Ada Hoffmann

15. Turning to Stone

Time flees,
and when the sound begins, you’ve run too far
ahead to hear.

A poem about an actual real-life autistic meltdown/catatonia thing that happened. Nor is it the only time I have had catatonia. Catatonia is a Thing.

I went through an unusual number of drafts with this poem. Folks on the poetry forum I was using at the time didn’t seem to get it no matter what I did. (Was it a drug trip? A lot of people seemed very intent on the idea that I was writing about a drug trip.) But they did have many useful suggestions, and they made the poem a stronger beast.

Putting the verses of the poem into first person was a very late development; earlier drafts were more distancing. The refrains in parentheses are also very altered from what they were in the early drafts. I wanted the people around the “stone woman” to be ironically admiring, expecting there to be something magical and powerful about her when in reality it’s just that she can’t move or talk right now. But that version of the lines didn’t connect with anyone. Adding some more realistically harsh external comments made them more powerful. It was also surprisingly painful to do.

The poem’s rhythm, which I rather like, was with it from the beginning.

I eventually worked up the nerve to stop posting drafts on the poetry forum and send it to Stone Telling, where Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan had yet more suggestions for edits (mostly about the enjambment). The published version is up here. Rose has told me that it’s still one of their favorite Stone Telling poems.

17. The Self-Rescuing Princess

Did you expect this: matted hair,
dress in the unsexy kind of tatters,
holes at the elbows and filth in the seams,
fingernails black, face scarred?

In 2013, and in the thick of processing some of my own traumas, I decided that the phrase “self-rescuing princess” made my hackles rise. It’s a common term of fan approval for female characters who don’t wilt around waiting for A Man to rescue them. It made me think thoughts about what it is to be rescued, to be in need of rescue, to have the need for rescue be presupposed but the idea of who is responsible for it to be in question. About the idea that, whatever horror might enter into a person’s life, a Good Person must remain self-sufficient in dealing with it and its aftereffects. (A relative of this idea is that the idea that these horrors are “for a therapist to deal with” and must never under any circumstances become an inconvenience to one’s actual friends.)

The resulting poem says a lot of things that I’m not sure I entirely agree with. Clearly, some part of me did at the time. (One thing I would certainly do differently if I was writing it again is the line that references Wonder Woman. I don’t think I really understood what that character was about at the time.) It’s still a fun rant, though – good enough for the editor of Lakeside Circus in 2014, though, and now good enough for MONSTERS IN MY MIND.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

13. Evianna Talirr Builds a Portal On Commission

Here’s the thing. Atoms lie.

First published in the 2014 HWA Poetry Showcase, this is the first official appearance of a character of mine who’s bounced around through a number of different settings and plots, including my out-on-spec novel. She’s one of two characters whom I built the novel around, and who existed before the rest of that setting did.

Here, you can find her luring an unnamed character into a portal to another universe in which he (?) will immediately cease to exist because the laws of physics no longer support his molecular structure. As one does.

14. The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library

“Foolishness,” said the whales again, and they swam back to the upper worlds, eating two of her bodies on the way without even saying thank you.

I wrote this as a birthday present for Bogi Takács; it’s the first and only story I’ve ever successfully written as a present. (Unless you count the rambling, badly spelled tale I once free-wrote for A. Merc Rustad, in which Elric of Melniboné meets Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid and Lovecraftian sea-witch hijinks ensue.)

Bogi was kind enough to make the process easy by listing story tropes that e liked: these included cephalopods and hive minds, especially if the hive minds were not presented as a bad thing. I ended up with a strange, almost fairy-tale-like flash story about a hive mind of squid. (At least one beta reader mistook it for a children’s story, which… Please don’t do that. There is flaying. A child who likes death and creepy stuff would probably enjoy it, but otherwise… don’t.)

After I showed the story to Bogi, I submitted it to the Friends of the Merrill Collection Contest (which it won) and then to various magazines, including Strange Horizons, which published it in December 2013. It’s free to read there. Out of all the stories I have ever written since then, this is still the one with my favorite title.

Song Pairing: Even aside from the fact that the literal voice of a literal whale is important in the story, there is no better accompaniment for this weird little undersea story than George Crumb’s beautifully weird piece of undersea chamber music, Voice of the Whale.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

11. A Certain Kind of Spider

The male of the species knows we want him.

This is an early poem from the point of view of a black widow spider. Pretty self-explanatory, really, and a good thematic pairing for the murderess protagonist of “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”. It’s also the only poem I ever had published in Star*Line, before I decided that I wasn’t very interested in Star*Line or the SFPA, really.

(The sign-language aspect of the poem was added rather hastily, when a beta reader asked how the male spider was still talking after the narrator had already eaten his head. Oops.)

12. The Siren of Mayberry Crescent

She snaps her jaws together.
Silence is golden.

A poem about the domestic life of a siren who, Little Mermaid-like, has gone on land with a lover who cannot deal with her voice.

