Australian Speculative Fiction Carnival

Welcome to June's Australian Speculative Fiction Blog Carnival. It's strange, as befits a speculative fiction carnival.

Why is it strange? This month's carnival is so unbelievably natconnish that you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing else happened. If blogs were on paper, two forests would have died to create Convergence reports.

I put on a stopwatch and found as many posts as I could about Convergence in the time. If I missed yours, it's because I couldn't paste the URL before the buzzer sounded. Please add more in the comments: we might make the record books.

I'm trying to put the Convergence reports under a cut just in case you don't want to know what you missed or don't want to be reminded of what you did while drunk. ( Zillions of reports, just waiting for you to click )

For fairness sake (and because Australia was mentioned), let me add a single post to the NZ national SF convention. I know 1 vs 5 million does not redress the balance, but it might mean that threemonkeys brings me more chocolate fish in future. Which reminds me, Donna has my chocolate fish.

The Ditmars
My favourite announcements:
Via London - the only way to get the earliest local announcements. And some local variants.

Announcements
A place to talk about conventions.
Book launch.
Margo stuff.
More Margo stuff.
Horror stuff.
Conflux Christmas lunch (in July, and somewhat Jewish).

What does a horror writer consider makes a good day?

Sample posts about New Ceres (the first is just to prove I check Horrorscope). You should already have subscribed to New Ceres - because I will keep telling you to until you do - yes, I know I'm a nag.

Writing theory for the charmingly frozen month of June. Click on every highlighted phrase, I dare you.

Interviews of Margo and of Margo again and of someone else. May I apologise for the third one? No-one else sent any in (it's always fun to receive info about myself, though, by all means send more)! I'm certain-sure more people were interviewed online this month.

Jennifer Fallon discovers fame.

I didn't list the zombie posts. Sorry. I read them and forgot to note the URLs. Obviously my brains got eaten by these people.

PS Not a single post reached Philologa by email except the one about my interview. It was very odd to look in my folder and find that the only email was about me. Please send cool posts to philologa(at)gmail.com for next month.

PPS This carnival isn't pretty because I had no idea how to make all the Convergence links look gorgeous without saying rude things about each and every blogger. (Also because I'm still suffering from post-Convention fatigue.) I value my friends more than I value the attractiveness of my blog and so I just listed the links, and then I thought "Drabbit, if I'm going to list the Convergence links, why not most of the others." So there it is. The ugliest Carnival in existence, full of convention goodness.

PPPS Apologies to Pheno friends. By the time I had done the Convergence bit, I was all conventioned out. Please feel free to add links to the best Pheno reports in the comments.

(no subject)

I forgot to say that I reminded the host this month about the carnival just after lunch and I had a really, really interesting conversation with myself about it and about tomorrow's post, which will be all about Russell Kirkpatrick. It was going to be today's, but I told myself firmly that the carnival was enough post for one day. In fact, I gave myself a good talking-to.

Tomorrow I teach worldbuilding and students have to deal with me. Pity the students.