Blake and Bikini Kill

And here are three Wolf House pictures by the much-too-talented olizmay. She has a deviantart gallery as well, wherein she demonstrates just how sickeningly diverse her creative talents are.

Timothy and Bikini Kill

Blake

Bette

1. Books one and two are going to be released in a combined hard copy in about four months’ time. More on that closer to the launch date.

2. Book five is ticking along. Everyone’s so far from where they started.

3. I now have a tumblr, where I throw all the random images, poems, quotes etc which I draw inspiration from in some way. Check out its random image function here (may be a not-work-safe image; some of them have breasts and stuff in ‘em), because that’s basically how I use it — I hit ‘random’ and then try to write on the image which comes up.  Oh! And if you’re into the twitter thang, I’m over here.

4. The best way to keep up with my regular whining about how hard it is writing trashy vampire novels about punk teenagers and how tortured and miserable I am is still through the Wolf House tag in my livejournal.

5.

Jay by SeveredScythe

FAN ART IS THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER, I LOVE IT. THE OTHER MOST AWESOME THING EVER IS FANFICTION, SO YOU SHOULD GO LOOK AT THIS STORY BY THEONLYTWIN

OH MY GOSH MY FACE LOOKS LIKE THIS RIGHT NOW: *____*

Ophelia's Salvation

I’m reading a fantastic book of essays called Gay Shame at the moment, and just finished one by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “Shame, Theatricality and Queer Performativity” about Henry James.

The essay looks at the depression James went through after the New York edition of his collected works was met with a “total failure to sell and its apparently terminal failure to evoke any recognition from any readership”. Sedgwick compares the devastating melancholia James went through to the very earliest shame-responses seen in infants sometime between the third and seventh month of life — that’s the age when babies start responding with recognisable shame-postures and expressions to stimuli.

And what stimuli causes that reaction? It happens when the baby smiles at a caregiver, and the caregiver fails to return that smile.

It sounds like such a simple comparison, but it’s pretty revelatory to me. It explains so much about the tangled emotional mess of my relationship to my writing, and it does it so clearly and cleanly that it’s a little bit mind-blowing. Writing novels, submitting stories to anthologies, posting fanfic on lj — they’re all different manifestations of the same basic thing: I’m offering a smile at the reader, hoping for a smile in return. And when the smile doesn’t come, bam! I’m just like the babies. Shame response a-go-go.

I don’t know what this new self-knowledge will mean in terms of my relationships with future writings and readers, but it’ll be interesting to find out.

The other thing I wanted to quote from Sedgwick’s essay is about the introductions James put on the stories in the New York edition, because it is exactly, perfectly, how I feel about Ophelia’s Salvation, and about writing the foreword to the 10th anniversary edition of that book:

The speaking self of the preface does not attempt to merge with the potentially shaming or shamed figurations of its younger self, younger fictions, younger heroes; its attempt is to love them. That love is shown to occur both in spite of shame and, more remarkably, through it.

Mary Borsellino, Melbourne Pride March, 2010.

Yesterday a big bunch of friends and I went to the Pride March in St Kilda. It was very hot and sunny, uncomfortably so, but the experience was incredibly positive and I am sincerely glad I went.

But there’s nothing like futile optimism to start a new year, so I’ve cleaned up everything at the last minute (ah, now that sounds more like me). The newly pressed and starched menu to your right has all the links you could want to artwork, excerpts, bells and whistles. And even a merch table, because Audrey and Erinna are very good at what they do.

So enjoy! And let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see on the site in future — my email’s mizmary@gmail.com

Instead of content today, let’s all just enjoy Lady Gaga as a vampire, from a recent issue of Out magazine.

I always feel a bit wretched wishing people a “Happy Holidays”, because it’s like I’m saying “I wish you a Merry Christmas even though you don’t celebrate Christmas at all, Merry or otherwise”, and that’s pretty shitty of me, even if it’s a well-intentioned shittiness. There needs to be a way of saying “man, I hope this time of year doesn’t suck for you, and that good stuff happens to you and the people you care about” without it being tangled up with potential awkwardness. Get on that, society!

Still, however your Decembers might look, you probably know at least a couple of people that you’re supposed to give delightful gifts to for one reason or another, right? And since you’re on the internet, it’s likely that some of the people you know are also on the internet. In fact, that might be where you know them from! They might be living on the OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD, in fact! It’s crazy! What an age we live in, huh?

If you’re anything like me, this situation is complicated by the fact that being on the internet and being lazy go hand in hand rather neatly. There are people on the other side of the world who need to be given nice things by you, but the post box is all the way outside, and maybe even down the street! That’s a long way to go! Shit! What are we going to do?

Fear not! For here is the perfect solution to your terrible situation. You should buy your internet friends some e-books. You don’t have to go anywhere! There are no shipping delays (did I ever tell you about the time I sent a friend a photo of LeVar Burton I took for her? I sent it October 19th, and she still doesn’t have it. The mail service is not the reliable bastion of reliability that it should be!) or wrapping-related traumas, or snooty salespeople, or pungent noisy crowds.

Plus, these particular e-books are totally excellent and your internet friends will love them, I swear. Think how excellently cool you’ll feel when you get emails saying “wow, those books you sent me over the internet were totally great, friend! I have had an amazingly happy holidays and/or a fantastically merry christmas, and I owe it all to your astounding long-distance gift-giving skills! Hurrah for you!”

