I’m beginning to feel like the fates have aligned so that each week’s therapy session speaks directly to a writing problem I am currently facing. This hasn’t been prearranged — it’s entirely a fluke — but it’s a happy coincidence. I’ve just passed the 1/3 mark of The Familiar and was starting to wonder if I should be concerned that a lot of the book’s final third is yet unclear, plot-wise. And then I read Kaaron Warren‘s fantastic contribution to this series, and now I have my answer…

Kaaron has been publishing short stories for nearly 20 years — ‘All You Can Do is Breathe’, by the way, is on the ballot for this year’s Stoker Awards — and has recently published three novels with Angry Robot Books. What makes Kaaron’s writing so engaging (and such a joy to read) is that it is so twisted, strange, inventive, and utterly unique. She comes at stories from wonderful, unusual angles — as she has this week’s writing advice.

It struck me last night that writing a story is a bit like filling in a Sudoku puzzle.

You start with a grid, dotted with things you know. Maybe a spark of an idea, a setting, a snippet of conversation. The rest of the grid is blank. Daunting. Some spaces you see straight away how to fill, but others? They seem impossible.

Some of the blanks are easily filled; who’s telling the story? Why? And you can describe your scene, build your character.

Once you’ve done that, the spaces that seemed difficult become easier. The story starts to fall into place until you’re left with only one or two of those impossible-seeming spaces, with the answers now obvious, and you know how your story ends and how you’re going to get there.

Kaaron Warren has won or been nominated for the Stoker Awards, the Australian Shadows Awards, the Aurealis Awards and the Ditmar Awards for her incredible short story collections (Dead Sea Fruit, The Grinding House and The Glass Woman) and her wonderfully creepy novels (Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification). You can find her online here.

Sure, I could bookmark the page, but let’s face it: I’ll click that little star, close the page, and then forget about it. So to ensure that my latest obsessions don’t get obliterated in the Never-Neverland of Lost Tabs, I thought I’d share a few of them with all of you.

First, from Flavorwire, a survey of evil children in art (click ‘view as a single page’ for the best effect). This one has remained open since February 1st because of Ray Caesar’s wonderfully bizarre images:

One day, when there is less writing to do and more time for dilly-dallying on the internetz, I’ll Google him and find out what other treasures he has in store for me, but for now these will have to suffice.

The next is from Killhouettes, brought to my attention when Jason Nahrung posted a link on Facebook (thanks, Jason!) Killhouettes are wonderfully gruesome parodies of Victorian silhouettes, which you can purchase for the low low price of $6.00 a piece. There are so many excellent ones to choose from (and speaking of evil children in art…) that I am paralysed by choice, and so have merely gazed at these for about a week or so without deciding which to buy. Plus, there’s Killhouette jewellery. What’s a girl to do?

And next is an image that is neither macabre nor evil, actually it’s downright sunny, but I like to imagine that something sinister was once planned in this Jacobean long gallery:

Last but not least, a series of incredible photographs taken on North Brother island, an abandoned leper colony within swimming distance of the Bronx, featured in the Daily Mail on February 4th. Kaaron Warren and Atlas Obscura get the credit for showing me this haunting set of photos — honestly, I’m captivated by all of them, and by the article (which casts Typhoid Mary in a seriously sinister light, if you ask me!) and I want to write stories for all of these images… but I’ll leave you with two particularly creepy/beautiful ones.

There, now. A few tabs can be closed. *computer sighs in relief*

So I blithely headed on over to The Word and chatted about Bluegrass Symphony, the Weird West, Midnight & Moonshine and, of course, Le Novel.

Visit Al’s site to read the whole trumpety thing.

*I tried to share this yesterday, but the internetz weren’t playing nice… Thanks for inviting me, Al!

Tonight, they dig a second pit on our beach. Big men, all of them, dark hair and skin slick with sweat. Hands slippery on worn shovel handles. Feet bare, soles scorched and cracking. The sun is a glowing boulder buried deep in the ocean, still baking the sand from below the horizon.

