This influences thing has gotten all out of order, but c’est la vie.

While walking in the unseasonable sun and warmth day (16 degrees celsius on Jan 12th. Lovely as it is, I think we all need to be afraid now), an Emmylou Harris song turned up on the IPod. It got me thinking about her incredible “Wrecking Ball” album and the number of artists to which that single work introduced me.

Of course, I was familiar, at least distantly, with Emmylou herself, though I’d never really paid much attention. I was much more familiar with producer Daniel Lanois, through his work with U2, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and – even earlier – such Toronto New Wave mainstays as Martha and the Muffins and Nash the Slash. He was not exactly the first person I could imagine producing an album for someone I thought of a ‘country singer’. However, his brilliant solo album “For the Beauty of Wynona” showed that he had deep love of dark folk music, the kind of lonely songs that Emmylou’s voice suited perfectly.

There’s an incredible line-up of songwriters on “Wrecking Ball”: Neil Young, Steve Earle, Anna McGarrigle, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Rodney Crowell, and Emmylou and Daniel themselves. Some I’d already known (Young, Earle, Dylan), some I now saw in a new light (Hendrix), and some were a new revelation. I quickly picked up work by Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams and their songs went into high rotation on my CD player (yes, children, there was music in a time before IPods).

Music has always played an important part in my writing and most of the books had an unofficial soundtrack. For The Night Inside, it was Shriekback, whose songs provided the section titles. For A Terrible Beauty, it was Fumbling Towards Ecstasy by Sarah Mclachlan. For Cold Hillside (my work in progress), it’s a series of playlists which include songs by Emmylou, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams.

The moody wash of the music, the depth of Emmylou’s voice, the songs that move from dark portraits of modern life to folk songs that reflect old traditions to love songs both sorrowful and hopeful, make this one album that would definitely make it onto the proverbial desert island with me.

And seriously, what writer of dark fiction wouldn’t get a shiver up their spine at the line:
“So I ran with the moon and I ran with the night
And the three of us were a terrible sight”

Ok, I admit it. I did not keep a record of what I read and my memory is … um…. not what it used to be, so this is more a note about the best things I think I read in 2012 (or perhaps late 2011).

Deathless
Catherynne Valente

I’d previously read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making but Deathless outdid all my expectations. It’s a dark take on the Russian folk tale “Koschei the Deathless” set in WWII Russia and less mortal realms. The authorial voice is stunning, with the cadence and tone that seems utterly perfect for the story. I bought it for my e-reader and then ended up buying a physical copy as well, both because it is a beautiful book and because there is a part of me that doesn’t consider e-books as “real”. But that’s just me – whatever way you choose to do it, you should read this book.

The Drowning Girl
Caitlin R. Kiernan
I read a couple of Caitlin Kiernan’s early books, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but they didn’t resonate for me, possibly because they were conflated with the rash of “I’m much cooler than you will ever be” horror novels I read in the 1990s. However, the very astute people at Bakka Phoenix, recommended this to me and they were absolutely right. It’s a brilliant, sad, funny book about finding a way to live in the world despite dangers both internal and external.
Both of these books were mentioned more than once in the “year’s best” panel at the World Fantasy Convention, so you don’t need to just take my word for it.

A quartet of fine books from my friends at ChiZine:

From Helen’s quietly disquieting stories of scholars to the rip-snorting conclusion to Gemma’s Hexslinger series, from David’s “big fat bastard” book about Russian spies, psychic powers, giant squids, and gangsters to Michael’s journey in the darkness at the heart of a Northern Ontario town, these books showed once again why “the house that Sandra and Brett built” is publishing some of the best dark fiction anywhere. (It also shows that Toronto is home to an amazing number of talented writers and that I’m lucky enough to know them). I’ve got a pile of ChiZine books in the “to be read” pile and I’m sure they’ll show up on next year’s list.

And, of course, see my post regarding David Keyes’ wonderful collection “I do so worry for all those lost at sea”.

Happy reading in 2013!

No, I’m not going to talk about my cats (of which I currently have none). I’m not going to talk about other people’s cats (much as I am fond of them). This is the next installment of “Influences” so I’m going to talk about books about cats and about writing about cats.

