Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 28

Signed personalised books for the holidays—including my memoir!

Image description: White background, blue lettering spelling “Phinney Books,” in all caps. And, in gold, an image of a Big Wheel lower left and “Seattle,” again all caps, lower right.

I’m teaming up again with Phinney Books, on Greenwood Avenue, Seattle, to bring you signed, personalised books for the holidays. Why Phinney Books? Well, because it’s my idea of a perfectly-sized bookshop with just the right stock. Also, it’s level-entry with a light front door so very easy for me to get in and out of. And of course before and after pandemic restrictions it’s wonderfully convenient because it’s right next door to the 74th St Alehouse, which sells an excellent pint of Guinness.

Here’s how it works.

Go to Phinney Books’ online ordering page to buy any of my books, no muss no fuss, and get them shipped to any address in US. Everyone else, see the next step.Email info@phinneybooks.com (phone is okay: 206-297-2665) with billing info: all major credit cards accepted. They use Square, so they’ll also need the 3-digit code on the back and your billing postal code.Tell them what you’d like: Spear (hardcover—audiobook and ebook available) Hild (paperback or hardcover—audiobook and ebook available) So Lucky (paperback—audiobook and ebook available) Ammonite (paperback—audiobook and ebook available) Slow River (paperback—ebook available) With Her Body (paperback only)Or my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party . SEE NOTE BELOW.*Don’t forget, you can order ebooks and audiobooks via the store (I narrated So Lucky and Spear). Sadly I can’t personalise those, though—unless you buy a card from Tom and I sign that.Tell them whether you want the books personalised (to you, or to someone else; if so, who; and what short thing you’d like me to add). If you give this order by phone, please spell out even the most common names.Give them your mailing address and payment info.Beam, sit back and relax: you’ve done your holiday shopping!

Tom, the owner, tells me he is happy to ship multiple copies, to ship internationally, and to ship express/priority, but then there will be extra charges you will have to work out with him.

Deadlines: The sooner you get orders in the better. I won’t be signing anything after Dec 15. My advice? Order as fast as possible, especially if you want a copy of the memoir. Good luck!

* There is a very limited supply of these. There were only 450 to start with and 15 years ago they were priced at $75. The most recent sales I’ve seen elsewhere (auction sites and the like) have been over $100, sometimes well over. And because they’re sealed in plastic—absolutely pristine—I can’t sign and personalise them. But each one is already signed and numbered inside the box. For this promotion only I’ll be selling a handful at $75 each. After that the price will go up. A lot.It takes time for Tom to order copies of With Her Body .The Aud novels are not currently available. I reverted the rights and sold everything I had lying about in an earlier promotion. But, woo-hoo!, they will be back on sale at some point in spiffy matching editions from Picador—and I’ll be doing the audio narration.Bending the Landscape is not currently available—though if you want to pay $750 you can find them online.And don’t forget, while you’re buying one of my books—or all of them! hey, it’s the holidays, splurge!—you can buy books by other people. Lots of books. Books make great gifts.

Treasure trove discovered: my memoir in a box!

Demon Jesus—a collage I made when I was five years old. Note the very careful nail holes. I’m not sure why the observer has only one leg; perhaps it fell off.

Kelley and I recently went through the house clearing out the accumulated clutter of 17 years. We found all sorts of interesting stuff1—including a stash of my limited edition, signed and numbered, memoir-in-a-box, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer’s early life. I’m delighted—I thought they were all truly, finally gone apart from my one working copy. I’m nor sure how many of them there are, maybe a dozen—Kelley opened the box long enough to see what it contained, then left it in the attic—but I’m going to part with a handful. The box is a lovely thing, a collector’s item, and there’s nothing I’d like more than to hoard them, gloat over them like a dragon with her gold, but I wrote it to be read.

This book is unique; there isn’t another like it in the world. And there were only 450 copies made. It is my early life in a box: the story of growing up queer, gender nonconforming, hungry (in all the ways) in a super-Catholic family in the north of England, from 1960 until I left for America in 1989. Stories of batty nuns and queer priests; sex and drugs and music; psychopathy and arson and nascent criminal master-mindery; desire, delinquency, and delight; violence, joy, and coalition-building. But above all it’s a love story: how my love of life led to love of words which led to meeting and falling in love with Kelley. Which changed everything—the story ends with me leaving the UK to come to the US to start our life together as writers.

