Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 26

You are a starfish

I like you.

I’m fascinated by rockpools. They’re probably my favourite thing about the ocean (and I love many things about it so that puts them at the top of a long list). There’s a strange attraction to spending hours scrambling over rocks and wading through tiny pools, harassing anenomes, and trying to crush as few tiny periwinkles as possible that can keep me absorbed for hours. My dad was my patient and willing accomplice in my explorations as a child, and now I get to play his role with my own spawn.

And sometimes among the blue and pink and ivory tentacles, the crimson spines and the hallucinogenic lightshows of shells, you get to find the stars.

Going Old Skool

Once, back in the mists of time, I attempted to write a book longhand. It was slighlty disappointing because when I tried to move it across to my computer, I found that copy-paste wasn’t working.

Actually, I just couldn’t read my handwriting. J.K. Rowling I was not destined to be.

So now I just do everything on computer, including my revisions. With the kids’ book I’ve been pretty stuck with my rewrites, so I did the unthinkable, and wasted ink.

The revision process is still slower than polishing a tiger’s eye with tissue paper, but it has been very different. It’s slower because I read the work in a completely new way. I’m more vicious with phrasing, more inclined to just strike through chunks.

And I’m beginning to feel like this might be a better way for me to work on revisions.

As you can see, I just could not bring myself to use a red pen. I needed to be a little kind to my poor writer-brain, after all.

sparklies and words.

I’m like eleven chapters behind on Kuroshitsuji so…my days have meaning again. (That is, I am catching up all the manga).

(aaaaah Toboso Yana I love your art, let’s be best friends, mmmkay?)

There is no way in hell I am ever going to be able to catch up with the Bleach manga these days and let’s be honest, too many characters my brain hurts so…sorry. Yeah.

As for When the Sea is Rising Red, I think I’ve written my final gift drabble for a while, I just need to post it. But it *is* written and I am all yay. Also. Done.

In the meanwhile, revisions progress on Beastkeeper (slowly, I dunno, it was so quick to write but I’m less than excited by it at the moment. That’s how this game goes – you just need to keep plugging away until the joy comes back.) and I’m taking a break from the adult novels (I have three completed, one with betas, and four in various stages of undress and experimentation) and slapping that YA book around for a bit. See what I mean about finding the joy?

So yes, things are happening, but they’re all under-the-surface things, so not terribly exciting to talk about.

Anyway, I’m off to indulge in pretty messed-up Ciel. Yay! Fun times!

the rain is running down the back of my neck.

So much rain my right knee is now non-functioning and not allowing me to sleep properly.

On the plus side it makes dreaming more interesting.

Right now I am working on draft 2 of the kids’ book, and listening to music. That’s a lie, I am actually cocooned in a fleece blanket and doing Supernatural marathon rewatches.

Ha. WHo needs pride?

Also the inside of my head feels like song song song

which is okay. I like it like this.

When the Sea is Rising Red drabbles.

A while back I got some touristy-type postcards of Cape Town and offered to write people drabbles. All they needed to do was send me a When the Sea is Rising Red prompt (the things I do on twitter when I’m avoiding work…:D).

All four six are finally done and written up and in the post, so here they are:

 

Cindy Pon prompted “She couldn’t believe she was asking him…”

She couldn’t believe she was asking him when she knew better than to hunt for answers she wouldn’t like. “If you’d had to choose?”

He looked up from his book – that same stupid Mapping the Dream that had been both a reading primer and an extended love letter. “What do you mean, choose?”

“Between us.” Felicita pretended to fiddle with the long line of buttons on her wrists. “If there had been no revolution, no barriers. Could you have?”

“If there had been no barriers, there would have been no choice.” He went back to staring at the page.

Ash Hetland gave me “Jannik glanced out the window…”

 Jannik glanced out the window, still waiting for Dash to appear in the shadows. He’d made the break as clean as he could because it was the only way he’d not lose his mind, but it didn’t stop the wanting, or Dash’s reflected anger battering against him. On rain-clean nights it wasn’t just sound that travelled.

Dash had always been fierce in his hate and it was worse now, turned inside out of love. It would have been easier if he’d been colder, more logical. Instead, Dash was a wild-fire in a rising wind. Dangerous. Unpredictable.

The empty space remained.

Jolantru‘s was “She ran through the green…”

She ran through the green to where the world stopped. The wind was a monster here on the Leap, catching her hair and dress in its fists and pulling her forward. Felicita crouched down to dig her fingers into the damp sod. She held her place like the old rocks and waited for a lull.

It came when her joints were frozen, knuckles turned yellow-white. Felicita inched forward to the drop. Tomorrow she was going upriver to MallenIve and leaving her girlhood behind. There were goodbyes to make. The wind caught her whisper and flung it down to the sea.

The last prompt came from Marieke  “Starlight cast shadows around her…”

 Starlight cast shadows around her, cold and remote. Only true fire accepted Esta; danced under her fingers, did as she commanded.

Before Rin died, fire was their weapon against stupid non-sea people in their wooden boats who fished and fought but were never at one with water. After Rin died, betrayed by an ocean that should have welcomed him, Esta had nothing left but flames.

