Friends

I'm knee deep in reading at the moment, with all kinds of deadlines rearing their ugly heads.

On the weekend I got an exterminator out to have a look at my rodent issue and to help me fix it! He diagnosed it as mice, sorted me with a solution and then discussed putting any and all food sources in my kitchen out of the reach of mice - including the dog food, and packets of food and so on. I had been using tupperware to store flour and sugar and so on but hadn't been totally good at say packets of pasta etc. After he left, I did a quick run out to the shops, bought a ton of plastic ware and came back to face the pantry of doom. It got cleaned out and sterilised and the less we speak of this the better. However, now, I have this pantry that is totally organised, all my food in containers, and a couple of big bins with the rest of my food like packets of pasta and baking things and so on, all packed up neatly in them.

So, I kind of have my dream pantry. Finally. Ironically. And in addition, I'm making sure that there is absolutely no food anywhere by doing my dishes as soon as possible. So I have my dream kitchen as well. And it's kind of like the universe playing a hilarious joke on me - the ex used one of the reasons for our split up as me being untidy in the kitchen. And all my life I've watched women have kitchens with all this storage stuff and thought it was totally anal and extra work to come in form the shops and open all your packets and tip them into containers. Now I understand that the whole point was not about being neat and tidy at all! It was PEST CONTROL! I am so in! I will probably for the rest of my life have an uber tidy kitchen from now on.

I've done my best to not like the new job and the people there. Or at least to not have fun and get comfortable. And to *like* it, damnit. And I have failed. Failed. Failed. Failed. I love it. The people are really nice, really interesting, so multiskilled and clever. I break when they break and I enjoy the conversations. I am enjoying working on just the one project - even though that doesn't suit the way my brain works, I do like the destress of that compared to my last job. And it is still a nice way to recharge after burnout. Also the work itself is positive and uplifting and more grounded in science. And so its soul charging. And now the office manager is back and has completely sorted all my needs, without me asking (I needed keys etc) and for things I didn't even know needed sorting (she didn't like the way my name was registering on my phone). Damnit, I like it. I want to stay. There, I said it.

So I'm mostly reading right now. I'm trying to read 400 shorts this month so as to be up to speed on Last Short Story. But I'm also getting back into the crafting. catundra is excited about patchworking in my vicinity and I am falling prey to the vibe in her sphere. My original position on quilting was that I was happy handsewing because it's portable, I can watch TV whilst doing it and I was perfectly happy limiting the number of quilts output. I happen to think that it's very important to guard your home from being overrun by patchwork quilts. Cept the other day, we were talking in the car on the mad dash to Carol's and ... well. It occurs to me now that if I am looking at the craft as wanting to be more artistic rather than just making blankets, if I want to learn and explore colour, movement and texture, the progress I can achieve is limited by the speed of my output. Meaning that if I machine sew, I have the opportunity to try more things out, learn and then experiment and eventually design my own projects ... and at some point, hope for artistic output. So yeah, I might be coming round to thinking about learning how to use a sewing machine. And um, speeding up my quilting output. Ahem.

I have been inspired for the November quilt block. I have chosen my pattern, made the templates and pieced about a quarter of it. I thought it was a really difficult block but now that I am working on it, I don't think that at all. It's certainly more complicated than my first block but I am pleased then that harder patterns are becoming more accessible to me. Cause it was a talk down from the pattern I really wanted to do - and that means that maybe soon that pattern, and harder beyond that, will be achievable.

Today on twitter:

• 18:26 Man, I miss Mexican food. Hair of the Dog Cantina, I love you! #
• 18:33 RT @BookBuzzr: "The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes." - Benjamin Disraeli (www.bookbuzzr.com) #quote #

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Man. I was gonna say something about the whole PW thing — particularly with reference to my suspicion it comes down not to ‘we r excluding women’ to ‘we r using a definition of ‘good’ that aligns with our definition of ‘masculine”, & so on. Or, as Jim Hines suggests, a result of a kind of blindness to our own blindnesses. And heck, it’s been ages since I said anything to really earn my feminist stripes. On the blogosphere, that is. And why is that, I hear you cry? Well, I’ve been busy in a dozen directions at once. The world has tried to divide-and-conquer me. But eventually the world tries just one well-placed kick too many & it wakes a girl up.

I’m back, baby.

Not sure I’d go so far as to girl-cott male authors, like Kathy Lette recommends. Because, y’know, none of us is free until all of us are free. And taking it out on male authors seems … well, against the spirit of the thing.

