But seriously, did I really need to get a body-trashing, head-stuffing cold so soon after the bronchitis (which might possibly have been a side effect of undiagnosed whooping cough?).

Yeah, no I didn’t need that.

It’s halfway through the month and so far I haven’t finished any of the things I said I wanted to. I have made progress on the novel re-outline (Outline 1, let’s call it) and the cyclone short story is about half-done. The only significant personal accomplishment was to catch up on all the Marvel superhero movies that precede The Avengers, so that now I can watch The Avengers just a few short weeks after everyone else did

Oops, looks like I have a meeting I forgot about. To work!

EDIT: According to the admin dashboard, the second post after this one will be the 500th Lexifabricographer entry [1]. I should think about doing something special. Hint – it will probably be an otherwise unpublishable short story.

[1] To clarify – the 500th since the original version was buggered up by Blogger and Andrew replaced it with this bland but far more functional WordPress version. [2]

[2] One of these days I must learn how to dress up the display so it looks a little less like the UI of a text editor.[3]

[3] Something to add to my indistinguishable-from-infinite list of distractions from writing.

“Every kid growing to an adult wants a power. Too stupid to want otherwise.”

The stories in Bad Power are about people who possess extraordinary abilities – superpowers – and how those abilities don’t make their lives better. Nobody dresses extravagantly. The only people fighting crime are the weary, jaded cops – primarily Detective Palmer, whose ability, if she has one, is getting all the fruitcake cases.

In ‘Shades of Grey’ a monstrous millionaire tests both the limits of his ability to heal any injury and society’s capacity to tolerate him. A young man is being stalked by a psychic homeless woman in ‘Palming the Lady’ but it’s not just him that needs to worry. A further exploration of the young man and his family in ‘Web of Lies’ is about the destructiveness of family secrets (some families more so than others). The eponymous tale, set some indistinct time generations earlier, is a gruesome morality play comparing the unwitting use of power to its deliberate exercise, and how either path can lead to terrible consequences. And finally, as if to relieve some of the grim fatalism of ‘Bad Power’, the final story ‘Cross that Bridge’ is the story of a policeman with an unusual tracking ability that condemns him to ostracism but lends hope where it is least liable to be found.

The last one is my favourite – it’s almost an adventurous romp, albeit one with a core of real dread. In the others there’s little relief from the cynicism of selfishly powerful and cruelly fearful people. Biancotti’s cast are for the most part an unlikeable lot, though an exception must be made for Palmer, whose self-recrimination is unfair if understandable, and Detective Ponti, the hunter who finds lost children. He’s not as creepy as his reputation suggests.

‘Bad Power’ treads familiar ground for a long-time comic reader like me; the notion of super-powers being a horrible curse rather than an extraordinary opportunity to do good is not new. Biancotti grounds her exploration of the idea in ordinary (mostly) contemporary life, and draws very different conclusions than a typical cape book. There are no flashy battles here – no fanciful costumes or bombastic monologues or heroic triumphs. There are just people, some good but most not so much, finding themselves with powers that do not, in themselves, offer solution. Just new problems.

I could quibble with the sentiment, denouncing it as elitist bullshit designed to exclude. Dismissing someone’s wordcraft on the basis of a tendency to move on to the next idea before the last one is fully baked, or stuffing boxes full of unread manuscripts into a shed away from the eyes of the world, or just never bothering to flesh out an ending? That seems mean and unnecessary.

Or perhaps I’m just hypersensitive to that criticism because it hits me square between the eyes. I am a lifelong procrastinator, attention-wanderer and abandoner of first drafts, good ideas and plots that exceed a certain degree of complexity. I have pretty much always been able to get away with a churned-out first pass followed by a light (at best) copy edit. Second drafts are a vanishing rarity in my experience. The idea of a third draft is something I can conceive only as an intellectual exercise, best left to academics and those with compulsions beyond their control.

To be frank, I’m just pretty lazy.

I’m coming to appreciate the point of the entry qualification. Writing for pleasure – getting the story out of your head in raw form, with whatever warts may come – is easy. Fun, even. The product may even be reasonably readable. But it probably isn’t as good as it could be.

