Tag Archives: Horror

Last Recommended Reading Post For A While…

Aside

My previous recommended reading post featured all Canadian authors, but I did read a bit outside of my nation in 2012. In the spirit of fairness, here is some work I really enjoyed by American and U.K. writers.

  • Folly of the World, Jesse Bullington. Orbit Books, December 2012
  • The Steel Seraglio, Mike Carey, Linda Carey, Louise Carey. CZP, April 2012
  • Silver, Rhiannon Held. Tor Books, June 2012
  • Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. DAW, August 2012
  • The Warlock’s Curse, M.K. Hobson. Tesla, October 2012
  • Soul Trade, Caitlin Kittredge. St. Martin’s Press, September 2012
  • Greatshadow, James Maxey. Solaris Books, January 2012.
  • Discount Armageddon, Seanan McGuire. DAW Books, March 2012
  • Forged in Fire, J.A. Pitts. Tor Books, June 2012
  • This is Why You Fear Me, Robert Shearman. CZP, November 2012
  • A Pretty Mouth, Molly Tanzer. Lazy Fascist September 2012

Most of the short fiction I read in 2012 was Canadian, but here’s a couple of American standouts from Fungi:

  • “Last Bloom on the Sage”, Andrew Penn Romine, Fungi, Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Orrin Grey eds., Innsmouth Free Press, December 2012
  • “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”, Molly Tanzer & Jesse Bullington, Fungi, Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Orrin Grey eds., Innsmouth Free Press, December 2012

In The Spirit of Christmas, Have A Free Story

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A few years ago, I extended a challenge to my writing group for our December meeting: write a 500 word Christmas-themed fantasy story. That meeting was mostly going to be a potluck anyway, so we agreed to read the stories aloud rather than critiquing them. Most of us played along, and it was a lot of fun (if you like stories about Christmas slashers and wishes gone wrong–apparently we had some issues with The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year.).

So here is my contribution, which remains the first (and only) piece of flash fiction that I’ve written:

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Nicholas stepped nimbly over the coals, still smoldering, within the fireplace. He had years of practice, and nary an ash clung to his polished, gleaming black boot.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall. He smiled at the old joke. Practice.

But in all those years, this was something new. It was new, and that bothered him. He pulled the long parchment list from within his heavy coat. Checking it once, he didn’t like what he saw.

He checked it twice.

But there was no disputing it. This house wasn’t on his list. Nicholas shouldn’t have stopped here. There was no longer a reason for him to have stopped here. That poor little girl. He shook his head. There had been nothing he could have done. Not all wishes, he sighed ruefully, can be granted. And not all pains can be soothed with toys. It had broken his heart, what she had wished for, but it just wasn’t within his power to grant.

There were no decorations in this house. No tree. No garland. No mistletoe. Framed photographs lined the mantle of the fireplace, but no stockings dangled beneath the images of a once happy family.

Nicholas turned his back on the unhappy dwelling and started back towards the chimney. A creak on the stairs stopped him in his boots. It was a soft noise, followed by the shuffle of fabric over hardwood.

A child’s slippers.

“Santa?” a weak voice rasped from the stairs.

He couldn’t be seen, unless he chose to be. That was the one rule that governed, and protected him. Him, and the magic of Christmas both.

He often chose to be seen.

“Yes, my child,” Nicholas answered as he turned; ready to flash the hundred watt smile that would bring a rosy cheeked, dimpled grin to the girl’s face. Perhaps the list was mistaken?

The smile died as he saw her, now practically on top of him. She’d crossed the intervening distance between them in a flash. Her breath, coppery and rank, wafted over him, and her grip upon his mittened hand was too firm to shake.

“You didn’t bring me what I asked for last year,” she said petulantly as she pressed her tongue to an oversized canine. A bead of black blood welled up slowly from the small wound. “But someone did.”

Nicholas screamed as she jerked his head down by his snowy white beard. Blood sprayed across the girl’s little face.

His blood.

She lapped at the arterial spray, like an animal. Her face was a vision of ecstasy. His eyes stopped focusing as she whispered in his ear.

“Now every child in the whole world will get my wish.”

#

Later, in every house that still believed in such things – and there were many – children left out plates of homemade cookies, and tumblers of milk, beading with condensation. Wherever they had succumbed to slumber a voice whispered through teeth that glinted like knives, and a stained rusty beard.

“I never drink…milk.”

Fin

Chilling Tales And Apparitions Too…err 2

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I just donated to Michael Kelly’s Apparitions 2 on Indiegogo.

