Sea Hearts Tasmanian launch, Hobart Book Shop

If you're in Hobart next Thursday night, 2 February, please feel free to turn up unannounced and un-RSVP'd to the double launch of Sea Hearts and Tansy Rayner Roberts's Reign of Beasts at the Hobart Book Shop in Salamanca Square.

Rowena Cory Daniells will launch Reign of Beasts, the final book in Tansy's The Creature Court trilogy.

Richard Harland, Worldshaker author, will launch Sea Hearts.

The fun starts at 5.30. We promise you a ROR-ing good time.

Watch this blog for news of further launch-like activity.

Jackie Morris hearts The Brides

Artist Jackie Morris blogs a Brides review with a difference.

"The character of Misskaella who exacts a terrible revenge on the men and the women of Rollrock with a simple act of magic and how this balances in her own life and story.

"The powerful ‘seeing’ of the thin veils between worlds.

"The description of how Misskaella finds the creature inside the seal and pinpoints the star like marks of light and life to draw them forth. Most of all this."

Then, not content with that, Jackie also tracks me down and interviews me! You get a sneak peek at the Writing Room too.

As you can see from the snippet here, Jackie's work is right up my alley—have a look around her site while you're there.

Revising a chunk of selkie-novel

Over here at Maggie Stiefvater's blog, she hosts not one, not two, but TEN writers; we each take a chunk of our own novel or story, scribble all over it and explain why we revise the way we do. It's fascinating for anyone interested in the close work of revision.

Sea Hearts/Brides first reviews

Just a few reviews have started to trickle out, getting the world ready for publication day (1 Feb here in Australia, 2 Feb in the UK). The Bookbag, in the UK, says that Brides is

"powerful, beautiful, dangerous, unsettling, truthful, earthy, challenging, poetic, wonderful, absorbing. I can't recommend it highly enough. Margo Lanagan has a unique, uncompromising and lyrical voice and she brings it to the folk myth of selkies in a soaring journey of passion and pain."

And Locus's Gary Wolfe is wonderfully thorough and thoughtful in a review now online here, finishing:

"Lanagan develops, without benefit of an external narrator or sidebar lectures, some sharp insights into female passivity and victimization (at least on the part of the seal-women), male fecklessness and almost helpless self-absorption[...], the complex relationships of parents and children, and the fragile negotiations between community and nature. Except for a few comments from distrustful mainlanders, we learn about Rollrock entirely from within, and for a while we seem to live there. It’s not always a pleasant vacation, but it’s a deeply illuminating one, and Sea Hearts may eventually be seen as some sort of masterpiece."

Also, my nephew says it's a tour de force. *waves to Finn*

Updated: Here in Australia, Sea Hearts will be in the shops next Monday, 30 January.

2011 publications

For my own and others' reference, here are the stories I published last year:

• 'Catastrophic Disruption of the Head' (9800 words), in The Wilful Eye, vol. 1 of Tales from the Tower, ed. Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab, Allen & Unwin
  
• 'The Proving of Smollett Standforth' (4800), in Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, ed. Jack Dann and Nick Gevers, HarperCollins
  
• 'Mulberry Boys' (7500), in Blood and Other Cravings, ed. Ellen Datlow, Tor
  
• 'Yon Horned Moon' (4800), in Anywhere But Earth, ed. Keith Stevenson, Coeur de Lion

If you can't get hold of any of these anthologies and would like a copy of a story, let me know in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter.

Update: You will need to leave me your email address, if you know I don't have it, if you want me to send you an e-copy of a story.

Tender Morsels is published in Russian

Translated by Nadia Sechkina—we corresponded by email during the translation, and at the end she wrote me a lovely email saying: "You know, I had not shed a tear during the 4 months of translation, but I really wept over the book, several times, when I was editing my work as if I was reading about Liga and her daughters for the first time."

So you can be sure it has lost none of its grab-you-by-the-guts-and-shake-you effect in the translation.

Last day of the year

So, my 2012 looks like this.

Publications:

• The selkie novel, in February: in Aus. Sea Hearts, in the UK The Brides of Rollrock Island. The US will also use the Brides title, when the book's published there in September. I've just sent off the copy edits for that edition, and received early copies of the printed Australian and UK editions, both very pretty.
• The Twelfth Planet Press collection of four stories is also coming out sometime; I have a mid-January deadline on that.
• Two more new short stories are due out in anthologies (Danel Olsen's Exotic Gothic 4, Jonathan Strahan's Under My Hat witches anthology).
• Reprints. "Mulberry Boys" and "Catastrophic Disruption of the Head" are being reprinted in Year's Bests, and 'The Goosle' is getting another outing in Paula Guran's Witches: Wicked, Wild and Wonderful.

Travels:

• Tasmania at end of January to the ROR novel workshop to get help moving the colonial novel from zero-draft to first-draft stage (yes, it's as squishy as that)
• Adelaide Writers' Week in March, the highlight of which (for me) will be being on a fantasy panel with Kelly Link
• Beijing, for The Fifth Australian Writers’ Week 2012, also in March
• Fiji in July–August, to run a week-long 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' workshop with Paradise Courses

Writing:

• The NSW colonial fantasy, Formidable Energies, will probably take up most of my brain-space in the first half of the year. I'm committed to getting a sizable chunk of work done on it by end June to fulfil the requirements of the grant Arts NSW gave me to write it.
• Besides that, I'm only committed to writing one short story. Wow. This is because I've been saying no to requests, having said yes too often and thoroughly burnt myself out in 2010–2011.

There's day-jobbery, too; I'm still doing 3 days a week, and this will last probably well into next year but won't be confirmed until end January. Mid-year I have to think hard about going back to full-time technical writing, for the purposes of paying off the mortgage, funding house renovations and working up some superannuation, as time is marching on and the books don't seem to be getting any more commercial.

This year is remarkable more for what's not in it than for what is—after three years on the Literature Board and the Vogel judges' panel, I feel a bit wobbly at the thought of a whole year without any obligatory reading in it. As I was sorting books into boxes to make way for renovation of what was the boys' bedroom, I found that a New Year's Resolution had formed in me, to read no book out of a sense of duty, but only books that promise to be inspiring.

I think it'll be an interesting year.

Quick note re grant apps

This, from over here, struck me as spot on for grant applications:

The thing to avoid is the “To whom it may concern….” person appearing. It’s amazing how many people when they sit down to write down something become someone else. The “To whom it may concern” person suddenly appears. You don’t talk like that. So don’t [write your application] like that. Make sure that you can see you in your [app-writing voice].

Lisa Hannett's blog posts are useful too, in a longer, deeper, more detailed way!

Christmas e-gift? Tender Morsels e-book bundle

Right now, from, say, Readings or Avid Reader, you can buy an e-copy of Tender Morsels, bundled with the Black Juice story 'Singing My Sister Down'.

That's two World Fantasy Award winners in the one bundle, and for only $9.99.

Make someone you love cry this Christmas—in a good way.

I'm just about to sign an agreement to have my whole Allen & Unwin backlist come out as e-books within 12 months or so. Might have to write some posts about some of the more interesting historical documents. (You can already get my gritty-realist YA novels from the mid-90s, The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly, for the Kindle.)