For two days, relentless heat. For two days, the grass mattress in our room was a bed of coals. For two days I laboured, but could not get up. Exhausted, I could hardly breathe. Now I stand, finally cool in the shallows. My curls are matted from struggling, from useless pushing and straining. Salt drips into my eyes. My white linen shift is soaked, transparent. It does not flutter in the sea breeze…

Read the rest here.

Yes, it’s awards season.

Bearing that in mind, Trent Jamieson‘s advice this week is perfectly timed. Trent is the author of a slew of incredible short stories (some of which are collected in Reserved for Travelling Shows), the Death Works trilogy (Death Most Definite,  Managing Death, The Business of Death) and the Nightbound Land duology (Roil and Night’s Engines) — and he is one of the loveliest people you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting. (I say “one of” because, seriously, he and Sean Williams would need to duke it out for the title of ‘Nicest Guy in Australian Speculative Fiction’. But since they’re both so nice, neither could possibly lose. Or win. Hence, “one of”.)

To top it all off, he’s provided an illustration to accompany his Tuesday Therapy session (see below), which pretty much rocks. In other words, this week’s advice is full of awesome.

So without further ado:

click to enlarge

Jealousy is poison. Career paths are up and down things so don’t compare your career to anyone else’s. And it’s easier to write when you’re not filled with a bleak despair that everyone seems to be doing better than you. Art isn’t a competition. Enjoy the process, enjoy the challenges, and enjoy the success of others. After all, your colleagues’ successes mean plenty of good stories to read, and you are a reader as well as a writer aren’t you?

Jealousy will poison your heart, and you kinda need that to write*.

*though writing with your heart would be messy. Fingers are better for typing and holding pens.

Trent lives with his wife Diana in Brisbane. His fifth novel, Night’s Engines, is due out through Angry Robot books in June. You can visit his website here. (Make sure to check out his Book Corner segments on Youtube. I dare you not to laugh.)

This year, Adelaide Writers Week has been dedicated to Margo, which is not only incredibly exciting but also completely deserved. Reading even a snippet of Sean William’s dedication explains why:

Her body of work is extensive: fifteen novels, fifty short stories, and four highly acclaimed short story collections, White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes and Yellowcake. She is the winner of multiple Aurealis, Ditmar and World Fantasy awards, as well as the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Sturgeon, Stoker, Tiptree, International Horror Guild, Locus, Shirley Jackson, Children’s Book Council, Hugo, Nebula, Commonwealth Writers Prize, alongside the Queensland and New South Wales’ Premier’s Awards. It is a list that aptly describes the diversity of her readership.

On top of all this talent, Margo is an absolutely lovely person and generous with her time and advice. For this week’s Tuesday Therapy, she shares some tips on fostering ideas and letting them grow:

Let your idea cook. I make notes for short stories on sticky notes or in notebooks. Each note is maybe an attractive halfof an idea – for example, “People buying silence in a can, jar, pill, or just downloading some.” Usually I still need a central character and situation. Having chosen a story to begin on, I carry this half-idea around with me, and it becomes my daydreaming material. I escape to it, idly look at it and like it, toss it from hand to hand and push it around whenever I’ve got a spare minute. Then when other business takes over, I move on from it, but at the next daydream opportunity, there it is with all its possibilities coming to life around it.

Welcome, Mr Jones.

Dr Angela: So, firstly, how did you get started as an editor? Was it a first love or a deep-seated desire to correct others?

Mr Jones: As much as I love correcting others (mainly because – in my mind at least – I’m nearly always right!), I never actually expected to become an editor. My family has no literary connections and so, except for a love of books and comics and monster magazines when I was younger, I never really saw myself being any way involved in the publishing industry.

I am, if nothing else, aware of my limitations, and I realised very early on that there were always going to be people out there who would be able to write fiction better than I ever could. Therefore, when I began contributing to fanzines in the early 1970s, I sent them non-fiction columns and articles rather than badly written fan fiction. These articles were invariably based around my love of movies.

