Podcast appearances and mentions of saint death

Choice Classic Radio presents The Saint, which aired from 1945 to 1951. Today we bring to you the episode titled “Death of a Cowboy.” Please consider supporting our show by becoming a patron at http://choiceclassicradio.com We hope you enjoy the show!

And for the sixteenth day of the Advent Calendar, something a little special. Today Jonathan talks to the delightful C.S.E Cooney about what she's been reading, what she'd recommend, her holiday recommendations, and her absolutely wonderful new novel Saint Death's Daughter and collection Dark Breakers. As always, our thanks to Clare for making the time to talk to us, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

197# Santa Muerte | New wave religion or Cult? On this weeks show... Santa Muerte is also known by a wide variety of other names: the Skinny Lady (la Flaquita),[16] the Bony Lady (la Huesuda),[16] the White Girl (la Niña Blanca),[17] the White Sister (la Hermana Blanca),[13] the Pretty Girl Santa Muerte can be translated into English as either "Saint Death" or "Holy Death", although the professor of Religious studies R. Andrew Chesnut believes that the former is a more accurate translation because it "better reveals" her identity as a folk saint.[13][14][15] A variant of this is Santísima Muerte, which is translated as "Most Holy Death" or "Most Saintly Death",[13] and devotees often call her Santisma Muerte during their rituals.[13] Also a new news segemnt Kwest News  MERCH STORE Our new merch is available on tee public! stickers, buttons, mugs and masks all with our sweet new design!  #MERCH #Sales #NASAScience #PodernFamily #teepublic https://teepublic.com/en-gb/t-shirt/21303964-nasa-beam-me-up… GET YOURS TODAY! CONTACT US!! Get in touch! Have a question for us or a comment or suggestion you can email us Website Neverastraightanswer.co.uk  Email Neverstraightanswer@gmail.com NEVERASTRAIGHTANSWER.CO.UK --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/neverastraightanswer/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/neverastraightanswer/support

With the end of the year almost upon us, Coode Street was looking for a way to celebrate the books we read and loved during 2022. We also wanted to help you find something great to read for yourself or for someone close to you. And so the 2022 Coode Street Advent Calendar was born! Here are twenty-eight books that we loved and that we think you might love too. Space operas and epic fantasies, horror stories and comedies. Six-hundred page immersive tomes and light-footed short story collections.  A little bit of everything! To make this more than just a list, though, we're going to do something else. Every day between now and December 25 we're chatting with the wonderful creators of these books and asking them about what they've been reading, what holiday story they'd recommend, their own books for this year, and the ones they might have coming in 2023. Kelly Barnhill and When Women Were Dragons & The Ogress and the Orphans Richard Buttner and The Adventurists C.S.E Cooney and Saint Death's Daughter Aliette de Bodard and Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances & The Red Scholar's Wake Stephanie Feldman and Saturnalia Nicola Griffith and Spear Elizabeth Hand and Hokuloa Road Alix E. Harrow and A Mirror Mended Kate Heartfield and The Embroidered Book N.K. Jemisin and The World We Make Alex Jennings and The Ballad of Perilous Graves Guy Gavriel Kay and All the Seas of the World Paul McAuley and Beyond the Burn Line Sam J. Miller and Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy & Boys, Beasts & Men Tamsyn Muir and Nona the Ninth Sequoia Nagamatsu and How High We Go in the Dark Tochi Onyebuchi and Goliath M. Rickert and Lucky Girl: How I Became a Horror Writer Kelly Robson and High Times in the Low Parliament Christopher Rowe and These Prisoning Hills Rachel Swirsky and January Fifteenth Lavie Tidhar and Neom Nghi Vo and Siren Queen & Into the Riverlands Liz Williams and Embertide Neon Yang and The Genesis of Misery The sharp-eyed among you will notice that there aren't quite 28 entries in our Advent Calendar. You're right! We're still to record a few, but they should all be in place before this is done. But keep your eyes peeled for more. What else did we do? Well, it's Coode Street, so we rambled about books of the year, short story collections and more. Hope you enjoy it!

For this episode, we're doing something really different and looking at the deity, Santa Muerte from Mexican folklore! How does this goddess link to Aztec mythology and the Catholic Church? Why is she revered within the cartel and prison communities? Find out this week!Support the showYou can find us on -Myth Monsters Website: https://mythmonsters.co.ukSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RPGDjM...Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...Google Podcasts: ...

The iOtians celebrate the Dog Days of Summer by checking out the great streaming content!  Prey on Hulu, Westworld Season 4 on HBO Max and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman on Netflix. They also share their thoughts on House of Dragons (HBO Max) and Rings of Power (Amazon Prime).Jake and Ron also got in touch with authors they've interviewed in the past to see what they are reading and watching this summer:Edward AshtonCITY OF ORANGE, by David Yoon. A deep exploration of love and loss and what happens when the world ends but you're too stubborn or stupid to end with it.THE 22 MURDERS OF MADISON MAY, by Max Barry. A police procedural that tripped and fell through a manhole into the multiverse.And also the Futurama reboot. I don't have super high expectations for this one, but I know I'm gonna watch it anyway.Sylvain NeuvelBooks: Face by Joma West comes out in a month or two. My favorite read in a while. The Violence, by Delilah Dawson is pretty recent and awesome.TV. New season of For All Mankind coming to Apple TV. That show's a must for anyone who likes Take Them To the Stars.Also, I think Strange New Worlds is the best trek yetJuliette WadeI'm hoping to read August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White, Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney, and Comeuppance Served Cold by Marion Deeds.Neil SharpsonHi gents! At the moment I'm reading Trilby Black's excellent "Finnegan's Awake", a YA novel about a teenage girl who believes she's been raised to single handedly fight the War on Terror. I'm trying to read more Irish language stuff so I'm gearing up to tackle "Cluiche na Corónach" which is the translation of "Game of Thrones" (wish me luck). The rest of my TBR pile consists of Lies of Descent by Troy Carroll Butcher and Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. I'd recommend The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brian, one of the funniest science fiction books ever written.Marina LostetterI'm looking forward to reading Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (book 2 in the Edinburgh Nights series) by T.L. Huchu, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, watching the adaptation of Mr. Malcom's List, and finally starting What We Do in the Shadows.The Wrath of the iOtiansEmail: thewrathoftheiotians@gmail.comInstagram: thewrathoftheiotiansTwitter:  @OfiOtiansWebsite: https://thewrathoftheiotians.buzzsprout.com/MusicLand Of The Me-me by Aleksandar Dimitrijevic (TONO)Licensed under the NEO Sounds Music License AgreementThe Lowest DeepA supernatural horror fiction series.Listen on: Spotify

Sarah Gailey, author of the upcoming book Just Like Home, joins us to talk about one of the most famous American short stories of all time: Shirley Jackson's 1948 classic, The Lottery.  Jackie reveals her long, sordid history with technology.  Rachel reads a book review from an alternate reality.  Theo discusses an affordable delicacy.  Topics include: old houses, cottagecore, rollerblading accidents, park raters, trusting your editor, killing off Chuck, mom texts, Muppet Treasure Island, cicada pizza, and cricket flour.Media mentioned: Saint Death's Daughter by CSE Cooney, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst, Let Me Hear You Whisper by Paul Zindel, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula LeGuin, The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, and Jordan Peele's Us.★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

For centuries, there was one primary saint Mexicans turned to for protection: the Virgin of Guadalupe. Then, beginning in the 1990s, the popularity of a new saint began to take hold: the skeletal Santa Muerte or Saint Death. The Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe overlapped with an ancient Aztec goddess in ways that blurred the boundary between Christianity and paganism. Similarly, Santa Muerte emerged as a liminal and uncertain figure on the edges of Mexican spirituality.

Santa Muerte (or “Saint Death”) is far more than a popular saint, she's a framework for understanding Mexican history, Mexican politics (in particular the legacies of corruption, and the marginalization of women, the poor, the incarcerated, and those living on the fringes of “legitimate” society), and finally Santa Muerte is an entry point for examining the ongoing power and influence of Catholicism in Mexico, and its relationship to the Mexican state and to indigenous communities. We speak with Luisa Grijalva, PhD, professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of International Relations at the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, México. Support Latitude Adjustment Podcast on Patreon!  Support the Palestine Podcast Academy on Launchgood!

