Nina Smith's Blog: The Gothic Chicken, page 2

The End of Everything

They swept in from The Darkness by the hundreds. Maybe thousands. She couldn’t tell, couldn’t count, could barely see. She could not set foot beyond that last gate. It was forbidden. She and her unit had to fight teetering on the edge of nothing, dizzying falls into a seething ocean to the right and left, the only escape down the narrow rocky path at their backs.

She’d never seen this many vampires. They’d come out of nowhere, red eyes and pale skin glowing in the night, and taken the last gate before the alarm even tolled.

Flower ducked a fist that would have sent her flying over the cliff, and swung her broadsword around in a vicious blow that toppled the vampire at the knees. The motion sent her off balance. She rolled, came to her feet and drove her sword up through the ribs of a vampire so tall he blocked out the moon. The creature exploded in a fountain of blood. Way past caring about trifles like that, splattered red, she swung her sword wide, careless, pretty damn sure she’d hit someone undead along the way.

Franco had fallen minutes ago. Bettany screamed three feet away and disappeared under the enemy wave, but her piercing death call just merged in the hubbub of roars, of swords, of the ocean crashing far below. It never occurred to Flower that she, too, might die; she’d been fighting too long now. She punched a vampire in the teeth and followed with her sword, and then Harald had her arm, pulling her out of the fighting, yelling something she couldn’t hear over the roaring in her ears.

“What?” Flower ducked down by the crumbled remnants of a wall, pulling him closer to hear better.

“We can’t hold the tower!” Harald yelled.

“Of course we can hold the tower, we’ve held it for centuries!”

As if to punctuate her words, the last tower burst into flames behind him. The flames lit the fighting in dreadful red.

Flower sighed in irritation. There’d be hell to pay when the king found out.

“We need reinforcements!” Harald yelled. “We’ll fall back to the second tower, but we can’t hold it long. Go! Get the Champion!” He shoved her.

Flower stumbled, righted herself, and ran from the jumping red shadows, her feet finding a sure path. She knew every step of the Impasse, knew which rocks to avoid, and how not to fall off the edge. She’d been here for decades, walked this path every night, but never before had to run for the lives of her unit. The vampires had never dared come this close, not once. Here she could run too fast and not die, look up in dread to find the second tower in flames too, and dart through the narrow space between the forbidding, towering spikes of the first gate, its two halves just offset enough to allow one person passage through, or one person to hold the line. The skeletal branches of the lone dead tree rose before her, bathed red with firelight, red with the rising full moon, red in the shadows of the Bitter Tower, the sentinel that watched over the Impasse, implacable, eternal.

Flower experienced a cold dart of fear, something almost – almost – alien after all these decades of defending the border, as though the tower might fall like the others. She brushed it off. It could not. She’d reach the tower and raise the alarm and the vampires would be beaten back once again and tomorrow they’d talk of their deeds and the king-

A hand grasped her shoulder from the darkness. Flower yelped and skidded to a halt. She raised her sword, then lowered it at once, relief flooding her blood so hard she felt dizzy.

“Flower, report,” The Champion’s voice was a low growl.

Flower opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out. She gripped the champion’s sleeve. His face and hair, streaked red with blood, turned him into a stranger in the moonlight. She’d known Valentin for nearly three hundred years, and certainly the Champion inspired respect, awe, perhaps a little fear in all the muses, but never...

“Have they reached this far?” She wouldn’t let herself finish the thought. Her words sounded high and uncertain against the distant cacophony of war. “When were you attacked? The blood-”

“I said report.” His eyes looked right through her, curiously blank tonight, like murderous stone. “How many are attacking?”

“Hundreds,” she said. “Maybe thousands. The last two towers are on fire and the gates destroyed. I was sent to find you. They want to fall back. We’ve already lost half our people.”

“No.” The Champion tightened his grip on her shoulder.

She winced in pain, but did not let it show. One did not show weakness before her General.

“Go,” he said. “Find the king. Tell him we need reinforcements.”

Flower gave one sharp nod and broke free of that grip, trying not to think about how easy it would be for the Champion to kill any muse warrior without breaking a sweat. What a thought to have.

