Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 3

thursday

Feeling a little overwhelmed by the in-tray, it would seem. #doodlesofinstagram

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Jan 13, 2016 at 8:50pm PST

Cherry Crow Children: on fighting, and fighting back

To celebrate the launch of Cherry Crow Children way back when, the plan was to do something of a blog tour — but it fell by the wayside because Life.

However, the first of the posts are written, and the launch of the ebook seems as good a time as any to put them up. So over the next few weeks I'll be posting a few pieces which explore the topics the collection touches upon.

 

I adore a good fight scene, and if the writers have choreographed me one where a woman gets to demonstrate her prowess, I love that most of all. (Although there will always be a special place in my heart for fight scenes which poke fun at our collective dream of being innately badhorse, vis a vis the one in Bridget Jones Diary.)

I don’t tend to write characters with martial prowess, however — because what interests me more is what we do when we can’t fight.

There are plenty of obvious reasons — most of them to do with lack of equality and unequal privilege structures — why starting in with some fisticuffs is simply not an option. Even laying those aside, however, most societies have a nuanced set of rules designed to minimise the true incidence of physical force.

So when we see an injustice we want to right, what’s left to us? What can we use, and what can we do, to bring about change? That’s one of the questions I explore in the stories of Cherry Crow Children.

All my protagonists are in some way disempowered.

Cadan is a stranger in town, confronted by unfamiliar customs and a culture grown as circuitous and puzzling as its geography. The townsfolk’s passive resistance to his urgency disarms his familiar tactics, saps him of his usual drive, and leaves him confused and rudderless.

Eliane is hampered by a generous heart and her instinctive empathy: able to see everyone’s perspective, she is eternally driven (and expected) to put others’ needs ahead of her own.

Mara is cripplingly poor and has family to support; anything she dares will risk more lives than her own.

Claudia, raised by a community so close-knit every individual is all but family and privacy is considered suspicious, has received from her mother the most unique and dangerous gift of all: a secret.

They all fight with what they have to hand: words; manoeuvring; logic and social conditioning. They don’t always win – not because I think that physical effort is the only way to win, but because I wanted to reflect how exhausting it can be, to have to fight the whole weight of society bearing down against you. But people are a resourceful breed; inevitably, we will devise other weapons. And when nothing else remains, people themselves are also weapons. And so, in the end, each of my characters must use the one thing they can claim as their own: what their society has labelled as their “weakness” – their bodies; their principles; their silence; their stubbornness.

Sometimes, we have nothing with which to fight — and that’s when fighting back can be the most important thing to do. And sometimes, when we fight back, we discover that we, ourselves — our willingness, our daring, our tenacity — are the ultimate weapon.

wild cat

Bought Ani a (scraggly, horrible, neglected) pot of cat grass to enjoy and I guess she likes it because this is where she's sat herself for twelve hours solid now. #catsofinstagram #burmesecatsofinstagram #authorcats

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Jan 5, 2016 at 6:32pm PST

family in chalk

Tonight's quiet play before bed involved some drawing on the new easel Squawk received for her birthday. After the usual gamut of flowers and monsters (and the truly baffling instruction to "draw blue! using green!"), Squawk asked me to draw a picture of her:

Then she wanted a picture of Dad:

So then she drew a picture of me, "with a BIG chin…and eyeballs and eyeballs and eyeballs and hair and eyeballs…"

…I look like Kylo Ren. (Or a whirling-eyed Elvis?)

it wasn't even that hot

This cat has run out of fucks to give. #burmesecatsofinstagram #catsofinstagram

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Jan 1, 2016 at 9:11pm PST

Aww…she was broody when she died :(

Aww…she was broody when she died

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Dec 22, 2015 at 8:57pm PST

BOO!

BOO!

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Dec 22, 2015 at 8:08pm PST

cats and notebooks

Mum's cat has decided to help me with my note-taking. Because of course. #burmesecatsofinstagram #catsofinstagram #bulletjournal #bujocats

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Dec 17, 2015 at 11:29pm PST

meowface

Squawk wearing her "cat mark" (mask) and cape. Her superhero name, she says, is "Meowface!" #toddlerlife

A photo posted by Deborah Kalin (@deborahkalin) on Dec 14, 2015 at 10:52pm PST

newsletter

A quick post today, for those who didn't already catch it on facebook or twitter, to announce that I'm starting an official newsletter.

It's still very much a nebulous creature, but it's intended to be a sort of set-and-forget reminder system to announce new publications. So if you don't want to trawl through the blog to find out when books and/or short stories are freely available, the newsletter is for you! At this stage I'm imagining no more than four (more like two!) newsletters a year.

So if you're interested, fling your email in the subscription box.