C.S.E. Cooney's Blog, page 15

Early December, Cradled by Waves

At the end of November through the first week of December, I visited my beloved Caitlyn Paxson on P.E.I! The Mi’kmaq Nation calls the Island “Abegweit,” “the land cradled on the waves.”

I’ve probably told you all about Caitlyn before, but I’ll say it again. She’s EXTRAORDINARY.

Caitlyn is a folklorist, museum interpreter, singer, harpist, poet, NPR book reviewer, AND THE MOST FANTASTIC WRITER OMG!

Along with Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick, she was an editor of the gorgeous (now sleeping for a 100 years) Goblin Fruit Magazine (archives here, for your finite but also endless pleasure).

She keeps a delicious newsletter called Book and Bramble. SUBSCRIBE! I do!

One of the many awesome things she includes in her newsletter is the monthly wreath she makes–usually with wildflowers and willow withies and grasses found roundabout her farm–and I got to wear December’s!

(Also, BONUS: Caitlyn’s mama makes those SQUID MUGS I’m always going on about–also BAT MUGS! and CAT MUGS! and RAVEN MUGS! and OWL BELLS! and GOBLETS! among others–over at her Etsy shop, Skybirdarts!)

Anyway, Caitlyn and I had a delicious time playing dress up and haunting one of the museums she works at--Beaconsfield Historic House--after hours. With permission, of course.

We decided to dress up at first like grand dames of a certain Belle Epoque-ish era. Then we decided to go full DARK BREAKERS, after my new story collection with Mythic Delirium, and dress up like the fey Gentry creatures who come through the walls at midnight and wreak havoc, mayhem, and mischief!

I mean. We only PRETENDED to. We were very respectful.

We posted SO MANY PICTURES on both her and my Instagram accounts, but I shall also post some here.

I was going to make this post all about all the others things I wanted to tell you too, but we’ll leave it here. For now. There’s always… THE NEXT BLOG POST!

Ballads from a Distant Star–IN NEW YORK CITY!

OMYGOSH OMYGOSH OMYGOSH!

My friend introduced me to some folks at Arts On Site, and I proposed a ONE-NIGHT-ONLY performance of BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR–and I got it!

PLEASE, book your calendars for MARCH 30TH! There will be two performances: 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM!

BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR:

BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR: Imagine the working families of a 19th Century mining town–sold by the company bosses to bodysnatching aliens, and taken in their silver ship to mine on a distant planet! Imagine how their songs, stories and legends mutate and change over these vast distances! The Pied Piper, the two sisters Shahrazad and Dunyazad (and the murderous king) of 1001 Nights, sundered lovers from folk songs everywhere, Thomas the Rhymer and the Faerie Queen, Two Strange Babes–even the famous and grisly tale of James Wilson, murdered by Burke and Hare! All re-told and re-envisioned as SFF songs, poems, scenes, and monologues–explored by an ethnomusicologist astronaut, looking for answers in the distant stars!

IT’S GOING TO BE FUN! It’s going to be 50 minutes of BIZARRITUDE AND GLORY! PUT IT ON YOUR CALENDARS! HUZZAH!

Featuring:

Carla Kissane
Tim Rodriguez
Carlos Hernandez
Amanda Baker

and yours truly, C. S. E. Cooney

Directed by Miriam Mikiel Grill

LET’S DO THIS THING!

Cover Reveal: The Twice-Drowned Saint (Art by Lasse Paldanius!)

In June of 2020, Mythic Delirium released the anthology A Sinister Quartet, which included three novellas by Jessica P. Wick, Amanda J. McGee, and Mike Allen respectively, and a novel by yours truly, C. S. E. Cooney.

Soon, in Februrary 2023, we are re-releasing The Twice-Drowned Saint: Being a Tale of Fabulous Gelethel, the Invisible Wonders Who Rule There, and the Apostates Who Try to Escape its Walls as a standalone novel–with new fabulous cover and interior art by Lasse Paldanius.

Read all about this Lapland-based artist here.

My publish Mike Allen sent me all these great shots of the first box of books arriving to send to book bloggers. If you’re a book blogger and you want a physical or e-book copy to review, let us know!

