Piccinini and her Skywhale
Posted: 19 May, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
My mum was an art teacher, so art has always been a huge part of my life. But no artwork has ever struck me like Patricia Puccinini’s work, and I don’t mean Skywhale.
I haven’t been to Canberra to see it flying. I find I never really know a piece of art until I’ve stood before it, or in this case, beneath it. I’ve seen some photos on @theskywhale_ and other sites. It looks good.
I support it because it’s Piccinini and it’s weird and awesome. Like most of her work, it leaves me feeling awed and peaceful. I fell in love with Piccinini’s work the day I saw it.
Her “Comforter” was the first piece I encountered, in the Art Gallery of NSW. “The Comforter,” is a sweet little girl, an orphan I thought. She reclines against a wall. In her arms a baby lies, but a baby with an unusual body shape. The little girl is covered in a fine down of soft black hair.
The Comforter — Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery
I crouched by this piece for a long time, amazed by the finish, the realism, the weirdness, the emotion and the beauty. The girl might be part monkey, and the baby part monster, but love and peace radiates from the scene.
Almost always, I wander through galleries looking and not finding what I want. I want artists to connect with me, to visually please and yet challenge me. I want their unique creations to connect with me and make me feel something.
Her work does it. As do Raqib Shaw’s glittering murals.
Piccinini twists conventions of beauty, tradition and normality into new shapes. Her people and creatures are just beyond the edges of my reality. I hurt with them, I fear them, and I fear for them. I want to help them, but do I dare?
In her work I see a challenge. Can we expand our empathy across conventions of appearance and difference?
I was thrilled when I heard about Skywhale. I would love to see it in the sky. But I feel afraid for it, too, as I fear for all her creations, that they will be shunned or stoned or ridiculed, because they are more different than our culture is prepared to tolerate.
I hope Skywhale travels around Australia and the world, and people are challenged and amazed by it. That they smile and laugh and make boob jokes.
Piccinini creates the best art I’ve ever seen. It comes from her soul, from a unique and magical place. It is new and wonderful and exquisitely executed.
When people question the value of her work, they’re decrying the value of art. Art’s purpose isn’t to please and entertain. It’s to explore. It’s a celebration of our creative spirit. It’s like the point on the pyramid of our civilisation. If we fail to expand our art, we are blunted. Our potential for growth is stunted.
We need art, like fiction, to challenge, stir, inspire and innovate. It’s like a knife disemboweling the skin of perceived reality to discover the shining intestines of what might be.
Skywhale makes me smile. It draws attention. It ends the debate on breastfeeding in public. Breasts are okay. With it floating above you, who could be afraid of a humble human breast in an infant’s mouth?
To me, Skywhale is the coolest thing Australia has ever done. I hope some of us realise that. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, it attracts global attention, and it’s bleeding edge.
The truly shocking thing is that Piccinini was only paid $8800 for her design. That’s very generous of her. She’s my hero.
Helen
Fun is a Con
Posted: 28 April, 2013 Filed under: Community, Conflux, Cons, Conventions, Doing Author Stuff, Natcon Leave a comment »I’m on the second plane, heading home to the Gold Coast, after the great surprise of bumping into Sue Bursztynski at the airport and sitting together on the flight to Melbourne.
As usual, Natcon was awesome and left me infused with the happy glow that comes from hanging out with fun creative people. The official website is here, with better photos than mine. If you think you might like conning, check it out.
The highlights were…
1) The conversations I had with anyone I could corner.
2) The dance floor on Saturday night – Groovers in the heart, ay yai yai yai – it was going off.
3) The Regency Dinner (What a feast! Twenty dishes!) Though I wish the music hadn’t returned as the soundtrack to haunt my hangover this morning.
4) Hearing kind words about my published shorts from lovely editors.
5) Pitching to Alex, Paul and Tara. Alex lights up the room with her beautiful personality and smile. And Paul has a really cool techno non-cigarette thing (Vape pen), over which he kindly answered my lengthy inquiry. What a team!
6) Training my very nice sensible friends Mr and Mrs @Klaus_bear (who now carry around a sleepy baby bear) how to cope with a Spec-crazed adolescent-equivalent. You cook her dinner, collect and deliver her to hotels and airports as required and aren’t the least displeased by her turning up four hours late to breakfast. They’re already great parents. Big thank you.
7) Staying up all night drinking, including going to a room party. I’m not sure that big glass of wine at 2.30 was such a great idea, Ben. But thanks!
8) The hangover. It’s kind of cathartic and um…something. This is where our writer slaps herself and says, right, enough, you can’t find anything good about a hangover. Move on!
