C.S.E. Cooney

in the place where lightning struck the reindeer
the scientists said: let them lie, 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 buzziness
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
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.

Elizabeth Paxson is the creatrix and proprietress of Skybirdarts on Etsy (and Skybirdarts on Instagram). I met her because she is the most fabulous mama of my most DARLINGEST friend Caitlyn Paxson, one of my favorite writers/first readers in the world.

(If you haven’t subscribed to Caitlyn’s Book and Bramble newsletter, which includes book news, wreaths of the month, goat pictures, cat pictures, shots of Prince Edward Island at its glorious best, and, well, AWESOME STUFF, I’m just saying: GET THEE TO THE BOOK AND BRAMBLERY!)

I’ve always loved Liz’s ceramics, but a few years ago, she stepped away from the form and took her famous “squid mugs” with her. This year, happily, she’s having her own private renaissance. You can bet I leapt right on her pile of prodigious output like a dragon at a gold rush! I want all of us to happily reap the results of her genius. They are SO BEAUTIFUL!

For your great happiness, I present to you a MINI-INTERVIEW with the artist Elizabeth Paxson!

CSEC: What drew you to ceramics in the first place? What’s your origin story?

EP: I studied ceramics in high school at Interlochen Arts Academy, graduating in 1969. I didn’t return to clay (after a lot of painting, collage and mixed media work,) until 2006, opening my Etsy shop in 2007.

It was all when Magill Foote wanted a squid octopus mug, and posted it. Suddenly there was an instant demand. 😳 So the shop was off and running!

(INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: I, too, love Magill Foote! He once helped me research old cinema for a book I was writing–The Twice-Drowned Saint! What a guy–helping artists the world over be EVEN MORE AWESOME! All while being awesome himself!)

CSEC: Liz, you took a hiatus from pottery and sculpting for a while. What made you return?

EP: When we moved north in 2014, I sold all my ceramics equipment and sort of regretted it, especially during the pandemic. So I decided to Carpe Diem before decrepitude overcomes me, and invested in new equipment, reopening Skybirdarts.etsy.com!

CSEC: What do you find most fascinating about the process right now?

EP: I love working with clay, both because as a person who has issues with ADD and mild OCD, it is really grounding and satisfying. And it’s the EARTH, literally!

I love thinking about one of my pieces emerging from a lake bed in a thousand years, and someone wondering who made it and why. Well, I bet I’ll confuse them!

What I love most is playing with forms, colors and concepts. Clay is a friendly substance, but it also has a mind of its own. You have to learn the dance–how to let its physical qualities guide you. I see some work that looks as if it is made in a factory, and that bores me. I mean, if you like that you can go to Walmart!

CSEC: What are some of your influences?

EP: Oh! My favorite influences for ceramics are folk art, Mexican, Japanese and ancient art.

CSEC: My favorite are your MINOAN GOBLETS! I love them so much. AND NOW THEY ARE MINE!

CALENDARS AHOY!

THIS THURSDAY! 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM EASTERN! LIVE-STREAMED ON TWITCH!

Some poets from our infamous (LOL) SITZFLEISCH POETRY HOUR and a few other verse-minded friends will be participating in an ALL-POET INFERNAL SALON!

Sure, they’ll be the ones in the limelight, writing poetry AS YOU WATCH, but we always pull INFERNAL CARD PROMPTS from our BARAJA DEL DESTINO for the AUDIENCE TOO!

Stream on twitch.tv/arvaneleron!

Herein: ALL THE LINKS to The Milford Readers and Writers Festival, in Milford, PA, THIS SATURDAY.

I’ll be there with my co-panelists and authors: Karen Heuler, Alex Shvartsman, Randee Dawn, Nicholas Kaufmann, and Lillian Longendorfer–with books to sell and sign!

Here is the panel info for Saturday morning, 11-12:30. It’s called CHOOSE YOUR REALITY, taking place at the Foundation Room at the The Columns Museum.

