C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 43
January 5, 2021
Podcast Launch! 04 Feb 2021
My brand new podcast, Eldritch Girl: Weird Gothic Stuff & Nonsense will be launching on 04 Feb 2021 at 12pm GMT! If you missed my sneaky announcement about the theme tune… you can listen to it again here. THE CROWS THEME is going to feature on the podcast and is by Gemma Cartmell.
Season 1 is the serialisation of my novel The Crows. I’m reading it out chapter by chapter (some chapters have been split into two parts to make every episode around the 30min mark). There are 21 chapters plus an epilogue, so the first season will have around 23/24 episodes. These will air weekly, every Thursday, at 12pm GMT.
On Mondays, you’ll get some bonus content airing at 12pm GMT! These bonus episodes will also be around 30mins long each, and will have extra content – me chatting about aspects of my world, reading out full or partial short stories, bits from the Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea companion, and more. They will also feature interviews with other authors who write in a range of genres for a bit of variety, with chats about their work.
I’m also looking into putting together a panel show but hosted by Clem Wells, a revenant who did a guest post on the blog on Undead Fashion a while back. The panel show will be hosted by Miss Wells (d. 1793), and she will be joined by various members of the undead community to discuss hot topics of the day. These bonus episodes will be about an hour long and form their own mini-series.
I’m so excited to share this with you! I’ve set up a Goodreads Group where you can discuss the novel and the world more generally: Pagham-on-Sea Tourist Board. I’m still setting up the discussions, and figuring out how it works (it’s my first Goodreads group). Feel free to create your own topics and chat about things you want to chat about! You can also ask me anything you like on my Goodreads profile.
January 1, 2021
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year from all of us in Pagham-on-Sea and beyond! How did you celebrate this year? We hope that you stayed safe and remain well.
Photo by rovenimages.com on Pexels.comMummers’ Parade
Photo by Breakingpic on Pexels.comTraditionally in Pagham-on-Sea the New Year is rung in with a number of events, not all possible to do this year. St Mark’s had their socially distanced firework display, and the History Society teamed up with the Pagham-on-Sea Players and Morris Dancers to produce the annual Mummers’ Parade on New Year’s Day, but this year by editing videos of past events and adding things recorded at home by the Players.
This year, a bawdy script by local playwright Ellis Johnson (1618-1663) was adapted for this medium by the History Society working with the PoS Players, called The Fish Wife’s Apron. You can listen to the audio on Spotify and iTunes. It is live on the PoS Players’ website and YouTube Channel. The Morris dances featured in the video are the top three from their December poll, as voted by you, and are from New Year’s Day 2019, 2018 and 2015.
Annual Charity Football Match
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.comThe annual charity football match organised by the landlords of a few local pubs was called off due to the restrictions in place on gatherings, and replaced with a Twitch stream of FIFA 20 for PS4, which raised £250 in donations for Cancer Research through the JustGiving page and £155 for the local Food Bank. Well done all!
Blood Donor Emergency Appeal
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.comAppropriate arrangements have been made to allow donors to use the Cavernlight Club premises (22-26 King Edward Street) in order to give blood to local recipients. Big thank you to all those who donated during Lockdown over the summer! Please contact Maria Tsadilas at lamia5thC (at) cavernlight (dot) co (dot) uk for more information and to book your slot if you have not got access to the Quatre Faces app.
Donation dates run 2 Jan – 15 Jan
If you donate to a specific recipient please state this in your email and bring your documentation with you. If you would like to set up regular donations with a specific recipient, you will first have to contact Quatrefacescouncil (at) outlook (dot) com with the subject line DONOR REQUEST. You will be set up with a profile, username and password and sent the details to login to the Quatre Faces app so that you can be matched with your recipient. If you have been approached privately, an interview may be required to confirm consent.
December 31, 2020
Bye Bye 2020!
Tomorrow I’m posting how Pagham-on-Sea residents celebrate(d) NYE and New Year’s Day, but today is a more personal look back at the year that was.
