While I was thinking about this post by Aliette de Bodard, on the prevalence of US tropes in storytelling, I wondered — as I do from time to time — how the fact that I’m Australian (living in Thailand, though that doesn’t really come into this post) writing for a predominantly US audience, affects my writing, consciously or unconsciously. Do I alter things according to my perception what I think Americans will understand and appreciate?

I’ve come to the consclusion that mostly I don’t — at least, not consciously. I know that America is a big, diverse country, and that while perhaps I know more about America than the average American knows about Australia, due to the nature of the flow of cultural product from centre to periphery, I certainly don’t know everything. I can’t second-guess America. I do know, though, that any Australian tropes I use may be interpreted as, or in light of, their nearest American equivalent, or American values in general.

As one example, I’m under the impression that America likes stories about winners. Australia rather likes stories about losers, people who go down fighting, or who just sort of battle on without triumphing. I think it has to do with the hostile, infertile landscape — you can’t triumph over this country, you’re always battling it, you can never achieve security here, it’s all too easy to try hard and still fail (as it surely is everywhere — but the land itself discourages the idea that effort leads naturally to success). It’s hard to be a great optimist when Death Stalks the Land, even when you live in Melbourne. But when I write about losers and people who just get by, maybe American readers find the characters puzzling or unappealing because (as well as any other reasons that there may be) there isn’t enough winning and general progress going on? Maybe I’m dead wrong, but the point is that I have the thought at all — I think I’m writing for a kind of foreign audience, and I expect some misunderstanding, but I don’t know if they think they’re foreign or expect to misunderstand. Am I making any sense?

And do (some? many?) fantasy writers use fantasy as a lingua franca, always assuming that we’re speaking the same magical language when in fact we might not be?

Anyway — I think certain Australian themes and figures connect very well with American counterparts — the cowboy, the brave outlaw, immigrant stories, colonial brutality. And America of course has its own great share of melancholy and pessimistic stories, and the landscape and legends of the American Old West segue pretty smoothly into Australia. But our different history, politics and demographics, our isolation from the rest of the West (except New Zealand), give us — I think — different views and dreams about ourselves that –I think — even well-informed Americans aren’t likely to be aware of, and there is no particular reason why they should be.

I’ve tried just once to write specifically for an American audience. I made an effort with The Heart of a Mouse to use American language and what could have been an American environment, according to my impression of both those things, as I didn’t want American readers to feel that the story was in a foreign place (although it isn’t necessarily in America, either, since a “search and replace” has been done on the whole world — in fact, I was trying to present homogenisation and franchise-ation as part of the apocalyptic scenario) . I was very surprised when some people took the story to be some kind of response to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (I haven’t read it.) The lesson I took away from that reaction was that people are going to interpret your work in light of what they know, not in light of what they imagine you might know. It’s hard to imagine the latter in any case. Or maybe they just assume that you know what they know. And when you try to write a story in the colours of another culture, it’s probably even more likely that people will see it in light of familiar material from that culture. Australians and Americans probably both make the understandable error of thinking we know each other better than we do. I remember getting quite a culture shock in the U.S. when I went there.

There’s also the fact that America has been influencing Australia for quite a long time now. Apart from direct lifting of American tropes, I don’t know to what extent “Australian” tropes are now influenced by American ones. How much has our own cultural product for the last few decades, even the last century, been influenced by American cinema, literature, and general cultural presence? I have no idea, really. Sometimes it’s obvious, but when it isn’t — well, you don’t know, do you? And it goes without saying that my understanding of American cultural product is coloured by my own background anyway.

But I think the interest in the loser and the battler persists. Maybe also a sense that nothing matters hugely, there’s no grand scheme, no great starting point and no great end. Shit happens, then you die. Your only glory, which is probably too strong a word, is in how you struggle along the way. I don’t know. Maybe I’m falsely imagining that my own cynicism and apathy have a cultural basis.

But back to readers — when a Westerner reads, say, a Japanese novel, I think there’s an expectation of difference, of cultural stuff that we won’t get or that we will at least have to put in some effort to understand. I just wonder if as English-reading people we also have that expectation of difference from other places in the Anglosphere, or if we forget sometimes?

I feel a bit nervous posting this. I’m trying to talk about stuff I don’t know about (this is the internet, what else should I be doing?). I just get…inchoate feelings? I don’t know what questions to ask, and I’m afraid of embarrassing myself. (I am embarrassed that I can’t be wonderfully eloquent and erudite and say trenchant and incisive things. I feel like a bear of very little brain at times. A lot of the time, actually!) Anyway, I suppose it’s only natural for a writer to have woolgathering thoughts about writing, so… post.

