We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title The Road to Woop Woop by participating in their blog tour. And if you're at all into winning free stuff, they're running a giveaway where you can potentially win a $50 book shopping spree.
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For today's stop, author Eugen Bacon shares some insight into where stories begin to germinate.
Stealing from the Everyday: The Road
to Woop Woop
People ask: Where do you get story ideas?
If you have a nose for a good story, ideas
are everywhere. I’ll share with you an excerpt from Writing
Speculative Fiction (2019) by
Macmillan:
Stephen
King in his book on writing saw stories as relics, parts of an undiscovered
world for writers to excavate. Feel, smell, see—ideas float everywhere. Stories
cartwheel in little word associations in your vocabulary. Unfound plots flirt
all around you: in the rubicund bell innocently dangling on the Christmas tree
in your unswept lounge; in the bald young man with honey-brown eyes who beamed
at you in the lift on your way to work; in the ash-eyed tramp by the wayside
who held your gaze a particular way and asked for nothing, but something drew
your hand to your pocket and you pulled out a note; in the tarmac-black pebble
that a little girl with braids throws onto a chalked out square on the gravel,
and you see nothing but the blackness of the stone as the child hops on one
foot, square after square, humming a nursery rhyme … --Writing Speculative
Fiction
I was powerwalking in Melbourne’s
Botanical Gardens one dawn, when I remembered an ad I saw on Seek.com: Must
have a phone.
It struck me, right there, an idea of a
black speculative fiction set in Old Kampala, where a village woman sacrifices
everything for her family. It starts with an ad the husband sees:
“Must have a smart
phone,” the job ad said.
#
Ping! A job alert.
He was good with
gasfitting, roofing, drainage, even power outlets, ladders, testing and
repairing. Most electrical things he could do, and gardening. His hands were
clever with greenscapes. He could water and feed lilies or stinkwood, trim
shrubs or mow grass, fertilise sunflower or pluck cashews from the plant.
What he wasn’t good with
was lies. The employer hadn’t been upfront at the interview about the data, how
it was out of pocket.
—“Unlimited Data”, unpublished story
The husband gets employment as an
itinerant handyman on call:
… peddling over fields,
tarmac and potholes, moving from suburb to suburb, gasfitting, roofing,
draining, mowing. Ping! Another job and he wheeled to it, phone in his pocket.
But doing jobs on call gobbled data.
The black-market solution is cheap but
costly.
Most stories in my new collection, The
Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories—be
they surreal, fantastical, scientific—came about walking, swimming, watching, listening
to people… A word, a phrase… It’s silly, really, how easy you can craft a
poignant story by taking something ordinary out of context and extrapolating:
What if?
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Releasing December 1, 2020
Speculative
Fiction | Dark Fantasy
Eugen Bacon’s work is cheeky with a fierce intelligence, in
prose that’s resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her
novel Claiming T-Mo ‘a confounding mysterious tour de
force’. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the
same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon’s own. This peculiar hybrid
of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders
of normalcy will hypnotise and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be
labelled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in
astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this
collection, by an award-winning African Australian author.
BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Eugen Bacon is African Australian, a computer scientist
mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She’s the author of Claiming T-Mo
(Meerkat Press) and Writing Speculative Fiction (Macmillan). Her work has won,
been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards,
including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows
Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans.
AUTHOR LINKS: Website | Twitter
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THE ROAD TO WOOP WOOP
An Excerpt
Tumbling
down the stretch, a confident glide, the 4WD is a beaut, over nineteen years
old.
The argument is brand-new. Maps are
convolutions, complicated like relationships. You scrunch the sheet, push it in
the glovebox. You feel River’s displeasure, but you hate navigating, and right
now you don’t care.
The wiper swishes to and fro,
braves unseasonal rain. You and River maintain your silence.
Rain. More rain.
“When’s the next stop?” River
tries. Sidewise glance, cautious smile. He is muscled, dark. Dreadlocks fall
down high cheekbones to square shoulders. Eyes like black gold give him the
rugged look of a mechanic.
“Does it matter?” you say.
“Should it?”
You don’t respond. Turn your head,
stare at a thin scratch on your window. The crack runs level with rolling
landscape racing away with rain. Up in the sky, a billow of cloud like a white
ghoul, dark-eyed and yawning into a scream.
