Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cons. First you put your foot in you mouth. Then you put on a concert.

FIRST: FOOT IN MOUTH

Our caravan arrives in Madison early Friday afternoon. Finding the hotel was tantamount to negotiating a labyrinth. Registration, bathroom, so on.

Out in the lobby, there is a sudden hubbub of greetings and lunch invitations. I hear someone call my name, I turn and greet my friend . . . But not by her name. By the name of another friend. Yeah.

WORSE.

Worse, I panic. And when she says, “Don’t worry about it,” I’m all like, “No, but I know your name, it’s . . . ” (I have known her for going on five years at least; I’ve been to her readings, watched her on panels, read her articles. I’m a FAN!) “It’s . . . ”

AND ALL I CAN THINK OF, IN BIG FLOATING LETTERS BEFORE MY EYES, IS HER TWITTER HANDLE.

HER FRIKKIN TWITTER HANDLE.

Anyway, I’m an idiot. I felt awful about it all weekend. I would not have hurt this woman’s feelings for the world; I’d’ve cut my tongue out first.

It’s the sort of thing I’m afraid of happening ALL THE TIME. And then it does. The proverbial ax! THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES, snapped free of its dental floss.

It’s different when you’re my grandmother, and all your children AND grandchildren are sort of interchangeable, and you EXPECT to be understood when you call someone “Rosie-Mary-Sho-Therese-Danielle-Suzie-Claire” at any given summoning.

But when you’re not a supercute Mima who is nearly 90 and the Italian Matriarch of four fine generations, it’s just a big ol’, as I have come to call it, FLUSTERF@&K. My ears felt like they were underwater and so did my lungs, and I got all clammy, and maybe in another universe I drowned or something. Or at least SOAKED MY HEAD. As I deserved.

http://gph.is/211ZK1H

(Even now, thinking of it, I want to go hide in my closet. Preferably with a chocolate bar and a good book. But no, that would be rewarding execrable behavior… DOH. I die. Cleaver, meet spleen.)

THEN: CONCERT

After that, a few of us went out to lunch, so that was all right.

I didn’t eat anything at that DIVINE Nepalese restaurant, alas. This, because I had about 3 billion tacos for breakfast.

But I did get to sit by Amal El-Mohtar (one of this year’s GUESTS OF HONOR) (I mean, anyone who’s reading this will know that already, right?) (but she’s my friend so I’ll say it again in all caps . . .  THE GUEST OF HONOR: MY AMALFACE!) and go over our setlist for that night. This was great, because, um.

WE HAD TO GIVE A CONCERT THAT NIGHT.

Total rehearsal time? 35 minutes.

Earlier, in discussing with Jessica P. Wick (my roommate, Amal’s best friend) how best to plan a concert one didn’t know one was even doing until a few weeks ago, and with the GUEST OF HONOR no less, Jess suggested that I do everything in my power to lower the pressure on Amal.

See, Amal had to travel all the way from a different country, after finishing up comps for her PhD, winning a Nebula Award, and then trundling over to Madison to do all the GUEST OF HONOR things like be on panels and give speeches and PRESIDE OVER A HONEY TASTING. That’s enough to do on a to do list, and I didn’t even mention all the papers she had to grade.

So I put together a setlist called “Brim and Star.” The latter, because that’s one of my nickname’s for Amal (after Emily of New Moon) (and also because she’s a luminous body), and the former because it’s short for my imaginary rockstar name “Brimstone Rhine.”

The set list went like this:

OPENING SONG: The Grand Finale of Mister Fox

POEM: Apple Jack Tangles the Maidy Lac with a Red, Red Ribbon

SONG: Black Widow’s Waltz

POEM: On the Division of Labour

SONG: Lady Knight / Pale Lady

POEM: Pieces

SONG: Foxgirl Song Cycle 1

POEM: Song for An Ancient City

SONG: Sisters Lionheart

POEM: Winter Tree

SONG: Rose’s Garden

POEM: No Poisoned Comb

SONG: Medea’s Dragon

POEM: Turning the Leaves

SONG: After the Rapture

POEM: New Ways

SONG: Daft Jamie

CLOSING SONG: The JubJub

Other fine things?

