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Marie Marshall
Author. Poet. Editor.
Tag: news
June 17, 2014
Look into my eyes!
I’d like you to look into the eyes of Chevonne Kusnetsov. Chevonne’s a teenager from New York city, a few decades into the future, and when she’s not barging her way through street-gang members and a neo-goth cult of vampire-fans at school, she’s a ruthless, nighttime destroyer of vampires on the streets of the city. She has few friends at school – maybe only slightly nerdy E.J. and wannabe goth Di – and the cell of vampire-fighters she belongs to isn’t exactly an environment that fosters friendship. Vamps keep things too busy for that. Hers is a story of how, ultimately, if you’re young you’re shoved to the sidelines, you’re someone to whom things happen rather than someone who makes things happen, from the beginning when a mentor dies to the end when there’s an attack on a famous American landmark. As her story unfolds, Chevonne finds love, death, blood, and heartbreak; she fights vampires on a plane, witnesses a school massacre, and learns, from the story of a famous 19c vampire-hunter, how the contagion of the Undead spread from Europe to America.
All this is in my new novel From My Cold, Undead Hand: Chevonne Kusnetsov vs the Sharp Teeth Krew. It’s due out soon, I’ll let you know when! It’s the first in a series of three novels, the second of which – KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE – is already being written. The series is aimed at the teenage / young-adult readership, a niche readership I never planned to write for but somehow I ended up here. I’m not complaining, it’s fun. The sketches here are by Millie Ho, and are preliminary artwork for the cover. Millie has already provided the cover for The Everywhen Angels, my previous teen/YA novel; as you already know, as well as being an artist Millie is a writer with a wonderful way with words. She’s currently hard at work on a YA novel of her own. If you want to know more about her, click on either of the two images in this post.
Want to know where I got the title From My Cold, Undead Hand from? Well here’s Chevonne to tell you about an encounter on a rooftop:
I spin round. There’s a vamp – another one to its right – and it’s holding my kite by the pack strap. Meck! They look like teens, all gang colors and handanas – must have been sired pretty young. And they’re smiling. I hate it when they do that. I also hate it when they have gats. This one right in front of me has one of those neat little Saudi machine-pistols, and it’s pointing right at me. Y’know, I’ve seen the old movies, read the old books, and nobody ever thinks to arm a storybook vampire. Hunters come armed with swords and stakes, vampires come armed with teeth. Real life, real life now outside the books and the old films, is different. In real life vampires carry guns. This is America, after all, and the vamp facing me is exercising a Constitutional right.
Stay tuned!
June 9, 2014
Of sequels, threequels, and w.h.y.
Just when I thought I had enough balls in the air, someone throws me another one. Instead of dropping them all, running, and hiding, I catch it and add it to the juggling act. Okay, last time I reported in, I was doing the final edit of From My Cold, Undead Hand, progressing the sequel KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, finishing two short stories – ‘Gravity’ and ‘The Warlock’s Hat’ – for a competition, and contacting a Ukrainian university about Vera Rich’s translations of Ivan Franko’s poetry.
Well, it all seemed manageable. I now have the finalised manuscript of From My Cold, Undead Hand here. It will ready for publication as soon as we have cover artwork and layout. I return to KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE as often as I can. The short stories have had their final edit, which involved opening up the sealed envelope I was about to mail them in. I have been looking at Vera Rich’s translation of ‘Death of Cain’, comparing it to an earlier translation by the Rev Perceval Cundy, wondering why she rendered ‘город’ as ‘city’ and not ‘garden’ in the context of the poem, and surprising myself at my own cheek at questioning an expert! So, all balls describing a neat arc in the air above my head. Then I found another ball in my pocket – the threequel to From My Cold, Undead Hand (working title KLONE vs OVERLORD) – and added it to the juggled bunch, rather shakily at first, then it too joined the arc. Equilibrium.
Then blow me down! An idea casually tossed to me by a fellow writer exploded in my head, and suddenly I have a plan for a sequel to The Everywhen Angels. With the working title of Among the Grove of Stones (which readers will recognise as a line from an extempore poem in the first book), it will tell the story of Connor Shaw, King Shaw’s nephew, and of how Ashe Sobiecki went missing, of what had been happening to the tulpas of dead Angels as they tried to pass through one last, forbidden door at the moment of death, and of why Angela and the other Unified Angels feel disturbances in the flow that even they can’t control. All of a sudden my control on all the juggled balls is becoming unsteady. I’m hoping I can prioritise and get everything in some semblance of equilibrium again by autumn, and then maybe I will be able to concentrate on finishing one of these jobs at a time.
I think I’m addicted to writing. My hits keep getting bigger.
June 1, 2014
#amwriting
From My Cold, Undead Hand reached an exciting stage today, as I received the manuscript back from its first professional edit. Progress continues on the sequel, KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE. In other news, I have just finished two short stories – ‘The Warlock’s Hat’ and ‘Gravity’ – as entries for the William Soutar Writing Prize. They have two entirely different settings, Dundee and South Africa, and are written in two entirely different styles. Let’s see how they fare. And I have written to the Ivan Franko National University of L’viv in the Ukraine, asking if I may have access to more of Vera Rich’s neglected translations. Watch this space.
May 28, 2014
Vampires lurk in a future NY, murderers lurk in the Bayous…
© Millie Ho
I hesitated to share some of Millie Ho’s preliminary work on the graphic version of From My Cold, Undead Hand, featuring teenage vampire-hunter Chevonne Kusnetsov, because this is as far as we got with the project. It would be doable if we both had unlimited time and no other projects on the go. However, I agreed with Millie when she said that she should concentrate on her own immediate work, and I promptly took my cue from that and dived back into my own. Nevertheless, you’ll all be pleased to know that she has agreed to produce the cover for the text and e-versions of the novel.