From there I moved on to editing my own small press magazines and that, eventually, led to editing books. So, as a person of limited skills, that’s pretty much what I’ve done since.

I should stress now that was never The Plan. In fact, I’ve never really had a “Plan” of any kind. There are things that I’ve wanted to do in my life, and some I’ve been very lucky to achieve. Of course, there are numerous others that I’ve failed miserably at.

Dr Lisa: Are there any current trends in horror fiction you’re keen to see die?

Mr Jones: Where shall I start . . .?

When it comes to current trends in horror fiction, I’d like to see most of them go away – from such pointless sub-genres as “paranormal romance”, “urban fantasy” and the “new weird” to the kind of obscenely violent and misogynistic crap you can find online or in the micro-publications.

I’m not advocating a return to the past – god knows, of all genres, horror should be about what we fear now – but I do think that the field has lost its way somewhat over the past decade. And some of the blame for that has to be laid at the door of the low standards exemplified by various awards systems, low-rent publishers, and the current batch of dumb and derivative movie-makers.  

I was thinking only the other day that if I wanted to create a new sub-genre (which I don’t, by the way), I would term it “literary horror” – meaning stories that are scary or unnerving, but which are also written with style and panache. The kind of horror stories I grew up reading by Ray Bradbury, or Richard Matheson, or Charles Beaumont. Beautifully crafted, but with the power to still scare the crap out of you!

Obviously, we are fortunate to have many writers who still do just that – Ramsey Campbell, Graham Joyce, Dr Lisa Tuttle, Reggie Oliver, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lucius Shepard, John Langan and many others including, dare I say, Angela Slatter – where reading their work is as much of a pleasure because of the language and characterisation as it is for their storytelling ability.

When I read a book or a short story, I want to be moved as much by the technique as I am by the narrative. It’s the same way with movies – when I watch a film by Orson Welles or John Ford or Fritz Lang or Jean Cocteau, I know that I am watching a great stylist telling a story in their own unique manner.

I only wish we had more people working in the horror field who were great stylists and not just desperate hacks.

Dr Angela: Obviously there’s been a lot of work to get to where you are today – you’re in a position to topple governments – what would you say were the milestone moments in your career?

Mr Jones: I wish I had that kind of power! Sometimes I still can’t get a cover changed on one of my own books!

In a career as long as mine, there have been a great many of milestones: from meeting people such as Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner, Dennis Etchison, Charles L. Grant, David Sutton and so many others who have helped me immeasurably over the years . . . working on the first three Hellraiser films with Clive Barker . . . meeting, and hanging out, with my literary heroes, such as Manly Wade Wellman, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Hugh B. Cave, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Basil Copper . . . meeting Peter Cushing, spending a magical afternoon in a recording studio with Christopher Lee, and receiving a phone call from Vincent Price . . . helping to run some of the best World Fantasy and World Horror conventions ever held . . . and just regularly spending time with friends and colleagues like Jo Fletcher, Michael Marshall Smith, Neil Gaiman, Peter Atkins, Randy Broecker, Kim Newman, Peter Crowther and all those other people who make my day-to-day existence that little bit more pleasurable . . .

And yes, I know it sounds trite, but every new book I do is also milestone. After all the months of hard work and the energy that I put into each one, it’s still a thrill when a new title comes out. Although, usually, somebody has somehow managed to screw up it up, so it’s never quite as perfect as I imagined when I was working on it. That is why publishing for me these days is also a series of petite morts – little deaths – but sadly not in the more pleasant meaning of the phrase!

Dr Lisa: Friendly zombies, sparkly vampires, young and hip witches, and telepaths with raging hormones have all been flooding the market in recent years . . . Does this ‘paranormal romanticising’ of horror fill you with despair? Or is the market hearty enough to support ‘fluffy’ horror and horror that’s actually . . . well . . . horrifying?

