Stu sent me this post about women’s evident tendency to be not so great at self-promotion. The poster says: “They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.”

I was talking with Gillian about this a while back, and promised I was going to write something, and never did, because I didn’t have a lot of evidence to bring up, just general impressions and personal experience. But now someone else has written about it, so I can nod and say, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that about women, too.” Not all women, but plenty enough. And obviously not all guys are topped up with self-confidence, either. But when I think about myself and confidence, my first thought is that I had it when I was a kid, and somehow lost it. I don’t know whether that’s a common thing for women, but I wouldn’t mind comparing experiences, if anyone wants to.

I remember being a sassy little thing with a pretty good opinion of myself. And my mother (sorry, Mum, for dragging you into this, but you went through this bullshit too, and worse than me) often told me that I was arrogant, and that I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet. So I learned to be coy. And we got that message at school (an all-girl school), too. Or rather, mixed messages. We were told not to hide our lights under a bushel (bushels, trumpets, wild ran the commonplace metaphors), but we were also told not to boast about ourselves, which somehow warped into not saying anything positive about ourselves. Which perhaps warped further into not thinking positively about ourselves. Say “I’m dumb, I’m not that good, I’m ugly” enough times, even out of false modesty, and you might start believing it. You certainly don’t get in the habit of putting yourself forward with confidence that someone might actually be interested in you for reasons beyond sex.

I think we were taught to be modest, also, for reasons to do with sex. “Bold girls” who “put themselves forward” were somehow “not nice” and were not “ladies”. Yes, I was brought up to be a fucken lady, mate. Not that many of us at school were particularly ladylike, but unfortunately the one ladyish lesson that we did seem to take to heart — as I see it, anyway, looking back — was the one about not drawing attention to your own accomplishments. You were supposed to be pleasing — your thoughts focused on the pleasure of others, not on your own advancement. Which is all very well in purely social situations, but not so helpful in the world of work. But while our educators and parents (it was the 70s and 80s) were all for us having careers, and did what they could to ensure we were prepared academically, perhaps they didn’t give so much thought to preparation for the non-academic side of work — the side that’s less about ability than chutzpah, and which includes the art of mining social occasions for career opportunities (which may start with something a simple as telling someone you’re a writer, rather than just mentioning your day job). I don’t know if the early education of girls, at home and at school, has changed much. I don’t get the sense that it has, really, but I’d be very interested to hear other people’s views — and I assume there must be differences between countries and cultures.

But while I learned early on to project a coy manner, my actual inner confidence didn’t sink until puberty, which is so normal as to be hardly worth mentioning (though it shouldn’t be normal) — but I’ll stick this idea out: becoming a woman just isn’t as cool or empowering as becoming a man, because of the way we’ve constructed ‘man’ and ‘woman’.  And in the first years of womanhood, just as you’re maturing, you’re also at your most desirable (at least in the current culture), and therefore your most vulnerable. When you should be becoming a person, you’re sweet sixteen and all too easily become principally a sex object, or a rejected sex object; either way, your subjectivity takes a hit. There’s so much media emphasis on women’s appearance, and so little on women’s accomplishments, that if that stuff gets in your head, your accomplishments can start to seem unimportant, even worthless. In my case, at least, that attitude took hold and stuck. I saw myself as an object for a very long time. (I know this happens to guys too, but my impression is that women are in more danger of losing their sense of personhood in the teen years.) Once you see yourself as an object, it’s as if you don’t exist. It’s pretty hard to find the will, courage, or even desire to promote yourself if you’re not real — if you’re abject, if you’re the very opposite of important — in your own mind.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in that I haven’t had to promote myself much. Because when I started writing I couldn’t have done it. I was taught to wait for others to notice you, and that was exactly what happened. Next time I have to do it, I’ll be able to — but that’s partly because I’ve now got some sort of profile and won’t be working from square zero. But my story is pretty unusual. I happened to have a weird book ready to publish when weird books were enjoying a surge of popularity. When I first tried to get a publisher for TEC, back in 2000 or 2001, my early efforts failed, and I didn’t know what to do next. I thought I had a pretty cool book, but when the couple of publishers who seemed the best bets (and who took unsolicited manuscripts) and one agent I’d met turned it down, I got stuck. I knew I ought to get an agent, but I didn’t know how to begin finding one. I knew there were lists, but how to choose names from the lists? And, good God, so many of them were in New York. Why would an agent in New York be interested in a random Australian with a strange book? (So a bit of cultural cringe there, as well.) The thought of contacting a writer and asking “Who’s your agent?” would never have occurred to me. The notion of bothering someone else like that, intruding on their time, would have been D: D: D:. In fact, even the thought of contacting an agent was pretty scary — not so much because of fear of rejection, but more a general sense of unworthiness, as if I didn’t even have the right to try to get someone’s attention and have my voice heard, especially by a citizen of New York. (And there’s another thing: seen and not heard. Is it still the case that women are to be seen, and men heard?) In short, I wasn’t confident enough to do the self-advertising and persevering that it often takes to get a first book published.

