The Continuum 8 program is up, and I’m delighted to be part of some awesome panels and reading sessions. If you’re in Melbourne for the long weekend and are up for some Natcon excitement, swing past the Rydges on Swanston — Friday’s admission is a mere gold coin donation! Bargain!

In case any of you want to drop in and say ‘hi’, or if you want to avoid me altogether, my sessions are:

Friday, ‘Splicing Genres’ 16:00
with Jane Routley, Jenny Blackford, Lisa Hannett, Claire Corbett, Rjurik Davidson
Fantasy murder mysteries, horror spy novels, science fiction romance… do the best stories defy genre boundaries?

Friday, ‘Tales as old as time’ 18:00
with Angela Slatter, Lisa Hannett, Jenny Blackford, Kirstyn McDermott, Jane Routley
Fairytales are in vogue again, all over TV and movie screens and for years collected by Ellen Datlow in retold anthologies. Why are we so fascinated with these stories? And with so many retellings and versions out there how do writers make them new again?

Saturday, ‘Readings’  16:00
with Claire Corbett, Angela Slatter, Lisa Hannett, Felicity Dowker

The program is packed with lots of excellent sessions, and though I haven’t yet had a chance to decide which panels I’ll attend (other than the ones I’ll be on, of course!) I will certainly be there to cheer everyone on at these events:

Friday, ‘Twelfth Planet Press Hour’ 19:00
Ever wondered how your favorite Twelve Planet collection would taste like in cupcake form? Then come along to the Twelfth Planet Cocktail hour, to celebrate the launch of the newest Twelve Planets, Through Splintered Walls, by Kaaron Warren, and Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan, plus the new TPP novella Salvage by Jason Nahrung and a surprise announcement! Each book will be lovingly interpreted as a cupcake by master baker, Terri Sellen. Your cocktail choice is entirely your own…

Saturday, ‘Ishtar Launch’ 14:00
Launch of Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar and KV Taylor (includes novellas by Deborah Biancotti, Cat Sparks, and Kaaron Warren)

Sunday, ‘Bread and Circuses Launch’ 16:00
Ticonderoga Publications launch of Bread and Circuses by Felicity Dowker

And of course the Ditmar / Chronos Awards on Sunday evening — I love a good awards show!

Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene have compiled 32 fantastic stories and poems first published in 2011, from New Zealand’s and Australia’s finest writers.

The contents are

• Peter M Ball “Briar Day” (Moonlight Tuber)
• Lee Battersby “Europe After The Rain” (After the Rain, Fablecroft Press)
• Deborah Biancotti “Bad Power” (Bad Power, Twelfth Planet Press)
• Jenny Blackford “The Head in the Goatskin Bag” (Kaleidotrope)
• Simon Brown “Thin Air” (Dead Red Heart, Ticonderoga Publications)
• David Conyers and David Kernot “Winds Of Nzambi” (Midnight Echo #6, AHWA)
• Stephen Dedman “More Matter, Less Art” (Midnight Echo #6, AHWA)
• Sara Douglass & Angela Slatter “The Hall of Lost Footsteps” (The Hall of Lost Footsteps, Ticonderoga Publications)
• Felicity Dowker “Berries & Incense” (More Scary Kisses, Ticonderoga Publications)
• Terry Dowling “Dark Me, Night You” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
• Jason Fischer “Hunting Rufus” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
• Christopher Green “Letters Of Love From The Once And Newly Dead” (Midnight Echo #5, AHWA)
• Paul Haines “The Past Is A Bridge Best Left Burnt” (The Last Days of Kali Yuga, Brimstone Press)
• Lisa L Hannett “Forever, Miss Tapekwa County” (Bluegrass Symphony, Ticonderoga Publications)
• Richard Harland “At The Top Of The Stairs” (Shadows and Tall Trees #2, Undertow Publications)
• John Harwood “Face To Face” (Ghosts by Gaslight, HarperCollins)
• Pete Kempshall “Someone Else To Play With” (Beauty Has Her Way, Dark Quest Books)
• Jo Langdon “Heaven” (After the Rain, Fablecroft Press)
• Maxine McArthur “The Soul of the Machine” (Winds of Change, CSFG)
• Ian McHugh “The Wishwriter’s Wife” (Daily Science Fiction)
• Andrew J McKiernan “Love Death” (Aurealis #45, Chimaera Publications)
• Kirstyn McDermott “Frostbitten” (More Scary Kisses, Ticonderoga Publications)
• Margaret Mahy “Wolf Night” (The Wilful Eye – Tales From the Tower #1, Allen & Unwin)
• Anne Mok “Interview with the Jiangshi” (Dead Red Heart, Ticonderoga Publications)
• Jason Nahrung “Wraiths” (Winds of Change, CSFG)
• Anthony Panegyres “Reading Coffee” (Overland, OL Society)
• Tansy Rayner Roberts “The Patrician” (Love and Romanpunk, Twelfth Planet Press)
• Angela Rega “Love In the Atacama or the Poetry of Fleas” (Crossed Genres, CGP)
• Angela Slatter “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
• Lucy Sussex “Thief of Lives” (Thief of Lies, Twelfth Planet Press)
• Kyla Ward “The Kite” (The Land of Bad Dreams, P’rea Press)
• Kaaron Warren “All You Can Do Is Breathe” (Blood and Other Cravings, Tor)

