Today, I wrote a newsletter about the absolute BOUQUET of responses we’ve been getting for our Infernal card prompts, Days 1-3. We have songs! We have poems! We have stories! We have NAIL ART!
And so, if you want to read all about it, look to my SUBSTACK!
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PROMPT FOR MONDAY OCTOBER 2nd: “The Artist Would Possess You” (The SANGRE suit.)
The card pull!
Every day in October, Carlos & I will pull a card from the Deck of Destiny for you!
Use it at will to inspire story, poems, plays, songs, other visual arts, or, you know, just how you wanna spend your day.
Our Kickstarter for NEGOCIOS INFERNALES (which includes the full 70-card Destino deck as its core mechanic) goes live on Tuesday, October 10th!
Check it out at NegociosInfernales.com!
🧜🏾♀️ Lágrimas: The Tears of Life
🐷 Carne: The Meat Of Life
❤️ Sangre: The Blood of Life
💀Hueso: The Bones of Life
🌬 Aire: The Breath of Life
⚡️Rayo: The Spark of Life
🛸 Espacio: The Spaces Between and Beyond
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I drafted this on 5/8/23 in my notebook, after a visit to my father in April. But I just now got to sit with it and type it out, and work on it.
for my papa
the preserves are hushlands, their paths mud
and a grayness hazes over the leafing
sandhill cranes dodder like two-legged fawns
while whooping cranes unfold like wet origami
and rosy-eyed white pelicans put on their yellow fins:
plate their breeding beaks for the season
The branches are bold with invisible stirrings
he finds robins obvious, dismissible
but listens, head cocked, for the red-bellied woodpecker
churr-churr-churr, thrra thrra thrra, brrrrr
hear that? he asks
but all I hear are robins, all I see
is what I’ve seen before: bluejays and blackbirds
a startling pair of electric swallows, nesting
sometimes, more elusively, a mote in my periphery
like dust in my eye, backlit by sky
there! I say, pointing where to point his lens
I don’t know what it is, but it’s something you will like.
it is, it is, it always is a thing he dotes on—
every rara avis another exclamation
bluebird! flycatcher! ruby-crowned kinglet!
these flecks I barely see, he knows by sight and sound
though forever prophesying, peering around
for the red-bellied woodpecker
that dot, that speck, that prick-your-finger red
somewhere overhead
there! I say
where? he asks
just there.
got him, says my father
good spotting, he tells me
praising me for pointing out a bird I cannot see
until he shows me with his camera
zoomed in
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PROMPT FOR SUNDAY OCTOBER 1st: “The Soul Loves All; the Mind But Some.” (The AIRE suit.)
Every day in October, Carlos & I will pull a card from the Deck of Destiny for you!
Use it at will to inspire story, poems, plays, songs, other visual arts, or, you know, just how you wanna spend your day.
Our Kickstarter for NEGOCIOS INFERNALES (which includes the full 70-card Destino deck as its core mechanic) goes live on Tuesday, October 10th!
Check it out at NegociosInfernales.com!
🧜🏾♀️ Lágrimas: The Tears of Life
🐷 Carne: The Meat Of Life
❤️ Sangre: The Blood of Life
💀Hueso: The Bones of Life
🌬 Aire: The Breath of Life
⚡️Rayo: The Spark of Life
🛸 Espacio: The Spaces Between and Beyond
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Here’s the Eventbrite link! You don’t need tickets for this, but if you sign up for the “free” ticket, that means you’ll get email reminders about the event in your inbox. Since there’s SO MUCH going on all the time!
Wilson, Cooney & Hernandez host writers & poets for an Infernal Salon: a literary event to support Arvan Eleron’s sub-a-thon!
C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez have made a roleplaying game! It’s called Negocios Infernales. Unlike other RPGs, however, Negocios Infernales uses a spooky deck of custom cards to determine success and failure, inspire improvisation, create characters, and create mayhem in the collaborative story you are telling.
For our Infernal Salon, we give every writer a prompt of one or more cards from our Negocios Infernales deck, la Baraja del Destino (“the Deck of Destiny“). Then we set a timer for 20 minutes.
Whilst our guests are inspired to write great and/or goofy works of fiction, poetry, memoir, or creative laundry lists, Greg and Carlos and Claire will introduce the writers, banter about all things nerdy under the sun, talk about the Arvan Eleron Stream, and gabble about Negocios Infernales’s forthcoming Kickstarter in October!
At the end of it all, the writers will share their infernally-inspired works with all of us! Much revelry will be had by all!
