Rowan's Con

This is the very first of my video blogs. May also be the last, we'll see! But I promised my editors of Shuttered that I'd film myself doing the trick that the character Rowan does. It's taken me a while to get round to it, because I had neither a sherry glass, nor a brandy glass, but I found some in a charity shop the other week and bought both for about 75p. Bargain!

Please excuse the sound blip, I think I got a text. ;)

Win Goodies!

I've been extremely lax on my blog. I've been very busy in my life - just moved into my very own places, got pet snails, got diagnosed as a coeliac. More on all this later! I'm planning on doing some vid-blogs, so you'll get to see (and hear) me. But just a quickie for now... Visit: Joyfully Jay's blog leave a comment on the post before midnight on the 11th of June, and you could not only win a copy of Shuttered, but also a KINDLE and a load of other goodies. :)

The Angler Fish, or, Sometimes Ladies are Larger

I watched the film John Carter recently, and was quite pleased with the female alien characters because they didn't have boobs. (Boobs are great, but bear with me...)

But, my mind was wandering and I was thinking about it and yeah, it did annoy me that these female aliens were still weaker than the males.

When I went to BristolCon last year, I attended a panel called Humans are Weird. The woman running the panel (a doctor) spoke about all the ways that humans are biologically different from animals and was discussing the ways we could apply this to fantasy races or sci-fi creatures, but said that often, we as writers, still base our non-human characters on humans. So the females will still have boobs, the males will still be bigger and stronger.

I wish more writers would stop thinking 'human'.

There are loads of animal species on Earth where the female is the big, strong one. So even all these 'but it's realistic for the women to be smaller and weaker!' arguments I hear are just lazy nonsense.

One of my favourite animals is the angler fish. You know the big deep-water fish with the scary teeth and the light dangling over the front of its face like bait? Yeah. That's the female. Male angler fish are teeny tiny. They're basically just a pair of testicles. A male angler fish will attach itself to a female and she'll basically absorb it and just use it to make babies.


Hyenas are interesting too, if we want a mammalian example. It's difficult to tell males and females apart because the females have psuedo-penises (which they give birth through, ouch!), and they're as aggressive and nasty as the males. Hyenas are matriarchal animals - like elephants and bonobos..

So, next time you write a non-human fantasy character, or an alien, please be aware that even on our planet, there are species where the female is the big scary one.

Blog Hop

These questions are hopping over to my blog from the gorgeous and sexy (she told me to say that) Jo Zebedee who answered them just last week on her blog. Jo's represented by Molly Ker Hawn of the Bent Agency and her first novel is out in Autumn from Tickety Boo Press. Go check it out.

What am I working on?

I'm currently working on an urban fantasy which is possibly the most complex thing I've ever written. So it's slow going! Lots of angst and real-life problems mixed in with the supernatural.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Well, the MC is an immortal lesbian, for a start. It's like Hollyoaks meets Lost meets Buffy, I guess. My style of writing is easily read and I'm hoping to get some humour in there too, I don't want everything to be all dark and depressing.

Why do I write what I do?

I write lots of supernatural and paranormal stories because I love that sort of thing! As you can see from my blog, I go on ghost hunts quite a lot. I'm not necessarily a believer, but I'm open minded and would love to see something for myself. My cousin's a medium too, and a few years ago now I used to sit with a group and we'd all learn about tarot and crystal healing and various things that I wasn't very good at.

How does my writing process work?

I usually get a feel for a character come into my mind and then I just sit down and start writing. I don't plot. I might scribble down ideas for future scenes in my notebook though. I have to have silence when I'm writing - no music, and the dog has to be asleep!

Who's next on the blog hop?

