Traveling the World (well okay, a bit of Canada & the Midwest), Finishing a Novel (1st draft anyway), Reading, Blurbing, Poetry Panel, Narration Podcast, you know…
A Widow’s Charm Tour with Caitlyn Paxson
I wrote extensively about our tour dates and stops in an earlier newsletter, so this one’s mostly pictures. What an adventure! This is what they mean when they say “time of your life.”
Caitlyn and I have been rising authors together for almost twenty years. It has taken decades to build our careers to this point, and the most important thing I’ve learned is to CELEBRATE OUR VICTORIES WHENEVER THEY COME, BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY.
I am so so so happy to celebrate Caitlyn’s incredible success with her. I LOVED being her conversation partner, and just GLOWING at her the whole time!
This is outside Hopeless Romantics in Toronto. I dressed to match the store.
This was at Artemis Books and Goods in Traverse City, Michigan. We were their FIRST AUTHOR EVENT.
They have LOTS of signed books—both mine and Caitlyn’s—if you wanted to order a signed one from them! Maybe mention you’d like a signed one, so that they know!
This was a great event, at CityLit Books in Chicago. SO MANY OF MY CHICAGO and CHICAGO SUBURBS friends came—in a torrential downpour!!! with tornado warnings!!!!—and I got to meet some old family friends of Caitlyn’s while we were there too!
Oh, and JULIA RIOS showed up, on their way to another state. They made sure to have a layover in Chicago, JUST TO COME TO THE EVENT! They’re the greatest.
I was so so happy.
Finishing (the FIRST DRAFT of) a Novel
Yes, it me.
I finished the first draft of Saint Death’s Doorway.
Yes I did.
HEE HEE.
Now I gotta git gud. Due date’s July 17th. Eep. Not much time.
“I’ve always relied on the kindness of beta readers.”
Poetry Panel and Narration Podcast
The poetry panel with Ali Trotta and Connecticut Poet Laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell was pretty awesome. They were both so insightful and passionate about poetry, and I got to brush off my performance piece “The Sea King’s Second Bride”—memorized, no less!
You can find Ali’s new, debut poetry collection, Offerings for Ordinary Gods, here: https://www.alitrotta.com/poetrycollections
This is what I wrote about it: “Ali Trotta’s Offerings for Ordinary Gods is a merge of witchcraft, myth, love potion, and grief memoir. Feminist, fervent, and at times forlorn, this poetry collection champions female figures who have been done dirty by history and myth’s trad narratives (as well as present day voices of the #MeToo movement), dispenses wisdom to the lonely and hurt from unexpected sources, and warns of dire curses awaiting those who do harm. Many of these poems are love poems, and none so deep as the love poems to a lost mother, for whom the poet’s yearning sounds the very depths of a siren’s sea.”
And Antoinette Brim-Bell’s website is full of her collections and collaborative art projects—including ballets based on her work! I suggest “Freedom is Red,” found here, among some of her others: https://www.antoinettebrimbell.com/poems
The narration podcast featured Andrew Hiller, whose comedic noir novella “Hornytown Chutzpah” recently came out with Atthis Arts. Andrew and his sister did the co-narration for that book. The podcast also featured Trendane Sparks, a renowned narrator of many BattleTech and Shadowrun audiobooks!
You can watch or listen to the VOD for that here:
French Translation of Desdemona, now with LINK!
Ah! I mentioned it in an earlier newsletter that it was coming, but now…
Desdemona, the French translation of my novella Desdemona and the Deep, is now AVAILABLE IN FRENCH from Argyll Editions!
HERE’S THE LINK! https://argyll.fr/produit/desdemona/
The incredible cover artist is Anouck Faure, whom I adore. And the incredible translator is Anne-Sylvie Homassel! I am so happy! So honored! I have to see how I can order a copy! I want to hug it!
Carlos made me a decal of the cover for our living room window, and then we had the wrap-around version of the color printed out so we could frame it.