He strode through the gate, and she breathed a little easier. He could hold off the vampires alone if need be. She ran for the Bitter Tower, skirting the low, ancient walls, ducking under the dead tree. The Bitter Tower loomed ahead. She slowed. Something rose up deep within. A surge of horror, perhaps. A prickle of fear. It should not be so dark. It should not be so silent. Hundreds of warriors should be in there, sleeping, playing cards, talking, stirring the soup pot in the huge kitchen.

Her feet felt like lead. She could move no further.

A glow sparked in a lower window, and she breathed out. There. Of course life remained in the tower.

The glow leaped up, too suddenly, and spread fingers across that window. Then it spread. Another window. Shapes flickered. People shapes, but they moved too fast for muses, and the fire crept up, and up, and up, until the Bitter Tower burned, just like the smaller towers that guarded the path to the Darkness. She took a halting step forward, her sword hanging slack in her left hand.

Slow, measured footsteps came down the path. She ignored them, unable to look away from the end of everything, until a slim, long-fingered hand tipped up her chin, and an almost skeletal face swam into view. “Flower.”

She shook her head, refusing to believe the evidence of her eyes.

“Flower.” The voice became stern. “Look at me.”

Flower snapped her attention to the king. “My king – the tower –”

“What has happened?”

“The last gate has fallen. The towers burn.”

He nodded, as though unsurprised. “You survived again.”

What a strange thing to say. “The warriors in the tower – we must help them –”

“There is nobody left to help.” The king pushed a strand of hair back from her face. He seemed curiously tired tonight, as though he’d travelled far and not slept, and she remembered that he hadn’t been there, he’d been – he’d been – she couldn’t grasp it. A flash of memory stirred, something old, something about a cellar, flames... “Nobody?”

“I’m glad you were spared.” He smiled, a thinning of the lips that held no warmth. “You are my best and brightest, and I will need you.”

“Need me for what? We must return to the last gate and hold back the vampires!”

“It is too late for that, my dear. You must travel to Shadow City and raise what muses you can. There’s a fairy stronghold on the path between here and the city. We will make our stand there. The Ishtar clan will fight with us.”

“What are you talking about?” Her voice rose in protest. “We’re just letting them that far into Shadow?”

His grip on her face tightened, and Flower felt pain; not from the fingers. She couldn’t find the source of it, just a slow, cold drain from her body. “Did I raise you to question me, child?”

“No, my king.”

“Go to the city. Raise my army. Meet me at Ishtar Village.” He let go.

“Yes, my king.” Flower stepped away, unsure what had just happened. Flames spiralled from the Bitter Tower, lighting the sky like a day that brought the sun too close to Shadow. The king had already gone, a streak of darkness striding through the gate and into the hell that waited beyond.

Flower dropped her bloody sword, fingers nerveless and cold. She hadn’t left the Bitter Tower in so long. It had become home. She glanced up at the flames once more, and tried not to think about bodies.

Then she plunged into the darkness that hid the road beyond.

Mapping Shadow (aka the mushroom curse)

Here's a map of Shadow. You might notice, if you look closely, that the coastal regions appear to have been named by a somewhat fearful cartographer - which leads us to today's Shadow Fact.

Shadow Fact 356:In the year 1986 (approximately 1884 in human time), a group of muses set out from Shadow City to map the whole of Shadow. Several Freakin Fairies, intensely interested in this process and hoping to open up some trade routes, applied to join the expedition. However, the muses refused on the grounds they didn't want to be poisoned or cursed hairless halfway into the wilds of Shadow.

Naturally, this didn't go down that well with the fairies, who promptly cursed the chief cartographer to be unable to resist any mushroom he ever saw. The muses didn't think this was so bad, until the chief got into a patch the Bloomin Fairies had nicknamed Moonie Soonie you'll be Seein a Rocket. Say no more.

The cartography was duly completed, and the Chief eventually confined to a mushroomless part of Shadow City, but the damage was done: no muse ever did go to find out if there really were fire-breathing sharks at the Impasse, or what was so terrifying at the Big Bay of Terrifying Tidal Surge.