(ETA: Seconds after posting, I’ve realised that some people mightn’t like my use of the word “periphery” to talk about an English-speaking country. Just to be clear, I’m talking about the Anglopshere, and I think of Australia as a country on the periphery of the Anglosphere. At least, I’ve always felt peripheral.)

Since I’ve been on this health kick I’ve been eating more meat. I know, meat isn’t usually associated with health kicks, but I figured I wasn’t getting enough protein. I’ve been chowing down on not just plenty of fish but chicken and even ham, which I haven’t eaten in ages. I’ve lost a little weight and kept it off, and I feel rather better than before. I’ve been eating fewer carbs and almost no cheese, on account of its fat content.

But my conscience has a problem with all this meat-munching. Much as my body likes the life omnivorous, my mind doesn’t, for all the usual ethical vegetarian reasons. Most of my concern is about farming and slaughter practices*, rather than eating animals per se, though the latter is part of it.

*Thailand has huge chicken factory farms, whence, I assume, come the skinless chicken breasts I prefer for my own consumption. In theory I could buy a chook at a market and kill it, pluck it and gut it myself. The fact that I’d rather eat tofu than do this suggests to me that I shouldn’t be eating any damn chicken.

I’ve had a think, and I’ve decided to try laying off the meat again, and reducing the fish, but finding other protein sources that aren’t full of fat. I fucking hate tofu and wheat gluten-based fake meat, but don’t mind beans, and textured vegetable protein can be quite good. I can’t get the latter at my local supermarket (for a Buddhist country, Thailand is rather disinterested in vegetarian eating, except for a 10-day vegetarian festival once a year, currently going on, but it’s more than vegetarian, it’s some kind of holy bland food, and I can’t say I like it) but it’s probably available at the big supermarkets in the downtown malls. I love edamame, which you can buy here and there, so I need to find a supplier.

I’ve got one slice of ham and two chicken breasts left in the fridge. I bought a tin of vetegarian chilli “non-carne” for when they’re gone. I tried it yesterday. It was ok. And I bought M&Ms again, for moral support. I’ve given up on the ice cream. Even the expensive brands aren’t that nice. The flavours are often somehow sickly. I like peppermint choc-chip, but I haven’t seen any tubs of it; in fact, in general it doesn’t seem to be such a common flavour here as it is is back home.

Madame Lenora’s turban was a sizzling pink, and she was fat again.
‘You’re fat again,’ said the Marquis, before seating himself at the table in her legendary tent.
‘Your head is fatter. The usual?’
‘The usual,’ he affirmed, containing a sigh. He still felt woozy from the warding glyphs placed among the pictures on the tent’s painted exterior. They couldn’t keep him out, of course. But they could let him know he wasn’t welcome. Except that he was, for the same reason a fly is welcome in a spider’s web. It just wasn’t a personal welcome.
He watched her hands while she shuffled the cards. It was awful, but he couldn’t make himself look elsewhere.
Each fat black finger was decorated with a ring. Fancy costume jewellery, enamel beasts and big semiprecious stones, as flashy as the rest of her costume, and, indeed, his own silver-sequinned jacket. Their kind weren’t given to understatement.
Nine of the rings glowed like little lightbulbs. Only one, on the fourth finger of the left hand, a marcasite panther curled around a moonstone as big as an olive, was dull. Uninhabited.
All nine of his brothers and sisters she had captured. Each capture made her stronger, each imprisoned sibling gave her another suite of powers.
He was one of the strongest of the ten, and he was the luckiest. But he would have to be very lucky to beat her now. Very, very lucky.
The spread suggested that luck was on his side. Madame Lenora’s smile was mischief itself.
‘Well, Marquis?’
He pursed his lips and tapped the head of his cane. This was unexpected. She might lie, but her cards didn’t.
On the other hand…
There was a reason why no one had gone to anyone’s aid until it was too late. Sibling rivalry was the curse of their family. It had taken him a thousand years to start missing one or two of them. As allies they would never be better than unreliable.
Yet it sat badly with him to take no action, attempt no revenge, to be a coward. But the consequence of failure… and there would be no rescue for any of them if he lost.
Madame Lenora, still full of mirth — were fat people really happier? — interrupted his thoughts.
‘How about you try your luck tonight? I’m game if you are.’
It was already over. The moment had passed, if there had even been a moment. ‘It seems I never am,’ he said, trying to be breezy.
Her pity wasn’t a pleasant meal, but he had a cast-iron digestion. He could make something of it.
He put the right amount of money down on the table and returned to his own black leather tent. Several customers were queued up outside, patiently waiting their turn to be flogged and humiliated.
He wondered if he hadn’t picked up some of their quirks of character.