© Millie Ho
Meanwhile the editing process has begun. The manuscript is with my publisher’s editor, and his eagle eye has already found an obvious typo on the first page! Chevonne is surprised at that, as you can see, but it shows that the process works. I can recommend it to any fellow authors who are thinking of submitting a manuscript, by the way. It might be costly without a publishing deal, but your submission will be more polished.
Another ‘meanwhile’ – I am busy writing the sequel, provisionally titled KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, upper case deliberate. I know where it starts – it starts with a 1960s-style beach party for vampire surfers. I know where it ends – in a devastated DC in the depths of a dark nuclear winter. I know a lot of the middle – blood is drunk, flesh is eaten, there is madness, there is a death cult, there is good, clean fun. How the story weaves from place to place is up to my characters. I allow them to live. Well, apart from the vampires who aren’t really ‘alive’ as such, but you know what I mean.
Watch this space, then, for more vampiric newsgrabs. It’ll be totally swagger!
Yet another ‘meanwhile’. Watch out for Hagridden, a novel set at the periphery of the American Civil War – a dangerous and murderous place to be, where escape from the battle does not necessarily mean an escape from the killing. It’s written by Sam Snoek-Brown, whom regular visitors to this web site will know is a contemporary American author whose writing I admire. There’s not long to wait for this novel, as it is due for launch in August of this year. Reminders here and here.
May 18, 2014
‘Photography on wings’
Photography on wings is the title of an exhibition, to be staged in Nottingham from 7th June to 31st July, of the photographs of Harminder Nagi. The photographs, all of winged creatures, will be accompanied by poetry by twenty international poets including myself. The exhibition is an extension of the book Continents Connect: poetry on wings which was published in 2012. If you’re anywhere near Nottingham between the dates mentioned above, please do make a point of going along to visit the exhibition. For those of you who can’t make it, here’s the poem I wrote for the book; it’s called ‘Eros and Psyche’, and I wrote it as though for Emily Dickinson.
I have your beauty safe in a box, ever since
I scotched my shoulder with a half-nocked arrow.
Sometimes I let it out to sit amongst the flowers
and drink; it settles until I shade it from the sun.
Things like this are made to delight us, I muse.
The cynic at my side shakes his head, quotes
a priori laws, says that the world is not about us.
The heart seeks pleasure first, I tell him firmly,
and I fall so deep in love with the phrase that
I etch it on my next arrow, drive that one deep
into the ambushed back of a poet, to her surprise.
May 14, 2014
The Phoenix rising is ‘a groundbreaking anthology’!
The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes, Editor-in-Chief Richard Vallance (Deputy Editor, me), recently received an accolade from World Literature Today, the prestigious and internationally respected literary periodical published by the University of Oklahoma. The anthology was included in its ‘Nota Benes’ page for summer 2014, which contains editorial recommendations for books to read over the season. You can see their comments in the context of their selection here. Their assessment was as follows:
‘A groundbreaking anthology of poetry presented in six languages, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes accomplishes a perfect revival of the sonnet. Divided into themes but without a formal table of contents, this artistically rendered collection provides readers with a sense of both choice and surprise. The 315 sonnets on display counter the popularly held notion that the sonnet is outmoded.’
May 5, 2014
Angélique Jamail at DFW Writers’ Conference
Below is a picture of Angélique Jamail at the recent DFW Writers’ Conference in Hurst, Texas, with a copy of The Milk of Female Kindness. The anthology, to which I contributed both poetry and some consulting editorship, was launched in Australia earlier this year. It is the ‘baby’ of Kasia James, and contains some wonderful pieces of writing about motherhood by a number of women from around the world. My own poems in the anthology are not available anywhere else, by the way.
image by Sarah Warburton
April 23, 2014
Chewbaccalaureate!
I have been asked to do some funny things in my time, but honouring the ‘Sacred Drunken Wookiee’ has to be one step beyond. Let me explain. Sort of.
I was recently approached by a member of the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, which is a Mardi Gras parade organization from New Orleans, and asked to provide a series of short poems. The poems would be integrated into a number of ‘parade throws’ – items to give away to the street audience as the parade passes.
The Krewe consists (according to the person who commissioned me) of in excess of five hundred wonderfully nerdy ‘sci-fi geeks’, whose mission is to save the Galaxy… one drunken nerd at a time. Their parade theme is science fiction taken not-too-seriously, eco-friendliness taken slightly more seriously, and whooping-it-up taken in deadly earnest.
We’ll be producing the parade throws between now and February 2015, when the parade season begins in New Orleans. They’ll be in the form of little boxes, into which will be placed little pictures, gew-gaws, and found items, as well as a little baked-and-painted TARDIS. The outside of the box will be decorated as a TARDIS, and the idea is either to inscribe my words on the back of the box, or include them in a little scroll inside. Whichever, I get my name and © on each poem.
It’s rather exciting knowing I’ll be part of next year’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, if even by remote control. It’s not my first remote connection with that city, as not only were several poems in my first collection, Naked in the Sea, inspired by what I knew of it, but also another poem was inscribed on an African drum which is now on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Not bad for someone frae Dundee…
April 2, 2014
Spring 2014 showcase at ‘the zen space’
The Spring 2014 showcase at the zen space is now published, and can be seen here. the zen space is my little e-zine for haiku and related in-the-moment poetry. I’ve been editing publishing it since 2011, honing my editorial skills. If you have never visited before, please feel free. There are now eleven showcases to browse through.
Marie Marshall 