Nicola Griffith's Blog

As I said a couple of weeks ago, we had an amazingly mild winter here in Seattle, a disturbingly mild winter. And spring. As predicted, the cherry tree exploded into puffs of pink. This was taken a few days ago:

Blossom is about to start falling. In a week, the lawn will be carpet of pink flowers.

Meanwhile, our two lilac trees (okay, one is ours, and one is the back neighbour’s, but it grows over our deck) are also getting in on the act. The one that grows over the kitchen deck is paler than the one that in the secret little north garden (not pictured) but it makes the deck smell heavenly.

Also on the kitchen deck, we have tiny yellow flowers that come every year but whose name I can never remember. The geranium—an annual, not the perennial kind; it was not supposed to survive the winter—has grown huge, massive leaves reaching everywhere, but no sign of flower buds.

However, we have our very first fuchsia buds swelling, which delights Kelley—she loves fuchsia (we have so much fuchsia, fuchsia of every kind, on the kitchen deck, the back deck, the front flower bed…)

And two tiny flowers growing among our Hot Lips salvia—little red pinpricks among the green:

And then there’s these, which I’m really, really hoping are snapdragons—I love snapdragons—but which I suppose could also be some kind of salvia:

Meanwhile, on the back deck: nothing. Just a few green leaves growing here and there in pots. We’ll see what transpires…

Today

This is Charlie this morning—he’d already been out in the sunshine and was just checking in for hi mid-morning treats. (Hey, it’s how my mother ensured her peace of mind on sunny days when otherwise I would have run wild and not be seen between dawn and dusk: she promised a cup of tea and a biscuit whenever I came home. It worked. I decided if I as young hoyden had been trainable with bribes, the cats might be, too. So when we started letting Charlie and George out unsupervised we started a regimen of stopping whatever we were doing and giving them love and treats. It was during the early lockdown days of the pandemic; it was easy. Now of course it’s much more inconvenient—but they remind us, loudly, of the implicit bargain. And, faithful servants that we are, we stop what we’re doing and obey…

In the Long Ago

Over on Patreon I’ve posted two new images of Charlie and George as they might have been drawn by scribes at Hild’s abbey. George was easy—the photo I was working from caught him almost perfectly in profile, so it was fairly simple to translate that to Lindisfarne Gospels visual style.

Charlie, well, Charlie has always been more awkward. I could have made my life easier by using any number of profile or head-on photos of him but I really wanted to try one in which this small cat looks like a massive panther with Resting Demonface. He ended up looking a bit Pictish—though his head is more realistically styled than any self-respecting medieval artist would produced—but I did manage to capture that expression. So all in all I’m pleased.

April is always a strange time here in our particular corner of the PNW where our house seems to sit in its own tiny pocket of micro-climate. We have what I believe is the last-to-bloom cherry tree in Seattle.

Three days ago the tree was bare and the sky brilliant blue. Two days ago we had thunder, lightning, hail…and a waterspout over Puget Sound. Waterspout sounds sort of cute ad friendly, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s a tornado over water—you do not want to encounter one if you’re in a boat. (Both these images are screen grabs from local news video—like the cats, I was very sensibly safe indoors; sorry for the poor quality.)

Yesterday? The cherry tree decided, Okay, the weather has thrown its final spring curveball, safe to bloom! And so it did.

Every year the speed of change surprises me. One day nothing—no leaves, no flowers—then one morning buds with tiny pink frills peeking from the tips. Then, hours or days later (always unexpected), spang! Leaves and flowers at once. Within a week the whole tree will look like a puff of cotton candy; three of four days after that they’ll all fall off and turn the lawn into a pink carpet. For days the cats will come home covered in petals, tracking them everywhere. Sadly (for us—Kelley really likes cherries), despite all the flowering there will be no fruit. There never is. I don’t know why. The tree is at least 25 years old, so it’s not a question of age. I don’t think it’s a nutrient or sunlight issue, either. I think our cherry just doesn’t have any suitable friends close enough to cross-pollinate.

Perhaps one day someone will plant something compatible, and one day there will be tiny little cherry trees springing up all over. Until then, the birds love the tree. The cats love the tree. And I love the tree. It seems content.

Remember the silver snakestone lapel pin I sometimes wear on my jacket? It was cast by (who also makes the great Fairford Duck pendants that Kelley likes so well). Now, with my blessing, she has used two of my Pictish- and one Viking coin-inspired animal designs to cast pendants. (The raven is from the Norse coin.) Right now they’re only for sale in bronze, but in a week or two they’ll be available in copper—and maybe silver? (Not sure about that.) Also, though I’m not sure of the timetable, she’ll cast the designs as lapel pins.

Each image below links to its Etsy sale page.

Yffing boar in Pictish style Sprinting hare Norse raven

If metal isn’t your thing but linoprints are, another artist friend, Vicki Platts-Brown, is working on a couple of other images (flying heron and the boxing hares). More when I have it. And if neither metal nor paper work for you, I recently had a conversation with a ceramicist about mugs. Stay tuned!

This post exists as something to point to the next time someone argues that my second novel, Slow River (1995), did not win the Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy Lambda Literary Award in 1996. Yes, I know that several databases—including Wikipedia1 and the Lambda Literary Foundation itself2—are confused on this point. Yes, Melissa Scott is listed as very deservedly winning the same award in the same year for Shadow Man; she did; it was a tie.

