Down to the last two stories for Mad Ancestor — and yes, they’re the oldest ones. They’re the hardest to tweak because they’re the furthest away. But although I was a different person when I wrote them, was I a different writer? Yes and no. I haven’t lost my love of the gothic and the fancy, I’ve just read more books and learned how to write in other styles. My tastes haven’t changed so much as multiplied. So I can still go back there and write in that style, but when lines don’t work, I find myself struggling to come up with new lines that keep faith with the story. I end up having very pedantic conversations with myself.

Take the first line of The Art of Dying. The 1997 original, which I put back in the Mad Ancestor beta version:

“Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of tragic fame, lay in a fold of angular limbs on tasselled brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking-room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

I have two problems with this. It’s unwieldy (too many adjectives, clunky rhythm), and what does “lay in a fold of angular limbs” mean? I know it means she is angular and she is folded up, but I don’t think it’s that well expressed.

Skipping over a version or two, the first line in the New Weird version goes:

“Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

Losing “tasselled” helps. We don’t need to know that much about the cushions, and the word is a messy lump of consonants. I’m not sure about “lately”. It adds context to the situation and a more distant tone to the narrative voice, a hint of irony or impending irony — but it weakens the phrase as adverbs are wont to do. “Lay where her friends had placed her” — I don’t mind that, although Vali is her lover, and perhaps it’s a bit odd to refer to a lover as a friend. Swap “friends” for “companions” and you have extra syllables and a weaker word. The thesaurus doesn’t help.

Recent ideas: “lay in angular disarray/disarrangement” (hmmm…); “lay folded in her mink coat” (few words, handy visual, means what it says, might be a goer — I don’t love “mink” and “brocade” so close together, it makes me think of a home furnishings catalogue, but it does go with the decadent vibe); “lay in mink-wrapped ruin” (gah, no); “lay in a place not entirely of dishonour” (stop it, KJ — I might like the line, but the aim is to renovate, not rewrite, so let’s not drag the sentence in any new directions).

I’m trying this: “Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of tragic fame, lay in her mink coat, folded and frail, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking-room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

Rhythm’s ok. Has visuals. “Folded and frail” separates “mink” and “brocade”. I’ll have to change the later “wasted towards frailty”, but that’s ok. “Wasted towards debility” would work.

And that’s just the first damn sentence.

As I’ve said to myself before, I need to stick to a plan of changing it as little as possible, and using as much of the original as possible, since I did like it and so did other people. However, there are additions in the New Weird version that I’m fond of, e.g. “Illness, allowed to run rampant, had repaid the favour with curious gifts.” On the other hand, that line tells the reader right away that Mona has allowed herself to get so sick, spoiling the surprise in the flashback. Between the nice line and the surprise, I think the surprise is more important.

Talking it out like this is helpful, actually. And it’s not like I have these problems with every line in everything I write (ok, I do, but… no, really, I don’t. Just most lines…) — but when a line isn’t working, I can get very stuck. I should have a routine checklist: Meaning, relation to rest of story, structure, rhythm, strength, tone. Of course, improving one element can muck up another. Sometimes I like to screw with meaning — let the words take a detour around meaning, or make a strange jump — so there’s also the question of where I can get away with doing that. (Not in a first sentence.)

I have less of this sort of trouble when I use first-person POV, I suppose because the POV character limits the options for what can be written, so that there are fewer decisions to make.

Concept scribble, style inspired by Alastair. Fonts: The King & Queen font, Ornamental Versals.

And back to Bangkok again. I didn’t get absolutely everything done, but while I was in Australia I made a fair bit of progress on That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. There are two stories that still need some TLC, and one that just needs a decision about the ending and a small shuffle at the start if I can make it fit.

It’s hot. If April is the cruellest month, I think of May as April’s eagerly thuggish henchman. Dim Sim was around yesterday — nice to know he hasn’t forgotten me, or rather, the food with which he associates me.

I happened across the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which requires only one sentence. I wrote a whole six. I <3 inchoate ideas. Inspired by the shrines to the gods of the local land in Chinese-settled parts of Bangkok. Not a factual representation of history or lore, though I’ve been told that the street gods were originally sea gods.

***

Seen only by the cat that slept beneath the shrine at the street’s end, the god of the street flowed out of her abode—a vermilion box, adorned with auspicious sayings in gilded characters, well-provided with offerings of food and drink, and bedecked in the beauty of jasmine flowers—and assumed a warrior’s shape, a curved broadsword in her hand, ready to battle any ghost or fiend of hell.

All over the city, wherever the people still kept shrines, the gods of the streets did thus, night after night.

In the olden days they had been sea gods. Their people had brought them off the boats that would never turn home, in their shrines–for where a shrine goes, a god goes–and implored them to guard the families in the new land.