“It is comprised of four panelists and a moderator whose writings have included varied and unique realities. The panel consists of the following authors: Karen Heuler, the moderator, who has created a sly, humorous tale with witchcraft, a formerly human cat and allegory in her book The Splendid City (June 2022); Alex Shvartsman whose realities combine humor with urban fantasy and horror; C.S.E. Cooney, whose books and poems contain worlds filled with fantastical and twisted characters; Nicholas Kaufmann, whose writings are a mixture of tightly plotted horror, urban fantasy and science fiction; and Randee Dawn, an entertainment journalist who has created a reality TV show run by mythical creatures in her debut novel Tune In Tomorrow (August 2022). This event Produced by Lillian Longendorfer.”

We’ll also be doing a signing and sell event at the Golden Fish Art Gallery on Saturday, September 17th from 2pm-4pm.

And then the evening ends with a “Books and Brews” reading at the Foundation Room of the Columns, beginning at 7:00 pm and ending whenever. Beverages will be available for purchase. This event is ticketed, I believe!

PLAYDAY 1: AUGUST 19TH, 2022

In person, a whole game of Negocios Infernales can usually be played within 4-5 hours–sometimes fewer!–depending on how many people are playing and if they’ve played before. Online, it’s a bit different. Role20 slows everything down (though we’re very grateful to have it), so it usually takes two sessions of about 4 hours each (breaks included) to get through a whole game.

We recently played with some folks from the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, as a Kaleiodcast exclusive. Kaleidocast is an audio literary magazine run by the BSFW, “a group dedicated to getting writers producing content with a professional polish for publication!” (Follow their Patreon!)

Session 1 of a two-session game of Negocios Infernales usually includes: Part 0: Pregame Trust and Affirmation; Part 1: Invocation; Part 2: Character Creation; Part 3: Relationships; and Part 4: Worldbuilding. This is where all the players collaboratively create their characters, their country, and their world, using the “Baraja del Destino” (the Deck of Destiny). Usually, by the time all this is done, players have a pretty good idea which of the seven plots/genres they’ll want to play.

At the end of session one, from all the worldbuilding and character creating we’d done, we knew we wanted to play “The Royal Wedding” plot. (Spoiler: it was kind of like the Red Wedding, but with more mollusks.)

I really liked the character I came up with: Ven. Viana de Eularia de Alvar. (In Negocios Infernales, we use the gender-neutral honorific “Ven.” for “Venerable,” instead of “Don” or “Doña” or Sir or Lady, etc.)

Together, along with “Melliza Exposita, the Royal Mirror” (the queen’s proxy, played by Mimi Mondal), “Jose Díaz, the Cypher Strike” (a thief of books, played by Cam Robb), Rodriguez the Fair (trickster, worldbreaker, spymaster, played by Liam Burke), and our AI/Rulebook Carlos Hernandez, we were well-set up by the end of the first session not only to have a wild night of improv, but maybe also to write, like, 15 novels set in our very weird world.

The chat was small but FIERCELY AWESOME, and they came up with the most amazing perfumer NPC that we pledged would show up in the plot once we got to the improv!

For flavor, Carlos took prompts I texted him from my character sheet & entered them into Midjourney, so now my character has a profile pic!

PLAYDAY 2: SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2022

In session two of Negocios Infernales, we got through Part 5: Plot; Part 6: Roleplay; and Part 7: The Alien Epilogue. The fun thing about Zoom is that it has an Alien filter, so for a while, several of us were cyclopses with deelie boppers, and those that weren’t used masks and funny voices to inspire our alien selves.

We’d known we were going to do the “The Royal Wedding” plot, so after we refreshed ourselves with the details of our last game, we got right into the interpreting the Plot cards. Then came the really wild stuff: the Roleplay. Each of us had to act as a Protagonist at least once, to solve the orders la Reina gave us. Each of us had to play an NPC at least once and use our Magic at least once.

