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Author: C.S.E. Cooney

C.S.E. Cooney's fiction and poetry can be found in Apex, Subterranean, Strange Horizons, Clockwork Phoenix 3, Ideomancer, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium. She has novellas forthcoming with Papaveria Press, Drollerie Press, and Black Gate Magazine. She keeps a blog at http://csecooney.livejournal.com/.
Sharon Shinn’s Royal Airs: A Review

Sharon Shinn’s Royal Airs: A Review

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BGRAFirst of all, I love getting snail mail. Postcards are great, letters are better — but best of all is a lumpy Manila package with something mysterious inside of it.

But when I came home to see my mailbox was stuffed full of a Manila envelope from Sharon Shinn, there was no mystery.

There was only a short squeal and a jig. I knew what awaited me. I bounded up the stairs to the third floor, reciting all the while:

“Her book! Her book! Her newest book!!!”

Because Sharon? Rocks.

(I mean, I thought she rocked long before I met her, but after John O’Neill introduced us at one of those World Fantasy breakfasts where you can’t believe you’re eating pancakes with a woman whose books you devour regularly, she rocked about a thousand times more.)

Royal Airs is the second in the “Elemental Blessings” series, which take place in the Kingdom of Chialto. It’s an exciting time in this secondary world, with “smoker cars” taking over for horse-drawn carriages, the blushing dawn of flying machines, alliances forming and falling apart with realms across the mountains and seas, the delicate balance of power between the regent, the primes of the Five Houses, and the heirs to the throne.

All of this and magic too!

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Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

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Herein we have Black Gate (or at least MOI, in my guise as doughty avatar) interviewing the inimitable Julia Rios, one of the editors for an upcoming YA fantasy anthology called Kaleidoscope.

Julia is straight-up The Right Stuff, in the humble opinion of this blogger, and everything she touches has a tendency to turn to rainbows.

I’m a product of the early eighties.

I like rainbows.

I am very excited for this anthology.

JuliaRiosBG: What is Kaleidoscope and how did the project come about?

Kaleidoscope is an anthology of diverse YA contemporary fantasy stories. I’m co-editing it with Alisa Krasnostein, the publisher at Twelfth Planet Press in Australia. Right now, we’re having a fundraiser on Pozible so we can afford to make the book and pay our authors the SFWA professional rate of $0.05 per word.

As for how this started, Kaleidoscope is a project born of podcasts! I host the Outer Alliance Podcast, which celebrates QUILTBAG content in SF/F. Alisa, my co-editor, is one of the members of Galactic Suburbia, which is an Australian feminist SF podcast. I love Galactic Suburbia, and apparently I’m not the only one, because they’ve racked up *two* Hugo nominations.

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Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

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Baalhu_by_navateI think I first saw Lauren K. Cannon’s art at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, 2011. John O’Neill and I were brainstorming about cover art for Mike Allen’s book and the moment I saw Cannon’s work, I was riveted.

I took home one of her postcards. It’s still pinned up by my writing desk, where I can watch the woman in her bird-skull headdress, kneeling by a bone-embedded riverbed and feeding her creepy little bird friends from bowls of blood.

I love that bird woman. I’d love to write about her, this Baalhu of the Ancients. But even when I didn’t know her name, I adored the bones of her. That’s what Cannon’s art does to me: catapults me from the quotidian into INSTANT STORYBRAIN.

By and by, John bought “Black Bride” to be the cover art for Mike Allen’s Black Fire Concerto. You should have heard the squeals of ecstatic (and perhaps mildly terrified) joy coming from my corner of Rhode Island. John didn’t even need a cell phone, probably. He could’ve just stepped out into his driveway somewhere in Suburbia, Illinois and heard the echoes. I couldn’t have been happier.

And then, as I began this series of Fantasy and the Arts Interviews (1 and 2 here and here), I knew immediately I wanted to interview her.

Cannon very graciously agreed to answer my questions in an email, and here I have them for you, dear Black Gate readers.

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Something Wicked This Way Comes: Michael D. Langois and Flock Theatre’s Halloween ’13 Macbeth

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Michael D. Langois and Flock Theatre’s Halloween ’13 Macbeth

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BGMacBanWitDear Black Gate Readers,

I must confess.