Main Achievement 2020: DEVELOPED SELF CARE
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Self Care. I learned how important this actually is for me, made space to do it in different formats, and went back to therapy. I have really struggled with the huge disruptions to my routine and discovered that I am almost certainly neurodivergent (potentially ADD/ADHD) and that I should look into this more to discover tools and strategies that will help me balance my work and personal life going forwards.
My mother died in May of a stomach infection, and, due to COVID, I was unable to go to the funeral or scatter her ashes, and nothing has been sorted out yet.
I underwent some serious shifts in identity, from losing my mum to accepting some aspects of my own self, especially my sexual orientation which, as near as I can understand it, is equal opportunities [pan?] grey/demisexual and grey/demiromantic, which I do not deal well with, as I have real trouble calibrating my sense of self internally and rely on external factors to be stable in order to readjust. So 2020 has been a really tough year in those respects.
Self care has been key, which looks like skincare routine, investing in myself by paying attention to things I just… haven’t paid any attention to in years, like buying my own clothes rather than accepting hand-me-downs in other people’s styles because they (sort of) fit me. I’m definitely not ungrateful but now I can afford to buy things that suit me and create my own looks again, I just… don’t. So I’m having to re-learn how to. This may sound really shallow but when you don’t have a sense of self, it’s really important to work out basics like – what my favourite colours are, what I actually genuinely like, what looks good on me – rather than go with a haphazard collection of things in other people’s styles and colours that I don’t even wear because when out of my work uniform I don’t see the point of getting dressed.
Self care has been not only re-establishing that basic sense of myself and actively combatting my body dysmorphia, but also allowing myself to wear things ‘in public’ and get dressed up for Zoom calls and Google Meets. I stopped wearing makeup daily a long while back – 2010-ish – and it’s been really fun taking an interest in that again too. Not daily, but when I want to.
Other aspects of self care have included giving myself permission not to be productive, to engage in activities I want to when I want to do them, and to accept rather than fight my oscillating attention span, brain fog days, and hyperfocus. I don’t try to create when I can’t.
There’s also a big spiritual element to my self care, and I used to have a journal discipline that was a key component of that, which I started in 2006. This year, as in another bad mental health year for me, I haven’t been able to keep it up. This year has been about finding new ways to engage with the world, with the Divine, with fellow believers and worshippers, and to express my spirituality and find new (to me) disciplines and practices that will work for me at this stage of my life.
I’m still incorporating journaling into this, as writing as a big part of my life, but in a different format to my usual one… and I’m giving myself time and space to figure this out and try a few things without pressuring myself to ‘get it right’ straight away.
So I’m chalking self care up as my main 2020 achievement, from the small things to the bigger things.
Favourite Community Moments
Around the end of March I found the brand new and growing Romancing the Gothic community which was an amazing way to connect with people and learn so many cool things. I live tweet the free lectures and talks, and have made so many great new friends!
Nita Pan put together the Wraiths Writing With Wine group, alcohol entirely optional, where we meet up twice a month and socialise online and chat about our projects. The Discord server has been so helpful for accountability and support! I’ve had so much fun and really enjoyed getting to know people (with some overlap from RtG!)
Favourite Reads
I can’t settle my brain to read very much. Last year, I read 10 books. In 2018 I read 3. I think I may have read more than 3 but wasn’t using Goodreads as much, so I’ve forgotten what they were. Anyway, this year my goal was 12 – one a month. I upped it to 20 and read 25. I’m including short stories here as well, because sometimes I can only read very short things. I read way more erotica than is pictured here, but hey-ho.
Highlights were:
Hungry Business by Maria DeBlassie
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Dare by Harley LaRoux
Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology ed. Celine Frohn
From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury
Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
POETRY
How to Unpeel a Monster, by Nimue Brown
The Evolution of a Girl by L. E. Bowman
Favourite Writing Moments 2020
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FAVOURITE MOMENT 1: Wrote a novel last year. Finished it this year. Got feedback on it. Gutted the novel, rewrote the whole middle section, added a prologue and an epilogue. Further critique and edits/revisions to come in 2021, and the release! While you wait for the ARC announcement, add Thirteenth to your Goodreads.