BUT anyhow, the damn internet took so damn long to load, who can remember what in hell my finely-tuned arguments really comprised of? Smarter people than I have already covered off the topic. I guess I’ll go kick some cans for a while.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Happy Birthday for yesterday thawrecka - hope you had a splendid day and a truly awesometacular year!

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on my novella 'The Sleeping and the Dead', the third story in Mark Deniz's Ishtar project AKA Red, Hot and Bad. I'm pretty happy with it but it has yet to be sighted by any eyes other than mine. So it may well completely suck. The day before I submitted a story to Clockwork Phoenix 3. So, in all, I consider I've had a productive writing time since I returned from WFC.

I've got a bunch of reading to complete for the Anthologies and Collected Works judging category of the Aurealis Awards. When that's done I'll be commencing work on Arctica in earnest, a novel I've been busting to engage with for at least a year, probably longer. I had laid down 28,000 words of first draft already but I've decided to scrap them and start again after a combination of research and plot structuring led me to some cleverer ideas.

Some photos of some things I've been working on lately.

Now redbraids has finally received it, her block for the quilting bee:



Late last week, catundra offered to help me out of my paralysis in progressing my Kimono Wallhanging by recutting the red borders which, um, were cut crooked. She fixed those and cut the final borders for me and this is how far along the project is now:



Not sure if you can see but the fabric is slightly skewed on the top border so that it moves from no symbols to the top bit of the symbols of the row below where it meets the red border. I'm debating unpicking this. Grr.

And at the same time catundra was fixing this, I was telling her about the red diamonds issue on the tumbling blocks quilt - that I know where they are going but they aren't really working for me. Suddenly we were on a mad dash out to the patchwork shop before closing, I'd bought new red fabrics and this is the new test block for random insertion in the monochrome:

Originally published at Stephanie Campisi. You can comment here or there.

This morning I cleverly managed to spill a cup of tea on my beautiful laptop, in the process managing to render half of its keys useless (although thankfully the rest of the machine still seems to be in working order). So I spent the day hogging a computer at Jono’s office while working on some commissioned articles. Obviously, though, I was in a bit of a frazzled state, as a quick proofread revealed that rather than writing about home invasions due to burglars, I’d spent quite a bit of time discussing how to keep buglers out of one’s home.

Fair enough, I suppose, as they can be rather noisy, but still. Not quite in line with my brief.

The laptop is now in the shop awaiting a new keyboard, so here I am hogging another of Jono’s computers. Can I just ask what on earth Apple was thinking when they not only put only two USB ports on their MacBook Pro, but placed them a) on the left side of the computer, making it hard to use a mouse unless you’re left-handed, and b) so closely together that they can scarcely be used at the same time?

via LikeItHateIt

I think it's been three weeks since I last posted my progress, supposed to be weekly so I should get back into this.

36 tasks done (doesn't seem enough for 3 weeks!)

7 personal (3 household, 3 errands, 1 TV (UK Queer as Folk S1 and 2)
25 TPP (4 ASif, 10 General, 4 R/SB, 1 BoE, 2 novellas, 2 Sprawl, 2 Horn)
1 A4
3 Craft

13 sent to Did Not Finish

(Oh and started new job, and sat Job Interview for Application 2. Reading for Aurealis Awards and Last Short Story also not on this list.)

I haven't felt like blogging in a while. Thanks to those who checked in, I'm alive and ok. And doing a lot of things, as usual. Thank you for your concern! I have some big thoughts bubbling away and that's taking up a lot of my brain space. Hopefully things will return to regular programming soon.

So there have been lots of links floating around in the wake of Publisher's Weekly releasing their list of the Top 10 Books of 2009, in which no women apparently wrote anything remotely worthy of being on the list. It seems. I've been following the responses to that - Tansy wrote a great one as did Lizzie Skurnick and The Mumpsimus.

I was just reading threemonkeys's post about what he was reading, and this really struck me:

Thinking of awards as a result of reading a bunch of short story collections. It would be hard to count how many awards all the stories in these four collections have won but it would be a very large number. In one case the collection as a whole won a World Fantasy award too. The collections were The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians by Bradley Denton, Things will Never be the Same by Howard Waldrop, A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by Jeffrey Ford. You might think one of those collections doesn't quite fit with the others. Don't think that, they belong together. But here is the thing. All these collections come from small scale publishers. All those awards and all the quality and all that enjoyable reading and the big guys aren't interested. I don't blame the big publishers - they are driven by what sells and short story collections don't sell in great numbers. I blame all those people who proudly say "oh I don't read short stories". People are entitled to taste preference, but I don't get the attitude that seems to go with it so often that short stories are somehow lesser things. Where did that come from.