I confess that I’m not sure I believe in confession, despite a semi-confessional blog style.

I confess that I don’t even really believe in Full Disclosure on blogs. I mean, they’re BLOGS. Whaddya need disclosure for? Come on!

But here I am, about to disclose.

Supposedly there is a chance I might feel guilty if I let you read this entirely fabulous interview all the way through and didn’t tell you that WAY BEFORE (like two whole weeks before) I ever interviewed Michael D. Langois, director of this year’s production of Flock Theatre‘s Macbeth, I also auditioned for the man.

Yea, even auditioned for THIS VERY PRODUCTION! GASP!

So what aren’t you going to get in this interview, dear Black Gaters?

You aren’t going to get a cool, calm, collected, impartial, disinterested, “Oh, so you’re doing Macbeth? How nice! Tell me about the play and its DARK MAGIC!” sort of interview-blog-article-thing.

(In fact, such an attitude would go against my aesthetic intentions for this “Fantasy and the Arts” series of interviews I’m doing.)

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Haunt the House: The Music and Art of Will Houlihan

Haunt the House: The Music and Art of Will Houlihan

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BGTentacleBalloon
I covet this tentacle-zeppelin. Will says it’s not for sale, but I’m determined to get a print. Somehow. I mean, not only for myself. I can think of at least three people who ought to have a copy hanging up in their living rooms.

Sometimes on rainy days, Westerly, Rhode Island reminds me of Stephen King’s fictional town of Derry, Maine.

You get that eerie sensation that there might be balloons in the sewer, blood in the bathtub, voices down the drain. And it is oddly full of musicians.

(Not that Derry was full of musicians; Derry’s claim to fame seems to be precocious preteens.)

That was one of the first things I noticed when I moved here. You can’t walk a block but you stub your toe on a musician.

Sometimes they travel in clumps.

There are as many singer-songwriters here as there are policemen. And there are a lot of policemen. Possibly because of all the musicians.

Anyway, one of my favorite musicians, almost since I moved here, is Haunt the House.

Is it still a musician if it is both a person and a band? Singer-songwriter Will Houlihan is both, and a visual artist besides. He is Haunt the House. He and his guitar and his harmonica and his words. Not to mention his doodles.

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Readercon 24: “A Most Readerconnish Miscellany”

Readercon 24: “A Most Readerconnish Miscellany”

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BGClaire
Yours Truly, C.S.E. Cooney

First of all…

HALLOOOOO Black Gate Readers!

I don’t even know if you remember me; it’s been so long, and I think there are probably a lot more of you now. Anyway, I’m C.S.E. Cooney, and I’m a writer, and sometimes I blog here, and today is one of those days.

So, hi. Again.

This last weekend, I attended Readercon 24, as participant and performer. This year, instead of signing up for ALL THE SCARILY CLEVER PANELS that I’m mostly unsuited for, I signed up to perform stuff.

BGBanjo
Caitlyn Paxson, Jacqueline of All Trades

Because I like performing.

Performing’s cool.

And since performing is so cool, why, Caitlyn Paxson (another writer, also a storyteller, also a harpist and banjo-player, also the Artistic Director of the Ottawa Storytellers and All-Around Belle Dame Sans Merci, only, like, Avec Merci) and I proposed to teach a workshop at Readercon called “From Page to Stage: Adapting Your Text for Performance.”

But I get ahead of myself.

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Arisia 2013

Arisia 2013

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Our stalwart audience. The Puffin is named Edgar, apparently. "A very good listener," says his buddy, Justine Graykin.
Our stalwart audience. The Puffin is named Edgar, apparently. “A very good listener,” says his buddy, Justine Graykin.

SATURDAY: 11:48 AM

This morning in the Green Room, as I nibbled at my pastry or bagel or whatever, mourning my lack of PG Tips with the bleary lamentations of a woman who has experienced the Awfulness of Dawn to commute in for an 8:30 AM panel about Discworld, I overheard one fellow say to another over the cream cheese, “In my world, I run the Federation.”

Ah.

I must be at a Science Fiction convention.

