There’s an old joke-cum-truism about being a writer: the fear of a blank page.
I’m well familiar with that phenomenon – I’ve even written about it before.
What I haven’t admitted before, though, is that for me the struggle to put words down doesn’t end when the page is no longer blank. And lately I’ve begun to think that that struggle might be due not to anxiety, but to another species of brain weasel altogether.
Continue reading “Why can’t I just focus?! Further adventures in weasel-wrangling”
I’m aware my recent posts have displayed a certain, um… patchiness. Part of that has been down to the simple fact that the last few weeks have been a frenzy of looking for, applying for, and then abruptly moving everything we own into, a new home. Ah, rental life.
The other big part of my recent distraction has been the ramping up of preparations for Continuum Speculative Fiction Convention in June.
If you don’t know what Continuum is, read on. But if you’re already familiar with Melbourne’s own spec fic convention, I have an even more important message for you.
Following on from last week, this is part 2/2 of my explainer on the major speculative fiction awards that are relevant to Australian SF authors like yours truly.
This week, I get into the two major international awards, the Hugo and the Locus – what they are and how to get involved in nominations/voting.
Continue reading “Making sense of spec fic awards: the Hugo & Locus Awards”
It turns out that while I was researching and writing up my big awards explainer post last week, Mother of Invention editor (and excellent writer in her own right) Rivqa Rafael was writing her own post listing all the awards MoI is currently eligible for. This led me to the double realisation that a) burying my own eligibility in the middle of my big explainer post was probably counter-productive and b) there’s a whole ‘nother award I didn’t even know about that I should have included.
I still have a lot to learn about this “writer” gig…
So! To I’m going to do a write-up shortly of the Locus Award, and make a second post this week covering that and the Hugos (expanded and split out from last week’s post to prevent it getting just too unwieldy). And in the meantime, separated out from the original post and now with added Locus, here is my list of eligible works for the 2019 awards:
I am thrilled to bits to announce the release of Luna Station Quarterly issue 37, with my story ‘Two Monsters Down in the Dark’ in pole position as the very first fiction of the issue!
‘Two Monsters’ started out as a technical challenge, but turned into a passion project. I fell in love with the character of Ellie, even as I struggled over many months to get her voice and her story right. It makes me so deeply happy to finally see her and Benji find a home.
You can read ‘Two Monsters’ for free online for the next week only (as well as eleven other SF stories from women and other authors on the femalish end of the spectrum; I’ve already fallen in love with K. Noel Moore’s ‘A Song for Hardy Connelly’ and can’t wait to read the rest). After that you’ll have to pay for a digital or print edition if you want to read it, so don’t dally!