Being on a panel with Amal and Max Gladstone, moderated by K Tempest Bradford, about collaboration. That was really funny. And the chairs were SUPER COMFORTABLE. The comfiest panel I’ve ever been on.

Until, that is, we had to start answering questions about the DARK SIDE of collaboration. Nah, okay, it was still great.

I also got to do a group reading–we called it THE FOUR MUSKETEERS–with Jeanine Marie Vaughne, Randee Dawn, and S Brackett Robertson.

Jeanine and Randee read excerpts from their novels (haunted dolls!) (warring Fae!); Brackett read an excerpt from a short story about trolls, tolls, and friendship; and I read from “Though She Be But Little,” forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine this July.

So.

What with the delicious meals, catching up with John O’Neill and Brendan Detzner and Karen Meisner (I know we were supposed to nap, Karen, and I babbled instead, so thank you for your time, and I adore you), meeting new people or people I’ve only met on Facebook (walking with Amy Scheiderman to the concert!), the panels I managed to attend, Amal’s gorgeous reading (she read “Seasons of Glass and Iron”–WAAAAHHHH!!!–and then she and Max read from their collaborative novella–WAAAAAHHHH!!!–and it was so good. So great and good), and all the hours I got to spend with three fabulous girlfriends in our hotel room, it was a beautiful time.

Also, I bought an Elise Matthesen necklace. GULP. It’s called OUR LADY OF STORMS. It’s all labradorite. And it’s three necklaces in one.

I’ve been on major con burn-out since last year, so WisCon is the last con I’m planning on attending for the foreseeable future.

I may change my mind, but the deep relaxation I feel right now at the thought of never going to another one EVER AGAIN must be nurtured.

Gene Wolfe took me to my first con in 2002. I’ve been going for 15 years, some years to multiple conventions. It’s time, it’s money, it’s work–and yet it’s “supposed” to feel like vacation. And you know? I’d rather go on vacation. Go see a friend in one of those distant lands they live in. Spend three quality days with them alone, not surrounded and busy.

For this year anyway, I’m done with cons.

This was a bright star to end on.

http://gph.is/XGEVvD

JUST FINISHED ALL SYSTEMS RED (The Murderbot Diaries), by Martha Wells.

My Amazon review:

UTTERLY CHARMING AND UNEXPECTEDLY MOVING! 

I think I knew I’d love Murderbot from the moment I read the word “Murderbot.” And then I read the first paragraph and was ineradicably hooked.

1. sungod

red to the touch
slathered in
sriracha
no lake can
quench you
nor bog
cool you
see, the denim of your jeans is
burnt away
all your clothes are merely
scorch marks

2. jongleur

sing me songs of
motley
i will shower you in
pennies
all my copper kisses
largesse to this populace
of one

tie up my ribbons
in the back
i will fasten on your mask
let us make our carnival
quotidien
every day
a parade

3. ravenboy

caw-caw cartwheel
tumbleweed tumble me
caper caper play steal
frocktail feathercoat
wing sing tickle giggle
black-beak black-velvet
peck peck sand stride
glossy buss busy kiss
grin shiver fly

4. canaryprince

i meet the canary prince at a fairy hop, where he points up and says plaintively, “i always trust a dance hall with a disco ball, don’t you?” i happen to agree, and make him a curtsey as curtesy demands of me, declaring, “dare you dance?”

a canary prince, they say, dares the devil, fine as any fellow in yellow silk, and he confides, “i can moonwalk to michael jackson all the way out the door,” which indeed he proceeds to do as smooth as the silver pour of milk with which our queen cools her tea.

no one has danced so backwards since ginger rogers joined our fête–it’s splendid!–and i tell him so, taking up his hands and twirling him about, all his hollow bones light and precise like piccolo trills.

he is the smell of limoncello and green brocade; a topaz grows on his forehead where i kissed him last we danced.

“so you remember me?” i ask, and he murmurs that memory into spanish moss hung round with spiders, curtaining our private tenderness from their prying gaze.

