Fun Night at the Aurealis Awards!

I had to tear myself away from revision work on the latest novel (I’m really in the flow!) to go to the Aurealis Awards last night – but so glad I did! The turnout was amazing – people from every state, a Who’s Who of spec fic in Australia. I’ve never seen an Awards night better attended by authors and publishers. It was so great to catch up with friends!
I only remembered to pull out my camera now and then – and spent half the night wondering why it wouldn’t work (I’d accidentally set it to video!) Here’s me (without glasses), Sean Williams and Cat Sparks before the show -

The venue is the old Independent Theatre in North Sydney, with its spectacular ceiling. Not sure if it’ll come out in this photo-

That’s when people were filing in, and Rob Hood’s first bit of video was showing on the screen. I wasn’t up for anything this time, so I could just sit back and enjoy. I sat next to a winner though! Thoraiya Dyer, who picked up the award for best Fantasy Short Story.

That’s Thoraiya – and she looked that happy even before she received the award! Apart from sitting next to a winner, I can claim I had a story in an anthology that was a winner – the “Ghosts By Gaslight” won best anthology, ed. Jack Dann and Nick Gevers.
All in all, a great night!

Steampunk at Supanova!

I had a ball at Supanova, signing Worldshakers and Liberators at the Dymocks stall, and doing a joint presentation on steampunk with fellow Australian steampunk author Michael Pryor. Huge event – I didn’t hear the final numbers, but on Saturday it was well on the way to being the biggest Supanova ever.

Best of all for me was to see so many steampunk costurmes there! In fact, there were more the second day than the first – because people had been buying steampunk gear from the stalls around.

Oh, yes, we’re arriving big time!

For some classy steampunk costuming, here are Michael (not the author), Angela and Cherie – plus me, not quite so classy because my shirt is hanging out. A real Victorian-era gentleman would probably die of shame if seen with his shirt hanging out.

I’m wearing my aviator helmet and goggles in that pic, but most of the time I wore my new steampunk hat. Cost me a lot of money, that hat – but, boy, did it attract a lot of attention! Here it is being modelled by a fan, Ruth. I’m wearing my ordinary black (but new) top hat.

I haven’t got a pic of all the authors at the signing table – sorry, Brandon (Sanderson – who’s completing Robert Jordan’s's Wheel of Time series), Kylie (Chan) and Trent (Jamieson). Here’s the best I can do – with Michael Pryor, Keri Arthur and yours truly-

Back on blog!

I’ve been a hermit lately – a very productive hermit, finishing the next novel. (Steampunk, of course – same world as the juggernaut books, but a different time and different characters.) Now it’s time to get out and about again – starting this weekend with Supanova on the Gold Coast. I’ve been invited as a guest, and Michael Pryor and I will be doing a presentation on – of course – Steampunk! I’m really looking forward to it because I’ve never attended a Supanova before – but I hear the buzz is fantastic. I’ve just found an image of the hotel where I’ll be staying, the Hilton at Surfers -

How about that? I just hope it doesn’t topple over between now and Friday night.
Supanova itself is in the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre at Broadbeach. The authors’ gang includes Keri Arthur, Trent Jamison, Bevan McGuinness, Brandon Sanderson (the American author who’s continuing Robert Howard’s series) and, I think, Alison Croggan, as well as Michael and myself. The media stars are even more dazzling, but still, that’s quite a show of authors. It’s going to be grrrrreat!

Weather-gods

I’ve now realised how lucky we were. When we left Wollongong for the flight to Paris, it was the start of a downpour here, and it didn’t stop raining until we came back on Friday. Now Paris is suffering the absence-of-Aileen-and-Richard effect – the temperature has dropped and looks set to continue around 7 degrees for days. It’s happened like this other times too. We ought to hire out our weather-enhancing powers!

I dreamed dreams of Paris last night! Today, I started to think my way back into the ongoing flow of the next novel – as usual, starting from far out with further planning. Tomorrow, closing in on the scene to be written next, then building up to a larger amount of actual writing day by day. Thin end of the wedge principle!

Meanwhile, here are a few more images from Montreuil, selected from all the ones Gilberte sent me, taken by the official photographer at the event.

