My Dh had finished the trailer for The Outcast Chronicles. Ta Da!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDfjjKVn96Q]
I’m going to interview him in a couple of weeks about putting the trailer together, so if you have any questions, drop them in the comments.
I have been running a series of interview with female fantasy writers to redress a perception I came across – that fantasy was a bit of a boy’s club. It really isn’t like that here in Australia. We have many wonderful fantasy writers who just happen to be female.
Today I’m interviewing Trent Jamieson because, for one thing he has a wonderful new book coming out. (Yay Trent!), and also I thought I’d ask him the same questions I’ve asked the female writers about fantasy writing and gender, to get his perspective as a male fantasy writer.
I’ve known Trent Jamieson since he was a fresh-faced aspiring writer coming to the VISION meetings (almost 15 years) and Trent has been a part of the ROR writing group for 8 years. He’s sold heaps of short stories, won or been a finalist in awards and now has a second series coming out.
Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.
Q: I can remember dropping you at the ferry after one of our critique sessions, saying – One day The Roil will be published, Trent. It’s so creative and interesting. It just has to hit the right publisher at the right time. Now it is coming out through Angry Robot. I was thrilled when you asked me for a cover quote. The Roil can be described as Steampunk, but it is so much more, dystopian SF, Lovecraftian horror. How long has The Roil (The Nightbound Land duology) been in the making?
Ooh, I remember that, too! I’m not sure if I believed you at the time, but I’m so glad you were right. In fact, I never quite believe it until I know the book is in print – just got an email from my publisher to say that copies arrived at Angry Robot today – Yay!
The Nightbound Land’s been around in my head a very long time, at least ten years though there are elements going back to my early twenties, just after I graduated Uni. I’ve notes sketches, and bits and pieces in my earliest notebooks. I think this is the world that I’ve kept circling all my adult life, and I might come back to it once I’ve finished the next book (which is due in a couple of weeks, Arrrgh!). I’ve short stories planned, there’s a novella I want to do concerning a person that really only shows up for an instant in book one (and as a corpse, no less, but up until that point they had led a very exciting, if rather tragic, life), there’s poems too. This is the world I always come back to in my mind.
It’s dark and grim (and I’ve glad you’ve noticed the Lovecraftian elements – there’s a reason my blog is called Trentonomicon) – and nonsensical. But it’s also very much grounded in my experience of city spaces. My wife Diana says she can’t read the scenes in Mirrlees or Tate without thinking of Brisbane.
This is Trent’s cool new book trailer for The Roil .
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd-GIecM1jQ]
Q: You’ve written a lot of short stories with an anthology Reserved for Travelling Shows and over 23 stories published individually. Your stories have been finalists in the Aurealis Awards four times and won twice (SF and YA, but also nominated in horror). Just as it is hard to pin down The Roil, it is hard to pin down your short stories. If you had to describe your genre as a writer, how would you do it? And, if that’s too hard, what are your favourite genres to write in?
I like to mess around in various genres. Believe it or not, my first published works were nonsense poems. But I don’t set out to write in a specific genre. Stories start as either a particular image, or a weird sentence or even a beat, I just follow the pulse to end.
I don’t know if I have a favourite genre, I like the grand epic gestures of Urban Fantasy, and the way it’s also curiously intimate.
Steampunk is just glorious, the machines, the clothes, the foggy streets (or in my case rain-drenched). I’m really itching to work on a sword and sorcery novel that has been sitting in my hard drive for years (I sold Death Most Definite, before I could get back to it).
I love genre fiction, but ultimately what makes a tale work is the author writing it not the appurtenances of genre, I love authors that are their own genre, I want to read a Tansy Rayner Roberts story or a Rowena Cory Daniels story or a Marianne de Pierres story or China Mieville or Michael Swanwick or Kim Westwood.
What I would love to be is an author that drags people with them whatever genre they write in (maybe one day, eh) though my sensibilities are deeply fantastical, so they know it’s always going to be a bit weird.
Q: You’ve tutored at Clarion South and the Queensland University of Technology. I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated your critiques at our ROR weekends. Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?
Honestly the most important thing is to read, and read lots. Everything you can get your hands on, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, swim in the words. You don’t learn to riff off words until you’ve heard a lot of tunes. Unless you’re some sort of genius, then you don’t need my advice anyway.