This is part two of my interview with C. S. E. Cooney about her publishing journey for Saint Death’s Daughter, featuring questions from my patrons. You can listen, or read the transcript below, and in case you missed it, part 1 of this interview is here! If you have not already devoured Saint Death’s Daughter in one day, like I did, I encourage you to check it out! It’s available as a printed book, an ebook, and an audiobook, and Claire does her own narration for the audio version!JuliaWelcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. This is part 2 of my interview with C. S. E. Cooney about her journey to publication with Saint Death’s Daughter. We’re picking up this conversation after Claire told us about how she loves to read her first drafts aloud. JuliaI love that about you! I love working with you, because I've done work at the same time and place as you, and even if I'm not super productive during those times, I always love hearing what you've come up with. Because I feel like I've gotten a lot out of just talking through plots with you, even if I haven't been writing. ClaireI Do. I Love that part. Yeah.JuliaBecause I think that writing is a lot of different things, and some of that is getting the words actually down on the page, but some of it is actually just being in a place where you can think through story structure, and what is actually happening. And one thing that I've learned about myself over years and years and years of basically feeling like I must be broken because I don't write x words every day… Which, there is so much advice out there that's like, “You're not a writer if you don't write every single day.” And I don't. I don't write every single day. ClaireYeah, it's so harmful. Oh my gosh.JuliaI have to have a long period of time usually before any project where I just kind of like think about it. And now that I've learned that this is how I work, it really has made a huge difference for me. Because I know that if someone has asked me to write a story for an anthology or something, I can tell myself very clearly, “You know we have to write a story for this anthology. So, let's start thinking about that.” And then I go about my business doing other things, but I'll be working through the problem in the back of my mind. And I will do research and I'll do other things, but the whole time, what I'm really doing is the hard brain work of invisibly creating something inside my head that I don't even necessarily really fully understand until I actually start writing. And I won't be ready to start writing until it's ready.ClaireI feel like I do that process, but I do it in drafts rather than in my brain first. But I draft a lot, like 4 to 8 drafts sometimes, so it's like I write before I even know what I want to write, before sometimes I have an idea. And that makes a whole draft before my draft starts, but sometimes it's just like this vague, you know, itch. Or a character, or even like a feeling between two characters. Like, what is that? How do you make that? Like, I wanted to write a theater story and I knew what the theater troupe did. And I kind of knew the world they did it in but I didn't have characters you know like the troupe was almost like an entity but somebody still has to tell the story. There has to actually be a plot. And these elements of this theater troupe that does this thing in a world that does this thing… those were like the tensions grinding against each other. So I had the 2 major tensions, but what are the pieces at play within those tensions? And I didn't know that until I started, you know, wrote the first line, which came out of nowhere.JuliaRight? yeah.ClaireAnd then I figured my way through from there. But it's funny how much you can do with 2 grinding tensions. JuliaI mean, yes, as the actress said to the bishop. You can count on me for that 12-year-old humor. ClaireLOL. Anytime, Julia Rios.JuliaNo, but I find that for me, I used to be the kind of person who writes a zero draft that's not a first draft. It's the draft where I try to tell myself what I'm even writing, and it's a giant mess and completely often unsalvageable. So I have many, many old stories languishing on hard drives that are just like a complete mess. It doesn't do anything for me, and many of them are such a mess that I've never come back to them. It's like, it's not worth it. Now that I know that I kind of have to do this percolating thing, my drafts come out a lot cleaner. Which isn't to say that I don't end up having to change them and edit them. I do! It's just that my rate of unsalvageable muck is lower.ClaireThat's cool. You can actually work on it because you're not shuddering away from it.JuliaAnd because there's something to work on. I literally, because I tried to do NaNoWriMo many years, and I had so many attempts at it that just came out as just a mess. Not a mess that you're like, “Oh, this could turn into a good story!” Just like, what is even happening here? No one knows.ClaireHave you over have you ever tried to do a NaNoWriMo where you've spent all year thinking and prepping for it the way you do for a short story for an anthology?JuliaI think, yes, I have, and that's probably the one that came the closest to actually being decent. This was many years ago, though, and I say close to being decent, by which I mean, like, had a full story arc. And I don't think I finished the word count during NaNoWriMo. I definitely didn't finish the novel during NaNoWriMo, but I had been thinking about it a lot before I started it, and I did do a big chunk of it during NaNoWriMo. I don't remember if I did 50,000 words or if those 50,000 words ended up staying. I think I still have that saved somewhere, possibly in a Google drive. But it's the kind of thing that also it was so long ago. I haven't attempted NaNoWriMo in many years because I finally figured out that like, hey, you know what? Trying to push myself in that particular way isn't actually productive for me. ClaireYeah, that's what Ellen Kushner once called the cult of word count, which, I have to say, I mean, all these years later: Saint Death's Daughter! But it is not really the story I wrote in NaNoWriMo, though there are many elements… Like, you could see the origins there. JuliaI don't think it's a cult of word count. I think that it's a really useful tool for some people. I think it depends a lot on what kind of writer you are. ClaireYeah, I always wanted to do it again.JuliaI know people for whom they have a great time and they come out of it with something that they enjoy. And I know several self publishers who, like, a lot of the people who really are successful in self publishing can just crank out stuff and they are very prolific. They have an idea of what they want to do and they just sit down and do it, and they do that over and over again. And if you're really fast, doing something with a bunch of other people and knowing that everybody's doing it at the same time can be a very powerful tool.ClaireI've always wanted to do it again, and I never have, and I wonder why. It was like that 1 year in Chicago, and, I mean, I was commuting an hour both ways to the bookstore that I worked at. I'd come home and I remember that I would read a chapter of Jane Eyre (which I've read an umpteenth billion times) right before writing, because I couldn't get started without having read something, but I couldn't read something that I would get into too much, because I didn't want to lose all my time to reading something that I found super fascinating, but it had to be really good. Because it had to feed the writing itself. So Jane Eyre was the book of choice, and I would set a timer. I'd read for a half hour, and then I would try to do 2,000 words, and it was really interesting, and it created a lot of cool things. And I feel like I was like, “This is cool. This works.” If I did that every month, oh boy. What a writer I would be! And it made it feel possible to to be that kind of writer, and yet I've never been able to duplicate it.JuliaWell, the other thing I wonder is, for you, if that isn't the kind of thing that you can sometimes do in a sprint, but can't do in a marathon setting. And often when you're writing as a career, you're doing a writing marathon. You're not doing a writing sprint.ClaireYeah. Yeah, maybe I'll do it this year, though who knows? It would be cool. You know, it'd be cool if I wrote the next two drafts of Miscellaneous Stones —sorry, of Saint Death's Daughter. I still do call it by its old title, or just by her name, really— if I did both drafts as NaNoWriMo to start with, to give myself, like, starting time motivation. You know, like, here's the seed… and maybe if I start out with 50,000 words and I don't give myself 12 years, it won't turn into almost. 200,000 words. Maybe I could just kind of keep it in… But, you know, usually a second draft doubles. So like 100,000 words is not bad for a novel, you know. We could maybe keep it at that that.JuliaSo you mentioned NaNoWriMo, and you said that this is what came out of it. Was this actually your NaNoWriMo novel?ClaireIt was, but it wasn't the beginning. The beginning is further back than that, though I often count the first draft of Saint Death's Daughter as the NaNoWriMo. I think it was 2006. But, before that, was a short story in Phyllis Eisenstein's science fiction class at Columbia College, where there was the idea of a girl raised in a family of assassins. But it was a sci-fi story, and the butler was not a housekeeper, and it was not undead. It was a robot, a robot butler named Graves. So, before that, though… Several years before that, either I was just in college or just before college, my friend Kiri took me out shooting in the Arizona desert. We were both raised in Arizona. She said, “You're going to be a writer. At some point you probably will have to write about guns, so you should definitely shoot a gun sometime during your life, and I want to be the one to take you to shoot a gun.” So we went out to the desert to shoot guns, and we had noise canceling headphones and everything, but either mine weren't working or my ears are very sensitive or bullets are just that loud, but it was so loud that after the first shot I was getting heart palpitations and my hands were sweaty because I didn't want to hear that sound again. I was like, “Oh gosh, if this had a silencer on it I'd be a badass assassin, but it doesn't and I'm afraid of the sound. Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a character who was supposed to be an assassin, but was allergic to violence?”That was the idea, and I remember when it happened, and it didn't show up in a short story for several years, and it didn't turn into a NaNoWrio novel. But the idea has always been appealing, especially throughout all the media and books I've read, and still am reading, where violence is such a problem solving tool on a micro and macro scale. There are so many TV shows where, if you don't agree with someone, you punch them in the face, which is not how my life works at all. And then like on an epic fantasy scale, if you don't agree with someone, you invade their country and you kill all of their orcs or whatever, you know? And I just thought like what if she doesn't have that option? What else can we do if you don't have that option? How many workarounds does somebody have to figure out in their life? In a world like ours that's full of violence, but you're incapable of it? Not that you don't want to sometimes, but that even wanting punishes you?I mean, I still think it's an interesting idea. Thank goodness, because it's still enough of an idea to create two more books out of, I think. And then trying to turn it and look at it from a different point of view. What does violence mean? What does history mean? What is, like, not only the violence of a physical violence, but the violence of your own history? The lies and the biases and the prejudices you've been told? The violence of your own education? How seeing the world and growing a little older and thinking about things differently, and learning another language changes your mind, you know? So, I mean, I still think that's interesting. JuliaYeah, I mean I think it's very interesting. I think that you really do dive into a lot of those questions, and it's very cool to see Miscellaneous Stones exploring them.Yeah, I think this leads into… This is a good place to dig into a question from Francesca Forrest.ClaireOh, I Love her!JuliaThat's because she's delightful! So, she says, “I know Claire's journey with this novel is very long. I'd love to hear what the most important differences are between the novel now and the novel she started so long ago, and which things have remained the same or very similar over all the years.”ClaireThe first novel, that was 50,000 words almost exactly, was very cheeky. It's very lighthearted, and the violence is cartoonish, and the consequences are surface. It's as funny as I could have made it at the time, which isn't very. But what has happened since then? Well, many things. Many drafts, many years, and also Carlos. And one of the wonderful things about Carlos—so he caught me at about draft four, so he's been with it for more than half the book, more than half of the drafts. It was about eight full drafts till it hit the agent and went on submission, and then a couple more drafts from the editor. So, Carlos did many, many things for me, but the three things that stand out are:The child, DatuThe father, Mac The Scratches, the Scratch family So, in the original, the child, Datu, is like one of those anime 6-year-old genius serial killers. Do you know what I mean? Like, cold stone killer, acrobatics, dance on the edge of a leaf. Really funny and witty, but also six years old. And he was like, “She's a child. She's six years old. She may have been trained. You know, like, you see children gymnasts who are capable of amazing things, or children Broadway performers, or child actors who've won the Academy Award, and they are amazing. They're still children, and that level of savant genius has a toll, generally.” He kept being dissatisfied. He's like, “We've seen cartoon death child already. Like, what else have you got?” So, I think Datu’s really different.Mac, the father, really different. Because he's one of the only nurturing, moral male characters in the in the novel. And I think Carlos was just like, You know, give me more than brooding male / potential love interest.” Earlier drafts, he definitely was Lanie's love interest, and I've moved far away from that. Because it is more interesting. Satisfying romantically is one thing, and what I kind of like to read and am inclined to write. But what is more intellectually and emotionally interesting now is different. And he's like, “I don't think if one's sister has enslaved a man, got her child upon him, abused him in many ways, that it's very likely that that man will end up falling in love with you, unless it's super traumatic and ugly, you know?” Like, he was just so repulsed by it in a way that was so different from every romance novel ever that takes a damaged man and puts it with your protagonist and by the end he's not as damaged because love has saved him, or whatever. Like all of those tropes that I grew up with. So he kept saying that. He kept being dissatisfied. And, you know, his best friend Maggie once told me, “You have too high of an opinion of his high opinion.” But the truth is I do want his high opinion so badly, and it tells me something when I can make him cry or laugh. Like, it's working. That's what I want. And when I make him make a certain face like, this just isn't right! This doesn't feel good. “Give me something. Mac has to be better than that. You have to make him better.”So he really turned into, in many ways, a moral center. He's wrong sometimes. But he thinks about it, comes back, and says, “I was wrong about that.” You know, he's actually capable of growth. He has such an interesting internal life. And he and Lanie become like brother and sister, true brother and sister almost in spite of everything that happened to them. Consciously, to make this decision to be family, that’s something that is a huge difference from brooding man who turns into a falcon, totally damaged, awesome, scarred, so hot, ends up being the love interest that lightheartedly, coyly flirts with you at the end sort of thing. I still have that Mac inside of me, but he doesn't fit anywhere in the future of Lanie Stones. What does fit in is an increasingly interesting intimate. Not sibling the way she and her sister are siblings, but like, will be there for you if you need me. Always, and in both physical and spiritual ways. And then, the Scratches… There's like the huge major villain, which is the Blackbird Bride, which, I actually am a little in love with her, and I feel deep pity for her. But she's also, like, she just needs to be shaken some sense into, and she's not capable of being shaken sense into. She was not born that way. But the Scratches are the villains on the ground, or at least the antagonists. They are definitely working against the Stoneses, for reasons that are both apparent and mysterious. There's the front reason, like, you owe us money. And then there's the deep-seated, like, your family versus my family a hundred years ago, feudal reasons.But the nature of the scratches… They were very much like cartoon villains, and in the first draft, by the end, Lanie had turned them into like neon colored bunny rabbits. That was what her magic did. They ended up being a bunch of neon bunny rabbits that she sold to a circus or something like that. That was that story. It is not that story anymore. There's no magic that turns anybody into neon colored bunny rabbits, and there are severe consequences to the Scratches doing things the way they do. Which is, you know, sometimes with violence, and sometimes with arrogance, or with coldness, or with an uncompromising vision. And not everybody survives that.And the Scratches, once they have enough power to do so, change their name back to their true name, and they start to live by their own standards. They'd been sort of subsuming themselves for so many years, but like the nature of of culture and language again like they kind of represent a lot of that and they are very reasonable and and yet have been part of a people who have been very oppressed and downtrodden for. Hundred years so like there's a there's like they occupy a whole different space. So I would say those are the 3 and I blame Carlos for all of them but also just like living in the world a little longer than 27 years Ah also helped.JuliaYeah, I mean, I'll say one thing that I noticed a lot, reading the final version versus the the draft that I read so many years ago… because I think it was probably ten years ago that I read a draft of this. ClaireYeah.JuliaFor me, some of the things that stood out were just how much more real a lot of the world felt. And I don't mean like I could imagine being there, because I feel like you always have drawn worlds that I could imagine being in. They're very vivid. And your writing voice tends to draw people in that way. So it's normal to think, “Oh, I'm reading something by C. S. E. Cooney and I feel like I could just walk into this world.”But the realness was more of this sort of like… The sense that all of this frivolity was happening in the harmony and contrast with oppression and suffering and what those things specifically meant and how they tied into each other and fed each other on multiple axes. And I don't know if part of that is just your deepening life experience or part of that is having feedback from different people. But I think, like, you were talking about the character of Mac, and how he changed from being just like a hot scarred hawk guy and into someone who has become in a lot of ways a moral center, and I think that I noticed that with Goody Graves as well. ClaireYeah.JuliaIn the draft that I remember first reading, Goody Graves was just sort of like a loyal retainer who was always there and liked Lanie. And that's great and cool, and it's also you know, unexpected that your loyal retainer is going to be an undead, stone, statue person. But in this draft you you learn a lot more about who she is and her backstory and what she is capable of doing or not doing, and it makes it feel that much more real and rich because you have a lot more — there's a lot more to chew on, I guess.ClaireYeah, Amal said when she read it —this will always stay with me, “It’s like I can see your stretch marks.” You know like she's read so much, like you, I feel like she can see all the layers. I don't think she ever read an earlier draft. And I'm very aware of the draft you read, because you were the one who gave me the language of the many gendered god of fire, and I remember changing that because of how you were very gently like, “I don't think we use those words anymore.” And then I started thinking about gender in a different way, because, at some point in our lives, we have to start. You know like if you don't know something, there's a point where you learn it, and that was the