L.D. Lewis's Blog, page 2

YEMI and A Sea Witch Vignette

Earlier this week, I mentioned that I am nearing the end of my draft of YEMI (the black mermaid WIP)(!!!!!), so thought I’d drop a little treat over on Patreon.

I write a lot of shorts in my Three Known Worlds universe, the most notable of which so far is Chesirah published in FIYAH #1 and reprinted at PodCastle and Pulpture Ediciones. They tend to be vignettes of key characters or snapshots of lesser known histories (see A Ruin of Shadows). The shorts add depth to my worlds and serve as something of a word dump for back stories I can’t reasonably work into a novel-length work on pain of a bloated word count.

YEMI features an iteration of famed sea witch “Ursula” as canon to my Three Known Worlds universe. This version of her is the origin, the creator of merfolk, salvaged from the drowning dead slaves and criminals of Irth. They were called “urfolk” first, before the “mer” was appended due to the linguistic customs of our reality, a feat explained in YEMI.

Ursla is effectively the first god to traverse realities as dictated by the lore of the Three Known Worlds. TKW maintains that many of the gods, the mythical beings with which we are familiar in our plane of existence were once (and still are) real, having migrated here from some other place in time and inevitably migrated elsewhere again at whim.

From Witch to Queen and God is something of an origin story for Ursla, and the character as depicted here will be carried into new adventures (though similar aspirations) in YEMI.

Pop over and enjoy a free read.

Twilight and the islands are on fire.

The witch walks out of the sea on two legs alongside her men, armed to the teeth with fury meant to carry them through Eros’s liberation. She’s forgotten the weight of locs drenched in seawater and what it is to have knees, the flex of heel and toe and the very concept of footing as she moves out of the surf across pebbled sand and silt. Stammered steps are unbecoming of a sea queen but no one who should fear her notices…

February 2019 Wrap Up

2019 is… a lot. And we’re only into February. I myself have a mixed bag of stuff going on (a drunk driver drove a truck through my parents’ living room last month, and taxes have murdered me almost entirely), but most of the good is happening in my publishing career, so yay for that.

TAKE THE MIC

[image error]

The cover for the YA anthology TAKE THE MIC: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance was released a few weeks ago, and features a short by yours truly. My story, The Helpers, is about finding or making your place in the movements that surround us.

I’m still stunned I made the cut for this. I’ve never written YA exactly, and the names —o gods, the names!— attached to this project are huge to me. I’m incredibly fortunate to be in their company.

Official release date is October 1st with A.A. Levine but you can (and should) pre-order.

 

YEMI

I reached 50k words on my latest novel WIP and dropped this aesthetic collage over on Twitter this month.

Yemi (Yemaya) Blackgate is a descendant of a certain mermaid princess and a human prince who fell in love and threw the world-out-of-water into chaos with their union. As their granddaughter, Yemi has come of age surrounded by people who openly mock her mer-lineage and on the edge of another civil war that threatens her ascension to the throne. When she’s forced into exile, she seeks out the help of a certain sea witch in reclaiming her birthright; but she has to decide whether she wants to rule Man or destroy them.

“CHESIRAH” Y PULPTURE EDICIONES

My novelette, “Chesirah” will be featured in an upcoming Spanish-language anthology for Pulpture Ediciones aimed at introducing the work of female SFF authors to Spanish readers. This is the first time my work is being translated (it’s my first fiction publication ever, as well!) and I’m really excited about this particular milestone.

NEXT MONTH

FIYAH drops the Issue #10 ToC and cover featuring artwork by Olivia Stephens. Then about mid-March, the biannual report from our Black Speculative Fiction Writer Surveys will be released, taking a look at the experiences of Black SFF writers on submission in the 2017-2018 years. I’m about halfway through organizing the stats on those.

Also in March, the POB Scoring Project will be reaching out to markets to ask which features they’re most interested in using as we expand. It’ll help prioritize what gets developed ahead of the summer scoring update.

I’ll also be dropping my first world-building piece over on Patreon in a couple of weeks, the topic of which will be MAGIC, what constitutes hard v soft, and where magic found in real-world PoC faiths + practices lands when implemented in fiction.

