Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 27

In 5 days: Menewood cover reveal!

On Wednesday next week you will see the glorious (fabulous, delicious, rich, dramatic…) cover of Menewood! It will blow you right out of your slippers

Hieme Horribilis

I wrote a version of this, Aestas Horribilis, less than four months ago, but as dozens of you have totally ignored it I’m doing it again. For those with limited time, the tl;dr = Don’t ask me for anything right now. Unless I’ve already offered, the answer is no. If you truly believe what you’re asking/offering is special (for example I *am* going to go to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and Book Prize ceremony), then talk to my agent or publicist and she’ll decide if it’s worth passing on.

The last half of last year was terrible (see the link above), The first quarter of this one has, with two exceptions, been worse. On top of the parental situation mentioned previously—which is continuing to devolve, though, as we now have some systems in place, the physical exhaustion factor is not much worse (emotional toll? different story)—we have a whole host of other things to deal with.

We now have three family situations. One you already know about. One is not my news to discuss. One involves my family in the UK—which adds another layer of difficulty.

This is something I’ve been through three times before. Each time, my sister comes perilously close to dying before we can get her detained under the UK Mental Health Act and given ECT—with or without her permission. Emotionally it’s very hard. Physically, too, because it can involve flying to Leeds and bullying healthcare providers into doing the only thing that works.

All I can say is I am thankful twice a day that my other sister is right there and able to do this. I literally could not right now because of my own health. As you can imagine, this multiple family stress is not restful. And stress and lack of rest are very, very bad for inflammatory immune system issues—of which I have a Santa’s sackful.

Mostly I don’t talk about them because there’s no need. When most people look at me they see an energetic—sharp, happy, healthy, in-control of a zesty life—wheelchair user who loves doing new things, meeting new people, and getting out and about. And most of the time what you see is absolutely what you’re getting. But not right now. Stress does terrible things to the body.

As well as MS I have undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy, ocular rosacea, odd heart issues2, probable MCAS3, allergies, and a really bizarre set of reactions to medications that just don’t affect most other people. Most of the time, when life is stable, all this stuff is just background noise—not to be treated lightly, obviously, but nothing too terrible. Most of the time, I tend to forget everything but MS exists.

Most of the time but not now.

Right now my MS symptoms are the worst they’ve ever been. In addition, my spondyloarthropy is acting up, and MCAS is making me vomit and start to go into shock at the drop of a hat—or even a whiff of high-histamine food. I’m in massive, endless, grinding pain despite physical therapy, ultrasound massage, painkillers, and muscle relaxants. I look terrible (which always hurts my pride). I can’t focus, I can’t sleep, and I’m getting nothing done. My entire system is on a hair trigger. In the last seven days alone I’ve had to cancel without warning two separate events, which also hurts my pride—I hate to be seen as unreliable.

So, right now I don’t want to speak to your class, give you an interview, sign your books, be on your panel, ‘just take a look’ at your book’ or any other damn thing. Unless, as I’ve said, I’ve already told you I will.4

One good thing—beyond good, fabulous—Kelley got a brilliant new job. The hours are reasonable, the pay is fantastic, the health benefits good, and—best of all—she not only enjoys the work but her coworkers and managers (and the firm as a whole—a global, enterprise-level company) are wonderful.

A second good thing: MENEWOOD is still on track for October 3 publication and the publisher is solidly behind it. With luck, I’ll be fighting fit by mid-summer and ready to take the world by storm!

Meanwhile, watch for more news tomorrow about MENEWOOD…

1 The search for a bed has widened from Leeds, to Yorkshire, to the whole North, and now south and central England—and still nothing.

2 By odd I mean variable. Since I first passed out spectacularly in a club at age 20 I’ve been diagnosed with both ventricular and atrial issues, mitral valve prolapse, various electrical issues, plus stenosis and sclerosis of other valves—only for all those things to have vanished by the next echocardiogram and/or stress test. Whenever one of my providers retires the next one simply doesn’t believe my story until he (and it’s always been a he) sees for himself and is confused. I’m used to it. I also believe that my heart is essentially very healthy and just prone to…misbehaviour. My blood work always shows stellar results. As one neurologist once told me: You have a Harvard Chart. In other words, even as a wheelchair user my biomarkers are pretty much green down the line.

