Hallowe'en Competwition: GIMME YO BEST SPOOKY STORY IN A TWEET

Why, hello!

The book tour is coming to close and OH BOY: six weeks, four festivals, some school appearances, LOTS of interviews and incessant talking about myself later, I fly off to Japan TOMORROW for more lurking around sites of magical activity. Then it's back to London to finish writing the Burnt Snow sequel, White Rain. What better way to celebrate the amazing time I've had with this book than to say LOOKY-LOOK! I'm having a twitter competition - just in time for Hallowe'en!

In my dreams I am actually this hot.

The #31witch Competwition: Concept! Judges! Rules! Prizes!

Okay, so the competition is this: we're looking for the world's spookiest story in tweet form. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO apart from, you know, set up a Twitter account and post the tweet is:

 

a.) include the hashtag "#31witch" in the tweet (so we can find it). If #31witch isn't there, we won't know your entry *exists*. 

b.) be COMPLETELY ORIGINAL (anyone ripping off another writer's work will be professionally doomed hereafter) and

c.) make sure we get it by (wait for it!) THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, THE NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN! (which is October 31, whichever hemisphere you are in). 

d.) no eye-gouging

We have made the rules so fantastically simple so you can devote all your magic mindpowers to composing spooky-story tweets.

There are FIVE prizes. First prize is a Pan Macmillan Australia SPOOKY BOOK PACK which contains an specially-inscribed copy of Burnt Snow amongst a selection of literary spooky treats. Four runners-up will receive a copy of Burnt Snow. All the winners will receive lifelong literary and Twitter glory and the ability to say "I was one of the winners of the Pan Macmillan Australia Spooky Story Competwition" for, like, ever.

Questions I Believe Will Be Frequently Asked:

I live in a strange and magical foreign country. Can I enter the competition even if the book is published in Australia?

YES, you can! This may indeed be an excellent chance to acquire a copy of Burnt Snow without having to mortgage your Nanna to pay postage.

Who are the judges?

The judges are way esteemed. They include ME (whahey!) and a crack literary evaluation team from my publishers, Pan Macmillan.

Can I enter more than once?

Yes, you can enter as many times as you like. Go crazy. Bring on the spooky. There are no fees, charges or obligations and your imagination is given free reign.

What is the history of Halloween, Van?

Well, funny you should ask. What we understand as the Halloween holiday had its origins in the Celtic "Samhain" or "Samuin" festival. In the Northern Hemisphere, the time it occurs marks the end of the summer and the conclusion of the lighter half of the year before the darker half starts - "Samuin" is an old Gaelic word that roughly translates to "summer's end". As a festival, Samhain celebrated the harvest at the end of summer, the storing of food to last for the winter and, as part of this, the slaughtering of animals. Perhaps because of the bloody (if practical) rituals of the season, as well as the transformation of the green summer landscape to the lifeless-looking winter, beliefs surround the holiday as being a time of the year where the wall between our world and others - like the realm of the dead - are particularly thin. The idea that the dead walk amongst us on this day found a cultural expression in dressing up as spooky things to either scare off the scary or blend amongst them. Some of the popular symbols of the holiday have a practical function: the Samhain bonfires were used to dispose of the bones of slaughtered animals, while, obviously, this time of the year in the North is the best time to harvest apples and pumpkins. Mmm... pumpkins.

"Halloween" is the name given to the Christian festival that was imposed to absorb the older pagan traditions: although the idea was to encourage people to worship all the Christian saints as part of festivities of All Soul's Day (on November 2nd), people just liked dressing up and dancing round bonfires way much more than a bit of appropriated ancestor veneration. Consequently, some evangelical Protestant denominations have incorporated the notion of a "Hell House" - like a walk-through diorama with staged scenes of the consequences of immoral activity - into their own Halloween celebrations so their flock still get to dress up in spooky costumes and light fires. So everyone wins. 

In Australia, although the Southern Hemisphere holiday should really be Beltane, or May Day (marking the passage of the seasons from winter to spring), Halloween traditions remain in place on October 31 because a.) people watch so much American television here and b.) see above points re: dressing up and dancing round bonfires.

See you in the #31witch competwition. While you're there, there's now a Burnt Snow news, events and surprises service running out of the handle @burntsnow. You DO NOT need to follow @burntsnow to enter the competition. :)

See you at midnight on Halloween! In the North! SO SPOOKY! Suggestions of fun places in the UK to go celebrate Samhain are gratefully received via the comments box below. 

xxx Van 

Me, me, me, Newcastle THIS IS NOT ART Festival Schedule, me, me, me...

Hey, blogfans!
It’s been absolutely crazy in my-book’s-just-come-out land. While it’s wonderful to travel the country signing and scribbling and pressing the flesh, there hasn’t been a lot of time to consider the other important things in life – like the rituals of the seasons (I think I just missed the Southern Hemisphere Candlemas) or what to do with a polished lump of forest jasper.

Secretly, forest jasper sustains and supports through times of stress.
And I have been so busy I have considered EATING THIS STONE.

Burnt Snow has been getting fantastic reviews, which is awesome. There’s now a handy Facebook fanpage for the book, where all the press and reviews and an upcoming *fun competition* get recorded and discussed. There’s also a Facebook group called Brody Meine is So Much Hotter than Edward Cullen which you can join if you wanna debate whether the guy in the video promo looks like Brody or Christian Slater does. This group was not actually started by me so you can imagine my surprise/delight/kinda-weirdness when I found out it was there. Remind me to talk about my Dark Half syndrome at some point.

