anachronoclast's Friends

9:02AM

Drains are well blocked.

Impatiently waiting for real estate agent to answer phones as this is beyond our repair abilities and we need a plumber.

In better news - me and Megan built an Absolut Disco in our backyard :)

3:51PM

Also wanted for Midsummer

- A good non alcoholic punch recipe - preferably without pineapple juice as a main ingredient and also tastes good when vodka is added later :)

- A loan of a punch bowl.

- The loan of a fairly stable outdoor table, needs to be stable enough to support dj decks and the amp, we have a car and can pick up and return.

- A bag of 100 tealight candles from Ikea *flutters eyelashes at Del*.

- Better food colouring - okay not really, but me and Megan just made a choc ripple cake (for practice) and used green food colouring!

- Also if anyone wants to bring music on an external usb hard drive we can plug them in.

- Which means we also need a USB hub thingy - cos the macbook only has 2 usb ports.

2:12PM - Midsummer 2009

Midsummer is the longest day of the year, and what better way to observe the passing of the year than with friends and family.

We'd like you to join us to celebrate Midsummer. There will be food, there will be music, there will be candles, and most importantly, there will be friends and family.

As actual midsummer falls on a Tuesday this year, we have selected the nearest Saturday :)

When: 19th December, 2009, from 5pm.
Where: Nigel & Renee's house*.
BYO: drinks, food to share, candles, fire wood, wishes and dreams
We will provide music, BBQ, ice, tea lights and salad.
Please RSVP
*if you don't know our address, please email or phone 0411740668.
---

Gosh the year has gone by fast, midsummer is this Saturday!

Few changes to the usual midsummer format this year. Firstly, to stop the candle ceremony going for hours, we will have a smaller table set up - wishes for absent friends, extra wishes etc can be done at that table, rather than as part of the ceremony, I don't want to stop people making wishes, but I think a limit of one wish per person during the actual ceremony is fair and should help keep time down.

For those that want to make, or avoid the ceremony - we will start it at at dusk.

Can I please get some willing wenches/volunteers to help with setting up for the party, food prep and decorations, I actually want to make some effort at decorating the backyard this year, not sure it will work, but it is worth a try?

Also - I'm looking forward to seeing everyone :)

4:49PM

I visited the zoo this afternoon. They have a new area to house the seals that is very awesome. They have seals, penguins, eels, sharks, manta rays, fish and pelicans!

Then I went to the giftshop to complete my errands. The staff all have cute red t-shirts with little elephants on them eagerly awaiting the birth of the baby elephant, which is due any day now.

The pregnant elephant is being very closely monitored and a caravan has been set up near the trail of the elephants which is housing the keepers who are on 24 hour watch.

The staff I talked to are all very excited, its the first baby elephant to be born at the zoo.

http://www.zoo.org.au/Melbourne/Dokkoon/Keeper_Blog

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/melbourne-zoo-staff-nervously-await-the-birth-of-baby-elephant-to-dokkoon/story-e6frf7kx-1225809225381

11:28AM - The Last Continuum 5 Report (With Rantings On Sound & Performance)

Welcome to The Most Non-Linear Continuum 5 Report In All The Blogsphere. For those outside what Adam Browne calls "the funky end of Australian Science Fiction" (with just a touch of shrill), the event I'm discussing is the speculative fiction convention Continuum 5: Galaxies By Gaslight. The convention was organized by committee; the artist liaison was Sue-Ann Barber.

Like so many of my blogs, I have cunningly buried some academic regurgitation in it, which I've incorporated seamlessly and brilliantly, either because I'm a lazy bad girl, or because I'm an awesome ethical re-cycler. One of those. But you wouldn't have picked that, if I hadn't told you, right?

Knowledge and information gained from listening to other writers – especially published authors – which I might apply to my own short stories

I think the essential secret to powerful confident readings and panel appearances is experience, both in performance, in writing, and in life. Your Jack Danns and Robert Hoods (I made you guys plural) are guys that have established their presence in more ways than one. They really know their stuff, and that confidence puts the listener at ease, and draws them in.

As far as the readings I listened to at Continuum – and I didn’t get to catch all of the readings, and I would have liked to have heard more – apologies to the writers I missed, or on whom I didn't make enough notes to work into this blog post.