The other thing is to take a delight in it. Writing is play, writing fiction is play, if you’re not enjoying it there are far more lucrative careers than writing (pretty much anything). It’s hard work, hard, hard work, but it should sing for you, too.
Q: Your Death Works trilogy was published by Orbit. The first book, Definite Most Definite was nominated for both the horror and the fantasy section of the Aurealis Awards (again you defy genre). This trilogy combines horror with humour, zombies and death as a corporate business (not to mention a love story).
The trilogy is set in Brisbane, our home town. In an interview on Fangbooks you say: ‘Brisbane is very important to me. From the brown, and slightly ominous coils of the Brisbane River to the flashing transmitters atop Mt Coot-tha, and the knitting needle bunches of the Kurilpa Bridge Brisbane is full of stories (and the possibility of adventure, explosions and love).’ Did you come across any resistance to setting the trilogy in a little-known Australian capital city?
None whatsoever. No-one ever told me not to set it in Brisbane, it never came up. Orbit grabbed it and ran with it, and they’ve never been anything but supportive – maybe it helps that Bernadette Foley, my publisher is from Brisbane!
See Trent’s cool Death Most Definite book trailer.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQtI__Zc5bY]
Q: You’ve been doing a series of quirky and amusing videos. (See See Trent’s Book corners 1- 5 and Trent’s Book Corners 6- 10). What inspired you to start these?
Honestly … I discovered that I had a video camera in my computer and thought, why not? They’re really something I do as a bit of a hobby. I have a rule that they have be pretty rough, and daggy, so far I am in no danger of breaking that rule.
And, I thought, I can do this, whereas I could never see myself podcasting. Galactic Suburbia, the Writer and the Critic, Coode St Review, all of these are brilliant podcasts – that I love, and could never hope to replicate – I figured there was some room for silliness.
Q: By the end of August, you’ll hand in the second Nightbound Land book, Night’s Engines. What do you plan to write next?
Gah! I’ve a kid’s series called The Players that I wrote with an Arts Council Grant a few years back, I’d like to see if I can sell that. I’ve a Sword and Sorcery novel called Empire December that I would like to finally polish up and send out. I’ve a story about a girl that is carried by a storm to a carnival in a cherry orchard run by the devil – and he’s a slick old devil this one. And there’s a Space Opera novel I’ve been meaning to write, not to mention an Urban Fantasy series about a family in Logan City – the city on the southern edge of Brisbane. And there’s a vampire novel that I want to write based on my short story “Day Boy”.
You know how it is, the ideas never stop coming. It’s deciding which one grabs you the most at the time and running with it.
Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?
If I pick up a book without knowing the author’s gender I rarely guess correctly, and that’s usually only because the odds suggest I have to get it right some of the time! So, to me, no. Writing is about inhabiting other people’s heads. Good writers of either sex do this. I think there is a difference in the way that different people write fantasy in the politics, the concerns, the lyricism etc that they bring to their work, but gender isn’t as big a determinant of that. Though this is me coming at it as a reader, and I want to read (or at least try) EVERYTHING!
But what happens if you cut out one sex is that you miss out on fifty percent of the voices, fifty percent of the richness of the world. I don’t want to reduce my chance of being surprised and delighted by half.
Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?
I expect to be entertained, challenged, shocked, and taken somewhere different when I pick up any book.
Margo Lanagan, Kate Griffin, Grace Dugan, Hope Mirrlees, Lucy Sussex, Kirsten Bishop, P.M. Newton, Steph Swainston, Krissy Kneen, Gail Carriger, Kate Elliott, and I could go on and on, all of these writers do that because, like any other writer I admire, they’re not me, I don’t know what they’re thinking or what game they’re playing with their stories, until I read them.
That’s the chief pleasure of reading any work of fiction, you’re reading someone else’s imagination, and mixing it with your own to form a cool sort of imaginative story stew. What an amazing thing that is.
Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?
I think it would be to the beginning of the universe. If you could somehow exist and watch the laws of physics coming into play, watch something become, well, something when before there wasn’t anything, how wonderful that would be!
Either that or I’d love to hang out with a T-rex or two.
Give-away Question:
What steampunk technology would you used to travel around the world?
Follow Trent on Twitter: @trentonomicon
See Trent’s Blog.
Find Trent on GoodReads.
As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the multi-genre talented Marianne de Pierres to drop by.
Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.
