Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 12

May 12 Months 12 Stories Prompt, and some news.

It’s May. The best month, because I was born in it, she said, with no hint of bias.

We’re moving on to a new prompt for our 12 months of short stories, and I’ve decided on PIRATES! for this one. Why pirates? Because there is so much there and you can do pretty much anything with it.

I’ll post about some interesting pirates through the month, but here’s your first: Zheng Shi.

She’s considered one of the most successful pirates that ever lived, an empress of the seas.

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From Wikipedia.

 

In other news, Charm is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.UK, for those who love their kindles best.

And I sold my April #12months12stories short to Shimmer, so there’s hope for us all.

CHARM: Chapter 1/22

NOTE: I’m releasing the first chapter of CHARM on a Friday because it’s the first of May. From next week it will be released every Wednesday. I hope you enjoy the read.

 

Escaping the Witch House

A handful of hair drops to the ground and lands in a dark tangle against the bathroom tiles. I stop. The pair of scissors trembles in my hand. Perhaps this isn’t my greatest idea. Not that I’ve ever exactly been known for great ideas. Irene Kerry; the Girl of Failed Good Intentions. I force my head up so I can stop looking at the mess of fallen hair, but the mirror isn’t much of an improvement.

My reflection snarls, grabs another fistful of curls, and snips. I think I’m supposed to feel relieved but instead my heart pounds like it’s trying get out before I do anything stupid. Stupider I keep hacking away. With each snick of the blades my stomach drops further and further, and depression settles over me in a fine ashy coating. This isn’t freeing in any way, it’s just a great big mess, and oh-god-I-am-an-idiot. There’s a reason hairdressers charge people for this, and the reason is staring at me in growing horror.

The last wisps fall. They’re everywhere—scattered around the basin, lying discarded on the white tiles. The bathroom light fizzes, the fluorescents bouncing off the cold antiseptic gleam of the tiny room. All I can see is hair.

My skin itches. Right now I can’t tell if it’s my eczema or if I’m having one of the weird stress-reactions I sometimes get, and I grab the edge of the basin. After a few deep breaths, it passes. I can do this. I snip desultorily at a few longer strands, and pretend that this is the look I was going for.

Everything will be better now. With my hair cut short and the curl flattened, I look a little like a boy. A scrawny, girlish boy, sure, but that’s better than nothing. I open the medicine cabinet to change the angle of the little mirror, and turn my head to the right so that the raw red prickle of my latest rash breakout is hidden. From this perspective I don’t look terrible-terrible. Maybe I can walk around like this for the rest of my life. Paper bags are great fashion accessories. So very in this season.

Not that I’m doing this to look good. It’s about carving myself anew identity, one that I dictate for myself. Or, if we’re being honest, maybe it’s because this way, just for once, Rain will really see me.

I almost laugh out loud. The day that happens is the day I know something has gone tremendously wrong with the world. I’ve long since learned to settle for friendship. I sweep up the hair and throw it in the cheap waste-basket lined with an old SPAR packet. The mass of black curls fills the bottom of the bag. It’s too much of a reminder of the girl I have decided to stop being, and I knot it closed.

A fast shower to sluice away the itch and already the weirdness of my new haircut is growing on me. It feels softer like this, like playing with a puppy and I keep touching it, running my fingers through the shortened curls. My head seems lighter, and I let my feeling of loss swirl away down the shower plug. I’m ready to face my life.

The bachelor flat I’m currently renting is the tiniest, most cramped little thing you’ve ever seen. It’s probably also the cheapest, and since I’ve just left school and all I have to my name is a crappy waitress job and a motley collection of oil paints and brushes, I’m certainly not in the running for anything bigger. Plus my dad had to put down the deposit, so I’m also paying him back for that. Technically I could have stayed at home while I decided what I wanted to do with my life, but my dad and I are…. we don’t hate each other or anything, we’re just two people who probably shouldn’t live together.

In the main room that doubles as bedroom and lounge—and if we’re being honest; giant laundry basket—I slip on a pair of faded men’s jeans that hang on my hips and a button-down long-sleeve shirt; black, naturally. Rain says I have been going through a goth-phase since we met in kindergarten, which is hilarious, coming from him. I tuck my mother’s evil-eye pendant under my shirt where no-one can see it and the cool stone settles against my breast-bone. She died when I was eight and it’s been ten years since I stole the pendant from where it hung on her bedroom wall, above her writing desk where she kept her leather-bound book of fairy tales. My father never missed it. Or if he did, he never said a thing to me. Not overly unusual in the Kerry household, really.

The necklace is the only item of jewellery I can wear that doesn’t set off my eczema. No earrings or rings or chokers for this girl, I’m afraid. I put it down to some blessing of my mother’s that I can even wear this. I keep it to remind myself. Of what, sometimes I’m not even that sure. Maybe that I’m not insane. I’ve inherited my looks from my dead mother—including a unibrow to make Frida Kahlo jealous—but that’s not all I got from her. She was weird. Not a good hey my mom’s a bit kooky but she’s okay weird. Proper weird.

She used to tell me when things were going to happen before they did, and when I asked her how she knew, she said it was nothing more than an art. Which was fine as an answer when I was three, but it got pretty stale fast. She also used to see things that weren’t there, and hide me from monsters she said were coming to find me. When I was little, I remember crouching breathless in her old kist, heart hammering in the dark and small space, waiting for monsters that never came while she drew chalk rings on the walls and floor, and put broken mirrors on the windowsills. Eventually I just stopped, refused to go on with her stupid crazy ideas. That’s when she got into her staying—up all night muttering to herself stage, which was harder to hide from than monsters, really. So yeah, weird-weird mother. The day she died, she saw her death coming and she sat me down on her bed and held my hands in hers and told me.

I think it messed me up a little. Who does that to their kid? Not that I really think she saw the future. It doesn’t take prophecy to predict your death when you kill yourself.

So now I get all stressed out when anything out of the ordinary happens because I wonder if I’m going mental like she was, and does insanity run in families and it’s not like I could ask my dad. “Hey, so remember how mom was like, a little, you know, off her freaking rocker before she died? Do you think I’ve got her…mad gene or something?” That should go down well.