That’s it for now! Thanks for being here.

-L

Patreon and The Dead Withheld

Good news, everyone! You can now support me on Patreon. I need time and money to both write and grow my publishing activism, and you can help take the weight off my need to keep multiple jobs with as little as $5/month.

I’m really excited about my FEINT project over there as well. I’m taking my paranormal neo-noir story THE DEAD WITHHELD (was hard to place because of its weird 19k word count) and turning it into a sandbox universe. I’ll be casting donors at certain tiers as characters with their own stories in the FEINT location of San Guin as an exercise in both worldbuilding and accountability. We’ll see how it shakes out.

Dizzy Carter is a deadwalker witch six years into the hunt for her wife’s murderer. A former blues-singer in San Guin, Dizzy’s lost her music and has shifted to work as a private investigator for the resources it allows her in tracking the apparent serial killer who took Lonnie from her. The first clue in years connects to a growing infestation of enterprising demons in the city. Aided by her violent nature, the madame of a succubus bordello, and dolls animated by captive souls she owes to the vengeful dead, Dizzy will take on anything to see Lonnie’s ghost freed. 

You can check out the other perks and plans and goals and such over there.

 

Award Eligibility

Self-promotion is one of those things that will never not be awkward if you’ve got a hint of humility in your bones. It will also never not be absolutely essential as a writer of color. So here we are.

This year has been huge for me and the projects of which I am a part. In the next couple of years, I’ve got some gorgeous novels I hope you’ll love. But until then, I’ve got one single, solitary written thing eligible for all your award considerations this year. And I am endlessly proud of that thing.

[image error] A RUIN OF SHADOWS (April 2018, Dancing Star Press) is eligible in all novella categories. It’s been wonderfully reviewed [1][2] by even more wonderful people. It’s on the Nebula Reading List and an excerpt inspired a gracious award from the Speculative Literature Foundation earlier this year! I will forever be thankful to everyone involved in producing and celebrating this little book.

 

I’ve also been busy with the award-winning [1][2] FIYAH Literary Magazine in my capacity as Art Director. Our covers in 2017 helped the incomparable Geneva B. to her first Hugo as Best Fan Artist this year. (In my quiet moments, I still scream about that.) In 2018, I’ve had the privilege of working with four different, incredible artists whose talent and vision have contributed vastly to the strength of every issue. I am proud of each and every one of them. You can read more about them and the rest of FIYAH’s award eligible work here.

 

Thank you to everyone who has supported my work, or FIYAH’s work. We’re just getting started.

Pitch Wars Mentor Wishlist

I’ve spent some days sort of staring at this page, wanting to get it right, filtering in the correct amount of cleverness and professionalism for my first mentor wishlist. The result is a pre-coffee rambling littered with Bob’s Burgers gifs.

[image error]

Hello. I’m LeKesha. You can call me L. I’m mentoring in the Adult category and I’m primarily looking for sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction.

About me:

I’m 32, formerly a paramedic, currently a data analyst. In 2016, I was a founding creator of FIYAH Literary Magazine for Black Speculative Fiction. We’re now a World Fantasy Award finalist! Last year, I signed with my lovely agent Jennifer Azantian and published a novelette, CHESIRAH with FIYAH (reprinted with PodCastle 2018). This year, I was awarded a grant by the Speculative Literature Foundation. I also published my first novella A RUIN OF SHADOWS with Dancing Star Press. It has been gloriously well-received and I could not be happier!

What I’m into:

[image error]

I use the umbrella term “speculative fiction” for SFF because I’m also into the works that are not exactly sci-fi and not exactly fantasy. I find the more warping or blending of spec fic’s subgenres, the less likely the work is to be derivative. Most of what I write is STEM-fantasy or science-fantasy anyway. So if you’re not exactly sure where your story fits, chances are I’ll not only like it, but I’ll know what to do with it.

I am absolutely here for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors and characters. I will not solely be considering stories by that demographic because a good story is a good story. But the desire to help get more representation out there is what brought me to Pitch Wars in the first place.