The two big pieces of news at this end is that I’m having my FIRST GUEST BLOGGER appear on these pages shortly; my old friend and comics author Christian Read (who has written for Buffy, Star Wars Adventures and Batman, amongst other works of complete genius) will be donating a piece on Voodoo Queens of New Orleans. HOW FUN IS THAT?

ALSO: I will be attending the National Young Writers’ Festival AND Crack Theatre Festival which are part of the amazing TINA (This is Not Art) Festival in beautiful Newcastle (the Australian one)… as from Thursday, SEPTEMBER 30 until Sunday, OCTOBER 3. So if you wanna see me bang on about: me, my book, TV, literary fiction, me, performance poetry, theatre literary management, me and theatre for social change (sometimes simultaneously – I am so way versatile) NOW YOU CAN! And it's free! My full schedule is below.

Would love, love, love to see y’all there – and if we haven’t met personally before, do make sure to say hello.

Thursday, September 30th

15:00 – 16:15 / Special Event
Festival Club
Launch Pad: Burnt Snow 
Did I really think that this would ever happen to me? ELEVEN years after my first NWFY appearance as an angry young radical playwright, I have returned to launch a fun, chunky book about witches and spookiness.
I’m doing a Newcastle/NYWF launch of Burnt Snow for the sentimental reason that it was going to my first NYWF that convinced me I had the entitlement to call myself a writer.  Please come join me as I celebrate coming full circle and the 10-year journey that’s brought me back to TINA. I’ll read a bit of my witchy book, answer a few questions – and there’s a rumour of a celebrity launcher guest who may or may not drop in. (Ooh, he'd better).

Friday, October 1st 

12:00 – 13:00 / Panel
Crackhouse: Lodge of Research
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Literary Management...  
This panel is part of the Crack Theatre Festival and it’s where I put my theatre-mafia hat on and bring out the violin case. Literary Management is what I do at my other job at the Finborough Theatre in London – that’s someone who selects scripts for development and programming and works with writers making their work better. Kinda useful to know about if you want to write for the theatre. My fellow panelists are Chris Mead (who runs Playwriting Australia) and Pater Matheson, who is not only my guru like Master Po to David Carridine in Kung Fu but also the former literary manager of the Melbourne Theatre Company.

16.00 – 17.00 / Panel
Crackhouse: Lodge of Research 
Theatre for social change 
On this, another theatre panel, I’ll be trying to answer the question: Can you use theatre to make the world a better place? … without cynicism. Hmm. Should be an interesting panel because the discussion of how much of this whacky artform can possibly change the world is certainly older than the Brecht/Lukacs stoushes of the 1950s (“Aristophanes is a big, fat fascist!” anyone?). Good panelists! Brenna Hobson from Company B Belvoir, Jane Gronow from Lowdown magazine and Alex Kelly from Ngapartji Ngapartji.

17:30 – 18:45 / Panel
City Hall: Mulubinba Room 
Debate: Free-To-Air Television is for Old People and Idiots 
This should be fun – though god knows why I was selected for this panel* – my experience of TV is appearing in crowd scenes at demos and writing some sick-child scenes for a BBC hospital drama. I only watch television to see live sport – but if you want to see a paranormal YA novelist/radical playwright talk about the upcoming NRL grand final with passion an integrity (CARN THE MIGHTY ROOSTERS), come along. The other people on either side of the debate are pretty cool – Zora Sanders who writes about TV, Alexandra Neill who is 9 or something and writes for Good News Week and William Kostakis who wrote the novel Loathing Lola. *I may be deliberately underplaying this because it is one of those comedy “Great Debate” things and I now have a comic persona to maintain. Sigh.

Saturday, October 2 

14:30 – 15:45 / Panel
Staple Manor
Vampires, Detectives and Rocket Ships: Oh My? 
This panel I’m REALLY looking forward to as it’s about that old chestnut of genre fiction vs literary fiction – and why one side often has a very negative attitude towards the other, and vice versa. It’s been a particularly interesting journey for me writing genre fiction because a lot of people who knew me as a playwright were (hopefully mock-) horrified when I announced my recent Burnt Snow career diversification. Again, the people on the panel are cool: Sommer Tothill, a writer who also reviews for the Brisbane Times; Kate Eltham, the CEO of the Queensland Writers’ Centre; microfictionista Daniel Walker; Krissy Kneen (who writes erotic memoirs, oh my!) and Thomas Benjamin Guerney, performance poet.

17:30 – 18:30 / Special Event
Crackhouse: Grand Lodge 
Performance vs Poetry 
Okay, so all I’m going to say about this debate thing is that my exboyfriend was a performance poet and I’ll be publicly releasing a lot of anxiety built up from three years of going to events that involved shoeless wankers screaming out nonsense like “I wanna be your dolphin!” during my debate speech allocation. I don’t even care who is on the rest of the panel because this one is all about ME... (although, some rather major poetry and performing people like writer/performer Tom Doig, poet/theatremaker Hadley, performance poet Steve Smart, poet/storyteller Candy Royalle, “drag king/queen wandering poltergeist” Di Drew and theatremaker Laura Scrivano are also rumoured to be involved). If you’ve ever heard the words “I want to explore the tundra of your womb” said to an audience without irony - and no, I am not joking - come stand with me.

Hope to see y’all soon. OH, and do feel free to follow me on Twitter if you’re curious to hear the kind of things I occasionally scream at the television.

Xxx