Weird & Speculative

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

A strange Sunday

In Uncategorized on November 9, 2009 at 12:42 pm

Sunday was one of those days when all I could seem to do was lounge on the sofa and read, in that semi-dream state where words mingle with reality. In the morning I took a sojourn among The Sea Kings of Mars thanks to Leigh Brackett. I have had the Fantasy Masterworks volume of her stories for some years, and was two thirds of the way through the titular story when I realised I had read it before. Later that afternoon, having had a nice chat with Garth Nix at World Fantasy, I returned to Sabriel and as with all good books, found a little more than I had the last time I lost myself in its pages.

I’ve been listening to audio and video recordings of Australian aboriginal speakers for the story I am researching. I would love to find a phonetic transcription so I can see the dialect represented on the page. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know. I’ve also been reading about the Stolen Generations. I’m wary of touching on a subject like this without any personal connection to it, but the story has taken me there so I think I have to trust it.

Stories in dreams and dream time stories. A strange Sunday.

Gemmell Award Winner

In The Fiction Front, Uncategorized on June 20, 2009 at 1:48 am

Andrezj Sapkowski has won the innugural David Gemmell award for Fantasy fiction (Fantasy with a big F, as the organisers say).

There is a lot to like about the Gemmell’s. I loved David Gemmell’s novels as a teenager and was sad when he passed away. I can really enjoy a rollicking good heroic fantasy, mark my consistent praise of George R R Martin as evidence. And any award that harnesses popular opinion and gets 10,000 votes for its shortlist deserves mighty praise. Read the rest of this entry »

To self publish or to not

In The Fiction Front, Uncategorized on March 23, 2009 at 2:42 pm

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about self publishing recently. I’ve been considering two projects that might be described as self publishing. And I’ve been looking at how self publishing fits into my professional life as a literature development worker. And I’ve just been following a thread incited by a Facebook status update from Mary Robinette Kowal on the brutal existence of self published authors at conventions. Basically, I think its time I put some of this into words.

Read the rest of this entry »

Between Flights

In Uncategorized on June 27, 2008 at 3:58 pm

We are trapped in light
Circling the destination
Home ever more distant

Touch Down

In Uncategorized on June 27, 2008 at 4:05 am

In San Diego. Have not slept for 24 hours! Very tired, full update when rested.

Horizon confirmed for Murky Depths #6

In Uncategorized on June 19, 2008 at 5:38 pm

In the excitement of my Welsh journeys, I haven’t mentioned that my story ‘Horizon’ is now confirmed for issue #6 of Murky Depths, debuting in December. w00t!

End Game Extract

In Uncategorized on June 15, 2008 at 6:37 pm

An extract from the opening of my new story, End Game. If anyone wants to help by offering feedback on the full story it is in the next post, password protected. Drop me a line and I will forward a password. damiengwalter@gmail.com

*****

Harvard names it a low risk run once too often. The fence makes his fat lipped grin as Spaceman memorises the number at a glance. He should take a walk up Main Street, get lost in the plate glass maze of store fronts and rich women, he knows it. But work is work, and besides, he always gets a game on when he visits the Algerian.

Spaceman steps off the tram two stops early, skips across four lanes of traffic and the central reservation, expert navigator of this outpost of the monoculture, this anyplace cloned from the flesh of London, New York, Beijing. He comes up on the tower from behind, sliding in through a fissure in the rusting chain-link.

They answer the buzzer fast. The Algerian and his boys toke hard and sleep late, but this morning the door opens quick. They do not even ask his name. Spaceman’s feet go heavy like lead. He could be standing on the surface of another planet, mass three times as great, weighed down by a crushing gravity. A girl shoulders her way out of the tower, pushing a buggy in front. Spaceman looks at a baby swaddled in pink, bright and grimy nylon. The girls eyes return him a dead addict stare. No more thinking Spaceman, time to go to work.

And he is through the door.

Charlie Stross Interview

In Uncategorized on June 9, 2008 at 4:41 pm

I interviewed Charlie Stross for todays Guardian.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2284587,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10

Boring old sci-fi

In Uncategorized on May 2, 2008 at 10:26 am

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or “SF” constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

Read more

The Alt. Report 2008

In Uncategorized on April 27, 2008 at 10:51 am

Alt.Fiction 2008 was, as predicted, fun, entertaining, enlightening and…expensive!