Mr Jones: Well, as I recently said in my Introduction to A Book of Horrors, it’s not my kind of horror. But then again, so much of what is being produced today is not what I would term “horror” in the first place.

It may utilise the tropes of horror, but it is so far removed from the emotions that good horror fiction should elicit in a reader that – as I have now come to understand – it should be considered a totally different genre. The odious Twilight books and films have nothing whatsoever to do with horror fiction, beyond obviously using vampires and werewolves to put across its own message about sexual abstinence in teenagers. The same is true of “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” – they have nothing in common with horror (beyond a few surface trappings) – and we would be wrong to claim them as our own.

I have always been an “inclusive” writer and editor – hopefully pushing the boundaries of what is considered genre – but I realise now that this type of fiction is not, for want of a better description, “horror”.

These “trends” in publishing come and go, but genuine horror fiction has been around for centuries, and it will continue to be so long after the latest “best-selling” marketing tool is gone and forgotten. The best writers write what they want to write, not what the market dictates. Those are the stories that we will remember long after the current fads are replaced with something equally asinine.

So yes, for a while I was filled with despair at what was happening to horror, but I can now see that all this crap that’s taking up shelf space in bookstores is, at best, transient – it won’t be around forever. Once the market flattens out, most of the writers and publishers will move on to something else. And the sooner the better in my opinion. Those of us working in the horror genre will still be around. Well, at least, I hope so . . .

Dr Angela: Best thing about being an editor?

Mr Jones: Working from home every day. I get to do what I want to do, when I want to do it.

My office is a converted upstairs bedroom, where my desk looks out over the back garden, so the view changes with the seasons. I live and work in my own little world, which means I can take a break for tea or lunch whenever I want.

Despite that, I still work “office hours” – usually 9:00 am to around 6:00 pm, with half-an-hour off for lunch – mostly 5-6 days a week, or longer if I have a pressing deadline. In fact, I pretty much work in some capacity (writing, editing, reading, meetings, correspondence) every day of the year except Christmas Day (when I still sneak a look at my e-mail!).

As I’ve said many times: I do what I love, and I love what I do.

Dr Lisa: If you could resurrect an author from the past in order to collaborate with him/her on a new project, who would it be? What would you hope to produce?

Mr Jones: Hmm . . . good question. I guess I have two “heroes” I would love to have worked with: The first, from a literary standpoint, is the American writer and editor August Derleth, the founder of Arkham House. He died the year I pretty much started in the genre – 1971 – so I never had any contact with him.

I truly admire Derleth’s work ethic and, like me, he was a bit of a polymath (although, if anything, he worked even harder than I do). He probably wasn’t the best editor, the best author, the best publisher in the world, but he turned out a remarkable body of work and, from everything I’ve read and heard about him, he was loyal to his friends and looked after his authors. And that’s pretty much the best you can ask for.

My Innsmouth series of anthologies are my tribute to him, but I would have loved to have co-edited a supernatural fiction anthology with him. I like to think that we would have worked well together, and even today I see similarities in our career paths.

My other “hero” would be Orson Welles – I’m fascinated in the manner he lived his life backwards: He began his career as the “wonder kid”, making such classics as Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and ended up pretty much a caricature of himself, earning money from voice-overs and TV commercials. I would have loved to have had the opportunity to have worked with him on any project – from a movie to a book.

Again, Welles was a polymath, which is why I think I am fascinated by him and his work. In fact, both Derleth and Welles were not always given the respect they were due during their lifetimes, and it is only in retrospect that we can stand back and truly appreciate their individual contributions to the varied media they worked in.

I think that’s true of most creative people: we kind of work in a “bubble”, surrounded by all the other things that influence our day-to-day lives. Only history will be able to look back on what we achieved and decide if we made a difference or not. Unfortunately, most people are no longer still around to hear that pronouncement on their lives, so it is my belief that we just have to do the very best we can while we are here, and leave the rest up to posterity.

However, I have certainly always made a point of trying to honour those people I respect while they are still among us to enjoy the accolades for their work. It is always a pleasure working with some of the older writers and helping to bring their writing to the attention of a new generation of readers.

Dr Angela: Worst thing about being an editor?

Mr Jones: Working from home every day. That “bubble” I work in often means that I don’t leave the house for days at a time. In fact, if it wasn’t for e-mail and phone, I would probably have very little social contact with the outside world at all!

Editing – like writing – is a lonely profession. I absolutely love getting into a book and working on it all day, but sometimes you miss that human interaction that people who work in offices have. That’s why writers sometimes go nuts at conventions – there’s a great sense of freedom, the opportunity to get out and be “let off the leash” with friends and colleagues for a short while!

Dr Lisa: What are you (and your clone — surely you must have one) working on next?

Mr Jones: Oh, trust me, there are plenty of people out there who are busier and work harder than I do. As I get older, I definitely feel myself slowing down these days.

As always, I’m working on the latest Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. We’ve been going so long now that we are starting to break some records! I’m also having a ball putting together the second volume of Zombie Apocalypse!. It was always conceived as a trilogy, and the publisher has already commissioned the third volume. I love the ZA! books because they are unlike anything else I’ve ever done before. They are hugely exciting and creative for everybody involved. It seems that people either love them or hate them – the North Americans, in particular, hated the first volume, but I think that’s perhaps because they didn’t understand it: they were expecting some kind of anthology, and that’s not what they are. It also hasn’t stopped the first one going through seven printings so far!

Beyond that, I’m also doing another Mammoth anthology for Robinson, and hopefully a new Innsmouth anthology for the revived Fedogan & Bremer imprint, and another big book of classic stories for Jo Fletcher – we have a huge volume of M.R. James coming out this year, illustrated by Les Edwards. I also have a string of projects to do for the lovely Pete and Nicky Crowther at PS Publishing, from more reissues of Basil Copper’s work to original anthologies and maybe even a movie art book sometime down the line.

And, of course, on top of all that, we’re gearing up for World Fantasy Convention 2013 in Brighton, which I am committed to making the best convention I have ever worked on. It’s going to be the last convention I help organise (again, I’m getting too old for this stuff), and so I want to go out with a bang. We already have some incredible guests announced, with many more surprises to come over the next year or so.

Dr Angela: Do you think the anthology has a future? Can they only survive if there are big names attached to them?

Mr Jones: Oh, I definitely think that the anthology will survive! Although in what format I am not sure. Things are changing incredibly quickly in publishing these days, and although I think that the print book will always survive in some form, I’m now not sure for the first time in my life that it will be the primary method for delivering words for much longer. New technology is creating all manner of new methods for presenting entertainment and information, and the publishing industry has to make sure that it keeps pace with those changes.

I’ve never sold an anthology on the basis of the names involved, and I have no plans to start now. I think it’s rude. If the only way you can sell a book is by throwing money at this name or that, then perhaps the concept behind the anthology is not worth exploring in the first place!

I think very carefully about the ideas behind my books – and why I want to do them – before I ever offer them to a publisher. Any idiot can throw a bunch of zombie stories together and call it an anthology and, in my opinion, way too many people are doing just that at the moment. The market – particularly in my genre – is saturated with anthologies. I’m not convinced that the horror field can sustain the number of anthologies being churned out by numerous small publishing imprints, plus we also need to ask ourselves if we really need another compilation of vampire stories, zombie stories, monster stories, or whatever.

Slapping together a bunch of stories and paying the authors a minimum rate to reprint their work is not likely to create a book that people are going to remember in ten or twenty years time. But then again, most people don’t care about that anymore. It’s all about the quick money. It’s all about the recognition. Most people don’t care about career paths or posterity anymore, and perhaps they are correct. But if you don’t have experienced editors who can nurture and build new authors through their short fiction, then you are eventually going to end up with a genre that is all the poorer for its lack of foresight.

