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Here we are, back in the house I grew up in. I’m even in the last bedroom I had (we tended to play musical chairs with bedrooms as we got older and needed or wanted different things from our living spaces). Currently, when it’s not sheltering guests from the east coast, it is a yoga/meditation room for the two (currently furloughed) massage therapists, one professional dancer, and my awesome mama who live in the house.

Carlos and I are camped out in here, quite cozily. Our bed is a snuggly heap of foam mats on the floor, which is not too different from our futon back home. Mama lent us her desk, and I bought a small, very portable folding desk from OfficeMax. Carlos and I have lined them up side by side right under the window. When Carlos is doing serious writing, he goes out to the front room and sits in the small easy chair by the fireplace, but I like my bench, which reminds me of my writing bench at home.

Right now, he’s sitting at his desk, with Roll20 and Zoom (audio only) open at the same time. Our friends Fran, Tom, DongWon, and Josh are playtesting our tabletop RPG-in-development “Negocios Infernales,” which Carlos has managed to input into Roll20. It’s his third virtual playtest, but the first one I’m here sitting in on. The fact that Carlos got this far in virtual game-building is, to me, terribly impressive. I’d’ve given up crying long ago.

It’s funny, the things each of can do more or less tirelessly that the other finds tedious or all but impossible.

Take game design for example. Carlos spent hours making this virtual play possible. Me, I took a nap. However, for the other game he’s developing–which is a card game called “Favors”–making prototypes requires a lot of cutting and stuffing into sleeves. I CAN DO THAT FOR HOURS. Just give me an audiobook and I’m happy occupied. Carlos hates doing things like that. I tell him it’s because I did office work for so many years. I’m like the resident envelope stuffer.

We both love being helpful to my mama, however. We have that in common. So today, we went out into the alley out back and attacked the chest-high alley plants growing out there. (“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” — Emerson.)

Here is another situation in which we are different:

Carlos in general dislikes gardening, but he loves the weedwhacker. He says it makes him feel like a god mowing down armies. It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s mechanized; it is the perfect tool for a job like this. But I? I like CHOPPING THINGS DOWN. And also LOPPING THINGS OFF.

So while he mowed down his grass armies, I went through a pile of tools until I found the LIMB LOPPER. Because there was a huge patch of greenery with stalks as thick as branches. And they needed lopping.

AND I AM YOUR GIRL FOR LOPPING AND CHOPPING. I may have mentioned.

All of which to say, we spent a good hour outside doing yard work. Which we never get to do in Queens (to Carlos’s great joy and contentment; he’d rather be writing) (so would I generally) (but after three years, I was super ready for some yard work).

I say this because this was after I went on a little neighborhood bike ride with my mama. And Carlos and my mama and I spent ten or fifteen minutes in the backyard shadowboxing, wielding bamboo sticks like tennis rackets and fencing foils and the batons from A Chorus Line’s “One.” That’s a lot of fun, physical movement for me. I revel in it. I glory in it. I don’t get this in apartment living.

I’m not sure if I’m losing weight, and I’m not sure I want to know. But I do know that I feel more deeply inside my body. My hands were trembling after all that lopping–I had to hold onto my drink with both hands!–and that tells me I was using and strengthening muscles that probably need it. My thighs are happy from three bike rides this week. Sore, yes, but happy. Also, I squatted down to get something the other day–and then I squatted again to fix it–and sprang back up, and realized my knees hadn’t creaked. I didn’t groan or huff. My legs didn’t complain. And it… it’d been a while.

Right now, Governor Cuomo has extended NY on Pause till May 15th. We’re therefore going to be extending our stay here yet again, for at least another fortnight past our already-extended return date. I’m in a city where most of my mother’s side of the family, and some of my father’s side, lives–and I can’t see them–except a few brothers who drop by and hang around outside in the yard to chat with us for a few minutes once every few weeks. Grocery shopping is stressful (we keep it at a minimum) and my ability to make money through narration is basically null, but…

But, in general, I’m happy. We’re safe. We’re comfortable. We’re among loving family. We take turns making family dinners, or sometimes just scrounging for ourselves. We watch things with my mama–Carlos and I watched the first two episodes of Los Espookys with her, and mama and I watched the new Emma, and alongside Caitlyn Paxson on Skype from Toronto. We kept waggling eyebrows at each other and making inappropriate comments in the chat. We play games at the table from time to time. We plant wildflowers.

