Gillian Pollack has accepted my story (title in limbo) for “Baggage”, an anthology of speculative fiction about the cultural baggage of Australians. It was a hard one to write and I still have to do some work on it. I know I wasn’t the only contributor who found the topic a challenge. I think the story has the potential to be pretty good if I don’t fuck up the rewrite.

Fantasy Magazine has accepted “Saving the Gleeful Horse”, the story I wrote for Vera Nazarian’s auction, and I’ve finished the intros for DEAD GIRLS and ELDRITCH KID.

I’m reading Walter Benjamin and wondering what he’d be writing if he were alive today. I suspect he’d be working for Lonely Planet, sending reams of rumination to baffled editors. Sometimes their red pens would skip a beat and in the middle of a hotel review or a potted history of Canada there’d be left a lonely line about the sadness of a coppery afternoon on the outskirts of a port city or the estrangement of mass instincts from life.

While I was at home (I’ve been back in BKK a couple of days) my parents took me to a little shop in their town, a wonderful den selling vintage buttons, braid, beads, hatpins and other goodies from times past.

A little box on a shelf caught my eye. Dark blue, with dancing fairy silhouettes on the cover, I thought it was a whimsically-decorated matchbox until belatedly I read “perfume”. Feeling the weight of the bottle inside I opened it and to my surprise found that although all the alcohol had long evaporated away, there was a little residue of brown viscous oil left.

The box and the bottle:

I opened the lid and took a sniff and oh, my, it was gorgeous. Old-fashioned and incensey, with one slippered foot in the boudoir and one in the joss house. Ten bucks later the little treasure was in my purse.

My nose only knows what it likes, and I can’t pick out the smells in a perfume unless it’s something blindingly obvious like tuberose. This does remind me of aloeswood oil, but I’m probably wrong. Besides, it has an odd habit of smelling a bit different whenever I open the bottle. I looked for it online, hoping to get a description, but no luck. I don’t even know how old it is. The design of the box looks 1920s-30s to me, but it could be a retro design from a later decade, or just an old one that was never changed. And the manufacturer is, or was, Australian. Now that’s something to be nostalgic about.

Continuing the morbid themes…

Seen recently in the local newspaper, a 3-hour craft workshop: Make and Decorate Your Own Coffin.

With only three hours to complete the coffin, it would have to be a plywood job. Of course, for the decoratively inclined, plywood is a good option — pale and easy to draw on.

I daydreamed about how I would decorate mine. Maybe figures from the Commedia dell’Arte, to portray the idea that all the world’s a stage, and because it would be an excuse to indulge my fetish for masked characters; or porn, to amuse, mystify, scandalise or bore future archaeologists; or decoupage photos of some bodacious siren, so that people will think that was me; or a whole lot of sudoku squares, to give me something to do in the afterlife.

So, how would you decorate yours?