As a child, I was definitely a cat-lover. I had cats from the time I was old enough to give them names that in this much less innocent time are very embarassing. When I started to read, books about animals were a steady part of my reading diet. Particularly influential were The Incredible Journey, Kpo the Leopard, Carbonel, and a book about a cougar I have been unable to track down, though the scene in which the young cougar’s mother falls during a leap across a gorge and is killed by dogs remains branded in my brain.

A good portion of the early fiction I wrote involved cats, though generally they were of the talking fantasy variety. Onto them, I grafted adventure (journeys, haunted houses, floods, fires, dogs…) and a certain amount of teen angst I absorbed from other books and television (romances, fights, misunderstandings…). I still have a few examples of these early stabs at writing, though I can’t bear to read them more than once every ten years or so.

We went to see the new Ang Lee film of the Life of Pi yesterday. The Tiger was exquisitely rendered in CGI, though I was always aware it was CGI, possibly because I knew it was CGI. That wasn’t really a problem, because the entire “adrift at sea” sequence is so stunningly beautiful that it exists on a plane that is almost more literary than cinematic. You never truly believe it, because it has the feel of a fairy tale. I’d be very interested to see the reaction of someone who had no idea what was about to happen, because of course my own responses were influenced by the fact I do know. (For the record, I believed everything in the book until the island. Then even my sf and fantasy-trained suspension of disbelief function started to fail. But I do know which version of the story I prefer.)

My interview on Speculating Canada is up now. Many thanks to Derek for his thoughtful questions.

Check out the other interviews on the site as well, especially the recent one with Helen Marshall, whose “Hair Side, Flesh Side” collection is currently in my “to read’ pile.

At a planning retreat for my day job, we were all given a Bond Girl alter-ego. I was lucky enough to be Diana Rigg’s character from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.

Sadly, I’m not in the least like either the Divine Ms. Rigg or her character. Sigh.

But this picture is definitely going on the door of my office.

A few words of warning up front: I am in no way impartial about the House of Pomegranates, the wonderful people who run it, and David Keyes’ new collection of short short I Do So Worry For All Those Lost At Sea. The House of Pomegranates Press published my short story collection and the illustrated Chrysanthemum Shadows, the creative team at its heart are dear friends, and I’ve loved David’s work for years.

This new collection features 11 short stories, some linked (or are all of them linked by some mysterious factor we can’t quite grasp?), some published before in one of David’s exquisite limited editions, some of them original to this book. The central core of stories revolve around the family who live in the mysterious The House of Sleep and their neighbours. One of these neighbours is a cartographer who also happens to be a wolf. Another is a large Hare who rents the vacant mansion nearby and takes photographs of the O sisters in stripey tights in the rooftop studio.

Putting Emily to bed, a small nightlight casts fantastic shadows about the warm room. Her angel wings hang upon the door.
“William, I am writing a novel.”
“Are you? Of what?”
“Of the people who live in this house.”
“You and me?”
“No, silly, not us. I’m writing about the other people who live here.”

In the other stories there are ghosts, sisters who flee to Paris, and a mermaid longing for the sea. The writing can be lush and dreamy, with an air of Edwardian elegance, or as spiky and modern as a half-coherent conversation with a lover down a bad connection to the other side of the world. It reads the way David’s artwork (sadly not included in this book) looks – just as his art looks just like the images his words conjure.

Reading these stories is like curling up in the window seat and watching dusk darken across the lawn, watching the fireflies spark against the trees, and listening to your eccentric friends and family talk about art and dinner and the moon, knowing that in a moment you’ll hear the sound of someone shaking up the perfect martini. There is heartbreak ahead – just as there has been pain and loss and grief behind – but for the moment, this moment, everything is beautiful.

