Sea Hearts/Brides book trailer

Look at this, my very first book trailer! I promise, I don't take up all the screentime; there are some very decorative, tantalising bits at the beginning!

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.