Madness and horrible disfiguring skin diseases. Hooray for family, right? I press a warm cloth over the worst of my eczema, then dab my cream over the patch that runs from the corner of my nose all down to my chin, and hope that it fades a little. I can’t even cover it up with make-up because that’s just asking to end up looking like some kind of medical encyclopaedia illustration. Eyeliner and shadow are full sum of my makeup collection, until the eczema decides to eat my eyelids, I suppose. There are more patches in the crooks of my elbows, and one persistent area just at my left armpit. There’s a reason I was never going to be Miss Bikini Queen of the Highveld.

It’s time to go pick up the love of my life.

Rain promised that he’d go out with me tonight, and I don’t care whether we go through to the crap-fest that is Zeplins on a Saturday night, full of rugby-playing Pretoria meat-heads, or if we hit one of the trendier-than-thou bars in Melville, but I’m determined to get him out of that house. Being around his mother for any length of time is enough to drive anyone off the deep end, and with Rain, well, there’s no-one who can quite fuck him up as much as Lily can. I’ve long since stopped being scared of her, but if it wasn’t for me rushing in and dragging Rain out into the sunshine every so often, I swear he’d just wither up and let his mother completely destroy him. It’s probably why we’re friends. Mutual mommy-issues.

“Right,” I say to the empty room. “That’s me done, then.” The stranger blinking back at me from the mirror no longer looks like my mother—I should have cut my hair off years ago. I glance at the boxy white alarm clock on my bed-side table. Knowing Rain, he’s probably counting every second until I get there. Somehow, I’m always running late.

I slam the cheap plywood door on the little white cubicle of my life and let the heat from the Joburg sun blast me.

Rain lives in Orange Grove, in one of those ancient face-brick houses that have “potential” in estate agent-speak. It’s poky and dark and the tiny garden is a mess, and one day some rich person is going to snap it up and gut it and re-invent it. Well, no. I lie. Because Orange Grove is not Norwood. Instead the place is just going to decay and inside it Lily and Rain are going to decay too. God, how depressing.

Lily opens the scarred door before I even knock, which means she’s been watching me come up the road. Lovely

“Hi, Lily.” I’ve always called Rain’s mom by her name—she insisted. I think it makes her feel younger or something. She blinks at me, and her expression flows easily from suspicion to surprise. “Your hair looks nice, Irene.”

“Thanks.” I twist my thumbs in the loops of my jeans, and wait for permission to enter. Of course, Lily thinks everything is nice, so it was pretty much a non-comment. She’s blocking the open doorway, smiling her perpetually vacant smile, and wearing one of her hand-embroidered peasant shirts. Her long hair is greying, and it’s always loose. For Lily, the seventies never really ended. She’s still smoking her way through bankies of weed and pretending everything is groovy. And she’s also still blocking my way in. I hitch my canvas army bag back up on my shoulder. “Is Rain in?” It’s a stupid question. Rain is always in.

“He told me you’ll be coming to visit.” She hasn’t budged. Lily gives me the creeps like just about no-one else does. Around her, it always feels like my skin is about to itch right off.

Finally, content that some kind of dominance game has been played out, Lily shuffles back a bit and I squeeze past her as politely as I can, trying my best not to actually touch her. She waves to someone across the road and then turns in, shutting the door. The place smells like curry and lentils and incense—an explosion of nag champa. Overhead an ancient fan stirs the muggy air around, swishing all the smells together.

In the windows, beaded things twirl, catching the sunlight. Lily has glued tiny mirrored tiles onto them and they wink out at the street. Her lounge is cluttered with knick-knacks and tchotchke of the kind you buy at the flea market for a hundred rand or less. The walls are crowded with paintings gone so dark that I have to squint to see what they’re actually of. Gathering dust in the corner of the dining room is an old upright piano long since appropriated as a shelf for Lily’s bead trays.

“He’s in his room,” Lily calls out after me as I stomp down the passage way. On the edges of the once-pink carpet the hardwood floor is almost grey. Cobwebby. Housecleaning and the general care of anything have never been Lily’s strong points. Even her house-plants are dead.

Of course Rain is in his room. Where else would he be? Damn boy never leaves the house unless I drag him out.

“Who won?” he asks when I slam open the door. “The lawnmower or you?” His voice has an English drawl—something he’s cultivated by watching way too many Brit-coms.

I dump my bag on his bed and flop down next to it. “Hilarious, I’m sure.”

Rain shuts the door and stands with his back pressed against it, as if he’s trying to stop something strange and terrible from coming in. Probably Lily. His arms are crossed in front of him, and he cocks his head so that his bleached hair falls over his eyes, and he grins. “I’m kidding. It suits you. Kinda.”

Well gee thanks, sweet talker. it’s about as close to a compliment as I’m going to get from the boy, so I settle in, digging through my bag for my cigs and a lighter.

Two years ago Rain tried to paint his room black and got bored half-way through, so he covered the last unfinished wall with band posters and comps and flyers. There’s a ratty couch against the wall—the crash couch—where everything gets dumped. Somewhere under all his junk is an Indian throw I bought for him at the Oriental Plaza. If there’s one thing that Rain has in common with his mother, it’s an aversion to cleaning anything.

“Are you going out like that?” I ask in a not too-subtle attempt to find out where’s he at, mentally. I light my cig and toss him the pack.

He catches it easily, lighting his own from one of the candles burning on his table.

“Every time you do that a sailor dies,” I tell him.

“So you’ve said. You know we’re nowhere near the sea, right?”Rain’s wearing scruffy black jeans that probably haven’t been washed since he bought them, and a pair of cheap canvas trainers, the rubber soles already cracked. The laces are loose, trailing like dirty little shed snake skins. In head to toe black, he looks like a coffin kid genetically spliced with an underfed surfer. He’s still wearing that damn jersey I gave him for his sixteenth birthday. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him not wear it—it’s like a second skin and by now it’s so thin that the elbows have worn away and the white of his tee shirt shines through the stitches. For all I know, he thinks it adds to his waifish charm. I refuse to admit that he’s right.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say stubbornly. “You still shouldn’t light a cig from a candle. It’s bad luck or something.”

