daily living, feelings and mental health, quick picks, recommendations

he’s an angry bird: “the mad eyes of the heron king,” and other things

ray brantley
words writtenthing(s) enjoyedstuff accomplished
TODAY: 91/277This incredible blackwater aquascape!Mostly managing my mental health!
TOTAL: 19,437/100,000PseudoPod 717: “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. DanskyPacking. Lots, and lots, and lots of packing.
Fell just short of my NaNoWriMo goal last month, but that’s all right. Keep trucking along, as someone somewhere probably said at some point. Right?

Watching the retrograde advance of his erstwhile conversational partner, Leonard did not think, “I could have died.” Nor did he think, “I must be dreaming,” or “That’s impossible,” or even “It talked.”

Rather, he held one thought and one thought only to his feverish mind, and held it close with a secret glee: “It talked to me.”

“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. Dansky

Richard has written a story that’s brimming with a little bit of everything that I love: lush, gorgeous prose; dialogue full of fabulist, atmospheric whimsy; all the dramatic irony of knowing that, while something truly terrible is approaching, the protagonist won’t spot the danger until it’s far too late. And birds. Tall, stately, predatory birds, who know very well who is their equal, and who is prey.

Poor Leonard.

“Fuck all this moving nonsense,” said Jasper sourly with only his eyes.

Literally everything else in my life is up in the air at the moment, and I expect that’s unlikely to change until at least the first week or so of September. Husband and I are spending our last week in our apartment packing up as many of our worldly possessions as we can cram into the cardboard boxes that now compose most of our interior decor. Then next week we close on our condo, and properly move in a few days later. We’re going to be home owners.

I can’t accurately describe how surreal this whole experience is for me, but I will give it a shot.

Six years ago I arrived in this country from Alabama with two cats and only as many personal belongings as I could safely cram into the trunk of my car, in graduate student loan debt to the tune of $70k USD, and unable to afford a place to live in the city of Toronto that would cost me more than $500 CAD/month.

I spent my first winter in an apartment where my roommates and I couldn’t risk running our space heaters at the same time without tripping all the breakers, and my first spring being told by our landlord that we couldn’t use the water for more than five minute increments at a time without risking the integrity of all the pipes in the house. I was miserable. I didn’t know anyone, no one knew me, and there was no way for me to know whether this grad school gamble would pay off–or if I would find myself limping back home two years later. But that didn’t happen, not only because of the support network I managed to create for myself here over the last six years, but because I put in the work to grow those relationships, to succeed at my degree program, and to secure a job that would do the miraculous: let me pay down my debt, and put 20% of each paycheque in savings. Six years later, that figure is half of what it was in 2014.

And, as I discovered recently, I managed to accomplish all of those things with misdiagnosed Celiac’s disease, and ADHD.

Wild, right?

I don’t say all of these things to puff myself up with unearned pride, or to diminish the support I did receive from my father while I was getting my feet under me here in Canada. My dad was, is, and always will be my rock, and he knows it. I say these things because too often I don’t look at the obstacles I surmounted to get to where I am right now, and don’t give myself credit for my successes. I am committed to owning those accomplishments now, even the ones that might look only like partial successes to others–because when you’re going through life like a car trying to speed off in six different with a brick dropped on the accelerator, it is a win to recognize that you’re going no where, and to make the conscious decision to stop. It is a win to ask yourself, “What am I feeling, right now? And what do I need to feel better?” And it’s a triumph to start down the path towards answering either of those questions.

So, for certain values of “describe why buying a condo is so surreal for you right now,” I suppose the rambling words above qualify, right?

daily living, site updates, the creative process, writing

time for a change

ray brantley
Words WrittenThing(s) EnjoyedStuff Accomplished
TODAY:
*sad deflated balloon noise*		PseudoPod Ep. 713: “You Can Stay All Day,” by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)Website redesign + updates. It’s summery! I like it!
TOTAL:
9,753 / 15,000		Cat Rambo‘s Short Story WorkshopSuccessfully administered medication to Mrs. Moo
Trying a new thing here. We’ll see how much I like it later.

(I’m not going to admit to how much time I spent fiddling with that silly table to make it look presentable, so we’ll see if this is a format I stick with going forward in subsequent posts. Anyway.)

During the 5-minute timed writing sessions for Cat Rambo’s Short Story workshop today I jotted down two pieces I rather enjoyed: a hypothetical beginning to a short story set in the same universe as my current project, Companion Animals, and a response to the prompt, “The doll was dead.” I’ve polished them just a hair and so figured I’d drop them here, so that hopefully in a few weeks’ time I can look back on this post and compare my progress.

“The doll was dead.”

The doll was dead.

