fantasy

After the publication of Ashes & Stones I was busy moving to Orkney. During this chaos, a story began to emerge—a woman’s story. She was insistent and ever-changing, spanning millennia. I called her Kára, a valkyrie’s name, a reincarnated being attested in an Old Norse poem in the Poetic Edda. If anyone could show me how to rise from the ashes of despair—it was Kára. Her name in Old Norse means wild and stormy; she was Orcadian through and through, but from way back.

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I began to write her tale down, incorporating what I had come to know from my extensive research into Scottish fairy folklore demonised during the witch hunts.

I wanted a witch book that wouldn’t dwell on persecution and suffering. I wanted a witch book that wasn’t vapidly escapist fantasy—plucking the good bits from women’s stories and leaving the rest. I wanted a witch book that wouldn’t trigger me, so I wrote one.

I also wanted complete artistic and editorial control of this book. Could I manifest this thing into the world in direct relationship to my readers? And then I made a plan to make this possible.

I will be running a Kickstarter for the book early next year, with a limited edition hardback and ebook. You—my wonderful subscribers—will be the first to hear about it!

I began to create maps of the alternate Scotland and Seal Islands where the novel takes place. There is also a map that shows how Kára perceives of time—a temporal map. From that grew sketches for chapter headings. Polished versions will be included in the book

The cover is by the wonderful artist who did the illustration for the cover of Ashes and Stones, Iain Macarthur. I told him about the book, sharing art from Vail Myers and Remedios Varo that influenced me. What he has created fits the book perfectly.

The York Minster. Taken with my iphone using Snapseed editing.

This year Fantasycon was in York, convenient for me as I live behind the rail station so the con was essentially in my back yard. The popular joke at the con was that York was indeed Winterfell. I confess I went simply because it was close to me– but fantasy is the genre I have always loved and with the embrace of the New Weird, it has become even closer to my heart.

The first con I ever attended was GenCon back in 1984. I was a dorky kid who played D&D. I remember trying to disguise my budding womanhood by wearing a man’s shirt and a fedora. I ended up wandering around pretty lonely, not knowing how how to approach the myriad boys and men around me. (I don’t remember any other girls, though there must have been some.) I was shy then, and not much has changed though I no longer wear men’s shirts and fedoras– maybe I should.

I still found the social aspect of this recent con daunting. Everyone was chatting in groups– presumably they’d known each other for years, or so it seemed. There was no way to enter into conversations as a lone woman. Or at least i should say I found it daunting.

And yet, things have changed. This was my first Fantasycon– since moving to the UK I have regularly attended Eastercon, the BSFA con– and in the last few years I have sold my hand made jewellery in the dealers room under the Feral Strumpet banner, which has helped me fund my trip to the con.

What I noticed was that feminism was alive and well in almost all the panels I attended. Challenging questions of inclusion and the purpose of violence against women in fiction where electric, bristling with new ideas. Men and women were voicing complex arguments; inclusion and nixing the misogynist cliches in the genre simply makes for richer stories.

Still the statistics are sobering– 50% of fantasy readers are women, yet we make up only 25% of published fantasy writers. These numbers, voiced by Abbadon Editor David Moore in his panel on Grimdark, were repeated in other panels I attended that weekend. There was an urgency to change this, something I had not felt before at any con.

It gave me hope. I would like to go back in time to that little girl hiding in plain sight and say “Hang in there– 30 years from now things will start changing and when they do, it’s going to happen fast.”