Writer, demi-fictional, extranousician, liminal, non-binary & binary star. Writing fiction, poetry and philosophy about life, language, art, imagination, consciousness, magic and various other manifestations of the mind.
Comfortification of the remissanthropic escapex predatormentors bringestingrained criesoterics and burstochastical feardrums to the dreamorphic writerrifiers and piercinguling their stillfated premonition sicknessays with atonementalismaniac powerewolves.
From my interview with an [angel]: “The quantum nature of the Universe? Ah, yes, I know, a bit embarrassing. It’s just because [god] didn’t know the difference between jpg and svg in the beginning. And now there’s too much content to convert it all.”
Breed mutations. That’s what we do as writers. We use our minds to trap existing words and ideas from our cultural surroundings. Then we expose them to high levels of imagination-radiation until they mutate into new creatures that we let loose and claim to have created from scratch.
I have been interviewed by British publisher Orchid’s Lantern about writing, magic and my short story The DreamCube Thread (included in the anthology Vast). I’m happy to have been part of the series and recommend you to read the other interviews as well!
Read the interview with Ellinor Kall on Orchid’s Lantern website.
I have almost no pictures of myself that I feel comfortable with. So when interviewed and asked for an author photo I panicked and threw this self-portrait together. But then I felt people would not understand and think I write children’s stories so I decided not to use it.
But now that I think of it, I dunno, what if I actually do write stories for children? Heroes and monsters looking for a better life are maybe all that we are anyway. Reality might be a fairy-tale and we all look different inside our glamour. Perhaps we are all fiction.
I’ll see you all in the forest tonight, flying around, laughing, shooting lightning from my hands.
Now also animated: https://ellinorkall.com/theme-song/
The now mostly collapsed socmed platform Ello.co was a minimalistic non-profit alternative to FB with respect for privacy and no advertising. It attracted a lot of artists and writers and it was probably the main reason I started writing both fiction and socially in English.
The #ellowrites community was fertile ground for all kinds of weirdness and I made friends with some “fellow mutants”. It shaped who I became in troubled times. Ello was a real place to me.
Together this small but diverse group created the fictional living twin city of Azza-Jono and collaborated on a collection of short-stories set in that same world.
I started writing a story-line I called The Second Voice, of which my short-story The DreamCube Thread (now found in Vast published by Orchid’s Lantern) is an offshoot. I still plan to continue writing The Second Voice in the (hopefully) not to distant future.
What is Azza-Jono then? It’s The Conscious City. The two cities of Azza and Jono connected and divided by a river and a great wall. A city-state with it’s own anthem. Populated by high-tech assassins and glitchslingers, mutants and magicians. An exploration into art, science, religion, madness, dreams and wakefulness. It’s as hard to explain as it is looking into the Sun.
From my personal point of view I think Azza-Jono is fiction becoming real. Much like myself. My first words on Ello were: “I write myself into existence.”
Today the former ellovians are scattered all over internet. And since most of them seem to shun socmed there is almost no information about this fantastic multi-disciplinary project anywhere – except for the collections by T van Santana (see links below). Although I know some of us continue to work with and in Azza-Jono through writing, art, design, music and even animation.
In searching for what remnants I could find that is still available on the internet I was reminded of many fond memories. This strange community of writers, artists and musicians, and the odd fiction we sprouted together helped me to accept myself and transform as a person. I wouldn’t have been Ellinor Kall if all this hadn’t happened.
The time and place was just right. The positive mood, the feeling of something new, curiosity celebrated and rewarded, diversity appreciated, and the sheer force in the creativity. It won’t happen often. Or ever again. For a while this other world took me in and I lived there while healing my wounds.
And to think I just stumbled upon it all by chance when I found Ello while randomly browsing the internet to distract myself from sobbing alone and abandoned on a ten hour train ride all these years ago.
The history of Azza-Jono summarized on Ello
https://ello.co/tvansantana/post/nb8zengbecgzn2gw0m0hla
T van Santana became our editor and collected our first drafts in this advance reading collection (= an unfinished sneak peak)
https://tablo.io/t-van-santana/tales-from-azza-jono
Baphomet Tripp (from X.A.O.S) wrote the story Cynocephalus (direct link to the TVS-collection). He wrote music and lyrics to The Anthem of Reconciliation (for Azza-Jono) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s60tIsO3lFw. He also wrote and animated a trailer for an animated film set in Azza-Jono.