Every time someone in the Chat subscribes to Arvan Eleron’s channel, we will either:
– draw another Destino card to help inspire our writers (the more cards, the merrier! or the more… macabre)
OR (the Chat decides!)
– add one more minute to the writers’ timer (thereby shaving a minute off their stress)
The chat is also welcome to use those extra card draws for their own prompts. Join in the fun! Write something wild and new–something you never would have written otherwise!
Join us for an evening of creative writing, reading, and supporting the wonderful Arvan Eleron Twitch stream: a place for games, speculative fiction, and a great community!
Arvan Eleron (né Gregory Wilson) is a Twitch broadcaster, Dungeon Master, gamer, author, musician, podcaster, and professor. Every week he streams games, interviews, tabletop roleplaying sessions, and more, all with the best community on the Internet: the Arvanauts!
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the ‘Beneath the Rising’ series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found at her website at www.premeemohamed.com. Join her Patreon at www.patreon.com/premee
Kate Maruyama is the author of Harrowgate, Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit, Bleak Houses and the upcoming The Collective from Writ Large Projects and Alterations from Running Wild Press. She is a writer of horror and the real horror: realism. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles where she lives. She serves on the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee of the Horror Writers of America and on the working board of Women Who Submit Lit a group for women identifying and nonbinary writers that works toward promoting gender parity in publishing.
Find her new novella Bleak House here and a triptych of Halloween novellas Halloween Beyond: Piercing the Vale here.
Marie Bilodeau is a French Canadian author and storyteller who writes mostly in English because, as her family would say, she’s contrary. Her speculative fiction has won several awards and been translated into Chinese and French (to her family’s delight, though they still believe her to be contrary). Marie is also a storyteller and has told stories (in both languages!) across Canada in theatres, tea shops, at festivals and under disco balls. Find out more at http://www.mariebilodeau.com. Find her at her website!
Valerie Valdes’s work has been featured in Uncanny Magazine, Fit for the Gods and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel Chilling Effect was published by Harper Voyager in September 2019 and Orbit UK in February 2020, with starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was also named one of Library Journal’s best SF/fantasy novels of 2019. The trilogy is now complete with Prime Deceptions and Fault Tolerance. Her space fantasy novel, Where Peace Is Lost, was released in August 2023
Valerie is co-editor of Escape Pod, and currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and the Viable Paradise workshop and has taught classes and given lectures for Writer’s Digest, Clarion West and Georgia State University. She has also served as a Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month since 2006. She lives in Georgia with her husband, children and cats. Find her at her website!
Deborah J. Brannon dedicates her nights and weekends to scribbling furiously and reading so much and so fondly that it’s certainly turned her brain. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Faerie Magazine (now Enchanted Living), Stone Telling, and Cabinet des Fées, while her original work can be found in Human Tales (ed. Jennifer Brozek), Scheherezade’s Bequest, and more.
Current projects include a poetry chapbook called The Beltane Verses written with her brother, a card game inspired by Hanahaki Disease, and even more mysterious and startling delights to be named soon.
Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer living in Hell’s Kitchen, NY and works as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Erewhon Books. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop of 2014 and a member of the NYC-based writing group, Altered Fluid.
You can find his fiction work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and forthcoming with Tor.com and Sunday Morning Transport. His short story, “Godmeat,” appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 anthology. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut from Realm Media. Martin also writes, and has written, book reviews, articles, and essays for Tor.com, Catapult, Ghostfire Gaming, Book Riot, Strange Horizons, and the Barnes and Noble Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog. You can find him online at @mcflycahill90.
Keep an eye out for his two forthcoming stories:
“We Will Witness,” coming on the Sunday Morning Transport on 10/22/23: A story of two young people, a millennia apart, meet. For one of them, it is an important moment of their life. For the other, it is the moment of their death.
&
“The Moment Before The Moment”, forthcoming from LightspeedNovember 2023: Azahn (Uhz-on) spent his entire life earning the role of Imperial Foresight, precognitive bodyguard to his divine ruler. But now, forcibly retired 3 weeks into the role, what will become of the life of a young man who can see a tomorrow for everyone but himself?
Find his fiction elsewhere, here!
Carlos Hernandez (he/him) is the author of The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (winner of the 2020 Pura Belpré Award), Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe, several Marvel comics—including the Strange Academy’s “Solve for X” trilogy—and numerous short stories, poems, plays, other speculative works.
Carlos earned his Ph. D. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from Binghamton University in 2000. He is currently Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches Composition, Creative Writing, Science Fiction, and other courses at BMCC. He has been on the faculty of Western Colorado University’s MFA Program, and a Writer in Residence and Guest of Honor at various schools and cons throughout the United States.
