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

After rather a long break, I’ve got a story published — The Heart of a Mouse, online at Subterranean.

Jeff VanderMeer gave me the prompt that led to this story, and he was also kind enough to critique it, as was Geoff Maloney. My thanks to them both, and to Jonathan Stephens for sage advice. Check out Subterranean’s catalogue, which includes trade paperback and limited and deluxe editions of classic and contemporary spec fic.

Or maybe I’ll call it Made in Malkuth.

Well, I’ve basically tidied up We the Enclosed, and I’ve been through all the surreal stuff like Maldoror Abroad and other bits and bobs, including some poems that I want to include, and there isn’t much left to do on all of those. Heart of a Mouse and Saving the Gleeful Horse are too new for me to see what might need doing to them, ditto the story for Baggage, Vision Splendid. I’ll probably wait for an editor’s opinion on those three.

Which means I have four stories to really work on: The Art of Dying, The Love of Beauty, Beach Rubble, and Between the Covers. I want to get them fixed by the end of the year. Yeah, I know that’s a lot of time for four stories, but I know my own sluglike pace, and Preston and I are still working on Book#2, which, I can now reveal, is called The Floating World.

I’d also like to get a couple more new stories down. I’ve only got 73k words, which doesn’t leave much room to cut material, and I think a couple of fresh, not-published-elsewhere stories would be very good to have in the mix. So I could fiddle with them this year and work properly on them next year, and hopefully have 80-90k by mid-year.

In other news, I have plants! Someone was moving house, and I acquired a whole lotta greenery at a bargain-basement 1000 baht the lot, plus ceramic pots. Some of the greenery is rather large; the biggest, a golden cane palm, reaches the ceiling and bends down to overhang the coffee table. We’ve put little paper-lantern party lights in it, which gives a bit of a tiki bar effect at night. There’s also a giant spider lily and an exuberant lady palm, and sundry smaller plants, including a badly sunburnt bird’s nest plant that I’ve put in the bathroom to convalesce (apparently it likes moisture much).

Gillian Pollack has accepted my story (title in limbo) for “Baggage”, an anthology of speculative fiction about the cultural baggage of Australians. It was a hard one to write and I still have to do some work on it. I know I wasn’t the only contributor who found the topic a challenge. I think the story has the potential to be pretty good if I don’t fuck up the rewrite.

Fantasy Magazine has accepted “Saving the Gleeful Horse”, the story I wrote for Vera Nazarian’s auction, and I’ve finished the intros for DEAD GIRLS and ELDRITCH KID.

I’m reading Walter Benjamin and wondering what he’d be writing if he were alive today. I suspect he’d be working for Lonely Planet, sending reams of rumination to baffled editors. Sometimes their red pens would skip a beat and in the middle of a hotel review or a potted history of Canada there’d be left a lonely line about the sadness of a coppery afternoon on the outskirts of a port city or the estrangement of mass instincts from life.

Valentine’s Day means love, and love comes in many forms — including the love of a boy for a girl who has been turned into a doll by a strange (and “strange” is only the tip of the iceberg) plague. By which I mean Dead Girls, by Richard Calder. Calder, who has lately been writing and illustrating a graphical story, Death and the Maiden — initially appearing in Murky Depths, then on its own — is writing a graphic novel version of Dead Girls, with artist Leonardo M. Giron illustrating. Calder has a new website here, with a page for Dead Girls (a composite of sketches at present, to which more will be added over the course of the year).

I’m looking forward to this graphic story bigtime. The novel is linguistically rich — hard to describe, but to use the Maldoror paradigm, as beautiful as the chance encounter, in a library of modern philosophy, of Madame de Pompadour, the Marquis de Sade, and, say, Nancy Spungen. I’m told that the graphic novel will be a different story, based on the book. In Death and the Maiden, Calder successfully welded ludic and brainy language and occasional diversions into history and theory with the graphical format, while moving the story apace, so I’m very eager to see what he and Giron come up with for Dead Girls. Dead Girls will be appearing in installments in Murky Depths.