Some changes are happening over here on the domain. I have finally transformed all of the backgrounds for all four of the mythopoetica.com sites. They’re all spiffier looking now, though unfinished. The most important thing I felt I needed to do was to remove the parchment background for the middle of each page, because it wasn’t really making for optimum reading. I’ve also prettified each site because I felt the designs should flow into each other, be both simple and complex, and every background should tell its own story. It’s not quite there yet, because I am a busy girl, but I am going to enjoy slowly polishing each background over the next couple of weeks. I’ll let you all know when it’s finalized but you should also peek at it now and off and on, because virtual graffiti-making is happening over here and that’s always fun!

In other news, related to Domus Exsulis and the WIP novel that had been given the working title of Saltwater Orphee - I’ve decided to name the novel Watermaidens, and those of you who have been keeping track would know exactly why. The novel does not belong solely to the Orphee, who has moved quite a ways off the centre stage – even if that mythic trope still informs the backstory. And I have more than one protagonist. Anywho, the name is apt for more than one reason and it does help seal the direction and depth the story has taken over the past couple of years. Also, the Watermaidens have been getting cheekier and more insistent in both my fictive and visual imagination, so how could I deny them? After all, did they not have me declare that the Fourteenth of February shall henceforth be known as Official Watermaidens Day?

Watermaidens began as a project that wove together three novellas I had written together, all of which had ties to Alta Exsilii (the Sea of Exiles), and of course, the element of water. However, Watermaidens has now turned into a distinct novel with its own unique character. The storytelling process has been instructing me and educating me about the world I created, and I am looking forward to seeing where it leads me, after I finish writing my phd dissertation. I have a good feeling about both of these tales and a solid plan.

The Caretaker’s Tale and The Dragon Who Thought She Was a Tree: Two Novellas will be released early next year, on this website in various ebook formats under The Mythogenetic Grove Press. I’ll hammer out the details with regards to pricing and other practical matters later on. I suspect the title will be shortened also, because there’s a very strong possibility both novellas will experience a fictive mind-meld. Watermaidens, on the other hand, will be a traditional (in so far as the medium goes, not the content) manuscript which I will be looking to submit, either to agents or editors, assuming I get to do everything the right way and produce a manuscript that I can be proud to submit.

As mentioned, all this will be happening in 2011, after I finish my phd. dissertation, but there will still be short, impromptu storytelling fragments posted in Domus Exsulis as part of my pledge to bring more content to this site, and to keep my fictive muscle (and my spirits) going with virtual word-busking. There’s a tip jar over there if you want to toss me a few coins, and word-of-mouth will help as well, but only if you want to, and only if you feel you’ve gotten something from the stories. For now, do enjoy the changes on all four of the sites!

Love,

The Ninny One and her elemental helpers

(c) Nin Harris 2006-2010

I have loved Tam Lin since I was 15. I loved it all the more because I could not find the full poems, instead piecing together scraps of verse from chapter headings of Diana Wynne-Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, dividing pages in a notebook between Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin. That much has been stated before.

What has never been outlined: the thick feeling of doom behind breastbone when faerie queens with beguiling, seductive and mysterious powers of persuasion are considered.

The reader always screams inward, urging faithful handmaidens into the opposite direction from that which is prescribed by dictates of the tale.

Don’t do it, you fool, why give up the sea to have your tail split? Why give up the pleasures of the deep so you can dance all wordless, self-conscious with daggers of pain shooting up your calves and thighs?

Why save him a few milliseconds before the very vocal princess with sunlight in her hair will come with parasol and frilled frock to pull him up into the palace, her handmaidens fluttering and fussing over him?

Why must you sacrifice your tongue, your mersisters their curls for love, for a knife you will never use because you are ultimately giving? Why must you cling on when he is turned into an adder, a snake, a lion, a flaming brand that will char you alive? Why must you pull him down from a steed at Miles Cross when she has taken his heart, his eyes, his soul, his thoughts? He will not be made a teind to hell, Janet, but the threat of the rock and the tree remains.

Walk away, Janet, walk away.

The faerie queens of the world will always win.

Go back into the sea, littlest mermaid, go back to your games amidst the shipwrecks and the half-opened chests.

Walk away, ugliest princess, walk away

For there will be a place where you are not ugly, and not required to fight, not required to grapple with live lions and snakes and adders just for the lure and the promise of what is transformed at long last.

Walk away from what seems to be East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Walk away, false goose-girl, or true princess or true fool. Walk away from the true goose-girl or false princess or true love. Let not Falada’s words be in vain, yet again.

Listen, for there will be hallways lined with books, soft carpets for your feet, hot drinks with steam soft-curled upward. Listen, for if you walk away there will be schools of fish, universes of meditating manta-rays and benevolent whales with songs woven just for you. Listen, for there are galaxies of light and color and sound. Listen, because you know you are stronger, more beautiful, more prideful and more magical than this, than this self you have reduced yourself into.

Walk away, princess, walk away.

Here, let me untangle a knot here, a pattern there, a mystery in the loom. Let me worry at a tear in the yellow wallpaper until it opens, wide enough to let you through, let you walk out of the walls, into the garden, onto the path that leads you into the deep green and brown velvet of the woods.

Listen, always a bridesmaid, and never a bride is just a dialectic you can puncture. Don’t be a bridesmaid. Don’t dance at the wedding. Throw off the lace and frills. Run off into the woods, run off into the woods.

Splash into the sea, swim away.

(3 March 2006)