They handed me a bowl of cooked wild grasses and they gave me the ceremonial shoes
My short story "The Creeping Influences" is now online at Shimmer. This would be the story with the bog body.
It is also the story with the non-binary protagonist, the story with the first-person narrator, and my longest piece of historical fiction to date, with many thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hawkwing_lb for beta-reading for Ireland. It is something of a big deal to have it finally in print: it took a long time to find a home, including multiple rejections of the species lovely but not for us and one acceptance that fell through under circumstances I hope never to repeat. It took a long time to write, too, and was almost lost early on to one of the periodic deaths of Bertie Owen, my fisher king of a laptop. I was asked about its antecedents for the exclusive material in the digital edition and I should probably respect that, but I don't think it's giving too much away to say that it feels to me like one of the more personal stories I have written and something of an outlier in my own work. It's almost not genre, except that I think it is and I wrote it.
(I mean, someone still has sex with the otherworld, so there's that.)
The title comes from a line by Seamus Heaney. In an organized universe, I would have read P.V. Glob's The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved (Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 År, 1965/1969) before or while writing "The Creeping Influences," since it inspired Heaney's poems of Danish and Irish bog bodies in the first place, but we live in the kind of universe where mostly I looked at maps and photographs and my life fell to pieces again that year. In hindsight it feels like a non-minor victory to have gotten a story out of it. This story, in any year, I would have been glad of.
I am happy to answer questions in comments to the best of my ability. I love the little illustrations of bog plants in the margins of the online edition, like an herbal. The entire issue is worth your time; it is full of ghosts (September is a good month for them, tipping into autumn) and I continue to adore the cover that Sandro Castelli gave it.
This is a good start to a day.
It is also the story with the non-binary protagonist, the story with the first-person narrator, and my longest piece of historical fiction to date, with many thanks to
hawkwing_lb for beta-reading for Ireland. It is something of a big deal to have it finally in print: it took a long time to find a home, including multiple rejections of the species lovely but not for us and one acceptance that fell through under circumstances I hope never to repeat. It took a long time to write, too, and was almost lost early on to one of the periodic deaths of Bertie Owen, my fisher king of a laptop. I was asked about its antecedents for the exclusive material in the digital edition and I should probably respect that, but I don't think it's giving too much away to say that it feels to me like one of the more personal stories I have written and something of an outlier in my own work. It's almost not genre, except that I think it is and I wrote it.(I mean, someone still has sex with the otherworld, so there's that.)
The title comes from a line by Seamus Heaney. In an organized universe, I would have read P.V. Glob's The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved (Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 År, 1965/1969) before or while writing "The Creeping Influences," since it inspired Heaney's poems of Danish and Irish bog bodies in the first place, but we live in the kind of universe where mostly I looked at maps and photographs and my life fell to pieces again that year. In hindsight it feels like a non-minor victory to have gotten a story out of it. This story, in any year, I would have been glad of.
I am happy to answer questions in comments to the best of my ability. I love the little illustrations of bog plants in the margins of the online edition, like an herbal. The entire issue is worth your time; it is full of ghosts (September is a good month for them, tipping into autumn) and I continue to adore the cover that Sandro Castelli gave it.
This is a good start to a day.
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Thank you!
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Thank you! I hope you enjoy.
I really just like it as a composition.
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I'm so glad!
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I was not expecting anything like the illustrations this story got and I am so happy about all of them.
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Thank you. It's one of the stories I really worried about screwing up while I was writing it. I also worried about dying in a research hole and think I managed to avoid that as well.
And whether it's hawkwing_lb's beta read or your own good ear, I don't know, but I heard the dialogue with Irish tones.
I know it's not as regional as it could be, but I am glad it works. I think I read a lot of prose by Irish writers from/about the appropriate decade.
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I have no idea if you want to read more about the topic, but I've heard good things about 'Bog Bodies Uncovered' by Miranda Aldhouse-Green. It won an award last year from the Society of American Archaeologists, which is where I came across it, and it's on my own to-read list.
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I'm not good at expressing in print when I am grinning really happily! Thank you!
I have no idea if you want to read more about the topic, but I've heard good things about 'Bog Bodies Uncovered' by Miranda Aldhouse-Green.
I absolutely do. I'm trying right now to track down Michael Almereyda's Trance/The Eternal (1998), a highly recommended horror movie with a bog body. Also I did eventually read Glob's The Bog People: my parents thoughtfully presented it to me for my birthday.
It won an award last year from the Society of American Archaeologists, which is where I came across it, and it's on my own to-read list.
Cool. Thanks for the recommendation!
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That means a lot to hear. Thank you.
Thank you for the non-binary; I'd love to see you write more first-person narration.
On some technical level, I suspect one was a direct consequence of the other: Roddy's pronouns would have been hell in the third person. But this was also the voice the story came in, right from the start; there was never a chance of it being told from anyone else's point of view.
They've done you proud with that cover and the little bog-plant illustrations.
I knew it was going to be the cover story, but somehow I had failed to realize the level of illustration it was going to get. It really makes me happy.
It makes me want to wear rust-green.
You should. I've seen that coat of yours. You look good.
Thank you again. This is a joy and a wonder.
Thank you for telling me!
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I really liked the paired stories of the relationship with Katherine and the discoveries in the bog, and how they came together to say something about the main character and their life. It was very neatly done.
I'm terrible at periods. Was it set in the '30s?
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Thank you! It's my first sale to them and I am very pleased with it.
I'm terrible at periods. Was it set in the '30s?
Yes, about the summer of 1937, so you can't be all that terrible. There are not that many direct temporal markers in the story: the major name-checks are the Irish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, and the discovery of Stoneyisland Man. I kept filtering wider geopolitical stuff out of the background of the story because it was not strictly pertinent and I was trying, as previously stated, not to die in a research hole.
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Thank you.
(I had forgotten that you moved! Or possibly not known. If it wasn't mentioned on LJ/DW, I would have missed it.)
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Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I especially liked your use of colour-words throughout - always fresh and surprising and absolutely evocative.
That is a neat thing to hear as feedback; thank you for telling me.
Also another vote for how good your dialogue is - like asakiyume I heard it all in Irish tones just from the vocabulary and syntax you used.
It's good to hear that it worked. I was mostly (as with most things) getting it out of books.