Madame Lenora’s turban was a sizzling pink, and she was fat again.
‘You’re fat again,’ said the Marquis, before seating himself at the table in her legendary tent.
‘Your head is fatter. The usual?’
‘The usual,’ he affirmed, containing a sigh. He still felt woozy from the warding glyphs placed among the pictures on the tent’s painted exterior. They couldn’t keep him out, of course. But they could let him know he wasn’t welcome. Except that he was, for the same reason a fly is welcome in a spider’s web. It just wasn’t a personal welcome.
He watched her hands while she shuffled the cards. It was awful, but he couldn’t make himself look elsewhere.
Each fat black finger was decorated with a ring. Fancy costume jewellery, enamel beasts and big semiprecious stones, as flashy as the rest of her costume, and, indeed, his own silver-sequinned jacket. Their kind weren’t given to understatement.
Nine of the rings glowed like little lightbulbs. Only one, on the fourth finger of the left hand, a marcasite panther curled around a moonstone as big as an olive, was dull. Uninhabited.
All nine of his brothers and sisters she had captured. Each capture made her stronger, each imprisoned sibling gave her another suite of powers.
He was one of the strongest of the ten, and he was the luckiest. But he would have to be very lucky to beat her now. Very, very lucky.
The spread suggested that luck was on his side. Madame Lenora’s smile was mischief itself.
‘Well, Marquis?’
He pursed his lips and tapped the head of his cane. This was unexpected. She might lie, but her cards didn’t.
On the other hand…
There was a reason why no one had gone to anyone’s aid until it was too late. Sibling rivalry was the curse of their family. It had taken him a thousand years to start missing one or two of them. As allies they would never be better than unreliable.
Yet it sat badly with him to take no action, attempt no revenge, to be a coward. But the consequence of failure… and there would be no rescue for any of them if he lost.
Madame Lenora, still full of mirth — were fat people really happier? — interrupted his thoughts.
‘How about you try your luck tonight? I’m game if you are.’
It was already over. The moment had passed, if there had even been a moment. ‘It seems I never am,’ he said, trying to be breezy.
Her pity wasn’t a pleasant meal, but he had a cast-iron digestion. He could make something of it.
He put the right amount of money down on the table and returned to his own black leather tent. Several customers were queued up outside, patiently waiting their turn to be flogged and humiliated.
He wondered if he hadn’t picked up some of their quirks of character.

(One-draft ficlet. Madame Lenora has been in my head for years, though I only got a name for her today. She has a cameo as another character in Gunpowder Tea. No matter what she looks like, she always wears these ten fancy rings. I assume they symbolise the ‘jewels’ of a well-developed and balanced nature, but I was thinking about what they could mean in a story, and I came up with this.)

Had a fruitful conversation with Stu about the story. Also drank afternoon coffee, a rarity for me these days, and stayed up in the quiet of night cutting and rearranging. I used to work at night all the time, but fell out of the habit somewhere along the line. I paid for the coffee in only sleeping 5 hours, so will try for a siesta today.

There’s a quote from Kandinsky that rings true for me:

“The artist must be blind to distinctions between ‘recognized’ or ‘unrecognized’ conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone. [...] All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need. All means are sinful which obscure that inner need.”

Or as a pretty fucked up but sometimes wise man said, “Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”

Which sound like pompous things to have in mind when merely writing a story — a thing which shouldn’t be so difficult! — but I don’t think I’ve been watching the trend of the inner need enough in this piece.

That said, a writer is not in the same boat as a visual artist since a writer demands much more of her audience’s time per item produced, with the exception of haiku and limericks. Still, there doesn’t seem much point in writing while ignoring the inner need (unless for good money, of course!), so that the trick is to do one’s will while keeping the audience in their seats — which may involve some deference to the demands of the age and whatever else. (Not even venturing into what deferences may be necessary to sell the work, which obviously applies to visual artists too.) But one can get so concerned about the audience — or so caught up in other people’s ideas — that one mistakes some other thing entirely for one’s will.

Well I’ve knocked the main bulk of Gunpowder Tea (everything before the end) down by 8000 words. I might have to put a few back, or write a few new ones, but I can also see where more could be cut.

I’m giving myself a week off writing to recharge. I’ve second-guessed this story far too many times, and I need to come back to it with a rested mind.

Yesterday I mucked around with the hair on Pan’s legs and tried out two new heads. I’ve tried open eyes, but so far can’t find an open-eyed look that works. Perhaps it’s a cliche, but so far I’m finding eyes the hardest thing about making a face, since you don’t have the colours of the eyeball to work with.

