I have been writing (mostly editing) although my literary-creativity brain was largely offline for almost half of 2022, and I now have some catching up to do! However, some pieces I’m really pleased with were published.
Short fiction and adjacencies
Published short stories:
“Merry in Time“, Beneath Ceaseless Skies #352 (languorous fairy tale of woods and promises)
“Twelve Observations Along George Street”, a piece for voices, performed by Penny Everingham, Kevin Spink and Hsiao-Ling Tang, and recorded as part of the Queensland Music Festival’s City Symphony project and available for a limited time through the City Symphony app
“The Wonderful Stag, or The Courtship of Red Elsie”, Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2021 edition, Tor.com (originally published on Tor.com in 2021)
Sold, coming out in 2023, and I’ll tell you more once tables of contents are announced:
“The Five Lazy Sisters”
“Catechism for Those Who Would Find Witches”
“Annie Coal”
Other:
Tiny illustrated stories for patrons: Between 11 and infinite, depending on how you count them. “Shrine”; “Memorial”; “Artist”; “The Tiger”; “The Girls in the House”; “Reputation”; “What a Terrible Situation” (multiple); “Visitor”; “The Lion and the Tortoise”; “The Bee and the Frog”; “The Mule and the Artichoke”. (I might have missed some.)
Patreon posts: 118 (I don’t know how to easily find out the word count)
The continuing Girl Flees House over on Twitter, up to 985 followers now, some of whom have been creating stories and poems based on it!
Ongoing, WIP, and fate to be decided
Extensive reworking on a short novel! Which now has more edits. It’s the urban gothic previously alluded to.
The PhD project — the topic has changed to be about the observation journal, and the creative project is now the novel above. The original PhD manuscript is awaiting further edits, but “Merry in Time“, published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies this year, is connected.
This post is a roughly tidied version of my November 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (that links to where they are first mentioned, but there’s often further discussion).
A short post this month! I was travelling for most of it, and also preparing and giving a writing workshop on short stories at World Fantasy, and an academic paper at the WIP conference at UQ. However, it is still a relatively long post, so the rest is below the cut…
It began as a series of observations about retellings that I’d encountered in the short-story reading project, but quickly grew into its own… direction? reference guide? invocation? invitation? litany?
This post is a roughly tidied version of my October 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post (that links to where they are first mentioned, but there’s often further discussion). Also, as usual, this post is long, so the rest is below the cut…
(Also, I’ve hurt my arm, so this is even less tidied than usual.)
As part of this year’s short story reading project, I’ve been noticing the strong structural and structuring pull rite or rituals exert on stories.
Structurally (and that’s how I’m talking about them in this post), rituals can be a way to first summon a story and peel apart a world, and then at the end to stitch through many layers, to mend and make new. And of course ritual brings with it layers of language, formulation, knowledge, history, time, family, the numinous brushing the physical, a way of altering the world or being acknowledged and changed by it, and (rendered bureaucratic) all the ways that can be made soulless.
This post is lengthy… (among other things, after the initial draft I injured myself in a way that made editing very difficult).
This post is a roughly tidied version of my September 2022 tweets about short stories. There’s a list of all stories at the very end of the post. Also, as usual, this post is long, so the rest is below the cut…
On this observation journal page, I was playing with more ways to look at a story (written or drawn) with fresh eyes.
It was a process I wanted to use on my own sketches and drafts, but as usual, I tried it out on a fairy tale first.
I used “Little Red Riding Hood”, because I’d just spent a couple pages on it in another context (The Story Behind the Story).
First, I kept the characters in their established roles (Little Red Riding Hood playing herself, the Mother playing the Mother, the Wolf… well, you know). For each, I listed their obvious/easy/common traits. This is easy and fun — leaning into stereotypes and cliches in order to use their strength against them is usually a good time (see e.g. The Caudwell Manoeuvre).
Then I mixed them up.
Character
Usual personality
LRR
innocent and plucky
Mother
solicitous but hands-off
Wolf
wily & ferocious
Grandmother
frail & vulnerable
Woodcutter
taciturn & pragmatic
Washerwomen
cheerful and in solidarity
(I like the version with the helpful laundry ladies at the river)
I then moved each characteristic up by one. Now it’s a story about a cool and capable Little Red Riding Hood, sent by her ferocious mother to visit her taciturn, pragmatic grandmother. On the way, she meets a frail, vulnerable wolf…
Next, I pushed things further by keeping the story the same, but having the characters play each others’ roles. Now it’s a tale of a washerwomen sent into the forest by a wolf to visit a child, and on the way they meet a treacherous woodcutter…
You could use either approach to shake up a story for retelling. But I’ve found it useful as a thought exercise when working on projects — drawn or written! I mightn’t ultimately make these changes, but playing through these exercises can highlight where I’ve made easy instead of interesting choices with a character, or identify where my original choice was correct but needs to be done with more deliberateness or flamboyance. And it’s an interesting way to break open someone else’s story in order to analyse it, or to have fun with it.
Writing/illustration exercise
Choose a story (written or visual). It can be someone else’s or your own.
List the characters. Next to each, briefly describe their obvious/default personality. Keep this simple. If it seems stereotypical, that’s fine.
Now, swap the characteristics around. Either randomly, or by shifting them all along one space.
Do a quick sketch (drawn or a paragraph) of what the story might now look like. (And make a note of any new ideas it gives you.)
Make a table with a list of roles (key characters) from the story. In the next column, put the same characters, but shuffled.
Pretend each character now has to play the new role to which you’ve assigned them.
Do a quick sketch (drawn or a paragraph) of what the story might now look like. (And make a note of any new ideas it gives you.)
Bonus, for each: Make a note of what worked, and what you liked, and see if you can identify why. Identify where the changes broke the story, or how robust the original idea was.
Bird and man watching plastic leaves get caught in a cafe fan
Support and/or follow
If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:
I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
Kathleen Jennings 