Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 6

Stretch Goal #1

My Kickstarter backers have spoken, and the two most popular enamel pin colours in the poll were green and teal. The plum (which is a personal favourite of mine) ran a very close third, so I will keep that one in mind for later stretch goals.

What does this mean? Until we make the first stretch goal of $16,000, absolutely nothing! But if we do make it…

1) Every backer with an enamel pin in their reward will be able to choose which variant of pin they wish to receive: black, teal or green.

2) A few more pledge levels will open up, allowing backers to add extra pins before the Kickstarter campaign closes.

3) Every pledge level at $99 or above will receive all 3 pins, one of each colour variant.

4) All backers will have the option of purchasing pins as add-ons via Backerkit, a few weeks after the Kickstarter campaign closes.

So let’s do this thing. Please spread the word about our awesome Kickstarter campaign, so we can reach $16,000 and unlock this awesome stretch goal. ONLY THREE DAYS TO GO!

We Did The Thing! Kickstarter Funded.

I’m delighted to announce that the Creature Court Kickstarter is FULLY FUNDED! This means all four books published, beautiful cover art by Kathleen Jennings, and all the other delightful rewards that my 340 first backers chose for themselves will all get to be made and sent out over this year.

It’s so exciting that I will have this trilogy back in print properly, and the new novella as well! I’ll also have the resources to do a paperback release next year, keeping these books in print into the future.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the campaign so far… and it’s not too late! We have stretch goals to shoot for now, starting with:

$16,000 – two colour variants of the enamel pin, to be unlocked! Backers are voting on their favourite options right now to decide which two colours will be selected.

$17,000 – Tansy will write a Creature Court flash/micro fiction for every day remaining of the campaign, to be published on the Kickstarter page! Backers will be invited to contribute prompts & requests.

You can still pledge for the next 4 days to get awesome rewards including limited edition hardbacks, digital bundles, felt mice, ebooks, postcards, enamel pins and more! LET’S SEE HOW FAR WE CAN TAKE THIS!

Creature Court at Rome

Hello, the Creature Court Kickstarter is at 89% and I am crazy excited at how close we are to funding! Here’s another blog post based on some thoughts I had on Twitter this week. This is the story of my love affair and lifelong obsession with Ancient Rome, and how that fed into this, still one of the most ambitious writing projects of my life to date.

I’ve been talking about the Creature Court non-stop for weeks now, because #kickstarter is a shameless beast. But I haven’t talked enough about the importance of Ancient Rome to these books. My university didn’t teach genre writing, so I decided to study History & English to fuel my future fictional endeavours. I got diverted into Classics because those subjects were just more INTERESTING. And that’s how my life got eaten by the Ancient World.

So here’s a thing: when you study women of the ancient world, you can’t rely on literature because so few of their words survive: you have to look at the spaces between the history of men: at art and archaeology and numismatics as well as words.

I was sent to Rome on scholarship to get a close up look at the statuary of imperial women. Which… is still one of the greatest experiences of my life. My partner was on long service leave at the time, so we pooled our savings and went for a MONTH.

We walked the city together, travelling on foot between museums, absorbing the city and digging into its history. As we walked, I constructed a whole different city in my head… one that wasn’t Rome at all, or at least was a strange and mythical version of it.

Two years later, I started writing Power and Majesty. Aufleur is a city shaped by my memories of walking around Rome, though it took on a whole different identity, thanks to a mash up of other historical loves: Edwardian London, Cabaret Paris, the Roaring 20s.

One of the strongest elements of Ancient Rome I brought to Aufleur was the Fasti (festival calendar) as written by Ovid. The beautiful thing about the Roman calendar is that they have SO MANY festivals & rituals, many of which were old news by the time Ovid was writing. Of course, not everyone celebrated every festival — most Romans picked and chose the gods they liked best, or the ones they felt were more appropriate to their family/situation. Some festivals were for everyone, some only for a single demographic.

But what if they weren’t? What if all those festivals, and more besides, were essential daily, weekly, monthly routine? What would it be like to live in a city revolving around such a complicated system? How would it work? Who supplies the garlands and honey cakes?

One of my favourite things about Ancient Rome is that they mostly took a holistic, highly open-minded attitude to religion. A highly superstitious culture, they brought in a huge range of immigrants & adopted every single god they brought with them. This means a lot of religious ritual to pack into a single city, full of immigrant communities and passing trade. You get a god and you get a god, DON’T OFFEND ANY GODS! Move up, let’s make room for more.

