Sale!

I’ve sold my story “This is My Angry Face” to Cosmos Magazine. Yay!

It’s my second sale there – the first was way back in 2010 – and, not counting the new stories in Angel Dust, my first Australian sale since the beginning of 2013.

Guest post on The Never Never Land anthology

I have a guest post on Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s blog about the upcoming CSFG anthology, The Never Never Land, as part of her current series on the writing community. Also about the exasperating consequences of titling one of your anthologies ‘Next’.

CSFG anthologies and community

Elizabeth asked me to write this post for her community blog series, on how community has helped and hindered us in pulling together CSFG’s forthcoming anthology, The Never Never Land. It’s a topic Elizabeth knows a fair bit about, having edited Winds of Change, the anthology before the last one, which was Next – although the Next anthology isn’t to be confused with the one that’s currently forthcoming, that’s The Never Never Land…

A moment of your indulgence, if you please, for an explanatory digression: Thanks to our esteemed comrades, the good Doctors Simon Petrie and Rob Porteous, we are forever constrained from calling any future anthologies the next one, because Next was the last one… Read more

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Upcoming course on writing SF and fantasy

Starting from 5 August, I’ll be teaching a 6-week evening course on writing SF and fantasy at the Canberra Institute of Technology, Bruce Campus. Details as follows:

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
CIT Solutions, Bruce Campus
6.30-8.30pm on 6 Wednesdays from 5 August – 9 September 2015

This course is aimed at writers with an interest in science fiction and fantasy or who are already actively writing in those genres. Covering the key aspects of the two genres it includes sessions on world-building, creating alien and fantastical creatures and characters, alternate and future technology, systems of magic and storytelling in SF and fantasy worlds.

Bookings: You can book online at CIT Solutions.

Story sample (with illustrations!)

I recently ran a mini-workshop with my daughter’s primary school class about illustrating stories in magazines (something I used to dabble in, once upon a time). We looked at some examples and talked a bit about what the illustrator is trying to do (make people interested, give them some idea of what kind of story it is) and trying not to do (give away the ending). Then I read them the first few pages from “Almost Angels”, one of the previously unpublished stories in Angel Dust, and they all had a go at illustrating the scene I’d read.

The story was actually originally written for my kids, from a prompt my son handed me one day, which consisted of a piece of paper with some stickers on it, of two beat-up old robots, a slug monster and a red cartoon planet (the sort with giant asteroid craters all over it). “Write a story about this, Dad!” I’m sure I’ve kept it somewhere, but do you think I can find it? Anyway, here’s some samples of the kids’ art from the workshop, along with the opening few pages of “Almost Angels”: