Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 24

Anine Booysen, South Africa, and Rape Crisis

WARNING: ALL ARTICLES ARE TRIGGERY.

A seventeen-year-old girl is gang-raped, disembowelled, her throat slit, and left to die.

The “corrective” rape of lesbians.

It is estimated that a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read”

I’m asking if those who can afford it go to Rape Crisis South Africa and support their 1000 hearts campaign to raise money to help rape victims.
I’m also asking that wherever you are, you help get this as viral as possible. Rape Crisis simply cannot keep going, keep helping, without funds.

Thanks to all those who can help. To my international friends who would like to donate – R100 is about $11 (USA) or 7 quid.

 

Rape Crisis are Cape Town-based. You can search for similar organisations around SA

here

. (thanks to S.L. Grey for the link.)

 

The Master List of Interesting

A friend suggested writing down all the things you find interesting, and from there work out the kind of fiction you want to write – the stories you really want to tell.

It’s a fun exercise, and oddly, most of the stuff that crops up has already appeared in everything I write

So here’s mine so far. (I keep adding to it, heh)

-Music

-murals

-the ocean

-mist and fog

-Survivalism/Anarchism (related because of post-world-melt down)

-Myths and legends, esp the epic motifs of sacrificial kings/men and tricksters and death-queens)

-symbolic cannibalism (can’t think of a better way to put this – stuff like my mother she killed me my father he ate me from The Almond Tree)

-androgyny

-cross-dressing

-liminality

-shape-shifting

-fantastical animals

-ruined cities

-reconstructed human bodies (including prosthetics)

-pyschopomps

-death

-drugs

-folk tradition – english ballads

-found family

-alternative lifestyles (travellers, squatters, communes etc)

-pretty straight boys being not straight.

-girls with guitars

-old houses

-UST

-card games and card divination (cards in general, really)

-birds, birdwatching

-rivers and waterfalls and mountain forests

-The Wild Hunt

-nudibranchia, cephalopoda, anemones, jellyfish, seahorses/pipefish

-beer (beer-making)

-tattoos

-self-deprecating humour

-metafiction

-fraught family dynamics

-weird sexual dynamics*

-portals

-crazy architecture

 

 

* Turns out the Amazing Kelly Link did something similar, and I stole some from her list.

Heirloom Dreams

This is a really old story, which I’m putting up now because I promised Tammy February.

It’s Hobverse, set about nine years before When the Sea is Rising Red, and featuring characters no-one will know except those un/lucky few who get to beta all my other Hobverse novels.

So; how Harun and Isidro ended up together, a love story in reverse.

Heirloom Dreams

A carved ivory bowl waits on the desk. Images of unicorns spiral around its faintly yellowed sides and the ash-fine grains of scriven inside are lit by fatcandle-light. Outside my private room, the dormitory is silent.

No student is supposed to have this much scriven; only the thimbleful eked out during classes. But I am House Guyin, and the masters will do nothing.

A distant firework hisses through the MallenIve sky, and a dim flicker of green briefly illuminates the stone room. Magic is deeper on Long Night, and I will touch it, use it. There are visions waiting for me, I can practically taste them.

I scoop up scriven in one of my mother’s heirloom powder-spoons and measure it out on the table in neat lines with the flat handle. Seven. If I am doing this tonight, there will be no half-measures, and seven is the most powerful number. Seven quick snorts from the pipette, and my sinuses are full of the burnt orange taste of magic. My head swims, and I feel, distantly, the way my body stretches tall, my limbs loose as drowned weeds.

The vision hits me hard, and I let my body take the impact; roll with it as I sway in my seat.

I’m on my back, lying on a hard narrow mattress. Clothed and sweaty. The air is too thin and the room jolts around me. A weight pins me down, and something wet moves across my neck. A flare of pain. The smell of flint, sweat, and copper mingles about me. Wind howls and under that I hear soft panting. I do not know where I am but my body feels older, the shape of my chest wider, my arms stronger. I have the beginnings of a soft paunch. The weight above me shifts, and warm breath blows across my cheek. Love, a voice says, and I realise it’s a man, some lover I’ve taken after growing bored with spawning heirs. A man who has me on my back as he leans in to kiss me, copper on his tongue and I welcome him.