And I get to go bike riding, which I’m afraid to do in New York. It’s a solitary activity–even if you’re biking with others–that harms none. I’m very grateful for that. I’m grateful to be here.

I’m worried about everybody. I have friends whose family and friends are dying. I miss being home. Plans for the rest of the summer and year are rippling and shedding. We must remain complex. We must remain flexible. We must remain ready to help.

And I must remember what Carlos says constantly: “Joy is local.” The world is monstrous, but joy is local. Both at once. And infinite else. We must remain complex.

I don’t seem to be any less busy. Not really spending a lot of time binging shows or books. Much is coming due. The trouble is juggling a schedule that seems to amorphous, or assigning priorities. Lists help. Waking up early helps–5:30-6:30. I don’t seem able to wake myself up with any number of alarms, but I’ll get up if Carlos wakes me. Even if the day gets slippery, at least I feel like there was enough of it, if I get up early.

I’m really enjoying writing the second draft of Fiddle, my new novel. It makes me laugh. It’s ridiculous and romantic and bizarre, and it suits my mood.

But I’m taking a break from Fiddle next week to finish copyedits on my ARC of The Sinister Quartet, which is coming out in June. My short novel–about 60,000 words–The Twice-Drowned Saint, will be found therein. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be creating recipes based on all four stories in the book, playlists for my novel, and videos of me reading excerpts.

This is in addition to game designing with Carlos (for his sabbatical, and also because we really want to get Negocios Infernales up and running), and helping him create videos/content for his upcoming book (vigorously virtual) book launch of Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. He’s been hard (and happily) at work giving virtual presentations for schools and libraries, and that content is just going to accelerate and keeping on coming. I’m very excited for him.

And that’s the state of the Hernandooney Household In Exile.

Oh, and if you’ve read this far–his book launch is on May 5th. He and Rick Riordan will be live on Instagram at 8 PM Eastern, challenging each other to a MYTH WAR in which the loser cuts off all his hair. Carlos made this graphic for it:

(A Spell for Mir)

by C. S. E. Cooney

no moon
is rising in this house today
no planet setting, nor sun
is dancing–all is quiet, all is
dark in this
theatre of the heavens

the street
of lights is quenched
stars stuffed under bushels, seats
are empty, the velvet cordons knotted
no movement
in the midnight curtains

yet
there is a ghost lamp
keeping company
with the past
campfire of our phantoms
its own dance, its own dance

somewhere in the abyss
restless colossi
stir beneath cloud forms
dream in crystal coffers of ammonia
beneath adamantine oceans
waiting to rise

waiting to rise, and dress
in finest raiment, leathern slippers
waiting to crawl
through your casement, ring the bell
at your door
waiting to visit your very house

where you have lit a lamp
just for them

Nonestic Meets the Nothing
by C. S. E. Cooney
for Amelia L. Cooney

there, where the waters of oz
run sun-rich with silt
where those old waters run
yellow-brick-yellow
powdered by paths pummeled by tornados
there, where gold-dust mingles with
bitter tears of dispossessed gargoyles
with silver sequins, and sad apples, and lonely-for-homeness
there, where come the waters, the waters of the river mouth
hard up against the nonestic sea
there, oh!
a terrible sea, that nothing sea
like a storm swept in
from the neverending story

Parochial Playground
by C. S. E. Cooney
for Joel Cooney

light as a feather, stiff as a board
light as a feather, stiff as a board
bright as a peacock, cold and hard
bright as a peacock, cold and hard

shove a shiv in the river
let its guts run down
shove a shiv in the river
let its guts run down

set a fire to the river
let the wyrms crawl ’round
set a fire to the river
let the wyrms crawl ’round

you are a
limnologist, standing at the edge
of a river
standing at that place where sunset meets
water, where land meets
lava, you are balancing
barefoot
in the riparian zone, between
the green leaves of
home and
a channel of molten potential

eyes open, all-radiant
you

JUMP!