As for the leg hair, I’ve tried showing it in different ways — literal and detailed, abstract and “painterly”, and something in between. I admit my own taste when I make images is for literal representation and detail, perhaps just because of the pleasure of “making it look real”, which I’ve never outgrown (but which I seldom achieve unless I’m copying a photograph with a pencil), or else for a pretty kind of stylisation (and always with the detail still); but I know that when I look at other people’s work I appreciate more impressionistic and expressionistic styles as well. Plus, there’s a limit to what I can do. I could make the hair very detailed, but the legs have to go with the body. Not having a model means I don’t even have a chance of making a figure with all muscles and flesh folds present and correct, so I need to leave some areas simplified — and the hair texture definitely shouldn’t dominate the piece in terms of interest for the eye.

I’ll probably go for the in-between, and ditto on the body, with some areas more more carefully rendered (e.g. face, hands) and others more “painterly”. I need to think about how the metal is going to look. Smooth bronze is hard to achieve and doesn’t suit every piece. A rougher surface is more interesting in itself, but I think I need to do a controlled kind of roughness. Variations in texture are interesting — smooth here, rough there — and I need to think about where I want to emphasise tension, bulk, movement etc.

I’m caught between a currently impossible desire to do something very tightly rendered and realistic, and knowing that it’s more than fine to be looser and more expressive. The deciding factor here is going to be less my will than my limitations. Maybe once I can accurately model a figure I’ll relax and get more adventurous.

Decided on a thingy I had to decide on, and on how to present it, and wrote it, albeit badly. The only question is where to put it. Atm it’s all in one, but I might break it up. I’m nearly at a long action scene, which is at least drafted, after which there’s the ending. I think there’ll be some spakfiller to lay here and there throughout, but not too much. I can hope not entirely without reason that the next draft might be close to a final.

I’m worried that with so much plot (or maybe it isn’t, but it feels like a lot) going on, the characters aren’t getting time to interact naturally. They have to interact mainly through the plot, and I’m not used to stage-managing that. Frankly I find it a bit of a drag. I’m looking for quick and elegant ways to show (or tell, I don’t care — this whole business of showing not telling is but a fashion) their relationships.

I’ve cut a 3000 word scene down to 1500 words, with 1000 words of conversation. Still can’t settle on POV, but it might be easier to decide now I’ve settled on the material. Some of the talk can come later, but it can be brief.

And I made a relationship between two characters friendlier, as there wasn’t room for the conflict that had been there and it didn’t serve much purpose.

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Pub Date: Mid-October; Publisher: Atlantic, Corvus imprint (UK edition)

Foreword: Michael Moorcock
Introduction by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Afterword: China Mieville

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have put together a humungous 750,000 word compendium of weird fiction covering over 100 years and 20 nationalities. More information at Jeff VanderMeer’s website, but I’ve included the table of contents below. It looks awesome, to say the least.

I’m pleased that Australian stories are identified as such. I think Australia has a funny position in the Anglosphere — English-speaking but far from the middle of things, with angles of our own from which we write, even if the material isn’t overtly Australian, and it’s nice to have one’s difference acknowledged.

Alfred Kubin is the first author in the book and I’m the last, which in itself gives me a rather weird feeling. Kubin was primarily an artist and I like his work a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a collection with dead authors before, and it gives me that good old sense of life’s brief span!

Table of Contents

Story order is chronological except for a couple of exceptions transposed for thematic reasons. Stories translated into English are largely positioned by date of first publication in their original language. Authors are North American or from the United Kingdom unless otherwise indicated.

Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 (translation, Austria)

F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907

Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910

M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911

Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912

Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 (translation, Austria)

Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Germany)

Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 (translation, Germany)

Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 (India)

Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 (new translation by Anna and Brendan Connell, Italy; first-ever translation into English)

A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 (new translation, Japan)

Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 (translation, German/Czech)

Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 (translation, Poland)

H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926

H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929

Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930

Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 (translation, Belgium)

Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 (translation, Belgium)

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933

Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 (translation, Japan)

Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936

Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 (translation, Poland)

Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939

Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941

Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942

Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943

William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 (translation, Argentina)

Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 (Benin)

Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950

Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951

Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951

Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 (new translation by Larry Nolen, Guatemala)

Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 (Nigeria)

Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 1953

Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Argentina)

William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956

Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959

Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963

Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Italy)

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)

Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967 (translation, Catalan)

Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)

Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967

Daphne Du Maurier, “Don’t Look Now,” 1971

Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975

Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976

James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976

Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977

Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 (Antigua and Barbuda/US)

George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979

Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980

Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980

Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980

William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981

M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981

Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982

M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982

Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 (translation, India)

F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984

Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984

Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984

Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 (translation, Finland)

Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987

Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987

Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988

Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 (Nigeria)

Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989

Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989

Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990

Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 (translation, Czech)

Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991

Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991

Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)

Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992

Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993

Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993

William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994

Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994

Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994

Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994

Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995

Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996

Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997

Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998

Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998

Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000

Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001

China Mieville, “Details,” 2002

Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002

Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002

Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002

Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003

Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003

Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003

Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003

Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004

Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 (Australia)

T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005

Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007

Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007

Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 (Iran)

Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009

Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009

Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009

K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010 (Australia)

There’s a messy bit in the middle that I need to bully myself into writing properly. The plot thickens, it’s talky, and I’m having trouble with POV and characterisation.

Women are said to be good multitaskers. I’m anything but — at least when it comes to writing. If I have more than one thing on the go I find it hard to switch between them. I also find it hard to get out of art mode and into writing mode, though not vice versa. If I’ve spent all day at the studio I don’t settle easily to writing the next day. My head’s usually full of images and ideas and ways to solve problems and I’m not good at shoving all that aside. (Whereas if I’ve been writing my head is full of doubts and fears and problems I have no idea how to solve, and I’m quite glad to forget about them!) Multitasking with art is no prob, though — there’s no danger of losing track of something you can see in front of you, so it’s easy to hop between pieces.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for sculptures. This week I’m going around to a local furniture restorer (closest thing to a carpenter in the neighbourhood, and I assume they have wood, glue and a saw) to see if they’ll make me some stands so that I can work with pieces on armatures at home. For quite a while I’ve been unsure about whether Bangkok is a good place for me to be, but these art classes make it a good place.

I now have a Goodreads author page:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/217735.K_J_Bishop

Today was a better day. There was just a whole lot I needed to cut. There is too much material in this for a novella, and I’m still convinced that it shouldn’t be a novel. A couple of unnecessary elaborations will have to go, and I have to stop pursuing some lines of thought of the “but what if” variety. First section is now 10,000 words. I’m up to the mushy bit in the middle. I’m tempted to jump straight to the solid section ahead, tighten some nuts and bolts there, and see if some of the material to cover in the mushy bit might fit in naturally there. I hope it’ll be easier to improve the first part in future drafts now that I’ve shortened it — I mean, I at least won’t have to worry about improving bits that are no longer there.

Going to a place in the country tomorrow. Early start!

I’ve made my word count already, so I get to blog.

Maybe writers aren’t meant to express a lot of frustration with or doubt in what they’re writing — I mean, all this blogging business is to create positive vibes around your work, right? — but I need to let it out. This story is kicking my arse so hard I need to wear a rubber tire for underwear. Parts of it are pleasing, I like them, they feel right — but damn near everything I’ve written for the purpose of shoving plot into what were, er, some elusively plotted scenes is bugging me. I feel like it’s not gripping the road. Maybe the plot is all wrong for the… the what? …the thingy? Maybe the plot is wrong for the thingy. Maybe the plot is wrong for the characters. Maybe I’ve tried to jam too much material (not so much plot as ideas, possibly) into a short(ish) work. I don’t know. This story has brought me to tears of frustration more than once. It’s hard to write when it feels as though no matter what words I put down, it’s all somehow going in the wrong direction.

I can’t change the plot or the ideas around it now. I’ve got to bite the pillow, persevere with the story I worked out, just do the best I can with it, then look for feedback. Maybe it’s fine, maybe the good will outweigh or at least balance the bad, if I can’t get rid of the bad. Maybe I’ll have to completely strip and rebuild it. But I really mustn’t think about that.

I’m going to cook some of those quail eggs. I always thought those little eggs were quail eggs, and they are, despite being labelled partridge. Apparently a partridge is the same bird as a quail. (ETA: Ok, they’re not the same. Partridge, quail, I don’t know, they’re little eggs!)

ETA 2: I bit the pillow. I moved a long plotty/expository conversation to what I think is a less awkward place and will look for ways to break it up a bit across other scenes, but honestly I’m not sure that I can; I don’t think it breaks naturally, so it might have to stay as it is. I’m now past 8000 words. Tomorrow’s my art class, so I’ll be at the studio, probably all day, since once I start I tend to want to keep going. Big Pan’s torso and legs are coming along. Tomorrow I want to get the arms right and do whatever else I can.