“Kindling” in Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror

I’ve had a few weeks of coming over all writerly, and some of the latest news is that my short steampunk-ish story “Kindling” (which I wrote about here and here), originally published in Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear from Peggy Bright Books, has been selected to appear in the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2012, to be published by Ticonderoga Publications in June 2013. So I’m celebrating it with this little steampunk fairytale picture.

In quite a cool little twist, I also illustrated the original publication of Faith Mudge’s “Oracle’s Tower”, and although the art won’t be in this book, I will exercise the illustrator’s prerogative to bask in a little reflected glory.

It is part of the following amazing line-up (with beautiful cover art by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich):

• Joanne Anderton, “Tied To The Waste”, Tales Of Talisman
• R.J. Astruc, “The Cook of Pearl House, A Malay Sailor by the Name of Maurice”, Dark Edifice 2
• Lee Battersby, “Comfort Ghost”, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 56
• Alan Baxter, “Tiny Lives”, Daily Science Fiction
• Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”, Bloodstones
• Eddy Burger, “The Witch’s Wardrobe”, Dark Edifice 3
• Isobelle Carmody, “The Stone Witch”, Under My Hat
• Jay Caselberg, “Beautiful”, The Washington Pastime
• Stephen Dedman, “The Fall”, Exotic Gothic 4, Postscripts
• Felicity Dowker, “To Wish On A Clockwork Heart”, Bread And Circuses
• Terry Dowling, “Nightside Eye”, Cemetary Dance
• Tom Dullemond, “Population Management”, Danse Macabre
• Thoraiya Dyer, “Sleeping Beauty”, Epilogue
• Will Elliot, “Hungry Man”, The One That Got Away
  
• Jason Fischer, “Pigroot Flat”, Midnight Echo 8
• Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull In Winter”, Bloodstones
• Lisa L. Hannett, “Sweet Subtleties”, Clarkesworld
• Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, “Bella Beaufort Goes To War”, Midnight And Moonshine
• Narrelle M. Harris, “Stalemate”, Showtime
• Kathleen Jennings, “Kindling”, Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear
• Gary Kemble, “Saturday Night at the Milkbar”, Midnight Echo 7
• Margo Lanagan, “Crow And Caper, Caper And Crow”, Under My Hat
• Martin Livings, “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet”, Living With The Dead
• Penelope Love, “A Small Bad Thing”, Bloodstones
• Andrew J. McKiernan, “Torch Song”, From Stage Door Shadows
• Karen Maric, “Anvil Of The Sun”, Aurealis
• Faith Mudge, “Oracle’s Tower”, To Spin A Darker Stair
• Nicole Murphy, “The Black Star Killer”, Damnation And Dames
• Jason Nahrung, “The Last Boat To Eden”, Surviving The End
• Tansy Rayner Roberts, “What Books Survive”, Epilogue
• Angela Slatter, “Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”, This Is Horror Webzine
• Anna Tambour, “The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard Of Lovecraft”, Lovecraft Zine
• Kyla Ward, “The Loquacious Cadaver”, The Lion And The Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables
• Kaaron Warren, “River Of Memory”, Zombies Vs. Robots

 

Comics and ebooks

Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear (including my short story “Kindling“) is now available in a Kindle edition from Amazon.

Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (including my comic “Finishing School“) is available as an ebook from a number of places. That should include iTunes, but possibly not in Australia yet.

I have just sent off the art for a new comic, which I hope will become a Real Thing, subject to various approvals. In the meantime, the picture at the top of the page is a personality comparison between my last comic heroine, Gwen, and my new one whose name is not currently used (but is Marilyn). I’ve been trying to loosen up and be a lot sketchier for this comic – “Finishing School” betrays signs of terror and excessive caution – and there are a few panels where I could feel that clicking. I’m not sure you can tell by looking which panels they are, but I can see where I began to let go.

I had to force that – blowing up the original thumbnail sketches, putting clean paper over them on a light box and going straight to inks with a dip pen, instead of doing complete-blue-pencil-and-technical-pen as for “Finishing School”.

