C.S.E. Cooney's Blog, page 10

Welcome, New Friends

I just ended my newsletter experiment on Substack, so I’m back to my website being the main source for all things C. S. E. Cooney-esque.

Of course, whenever Carlos and I collaborate, we post the news on hernandooney.com, so if you’re a follower/fan of Negocios Infernales, that’s the place to be… though I do like to re-blog it here, and vice versa. Same with conventions we’ll be at, appearances, etc, etc.

If for some reason you have trouble following WordPress blogs, but you want to get all our news right in your inbox, as you would with other newsletter services, I found a how-to here.

Oh.

By the way…

HAPPY NEW YEAR FRIENDS!!!

I have so much to tell you!

Carlos and I have been sending out updates to our Kickstarter backers, along with Google polls in order to arrange the Roll20 games of Negocios Infernales and the Infernal Salons that we promised as rewards. We also sent our edits for our little collection Infernal Bargains to our editor, Alana J Abbott, at Outland Entertainment.

All that’s left is to sign the contract, heh heh heh… >.>

This is the collection of all the works Carlos and I wrote and/or published based on card draws from Negocios Infernales’s DECK OF DESTINY (la Baraja del Destino). It was a stretch goal that we sort of BLEW RIGHT THROUGH. So I’m excited to have a new COLLECTION out soon! AND WITH MY DOCTOR HUSBANDPANTS NO LESS!

Right now, I’m working on my sequel to Saint Death’s Herald. It’s due at the end of February. I have a couple exciting books I’ll be blurbing, as well. AND I get to write three short stories for upcoming anthologies that I’m so excited about. Maybe I’ll do a whole other blog on that!

I’ll also be writing more about the cons we’ll be attending this year. We’ll be attending SFF book cons as well as game cons, so we’ll be out and about a lot this year. Carlos and I will both be Guests of Honor as HELIOsphere this year–along with Clarkesworld’s NEIL CLARKE. That’s in New Jersey.

Our first con of the year, though, will be PLANET (the Kansas City Comic Con), the local con for our game publishers, Outland Entertainment. We were so busy traveling for the holidays, getting sick from traveling, and recovering from travel (and from last semester/end of last year) that we skipped Boskone this year for our mental health. It was a great decision, but we also missed everybody.

This Saturday, I’m scooting over to Boston for a quick day trip for one reason only:

TO WATCH A HALLMARK MOVIE AT A FRIEND’S HOUSE.

But not just ANY Hallmark Movie, friends.

This Hallmark movie is the FILM DEBUT of my friend, the brilliant playwright (and now SCREENWRITER!) Reina Hardy! It’s part of Hallmark’s February “Loveuary”–all Jane Austen movies, all the time. Reina’s is called PAGING MR. DARCY, and it looks adorable.

But mostly, mostly, for the whole next month, till LEAPDAY, I’ll be finishing my novel, Saint Death’s Herald. (Or as my mom, J-9, Carlos, and I have all taken to calling it, “HAROLD!” in a bad New York accent.)

I’ve been using the new cover as my screensaver on my phone, and the wallpaper on my laptop, but it’s not public yet so I can’t show you how PRETTY IT IS! But it is. SO PRETTY. So cheerful. I look at it whenever I want to re-inspire myself.

It’s, like, a book cover. Of a finished book. So I have to finish!!!

More soon! About the short stories in these awesome upcoming anthologies, and the D&D event we just played in public at the Klein Auditorium, and playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with Carlos–my first video game as an adult!!!! I mean…

Life is very full. And, locally, very sweet indeed.

Mythic Delirium’s 25th Anniversary!

The Mythic Delirium team (Mike and Anita Allen) is celebrating their 25th anniversary as a publishing company! It is also honoring Yukimi Ogawa’s debut short fiction collection Like Smoke, Like Light landing on Publisher Weekly’s short list of Best Science fiction/Fantasy, Horror of 2023. How are they celebrating? By putting 20 ebooks on sale for .99 in a book bundle!

Three of the titles Mike mentions are mine: Dark Breakers, The Twice-Drowned Saint, and Bone Swans, but I also have stories in Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 5 (in this anthology is the first story Carlos and I ever collaborated on, back when we were first becoming friends: “The Book of May”), and A Sinister Quartet.

My story in A Sinister Quartet is an earlier version of our later standalone release The Twice-Drowned Saint, but the anthology as a whole is amazing, with dark fantasy/fairy tale retelling novellas by Jessica P. Wick (“An Unkindness”), Amanda J. McGee (“Viridian”), and a horror novella by Mike Allen (“The Comforter”).