The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011 is scheduled for publication in July 2012 and can be pre-ordered at indiebooksonline.com. The anthology will be available in hardcover, ebook and trade editions.

But if I do that, the second half of the book will never get written. It will languish in rewrites until it dies. So, to make myself feel better about the draftiness of some of the draft, I am turning to the experts. And also to Dory from Finding Nemo.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
― Stephen King

Heinlein’s Rules for Writers

Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in … the edit.”
― Will Self

Woo hoo!!

Thanks, Arts SA, for helping me to attend World Fantasy in Toronto this year! This will be my first WF convention, and I’m REALLY excited that I’m getting the chance to go. Three cheers for Arts SA!

Thanks, Nicole!

The very best thing I did for myself was set up a business plan.

Yeah, I know. Writers are supposed to be all artsy, at the whim of the muse, starving in garrets, not worried about the paltry realities of the world.

Except things like bills have a nasty way of sneaking up on you and, you know, I like to eat. Besides, the one cliché of being a writer I will embrace is drinking, and that costs money…

So make yourself a business plan. Work out where you want to be in five years and how to get there. Be honest but be ambitious. I just found one online and downloaded it. Then regularly (I do it every two months) look at it; work out how you’re going, work out what your next steps should be and act.

This industry is changing rapidly, and it’s the folks who are thinking seriously about what’s going on, have a plan and are flexible in the implementation of it who are going to make the most out of it.

Nicole Murphy has been a primary school teacher, bookstore owner, journalist and checkout chick. She grew up reading Tolkien, Lewis and Le Guin; spent her twenties discovering Quick, Lindsey and Deveraux and lives her love of science fiction and fantasy through her involvement with the Conflux science fiction conventions. Her urban fantasy trilogy Dream of Asarlai is published in Australia/NZ by HarperVoyager. She’s just commenced a new venture, In fabula-divinos (http://thetaletellers.wordpress.com) which is aimed at mentoring up-and-coming writers. She lives with her husband in Queanbeyan, NSW. Visit her website http://nicolermurphy.com

I’ve said it once and I’ve said it again (and again and again): I’m a huge fan of Peter M. Ball‘s short fiction. Pete’s subject matter, his tone, his concise sentences, his poignant and heartwrenchingly beautiful turn of phrase — all of it combines to make stories that I simply must read again and again because I like them so much. His stories linger in my imagination long, long, long after I’ve read them — and I get a buzz every time he publishes something new because I know it will be gold. Many of his stories are available online, so if you haven’t yet encountered Peter’s work, click here and follow the tantalising links.

Peter has won Ditmar and Aurealis Awards, his work has been collected in several international Year’s Best collections, and he has had incredible publishing success both here in Australia and also overseas. Today, Pete shares some great practical advice — all writers, take note!

Track your damn rights.

I first heard this at a seminar being run by, I think, Kevin J. Anderson, and it’s proven to be one of the most remarkably useful things I’ve ever done. It doesn’t have to be complex, so long as you know when something is sold, what rights you’ve given away, and when they revert.