So, job done: Fairies one, muses zero.

Spooky Play

Q: Why is Halloween so important?

A: (Settle in, grab some popcorn).

I've been a performance artist for a long time, but I can't dance unless everything about it is spooky AF and fuelled by strong emotion. I write about traumatic things. Sure, the Shadow series is light and fizzy and funny on the surface, but it's driven by a helluva dystopic world we live in. That's why it's called Shadow.

So sometimes people ask me, why can't you just be normal? Why can't you make happy things? I don't want you to make me feel things that are not happy...

The answer to that is, first, hey, you don't have to read my books or watch me dance. Second, and more importantly, ignoring bad things, or sad things, does not make them go away. It makes them get bigger. Also being happy for the sake of other people's comfort is toxic - if we don't explore our own shadow selves, and through that the collective shadow of our world, these things will overwhelm us.

Stories, art and performance are kind of a safe way to do this, to explore the themes and emotions, transmute them into play, and then set them free. And - to come back to the original question - so is Halloween. Halloween is a descendant of a festival that recognised a moment when the veils thinned between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Ghosts roamed the night, and people paid respects to their ancestors.

It's unsurprising in a culture and point in history (and here I can only speak from my own lens and experience, living in Australia and being of Irish descent - I do not presume to speak for anyone else) where we either deny or live in fear of things that go bump in the night, that such a festival would become about all things supernatural and - by extension - all things we fear.

Which is exactly why Halloween is important. It gives us a moment in the year to go out and explore trauma, and emotion, and fear. It gives us a moment in the year to choose to turn those things into play, tell stories, talk about them, transmute them, set them free.

Also, it's a great time to light a candle for your ancestors and leave a flower for your friendly neighbourhood ghost ;)

Happy #31DaysOfHalloween

Song of the Serpent King | Colouring Competition

Welcome to the Song of the Serpent King Colouring Competition!

This is open to anyone of any age. I would like to invite you to download and print the image below, and colour it any way you like - crayons, pencils, oil paint, photo shop, whatever is your jam, I just want to see your art :)

When you're done, scan or photograph if needed, and post on Instagram or Facebook.

Instagram: Please use #songoftheserpentking and tag me @colouringtales

Facebook: Please use #songoftheserpentking and tag me @ninasmithauthor

If you're shy, email it to me - ninasmithauthor (at) gmail (dot) com.

I will share entries to my pages, and whichever one has a whole bunch of interaction by the time we're done (or maybe if I just just love it a whole lot) I will send you a signed copy of Song of the Serpent King, as soon as the books land on my doorstep.

Sound good? You know what to do!

The Song of the Serpent King

There's something about drawing snakes and trees that is endlessly fascinating: they curve and twist and flow, and it doesn't really matter how far you take the line, because those hypnotic shapes can fill the whole page.

I started drawing snakes and trees while we were in lockdown. In an uncertain and perilous time, those lines soothed my anxious mind.

And then, the story began to unfold. It was a story I had dreamed some years ago, and that floated just beneath the surface for all that time, patiently waiting for a way to be told, for a time when I could find a way to pour the images onto a page. I showed some people the early sketches, and they all said the same thing: I want to colour that in.

I loved that, I decided, because if you colour this in, it becomes your story, your art, as well as mine. It becomes something we share together, and that is beautiful.

The Song of the Serpent King is a colouring book and a tale: a tale of the ancient serpent people who once shared the world with humans, only to be driven underground where they now wait, calling for us to listen once more to their song.

The books are in production and will be available very soon. Follow me on Instagram at @colouringtales for all the updates.

Full Shot of Jacks II: The Chicken Insurrection

The agonising screams. The jarring crack of broken bones. It was oozing, bubbling, scarlet blood. It was itching reeking sweat. It was golf. “Topper de Monin...

