HOLY SMOKES! HOLY MOLY! HOLY EVERYTHING AND THE FURIES TOO!
BRIMSTONE RHINE JUST MADE GOAL!!!
There are still two weeks left of the campaign. I am under STRICT ORDERS not to ask for any of my AWESOME STRETCH GOALS until I have budgeted to pay myself, which I, uh, didn’t do in all my previous calculations.
So, the next few hundred dollars will be a stipend to the creator.
After that, if I get anymore (well, *BUG-EYES* what’s the LIKELIHOOD???), it will go to MORE ASTONISHING PROJECTS YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW!!!
But until then, here is a BIZARRE Shakespeare monologue I did in one of my VOICES for YOU. Because you are my LEEETLEST LUVCUFFS!
First of all, we only have $210 to go until BRIMSTONE RHINE is funded! That’s very exciting! Things’ve slowed down a little. In a way, I can’t say I’m ungrateful! Ha! At least my skull has stopped spinning. Hopefully in the next few weeks we can creep on up to the END GOAL!
Ultima Thule! Excelsior! FABOOSH!
Second of all, Julia Rios of the Outer Alliance Podcast was so kind as to interview me about Brimstone Rhine. The interview includes a beautiful discussion with YA fantasy authors Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown about their books STRANGER and HOSTAGE, and then I come on at the end for a chat, and Julia Rios asked me to SING. So I did.
1. O Loathly Ones
2. Can of Worms
3. Lavender’s Darling
4. Mockingbird and Kestrel Girl
5. Chevalier
6. The Headless Bride
7. Black Widow’s Waltz
8. Barrow Brine
I wrote all but “Mockingbird and Kestrel Girl” and “Barrow Brine” during a single slow day at work. “Mockingbird” I wrote a bit earlier for my friend the poet Dominik Parisien one day (also at work), thinking it might cheer him up a bit. Also because he was so unwise as to tell me, “You have shiny eyes. I’d like to pluck them out.” And that’s what you get for such high-falutin’ compliments.
“Barrow Brine, or The Kenning Song” I wrote when my friend the musician Samu Rahn (of Cairn) and I were passing forth kennings for the ocean through text messages. “Barrow Brine” was the BEST ONE I CAME UP WITH. So I wrote that, made up a quick tune, sang it on my Voice Memos app, texted it to him, and within the week, he’d recorded over my skeletal melody a VERY PRETTY guitar part, and it made me super happy.
The song “Chevalier” is a continuation of a theme Mike Allen and I explored once in a poem (due out soon) about a conversation between the ghost of Joan of Arc and the prisoner Gilles de Rais on the eve of his execution for heinous crimes. I always liked the thought of a saint and a monster as comrades in arms. Or… was it quite so simple as that? HISTORY IS SO INTERESTING!
OH! Also for your reading amusement, Deb Stanish at Uncanny Magazine interviewed me!!! HERE IS THE LINK! If you get the WHOLE EBOOK, you get TOTAL ACCESS TO EVERYTHING Beautiful Uncanny Magazine and all its SPACE UNICORNS has to offer!!!
Okay. I told you I’d do it, so I did it.
Some things to bear in mind:
1.) THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. They may be puppets, but they are WICKED NAKED PUPPETS doing WICKED NAKED THINGS.
1a.) This YouTube Video is probably not safe for your grandparents either. At least, I won’t be showing it to MY grandmothers. Although, come to think of it, my own mother is a grandmother (to my nieces) and she cackled. So use your discretion.
1b.) NO, REALLY! USE YOUR DISCRETION! Don’t watch it if you are sensitive to this sort of thing. The LAST thing I want to do is offend you. I’m here only to AMUSE you.
1c.) To that end, maybe don’t show your YOUNG CHILDREN either. (Unless you want to have that conversation.) Because, again, though they are puppets… THEY ARE WICKED NAKED PUPPETS.