Crafting a smooth, polished story from the first-pass dross isn’t just a case of spell-checking and making sure the tense is consistent. Dialogue will need tightening, descriptions will need honing and, depending on the length, scenes and characters may need to be moved, added or removed. There might need to be an editing pass that considers tone and theme, screwing down or sawing off anything that doesn’t contribute to one or both. In short stories, the setup to a punchline will usually need tightening [1]. In longer works, needless repetition must be hunted down and executed, pace and escalation of tension should be assessed and the overall structure needs checking over to make sure that there’s a beginning, middle and ending (though not necessarily in that order). And a million other things that may only become apparent with a series of increasingly tedious read-throughs. And after that, it’s probably good enouigh to go out for criticism by peers, followed by more revision, and then maybe editing by someone who knows how editing is really done. Then more revisions. And then *maybe* the story will be as good as it can be.

It’s hard work, in other words. Maybe not back breaking labour, but effort all the same and sustained effort at that. Being a lazy person as we have established, I’ve usually been content to let my attachment to a piece of writing go at that stage. Get it done, show it to a couple of mates (and a big hello to the ten or so lovely people who read Lexifab on a regular basis) and then move on.

That’s all very well, but it’s not likely to result in professional sales. I have a couple of goals for this year and the next. One of them is to finish the current work-in-progress novel. The other is to write some short stories, hone them to what I can get at least a couple of people other than myself to agree is a professional standard and then try to sell them. Or at least embark on the joys of shopping them around to publishers to see what happens.

So with all that in mind, I have some specific goals for May, which I am posting here to try to keep myself honest:

1. Finish the outline of the novel. I finished the first draft in April. It was an incoherent mess, but the rough idea of a good story is there. So the goal here is to turn that dross into the skeleton of a good novel. That may take several passes (I’m expecting it to be something like three or four but it might be more). Only when I have a structure that I am happy with do I intend to start on the second draft. What I hope is that working from a solid outline will minimise the number of subsequent drafts I have to tackle, but that’s just a theory at this stage. I won’t know until I’ve tried it.
2. I have two short stories in progress. An unnamed story set during a cyclone and an unnamed story told entirely in tweet-length passages. I plan to finish both of those.
3. I am rewriting ‘The Rutherford Expedition’ as a comic script. That’s only in outline form at the moment. Since I have done very little scripting (and not for ages) I have no idea how much work that’s going to take. In fact the main reason I’m doing it [2] is to see what it takes to write a script.

Above and beyond all that I will also be resuming my book reviews, ‘Lost’ recaps and occasional flirtations with flash fiction. Over the past two months I’ve lost a lot of momentum. This month I intend to claw that back.

[1] For an obvious example, look at my flash fiction piece ‘The Rutherford Expedition‘ where, for reasons of keeping to the thousand word limit, the big reveal of the killer’s identity comes from absolutely nowhere. That’s because I didn’t know who the killer was when I started writing it, and I only thought of the ending a couple of paragraphs before I got there. On a rewrite I would need some way to establish the prior animosity of the underworld dwellers, to flesh out more of the characters and to make it less obvious that the murder suspect is a red herring. I doubt I could keep that to a thousand words.

[2] …apart from a general sense of dissatisfaction that I told it completely right the first time. Because I didn’t (refer to [1] above).

What I did manage to do was to find a fair amount of time to read. Several bedridden days contributed handily. It was good that I got something out of that deal, because the coughing sucked (and continues to do so).

Books

The Final Empire: Mistborn Book One by Brandon Sanderson – A fantasy epic that starts from the premise that the all-powerful Dark Lord won the final battle between good and evil, and now rules over a blighted slave world with an iron fist. All good grist for the fantasy mill, and a concept explored well in the outstanding Midnight campaign setting for D20 from a few (oops, nearly 10) years ago. Sanderson does a great job of pulling together the characters – a collection of rebellious criminals intent on overthrowing the Empire by means of an elaborate heist – and the setting elements, including a well-thought-out and lavishly detailed magic system.

But I could not for the life of me love this book. The pace plodded, several rather interesting events were pushed to the background and the author detailed every single thought that passed through his POV characters’ heads. That last one in particular drove me nuts. Despite the admirable intricacy with which all the moving parts interacted, it wasn’t until nearly three-quarters of the way through that I finally thought the book hit its stride. By the end (which felt oddly rushed, although probably only by comparison to the rest of it) I was almost keen to move onto the next volume in the trilogy. But…well, I haven’t yet, and there are a lot of other books on my shelves with a more enticing claim on my attention.

