Angela Slatter's Blog, page 59

Dublin Ghost Story Festival

I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to this!

Never been to Dublin, despite all the Flynns, Elliotts, and Hortons in  my family tree.

Sure, only three days in Dublin, but hey! Dublin!

More Tor.com Talking: Angela and Lisa on the Love-Hate Relationship with Short Stories

Still talking!

The Bone Swans of C.S.E. Cooney

C. S. E. Cooney (A.K.A. The Glorious Claire) is the author of Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium 2015), the title story of which was nominated for the 2015 Nebula Award. Her novella The Two Paupers, the second installment of her Dark Breakers series, will shortly be appearing in Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016.  She is an audiobook narrator for Tantor Media, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and the Rhysling Award-winning author of the poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction can be found in Black Gate, Strange Horizons, Apex, GigaNotoSaurus, Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 5, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk,  Steam-Powered II, The Book of Dead Things, Cabinet des Fées, Stone Telling, and Goblin Fruit. She lurks on Twitter as @csecooney.

1. What do new readers need to know about C. S. E. Cooney?

What I’ve noticed is reviewers often describe C. S. E. Cooney as “playful” and “lyrical.”

Now, I tend to like the former better than the latter, because “playful” draws more readers to my sandbox. Which is just where I like them! So I can play with them! Whereas “lyrical,” you know, might frighten them away again. It would intimidate me. Unless someone went on to explain, very gently and enthusiastically, “You know, lyrical. Like Dr. Seuss. Or Edward Gorey.”

(My father once described my early poetry as a cross between Shakespeare and Edward Lear. So of course I had to go and re-read “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.” And whaddya know? He was RIGHT!)

Other adjectives that seem to pop up are “ wild” and “gleeful” and “macabre.” I feel like I should come with a warning label!

But one of my favorite things anyone has ever said about my writing came from my friend Amal El-Mohtar. In addition to being my shield-sister and sometimes-collaborator in a performance group called The Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, she is also one of the finest writers in my circle, and one of the first editors to publish my poetry. She told me, after reading my novella “The Big Bah-Ha,” “Your writing has such muscular velocity.”

So, I guess . . . Let new readers know that C. S. E. Cooney is the lyrical lovechild of Doctor Learspeare Goreuss. She is the abattoir where fairy tales go singing to the slaughter. She will happily flex her writerly writing muscles for you while bouncing up and down at impossible speeds. Her sandbox wants you in it. She likes to play.

Oh, and. Maybe you should drink tea before reading. PG Tips preferably. Coffee if you insist.

2. What was the inspiration for your collection Bone Swans?

I had this novella, “The Big Bah-Ha,” that had been published by a small press that had since folded. I took it to my buddy Mike Allen, a fine poet and writer and editor himself, who’d mentioned at one point some things he might have done differently had he been editing my text. I said, “Now that it belongs to me again, can you maybe tell me some of those things? I want to re-release it as an e-book. Self-published, that kind of thing. Better than languishing.”

He said, “I’ll do you one better. Want to put together a collection?” He was doing a Kickstarter for a new Clockwork Phoenix anthology, and wanted something new to offer to his backers. I’d be that new thing.

And I was like:

SMILEY EMOJI DEVIL EMOJI EXCLAMATION POINT GOAT ICON HEAVY METAL ICON AAUGHH MIKE ALLEN AAUUGH!!!

In a nutshell.

Four of the stories were previously published. “Life on the Sun” (Black Gate Magazine) and “Martyr’s Gem” (GigoNotoSaurus) were both based on dreams.

“Milkmaid” (also GigaNotoSaurus—one of the few novella markets) came from this idea of non-beautiful characters getting beautiful love stories. Also maybe it was time to flip some old tropes upside-down and see what crawled out from beneath.

“The Big Bah-Ha” was born of a few previously mentioned characters called “The Tall Ones” demanding further stories. They’d only gotten mention in poems before—like in “Wild Over Tombs Does Grow.” The Flabberghast, in particular, insisted I devote more ink-on-page to his magnificence. His time to shine, he claimed. From that white light he swallowed, right up through his diamond teeth.

The title story was original to the collection.