In terms of original word count, Party is short—no more than 45,000 words—mostly short essays with titles such as “Limb of Satan” to “No-Pants Griffith” to “Whole Psychopath.” These are all true stories; some are funny, some are not. But words are only part of the story. Included in the box are scratch-n-sniff cards; a fold-out poster of one of my first artworks (a collage crucifixion of Jesus with demon-red eyes; I was four); a facsimile of my first book—written and drawn at age four with crayon; a CD of me performing with my band; a signed baby photo; diary excerpts; excerpts from my first handwritten novel; old poetry; a recipe for plastic omelette (I’m lucky no one died); quotes from my very first editorial letters (for that same unpublished handwritten novel), and lots and lots of stories, all true—building my first still (again, I’m lucky no one died); the grief of trying to save a sister who did not want to be saved; tales of loneliness and unexpected alliances; and always—always—being different. It’s the story of, well, the early life that made me me—a writer.

For a taste, here are two short readings from the book, stories of me at age four (No-Pants Griffith) and sixteen (Bird of the Fragile Spirit).2 Then tune in tomorrow for how to get hold of one of these beautiful objects.

No-Pants GriffithBird of the Fragile Spirit

1 Seriously. All kinds of stuff. So much cool stuff that I’m thinking of starting a Patreon next year and using some of it for Reward tiers.

2 The recording is not great quality—and weirdly I sound as though I have a lisp; I don’t. Also, the title of this piece if that of a poem I wrote at 17 that I later turned into a song.

Gorgeous Kelley

Kelley has a new photo, taken earlier this month. I love it—it looks exactly like her with the cool hair matching the fabulous opal, and the nifty tats going with the delicious muscles. Not to mention her lovely eyes.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good new photo. This one is by Ed Sozinho, of Sozinho Imagery who lives just around the corner from us. If you live in Seattle and need a corporate or author photo, drop him a line.

Hild, Menewood, and Meanwood

Today is the feast day of Hild of Whitby, aka St Hilda, who died 1408 years ago. It seems like a good time to announce that Menewood, the sequel to Hild, has finally entered copyediting—it’s in the production cycle. It will be published by FSG/MCD in October 2023.

I’ve seen a draft of the cover—it’s fantastic!—and here’s a first stab at the flap copy:

In the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change. Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking’s court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable Lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.

But Edwin recalls his most trusted advisor. Old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at his heels. War is brewing—bitter war, winter war. Not knowing who to trust he becomes volatile and unpredictable. Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead, and now she must navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.

She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must find a new strength, the implacable determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, her community slowly takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, and she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future…

The copy will change, it always does, but I think it gives a sense of the sweep of the book: Menewood is epic. It begins four months after the end of Hild, and covers only four years of Hild’s life, but those years are intense: war and defeat, alliance and betrayal, birth and death, joy and forgiveness, violence and rage, love and lust, war and victory, grief and loss, learning and building, bravery and cowardice, growth and change, war and devastation, power and responsibility, and the making, breaking, and shaping of kings.

Menewood is also full of quieter moments: peace, pleasure, contentment, understanding, acceptance, forgiveness, sorrow, laughter, warmth, friendship, and farewells. It is a book about life: how it feels, what it means, how it changes.

Menewood the book is big—30% longer than Hild. I have a lot to say about it—I could post three times a week from now until October and still not run out of things to talk about—but for now I want to touch briefly on Menewood the place.

The Old English pronunciation of Menewood would be something like MEN-eh-wood. But I pronounce it MEEN-wood because I have based it on a real place: Meanwood, in Leeds, Yorkshire. The fictional stream running through Menewood is the real Meanwood Beck; the fictional valley of Menewood is the real Meanwood Valley. You can go there today, walk under the trees alongside the beck in Hild’s footsteps and imagine her running, laughing, weeping, and deciding the fate of kings.

