FROM THE BLOG

Friday 26th April / posted by Rhian Todhunter

A VERY BUSY GUY

Literary prize-winner Guy Salvidge is a busy man.

With two stories being published this year, a sequel underway, and plans to start a crime novel in the near future – writer in residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Guy Salvidge joins me to treat us to a live reading and look at his busy schedule.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN

http://rtrfm.com.au/story/what-a-busy-guy/

Exciting news – upcoming anthology The Tobacco-Stained Sky: An Anthology of Post-Apocalyptic Noir will now be edited by myself and Andrez Bergen for release in the second half of 2013. The book will be published by Another Sky Press, and publisher Kristopher Young has kindly given me a share of the editorial reins alongside Andrez. The Tobacco-Stained Sky is a themed collection of post-apocalyptic stories set in the universe of Andrez Bergen’s novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat. The new collection  includes a story of my own, “The Dying Rain”, which features the same protagonist, Tyler Bramble, as my recently-published “Blue Swirls” in Tincture Journal. The collection features 16 stories and 8 comics, and now it’s my job to edit these works for publication and put them into a sequence. I’m enormously excited about the task and I can’t wait to get cracking – which I’ll be able to do as early as the upcoming Easter weekend when I’ll be at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre doing the first part of my Emerging Writer-in-Residence gig.

Oh, and I have another exciting piece of writing news that I’ll have to keep under my hat for a week or two yet. This regards Yellowcake Summer, sequel to Yellowcake Springs.

Tincture Journal Issue One, which contains my story “Blue Swirls”, is out now! Available as an ebook only, a Tincture will cost you $8 from the publisher’s website in .mobi or .epub formats. I’ve had a sneak peek at Issue One and there’s plenty of entertaining and thought-provoking fiction, non-fiction and poetry by a range of Australian and international authors inside. Get yourself a Tincture; you’ll feel a whole lot better for it. 

Editor Daniel Young is also on the hunt for a new crop of authors for Issue Two, so get submitting!

Guy Salvidge will read from and talk about his work at this literary dinner. Bring your favourite drinks to complement the three course meal, meet Guy and mingle with local authors.

Costs: $25 for KSP-members and $30 for non-members. Booking and payment in advance is essential. You can book online here. 

“Set Sail into Publishing: Charting a Course for Your Writing Career” with Guy Salvidge

So your novel, play or book of poetry is written and raring to go – where to next? Should you send your manuscript to the traditional publishers, most of which are located in Melbourne and Sydney? (If they even accept unsolicited manuscripts, that is.) Maybe you could try your hand at major literary awards like The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award or the T.A.G. Hungerford Award? Should you opt for a smaller print-on-demand publisher? What are the benefits and drawbacks of this form of publication? Maybe you should go it alone with self-publishing, or perhaps you could become part of the digital revolution and forego print publication altogether? Maybe you should consider a Manuscript Assessment or Mentorship first?

All of these options and more will be discussed in “Set Sail into Publishing: Charting a Course for Your Writing Career” with WA writer Guy Salvidge.  Participants will navigate the treacherous waters of modern publishing and chart a course forward for themselves and their creative work.

Costs: $30 for KSP members and $45 for non-members. Booking and payment in advance is essential. You can book online here.

After many, many hours of editing over the past couple of weeks, I’ve managed to get the ms. of Yellowcake Summer up to what I call ‘Second Draft’ status. This means that I’ve cut out nearly 15,000 words of the original 90,000 word long ms., hopefully losing nothing in the process. Now the novel goes off to beta readers and the publisher, IP, and I have a well-earned rest for the next 20 hours until I start back at work for 2013!

In case you don’t know, this new novel is the sequel to Yellowcake Springs, which was published by Glass House Books in 2011 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Norma K Hemming Award in 2012. Yellowcake Summer is a direct sequel but there won’t be a third volume (even though Yellowcake Winter would make a great title, don’t you think?). Nope, it’s a duology or a pair or whatever you call a two book series. 

I had a lot of fun writing Yellowcake Summer and I imagine it’ll be a fun read too. I can’t wait for you to read it!