The story behind “Bone Swans of Amandale” is this. So, for a few seconds, I was involved in a New York City writing group. This included Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Catherynne Valente, Kat Howard, Lev Grossman, Theodora Goss and myself. One day, I was flipping through a Mercer Mayer illustration of The Pied Piper while Doctor Goss stared out the window like a Swan Princess surveying the Hudson. She remarked, apropos of nothing, that she’d love to have a rose named after her. A Mercer Mayer rat winked up at me from the page.

That was when it happened. SHA-BOOM went the cannons! Dora Rose, the rat Maurice, beautiful Nicolas. There they were, cavorting. I couldn’t write the thing fast enough.

3. What is it about folk and fairy tales, myth and legend that attracts you?

They’re like the bullet points on an outline that ends in a trilogy ten years later. The thread and buttons and length of cloth that become a gown, if you have the right machine, the template, the time.

Like items on a shopping list that, with the application of labor, a liberal hand with spices, a pre-heated oven, music to dance to, a bottle of wine to make the work of cooking a bit more giddy, turn into a feast.

They’re a place to start.

4. What was the first story you ever told?

You know those games you play on the playground where the sand is the lava and you leap from obstacle to obstacle to get to the castle, and there are pirates and a drawbridge and big spiders because you watched the movie KRULL too many times in your 80’s childhood?

I wrote something based on that, in third grade. My first chapter book. THE HALLS OF DIFFICULTY.

5. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

Early childhood: The Brothers Grimm. Hans Christian Anderson, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, Stories for Free Children, Reading Rainbow.

Middle Childhood: Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux, Susan Cooper, the Trixie Belden books, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, L. M. Montgomery.

Teens: Robin McKinley, Patricia A. McKillip, Anne McCaffrey, the Brian Froud Faerielands series, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Mercedes Lackey, the Datlow/Windling Fairy Tale Anthologies, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Georgette Heyer, Charles De LInt.

Twenties: Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula K. Leguin, James Enge, Ysabeau Wilce, Sharon Shinn, Dorothy Dunnett, Terry Pratchett, Bulgakov, Voltaire, Peter Barnes (“Red Noses” in particular), Caryl Churchill (“The Skriker”), Tony Morrison, “Beloved”), Dostoyevsky, N. K. Jemisin.

Thirties: Kage Baker, Liz Duffy Adams, Carlos Hernandez, Nnedi Okorafor, Lin Manuel Miranda . . .

Actually, it seems now that I am surrounded by the most marvelous writers, and I have the least time to read I ever did!!! And it’s a pity. Because this is the time I’d be best at reading, maybe. The time I’d be paying closest attention. Probably also why I’ve gotten so slow. I only ever just ate books before.

6. What was the impulse behind the very saucy and wonderful The Witch in the Almond Tree?

Hormones.

Heh heh heh.

7. You’re a writer, a poet, a singer, a narrator, an actress and all-round amazeballs talented human being – how do you manage to balance ALL OF THE EVERYTHING?

Well, I wasn’t ALL those things until last year. For a long time I worked at a used bookstore, which gave me a lot of time to read, a lot of exposure to books and authors. Didn’t pay much, and I had a long commute—but that let me read. And I wrote along the edges, deep into the night, and on weekends.

Then I moved to Rhode Island, where I sold admission tickets for three years to Mystic Aquarium. Again, the pay wasn’t much. There would be weeks wherein I only worked a day and a half. Sure, I had college debt, and did most of my grocery shopping at food pantries, but I also had plenty of time and quiet in which to write.

I was so grateful—both for having a job at all in that economy, and also for the time that poverty afforded me.

Time. It’s so beautiful. And so expensive.

When I got my audiobook narrating gig last year—the best job in the world!!!—all my time to write and read disappeared. I had a new job, new roommates, new commute, new long-distance relationship. I had no idea how tired all this would make me, how riled and restless my mind became trying to juggle it.

I no longer had hours and horizon to fill. I had trouble with my, er, “sitzfleisch,” as it were.

But my beloved Carlos Hernandez, himself A MOST EXTRAORDINARY WRITER, has this GREAT HABIT of popping awake at 3 in the morning. You know, to grade papers and stuff.