I like third-person narrative structure. First-person is okay, but the voice has to be entertaining. I’m not a good fit for second-person. Similarly, multi-POV is great! Each character is a different window into the world you’ve created and I love lush world-building. Multi-POV has to be neat, though, or else it’s a nightmare. I can help with that.

[image error]Romance… I like my romance minimal or somewhat tortured. Unrequited or impossible (circumstances as obstacles) love are my favorite. Sweet, fluffy romance can be present but should not overwhelm or be central the central arc of the story. Similarly sex scenes are fine, but I’m not your best bet for erotica.

I love, LOVE compelling villainy and complex anti-heroes. If they’re the MC, even better.

Give me your queer-for-no-reason characters that I may love on them excessively. Extra points if you give them a world that loves them. This is SFF and there’s no reason to keep homophobia in our newly imagined worlds.

Profanity… it’d be weird if you didn’t have it. I am also unreasonably entertained by tame expletives (ie “fluffernutter” rather than “ah, fuck”) so not everyone has to curse like a sailor, but I don’t mind if they do.

8/23 add: Comp titles: I could not possibly care less. Truly, don’t stress about it as far as pitching me is concerned. The only time I’ve used them personally was in a DVpit pitch and neither of the titles were books. Didn’t even use them in my queries. There are so many other things I’d rather you stress about. 

IF YOU HAVE AN SFF AIDA RETELLING, (or other opera, really) SEND IT TO ME AND ONLY ME OMG. I mean… maybe not only me. But mostly me. Please.

Hard sells:

I wish I was more into werewolves, vampires, and zombies but I am not. I’m also not into fae and folkloric beings in the traditional European sense. I’m also averse to the High Fantasy style of naming things (too many consecutive u’s, violent, gratuitous use of apostrophes, q’s in weird places). This is not to be confused with Indigenous language naming traditions, which are glorious. If you do pitch those other things, though, just understand that the story has to be doing something special with them for my consideration in the long run.

8/23 add: Anything over 150k is going to be hard for me. 90k-120k is my preferred length, really. We simply do not have all the time in the world to work through the story, so if it’s a George R. R. Martin-esque 290K monster, it needs to be so close to perfect already.

Hard no’s:
[image error]

Sexual assault. There is nothing so special or different you can do with sexual assault that will make it palatable or —honestly— necessary.
Narratives which rely on the genocide/evisceration of marginalized cultures for character growth. Seriously. Come on.
Romeo and Juliet retellings

Other Considerations:

Life experiences dictate that I’m able to provide authentic feedback for the following additional content: bipolar disorder, queerness (cisgender bisexual woman), hoh/use of ASL, paramedic/mass casualty events. But I encourage everyone not to use this as your sensitivity read opportunity. That should be done already.

What to Expect:

[image error]I can be blunt, but it comes from a place of not wanting to waste our time and not because I hate you. I’m mission-oriented, I pay attention to details, I’ll probably have a thousand questions for you. All of that is intended to understand your voice and the core of your story so we can develop it without sacrificing what’s important to you. I have also been known to send support gift bundles of cookies, make playlists, and aesthetic collages for additional inspiration. I want you to win! I want you to have fun! And I want to fall in love with your creation.

Check out the other adult mentor wishlists here.

1.


Alexa & Suzanne (Accepts NA)

2.

Alice

3.

Angel (Accepts NA)

4.

Carolyne

5.

Carrie

6.

Dan & Michael

7.

Diana (Accepts NA)

8.

Farah (Accepts NA)

9.

Gigi

10.

Heather & Lana (Accepts NA)

11.

Helen (Accepts NA)

12.

Ian & Laura (Accepts NA)

13.

Jason (Accepts NA)

14.


K.A. Doore

15.

Katrina

16.

Kristen L.

17.

Kristin R. (Accepts NA)

18.

Kristin W. (Accepts NA)

19.

L. D. Lewis

20.

Laura & Tif (Accepts NA)

21.

Layne

22.

Marty & Léonie (Accepts NA)

23.

Mary Ann (Accepts NA)

24.

Mia & Kellye (Accepts NA)

25.

Michelle (Accepts NA)

26.

