Tag Archives: Trent Jamieson

Meet the Authors…

Over at the Logan North Library next Saturday there’ll be a bunch of us authors talking about writing craft. It’s a free event, but it’s essential to book.

 

 

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Trent Jamieson’s Book Launch for ‘Night’s Engines’. (Book 2 of the Nightbound Land)

Back in 2003 the ROR group went to Varuna to critiue our books in progress. Oh my, we all look so young! (Tansy, Marianne, Trent, Maxine and me). Trent put in a book which would later be developed into the Nightbound Land duology. I remember being in awe of his vision for this world, so different and inventive. And Margaret, would she escape…

Flash foward to 2012 and the second book of the Nightbound land is about to be released. Yay!

Trent says:

The Nightbound Land was inspired by my love of monsters and Steampunk. I wanted to write a big secondary world science fantasy filled with steam engines, mad men, and creatures out of nightmare, and the world of Shale was the perfect canvas for my obsessions. It’s everything I love about fantasy bound up in tooth and claw and clockwork machines. I only hope that it’s as fun to read as it was to write.

AVID READER (in Westend,brisbane) are holding a “Night’s Engines” evening, where they’ll celebrate a stella year of writing and publishing books!
Thursday 19th July
6pm for a 6.30pm start
Free event but RSVP essential
RSVP to events@avidreader.com.au 38463422
Trent Jamieson must be the hardest working writer in Australia. We have had book launches for 5 Jamieson books in the past two years and we are SO PROUD! To celebrate publication of the second book in his Nightbound Land series we are holding our first ever dress up party. Come as Trent Jamieson means obligatory moustaches, beards and/or glasses. Dress up and have some fun or just come on down and celebrate with us in the traditional un-hirsute manner.
So, here’s wishing Trent, all the best with this duology. I’ll be coming along to the launch, although I won’t be in steam punk costume. (Haven’t got anything suitable).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd-GIecM1jQ&feature=player_embedded]

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Gold Coast Literati Event

If you live in South East Queensland and you love books and writing, the Gold Coast Literati Event will be held the weekend of the 24, 25th of May, 2012.

For more information see here.

Who is is for? Readers of all genres (spec Fic and mystery among them).

Who will be there? Myself, Marianne de Pierres, Trent Jamieson, Louise Cusack, Kylie Chan, Queenie Chan and many more.

What will be happening? Workshops, panels, talks and general celebration of books and writing!

So rock up, have some fun and say Hi!

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ROR … Recovering

Here I am, back from the 2012 ROR (See here for more info on the ROR writers group). This year we went to Steeles Island. Lovely spot, great premises.

Here's the view up the estury

The view up the estuary

This was an intense week. We read 5 manuscripts beforehand and wrote reports then spent a morning, or an afternoon, on each ms. It reminded me why I love writing – sitting around, getting excited with my fellow writers about plotting, foreshadowing, characterisation, blending back story and of course … talking about the industry.

The room where it all happened.

I had a bit of a problem with the room. The ceiling was at an angle, the chimney fireplace ran at two different angles and then there were the horizontals and the verticals… the angle of one of the chimney sides was at war with all the other angles in the room. It got so I couldn’t look in that direction. The others thought this was hilarious, but it really bothered me. Confession … writers can be a little neurotic. (I can’t find a photo of the wall in question that shows the ceiling and the chimney. You will have to take my word for it).

You can see the energy level from this pic of Tansy and Richard

The guys did a brilliant job of critiquing all the manuscripts. I’m not allowed to say much about the books because we don’t want to jinx them.

Margo being insightful

(Marianne and Trent couldn’t make this ROR due to work commitments and where they were up to in their current manuscripts).

Maxine attended virtually by skype and this worked surprisingly well. Her book is on its second draft and it was really interesting to see how she had incorporated the feedback from the last ROR. (Come on Maxine – get that book finished. I’m dying to read the ending!). Richard put in his usual quirky polished manuscript.

Dirk provided us with amazing cooking while giving excellent insights into our books. Somehow he managed to pull enough of a manuscript together despite life getting in the way, for us to get swept away by his project. Tansy has a follow up to her highly successful novella bubbling in the writing pot. Margo brought a new project along that was in a raw state deliberately to sound us out. This was really interesting and we had a terrific time brain storming.  The guys were great with my book. They helped me realise the difference between book one of a new trilogy and book four of a series. Obvious once you say it, but really hard to see when you are neck deep in manuscript.

