Attendees at the 2012 WriteFest

This year I’ll be attending WriteFest to run a Pitching Workshop. It’ll be hands-on where you get to work on condensing your book for the pitch. I’ll help find the core of your story.

YA presenter Cheryse Durant with two aspiring writers during one of her school visits.

There’s lots happening. Dr David Craig will run a workshop: Dirty Tricks – the Nature of Undercover Operations I’ve seen David Craig speak on detecting lies using body language. It was fascinating. He’s had over 20 years experience in criminology and his CV reads like the back-story for a thriller hero. His Book, Lie Catcher, is available from Big Sky  Publishing.

See more on this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNiNTAPaDR8

There’s workshops on the craft of writing, writing for Young Adults, Branding for Writers and the Chemistry of Reading. (Bet you never expected to hear that). For a full program see here. And for background on all the presenters see here.

Last year Sandy won the QLD Writers Centre Johnno Award for her contribution to QLD writing.

Sandy receiving her award from the chair of the QWC

So if you live within a couple of hours drive of Bundy drop in and spend a weekend with people who are passionate about writing and reading.

With Piro in centre (she must be standing on a box) and Byren and Fyn in the background, Clint Langley has once again done a brilliant job. Thank you Clint and thank you Solaris!

Thursday, Richard Harland will be there with bells on running a Writing Steam punk workshop from midday until three. Richard’s had a wonderful time in France recently, promoting his Worldshaker series. As you can see, he gets right into the steam punk era.

At 4pm there will be a Steam Punk High Tea. What could be more delicious? And then there’s the Opening Cocktail party at 7:45pm.

Friday, 11 am Fablecroft Press will be launching One Small Step (Go Tehani). (One of my stories is in this anthology). Unfortunately, I have to work on Friday so I won’t be able to make the launch.  I’ll fly down late Friday night and stagger into my hotel room.

At 2:30pm there’s a Guest of Honour interview with Marc Casgione, Publishing Director of Angry Robots. (more on the GoHs down below.

And you can’t miss the Regency Gothic Banquet  starting 7pm.

Gorgeous gloves from this site.

On Saturday morning I’ll be running a workshop preparing lucky authors who will pitch their books to Marc Gasciogne later the same day.

At 2:30pm there will be a Guest of Honour interview with Naolo Hopkins, writer of challenging SF.

And at 5pm the Ditmar Award Winners will be announced, along with the winner of the Hemming Award.

8pm, the attendees will let their hair down at the Junkyard Cathedral Masquerade.

Sunday there will be a panel on Book Covers, which I’ve been prepping for. And I’m sure there will be a fierce debate of the possibility of a female Dr Who at 12:30pm. (I saw plenty of female Dr Whos at Supanova).

Is the World ready for a Female Dr Who? by Vinne Bartilucci

See here for a full list of workshops, events and pitching opportunities.

The Guests of Honour are:

Naolo Hopkins from the other side of the Pacific. She is the author of four novels and a short story collection (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, Skin Folk).

Marc Gasciogne, Publishing Director of Angry Robot, UK. See an interview with Marc here at Bibliophile Stalker. Marc will he hearing the pitching session . (I’ll be running a workshop on pitching to help the writers prepare).

From Australia, we have Karen Miller, author of more fantasy books than you can shake a stick at.

Fan guest of honour is Rose Mitchell, long time fan and power-house behind many conventions including  World Cons.

And special guest, Kaaron Warren, writer of challenging macabre stories and novels.

A great time will be had by all, four days of programming is a big task to organise. See my interview with Donna and Nicole.

In no particular order with the judges’ comments:

The novel Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (Random House Australia)

“Forsyth weaves together the stories of three vitally different women amongst the flavours and fortunes of 16th and 17th century France, exploring the themes of sex, sexuality, love, ageing, beauty, vengeance, jealousy and fear.”

The novel Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

“Sea Hearts takes us on a journey through what it means to be male and female, lover and loved, thing and person, and Lanagan’s rich prose goes beyond the fantastical towards new sensibilities and understandings.”

