Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Better late than never, and I'm in England, which makes a little tardiness forgivable (because I don't live here, not because the English are chronically tardy, although if one judges by my friends, the English are maybe a little chronically tardy), so...

Rolling in the Deep, my story of mermaids and deep sea exploration and why maybe combining the two is a bad plan, is out! Yay!

The print edition is already sold out at Subterranean Press's website! I, er. Less yay.

But! There are other ways to get this fabulous tale of sirens and slaughter. The eBook edition is available now, from many fine retailers. If you still want to have a physical copy to stroke and love and call your own, I have called Borderlands and confirmed that they have five copies (5) on order. (They might be able to get a few more from their distributor. It's all a matter of timing. So.)

If you want to get a physical copy of your very own, please call—don't email, as email can take a while to be answered—Borderlands Books at 415 824-8203. The books are en route and are definitely coming to the store. If they go quickly, the store will attempt to obtain more from their supplier, but cannot guarantee any additional stock at this time.

Mermaids!

(I thought a lot about whether this needed a trigger warning, and decided that it was better to err on the side of caution. So...TW: very oblique and carefully worded mention of a suicide attempt.)

I don't think it's any secret that I am a voracious reader. I read constantly. My friend Michelle has commented on more than one occasion that she, as a lifelong reader, is still amazed by the way she'll turn her back for thirty seconds, look back, and find me with my nose in a book. Since I grew up very poor, I also grew up a voracious re-reader; my favorite books were likely to be read five, ten, twenty times before I moved on, and I still go back to them. There aren't many new books added to that shelf these days—I finally have more than I can read—but when I need a friend, those favorites are always there.

When I was fourteen, I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for the first through fifth times.

Tam Lin is based on the ballad (which I was already enamored of, and would become obsessed with somewhere between readings three and five), but only very loosely so; it shares a structure, and not the details. It's about a girl named Janet, who loves to read, and goes to college, where she can read as much as she wants. It's about growing up and growing older and how those aren't always the same things, and it's about the things she does while she's at school, about falling in and out of love, and Shakespeare, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and festive elephants, and pink curtains, and growing apart, and oh, right, the Queen of Faerie and the Tithe to Hell.

The main character, Janet, was everything I wanted to grow up to be. She was strong and smart and living in a world where the magic was subtle enough that I could see myself in her. She loved all the books I loved, and she wrote poetry constantly. It was because of this book that I wrote a sonnet a day every day for my entire high school career. Some of them were terrible, and some of them were just technically clean without being anything more than homework I had set for myself...but all of them taught me about word choice and meaning what you said, and they sparked a lifelong love of structured poetry.

Books were my salvation when I was a teenager (they still are, although I've gotten better about knowing how to save myself), but very few of them had real people doing things I could relate to and understand. Not like Janet. She was flawed and fallible and exactly what I needed, and better still, she gave my friends and I access to concepts like saying something when you needed help, and knowing that phrase would get you what you needed instantly, no questions asked. Because we thought we were being terribly clever, we used the phrase "pink curtains," which had been adopted for that purpose by Janet and her friends.

When I was sixteen, I decided I was done. I was out of cope. I was finished. I took myself and my favorite book (not Tam Lin, IT, by Stephen King) and went to a place and did a thing, and it was supposed to make me not have to exist anymore. And somewhere in the middle of the thing, I changed my mind. I literally started thinking about the characters in the books I loved, and how disappointed in me they would be, and how they wouldn't do this to themselves. They had more important things to do than die, and maybe so did I.

I went to a pay phone. I called a friend. I told her it was pink curtains, and she came and got me, and she did not judge, and she did not yell, and she helped me, because we had a framework for friends who would do that. That, like so much else that was good in our lives, we had learned from a book. From this book.

I still love T.S. Eliot and I still write sonnets and I went to college as a folklore major partially because I wanted to read, and study "Tam Lin," and be Janet Carter for a little while. Tam Lin influenced so much of who I grew up to be...and it helped me know that I could ask for help. So it's part of why I was able to grow up at all.

I love this book so much. I always will.