The initial logic to this was simple: Having a central database where you list all the rights sold for a piece, who their sold to, and when they revert seems like a lot of superfluous work at the start your career when you’re only selling a handful of stories, but it’ll become important faster than you think. When someone emails and says “I’d like to reprint X”  or “can we have the audio rights to Y”, you’re far better off checking one well-maintained document than a scrambling through a filing cabinet to find the original contract.

More importantly, getting into the habit of entering the rights your selling when you sign off on a contract means you think about them a little more. This is way more important than it used to be for short story writers, given the changes the web has wrought on our industry. Novelists are given all sorts of warnings about their rights, but short story writers…well, we’ve never really had to give it much thought until now.

Tracking rights means you have to ask yourself if you’re really happy to let that online site archive your work forever? Are you bothered by the fact that this market will take e-book rights forever and continue selling your work long after you’ve spent the dollars they’re paying you now? I have no problem with people doing either, if that’s best for their career, so long as they are aware they’re the ones making that decision.

It’s easy to gloss past these questions when you’re just perusing the contract, but tracking your rights means you need to answer them before you sign the rights away.

Track your damn rights. Start early, even when it feels absurd, when there’s but one lonely story sale sitting in your spreadsheet. Future you with thank you for it.

Peter M. Ball is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. His publications include the novellas Horn and Bleed from Twelfth Planet Press, and his short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, Weird Tales, and anthologies including Dreaming Again, Interfictions II and Eclipse 4. He can be found online at www.petermball.com and on Twitter @Petermball.

This photo of Cat, Liz and I (taken from Cat Spark’s photoset) sums up the mood on Saturday night: happy, boisterous, supportive, and so much fun. Like the Australian speculative fiction community in general, I’d say. Everyone was all dolled up — which is another thing I love about the Aurealis Awards! — and smiling, smiling, smiling. If you look at Cat’s photos, or at Tehani’s set, you’ll be greeted with a collection of people having a wonderful time, and all the smiles are genuine.

Of course, I was walking around on cloud nine all night. I was so surprised to have won the Best Collection award that I fell out of my shoe on the way up to the stage. I felt so lucky just to have been on a shortlist with Paul, Tansy, Deb and Sue that, as much as everyone likes to win, I really was totally stoked with just having my name next to theirs for all the world to see. So I floated up to the stage, dropped my shoe (luckily my dress was long) and then floated back to my seat. And there I was, feeling the adrenaline starting to ebb, feeling so relieved that I’d managed to make a speech that sounded somewhat composed and moderately articulate… and then I heard Kirstyn say that I’d tied with Paul Haines for the Best Horror Short Story award. It was at that point that I lost all composure, and with it All The Words.

Photo by Cat Sparks

I wish I could have had the presence of mind to say what an incredible honour it was to be on the winner’s podium with Paul. And, again, to have been on a shortlist with Deb Biancotti! Angela Slatter! And OMG MARGO LANAGAN! But as everyone saw, all I could muster was a goofy smile, a wide-eyed expression, and about a dozen shocked ‘thank yous’ before I sat back down. I was so happy to see Thoraiya Dyer win for Best Fantasy Short Story — two years in a row! — and loved that Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle won for Best Science Fiction novel (also loved her speech!), that Jack Dann’s Ghosts by Gaslight won Best Anthology, and that the Galactic Suburbia podcast was awarded the Peter McNamara!

The Rydges after-party was a wonderful, champagne-filled romp (note to self: next year, eat dinner first!) and it was so much fun catching up with friends I don’t get to see anywhere near enough, seeing Facebook and Twitter friends in 3D, and chatting and chatting and chatting — until the bar staff kicked us all out!

For some reason, I woke up with an incredible headache Sunday morning… but the lovely Angie Rega whisked me away for breakfast and to show me around Sydney for the day (I’d only been there once before, at last year’s AAs!) so I staved off the hangover with bacon and lots of walking. (Well, sort of staved off. Kept at bay.)

Thanks, everyone, for a fabulous weekend! Can’t wait to see you all again at Continuum!

