Ishtar

This novella collection is powerful, sexy and very, very deadly.

The 5 Loves of Ishtar: Kaaron Warren

And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living: Deborah Biancotti

The Sleeping and the Dead: Cat Sparks

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10 Things About Ishtar:
‘The Five Loves of Ishtar’

I don’t want to give my story way, so instead of listing ten things about Ishtar, I’m going to list ten things about washerwomen!

Ten things about washerwomen in history:

10.    The washerwoman has been known as scrubber, swabber, char, Mrs Mop, gleaner, picker, scavenger bird, crow and vulture, according to Roget’s Thesaurus.

9.    Cumulative Trauma Disorder (CTD) has been around for a long time, variously known as miner’s knee, tennis elbow or washerwoman’s thumb.

8.    The Night Washerwomen walk the land eternally, cursed for killing their own children. If they catch you, they will wrap you in their washing and drown you where their pool.

7.    The opposite of the Night Washerwoman was a real woman called Oseola McCarty, who washed clothes all her life, saving half of what she earned, until she had enough to establish a scholarship fund.

6.    The Washerwoman is an old profession. She was once known as Lavender. Other old jobs are the Kempster, or wool comber, the Pigman, or crockery dealer, and the Colporteur, or peddler of books.

5.    The Mormon Battalion of 1846 took along four laundresses.

4.    A few drops of kerosene or some peach-tree leaves are a washerwoman’s friend, because they will help to whiten the clothes.

3.    Hooch Girl is Vietnam War US slang for a Vietnamese woman hired by the American military as a washerwoman. John Wayne was slang for a can opener.

2.    Here is Paul Guigou’s Lavandiere.

1.    Ishtar’s washerwomen inherit their job and they serve her until the moment of their death.

Here at Gilgamesh Press, we want to continue with the sneak peaks into our debut book, Ishtar!

‘The Five Loves of Ishtar’

10 Things about Ishtar:
(‘The Sleeping and the Dead’)

10.    The nuns collate their scriptures from a myriad of ancient sources: celebrity cookbooks, women’s magazines. That glossy paper made it right through Armageddon, barely blackened by the pyres of burning Bibles.

9.    She likes tattoos inked before the fall. Everything from hot rods to baby feet. Jesus, naked ladies, dragons.

8.    Storm clouds sully the horizon. Vast, voluminous boiling things, cauldrons of corrosive isotopes and acid flashback.

7.    Windborne apparitions linger like imprints, remnants of better places, better days.

6.    Women worship at her feet. The walking dead whose wombs still pulse with blood.

5.    Ishtar has heard the skulls speak on more than one occasion, a fact she keeps hidden from the nuns.

4.    The ossuary endures.

3.    Death stalks the surface. The men were safer in the Underworld. Much safer.

2.    Memories are as unreliable as seasons.

1.    A deity cannot attain salvation. She must create it.

‘The Sleeping and the Dead’

It always bothers me when stories portray characters who are centuries old as reasonable people possessed of rational human perspective. Gods, by their very definition, cannot be sane in the way that term applies to you and me. Entropy is relentless. Time corrodes, empires rise and fall while a god still stands. How could millennial loneliness not leave incomprehensible scars?

The Sleeping and the Dead is a portrait of a world that has eaten itself alive. Birth has become an abomination, hope a blight upon the landscape. The would-be mothers perpetuate Hell. The crazy nuns are the ones who’ve got it right.

Consumer culture inherited the god it deserved, all mood swings, grace and flaming retribution. My Ishtar is an amnesiac deity. The turmoils of post-civilised dischord have lulled her into a state of exhausted ennui. She doesn’t remember why she does the things she does. Her fertility clinic is perpetuated as a half-baked gesture towards the tedium infusing and permeating the aching years.

Assisting hopeful mothers doesn’t interest her in the slightest. She does it because she’s bored of death and its grim accoutrements. Anna Ishtar has wallowed way too long in her own intellectual mire. She’s not quite crazy, just teetering on the brink.

Daisy and her nuns smell the raw power on her, even if Ishtar herself has mislaid her origins and purpose. That a god walks among them comes as no surprise, for they are blessed and theirs is holy art.

Who is Thomas to her really? No one, so she makes him someone; her quest a mere diversion to while away the hours.

Cat Sparks
2011
http://catsparks.net/

Due out 13th November 2011!

“Sometimes when I’m reading one of Deborah Biancotti’s stories I feel actually, physically, chilled to the bone. That’s how good she is.

‘And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living’

The true spark for my upcoming Ishtar novella was when Mark Deniz asked me to contribute to an anthology that would feature a past, present & future setting. Some sparks are pragmatic, I guess… “

To read the full post, click here!

If you ever want to find out more about Assyrian gods, please leave a comment and I can try and pop up a post.

So…I’m going to let you pick.

Please comment here as to a god/dess you’d like to know more about and we might see them next week! (Depending on how many people comment).

For now: here’s a little titbit about Tiamat:

“Do you know how uncomfortable it is to be ripped in two? I mean, literally ripped into two different pieces. Part of my body now forms the sky and the other half, the ground. It gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘breezy’.”

I, on the other hand, am much more interesting. It’s hard not to be, when you are one of the seven great deities of Sumer and a fertility goddess. And no matter what anyone says, fertility goddesses know how to have a good time, if you understand my meaning.

Who am I? Name is Ninhursag.

I had a few titles, as well as husbands, but that’s neither here nor there.

What? I have to list them?

Well, I was known as the Great Lady of Heaven, Lady of the Mountain, Great Queen, Lady of Birth and so forth, and I was married to at least EnKi, the misogynistic a***hole, although he claims to love women.

Fashion was different back when I was a leading lady of the heavens. Horned headdresses and tiered skirts were all the rage, as were weapons. I used to have a quiver slung over my shoulder for effect, although I did know how to use it. EnKi can vouch for that. Damn gods and their regenerative abilities. For a while, I even had a little lion cub I walked around, like the Tinkerbell of today.

I had a few children as well, as is required of a fertility goddess. One must prove one is capable, naturally. Ninurta and Ninsar are two of my children who you may have heard of, although there were many more. Ninsar wasn’t always the brightest, and fell for the charms of her own father. I can’t believe I forgave EnKi for that. But divorce is a wonderful thing.

I was also involved in the creation of humankind, although the reality isn’t quite the picture painted by the myths (let’s say I didn’t just watch EnKi uncover the heads of the humans in soil using a hoe, or watch as Nammu made you all from clay).

But that’s a whole different story, and one I can’t be bothered telling right now. It’s time to go out and be fertile and whatnot.