SNAFU at the Aurealis Awards

​When I was working in Singapore, there was a phrase in Singlish that always stuck with me. You’d say someone was “blur” or “blur like sotong”. Sotong means squid in Malay and to say they were “blur” like a squid meant they had that same dull, glassy-eyed expression that you saw on those hapless molluscs in a fish market. If you were blur, then you were obtuse, oblivious to everything around you; you weren’t in on the joke or up to speed with current events.
 
Anyway, I’ve been so blur recently that I didn’t even realise that Non-Zero Sum had been nominated for an Aurealis Award, and only found out when I got tagged in a Facebook post saying it had made the shortlist!

t’s an open secret that writers are their own worst critics. By and large we have no idea how stories are going to be received. Occasionally you get a good feeling about a story. Something about it just gives you an expectation that other people are going to like it just as much as you, but that feeling is rare. Here’s where I should say that I had just such a feeling about Non-Zero Sum, but the truth is I didn’t. I liked the central idea: that nuclear explosions rip open a gate between worlds and allow things to come through.  I liked the characters--a military HAZMAT team sent to a nuclear accident to gather data and then running into supernatural, monster weirdness--the action scenes were fun (imagine if HP Lovecraft had grown up playing Doom and Quake), but the story never jelled for me. I always felt I could have done more with it.
 
Shows what I know... Told you I was blur.
 
Non-Zero Sum probably won’t win. It’s up against some stiff competition, and this style of fast-paced action stories may not be to the judge’s taste. But what the hell… it’s shortlisted and I’m running with that and slapping a big “Finalist” sticker on this post anyway. 
 
Thanks to Geoff Brown, AJ Spedding and everyone at Cohesion Press. You guys are the best!