Category: Ghost Assassins Of Bijou

Lessons From World Fantasy Convention

11/26/2025

In the early months of 2025, my friend, and multiple award-winning writer-extraordinaire, Lee Murray ONZM, suggested that we attend the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, UK. My first instinct was to say no because it’s fucking expensive to travel to the other side of the planet from Aotearoa New Zealand.

I’m so bloody happy that I changed my mind.

First, I got to travel with Lee, who shares my love of the weird and bizarre. We drove terrifying narrow roads, circled roundabouts searching for the exit, were kept company by ravens, wandered presque-lost across Bodmin Moor, laughed, ate all the cheese and revelled in ancient myths and legends brought to life in the curated landscapes of the south-west and south of England. She also held my hand throughout the Convention and introduced me to everyone—even people she was meeting for the first time herself. Being Lee’s friend meant that her friends, new and old, also became mine.

Second, after the disappointment of the 2020 WorldCon (CoNZealand), which thanks to Covid was virtual instead of local and in-person, it was incredible to experience a writers’ convention of a global rather than local scale.

I came away with new friends, personal contacts with several publishers, a deeper appreciation of the industry I’m part of, and some great book recommendations. Creative conversations in the bar, around tables, in the hallways and over food proved to be incredibly valuable. Both experienced and new writers were generous with their time and thoughts, and showed genuine interested in me and my writing projects. By the end of the fourth day, I was shattered but also reinvigorated with possibilities and ideas.

I spoke on two panels. The first was Feminism and Feminist Themes in Genre Fiction. I made the mistake of being too reliant on the page of notes I’d prepared, so panicked when they didn’t align with the first question I was asked. It threw me off. I was embarrassed and took a while to calm down and order my thoughts into something that made sense. I came away thinking I’d done a shit job. On the last day of the Con, I sat next to a horror writer who told me that the Feminism panel had been her favourite session. Redemption!

The second panel was Older People in Fantasy and Horror. By this stage, I was more relaxed and had managed to squash down much of my imposter syndrome. Also on the panel were, Juliet Marillier (Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient) and the UK’s master of horror, Ramsey Campbell. The room was packed. I only used my notes to refer to a few figures about the average age and sex of readers and for the rest of the panel talked from my experience of being older and writing older characters. I had fun, and given the audience response, they did to.

I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who speaks or sits on a panel without notes at hand, but what I learned was that I can trust myself. I have a wealth of lived experience in all manner of things and know stuff others don’t. I may not be able to give you a clear, concise and academic definition of what feminist genre fiction is—but I know how to write it.

I attended a heap of panels, some book launches and both the British (for which I was a judge) and the World Fantasy Awards (for which Lee was a judge) ceremonies. So there was lots of learning and clapping involved. My favourite of the panels I attended were Weird Fiction, Animals in Fantasy and Embodying the Non-Human. There’s a theme there!

It was a surprise to me that not everyone goes to Cons to attend panels, readings and book launches—some attendees spend the entire Con hanging in the public spaces—they go for the conversations, to make contacts, seeking opportunities for collaboration, and to develop relationships. Writing’s such a solitary pursuit, and yet success requires putting yourself out there. I’m not so good at that, but I forced myself to start conversations with strangers and talked about the Ghost Assassins of Bijou novellas to anyone who’d listen. I’d also taken a few copies of my short story collection, Letters From Elsewhere, with me and gave them to some lovely people.

The experience confirmed for me the extra challenges writers from Aotearoa face in being so physically distant from major markets. It’s so hard for us to raise our voices and be seen, when no one knows who we are. We can’t just catch a train or drive to next month’s Con to cement those relationships. Without substantial financial assistance or the Ghost Assassins of Bijou getting picked up and becoming a best-seller, it’s very unlikely I’ll attend another big international Con in the next few years so, for now, all I can do is rely on social media, my blogs and newsletters, and keep submitting my writing to keep my name in the forefront of people’s minds.

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Why Write Novellas?

3/2/2025

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In the 11 years I’ve been writing fiction, I’ve only completed one full length novel. The two others I started sit stranded at around 30,000 words — the characters fated to remain frozen mid-action surrounded by the crumbling facades of my world-building. I just can’t muster the commitment needed to revitalise them. Yet, in those same 11 years, I’ve written a multitude of short stories, numerous poems and seven novellas.

When setting out to write the Ghost Assassins of Bijou series. I made the deliberate choice to write them as novellas. Each of the five stories are between 22-29K words in length, so roughly 100 pages in book form with a reading time of 2 - 4 hours. While each novella stands alone, as a series, they read as a layered and complex novel.