That's me enjoying the brilliant banter of the RORees

On the Thursday evening we drove into Hobart for the launch of Tansy’s Reign of Beasts and Margo’s Sea Hearts. (More on the launch). This was held at the Hobart Bookshop in Salamanca Square. Waves to Chris and Janet!  (Here’s Margo being interviewed about Sea Hearts. The original novella won a World Best Fantasy Award). Book one of Tansy’s Creature Court trilogy won the Aurealis Award for fantasy.

There was a terrific turn out for the launch. I want to thank some of the ROR blog followers and the Twitter Team for turning up to wave the flag.

This is me kissing my DH at the launch

And while all this was going on I spent every spare moment chained to my lap top madly working on the rewrites for Solaris. Serious Brain Overload!!!

So, to help me and everyone else calm down, here are some photos from Steeles Island.

The steps down to the beach in the early morning light

Tansy's partner and their youngest on the tidal sands

Sunshine on sea a Wild Tassie Beach

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Winner Trent Jamieson Give-away!

Trent says:

I’ve read through the answers and they’re all great – really, there isn’t one that doesn’t appeal – but for me the best was Melissa Mays.

Who wouldn’t want to travel that way, and the sky plays a very important part of Roil, and an even greater role in the sequel Night’s Engines. So Melissa, as soon as my copies of Roil arrive I’ll send on your way. And thanks to everyone else.

Melissa can you email me:  rowena(at)corydaniells(dot)com with your postal address, and I’ll forward your email to Trent.

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Doing anything Saturday 27th, August, 2011?

Once a year, the good folk down at the Logan North Library run a Speculative Fiction month. On Saturday 27th of August some friends and I will be on a panel talking about writing.

So if you are in the neighbourhood, drop by and say Hi!

(Logan North Library, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)

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Meet Trent Jamieson …

I have been running a series of  interview with female fantasy writers to redress a perception I came across – that fantasy was a bit of a boy’s club. It really isn’t like that here in Australia. We have many wonderful fantasy writers who just happen to be female.

Today I’m interviewing Trent Jamieson because, for one thing he has a wonderful new book coming out. (Yay Trent!), and also I thought I’d ask him the same questions I’ve asked the female writers about fantasy writing and gender, to get his perspective as a male fantasy writer.

I’ve known Trent Jamieson since he was a fresh-faced aspiring writer coming to the VISION meetings (almost 15 years) and Trent has been a part of the ROR writing group for 8 years. He’s sold heaps of short stories, won or been a finalist in awards and now has a second series coming out.

Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.

Q: I can remember dropping you at the ferry after one of our critique sessions, saying – One day The Roil will be published, Trent. It’s so creative and interesting. It just has to hit the right publisher at the right time. Now it is coming out through Angry Robot. I was thrilled when you asked me for a cover quote. The Roil can be described as Steampunk, but it is so much more, dystopian SF, Lovecraftian horror. How long has The Roil (The Nightbound Land duology) been in the making?

Ooh, I remember that, too! I’m not sure if I believed you at the time, but I’m so glad you were right. In fact, I never quite believe it until I know the book is in print – just got an email from my publisher to say that copies arrived at Angry Robot today – Yay!

The Nightbound Land’s been around in my head a very long time, at least ten years though there are elements going back to my early twenties, just after I graduated Uni. I’ve notes sketches, and bits and pieces in my earliest notebooks. I think this is the world that I’ve kept circling all my adult life, and I might come back to it once I’ve finished the next book (which is due in a couple of weeks, Arrrgh!). I’ve short stories planned, there’s a novella I want to do concerning a person that really only shows up for an instant in book one (and as a corpse, no less, but up until that point they had led a very exciting, if rather tragic, life), there’s poems too. This is the world I always come back to in my mind.

It’s dark and grim (and I’ve glad you’ve noticed the Lovecraftian elements – there’s a reason my blog is called Trentonomicon) – and nonsensical. But it’s also very much grounded in my experience of city spaces. My wife Diana says she can’t read the scenes in Mirrlees or Tate without thinking of Brisbane.

This is Trent’s cool new book trailer for The Roil .

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd-GIecM1jQ]

Q: You’ve written a lot of short stories with an anthology Reserved for Travelling Shows and over 23 stories published individually. Your stories have been finalists in the Aurealis Awards four times and won twice (SF and YA, but also nominated in horror). Just as it is hard to pin down The Roil, it is hard to pin down your short stories. If you had to describe your genre as a writer, how would you do it? And, if that’s too hard, what are your favourite genres to write in?

I like to mess around in various genres. Believe it or not, my first published works were nonsense poems. But I don’t set out to write in a specific genre. Stories start as either a particular image, or a weird sentence or even a beat, I just follow the pulse to end.