He found it at the bottom of the ravine, half-drowned under grey water run-off and a discarded soda bottle. The doll’s pale pink dress had discoloured under the malign indifference of the elements. Maybe it wasn’t pink at all. Maybe it had been red, once upon a happier time. He would never know for sure, and didn’t care. It was difficult to care, in that moment, about anything other than the doll’s open, staring eyes, which could not be black plastic buttons held in place by a neat criss-cross stitch of black thread, or beads, or little glass marbles with swirls of too-bright colour for irises, tidily affixed to a face of fabric or porcelain.

They couldn’t be any of those things, because fabric could not bruise, and glass could not bleed.

A Last Defence

Starlight pours through the airlock’s glass porthole and illuminates the crime scene before her torch can catch up. Blood, she thinks, glitters like a scattering of diamonds spilt from some baroness’s upended jewelry box. Viscera is duller, like silverware in need of a polish.

She has an academic knowledge of her shaking hands, like her body feels the fear before her mind does. That is one of many things she does not share in common with the little cat that stands, immutable as gravity, fierce as an entire battalion of Imperial pistoleers, on the opposite side of the airlock door.

The station’s failing bulwark groans when the escape pod door hisses open. She turns to throw herself into it, but not without one last look over her shoulder through the porthole. Her saviour, her last defence against the Emperor’s coterie–so small and brave, and so alone.

daily living, kitten fostering

kitten fostering: my latest adventure

ray brantley

Over the last month and a half, as anyone who follows my dedicated cat-centric account on instagram can probably tell, I’ve taken on some additional responsibilities.

  • Georgie!
  • Thomas!
  • Abigail!

…three of them, actually.

Thomas and Abigail are our current resident foster gremlins, but Georgie was the first to come home with us back in June. The experience of caring for, socializing, and acclimating our entire household to the presence of something so small and precious, and yet so disruptive, was a trial by fire about which I have exactly zero regrets. Managing her care on top of all the other dramatic life changes that are happening behind the scenes here was hard, but not nearly as hard as letting her go early this month. That’s the thing about foster parenting, of course: the goal is always goodbye, but sometimes goodbye happens before we’re ready for it.

Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking. “But Elisabeth, isn’t this supposed to be a speculative fiction writing/review/recommendation blog? What’s with all the cats all of a sudden*?”

My response: listen, it clearly says on the tin that this website suffers from something of an identity crisis, so if we’re all being honest with ourselves here, this post is exactly on brand. Kittens today, NaNoWriMo updates tomorrow, records and information management-inspired free-form poetry on Wednesday–I know what the people want, all right?

*crickets*

Anyway, I said all that to say, as kitten fostering continues to take up a larger part of my time, I want to document some of my missteps, mishaps, and other lessons learned here on this blog, in hopes of helping other fledgling foster parents who might be trawling WordPress reader for support or advice.

So, first piece of advice:

If your vet’s office rings you up and asks you, “So, ready to take on your first foster kitten?” before you’ve had time to order your play pen or other essential kitten containment accoutrements, don’t be an exceedingly obliging Southerner. Say no! Say, “Just give me another day and then I’ll be ready,” because while you can pull a hat trick at the last minute and make do with your mother-in-law’s rejected dog kennel, some towels, and an aluminum lasagna tray as an ad-hoc litter box, you will really, really wish you hadn’t.

Take the time you need to get yourself set up. You’ll be glad that you did, and your new foster baby will be, too.

* I actually grew up involved with greyhound rescue back in Alabama, so this work isn’t entirely new to me. That being said, fostering kittens who need medical care is a much different kettle of fish from looking after fully grown adult dogs who can more or less take care of themselves, so really, I absolutely was in over my head when I started doing this. oops.

writing

camp nanowrimo

ray brantley

I’m participating! Look, I’ve even got a project set up on the official NaNoWriMo website and everything.

A bit annoyed that the embeddable widget option seems to be gone, but that’s not really the point.

I’ve set a modest 20k word count goal for myself for the month, which I think is attainable as long as I make sure not to stress myself out or over do it. After two days, I do believe I’ve determined that I am at my most creatively productive between 8 and 9am, which is when I’ve been writing my 100 word minimum each day for the last month and change anyway.

Please feel free to add me as a writing buddy! I would love to be your cheerleader as you put down words on your passion project.

the creative process, world building, writing

‘companion animals’; progress and an excerpt

ray brantley

First order of business, my accountability to myself: today’s word count target was not just met, but more than doubled! Each week I work on this project, I’m able to produce just a little bit more than I did the week before.

So that’s exciting. And, after sharing the first chapter draft with @amaraqwolf for a bit of external feedback, I feel more comfortable discussing the nature of what I’m working on here with less ambiguity, and providing you with a short excerpt!

Continue reading “‘companion animals’; progress and an excerpt” →
the creative process, writing

on accountability, and a little bit of pride: writerly updates

ray brantley

I finished the first first draft of the first chapter of a novel this morning!

