On the subject of writing, I’m on the home stretch in making a new version of The Art of Dying. It’s been taking a long time, partly because there are four different versions I’ve been hopping between, trying to pick what I like from each one. Boundless opportunities for indecision! I’ve put back some stuff from the original, which was only published in Australia, and I’ve cut out some fancy bits that I liked in themselves but which I decided I liked the story better without. There are no big changes, just tweaking, tweaking. I once did start on a rewrite from the ground up, and it was probably a better written story, but it was also an entirely different beast, and it seemed kind of irrational to change it so much.

One of the temptations is to cut out a campy gothic bit or two. But since the whole story is on the campy gothic side, I should probably leave them in

I was trying to remember how I got enamoured of weird dark cities. I think first bite was probably from Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, especially Sweet Thing/Candidate. (It’s safe in the city / to love in a doorway / to wrangle some screams from the dawn…) Which is a good excuse to post a link to Sweet Thing with Bowie and puppies, isn’t it? Bowie! Puppies! Get ‘em here, thing!

ETA: Most Swedish Chef skits could be metaphors for writing, but this one struck me as especially apt.

I will always remember how writing my story for this anthology was like chewing my own leg off. And I will also remember Gillian Polack’s editorial patience, conscientiousness, and hand-holding.

Not really related to cultural baggage, but Australian anyway: I’m feeling left out. For the past five years my fellow Melburnians, in their boho-bogan way, have been wearing spray-on jeans and calf-high boots (ugg, biker, musketeer, cavalry, take your pick) in the winter. It seems to have become a sort of municipal costume. And I don’t have any spray-on jeans, and while I do have boots, they’re go-go boots that don’t really go over jeans. Do I take the plunge? I’m feeling more and more old hat, even mumsy, in my bootleg jeans over mid-heel shoes. I don’t think I’m even going to have time to go shopping for costumes this visit, but maybe next year, if the tides of fashion haven’t turned…

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

Writing update: I’ve got all but two of the collection stories to the “nearly finished” stage, which means I might have a fact or a quote to check, or a few lines or a paragraph to alter if I can think of better words, but they’re basically done. I hope I can get the remaining two fixed and the new story written by midyear. (I probably won’t finish the new story by then, but the midyear goal has been good for keeping me focused.) The Floating World continues to get written. I’m taking a few days off from story wrangling in order to concentrate on rock ‘n’ roll, porn, and de-lousing my golden cane palm.

“Baggage”  is, in brief — in Gillian’s words — a speculative fiction anthology that examines the stories and other cultural baggage that migrants have brought with us to Australia over the last 200 odd years. She also says: “If you think Australian culture is all about neighbours and mateship, you may find Baggage distressing.”

My migrants came to Australia between 120 and 150-odd years ago — recently enough that we’re still in contact with cousins in Scotland on my father’s side, but long enough ago that we can’t claim to be anything other than Australian. And we’re white Anglo-Celts, as invisibly, pervasively mainstream as you can get. So I had to think about what kind of cultural baggage we might have, and settled for what I knew or thought I knew we had, since I wasn’t able to go back to Oz and do any research on things I didn’t know about.

This was without doubt the hardest writing job I’ve ever had. If I hadn’t agreed to do it, and if I hadn’t been so dead keen to be part of a project that dares to be about a big and complex and sensitive topic, I would have given up. I’m very happy that I didn’t give up. I’m proud to be in this anthology and I can’t praise Gillian enough for her great patience with me as I repeatedly stressed out. Hecatombs to you, Gillian.

And I’m still nervous, perhaps because I’ve been told what to think about cultural baggage by academia and the media, so that it was difficult to put a whole bunch of very educated people’s opinions aside and tell the story I wanted to tell; and there was always the terror of clumsily saying something I shouldn’t, or not saying something I should, and that terror is now echoing on, probably quite irrationally, now that I can’t make any more changes.

This story became very important to me as I was writing it; it’s by far the most personal story I’ve ever published, and there’s a fair bit of true material in it. It preserves a couple of our family tales, and I’m glad about that. And looking at the list of who’s on board (below), I can’t wait to have my own copy of what I think is going to be a great book.

