Tomorrow I am flying out of Oamaru on the last Air New Zealand flight to leave from the airport! In one of those freakishly tiny planes!

I am pretty sure that this situation is ripe for narrative drama - "tragedy struck today when the final flight out of Oamaru was eaten by a giant", that kind of thing - so I am superstitiously writing about it in here so that it can never happen.

Assuming I live out the day and make it to a new decade, I will have to write some books I guess! To that end, what is your favourite creepy fairy tale/folk tale/mythological creature?

I myself was always a bit cautious around water in the wild for fear of possible taniwha, and gorgons just creep me the heck out. SNAKES. SNAKES FOR HAIR.

Mmmmm, giftmas. I have had a new and unexpected pleasure this year, which is reading the fan fiction of certain friends' works in the annual Yuletide awesomeganza, and cackling, "JOSSED! JOSSED! SUPER SUPER JOSSED!" because I know how things turn out.

It's like being a showrunner, without any of the anxiety or insane working hours!

Anyhow, speaking of holiday-related writing, this year I wrote a short story for people who signed up for my Christmas Card list instead of sending them Christmas cards, and duly sent it out. At midnight New Zealand time, because that patience thing has never been one of my strong suits.

However, since December 25th is now well and truly over, everyone may now read my story. For lo, I am as generous as a post-nightmare Scrooge! It is a pleasant wee thing about fairies and food and there is a recipe at the end.

Queen of the Kitchen.

Enjoy!

The new Minuit album, by the by, is called Find Me Before I Die A Lonely Death.Com. I think this is almost certainly the best album title in the history of ever.

Dear readers, I am waiting for it to become midnight so I can send off my Christmas story to those excellent people who requested it, and I am impatient!

So impatient, in fact, that I will finally tell the story of that time I threw up on my shoes in Atlanta airport.

In 2008, disaster hit feminist SFF convention WisCon. Disaster took the form of STOMACH DEATH FLU, prostrating many of the attendees and making the rest eye the Con Suite delectables with more than the usual caution. People told terrible tales of evacuating both ends in the nice WisCon bathrooms, and I'm sure the hotel staff were just so thrilled at all the sick geeks weakly tottering about.

I was fine.

That was good! Because I was going to visit my delightful agent Barry in NYC and stay with him for a while there, in the company of my best friend, revena. Because of flight shenanigans, however, she was flying direct from Wisconsin, and I was connecting in Atlanta.

My connection, naturally, was delayed.

I sighed, read some book, listened to some music, ate a ham sandwich, read some more book, walked into the toilet past the long queue, walked out of the toilet, grabbed a man who was standing by an empty airport wheelchair, and said, "Is someone using that?"

I don't know if he replied, because at that point I fainted into the chair.

I came to with someone kneeling by my faithful chair - a fellow traveller, who was a doctor - asking me significant questions, like was I pregnant. "Why is he bothering me with all this?" I thought, and then I leaned over and very neatly threw up all over my shoes. And the chair footrest. And quite a lot of the floor.

Under normal circumstances, dear readers, putting anyone to any trouble makes me cringe with anxiety. I regularly apologise for bumping into inanimate objects. But here I had pushed into the front of a queue, stolen someone's wheelchair, and exported the contents of my stomach onto airport property and I did not care. I was too sick to care! Here I was, and other people would just have to deal with me.

Some time later, when the helpful doctor had satisfied himself that I wasn't going to die and run to catch his flight and a helpful lady had given me a stain removal pen for the parts of my skirt that had caught vomit backsplash and various people were making uninformed but kindly-intended speculations on what was wrong with me, the airport paramedics arrived. They had taken a while, because their kit had liquids in it, and security had held them up.

No comment.

By this point an airport cleaner was mopping up my lunch, and I had recovered myself enough to apologise to her. She assured me that it was no trouble, goodness me, I couldn't help it! Up to this point, in fact, no one had been anything but nice to me, as befits the treatment of sick people far from home.

Then a paramedic - a man paid to treat sick people far from home - sneered, raised an eyebrow, and snottily inquired, "Do you make this much mess everywhere you go?"

Dear readers, I summoned all the dignity I could while I was standing on one foot in a pool of my own spew. It turned out to be quite a lot. "Of course not," I said. "My mother taught me manners."

And that's the vomit story. Merry Christmas Eve, y'all!

Oh, FAMILY.

My mother is a teacher. My father was a teacher before he retired. Neither of them can approach anything I write without scrutinising it for errors.

My father is currently reading the ARC of Guardian of the Dead.

Dad: *bursting through door* "Page 57! You are never EVER "in a marae"! You are always ON a marae.
Me: "Thank you, Dad; I wish someone had caught that-"
Dad: *indignant* "Someone just did!"
Me: "-but the last copy-edits were sent over a month ago."

TWO MINUTES LATER, NO LIE:

Dad: "I don't like being critical-"
Me: "THEN STOP."
Dad: "No, no, look! 'Soliders'!'"

I swear, he is going to remain astonished at my churlish reactions to his triumphant red-penning right up until the point my teeth meet in his throat.