Here, they were gods of streets.

Here, in this humid and hot country, where all manner of evil and rotting spirits collected in the steamy air, they had learned how to fight.

(closeups on several god vs. ghost duels, then zoom out to epic top-view scene of hundreds of such battles…in an alternative life, I make this movie!)

Somehow I ended up on this page about fabliaux, Medieval French comic tales. Naturally, I wanted to read about “the knight who made cunts and arseholes speak”. There’s a short verse excerpt, after reading which I went searching for, and found, the whole thing, translated into English prose by Dr Helen Nicholson. Heartily recommended to lovers of ribald comedy!

I wasn’t that happy with Hearts & Guns as a title for the story collection. It’s snappy, but doesn’t give any sense of fantasy or strangeness. I’ve decided to use a line in one of the poems and call it That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote.

I’m getting there with the beta edits. Maybe one day they’ll name a snail after me.

Also, reading Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, a historical novel based on the life of Doc Holliday, mainly when he was in Dodge City, before Tombstone. A great pleasure to read, will be sorry to finish it.

The Brass Gardens of Winterhouse Street

is a book that begins and ends in Winterhouse Street, where the sky is draped in clouds, and the houses robed in ivy.

Very often, the reader is wearing gloves—of, for instance, white velour stitched with brilliants, or of grey kid that has absorbed an odour of buring lavender, or of navy-blue silk, once having belonged to a surgeon-priest, and delicately soiled with the overflow of sacrificial operations.

The book dreams of the reader’s gloves. One could say the book has a fetish.

If the reader’s hands are bare, the book will imagine a suitable integument in which to encase them, such as the velvet of a peach or the caecum of a saint.

The book is really a demon, as all grimoires and many books of sacred scripture are.

It is bound once in black leather and twice in chains.

Bookbinders, too, have their fetishes.

The book, or demon, contains the whole of Winterhouse Street, and the gardens, which are named for the statues of brass that the demon once swallowed, having been tricked into thinking they were human beings.

The human beings of Winterhouse Street are retired, or just tired, functionaries of the demon’s immune system. They are prone to being prone; they prune a little, and swear by prunes.

Strangers roam the gardens, always wearing gloves of fine or strange stuff, always looking for a way out that does not lead to Winterhouse Street, always forming secret societies with claims to privileged understanding of the world, for which knowledge they torture one other in sport and in earnest.

The pale functionaries, watching if they happen to be awake, are as entertained as their constitutions permit.

Some of the foreigners adopt outwardly the custom of Winterhouse Street and spend their days in bed, in desperate silence, attempting to free themselves by means of astral projection.

Mrs River was a character I came up with when I was trying to write another book after The Etched City. She’s an old lady who decides to run away to sea. She was inspired by Marian Leatherby in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, who has adventures in a strange institution for the aged. I wrote quite a lot about her, but couldn’t think of a plot. I got in a tizz, then in a funk, and discarded her story.

I recently went digging for Mrs River material. I think she might live in the world of Saving the Gleeful Horse, with the White Ma’at and Prince November, and chalk downs and market gardens and canals. And I have some tenuous ideas for a plot, which might see her doing something other than running away to sea.

This is first-drafty, but I like it. I had forgotten how much I did like it.

It was so easy, Mrs River thought, with things in the garden. Just put seeds in, and something remarkable would grow. She wiped her eyes on her apron, looked up, and saw the full moon and the Gillespie sign glaring at each other across the sky. And as she looked from one to the other she suddenly felt the woozy sway of vertigo. Her left knee bent, her gumboot slipped, and, arms flailing, she fell backwards onto her bottom on the grass.

That did it. She wasn’t hurt, but the shock brought on tears. As she sobbed she talked to herself. ‘Just have a good cry,’ Mrs River advised herself. ‘Have a good cry, you great big silly sausage. Silly, weak old sausage.’

When the crying eventually stopped, like a clockwork mechanism winding down, she hauled herself up with the help of a thick, low branch of the peach tree.

As she rose, her gaze met the flowers of the datura, glowing with a thin and bitter prettiness in the moonlight.

‘And what are you gawking at?’ she snapped. ‘You sly, you bad-hearted… Lord Ichabod.’ Still gripping the branch for support, she turned her attention to the prickly pear. ‘Or you, Old Bother?’ She even rounded on the peach tree, which had helped her. ‘Or, for that matter, you, Lady Burden?’

Unable to imagine from where these peculiar names were coming to her tongue, but finding a queer sort of fascination in uttering them, Mrs River stood and addressed the plants of the back garden. Firstly, feeling bad about having spoken to them in such an angry way, she gave apologetic smiles to the datura and the prickly pear, and patted the trunk of the peach.

