Yesterday, I was left a comment on my blog by Lisa, who I assume is German. She said, “Hey Ben!!!

Do you know that your book Black Sheep was chosen for the German final examinations. Sounds kind of interesting. I think I am going to buy it to read the whole book. Hope I did well in analysing the scene.

Good luck for your career, Lisa.”

So.

I had no idea. Anyone else heard this?

I’d be curious to see what scene they used, and if it was translated into German, and how that happened, and if anyone was contacted about it. Hell, I just got no idea what’s going on. Perhaps another Ben Peek wrote another Black Sheepand it is him.

The worse thing about being a writer is the time.

When you’re just starting out, everything moves at a glacial speed. You figure that the melting polar caps will be touching your toes by the time that someone takes a moment out of their day to reject you. When I began submitting stories around, it wasn’t uncommon to wait six, seven months for a hastily written note, or a check box with ticks, or a form letter with your name and or title spelt wrongly at the top. Everything was done by post then, so I could spend weeks waiting till I got home from school to check the mail and find it empty (or with a bill for my mum–now the bills are for me, and I rather don’t like going to get the mail, because nothing good comes from it). I never really noticed the time, then, but it was around fifteen years that I began doing this gig, and that’s a lot of time behind me.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t experience that waiting still. I do, but the difference is, now, with a job and bills and all, I feel that time differently. I feel it especially on the days when the writing is a struggle, both creatively and career wise, of which the latter is known to influence the former. Maybe part of it is that we live in a society in which careers (or at least occupations) define our sense of identity, and when you’re not succeeding at your chosen profession, you feel as if your identity is one that has been compromised; or perhaps it’s simply that to be creative, being content with oneself is the state of mind from which one can work without interruption; or maybe it has nothing to do with any of those things. But, to be honest, I suspect that it might be the first–and being a writer, it has no set path for ’success’. no way to reach an end goal. When you start, for example, on the edges of the frozen wastes that is the publishing industry, trying to have people speak to you while you’re in the cold, getting published is good enough. When you get published, however, you realise that there are levels of publication, and that the higher up the food chain you go, the warmer it gets, and the more people you find huddled round the steel drums reading. Then once you get a place at a steel drum, there’s the glances at the windows, and those people who have indoor fires, and who have gas or electricity, and once you get in there, you want more space, maybe extra rooms, and more images I can make to illustrate my already dragged out point.

But it all takes time, and for most of it, your time is spent waiting on other peoples time, and there’s just not a whole lot you can do about it, because you got no pull with time.

Speaking of which, I got to work in a few hours, so off to write before that.

27-year-old Chen Liu, who also went by the name of Anthony Liu, was found dead in marshland surrounding the Georges River in Sydney’s south last year.

Police say the severely decomposed body was found just after 6:00pm (AEDT) on 1 November 2008 by two children, aged 9 and 14, who told their parents they had seen a body in Oatley Bay while on a canoeing trip.

Police say Mr Liu had been dead for 12 days before being discovered.

The Homicide Squad has been handling the case in conjunction with the Hurstville Local Area Command, forming Strike Force Renfree, but so far no arrests have been made.

They have now released an X-ray of the 27-year-old’s skull and neck, which shows it was filled with 34 nails.

“Post-mortem examination results revealed Mr Liu was shot repeatedly to the head with a high-powered nail gun. Similar types of nail guns can fire nails up to 85 millimetres long,” Detective Inspector Mark Newham of the Homicide Squad said in a statement.

Link.

(Thanks to ataxi, I think.)

I made a little dialogue for yesterday’s post because it gave me a laugh. I had a whole lot I wanted to add to it, but decided the gag worked best being short–the only thing I’d change is the title, perhaps, since I originally wanted to call it JG Ballard, but then swapped it at the last moment for reasons I can’t fully explain.

