We are super thrilled to welcome to our family, Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan! Academia Lunare will bring you their first collaboration: an exciting writing guide for novice writers who have never tried their hand at the speculative genre.
Spec-Fic for Newbies (working title!) originates from a love of writing, reading, and teaching Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. Tiffani Angus (Ph.D.) and Val Nolan (Ph.D.) met at the 2009 Clarion Writers’ Workshop in California and since then have collaborated many times as fans and scholars on panels for SFF conventions and writing retreats, while also sharing lesson plans, ideas, and teaching activities from their days jobs in Anglia Ruskin University and Aberystwyth University.
Tiffani mainly writes Fantasy (such as her novel Threading the Labyrinth), and Val mainly writes Science Fiction (with stories in Interzone, Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Best of British Science Fiction), so working together on this book and combining their experience as SFF writers and as university lecturers in Creative Writing and Literature made perfect sense!
Every year they see new students who want to write SFF/Horror but have never tried the genres, have tried but found themselves floundering, or, worse, have been discouraged by those who tell them Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are somehow not “real” literature (spoiler alert: they’re the most real literature of all!).
This book is for all those future Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror writers!
Tiffani and Val are approaching these three exciting fields by breaking them down into bite-sized subgenres with a fun, open, and contemporary approach. Each chapter will contain 8-10 subgenres, with a quick and nerdy history of each derived from classroom teaching practices, along with a list of potential pitfalls, a description of why it’s fun to write in these subgenres, as well as activities for new writers to try out and to get them started!
In our monthly newsletter you will be able to follow this project's progress, as usual, and we will share more info on release dates as we move forward.
About the Authors:
Tiffani Angus (Ph.D. in Creative Writing) was born in Hollywood and grew up in Las Vegas. She attended the SFF workshops Viable Paradise (2008) and Clarion (2009), and she is a regular attendee of the Milford SF Writer’s Conference. An academic in the UK, she is the Course Leader for the MA Creative Writing and the Co-Course Leader for the MA Publishing, at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, where she also teaches undergraduate writing and supervises PhD students researching/writing SFF. She’s also a Director of the Anglia Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy and, as a ‘scholar-fan’, regularly attends SFF conventions and participates on programming.
Since 2009, she has published short stories in a variety of genres including science fiction, historical fantasy, horror, and even erotica. In 2020, her debut novel, the historical fantasy Threading the Labyrinth, was published by Unsung Stories and was shortlisted in for the BSFA Best Novel Award.
Website: http://www.tiffani-angus.com/
Twitter: @tiffaniangus
Val Nolan (Ph.D) lectures in genre fiction and creative writing at Aberystwyth University where he teaches modules on reading and writing science fiction, fantasy, and comics. His academic publications include ‘Nostalgia for Infinity: Hard Determinism and Hard Science in Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space Sequence’ in Science Fiction Studies (2019), ‘Break Free: Understanding, Reimagining, and Reclaiming Stories in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory’ in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comic Books (2014), ‘Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis’ in the Flann O’Brien Centenary Issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011), and ‘If it was Just Th’ol Book…: A History of the John McGahern Banning Controversy’ in Irish Studies Review (2011). He has contributed to Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, as well as writing book reviews for many years for the Irish Examiner.
He has also published short stories in anthologies and magazines such as Year’s Best Science Fiction, Best of British Science Fiction, BFS Horizons, Unidentified Funny Objects, and the ‘Futures’ page of Nature. His story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Award (2014), and his anti-fascist novelette ‘Make America Great Again’ appeared in Interzone (2020). He conducted his doctoral research on contemporary Irish fiction at National University of Ireland, Galway, and he attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2009.
Twitter: @VallescuraRule
I am very excited to work with Tiffani and Val for this Academia Lunare Project, and I am sure that you will find it as useful and entertaining as we do!
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