More publication news, yay! My poem “Storm-yarn” is forthcoming in Issue 9 of the lovely inkscrawl, guest-edited by Bogi Takács.
I’m really happy with this! “Storm-yarn” is a recent poem but based on an old story idea that never went anywhere. Worked out in poem form at least. 🙂
I promised Sunday recs, and then I went away and did other things and forgot about it till I was about to go to bed. It’s past midnight here now, but it’s still Sunday somewhere in the world! And there’s always time for recs. 🙂
The Woman Sings Her Marriage Into Being by Lev Mirov (in Through the Gate) – an utterly wonderful poem! Word-magic and a loving story contained within it. Such delicious words, I loved tasting them in my mouth when reading. The other poems in this newest issue of Through the Gate are lovely too – it’s a short issue but the poems work so well together thematically, birds and death.
Monkey King, Faerie Queen by Zen Cho (in Kaleidotrope) – a great melding of folklore/mythology from east and west. Trickster tales are such fun! The narrative voice here is full of cheeky humour and authorial insertions. I’m reading Zen Cho’s short stories so that I have some sense of her style before I get my hands on Sorcerer to the Crown – and based on this story, I really like her writing!
A Riddler at Market by Rose Lemberg (in Uncanny Magazine) – ohhh this poem is so happy and charming! I mean that in the best of ways! This is a comfort-read poem with glorious word use (as one expects of Rose’s writing!).
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Speaking of Uncanny Magazine, their Kickstarter campaign for Year Two of the magazine is still ongoing! A few more days to go. They’ve already reached their basic goal, but more backers will mean more stretch goals, including getting more unsolicited stories and poems! Go and support them if you can – Uncanny is amazing and I would love to see even more stories out there.
My flash fiction piece “Memory” (fantasy, of sorts) will be appearing in The Flash Fiction Press on 21 September. I’ll post a link when it’s up!
After a bit of a fallow period during my all-too-busy summer, I’ve been increasing my fiction & poetry submission volume during the past couple of weeks. I’ve also got a lot of new – and some old – stories brewing, including a sequel to Moss. In fact, since I just spent the past hour and a half trawling through my notebooks and typing down ideas into a file for later consultation, I actually feel a bit overwhelmed by ideas. 😀 Always more ideas than time to write! And so many projects I’m working on/want to work on! (I really need to revise my poetry collection and actually send it out. I’ve been sitting on it for far too long…)
However, now out for a walk to brainstorm one of those story ideas.
Coming up later today: Sunday recs! I’ve been reading SO MUCH good stuff this week.
Firstly: get yourself a copy of Kate Elliott’s newest book, Court of Fives. I finally got myself one and glommed the book in a few breathless sessions. I would’ve read it in a single day (I got halfway through in a few hours on my first reading session) but I was helping people move on Fri & Sat, so no book marathon for me. Anyway! It’s definitely the kind of book you want to enjoy in long, deliciously breathless sessions. Here’s how Kate describes the book:
I call this “Little Women meet American Ninja Warrior in a setting inspired by Greco-Roman Egypt” while the publisher has pitched it as “Little Women meets Game of Thrones meets The Hunger Games.” (source)
I could go on and on about how much I loved this book. 😀 I’m a huge fan of Kate Elliott’s work and look forward to her new releases. I was a bit apprehensive about the YA part, because in general I’m not a big YA fan – but Court of Fives was just a damn good book, and the YA was mostly in the protagonist’s age and some of the conventions in the book. OK, so I guess the YA thing also meant that the awesome worldbuilding couldn’t be described in as much detail as Elliott usually likes to do (and which I like). But it was also cool to see how much can be revealed through rather little overt description.
Things I loved: the worldbuilding (Ptolemaic Egypt creates great fodder for inspiration!); the sibling relationships (sisters being sisterly, yessss); the Fives game itself (great descriptions of action too); how the protagonist Jes kept on being sensible and making rational decisions despite being a teenager amid difficult circumstances.
I wish the next book was out already! 😀 I loved the ending for CoF, but damn, it was a tantalising one.
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In case you can’t get out and buy CoF right this minute, here are two delightful things to read in the meantime:
Et je ne pleurais jamais les larmes cicatrisantes magiques; c’est seulement un mensonge joli: Aarne-Thompson Index No. 310 by Elizabeth R. McClellan (in Niteblade) – a great Rapunzel poem with a twist. I do love a good narrative poem.
Stone Hunger by N.K. Jemisin (in Clarkesworld) – an excellent secondary-world story with creepy and compelling worldbuilding (as is usual for Jemisin – she has such good worldbuilding in all her novels too). After reading this and finding out that it was a sketch of sorts for the world of Jemisin’s newest novel The Fifth Season, I got even more excited about reading said new novel. I asked my local library network to order the book and apparently three copies are making their way to three libraries. Yay!
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So many exciting novels coming out or just appeared! I’m especially excited about Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings, Fran Wilde’s Updraft, and Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown. I wish I had more money so I could buy all the books, but I will ask my local library network to order them if nothing else – as in the case of The Fifth Season, it’s so great that they’re very much open to ordering new books based on customer recommendations. I heart libraries.