Either way, the joke was built out of a thought that has been running through my head, and about how much I respond to fiction that does have a large thematic that connects with the world that I live in. The writing that I’ve really enjoyed as a reader–and which has influenced me as a writer–has always done that. Salman Rushdie’s engagement with racial/cultural identity in the Satanic Verses, Lydia Millet’s use of the history of atomic bombs in America in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the Vietnam in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Geoff Ryman’s combination of third world poverty and science in Air… the list is pretty long and cool, at least in my opinion (A Clockwork Orange, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon). That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy a book that has nothing of that in it. I chilled out to Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale because it was full of energy–the movie, on the other hand, had a nice thematic content to it; but the book didn’t–and Chandler’s Marlowe books are pretty sweet as something to just sit back and get lost in. George R.R. Martin’s sprawling Songs of Ice and Fire saga is a similar kind of deal. But I tend to read those books and, while I enjoy the time that I am in them, I don’t remember much of them afterwards. Quite often, I don’t end up going to find another book by the author. I enjoyed Christopher Brookmyre’s One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night a whole fucking lot, and recommend it to anyone wanting to read a satirical action novel about a high school reunion on a oil rig, but while I’ve read a couple of others, they’re seemed a bit same in the jokes and tone, and I don’t feel a particular need to get any more.

In contrast, I bought Lydia Millet’s new novel the week it was released.

This enjoyment that I take is particularly evident in my work, I think. A story only begins to work for me when it picks up from things in the world that I see, or hear about, and want to discuss in that huge bubble of the shared reader experience. I don’t really have much interest in answering things, or being given them, but I do like the idea of having different opinions, takes, and being engaged with that. The engagement is what I want, of course, though there are certain areas I don’t go to. I’m not interested in writing anything that would support the idea that homosexuality is a sin, or which claims that keeping immigrants floating in international water until they are tossed back to wherever they’re trying to escape is the way to go. What I dislike about those opinions is about how writing about them is, at least to me, drawing lines throughout the world, putting people into artificial groups that somehow give more worth to one group, while condemning another. I’d rather create work that seeks to break down those notions.

Anyhow, that’s my random thought connected to yesterday’s post, and now I go off to keep working at my Octavia Butler piece, and to try and not focus on how such ideas are often deemed uncommercial.

There:

A blurry snapshot of the future.

You’re missing the way the predictive nature of this. Can’t you see how the censors over every car space? How they monitor how much of the parking lot is free and how much of it is taken? How the board that tells you how many there are, per level even, and how all of this is symbolic–

Symbolic for how our lives are being neatly shuffled into slots, how we’re being monitored, how this represents the very future of our world?

…

…

The populist award of Australian speculative fiction Ditmars is either open to voting now (or will be soon), and in the tradition of drumming up support for work, publishers are offering free copies of short fiction so you can read and vote. Of course, that’s just to get on the nomination list, as the actual winners are decided by people who attend the convention that the award is given out at (and thus, the winners are often decided by how popular you are, or how many friends you have–due to the size of the local scene here, it’s more than doable to rig the awards, should you be so inclined).

But, really, that’s not what this post is about. Instead, it’s about getting a bit of a free read, and voting if you’d like. It’s mostly about the fiction, however.

One of the anthologies that I appeared in last year, 2012, is being offered to anyone free as an electronic version if you are eligible to vote:

Twelfth Planet Press is offering an electronic copy of our near future anthology 2012 free to anyone who is eligible to nominate in the Ditmars this year.

Both the anthology, edited by Ben Payne and myself, and each of the individual stories are eligible for nomination in this year’s Ditmars.

* “Watertight Lies” by Deborah Biancotti
* “Fleshy” by Tansy Rayner Roberts
* “Oh, Russia” by Simon Brown
* “Soft Viscosity” by David Conyers
* “Apocalypse Now” by Lucy Sussex
* “The Last Word” by Dirk Flinthart
* “Ghost Jail” by Kaaron Warren
* “Love You Like Water” by Angela Slatter
* “Skinsongs” by Martin Livings
* “David Bowie” by Ben Peek
* “Oblivion” by Sean McMullen

Leave a comment here with your email address and details of your eligibility and we will send you the pdf. We ask that you not share the file with anyone else.

I believe you’re eligible if you can read, but does it really matter? Free fiction is free fiction. If you want to follow links, there are also stories at Jonathan Strahan’s blog , Margo Lanagan’s, and Ellen Datlow’s. In the great scheme of things for free fiction, you can also read my piece, ‘The Funeral, Ruined’ here for free.

Remember, reading is how you save Xmas from Jesus.