The pre-order links are still appearing in various places, but they will all be gathered conveniently in one place on Mythic Delirium’s website. Here’s where to find The Twice-Drowned Saint!

Chapbooks on the Brain

Earlier this month at the World Fantasy Convention, I saw the most FANTASTIC panel about speculative poetry. And while I must say I’ve never fallen OUT of love with it, I FELL IN LOVE A LITTLE HARDER after that panel, and all I wanted to do was write a chapbook.

For weeks I wandered the house, thinking WHAT IS MY CHAPBOOK IDEA?

And then I realized that a long-form narrative poem I’d roughly drafted out is actually kind of an outline-in-verse for a great, long-form narrative-poem-in-poems chapbook idea that I think I might be calling The (Future Former) King of Elfland’s Printing Press.

But that might take a while to get up to submission-speed. And of course, Patty and Carlos and I are working on our Lamp! collaboration, which will be another chapbook-length shared-world poetry collection.

And that’s fine. You know, things take time and all that.

But I wanted to ALREADY HAVE WRITTEN A CHAPBOOK RIGHT NOW.

And then I got the idea!

I’ve had this website/blog since 2014. I’d been missing LiveJournal for while at that point, and I had a lot of projects I was really into, and I wanted to be blogging about all and sundry, so I got Julia Rios and Amal El-Mohtar to advise me. And here we are.

It’s not fancy and never has been, but it is so much better than that feeling of missing blogging, and it uploads nicely to my Goodreads and my Amazon Author pages which I normally don’t have very much to do with, other than occasional housekeeping. (I should probably do more.)

But I have, over the years, written many an occasional poem here. And I thought about a chapbook I might call The Day I Superglued the Moon (and other poems). And I could divide them up into these sections:

Celestial
Terrestrial
Pestilential
Sororal
Romantical
Fantastic
Ekphrastic
Infernal

Of course, by the time I got through sorting them all out, it’s probably longer than a chapbook. More of a collection. And who’s to say who’s publishing such things these days, but it can’t hurt to have a go at further curating the manuscript and seeing what comes of it!

Submissions AHOY!

Carrion Returns

in the place where lightning struck the reindeer
the scientists said: let them lie, let them be
let’s see what hums and grows, what comes and goes
those trophic highs and trough-like lows
what raptors take, what rodents take, taken in turns
what interacts, what retracts
what crawls after
to eat the blowflies that bloom upon the carcass
how the landscape flushes under these caresses
as the scavengers try to save us

but watching reindeer rot is not for the faint of heart
naked feasts of nature don’t sell postcards to tourists
such rankness, such decay: too much for holiday hikers
who want their vacation world free of the business of death
the busyness
the buzziness
the buzzard-full patience of death, sans time-lapse

someday, there will be new trees
where lightning smote and reindeer fell
bush and brush, bursting from berries buried
in the feces
of the predators who fed there
the scavengers who scavenged
the birds who ate the blowflies that bloomed upon the carcass

meantime, meantime,
all this messy in-between
so many skulls for the sun to strip
before the green moves in

by C. S. E. Cooney
10/24/2022

I am writing this poem a few days after reading a truly awe-striking article in The Guardian called “Landscape of Fear.” Further, my friend William Hoffmann recently suggested I use this incredible embroidered art piece “Animalium,” by fiber artist Chris Roberts-Antieau, for a prompt. It reminds him of a mutual friend of ours, dearly beloved of us, who is grieving the sudden and horrifying loss of her sister. There is so little to say in these raw days.

Festival of the Deadlands: Author Reading and Editor Interview

This Thursday night, at 7 PM Eastern Time, please join us LIVE on twitch.tv/arvaneleron for a dark and delicious literary event in support of The Festival of the Deadlands: a month-long crowdfunding celebration to support a third year of The Deadlands magazine!

Join hosts Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney, as well as Deadlands writers Phoenix Alexander, Ai Jiang, Premee Mohamed, Josh Rountree, Fran Wilde, Daria Lavelle for 90 minutes of stories and poems, as well as an interview with Deadlands editor Laura Blackwell.

