Angela Slatter's Blog, page 90

Tor.com novellas announced …

… and I’m exceedingly pleased to say that mine, Of Sorrow and Such, which returns to the world of Sourdough to check on one of my favourite characters, Patience Sykes, is one of them!

There are also works by KJ Parker, Seanan McGuire, Daniel Polansky, Emily Foster, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

The rest of the press release is here.

Further details as soon as they come to hand.

Next Project

Kathleen’s bid for a post-it note book

Kathleen Jennings is trying to convince me that our next project together should be done on post-its.

I have said ‘no’ for I am apparently a curmudgeon.

Nevertheless, we’ll be doing my story “Flight” as an illustrated book.

The Female Factory: Baggage

Baggage is the second story in The Female Factory

How to explain that a really rather nasty story sprang from watching a really adorable documentary?

Angela loves badgers. Angela thinks they’re adorable. Angela might be slightly obsessed with them – to the point where she made Lisa sit down and watch the aforementioned documentary, Badgers – Secrets of the Sett. Lisa also enjoyed the documentary (or said she did) … the important thing to remember is the idea that stuck with her: that badger females can keep fertilised eggs in stasis in the womb for months, until it is safe for them to begin gestation. As if that’s not cool enough, they can also store more than one embryo at a time, fertilised by different boars.

So, when we were looking for a first story for the collection, Lisa brought up this intriguing feature and said, ‘What if a woman could do that?’ We took it further: what if a woman could have absolute control over her reproductive system? What if she could decide how many babies to have, and when, and with whom? And what if big business, in a world where fertility rates are dropping like an out-of-control elevator, found a way to take back that control of a most intimate process?

Thus Robin was born. She was hard to write; she’s not a pleasant character, but there is something one grudgingly admires about her tenacity. The story also challenged all the pink and fluffy ideas about motherhood being a wonderful thing, and examines the harsher side for those who can, and those who cannot, have children.

The Bitterwood Posts: The Maiden in the Ice

The Maiden in the Ice

Her boots are stout, the winter ones, with tiny ridges of metal embedded in the soles to clutch at the slippery surface, and she moves quickly with the light cautious step of a fox approaching a henhouse. Her ears almost hurt from the effort of listening for the slow, dark moan that will tell her the floe is about to betray her. For a while she tries to keep her eyes firmly fixed on her destination, on the silver-ash clump of sedge not so far – yet so very far – away. But the panic she’s tamped down hard gets the better of her, and she looks to the sparkling, treacherous ground upon which she moves, seeking the cracks, the veins, the fissures that are surely forming there.

            But what she sees is something entirely different.

            An oval face; skin sallow – in the sun it will become olive; dark-flecked, large eyes; thick straight brows; an unbalanced mouth, the top lip thin, the bottom full; and hair as black as Rikke has ever seen. Black as nightmares, black as a cunning woman’s cat, black as the water she is trying to escape. Older than Rikke, caught between girl and woman, and suspended in the solid lake as if she’s a statue, standing; head titled back, one arm reaching up, the other pointing downward.

            Rikke shrieks. She forgets the singing winter grass, her mother’s tisane, her mother’s disappointment; she forgets all her fears of a permafrost death, of cold and hoar. She spins about and runs, boots throwing shredded ribbons of rime behind, body moving faster, so much faster than her little legs it is a wonder she does not fall. She clatters into the house making such a noise that Aggi drags herself from bed and Rikke’s father, Gamli, comes running in from outside where he has been seeing to the chickens and the goats. When they decipher their daughter’s shouts, Gamli leaves the little cottage, yelling at the top of his lungs.

            The cry goes up from house to house. ‘Someone’s in the lake!’

 

One of my favourite characters in the Sourdough collection was Ella, who started that  collection in “The Shadow Tree” and threaded throughout several other tales as a kind of malign presence. I’d always wanted to write a story to show where she’d come from, how she came to be exiled from her home. I had the title, “The Maiden in the Ice”, long before the rest of the tale, and the vision of the girl seemingly suspended, but still moving inexorably up towards the surface. Other stories that influenced this one were “The Pied Piper of Hamlin”, Christina Rosetti’s “The Goblin Market”, and Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King”.

As Hepsibah Ballantyne floats through Bitterwood, so does Ella, though more subtly, with scattered mentions of the Plague Maiden. I wanted the idea of kindness rewarded and bad behaviour punished to be the beginning of her journey through this world. The main character, Rikke, is an analogue of the child who wasn’t taken by the Pied Piper because he was lame and couldn’t keep up; Rikke was distracted by her books.

