The Large Amorphous Manuscript

Occasionally, I weep elsewhere about the Large Amorphous Manuscript. It is not a novel. It is, perhaps, an outline that is twice the length of what the final story should be. It is a tangled mass of threads, the back of an embroidery, knotted and tangled. And yet there are some shining colours there, in a dozen sentences of describing trees one will stand waving its branches. It is a dense, rough sketch which must be refined, have its composition straightened out, details lost and added, lines inked darker or faded out, textures flooded in.

Illustration is easier.

Sometimes I draw plot points.

 

“Kindling” in Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror

I’ve had a few weeks of coming over all writerly, and some of the latest news is that my short steampunk-ish story “Kindling” (which I wrote about here and here), originally published in Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear from Peggy Bright Books, has been selected to appear in the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2012, to be published by Ticonderoga Publications in June 2013. So I’m celebrating it with this little steampunk fairytale picture.

In quite a cool little twist, I also illustrated the original publication of Faith Mudge’s “Oracle’s Tower”, and although the art won’t be in this book, I will exercise the illustrator’s prerogative to bask in a little reflected glory.

It is part of the following amazing line-up (with beautiful cover art by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich):

• Joanne Anderton, “Tied To The Waste”, Tales Of Talisman
• R.J. Astruc, “The Cook of Pearl House, A Malay Sailor by the Name of Maurice”, Dark Edifice 2
• Lee Battersby, “Comfort Ghost”, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 56
• Alan Baxter, “Tiny Lives”, Daily Science Fiction
• Jenny Blackford, “A Moveable Feast”, Bloodstones
• Eddy Burger, “The Witch’s Wardrobe”, Dark Edifice 3
• Isobelle Carmody, “The Stone Witch”, Under My Hat
• Jay Caselberg, “Beautiful”, The Washington Pastime
• Stephen Dedman, “The Fall”, Exotic Gothic 4, Postscripts
• Felicity Dowker, “To Wish On A Clockwork Heart”, Bread And Circuses
• Terry Dowling, “Nightside Eye”, Cemetary Dance
• Tom Dullemond, “Population Management”, Danse Macabre
• Thoraiya Dyer, “Sleeping Beauty”, Epilogue
• Will Elliot, “Hungry Man”, The One That Got Away
  
• Jason Fischer, “Pigroot Flat”, Midnight Echo 8
• Dirk Flinthart, “The Bull In Winter”, Bloodstones
• Lisa L. Hannett, “Sweet Subtleties”, Clarkesworld
• Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, “Bella Beaufort Goes To War”, Midnight And Moonshine
• Narrelle M. Harris, “Stalemate”, Showtime
• Kathleen Jennings, “Kindling”, Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear
• Gary Kemble, “Saturday Night at the Milkbar”, Midnight Echo 7
• Margo Lanagan, “Crow And Caper, Caper And Crow”, Under My Hat
• Martin Livings, “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet”, Living With The Dead
• Penelope Love, “A Small Bad Thing”, Bloodstones
• Andrew J. McKiernan, “Torch Song”, From Stage Door Shadows
• Karen Maric, “Anvil Of The Sun”, Aurealis
• Faith Mudge, “Oracle’s Tower”, To Spin A Darker Stair
• Nicole Murphy, “The Black Star Killer”, Damnation And Dames
• Jason Nahrung, “The Last Boat To Eden”, Surviving The End
• Tansy Rayner Roberts, “What Books Survive”, Epilogue
• Angela Slatter, “Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”, This Is Horror Webzine
• Anna Tambour, “The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard Of Lovecraft”, Lovecraft Zine
• Kyla Ward, “The Loquacious Cadaver”, The Lion And The Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables
• Kaaron Warren, “River Of Memory”, Zombies Vs. Robots

 

One Small Step Anthology – Ella and the Flame

Sable jumped to her feet. “Let me be the dragon!” she cried. “Look!” And she cast great shadows with her arms so that they looked like jaws.

“It looks like a dog!” exclaimed Ella, scornful.

“It’s a wolf-dragon,” said Sable. “Go on!”

Outside, there was a roar of voices, and then a hissing, a whispering.

“Go on!” said Anne urgently. “A great dragon?”

