Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney (Rebellion Publishing, 2023)

★★★☆☆

Necromancer with an allergy to violence becomes embroiled in political intrigues.

Told with glee and pizzazz, this story gave me a lot of what I love most about Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods or Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief series, which is to say, sublime encounters with the numinous. The joys depicted here were gorgeous and glorious, and I appreciated the explorations of complex trauma and consent. It’s a long book, but I never found the style inaccessible or boring. (I did, however, have to start a vocabulary list* to keep track of all the unfamiliar words/archaisms I learned.)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf, 2022)

★★★☆☆

More-literary-than-speculative novel, currently experiencing a surge of popularity, about a trio of friends who make video games.

On the plus side: I felt that Sam and Sadie were well-realized characters, and I appreciated seeing a relationship that was grounded in creative collaboration over sex or romance; I felt like this was the beating heart of the novel and done mostly well.

On the minus side…

And She Sang ‘Crows!’: A Dwarf Fortress Story

An Agitated Giant Peach-Faced Lovebird has killed two dwarves, earning it the name Tusungavog (“Conjuredredged”).

Nick’s fort has been having a right time of it lately, with giant birds getting into his farming area, killing most of his chickens, and murdering two of his dwarves. As he explains,

“Agitated” animals that attack are apparently what happens when you fell too many trees per unit of time (likewise fishing, plant gathering, and hunting) and although they theoretically can reset, attacking those animals while other animals [are] on the map can flip them to Agitated, which makes it easy to spiral out of control.

This is having various distressing consequences:

The ravens also keep chasing people into trees they can’t get down from?
I keep finding starving, dehydrated dorfs passed out in the canopy layer

A dwarf settles for an afternoon snooze among some autumnal tree branches. Not shown: crippling hunger and thirst, fear of mortality.

But the beauty of this game lies in scenes like the following:

Much of the front of the fort is stacked three and four deep with Agitated Giant Raven and Agitated Flying Squirrel Men and Agitated Unicorns and Agitated Peach-Faced Lovebirds and this kid is out here, undaunted.

A dwarven child plays make believe while corpses of dwarves and Agitated Giant Ravens litter the ground nearby.

And the irony, too:

Description of an in-game poem called And She Sang ‘Crows!’ — an example of a poetic form “concerning someone recently deceased.” 😐

This was all far too funny not to take as a poetry-writing challenge. So, presented without further comment:

And She Sang ‘Crows!’
Såkzul Letmoslegon

Winged shapes overhead, in a beat ending all music. Crows!

The unlucky are scattered aloft. Strangest mood:
Tired bones in the trees, deep asleep, go unheard.
Slender leaves red with fall; underneath, a red hood;
Voices rise from the fort—come back in—your own good—
But the child finds herself humming still. Pretty bird.

Where Flowers Take Root

“Nym had never managed to catch more of Raika than her scent—like smoke and leather and wood. The very first time, she’d followed its trail to a top-shelved jar of nightbloom essence, five milliliters emptier than last marked. Beneath the bottle, Nym left a scrap: Caught you.”

I have a story out in the latest issue of OFIC Magazine! “Where Flowers Take Root,” co-written with Ansel Xiu, is:

  • a queer f/f fantasy adventure romance

  • a hopeful, indulgent little story about finding homes in each other

  • “fantasy, mixing poisons for great justice, toxic kingdoms, sneaky note-passing, exploring the city at night, nosegays & nose gays (you’ll see), masquerade balls and hidden identities and perilous escapes oh my”

A digital copy of the issue is $8 USD, and you can get yours here.

It’s hard to believe this little story is out in the world! We completed it in late 2019/early 2020, right before the pandemic hit; I still remember our initial brainstorming meeting at the hot bar of a Whole Foods, where we tossed around archetypes and landed on “apothecary + thief.” Ansel and I are still friends now, though it was a close thing: we butted heads about things as small as word choice, and as big as the entire plot. Our writing interests have diverged since, but who knows—maybe we’ll collab again someday.

Re-read: Animorphs by K. A. Applegate

Over the last two months, I (re-)read the entire 54-book Animorphs series,* originally published by Scholastic in 1996-2001.

This series was formative for me. It, along with Brian Jacques’s Redwall, kicked off my interest in SFF. I remember thinking “‘science fiction’ must mean something that could be true—like people being infested by Yeerks and no one knowing about it.” I remember ordering the books via the Scholastic Book Club in the late 90s, through newsprint catalogs that looked like this.

Despite these memories, I had only ever finished about two-thirds of the series, and I knew nothing of how it ended, except grimly.

Present day: I and a few co-readers had been talking about returning to the series for some time. The ebooks are freely available on the Internet, with the author’s approval. In 2022, I could find no greater comfort than indulging in the stories I’d loved as a child. Thus: my Great Animorphs Re-Read. There are far too many books in the series to do individual reviews, but I will be sharing my big takeaways from a craft and storytelling perspective (series-end spoilers ahead).

