Ceallaigh's Blog
Aaron Pound of Dreaming About Other Worlds has offered the most comprehensive review to date of The Ruin of Beltany Ring: A Collection of Pagan Poems and Tales. Among other things, he writes:
"At a mere eighty-two pages, this collection ends much too soon. C.S. MacCath's short stories have a raw and almost visceral feel that hones directly into the travails and triumphs of everyday life, casting light onto the ways in which those living such lives might turn to Pagan spirituality to help guide them through their days. The poems, on the other hand, display a strange mixture of the seriousness of epic myth combined with a joyful willingness to play with those myths, and an angry undercurrent beneath it all, that sometimes rises to the fore in a bitter rage. As I noted before, this isn't really a collection of fantasy stories: The subtitle for the book is A Collection of Pagan Poems and Tales, and that is an entirely accurate description. One could almost think of this book as a Pagan prayer manual, offering a brief and engaging glimpse into the thinking of a member of the modern Pagan movement, and as that it is definitely a collection worth reading."
Working hard on the words lately. I'm in that place where I don't know whether I have 12,000 words of awesome or 12,000 words of what-the-hell-were-you-thinking (and yes, the B Beast is going to top out at 12,000 words, twice my original word count limit and thank you, Rhonda). I've been running my language through the sifter, again and again, turning words into art, or trying, anyway, because that's what I was hired to do. Come to think of it, this gig is teaching me about art, about story, about making a beautiful thing because beauty. Each time Rhonda has asked me to write for her, I've taken the work as a challenge to myself, a way to practice some new piece of craft.
Jodie (Bookgazing) of the Lady Business feminist blog has written a review of "The Daemons of Tairdean Town" that leaves me a little speechless and makes me want to work harder at storytelling. My heartfelt thanks for her kind words. They mean a lot to me.
You can find the review here: http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/83284.html
Spoilers Below!
Well, I've at long last completed the Mass Effect trilogy and experienced for myself the oft-criticized ending. Here are my thoughts:
Battle Mechanics
From the time you put boots on the ground in London, the game is incredibly buggy. At one point, I needed to survive a protracted battle until my team could be evacuated, but the shuttle never came, I killed all the bad guys, the battle music kept playing and game-play was essentially stuck. So I had to go back to my last save and fight the whole battle again, at which point the shuttle did show up when it was supposed to.
I continue to be delighted at the reception my little collection is getting. This time, Jennifer Lawrence of Eternal Haunted Summer offers a review so generous it has left me somewhat gobsmacked and has motivated me to keep writing and keep the faith, in more ways than one.
Ser at Pagan Book Reviews has written a glowing review of The Ruin of Beltany Ring. Here's an excerpt:
The Ruin of Beltany Ring has received another good review, this time from Rebecca Buchanan of BookMusings: (Re)Discovering Pagan Literature. Thank you kindly, ma'am!
In other news, our new home has weathered its first crowd of Gaels, who came to stay from Friday to Sunday for a weekend retreat and training session. Everybody had a bed, everybody was fed and we even managed to have a wee outdoor fire Saturday night.
Two new reviews for Scheherazade’s Façade are up, and both have positively mentioned my short story, 'The Daemons of Tairdean Town'.
Lokifan writes:
"The Daemons of Tairdean Town by C. S. MacCath is charming and heartbreaking and full of the unexpected."
and Andrea Blythe writes:
"As the title suggests, this anthology features fantasy stories with characters that exist outside the gender binary. Various characters in these stories shift genders at whim, have secret selves of the opposite gender, cross dress to hide their identity, are transgender, or perform other acts of gender bending. Through the book, the stories are consistently good with strong writing, interesting multi-dimensional characters, and fascinating worlds. Here are a few of my favorites:
Sean and I took in a double feature last night and came away with mixed reviews of the films we saw. Man of Steel was wonderfully science-fictional and human, full of imaginative Kryptonian technologies and glimpses at the emotional struggle of the man-who-would-be-Superman as he came into his own over many years. However, I have to point out that this is the third Superman movie of the last decade and the sixth of my lifetime, and since the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve there have been few blockbuster treatments of superheroines. I was pleased with Amy Adams' Lois Lane, who was more determined than plucky, but my opinion of superhero love interests is colored by my frustration at the lack of comic book films that feature female leads.
It's great when a story you've written years ago finds new friends. So is the case with "From Our Minds to Yours", which appeared in The Pagan Anthology of Short Fiction: 13 Prize Winning Tales.
Ally Leja of Geek Inked Magazine has written a thoughtful discussion of the issues raised by the story and given it a positive review.