Friends, readers, colleagues:
Greetings at the end of the first week of November. My heart is very full and my mind is very busy. The mornings are brighter, but the nights are closer, and the cold is creeping in.
First and foremost: many people need so many kinds of help, locally and globally. Many people (right in this house, even, and probably in yours) need, at the very least, a lot of hugs and hot tea.
You all probably have organizations you support, and I do too. NPR has more, and there are more you can vet through Charity Navigator. Here are a few of my favorites.
I know it’s like putting a bandaid on a mortal wound. I know there’s far more to do than this. There is also this.
World Central Kitchen
Save the Children
Médecins Sans Frontières
Books I’m looking forward to reading:
The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen. Christa’s novel just came out, and I’ve been looking forward to it for over a year! I’ve heard her read excerpts, so I’m like that fish that’s been swimming around with a hook in its mouth since StokerCon! The legendary Salmon of StokerCon, that’s what they call me. Here’s Christa:
The Briar Book of the Dead, by Angela Slatter. I will read anything, but anything, that Angela Slatter writes, and, I mean, come on. A title like THE BRIAR BOOK OF THE DEAD??? Why am I not reading it RIGHT NOW?
The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera. The Saint of Bright Doors. Well. I mean. Look. THAT TITLE. It slays me. Plus, I can’t tell you how many people have been recommending it. But also, CASSANDRA FRIKKIN KHAW recommended it to me personally. (Okay, it was to a whole group of fans at Barnes and Noble.) So it’s high on my list.
Books I’ve loved lately:
Starling House, by Alix E. Harrow. The Siege of Burning Grass, by Premee Mohamed.
My hot-off-the-book(stagram) review for Starling House was: “I had Starling House-shaped dreams last night, so the minute I woke up I started finishing it and didn’t stop till I did. So you get me, with uncombed hair, in my nightgown, hugging this book 10 seconds after I finished it. I mean, I slapped that book shut so hard I made Carlos jump! I want to SQUEEZE IT AND EAT IT AND EXPLODE IT LIKE CONFETTI.”
Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass is forthcoming from Solaris Books in March of 2024. I read it to blurb it, and I don’t know if my blurb (blurb is starting to look VERY WEIRD the more I write it blurb blurb blurb) quite conveyed the thunderstorm of feelings I bore inside me after finishing this book, but I wrote:
I plunged into The Siege of Burning Grass knowing nothing except that Premee Mohamed wrote it. What more did I need? And yet, it astonished me. A colossal work of fiction and philosophy, Siege is something like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind meets The Things They Carried by way of The Brothers Karamazov. I loved Alefret, Mohamed’s monstrous man of peace, instantly and wholly. I feared for him, I suffered with him, I raged alongside him, all against a backdrop of gorgeous and lonely immensity. I wanted nothing for days but to be reading this book.
Movie I’m determined to watch with my best friend Mir on Thursday even though I should be writing but we haven’t watched a movie together in more than year: Polite Society.
Any of you see it?
You probably knew my October was gonna be a whirl, if you read my last newsletter. And it was. Um. Soooo….
Our Kickstarter for Negocios Infernales funded in less than 12 hours. It’s about 170% funded right now, and it ends on Friday, November 10th, at 10 PM. There’s one stretch goal to go, but honestly, whether or not we reach it, Carlos and I are dizzied, dazzled, and ecstatic. If you’re one of our backers, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
If you’re not YET one of our backers, may I introduce you to Negocios Infernales? There’s always the Kickstarter page, with the goofy home video we made, and lots of graphics.
But there’s also:
this YouTube video on RPG Rundown in which Dave Munger interviews Carlos and me, and we play around with some of the game’s mechanics to GREAT EFFECT!
this interview with Egg Embry on EN World RPG News and Reviews
parts 1 and 2 of the full playthrough of our game with Cassandra Khaw, Brandon O’Brien, Will Sobel, and Anna Russell
One of my favorite things we did in October was our Halloween Infernal Salon! We invited writers, poets, musicians, and even NAIL-WRAP ARTISTS to pull prompts from la Baraja del Destino (“the Deck of Destiny”) and make new art with us on our buddy Greg’s awesome Twitch channel: twitch.tv/arvaneleron! Oh, the glory!
Here’s our amazing cast of artists, with their photos and bios. And here’s the YouTube bounce of our Infernal Salon. Turn it on while washing dishes! Observe how these artists, in just 25 minutes, created brand-new works of art right before our eyes. The geniuses!
I also went to two cons last month. The first was Can*Con. This was special for several reasons. One: I got to take a road trip with my mama. Two: it was our first time back in Ottawa since before the pandemic, and WE LOVE OTTAWA, because… Three: AMAL LIVES THERE.
So that’s where we stayed, with our friends Amal and Stu.
And they took us to a production of Sweeney Todd. My second of the year! I am so lucky! So many meat pies!
And once, when we were supposed to be buying bus tickets, Amal and I snuck away to a consignment shop instead. It was called “Clothes Encounters of a Second Time,” and it had a CAT.
And I got to see Amal and several of her Table of Content mates from The Book of Witches in conversation at Perfect Books on Elgin Street.
And I got to hug her parents, and sister, and nephew. And we got to be on a panel together about BONDS OF SISTERHOOD in fiction, and it was so UNBEARABLY LOVELY I kind of want to cry.
And I met a lot of new people, and talked to some fine old friends. And it was busy and beautiful.
Then I came home, spent a week in the studio narrating an audiobook, like I do for a living—a cozy mystery this time!—and then Carlos and I attended the 2023 World Fantasy Convention.
We ran an Infernal Salon first thing Thursday morning. For pre-con programming, it went super-well! I mean… we had PEOPLE! Everyone participated, and everyone shared! For my prompt, I wrote this spell… I mean… song? I mean… poem? Thing.
We had a wonderful reading on Friday night. I read from Saint Death’s Herald, and Carlos read from his forthcoming short story called “The Boy of La Mancha Rides a Ghost Horse.” Carlos was on a panel about Kickstarters, and I was on a panel of generating narrative from art, which was pretty appropriate given our October Kickstarter project!
And then…
I won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
Now it’s November, friends, and I’m trying to generate the last 50,000 words of my novel Saint Death’s Herald for NaNoWriMo.
I’m trying to keep calm, keep focused, and maintain what my friend Caitlyn Paxson calls “Big Book Energy.” For I have a deadline, and I have a desire, and giving this project anything less than 150% seems, at this point, completely ungrateful. But still. It’s not easy.
I’m glad to be home. Glad to be quiet. Glad to be “gazin’ to the future,” like Rosemary and her penknife in my favorite Bob Dylan song.
Thanks for reading.
Take care of yourselves out there, “times being what they are, hard and getting harder all the time.”
Yours truly,
C. S. E. Cooney
oh man, saint of bright doors was GOOD
I was going to tell you to let me know when you had finished it so I could tell you a joke, but then I realized the joke was about Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances (also GOOD but definitely not the same book)
Yes, "Polite Society" was DA BOMB!
And I am loving the heck out of "Starling House" right now. :)
Take care of YOURself, Claire. We need you.