On her Undead Studies blog this month, Nyssa Pascoe is interviewing Australian authors who have dealt with the odd zombie and/or undead apocalypse in their writing. I was a willing participant — and here is the result.
The good news is my story “Desert Madonna”, published in Anywhere But Earth, which was edited by Keith Stevenson and published through Coeur de Lion in 2011, has been selected as a finalist in the Science Fiction Short Story category of the 2011 Aurealis Awards (Australia’s major specfic genre awards). This came as quite a surprise, not because the story isn’t any good, but because I hadn’t even been thinking about it when the news came down out of the ether.
As it happens, two other stories from Keith Stevenson’s excellent anthology are also finalists, giving Anywhere But Earth a hit rate of 3 out of 5. The other stories are “SIBO” by Penelope Love and “Rains of la Strange” by Robert Stephenson. My wonderful partner Cat Sparks also has a story on the list: “Dead Low” from Midnight Echo. There’ll be no household rivalry, honest, even though she’s got so many of the things already you could built a full-size rocket with them!
For a full list of the Aurealis Awards finalists in all categories, go to the Award website.
Winners of the 2011 Aurealis Awards and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence will be announced at the Aurealis Awards ceremony, on the evening of Saturday 12 May at the Independent Theatre, North Sydney. Details of the evening and a link to the online booking website are available at www.aurealisawards.com.
Copies of Anywhere But Earth are available here.
I’ll be running a one-day specfic writing course for the NSW Writers’ Centre in early March. The blurb is below. It should be lots of fun, as well as informative, so check it out and book yourself in today.
Making the Impossible Real: Writing Speculative Fiction
Tutor: Robert Hood
When: Sunday 4 March-10am-4pmWhether dealing with angels or demons, past or future, aliens, post-humans or artificial intelligences, stories of alternate realities, imagined futures and fantastical impossibilities have been a never-ending source of fascination for writers and readers for as long as humanity has told stories. But once you leave the everyday world behind, once you embrace worlds where the impossible happens, how do you make your writing believable? How do you make the impossible possible?
Award-winning, internationally published writer Robert Hood has wrestled with these issues in his own work. Variously referred to as “a brilliant fantasist”, “Australia’s master of dark fantasy” and “Aussie horror’s wicked godfather”, Rob has written stories of ghosts, robots, monsters, aliens and many other fantastical entities, even human beings – equally at home in the various genres that we refer to as “speculative fiction”: science fiction, fantasy and fantastical horror, for both adults and children.
In this one-day course, Rob will share his insights into how to make your wildest imaginings real. More than startling ideas or bizarre speculation, these genres require the same attention to characterization, plot development, dialogue, scene-setting, style and thematic resonance as all fiction – but with special qualities unique to themselves. The course offers practical exercises that will help you develop these qualities, as well as exploring questions of particular relevance to new authors, such as sources for ideas, manuscript presentation, getting published and the pitfalls that should be avoided at all cost.
Information on cost etc. as well as booking details can be found on the NSW Writers’ Centre website.