I particularly enjoyed Lucy Sussex’s reading. She’s a poised and stylish lady, and she writes as she is – very cultured, her work is both theorized and dramatically engaging, and her study of 19^th Century literature pays off in the witticism of the dialogue in her stories. There is a different aesthetic at work in pre-WWI fiction, and I think she evoked that very well in her interview with Barbara Baynton. (The story she read is available in Midnight Echo #3!) She offered the audience a choice of what they’d like to hear, which I thought was a simple and effective way of getting the listeners to feel involved. She was also “in costume” in an understated way, which is a legitimate dramatic device.

Gillian Polack actually has a quietly enchanting personality – she is a really sweet person, and without trying to she projects that. She introduced her story with an ad-libbed saga of the hurricane-related delays to publication of her book The Art of Effective Dreaming. At her website she reiterates similar sentiments, “As far as I know I am the only Australian writer to have a book delayed by Katrina, Rita and Ike.” This personalised the reading, which was a lovely way to begin. Gillian had told me she has “a small voice” – and she was very quiet. Given the readings room was tiny, it didn’t really matter.

Paul Kidd read a humorous piece about “furries” - a sub-set of fantasy fiction, where characters are talking animals, possibly shape shifters, and often with a titillating aspect. Given the target audience were well-versed in the genre, the comedy went down very well, and his reading was lively, and delivered with good volume.

My favourite reading at the convention was one by Kirstyn McDermott, who read a short story titled ‘Golden’, which appeared in the Island literary journal. Delivered clearly, with a good sense of pace – McDermott allowed pauses for images to sink in, and to emphasize the poetic use of repetition - 'Good as new... Good as old.' - goose-flesh-raisingly good stuff. A very visual story, and quite complex, but by allowing the listener time to absorb the details - rather kicked arse.

Sean Williams and Deborah Biancotti read each others stories, which was a nice way of changing the focus of the reading, you could watch the author reacting to hearing their work interpreted - and I thought they each had a good empathy with the others writing. An interesting session.

Knowledge of presentation techniques gained from watching experienced guest readers

Continuum 5: Galaxies By Gaslight featured a blended program of readings and panel discussions, presentations, and demonstrations. Some of the rooms were equipped with PA systems; others were simply a room set aside for acoustic presentation.

Some issues arose from the use of the PA – the Reinventing Your Fandom discussion by Claire McKenna and Paul Kidd was blighted by feedback due to a poorly tuned PA. Maybe the live sound tech had done a crappy job, or maybe some well-meaning writer had buggered up the EQ, but either way the result was awful pinging feedback. I couldn't tolerate the sound for the full duration of the session.

Eugene Gramalis takes the prize for worst microphone technique at the convention, during the ZomRomCom panel (on the viability of Zombie Romance Fiction), and he wasn’t even holding a mic! The mics were set up on short stands on the tables, and Gramalis proceeded to punctuate his words with THUMP! He was raising his hand, and dropping it indelicately on the table, and the effect through the PA was ugly and distracting. After a while he influenced some of the other writers to do the same thing – awful!

Observations of presentation techniques gained from watching experienced guest readers

The most notable technical issue I observe at writing events, particularly at poetry slams and open mic nights, are very bad habits regarding microphone technique. So many writers, when given the opportunity to hold a microphone, mimic what they see rap artists doing live and in video clips. They cup their hand around the microphone casing, over the grill at the back, blocking the flow of air through the microphone. What these people clearly don’t realize, is that it makes them look like wankers, because it sounds completely crap.

The dynamic microphones used for live sound are usually a Shure SM-58, or a cheaper copy of an SM-58. The diaphragm inside the microphone casing is a piece of cardboard, that vibrates when sound waves (the voice) hit it. For the diaphragm to vibrate freely, the air needs to be able to flow through the rear of the mic; if it is blocked by the hand, the sound waves reflect back, and this complicates the signal going to the PA resulting in a vocal delivery that is less clear than it should be. Covering the back of the mic is a beat-box technique, which is OK when the vocal effect is percussive, but it really works against articulating spoken word performance.

Observations with regard to the way stories need to be written to make an impact as an oral presentation

Short pieces generally work best for performance – poetry and flash fiction are great for audio adaptation. Dialogue works best when two writers share a piece, or if the writer can “do voices”. Long passages of description only work if the writing is extremely clear. In general, performance reveals problems of “murky writing” in prose, and is a good way to road test short stories.