“No, three dragons!” revised Ella, suddenly gleeful… So Anne cast a demure dragon upon the wall, and Mary a reluctant one, and Sable moved her sleeves against the light like beating wings…

I do sometimes write stories - the sort that have lots of words in them and no pictures at all! So (because I can’t help myself) here, above, is a page of my notebook with some scribblings for my little story “Ella and the Flame”, which is not quite so pleasant as these selections from it appear. It is in Fablecroft’s latest anthology, One Small Step, which is now available to order and will be launched at Conflux in Canberra on Friday 26 April.

It is also available in a giveaway on GoodReads (open until 20 April).

The anthology has a striking table of contents, including a foreword by Marianne de Pierres and stories by Joanne Anderton & Rabia Gale, Deborah Biancotti, Jodi Cleghorn, Rowena Cory Daniells, Thoraiya Dyer, Kate Gordon, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter, Penelope Love, Michelle Marquardt, DK Mok, Faith Mudge, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Barbara Robson, Cat Sparks, Suzanne J Willis (and me).

 

The Invisible Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for H G Wells’ The Invisible Man, the only Wells I have read the whole way through (made it up on Verne).

In related news, apparently Tesla invented the Daleks, as well as everything else.

In other news:  Sue Bursztynski has been hosting a series of excellent behind-the-scenes posts on the stories in Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear. They aren’t tagged, but they start on 30 June, and you can work forward from there. It’s a sort of director’s commentary, with input from the authors and both the editors, and I’ve loved reading them! The post on my story, “Kindling”, is here, and has pictures: Kathleen Jennings Kindles

 

Illustration Friday: Heights

I drew these on Saturday, as a warm-up exercise before starting on other work, and now it is… Thursday? Who let that happen? Anyway, this is a series of drawings from/for/related to a little airship story of which more may be heard one day. Pen and ink with digital shading. The single shade is due to having the other work to finish, but fits with what I have been trying to do with the story, which is to write a story that ought to be steampunk but feels more blue-and-white than bronze-and-copper. I am not sure whether the story succeeds, but the drawing does. It is very late on Thursday, and that is as deep an analysis as I am capable of.

 

Exploding Mice! (or: new story for publication)

Late in 2011, editors Edwina Harvey and Simon Petrie invited a number of people to write stories for their new anthology Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear (due from Peggy Bright Books in June 2012). The title was intriguing, and the topic was elaborated as follows:

“Nothing happens without some initial impetus or spark. But it’s also impossible to predict exactly what will happen once that spark is struck, that match lit. Will the rocket shoot skywards? Will the dragon shoot flames from its mouth if provoked by one more jab from the rusty sword? Will the fireworks display appease, or at least distract, the ruthless, jaded emperor? “

I find set topics attractive, but this turned out to be a very tricky idea on which to get a grip. Almost all stories have something that sets them off, and I came up with scores of excellent impetuses, but those stories all became about what happened afterwards, not about the point of ignition or the catalyst. At last I wrote my way into “Kindling”, and a dingy cafe in an odd, little, over-mapped world: part noir, part fantasy, part steampunk. No images for it – I do occasionally live an unillustrated life – but I managed to name-check the creature in the illustration above (there is also a very oblique Darren Hanlon reference). With adjustments from helpful beta-readers and a few editorial wranglings over the correct nomenclature for several professions, the story was accepted!

The line-up is impressive:

• Joanne Anderton, ‘The Bone Chime Song’
• Adam Browne, ‘The D____d’
• Sue Bursztynski, ‘Five Ways to Start a War’
• Brenda Cooper, ‘Between Lines’
• Katherine Cummings, ‘The Travelling Salesman and the Farmer’s Daughter’
• Thoraiya Dyer, ‘Faet’s Fire’
• Kathleen Jennings, ‘Kindling’
• Dave Luckett, ‘History: Theory and Practice’
• Ian McHugh, ‘The Godbreaker and Unggubudh the Mountain’
• Sean McMullen, ‘Hard Cases’
• Ripley Patton, ‘Mary Had a Unicorn’
• Rob Porteous (of CSFG), ‘The Subjunctive Case’
• Anna Tambour, ‘Murder at the Tip’

As is the cover from Les Petersen:

The writing of the bio proved to be as fraught as the writing of the story. My final bio is fairly respectable. The original, vetoed bio was written late at night in a state of desperation and included the following edifying anecdote:

“When Kathleen Jennings was young, an old man with an enormous beard who played the piano accordion gave her a Nobel Detonator tin. He told her that Nobel had switched to packaging its detonators in cardboard, but mice ate through the boxes and ran away with the detonators. When the mice bit into the detonators, he heard the mice go “pop, pop, pop”. The theme of this anthology has given her flashbacks to that story.”