She flicked a match against her thumbnail and watched the burst of blue and orange. Dash had said, “Light me a fire.”

And light a fire she would. Esta smiled, caught between starlight and flicker.

For Tilted Lamp, who asked for a pyjama party (Dash/Jannik)

“And what the fuck is that, exactly?”

His furrowed brow makes me realise that this is not what one does after feeding; hand your meal a – I look down at the offending bundle – nightshirt. One does not assume said meal is staying the night. “Um,” I say. “It’s for you to sleep in.” My voice does that questioning thing at the end. That thing I have been training myself out of.

The hob – Dash – grins in mockery. “A pyjama party, bat? What’s next, bed time stories?” He glances at my over-flowing bookcase.

“If you want.”

And for Nicole who just wanted a slashy little feeding scene between Dash and Jannik. Which turned out to be super-hard to write in 100 words.

The bat’s not like I expected. You hear stories about how they’ll leave you dry and dead if only the laws were different. But this one’s all jitters. It makes me feel like I’m in charge. “Are you doing this, bat, or should I just go and show myself the door?”

He’s been staring at my arm where I rolled the sleeve up. “Oh,” he says. “I -yes. No. I mean, I am doing this.” He touches the crook of my elbow with one finger. “I am.”

And after, he looks at me proper-like, and I know I’ll come back.

 

 

 

four WtSiRR drabbles.

A while back I got some touristy-type postcards of Cape Town and offered to write people drabbles. All they needed to do was send me a When the Sea is Rising Red prompt (the things I do on twitter when I’m avoiding work…:D).

All four are finally done and written up and in the post, so here they are:

Cindy Pon prompted “She couldn’t believe she was asking him…”

She couldn’t believe she was asking him when she knew better than to hunt for answers she wouldn’t like. “If you’d had to choose?”

He looked up from his book – that same stupid Mapping the Dream that had been both a reading primer and an extended love letter. “What do you mean, choose?”

“Between us.” Felicita pretended to fiddle with the long line of buttons on her wrists. “If there had been no revolution, no barriers. Could you have?”

“If there had been no barriers, there would have been no choice.” He went back to staring at the page.

Ash Hetland gave me “Jannik glanced out the window…”

 Jannik glanced out the window, still waiting for Dash to appear in the shadows. He’d made the break as clean as he could because it was the only way he’d not lose his mind, but it didn’t stop the wanting, or Dash’s reflected anger battering against him. On rain-clean nights it wasn’t just sound that travelled.

Dash had always been fierce in his hate and it was worse now, turned inside out of love. It would have been easier if he’d been colder, more logical. Instead, Dash was a wild-fire in a rising wind. Dangerous. Unpredictable.

The empty space remained.

Jolantru‘s was “She ran through the green…”

She ran through the green to where the world stopped. The wind was a monster here on the Leap, catching her hair and dress in its fists and pulling her forward. Felicita crouched down to dig her fingers into the damp sod. She held her place like the old rocks and waited for a lull.

It came when her joints were frozen, knuckles turned yellow-white. Felicita inched forward to the drop. Tomorrow she was going upriver to MallenIve and leaving her girlhood behind. There were goodbyes to make. The wind caught her whisper and flung it down to the sea.

The last prompt came from Marieke  “Starlight cast shadows around her…”

 Starlight cast shadows around her, cold and remote. Only true fire accepted Esta; danced under her fingers, did as she commanded.

Before Rin died, fire was their weapon against stupid non-sea people in their wooden boats who fished and fought but were never at one with water. After Rin died, betrayed by an ocean that should have welcomed him, Esta had nothing left but flames.

She flicked a match against her thumbnail and watched the burst of blue and orange. Dash had said, “Light me a fire.”

And light a fire she would. Esta smiled, caught between starlight and flicker.

 

 

 

Drabble number one

Yesterday I was in tourist central, so I picked up some postcards. Today I asked the twitterverse for When the sea is Rising Red prompts, and said I’d send people drabbles.

 

The first one is for Cindy Pon, who prompted “She couldn’t believe she was asking him…”

 

She gets the postcard of Cape Point (which inspired Pelim’s Leap):

and the drabble (kept as spoiler-free as is possible ):

mid-year book-keeping

I am one cold and tired bunny.

Progress update for the first half of the year:

The Melancholy Raven (a new Felicita book) has been revised and is with my agent. (82.5k)

Ghost Song – my attempt to write a commercial YA novel – has been tossed from my life and I feel a million times better for it. (30k)

Mundus – my For Me book is sitting at 37k

Beastkeeper – 1st draft complete at 29k

And now I’m revising Nulled & Void, which is currently at around 89k

So there, I have now proved to myself that I have been doing some work. Go me.

New Book Progress

11 k into the new book, so I am quite happy about that.

Because it is (very very loosely) inspired by Beauty and the Beast I give you this pic that I dug up. (GiS for Beauty and the Beast brings up a lot of Disney, sadly)

(from SurLaLune Fairy Tales)

My earliest memory of the Beauty and the Beast story was from Story Teller (you will hear this a lot, I was a lonely child and I loved my Story Tellers) and I do love the illustrations they used for that one.

