The Sunderlorn Rise

THE WATER WOMEN by Yah Yah Scholfield / Émotion (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1966) / What the Water Gave Me, Florence + The Machine

THE WATER WOMEN is up on my website! I think it was a commission but I really don’t know who for hm … Anyways! It’s about the town of Easton’s strange tradition, a girl named Myrtle and her uncle, who are trying to survive it. As with all of my stories, it has themes of mental illness, familial bonds and balance/circles! 

that ate the flowers. Then he smiled with his straight teeth. In the song the long forest path changed with every turn—

I saw meadows in the hard red earth. 

“modern AU Ghostline, as set in the Manitoba wilderness” never underestimate how much i want this now james

I was struck and kicked, and buried in the dark to shrink or fester. Instead I slowly healed, cellared under the Horton’s at Darkwater Crossing.

For a while when I was let free I could only stand in the sun, blind and blinking, and be touched by the wind as it tasted my face. But after that I start my truck, and the keys bite and growl before the engine begins to purr. It is glad to have me back. I adjust the seat. My legs are wrong, have always been wrong, for the placing of these pedals. 

I lose myself in the traffic, and then I lose the traffic, and then I drive alone. Only the prairie as it sings to itself, the song of grass to grass. The dry ground, cracked brown in an irony of thirst, beside the wide brown wetness of river. The leafless trees and the trees that are still green, bristling with pins and resinous in the breeze. The wind, the wind, the wind through my rolldown window, sighing as it roars and sighs.

My cellphone beside me is brick-shaped in the cover it wears to keep it safe from my hands’ sometimes-stupidity. Inside it, riding passenger next to me, the lockscreen is alive with updates, rolling and scrolling over themselves like ants seething out of an anthome. Messages from rabbits and wildfowl. The simmering incessant push notifications, so teeming I sometimes am made to mute them, of a thousand-thousand things in the distance, gathered to dismantle a car-killed stag.

I glance from the road like I know that I shouldn’t, but me and the road are alone, so I see no harm in not seeing it. Another message; a new and seldom and special kind, for which I’m meant to be always waiting.

1. Writer’s Market 2019 is a great place to start– it gives you a list of magazines and journals that you can send your work to depending on the genre as well as lists a shit ton of literary agents that specify what genres they represent, how you can get in contact with them and how they accept query letters. this is a book that updates every year and tbh i only bought it this year so i dont know how critical it is to have an updated version  

2. do your research. mostly on literary agents because if you listed on your site that you like to represent fluffy YA novels and some asshole sends you a 80k manuscript about like…gritty viking culture, you will be severely pissed off. always go in finding someone who you know will actually like your work because they’re the ones who will try to advocate for you in getting published.

3. learn how to write a query letter. there are slightly varying formulas to how you can write an effective query letter. you’re also going to want to get feedback on your query letter because its the first thing the literary agent will read and based on how well you do it, it could be the difference between them rejecting you outright and giving your manuscript a quick read

4. unfortunately, you’re gonna want to get a twitter. Twitter is where a lot of literary agents are nowadays, and they host things like twitter pitch parties, where you pitch your manuscript in a few sentences and hashtag it with #Pitmad #Pitdark, some version of pit. a lot of literary agents and publishers will ALSO post their manuscript wishlists, which is just the kind of books they’d like to represent/publish, and they hashtag this with #MSWL (it is NOT for writers to use, only for agents/publishers)

Queryshark is great for seeing how query letters work and what doesn’t. There’s hundreds of examples on there to compare with!

1. Potatoes. Best starch and caloric yield per acre of just about any food.

2. Tomatoes. Easy to can or dry, tasty, high in nutrients.

3. Corn, beans, and squash, planted Three Sisters style. All are nutritious, and planted this way the beans put back into the soil the nitrogen the corn uses. If you plant dent or flour corn and dry beans and sun-dry the squash, all store well. 

4. Mint. It’s useful for minor aches and pains in salve, it’s good for upset stomachs, and it’s quite tasty.

5. Hot peppers. Tasty, and also useful for aches and pains.

8. Radishes. Same reason. Regrows in a few weeks. How perfect is that.

9. Strawberries. If the climate is right for it. Easy and jummy. Strawberry plants can live multiple years (though they give less fruit after the first 3 years) and create their own baby-plants in fall. So you can have more strawberry plants every year or give the plants to other zombie-apocalypse survivors.

