UPDATE MARCH 2019
Kitty and Cadaver is to be published this year by Clan Destine Press.
Subscribe to the Mortal Whispers newsletter or the Mortal Words blog for up-to-date news on its release.
Original post:
Anyone who has spoken to me lately has seen me, bright-eyed and over-excited, going on (and on and on and on) about my multimedia online story project. And I really am VERY ALLCAPS EXCITED about it. The project is called Kitty and Cadaver, and this post is so I can squee all about it to the world – and then invite you to join me!
Kitty and Cadaver outline
Kitty and Cadaver is a book about a rock band that uses music as magic to save the world from monsters. As the story opens, the three surviving members of the band (who played as Rome Burning until the very recent and violent death of their lead singer) and their roadie have come to Melbourne, Australia, to lick their wounds and try to regroup, as it were.
Enter Kitty Carrasco, a 21 year old with a strange past, who works as a beautician in a mortuary. Brought up by her grandparents, Kitty doesn’t know what happened to her parents, and she doesn’t know why her grandparents forbade music in their household.
Of course, things start going pear-shaped pretty quickly, and the dead start getting restless. Some of them start to literally sit up and take notice. It’s as well Kitty has a cool head on her shoulders and, despite her grandparents’ best attempts, knows how to sing to the dead anyway.
Soon Kitty meets up with Steve (Texan, bass player), Salvadore (guitarist from Goa, India), Yuka (Japanese, drummer) and Laszlo (the Hungarian roadie who knows a lot more about the violin than he’s letting on). With them is another guitarist, Stephen, whom Steve is trying to recruit as his replacement. (Steve would rather like to be one of the few band members to retire rather than being killed on the job.)
The trouble is, each and every one of those people has a secret. Some of them don’t even know they’re keeping one.
So all they have to do is try not to get eaten, sing the dead back to sleep, find out who’s raising them and save the world. Again. As soon as they can stop fighting among themselves, in traditional rock band fashion.
Not just a book – a whole song and dance! And also a comic book.
The whole thing about writing a story about a band that defeats monsters with music was that, clearly, I had to write music as part of the story. Well, it’s been 30 years since I learned the piano, although I’ve dabbled in songwriting on and off in the intervening decades. Oh, but look – I have an awesomely talented niece, Jess Harris, a guitarist and songwriter! I’m more excited than I can tell you that I’m now co-writing songs with Jess (and Jess is contributing some of her own songs) for this book about a band.
So now my book, which I wanted to post in chapters and parts in a blog, had songs to go with it.
The next thing I realised was that, if I wanted to post this onto a blog, I’d need banner art. I approached Nath Holden, the drummer from Jess’s old band, Vermillion, who is also a pretty cool artist. He came right on board to create the banner you see above. At the same time he said, ‘That’s a neat idea. Have you thought about making it into a comic?’
I’m sure you can guess what happened next.
Nath and I are in the process of creating an 18 page comic, telling the ‘secret origin’ of Yuka – the drummer whose heavy metal band accidentally summoned a demon, and Yuka was the only survivor of the encounter. We hope to bring you the first pages of Demon of the Earth in a few months.
Not to mention the craft project
My brain is having some kind of creative supernova at this point, because my next thought was ‘Yuka wears bracelets and a necklace made out of the smashed up musical instruments of her dead bandmates as memento mori. It would be so cool to have something like that’.
My researches showed that only a very few craftspeople/jewellers made wearable art from recycled instruments, and I couldn’t find any in Australia. So I thought the obvious next step would be to collect suitable materials and then have a workshop. Yay!
I’m in the process of getting donations of bits of instruments that might otherwise be thrown away, and my friend Ali Alexander, a jewellery maker, is going to work with me to determine how best to use such materials and then get the workshop together in a few months’ time. Stay tuned for details!
The Axe Principle
One of the key ideas behind the world of Kitty and Cadaver is that the band has a 700 year history, playing under different names, depending on the make-up of the troupe at the time.
The piper and drummer who began in all in the 13th century died long ago, but the mantle has been handed on and on through the centuries. Like an axe that has had its handle replaced, then the head, then the handle, then the head – hundreds of years later, it may be considered the same axe with an historic persistence-of-vision, although the component parts are no longer the original.
This means that although Kitty and the band she’s meeting now are the latest incarnation, I have a hugely long history of music magic I can play with in this universe. I can write short stories or comics set anywhere in that time period, with whatever the band looked like then. I can write songs that are from the band’s repertoire and then invite musicians to work out how they sounded in the 16th century, or the sixties; as madrigals or pirate metal!
An invitation to play
But wait, there’s more!
Another key idea behind the Kitty and Cadaver universe is that this is a huge world, with room to play in all kinds of time periods and musical styles and even characters. The music and art already coming out of this idea could lead to so much more. Add to this my background as a writer of fanfiction – thirty-odd years ago, it’s where I learned so much about writing, and where I’ve seen many writers and artists make a start before going on to professional work.
The result is that I’ll be posting Kitty and Cadaver under a creative commons licence, and inviting people to come and play in my sandpit. The licence I’m using essentially means that I’ll be thrilled if you have some creative response to the work as long as you credit the source and don’t use it for commercial purposes.
That’s getting a bit ahead of myself, I know. Still, everyone I’ve spoken to about the world of Kitty has been enthused about the creative possibilities, and I’d love for the project to grow!
Blogging at Kitty and Cadaver
I aim to post a new part each Monday, but I’ll also be blogging about related material: song lyrics and soundfiles; other books with music and monsters; music-themed art and craft; music-related folklore; the occasional video or link about the macabre (I have a video up already about being a make-up artist in a mortuary); discussions of music, instruments and music history; and pretty much anything that seems relevant and interesting.
Join us at Kitty and Cadaver
The Kitty and Cadaver project has its main site, www.kittyandcadaver.com – please visit that for the blog posts and the weekly story update.
You can also follow the Kitty and Cadaver project on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. (Some songs are already posted on Facebook and Tumblr, as well as Jess’s Soundcloud site.) When we’ve had the opportunity to develop some more art for a clip, you’ll also find songs and related videos being posted in the Kitty YouTube channel.
If you’re new here, start at Kitty and Cadaver: Not the Zombie Apocalypse, Chapter One, Part One.