The art was done by Alan Baker – and you can see a little of what they looked like in this post by Robin Has An Idea. (Really, go look, they defined my childhood.)

(If you have no idea what Story Teller is, it was a series of magazines and tapes that well…told stories. Most of them were highly abridged classics, but there was a wonderful variety, and it’s the reason almost every adult South African of a certain age knows The Marrog off by heart.

You can go see Beauty and The Beast here, but the tape quality is little stretchy.

Anyway, I always found Beauty and the Beast terrifying and disturbing. It wasn’t romantic, and it wasn’t happy. Even as a child I found so many of the concepts that lay under the skin of the story rather troubling. As an adult, I can see why now, but back then I just knew there was something off about the whole thing. So naturally it’s wormed deep in my brain, and in the way I view stories and fairy-tale romances.

 

And with that, I leave before I say too much about what I’m writing, though if you read this far I will reward/punish you with a snippet from the new book.

 

The car belched thick choking smoke into the forest clearing. The engine spat, coughed, and then with a roar, the car was lurching away. Sarah’s father didn’t even look back at her. He raised one hand in good bye, and that was that. He dropped it back to the steering wheel almost as soon as he’d lifted it.

Sarah and her grandmother stood silently watching the woods darken, until the sound of the car was a distant throb. “Wastrel,” said her grandmother. “Blackguard.” She sniffed. “Hard to believe sometimes that he’s my own true-born son.”

Sarah swallowed away the snot-thick feeling of her unshed tears. “I’m Sarah,” she said in a small voice.

“I know your name, girl, of course I do,” said her grandmother. “You will call me Nanna.” She drew herself straighter and held out one arm to the air. Down from the darkening skies, like a falling comet, came the white raven. It lit on her grandmother’s arm and bowed, raising its beak. “And?” Nanna said.

The raven answered her in human speech. Its voice was high and sweet. “The little king will be past the borderlands by now.”

“Hmph. Good riddance then.” Nanna twitched her arm. “The girl,” she said to the raven. “He called it Sarah.”

“Well met, Princess,” said the raven. It clacked its beak and stared at her quizzically. “You have her look to you.”

“My mother?” Sarah’s heart bounced up in her chest, hope catching her by surprise. “You know her?”

“I knew her once,” the white raven replied. “It has been long since last we looked in turn and looked the same. A thousand years have passed and the forests have grown smaller.”

“Er, okay.” It didn’t seem strange to Sarah that she was having a conversation with a bird. Vaguely, she was aware that it should have seemed weird, but there was a dreamy quality to the day’s ending that made everything seem utterly reasonable.

YA books I have loved

This is going to be something of a work in progress, as you’ll see. (I’ll be constantly updating, when I find time/read an amazing new book.)

But first an explanation: I’m a hypocrite. I get really mad when people refuse to read a YA book because they believe that YA is inherently shit, but I also get angry when I read the kind of YA these readers are talking about. And then I’m all GAAAH I HATE YA STOMP STOMP STOMP RANT

See it’s not true. I love books, and I love it when I read a book that makes my toes curl and my breath jump all over the place. I like books that play with language and do interesting things; books with complex, believable characters who are driven by more than “which hawt guy must I choose to gift with my va-jay-jay?”

And those complex, interesting, beautiful books can actually be found in the YA section. Chances are though, that (bar a few that make the award lists) you don’t always hear people talking about them.

So here goes. I’ll be keeping a list of the YA books I’ve read that made me go YESSS THANK YOU and want to shower the writers with rose petals and diamonds. (In a completely non-creepy way. *ahem*)

If you read this and think of a book you believe I’ll like *please* leave me a recommendation in the comments section. My TBR pile is scary as it is, but that has never stopped me from adding to it.

 

And on that note, let us begin:

Chime – Franny Billingsley

(first, a confession: I avoid a great many YA books because of their covers. (yes, I know) Please be better than me and ignore the fact that most of these covers make the books look…like something they are not.)

Before Briony’s stepmother died, she made sure Briony blamed herself for all the family’s hardships. Now Briony has worn her guilt for so long it’s become a second skin. She often escapes to the swamp, where she tells stories to the Old Ones, the spirits who haunt the marshes. But only witches can see the Old Ones, and in her village, witches are sentenced to death. Briony lives in fear her secret will be found out, even as she believes she deserves the worst kind of punishment.

Then Eldric comes along with his golden lion eyes and mane of tawny hair. He’s as natural as the sun, and treats her as if she’s extraordinary. And everything starts to change. As many secrets as Briony has been holding, there are secrets even she doesn’t know.

Chime is a gorgeously-told story, with language that circles and trips over itself in a spiraling dance. It’s magical and poetic and twisty. While the ending is not surprising, the way the tale unfolds and the way Briony unfolds with it is just wonderful.

1: This is all I’m putting up today, but I’ll constantly be adding to this. If you’re reading this via LJ, I swear all titles will be under a cut after this. Mwah.