2. I wrote this for my beautiful actor friend Eric. He sometimes does Voices. One of his Voices is named “Ivan.” Eric makes astonishing metaphors out of coffee mugs and broken lightbulbs. He also sometimes jumps out of airplanes. (Hence the “Icarus.”) I wrote this song to make him laugh. I never thought it would have puppet theatre put to it. But life is, at its most exciting, TOTES UNPREDICTABLE, YO. Kind of like this FRIKKIN CAMPAIGN.
4. My magical Canadian wizard friend Magill Foote of Rule2 Productions took my ridiculous phone footage of last week’s dining-room-table-puppet show and made it all purty, with red curtains and and a bouncy sing-along-ball and all. ALL THE KUDOS TO MAGILL THE MAGICIAN!!!
5. I recently gave this song (and all its silliness) over to a project called “Angels of the Meanwhile,” a chapbook spearheaded by writer Alexandra Erin. Proceeds will go to benefit Elizabeth R. McClellan’s shoulder surgery. Now, our Elizabeth, you may or may not remember, is the gal who inspired the entire ALECTO! ALECTO! album to begin with. She is important to me. An important woman, an important poet, and one who helps whoever she can whenever she can. To read more about her shoulder surgery and how YOU might be able to help, follow this link!
There is a happy squirmy squidmonster in my brain and I don’t quite know what to do with it. In 3.5 days we’ve raised $3325 of the $5000 goal.
People are starting to hint that I might want stretch goals. And I’m like, “I can’t think about that right now, gotta focus, focus, focus on the TASK AT HAND!”
This task being the initial goal, $5000. Which, 3.5 days ago seemed AS FAR AWAY AS NEPTUNE!!!
Right now we’ve funded my collaborator and sound engineer, we’ve funded the album art and artist, and we’ve funded ALL THE LOVELY SESSION MUSICIANS I’ll be hiring for the studio. I LOVE PAYING MUSICIANS YIPPEEEE!!!
Right now we’re in the first third of funding the physical CDs, distribution, promotion, and a couple of concerts. CONCERTS YIPPEEEE!!!
(We have a concert coming up. March 20th. Arts Café Mystic. EEP!!! Glenn Kendzia on keyboard and guitar, Jack Hanlon on BULL FIDDLE, baby.)
And my squidmonsterbabybrain is sort of sparking and fireworking and sending off little SOS flares. Like this:
But the truth is… Squidmonster has IDEAS. For stretch goals.
More on that later.
Right now I just wanted to tell you that if we hit $3500, I totally have ANOTHER SURPRISE for you.
Last night, to celebrate the passing of our HALFWAY TO THE GOAL mark, my friend (unholy amazing) (writer) (not enough SUPERLATIVES!) (general expediter of awesome) (famulus) Carlos Hernandez and I put this DEMO REEL together for you.
It’s just four or five songs. It’s scratch vocals and instruments. BUT! It is here. For YOU. As you’re listening, PLEASE remember it is the ROUGHEST of rough demo reels.
Think of it like… Like cake. Now, cake and cake batter are NOT the same thing. This is cake batter. We’re working to bring you the cake. And you’re helping.
But I wanted to give you a spoon to lick. Because you have been SUCH BRILLIANT HELPERS ALREADY.
And he and my other WONDERFUL WIZARD FRIEND Magill Foote did the art and design for a trailer of my book MISCELLANEOUS STONES: ASSASSIN (currently in its in FOURTH $#%&ing DRAFT REVISION, but going strong).
And so… The next set of monies we make for Brimstone Rhine goes RIGHT TO GRANT! I am so excited to finally be able to pay him for his GORGEOUS ARTWORK, because heretofore he’s always just… somehow… just… GIVEN it to me. For fun? Because, because… I guess that’s what FRIKKIN WIZARDS DO???
But enough of that nonsense! It’s time to GIVE BACK! That’s what I say. Well, give back AND make MIRACULOUS AND TERRIFYING ALBUM ART for the GLORY OF BRIMSTONE RHINE!
So I’ve been working on a Project this past year called BRIMSTONE RHINE.
It all started with this cool dream I had about a rockstar of the same name. She was a highly eccentric individual, who, when performing, wore only a black net veil and a pair of bright pink Superman underwear.