2011 Aurealis Award Winners

CHILDREN’S FICTION (told primarily through words)

 City of Lies by Lian Tanner (Allen & Unwin)

CHILDREN’S FICTION (told primarily through pictures)

 Sounds Spooky by Christopher Cheng (author) and Sarah Davis (illustrator) (Random House Australia)

YOUNG ADULT SHORT STORY

“Nation of the Night” by Sue Isle (Nightsiders, Twelfth Planet Press)

YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Only Ever Always by Penni  Russon (Allen & Unwin)

ILLUSTRATED BOOK / GRAPHIC NOVEL

Hidden by Mirranda Burton (author and illustrator) (Black Pepper)

The Deep: Here be Dragons by Tom Taylor (author) and James Brouwer (illustrator) (Gestalt Publishing)

COLLECTION

Bluegrass Symphony by Lisa L. Hannett (Ticonderoga Publications)

ANTHOLOGY

Ghosts by Gaslight edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers (Harper Voyager)

HORROR SHORT STORY

“The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt” by Paul Haines (The Last Days of Kali Yuga, Brimstone Press)

“The Short Go: a Future in Eight Seconds” by Lisa L. Hannett (Bluegrass Symphony, Ticonderoga Publications)

HORROR NOVEL

NO SHORTLIST OR WINNING NOVEL

FANTASY SHORT STORY

“Fruit of the Pipal Tree” by Thoraiya Dyer (After the Rain, FableCroft Publishing)

FANTASY NOVEL

Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman (Hachette)

SCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY

“Rains of la Strange” by Robert N Stephenson (Anywhere but Earth, Coeur de Lion)

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood (HarperCollins)

Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award

Galactic Suburbia podcast – Alisa Krasnostein, Alex Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Andrew Finch (producer)

Kris Hembury Encouragement Award

Emily Craven of Adelaide

Gobsmacking, isn’t it?

Over the past four decades, Jack Dann has edited or written over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller, The Memory Cathedral, the World Fantasy Award-winning Dreaming Down Under (which had the honour of being the first Australian book to win this award) and most recently Ghosts By Gaslight, which was shortlisted for a Stoker Award and also for an Aurealis Award this year.

Jack is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, the Peter McNamara Convenors Award for Excellence, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). In other words, he knows a thing or two about writing excellent stories, so you might want to take notes.

Anyone who has met Jack knows he’s a legend. I was lucky enough to have him as a tutor at Clarion in 2009, and his passion for storytelling, for teaching, and for people was infectious and inspiring (but how the man still had so much energy after back-to-back-to-back crits remains a mystery…) If any of you get the chance to take a workshop with Jack, jump at it! You’ll leave with a trove full of gems like the ones he has been kind enough to share with us today.

I once wrote an article called “A Few Keys to the Kingdom” for Writers Digest, which was directed to budding writers. It has been reprinted quite a bit. Here are some of those “keys”:

1. You must begin. Every day you must write, no matter what.

2. Give the best part of every day to your writing. Get up early and write if you can. If you can’t, read or put your desk in order or do research. It’s important to establish the habit of working every day.

3. Make appointments with yourself to write. Make yourself feel as guilty as possible. Do whatever you must to get to the computer.

4. Copy! Don’t plagiarise, but find writers you admire, and read and reread their best work. Dissect their prose sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. Memorise passages if you have to, but get into the weave of the writer’s work. It will give an unconscious form and balance to your own work. Don’t worry, no one else will know. You will put these unconscious “forms” through your own sensorium.

5. Read constantly and widely.

6. Be prepared to be surprised and upset by what you write.

7. Don’t try to be a critic while you’re writing. The first stages of writing are often intuitive, right-brained work. But once you have a draft, or you become blocked on a story, you must rethink and rework.

8. If you’re having trouble with a sentence or a passage or a plot twist, ask yourself if something doesn’t need to be cut. If you have an especially elegant sentence that just isn’t working with the rest of your humdrum prose, cut out the sentence. It’s probably purple, anyway.

9. If you find yourself blocked, take a break and read and take notes and read and take more notes. Being blocked is natural. It’s your unconscious asking for more information.

10. Rewrite everything until you feel that what you have on paper corresponds as closely as possible to that wonderful image you originally had in your mind.

11. Keep working toward making clear sentences and building solid story structures. Style is really only transparency of thought and idea. Writing well is a result of clear thinking. Cut out everything that sounds nice but doesn’t convey the specific meaning you want. Find the exact word to express your thought: that’s what Roget made his Thesaurus for. The particular way you think, the way you experience and perceive the world, will become your “style”.