We called upon the chat–again, small but AMAZING–to help us interpret certain cards and make certain decisions as we played. And yes, we used the NPC, perfumer “Marinel Curie,” which the chat had invented for us in the last game.

In the end, it was almost five hours of harried wizards, demonic monkeys with red glass claws, shapeshifters who have to smell whoever they want to change into, cannibal pearls, alien mollusks, masquerades, cypher-strikers, truth-extractors, and so much more! It was unpredictable and precarious; we were on the verge of losing the game. Our Reina Resoluta token had slid all the way down the Sword. If she’d gotten buried to the hilt, it would have been all over. Thanks to our Doom mechanic (which three of us had to activate to forestall failure), we won by the skin of our teeth. We’d lost most of the rest of our skin.

Carlos and I are very grateful that Kaleidocast played with us. We should have footage from the two sessions available through Kaleidocast one of these days, so consider supporting their Patreron!

Also, we’re gearing up for next year’s Kickstarter for Negocios Infernales, forthcoming from Outland Entertainment, so sign up here to keep abreast of the latest and greatest news: negociosinfernales.com

This last week, Carlos and I applied for a Writers’ Retreat at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. I’ve never applied for that sort of thing before. It’s quite cost effective: you get both room and board (food by a chef), for less than a typical Air B&B and certainly less than a hotel room, for a range of days and nights of your choice.

You have to fill out an application, talk about your writing, send a sample, and an application fee–all these things! It kind of reminded me of the grant proposals I’ve seen. And I thought: it IS like writing a grant! A grant of time and space to create in.

Anyway, we were supposed to talk about what project we’d be working on. And I couldn’t decide! So I just wrote down all my projects. Who know what I might be working on by the time we get there next year!

But I thought it would be good for me to post here, since it is easy to look at a year (at least for me) and think how little one has done.

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CURRENT PROJECTS

SAINT DEATH’S HERALD: the sequel to my high fantasy novel that just came out in 2022 with Rebellion Publishing, SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER. The novel follows the further adventures of necromancer Lanie Stones, as she tries to right the wrongs of a previous generation, battle the powerful ghost of her dread great-grandfather, and return the souls of three thousand wizards that had been ripped untimely from their bodies. 

FIDDLE: a rompy rom-com fantasy novella set in the same world as DESDEMONA AND THE DEEP, my novella published by Tor.com, and DARK BREAKERS, my short story collection published by Mythic Delirium. FIDDLE has an 80’s aesthetic with a high fantasy flair! Goblins and space travel, fairies with surf boards, and a nerdy, introverted heroine who has to attend three weddings and a great infernal hatching event all in one day.

BALLADS FROM A DISTANT STAR: a concept album under my singer/songwriter name Brimstone Rhine, after my three previous albums. This album follows, in folk songs, the adventures of a group of miners and their families who were body-snatched by aliens and brought on their spaceship to work the mines of a distant planet.

THE DEVIL AND LADY MIDNIGHT: a theatrical 6-episode musical podcast. This is a collaboration with writer Tina Connolly and songwriter Dr. Mary Crowell. The Devil comes to New York, hungry for friends both new and old. While she’s there, she might as well put on a show. 

LAMP: a poetry anthology called LAMP. This is a collaboration with writers Patty Templeton and Carlos Hernandez. A shared-world poetry collection following a troupe of actors as they flee a large city for a small town at the edge of a salt marsh: exploring the tensions between cityfolk and townsfolk, the resentment between outsiders and inner circles, the friendships made when boundaries are crossed, and the art that blossoms under new alliances.

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And since I already made that “current projects” list, I was thinking of things I’ve actually finished this year. How January seems a million years ago already!

But for the sake of remembering:

GAME WRITING for FOOL’S GOLD: INTO THE BELLOWING WILDS, “a 5th edition campaign setting based on the hit Youtube series by Dingo Doodles and Felix Irnich,” forthcoming from Hitpoint Press.