FAVOURITE MOMENT 2: Was published in the horror anthology F is for Fear by Red Cape Publishing. My story is one of 13 tales of terror, and is called THE SOUND OF DARKNESS. It came out in October 2020.
FAVOURITE MOMENT 3: My novella THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND was accepted into the forthcoming anthology Spooky by Association, ed. Nita Pan. Really excited for this!
FAVOURITE PROJECT 2020: Without a doubt, Eldritch Girls Just Want to Have Fun, started January 2020 and co-written with Nita Pan. My post on the co-writing process is here. It’s my first co-written project, and I’m loving the process and the whole experience. It’s also one of my favourite things to write.
Snippets I like!
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December 29, 2020
Follow me on Spotify for Reading/Character Playlists
December 28, 2020
2021 ~ Looking Forwards
So what are your goals for 2021? …Perhaps that’s an unfair question as my main “plan” is to hold all plans lightly.
This year mainly taught me that whatever plans we make and take for granted can be undone or thwarted in ways that never occurred to me would be possible, and the frustration has been difficult to overcome at times. So I am going to look forwards with hope and a whole list of possibilities, but try not to hold on to them.
I never make New Year’s resolutions anyway, and when I do they are usually a long list of increasingly grandiose and ridiculous things, like “visit every sea area in the shipping forecast” which my husband has always wanted to do, but we still haven’t managed. This year I have a few more practical things in mind, and a few schemes I don’t want to unveil just yet because who even knows what might happen. But I do have a few things I can share already.
1. The much-anticipated second novel set in Pagham-on-Sea, Thirteenth, is going to be released!
Genre: Weird Gothic | Adult | Eldritch Horror
Wordcount: 100K
Release Date: tbc – March 2021
THIRTEENTH is an eldritch family drama that puts a Lovecraftian twist on HANNIBAL RISING x FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, set it in East Sussex. Content Warnings for drug use, self harm, suicide ideation, violence, gore, body horror, and strong language.
2. My short historical weird fiction novella The Reluctant Husband is going to be in the SPOOKY BY ASSOCIATION anthology. It is set in the 1930s and features the awfully mediocre Nathan Montague Porter, civil servant, book collector and dabbler in arcane secrets, who gets more than he bargained for when his dabbling draws attention from the Watcher, an entity whose presence overshadows Nathan’s life. It is a kind of anti-romance, in which Nathan courts an eldritch tea lady, Dierdre Wend, to get some answers and ends up as the title suggests.
3. I want to write more short stories in 2021. I have made a list of anthology deadlines up to March and already submitted one piece. I have another in the beta stages, and a few more ideas. Let’s see how this goes. Pieces that are not accepted will be worked on further, and possibly I will release my own anthology, or continue to shop them around. That sounds like 2022’s problem.
4. Reading for pleasure is very hard for me when my brain refuses to cooperate. I DNF things a lot, not because of quality but because I can’t focus. Having my usual routine and structure taken from me really doesn’t help. My Goodreads goal this year will be the same as last year: 12 books, one a month. I count short stories and novellas in my score. If it looks like I will get to 20, I will increase it!
5. To reveal at least one of my two secrets. MWAHAHAAAA. There’s a hint regarding one of them in this post.
Wishing You A Happy New Year
So I wish you all a very happy new year, and hope that it will bring some good/better things your way. What are your goals/aims/plans/hopes/dreams for the coming year? Feel free to share them in the comments if you’d like!
December 27, 2020
The Crows: Theme Tune by Gemma Cartmell
YOU MAY REMEMBER that I reviewed the novella The Truth in Lies by Gemma Cartmell earlier in 2020. That post is here. Gemma Cartmell is also a musician and composer, and her YouTube Channel showcases her work – ambient, instrumental, moody and Gothic.