I didn't do the Biancotti book for sales. I produced the collection because I thought it was a book worth doing. It struck me that not only do women seem to be conspicuously absent from awards lists (though that is not true for Biancotti), or year's bests (also not true locally for Biancotti) but they also seem, at least in Australia, to be much less likely to be collected in single author collections (and yet?). Or collected a lot later in their writing careers, once they have "proved" themselves (ah). I wanted to change this somehow and it seemed to me that the best way to do that was to put my money where my mouth was, to believe in female writers and start producing their collections, which was one of the reasons for this book.

The thing though was the sales on A Book of Endings have been really strong and the book is holding its own financially. It's not a book I will regret doing on any grounds - working with Biancotti was a fantastic chance to work with someone so brilliant and driven, and I learned a lot in the process and grew as a publisher and editor. The book has sold well, and it's only been out just over two months. It has also received the most attention and publicity of all the TPP books, including Horn. I'm proud of this book. And I'm proud of it standing out there as an example of the kind of books that I want to produce at Twelfth Planet Press.

Many people told me that single author collections don't sell. Many other people told me that readers had been long waiting for a Biancotti collection. It's hard to know what is really true until you test things out. The thing that strikes me though is that ... critical acclaim, and literary criticism and awards and best of lists seem so out of step with sales figures. A book can be considered to be "the best of the year", but ... if it doesn't really sell, and readers don't embrace it, what does that mean? (This question still stumps me, I have thought about it a lot and don't really know yet.) You can't argue against a phenomenon like Harry Potter or Twilight, books that got people who don't normally read to read. Were they good books? Were they *quality*? Were they not good because men didn't like to read them? If only young girls bought and read them, is it suddenly unimportant? Even if they bought them in extreme, beyond comprehension, numbers?

It strikes me as so odd to constantly go round and round having the same simple conversation - that just because you cannot relate to material and thus it doesn't capture *your* imagination, it is somehow a lesser book/story, yet if the book/story you think is great doesn't capture my imagination and I cannot relate to it, then there is something wrong with *me* and not the book. It seems so obvious to me that different readers, with different life contexts, would appreciate different books to each other. And that it is not only ridiculous, but pompous, ignorant and selfinvolved, narrow minded and unintellectual, that for a book to be considered "best/good quality/worthy" it must have the perspective, gaze and appeal to/for and of a white male audience.

I feel embarrassed now for the people who compile homogeneous lists and present them to the world. It's kind of like wandering onto a packed train with your fly down or a bit of toilet paper attached to the heel of your shoe. Everyone else is trying not to catch your eye and is cringing just a little inside. But the more these lists kind of keep happening, the more I think, "wow, you don't represent or even consider me, and what I am looking for in a reading experience". And I devalue the worth of the recommendation and I move on.

And the big question, do single author collections sell? I think the right ones do. Are they worth doing? I think the right ones are.

Now the warmer weather has arrived (more or less) I'm back on the bike for longer rides. I'm missing my usual riding partner K, who's up north with her baby, but solo rides at night are a good option in summer. I know enough well-lit back streets and bike paths now and have a few good night-time routes worked out.

But daytime rides are still the best, so today I went for a ride with my mate Steve, through the back parts of Annandale and Glebe, over Anzac Bridge and then over the Harbour Bridge and back. We stopped for coffee and waffles on the way which was rather pleasant (and which possibly negated all the exercise benefit of the ride, but oh well.) Home again, tired and happy, and ready for a relaxing afternoon of not very much. And maybe I'll treat myself to pizza tonight. Hmm, yes, an excellent notion, Mr Barnes.

Spent a pleasant and leisurely afternoon in Kiama visiting Alan & Halinka. Kiama is about half an hour's drive south of Wollongong, utterly gorgeous and somewhere we have never bothered to visit up until now. It's best known for it's blowhole, quite literally a tourist trap as several idiotic foreigners have jumped into it with deadly consequences over the years.





Rob, Alan and Halinka on the back deck eating delicious gluten-free chocolate and orange cake.

My Chinese horoscope for tomorrow:

Consider the consequences of having an affair before going ahead with it. You might want to treat yourself to something adventurous for fun, like hot air ballooning. Or you could make plans to go to a comic convention that has sci-fi related events.


LOL.
So I should not have an affair, and rather I should go to a con? Has my star sign given up on my love life too, in favour of specfic?

Fucking weird.