5. magnolia

i think of you in the first blossoms
forsythia, dogwood, magnolia
the circus-hearted tulip, the bashful violet

you are the ever-flowering tree
the year-round blossom

those heart’s blood petals you scattered on my pillow
I remember them still
unbruised and fragrant
warm as skin

OMERGERD I AM SO EXCITED!!!

Stop, Collaborate and Listen
Fri, 4:00–5:15 pm Conference 2
Moderator: K. Tempest Bradford, Amal El-Mohtar.
Participants: Julia Starkey, K. Tempest Bradford, Amal El-Mohtar, C. S. E. Cooney , Max Gladstone

Amal El-Mohtar has a history of collaborating with likeminded souls, from editing a poetry zine to performing with a troupe of writer/musicians to co-writing fiction and beyond. How is it possible to discover fellow travelers and co conspirators across space and time(zones)? What are the benefits of such long distance collaborations, and how do different kinds of collaborative projects come together?

Music & Miscellania
Fri, 9:00–10:15 pm Michelangelos

Participants: C. S. E. Cooney , Amal El-Mohtar

Come and enjoy a musical extravaganza concocted by bewitching sensations Amal El-Mohtar and C.S.E. Cooney. Their repertoire includes singing, musical instruments of undisclosed types, moderate mayhem and poetry.

The Four Musketeers (Reading)
Sat, 10:00–11:15 am Conference 4

Participants: C. S. E. Cooney , Randee Dawn, S. Brackett Robertson, Jeanine Marie Vaughn

The Four Musketeers come together to tell tales of trolls, pirates, fae warfare, haunted dolls, and shadowspirits.

All last week I worked on a SECRET PROJECT that I’m sure I’ll be allowed to mention soon (when? WHEN? I dunno. But SOON!). Monday-Thursday. At home, right there in my study. SELF-MOTIVATIONS GALORE!

I really wanted to be done by Thursday evening, when Hernandez would be trundling in from New York, and we got really down to the RAPTUROUS ADVENTURES OF THE WEEKEND.

Which included:

FRIDAY: “It crunched most satisfyingly.” 

An 11:35 AM showing of Beauty and the Beast at the Mystic Luxury Cinema! Julia Rios, joining us. She had already seen it, but she is a nuanced re-watcher, and it was Carlos’s and my first time.

An in-depth discussion ensued–what was impressive, what was missing, how it compared to both the animation and the Broadway musical iteration (both of which I am thoroughly conversant in).

How the moment Belle decides not to leave the Beast to the wolves is also the moment when she is no longer a prisoner, not truly. The shared love of books. The scene with the horse which I believe was lifted straight out of Robin McKinley’s book BEAUTY. The interestingly unhinged Gaston who manages to be just a leeetle too disturbing for a caricature. That moment with the wardrobe, when the youth, now dressed in a gown and cosmetics, instead of screaming and running like the others, smiles beatifically, and she urges him, “Be free!” Oh, and just . . . AUDRA MCDONALD!!! IN GENERAL! Yes, yes, and I’m probably not saying anything everybody else isn’t; I’m just late to the game, as usual.

The Mystic Luxury Cinemas, meanwhile, was beautiful. Small, with an old-fashioned feeling, and yet the seats were STATE OF THE ART.

I got good news in my email–some positive movement on my novel manuscript, nothing Earth-shattering or definitive, but movement AT LAST–while leaving the theatre.

In the general mayhem and dancing that ensued, Julia’s iPhone went FLYING, and then her heel went CRUNCHING, so we ended up piling into the car and driving into New London to drop it off for repair. Then we ate at the Olive Garden to celebrate.

¡ZUPPA TOSCANO, MES AMIS! BREADSTICKS!

Then we scooted back to Westerly for our First Friday open mic. It was, if I may say, just as fulfilling as the LAST ONE! Which had been the best thus far! We had barely five minutes left after all the wonderful readers/reciters to scoot over to the ACGOW and see the newest show, featuring Arlene Piacquadio and Kristie Foss. I LOVE ENCAUSTICS! AND POLYMER AND PORCELAIN!!!

SATURDAY: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.”

On Saturday, Hernandez and I went back to New London. Doctor Doctorpants was in need of PANTS, and Crystal Mall (we’d heard) was the place to GET THEM. We arrived early, just as the mall was opening, and had such good luck at the first store that we were out by 10 and a bit bewildered over how to wile the next five hours till our show started at three.