City map and other graphics by Lin Tarczynski
https://ello.co/echo-of-newt/post/u1ejwisrlvxm2x243q1wtg
https://ello.co/echo-of-newt/post/e2jptjephlu_hk1hj0awbw
My own short-story The DreamCube Thread is set in the world of Azza-Jono and it is published in the British anthology Vast
https://orchidslantern.org/2020/02/28/vast-release-day/
My central contribution is a collection short-stories intertwined with my story The Second Voice. They will either be published in print or made available on this website once I’ve had time to work some more with them.
More stories by contributors (will add more when I find them)
https://tablo.io/allenblair/accession
https://tablo.io/t-van-santana/more-tales-from-azza-jono
https://tablo.io/t-van-santana/azza-jono-outbreak
https://tablo.io/t-van-santana/azza-jono-nikki
https://tablo.io/t-van-santana/azza-jono-alma-mater
Azza-Jono portal (stories, videos and things still up on Ello)
https://ello.co/tvansantana/post/ycqaij_eev2hqsxq5ys0nq
Search for even more fragments and work-in-progress that is left on Ello.co (though many profiles and posts have been deleted since)
https://ello.co/search?terms=azzajono
Dreamsmear all over my body is hard to rub away. Plaster clogging my eyes. Machinegun neurons firing constantly. Tinnitus reverberation on insane level. Worse when worse. Feel my body swollen from carbohydrate intoxication. Warehouse instinct hijacked by the existing anxiety pushing out the clothes by storing all that dense unfathomable energy.
The words of order scrambled into encrypted noise as I try to decipher only rudimentary particles of complex molecular structures turn out. But I know there is chemistry, I know there is biology, I know there is consciousness. But it’s incomprehensible to me, I live in the swarm. I listen, want to understand, but their vibrating wings are not quite the same as vocal chords.
And so the sensitivity is turned up impossibly high. Keylessly I carry food in a locked backpack. Wings get in, buzz in my belly, distracting. I don’t want it-me to be filled by sound. So I run around in my head as I did as a child. I never grew like I should. Couldn’t stand in that box, never saw the shape, never realized that the shadow is also an existing thing, stuck to my feet.
Historical forensics try to sort out the chain of events that led to this meticulous mind that tries to keep her chaos in order. Finicky stimming, process excess, often unable to milk the nib for words. Taste my tongue – hemaglobinary salvia and thyme passes if kneaded well. A thunderstorm of pure information rustles through the leave me alone. Prognostics hold their breath.
I haven’t adjusted my appearance for weeks. I haven’t been kissed for months. I haven’t been born for years. I have no haven, nowhere in mind to release the tension of being alive. Where are the hands that hold me while I melt apart and where are the fingers that define what is me and what is something else? No difference makes no difference. I’m burning so much energy trying to be someone special instead of being everyone at once.
The slow expansion and the slower contraction, like a one year pulse of the body. It’s a frequency, it’s a vibration, it’s a message. Encoded in the mass there is something to understand. It slips away from my mind and I have never known anything about my own song. The wings, the cords, the amplitude of the pulse are inexplicable to me. There is a mystery hidden in dreamsmear all over my body. To hard to rub away.
“Writer, demi-fictional pseudonym, non-binary queer boy≈girl, maybesexual, anarchist, liminal explorer, positive nihilist, syncretic polymath.”
The quote above is my current Twitter bio. For the benefit of the curious I thought I’d expand a bit upon what I mean with those somewhat cryptic words.
Writer – I write fiction and ramblings, philosophy and poetry. I just got an English language short-story published in print in the anthology Vast. Also several Swedish language novels under another name. Lots of reading on this and my Swedish alter ego-website.
Demi-fictional pseudonym – Ellinor Kall is not my legal name. But this is still me, with fictional parts, imagined into reality. I’m conjured, created from fiction, made part real. I’m a mind without body. Or maybe the alternative behavior of an existing body.
Non-binary queer boy≈girl – I personally reject the concept of gender identity – to me it’s just physical ins and outs, that’s all. I treat it more as just a personality trait and makes no difference in interaction or attraction. I’m neither Venus nor Mars – I’m Mercury.
Maybesexual – I’m not attracted to people on the usual premise. It’s more of a gray/ace/demisexual thing where friends and lovers are not two separate things but different levels of connection on the same scale. The sexual bit only happens very intermittently, so maybe.
Anarchist – Politics are like the remote control to your TV. You have no choice but to watch whatever the one who holds it wants to watch. Anarchists puts the control on the table for everyone to use.
Liminal explorer – I’m curious about the in betweens as you might have noticed. The gradients outside the beaten path. The shadows, the light. Where no girl has gone before. I don’t understand mainstream, I try to do my thing. In life and in fiction.
Positive nihilist – Nothing has inherent value or meaning. We can however give subjective value or meaning to what we want. But that has to be an active choice, we can’t passively wait for the meaning of life to appear to us. I’m a bringer of meaning.