3 Getting a definite diagnosis can involve inconvenient, time-sensitive, and often painful invasive tests. So I’m fine with ‘probable’ for now. There are no decent treatments anyway.

4 And even then, honestly, it really depends on the vagaries of a seriously out-of-whack immune system. For example, I truly hope to be at Emerald City Comic Con at the weekend—but if I feel then how I feel today, well, I’m not sure.

Spear a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist

Image description: The covers of the five books on the shortlist and underneath text reading “The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation, honors and extends Bradbury’s literary legacy by celebrating and elevating the writers working in his field today. Bradbury always made his own rules, writing across specific genre boundaries throughout his career.” And below that, the logo of the Ray Bradbury Foundation.

Today I woke up to snow (boo!) and the news that Spear is one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Ray Bradbury Prize (yay!). Here’s the shortlist:

Sara Gran, “The Book of the Most Precious Substance”Nicola Griffith, “Spear”Alex Jennings, “The Ballad of Perilous Graves”Ray Nayler, “The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel”George Saunders, “Liberation Day: Stories”

I love being nominated for awards—and this is especially cool because it’s a new one for me. So I’m delighted!

It also means I’ll be in Los Angeles for a couple of days during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books April 21-23. I’ll be at the ceremony on Friday, of course, but also doing a panel and/or reading over the weekend. More details when I have them.

For now I’m going to go drink more coffee and watch the snow fall…

2023: A Big Year

2023 is a year of Big Anniversaries—those ending in 0 or 5—marking significant life events for me and Kelley. Here are some of them:

January40th anniversary of the television debut of the band I fronted, Janes Plane, late one Monday night in January (I don’t have the exact date—I always forget and, yep, I forgot this year too) on Channel 4’s Whatever You WantFebruary30th anniversary of Ammonite. Yes, the copyright page says 1992, but the book did not hit shelves in the US until the end of January/beginning of February and, in the UK, later in February/beginning of March.Early March30th anniversary of my MS diagnosis, which I got the day after I got off the plane from London where I’d been launching Ammonite.June45th anniversary of Kelley’s high school graduation. Kelley loved her HS, remembers it fondly, and attends reunions when she can. 45th anniversary of my last day suffering the stifling strictures of Catholic Grammar School education—but for me it’s the escape from the experience that’s worth celebrating, not the experience itself.June 26th35th anniversary of meeting Kelley at Clarion and falling indelibly in love.35th anniversary also, of course, of us both going through the life-altering experience that is Clarion where we met so many people who are part of our lives.September 430th anniversary of our no-legal-force wedding at our house in Atlanta, GA.10th anniversary of our extremely-legally-binding wedding overlooking Puget Sound right here in Seattle, WA.October 30 anniversary of the publication of Menewood.November 1310th anniversary of the publication of Hild……and, four days later, the 1409th anniversary of Hild’s birth—though that’s cheating because a) it’s not about me and b) it doesn’t end in zero or five But, hey, this is my list so I make the rules.

In other words, it’s going to be a big year. At this point I’ve no idea how and when we’ll be celebrating but you can bet we will.

Self-portrait

Self portrait

Image description: Sketch outline in muted colours (pale brown, mahogany, pink, ochre) of head, three-quarter profile, of a short-haired white woman

Until now I’d never tried to draw a human portrait of any kind, but about 10 years ago I took a selfie, with an old iPhone 4 in low light, that bleached out much of my skin and left the rest in oddly pink/brown tones. I’ve always liked it. (For two reasons. One, pure vanity! The bleaching makes me look much younger than I really did. And two, I was fascinated by the fact that although what was left because of the over-exposure were just a few dabs and streaks of colour, it still suggested a whole face. So today when I got tired of working on the Dramatis Personae for MENEWOOD, and then when I switched to working on maps got tired of that, I thought, Well, let’s see what happens if I noodle around with a few dabs of pink and brown…

Perhaps this happens to a lot of people, but when I first pick up something—an instrument or paintbrush or fencing foil, or boxing or aikido or gymnastics—I often do surprisingly well. It’s a powerful kind of Beginner’s Luck, a First-timer’s Fluke. And it really is a fluke: it can take me a hundred more attempts to get back to the unselfconscious ease and fluency of that first time—if I bother to stick with it. It makes me wonder just how instinctively amazing we could all be at many things if we just got out of our own way…

Working on this portrait was an extremely strange experience. If I’d thought about it at all beforehand I might have guessed it would feel like the visual-art equivalent of writing a memoir. It wasn’t like that at all. It felt…oddly embarrassing, even furtive, like something to be done in the dark.

