I had one novelette out in 2021: “Colors of the Immortal Palette” (12,900 words) appeared in issue 39 of Uncanny Magazine.
“Colors of the Immortal Palette” combines so many things that I love–Sondheim musicals, impressionist art, and ukiyo-e prints, to name just a few of the inspirations. It is also deeply personal, an exploration of navigating the world of art from a marginalized perspective. Plus I realized that I’d never written a vampire story, and wanted to play with ideas about immortality, legacy, and time.
Here is a short excerpt from the beginning:
LEAD WHITE
I will always remember the view of Paris from his window. Snow, pure and untouched, softens the outline of the buildings and covers the grime of the streets. White, the color of beginnings. His canvas is primed and ready to be painted, and stark winter sunlight glows bright on his undead skin.
The studio is cramped, drafty despite the heat radiating from the stove. One corner is clean and lavishly decorated, the rest a cluttered chaos of painting supplies and personal effects. He studies me intently as I take in the room, evaluating me much as he did at the Café Guerbois when I’d first caught his eye.
I wait for him to ask how I came to be in Paris. Artists are so very predictable that way—no trouble at all accepting this pale immortal creature as one of their own, but a woman of my mixed ancestry? Utterly implausible.
“You should hear the stories they tell of you at the café,” he says. “If Émile is to be believed, you arrived here as an ukiyo-e courtesan, nothing more than paper wrapped around a porcelain bowl. A painter—he will not say which of us it was, of course—bought the bowl and the print along with it.”
“And the painter pulled me from the print with the sheer force of his imagination, I’m sure,” I reply, laughing. “Émile is a novelist and can hardly be trusted to give an accurate account. The reality of my conception is vastly more mundane, I assure you…though it does involve a courtesan.”
Want to read the rest? Head over to Uncanny Magazine: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/colors-of-the-immortal-palette/