The trilogy The Outcast Chronicles (comprising the novels Besieged, Exile and Sanctuary) by Rowena Cory Daniells (Solaris)

“The Outcast Chronicles trilogyis a tour de force of extraordinarily detailed world building. Rowena has created political intrigue, attempts at genocide, a dangerous world of magic that many believe to be gods, with flawed, noble and ignoble characters on all sides. There is poetry and wit in the writing, and characters that stay with you long after you have finished this gripping trilogy.”

The novel Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier (HarperVoyager)

“Winter Be My Shield is a suspenseful, grim, and gritty heroic fantasy novel – the first of a trilogy – set in a cold, wintry land. Jo Spurrier focuses the events around a dangerously powerful young woman, a horribly wounded war veteran, and a cruel, yet strangely sympathetic villain, all of them coming to terms with their tormented pasts. The author is a remarkably accomplished storyteller who must surely have a huge career ahead.”

The winner and runner-up of the Hemming Award will be announced at the national SF Convention, Conflux, next weekend. Best of luck to everyone and you are already winners.

Supanova is heaps of fun. Amazing costumes, lots of talented people, writers, artists, actors from right across the mediums and associated speculative fiction sub genres. It’s always great to catch up with readers. It’s really nice to go somewhere, where the things you love aren’t considered weird.

This is me with Meaghan in Brisbane

Here I am at the last Supanova, hanging out with Isobelle Carmody and the Dark Lord.

So if you are in Melbourne and plan to come to Supanova, drop by and say Hi!

And we even got a nice write up in the print media! (The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald)

Narrelle M Harris will interrogate two fellow authors – and herself! – about why they’ve turned from fantasy to crime to explore Melbourne’s underworld and other-worldly…

Narrelle M Harris writes both crime and fantasy. She is the author of two frequently hilarious crime vampire novels set in Melbourne: The Opposite of Life and its sequel, Walking Shadows, published last year by Clan Destine Press. Both feature daggy Glen Waverly resident, Gary Hooper, who might be Melbourne’s (or maybe the world’s) least impressive vampire and his geekgirl librarian friend Lissa.

Narrelle also writes in the business sector. She created the Melbourne Literary iPhone app in association with Sutro Media.

Alison Goodman has received world-wide recognition for her fantasy books Eon and Eona which have been sold into 18 countries, and translated into 11 languages. Her first crime novel, A New Kind of Death, previously published in the USA as Killing the Rabbit, is now available to an Australian audience, thanks to Clan Destine Press. It’s a dark and wickedly adult comic thriller with just a touch of speculative intrigue and was highly recommended in Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards.

Alison was a D.J. O’Hearn Memorial Fellow at Melbourne University, holds a Master of Arts, and has taught creative writing at postgraduate level. She is currently working on a new fiction series.

Fantasy writer R C Daniells has also turned her hand to crime – with a paranormal twist in The Price of Fame (Clan Destine Press). At its centre is documentary maker Antonia Carlyle who uncovers dark secrets in St Kilda when she researches the cult ’80s band, The Tough Romantics, and its doomed singer Genevieve James. The iconic band’s rise to international fame, she discovers, had as much to do with its cutting edge sound as its history of tragedy, betrayal and murder…

In her spare time, Rowena has devoted five years to studying each of these martial arts – Tae Kwon Do, Aikido and Iaido, the art of the Samurai Sword.

If you’d like to attend, here’s the info:

The Rising Sun Hotel, cnr Raglan St & Eastern Rd, South Melbourne (no lift). Mel Ref: 57, H2.Try 1, 55, 112 or St Kilda Road trams. Free on-street parking after 6pm.

$10 (members/concession )/$15 (non-members). Dinner upstairs from 6.30pm. Men or ‘brothers-in-law’ welcome. No bookings necessary. 10% for members from the Sun Bookshop bookstall.

Info: Carmel Shute on 0412 569 356 or go to www.sistersincrime.org.au

I like listening to music when I write. Not all the time, of course. Sometimes you need the sounds of silence so that the difficult words have somewhere to line up and make their own rhythm.  But generally, and especially during first drafts, I like building up a soundtrack to the world I’m building.

I have eclectic tastes in music: my collection contains classical, light opera and new age albums right next to alternative rock, pop punk, folk punk and the occasional heavy metal band. I like to discover new bands and new styles, though not everything is to my taste. I’m open to persuasion, though. I’m always chasing after the corollary to Sturgeons Law.

