I got back from Ireland and London this week. Very glad I went — Ireland was great, very green as everyone says, restful, great people, good food. I’ll write more about places we went when I get around to uploading photos.

It was nice being in places where you could go for an invigorating walk. I don’t think there’s any such thing as an invigorating walk in Bangkok. If I walk fast I come home feeling like a piece of chewing gum squashed on the bottom of a shoe. If I walk at regular Thai pace, which is slightly faster than standing still, I come home feeling similar, but without the benefit of exercise. I don’t think I’d have liked the Irish winter, but the Irish summer was very refreshing. The rain it rainethed pretty well every day — all that green comes at a price, I guess — but not very hard or for very long.

My flowering vine isn’t flowering. It flowered when it was just a plant in a pot, no doubt regularly pruned, but once I let it grow it stopped making flowers. So I’ve stuck some ‘flower spike’ fertiliser sticks in its pot to encourage it. Its companion didn’t grow at all, due — I think — to a weed in its pot that turned out to be a chilli plant. I’ve repotted the chilli and we’ll see if vine #2 recovers. None of my plants are really enthusiastic flowerers, except for an ylang-ylang I picked up in a street market. The flowers look weird, like rather ratty yellow sea anemones, but they certainly smell good. Maybe the others aren’t getting enough sun on the balconies, or maybe they need more fertiliser. I bought some bat guano to try — how could I resist a bag of bat shit?

And randomly, some Winnie the Pooh mental disorder gifs by Matthew Wilkinson.

I will get Tea Master finished. It will work. I can make it work. I have the power.

Just giving myself a pep talk!

It’s 30,000 words now, without the end. That means this draft is likely to hit 40,000 after all.

It needs a lot of work still. Not so much in terms of plot, but how the plot is presented — who says what to whom, and when, and how I juggle POV.

And characterisation. Usually that’s the one thing I don’t have to worry about. My characters tend to write themselves. If they don’t, the story, if it gets off the ground at all, doesn’t land. But I’ve had to push characters around in this and decide things for them. Now they have to get comfortable in their roles, and I have to get comfortable with them in those roles, and they and I have to work on presentation — conversation, interior dialogue, mood.

There are also scenes that half belong to older drafts that I haven’t rewritten much, if at all, because there’ll be no point doing that until I’ve got some other things sorted out.

I pulled out (for the 3rd or 4th time!) the plot element that I thought I was finally going to leave in. It was working in some ways, but not in others. It’s one story with it and a different story without it, for one of the characters; it doesn’t significantly change the story as a whole. It needs a supporting bit to hold it up, which I thought turned out to be quite a cool thing in itself, and added to the story — but it (the main thing, not the support) also brought logistic problems and made characterisation harder. I’m still not sure what I’ll do about it. (ETA: I may just have worked out a way around the logistic problem. Or not. Maybe there’s a catch…)

I so wanted to have this finished by now, and honestly, it’s still not that close. And I’m feeling tired. I probably need a breather, but don’t really want to take one. I want to be sitting and writing and feeling things clicking into place as I write. I’m bloodymindedly sure that they will click, because I refuse to have put this much effort into something that isn’t going to work. And there are parts of it that I love, and parts of it that are fine. There are just a couple of biggish locks to pick, as it were.

In the meantime, I am going to have a break, because we’re off to Ireland next week. Although I’ll be taking the laptop and probably doing some work, I hate writing on that tiny screen. I can’t see the little itty bitty words, when I make the font bigger I can’t see enough of the story (having finally got a proper monitor I can’t believe I went for years without one), and I’m not that good at working in a room where I’m not on my own. So I’m not expecting to get vast amounts done. What I’ll probably do is reread, make notes, think, move things around, get a better sense for what’s lacking and what’s overdone, and only do serious rewriting if inspired.

What I will do, between now and then, is properly write the end, or an end. It’s partly written; it just needs some steady jogging-pace writing to make it more of a finished product. I’ve got time to do it, and you never know, the end might help with the middle!

So, er, finally some pics from Hong Kong!

Lantern dragon at the History Museum:

Sparkly dragon pants at the Sunday kung fu demonstration in Kowloon Park:

Beetroot?

A shop selling curios/antiques/junk:

Bruce Lee:

Looking across from Kowloon to Hong Kong at night (there’s a nightly sound and light show where the skyscrapers ripple with rainbow colours and lasers wave around, too):

Pink rabbit-dragons for the Year of the Rabbit:

Topiary dragon at Kowloon Walled City Park…

…on the site of the former Kowloon Walled City, which really needs a post of its own. This is a model at the park:

View from Victoria Peak:

Outdoor escalators — these climb from the commercial district at the bottom of the peak to the residential region higher up:

One of Hong Kong’s very cute trams — you can see how narrow it is next to the bus:

A panda doing what pandas do (at Ocean Park — don’t ask why pandas are at a marine-themed park, all life came from the oceans, ok?):

Panda rests, ponders meaning of life, thinks it has something to do with bamboo:

Giant salamander — I loved this creature, it was like a living stone:

More cool beasties — giant spider crabs:

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…

Just a quick note to say that I wasn’t in any kind of danger during the trouble in Bangkok, and that I’m in Australia now and for the next few weeks. I don’t like writing about political goings on in Thailand, as it’s always complicated and I don’t feel particularly well informed by the English-language news sources. But our part of town is very safe from disruptions, as there isn’t anything there to interest political agitators.

