Ceallaigh's Blog
I have a confession to make. I like to sew, to garden, to can and preserve food. I like to make my home a comfortable place to live in and to receive guests. Not fancy mind you; I'm not that kind of girl. But comfortable. Liveable.
Here's another confession. I like to write for the sake of the beauty of the words. Yes, I want to be commercially successful, and yes, I want for people to read what I write. But I love challenging my skill too, even when it means I spend 'too much' time on a story or poem once in awhile.
I've been thinking a lot about these things as Sean and I plan our move to Cape Breton, where we will be buying a rural home and settling down. In making this decision, I am making larger decisions about the direction of my life. I have a Master's degree, but I'm consciously deciding to be a Gaelic speaker for the sake of it, a homesteader, a writer who might or might not ever 'make it'.
I went on a long-haul animal pickup today on behalf of Hope for Wildlife to retrieve a lame goose under the care of some people in Clark's Cove. It was their belief that she had been hit by a car, since they had found her in the street, and she wasn't comfortable standing up. When I spoke with one of these people, she reported that the goose was docile, friendly and responded well to attention. As a wildlife rescuer, I worried about that, since it means she has been habituated to us. But Hope for Wildlife keeps a flock of lame geese on the farm, so habituation isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case. If she's lame but can eventually walk, she'll probably find a home there.
I am delighted to report that two poems will appear in a forthcoming issue of Astropoetica.
"Sol Prayer: By the Oracle Duality Chang Shen / Song of the Star Cradle" first appeared in Mythic Delirium in 2006 and is set in the Petals of the Twenty Thousand Blossom universe.
"The Cradle" is a brand-new piece about quantum physics, indecisiveness and ennui.
Hooray for poems about space and physics!
I had planned to write a Year in Review post last week, but we've had family here, and sudden, expensive car repairs, and a computer death and replacement, and, and, and...
It was an odd year for my writing. I finished edits on Twilight of the World Sea People, which is still making the rounds to prospective agents and editors. Scheherazade's Facade - which includes my story The Daemons of Tairdean Town - found its way into print via Circlet Press and a successful Kickstarter project. I was nominated for a Rhysling Award again, this time for my poem "When I arrived, this is what she said", which appeared in Goblin Fruit. And I was a guest at Hal-Con, Atlantic Canada's largest fan-run convention.
Please Note: With this edition of Activism Updates, I'm relinquishing the illusion of a schedule for the series, since it's become abundantly clear to me that I haven't the time to stick to it. Worse, I've stopped actually reading the activism e-mails that come to me from various sources; I drop them in a folder for later perusal, thinking I might use them in the blog series, and then never return to them. So I've actually become a less-effective activist than I was when I began, and that's problematic for me. I've also noticed an uptick in the number of activism posts from friends in my social networking feeds, which seems to indicate an increasing level of comfort among my peers for this sort of material, so I'm less worried about the spamming issue.
Like any pair of geeks, Sean and I have been looking forward to this film for years, have played and shared the trailers, have swooned over the snippets of song we've heard. We've even planned to go to the midnight showing on the day of its premiere, and we've talked about whether or not Peter Jackson will once again render Tolkien's work with the loving detail he gave to "The Lord of the Rings".
So we were devastated to learn that animal wranglers for the film have recently alleged that at least twenty-seven horses, goats, sheep and chickens died off-set during production because of poor living conditions and neglect. Entertainment Weekly writes:
We've had a few irons in the fire here at Taigh MacCath-Moran and haven't been quite ready to talk about them until recently. But now that things are sorted, I wanted to announce a couple of cool changes in our lives.
First, we're finally permanent residents of Canada, which means we're not tied to our working visas any longer and can move about as we please, not that we'd ever live anywhere but Nova Scotia. There's a celebratory pub night in the works, so if you're local, consider yourself invited (and if you're not and want to come anyway, consider yourself invited to stay at our house overnight). I'll post the date on that once it's finalized.
On Saturday afternoon of the convention, four holes-in-the-shoes, dust-in-the-petticoats wandering minstrels offered up an hour of entertainments designed to lift the spirit and put the mind at ease. Never you mind that our minstrels were forced to move at the last minute from their assigned space to a suite on the tenth floor because NO YOU CAN'T BRING YOUR HOME-MADE COOKIES INTO THE KING ROOM (Did you know that forbidden cookies taste like unicorn giggles?) and NO YOU CAN'T HAVE SINGING EITHER (what kind of Lurch/Miss Umbrage wannabe was running that room, anyway?). Never you mind that halfway through the hour, the hand-painted backdrop slipped from its duct tape mooring and had to be violently ripped from the wall by one C.S.E. (Claire) Cooney mid-sentence. These women were professionals, and no cookie, singing or backdrop calamity was going to stand between them and the show.
I'm delighted to report that Scheherazade’s Façade, the first anthology of Circlet Press' new Gressive Press imprint, is now available!
The e-book editions of the anthology can be purchased through Circlet Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other book retailers. The print edition will be available through the same in a few days, once the title navigates its way through the publishing system.
I'm home from World Fantasy Con and slept in my own bed last night. Woohoo! It was tremendous to put faces to names, to make friends of colleagues, to share the experience of writing with other professionals. It was also great to geek out a bit over the books I love; I now have signed, hard cover editions of The Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, and I also have signed hard cover editions of Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen by Garth Nix. Both authors were great people, and it was great to be able to tell them in person how much I enjoyed their work. Finally, I had the singular pleasure of listening to Guy Gavriel Kay read from his forthcoming novel, which I shall purchase immediately when it's released.