It’s my turn to host the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival for this month, so following is a round up of all kinds of interesting spec fic related interwebby goodness. If I’ve missed anything, add a link in the comments or email me and I’ll update the post.

First off, Eneit Press interviews Gillian Polack as part of Women In Horror Month.

That segues nicely to Gillian Polak’s own LiveJournal entries which include some thoughts on characters and Good books and equal opportunity neglect. A cryptic title, but a very interesting post.

Here, Graham Storr annouces the release of TimeSplash. A novel with a single word title containing two capital letters? The man is clearly a genius.

Throughout the last few weeks a bunch of very savvy folk have been putting together snapshot interviews of Australian spec fic writers. Links to all 90 or so 2010 Snapshots have now been collated into one place for your perusing pleasure.

Horrorscope, the Australian Dark Fiction Weblog has been busy. Here’s a review of the Horror Stories of Robert E Howard. Here’s a review of The World Is Dead, a review of Zombie: An Anthology Of The Undead and Horns, by Joe Hill.

Also from Horrorscope, a rundown of the 2009 Bram Stoker Award nominees and the 2009 Australian Shadows Awards finalists. Not only that, there’s the Table of Contents for Midnight Echo #4. Midnight Echo # 5 is now open to submissions.

At Delimiter Kim Falconer talks about ebooks.

Here’s a review of the new “superhero” movie, Kick Ass, over at The Furnace.

The fabtastic convention that is Continuum happened at the end of February. This time it was Continuum 6: Future Tense. You can read my report of the con here. One of the guests of honour was the truly inspiring Mark Pesce. Mark wrote a short story for Continuum, called Both Your Houses. You can find that story here.

Brisvegas resident Joanna Penn posts here about lessons learnt from Doctor Who. And who couldn’t learn a thing or two from the good Doctor?

Talking of Doctor Who, here’s a photo by Cat Sparks of Trudi Canavan’s pantry. Why would I post that here? Look at the photo and try to contain the awesome.

And talking of Joanna Penn (my segue skills are unrivalled!) she was kind enough to interview me for a podcast on March 4th. We cover a lot in the half-hour podcast, including writing about supernatural themes, playing with religious mythology, writing fight scenes and more. And it even comes with a warning!

And talking of podcasts (yeah, I know, you’re blown away by my skills) those legendary ladies of the genre Alisa, Tansy and Alex have started a new spec fic podcast via Twelfth Planet Press called Galactic Suburbia. The first episode has just been posted with hopefully many more to follow.

On the publishing front, Tehani Wesley has announced her new project, FableCroft Publishing, and has put a call out for strongly Australian spec fic for a reprint anthology and Liz Grzyb has released the ToC for Scary Kisses, which is now available for pre-order via Ticonderoga Publications.

This one isn’t Australian, but it’s a bit of positive reinforcement for fantasy writers everywhere. On March 5th, Publishers Weekly announced that Harper Teen paid seven figures for a debut YA trilogy based around a retelling of the Greek tragedies.

The Outlandish Voices podcast (where new and established writers read their stories for the masses) has moved to a better hosting arrangement at Podbean, so you can rate and comment on the stories now.

And what’s a blog carnival without a bit of self-pimpage? I wrote a review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy here and the Bitten By Books website wrote glowing reviews of both my books, which is always nice. Here’s their review of RealmShift and here’s their review of MageSign.

Lastly, I updated a couple of new links on my Markets For Writers page. Let me know if you’d like to see other links on there.

And don’t forget to leave a comment with anything else relevant (or completely irrelevant, I don’t mind) that I might have missed.

EDIT: Very important post I missed from Cat Sparks’ LiveJournal regarding Dudcon III and the Ditmars.

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I’ll be hosting the Australian Spec Fic blog carnival in March, posting up a loads of stuff on March 15th. If you have any posts you think are relevant, please let me have the links. It can be anything spec fic related, about writing, books, movies, TV or anything you can find even a vague relevance for.

You can leave links in the comments section here or you can use this fancy Google document form thing that collates everything into a neat spreadsheet for us. Spread the word and hit me up with links to include.

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The latest list of recommended reading from Locus Online has been announced. You know I’ve been rattling on for months about Paul Haine’s awesome novella, “Wives”. Well, that’s on there, as is Margo Lanagan’s novella, “Sea Hearts”, from the same anthology. And, in fact, the “X6″ Novellanthology itself is listed. So yeah, you really need to read that book if you haven’t.

Other Aussies listed are Peter M Ball for his novella, “Horn”, and Deb Biancotti for her collection, “A Book Of Endings”, both released by the phenomenon that is Twelfth Planet Press. Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois get a nod as editors of “The Dragon Book” anthology. Garth Nix is mentioned for “The Heart of the City” novellette, Peter M Ball is mentioned again for “On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk” in the short story list and two more mentions in short stories for Margo Lanagan with “Ferryman” and “Living Curiosities”. What a brilliant result.

I’m sure I missed some Aussies, so apologies in advance if I did! It’s a great list. See the whole thing here.

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My short story “Trial Not Required” has just been published in M-Brane SF magazine. It’s in issue 13 and starts on page 13, which is kinda cool. The PDF edition of the mag is out now and the print edition should be available in the next couple of days.