According to Wikipedia, the name derives from Meene wude — a boundary wood. But I can’t find meene in any Old English glossaries, and mene seems to mean necklace, so, well, your guess is as a good as mine.

I grew up in Headingley, a part northwest Leeds that borders Meanwood, and as a child and teenager ran wild in Meanwood Park, which at about 70 acres covers only a tiny part of the valley. For me, as for Hild, Meanwood is the heart of Elmet, the heart of home. I have a deep and abiding affection for the sound and scent of its trees and air and water. When I go back to the UK I always visit the park, and as soon as I’m under the trees the scent of the soil is a stab under my ribs; it’s part of me.

Here’s a photo of Meanwood Beck I took years ago with Crapcam.

In Hild’s time it would have been bigger and burlier. If you look at a map of Meanwood Valley you’ll see the shape the beck (from a Norse word for brook) carved from the hills on its way to the river Aire.

Above all, Menewood is about Hild. She is on every page, the burning heart around which events turn. And just as in the first book, Hild is most at home in nature, so the book is full of water, sky, and high wild places. I can’t wait for you to read it.

Holiday Bookfest—Live! In-person!—Saturday 19 November!

Come meet me and 27 other local authors next Saturday from 2-4 pm at the Phinney Center. We’ll be signing books, talking about books, reading from books and generally hanging out. I’ll be doing a 10-minute reading—I haven’t decided what, yet. Maybe Spear? Maybe Menewood? Maybe something entirely different? Come and find out!

The Phinneywood blog has all the details:

Discover new ways local authors can help you look at life through the world of books available at the  Holiday Bookfest, once again, finally, being held in person at the PNA on Saturday, November 19, 2-4 p.m. (Blue Building, 2nd floor).

Come to meet local authors, buy books, and get them signed.  Come for author readings, held every 15 minutes. Come to support our local bookseller Phinney Books, who is donating part of the proceeds to the tutoring center Bureau of Fearless Ideas and the PNA. And please bring your gently used children’s books for donation to the Pocket Libraries program!

Among the more twenty-eight authors will be bestselling crime novelist Elizabeth George, Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest, first-time young adult novelist Zoe Hana Mikuta, and memoirist Jessica Gigot, a Skagit Valley farmer.

With the holidays at hand, how about a new cookbook? On hand will be four chef authors: Polina Chesnakova, Hsiao-Ching Chou, Jackie Freeman and Andrea Pons.

And in the gift-giving season, new children’s books will delight the kids in your life. Meet authors Rob Albanese, Lynne Brunelle, Ben Clanton, Andy Chou Musser and Walker Ranson, a young man who penned his first book with his mother, veteran novelist Suzanne Selfors.

A smorgasbord of great books awaits from authors Erica Bauermeister, Robert Dugoni, Laurie Frankel, Nicola Griffith, Thor Hanson, Molly Hashimoto, Priscilla Long, Sharon Mentyka, Boyd Morrison, Steve Olson, Putsata Reang, Steven Reddy, Neal Thompson, Tara Austen Weaver, David B. Williams and the students of BFI.

The building is fully accessible. It’s an airy space, the windows will be open, and mask-wearing is encouraged. Also, I know half the writers—we’re a friendly bunch. And, y’know, there’s a pub and a fine bookstore not too far away—just saying. So come on down and buy a bunch of signed books to give away as gifts—or keep for yourself.

See you there!

Aestas horribilis

I haven’t posted here for over a month. I had to cancel our trip to World Fantasy in New Orleans. I’ve been missing on social media. I have not read the books I promised and not written the blurbs I offered. I haven’t been commenting on politics or history or all things viral.1 I’ve been ignoring friends’ invitations and enquiries. Why? Late summer was horrible; I’ve been overwhelmed.

I’ve already mentioned events of July, when Kelley was laid off2, I broke the cuboid bone in my foot, and then had a bruising wheelchair crash. What I haven’t talked about before here is that Kelley’s mother has Alzheimer’s which has been rapidly increasing upon her. And two months ago she fell, broke her hip and arm, and got concussion.