10. Winter carrots. Your winter will be boring if you only have potatoes. Carrots are a great winter veggie. 

11. Onion and garlic. Because you really can’t cook without them, can you?

Oh, & maybe just as important is what NOT to grow or the apocalypse or just for your first DIY garden:

1. Cauliflower. Difficult. Requires a lot of work, time, space and nutrients and you’re quite likely to end up empty handed.

2. Broccoli. Same reason.

3. Olives. The trees need to be over 5 years old to produce their first olive and many more for a good harvest. That’s not much use for immediate survival.

Almost every veggie or fruit has its weaknesses and things you just need to know. Tomatoes will do way better if you know how to recognize and remove ‘suckers’. Mint and some other herbs will take over your whole garden unless you contain them.

Mix it up! mono-crops are BAD. you want resilience against Climate Change, Insects, and disease... variety=resilience.

If the intention is more like, "i am worried and fearful, and being able to control something would please me" then the answer is different. If it's more like "I want to feel mastery and build my skills" and the person has only done houseplants before and they live in the city, then an indoor herb or windowsill cut-and-come again lettuce mix would be fun. If they have a balcony and buckets, then nothing beats the sensory pleasure of digging up potatoes just for making one happy, but climbing beans might be a challenge; if they were in the right climate I would definitely try broad beans on a balcony.

And if it's really all about food resilience and security, then what we really want are perennial fruit bushes! Some of them are friendly companions for balconies, and would be an easy way to feel pleasure and begin learning without having any initial skills. But the payoff takes about a year, so it's very dependent on your anxiety and the intention: how much brain space is one planning to dedicate on apocalypse-fretting? Will it last a year?

Austerity? No Deal Brexit? Global Pandemic? Pump up the Blitz Spirit rhetoric. Paint it as proof for British exceptionalism. Fortitude, high spirits in dark times, community support.

When, nah, actually it was a desperate response to government failure. Not even failure: conscious political choices, about who matters, who doesn’t, and who should bear the brunt of national economic challenges.

De Mi Rancho A Tu Cocina: an abuela from Michuacan shows you how to make DELICIOUS rancho food and occasionally shows you scenes from around the rancho.

Doña Lupita: Another abuela, this time from Guerrero, making incredible-looking food over a comal

Simply Mamá Cooks: Tejano woman with a Korean-American husband makes recipes from both cultures, great for classic easy-to-make weeknight comfort food recipes, too

Li Ziqi: a real-life Disney princess from Sichuan who shows you how to make sauce with duck egg yolks, starting with hatching the ducks that lay the eggs

Dianxi Ziaoge:  another Chinese farm girl, she shows you her idyllic life in rural Yunnan as she makes food with her HUGE RIDICULOUS FUFFYBOI, Dawang, often joining her on adventures

Wild Girl: Yet another Chinese farm girl, this time from Guizhou, who has a little bit more of an emphasis on cooking with food foraged from her gorgeous surroundings

Catch The Sea Official: A young woman living in the fishing city of Rizhao, foraging her own seafood and then cooking it up. I could watch her squeeze the water out of cat’s eye turban snails all day.

Cooking with Sros, Sros Yummy Cooking Vlog: Sros makes delicious Cambodian food with a warm, sunny personality and a great accent!

Am Thuc Me Lam: A son who videos his mother farming and cooking in rural Vietnam

Traditional Me: Young woman in rural Sri Lanka lives with her grandmother and brother, makes incredible looking food set to jaunty music with lush scenery

Village Cooking Channel: Five VERY ENTHUSIASTIC Tamil men make large batches of food for their local old age home.

Veg Village Food: Pakistani granny makes huge batches of vegetarian food for local needy children. 

Desi Food Recipes: Soothing Indian granny shows you how to make classic Desi dishes in non-giant size proportions

Maangchi: The Julia Child of Korean food, everyone fucking loves Maangchi

Jun’s Kitchen: Japanese guy makes food with his cats, what’s not to love?