You should read it.

W is for WAHEELA.

There are no werewolves in upper Canada. The waheela ate them all. But when you're a cold-resistant therianthrope that can turn into a giant wolf-bear-hybrid-thing capable of throwing cars without expending any real effort, you can pretty much eat whatever the fuck you want. Including each other; waheela don't get along, and have a nasty tendency to turn cannibal when forced to co-exist for extended periods of time. Family groups are generally temporary, and exist only as long as they can fight the urge to eat each other. Female waheela will sometimes form close bonds with their children, and littermates occasionally feel affection toward one another, but that's about it as far as loving waheela families go.

Waheela are equally comfortable in both their forms, as they find both to have advantages. Wolf-bear-hybrid-things can take down moose, which helps to keep them fed, but human fingers are better at skinning and preparing meat. Many waheela, if not the majority, prefer their food cooked, and have even learned to tolerate each other for the sake of trading meals (I give you a haunch of moose, you give me some of that venison stew, everybody wins). There is no such thing as "the average waheela," because we've never been able to spend enough time with them to find out what the average waheela would look like. They are, for the most part, not aggressive toward humans, viewing them as somewhat sad, what with their inability to turn into giant walls of furry muscle. This attitude changes quickly once humans get out the guns.

Istas (last name unknown) is a waheela living in Manhattan, where she is an active, if somewhat nerve-wracking, part of the local Gothic Lolita community. She owns nineteen frilly parasols. Woe betide he who damages one of them.

Seriously.

Remember how back in March of this year, I had a short story in an anthology called Tales from the Ur-Bar? It was pretty awesome. I had a great time, and the editors were fabulous to work with, and so when Josh and Patricia (see re: the editors) asked me if I thought I might want to do it again, I was delighted. I love anthologies, I love an excuse to write short fiction, and I love working with people who have already proven themselves to be rockin' cool. And so I wrote them a story, and now...

"We Will Not Be Undersold" has been, well, sold to the anthology The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity, edited by Josh Palmatier and and Patricia Bray. The anthology will be coming out in March of 2012, which seems at once very far in the future, and far, far too soon for my taste. It involves a big box super-store, true love, picnic tables, M&Ms, and plastic.

This is most definitely not a Toby universe short story; it contains fae creatures, but they're not playing by the rules of Toby's world, and I bet none of them could take her in a fair fight. At the same time, they're strange and quirky and were a huge amount of fun for me to write, and I really, really enjoyed the process of writing their story. (Story, singular. Unlike Mina Norton or the Fighting Pumpkins, these folks are not turning into a series. Dammit. I absolutely refuse.)

I'll post again as we approach the time when the book will become a sweet reality, rather than a future milestone, but for right now, remember, shop smart. Shop Undermart. We will not be undersold!

While I was in New York, after the reading I did with the ever-lovely Cat Valente, I noticed that she had an ARC of The Habitation of the Blessed which looked, well, lonely. Deeply lonely. Unloved, even, an abandoned little slip of a book, begging for someone who would love it. I volunteered.

"If you take it, you have to talk about it," cautioned Cat. I said I understood, for that is the Rule and the Law of the ARC: if you take it, you have to talk about it. That's the bargain you make when you open the covers and release all that new book smell. I took the book.

Now I am talking about it.

The Habitation of the Blessed is the first book in the three-part Dirge for Prestor John, a historical figure who may or may not have been an early example of the Internet hoax. "Dude, let's tell the Church that we have all this neat shit, and watch them freak out!" Oh, they were wacky in the "here there be dragons" days. But The Habitation of the Blessed takes the approach that, in fact, Prestor John was a real man; his land contained all the things he claimed it contained; all those wonders once were true things. So where did they all go?

If you're familiar with Valente's Orphan's Tales books (In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice), the structure of Habitation will be familiar to you; told through three written memoirs and the reactions of two monks, it nests stories inside of stories, moving back and forth through time as the threads wind slowly together. This is not a book to be read in an afternoon; the density of its mythology is too great for that, and you'd miss a lot if you tried to rush. Valente has always been a fan of ornate and graceful language, a tendency which she honed with Palimpsest, and Habitation is no different; it's sort of like what you'd get if a medieval bestiary and a poet's dictionary decided to tryst in a seedy fairy tale bar, and then left the baby to be raised by the goosegirl who lives in the shed out back.

