chrisjohnstone

There's a very nice article here by Geoff Willmetts on the problems most commonly seen when reading through the slush pile. The pointers start out simple and work towards the somewhat more complex. Well worth a glance over.

My story Cynocephalus has gone online at NewMyths. You can read it here.

NewMyths seems to be collecting quite an impressive list of authors with impressive awards attached to their names*. I've been watching NewMyths ever since its inception, stopping in now and again, and I have to say that Scott T. Barnes et al. have been doing a really good job with the site.

And of course, everyone else's articles and stories in this issue look interesting, as always. I'll have to make some time to give them a read over.

* EDIT: Note that this doesn't include me. I am neither impressive, nor am I attached to impressive awards.

I've lost track of who's posted this and who hasn't. I nabbed the link from the GWlist.

Very much fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY

One of my stories, To Each a Song, is now online at the fiction magazine, A Fly in Amber. You can read it here. I've mentioned before that I think the good people at A Fly in Amber are putting out an excellent online magazine. I won't belabour the point except to say it again (which I have).

Strangely, bizzarely, am off to see Pearl Jam and Ben Harper tonight. I say 'strangely and bizzarely' because this is how I feel about the experience. I never did see either act live on stage when they were huge, when I was younger, when all my friends and me were into Pearl Jam (and to a lesser extent Harper).

So I suspect most people will know all about Ivor Cutler... but a few folk may not. I've liked Ivor Cutler for a while but (strangely) never thought to check whether there were videos of his songs floating about. Turns out, of course, there are...

Ivor Cutler- Shoplifters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGge-_cQo

Ivor Cutler - Walking to a Farm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ueXjIn8riI

...and one of my favourites...
Ivor Cutler - The Shapely Balloon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ERR7TrCVg

...and another favourite...
Ivor Cutler - Looking for Truth With a Pin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay_0_nWu8rw

(Also posted to the GW list)

I've spent a few hours this afternoon updating the fiction and podcast page that I (very occasionally) use a a Voice-piece of Me. As I'm putting the whole thing together myself, it looks quite amateur, but all-in-all, I like the nice, simple, clean look that Nvu can achieve.

I've added a gallery area (though so far there is only one gallery) and added image links to three short stories (so very, very old now, so very written long ago and published long ago too) that are online (The Green Man, Lapis Excillis and The Old Oxford Charm). Plus, I've added a page linking to other writing podcasts and tidied things up generally. I also updated the blog, which I'd neglected for a while.

The index page is here and from there you can navigate around to pretty much anywhere on the site.

If you do happen to wander around and find a link that's broken or a missing image or something else that's missing, let me know.

Right. Now I need to do something that doesn't involve staring at a screen.

I wish I had a camera.

The Mexican postgrads at uni have constructed an elaborate ofrenda (altar display)  complete with colourful skeletons, fruit, food and skull cookies. The shrine is dedicated to Charles Darwin and has his photo at its heart. Apparently if we were to forget to build a shrine to Darwin on Día de muertos, then Darwin would torment us by manifesting as a ghost and pulling our legs.

Pesky ghost of Darwin.

Well, we returned last night, winging our way into Melbourne on all hallows eve. It's been an long, interesting, varied and wonderful holiday. I'll post some photos once I've sorted the chaff from the thousand or so digital shots I have.

Meanwhile, I've just worked through 200+ unopened emails in my gmail account and now need to start in on my university account. As such, I have some tabs that need closing. A lot of these are links that people sent me a while ago, and you may already be aware of them or even using them actively. More than a few are things I intended to post about a long, long time ago, but never got around to.

In case you're not using these or similar sites already, Biblioz and Abebooks good book buying sites that provide a pleasant alternative to Amazon.

Here, you can see a short clip on a working model of the Antikythera Device.

The Magic Portal has been around a while, but if you haven't seen it, it's strange, interesting and weird and, well, magical.

A friend is still putting cartoons up for the general entertainment of passing Richmondsonians. Round 3 of entries appears to be closed, but I'm sure there will be another round of submissions for those of you with a cartoonist spark.

I found myself quite liking Tame Impala's sample songs, especially Sundown Syndrome. I need to listen to them more to decide whether I'd want to get hold of a whole album, or, um, I guess EP, as that seems to be more or less all that is currently available.

Here's Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawkins and Arthur C Clarke discussing stuff.

I have little or no time to play computer games these days, but Machinarium may well change my mind about that. Beautiful. Evocative. Surreal. All this, with cute, rusty robots.

And this clip of Stephen Fry revisiting Douglas Adams's Last Chance to See is possibly the funniest thing I've seen in... um, well, maybe ever. I presume that the poor unfortunate bird has to had too much exposure to humans during captive rearing and now thinks its a person, or thinks people are kakapos or something along those lines...

Chris

We're in Alice Springs. Did Uluru, The Olgas and King's Canyon yesterday. All of it was amazing. We had dingoes skulking around the hostel at night, being quiet and secretive, acting more like ghosts of dogs than anything else. Saw some amazing birds and lizards in the outback. In one of the deep, strange, eerie gullies of the Olgas we listened to a western bower bird mimicking eagles and honeyeaters and rocks falling and tree branches cracking. It sounded like someone had hidden a tape-recorder in the scrub.