Nancy - then and now

At the recent World Fantasy convention here in Toronto (ok, Richmond Hill), I was on a panel about the late, much-missed Twilght Zone magazine. I was fortunate enough to make my first professional sale to TZ, after having entered their annual short story contest and finished as a runner-up for my story “The Party Over There”. The editor, Tappan King, returned the story with the comments that “perhaps I should rethink the ending” and “it needs to be deeper”. Since the ending was what the story was about and I had no idea what “deeper” meant, I didn’t do anything. Then one day he called me at work. After I stopped gibbering, I admitted that I hadn’t sent the story back because I didn’t want to change it. He said “so send it back as it was and tell me I’m full of shit”. I made some minor modifications and did just that (well, minus the shit reference). He bought it and my next story “Exodus 22:18” as well.

At the convention, the panel included Elizabeth Hand (to whom I lost the first TZ First Publication contest – and the best story definitely won), Scott Edelman, Darrel Schweitzer and Lawrence Connelly. We shared stories about our experiences and what the magazine and its staff had meant to us. I was a subscriber for a year or two before I entered the contest and I found the magazine to be an incredible resource for book reviews, introducing me to new writers as well as classics, and a place to find the kind of dark fantasy fiction I loved by the best writers around.

Thanks to the convention team and my fellow panelists for a great hour of memories.

For more information, check the article on Lawrence’s site.

By rights, Modesty Blaise should come much later in the influence sequence, but a friend mentioned this series the other day, which sent me back to reread the first two.

I think the second of the series (Sabre-Tooth) made it’s way into our house in one of the boxes of books that my Dad brought home (this was definitely a major benefit of having a parent work in the book business). After determining that no sabre-tooth tigers were involved, I ignored it for months, maybe even years. When I finally did read it, I was instantly converted to a fan. I gradually found the other books, mostly used, which results in a interesting range of cover treatments.

In my rereading, I discovered that they hold up remarkably well. The writing is economical and clear, the humour sophisicated and utterly embedded in the characters, the plots (at least in the first books) not too outlandish, and the ingenuity with which Modesty and Willie get out of yet another life-threatening situation always entertaining. However, it’s the characters that always set these books apart from so many other spy thrillers. Despite her comic strip origins, Modesty is a rich and complicated hero. There is nothing camp or comical about her, beyond her own sense of humour. She is fierce, strong-willed, intelligent, brave and professional. She can command criminals and soldiers, plan and execute complicated “capers”, and never backs away from the hard choice. She always gets the boy, so to speak, but none of them ever get her for a moment longer than she chooses. She is loyal, fair, and – to the benefit of the British government – a “compulsive payer of debts”.

I always thought “What would Modesty do?” would make a good mantra – but there’s no way I could ever live up to that.

I see reflections of her in the characters I created as a teenager and suspect that if I were to ever write a fight scene, it would be a lot like a Modesty Blaise one.

I wish that someone would make a movie that does her justice, if only to set a new group of fans hunting for stories about a character who was always so much more than just “the female James Bond.”

My website was hacked last weekend. Why anyone would hack it is beyond me, but there you go. Thanks to Deane for the quick restore.
“Understanding WordPress and Social media 101” is going on my “things to do” list now.

No one, even at their most charitable, would call me technologically adept. My brother, his friend (and my future husband, though we didn’t know it at the time) and I were once discussing an article that had posited that the world would be divided into techno-lords and techno-peasants. Richard claimed techno-lord status, I was clearly a techno-peasant and my brother decided he would be a techno-parasite instead. All of this to lead up to the fact that my web hosting service migrated their platform or some such other hand-wavy technical thing last week and I’ve had nothing but trouble since. Part of this is my own fault, since I failed to read the instructions with sufficient diligence (in my defense, I think it’s a good idea to put the single big thing you must absolutely do to get your service back in ALL of the many e-mails I received. Preferably at the top.) and partially because the parts I did read just made my brain hurt. But at least I eventually made it here again.

Another thing I’m bad at is noticing Facebook messages and as a result missed a request from Derek Newman-Stille at Speculating Canada regarding an article on my book “A Terrible Beauty”. When I finally did clue in, I went to read the review and was both flattered by the kind words and impressed by the fact that Derek had found imagery that had never even occurred to me while I was writing. His comments regarding the use of lake and water imagery struck me as absolutely true and a complete surprise to me.

The site features interviews, reviews and articles about horror, sf and fantasy from a Canadian perspective and it’s definitely going on my favorites list.