Just because something “sells” now doesn’t mean it’s any good. Look at the “romantic comedies” churned out by Hollywood; look at the kind of music that comes from “talent” shows like American Idol or X Factor; look at the “stars” created by “reality” TV; look at the books being published as “paranormal romance”, “urban fantasy”, “steampunk”, “apocalyptic fiction” and all those other pointless sub-genres that are currently “hot”. Most of them will not be remembered in a few years’ time, let alone after a decade or so.

What do they add to our combined knowledge, our culture, our arts? Nothing. Most of this stuff is as disposable as a cup of latte. In the same way that high streets around the world seem to consist of nothing but identical coffee shops these days, so the creative arts are swamped by mindless, disposable rubbish that will have no lasting impact on anybody’s life in any meaningful way.

Everything is so superficial these days – even fiction – that nobody cares unless they can make money off it. Just because a book is not a “best-seller” doesn’t mean that it is not a good book; just because a film isn’t a blockbuster, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good movie, and just because a music isn’t a “hit” doesn’t mean that we will still not be listening to it for years to come.

There’s a reason why we are still reading long-dead authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.G. Wells, M.R. James and so many others when writers of the 1980s and ’90s, who were considered “best-sellers” then, are now out of print and totally forgotten. As I said earlier, history has a way of sorting this out.

I’ve always been in this genre for the long game. There’s no point doing a book unless you first ask yourself, “Why should this book exist? What does this book offer that others do not?”. I’ve never been interested in jumping on bandwagons, or taking advantage of current trends (although it is always nice when a title sells well), and I want to be able to look back on my career and be able to say to myself, about any title that I’ve done, that I did the best I could at that time.

I’m very proud of all the books I’ve been involved with – even the “work for hire” projects – and I still get a thrill when a title sells to a foreign market or gets reprinted again, years after it was first published. That’s what building a career is all about.

Of course, if somebody wanted to offer me a huge amount of money to put together another vampire anthology, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand! But I would sit down and think to myself: “How can I make this vampire anthology different to all the other vampire anthologies that have been done before?”

Dr Lisa: You are incredibly prolific – most people couldn’t imagine publishing one anthology a year, much less ten – so tell us: have you got a clone locked up in a room somewhere, editing his duplicated fingers off? How do you balance so many projects at once?

Mr Jones: Actually, I’m not all that prolific – editors such as Martin H. Greenberg or Mike Ashley have produced a great many more titles than I have. I just have a good work ethic: get the job done first, then goof off. It also helps that I truly enjoy the work I do – I am extremely grateful that publishers pay me to do this job and readers continue to buy the books that I produce. I have also learned that working on different types of books – anthologies, single-author collections, non-fiction – keeps the work fresh and interesting.

Yes, there are days when I’m not in the mood, or overwhelmed, and then I’m down the pub, or watching a DVD, or answering questions for an interview like this! The secret is to always be engaged with something creative – whether it’s reading a book, having discussions with friends, or watching the latest episode of Doctor Who! It helps recharge the batteries and gets you ready to go back to work again.

Of course, the other reason I publish four or five books a year is because I need the money. Unless you’re very lucky, there’s not much money in editing (even less than there is being a novelist) because you share any advance and royalties with the contributors to the book. And that’s absolutely how it should be. Anthologies are a joint creative effort, and everybody should share in any success. If everybody has done their best work – editor, authors, publisher – then that anthology will hopefully sell, and keep on selling, generating a small amount of income for years to come. At least that’s the idea.

And those little bits of money here and there are what keep me going. It’s not the easiest life in the world, but if I had wanted security, then I could have gone and worked in an office. Editing is a calling – it’s what I have to do. It’s what I need to do. As I said earlier, I can’t imagine a better job. And so long as I can keep coming up with projects that interest me and, more importantly, the readers, then I will be content to keep working on anthologies until the day I die. No doubt over a keyboard typing words such as th . . .

