Things I’ve been reading
Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
Life Kills by Miles Vertigan
The Radleys by Matt Haig
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
Spurious by Lars Iyer
Things I’ve been reading
The Brain-Dead Megaphone by George Saunders
Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich
What I’d Say To the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats by Jack Handey
Story by Robert McKee
Things I’ve been reading
Born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives by John Gorham Palfrey
You are not a gadget: a manifesto by Jaron Lanier
Landscapes and seasons of the medieval world by Derek Albert Pearsall
Malcolm & Juliet by Bernard Beckett
“You only had to survive one of your regrets”
Pharmacists live in minutiae… Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.
[…] It was funny — a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. […] You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.
“Chris Miles’ cheeky fusion of fae and suburbia”
My short story ‘The Household Debt’ is among the many tales of fantasy, horror and science-fiction in the latest Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Editor Simon Petrie kindly namechecks my piece in his blog post introducing the issue, aptly describing it as a ‘cheeky fusion of fae and suburbia’. It’s also my first full-length speculative fiction story sale.
If you’re not aware of it, ASIM is edited by a cooperative whose members (many of whom are celebrated genre authors in their own right) take turns to oversee the selection of stories for an individual issue. It’s one of the (if not the) most regular print outlets for genre fiction in Australia, publishing local and international authors, and I’m thrilled that my story has found a home within its pages.
I haven’t had a chance to read issue 51 cover to cover, but so far I’ve been very impressed by fellow newcomer Robin Shortt’s ‘Bonsai’, and am looking forward to reading the Keith Stevenson and Thoraiya Dyer pieces.
And if I may be so crass, print ($12.95) and PDF ($4.95) copies of ASIM 51 can be purchased at andromedaspaceways.com.
Things I’ve been reading
Stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
Farce: The Critical Idiom by Jessica Milner Davis
English Comedy: Its Role and Nature from Chaucer to the Present Day by Allan Edwin Rodway
The Alchemy of Laughter by Glen Cavaliero
The Nature of Narrative by Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg
Siggy and Amber by Doug MacLeod
Air by Geoff Ryman
Things I’ve been reading
Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman
Bereft by Chris Womersley
The Cambridge Companion to Milton by Dennis Danielson
Blank Verse by Robert B Shaw
The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God As King by Michael Bryson
An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton
“Why is blank verse such a promising medium for dialogue?”
Why is blank verse such a promising medium for dialogue? Probably it is because the form conveys a slight heightening to the material through its recurrent sound-patterns, holding our attention without distracting us by its artifice. Our attention thus engaged, we are reminded of the collaboratively creative nature of conversation, which is human drama in itself… Even if the language (of blank verse) is colloquial, the meter formalizes it and, in the way of many esthetic devices, entices us even as it distances us from the dialogue we are overhearing. We are carried by the rhythms as the speakers are. Because each speaker sustains similar rhythms, we feel the intensity of their connection to each other: they are in some sense on the same wavelength, even if what they are exchanging is mottled with misunderstandings. Their speech is the way they reveal themselves, and blank verse, in its unobtrusive though stylized way, draws our attention to disclosures of character.
Blank verse: a guide to its history and use by Robert B. Shaw, page 7
“The way wind was visible when it ruffled a field of wheat”
In his father’s slumping shoulders, in the expressions that flitted across his weathered features, Quinn saw something of their family’s terrible story, the way wind was visible when it ruffled a field of wheat.
Bereft by Chris Womersley, pages 103–4
Things I’ve been reading
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley
The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett
“A fist-sized forest in our chest”
There’s one of Shadow’s pieces, a painting on a crumbling wall of a heart cracked by earthquake… It’s not a heart like you see on a Valentine’s Day card. It’s the heart how it really is: fine veins and atriums and arteries. A fist-sized forest in our chest.
Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley, page 2
Things I’ve been reading
Doctor Who: Coming of the Terraphiles by Michael Moorcock
The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner
Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 by Rachel Falconer
Grimsdon by Deborah Abela
Worldshaker by Richard Harland
“The inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure”
(Alice) had many friends among the children of the village, for she was bold and quick-witted… She was often punished… but she took her whippings as a proud child does, as the inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure.
The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett, page 55
Things I’ve been reading
Kraken by China Miéville
Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything In Between by Carole Burns
Australians and Egypt, 1914–1919 by Suzanne Mary Brugger
The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World by Jasmine Day
The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming
Mr. Thundermug: A Novel by Cornelius Medvei
Things I’ve been reading
C by Tom McCarthy
The Cheeky Monkey: writing narrative comedy by Tim Ferguson
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction by Stephen Thomas Knight
“Some vermicular, primordial instinct”
…there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoroscope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscillated against each other awkwardly, like animals — reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures — who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet understand, through some vermicular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours.
Things I’ve been reading
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945 by Michelle Arrow
Things I’ve been reading
The Body’s Edge: Our Cultural Obsession With Skin by Marc Lappe
Skin by Claudia Benthien
Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations With the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture by Robert Zwijnenberg
This is Shyness by Leanne Hall
Things I’ve been reading
The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
The billionaire’s curse by Richard Newsome
The scarecrow and his servant by Philip Pullman
Off with their heads! Fairy tales and the culture of childhood by Maria Tatar
Voracious children: who eats whom in children’s literature by Carolyn Daniel
Dreaming of Cockaigne: medieval fantasies of the perfect life by Herman Pliej
Things I’ve been reading
How novels work by John Mullan
Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet
Consuming passions: leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain by Judith Flanders
Victorian culture and the idea of the grotesque by Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow & David Amigoni (editors)
Stratford boys by Jan Mark