“Or something. You sound like lLily.”

My mouth thins. “Out. Where are we headed tonight?”

“I’m not going out.” He scuffs at the once—blue carpet with the toe of his shoe. Smoke plumes around his fingers, and on the table the candles gutter.

Okay, now I want to strangle him. If he’s going to be like this then I might as well have stayed home to paint. “You said—”

“I know what I said.” Rain shuffles over to the bed, arms still hugging his chest, and sits down next to me. Our smoke meets, tangles. I like to think they’re our ghost-selves. “Come on, Irene. Let’s just chill here.” He’s pulling the plaintive Rain voice, to which I have developed an immunity.

“Wonderful.”

“Don’t get bitchy. There’s nothing to do if we go out, except drink—we can do that here.”

I resist the urge to beat him to death with a pillow; just grit my teeth and lie on the bed with my legs over the edge and stare up at the pressed ceiling gone yellow with cigarette smoke. “I’m not being bitchy,” I say. “You can’t sit in this room forever, you know.”

He stretches out next to me, his breath fluttering. A small noise in the cramped room. We lie like that, side by side, our ghost-selves polluting the ceiling a little more, while outside the neighbourhood dogs bark, and the faint noise of the Louis Botha traffic drones.

The bed springs creak. He’s up, across the room, lighting a stick of incense. The sicksweet smell coils through the muggy air as he sifts through his collection of LPs. Plastic rustles. A button clicks, and the needle drops. The record hisses as the needle bounces along the grooves. If he puts on Nick Cave, I’m going to scream. The lid snicks into place. Rain is the only person I know who actually owns a record player. I think it used to be Lily’s.

A bass lead thunders the crappy speakers, making them buzz. Fucking Joy Division.

“Want a drink?”

I lift my head so that I can see him across the dusky room. He’s fiddling behind the burnt—out speakers that he uses as an incense table and hiding place for his stash.

It’s not vodka today though. Cooking sherry, which means he’s been too scared to leave the house for days now.

“Why are you drinking this shit? It’s like, 38 degrees outside. The bloody roads are melting and you’re drinking sherry? You know who drinks sherry? Old ladies who have no pets and buy tins of dog food and hair nets. And dye their hair blue.”

Rain is smiling despite my ranting. “So you don’t want any then?”

“Ah, whatever. Just pour me one.” If I’m going to be stuck in Rain’s house on a Saturday afternoon, I might as well get pissed. He’s right. There’s nothing else to do. We have no car, we have no money, and we live in Joburg. That’s a death-sentence right there. Not in the way you’re thinking. I know everyone seems to believe that if you live in Joburg and you take one step out of your house you’re going to get gunned down, and then crazy hordes will rape your corpse while mutilating your remains for muti. It’s really not like that. But, Joburg is huge. It sprawls. And it runs on cash and flash. If you don’t have any, then you might as well not matter. You’re screwed.

I sit up and take my drink. The sherry is sticky sweet, enough to make my stomach turn. But I sip at it anyway.

By the time the late afternoon sun turns the curtains into a backlit post—modern artwork, we’ve finished the bottle of sherry. I’m feeling sick, my stomach protesting. We’ve worked our way through Joy Division and The Doors. Now we’re on the Velvet Underground. Rain is the most retro person I know. He categorically refuses to listen to anything that wasn’t recorded before the year Kurt Cobain ate shotgun. He says it’s the day the music died. I’ve given up arguing with him about how he was nine at the time and I remember he still thought Wet Wet Wet were the greatest and he had posters of Marti Pellow torn out of Top 40 and stuck up all over his room, so no, pseudo retro-boy, I don’t think so. His whole shtick is just meaningless.

“I’m going to go stir-crazy in this house,” I say. “Out,”I moan, clutching at my chest. “Must. Get. Out.”

Rain is sitting cross-legged on the floor against the bed, mumbling along to the music. He cranes his neck so that he can look up at me. “No.” He pauses, and cocks his head like he’s at least thinking about it. “Where?”

“I dunno. Doors, Zeplins. Anywhere.” I chuck a hippy-velvet scatter cushion at him. “Any place but here. Besides,” I wave my glass at him, “We need more booze.” I put on my best Richard E. Grant voice. “I demand some booze!” But I know I’ll go where ever Rain wants, because I like to make Rain happy.

God, I know it’s stupid. No-one has to tell me that. And I’m self-aware enough to know that he’s never going to like me that way, and he’s fucked-up and selfish and stupid and not worth my time, but it’s not like I chose this. I hate that he’s in my head like a cancer and I can’t cut him out.

Memory, who is the only person who still speaks to me now that school is over, told me that I need to get Rain out of my system by having sex with him. Because he’s bound to be so utterly crap that I’ll be embarrassed to have ever had a crush on him in the first place. When I explained to Memory that this would be slightly difficult to achieve, seeing as how Rain is gayer than a freaking camp-ground, Memory said I should just get him completely shit-faced and talk in a really deep voice. And make sure the seduction happens in a dark room.

Yeah, no. Memory needs to never become an advice columnist or anything, because that way lies insanity.

“Okay,” Rain says, finally.

And I grin, because we’re at least getting out of Lily’s witch-house.

—

Till Wednesday!

(and if you don’t like waiting for updates, you can buy the complete book)

I can see and stuff!

So after a lifetime of terrible vision, I had an operation (ICL for those who need to know this sort of thing), and now I can see and it’s kinda weird.

 

Cool weird, though.

 

Anyway, for the last week or so I have been adjusting to life as a regular human who doesn’t fumble around, and can’t see their fingers perfectly when they are 1 centimetre from their eyes. Yeah, had to relearn to put in eye drops….

I was slightly worried that with the delay I would run late on the Giftling Novel, even though I built in a lot of cushion time. But all looks good, and I’m running through a final pass now. I’ve read this book so many times that right now it looks like the worst thing to ever have been worded, but this is a common writer-feel around about this point, so I’m just taking deep breaths and tweaking.