Here’s the table of contents (note that Tessa is in it too!):

Vision Splendid — K.J. Bishop
Telescope — Jack Dann
Hive of Glass — Kaaron Warren
Kunmanara – Somebody Somebody — Yaritji Green
Manifest Destiny — Janeen Webb
Albert & Victoria/Slow Dreams — Lucy Sussex
Macreadie v The Love Machine — Jennifer Fallon
A Pearling Tale — Maxine McArthur
Acception — Tessa Kum
An Ear for Home — Laura E. Goodin
Home Turf — Deborah Biancotti
Archives, space, shame, love — Monica Carroll
Welcome, farewell — Simon Brown

There are now electronic uncorrected proof copies of Baggage available for review. For more info, please visit Gillian’s blog here.

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.

I was talking with Gillian about this a while back, and promised I was going to write something, and never did, because I didn’t have a lot of evidence to bring up, just general impressions and personal experience. But now someone else has written about it, so I can nod and say, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that about women, too.” Not all women, but plenty enough. And obviously not all guys are topped up with self-confidence, either. But when I think about myself and confidence, my first thought is that I had it when I was a kid, and somehow lost it. I don’t know whether that’s a common thing for women, but I wouldn’t mind comparing experiences, if anyone wants to.

I remember being a sassy little thing with a pretty good opinion of myself. And my mother (sorry, Mum, for dragging you into this, but you went through this bullshit too, and worse than me) often told me that I was arrogant, and that I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet. So I learned to be coy. And we got that message at school (an all-girl school), too. Or rather, mixed messages. We were told not to hide our lights under a bushel (bushels, trumpets, wild ran the commonplace metaphors), but we were also told not to boast about ourselves, which somehow warped into not saying anything positive about ourselves. Which perhaps warped further into not thinking positively about ourselves. Say “I’m dumb, I’m not that good, I’m ugly” enough times, even out of false modesty, and you might start believing it. You certainly don’t get in the habit of putting yourself forward with confidence that someone might actually be interested in you for reasons beyond sex.

I think we were taught to be modest, also, for reasons to do with sex. “Bold girls” who “put themselves forward” were somehow “not nice” and were not “ladies”. Yes, I was brought up to be a fucken lady, mate. Not that many of us at school were particularly ladylike, but unfortunately the one ladyish lesson that we did seem to take to heart — as I see it, anyway, looking back — was the one about not drawing attention to your own accomplishments. You were supposed to be pleasing — your thoughts focused on the pleasure of others, not on your own advancement. Which is all very well in purely social situations, but not so helpful in the world of work. But while our educators and parents (it was the 70s and 80s) were all for us having careers, and did what they could to ensure we were prepared academically, perhaps they didn’t give so much thought to preparation for the non-academic side of work — the side that’s less about ability than chutzpah, and which includes the art of mining social occasions for career opportunities (which may start with something a simple as telling someone you’re a writer, rather than just mentioning your day job). I don’t know if the early education of girls, at home and at school, has changed much. I don’t get the sense that it has, really, but I’d be very interested to hear other people’s views — and I assume there must be differences between countries and cultures.