Now, I wasn’t going to pop awake at three. No way, no how. But I could just about manage 4:30 AM. (Plus, we don’t live in the same state, so it was an opportunity to Skype him and coo over his curly hair.)

And so, writing on Skype dates from about 5 AM to 6:30 every morning, writing in tiny, scratchy, flaky, teeth-to-cement amounts, I managed to finish the fourth draft of a novel. Which I didn’t think was possible under the circumstances.

So that’s about how I manage my time these days. I am very jealous of it. I covet it. I get a bit wild-eyed and sharp-tongued when it’s threatened, even by so fine a thing as an invitation to spend time with people I love.

At least this year I’m not also trying to crowdfund for two EPs. Then figuring out how to make them.

I’d never done such a thing before! My “Brimstone Rhine” project was a whim. I thought it was important. The sort of hubris that says, “Even though I’ve never written songs before, HEY, GUESS WHAT, these songs I wrote are pretty great!!! PEOPLE SHOULD HEAR THEM!!!”

And then, not knowing how, not even being able to play my own instrument, just sing a little, make an album happen. What was I thinking? But the thing is done. No regrets. I wouldn’t necessarily do it again—at least, not like that. But I don’t regret having done it.

Which is not the same as saying I WOULD have done it had I but known THEN what I know NOW.

8. You are allowed to invite five people for dinner and shenanigans – characters or writer: name them and why are they on your guest list?

Cordelia Vorkosigan (Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor), Gabi Réal (The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria), Mary Griffith (Kage Baker’s Empress of Mars), Aphra Behn (particularly, in the play “Or,” by Liz Duffy Adams), and Hypatia of Alexandria.

Why?

Because I want to be a fly on their wall, dude.

9. What is your favourite story, novel or short or novella or epic poem, of all time?

Uh. That changes.

But my CURRENT favorite NOVEL of ALL TIME is Cordelia’s Honor. (It’s been on my list a while.) On that list has also been The Master and Margarita. And also the entire series known as The Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett.

Novella: “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire,” by Ysabeau Wilce. (Again, these are just present favorites. But once a favorite, always a favorite. But I do get to have other favorites. There just isn’t enough time to be monogamous about literature.)

Epic poem, epic poem, epic poem . . .

Well. It’s a long poem, but I’m not sure if it’s epic. “The White Road” by Neil Gaiman had a profound effect on me. When I first read it as a youngish twenties-something, I thought, “CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND I ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES WHO WRITE STORY-POEMS, WHAT?”

I mean, not including Homer and The Highwayman. You know.

That said, every time I hear Rose Lemberg read a poem aloud, I sort of collapse into happy lava inside.

10. What’s next for C.S.E. Cooney?

I HAVE FINISHED MY NOVEL MISCELLANEOUS STONES: ASSASSIN. 

First, it goes to the writing group. Then, it will find an agent. THEN, IT WILL TAKE THE WORLD BY STORM!!!

ALTERNATELY, nobody or their mother will want it, and then I WILL WEEP ALL OVER MY FACE, and then I will SELF-PUBLISH IT and write MORE. Because this is the 21st CENTURY, YO!

I want to write the third installment of my Dark Breakers novella trilogy, called “Desdemona and the Deep.” Then maybe collect all three self-published ebooks and sell it as a print book called DARK BREAKERS. To someone. Somewhere.

And I want to write the continuing adventures of a few characters from “The Bone Swans of Amandale” in two stories called “Nicolas and the Oracles” and “Silver and Bone.” Then collect all three in something called SILVER AND BONE. And try to sell it to someone. Somewhere.

And I want to write a musical. And more albums. And help design a few games. Games are fun, I’m learning. Slowly, but I learn.

 

My Preciouuuuuuussss!!

In my grabby paws at last!

A Daughter of No Nation: Alyx Dellamonica

Photo by Kelly Robson, who is also excellent

I love Canadians. I would collect more of them but I always run into problems with Customs. One of my new Canadian faves is the very talented Alyx Dellamonica, author of the Most Excellent Hidden Sea Tales trilogy from Tor (a well as the duopoly Indigo Springs and Blue Magic), inventor of Stormwrack, creative writing teacher, Clarion West Borg Alum, and general delightful person. Today she talks about choosing cool books, balancing her teaching and writing lives, and inviting Miles Vorkosigan to dinner. Her latest book is Daughter of No Nation, and you need it.

