Where the word things are

E-book now up for sale, paperback coming very soon!

(That photo is one the publisher sent me, and lookit lookit it's a real thing loooooooook I MADE A THING)

If you have read it already, could you please leave a review at Amazon?

If you haven't read it already and can't afford to buy it right now, email me (mizmary@gmail.com)and I'll send it to you -- all I ask in return is that you review it when you're done.

Guuuuuuuuuuuuys I made a booooooook.

All Cats are Grey in the Dark
A Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) fic

Contains spoilers for the end of the second anime series.

I got my welcome letter for the Pottermore beta, finally. I'm in Slytherin, my animal's a black cat, and my wand is a 12.5 inch unbending sycamore with a dragon heartstring, which essentially translates to "Mary is a drama queen, stubborn, and likes seeking out new experiences" in wand-language. It's a fair assessment.

A few weeks ago I switched to using a Lush solid shampoo and look how great my hair is now! That's from ddoing nothing but brushing the knots out while it was still wet and then letting it air-dry, and the photo doesn't even convey the extent of neato flippity-ness that exists in-person. TRULY THIS IS MIRACLE PRODUCT.

Man, look at those sexy dark circles under my eyes. Hawt. Speaking of (that was the best-worst segue I've done in a while), Death Note! It's neat! I love it! I know I am the very last person on earth to get on the Death Note train, but it is truly glorious. It's genuinely tragic one moment and then oh god are L and Light really engaging in a psychological tango by an intense and overthought game of tennis the next. I cannot properly cope with how clever-stupid the pair of them are. I laugh out loud while reading the manga in public. I can't help it. Plus Near, Mello, and Matt give me all of the Robin feelings, and Misa is somewhere between pre-Crisis Jay and Harley Quinn, honestly.

You can take the girl out of DC-reading, but you can't take the DC-reading out of the girl.

I may have a publisher for the novel I wrote between October and April, aka New Novel, aka The Devil's Mixtape. It's a wee indie one in the US which my friend Narrelle suggested. I have a lot of feelings about this! There have been some crying moments, and not the happy-crying sort (which I mostly only get from Rumer Godden books and sometimes fanfictions) -- going with a small publisher (which I haven't yet, officially, but which is almost certainly how things are going to work out) feels like I've failed to be a success at this whole thing, yet again. Which is stupid! And a part of me knows it's stupid!

But still there are tears and feeling bummed, because another part of me remains convinced that all the publishing industry people I know, be they writers or editors or agents or whatever, think that I'm rubbish and, if they feel any emotion about me beyond 'she's rubbish', feel pity at me for my rubbishness. And even though hard-copy book stores are rapidly approaching status as an endangered species in Australia at this point, I still hold fragile girlish hopes of someday seeing my books for sale in book stores. Oh well, Hares & Hyenas might take a couple, I guess we'll see.

Next Novel (which genuinely doesn't have a title yet, not a good one anyway -- I suspect I can't just call it "A Biopunk Story About Feelings") is dragging a bit simply because I've been busy doing not much of anything useful.

I saw Harry Potter yesterday and blubbed like a blubbery thing. And when I got home afterwards I was tumblring lots of Remus Lupin-related stuff, because I love him forevers and evers. And that made me remember the Aesop fable of the Dog and the Wolf, which I first read for Sirius-and-Remus related reasons back in the day, but came to love for completely unrelated reasons.

Here's the version of the fable of the Dog and the Wolf, as I retold it in the still-homeless New Novel:

"A wolf was walking down the road, coat thin over bone and skin and not much else. The wolf was starving. Then he met a dog, sitting by the side of the road. The dog was fat and sleek and happy.

"'Wolf," the dog said. 'You look miserable.'

"'I am miserable," the wolf answered. 'I haven't eaten for days.'

"'Come home with me. There's plenty to eat there,' the dog said. 'You won't be miserable then, will you?'

"'I'm tired, as well as hungry,' the wolf answered. 'I haven't slept for days.'

"'Come home with me. There are soft carpets at the fire,' the dog said. 'You can rest after you've eaten.'

"'All right,' the wolf answered. 'But tell me, dog, why is the fur at your neck worn away? You've heard my troubles, please tell me yours.'

"'Oh, that,' the dog said. 'That's nothing. My fur is worn where my collar rubs, that's all. You'll have one just the same, when my master's met and fed you.'

"And with that, the wolf walked away. For it's better to be hungry and tired and free than to be fat and sleek and at a master's mercy."

The fact I have one of the characters tell the story in New Novel shows how relevant I think it is to the particular themes and metaphors and whatever that are present in that story, but while I was randomly poking at tumblr last night I realised how it also overlaps with this remark I made a couple of days ago -- that Glinda and Charles and Eduardo all go to the same group therapy session each week. It’s called "I don’t understand why my decision to compromise constantly because I want to belong to the oppressive status quo made my bff/true love so CROSS, you know?"

It's dogs and wolves. It's Mark in the hallway, admitting that he needs Wardo in Palo Alto. Elphaba pleading with Glinda to think of what they could do, if Glinda came with her. It's Erik on the beach telling Charles that he wants him by his side. The wolf can't make itself tame, but neither can the dog make itself wild.

And it's kind of ironic that Sirius and Remus, the only literal dog/wolf pair in my large stable of angsty pairings of my heart, are symbols of depression and of illness and stars and moons and whatever, rather than representing the obedience/freedom dynamic that tears apart the others.

I think Next Novel is hitting its stride a bit. Still wildly unsure if it's any good, but I'm trying to leave worries about that until later. It's science ficton, sort of. It owes a lot to the John Wyndham stories I grew up reading, at any rate.