Today on twitter:

• 09:08 Best 10 hours of sleep I've ever had. Today: clearing the decks on the paperwork & taxes, making space to make changes in my life. #
• 09:15 RT @clarkesworld: If you were at #WFC2009 or live in the San Jose area, you need to read this bit.ly/FC80Z #

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Just a friendly reminder that the deadline for Sprawl closes December 20th 2009. Someone just asked me about multiple submissions and I don't have a problem with authors submitting more than one work. I'd like to consider as much material appropriate to the theme as possible for what I hope to be a stand out anthology at Aussiecon 4.

Twelfth Planet Press is currently reading for Sprawl, a new anthology that will showcase Australia’s best and most exciting writers to an international audience. Sprawl will be launched at Aussiecon4 in Melbourne 2010.

Australia is a nation for the 21st century. Twenty one million people crowded into seven major cities; a modern technologically advanced society that sits perched on the perimeter of a vast dry interior occupied by an ancient, alien aboriginal culture.

Sprawl is an exciting new original anthology, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and published by Twelfth Planet Press, that will give readers from around the world a unique glimpse into the strange, dark, and often wondrous magics that fill the days and nights of Australia’s dreaming cities and towns, homes and parks, and most of all, it’s endlessly stretching suburbs.

Taking as its point of inspiration the delightful and whimsical creations of Shaun Tan’s art and fiction in Tales from Outer Suburbia, Sprawl is intended to be a book that glimpses into the brightest dreams and darkest fears of modern Australia.

Stories for Sprawl should be original fantasy stories of between 2,500 wds and 7,500 wds, and should be Australian in voice and setting, and fantastical in nature. Sprawl looks to pioneer a new subgenre – the Australian suburban fantasy – and we’d love if you could be a part of it!

How: send your submission in rtf attachment to twelfthplanetpress@gmail.com
Length: stories should be between 2 500 and 7 500 words
Submissions will close December 20, 2009.
Payment: AUS$50 per story

Originally published at Stephanie Campisi. You can comment here or there.

From ‘Towards an action-oriented science curriculum’, by Hodson, D, Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education:

‘We certainly need to rake steps to counter the somewhat bleak view of technological determinism’

It actually took me several reads to realise that anything was wrong here.

Oh, and in other news, WQ, a writing magazine out of Queensland, will publish a short article of mine in its next issue. I also had a short article in their recent young writers edition, and I can recommend it as a magazine–it’s a very nice looking magazine, and there’s some great content.

Other than that, I’ve been spending my days at work writing on education stuff, and at home writing web content stuff. My fingers have been worn down to stubs, but my typing speed is faster than light!

... you're stretchier! I glimpsed the half lotus on my left side tonight. Though my knee hurts now so maybe that was bad practice.

I've embarked on a new emotional journey this week. Thank you to the couple of people who have kicked me onto the path guided me to a new way of thinking and are helping me to explore this.

Here's what I have, no matter how honest you are, what you discover is that this honesty just brings you to a place where you can finally start being honest. That honesty shows you how honest you yet need to be. Much like yoga really - you work really hard to attain a pose only to find, once you get there that you have finally mastered the preparatory pose. Or that this was pose A of A-E.

San Jose was the third World Fantasy Convention I’ve attended and by far my favourite. Not sure why exactly, but at a guess I’d say it’s because I’ve finally gotten over the bunny in the headlights factor. I feel that I fit in. Like I’m part of the circus instead of just a misdirected tourist or a fortunate bystander. I’ve learnt that you don’t have to be a big time player to deserve a ringside seat. Or something. Of course, my sense of entitlement probably owes much to the generous behaviour of my traveling companions Garth Nix, Jonathan Strahan, Sean Williams and Deb Biancotti, and other good folks I’ve made friends with along the way.

It’s been a difficult year so I went to WFC expressly to cheer up and have fun. To soak up the vibe and to be with my people. To look the industry square in the face and ponder the significance of my own participation. I need ponder no longer. I know where I belong. I returned home content, with nothing to prove, yet everything to aspire to.

Full marks to Garth Nix, WFC guest of honour and Australian ambassador of awesome. He spent what I suspect amounts to thousands of dollars shouting drinks and picking up the dinner checks for his friends and colleagues, never missing a beat when it came to introductions and the opportunity to facilitate a connection or talk up the talents one of his countrymen. Garth is the truest kind of gentleman, sharing what he refers to as his 'good fortune', never succumbing to the temptation of self aggrandisation, transcending all such pathetic pantomimes by sheer force of style.

Sir, I raise a sea breeze* in your honour! May all your future novels be best sellers.

Entire WFC 2009 photo set here

*official drink of Australian spec fic writers abroad