But while I learned early on to project a coy manner, my actual inner confidence didn’t sink until puberty, which is so normal as to be hardly worth mentioning (though it shouldn’t be normal) — but I’ll stick this idea out: becoming a woman just isn’t as cool or empowering as becoming a man, because of the way we’ve constructed ‘man’ and ‘woman’.  And in the first years of womanhood, just as you’re maturing, you’re also at your most desirable (at least in the current culture), and therefore your most vulnerable. When you should be becoming a person, you’re sweet sixteen and all too easily become principally a sex object, or a rejected sex object; either way, your subjectivity takes a hit. There’s so much media emphasis on women’s appearance, and so little on women’s accomplishments, that if that stuff gets in your head, your accomplishments can start to seem unimportant, even worthless. In my case, at least, that attitude took hold and stuck. I saw myself as an object for a very long time. (I know this happens to guys too, but my impression is that women are in more danger of losing their sense of personhood in the teen years.) Once you see yourself as an object, it’s as if you don’t exist. It’s pretty hard to find the will, courage, or even desire to promote yourself if you’re not real — if you’re abject, if you’re the very opposite of important — in your own mind.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in that I haven’t had to promote myself much. Because when I started writing I couldn’t have done it. I was taught to wait for others to notice you, and that was exactly what happened. Next time I have to do it, I’ll be able to — but that’s partly because I’ve now got some sort of profile and won’t be working from square zero. But my story is pretty unusual. I happened to have a weird book ready to publish when weird books were enjoying a surge of popularity. When I first tried to get a publisher for TEC, back in 2000 or 2001, my early efforts failed, and I didn’t know what to do next. I thought I had a pretty cool book, but when the couple of publishers who seemed the best bets (and who took unsolicited manuscripts) and one agent I’d met turned it down, I got stuck. I knew I ought to get an agent, but I didn’t know how to begin finding one. I knew there were lists, but how to choose names from the lists? And, good God, so many of them were in New York. Why would an agent in New York be interested in a random Australian with a strange book? (So a bit of cultural cringe there, as well.) The thought of contacting a writer and asking “Who’s your agent?” would never have occurred to me. The notion of bothering someone else like that, intruding on their time, would have been D: D: D:. In fact, even the thought of contacting an agent was pretty scary — not so much because of fear of rejection, but more a general sense of unworthiness, as if I didn’t even have the right to try to get someone’s attention and have my voice heard, especially by a citizen of New York. (And there’s another thing: seen and not heard. Is it still the case that women are to be seen, and men heard?) In short, I wasn’t confident enough to do the self-advertising and persevering that it often takes to get a first book published.

Anyway, I got noticed — eventually by Jeff VanderMeer, who is not only great at promoting his own work, but is a generous promoter of other writers. But there was a whole lotta luck involved. Without that luck, without the attention and effort of people — starting with Geoff Maloney, and most of my helping hands have been male — who steered me first to Prime Books and then to major publishers, I’d probably still be sitting here with an unpublished book — unless I’d grown some confidence somewhere along the line, and I doubt I would have. I started to grow confidence when I got published, not before. And it grew slowly, and I think it’s still a work in progress. And I remember that when I was first given real, practical help, I was astonished. I could hardly get my head around the fact that someone thought my work was worth their time. And that attitude didn’t come from put-downs in the past, since I’d had a lot of praise for my work at school (art and writing); but while praise is nice, it isn’t half as good as help. Tuition, mentoring, initiation into professional networks, all the stuff that can actually bring results: that kind of real, practical assistance is the petrol to which praise is the car wax (lovely and validating though praise is). And I wonder — do girls get as much practical help, from birth to adulthood, as boys do? Does our society truly have as much goodwill towards girls’ ambitions as boys’ ? Do we want girls to succeed in the public sphere as much as boys, and show it with our time and our wallets, not just our words?

So I guess I’m just wondering about women and the confidence to self-promote. If you’ve got it, how did you get it? Could you imagine a scenario where being a pain in the arse might have a positive outcome? Would you mind being a pain in the arse to get what you want, or would your self-image revolt? Could you lie to get a job or a place on a course if you were pretty sure you could live up to your own boasts, and could you live with being caught out in the lie? Have men supported your ambitions? Have women? Am I asking the wrong questions? And guys, what do you think?

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.

Why am I writing this? Well, I have a story to correct, it needs lots of little fiddly adjustments, and I have to do it fast. So I’m running from not my worst nightmare, but certainly something that makes me wish there was a drug to make you very calm and very alert at the same time. And smart. Smart would be good.

As I’ve said, I do believe in those spirits and daemons — or at least, I choose to believe in them because it’s how I experience the writing process, and I don’t think it would help to try not to believe in it. This belief rides along with the caveat that I don’t even know what I am, or what my consciousness really is, or where it is; so that to say “they” seem external is to say that they seem external to something the nature, location and  limits of which are unknown.  So I believe in what seems to be and in what appears to work, while in the background there’s the allowance that I don’t know what really is or how it works.

If they are separate or even half-separate from us, I wonder how they perceive us. When we write about fairies and such we tend to assume they can see our world clearly, get about in it easily, and communicate with us whenever they choose. But perhaps we’re as unclear to most of them as they are to most of us; perhaps only some of them are walkers between worlds — magicians amongst their own kind — and perhaps even those adepts have difficulties from time to time. Gilbert’s anecdote about Tom Waits telling off the muse for sending him music while he was busy driving suggests that if they’re there, they may not all be quite au fait with our human reality as we perceive it. Perhaps they can’t always perceive our physical motion in 3D space; they might only perceive our motion in thought. When we create ritual space we create a particular pattern of motions in thought; perhaps in addition to preparing our own minds it’s like shining the Bat Signal to them.