Much like with my Kickstarter addiction, I am quite fond of this, the Canadian equivalent, and am hopeful that my streak of endorsing winners continues. I had a chance to interview Michael a while back, in fact, it was my first ever story for Prairie Books Now (it was also a lot of fun). I finally had a chance to Meet Michael in November during the 2012 World Fantasy Con. We also shared a table of contents in Tesseracts 16, and I can tell you, Michael is one hell of an author–and one hell of an editor.

Chilling Tales, also edited by Michael, was in my mind the strongest Canadian anthology of speculative fiction to come be released in 2011, and any number of its stories deserved a place on a year’s best list. If you’re into horror and crowdsourcing, Michael Kelly’s new anthology is definitely worth funding.

This interview originally appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Prairie books NOW.

chilling-tales

Chilling Tales Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd Did I Live

Michael Kelly, Editor

Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

$14.95 pb, 224 pages

ISBN: 978-1-894063-52-4

Underneath that cool Canadian reserve, a dark heart beats, believes Michael Kelly, editor of Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live.

Chilling Tales features stories from Canadian horror fiction mainstays Brett Alexander Savory, Sandra Kasturi, and Nancy Kilpatrick, as well as some of the nation’s brightest (or should that be darkest) up and comers such as Gemma Files. Robert J. Wiersema, best known for his literary fiction, leads off the collection with a honky-tonk infused ghost story.

Kelly sensed a distinctly Canadian worldview, a “tangible loneliness” and “disquieting solitude” permeating the stories of his collection. But he feels Canadian writers are “merely doing what comes naturally—in this vast, sprawling land of ice and prairies, of wind and rock and water, of major urban centres encroaching on the barrens with spreading tendrils—exploring the other, that vastness.”

Anthologies such as Chilling Tales have been something of a rarity, although Don Hutchinson’s Northern Frights series left “an indelible impression” upon Kelly.

“There’s no easy answer,” he says, of the dearth of all-Canadian horror collections. “Part of it, I surmise, might be that Canadian genre writing is somewhat marginalized by the bigger publishing houses.”

It’s no surprise to Kelly that the two most recent such volumes were published by Chilling Tales’s publisher, Brian Hades at Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy. “It is the smaller houses with an indie spirit that will take a chance on a project like this.”

Kelly felt it was time to showcase Canada’s dark heart. There was no open call for submissions; instead he went hunting for authors that “shared that strange dark worldview” he was conjuring.

“I also mentioned that they could recommend some authors to me, as well. It was a bit of word-of-mouth and also me soliciting authors I admired.”

A writer himself, the Pickering, Ontario-based, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Kelly enjoyed the challenge of editing the collection.

“There’s a certain order to the stories, a flow, whether you’re moving from something short and shocking, to something literary and poetic, to something prosaic. It’s a balancing act,” he says. “When I’m writing fiction, I just want to tell a story. I’m writing for me, though, no one else. When I’m editing a commercial anthology, I’m cognizant of the reader.”

The result? An eminently readable, page turning collection, tales that leap from the page, burrowing into you. It is as if the authors are kids around a campfire, each trying to one up the other with the imaginatively macabre. From ghosts, to issues of faith, to the very unusual skin condition in David Nickle’s “Looker”, Chilling Tales has a velocity that keeps its reader huddled up for just one more story.

“I’m hoping this first volume will act as a benchmark for future volumes,” says Kelly. “I wanted to show that Canadian writers can be as literate, entertaining, edifying, and as scary as their contemporaries. Of course, I already knew that. Now, everyone will know.”

My World Fantasy Convention Roundup

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Another World Fantasy Convention has come and gone, and as my blog readers seem to enjoy these reports (if my site stats are to be believed) here’s the WFC2012 report.

Better late than never, right?

World Fantasy is my favourite convention, hands down. Maybe I imprinted on it somehow, World Fantasy 2008 in Calgary was the first away from home conference I ever attended. I talked comic books with Tad Williams, football with George R.R. Martin and Hemingway with Joe Haldeman. I met tons of people who became good friends. That is bound to make an impression on a guy.

This year’s convention was also held in Canada, so I knew I’d also have a lot of friends to meet up with. It was an early start for me, as I flew off Thursday morning with friend and fellow Turnstone Press author, Karen Dudley. We’d hoped to meet up with another Manitoba writer, Shen Braun, who was arriving at the same time as us, but on a different flight, and split a cab from Pearson airport to the conference hotel (it was quite the jaunt as World Fantasy Toronto was actually in Richmond Hill, or so I kept being told). Unfortunately, Shen didn’t get in on time, but Karen and I did share the plane with Winnipeg writer Gerald Brandt. Even more luck, our mutual friends Eileen Bell and Ryan McFadden were on route to the conference and near the airport, so they swung by to pick us all up. It was a tight squeeze with five writers and their luggage in a Toyota Corolla, but we made it work.