This is a collaboration with my beloved Carlos, of course. It was my first time doing any such kind of writing. We were invited by editor (and our dear friend) Dominik Parisien, and are part of a whole team of writers and editors and game-designers working with GM Felix Irnich’s world to create the campaign setting.

NEGOCIOS INFERNALES: This is the year that Carlos and I finished our rulebook for Negocios Infernales, our gm-less, collaborative TTRPG about Inquisition and Aliens. We finished the first draft later than we wanted, and then added an afterward and a WHOLE APPENDIX for the second draft on our editors’ request.

Carlos also drafted (and I helped revise) an introductory COMIC that artist Rebecca Huston (who did our “Baraja del Destino,” or “Deck of Destiny” for the game) illustrated. It is going to be AVAILABLE THIS YEAR AT GENCON!!! (Oh, here’s our GenCon schedule, if you’re interested!)

“CATHARSIS”: This was the short story I wrote for this year’s Origins Game Fair Anthology Rogue Artists, published by Atthis Arts. I loved, loved, LOVED writing this story, because it was inspired by writing the RULEBOOK for Negocios Infernales.

As Carlos and I wrote the rulebook together, we played a single game Negocios Game the whole way through–over the course of months–to be able to provide examples in the rulebook. When we were doing the “Worldbuilding” section, I came up with the idea of a theatre troupe that utterly captivated me. I wanted to write about them so hard! And so, I did! Now this short story exists in the world, alongside its origins in our rulebook–and that tickles me!

“CAPTAIN COMEBACK SAVES THE DAY“: This is a short story, forthcoming from The Sunday Morning Transport. It’s another collaboration with Carlos, and it has a long history. The idea started as the idea for a radio play on a road trip to Ottawa we took maybe four or five years ago.

We loved the idea of a “superhero” and a “supervillain” being married and in the same house, 1940’s-1950’s-ish, and the supervillain wife basically keeps creating deadly scenarios around town for her husband to “fix,” so that he can be a superhero–which is all he ever wanted. He inevitably gets utterly destroyed in the process, but she has a resurrection machine that brings him back to life (and conveniently wipes the hero’s brain of all memories of his wife as a supervillain).

We still think this would be a great radio play, but we tried a single “episode” as a short story, and the structure took on such a surprising form! COLLABORATION IS SO WEIRD AND AWESOME!

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The list of what I finished doesn’t seem like much, but then again, I’ve been working on all that other stuff too. Plus, I narrated seven audiobooks this year–including my own!

…And read a metric ton of 2021’s SFF work for the World Fantasy Awards.

I was not idle, but…

What my brain says: Yeah, not all that much. Should’ve finished three novels, put out two albums, and starred in a Broadway Musical.

What my blog (and Carlos) says: GOOFUS MCDOOFUS

I’ve been trying (and for the most part succeeding) to dive into writing with all joy. There were some years there where the joy was deep in a cavity and took some excavating. This year, it’s been better. It’s been good.

I’ve really enjoyed my Sitzfleisch Poetry Hour a whole lot! And my musical theatre collaboration with Mary and Tina. And my LAMP poetry collaboration with Patty and Carlos. None of these are urgent. They’re slow-blossoming, wondrous.

The next thing I am really eager to do is set aside a chunk of time devoted solely to finishing Act II of Ballads from a Distant Star, and starting to research the best crowdfunding platforms for that project.

Kickstarter is super high pressure; I dislike the “all or nothing.” With “something” at least, I could make SOMETHING. A promise. A placeholder. I used Indiegogo for the last albums, but since then I think they’ve become a different kind of platform, so… Sigh. Back to the drawing board! Maybe some grants! We’ll see what happens.

Okay, Cooney. Enough blogging for the day. This whole time you should’ve been working on your novel.