Oh, but I will tell you more of the show presently.

First, we went to Muddy Waters Cafe, right in the heart of New London. I knew the coffee would be really good there (for Carlos), and I knew they had sandwiches (for me). We had a delicious time eating and drinking. I read him another chapter of Bujold’s Memory. He’d mistaken his copy of Keramet Reiter’s 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement, which he is reading for short story research, for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is he reading to ME. So I said, “Read me a bit of 23/7!” I’ve already read it, because it was my honor to narrate it for Tantor Media last year. So he did, and it was just beautiful. Heartbreaking, but beautiful. That bit about the Soledad Brothers.

Then we stopped in at the Hygienic Art Gallery, just to see what was going on. And then we went to Ocean Beach Park, where we played video games at the Arcade and walked along the boardwalk and nature path. Then we went into the car, and I read him another chapter of Memory. (Yes, we like going on long walks and reading books. We’re like an ad. For something. Low blood-pressure, probably. Except–probably not, for we’re both highly excitable, and me, I have a temper. So it’s probably good I like relaxing things because otherwise my head would pop off.)

We had about 45 minutes left before 3–and our SHOW!!!–which was just five minutes away–so we hopped back over to Dev’s Bean and Bistro for a cuppa. Well, I had a cuppa. Hernandez had a diet coca cola.

AND THEN! AT LAST! OUR SHOW!

So!

Flock Theatre, presented in cooperation with the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, is putting on Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night–AT MONTE CRISTO COTTAGE, where Eugene O’Neill’s family spent their summers throughout his childhood and early adulthood. It’s the HOUSE where the PLAY actually TAKES PLACE.

Both the original and the extended run SOLD OUT before opening weekend! LUCKILY, I was on top of things, and bought tickets a month ago! Both for Hernandez and me, and later, for Sita and me on the 23rd, so I get to see it TWICE!

Boy, though. After this first time . . .

It was very good, very fine. But as my friend Anne Flammang (who plays Mary Tyrone) said in an email, “The play is too too, if you know what I mean.” (Italics my own.)

But talk about a HAUNTING. I tell you, I am very sad that “haunting” has become such a blurb-y short-cut of a soundbite to describe things, because it’s the perfect word now, and I don’t know how often it is.

Imagine it: the most autobiographical of O’Neill’s plays. Taking place in the actual room where the whole play takes place. In the house where he spent summers. Talk about actors endowing objects with intent? The entire HOUSE is an endowed object! That’s the first “haunting.”

The second “haunting” is the text itself. It’s a play where we see a single day of a family’s life, and we hear, in excruciating detail, and in looped repeat, all the old grievances played and replayed, the cycles of explosive temper, periodic affection, connection, repellent rappelling off one another, careening into darkness. From time to time a revelation. It reminded me of that old Melville Davisson Post quote from Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries:

“…It is the dead who govern. Look you, man, how they work their will upon us! Who have made the laws? The dead! Who have made the customs that we obey and that form and shape our lives? The dead! And the titles to our lands-have not the dead devised them?…If a surveyor runs a line he begins at some corner that the dead set up; and if one goes to law upon a question the judge looks backward through his books until he finds out how the dead have settled it-and he follows that. And all the writers, when they would give weight and authority to their opinions, quote the dead; and the orators and all those who preach and lecture-are not their mouths filled with words that the dead have spoken? Why, man, our lives follow grooves that the dead have run out with their thumbnails!”

I think I read that quote in a Neil Gaiman book somewhere, but I don’t remember where. American Gods? Anyway. It’s like that–we’re watching ghosts, following their painstaking, painful grooves. And we’re right there in the room with them. They look through us, past us, but they cannot see us. Maybe we’re the ghosts.

The third “haunting” is memory. O’Neill is writing his memories, but the characters themselves are all feeding on and bleeding out memory. You feel the characters, in their present, are so stuck in their pasts that they, in fact, have no future. Mary Tyrone says, at one point, “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.” And THAT, as Hernandez noted, “is ghost talk.”