1. First of all, what do new readers need to know about Alyx Dellamonica?

I am prolific! An absolute busy bee! And so there’s a lot of my writing to be had, in a number of styles and genres. My publisher, Tor, has sample chapters of all of my novels up on their website, along with a bunch of stories that are prequels to my current trilogy. But there’s also my baby werewolf has two mommies story, “The Cage, a time-travel horror piece called “The Color of Paradox,” and a story, “Wild Things,” about magical contamination in the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Or, if military SF with squid aliens is more your thing, I have Proxy War stories up at Strange Horizons and Lightspeed. You’d rather have an alternate history of Joan of Arc? I’ve got that too!

2. When did you first start writing and can you remember the first thing you finished?

I was writing Dr. Seuss-inspired doggerel as soon as I could actually put words on a page: I made books of poetry by stapling illustrated pages of badly scrawled manuscript together as a six year old. My first novel–or so I thought–was completed when I was in fourth grade… I was inspired by a Canadian novelist named Gordon Korman, who at thirteen published a book called This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall! I finished my first real novel at some point during university and then wrote something like three more trunk books, even as I was selling my first short stories. Then Tor bought my debut novel, Indigo Springs.

3. How do you balance the life of teaching with your own creativity?

The primary challenge I face as an instructor is less with writing than with reading. I see so much beginner fiction that I occasionally have a subconscious response whereby I don’t want to read anything anymore. Partly it’s because I’m tired, and I read all day… but it’s also because most beginner fiction isn’t all that good, or fun to read, even when it shows promise. I have learned to work my way back into fiction reading after a stretch of heavy marking by rereading my favorite novels. This has a benefit, which is that when you set aside time to reread, you come to understand–on a deeper level–just why your favorite novels work and what the authors did to make them so terrific.

My other strategies for this are to keep an eye out for cool books to blurb–my editors are great at picking things I’ll love–and to review for Tor.com. I am also broadening my reading of short fiction.

4. Where did the original idea for Child of a Hidden Sea come from?

Indigo Springs is a novel I’m really proud of, not least because it’s feminist and it has a lot of queer characters, plus it won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. It’s a bit of a sad novel, though, and the sequel, Blue Magic, has a massive body count as the magical/environmental disaster at its heart spreads across the world. After those books were done, I vowed to write something fun.

Having decided that, I made a long list of everything I think is fun, which included hopelessly nerdy topics like “Biodiversity!” and “The History of Fingerprinting!” and more obvious candy, like “Pirates!” and “Boys with albatross wings!” And then, rather than picking and choosing, I decided to see how many of the items on that list, which filled two pages, I could shoehorn into one book, or perhaps three.

5. When did Sophie Hansa start talking to you?

I created a sporty and outdoors-oriented protagonist who overshares her every thought–I lean to the overly tactful–and then gave her a profession I know a fair amount about, which was nature photography. We all of us give way to periodic fantasies, after all, about the people we would be if we were, let’s be face it, completely different human beings. Every now and then, we tell ourselves: “In another world, if I wasn’t asthmatic and afraid of heights, I would totally be a firefighter!” So I imagined an athletic, emotionally expressive serial camper who thinks nothing of rappelling off cliffs to get a shot of baby birds hatching, or of cave diving for the sheer exploratory thrill of it even though the real me’s feelings on that subject are “OMG, do you have any clue how dangerous that is? And also cold?”

Since Sophie’s primary motivation in any situation tends to be curiosity, all I had to do to get her talking was to present her with a puzzle. Look, Sophie, you’ve fallen into another world. What world? How do you know it’s different? Why don’t I recognize that species of shark? And…. we’re off!