12. Read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

JACK DANN is a multiple-award winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which was #1 on The Age Bestseller list, and The Silent, which Library Journal chose as one of their ‘Hot Picks’ and wrote: “This is narrative storytelling at its best… Most emphatically recommended.” Dann’s stories have been collected in Timetipping,Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. The West Australian said it was “Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing. Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller.” His collaborative stories can be found in the collection The Fiction Factory. Dann lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York. You can visit his website here.

“A Few Keys to the Kingdom” by Jack Dann. Copyright (c) 1989, 2000, 2012 by Jack Dann. First published in different form as “A Few Keys to the Kingdom: Thoughts on Getting Published, and on Being the Best Writer You Can Be” in Writer’s Digest 69 (January, 1989). All rights are reserved by the author. This work cannot be reproduced–electronically or in any other form–without the express permission of the author.

What makes a novel a must-read for me is character. I like characters (point of view characters in particular) to be real. This doesn’t mean they must resemble my next door neighbour or the man who runs the corner shop. But I need to be able to inhabit their skin while I’m reading. My favourite writers do character so well that I am immediately sucked into the point of view – no time to start working out what technical tricks are being employed, no being distracted by niggling uncertainties of style. Two writers who take us right inside their characters’ heads are Margo Lanagan in her remarkable novel Tender Morsels, based on the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red, and Joe Abercrombie in any of his dark, twisted epic fantasies. Margo uses a well-considered combination of first person and tight third person; Joe is a master of tight third.
 
I strive to create characters as skilfully as these writers do. There are two parts to it. One is technical: putting together various elements to create a particular voice, including the approach to point of view. That’s too big a topic to discuss here.
 
The other is intuitive and relates less to the process of writing and more to how the writer interacts with other people in real life. Writers who can portray flawed, cruel, selfish characters in a way that leaves us reluctantly liking those indivduals must surely have a deep understanding and acceptance of humankind, warts and all. Whether it’s easier to portray noble, good and wise characters is debatable. Of course, in fleshing out those characters, the writer may discover hidden flaws and frailites that make them entirely real.
 
You don’t get that kind of understanding from sitting on your bum in front of your laptop, folks. You get it by living life, by getting out there and meeting all kinds of people and by recognising that under the surface every human being is worthy of your respect and compassion. The key to character is learning to understand and accept your fellow human beings from the inside out. It’s being able to walk in their shoes and see the world through their eyes.  

I couldn’t agree more. Thanks so much for sharing, Juliet!

 Juliet Marillier was born and brought up in Dunedin, New Zealand, and now lives in Western Australia. Her historical fantasy novels for adults and young adults have been translated into many languages and have won a number of awards including the Aurealis, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Sir Julius Vogel Award and the Prix Imaginales. Her lifelong love of folklore, fairy tales and mythology is a major influence on her writing. Juliet is currently working  on the Shadowfell series, a story of tyranny and rebellion set in a magical version of ancient Scotland. The first book in the series, Shadowfell, will be published by Pan Macmillan in July, and by Knopf US in September. Juliet is a full time writer; her other job is Mad Dog Lady. She blogs monthly on http://www.writerunboxed.com and her website is at http://www.julietmarillier.com.

Dr Angela: What attracts you to the dark side?

This is a question I’ve been asked all my life and one to which I’ve yet to come up with a completely satisfactory answer. But let me try once more.

The superficial part of it is that I really do like scaring people – including myself. The feeling of being scared, or more so the feeling of having attained safety after being in a state of fright, is an undeniably pleasurable experience. Roller coasters, ghost trains, horror movies; you know the drill. To my eternal chagrin, my husband is, for all practical purposes, unscareable. Seriously, I have actually gone to extent of hiding myself beneath our bed one night and reaching out to suddenly grab his ankle, and all he did was frown and ask with a weary and curious tolerance, “Kirstyn, what are you doing down there?” Impossible man! I ask you, what normal person isn’t afraid of monsters beneath the bed?