It’s been difficult. Kelley and I are both exhausted and stressed and working hard on taking care of an old and fragile woman with dementia (and forgets she’s just had her hip replaced and is wearing a cast and tries to walk) and her old and confused husband. We have no time, we have no bandwidth, we don’t know how long this will last or what the future holds. Those of you who have had to manage this kind of thing don’t need telling; those of you who haven’t, well, I hope you never do.

One of the things that adds to the stress is having to renege on promises and cancel things. So let me be clear here: if you ask me a favour3 in the next three months you will not even get the courtesy of a no. Until late winter/early spring, my focus will be very close to home.

Not everything that I’ve been busy with the last couple of months has been bad. The good thing, the best thing—the thing that’s kept me sane—is MENEWOOD. I have a lot to say, and I’ll do that in a separate post, but for now here’s the headline: It’s done, it’s entering the publisher’s production cycle, and oh it will be worth the wait!

Also coming soon here news of a couple of events this month and next, plus the usual holiday books-as-gifts notice.

Meanwhile, it’s truly autumn here in Seattle, and amazingly we still have vivid yellow begonias in bloom, fuchsias brightening both decks and the front bed, and even a few salvia of various colours and shapes giving hummingbirds nectar. The cats are in fine fettle, I love my sweetie and she loves me, and I’m already chortling over the writing ideas I have for what comes next.

Here at Chez Nickel there will be a lot to be thankful for over turkey this year. I wish the same for you.

1 There is so very much to say about this. I could write ten fucking posts and still not get it off my chest.

2 Oh, I could write such a screed about this, and perhaps one day I will.

3 A favour, as opposed to paid opportunity, invitation to something seriously fun, or normal professional activities

This year’s flowers

Every summer we plant a bunch of annuals alongside our surviving perennials in containers on our kitchen and back decks, where I can more easily get to them to water, dead-head, fertilise, etc. I sometimes post pictures on Twitter and Instagram, and several people have asked if I’d do a post going into the planting in a bit more depth because they’re thinking about trying something similar next year.

I’m happy to do that—but to be clear, I am not an expert, far from it. Half the time I dn’t even know the names of the stuff I plant—I pick them because I like the colour, and from the care labels I can guess how much sun/shade and water/not they need, and how high (if vines) how wide (if shrubs) and how long If trailing plants) they’ll grow.

Today I’ll just post pretty pictures of different parts of the garden/decks taken at different times of year, with the names of the plants (at lest the ones I remember) bascially the results. Then sometime in the next couple of weeks I’ll do a more detailed, how-I-decided-and-what-I-did-and-why post, that is, the initial choices. Backwards, I know, but right now the plants are blooming, and it’s pointless planning for next year yet, so it makes sense to me.

The Results

This year we changed the colour of our house exterior, so we had to tear out the climbing roses at the front of in order to paint. This broke my heart (well, okay, made me sigh a bit) because I’d spent years training those fucking roses to look perfect. Here’s how it used to be, from the inside of the front picture window and then from the outside:

Seeing the roses around the porch trellis from inside the house The front garden with roses all around the front porch

Sadly, because the timbers on the front bed had rotted, we also had to tear out everything in the front bed. So we made a new flower bed with a couple of trellises, and planted a mix of vines, shrubs and flowers, both perennial and annual.

Midday sun, August

The vines at the front—on either side of the porch—are a mix of evergreen jasmine (glossy green leaves, for colour during the winter, white flowers for a lovely scent all summer) and deciduous trumpet vines, which (once they flower—not this year, sadly) will have gorgeous flame/salmon flowers that hummingbirds love.

You can see from the picture that I went with lots of warm colours to offset the indigo house—mostly petunias at the front (which being annuals never last past the end of September), with some geranium, hyssop, yellow snapdragon, and a ground cover with white flowers that I can never remember the name of, and at the back some hardy fuchsia plus a shrub with wine-coloured foliage that I frankly have no idea what it is but seem to remember thinking, Hey, that’ll work!

We had such a terrible spring and such a slow start to summer that the front bed looks a bit sparse. Hopefully this time next year will be marvellous.

