C.S.E. Cooney

One: I have a new poem out at Uncanny Magazine. It is called “fowlskin.”

Some of you may remember last August, when I wrote about attending the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic’s free workshop called Everyday Magic Challenge. (I wrote about it here.)

Well, during that week, we met three times, one hour each, and Dr. Warman and Dr. Cleto would talk so lovingly and dazzlingly about fairy tales, feminism, power, beauty, poetry, fashion, and give us little challenges to sparkle up our days. One of those challenges led to the first draft of “fowlskin.”

Two: Serendipitously, the Good Doctoras of Carterhaugh (as I like to refer to them in my head) are hosting ANOTHER Everyday Magic Challenge NEXT WEEK.

And I just thought, if you needed some additional charm in your life, sign up and be NOURISHED. One week. Three challenges. It’s free, m’dudes.

Three: Oh, well, I have a secret, but it’s not my secret to tell. A friend of mine is getting such radically great news in their career life that it makes my stomach turn MORE CARTWHEELS every day! So that’s improving my mood all week. MAY ALL YOUR FRIENDS KNOW SUCH SUCCESS AFTER SUCH HARD WORK! AND YOU TOO!

Four: I’ve got to get back to novel writing. This was just my one-hour break. Keep wishing me luck, love, and ingenuity. And most of all… SPEED. Where’s my HASTEN SPELL when I need one???

(Warning: Spoilers, darling. Also, mildly lurid. Read no further if you want neither.)

The Emperor

by C. S. E. Cooney

the emperor is slick as silk
vein-purple, exposed, ascended
the emperor is vulnerable, sinewy
he is unblinking, ready for me

the emperor knows he is beautiful
the emperor thinks I am beautiful
in this nowhere-sea of buoyant gravity
broken moons, osseous chips of divinity

where the emperor is, is starlight
when the emperor speaks, is velvet
when the emperor rises, I rise to meet him
lean in, caress him, he doesn’t expect me

what we share, you might share too
this connection: phrenic, electric
his manipulation, my capitulation
you yet may unravel, if you ask the right questions

it is a matter, only, of open-mindedness
it is a matter, just, of mind-wipèdness
it is a matter of splendor and predator teeth
of appendages, flexible and erotic

you who know–yes you–you know what I mean
how we sleep, and how we dream
how spent, how unrelenting, how consuming this thing
all in hushed secrecy, all-in consent

in secrecy, until our rotting curtain rips
and our spending outspills, the dream dispelled
no, do not turn away: distrustful, betrayed
the emperor could yet love us all

he could yet love us all
bodymindsoul
if only we just
let him
in

---

What I wrote later about this poem on Instagram:

Just posted this poem on my blog at csecooney.com, LOL. I put ONLY the title on the first page here, in case you’re not into spoilers, or, you know, the mildly naughty bits. I mean… IT’S A FAN POEM! FOR BALDUR’S GATE 3!!!

Swipe if you wanna.

Jeez, the last fan poem I wrote in love-letter form was after I read BEOWULF. I wrote “Love Song to Beowulf” because that book definitely fell into the THIS BOOK IS SO HOT I HAVE TO WRITE IT A POEM category.

This time, in Baldur’s Gate 3, it was the EMPEROR, of all characters, who got me. THE EMPEROR! WHAT???

…Though I could literally write poems about ALL the Baldur’s Gate 3 main party characters… AHEM most notably, about Karlach and Halsin, so there. And I may yet. I MAY YET. I haven’t finished playing the game yet!

Poor poets. What do we do when we’re so strung out on our first video games as adults that we turn to poetry to VENT OUR WHATEVER?

I mean, the last video game I played with either Atari’s Frogger in the late 80’s, or maybe Oregon Trail, or maybe Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?

People. You know this already, but. VIDEO GAMES HAVE COME A LONG WAY.

That’s all. Who knows? I might be embarrassed about this tomorrow.

…nah.

Later, in comments:

We save-scummed the interaction, because we wanted to see what would happen, but didn’t actually think our character would go through with it. Still, in some alternate timeline, they DID. But then we wiped the interaction out of existence… JUST LIKE HE WOULD HAVE DONE! WHO’S THE EMPEROR NOW???

The Mythic Delirium team (Mike and Anita Allen) is celebrating their 25th anniversary as a publishing company! It is also honoring Yukimi Ogawa’s debut short fiction collection Like Smoke, Like Light landing on Publisher Weekly’s short list of Best Science fiction/Fantasy, Horror of 2023. How are they celebrating? By putting 20 ebooks on sale for .99 in a book bundle!