Arriving at the hotel was a homecoming of sorts. Every time I turned around, there was someone else I knew. A great feeling. Over the weekend, I not only connected with friends who are scattered across the continent, but met many new friends.

After ditching our bags, we had to hustle to get through registration and grab our swag bags (the swag at WFC is truly epic, this is only what I could fit in my luggage, I left at least this much behind on the trade table.)

We had to hustle because Thursday night, Turnstone was sponsoring the Ravenstone Books Launch Party for Thunder Road and Food for the Gods. I’m glad the party was Thursday, it meant I didn’t have it hanging over my head for the entire weekend. I know the way I roll, and there was no way I’d have been able to relax and enjoy the convention until the launch was over. Marie Bilodeau from Ottawa served as our host and Bakka Phoenix was there to sell copies of our novels. We managed to get the room set up, and just finish having a bite to eat before it was time to open the doors and the worrying began. What if no one shows up? What if everyone shows up? Fortunately, we had just the right mix, the room was full, but not so packed that we couldn’t move about and mingle. I had a great time, signed a bunch of books, and met a few people I’d only know through Twitter or Facebook. It was over too soon, but it did teach me how stressful organizing an event can be. My hats off to people who do it all the time.

Friday:

I took in Julie Czerneda’s reading from her forthcoming fantasy novel, A Turn of Light. I’ve been curious about this one for a long time, as I’ve always had my feet deeper in fantasy than in science fiction, looking forward to reading the whole book. The samples Julie read were enough to entice me to read the book when it releases.

At my very first World Fantasy Con, I met Chandra Rooney. She was on a panel about writing tie-in fiction. I read her Tarot Cafe novel, The Wild Hunt, and interviewed her here. It was great to be able to chat for a bit after her reading. The samples Chandra read are unpublished right now, but you’re in for a treat when they do see the inside of bookstores.

I think the only panel I took in this year was Sandra Kasturi’s interviewing World Fantasy special guest, Tanya Huff. Sandra’s a riot and Tanya is also funny as hell, and a consummate pro to boot. She shared some great stories from her career with a packed and eager room. Good times.

Every World Fantasy Convention also includes a mass signing, putting every author in one big banquet room for two hours, and lets the signature hounds go wild. It was a better experience than I was expecting. I did actually sign some copies of Thunder Road, despite Fantasy giants like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss being in the same room. I handed out a bunch of my temporary tattoos and had fun chatting with Neil Godbout from Prince George (who’s debut YA novel, Disintegrate, is well worth checking out) and Robert Sawyer.

After the signing had concluded I made my way up to the hospitality suites and flitted between the EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Fall launch, the Tor Books party and the Con Suite. I happened to be around when it was announced that James A. Moore had wrote a story about Dr. Doom and Barbie. There was a bet of some kind involved, I never did suss out all the details, something about 55$ and popcorn. James joked it was the best per word rate he’d received to date. Christopher Golden read the story aloud to a dozen or more listeners. The story, about 1200 words, complete with a beginning, middle, and end, was evidently written in about 45 minutes. It was amazing. James promised to put it up on his blog at some point. As soon as it surfaces, I’ll link to it, because it’s too good not to read.

I picked up a copy of Shanghai Steam (complete with an awesome story by my bud, Shen) and read the first five minutes of “Back in Black” from Tesseracts 16, joined by fellow contributors Michael Kelly, Sandra Kasturi, Adria Laycraft and Randy McCharles.

Saturday was mostly spent taking in readings:

James L. Sutter, author of Death’s Heretic and fiction editor at Paizo did a short reading, and then led a fun Q&A about writing and gaming with his audience. I’m still holding out hope that Paizo will let him write a novel set in his Distant Worlds Pathfinder Campaign setting. It’s may be a bit of a fringe product, but it was one of the coolest game accessories I’ve seen in years, and it was obvious James had a real passion for it.

Another Paizo author, Dave Gross, had the room next. Dave read from Queen of Thorns. It was a saucy reading for 9:30 in the morning. Man, I love the character of Radovan! I picked up Dave’s previous book, Master of Devils after Dave’s reading at When Words Collide 2011 in Calgary, and have been looking forward to his next book ever since.

Suzanne Church won the Aurora Award for her short story “The Needle’s Eye” so I wanted to check out her reading (also, she promised candy). Suzanne read snippets from a few different stories (bought her issue of Clarkesworld while I was picking up my “rejected by Clarkesworld card), all very different, but all excellent.

I had to run to make Helen Marshall’s reading from her new collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side, but it was worth it. A very intriguing story, and perfect delivery in the reading.