Ahem. The deeper answer to the question is that I find myself fascinated by the monstrous – which really boils down to being anything we’re told “normal” people shouldn’t look at or think about or discuss in polite company. Taboo topics. Fringe dwellers. The black in black-and-white. I don’t believe in Evil as a manifest force. I do believe that humans are capable of doing evil things, and that a great number of humans acting in concert are capable of great evil indeed, but what interests me are the underlying reasons, motivations and causes. What makes a human being – someone similar to myself, perhaps – able to commit certain acts that I would find abhorrent, or allow others to commit them? I deeply, deeply want to understand this.

Dr Lisa: Visual artists and their striking artworks are noticeable features in your fiction: have you dabbled in the fine arts yourself, or is this a passion you explore best in words?

I studied art through to senior high school and that about as far as my formal education – and possibly my technical skill level! – goes in regards to the visual arts. I used to paint and work with clay a little, and photography is something I love and would love to spend more time with, but not having more time is exactly the problem. So, yeah, writing is pretty much where I expend the vast majority of my creative energy these days.

That said, creativity and obsession and the role of the artist is definitely a major preoccupation in my work, and one of the reasons I often choose to represent this via the visual arts is because – to be blunt – writers writing about writers writing can quickly devolve into a recursive kind of solipsism. Not that it can’t be done well – The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy by Barbara Vine; Misery by Stephen King; Persuasion by A.S. Byatt – but it has been done a lot.

Dr Angela: Tolstoy said all happy families were the same but all unhappy families were different in their misery – or something like that, hey, he’s dead, what’s he gonna do? Do you agree? Is there richer meat in unhappiness?

I think people find happiness in as many varied ways and forms as they find unhappiness, so I’m going to have to disagree with dear, dead Leo there. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) In fact, there are few things as satisfying in a narrative as a skilfully wrought Happy Ending – one that comes after much struggle and cost, one that feels both credible and deserved, one that rewards the reader as richly as it does the characters. It’s damn hard to write such an ending, and I tip my hat to those few authors who manage it.

And why is it so hard? Because although unhappiness might not provide richer meat, it certainly seems to be more believable to us. We’re more likely to accept something bad unexpectedly happening to a character than something good – famously, coincidence is only credible in fiction if it results in a negative outcome to those concerned. Are we all just terribly pessimistic creatures? Maybe, or maybe we recognise that happiness, while ideal, is not a particularly challenging situation in which to find ourselves:

“You’re happy? Oh no! What on earth are you going to do? How are you going to escape from this happiness? Who’s responsible for it? How did it happen and how can I stop it from happening to me?”

There’s just not a whole lot there to work with, story wise, possibly because genuine happiness really is the desired endgame for human beings. If achieved, we don’t want the situation to ever change – and as you know, change is the very essence of story. Besides, it would be a rare person indeed whose life actually did consist of gently meandering from one state of happiness to another, which brings us right back around to the issue of verisimilitude and believability. Hmm. Not sure if I’ve answered the question so much as talked myself into circles around it. Darkness, cynicism and despair, anyone?

Dr Lisa: Exploring uncomfortable, horrific, unsettling, disgusting or straight-out terrifying concepts is part and parcel of writing dark fiction. These stories aren’t meant to leave readers with a warm fuzzy feeling once the final page is turned. Even so, are there lines you won’t cross in your work (e.g. characters eating baby mince for breakfast) or is everything fair game (babies, mince, you get the idea…)?

Philosophically, there are no lines I would draw in terms of concepts or subject matter. I wouldn’t write a story that glorified paedophilia, but I might – and have – include themes or scenes of paedophilia in a story if it was required to tell the story. In fact, the more repulsive or horrific or unsettling I find a concept, the more likely I am to be compelled to try to come to terms with it and perhaps write about it in some form. For me, that’s what makes dark fiction such a fascinating and fruitful genre. It doesn’t let me flinch – it requires me not to flinch.

Personally speaking, though, I find it very difficult to write about any sort of cruelty to animals and I don’t think I would ever use that as a convenient plot point or means of either motivating or explaining a character. This isn’t because I think that such subject should be off limits; it’s simply a personal pressure point and I would need a very, very good reason to put myself through the researching and writing of such material. I don’t generally like depictions of animal cruelty in fiction – either books or movies – and nothing will raise my hackles quicker than a scene where an animal is gratuitously tortured or killed. Too many adorable kittens and loyal hounds have been sacrificed in the name of emotional short-cuts! As with everything, it can be used to good effect – in the Fincher adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example – but it’s a very tough sell for me.