Word count currently sitting at a very modest ~6,500 words, with so very many left to go before the finish line is even in sight, but I think what I am most proud of with this particular accomplishment is how steady and incremental process made it possible.

I decided, a little over a month ago while I was nearing the end of my mental health leave from work, that I would do everything in my power to write just 100 words a day towards a novel. That’s it; 100 words at minimum every day, no matter what, and I would work on making these words appear for just an hour each morning. When that hour was up, or when I hit my word count minimum (whichever came first), I’d close out of Scrivener, put the project aside, and not think about it at all for the next twenty-four hours.

And… I did it.

Non-draft words were research-related earlier in the month. Consistency also not great early on.
…but by June I really had hit my stride, and only missed one day.

I wasn’t 100% consistent; the stats above show that pretty transparently, but what they also demonstrate is a clear commitment to trying again every time I faltered or struggled. Some days (here’s looking at you, May 26 and 27), I just could not get the words to come together the way I wanted them to, and didn’t meet even my minimum required output before my hour was up and I had to call it quits for the day. On other days, as soon as I hit that word count minimum, that was it, I was done, extracting another word out of my brain was akin to pulling teeth, but when I walked away from the project for the day it was nevertheless with a sense of modest accomplishment, that I had kept my word to myself and made progress towards a goal that meant a lot to me.

And then there were days like June 22 and 23: ~800 words! And subsequently, almost 600 words! All accomplished roughly within that hour I set aside for myself in the morning before starting my day job, and many of those words such a delight to write that stopping myself from continuing was nearly as challenging as getting started had been when this process began. But I did stop, and I put the project away again, because this steady, incremental, consistent progress is far better for me than just the occasional day here and there throughout an otherwise creatively barren year where I manage to write a deluge.

All this to say, Self, well done. Good job! I am proud of you, Self, for reclaiming hours from your day to devote to the work that has always been central to your–our–identity. And I am extremely excited to see what we will have to share with the world when June 24, 20201 arrives.

Anyway, enjoy this glorious piece of artwork I commissioned from my talented artist friend, Cami Woodruff, of mine and my husband’s two ragdoll cats, and our temporary foster gremlin, Georgie.

From left to right: our beautiful Mrs. Moo, her dopey son Jasper, and one small ground squirrel in a kitten suit named Georgie. Art by Cami!

some recommended reading

“Late Night at the Low Road Diner,” by my dear friend Frances Rowat, published at Liminal Stories.

daily living, feelings and mental health

gratitude

ray brantley

I got married seven months ago. (Give or take a couple of days, but what is a couple of days in pandemic time anyway?)

“if your man won’t do your wedding makeup for you, is he even worth marrying?” and other extremely queer takes by me. A thousand thanks to Maxwell Giffen for the beautiful photographs.

Prior to the lockdown I made the seemingly inconsequential decision to make my computer desktop background a randomized slideshow of our wedding photos. In retrospect I think I did this a little before Halloween in anticipation of a small family get-together, and figured it would be a nice surprise for my in-laws, who hadn’t seen the polished versions of the photos yet. The slideshow had the desired effect, of course, and everyone enjoyed gushing over the pictures while chatting about how much fun both the ceremony and the reception had been.

(Pro-tip to anyone out there planning a wedding in the somewhat near future: go small. Go to the courthouse. Wear comfortable shoes. You will be handsome/beautiful regardless, and complete strangers will cheer for you. That is a magical experience.)

Anyway, this post isn’t really about my wedding, or my wedding photos. It’s about how now in this time of social and physical distancing, one completely absent-minded decision I made in preparation for a holiday party last October now reminds me daily, hourly, every time I minimize an application or lock my laptop screen, that I am loved by so many people. The people in those photos crossed continents and international borders and, in one instance, even the Atlantic Ocean, out of love for us, for me.

And that love has nourished the shit out me these last three months while I’ve struggled to claw my way up and out of the black pit of despair known as Depression(™).

It’s an ongoing struggle, for the record, and not one that I anticipate definitively ‘defeating’. But I’m going to make time to talk more candidly about my experiences here because the instinct to play one’s cards so closely to one’s chest when depressed is precisely the opposite of what one needs to do to heal.

recommendations

recommendation: “new model astronauts,” by alasdair stuart

ray brantley

This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid . If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Five years ago, I wrote a piece about Interstellar and the death of the astronaut myth. […]

New Model Astronauts — The Man of Words

Presented without additional commentary because when it comes to Alasdair’s writing, it truthfully doesn’t require any.

I somehow managed to miss this post about the evolution of the astronaut mythos in book and film when it was originally posted last month, but for all NASA kids who grew up in the shadow of the Saturn V, the Marshall Spaceflight Center, who know their grandparents laid hands on the science that got us to the stars, it’s required reading.

quick picks, recommendations

just my two cents: “vincent’s penny,” by chris barnham

ray brantley

(see what I did there? /finger guns)

Listen at Podcastle 628: Vincent’s Penny, May 26, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.