point where I learned like, oh, a fire god, a many-gendered god of fire makes it much more interesting and open and like less like, “Oh, I don't want to touch that…” You know, like, you gave me my god of fire, Julia.JuliaOh, that's so nice! I love the way that worked out, by the way. And I really love that the inn that she sort of ends up working at has a history of having been a brothel at one point, and it's still actually there and informs the present of it today. And I love the character that's clearly Patty Templeton.ClaireDread! Yes, I want to write the novella that's mentioned in the footnote about Havoc Dreadnought. Havoc: the life and times of Havoc Dreadnoought, and how she… like there's a huge footnote about it, and yeah, I want that to be the title of a novella someday. JuliaI guarantee you you will have a built-in readership for that.ClaireYeah, I love the school. So there's an inn, and on top of the inn is a bakery, and on top of the bakery is a school, and the the school part had been a brothel, but they leave a lot of the brothel trappings to sort of, the footnote says, to lure people into higher education. To lure the unsuspecting into higher education. I feel like some of the cheekiness of the first draft, when I really just wanted to be Terry Pratchett and failed constantly. I'd lost a lot of the humor in many of the drafts to come, and then I just missed it so much that, very late in the drafting process… There was so much world-building and backstory that I wanted that didn't fit into the narrative flow, and so many jokes that I wanted to make that delighted me, so that's when the footnotes happened.I was like, I have to cut all this, ooh, but I could put it in a footnote and then make it even funnier! So that's what I did and I feel like Jasper Fforde, Terry Pratchett Susannah Clarke, you know, I think they sort of give you permission to do footnotes.And when I was younger, if a story had footnotes in it, I would actually not read them. It just didn't occur to me to do so. And I feel like if a younger person, or somebody who hates footnotes, read Saint Death’s Daughter through, they'd still get it without having to read the footnotes, but the footnotes are the parts that made me laugh out loud. And I don't easily respond to my own writing like that. But some of the footnotes still make me laugh.And I have to say that's what Carlos says. When he's writing, if he can make himself laugh out loud, he knows it's working, because it's like tickling yourself. It's a lot harder to do.JuliaYeah, I 100% agree with that. Okay, so last Patron question is, “I would love to find out what it was like finding an agent and how your agent helps you in your career.”ClaireOkay, yeah, it's so hard. I thought when I was first setting out to find an agent, I'm like, “I'm going to submit to an agent a day. No, five agents a day!” It's a numbers game —everybody says it's a numbers game— if you can get to a hundred submissions, your chances are so much higher than if you do ten submissions, but so is dating, they say. I don't know how similar or dissimilar they are, but what I found when I was submitting….First of all, it's sort of like the cover letter and the synopsis takes a lot of eyes and brains. You definitely want to get some friends on it, especially friends who've already gone through the process. For doing the synopsis, if you have three friends who've read your book, basically what I ask them is, “Could each of you write your version of a synopsis of my book and send it to me?” My friend Caitlyn is really good at that. So I think Carlos maybe did, and Caitlyn did, and I had my synopsis. And Caitlyn's really good at making my book sound like something somebody would want to read. I wrote a very stilted like, “And then, she very formally did this thing in an elucidating sort of way, and you know there was a villain…” or whatever. It just was very stiff, and she'd be like, “Kapow! Kablam! Exclamation point!” I mean it all felt like an exclamation point. It felt like an actual back of a book, and by reading her synopsis, I saw what was important or what stood out, or like, “Oh that's what it feels like to write a compelling synopsis. I think she left a few important things out which I will slip in and try to do it more in her style…” And then again if you have a third view, it's even better because then you can have a pretty hefty, true to the story synopsis in a way that you, as a writer, may be too close to write initially. So I say cover letter, synopsis… And cover letter is much like a cover letter for a submission for a short story, where you give your credits. So you have to make yourself look like you're worth reading the first chapter of, I guess. Which doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a bunch of credits to your name, but you just have to, I guess, be confident, or know who you are, or at least be polite and professional. So anyway. All of that to say that I set out with this very what Caitlyn calls Big Book Energy. You know, I'm going to do all of this because it's a numbers game! And I found that like after submitting one, I had this terrible headache. My stomach was a mess. I had to go lay down, and the whole day was shot, and I was like damn it this is not how you win a numbers game! But I couldn't, emotionally, make myself do more than one a day, very rarely more than one a week, so it was a very, for me, slow process. I Still don't know, if I have to do it again, how would I do it. Because it would just… I'd hope I'd be tougher now. And I'd hope I'd make better lists and do things better, but actually I think it will always be hard, and it's what mood people are in how overwhelmed they are, how much they might like the thing that you're writing. And, boy, like books are so personal and so intimate. So I would say that I sent it out to a lot of people. I got very few responses. Some of the responses I got quick were just, “This is not for me. Didn't catch my interest.” And you try to think, “Ah, I didn't catch their interest. I am boring. Nobody loves me.” Eventually, I got a great response from one of the submission editors at New Leaf, I think they're called. I loved every single agent bio that I read, I loved their mission statement, I was like, “Oh, these people! I want these people to read my book and love me!” And it got to the submissions editor or agent, the one who reads things before they send it up to the main agent, like kind of to get you past the slush pile, and she just wrote back with such enthusiasm! And she's like, “I'm going to set it up to my boss right away!”Even just that stage, even to get any kind of feedback of that tone of voice that I'd been waiting for… I want the people who represent me to have that tone of voice! And it did get passed up to her agent, and I think she even was reading it, but I think she had a baby and a lot of things.And in that interim, when she was reading it and having a baby and life was happening, Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann & Associates also read it. And he was a suggestion of a writing friend, who said, “This is my agent. I really like him. just tell him I sent you.” So that was a kind of a Who You Know moment. It was Audrey Niffenegger, who I had met once at Columbia College Chicago. We were on a panel together. She had been a teacher there and I had been a student. She wrote The Time Traveler's Wife. So we were Facebook friends, but we had had literally no interaction since that one panel we were on, where we were on a panel but didn't really talk to each other, we just talked with each other. And she saw on Facebook when I was like, “Oh, this agent quest, it's such a slog.” You know, how one does when one's on an agent quest. She private messaged me and she said, “Try Regal Hoffman. I didn't know you didn't have an agent.” You know, like, tell him I sent you… So Marcus got back to me and he wrote an email. He said, “I quite like the first 50 pages. May I see the rest?” And then he wrote an email saying, “I would love to talk to you to tell you about this agency.” When I talked to him, I just loved him immediately. He said all the right things, and in such a tone of voice, very European. He's German, and just gentle and warm and really incisive, and had great questions, and… It's like that kind of person you want on your team, that he'll be the editor before your editor gets to you. He'll be the editor who makes the draft that makes the the publication happen. So just on all of those levels, I really clicked. So I wrote to the people at New Leaf, who still had my manuscript. I was like, “I'm sorry, I'm going with another agency.” And that agent had just read it and said, “Oh, I just finished it! I was about to write to you.” So I feel this very warm radiant feeling toward New Leaf, and I think I feel like if I had gone a little further in the process, maybe would have not been so emotionally wrecked by it, I would have gotten better at it. I would have gotten a tighter and tighter synopsis and cover letter. You know, it might have taken 50 or 100 more, but I think eventually it would have happened. That it happened this fast, I think, was due to the shortcuts of going to conventions, being on panels, that whole networking web that happens that you think will never happen that it's really hard to make happen on purpose. But Gene Wolfe once told me, “You know, all networking means is making friends.” And you don't really make friends with this cold eye of calculation of what your friends will do for you someday, you just sort of make friends who all love the things you love writing and reading, you know, and then sometimes somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, and that's one way to do it. But I think the other way also works. It just takes longer and has a toll. So I would say, working with my agent is amazing. I sometimes like think of him as like a ninja elven prince. Yeah, that's the space in my brain he occupies. He's sly, he likes things like talking up my book, and making deals, and like, going to parties. Things that I don't really know how to do, and don't really want to know how to do. he has people who do the contracts like, “Markus, can you look at this contract because it's scary?” And then he'll look at it, and he does things that I can't. I don't have the tool set, and I'm so, so grateful. And as Carlos and I have done some collaborative projects, It's been really fun, because Carlos's agent is DongWon Song and mine is Markus Hoffmann, but they used to almost work together at one point. They knew each other! And they met at a house party at our house, and they're like, “What are you doing here?” So they get to work together sometimes on mutual contracts and it's really nice that they already had a kind of warm, friendly relationship.JuliaOh, that is nice. So how long would you say it took from the time you started sending queries out until the time you ended up with an agent?ClaireIt's it's really hard to say because, like at one point I had sent it to an agent and he suggested these edits, so that took me six months to make the edits and turn it back in. He suggested more edits, and at that point, I thought, “Ooh. I liked the first round of edits a lot, but the second set of edits sounds like the book he wants is not the book I want to write.” And so I gently backed away very amicably and then started submitting again.And then there maybe comes a time where it's like, “Oh, I can't believe I ever thought that draft was worth submitting. I think I need to just sit down and rework it.” You know? So it was a lot of stops and starts, and it was years. I think I started submitting it at the fourth draft and it wasn't until like draft eight that it got an agent. That's at least a draft a year, so I would say maybe four years for that one. Some people don't ever start submitting until they are totally sure they're done. Me, I'm like totally sure I'm done after my first draft, and then two weeks later I'm like, “What was I thinking?” And you know then twelve years later it's ready…JuliaOkay, well thank you so much for talking to me about this. We didn't talk about your career as an Audiobook narrator at all, which is a sort of a separate thing from your writing career. Except for when you narrate your own books. ClaireYes, thank goodness.JuliaAnd so I want to close this out by asking how was the experience of narrating this novel as a narrator who is also the writer of the book? Did you always know it was going to be you? Did you really want it to be you? And what was the whole experience like?ClaireThat's a great question, and it has a complicated answer, so forgive me beforehand. So, if I could have gotten a world class, phenomenal, powerful narrator like one of the ones I listen to all the time, like Kate Reading, for example. Or who's the really famous one? Simon Vance. You know, somebody of that caliber. Then I would totally have wanted somebody else to narrate my audiobook. But most narrators are like me, where we're pretty good. We make a living, or we would make a living if we lived in a small town and had two roommates. But since I'm married to Carlos, you know, I make a living as far as I'm concerned, but not like a New York City living. Anyway, so if somebody is just going to be very good, and I know I'm pretty good, and I know how to pronounce all my made up words. So that part of my narrating writing brain is like, “I should probably do it unless they get somebody extraordinary.” Which sounds… I don't know how it sounds, but that's how my brain works. Now, Carlos, and my mother, and a couple people who love me very much have agitated strongly from the beginning that no matter if they got Kate Reading or Simon Vance, I should still be the one to narrate it, which I fight against because there's a part of me that is not arrogant enough to think that that my text couldn't be improved upon by somebody else. I would be eager to listen to a different interpretation. It's easier to listen to somebody else's voice than my own, even though I like my voice just fine. All of that to say, when we made this deal, Rebellion seemed very excited. They like having authors narrate their own work and that had been kind of a handshake agreement. And earlier this year, as we're getting closer to publication, it ran into some snags. Like, it's pretty expensive to hire a US narrator. They have people in-house. They have deals going on. So it was almost that I couldn't narrate it and they had some pretty good narrators lined up, and I was like, “Okay, well just make sure that they call me so I can give them the pronunciations of the words I made up.”But I was unhappy, I think, in that moment because I had been looking forward to it. for two years I'd sort of had it in my head I was going to do it. I'd been prepping for it, and so that felt like a little like, “Oh it's not going to happen. Okay.” And I had to readjust my thinking.But over the pandemic, instead of commuting to Connecticut to do my studio recording for Tantor Audio, they have a working relationship with a small studio that's just three miles from me, which I can walk to. Three miles is a big difference from a three hour commute to Connecticut and staying overnight for three or four days, which is what I'd been doing for the two or three years since I'd moved here before the pandemic. So I told my agent and Rebellion. I was like, “Well, there's this little studio I work with. They do all this amazing professional production work for all of these different companies. Here are their rates. Here's their email. Maybe we could work something out.”And the next thing I knew, they're like, “Okay, you're recording next week.”So whatever they worked out, whatever my agent did, and whatever all of the powers that be… Because of the pandemic, and because of this relationship, and maybe because I wrote the right email at the right time, all of this worked out so that I could I could actually record my audiobook. So it was a bit of a roller coaster right at the end, and it was right up at the edge of time of when we could record it to have it out concurrently with the book. All of which to say that I didn't have as much prep time as I had wanted, and yet I have been prepping for twelve years at this point.I wanted to make every day in the studio more than usually special. I really wanted to say this is the end of a very long journey of many drafts and many despairs and a lot of leveling up. And yet it felt like another day. If I didn't pay super close attention, it would just be another grinding week at the studio, and I didn't want that. So every day I dressed up to match the section of the book that I was going to be recording. I wore like a different little perfume that had a note of citrus in it because citrus is the smell of necromancy in my book, and I wore a piece of jewelry that usually a friend or a loved one had given me that had to do with the book. I really tried to make it not just a recording, but a celebration of a decade and a half of work. And it was a blessing, in that sense, to record my work, and to look at it in its final form, and to say, “Ah, well, this was a thing, and this is what that thing looks like, and now it's in my mouth, and it's for you in your ears for all of posterity.” And that's something, because you know we still listen to W. B. Yeats at the beginning of the twentieth century reading his work in his own voice. There are probably better actors to read his work, but it is something to have his poems and his own voice. And so now we have this work in my voice, and I feel that in this human pageant, it's something that is super special. Very pleased.JuliaI think it's great. I loved it, and I think you're a wonderful narrator. I think you're not giving yourself enough credit.ClaireOh, but not British, Julia!JuliaWell, no, you're not British, but you are someone with a huge background in theater, and training, and also a large amount of experience at this point in narration, and you know your stories better than anyone, because you did spend all of your twelve years refining this particular book.ClaireThat's what Carlos says, so you and Carlos… if you and Carlos say it, I know that you're both more right than I am because I trust your brains.JuliaI thought it was a wonderful experience listening to you read it, and if you're listening to this podcast and you like listening to things, go ahead and pick up the audiobook of Saint Death's Daughter, because it is really wonderful. If you like to read things on the page, the text is also there for you, and that is also wonderful. But if you like listening to Claire's voice, get that audiobook. Thank you Claire and, thank you so much for taking all of this time to talk to us and answer all of our questions.ClaireThank you so much. Julia.JuliaI hope everybody goes out and reads your wonderful book, which is full of horrifying things, and also great bits of humor, and wonderful humanity. ClaireThank you.JuliaThanks so much for listening. If you want to have the chance to ask your own questions, or request specific kinds of posts from me, consider joining my patreon which is at patreon.com/juliarios, or my substack, which is at omgjulia.substack.com All patrons and subscribers get early access to every piece of creative work I commission from other creators in my Worlds of Possibility project, and your pledges and subscriber fees go directly to help pay for those stories and poems, and for the cost of my equipment and my labor, because recording these interviews, and then editing the transcripts and editing the recordings and making them podcast-ready for you takes a lot of time and effort! I am a little later on this one than I had intended to be because I got COVID again! Oops! So that’s why my voice sounds a little hoarse right now. Luckily, I was able to get antivirals, so that is fine, and I am doing better, but it kind of threw a wrench in things and it really made me realize how much time and effort this kind of thing takes. It takes a lot! So, if you have been enjoying this, please do subscribe. Please, any amount that you feel like contributing will absolutely help keep things going for me. And I’m in the middle of accepting all the pieces I am going to accept for this wave of Worlds of Possibility, and I have some GREAT stories to share with you, so I can’t wait to get into that, too. Thank you for listening, and I’ll catch you next time!Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, your hosts discuss the lyrical, lovely, looney novel Saint Death's Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney. There's a lot of talk about bones (understandable when the book features a necromancer as the main character). The conversation ranges from abusive family dynamics to discovering excellent found family. This week's Words Are Weird pits two equally legitimate sources against each other – Merriam-Webster vs LiveJournal – and features a weird synonym for “to scrape” (as in “to scrape your knee”)Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris”- Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