Some thoughts on reading (maybe only I would have)

Most writers don’t memorise their stories, and perform them from memory – and we don’t expect our writers to be actors – but even in a context of the performing writer this means, that most writers don’t rehearse their performances. And by rehearsal I do not mean running through your story a couple of times the week of a festival – I mean work on your reading for an hour a day, for at least a couple of weeks. I’m going to make an analogy to music (I would make the analogy to acting, if I felt qualified to talk about that.) Musicians, who memorise their music for performance, are free to make eye contact with one another, make eye contact with the audience, and move around – but there’s actually more important stuff going on.

For the sake of the analogy, don’t think about some rock pig, think about a classical singer, because they really read the music when they’re rehearsing and learning, just like a writer does when reading a story, but they do so thinking analytically with technical and interpretive goals in mind. The song (or the story) is finished as a piece of art, but the performance has to be created as a piece of art in it’s own right. Music scores for vocal works with lyrics, have the same essential ingredients as a prose performance piece – a string of vowel sounds, complicated by consonants and punctuation. But what the score has to help the performer, which a short story doesn’t have, is a broad range of technical and expression markings to help the performer interpret how the composer heard the work in their head. The performer will have a pencil on the music stand, and make their own technical and interpretative markings to overcome difficulties, and to shape the performance and make it their own.

To the audience it will appear to be a channeling of the works emotion, and they will have “a beautiful voice” or “a powerful voice”. In actuality, the performers emotions are not in any way aligned with the emotion in the work. Your life experience allows you to understand the piece, but you don’t have to slash-your-wrists-and-die to perform a slash-your-wrists-and-die lieder. And the beautiful/powerful voice, is a crafted, developed skill, and the performer may have started their training sounding nothing like that.

Really, to expect writers to learn how to perform from watching other writers perform is a terrible idea, because if you talk to people from the performing arts about writers and performance, they roll their eyes, and scoff, “Writers…”

Writers -- Don’t learn to read your stories from watching writers.

Take a drama workshop. Take a Shakespearian drama workshop. Get singing lessons. Join a community choir. Join the Samba School. Play a clave on woodblocks for a year. Buy a metronome, and learn to slow down, and speed up, and swing. Think about time, metre, pulse, rhythm. Get acting lessons, and take a few AMEB exams from the Speech & Drama Syllabus. Learn to control your breath, learn when and how to inhale, learn the registers in your voice, set aside your “just talking” voice, and ideas of having a “small voice” and cultural prejudices about the “proper” way to sound.

Don’t look at other writers to learn how to perform, because as good as their stories might be… their performances and vocal delivery are often boring.

The benefits to be gained from a public presentation of work

• Getting some immediate feedback from a live audience
• Promoting any books or anthologies containing ones work
• Networking and discovering other artists
• Building confidence in ones ability
• Road testing pieces of writing for clarity, humour, emotional impact, effectiveness of imagery, and musical or poetic effects such as rhythm.

General performance pointers

• Coffee before a performance – bad.
• Eating before a performance – bad.
• Drinking alcohol before a performance – bad.
• Going to the toilet several times before a performance – good.
• Having tissues on hand – good.
• Having a bottle of water on hand – good.
• Having an extra piece of writing on hand, in case there is time – good.
• Doing a vocal warm-up before performing – good.

O, hey, I was on a panel too.

I got to participate in a panel called Untapped Fears: What's Left To Scare Us In The Age Of Terror.

The consensus was pretty much:

We're scared by:

1.) the same stuff that always scared us.
2.) those crazy, crazy, dysfunctional people.

The panel was wrangled by Rocky Wood - who did a fine job of making sure we all contributed - with Robert Hood, Garry Fay and Alan Baxter. All cool horror writers and affictionados, and nice guys too! I was happy to get a couple of decent points in, given that line-up.

I had arranged to record the session through the PA desk, but unfortunately we were moved to a room without a PA, and so the recording I got has a lot of muck on it from people talking in an adjacent space. (Nothing interferes with a recording of the human voice, like the human voice.)

The panel discussions and readings area is definitely something I want to work on more, so hopefully I’ll be invited, or have a chance to apply, and appear at more events. A good experience!

My personal reactions to the experience of presenting a panel in public

I’m always nervous before a performance – be it a writing gig, or a music gig. You really have to just learn to accept nerves, that they will lower the standard of your performance by up to 20% of what you could achieve in a neutral setting – say a run through in your rehearsal space. So lots of rehearsing is wise. Getting the rehearsal room standard polished to the point, that if you rough it up 20% with nerves, it will still come across as a polished performance – a really good idea! While it's a little different when you're improvising a panel (not reading a story), preparation is still a good idea. This also applies to radio appearances and recorded interviews. Lack of preparation is the reason a normally witty person will 'go blank' once they're in front of an audience - while you might feel like a dick getting a friend to interview you for practice, it could be a really good idea before a media interview or panel appearance.