ETA:

Dad: "There's a question mark missing here. 'Oh. You've still got the Bible.' Should have a question mark after Bible."
Me: "No, that's a statement."
Dad: "No, it's a question."
Me: "It's a statement. She knows that he's got the Bible! She's stating that he still has it! I WROTE THE BOOK!"

Oh, FAMILY.

I just got a truly horrible email.

You really got the guts to break up with me over email?

Tell you what! I just made a nice compilation of your/our best scenes and put it up for download on [link redacted on account of it is probably a virus]

Oh and btw: This email just went out to your parents. I bet they didn't know you were into dirty stuff like this.

Cheers!

Your ex bf

If you get this, don't click. No one has put your sex life online. It's designed to terrify you into clicking the link.

More Georgette!

AUNT: My son is engaged to a bore and my daughter wants to marry a poor poet instead of the very eligible match we'd arranged and the family has no money because my husband gambled it away but my son is making that right through careful and autocratic management.
SIR HORACE: Will you look after my daughter and find a husband for her? Dear little thing, never gives me any trouble.
AUNT: Sure!
ME: Sometime, I'm going to start a book with a scene where all the main conflicts are neatly laid out by conversation in the drawing room.

AUNT: We must be very kind to your little cousin! She has lived abroad and will be shy of London and need guidance in the ways of the Ton.
CECILIA: Yes, Mama.
SOPHY: Hello, family! I have brought you a monkey.
AUNT: ...
SOPHY: And a parrot. GOSH, this family seems to be full of muddled relationships! I will untangle them.

CHARLES: Hello, Sophy. I am your hot cousin. Please excuse the stick up my butt - my dreadful fiancee put it there.
SOPHY: Oh, not a problem. I'll get that out of there in a jiff. Can I drive your horses?
CHARLES: Certainly not! No little woman could handle these horses!
SOPHY: 1) I am five foot nine and 2) You seem to have stepped down from the carriage for a minute.
CHARLES: COME BACK HERE.

DREADFUL FIANCEE: What a ghastly, unmannered girl!
CHARLES: But just look at her ride.
DF: Yes! Most unladylike!
CHARLES: Mmm.

DF: Now, Sophy, let me give you some advice.
SOPHY: No, thank you. I am afraid that if I get angry I might do something wicked.
DF: WELL I was just going to say that you are a disgrace and are getting a terrible reputation with all these men clustering around you for HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT reason and ladies like me with safe reputations could do things like drive a carriage through the park, but for girls like you - WELL it is just as well I am with you today, because with ME by your side you will be above reproach.
SOPHY: Oh, good! I shall drive this carriage through the city, then, by all the passing rakes and bounders.
DF: ... people can see me
SOPHY: Why on earth does everyone keep assuming I don't mean what I say?

CECILIA: This is very strange. Sophy keeps throwing me together with my poet at every opportunity, but he keeps talking about poetry instead of attending properly to my needs. Perhaps... I don't love him?
CHARLES: CECILIA, what are you DOING out here alone with this poet?
CECILIA: I AM GOING TO MARRY HIM SO THERE.
CHARLES: I WILL NEVER ALLOW IT.
SOPHY: Charles, you MORON. After all my hard work!

SOPHY: It seems Charles' younger brother has got himself in debt! I will fix that.
GEORGETTE HEYER: Hello! In a book written in 1950, I felt fit to include a chapter of virulent anti-Semitism, portraying an Evil Grasping Jew that Dickens would have thought far too over the top.
ME: Wow, Heyer. Way to screw over your own awesome book.

I'm in Invercargill, which is the bottom of the South Island, and thus as far south as most people are likely to ever get. My father and I visited my grandfather today, and I picked up a book in his living room, yellow and spotted. It's The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, where "contemporary" means 1960.

As I always do when picking up a modern poetry anthology, I checked how many women were in the list (quite a few, as it happened) and then flicked to see what had been included by Sylvia Plath. Two very minor poems: "Frog Autumn" and "Metaphors".

No "Daddy", no "Lady Lazarus", no "Ariel", no "Tulips".

"Of course not," I thought, and my skin went cold and tight. "They hadn't been published yet. She was still alive when this book came out."

The delightfully pompous editor, Kenneth Allot, wrote of her, "Sylvia Plath's poetic gift is a civilized one without being at all weak or precious," and reading it, I nearly laughed out loud. I hope he got a shock when he read the Ariel poems; sharp and bright and raging, contained in controlled stanzas, polished until they gleamed like knives, anything but civilised.

But precious, oh yes, and not in the prissy lady poet way he means. The Ariel poems mean so much to many feminists, then and now. They are very precious to me.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

Oh, not civilised at all. Civilisation was the smug, wheedling voice of "The Applicant", and it wanted to sell her to the highest bidder.

She was 30 years old. She was depressed and angry. She wrote the Ariel poems. And one day, she went downstairs, turned on the gas, and put her head in the oven. No one who knows can ever read those last poems without remembering it.

My modern poetry lecturer once opined, with unusual forthrightness, that her husband Ted Hughes hounded her to her death because she was a better poet than him, and he couldn't stand it. I think the lecturer was only partly right. Sylvia Plath was the one responsible for putting her head in that oven, but unless Ted Hughes hid a masterpiece in a drawer somewhere, to be discovered by later biographers, I think her poetry will now always be better than his.

