Not one, not two, but THREE reprints!

The Wagga residency was two weeks of energetic writing and leisurely exploring the very green countryside in that part of the Riverina, with Griffith Agricultural Show and Junee's Broadway Museum being highlights. Wagga's Museum of the Riverina was beautifully and professionally curated, too, but I also like a collection that's just everyone's old stuff piled into rooms with assorted labels (or not).

The reading and workshop went well, and I drafted 130 pages (about 43,000 words) of novel, which I'm now typing up in fits and starts—am about two-thirds of the way through. It would be nice to have something like a full draft by the end of January, but I've a short story to write as well before December, and a weekend away, and a competing project, and a part-time job, and there's Christmas, so we'll see.

I still have major decisions to make, in terms of the era in which this novel is set, and the country where it's all happening, and what kind of person one of the two protagonists is going to be. How much of the manuscript I'm typing will stay is anybody's guess—in fact, there are bits I'm not typing, being pretty sure they're wrongheaded—but I'm not throwing them away yet either, just in case they're not.

In the meantime, three of my stories have been reprinted in recent anthologies, which were waiting at the PO box when I got home from Wagga. From left to right, they are:

• Ellen Datlow's Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology, which is a very cool production from Hydra House, containing stories from Clarion West alumni with comments on each story by CW instructors. "Mulberry Boys" (first published in Ellen's Blood and Other Cravings, is in here, with comments from the wonderful Howard Waldrop on my back-asswards approach to my career.
• Then there's the handsome hardback The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, edited by Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene and published by Ticonderoga Publications, which is a big, solid chocolate box of stories, one of which is "Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow", which first came out in Jonathan Strahan's YA witches anthology Under My Hat.
• Thirdly, Adolfo Aranjuez has again edited Award Winning Australian Writing for Melbourne Books, and this 2013 edition contains the Aurealis-garnering and Shirley Jackson-shortlisted "Bajazzle", my nasty sheela-na-gig story, first published in Cracklescape.

Right, back to writing something original now.