9) Marc Gascgoine’s kaffeeklatsch. He loves what he does.
10) The launch of NEXT, containing Casino Five (by me). It’s fantastic having a story selected and polished and published in such a beautiful book. And congratulations to all the other launchers, too!
11) Gillian’s Three Senses workshop. I was high on scents.
12) The Newbies. Welcome to the community!
Now, I shall present a balanced view and list the things that went very badly. My sneakers and swimmers stayed in my suitcase which refused to close when I was packing. Today I woke up at seven am despite staying up until three am. There might have been an alien in my ceiling.
Saying bye is always sad and discombobulating, as you never quite know which time is the last time you’ll see someone.
Who to hug and who not to hug can also be confusing. I’ve never been comfortable with a hug-all policy. If anyone missed a hug that was due, we’ll have one next time. And if you were hugged against your will, I’d take it back if I could.
Oh god, we’ve come to the Thank You part, which reminds me of that sweet white Greek goo we used to eat off a spoon dipped in water. Apologies if I miss you. Remind me.
Big breath.
Thanks to Gillian for bringing me a puffy warm vest thingy; everyone for being so welcoming and friendly; Donna, Nicole, and the team for organising Conflux; Russ, Claire, Kaaron, Emma Kate, Ben and everyone for buying/sharing drinks; Jason for his loud exclamations of love for Surgeon Scalpelfingers; Ian for eliciting and enduring various rants from me; Zena for sharing her social media smarts and the dance floor; Kyla for being brilliantly dressed and friendly; Rob, Simon, Nicole and everyone who helped with the Next launch; Lawrie and all the other costumers; Rachel and Emma for rockin’ the dance floor from the start of the night.
More thanks to Jodi, Wade and Jack for creative exploration on our Life Transitions panel; everyone at the Writing Community panel for sharing their experiences and ideas; Alan for saying I looked like a mugger (I still want that witch); everyone who shared autism and ASD stories with me; everyone who told me about their lives (jobs, housemates, nightclubs, etc); all the professional writers for being fun, encouraging and fantastic role models who let their hair down and party; the Newbies for their fresh shining faces, wide eyes and fertile minds; and everyone who hung out and chatted. You know who you are.
Breathe out.
There were people who I missed having a good talk to. Next time. The plane is about to land. Close the computer. Back to reality.
I can’t wait to get home.
Helen. 
PS. And here are a few shots of Canberra scenery. I need to get my phone fixed so that it takes photos the normal way. Taking selfies of everything is painful.
PPS. My family seems to have survived, or even thrived, without me. This augurs well for them letting me out again next year. When and where is next year’s Natcon?
Gold Coast Supanova 2013
Posted: 22 April, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment »Dear Reader,
Supanova 2013 was my first time at a convention as an exhibitor. I attended as part of my group, Gold Coast Speckies. It was a fair amount of work to get organised, but we shared that fairly. And when we were there we had a great time.
Our goals were to increase our web and Twitter followings, and to get the word out about us and Speculative Fiction, and sell some books. Our Twitter following didn’t increase much at all, which is a wake up call. It seems that while many writers love Twitter, much of the world (even the geek world) is not on it. Most people were more interested in buying an e-book instead of a physical copy.
We were delighted with our experience and the conversations we had, though.
The best parts, for me, were the happy faces and the great costumes, and talking to writers who were taking the first steps onto their creative path. I told them to join the Vision Writers and GC Speckies Yahoo groups.
It surprises me, actually, that this is my first piece of advice to new writers. Maybe I should say something like, “Write every day.”
But I feel like getting into the community is the best place to start, because it’s your line to advice, critique and markets. But even more importantly, writerly friendship and understanding. I feel like I wrote in a vacuum through my twenties and it didn’t help me with the quantity or quality of my writing.
On Wednesday I’m heading to Canberra for Conflux, for a long weekend packed with panels and meetings and afternoon teas and dinners. I can’t wait! Actually, I better go and pack.
My panels are: “Birth, Life and Death — Life Transitions in Speculative Fiction,” that’s on Thursday night at 9pm. Jodi Cleghorn can pinch me to keep me awake. My other panel is “Writing Communities” on Saturday morning at 10am. If I am hung over for this panel, my key point of advice will be, “Do not drink too much with one part of your writing community and embarrass yourself in front of another of your writing community the next day.”
Jokes aside — I promise not be (obviously) hung over or sleep deprived — I am very much looking forward to both of these panels. Speaking at Natcon is a little scary because there are so very many very knowledgeable writers about, but I think we all have unique insights and different views to share.
Goodnight and good writing and reading!
