Book launch for Avon Valley author

AVON Valley author Guy Salvidge is launching two new books at Northam Library on Saturday, September 28.

Yellowcake Summer is the sequel to his 2011 book Yellowcake Springs which received an IP Picks award.

It is set partly in the Avon Valley of the future.

“It took me two years to write this one between the school holidays,” Mr Salvidge said.

“My influences are various science fiction and crime authors including Philip K Dick and Raymond Chandler.”

His other book is The Tobacco-stained Sky, a collection of post-apocalyptic noir, future crime fiction short stories from various authors in Japan, India and the United States.

It has been published by a small American publisher.

Earlier this year, Mr Salvidge was a writer in residence at the KSP writer’s centre in Greenmount. In that time, he started writing a new novel called Dan, A Cautionary Tale.

It is a crime story set in a Perth bottle shop 10 years ago.

“I have a view to get it published next year,” Mr Salvidge said.

Mr Salvidge will also be appearing at the Avon Valley writer’s festival this weekend proving various workshops.

Yellowcake Summer giveaway on Goodreads

It’s pretty self explanatory, but it’s only open to Australian residents.

 

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18302629-yellowcake-summer

 

Enjoy!

Dancing With Myself: GUY SALVIDGE interviews GUY SALVIDGE

What’s this ‘Yellowcake’ business? You mean yellowcake as in uranium?

Indeed. Yellowcake Summer is a dystopian novel set in Western Australia around fifty years from now. In it, a Chinese company called CIQ Sinocorp has bought up a vast tract of the state and set up a nuclear reactor town, Yellowcake Springs, there. The region has been deemed a ‘Protectorate’ not subject to Australian law, and not everyone is happy with that.

Hang on a minute. This is a sequel, isn’t it? 

It is. The first novel, Yellowcake Springs, won an Australian competition called IP Picks and was subsequently published by IP in 2011. The novel was later shortlisted for the Norma K Hemming Award in 2012.

Right. So what happens in Yellowcake Springs?

In Yellowcake Springs, we follow the lives of three people in vastly different situations in the year 2058. Sylvia Baron is an advertising rep living an affluent life in Yellowcake Springs. Rion is a vagrant from the ‘Belt town of East Hills, trying to scrape out a living. Jiang Wei is a young Chinese man recruited by CIQ Sinocorp to work at Yellowcake Springs. The lives of all three become intertwined partly through the use of Controlled Dreaming State, a sort of advanced virtual reality. Sylvia’s husband heads up a secret environmental (or ‘mental) group known as Misanthropos and the group stages an attack on the reactor complex.

Sounds dicey. So what happens in Yellowcake Summer?

By the time of Yellowcake Summer, three years have passed since the events of the first book. Sylvia Baron is getting out of prison for something that happened in the first book, Rion is about to be conscripted into something called the Civilian Police Force, and our third viewpoint character Jeremy Peters is about to be promoted to Director of Security of Yellowcake Springs.

Am I going to have to wait for Yellowcake Winter to find out how it all ends?

Tempting title, but no. The story is complete in two volumes.

Got anything else coming out, an anthology of post-apocalyptic noir perhaps?

As a matter of fact, yes! A couple of years ago, I read a novel calledTobacco-Stained Mountain Goat by an ex-pat Aussie called Andrez Bergen. Mad book, a mish-mash of detective and science fiction. Lots of fun. Anyway, I wrote a review of that and Andrez ended up inviting me to write a story for something he was putting together called The Tobacco-Stained Sky: An Anthology ofPost-Apocalyptic Noir.

 I can’t help but see your name on the front cover there. Am I blind?

No, what happened was that the whole project was crying out for someone to edit the prose fiction. Someone innovative, someone handsome, someone –

— we get it, sheesh. So it’s a good book, is it?

Fantastic book. It has some amazingly entertaining and well written stories in it by people like Josh Stallings, Chad Eagleton, Julie Morrigan and Nigel Bird. Plus a whole bunch of comics, artworks, you name it.The Tobacco-Stained Sky will be out very soon, on August 26^th.

So you managed to get a short story published in an anthology that you edited? *slow hand clap*

Wait a minute, I had the story in there before –

Never mind. I take it you have some other stories doing the rounds, then? 

My story in The Tobacco-Stained Sky, “The Dying Rain”, turned out to be the first in a series of stories featuring Tyler Bramble, a Seeker living in post-apocalyptic Melbourne. These stories are in the Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat universe. The second Tyler Bramble story, “Blue Swirls”, was published in a new Australian magazine called Tincture Journal and will shortly be featured in the second issue of Canadian anthology, Warpaint. I’ve written a third Tyler Bramble story, “A Void”, which might come out sometime next year, with a bit of luck.