Why are so many databases wrong? No idea. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right, and my website is right; the paperback reprint covers of Slow River are right, and the Amazon page is right.

Anyway, as proof and for future reference, here is the lump of lucite I was presented in 1996. The object itself has deteriorated a little—lots of bubbling—which in some light makes it difficult to read, so I too a few different shots. Image descriptions below.3

ID: Four photos from different angles—one held, two upright on a table, one propped on a reading stand—of a literary award in the form of a book-shaped chunk of lucite, inside which is embedded a bronze medallion with the Greek letter Lambda centred inside palm leaves over an open book, and engraved with “Lambda Literary Awards.” Below that, printed in black, float the words “Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy, 1995. Slow River, Nicola Griffith, DelRay”

So there you go. For the record, in terms of the Lambda Literary Foundation I’ve won the award six (6) times and been a finalist five (5) times, in a variety of categories, and in 2013 was presented with the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

Any Wikipedia editors out there: feel free to jump in and fix this. The Powers That Be frown on authors editing info about themselves. ︎Yes, they’ve been notified. Like all nonprofits, things move slowly, and sometimes details slip through the cracks. EDIT TO ADD: Woo-hoo, fixed even before I posted this! ︎Yes, they misspelled Del Rey as DelRay. If I had a dollar for every time… ︎

Speer by Nicola Griffith, translated by Elena Helfrecht (Carcosa Verlag, 2026)

Last week I got my copies of the German translation of Spear: Speer. They are gorgeous objects. The front cover has a wonderful trompe l’oeil 3-D effect; the end papers are a gorgeous autumnal berry colour; and each comes with its own beautiful bookmark ribbon. You can see that better in this photo:

I don’t read German, but given the fine attention to detail in the physical presentation, I have no doubt the translation, by Elena Helfrecht, is very good. (Any German readers out there who read it, please let me know what you think!)

There are now several editions of Spear—English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German—and all are lovely. I feel very lucky.

A special item has just gone up for auction to support a fundraising for Locus, the original and best SFF trade magazine. The item in question is a handmade art book based on Ammonite—even some of the paper is handmade, special Japanese paper; the art is all linocuts, hand printed; the type is letterpress—signed by both me and the artist, Vicki Platts-Brown. (Vicki, if you recall, is the creator of several prints hanging on our walls—a gorgeous birch tree, two herons, a brilliant rooster—plus the huge collage we call Petalville.)

To tempt you, here’s a gallery of images you can click through:

Note the gorgeous texture of everything. And, as you can see, there’s some ingenious folding, a case with a tiny little gold magnet, gold (I think? might be wrong) ink, and just a really interesting concept.

So the book-as-piece-of-art is in itself a wondrous thing. But more to the point it is up for auction for a worthy cause. Locus is one of the linchpins of the SFF genre, essentially the journal of record for the field, and has been for decades. It’s been a nonprofit for a while now, and they know how to make a dollar stretch. But to maintain the reviews, the archives, the interviews, the reporting on major SFF events, moments, and milestones does cost money.

As my item will be auctioned, I don’t know what price range to expect—though I can can tell you the floor is $400. Here’s the auction link. It will be live for 7 days:
https://locus.betterworld.org/auctions/locus-magazine-science-fiction-f-2/items/ammonite-art-book

If this iteration of Ammonite is currently beyond your budget, no worries, there are many other wonderful ways to support Locus and the genre the magazine itself supports.

Some examples:

signed books and collectibles by famous authorssigned original artmugs and t-shirtsone-on-one Zoom chat with Famous Authorsgroups Zoom chats with authorspersonalised critiques of your storymany more!

Please go take a look and consider supporting their work.

Meanwhile, again, the auction for the Ammonite art book is live from today at 12 noon PST and last for 7 days:
https://locus.betterworld.org/auctions/locus-magazine-science-fiction-f-2/items/ammonite-art-book

Good luck!

Many of you are, I hope, currently at or heading to a No Kings gathering this fine, sunny Saturday. I’m sorry to say I can’t: I’ve just got back from Florida and brought a nasty upper respiratory tract infection with me. I’ll be coughing my lungs out and feeling like death warmed up while everyone else competes for Best Signage and Most Witty Takedown of our current political leaders. And also make connections and sign up for organisational and observational training. Because it’s that kind of hard, continuing work that leads to change. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere.

Charlie and George of course also have no time for kings—mainly because, being god-emperors of Broadview, such lesser beings are beneath their notice.

I will leave you with Charlie enjoying the morning sun and hoping that some bird or squirrel will come down from the cherry tree—which as you can see if being colonised by the over-exuberant clematis—and join him for lunch on the deck.

Again over on Gemæcce (my research blog), two posts about Early Medieval Pictish stones—or, more specifically, the animals carved on them. It can be hard to tell sometimes whether these easts are real, wholly imaginary, or just attempts to convey something they’ve never seen in real life.

Certainly some are very real, and realistic—and I’ve drawn a few examples. But as far as we know (certainly as far as I know, and I’ve searched extensively) the Picts never carved many of the animals Hild would have been familiar with. So I set out to create what I thought those beasties might have looked like if they had. One of those examples in particular gave me a lot of trouble…

Anyway, take a look for yourself:

Haring After PictsMad as a March Hare

Over on Gemæcce a post about Julian of Norwich’s famous quote (“All shall be well and all shall be well…”) and some thoughts about wording, and how this all relates to Hild’s evolving notions of belief.