Adventures of a Bookonaut

Aug 6, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Jenny Blackford

You write historical fiction, speculative and realist poetry and short fiction. You've been published locally and internationally in all of these areas. What currently has your creative focus in its grip?

Right now, it's poetry of all genres that has me in its stern grip. My most recent poem is totally realistic, taken from real life, with nothing supernatural, but the end is so creepy that it's arguably horror.

I've been cursed – or blessed – with versatility. My focus is a bit on the fuzzy side. I might be the only writer who's had sf stories in, for example, local Cosmos and international Penumbra, fantasy stories in HarperCollins’ Dreaming Again and plenty of small press anthologies, such as (soon) Phantazein, mild horror stories in Aussie Bloodstones and US Kaleidotrope, a YA-crossover historical novella, The Priestess and the Slave, commissioned and published by US small press Hadley Rille Books (and praised by feminist historical journal HerStoria), realist poems in Westerly and the School Magazine (both Australian literary journals, for adults and children respectively), spec fic poems in Strange Horizons and Star*Line (both US spec fic journals), and stories for kids in all sorts of genres in the School Magazine and various anthologies such as Random House's 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children, plus any amount of literary criticism over the years, mostly published in New York Review of Science Fiction – and I was one of the Editorial Collective that published Australian Science Fiction Review Series II. And now Pitt Street Poetry, who publish high-profile poets such as Mark Tredinnick and Jean Kent, have published a collection of my cat poems, with gorgeous illustrations. So when I'm asked to introduce what I write, I find it hard to explain in a few words!

My awards are all over the place, too. I placed second in the Science Fiction Poetry Association poetry competition last year (with a horror/sf poem), but also in the 2013 Rhonda Jankovic competition for poetry with a social justice theme (and that poem was largely about the 5th Century BC Plague of Athens) announced earlier this year, and the 2013 WB Yeats Poetry Prize for Australia (for a realist poem that just happened to mention hunting mammoths), both announced this year. Most recently, I came first in the Humorous Verse section of this year’s Henry Lawson competition, with an absurd animal poem.

But, yes, it's poetry that I can't help writing these days.

I read your Power Men poem at Strange Horizons recently and thought it displayed the power of poetry to slip between rigid genre borders, to play with realism and fantasy, to be metaphorical or fantastical. What are your thoughts?

Thanks, Sean! Here's a link to the poem, so people can see what we're talking about: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20131216/blackford-p.shtml

That's certainly one of the most wonderful things about spec fic poetry – that it allows us to play with a sense of wonder about the natural, scientific world.

I've always looked at those huge metal structures and though how much they're like giants who were striding across the landscape, then were somehow frozen in place. I sat down to try to express that, and the poem happened. Very little of the process was conscious. They wanted to be trolls, and to be free to dance just one night. I'm lucky that the spec fic world allowed a poem about these fantastic creatures to be published!

You've recently released a pamphlet of beautifully illustrated cat poems, The Duties of a Cat, through Pitt Street Poetry. Is poetry your future direction or is it a matter of finding the right form for the right project?

I'm very grateful that Pitt Street Poetry accepted my manuscript, and shaped it into such a beautiful tiny book – and that they commissioned those gorgeous cat pictures, many of them taken from photos of our own cat Felix.

You're probably right that poetry is my new direction. As we get older, if we're lucky, we become ourselves, and I'm apparently turning back into the poet that I was at 15.

But it isn't the only direction. My husband Russell Blackford says that The Priestess and the Slave is historical fiction written by a poet, with unusual density and imagery.

I find that, even with poetry, the genre of anything I start is indeterminate until it's finished. I never (or almost never) set out deliberately to write anything (least of all a poem) in a certain genre. For me, a poem or a story almost starts with a phrase or an image, and where it goes from there is totally unpredictable. Often, I don't know whether something I'm working on is speculative or not until it's finished – sometimes not even them.

Indeed, I find that each thing I write (not just the characters) has a will of its own. Several short stories demanded to become novels, some novels wanted to be poems instead. Right now, everything seems to want to turn into a poem – but a year or so back, I had a bunch of ideas that turned into picture book manuscripts.