Back in 2020, when A Sinister Quartet first came out, we did a bunch of fun things, which I blogged about:

A Playlist for the Twice-Drowned SaintAll the playlists for A Sinister QuartetZoom salon of us reading from our workThe Sinister Quartet Mini-Cookbook (Mostly Evil Pastries)Some insights into the Twice-Drowned Saint’s writing process, and how it connects to other C. S. E. Cooney storiesExcerpts and readings from A Sinister QuartetFour authors of Sinister Quartet interview each other on Scalzi’s Big IdeaA Sinister Quartet’s Guide to Books and Booze on The Next Best Book Blog

Mike says:

“The recognition won by Yukimi’s book inspired us to hold one more celebratory sale to semi-officially close out Mythic Delirium’s 25th anniversary year. One more time in 2023, we’re discounting e-books to 99 cents on most all major platforms — and not just Yukimi’s collection, but twenty titles that together span the most recent fifteen years of Mythic Delirium’s twenty-five years of existence in some form.

For the record, these twenty titles together account for: one World Fantasy Award win, one Mythopoeic Award win, one Kirkus starred review and Best of the Year listing, one Publishers Weekly Best of the Year listing, one Theodore Sturgeon Award nomination, one WSFA Small Press Award nomination, one Aurelius Award nomination, two Library Journal starred reviews, three Locus Award nominations, three World Fantasy Award nominations, four Shirley Jackson Award nominations, five Nebula Award nominations, ten PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred reviews and at least sixteen stories reprinted in various “Best of the Year” volumes. (Yes, I count these things, obsessively. And that’s not the full list! That’s just for the twenty books included in this bundle.)

We’re proud of all our books. By no means is creating and showcasing art all about awards — but you can take it as an indicator of our dedication to quality as we pursue our quirky art.

Some of these titles have been discounted within the past year or two, multiple times even, but others I’ve not offered in a discount sale for over half a decade, so get them while they’re hot!”

My December Newsletter…

…IS LIVE ON SUBSTACK!

Please do scooch on over there if that’s interesting to you!

Yours truly,

C. S. E. Cooney

This little piece I wrote…

When the lovely team at Solaris Books learned that I was fording the wild waters of NaNoWriMo this year, they encouraged me to write about my LAST NaNoWriMo experience…

…which was 2009, when I wrote the first draft of what would later be titled SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER, but which was titled, at that time: MISCELLANEOUS STONES: ASSASSIN. (It was meant to be ironic.) (LOL.) (I like the new one better, so thanks, Team Solaris, for saving me from m’self!)

Here’s the link, for those of you who might be interested! They got the article placed at Writers Online in the UK, which was just DARLING of them.

And what, you ask, am I doing posting about this when I ought to be finishing my 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo??? Not to mention my ACTUAL and REAL novel deadline for which I was PAID??? (And for which… shhh… I have already SEEN the COVER ART, but I can’t show you yet AAAUGGGHHH!!!!)

And my answer is…

>.>

GLITTERBOMB!

NaNoWriMo Progress + What I’m Reading in the Dead of Night

Remember, my word count started when I already had 60K+ words written. Last night’s total word count was 77,422, of a projected 100,000, so I’m closing in on THAT goal, if slightly behind on my 50,000. But I think I’ll make it!

It occurred to me after doing it a few times that posting constantly about NaNoWriMo word count progress could make the whole thing NaNoWriMo experience less fun for some people. I’m not really super competitive, and I really hate when other people feel like they’re doing less in comparison with me.

I want to tell this circle of friends and colleagues: you know, I don’t have kids. I don’t have full time work; I’m an audiobook narrator with no book on the books till December! I have a lot more time to write than a lot of people, and I still find it hard to write! I re-joined NaNoWriMo for the incredible energy of knowing THOUSANDS OF WRITERS are just… MAKING STUFF UP this month!

ME TOO YES PLEASE!

Now, I’m not doing too badly. Not on POINT exactly with my desired 2000 words a day, but still, very pleased, and making progress. I’m super pleased that my new friend Ben, whom we met this year at GenCon, is ROCKING his first NaNoWriMo. Talk about word count–and he’s doing it on his lunch breaks and early in the morning, like a BOSS! I sort of live vicariously through him.

This last week’s work on Saint Death’s Herald (or “Harold” as my mom, Clarence, and J9 are calling it) has been a pretty big set-piece battle scene. Like Hamlet is a seven-soliloquy play that the rest of the plot sort of dangles from, Saint Death’s Herald seems to have a 4-battle structure, with all my favorite bits happening in between the fighting. The limestone bridge chapter, for example, is my favorite chapter so far. But I like any scene where my characters sit, eat, and chat. Maybe play some music if their fingers aren’t too cold. You know?