What I do know is that it’s possible to feel that they — perhaps I should call them fairies — are terribly close, as if they were just on the other side of a glass partition, and the feeling that they are there and the knowing that you can’t get through the partition can be crazy-making. Or if you get torn between the other world and your own — it’s like the scene with Pan in The Wind in the Willows. And unlike Kenneth Grahame’s gentle Pan-Pashupati, you can’t expect them to make you forget, “lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure.” Speaking for myself, the awful remembrance fades — but it takes time.

Gilbert talks about the letdown after the visitation, and makes the wise point that you can still go on — you have your own powers to draw on, after all, and they may be greater than you think. (Edit: maybe her example of a North African dancer possessed by God for one night isn’t quite apposite for a presumably secular or near-secular audience, because that guy already has a faith; he may well feel bereft the “morning after”, but he doesn’t have to wonder what it was that possessed him, and he can expect to meet it again at the end of his life, which must be some consolation.) But if the visitation comes before you’ve discovered your abilities, or if it’s very strong, you might need a while to dust off and get back up. For people for whom the external genius feels real, it may not be so much a psychic security blanket as a wild carny-man who takes you to see the strangest things in tents and then has his way with you in a wagon painted with eyes and signs and pulled by a balrog. Or you may at least have to do some negotiating with it, so that you can keep a foot in both worlds. Then it can become a dance, a game, a ludic play — but it begins with acknowledging that while the whole thing may be a joke, it isn’t bullshit.

I don’t know whether, if you really feel your work comes from within, you could talk yourself into believing it comes from without, even for the sake of mental peace, if such would be brought about. I’ve written one or two things that feel a good 95% my own. If something else was helping, it was helping very subtly most of the time. In the event of those stories not working out, it would be hard for me to palm the blame off on a supernatural being. And even when the work feels only half or less than half your own, there’s still the matter that you’re the one turning this inspirational stuff into readable (by at least a few people) stuff. If “they” are the rider, you are the horse, and you, poor dumb animal, might shy at jumps or want to stop and eat grass, or really act up and throw the rider — and since you’re a conscious, thinking horse, you own those mistakes, is how I think of it.

I also wonder how much the high rate of mental health problems and suicide amongst writers can be blamed on ego issues directly related to writing. Virginia Woolf was manic-depressive and heard voices calling her to “do wild things”. Yukio Mishima wanted to create the perfect body and then destroy that body for Japan and the Emperor. These problems are of a different order from performance anxiety, one would think. Or you have Charlotte Perkins Gilman who recovered from serious depression and eventually suicided (self-euthanased might be a better term) because she had cancer — nothing to do, seemingly, with her being a writer. The jury is still out on the nature or even the existence of a link between madness and creativity, and on why writers — or the published writers that have gone on history’s record — are statistically prone to suicide. Perhaps the very act of writing leeches reality from life, transferring the life into the work like the soul of a sorcerer into a magic stone, making suicide a less unthinkable response to suffering. Obviously, it also isn’t hard to see how the self-employed, irregular, work-anywhere life of a writer abets a self-corrosive lifestyle — you can’t be soused at 9 am if you have to be in the office.

That said, I agree entirely with Gilbert that it is probably very healthy not to see yourself as some sort of almighty Author. We all process our culture and experiences into our work; we’re all products of our influences and our genetics. Keeping that in mind might contain the ego and its anxieties just as effectively as believing in gods and daemons. Which isn’t going to help out with the social, financial and physical health problems that may go with the writing life, but at least one area will see improvement. If you actually do experience creative inspiration as something supernatural — and belief may open the door to experience, or to a game that seems very real — there’s no guarantee that feeling yourself haunted by ghosts, ridden by the loa, fucked by a succubus, bitten by a duende or otherwise whirled into the mind’s Waterish Witchland will improve your sanity — though it certainly adds a level of interest to life, and perhaps may be recommended on that score alone.