Friday, October 14, 2011  Steam-Powered II Roundtable! C.S.E.
Cooney  C.S.E. Cooney, also Claire Cooney, lives at LiveJournal,
and brings to us a piece reminding us of the source of steam
power in C.S.E. Cooney on “The Canary of Candletown.”  A two-
sentence summary:  A burnt-out revolutionary’s kindness awakens
the passionate devotion of a young mining laborer. But the
Candletown Company is careful to stomp out any flame ignited
underground.   How did your characters come to be?  It started
with the name Kanarien, which is the German for canary. I’ve
always been haunted by the idea of sending a singing thing into
the dark, then waiting for it to stop singing. And I really like
the name Dagomar. I didn’t necessarily want two German
characters, so I played with the idea of a girl growing up in
the mines without a name, and also what it would mean, suddenly,
to be given one by the first person to care about her. Why this
setting?  I share my morning commute with a very clever Belgian
named Thomas. One day, we ha