Me in steampunk gear, signing.

Me and the lovely Bénédicte at the Hélium stall.

Gilberte standing between Aileen and me, Marie (who helped at the stall) to the left of me, some of the young readers from the Montreuil club at the front, and Valérie and Élodie (librarians and organizers of the club) on the far right.

Figtree Again

Here are the photos I failed to put up when my camera battery ran flat! Our local Rue St Maur Metro entrance

And the spiral staircase going up to our apartment on the 2nd floor

Ah, memories! Far removed from the Figtree present, separated by a long plane flight. But not quite as bad as the flight out to Paris, once we were over the initial seven hour wait at Charles de Gaulle airport. We were 11 hours flying to Hong Kong, 2 hours at Hong Kong, then 8 hours to Sydney. Aileen got some perfume at Hong Kong, which will be an Xmas present from me, the Hong Kong officials managed to get us on seats together (after everyone had been saying it couldn’t be done, flight was chockers – still don’t know how they managed to move the passenger who would’ve been next to me, but they did it, at the v last minute when almost everybody had boarded. Thanks, HK officials!).

The most interesting event of the second flight was when I asked Aileen if she could see the dinner trolley coming; A’s answer, No, but they won’t be coming until we take off; R’s response, Well, actually we took off half an hour ago. We’d been standing idling on the tarmac for ages, then Aileen fell asleep for the actual takeoff, and didn’t realise our smooth cruising through the air wasn’t more idling on the tarmac.

So, we ate airplane food, fell asleep at times (we had two full albeit shortened nights on the plane) and generally felt like two very grubby termites squeezed into a very tight log – until we finally landed, got waved through customs, and caught the airport train back to Wollongong. It was as though the weather had decided to celebrate our return, after twelve days of rain (as Michelle told us) – the sun was out, the sky was sky-blue, the bush and grass was v green after all the rain, and the sea was sea-blue. So much green and blue! And temperature in the low twenties … A perfect Australian day! It seemed fitting that we shared our railway carriage with a guy dressed up in a rooster suit of bright red and green feathers.

Michelle collected us from the station, Habibi welcomed us home

We dragged our suitcases over the threshold – my big one was 22.8 kilos, small one was at least 12, not to mention four and a half litres of duty-free liquor – and now here we are. Half-unpacked, desperate for sleep but trying to hang out till evening, 14 days mail and newspapers to catch up on.

Au revoir, Rue Saint Maur

Off today! Groan! But happy memories of the time we’ve enjoyed in Paris.

Yesterday evening we celebrated our last night in the apartment with a bottle of good French champagne and, er, pizzas. Well, we’re half class. It had to be something takeaway, and there’s a really good pizza place right next to the front door of our apartment block. The guy who makes the pizzas is from Bangladesh – it’s a multicultural world…

Today, all can be revealed – the divan bed folded out had a tilt on one side, so we made a bigger bed facing the other way by folding out a chair that converted into a bed. But the way it converted – we couldn’t make sense of it when we tried to turn it back into a chair on our second day. We were thinking we’d never manage it at the end. But hurrah! We worked it out (after about half an hour!)

We took our time packing, had a final lunch, went to our local cafe for a final coffee. We said au revoir to our little apartment, au revoir to our local metro and supermarket. Then I called for a taxi on Aileen’s mobile. Mine had already run out of credit, and I was sure hers would too before I completed the booking. It’s hard enough hearing taxi reservation voices in Australia – add a different language, and it was a nightmare. I couldn’t hear enough to press the right buttons, and when I got someone on the other end who spoke a little English, even then there were so many tricky questions to understand and answer.

Anyway, we got our taxi and made it out to the airport – we had plenty of time then, but now we have even more. Because the first thing we saw when we looked at the Departures board was that our KLM flight to Amsterdam was ‘annule’ – cancelled!

