CSFG Anthology – Unnatural Order

The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG) has just announced its 2019 anthology theme: Unnatural Order.

Here is the vital link:

https://csfg.org.au/publications/unnatural-order/

Maws, paws, jaws, and claws! Fin and fur and fang. Tentacles, scales, steel. The weirder the protagonist, the more alien, the less recognizable, the better!

Thanks to Dave for the notification.

Announcement – A Hand of Knaves TOC — David Versace

The table of contents for CSFG’s upcoming anthology A Hand of Knaves has just been released. I am pleased to announced that my story “A Moment’s Peace” is in the mix. (It’s a fantasy-world burglary featuring a point man with an unusual condition). You can see the full list of authors and titles here. A…

via Announcement – A Hand of Knaves TOC — David Versace

It’s me…in Never Never Land

I’ve mentioned the Never Never Land anthology before. It was recently put out by CSFG Publishing. It has been available for a while as a paperback, but now it is more widely, easily, and cheaply (and less heavily) available as an ebook.

In honour of the launch of the ebook, the authors of the stories have contributed insights into how the stories came about.  My one is here.

Please try to ignore the photo.

 

Obligatory.

The Never Never Land Launch

The CSFG anthology The Never Never Land was just launched at Conflux 11 in Canberra this very day.  It’s edited by Mitchell Akhurst, Phillip Berrie and Ian McHugh, which is a good indicator that it’ll be a good read.  An even better indicator is the presence of a story of mine — ‘Ghost Versions’, on page 155 to be exact.

The cover of The Never Never Land, what you ought to of buy ‘cos it’s got my excellent writing type words in it.

Getting a story accepted is a rare event for me and on its own enough to make me extremely pleased.  What’s even rarer — in fact, never happened before — is that I attended the launch and met the people I had been working with via the interweb.

The great thing about the theme is that it is unapologetically Australian.  Sometimes when I write a piece I ask myself — where am I going to send it?  And if the piece is highly Australian in tone and setting, the rumour mill suggests ‘to someone in Australia’ is the only answer.  Is this true?  I don’t know.  I do know that a lot of stories by Aussies that make it into international magazines seem rather transatlantic (or just English, if in Interzone) in tone, though Ian McHugh said that he did not find it a problem, and he hits Asimov’s and the like with admirable regularity.

So it was a fun story to write, if not light in tone.

The other unusual thing about the whole experience was that they kind of knew me.

I’ve been publishing short fiction for a horribly long time — over 20 years — but never more than one here, one there, never in a pattern.  The oddest thing anyone said today was that when they saw my story they didn’t think it was ‘typical’ of me.  That they even had a conception of what was typical surprised me (and rather pleased me, I have to say).

And now, when I’m writing, I’ll be thinking…someone is watching.

For me, that’s a scary story.

Other ones.