Waltz of Shadows by Joe R. Lansdale – Joe Lansdale writes beautiful prose about the most ugly human behaviour he can think of. This is a fairly typical grim crime drama, in which an honest hard working family man is drawn unwittingly into depravity and horror, distinguished by the beguiling language Lansdale employs to describe the stomach-churning excesses of his vile antagonists. I can’t really recommend it – there are better examples of Lansdale out there where he doesn’t feel the need to constantly one-up himself on the grue factor – but it is an entirely successful work on its own terms. I enjoyed it, for what that’s worth.

Charmed Life (The Chronicles of Chrestomanci Volume 1) by Diana Wynne Jones – By a strange oversight, I had never read any DWJ before now (though happily regular correspondents Andrea and Doctor Clam were on hand to correct my error). Charmed Life is a warm and charming tale of magic and loyalty with a surprisingly grim core. The rags to riches adventures of orphans Eric ‘Cat’ Chant and his sister Gwendolen as they are drawn into the world of magicians is light and inventive. I confess to becoming somewhat frustrated by Cat’s rather muleish failure to recognise where his best interests lie, in the face of increasingly weighty evidence, but that’s a small complaint. Another book in the series The Lives of Christopher Chant, was bundled with this one. I shall attack it soon.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey – I like supernatural crime noir. Sandman Slim starts with James Stark crawling out of Hell to wreak vengeance on the cabal of vicious sorcerors who sent him there. There’s a decapitation in the first couple of chapters. Sports cars are wrecked, fireballs are thrown and an awful lot of people are killed with something that sounds like Monkey’s magic wishing staff but adorned with gratuitous spikes. This is violent supernatural mayhem with some clever additions to the usual War-twixt-Heaven’n'Hell cosmology, which I won’t spoil. I was pretty confident I would enjoy this book and it did not let me down.

The Last Days of Kali Yuga by Paul Haines – I have promised a full review of this. I *will* get to it. Right after I get to the full review of Bad Power, which has been waiting in line for longer. It’s great, though, so I will understand if you can’t old out for the full review before rushing off to read it for yourself.

Fireside Magazine Spring 2012 Issue 1 – I picked this one up as a reward for backing the launch of a short story periodical through Kickstarter. I came in on the promise of the Chuck Wendig story – ‘Emerald Lakes’ is a prequel to Wendig’s not-safe-for-young-adults YA-noir Shotgun Gravy – but all four prose stories were excellent. There was also a short comic, about which – despite containing both ninjas and a yeti god-king – I was somewhat more ambivalent. Whatever,  four out of five ain’t bad. The Atlanta Burns story carries the same unrelentingly harsh tone of its longer successor, so obviously I felt I got my money’s worth there (and it has a kickarse punchline). Tobias Buckell’s ‘Press Enter to Execute’ is a nice little speculative thriller, Christie Yant’s ‘Temperance’ is a very odd comment on how communities change, and – probably my pick for the lot – Ken Liu’s ‘To the Moon’ juxtaposes the plight of the modern asylum seeker with the tricks of the Monkey King. It’s elegant and sad and I loved it.

Conclusions

No new entries in April for the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge – my reading list included only one woman and only one Australian, but they weren’t the same person. Not quite as much short fiction as the previous couple of months, though I did make up for it there towards the end. The tone was dialled around to the crime/noir side of things, with a good helping of the supernatural and fantasy. Still no science fiction. For the pick of the month I would probably go with The Last Days of Kali Yuga over Charmed Life (Sandman Slim pulled a close third).

Resolutions for next month – more women, more Australians and some non-fiction.

That equivocation aside, what the last couple of months’ reading has helped me realise is that my appetite for good short stories is growing ravenous. I tend to drift away from reading short form stuff for years at a time, only to rediscover it and feast gluttonously in short bursts. I have the feeling that the current rate of consumption might be a little more sustained, thanks to the Kindle. For whatever personal prejudice, I haven’t ever tended to buy short fiction in great quantities, which I suspect lumps me in with 95% of the rest of the reading community. Having easy access to relatively low priced collections through ebook vendors – primarily Amazon, but also Smashwords, direct from authors/publishers and presumably Google Books and Apple – has changed my purchasing habits. It’s not that I don’t think of my ebooks as ‘real’, per se – but knowing that I don’t have to find shelf space for my impulse buys has really made a difference in what I’m willing to take a chance on.