I invited the amazing C. S. E. Cooney to talk with me about her journey to publication (a journey that lasted 12 years!) for Saint Death’s Daughter. We had a long talk, and she answered a lot of questions from my patrons and subscribers, who had the chance to send in their specific questions ahead of time. Here is the first part of the interview, which you may listen to, or read a transcript below!If you have not already devoured Saint Death’s Daughter in one day, like I did, I encourage you to check it out! It’s available as a printed book, an ebook, and an audiobook, and Claire does her own narration for the audio version!JuliaHello and welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and with me today is special guest C. S. E. Cooney. Welcome!ClaireThank you Julia! It's lovely to be here.JuliaSo C. S. E. Cooney, also known as Claire, is a wonderful writer of fantasy short fiction, long fiction, and, most recently, the novel Saint Death's Daughter. Claire, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and tell people a little bit about your writing career as a whole?ClaireI feel like I have been writing fantasy since I was pretty young—fifth or sixth grade, I would go around in circles around the playground with the two friends that I had and just tell them stories that I would then fill notebooks full of. The first ones were like, one was called My World and the sequel was Animal World. And then, in high school, I would name all my friends ridiculous, long, elven names made out of all of the words they liked the best. Like, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite jewel? What's your favorite flower? And then I would Smush them all together and then they'd get names like Erazellalzenarayneraniananamavario. And they'd come from a house and they'd have this backstory, and they all thought that one day I would write this epic trilogy called The Elven Story. But what I guess I was doing is what most people were doing: playing D&D with their friends. But I didn't know about D&D, so I was sort of doing the same thing like with my own imprimatur. It was more like out loud oral storytelling, having adventures or like parallel lives to the lives we were leading as high schoolers. But I think when my father introduced me to the person who became my mentor, I was about 18. I'd, you know, been writing and rewriting two or three different novels throughout high school, and one of the gentlemen who was in my father's congregation—my dad is a director of music and liturgy at St. Anne's church—one of his congregation members was Gene Wolfe, who was a renowned science fiction and fantasy writer. But of course me at 17 or 18, I don't know from Gene Wolfe!Actually, that's not true. You know you’ve got the stack of books your friends lend you, and my friend Lydia had let me one, and it was on the top of my book stack, and I was flying out from Phoenix to see my dad in Chicago as I did periodically summers and winters, and I grabbed the first one off my book stack, read it on the plane, and it happened to be Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe! But at that time I never paid attention to authors because they didn't matter. The stories mattered, and the only time I tried to remember an author's name was if I liked the story enough and wanted to get more of that. Then it was sort of more like a tagging system, you know, but I never thought of them as people…So he introduces me to Gene and we go to dinner with Gene and Rosemary and my dad and my stepmom, and Gene made me feel so comfortable that by the end of the evening I was like, “Can I send you my novel?” Just like you do when you're 17 or 18, and I just remember the look on his face so clearly, which was like this minor hesitation, and then this warm, “How about you send me the first three chapters? And I can't promise I'll have anything to say about it.” Just like very gentle, and it had me back pedaling, like, “Oh, no, I could just send you one chapter!” You know? Or, “You don't have to!” And he's like, “Go ahead, send three chapters.”And then I think he only ended up reading one chapter, but he wrote me a five page letter about it. Or three pages. You know, it was a significant letter, and it was typed and it was it was chock full. And that started a correspondence when I went back to Phoenix, and when I moved to Illinois eventually to go to college, our correspondence kept up. We would go to conventions. He took me to my first convention. He taught me how to write short stories. You know, he's like, “You know, novels are great, but in order to build up your byline, you have to write a lot of short fiction. You have to get some credits to your name, and then you can get an agent.” Like, it was the kind of the old fashioned trajectory that he knew that worked for him that he was teaching me.And it took just about as long as you'd imagine—about 20 years of trial and error. But, you know, in 2015, Mythic Delirium published my first short story collection. Four pieces had been previously published, and one hadn't. It was called Bone Swans, and Gene wrote the introduction for that. And that was maybe I think 15 years after I'd met him, so.I would say maybe the publication of Bone Swans and the fact that it got the World Fantasy Award was the beginning of my career as it is now, though it took 15 years of doing a lot of different stuff to get to that point. Doing a lot of short stories, writing a lot of novellas, just going to college and going to school for writing and figuring all that out, reading a lot, failing a lot, you know. And then that small press success seven years ago. It's hardly like, hardly seems it could be seven years, on both ends, you know? Both too short or too long. But I think having having an award and having a collection was what got me, eventually, an agent who could eventually sell the novel I'd been working on for just about as long as I'd been writing anything else, and which is now Saint Death's Daughter. It wasn't then. It's too late now for Gene to read it. He passed away a few years ago, but he always liked the idea, and at one point several years ago he's like, “That's a good idea. Are you still writing it?” And I'd written a lot of things in the interim, but that one, I think partly because I started writing it as I was still teaching myself to write (which is an ongoing process), but there's a very big difference between you know, 26 and 36, or 40, as I am now.And you could write a book perpetually, but at least I think the final version of Saint Death's Daughter as it is—I just narrated it, so I now know beginning to end what it is, that it exists as a single unit and not as 16,000,000 ongoing fluid units—I thought, “Okay. This was the best I could do in all the years that I gave to it, and it constantly got better, and it's out in the world, and it is a good and fine work and I'm proud of it. Now, moving on!” So that's my career in a nutshell.JuliaI asked my patrons if they wanted to ask specific questions, if they were curious about specific things. So one of the reasons we're doing this interview is I allow my patrons to vote on the kind of content that I post and also, if I'm doing something like this, ask questions of their own. And when I asked them recently what would they like to see more of, they all said, “We would really like to see more writing process posts, and we'd love to see like you talking to other authors, or giving us your own stuff.” I had done a process post of my own recently, and they were like, “We'd like more stuff like that, and we'd love to hear you talk to other authors.” Well, I had your book pre-ordered, and I listened to it all in one day, and I was like, all right, this is clearly a good one. I'm going to see if Claire is willing to talk to me about Saint Death’s Daughter. I know that it has a long and complicated process leading up to it and this will be really interesting. So, I knew that, personally, but I was like all right, what do my patrons want to know? So one person, who doesn't know you at all, asked how you came up with the title of the novel. I thought that was fascinating because, of course, when I first read the draft of it that I read years ago that is not the final version at all, It was called Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer [Note, after the fact: I think actually it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin the first time I read a draft], and I don't know how many titles you've had, and I don't know how you landed on this one, but if you want to share the story of how this book came to have its title, I'd love to hear it.ClaireWell, originally it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin, which was meant to be ironic. And the interesting thing I'm learning about ironic titles is that, well, I was never very good at irony anyway, but. I was like trying to be ironic and sophisticated, but you'd have to read the story first to know that it was ironic, and usually a title is part of what gets you to read the story in the first place. So I think that I was going about it a bit backwards in my desire to be more sophisticated and ironic. So, initially, it's the name of the character, Miscellaneous Stones, and the word assassin because she's from a family of assassins. But it's ironic because she's allergic to violence. So she thinks (this is in the early drafts) that she has to grow up and be like the rest of her family, a slick, awesome, sophisticated assassin, but really, she just projectile vomits anytime like somebody swats a fly near her. You know that was the idea like way back in the first draft the NaNoWriMo draft.In the interest of not being so obfuscating, I was like, well she actually is not an assassin and the way that the drafts turned out, everybody knows she's a necromancer from birth because of her allergy, so there's really no chance she'd ever think she'd grow up to be an assassin. So let's just call her what she is. She's a necromancer, Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer. Of course later as I was researching the word necromancer, the mancy part of mancer is more about prophecy and oracles. And it's like it's prophesying through the dead, like you know some people scry through birds, and some people scry through cards like cartomancy. You know, there's all the mancies and it's really about like trying to tell the future. So necromancy is really about trying to tell the future through the dead, which I think she can do. It's one of her powers. But really, she's like a death magic. But in this world magic is is part of the religion. It's the more you pay attention to the gods, the more they pay attention back at you, and their attention is what magic is. It's what's called the panthauma, the all-marvel, and panthauma’s what makes good stuff happen. So there's like a give and take, so really, a really good magician is a saint, in that sense that they are devoted to their god and the god is super super devoted back. That god's just pleased somebody's paying attention, because a lot of people (like in our world) in that world, are like yeah, the gods. Whatever. We'll pay attention on the holy days, maybe. Mostly dress up and eat good food, but a true saint is as rare as it ever was, or as nonexistent. At least in this world, they actually exist. That they're devoted. It's like vocation. It's almost fanaticism in some ways. All of which to say, the truth is it went out on submission as Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer, and I never even call her Miscellaneous! I call her Lanie because it's easier, and that was an edit that happened perhaps from my agent. It may have been either my current agent or an earlier agent who'd been looking at it was like, “These are mouthfuls. Why don't you shorten their name?” So really, Miscellaneous Stones, it's only when she's talking to herself or somebody's like being very stern who knows her very well, they might call her Miscellaneous Stones, but mostly she's talking to herself, and to everybody else in the text, she's Lanie. And I know this is a lot. Okay, but so it went out on submission when it was accepted, everybody was super excited, and the editor at the time at Rebellion. Kate Coe, who was a darling and just like would respond to me in all caps in her emails, which was exactly how I think so I was like, “Ooh all caps. We're best friends!” But one of her suggestions was like, “We're super on board. We like the title, but you really have to know what you're reading in order to understand it. Do you have anything else?” And I think that I probably had been prepared in some way, like, I had a notion for years possibly that this wasn't exactly the right title. But maybe I was too lazy, or you get really attached, so I had the title almost right away. Knowing that Lanie is a devotee of the goddess of death, Doédenna, and her nickname is Saint Death, and their relationship is that of like best friends, or acolyte and divine, or mother and daughter.Lanie has a very complicated relationship with mother figures. So. In this grand scheme of the idea of Lanie and her arc that hopefully will have other books in it. But even if it was just this one book, I wanted to give her in this book: she's a daughter. And when you're the daughter of a celebrity, like a god, for example, who you are is defined by who you come from. So it's like, “You’re Saint Death's daughter.” That's how people think of you. That's why you're important.And I feel like, in that sense, it defines her. It's also something to chafe against, like what else is she besides a necromancer? This is one of the questions. You know, who are you when you're not your vocation? But the the whole arc lends itself to the title. Saint Death's Daughter, Saint Death's Herald, Saint Death's Doorway is a progression of character and duties and power, I think, until you become the doorway through which the dead have passage basically into the god. That's her trajectory in my head, even if she never gets there on the page, which I hope she will. At least I know, and it makes sense, and I proposed that as a series of titles for a proposed trilogy and they leapt on it. And so there might have been even more titles out there, but that was the first thing that I thought, “Oh I think they'll like this.” And they did! And I didn't have to think about it anymore.JuliaOkay, so you said you have already future titles planned. Do you actually have book deals for those, or is it something that you're hoping might happen sometime?ClaireI don't have book deals. I think a few things are just up in the air and I kind of talk to my agent about it a little and he's like let's just see what happens, so it's sort of that. Also, Kate, who was the one who acquired Saint Death's Daughter, has since moved on from Rebellion to do her own thing. I think that I'm just going to see where this book goes. If Rebellion doesn't end up wanting it for whatever reason, and I'm not sure, I haven't written them yet, then I probably will still write them because I want to. And thanks to you, Julia, you have taught me of the wonderful wide world of self-publishing, which I have dabbled in mostly because of you. Also I have some really great connections with small presses that maybe if I made really big eyes at them and came like a small mouse skeleton with, you know, shiny, dead, undead eyes and blinked my bony eyelashes… Maybe they'd be like, “Okay, Claire I could just maybe do this for you.” Or at least or at least help me package it somehow. I'd probably hire a team or do a Kickstarter or something you know, um maybe not Kickstarter. Whatever is the least evil at the time. If it comes to that, I feel like I want to tell the story and so… but until I know I'm just going to wait a few months and then I'll ping my agent again see what he thinks. I'm also working on so many other things so it's sort of like, “But I've made a promise in Saint Death's Daughter. I've tried to do two things. 