A shoot of spray through River’s
window brushes your cheek.
A glide of eye. “Hell’s the
matter?” you say.
“You ask me-e. Something
bothering you?”
“The window.”
He gives you a look.
Classic, you think. But you know
that if you listen long enough, every argument is an empty road that attracts
unfinished business. It’s an iceberg full of whimsy about fumaroles and
geysers. It’s a corpse that spends eternity reliving apparitions of itself in
the throes of death. Your fights are puffed-up trivia, championed to crusades.
You fill up teabags with animus that pours into kettles of disarray, scalding
as missiles. They leave you ashy and scattered—that’s what’s left of your
lovemaking, or the paranoia of it, you wonder about that.
More silence, the cloud of your
argument hangs above it. He shrugs. Rolls up his window. Still air swells in
the car.
“Air con working?” you say.
He flexes long
corduroyed legs that end in moccasins. Flicks on the air button—and the radio.
The bars of a soulful number, a remix by some new artist, give way to an even
darker track titled ‘Nameless.’ It’s about a high priest who wears skinny black
jeans and thrums heavy metal to bring space demons into a church that’s dressed
as a concert. And the torments join in evensong, chanting psalms and canticles
until daybreak when the demons wisp back into thin air, fading with them
thirteen souls of the faithful, an annual pact with the priest.
Rain pelts the roof and windows
like a drum.
He hums. Your face is distant. You
might well be strangers, tossed into a tight drive from Broome to Kununurra.
The lilt of his voice merges with
the somber melody.
You turn your face upward. A drift
of darkness, even with full day, is approaching from the skies. Now it’s
half-light. You flip the sun visor down. Not for compulsion or vanity, nothing
like an urge to peer at yourself in the mirror. Perhaps it’s to busy your
hands, to distract yourself, keep from bedevilment—the kind that pulls out a
quarrel. You steal a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Deep, deep eyes. They
gleam like a cat’s. The soft curtain of your fringe is softening, despite
thickset brows like a man’s. You feel disconnected with yourself, with the
trip, with River. You flip the sun visor up.
Now the world is all grim. River
turns on the headlights, but visibility is still bad. A bolt of lightning. You
both see the arms of a reaching tree that has appeared on the road, right there
in your path. You squeal, throw your arms out. River swerves. A slam of brakes.
A screech of tires. Boom!
The world stops in a swallowing
blackness. Inside the hollow, your ears are ringing. The car, fully intact, is
shooting out of the dark cloud in slow motion, picking up speed. It’s soaring
along the road washed in a new aurora of lavender, turquoise and silver, then
it’s all clear. A gentle sun breaks through fluffs of cloud no more engulfed in
blackness. You level yourself with a hand on the dashboard, uncertain what
exactly happened.
You look at River. His
hands . . . wrist up . . . he has no hands.
Nothing bloody as you’d expect from a man with severed wrists. Just empty space
where the arms end.
But River’s unperturbed, his arms
positioned as if he’s driving, even while nothing is touching the steering
that’s moving itself, turning and leveling.
“Brought my shades?” he asks.
“Your hands,” you say.
“What about them?”
“Can’t you see?”
His glance is full of impatience.
You sink back to your seat, unable
to understand it, unclear to tell him, as the driverless car races along in
silence down the lone road.