Michelle & Katie (Accepts NA)

27.


Natasha

28.

Nikki (Accepts NA)

29.

Paris

30.

Rebecca (Accepts NA)

31.

Rheea

32.

Sarah (Accepts NA)

33.

Shari & Clarissa

34.

Susan (Accepts NA)

35.

T. Frohock

36.

Victoria & RF (Accepts NA)

37.

Wendy (Accepts NA)

Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.

A RUIN OF SHADOWS NOW AVAILABLE

[image error] ISBN13: 9781732141803
Published by Dancing Star Press
Artwork by Emily Cheeseman

What an amazing week! A RUIN OF SHADOWS was released by Dancing Star Press and the reception has been wonderful. I get excited all over again when someone tweets me a picture of the book when they received it. Being in print is still surreal.

Also announced last week, I was awarded the Working-Class Writers Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation. The writing sample in my application came from an earlier version of A RUIN OF SHADOWS.

I’m thrilled to share the success with Jennifer Crispin, the publisher at Dancing Star. My story is the debut for the new micropress and I’m hoping it bodes well for future titles.

They are now open for novella submissions through June 30th.

If you get a chance to read the story, reviews are greatly appreciated particularly on Amazon, where I believe it’s something like 15 reviews minimum before certain promotional efforts kick in on the platform. Links are below.

The novel series from which SHADOWS and my novelette CHESIRAH are derived will be on submission soon! So here’s hoping it won’t be too much longer before the next installment in the Three Known Worlds Universe.

April 2018. Dancing Star Press     $3.99 – $9.99
Paperback and ebook available at: Dancing Star Press  |  Amazon [paperback] [kindle] | Barnes + Noble  |  Kobo
Goodreads

 

 

Interview with Dancing Star Press

[image error]

In preparation for the release of A RUIN OF SHADOWS next Tuesday, my publisher at Dancing Star Press interviewed me about my story, my process, music, and my work at FIYAH Literary Magazine. The below is an excerpt, but you can check out the whole thing here and order the novella at all these fine places that sell books.

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

​It definitely doesn’t energize me. Writing’s a bit like bloodletting, isn’t it? Or at least what bloodletting was supposed to do. You’re gradually putting more and more of yourself on the page ​and it’s draining until it isn’t. You inevitably get to that light feeling, that punchy sort of euphoria that feels like energy, but indicates you should probably hydrate and maybe have a cookie and chill out for a while. Finishing a story is pretty great, though.

From your twitter account it seems like you have endless writing projects going. How many stories do you typically have on deck at any one time?

​I usually keep three projects going at a time, all of them in different phases of development. When I get frustrated with one​, I can bounce to another. I think it makes me slower at completing things, but occasionally I’ll finish three things around the same time. So that’s cool.

How did you first get into the fantasy genre?

​I… have control issues. The real world is restrictive and positively lousy with misery. I know I can do better, so I do.

Read the full interview at DancingStarPress.com

A Ruin Of Shadows: Rundown

[image error]My novella cover is here with artwork by Emily Cheeseman!

A RUIN OF SHADOWS:

General Daynja Édo is a legend: head of the celebrated Boorhian Empire’s military and possessor of a mask of untold power. She has raised her Shadow Army of seven assassins from childhood. But mounting disillusionment over a life of brutality, a petulant emperor, and prodding from The Artful Djinni force her to defy orders for the first time in her thirty year career. When the empire decides they no longer need Édo if they can get the mask, she must face the monsters of her own making and the legacy they’ve tur ned against her.

Content warning for violence and some language

This is the second story published in my Three Known Worlds universe, the first being “Chesirah” in the inaugural issue of FIYAH Literary Magazine. Both stories are part of a series of short fiction that explains and expands on the history of a narrative centered in some novels my agent is working on getting to you soon. I’ll likely talk about it a bit more in subsequent posts as we get closer to our release date. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

In the meantime, A RUIN OF SHADOWS drops April 24th, 2018 from Dancing Star Press. You can pre-order it here. Here’s its Spotify playlist. See if it gives you an idea what you’re in for.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/odvillain/playlist/2dwW94XSG1f1wAlBfBMVyO

The Importance of Writing Carefree Blackness™

Re-posted from my original 2016 Tumblr for relevance to the reasons I write. -LL

Post-NaNoWriMo, I volunteered beta-reading services. It combined my love of reading with my love of asking too many questions. The push for diversity in publishing has created attempts at diversity in writing, and thus requests for diverse beta-readers.