Getting an email like that would feel pretty good, right? Yep, it sure would. So your course of action is clear: this December, choose life. Give your internet friends their very own copies of The Wolf House books one and two, and then settle back and enjoy the gratitude they heap upon you for it.

Will and Lily Wallpaper

Look at the AMAZING wallpaper Audrey emailed me tonight. It’s Will and Lily from Book two and it RULES SO HARD. She’s made other wallpapers too, which I’ll put up when people have had more of a chance to actually buy the book and read it. SO GO DO THAT, YEP.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAY

The Wolf House #2: Roads and Crosses is now available. IT’S REALLY COOL. Here’re just a couple of the images Audrey Fox has drawn for this book; I will be adding more in coming weeks.

Sofie

Jenny

Bette from a scene in book #2

Here’s what LJ Smith, the grand high queen of YA vampire novels, has to say about The Wolf House series:

“Electrifying. Chilling. Enthralling. Amazing. One of the truest young voices I’ve ever heard, with a plot that keeps you stuck to the pages and stops the breath in your throat. This is a writer who will go farther than perhaps even she imagines.”

- L.J. Smith, author of the Vampire Diaries series

Caityn and Julian from Kindred: the Embraced

I’ve been holding off writing about this show because I haven’t been able to decide which of the characters from it I should write about. It has an entertaining, if totally inept, vampire hunter character in it, who has the particular virtue of being played by C Thomas Howell, who played Ponyboy in the movie of The Outsiders. The Outsiders is a book I learned a lot from as a teen, and I had a huge crush on the character Dally — I think there’s more than a little of him in Sofie, whom you’ll meet in book #2 of The Wolf House (which is coming out in a couple of days, provided nothing else dire befalls it before then — there’ve been delays on delays on this puppy, bah).

Anyway, I was talking Kindred. In addition to C Thomas Howell the inept vampire hunter, this show also features the late Mark Frankel as Julian Luna, who rules over the vampire gangs of San Francisco as their Prince. There’s Brigid Walsh as Sasha, the teenaged human wild-child who doesn’t have any family left except her Julian “the Uncle who never looks any older”, and Channon Roe as Cash, the scruffy biker kid who works as Julian’s bodyguard and catches Sasha’s eye, and Stacey Haiduk as Lillie, the slick, clever owner of the vampire-friendly nightclub Haven, and Kelly Rutherford as Caitlyn, the human journalist who’s falling in love with Julian despite her misgivings about him, and Jeff Kober as Daedalus, the bald and monstrous Nosferatu who likes to paint but then destroys his art for being hideous, and Erik King as Sonny, the cop who has a good reason to work the night shift, and Brian Thompson as Eddie, the thuggish vampire mobster who wants to take Julian’s place, and Patrick Bauchau as Archon, Julian’s mentor.

Stacey Haiduk as Lillie

If it seems weird that I can rattle off the entire cast like that, it’s because every single time I’ve seen any of them in anything in the years since — be it Buffy, Angel, Carnivale, Jurassic Park, Scream, Dexter, whatever — I’ve always, always gone ‘oh, there’s [whoever] from Kindred’. I’m sure the actors themselves have all long, long forgotten this very shortlived and, frankly, pretty anemic show, but I never have. It’s stuck with me, got under my skin, into the marrow.

It’s a major element of how I view, and consequently write, vampire fiction.

Sometimes I make offhand jokes like “The Wolf House is basically just an extended love-letter about how much I loved Kindred”. It rankles a little bit when people say things which suggest that they think The Wolf House is only the sum of its influences — yeah, I’ve seen “Life on the Murder Scene”, the documentary about My Chemical Romance’s early years, way more often than anyone probably should, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t bring my own brain and creativity to the LotMS-inspired beats of these books.

Brigid Walsh as Sasha

Without getting ridiculously defensive about my craft and originality or whatever I’m being precious about there, my point is that I really am joking when I say “The Wolf House is basically just an extended love-letter about how much I loved Kindred”, but at the same time I’m being serious as well. Because the almost-28-year-old who’s writing these books is doing so largely because she remembers how exciting, how exotic and erotic and dangerous and dark and sexy this show seemed when she was fifteen.

Julian and Sasha

I watch it now and I can see the cheap production values, the awkward performances, the lazy scripts, the missed opportunities. But I can also still see it with a fifteen-year-old’s eyes, bewitched at the idea of these sophisticated, ageless people with money and power to spare, trying to keep their petty wars with one another secret from the human society all around. I can still see the teenagers caught up in these vendettas, in love with dangerous and compelling creatures because they never fitted into the ordinary world in the first place. I can still see the anger and the beauty and the tension in the story of a young woman turned into a vampire against her will, trying to exist in that society because there isn’t anywhere else left for her. I can still see how weirdly intimate letting someone taste your blood seemed to be, the first time I saw it onscreen.

Julian and Lillie

Kindred: the Embraced was never very good television, but to teenaged me it was the most important, exciting thing that had ever been created for the small screen. It’s what I think of when I see people bitching about Twilight, because though I’ve got my own problems with that series, I also know that successful vampire fiction, especially for teen audiences, isn’t about the head. It’s about the heart, about the rush of blush that flushes the cheeks and races fast, the thrill of that dark allure that’s so strange and powerful.

Kindred was that for me, and so I’ll love it forever. And The Wolf  House is, among other things, an extended letter about how much I loved it, and all that it taught me.