Dr Angela: Who is your favourite dark character? You’re a proponent of the ‘a character doesn’t have to be likeable to be compelling’ school?

I am definitely a proponent of that school! Both the writer and reader sides of me find “compelling” to be a far more important character attribute than “likeability”, and it can arise from many sources: revulsion, terror, fascination, curiosity, to name but a few. In fact, the most likable characters are often not at all compelling – they’re just people you enjoying spending time with – in which case the actual compulsion for the reader to turn the page needs to come from someone or something else entirely.

As for my favourite dark character, that’s a hard one. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (and, even better, Lunar Park) would rate a mention, mostly because of the constant, exquisite tension between fantasy and reality, between boredom and hyper-arousal, that surrounds him. Also Stevie from Slights by Kaaron Warren, who is a relentlessly brutal (and brutalised) young woman, snarky and psychotic and sharp-edged; not a person you would want to hang around with in real life, but an utterly compelling character to inhabit for a few hundred pages.

The truth is, I have many, many favourite dark novels and stories, but not many dark characters spring immediately to mind from them. In the stories I love best, the characters are beset by darkness but not necessarily of the darkness themselves. Or at least, I don’t perceive them that way. I adore Claudia from Interview with a Vampire, for instance. I suppose, being a childlike vampire who routinely seduces, drains and kills her maternally-minded victims, she could be considered a “dark” character – but I don’t see her like that. She is what she has been made to be and behaves as her vampiric nature, and instinct for self-preservation, dictates – the true monsters in that story are the French vampires who murder Claudia, along with her surrogate mother, for being an outsider ignorant of their rules.

Darkness, like so much else, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Dr Lisa: Are there particular horror / dark fiction stories (written by other authors) that have really stuck with you over the years? Ones that still resonate with you long after you finished reading them?

Oh hell, yes – dark fiction resonates more strongly with me than other genres, and seems to leave the most indelible marks. There are far too many beloved  titles to offer any kind of complete list here, but let me give you some off the top of my head. Since we’re talking about lasting resonance, I’ll try to limit these to works which I first read at least ten years ago:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, because of Merricat and her magic which might not be magic, and because of the magnificent high-gothic ending. I loved the uncompromising way in which Jackson tells the story from Merricat’s point of view – talk about a compelling but not necessarily likeable character! – and how this leaves the reader on a constantly uneven footing in regards to what might be really happening. It’s a brilliant, careful, startling novel.

Skin by Kathe Koja, because of the divine use of language, and because of the characters who come together and fall apart, who tear each apart out of love and ambition. It’s a novel about art and taboo and desire in all its forms, and scenes from it still linger with me. Much of Koja’s fiction tends to haunt me, actually: the self-emaciating dancer from “Pas de Deaux”; the overheard lovers in “Angels in Love”; the brilliant dynamics at play between the characters in Kink. She is an accomplished stylist, an inspiring writer.

And I can’t let a chance to mention Caitlin R. Kiernan go by – one of the best writers of truly weird/macabre fiction working today, and one who is ludicrously under-read. Her short fiction has always left a mark on me – “Spindleshanks” remains one of the few pieces of written work to literally give me nightmares; usually it takes something visual, like film, to stalk me into sleep. Kiernan’s work often treads the liminal and evades absolute explanation, which is exactly the type of fiction I enjoy the most, the type that keeps my brain sifting over a story long after I’ve put the book down.

I could go on – there’s House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, many pieces of short fiction of Ramsey Campbell, Weaveworld by Clive Barker, and a whole bunch of stories which would require me to go on an author/title hunt through my anthology shelves – but this is already getting to be an essay-length answer!

Dr Angela: Do you think we, as writers, reach into ourselves to find the darkness? Do you ever feel like you’ve put too much of yourself on the page?

That would be yes to both questions. Research will only take a writer so far when it comes to building characters. At some point, you have to put yourself inside your characters to really bring them to life – you have to feel what they feel, want what they want, fear that they fear, in order to understand them and make them believable.  That’s not to suggest that there is necessarily an element of autobiography in everything you write, but the writer does put herself on the page in some form. How can she not? So, yes, if you’re writing about darkness – especially if you’re writing on the side of darkness – then you absolutely have to tap into whatever black little vein resides within you.