So ahem, back to my city. I wanted a protagonist who had a job, and a life, before being dragged into the shadow world of war, fighting-the-sky and transforming into animals. Velody and her friends became craftswomen who provide for the city rituals. Velody is a dressmaker, Rhian is a florister and Delphine is a ribboner. Rhian & Delphine put their arts together to make garlands for the many city festivals of the complicated Aufleur calendar, based on the Roman but with extra content packed in. This made for a rich, complex fantasy background that I fell in love with. The daylight world of Aufleur is constantly moving on to the next festival. Sometimes, overlapping. Unlike the Romans, my calendar is numerically perfect so you don’t end up with Saturnalia in July.

And this might be a good time to link to one of my all time most-linked blog posts: 10 Roman Festivals That Are Weirder Than Halloween. A cheeky post that sums up a lot of my Honours thesis. Roman festivals are SO GREAT.

The Floralia, the circuses, and many of the other festivals that appear throughout the Creature Court novels are largely based on real history, only some of them are more complex than they were historically (and some, honestly are played down, Romans were SO EXTRA).

If you want to read an epic fantasy based around complex Ancient Roman festivals, mashed up with urban fantasy anti-hero tropes, a touch of blood spatter & cute flapper frocks, The Creature Court is the trilogy for you!

For a taste of what the books are like, check out this episode of my fiction podcast where I read aloud a chapter of Power & Majesty in which Everything Goes Wrong at the Floralia parade.

Listen to the Creature Court!

Special Creature Court episode! Download or stream it here.

I read one of my favourite chapters of Power and Majesty to tie in with my Kickstarter to raise money for the grand Creature Court Reprint Project.

Our last serial, Let Sleeping Princes Lie is now available as a Kindle pre-order, or you can download it straight away if you subscribe to my Patreon.

Sign up to my author newsletter for updates, follow me on Twitter at @tansyrr or @sheepmightfly, find me on Facebook at TansyRRBooks, and if you like this podcast consider supporting me at Patreon where you can receive all kinds of cool rewards, early ebooks and exclusive stories for a small monthly pledge.



See you next week!

So Many Wins For One Weekend!

I’m delighted to announce that I won four Aurealis Awards yesterday which is, still a ridiculous fact I can’t quite compute.

Before this I had won 2, Best Novel in 2011 for Power and Majesty, and the Convenor’s Award in 2012 for Galactic Suburbia. So….

FOUR. I can’t even.

The awards, btw were for Girl Reporter (Best YA Short Fiction, Best SF Novella), “The Curse Has Come Upon Me, Cried,” (Best Fantasy Short Story) and The Fictional Mother (Convenor’s Award).

To celebrate these wins, I have sent links to ALL of my Kickstarter backers to download 2 free ebooks: The Fictional Mother (essays) and Please Look After This Angel (short story collection in which “Curse” appears). If you’ve been meaning to pledge to the Creature Court Kickstarter but haven’t got around to it, this would be a VERY good week to do that, as the free downloads of my 2 Aurealis Award-winning books are available to all backers until Friday 6 April.

You can get access to the free books by pledging to my Kickstarter for as little as $1!

We still have nearly $4000 to raise for the Kickstarter and 11 days to do it in! Will I make the goal in time? Do I get to make these books????

PS: In other exciting awards news, I’m on the Best Fancast shortlist of the Hugo Awards twice, for Galactic Suburbia and Verity! Also Kathleen Jennings, whose wonderful art is an essential part of the Creature Court Kickstarter, is nominated for Best Professional Artist!!

Creature Court Reading List

I was recently asked about books that influenced/inspired the Creature Court trilogy, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

Here’s the Twitter thread where I expanded on the books at length: The Great Creature Court Reading List.

COURT FANTASY

Melusine, by Sarah Monette (and the rest of the Doctrine of the Labyrinth)

The Black Jewels Trilogy, by Anne Bishop

Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey

The Green Lion Trilogy & The Queen’s Necklace, by Teresa Edgerton

Daughter, Mistress & Servant of the Empire, by Raymond E Feist & Janny Wurts

Blood and Honour, by Simon R Green

ROARING TWENTIES

Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos

The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family, by Mary S Lovell

The Diviners, by Libba Bray

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, by Genevieve Valentine

ANCIENT ROME

The Fasti, by Ovid

Masters of Rome series, by Colleen McCullough

The Silver Pigs & rest of the Falco series, by Lindsey Davis

The Course of Honour, by Lindsey Davis

I, Claudia series, by Marilyn Todd

The Roman Mysteries, by Caroline Lawrence

Romanitas, by Sophia McDougall

Lavinia, by Ursula K Le Guin

THEATRE

Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters

Wise Children, by Angela Carter

Masks and Shadows, by Stephanie Burgis

Pantomime, by Laura Lam

Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean

Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood

Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett

Flappers Gotta Flap

This first appeared as a Twitter thread to commemorate the milestone of $8000 raised in my Creature Court Kickstarter!