Helen
Gold Coast Writers Fest: Daniells, Bell and Smith talk Spec Fic
Posted: 27 October, 2012 Filed under: GC Speckies, Writing Leave a comment »Today GC Speckies were delighted to attend The Gold Coast Writers Festival session about Science Fiction and Fantasy. Authors Rowena Cory Daniells, A.A. Bell and Jill Smith talked about their writing and our favourite genre. We also got to chat with them afterwards!
On the panel the writers said that Queensland was producing some great writing. They also discussed their first explorations of Science Fiction as children, from Lost in Space to the Jetsons.
They talked about how Science Fiction foretold the future.
“Who has a mobile phone?” Bell asked, and all but three of the audience members raised their hands. Science Fiction predicted those, but it didn’t predict the internet, Daniells said.
Bell said she would have her eye on the “black sheep,” those trying out different things in their writing than the rest of the flock. Those in the audience without the mobile phones might be in the new wave of big writers, she said.
Bell also discussed the distinction between Sci-Fi, S.F. and Science Fiction, and this was new and interesting to us. She said Sci-Fi was the more popular and fun end of the continuum, whereas Science Fiction was the scientific, political and intellectual extrapolation of science.
Daniells, Smith and Bell saw the future of Science Fiction and Fantasy as positive and dynamic. Publishing developments like small independent publishers, self publishing and e-books have allowed cross genre work to find readers, whereas mainstream publishers traditionally shied away from cross genre work which wasn’t marketable to a defined market.
Daniells said that Fantasy was growing up, from traditional and quest based fantasy to grittier and multifaceted work. She said that Science Fiction raised the ethical issues of science that the real world will one day have to face, such as genetic predisposition to disease and the effect that might have on insurance policies.
When asked about dystopian cyberpunk, the authors said readers prefered positive fiction, and negativity in Science Fiction may have pushed readers toward Fantasy. Smith said readers love strong characters who triumph in a happy ending. Bell said she encouraged readers to enjoy story shapes and the mood and technique of novels, rather than focusing on which part of Speculative Fiction a novel fell into.
The writers also said the internet has enabled Queensland writers to sell their writing in other states and countries, the only inconvenience being the time zone differences.
Daniells said she saw herself as a citizen of the world and her writing reflects the greater human condition.
Rowena Cory Daniells is author of the King Rolen’s Kin trilogy, A.A. Bell is author of the Diamond Eyes trilogy and Jill Smith is author of Dual Visions.
GC Speckies Helen, Janis and Adriana attended the session and handed out some cards, hoping to recruit more local readers and writers to our meetings on the 3rd Sunday of the month at Ashmore. One fan we met recommended Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell.
It was great to see these award-winning and knowledgeable authors! I hope I’ve relayed their panel accurately and would love them to clarify or expand on their views, if they wish to do so.
Cross posted at www.gcspeckies.com
Natcon 2012 Rocked Socks
Posted: 15 June, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 11 Comments »I’m not good at post-con blogs, but I must blog about Natcon 2012 because otherwise I’d fail to acknowledge the fantastic people that are Australian Speculative Fiction. Yes, you know who you are. Everyone who was there. And you folks who couldn’t make it but wanted to. Etc.
Everyone I met was friendly and nice; my hair and hat received a zeppelin of compliments that should ensure their floatation until next June. The hat is safely away in the cupboard. I’m just a little grumpy with it, but haven’t even waved a bread knife at it yet.
No one was too friendly, except the cab driver who took me back to my hotel after midnight on Sunday morning. He was disturbingly enamoured with how deeferent my hair was to the point of being a beet creepy. But he let me out of the cab with all strands, ribbons and other accoutrements intact.
The niceness of con-goers is a special phenomenon, and I could wonder if everyone is nice because they want other people to like them and their work. But I don’t think that’s true, because not everyone creates work. I think a common love of genre is behind the spirit. I’ve heard someone else say it’s because we’re all fans at heart.
I wish I could bottle the convention spirit and spread it through the atmosphere, because it’s a spirit I’ve never found anywhere else. It seems to epitomise the opposite of hostility and war.
Maybe this is what religious people love about their spirituality, but I’ve been to churches and never felt anything akin to the enjoyment of hanging out at a convention.
I have been to literary nights and witnessed aggressive debates, which fell into name-calling and abuse, and to some extent I’d like to see more debate at conventions, without name-calling. Maybe I should attend more panels and debates…
There was a debate or two, wasn’t there? That might be a place for me to start. Scratch that last para.
I’m glad that I’m still making friends on Twitter with people I saw at Natcon, like Nalini Haynes, who I didn’t bump into at the con though I saw her on a panel. Social media is great for that. By the time I see her at the next con it’s very likely we’ll be friends.
