This is the last week re: the discount across ebook platforms for WATERMYTH (ends 29 FEBRUARY 2024), although I am participating in #smashword's promotion period in March so you can wait till then if you were wanting to grab a copy via smashwords.
Short description: Regya has been set a task: to take the potentially deadly Mermaid Storytelling Exam. She has been placed in Yrejveree, the mythical island of exiles to which many Amors have brought their Psyches. Can a mermaid armed with the powers bestowed by her storytelling craft, her Javanese engineer housemate and her mermaid landlady defeat these beings intent on conquest?
Do you like slow-burn epic fantasy mashed up with domestic fantasy? Ever read an epic fantasy that started in a kitchen and thought, "Damn, I wish there was more of that!"
Well, so did I and that is what I took into writing this series!
Think kitchens, a Kitchen Witch, lots of loving descriptions of food amidst byzantine conflict, political machinations and wars between merkingdoms. Plus, mermaids and faeries in a postcolonial portal fantasy universe. That's the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms, and Watermyth is the first novel.
In 1996, I wrote a 17-19 page* poem revisiting the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of a Psyche who never found her Cupid again. A year later, I created a hypertext project about the island upon which my Psyche found herself. In 2009, I began the project that would become the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms, around the premise of "What if instead of ONE Cupid, there was an entire civilization of them?"
Watermyth, the first book of my slow domestic fantasy takes over epic fantasy with mermaids, sirens, faeries, weremaidens and a whole lot of myth and history,
Update of my 🎙 Author #introduction since my debut novel was finally published on the 7th of January, 2024.
Hi, I'm Anita. I used to be published as Nin Harris and under that name I have had fiction and poetry published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine etc. I write baroque planetary romances, dark fiction, Gothic fantasy, #domesticfantasy with #mermaids and #darkacademia settings. I have just published my debut novel, #Watermyth and am working on its sequel, #Rosemirror. I am also a literary academic, a musician and a composer. I have a great deal of imposter syndrome about all of the above, particularly about calling myself a musician and composer given I'm only getting a formal education for most of my musical needs in the past four years (apart from #classicalguitar for which I've had classes off and on since 1995). But I have been making music/composing my whole life.
"In Ictu Oculi (In the Blink of an Eye)," Juan de Valdés Leal, 1670-72.
I find this brutally macabre work endlessly fascinating. Death itself treads on a celestial sphere, and is surrounded by markers of worldly wealth and power, while snuffing out a candle. Death levels all; it doesn't care about your achievements, and it looks out at you as if warning that your turn will come.
This is viewed as Leal's finest work, and is part of a diptych; the other part shows the corpses of a knight and bishop. What's weird is that these were commissioned for a charity hospital...quite a thing to see when you go in! But in those days a hospital was likely the last stop anyway...
This still hangs at the hospital, along with a number of other works.
Thread! 🧵🎃 📚 Happy October! This month I'll be making a daily #Halloween Countdown post on the theme of #DarkAcademia, with a separate book recommendation and atmospheric, eerie quote each day.
This will be "Part 2," in a way, adding to a previous thread, which I reposted recently with the tag #31DABooks.
#DarkAcademia novel: THE HONEYS by Ryan La Sala (2022)
Quote:
I don’t fear the dark. I know the dark, and it knows me. Within it, I’m safe from the sun’s lovely illusions. I know what I’ve always known: The monsters worth fearing are the ones that are dangerous enough to hide in daylight.
Quote:
Death always visited me in August. A slow and delicious month we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick.
I should have seen it coming. The way the body would be laid out on the library floor, the way the gardens would be torn apart by the search. The way our jealousy, greed, and ambition were waiting to devour us all, like a snake eating its own tail. The ouroboros.
#DarkAcademia novel: THE BROKEN GIRLS by Simone St. James (2018)
Quote:
Written in pencil, the lines of a familiar rhyme looked back up at her: Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!
#DarkAcademia novel: THE TEMPLE HOUSE VANISHING by Rachel Donohue (2020)
Quote:
I held the skull in my hands. I imagined, for a moment, I could squeeze it and it would shatter.
I have not thought about this for many years, but now I wonder if I should not have chosen the skull. That perhaps if I had just picked a gemstone, things would have been different. I would not have become what I did. But then I remember the way I felt as they both, he and Victoria, looked at me, and I think perhaps not.
#DarkAcademia novel: MY DEAREST DARKEST by Kayla Cottingham (2022)
From the cover: You’ll never guess what’s watching in the dark...
