Guest Post: Sheryl R. Hayers Stirs Up Crockpot Short Ribs of Hope

Imagine a Hellmouth. No, not the one in Sunnydale, California””a medieval Hellmouth, straight out of a manuscript illumination. Pointy teeth, flames, unhappy people.
When I decided that I wanted to write a book about a medieval woman who leads a raid on Hell, that was the sort of underworld that immediately came to my mind. A mouth, though, implies a throat, and a stomach, and, well, everything else.

So I had a Hellbeast on my hands, a creature that spends centuries underground, but occasionally makes an appearance on the surface. It’s a little like a platypus, but without the bill. And a lot bigger.

Within the Hellbeast, there are revenants. But there are also humans””some have been altered in various ways, and some are extremely long-lived, but they are humans nonetheless. This led me to an unusual world-building question: What do people eat in the underworld?

That is a trick question, of course. Should you find yourself in any sort of underworld, and/or in Faerie, it’s best not to eat anything at all. The old stories are quite clear on that point. Probably the most famous example is that of Persephone, who is obliged to spend part of every year in the underworld because she ate a pomegranate seed there.

Food is a medium of communication between the world below and the world above. To be in a world””to see it, to speak to its inhabitants””is to be of that world. The food of the underworld is part of the underworld, and makes the eater part of the underworld too.

Conversely, food allows the dead to become, temporarily at least, part of the world above once more. When Odysseus wants to speak to the dead, he pours a libation of milk, honey, wine and water, and sprinkles barley meal over the whole mess, praying to Persephone, among others. What really draws the dead to him, though, is sheep’s blood that he lets run into a pit. The seer Teresias will only speak to him after drinking the blood.

Red wine and honey were also in the jars sent along to the afterlife with King Tutankhamun in Egypt, who could also choose from a variety of mummified meats slathered in tree resin.

In an underworld, food isn’t just about communication, status and sustenance. It’s often about torment. Hel, the ruler of the Norse underworld, has a plate called Hunger and a knife called Famine. Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia, and murdered his own son to feed him to the gods. His punishment is to stand in water, with a fruit-laden branch over his head, just barely unable to drink or eat.

In Dante’s Inferno, a nobleman named Ugolino (who may have eaten his children’s bodies in the final throes of his own starvation) is frozen in a pit next to the man who betrayed him, forever gnawing on his enemy’s head. He is both tormentor and the tormented.

Hell was one of several medieval examples of a “topsy-turvy world”, writes Herman Pleij in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. If you ate too much, or committed some other food-related sin such as cannibalism, your punishment in the world below would be to become food yourself, to be denied food, or to be forced to eat unclean or disgusting food. Gluttons would be punished by being made “to suffer such terrible hunger and thirst that they eventually beg for hay, dregs of wine, and finally excrement and urine” before being served the meat of toads or even dragons.

Sometimes, the residents of Hell punish themselves. In the allegory of the long spoons, the residents of Hell are unable to get the food to their mouths because their spoons are too long; in heaven, the same spoons cause no difficulty, as people there are kind enough to feed each other.

I had some ideas, then, for what sort of food would be right in my medieval European Hellbeast. Something that would be of the underworld, not just in it. Something red, to recall pomegranates and wine. Something that would be a little horrifying to the world above. Something that recalls the sacrifice Odysseus made, when he needed to bridge the world of the living and the dead. And for practical reasons, something that would be available in those long centuries when the Beast is dormant under the earth.

I’m sorry to say that what I came up with is the blood of the Beast itself. The denizens of Hell drink it, and they eat it, in the form of glittering balls that look a little like caviar, or like pomegranate seeds.

This is not a meal I can endorse, as a vegetarian. As a substitute, might I suggest some pomegranate tapioca?

BIO: Kate Heartfield’s debut novel Armed in Her Fashion (CZP) is available as an ebook as of April 24, and as a paperback as of May 17. Her interactive novel The Road to Canterbury is now available from Choice of Games. Tor.com Publications will publish two time-travel novellas by Kate, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in late 2018. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Kate is a former newspaper editor and lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Website: https://heartfieldfiction.com/
About Armed in Her Fashion: https://chizinepub.com/armed-in-her-fashion/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35497377-armed-in-her-fashion
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kateheartfield

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.

I was one of the very few kids who were able to graduate early from high school. Very few high schools in Minnesota had been doing this during my last year of school. My school, a fairly large school in a podunk town, was one of the very last schools to offer this service, and I was one of the lucky ones to get out.

The year before my senior year I had been accepted to a creative program in Scotland. It was by far, the best experience I have ever had. Not only was I staying at St. Andrews, I was surrounded by like minded people. Plus, I got to take really amazing classes with some of the brightest people I’ve ever known. That was where I met some of my best friends, who throughout the past year or so I have still kept in contact with.

One of my very good friends that I met at St. Andrews, Magali, lives in a small town a little outside Paris. A week or two after the program ended, Magali and I messaged and video chatted as much as we could due to time zone changes. At this point, I had gotten my first job and she was getting ready to go back to school.

One night, we were messaging and suddenly, I had reached an epiphany. I had been working almost everyday at my job and had enough money for a plane ticket to Paris. My fingers anxiously typed and waited for a response. Magali couldn’t have been more ecstatic with the idea! That night we planned a time to chat to talk in more details about the trip.

I had known at the time that I had enough credits to graduate early, so from that point on, I set my goal in mind and focused on my trip. Magali and I had told all of our friends about me visiting. We had started to get the gang back together. Our friend Jane traveled from the Czech Republic to stay with us for a week and then our friend Pax from London had taken the train to stay with us for a weekend.

So, in March when I graduated, I continued to save up for a month before I made the nine hour plane ride there. Every day was exhausting, mentally and physically. I had been working eight hours a day, five days away. My feet burned after every shift and after each day it felt like the days kept getting longer. I had been working in customer service for about almost a year and my high school job had almost got the best of me. It had gotten to the point where I was taking more orders than I could handle.

But in the end it was all worth it.

I took a trip that some people don’t do until they retire. The best part was that I did all by myself. I planned, budgeted and saved up for it all by myself. It was one of the most empowering experiences I’ve ever had. I was seventeen and had a month long sleepover with my best friends. I couldn’t of wished for a better trip.

I spent the days walking around Paris, going to Kpop shops, going to art museums and most importantly, eating a lot of food. I remember we went to the Lourve where Magali demanded we take a picture of her flipping off the Mona Lisa. I had also spent a week going to school with Magali and meeting all of her friends, who were all wonderful and kind people to be around. They tried teaching me French, but my pronunciation was always way off.

I encourage any young women to take a trip like the one I had. It was one of the most eye opening and jaw dropping experiences I have ever had. In the end, you only get very few chances to do something like this and you should take advantage of that.

Molly Baumgardner is a young writer and cat enthusiast. You can read some of her work at https://www.wattpad.com/user/awesomewriter65

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.