Laura Blackwell is copy editor for The Deadlands and was a copy editor at Hugo-nominated publication Shimmer for four years. She is also a Pushcart-nominated author with stories in Nightmare, PseudoPod, and Chiral Mad 5, among others. She co-hosts Story Hour with Daniel Marcus.

Deadlands copyeditor Laura Blackwell

Josh Rountree has published more than 60 stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Realms of Fantasy, The Deadlands, Bourbon Penn, PseudoPod, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and A Punk Rock Future. His latest short fiction collection is Fantastic Americana: Stories from Fairwood Press. His novel The Legend of Charlie Fish will be published by Tachyon Publications next year. Josh lives somewhere in the untamed wilds of Texas, and tweets about books, records, and guitars at @josh_rountree

Deadlands writer Josh Rountree

Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, an immigrant from Fujian. Her work has appeared in F&SF, Uncanny, and The Dark. Her debut novella Linghun (April 2023) is forthcoming with Dark Matter INK. Find her on Twitter (@AiJiang_) and online (http://aijiang.ca).  

Deadlands author Ai Jiang

Premee Mohamed is an award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and at her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

Deadlands author Premee Mohamed

Phoenix Alexander (he/him) is a queer, Greek-Cypriot author of SFF and horror. Find his stories in ‘The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,’ ‘The Dark,’ ‘Escape Pod,’ and ‘The Deadlands’ among others, with links to all of his work at www.phoenixalexanderauthor.com.

Deadlands author Phoenix Alexander

Nebula-award winning author Fran Wilde writes all kinds of stories for both the living and the dead. 

Daria Lavelle writes true fiction about impossible things. Her work has been shortlisted by The Masters Review and Molotov Cocktail, and has appeared in The Deadlands, Dark Matter, The Arcanist and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence, and is at work on a novel about food, ghosts, and the New York culinary scene.

Professor of English by day & game designer by night, Carlos Hernandez (@WriteTeachPlay) is also the author of The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Sal & Gabi Break the Universe, Sal & Gabi Fix the Universe, and many other works of SFF prose & poetry.

C. S. E. Cooney  (https://linktr.ee/csecooney) won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bone Swans in 2016. Other notable works include Dark Breakers, Desdemona and the Deep, and Saint Death’s Daughter, as well as many works of speculative fiction, poetry, and song.

Hosts Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney. Photo credit: Andrew Jose

Twitch host Gregory A. Wilson (@GregoryAWilson) is a speculative fiction author, college professor, musician, podcaster, game master, and TwitchTV host – more at gregoryawilson.com

We hope to see you there! And please don’t forget to support The Deadlands!

The Art of Earth: an Interview with Ceramics Artist Elizabeth Paxson

Elizabeth Paxson, creator of Skybirdarts on Etsy!

Elizabeth Paxson is the creatrix and proprietress of Skybirdarts on Etsy (and Skybirdarts on Instagram). I met her because she is the most fabulous mama of my most DARLINGEST friend Caitlyn Paxson, one of my favorite writers/first readers in the world.

(If you haven’t subscribed to Caitlyn’s Book and Bramble newsletter, which includes book news, wreaths of the month, goat pictures, cat pictures, shots of Prince Edward Island at its glorious best, and, well, AWESOME STUFF, I’m just saying: GET THEE TO THE BOOK AND BRAMBLERY!)

I’ve always loved Liz’s ceramics, but a few years ago, she stepped away from the form and took her famous “squid mugs” with her. This year, happily, she’s having her own private renaissance. You can bet I leapt right on her pile of prodigious output like a dragon at a gold rush! I want all of us to happily reap the results of her genius. They are SO BEAUTIFUL!

For your great happiness, I present to you a MINI-INTERVIEW with the artist Elizabeth Paxson!

CSEC: What drew you to ceramics in the first place? What’s your origin story?

EP: I studied ceramics in high school at Interlochen Arts Academy, graduating in 1969. I didn’t return to clay (after a lot of painting, collage and mixed media work,) until 2006, opening my Etsy shop in 2007.

It was all when Magill Foote wanted a squid octopus mug, and posted it. Suddenly there was an instant demand. So the shop was off and running!

(INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: I, too, love Magill Foote! He once helped me research old cinema for a book I was writing–The Twice-Drowned Saint! What a guy–helping artists the world over be EVEN MORE AWESOME! All while being awesome himself!)

