Deborah Kalin

so much for regular blogging

Apr 052012

So how dull do deadlines make my blog, huh? The answer is, apparently, very.

The past month has seen me squirrelling every spare minute into writing a commissioned short (which I intended to be a touch on the melancholy side of light-hearted, but which actually turned out to be … angry). The pace I set myself to get it done was somewhat faster than normal, because I was worried about it eating into my writing-for-TPP time, so it's been a pretty gruelling month, and I've been frothing at the mouth with envy for those who don't have time-gobbling dayjobs. Yeah, I know, we've all been there, if we're not all still there.

Sometimes I can't help but think Plan B¹ is a trap.

Things may² continue to be dull around these parts for a while to come, since the deadlines are by no means satisfied and my own personal neuroses brought on by needing BUFFERS whenever I start to consider numbers as targets require feeding in the face of the deadlines. I'm more active (if barely) on Twitter, which lets me dip in and out as it suits me.

namely: making sure you can pay the rent [↩]
or may not. Hopefully may not. But I can't promise. [↩]

Sale to TPP!

announcements, briskwater mare, cherry crow children, the wages of honey 8 Responses »

Mar 132012

I have a confession to make: for a couple of months now, I've had some Good News that I've not been able to share. And by good news, I mean KERMIT-FLAILINGLY AWESOME NEWS!

It has been very difficult not to share this news with you all, and I feel most strongly that you should all admire my stoic moral character as a consequence.

But now the news is out:

Twelfth Planet Press is delighted to announce that fantasy author Deborah Kalin has joined the Twelve Planets series with a collection featuring her beautifully horrific story, “Wages of Honey”.

YES, I AM BEING PUBLISHED BY TWELFTH PLANET PRESS!

This is a dream come true for me. Twelfth Planet Press has been producing some breathtaking work, and almost as soon as I heard about the Twelve Planets series I wanted to be a part of it. I still can't quite believe that it's happening.

"The Wages of Honey" (aka the thorn girls story) cost me not a little pain in the making, and ended up at a difficult length. And thank all that's holy that it did, because if it hadn't been so demanding, and so awkward and defiant a length, I might not have loved it so fiercely that only the very best home for it would do. I submitted it to TPP almost in spite of myself: it fit their brief so perfectly that, even though I didn't have any stories to accompany it, and even though TPP didn't publish single stories, and even though the Twelve Planet series was full at that stage, I just had to.

To my delight, Alisa also felt that my story had come home to roost with her press, and so I'm now hard at work writing three more equally awkward and defiant stories to match and accompany "The Wages of Honey" in what will be my first collection.

(I can't believe I just wrote that. I'm going to have a collection to my name! It's like I'm a real author or something!)

I don't have a title for the collection yet, but I can tell you that two of the three in-progress stories have titles. (This is unusual for me, to have a title before a story.)

They're going to be called "The Briskwater Mare", and "The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood".¹

Unless they're not. [↩]

wherein i share why i can't use 'amongst' without crippling fear

journal Comments Off

Mar 132012

Gillian Polack is running a series of guest posts in honour of Women's History Month, and as of today my contribution is up.

Given the majority of my professional colleagues are Australian women authors, the brief for this blog post seemed impossible. How could I possibly pick just one?

So I decided to be a little unfair, and pick the woman who first taught me about writing, at least formally: Margo Lanagan.

Head on over to Gillian's blog to read the rest!

in which my to-read stack … expands

journal 2 Responses »

Mar 032012

One thing that putting up links to Aussie women authors is achieving: my book hunger is breaking through my savings. I have purchased 16 books in the past three weeks, 15 of which are authored by women. Not all of them by Aussie women, since when my book hunger broke its bonds I remembered all the books I'd coveted at WFC and there was simply no resisting all the pretty.

The other thing it does is staccato-ise my twitter feed. I get one tweet in, spot a name, and have to jot it down on my list to research. Women: there be a lot of you.

And in more whimsical news: an interview I participated in a while back is now up in Romanian. It's almost like I speak another language, without even knowing.

the host is rushing 'twixt night and day

away come away 2 Responses »

Feb 262012

And … draft.

Sorta. It's been a long time since I've written anything so amazingly chaotic, that changed so much during the writing that now, at the end (and I use the word end rather loosely, because the last 7+ scenes are in fact simply a 2,000 word note to myself for when I run across them in the next revision), I can quite literally and confidently say: I have no idea what I've just written.

It's not a book. Yet. It is currently 135,000 words of … exploration?

It started out as a novel about faeries. It seems, actually, to be about biological discrimination, mental wellbeing and normalcy, and to have not a single faerie after all.

Huh. Would you look at that.

330k words and still the woman is silent. Characters!

away come away, hummingbird key, writing life Comments Off

Feb 162012

Today's walk home brought me rain (and therefore a fetching dampened-rat hairstyle), and the opening and closing lines of a new novel. Which are perfect.

(Which is not to say they won't change, although I do have a feeling they'll only be edited for precision/word choice, but more to say that it opens and closes the main character's arc and gives me that arc all in two simple sentences.)