There was a slight dissonance, I found, when talking to faces I’d never seen clearly before. I had to remind myself, for example, that Sean Wright had admired my tomatoes a year ago as a Twitterpic; although I’d never seen his face we’d shared many exchanges and I consider him a friend.
There’s not much else to say. I had a top time and got a great idea (The Fairytale Villains and Short Story panels inspired this) which I’ve launched into.
It might be worth noting that I found the best spot in the WHOLE con on Sunday. It was, what I came to think of as, Jo Anderton’s chair by the fire. That girl is a clever cookie.
Enough rambling. I am sooooo sick. And I keep getting sicker. This con lurgy is bad news. Perhaps they are testing biological weapons on us in an attempt to exterminate nerds. What a stagnant world it would be then.
So thanks heaps to the organisers and all the volunteers, and the dear waitress and maître d who worked their arses off to keep the hoard fed, coffeed and boozed.
I can’t wait until the next Natcon, and will drag more GCSpeckies with me if at all possible.
Until then, I’ll see you in the social media sphere.
Helen Stubbs
Special Guest Patty Jansen on Sci-fi and her sale to Analog Magazine
Posted: 15 February, 2012 Filed under: GC Speckies, Guest Authors, Patty Jansen, Writing 1 Comment »
G’day, g’day,
I hope 2012 is treating you well. It’s been a great start to the year for me, with my story ‘Sayuri’s Revenge,’ accepted for publication in Tales from the Bell Club, to be published later this year. This is my first overseas publication.
Another exciting thing for me has been the beginning of GC Speckies, a sci-fi, fantasy, horror, animae appreciation group. It’s been one of my dreams to get a fan group going on the Gold Coast, so we’ve done it! We meet the third Sunday of the month, in Ashmore. If you’d like to come along, please contact me.
Now, I’m stoked to have an interview with Patty Jansen to share. I got to ask her all those personal questions I like to ask authors (but if you ask them in person sometimes they go into shock!), and she’s given some great advice. I’m sure she’d be happy to answer any questions you’d like to ask her.
Patty has a story coming out soon in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. She’s a member of SFWA and has sold fiction to Redstone SF and the Grantville Gazette. She was a winner of the Writers of the Future contest.
Helen: Hi Patty, and welcome to my blog! From your career, working as a scientist, I can see that science has always been important to you. What sort of science intrigues you most?
Patty: I am very much a hard sciences person. I try to remember that social sciences are science, too, but have to admit that part of me is always going to be only pretending to believe that. I lean towards the biological sciences. I am terrible at maths, which makes my recent fascination with astronomy frankly quite scary. When reading up for worldbuilding and the like, my reading very quickly gets to the level of scientific publications, because I’m used to reading them, and I know how likely error or reader bias gets introduced in citations of citations.
Helen: That’s great that you didn’t let the maths hold you back! Can I ask what drew you to writing and what do you love about combining science and fiction?
Patty: Imagine a person interested in hard sciences, but that same person has somehow been born with an ability to ‘feel’ the structure of language. That would be me. I worked in sciences, but was not going to make any great new discoveries. I found I was much more interested in the communication of science. Science Fiction is often seen as a vehicle to predict the future (and getting it wildly wrong). I think the real value of Science Fiction is that it makes abstract science visible, and that it inspires, rather than predicts.
Helen: Wow. Science Fiction is inspiring. What piece of writing do you feel is your best?
Patty: All of them 
Joking aside, there are different aspects I love best about every piece I have written. If it doesn’t give me some sort of thrill to re-read, I know it’s not working. It could be purely emotional. For example the emotions in my kids book The Far Horizon slot together perfectly. Similarly in my story Where the Plains Merge into the Sky (Scapezine issue 2), a fairly standard situation came together beautifully, of a girl trying to comply with family expectations, and failing miserably. I love the space-operatic social worldbuilding in Watcher’s Web, and the hard SF world in my ISF/Allion universe, in which my novelette His Name In Lights is set. I’m quite happy with the way one of the societies in my Icefire trilogy sciencifies fantasy. People would have this approach to magic, if magic existed. They would try to quantify it, and work out some ‘if I poke here then this happens’ kind of formulas. That is all Newton did. Observe, calculate, reproduce, check. Oops, went off-topic a bit.
Helen: What writing achievement are you happiest about?
Patty: I read through these questions a few days ago, and was going to say winning the Writers of the Future contest and going to their workshop in Hollywood, but then I sold a story to Analog. I can’t believe I’ll be one of the very, very few Australians to grace these august pages. I love Analog. It’s the only magazine that gets unwrapped and read the moment it hits my letterbox.
