More than five years ago, I took a sabbatical from writing. Since then the facts of the world have become wilder and weirder than anyone could have imagined, making fiction well-nigh impossible. Will I ever write again? As we say in Dundee, Eh havnae a Scooby!*
Take care,
M.
*Scottish rhyming slang.
Yes, it has been a long time, folks, but then I’m still enjoying a sabbatical, still sorting this old head out.
I’m not totally inactive, however. I continue to pen the occasional weird poem, and of course to edit the zen space. Speaking of which, the Autumn 2019 Showcase is now published there. Visit, please.
MM.
In case you missed it elsewhere, the latest (Summer 2017) Showcase at the zen space is now published.
the zen space is an e-zine for haiku and related in-the-moment words, and I have been the editor since it started six years ago. Yes, with this issue the zen space celebrates its sixth birthday! The latest Showcase includes not only haiku and other recognisable Japanese-inspired forms in English, but also some poetry it’s hard to categorise. It also features some beautiful mandalas from our most ‘quoted’ artist Marie Taylor.
Although I say it myself, it’s a good ‘un this time. Check it out for yourselves – click on the Mandala below and follow the links.
MM.
I had a CRAFT moment and clean forgot about the April issue of Jersey Devil Press (the May issue’s already out, as you would imagine!). I have a poem in that April issue, with the title Sergeant Cuff names a rose ‘Catherine Earnshaw’. It was originally intended for their ‘Victorian Mash-up’ issue, but the editors slipped it in ahead of that. Jersey Devil Press is notoriously difficult to get something accepted by, unless you hit precisely the right note for them, so I’m belatedly proud. This is the first time I have submitted a poem to a journal for about five years (I stopped while I was writing my collection I am not a fish and I never got started again), so I’m doubly pleased.
Check out the April issue here, and maybe keep an eye on JDP as a whole, as there’s always some good stuff in there.
I learned this morning of the death by violence of Iain Rossouw. Iain headed Honeymead Books, sister-house of my publisher P’kaboo. More can be read here on his wife Lyz’s blog. I don’t really know what to say – this is awful news.
Are you an aspiring artist? Would you like to take a punt at designing a cover illustration for my latest YA/teen vampire novel, KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, sequel to From My Cold, Undead Hand? I have little to offer you at this point except recognition, but in that respect I would be helping you and you would be helping me.
Your illustration does not have to be fancy. In fact if you could take a cue from Millie Ho’s excellent black-and-white cover for the first book in the series (look right) you’ll see the kind of aesthetic we’re looking for.
If you would like to offer your services, please get in touch with the publisher direct.
Thank you,
MM.
During my sabbatical from novel-writing, I haven’t exactly been idle. Here are a couple of things that are going on right now.
Turning my short story ‘Axe’ into a screenplay. I had been working closely with a Scottish screen-writer to turn my short story ‘Axe‘ into a drama for TV or the ‘big screen’. Currently, many scenes have been written, both from the story itself and from additional narrative material I have provided – and it’s looking good!
However, the screen-writer has had to pull out, for unforeseen private reasons, and he’s not certain whether he’ll be able to take up the task again. I fully understand the reasons he gave me, and he left the ball in my court as to what to do next. Between us we have a substantial amount of material. I think my choices are as follows:
1. Do nothing, in the hope that the screen-writer may be able to resume the project at a later date; this of course runs the risk of the whole project stalling completely.
2. Try to finish the script myself; this is not my area of expertise, and I am, after all, on a writing sabbatical.
3. Get together with my literary agent and look for another screen-writer; my previous collaborator would be okay with that, but it would need someone who could build seamlessly onto the work already done.
I’ll let you know what turns up.
I Tamburisti di FIREnze. If you don’t already know about Burning Man, find out about it. It’s a festival, for want of a better word, or rather an annual gathering of people in the middle of a desert in Nevada, USA. Whilst there, people perform, make things, share, live together, interact, laugh, work, and generally enjoy themselves. But the main thing is that they do so entirely without money transactions, or even barter transactions. Everything that is provided is a gift entirely without strings, given in the hope that everything will be paid forward in some way. It seems to work, right down to the clearing away of site debris afterwards.
This year the theme is The Renaissance. I was contacted a few days ago by the Project Coordinator of ‘Camp Thump Thump’, a group that regularly attends Burning Man, giving lessons in drum-making and drumming, letting people build, play, and take away their own drums. For 2016 the group has adopted a theme based on renaissance Italy – the time of the Borgias, the Medici, and Leonardo da Vinci – and have reinvented themselves as I Tamburisti di FIREnze for the duration of this year’s Burning Man. The Coordinator asked me to provide some Renaissance-flavoured text for their use, and I have been working on pen-portraits of (fictitious) 16c Guild-members for her.
I’m not yet sure whether or how my work will be used, but again if it is, I’ll let you know.
The manuscript of KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE is open in front of me, and my collection The Last-but-one Samurai and other stories is currently being edited. Meanwhile Angélique Jamail has featured another of my Gothic poems from 2010 on her blog…
Another quarter of the year has rolled round, and I have been busy putting together the latest offering from the zen space, the e-zine of which I am the editor, publisher, and wot-not. This time there is no set theme, and the illustrations by Vincent van Gogh are totally irrelevant. Or you could say their irrelevance is relevant, and if you wanted to sound really clever, you could say it’s the spaces in between that are relevant. Yer pays yer money and yer takes yer choice, as they say. Except of course the zen space is absolutely free. Click here, or on Vincent’s self portrait to be transported…
The sequel to From My Cold Undead Hand – KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE – is being prepared for publication!
HAV YU SEEN DIS GURL?
The editing process has begun on the sequel to my first YA vampire novel. I’m working with the eagle-eyed editor whose built-in detector for not just typos but lame turns of phrase* is, even as you read this, scanning the manuscript. He’s making it ready for publication this year!
The story itself jumps ahead several years from the first novel, into a throughly dystopian setting. Some of the characters express themselves in a ‘conlang‘ called NU AMERIKAN, and all of the official notices are printed in it too. But don’t worry about that, as it is only seeded through the book and doesn’t hurt the flow of reading. Basically, NU AMERIKAN is a simplification of modern American English, rather the same way that George Orwell’s fictional ‘Newspeak’ related to the English of Great Britain. Creating it was a stimulating intellectual exercise – and fun.
But the prime purpose of the novel is to be an adventure. There is a new… hero? protagonist? A couple of the characters from From My Cold, Undead Hand appear again, but it might surprise you how they appear. Importantly there will be lots of action, in a nightmare landscape full of danger. More news as I get it.
*Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but sometime’s I’m guilty of that.
Marie Marshall 