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World Fantasy 2012: Neither Hurricane, SuperStorm, Sleet, nor Hail Can Daunt Our Heroine If She Wears Enough Chain Mail…

World Fantasy 2012: Neither Hurricane, SuperStorm, Sleet, nor Hail Can Daunt Our Heroine If She Wears Enough Chain Mail…

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bgruby-slippers
My ruby slippers by hurricane candlelight. Sigh.

Well, as Rabbie Burns would say, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

I had all these wonderful, these glorious, these SUPREME plans to fly from Rhode Island to Chicago on Monday, October 29th, 2012 and spend a few days there among folks I hadn’t seen since I moved last November.

But a little storm named Sandy had other ideas. Oh, I won’t go into the details. They’re not gory enough; besides, it would sound like I’m complaining.

And really, I spent a very pleasant Monday in my attic apartment — which trembled — looking out the windows at sideways trees, contemplating putting on my ruby slippers in case the house fell on me, writing romantic letters by candlelight and reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass. So that was all right.

bgromantic-desk1
My desk. Where I wrote romantic hurricane letters.

But fly to Chicago? See family? Spend Halloween among friends, with soup and bonfire and creepy literature? Drive in caravan to Toronto(ish area) where the World Fantasy Convention was located?

CAPTAIN, IT’S A NO-GO. Halloween has been canceled, repeat, Halloween has been canceled.

However, my story does not end with the storm. No, it is just beginning.

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Goblin Secrets, A Review

Goblin Secrets, A Review

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bggobsecGoblin Secrets
 William Alexander
Margaret K. McElderry Books (240 pages, $16.99, Hardcover 2012)
Reviewed by C.S.E. Cooney

After reading this article about the decay of criticism in online book culture and the rise of the “cult of admiration,” I’m feeling a little furtive, a little tender, when I first sit down to write about things I like. Ashamed of, I dunno, “enthusing.”

I mean, look at that word. “Enthuse.” It’s just soggy with connotation. To enthuse is to be ridiculous, unsophisticated, bumptious even — and don’t I wish my brains to be a whirl of razorblades, that my words might be bright like blood on snow?

That said, alas, I can never sufficiently motivate myself to write about things I dislike. The energy it takes to be snarky! And then, to be cleverly snarky! Things I perceive as stupid sap me of that energy. In fact, stupid things fade so fast from my mind, it’s almost like a magical amnesia, like I was wand-bopped by some Fairy of Forgetting on my Naming Day and doomed to be as unlike Addison DeWitt as a self-styled critic may be.

This forgetting may be a kind of criticism in itself, but it’s not the public, in your face(book), post-to-the-Zeitgeist kind. It is personal. It is not at all useful to society in the ways certain negative reviews can be. (For the interested, author James Enge listed a few services negative reviews may provide, in a recent blog:

Negative reviews provide a public health service: some books, or elements in some books, constitute hazards that the public has a right to be warned about… [They also can be] useful autopsies of failure. Sometimes you can figure out how fiction works by examining a fiction that doesn’t work.

The point of all this — the POINT, my friends and fellow readers — is… that I, um, loved Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander.

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Snarky Female Protagonists and Why I Read Them

Snarky Female Protagonists and Why I Read Them

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junoDear Black Gate readers,

I don’t even remember what my last post was. Mea culpa, mea culpa; I was moving across the country, I was getting a job with some Beluga whales, I was joining a writing group,  I was traveling to places I’d never been before, I was reading other people’s fledgling novels and trying to come up with some kind — any kind! — of useful crit for them, I was writing up a storm.

(Several storms. Big magical brouhahas*, with silver clouds and dark lightning and dead swans and such.)

Woe is me, these things are hard, man! But enough of this moaning and groaning. I’m back now, see?  And I’ve been reading.

You know that thing that happens when suddenly you realize how busy you’ve been because you haven’t picked up a book for the sheer pleasure of reading in a while? There are many joys in reading other people’s early drafts of things that are going to turn into magnificently faboosh final drafts, but one of the downers is that when I’m doing that, I feel guilty reading anything for fun. And I’m a fast reader; I’m just a slow dang beta-reader.

However! Last week, I found myself at the Westerly Public Library, a place of golden beauty and polished staircases, browsing. Browsing, I tell you! Do you know how that felt?

Novel.

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