If you look carefully at the front window you can see through to the back deck and a peekaboo view of the flowers there. And here’s a closeup:

Taken in early evening light in late August

From the top, centre: flame-coloured snapdragon (I hope the vines at the front will flower that colour); just below that pink geranium, to the right of that, red geranium, below the geranium little pink million bells below that red petunia, to the left of the petunia orange marigold, moving clockwise and up a bit, more marigold, next to that variable-pink petunia, above that red/purple salvia, above that hyssop, and at the top blue/purple salvia.

And here’s a wider shot taken a month earlier—before those gorgeous snapdragons really got going, and showing some dark red salvia—in early morning light:

Early July morning

The back deck is where Kelley and I sit in the evenings to talk, drink wine, and grill while bees and hummingbirds zuzz at us and the cats completely ignore us. Here’s a wider shot, showing some other flowers and fruits: some bright pink petunias, behind that a small blueberry shrub—we didn’t get many this year, but are hopeful for next—and some strawberries planted around some kind of daisy.

Early evening on a hazy day

The side deck, just off the kitchen, is where I spend time during the day—usually for an hour or so after lunch—with a cup of tea, some chocolate, and a book. This year that deck has been a haven and balm.

Kitchen deck early afternoon

Here, from lower left, we have pale salmon-pink petunia; above that, Flaming Lips, a kind of Salvia—with some vivid red petunia planted at its base; on the ground, fuchsia; next to that the three jasmine vines we’ve had for years now, entwined to make a small tree; behind the jasmine, though you can’t see it, is rosemary with a few marigolds for colour; at the base of the blue pot that hold the jasmine is something I’m really pleased with this year: bright yellow begonia. (We tried begonias last year on the back deck and they did not do well.) You can see things more clearly here—though it was early in the summer before things really got going adn before we decided where things would end up. Those blue and yellow flowers in front of the begonia (er, the name will come to me…) got moved somewhere else, as did the small purple things to the left of the jasmine—to the front garden I think:

Early summer, when things are just getting started

And this is the deck from the opposite angle. You can see we have a variety of herbs in the coir baskets, along with flowers for colour (petunias in various colours are my standby). We also have herbs in pots on the deck itself—some sage and some oregano I think—stuff like chives and basil and thyme and marjoram:

End of September

From a slightly wider angle you can see the hanging basket behind the herbs, again with Flaming Lips salvia—hummingbirds adore salvia, and I love watching them, so we try to plant different varieties in different places.

Those orange things are million bells I think, and on the table there a basket of petunia and marigolds—but I’d just dead-headed a batch in this photo (marigolds, like petunias, are super-sensitive to moisture of lack thereof; miss a day of watering when the sun is shining and, oof, sadness ensues) so they’re not visible—and behind that some lavender (it didn’t do well this year, I’m not sure why) and then behind the table another coir basket full of fuchsia an little blue flowers that have some woman’s name I always forget—lobelia? veronica?

End of September

So the above photo is from September, and this one is what the table and basket behind it looked like in June (and before we add the petunia to the pot with marigolds):

Early days—lavender, marigold, fuchsia in June

To whet you appetite for a future, How To post, here’s another photo, taken the same day in June, this time of the back deck, while we were still figuring out where things would go and whether we’d bought enough. You can see still still in their starter pots—with the strawberries looking particularly delicious.

Wine o’clock in June

Me at 62

When it comes to special occasions, I mostly talk here about Kelley’s birthdays and our various when-we-met, when-we-married, when-I-moved-here anniversaries, and only bring up my own birthday when it’s one of those end-in-zero-or-5 milestones.

Posts usually come with photos but frankly I’m crap at taking selfies—I usually look something between bored and homicidal. Case in point, my most recent selfie, taken one afternoon in late July about an hour after the third bad-thing-in-one-day event.

Okay, technically still 61 here, but close enough

In my defence, they were pretty bad things: Kelley got laid off with no warning, I found out I had a fractured cuboid bone (and it fucking hurt), and then on the way out of the MRI suite (because of cuboid bone) I had my first-ever wheelchair crash, in which I hit a misaligned paving stone at speed, went flying into the road headfirst, and was landed on by my 40kg wheelchair. I was *grumpy*.