But, so, as I’ve been writing and trying to make word count, I seem to be falling into habits of my twenties, which I graciously, um, aged out of in my mid-thirties and forties. Like staying up till 1 AM writing. >.>

But, look. It’s also so exciting, in some ways, to stay up till my brain is befogged and my mind is bedazzled. I can’t think in linear lines anymore. There comes a point in the night where I can’t edit any of the text anymore. I just have to… jump. Think: “Oh, I’ll make sense of it later. Because I literally can’t right now.’

It starts to go more like… “Oh, I think there’s a sentence about six sentences ahead that I haven’t written yet, so I’ll write this sentence now and fit it in later.” Or, “Hey, I think this is the next thing that that other character does, even though I don’t know the rest of the thing THIS character that this character is doing, but everything’s boring, so I’m just gonna leave this boring character here mid-sentence and go write that other more interesting and shiny paragraph for a while.”

The results of this week’s writing are, therefore, what I’ve started calling, just now, “an archipelago draft” of a chapter. There are OH SO MANY islands of unconnected text that are now my solemn duty, by the light of day, to string together into a (as Desiree says in A Little Night Music) “sort of coherent existence after so many years of muddle.”

And by years, I mean “nights,” of course.

The fact that my sleep schedule is now whacked, that I go through my days a bit dozy and ditzy, and that when I’m not writing all night, I’m up till 3 AM–last last night–reading Holly Black’s Folk of Air series is all a part of NaNoWriMo’s collateral damage. Or maybe collateral bonus?

Hurry up, NYPL; I need my Queen of Nothing book stat! Don’t make me wait 4 AGONIZING weeks for the third movement of a frikkin trilogy!

Ah! One of three books I bought at Book Moon Books is now FINISHED. Cruel Prince is the first of Holly Black’s Folk of Air series. DELICIOUS! It would pair nicely with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy. Mmn. Maybe I’ll try the Older next. That will be a TREAT!

200% Funded. Phew Baby.

On this, the last day of our NEGOCIOS INFERNALES Kickstarter campaign, Carlos & I:

threw ourselves a pizza party watched some Critical Rolekept pausing it to flip to our KS tab and gawp in astonishment as our campaign’s numbers kept creeping up in the last 4 hours until it reached $20,000!

$20,147.10 to be exact. That’s more than 200% of our goal, and just a DREAM COME TRUE. Years in the making.

We captured the last of the countdown for you. BONUS CONFETTI!

After that, we turned on our eyeball lights and bubble machine and had ourselves a slow dance, so we could dictate a love note for you, our backers.

In case the butterscotch schnapps didn’t say it loudly enough: THANK YOU.

Some Kind of Spell

We hosted an Infernal Salon on Thursday morning at World Fantasy. I had a few false starts with my prompts, but I managed to squeeze this out by the very end of our 25 minute timer!

I don’t know what it means, or where it belongs, so it probably belongs to that glorious category of nonsense rhymes.

And, as we all know, all nonsense rhymes are really spells.

I think these were my prompts, but I can’t remember! The suits are right, anyway. (Also, I don’t know why they uploaded vertically. Weird!)

Remember, our Negocios Infernales campaign–which includes this deck of 70 oracular cards: la Baraja del Destino!–is running until Friday, November 10th! Check it out here: NegociosInfernales.com

Some Kind of Spell

by C. S. E. Cooney

October 26th, 2023

orrery oracle
candlelit coracle
needle and artery
glimmering thread

face in the solar flare
starry eyes everywhere
bloody tongue hungry
for uncanny bread

stitch me up, stitch me up
cut after glassy cut
how the world’s woefulness
salts every wound

map of uncharted sky
lift up your shadowed eyes
write on the silver wall
ink of the moon

sit on the opal shore
facing the golden door
eating the spoiled fruit
washed on the tide

nettle cloth, mermaid broth
prophecy every thought
pierced through, revealed
morning-dawn shy

Tomorrow’s HALLOWEEN Infernal Salon!

Well. This has been an exciting week. But do you know what’s EVEN MORE EXCITING?

Tomorrow–Halloween!–Carlos, Gregory A. Wilson, and I are hosting one of our INFERNAL SALONS for Halloween.

Really quick run-down of what happens, if this is your first time.

