What is Ecchi no City? Many moons ago, Ross E. Lockhart wrote a review of The Etched City in which he noted in passing that the book is rather heteronormative for a novel that nods in the direction of Decadence. There are reasons why it’s heteronormative, but they’re boring (basically, none of the characters wanted to be explicitly gay or bi). Possibly less boring, maybe, is Ecchi no City, a doujinshi I started writing in response to Mr Lockheart’s comment. “Ecchi” is a Japanese word meaning sexy, smutty or mildly perverted. “Ecchi no City” = “City of Ecchi”. This dubious project is probably best described as a parodic re-imagining of the romance plot of The Etched City by the part of my mind that never left the back of Year 8 math class. The artwork is inconsistent (though consistently bad!), and the content is puerile.

For anyone who doesn’t know about chibis, the only juvenile character is the fetus. Gwynn is in fact a swank bishounen, and Beth doesn’t really have cat ears. At present the level of smut is very mild, but that may change if I feel inspired in a pornographic direction.

If you’ve read The Etched City, enjoyed it, and you don’t like AU parodies where characters act OOC and end up in unlikely sexual situations, you probably won’t like this doujinshi!

Ecchi no City doesn’t make sense, but a passing familiarity with Bancoran, Takarazuka, A Clockwork Orange, Are You Being Served?, and Day of the Tentacle, might help clarify some of the nonsense.

Thanks to Ross E. Lockhart, Jenna for suggesting the theme of Beth picking up girls and drawing pictures of them, Roz Kaveney for the “female virtue” line on p.9, Christian Read for the black, mauve and plaid on p.11, and to Laurie and Scott for inspirational thoughts.

Ecchi no City archive

This is a one-page index for the Ecchi no City doujinshi archive. New pages, as I get around to them (which will be infrequently, as I’m pretty busy now) will be posted to the blog and added to this page.

For background info on Ecchi no City, please read this.

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Archive:
01 — 02 — 03 — 04 — 05 — 06 — 07 — 08 — 09 — 10
11 — 12 — 13 — 14 — 15 — 16 — 17 — 18 — 19 — 20
21 — 22 — 23 — 24 — 25 — 26 — 27 — 28 — 29 — 30
31 — 32 — 33 — 34 — 35 — 36 — 37 — 38 — 39 — 40
41 — 42 — 43 — 44 — 45 — 46 — 47 — 48 — 49 — 50
51 — 52 — 53 — 54 — 55 — 56 — 57 — 58 — 59 — 60
61 — 62 — 63 — 64 — 65 — 66 — 67 — 68 — 69

I’m still tidying stories up. Probably going to be doing this for the rest of the year, slowcoach that I am. I’ve put The Art of Dying and The Love of Beauty in the too-hard basket for the nonce, and have been working on Alsiso and We the Enclosed. I’ve found things I want to change on every page of both of them, but they’re not big things, although I rewrote Alsiso more than I thought I was going to. Anyway, actually making some progress on these.

Gillian and I have passed the story for Baggage (add Jack Dann to the contributor’s list at that link) back and forth a couple of times, and it’s now officially almost ready, except for one short but important paragraph that might not be working. I’m going to see whether I can get a couple of other readers to have a look at it and tell me whether they think it’s saying what I’m trying to make it say. The trouble is that I’m trying to say something quite complicated, which would usually be stated in academic language informed by feminism, from the POV of a 14 year old in the 1950s. The character doesn’t have the mental tools to understand, let alone articulate, the entirety of what she’s feeling.

I need to find a way for the character’s thought to seem believable in context, and also to mean what I want it to mean, even though it won’t be able to outright say what it means, I don’t think. The most sophisticated and eloquent record of human experience to which this character has access would be the King James Bible, and at the moment I’ve got her thoughts referring to a New Testament metaphor, as if she’s latched onto the Bible as the best available teacher and psychoanalytic tool. I don’t know if I can do it any better, to be honest. I thought the paragraph was working, but I was brought up C of E, and Gillian’s Jewish, and maybe I’m not communicating past the Christian (or even just the C of E) sphere — which will matter, because this book will be published in Australia, and a lot of Australians are brought up with no religion except football.