By the way, there's a brand new audiobook version of The Priestess and the Slave available right now, and I have a few free promo codes to give away in exchange for HONEST reviews. I might be biased, but I think that Hollie Jackson has done a beautiful job of narrating it. Please email me at jennyblackford [at] bigpond [dot] com if you're interested!

4. What Australian works have you loved recently?

Just a few brilliant works of Aussie creativity, off the top of my head: Mark Tredinnick's Bluewren Cantos; Thoraiya Dyer's Asymmetry; Judy Johnson's Stone Scar Air Water; Jason Nahrung's Blood and Dust; Kirstyn McDermott's Perfections; Janeen Webb's Death at the Blue Elephant; Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter's Midnight and Moonshine.

5. 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?

Poetry has been a cottage industry for a long time. The introduction of nimbler printing technologies has made the printing of poetry faster and cheaper, though sales are seldom stratospheric. It's also worth noting that poetry is a great fit for the internet. Poems work really well on a website – look, for example, at The Pedestal Magazine! (Note that that last link will take you to my poem "Their Cold Eyes Pierced My Skin", which probably isn't recommended for people much younger than 18.) I'm thrilled that this longish poem has been reprinted in the recent Australian anthology of speculative poetry lovingly edited by Tim Jones and P.S. Cottier, The Stars Like Sand – a book well worth seeking out, with a very wide range of styles – and a poem by you too, Sean!

I'm hoping that in five years I'll have a wide range of publications – more poetry, a poetic picture book or three, maybe a fantasy trilogy set in the Bronze Age, maybe a ghost story for 10s to 12s... I have quite a few projects simmering away, and I love all those genres and sub-genres, and more.

And I hope to continue reading widely and deeply all over the spectrum!

Jenny Blackford's poems and stories have appeared in Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, The Pedestal Magazine and more. Pamela Sargent called her historical novel set in classical Athens and Delphi, The Priestess and the Slave, "elegant". Her first poetry collection, The Duties of a Cat, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in late 2013. Her website is www.jennyblackford.com, she blogs at http://jennyblackford.livejournal.com, and she tweets as @dutiesofacat.

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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Snapshot 2014 - Louise Cusack

Can you tell us a bit about your current work in progress, Silk, particularly how you feel your research trip helped in its writing?

This book has been a few years in the making and flows out of my obsession with Da Vinci and the extraordinary times he lived in. So firstly, the blurb:

The Florentia series is set in a lost world conquered by Renaissance Italians at the time of Da Vinci. It follows the fate of a resourceful young ambassador who must choose between two men she comes to love completely: the brutal generale who can save her world, and the engineer from Earth who can destroy it.

The story opens with our young ambassador betrothed to the generale everyone fears, while an unsuspecting engineer from our world is pulled through a portal into theirs. Florentia is a hotbed of political intrigue that’s been festering for five centuries, and inside that pressure-cooker I’ve created a high-stakes story with dire consequences if any of the three lead characters make a wrong choice. The political machinations were delicious to write, but of course, being a romantic at heart, the love story was an important component for me as well – and I do like a good love triangle!

The setting of Florentia is deliberately elaborate. A couple of years ago I spent a week in Rome and two weeks in Florence researching art and architecture that the wealthy Medici family had commissioned from artists like Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi. I met Medici scholars and even stayed in a palazzo owned by the Medici family 500 years before. My goal was to imagine what sort of wonders the invading Medici would have created on Florentia in the 500 years they’d been ruling it, assuming they had the resources of an entire world to drawn on. I’ve got a pretty good imagination, so hopefully I’ve done that justice. To test the water, I entered Silk in a couple of big US writing contests for fantasy stories with romantic elements, and it’s finaled in The Beacon, Show me the Spark, and the Sheila,which is really encouraging. Now I just need to finish editing it and sell it!

You wrote the bestselling Shadow through Time series. What was it that attracted you to writing Fantasy in the first place?

