Poetry sale: Plunge Magazine

I’m back from a wonderful trip to the UK – much silliness, laughter and shenanigans ensued in London, Elmswell and Deganwy. I swam in a glacial lake in my underwear, took lots of photos of castles and the Welsh hills, watched trolling Saruman and enjoyed myself muchly in the company of dear friends. The only downside is that my trip wasn’t long enough to produce proper homesickness for Finland, so now I’m missing the UK rather a lot. That’s what you get for having two home countries of a sort like I do, I suppose.

Anyway, now that I’m back, I can share news of the yayworthy variety: my poem ‘The Understanding’ will appear in the next issue of Plunge Magazine!

Plunge is an awesome new publication with a tagline that piqued my interest at once: “queer. women. genre.”. I’m really pleased that ‘The Understanding’ has found a home in such a lovely magazine. It’s a poem that is a marriage of my love for manuscript studies and fantasy: a lyric from an edition of “Middle Argental” poems. Mmm, fake manuscript editions. So much fun.

I’ll post a link when the new issue is up!

‘Wolf Daughter’ online at Strange Horizons!

I feel like a fool because my poem ‘Wolf Daughter’ has been online at Strange Horizons for a week, and I’ve failed to notice before now!

Read it here!

Anyway! This is my celebratory wee-hours-of-the-night post. I feel really happy to have a poem in Strange Horizons – it’s a wonderful publication full of really excellent speculative writing. They also do podcasts of the stories and poems that are up – the podcast including me reading ‘Wolf Daughter’ will be up later this month. I’ll post a link to that when it’s up.

The first lines of ‘Wolf Daughter’ spilled out in a sudden burst last autumn, and the first draft was born in a rush of words. It’s set in a world like pseudo-nineteenth-century Finland, with tints of Finnishness and folklore. This loosely-inspired-by-Finnish-folklore thing is something of an occasionally-recurring feature in my speculative poems. There may well be more where ‘Wolf Daughter’ came from.

Sunday recs: Kate Elliott and an assortment

Number one rec today – something I’ve mentioned before, too – is Kate Elliott’s amazing Spiritwalker Trilogy. I’ve had the flu – a-bloody-gain – and have been gobbling down books. I just reread the first two instalments of Elliott’s trilogy, Cold Magic and Cold Fire, and cannot wait for the last one (Cold Steel) to come out (June 25th!). Seriously, I haven’t enjoyed a reread this much in ages. Elliott describes the books as “an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, the intelligent descendents of troodons, and a dash of steampunk whose gas lamps can be easily doused by the touch of a powerful cold mage”. It’s an amazing, wild ride. The setting and characters are incredibly delicious. I really admire Kate Elliott as a writer, and she blogs most enjoyably too!

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As to recs of a shorter sort, here is a random sweetshop assortment of online fiction I’ve read and enjoyed recently (yes, I was on a Strange Horizons binge):

The Lucia Bird by Ryan Simco, from Strange Horizons. Oh wow. I have a soft spot for stories involving awesome grandfathers, so this science fantasy totally got to me.

The Last Sophia by C.S.E. Cooney, from SH. An intriguing fairy story, excellent narrator. Gentry babes! Lush imagery! Nineteenth-century diction! Strange but awesome.

Hear the Enemy, My Daughter by Kenneth Schneyer, also from SH. This was a pretty upsetting story, for me, but very cool use of language/linguistics in SF. I do so appreciate linguist protagonists!

The Thing Under the Drawing Room by Jedediah Berry, from the inaugural issue of Interfictions Online. This is a weird and wonderful tale. I really enjoyed the writing style, and the whole story was just delightful! A barbarian hero in a sprawling Gothic complex of a house, in a competition involving being possessed by the spirit of an old god. Brilliant stuff.

Poetry in Polu Texni: Beauty Remembers

Excellent news for this June Monday: my poem ‘Beauty Remembers’ is now online at Polu Texni.

Read it here!

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Since the poem was inspired by the tale of Beauty and the Beast, I think this is the time to wax lyrical about how much that fairy tale has inspired and continues to inspire me.

