Monthly Archives: January 2011

01/21/11

Hong Kong

I’m going to Hong Kong for a few days. I’ve only been there once before, when I was eight — it was my first trip out of Australia. I loved it then and I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like now. Also looking forward to being in a place with hills for a few days!

And I had me a revelation. People who’ve been following this blog know that I’ve had a lot of second thoughts about writing and regrets about continuing to try to write after The Etched City, rather than do something else, like go back to a real job. Then, thanks to Silence Without, I saw this talk by Barry Schwartz on how the overabundance of choices in modern life helps to make us miserable. Too little choice is bad, but so is too much. I already knew that I tend to get fatigued and fed up when I go shopping in big stores with too much stuff to look through and decide amongst, but Schwartz also explains — convincingly, I think — how we’re likely to be less happy with our choices when we have a hell of a lot of options.

Career/job/that thing you do is obviously a huge choice for the modern middle classes. And I’m very glad I had and have more options than “barefoot and pregnant”. But because I chose writing, of all things, from everything else I could have done, I feel a lot of responsibility for that choice, for my lostness and failure in the last few years, and a lot of woulda-shoulda-coulda about paths not taken.

A couple of of days after watching that talk, though, it struck me that I didn’t particularly choose writing. It chose me. I wasn’t able to not do it, even when the muse had packed up and gone to Panama and I had no ideas (ETA: correction, loads of ideas but couldn’t work out how to turn them into anything publishable) and was freaking out.

It wasn’t what I chose to do with my life, it was what life chose to do with me. That makes a difference. The responsibility isn’t all mine. Life just finally picked something for me to do. I don’t know whether this is even “my” life, really. The pattern doesn’t own the kaleidoscope.

I don’t know what this means yet, but I don’t feel like I made a terrible mistake anymore. I will keep writing. Maybe I will write something good. I wrote three good stories last year. (Yes, I think Heart of a Mouse was good, and no, I haven’t read The Road, sometimes stories or books are like each other because they draw on similar tropes, ‘k? :-) )

I’m trying to thrash out a beta-able draft of Tea Master. I think it’ll still take a while. I’m struggling with the tone a bit (I mean, a lot.) I’m mainly worried that the scenes are too different — that there’s too much of a contrast between silly in one scene and serious in another. Even though I think there’s a reason why it can and even should have a collagey feel, it just might not work  in a piece this short. Though it always seemed to work in Monkey. Anyway, if the tone doesn’t work for any people I can possible cajole into beta-ing this thing, I’ll worry about it then. (If the plot doesn’t work, I might prefer not to know!)

I think I know (yet another reason) why this story is causing me so much trouble, too. It didn’t “really happen”. I changed the characters and circumstances a lot in order to turn a daydream into a story, and I think my heart is really still with the daydream. It was originally a gentle interlude, and it’s hard to make lengthy fantasy stories out of gentle interludes. Anyway, the interlude quality is still in it, I think.

I would still like to work out why I’m so obsessed with this story. Especially when the muse is really still in Panama, occasional visitations aside. Ginflailbathchocolatetv… ETA: I do know, though. Trying to capture something that I can’t capture with this. Wrong story, wrong characters, wrong plot, and I keep trying to tweak it to make it do what it can’t. I just hope it captures something else — and not a boojum! Ginflailbathchocolatetv…

01/17/11

Blue flower tea

Someone told me recently that the blue flower growing on the balcony is edible and you can make tea with it. My acquaintance said the tea is medicinal, and when I didn’t understand what kind of medicine (my Thai is still crap), drew a line down the centre of her body a few times. I’ve seen yoghurt and slimming product ads with an arrow doing the same thing, so my guess was that either the tea is good for digestion in general, or else a laxative. Anyway, I didn’t have to go out that day, so I decided to make the flower tea. After rinsing three flowers, I poured hot water on them and watched the blue colour seep off the petals and fill the water until it was approximately the colour of Windex.