Gasping, I pull out of the vision, wrenching my neck and back. I’m on my knees, the cold of the flagstones seeping into my palms and through the fabric of my trousers. I’ve never wanted to pull out of a vision before, though I know I’m strong enough to do it. No-one ever warned me that it would hurt this much. I’m still trying to get my breath back and keep the vision locked down when someone raps softly at my door.

He tastes like sour milk and blood and Pelimburg wine.

Another firework sizzles over the rooftops.

“Harun?”

“Wait,” I say as I struggle to my feet. I lean against the whitewashed Chalice-room wall for a moment, get my bearings, and then slip out to join Lien and his cronies in the passage.

They are dressed in their various House finery, all of them. Something we’re not supposed to do while still at the Chalice, but it is the Long Night, and student tradition dictates that we last year students sneak out of the university to join the other revellers in the cold. We will wear our rank like shields.

Lien waits for me to take the lead, and we slip past the dorms of sleeping first- and second-years, along the shadowed walls, out into the biting air. My breath steams. I pull my coat close, wrap the scarf of unicorn hair tighter. It smells faintly of the musky incense and citrus dust of the Guyin mansion.

A series of whistles and bangs splutters in the night and fireworks blaze blue and green and violet across the empty sky.

“Are we dawdling for a reason, Harun?”

Lien thinks he can talk to me like this because I fuck him. The idiot. I turn my back and walk slower, not bothering to answer him.

The heavy wooden Chalice gates are bolted, though no-one stands guard. We slip over the brick wall where winter ivy clings still, the leaves crumbling under our hands and boots.

Most of the fireworks are coming from Marshall Square, near the old theatre. Before coming to the Chalice, I had never even seen the old play-house; setting for low-brow bawdy entertainment. Now I know the network of pubs and poetry rooms that circle it as well as I know every room and passage of the ancestral home. With my head covered against the new-risen wind, I lope down the hillside toward the Square. Behind me boots slip and stamp on the frosted cobbles.

“Look,” says Lien, and I pause to turn back. Yellow silk flashes as a small parade passes down one of the side roads. The drums throb, and the painted paper statues of Gris and his loyal Ives’ dogs dance down the alleys, held aloft by Lammers drunk on vai and high on scriven. So high they don’t even feel the cold, their arms bare to the winter.

It is winter. There is a war. I have never known fear or sorrow. I feel them now. And fear, most importantly fear. There are people I have promised to help. I have [promised to help the one I hate in order to save strangers, to pay back a debt I don’t remember incurring. Ives. Something to do with Ives and House Pelim.

When I look up, still fighting the vision down and trying to lock it back under, the others have gone on ahead, following the stamping dancers and their giddy puppets. Anger rises in me, cold and clean. I am not meant to be left behind, to follow Lien and his pack of sycophants. I snarl, and instead of turning down the side road after them, I carry on down the wide empty main road. If Lien wants me, he can come find me. I don’t go running after other Houses, not like Ives.

As I tramp further down the street, the fireworks go off more frequently, clustered together in explosions of raining fire. There are people on the pavements; dancing, singing in drunken snatches. The street vendors are swaddled against the chill. They poke at grilled sausages and dried trout, little wyrm coiled on greensticks and roasted to a crisp. There is a cacophony of vendors’ argot and the silver clang of the handbells that are only played on Long Night. The night to chase the old year out, to welcome in the new.

MallenIve is almost overwhelming after the austerity of the Chalice. My head is so used to the dry voices of my lecturers, of magical theory and history. It’s as if I’d forgotten how real the city could be, how earthy. Let Lien and the others go hang, I will find my own entertainment here.

A juggler passes me, spinning fire. He grins and pokes out a suggestive tongue. Tonight there are no differences between Houses, no high and low. Or so they would have you believe. And there’s many a Lammer who buys into it, who beds down with a serving girl or boy for the night, and takes the chance to dabble in the filth.

I could do it too, and no-one would know.

“It will be different next time. We just need to try again, until they accept us.” His voice is new-familiar, saws at my heart like a silken thread.

“Oh really?” I’m sitting in a bath tub, while behind me he sluices warm water down my back. Fingers dig into my scalp, dragging the suds through my hair. “They spat on you,” I say.

“What did you expect?”

“That they would show a little respect,” I jerk my neck to the side to crick a muscle. “I am House Guyin after all.”

“But I am not,” he says, and another jugful of water pours over my head and back.

