come here, my curly-headed ram come lean against my belly, in trust and in full blissome, give the blossom of your head unto my shears
tentative at first, then all too ardent my bladework leaps alive at you you sit and hum your secret smile content to barter proficiency for intimacy
then shall I lop at you and chop at you! hack and whack and saw at you! snip and clip and rip at you–and only when I’m through, will I run my fingers warm over your skull, and shake your loosened winterfall away
the day before this day, I play at mourning: extoll the thing I must, by your request, annihilate your medusa mane of brown and gray
I tug your curls taut, then let them sproing and sproinging, think of spring as you scrub the shrub about your ears eager to be tidy, greedy to be clean
now shorn, my ram, you move to get the broom I wrap the clippers and reset the room you stop me in the middle, as if by chance “ah, my kindness!” you whisper, and we dance
On Sunday, February 5th, 7 PM – 8:30 PM EST: a night of 10 readings by authors who will make you kermit-flail, muppet-scream, and MEME ABOUT!
Featuring: Zig Zag Claybourne, Linda Addison, Charlie Jane Anders, Martha Wells, Patty Templeton, LaShawn Wanak, Maria Dong, Michael W. Lucas, Carlos Hernandez, and yours truly, C. S. E. Cooney!
2.) Both Saint Death’s Daughter and Dark Breakers made it to Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List–and what a list it is!
That list! Those authors! Their books! I’m so excited! The ones I’ve already read, I want to read again. But then, when would I read all the other ones!
In honor of this, and the forthcoming release of my novel The Twice-Drowned Saint as a standalone book in a couple of weeks, Mike Allen at Mythic Delirium writes:
From now through the official Feb. 7 debut date of The Twice-Drowned Saint, and likely for several days after; we’re offering a two-for-one e-book deal: pay half-price (($7 + $6)/2=$7.50) and get both (Dark Breakers and The Twice-Drowned Saint), in the format of your choice, delivered to your inbox.
3.) The wonderful team at Solaris Books made me this great video and graphic for the forthcoming release of the SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER paperback.
(In my head it is always THE PINK PAPERBACK! ALLCAPS!)
I’d done one before with the A Sinister Quarter group, but this was the first I set up on my own. One of the r/Fantasy moderators was reading Saint Death’s Daughter with her book group and invited me to show up so they could ask questions. It was really fun!
Here’s the link if you’re interested in reading the archives!
5.) I finished my outline for SAINT DEATH’S HERALD!
It’s almost 10,000 words! That’s, like, writing a novelette to tell me the story of a novel. It has snatches of dialogue, even a footnote. It’s basically like writing a mini-draft! IT MAY HAVE SAVED ME A DECADE OF WRITING! It’s very EXCITING!
I made a GRAPHIC! It’s very cheerful!
6.) On Poetry
This was sort of a banner week for poetry! On Friday, Patty Templeton and Carlos and I had our second-ever session for writing LAMP, our shared-world poetry anthology about a troupe of actors, fleeing the city Lamp after disaster, trying to find haven in the Grays–the salt marshes–in a little town called Porthole. VERY EXCITING.
Then, on Monday night, we had our Sitzfleisch Poetry Hour (“Anyone can write poetry for one hour a month!”), and I whipped the first movement of “The (Future Former) King of Elfland’s Printing Press” into tolerable first-draft shape!
And also, sometime either last week or this week, I applied for a grant. That was unexpected. I was encouraged by a friend. It’s a lotto ticket, a flare in the dark, but it gave me a new look at my poetry collection, and made me glad I’d put it together at the beginning of January, sort of on a whim!
7.) On Ballads from a Distant Star
Our first get-together/rehearsal is on Saturday! I’ve been learning how to book rehearsal space in New York City, hot damn! I had a meeting with Carla Kissane at Alice’s Tea Cup yesterday, and learned so much. I really want to treat my cast right, and for all of us to have great fun!
Carlos made us this initial graphic. We’re thinking there will be a series of “Missing” posters of each of the miners mentioned.
8.) Negocios Infernales–coming soon!
I know we keep saying that, but we’ve been seeing bits and shimmers of the card layout, and we’re so excited about the rulebook.
Our last Infernal Salon, hosted by the Virtual Gumbo Fiction Salon in January, went so well! (Carlos wrote a new song for Ballads from a Distant Star! In 20 minutes!)
I hope we’ll have more concrete news for you soon!
DescriptionMany beloved versions of fairy tales we tell our children are sanitized versions of grim stories, including Grimm ones. We can write the graphic violence and debauchery out of these tales, but should we? What gets lost when we blunt the sharp edges of Cinderella’s story? There’s much to learn about the human condition from these rich sources of psychological drama. And some fine authors have mined the unexpurgated stories. Let’s discuss tales, especially those that may have been overlooked.