In a 2014 essay, Allan Gurganus said, “A novella, containing the best of poem and novel, gives us the whiplash of one and echoes of the other.” I find beauty in the stark brevity of novellas and prefer the sharp stab of emotion to the drawn-out torment of longer-form novels. Then again, I also rip off plasters and dive into freezing water…so my reading preferences reflect my life-style perversities.

When I consider my favourite reads from the last few years many of them are novellas:
To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

None of this is to say that I don’t like reading novels or even sagas, I do, but I prefer the shorter form. I’d rather read a series of short books set in the same world / universe, than a seemingly endless saga rolled into an enormous single offering. I’m easily bored and often skim-read large swathes of a saga to leap from one action scene to the next. Whereas, I'll cling to every nuance and word of a well-crafted and perfectly formed novella.

As a writer, the novella has given me the freedom to be innovative in how I use words to create emotions and responses. In the Ghost Assassins of Bijou novellas, I’ve made use of songs and haiku to invoke a sharper emotional response than could be achieved with even the most beautifully crafted paragraphs of prose and dialogue. I've also experimented with different points of view.

I don’t consciously follow formats such as the Hero’s Journey or the 3-Act Structure when I’m writing a novella. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a flow to the storyline or a lack of tension, it just means the points of high emotion, high tension and relief occur organically and often in ways that aren’t expected or anticipated. When read as a series, the high points hit differently.

Like Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy, the Ghost Assassins of Bijou is a series of novellas. In this way the series offers the complexity of a novel — deep world-building enriched by multiple points of view and subplots weaving through an overarching storyline — with the artistry of a poem.

Novellas offer a deeper exploration than a short story, while being more focussed than a novel. Our minds are busy, and our senses overwhelmed. Every day we’re assailed by an avalanche of unfettered information that we must critically assess to determine what's true, what's important, and what's critical. When I read a book, I want to escape and be distracted from the horrors and mundanities of our increasingly dystopian world.

So, when I write a book, I write it for me. And this is why I write novellas.

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A Year of Writing with a Critique Group

2/2/2025

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Just over a year ago, I committed to writing an additional four novellas in the five book Ghost Assassins of Bijou collection by year’s end. That meant committing to writing a novella, of around 25,000 words, every three months. I’m an inherently lazy human being and a slow writer, so the task I’d set was daunting.

Then, by the delightfulness and serendipity that is fate, I was invited to join a critique group with two local speculative fiction authors – both of whom are vastly more experienced, lauded and awarded than I am. We meet for two hours every fortnight to critique and offer feedback on each other’s work. When we can’t meet in person, we meet online and once or twice we’ve relied on electronic feedback only.

Despite our early decision to limit our submissions to 4000 words, or a short story, that didn’t last past our first get together. I’ve routinely bombarded them with over 10,000 new or rewritten words each session. They never complain (well not to me anyway!) and at times were disappointed when I didn’t give them the next chapter.
It’s been amazing! I’ve learnt so much.

When I look back at their comments from the beginning of last year, the pages of my manuscripts are littered with corrections to grammar and sentence structure, and comments pointing out inconsistencies and problems with my plotting. The most recent feedback was much less grammatical, and more about tweaks to the storyline aimed at keeping the reader satisfied. I still can’t quite get my head around run-on sentences but I’m much better at comma placement.

My critique crones have gifted me ideas for literary devices to keep dry details out of the prose and others that weave poetry into the prose in ways that I never would have had the courage to attempt on my own. They’ve kept my characters’ voices true and the plot holes tiny. Best of all though, they’ve littered my pages with ticks and scrawled love-hearts in the margins when they find a phrase or section that they enjoy.

For the first few months I was terrified I was bringing very little to the group. I’m neither an expert in grammar nor spotting plot-holes and need time to chew over new ideas – but I have other skills. I’m good at world-building and character development, I possess a strong aversion to the overuse of -ly adverbs, and I know when a story needs more tension. I also do my best to be generous with ticks and love-hearts in the margins.

So – did I meet my goal of writing four novellas in a year?

Not quite.

With rewrites for consistency through the collection, it took an extra month. I’m now in the process of doing final edits and lay-out and writing the synopses for each novella and one for the collection.

Could I have done it without my critique crones?

Maybe.

But, without them, it would have been a set of pretty stones rather than a collection of polished jewels.

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Storytelling as Resistance

12/1/2024

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For many of us, there is much in the world to be afraid of as 2024 stumbles to a close.

War – genocide – mutating viruses – religious fundamentalism – fascism – rampant capitalism – misogyny – racism – trans & homophobia – exploitation – climate change.

Then there’s the environment…our air, oceans, rivers, land and biota are being polluted, exploited, destroyed and rendered extinct.