Is that it?

No-o. I had a story, “The Last First”, in Another Sky Press’ Alien Sky anthology earlier this year.

 Wait, you didn’t edit that as well, did you?

No, it was edited by a very nice man named Justin Nicholes. We aren’t even related.

Working on something else, are you?

Right now I’m writing a crime fiction novel called Dan: A Cautionary Tale. Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be selected as a Writer-in-Residence at the KSP Writers’ Centre in Perth, so I had four solid weeks to make a start on the novel. I’m about half way through.

So you write full time, do you? Raking in the big bucks just like F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Um, not quite. I have a day job, of sorts. You know, teaching high school English and all that.

But you’ll be able to give that away soon, won’t you? Just as soon as Yellowcake Summer hits the big time like that crime novel by that guy who turned out to be that lady, what’s her name?

…

Reblogged from Nigel Bird’s Sea Minor.

Interview regarding Yellowcake Summer in IP Enews 59

[Guy Salvidge talks about his sequel to Yellowcake Springs, Yellowcake Summer, with David Reiter.]

DR: Yellowcake Summer is the sequel to your first IP title,Yellowcake Springs. Did you plan to write a sequel from the outset, or did it occur to you after you’d written the first book?

GS: I originally intended Yellowcake Springs to be a standalone title, but I found that after completing it the main characters were still kicking around in my head, wanting another chance. In particular, I had a clear idea of how I wanted Jeremy to develop from the ‘second string’ character that he is in the first novel to one of the major players in Yellowcake Summer.Furthermore, as the ‘Belt region of the Yellowcake universe is based on my own home in the Avon Valley, I found myself inspired by some specific settings, such as those that became Ley Farm and The Rusty Swan.

DR: Did the writing of the first book make it easier to get into the second? Did you learn anything from the reviews of Yellowcake Springs?

GS: Yellowcake Springs was certainly a breakthrough novel for me and it gave me confidence to start working on the sequel soon after publication. A number of people expressed their empathy for Rion’s plight in particular, so I made sure to keep him as the ‘moral centre’ of the sequel. Reviews of Yellowcake Springs were almost uniformly positive so I decided to stick to pretty much the same formula for Yellowcake Summer. The books can probably be seen as two halves of one longer, and now completed, story.

DR: The dystopian novel has been a popular sub-genre for some time. How much of this has to do with our fascination with doomsday stories and our uncertainty about the future?

GS: Dystopias are very much in vogue these days and it isn’t hard to see why. Fears about climate change, terrorism, food and water security and humanitarian crises are played out in dystopian stories of various kinds. It’s our way as writers and readers of expressing our discontent with the present course our civilisation seems to be taking. Growing up, I was fascinated with nuclear war and after-the-bomb scenarios, but it wasn’t until I watched An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 that I realised that climate change would be to my generation what nuclear war had been to that of my parents.

DR: Both novels are set in Western Australia. What strategies did you adopt to make their themes more universal?

GS: In my twenties I was leery of writing about Australian settings. My first published novel, The Kingdom of Four Rivers, was set hundreds of years into the future in a jungle-infested China, for example. On reflection, however, I realised that a certain verisimilitude would always be missing in constructing such settings, so I decided to set Yellowcake Springs in a world I personally knew. It was around this time that I also began to read a lot of Southern US fiction, which is almost always imbued with a strong sense of place and stubborn regionality. I realised then that I ought to be proud of my own regionality myself. Insofar as the themes in these or any novels can be said to be universal, I felt that the plight of my characters would be reasonably relatable to a non-Australian audience.

DR: Your ‘day job’ is teaching. Are your colleagues and students aware of your other life, and, if so, how do they respond to Guy Salvidge, the author?

GS: They certainly are! Some of my students like to remind me about how much they can find out about me on Google, which seems to be as accurate a measure of fame as any these days. As I teach English for a living, I find that the fact that I actively write stories gives me a certain credibility with students too. Some of my colleagues are quite enthusiastic about my work and a number of them have supported me over the years in various ways. But, for staff and students alike, my primary role as author is in disabusing them of the notion that I am (or very soon will be) a millionaire. I’m not in a position to retire from teaching just yet!

http://ipoz.biz/News/eNews59.htm

Yellowcake Summer is here (on Kindle at least)!