Aaaaand Book#2 continues to get written. I do wish I didn’t find writing to be quite so much like wading through half-set concrete. I’d love to be faster. The other night I went to a meditation class, in the name of starting out on trying to improve my concentration and mental alertness. The meditation itself — some sort of Tibetan vipassana, apparently — was incredibly tedious (as meditation is wont to be!), but the next day I woke up with a clear and quite energetic brain. However, I had also given in to a craving for red meat on the day I went to the class, so I don’t know whether my abnormally zinging mind was due to the vipassana or the cottage pie. I’ll have to go to the class a few more times under controlled conditions (or eat cottage pie a few more times under controlled conditions…)

At the end of the session we had to recite a Buddhist prayer in English, which kind of sucked. When prayers were required in school assemblies I used to mumble blasphemies or the lyrics of Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me, but you can’t really do that in a room with only 15 people. It’s much better when foreign prayers stay in the foreign language and you have no idea what sort of thing you’re saying. Thing is, I’m decisively not a Buddhist. If there’s a cycle of reincarnation, I’m not praying for my own or anyone else’s release from it. As far as I’m concerned, we can all stay here and learn to live with grace and flair within the limitations of mortality and the separation of minds, or until we work out how to ease or break those limitations. I think it’s far too early in the human story to be thinking about packing it all in. Sure, life is a bad job for millions of people. But it doesn’t have to be. There’ll always be suffering, but there could be a lot less if we’d get our act together. So I guess if I were going to pray for anything, it would be that — that we become sufficiently compassionate and liberated from ignorance that human life in general gets better. But anyhow, if the meditation really does work, I guess I can put up with a certain amount of religious garnish. Being made to pray just brings out the shirty teenager in me, lol.

EDIT: The moment a bubble bursts. Beautiful image.

Well, here I go starting off to make a collection of stories. I’m calling it Hearts & Guns as a working title, because it sounds snazzy and I can imagine it with a  cool tattoo-art style cover. The eventual title — if there is one, that is; I’ll still need to find a publisher when all this is done — will probably be something completely different. Sea Hare, maybe. Sea hares do very little, but they release ink when disturbed, which makes me think they might be my totem animal.

Or I could take the metal route and call it Bacterial Hemorrhage or Horseshoes for Satan or Smoking the Corpse of Christ in the Boys Room. I kind of wish I wrote the sort of stories that would justify a title like that. Anyway, thinking of titles is very pleasant and I could do it all day.

This morning I worked on The Art of Dying, trying to drive it somewhat off Wardour Street, fix some naively portentous dialogue, and work out how exactly they are all jammed in that carriage anyway. And where that river or canal is going, if not over the cliff. I think it had better go over the cliff. Also wondering how open to leave it. The original version is very open, but in at least one later version I let the characters have more thoughts as to the meaning of what happens in the story. I’m pretty sure I’m going to take that out again. I don’t think the characters should be shaping the whys and wherefores of this, other than obliquely.

I’m very fond of this story, and it’s clear to me now that I’m going to spend a lot of time fucking around with it. So in order to get — hopefully — some actual progress made, I’d better look at something else this afternoon.

Next up today is The Love of Beauty, my second published story, from 10 or 11 years ago. I’ve only rewritten it once, and only slightly, so I don’t have 6 or 7 versions to compare as I do with TAoD. It’s also rather gothic, a take on a fairytale, and has (I think!) quite a straightforward narrative (let’s not say plot; have I ever written a plot?).

Hmm, one version is 1500 words longer than the other. What on earth did I add? I could have sworn I only made a couple of small changes. Hmm, again… And why did I change his name from Seaming to Shipton? Seaming was just right.  Hmm the third…

I took out the sauntering presence again and made the description like it was before and left a few words undecided, but all these things are negotiable. An estimable beta reader is looking at it this week — may Shiva grant him a boon or three.

So, what’s next? Well, aside from Book#2, I should get on with tidying up stories for a prospective collection. The oldest one, The Art of Dying, is 12 years old, and there’s so much of it that I’d like to rewrite now — but it would be a completely different story then, which I don’t want. It’s very Wardour Street and Wardour Street it’ll have to stay. The best I can do is make it stand up a little straighter, I think.I suppose the same goes for most of them.

I’ve only got just enough words for a collection — the editor would have to take just about everything I’ve written — so I’d like to come up with a couple of new ones, if I possibly can.

But right now I have a good old-fashioned behind-the-eyeballs sinus headache, so I’m not doing any of that. Reading The Spy’s Bedside Book – tasty snippets of espionage, though as former MI5 head Stella Rimington says in her introduction to the new edition, hardly any women spies in it, which is a pity.

7:50 – feeling: dazed and feral. Experiencing consequences of yesterday’s abuse of cold medicine. Maybe I could go to the doc and get some proper amphetamines. What kind of medical complaint would I have to pretend to have…? O_o

I’m really struggling with these last couple of troublespots. I think I’m about to be a spot myself — a skidmark, left behind by the arse of this story.