For any artists reading this—amateur or professional—is that your experience of self-portraits? Or is this more of a non-artist’s thing? Or just a beginner’s thing?

Suzy McKee Charnas

Suzy McKee Charnas 1939- 2023

Image description: Black and white photo of a middle-aged white woman with short grey hair looking directly at the camera in a way that tells the viewer quite dispassionately that she sees you, and she understands

Suzy McKee Charnas died last night. I found out this morning and have been weeping since. I have a lot to say about her—without her work, my work would not exist—but can’t right now.

If you want to honour her, go read one of her books. Start with the first two Holdfast Chronicles, Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines. Be warned, though: when you read the first one you will want to flinch and look away. Don’t. She didn’t.

Spear—Award Eligibility

Image description: A book, Spear by Nicola Griffith. On the cover, the background is charcoal, shading to black at the bottom, with the author’s name at the top is orange-red and the title, at the bottom, and ‘from the author Hild’ in white. The main image is of a great hanging bowl of black iron with inlaid figures and great bronze escutcheons for the hanging hooks. It is wreathed about by smoke and flame and steam, and the steam forms images: in white, woods with a woman and a stone and a sword; about the trees, shading to orange, is an figure with a spear on a horse; a fort gate and box palisade, and over all, flying up in the smoke towards the author’s name, two birds.

I’ve been asked several times by readers who are drawing up their award-nomination lists whether Spear should be categorised as a novel or novella.

Simple Answer

The book is 45,000 words (excluding the Author’s Note). So if the award you’re nominating for has word-length categories for novella (and most SFF awards specify 25,000 – 39,999 words), then it’s a novel. ETA Having said that, the Hugo apparently allows 20% leeway—so in Hugo terms it could, in fact, be a novella because it’s under 48,000!

More Complicated

If the award does not specify such word-length categories, then it gets a bit more complicated. When I started writing Spear I was aiming for a novelette of 12,000 – 14,000 words. By the end of the first day, though, it was perfectly obvious it would be longer than that, and I switched gears. I treated it as a novella. Which means it’s structured as a novella, with no chapter breaks and a single through-line.

Having said that, it’s not not-a-novella just because I got wordy. The narrative timeline covers years, which usually spells ‘novel’ territory in Fantasy (though not necessarily in SF). There’s enough Arthurian touchstones/tropes—Percival’s story, the Grail, Excalibur, Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere, Merlin-Nimuë (plus one nifty Arthurian-historiography easter egg that no one’s spotted yet, chortle)—for half a trilogy. And then there’s the historical feel, coming of age story, love story, and the folding in of Irish myth.

Conclusion

Spear is a short novel or a long novella with a lot packed in. I’m truly delighted that so many people like it well enough to want to nominate it for something. The book was a joy to write and it thrills me that some of you found it a joy to read. Thank you.

2023!

Happy 2023!

Here at the Team Nickel headquarters, team members began the day with utter overindulgence, involving (for two-legs) a big chunk of fried cod for breakfast, with Irish breakfast tea and the New York Times (digital) and Seattle Times (paper), followed almost immediately by delicious double-shot Americano and a judicious selection of Fran’s truffles. The four-foots, meanwhile, broke their fast on a moving feast of thrown freeze-dried raw-food treats that scampered under sofas and between chairs, followed by a real workout involving chasing Feather uphill and downdale, ending only with a tragic tangle in the Christmas tree. At which point their assumed their sentry positions boxing us into the kitchen-breakfast room area, alert to further entertainment possibilities.

Image description: George, a 3-year old tabby in his prime, sits upright, tail just so, looking down at his staff from the pinnacle of his cat treeCharlie, a 3-year old tabby whose description as a ‘fit young cat’ by his personal physician has gone to his head, sitting in an upright position exactly mirroring his brother’s, tail just so, watching his staff from the family room while also keeping the Christmas tree in his peripheral vision in case that frisky Feather should make another appearance.

