deborahb

Next week in Melbourne, apart from copious eating of Melbourne food & some drinking (less so on the drinking; my liver is lonely without my gallbladder), I’ll be wandering about WorldCon trying not to think about how much time has passed since the LAST AussieCon in Melbourne’s Southbank Convention area.

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.

Am in the eye of the storm on teh novel (aka BROKEN). Have just finished the BIGGEST edit so far, but I know it’s not the last. So I’m trying to relax & giving myself a few days off writing entirely. The effect of not-writing is to make me feel stressed & — according to a trusted source (or two) — cantankerous. Just can’t win with this writing gig, eh? Either I’m exhausted as all hell or stressed out of my brain.

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!

On a day which can only be described as ‘on the cruddier side of cruddy’, I discovered that Dexter Season 4 is even darker than previous seasons. It unnerved me so much that at least one point I had to stop eating my dinner.

… Hurrah!

I also discovered, in the mail, my custom-made 2010 Demotivators calendar. Who knew you could build these suckers with all your own favourite demotivational posters, hand-chosen for their most appropriate month?! (And why did you not mention this earlier?)

In other good news, Conflux 6 was damn good fun. It began, alas, with a bus ride so bad I spent the 3 hours composing a complaint letter in my head (it began with ‘Dear Fucking Murrays’ and ended with ‘the worst bus ride ever!’ Until I realised it wasn’t the worst bus ride ever, it was only the second worst.)

(Since we’re on the topic, the worst bus ride ever was the bus ride from, I think, Vienna to Amsterdam. It took somewhere over 10 hours & it crammed the majority of people on the SMALLER bus while leaving the BIGGER bus over half empty. It stopped once in 10 hours — at a German airport — not counting a couple of border crossings, & wound up in Amsterdam well into the dark of night, when the hostel was booked out & only a handful of us got in, leaving the others to seedier & seedier options as the night progressed. At which point we all decided that, fck sleeping, we were gonna see what all the fuss was about. And — Nige, do you remember this?! — we came across a striking hooker in a blue-lit window, & her eyes — I kid you not — were electric. Those eyes GLOWED brilliant blue. I remember hardly anything else about that night, but I remember her eyes.)

Anyhow. Murrays can still expect a letter from me, yes.

At Conflux I hung out for a few hours Saturday afternoon, taking part in the mass signing — which could have been awkward & embarrassing, but was made excellent fun by the company. And then even more fun when Chris Barnes announced, “I’m going to go get your book and bring it back and announce loudly, ‘Where is that wonderful writer, Deborah Biancotti?!’ And then bow obsequiously when I pretend to spot you for the first time.’”

And, of course, it proved to be even more hilarious when he actually did it. (Thanks, Chris!)

After that, it was laughs in the bar, & then I forlornly left the rest of the con to attend the banquet, & I took the bf off to a more low-key dinner at Mecca Bah. Which was also excellent, but honestly? Lacked the thrill of a Polack-inspired menu.

The next day was a leisurely breakfast at Gus’s, of course (every Canberra trip needs breakfast at Gus’s), then off to the bar & dealers’ room for several hours of ‘strategising’, then more bar time & lunch with some of the gang (Alisa, Rob, Alan, Chris). And then helping the awesome Karen Herkes with the cake for Nick Stathoplous while fending off several rather vain attempts with the icing pens by con-goers (though several other attempts were brilliant — obviously the trained painters in the group). I also got to tell Nicole Murphy that she’s my hero.

AND THEN it was nothing but chilling, grabbing extra copies of A Book of Endings from ‘the publisher’ as I like to call gj, dinner with the bf (who was avoiding the con through ample application of fishing), & popping back to the Marque to find Nick Stathopoulos, give him a birthday present & catch the beginning of the birthday festivities.

And so — as they say in the classics — to bed.

Thanks to the Conflux team for making this such a fun, chilled con.

An update!

Firstly, my program items for Continuum include just one confirmed very cool, event:

Reading with Sean Williams!
Sunday 2.00pm Sun Sphere

Yes, reading WITH Sean, who graciously agreed to my cunning plan to avoid reading my own stuff.

The idea was planted in my head years back by Simon Brown, who listened sympathetically to my comment that I don’t like reading my own stuff. Simon said, ‘Next time we’re both at the same con, let’s swap.’ And then he fled to Thailand.

So, filled with a sense of uneasy duty re. the promoting of my first book, A Book of Endings, I approached the ever-gracious Mr Williams with the inherited plan and he, graciously, agreed! Which means Sunday from 2pm, he’ll be reading some of my stuff & I’ll be reading some of his, & we might swap back & forth or whatever fits in with the timeslot(s).

There is another unconfirmed event, of course, which is the launch of A Book of Endings (now available for pre-order) by the eminent Jonathan Strahan. This is the rogue, off-campus, programme-defying plan to have a glass of champagne to celebrate the fact the book is (hopefully!) printed and available for sale. But if it’s NOT printed or for sale, there will still be champagne, although we may all have to buy our own ‘cos the publisher will be in tears. (We shall buy drinks for the publisher, too, in that event.)

We DID have one of your standard programmed launches, but for various reasons that timeslot didn’t work out* & the programmers have been very accommodating in letting us do some kinda rebellious off-grid whatever-we-want thing instead. We don’t yet understand what that thing is because we are miles away from Melbourne, but we need a venue within very, very short stumbling distance who’d accommodate us for an hour probably on Saturday at 5:30pm. Perhaps we shall even do a launch-&-run, by turning up in a bar, ordering drinks, sending up a rousing cheer, & then running like hell before the owners of the establishment work out what in god’s name we’re doing there.

And once we have THAT plan in hand — whatever it is– by god, there’ll be a celebration!

—–
* The chaos of the launch does not phase me. Once we decided to go with the title, A Book of Endings (now available for pre-order), a whole bunch of things turned upside-down & so it is only to be expected that crazy, arse-about stuff is gonna happen with this book from woe to go. Or, go to woe, whichever is set to happen last…**
** Plans for the Sydney launch of A Book of Endings (now available for pre-order), however, are tracking well. Keep 3pm Saturday 10 October free for a launch by the awesome Garth Nix!