I’ve recently taken part in Fablecroft’s series on Indie Press and you can find my thoughts here. Also upcoming is an article in Geek Speak about the Peacemaker Comic and my Bibliobuffet In Conversation with Gillian Polack and Justina Robson. Will post those links soon.

Tara Sharp 3 is surging along on a tide of Tara-like investigations and nonsense. Always such fun to be in her head. I’ll be taking her with me to SheKilda and hope I can step out of Tara-land at the convention and be me!

Brigitte has done some character sketches for the new characters in issue 2  of Peacemaker and will be starting on the sequencing soon. YAY!

Angel Arias is in stores in about ten days and Yunyu’s wonderful new song Bluebeard will be made available free for everyone to enjoy with the book. The song really fits the tempo of Angel Arias which is quite a fast-paced survival tale. There is also a pirate in the book which connects well with the title (even though my pirate is called Ruzalia).

There’ve been some wonderful reviews for Burn Bright over the last few months but this is definitely one of the best I’ve read. The reviewer really understood the themes of the book.

Lastly, I’m always happy to see people are still discovering Parrish Plessis and this review just popped up for Nylon Angel. “Guts and Personal Demons” is certainly an apt description of Parrish!

Some news on the comic front!

As of next month issue 1 of Peacemaker will no longer be on special at .99c AUD and will now cost $3.99 AUD.

The good news is that for your money you will also get the short story (approximately 5k words) that the character  is based on and a bunch of concept art from Brigitte Sutherland, along with her commentary, as part of the new price. Although the comic follows a different story line from the original short story, you can see the development of Virgin’s character and the heavy influences of the Australian Outback and spiritual weirdness. Brigitte’s commentary also gives some sneak peaks into my novel in progress.

Issue 2 is in the pipeline and will be double the size of issue 1. It will follow the same pattern of a reduced price initially, and then a package deal with extras when the price increases.

For anyone who has already purchased the comic and would like the short story and concept art extra as well, you can email me via this website and I will arrange it for the price of .99c AUD.

N.B. Many thanks to Tehani Wessely at Fablecroft for making the short story pdf available for me. The story was originally published as “Gin Jackson: Neophyte Ranger” in AGOG Smashing Stories, Cat Sparks (ed.), AGOG! Press, 2004, and later reprinted  as Virgin Jackson in Australas Imaginarium, a Fablecroft publication. Australis Imaginarium is still available for purchase and is full of terrific stories.

Well, I’m going to put the whole Sentients of Orion thing behind me as of now.

Below is the TOC from Fablecroft Publishing’s upcoming anthology Australis Imaginarium. I’m sure you’ll agree this will be a great read:

“Once a Month, on a Sunday” by Ian McHugh

“Night Heron’s Curse” by Thoraiya Dyer

“Hunter of Darkness, Hunter of Light” by Michael Pryor

“A Pig’s Whisper” by Margo Lanagan

“Stealing Free” by Deborah Biancotti

“Suffer the Little Children” by  Rowena Cory Daniells

“Virgin Jackson” by Marianne de Pierres

“The Claws of Native Ghosts” by Lee Battersby

“The Jacaranda Wife” by Angela Slatter

“The Dark Under the Skin” by Dirk Strasser

“Red Ochre” by Lucy Sussex

“Passing the Bone” by Sean Williams

And … the IO9 newsletter brought a lovely article on Sparticles today (Super Symmetry Particles). That name alone is worthy of a short story. Love it! Here is a snip from it:

The more exciting possibility is that an as yet undiscovered, undetected particle is messing with the interaction between the muon and the proton, skewing the result. These mystery particles might be wonderfully named “sparticles”, hypothetical particles predicted by the quantum theory of supersymmetry. Sparticles (short for supersymmetry particles) are partners of the various known subatomic particles that are thought to be 1,000 times more massive than their known counterparts and existed for only trillionths of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

So much great stuff to think about!