I don’t know if I have a favourite genre, I like the grand epic gestures of Urban Fantasy, and the way it’s also curiously intimate.

Steampunk is just glorious, the machines, the clothes, the foggy streets (or in my case rain-drenched). I’m really itching to work on a sword and sorcery novel that has been sitting in my hard drive for years (I sold Death Most Definite, before I could get back to it).

I love genre fiction, but ultimately what makes a tale work is the author writing it not the appurtenances of genre, I love authors that are their own genre, I want to read a Tansy Rayner Roberts story or a Rowena Cory Daniels story or a Marianne de Pierres story or China Mieville or Michael Swanwick or Kim Westwood.

What I would love to be is an author that drags people with them whatever genre they write in (maybe one day, eh) though my sensibilities are deeply fantastical, so they know it’s always going to be a bit weird.

Q: You’ve tutored at Clarion South and the Queensland University of Technology. I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated your critiques at our ROR weekends. Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?

Honestly the most important thing is to read, and read lots. Everything you can get your hands on, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, swim in the words. You don’t learn to riff off words until you’ve heard a lot of tunes. Unless you’re some sort of genius, then you don’t need my advice anyway.

The other thing is to take a delight in it. Writing is play, writing fiction is play, if you’re not enjoying it there are far more lucrative careers than writing (pretty much anything). It’s hard work, hard, hard work, but it should sing for you, too.

Q: Your Death Works trilogy was published by Orbit. The first book, Definite Most Definite was nominated for both the horror and the fantasy section of the Aurealis Awards (again you defy genre). This trilogy combines horror with humour, zombies and death as a corporate business (not to mention a love story).

The trilogy is set in Brisbane, our home town. In an interview on Fangbooks you say: ‘Brisbane is very important to me. From the brown, and slightly ominous coils of the Brisbane River to the flashing transmitters atop Mt Coot-tha, and the knitting needle bunches of the Kurilpa Bridge Brisbane is full of stories (and the possibility of adventure, explosions and love).’ Did you come across any resistance to setting the trilogy in a little-known Australian capital city?

None whatsoever. No-one ever told me not to set it in Brisbane, it never came up. Orbit grabbed it and ran with it, and they’ve never been anything but supportive – maybe it helps that Bernadette Foley, my publisher is from Brisbane!

See Trent’s cool Death Most Definite book trailer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQtI__Zc5bY]

Q: You’ve been doing a series of quirky and amusing videos. (See See Trent’s Book corners 1- 5 and Trent’s Book Corners 6- 10). What inspired you to start these?

Honestly … I discovered that I had a video camera in my computer and thought, why not? They’re really something I do as a bit of a hobby. I have a rule that they have be pretty rough, and daggy, so far I am in no danger of breaking that rule.

And, I thought, I can do this, whereas I could never see myself podcasting. Galactic Suburbia, the Writer and the Critic, Coode St Review, all of these are brilliant podcasts – that I love, and could never hope to replicate – I figured there was some room for silliness.

Q: By the end of August, you’ll hand in the second Nightbound Land book, Night’s Engines. What do you plan to write next?

Gah! I’ve a kid’s series called The Players that I wrote with an Arts Council Grant a few years back, I’d like to see if I can sell that. I’ve a Sword and Sorcery novel called Empire December that I would like to finally polish up and send out. I’ve a story about a girl that is carried by a storm to a carnival in a cherry orchard run by the devil – and he’s a slick old devil this one. And there’s a Space Opera novel I’ve been meaning to write, not to mention an Urban Fantasy series about a family in Logan City – the city on the southern edge of Brisbane. And there’s a vampire novel that I want to write based on my short story “Day Boy”.

You know how it is, the ideas never stop coming. It’s deciding which one grabs you the most at the time and running with it.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

If I pick up a book without knowing the author’s gender I rarely guess correctly, and that’s usually only because the odds suggest I have to get it right some of the time! So, to me, no. Writing is about inhabiting other people’s heads. Good writers of either sex do this. I think there is a difference in the way that different people write fantasy in the politics, the concerns, the lyricism etc that they bring to their work, but gender isn’t as big a determinant of that. Though this is me coming at it as a reader, and I want to read (or at least try) EVERYTHING!

But what happens if you cut out one sex is that you miss out on fifty percent of the voices, fifty percent of the richness of the world. I don’t want to reduce my chance of being surprised and delighted by half.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

I expect to be entertained, challenged, shocked, and taken somewhere different when I pick up any book.