1) I've tried to give a full complete book that stands alone and that, if it leaves you wanting more, it also leaves you satisfied which is a trick, you know. Like, did I pull it off? Did I not? But I feel like I've told a whole story, and left enough threads that, if I never write them, then hopefully there's a team of like fan fiction writers who could take it and run with it. You know? But if I do write it, I've given myself a lot of threads into the future, which, in my head, I have followed out to many different conclusions.JuliaYeah, I mean, I think I definitely felt like the ending did tie everything up that really needed to be tied up, in that there weren't so many burning questions that I had at the end that I was like, “Oh no, and now I'm at the end of the book and there's nothing I can do!” Which I feel like happens when you have books that are a series that end in Cliff hangers a lot of the time. ClaireYeah I don't like cliffhangers because you know many of our beloved fantasy writers have had these long book deals and then life got in the way and people get bitterly bitterly angry. But there's nothing —you can't force somebody to write, and this one took, you know, twelve years. I don't think the other two will take twelve years, but how many more sets of twelve years do I even have, you know? And at what point will this story not be pertinent anymore? You know, as far as the one I need to be telling as a writer.JuliaGreat questions. So, you mentioned that you're working on a lot of other things, and I know that you're always working on a lot of things. Ah, but this is interesting. I don't know how you're going to answer this one. It's another Patron question. They ask, “What do you do when you're low on ideas?” and I was like I don't know that I've ever known Claire to be low on ideas… But do you get low on ideas? And if so, what do you do?ClaireI can answer that because up until 2019, I would say, maybe 2015 to 2019, I don't know if I was low on ideas, but it felt… it was that burnt out, like charcoal in the back of the mouth feeling that writing feels like sharpening your teeth on cement, you know? Like that terrible feeling of, “I don't want to, but if I don't, then all of my life to this point has been wasted.” That’s just a terrible place to write in. You know like the burnt out thing. Um, but once Saint Death's Daughter, which was not Saint Death's Daughter at the time, had been drafted to the fullness of its ability and turned into my agent... So, after eight drafts I sent it to an agent who finally liked it enough to say sure, asked me for two more drafts, took me another year and a half to do… So, that was turned in. And it was also at the end of 2019 when my novella, Desdemona and the Deep, came out. It always ends up that no matter how you try to space them, all your deadlines end up in the same week for projects you've been working on for a decade and a half, or five years, the last three years. It's like it doesn't matter. They just all end up due that same week.And so Desdemona had gone through its rewrites and its copy edits and it was coming out that July, and for a little bit, there was nothing impending on my plate that needed to be done that anybody wanted and that I had been working on for years already. So I was like, “I am not going to write again until I can do it in joy.” And I was seriously, like it had been so long since I'd felt joy or had been allowed to work on a new thing. “Allowed” you know in quotes, right? Because you have to finish what you started or else, again, you've —well this is for me; this is my voice in my head— you've wasted the last twenty years of your life and all of the money you spent on college. But it was a firm like, “I'm not going to sit down every day and try to be disciplined and try to write for the sake of writing. You know? just I don't want to do it. I don't. I don't want to waste my life in that way anymore.” And so I just kind of like didn't for a few weeks. You know, I can't remember how long, but I stared out a lot of windows, and I read romance novels and mysteries. And, you know, I alarmed a lot of my family who are like, “You can't stop writing! What will you do?”And I'm like, “Well, something that makes me happy, hopefully!” And then on the way to an event for Carlos —Carlos is my husband, and it was that was the year Sal and Gabi Break the Universe came out, I think. Either Break or Fix. I think it was Break came out in 2019 and Fix came out in 2020 because it was a pandemic book— it was a Disney event, and it was in the Bronx, it was the Bronx is Reading Book Festival, and I was staring out the window in this car that had been called up for him, very fancy-like, and we were passing rows and rows of houses and the thought came to me. It was a random thought. It was just like, “What if houses were people?” Like just very random, very gentle. And it was that what if moment that I hadn't felt it in so long. I was so surprised by it. I was so delighted. My brain, it was in that feeling of it was so hard to concentrate on anything else with the story that was building almost like a dam behind my eyelids.I went to bed, wide-eyed in the dark that night, fell asleep, woke up. We were getting coffee and tea in the kitchen, and I was like, “And then this happens in the buh buh buh buh…” But I told Carlos the whole story that had just occurred to me in the last twelve hours or so, and he asked me a lot of questions, and then I sat down and I started writing it longhand, which I hadn't done again for years. And took the time I wanted to. Stopped when my hand got tired. And in a few months, I had a whole novella drafted.Then I was like, “I'll type that when I feel like it.” And so was like, again, “I'm not going to write anything till I feel like it.” A few weeks later I had a really cool, funny romcom dream where a girl who was a severe introvert had to go to three different weddings in a single day, and she had to like change into a different bridesmaid outfit for each of them and they were all across town from each other, and I was like, “That would be a really fun plot for a novel if I could manage it.”And of course me being me, I write fantasy more than romance, though I often have romance elements. And so I was like, “Oh, I could set it in the world of Desdemona and the Deep and Dark Breakers! Ooh, but what if it wasn't in the gilded age equivalent that those stories are in? What if it was like in their 1980s? So what if there are like boomboxes and like space travel? But she's a goblin!” And then it just went on, and she's a severe introvert, and goblins are sort of —in that world— have a lot of spider-like attributes. So, it's like what if she's like a brown recluse? But like she's super, super introverted. She'll bite you if you come up on her unexpectedly. She's kind of a computer nerd. She grinds lenses. Like you look through the lenses and each lens does different things. So anyway, I just fell in love with her and I wrote this RomCom. Again, just typed it out. It was supposed to be very light and funny, and I did the first draft, and it was done in like two months or so. And that was 2019.So I guess that what I do now, if I'm feeling low energy —well, then the pandemic happened and a whole different thing happened— but I try to do a couple things, like 1) write when it feels joyful, but 2) since I often want to write but have low energy, what has worked for me lately is making writing dates with other writers to do a silent Zoom together, like a cafe. There are whole cafe kind of —like my friends in Chicago have this virtual cafe where people go and they are kind of like hosting for hour sessions and on the the top of the hour everybody chats for about 15 minutes, then they do a timed sprint for 45 minutes that's quiet, and then they'll do that. Maybe that will last 3 hours. And there's another one that some playwriting friends started, but it starts very rigidly 9:00 every morning and very rigidly closes at noon. And when I need more pressure than I give myself, just like constraint and pressure, I set my alarm for 5 minutes before 9:00, check my email for the link (it comes every day regardless of whether I sign in), and get my butt in the chair so that I'm kind of responsible to somebody. And then I sit and write for that time because those constraints, nobody's making me but the constraints in place, or this kind of social aspect, even though there's not a lot of interaction, have really given me the little energetic boost to get my butt in the chair —sitzfleisch— and to do to do some of that work.JuliaOkay, so I feel like all of this was amazing and fascinating. But if I boil it down to bullet points, what I've got is if you are feeling overwhelmed because everything has become too much and you can't find joy in your writing, the best thing to do is to actively take a break and not write. And then your ideas will start flowing again once you've actually allowed yourself to relax. ClaireThat's the hope, sure. JuliaBut that seems to be what happened for you?ClaireYes.JuliaBecause rest is part of the cycle, I think. I mean, that sort of goes along with the theory of fallow fields and crops. You need to not harvest every single season because if you do your field will just run completely out of rich minerals in the soil.ClaireYes, my father called it fertile boredom.JuliaOkay, so there's that, and then the second thing is: it helps you to have community accountability, and so having friends that are also writing at the same time as you is helpful.ClaireYeah, and that's a recent development. That was a pandemic development. I think it started a little bit before, but I didn't notice. It was when Carlos and I both had drafts due at the same time, and we started working together. So, suddenly to have two people and a deadline, it's almost like being in college where right after college it was really hard to write for a little while because there was no expectation of turning anything in, or a certain page number, but before college I wrote all the time! 8 to 10 hours, just for fun, and it was really hard. Like, how do you do that again? How do you want to do that again?And I never have gotten back to that level of desire and losing myself, except for moments, but like once you have the pressure and the deadline and the expectation. It's really hard to do it just for fun for me. But and with Carlos and I both writing together, it was so pleasurable and so much easier. And I recently learned a friend, not a friend, an acquaintance. A friendly acquaintance, who I was doing a podcast with through Rebellion, was telling me that she has ADHD and that when she sits with her partner and he's working and very focused and she's writing, she suddenly can focus a lot easier, and that her therapist called it body doubling. And I realized that's probably what was happening with me and Carlos. We were body doubling. And it seems to be what has been helping me the most now, in that kind of… this scattered, like, what day is it? What even is time? Who am I? I was like, “Oh. Other writers are in the world! Dee dee dee dee dee!” You know?JuliaThat's really interesting I find it's this is sort of the opposite for me, and I bring this up because I know that people listening to this are wondering about different processes, and I'm just here to tell you there are so many different processes! And the correct trick is just finding whatever works for you, and it might be different from time to time, but like don't feel like anything is how it always works and has to work that way and if it doesn't you're wrong. ClaireYeah.JuliaBut for me, I find that when I try to do group writing type things where it's, you know, 45 minutes of writing and fifteen minutes of chat, whether it's in person or in video or whatever, I am usually way less productive. It's hard hard for me to get into a good zone for work, and I kind of have to do stuff being on my own.ClaireThat's historically been true for me too.JuliaBefore the pandemic, I used to go to my local coffee shop, and I was a regular! The entire staff knew me. They all knew what drinks I liked! Like, I could walk in the door and they'd start making me a drink because they already knew what I wanted. That is how much I was in there. And I would just spend all day.ClaireI Love that.JuliaBut I would do it on my own, and I just kind of let the the roar of people chatting and drinking coffee around me be background, but I wouldn't have to pay attention to any of it. If I'm there with other people who are there for the same purpose, all of my focus goes out the window. And I don't know why. That's just always been the way it is. So like the body doubling thing doesn't—it's like a distraction instead of a.ClaireWell, it's so interesting because historically I never could write in a cafe or a library. Carlos is really good at that. But I look at too many people. It's really like I could do it if I put earphones on and made like ocean sounds and almost a shade over my eyes. It's too much and and generally, historically, I've always written alone, so this new development during the pandemic, like something else was happening that was even bigger than my need to isolate and focus, which was always a big need for me. So the other thing that I do, when I don't want people, is make it beautiful. So, like, light a candle, sometimes I do essential oils, or a smell, or like clear off my desk. Right? Handwrite, use a different ink, you know. Or like just something that makes it different. And make it beautiful. To make it ritual, almost, so that it's a different space. So that it's pleasurable, or sensual, to do the thing rather than drudgery.JuliaThat's really interesting. Do you find that the environment that you create for your writing affects what you put on the page?ClaireI don't know, but I would say that it's harder or easier depending on the environment to write at all. I like having a window to look out of. It's harder for me to pay attention if I'm looking at a wall. So, I would say all of the things that make it easier to get my butt in the chair. It's sort of like if it's attractive to be in the chair, then it's easier. But if it's sort of like, ehhh, I have to settle, and I have to be here, and I have to like shade my eyes and hide my ears, and like not pay attention to all the people around me. You know, I can get stuff done, but historically, I would say it's easier to do nonfiction blogging administrative work in that situation. Like, I can do administrative work at a cafe but fiction really really hard to do. I am audience motivated just like I'm food motivated. So if I know like my mom has heard the last chapter and she's like, “What's going to happen next?” That also motivates me to write because I've always read aloud my work. The instant I've written a sentence, I'm like, “Listen to this, guys!” So that's another thing that works for me, but some people would be… like I think for you, the idea of somebody immediately listening to your first draft would be so horrifying that it would stop you from writing, so that's where we're different, too. JuliaI'm a “not sharer” so I did the recent process post about one of the stories that I had written, and that was a really big step for me, because it was, “Okay, well, you want to know about what I was thinking, and I'm going to share with you things that feel very close and personal about like my process and my life.” ClaireYeah. Yeah.JuliaAnd my first drafts feel that way. I'm like, “What, you want to see… you want to like open up my insides and look at them? I don't think that sounds comfortable.”ClaireAnd for me, it's like, “Look at me! It's all sequins in here!”And that is where we’re leaving off for this episode. Next time we’ll get into how many drafts Claire typically writes for a project, what her agent search was like, how the final version of the book changed over time, and what it was like to narrate the audiobook version. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to have the chance to ask your own questions, or request specific kinds of posts from me, consider joining my patreon which is at patreon.com/juliarios, or my substack, which is at omgjulia.substack.com All patrons and subscribers get early access to every piece of creative work I commission from other creators in my Worlds of Possibility project, and your pledges and subscriber fees go directly to help pay for those stories and poems and things. I just wrapped up my first open submission period for that project, and there are SO MANY cool stories in my second round consideration pile. It’s going to be really hard to choose which ones I can actually accept, and I can’t wait to share them with you!Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Dark Side of the Library Podcast Episode #47: Dark Adult Fiction Books Coming Out April 2022 Show Notes: (Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Signature Classics), by Oscar Wilde  (Author) – April 5, 2022 https://amzn.to/3IvQLRi   Frankenstein (Pretty Book Edition), by Thomas Nelson (April 5) https://amzn.to/3Jw7TrG   The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, https://amzn.to/3tkkcAe   Saint Death's Daughter (1) (Saint Death Series), by C. S. E. Cooney  (Author) – April 12, 2022 https://amzn.to/36Fe65S   Atomic Anna, by Rachel Barenbaum (April 5) https://amzn.to/3L8ntu2   Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel, by Claire Kohda  (Author) – April 12, 2022 https://amzn.to/3wtbW4f Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (April 5) https://amzn.to/3JBKPHW The Unquiet Dead, by Stacie Murphy (April 5) https://amzn.to/3uipZHh   The Fervor, by Alma Katsu  (Author)  – April 26, 2022 https://amzn.to/3HsvZSg   Asha of the Air, by John Huddles  (Author) – April 26, 2022 https://amzn.to/3Kb4PBg   The Children on the Hill, by Jennifer McMahon  (Author) – April 26, 2022 https://amzn.to/3HvdmNr   Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher  (Author) – April 26, 2022 https://amzn.to/3uhfvaY   Flint and Mirror, by John Crowley  (Author)  – April 19, 2022 https://amzn.to/3D0qlWZ