After a while they got distracted and wandered outside to harass the hummingbirds, leaving Kelley free to chat with her folks in Florida and me to gloat over my lovely clean desktop and started pondering the various files and lists in that To Do folder.

Image description: Mac desktriop showing moonlit sand dunes, with four icons—different drives and an alias of the Settings app—on the lower left and a single folder, labelled To Do, in the upper right.

I have Many Plans, but don’t intend to start in on any of them until Jan 8, at which time I’ll take down my email away message and re-engage with the world.

For now, though, I think I’ll spend the day alternately painting the background of a topographical map of Northern Britain in the Early Seventh Century (I’ll show you that soon) and doing research that will serve both Peretur and Hild this year.

In other words, 2023 is off to a shining start—even the sun is out—and I have high hopes for the year. May yours have begun equally well and just keep getting better.

2022 Blog Stats

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured dark pink, the UK medium pink, and the rest of the world pale pink—with some countries (mainly in Africa) showing blank.

Like last year, the number of people who came to read something increased—but not by much. I posted slightly more often—68 posts—but many of them were brief and informational, notices of appearances and so on.

The Top 5 countries from where my readers log on haven’t changed at all from last year, but the next five were a bit different, with China appearing for the first time, displacing Sweden:

USUKCanadaAustraliaGermanyFranceChinaIndiaNetherlandsIreland

Of the Top 10 New Posts, seven were about my books, and one each about my horrible summer, war in Europe, and realistic Covid death tolls. For some reason, no one seemed to want to read about bright and lovely things like flowers, Kelley, love, or cats. (I’m curious about whether other bloggers had the same experience.)

Aestas horribilisSpear is here!Competition: One adjective to rule them allm,War in EuropeTwo years and 20 million deadSpeaking Spear, Part 1Win a pin and a free pony!Hild, Menewood, and MeanwoodBig, giant juicy interviewTreasure trove discovered

The Top 15 Overall were mostly perennial favourites—though for the first time since they were written Huge News: Multiple Sclerosis is a metabolic disorder (2011), Books about women don’t win awards (2015) and Lame is so gay (2011) fell off the list—with just three new ones* sneaking in:

Men Are Afraid Women Will Laugh At ThemSpearAbout the Real HildHildAboutAestas Horribilis*A List of Bookshops in the UKThe language of HildSpear is here!*MENEWOOD!!So LuckyAmmoniteFiction that passes the Fries TestKitten Report #11: Seven months oldCompetition: One adjective to rule them all*

What lies ahead for this site? I don’t know. I do know that this blog isn’t going anywhere. I enjoy writing the posts and people seem to enjoy reading them. It ticks along nicely. Plus, this year’s Twitter debacle is just another confirmation that we all need to own our own platforms. Even if I thought all those other social platforms really were being run as public utilities for the greater good (ha ha ha), I like being able to say things too long for Twitter and not pretty enough for Instagram. This is the best place to do that.

Do I want to start a newsletter? No. For the simple reason that this blog functions as a newsletter. All you have to do is subscribe (in desktop view just look at the top of the right hand sidebar; in mobile platforms, scroll right to the end of an individual post), and every new post will be delivered directly to your mailbox the minute it’s published. No muss, no fuss—just like any other newsletter, except that a) you don’t have to pay a dime, and b) I’ll never share your data with anyone for anything. Plus, on a blog you can talk back if you like.

I would like to get back to posting longer and more interesting things. When I last checked I had well over 300 posts partially drafted. Many are from years ago and so will no longer be relevant, but I’m guessing a few others might be worth revisiting. But even if I deleted them all tomorrow, I have a list as long as my arm of things I’d love to talk about. It’s just a question of whether I have the heart—that mix of hope, health, energy, time, and sheer bloody-mindedness that long-term blogging requires to be successful. But I like this blog; I’ve been doing this or something like this for nearly 30 years. So stay tuned for another blog post soon—tomorrow? Monday?—about what to look forward to in 2023.

See you on the other side…

Happy Hedgepig Disco Season to All!

Via Roisín Astell on Twitter (from Verdun bibliothèque municipale MS 107, f.8r)