.

Except, well, for a grim satisfaction.

Because as much as the story kept me rapt, I admit I had a mild contempt for the man, the outsider. I wanted to see his inhumanity crushed, his absence of emotion, empathy, caring, his whatever it was that I could moralistically point to and say ‘this is a good quality, a good man’, derailed. Undermined. And destroyed.

And if you’re wondering now at my own humanity, you wouldn’t be alone. I wondered about it myself. How cunning of Camus, I thought, to make me into the very thing, the very kind of human, he was dissecting.

But turns out I got that wrong, too. My second interpretation in over two decades & I blew it.

Because one interpretation of the outsider is that he is an existentialist, a man who is existing very truly in the moment. And though he doesn’t express emotion, it’s there, hidden in his comments about the sun on his skin, the bright light in his eyes. This is his emotional statement.

Which stumps me because I thought existentialists kinda made some sort of decision to experience the world. It didn’t occur to me that, of course, they just *experience* it, they don’t go on & on about their decisions.

But even more confusing, Camus explains at the end of the book that this story is about the machine of society crushing not the machine of man but — that overused phrase — “the individual”. Condemning the individual based not on the individual’s crime but on the socially unacceptable behaviour the individual displays while being tried and even before the trial. A kind of Lindy Chamberlain death-by-media approach.

The individual — the Outsider — it transpires is condemned because of that strange, solitary scene at the beginning of the book: the moment he fails to cry at his mother’s funeral. (Ah! cried my fifteen-year-old-self. The death of the mother! Hurrah!)

Which sounds far-fetched until you discover that it’s already happened. At least once this year.

So, intellectually, I understand what Camus is saying about the indifference of the world, the indifference of the social machine, the — apparently virtuous — indifference of the precious “individual”.

I just don’t understand why in hell Camus used a psychopath to demonstrate it.

On the bright side, I totally scored on the presents!

Which begs the question: will there be THREE of those fantastical statues to present?!

Fine company to be had in the list, with Paul Haines, Kaaron Warren, Jason Fischer, Felicity Dawker and other fabby writers. Hurrah!

As an early birthday present, I scored an invitation to be part of the fabulous Poe’s Deadly Daughters blog this weekend (this weekend in Canada, which is a few hours behind the Sydney weekend). The awesome Sharon Wildwind made me think really hard about everything the Australian landscape has ever meant to me (namely: something horrible) after some comments I made on a WFC panel some years back. People have largely ignored me when I’ve complained about the creepiness of the landscape before, so this is a great leap forward.

Lemme know what you think.

In this ultimate issue Dirk Flinthart delivers a rollicking good tale with pirates & Patti Kurtz has a rotten time with elves (“Really, the last thing I wanted to do was trudge through a raging thunderstorm with an Elf” goes the first line, so you know you’re in for an adventure right there.) My AA-winning story A Scar for Leida (with witches!) is reprinted along with an interview where the editor asks me why people keep thinking I write YA fiction.

Step up for Shiny 6, guaranteed to float yer boat.