I made it back from supper in time for the epic ChiZine party. I’ve met so many of the ChiZine authors, and they’re all awesome people in addition to being great writers, but the gravitational pull of that much awesome in one room made for a very crowded party. So I wandered the halls roaming between the consuite party, ChiZine party, and the hotel bar.

It sounds bad, but I mostly behaved (mostly). I had to be up at 5 to get ready for my flight home.

I survived the weekend on two hours of sleep a night and managed not to pick up any con crud despite seemingly being surrounded by coughers and flu carriers (Looking at you, Mrs. Dudley). It was also quite the change of gears to go from drinking bourbon with friends for four days and being on no one’s schedule but my own to plunging back to the incessant ringing of telephones and vague requests for “that blue book, you know the one.”

Next week the western leg of the tour starts! Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, I am coming for you…

Write on.

Lurching Home From Brandon

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Home from Brandon now, and I had a blast attending Corey Redekop’s reading of Husk at the Evans Theatre. I tagged along with Corey and THIN AIR GM, Perry Grosshans, for the drive out. It was cool to see a bunch of my Prairiecon gaming buddies come out for the event, and to see Brandon SF writer Patrick Johanneson on his home turf. A great (and also gross) reading from the book preceded a brief Q&A, and then Corey signed a bunch of books.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Husk, AKA the Great Canadian Gay Mennonite Zombie novel, here’s the book trailer:

After the signing, the Evans Theatre screened the new Canadian Zombie Comedy (don’t call it a Zomedy, PLEASE) A Little Bit Zombie. The movie was a riot, the cast was great, and the audience was laughing out loud. I’ll definitely watch the flick again, as there were a bunch of jokes I’m sure I missed in that laughter. Also, if I ever see a can of Tactical Bacon at Safeway, I’ll be buying it.

Check out the trailer for A Little Bit Zombie:

Thanks Perry and Corey, for letting me join you for the ride out, and thanks to writing chum, Shen Braun, for letting me crash at your house, without your generosity, I probably would have missed an awesome event.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Norse Mythology Updates To Talk About A Comic Book

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From Prairie books NOW Fall 2011 issue:

Has She No Shame?

Comic explores good, evil, and all things in between…

“What would Batman be without the Joker? How about Van Helsing without Dracula?”

These are questions Lovern Kindzierski muses on when explaining why he prefers villains to heroes. But for the Winnipeg comic creator, it is also an aesthetic decision.

“The villains always had the best designed costumes. Think of Maleficent. She was so much more attractive than the dumpy fairy godmothers.”

It was on his honeymoon that Kindzierski first conceived of the story of Shame, which has now come to fruition in the first of three graphic novels, Shame: Conception. He entertained his new bride with a tale “about the nastiest woman that ever lived.” His wife then held him hostage with a pen and notepad the next morning until he’d written this first arc of the story.

Shame, an outwardly beautiful child was born to physically hideous, but kind, Mother Virtue, when the healer allowed herself one selfish wish—a child of her own. It was from this wish and the meddling of the demonic entity Slur that Shame came into the world. Mother Virtue knew what her daughter would become and so locked the child away in a personal Eden, a place named Cradle. Only there could Shame be safe from the influence of her father.

“I very much like the idea that shame would come from virtue.” Kindzierski says, noting how exhilarating it was to tell this story for the first time. As he was making up the tale, he rolled through the associations of the word shame, and the story became clearer and clearer to him.

“The power of such loaded archetypes just swept me along like a straw being driven by a tornado,” he says.

When Shame embraces evil, Kindzierski’s words are given unsettling weight by his artist collaborator, John Bolton. Cradle’s idyllic cage becomes twisted and bizarre.

“He is a genius,” Kindzierski says of Bolton, feeling  there could not be any artist better or more appropriate to illustrate Shame: Conception. “John is able to portray all of the extremes of beauty and horror of the story and do it all masterfully. As an artist he has no weaknesses.”

Kindzierski, an artist himself, is best known in comics as a colourist.

“I had been writing my own stories for my comic art from way before I broke into the industry,” he says. Nothing came of these first efforts, but eventually Kindzierski’s art got him work in the field. A short story for a Marvel Comics fund raiser was well received and “as I wrote more I got more to write,” he says.

To Kindzierski the great strength of comics as an art form “is that they mainline directly into your understanding of the story,” working on a conscious and unconscious level with their combination of imagery and the written word.

Our understanding of this particular story will deepen in the next two books of the trilogy. Shame’s corruption “has become like a cancerous growth on the face of the world,” Kindzierski says, teasing at a swelling body count now that Shame is free from her prison.

“I like my heroes dark and my villains darker.”