So now I have several recent anthologies lined up in my to-read pile, and I’ve picked up the collected works of several out-of-copyright and long-deceased authors – Poe, Lovecraft, Howard, Chesterton. If I can find Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Lieber and whoever that guy was who wrote the Shadow [consulted memory further: Lester Dent], then so much the better. Chow down.

Since technical dysfunctionality has already eaten one post, I’m not going to risk writing anything lengthy. So instead here is a short piece I wrote last week when I was procrastinating on doing something – I can’t even remember what that was. Would that work avoidance was always so productive…

My damn cough is still hanging around. I thought I’d knocked it on the head but now I believe it may have been more tenacious than I gave it credit for.

Let’s see if some sleep will deal with that.

Moonlight Serenade

“He’s dead.”

“What does that even mean?”

She pries the spade from his shaking fingers with slow care, ignoring the steady drip from the shoulder of its blade onto the sleeve of her coat. He resists for a moment out of instinct, not ready to relinquish this, his only means of defence. He remembers himself then, grimaces a brave face at her and relaxes his grip.

“He’s not coming back.”

The air is electric with aromatic flavours of burning – blood, nylon, leather mingling in a spiky miasma. Smoke curls from the bones scorching excavations down through the shag pile carpet. The debris has scattered. When Dunbar’s head came away from his shoulders, it was like the pin yanked from a grenade. His body shuddered and sloughed the leather jacket, custom shades, tight stonewash denims and tattoo-mottled skin in one grotesque moulting moment. Then his bones exploded.

“He said he could never die. He said nothing could kill him.”

She grasps his hand, feels that his pulse like a fist slamming the table. “That’s what he said. After all this time he must have believed it.” She spins the spade, captivated by the blood’s pink glint against the blade’s pristine silver. “Why would he have something like this? Unless he thought he was invulnerable?”

Every exhalation is a fierce rasp of survivor’s triumph. His eyes shine like moons, full and unblinking. “He thought he was in control. He thought he was the predator. He thought I wouldn’t do it.”

She said softly “Neither did I.”

“Did I do the wrong thing?”

She doesn’t answer at first. “He was a monster.”

“Yes he was.”

“He was a killer.”

“It’s been decades. He might have killed hundreds of people. He said he would kill us when he was done.”

“When he said he would hurt me – you believed it?”

“He wasn’t playing any more. That’s what I thought.”

She sighs. Up until this moment she’s been able to cruise the convenient self-deception that her confusion is the disorientation of the sleeper jerked awake from a lifelike dream. Now it’s all getting real. Undeniable. “What do we do now?”

“Walk away?”

“Is it really that simple? The other guests could have seen him bring us here. They must have heard the screams. Those howls. They would’ve woken the dead.” She shakes her head. “We paid for the cabin with your card. Sooner or later someone will look. It will come back to us.”

“If they saw something, they saw a man.” He grins, kneels to scoop of the misshapen skull made of sharp angles and raised ridges and deep thorned teeth. He holds it up and turns it. The flicker from the wood heater throws leering spiked shadows on the rose walls and velvet curtains. “They didn’t see anything like this.”

He has a point. Nobody will mistake the remains for human. “There are bones everywhere. We need to get rid of them.”

“We bury them. That’s what he said he’d do to us.”

“If we go out wandering the gardens with a shovel with this temperature, people really will ask questions. Someone’s bound to call the cops. Anyway the landscaping is a work of art. I don’t want to go digging holes everywhere.”

“Then what?”

She considered. “We’ll burn them. The shovel as well. We should be able to get the fireplace hot enough to melt silver, don’t you think?”

He frowns. He’s no metallurgist. “Maybe if we stoke it as far as it will go.”

“I’ll build the fire up and start feeding the bones in. You go out and chop up a few stacks of firewood.” She points at the skull. “Take that with you. Smash it up with the axe.”