In less cool news, the elderly cat now needs a chair to get up to her food bowl, and that makes me sad. I can’t with pets any more. They get old and die and it’s like someone stabbed you through the heart, so you go out and get a new pet so you can get stabbed all over again. Humans.

Reading and writtering

Went to the library and got out some fat fantasy books (Robin Hobb), fat…historicals (Patrick O’Brian), some sf I’ve been meaning to read for a while (Liz Williams) and some SA fic (Kgebetli Moele).

Reading can make me feel guilty sometimes. I love reading, I would much rather spend the day reading than a)writing, b)exercising c)cleaning house (ahahaha) or any thing really. So it makes me feel guilty when I do it. (“But your house is filthy, you’re fat and disgusting, you’re lazy and pathetic,” my inner voice cries, on a loop.)

So sometimes I have to explain to the Inner Voice that reading is part of my job (Nice, eh? :D). Reading more can only make me a better writer, can only expand my knowledge, my skills, my love of story.

Cat, it’s okay to read. No one cares about your stupid house being clean except you.

—

Okay on to writing. Working hard on my Giftling Novel. It’s a very old novel from back when I was trying to write urban fantasy. Which is, yeah, not really where I see myself going these days. But I still love the story and it’s fascinating (to me, I doubt to anyone else) to see the bones of my interests laid out. This was back in the day where I was convinced that Neil Gaiman and I were destined to be besties because his agent repped the book. (Alas, it didn’t sell and we parted ways; there went my BFF shot with Neily Baby *sadface* Then he stole my secret girlfriend so like, we must be mortal enemies or something now, I dunno….).

ANYWAY, this is not a throw-away novel, it’s more a piece of the past that can never shift up to join the future. It’s YA, it’s set in suburban Joburg (oh…there’s nothing cool about suburban Joburg, so, yeah, but hey, it’s where I grew up.), and there’s magic. Well, and rats. And stuff. There was a lot more heroin in the original book but editors kept thinking I was trying to write an issue novel whereas I was like, no some people just happen to do drugs and it’s not an issue.

So all the drugs are gone (*sadface* That’s frankly the only part of the book I regret losing).

But hey, it’s been pretty fun revisiting this place, remembering part of my headspace when I was writing.

IN WHICH BETH BERNOBICH AND CAT HELLISEN SQUEE OVER BOOKS

Beth Bernobich is a writer whose Work I Love, and we’re just going to NNGHHHH about the work we love. So whip out your TBR lists and get adding. (All book covers lead to a goodreads page, for ease of finding a store)

I’ll wait….

Welcome Beth, and let’s get started in the misty past, and talk a little about influence.

 

Beth: So you asked me about writers I love who do that combination of complex characters and magic and intrigue. And I have names! But seeing as I’m a contrary sort of person, my first name is an author who wrote historical fiction, not fantasy or SF. Patrick O’Brian wrote a twenty-book series set during Napoleonic Wars. There’s Jack Aubrey, captain in the British Navy, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish physician, natural philosopher, and multi-lingual spy. I could probably go on for days about why I love these books so much. The sweeping action of historical events, the multi-layered characterization, the goddamned beautiful prose. Also, the sloth. (You really need to read the scene with the sloth.)

Cat: Sloths and goddamned beautiful prose. I am, as they say, sold.

When I was a wee thing, most of my reading tended towards the Gemmel/Feist/Donaldson type stuff, but then a friend’s father handed me a copy of Mervyn Peake‘s Gormenghast, which has forever changed my view of fantasy. (I remember seeing Titus Groan in the sff section of my library before this, and dismissing it for having a “stupid title”. To be fair, I was a bratty teenager at the time.)

For me Gormenghast is utterly magical without being overtly magical and I think it set the tone, in that sense, for a lot of the fantasy I love now. I still adore the magical trappings of fantasy, but I am far more interested in characters and how they react to each other. Lush description and playful language are major added bonuses. All the elves and spells and monsters in the world won’t make a book interesting for me if it is not, at its heart, about the relationships between people. Those things are just there to make it richer.

So, from the past and on to the now – is there a writer working now whose work you love? I think we both know that those are often the books that influence our own writing the most, but  in ways no reader could see. What they do is make us go, “OH YES, I want to be able to make a reader feel that too.” and we are once again inspired.

 

Beth: There are so MANY authors whose works I love, so picking just one is hard. *closes eyes, spins around, and plucks a name from the list*
 
Nicola Griffith . It feels presumptuous to say her works influence my writing. Let’s go with I love her books with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.
 
The first book of hers I read was Slow River, and it just devastated me in all the right ways. The prose, oh how I love Griffith’s prose. Exquisite, graceful prose. The characters, who are complex and layered. The story told through three interweaving threads, from past to present. Griffith is a master of technique. She can veer from past tense to present, from one timeline to another, all the while weaving an absolutely riveting story. She’s also not afraid to show her characters doing ugly things, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes because they are deeply flawed people. At the same time, it’s not ugliness for the sake of ugliness. Those flaws can be heartbreaking, and there’s a thread of compassion running through her books, whether she’s writing a near future SF like Slow River, or a historical novel like Hild, or a noire mystery like Stay.



What about you? What books have colored your writing?

 

Cat: I have only read Hild, but that was amazing, so I need to go dig up her other works. This conversation is going to be hell on my bank balance *grins*

There’s one (to me) very clear influence on my writing, though whether or not that comes across to other people, I have no idea.

Tanith Lee. Okay, a disclaimer:  not everything of hers is brilliant, but when she hits the mark, she hits it ohgodsohard. Her writing is lush, dark, strange; her characters are never innocents, whatever side they seem to be on. For me it’s the fluidity of gender, the scheming, the betrayals, the gods and magics and darkness of her work that I fell in love with. I remember as a teen reading When the Lights Go Out over and over, and thinking,  “This this this, this is fantasy, this is how I want it to be.”