Quote:
While all towns have their ghosts, Rainwater’s was special. They sank through its submerged sea caves and slithered up its cliffs. They bounced around its caverns and tunnels like electrical pulses in a brain, echoing memories of footsteps and laughter and screams through the ground and into the towering evergreen trees. The peninsula had a habit of keeping things long after they were gone.
#DarkAcademia novel: SHADOW OF THE LIONS by Christopher Swann (2017)
Quote:
The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then... the lions were left alone.
#DarkAcademia novel: VERY BAD PEOPLE by Kit Frick (2022)
Quote:
Tuesday morning, three classrooms have been ghosted. All over campus, there are whispers. It’s happening again. And I heard they make initiates drink blood. And it’s just a stupid hoax. The teachers talk too. I bet I know who is responsible. And at least they’re not defacing school property. And there are proper channels here at Tipton.
Three students have completed their initiation rite. Which leaves seven of us.
#DarkAcademia novel: SUMMER SONS by Lee Mandelo (2021)
Quote:
“This is where it gets interesting. The second son loves this girl so much he decides to step onto an unholy path. Now the story varies, but in the one my mama told me, he makes a deal. He takes his youngest sister, goes to a crossroad on the property past the witching hour, and he waits until some evil comes to him. He looks that evil square in the face and offers it his sister in return for his wife.”
#DarkAcademia novel: DON'T BREATHE A WORD by Jordyn Taylor (2021)
Quote:
“Yesterday” starts to play again from the beginning, but it’s a hell of a lot eerier as it becomes the backdrop to the story I typed on the next slide: “In 1962, Hardwick sent a small group of students underground to test a nuclear fallout shelter. Six went down, but only five survived…”
#DarkAcademia novel: THE IT GIRL by Ruth Ware (2020)
Quote:
Afterwards, it was the door she would remember. It was open, she kept saying to the police. I should have known something was wrong.
... Dr. Myers’s door was closed, as it always was. But the other door, her door, was open. That was the last thing she remembered. She should have known something was wrong.
#DarkAcademia novel: MISSING CLARISSA by Ripley Jones (2023)
Quote:
Everyone from Oreville knows the story of Clarissa. Her living ghost haunts the long rain-dark winters alongside the looming specters of Washington’s grim army of infamous serial killers and litany of missing girls…. Clarissa Campbell, who vanished so completely that no one has found a trace of her – not the full investigative force of the Oreville police department, not legions of armchair sleuths and online obsessives, not television news crews or magazine reporters or Clarissa’s friends and family.
#DarkAcademia novel: THE SOCIETY FOR SOULLESS GIRLS by Laura Steven (2022)
Quote:
The page was exactly as I last saw it, with one tiny, significant exception: the droplet of blood in the bottom right corner....
The sight made me smile. Someone had tried to perform the ritual. I knew it in my bones. There was someone at Carvell as intrigued by the occult as I was. For some reason, this knowledge bolstered me.
In a moment, the decision was made. I was going to attempt the ritual too.
#DarkAcademia novel: RIVER OF ASHES by Alexandrea Weis and Lucas Astor (2022)
Quote:
The stars weren’t twinkling, and there was no moon. Perfect.
He cut across the field of high grass. Not far from the cells, the lone howl of a dog stopped him in his tracks. Silence. Seconds ticked by, but the only sounds were the chirp of the crickets and the occasional croak of frogs.
When the dogs appear, death is near.
He chuckled. Maybe the dogs knew what he had planned.
I saw some of his art online and thought it looked like “Invisible Hands” from Liquid Television, which I LOVED. Same artist! This didn’t have quite the same level of twisted, creepiness as that animated series, but I was so happy to find his work in comic form. There’s more too.
I really wanted to like this. And I did until just after Robin gets into Oxford. Maybe it’s because so much resonated with my own life & studies, I didn’t need to be lectured to as much as he did—I get it, girl. My frustration may just be disappointment in my younger self. What is going on with editors these days? It did NOT need to be this long. The magical system rooted in translation was pretty cool. #DarkAcademia fails me again.
I realize now that I have no idea what #DarkAcademia is as a genre (see my journey in this thread). This is supposedly the best example. Magic really isn’t part of it.
This book isn’t for me. Outside of my mistaken expectations, the characters are assholes (a requirement!) and it went on way too long. The writing at the start made me take notice—Tartt can write—but I just didn’t care for her world and its people.