Holiday Accountability Checklist

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As of this moment, I’m on holidays from bookselling until after my book launch. Of course, when you’re a writer, holidays from the day job usually means typing until your fingers bleed (in between the paroxysms of self-doubt and inevitable bouts of internet time-wastage). I do plan on taking advantage of these dog days of summer, visiting family, playing tennis, etc. but mostly, I’ll be working.

For your observing pleasure I’ve decided to post a list of my writing goals for the next couple weeks. I know there is no way in hell all of this will get done. It probably wouldn’t have been possible even when I wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook, but by itemizing every project big and small that is on my to-do list, and most importantly, making it public, I’ll try that extra little bit harder (you know, to avoid the shame (and stink) of failure).

So, here’s the list:

  • Choose the passage I’ll be reading for my Thunder Road launch.
  • Attend my own book launch.
  • Don’t screw up my own book launch.
  • Choose the passage I’ll be reading for my THIN AIR appearance.
  • Finish the current (3rd) draft of Tombstone Blues (four chapters and a short epilogue left to look at).
  • Walk the Winnipeg locations of Tombstone Blues for veracity & feeling (this will be repeated in the fall, as the novel is set in November).
  • Arrange research trip to the virus lab.
  • Actually go to the virus lab.
  • Start 4th draft of Tombstone Blues.
  • Finish 4th draft of Tombstone Blues.
  • Finish my story for submission to Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Dead North anthology.
  • Go back to the drawing board (notebook?) and completely redraft my Urban Green Man short story so that I’m not embarrassed to have Adria Laycraft and Janice Blaine read it.
  • Revise two short stories that On Spec offered to take a second look at in their next submissions period.
  • Write a guest blog for As You Were.
  • Write a new blog post every day.
  • Update a few things on my website.
  • Answer interview questions for my first confirmed interview.
  • Brainstorm ideas for a horror story for when John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine reopens to submissions.
  • Brainstorm ideas for the forthcoming Innsmouth Free Press anthology Swords and Mythos.
  • Dust off an old, too-long short story to see if I can resurrect it as a novelette or novella for Innsmouth’s new Jazz Age Cthulhu venture.
  • Dust off my 2nd draft of a Sword and Sorcery manuscript and give it a reread, as I’ve been itching to get back to it lately.
  • Look at the outline for the as-yet-untitled third book in the Thunder Road trilogy.
  • Most importantly, write new damn words, every damn day.

Wow. I will be busy, won’t I?

When Words Collide Roundup

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Calgary’s literary festival “When Words Collide” is fast becoming one of my favourite conferences. Outside of maybe the World Fantasy Convention, this is most fun I’ve had as a writer. A lot of the credit goes to organizer, Randy McCharles (who also chaired World Fantasy when it was in Calgary–my first real con, FYI) and won an Aurora Award this year for founding and organizing last year’s festival.

Thursday I was supposed to attend the Bundoran Press launch of Hayden Trenholm’s Blood and Water, but by the time I’d finished supper with an old friend, the event was just getting underway, so it was a low key but very late evening of talking comics for me instead. Probably a good thing as loaded as the rest of the weekend was.

One of the things about being a Winnipegger, is that inevitably when you travel across the country (or the world) you end up hanging out with other Winnipeggers. So I did spent a bit of time with fellow ‘Peg specfic writers Sherry Peters and Gerald Brandt. It was also nice to see that Aurora nominated Greg Chomichuk attended the con (and brought his dad, Walter–lovely man). I also had lunch with Jean and Joedi, two publisher reps out in Calgary. It was nice to see them on their home turf. Normally we only get to talk over book catalogues in Winnipeg.

I didn’t take in much programming Friday, instead hanging around the Dealer’s Room catching up with old friends. I met the Tyche Books team–they’re doing some nice looking work, keep an eye on this rising Edmonton Press. They sent me home with some recipes from Krista Ball’s new book What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank (Brains and Butter! Together at last! Yum!). I also managed to reconnect with Seattle author Rhiannon Held. We met in Columbus, Ohio for the 2010 World Fantasy Convention and I interviewed her for the release of her debut novel, Silver. It was very cool that she made the trip to Calgary. I also caught the tail end of the Keynote speeches (Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta).

I took in the SF Canada and On Spec party which honoured the Aurora nominees as well as the joint launch party for Bundoran Press, Breathless Press and The Tenth Circle Project. Eventually I ended up at an impromptu scotch tasting (you’ll sense a theme here) that proved to be very, very dangerous.

Saturday morning I dusted myself off in time for my panel on Telling a Book by Its Cover (with former Saskatoon colleague Kent Pollard, Stephanie Johanson of Neo-Opsis, artist Dan O’Driscoll and publisher Justyn Perry). It went well–I think. Sometimes it can be hard to judge. I was moderating, I think I kept everyone in the conversation, and that we stayed mostly on topic. Page proofs showed up on my door the week before the con, so I didn’t prepare as well as I’d hoped–I also didn’t want to lug an entire suitcase of books with covers that worked and covers that didn’t on the plane with me.