Three of the titles Mike mentions are mine: Dark Breakers, The Twice-Drowned Saint, and Bone Swans, but I also have stories in Clockwork Phoenix 3 and 5 (in this anthology is the first story Carlos and I ever collaborated on, back when we were first becoming friends: “The Book of May”), and A Sinister Quartet.

My story in A Sinister Quartet is an earlier version of our later standalone release The Twice-Drowned Saint, but the anthology as a whole is amazing, with dark fantasy/fairy tale retelling novellas by Jessica P. Wick (“An Unkindness”), Amanda J. McGee (“Viridian”), and a horror novella by Mike Allen (“The Comforter”).

Back in 2020, when A Sinister Quartet first came out, we did a bunch of fun things, which I blogged about:

• A Playlist for the Twice-Drowned Saint
• All the playlists for A Sinister Quartet
• Zoom salon of us reading from our work
• The Sinister Quartet Mini-Cookbook (Mostly Evil Pastries)
• Some insights into the Twice-Drowned Saint’s writing process, and how it connects to other C. S. E. Cooney stories
• Excerpts and readings from A Sinister Quartet
• Four authors of Sinister Quartet interview each other on Scalzi’s Big Idea
• A Sinister Quartet’s Guide to Books and Booze on The Next Best Book Blog

Mike says:

“The recognition won by Yukimi’s book inspired us to hold one more celebratory sale to semi-officially close out Mythic Delirium’s 25th anniversary year. One more time in 2023, we’re discounting e-books to 99 cents on most all major platforms — and not just Yukimi’s collection, but twenty titles that together span the most recent fifteen years of Mythic Delirium’s twenty-five years of existence in some form.

For the record, these twenty titles together account for: one World Fantasy Award win, one Mythopoeic Award win, one Kirkus starred review and Best of the Year listing, one Publishers Weekly Best of the Year listing, one Theodore Sturgeon Award nomination, one WSFA Small Press Award nomination, one Aurelius Award nomination, two Library Journal starred reviews, three Locus Award nominations, three World Fantasy Award nominations, four Shirley Jackson Award nominations, five Nebula Award nominations, ten PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred reviews and at least sixteen stories reprinted in various “Best of the Year” volumes. (Yes, I count these things, obsessively. And that’s not the full list! That’s just for the twenty books included in this bundle.)

We’re proud of all our books. By no means is creating and showcasing art all about awards — but you can take it as an indicator of our dedication to quality as we pursue our quirky art.

Some of these titles have been discounted within the past year or two, multiple times even, but others I’ve not offered in a discount sale for over half a decade, so get them while they’re hot!”

…IS LIVE ON SUBSTACK!

Please do scooch on over there if that’s interesting to you!

Yours truly,

C. S. E. Cooney

When the lovely team at Solaris Books learned that I was fording the wild waters of NaNoWriMo this year, they encouraged me to write about my LAST NaNoWriMo experience…

…which was 2009, when I wrote the first draft of what would later be titled SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER, but which was titled, at that time: MISCELLANEOUS STONES: ASSASSIN. (It was meant to be ironic.) (LOL.) (I like the new one better, so thanks, Team Solaris, for saving me from m’self!)

Here’s the link, for those of you who might be interested! They got the article placed at Writers Online in the UK, which was just DARLING of them.

And what, you ask, am I doing posting about this when I ought to be finishing my 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo??? Not to mention my ACTUAL and REAL novel deadline for which I was PAID??? (And for which… shhh… I have already SEEN the COVER ART, but I can’t show you yet AAAUGGGHHH!!!!)

And my answer is…

>.>

<.<

GLITTERBOMB!

It occurred to me after doing it a few times that posting constantly about NaNoWriMo word count progress could make the whole thing NaNoWriMo experience less fun for some people. I’m not really super competitive, and I really hate when other people feel like they’re doing less in comparison with me.

I want to tell this circle of friends and colleagues: you know, I don’t have kids. I don’t have full time work; I’m an audiobook narrator with no book on the books till December! I have a lot more time to write than a lot of people, and I still find it hard to write! I re-joined NaNoWriMo for the incredible energy of knowing THOUSANDS OF WRITERS are just… MAKING STUFF UP this month!

ME TOO YES PLEASE!

