asakiyume | Entries tagged with inconvenient god

Lagoonfire, the sequel to The Inconvenient God--or shall we say, the second in the Tales of the Polity--has a cover!

Art this time by Susan Lavoie.

And it has a back blurb for the paperback edition:

The past can be a difficult thing to escape…

Decommissioner Thirty-Seven is not the most conventional decommissioner at the Ministry of Divinities, but she takes her role of helping fading gods to retire seriously—and feels bad when things go wrong. Take the decommissioning of Laloran-morna, former god of warm ocean waves: she botched that, somehow, and now he spurts saltwater when upset. When seawater invades a development project in Laloran-morna’s old haunts, suspicion naturally falls on him. But is the retired god the source of the problem? Or is it the work of a mortal saboteur? Searching for the answer to these questions brings Thirty-Seven face-to-face with a past she’d rather forget.

Soon it'll be available for preorder! It's long enough--a novella rather than a novelette--that the publisher can send it to places like Publisher's Weekly to review... I am dying of hope and anxiety!

I'm happy to report that Annorlunda Books, which published The Inconvenient God, will publish the sequel, which will be called (thanks to good advice from

sartorias) Lagoonfire.

No timeline yet, and I mean... I am thankful each day just to be alive another day, and have no real faith that that will continue, so ... For now I'm just happy that the publisher liked the story and wants to publish it!

The healing angel and I finished reading Hamlet aloud to each other today--we'd been working on it ever since I finished reading The Raven Tower and since I found out she never read it in high school. What a ripping good yarn, right? And so many good bits I'd forgotten, and over-the-top bits, and everything.

healing angel at the end: Wait, is Hamlet nominating Fortinbras to be the new king of Denmark?

me: Yup.

healing angel: What's wrong with Horatio?! How about a nice scholarly king... who's afraid of ghosts?

Other things that stuck out at me this time around: Shakespeare getting a dig in at classism by having the gravediggers observe that the only reason Ophelia is getting a Christian burial is because she's a noblewoman:
--Will you ha' the truth an't? If this had not been a
gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o' Christian burial.

--Why, there thou say'st! And the more pity that great folk
should have count'nance in this world to drown or hang themselves
more than their even-Christian.

That, and Gertrude describing Hamlet as fat and out of breath in the fight with Laertes!

And speaking of breathless, the short story "John Simnel's First Goshawk," by Tegan Moore, knocked the wind right out of me with its beauty of language and theme and the controlled, powerful, graceful way it unfolded.

This is how you break a hawk: wait him out ... If the falconer sleeps, he simply begins the excruciating wait again the next day. If the hawk sleeps, however, then the bird has lost forever ...

And this is how you break a boy: tell him he is king ... You must crown him and put him at the front of an army. If you fail, there is always another handsome hazel-eyed boy somewhere in the world. Anyone might do.

And

If escaped, or even freed, is something tamed and trained in this way ever its own sovereign?

I have a draft of my Inconvenient God sequel, but it's still in isolation while I decide how contagious it is and if radical surgery or chemotherapy will be necessary. As I said to Wakanomori, it's exactly the story you could expect from someone who spent six months working in a jail and the rest of the time editing papers on how the Chinese government incentivizes local officials to enact the policies it wants to carry out ... while living in T*rump's America.

Current Music: Thalía & Natti Natasha: No me acuerdo
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/942051.html

I'm nearing the climax of my sequel to The Inconvenient God. I'm excited! This story's considerably longer than that one--with more details about the protagonist's past, including her ~ ~ name ~ ~ (Sweeting was what her grandparents called her, but it's not her name.)

I probably won't finish it by the end of the year--too much other stuff going on--but early in the new year.

... okay, going to take my high energy off for a run and to work out more plot details.

Here--enjoy Sofi Tukker singing "Matadora"

Watch on YouTube

Current Music: Sofi Tukker: Matadora
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/937154.html

I think everyone who reads me here probably already reads

sovay, but just in case not...

I was blown away by her review of An Inconvenient God.

sovay's reviews are as good as stories: when she reviews films, she captures the drama of them, and without spoiling them in the least, makes you feel, by the power of her writing, what makes them funny, poignant, terrifying, tragic--whatever. It's a huge honor to have that attention paid to my own work.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/916079.html

Sherwood Smith asked me some really interesting questions that The Inconvenient God raised for her, and she posted the questions and answers over on the Book View Cafe blog (here).

