Cymeric Monsters

I had a fabulous weekend at Edinburgh’s one and only SFFH literary festival, Cymera.

While I only managed to make a few panels, I got to hang out with all the lovely folk I know from Edinburgh SFF and GSFWC, and I had the pleasure of going to some open mic readings and lmty the talent upcoming is pretty damn incredible.

I saw folk who not only have excellent writing, but also the far rarer ability to perform. It’s a real skill, and one I am well aware is not one of mine. So I appreciate seeing it in others.

The future of genre is looking good, and the real talent is out there making stories from their own brains and not regurgitating AI slop.

This weekend artist Jenni Coutts gave me the original pen and ink of her beautiful art of Aleks and Ilea. I commisioned this as a gift to myself, because she’s one of my favourite artists and I have a number of prints of hers on my wall. It was time to get myself the real deal.

For those who haven’t seen the art Jenni drew for me to celebrate The Shape of Monsters, here it is:

I love it more than I can actually get across on screen. It fills me with squee and delight.

I restrained myself from buying masses of books because my TBR pile is literally going to kill me soon. The cat has alreayd knocked it down once and, actually, being hit on the head by a tower of books is unfun.

However, I did pick up two things to add to the tower:

Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska, which sounds suitably horrifying considering how the world is dealing with with the erosion of women’s rights and the rise of AI.

And the second Wiz Duo from Wizard’s Tower, which is a double novella set, and includes a story by E.M. Faulds which I read in an early draft and is basically what happens when you get the world’s weirdest flesh-tunnel in a post-climatecrash normcore Glasgow. It’s gooooood.

This coming week I’ll be in Edinburgh Bookshop to catch Lyndsey Croal celebrating the launch of her Scottish folklore collection Dark Crescent. I read it earlier, but I needs to gets me a signed copy :D

(for those thinking that art styler is familiar, yes, Jenni Coutts did the cover art for Dark Crescent)

If you’re at the launch on Thursday, I’ll see you there!