6. Who were/are your literary heroes/influences?

As a kid I read a lot of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and a fair bit of Andre Norton and Harlan Ellison. There was no censorship at home, so if Jaws was in the house, I read Peter Benchley. If Shakespeare was in the house, I read Shakespeare. (Playboy was in the house, so I read that too. They used to publish quite interesting fiction; I don’t know if they still do.) When I got to grade school, I found our library had the Foundation books and the Heinlein juveniles. A poet named Monty Reid gave me Walk to the Walls of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas, when I was sixteen. I also read–and still read–a lot of mysteries. As a first grader it was the series books, like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift… even in a pinch the Bobbsey Twins would do. Finally, I had a series of history books that my mother had passed down, which were the biographies of famous U.S. women. A lot of these were the stories of women who rose to the blinding personal height of growing up to be a First Lady, but in the mix were Sacagawea, Julia Howe, Jane Adams,  Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a number of other suffragettes and U.S. women of letters.

7. You get to invite five fictional characters to dinner: what’s your guest list look like?

I’d like to meet Nancy Drew. I’d have to meet Frank Mackie from Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels. We’d need Miles Vorkosigan, just to ensure that, y’know, shit happened. Thursday Next, I think. And to round everything out, I’d like to add Kivrin from Connie Willis’s Oxford time travel novels. In which case, can we please invite Connie, too?

8. Which book, either fictional or otherwise, would you say taught you the most about writing?

I’m not sure there’s any one book. I used to get Writer’s Digest every month as a teen and–because I was just starting out–there was always something in it that seemed new-to-me and exciting and untried. If I’d started to slow down on churning out what we’d now call my juvenalia, that monthly sense of the writing world, out there waiting for me, would get me started again. This was before the Internet, and so was really valuable.

The fiction writers who had the strongest effect on me as a beginning author were Madeline L’Engle, Bradbury, King and especially Peter Straub. I went to Clarion West in 1995 with a list of Straub-y prose tricks I wanted to learn.

9. What can you tell us about Daughter of No Nation?

A Daughter of No Nation is the middle book in the Hidden Sea Tales trilogy. I describe these books as *Narnia for Environmentalists,* because in them Sophie Hansa discovers a world where the magic you can work in your home nation is entirely dependent on your microclimate: you write spells using the species available to you.

Sophie isn’t especially welcome on this other world, which is called Stormwrack, but she’s trying to figure out its relationship to Earth, and she’s deeply interested in this guy, Garland Parrish, who is the captain of the sailing vessel Nightjar. This would be easier to deal with if her little sister, Verena, didn’t have a raging crush on Parrish.  Sophie’s also trying to figure out why everyone thinks she should stay well away from her birth father,  who is essentially a duelling Supreme Court justice from one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Because, really, what better way is there to improve the concept of Supreme Court Justice than to give them the power to settle out of court disputes with a big wood-chipper of a sword?

10. What’s next for Alyx Dellamonica?

I’m busy figuring out what my next book will be like, and writing short stories in the meantime. One will be out soon at BENEATH CEASELESS SKIES: It takes place on Stormwrack, and is called “The Boy Who Would Not Be Enchanted.”

 

 

ICYMI – St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls …

… is available to read over at Tor.com.

This tale won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story last year and is a good taster for my World Fantasy Award winning collection The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings.

With art by Kathleen Jennings, naturally.

The Dark meets The Jacaranda Wife

“The Jacaranda Wife” was probably my first publication in a  high-profile, widely distributed anthology – Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again from HarperCollins – and it gives me great joy to see it getting another life over at The Dark’s May Issue. You might seriously consider sending some funds to their Patreon account.

It will also be in my collection from Prime Books, A Feast of Sorrows: Stories (edited by Paula Guran), available in October this year.

And this ish already has a very positive review! Thanks, SFRevu.

New Nightmare Magazine!

The May issue of the most excellent Nightmare has an excellent line up (as it always does, let’s face it).

This month, we have original fiction from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Old Horror Writer”) and Lisa Goldstein (“Sawing”), along with reprints by Joe Hill (“Twittering from the Circus of the Dead”) and Sarah Langan (“The Lost”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Angela Slatter.

So, yes, more talking from me – thanks for the excellent questions, Lisa Morton!.

Longform vs Shortform …

… plus carrots and sticks … and hands. All of the waving hands.

Just a little something …

… from The Very Kathleen Jennings for the Vigil launch bags.