That’s right – Yellowcake Summer has arrived at the Kindle store and is available to purchase for $9.99. For those of you waiting for the physical edition, you can purchase it from Amazon here.  I’ll add links to other booksellers as they become available. To celebrate the release, I’ll be launching the novel with my publisher David Reiter of Interactive Publications at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Perth at 3pm on Sunday September 15th – details here. I’ll also be appearing as part of the Avon Valley Writers’ Festival on the weekend of 21-22nd September in Northam and Toodyay. Exciting times!

Yellowcake Summer is on the horizon

My third novel, Yellowcake Summer, which is a sequel to Yellowcake Springs, will be released by IP in September.  The novel follows the fortunes of Rion, Sylvia and Peters — all major characters from the first novel — as they swelter through the thirsty Australian summer. I’ve written this story in two parts, so there won’t be a third Yellowcake volume. Everything that is set up in Yellowcake Springs comes to a head in Yellowcake Summer.

To celebrate the release, I’ll be holding launch events at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in Greenmount and the Northam Regional Library during September. More details on this will follow soon. I’ll also be promoting the novel at the Avon Valley Writers’ Festival on September 22-23 in Toodyay and Northam, where I’ll be presenting a workshop on novel writing.

Videos from my Literary Dinner at KSP on 7th May

Check out the media section on my official website for some newly-uploaded videos of readings from my recent Literary Dinner at KSP on May 7th. Here you’ll find me reading from Yellowcake Summer, “The Dying Rain” and Dan: A Cautionary Tale.

 

 

My time as Emerging Writer-in-Residence at the KSP Writers’ Centre

My time as Emerging Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre has been an extremely busy and enormously productive one. I did a short, five day stint over Easter and then a longer, three week block from April 15th to May 5th 2013. My major goal for this period was to produce 40,000 words on a new novel, Dan: A Cautionary Tale. I actually didn’t start writing the novel at all over Easter, so I left myself just 21 days to write this amount, setting myself an ambitious target of 2000 words per day. I’m happy to report that as of today, May 2nd, I’ve written 36,000 words and foresee no problems in reaching my target on or before May 5th. I’ve also had the opportunity to read from Dan at several of the regular KSP groups, including the Tuesday morning group, Writefree women’s group. Thursday Night Group and Speculative Fiction group. I found these writers very welcoming and enthusiastic about Dan, and I got plenty of confidence from that.

I needed it, too, as one of my other tasks was to read from the novel on RTR FM’s ‘Artbeat’ program. This was only my second time appearing on the radio (the other was last year on York FM) and I was very nervous. I had earlier read a chapter from Dan at the Thursday Night Group that had seemed to go down especially well, so I chose this short, 1000 word chapter to read on the radio. The chapter features our protagonist Will attempting to get his forklift ticket so that he can drive the forklift legally at the bottleshop where he works. I managed to read the excerpt live without any major mishaps, and in the end I was glad to have done so. You can listen to this reading here: http://rtrfm.com.au/story/what-a-busy-guy/

In my first stint over Easter, before I got started on Dan, I was busy working on a project called The Tobacco-Stained Sky: An Anthology of Post-Apocalyptic Noir. In 2012 I had been invited by author Andrez Bergen to write a story for this themed collection, set in post-apocalyptic Melbourne, and for this I had written a story “The Dying Rain”. As it transpired, however, the anthology was short a prose editor, and so when I was offered the opportunity to take on this role I jumped at the chance. Thus I had 60,000 words of prose to tweak, as well as an introduction to write, which consumed my attention during this Easter period. The anthology will be out from US publisher Another Sky Press later this year.

Wedged between my Writer-in-Residence stints was KSP’s ‘2013 Writers and Performance Festival of the Asian-Australian Voice’, which I’ve written about more extensively here: https://guysalvidge.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/wrap-up-on-ksps-festival-of-the-asian-australian-voice/ This was an amazing weekend and a great opportunity to meet and mingle with a whole host of talented writers including Benjamin Law, Oliver Phommavanh, Lily Chan, Nadine Brown, Jackson and plenty of others. The festival ended on Sunday April 14th, meaning that I was literally moving into KSP the day those talented writers were moving out.