Now, I’m not doing too badly. Not on POINT exactly with my desired 2000 words a day, but still, very pleased, and making progress. I’m super pleased that my new friend Ben, whom we met this year at GenCon, is ROCKING his first NaNoWriMo. Talk about word count–and he’s doing it on his lunch breaks and early in the morning, like a BOSS! I sort of live vicariously through him.

This last week’s work on Saint Death’s Herald (or “Harold” as my mom, Clarence, and J9 are calling it) has been a pretty big set-piece battle scene. Like Hamlet is a seven-soliloquy play that the rest of the plot sort of dangles from, Saint Death’s Herald seems to have a 4-battle structure, with all my favorite bits happening in between the fighting. The limestone bridge chapter, for example, is my favorite chapter so far. But I like any scene where my characters sit, eat, and chat. Maybe play some music if their fingers aren’t too cold. You know?

But, so, as I’ve been writing and trying to make word count, I seem to be falling into habits of my twenties, which I graciously, um, aged out of in my mid-thirties and forties. Like staying up till 1 AM writing. >.>

But, look. It’s also so exciting, in some ways, to stay up till my brain is befogged and my mind is bedazzled. I can’t think in linear lines anymore. There comes a point in the night where I can’t edit any of the text anymore. I just have to… jump. Think: “Oh, I’ll make sense of it later. Because I literally can’t right now.’

It starts to go more like… “Oh, I think there’s a sentence about six sentences ahead that I haven’t written yet, so I’ll write this sentence now and fit it in later.” Or, “Hey, I think this is the next thing that that other character does, even though I don’t know the rest of the thing THIS character that this character is doing, but everything’s boring, so I’m just gonna leave this boring character here mid-sentence and go write that other more interesting and shiny paragraph for a while.”

The results of this week’s writing are, therefore, what I’ve started calling, just now, “an archipelago draft” of a chapter. There are OH SO MANY islands of unconnected text that are now my solemn duty, by the light of day, to string together into a (as Desiree says in A Little Night Music) “sort of coherent existence after so many years of muddle.”

And by years, I mean “nights,” of course.

The fact that my sleep schedule is now whacked, that I go through my days a bit dozy and ditzy, and that when I’m not writing all night, I’m up till 3 AM–last last night–reading Holly Black’s Folk of Air series is all a part of NaNoWriMo’s collateral damage. Or maybe collateral bonus?

Hurry up, NYPL; I need my Queen of Nothing book stat! Don’t make me wait 4 AGONIZING weeks for the third movement of a frikkin trilogy!

On this, the last day of our NEGOCIOS INFERNALES Kickstarter campaign, Carlos & I:

• threw ourselves a pizza party
• watched some Critical Role
• kept pausing it to flip to our KS tab and gawp in astonishment as our campaign’s numbers kept creeping up in the last 4 hours until it reached $20,000!

$20,147.10 to be exact. That’s more than 200% of our goal, and just a DREAM COME TRUE. Years in the making.

We captured the last of the countdown for you. BONUS CONFETTI!

After that, we turned on our eyeball lights and bubble machine and had ourselves a slow dance, so we could dictate a love note for you, our backers.

In case the butterscotch schnapps didn’t say it loudly enough: THANK YOU.

We hosted an Infernal Salon on Thursday morning at World Fantasy. I had a few false starts with my prompts, but I managed to squeeze this out by the very end of our 25 minute timer!

I don’t know what it means, or where it belongs, so it probably belongs to that glorious category of nonsense rhymes.

And, as we all know, all nonsense rhymes are really spells.

I think these were my prompts, but I can’t remember! The suits are right, anyway. (Also, I don’t know why they uploaded vertically. Weird!)

Remember, our Negocios Infernales campaign–which includes this deck of 70 oracular cards: la Baraja del Destino!–is running until Friday, November 10th! Check it out here: NegociosInfernales.com

Some Kind of Spell

by C. S. E. Cooney

October 26th, 2023

orrery oracle
candlelit coracle
needle and artery
glimmering thread

face in the solar flare
starry eyes everywhere
bloody tongue hungry
for uncanny bread

stitch me up, stitch me up
cut after glassy cut
how the world’s woefulness
salts every wound

map of uncharted sky
lift up your shadowed eyes
write on the silver wall
ink of the moon

sit on the opal shore
facing the golden door
eating the spoiled fruit
washed on the tide

nettle cloth, mermaid broth
prophecy every thought
pierced through, revealed
morning-dawn shy