 

Illustration Friday: Fluid (and fairytales)

Pen and ink with digital colour. I love the constant transition in fairytales – human to tree to bird to animal…

In Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” class on the weekend, one of the exercises was to make (and maintain) a list of elements we really liked in stories, and another of ones which disturbed us. I may post the full list in time, but  this is one of the elements I like – characters who easily and naturally shift between states. Not “shape shifters” as such (were-creatures, for example, although I don’t mind the odd one), but beings which appear part physical, part metaphorical – the thorn-lady of Diana Wynne Jones’ Deep Secret, the Faery Queen starting up out of a bush o’ broom in the ballad of Tam Lin, Tam Lin’s own transformations (man and creature and glowing iron), the shifting dream-states of Wonderland. The ageing, elongating, bulging, shifting, feather-grown variations of Studio Ghibli characters. Cat Valente’s princess in a tower, trapped between states, her mysterious pirate captain. Selkies, moving to and fro between seal and human (unless someone intervenes). Bear-princes, crane-wives, swan-women, raven-brothers. Sometimes the changeableness is a great and beautiful power, yet often flexibility is a trap – E. Nesbit’s “Belinda and Bellamant”, the lovers of Ladyhawk, each cursed with unsychronised transformations – and a settled state (Valente’s princess again, Tam Lin helpless and human) is a basis for freedom.

It is a theme I enjoy playing with in my stories as well as illustrations – the water-to-child-to-human progression of “Mouseskin”, the promise-bound river-creature of “Undine Love”, the twined shifting background characters of “The Splendour Falls”. The purpose of transformation is different in each, of course, but often it seems to be about becoming human (mature, an adult, responsible) or relinquishing that. In others it is about forcing people to be what someone else thinks they should be.

 

Illustration Friday: Scary

Pen and ink. The shading is added digitally, but next time I would do it with watercolour – I enjoy the fluidity of it for single-colour work.

I enjoy stories where someone (character or audience) is shrunk to doll-size – whether Diana Wynne Jones’ Magicians of Caprona or Doctor Who’s “Night Terrors”, E. Nesbit’s “The Town in the Library in the Town in the Library”, the opening scenes of Babe or any number of others. They are usually intended to be scary, but I don’t find them so. I enjoy the fantasy – a fascination with small details, the coffee cans full of beads and the plaster ham in Beatrix Potter’s A Tale of Two Bad Mice, the giant Oreo in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. However, the best of them capture that dollshouse disproportion, where the scale of everything is always slightly off. Although it doesn’t scare me I find it beautifully unsettling.

After recently reading some M.R.James and watching Paranormal Activity 3, I am realising it is that gradual discomfort, the perpetual off-kilter sensation that I like best about horror. Sustained eeriness, rather than fright. The eternal unspoken whispering, the phenomenon which hints at but never fully grants an explanation. The serious scary stories which I like best are those which gradually and casually build to some subtle fright, and then never resolve it fully: I like the stories of the characters to be finished, for good or ill, but I do not want all questions to be answered – one reason that I don’t care for strong occult overtones in books I read in order to make myself scared of the sound of the wind. If all ghosts are identified, diagnosed and laid to rest, then that is as bad as ending a fantasy with “it was all a dream”. No, a little wonder and thrilling fear should stay in the world.

In other news: Delia Sherman’s Freedom Maze is loose on the world, and I did the cover and it has Delia’s words inside and Gregory Maguire’s words on top of it, and I am possibly a little excited.

 

“Undine Love” published in ASIM 52

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine issue 52 is out! (Cover by Olivia Kernot). My copy has arrived, but my housemate has pinched it and is lying on the sofa reading out extracts, preceded by, “This story contains the immortal line…” She appears to like it so – go, buy, read.

I am always delighted to see a new ASIM (even if I can’t get near it) but particularly so with this issue, because (in addition to two illustrations) it has one of my stories in it: “Undine Love”.