Hold on tight, duckies and hoppers. Time for an epic thread about My Favourite Flappers (not for Old Fogies). In the 1920s a new kind of woman emerged: she bobbed and shingled her hair, drank and smoked in public, left her corset at home, and decided to enjoy herself.

Let’s start with Clara Bow, the original “It Girl.” This glamorous, tousle-haired actress was the queen of the silent era silver screen. The self-described “awkward, funny-faced kid” hustled her heart out to get parts from age 16. As the quintessential Flapper in film after film, Clara came to symbolise the wild freedoms women claimed for themselves in the Roaring Twenties.

Adele Rogers St Johns, screenwriter, said:

“Clara is the total nonconformist. What she wants she gets, if she can. What she desires to do she does. She has a big heart, a remarkable brain, and the most utter contempt for the world in general. Time doesn’t exist for her, except that she thinks it will stop tomorrow. She has real courage, because she lives boldly. Who are we, after all, to say she is wrong?”

Colleen Moore, another epic film star of the 20s was established long before Clara Bow, and they competed for flapper roles before Moore withdrew, declaring the age of the Flapper was over. It was Colleen Moore who popularised the Flapper look, including the iconic “Dutch-boy” haircut she kept all her life. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who for better or worse wrote a lot of words defining this era, called this “the most fateful haircut since Samson’s.”

Colleen herself said:

“We were coming out of the Victorian era and in my pictures I danced the Charleston, I smoked in public and I drank cocktails. Nice girls didn’t do that before.”

Josephine Baker danced for her living from age 8, from street corners & Harlem clubs to a European tour. She joined La Revue Nègre in Paris and she STORMED EUROPE WITH HER AWESOME. With comedy routines, the most extreme Charleston anyone had seen, and an iconic outfit entirely composed of bananas, Josephine rocked Paris and became that city’s highest paid entertainer.

I’m also pretty sure Josephine Baker invented the finger-guns. Fight me.

This glamorous bisexual star refused to return to America because it was so hard to exist there as a woman of colour. Josephine Baker stayed in Paris until WWII broke out, spied for the Resistance, fought racism & continued to be awesome.

Josephine Baker:

“To realise our dreams we must decide to wake up.”

Theda Bara AKA the Vamp, also billed as Hollywood’s first Femme Fatale, was a silent movie star who played famous seductresses like Cleopatra and Salome. It was a popular trend at the time to promote actresses with mysterious & exotic backstories: Theda therefore became the Serpent of the Nile, despite never having visited Egypt.

Theda Bara’s movie A Fool There Was caused a mass fad across the country of young women cosplaying a glam vampire aesthetic, with low-cut gowns, pendant earrings, heavy eyeliner and dark lipstick. Vampmania!

Theda Bara:

“To be good is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered.”

Florence Mills was a Broadway performer famous for dancing the Charleston in the Plantation Revue, a Broadway show created from nightclub acts. She became an international star & used her music & fame to speak up for racial equality. Florence died at the height of her success and fame, in 1927. She was mourned by the nation and the music world; thousands including huge numbers of celebrities attended her funeral.

Florence Mills:

“I belong to a race that sings and dances as it breathes. I don’t care where I am so long as I can sing and dance. The wide world is my stage and I am my audience.”

The Roaring Twenties wasn’t just about the Charleston – sometimes it was about the shimmy! Gilda Gray was one of the Ziegfeld Follies, whose shimmy became a national craze in the US. When asked about the dance Gilda replied “I’m shaking my chemise” and later credited the move to Native Americans from whom she had (apparently) learned the dance.

Bessie Smith was “the voice of the Roaring Twenties,” also known as the Empress of the Blues. She broke bestselling album records, and transfixed audiences with the power of her voice. Bessie performed live with Louis Armstrong in1925, the two famous icons of jazz clashing to outdo each other… he was the only trumpet player who could match her impressive voice.

Only with the invention of the electric microphone were other singers able to compete against a Bessie Smith performance. She was just that epic.

Zelda Fitzgerald, credited as the “first American flapper” by her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a writer, socialite and epic symbol of abandon, excess and other outrageous behaviour, punctuated by psychiatric breakdowns. Her husband was furious Zelda used their explosive marriage in her novel; he wanted to use the same material, but she wrote her novel faster! (Dude you literally stole her diary & put excerpts in your fiction, step back)

My favourite Zelda Fitzgerald quote is from when a magazine asked her to send in a recipe:

“See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week.”

Zelda Fitzgerald on the Flapper:

“The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure … she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.”

If you enjoyed this post, check out my 1920’s inspired fantasy trilogy The Creature Court (flappers with swords!!) crowdfunding now on Kickstarter.

Reasons To Support My Kickstarter

1. Australian epic fantasy with a difference — Roman festivals! Flappers with swords! The sky is totally trying to eat people!