Greg, Carlos, and I will draw SPOOKY CARDS from “la baraja del Destino” (the DECK OF DESTINY!) for our guest artists. The Destino deck is a 70-card deck of images and strange adages from our RPG Negocios Infernales , meant to inspire all kinds of art and provoke wild roleplay!Next, we set a timer, and send our artists off to create. They mute us, and we in turn, spend the next 25 minutes introducing them and praising them to the skies. When the timer dings, our artists read to us–or sing to us–or show off their art, in whatever form it takes! DISMISSED! WE ALL GO TRICK-OR-TREATING AND EAT CANDY!

You know where. It’s on that GREAT TWITCH STREAM twitch.tv/arvaneleron!

AND it’s an afternoon celebration, from 3:30-5:30 PM EST, so you’ll be out in time for trick-or-treating.

…oh, and we have some special overseas guests—but thankfully, for them, it’ll be WELL after supper!

FEATURING Kenesha Williams

Kenesha Williams is an author, screenwriter, and essayist. As an, essayist she has written for, Time Magazine’s, Motto and Fireside Fiction. She has been a panelist and speaker at StokerCon, the Horror Writers of America convention; Boskone, ECBACC, the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention; the 2017 African Americans Expo, and MECCACon. You can catch up with her on her website www.keneshawilliams.com

LaShawn M. Wanak

LaShawn M. Wanak writes fiction, essays, and poetry and is the editor of the speculative magazine GigaNotoSaurus.

Rhiannon Parker-Cooney
(as the Espacio suit of Negocios Infernales‘s Deck of Destiny!)

Rhiannon Parker-Cooney is a licensed Esthetician, self-taught make-up artist, Dungeon Master, nail art addict, and Co-Owner of Sun and Moon Wellness in Phoenix, Az. Book her services at vagaro.com/sunandmoonwellness. She does everything from facials, lashes, and full-body waxing.

Kyle Kratky

Kyle Kratky  is a writer and director living in the Midwest. He has written and directed over 200 plays and several short films. He is a seasoned solo performance artist, having performed all across the USA. He also makes ice cream and goes backpacking. He is currently producing two short films and The Reconcile, a new podcast about apologies and what “I’m sorry” really means. 

Dr. Mary Crowell

Dr. Mary Crowell (she/her) is a geeky musician/songwriter/teacher from north Alabama. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano and sometimes yoga. Mary writes songs about gaming, coffee, beagles, mythology, and zombies. Check her out on Patreon (Drmaryccrowell) and her website: http://marycrowell.com or follow on Twitter (@)DrMaryCCrowell. Mary’s latest gaming album is available here: I Have Missed You at My Table! 

Lynn Emery

Lynn Emery is the author of thirty-plus novels. Her third novel, After All, became a movie produced by BET (Black Entertainment Television). She has authored twelve romantic suspense novels, two paranormal mystery series, a sci-fi mystery trilogy, and a cozy mystery trilogy. In her other career, she is a licensed clinical social worker. She has worked in a secure psychiatric hospital, in a correctional facility, as a child welfare investigator, and has been designated twice as an expert court witness. 

J9 Vaughn

J9 Vaughn is a badass librarian, witch, writer, and memoirist, who fosters kittens like a boss, and has just celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the No-Shush Salon, their library-based gathering space for writers at the Glen Ellyn Public Library.

Emma J. Gibbon

Emma J. Gibbon Described by NPR as “Shirley Jackson meets Johnny Rotten,” Emma J. Gibbon is an award-winning horror writer, poet and podcast writer. Her debut fiction collection, Dark Blood Comes from the Feet, was one of NPR’s best books of 2020 and won the Maine Literary Book Award for Speculative Fiction. You can find her at emmajgibbon.com.

Steve Toase

Steve Toase is a British born horror writer living in the Franconian Forest in Germany. His collection To Drown in Dark Water is published by Undertow. He is also a regular contributor to Fortean Times, and loves classic motorbikes and vintage cocktails. 

Eden Royce

Eden Royce is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina now living in England. She’s a Shirley Jackson Award finalist for her adult short fiction, and her debut middle grade novel, ROOT MAGIC is a Walter Award Honoree, a Nebula Award finalist, a Mythopoeic Fantasy award winner, and an Ignyte award winner for outstanding children’s literature. She loves tea, coffee, bookstores, and roller skating – not always in that order.

Carina Bissett

Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. Her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations is forthcoming from Trepidatio Publishing in Spring 2024. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.

Elijah Woodruff

Elijah Woodruff (he/him) is a high school English teacher who doesn’t do it for the money but wouldn’t mind being paid a little more. He spends his time drinking too much coffee and hanging out with his wife.