Anyway, I got noticed — eventually by Jeff VanderMeer, who is not only great at promoting his own work, but is a generous promoter of other writers. But there was a whole lotta luck involved. Without that luck, without the attention and effort of people — starting with Geoff Maloney, and most of my helping hands have been male — who steered me first to Prime Books and then to major publishers, I’d probably still be sitting here with an unpublished book — unless I’d grown some confidence somewhere along the line, and I doubt I would have. I started to grow confidence when I got published, not before. And it grew slowly, and I think it’s still a work in progress. And I remember that when I was first given real, practical help, I was astonished. I could hardly get my head around the fact that someone thought my work was worth their time. And that attitude didn’t come from put-downs in the past, since I’d had a lot of praise for my work at school (art and writing); but while praise is nice, it isn’t half as good as help. Tuition, mentoring, initiation into professional networks, all the stuff that can actually bring results: that kind of real, practical assistance is the petrol to which praise is the car wax (lovely and validating though praise is). And I wonder — do girls get as much practical help, from birth to adulthood, as boys do? Does our society truly have as much goodwill towards girls’ ambitions as boys’ ? Do we want girls to succeed in the public sphere as much as boys, and show it with our time and our wallets, not just our words?

So I guess I’m just wondering about women and the confidence to self-promote. If you’ve got it, how did you get it? Could you imagine a scenario where being a pain in the arse might have a positive outcome? Would you mind being a pain in the arse to get what you want, or would your self-image revolt? Could you lie to get a job or a place on a course if you were pretty sure you could live up to your own boasts, and could you live with being caught out in the lie? Have men supported your ambitions? Have women? Am I asking the wrong questions? And guys, what do you think?

Woo hoo! Just heard one of the big shopping malls near us is building an ice rink. There’s a rink at a mall further away, but it’s a tiny wee thing. The promoters of the new one are calling it, in advance, “the world’s most exciting ice rink”, which could mean all sorts of things — tunnels, ramps, stairs — trapdoors that open randomly in the ice and drop you into boiling oil and acid — roving zambonis armed with razor-sharp rotating blades, chainsaws, flame throwers, tactical nukes, etc. — but what I hope it means is that whatever else it may be, it’ll be a full size rink. I used to be a pretty keen skater when I was a teen, and it would be great to have a local place to skate properly. Of course, a rink the size of a bedsitter with a couple of hundred people on it could be exciting in its own way…

It’s supposed to open in September.

I have a fear of bios. I hate writing them. I don’t like interviews, either. I’m afraid of saying something thoughtless, tactless, dumb, ditzy, etc.; as for bios, the fear is harder to pin down. It’s some kind of shyness, an irrational fear of exposing basic facts about myself to strangers with whom I can’t have a conversation. I have a thick skin for criticism, but I’m hopelessly delicate about misrepresentation, and I suppose I’m afraid of misrepresenting myself. Or maybe I’m afraid of accurately representing myself, as I often feel I’m a bit silly. I try to compensate for the silliness, and end up sounding pretentious.

Anyway, the bio for Baggage is an extended thing in which we had to write about our stories. I have to proof it and I’ve been putting off doing so out of reluctance to read my own words about myself and my thought processes. I’ve got as far as opening the file, but I feel dizzy and sick with anxiety about what I might find in there. My vision is actually blurring, and and I have a lump in my throat as if I were going to cry.

This is terribly weird. I wasn’t always this self-conscious; the longer I stick with writing, the worse it seems to get. Obviously I’m not shy in the blogosphere. But here there are two differences, a delete button and the fact that it isn’t a one-way communication.

It seems strange to get shyer as you get older, but I beat my first shyness by learning to fake it — doing the fake personality thing. And I still do a lot of that. I’m not used to being sincerely myself, except with friends (and I guess I think of this blog as principally a communication with friends, too). So talking openly and honestly, without the barrier of fiction, to readers, is uncomfortable. I need to get it into my head that it really doesn’t matter much what random people think of you.

Ok, I got through reading it (it’s only a page…). And there are only 2 or 3 small changes I want to make. I still don’t like it. I don’t like giving my opinions, which often seem either untutored or over-tutored when I think about them — as if I don’t know shit and am trying to pretend that I do, because a writer is expected to know shit and have opinions and understand her own work. But I’m always terribly uncertain about everything, so that it’s hard for me to make any sort of clear statement.