In that sense, although our work is dissimilar, her influence shows in the way I treat gender and love. I don’t think love is perfect or beautiful – there’s an underlying ugliness to it, an obsession; and obsession drives people to do terrible things. It’s overcoming that obsession, slipping between the cracks and flaws to find the bright hearts, that’s what I want to see.

Her fantasy tends to veer to more modern settings, and quite often in fantastically re-imagined European cities – her books of Paradys are stories scattered through a timeline all linked by the city of Paris. I don’t write faux-medieval settings with knights and princess who need saving, and her work has definitely influenced me setting-wise.

She’s *just* released a new book – A Different City, which I need to get my paws on.

Okay, so we’ve done past and present, so let’s look to the future. This is less about influence and more about what exciting new worlds are going to be opening up to us.

Are there any newer writers who you hope to see great things from?

Beth: Yeah, my to-be-read list just grew that much longer as well.
 
As for newer writers? The first name that comes to mind is John Chu . John’s an amazing writer, who has already won a Hugo for his story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”. Go, read this story now. In fact, read all John’s stories. You will be happy you did. His craftsmanship is superb. His characters are vibrant and real. I’m always delighted when I hear about a new story from him.
 
Shveta Thakrar is another new writer who is getting some well deserved buzz. Her short story “Krishna Blue” made the NPR Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2014 and 2014 Locus Recommended Reading lists, and I’m excited to hear that she’s working on a couple novels as well. The best way to describe her stories is to use her own words: “stories about spider silk and shadows, magic and marauders, and courageous girls illuminated by dancing rainbow flames.”
 
One last author I want to mention is Aliette de Bodard . Aliette has already collected an impressive number of awards for her short stories, including a couple Nebulas. The minute you read one of her stories, you’ll see why. She uses her lovely, sharp prose like a scalpel that cuts deep into her characters. Unflinching is the word that comes to mind. You can imagine my excitement when I found out that she has a novel coming out this August. It’s called The House of Shattered Wings and the description is  “a devastated Belle Epoque Paris split between quasi-feudal Houses, addictive magic, dragons–and entirely too many dead bodies!” My first reaction was a giant YES!!!



What about you?





 

Cat: OH. That was lovely.

Both names heading to my Rather Immense and Scary reading list. Funnily enough, I was also going to talk about Aliette, so *grin* Pipped to the post….

I’m always seeing new names doing interesting things, often coming up through short stories, and then there are names who have been around for a while writing short stories and novellas and winning things so it’s not as if they are *new* writers,  but certainly ones who I think are going to go from strength to strength.

However, there are writers who are not famous, or well-known outside of South Africa, who I think are amazing, and I really want to see what else they’re going to do: one of those is Rachel Zadok, who has been drifting closer and closer to specfic, and her novel Sister-Sister is a beautiful, dark, twisted ghost story set in a South African near-future.

Another not-that-new writer who I think is going to become more and more interesting with time is Laura Lam, who writers gender-playing fantasy with circus-bright trappings.

And that’s a wrap!

Thanks so much for chatting, Beth, and for adding ALL THE THINGS to my reading list. For those interested in Beth’s work, she’s currently running a kickstarter to fund a coda to her three book River of Souls series. if you’re not familiar with them, one of the tiers gets you all three novels, which rather helps.

https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/1678456/video-506371-h264_high.mp4

 

Ideas brimming

Today was spent synopsis-ing and panicking, two things that do seem to rather go together.

 

While I was falling down a black hole of self-doubt and crushing despair, I was throwing ideas at my writer friends, and something lodged in my brain.

 

So, I have a little something I’d like to get off the ground and I have most of a week before school hols kick in, so I will be brainstorming like a brainstorming thing, but the tentative idea is you will be getting a YA novel, gratis.

 

 

but with less Mycroftian sarcasm. *g*

Fourth Star for Beastkeeper

The release of Beastkeeper has been something like amazing.

Four starred reviews. Four. that’s like…wow. I have to slap myself a little to make sure I’m not dreaming this.

Many thanks go to my amazing editor at Henry Holt, Noa Wheeler, for giving this book the thought and care in editing that pushed it to this point.

“In this elegant, lyrical, and startling original fairy tale . . . While there are hints of “Beauty and the Beast” here, this is a story all its own, and older fans of fairy tales and their retellings will revel in this poetic, tragic, epic story of a girl who is faced with the worst of what people can choose and instead decides to step outside of the curse and make her own way.”  – BCCB, STARRED REVIEW

“Beastkeeper is a bright, beautiful sliver of a novel . . . Every page shimmers with magic.” – VOYA, STARRED REVIEW

“Blending modern-day problems and ancient magical curses, Hellisen’s novel sparkles like a classic fairy tale, even as it plumbs unpleasant truths.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“This tangled tale of jealousy and revenge retells the classic “Beauty and the Beast” story, but with a twist . . . With lush, descriptive language and complicated familial relationships, this complex story line challenges readers to pay close attention to the details. Hand this middle grade/YA crossover to tweens and teens who enjoy dark fairy-tale retellings.” – School Library Journal

“Hellisen’s narration is thoughtful and lyrical . . . A wild, unique fairy tale.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

Screaming at the water-cooler

As a writer who works from home, I can be kinda ambivalent about twitter. I follow a pretty wide range of tweeps – activists, game-designers, readers, journalists, other writers, people I have met at parties, artists, celebrity accounts, runners, computer programmers, conservationists, archers, photographers, chefs, mommy-bloggers, Curate-accounts…. so things can get pretty loud and angry sometimes. Lots of opinions, lots of voices all Being Right.

 

I’m online because twitter is my water-cooler. It’s where I hang out when I have my tea, and interact with Other Humans who are not eight years old. It’s where I get the news (often before it breaks), where I can get sucked into rants and discourses. Unfortunately, for a large portion of last year, twitter started to get really unfriendly. Not to me, particularly, but it became a place where I would be guaranteed to leave fuming. People fighting non-stop, throwing tantrums, trolling, being cruel – both in attack and defense. It became a pretty shitty place to hang out with tea.

 

I quietened down some of the people I was following, which helped, but I refuse to simply turn twitter into an echo-chamber, where everyone always agreed with me, and me alone. I became a lot faster on the mute-button, allowing that there were days where people I otherwise liked were just pushing me too close to a ragey edge.

