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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I'm so glad!