(Sturgeon’s Law being that 95% of everything is crap: the corollary therefore being that the other 5% is worth looking out for. One day I’ll find the 5% of yodelling that works for me.)

Music has been a long love of mine. I learned piano as a child, played the recorder at school and on and off over the years I’ve attempted songwriting. I co-created a Blake’s 7 filktape back in the 80s (writing lyrics mainly, though also one piece of music, and I even sang on one track.)  I’m better at lyrics than melodies, though, and sadly my vocal range is limited and kind of nasal – but the call of music is always near.

In fact, for me, music and writing are never far apart. My crime novellas, Fly by Night and Sacrifice, are about two musicians. I’ve written lyrics for some of my stories, and music is often referenced in my books. It seems perfectly natural to me to develop a soundtrack for each book I write.

By ‘soundtrack’ I don’t mean ‘playlist’. I’ve compiled a playlist or two to accompany books I’m working on, but often once I’ve done so, I don’t listen to it. I tend to pick songs that reflect aspects of the plot or

character development, but then I find that in the writing, things move and change; they subtly change or veer off, and songs I might have liked while I was working on the first draft of chapter five are no longer right by the time I’m at chapter 25. By the second or third rewrite they may not be relevant at all. Worse, the song might be subconsciously pushing me in a particular direction which lacks subtlety or that truthfulness which is so important and getting to the heart of the character or their story.

I suppose a playlist focuses too much on the lyrics, which can be detrimental. Soundtracks are more about the general rhythm and atmosphere of the aural landscape that contributes to the mood and setting.

So playlists don’t usually work for me – but I do definitely have soundtracks that go with my writing. When I wrote Fly By Night and Sacrifice, I spent a lot of time listening to REM and About Six Feet (my brother in law’s band – he allowed me to use the lyrics to some of the songs in the book). When I wrote Witch Honour and Witch Faith, Loreena McKennitt, Clannad and Enya got a lot of air time.

The Opposite of Life had a more eclectic soundtrack of alternative rock, but by the time I got to Walking Shadows, I was steeped in pop punk and the likes of Fall Out Boy, though more recently the soundscape consisted of Shinedown,, The Matches and Florence and the Machine.

The artists listed for each book are of course not the only ones I listen to while working. My choices can be fairly wide-ranging and include quirky lounge music (like The Real Tuesday Weld), show tunes from Cole Porter as well as music selected for its ambience.

It’s not completely random, though. The choice of the right bands, the right kinds of songs, the right mood and tempo, can be important in getting my head into the right space.  I work full time in day jobs to pay the bills, with only ten or so hours a week to write, so choosing the right background sound can act like a mnemonic  trigger (or Pavlovian response) and switch my brain from corporate-writer-mode to creative-writer-mode faster than I can sometimes achieve on my own after a day in the office.

Sometimes it’s too much. If I have a tricky scene, or something

intense, I need silence. Then the music goes off and it’s just me and the tyranny of the blank page. Often, though, the aural queue helps slot me into the imagined world I’m writing, unlocks the imagined people, and off I can go.

I may not have pursued music through the piano (and a short lived attempt at the guitar, abandoned when I broke both bones in my forearm a month later); I may only attempt to write songs in a haphazard fashion; I may be half-hearted and fickle about the use of playlists; but music is an essential part of how I write and the worlds I create.

And I’m open to suggestions. Does anyone have any bands to recommend? After all, I do have a new book to write.

What’s your favourite vampire-related song and why?

Catch up with Narrelle on GoodReads.

Catch up with Narrelle on Twitter  @daggyvamp

Narrelle’s Web Page.

www.narrellemharris.com

]]> http://www.rowena-cory-daniells.com/2013/03/13/typing-in-the-rhythm-section/feed/ 4 http://www.rowena-cory-daniells.com/2013/02/12/sisters-in-crime-event-killers-crims-cops/ http://www.rowena-cory-daniells.com/2013/02/12/sisters-in-crime-event-killers-crims-cops/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:54:12 +0000 admin http://www.rowena-cory-daniells.com/?p=2980 Continue reading →]]> If you like a good thriller, if you like getting your teeth into a mystery, if you enjoy your crime with a touch of the X Files… then you might like to come along to this event.

