Drabblecast will republish ‘Aqua Vita’ in audio format. This story first appeared in Voiceworks.

Okay, I’ve done it. I’m on twitter. (This is continued punishment for dating a software developer, isn’t it?)

Actually, my main concern is that I’m not exactly known for being able to write a sentence of fewer than 140 characters. . .

Cat Rambo briefly reviews Sybil’s Garage 6 over at Fantasy Magazine. She picks out a few highlights, including ‘Drinking Black Coffee at the Jasper Grey Cafe’:

The magazine finishes with Stephanie Campisi’s “Drinking Black Coffee at the Jasper Grey Cafe,” a place both inviting and umheimlich at the same time, much like the magazine at its best:

The cafe that you should never visit is famous for its perfect coffee, ground with mortar and pestle before you and brewed in an enormous old-fashioned espresso maker that bubbles the boiling liquid up through a spout until it fountains down and around, beautifully and precisely heated, and is then poured with an elegant turn of the wrist, where its subtle froth frills against the side of the thick, glazed cups, the type that has feet at the bottom, the type that is the hybrid child of a wine glass and mug; the froth licks the side of the cups like the lapping of the ocean.

In other writerly news, I put together my first grant application today (one whole day before the deadline). It’s for a YA book to be called The War of the Kites, and which I’ll probably start writing once I’m done with Spatterbaum and Zitherbother and an another idea or two I’m toying with.

Oh, and for any under 18s, I’ll be doing a workshop with Express Media/Voiceworks at Syn Radio this weekend. Feel free to pop along.

I’m quite sure that this was an episode of Millennium.

Spatterbaum and Zitherbother edits are well underway, and I hope to have approximately the first third revised by the end of today. Lots of slashing and hacking going on (in terms of word count, not content), although somehow my word count is growing in the fast and twisted way of my science experiment broad beans in grade 2. Oops.

So, hunting through Duotrope, it occurred to me that an inordinate amount of non-paying or very low-paying markets don’t take reprints. In my opinion, this is very silly.

Also, in case you were wondering, I managed to eat all of my 27 persimmons last week. And today I have had six bok choi(s?). Because, clearly, I like to do things in moderation.

Also, breaking news from the UK: I before E rule no longer to be taught in schools.

The new issue of Opium magazine contains a 9 word short story by Jonathon Keats. The story is printed on the cover, which is covered with 2 layers of black ink, and an incremental overlay. Over time, the ink will break down, allowing the story to be read bit by bit. You’re looking at roughly 1,000 years.

This is the most sophisticated joke around ‘how do you keep an idiot in suspense?’ that I’ve seen recently!

The other day I received a response from a reader about my story A Pox on all your Houses where the reader told me that although they’d enjoyed the story, they wanted an explanation for the existence of the giant pimple in Priyanka Singh’s house.

My response, really, was along the lines of that of a foot-stamping three year old trying to explain why a ballerina outfit is appropriate camping gear: ‘Just because.’ In my mind, the point of the story isn’t really the the why or the what of the pimple, but the reactions of Priyanka Singh and her father to the house’s sudden acne outbreak.

I write absurd, silly fiction about all sorts of absurd silly things (although, more often than not, about fish or teapots, except for my novels, which are so far entirely free of such things, but contain more baked goods). The point of introduction of the absurd or fantastic element is to me a marker to the reader that notes, ‘okay, I know this is silly, but let’s run with this and see what happens’.

This might be more of a problem if I wrote hard science fiction (mostly because my dad would be calling me up to explain why my chemistry is. entirely. wrong.), but in my mind, the point of the absurd is that it’s absurd–suspension of disbelief kicks in, and we’re all having fun.

Should silliness/the fantastic just be allowed to be? Or should there be a purpose?

Man charged with impersonating dead mother

The investigators played along as Parkin showed up for the interview “wearing a red cardigan, lipstick, manicured nails and breathing through an oxygen mask”, prosecutors said.

In other news, Jono finally had his cast taken off today, and gleefully informed me that he’d brought it home for me to look at. Much like a cat dragging in a dead rat. . .only the rat would probably smell better. Oh, I’m a lucky girl.

Oh no! An extremely silly pun-based idea is intefering with my attempts at serious literature. You know, just for a change.

One of the reasons why Jono’s mum is awesome:

(Okay, so that’s a stock photo that I stole off the internet, but I really do have many, many persimmons on my lounge room table. So many, in fact, that I fully intend to make myself sick from eating all of them over very few days, but it’ll be worth it).

And while I’m stealing photos off the internet, I might as well post this picture, which pretty much only needs a G&T (and a shoulder massage from the long-suffering boyfriend, and perhaps some very dark chocolate) to be akin to my idea of Heaven (although those shelves would be hard to search):

I’ve completed the first two chapters worth of edits on Spatterbaum and Zitherbother, and as a result, my brain is taking on mush-like qualities. The book has turned out to be pitched to a slightly older audience than I first anticipated, so a lot of the rewriting is taking the form of New and Improved character motivations and plotting, as well as the standard sentence-level stuff.

I’m working on a couple of short stories at the moment, too (well, about half a dozen, really, but only two today). One, about eco-friendly guerilla protest tactics using contact lenses, is coming along quite nicely, but the other one is about as much fun as pulling teeth (having them pulled, that is, and without anaesthetic. I’d imagine that the act of pulling teeth could be quite a lark for those with a wide streak of schadenfreude). It’s for a themed anthology where I’ve been asked to write a story set to a song with entirely indecipherable, nonsensical song lyrics–and not indecipherable and nonsensical in a good way–and I’m really struggling to keep my story centred around it. I think the song focus has definitely been to the detriment of the story, to be honest. Perhaps I can get off track a bit and make it something that has been ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘written around’ this bloody song.