She talks to wolves...

I need a new planner. This planner is exceedingly necessary to schedule work, school, and the copious number of projects I never seem to make any headway on because I stare at how many there are and get stuck that way. Stare. Stare. The proverbial deer in headlights.

Anyway, when I do manage to snag a new planner, one of the first dates going in there is SEPTEMBER 1st, 2009. I will probably draw a little doodle, such as a jack-o-lantern or a wee flying fairy. Or maybe a consternated cat. It might even have thorns rather than fur.

Why?

I'll tell you why (or, rather, Seanan McGuire will):



(Psst, you can pre-order Rosemary and Rue at Amazon.com or your local bookstore. See Seanan McGuire on the Internet at her website.)

Also, I made an icon, because I just really can't seem to control myself:

Way back when (where the value of when equals March 4th, 2008), the talented Mia Nutick debuted the amazing new chimera_fancies: pendants of various sizes, painted in gorgeous and sometimes glittering colors, featuring tiny poems constructed from the printed pages of old books. It was recycled creativity at its finest and the poem-pendants she crafted were nothing less than revelatory.

I was lucky enough to land one of the most beautiful early examples of her art: the black and red-glittering flower-kissed pendant that proclaims "wicked girls saving ourselves." Yet even though Wicked Girls came to live only with me, its influence has been vast.

On May 9th, 2008, seanan_mcguire wrote a song inspired by the poem-pendant, entitled, naturally enough, "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." It is, in a word, amazing, and you don't have to take my word for it. You can listen to a recording here or even watch a video of her performing it live at Duckon 2009 with Vixy & Tony and S.J. Tucker! (Seriously, listen. You need to, even if you don't know that you do.)

The concept of wicked girls saving themselves is one that's very inspiring to me and close to my heart (and I don't just mean when I'm wearing the pendant, hah). For all intents and purposes, I've been a wicked girl for most of my life and definitely had to save myself a time or two. Poem-pendants and beautiful songs that encourage this behavior simply enrich my life. I dare say that's true for more girls than me.

Seanan recently engaged in penning some apocryphal verses to her song, because she's crazy and always plays the best party games. As she says in the title of that post, the world is in need of wicked girls. That sparked something inside me and so an icon meme was born. And so, for your pleasure, I present to you the birth of a new line of "Wicked Girls" icons, starring some of my favorite wicked girls:




( There are seven more behind the cut! )

In order, this particular run of Wicked Girls icons stars: Toby Daye (from Seanan McGuire's forthcoming Rosemary and Rue!), Ofelia from Pan's Labyrinth, Coraline from Neil Gaiman's Coraline, Emma Frost of X-Men fame, Alice from Resident Evil, Elizabeth from Pirates of the Caribbean, Elphaba from Wicked, Flying Snow from Hero, September from The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and Sorrow from The Orphan's Tales (the latter two being by Catherynne M. Valente, of course).

Comments are keen! If you use, feel free to credit talkstowolves. And I am totally open to requests!

About a month ago, Kyle Cassidy (photographer extraordinaire) put out a call for participants in a top secret photography project. Seeing as how I dabble in photography and leap at any excuse to do photography-based expeditions, I leapt then to volunteer. Once some twenty-odd of us had enthusiastically responded and assembled, he revealed the mechanics of this project. The gist was this:

On June 11th I was looking at some photographs by [insert name of a famous photographer who I won't name but you can probably figure out] thinking Did he really mean to take this photo? Does this guy's camera go off at random? and I started wondering what the photos would be like if someone just carried around a camera that captured an image at random. And of course, I then thought why not find out?

For two days, we all carried our cameras around with us everywhere: they perched on our bedside tables, hung around our wrists, weighed down our necks, nestled in the tops of our purses. We anticipated the vibe of a text message or the custom ringtone set up to mean: "NOW! Now, my friends! CLICKENZEE!!!"

And we did: we clicked, we took a picture of whatever was in front of us at the time. We took pictures of walls, of ceilings, of the floor. We took pictures of hummingbirds, orchid shadows, and blurring greenery as we sailed down curving highways. We took pictures of washing machines and vacuum cleaners and empty carts clustered at the grocery store. We took pictures of husbands and ex-girlfriends and grandmothers. We took pictures of no one at all.

Apart, our photos are nothing: random moments without context. But together, they are the Hive; together, they are a bee-eyed gaze at our world in all its multi-faceted mundanity and glory.