Killers, Crims & Cops, Ceylon Inn, Thursday 28th, 2013. It’s being hosted by ClanDestine Press and Sisters in Crime (but Brother in Law are welcome, too!)

I’ve found that readers often read across several genres and writers often write across several, so here I am in my RC Daniells incarnation. (My book The Price of Fame is the only one with a touch of paranormal. The others are straight thriller and crime). It’s an evening of good food, wine and talk about killers, crims and cops! Meet Katherine Howell, Sandy Curtis, Lindy Cameron and me.  (Click on poster to see larger image).

In November 2010 I was busy. I was far, far too busy to do the National Novel Writing Month. So the beginning of November came and went with nothing but a wistful sigh on the writing front. And then I had a dream about a group of empaths that saw everything by its emotions – cars, dirt, people – to such an extent that a skilled empath could become invisible to others. And one of the empaths had turned against the rest, leaving every last one of them shattered.

My contemporary fantasy YA novel SEE THROUGH was finished three weeks later. (And by “finished” I mean the first draft was written – you’ll notice this was over two years ago.)

Canberra Yacht Club Jetty

I had no time to research or design an unusual setting, so I set the story in a place I’d always meant to use for a fantasy, simply because almost no-one else had – my home town of Canberra. After an eerie night-time trip to write with other NaNoers in the small town of Collector (there was a dead rabbit just outside the door of the hall, and half the lights didn’t work) I set a vital part of the story there. The cover photo was taken in Canberra, too – from a boat on Lake Burley Griffin looking towards Rydges.

It wasn’t the first time I’d written about people with empathic ability – and I always made the skill both a gift and a curse; never something that could be switched off.

I know exactly why I was so fascinated with the idea of strong emotions hitting more than one person at a time. For seven years I struggled with a mental illness that fell under the category of “social anxiety”. One part of that disorder was that I felt convinced I was channelling the emotions of people around me – only negative emotions, of course – stress, anger, grief. Some of it was based on reading body language and on my knowledge of a person’s struggles or personality. But the feelings were out of control and out of proportion. It also made me a terrible friend, because if someone was upset then I was devastated – even though nothing had happened to me! Mental illness is a strange world, and I enjoyed imagining a place where the pain and uselessness I felt had an up side.

My very obvious reference to the Stolen Generation in the prologue (a child is taken from her natural parents by law) was

completely unconscious. I’m glad (though a little scared) that it’s there. It’s a fitting part of an Australian fantasy novel. You can read the prologue for free, incidentally (here), and it can stand alone as a short story.

The book goes on to explore some of the different ways minority and majority groups in Australia see each other, and negotiate the difficult path to peaceful co-existence. There aren’t any easy answers in real life or the book: it is always simply hard work and careful kindness.

SEE THROUGH by Louise Curtis

Amy is a young empath stolen from her Normal parents by law on her fifth birthday – with deadly consequences. Her carefully constructed serenity is ripped away a second time when her empath community is attacked from within.

Louise writes about writing, steampunk, and her one-year old daughter on her blog. She has no superpowers that she cares to disclose at this time.

Here she is, sleeping on my notes. This is where I keep my maps, family trees, time lines and list of alliances. So of course that is where she sleeps. She’s keeping company with the two little cat sculptures that sleep on my desk to hold business cards in place. (Thanks Leanne, this is where they ended up!).  And she does go well with the colour scheme, even down to my current desktop theme which is castles of Europe. I use the desk top themes to help me get in the right mood to write about the world of King Rolen’s Kin, with thrones and lives at stake. (It’s pretty hard to think strategic battles and cloaks flying in the wind when it’s 38 degrees with 90% humidity).

So, seeing Sassy cat was happy, I went off to yoga and when I came back she had moved on and I could get to work. I do sometimes work with her beside me. She puts up with me sliding pages out from under her and I put up with sneezing because, wouldn’t you know it, I’m allergic to cats. For several years every time one of my daughters left home and moved into a flat she got a kitten, then she’d move back home with the cat, then she’d moves out and leave the cat with me.

Back to writing…