Adventures of a Bookonaut

Aug 3, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Julia Rios

Your most recent work that most Australians in the Spec Fic scene would be familiar with is the crowd funded Kaleidoscope anthology which you have co-edited with Alisa Krasnostein . What do you or will you take away from this process?

It’s been wonderful working on this book with Alisa. I’ve learned a lot about how publishing works in Australia, and it’s exposed me to some Australian writers I might not have known about otherwise. It’s also been lovely to see how the bigger names in Australian speculative fiction will step in and offer support, whether by contributing stories to a small press anthology, or offering helpful advice. Australian speculative fiction seems to have a tight and supportive community, which is fantastic.

You've been nominated for a Pushcart prize for some of your poetry and you were also involved in an interview series for Stone Telling Magazine. I am finding that poetry and speculative fiction are mixing quite well (in that we have several poets/authors) down under and wondered what you sensed was the case in the circles you moved in?

I do think that speculative fiction and poetry mix very well. My first sale was a poem that Amal El-Mohtar bought for the wonderful magazine Goblin Fruit. Now I’ve bought a story from Amal for Kaleidoscope, which is a lovely role reversal. There are a lot of poets who also write fiction,and vice versa, and I think that strengthening one area of writing can strengthen others as well.

A podcaster, editor, author and poet - what projects do you have lined up for the future, or what creative work would you like to attempt that you haven't had the chance to yet?

Lined up in the future, I’m planning to co-edit a Year’s Best YA Science Fiction and Fantasy book with Alisa, and we’re hoping Kaleidoscope will do well enough that we can make a second volume. We work really well together, and we both love the way the first book came out. I’ll also continue my work with Strange Horizons, the Outer Alliance Podcast, and The Skiffy and Fanty Show.

I would love to narrate an audiobook, write a novel (one that works, as opposed to the many I have written that did not work!), edit a quartet of novellas or a collection of stories in a shared world, collaborate with another writer on something… I could go on…

What Australian works have you loved recently?

As everyone likely already knows, I am an Australian podcast addict. I continue to love Galactic Suburbia, Galactic Chat, The Writer & the Critic, Coode Street, and The Book Was Better. I suspect most people reading this will be familiar with the first four. The last one is a podcast where the hosts review novelizations of films, which are often fascinating and unintentionally hilarious.

As for fiction, I love too many things to name, so I’ll stick with three: I’ve been reading a lot for the Year’s Best YA from 2013, and I’ve discovered a lot of wonderful new-to-me authors. I really loved By Bone Light, by Juliet Marillier, which won the Aurealis Award for Best YA Short Fiction, and I also really enjoyed The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories by Joanne Anderton. I’m a big fan of Tansy Rayner Roberts and I’m very much looking forward to Drowned Vanilla, the second in her alter ego’s fluffy mystery series.

Aside from books and podcasts, Liz Argall is an Australian living in the US, and she does a wonderful web comic called Things Without Arms and Legs. And finally, thanks to The Skiffy and Fanty Show’s SF world tour, Ian Mond and Danny Oz have introduced me to Sons of Steel, which is a gritty dystopian rock opera from the 80s, and the very best movie we have ever watched for our Torture Cinema segment (which is where we watch terrible movies and review them).

Have recent changes in the publishing industry influenced the way you work? What do you think you will be publishing/writing/reading in five years from now?

I think ebooks are bigger now than ever before, and I expect they’ll be sticking around for a long time. This does change how I work because it means I am always thinking about how things will work for readers. I self published an ebook travel guide for Boston (which is where I live) last year, and it was really neat to see how accessible self-publishing has become. I think i’m a lot more likely to read self-published stuff now than I was a few years ago, too. As for what I’ll be reading/writing/publishing in five years, I have no idea. If you’d told me five years ago that I would have self-published a travel guide, become part of a really fun international podcasting community, and started editing anthologies with a small press in Australia, I’m not sure I would have believed you!

