I’m working on a short story for an anthology my friend Sonya is putting together. It involves murder, ghosts and other spirits, romance, wind chimes, and a dark forest. I hope you’ll enjoy it when it comes out.
Anthologies are difficult in general. Some other friends and I were trying to put one together, but more than a year on it’s still in limbo because it was so difficult to allocate responsibility. I’m really proud of two stories of mine that were published in recentanthologies, but I’m not sure how they were received because neither book has gotten very many reviews. It can be a little discouraging. But then I realize that I myself haven’t read that many anthologies recently–I haven’t even finished reading the ones I was published in. So maybe everyone’s just busy.
Anyway, anthologies are an incredible way to discover new authors, and I haven’t been doing enough reading lately. Are there any collections you’d recommend?
On a completely different subject, I realized last night that the publication of “In the Nevergo” qualified me for an “Affiliate Writer” membership in the Horror Writers’ Association. I applied and was accepted today. I have a few more dark fantasy pieces in the works, so I’m hopeful that I might be able to upgrade to an “Active Writer” (i.e. full) membership before too long. I’ll see if there’s a badge or something I can put on my website. There aren’t a lot of concrete benefits to joining writers’ associations at this point in my career, but it’s a nice boost in a field where it’s hard to feel like a working professional.
(***I just checked and saw that under the updated membership requirements I also qualify for an Associate Membership in SFWA. I’m not quite ready to pay two sets of dues, though, so I’ll keep working towards a full membership there for now.)
Our anthology ‘Once Upon a Wicked Heart’ is launching today! Join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/clcannon for our launch party. You’ll get some sneak-peaks at the book and a chance to win some fairy-tale swag and other prizes.
When I was little, I spent a lot of time reading the books my mother had kept from her childhood. One of them was an abridged version of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book illustrated by Grace Dallas Clarke.
The book was illustrated in a colorful 1950s style (I don’t have a copy now, but you can see some illustrations here.) I read the book multiple times, but my favorite stories in it were “Felicia and the Pot of Pinks,” “The Princess on the Glass Hill,” and “Diamonds and Toads.”
For some reason I have a strong memory of reading this book on an airplane, though I would have been young and I’m not sure where we would have been going. Anyway, I had lots of time to pore over the illustrations. “Diamonds and Toads” particularly stuck with me. I can see the glitter of the falling diamonds from one sister’s mouth, the other sister’s sassy expression, her hands on her hips. Later, cursed for her rudeness, she looks bewildered and ashamed, turning away defensively as snakes and toads fall from her mouth.
“Diamonds and Toads” is a “good sister/bad sister” story, a motif so common in world literature that you could fill a decent-sized book just with versions of Cinderella. Lately I’m starting to think more about the bad sisters in these stories than the good ones. Some of them are cruel, but their cardinal sins are usually greed, laziness, rudeness, and pride. In return, they’re often maimed or killed. Cinderellas’ stepsisters lose their eyes in some versions of the story, and “The Two Caskets” ends with the stepsister (along with her mother) being burned alive. Sure, she was rude and lazy, but isn’t that a bit harsh?
“Diamonds and Toads” is a classic example of this story. There are two sisters–one pretty and good, one ugly and bad–and their mother, who is also ugly and bad and thus favors the girl who resembles her. She and her daughter are cruel to the pretty sister, making her do all the work and fetch the water every day at the well. (I made the sister a little more sympathetic in my story, but I hope I still captured the spirit of the original.) At the well, the good girl meets and is nice to a fairy, and is rewarded with a shower of diamonds and flowers falling from her mouth whenever she speaks. The bad sister is rude to the fairy, so she’s punished: for the rest of her life, toads and snakes will fall from her mouth whenever she speaks. Eventually “even the widow was sickened by her older daughter, and drove her out, and she died alone and miserable in the woods.”
