Indeed it was. First-ever Silver Brown-related interview to boot. Fully enjoyed that experience; the guy interviewing me was probably more nervous than I was. Although to be fair, the backstory of how the book came into existence would probably make any rational person shit themselves. Not me, though. I actually lived through that nightmare, so it doesn’t have quite the same effect. He told me the podcast is coming out on June 3, so I guess I’ll have more details about that to share with you then.
The chapters I’m editing now see Florys being taken to the headquarters of Lodge No. 7712 of the Thirteenth Nation Sisterhood, located on the forest island of ₪EYONUGIISHI. There, she is to have a face-to-face discussion with the dreaded and ill-tempered Crocus Acadia, a senior cyberwitch and reigning Vizier-Queen of the Lodge, who (among other things) smokes her cigarettes through a big hole in her neck that she had surgically installed on purpose, and has the ability to rip a person’s head off (“like it was made of paper”, as Florys puts it) using nothing but a stare. I won’t elaborate too much on what the discussion is about. You’ll just have to wait until I eventually publish those chapters to learn more about that. I more so wanted to highlight ₪EYONUGIISHI itself and what a freakishly surreal place it is.
In addition to the myriad of booby traps on the island that were put there to deter outsiders (which include ravenous flesh-eating beetles that only experienced Sisters know how to tame and trees that excrete highly corrosive sap when touched), the entrance to the Lodge headquarters is located in an impossible-to-find spot, inside a tool shed in the middle of a meadow…
Something like this one, except with different graffiti.
The meadow is a wandering meadow – a special type of program devised by the Sisterhood that alters its own coordinates daily. It could be on one side of the island one day and the other side the next day, the only constant being that it’s always on the island somewhere. Its outward appearance is merely a diversion; it’s not really a tool shed. It’s actually an elevator. A living elevator.
From its walls it emits a substance closely resembling spider silk. This silk accumulates into a wad roughly the size of a small horse every two hours or so, which sits neatly atop an orifice in the dead centre of the floor. Once the Entity has scanned a Sister’s fingerprints and verified that she is worthy to enter the Lodge headquarters, the Sister gets inside the tool shed and puts the wad on, as if it was a fur coat. The Entity then swallows the wad whole down the orifice, with her inside.
The Entity has several other esophagi aside from the main one, as well as several anal openings that provide a way out of the Lodge headquarters. Some of the other esophagi are comparatively pleasant compared to the main one. But Florys doesn’t care about any of that. She hates all these elevators, and always complains to her Aunt Jennifer whenever she has to ride in one. She would prefer an elevator with an impeccably dressed attendant, a string quartet and a fully-stocked champagne bar.
The gargantuan literary tentacle with ten thousand eyes and ten thousand tongues protruding out of the left side my gut is about to molt again. I can feel those characteristic hormones and enzymes it emits burning the walls of my blood vessels. Like an über-hot red mustard that makes wasabi seem like mayonnaise by comparison. Only felt instead of tasted. The thing seems to time the eclosion of its instars with the phases of the earth, to drink in the energy of the sun. Or something like that.
