author, historian & phd candidate

House of Longing - Text Publishing, June 2023

Category: 1. Writing Page 1 of 5

Dark Power

I’m excited to finally be able to say that I’ll be appearing at Canberra Writers Festival this year! My session, entitled “Dark Power” is on at the Kambri Cultural Centre, ANU, on Sunday the 20th of August, from 12:30 to 1:30. I’ll be chatting with Marija Peričić (author of Exquisite Corpse and The Lost Pages) and moderator Ebony Bennett.

You can book tickets via the festival web site.

Where to Pre-Order House of Longing

House of Longing will soon be out in the world and pre-orders are open if you’d like to purchase your copy in advance. (Pre-orders also help authors, as they show booksellers that there’s an audience awaiting a particular book.)

If you have an independent bookseller nearby, I absolutely recommend checking whether you can set up a pre-order through them. You can find a list of the shops that are in the Book People network at https://www.bookpeople.org.au/find-a-bookshop and http://www.indies.com.au is another great place to find your local purveyor of bookish goodness.

Stores with online pre-orders include:
New South Wales
* Byron Bay & Lennox Head: The Bookroom Collective
* Crows Nest: Constant Reader
* Darlinghurst: The Bookshop Darlinghurst
* Glebe: Glee Books
* Newtown: Better Read Than Dead
* Potts Point: Potts Point Bookshop
* Sydney: Abbey’s Bookshop
Northern Territory
* Darwin: The Bookshop Darwin
Queensland
* Bulimba: Riverbend Books
South Australia
* Adelaide: Imprints Booksellers
* Stirling: Matilda Bookshop
Victoria
* Albert Park, Elsternwick & Richmond: Avenue Bookstore
* Mornington: Farrells Bookshop
* Multiple locations: Readings
* Torquay: Torquay Books
* West Footscray: The Chestnut Tree Bookshop
* Yarraville: The Sun Bookshop
Western Australia
* Maylands: Rabble Books & Games
* Perth: Boffins Books

New Zealand
* Auckland: The Women’s Bookshop

My own local, Need2Read in Warragul, doesn’t have an online store, but they’re always very happy to order books in for people and it’s hardly a trial to pop in to their lovely shop. Find them at http://www.need2read.com.au

Of course, there are always the bigbois of the online world:
Australia
* Booktopia
* Dymocks
* QBD
* Collins
* Amazon Australia
New Zealand
* Mighty Ape
* The Nile

House of Longing is currently only available in print form from Australian and New Zealand bookshops, but if you’re an ebook reader from abroad you’re in luck, because you should be able to purchase it from your local Amazon site. You can also pre-order it from Barnes & Noble.

If you’d like to pre-order a print copy from abroad, shops such as The Bookshop Darlinghurst, The Chestnut Tree and Readings offer international postage.

Extinction Notice

I have a short story, “Earth-seed” in the new cli-fi anthology Extinction Notice: Tales of a Warming Earth. It’s a huge collection of stories, poetry and songs, and all profits will be donated to environmental charities, so I encourage you to check it out at http://outskirtspress.com/davidwatson!

TV: Lynda Day (Press Gang)

Always a little behind the times, I took around three decades to get around to watching “Press Gang”, despite owning the DVD collection for two of those decades. I thought I’d probably left it too late, as 80s and 90s teen TV has generally aged poorly, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Sure, the fashion is a bit iffy, but the soul of the series holds up well even today.

I wish I’d watched “Press Gang” back in the day because I really could’ve used having a character like Lynda to see myself in. Like me, she’s ambitious, driven, goal-focused… and absolutely rubbish at people. It’s not that she doesn’t have a good heart, but rather that emotions are a confusing and irritating distraction from more important things—especially when those emotions are her own. Her single-mindedness makes her an excellent editor, but it’s at the expense of human relationships, something that she touches upon occasionally but never in any real depth. She has Kenny, her ever-patient best friend and assistant editor, and Gazette head-writer Sarah, but they both leave her eventually, and that comes as no surprise.

At the beginning of her friendship with Sarah, Lynda says that everyone leaves her, as a way to manipulate Sarah, but it’s a manipulation based on truth. Lynda is too much for most people to handle. She’s hard work, she’s abrasive, and she is quite terrible at offering the comfort and understanding that most people want from a friend. To be fair, she doesn’t expect to receive that kind of care, either. Lynda might be difficult, but she’s rarely a hypocrite. She does what she thinks is the right thing to do, and she’s loyal to the people she cares for, even if they can’t see that, obscured as it is by her harsh tongue and abrasive ways.

And then, of course, there’s Spike, Lynda’s on-off boyfriend. He wants Lynda from the moment he meets her, but she takes a while to warm to him, and even longer to admit that she has feelings for him as well. “Press Gang” is partially the story of the push-pull relationship between Lynda and Spike and, while the later series don’t quite maintain the antagonistic chemistry of the show’s beginning, there is still the feeling that Lynda needs to be with someone like Spike, who will call her out when she behaves badly, but still love her for who she is, instead of despite of it.

Importantly, “Press Gang” never punishes Lynda for being a strong-minded woman who puts her work before her emotions. It’s not that Lynda never suffers negative consequences of her actions, but rather that bad things don’t happen to her simply because of the person she is. If anything, the powerful people in her life are too accepting, too willing to uplift her as a young woman of exceptional talent. I’m more than happy to overlook a little lack of realism on that count, though, as I would far prefer young female media consumers were offered too much hope for future success rather than too little.

Lynda’s a great character because she remains herself throughout the entirety of “Press Gang”. There’s no softening, no adoption of a more palatable kind of femininity, and I wish there had been a lot more Lynda’s to be found in my childhood media consumption, instead of an endless parade of girls casting off their tomboy personalities the moment that puberty began.

The Ghost of You

Black Telephone magazine

A slightly belated announcement that the second issue of Black Telephone Magazine has launched, containing my piece “The Ghost of You”—a dark sci-fi piece about love and loss, with a fantasy aesthetic.

You can find my piece here, but please check out the rest of the great content as well!

Within These Walls

Another writing announcement!

My piece “Within These Walls” is now available to read for free at
Daily Science Fiction. Hope you like it.

Three Days with the Kid

Another writing announcement! My piece “Three Days with the Kid” has just been published as part of Strange Horizons‘s climate crisis special.

You can read the piece online, or listen to it on the podcast.

Make sure you check out the gorgeous art by Dante Luiz while you’re there!

Plucked

A very belated update! I am pleased to announce that my piece “Plucked” was published in January. “Plucked” is a new, feminist fairy tale, and it has found the perfect home at Corvid Queen, which focuses on mythology, folk lore and fairy tales, all with a deliciously feminist bent.

You can read “Plucked” online if it sounds like your kind of thing!

On Clockwork Wings

I’m pleased to be able to announce that my piece “On Clockwork Wings” has just been published in the current issue of Galaxy’s Edge. I’m particularly excited to have my writing alongside that of such speculative fiction greats as Mercedes Lackey and Robert Silverberg and all the other excellent authors featured in this issue. You can currently read my story online at http://www.galaxysedge.com, but please consider supporting the great work editor Mike Resnick does by purchasing a paperback or ebook copy (links at that address).


The Bomb Chaser

I’m very pleased to announce that my short story “The Bomb Chaser” has recently been published by Daily Science Fiction. DSF is a fantastic source for great speculative fiction AND it’s completely free to read, so you can check out my piece and hundreds of others online.

 

You can read “The Bomb Chaser” here.

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