The whole landscape is amazing and wonderful and too big to describe

This is beautiful. The talk is on creativity and creatives and creative issues and stuff. But, really, it's just beautiful.

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

And remember those haunting mugshots I posted about earlier? It seems that other people thought they were haunting too, including Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, both of whom pointed out the following site where there are more shots.

http://www.atimetoget.com/2009/07/early-sydney-mug-shots.html


Edit: I'm off to the Top End tomorrow at an ungodly early hour of the morning. I haven't packed. I'm still at uni finishing up work on a manuscript. I doubt I shall be sleeping tonight. -sigh- Onward!

The first review for the anthology Dead Souls has been spotted. The reviewer seems to have reasonably liked my story in the anthology, The Unbedreamed, which is nice.

Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews looks like a good review site in general. Worth checking out.

You know that feeling you get when you're so tired that your throat hurts because breathing has become painful?

That's about where I am at the moment.

However, unfortunately, I need to stop complaining and get back to marking undergrad assignments. Sigh.

It looks like I may have sold a story, Cynocephalus, to the fiction magazine NewMyths.

NewMyths is one of a number of relatively new online fiction sites that I've been keeping an eye on and like the look of. The site has been unfolding and growing nicely since its inception.

It seems that back in the day, when Sydney police were first toying with the idea of taking mugshots of criminals, they perhaps didn't have a good feel for how said photos should be taken. As far as I can tell, what they appear to have done is called in a professional portraitist and had him snap shots of various arrestees as they were lingering around a cement holding yard.

The result is a collection of strangely pathos-laden photos with the destitute or the criminal either posing for the camera, as if it were a Victorian family photo, or looking dejected, as if perhaps they were guessing that the photo would likely come back to haunt them. I guess, at the time, it may have seemed novel for some of these people. Some of them may never have had their photo taken before, and so they posed, smiled and tried to look their best.

You can see a few of these photos here at the ABCr/n site. I haven't put a lot of effort into tracking down more of them, but there is presumably a archive source online somewhere.

I've always intended to go back and re-read some of the Mary Poppins books, though have never quite got around to it. I think this photo of Pamela Lyndon Travers (found on the ABC radio national site) dressed as A Misummer Night's Dream's Titania just moved the Mary Poppins books up the reading pile a bit...

So, it looks like I've sold a short story to A Fly in Amber, an online magazine of fiction you can visit here. Aside from just liking the name of the magazine a lot, I like that they provide a range of fiction in YA, SFF and general literature categories. I think as readers we often become too wrapped up in our favourite genre comfort blankets, so it's nice to a see a market providing more of a range. I like the idea that a devoted high fantasy reader might easily pop across and read some general lit or SF instead, and find that they quite like it too.

The story, if you've already read it in a workshop forum, is To Each a Song (the one about the young woman who works in a library and can hear the songs of the dead). It'll be published in the November issue online.

Also, I thought I'd quickly post my (very short) list of panels etc I'll be up for at Continuum in Melbourne. Hope to see you there.

The Scientific Consideration of Life on Other Planets
SATURDAY 10am Fire Space
How possible is it that there may, in fact, be aliens in our universe?
Peter Fagan, Chris Johnstone

Reading
SUNDAY 12.20pm Sun Sphere

Do you have to be a scientist to write GOOD science fiction?
SUNDAY 3pm Fire Space
Science Fiction is all about imagining the science of another time and place and applying those elements to a story. Does it help to have a science background in order to produce decent science fiction?
Grace Dugan, Chris Johnstone, Sean Williams

I think this is just lovely. Would it be crazy to have one of these in my living room? I can't decide if I'd work furniture around it or just leave the room empty except maybe for a coffee table and a few cushions. Of course, a giant teacup would help make it feel more homely too I guess.

Well, I made it back. Which means that I'll be at the MWF Coraline event tomorrow.

Right now I'm relaxing, listening to Bob Dylan's Modern Times, catching up on emails and considering whether I feel awake enough to do some work on a paper.

Meanwhile, I know a few of you are in Adelaide and I'd like to wave a hand towards an really stunning, evocative Adelaide artist, Shane Devries. I'm seriously thinking about getting Where Robots Come From as a print. And maybe Desert Singers. Or Awkward Trio. Or all of them. Shane's site is at www.shanedevries.com and his blog is here. He has exhibitions too.

Yes, that's right. The people, the summer heat, the great tea... I couldn't stay away.

I am in fact posting from China. Again. Still.

-sigh-

Apparently there is a monsoon that is stopping our flight from heading to Melbourne. We are (hopefully) leaving tomorrow morning, but this depends on the monsoon dissipating I suppose.... unless... hold on... I don't know much about monsoons, but don't they last for weeks?

But that's definitely what the staff keep telling me. Unless they mean typhoon.

Ok. So now I'm checking weather maps.... checking... and yes, there is a massive weather system sitting right on top of Yangjiang. I guess that's the puppy. I've no idea if it's a typhoon or something else, but yup, that'd maybe ground flights out of Shanghai.

I guess I'll be back in Melbourne in a day or two.

Maybe.