Rants and Reviews

Return of the Return of the Obra Dinn

denalistannard

A topical post about a game that’s been out for almost a year! But I’ve got the desperate urge to play it again and despite how fucking excellent this game is, the replay value is basically nil and I’m sad about it. I’ve also got the desperate urge to make more people play it (there’s only one fic on AO3 and that’s a goddamn tragedy).

Related image

This is an amazing game for people who don’t play many games (I know because I am one of them) – and it’s one where watching an LP can’t really replicate the experience of piecing the story together for yourself. If you love The Terror and internet speculation on the cascading mistakes that led to the Franklin Expedition’s awful fate then buddy, have I got a game for you .

Continue reading “Return of the Return of the Obra Dinn” →

Adventures, Rants and Reviews

Hellier: Here be Gerblins

denalistannard

We watched Hellier for research purposes while sequestered at Emily Tesh’s writing retreat and it certainly was a show that we watched.

To quote the IMDB page:

A small crew of paranormal researchers find themselves in a dying coal town, where a series of strange coincidences leads them to a decades-old mystery with far-reaching implications.

While the documentary does follow a team of paranormal researchers to a dying coal town, the rest of the description is complete and total bullshit. What actually happens is:

  • A researcher receives some emails from a guy claiming gerblins are dicking around his house somewhere around the Appalachian town of Hellier. They’re all peering in his windows and stealing his children’s toys and he has some blurry pictures as proof. One shows some three-toed footprints, one shows an apparently incredibly suggestive white blur. Could be a snowy owl, could be some grease on the lens, OR it would be the bald dome of an extraterrestrial goblin man. Equal odds.
  • The crew go into excruciating detail on how they all know each other and their relevant paranormal qualifications.
  • They go to Hellier and conclude that the locals not being very interested in talking to them or having many tales of the paranormal to share is proof that there is something extra paranormal happening.
  • They sit on a porch, do what’s essentially advanced Ouija, and yell at some bushes that might have a coyote or something in.
  • They go to an abandoned mine and see a tin can. For extremely convoluted reasons, they conclude the tin can is literally or metaphorically an alien.
  • Mission….accomplished…..?

Did we mention that this takes six hour-long episodes to cover? It’s not clear who the bigger saps are, the ones who take incredibly expensive video gear into an abandoned train tunnel to shout at bats for four hours about high strangeness and Indrid Cold (who might be an alien, might be a black man, might be both, this isn’t even something they made up, this is actual paranormal lore) or us, for watching six hours of it.

Just kidding, it’s definitely them.

Four grown adults with video editing skills go deep into the heart of Appalachia, where communities have been rocked by decades of poverty, addiction, and the brutal economy of mining, bother the locals, and their takeaway is ‘okay, the goblins definitely could have used the cave systems to get between Kentucky and Ohio. Also the Mothman Prophecies said that sometimes Indrid Cold appears as a tin can.’

We never see any goblins.

The thing they heard in the train tunnel was definitely a bat.

And we’re absolutely watching Season 2 when it comes out in November.

Adventures

One month: In summary

denalistannard

The past month has been a ride, my friends. Let’s take stock.

August 14: We reunited in London and met six to twelve pigeons and a cat. We also ate our way through the Borrough Market, saw Gwendoline Christie at the Bridge Theatre, and went swimming on Hampstead Heath.

Cooting it up

August 16: We went to Dublin WorldCon. We mingled! We malingered! One of us developed a month-long cough! Read all about it.

August 18: Our amazing friend and colleague Emily Tesh hosted a writers retreat in Donegal for a group of new and emerging authors. We watched a documentary on goblins, rode horses into the sea, and met every dog in Northern Ireland.

Snoop and Koda, Good Dogs
Wanderer above a sea of goddamn sea
Oh no there’s only one bunkbed
Hacking straight into the water
Probably a fairy cat
Infinite tea

August 23: We developed the concept and outline for our next book. Peer pressure is amazing in that being surrounded by seven other writers makes you feel the need to be productive or else you might die. Goblin documentaries are also very inspiring. Stay tuned for more about Long Trail!

Long Trail (1)

August 28: One of us now has a byline doing environmental journalism!

September 9: The other of us is in the midst of a Kickstarter to print her webcomic!

September 14: And, best of all, we are out on submission with The Fairy Dealer.

IMG_20190821_193613_1

Reader, we could not be more excited.

Happy September!

Adventures

WorldCon Roundup

denalistannard

Dublin WorldCon was our first outing as professional literary type people, which means careful conduct i.e., giving business cards to friends who already knew our contact details and skipping the Hugo awards to watch season 2 of Derry Girls in our Airbnb. It was also the first time either of us had been to a con, which is probably appropriate since WorldCon splits the difference between the two.

WorldCon is half an industry event full of networking opportunities, and half a locus of fannishness full of cosplay and opportunities to buy merch. Navigating the two is a slippery proposition and getting the most out of the week definitely takes skill, careful planning, and a knowledge of your personal limit for how many panels you can sit through in a row. You also need cool friends you can meet for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and drinks or you are going to burn out and die very quickly.