& Simply Wonderful People

There were other awesome people floating around, but these are the people who made an impression at this Con.

Got to meet the delightful Felicity Dowker, and renamed the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Co-op as the more interesting Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Cult. Got to have a chat with Narrelle Harris, who'd have to be one of the most disarmingly friendly writers around. Had a coffee with the very cool Earl Livings and Jason Nahrung, and a swirl of other equally cool people, like Tracey Rolfe and Bren MacDibble, who were there but not seated so much in conversation range at the assembled cafe tables.

And then there was Gillian Polack, who gave me this impromptu feminist pep-talk after having read my blogs about retardedness in music education, and basically blew my mind. The main sensation of talking with Gillian was one of dizzyness and disorientation, because compared to the majority of music academics I'm accustomed to, talking to Gillian was like switching from breathing methane to pure oxygen. Concerns taken seriously by an intelligent person, brain no longer starving. And my thoughts on that conversation are probably the subject for a dedicated blog, another day, as I'm still ruminating on so much of it.

(Gillian, you are amazingly thoughtful, and thank you for that.)

11:25AM

Do any of my friends know anything about Victoria Geology. More precisely, if I find a flaked core on land adjacent the Koo Wee Rup Swamp and its sitting 60cm down right on the clay layer, how can I tell how old it is using associative dating. We haven't found any hearth features or reliable charcoal samples - so carbon dating is out.

My boss is all excited and thinks we are looking at a possibly Pleistocene site. The oldest artifacts previously recorded in the area at no older than 20,000yo. I really have no idea, and am frantically trying to learn geology.

11:06PM - ZERO TOLERANCE MAGAZINE - ISSUE 032

ZERO TOLERANCE
ISSUE 032 - NOV / DEC 2009

Karl Sanders: "This is music, does it really matter?"

Well known for his fascination with all things ancient and Egyptian, Nile frontman Karl Sanders talks to Zero Tolerance Magazine about the extent to which his interest in the past has shaped his music. Addressing the accusations of historical inaccuracy and anachronism which are sometimes thrown in Nile's direction, he says, "I think that music, death metal or any other kind functions as entertainment...The Mummy movies for example, depart greatly from established historical fact. They really abuse history, so much that when that movie was out for the first couple of years I really hated it. I was actively against Hollywood movies about Egypt but then, a funny thing happened. My son, who was nine-years-old at the time, started watching it every day. He must have played that goddamned Mummy movie 50 fucking times and after having to watch it with him... it finally clicked. This is how young minds are inspired! This is what gives people the drive to actually go to school and learn some history, archaeology and go out digging in the desert! In a similar way I can't look at Nile as being utterly factual because we're playing death metal songs and we lean towards those aspects of history and Egyptology. We're not presenting a fair and balanced perspective of Ancient Egypt, we're finding all the brutal stuff because it makes good death metal songs! There was this German guy, an ethno-musicologist who was very upset that we were using various Middle-Eastern cultures. "How can you play a Turkish Baglama Saz in a song about Egypt?!' This is music, does it really matter?"

Whether it does really matter is taken up elsewhere in the current issue of Zero Tolerance Magazine in which the importance of the past - both real and imagined - to extreme music is investigated. Sharing their perspectives, along with Nile, are Melechesh, Wraiths, Scythian, Allerseelen and more. Calum Harvie, editor of Zero Tolerance Magazine, comments: "The past has always been important to musicians, and the extreme music underground is no different. What has been eye-opening, though, is the sheer variety of ways in which history exerts an influence, whether it's simply providing an image or something deeper and, dare I say, more profound."

10:10PM - AHWA NEWS DIGEST [01.11.09-10.12.09]

AHWA NEWS DIGEST [01.11.09-10.12.09]

The following digest of recent horror news is compiled from pieces published to HorrorScope and the Australian Horror Writers' Association website.

Aurealis Awards finalists
The finalists for the 2009 Aurealis Awards have been announced! The Aurealis Awards celebrate the best of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror publications. Winners will be announced at the Aurealis Awards ceremony at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane on Saturday 23 January 2010. Click through to view the finalists!