In case you can't tell, I liked the book.

Now, there are flaws. Depending on your familiarity with the source material, you may find yourself turning to your dictionary or even Wikipedia to check linguistic and historical facts. Parts of each storyline are omitted due to a fabulous, totally in-universe complication; this helps to reinforce the reality of the world, but is also a bit frustrating, because dude, missing story. But Valente never leaves out so much that you can't fill it in yourself, and as every horror movie, ever, has demonstrated, the monster you imagine is always more fantastic than the monster that you see.

Because this is the first book of three, it doesn't resolve so much as "find a convenient point and stop there for a little while, you know, to rest, maybe have some tea." You don't walk away with a complete story sleeping in your heart. And yet...

You walk away having seen something beautiful. Valente loves this story, and it shows in every word. She takes risks, and, for the most part, the risks pay off. I highly recommend The Habitation of the Blessed. It is beautiful, and strange, and a chronicle of something very dear that we know, inevitably, must be lost to us.

Read it, and rejoice, and learn, and grieve.

I've been writing structured poetry for most of my life. For the past several years, I've participated in a writing exercise I call "Iron Poet," wherein I request three words and a poetic form, and then write a poem to match the suggestion. (I don't have a round going right now, because I am out of hours in the day. I miss it. But I'm not quite that insane.)

I am honored and delighted to have a vilanelle in the latest issue of Goblin Fruit, an online magazine of speculative poetry. It's titled "Ever After Variations," and you can read it for free by following the link above.

Cabinet des Fees is an online journal of fairy tales. They publish fiction and poetry, essays and interviews, and I am totally over the moon to be interviewed in the latest issue. Another of my poems is reproduced alongside the article, titled "Baba Yaga Said." It's free verse, rather than a strict structure, and I'm quite fond of it. The interview was a joy, and the article is fantastic. Plus, check out this awesome description of me:

"A folklore maven and woman of the beautiful weird, Seanan burst onto the urban fantasy scene last year with Rosemary and Rue, the first book in her October Daye series. As her first series proliferates (Rosemary and Rue was recently joined by A Local Habitation, with An Artificial Night forthcoming in September), Seanan is also writing a year-long American folkpunk piece entitled Sparrow Hill Road at The Edge of Propinquity and has just published Feed, the first part of a zombie politico-thriller trilogy, under the pseudonym Mira Grant. Most of us are quite sure that Seanan never actually sleeps."

I'm folkpunk! Also a woman of the beautiful weird!

Halloweentown princess is go.

I am not a Triskaidekaphobe; if anything, I'm more of a Triskaidekaphile. I love the number thirteen. I spent the entire year that I was thirteen wandering around feeling lucky (and even extended it into my fourteenth year by quite a bit, insisting that I needed to get thirteen months, weeks, days, and hours of being thirteen). I've always considered Friday the 13th to be "my lucky day," and I love years like 2009, where the stars align just right and we get three Friday the 13ths in a single calendar year. (This year, 2010, the stars have not aligned just right, and we're only getting one, in August. I hope to spend it in Australia, where I will use its potent payload of sheer good luck to not die horribly.)

But why is Friday the 13th unlucky? One could argue that it has become unlucky because so many people believe it is, and there's value in that position, but what started it? Here's the fun part: no one really seems to know for sure. It's a combination of unlucky thirteen and unlucky Friday, and it just bumbles around being baleful at all the other days on the calendar.

So why is thirteen unlucky? Some people claim that Judas was the thirteenth person to join the table during the Last Supper (which doesn't explain why "thirty" isn't unlucky, too, that being the number of pieces of silver he's supposed to have received). Others think it came from the Norse, where alternately, Loki was regarded as the thirteenth god of the pantheon, or just the thirteenth person to show up at Baldr's funeral, having also arranged Baldr's death. (So you know, if you arrange my death, you're not invited to my funeral.) There's an old superstition that says that when thirteen people gather, one of them will be dead within the year, which is statistically viable in certain cases, and not so much in others.

