Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Opal Vapour



One of my scriberly interests is writing reviews. I write book reviews that usually go up on Goodreads, and reviews of stage productions, especially dance, for Artshub.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to review a really lovely show called Opal Vapour, a collaboration between dancer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, musician and fabric artist Ria Soemardjo and lighting and set designer Paula van Beek.

The show is touring Australia at the moment (north Queensland as I write) so watch out for these gifted young women coming to a venue near you! You can read my review on Artshub to give you a taste of what this show is all about, and for more pics and info about the artists, check out http://opalvapour.com.au/

Friday, May 24, 2013

How Real is your Fantasy?

On her own webpage, Joanna Fay explains how she uses intuition and word association to invent meaningful names for people, places and objects in her fantasy writing.

"In the ‘show, don’t tell’ model, there are two main aspects I use to give the world of Siaris a feeling of internal realism. One is context; using only the context of a naming noun. The other is creating an unfamiliar word that has real word associations or suggestiveness in its soundforms. Even more effective is to combine the two; then the need to ‘tell’ drops away."

For more check out the full post on Jo's own webpage.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Laura E Goodin wins The Kris Hembury Award for Encouragement

Our heartiest congratulations to Laura for winning the Kris Hembury Award at last night's Australian Aurealis Awards held at the Independent Theatre in North Sydney.

You can read Laura's response to this award at her blog, A Motley Coat.

And the live reports of the Aurealis Awards at Twitter.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Short Story Competition Win

Over at carolryles.net, I blog about my win in the Conflux 9 short story competition.

I’m especially pleased about this as the story, "The Silence of Clockwork" works as a prequel to my novel, Heart Fire, by showing some of the history of its male protagonist, Ruk, a bold, daring shapeshifting spirit who plots to escape the human word, but his shifterness prevents him.

Conflux 9 was held in Canberra in late April. It’s theme was steampunk (angels, junk and steam), an added bonus.


Thursday, May 16, 2013

Writerly Advice

I was clicking through the multitude of blogs on my blogroll when I came across this, for me very timely, post on productivity and time management on Australian Writer's Marketplace Online. In discussing the centre's regular Writing Race, Louise Cusack, team captain for the last of these, and Amy Chatwin from AWM have some very useful things to say. According to Louise Cusack even cats can help us in our quest for handling our time and getting published. It makes sense when she says it, I promise.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Gender and Book Covers

Over the past year there has been much discussion about the portrayal of women on book covers with Jim C.Hines and John Scalzi doing their bit to show just how ridiculous women's poses (on fantasy novel covers in particular) often is. What I hadn't realised though is how at least some publishers skew the covers of novels by women to what they perceive as the likings of the women's market - because, of course, all books by women are about things of interest only to women. Right?

Well no. It's akin to the fact that my daughter felt she had to apologise for giving me a pink card for Mothers' Day because all women like pink, don't they. Again no. I really dislike pink as she well knows. I'm not fond of washed out baby blues and lavenders or purple either and I'm by no means the only one. If you look around certain women's wear sections of most stores, though, that's often all you can buy. The retailers' perception is that women like such colours so that's how they skew their buying. The clothing sells - because there are no alternatives - so they have their perception reinforced and so it continues.

It seems something similar might be happening among publishers except here the perception appears to be woman writer = won't get read by men because girl cooties = will only be read by women = girlie covers because women like girlie covers, don't they. Maureen Johnson tackles this in her post The Gender Coverup on The Huffington Post website. It's worth reading to the end before you go to the link where, in answer to a challenge by Johnson, a number of classics written by men have some of their better known covers redone as if they had female authors. They are clever and are a real eye-opener.

Edited for more clarity.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Guest blogging

On her website, Joanna Fay has been inviting various authors to write guest blog posts about favourite characters they have created in her weekly Character Column. So far four Egobooers have accepted her challenge and, if you are interested, I've linked to each of their posts - Carol Ryles and St OliviaKeira McKenzie with NedSatima Flavell and Nustofer and most recently I've posted about one of my own favourites, Seri.

I have been fascinated to read all the posts, not just those by Egobooers, and to find out more about how different writers develop particular characters. In my case, it was love with my first glimpse of Seri but not everyone seems to have the same experience with their characters so it's proving an interesting series.