 

But I wanted to see good there again. I wanted to see the connections, the community, the sheer force of working to help that twitter can be. I guess I got my wish. So, if you’re not in South Africa, you may not know, but the mountains near where I live are on fire. (#CTFires) It’s a really huge fire, destroying 1000s of hectares of mountain reserve, creeping close to settlements, and generally causing a lot of grief and fear.

 

But twitter. Wow, twitter and its other social media cousins have been an eye-opener. Just when I’m ready to give up because dear god could people get any more petty – a wave of support comes crashing though the twittersphere, spreading donations, prayers, good thoughts, money, food, time, animal rescue, offers of housing…. People are organising collections, tweeting about the need for more halaal food donations, spreading the numbers of snake and tortoise experts, child care service for fire-fighters… It’s glorious.

 

When these flames are finally doused, I want to remember what twitter can be for. Not just an ego-loaded mess of opinions and selfies and rants, but a place where we can help others.

 

And if that sounds all hippie and stuff, welp, then I’m a gorram smelly hippie and proud of it.

The (Mostly) Complete SA Spec Reader

An archive of speculative fiction written by South Africans, the list includes fantasy, science fiction, and related works – horror, dystopia, etc. This is simply a list with links, and not a review site, I pass no judgement and kept the list alphabetical.

 

This is a work in progress – if you know of more, email me at cat at cathellisen dot com with the details. In the interests of keeping the list manageable, please only link me to works published by a reputable press, thank you. For the majority of authors, I’ve linked to Amazon simply because it’s easier for international buyers.

 

A – Adeline Radloff – Sidekick

– Alex Smith – Devilskein & Dearlove

– Angela Meadon – various short stories and novellas

 

C – Cat Hellisen – When the Sea is Rising Red, House of Sand and Secrets, Beastkeeper.

– Charlie Human – Apocalypse Now-Now, Kill Baxter

 

D – Dave de Burgh – Betrayal’s Shadow

– Dave Freer – (Dave Freer often writes together with Eric Flint and Mercedes Lackey) – Much Fall of Blood, The Rats the Bats and the Ugly, Pyramid Power, (and loads more.)

– David Horscroft – Fletcher

 

H – Henrietta Rose-Innes – Ninevah

J – Joan De La Haye – A prolific horror and specfic writer with many works listed here

 

I - Iain S. Thomas – Intentional Dissonance

 

L – Lauren Beukes – Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters

– Lily Herne – Deadlands, Death of a Saint, The Army of the Lost

– Liz de Jager – Banished, Vowed

– Louis Greenberg – Dark Windows

 

N – Nerine Dorman – Prolific writer of fantasy, horror, and SF – works listed here.

 

R – Rachel Zadok – Sister-Sister

 

S –  Sally Partridge – Pick,  Planet X

–  Sarah Lotz – The Three, Day Four

– S.L. Grey – The Mall, The Ward, The New Girl

– Something Wicked – a South African Horror/SF magazine, still produces anthologies

 

T – Toby Bennet – Mainly horror and fantasy – works listed here

 

COUNTER-CURSE

 

 

 

 

COUNTER-CURSE

by C.L. Hellisen

***

There are always three stories. The winner tells one; the loser tells another; and the third, the one we could call truth if we looked at it sidelong through a piece of shattered glass, that is the story that fades soonest, forgotten even as it tells itself.

There is no room for truth in love.

Here is the story that eats its own tail. We must tell it quickly in dreams and whispers, before there is nothing left of it but an eye that watches and a mouth too choked to speak. It starts in the forest, where all the wild things learn their sleights and magics, in a castle, where all the tame things learn their place.

The king and queen are not important to this story (they have their own – it is short and bloody and sad, and it ends before it should), instead, there is a man who works with the castle beasts, with the horses and the falcons and the ravens. He was not born in the castle, but grew up in the forest that surrounds it, and he has a talent for speaking the tongues of animals. He is well-paid, he has a wife who is clever and almost beautiful when the candles are low. He is a comfortable man, with a comfortable life. He enjoys his work, he loves his wife. He loves his daughter.

When she was born, he likes to say, all the animals from the castle came to pay their respect. Every beast from the stable and keep, mouse and war horse both. It might even be true. Freya is smart like her mother, and she has her father’s talent, although it takes a different form. This doesn’t bother her. She plays with her magic like a princess plays with a golden ball – it is precious, and yet, it is just a toy. She makes rushes dance across the castle flagstones, teaches hares to stay away from the castle gardens, sets the great candles of the watchclocks to burn bright and high, their flames charmed into a flickering puppetry.

She is a plain girl, though there are no mirrors to tell her this, and it does not matter for her suitors are many and varied in temperament. She finds them amusing. Freya is waiting for love to come to her on bright and shining hooves, to be a roaring thing that takes her completely by surprise – the way she sees it still for her parents, who hold hands when they walk at night, and who laugh over spilled milk and spoiled fruit.

Instead, her mother brings home a girl so beautiful that it blinds her.

“This is Inga,” says her mother, as she pushes the girl forward. Her hair is a flow of sunlight against the kind of milky skin that terrible poets seem to favour in their verse. Her eyes are deep and black and wide as winter. She smells like pine needles. She smells like the heart of ice She smells like magic.

Inga mutters her hello, awkward and out of place. She has some tragic story – a family dead – these things happen. She was working as a maid. Freya’s mother – whose needlework is small and fine as though it were stitched by mice (and perhaps it is) – found her barefoot and ash-painted in the lower kitchens, scrubbing out the blackened pots. The lowest job for the lowest scullery maid.

“I could taste her magic,” she says to Freya’s father. “How anyone could not have noticed…”

It’s true. She has that same strange under-the-tongue taste of cold air which Freya and her father both have. In Inga, it is sharper than splinters, sweeter than sugar shards. Even so, Freya knows that she is stronger still. Inga’s real power lies in her beauty and Freya finds herself caught in it.