Through a level of planning that exceeded the Franklin expedition, we came away with a list of book recs, a chart-topping fairy song (It goes ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday’ and it is a bop), and an amazingly comprehensive rundown on how not to write a romance. And no lead poisoning.

We also came away with the outline for our next book, but that’s a whole other post.

But the really good thing about going to WorldCon is that afterwards, you can go hang out at Emily Tesh’s country estate with cool, like-minded people and be really glad you aren’t there anymore.

And that too, is a post for another day.

making sausage

On the tragedy of completion

denalistannard

No, this will not be about ‘the little death.’ Though actually, that’s not a bad way to describe it.

I feel like every writer has reached that point where they would give anything to be done with a certain project/draft/manuscript. The finish line is the goal! Having that final word count! Crossing off that final to do! Sending it off to betas or agents or publishers, or even just hitting post. It’s someone else’s problem now, baby.

But what comes after that? Naturally there’s the relief, the celebration, the smugness, the need to tweet gloatingly about it, but there’s also a special kind of emptiness that comes with it.

Continue reading “On the tragedy of completion” →

Fiction, Kingdom of Rust

Father’s Day – and some sap

denalistannard

In honor of father’s day, an update! And, more importantly, a new story.

With The Fairy Dealer off with our agency, we’ve turned out attention to revisions of our very first manuscript together. Star Boys was our first original project and our first love – and we realized, after a year without peeking at it, that a first love can be…sloppy. Still beautiful! Still lovable! But worth some fixing up.

As we hack and slash our way through Star Boys: Redux, frankly loving the rewrite process as we get the chance to revisit characters we know better than ever, we wanted to keep up the cadence of sharing short stories on here.

What better way to celebrate father’s day than with the tale of one of our hero’s magical upbringing? Magical is one way of putting it, anyway.

Enjoy!

Continue reading “Father’s Day – and some sap” →

Fiction, Kingdom of Rust, Weed Brownie

Weed Brownie: Origins

denalistannard

Happy Sunday!

We’re trying to get into a better cadence of posting on here, and the good news is that, since we’re categorically unable to resist writing short stories for our own universe, we have no shortage of material.

This week, we’re celebrating the submission of our final manuscript to the agency by posting the story of the origins of Weed Brownie – the favorite pun and chief descriptor of our main character, as well as what we called this work for way too long.

Enjoy the tale below – and as always, you can keep up with us on Twitter, Instagram, and via our mailing list.

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Adventures, Housekeeping

May 2019: An update!

denalistannard

Has it been a while, or is it just us?

Going by the date on our last post, it ain’t just us. We promise we haven’t been slacking! Since the new year (happy new year, five months late), we have been able to reunite twice – no mean feat when you live on opposite sides of the ocean, give or take half a continent.

We spent a week in Colorado, snowshoeing up mountains, and then a brief weekend in Paris, getting the French word for ‘skeleton’ wrong. We have also been working hard on finalizing (finally) the manuscript for Kingdom of Rust Book 1 – which finally, maybe, has a name! Thanks to some much needed input from our agency and editorial team, over the past several months we’ve reworked several major plot points, tightened structure, and all-around raised the stakes. The Fairy Dealer is just about ready to go out on submission and we could not be more excited. The outline for book 2, The Fairy Doctor, is also nearly complete, and it’s only with great restraint that we have kept ourselves from diving headfirst into writing it before the first book’s wrapped up properly.

Equally exciting, we’ve started to return to our first manuscript, Star Boys, for the first time in almost a year! With one MS about ready for submission, we’d like to have another primed on the back-burner, and this story has never strayed far from our thoughts. It may be looking at a major structural rewrite, but we’re looking forward to spending time with our old favorites once again!

Keep up with our shenanigans on Twitter and Instagram, and if you’re really keen, subscribe to our mailing list.

Cheers!

 

Keeping cool in the Rockies
24 hours in Gay Paree

 

Fiction, Kingdom of Rust

Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 5

denalistannard

Fairies are finicky creatures, and so we must not expect a lot from them and we must be patient in our search for them

Content warnings: Coarse language, drug references

It had been almost two weeks and Wes wasn’t worrying. He was much too busy with papers and rotation and shopping and food prep, which took up way more time than he considered reasonable. But Pidge would want him to eat properly, even if he wasn’t there to bully Wes into it.

Leaving the window open with a glass of oat milk on the sill hadn’t lured Pidge back, and nor had the pile of glitter or the Claire’s plastic bracelet he’d got out of the hospital’s lost and found. His WhatsApp messages were left unread too and no birds had tapped on the window to tell him, in Pidge’s voice, that the Alaskan Thunder Fuck was budding and he’d be right over when the harvesting was done. Wes knew, because Jessica kept repeating it, that this was to be expected, it came with the territory of dating a supernatural creature, or a guy who was almost thirty and sold weed out of a derelict warehouse. Wes worried anyway though because maybe another of Pidge’s siblings had hurt him, or maybe he’d gotten bored of playing house with a mortal, or maybe he’d just gotten bored of Wes.  

Continue reading “Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 5” →