The publisher, Chris Fletcher, asked for a little afterword about the story to include in the issue. This is what wrote:

“Trial Not Required” is a story born of a single absurd concept that occurred to me one night – wouldn’t it be strange if there was a big artificial ape that was once cutting edge technology but was now old-fashioned and a bit of a freak. And what if that ape started to question its role and the role of those that made it…?

You can find out all about it here. I hope you like it.

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The Australian speculative fiction blog carnival is off to a galloping start for 2010. You can find the January collected posts at Egoboo WA.

There’s loads of stuff there, including a few bits by yours truly. Things about Continuum, Natcon, feminism in spec fic and the furore surrounding it, reviews, fiction, interviews, publishing news, giveaways. By Odin’s Mighty Bollocks, it’ll take you till next month just to get through it all.

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Not be mistaken for anything to do with flash fiction, Genre Flash 4 is a PDF magazine listing “The best Australian genre fiction and true crime.” It’s a 24 page magazine that lists all sorts of genre fiction novels and true crime books by Australians, along with a run down of the content, where you can find them and so on. It’s an informative little package.

There’s also an interview with Fiona McIntosh and an article called “A Passage To Neverland” by Stephen Lord.

Full colour, very slick and absolutely free. It’s worth a look. Also, if you can think of any book stores or libraries, reading clubs or anything along those lines that might be interested, please pass it on to them. The beauty of a PDF zine like this is that it’s easily shared. (Obviously, it goes without saying that my own books are listed in there, so that’s another reason I’m so keen for you to share it around!)

So find out what’s hot in “Crime, Mysteries, Thrillers, SF, Science & Speculative Fiction, Fantasy & Horror”.

Get your copy right here!
(Right click and Save As to download a copy – it’s about 1.7MB.)

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More often than not when submitting stories for publication a rejection comes in the form of a standard line. It’s usually something along the line of “thanks but no thanks” and that’s it. It’s fair enough too – having been on the other side of the fence I can sympathise with the editors. As a writer, however, it’s always good to get a bit more feedback from an editor. A rejection is one thing, a rejection with a reason is better.

Today I got a rejection that makes me feel like I’m on the right track at least:

Dear Alan:

Thank you very much for submitting “Your Story” to Publication. We have decided not to accept your work for publication. This is not necessarily a reflection on the work itself (your story is well written, interesting and different), it simply isn’t quite right for Publication. We wish you all the best in finding your work a home.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Everything about that is a pretty standard rejection, except the bit in brackets: (your story is well written, interesting and different). The editor didn’t need to add that but they did. Those are three things that I’m always aiming for, so even though that’s a rejection, it’s an encouraging one.

Ever onwards.

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For Friday Flash this week I thought I’d draw your attention to a piece I’ve just had published in the House Of Horror ezine in the UK. Each issue there is divided up into different rooms, with different things available in each part of the house – you can find my piece in The Basement, where it belongs.

It’s called “Trapped” and it’s a little yarn about the way a couple cares for each other. I hope you like it.

Click here to go directly to the story.

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You may or may not know about SeizureOnline. According to the website:

Seizure is

* a new avenue for authors to get published
* a collection of serialised novels
* a website with RSS feeds, sub-divided by each story with its own feed
* available worldwide
* released monthly in collected book format.

It’s a pretty cool and very slick little venture. Primarily Seizure is interested in serialising longer works over several editions. However, they also want to publish occasional one-off short stories in various editions and they were kind enough to accept my sea monster horror story Deep Sea Fishing for publication in issue 4. The story is available online and in a collected print edition through Amazon.

They were also nice enough to conduct a quick interview with me, which is also up on their website. Other than the question about the story itself, all the other questions and answers are rather silly. So, go and support a quality market for writers and find some great fiction as well. Love to hear what you think of my sea monster story.

Here are all the relevant links:

The interview with me on the Seizure blog.

My story, Deep Sea Fishing, at SeizureOnline.

Amazon page for the print edition featuring my story.

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I had an interesting experience last night. By the very generous invitation of Laura Goodin I went to Wollongong and recorded one of my stories for a podcast. Laura produces the Outlandish Voices podcast where short speculative fiction stories from established and emerging writers in the Illawarra region are read, usually by the writers themselves.

One of my stories, Standoff, has been podcast before, but that was read by someone else for the Wily Writers website. This is the first time I’ve read one of my own stories aloud. For some reason my English accent seemed to come through when I sat down in front of the mic. I’m not sure why, but at least it wasn’t the west country or Scottish aspect of my heritage that came through. So, if any of you are interested in hearing me read you a story, watch this space and I’ll let you know when it’s up. The story in question is Crossfire, originally published in The Oddville Press.

I joked with Laura that from all of my work, she’d avoided the darker stories and chose the one funny, whimsical sort of thing I’d had published. She said, “That’s because dark is not how I roll.” Fair enough. I’ll let you know when the story is up – meanwhile, go and have a listen the other stuff that’s there already.

Here’s the Outlandish Voices site to get the podcasts, via Australian Community Radio Podcasts.

And here’s the Outlandish Voices Facebook page. Become a fan!

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