There are also a lot of cultures that hold thirteen to be lucky, one way or another. The Torah describes the thirteen attributes of mercy, and boys become men on their thirteenth birthdays. Italy considers thirteen to be a lucky number, as does Colgate University. Thirteen is when kids can see PG-13 movies unaccompanied, and believe me, that is incredibly lucky when it happens. Also, thirteen is a prime number, which always leaves me well-disposed.

So maybe it's all Friday's baggage. Sure, we tend to regard Friday as lucky in the modern era—it's the last day of the work or school week, it's the day when all the new movies open, and it's the day when bedtime is suspended—but for a long time, Friday was viewed as unlucky. Maritime folklore holds that it's a bad idea to start a long voyage on a Friday. Jesus may or may not have been crucified on a Friday, and "Black Friday" either means "day of horrible disaster" or "the day after Thanksgiving, when we create horrible disasters in the mall parking lot." Who knows?

The theories on why we've decided Friday the 13th is singularly unlucky range from the ancient (Frigga is pissed off about Christianity) to the political (the early Christians made thirteen unlucky because the pagans considered it lucky) to the osmosis of popular culture (Thomas W. Lawson's 1907 novel, Friday, the Thirteenth). Regardless of why it happened, it's unlikely to unhappen any time soon, especially not if Jason and his machete have anything to say about it.

Happy Wednesday the thirteenth! Try not to walk under any ladders.

Good girls only make the news one way.
Special reports when the kids go to bed
And the ghouls come out to play.
Good girls make their marks and fade away,
People say their prayers and they shake their heads
And they bury them anyway,

And they'll tell you "she was lovely,"
Though they all forget the names
Of the ones who pay the good girl's fee
Down the rocky road to fame—

        So when the crossroads call and your faith is thin
        And you're afraid you might explode,
        Go and talk to the girl in the green silk gown
        Who walks on Sparrow Hill Road...

Rose Marshall was sixteen the year she died: 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt began his fourth term as President of the United States and World War II came staggering to a close. A lot of people have said a lot of things since then. She's been called everything from angel to devil. Some people say she makes men race with her and drives them to their deaths. Some say she's trying to save the drivers from that same fate. They whisper her name everywhere from Michigan to Maine, from Wyoming to Washington...but no one really knows the truth. No one knows what really happened that long-ago night on the blind curve at the top of Sparrow Hill Road.

Not until now, anyway.

I am pleased as punch to announce that I will be joining The Edge of Propinquity as one of their 2010 Universe Authors. Starting in January, I'll be inviting you to ride along on the way to Sparrow Hill Road, where a girl named Rose Marshall raced, and died, and rose again to walk the world as an urban legend of a very special kind. I've been looking forward to telling her story for a long time. I finally have the chance to do it. Here's hoping you'll come along for the ride.

Come on, now; let me tell you about Rose Marshall, the sweetest girl that you'd ever see. They always say that the good die young...

As an urban fantasy author who grew up on a steady diet of fairy tales, horror movies, Disney princesses, Victorian Gothics, and other seeming contradictory influences, I'm pretty regularly asked "Well, can't you just make up your mind?" Unicorns aren't supposed to gore you; werewolves aren't supposed to save the day. Horror and fantasy aren't meant to exist on the same shelf, much less in the same story. And to this I say...

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, there were three sisters, living in...well, not harmony, exactly, but living in the sort of uneasy cease-fire that comes naturally to a lot of siblings. Horror—we'll call her Rose Red, in honor of the color she tends to paint the landscape behind her—thought that her sisters played too nicely with their toys. They never stopped to smell the entrails. Fantasy, on the other hand—and let's call her Snow White, since that's a nice, familiar, fantasy name—wondered why Rose had to be so nasty all the time, and why her sisters couldn't see the virtue of sugar and spice and sleeping for a hundred years beneath the fairy hills. Meanwhile, stuck in the middle of it all, you had their poor sister Marchen—arguably the eldest, and somehow always the first to be forgotten—trying to hold it all together. We'll call her Lily Fair (and there's a reason for that), and she was constantly trying to strike a balance between the other two, or at least keep them from killing each other, because Lily understood something that people still have trouble with today: Lily understood that they were all telling the same story.