At the CUNY Graduate Center, Carlos teaches in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program, where his academic interests have centered around game-based learning in postsecondary environments, which has led him to work extensively game writing and game design.
He has served as lead writer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games. As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he’s contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial.
Together with his wife C. S. E. Cooney, he has co-designed the TTRPG Negocios Infernales, forthcoming from Outland Entertainment. Find him at https://hernandooney.com/
C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a World Fantasy Award-winning author, a Rhysling Award-winning poet, the singer-songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and an audiobook narrator of over 120 audiobooks.
Her books include Saint Death’s Daughter (on Kirkus Review’s list of Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022), The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, Desdemona and the Deep, and Bone Swans: Stories.
Her plays have been performed in several countries: most recently “Ballads from a Distant Star,” at Arts on Site in New York City in 2023. Her albums Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir are all available for purchase or streaming on Bandcamp. Her short fiction and poetry can be found in many speculative fiction magazines and anthologies.
Find out more at csecooney.com or https://linktr.ee/csecooney
Gregory A. Wilson is a speculative fiction author, podcaster, college professor, and TwitchTV channel host.
In the world of fantasy fiction, Greg’s first novel, an epic fantasy called The Third Sign, came out in 2009, and his first graphic novel, the 2021 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Medalist for Graphic Novel-winning Icarus, was published in 2020 as two graphic novels; his third novel, the 2023 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy Finalist Grayshade (Book One of The Gray Assassin Trilogy), was published in 2022.
Greg has short stories in a number of anthologies, is the lead writer for the video game Chosen Heart, and has written flavor text and character treatments for several other card and board games. He is also the co-host of the long-running and critically-acclaimed show Speculate!, now an actual play podcast which features tabletop role-playing games with professionals from the speculative fiction field. Finally, he hosts a successful TwitchTV channel under the moniker Arvan Eleron, focusing on story and narrative and featuring a number of tabletop role-playing campaigns, several of them sponsored.
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This is an excerpt from ZigZag Claybourne’s BREATH, WARMTH, AND DREAM.
Recorded with permission by the author.
This novel will be Kickstarting next month, October 2023, at this link.
For more information about the amazing ZigZag Claybourne, follow his website!
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This is a skein of NETTLE THREAD. Yes, NETTLE THREAD. (I bought it from Etsy.) I was researching it a lot for my book, because… well. You’ll see. It all makes sense, if you know your fairytales, or even if you don’t, I’ll MAKE it make sense!
But I was thinking, after the bracelets Francesca Forrest showed me that she made from milkweed fibers, that I might try my hand at braiding some bracelets/bookmarks over the next year or so. I could learn something interesting to do with my hands, and then have all these little nettle objects I could give away with ARCS of my book, or signed author copies or something.
MAYBE IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA! But it seems so ROMANTIC AND MAGICAL to have NETTLE BRAIDS. Ooh, maybe with little glass beads or something. Wouldn’t those be GREAT ENDOWED OBJECTS for all you awesome fantasy readers out there?
Also, I hope it doesn’t just sit around on my desk looking at me accusingly. That’s partly why I’m telling you this in the first place.
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Today is September 13th! And that makes me a DAY LATE in posting this!
Here’s a fun play-through of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES (see below!) with some folks from Kaleidocast! It begins after our Pre-Game Trust and Affirmation exercises, after the Invocation (collaboratively telling the backstory of our game), after Character Creation (creating your wizards), and World-Building. We review the characters and the world, but in this playthrough, we jump right into Plot-Generation, Roleplay, and end with the infamous Alien Epilogue.
An especial thank you to the wonderful Rob Cameron, Mimi Mondal, and Liam Burke for permission to use this video!
Kaleidocast is the official podcast of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers (BSFW), a “group dedicated to getting writers producing content with a professional polish for publication,” that offers “critique groups and workshops to members with regular guest lectures from those working in the industry today.”
For Kaleidocast’s annual fundraising effort, game designers Carlos Hernandez and C. S. E. Cooney offered to run their TTRPG “Negocios Infernales,” for the Kaleidocast backers, with the participation of some of the celebrated writers and gamers of BSFW.
ROB CAMERON: author of DAYDREAMER, his debut Middle Grade novel forthcoming from Labyrinth Road in 2024. Rob Cameron is a teacher, linguist, and writer. He has poetry, stories, and essays in Star*Line Poetry Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Foreign Policy Magazine, and Tor.com, among others. Rob is also lead organizer for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, a guest host and curator for the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series, and executive producer of Kaleidocast.nyc.