So here’s a better one, a screen cap I took a couple of hours ago during a Zoom meeting. I hadn’t been up very long (do you get up early on your birthday?) so I’m a bit blank, but like all Zoom pix it’s flattering—I always use the ‘touch up my appearance’ setting at about 25% strength, and the direct light smoothes out my skin. But, hey, it’s my birthday. I get to cheat a bit if I want.

Early morning Zoom—too early, really, for one’s birthday

The rest of my day will be spent working on Menewood (I finally have editorial notes, yay!) followed by more video chats, business and personal, then a lovely evening of Champagne and caviar on the deck with Kelley. The weather looks absolutely gorgeous for the end of September and we intend to take every advantage of our pretty flowers and ice-cold wine.

May you have an equally lovely day.

Facing the Butcherbird

Hild as Butcherbird

Image description: Oil-painting-like image of a seventh-century warrior staring directly at the observer, blue-green eyes narrowed and looking as though she’ll ride right over you.

Over on Gemæcce, my research blog, I’ve been doing a . In Hild, she has four. (Actually six, if you count Light of the World and King’s Fist—but they’re more titles than epithets. And then there are the two she adds in Menewood—but I’ll get to those closer to publication next year.) Butcherbird is the name she acquired as a teenager after she impaled bandits on stakes across the Aire Gap to deter further incursions into Elmet from Craven.

Last year I talked about that —which also impales prey, hanging mouse pups, bees, lizards and so on thorns and fences. But I was never happy with the illustration I used, probably because I was trying to making one sketch do two things—represent a grey shrike and a red shrike—and it ended up stiff and weird and not at all representative of the threat of such a predator (bird or woman). So now I’ve had another go, approaching representation from a different perspective.

Hild as Butcherbird

First, I tried with Hild herself. I went to DALL-E, a platform that uses machine learning to generate images, and told it to create an oil painting based on my image.1 “Oil painting of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon warrior with blue-green eyes based on images of Nicola Griffith.” What I got back wasn’t great. My face, like most people’s, is asymmetrical—but what I got back was seriously wonky. And her hair was flowing blonde tresses (it must have found one of those rare images of me with long hair2), and her mouth was not only crooked but bow-shaped (shudder). So then I uploaded one of my author photos, added “looking formidable” to the prompt, and tried again. Still wonky, still blonde, still bow-shaped mouth, but now at least beginning to look like someone who a) might have survived birth and b) you wouldn’t want to cross.

I took it through Photoshop and then worked on it with Procreate (the two programmes have different strengths) and started to get something not too embarrassing. And here it is. It’s extremely rough, and if I were going to use it for anything serious I’d do a lot more work—she not bony enough; I’d rather her hair was at least braided out of the way; she should be dirtier, and bloody—but for the purpose of this post this sketched-in outline of changes is good enough.

Butcherbird shield

Second, I tried to create the shield the Butcherbird’s Hounds carry. At the beginning of Menewood we get to see this usually-hidden shield (briefly), a sight that’s supposed to terrify her opponents with its crude cruelty—chalk-white paint splashed directly onto raw planks and daubed with bloody red—and suggest what might happen to them if they lose.

This one I did the old-fashioned way, no machine-learning involved, going for something you might get if you used a stick wrapped in cloth to smear on the paint. I wanted it to be blunt and brutal—no subtlety involved. It’s a threat and a warning.

Shield of the Butcherbird

Image description: A seventh-century shield with sewn leather rim and bronze boss, painted stark white directly onto the planking, and daubed with a bloody red image of a man impaled on a stake.

So now I’m happy: these images capture what it might feel like to face the Butcherbird when she’s coming for you—probably the last things you would ever see.

1 Why me? Not because I think I look like Hild but because that way I could be sure I was’t ripping off anyone else’s imagery or likeness. (Go read about some of the ethical grey areas surrounding AI/machine-learning image generation. I plan to err on the side of caution.) Also I have blue-green eyes.

2 I’ve no idea how—even I can’t find one online. But, eh, just for you, here’s one and here’s another.

Kelley on the planet

Today is the start of another year on the planet for my favourite person. If I were Empress of the Universe every bell on earth would peal with joy and celebration. She makes the world a better place. I am lucky to share my life with her.