The first poem comes out of that bright, bold yellow in Amelia’s painting. I immediately thought of it as “Oz Yellow”–like the yellow brick road. The similarities between her roiling blue ocean and “The Nothing” in the Neverending Story struck me, and for the first time, I thought of those two childhood books (and films) together. Today I learned that the ocean of Oz was called “the Nonestic Ocean” which means “the non-existing ocean.” And that made me think of “The Nothing” as well.

The second poem “Parochial Playground” came out of a memory of that old schoolyard game we used to play: “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” It begins by a circle of children lifting a single supine child in their midst all together, each child using only their index and middle fingers to raise her. It ends with that child–her eyes closed–being led to and placed upon a cement curb stop, told she is on the Empire State Building, and then… pushed off. The fall is not long. And it is forever.

Context: A conversation between two goblin sisters of Hatch Khelekeres— Loxósseliss “Fiddle” and Dida–about the half-selkie boy (elephant seal, from the Pinkbladder family) whom Dida wants to marry.

These goblin girls both have spider-like attributes. Dida shares a few things in common with the spitting spider. Lox (or “Fiddle”) is very much like a brown recluse. She likes computer games, staying in, and accidentally biting people who startle her.

“Wait,” I said, and Dida stopped rhapsodizing for a second. “Does your boy have immunity to . . . you know?” I gestured to her wet mouth.

Dida’s semi-translucent hair-legs writhed in ecstasy across her entire scalp. She smoothed the silken tatters of her mini-dress, then immediately rumpled them again as she began hopping up and down and hugging herself

“He’s fine.”

Her smirk indicated something more like “and by fine I mean HIS ASS” or perhaps “to people who are immune to its toxicity, this saliva is a feature not a bug.”

She went on to explain, “Gentry-babes from the Fathom Realms are particularly robust.”

“I see. More so than ungulates?”

The smirk deepened. “Brine is an excellent lubricant.”

I shuddered. “Saltwater? In all those crevices?”

She laughed. “Friction!”

“Chafing.”

“Excitement!”

“Rash. Rash on all your carapaces.”

“He’s worth it. I promise. Those thighs! That nose bladder! So. Will you go with me?”

And then she said the P word again. And again. And again.

“Please? Please, Fiddle? Pretty please? With sugar on top of dwayberry tarts and fruit flies and earwigs—please?”

From TweetSpeak’s Poetry Prompt Free Mini-Series. Sign up at their website to get prompts in mail.

This is the last of the prompts in this mini-series based on the book How to Read a Poem, based on Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry“, but there are more free prompts here.

Prompt
Based on Robert Haight’s “How Is It That The Snow“
Write a poem that begins with a question. Don’t try too hard to answer it.

Since When

by C. S. E. Cooney

for Kiri

since when
did we take up our cameras, capture
our faces–
graceless, ageless, haggard and fey, shades of
dwayberry and moth-wing-gray
in the dusk?
since when was that us?

since when
did we use tablecloths for
tables
instead of affixing them to our
persons with safety pins and fringed sashes–
choose to do dishes, when we might be prancing off
for sultry parklands, hand in hand, crushing
dusty moonbeams with our combat boots?

since when
did we reread Rilla, looking for escape
in friendly old pages, hoping to shake
off days of confinement, grinding duties
fearful uncertainties, find not comfort but
consanguinity with grief
death tolls that defy belief, and hear again
(as for the first time, again) that phantom
piper, and wonder–if he plays, he plays
for thee, for me–
for our beloveds or beloved strangers
on my side
or on thy side of the sea?

Hear me out, hear me out.

Both Martha Well‘s NETWORK EFFECT and Carlos Hernandez‘s SAL AND GABI FIX THE UNIVERSE are out on May 5th of this year.

