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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.

It was bittersweet being at the LAST Fantastic Queensland AA ceremony. Before FQ took over, I never even attended an AA event. But they made such a classy event out of it that eventually I found I couldn’t NOT attend. I’m looking forward to hearing which brave souls take up the baton. (I was about to add something about continuing the legacy, but realised what an appalling mixed metaphor that would be.)

To no one’s surprise, Greg Egan took out Best Collection. But the real intrigue of the evening lay in discovering what would happen when he did. Egan has famously removed himself from award lists for long enough that I forget why he ever did it in the first place. And he’s so notoriously private that I’ve only ever met 2 people who claim to have met him. (This fact amused my non-fandom bf so much he later used it to claim that HE, in fact, was Greg Egan & he’d been looking for a way to break it to me for the past several years.)

But since neither of the 2 Egan-witnesses can actually describe him, I figure Egan a) carries one of those Men in Black memory zappers, or b) moves in complete darkness.

So: what would happen at the moment his name was called? Would he spring from the audience on legs like pistons (a la Burton’s apes from his awful re-imagined Planet of the Apes movie), screaming his disapproval at the audience, smashing the award on the back wall of the hall and disappearing wrathfully into the night? Would he instead descend demurely, accept his award & apologise for never calling or dropping by, while we all sat mutely thinking, “So THAT’S what he looks like?”

And, did he actually DO either or both of those things before donning dark glasses and holding up his MIB memory zapper?

Because what I *remember* happening is a petite female publishing rep descending to the microphone & accepting the award on behalf of the publishers (not, notably, on behalf of Greg) & commenting that Gollancz was pleased we liked Greg’s stories.

(Those of us with more acute hearing picked up the unuttered phrase that followed: that she was maybe a little sorry that Greg didn’t like that we liked his stories.)

There were some other marvellous moments in the evening: Haines getting TWO best horror awards & giving my favourite speech of the evening (my favourite speeches are almost always the shortest ones , the establishment of the Chris Hembry award for promising new writers; and the granting of the Peter McNamara award for service to the community to Justin Ackroyd. Much deserved & long overdue! Justin’s support of the community is outstanding. For me alone he’s encouraged my involvement in fandom, he’s babysat me at my first couple of WFCs, he’s added my name to his ‘best of 2009′ book list — AND he’s personally sold (& sold out) of A Book of Endings in Melbourne, where he’s been selling books for 33 years.

That, my friends, was a blast to witness!

Also there was drinking & carousing (even if those 2 words mean the same thing) & laughs & catching up with fabulous people & then collapsing for about 24 hours straight in our free upgrade of a hotel room. All of which was a delight & a wonderful start to the writing year. Happy Year of the Tiger, everyone!

Now, back to work.

From the latest Ansible:

Ursula K. Le Guin laments the passing of the squid: ‘[L]ast night on the Lehrer news hour Margaret Atwood did not say she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking squids, but said that she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking cabbages. I am pondering the significance of this change from sea beast to land vegetable, but so far it escapes me. She was otherwise charming, and I do think The Year of the Flood is good science fiction even though its cabbages are speechless.’ (23 September) Those eloquent cabbages presumably live on Planet X: the indefatigable Ms Atwood told the New York Times that her work is not sf since ‘I don’t write about Planet X, I write about where we are now.’ (21 September)

Also Eddie Izzard has an encounter of the SF kind. And a Booker prize judge makes some interesting comments about SF living in ‘special rooms’. I often do think the SF ghetto is a self-perpetuating thing. Though I understand this view upsets people who damn well *enjoy* their persecution complexes & don’t like me spoiling their fun!

So I’ll refrain from saying more.

OK, so I’m getting a little obsessed with cover art (ever since Nick Stathopoulos turned in the fabulous A Book of Endings cover!). Yesterday I spent a couple hours staring at these sites:

http://www.thebookdesignreview.com
http://shelvedbooks.blogspot.com
http://henryseneyee.blogspot.com

I also followed various links, finding myself in a world of cover debate. Including a link to a rant by Stuart Evers on the good side of bad books:

After a promising first page, which actually made me laugh, Low Alcohol descended into the kind of literary hell most readers would hesitate to enter, even led by a Dickens or an Austen, let alone a debut novelist sniffing like a mangy dog around the arse end of Martin Amis. Derivative, unfunny, nasty and puerile, the whole shabby affair – concerning the life and loves of Doug Down – was an ill-conceived disaster. And I’m glad I read it before it fell out of print.

See, I’m not convinced there’s a value in that. Surely life is too short for bad books in the same way it’s too short for bad coffee, bad food and bad love affairs…?

Over at The Guardian, Alison Flood asks the question “are we really going to admit to judging books by their covers?” To which the answer must be ‘yes’. Even in an age when more & more of us are looking at electronic solutions for our libraries, it’s probably useful not to stray TOO far from your content with a misleading cover.

(This presented a particular problem for the cover of my own antho, as I find myself moving further away from genre into just a kind of ‘weird urban’ storytelling. Which — I hope! — the Stathopoulos cover captured rather brilliantly!)

Please-god, spare me from ever having a chicklit cover! Or from finding myself in the ‘chicklit’ section of Barnes & Noble (seriously, does that exist?). Somewhere I’ve seen chicklit referred to as the ‘buying shoes in the big city’ genre. Which reminds me, I think I *did* write a story about buying shoes in a big city once. But I like to think it was only because I needed shoes. And live in a city.

I digress. Let’s leave the final word on that one to author Janelle Brown, ““Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in.””

BUT lots of interesting reading suggested at SF Signal. In this case, non-genre titles for genre readers.

And there’s also recommendations on literary fiction for people who hate literary fiction at Emerald City.