When I went to the KLM counter, it turned out we’d already been booked onto an Air France flight going to Hong Kong, followed by a Qantas flight to Sydney. So we didn’t avoid Qantas in the end after all! Our plane doesn’t leave Paris until 11.20, almost 5 hours after our original flight, but because we don’t have the extra flight and airport stop at Amsterdam, and because our stop in Hong Kong is 2 hours instead of about 7, we end up arriving in Sydney more than an hour earlier. So it’s all good – better to hang around now through the evening than at Kuala Lumpur when we’d be already half zombified. And we’ve got a voucher for a restaurant meal, so no complaints from us!

Au revoir, Paris!

Today, we head off to Versailles, thus completing Aileen’s wish list of all the things she wanted to do in Paris. Mine’s already been completed. It was only a wish-list, and I was only hoping to get some of it done – amazingly, we’ve done everything, alone or together but mostly together.

We’ve developed a new habit. At home we take it in turns to make coffee/tea in the morning, then drink it in bed while reading the newspaper. Now instead of the newspaper we use my iPad to read and answer email in bed with morning coffee. I think I’ll have a struggle to reclaim the iPad when we’re home – Aileen has become very VERY attached to it.

Ditto Habibi – I suspect he’s become VERY attached to Michelle. She’s ended up staying the whole time in our house, and the cat follows her everywhere, I hear, even into the toilet. He’s going to get a reality check v soon!

Later in day … We’re desperately trying to eat as many patisserie cakes and Algerian sweets as we can before we have to leave. Well, I exaggerate, but it’s a good thing they only weigh the baggages and not the passengers for the plane.

We went to Versailles today – lucky, the sun shone, even though it was so cold I used the earflaps of my Russian cap. Versailles is very grand, not to say grandiose – all that heavy gilt and marble, but it doesn’t look as if anyone ever actually lived there. Relatively unfurnished compared to Fontainebleau. I suppose no one ever actually did live there in an ordinary human way – it was all a show of magnificence, a public display.

I knew my camera battery was low, but I took a picture in one room and the power died on me completely. I took a picture of our local metro (just fifty meters away) and the stairs to our apartment, but I can’t transfer anything from my camera now. Here’s a photo inside our apartment I took earlier -

Last Day at Montreuil

A little early morning blogging. Today’s the last day of the Salon de Montreuil, and I’ve got a couple of hours signing to do. Aileen’s already gone off to re-visit Rue Mouffetard, an open air market sort of street we fell in love with when we stayed close by last time in Paris. I think she plans to dawdle from patisserie to patisserie, cafe to cafe.

She’s taken her spoon with her for getting back into the flat. To open the door, you turn the key through two locks, then a little bit extra to draw back the latch – and that last bit is very stiff. Aileen’s long fingers can’t manage it on their own, so we re-discovered the lever principle – she inserts the handle of the spoon through the hole in the part of the key you grip, then presses down on the spoon to turn the key. A triumph of human ingenuity!!

OK, many hours later … We’re just warming up after taking an afternoon stroll around Père Lachaise cemetery. It an enormous place, bigger than Rookwood in Sydney, and filled with countless ‘sepultures’, which I guess means sepulchres – like miniature houses. All different styles, medieval and Renaissance and classical, some huge and showy, others, well, like little sentry boxes. They have a door at the front, often with a metal grille so you can see inside. Sometimes the doors are open or have fallen in, like this sepulchre Aileen’s ghouling around in -

The sepulchres are all packed in close side by side, an enormous city of the dead.

We started out looking for famous names, the sepulchre of Heloise and Abelard, and Moliere and La Fontaine. But after that it got more and more difficult – although we bumbled around looking for Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and many more, the only other one we actually found was Balzac, the French novelist. Meanwhile, it was growing colder and colder! It was a mostly sunny, but usually also means a cold day – my raincoat and padded jerkin weren’t enough to keep me warm.

Earlier in the day was my last session of signing at the Hélium stall. I shall miss it. I signed quite a few copies after a slow start – but I was also the subject of a great many photos, in my aviator’s helmet and steampunk goggles. Then, saying goodbye to everyone at the end, well, it seemed very strange and a little sad to think that we wouldn’t all be meeting again the next day! But I think Sophie and Gilberte, Bénédicte and Hélène, Cécile and Elsa – I think they’ll all need a week to recover. I had the easy job!