9:39 – only that bit on page 4 to go, after finding some additional bits that seemed to urgently need mucking around with. I put back the loitering presence, because it does serve as a bridge between the mundane and the strange, or shows the strangeness always latent in the mundane. But now it’s “belonging to the afternoon” rather than “of the afternoon”. I think it makes a difference. Frehley says he wants to be back on Jendell by lunchtime.

10:41 – UNCLE!

The boots came off some time ago, but I’m still wearing Frehley’s severed head. There’s a full morning moon in the smoggy celadon sky above the Conrad hotel. Beautiful. I’m going to finish this today, which means I’m going to say “Sod it, good enough” to a lot of small stuff that I can’t find a stronger or tidier or more exact way to say. I’m going to leave in a few banalities and barbarisms and things that stick in my teeth. I can’t even spend all day on it, because I also have to work on book#2.

I think I’ve learned stuff from writing this story. I’ve realised how lumpy my writing can be — lacking connective tissue, indications of gesture during dialogue, ways of indicating manner and mood, little bridges from one element to the next — and have tried to smooth out its lumpy tendencies. I don’t know that I’ve succeeded all that well, but I’ve started a collection of “bridging bits” in a notebook for future reference.

Anyway, onwards — in the good company of Sir Tessa. Poking things with sticks. What was it Sappho said? If you’re squeamish, don’t prod the beach rubble!

7:02 – feeling: determined. Eating: buttered toast. Listening to: Kiss – God of Thunder, live 1976. Stu sneaks up behind me while I’m headbanging to this. Sprung, lol.

8:26 – some minesweeping done. I can’t deny, I hate this part. It’s where I have to face my own inadequacies — of intellect, understanding and writerly craft — and lose the fight with at least some of them. I’m going to make more toast. I am toast. Toast eat toast.

10:32 – pages 1,3 & 5 clear. I don’t want to think about the mess on page 2. Resorted to cold medicine an hour ago. Feeling: spacey… soon it will be time to return to Planet Jendell…

11:45 – up to page 9 (of 11 and a bit). Still have a paragraph on p.4, a line each on 6 & 8, and the mess on 2. Eating: licorice. Going to break off for a bit now to deal with book#2.

12:45 – turns out I didn’t really have to do anything. Preston is writing some great stuff. More coffee. Biscuits. Left to do: the mess on 2, the paragraph on 4, a line on 9, and the stuff on 11 & 12 that I didn’t take care of yesterday. Distracted by this, via Michael Cisco. The cool bit starts at 5:46. Hypnotism, convulsions, silks and wigs (no, not lawyers!). Brain clearly wants diversion. Telly time.

2:30 – 2,4, and the last 300 words. I’m going to the supermarket. It’s time to bring out the big guns, expense be damned.

3:43 – by the power of Vegemite, the mess on page 2 is cleared up. Basically, I put it all back to nearly the way it was before. Now there’s just one sentence on 2, the paragraph on 4, which is an important one, and the end. (Vegemite is rumoured to be good for clearing up pimples, too.) I’ve actually cut a few words off. I’m thinking of packing it in for the day and attacking these last couple of things tomorrow. I could legitimately spend some time practising my Thai this afternoon — I am supposed to be learning to read and write. Or I could have another long bath and watch more telly…

5:02 – long bath is, once again, lengthy. Got a bit more done on the last page. The rest will have to wait till tomorrow. I really wanted to get this done today and I’m sorry I didn’t, but it’s very close now. This is without doubt the trickiest story I’ve ever tried to write. Sorry, Ace, but I need your spaceman powers for just one more day.

7:18 – feeling: murky. Sleeping pill failed :-/. Listening to: Orom (Egyszer, Csondben), Forest of Shadows (Eternal Autumn), Carpathian Forest (The Last Sigh of Nostalgia),  Kult ov Azazel (An Eternity With Satan), Thylord (Maggots Never Surrender) – wait, how the hell did I get here? YouTube is of the devil!

7:49 – Ace Frehley t-shirt: check. Hot ginger drink: check. Ønwåřd!

9:00 – got distracted by aliens, but — page 6!

10:21 – crap. Something I added earlier to add richness puts too much emphasis on a theme that’s already emphasised enough, and confuses the theme into the bargain. I was asked if I couldn’t put in a bit more sumptuousness but I’m finding it harder than expected to find appropriate places to add richesse of expression, and to think of anything suitable when I do find a place. I’ve done a bit, but I may not be able to do more than a bit.