Greer Gilman mod John Langan Katherine Arden Bruce Coville C. S. E. Cooney
How to Kill a Character
Marina 3 Writing / Publishing Panel
Sat 4:00 PM Duration: 01:00
DescriptionDeath shouldn’t be easy. Killing characters within a story shouldn’t just glorify death or play to prurient interest. How, when, and why should you end a character so that it serves the greater purpose of the story? Is anyone really safe within a story? Does the audience or their expectations matter to whether killing a protagonist or significant character is appropriate? Does wiping out spear holders matter, and should it?
Max Gladstone mod Bracken MacLeod Brenda Clough P. Djèlí Clark C. S. E. Cooney
Boskone Book Party
Galleria – Autographing Fiction, Literature Event
Sat 5:30 PM Duration: 01:00
Many authors!
Group Reading: Mythic Delirium Books
Griffin Fiction, Literature Reading
Sun 11:30 AM Duration: 01:00
Mike Allen mod Theodora Goss C. S. E. Cooney
Kaffeeklatsch 2: C.S.E. Cooney& Carlos Hernandez
Community / Fandom Galleria – Kaffeeklatsch 2\ Kaffeeklatsch\
“Limited edition (First Printing) – 8 pgs. full color, tabloid newspaper sized edition, 100 numbered copies. All orders come wrapped in an archival poly bag with an acid free backer board. $12.00US + $2.25s/h (US Orders) or $5.25s/h (Foreign Orders). How The Statue Learned To Dream features a new story in C.S.E. Cooney’s Desdemona and the Deep/Dark Breakers collection of stories.”
The artwork is by Sarah Marshall, and the whole thing is just truly a beautiful piece of ephemera in the world. I dedicated my story to MaryAnn Harris and Charles De Lint, and donated half my earnings to the Harris/De Lint Recovery Fund. You can read the summary of MaryAnn’s story here at the GoFundMe page.
All my best hopes go to the Harris/De Lint family. This story was trying to return a little of the magic of community that they do so well during this time.
INFERNAL SALON: The Gumbo Fiction Cafe Edition, Thursday January 12th–Virtual
Here are a few details about our show, from our host Tina Jens at the Virtual Gumbo Fiction Salon (find them on Facebook).
Register in advance for the show to get a Zoom EMAIL PASSWORD & LINK:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the meeting.
What is an Infernal Salon, you ask?
C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos will be giving every writer a prompt of one or more cards from the very spooky deck that we and artist Rebecca Huston invented for our TTRPG “Negocios Infernales.” Once every writer has their prompt, we’ll set a timer for 15 minutes.
When the timer dings, the writers who want to will share their infernally-inspired works with all of us! Much revelry will be had by all.
SHOW DEETS
ADMISSION–we encourage a donation from those who can afford it. We recommend $2 for students/teachers, $4 for others, though any amount is appreciated: paypal.me/TinaLJens, Venmo: @TinaJens
We’ll open up 15 minutes before showtime. Our show is geared toward the commercial genres, but all forms of writing are encouraged.
For the first time, the Rosenbach Museum & Library is partnering with Galactic Philadelphia for a speculative fiction literary salon. Hear from Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and C.S.E. Cooney as they read from their latest work and converse with them and other guests in an informal and engaging salon-style conversation. Before the readings, you’ll get the chance to explore the Rosenbach with a tour of Dr. Rosenbach’s library or the Programs Gallery special exhibition. We’ll convene for readings at 6:15 p.m., get books signed by the authors and be entered into a raffle for the chance to win a free book! Finally, although the Rosenbach will close at 8 p.m., the audience is invited to continue their conversation at a nearby pub.
The authors’ books will be available for sale throughout the evening. Every attendee will receive one raffle ticket (included in your ticket) for a chance to win books of recently published or about to be released books by various authors.
At the end of November through the first week of December, I visited my beloved Caitlyn Paxson on P.E.I! The Mi’kmaq Nation calls the Island “Abegweit,” “the land cradled on the waves.”
I’ve probably told you all about Caitlyn before, but I’ll say it again. She’s EXTRAORDINARY.
Along with Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick, she was an editor of the gorgeous (now sleeping for a 100 years) Goblin Fruit Magazine (archives here, for your finite but also endless pleasure).
She keeps a delicious newsletter called Book and Bramble. SUBSCRIBE! I do!
One of the many awesome things she includes in her newsletter is the monthly wreath she makes–usually with wildflowers and willow withies and grasses found roundabout her farm–and I got to wear December’s!
Anyway, Caitlyn and I had a delicious time playing dress up and haunting one of the museums she works at--Beaconsfield Historic House--after hours. With permission, of course.
We decided to dress up at first like grand dames of a certain Belle Epoque-ish era. Then we decided to go full DARK BREAKERS, after my new story collection with Mythic Delirium, and dress up like the fey Gentry creatures who come through the walls at midnight and wreak havoc, mayhem, and mischief!
I mean. We only PRETENDED to. We were very respectful.
I was going to make this post all about all the others things I wanted to tell you too, but we’ll leave it here. For now. There’s always… THE NEXT BLOG POST!
My friend introduced me to some folks at Arts On Site, and I proposed a ONE-NIGHT-ONLY performance of BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR–and I got it!