The inspiration for this one came from a minor D&D NPC who was a siren (actually a “sirine”, which, in typical D&D monster fashion, is rather different from the original myths). I started wondering what her home life was like and how she felt about it. Inevitably the poem wandered from that starting point and went somewhere else, and some uncomfortably personal stuff also crept in.

This poem was published in Mythic Delirium #29. It was nominated in the long category for the Rhysling Award that year, which was my first-ever Rhysling Award nomination. (The second, “The Giantess’s Dream”, was in the short-form category, and was published too recently to go into this collection.)

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

8. Goblin Love Song

I want to suck the marrow from your bones.

A short, sexy, violent poem. I would probably have sent this to Twisted Moon if it’d been around then. Instead it ended up in a horror zine called The Literary Hatchet.

10. Lady Blue and the Lampreys

The lamprey stomps to the bar and orders a Jim Beam, Bloody Tom’s favorite. Benny’s the kind of bartender who doesn’t say anything. Just slides the glass across and takes his money.

Back in 2013 or so, I kept toying with the idea of writing a gender-flipped Bluebeard. Eventually, I wrote a gender-flipped Bluebeard villanelle, called “Bluebells”.

My beta readers agreed that “Bluebells” was pretty, but it lacked something; villanelles are lousy for depicting a sequence of events, and so, for what the villanelle did manage to describe, context was missing.

Shortly after that, A. Merc Rustad and I were talking to each other about how horror stories have both an “inner story” and an “outer story”. I realized suddenly why the fix to “Bluebells” was eluding me. “Gender-flipped Bluebeard” sounded like a full story prompt, but it was only the inner part of the story. And that meant that the outer part of the story could be… anything I wanted.

I’m not sure anymore how I got from “anything I wanted” to “INVASION OF SOUL-EATING LAMPREY PEOPLE”, but Merc liked the idea.

“Lady Blue and the Lampreys” ended up being a rather un-fairytale-like weird horror story with a femme-fatale protagonist and a noir feel. Appropriately, it was published in The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir.

Lady Blue appears again in the story “As Hollow as a Heart”, which is possibly a prequel but more likely a slight AU, and was published in Lamplight earlier this year. “As Hollow as a Heart” doesn’t appear in MONSTERS IN MY MIND, as its publication date is a little too recent. You can look for it, probably, in a future collection.

Song Pairing: Lady Blue spends an important scene in this story listening to various parts of Verdi’s Requiem. In my mind, the part that is linked most indelibly to her is the “Libera Me”.

That soprano, though! Those high, wailing notes! Those totally gratuitous reprises of other parts of the Requiem! That fugue! That ENDING! *dramatically swoons*

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

6. Moon Laws, Dream Laws

The Un-God told us, later, that this was a lie, and that the sun’s disappearance was astronomy and optics. But a story can be true and not true, just as my Lady is the moon and not the moon.

This story was written – and by that I mean conceived, drafted, beta read, revised, and submitted – in one week. It entirely owes its existence to Krista D. Ball, who was friends with the person editing Tyche Books’ “Ride the Moon” anthology, and who asked around to everyone she knew when the editor suddenly had several of their solicited authors back out at the last minute.

I was not at all convinced that I could write anything good to such a short deadline, but with Krista’s encouragement, I just DID it. Not only did the editor like the story, but it ended up in pride of place as the anthology’s very last story – the one that summed up the anthology’s themes, I suppose, most fully.

“Moon Laws, Dream Laws” takes place in a fictional world that venerates polytheistic, mystical gods – gods whose whims can and do directly influence the physical world. But it’s also a technologically advanced world that is building a moon colony. The protagonist, Viola, is a priestess of the Lady of Blood and Stone, an easily angered, Artemis-like moon goddess. Her wife, Trulia, has been selected for a mission to the moon – but the Lady of Blood and Stone is very particular about who and what is allowed on her surface, and things quickly go awry.

Trulia was one of the first overtly autistic characters that I wrote into a published story, and I liked very much having a queer autistic woman as a love interest.

Viola and Trulia’s universe appears again – with a completely different set of mortal characters, and a very different kind of plot – in “The Herdsman of the Dead”, a story from Shimmer Magazine that didn’t make it into MONSTERS IN MY MIND. (I think “Herdsman” is a very good story, but it wasn’t a tonal fit for the collection.) The Herdsman of the Dead is a god who is mentioned a few times in “Moon Laws”, so people who’ve read that story can look out for that bit of continuity.

Song Pairing: There is no better song for a story about a moon priestess than Bellini’s “Casta Diva“, a literal hymn to the moon in operatic form.

7. Memo From Neverland

I fell out of my crib with nothing.
Now the mermaids and tigers are mine-

A short poem about some of the more practical considerations of being Peter Pan. It appeared in Kaleidotrope’s Winter 2014 issue, and is free to read there online. The poem emerged from some thoughts that I had about “adulting”, and about what it really does and doesn’t mean.

A beta reader told me that this poem is wildly out of character for Peter Pan and at odds with values that he strongly espouses in the actual books/plays/films. I considered this criticism seriously, and concluded that it’s true, but that I also don’t care. 😀

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.