10:52 – Gordon Bennett! Distracted by JM McDermott’s thoughts on the sometimes falseness of literary fiction, via the Vanderblog. I’d like to think some about this, but really don’t have the time. Where are the snows of yesteryear, and the speedballs I used to know? I like donuts.

11:21 – page 7!

12:03 – I had to change some stuff here after doing a bit of research. Hope it gels plausibly with the facts now. Otherwise, just putting stuff back to how it was before I mucked around with it.

12:37 – page 7 nearly done. Up to another important bit. Might knock off for lunch.

1:56 – page 8!

2:34 – page 9!

2:50 – page 10, despite a detour to learn that Ace Frehley’s “Space Ace” character comes from the planet Jendell. Ginger coffee is the goodness. I still like donuts, yet, there are no donuts here. Piano break. No point renting this thing if I don’t play it sometimes.

5:00 – page 11. This is the time of day when I’m very, very distractable. A legitimate bit of research on tennis socks can turn into an hour’s examination of Chloe Sevigny’s wardrobe, then drift into windless, tideless latitudes of men’s fashion. Hearty hearts from me to most of these outfits. Now, over here, I wonder why on earth this look (shall we call it Male Bene Gesserit? Kwisatz Haderach?) hasn’t caught on. And I’d like to take this guy and dress him in proper trousers. Or dress him in proper trousers and then take him. I guess I must just be a philistine.

6:45 – long bath is long again. 600 words to go, plus final minesweeping. Milord is speaking of dinner. Donuts?

Right. Trying again! (Yes, Yoda, I heard that…)

7:20 – page 2, near the bottom. Drinking: ginger concentrate. Feeling: a bit bleary. Listening to: birds outside the window, the gentle susurrating hum of the airconditioner. Ace Frehley’s decapitated head is close to my heart, and the clock is ticking…

8:25 – page 3! Still a few sticky little sentences left on 1 & 2, but nothing to worry about too much. Breakfast time!

10:07 – taking words out, putting them back. I know this could be made better, but not by me, it seems. Added a tiny bit of weight to a nuance. Well, I think it’s a nuance. I could add a little more weight to it, but I don’t want it to be more than a nuance… Anyway, I’m up to that tricky bit again. 15 min break to gather wits…

10:40 – crap, distracted by salamander limb regrowth. Ok, now have giant steaming mug of ginger coffee. Onto The Tricky Bit!

11:47 – Hmm, so I’m changing this important bit to have a different tone…this could be perilous….

12:19 – was that lunch? I guess it was. Should’ve been paying more attention. Can I has another lunch, though?

12:58 – page 3 done. 1/2 of page 4 to go, also tricky, then it gets easier. I think I know why this first part is so hard. I’m trying to write about strong emotions without dodging off into minimalism or imagistic “show don’t tell”. And the main character is an angry woman. Isn’t female anger a hard thing to write about? The angry woman deserves eloquence, but it can be hard to find words to serve her. Kali, I hope this offering pleases you…

1:35 – crap, getting distracted. Ok, break, run around with pants on head.

2:45 – Tricky bit done. And changed. The changes aren’t big in themselves, but they increase the dose of science fiction in the story, so that what was almost entirely a metaphor becomes potentially — it’s still open to interpretation — not so metaphorical. Blame Ace Frehley. I guess if Gillian doesn’t think it works, it won’t take long to change it back. But maybe the thing that just came to me wanted to be there all along, and its absence was the reason I couldn’t get this story tuned right. TV break!

3:50 – random thought: are we just as phantomlike to the aliens and ghosts and fairies and spirits as they are to us?

4:03 – flailing thought: did I just improve the story or disimprove it? Don’t look down!

4:54 – end of page 4, by Kali. The next couple of pages should be quicker. Distraction! Kali Barbie (but no Shiva Ken, sadly). This guy could make Kali Barbie’s dream house and Kali Barbie’s dream car, the Chuggernaut.

6:12 – oops, long bath is long!

6:55 – on page 5, attention still good but ability to have thoughts and use words starting to nargle wuzzn phht. I know I’m an inefficient writer, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m an inefficient or deficient thinker, too. When I write, I often feel like a piece of my brain that would be very helpful to the process is missing. But maybe this is quite normal?

