Multipass Saw Her Standing There

A few years back, this blog had a feature called Multipass, which ran on Mondays. It was widely read and acclaimed (ha no) and had adorable post titles based on song lyrics and here we are again! Today, four things make a multipass.

Over the holiday weekend, I put Fellowship of the Ring into the DVD player (the four hundred hour version, naturally) while I baked all the carrot cake that was fit to eat. After Fellowship concluded, in went Two Towers. I only got through the first disk there before real life called me away. But!

It's been a heck of a long time since I've seen the films and gosh, they look old. Granted, I'm not looking at a blu-ray version, but the digital elements are often really obvious. Oh technology, what're you doing to our media anyhow?

It's funny how the films struck me, and also how the sweeping battle scenes haven't aged well -- at least for me. They feel cold and heartless, whereas you get smaller scenes like Eowyn offering Aragorn her awful stew and there's loads of subtext; she's highly into him because he saved her world, he's like 87 and trying to still be polite when he's ready to run away with the elves because he knows he looks fine while barefoot on a chaise lounge. These small moments payoff when we see Eowyn confront the Witch King, because we're like "yes, girl, that's who you are," but the bigger battles of warg vs. Rohan farmer don't carry much emotion. They're all spectacle and little else.

Clarkesworld Year Nine (Volume One) is out, and I've got a story in its pages. "Pithing Needle" is one of a duology that I wrote for CW (the other being "The Cumulative Effects of Light Over Time," in the Upgraded anthology).

These two stories take place on a fucked up Earth where an alien vessel has crashed and all manner of insanity is streaming out of the ship's remains. The aliens are weird and humanity is made stranger for our contact with them. I laugh when I think of the reviews these stories received, one reviewer saying I was "obsessed" with this story, because I'd published two different versions. The stories are in conversation with one another, is all; they show very different aspects of the world and character. If that's obsession, okay. In writing this multipass, I found this amazing article by Octavia Cade about aliens and eating and horror and food, which includes "Pithing Needle," and just wow. Thank you, Octavia.

(The other thing about this story is, I remember being distinctly thrilled to appear along side Helena Bell's "Lovecraft." Oh my stars, that story.)

Volume One is out now (more here!); volume two hits later this year, and I'll have a story in there, too -- it's one of my favorites, "Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds."

Four years ago, Masque Books published a digital edition of my book, Watermark. They had no interest in publishing it in paper given how badly Rings of Anubis was selling (or do we call that not selling?) -- but I sure did, and now that the contract with Masque has come to a close, Watermark is available in paperback!

Watermark tells the story of a kelpie, sent to the human world as a punishment. Pip lives between worlds, not fully remembering why she was expelled from Otherworld, the fairy world that stands on the eve of its own destruction. Pip meets up with other unseelie fae in the human world, some of whom are convinced she can save Otherworld, others of whom contain the memories she can no longer access.

It's a kissing book, okay?

It's also a book about losing things and finding second chances in the ashes. It's about the hope that those closest to us are never quite gone.

Leave a comment on this multipass and I'll enter you in a giveaway for a copy, okay? Okay! I'll draw at least one name at the end of the week, April 6.

You can read chapter one here!

I spent Lent away from Twitter again -- searching my blog proved I did that last year, too. It's good for the brainmeats.

I'm ~15K into writing the next Folley & Mallory adventure, which is also the last planned book in that series. I realized something about the book last week, because why have one neat timeline when you could have three braided together -- because the subtext of these books has always been mothers and daughters and how they both love and hurt one another, sometimes with intention, and these things need some form of resolution. We can't be all spectacle; we need to understand the pain so we can fully enjoy and appreciate the confrontation with the Witch King.

They're taking the jackals to Isengard!

Wait, I've mixed my medias.

Leave a comment! Win a book! Multipass! (International is fine!)