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So, Free Comic Book Day for 2012 was on May 5! It’s taken me this long to blog about it because I completely forgot. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
Last year’s was a pretty good one, but this year it was even bigger with four stores taking part in the festivities.
Our first stop was local comics stalwart GnB Comics. They had two guests this year, Nicola Scott and Ardian Syaf, and a great sale, so the shop was insanely crowded! But it was great.
 Nicola Scott and Ardian Syaf, being awesome and signing Our second stop was Books Kinokuniya, but when we arrived, they were almost completely out of comics! Which was a huge shocker, since they’re a really big bookstore (even if they’re not strictly comics-only) but this year they’d started much earlier, at 10am instead of noon. But the staff were awesome and managed to rustle up the last few sets of comics for us, which was great :D
Third stop was Harris Planerds at Somerset. They were also giving out comics, but more importantly, they’re having a great sale until 20 May because it’s their first birthday! Get one item at 10% off, two at 20% off, etc. up to a maximum of 60% off. It’s on until 20 May (next Sunday) so head on down while you can – they have a pretty wide range of toys, graphic novels, and fiction. The more you buy, the more you save.
Our final stop was Paradigm Infinitum at Midpoint Orchard. They were launching their graphic novels section and giving away some older comics to celebrate. I didn’t get to check out their GNs, but it was great to see so many places celebrating FCBD.
It’s really catching on, so here’s to a bigger, better FCBD next year. Honestly, I can’t wait.
The Singapore Writers Festival is back for 2012! It’ll be held from 2 – 11 November 2012, but we don’t have any details of location and ticketing just yet.
SWF is looking for volunteers, though! I would totally sign up if I didn’t have school, but alas.
Anyway! Here’s what you need to do if you want to volunteer:
Please email nac_swf@nac.gov.sg with the following details:
1. Name (as per IC/FIN)
2. NRIC/FI number;
3. Age;
4. Mobile Number;
5. Language proficiency;
6. Profession;
7. Previous Volunteering experiences (if any)
Submit before 13 July 2012 for a chance to volunteer!
My friend June and Math Paper Press (an imprint of the excellent folks at BooksActually) are looking for pieces of short fiction for an upcoming speculative fiction collection!
It is, rather amusingly, called The Ayam Curtain – if you don’t get it, try saying it out loud. (And if, rather depressingly, you’re too young to get it: have a Wikipedia article.)
Here’s what they want:
Category I: SPEAKING BIRD LANGUAGE
From the branches above Orchard Road to the void decks where old men with cages gather, bird share stories of fantastic realities they have visited in a cacophony of tweets.
Send us microscopic glimpses into fantastical worlds of lengths between 100-150 words.
Category II: THE AYAM CURTAIN
Numbering more than 23 billion across the globe, there are more specimens of Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken, than any other bird in the world. On paper, by the reckoning of numbers, they are a runaway success as a species. But what utopias do they dream of, caged in their factory farm coops?
Send us 500-1000 word stories of worlds where the boundaries have been shifted in strange ways.
Submissions are already option, and they close on 31 May 2012. For more information, check out their website!
I was tagged by the wonderful J Damask (also known as Jolantru), so here’s a sneak peek into what I’ve been working on lately.
Here is the meme:
Writers, here are your rules for the Lucky 7 Meme:
1. Go to page 77 of your current MS/WIP
2. Go to line 7.
3. Copy down the next 7 lines, sentences, or paragraphs, and post them as they’re written.
4. Tag 7 authors.
5. Let them know.
I don’t actually have a page 77 yet, so here’s something from page 37 instead.
“I need an audience,” Josiah said.
“With the king?” Lorenzo asked. “You know you can just call.”
“Not with the king,” he said tentatively. “With the queen.”
That caught the vampire by surprise. “The queen? Can I ask why? Her Majesty doesn’t like to be disturbed.”
“Only by humans,” he said darkly. “The last time she saw me, she tried to run me over in her car.”
“That was unfortunate, yes.” Lorenzo winced apologetically. “She comes from old blood. They can be very conservative, and they’re pretty set in their ways.”
Josiah refrained from pointing out that Lorenzo came from old blood too, but he hadn’t yet tried to mow him down with an Italian supercar. “Can you arrange it?”
What a whirlwind week it’s been! Many updates on the writing front, plus great news coverage that I was half-expecting but not really prepared for. And all to do with The Steampowered Globe! It’s taken me a few days to start writing this because I’ve just been so excited and slightly incoherent because of it :D
First up: you can now get The Steampowered Globe on Kindle! You can find the Amazon page here. As of today, we are in the top 30 in Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies for the Kindle, which is so exciting. Our other books will also be available soon. Of course, you can still buy a physical copy of the books from our publisher, Two Trees.
Secondly: Jess Nevins interviewed us for an io9.com review of The Steampowered Globe! I admit, I started screaming in excitement when I found out he was interested in talking to some of us. This is an Especially Big Deal to me because he’s one of my personal heroes.
Here’s what he said about my story:
“Morrow’s Knight,” by Viki Chua, a self-described “mild-mannered university student,” is the most traditional of the stories: set in Victorian London, a dirigible inventor and mechanic loses her scientist/inventor brother to murder, but she comes to suspect that while his body is gone, his soul is not. Chua said that her goal was to add to the numbers of female engineers in fiction, and she succeeded in the character of Helena, the protagonist of “Morrow Knight.” [sic] If the plot moves along predictable lines, it does so smoothly and pleasantly.
It may not be a raving review – he’s reserved that for the best stories in the anthology – but it’s good enough for me. Let’s just say I spent the last few days grinning like an idiot.
A little bit of backstory of why I’m so excited: Jess Nevins (who is the authority on steampunk) and he’d done some amazing annotations for the source comic. I owe him an immense debt of gratitude because his excellent annotations for The League of Extraorindary Gentlemen was my first real introduction into steampunk literature, to which I owe a lot in my development as a writer. His books are some of my favorites, especially the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (which is an amazing compedium of knowledge, and highly recommended if you’re into Victorian fiction).
We’ve got more coverage since then: Cory Doctorow (!) on BoingBoing and the excellent folks from the World SF Blog wrote about us, which led to more excited shrieking on my part. And I’m told that there are more plans afoot involving another famous steampunk name, which makes me even more excited!
And so I shall end this with some excited screaming, and I hope you will join me: ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhhh!
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