Julia Rios writes all sorts of things, hosts the Outer Alliance Podcast (celebrating QUILTBAG speculative fiction), and is one of the three fiction editors at Strange Horizons. Her fiction, articles, interviews, and poetry have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Stone Telling,Jabberwocky, and several other places. She's half-Mexican, but her (fairly dreadful) French is better than her Spanish.

You can find out more about Julia here.

This interview was conducted as part of the 2014 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’ll be blogging interviews from 28 July to 10 August and collating the links at SF Signal. You can find other interviews in this series at the links below:

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Aug 2, 2014

Snapshot 2014 Jason Fischer

I here you are writing a "How to Pun for Dummies Book" no? Oh well. What have you got on the boil currently?

"Paranomasia for Pacifiers" is sadly still on the drawing board! As for what I've currently got on the go, I've got half of a draft novel under my belt (working title "Gone", an empty earth thriller) and am currently working on a novella project for a local indie press. I've recently written an Aussie Cthulhu story for an anthology, worked on a couple of comic projects, and had a tilt at the Baen Fantasy Award. Sadly I'm studying at the moment, so the amount of hours I can pour into writing has slowed to a trickle - a consistent trickle, but still a trickle.

Everything is a Graveyard came out late last year from Ticonderoga, a collection of your short fiction. What does it feel like to have that collection published?

A great feeling - not only did I get to tick off "publish a collection" from the bucket list, but I got to work with Russ and Liz from Ticonderoga, and we took the book straight from its launch in Adelaide to the Melbourne Zombie Convention the next day. A great experience, and we had a lot of fun doing a small press road trip.

The cover art for Everything Is A Graveyard was custom painted for the book by Aussie comics legend Jason Paulos, and existed before the novella which it inspired. Dropbears, Toranas, bogans, it's got it all.

It was a lot of fun revisiting some of my early short stories, and I'd like to think the book is an accurate description of my journey as a writer. It's got pride of place on my brag shelf!

You also have a YA novel, Quiver and a thriller novella Viral: Anomaly with Steven Savile, are you looking towards the longer form, and are you intending to stay within the horror genre?

Definitely looking towards longer works these days - my default setting is novellas and longer. As for horror, it's been good to me but I'm trying a few different things now, such as Gone which is SF thriller. I'm hoping to continue the story of Quiver in the near future, and have mapped out several sequels in the series. I've got perhaps half-a-dozen other book ideas waiting in the wings, and if I was organised I'd be dangerous.

What Australian works have you loved recently?

I absolutely loved the HELL out of Andrew MacRae's Trucksong - hands down this is the most original story I've read in ages. I get the feeling it belongs in the same vein as Paul Haines', Wives and Kaaron Warren's, Slights, as a book that people will talk about long after they've read it and moved on to other things.

Other recent Aussie books I've enjoyed are Kim Westwood's The Courier's New Bicycle, and Cat Sparks', The Bride Price.

Have recent changes in the publishing industry influenced the way you work? What do you think you will be publishing/writing/reading in five years from now?

I wouldn't say it's made much difference to how I work, but there are many more options once you've finished the work, a terrifying amount of options! I think that advances in POD technology are allowing publishers to be brave with small press work, which is a good thing. Publishing e-books still confuses the hell out of me (how the hell do you promote them effectively, do "signings" etc?), but I sure love reading them.

As for what I hope to be doing in five years, it will be much the same as I'm doing now. Writing novels and having a ball, reading everything I can get my hands on, and polluting the internet with as many daggy dad-jokes and puns as is humanly possible. If I can make one person groan a day, it's a life well-lived.

Jason Fischer is a writer who lives near Adelaide, South Australia, with his wife and son. He has a passion for godawful puns, and is known to sing karaoke until the small hours.

He attended the Clarion South Writers Workshop in 2007, and has been short-listed in the Aurealis Awards, the Ditmar Awards, and the Australian Shadows Awards.

Jason won the 2009 Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) Short Story and the 2010 AHWA Flash Fiction Competitions, and is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest. He is the author of over thirty short stories, with his first collection “Everything is a Graveyard” now available from Ticonderoga Publications.