The thing that disturbs me most about that horrible ending to her brilliant, messy life, is that she put wet towels against the door to the room her sleeping children were in, so that the gas that killed her could not harm them. I imagine she hurt them badly by refusing to live any longer, but she determined not to hurt them in the manner of her dying.

It's so stark, like all suicides, and it frightens me a little. I wonder, if she loved them enough to do that, even in her despair, couldn't she have lived for them also? But is it right to consider if she should have? How much of ourselves can we ethically trade for the happiness of others?

Sylvia Plath certainly can't tell me. After she put her head in the oven, she had no more words for anyone.

How YOU doin'?

Yesterday readers of my twitter (@kehealey) saw the following:

Twitter, this day, okay, THIS DAY, you would not believe it.

I am going to have to destroy a priceless object or something JUST to pay this day back what it deserves in its offenses against me.

Something as precious and irreplacable as my SOUL, which this day has, if not destroyed, considerably mangled.

Small children in the airport are shying from my dour mien! RUN, children, run, lest this day wipe off on you!

Some time later, I tweeted:

Day improved. Now have wine. Tomorrow I will tell you ALL about it, and you shall laugh at my misfortunes, as is entirely appropriate.

Gather, dear readers, and Spinster Aunt Karen will tell you a story.

It is the story of a young woman journeying to her really rather distant homeland* from her current abode via that miracle of engineering, the aeroplane. She began the journey right on time and high of spirit, wafting through the check-in and security lines with ease, for her heart was pure (and her skin was pale).

The peril, though she did not recognise it, began when she was seated at the very back of the plane, beside a windowless wall. "Sorry," the charming and efficient stewardess said. "We'll try and put you somewhere else if there's space."

There was not! Instead, a young man of the hippy persuasion came and sat beside the young woman. The young woman had no objections to hippies, nor, indeed, to a principled rejection of chemical deodorants, but she rather wished the young hippy had employed some other agent to disguise his rank scent, or that he had washed. And kept his shoes on.

The flight began, and the young woman found it most disconcerting not being able to see even a glimpse of the world outside the plane.

She found it especially so when the turbulence began.

Dear readers! The young woman was a seasoned traveller, accustomed to international travel several times a year for the last half-decade, and she had never in her life encountered such an airy buffeting. The plane shuddered, swooped, and dived, battling the winds and causing sounds of dismay to issue ceaselessly from its passengers. When even the charming and efficient stewardess looked over her shoulder at her colleagues, her lips pressed tightly in ill-concealed alarm, the young woman felt her heart grow faint.

"If I am to die in this barren tube, with never another glance at the world I have loved so well, then I will die as I have lived," she reasoned. Accordingly, she opened the book clutched in her hands, which was Death Before Wicket, by the lovely Kerry Greenwood, and concentrated fiercely upon each refreshing sentence.

Readers, it very nearly helped! The delights of a 1920s mystery made beautiful by cricket, Sydney University, and the divine Hon. Phryne Fisher did not destroy the young woman's fear, but they were able to greatly abate it.

Until the stench-ridden hippy, who was holding a book entitled The Book Of Life And Death, leaned over. "We're both reading a book with death in the title," he said, nodding at the motions of the bucking aircraft. "That's not a coincidence."

The young woman wished murder by venomous snakes upon the hippy, and fervently hoped that such a curse would not be rendered irrelevant.

And, lo! After an hour of terror, the gallant pilots found smoother air, the plane proceeded with only a few minor bangs, and the young woman joyously stepped through the arrival doors of Christchurch International Airport, waiting for the delighted cry of familial recognition.

It came not.

After much consternation, and imagining of road accidents and like catastrophes, and after enlisting the assistance of a noble and great-minded friend, the young woman was greeted by her mother at last.

"Hello!" the mother cried. "I'm sorry I'm late; I couldn't get away. I was hoping your plane might be delayed."

"FOR AN HOUR?" the young woman asked. "Madam, my nerves are as a scatter of dry beans dancing upon a drum! I shall never forgive you!"

"Would you like a diet coke?" her mother enquired.

"Welllll," the young woman conceded. "Yes."

AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Except, we can hope, the hippy.


* Note for the geographically disinclined - Melbourne is four hours from Christchurch via plane. The Tasman is quite a big sea.

Readers, would you like a copy of Guardian of the Dead?

Of course you would! You have been saving your pennies like a squirrel saves whatever squirrels eat, or the way alligators stick food under a bank until it becomes nice and rotten!

But if you live in the US or Canada, you have a chance of getting Guardian for free simply by entering this contest.

Ho, hum, Karen, you say, contest schmontest WAIT. The THREE winners get FIVE upcoming Little, Brown books? Guardian of the Dead, Sisters Red, 13 Treasures, Ship Breaker, and the sequel to Prophecy of the Sisters: Guardian of the Gate? Madam, I will assay!

Yes, assay. Assay like anything! And give thanks unto the Book Smugglers, for they are delightful, and their contests mighty.