I was first exposed to the fairy tale through the Disney movie. I was five years old when it came out, and it was the first film I ever went to see at a cinema. I remember me and my friend had to sit perched high on the seats to be able to see the screen. We were mesmerised.

It was a magical – and, I think, formative – experience. The Disney version of Beauty and the Beast has stayed with me all these years. I’m not ashamed to admit that I still love it. As a geeky brown-haired bookworm, I identified with Belle from the start. It was fabulous to have an animated character who also liked to read and who dreamt of adventures in the great wide somewhere. I still get shivers in the scene where Belle explores the forbidden west wing of the castle – the music, the animation, ah, such magic!

Later, I found the original fairy tale and loved it too. I was also drawn to other tales of animal transformation and love – The Black Bull of Norroway is a fantastic example, with its powerful female hero climbing the glass mountain to get to her love. And I’m a total sucker for retellings or adaptations of Beauty and the Beast or similar tales. Even if I think the adaptations/retellings are horrible, I’ll enjoy some part of them because hey, it’s Beauty and the Beast!

Naturally, the theme crops up in my own writing, too. Most notably, recently, in the novel I started during Nano 2008 and finished the first draft of last autumn. (The novel that I should edit properly sometime…) Anyway, it’s inspired by Beauty and the Beast, and is set in a strange city and a realm within that city.

While I was revising that novel last August, I was so caught up in the beauty/beast theme that this poem popped out, too. I’m really happy that ‘Beauty Remembers’ is available online now for all to read.

Sunday recs: Interfictions &c.

I haven’t read through the entire inaugural issue yet, but the new online journal Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts is already a delight. I’m hugely fond of the spaces between/amidst genres, styles, fiction/nonfiction, types of art – so Interfictions makes me feel all fuzzy inside. 🙂 Such a weird, delicious mixture of texts (and pictures and sound, even!).

In the vein of artistic interdisciplinarity, here’s something I recently enjoyed from Strange Horizons: an experimental, intertextual, weird, and rather awesome piece. Book of Vole (Excerpts), by Jane Tolmie and Perry Rath.

Also from SH, a strange and oddly intriguing story about maths: A to Z Theory by Toh EnJoe.

That’s my recs for tonight! I’m off to eat some pie now. Mmm, berries.

Poetry sale to Niteblade

News of yay: my poem ‘Bitter Mnemosyne’ will be appearing in the fantasy and horror magazine Niteblade.

Am very pleased that this poem has found such a good home! It’s about memory, cherries, and a journey to the underworld. Greek mythology was one of my childhood’s great inspirations, so of course such themes surface occasionally even now.

Sunday recs: A novella

I just finished reading an amazing fantasy novella:

Martyr’s Gem by C.S.E. Cooney.

It’s a gorgeously written story with characters that jumped off the screen and will linger in my mind for a good while, I suspect. The island culture she’s created is fascinating and vibrant. Sharks and gemstones! Bantering, loving sibling relationships! A society where men and women are pretty equal! An interesting oral storytelling culture and stories-within-stories!

I love pretty much everything about this novella. Go forth and be immersed!

Whinging and worldbuilding

The pressure to come up with a brilliant post after a long time of not posting: I have it. So, I’ll just get this out, sans brilliance, but posted at least!

I haven’t been writing too much recently. In the past month, I’ve written just a couple of poems and such – oh, and my morning pages, which I’ve been diligently doing every morning since 13 March. I’m glad I’ve continued doing morning pages, but it’s not proper creative writing (despite the occasional flash of a good sentence or description).

I think I need a new Project. Something I could work on, but that I could fit into my all-too-crammed schedule. On top of my day job, I’m doing a translation gig and slowly working towards PhD applications. Pile some volunteer work and daily life on the whole thing, and… yeah. Not too much time for writing. I should just do more 15-min writing spurts and such, though. But when your brain energy is sucked up by everything else, it’s difficult to get a creative flow going in the evening. I feel bad when I’m not writing, incomplete; so why is it so hard to just do writing exercises if nothing else?