When my friend Sonya Lano told me that Fiction-Atlas Press was calling for submissions for an anthology about fairy-tale villains getting their own happily-ever-after, my mind immediately went to “Diamonds and Toads.” I can get a bit gloomy, but I’m not a dark fantasy writer: I wasn’t sure I could write a romance about a child-murdering witch or any other serious villain. But everyone’s said something they regretted, and something about this story has always spoken to me. Plus, snakes are cool. So I decided to try it out.
Next, I needed to find a romance for my protagonist. My first idea was to have her meet up with the girl from “The Two Caskets”–terribly scarred from the fire, but still alive–and have them hit it off. But that seemed a bit too complicated for a short story or novelette, so I needed something simpler. Fortunately, Sonya suggested another possibility that was right up my alley, and I got really interested in the project. But in order for this fairy tale to work, I’d need to get my heroine on a more equal footing with her love interest, and that’s what this story is about.
“Serpents” is a novelette of about 10,700 words that follows Fan’s adventures after she’s kicked out of her family home. (The original character’s name is Fanchon, short for Francoise, so Fanny would be a more natural translation, but for obvious reasons I decided not to go with that. Frannie is my partner’s name, which would have been weird, and Fancy and Frances didn’t seem quite the vibe, so Fan it was.) Once I had the idea straight in my mind, the writing process was pretty straightforward because I was happy with the story and how it played out. I’m still happy with it, and I had a lot of fun with it, so I hope you’ll feel the same
Once Upon a Wicked Heart is a collaborative anthology from Fiction-Atlas Press. There are twelve total stories in the book, most quite a bit darker than mine from what I’ve heard but a few with happy endings. Sonya has a story there, too–a dark (less dark? haha) retelling of “The Juniper Tree”–and all the others look really interesting. There’s a universal buy page here where you can check it out, or you can look us up on Goodreads. We’re doing a pre-release sale price of 99 cents (the full price will be $2.99), so it’s a good idea to preorder if you’re interested. You can also visit us online at the anthology release party on November 19 (that’s this Saturday) on the group’s Facebook page. Sonya and I will be posting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST that day, so drop by and see us.
There are lots of other fairy tales I’d like to explore in more depth, so I hope to do more projects like this later. Is there any story that really stuck with you?
My fiancee and I went to a bonsai festival this weekend. Naturally, since then I’ve been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of articles about bonsai, reassuring myself that yes, I should not become a bonsai hobbyist. For me, the most interesting theme in all these videos is how slow and gradual the work is: artists work every day on their living sculptures, pruning and refining, transplanting and fertilizing, and day by day the average person wouldn’t see any change at all. Only after decades does the mature plant show the vision the artist had in their head all along. If you went to a bonsai nursery, everything under the age of two would look like an unremarkable seedling, and it would be hard to imagine how those twiggy little things could transform into sculpture worth handing down for generations.
So I was thinking about writing, and how it’s slow, incremental work, and how little progress the average author seems to make from day to day (even a prolific day’s writing is only a few minutes’ reading for most people). And so I though I might like to put a little sapling on display, so that no matter how long it takes me to finish a piece of my regular work, there’s always a little window open for anyone who’s interested to see what I’m doing. So I created a document today, and planted a seed, and here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uq1Gd7Z0svfbvOuYisnVZUbSp87TBupnsA8CUabFU68/edit
This is the beginning of what I hope will turn out to be a novel. It’s an actual working document, with notes and scribbles and half-finished sentences and all, and so far only a few words of prose. If you’re ever curious about what I’m doing, you can go and have a look, and leave a comment if you’d like. I’ll try to spend at least a minute on it whenever I tend to my other seedlings.
It’s back-to-school-time! I teach part-time at a local elementary school, and today I went in to set up my desk and attend a safety seminar online (all in Czech, so perhaps I didn’t absorb as much as others…). Next week I’ll go around to locate the classrooms of the classes that I haven’t taught before, as well as meeting with Czech colleagues to discuss how the year’s lessons will run. We’re using a new structure this year, with lots of co-teaching, so I’m guessing lots of coordination will be required. Everyone seems very gung-ho, though, so I hope things will go off well.