Let's Talk About Shadow

So I've been pretty absent around here lately. Between working, producing dance shows and plunging head first into a desert adventure that kick-started a whole other kind of shadow work (I'll come back to that another time) life's been pretty hectic, and opportunities to write few and far between. Gods I miss spending that time with my characters. Anyway, my focus is shifting back. I am currently working on the last few chapter of Shadow Book 9, which means I've drafted nearly the whole series, and released nearly half. It's both exciting and terrifying, because Shadow has been part of my life for a very long time. It's a world I love escaping into, because it's sarcastic and silly and terrifying all at the same time, and those three qualities (for me at least) work in perfect harmony. Tonight, I started to think about how it all started, and where I'm at, and where you're at, if you've been following the series. Shadow was inspired by a few things. When I was 18, I used to sit on Forrest Chase in Perth City, amongst the lights and magic of a city night, and imagine a whole other world full of strange creatures moving around me. Fast forward to thirty-something me, and a music clip about some crazy dude running around a spooky goth garden crystallised those old fantasies into the germ of a story. I went through a few drafts and a lot of changes before it started to flow, but suddenly, I had this crazy world on my hands with infinite potential for fuckery. Oh hell yes. And I called it Shadow. There was never any doubt about this name. That world was called Shadow, and our world was called Dream. Recent events have made me ponder this choice of name quite a bit, but again, that's a conversation we can have later. If you're following the series, you will have read about Hippy Ishtar in Book 1, and her quest for a weapon that would save her people (but probably doom her); then about Flower and Nikifor in Book 2, and their quest for missing things - a king, whole tribes of fairies, Nikifor' sanity; then about Krysta Ishtar in Book 3, and her grumpy uprising and overthrowing of a tyrant; and finally about Fizz Pop in Book 4, and the consequences of being born into a cult under the sway of a dodgy amoral scientist. Book 5 is on the way. HONEST IT IS. It's called Mannequins. The edits are well underway, and I have a cover model living in my back room. Isn't she gorgeous? Mannequins was my favourite book in the series to write for a lot of reasons, the top two being it's got an army of evil mannequins with terrible taste in fashion, and that I got to unleash pixies Misery and Doom on an unsuspecting Fremantle, where pretty much the whole thing is set. I've been dying to release this one. It's so much fun they'll probably make a law against it. (Caveat: This is a long post and it's nearly midnight. If you've read this far, I love you and you're my favourite reader). I can't wait to get some imagery happening. That said, I'm still stupid busy. I need pushing. If you don't hear more about this soon, please feel free to start poking me on Facebook or Insta and telling me to hurry the hell up. Mannequins or bust!

Let's Talk About Shadow

So I've been pretty absent around here lately. Between working, producing dance shows and plunging head first into a desert adventure that kick-started a whole other kind of shadow work (I'll come back to that another time) life's been pretty hectic, and opportunities to write few and far between. Gods I miss spending that time with my characters.

Anyway, my focus is shifting back. I am currently working on the last few chapters of Shadow Book 9, which means I've drafted nearly the whole series, and released nearly half. It's both exciting and terrifying, because Shadow has been part of my life for a very long time. It's a world I love escaping into, because it's sarcastic and silly and terrifying all at the same time, and those three qualities (for me at least) work in perfect harmony.

Tonight, I started to think about how it all started, and where I'm at, and where you're at, if you've been following the series.

Shadow was inspired by a few things. When I was 18, I used to sit on Forrest Chase in Perth City, amongst the lights and magic of a city night, and imagine a whole other world full of strange creatures moving around me. Fast forward to thirty-something me, and a music clip about some crazy dude running around a spooky goth garden crystallised those old fantasies into the germ of a story. I went through a few drafts and a lot of changes before it started to flow, but suddenly, I had this crazy world on my hands with infinite potential for fuckery. Oh hell yes.

And I called it Shadow. There was never any doubt about this name. That world was called Shadow, and our world was called Dream. Recent events have made me ponder this choice of name quite a bit, but again, that's a conversation we can have later.

If you're following the series, you will have read about Hippy Ishtar in Book 1, and her quest for a weapon that would save her people (but probably doom her); then about Flower and Nikifor in Book 2, and their quest for missing things - a king, whole tribes of fairies, Nikifor' sanity; then about Krysta Ishtar in Book 3, and her grumpy uprising and overthrowing of a tyrant; and finally about Fizz Pop in Book 4, and the consequences of being born into a cult under the sway of a dodgy amoral scientist.