His YA zombie apocalypse novel “Quiver” is now available from Black House Comics, or via www.tamsynwebb.com.

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Aug 1, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Laura E. Goodin

You are a multi-talented writer and poet, not to mention fencer (the sword carrying kind ). What has your creative attention at the moment that you can talk to us about?

I've started writing a script -- spec fic for the stage! And it's got opera bits in it! And swords! It's going slowly, because I'm trying to fit it in around a number of horrendous time-sucks, including earning a living and getting ready to move for the third time in five years. I'm also in the musing stage of a swashbuckling novel, which also has swords in it, and a short story that coincidentally ALSO has swords in it. And a poem that doesn't have swords in it, but I'm thinking that it suffers thereby, and I may remedy it soon. I spent much of last year collaborating with my husband, composer Houston Dunleavy, on a bunch of texts that he set, and on a one-man musical we wrote with the actor and produced in Sydney. This year's writing has been more solitary. So far, at least.

Your most recent work was a play "Useless Questions" performed in Sacramento in February, you also write Libretti, what do these writing outlets supply that say, short fiction doesn't?

Performance writing provides some really daunting, and yet exhilarating, challenges. Your writing must be entirely pared down to where the bone shavings are curling from the blade. It must be as spare, and yet as intense, as poetry, and still give the audience the lavishness of a novel -- with no descriptive passages or inner monologues to do the hard work for you. And then, once you've written it, you have to workshop it, because it must function in real time. And then you must get it produced, which you'll probably have to do yourself. And then you have to surrender control over the work almost entirely as the director and the actors bring their own incandescent talents to it -- and you have to be able to passionately love what they do to it, with it, for it. And THEN you have the nail-biting terror of the audience watching it RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU OH GOD WHAT IF THEY HATE IT. Yeah. You know you're alive when you write for performance, all right.

Among your many creative outlets and productions I don't notice a novel. Is this a form that you want to attempt in the future or do you find that plays, libretti, poetry and short fiction allow you to do what you want creatively?

Oh, there are novels. They languish. We will not speak of this again.

What Australian works have you loved recently?

I am humiliated to admit that I have read pretty much zero fiction over the past year, let alone Australian works, let ALONE any works by my friends. I'm reading a lot of nonfiction, largely to give myself some background to yet ANOTHER novel, which will includes swords only incidentally. I'm branching out.

Have recent changes in the publishing industry influenced the way you work? What do you think you will be publishing/writing/reading in five years from now?

You know, I can't honestly say that recent changes in publishing have had any effect on my working style or my career objectives. I figure my first job is to make sure I have some product; how I sell it is something that I'll worry about later. This may be tragically, regrettably naive of me, but I feel yucky if I start trying to market my "brand" or whatever. I have to trust the writing. If I try to force opportunities, they'll look...well, forced. Dancer John W. Bubbles was quoted by Maurice Hines as saying, “Never do a step that you don’t love because the audience will see it.” I feel the same way about what I write: if it's for the sake of getting published, rather than for the sake of the story, the reader will be able to tell. They will.
As to what I'll be publishing/writing/reading in five years? I'm hoping to release some of those novels into the wild. I'm hoping to be writing works of heart-stopping artistic courage that make everyone who reads or sees them strive to be ever more fully human. And I'm hoping to be reading more of my friends' fabulous stuff.

Laura E. Goodin is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, old-fashioned adventure, humor, plays, libretti, poetry, and (very occasionally) nonfiction. Her work has been published and/or performed on three continents, and plenty more projects are in the works.
Laura is interested not only in the wondrous and sublime that form the core of speculative fiction, but in how music, drama, and other performance arts can incorporate a bit of surreality, unreality, and hyperreality. Encountering strangeness and wonder in unexpected places and unexpected ways is what she finds most intriguing and exciting about being a writer.

Laura can be found here at her website.

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Aug 3, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Julia Rios

Aug 2, 2014

Snapshot 2014 Jason Fischer

Aug 1, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Laura E. Goodin

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