The one unfortunate problem with returning to school is returning to an early-morning schedule. I asked not to be given any classes that started before nine, but unfortunately that request wasn’t granted, so I’ll be waking up around six for the next year. (I used to wake up later than that, but I’m trying to reduce excess stress in my life, and cramming myself into my clothes five minutes before the tram comes doesn’t make for a healthy or productive workday.) As I’m also trying once again to fight back against my lifelong foe, Chronic Sleep Deprivation, I’m trying to make myself turn all screens off at nine so as to be in bed by ten. We’ll see how that plays out in reality.
Looking forward to seeing Fran tonight. It’s a chilly, rainy Friday, and I’m guessing we’ll have a quiet weekend. We want to go to an ice cream festival this Sunday, and I think we’ve got about a fifty percent chance of beautiful weather; the other fifty percent will be comically inappropriate. But I’m guessing the ice cream will be worth the visit.
Dal (my smaller cat) is running around the house like a handful of bouncy balls. He knocked over a flowerpot that used to contain a basil plant but (post feline depredations) now contains dirt. Contained, rather; he decided to flip it over and gleefully play with the dirt, leaving a big sweeping spiral on the floor. My fault for not throwing out the remnants of my poor plant before the dirt dried out. Sadly, he isn’t very good at sweeping. Yggi (my big cat) has sensibly decided to hang out under my chair and doze.
Reading: Still The Haunting of Hill House, Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, and A Suitable Boy. Writing: VOID is at 160k, I think. Have not finished any shorts yet, but have a long list to work on.
I’ve been very into containers this week. It seems to help a bit with executive dysfunction as regards cleaning up, as a lot of my brain paralysis re: putting things away seems to derive from having nowhere to put them. So I’ve been collecting little baskets, bowls, and boxes for all my little things (hairpins, perfume, erasers, etc.) and joyfully putting them away. I still have a long way to go before I’d call myself “tidy,” but it’s nice to have things displayed where I can enjoy looking at them. What’s annoying me is that the only top drawer in my kitchen is too narrow for a silverware divider, but too shallow for a basket, so I’m still looking for a way to organize the silverware. A serious and concerning problem, obviously.
Rainy and cool in the Czech Republic. Still enjoying the last bit of quiet, since messages are starting to come in from my public-school job and I’m guessing we’ll be in meetings next week. I’ve been working on a lot of different anthology submissions, hoping I can get at least most of them done before they’re due. Still reading A Suitable Boy and rereading The Haunting of Hill House, but have also started reading a collection of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories. Yesterday I rewatched about half of Father of the Bride (skipping over the cringe parts), which I watched again and again when I was a kid because we didn’t have many VHS tapes. I was surprised by how well parts of it held up, as it’s kind of a dumb movie; the emotional scenes are really well. Was also kind of horrified by the protagonist’s behavior, though. It’s hard to imagine someone being so ugly about their daughter’s wedding. I’m not sure how much of that is from the original (made in 1950) and how much was just considered funny in the 90s.
Not much to report on, really. Looking forward to seeing Fran this weekend and going to writers’ group tomorrow. Hope all of you are doing well.
Hi, kids! Having another quiet night. Tomorrow I’m taking the day off from writers’ group to spend time with Fran and her mom, so I’m hoping to get some work done today. Very quiet with just me and the cats; I’m used to sharing Friday nights with someone else now.
Recently I’ve gotten a decent amount of work done. I finished a short dark piece on a fictional species of invasive fish, and have begun several other new projects.(Yeah, I know…). Actually, I’ve just noticed that there are many more open markets for horror than for fantasy, so I’m trying my hand at a few more short horror stories. Lots of anthologies coming out that I’m excited to submit to.
I’m feeling a bit better about the craft in general now. I got a couple of really nice rejection emails last week–you wouldn’t think a rejection would make you happier, but these were really complimentary. Sometimes all you need is for a professional to tell you you’re not a hack. So I’ve started confidently attempting projects that are rather out of my usual wheelhouse. I also have a couple of stories I wrote before developing the new prose style (technique?) that I use now. I’ll probably put them up here, rather than rework them, because I’ve already got plenty on my to-do list, and reworking an old story is just as hard as writing a new one. You’ll see them soon.