Had quite a good flight, stopped in Singapore for an hour and visited the butterfly house at the airport. I didn’t have my camera with me, but will on the way back when I have a longer stopover. There were some particularly lovely swallowtail butterflies like this one, which looked like black lace with the light behind them.

Flying over Australia, I saw more green than I have for years. Who knows if the drought has really broken, but there has at least been a respite. My parents’ garden is looking great and they have a lawn for the first time I can remember — even if most of it is weeds!

Yukio Mishima’s favourite saint. Inspired by recent trip to boy bar and by Takato Yamamoto. Ink on watercolour paper, quick digital colour. No model except for the right hand, which I think I’ve used in three pictures now! I’ve been drawing this with a fine-nib steel pen, which doesn’t like the rough paper, so the lineart is crap (not that my penwork is ever very good). When I’ve finished the ink and digital colour I’ll probably try painting it for real, which should result in a nice mess .

I’m not sure what to do with the halo. My first plan was to fill it with flowers, but now I think that might look twee. So maybe butterflies and moths (and a caterpillar or two).

Something that I think wants to be an Arthur Rackham tree has started to take root in the background, telling me it wants to be adorned with skulls, devil faces, lizards and other goodies. Guess I’ll be a while on this one…

I’ve got too many pictures from Nepal and not enough will to organise them at the moment, but here’s one as a placeholder. It’s a decoration on a strut under a temple roof. It’s true, God gave rock and roll to you! (And furry sex too, if you look below.)

My internet is so fucked. In case it gets even more fucked, in this brief moment of being able to access my own site, just want to say I’ll be away in Kathmandu from 6th-14th Feb and probably not checking email.

A couple of weeks ago I went with a friend to a town called Mahachai for the purpose of seeing a giant fish market (as in a giant market where fish are sold, not one where giant fish are sold.)

To get there, we took the train from a station across the river. The skytrain now — at last — crosses the Chao Phraya. From the second and currently last station on that extension of the line, it’s a 15 min walk up a main road to what at first glance seems to be a busy little market beside the terminus of a disused train track, but is in fact a station.

I had gone there the day before just to look around, having seen very little of west Bangkok. I went wandering down the railway tracks, browsing the market stalls, bought a couple of pieces of kitchen crockery, and then found a white-flowered bush of a species I didn’t even vaguely recognise.  The flowers smelled like, well, English hedgerow came to mind. Blossoms of the May, and all that. All around was tropical vegetation, and maybe this bush was native to the Southeast Asian tropics too, but the smell took me right out of Bangkok and deposited me in a woodland I know (indeed, the only English woodland I know personally) on the outskirts of London, with oak and holly and bluebell lawns and foxes and distant grey Brutalist housing estates on a grey horizon peeping through the poplar trunks on the forest fringe.

Suddenly missing Old Blighty (though whenever I go there, all I ever do is complain about the cold and the food), I stood there sniffing the flowers like they were full of cocaine, not minding the odd looks I was getting. I had to resist the temptation to pick a few flowers to take home.

Anyway, I knew where the railway track was, and my friend correctly identified the area on which the market stood as the platform of a station (I had missed seeing the clock and the ticket booth they day before — observant, aren’t I?). The train to Mahachai came, and for an hour’s ride (sans cushions, mind you), cost 10 baht — about 30 cents.

Mahachai was a fun place to wander around. Apparently we completely missed the main part of the town, but we found a fish market anyway. What I found most interesting were the pastes — shrimp pastes, I guess — moulded into huge smooth egg-shapes. It all smelled wonderful, of course. On the other side of the market was a river. Fishing boats were working on the water and ferries were going back and forth between Mahachai and a town on the other bank. Half the passengers on the ferries were on motorbikes, which they didn’t wheel but rode directly onto and off the boat, up and down the pier ramps.

No knowing where to go, we had been following a group of tourists from Bangkok. On the other side, they all got into a fleet of rickshaws (real rickshaws, not tuk-tuks) and went…somewhere. So we wandered around, and presently came to a wat with a large glass case in its front courtyard. The case contained an enormous stuffed turtle, festooned with pearls and flowers and attended by a mongoose (I think) and a small mummified cetacean, possibly a river porpoise (below the mongoose(?)’s chin in the photo).

A sign on the shrine proclaimed the turtle to be Mafeuang the Turtle Goddess. The case had wheels, so maybe Mafeuang sometimes gets trundled through the streets — or the wheels might just be for ease of transport for cleaning and upkeep, I guess.

A little further on we came to an ornate Chinese cemetery. The graves were like beds, some king-sized, with voluted and painted surrounds. On a house near the cemetery was this banner featuring Taoist Jesus, advertising a pre-burial body-washing service for unclaimed corpses:

There was a dearth of restaurants in the town, so we ate back at Mahachai, then explored a blingy Chinese temple.  Chinese settlements in Thailand tend to be along coasts and rivers, since trade used to go by water.

On the way back, at the skytrain station, I noticed this sign:

And thus the day closed on a note of ponderable mystery.