Oh, I am sure DISSERTATIONS UPON DISSERTATIONS have been written about this play, and I’ve not read a one of them. I read it on the page once, and studied it a little, back in high school. I remember coming away with the thought that O’Neill has no subtext. Everything is spoken. At length.

It works better on stage, out loud. I should have known!

It’s more of a symphony than a dramatic structure. The movements. The themes. The leitmotifs. Those moments of furious crescendo, fading to the specter of pianissimo. It was like watching music adapted to a different medium. Music without music.

I liked the fourth act best. It burst out shining and visceral. The wounds were, not old scar and memory, but fresh and raw. I do not think it could exist separate of the bulk and weariness of the first three acts, though. I must gird my loins to see it again.

I think my mother will love it.

Sunday: “Some things just get better and better and better than they’ve already been.”

Yesterday, Sunday, we began our writing retreat in this house by the sea. I can see the waters of Watch Hill from my window.

Yesterday, I gutted the first draft of Desdemona and the Deep. I wrote an outline, and fitted all the newly shattered jigsaw pieces into the order they shall be reappearing. And then I’ll rewrite the whole thing.

Hernandez is busy working on a short story, and line edits for the first third of his novel-in-progress. Last night we went to the Matunuck Oyster Bar in South Kingston, where there was swordfish and jambalaya and scallops ceviche.

We are very happy.

A fog-swallowed day. He’s carapaced to resist it, whatever’s coming. Full on weather warrior, that one. Don’t ask where he got his old armament, the battered brown kind that deflects acid like raindrops. Bullets or hail, makes no never mind. Might’ve slaughtered for it, might’ve bartered for it. A fistful of blueberries or viscera; he ain’t telling.

Can hear him before you see him. It’s the humming gives him away. Most folks think the Street of Queens can only be survived by slinking by. Head low, shoulders hunched–and for Frig’s, Freyja’s, and Fraggle Rock’s sake don’t make eye contact or your ass is last winter’s dog scat after the first thaw.

But the humming. That’s his secret. How you know it’s him. Another day, another sunny smile. Ready for anything, wary as a broken bottle.  He hums and thrums his way across the street. Makes it to the other side, safe. I watch from the window tucked in his right hand. From a hundred miles away, safe in my tower, nose pressed to my mirror, watching.

Trucks swerve to avoid him. Even the cyclists slow their kamikaze velocities–out of respect, see. That music? That’s old jubjub. La canción. El encantamiento. That’s the secret, he told me once. “You gotta sing your way through this city. Remember that.”

Wasn’t a lesson so much as a reminder. I too lived among cliffdwellers once, in the City of Drowned Glass. Got soft in this tree-lined place, where the rain is just rain, and the trucks don’t have teeth. I admit, I’d rather an ocean than the cicada roar of construction–and when I say cicada, think just popped outta the shell, size of a football field, and yeah, the city’s no place for entomophobes. Like I said. Soft.

But my breath fogs the mirror. The cityscape rolls away into gray as he makes his daily commute via katabasis. Green eyes, a slick stairwell, gone.

I’ll be joining him soon. Some things you just know. The tune in your throat tells you so. Time to polish my old breastplate to bronzelight. Time to open my mouth and sing.

for Carlos Hernandez 

the hillwalk, the riverway

pale gull and daymoon

crack of crocus in a shady grove

yellow, purple, yellow

and the current–

a swift and lapis mercury

sunfolded

To start:

Liz Duffy Adams is the WORLD FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT of Or, and Dog Act . . .

Although the first play I saw by her was A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, which takes place about ten years after the events of the Salem Witch Trails, and which, by the way, is EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED FROM A PLAY.

She is also in my WRITING GROUP–along with Ellen Kushner (The World of Swordspoint Books, Thomas the Rhymer), Delia Sherman (The Freedom Maze, The Evil Wizard Smallbone, Whitehall—also with Liz), Joel Derfner (Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Happened Instead, Tremontaine), and Carlos Hernandez (The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria. 

More to the POINT, Liz Duffy Adams–playwright and GODDESS–also heard me saying how much I wanted a FURRY HOT WATER BOTTLE, just like they have–or used to have, no longer available now–at RESTORATION HARDWARE–and she made me THIS!