Margo Lanagan, Kate Griffin, Grace Dugan, Hope Mirrlees, Lucy Sussex, Kirsten Bishop, P.M. Newton, Steph Swainston, Krissy Kneen, Gail Carriger, Kate Elliott, and I could go on and on, all of these writers do that because, like any other writer I admire, they’re not me, I don’t know what they’re thinking or what game they’re playing with their stories, until I read them.

That’s the chief pleasure of reading any work of fiction, you’re reading someone else’s imagination, and mixing it with your own to form a cool sort of imaginative story stew. What an amazing thing that is.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

I think it would be to the beginning of the universe. If you could somehow exist and watch the laws of physics coming into play, watch something become, well, something when before there wasn’t anything, how wonderful that would be!

Either that or I’d love to hang out with a T-rex or two.

Give-away Question:

What steampunk technology would you used to travel around the world?

Follow Trent on Twitter:  @trentonomicon

See Trent’s Blog.

Find Trent on GoodReads.

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Ripping Reads …

A couple of weeks ago my writing group did really well at the Aurealis Awards. I thought I might do a round-up of their books, so if you’re looking for a ripping read like Richard is, you’ll be able to find it.

So … Starting with Trent Jamieson. Trent’s Death Works trilogy is set in Brisbane (yay!) and it’s really quirky. It starts with Steve sitting in the food court in the city when a dead girl saves his life. Steve works for corporate death, helping souls into the afterlife and there’s a take-over bid. Suddenly he’s on the run with the dead girl …   Book one was a finalist in both the horror and the fantasy section of the Aurealis Awards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And coming out next year is Trent’s new series The Roil. Very dark and full of daring do!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Creature Court series. The first book of this series was a finalist in the fantasy section of Aurealis Award and won this section. This series combines a threatened city, with powerful shapeshifters and a dressmaker who suddenly finds herself caught up in a battle to save her home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marianne has been really busy. If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stepanie Plum books you’ll love her Tara Sharp series. Book one won the Davitt Award for female mystery writers. There’s just a touch of paranormal as the main character has the ability to read body language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there’s her new YA series. Dark, sensual and exciting. I like reading YA because the focus is on the protagonist and you get straight into the story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And don’t forget her two SF series. The rollercoaster ride of the Parrish books. (Aurealis Award finalists)

 

 

 

 

 

And the slightly more cereberal but just as addictive Sentient of Orien series. (Aurealis Award finalists and book four won the award)

 

 

 

 

Then we have Richard, who’s been having heaps of success with his quirky steam punk series. Worldshaker has just won two awards in France. It gives him an excuse to dress up in waistcoats and top hats!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And there’s Margo’s latest book Tender Morsels. I’ve  lost track of the number of awards Margo has won for her writing. This book should come with a warning – disturbing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you like time travel, there’s Maxine McArthur’s series and her robot mystery nove, Less than Human. (Once again, finalists and winners of the Aurealis Awards).

 

 

 

 

 

 

With so many good books to read, it’s hard to know where to start!

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Congratulations to the ROR Writers!

Over at the ROR blog I’ve done a post about the Aurealis Awards. Four wins for the ROR team!

Congratulations to all the writers who made the final lists and to the winners.

Now I’m going to give Trent Jamieson’s book a plug because his book was shortlisted for both the horror and the fantasy novel sections of the Aurealis Awards and didn’t win either, but it’s a great read!


Try it if you like quirky Dark Urban Fantasy.

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Friends doing well!

Over on the ROR blog I’ve done a post about the Aurealis Awards. These are the Australian equivalent to the Nebulas or the Hugos (I forget which one is judged by a panel of peers).  Several members of my writing group are on the short list in different sections.

This is us at the Maleny ROR. Dirk, Richard, Maxine, Me, Tansy, Trent (Marianne was sick and Margo had deadlines).

Why join a writing group? Here’s why Marianne and I started ROR. I can honestly say, the RORees have been like an extended family. Publishing is a tough business. We authors write because we love it, but there are times when you just need to talk to someone else who knows where you’re coming from.

We meet every year or so to critique our works-in-progress (WIPs). Having a group of people all look over your manuscript is great. If four out of five people say X needs changing, then you can be sure it does. Our crits are never destructive, always constructive because we want our friends’ books to be the best they can possibly be. And the ROR team have had some success. (See here).

If you’ve like to start your own critique group like ROR I’ve done a couple of posts on the topic. ROR 101 and Critiquing 101.

So there we are. Kuds to to my fellow RORees for making it into the final lists of the Aurealis Awards and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for them on Saturday night!

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