adelaidesean: (Movember - FZ black)
A quick reminder that Concept Sc-Fi's first annual short story competition, which I'll be judging, is now open for entries. The themes are space opera and music. Make me proud!

ETA: Poetry is allowed! (Hey, that rhymes.)

adelaidesean: (WOTF 23)
Concept Sci-fi is hosting its first annual Short Story Competition, offering entrants a chance to win £100 plus some signed goodies from competition judge, um, me.

Details in the link above. It's a themed competition. Here's the blurb:

Frank Zappa once said that everything in the universe is part of one great big note. He wasn't far wrong. There's music in the earth's core, in the sun's atmosphere, even in the roiling fire of the Big Bang. There's music in our interior lives too, in the stories we tell. "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable", according to Leonard Bernstein, which makes it a perfect tool in the writing of space opera--my true but not my only love.

Way back in the late 1980s, I had to choose between two lives: one writing words and another writing notes. In an alternate universe, there's a version of me beavering away at a new symphony, or the score to a Hollywood movie. Here, the closest I get is putting Gary Numan lyrics in the mouths of my characters, and dreaming.

Dream for me. Tell me the note that ripples through spacetime in the wake of an ftl cruiser. Convey to me the songs that alien cephalopods whistle in their jovian soup. Give me the music of the spheres as you hear it. When the echoes fade, we'll all be richer for it.
adelaidesean: (haiku)
I'm boxing up my archives for another drop to the excellent Fryer Library at the University of Queensland--unearthing still more godawful juvenilia in the process. But that's what not this post is about, thank goodness.*

I simply want to commemorate the coolest award I ever received, for the 2000 Inaugural Sydney Writers' Festival Haiku Competition. I've talked about this before, but apart from a brief appearance in the infamous "Haiku Man" video (screened at a certain Brisbane natcon) the embroidered Y-fronts I won** have never been seen outside my office. So here they are, as modelled by the seductive walnut tree in our backyard:



Aren't they purdy? I have no idea how the valuers are going to assess them, but I'm glad they're going to a happy place.

haiku underpants:
just one owner, low mileage
worn only when drunk


* Nor is it about the mounds of homemade D&D modules I'm also donating, plus every scrap of music I ever wrote. Yowza.

** The giant banner I also received, visible at the link above, is going too. That's my second-strangest/coolest publication. Literary festivals should do this kind of thing more often! (Somehow I can't see stuffy old Adelaide Writers' Week really getting into spirit.)

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