'da big update

Time for a much needed update, if only to get my damned mind off a story that just will not resolve for me!

So, been busy with lots of work. The lovely ph8 from Speculate has been keeping my schedule full with lots of coding work; the new Australian Horror Writers Association website is online and just needs some minor bug-fixes and a couple of feature updates before it is officially done; I also recently completed a site for Workforce Retention and am currently working on a new logo for them.

The new issue of Aurealis (#37)  is pretty much done and out the door (Yay!). It is the first issue with the new editorial team of Stephen Higgins and Stuart Mayne and I think it is going to be a doozy! There are some really great stories in there and the illustrators, as usual, have come through for me with some stunning images. I think it always helps that the stories I send them are top notch. Oh, and this issue will feature a cover image by me :)

Apart from that my past 2 weeks have been an absolute disaster. Too much to go into here but suffice to say I've almost felt cursed. If it could go wrong, it has gone wrong! Here's hoping next week is better.

Thursday was very nice. ph8 took Arthur and I out for lunch in Crows Nest to thank us for the work we've been doing. Totally unnecessary, but appreciated in the extreme. My last 12mths working for Speculate have been a pleasure and I can't think of working for anyone better than ph8. Lunches like that are definitely the icing on the very scrumptious cake which is the Speculate team :) 

I stoppped off at Galaxy on the way there too, which was very bad of me. I bought:

* The first volume of John C.Wright's new series "Orphans of Chaos". I've been looking forward to this as Mr.Wright has rapidly become one of my favourite authors. His Golden Age trilogy (The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant, The Golden Transcendence) is one of the most amazing SF worlds I have visited in many years recalling the best of Jack Vance, Olaf Stapledon and Van Vogt but also bringing in the latest extropolations of scientific Transhumanism with all the flair and gadgetry of Greg Egan and Charlie Stross. His next series, the "Everness" series was more a semi-lovecraftian/Dunsanian horror with strong echoes of William Hope Hodgson and Clark Ashton Smith... but again, with a modern relevance that made it different and special, with many scathing and satirical looks at the current political system in the US. Since writing those books Mr.Wright has had a religious experience and become a Christian. This is said to be very much reflected in "Orphans of Chaos" which is described in the blurb quote at: "A bit like C.S.Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia updated by half a century, but with more gusto" - Locus. Should be very interesting!

A copy of Lucius Shepard's "Life During Wartime" - I lost my copy years ago and needed to replace it. This is one book that really got me going full-tilt into modern SF and onto other writers such a Iain Banks and William Gibson. "Life During Wartime" is an amazing SF/cyber-punk/magic-realism novel of (very) near-future war in Central America. Published in 1987 (so I was 17 when I read it) this story was very topical for the time, in which America was at the peak of its war on drugs in Central and South America. It is, I feel, even more so now with events in the Middle East. This story is the "Heart of Darkness" and the "Apocalypse Now" of the new century. If you haven't read it, and you've trusted my recommendations before, then I urge you to do so with this book. It is beautiful and terrifying and a real experience to read. As part of the Gollancz "SF Masterworks" series (#66) it is also fairly cheap and readily available almost anywhere. So you've got no excuse.

Lasty (I put two back on the shelf) I bought (and this is why I put two back on the shelf) The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. This is a massive hardcover from the New England Science Fiction Association Press, and it cost me a pretty-penny too, but it was more than worth it to me. I have most of Cordwainer Smith's stuff in other collections I've picked up from 2nd hand stores over the years, and I have Norstrilia (of course) but there were still a couple of stories missing. How could I get the full story of the Instrumentality and the Rediscovery of Man if I didn't have all the stories?! Yes, I definitely needed this book. Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger) is probably the Greatest 'Forgotten' Science Fiction author there has ever been. His stories, published between 1950 and 1966 (when he died), are possible the strangest, most otherworldy, of all SF stories. The places and times he writes about have such an peculiarity about them that they truly seem alien and detatched from the world we know but, in some strange way, never overly fanciful. They are weird, and disturbing, and surreal... but they also seem real! As if they weren't being written so much as 'dictated' from some far off time in the future where Mankind has spread throughout the universe, lost itself in a Dark Ages, and risen again (The Rediscovery of Man) into something so far from our imaginings that it is barely recognisable to us as human. The more I read Cordwainer Smith, the more I am in awe of the worlds he could create in such short stories. I'm sure some of his stories are available in a collection from the "SF Masterworks" series mentioned above (it might even be called "The Rediscovery of Man" too) so you should be able to grab at least some of his stories for a bargain price. Go on, you'll love yourself for it :)

I've still go lots of illustrations to finish for the "Shards: Forty Short Sharp Tales" collection, and lots of stories to write... although one has me stuck on getting it completed, which has kept me frustrated and a pain to be around for days. Hopefully the brain-knot will loosen soon and I'll be able to figure out how to finish it of. I find it hard to start a new story when one is as stuck as this one is. I know the answer will come, I just have to be patient and let my 'back-brain' (as karenmiller called it) work it out.

To get my mind off it, I'm going to go and sit mindlessly in front of the tube. I've got the DVD of "Nightwatch" there, so I'm going to put that on. The book was pretty damn good, and the film did better in Russia than Lord of the Rings, so I'm looking forward to it.

Sorry for the massive update... I guess I'm not having as many problems writing as I thought :)