Celine Kiernan's Blog, page 14

<3

Ok so I look like a beetroot faced farmer in from digging up her spuds – some things can’t be helped- but maaaaan I’m so damned happy! This is me holding a flat of the wonderful UK cover for Into the Grey. WalkerBooks, you rock.  As soon as I can break myself away from the writing desk and get into town, I’ll be framing this and adding it to the (very small) collection of my covers that I love enough to frame and hang on the wall. (See just peeping over my shoulder there? That’s Allen and Unwin’s cover for the Australian version of the same book.)

wolfman gif – super rough

Just messing around with a wacom tablet for the first time. Super rough and sketchy as I get used to this weird way of drawing things. Think I might go ahead and try and clean this up into proper drawings.

Dear Author…

So don’t read your reviews. Sooner or later you will have one of those moments of lonely (possibly drunken) solipsism which led to you irretrievably embarrassing yourself on the internet.

(photo sourced here)

Ane Brun – Balloon Ranger

I could listen to this song all day

Kickstart Some Practical Monsters…

A plea and pitch from those wonderful practical effects guys over at ADI. They’re trying to kick start a movie designed to use ONLY practical effects. Come on you fans of The Thing, Pumpkinhead, and the original Star Wars. Help them out.

Scribbling away on the WiP…

You see, what I object to, what I greatly object to, is the implication that my people’s story does not count – that it has been nothing but an aberration, a bump in the road, a mistake from which you will now rescue us. What did you expect would happen here, Little Merchant? Did you expect us to let go of all that has shaped us? To cast aside our history? And take up yours maybe – is that it? As if by doing so we would gain an identity more significant than our own.

When our people’s paths diverged, the road mine were forced down was not a pleasant one, but what it made of us is not something  that you can now discard or repaint in your own image. We are not you, neither do we long to be you. We have our own story, it has given us our names and our language and our songs, and much as I am pained by how we were crippled by it, I will not have you make me ashamed of what I am. That would be another way of allowing you own me, I think, and I no longer have any desire to be owned.

Quartered: WiP 13/05/2013

Louis MacNeice – Prayer before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.

Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the

club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.

I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,

with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,

on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me

With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk

to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light

in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me

For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words

when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,

my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,

my life when they murder by means of my

hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me

In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when

old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains

frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white

waves call me to folly and the desert calls

me to doom and the beggar refuses

my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,

Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God

come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me

With strength against those who would freeze my

humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,

would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with

one face, a thing, and against all those

who would dissipate my entirety, would

blow me like thistledown hither and

thither or hither and thither

like water held in the

hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.

Otherwise kill me.

(a recent discussion on FB brought this poem back to my mind. It has been many years since I first encountered it. It moves me still. Its emotion and honesty chills my spine and tightens my gut.)

In honor of the sunshine…

Billy Stewart’s wonderful, scat-tastic, samba-ish version of Summertime.

I DARE you not to shake your hips.

A little distracted at the mo…

Hi guys, sorry about the silence recently- it’s going to continue for a while longer, I’m afraid. In the next couple of weeks, I very much need to get the current novel finished. After that I’ll be in house working on an animated TV series. The schedule on the TV series  and the commute to and from the studio means that I won’t have much time for anything else for the next year or so ( not if I want my loved ones to remember my name in any case!)

I’ll certainly be putting up bits and pieces of art work, and also any news that comes along re the UK/US  publication of Into the Grey or the released date for Resonance, but other than that, it’ll be a little quiet around here for the next while or so.

For now, big hugs and see you around FB or .

xox

Shhh… don’t tell my daughter

Shhhhh… don’t tell my daughter, but this is a detail from her 19th birthday cake. I’m only showing a little detail because the entire cake is to be a surprise (not that she reads my blog anyway! But just in case!) If you want to see the whole thing, with an explanation of the picture, go here)