‘Now you,’ she said to the aloe, ‘are Old Penance. Blood plums, you must be Lady Luncheon and… John Torn of the Heart. You morning glories are the Queen’s Ears, and you geraniums are obviously the Queen’s Fleas. Hibiscus, I think you are Lorna Peru. And lawn, if you can hear me, you are the Lagoon of Venus.’

Other objects started to draw her attention. She moved away from the tree and stood in the centre of the yard to speak to them. ‘Compost, you are certainly Old Blimey. Watering can, I know you’re Beckoning Darcy. And you, rake and hoe, you are Calypso Jake and Adagio Joe.’

Once started, she was utterly unable to stop. She walked around to the front garden, and instantly knew that the guelder rose was the Gluewife, the carnations were collectively the Canticle of Soap, and the roses the Phrygian Prophets. It took her a minute to think of something for the hydrangeas, but she was pleased with the name when it came to her: they were Evening Cheeses.

When eventually she went back indoors, and after she had taken a moment to change into a clean dress, Mrs River went around the house. She bustled in and out of the rooms, She bustled around the house, words banging on her tongue like unexpected visitors at her front door. They were so rapid and so many she had trouble keeping up with them all. The roses on the wallpaper in the hall became the Fortunes; the rose-glass goblet was the Praise; Black Toby already had a name; the ivory horse became Saltimblessed, the bisque children the Quadrascals, the galleon on the plate the Speed of a Star; the sitting room clock was Mrs Whoop-de-do, and the wooden clock in the kitchen was the Emperor Botulism. All mirrors in the house were the Misters. The white toilet, receptacle of reverence past, could be the Mother of God, Mrs River carelessly decided.

It was necessary for her to find a notebook, in which she wrote down these names and all the others she came up with. The notebook itself she named the Importance, and knew instantly that the pen she wrote with was called Mirabila. She felt less that she was guiding the nib than that the funny words were dragging it along.

Words?

The word ‘words’ didn’t feel quite right.

Names?

They didn’t feel exactly like ‘names’, either.

They were… they were…

…Sudds, she wrote, and felt so satisfied with that that she penned the initial ‘S’ and the last ‘s’ with swashbuckling flourishes.

It was well past midnight when she finally fell into bed, worn out by her work.

Yesterday I wrote 4000 words. That’s a lot more than my usual. I was wondering why I get so tired of writing, and it occurred to me that because I tend to work slowly, I might be like someone carrying around a heavy suitcase for a long time. There’s effort involved in just mentally holding onto material for that long. I forget things, make piles of notes, lose notes, change my mind, etc. — I waste a lot of energy.

So I decided to try writing fast. Not blurting, “bad writing” fast — it still took me about 10 hours to do those 4000 words — but fast as in, if I wrote like this every day for a month, I’d have a first draft of a novel.

I can only write in that steady way when I know what I want to write — what events occur, what the emotional content is. Too often I don’t know what’s happening, simply don’t know what I want, other than perhaps a certain atmosphere. And I can fiddle around for ages trying to create that atmosphere in a scene, and then plot blows the atmosphere apart. That has been happening with Gunpowder Tea. I’ve been finding it very difficult to get plot, the mechanics of the non-real world, emotion and atmosphere all playing nice together. I’m beginning to wonder whether there are certain atmospheric textures that are damn near impossible to create as sustained qualities in a fantasy world — or at least, a fantasy world with magic or supernatural elements — because the fantastical itself destroys them. It’s a bit like having the light filtering through a shoji screen, and going ooh, isn’t that nice and mysterious, and then a dragon charges through the screen. And the dragon is awesome, but the mysterious, suggestive light is gone. Anyway, the piece I was working on yesterday is mainstream, no fantasy whatsoever.

(ETA: Or maybe the problem is that I sometimes get enamoured with the texture of a film — the whole atmosphere created by colours, lighting, music, the ratio of dialogue to silence, and want to recreate it with the written word, and run into difficulties.)

(ETA 2: Of course, the problem just might be my magpie mind. I get the shoji screen, and then I just have to have that horse with a lamp on its head, and put it in the same room!)

Done it — finished the story collection, still with the working title of Hearts & Guns. It’s about 76,000 words and covers material from 1997 to 2010. It includes most of my published short fiction, a new story, and some odds and ends of poetry and ultra-short things.

Generally the older the story, the more I’ve revised it, though I’ve tried not to go overboard (and I brought The Art of Dying back closer to its original form than its other revised versions).

It does need beta reading. If anyone would like to volunteer, please email me. I’ll have your babies reciprocate any reading/critique.

ETA: Thanks everyone who offered, I’ve got enough now!