So, Helsinki won the bid for Worldcon in 2017! I’m incredibly excited about this news! It’s going to be so awesome. My hometown is a fabulous spot for Worldcon (I MIGHT be a bit biased, of course :D), and Finnish cons are really well organised so I know this one will be too. I’m just ridiculously excited that writers whose work I admire may be coming to my city in two years.
Worldcon, a bike ride away from my house! HOW COOL IS THAT.
One rec today, a long and wonderful read:
The Earth and Everything Under by K.M. Ferebee (in Shimmer Magazine).
I just read this story last night (it appeared last year) and was struck by a strange, melancholy sense of beauty. I absolutely love the way Ferebee writes! She creates a strange world both like and unlike our own, and paints such images with her words. I love it. This was the perfect reading after an exhausting, busy day. Such word-magic to sink into!
Sunday recs! Three stories I’ve enjoyed lately:
With a Golden Risha by P. Djéli Clark (in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly) – a fun epic tale of air pirates and music. I enjoy it when music is used to further plot.
Monsters in Space by Angela Ambroz (in Shimmer) – featuring an extremely entertaining narrator, such an awesome voice.
The Girl, the Ghul and the Gift-Keeper by Rhea Daniel (in Silver Blade) – a cool Middle Eastern influenced ghul story.
I was randomly browsing a couple of my old diaries last night, and came across a rather interesting entry from when I was 13. In it I angst profusely about how my stories are shit: my plots are shit because I don’t plan them in advance, my sentences sound terrible, I’ll never write anything decent! But at the very end of the entry I give some surprisingly sage advice to myself: just keep writing something even if it’s shit. Yes good, 13-year-old self!
Anyway, the entry includes some more writing advice from 13-year-old Sara, so I thought I’d share it with you for the lulz! It was originally written in Finnish – I used to write my diary more in Finnish; these days it’s almost entirely in English, interestingly – so this is a translation. But I’ve kept the original capitalisation and excessive punctuation for your reading pleasure. 😉
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SARA’S WRITING ADVICE, AGED 13:
If you don’t have a proper plot, you don’t have anything. And a proper plot won’t happen unless you have a proper main character and bad guy. The main character MUST NOT be blah and boring – but somehow special. And they DON’T NEED TO BE perfect or anything, but they have to have FLAWS AND BAD HABITS AND PREJUDICES!!!!! [drawing of three angry-looking skulls]
And the bad guy – they’re REALLY IMPORTANT. They have to be really merciless, but not stupid and PATHETIC! They have to feel REAL and sensible too!!
And the plot has to make at least some sort of sense and must be COMPLEX and above all INTERESTING!!!!! And especially the beginning needs to be good, otherwise the reader’s interest will stop right there…
AND THE TEXT HAS TO FEEL ALIVE!!!!! You have to carry the reader with you and the text has to sound GOOD…
So there’s the basic guidelines à la Sara.
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13-year-old me definitely loved her exclamation marks times five, huh? 😀 This is very much navel-gazing, but I think it’s fascinating that even when I was that young, I was analysing my own writing (even if from an angsty “IT’LL NEVER BE GOOD WAAAAH” perspective). And from the perspective of potential reader response, too! I also note in the same entry that inspiration needs to be fed for it to keep going, which is actually surprising, considering that when I was younger I basically believed in the magical sort of “strikes you like lightning” inspiration and not so much the “bum in chair, fingers on keyboard” practical approach.
My diaries also include some rather adorably effusive descriptions of how awesome writing is. This is from the entry quoted above:
“At its best writing is like a drug… a LOVELY drug you get addicted to… when you’re writing a SUPER GOOD story, you’re dancing on the clouds and go to amazing places and drink from the chalice of the gods…”
A purple-prose way of putting it, sure, but I still agree. At its best, writing is magic.
Yay! My mini-chapbook for the Origami Poetry Project is out!
Well, it’s been out since last week, but since I was away and internetless at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival,(*) I only found out about this last night when I got back.
My chapbook Watching the City is on the home page right now, but you can also print it from my poet page. After printing, fold it according to the instructions here and ta-da, you have a mini-chapbook! Tiny poetry!
As I mentioned in my previous post about this: consider this mini-chapbook a prelude to a longer Helsinki-inspired chapbook/collection that I’ve got in the works. So much in the works that it’s basically already done, all that’s left is sending it out to potential publishers. That’s required enough energy that I’ve had the project on hold for quite a while. Will do my best to get it sent out this summer!
(*) After a series of ridiculously unfortunate events, my folk dance group finally got to perform. And we danced well!
Eeeep!
I didn’t realise that my novelette “Moss” had already appeared in Silver Blade Magazine – but it has! This is my longest published story to date – a novelette, eeee! I feel so happy it’s out and I can share it with everyone!
Read “Moss” here!
Note: trigger warning for (implied) incest: the story was inspired by the fairytale “Donkeyskin” and some other variants of Aarne-Thompson motif #510B. It’s not graphic at all in “Moss”, just implied, like I said, but I thought I’d warn about it anyway.
“Moss” is set in the forest world of “Boat-husk” and “The Ruin” . Timeline-wise, this novelette is set way back in the world’s history compared to “The Ruin” – the apocalyptic event mentioned in “The Ruin” is still far, far in the future for the protagonists of “Moss”.
I really enjoy this world I’ve built/am building! I hope you do too. 🙂 (I should do something about the zero draft of a novel I wrote last Nanowrimo, also set in this forest world…)