Growing up, I was one of those kids who never felt like they belonged, so I was drawn to ‘stranger in a strange land’ stories like The Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Dune, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land – novels that explored that idea of seeing a world through fresh eyes. As a teenager, when my girlfriends were reading romance novels, I was devouring the Edgar Rice Burroughs Princess of Mars series (recently made into the Disney movie John Carter). I’ve written ‘light’ romances, but my best work is always going to be dark fantasy. I don’t know why, but creating other worlds comes naturally to me, and I think that’s why I do so well working with computer game companies to help them develop fantasy and sci fi world building.

You run a mentoring business and have mentored and assessed manuscripts for International Best Sellers like Australia's Kylie Scott. Aside from success and remuneration what do you love about the mentoring and assessment process?

Part of my mission statement is to share my passion for storytelling and inspire others to tell their own stories, so mentoring and assessment fit that nicely. Some years I have more time for it than others. From a practical perspective, I completely “get” the psychological side – the self-doubt, the grandiose dreams, the desperate desire to share your characters with other people. I also understand that writing is a business, and now more than ever, you have to have strong writing craft along with a great story if you expect a major publishing house to take you on. I’m good at teaching the craft. I’ve assessed over 200 manuscripts now. And I’m naturally quite a nurturing person, which helps. So I couple that with honesty about what needs to be fixed, and excitement and enthusiasm for what’s already working fabulously. I try to help people see that their dream is practical and do-able. You just need faith and persistence!

What Australian works have you loved recently?

Jason Nahrung’s Salvage is a fave. I re-read that recently. Cheryse Durrant’s The Blood She Betrayed was a pretty awesome spec fic debut – a kick-ass heroine arriving on our world from another world – so she’s an author to look out for. Anything by Kylie Scott – really, she’s such a talent. I love her zombie erotica (Flesh, Skin) and her Stage Dive romances are great too: Lick, Play, Lead and soon Deep – again taking everyday characters and thrusting them into extraordinary circumstances (a zombie society, the high-drama world of big International rock bands). I’ve also been working through the Kimberley Freeman and Kate Morton backlists and loving their historical worlds.

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?

Twenty years ago all I did was write, and now I need time for social media every day. That’s distracting. And it’s not going away. The huge rise in indie authors means that I’m not competing against twenty other fantasy authors in the bookstore for a sale, I’m competing against thousands (many indie/self-published) in Amazon and the Book Depository. So author platform is no longer something any of us can ignore. And the fact that there isn’t any ‘right’ way to do promotion, means that authors waste a lot of time on social platforms that don’t engage readers. Of course, the best advice is write a fabulous book, but I’ve seen people do that, and not make sales because their book was lost amid the thousands of new releases every day.

The rise in self publishing has meant that anyone with a word processing program can toss together a ‘novel’, spell check it, whack a cover on it, then in a few quick steps they’re “published” by Amazon or Smashwords which, as you can imagine, upsets some of the established authors who had to work much harder for the status of “published author”. Of course, there are also indie authors who go to a lot of trouble with editing, professional covers etc, and hybrid authors who have traditionally published books and also indie books. The upshot is that there are a lot of authors out there now. Recently a multi-published International best-selling author told me that she felt like she’d wasted her adult life striving for something that’s worthless now, and several established authors have retired because the effort of meeting big publishing house standards isn’t worth the return any more – the market is flooded with “authors” so the specialness of that job is gone. As a mentor of both new and established authors I get to see both sides: the fabulous reality that everyone who has the dream to be a published author can now achieve that, and the disappointment of those who had to work harder to achieve that status. I have no answers, really, and all the writing organizations I belong to have been grappling with their definition of “published author” for the last few years. So from an author’s perspective, the ground has really shifted in the last three years. Readers, as well, are flooded with books, which sounds great, except that there’s little to filter them for quality in the digital realm. Word of mouth and book blogging have grown and may offer some direction, but it truly is a brave new world out there with plenty of choice for both readers and writers.

In five years time I have no idea what media I’ll be writing in, but I know there will be characters going from one world into another world, and seeing that new world through fresh eyes. That sort of continuity is exciting to me.

Louise Cusack lives in Australia, in a tiny fishing village on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. She's a long-time vegetarian and caffeine addict who mentors other writers when she isn't writing herself. A Trekkie from way back, she loves all thing science fiction and fantasy, especially if it has a good love story.