Stephen Palmer is the author of eight novels: Memory Seed (Orbit 1996), Glass (Orbit 1997), Flowercrash (Wildside 2002), Muezzinland (Wildside 2003), Hallucinating (Wildside 2004) and The Rat And The Serpent (Prime Books 2005). In 2010 PS Publishing published Urbis Morpheos. In 2014 Infinity Plus Press published his surreal slipstream steampunk novel Hairy London. Ebooks of Muezzinland, Hallucinating and The Rat And The Serpent are available from Infinity Plus, who also recently acquired the ebooks of Memory Seed, Glass and Flowercrash. His short stories have been published by Wildside Press, Spectrum SF, NewCon Press, Mutation Press, Eibonvale Press, Solaris, TFQ and Unspoken Water. Further short stories will appear in 2014.

Thaddeus White is the author of fantasy novels Bane of Souls and Journey to Altmortis, as well the fantasy comedy Sir Edric's Temple.

Hunter Frost is the author of What Can Brown Do For You? which features in Torquere Press's Men in Uniform anthology. Visit her site to see what else she's up to.

Sex on Wings by Jo Zebedee

Today I'm being joined by Jo Zebedee author of the soon-to-be-released Abendau trilogy (which I've had the pleasure of reading - they're brilliant so keep an eye out for them!)

~

Sex on Wings

I've always had a soft spot for a nice, sexy space pilot. I blame Han Solo for it, mostly, but Barbarella - all thigh-high boots, wide-eyed and shocked by the evil Dr Durand-Durand - has something to answer for, too.

pic by Victor Habbick from Free Digital Photos

It's not just the sexy ones; I even like the Buck Rogers of this world, and the never-seen outside of the pages of a book, Ellie Quinns. For me, frankly, no space opera is complete without a space pilot, blaster hip-holstered, dashing, irreverent, and unpredictable. (There might be predictable ones out there; they're not real space pilots. Ever. No matter how low their intimate voice is, or how their eyes flash, they don't know their landing bay from their orbital habitat.)

So, why do space pilots equal sci-fi to me?

Firstly, full disclosure. I say science and I say fiction and they're not equal. For me it's three quarters fiction and one quarter science, half of which is dodgy. I used to be embarrassed about that. What sort of sci-fi writer couldn't give a stuff that faster-than-light travel isn't possible, or that you can't hear sounds in a vacuum? Surely these things matter? And they do, to an extent - mainly to ensure I'm not laughed at too badly. But, frankly, being constrained by little details like the speed of light doesn't get you to the end of the Kessel Run in a half-decent time, and I always fancied a run at that.

So, when I say sexy pilot, I mean space opera in all its gloriously colourful, cheesy, shoot-from-the-hip best. Because space opera brings something to the genre that it needs: escapism. Not grim stories about surviving the colonisation of a hostile world wearing an oxygen tank and a baggy space suit, equipped only with a magnetic tool-kit. My one attempt at such a story was terrible. Only the sex scenes were interesting and, frankly, by then I needed something to excite me. Which isn't to say all such stories are awful, but that a space-opera-bunny shouldn't be forced to obey the laws of physics.

It makes me wonder if sci-fi doesn't shoot itself in the foot a little. The genre remains niche compared to its elf-clad brother, fantasy. Escapism, surely, is part of the reason we read fiction. For realism, I could turn to misery-memoirs (but won't.)

I'm a die-hard sci-fi reader, with a library behind me including Clarke and Heinlein, Bradbury and Herbert. I adore Paul Atreides as the Fremen do, but I still feel (or felt, I'm in recovery) the need to hide what I love of the genre, for fear of being seen as low-brow, light-weight even. When popular writers like Bujold get criticised for winning the Hugo and Nebula by factions of the community, it drives the belief that such writing - the kind I love and the kind I write - isn't worthy of the serious genre of science fiction. If that's the case, how we attract new readers seeking escapism? For me, it's about widening the genre and accepting that some readers like to escape into new worlds, with characters beyond those who are Earth-bound.

For that reason, I say bring me your space pilots who don't know what gravity does. Hand me your mavericks who don't care about a critter-ridden planet with no air. Give me a quirked smile, a raised eyebrow, and a thigh-high boot and I'm yours for every page-turning moment. Because, for me, that's what sci-fi's about.