Book 5 is on the way. HONEST IT IS. It's called Mannequins. The edits are well underway, and I have a cover model living in my back room. Isn't she gorgeous?

Mannequins was my favourite book in the series to write for a lot of reasons, the top two being it's got an army of evil mannequins with terrible taste in fashion, and that I got to unleash pixies Misery and Doom on an unsuspecting Fremantle, where pretty much the whole thing is set.

I've been dying to release this one. It's so much fun they'll probably make a law against it. (Caveat: This is a long post and it's nearly midnight. If you've read this far, I love you and you're my favourite reader). I can't wait to get some imagery happening.

That said, I'm still stupid busy. I need pushing. If you don't hear more about this soon, please feel free to start poking me on Facebook or Insta and telling me to hurry the hell up. Mannequins or bust!

A Little Viking Inspiration

It's not often your friendly local fantasy author gets out for a little R&R... Who am I kidding? Every chance I get, I love to go out and experience something. It's so very important to have downtime, to do new things, to do old things, and on the odd occasion, to go and spend ten hours straight at the local medieval carnival cuddling snakes, checking out the shiny things, cheering the burning of the dragon (not a real dragon BTW I totes checked before cheering) and hanging with the awesome duo FangSmith. As an added bonus, I totally found my inner Viking. As a big fan of the TV series Vikings, before we even went to the carnival grounds I headed over to a hair braiding stall run by the very lovely and talented Julia, and asked her to make me a Viking. She did just that. Three days later, I'm hanging onto these braid for dear life, I love them so much. Here's some photos of the day. (photo credit to Megan of Fangsmith, who is not only an awesome vampire, but the awesomest photographer). Can't wait for next year!

100 Days for Change

I don't normally like to mix my work life with my art life, but on this occasion, I'm going to. As you know, by night I'm a writer of dark comic fantasy fiction. By day I'm a communications specialist at a cool little marketing company called ipCreative. In the course of my day job, I've encountered an initiative called 100 Days for Change, started by Women and Leadership Australia, which aims to bring about greater gender equity in the workplace through a series of grass roots changes by ordinary people. All that's required is to make a pledge here on what you will change to create greater gender equity in the workplace, and then post it on social media with the hashtag #100daysforchange. Then go out and do it! The initiative is being championed by Kristal Kinsela of ipCreative's sister business, IPS - you can check out a cool video of Kristal talking about the initiative here. What I like about 100 Days for Change is the approach: when seeking any major change, it's far more effective to simply get in there, boots and all, do it yourself, than wait for legislation to come down from on high. Here's my pledge: This is really important to me. I've always done my best to write strong female characters in my fiction, precisely because it was strong female characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Sarah Connor when I was growing up that inspired me to always stand on my own two feet, and speak up when something wasn't right. There are a few more strong female characters in popular fiction/film now. We've had Wonder Woman charging across the trenches, Captain Janeway showing no mercy, and fabulous films like Heat, where Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock were strong, pig headed, flawed, human, and wonderful - far more than just a pretty accessory. Pop culture just as easily goes the other way though - and every time I see a female character who is just there for decoration, or who starts off strong and ends the story needing rescue (hello Robin Hood Prince of Thieves) I cringe. As a woman, I want to be more than that. I want heroines who inspire me. Stories are the way in which we understand our world. They reflect us back at ourselves. They plant seeds and ideas that grow into the realities of the future, because you can't make something solid happen without the spark, the idea, that starts it all off. (Remember Monkey Magic, back in the 1980s? In the opening of every episode, they told us - "The Father Buddha said: With our thoughts, we make the world.") As a writer, and as a marketing professional, I want to be a part of creating stories, images and ideas that mirror to younger women and girls their own potential: that they can be anything, go as far as they choose, and that they do not have to live lives limited by traditional gender roles. I want to help make a world where there are stories, ideas, and spaces for the strong, independent women of the future.