“The Sky Lit Up” – Read a book with end of the world / alien invasion type shit
“The Wind” – Read a book that heavily features one of the four elements (earth, air, water, fire)
“My Beautiful Leah” – Read a book about a main character who is sad or suffers from mental illness
“A Perfect Day Elise” – Get some fresh air and go read outside
“Catherine” – Finally read that book you’ve jealously watched others read and love
“Electric Light” – Read a digital book
“The Garden” – Read a book that mostly takes place outdoors
“Joy” – Read a book with a one word title or that has an emotion in the title
“The River” – Read a book about transformation
“No Girl So Sweet” – Read a book that makes you swoon
“Is This Desire?” – Read a book that doesn’t fit neatly into one genre
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000)
“Big Exit” – if you DNF a book, take credit here
“Good Fortune”- Read a book you picked up at a book sale or bought for crazy cheap
“A Place Called Home” – Read a book that takes place in your hometown/state
“One Line” – Read a book of poetry
“Beautiful Feeling” – Read a book that gives you all the feels
“The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore” – Read a book that features sex and/or drugs
“This Mess We're In” – Read a book that’s a hot hot mess
“You Said Something” - Read a book that takes place in a big city
“Kamikaze” – Read a book that features flying or outer space
“This Is Love” – Read a book by a favorite author
“Horses In My Dreams” – Read a book that prominently features an animal (bonus points if the author isn’t a dickhead and animal doesn’t die)
“We Float” – Read whatever the fuck you want and take credit for it here
Uh Huh Her (2004)
“The Life And Death Of Mr. Badmouth” – Read a book by an author who is no longer living
“Shame” – Read a book you would not want someone to catch you reading
“Who The Fuck?” – Read a book by a new-to-you author
“The Pocket Knife” – Read a coming-of-age story
“The Letter” – Read a book about writing
“The Slow Drug” – Read a book that takes you a while to warm up to
“No Child Of Mine” – Read a book that features a child protagonist
“Cat On The Wall” – Read a book with an animal on the cover
“You Come Through” – Read a book a buddy recommends for you
“It's You” – Read a book told in second person or a book that breaks the fourth wall
“The End” – Read the last book of a series or published by an author
“The Desperate Kingdom Of Love” – Read a book you desperately wanted to love but didn’t
“The Darker Days Of Me And Him” – Read a book about a break up
“The Devil” – Read a book about angels, devils, demons, or religion
“Dear Darkness” – Read a book that takes place primarily at night
“Grow Grow Grow” – Read a book has repetitive words in the title
“When Under Ether” – Read some science fiction
“White Chalk” – Read a book with a white cover
“Broken Harp” – Read a book that disappointed you
“Silence” – Read a book when no one else is around
“To Talk To You” – Listen to an audio book
“The Piano” – Read a ghost story or a story about murder
“Before Departure” – Read a book while you’re on a trip / travelling
“The Mountain” – Read a book that’s been sitting in your TBR pile for a long time
A Woman A Man Walked By (2009)
“Black Hearted Love” – Read a Halloween themed book
“Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen” – Read a book with a number(s) in the title
“Leaving California” – Read a book set in a state you used to live in, or written by an author who lives there
“The Chair” – Read a book in your most comfy reading spot
“April” – Read a book with a month in the title
“A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go”- Read a book with a ridiculously long title
“The Soldier” – Read a book about war, or in which a war is taking place / in the background
“Pig Will Not” – Read a book set on a farm or featuring farm animals
“Passionless, Pointless” – read a book that literally went nowhere / made no sense
“Cracks In The Canvas” – Read a banged up, used book
Let England Shake (2011)
“Let England Shake” – Read a book set in a different country
“The Last Living Rose” – Read a book with flowers on the cover
“The Glorious Land” – Read a book where setting and place is very much its own character
“The Words That Maketh Murder” – Read some murder mystery / noir
“All And Everyone” – Read a book that features a large cast of main characters
“On Battleship Hill” – Read a book in which nature takes over / cli fi
“England” – Read a book written by an author from another country
“In The Dark Places” – Read a book that’s dark and twisted
“Bitter Branches” – Read a book that takes place mostly outdoors / in the woods
“Hanging In The Wire” – Do a buddy read and then chat with your buddy about it online
“Written On The Forehead” – Read a book that makes you frequently furrow your brow
“The Colour Of The Earth” – Read a book with earth tones on the cover
The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016)
“The Community Of Hope” – Read a book that could be considered a sell out
“The Ministry Of Defence” – Read a dystopian novel
“A Line In The Sand’ – Give a genre you didn’t like a second chance
“Chain Of Keys” – Read a book you’ve been hesitant to pick up
“River Anacostia” – Read a book that features religion
“Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln” – read a book that’s an homage to something/someone
“The Orange Monkey” – Read a book that’s a bit bizarre
“Medicinals” – Read a book that deals with drug use or addiction
“The Ministry Of Social Affairs” – Read a book that addresses social injustice in some way
“The Wheel” – Read a book with an inanimate object in the title
“Dollar, Dollar” – Go ahead and buy yourself a book, then read it as soon as you bring it home