“Undine Love” started as a symptom of reading Gothic fiction (as in, actual Gothic fiction written in the late 1700s and early 1800s, with people being dragged off to hell and screaming “Wertrold, Wertrold, save me!” and wrestling anacondas in Ceylon, in case you ever wondered what Jane Austen’s characters were reading). I began writing a story in suitably anguished prose, then wondered whether (as an exercise) it would work if updated from wuthering medievalish riverbanks to a modern beachhouse. It worked, but it felt rather sandy and unpleasant, so I shifted the story to something like the Lockyer Valley, where my parents live now and where the side roads plunge into deep romantic creek-valleys, and set it at a farmhouse and a bed-and-breakfast above a little river.

It’s a world away, now, from Peter Haining’s Great British Tales of Terror. Along with a terrible pun it has acquired Tori and Jack, Bartok and George and the Damsons, a ute, bagpipes and an out-of-place apple orchard, and I’m still a little inclined to be in love with them all. It’s about… well, contracts and family businesses, longings, faithfulness, promises and fences, and a setting that – if it existed – would have been badly damaged by the floods which swept down this January, after the story was written.

To my delight (although I would still love to see another artist’s version of my words one day) I was asked to illustrate “Undine Love”, and filled several pages with detailed scribbles, but couldn’t suit any of them to a finished style (or get my sister to pose with the bagpipes). I think these sketches were a better representation of the word-pictures remaining in my head, but they were still made up of words and more like story-boards. I couldn’t pin them to the page to my satisfaction. Here are some of them (click to view larger on the Flickr page):

I settled, at last, on a stark, decorative style (with a definite nod to Ichijo Narumi’s Female Nude Seated in Water, although I could never hope to match those beautiful ripples):

I will not rule out the possibility that the apple orchard is a reference to Anna Tambour’s heartbreakingly beautiful story “The Valley of the Sugars of Salt” (together with Dirk Flinthart’s “The Ballad of Farther-on-Jones” it is one of my very favourite stories). There is, however, another and entirely unplanned connection to Anna’s stories. We were discussing upcoming publications and I told her about the introduced species in “Undine Love”. She sent me a copy of her story “Gnawer of the Moon Seeks Summit of Paradise” (published in Sprawl) and our two stories touch on almost exactly the same theme in similar settings from opposite standpoints – in some cases, down to sentences which directly contradict the other story.

I also illustrated Liz Colter’s haunting story “The Unseen Truths”, although in an entirely different style. I really like working with new authors and stories, drawing out an illustration from unfamiliar words. The process is not at all like the process for illustrating one’s own story, which already has so much visual baggage associated with it.

 

Blurb Wars

I have been spending some evenings in the company of various very cool people (VCPs – you know who you are!). With two particular VCPs I have been spending happy hours in the Indooroopilly McCafe, drinking lattes (we are nothing if not classy) and dissecting the notes one of them takes in Kim Wilkins’ writing lectures.

One of the tutorial activities involved writing blurbs for hypothetical books, and my friend thought her classmates took the task far, far too seriously. To assuage her disappointment, we invented Blurb Wars.

To play Blurb Wars:

1. Each player takes a sheet of paper, draws a rectangle and writes an imaginary book title in it. The pages are then passed along one player.
2. Each player then draws the cover art for the title they have received. Again, the pages are passed along.
3. The third player then has to write a thrilling blurb.

Some variations:

1. Themes – for example, we played a round of sequels. They were invented sequels to invented novels (Son of the Cousin of the Bride of the Swamp-Thing, and so forth), but you could also do: sequels to known, sadly sequelless books; titles with a certain word in them; genre-themed rounds (eg romance, science fiction), and so on.
2. Add extra steps, such as writing the opening paragraph or doing the movie poster and casting, or writing a review. These steps could be in any order – you could, for example, start with the casting, then the poster, then the title of the book of the movie.
3. Randomly generate elements, e.g. titles could be chosen by choosing one noun and one adjective out of hats.
4. Play it off the back of a particular fairytale or storytelling game.

Scoring:

None. I prefer games which are played with no or minimal scoring (or, indeed, strategy), but simply for the purposes of invention and hilarity. You may invent your own scoring to suit your purposes. Or put the pages on display and let people vote on which they’d read.

This is my favourite of my covers: