by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 5, 2016 | writing and publishing
Personally, at this time of year, I like to roll back the clock to that time before Christmas when dark and light meant something more than decor. To the time when the seasonal wheel turns and we embrace the darkness and the coming of the light at Winter Solstice. Before electricity, people who were connected to the earth, whispered stories in the dark time; stories of death and rebirth, of hungry ghosts, and nightmare creatures, of divine intervention, and justice. Read on to understand how we arrived in our current state of commercial oblivion and why we need to frighten up.
KC Redding-Gonzalez explains the evolution of Christmas in contemporary culture and introduces us to the Krampus.
by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 4, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
I am mending from surgery and reading this giant book. Flipping page after page, devouring pretty words, precise and commanding. Sucked in by Daniel Vyleta’s command of language, his descriptions, his metaphors, a voice that purrs like Dickens, HG Wells, Jules Verne. Reading, dozing, dreaming. Once I awake from being chased through the grimy streets of London with the three teen protagonists. Charlie, Thomas, and Livia. A love triangle. The story seeps inside me like the smoke. I want to stop, but I can’t. It lulls like heroine. I must know it all, why it is how it is, how it ends…if it ends.
He hooks me on page one.
There is movement all around the dormitory. Pale figures stretching, rising, whispering in groups. Haste wrestles with reluctance. There are only a handful of candles; moonlight on the snow outside the windows, their panes milky with its ghostly glow. Soon the boys move in procession out the twin doors. Nobody wants to be first, or last: not Charlie, not Thomas, not even the handful of boys who hold special favour. Best to be lost in the crowd.
This is no Hogwarts.
Smoke is a virus: the visible manifestation of vice. There was a time before smoke, in the 1600s, when a man could sin and his body would not betray him by issuing streams of smoke. But the soot breeds like germs and as the English conquer the world, they spread it like the plague, like blankets soaked in smallpox. Now smoke is an industry, managed by the grand families through “cigarettes and sweeties.” And those looking for a cure are pursued and stopped. The upper classes do not smoke; at least, their sin is not visible like the peasants and the poor who litter London’s streets. They mask it, control it, like everything else. Of course, they are morally superior and must appear that way. There is even a bill in parliament to close the borders and contain it, to banish foreigners: a frightful link to now.
Baron and Lady Naylor, Livia’s parents, search for a cure, make it their life’s work, use science, laboratories, and pure untainted innocents captured from distant parts of the globe. But is it a cure, they seek? Perhaps, it is something else?
Warning: Smoke is no romance novel. Smoke is Steampunk, that new indescribable genre that crosses science fiction and fantasy with settings in the 1800s and modern mechanics. There is a man who has changed his niece into a clockwork girl to control her morality, her smoking. When she feels sinful she winds the screws a little tighter and hardly smokes at all.
What do you think of it, this smoke? Is it blowing our way, a black noxious virus breeding somewhere in our immorality? Or is this merely Vyleta’s crazed imagination seeking to explain what has been; or perhaps, warning us of what is to come?
431 pages
by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 2, 2016 | journal, wildcrafting, writing and publishing
I love this Neil Gaiman quote. You can tell children dark stories “as long as you tell them that you can be smart, and you can be brave, and you can be tricky, and you can be plucky, and you can keep going.” Read Maria Popova’s commentary on Neil Gaiman’s Reimagined Hansel and Gretel:
via Neil Gaiman Reimagines Hansel and Gretel, with Stunning Illustrations by Italian Graphic Artist Lorenzo Mattotti – Brain Pickings
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 22, 2016 | writing and publishing
Incunabula. What an amazing word. To learn about the history of book printing, read Kristen Twardowski’s post below. My incunabula is nearly ready to meet the printer.
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 13, 2016 | Ireland, journal, mythology, writing and publishing
As I paint the finishing gloss on To Charm a Killer, my mind drifts back to its creation. I can’t remember how the whole story came together–there were many edits, revisions, and transformations along the way. But, I do know some things.
In the beginning, a girl was abducted by a priest.
Hollystone Coven emerged as the hook for the series: a coven of witches who solve murders using magic. Not the blink and it’s done stuff, but by manipulating energy through ritual concentration and manifestation. For example, through focussed chanting, they raise power and bend and shape the forces of nature; something, we all have the capability of doing, if only we believed.
One day while hiking at Buntzen Lake, we came upon a large circle of people hidden in the woods. They were chanting “El Diablo” — whether conjuring or banishing the devil, I do not know. But that was the moment, the witches of Hollystone Coven began meeting there for Sabbat rituals.
I fell in love with Estrada, the High Priest of Hollystone Coven–everyone does–and he fell in love with the woods and with faeries.
“I’m serious, Sara. This forest reeks of life, especially after the September rains. Can’t you smell it?” He loved the primordial odour of wet earth; imagined his beginnings in the first fecund ooze…a microscopic amoebic creature, not yet conscious of the magical transformation that would one day occur.
Then I began scouting locations–walking in the footsteps of my characters.
Old Alexandra Bridge in Yale, BC is a real place, though the intuitive path Estrada follows to meet the killer is purely his own.
Drawn toward the killer by some unfathomable force, Estrada took his first steps across the Old Alexandra Bridge with trepidation. He couldn’t help but look down through the open u-shaped steel decking that stretched like rusty metal waves beneath his boots. Resting a leather-gloved hand on the orange railing, he stared, mesmerized by the roiling green-brown river. Beneath him, the Fraser, rife with sediment and autumn rain, funnelled through a canyon of colossal grey rocks into spiralling white-capped eddies. It was deep, cold, and forbidding.
And, when it was decided that the girl must travel to Ireland to escape the priest, I went with her to co-create her experiences. On Shop Street in Galway, I watched a woman performing street art, and she became an inspiration for Primrose, the Irish fey witch.
Draped and hooded in a forest green cloak that dragged upon the stones in folds, Primrose stood serenely, her hands hidden beneath gaping sleeves. Clustered branches of appliquéd emerald and silver oak leaves meandered over the cloak like a shimmering forest. The tiny elfish face beneath the hood was painted bright green, except for the area around her eyes, which was etched in dark spirals to resemble the knots of a tree. Her ever-changing irises glowed with golden iridescence as she smiled.
“You look like a nature goddess.”
“She’s Danu, Matriarch of the Irish gods,” said Estrada.
Primrose leads the girl on a mystical adventure in Ireland.
And when Estrada arrives, he experiences Primrose in a wholly different way.
That is as much as I can say; to say more would divulge too many secrets. This is, after all, a mystery.
Ireland is a magical land, and I hope to see you there one day. If this book is your inspiration, I will be smiling.
The Sligo Road
Dolmens at Carrowmore
Communing with the Faeries at Tara, seat of the High Kings of Celtic Ireland
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 9, 2016 | Book Review, writing and publishing
Why do I love this book?
Nettie Lonesome is one tough, sympathetic, orphaned in childhood, raised by abusive idiots, going-to-save humanity heroine. Her friends are shapeshifters; her quest to kill monsters. Bowen has created a world resembling America of the 1870s. There are Durango Rangers, ranchers, indigenous tribes, and one thing more: MONSTERS. All kinds of monsters—the kind mothers teach their children to fear and with reason—vampires, chupacabras, and harpies. It’s Lonesome Dove meets From Dusk Till Dawn.
But this is not just a book about a seventeen-year-old girl killing monsters. That’s what she does; not who she is. This is a sweet and tender story—a coming-of-age story, a finding out who you are and what you are kind of story, a who-do-you-love story.
Wake of Vultures is marketed as Adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy but with Nettie in the lead, it’s a great YA read too. What really sets this book apart is Bowen’s writing style. Her prose is tight, pithy, blow you away visceral. She’s a poet in stompy boots.
“Eternity was a wake of vultures, a harem of harpies, a brigade of bragging bitch-buzzards carrying her through the night, flying her toward the gaping mouth of a cave at the top of a mountain that nothing on two legs could ever reach” (313).
And it’s book one in The Shadow series. Conspiracy of Ravens picks up where this leaves off, and Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen is currently writing book three. For some real fun, follow the author on Twitter @DelilahSDawson