Writers-in-Residence at KSP are treated very nicely: they are afforded accommodation in one of three newly-built retreats: Aldridge, Clarke and Phillips. I stayed in the Aldridge chalet and I found this to be a very cosy writing space indeed. For cooking, not that I did a tremendous amount of it, I had the use of the main kitchen up at Katharine’s house. During my stay, I also had the opportunity to attend several book launches in Perth and Fremantle, including those for Lee Battersby’s novel The Marching Dead and Bruce Russell’s Reunion. This Sunday I’m also off to Rockingham to meet author Kaaron Warren, who will be in Perth hosting a number of events, including one organised by the very same Lee Battersby, himself previously a Writer-in-Residence at KSP.

One of my major tasks as Writer-in-Residence was to prepare and run a three hour workshop. My workshop, “Sail into Publishing: Charting a Course for Your Writing Career”, was held on Saturday 27th April and by accounts it went well. I went a little overboard on the slides (83 in all, even though a lot of them were pictures) and thus I had to rush through my presentation toward the end. I covered an awful lot about what I’ve learned about publishing in this presentation; if you’d like to download it, you need only to paste this link into your web browser and the presentation will start downloading: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53426575/Sail%20into%20Publishing.pptx

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to assist Dr Melissa O’Shea in running the third day of this year’s Write-a-Rama, a workshop for 10-15 year-old students. I first participated in this program last year, so I knew pretty much what to expect. My task today was to assist students in learning how to properly edit their own work, although I did manage to work some theory on writing into my talk as well. I was very impressed with the calibre of writing on display and I thank Melissa for giving me the opportunity to work with these students again.

Lastly, on Monday I gave an interview to students from Eastern Hills SHS who had come to KSP to make a documentary film for a school assignment. I spoke to them about my time at KSP and also provided a little history about Katharine Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssell. Here I was assisted by KSP stalwart Chris Oakeley, who helpfully produced some speaking notes for me. I’d also like to acknowledge the amazing work done by KSP’s Co-ordinator Shannon Coyle and its Chairperson Renee Hammond. While I’m at it, thanks must also go to Treasurer Robert Perks and Management Committee members Danika Potter, Karen Treanor and Mardi May. Each of these people has assisted me in some way over these past weeks and months, and I thank them for their tireless efforts in working for the benefit of KSP.

I’m nearly done now: I have just 4000 more words to write on Dan, as well as a Literary Dinner to read at this coming Tuesday. This will be one of KSP’s series of literary dinners for the year, at which the Writer-in-Residence reads for three lots of ten minutes. I’ll be reading excerpts from my soon-to-be-published third novel Yellowcake Summer, “The Dying Rain” and Dan. My final task as a Writer-in-Residence will be to mentor a promising KSP writer, and for this I have chosen to assist Tuesday morning group regular Franci Leibenberg. Franci and I have been competing of late to see who can hit 40,000 words on their novel the quickest, and my plan is to assist Franci in structuring her work-in-progress over the coming weeks and months.

I think that’s it. For exercise I’ve been walking up Old York Road, quite a steep climb, and on occasion I’ve made it to the nearby John Forrest National Park. But frankly, a lot of the time I’ve been too busy to stray far. It’s not often in life that one gets the opportunity to do what one truly wants to do for an extended period of time, but that’s exactly how it’s been for me here at KSP. It’s been an amazing time.

A VERY BUSY GUY << RTR FM // THE SOUND ALTERNATIVE

FROM THE BLOG

Friday 26th April / posted by Rhian Todhunter

A VERY BUSY GUY

Literary prize-winner Guy Salvidge is a busy man.

With two stories being published this year, a sequel underway, and plans to start a crime novel in the near future – writer in residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Guy Salvidge joins me to treat us to a live reading and look at his busy schedule.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN

http://rtrfm.com.au/story/what-a-busy-guy/

Yellowcake Summer is in Second Draft state!

After many, many hours of editing over the past couple of weeks, I’ve managed to get the ms. of Yellowcake Summer up to what I call ‘Second Draft’ status. This means that I’ve cut out nearly 15,000 words of the original 90,000 word long ms., hopefully losing nothing in the process. Now the novel goes off to beta readers and the publisher, IP, and I have a well-earned rest for the next 20 hours until I start back at work for 2013!

In case you don’t know, this new novel is the sequel to Yellowcake Springs, which was published by Glass House Books in 2011 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Norma K Hemming Award in 2012. Yellowcake Summer is a direct sequel but there won’t be a third volume (even though Yellowcake Winter would make a great title, don’t you think?). Nope, it’s a duology or a pair or whatever you call a two book series 🙂

I had a lot of fun writing Yellowcake Summer and I imagine it’ll be a fun read too. I can’t wait for you to read it!