2. Bringing these books back into print will make me happy.

3. Bringing these books back into print will make my readers happy, especially the ones who have been trying to get hold of a copy of Book 3 for the last six years.

4. Naked men fall out of the sky and sometimes they turn into cats. CATS.

5. These books include so many sexy shenanigans I can’t even tell you. NSFW.

6. Kathleen Jennings makes beautiful art and she needs to be paid for her work. She also deserves the people’s ovation and fame forever so, you know. Get on that.

7. You know you want to wear her beautiful Art Deco enamel pin. You KNOW you want to own it in more than one colour (but we only get that option if we reach the stretch goal).

8. A brand new Creature Court novella! Coming to you in July… only if you pledge to my campaign.

9. Felt mice. I am making so many felt mice. They are adorable. You need one in your house.

10. Heroes don’t have to be broken, power doesn’t have to corrupt, and destiny doesn’t have to bite you in the face. But, you know. Sometimes all those things happen. And someone has to read about them. Why not you?

Livestream Tomorrow!

I’m recording a live Kickstarter video stream tomorrow! Check it out. If you subscribe now you’ll get a notification tomorrow before I go live at 12:00 noon AEST (Hobart time). You can also post questions ahead of time for me to answer.

Casting the Creature Court, Silent Movie style Part I

A big part of what made me want to write The Creature Court trilogy in the first place was the idea of epic fantasy that uses historical influences other than medieval. My Aufleur is a combination of Ancient Rome and the 1920’s, with a whole lot of theatre traditions from 19th and early 20th century Europe along the way — flapper frocks and jazz music, cabaret, British music hall and even a little pantomime.

The visual aesthetic of the 1920’s is the thing I keep coming back to, in explaining to readers how these books work. Flappers with swords! Gin cocktails, loud music and oh, yes, the sky is falling. The 1920’s in Europe is best known for being that moment between two wars, when young people went wild because they were happy to be alive and a lot of old social traditions were kicked to the kerb.

In Aufleur, there’s a whole different tension because there is a war going on, but the daylight people don’t know about it, so they fill their days with festivals, frolics and yes, scandalously short dresses. No more corsets! Let’s go dancing! (all this and half my characters are broken maniacs who regularly change into animals and monsters to fight that invisible war)

For fun, I thought I’d introduce you to some of the Creature Court’s most important characters by casting a 1920’s silent movie adaptation. Time travel is a must with character-casting games, right? (I’m only doing 5 characters per post because… this is epic fantasy, there are a lot of characters)

Livilla is the easiest! This bombshell Lord of Wolves was written with the classic flapper vamp aesthetic in mind: she’s all red and black frocks, cigarette holders and sharply bobbed hair. I may have been first influenced by Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago, but of course if you go back to the actual silent movie era, we have Louise Brooks ready and willing to play this part.

“Of course I can shift into a wolf. Can’t everybody?”

Then Poet, mysterious Lord of Rats who seems awfully charming but… well, no one quite knows whose side he’s on. I wasted a lot of time looking for silent movie actors wearing glasses (there aren’t any that don’t look super goofy!) so you’ll have to imagine the spectacles, but I couldn’t go past a young Rudolph Valentino with such a sinister expression. (He’s a little too handsome really — I was this close to casting young Buster Keaton!)

“Welcome to the show… don’t assume you’ll leave it alive.”

Delphine gave me a lot of options to choose from pretty much every blonde flapper looks like her! And again, Kirsten Dunst in The Cat’s Meow would be a good modern choice, but looking at the entertainment stars of the 1920’s I couldn’t go past Gilda Gray, the Ziegfeld Folly famous for shaking her chemise and popularising the shimmy.

“Put those swords away, I’m going to dance till I drop.”

Topaz, a protagonist who doesn’t come in until Book 2, was a tricky one less because she’s black (there were plenty of POC women working in Hollywood & the entertainment industry generally in the 20’s even if you don’t see quite as much coverage of the ones who weren’t Josephine Baker) and more because she’s TOO YOUNG TO BE IN SILENT MOVIES. If we age her up a couple of years, though, I love this image of Nina Mae McKinney mostly because of her sarcastic face. This is Topaz’ face pretty much constantly through Book 3.

“You’re all terrible people but I work in the theatre, so I’m used to that.”

Finally Ashiol! I went back and forth trying to find the right ‘mad bad and dangerous to know’ actor for my beautiful bisexual sack of angry cats, and settled eventually on Antonio Moreno because of this picture, even though he looks completely unlike Ashiol in ever other single picture I’ve seen of him. I believe in you, Antonio.

“When can I be somewhere else, preferably drunk and also cats?”

Come back next time to find out who I’d cast as Isangell, Garnet, Heliora… and more! Who’s your favourite? Drop suggestions in the comments.