Ella is a character that I’m exploring a lot more in the next collection, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.

 

 

The Writer and the Critic: new casting of the pod

The lovely Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond have released their latest  episode of The Writer and the Critic. You can listen here.

They discuss Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and my Bitterwood Bible (so I will spend the morning listening, in fear).

And a reminder: there’s a Goodreads giveaway of both Bitterwood and Sourdough over here.

She Walks in Shadows

Amazing cover art by Sara Diesel

I’m delighted to say that my story “Lavinia’s Wood” has been accepted for She Walks in Shadows, the first all-women Lovecraft anthology (yes, women do write Lovecraftian fiction, no matter what the rumours say). Thanks to editors extraordinaire Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles!

‘You can’t read, can you?’

The undecayed Whatleys were possessed of an impressive fortune and a strict sense of philanthropy, which was how Lavinia Whatley, either afflicted or blessed – depending upon to whom one spoke – with albinism, came to be invited to the large house located on the correct fork of the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corners.

Despite fine intentions and enthusiastically mouthed better sentiments, all the older members of the sound branch had, at some point, used phrases such as ‘Witch Whatleys’, ‘Lesser Whatleys’, and, perhaps worst of all, ‘Queer Whatleys’. And they’d used them in their children’s hearing; children who stored spite in a more concentrated form, having not been exposed to the world and its doings, to learning things that sometimes diluted the acid of their malice.

Goodreads Giveaway: Sourdough + Bitterwood

Right! My next Goodreads giveaway is for Australia only. It consists of:

1 x hardcopy of Sourdough and Other Tales (now out of print and rather rare)

1 x hardcopy of The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

1 x limited edition book-bag emblazoned with the art of Kathleen Jennings

Go here to enter.

The Bitterwood Posts: The Coffin-maker’s Daughter

I thought I might do a post on each of the stories in The Bitterwood Bible, for anyone who’s interested in the story backgrounds.

Today, it’s “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter”, my British Fantasy Award-winning tale, which originally appeared in the beautiful Fearie Tales anthology edited by Steve Jones and published by Jo Fletcher Books.

“The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter”

When Steve emailed me asking for a submission for this anthology that needed to be ‘more horror than fantasy’, I was casting about for ideas with a bit of personal terror. I don’t really think of myself as a horror writer. My first effort was deemed ‘Good, but I think you can do better’. After some fist shaking and howling (on my part), I went back to work. I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s Lungs for the first time … when “My Boy Builds Coffins” came on, I started to think about a society that regarded coffin-making not simply as a necessary service, but also as an art form. On top of that, it was an eldritch art form required to keep the dead beneath the earth. I wanted a story that had layers of unspoken secrets – and also different sorts of ghosts.

When I heard “Girl with One Eye”, I got a picture of Hepsibah in my mind’s eye: this thin girl standing in front of this heavy door, with a short gamine haircut that had started to grow out and curl a bit because she wasn’t overly given to worrying about her appearance. She was wearing a brown woollen dress, a bit Jane Eyre-like, with long sleeves, buttons up the front and long skirts, and she had on a kind of baker boy’s cap. At her shoulder was the ghost of her father, and Hector is a nasty piece of work. I could hear his voice and knew how adversarial their relationship was, but that no matter how much Hepsibah hated her father, she shared some characteristics with him and that’s why he was still hanging around. The society was a kind of Victorian setting but mixed with some elements similar to the world of Sourdough and Other Stories.

Hepsibah is one of my favourite characters – she’s a terrible mess of a human, but really fascinating. I wanted to give a reader one picture of her and then twist that around at the end, show that she wasn’t as well-adjusted as she at first appeared. That she and her dreadful father had more in common than anyone might think. And she was very important because as soon as I’d written this story, I knew I had the start of a new collection – The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings – because she wasn’t the sort of character who would just quietly go away.

 

Owning Your Face

This is probably one of the most important things you’ll ever watch.

For more of Rob’s story, read Ugly.

Locus Recommended Reading List

Am absolutely delighted to see The Bitterwood Bible has made it onto the Locus Recommended Reading List, alongside works by some thoroughly awesome folks, like Helen Marshall, Robert Shearman, Rjurik Davidson, Kathleen Jennings … for ze full list, go here.