(One-draft ficlet. Madame Lenora has been in my head for years, though I only got a name for her today. She has a cameo as another character in Gunpowder Tea. No matter what she looks like, she always wears these ten fancy rings. I assume they symbolise the ‘jewels’ of a well-developed and balanced nature, but I was thinking about what they could mean in a story, and I came up with this.)

Best cakes I’ve ever seen!

Scott Hove’s website

Had a fruitful conversation with Stu about the story. Also drank afternoon coffee, a rarity for me these days, and stayed up in the quiet of night cutting and rearranging. I used to work at night all the time, but fell out of the habit somewhere along the line. I paid for the coffee in only sleeping 5 hours, so will try for a siesta today.

There’s a quote from Kandinsky that rings true for me:

“The artist must be blind to distinctions between ‘recognized’ or ‘unrecognized’ conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone. [...] All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need. All means are sinful which obscure that inner need.”

Or as a pretty fucked up but sometimes wise man said, “Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”

Which sound like pompous things to have in mind when merely writing a story — a thing which shouldn’t be so difficult! — but I don’t think I’ve been watching the trend of the inner need enough in this piece.

That said, a writer is not in the same boat as a visual artist since a writer demands much more of her audience’s time per item produced, with the exception of haiku and limericks. Still, there doesn’t seem much point in writing while ignoring the inner need (unless for good money, of course!), so that the trick is to do one’s will while keeping the audience in their seats — which may involve some deference to the demands of the age and whatever else. (Not even venturing into what deferences may be necessary to sell the work, which obviously applies to visual artists too.) But one can get so concerned about the audience — or so caught up in other people’s ideas — that one mistakes some other thing entirely for one’s will.

On the train the other day I saw a woman with a beautiful, unusual face — sort of a Thai version of a Leonardo da Vinci angel. I tried to make her from memory when I got home, but couldn’t. The head I’d made decided she wanted to be a fairy — here she is. She’s nearly finished. If I knew what I was doing I could finish her today, but I don’t know what I’m doing! In real life she doesn’t look so much like she’s puckering up for a kiss, it’s just how the picture came out. I’ll definitely get her cast, probably with a green or blue-green patina.

I’m learning that one of the challenges with little pieces like this is not getting your bloody fingers all over them. I’m at the stage of refining details and I’m holding her on a stick (the end of a tool, actually), but I still forget and keep squashing her hair and dress, chiz.

These are the two heads I’ve made for Pan, looking rather like David Bowie’s head in the sandpit in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Neither is quite what I want, but they’re better than the previous ones.

The carpenter made the stand, so now I can make bigger pieces at home and unleash a few ideas.

Man, these bronze sculptures are hard to photograph. These pics are Photoshopped to try and bring out natural colour and shadow detail. I don’t know if I can do better than this with the camera and lighting (i.e. the sun) I’ve got. (ETA I’ve bought a better lightbulb…)

I don’t believe it, but it’s true, so I guess I have to. If I didn’t already know that wowserism was back, I know it now.

Victoria’s Liberal* government under Ted Baillieu is actually going to ban the sale of the humble bong in the state next year. (*For non-Australians, the Liberal Party is conservative. Confusing, I know.)

This is silly. Cannabis is a popular drug in the Land of Oz, minor possession has been decriminalised in most states (though it’s still illegal, attracting fines around the level of a parking ticket, with much harsher penalties for large-scale possession and trafficking), and people will continue to smoke it with or without arrays of snazzy bongs to choose from.

Before I go any further, let me say that I think the stuff should be legal. Do what they did with brothels. Get crime out of the picture, let adults enjoy themselves, and tax the industry. It has been said many times and it’s hard to disagree: if we can accept a drug like alcohol, and all the violence, illness and mishap that goes with it, we should be able to accept cannabis. Prohibition of something that a lot of people want to partake of doesn’t work.

