Fiction, free to a good home in your brain. Or a bad one.

[mrissa]

I have a story called Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish up at Abyss and Apex in this month's issue. It's a Kalevala retelling (big surprise, with that title). Go on and read if you like.

(I've been using the Bletchley Park icon for all things Finnish, because Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain have both, but this does not. I don't want you to go expecting vacuum tubes and come back disappointed due to lack of computing.)

Comments

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

I loved the singing of charms, but I would wouldn't I. ;) It also has the proper bittersweetness of a good folktale.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the feedback! Always appreciated.

[biguglymandoll.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm. This was a little hard for me, having just smoked several pounds of yummy fish today. ;-)

I really enjoyed the story! I'm not at all familiar with Kalevala or Finnish folktales, so it's new to me, and delightful. Thanks for sharing!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I think the Kalevala is way underused in fantasy. It's so gloriously weird.

[aedifica]

That just cries out to be read aloud! If one could figure out believable pronunciations of the names, anyway, and if one had a venue for reading things aloud.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Finnish tends to emphasize first syllables (and secondarily emphasize third ones), if that helps. Doubled vowels are longer.

Probably not enough? Well, I will put it on my list for possible readings at Minicon next year. Or I could just make a point of pronouncing "Joukahainen" for you next time I see you.

[aedifica]

Pronouncing "Väinämöinen" at me would be even more helpful. :-) (I can make a reasonable guess at "Joukahainen," though a Finn might laugh at the result, but I don't know what umlauts mean in Finnish.)

I asked my local Pronouncer of All Things Northern European (also known as my sister) and she said alas, she has no Finnish. Which I expected, since I know it's a Finno-Hungarian language instead of a Germanic language, but it was still worth asking. (She was doing a master's in Medieval Germanic Stuff until she decided it really wasn't what she wanted to do with her life, but she took some Icelandic and a few other things before she got to that point.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Will do, then.

I have very little Finnish myself, and the Finnish I do have is scary because it seems to have arrived by osmosis.

[carbonel]

Synchronicity -- another friend just had a story published in the same issue of Abyss and Apex. It's "Walking Across the Bomb," by Alexandra MacKenzie.