 

Steampunk Adventuress

I have been variously snowed under, sick and out of town, so in the interests of posting something other than a Dalek, here is a rambling lady I drew earlier in the year. The original pen and ink drawing was a gift to a friend based on the very brief description of one of her characters as a steampunk witch (I added the cloud and birds digitally for a touch of colour.). I understand the illustration does not resemble the character at all, but I am pleased with the Swiss Army Staff. You probably cannot tell, but it incorporates (among other things) a music box.

 

 

Illustration Friday: Heights

I drew these on Saturday, as a warm-up exercise before starting on other work, and now it is… Thursday? Who let that happen? Anyway, this is a series of drawings from/for/related to a little airship story of which more may be heard one day. Pen and ink with digital shading. The single shade is due to having the other work to finish, but fits with what I have been trying to do with the story, which is to write a story that ought to be steampunk but feels more blue-and-white than bronze-and-copper. I am not sure whether the story succeeds, but the drawing does. It is very late on Thursday, and that is as deep an analysis as I am capable of.

 

Illustration Friday: Stripes

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

This was drawn in pen and ink with digital colour for Illustration Friday, and is part of an idea I was toying with for a steampunk/clockpunk circus. But here I discovered a flaw – for who would wind up the tiger?

The limerick is by William Cosmo Monkhouse.

 

A Dalek called Paddington

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Michael Bond’s A Bear called Paddington. A number of illustrators have drawn Paddington Brown over the years, but my Paddington has always been the one of Peggy Fortnum’s original illustrations.

In other news: I am back from my holiday and will put up more non-Dalek pictures and posts soon, but in the meantime, Steampunk! comes out on Tuesday the 11th, and I have my contributor copies! I may have danced a little bit.

 

The Dalek’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is a companion piece to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dalek“, both part of the Dalek Game (and both for Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although I’m sure you worked that out). This could also have been “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Dalek”.

In other news: I am reading beautiful books which I can’t recommend to you because either they aren’t published yet (bwahahaha) or they are in German and I haven’t checked the beauty of the translation yet. The emergency portfolio which Shayna helped me put together (aka suffered, comforted and plied me with Turkish delight icecream while I tried to use her computer) was received with very gratifying words. Oh, and the Steampunk! anthology has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly!

 

Steampunk!

Here is the table of contents for Steampunk!, the anthology Kelly Link and Gavin Grant edited and which is being published by Candlewick Press this year:

• Cassandra Clare, “Some Fortunate Future Day”
• Libba Bray, “The Last Ride of the Glory Girls”
• Cory Doctorow, “Clockwork Fagin”
• Shawn Cheng, “Seven Days Beset by Demons” (comic)
• Ysabeau Wilce, “Hand in Glove”
• Delia Sherman, “The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor”
• Elizabeth Knox, “Gethsemene”
• Kelly Link, “The Summer People”
• Garth Nix, “Peace in Our Time”
• Christopher Rowe, “Nowhere Fast”
• Kathleen Jennings, “Finishing School” (comic)
• Dylan Horrocks, “Steam Girl”
• Holly Black, “Everything Amiable and Obliging”

I’ve been being alternately cryptic and stressed about this for some time, but it’s really drawn and written and real and proofread and everything now, and everytime I look at that table of contents I feel a bit faint.

“Finishing School” has flying machines and explorers and steam-powered kangaroos and bushrangers and Mulga Bill. It does not, however, feature the Australian coat of arms, so the wind-up emu below found himself without a job at the draft stage and didn’t make it into the comic.

 

Illustration Friday: Blur

Larger version here.

Pen line work with digital colour and editing. Part character test, part messing around with thaumatropes (and dirigibles). The reason for Gwen’s expression in the last panel is because she is actually doing something subversive (more on this in the fulness of time).

The two separate pictures are of a dirigible and (if you turn your computer upside down) a seated man who has just dropped a bowl. Together they are *meant* to look like a rudimentary and possibly unfeasible aircraft. Still working on the optical illusions here.

Edited to turn one of the images the right way up – I kept waking up last night with it bothering me.

