Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here at The Word. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It’s hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things that readers of The Word will find edifying.
Today it’s Deborah Biancotti.
Who is Deborah?
I’m a Sydney-based fiction writer whose first story won an Aurealis Award (Best Horror short) and first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS, was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Though right at this exact moment I’m working on novellas and novels.
What are you tooting about?
My second collection is out from Twelfth Planet Press. It’s a short story suite about the consequences of being especially gifted or powerful in a world that doesn’t encourage that. It’s part of the TWELVE PLANETS series, and it’s called BAD POWER.
To quote one blog review, it’s a world that has ‘super powers but no superheroes’, where the victories are relative and the defeats are absolute (to paraphrase my own back cover blurb).
There are five interlinked stories in the book, each from the point of view of a different character, though most of the stories fall into the genre of contemporary supernatural police procedural. Hence we’re calling it a ‘pocketbook police procedural’. Nifty, eh?
The one character who appears more than anyone else is Detective Enora Palmer. She’s the kind of character I describe as a ‘beautiful fuckup’. I mean, she’s really trying hard to do some good, you know? And the world, my friends, does not give brownie points for trying to do good. The world does not differentiate, it does not bless the deserving or punish the evil. The world breaks everyone roughly about equally, as Hemingway taught me.
It also has an awesome introduction by Ann Vandermeer.
Oh, and it’s short. Only 30,000 words. A quick read!
Where to buy the book: http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com/store-items/bad-power
Where to find Deborah:
http://deborahbiancotti.net
http://deborahb.livejournal.com
http://www.facebook.com/deborahbiancotti
http://www.goodreads.com/deborahbiancotti
https://twitter.com/deborah_b
.
Woot for the toot! ;p
[...] (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}This Tuesday, I’m tooting in Alan Baxter’s Tuesday Toots series, waxing lyrical about my book, BAD POWER, from Twelfth Planet [...]