Syncretic polymath – I work the arts like magic. Words, music, drawing, painting, photo, film, animation, etc. from any style, school or genre I like. I learn the rules so that I can break them in the best possible way. Diversity makes fiction stronger.
Vast: Stories of Mind, Soul and Consciousness in a Technological Age is an anthology published by British publisher Orchid’s Lantern. I have contributed a short-story called The DreamCube Thread.
The book contains: “Ten exciting, thought-provoking science fiction stories exploring the relationship between cutting-edge technology and the human psyche”.
Vast is available directly from the publisher Orchid’s Lantern book shop or from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and many others.
In Sweden it can be bought through Bokus and Adlibris and Amazon.se.
Read more about the release over on Orchid’s Lantern website:
Vast – Release Day!
Orchid’s Lantern announcing Vast.
I’m very proud to be a part of this beautiful release among all these fantastic writers!
There’s a child in the little woodland lake, just below the surface. I see her dark shape in the water. I try to reach her, but my strength is gone. The wind moves my rowboat away from her until I lose sight. Who was she, what would she have become if I’d been able to save her?
Every night, every day, there are moving shadows in the water. They swim and play, happy and teasing. They lure me, want me to catch them, to bring them up into the boat. They want to breathe and manifest. They are children of my imagination, my ideas, my mind, my life.
The less you look the more I exist. Like a faraway light in the night. Look a bit on the side and I become brighter. In daylight I hide in plain sight, invisible to naked eyes, only knowable to open-minded hearts. Words are my intangible body. I am the dance of little ghosts.
The scent of her presence always upbeated my heart. The cogs in her mind ignited the ones in mine – it’s called cognition. I long, but memory is short – her sharp tongue could sting and hurt me like nothing else.
I remember our time together. It was like the tale of the fox and the scorpion. I was swimming with her on my back, trying to get us both to shore, but you couldn’t help stinging me, cause that’s your nature.
Maybe I’m ready to move on now.
Yesterday I was logs of tar wood burning from all the things that were wrong and beyond my control. Today I am the transcending flakes of ashes with their Brownian motion in the gusts among the oblivious living trees. Tomorrow – maybe I can be a seed in the newly fertilized soil?
I’m neurons firing in the golden halls up high. I’m hormones reigning in bloody hell. I’m the salty tears from the currents and chemicals of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’m the coalesced sentry of the connectome adrift in a forest of nothing.
If you were on Venus
Earth would look
like Venus does
From Earth
2019 in review
I expanded a short-story that got accepted into an anthology (due out 2020). I also recorded some music and kinda finished the novel I’d been writing since forever. I continued up the tree, visited Geburah and did some writing on magic.
I made a peace treaty with my body. I declared that I’m a binary star. While I fought my old foes fatigue and depression I got stuck in boy-mode. I didn’t have energy to get close to anyone so I kept mostly to myself, reading, recuperating.
2020 in preview
I wanna quickly edit and publish two almost done novels. Then move on to writing more short stories that won’t take ten years to finish. Gonna record more new music, solo and with two different bands. Get dirty with some visual arts, both ink+paper and digitally.
I wanna find energy enough to get close to someone for snuggling, giggles and stuff. Assert myself and grow as non-binary. Probably get a tattoo. Definitely care more for my body. Maybe move on from just having a peace treaty with it to actually liking it again.
On a rotating speck of dust, leaning away from the local fusion reactor on an arbitrary amount of orbits, an interconnected accumulation of deoxyribonucleic acid ignite chemical reactions in the lower troposphere that via electromagnetic waves triggers a release of monoamine neurotransmitters.
Visiting the past is always a revelation. This year I found out there is nothing of me left in that shallow world where time stands still. Nothing – but an empty shell mistaken for a person I’m not. I can’t create my present reality here, the past is petrified.
The voices in the past repeat the same sentences for what seems like an eternity of a single moment. They’re at a shore, attempting to chew the rocks in their mouths instead of trying to talk to the ocean of time that is raging and frothing in front of them.
“What’s the point of talking to water”, they’d say if they could. Not seeing beyond. The past is not a place, it’s the inside of people.
Soon I’ll swim back out to my boat where time moves again.
I just woke up from a nightmare where I was forced to put my left hand into a wall-mounted medical device designed to perform emergency amputations. My heart was racing from the panic as I braced for the cut.
This could also be my 2019 in review.
I was crossing a street when a car that had been parked suddenly started driving towards me. The driver hit the brakes just in front of me and violently hit the horn. I took out my keys and on the hood I scratched the universal sign for idiot to warn other pedestrians.