I make myself grin back at the juggler, and he passes me with a wink. Something loosens inside my chest, freeing me. Maybe, on this one night when things are what they are not, I can play at being someone else. One more turn, and I break out into Marshall Square, where ropes of coloured paper lanterns are slung from roof corner to roof corner, little flames dancing between the bunting. The wide drum, the biggest in all of the city, stands on a makeshift stage in the centre of the Square, a spynxes’ hide stretched thin over her mouth, and to her side stands the drummer – small and wiry, his arms bare so that the corded muscle shines. The mallet he holds is leather-bound, and he stands with it ready. He has been holding this pose since sundown, the sweat dripping from his shaking body.

The crowd heaves, and someone shoves me as all around me people jostle for space, waiting eagerly for the final hour of the year. The ground comes hurtling toward me, and I brace myself for the fall.

My father is crying. I’ve never seen the old man show so much as a flicker of emotion. Strangely, in this, it is my mother who is calm, who does not raise her voice nor lower her eyes. Her face is hard.

“You cannot change it?” she says.

“No. And I wouldn’t even if I could.”

“You always were stubborn.” She straightens her back further, looks down on me. “You can’t stay here. Not with that-”

“Give him the small house on Ivy,” my father says, interrupting her. “We are not a common House, to throw our child away over foolishness.”

“Foolishness?” My mother turns her anger onto him now. “There will be no Guyin heir, thanks to thisfoolishness.”

Father snorts in bitter amusement. “You knew there never would be. We saw the end coming, Millia. We just never saw the shape it would take.”

A hand in mine, tightens.

A hand on my arm catches me, hauls me upright, then lets go almost immediately.

I’m about to mutter my thanks, until I look up.

The boy smiles and shrugs, hands held out in mute apology. He’s stone-pale, even under the warm lantern light, and his hair is dark, swept back from his face in a loose tail. There is no mistaking the bat features, the little triangle of the milky-white third eyelid that partly covers the corner of his eyes.

“Sorry, yeah, no touching the Lammers. I know. I could have just let you fall,” he says.

Another shove behind me almost sends me careening into him, but he side-steps neatly. I had forgotten that the bats are allowed to walk MallenIve on Long Night. Everyone is equal tonight, even the bats, apparently.

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted to see what you’d do.” He has a cocky grin, wide enough to show the tips of his fangs. “A House scion in my debt.”

“I’m not in your debt.”

“No.” He sighs. “I suppose not. Next time I’ll just let you hit the ground.”

“There won’t be a next time.” There is confusion in my voice, the absolute strangeness of talking to a bat as if it were a person. It’s surreal. His voice is familiar-new.

I can do anything I want to. Be anyone. It’s just one night.

“It’s just as kiss,” he says, as the boom of the wide drum fades.

“Do you want a drink?” I hear myself saying. “Will that settle your debt?”

“It may do,” says the bat, and holds out one white hand. “Isidro.”

We take shelter in the firelit belly of The Fountain Of Mallen, the nearest pub to the Square. It’s full inside, but we weasel a corner to ourselves., standing against a leaning shelf that runs along the interior walls. A few people give us a sidelong stare, then shift their attention back to their drinks when they realise who I am.

“So,” I say to him, still lost. “What do you want to drink?” Now that I’m looking at him clearly, I realise that he’s beautiful, even for a bat. If his cheeks were rouged, his hair dyed lighter, if something could hide his eyes, his teeth.

He shrugs. “Whatever you’re having.”

I leave him and fight my way to the bar and order two vais. The vai here is a home brew and has a kick that could rival a wild uni’s, but I’ve grown used to the taste.

Isisdro stares at his glass, one eyebrow raised. “Vai?”

“That’s what they like to call it.”

“I’ve never had any before.” He lifts the glass and peers at the clear, slightly oily fluid, sloshing around the tumbler.

Of course. He’s a bat. It’s not like they’re wandering into the pubs for a spot of socialising.

Finally, he sips and swallows. It’s almost amusing to watch him. The bat sets the glass down, as if he’s scared that he’s going to spill, and slides the glass across the little shelf toward me. “Don’t think I’m being rude…”

“It tastes like shit,” I say. “I know.” And down mine and pull his over to replace it.

With my head this full of scriven, I shouldn’t be drinking vai, but tonight I feel reckless, not myself. Just for once, I want to not be the sole heir of the second-most powerful House in MallenIve. I want to be a student, out getting drunk, getting laid, doing something dangerous and stupid.