Lazy morning, busy afternoon

Lying in bed this morning – I don’t have to do signing until midday, then I get to meet with the Salon de Montreuil young readers. So I’ll do some blog now and finish off later.

We ate at a nearby estaminet last night. Did I mention we’re in a great area for restaurants, bars, nightclubs? (Thank God they didn’t have a party upstairs last night!) We’ve taken to enjoying as much French cuisine as we can. We went a bit cheaper one night, and learned our lesson – good cooking costs around 17€ for a main course dish ($25 Australian), and there are heaps of places for that. I guess haute cuisine would be on a different scale again. For wine, you can get pichets (mini-carafes) or quarter bottles – perfect for us, because I usually want red and Aileen wants white.

For lunch, if we’re chez nous, we have a baguette with prosciutto-style jambon cru (Whoo! See how I’m getting pretentiously French!), smelly French cheese, cherry tomatoes, duck (my only attempt to cook in the apartment – I was just amazed at being able to buy thick fillet of duck in the supermarket) – and for me at. He moment, this scrumptious 1999 Bordeaux red I found in a different supermarket for a mere $20. Ah, the good life!

I’ll have to be v careful with photos from now on. My camera battery is almost exhausted and I didn’t bring a charger. I suppose I could always email myself photos from my mobile, if my French SIMcard lets me. (Strange system, where you have to identify yourself with passport or proof of identity to keep using a SIM – but since you get 15 days before they cut you off, it’s no worry for us.)

Hah! Back from Montreuil, and I just discovered that I’ve been keeping my blog on Ripping Ozzie Reads (which I’m v happy to do, as long as I don’t overdo my column inches) – but I haven’t been publishing to THIS blog. Which is why, all of a sudden, the last four days have popped up all at once!

Today was great. First, two hours of signing … And the best bit about it was the number of people who were buying Le Worldshaker because someone else had recommended it to them. That’s the best! Here’s me signing at the Hélium stall (hmm, photo seems to come up later in the blog entry …

Then came the meeting with the Club de Montreuil – a group of young readers, voracious readers, who meet and argue over their favourite books – and I’m so happy to say Le Worldshaker was a favourite! I think of it almost like the French salons of previous centuries, when they judged books, recommended books, and generally influenced public opinion about books.

So, of course, it was wonderful to talk to such special readers. The librarians, Valérie and Élodie (hope I spelled that right) did a great job of helping me to understand the questions, and I answered in French. There were some v thoughtful questions! I finished off with a Mr Gibber/M. Gibbon reading and gave away all the posters I’d brought with me.

Here’s a photo taken with the club members afterwards. I’ve become really fond of my steampunk goggles! Because I’m doing this with an iPad app, I can’t publish a large-size image, but as soon as I get back to my laptop in Australia, I’ll put up a better photo.

Merci, club de Montreuil, c’était un grand plaisir de vous rencontrer!

Rain and Fans

So sad – we can see the end of the Paris is it approaching, and we’re nowhere near ready to go!

Here’s me in my steampunk goggles, aspromised

I put them on now and then when doing signings this afternoon, and for interview photo afterwards.

Today we got rained on – not heavy bucketfuls of rain, Australia-style, but it lasted the whole morning, varying back and forth between drizzle and light shower. Aileen and I enjoyed the St Ouen flea market experience we went to another at Montreuil (not far from the Salon or Book Fair). Whereas Montreuil was more serious vintage and antiques oriented – and more expensive – Montreuil was mostly clothing, secondhand or cheap, a treasure trove of everything imaginable. We were selective only because we have to keep inside weight restrictions for the flight home. I bought a padded jerkin, Aileen ought an amazing skirt and a dozen other small items. Only problem was the rain – these were open-air stalls – plus the fact that my fold-up umbrella turned inside and then started coming loose from the prongs. It was only half an umbrella by the end.

So we headed back to our apartment. I was on for two hours signing at the end of the afternoon, then had an interview with Nathan, a big fan of the juggernaut books, and his brother and friend. I really feel as if I have ‘fans’ in France more than any other country – young readers who don’t just like the books, or love the books, but who get right behind them and influence others to read them. It’s a great feeling to have that special level of support!