Her stagehands called her “The Headless Bride” for the way her blonde bun stuck up out of her black veil like a neck stump. So she wrote an EP called The Headless Bride to spite them.
I woke up from the dream, wrote most of The Headless Bride EP that day while I was at work, then wrote another EP called Alecto! Alecto! a few months later.
Then I talked to a REAL musician about album-making. And then I made a plan.
We’re in the hall of the Shaw Mansion, in costume.
This place. This place, lemme tell you. Steve, the guy in charge, took my co-actress Madeleine and me all around, showing us things like whale vertebra and books of sea-chanteys from the eighteenth century.
He showed us a chair from a ship called the Resolute, which froze in the waters on its way to find the Northwest Passage. The chair was salvagedlootedrescued appropriated when the ship later came free. The US government returned it to England. Queen Victoria, in her turn, broke the ship up for pieces and made desks out of it. One of those desks sits in the Oval Office. There is a table George Washington sat at for dinner, and a mirror he shaved himself in. There is another table apprised at 4 million. So anyway. This is our theatre.
This is our THEATRE, people, for “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” And there we are, in silk and pearls and panniers, and the boys are wearing wigs and lace jabots, and all of us are in heels. And I hear our director say, “Places. Curtain in five.”
This is a theatre without curtains, but we know what he means because it is ritual. We are surrounded by priceless historical artifacts, and portraits of the dead who used to own this house. We are in the port city that Benedict Arnold burned to the ground, the city that burns him in effigy in September. We are doing an English play based on a French novel of letters. And our director says words that actors have heard for hundreds of years, and it is dress rehearsal, and we are there. We are there.
And mostly I find this kind of stuff commonplace. But last night I found it extraordinary.
And I wonder what happened in the early days of Greek theatre when the actors were about ready to put on their masks and step out into the amphitheatre. What words were spoken. There were no curtains then either, but actors are actors are actors, and I am sure something was said.
So I was driving my mother to work yesterday, and started discussing something about other people’s descriptions of my writing that seems to crop up fairly often. It’s become obvious enough that I actually NOTICED it.
Me: A lot of people call it “wild.” But… I mean, it’s all deliberately crafted, right? Why is something that undergoes sixteen drafts still considered wild? I went to school for this. I write plenty of crap. I make a lot of mistakes. I try to fix it. How does that make the writing wild?
Sita: Face it. You’re wild. That’s cool.
Me: Well, I may be wild, but how does that make my writing wild? Anyway, I’m not sure I’m wild. I drive at exactly the speed limit. I follow the rules.
Sita: You have your own fashion. You don’t follow convention. You often don’t comb your hair. In some people’s view, that’s wild.
Me: All right, all right… So maybe my hygiene is questionable and I wear weird thrift store clothes and rhinestones. HOW DOES THAT TRANSLATE TO MY WRITING??? People who don’t even KNOW me call my writing wild. What am I doing that’s so WILD?
Sita: JUST OWN IT! YOU’RE WILD! YOUR WRITING IS WILD. MOTHER BEAR SAYS SO!
Me: FINE! I’LL BE WILD! I’LL BE WILD ‘CAUSE YOU SAID SO, MOTHER BEAR!
That was that.
The thought may still trouble me some, that I’m doing something I don’t know about and am not even trying to do that’s immediately recognizable to strangers–but at least the memory of my mother laughing at me and yelling at me is there to mitigate my troubles.
Sita does remind me of my ferocity sometimes. I have moods she calls my “Wolf Girl” moods, all bite and slash and rip. Maybe that comes through in the writing too. Maybe I am, like she says, passing some boundaries in writing I didn’t know existed, like beluga whales who don’t know which ocean they’re in because it’s all one ocean, or coyotes that don’t recognize property lines or that the farmer’s chickens aren’t theirs by right. I sure as heck can’t see it. And I actually think it’s dangerous to be so unconscious of my own medium. I think it’s important that I know what it is that I’m doing. Especially by the sixteenth draft!
But maybe that’s what other people are for. To tell you that you’re wild, and so is the work of your hands. You don’t necessarily have to believe them. After all, we all get to have our opinions. And then argue about them.
C.S.E. Cooney 