I actually have a Project ghosting about in my mind, and ideas spilling out onto paper every now and then. But it’s just a nascent world as yet, not a story I could tell. It’s still in slow, slow percolation mode.

Which is why I should get reading more inspiring stuff about worldbuilding. So, for starters, here’s some stuff by Kate Elliott (author of the awesome Spiritwalker series), who is amazing at worldbuilding.

So, there are approaches to worldbuilding that start with making a physical map, a geographical account of the world you’re creating. Kate Elliott has a slightly different approach, visualising the more intangible elements of the world before drawing a physical map. In this first, “internalized map”, she sketches out some of the cosmology and subjective worldviews of the various peoples in her world. How I understand it is that she creates the emotional world before the physical one. What do her characters think like? Why is it that they think like they do? She writes:

Every character in the story has an internal map through which they measure, comprehend, and navigate the world they live in. Their maps won’t be the same as every other character’s, and they won’t be the same as mine.

Kate E has also written another great post on the subject of worldbuilding and mapmaking here. Maps are not objective:

The point to come back to as a world builder is to always remember that you, the one who is drawing the map, are making a series of decisions about what matters enough to go in the map, and about what and how it is represented.

Look at medieval maps, for instance. This is a map of the world. So is this, the Holy Land at its centre. Maps can illuminate what their cultures consider important – this is also something to consider when making a map for a fantasy world.

Of course, map-making (of any sort) isn’t the only way to go about worldbuilding. Kate Elliott (yes, today’s an Elliott-link day) has a great post about who’s visible in your story. You have to question your world: always ask questions. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, with my nascent Project.

And naturally, there are even more ways of starting your worldbuilding. As a linguist with an interest in social history, some of the first worldbuilding questions I ask are about language and its social meanings, and the presence (or not) of multilingualism. And consider Tolkien, with his ultimate worldbuilding-from-linguistics approach. But I think that’s a subject for another post!

Drabble for my grandfather

Long time no blog. Busy, &c &c. ad nauseam.

Last night at my writers’ group I led an exercise on description. We each brought an interesting object and then spent five minutes writing short descriptions of each. It brought out some really good stuff, I think – a nice exercise.

And one of the objects resulted in me being engulfed by memory and sadness, and the following drabble resulted (the version below is edited from the original rough write). I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather lately, the first loved one I lost to death. Nearly nine years ago, and I miss him. I always will.

So here’s a short piece. For you, ukki.

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From the Woodwork

I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. Grandad, with his steady hands and carpenter’s heart. These were his, I think as I run my fingers along the battered red handles of the pliers. His hands gripped them just like I’m doing now. They feel solid. Grandad was solid too, to the last.

I blink back tears, concentrate on the object in my hands. The pliers are flecked with paint from his past projects. The jaws, well-worn from countless hours of use, are rusty now. The shape and weight of the pliers give me strange comfort. I open and close them a few times. It feels like a heartbeat.

Like Grandad’s heart, that beat too irregularly, and then stopped beating.

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Sunday recs: Calls, swans, mermaids

I have several things I want to blog about, but life’s been giving me little time for reflection lately, and most of those potential posts require reflection. So, we’ll just do a very modest Sunday recs tonight.

A poem: Learning My Way Around by Neile Graham, from Goblin Fruit’s autumn 2011 issue. Birds, breadcrumbs, calls.

A story: Swan-Brother by Gabriel Murray. 1700s/1800s alt world with magic, a beautiful, sad story about brothers and swan-magic.

And then for this week’s favourite: Mermaid’s Hook by Liz Argall. Wow. This story is amazing: the POV, the realisation of what the setting actually is, the wonderful ending… I really love it all. The POV is especially excellently done: such a tight, never-faltering third person. I love the language and the atmosphere. Such a joy of a story!

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I’m trying to work on a story in Finnish right now, but it’s horribly sticky going. Times like this, I lose faith in myself as a writer, especially in Finnish.

So it’s good to have reminders to be forgiving to myself.