When he returns a few minutes later she has gathered up the smouldering bones and the box fireplace is roaring. He props open one of the sash windows, letting the midnight freeze counter the hot blast.

“Now for the head.” She arranges the skull fragments on the spade’s severed blade. One larger chunk at the centre is recognisable as most of an eye socket. It glares its mute accusation. She recoils with remorse but there’s no need to blink her tears away. The heat of the kindled inferno takes care of those.

She dons heavy gauntlet mittens. She places the spade and its gruesome payload atop the pyre. It settles into place, the blood sizzling to black wisps in an instant. A hiss whistles from within, furious and urgent. Then it’s gone.

She shuts the front door and levers the vent open all the way. Light flares, throwing their shadows further across the king poster bed, up the walls decked with tasteful nudes to the ceiling mirror.

“That’s it,” she says. “We’ll stoke it every twenty minutes or so. Keep it going all night. In the morning we let it die down over breakfast. We’ll scrape out whatever’s left and dump it off one of the walking tracks.”

“You think of everything.”

“Hmm, I hope so.” She smiles, slumps against him, tension slipping away. “We’ll probably lose our security deposit on the carpets.” She snakes an arm around his waist. She tugs apart the buttons on his shirt, pulls it free and balls it up. He’s glowing golden brown, reflecting the searing firelight. “This will have to go. It’s covered in blood.” She tosses it on top of the woodpile. “You’re going to need a bath.”

He smiles at the hunger in her words. “Honey?”

“Mm?”

“Next year, why don’t you let me pick the surprise?”

She pouts. “Was it too much for you?”

He leans in, bears her down, kisses her on the forehead and mouth and throat. “I love you.” He growls, letting her hear the animal inside.

“Happy anniversary, my love.”

The bronchitis hung around forever, morphing its modus operandi several times over – hacking cough, stinking headache, fever, lethargy and never all at the same time. Thankfully the suite of antibiotics – including one normally prescribed for pneumonia (!) – put a bullet in its tricksy little brain and rolled it into a ditch. I’m still a bit on the flimsy side, but I’ll be back at work on Monday without any problems.

The writing

Since I had the concentration span of a fish finger during the illness, work on the novel was non-existent. That is, until one night last week when I sat down and hammered out the final chunk of text for Draft Zero of my novel in a single literally feverish session of a couple of hours. It really was one of those trance-writing sessions that some authors talk about, when the story pours out as fast as the writer can type it. [1] I don’t have those very often – my technique is more “think for twenty minutes, type for five, repeat”. It seems that slight doses of delirium agree with me. Reading back over it, it’s mostly usuable, which is even more startling.

So, yay, step one complete. My unreadable mess draft is finished. Sure, nothing much happens for the first forty pages, the protagonist doesn’t drive the action much, the cosmology is half-thought-out and largely nonsensical, there’s continuity errors all over the place and the climax is a cluttered mess that fails to address most if not all of the questions raised in the preceding narrative – but it’s done. Next job will be to go back to first principles and write a proper outline of the novel. What’s there is a useful guide, but now I have to knuckle down and start applying some elbow grease. I figure I will do at least three or four passes on the outline before I dive back into the writing. I do tend to write a lot faster when I know where I am going with something. I’m not setting myself any deadlines yet, but I hope it won’t take more than a few weeks to get the outline into the shape I want. While I’m doing that I will write short fiction if I feel the occasional urge to be spontaneously creative.

The wedding

The wedding of the year took place on a beautiful autumn afternoon alongside one of Canberra’s many picturesque lakes. Simon and Sarah opted for a very simple ceremony under the trees, with the formalities over and done with inside ten minutes. That’s always a good idea when most of your guests are standing. Brother Jimbo and I acted as Simon’s groomsmen. I am happy to report that neither of us managed to break anything. Then there were photos with mountains, trees and a lake decorating the backgrounds, some chitchat with some dear friends who’d come from near and far for the ceremony – not to mention various members of Simon’s family whom I’ve not laid eyes on for mroe than ten years – and finally it was off to the reception.

The venue was a small brewery called Zierholz, in the industrial wilds of Fyshwick. The food was excellent German fare – sausage, pork, sauerkraut and a slightly out-of-place-but-delicious risotto – but the beer was extraordinary, with a great range of styles. Nothing that I tried was less than pleasant and a couple of them I would have been happy to drink myself sick on. If not for the fact that I was still popping post-bronchitis codeine and that I had to do a speech, I would have researched their range with considerably more diligence.