When police discovered a body near the shrine of Saint Death, they were shocked to see that the victim had been decapitated, and his heart carved out from his chest. Surely this bizarre crime was a one off? No, it wasn'tJoin Peter Laws as he explores a string of horrific ritualistic murders in Argentina.WARNING: This episodes contains some upsetting details.-Visit us at itsfrightful.net-Check out our other podcasts: itsarclightmedia.comEpisode Sponser:-Download Best Fiends FREE today on the App Store or Google Play.

WARNING: this episode contains graphic depictions of violence, involving ritualistic sacrifice, the abuse, torture, dismemberment, and murder of children.  Listener discretion is strongly advised.  Welcome back to Rogue Darkness! In this episode we'll be delving grotesque case of a cult from Mexico, whose dedication to the deity Santa Muerte, lead them to commit human sacrifices in an attempt to get what they desired …Articles referenced:https://listverse.com/2014/07/02/10-terrifyingly-evil-killer-cults/https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/mexico-holy-death-cult/amphttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Merazhttps://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-17570199.amphttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_MerazBackground music: “Angel of Death” by Mattia Cupelli (Royalty Free) Listen to “Angel of Death”, and many other of Mattia's beautiful  songs here: https://youtube.com/c/MattiaCupelliComposerGet 10% off your first month of professional online counseling from Better Help! betterhelp.com/listener My  intro music was a collaboration piece done by me and aandyvalentine on Fiverr. Definitely reach out to him if you're ever looking for some awesome music for your show! Check out Lovi Artes for some amazing candles for all of your ritualistic needs! https://loviartes.com/Contact: roguedarknesspod@gmail.comFollow me on my socials! IG: https://instagram.com/rogue_darkness?igshid=e2qxf6xt3dqqTwitter: @rogue_darknessYouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC3Ne_hJYPGj3d-W4CL_MDfA