I’m not an eloquent person. I don’t have a great way with words. Sometimes I don’t have any way with words. And boy do I notice it when I’m correcting stuff I wrote weeks or months ago. It’s positively embarrassing to see the simple sentences I’ve screwed up. Oddly, it’s often the more complicated ones that I get right, so maybe the simpler ones and their errant commas and doubtful meanings get bypassed when I correct a story as a continuation of writing it, rather than taking a break.

Why am I writing this? Well, I have a story to correct, it needs lots of little fiddly adjustments, and I have to do it fast. So I’m running from not my worst nightmare, but certainly something that makes me wish there was a drug to make you very calm and very alert at the same time. And smart. Smart would be good.

Nature is awesome…

Transparent sea cucumber Enypniastes, via oceanleadership.org

Eny swimming

And while I’m doing pretties, a dreamlike flower with hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade.

And for the cute, a sea pig…

And for the weird… as Stu said, these people obviously aren’t marine biologists.

Oh, my, only four days into the year and already I’ve found (via Random Index) a devilish enabler of procrastination — Outrepart, a site featuring 100 “astounding images from everywhere”, updated hourly, with links.

A minute there led to a couple of hours looking at, amongst other things –
A regal penis
An ithyphallic Jesus (c.1525)
Crappy taxidermy
Japanese surgical illustrations
The strange and luscious art of Madeline von Foerster
The strange and luscious art of John Brophy
Moose
Undream the Echoes, a blog of macabre and unsettling things
Rob Evans, whose eerie paintings often show strangeness occurring in liminal places between the home and the outdoors, or the domestic and the wild.
A haunting abstract sculpture or installation by Harm van den Dorpel (all troubling and seductive latency)
Captain Jeff and the Squeeze Box, from Curious Pages (recommended inappropriate books for kids)
And MY ALLIGATOR MAN-GOD-THING.

And again from Random Index, the surreal drawings of Walter Schnackenberg.

Well, I guess it’s better than looking at porn or playing Bejeweled.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love talks about the idea of creative inspiration or genius dwelling outside the human individual. She doesn’t go so far as to say she believes in or expects others to believe in daemons or spirits (though she refers to the sometimes-seemingly-supernatural aspects of creativity), but does suggest that it might be good for our sanity — keeping both ego and anxiety down to manageable size — if we adopted the idea that the human author might not be the only party involved in the making of literature.

As I’ve said, I do believe in those spirits and daemons — or at least, I choose to believe in them because it’s how I experience the writing process, and I don’t think it would help to try not to believe in it. This belief rides along with the caveat that I don’t even know what I am, or what my consciousness really is, or where it is; so that to say “they” seem external is to say that they seem external to something the nature, location and  limits of which are unknown.  So I believe in what seems to be and in what appears to work, while in the background there’s the allowance that I don’t know what really is or how it works.

If they are separate or even half-separate from us, I wonder how they perceive us. When we write about fairies and such we tend to assume they can see our world clearly, get about in it easily, and communicate with us whenever they choose. But perhaps we’re as unclear to most of them as they are to most of us; perhaps only some of them are walkers between worlds — magicians amongst their own kind — and perhaps even those adepts have difficulties from time to time. Gilbert’s anecdote about Tom Waits telling off the muse for sending him music while he was busy driving suggests that if they’re there, they may not all be quite au fait with our human reality as we perceive it. Perhaps they can’t always perceive our physical motion in 3D space; they might only perceive our motion in thought. When we create ritual space we create a particular pattern of motions in thought; perhaps in addition to preparing our own minds it’s like shining the Bat Signal to them.

What I do know is that it’s possible to feel that they — perhaps I should call them fairies — are terribly close, as if they were just on the other side of a glass partition, and the feeling that they are there and the knowing that you can’t get through the partition can be crazy-making. Or if you get torn between the other world and your own — it’s like the scene with Pan in The Wind in the Willows. And unlike Kenneth Grahame’s gentle Pan-Pashupati, you can’t expect them to make you forget, “lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure.” Speaking for myself, the awful remembrance fades — but it takes time.

Gilbert talks about the letdown after the visitation, and makes the wise point that you can still go on — you have your own powers to draw on, after all, and they may be greater than you think. (Edit: maybe her example of a North African dancer possessed by God for one night isn’t quite apposite for a presumably secular or near-secular audience, because that guy already has a faith; he may well feel bereft the “morning after”, but he doesn’t have to wonder what it was that possessed him, and he can expect to meet it again at the end of his life, which must be some consolation.) But if the visitation comes before you’ve discovered your abilities, or if it’s very strong, you might need a while to dust off and get back up. For people for whom the external genius feels real, it may not be so much a psychic security blanket as a wild carny-man who takes you to see the strangest things in tents and then has his way with you in a wagon painted with eyes and signs and pulled by a balrog. Or you may at least have to do some negotiating with it, so that you can keep a foot in both worlds. Then it can become a dance, a game, a ludic play — but it begins with acknowledging that while the whole thing may be a joke, it isn’t bullshit.