Gemma Cartmell
Website
Bandcamp
Soundcloud
YouTube
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
I commissioned this short theme for The Crows, and I love it! It’s a perfect piece for the story of a ruined manor house regaining its former glory through slow, painful renovations, and the dark secrets it holds gradually coming to light in the process. What do you think? I’ve posted some original art from the novel below…
Fairwood House, known locally as ‘The Crows’, by Tom Brown – GothicalTomB on Twitter, hopelessmaine on InstagramYou can read the first 5 chapters for free on Wattpad – try before you buy! If you want the paperback, it’s available on Amazon and contains five original illustrations by Tom Brown, including the one featured here. The ebook is available across all digital platforms, but you can also buy it directly from me via my Ko-Fi shop or here on my website. It contains three out of the five original illustrations by Tom Brown.
But why did I commission this short theme tune, and will there be more music? Well… you’ll have to watch this space and see what is coming in 2021.
December 19, 2020
Ghostly Advent Calendar Days 19-25
A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
SHAKESPEARE, A WINTER’S TALE
Of sprites and goblins.
In celebration of the release of F is for Fear, featuring 13 tales of terror including my own short story, ‘The Sound of Darkness’, 25+ stories of ghosts, ghouls and spooky goings-on have been collected for you here, all ready to be accessed and read by the fireside.
Days 1-7 were in this post: links to historical ghosts, 1100s-1600s!
Days 8-18 are here – ghosts of the 1700s and 1800s, with fiction thrown in. Enjoy the jumbled windows, free book links and ghost stories galore!
This is the final installment: days 19-25. Enjoy! Day 24 is a link to a ghost story telling event on that day [GMT], so you might want to click on that window a little early…
December 14, 2020
Cover Reveal and Q&A with C. M. Rosens
Front cover design by Rebecca F. Kenney | wraparound design C. M. RosensExtract from THIRTEENTH – strong language
~ Q&A: The Crows, Writing, and Me ~
To view the videos for this Q&A with my full answers, check out this YouTube Playlist! It contains all Pagham-on-Sea relevant videos. These questions are related to the novel already published, The Crows.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbmPrtrWHxBBN3JxX1jEFmjdzm2PIln2P
Where did you get your ideas for the story [The Crows] and the characters?
@gracievhemphill (Twitter) | @graciehemphill (Insta)
The first draft was my first attempt at a fluffy mystery-romance. Most of my first drafts are totally different to their finished products, and I made so many changes which happened organically as I explored the world more and populated it with different characters and communities. I wanted to create something like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a sense of magic in the mundane and familiar. The story came out of the setting and the characters drove it, and I realised I wanted characters that could explore elements of my own mental health journey and also explored and Gothicised experiences close to me. Ricky came out of that, while the house was inspired mainly by Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the Vincent Price film The House on Haunted Hill, Stephen King’s Rose Red and Salem’s Lot, and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. But I wanted to subvert the ‘evil sentient building’ narrative and create something else. Once I have the basic ideas I explore them with experimental writing and things develop as I write, and the editing process and beta process helps me to filter the best themes and ideas and sharpen everything up for the finished product.
What’s next for Pagham-on-Sea?
@FrankGothic (Twitter) | frankr.lopez (Insta)
After THIRTEENTH, which is the next novel coming out early next year (2021), I’m going to focus on the goremance spin off ELDRITCH GIRLS set in Brighton (but it does have one Pagham-on-Sea scene), and a werewolf thriller where you get to explore Barker Crescent and the werewolf community of the town. I have so many ideas though, but that’s what’s coming ‘next’. There will be more stories with Fairwood House/The Crows and the Porters, though, fear not! But the other novels, which will all standalone and form their own set of spin off series too, I think, will hopefully coalesce into one big jigsaw picture. I kind of like the Discworld series approach, where there are overlapping events and characters and settings, but so many different stories to enjoy within the world, and you can start at any point with any of them. That’s what I’m going for here.
Who won the flower show this year?