A few of the treasures at Skybirdarts!

CSEC: Liz, you took a hiatus from pottery and sculpting for a while. What made you return?

EP: When we moved north in 2014, I sold all my ceramics equipment and sort of regretted it, especially during the pandemic. So I decided to Carpe Diem before decrepitude overcomes me, and invested in new equipment, reopening Skybirdarts.etsy.com!

CSEC: What do you find most fascinating about the process right now?

EP: I love working with clay, both because as a person who has issues with ADD and mild OCD, it is really grounding and satisfying. And it’s the EARTH, literally!

I love thinking about one of my pieces emerging from a lake bed in a thousand years, and someone wondering who made it and why. Well, I bet I’ll confuse them!

What I love most is playing with forms, colors and concepts. Clay is a friendly substance, but it also has a mind of its own. You have to learn the dance–how to let its physical qualities guide you. I see some work that looks as if it is made in a factory, and that bores me. I mean, if you like that you can go to Walmart!

CSEC: What are some of your influences?

EP: Oh! My favorite influences for ceramics are folk art, Mexican, Japanese and ancient art.

CSEC: My favorite are your MINOAN GOBLETS! I love them so much. AND NOW THEY ARE MINE!

THIS THURSDAY! Infernal Poetry Salon!

CALENDARS AHOY!

THIS THURSDAY! 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM EASTERN! LIVE-STREAMED ON TWITCH!

Some poets from our infamous (LOL) SITZFLEISCH POETRY HOUR and a few other verse-minded friends will be participating in an ALL-POET INFERNAL SALON!

Sure, they’ll be the ones in the limelight, writing poetry AS YOU WATCH, but we always pull INFERNAL CARD PROMPTS from our BARAJA DEL DESTINO for the AUDIENCE TOO!

Stream on twitch.tv/arvaneleron!

Upcoming: The Milford Readers and Writers Festival

Herein: ALL THE LINKS to The Milford Readers and Writers Festival, in Milford, PA, THIS SATURDAY.

I’ll be there with my co-panelists and authors: Karen Heuler, Alex Shvartsman, Randee Dawn, Nicholas Kaufmann, and Lillian Longendorfer–with books to sell and sign!

Here is the panel info for Saturday morning, 11-12:30. It’s called CHOOSE YOUR REALITY, taking place at the Foundation Room at the The Columns Museum.

“It is comprised of four panelists and a moderator whose writings have included varied and unique realities. The panel consists of the following authors: Karen Heuler, the moderator, who has created a sly, humorous tale with witchcraft, a formerly human cat and allegory in her book The Splendid City (June 2022); Alex Shvartsman whose realities combine humor with urban fantasy and horror; C.S.E. Cooney, whose books and poems contain worlds filled with fantastical and twisted characters; Nicholas Kaufmann, whose writings are a mixture of tightly plotted horror, urban fantasy and science fiction; and Randee Dawn, an entertainment journalist who has created a reality TV show run by mythical creatures in her debut novel Tune In Tomorrow (August 2022). This event Produced by Lillian Longendorfer.”

We’ll also be doing a signing and sell event at the Golden Fish Art Gallery on Saturday, September 17th from 2pm-4pm.

And then the evening ends with a “Books and Brews” reading at the Foundation Room of the Columns, beginning at 7:00 pm and ending whenever. Beverages will be available for purchase. This event is ticketed, I believe!

Negocios Infernales for Kaleidocast

PLAYDAY 1: AUGUST 19TH, 2022

In person, a whole game of Negocios Infernales can usually be played within 4-5 hours–sometimes fewer!–depending on how many people are playing and if they’ve played before. Online, it’s a bit different. Role20 slows everything down (though we’re very grateful to have it), so it usually takes two sessions of about 4 hours each (breaks included) to get through a whole game.

We recently played with some folks from the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, as a Kaleiodcast exclusive. Kaleidocast is an audio literary magazine run by the BSFW, “a group dedicated to getting writers producing content with a professional polish for publication!” (Follow their Patreon!)

