News update
Recently Read Books
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 | News update | 2 Comments
Because reading is important (and delicious). One of my favorite things to learn, that I learn every workshop, festival and convention, is that reading is important. “Writers must read!” People proclaim and every time they do I get a delicious shiver. Really? I can indulge in my addiction? I am trying to strategically target my addiction a little more.
Things I’ve read in the past month or so, a scattering of thoughts:
Conflux 6 Virtual Mini-Con
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | News update | No Comments
As I mentioned a very long time ago, I’m a guest panelist at the Conflux Virtual Mini-Con. Conflux is a wonderful Speculative Fiction Convention held in Canberra, Australia every year in October. I’ve had a wonderful time every time, with top notch panels, interesting workshops and lovely people.
The panel will be starting in a few hours (Sunday 30 August for folks in Australia, Saturday 29 August for folks in the US) and will be archived. I’ve ‘been’ to a few virtual festivals (although this is the first time I will be guesting) and have been surprised at how much I have learned either during the festival or after the festival has officially ended. So check it out, either soonish, participate in real time and ask squirly questions, or check it out later and see what gems of knowledge have been casually dropped. Conflux Virtual Mini-Con coming to the interwebs near you, wherever you are.
Because it is hard (and because spaces are important)
Monday, August 24th, 2009 | News update | 8 Comments
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
John F. Kennedy – September 12, 1962.
Words on our wall. My sweetheart just put them at the entrance to our room – next to bible thick books in leather, a papier mache chicken and stands above library books, new books and old books from Powells and a few precious tomes from Australia.
Clarion by the numbers
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 | News update, Technology and design | No Comments
Clarion Writers Workshop is over for 2009. Wow.
Going by the numbers:
- 6 stories critiqued, 5 stories written (my first story was on day 1 and was a submission story)
- One novel proposal, outline and first chapter written and critiqued
- 30 pounds of paper brought home containing those critiques
- Critiquing many many stories, I want to get a full count of stories, pages and words, I shall ask
- Including naps in the afternoon I averaged 5 hours sleep a night/day over 6 weeks
- Living with 17 other people intensely creating for 6 weeks
- 6 amazing teachers
- One incredible experience
People writing descriptively about it:
- Ken Schneyer’s collated posts
- Mishelle’s blog has posts
- So has Tiffani
Clarion is seriously good stuff for any writer, and given the close relationship between genre fiction and comics I particularly recommend that comics writers get their short story writing hats on and go for this experience as well. I’m excited by how this short story workshop can enrich comics as a form.
Goodnight all.
At Clarion, in the USA and loving it
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | News update | 2 Comments
Life has been an amazing and frantic. Since last I wrote I’ve reached the United States unpacked in a big rush in Portland (turning a rather nice basement into a cosy home) and then zoomed down to San Diego.
I’m in the third week of Clarion Writer’s Workshop, the bees knees of creative development. I’m working with really talented people to make our work shine and it is just fantastic. Week 1 was Holly Black (of Spiderwick Chronicles fame), week 2 Larissa Lai (When Fox is a Thousand & Saltfish Girl) and we’ve just started working with Robert Crais (Elvis Cole novels fame, crime/mystery books and used to write for top TV shows).
Robert Crais is a Clarion graduate, as is Kim Stanley Robinson who will be teaching us next week.
Sleeping 5 hours a night, working like a dog and loving it. Must dash, I’m starving and class starts at 8am.
And in other news
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | News update | No Comments
And in other news I’m writing and doing all sorts of things while waiting for our flight. Update of our adventures by the numbers:
- 15 minutes until we board our plane for Los Angeles
- 45 minutes until the plane takes off (nominally)
- 10am Monday we leave Australia, we travel for 14 hours and arrive 7.30am Monday. Ah the joys of time travel.
- 7 days in Los Angeles
- 10 days in Portland
- then 6 weeks at Clarion
- 1-14 days amount of time I need to have my ankle in a brace. Given my physiotherapist will be on another continent I’m going to go for the conservative end of things.
- ?????? amount of time we will live in America.
It still hasn’t quite sunk in. We’re going, we’re on our way. I am so full of enthusiasm and excitement. We are in a state of becoming.
5am Melbourne – After the Emerging Writers Festival
Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | Conventions, News update | No Comments
The Emerging Writers Festival is over. I had a rocking good time. Met some lovely people. Had the brain juices stimulated, challenged, soothed and had some of my wackier ideas encouraged! Beware.
As always, I didn’t attend most of the panels I intended to go to. Instead I wandered from interesting thing to interesting thing and like a jellyfish followed the currents that found me. There were times when I was juiced up on the best drug of all (ideas), mind and mouth rambling and brain sparking off in all directions from good company.
There were some times when I was asked some really hard questions about my own work, discovered some deep emotions and subtext to my graphic novel script that I had never realised. I felt confused, sad, struggling, lost and around my own writing – going back to my hotel with a laptop full of mud… And built a bridge, got over it and wrote important words. There is still some difficult work to be done (and dusted before Clarion), but I’ve made an important breakthrough… now I just have to hold on to it.