So, without further ado…

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief by Victoria Chang

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief by Victoria Chang (Milkweed Editions, 2021)

★★★☆☆

A collection of letters/poems exploring grief, intergenerational trauma, writing, and identity, from the perspective of a Chinese-American daughter and parent.

In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.

I felt a profound connection to the subject matter of this collection. Chang writes of her mother’s death and her father’s dementia; between her epistles, she collages her mother’s narrative of escaping Communist China against family photos and documents. Some of my own lines of inquiry have mirrored Chang’s: How did my dad’s family escape the Cultural Revolution? Who are these people whose graves I am visiting but have never met? I’ve found artifacts of my mother’s and grandmother’s lives after their deaths—certificates and passports, journals I can’t read—and my other grandmother lost her mind to Alzheimer’s. I’m affected by the peculiar forms of grief experienced by privileged children of Chinese immigrants, many of which Chang explores here.

Lucky people are supposed to live in the future. (…) The problem is that the space between how you really feel and luck is always shame.

Some blog upgrades: Bigfoot and Quotebacks

My recent review of Beyond Survival included a long but necessary footnote in the first sentence, which made me want to install fancy inline popover footnotes 1  akin to what I’ve seen on some technology blogs.

This blog runs on Squarespace, so I set up Bigfoot by following the instructions on this 512 Pixels post (including Anthony Craig’s modification for properly resetting numerical footnotes). Overall, the biggest issue I encountered was that despite the stipulation that “the Bigfoot site has all of the various options you can set in Javascript outlined,” the Bigfoot site has a BIG RED (FAUX) SPLASH SCREEN with THREE BIG BUTTONS on it, making it unclear (to me) that you should not click one of the buttons but instead should scroll further down to get to the documentation. I spent an inordinate amount of time poking around in the Bigfoot files and on Github trying to find the documentation, long enough that I was like “I guess the references to ‘website documentation’ are outdated and perhaps outmoded.”

(It was also unclear that to download bigfoot-number.zip 2  —to get numeric footnotes—one should go to the demo, apply the numeric style, then download.)

I write these things here in case anyone else runs into the same silly hangups. It is possible to be too precious about interface design, y’all. Anyway, you can now see footnotes in action, here and on the full review!

I’m also trying out Quotebacks, a cute snippet-to-embeddable-blockquote feature, available as a Chrome extension:

The ultimate goal is to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discusson space. To promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish.

Here’s to more (and prettier) blogging in 2022!

Update: June 14, 2022

I noticed on a recent blog post that Bigfoot footnotes don’t play well with Squarespace image blocks, by default displaying “underneath” them as in the screenshot below.

 
A blog post in which the text in an expanded footnote is covered up by one of the images in the post.

Screenshot of a post on this blog, showing the expanded footnote covered up by an image in the post.

 

To resolve this, I updated bigfoot-number.css to change the z-index of .bigfoot-footnote from the default value 10 to something higher:

.bigfoot-footnote {
  position: absolute;
  z-index: 20;

I’ll continue to keep any further notes about my Bigfoot modifications in this post as a record for myself and anyone else who stumbles across the same issues.

As of today I also noticed that Nathan Cashion on Medium has written a helpful walkthrough about using Bigfoot and Squarespace (as well as a jQuery-less fork of Bigfoot called Littlefoot). I probably won’t bother with Littlefoot for now, but it’s good to know about as an option.

  1. Like these! ↩

  2. Hunh. And here I’ve just learned that putting backticks around text in Squarespace’s WYSIWYG text editor can get you inline code/monospace formatting, which isn’t documented anywhere. I swear, mostly Squarespace is much less of a headache for me than rolling my own, but fighting for the customizations I do want does get tiring. ↩

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editor), Ejeris Dixon (Editor) (AK Press, 2020)

★★★☆☆

Collection of articles/essays/interviews covering the history, theory, politic, and praxis of transformative justice, sometimes positioned as a community-based “alternative”* to prisons and policing.

*Note that contributor and abolitionist Mariame Kaba explicitly denounces this positioning and the binary it implies, calling transformative justice “an ideology, a framework, a political vision, a practice […] to shift and transform our relationships to allow us to build the conditions under which we will no longer need prisons and surveillance and policing” but positing that an institutional “alternative” to the prison-industrial complex, itself an institution of oppression conflating different harms, is impossible, and a trap of thinking.

This is a bit of a hard one to rate because on the one hand, it is undoubtedly an important and pioneering collection, but on the other, it is disjointed in a way that made it difficult for me, a person who is already interested in transformative justice (TJ), to derive learning from. It almost felt like it should have been two (or more) books. Some of this is reflected in the subtitle, “Strategies and Stories.” There has been an editorial decision in this book to position accounts of TJ in practice (successful and otherwise) alongside reflections on the movement’s history and struggles. While I think both are necessary, I didn’t find myself able to take away much from either with the way they were presented here.