And… just WAIT till you see Anouck’s cover for Anne-Sylvie’s translation of my novella The Breaker Queen! It’s currently my desktop wallpaper, but it’s not for public consumption yet.
Theatre I Loved
I mean, say no more. Except, I will. Or maybe I should let the creators speak for me:
Imagine Milton’s Paradise Lost, except God is an alien overlord, Satan is a bitter divorcee, and Eve is a feminist icon. Throw in drag queen space demons, cosmic rock anthems, and a mysterious substance called Space Jelly, and you have the irreverent new musical, Paradise Lost in Space.
At a time when the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people are being challenged, we wanted to reclaim Western culture’s foundational creation myth, to make room for the true, queer beauty of our diverse experiences. Revitalizing this old story as a campy space opera, Paradise Lost in Space has the power to entertain and connect audiences
I really loved it. I laughed my ass off. It came out of a piece of queer ritual theatre at a fairy festival, and you could feel the holiness right there the whole time, with all the sacred and profane together.
Check it out here: https://www.paradiselostinspace.com
Cumulo, by Emily Batsford is a “nonverbal puppet piece explores our accumulation of self and the experiences that shape us. Soar with Plum as they free-fall through the sky, meeting weather and whimsy along the way.”
Yeah, that’s what the text said, but the experience was beautiful and harrowing. I thought it was going to be like the cotton candy they were serving at the concessions stand. No. No. It was… a nightmare in free-fall. It was thunderous. I can still feel it in my chest.
I love the puppet designer, Yuliya Tsukerman, both as a poet and a mask-maker as well as a puppeteer. I highly recommend you follow her on Instagram and Patreon!
This is me in the onboarding portion of Cumulo. It only LOOKS soft and pink. But watch out for the monsters.
Canciones by Radical Evolution
This was an awesome immersive theatre experience. Imagine going to a family party, where the family has been mariachis for GENERATIONS, and ALL the drama is going down. You are fed tamales, chat with the actors, and are encouraged to gossip about what’s going on in the other rooms.
And the music? Is FABULOUS.
https://www.radicalevolution.org/canciones
Soundbites: 10-Minute New Musical Festival
Theatre Now New York runs the Sound Bites Festival of 10-Minute Musicals. I was in it last year! This year, they were in Symphony Space, which was a great place for them.
I love any new plays festival. It’s like reading an anthology; you may not like everything, but you love the work as a whole, and the high level of the work individually. And the ones that ring in you, SING IN YOU.
Books I’m Blurbing
These are all blurbs for novels and novellas forthcoming THIS YEAR! Keep an eye out for them!
The Asterist by A. T. Sayre.
Pre-order it on Bookshop, B&N, Amazon, or at your friendly indie bookstore!
What I wrote about it:
What do you get when you take a bitter, demoralized loner finishing up his last tedious job in space and introduce him to a flash-frozen alien who’s just crash-landed on his asteroid? A.T. Sayre’s The Asterist. What a hero’s journey: to watch a grumpy curmudgeon strip off decades of bleak ennui to reveal complex layers of competence, scientific curiosity, excitement, and affection, as he learns to communicate with this wanderer in his midst. Fans of Murderbot’s blistering sarcasm and Project Hail Mary’s last-ditch problem solving will thrum to the themes of The Asterist. Pretty damned satisfying.
These next two are novellas coming out this year, but I don’t have pre-order links for them yet. I’ll get them to you as soon as I do!
A House of Perfect Safety (novella) by Virginia Mohlere
What I wrote about it:
When a book so singularly focused on healing meets the current tropes of SFF, it might easily be relegated to the sub-genre of “cozy fantasy.” And while A House of Perfect Safety by Virginia M. Mohlere is deeply comforting, radiant with care, I would not call it cozy. There is such ferocity in its desire for the safety and well-being of its characters, such passionate fury at the cruelties of a world that inflicts harm on the poor, the weak, the low of status, and such profound acknowledgement of pain, that every flicker of light, every new growth, every step towards freedom, is an enormous victory against the powers that seek to break us. Mohlere’s magic and invention call to mind Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, but the deep work undergirding her prose sounds an alternative to LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, entreating us not to walk away from suffering, but to serve to alleviate it instead—and not only that, but to end it at the source, both individually and in community, for once and for all.