@MasonHawth0rne (Twitter)
The flower show 2020 was a bit controversial because it was nearly cancelled over lockdown, but the judges did end up going around people’s gardens on individual socially distanced walking circuits and viewing some entries. The event was officially cancelled in its usual form, and the fate of the 2021 show is similarly uncertain at the moment. Honorary winners were announced in ‘participation’ awards, with no overall winner. This was more to recognise the hard work the entrants had put in, and to make it less disappointing for everyone.
How are the vampire nightclubs faring in the age of social distancing?
@MasonHawth0rne (Twitter)
Well, obviously all night clubs are closed and the vampire-run cafés are under the curfew rules and takeaway only, staff are furloughed. Vampires tend to have good communal resources from their nefarious gains, usually centuries of killing people and stealing their belongings, so the money isn’t an issue, but lockdown and social distancing is having some serious effects on hunting habits. One nightclub, Twilight, has a very bad track record with underage clientele and non-consensual feeding and drink spiking (with vampire blood). It’s no surprise that the vampires known to frequent this club were the same ones who were engaged in bad practice over lockdown, luring willing donors into their ‘bubble’ and giving them over to their whole nest as blood rations, and attacking dog walkers and joggers/people taking their daily exercise walk. Several vampires have been de-fanged and starved by authorities as examples to the others, and again, it’s no coincidence that these are mainly regulars at the Twilight club.
What’s your favourite bit of folklore?
@MostlyVanilla (Twitter)
I’ve always liked a good death omen, a black dog tale, and anything vampire related. Vampire folklore and revenant lore, corpse roads, all that kind of stuff, anything death relate basically, that’s got to be my favourite.
If you could go back in time and fight someone, who would you fight?
@MostlyVanilla (Twitter)
…I reckon I could take Bonny Prince Charlie. Not for any political reason or anything. He just sounds like someone I could take.
Do you ever base your characters on real people?
@foodforflo (Twitter)
If I want them to be realistic then yes, I base them on at least the way real people behave, or the way I have observed people behave, or from personality traits I’ve seen in action or have myself. I sometimes have people in mind for certain characters in terms of personality or appearance, but then other things take over and they hopefully become their own character or person and are not recognisable as the person I was thinking of.
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
@foodforflo (Twitter)
About a year? Including the edits and revisions and beta processes, I’d say a year and a bit to give people chance to read and comment. The formatting etc may take a little bit longer.
Are there any big things you decided to edit out of The Crows?
@foodforflo (Twitter)
Lucretia’s skeleton, and Mercy’s POV sections. You can read snippets of Mercy on my website! I’ll post the skeleton chapter edit as a bonus, which was originally how she met Ricky, and learned about the wishing well. You can read another cut part, from Carrie’s POV, here already.
I imagine you mostly cackling with mad delight when writing, but do you ever frighten yourself?
@Nimue_B (Twitter) | WordPress: Druidlife
SPOILERS FOR THE CROWS
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So there’s one concept I used in The Crows that genuinely does scare me, and it’s the idea of being infected with parasites or being drugged knowing what will happen to you afterwards, against your will. It didn’t frighten me as I was writing it, but it did horrify me, and just thinking about it too much really bothers me a lot. It’s the one thing that I deeply disliked writing.
December 10, 2020
Cover Reveal + Q&A! Mon 14 Dec
Cover Design: Rebecca F. KenneyQ&A with C. M. Rosens
Do you have any questions about The Crows, Thirteenth, the world I’ve created or the characters that inhabit it? Anything you’d like to know about me? Ask me now in the run-up to Monday, and I’ll answer all your questions and post my responses! [I can keep your questions anonymous if you prefer, or give you a shout-out by tagging you on social media].
I will post my responses in video format Monday 9pm GMT, but I’ll also try and type up my responses in a transcript (or if not a direct transcript more or less the same!) and post to this site. I might try my hand at Insta Live and post to IGTV, but a recorded response would allow me to post snippets on Twitter and to Facebook as well, and upload to YouTube, so I may go for that!
Submit your Questions!
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