We hope you enjoy:



Read Kyle's unveiling post and join in the discussion there, if you please!

This meme has been making the rounds on my reading page, lately seen on matociquala, catvalente, and seanan_mcguire. I thought this was a good excuse to tour my documents of works that can technically be deemed "in progress." The results are mildly embarrassing!


Long fiction.

"The brutality of our predecessors - soon to be our ancestors as the wheel turns - always came with a great price." - The Book of Aqualis.

"Imagine a house." - Elsebeing.

"The blood would never wash away." - Godkiller.

"My name is Hanayoru." - Passion.

"I finally rose from the valley of Death, because I was called." - Reascension.

Short fiction.

"Once upon a time, there was a weaver girl." - "A Bridge of Wings."

"The birdmaker lived in a glass aerie near the sea, and she lived all alone." - "Birdmaker."

"She was the gatekeeper to sanctuary. No one had yet passed her alive; well, some had." - "Burier."

"Marion opened the heavy door onto a cold November night." - "Child of Midnight."

"There was once a man who couldn’t walk about in any skin but the one he had." - "Coyote Skins."

"Mother of... Carin could think of no suitable epithet as she stared upon the heart of Eronleigh, the city of Close-Blooming Flowers." - "Heartwood."

"Do you know what it is to crave violence against yourself?" - "Stillness of the Soul."

"He said we would be superheroes." - "Superheroes."

"The Ladies Tea and Illuminated Mapmaking Society did not actually succeed in taking tea each time they assembled, nor indeed did they ever sell any significant number of the maps their members were presumably so respected for rendering and illuminating." -Untitled Ladies Tea and Illuminated Mapmaking Society story.

"With her throat cut, she found it difficult to speak; she managed." - Untitled urban minotaur story.

"She dragged herself from the receding sea, pearlescent nails scrabbling for purchase against the scree of the shore." - "Wages."

"The dancer dances, and she dances all alone." - "When Death Dances."


What this says to me is that I need to finish some stories. Egad.

P.S. Can anyone else tell how deeply Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn is worked into my consciousness from a couple of these?

Thanks to jolantru, I discovered tonight that Crossed Genres is in the midst of voting for their flash fiction competition. Being a fan of "fantasy and science fiction with a twist," I couldn't help immediately kicking back and checking out the ten finalists.

I'm more than glad I did: there are a couple of emotional and several amusing pieces here. I hope you'll go and discover them for yourself! And, as I don't want to affect your voting, I'll put my commentary on several of the stories behind a cut.

( Read more... )

P.S. Voting is open until 11:59 PM US Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, June 30th. Don't forget to vote if you check it out!



Originally posted at Livejournal. You can comment here or there.

I recently realized (thanks, ironed_orchid!) that I've been terribly remiss in keeping talkstowolves updated. You see, when Dreamwidth entered opened beta, I was posting here first and using their handy crossposting feature to update Livejournal. Except then I realized that all of the links were geared to Dreamwidth, when I really rather wanted to keep the links and usernames specific to each site: e.g., I want my Livejournal posts linking to other Livejournal posts and my LJ user tags hooking up to the Livejournals and not to the Dreamwidths of those users. Especially since, crossposting from Dreamwidth, Dreamwidth converts your LJ user tags into DW user tags whether that user exists or not. It was messy and complicated and I really just didn't like it.

I've discovered that I'm really a Livejournal user by default, at heart.

So I've decided to make this DW my mirror from LJ, which means I need to get better about remembering to manually crosspost everything. I'm also going to let all the post-specific links here just link back to the original posts on Livejournal.

That said, I've today gone back and crossposted a month's worth of posts: so if you're interested to see what you've been missing (and you don't already read my Livejournal), check it out!

First, seanan_mcguire is giving away another ARC of Rosemary and Rue for the price of one comment. If you're a fan of urban fantasy, detective stories, fairy tales, or bad-ass Fae... you want to read this book! Comment here for a chance to win. Check out her website to learn more about the series.

Secondly, ysabetwordsmith has put up an interesting poll on cyberfunded/crowdfunded fiction, asking questions about what creators prefer to create and what consumers prefer to consume. If you engage in crowdfunded projects or read them (such as haikujaguar's Spots the Space Marine series or catvalente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making), please do participate in the poll!