Simon extended me the honour of delivering his best man speech, which I think came off well. Lacking the sincerity and depth of character to do a serious speech, I went for (specious) meta-analysis of the purpose of best man speeches and for (ludicous) speculation as to what Sarah might be getting out of the marriage. I made it to the end without blowing any of the jokes or collapsing with a coughing fit, and everyone laughed at the right parts, so I assume that it had the desired effect.

Even jokey public speaking takes a lot out of me though – after the speech (and the fatty food, and the booze, and the tremendously rich and fabulous chocolate cake) I was trashed. That’s my excuse for not dancing – not even for ‘The Time Warp’. My other excuse is that I can’t dance, but in fairness nobody else used that as an excuse, even though it would have been reasonable to do so.

Anyway, the whole day was sweet but exhausting. I’m glad for the relative lack of social obligations today. I probably need a bit of a rest before I resume normal speed tomorrow. I have a lot of work, exercise and writing to catch up on.

[1] Alternately, it may be comparable to Stephen King’s inability to recall writing the novel Cujo, though in that case it was because he was hoovering up sacks of cocaine at the time.

The Dinocalypse Trilogy by Evil Hat, Chuck Wendig and now a bunch of other people. To kick off the fiction line of their rip-roaring pulp-action Spirit of the Century game, Evil Hat Productions have invited funding for a trilogy of novels by Chuck Wendig. I will say only this: Time-travelling psychic dinosaurs invade New York. If that sentence is not enough to absolve these books of the presumed sin of being gaming tie-in novels, your tastes and mine may fail to correspond at a primal level.

BUT this being a project orchestrated by the inestimable Fred Hicks, the Dinocalypse Kickstarter blew through its initial targets in, I dunno, three or four minutes. Now they’re aiming for the stars, tacking on another novel for every five grand or so raised. So for the minimum buy-in of ten bucks, you can currently pick up SIX novels, written by a variety of young people who are extremely hot right now [1]. I told you that so that I could tell you this – the next stretch goal is for pledges totalling thirty grand. If they hit that target – and they will, in another couple of days probably – the next novel down the pipeline will feature Professor Khan, the intelligent gorilla who lectures at Oxford, in an adventure on Mars.

THAT IS A BOOK THAT I NEED TO EXIST!

(Ahem). If you like ridiculous high-octane pulp action with airships and jetpacks and sorceror-detectives and international dames of intrigue, consider slinging this one some bucks. The minimum pledge reward represents stunningly good value.

Shadowrun Returns by Harebrained Schemes. When I was still at uni I played the absolute hell out of tabletop Shadowrun. In summary the setting sounds pretty weak: in the near cyberpunk future ruled by megacorporations, the Mayan apocalypse arrives and heralds the return of magic to the world. A whole bunch of people find they can work spells and a whole bunch of others get turned into elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls and so on. Everyone plays edgy criminals with smart guns, stealth motorbikes, armoured trenchcoats and monofilament katanas and they all get together to steal corporate data from heavily fortified research labs and to blow the shit out of dragons or an attack chopper or whatever.

Shut up, it’s awesome. No, YOU’RE old!

Whatever, grampa. Anyhow, anarchic criminality, gun fetishism and stickin’ it to the man-who-might-be-a-dragon would seem like a good fit for a computer game translation, right? For some reason none of the attempts to date ever managed to capture the appeal of the original setting. That sense of the improverished street renegade struggling not to draw the attention of insanely powerful enemies; the wonder of ancient elf conspiracies and creepy alien shamanism; the clash of cultures, corporate and criminal, Native American and Elven, Orc Underground and (boo!spit!) Humanis Policlub. Back then I think we never quite got at the meat of what made the setting interesting (we were too busy playing it like a reskinned D&D with machine guns and hand grenades).

I’m kind of hoping that this game – a turn-based 2D interative story-telling game for PCs and tablets – will manage to find the sweet spot between immersion, in what was to me a fascinating setting, and the technoporn of smart-linking your Ares Predator to your combat reflexes and ocular implants. It’s back with at leats one of the original designers, so I have some reason to be optimistic.