PLEASE, book your calendars for MARCH 30TH! There will be two performances: 6:30 PM and 8:30 PM!
BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR:
BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR: Imagine the working families of a 19th Century mining town–sold by the company bosses to bodysnatching aliens, and taken in their silver ship to mine on a distant planet! Imagine how their songs, stories and legends mutate and change over these vast distances! The Pied Piper, the two sisters Shahrazad and Dunyazad (and the murderous king) of 1001 Nights, sundered lovers from folk songs everywhere, Thomas the Rhymer and the Faerie Queen, Two Strange Babes–even the famous and grisly tale of James Wilson, murdered by Burke and Hare! All re-told and re-envisioned as SFF songs, poems, scenes, and monologues–explored by an ethnomusicologist astronaut, looking for answers in the distant stars!
IT’S GOING TO BE FUN! It’s going to be 50 minutes of BIZARRITUDE AND GLORY! PUT IT ON YOUR CALENDARS! HUZZAH!
In June of 2020, Mythic Delirium released the anthology A Sinister Quartet, which included three novellas by Jessica P. Wick, Amanda J. McGee, and Mike Allen respectively, and a novel by yours truly, C. S. E. Cooney.
Soon, in Februrary 2023, we are re-releasing The Twice-Drowned Saint: Being a Tale of Fabulous Gelethel, the Invisible Wonders Who Rule There, and the Apostates Who Try to Escape its Walls as a standalone novel–with new fabulous cover and interior art by Lasse Paldanius.
My publish Mike Allen sent me all these great shots of the first box of books arriving to send to book bloggers. If you’re a book blogger and you want a physical or e-book copy to review, let us know!
The pre-order links are still appearing in various places, but they will all be gathered conveniently in one place on Mythic Delirium’s website. Here’s where to find The Twice-Drowned Saint!
Earlier this month at the World Fantasy Convention, I saw the most FANTASTIC panel about speculative poetry. And while I must say I’ve never fallen OUT of love with it, I FELL IN LOVE A LITTLE HARDER after that panel, and all I wanted to do was write a chapbook.
For weeks I wandered the house, thinking WHAT IS MY CHAPBOOK IDEA?
And then I realized that a long-form narrative poem I’d roughly drafted out is actually kind of an outline-in-verse for a great, long-form narrative-poem-in-poems chapbook idea that I think I might be calling The (Future Former) King of Elfland’s Printing Press.
But that might take a while to get up to submission-speed. And of course, Patty and Carlos and I are working on our Lamp! collaboration, which will be another chapbook-length shared-world poetry collection.
And that’s fine. You know, things take time and all that.
But I wanted to ALREADY HAVE WRITTEN A CHAPBOOK RIGHT NOW.
And then I got the idea!
I’ve had this website/blog since 2014. I’d been missing LiveJournal for while at that point, and I had a lot of projects I was really into, and I wanted to be blogging about all and sundry, so I got Julia Rios and Amal El-Mohtar to advise me. And here we are.
It’s not fancy and never has been, but it is so much better than that feeling of missing blogging, and it uploads nicely to my Goodreads and my Amazon Author pages which I normally don’t have very much to do with, other than occasional housekeeping. (I should probably do more.)
But I have, over the years, written many an occasional poem here. And I thought about a chapbook I might call The Day I Superglued the Moon (and other poems). And I could divide them up into these sections:
Of course, by the time I got through sorting them all out, it’s probably longer than a chapbook. More of a collection. And who’s to say who’s publishing such things these days, but it can’t hurt to have a go at further curating the manuscript and seeing what comes of it!
in the place where lightning struck the reindeer the scientists decided, strong-minded, to let them be: let’s see what hums and grows, what comes and goes those trophic highs and trough-like lows what raptors take, what rodents take, taken in turns what interacts, what retracts what crawls after to eat the blowflies that bloom upon the carcass how the landscape flushes under these caresses as the scavengers try to save us
but watching reindeer rot is not for the faint of heart naked feasts of nature don’t sell postcards to tourists such rankness, such decay: too much for holiday hikers who want their vacation world free of the business of death the busyness the buzzy-ness the buzzard-full patience of death, sans time-lapse
someday, there will be new trees where lightning smote and reindeer fell bush and brush, bursting from berries buried in the feces of the predators who fed there the scavengers who scavenged the birds who ate the blowflies that bloomed upon the carcass
meantime, meantime, all this messy in-between time
so many skulls for the sun to strip before the green moves in
by C. S. E. Cooney 10/24/2022
I am writing this poem a few days after reading a truly awe-striking article in The Guardian called “Landscape of Fear.” Further, my friend William Hoffmann recently suggested I use this incredible embroidered art piece “Animalium,” by fiber artist Chris Roberts-Antieau, for a prompt. It reminds him of a mutual friend of ours, dearly beloved of us, who is grieving the sudden and horrifying loss of her sister. There is so little to say in these raw days.
C.S.E. Cooney 