That said, fair enough if they had wanted to remove bongs from public view, in the same spirit as cigarette advertising is banned. They could have required bong shops to paint their windows, or to keep the bong selection in a blocked-off section at the back, behind all the t-shirts and whatnot. Let all pleasures be available to them as wants ‘em, but I see nothing wrong with requiring the unhealthy ones not to advertise themselves. (One might include certain foods!)

If the ban on the bong wasn’t enough to make me want to tear my hair out — or really, tear someone else’s hair out — there’s this: hookah pipes will still be available, albeit with their display in retail outlets limited to three pipes. “As we understand it, they [hookah pipes] are used primarily for cultural reasons and the ban is more focused on illicit drug use,” a government spokesman said, going from an issue of culture to an issue of legality in one sentence, and suggesting that the government doesn’t understand very much.

Now, much as I’m glad that hookahs won’t be entirely scuttled, pretty things that they are, however I turn the matter around in my mind, I cannot see how the smoking of (a substance) in a hookah is any more or any less “cultural” than the smoking of (a substance) in a bong. Apparently Arabs and Middle Easterners, representatives from whose communities were consulted on the legislation, have culture; the rest of us just have habits.

If you want to discourage tobacco smoking, there’s no reason to take one kind of water pipe off the shelves and not the other. If you want to try to discourage the uptake of marijuana, then yes, perhaps you want to hide the bongs before you hide the hookahs, the latter being not particularly associated with cannabis in the public imagination. But don’t, for Pete’s sake, make concessions to this or that group for unhealthy practices on “cultural” grounds.

I have an idea: let’s ban the potato. You can make a bong out of a potato. You can also shove potatoes up car exhaust pipes, plus they’re full of carbohydrates. However, Australians of Irish descent will be allowed to keep up to three potatoes in their homes for cultural reasons.

Over at The Atlantic, E.D. Kain, editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and writer on public policy and criminal justice reform at Forbes, wonders when fantasy (he’s mostly talking about Tolkien-lineage secondary world kind), once dorky, is going to lose its media popularity.

It’s hard to dissect a zeitgeist when you’re in it. And sometimes there’s no particular reason for a fashion, other than that someone made money from a particular product and others hope to do likewise with a similar product. And some fantasies — vampires, for instance — are enduringly popular because they speak to something, perhaps something physical, that generation after generation goes through. Girls and vampires are like girls and horses — the fascination may never fade unless whatever unresolvable thing the fantasy figure brings up is, in fact, resolved. The popularity of Twilight shouldn’t be assumed to be related to the popularity of Harry Potter or A Game of Thrones.

“There’s a reason fantasy wasn’t mainstream before. It’s a genre that appeals to people who play D&D and get their kicks reading about elves with names like Tanis Half-Elven and Galadriel,” writes Kain. Hmm. So why is it mainstream now? (I have no idea, actually.) Regarding the people who play D&D etc., maybe I’m wrong (hey, the internet is the place to be wrong, innit?) but, having been one in my youth, I would say fantasy appeals to people who, amongst other things, prefer elves and dragons to whatever fantasies the popular mainstream is pushing. A materialist fantasy? A religious fantasy? A fantasy of power, beauty and love via possession of brand-name items? Someone who sees through all this crap still needs an outlet for the natural human tendency to dream and imagine, and perhaps would like to dream of a world that isn’t full of crap. Elves? Better than crap. Dragons? Better than crap. (I was more the kind who would have gone for at least some of the crap if I could have afforded it, I admit.)

More complexly (is that a word?), some people might want to live out popular fantasies as fantasies only. Military conquest is a dangerous but enduring fantasy. Better to enjoy it in the privacy of a book, or a roleplaying game, hopefully aware of what you’re enjoying, than to go forth and kill real people who don’t need killing.

The dreams of science fiction, that other refuge of nerds, haven’t come true, except for one or two that we aren’t sure we want to be true, like cloning. The holy grail of the popular science fiction dream, FTL travel, is probably locked out of reach by the laws of physics. Our itch to explore goes unscratched.

Our minds have to go somewhere to play.

Human beings live through our dreams in so many ways. We dream collectively. The post-war dream, the capitalist dream, doesn’t have an external enemy these days — at least, not one against which it can wage a narratively satisfying war. A madman with a dirty bomb could do a lot of damage. The Yellowstone supervolcano could do a lot more. We’re at the mercy of chaos, just as we’ve always been. The climate? Science makes a compelling case that we’re our own enemy on that front, which is no fun, and we seem not to have the will to fight ourselves.