Sure, Rose's stories tended to wreak havoc on the poor woodland creatures, while Snow's tended to result in an unbearable overabundance of talking rabbits; sure, Lily's stories almost always came with morals, while the other two were perfectly content to just let a haunted castle be a haunted castle; but they were all sides of the same basic human need to imagine something more. Marchen contained all the horror and all the fantasy that anybody could want, and as long as Lily was in charge of that weird little trio, things held together.

But then, well, things changed. Marchen was reduced, cleansed and simplified, becoming "fairy tales" and getting regulated to the nursery, where they were taught alongside Mother Goose and her kin. The Fair Folk of the old stories began transforming into the Tinker Belles and Hot Topic decals of today. Little Red Riding Hood lived. Cinderella's sisters kept their eyes. And bit by bit, Lily lost control. Quite literally—the name "Lily Fair" isn't just a casual invention, but takes its source from the same tradition that gives us Rose and Snow. How many people have heard the story that it comes from? Not many. Like so many other stories that mixed the horrific with the fantastic, the tale that Lily came from was left behind when the decision was made to turn the darkest stories into tales for children.

Without Lily to provide balance and keep them together, Rose and Snow began rapidly drifting apart. While there were elements of horror in fantasy—Shelob, anyone?—they were reduced to the merely monstrous, becoming things for the glorious light to overcome, often to the strains of a gallant harper's jaunty airs. Meanwhile, while there might be fantasy in the horrific—even Frankenstein dreams of better things while making his monster, much as he'll later come to regret that particular plan—it became more and more fleeting, used to taunt the doomed while dragging them deeper down into the pit. Rose and Snow stopped speaking to one another. They didn't even exchange birthday cards anymore. And no one mentioned Lily, because who wants to go through that again?

And they all lived miserably ever after.

Only not, because "man" and "magpie" share letters for a reason. We never really let go of the older, twistier stories; we just put them on shelves for a little while, until we could figure out what to do with them. How to make the a functional part of our world again. Bit by bit, we've been rediscovering those old paths, and realizing that fairy tales really were urban fantasy, as we currently define it. "Fantasy set in what is essentially the real world, mingling with real people, in real situations." Well, once upon a time, "the real world" wasn't a city, it was a big, scary wood where there might be wolves, or robbers, or any one of a thousand other things. "Real people" weren't businessmen and police, they were woodcutters and tinkers and little old women whose granddaughters brought them baskets full of goodies. The world changed, the stories moved on...but the roots remained.

I see the current trend toward urban fantasy as, in some ways, the resurrection of Lily Fair. We always needed her; we always needed that middle ground, where the monsters and the fairy godmothers could get together and work out their problems without worrying about the curtains (they're stain-proof) or what the neighbors will think (they're all enchanted princes, anyway). Urban fantasy gives us that, and more, because it makes the trio whole again. I have made up my mind, thank you very much. I've decided to be a daughter of Lily Fair, who might not be as sweet, and might not be as sour, but is never, never boring.

This time, I think we're shooting for the happy ending.

(Originally posted as a guest blog for Penguin.com.)

Almost everybody's heard the basic hitch-hiking ghost story—dude (usually) gives a girl a ride home, and later finds out that she was actually dead way before she got into the car—but there are some really fascinating regional variants. So here is my question for you:

How does the story go? Is she a victim, a predator, or just a confused kid trying to go home? Is seeing a hitcher like seeing the Bean Nighe—you're just doomed to die now? How does it go?

To be clear, I'm not asking you to make something up; I want to know how, in your part of the country or the world, the story goes. Or, if this is the first time you've encountered the idea (outside Disney's Haunted Mansion), I'd like to know that, too.

Curious cat is curious.