You never know who’ll you bump into at these things, so imagine my surprise when Sarah Kades and I recognized each other in the hotel hallway. We used to work together at the book store before she moved to Calgary, where she now works as an archaeologist and writes adventure romance. I’ve made a mental note to check out her book.

I rarely go to the Kaffee Klatches, but I hadn’t seen mystery author Anthony Bidulka in a few years. Anthony is an amazing raconteur and had some great tales to tell. A fun, genuine guy and one hell of a writer. I’m really looking forward to his new series of books.

Next was the first set of readings I attended. Nicole Luiken read from her YA novel Dreamline, Jennifer Kennedy read from her Norse influenced story “Fingernails” which appeared in Danse Macabre, and Cat McDonald read from a work in progress.

Eventually, I shined myself up for the Aurora Awards Banquet; grey dinner jacket, salmon coloured shirt and matching tie and my Autobots belt buckle. The food would have been adequate if I had paid twenty dollars rather than forty for my banquet ticket, but at least there was cheesecake at the end (and whiskey throughout). My good friend Rob Sawyer won for best novel–which makes three in a row, his WWW trilogy has made a clean sweep of the award. When asked who will win, I always tend to vote with my heart rather than my head but this year I was wrong more than I was right on either count. One result I’m very happy to report I was right on in both regards was Helen Marshall taking the Aurora for Best Poem/Song. “Skeleton Leaves” is simply an amazing work.

I was also very excited for On Spec to take home an Aurora. It’s always great to see Barb Galler-Smith, Diane Walton and the On Spec team at conventions. They also published the first story I sold, and even cooler, the artist of the cover for that issue, Dan O’Driscoll, won an Aurora too.

Here’s the full list of winners:

Best Novel
Wonder, Robert J. Sawyer (Penguin Canada)

Best Short Fiction
“The Needle’s Eye,” Suzanne Church, from Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live (EDGE)

Best Poem/Song
“Skeleton Leaves,” Helen Marshall (Kelp Queen Press)

Best Graphic Novel
Goblins, Tarol Hunt (Webcomic)

Best Related Work
On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic, Copper Pig Writers’ Society

Best Artist
Dan O’Driscoll

Best Fan Publication
Bourbon and Eggnog, Eileen Bell, Ryan McFadden, Billie Milholland, and Randy McCharles (10th Circle Project)

Best Fan Filk Musician (for music based on sci-fi)
Phil Mills

Best Fan Organization
When Words Collide, presented to founder and chair Randy McCharles

Best Fan (Other)
Peter Watts, “Reality: The Ultimate Mythology,” Toronto SpecFic Colloquium lecture

Saturday night was party night (More parties! Woo!). There were several going on around the hotel. IFWA (Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association) honoured the Aurora Award winners. EDGE publications had a party to celebrate the launch of their fall line. Eventually I ended up at the ChiZine Publications room party. Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi were there of course, as was Napier’s Bones author Derryl Murphy. I also met author and publisher at Faery Ink Press Clare Marshall and hung out a bit with Colleen Anderson. I may have also accidentally pitched a book I haven’t written yet while complaining about how hard I find it to do elevator pitches for my own work (I do a pretty good job of selling other people’s stuff–eleven years of bookselling helps there, but I find it almost impossible to think of a good tagline for any of my own stories). I left the party with an advance reading copy of Robert Shearman’s forthcoming collection of short stories Remember Why You Fear Me.

Sunday came all to soon after three straight late nights and early mornings.

At the EDGE Fall launch, I read from “Back in Black” and was told by the Sheriff of When Words Collide, one Cat McDonald, that I rocked the mic like a bulldog. Everyone at the launch delivered great readings (Dave Duncan, Tim Reynolds, Jennifer Kennedy, Randy McCharles and Adria Laycraft). Immediately afterwards, I read with fellow Turnstone Press author and writing group chum, Karen Dudley. I read from Thunder Road, Karen read from Food for the Gods. It wasn’t my best reading, I’m afraid. My EDGE reading was near the end of the slot, so there was only ten minutes or so between it and my Thunder Road piece. Didn’t quite have the batteries recharged, or didn’t switch gears fast enough. Not the end of the world, but disappointing. I will say big thanks to Eileen Bell, Erika Holt, and Ryan McFadden for being among the audience, especially since Eileen and Erika were at the readings Karen and I did at Keycon.