The clamour is growing louder; people have taken up the count as the last minute of the old year winds down. I lean in toward Isidro, and shout over the noise. He smells like flint. “I guess I still owe you a drink,” I say, my voice slurred and scriv-slow.

He opens his eyes wide, and they are very dark and very blue. “So you do. And after trying to poison me with that,” he gestures to the empty glass, “I should think I get to choose.”

I nod. Before I’ve even started to ask him what he wants, he ducks forward and there is a sting at my throat. The crowd is cheering. A huge boom swallows all the noise.

Long Night is over.

Isidro pulls away, blood on his mouth. Even bringing my hand up to brush the oozing wound at my throat is hard. I feel stunned, like I can barely move. No-one touches me without my permission.

He moves again, so fast that I can’t stop him, only this time there is no pain, just his lips against mine, tasting of my blood. I wrench my head to the side and he whispers something in my ear.

I can’t hear him over the sounds of toasts and stupid drunken happiness. Over the last fading, hollow echo of the drum.

“What?”

He leans in and shouts against my ear.

“It’s just a kiss,” he says.

–

 

Go do some work, Cat.

The night lamps and the low fat moon bring out the cockroaches; each one as large as my thumb, with wingshells of malachite green. They are not good at flying, blundering across the living space, their wings whirring. They crawl up the walls and hang there like jewels. Farin collects the dead ones so she can sew their shells onto her shirt, she says. She keeps them in a sweetwood box, with her hair pins and silk ribbons.

Fidgeting about with already written stuff is not the same thing as actually writing a new scene. Now go do some work.

You bustard.

I’m finally making actual pen and paper notes of all the rather nebulous Hobverse stuff that’s either been floating about in my head, or was lost in the Great Accidental Wiki-Deletion*.

I’m working out the suits for the cards, and they were pretty obvious to me, and each has an elemental and House symbolism tied to them, and it all makes sense and it all works.

Except the one suit is bustards.

And yeah, I can just imagine Poor Reader going “What? Is this some kind of outlandish spelling of bastard of which I was hitherto unaware? Why are all the other suits birds? WHY DOES THIS STUPID WRITER KEEP MAKING UP WORDS?!”

So, a bustard.

*I did indeed have an entire database of info keeping all the wordbuilding straight, and yes, I accidentally deleted it. I’m slowly rebuilding it but dear god it’s painful. For those who are interested in that sort of thing, I use Zim Desktop WIki

Bye til next year, probably.

Wishing all a safe and peaceful holiday, however you’re spending it.

 

Starting arting

I am pretty slack when it comes to art. mainly because I find art yanno, hard. Which is dumb, because I find writing hard too and that doesn’t stop me. Not for long, anyway.

So I’ve begun a project I’m calling art365, which is basically to make a piece of art everyday for a year. It doesn’t have to be amazing, huge, or professional. It needs to exist. It can be a sketch, a doodle, a painting, a piece of folded paper. As long as I have created something that I consider art, my goal is met.

I’m two days in, and so far I’ve played with oil pastels and sharpie.

 

Day 1: Neither Fish Nor Fowl.

As you can see, I’ve not really used oil pastel before, and I didn’t realise that lighter colours do not show over the dark ones. So I learned something there.

 

 

Day 2: Lils and Nala.

This was just a quick sharpie sketch from the climax of WtSiRR, mainly because I love Lils and Nala so much and I couldn’t think of anything else to draw. I don’t often do figures because um..lol HARD. I hope by the end of the year I am better at them.

 

If anyone decides to join in, let me know, I’d love to see what you do.

Pick a card any card

I’m planning on finishing the first draft of New Hob Book in the new year, and then I can go back to one of the languishing WiPs

The one closest to being finished is  N&V, which just needs to be rewritten back into third and I need to put back all the extra PoVs and change the big bad and wait did I say closest to finished? Argh. Me. This book. Our eternal struggle to make it work.

Mundus, The Dog God Book, and Paper Teeth need variously, middles and endings and a decision about which one my agent might be interested in. I think I’m most in the mood to finish Mundus.

 

Mainly because of Zaile.