.

In ‘Wendigo, Waistcoat, Spyglass and Other Words’ Jeremy and I chat about style, the short form, and “the human side of even the nastiest creatures.” Jeremy asked such fantastic questions — it was an absolute pleasure answering them.

Why the short form? What is it that you love about the short story?

Initially, I started writing short stories because I was also working on my PhD, which is a long and often tedious process. I wanted to write something brief, immediate, with a clear end in sight. Also, I had loads of ideas for stories, and no matter how much I tried to ignore them, more kept cropping up. I’d be reading all sorts of dry academic articles or translating passages from the Icelandic sagas while my back-brain was jumping up and down, shouting “There’s a crow stuck in a mechanical carnival! What’re you going to do about it?” or “She’s got to sing while eating corpses! How’s she going to do that without a voice?” Things like that are hard to ignore.

Read the whole interview here.

This is what my oubliette looks like… No, seriously. I’m not just sitting in my living room writing my book most days, or taking the laptop to bed…

So, it’s been a month since I got my grant. A month of being a full time writer. This has been a completely new experience for me: I’m used to holding down at least three contracts at once, working on my PhD and cramming my writing in on the side. So to have time… Well, it’s been awesome and also a challenge.

The first week of January was a complete write-off. I wrote about four versions of the book’s first chapter, all of which totally sucked, until I finally managed to come up with something I could live with. Some days I’ve achieved as little as 300 words, other days I’ve done over 2,500. I’ve tried to keep the weekends free, but have wound up writing on most days regardless.

All told, this month (well, three weeks) has earned me 26,971 words and The Familiar is well under way! If I can maintain my tortoise pace and make myself comfortable in my gorgeous oubliette, I should have a first draft by May/June… which will give me a couple MUCH NEEDED months to rewrite, edit, delete any crap I’ve written thus far. This, too, is a new experience. I’m used to working on short stories. Agonising over every word. Getting every sentence, paragraph, scene just right before moving on so that, basically, the first draft is pretty much the final draft.

That is so not happening with this book, let me tell you.

Nevertheless, January = 26,971 words.

Woo hoo!

Let’s hope things keep clipping along like this in February!

]]> http://lisahannett.com/2012/01/31/tales-from-the-oubliette-full-time-writer-one-month-in/feed/ 4 lisahannett 236298311668083575XQyvFn2Ec http://lisahannett.com/2012/01/31/tuesday-therapy-being-the-best-magpie/ http://lisahannett.com/2012/01/31/tuesday-therapy-being-the-best-magpie/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:46:09 +0000 lisahannett http://lisahannett.com/?p=1711 ]]> Jason Fischer is a fellow Adelaidean, harmonica-player, sometimes singer of undead camel songs, zombie aficionado, writer of rollicking stories, and all ’round hell of a nice guy. For this week’s Tuesday Therapy, Jason shares some advice that, really, I just adore. Writers as magpies: what a fantastic (and incredibly accurate) image…

Be the Best Magpie You Can Be. Collect shiny things wherever you go, and let them soak into your hindbrain. Read widely, woolgather often, and give yourself permission to fall down the rabbit hole of research. Look at cool maps and old books, watch odd docos, chat to interesting strangers. Having said this, keep only the shiniest of things, and discard everything else. Even the weirdest scrap of stuff can be an absolute game-changer. And above all, know when to climb *out* of the rabbit-hole and actually do some writing.

Jason attended the Clarion South writers workshop in 2007, and has been shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards, the Ditmar Awards, and the Australian Shadows Awards. He won the 2009 AHWA Short Story and the 2010 AHWA Flash Fiction Competitions, and is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Jason has stories in Dreaming Again, Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Aurealis Magazine. His “After The World” series of zombie-apocalypse novellas are available from Black House Comics, and his fantasy novel “Tusk” is soon to be serialised in Terra Magazine. You can visit him online here.