Session 1 of a two-session game of Negocios Infernales usually includes: Part 0: Pregame Trust and Affirmation; Part 1: Invocation; Part 2: Character Creation; Part 3: Relationships; and Part 4: Worldbuilding. This is where all the players collaboratively create their characters, their country, and their world, using the “Baraja del Destino” (the Deck of Destiny). Usually, by the time all this is done, players have a pretty good idea which of the seven plots/genres they’ll want to play.

These were the four cards I drew for my Character Creation, representing clockwise: Motivation, Role in Court, Magic, and Doom. This is Roll20’s version of our Character Creation sheet, and these are how I interpreted the four cards I drew (shown above).

At the end of session one, from all the worldbuilding and character creating we’d done, we knew we wanted to play “The Royal Wedding” plot. (Spoiler: it was kind of like the Red Wedding, but with more mollusks.)

I really liked the character I came up with: Ven. Viana de Eularia de Alvar. (In Negocios Infernales, we use the gender-neutral honorific “Ven.” for “Venerable,” instead of “Don” or “Doña” or Sir or Lady, etc.)

Together, along with “Melliza Exposita, the Royal Mirror” (the queen’s proxy, played by Mimi Mondal), “Jose Díaz, the Cypher Strike” (a thief of books, played by Cam Robb), Rodriguez the Fair (trickster, worldbreaker, spymaster, played by Liam Burke), and our AI/Rulebook Carlos Hernandez, we were well-set up by the end of the first session not only to have a wild night of improv, but maybe also to write, like, 15 novels set in our very weird world.

This was my Magic card, representing the powers I got from my bargain with “the Benefactors.” (The characters in Negocios Infernales think these “Benefactors” are devils. They are, in fact, aliens, hoping to bring humans into the great Cosmic Consciousness). I interpreted the card as my character (who is very lonely) asking for familiar. She was given a red glass orb that, when fed upon her blood, turns into a strange monkey-like creature. It can do one task before it returns to Ven. Viana in its red-orb shape, at which point, if she wants it to do something else, she feeds it more blood. It can spy, fetch, act as courier, and transmit everything it sees telepathically.

The chat was small but FIERCELY AWESOME, and they came up with the most amazing perfumer NPC that we pledged would show up in the plot once we got to the improv!

For flavor, Carlos took prompts I texted him from my character sheet & entered them into Midjourney, so now my character has a profile pic!

When Carlos fed a few of my keywords into Midjourney, this is how the AI interpreted my characterr.PLAYDAY 2: SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2022

In session two of Negocios Infernales, we got through Part 5: Plot; Part 6: Roleplay; and Part 7: The Alien Epilogue. The fun thing about Zoom is that it has an Alien filter, so for a while, several of us were cyclopses with deelie boppers, and those that weren’t used masks and funny voices to inspire our alien selves.

We’d known we were going to do the “The Royal Wedding” plot, so after we refreshed ourselves with the details of our last game, we got right into the interpreting the Plot cards. Then came the really wild stuff: the Roleplay. Each of us had to act as a Protagonist at least once, to solve the orders la Reina gave us. Each of us had to play an NPC at least once and use our Magic at least once.

We called upon the chat–again, small but AMAZING–to help us interpret certain cards and make certain decisions as we played. And yes, we used the NPC, perfumer “Marinel Curie,” which the chat had invented for us in the last game.

In the end, it was almost five hours of harried wizards, demonic monkeys with red glass claws, shapeshifters who have to smell whoever they want to change into, cannibal pearls, alien mollusks, masquerades, cypher-strikers, truth-extractors, and so much more! It was unpredictable and precarious; we were on the verge of losing the game. Our Reina Resoluta token had slid all the way down the Sword. If she’d gotten buried to the hilt, it would have been all over. Thanks to our Doom mechanic (which three of us had to activate to forestall failure), we won by the skin of our teeth. We’d lost most of the rest of our skin.

Carlos and I are very grateful that Kaleidocast played with us. We should have footage from the two sessions available through Kaleidocast one of these days, so consider supporting their Patreron!

Also, we’re gearing up for next year’s Kickstarter for Negocios Infernales, forthcoming from Outland Entertainment, so sign up here to keep abreast of the latest and greatest news: negociosinfernales.com