And finally, Jess Nevins, an uber-historian of American pulp fiction, is compiling an Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes. Okay, so this is a pretty obscure subject, but I do think this kind of cultural anthropology is both cool and valuable. Where else in this day an age are you going to find a detailed accounting of the careers of luminous creations like Captain Future, Mister Amazing  and, I dunno, Lady Zap or whoever. The point is, we’d never know how many of those three I just made up without a useful reference resource like this book and website. Unless I told you that it was two.

So that’s where my Kickstarter addiction has wandered this month. There’s obviously a wealth of stuff on there that it would be dangerous for me to explore any further given my apparent inability to suppress the urge to impulse-support neat stuff. If you seen something cool out there (or at Indiegogo or wherever else) shout it out in the comments.

[1] One of whom is a chap named Brian Clevinger, who writes a comic called Atomic Robo (art by Scott Wegener). As an aside, remind me one day to tell you how frickin’ great it is.

Most of the books I read this month were short stories. That was deliberate. Knowing I had less time than usual, I just went with stuff I could dip into quickly. I plan to chuck a few more collections and anthologies in my Kindle’s ‘to read’ folder to make sure I have a good supply handy – this month isn’t looking any better for spare time.

With four more books read this month my total comes to 17, including 5 for the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge. Despite the lean count, I still look pretty good to hit my goals of reading 80 books this year and reading 6 works by Australian women (not that the latter has turned out to be difficult at all). I’m halfway through a couple of paperbacks that I should finish soon. That will punch up the April numbers, as bad sitcoms would have us believe they say in high-powered business meetings.

So here we are with the riches uncovered in March. Will we see a repeat of last month’s controversial review of something I didn’t like that much? Er, no.

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton – Kindle copy. I believe that I picked this up on the recommendation of someone like Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. It’s a 1992 novel that does a remarkably good job of describing itself in the title – to whit, one day every television channel in the world cuts to a picture of a mildly-confused Buddy Holly, sitting in a glass box in orbit around the Jovian moon Ganymede. Holly chats amiably to the camera, sings a few songs and asks if anyone can get in touch with one Oliver Vale of Topeka, Kansas. Most of the novel is concerned with Oliver Vale – who was conceived at the moment Holly died, decades earlier – fleeing for his life while he tries to figure out what’s going on, pursued by enraged couch potatoes, crazed evangelists, a hit man from the FCC and a cyborg doberman.

It’s part road movie, part nostalgic journey through the early decades of American rock and roll and part alien/Atlantean high weirdness. It’s funny most of the time but there are some achingly sad moments, of wasted lives and squandered love and obsession supplanting affection. To me it also commited the unsettling crime of inflicting every song Buddy Holly ever recorded as a string of consecutive earworms. Which is fine until ‘Rave On’ gets into your brain and just stays there for a week. (Oh, and you can get the book for free if you want to. Obviously I think you should. Especially Evan, who won’t read this. Also, there’s a movie in production starring the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. The trailer is pretty amusing).

Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts – short story collection, Kindle version. My review is here. I liked it a lot.

Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti – short story collection, Kindle version. Review coming as soon as I finish it. I liked it a lot as well.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled by Various authors (Anthology edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker)  Kindle version. Beat to a Pulp is a series of anthologies of crime noir short stories. I won’t go through the full collection of thirteen stories – most of them were enjoyably gruesome and misanthropic, ranging from fair to pretty good. There were outliers in both directions, of course. I’ll only mention a few of the best ones, but in all it’s a good collection, well worth checking out if you have a taste for sex and violence, murder and revenge and bodies dumped in bayous for the ‘gators to pick over.

The first story is ‘The Tachibana Hustle’ by Garnett Elliott, which has by far the strangest premise of the lot: it’s the story of some low-rent Tokyo hoodlums trying to preserve their boss’ fading star by stealing these new-fangled Pac-man games everyone’s putting their money into. Like every other story in the anthology it’s violent, but unlike all the others it’s kind of adorable too. Viper and Jun are such hard-luck losers it’s mean not to like them a little. Most of the protagonists of the rest of the stories are vicious, uncompromising, world-weary or all three, so the laughs die off pretty quick. Still there are some gems in there – ‘Second Round Dive’ by Benoit Lelievre, about classic down-on-his-luck boxer, is grim and inevitable; ‘.38 Special’ by Amy Grech lends a kinky absurdity to Russian Roulette; and I have to give a special shout-out to the stomach-churning brutality of ‘The Death Fantastique’ by John Hornor Jacobs.