I think they’d make an EXCELLENT book pairing. I’ve been sort of nesting them in my mind, imagining Sal Vidón spending a summer weekend reading all the Murderbot Diaries, then dressing up as Murderbot/SecUnit for Halloween/Rompenoche.

I mean, it makes SO MUCH sense! Sal goes to an arts school, loves cosplay, adores robots–has a few sentient robot friends, including a toilet–and would be on the lookout for fictional heroes as ace/aro as he!

Also, the Remembranation Machine in SAL AND GABI FIX THE UNIVERSE, a super-intelligent computer with cosmic processing power, would probably want to cosplay ART, the “Asshole Research Transport” in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.

…Except the Remembranation Machine is not NEARLY sarcastic enough to pull it off, so it’d have to collaborate on its cosplay with its pal, the Entropy Sweeper, who is sarcastic enough for the two of them.

Carlos asked me who Gabi would be cosplaying. (We figured out American Stepmom would be Dr. Mensah and Gustavo would be Thiago.) And something Sharon Shinn said on Facebook MADE ME REALIZE…

GABI wouldn’t settle for cosplaying a secondary character. Oh, no. She’d retaliate by reading Ann Leckie’s ENTIRE Imperial Radch series! And she’d cosplay Breq, the ancillary unit of the starship Justice of Toren’s AI!!!

Anyway, that’s my daydream. Love BOTH these books so much. Both of them out on 5/5. PRE–ORDER!

Recording from home, my mom’s home, with everyone else at home, during shelter-in-place, is a little like…

“OKAY EVERYONE IT’S QUARANTINE TIME. LET’S ALL LEARN NEW SKILLS. HOW ABOUT INTERPRETATIVE DANCE REPLACING ALL CONVERSATION?”

(Except, LOL, my own.)

(I tried getting up at 5 to record, and almost succeeded, but got snuggled back to oblivion. My bad.)

Ice machines, man. Everyone wants cold drinks. And they want them NOW. It’s like we’re living in a desert or something…

What’s that new noise? Ah. A juicer, I’d bet. Okay, well. I got 30% of my project done. Just need two more quiet mornings and I can probably finish. Probably time to call it a day, let people be people and not mimes.

No, autocorrect, I did not mean “mines.” Okay, maybe I did.

From TweetSpeak’s Poetry Prompt Free Mini-Series. Sign up at their website to get prompts in mail.

Prompt
Based on Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum‘s Poem “Constellations“
McFadyen-Ketchum “catches the light” of these fireflies from a variety of angles, describing them in different settings, times, and imaginations. Each stanza presents its own flash of insight about these creatures. Choose an object to explore from a few different perspectives in a poem.

iPhone

by C. S. E. Cooney

handheld device, second brain, window to the world
record of my index print, trained to my voice, trained to call
the ones I love, by the names I’ve assigned them

palm-sized secretary, ball-and-chain, tethered attention
bearer of bad news, scavenger of headlines, object that tamed
me, that brought me to heel at a flash, a banner, a buzz, a ping

o love letter, o music box, o theatre, o photo album
o family, o amanuensis, o secret keeper, o library
o campfire, o atlas, o diet, o meter of my steps

and when you break down, as you are breaking now
how I mourn you, how I feel my future on the fritz
how I plug you in, avoid you, am repulsed, ashamed, a failure

ah, but when you work, how only I forget to thank you
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you

From TweetSpeak’s Poetry Prompt Free Mini-Series. Sign up at their website to get prompts in mail.

PROMPT
Based on Chris Forhan’s Poem “What My Father Left Behind“
In Forhan’s poem, not only do the line breaks, but the stanza breaks (breaks between groups of lines), carry a lot of “weight”: half-finished—, he might be, and it arcs, for instance. Write a poem in which the breaks at stanzas suggest emotions, multiple meanings, themes, or suspense. Challenge yourself further by making each stanza the same number of lines.