Q: You’ve just seen the release of the fourth book of your huge space opera series Sentients of Orion. Was writing the YA fantasy series that starts with Burn Bright a fun break for you?
Well to be honest … there is some science fiction in Burn Bright. It just wrote itself in without my say! But the fantasy side of the story was lovely to compose. I found myself more able to indulge my word muse and loved writing the younger character.
Q: You combined with singer song writer Yunyu to produce a song and book trailer for Burn Bright. Since much of the book takes place in and around dance clubs, this seems very appropriate. How much collaboration was involved in this project?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4iHj1AIMg&feature=player_embedded]
Simply, Yunyu read an early draft of the novel and went away and wrote a sensational song. Or songs, actually, three of them. In the end we could only afford to record one, so we picked Angel Arias. From her end, there was a lot more arranging and production to do after that. I was able to sit back and enjoy her genius. We got together a couple of times in Sydney and brainstormed the business side of it, but essentially the creative side was one artist inspiring another.
Q: Burn Bright takes its main character, Retra to some pretty dark places. She’s looking for her brother on an island where teenagers party non-stop and there are no rules except the warning not to wander off the path. It feels very surreal and dreamlike. Was it hard to slip into this alternate fantasy world when you sat down to write? (Read the first chapter of Burn Bright).
Not at all. It’s been sitting in my hindbrain since I was a teenager. I think it reflects the fact that I had my own dark places to contend with back then. Perhaps, if anything, writing the book has been a catharsis.
Q: Book two Angel Arias is due out late in 2011. (Love the cover, by the way). Did you have the second book finished before the first one was released? And, following on from that, did you plan the whole series before you started to write?
No, the second book was not written but in early meeting with my publisher, Zoe Walton, we discussed where the story might go and how many books it might take to get there. The second book synopsis was written, I just needed to decide whether it should be structured in on or two parts (hence bk 3.)
Q:Slightly off the topic of fantasy, since your Parrish series was described as near-future Australian cyber punk, I see there’s a We want more Parrish site on Facebook. Are you planning any more books on Parrish?
That will rather depend on a publisher wanting to publish them. At the moment I’m in talks with someone on a sideline Parrish project, and I’m writing a novelette (1o K) for an e-book publisher. But a full blown series is not something that’s likely to happen in the immediate future.
Q: You also write ‘frivolous, fun-filled urban fantasy’ under the pen-name Marianne Delacourt. Your first Tara Sharp book, Sharp Shooter, won the Davitt Award. There’s a touch of paranormal in this series because the main character can tell what people are thinking from their body language. Did you do a lot of research to make the paranormal element believable?
I did do a lot of research but much of it was anecdotal or “dubious”. What was really interesting were the studies done on paralanguage itself. We are so much more than the words we speak. Communication is complex and largely subconscious.
Q: I notice you have a degree in film and television. Do you plan to get back into writing scripts and, if you do, are there some exciting projects brewing away in the background?
I’ve been slowly working on a script with New Zealand writer Lynne Jamneck for Enchanter Productions called Stalking Daylight. It’s been a slow process because Lynne’s been studying full time and I’ve been writing full time. However we’re nearly there on it. It’s an original SF thriller (not an adaption of a book) in the vein of PK Dick and Vernor Vinge’s work.
Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?
Well, I just have to say that if some people think fantasy is a boy’s club, they should look over the fence at SF J
To answer your second question though, I think there is a difference in way that male and female writers tell fantasy stories. But you have to be careful about making blanket statements because there are also many commonalities. And for every difference you might point out, there is an exception to the rule you’re trying to define. I guess the only thing I’d be comment on is that male authors write male characters a little differently. And it’s a difference that is both gratifying and enlightening.
Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?
No. Not at all. I never think about the author’s sex when I read a book. Afterwards, though, if it gives me cause to reflect, those considerations might crop up. I certainly never choose a book to read based on gender.
Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?
Right now (post deadline!) I’d settle for masseuse and a slice of banana cake right here in my own time!
Give-away question to win a copy of Burn Bright:
If you could choose your favourite musician to compose music for your favourite book, who would it be and what would be the book?
Filed under Australian Writers, Book Giveaway, Characterisation, Collaboration, Covers, creativity, Dark Urban Fantasy, Fantasy books, Female Fantasy Authors, Fun Stuff, Music and Writers, Nourish the Writer, Promoting Friend's Books, Script Writing, The World in all its Absurdity, The Writing Fraternity
If you like the book trailer my (long suffering) husband did for King Rolen’s Kin you may like to drop by this site and vote for it. (You vote in the side bar).