Fantasy provides an escape into a world where there are at least a few rules — as many if not most books do, but the presence of rules in fantasy is highlighted by their unfamiliar nature. As for fighting ourselves, though, fantasy does tend to offer heroes who overcome their own weaknesses, and who endure privation and pain and make sacrifices. They could serve as examples in many situations (if we ask them to do myth duty rather than just entertain). But there’s a danger in being satisfied with vicarious experience of the example, so that one doesn’t enact it in life. I think I’m as prone to this as anyone.

I have no idea when fantasy’s spell will wear out, but I find it interesting to wonder why, at certain times, a culture gets a boner for certain forms of dreaming. Sometimes it’s obvious at the time, but although I can think of reasons why we’re into fantasy right now (and I’m aware that this post isn’t any kind of cogent presentation — I’m out of practice at even pretending to be cogent — but more a vague drifting around what those reasons might be), nothing leaps out at me going “This is why!”

On a soapbox on a tangent: Kain diverges briefly into talking about fantasy and genre, getting right under the bunions of the Clomping Foot of Nerdism with “whether the Harry Potter books qualify as true fantasy is more controversial, with many fans and many detractors in the fantasy traditionalist camp”, and claims “no self-respecting fantasy purist would ever be caught dead reading [Twilight].” I don’t know what a fantasy purist is when it’s at home — my mind helpfully makes a picture of Oliver Cromwell armed with Excalibur. Then Excalibur goes all Stormbringer and starts laying waste to Cromwell’s nearest and dearest before plunging into Cromwell’s chest and claiming his soul for God. Fade to black. Anyway, most conversations about what is or isn’t fantasy remind me of metalheads arguing about whether some screaming distorted paean to the rotting anus of Christ is Blackened Death Metal or Black Christian Metal. In a word, disturbing.

“Fantasy” is a broad-reaching term. It covers all manner of myth, including science-fiction, as well as its other, real-world meaning, where it covers pornography, advertising and of course religion, and is implicated in psychology and political ideology — and I think an understanding of fantasy’s operations out of reality help to identify its operations within reality, where they otherwise may go camouflaged like ninjas in out midst. Maybe we need a special word for “secondary world fantasy with dragons, magic swords and optional elves” to avoid confusion?

Whew. Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything but “this is what I did today” or “I like this.” Give my brain a week off writing and it gets the blithering urge!

Well I’ve knocked the main bulk of Gunpowder Tea (everything before the end) down by 8000 words. I might have to put a few back, or write a few new ones, but I can also see where more could be cut.

I’m giving myself a week off writing to recharge. I’ve second-guessed this story far too many times, and I need to come back to it with a rested mind.

Yesterday I mucked around with the hair on Pan’s legs and tried out two new heads. I’ve tried open eyes, but so far can’t find an open-eyed look that works. Perhaps it’s a cliche, but so far I’m finding eyes the hardest thing about making a face, since you don’t have the colours of the eyeball to work with.

As for the leg hair, I’ve tried showing it in different ways — literal and detailed, abstract and “painterly”, and something in between. I admit my own taste when I make images is for literal representation and detail, perhaps just because of the pleasure of “making it look real”, which I’ve never outgrown (but which I seldom achieve unless I’m copying a photograph with a pencil), or else for a pretty kind of stylisation (and always with the detail still); but I know that when I look at other people’s work I appreciate more impressionistic and expressionistic styles as well. Plus, there’s a limit to what I can do. I could make the hair very detailed, but the legs have to go with the body. Not having a model means I don’t even have a chance of making a figure with all muscles and flesh folds present and correct, so I need to leave some areas simplified — and the hair texture definitely shouldn’t dominate the piece in terms of interest for the eye.

I’ll probably go for the in-between, and ditto on the body, with some areas more more carefully rendered (e.g. face, hands) and others more “painterly”. I need to think about how the metal is going to look. Smooth bronze is hard to achieve and doesn’t suit every piece. A rougher surface is more interesting in itself, but I think I need to do a controlled kind of roughness. Variations in texture are interesting — smooth here, rough there — and I need to think about where I want to emphasise tension, bulk, movement etc.

I’m caught between a currently impossible desire to do something very tightly rendered and realistic, and knowing that it’s more than fine to be looser and more expressive. The deciding factor here is going to be less my will than my limitations. Maybe once I can accurately model a figure I’ll relax and get more adventurous.