I think my favorite question was the one about whether writing words down chains them. The technology of writing is really wonderful and makes miracles possible, in terms of sharing and transmission, but the spoken word has real power too. I love thinking about their different strengths.

And speaking of spoken word (heh),

okrablossom linked me to another beautiful spoken word poem, "Rise," by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, this time in collaboration with Aka Niviâna, an Inuk poet. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is from the Marshall Islands, which are gravely threatened by rising sea levels, and many of her poems deal with climate change. Aka Niviâna is from Kalaallit Nunaat--Greenland--whose melting glaciers create the rising sea levels. Her poems often deal with the legacy of colonization.

Their words, combined with the breathtaking images, is really powerful (video (6 minutes) and text of the poem available here).

--Sister of ice and snow, I'm coming to you
--Sister of ocean and sand, I welcome you

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/909901.html

Today The Inconvenient God is available for purchase, from multiple sources and in multiple formats! Andrea Johnson, the Little Red Reviewer, gave it an excellent write-up

The Inconvenient God touches on lost history, colonialism, the best (and worst) ways to chat with divinities, culture clash, and how to enjoy the new without forgetting the old.

I love the chatty style of Andrea's reviews. This made me laugh:

To be honest, when I read the back cover copy, I thought this was going to be about an old sky beard who was a professor at a college, and the guy refused to retire even though he had dementia. Yeah, that is not at all what this story is about!!

To pique your curiosity further: there's an apple goddess in this story too. That fact makes its autumn release feel just right.

Don't forget that if you do buy the story and send proof of purchase to the publisher, you can get a coupon to receive the lovely story The Lilies of Dawn for just 99 cents. More on that promotion here.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/908341.html

I finished the Timor book, Eden to Paradise. It continued as it had begun, being very satisfying when it was talking about Timorese customs and lifeways and very irksome when the author's biases became too intrusive. Do people still use the word "pacification" unselfconsciously, when talking about colonial adventures? And she's got a section where she talks about how hard it is for the Portuguese administrator to deal with all the Timorese interpersonal conflicts. Oh hey, I know a way to solve that... But anyway. It was still genuinely great to have a look at how people were living so long ago.

A few interesting short stories:

In Apex Magazine, "Field Biology of the Wee Fairies," by Naomi Kritzer, available to read free here.

It starts out in a way I found unpromising: spunky science-interested girl in 1962 doesn't care about getting a fairy the way all the Other Girls do--but then it surprised and delighted me by where it went next.

In Fireside Magazine, "The Ceremony," by Mari Ness, available to read free here.

It's a flash fiction take on Sleeping Beauty from a weird-creepy, but not horrifying, perspective.

In It Happened at the Ball, the first story, "The Siret Mask," by Marie Brennan. Available for purchase from multiple venues, links at the bottom of the page here.

This is an excellent tale of concealed identities--good for a story about a mask--and transformations, featuring a dashing thief. I particularly loved the details of one costume change--I always wonder how masters of disguise manage it, and this showed how!

And the promo! Annorlunda Books is offering Vanessa Fogg's beautiful The Lilies of Dawn for just 99 cents with proof of a preorder or (after October 10) purchase of my novelette, The Inconvenient God. Details here. Look at these covers together!

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/907277.html

Here is the final cover for my novelette, The Inconvenient God, which Annorlunda Books is bringing out in October! In case you can't read the text blurb, it says,

What happens if you try to retire a god who is not ready to leave?

An official from the Ministry of Divinity arrives at a university to decommission a local god. She is expecting an easy decommissioning of a waning god of mischief but finds instead an active god not interested in retiring and university administrators who have not told her the full story about the god. Can the Decommissioner discover the true story of this god in time to prevent his most destructive round of mischief yet?

This story had its genesis in a conversation on

sovay's journal years ago--the talk turned to exorcisms and exorcising a god from his precinct (this entry; this thread), and the idea lingered.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/906083.html

I am staggeringly lucky to have cover art by Likhain for "The Inconvenient God," a novelette (maybe a noveletina? Extra long short story?) coming out this fall from Annorlunda Press.

Behold! (All Likhain's art is just gorgeous.)

(link to her original tweet here)

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/904009.html

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with inconvenient god

Lagoonfire cover

Lagoonfire

reading and related

further adventures of Decommissioner 37

(no subject)

written word, spoken word

Novelette birthday today

Wednesday reading, plus a promo

Final cover for The Inconvenient God

cover: The Inconvenient God