I stayed in the room for the next group of readers: Bob Stallworthy, Susan Forest, and Colleen Anderson. A little bit of poetry, a little bit of prose. Very good stuff. After a late lunch, I took in the Tenth Circle Project readings with Eileen Bell, Randy McCharles, Ryan McFadden and Billie Milholland. This is a great neo-noir shared world series with some fun science fictional elements.

The Dead Dog party is a convention staple, where the con survivors take in one more night of socializing and fun. So glad I stayed in town for it this year. There was a crazy lightning storm (which despite arriving several beers in, had me scribbling notes in my notebook) that a bunch of us writer types watched from the hotel’s exterior balcony. I didn’t quite close the joint down, at 3:30 am I decided that turning into a pumpkin was in my best interest.

Best part of the con is how many friends I have out in Alberta now. I’ve already bought my membership for next year.

Guests at When Words Collide 2013 include: Patricia Briggs, David B. Coe, and my publisher, Jamis Paulson of Turnstone. When Words Collide is changing venues for next year, and while I loved the open central area of the hotel that allowed you to see who was currently in the bar or having a meal (and those exterior balconies), the place was also hot as Surtur’s ball sack. I definitely won’t miss that. Hopefully new venue, the Carriage House Inn will be a good fit.

Still Not the Semi-mythical Post About My Trip to Ottawa

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It’s been a month since I returned from Ottawa, and still no blog post about it. Just what the hell is my problem, anyway?

Mostly it has been camera issues, as I wanted to include some photographic evidence of the trip. Camera issues have been sorted out, laziness issues continue unabated…

Seriously though, various writing things have come up which made blogging seem like procrastination (given how much I like procrastination you’d think I’d have been all over the blogging instead of re-watching movies like Broken Arrow and Face Off.) So…what kind of “writing things” (that’s the technical term–I checked with my editor) have I been up to:

I finished a review of David Nickle’s excellent Rasputin’s Bastards for The Winnipeg Review. It was a great read, but it was also a big Russian bear to review.

Copy edits and page proofs for Thunder Road. I’m not sure how many of you reread the books you buy, but I’ve reread this book I’ve written more times than I can easily count. Page proofs are also the terror-stage of publishing. It’s the last chance I’ll get to change anything. Which of course means I want to change everything.

With only a month until the launch of the book, there’s been a lot of unexpected (okay, expected, but completely ignored) things to take care of. I spent a good week tracking down the mailing address of what seems like pretty much everyone in Winnipeg. I promised the store I’d blow the roof off the place (the metaphorical roof, not the literal roof–that would get me fired and arrested). This seems more likely to happen, as within a week of the date being set, we had enough reservations that the event grew too large for its initial venue. So, thank you, Winnipeg. That was an amazing feeling.

I’ve finally posted the cover for Thunder Road. If you missed it on Facebook and Twitter, here it is again, because I can’t stop looking at the thing:

Trilogy, you say? I’m hard (ha!) at work on Tombstone Blues. And somewhere in this sea of first book publicity I still need to finish that damned sequel. It’s coming along. More slowly than I’d like, but hopefully I won’t be embarrassed of the book when I turn it in to Turnstone Press in November.

I’ve added a second reading at When Words Collide. I’m part of EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy’s fall launch. I’ll be reading the first five minutes or so of my Tesseracts 16 short story “Back in Black.”

In other short story news, I’ve finished my galley edits for “First They Came for the Pigs” which was a surprisingly painless procedure. Pre-sale on the Fungi anthology happens in November, release is set for December.

I also finished a short story: “A Taste of the Other Side” (almost finished, actually, still some tiny amounts of polish to be lacquered on to it) and will be submitting it to the editor this week. This one was for an anthology where I’d been invited to submit a story. That was a big deal for me, it also means added pressure to get it right out of the gate. I think it works. We’ll see.

The last “writer thing” I’ve had to do involved writing a one hundred word bio of myself. It seems every time I need a bio, a slightly different word count is asked for, and so I must toil at trying to make myself seem a) interesting and b) not a total douche. Thanks to The Daly Show, a little less douche has become my biographical mantra.

Write on!

My Keycon Roundup

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Another Keycon has come and gone. Keycon is my home science fiction and fantasy convention. I’ve been attending the con regularly since I started writing and always found it to be a fun, laid-back experience. Keycon also usually has a very strong literary track of programming.

This year’s author Guests of Honour were Timothy Zahn and Jonathan Maberry. Other out of town writers in attendance included Robert J. Sawyer, Eileen Bell, Marie Bilodeau and Erika Holt. Manitoba’s SF&F writing contingent were out in force as well, with programming including myself, Karen Dudley, Sherry Peters, Ronald Hore, Chris Rutkowski, Craig Russell, Gerald Brandt (Gerald, I’m including you even though you didn’t do any panels–next year you’ll have no choice, Mr. Published author!) and Lindsay Kitson.