A River Wide (novella) by Amanda J. McGee
What I wrote about it:
Like Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, and Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, Amanda J. McGee’s novella A River Wide taps the bonds of sisterhood, survival, and power, and floods the senses with river water and witchcraft. McGee’s characters have a deep, Dillard-esque, and—dare I say—holy bond with the Appalachian landscape, which can be capricious, cruel, generous, or tender in turns, much like the prose itself. A River Wide wanders deftly into various creeks and hollows of genre: thriller, ghost story, romance, family drama, and a middle-of-life coming-of-age. It moved me, deeply.
Books I’m Looking Forward To:
Description:
A young woman undertakes a terrifying journey—and a terrifying transformation—in this genre-blending speculative suspense novel set in South Korea and the US which mixes fantasy, gothic vibes and queer longing, with a shot of feminist body horror.
Fairytales are for children. Until the day we awaken in a place full of monsters, being softly enveloped by the dark.
Nineteen-year-old undocumented immigrant Hee-Jin lies on the floor of her cramped Seoul apartment, listening for footsteps.
But the knock on the door isn’t the police finally coming to deport her to North Korea. Instead, sprawled on the doorstep is a disfigured, bird-like corpse—and it has her eyes. Her younger sister, artist Hee-Young, is meant to be on an art program in America, not dead of a strange overdose.
But in Hee-Young’s pocket is a plane ticket and US passport. Seeing her chance for freedom, Hee-Jin steals her sister’s identity and takes her place, determined to uncover what really happened to her.
But the deeper she dives into the program’s strange workings, the closer she gets to the monstrous secret at its heart.
A page-turner of a mystery filled with gorgeous, creepy Korean folklore and imagery, Aviary, written by critically acclaimed Korean American author Maria Dong, is also a story about power, violence, exploitation—and transformation. And, above all, it’s about the choices women make from within a system where all the available options are bad ones.
An Embodiment of Souls by Julia Laurel
Description:
IN THIS QUEER POLITICAL NECROMANTASY, A SECRET MARRIAGE PACT FOR SURVIVAL COULD UNDO A KINGDOM . . .
As the daughter of a foreign ambassador, Rissa hoped living abroad would protect her from home’s puritanical customs where women are forbidden to walk at night or use magic except to support a necromancer’s dual identity. Alek, the youngest prince of the Memric Isle, hasn’t yet taken his Second body. Fearing he’ll be accused of sin and his body claimed as a Second himself, Alek lives piously while studying abroad, even though he’s distracted by magic—and his handsome roommate, Gable. When Alek meets Rissa by chance, his quiet life is thrown into chaos. One of Rissa’s fathers has been abducted, and Alek and Gable are witnesses. Alek and Rissa form a secret alliance to find her father and uncover the truth behind the conspiracy, risking life and freedom as they follow clues straight to the heart of the Memric Isle’s government.
Artists I Love
I was at the Nyack Street Fair last Sunday, and stopped in my tracks for two things: the artist Amy Ackerman and a Bloody Mary Mix by a chef-artist named “K.”
I don’t even like Bloody Mary mix, but I loved K’s instantly. Hand-made, small batch, BIPOC owned.
It’s so good. SO GOOD. I got some for Carlos, both the Original and the Deep Heat. It’s award-winning, and really… just worth it.
As for Amy Ackerman, I was just strolling by, and then this picture caught my eye.
It’s the one on the bottom left, a woman being embraced by a horned shadowy creature and a translucent ghost creature. And then, the more I looked, the more I fell in love with the art. Instead of spending ALL my budget on a big piece of art, I bought several cards to spread the love to my friends. B
ut… really. I loved so many pieces SO MUCH.
This is exactly what I saw when strolling by Amy Ackerman’s booth at the Nyack Street Fair:
C.S.E. Cooney 