Helen: Congratulations! That’s awesome. I also wanted to ask, what’s your favourite book and/or author? What genres do you love to read?
Patty: I’m a very big fan of C.J. Cherryh for her realistic alien characters. She is my all-time most favourite author. I love Stephen Baxter for the meticulous research he puts into his books. Also Alastair Reynolds for grand ideas, and he’s just an all-round cool guy. In Australia, Sean Williams. My main preferred genres are hard SF and space opera. Unfortunately, there is not an awful lot of that being published in Australia.
Helen: I love Sheri Tepper for her realistic alien characters:) Now, I know you’ve been involved with the Speculative Fiction community in Australia, such as the Andromeda Spaceways Co-operative. What has been the most enjoyable activity you’ve been involved in?
Patty: Oooohhh, that’s a hard one. I always like connecting with fellow writers. Cons are fun purely for the social aspect. As for the most awesome, I’m going to pick Worldcon in Melbourne. But recently I also enjoyed going to the NSW Writers’ Centre SpecFic day. This is an awesome, activity-packed event. Thanks so much to Kate Forsyth for organising. Writing is a lonely business. Even ‘locals’ in Sydney live spread out over the metropolitan area, and most live around the edges. It’s not easy to meet local writers in Sydney.
Helen: What advice would you give to writers getting started today?
Patty: A few things:
You’re never going to get published if you don’t submit.
There is no one right path to publication.
Allow time for your skills to develop. A beginning musician doesn’t expect to be accepted into the Symphony either.
Even the big-name writers get rejections.
Know your stuff. Not just writing skill, but know what the story is about, know the facts about the subject of the story.
Helen: Great advice. It was great to meet you at Conflux last year. What was the best part of the convention for you. (Apart from meeting me, of course.)
Patty: I’m actually going to mention something that didn’t take part at the con per se, because you already know I enjoy meeting other writers. On the Monday, a couple of ASIM buddies decided to make a quick trip to the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Station, also known as Tidbinbilla. There is a visitor centre onsite that’s well worth a visit. That visit was incredibly awesome (thanks, Simon Petrie), but it had a tail. Being interested in astronomy, I figured, when I got home, that they might have a blog, Facebook or Twitter account that I could follow. Not only was that the case, I also saw that they were days from registering for Australia’s first-ever Tweetup. Tweetups are PR events organised by NASA, where usually 50 lucky individuals get the chance to look behind the scenes and talk to interesting people. I applied. I got in. So in November, I spent an incredibly wet weekend amongst telescopes talking astronomy and science and watching the Mars Curiosity rover liftoff, and talking to some of the scientists involved in this giant project.
Helen: That must have been wonderful. You lucky thing! Next, could you compare the benefits/drawbacks of publishing overseas and in Australia?
Patty: It really depends on what your aims are. There are some great Australian magazines and anthologies. But if you want to publish on a pro level, you really have to go overseas. The only Australian pro market is Cosmos, and they will only take stories under 4000 words. Guess how many of those I write?
Even if you start submitting in Australia, you will fairly soon run out of markets. I’ve not found there to be huge differences between Australian or overseas markets. They’re both at the end of an email address. They’ll both require some edits. An overseas market may Americanize (urgh, don’t believe I wrote that, must go wash the keyboard now) your story. Or it may not.
Helen: Ha-ha! The zeds make me shudder, too! Thanks for telling us all, Patty. It was great to have you share your experiences.
Below are links to Patty’s stories. She self-publishes longer works and is completing the third book in her Icefire trilogy, a dark post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy.
See her website, blog, Amazon, or Smashwords page for more details.
This has been my first blog interview, so let me know if you liked it or abhored it.
Have a great future until I see you next!
Helen
Where is Rainbow? A Diamond Loveheart Star story
Posted: 29 December, 2011 Filed under: Kids Spec Fic, Writing | Tags: child writer, childrens story 3 Comments »
Hello,
Here is the first book created by H.K & J.Z Sparkle. I’m the first nom de plume, there. J.Z is the five-year-old illustrator and creative influence. She invented Diamond Loveheart Star, I think, and also had some direction in the story line.
The slideshow below is not ideal, but might work best in fullscreen and if you pause it so you can move on at your leisure. If it has already moved on, the first slide should be the cover, which is also above.
Thanks for reading.
In other writing news, I got my copy of Midnight Echo 6 in mail today. My story is really in there! You can read part of my story here. If you love it you can buy a copy from the Australian Horror Writers’ Shop.
Hope you enjoy!
Helen and J.Z