If I do something with 10% of the ideas I’ve had at the festival it shall be a good year. I got up at 5am this morning, with three articles bubbling in my head. Dragging myself up before the morning light I ignored those concepts completely and wrote a comic script instead. I thought it would be a good fun fluff piece (if slightly disturbing) for Tango’s new anthology Love and War. But as I wrote it, dammit, I realised it had a deep and meaningful subtext directly relevant to the theme of the anthology. Ben Hutchings would be the perfect artist for it if he’s available and willing. The working title of the comic? Love and Spandex.
Numbers, Ankles and Visas
Monday, May 18th, 2009 | News update | 4 Comments
It’s been a full few weeks. Here’s a little by the numbers.
- 6 whole days until I leave Canberra
- 4 whole days to pack up most of the house and prepare an awesome farewell
- 3 torn ligaments in my right ankle
- 3 visits to the physiotherapist and 1 ankle brace
- 1 set of x-rays showing no bones broken
- 2 Visas, one for Mike(y), one for me. America here we come!
- 1 night of rockband, singstar and pata pata pata pon until 3am with friends
- 1 night of Eurovision and friends
- boundless, the sensation of blessedness around the good people I have in my life.
And here’s a picture of my bruised ankle from a few days ago. Since then the migration of bruising to my toes has contined in a black textured manner, the swelling has gone down further and the bruising over the ankle has faded. This happened shortly after my last post on accident prone lizness… the pen really is mightier than the sword. Owwww!
Liz's purple bruised ankle
Little liz – the accident prone years
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | News update, clarion | No Comments
… no the accident prone years would mean just about any year. I am writing this with a strapped finger after getting a deep slash in my finger while examining suitcases.
I wrote up this anecdote to share with my Co-Clarionaters, we’re getting to know each other and Mr
The scene. Midnight, an eight year old Liz is cutting up a chocolate syrup bottle with stanley knife (box cutter). The plastic is really hard and I am tired and impatient and get careless. The stanley knife suddenly swishes really smoothly through plastic and over one of my fingers.
There’s a lot of blood. Everyone is sleeping and I know I shouldn’t be up and I don’t want to bother anyone and I don’t want to get into trouble so I stifle any kind of sound and try to apply first aid.
My parents, woken by random sounds and movements late at night find a bathroom with blood splats and a messy pile of bandaids that keep floating off.
My parents say “What’s going on?” with some urgency.
I hide my hand behind my back and say “nothing” convinced I am going to be in the biggest trouble ever for being so stupid with a knife.
I don’t get into trouble at all and am whisked off to hospital where I get a tetanus shot, many local anesthetic injections and get two stitches. I watch with fascination as the thread passes through my flesh and somewhere in the back of my head I’m thinking “Wow this will make a great story.”
I’m particularly pleased that I will remember this as I’m still cross that I don’t remember breaking my leg when I was three ’cause that was really cool and my leg bent at a funny angle. It’s very unfair I don’t remember breaking my leg especially because my brother says that when you break a limb it heals to be stronger and so my chances of ever having a broken leg again have been reduced by 50%.
I get a day off school to recover and I traumatise my little sister for years and years with slow graphic descriptions of watching needle and thread go through flesh.
Even at eight everything was material to observe and absorb to use for later and my technique for any kind of trauma or scary thing is “this will be useful material”.
Liz Bio vs 2
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | News update | No Comments
With thanks for the kind crits, here is version 2:
A zombie love story, a seed that breaks through and changes the world, the quest to be cool through the power of snake skins or the disillusionment of of a nuclear physicist are a few of Liz’s tales. Dark and macabre or playful and delicious – she writes stories about hope, strength, survival and change. Liz writes across many media and genres, but comics are her major passion.
Liz carves out a diverse career as a freelancer, frequently working in educational comics as a writer, editor, project manager, talent scout and artist liaison. She has run creative workshops for a range of organisations, including the National Museum of Australia, Conflux and the Young Music Society. She even gets paid for writing creative works and essays, on spec or by commission. She has worked on and off as a Life Model for nine years. Prior to become a freelancer she worked as researcher, union organiser, refuge worker, circus manager and providing consulting and support to the community sector.
Her comics have been published in an array of publications, including Meanjin, The Girl’s Guide to Guy Stuff, Eat Comics, Something Wicked and in the collection Songs Dreams and Nightmares. She has supported and written for lip magazine since its inception. Her work is often psychological, poignant and she loves gritty urban fantasy. Her anthology, Dreams of Tomorrow, won a Bronze Ledger Award for Small Press of the Year. On Boxing Day she appeared nude in the Canberra Times to support the Parisian Life Model Strike and in January 2009 her musical Comic Book Opera, written with composer Michael Sollis, was performed for the first time.
If you want to find out more check out www.lizargall.com , drop her a line or say hi.
Liz is
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