JG Ballard has died.

“He was a charming, classic English gentleman with a generous heart, a cynical take on the world and a huge sense of humour.

“He was a colonial figure in some senses. He had grown up in Shanghai and had very good manners. He was very generous and polite and it took a long while before he would do anything that wasn’t very controlled.”

Once he did relax, his relentless imagination and idiosyncratic interests made him a unique dining companion.

“Everything that everybody else was bored by or appalled by, he was excited by. He wasn’t really interested in English literary parties and kept himself outside that.

“He was bored by the heritage of Central London and, unlike other writers, never wanted to talk about what he was writing. He preferred to talk about ideas, or some weird news cuttings he had brought along.

“Living out in Shepperton for so long, he was one of the first to undersand that the psychosis of suburbia was a fascinating thing to pursue.

“He loved the edges of cities: shopping complexes, motorways and airports. He was very taken up with Watford because of its multi-storey car parks.

“Where other people were terrified by the consumerist culture he saw it as exciting, something he could manipulate, shredding it and making his own world out of it.”

–Iain Sinclair.

I always found Ballard to be an interesting author, in the best of terms. He had a lot of ideas floating around in his work, and with his short work, he had nice changes in form, one of which influenced a short piece I wrote a few years back. I still think ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ is one of the darkest and most intelligent uses of form I’ve read.

It’s a shame to say this now that he’s dead, but if you’ve never read any of his work, you could do worse than checking some out.

Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll, built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crater created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test.

Link.

Rob Hood has interviewed Kaaron Warren, who is lovely, and has a novel coming out in the future, so here’s a quote and a link:

I first stumbled upon Kaaron Warren via her story “Bone Dog”, which she had submitted to my partner Cat Sparks for possible inclusion in the second Agog! anthology, Agog! Terrific Tales (Agog! Press, 2003). It was a perverse, nasty tale that begins with these words:

In the porn industry, models don’t usually get to choose the venue for photo shoots. I guess ‘Fat Slits’ has to be a bit more flexible than other magazines; some of us can’t get too far from home.

The story was as outlandish as this opening suggests: beautifully written, intelligent and mind-numbing — and clearly the work of some sort of crack-addled goth chick. Cat accepted it at once. When I finally met Kaaron, probably at the launch of the book, I wasn’t prepared for the suburban mom she turned out to be. Of course in time this image was revealed to be a façade, hiding a bent imagination made all the more effectively grotesque by her tight grasp on the ordinary details — and perversities — of life. These days she’s had many stories published, has won awards and has produced an excellent collection, The Glass Woman (Prime Books, 2008). She’s still a great mum, too, as well as a smart, generous and open-hearted friend and a lovely person all round.

I was excited — and a little jealous — when I heard that she’d sold not one, but three novels to the new, high-profile UK imprint Angry Robot. Horror fiction is about to receive a massive shot in the arm.

Undead Backbrain: Thanks for talking to us, Kaaron. Your first novel, Slights, is about to be published by Angry Robot Press — and from the cover and the accompanying blurbs, it looks to be a horror novel that will do the genre proud. Without giving too much away, what’s it about?

Kaaron Warren: Thanks for talking to me! Slights is about a woman who, at 18, accidentally kills her mother in a car accident. Stephanie (Steve) experiences near death as a result of her injuries, but she sees no shining light, hears no loving voices. Instead, she finds herself in a cold dark room, surrounded by people she barely knows. The only thing she recognises in them is anger; she sees that they are anxious for her to die so they can devour her. She visits this room a number of times throughout the novel as she attempts suicide periodically. She is unpopular, disliked, unable to fit in to society. She gradually recognises the people in the room; each and every one is a person she slighted in some way. Steve becomes obsessed with death. Her brother, a successful politician, has no time for her, and her police officer father died years earlier, a hero. She is obsessed with her own death because in the afterlife, at least, she is the centre of attention. And she becomes obsessed with the deaths of others. She digs up her backyard with the intention of planting night-blooming jasmine, a comfort flower. Instead, she finds odd things; a cracked glass cufflink, an old belt, a dented lunchbox, a shoe heel, many more odd, small items. These lead her to understand more about her past, and about why she is driven to do the things she does.

Link.