Filed under Book trailers, Fantasy books, Fun Stuff, Genre, Publishing Industry
Today I’m celebrating the launch of Trent Jamieson’s book Death Most Definite, published by Orbit, part of the Death Works trilogy.
Here is the trailer.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQtI__Zc5bY]
Tren’t s book is set in Brisbane with a quirky hero and an off beat premise. It’s a refreshing take on Dark Urban Fantasy.
Go Trent!
by Hhen
Are you scrambling to keep up?
Once upon a time, you could learn how to do something and then you knew it. You were an expert. You could wear your fine, fine hat with pride. Thirty years ago we used Letraset to put the wording into a piece of art work. We used a bromide machine to enlarge and reduce artwork, then printed it up in a dark room. We laid out a book by cutting and pasting, using a t-square to keep it straight on the page. Daryl and I started as graphic artists in this era.
Then along came the computer era. So we bought one (or two) computers and learnt how to use the word program and photoshop. It was that or be left behind.
When the first book of my first trilogy came out in 1999, Daryl set up a web page for me. My publishers were impressed. They were scrambling keep up. Then of course I had to update the web page, so I had to learn how to use Adobe GoLive, or get left behind.
In 2002, when the third book of my trilogy came out, Daryl created a book trailer for it. My publishers weren’t sure what to do with it. The concept of a book trailer was very new then.
I’ve updated my web page every few years, which usually meant a complete redesign of the look and more complex structure with the pages and sub pages. I’d surf the web, studying other authors’ web pages to see how they presented themselves.
Then along came blogs. I must admit I resisted blogging for ages. With 6 children, plus all the volunteer work I’ve done for arts organisations over the years, I really resent anything that takes time away from my writing. Also, I thought why would anyone be interested in what I have to say? Besides, I had a web page. So I was a luddite, where blogging was concerned.
But web pages are static. There’s not interaction with your readers. And I knew I was going to have to start all over again, and learn a new skill. Not enough hours in the day, not enough space left in my brain to start over … To paraphrase Winnie the Pooh, It was all too much for a bear of little brain.
Luckily, Dave Freer invited me to join the Mad Genius Club, writers’ division, where I only had to blog once a week. And I discovered blogging is not that hard. In fact, it’s fun. It’s addictive, even. Before I knew it, I had the MGC blog, the ROR blog (my writing group), plus a blog on Live Journal. And my friends had blogs on wordpress which allowed you to put pages behind the blog. Blogs had morphed into web pages.
When the covers arrived for my new fantasy series, I started this blog, with pages behind it. And that meant I could simplify my old web page. So I rolled up my arms, completely redesigned my web page (for the fifth time since 1999) and took it apart, then put it all back together again. Took me all week end. Here it is. A leaner cleaner web page, that acts as a back up to this site.
I still haven’t tweeted yet. I feel as if I add one more thing to my list of commitments I’ll be twittering for real.
So tell me, are you scrambling every couple of years to keep up with the way the web is changing?
Filed under Nourish the Writer, Writing craft
Drum roll …. the book trailer for my new series ‘The Chronicles of King Rolen’s Kin’.
With thanks to my long suffering husband, Daryl, here it is, the product of months of working on the book trailer at night after a hard day’s work and spending the weekend working, when he could have been snoozing on the couch ‘watching’ the cricket. ( Daryl’s site is here).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5uZbt052w]
When I write a book I create a Resonance folder. There is a specific feel I want for the world, the people and the tone of the story. I collect images, stories about places, photos of people and music which I associate with the story. It helps me to immerse myself in the series. Do readers get the same feel that I get from a series? I don’t know, but with a book trailer we are one step closer.
As writer and publicist Arielle Ford says:
‘there is only so much … you can write about your book before you have saturated your target audience. But in one minute or less you can tap into the visual, auditory and emotional senses of your potential reader with a book trailer.’
Read the rest of her article here. I don’t know if book trailers sell books, but they are certainly fun to dream up and fun to put together, especially when they capture the feel of the book. I must admit I’ve been to the New Covey Book Trailer Award site and browsed, when I should have been writing. Some book trailers are funny and some are insightful.
What do you think of book trailers? Do they pique your interest in a series?
Filed under Book trailers
