All Our Projects, Past and Present

October is such a big month!

This last weekend was the first ever FIYAHcon, and it was stunning to behold. I wasn’t there all weekend, but I caught a few panels (my husband Carlos Hernandez moderated one on Middle Grade SFF, and I really wanted to catch the Usurping Lovecraft panel, which I heard was an incredible success), the big interview with GoH Rebecca Roanhorse, the Ignyte Awards (hosted by Jesse of Bowties and Books; they were COMPLETELY charming, plus dog!), and the closing ceremony. It was enough to make me wish I’d been screen-locked to it beginning to end.

Hopefully, when FIYAHcon meets in MeatSpace, I can attend and devote all my attention to it, for there will be no other distractions, nor the haze of ZoomFatigue. Such great, good work.

Ah, and if you have not yet subscribed to FIYAH Magazine, now is really the time! I have their JOY issue queued up and ready to be read on my Kindle. One can also donate to support their work!

One of my favorite things I did this month was host an EPIC Read-Along-A-Thon of Kathleen Jenning’s Travelogues: Vignettes of Trains in Motion. We had 21 people show up, from all across the U. S. and Australia, and 14 people took turns reading the text, which I’d divided into stanzas and color-coded the stanzas so as to assign the colors to “passengers.”

Since there are nine vignettes, we called each of the vignettes “journeys,” and Carlos and my roommate Mir (a New York City director) played the train conductors, ushering us in and out of the trains. It was pretty joyous.

At the end of September, Mir and I collaborated on making an audiobook together. She directed a collection of some of my shorter work–erotic fairytales and dark fantasy–called The Witch in the Almond Tree and Others Stories.

It was my first time working with a really hands-on director, and her first time directing an audiobook, so we both learned so much from each other and the experience. Every day it got more and more fun, especially since the material we were working with was pretty… phew. RAMBUNCTIOUS.

I plan to release the ebook collection on Amazon in about a week or so, and shortly thereafter, the audiobook on Audible. Though I have a little experience in self-publishing, I am still experiencing a bit of a learning curve here, but thankfully, I know many smart people with many skills. My brother Jeremy Cooney engineered and produced the audiobook, and my friend Brett Massé designed both the cover and layout. I am looking forward to sharing this with you.

Meanwhile, I am almost 2/3s of the way done with my novel edits for Saint Death’s Daughter. Well, initial novel edits, I’m sure. I have been writing this book for so, so long. I’ve done so many drafts: first, on my own, then after several rounds of beta-readers, then as it went through its Great Agent Rounds, and now with an Actual Editor Under Contract! It is easy to slump, to think, I have been writing this FOREVER. (10 years is a LONG TIME!) And will it EVER END? But at the same time, I am deeply aware that 1.) the work is STILL pleasurable (and it hasn’t always been), and 2.) It keeps–wildly–getting better.

I just… I also have other projects I want to work on. (Like the next in that series!)

One thing that’s been percolating lately (I think I mentioned it a blog or so ago) is taking an old idea for a stage play I was developing with Marissa McKown in Chicago and turning it into a, let’s see, maybe radio play series. Maybe 8 episodes. Like a mini-series. I’m going to listen to a few of the latest, greatest innovations, see what’s up, and see if I can explode out the old idea into a new form.

I even know the title:

THE DEVIL AND LADY MIDNIGHT.

Let me brainstorm episode titles off the top of my head, just for fun, right here and now:

Episode One: Coming Soon to an Underground Near You
Episode Two: Happy Birthday, Mr. Og
Episode Three: That Insolent Bastard of the Garden
Episode Four: Desire is a Broken Pomegranate
Episode Five: The Ruins Our Voices Leave Us
Episode Six: Az, What is That Singing?
Episode Seven: Lady Midnight, Clothed in Flame
Episode Eight: Lucy Lumen Takes a Train to Nowhere

Well, that was fun.

Anyway, then there’s my whole Distant Stars album project, and my whole Dark Breakers collection idea, not to mention those two novellas–Fiddle and I Shall Make a Ruin of Myself–that I drafted last year that I’d love to dive back into and get on the market. As well as… well, Carlos and I are very excited about some developments with our game Negocios Infernales, but more than that I cannot say for now.

As Ysabeau Wilce‘s redoubtable Flora Segunda would quote the Coyote Queen as saying, “There’s no way out but through.”

And so–back to my edits.