I’m very pleased to report that I have been successful in gaining a residency at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre for 2013! Each year, KSP (which is located in Greenmount, Western Australia) selects one ‘Established’ Writer in Residence, three ‘Emerging’ Writers in Residence, and three ‘Young’ (under 25) Writers in Residence. The other two Emerging Writers for 2013 have been chosen: they are Kate Cantrell from Brisbane and Felicity Castagna from Sydney. Both come very impressively credentialed, so I’m in good company.

KSP Writers in Residence are offered accommodation at the centre for four weeks (one week for Young Writers) and the residencies are spread throughout the year. While there, Writers in Residence work on a creative project of their choice for the bulk of their time, but they also host a three hour workshop that is open to the public, as well as hosting a literary dinner, perform readings and offer mentoring to selected KSP writers. The chalets at KSP are pretty impressive as well, having been done up in recent times. In short, it’s pretty much the dream job for a writer for four weeks.

My own residency is scheduled for April-May 2013 and by that time I hope to have completed work on my novel Yellowcake Summer, although I suspect that I may be still revising it for publication. The plan is for me to get cracking on a new project: a suburban crime novel set in the outer northern suburbs of Perth in the early noughties. I can’t wait to start work on this one! My planned workshop is called “Breaking into Publishing” and will basically try to cram everything I’ve learned about trying to get published into three hours (if that’s possible). More details will follow soon, but for now, here’s a link to the Residency page on the KSP website.

Bruce Gillespie’s SF Commentary 83 and 84 are out and freely available on efanzines.com. That’s well over 200 pages of SF criticism, reviews and letters. Seriously, if you are into SF then you need to check it out. Bruce has people like Brian Aldiss writing in regularly. SF Commentary 83 also features my reviews of Philip K Dick’s novels, which runs to more then 22,000 words. Thanks to Bruce for the amazing amount of work that goes into producing this fanzine, which is now comfortably into its fourth decade.

http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC83L.pdf

http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC84L.pdf

Start over here at Alisa Krasnostein’s blog for links to dozens and dozens of interviews with various people in the Australian speculative fiction scene. There should be over 100 by June 8th, and they make for interesting reading. Alisa interviews yours truly here.  There’s even some tributes to two recently deceased members of this community, Paul Haines and Sara Douglass. Haines’ piece on the end of his writing career is a must read. 

Some very exciting news: the shortlist for the Norma K Hemming Award is out and Yellowcake Springs is one of the nine novels chosen. The Award is for a work of speculative fiction published in Australia that addresses themes of race, class, gender, sexuality and/or disability. It’s an awesome shortlist and I’m stoked on a number of levels to be on it. For a start, I’m on the same page with the late, great Sara Douglass – probably Australia’s most popular and successful fantasy author of the last 15 years. There’s there’s the fact that I’m the only male on the shortlist. Does this mean anything? I guess I don’t know, but I’m pleased that my work is considered as transcending gender boundaries (and there’s a bit of gender bending inYellowcake Springs). And lastly, look at the publishers: HarperCollins dominates this list with 5/9 titles, and the other three aside from my own are from established small presses Ticonderoga, Twelfth Planet and Scribe. That leaves little old IP punching well above its weight, and little old me chuffed to rate a mention.

Here’s the full shortlist:

Black Glass novel by Meg Mundell published by Scribe Publications (Brunswick VIC)

Bluegrass Symphony collection by Lisa L Hannett published by Ticonderoga Publications (Perth, WA)

The Devil’s Diadem novel by Sara Douglass (1957 – 2011) published by HarperCollins

Eona novel by Alison Goodman published by HarperCollins

Hindsight novel by A A Bell published by HarperCollins

Nightsiders novel by Sue Isle published by Twelfth Planet Press (Perth, WA)

Road to the Soul novel by Kim Falconer published by HarperCollins

The Shattered City novel by Tansy Rayner Roberts published by HarperCollins

Yellowcake Springs novel by Guy Salvidge published by Interactive Publications


The winner of the 2012 Norma K Hemming Award will be announced at Continuum 8,  this year’s National SF Convention, to be held in Melbourne on the weekend of June 8-11.