This year’s con really kicked off on Thursday for me. Marie launched Destiny’s Fall to a small, but enthusiastic crowd at McNally Robinson, and we went for drinks and appetizers afterwards and made plans to explore Winnipeg Friday Afternoon before the con officially started. Also, Erika gave me an awesome Inkpunks button! (Seriously, you must check out their shared blog, it’s invariably filled with awesome.)

Touring visiting writers about Winnipeg/Manitoba is awesome, and in many cases, because I didn’t grow up in the city myself, I get to experience these places for the first time, or at least, for the first time in years (I feel there is another blog post in that sentiment somewhere…). Wendy, Marie and I met Rob, Sherry and Erika at The Forks, in the Oodena Celebration Circle (one of my favourite spots in Winnipeg), and grabbed a bite to eat before exploring the market (I bought a Spider-Man toque/half balaclava that everyone was very disappointed I didn’t wear for my reading–it is now my Twitter and Facebook avatar) and taking in the River Walk, amazingly for this time of year, it was not under three feet of water. Afterwards, I took Marie to Louis Riel’s grave, and we walked the grounds of the St. Boniface Cathedral and the Manitoba Legislature before grabbing our memberships to the con and fleeing downtown just ahead of rush hour traffic.

We all met up again for a barbecue at Karen’s house (Bison burgers!) and were joined by Eileen and Winnipeg artist (and former Keycon Artist GoH) Kari-Ann Anderson, and as Opening Ceremonies were looming we made our way back to the Radisson.

One of the reasons I love attending cons is that I get to talk face to face with my twitter and Facebook pals. At the Ice Cream Social following Opening Ceremonies (where I learned we’d all missed being there for the “Also Attending” announcement–we were in the Dealer’s Room, dropping coin) I met up Dieselpunk author and Twitter pal Lindsay Kitson, who joined us for some of the evening. I didn’t take in any programming Friday, instead enjoying the many Hospitality Suites (I think the Nautilus-themed decorations of the New Cairo Club suite were my favourite–even if the drinks they served were not).

My reading was at 10:00 am, on Saturday. As such, I was expecting to be reading to Karen Dudley, who was sharing the reading slot with me, and one or two other folks if I was lucky. Instead, we had a turnout of close to twenty people! If that doesn’t sound like a lot, trust me, for a con, it is. Many attendees were new friends (and old–including a couple who paid for a day pass just to attend the reading! Thanks Mike and Hilary!), some people I know only by name or brief conversations at the con, but a handful–completely new to me. My publisher, Turnstone Press also printed chapbooks that held the first chapters of Thunder Road and Food for the Gods, and Keycon was kind enough to hand these out with their program books. It was an amazing experience, and I’m grateful to everyone who came and listened so attentively, and who seemed to really enjoy what they heard.

This year’s panels attended included: Does it always have to be Good vs. Evil (Timothy Zahn–whose Heir to the Empire is the post-Empire Strikes Back highlight of the Star Wars franchise in my opinion–and Craig Russell, author of 2011 Aurora nominated Black Bottle Man). Storytime with Marie, where Marie Bilodeau told the story of finding the perfect ending to the first story she sold (if you’ve never checked out her storytelling you’re cheating yourself of an amazing experience). Feminism in Fantasy was more a discussion of feminism and women’s issues in general than in fantasy specifically, but I thought the panelists did a good job (Marie Bilodeau and Karen Dudley (panel crasher!) moderated by Keycon stalwart LeAmber Kensley). Stereotypes in Speculative Fiction (Jonathan Maberry, Marie Bilodeau) which didn’t have a lot to do with the topic at hand, but was still tons of fun as Jonathan is an amazing storyteller.

Drinks with Jonathan and most of the attending writers followed, where we talked vampires, folklore, politics, American views of Canadians and vice versa, bourbon and why the Zombie Apocalypse will be all Jonathan’s fault. Jonathan knows a lot about science, folklore, and shares my love of Knob Creek bourbon. He even enjoyed his first Canadian beer, a Fort Garry Pale. I also got to meet and chat with up-and-coming Winnipeg writer Tara Lee Baxter. She loves the Norse stuff too, so I can’t wait to read her book someday.

I cut my con a day short this year–for my Mom’s birthday–but I’m already excited about next year. The Stars Are Right is the the theme, 100 years of H.P. Lovecraft, 50 years of Doctor Who, 30 years of Keycon. So far confirmed as a guest is Innsmouth Free Press editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who is also co-editor of Fungi, which contains my story “First They Came for the Pigs”. I’m really looking forward to meeting her, and participating in all the eldritch horror that Keycon has to offer.

Write on!