“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”

“Why would we do that?”

“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”

The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.

The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room.

I know I will never leave this place.

famous last words

Anyway, in summary:

What’s it about?
Sebastian is a boy plucked from a life of poverty and abuse by Vincent, a mysterious and powerful stranger, and is groomed for the sort of greatness that powerful men seek to pass on to their proteges. (Greatness in this context comes in such exciting flavours as ‘murder with impunity,’ ‘body-snatching,’ and ‘immortality.’) Over the centuries, Sebastian reaps the rewards of being within Vincent’s inner circle, but cannot escape his own conscience. A confrontation as well as a reckoning is inevitable.

What’s so good about it?
You know what “they” say about bad pennies, but what is Chris Barnham saying about them? Possibly that there’s more than one, and whether or not that penny is ‘bad’ or or ‘good’ or bound to turn up again is entirely up to the reader. Sebastian is the lens through which we experience both the horror of a child’s abuse by his father, his serendipitous rescue by a stranger, and his gradual transformation into a man with more in common with his monstrous mentor than he is prepared to admit to himself.

I enjoy any story that makes me struggle to find an appropriate genre label for it. This one spans genres, being equal parts historical fiction and fantasy (hence its appearance on PodCastle), but I’d stretch it further and categorize it as a piece of horror fiction, too. The horror is slow to approach, and subtly written, but it will slam into you like a freight train if you pick the story up for a second time and re-read it from the beginning.

Where can I find it?
You can find the full text of “Vincent’s Penny” over here at PodCastle, and I would strongly recommend reading along with the story as you listen to Matt Dovey’s A+ narration. It’s well worth your time.

Happy listening!

constructive deconstruction, recommendations

along came a literary device: ‘a guest for mr. spider’ and the magnus archives, part 1

ray brantley 
Some spiders sneak when stealth is moot, 
Slipping into unsuspecting boot, 
Settling in without a care, 
Comfort found in sweaty lair

Post-it Poetry – Spider Sense — Dim But Bright Poetry

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please be mindful that, while episode 81 of the Magnus Archives, “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” is the focus of this article, I may reference specific events or information from later episodes in passing. This is not a spoiler-free zone, apologies!

I will gamely admit that I currently view all creative works I encounter through a Magnus Archives conversion lens, as I’ve spent the last three months thoroughly marinating myself in all existing episodes and as much sweet, sweet fan-created content as I can get my greedy little hands on.[1] My obsession also means that I’m spotting connections and parallels to the show’s motifs everywhere, including innocent bystander blog posts that turn up on WordPress Reader. Which is where I spotted Dim But Bright Poetry‘s charmingly illustrated “Spider Sense,” now featured at the top of this post. Almost immediately after reading it I thought of “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” and could not stop thinking about it.

A quick note before I get started: spiders in the Magnusverse serve several specific narrative functions, and I have every intention of giving discussing these functions and plotty labyrinths in more detail at a later date–but, I’m not going to get into them in detail today. Today I just want to write about spiders, I guess.

Just a friendly drawing of a friendly arachnid who means you no harm at all, probably.
Art by lunarsmith on DeviantArt

Is there enough collective cultural knowledge behind the verse, “along came a spider,” to transform it into a literary conceit? I think there must be, otherwise spiders and their webs and the sorts of spidery characters who crouch at their centres–or find themselves tangled up within them–wouldn’t be such a mainstay of literature. Specifically children’s literature, where the spider as a character is nearly always sly and clever and unambiguously up to no good, and therefore a reliable source of dramatic tension in a story or poem. When the spider comes along in a children’s tale, its arrival signals to a young reader that someone in the story is in danger, whether that someone is Mary Howitt’s Fly or, as is probably the case in “Spider Sense,” some unknown person’s socked foot. (Or the spider itself. One small spider vs. one large foot? Odds aren’t looking good for you, little spider.)

This brings us to The Magnus Archives, an audio drama horror podcast produced by The Rusty Quill that is intended for older audiences and so lacks on its surface anything to do with children’s literature. But Episode 81 is transparently about childhood, grounded in the recollection of narrator and central protagonist Jonathan Sims’ childhood trauma as he records his statement for the Magnus Institute.[2]

The object at the centre of his trauma is a book–a children’s book, at first blush–called “A Guest for Mr. Spider.” And this book, more than any of the other nightmarish tomes in the series–which are all capable of scarring minds, ruining lives, and dispensing horror after horror upon anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon one–is the one book that feels the most fundamentally evil to me as a listener. I suspect it feels that way because it is the only one whose very design preys upon the trust of children and their engagement with stories.

Continue reading “along came a literary device: ‘a guest for mr. spider’ and the magnus archives, part 1” →