It’s a lot.

It’s too much and it’s understandable to feel paralysed and overwhelmed. I faltered and came close to crumbling a month ago. I’m just one person, after all, and I couldn’t see how anything I did could make a difference.

Then somewhere, I forget where, I read the three words that entitle this blog. Storytelling as resistance. Those three words sparked a realisation that in dark times, we need stories that challenge the darkness. I hunted for support to fuel my tiny spluttering spark, and I found it from two writers — both women of colour. This came as no surprise, as women of colour face additional layers of overt oppression, discrimination and violence.

A quote from Toni Morrison reminded me not to fall into the trap of doomscrolling and constantly following the news headlines. “I know the world is bruised and bleeding and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.” I’m not always good at this, but I try to limit my exposure.

I don’t watch televised news broadcasts, except under exceptional circumstances. It reminds me too much of the Romans in their amphitheatres, revelling in the gore of gladiator against gladiator, animal slayings and human executions. I do not wish to revel in human misery and disaster presented to me in bite-sized packages by a media who seeks ratings at the cost of dignity and the truth.

Toni Morrison also offered a call to action. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” Writing is something I can do.

The real inspiration for me to keep writing came from Edwidge Danticat, who added fuel to my flame. She reminded me that stories are powerful, and can change lives. She said, “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously…knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” I love this.

We never know who will need the words we write. While I might write words as an act of rebellion, someone, somewhere, sometime might read those words to survive. Writing rebellious stories is a thing I can and must do — it’s my human obligation.

So, with renewed vigour and fire in my belly, I am writing. And, in the words of Margaret Atwood, “A word, after a word, after a word is power.” But I also want to say, this is me and my way of coping. We all have to find our own way forward, there is no right or wrong path. So, you do what you need to do.

When I wrote the first Ghost Assassins of Bijou novella in 2023, I wanted to write a commentary on the invisibility of older women in society. Through 2024, I’ve written a further four novellas in the intertwined collection and the themes have expanded.

Written from a very solid feminist perspective, the collection challenges the rise of fundamentalism, extremism and misogyny, it explores self-determination, otherness, PTSD in women and colonialism and addresses the impact of sexual and physical violation.

I believe that what I’ve written is more important now than when I started it. It's my sincere hope that in these dark times, readers will find hope within the pages of the Ghost Assassins of Bijou. Well, when the collection is published of course — but that’s a story for another day!

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Monsters From the Deep

10/31/2024

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In the antipodes, Halloween is out of season, it’s spring here and all about rebirth and hope. So rather than talk about spooky things, this month I’ve mixed my interests in monsters and marine critters to talk about monsters from the deep.

As I’ve been writing the initial five Ghost Assassins of Bijou novellas, I’ve leaned into my training and expertise as a marine biologist. Bijou is a marine planet, with an equatorial archipelago of extinct volcanic islands making up the minor terrestrial habitat. Much like we Earthlings, the human inhabitants of Bijou are limited to the land and the coastal fringes and surface of the ocean. As the stories have progressed, it’s become obvious that, also like us, the human residents of Bijou know next to nothing about most of their planet. Unlike us, however, they do have relationships with the sentient inhabitants of their ocean—especially with the belosa, a cuttlefish-like creature, some of whom choose to be living spaceships for the ghost assassins.

I could have created an entirely new creature to fill this role, but the shape and motion of cuttlefish lends them beautifully to being spaceships. They’re also intelligent, have distinct methods of communication and are well studied. This made it (relatively) easy to take an extant creature and develop it into one of science fiction. And there’s so much more life in the depths that we can use in this way.

The deep sea is Earth’s largest habitat, offering a massive 97% of the habitable space available to life on our planet. Which is remarkable, given how little we know of the lives and range of creatures that exist there. It’s estimated that we know less than 10% of the existing species of the deep sea. What monsters lurk beyond our reach and understanding?

Let’s set the scene in our search for monsters from the deep.
The deep sea is defined as beyond the reach of light, on average this happens at around 200m of depth. No plants live beyond this depth. The water is cold (~2°C), and the pressures are immense (an additional atmosphere of pressure for every 10m of depth). Around 70% of the sea floor is abyssal plains, but there are a multitude of other habitats including: seamounts, canyons, troughs, ridges, cold seeps, hydrothermal vents, polymetallic nodule fields, and asphalt fields or brine pools. Life in these habitats requires extreme (to us) adaptations.

Many animals at these depths have foregone the need to move. Why waste energy on locomotion when the food comes to you? Others have abandoned the sun as their source of energy and rely instead on the energy contained in inorganic chemicals that leach through Earth’s crust at vents and seeps. Oxygen isn’t always required, and life has found ways to exist in extremes that should kill. Creatures are diverse, often long-lived, and can be surprisingly large.