World Fantasy Award 2023 Acceptance Speech for Novel

I’d written this speech twice and was about to write it again when my husband Carlos suggested I just do the Napoleon Dynamite dance for you instead.

*executes exactly two moves from the Napoleon Dynamite dance*

[What I didn’t plan, and what happened: my oak leaf crown flew off backward. But that’s okay: Sam J. Miller said it was a feature not a bug. And a good clown “sits in the mistake,” or some such phrase. So I just went with it.]

That’s as far as I got. Then I realized I didn’t have pockets. Also, the Napoleon Dynamite dance is harder than it looks.

[I had prepared two speeches for the alternate universes in which I won in either Collections or Novel, but we’re in this AU, so you get this one.]

I didn’t know, starting out, that writing what I thought was a light cartoonish NaNoWriMo satire about a protagonist in a fantasy novel who literally cannot use violence to solve any of the problems of a fantasy novel, would evolve, over the years—after many a workshop, and great beta readers, and awesome agent edits and awesome editor edits—into writing about a culture of glamorized violence, toxic family dynamics, a lifetime of bad pedagogy that needs to be re-assessed in maturity, found family, and an idea of death that even I, the author, might turn to for comfort in times of loss.

[What I didn’t plan, and what happened: I started crying at this point, but kept going, because what are you gonna do?]

I didn’t know, in all those years, over all those drafts, and all those near moments of giving up—except I’d already poured so much time into it—that my friend would be listening to the audiobook of Saint Death’s Daughter on her way to her sister’s funeral, or another friend would read it after losing her beloved pet, and another in her own year of grief. What I didn’t think about consciously, while writing, was that a book about the world’s friendliest necromancer, who so intensely loves and reveres her gentle god of death, might provide some peace and connection in a time of loss.

I did believe books could be holy. I just didn’t think my book could be. That it is had been, for some, makes me so grateful.

That’s my feeling, too, reading the works of my fellow nominees. Gratitude. That sense of holiness. Of deep music playing. Of pristine sentences building out bastions of beauty in my mindscape: new places to visit in the quiet, and be reverent for a while. There is a certain buoyancy and playfulness in great prose that is its own kind of holiness in our dark times.

My favorite line from the movie Charlotte Grey is: “There must be something to set against all this.”

I made this book, in part, as my “something to set against all this.” I didn’t make it—by any means—quickly (it took 12 years). I didn’t make it alone. I devoted a whole chapter of acknowledgements to all the people who helped me, and it’s practically longer than the book—which is saying something.

And I didn’t make this book in a vacuum of art. We are in a blazing age of SFF. The world is aglow with the work going on right now—every year more rich and wild and worthy of the world we are reflecting, the world we are warning against, and the world we are helping to envision. I am in awe of this age, and this symphony of voices, and I’m so glad to lift my voice with yours. Thank you.

Hernandooney World Fantasy Schedule (tentative)

THURSDAY

The Infernal Salon: 11:00 AM – 12:50 PM, Empire A/B

A fun, low-stakes writing workshop that uses spooky cards for writing prompts, a timed writing session, and an impromptu open mic at the end for people to share what they’ve written.

C.S.E. Cooney, Carlos Hernandez

FRIDAY

Kaffeeklatsch: 01:00 PM – 01:50 PM, The Dragon’s Den (Terrace)

C.S.E. Cooney

Signups at Registration!

Reading: 05:00 PM – 05:25 PM, Chouteau A

C.S.E. Cooney

Reading: : 05:30 PM – 05:55 PM, Chouteau A

Carlos Hernandez

SATURDAY

Panel: Kickstarter – the Ins and Outs: 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM, Empire A/B

Individual authors, artists, and even small press publishing companies are using Kickstarter more and more in order to fund new projects. What kinds of projects do or don’t work well on the platform? And what are the strategies a publisher can use in order to make the launch as strong as possible?

Joshua Palmatier (M), Blake Hausladen, Carlos Hernandez, Jennifer (J.M.) Landels

SUNDAY

Panel: Art Generating Story, 10 AM (tentative)

(I’m told I’m on this one, but it’s not on the schedule that can be found online yet, just in an email. I will update as I know if this is on or not, and if so, where and with whom!)

There are so many readings I do not want to miss! And so many lunches and dinners and breakfasts I want to have with friends. AND BRANDON O’BRIEN IS RUNNING AN OPEN MIC, I think on THURSDAY NIGHT AT 10, and HOW CAN I RESIST??? It is so late though. So, so late. BUT ALSO, HOW CAN I RESIST???