Still working slowly through A Suitable Boy, but I’ll probably take another break and read something different. Also still flipping through The Haunting of Hill House, which I reread every couple of years. It still holds up for me. Sometimes you look back at a story that helped to shape your adolescence (and your creative aesthetic) and realize it has fundamental structural flaws that might actually be influencing the way you put your own work together. I guess in a way that’s nice: if XYZ Book has major flaws, but still won several prizes and lingers in the fond memories of many, there’s probably hope for me. I think I’ll try The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton next; it seems like a good choice for the season.
We’re getting into the early-autumn weeks where witchy, spooky things linger at the fringes of daylight and I am very susceptible to Spook. I want real-life ghost stories and dark harvest aesthetic. I bought ribbon to redecorate my front door wreath, and might get to that tonight. Ooh, I could also bring down the glass Jack-o-lantern I bought last year. I’m getting more and more into this kind of light-vintage, 70s-80s domestic aesthetic of deathless wooden furniture, lace and florals, etc. etc. I want a La-Z-Boy chair and an indomitable couch, a wooden chest for blankets, a basket of scarves in the closet. I want lighting with the warm tinge of the old incandescent bulbs, and the kind of quiet you’d hear on a summer night at my grandparents’ old farm. (But I don’t want to leave the city–haha, oh no–and moving apartments with old-fashioned furniture is a bit of an endeavor.)
I think this kind of feeling is pretty common now, at least judging by the popularity of the whole “cottagecore” trend. I guess we’re still trying to imagine there are still insects buzzing outside, that the natural world is still proceeding in ordered seasons the way it’s supposed to. I think everyone wants to rewind the clock on nature (see rewilding efforts, which I’m a big fan of). I’m not sure how successful it can really be, but there’s something comforting in the idea. Maybe aesthetics like cottagecore are also a harmless way to connect to cultural traditions marred by outdated social mores (not to speak of horrific historical atrocities). I think also that, being 37 and likely to remain childless, I might be thinking nostalgically about the continuity of family. I’ve gotten into perfumes lately, and two scents I’m really fond of are one my mother used to wear and one that reminds me of my grandmother. I do think it’s easier to feel that old-timey vibe here in Central Europe, where the landscape seems to change much more slowly than in the places I’ve lived before. And of course, given everything, I haven’t seen my actual family in more than two years.
Anyway. Take care, everyone, and have a good weekend. Let’s move on one day at a time.
Another quiet week. More people are coming back from vacation, but I only had to teach a few lessons this week, and really enjoyed the free time. I finished my submission for writers’ group early, which was a nice treat; usually I’m up late Friday night to get it done.
Re: computer: We looked at parts to build one, and it made my brain ache, so for peace of mind I went with a laptop. Hello, new Acer. May you prosper.
Fran’s mom is visiting. Met her for the first time yesterday and it was lovely. We don’t really have a common language (even if I spoke more Italian, I wouldn’t understand Sicilian), but I’m picking up bits as fast as I can and making Fran translate the rest. Got to taste proper Italian sausage yesterday (of course her mom brought a lot of food in her luggage ^_^). Did you know they sometimes put vegetables into the sausage casing? I did not, but I support it.
Went to a giant craft store the other day. Bought way too many craft supplies and had a great time.
Cold Comfort Farm was funny but had a lot of flaws: the parody was clunky, and I don’t think the author quite managed what she was going for. But I started watching the movie just now, and it seems to do the job much better. Quite funny; will see if it holds up.
Besides the new section of VOID, I started two new projects: a short story for submission, and another one for Halloween. “But Katherine,” you say, sounding rather exasperated, “every week you tell us about a new project you’ve started. Very rarely do you mention a project that’s finished.” Well, I’ll tell you that that’s an entirely valid point. Wish me luck.
Katherine Traylor 