Of my eleven beta-reads, eight of them were given to me based on my blackness perspective. I am not upset about this at all. If you’re not black and you’re making an effort to include black characters in your things and want to make sure you’re not being the worst possible person about it, good on you. Of those eight manuscripts, five of them have black main characters, and four of those have struggle-based narratives.

“The struggle,” for anyone unaware is basically living life through the impacts of institutionalized racism. Sometimes this means arguing respectability politics and combating “too black” and “not black enough” lines in our own community. Sometimes it means dealing with the backlash of promoting our own standards of beauty. Sometimes it’s having to explain and defend our social justice movements. Sometimes it’s living through the aftermath of a race-based shooting. Sometimes it’s the politics involved in choosing a PWI vs an HBCU. And sometimes it’s swallowing the mountain of micro-aggressions and casual racism only we can see worked into our daily lives.

I’m noticing white writers seem to lump together slavery and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960′s. It’s probably because those are the standard narratives for the black experience as taught in grade school. And so writing black characters has become a reflection on the pain associated with blackness. And writing these things becomes a way to illustrate one’s own “wokeness” or “hipness” or “down-with-the-causeness.” You get my very uncool point.

Writing with a focus on this aspect of black life, while important on some level, is damaging on another. Black women especially are saddled with the resilience stereotype: that we have been through so much without our backs being broken and we can continue to do so there is no real rush to relieve us of our burdens. Our strength is a defining characteristic and without something to fight, it is useless. Without something to overcome, what remains of our personality?

It’s also true that many of our well-known pieces of literature are struggle-driven narratives. The Color Purple. A Raisin in the Sun. Beloved. Native Son. Literary culture (with its broad, white base) is endeared to them for their dramatic profundity, the skill with which these authors paint true ugliness so deep it becomes beautiful. And for some reason, we are stuck in this place. The only stories people know to tell about us, are about our pain.

Now if you’re really woke, you’ll notice the glee with which black women entrenched in the fight greet images of black whimsy. It goes beyond the standard-issue “the laughter of children is a joy forever” reaction. We are seldom represented outside of our own circles as people capable of happiness or frivolity. Watching us dance at a protest literally gives us energy. It’s why Lupita going from Patsey in 12 Years a Slave to Maz Kanata in The Force Awakens (and heavens to murgatroyd, John Boyega) gave black girl nerds LIFE. It’s why NBC’s production of The Wiz Live! was hailed in the community as it was. What a novelty to not see ourselves in roles where blackness isn’t an armor or a tragic diary entry. This is what it looks like to have fun.

[image error]Uzo Aduba as Glinda the Good Witch in THE WIZ Live! artwork by squeegool

And it isn’t just about black people reading black representation. Allowing us happiness in literature is another way to humanize us to non-black audiences. This is a thing that shouldn’t need to be facilitated, but the world’s a hard place, so here we are. We live in a society where a white child’s obsession with a toy gun is treated as a sweet and perfectly innocent rite of passage in a beloved cinematic Christmas classic. A black child with a toy gun is automatically deemed a threat, and he is executed for it. Black lives are rarely envisioned innocently or without tension. As such, black children are seen as having no capacity for imagination what with all that serious, bitter blackness within them. The reasons for this are myriad and complex and deeply rooted in centuries of problematic racial depiction. But literature is in a unique position to address and aid in the repair without volatility.

So when you’re doing your research on how to write us, it shouldn’t be just on how to non-offensively write our dialect or describe our skin tone without food analogies or how many times is too many times to use “nigger.” If you’re going to write diverse characters, that means giving them the full spectrum of humanity and not just using them as statements and plot devices. And humanity for black characters – women and girls especially – means letting them dance or build airships or be alien pirate matriarchs or battle dragons for once instead of the patriarchy.