 

September Book Reviews

Adventures in Two Worlds – A J Cronin: Autobiographical, but not dry facts and memories – so far to the other side that at times it was like fiction and at other times maudlin. But while the beginning and end tended towards the overblown, the rest of the chapters were beautifully written scenes of life as a doctor in Scottish villages, Welsh mining towns and the wealthy and poor streets of London: entertaining, romantic, endearing and occasionally reminiscent of James Herriot. I read a few chapters – about the district nurse and her bicycle, daft Tam and his houseboat and the widow on her farm – to my parents and predictably we all got choked up.

White Rabbit – Bruce Marshall: A biography of Wing Commander F F E Yeo-Thomas, of whom I knew a little from his appearance in the pages of Leo Marks’ Between Silk and Cyanide. Cloak and dagger adventures in occupied France during World War II, parachute runs, double agents, escapes in and from p.o.w. and concentration camps, fleeing through Germany – fascinating and gripping, though with too many French phrases for me to attempt reading it out loud with anything like confidence.

A Room with a View – E M Forster: Gentle and very enjoyable, although the end takes a sudden literary turn and all the characters change their apparent character which although Meaningful isn’t necessarily Fun. But I love the slightly erratic, slightly socially-misplaced, loving and expansive Honeychurches, and their difficult relatives.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy: A father and his son’s journey on foot through the ash of a long-burned-out America. Bleak, occasionally frightening, occasionally hypnotic, with a placidly mundane streak of horror. Literary science fiction which is a genre that is usually like an unsettling dream (and, if you are used to the other sort, leaves you wanting detail of exactly how the disaster took place, and the science behind all the after-effects – but plenty of post-apocalyptic nastiness and survival on the edge of everything). Neatly and elegantly worded.

Serena – Sylvia Andrews: I brought this on myself, but I was out of Heyers and there were two regency romances in the 50c bin out the front of the Annerley community bookstore and – I still hurt a little bit, although not as much from this one as the other (which caused me to wish physical injury upon myself, of which more next month). This had all the requisite melodrama, hijinks, disguises, passion, rage, betrayal, compromised innocence &c, &c, but… it was about the romance, and written to that end (whereas Georgette Heyer is like DWJ – her stories are fabulous and cumulative disasters, of which an occasional romance is only one of the many unlikely by-products). Anyway, back to Serena: Beautiful (of course) young (white) woman from the West Indies (non-slave-owning!) who thinks she is plain (she isn’t) and old (she isn’t) escorts her younger (sillier) niece to London to give her a London Season (because you’re worth it) and while they are in boot camp in the country she isn’t allowed to ride alone so she dresses up as a boy and meets a man who finds out she is in disguise but they like each other so they keep meeting and then they meet in London but he gives her the cold shoulder when he finds out her name because his brother went to the West Indies with his wife when Serena was 14 (remember this) but Serena’s brother stole his wife and the wife told her husband she didn’t want him and so he committed suicide and then Serena’s brother told the wife he didn’t want her so she went back to England and told everyone that Serena had led her husband astray and then jilted him (I told you to remember the 14 years old part) and then had a baby who is actually Serena’s nephew but our hero (who naturally is brooding and cannot trust a woman) thinks is his nephew and is raising but his (evil, Irish) mother is convinced he is sickly and won’t let the boy walk anywhere and his terrified that Serena will expose her secret and so she enlists help (from evil! Irishmen! and our hero’s sometimes-jilted mistress) and then there are kidnappings and faked compromises of virtue and…

Worldshaker – Richard Harland: A steampunk novel, set in the claustrophobic, stratified, artificially-maintained Victorian society of the great steam-powered juggernaut/mobile city Worldshaker, which rolls across the countries. A coming of age story, and a what-is-humanity story, an above-and-below decks story, a British Public Schoolboy story and a story of revolution, violence and retribution. I would have liked to have been a bit more convinced of the feasibility of the juggernaut and the whole system and society, but this wouldn’t have bothered me at all if I hadn’t been aware of the juxtaposition of the two rival sides of the genre: the Victorian-inspired, cogs&gears fantasy on the one hand, and the questions of class and imperialism and colonialism and very real violence and death on on the other. I know Richard Harland is very aware of those two aspects, and so I suspect that dissonance was deliberate. I am keen to see how he rebuilds in the sequel what was torn down in this story (but still wanted more of the nuts & bolts of how the cogs & gears worked).