Then I drank it. It tasted quite pleasant. And I didn’t get diarrhea. But I did get a bit lightheaded and headachey for a short while, and found myself giggling. I made the tea the next day with two flowers, and got the minor head symptoms, but not the giggles.

Of course, I’m tempted to make the tea with a whole lot of flowers, take an aspirin beforehand, and see what happens. (This is a hypothetical temptation, really, since most of the flowers are out of my reach. Probably just as well.)

01/12/11

Tea master

It’s cool (23C, maybe less when I went out an hour ago) and rainy this morning. People are walking around in long sleeves, even jumpers and scarves. If I was in Australia I’d probably be in long sleeves and jeans, but here I still went out in shorts and a singlet. Really cool, fresh-feeling weather is too rare to not enjoy to the full!

I got my hair cut yesterday. I’m growing out the layers I got a couple of years ago. My hair looks nice with layers, but since I nearly always have to tie it up or back for comfort’s sake, there isn’t much point in having them. In retrospect, I asked the hairdresser to cut it too short — there’s only just enough for a mini-tufty ponytail — but now I’ve got a good idea of what I’d look like with actual short hair, which I was thinking of going for, maybe — and I can see that I probably look better with it long enough to go up, so in the long run I might have saved myself some angst. (Although “up” and “short’ probably look similar from the front, they look different from other angles, and I like the way “up” looks…) Anyway, this year I’ll get to revisit myself with simple one-length hair and see if I like it. If I don’t, I can always get layers again.

I’ve finally got a first draft of the tea master story. Rough first draft, though — some scenes are more like scribbly sketches, and I realised as I was finishing it up that I’ll have to alter a couple of plot points, which will affect just about every scene. This story has had me on the ropes so many times! It’s on the plotty side for its length, and it has what I think of as “machinery” (magic or science or metaphysics or whatever — stuff that isn’t to do with human relations). It’s the world of The Etched City, so things are fluid and surreal and affected by states of mind — or the world is a state of mind — but in this particular story there’s a system that exists within that fluidity (or some people think it exists, anyway), so there’s that to fit in; and all the characters have backstory, and they don’t know one another beforehand, and POV moves around, and there’s a personal theme and a related social theme that possibly gets short shrift (on the other hand, I don’t want to hammer it), and then there’s the actual writing, which I don’t want to be swamped by plot and machinery, and etc.. Perhaps it should be a novel, but I’m not sure that it has any reason to be a novel — though I’d quite like to come up with a way to turn it into one — but for now I want to write it as a novella and see what happens.

Anyway, today I’m going to paint apples — as in, paint a picture of apples, having bought two apples of different size and character for the purpose. I know, there’s exotic tropical fruit around and I choose apples, but I have a tendency to try to run before I can walk, so this time I’m keeping it simple!

01/9/11

Morning pictures

I haven’t posted anything about Bangkok for a while. Since it was a nice breezy morning, I thought I’d go out early and take pictures on the main road.

A little restaurant, open for breakfast. It wasn’t that dark, either; the light was just a bit low for the camera.
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I like the building in the middle –
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Two creatures with silver skins…
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The Robot Building!
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The quite imposing Empire Tower…
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I will survive…
house1

house2

house3

01/3/11

Cherry baby finished

Man, photographing this was hard. Shiny paint! I had to mix two photos together. Then I couldn’t resist fiddling with the colours and contrast. Anyway, I’ve bought two nice simple apples to paint next.

baby2

01/1/11

WIP – baby likes cherries

Happy New Year!

So this is what I’ve been doing with those water-miscible oils. This is Photoshopped a bit, just to test out a couple of things — not sure if I’m going to make the eyes shiny like that. Not sure what I’m going to do with the tail, either — I could try to make the segments more distinct, but I don’t think the picture needs another detailed area, so might leave it as is.

I don’t really know why this baby lives in my head!

babywip2

ETA: I did something you’re not meant to do — I used the actual black paint that came in the box rather than mixing all the black with brown and blue, since I was going to run out of brown and blue pretty fast! (And what’s the point of having black paint if you don’t use it?)