I remember reading a Neil Gaiman quote once where he said that when he was a kid, he always expected to be a science fiction author when he grew up. I was the same -- when I was wee I was certain that anything I wrote as a grown-up would be sci-fi for sure. It feels nice to be actually fulfilling that certainty, if only in a kind-of-sort-of way.

I'm sorry this journal has been All Novels All The Time recently. My fannish output at the moment hovers around the level of "Mark is an arrogant little snot and I'm not sure if I love him despite of this or because of it! Eduardo is a tiny baby and makes my heart break oh god you tiny baby why are teenagers all so teenaged in everything they doooo". Which I don't mind doing on tumblr, because tumblr is all ridiculous all the time, but over here in the land of journals there are actual posts of content and stories and thoughts and stuff, and I don't think endless posts of BOYS WHY ARE YOU BOTH SO STUPID YOU STUPID BOYS would be especially appreciated.

As a final speaking-of-novels (sorry, sorry!) remark: if people who dig my stuff want to have a look at New Novel (the one I wrote right after finishing Wolf House), hit me up at mizmary@gmail.com. The book's currently wandering the wild uncharted lands of Looking-For-A-Publisher, and thus is still in a rough-edged and scruffy sort of form, but I am feeling restless and silly and want to throw words at people’s heads. I’m not sure if they’re very good words or not, but you’d be getting them for free so you really can’t complain if they’re only serviceable really.

I just found out today that a story I wrote is going to be in Steamlust: Steampunk Erotic Romance, out later this year.

(It's the story I mentioned here; I heard back earlier than I expected.)

NEW NOVEL IS FINISHED. And has been thrown at the heads of select friends and well-wishers. It's got sex and violence and bad language and monsters in it, because I sure have made a radical departure from my last works with this one!

Now that it's done I can have the obligatory OH GOD I WILL NEVER BE GOOD AND NEVER BE SUCCESSFUL misery, which I have been staving off by pointed Not Thinking About It while I was finishing the book.

In other writery news, Immortal Stories is an article what I've written about Let Me In: Crossroads, in which I interview the ever-wonderful Marc Andreyko.

April 5 is the official release of The Girl Who Was on Fire, and the excellent folk at Smart Pop books are holding their own version of the Hunger Games’ reaping -- one that has, in their words, "much less threat of death and way less perilous prizes."

And this journal is one of the Districts. District 9 to be exact, which I think means possibly it's the supplier of Panem's stock of films about extended metaphors with aliens and racism.

The prizes are copies of The Girl Who Was on Fire, which is a fabulous book full of delicious chewy thoughts about what I continue to consider the best series of YA-protagonist novels I've read in years, The Hunger Games.

To be in the running to be one of the two winners of the reaping, you can:

• Leave a comment on this post with your email or twitter username, and the answer to this question: What horrified or frightened you the most in the series, and why? (obviously, the comments will contain SPOILERS, so if you haven't yet read the books you should go do that first and then come back.)



• OR answer the question in your own dreamwidth / livejournal / tumblr / facebook / twitter / etc and then leave the link in the comments here, along with your email or twitter username (so that you can be contacted if you win).

This contest is open to EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, but only for ONE DAY so enter fast!





My essay in The Girl Who Was On Fire is entitled Your Heart Is a Weapon the Size of Your Fist: Love as a Political Act in the Hunger Games, and I'm really rather proud of it. It's largely about how the novels interact with and reflect texts such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and V for Vendetta, and about how in the end, being able to love is far more important than being able to fight.

The effect of this tiny, humanizing act—singing to a dying child—has immediate and far reaching consequences. Rue’s district sends Katniss bread. Rue’s fellow tribute spares her life when they face off later in the Games. In Catching Fire, it’s Rue’s song that the district whistles to Katniss to show their support for her, and in Mockingjay Boggs offers Katniss’ singing as a moment when he was touched by her.

Do you begin to see what President Snow couldn't?

Love, like fire, is catching.

CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED! THANKS SO MUCH TO THOSE WHO ENTERED, AND GOOD LUCK!

I have a story in Dark Desires: Love That's Out of This World.

Seance by Mary Borsellino
In their downtime between tours, a pair of musicians rent an old country house to get away from it all. It’s a chance for them to do nothing but eat toasted cheese sandwiches, have lazy afternoon sex, and explore the grounds of the house they’re staying in. The chance discovery of the planchette from a Ouija board makes them realise that they’re not quite as alone as they thought.

It'll probably be in a smaller, electronic collection too -- I'll give details of that when I find 'em out.

I'd make a self-deprecating remark about using multiple university qualifications in creative writing for the penning of tales about ghost sex, but whatever. I like my life and I like what I write.

For those of you looking for a cheap and porny ebook, I have a story in the $3.99 collection Stand By Your Man.

Includes:

Tour Fling by Mary Borsellino

Ben's band is the hot new thing on the line up for this summer's national tour of festival shows. And with festival tours come tour flings: sweet little love affairs in bus bunk-beds and stolen backstage kisses. In Louis, Ben thinks he might have found his perfect tour fling - will a stolen afternoon at the beach prove him right?

(This is the same story that appears in When a Man Loves a Man)

Ben is one of the characters in my currently in-progress novel; I decided he deserved to get a bit of lighthearted fun on the side.

This story was also the first piece of writing I did after having my massive meltdown following the paperback publication of The Wolf House -- within 24 hours of an all-night sobbing fit, I'd forced myself to sit down and start writing again, because I knew it was the only way I'd ever start feeling better. I'm just glad the result was one of my better pieces of short erotica.