Ticket to Alt.Fiction – £20. Various snack meals – £30. Too many excellent small press books and magazine subscriptions – £100. Getting to hear John Jarrold bang his fist on the table whilst telling us all that publishing is a commercial industry – £PRICELESS!

I’ve seen JJ talk at every con and festival I’ve been to in recent years, and to be frank I agree with pretty much everything he says. Publishing is a commercial industry. Good isn’t good enough, new writers have to be great. You need to know the spectrum of writers working in your genre today, thats who you will be compared with, not writers of thirty or forty years ago. Agents, publishers and  bookselers are investing in an authors career, not just one book. JJ was backed up by the commisioning editors for Harper Collins Voyager and Games Workshop Solaris imprints, and novelist Mike Marshall Smith. It was a stark but encouraging message, because what came over clearly was that all the professionals in the publishing biz are really passionate about writing they think is good enough and work damn hard to champion it.

Charlie Stross’ reading was excellent. I now have a signed ARC of ‘Haltiing State’, the novel which has seen Stross summoned to address the Pentagon Defense Commiteee and is on the summer reading list of the United States Secretary of Defense. Stross had brought the wrong notes of a talk he had given at MIT the week before. We were up to it, the audience told him. No you aren’t, he responded, flicking past the third extract from Halting State to a less jargony piece from his yet to be published space opera. I’m going to get an interview with Charlie soon, I want to know more about this Pentagon thing.

Outside the talks, most of the fun and games were taking place in the bar and book hall. Elastic Press had a bunch of excellent small press titles and I renewed by subscription to Interzone and Black Static. I think the money I spend on magazine subscriptions is singlehandedly propping up the specualtive fiction market place at the moment. As usual Alt.Fiction was really about chatting to people in the genre community, and its amazing what you find out. Not that I’m telling you lot, you’ll just have to make it to next years Alt.Fiction  and find out for yourself!

Audio is Our Future

In Uncategorized on April 12, 2008 at 12:54 am

I’d like to gamble that when clever people were kicking around ideas about how the internet would revolutise society, no one predicted the revival of the oral tradition. I know if anyone had told me I’d be using my super powerful computer to listen to stories much the same as my ancesteros told around the campfire, I’d have scratched my head and said ‘What?!’.

Perhaps because I’ve been lucky enough to have had a couple of great audio productions of my stories, Cthul-You for BBC Radio and Circe’s over at the Drabblecast, I’ve been converted to the potential of audio. Especialy for short fiction, which I think is just at the start of a great renaissance driven by audio.

I think the big abscence from this years Hugo and Nebula ballots is Steve Eley over at Escape Pod. If theres an editor who has brought more new readers into the genre in recent years I’d like to know about them. I’ve found more great stories on Escape Pod than any other venue, including the major magazines, and discoevered some of my favourite writers including Mike Resnick, Tim Pratt and Greg Van Eekhout. And although I’m biased I think Norm Sherman at the Drabblecast is such a top narrator, and his podcasts have such great production that he is quickly coming up behind Escape Pod.

Theres something about a well read story that beats more sophisticated forms of adaptation like video. Maybe because it isn’t an adaptation. You are getting the real story, and if the reading captures the voice of the text then it can be both a very intimate and a very powerful way to engage writer and reader. Its also convenient. Audio fits into our ever more hectic modern lifestyles. You can listen to a story on a commute, in the shower, at night in bed. You can also share it with other people – just like sitting round the campfire again, audio takes stories back to be a communal experience when we want them to be.

The spur for this post today was listening to Graves by Joe Haldeman on the Star Ship Sofa podcast. Give it a listen, it really is an amazing (and pretty creepy) story.

Anyone elese have any audio recommendations? I’m always looking for more good stories.

Radiohead Suck

In Uncategorized on April 4, 2008 at 11:42 pm

This is really sad. I’m watching Radiohead on TV. They suck. What happened people? They used to be alright. Now they sound like a nervous cough.

Somebody give Tom York a Lockett.

The Longest Wait

In Uncategorized on March 26, 2008 at 2:42 pm

A number of writers have declared places won on the Clarion West workshop, herehere and here. I still have seen nothing either way on Clarion East / San Diego which is where I have applied. There is still hope, but it is growing dimmer.