Jo Zebedee is represented by Molly Ker Hawn of the Bent Agency. Her first novel is due for release in Autumn from Tickety Boo Press.

Pinterest

I'm quite late at discovering this, I know, but Pinterest is a pretty good site for writers. I've used it (after the novels were finished!) to pin pictures from my stories.

This one is from The Beautiful Man (which is currently out on submission).TBM

Sweeper

The sound of bristles sweeping cobbled streets reached her ears as she cowered in the darkened room. They swept slowly, pushing the brooms rhythmically.

Rasp... rasp... rasp...

There were no other sounds. No voices. No animals. She blinked into the darkness and pulled her knees up to her chin.

She willed it to rain. They could sweep the streets all day but the stains would remain.

Paint the town red, she thought. And she grinned.

A tear ran down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. Her smile faded as she listened to the sweepers. She wondered if anybody had survived this time. She hoped so.

Coward, she told herself.

But still she sat in the darkness a little longer. Waiting.

Rasp... rasp...

And then silence. She sighed and got to her feet, feeling along the wall for the door handle. She left the room, shielding her eyes against the daylight.

The sweepers lined the street, their brooms still. Sun glinted off their metal skin and she squinted.

The cobbles were smeared red and brown but were no longer coated with glistening entrails. She peered down a drain to see the water beneath running almost black. Things floated on the surface.

She looked away. “Good work,” she said.

And the sweepers raised their brooms in salute.  

(First published in Everyday Weirdness in 2010)

The Gods

The beaches were lined with bones and the bodies of the dead. That was until the Gods came forth from the ocean and the dead awoke screaming and terrified.

I had seen the footage on the News. Live footage. I remember that it had cut off halfway through; I remember hearing a woman’s scream and then nothing. And I had changed the channel and watched a sitcom.

I didn’t believe it was happening or rather, I didn’t want to believe it was happening. I told people that it was a gimmick, an advertisement, something to laugh about.

But I sort of knew it was real. Deep down. I felt it in my bones.

I heard people say that it was aliens. I didn’t laugh at that. I hoped it was aliens. Aliens were less terrifying than Gods. Aliens were nothing to do with me.

Graveyards filled with zombies. But only because the Earth had pushed up the bodies, turning them out of their graves and giving them back to the world.

I remember not being afraid. I was just deeply sad. The Gods were angry and everybody was being punished for it. There was no escape even in death.

I watched from my window as buildings fell and the sky filled with dust. In my city a statue taller than the highest skyscraper ran amok, ripping up roads, hurtling bricks and lampposts and cars. And people.

Some people said that it was robots. Giant robots built by man that had turned against us. Or perhaps it was alien robots from outer space.

I wished that it was. I tried to believe that it was but by now I knew...

It was the Gods.

Other people had known before me and as forests burned and seas froze over, more people came to realise.

I wish it was the media, or aliens, or robots, or monsters, or the military, but it was the Gods. And we had angered them.

I had angered them. I had...

I stood on a sea of frozen ice and watched as the sun exploded.

(First published in Everyday Weirdness in 2010)

Completion

I started The Kingdom of Malinas when I was seventeen and self-published it several years later in 2008. The second book in the trilogy, The Empress Graves, needed a rewrite and a whole sub-plot adding before it could be published on my birthday in 2010.

The third and final book in The Power of Malinas trilogy, The Barbarians' Key, has now finally been written. I started it years ago, after finishing the first draft of the second book, but I only got to chapter sixteen before I went on to do other things.

I picked it up after completing The Empress Graves and worked hard trying to remember what I had intended the resolution of the series to be! Luckily, I kept notes, so I looked through those - keeping some ideas, abandoning others, even deciding not to add in two new characters I'd created. The plot is far more complex than in the other two books, there is more happening and the action takes place throughout the country of Aldenland.

I have been through my first draft, tweaking and editing and correcting mistakes, and now the book is with a lovely beta reader who will let me know exactly which bits work and which don't.

I will then work on it again. And soon, I hope, I will release it on Lulu.

In the meantime, here is what the cover will look like: