This is the final Boosting the Signal post for Friday the 23rd/Saturday the 24th! Heading into a long weekend in the States means y’all get THREE posts. And I’m putting this one up on Saturday morning just to help make sure people see it.
And this one’s a special one too, since it’s actually about an anthology! Bad-Ass Faeries is a title you may have seen in the post I put up about Danielle Ackley-McPhail. It’s an ongoing anthology series, and this post is featuring Kimberley Long-Ewing, who’ll be one of the authors in the forthcoming fourth volume, It’s Elemental, due in September of this year. I call the entire concept of badass faeries entirely acceptable.
Kimberley’s story in the anthology is “Spin, Weave, and Measure”, and her character Yarrow’s goal? Well. If you’ve got a bad-ass faerie loose among humankind, what do you think she’s out to do?
ETA 6/6/2014: Correcting the spelling of Kimberley’s name! My bad!
My sisters and I have watched you for millennia. You were, for the most part, quite boring. Then you invented weaving and spinning. We learned. We watch the patterns of eternity in the weft and weave of our cloth. We wove our own patterns, subtly nudging and shaping the world.
All the world’s a stage and the gianes work in the shadows, behind the scenes. Rose, Thorn, and I moved to Britain in the pockets of a sweet girl from Sicily. We set up shop and, on our whim, would draw in a creative soul to loan a little token of our esteem. Later, we followed a snippet of our cloth across the ocean to America. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of our clients —Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Thomas J. Watson, Nolan Bushnell, and…well, perhaps I shouldn’t list too many of them. The agreement is that we will bestow our blessings by weaving reality in the clients favor. We will hold that pattern for seven years. Then they are on their own. Yet you’d think we were the oath breakers when we call for our token. We had to become quite adept at recovering them. We are of shadow, shape shifters and master trackers. The few who succeeded in thwarting us learned the error of their ways. We are, after all, on good terms with the Furies. What fools these mortals be.
Oh what a tangled web we weave and none greater than the world wide web. I love spinning bits into threads that Rose then shapes into, well, all sorts of things. Poor Thorn spends so much time snipping away at stray information strewn across the Internet. Rumors of our existence irk her most. Rose just smirks and says that Thorn actually loves playing whack-a-mole. I think Rose just enjoys tormenting Thorn. It’s not just Thorn she taunts with her cloth of data. Upon my tongue so many slanders ride. So many rumors, so little time.
It passes the time anyway. You try spending millennia with your sisters. I think we ran out of novel topics of conversation after about year twenty. Oh, there are new toys you develop which hold our interest but awhile. But I can already tell you what Rose and Thorn will have to say about them. So predictable. At least Rose explores new poets. Not that any of them compare with Shakespeare. I appreciate her efforts and perhaps one day she will find one worthy of my attention. Thorn, on the other hand, never moved past Sappho. Imagine having the same poetry quoted at you for centuries. It is so tiresome.
Now Thorn is giving me one of her looks—the one that says it’s time to work. We’re spinning a web to bring in our next victim client. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble and all that. You know. Off to spin thread. Let’s see who we attract today.
~Yarrow
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One response to “Boosting the Signal: Bad-Ass Faeries: It’s Elemental, feat. Kimberley Long-Ewing”
Boosting the Signal: Dragons & Dirigibles, by @cindyspape http://t.co/GnVPTPdsSS