Louise has been published by Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins and Pan Macmillan. She writes about intrepid characters entering worlds that are new and strange to them, whether that's an everyday woman from our world traversing a portal into a sepia kingdom, an amorous mermaid stranded on dry land, or a reclusive oyster farmer who must face the modern world when a geek arrives on her doorstep. Louise also works with computer game companies to develop fantasy and sci fi world-building and recently did a stint as a Special Interest speaker on a luxury cruise.

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Aug 4, 2014

Snapshot 2014 - Paul Weimer

You are involved with the Hugo nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show. As fan, writer and man who wears many sci-fi hats, what has this nomination meant for you personally?

First of all, it was a complete surprise. Even given the tie to make 7 nominees in the category, I never imagined there was a real chance that it would happen, this year. If you told
me, a decade ago, I'd have a Hugo nomination for anything, I'd not have believed you. Beyond that, its been gratifying. Although you are nominated for work in the past and not
work you are doing now, in a way I feel its a vindication and testament to the World SF tour we are doing this year. The nomination makes me feel we are doing good, recognized work.
And I can forevermore say I was a Hugo nominee.

One of those hats mentioned is "working" for SF Signal, conducting interviews and reviewing books. Is there a specific interview, review or experience that arose because of this work that keeps you engaged and excited by the genre and its community?

I'd flogged it a lot the last year and change, but I have to say it was my piece on Silk Road Fantasy, that I published this year. It was and is a signpost of a lot of things I'd been talking about in regards to this microgenre. When I started hearing authors like Elizabeth Bear talk about their work in this formulation--and to point to me as the person who has helped repopularise the idea, I felt like I had had a real influence on the community and the long conversation.

A Hugo nomination is an outstanding achievement, aside from winning one, what else would you like to achieve as part of your involvement in the community?

I wouldn't mind being a better fan writer, big enough that I'd be in the weight class of those who have been and are being nominated for best fan writer. I'd also like to write some more short fiction, perhaps a novel someday. I don't have major ambitions to be a full time writer in the community, but having a piece or three out there, yes, I'd like to make that mark.
I'd also like to continue to be part of the aforementioned long conversation, and help bring genre into a new and better place. I'd like to help Genre, to paraphrase Ken Macleod, to be in the early days of a better nation.

What Australian works have you loved recently?

First of all, I'd like to give a shout out to Andrew Macrae's Trucksong. It was a strange, phantasmagorical piece of work, very much not what I had been expecting. In my mundane real job, I have a connection to the trucking industry, so there was an especially strange and surreal thrill to hear about futuristic sentient Kenworth trucks. I've idly wondered if my company's products, part of the engine cooling system, exist within these vehicles still.

Beyond that, recently, that depends, slightly, on what you define as Australian. Are Jonathan Strahan's anthologies Australian, even though they collect authors from far beyond Australia? If so, his Reach For Infinity and Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 8 are prima facie evidence that he is one of the best editors in the business today. I haven't read it yet, but I am intrigued by Craig Cormick's The Shadow Master. I got to meet Craig, as he improbably came from Canberra to attend Convergence here in Minnesota recently. We recorded many interviews for Skiffy and Fanty while at Convergence, and he was among them. I was intrigued enough by our conversation to pick up a paper copy of the book. I fair suspect I will be reading that soon.

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?

Save the easy question for last, I see. I can see several possibles futures in five years, some of them very good for readers and authors, and some of them that would be disastrous. There is a real struggle for the future of books and publishing among some very large players. I think something is going to fall, somewhere, and the knock on effects of that fall will be impossible to predict. But something is going to give, somewhere, hard.

Paul Weimer is a Hugo Nominated podcaster [The Skiffy and Fanty Show 2014], SF Signal Irregular, Genre reviewer/columnist & writer. When he isn’t doing all of that, he loves photography and playing and talking about roleplaying games. You can find him on Twitter as @princejvstin, and commenting on genre blogs far and wide. http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin”

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Aug 6, 2014

Snapshot 2014 – Jenny Blackford

Snapshot 2014 - Louise Cusack

Aug 4, 2014

Snapshot 2014 - Paul Weimer

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