“Welcome, sister,” Freya says, and when Inga looks up at her with those drowning eyes, Freya knows nothing will ever be true again.

***

It doesn’t take long for the beautiful to see the beautiful; after all, they have eyes only for their own reflections. The son of the king and queen is one of those pretty fools who are not malicious so much as bred to believe the lies they are fed. He is only as vain and shallow as he has been brought up to be. This is what Freya tells herself when the prince begins to send Inga gifts of delicate necklaces and embroidered slippers.

She watches Inga fall in love with the idea of her prince.

“You shouldn’t,” she tells her one day. They are both sitting at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes and carrots with slender sickle-bladed knives. Or at least, Freya is. Inga is day-dreaming, her head pillowed on one palm as she watches Freya’s knife swoop lazily through the air, slicing gentle skirts of orange from her dancing carrot.

“Shouldn’t what?” Inga’s eyes are half-lidded, her voice slow as a waking dream.

The carrot and knife dance faster, the blade paring away at its partner. Freya waits for the tremble in her throat to die. When she is sure she will speak without betraying herself she says; “Don’t trust the sons of kings. They don’t marry the foster-daughters of court magicians. They marry princess. You would be nothing more than a- than a dalliance. There are others who would give you more.”

Inga turns her head like a hunting snake and stares at her. “You’re jealous.”

And Inga is right but for all the wrong reasons. “Not – not – not of you,” Freya tries to say but the words are all caught up in her throat and crawling over each other like maggots in meat, and besides, Inga is already on her feet, her dark eyes like blown-out stars, her hair swirling in the gale of her anger. She storms from the kitchen, and slams the door behind her.

On the table, Freya’s carrot has been pared down to the pale core, lying in a bed of orange curls like flayed skin. She gathers the remains and chops them dully to add to the evening meal.

***

The prince can be charming, can be witty, can be attentive. These are the things that make him as popular as he is among the court ladies, Freya knows. Where before he was never someone she paid overly much attention to, now Freya finds herself waiting in the places she knows he frequents, learning his times and routines that she can follow him without following him. She wants to be able to know her enemy, her rival, to know him so completely that any move he makes she will be assured hers is better. When the prince sends Inga a set of earrings made of silver and sapphire, Freya carves a small and beautiful box with an intricate locking mechanism for her to keep them in. “If you wear them, you might lose them,” she tells her foster sister, and reluctantly, the earrings are hidden away. Inga keeps the box by her bed, and soon forgets to open it.

Freya does the same for each thing he sends to Inga – finds some way of reducing it, hiding it, replacing it with a gift more practical. She dresses Inga in gloves she has knitted, tunics she has edged with tiny embroidered wrens, shoes she has lined with rabbit fur. Each time she sees Inga wearing one of these, she is certain that she has stitched her foster-sister closer to her.

Inga wears her gifts with the careless ignorance of the beautiful. At night she begs Freya’s help and Freya shreds her dreams and weaves silk dresses out of spiders’ webs and dancing slippers from the sparkle of starlight on ice. She twists straw into golden bangles and thistles into jewelled hair combs. She dresses her foster-sister in her magic.

When the magician and his wife are asleep, Inga crawls through the window to join the prince at his innumerable balls and dances. Each time she kisses Freya’s cheeks fiercely and makes her promise to say nothing.

Always, Freya promises, and keeps the memory of the kisses burned into her skin.

She is losing Inga, though she knows that the truth is she never had her.

***

The problem with broken hearts is that they are sharp and jagged and filled with long fine splinters. Broken hearts are cruel. Broken hearts can see only their own misery.

Because she wasn’t the one Inga fell in love with, Freya feeds her jealousy as attentively as a watchman feeding twigs to a fire. As Inga has grown more beautiful, so Freya has grown more powerful. She has found how easy it is to shed her skin and sprout feathers. She turns into a white raven and soars over the forests when the prince goes hunting. He is always so quick to kill, like an animal, she thinks. Like a beast. She can no longer see him as human, he is a hunting thing and all he touches he destroys.

The prince is obsessed with a white hart that lives in the forest, and he chases the deer through spring and summer and autumn and winter, seeing no other prey as worthy. When he finally brings it down and stains the white snow crimson, Freya is there to see it. She lands, raven-skinned, on the corpse, and the prince’s men laugh and say it is a sign – a white raven to mark the death of the white stag.

“A ten-point stag,” says one of the men. “An excellent shot, sire.” He looks to Freya. “The bird’s wings would make a pretty ornament.”

The prince smiles and shakes his head. “I have what I want,” he says as Freya lurches skywards.

Later, the stag’s pale head is mounted in the castle hall. It looks down over the courtiers, over the lords and ladies. It is a reminder to Freya that the prince is a beast who collects trophies. That he cares only for the chase and the kill.

It might not be the truth, but it is Freya’s truth.

Her splintered heart festers, her hate and jealousy cushioning it in her breast. And like a sickening thing, her mind is poisoned, and at night she dreams of beasts and teeth, of murders and betrayals.

***

It is Inga’s seventeenth birthday, and the prince has sent her a gown trimmed in ermine, a golden circlet for her brow. The court-ladies have long since given up – against the shimmer of Inga’s beauty they cannot compare. Like the mystical white hart he once chased through the frozen forest, the Prince has found something beautiful that he must have, he hunts Inga as completely as she hunts him.

They deserve each other, Freya thinks, and weaves the gift she has designed for her foster-sister.

“He loves you,” she says that evening, as she helps Inga tie the laces of her tunic and dress, as she straightens the hair combs that hold her golden mane in place. He loves you like a white stag, like a trophy for his hall.

“He does,” Inga smiles, it is dreamy, soft and Freya hates it. It makes her look like an imbecile. They deserve each other.

“What if he strays?” Freya asks, her tone innocent.

Inga frowns. “That would never happen-”

“Real life isn’t a children’s tale,” Freya says. Her fingers twists and braid, twist and braid, twist and braid. “Look at his father – the old queen must watch and pretend she sees nothing when he takes court ladies as lovers. Younger, prettier women who replace her. One day that might also happen-”

“Shut up!” Inga says fiercely. “He’s not like that.”