Also worth the very reasonable price of admission is a well-research opening essay on the history of hardboiled noir and its antecedents in Westerns and pre-WWI crime fiction, most of which I had no idea about.

The four short stories that make up Love and Romanpunk wrap around the premise that the Rome of Augustus and his heirs was crawling with mythological beasts, in particular vampires and lamia. So far, so here-take-all-my-money please. I’m not a particularly dedicated history buff (unlike Rayner Roberts, who has a doctorate all up in that bizzo) but I am drawn to the lives gleefully depicted in I, Claudius, Rome and even goddamn Gladiator. There’s just something about the series of debauched lunatics who paraded through Octavius’ wake that captures the imagination – Nero, Tiberius, Caligula and dear old Claw-claw-Claudius. Rayner Roberts cannily folds inhuman monsters into that mix and serves up a delicious alternate history in which lamia plague humanity over the course of centuries.

First up is my personal favourite, ‘Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary’, which recounts the rise and disintegration of the Augustine Emperors, as told by Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina Minor. It begins – and wins my undying affection – with this passage:

Let us begin with the issue of most interest to future historians: I did not poison my uncle and husband, the Emperor Claudius. Instead, I drove a stake through his heart.

Colour me delighted. It goes on to detail, in alphabetical order, the specific mythological monsters that helped or beset or sometimes comprised the various branches of the Imperial family. Basilisks, centaurs, harpies – and of course the much-reviled Livia (Augustus’ wife) was a blood-drinking lamia. The story centres around the Julias, the three sisters of Caligula (Julia Agrippina, Julia Drusilla and Julia Livilla) who fight to preserve themselves, their brothers and their children from various brushes with mythology and from their fiendish relatives.

The choice to tell the story in an alphabetical-order series of vignettes seems a catchy gimmick at first, but the story so comes alive with Julia Agrippina’s passionate ferocity that the gimmick completely fades into the background. Looking back on it, it’s a clever artifice that gives ‘Julia Agrippina’ the feel of a real old-world bestiary as well as an epic family saga.

‘Lamia Victoriana’ is a gothic retelling of the romance between Mary Wollstonecraft and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which somehow despite the presence of bloodsucking monsters, gratuitous murders and a rather steamy lesbian seduction is rather less sordid than its real-history equivalent. The characters swan about The Continent being determinedly romantic and inevitably tragic, which makes it sound like a romp, albeit one where the consequences of thoughtless indulgence and frequent acts of murder are always lurking. The ending is upliftingly chilling, which is a bit of a neat trick.

‘The Patrician’, a YA romance featuring a young woman and an ancient monster hunter (set primarily in an Australian tourist attraction only a little more improbable than most of the real ones) which explores the dynamic of a Doctor/Companion relationship without once making even an oblique reference to Doctor Who. Instead, ‘The Patrician’ concerns the hunting of ancient Roman monsters and their kind, with the focus on the young protagonist’s lifetime journey to becoming an unmitigated badarse. This is the story in the collection that picked up a nomination for an Aurealis Award, for which it is more than deserving, though as I mentioned it’s not my favourite. I loved the line “She did not see him again for five years, and when she did, he was too busy stabbing harpies to stop and chat.” Sweet.

Finally there’s ‘The Last of the Romanpunks’, which is a straight-up action-adventure set on an airship crawling with monsters. It ties directly back to the previous three stories in amusing and unexpected ways, but Rayner Roberts never lets that get in the way of the hardboiled Die Hard antics. Snappy dialogue, clever and determined protagonists and – yeah, well, she had me at airships.

‘Love and Romanpunk’ is a great collection. While I picked up this one more or less on a Rome-based whim after hearing it mentioned on the Galactic Suburbia podcast (co-hosted by the author of this collection and its editor, Alisa Krasnostein), I now plan to pick up the rest of the Twelve Planets Series as soon as they become available on the Kindle. Highly recommended.