–

Their first stop was a small tea shop in the middle of a garden park. Although garden park was really an inadequate description, Daniel mused as he leaned back on the white wire chair. The little round tables and matching curlicued chairs were all Victorian Conservatory, but the garden was sultry, steaming. Bamboo competed with vine-dripping trees – none of which Daniel recognised – and troupes of little grey-green monkeys bounded though the tops, making the branches shake and rain down fruits and flowers and dying leaves.

The waiter was a simian girl who spent most of her time walking about on her hands or jumping from table to table. She was fast, Daniel had to give her that. Almost as soon as they’d taken a seat, she’d delivered two ice cold glasses of water, complete with slices of lime. She wore no clothes , but her fur was long and pale beige and more or less modest. Unless you stared. Which Daniel was doing now. Her nipples were cherry pink nubs that poked through the soft long fur on her chest and belly. She had a double row of them, six altogether.

“Acrobat clan,” Zaile said. “Performers, normally. Some of them tend to get bored of circus life and run off to be accountants.”

“And waiters,” said Daniel. He downed the water and wiped his forehead. His skin was pulsing with exertion and the heat.

“And yes, waiters.” Zaile bent over the menu, studying it. After a while he called the simian girl back over. “Earthie,” he said, pointing at Daniel. “First day.”

“Oh,” the girl snapped the menu out of Zaile’s hand. “Should have seen that. I’m slow today. I thought you’d stopped bringing them here.”

“It’s not one of mine.”

“Hmph.” The girl tucked the menus under one arm. “It’s still here though. I can do you . . fruit. And more fruit.”

Zaile looked over at Daniel. “That work for you?”

“Um.” Daniel fidgeted. “You do realise I don’t have any money, right?”

The simian girl and Zaile both started laughing. “You’ll pay in talents,” Zaile said. “Whatever you’re good at, or whatever you deem worthy about yourself. You share the happiness, basically.”

“What?” Daniel tried to wrap his mind around the concept. It sounded like something a bunch of stoned hippies had come up with after a night of acid and spliff. It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Or he could pay for you,” the girl said, and eyed Zaile. “I’m down with that.”

Zaile leaned his chin on the palm of one hand and snorted. “I’ll bet you are. But you’re bound to be disappointed.”

“Why’s that?” the girl said, her tail curling about her in a display that was alarmingly coquettish.

“I’ve swapped sex for poetry.”

“Oh. Crap.” The girl stopped waving her tail. “Fruit. On the house.”

“Really?” Zaile raised an eyebrow. “I could do you a sonnet. I am dead good with rhyming couplets.”

“Gah.” The girl pulled a sour face. “I am so disappointed, I can’t even begin to explain the enormity of my despair.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t offer,” Zaile called out as the girl hopped off to a small glass-walled octagonal building where, presumably, the food was made.

“You sell yourself for food?” Daniel said, after a few minutes had passed.

“Crass. No. Only a fucking earthie would see it like that.” Zaile seemed more amused than annoyed. “Besides, I have other talents. I paid for an entire wardrobe designed by the Great Salamander with an epic prose poem.”

“Right.” Daniel folded his hands on his lap and stared at them. “And what if you’re not a poet or a prostitute?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Zaile said, drawling each word long and slow. “Hezekiah must have loved you, you repressed little shit. Did you let him fuck you? Because that’s his game – look for the most emotionally wrecked excuse for humanity he can find, and proceed to mess with them even more. He loves it when you earthies hate yourselves.”

 

–

oh yeah, Mundus, I choose you.

 

A Happy End-of-Year round up.

Generally I beat myself up a lot for laziness and failure, so I like to, at the end of a year, try and look at what I have achieved rather than roll around in misery. Even wangsting cats need a break from wangst.

 

1) I had my first book come out in February. So that was kinda cool.

2) The companion story Mother, Crone, Maiden came out on Tor

3) I moved into a new house.

4) I finished two books:  a twisted children’s book, and another Hobverse story.

5) I am in the process of writing three (or four, if I ever feel I can fix the fourth one) stand-alone fantasy novels, and um…another Hobverse book. (shut up, I know, ha!)

6) I started and gave up a commercial YA fantasy, and learned something valuable about what really interests me as a writer.

7) I read approximately 73 books, (some were plays, so I didn’t know if I should count them, but then I considered all the books I start and never finish and figured the plays can stay.)

 

See, that made me feel better.

Occasionally writing

And I hate myself for it; for not being like the other boys in the Stilts, for being born an Onnery and mollycot and a monster and most especially that I was born with an idiot for a sister.