Onto the monsters!
Let’s start with Cnidarians (the C is silent)—jellyfish, corals, anemones and hydroids. These creatures have a mouth that also serves as their anus, they also have muscles, reproductive organs and tentacles. Already so much fun. But best of all, they kill with an explosion of tiny poison-tipped harpoons. Imagine visiting a strange planet, where simply brushing past a delicate feather-like shrub results in your body being swamped with a neurotoxin that stops your heart. The feathers wrap around you and the creature spends the next century feasting on your remains. Or your spaceship emerges from hyper-drive into the slow drifting tentacles of a massive space-jelly. There is no escape. Death is slow in the gut sac behind the creature’s dual-function mouth/arse—but it’s inevitable.

I’m not going to bother talking about marine worms, because…well…Dune. We all know what that looks like. All I’ll add is that the penis worm doesn’t hunt—it waits. To capture passing soldiers, the penis worm vomits out its toothed throat then retracts it, dragging the flailing prey with it. Death by penis worm—so noble.

Molluscs include a wide variety of life-forms including snails (gastropods); clams (bivalves); chitons; and squids (cephalopods). This group is rich pickings for premade monsters filled as it is with active predators armed with deadly toxins, camouflage and more terrifying tentacles. Probably the most frightening thing about molluscs is the weird feeding organ they all possess. It’s called a radula, a movable belt covered with teeth. The radula can scrape flesh from bones, drill holes in the hulls of space stations and inject toxins into unwary interplanetary explorers. Abandon all hope, weary travellers.

Crustaceans are equipped with many limbs. So many limbs. Delicate antennae that detect movement, taste, electrical currents to focus the hunt. Legs and more legs enable them to skitter over the barriers protecting a newly established colony. They swim through space and time using the oar-like appendages under their tails. Hidden beneath desert sands, they’ll spy on you with stalked eyes, then snap you up with claws and pincers that hold, slice and dice. Some of them move so fast they can teleport. You’ll never see the parasite before it steals your body for its own purposes—leaving you a more witless zombie than usual.

Next on our list of monsters from the deep are the armoured echinoderms—starfish, sea cucumbers, urchins, brittle stars, crinoids and the like—distinct in the animal world with their 5-sided symmetry. Ravenous and relentless they glide across the vast freeze-dried plains on hydrostatic tube feet. They’re impervious to your weapons. When they catch you—and they will catch you—they’ll hover over your trapped body and extrude their stomach out through their mouth. Once you’re digested, they draw their stomach inside and glide away. Behind them, the hollow husk of your once perfect body wafts in the currents of an alien breeze.

When you stare out at the night sky, filled with stars and mysteries, some of those stars aren’t what you think they are. Giant angler fish drift the universe on cosmic tides, their bodies invisible against the blackness of the void. Some of those distant stars are bioluminescent lures, hung out to draw in unsuspecting colonists searching for planets within the Goldilocks range. Once the unspeakably enormous maw closes its needled teeth around your interstellar generation-ship, the lights wink out—forever.

If, these macro monsters don’t offer you the perfect character for your next space horror…then what about the dangers of the micro monsters of the deep. Imagine bacteria that deplete the sulphur in your skin, leaving you with lesions that can’t heal and a compromised metabolism. Maybe the archaea in your gut are replaced by those that feed on, rather than produce, the methane you require for digestion? Deep sea viruses are more likely to be lysogenic, meaning they replace sections of your DNA with their own to reprogramme your metabolism for their own needs and they need to be cold…so very, very cold.

Honestly, I could write so much more but I think I’ve made my point. There’s no need to reinvent biology in the search for monsters. The way I imagine and extrapolate monsters from living creatures is, if it can swim it can probably also fly, if it can live in the dark expanse of the ocean, it’ll do just fine in space and if it’s small it can become very, very big.

Need more inspiration? Then, let your fingers lead you down a penis wormhole of online research. Or head to your local library and flick through any number of books about sea life (because it lives in my bookshelf, I referred to Peter Batson’s 2003 edition of, Deep New Zealand: Blue Water, Black Abyss, in my research for this blog). Finally, if you enjoy a field trip head to your nearest aquarium or marine research lab on an open day.

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Lessons From World Fantasy Convention

Why Write Novellas?

A Year of Writing with a Critique Group

Storytelling as Resistance

Monsters From the Deep

Archives

Categories

Lessons From World Fantasy Convention

Why Write Novellas?

A Year of Writing with a Critique Group

​Storytelling as Resistance

Monsters From the Deep

Archives

Categories

Storytelling as Resistance