It seems The Heart of a Mouse won this year’s Aurealis Award for best science fiction short story. I’m really, really happy. Mouse is feigning nonchalance, but I think he’s quite chuffed too.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and many thanks to the judges and organisers of the AA’s for their efforts, to Subterranean for publishing the story, Jeff VanderMeer for the batshit prompt that kicked it off, and extra thanks to Jeff VanderMeer and Geoff Maloney for reading the first draft, and the inimitable Kyla Ward for being my collector!
This was quite a morale booster for me, as it reminded me that even though I haven’t built anything resembling a career in writing, I apparently haven’t lost my mojo, however much it feels like it sometimes.
I’ve often felt a lack of mojo in Bangkok, I have to say, but it’s better in the new place. I’m inclined to think that the fact it’s an old area helps. There must be more spirits here, and even if they’re not from my culture, perhaps they don’t mind helping out a foreigner. It’s a Chinese district, so they themselves would have been foreigners too — not to mention that ghosts of a Confucian background might be sympathetic to a person trying to follow the way of the pen. Possibly there are more spirits at ground level, too, as opposed to up in the air where the apartments were. And, of course, there’s the god of the street looking out for us all.
This reminds me of something I meant to say about Hong Kong. When I was on the bus going into downtown Kowloon, the bus went past a Sycamore Street. Now, the story in The Art of Dying (that story that seemed to fall into my head from some mysterious place) begins in an opium den on a Sycamore Street. And this Sycamore looked close to the water — like it could have once been the kind of dockside street where you might expect an opium den to be.
There are also a number of places in Hong Kong named after William Jardine of Jardine, Matheson & Co. One of the main characters in The Art of Dying is Vali Jardine. I love coincidences. I looked up Sycamore Street on the net and found an old map showing that before land reclamation it had indeed been a street behind a dock (the Cosmopolitan Dock in Tai Kok Tsui). I went down there, but it was a respectable and nondescript area, and I couldn’t find much historical info about what kind of street it had been, except that the Hong Kong Ferry staff quarters had been there.
I did go to Hong Kong as a kid, just for a few days on the way to England, so it’s possible I picked up Jardine’s name, though I doubt I’d have noticed Sycamore Street. Anyway, while I was walking around, I had the weirdest sense of feeling at home there in Kowloon. I felt kind of teary, as if I had once lived there, although I don’t particularly believe in past lives — although I do like the idea. I suppose I had stirred myself up. I have to admit, my nostalgia peaked at the archival remains of Kowloon Walled City, though I shouldn’t put too much store by that — it was the kind of place that would fire anyone’s imagination, and it was a nostalgic exhibit on the grounds of the park where the place used to be. Anyway, I went to a fortune teller to ask about it, as you do. She told me that yes, I’d had a past life in Hong Kong — she knew what I wanted to hear, of course, but I’d have interpreted the cards I drew the same way. She said I had met a rich man who took me all around the world, and then we came back to Hong Kong. I forgot to ask what my profession had been. Maybe I was a bar girl. I must have looked a bit freaked out, as the guy who was translating kept telling me not to worry and that my past life couldn’t affect this one. (I always thought the point was that it could). He was a fortune teller too, so maybe he saw something to suggest I’d misbehaved a bit in the life under discussion.
I think Hong Kong is the kind of place which, if you had lived there in earlier times, you would still recognise it, because of its distinctive geography. No matter what kind of buildings go up, the hills would stay the same.
I don’t know. For a short while I went to a group that met for the purpose of psychic exploration. One of the exercises was to look at another member and try to see them, or around them, with your inner eye. While I was doing this with a Lebanese-looking girl I saw (ETA: I mean ’saw’ with mind’s eye) thin black figures moving around her. I didn’t say anything, as I couldn’t see why she would have what looked like black ghosts hanging out with her. Later on, she told the group she was part Aboriginal. Coincidence? Maybe. I perhaps too often find Occam’s razor awkward to lift, as it isn’t always clear what the simplest explanation is. ‘Supernatural’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘complicated’. Maybe there’s just a whole lot of stuff floating on the astral airwaves, all muddled up together, and we pick it up unconsciously through personal affinity — perhaps that childhood adventure in Hong Kong turned something in me in that direction.
Which all leads me to wondering how a belief in past lives might affect one’s sense of identity and one’s politics. Which should go in another post.
His toes are a bit twisted (maybe because the wax-clay model’s feet didn’t have armature wire in them and got bent at some point in the foundry?), but if I really want to I (assume I) can get another wax model cast from the mould, fix them, and get a new mould made for any further casts. In the meantime, I’m still extremely happy with how he came out.