Which reminds me: If you like young adult fiction, especially such excellent fare as Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan... you should really check out the following serialized novel:


Follow September into Fairyland:
Livejournal | Facebook
Updates every Monday!

Kaylee is now part of the Infinite Cat Project! She even gets a Firefly-specific caption on her post; isn't that sweet?



Congratulations to Kaylee! And thanks to Mike. (Also thanks to my husband, Andy, who suggested bringing up the Infinite Cat Project when Kaylee was so happily looking at pictures of herself and Tiger Jack on the computer a moment before.)

Now, if only we could get a picture of Tiger Jack looking at the picture of Kaylee looking at the Infinite Cat Project...

Hello. My name is Deborah and I am an icon addict. Especially when I'm sick and find playing around with images in Photoshop to be low-key and soothing.

So, here you have them: a slew of icons inspired by catvalente's upcoming serialized novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Are you excited to see it spin out? You should be.

Previews:



( On to the rest of the icons! )


If you like them, do let me know! Comments make this sick-frazzled girl happy. Also, if you choose to use them, you can credit talkstowolves. Enjoy!

Oh, and if you fancy an icon with a different phrase, do let me know. I'll take requests.

( We also have a banner and buttons! )

( Leopard of Little Breezes icons here! )

Andy and I moved to Atlanta almost a year ago now, on August 15, 2008. We actually moved to Kennesaw, a fantastic community about thirty minutes to the northwest of downtown Atlanta, depending on the traffic. And even though we've been here almost ten full months, we haven't actually made it a home yet.

In my Atlanta icon featured on this post, I quote Seanan McGuire's song "This Is My Town," saying, "I walk these streets as a stranger." This is utterly apt. I haven't done much exploring of Atlanta beyond knowing how to get to my university and finding a salon (which incidentally has a Whole Foods and a Cheesecake Factory nearby, two other locations that I am moderately familiar with). Andy hasn't done any exploring of Atlanta at all.

Why is that? How have we lived in a place for nearly a year and not attained more of a familiarity with our city? When we moved, we moved without jobs. I was beginning my first semester of graduate school a mere three days after our move-in date. Andy was comfortable in his experience as a history teacher and in the news we'd repeatedly heard, that Georgia was desperately looking for new teachers. We were looking into a bright future.

Within a month of our moving here, the economy fell apart. The promising university job that Andy had lined up disappeared as the order for a hiring freeze came down the line while they were still processing his background check. Suddenly, jobs were scarce and growing scarcer. I was buried in one of the hardest semesters I hope I ever have to face and so couldn't find a job, and Andy's striving came to naught.

So, yes, for nearly a year now we've been living as conservatively as we could. We don't have the funds to go out, nor did we really have the time when I was taking classes. On some level, I know that I've also been hesitant to embrace our surroundings: afraid to really allow myself to love this place, to experience it fully as a home, terrified that it'd be taken from me by this horrid economy and job market.

This is a totally counter-productive way to live, meaning that you don't actually live at all. You survive. You move through the days in tension and caution.

Well, as my friend Bellee might say: fuck a bunch of that.

On Monday, I decided to get my library card. As part of that living conservatively deal, I don't have a large enough book fund to really keep me happy. Besides, I have many fond memories of trawling through the library for treasures as a kid, discovering some excellent books I might otherwise not have been exposed to (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire when I was 14, for one!). Since you have to live in this county to have free access to its libraries, getting my library card seemed like a good way to plant the first flag and declare "This is my home!"

I'm so glad that I did. The library actually didn't end up having any of the books I was looking for and was a tiny bit disappointingly dingy, but that's okay! I have seventeen libraries at my disposal now! I can search their card catalogue online! The library building itself was gorgeous and huge!



And, best of all, I had to get there by driving through downtown Marietta.

The only parts of Marietta that we'd been exposed to so far were rather rundown and not actually places you'd want to hang about in. I wondered why I'd heard such good things about the town, why Alton Brown chose to make it his home over Kennesaw. Well, let me tell you-- now I know!

Downtown Marietta is lovely. Full of pedestrians, older architecture, clean and pictureseque storefronts, tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants. It was the type of downtown that made me long to ditch my car, leap out onto the sidewalk, and just ramble. It was a tiny balm to my soul made slightly raw by the absence of Tokyo.

I didn't have a chance to explore it on Monday and Andy and I don't have the funds to enjoy it properly. However, we will be returning there. We will embrace it and explore.