Collision cover

The front cover for the forthcoming World's Collider anthology is now available for public consumption:

Available from Nightscape Press, it'll be out this summer (or winter, if you're living in the same hemisphere I am). That is, of course, dependent on whether I've written that 100 word bio I've been asked to do. Better get on that...

(And for more info about the book, release dates and the like, you can follow the fan page on Facebook. Go on.)

Hearts for Dead Red

The release of Ellen Datlow's Honourable Mentions list the other day not only gave praise to individual writers, but - by extension - to the books they featured in. One book to come off particularly well was Ticonderoga's Australian vampire anthology Dead Red Heart, with 16 of its 33 stories making the list.

Now, in further good news for the collection, Black Static Magazine in the UK has published a review that has plenty of love for the book, commenting on every story individually before giving the work as a whole the thumbs up.

You'll have to grab a copy of the mag itself to read the whole review, but in the meantime I'm happy to say the reaction to my contribution was a positive one:

In Pete Kempshall’s ‘All that Glisters’ the employees of a mining company discover that the legends about an old, abandoned mine have some truth to them, but the precise nature of the menace they face adds a startling note of originality. Along with the unusual concept, this story has some very deft characterisation, with two gay surveyors and a bigoted mine owner portrayed convincingly, while even the calculating agent has some qualms, so that he isn’t the cardboard cut-out villain of the piece.

Dead Red Heart is still available to order from Ticonderoga, Amazon and The Book Depository.

Ellen Datlow's Honourable Mentions 2011

Just a quick post, this one, if only because it's being reported extensively elsewhere.

Uber-editor Ellen Datlow has just released her Honourable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year, and I'm pleased and privileged to say I have a story on the list. The yarn in question is All That Glisters from the Australian vampire anthology Dead Red Heart, and it's just one of an impressive number of stories from Australian writers to make the cut.

Congrats to everyone chosen, especially the significant number of my mates who also got mentioned. Far too many to name here: you know who you are :)

There are a shade more than 600 stories listed overall (if there's anyone on the planet who reads more than Ellen Datlow, I'd be very surprised...), and you can check out the full list here.

Damnation and Dames launch

This time last week saw Damnation and Dames get the equivalent of a bottle of champagne smashed across its bow, when it had its official launch. Scheduled for release as part of this year's Swancon programme, the paranormal noir anthology was sent out into the world by one of the guests of honour at the convention, Marianne de Pierres, alongside the brilliant publisher/editor team from Ticonderoga Books, Russell Farr and Liz Gryzb.

I was very pleased to be asked along to help out, and as well as scribbling in some copies of the book, I was persuaded to do an impromtu reading from my story Sound and Fury. Given that I was on the brink of a bout of flu that ended up wiping out most of the next week (which is why this blog post is so very late...) it was a relief to get through the excerpt without coughing up internal organs midway through. Not the kind of horror the audience had signed up for.

So, a big thanks to everyone who attended and bought copies of the shiny new book - for anybody who wants to pick one up for themselves, you can order one direct from Ticonderoga or (quite soon, as I understand it) the Book Depository and Amazon.

From left: Russell Farr, Liz Gryzb, myself, Marianne de Pierres.

Reading from Sound and Fury.

(Pictures courtesy Liz Gryzb)

Countdown to launch

Just a quick reminder to anyone in the Perth area that Damnation and Dames will be launching at Swancon this Friday.

Damnation and Dames is a collection of 'paranormal noir' stories from the likes of Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter, Alan Baxter and Felicity Dowker, Rob Hood, and yes, me. And it's edited by Liz Grzyb and Amanda Pillar, who've got stellar records at this kind of thing, so you know it'll be well worth a look.

Usually you'd have to have forked out for convention tickets to attend, but this year - for the Friday only - a gold coin donation is enough to get you in the door. The launch kicks off at 5.30pm at the Pan Pacific Hotel on Adelaide Terrace in Perth city. I'm not completely sure what the format is, but I imagine there'll be signings and stuff.

So if you're at a loose end on Friday, pop along. Be good to see you!

Collision alert

Promotional material for the upcoming anthology World's Collider is starting to trickle out. This here is a postcard that will be distributed to every attendee at the World Horror Convention in Utah:

For a number of reasons, the publisher for the anthology had changed, and Nightscape Press will now be distributing the book. Release date to be confirmed, so watch this space.

Working without a net

I’d hoped to get an update online a little sooner than this, but real life being what it is, other things got in the way. Never mind – that just means there’s lots to report later... For now, though, I promised to provide some details about the project I’ve decided to work on during 2012. So here goes.

After a few years of concentrating on short stories (and after some harassment from other writers, urging me to get my finger out), I’ve started work on my first novel. It goes without saying that this is an entirely different discipline to the one I’m used to and the learning curve isn’t steep so much as precipitous.

If anything’s held me back from attempting something bigger than my usual writing, it’s the planning. With short stories, I plot meticulously – there’s still room for the tale to breathe, to change and surprise me, but I don’t normally write the first word unless I know with a reasonable degree of detail how I’m going to get from A to B. Taking a similar approach to a novel (while fitting it in around a mentally draining day job) would mean I’d still be tinkering with the plot in 2022, so I made the decision to just start. I know very roughly what I want to happen, and in what order, but large swathes of this story will be developed on the fly. It’s like working without a safety net – it could be spectacular, or I could end up getting scraped off the floor of the Big Top.

What it has done is get me writing – I’ve committed to 2000 words a week, with the target of 80-100,000 by the end of the year (allowing for slip ups). I write on Sundays, and during the week concentrate on plotting the next weekend’s draft. And so far it’s working.

The problem is, it’s not very efficient.

I’ve found that the key part of writing anything is getting words on the page – no matter how rough, how crap it is, if you have a first draft, you can fix most things in the rewrites. But on this kind of scale, with this level of planning? That really cool piece of character development I thought of during the week? Clashes with what I wrote in week one. That idea that emerged on Thursday lunchtime to pump up the ending? That’ll mean reworking week seven. Again. Ten weeks in, and I’ve had to go back and revise at least half of my total word count.

I’ve attempted to limit the damage by purchasing Scrivener, a piece of software the praises of which Mac users have long sung and which has finally become available for Windows. A one-stop organization tool for long-form writing, it’s actually proven very useful so far, structuring my draft more solidly than if I’d not used it. But the process is still very daunting. And while it’s still early days, I’ve not yet got a sense of whether or not the project is really coming together. For someone who’s used to having everything wrapped up prettily in 5000 words or less, it’s shit-scary.

But I won’t know unless I try, so I’ll forge on and try to update here on progress. One thing that has emerged from the process, however – and something I’ll take away even if this does turn into an almighty car crash – is that I’ve once again got the taste for writing. After such a long fallow period in 2011, piecing this story together has fired my enthusiasm for others – I have two short story drafts running parallel to this novel, more stories on the go at any one time than I’ve ever had.

And that, at least, is a win.