Crossing Out the Old, Scribbling in the New
Welcome to Crosshatches!
Social media is rotting out from under us - and just as my writing was beginning to find audiences, too! Creators of all stripes have felt the squeeze as they’ve found it more and more difficult to be heard over all the noise on these sites.
The time seemed ripe to start a newsletter.
With Crosshatches, my aim is to occasionally talk about my approach to writing, as well as point you in the direction of cool stuff I've read, watched, or played.
With that out of the way, I’ll get to it.
What I’ve Written
On the writing front, I finished a novella in April. It takes place in the same setting as my dark fantasy novelette, As the Shore to the Tides, So Blood Calls to Blood. When I started, I was convinced it would be on the longer end of short story, perhaps even a novelette, but the story kept building and succeeded in getting away from me. Afterwards, there were two months or so where my word hoard was spent, and I ended up reading to replenish it.
I’ve since stretched out my hand, found my words had returned, and finished a flash piece where I tried my hand at writing an Aickmanesque story. I also started a weird (or is it Weird?) post-apocalyptic sword & sorcery story that I hope to finish soon.
What I’ve Read
One of the great things about vacationing in a lovely but very rural area is that it affords me plenty of time to read. After finishing a re-read of Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson, I picked up Leech by Hiron Ennes. Overall, a fun read that invited comparison to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice in that the protagonist is a parasite distributed across dozens, perhaps hundreds of bodies. The parasite is The Institute (think, a mixture of the Centers for Disease Control and the Académie des sciences), sending its hosts to cultivate the health of the population. Never know when you’ll need a spare body, so might as well make sure they’re hale and hearty. I also finished Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I wrote For the Devil on the last day of my vacation (boo!). Much more Capital-L literary in her approach than Donaldson or Ennes, it is nevertheless ironic that Lima’s novel is a nod to the venerable genre tradition of a fix-up. Craft sets up its metanarrative in the past, where an unnamed writer is not so much inspired as commissioned by the Devil to write these stories. Surreal and often Weird, Lima’s narratives often capture the anxieties of immigration and the uncanniness of feeling you belong in two different places at once.
Short Fiction: Grottmata by Thomas Ha (Nightmare Magazine #142)
"...War is not a new experience; it is a new world. . . so the world of war is stalked by the monsters called battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a life and intelligence of their own. . ." The Citadel of the Autarch, Chapter I
Yes and, Thomas Ha seems to say in his latest story, Grottmata. Bia-Peitha still echoes with the war that ended with their occupation. The suicides of four soldiers attracts the attention of an imperial investigator, who himself hails from another colonized world. As his investigation unearths, all the pain and bloodshed and cruelty war leaves in its wake has trickled down into the very groundwater of Bia-Peitha. Imbued with a memory cobbled together from the last anguished moments thousands suffered before their deaths, the collective conscience known as the Grottmata can only recreate the very violence that originated it. It can only ever seek vengeance because the bloodshed, the violence, the pain didn't happen years ago. No, that fear, that anger, that pain is happening now. And how can the investigator and the Grottmata's adoptive daughter, Gemma, grapple with their past traumas, the humiliation brought about by colonization, and also break the never-ending cycle of vengeance?
One More Thing. . .
Keep on the lookout for Seize the Press #11, and don’t forget to sign up for the STP newsletter while you’re at it. Reminder: if you have a pitch for an essay that fits the anticapitalist vision of Seize the Press, send it my way (karlo@seizethepress.com)
Over at Podside Picnic, we say our good-byes to Watership Down, bring back Aaron Thorpe to wax rhapsodic about Season 1 of For All Mankind, and hope to continue with our limited series, The Chronicles of the Chronicles of Riddick, with the next film in that franchise. . . you guessed it: The Chronicles of Riddick.
However, if you’re not interested in a monthly commitment, you can purchase some of our more popular individual episodes under Podside’s shop.
And that’s all she wrote!