 You're in for a scare! It's a fun-filled Halloween episode this week on the KPL Podcast. First up we chat with horror author Cassandra Khaw about her latest haunted tale, Nothing but Blackened Teeth! Then Jigisha and Ryan discuss some global monsters, folklore, and urban legends that keep their nightlights on. All this and more on a very haunting episode of the KPL Podcast! 1. The Eye2. Shutter3. Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

The rarest and wisest characters tell their own tale and create their own mythology. C.S.E. Cooney, Mimi Mondal, and Joshua A.C. Newman bring you characters that refuse to conform. "The Foxgirl Cycle" by C.S.E. Cooney, Read by C.S.E. Cooney, produced by Jeremy Cooney and Stefan Mark Dollak C.S.E. Cooney is the author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories. Her short novel The Twice-Drowned Saint is included in Mythic Delirium's anthology The Sinister Quartet. Her forthcoming novel Saint Death's Daughter will be out with Rebellion in Spring of 2022. Other work includes Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, and short fiction and poetry in Jonathan Strahan's anthology Dragons, Ellen Datlow's Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Aspiring dungeon master, audiobook engineer, podcaster, and musician, Jeremy Cooney draws inspiration from bawdy pirate tales, Irish and American folk music, sword and sorcery fantasy, and gritty science fiction. His projects include Hail the Void (a 5th Edition DnD podcast starring his companion, his brother, his mother, and his friends) and editing and production of the Gown of Harmonies audiobook by Francessca Forrest. ​The early music specialist Stefan Mark Dollak plays lutes, hurdy-gurdy, the pipe & tabor, the bladder-pipe, guitar, mandolin, pennywhistle, ukulele, harmonica, krummhorns, bass guitar, ocarina, and possibly other instruments. In addition to early music on period instruments, Stef has performed traditional folk music, classical, pop, world music, ambient, ritual, trance, and even a few showtunes. "Sailing to the Underworld" by Mimi Mondal with Joshua A.C. Newman, Read by Jose Febus Mimi Mondal is a Dalit writer of speculative fiction and social-justice nonfiction, and the Poetry and Reprints Editor of Uncanny Magazine. Her first anthology, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, was published by Twelfth Planet Press in 2017. Mimi's writings have also appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Anathema Magazine,The Book Smugglers, Podcastle, Daily Science Fiction, Scroll.in, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship for the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 2015. More about her background, politics, literary tastes and editorial preferences can be found at this interview with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Mimi lives in Manhattan and tweets from @Miminality. Joshua A.C. Newman is a publisher, author, illustrator, game designer, graphic designer, and experimental musician. He lives in Arkham, Massachusetts with no cats and a suspicious pile of electronic components. Jose Febus's credits include the short film " Not Guilty" for which the award of Best Actor was honored at the My Final Shot Production Film Festival. Other films include Attempted Burglary, Plurality and Chicago Boricua. Television credits include The Path, Blindspot, Law & Order, Law & Order Criminal Intent. Web Series - East Willy B. His Off-Off Broadway credits include O'Rex with the G&F Company, The Deep Run at PRTT and Acts of Mercy written by Michael John Garces at The Rattlestick Theater. Regional credits include Ana in the Tropics at the Portland Center Stage, Williamstown Theater and the Hartford Stage Co. jlfebus@hotmail.com

An Interview with the Santa Muerte High Priest of Los Angeles. Mexican Gangsters doing sessions with Santa Muerte? Only on the Fringe! Get some real understanding about Santa Muerte from the man himself.

Simon Templar had a visit from a cowboy named McGowan but known as Tex. Seems that someone was trying to kill him as he was bushwhacked stepping out of a taxi in New York. In a couple of days he was due in Chicago to see a guy who knew he was coming but wasn’t hankering after seeing him seems he was trying to make sure Tex didn’t make it. So Tex he wanted The Saint to make sure he managed to stay alive. Duration: 28:05 Starring: Tom Conway Broadcast Date: 1st July 1951

A look at Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a Mexican folk saint whose popularity has skyrocketed over the last 20 years. The Catholic Church has condemned Santa Muerte as "satanic," the Mexican military has destroyed shrines to her, the Mexican government refuses to acknowledge the veneration of Santa Muerte as a religion, and the media in the US and Mexico have conflated the cult of Santa Muerte with drug cartels. But that's not the whole story. We take a look at the history behind Santa Muerte and see how many people who've felt rejected by the Catholic Church have been able to find hope, comfort, and community in Santa Muerte. Highlights include: • Marijuana smoke used as incense • A trans woman who puts on the largest festival to Saint Death • A reimagined version of the rosary • Frida Kahlo holding a ying yang Note: there's a mention of someone being beheaded at 1:21-2:32. For all of our shownotes, including our sources, visit buriedsecretspodcast.com. You can listen to more audio on our patreon ($3/month): https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecrets Follow us on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast, and follow Jen @jenmariewilde. E-mail us at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com. 

In this Pride48 (Live!) episode, we discuss the strange and fascinating topic of La Santa Muerte (or Saint Death).

