Blog Birthday!

It has been three years since I started this blog! It does not feel that long! (Add all the other usual exclamations about how time passes so quickly.)

In three years, I’ve written 191 posts. No, I’ve published 191 posts; there is a number of never published drivels that are better left forgotten.

The most popular posts have been… who would have guessed… chocolate reviews! Very funny, considering this was never meant to be a chocolate review blog, it was a joke from a friend that inspired the very first review! But, apparently, people do read such things – and who can blame them? Chocolate is good. (Chocolate is food of the gods!) The most popular chocolate post is this multi-bar review of Fazer’s Travel chocolates.

The most popular posts that are not about chocolate are a review of Manda Scott’s novel “Hen’s Teeth”, a post about the costumes for the movie “The Girl King” (17^th century!), a review of Kelly Gardiner’s “Goddess” (17^th century!), my favourite books in 2015, and our visit to the Heavy Metal exhibition hosted by the Häme Castle. It also seems that my travel tales (especially ones about chocolate and cafés) have been popular as well as the little stories about seasonal celebrations (Halloween, Valentine’s Day etc.). Readers are also interested in writing, especially the science fiction anthology “Synthesis” and our werewolf novella “Musta Susi”.

After three years, I can't quite decide what to do about this blog. My DH and I recently signed a publishing contract for our debut novel. What can I say? It’s something I’ve been daydreaming about since I was quite small. I learned to read when I was about four or five years old (I’ve been told; I can’t remember) and since then have loved reading passionately. I wasn’t even at school yet, but I still remember very vividly the first time I realised that people actually have to write all the books (I even remember exactly where I sat… with a book open before me, of course). So... someone gets to write books! I knew that was what I wanted to do, and although that dream was buried many times, for years and years, and very, very deep, and mountains of dirt was packed on top of it with a heavy shovel... I could never quite get over it.

So now that the revision process of our manuscript is in full swing, I wonder if there’ll be much time for blogging – and, considering that the novel will be published in Finnish, perhaps I should also blog in Finnish. Furthermore, should I blog about more important topics? Stop with the chocolate reviews and other frivolous matters already and become a more… um, all right, somehow I have a hard time imagining myself as a serious blogger! 😁

Honorary award for "Musta Susi" - our werewolf story

Something soft and furry touched him. He screamed, smelled blood and sweat. Panting, clutching his dagger, he stumbled around in the small space. Where was the exit? Where?

An item stolen from the Royal Palace of Stockholm ends up in the hands of Caribbean pirates. [...] The adventure, set in the 17th century, has many plot twists and is rigorous in its historical detail.

Above is an excerpt and the judges’ description of the short story “Musta Susi” (“Black Wolf”) that my DH and I submitted to the competition organised by the Science Fiction Society of Tampere. The judges decided to give our pirate/werewolf adventure story an honorary award! Last night, we attended the awards ceremony in Tampere. The story, set in the 17^th century, will later be published in “Portti”, a science fiction and fantasy magazine. You can read more about the competition and our story over in Marko's blog.

(Photo by Varpu Susimetsä)

Now that my husband and I have been writing together for some time (our story "Entombed" was published in "666" horror anthology), people often ask us how that works. Writing is a creative process, after all, so how do two people collaborate on it? I mentioned some of the benefits earlier, but how it works in practice is something like this:

Usually, one of us has an initial idea. We develop it together and draft some kind of an outline, sometimes more, sometimes less detailed. Then we decide which chapters/scenes/parts each of us would like to write, or at least to start with, and do that. (Eventually someone does have to write the scenes neither of us was too keen on, so then there’s nothing for it; we have to do it.) Anyway, once we’ve written the first draft of a scene/chapter, we give it to the other one who then reads it and rewrites it.

To be able to do that, you have to trust the other person completely. You have to trust that they’ll see what you’ve been trying/wanting to do with the scene, to improve the parts that need improving and to enhance the parts that already work. We keep cycling the scenes/chapters back and forth, each of us making changes and rewriting in their turn – and often getting new ideas from what the other one has done with the scene.

This approach has worked well for us, probably because we have very similar ideas about what sort of stories we want to write, what – for us – makes a good story. Another thing that helps is that we have fairly different strengths: my DH is the logical one, he can see the story as a whole and this makes him a better plotter. I tend to focus more on feelings, both in terms of what the characters are going through, how to show that, and in terms of the feel of the writing (tension; how to express atmosphere etc.). Since we write historical fiction, we have to do research – and it helps when there are two of you. While there are things we both need to know, our interests also diverge a bit, so that Marko is more interested in, e.g., how muskets work, while I’m more interested in, say, what people wore and what they ate.

So, we keep working on individual chapters until we think we have all the scenes, which is when we put it all together. Then we take turns rereading and rewriting the whole story.

In addition to a similar idea of what we want to write, there seems to be one topic we’re both drawn to again and again: werewolves. Or werewolves, wolfmen, shape-shifting into wolves... My DH’s previous werewolf story “Susiveri” (“Wolf Blood”) received an honorary award in the same competition in 2014, while my shape-shifter story “Surunkantaja” (“Sorrow Bearer”) set in Viking Age Finland received a second prize in Nova short story competition in 2013 (more here), and another one I wrote about a werewolf theme got shortlisted in the same competition earlier this year. One of the competition organisers remarked yesterday that we might consider putting together an anthology one day... Well, who knows!

666 Anthology

This is the book I mentioned yesterday! There it is now, out in the world, ready to frighten readers... It includes 32 short (666 words exactly) horror stories. Some are written by established authors, some are stories that were submitted to a writing competition organised by Fantastic Books Publishing. The ebook is available at the publisher’s online store and the paperback (and the Kindle edition) on Amazon.

One of the stories in the collection, “Entombed”, is something of a weird tale that I wrote together with my husband, Marko Susimetsä. I had the initial idea some time ago already – but it was just that, an idea, and it left me asking, “then what”. I told my husband about it, and he immediately said, “What if this happened?” And it was just the right thing! That was how it had to go. We’ve been collaborating quite a lot recently, and this is one of the best things about it: two brains are better than one (ghouls would agree with me :P), and we often bounce ideas back and forth and inspire each other. It also helps to know that if you get stuck, you’re not alone; you can talk about the problem and try to... make it go away. And it’s also a lot of fun!

So we had an idea for something we knew would be a short story. I wrote some notes and saved them in my “thoughts” file (I lack the confidence to call them ideas). Then the competition came up, and we decided to try and see if the idea might evolve into a suitable story. Making it exactly 666 words long (or short) was a bit of a challenge, since we both tend to think in terms of longer stories. But we kept the word limit in mind while writing the first draft and thus did not end up with a huge amount of words to cut. It took some wrestling with words, but eventually we had the required 666. And we even managed to sneak in a Conan the Barbarian reference. ;)

We're still waiting for our copy (must have the paperback edition), so I haven't read the other stories in the anthology - but I have read other stories by some of the authors, and I have a feeling this is a collection of truly chilling tales.

Happy Halloween!

What do you think, did I manage to pick an appropriate book for the season? Also, this is one of my favourite songs at the moment:

I also thought I'd let you know that today (appropriately) is the launch day of "666", an anthology of bite-sized horror stories by Fantastic Books Publishing. Each story is 666 words long (or short, depending on how you look at it). This collection features a grave story (yes, pun intended) which I wrote together with my DH. And I'd like to welcome you to the launch party tonight! It takes place at 6:66... or 19:06 UTC in Facebook. You can find the event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1044691382276161/

Review: “The Gingerbread Princess” by Stephanie Dray

I first encountered Stephanie Dray’s work in "The Year of Ravens: A Novel of Boudica's Rebellion", where I much enjoyed her contribution to the anthology. I subscribed to her newsletter, which includes information about her novels and those by other historical fiction authors (my favourite genre!), frequent chances to win books – and, along with the latest one, a gift from the author: a free novella, titled “The Gingerbread Princess”. If that’s not generous, I don’t know what is! Since the story was free, I thought the least I could do was to write a few words.

The story, told by Elise, a kitchen girl and king’s bastard who desires to be acknowledged by her father, is a sort of prequel to one of the classic fairy tales (you can guess which one from the title). Although it does resemble historical fantasy, it is told in a traditional folk tale fashion: we have princes, knights, castles; even the trial/test/challenge of three. The writing is evocative – the description of various dishes created by Elise’s mother, a cook with a magical ability to guess exactly what a person desires to eat, had my mouth watering (until it disgusted me, which sounds awful but is actually brilliant, but I can’t tell you why for that would be a huge spoiler).

What begins as an innocent enough fairly tale turns out to be dark and no less grim than those collected by the Grimms. After a somewhat slow start, the story quickly spirals from one horrific event to another, and even worse. I love stories where the characters face impossible choices, and this... this is all about such choices and their consequences. In a short, fairly simple tale, Dray reveals so much about human nature; cruelty, corruption, how terrible deeds – even when your intentions are good to begin with – can poison everything. Yet, underneath it all, there is heart-breaking sacrifice.

The only problem I had with the story was that it is so short... but this is my problem with most short stories. I’m used to longer stories and it’s hard (I’d say impossible, but who knows?) to achieve the kind of deep emotional involvement that I crave from a story when you only have a few dozen pages to tell it. Still, the premise here is fairly simple, and a novella is probably the right form for such a story. And even though I felt I did not know the characters well enough to truly suffer with them (that is such a weird thing to wish for!) I will have to say that, unlike some short stories, "The Gingerbread Princess" did not leave me thinking, "So that was it?"

New blog feature

I’ve been putting this off for several months now – I don’t know why, but it makes me nervous. However, I've been told that I should have an “About me” section somewhere here in my blog, so... there it is now. Up there, below the title image (or whatever that’s called, I’m not familiar with the terminology... but that would be the picture with the sword) you can find links to my Facebook page, Goodreads author page and now to the “About me” section.