So, this story for the anthology is kicking me in the nuts. Mainly because I care a lot about it and want it to be really really good. Gillian liked it but she asked me to make it better and I’m glad she pushed me, because I think it is a bit better now, but every time I go over it I see something else to fix, or take out, or put back in again, which means, time to finish the fucker. (”Fucker” being a term of endearment, of course, Gillian, if you’re reading this! <3 <3)

It’s now nearly 7 am. I want to get this redraft finished today. 12 pages, 7000 words, slight hangover, but nothing else to do today, so definitely doable if I don’t let myself get distracted by porn, hot aliens, hot alien porn, or Hungarian folk metal on Youtube.

I’m writing this to give myself the incentive of public shame if I don’t get the work done.

7:01 – page 1. Go!

7:58 – halfway thru page 1. Still two sentences I dont like in the first half. Shower!

8:20 – fixed one of those sentences (and cut some words in the process, yay, because I need to do that too). Highlighted a few other words for incessant dithering over later on.

8:30 – fixed two of those words. Dress in black jeans, t-shirt decorated with Ace Frehley’s silver, severed, gore-dripping head, and RM Williams boots, because that is the closest thing I have to a badass outfit in Bangkok and feeling badass never hurts when there be work to be done, right? Cuban heels keep feet on floor under desk and reduce chances of going walkabout. Option of gluing arse of jeans to chair held in reserve.

9:38 – page 2! (Ok, 4 sentences and a couple of words in page 1 not settled, but I’m sure my subconscious is working on them.) Hungry! Wasfer breakfast?

10:08 – leftover tabouleh, toast and hot ginger drink, apparently. That took half an hour?! IKU ZO!!!

10:56 – 2/3 through page 2. Put back something I took out (from the version Gillian said she liked) ages ago. Just a little paragraph describing a street. Which Australian readers might not need but foreign readers might. And what’s wrong with a little description of a street anyway? Just tidied it a bit. The description, not the street. The street was already tidy.

11:17 – feel as though I’ve written quite a bit, but I’m still 2/3 through page 2. Have I just been cutting stuff out? There was a new section I put in that I liked, but I don’t have the chops to write it 100% and written 80%  it’s no good. (It’s one of those kinda guitar-solo sections where you really want to hit at least 95% of the notes or, you know, play something easier.) And it might be redundant anyway, given that there’s a section of similar tone that’s in there already and absolutely has to stay. So, out. Right. Smoko.

12:35 – page 3! Left a couple of chunks behind on p2. Their fate probably depends on word count. Now at the mental statge where the whole thing looks like a ball of dung that I’m pushing up a hill that I can’t see because I have a giant ball of dung in front of me.

1:24 – after spending some time walking (not pacing, I swear!) around the public balcony on the floor below, am 1/2 through p3.  Am now up to an important bit, so lunch, though perhaps undeserved, seems justified…

2:22 – ohnoes. I’ve just looked back at the changes I made on p1 and I think what I had before was better.

3:08 – Mm, some was better, some wasn’t. Reading aloud really does help. Thankful thoughts to Gillian for asking me to do that. I really must do it more often. It helps to keep me focused, too — maybe because it engages more of me than silent writing does, so there’s less of me to get distracted? Not that I’ve been distracted today, I’ve just been slooooow.

3:45 – so page, er 1, is nearly done. A couple of little grotty spots, but I think it’s basically ok. I’m getting a headache, so I’m going to watch TV for a bit. She died with her boots on, they’ll say. In front of the telly.

5:50 – back to work! Page…..2…..

6:22 – midway through p2. I broke that description up. It was too much like, ok, now I’m going to describe the town…which would have been fine, but the POV character is so not thinking about the town in the scene, and I think a paragraph’s pause for a description is going to muddy the waters a bit. I had this, which I like a lot:

A sauntering essence (presence?) of the afternoon, as though released by the absence of living persons in the street, seemed to wend its way from verandah to verandah, leaning a creased and flannelly shoulder against windows with lace curtains that gave a little in the middle.

But I don’t think there’s room for a sauntering essence or presence of the afternoon in this story. I’ll have to keep it aside to use elsewhere.

6:44 – Magic moment. Open thesaurus at random page. Receive freebie. Not just word, idea. This is when I love writing. When the fairies hang about.

7:13 – a bit of architectural research done, page 2 nearly done. I’m obviously not going to finish this today! I can feel my brain getting sludgy. I might do a bit more later on but I’m officially clocking off. But I think I’ve done good work and tomorrow’s another day. Next week there’s a religious holiday, so no work and no Thai classes until Thursday. I intend to do tomorrow the same thing as today, i.e. try to get this finished, in the same t-shirt. If I rinse it out tonight and hang it up on the balcony it’ll be dry in the morning.

Ace t-shirt!