Welcome to Radio Free Fresno, coming to you from the South of Shaw! In this episode, we're blessing our podcast by discussing the background of La Santisima Muerte, Santa Muerte, La Nina Blanca, Saint Death. She was originally for anyone, and was especially adored by those who were excluded from the Catholic church in Mexico. She has worldwide popularity, and I will be discussing her origin story before giving a brief overview of the aim of this podcast! *South of Shaw refers to an academically researched and statistically proven race and class divide in Fresno, CA. North of Shaw avenue is predominantly affluent. South of Shaw avenue is predominantly low income, with many of us being from communities of color. We are the "wrong side of the tracks", so to speak. However, despite our bad rap, South of Shaw is vibrant and cultured with the best taco trucks and Pho shops in town. Below is a quick link for more info on this divide. Radio Free Fresno is a take on Radio Free Albemuth, a novel by science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick! A message from the underground to spotlight different issues from a "South of Shaw" perspective. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/fresnos-segregation/567299/ More on encroaching gentrification in Fresno, CA: https://www.fresno.gov/darm/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/2019-Downtown-Displacement-Report-Draft_english.pdf Info about South of Shaw Media Art Collective can be found on our website! https://south-of-shaw-media.weeblysite.com/ Like us on facebook for local news and blog posts! https://www.facebook.com/SOUTHOFSHAWMEDIA/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/southofshawmedia/support

In our first CILIP Carnegie show of 2018 we chat to three of the shortlisted authors   Marcus Sedgwick on Saint Death,  Anthony McGowan on Rook, And Lauren Wolk on Beyond the Bright Sea.

From 2009 to 2012 in Sonora, Mexico, Silvia Meraz Moreno put together a plan to receive good fortune from Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. She led her impoverished family to believe that they’d be rewarded with wealth in exchange for human sacrifices… so the Sect of Nacozari set out to kill. 

Author Carmen Baca, from Las Vegas, New Mexico, called in to discuss her latest release, "El Hermano". From her Amazon page: "El Hermano takes place during the forty days of Lent in 1928 as José and his cousins conspire to spy on one of the brotherhood’s secret rituals to see what lies ahead for them as novices. José knows his time to join the cofradías (of which his own father is Hermano Mayor) is near, but having seen Hermanos who appear to be in pain after a night spent at the morada, a meeting house and chapel, and having heard stories about those who even died in the past because of whatever went on within the sacred structure, his fear guides him to join his cousins in their clandestine scheme. Little do they know, certain New Mexican legends conspire against them; La Muerte , Saint Death, warns José to leave his future unknown, a ball of fire thought to be a witch crosses their path, and even la Llorona, ghost of the Weeping Woman, and el Diablo, the Devil make an appearance." Check out Carmen Baca and her terrific book!

This week, Keyerra talks about Silvia Meraz Moreno and the cult killings in the name of Santa Muerte Talk to me! crimeincolor/sothisisthekey on twitter References: Silvia Meras | Murderpedia http://murderpedia.org/female.M/m/meraz-silvia.htm Children 'sacrificed' to Mexico's cult of Saint Death http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/9177633/Children-sacrificed-to-Mexicos-cult-of-Saint-Death.html Santa Muerte - International Cultic Studies http://www.icsahome.com/groups/santamuerte Mexican Border Family Suspected of Human Sacrifice http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46919631/ns/world_news-americas/t/mexican-border-family-suspected-human-sacrifice/#.WVOmLYQrKUk Mexico: 2 kids, woman killed in Saint Death ritual http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-mexico-2-kids-woman-killed-in-saint-death-ritual-2012mar30-story.html

Episode Overview: Today's episode is an interview Jill did with award-winning author and illustrator Marcus Sedgwick, whose latest book Saint Death was published back in April.    Other Books Mentioned in this episode:  The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson   Say Hello! Find OverDrive on Facebook at OverDriveforLibraries and Twitter at @ProBookNerds. Email us directly at professionalbooknerds@overdrive.com  Music "Buddy" provided royalty free from www.bensound.com  Podcast Overview We're not just book nerds: we're professional book nerds and the staff librarians who work at OverDrive, the leading app for eBooks and audiobooks available through public libraries and schools. Hear about the best books we've read, get personalized recommendations, and learn about the hottest books coming out that we can't wait to dive into. For more great reads, find OverDrive on Facebook and Twitter.

This week, Rebecca and Jeff talk about UK reading habits, a new Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, audiobook recommendations, the Salander dynasty, and much more.    This episode is sponsored by: Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick Audible   Links discussed in this episode: Knopf announces 5th book in Millennium series  Emergency Room for the mindWeird news: Insane Clown Posse being sued for plagiarizing poem from Chicken Soup for the Soul  World Book Night Survey HBO making a Fahrenheit 451 movie

Rebroadcast from 2015 Episode 139 - This week, we are joined by esoteric researcher and writer David Metcalfe to talk about Mexico's folk saint, Santa Muerte. Santa Muerte (Spanish for Saint Death), is a female folk saint venerated primarily in Mexico and the South western United States. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees.

The Saint Death Of The Saint 7-16-50 http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 5432

The Saint Death Of The Saint 7-16-50 http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 5432

Mike Duran, author of The Ghost Box and Saint Death, novels in the Reagan Moon para-noir series, joins us in Episodes 27 & 28 this week. We had a blast talking to him. Sometimes funny, sometimes very serious, Mike is a former pastor and he definitely keeps us on our toes throughout both episodes. As Christian writers...hope has to be a pretty big factor in our writing. ~Mike Duran   In Episode 28, Stand On Your Head: Our Plotting vs Pantsing question sends us down a hilarious rabbit trail, before Mike helps us get back on track. Then he talks about his own paranoia as a writer. Mike shares how he figures out what book to write next. We discuss the learning curve of Scrivener, but also the benefits, too. (Hint: we all use Scrivener and LOVE it.) Mike compares the editing process to a visit to a dentist, and while it's a gross comparison in a way, it has a lot of merit. Had us in stitches! :) Writer's block, or the lack thereof. Mike's solutions for feeling inspirationally dry are tremendously helpful (and is a technique I've used myself!) Mike starts waxing philosophical about writer's inspirational...and it gets deep (in a good way.) Mike recommends not eating or drinking during writing, and also uses a standing desk. He believes he writes better when he's standing. What characteristic does Mike share with his son? (Hint: it kind of grosses Aaron out!) And yeah, we went there. Mike compares his marketing practices to corpses about to be autopsied. (He's kidding.) Through giggles, we manage to get in some deep theological discussion. Which, if you've read Mike's blog, shouldn't surprise you at all. When we start discussing theology in tandem with physics and the reality of time, it gets deep. Truly a fascinating discussion. Listen to Episode 27 Links: Mike Duran The Ghost Box Saint Death Peace Like a River (Leif Enger) Moby Dick Dante Twilight Zone Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas Series Dean Koontz's Frankenstein Tosca Lee's Demon Realm Makers Ex Machina (motion picture) Drawing On the Right Side of Your Brain Eternity in Their Heart The Creator and the Cosmos

Mike Duran, author of The Ghost Box and Saint Death, novels in the Reagan Moon para-noir series, joins us in Episodes 27 & 28 this week. We had a blast talking to him. Sometimes funny, sometimes very serious, Mike is a former pastor and he definitely keeps us on our toes throughout both episodes. As Christian writers...hope has to be a pretty big factor in our writing. ~Mike Duran In Episode 27: Mike shares about his unlikely background, which includes going from dabbling in the occult to being a pastor. We're pretty sure it informs Reagan Moon's stories, which are definitely fun reads, but they may not be for all our listeners. Mike describes Reagan in a bit of a...colorful...manner. ;) We discuss paranormal stuff...and Mike suggests that a lot of that may exist more than people realize. You may or may not agree, but it's still a fascinating discussion. So, what you're saying is that life is a little more like Hot Topic than we want to admit? ~Aaron DeMott Why Los Angeles needed to be the setting for the Reagan Moon books...I think when you hear his reasoning, it'll make perfect sense. The background for Saint Death is really a fascinating discussion, and some of it has been in the news in the last few months (I vaguely remember hearing about it.) Mike describes a research trip he and his wife did in the process of writing this book. It's interesting, to say the least. Mike's answer to our superhero question raises a few eyebrows. But given his background, it makes perfect sense. Gremlins! (And not the movie!) The true origins of ghost boxes (who knew?)! Some moderately gross stuff (that may make some of our listeners squeamish!) Mike's "what's up next" is definitely something to look forward to if you're a writer interested in horror and/or writing from a faith perspective and what the parameters are for that. Links: Mike Duran The Ghost Box Saint Death Peace Like a River (Leif Enger) Moby Dick Dante Twilight Zone Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas Series Dean Koontz's Frankenstein Tosca Lee's Demon Realm Makers

The Saint Death Of The Saint 7-16-50 http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 2978

Interview starts 59:50   David Metcalfe, Andrew Chesnut Ph.D, and Red Pill Junkie are here to discuss their research into one of the fastest growing religions - Santa Muerte. David and Andrew are some of the few writing and researching this recent insurgence of interest.  We chat about the iconography around Saint Death, how this has been spreading and how it's easy for the media to portray this in a negative light. This Grim reaperess is apparently a miracle worker and is re-calibrating death but is also gaining the reputation as the Narco Saint.    https://skeletonsaint.com/about/ https://twitter.com/davidbmetcalfe  https://twitter.com/AndrewChesnut1  https://twitter.com/red_pill_junkie    In the intro, Grimerica's very first guest Efrain Palermo joins us to chat about his recent projects. He's kicking off a crowd based experiment with ice spikes in ice cube trays and his new novella "Phobian Dreams" will be coming out soon. Special thanks to Neil for the great "Trip Report" jingle and Markus for the donation from Sweden. We chat about the Paranormal swag from George Coghill and share some synchronicities from Anna in NYC. The site has been updated again so please take a look and thanks to those who have contributed to the show, it's really appreciated.    Links to stuff talked about in the intro and during the show:   http://coghillcartooning.com/  http://palermoproject.com/  http://dailygrail.com/blogs/red-pill-junkie  http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/water-crystal.html  http://techgnosis.com/ http://realitysandwich.com/    Please Help support the show. Grimerica’s Honey DoBeDoBeDo List: !! – Grimerica is fully and solely listener supported. We adhere to the Value for Value model.  0 ads, 0 sponsorships, 0 breaks, 0 portals and links to corporate websites… just many hours of unlimited content for free. Thanks for listening!!   Check out all the other donation types, t-shirts, magnets and get a Grimerica email addy: http://www.grimerica.ca/support/ Leave a review on iTunes and/or Stitcher https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-grimerica-show/id653314424?mt=2# http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-grimerica-show    Sign up for our newsletter http://www.grimerica.ca/news Leave a comment, ideas and guest/topic suggestions under any episode or blog http://www.grimerica.ca/ SPAM Graham = and send him your synchronicities, feedback, strange experiences and psychedelic trip reports!! graham@grimerica.com Tweet Darren https://twitter.com/Grimerica Send us a postcard or letter http://www.grimerica.ca/contact/ Thanks to Wayne Darnell for help with the website. http://www.darnelldigitalink.com/   MUSIC Grimerica Theme - Lock & Key Santa Muerte - To Die For Santa Muerte - Dimelo  

The Saint is hired with steaks to guard a cattleman and then his charge is murdered. Original Air Date: July 1, 1951 Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.net Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net. Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715   Read more ...