>.>

<.<

🙂

now, the book itself (trade paperback, Americana-colored,
some bleached field or other on the cover) the book itself
was nothing much to look at: creased a bit, battered a bit,
yellowing and dog-eared, read maybe once but loved for all that–
read thoroughly, pored over and furrowed through, a lived-in look–
this book, then, acted on me like slow poison.
I became porous, mottled: like my left mandibular cuspid
(the one that never looks clean), this book stained me,
made me more, the way a stain can make a floor more floor,
less perfect yet idiosyncratic, the way a scorch mark makes
a tea-towel perfectly your own, the way a scar can make a home.
somewhere, on the map of myself, this book pinned a
you-are-here-sign to my skin, ate its acid splash all the way in,
and there I was, inside its pages: invisible, an onlooker, voyeur and passenger,
passive–yet more present to its moment than to my earliest memories.
slow and deep I sank in it, seeping dark fluids into that wrecked landscape
until we stuck together, those pages and me: stuck with a gross moistness
like old brown boots to an abattoir floor, like a house fly to a cobra lily.
it was not beautiful, that butchery, it was not kind or generous;
I never want to go again into that poisoned land, nor hold the book
in my naked hands without gloves between me and its radiant stink.
yet how can I regret the days I spent here, staked thigh-high in tides of pig shit,
flayed ribbon-raw on a scarecrow pole, eyes pinned to the tops of my sockets,
sick to my bones with the holy act of staring at the sun?

Yesterday, Tina Connolly and Mary Crowell and I did our FIRST READ-THROUGH of our FIRST DRAFT of our FIRST EPISODE of The Devil and Lady Midnight.

The first thing Tina said was that I should play Lucy (Lucy Lumen of Lucid Theater, Theatre of the Underground…), and even though I tried to protest, I mean…

Who are we kidding? Of COURSE I wanted to play Lucy. And OF COURSE Tina knew that.

“It’s not like I’ve been anticipating this for weeks, casting it all in my head.”

She, of course, wanted to be the vampire Didier, and DIDN’T SHE ROCK IT!

We cast Mary as Mavis Day, Mr. Og, Az AND the stage directions. Of course, she’s also done recordings of all of her songs so far in that episode, which we played at the appropriate times.

One of our great discoveries was that, since this is going to be a radio play/podcast series, reading the stage directions out loud worked REALLY well, and we’re going to lean into that, transforming them into a Narrator’s voice, and by the sixth and final episode, we learn who this mysterious Narrator ACTUALLY is.

The first episode ran 38 minutes with all the songs. Yes, there are songs. Did I mention this is a MUSICAL THEATRE radio play/podcast series?

It was so magical to see the first episode as a whole, with its cold open monologue, its opening credits song, three scenes (with two songs), and outro.

It needs tightening and editing and maybe one more short song, but Horned Lords! It was SO COOL! And it really showed us that we need to be doing read-throughs regularly as we put this thing together!

We don’t really want to start editing the first episode until we have all six roughed out. Originally, we’d planned to do one really polished episode and then a very strong outline, but we’re having so much fun, and by the time we’re done with this project, we’ll have a shiny thing to present… somewhere.

To our agents? To podcast platforms? TO KICKSTARTER? To some kind of GRANT?

Who knows? But for now, our 90 minute collaboration every Wednesday has born SUCH FRUIT!

We always emerge from this virtual sessions so JAZZED. We live across the country from each other: East Coast, south Midwest, and Pacific Coast–and yet to be able to see each other regularly and work with each other like this? It’s SCRUMPTIOUS.

Our “little side project.”

So, if you don’t know Tina Connolly’s work, here are a few awesome things:
Her Seriously YA tetralogy
Her amazing adult fantasy trilogy Ironskin
Her collection On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories

And if you don’t know Dr. Mary Crowell’s work, she just released her pandemic album I Have Missed You at My Table (click through to stream it on Bandcamp) (mostly RPG-inspired songs!!!). Plus, her album Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour is just MARVELOUS!

Also, she’s just written MY BOOK Saint Death’s Daughter a song on Patreon called “In the Bones of Her Cloak,” that I am in love with.

So that’s what we’re up to!