Occasional

By C. S. E. Cooney

he says, shy-scratching his quarantine curls, “there are people
in the kitchen, talking, so I’m waiting, like a gremlin, waiting
for my turn to go in and cook, some waffles and eggs, perhaps
a second cup of coffee”

I say (or want to say), “let me make your breakfast! thaw
your Eggos, stir in my colibrí’s sweet ratio of sugar to
caffeine, not break your yolk this time, serve it up pristine
in one of mama’s cobalt bowls!”

he checks his twitter, stands and paces, sneaks out
the door in his pajamas, alligator t-shirt, ducks back in
grinning, mutters, “not yet!” like a gremlin, prances to
his laptop, dainty, rinse-repeat

I, like a folksong, bend head to breast, lean over laptop, tap-
tapping it all out, real-time, here’s a poem, it hardly rhymes but
it’s us, right now, 9:56, a rill of wind chimes just outside our
wide-open window

A few days ago, I read Gown of Harmonies by Francesca Forrest and it was JUST WHAT I NEEDED!

Francesca’s work, for some reason, always is. Last year, I read her novella The Inconvenient God, which made me laugh–so utterly surprising and delightful as it was. And her earlier, still so gorgeous, epistolary novel, Pen Pal, abides in me still.

Francesca’s newest novelette, Gown of Harmonies, delivers just that same “fabulous Francesca feeling,” though it’s never the same feeling, because she’s always trying something new!

This story is full fairy magic, human music, fairy trickery, human heart. Labor and stubbornness. And kindness. So much kindness. I’d recommend this story for anyone who loves the works of Robin McKinley and Patricia A McKillip.

Speaking of kindness, Francesca announced when she put out this novelette that all proceeds from it would go to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, which local to the author! That’s JUST THE SORT OF THING I love in this world, and every time I see evidence of it, I get happier.

A few hours of reading Gown of Harmonies, I started to get this… itch. (No, not that kind of itch!) The last audiobook I recorded was back in December, for Tantor, and since then I’ve been exercising my talents (maybe kind of an obsession) by reading Jasper Fforde books to my husband Carlos. (OMGoodness, Early Riser was one of our FAVORITE THINGS WE READ last year!!!)

But now that we’re “Sheltering in Place” at my mom’s house in Arizona (we came for a little vacation and then… stayed) (we don’t know when we’ll be able to go home to NYC) (we’re very lucky to be here) (also, I only packed for a week), we’re reading the ARC of Martha Well‘s forthcoming Murderbot novel, Network Effect. My mom jumped in, so I get a larger audience, which suits my inner Norma Desmond like whoa.

(FUN FACT, Network Effect coming out on May 5th, the same day Carlos’s book Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe comes out with Disney Hyperion! PRE-ORDER!)

All of which to say, I thought that it might be time to do a little reading-aloud project that might go a little further than Carlos’s ears. To that end, I asked Francesca Forrest (who is my friend!) if I might volunteer my voice for her audiobook.

Reader, SHE SAID YES!

So I found a little team willing to proof and produce me. These are Jessica P. Wick: a poet, author, and an AMAZING proofer and editor of books and audiobooks–so, if you’re looking for someone to do that, I recommend her heartily–and Jeremy Cooney: one of my five beautiful brothers, (like all my brothers, great at everything), musician, game master and podcaster, video editor, etc. He’s also the one who collaborates with me on my Brimstone Rhine projects.

All proceeds from the audiobook for Gown of Harmonies will ALSO go to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, to help create support for those who have been laid off in this crisis, & otherwise!

Also: MORE ACCESSIBILE FICTION FTW!

Since necessity breeds innovation, I have taken two of the foam mats (see above) that we are sleeping on in mama’s guest room (well, it was a “yoga/meditation room,” hence no bed and the need for Home Depot’s foam mats), and a little folding desk we got from Staples, and I borrowed a mic from Jeremy. Therewith, I have set up what will pass for a small studio!

I figure, if I get up at 5 AM before everyone else, including cats and birds and traffic are awake, I can record The Gown of Harmonies tomorrow and possibly the next day. And then send it on to Jess to proof me, and Remi to produce me, ET VOILA! We will have made a thing. TOGETHAH!

I am EXCITED!