 

She found a FAUX FUR VEST at a thrift store, and had a friend SEW IT UP!

 

AND THEN SHE ADDED A HOT WATER BOTTLE! AND A PRETTY RIBBON!

AND NOW IT IS MY NEW FRIEND AND I LOVE IT AND I USED IT YESTERDAY AND IT CUDDLED TO MY FEET AND IT IS BEST AND LOVE AND BEAUTIFUL AND ALSO IT WAS MADE BY A WORLD FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT SO THERE!

*pant* *pant*

I am very lucky!!!

And and now YOU ARE LUCKY TOO, because I have told you about Whitehall (for which Liz and Delia were head writers) which is all about WOMEN OF THE RESTORATION HOT DAMN, and it is SWASHBUCKLY and WITTY and SEXY and CHARLIE TWO I LOVE YOU!!!

You’re even DOUBLY lucky, for I also mentioned Tremontaine, which, if you liked Swordspoint and Privilege of the Sword, which of course you did, YOU MUST READ IMMEDIATELY, and now the whole season one is conveniently packaged for your pleasure in a PAPERBACK BOOK published by Saga Press, available in May 2017, thank you NAVAH et al!

And even though I wrote this blog on April 1st, it is NO JOKE! So . . .

YOU’RE WELCOME!

 

 

1. SOLD A STORY

Well, okay. So this is my latest Facebook status. It was carefully crafted, each ALLCAPS in its very particular place, and really, it oughtn’t to be wasted as ephemera, when it could be in a BLOG:

Ahem.
PEOPLE OF ETERNIA!!!
I am here to end your sweet, sweet torment!

Just in case you were wondering, re: my last, something last, latest, vaguebookery (just the handful of you who care, WHO WITHER AWAY WITH EVERY HOUR I HAVE KEPT YOU IN SUSPENSE), O YE BRAVE SOULIES, YE:

Faint and sigh and pine NO LONGER! FOR THIS IS THE 6:43 PM EST OF TRUTH!

PEOPLE OF ETERNIA! I, EVEN I, SHE-ROID, HAVE SIGNED A CONTRACT WITH UNCANNY MAGAZINE, who have so, so (wisely?) (weirdly?) (well?) SO JUST BOUGHT the BIZARREST story I have ever WRITTEN, bar NONE (even the BIG BAH-HA, and that’s saying something, tho’ I don’t know WHAT!), and their acceptance letter went something like this:

“This might be the weirdest story we’ve ever received, and we f***ing love it.”

Which made me superhappy, so, yeah, thanks, Michael and Lynne, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE WEIRDEST OF SOMETHING!

(Besides my eighth grade class at St. Jerome’s parochial school in Phoenix, Arizona.)

Anyhoo. Watch for the silver sky, pets. And thanks for your ENDURING PATIENCE.

The story’s called “Though She Be But Little,” and, you know. It’ll be out sometime. At a genre magazine near you.

You know what I’m going to read next??? CODE NAME VERITY! That’s right! In PARTICULAR because Amal and Caitlyn loved it SO MUCH and were AFRAID to tell me too much about it, so instead they just told me it had women friends and it was sad, and then I didn’t want to read it. But Jessica Wick, in her wisdom, sat me down and told me it does not end with the taste of sadness, but rather, of TRIUMPH. And then she explained WHY, and now I MUST READ IT. I won’t tell you, though. You probably don’t like spoilers. Not like me, who LOVES them. THE SPICE OF LIFE, SPOILERS.

But I am also going to read it because I am watching FOYLE’S WAR. I might also reread THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY while I’m at it. And also watch ENIGMA and CHARLOTTE GRAY again. Because. Everyone’s making WWII parallels anyway. I may as well immerse myself in the ART of it.

4. AM BEING READ TO 

And speaking of WWII-era art, and also the best books in the whole wide world, Carlos Hernandez (yes, he, the WORLD FAMOUS AUTHOR of the MOST MAGNIFICENT short story collection EVER) is reading me one of HIS favorites, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY.

And it slays me.
Slaughters, garrotes, guts, re-strings and PLAYS me.