100 Lightnings anthology seeks submissions
100 Lightnings is a new anthology edited by Stephen Studach, to be published by iconic cult publishers Paroxysm Press; this will be a one hundred work anthology, featuring some of the best new flash fiction from Australia and around the world. Please see the publisher website for MS format guidelines.

Your Big Break film competition
Screenwriters take note! Tourism New Zealand is offering aspiring filmmakers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get their work in front of director, producer, and screenwriter Peter Jackson. The short film competition 100% Pure New Zealand Presents Your Big Break will give the top five entrants time working with the Academy Award-winning team responsible for the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Click through for details.

Dymocks Southland Bestselling Horror Titles for November ‘09
Dymocks Southland is general bookshop in Cheltenham, Victoria, boasting a great range of speculative fiction. Click through for the Top 10 bestselling horror titles for November 2009.

Brimstone Press horror film special offer
Brimstone Press is running an amazing deal for lovers of horror. The next 15 Australian customers who order a Brimstone Press book through the publisher's website will receive FREE double passes to see two of the hottest horror films of the year: Paranormal Activity and Zombieland (value $64).

Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Volume 4 available for pre-order
Angela Challis, editor of the Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror series of 'year's best' anthologies, has announced the line-up for Volume 4. Featured writers include Peter M. Ball, Lee Battersby, John Birmingham, Stephen Dedman, Paul Haines, Richard Harland, Robert Hood, Pete Kempshall, Kirstyn McDermott, Jason Nahrung, and Miranda Siemienowicz. Click through to preview the fabulous contents! ADFH Vol 4 will go on sale nationally in March 2010, but can be pre-ordered immediately from the Brimstone Press website.

Australian Shadows Award entry deadline reminder
The deadline for entering work into the Australian Shadows Award is drawing near (December 31). The Australian Shadows Award is coordinated by the Australian Horror Writers Association and is the peak award for horror fiction in Australia. Full details on the award can be found here.

Midnight Echo #3
Assembled by guest editor Stephen Studach and his talented crew, in these hallowed pages you will find a slew of stories, a devil's clawful of poetry, a clutch of dark and macabre art, and an exclusive interview by Lucy Sussex with Barbara Baynton - her first since her death in 1929! Obtain your copy at the Midnight Echo website. AHWA members receive a PDF version of the magazine free!

World Fantasy Award Winners 2009
The 2009 World Fantasy Awards were presented at the World Fantasy Convention held in San Jose, California in November. Two Australians were honoured with awards; Margo Lanagan in the category Best Novel (tied result), and Shaun Tan in the category of Best Artist.


Submitting News

If you have news about Australian and New Zealand Horror publishing and film, or news of professional development opportunities in the field, feel free to submit news to Talie Helene, AHWA News Editor. Just visit HorrorScope, and click on the convenient email link. (International news is not unwelcome, although relevance to Antipodean literary arts practitioners is strongly preferred.)

For information on the Australian Horror Writers' Association, visit australianhorror.com.

This AHWA NEWS DIGEST has been compiled, written, and republished in select Australian horror haunts by Talie Helene. Currently archived at the AHWA MySpace page, and Southern Horror; hosted at the social networking sites Darklands and A Writer Goes On A Journey; and hosted by AHWA members Felicity Dowker, Brenton Tomlinson, Scott Wilson, and Jeff Ritchie (Scary Minds: Horror's Last Colonial Outpost).

If you would like to support the AHWA News effort by hosting a copy of the AHWA News Digest on your blog or website, contact Talie to receive a fully formatted HTML edition of the digest by email.

7:58AM - BV Slam 2009 Grand Finale

4:06PM

Who borrowed my West Wing Season 1???

12:12PM

Before I bin them. I don't suppose anyone has any use for an old thick pin nokia car charger.

We have two. I'm keeping the thin pin one.

4:54PM - Circus!

So quite a few of us appear to be going to the NICA show on the 12th December.

I'm not exactly sure who, as Travis kindly booked tickets.

Anyway - would people be interested in meeting up before the show for dinner?

Either on Victoria St, or somewhere closer to the NICA venue. Not knowing that side of town, recommendations on where to eat on Chapel St/High St would be appreciated :)

EDIT: Borscht, Vodka & Tears is in the vicinity and is a place I've wanted to go for a long time and never managed it. That said, it isn't very cheap - so cheaper food suggestions are welcome.

http://www.borschvodkaandtears.com/