MIMI MONDAL: Mimi is a writer and editor of the fictitious. Her fiction has been nominated twice for the Nebula Award: in 2020 with her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light, and in 2022 for ancient-Bengal-inspired setting titled Shankhabhumi and the adventure “In the Mists of Manivarsha” in the Dungeons & Dragons anthology Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. In 2018 she received nominations for the Hugo, British Fantasy and Ditmar Awards, and was awarded the Locus Award for Non-fiction for co-editing the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler with Alexandra Pierce.
LIAM BURKE: an independent author with a penchant for a variety of speculative fiction. His main passion is for juxtaposing biting humor along with the sharp teeth of horror, razor code of cyberpunk, and back alley deals of urban fantasy.
With a background in theatre and the arts, he has brought his flair for the dramatically macabre to various works including his Moments series of short horror compilations, an illustrated fairy tale for his son, his Cyberpunk flash fiction featured on multiple podcasts, and a novelette about urban wizards set in his favorite tabletop RPG.
C. S. E. COONEY (co-designer of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES) is a World Fantasy Award-winning author. Her books include The Twice-Drowned Saint, Saint Death’s Daughter (nominated for the World Fantasy Award, on Kirkus Review’s list of Year’s Science Fiction and Best Fantasy 2022), Dark Breakers (nominated for the World Fantasy Award, Locus Award finalist), Desdemona and the Deep (nominated for the World Fantasy Award), and Bone Swans: Stories.
As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, as well as short fiction for podcasts such as Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Podcastle.
CARLOS HERNANDEZ (co-designer of NEGOCIOS INFERNALES): New York Times best-selling author Carlos Hernandez wrote the critically acclaimed short story collection The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium, 2016), the novel Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (Disney Hyperion, 2019), which won the 2020 Pura Belpré Award, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. For Marvel Comics, he’s written stories about America Chavez, Spiderman, Spiderpunk, Miles Morales, and the Strange Academy. He’s also written dozens of short stories, poems, and works of drama, usually in the SFF mode.
He has served as lead writer and a game designer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games. As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he’s contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial.
The 7 Suits of Destino
🧜🏾♀️ Lágrimas: The Tears of Life
🐷 Carne: The Meat Of Life
❤️ Sangre: The Blood of Life
💀Hueso: The Bones of Life
🌬 Aire: The Breath of Life
⚡️Rayo: The Spark of Life
🛸 Espacio: The Spaces Between and Beyond
NEGOCIOS INFERNALES forthcoming from OUTLAND ENTERTAINMENT!
Follow our Kickstarter Upcoming Projects page at: negociosinfernales.com!
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On making Negocios Infernales, failing forward for fun, and creating a “gateway game” for those of us who ACTIVELY RESISTED role-playing games for so so very long.
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Okay, am writing. Obviously. To deadline. This won’t mean anything to you, but I’m in the Witch Queen’s City section of SAINT DEATH’S HERALD.
It’s getting weird. We’ve had a lot of character-depth moments and stranger-in-a-strange-land moments, and now we have come to a sort of ALTERCATION moment.
I have been writing and re-writing this chapter for weeks. I finally have the first part right, structurally and tonally. But when it came to the altercation, I… hand-waved, a bit.
COMBAT IS NOT EASY. I don’t have a very good internal aerial view of objects in space, and it’s easier for me to think poetically and emotionally than ACTIVELY.
The last book? That battle? With Duantri and Cracchen? Do you know how many Ip Man and Jackie Chan clips on YouTube I had to watch to even get a sense of bodies in motion??? ARG!
But the time has come for Duantri to fight again. And so, I asked Carlos to help me simulate a combat. He helped make me a map. We used meeples, and dice, and some D&D figurines my brother Jeremy Cooney made us.
The final written combat won’t really be a round-by-round D&D regurgitation. When that works, that really works (as in the case of most Ilona Andrews books. I suspect they are master gamers and their fight scenes are CHEF KISS, but definitely seem to lean on things like stats, by-the-book spells, hit points, lair actions, that sort of thing), but the point is, I’m not that good.
But creating this fun combat simulation really did help me not DREAD writing this scene. I have notes! I have OPTIONS! It gave me a starting point.
And, most importantly, Carlos and I had so much fun setting it up. And it was surprising.
So now… I just have to re-draft the chapter. Again.
But it will be better than the chapter it was.
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C.S.E. Cooney 