I don’t know whether, if you really feel your work comes from within, you could talk yourself into believing it comes from without, even for the sake of mental peace, if such would be brought about. I’ve written one or two things that feel a good 95% my own. If something else was helping, it was helping very subtly most of the time. In the event of those stories not working out, it would be hard for me to palm the blame off on a supernatural being. And even when the work feels only half or less than half your own, there’s still the matter that you’re the one turning this inspirational stuff into readable (by at least a few people) stuff. If “they” are the rider, you are the horse, and you, poor dumb animal, might shy at jumps or want to stop and eat grass, or really act up and throw the rider — and since you’re a conscious, thinking horse, you own those mistakes, is how I think of it.

I also wonder how much the high rate of mental health problems and suicide amongst writers can be blamed on ego issues directly related to writing. Virginia Woolf was manic-depressive and heard voices calling her to “do wild things”. Yukio Mishima wanted to create the perfect body and then destroy that body for Japan and the Emperor. These problems are of a different order from performance anxiety, one would think. Or you have Charlotte Perkins Gilman who recovered from serious depression and eventually suicided (self-euthanased might be a better term) because she had cancer — nothing to do, seemingly, with her being a writer. The jury is still out on the nature or even the existence of a link between madness and creativity, and on why writers — or the published writers that have gone on history’s record — are statistically prone to suicide. Perhaps the very act of writing leeches reality from life, transferring the life into the work like the soul of a sorcerer into a magic stone, making suicide a less unthinkable response to suffering. Obviously, it also isn’t hard to see how the self-employed, irregular, work-anywhere life of a writer abets a self-corrosive lifestyle — you can’t be soused at 9 am if you have to be in the office.

That said, I agree entirely with Gilbert that it is probably very healthy not to see yourself as some sort of almighty Author. We all process our culture and experiences into our work; we’re all products of our influences and our genetics. Keeping that in mind might contain the ego and its anxieties just as effectively as believing in gods and daemons. Which isn’t going to help out with the social, financial and physical health problems that may go with the writing life, but at least one area will see improvement. If you actually do experience creative inspiration as something supernatural — and belief may open the door to experience, or to a game that seems very real — there’s no guarantee that feeling yourself haunted by ghosts, ridden by the loa, fucked by a succubus, bitten by a duende or otherwise whirled into the mind’s Waterish Witchland will improve your sanity — though it certainly adds a level of interest to life, and perhaps may be recommended on that score alone.

A nice beginning to the year: The Complex Chinese edition of The Etched City (蝕刻之城 — “shi ke zhi cheng”, I think — hope I’ll be able to find out how to say it properly), is out from Fullon Books in Taiwan, with a way cool cover — and a promo video. (Technically it’s out on 7th January, but it’s available for order now). Complex Chinese covers Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, though not mainland China. Translations are exciting and wonderful things, and I feel enormously lucky to have had my work published in other languages. And it’s really a thrill to be published in Chinese — a thrill from the bottom of my DNA, because I feel like a butterfly has taken my pollen to a distant garden. Where it might get blown away by the wind, or washed away by the rain, but hey, I’d rather just think about the butterfly. So a toast for the New Year to Zhou Pei Yu, who translated the book, and to translators everywhere. And a second drink to Gray Tan, my agent in Taiwan, and Danny Lin, who recommended the book to Gray, and to Fullon Books and the cover artist, whose name I hope to find out — I really dig that picture.

* * *

New Year plans and resolutions:

Last night was fun. Watching fireworks go off behind tall buildings is strange — at first you can’t see much, then as smoke fills the air the coloured flashes light up the smoke. Had a conversation with a guy who taught motorcycle riding, with the consequence that my major New Year’s resolution is to take the motorbike taxis less often and limit my use of them to short rides down quiet streets or very congested sections of main road (which used to be my rule, but I got a bit blase last year). What he had to say about falls and injuries was a timely reminder that Motorbikes Are Dangerous. Terribly convenient in this city, but this year I’m going to try to allow enough time for cabs and Shanks’s pony instead.

My other resolution is to read a book a week. Last year I probably only read one a month. I’ve gotten started on this — read Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala last week, now reading Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume.

Travel plans: Australia in March and maybe again in October or November. Hopefully Kathmandu and surrounds for a week in February.

Writing: Still working on new material for the collection. It’s getting there. I’d really, really like to have this thing sewn up by midyear. The Floating World is the other major project. I won’t be taking on anything else — unless for one reason or another it’s irresistible.