“Or you,” Freya continues as though she has not heard. “Your head might be turned by the wink of a nobleman or knight. After all, you wouldn’t be the first queen to run off with her husband’s most trusted companion.”

“I hate you,” Inga whispers, her eyes glassy. “You’ve always been jealous that the prince saw me and not you.”

“He sees you, but he does not love. You are beautiful, and so – for now – you have his eye. It will not always be so. Men are faithless. He will move on.”

“Petty petty jealousy,” Inga says, but she is scared that at the heart of it, her sister is right.

“Not true,” Freya says. “But I can make it so these things never happen.” It’s a lie, of course. There is no magic that will make someone fall in love any more than one to make them fall out of love. But Inga doesn’t know this. Her magic is weaker than Freya’s and she doesn’t have her natural understanding of it.

“Can you really?”

Freya smiles, and lets Inga ask her for a curse.

“What will it do?” Inga asks when it is done, the magic laid under skin like a tracery of fine silver wires. “How will I know if it works?”

“It will work.” Freya smooths her hands over her lost sister’s shoulders. “No-one could stray from someone as beautiful as you, could fall in love with another, and no-one would fly away from their life with one they have promised to love for always.” The curse is sharp as bramble thorns. The prince does not love his trophy wife, he is merely in love with his reflection in her. Should he truly ever fall in love he will no longer be a man, but a beast. A hunting beast of the forest, a horror, an abomination. And if Inga is ever to leave the cage she has built for herself, she will become a bird and die a bird’s little death.

One corner of Freya’s mouth curls upward. It’s only fitting, she tells herself. It’s what they deserve.

Perhaps Inga is not as slow and stupid at magic as Freya has always assumed. She narrows her eyes and takes Freya’s wrists in her long and delicate fingers. “Should I lose my prince,” she says, and Freya feels the hooks and claws of Inga’s spell catching at her sinews, digging into her bones, “you will take the form of a raven white and be bound to me in his place for all eternity. Your freedom will come only when you lose what you love most.”

The two woman step apart from each other, their teeth bared.

“So be it,” says Freya.

***

Years pass, and nothing changes. The old king and his wife die, and the prince and his pretty Inga take their place. They have a little son, an heir who grows spoiled and wild under the long shadows of the castle.

She cannot watch their happiness, so Freya leaves the castle and goes into the darkest parts of the forest, weaving her solitude around her. Briefly, she takes a suitor. A man she barely cares for, but he gives her a daughter before he leaves, and she keeps the girl as close to her as she can, never letting her leave the sanctuary of the deepest heart of the forest. She weaves spells around the Within, cocooning it in magic. In protection.

Even this is not enough, and Freya’s daughter escapes her mother’s clinging confines and runs far from the icy forest, following the sun and the promise of freedom.

Time slips slow and strange, long and short and inbetween, and Freya and Inga begin to forget. Their children have grown to adulthood, and nothing has ever happened. The prince is a king, and the head of the white hart still watches the hall while cobwebs gather in its antlers. The king’s other trophy is perhaps less beautiful, but she has been tempered by the years, and so has the king. For the first time, he sees her as a person, as someone who makes him laugh at spilled milk and spoiled fruit. She in turn has begun to so see him as just a man, with flaws and facets. The mirror has tarnished but she has put aside dreams of love and settled for days that do not last too long. And she has her son, a distraction and a hope that things will be better for him.

Curses are not bound by time or memory.

The day the king becomes a beast, the day the man falls in love, Freya knows it. Inga has lost her once-handsome prince to love, he is nothing but a beast.

Freya is deep in the heart of the forest – the Within that is hers and hers alone – when the pain reshapes her body. Her feet turn to claws and her arms are jerked out of shape and rearranged. She is shrouded in feathers, and like a fine chain, she feels the magic pulling her through the skies to Inga’s windowsill at the very top of the castle. It is already deserted, the servants have fled. In the courtyard, the king-that-was prowls the flag stones, his great claws raking gashes through the pitted stone.

“What have you done?” Inga says through gritted teeth.

The raven caws, flicks its white feathers. “What I promised. He is no man.” She thinks of the daughter she loves, long since fled from the Within, and hopes that her run-away child will stay safe.

Inga presses her lips into a thin line, and tightens her grip on the ledge so that her finger bones show whitely beneath her thin skin. Her hands are beginning to age, just a little, and Freya can see wrinkles gathering at the corners of her eyes. Fine threads of silver weave between the gold of her hair. “And what happens if I leave this monster now, tell me?”

“You will become a little bird. You will have no more brains or heart than a wren.” The raven bows. “And then you will die.”

“Break it.”

And Freya knows that her jealousy has betrayed her, that she has lost everything. “I cannot.”

“Then – do something.” The desperation rises in Inga’s voice, making it brittle.

The raven can only twist and braid, twist and braid, twist and braid, pulling the threads of the curse into a neater shape. “There,” she says when she is done. “The prince will be a man again, but only when the one he loves, loves him in return.”

For a long moment Inga says nothing. She smiles instead, her eyes far away. Her smile is terrible. “And my son?”

Freya knows what she is asking; if the curse will follow him, if he too will be made a beast by his desire. “Send him away,” Freya says, and for the first time she feels regret. The boy is an innocent but even innocents will be caught in curses. “Send him far from magic and mystery and true love.”

Inga closes her eyes. “There is no place far enough for him to run from love.”

“Out of the forest, into the world of science and now. There he will be safe from curses.”

“He will hate me, he will not understand,” Inga says, and Freya’s broken heart breaks more because she has done this to the one she once held dearest.

“Better to hate you, better to hate everyone,” Freya says softly and they both look to the beast below. “Than to be a man who falls in love.”

“Or his keeper.”

The first snow has begun to drift from the clouds and far below, the beast roars into the flurry and the falling night. The curses work their way deeper and Freya knows she must turn her heart to stone and forget her daughter. She must stay a raven and belong only to Inga so that the girl can live.

She bows her head and empties her mind of regret. There is an eternity to unremember love.

fin

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