As to putting too much of myself into a story, it’s odd how that works. Occasionally, I find myself angsting over some personal peccadillo or weird habit or embarrassing/distasteful train-of-thought I’ve lent to a character – this is actually me; what if people realise it’s me? Then I look at all of the rest of the made-up stuff in the story, stuff that would be far, far worse if anyone ever thought it an accurate reflection of me personally, and realise that way madness lies. A writer needs to put as much – or as little – of herself into a story as that story requires. Even if it feels like you’ve scraped yourself raw afterwards. Chances are, the only people who will ever guess what That Scene is actually about are the people who already know. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway

Dr Lisa: The most intriguing / spooky / fascinating / gorgeous cemetery you’ve ever visited is…?

Hmm, that’s really a hard question as I’ve visited and photographed so many of them! I will have to strike the word “spooky” from that list though – I’ve never found cemeteries particularly eerie or frightening. Peaceful and sometimes sad, yes, but not spooky. Mind you, I do usually visit them in daylight hours …

As for gorgeous and fascinating, I really love the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, which I visited in the middle of winter one year. The were so many different narrative and figurative gravemarkers (my favourite kind) – plenty of angels, of course, but also knights-at-arms, grieving women and even fantasy-style dwarves. I speak neither Austrian nor German, so I couldn’t read much on the graves themselves, but wandering through a deserted and snow-blanketed cemetery with only a dozen imperious ravens for company was an experience I’ll always cherish.

On that same trip I also came across one of my favourite gravemarkers – a large bas-relief style muse holding an artist’s palette in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other. [See attached photos – feel free to use in the Lair if you like.] There are no wings, so she’s definitely a muse and not an angel and I can only assume the grave she is guarding belonged to a painter. The marker was in the Alter Südlicher Friedhof in Munich and I have unfortunately misplaced the notebook onto which I copied the inscription for later translation. But she is exquisite.

Incidentally, the Alter Südlicher Friedhof is one of Munich’s oldest cemeteries – built in the early 1500’s – and was still in use until about fifty years ago. It’s a woodland cemetery, with lots of trees and footpaths (the interior paths were closed for maintenance when I was there), and a very beautiful place in it’s own right. The locals use it for jogging through, presumably because it’s right in the middle of a dense metropolitan area and serves as a large, peaceful and concrete-free park. Which I find particularly wonderful. The dead deserve company, not isolation.

Dr Angela: Heathcliff or Edward? Vlad the Impaler or Michael Meyers? Christopher Lee’s Dracula or Bela Lugosi’s?

Firstly, Heathcliff, because even though he is appalling to the women who love him, everyone knows it – including Heathcliff. Also, the only things known to sparkle on the Yorkskire moors are will-o-the-wisps. Who doesn’t love will-o-the-wisps?

Secondly, I’m not a huge fan of the Halloween franchise and find Michael Myers to be a rather bland and predictable monster. (I definitely have more of a soft spot for Freddy Kreuger than for any of his cinematic counterparts.) So I’ll have to go with Vlad because the legends surrounding him truly are monstrous. Plus I’ve lived with an illustration from The Hamlyn Book of Horror in my head since primary school – an infinity of half-naked men impaled on spikes, with Vlad Tepes feasting in the foreground. I stumbled across a tattered, broken-spined, ex-library copy of the book a few years ago on eBay and was both delighted and bemused to find that particular illustration exactly as I remembered it, with one exception: the illustration is in restrained sepia tones, whereas I recalled it being rather more resplendently sanguine. The mind, she loves to play tricks with the memory!

Finally, with all due respect to Mr Lee, my heart belongs to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. His performance has a weird and playful elegance which definitely does justice to the script. “I don’t drink … wine.” Ah, Bela!

Dr Lisa: You’ve found a reverse time capsule: that is, a capsule future Kirstyn has sent back to let you know how things have turned out. What does it look like, and what do you find inside it?

If future Kirstyn knows present Kirstyn well (and I would hope that she does), then the only thing in the time capsule will be a hand-written note that says simply, “You are happy.” Because, honestly, I wouldn’t want to know my future in any more detail than that.

(Of course, whether I would believe such a note is another question entirely. I’m sure future Kirstyn will be even better at mind games than I am!)