Words are still heavy. Even thinking in words is heavy. It might not be just the smoke. It’s very hot, and a four-storey derelict building near me is being demolished in slow motion with what I call drilldozers — bulldozers with pneumatic drill heads, which make a juddering mechanical noise from 9-ish till 6-ish (with a break for lunch). There are no adjacent buildings and there’s a huge vacant lot next door, so you’d think they could use explosives to bring it down quickly, but maybe the Skytrain is too close, or maybe the drilldozers are just cheaper. I think I’ll be taking my computer into school next week and trying to work there. (And if the people who’ve been lobbing grenades around Bangkok recently want to come down and chuck a few into that building, it’s ok by me!)

Anyway, while words are heavy, images are light, so have a devil child:

I really need to stop drawing faces in half profile! And start drawing them showing some emotion. I’m pretty sure this picture was obscurely inspired by this, via Alankria. Girl. Tempting object. Never-to-be-developed person. It would be a shame not to take a bite out of her. Vessel for male ego. Mother is lurking inside. Girl will never be human. What the hell would she become if she was allowed to grow up naturally, on her own terms?

Bangkok’s air has been disgusting lately. It’s full of smoke from the seasonal burning off of rice fields, and possibly forest fires. Anyway, my eyes are sore and my sinuses are borked and I feel dopey. Words feel like heavy things to lift. On the positive side, while my brain’s been lost in the fog I’ve cleaned quite a lot of bugs and bug poo (white sticky stuff) off my indoor tree. Some people think this kind of bug poo was the original manna from heaven that the Israelites ate. And I could eat it too if I hadn’t sprayed the tree with pesticide. But I did eat the pollen from the giant spider lily, which flowers indoors, where it had melted against the window. It tasted like sugar syrup. I feel sorry for this plant, because it flowers profusely but has no other spider lillies to pollinate with. I feel like collecting some of its pollen and taking it down to the spider lillies across the street!

I recently got my author copies of the Traditional Chinese edition of The Etched City. Fab artist Wang-Tin (Andy) Lin has posted some info on his blog about how he created the awesome cover art. (Google Translate helps a bit if you want to read the text). The sphinx’s face looks rather like me, but Andy says he’s never seen my photo, so it’s (maybe!) just a coincidence. And the crocodile fetus and lotus man are on the back! The old parchment look on the cover is reproduced on the title page of the book, and the cover has a finish I’ve never seen before, matte but kind of grainy, almost like a sort of plastic, which looks good and feels as if it might be more durable than regular cardboard. I’m grateful to Andy for the artwork and to the publishers, Fullon, for doing such a lovely all-round job.

Speaking of art, the eye candy’s been piling up in my Firefox again.

Artists:

Stacey Rozich

Tiffany Bozic (found via Wurzeltod, major love for The Silent Dredge)

Anna Lukashevsky

Sam Wolfe Connelly (interior contents not as sweet as the front page pic!)

Zhou Fan (artist’s website here.)

Jon MacNair (I like the “fine art” section)

Kristen Ferrell

Jessica Albarn

Joel Peter Witkin

Nick Sheehy

Images I hadn’t seen before by one of my always favourites, Takato Yamamoto. Lots of other good stuff at Mondobizzarro.

Individual pics/vids:

The People Tree (video) by N.A.S.A. (North America South America), thanks to Penchaft for pointing it out to me!

Madam Satan by Adrian Greenberg

A weird etching by Tommaso Gorla

Saving the Gleeful Horse, a story I wrote for an auction last year, is online at Fantasy Magazine. Here’s the eponymous horse (which I’ve posted here before).

Writing update: I’ve got all but two of the collection stories to the “nearly finished” stage, which means I might have a fact or a quote to check, or a few lines or a paragraph to alter if I can think of better words, but they’re basically done. I hope I can get the remaining two fixed and the new story written by midyear. (I probably won’t finish the new story by then, but the midyear goal has been good for keeping me focused.) The Floating World continues to get written. I’m taking a few days off from story wrangling in order to concentrate on rock ‘n’ roll, porn, and de-lousing my golden cane palm.

Well, I think he’s as finished as he’s going to be. The budding flowers are a bit feeble — probably needed to be bigger. But I should get back to writing now.

Essentially benign, despite its appearance. Lights the way in interludic stretches where the world is half-extinguished and half-asleep. Its mind is in the caterpillar. It wants to be transferred to a horizontal picture with other creatures following it.

Hmm, so the drawing is getting close to finished. I did a photoshop test with the half properly pencilled tree. After trying it in brown, I thought it looked better in light tones. I’ll have to get rid of the heavy shading on the bottom edge of the trunk, though — it’s too dominant. And I’m wondering if the whole drawing of the tree should be softer and sketchier, like it was before; somehow it seems to clash more with the figure now than it did as a rough(er) sketch. Or maybe the thick bough of the tree needs more pencil shading on top; the current brightness is fighting with the figure? I think I’ve been looking at this for too long. Opinions, anyone?

EDIT:

I lightened up the tree and roughly smudged it. I think this is getting closer. Once there are budding flowers and more twiggy bits it should be ok. Reckon I can finish the drawing now. Which might take a while, since there’s a h-h-h-hand D:

Well, I went for the floral halo after all, and scrapped the idea of skulls and whatnot on the tree  — not so much out of laziness (although, er, that might have been a factor) as because there’s nothing to connect skulls and lizards visually with anything else in the picture — it’d be different if he had a halo of skulls and lizards, but then he wouldn’t look much like a saint. So I’m just leaving it as a dead-ish tree, of which a few twigs will be (miraculously?) budding into flower.

I was going to do the tree in pen, but I quite like the effect of the photoshopped pencil, so I’ll probably do a pencil version first before I go inking. The lower picture especially is starting to look like the kind of Rackham tree I want. It turns out the fine nib wasn’t the problem so much as the very thick ink I was using. I got some thinner ink and things are considerably smoother now.

Yukio Mishima’s favourite saint. Inspired by recent trip to boy bar and by Takato Yamamoto. Ink on watercolour paper, quick digital colour. No model except for the right hand, which I think I’ve used in three pictures now! I’ve been drawing this with a fine-nib steel pen, which doesn’t like the rough paper, so the lineart is crap (not that my penwork is ever very good). When I’ve finished the ink and digital colour I’ll probably try painting it for real, which should result in a nice mess .

I’m not sure what to do with the halo. My first plan was to fill it with flowers, but now I think that might look twee. So maybe butterflies and moths (and a caterpillar or two).

Something that I think wants to be an Arthur Rackham tree has started to take root in the background, telling me it wants to be adorned with skulls, devil faces, lizards and other goodies. Guess I’ll be a while on this one…

I’ve got too many pictures from Nepal and not enough will to organise them at the moment, but here’s one as a placeholder. It’s a decoration on a strut under a temple roof. It’s true, God gave rock and roll to you! (And furry sex too, if you look below.)