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.

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.

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.

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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.

As a rule I don’t do Engrish posts (glass houses, stones!) but I couldn’t leave this at home in a drawer — and what is it about police phones/booths and time travel?

Think of the porn, censor the children. Oh, wait, that should go the other way around. And the bestiality. Gotta get the bloody bestiality back where the kids can’t see it — out in the back paddock where it’s a private matter between a  man and his livestock. The current (KRudd) Australian Labor government just doesn’t want to give this one up.

So that communications minister Stephen Conroy announces legislation to Censor The Internet And Keep Australia Pure will be introduced….just before next year’s election. Bearing in mind that opposition leader Tony Abbott is an outspoken wowser with a support base of religious nutjobs, it isn’t a huge stretch to see the strategy behind the move.

Putting aside the possibility of the legislation getting through both houses of parliament and actually going into effect, which is scary enough, what worries me more than the possibility of a national-level internet (really World Wide Web) filter  is the opportunity the Rudd government has just handed “Mad Monk” Tony Abbott.

They must be assuming that Abbott and the Liberal Party will support the legislation. Which they might. But if they do, will the antediluvians and troglodytes have any reason to change their vote to Labor, who after all still support the right to abortion, birth control, schooling for girls, etc?

And they also might not support it. Abbott’s response to minister Conroy’s announcement was notably guarded. There are certainly Liberal MPs who don’t want it. And Abbott, well, what he wants is to be Prime Minister. Very, very much. If he can learn to subdue his personal agendas to the demands of his ambition, learn patience and mature in guile, he could recast himself. Be seen to put his own extreme views aside in the name of supporting the views of the majority. Be a bloke of the folk, just like John Howard. And get elected, just like John Howard. And then gradually, when the door of opportunity opens, shove his own agenda through it onto the country, just like John Howard.

If Abbott plays his cards right, he could conceivably pick up a fair few swinging or simply furious voters.  If those voters are in marginal seats, there’s your election. The Exclusive Brethren will be happy, and the rest of Australia will be wondering what they’ve gone and done.

Or am I wrong? I’ve been away from home for four years now, and haven’t spent long enough on visits to pick up the pulse of the zeitgeist. Has the place really changed that much? Has a tide of wowserism swept in, and a tide of stupidity too? Because censorship will not make the internet a nice place for children to play, and filtering the web will not stop the electronic circulation of child pornography and other criminal material. Errors are inevitable (a leaked list of “planned” sites to ban included a dentist’s web page) and the scope for abuse enormous. It really isn’t too hard to understand this. And it’s easy to be either appalled that our federal government doesn’t understand, or offended that they think we don’t, however you interpret their actions.

I hope that at next year’s election KRudd & co do get back in, because the alternative is dismal.  But I hope their majority is so thin that their arrogance won’t be able to squeeze through it.

When I looked at this c.1916 picture of Elasmotherium, my first thought was, “Fuck, it’s a really-truly unicorn!” (More recent pictures look more like woolly rhinos.)

The artist, Heinrich Harder, made a lot of pictures of prehistoric animals. Arsinoitherium had a particularly badass head, but as a mostly aquatic swamp dweller it can’t be a candidate, rather to my regret.

Elasmotherium may have survived into historic times. 10th century traveller and writer Ibn Fadlan describes an animal that matches Elasmotherium’s description, and gives this colourful account of its behaviour: “Whenever it sees a rider, it approaches and if the rider has a fast horse, the horse tries to escape by running fast, and if the beast overtakes them, it picks the rider out of the saddle with its horn, and tosses him in the air, and meets him with the point of the horn, and continues doing so until the rider dies. But it will not harm or hurt the horse in any way or manner.”

Glyptodon and Doedicurus match up with Kirby’s suggestion of an armadillo. Glyptodon looks rather round and slippery for riding on, but Doedicurus had a dip behind a hump in the shell where a saddle might go — and the hump was possibly a fat store like a camel’s. It also had a wickedly spiked tail. I can imagine it surviving a bumpy fall, which would be a bonus.

Waiving the issue of domesticability (I think that already got waived with the centipede), it comes down to a bit of a dance between ambience and narrative ideas. While I want to avoid a big-lipped alligator moment, I’d also really like to have a beast that can do more than break its legs/neck when it falls.

No, I don’t know why I’m getting so obsessed with this. Wait, yes I do. I’m not sure how to write the scene after the one I’ve nearly finished, and research is the noblest form of procrastination. Gulp.

Alankria’s friend Ju (shuju_the_red) is in a very tight spot involving imminent eviction and a lack of ready funds due to having to bribe police to release her mother. The whole situation sounds shitty. Ju needs $US2500 (about $500 already raised) by 11am Friday, Phillippines time, 10pm Thursday America east coast time. By Philippines standards $2500 isn’t small potatoes, but as Alankria says, it’ll only take a couple hundred people donating ten bucks each to get her out of the pickle. And ’tis the season for giving.

Sam Henderson is offering a free copy of her book Heaven’s Bones if you donate $10 or more.

Update: donations have reached $1,378. Alankria is offering a postcard story for donations of $25 or more.

Update: donations passed $200o. Shuju was able to pick up a bit of extra work and reckons she’s in the clear. Donation button’s still up if you want to add to the amount raised.

Dedalus Books is a publisher that I would guess not a lot of people have heard of. Based in the UK, they specialise in literary fiction and translated fiction, with a bent towards the fantastic, surreal, decadent, postmodern and strange. Their best-known publication is probably The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin; they also publish postmodernist author Andrew Crumey, contemporary decadents Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, acclaimed French author Sylvie Germain, classic authors like Octave Mirbeau and Rachilde, and an impressive list of others, as well as collections of translated short fiction and some non-fiction. Their translations have won various prizes, including The Pen/Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize in the USA and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize in the UK.

Unfortunately, producing high quality books isn’t enough to keep them afloat. They used to receive an Arts Council grant, but lost it after a good year. Although they intend to apply again, they’re currently in a somewhat tight situation, explained here. I just thought I’d mention them here, with Christmas coming up and people possibly looking for books to buy. Me, I’m looking at Bruges-la-Mort and Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (who knew that Queen Victoria took cannabis for period pain?)

Philippines spec fic guru Charles Tan gave me an opportunity to yadder over at his blog, Bibliophile Stalker.

Reading: I recently finished reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, who suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome — a state where a person is conscious but unable to communicate due to total paralysis of the body. Bauby was left with some movement in his head and eyes, and wrote the entire book by having a helper recite the letters of the alphabet in their order of frequency in French, and blinking when the right letter was reached — meaning that he had to compose everything he had to say beforehand. The book is short and mainly describes his life after the stroke, in brief chapters — it’s a series of sessions in which facts, feelings and images are arranged with no wastage of words, but with finely tuned artistry, in such a way that a big picture of a life is created. Recommended.

In the paper today I read about Belgian locked-in syndrome sufferer Rom Houben, who was thought to be in a vegetative state for 23 years, whereas he was aware the entire time. I can’t process what that would be like — it’s literally unimaginable. How would you not go mad? Perhaps you would want to go mad, and be tortured by your ongoing full awareness and sanity. Houben is also writing a book.

Awwww….