Sigh.

I guess this is how I know I really must be close to finishing the faerie novel, no matter how otherwise it might seem. And it really doesn't feel anywhere near finished since I realised yesterday that, 105k words in, my main character still hasn't chased anything for herself yet. Er, oops?

So yesterday I had to forego wordcount in order to trawl through the manuscript for all her POV scenes. And tonight I am going to trawl the internet and rack my brain for narrative structures dealing with conspiracy plots and accidental heroes and storylines where a veritable stuffstorm explodes on an unsuspecting person.

Any suggestions?

Grace

journal 3 Responses »

Feb 122012

On a quiet Sunday morning, I can hear the trains rattling by.

I don't live close enough that they're audible with each passing (thankfully), but when the world is still outside my window then I can hear it, the distant clatter-and-clack, clatter-and-clack of an electric train rushing over tracks originally built to accommodate steam engines.

Sometimes — very rarely — it really is a steam engine, its strident whistle a jarring incongruity against the hum of twenty first century traffic.

Today it's making me somewhat melancholy — or perhaps I'm noticing it today because I am melancholy? Such is the inevitable cycle of these things.

I find myself thinking, today, of R.

I don't know her well, or indeed at all, really. But I think she's a very gracious and graceful woman.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I can do crises. Give me a car accident, or a family calamity, or even just someone in a panic and needing to be talked down, and that's all in my stride. But strangers, and social situations, they can (and often do) strain me to the very eye-teeth of my abilities. If something happens while I'm out there, on the raggedy edge of my coping skills — well, my defences are already stretched too thin, and I take the hurt deeply.

Those situations that undo me, R. takes in her stride. She faces them with manners that are downright Victorian: she's warm and open and engages fearlessly and competently in any conversation. She dares, and she's bullet-proof … or at least, whatever wounds she takes, she doesn't show. She is grace under pressure.

Everyone has something to teach us, and R. taught me that sometimes, all it takes to be amazing is a very small, simple thing — like caring.

i can't help but count the seconds ticking by

away come away, briskwater mare, journal, writing life Comments Off

Feb 042012

Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

creativity is an addiction

journal, writing life 2 Responses »

Jan 262012

A golden outfit made from spider silk has gone on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum:

The four-metre-long hand-woven textile, a natural vivid gold colour, was made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar by 80 people over five years.

I remember hearing about endeavours by scientists to mass-produce spider silk. The approach, if I remember correctly, was to modify the DNA of goats so that spider silk proteins were produced in the goats' milk. I even wrote a (terrible) story around that premise during my stint at Clarion South. But I haven't heard any more on that front for years — I wonder what happened?

I never knew that anybody had collected enough spider silk by hand to weave fabric from it, which is apparently an until-now forgotten art.

The effort involved in such an endeavour — catching the spiders every morning, harnessing them into contraptions designed to extract their silk, making thread out of the silk and textile out of the fabric — the patience and time and labour that has been poured into it is … humbling.

It made me think about all the energy that I pour into my writing. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated with my chronic time-poverty, it's easy to feel dispirited. About a lack of progress, or the latest mental block, or the sheer enormity of the task still to go. And I can't whinge, like I want to, because I chose this, and I keep choosing this. Every day I choose writing. (Even if it feels like a Clayton's Choice, but that's a topic for a whole different post.)

It helps me to stumble across stories like this. Tales of fascination, and the endeavours born out of and carried onwards by that fascination. Perhaps making a coat out of spider silk does nothing for us on a practical level: but I, for one, smiled when I heard of it. And felt inspired.

And now I have a new trick to add to my toolbox for when I get the grumps with the process: I shall simply consider my words to be little golden orb spiders. All I need to do is catch a few dozen a day, and coax them gently into a pleasing order.

And hope the wily bastards stay put.

in which the linkable kindle list is born

journal Comments Off

Jan 202012

The laundry sink is backed up, so there's been no washing for over a week now, which has forced a little ingenuity and/or creativity into this week's wardrobe choices. If I were rich, I could afford to live somewhere that had, oh, I don't know, working taps. It's the little things, eh?

Anyway! I have not been idle!

After much trawling for solutions that would allow me to add links (simply and with a minimum of headache) to the list of australian women writers on Kindle, I believe I have at last hit upon a solution. I have therefore set up a page: Australian Women Writers on Kindle.

It's currently not optimised, display-wise, and the list only has those whose names I've managed to collect links for¹, but it will grow, link by link and name by name, as I add to it in dribs and drabs over the coming evenings.

The names are sorted into sub-lists of genres (contemporary, historical, romance, speculative fiction, non fiction, memoir) and format (novels and anthologies) — which is broad, but I figured part of the fun of a reading challenge is finding something outside your comfort zone.

And now, it's totally time for a pizza dinner.

if your name, or the name of the author you think is missing, is not on this page but is on the blog post of the initial response, then I'm working on adding it [↩]

Older Entries