A nice beginning to the year: The Complex Chinese edition of The Etched City (蝕刻之城 — “shi ke zhi cheng”, I think — hope I’ll be able to find out how to say it properly), is out from Fullon Books in Taiwan, with a way cool cover — and a promo video. (Technically it’s out on 7th January, but it’s available for order now). Complex Chinese covers Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, though not mainland China. Translations are exciting and wonderful things, and I feel enormously lucky to have had my work published in other languages. And it’s really a thrill to be published in Chinese — a thrill from the bottom of my DNA, because I feel like a butterfly has taken my pollen to a distant garden. Where it might get blown away by the wind, or washed away by the rain, but hey, I’d rather just think about the butterfly. So a toast for the New Year to Zhou Pei Yu, who translated the book, and to translators everywhere. And a second drink to Gray Tan, my agent in Taiwan, and Danny Lin, who recommended the book to Gray, and to Fullon Books and the cover artist, whose name I hope to find out — I really dig that picture.

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New Year plans and resolutions:

Last night was fun. Watching fireworks go off behind tall buildings is strange — at first you can’t see much, then as smoke fills the air the coloured flashes light up the smoke. Had a conversation with a guy who taught motorcycle riding, with the consequence that my major New Year’s resolution is to take the motorbike taxis less often and limit my use of them to short rides down quiet streets or very congested sections of main road (which used to be my rule, but I got a bit blase last year). What he had to say about falls and injuries was a timely reminder that Motorbikes Are Dangerous. Terribly convenient in this city, but this year I’m going to try to allow enough time for cabs and Shanks’s pony instead.

My other resolution is to read a book a week. Last year I probably only read one a month. I’ve gotten started on this — read Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala last week, now reading Radical Alterity by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume.

Travel plans: Australia in March and maybe again in October or November. Hopefully Kathmandu and surrounds for a week in February.

Writing: Still working on new material for the collection. It’s getting there. I’d really, really like to have this thing sewn up by midyear. The Floating World is the other major project. I won’t be taking on anything else — unless for one reason or another it’s irresistible.

When I looked at this c.1916 picture of Elasmotherium, my first thought was, “Fuck, it’s a really-truly unicorn!” (More recent pictures look more like woolly rhinos.)

The artist, Heinrich Harder, made a lot of pictures of prehistoric animals. Arsinoitherium had a particularly badass head, but as a mostly aquatic swamp dweller it can’t be a candidate, rather to my regret.

Elasmotherium may have survived into historic times. 10th century traveller and writer Ibn Fadlan describes an animal that matches Elasmotherium’s description, and gives this colourful account of its behaviour: “Whenever it sees a rider, it approaches and if the rider has a fast horse, the horse tries to escape by running fast, and if the beast overtakes them, it picks the rider out of the saddle with its horn, and tosses him in the air, and meets him with the point of the horn, and continues doing so until the rider dies. But it will not harm or hurt the horse in any way or manner.”

Glyptodon and Doedicurus match up with Kirby’s suggestion of an armadillo. Glyptodon looks rather round and slippery for riding on, but Doedicurus had a dip behind a hump in the shell where a saddle might go — and the hump was possibly a fat store like a camel’s. It also had a wickedly spiked tail. I can imagine it surviving a bumpy fall, which would be a bonus.

Waiving the issue of domesticability (I think that already got waived with the centipede), it comes down to a bit of a dance between ambience and narrative ideas. While I want to avoid a big-lipped alligator moment, I’d also really like to have a beast that can do more than break its legs/neck when it falls.

No, I don’t know why I’m getting so obsessed with this. Wait, yes I do. I’m not sure how to write the scene after the one I’ve nearly finished, and research is the noblest form of procrastination. Gulp.

Collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie. Like botanical illustrations from dreamland.

Extreme embroidery by Angelo Filomeno. More here.

Right, back to researching yurt construction, alpine steppe flora, and various ways of hurting yourself when you fall off a cliff. I’ll probably use about 0.01% of the info I find, but it’s sort of nice to have it all available so that I can choose details to include without wondering whether they’re realistic or not.

Some things I don’t worry about, like large-scale geography. My fantasy world, such as it is, is made of overlapping mythic territories, and geography and climate are subordinate to that, but I like each individual environment to work on its own terms. And I have to decide what tradeoffs to make between ambience and practicality — e.g. in this case a horse is being ridden where a yak or Bactrian camel might be more practical, but maybe I just want horse-ambience — though if I want the mountains to be alpine desert, like the Kunlun Mountains, which was my original idea, it might have to be a yak, since I think you’d have to carry a ton of feed on pack animals to get a horse through — or let your horse go hungry. Buy feed from herders? Maybe, but why are herders living in a poxy alpine desert when there’s probably a nice grassy steppe a couple of thousand feet down? All these things can be worked out, but they take a bit of thinking. And in a short story there isn’t room to go into detail. Maybe there are mining towns; there’d be feed for the pit ponies, but I want a somewhat otherworldly ambience, and mining towns don’t really go with that.  Or maybe they do? A donkey is technically an option, but the story starts at the winter solstice and has one other sort-of-though-not-really Christian element, and a main character riding on a donkey could underline the wrong idea. (Llamas and alpacas are right out; wrong ethnic feel and not strong enough to carry an adult rider very far, it looks like — even though llamas eat lichen, which would be perfect for the alpine desert.)

Get caught up in trivia, who me?

Edit: Having just looked at Alex’s blog, I feel inspired by the donestre. Carnivores can go quite a long time between meals. What sort of carnivore? Maybe an enormous giant centipede, which I guess comes to mind because I have a friend who has done battle with two pretty big ones in real life. But that really would change the ambience… and it needs to startle at a noise enough to throw its rider, and I somehow doubt a centipede would; but since the creature is in the realm of utter fantasy, it could. But is a domesticated giant centipede way cool, or way silly…? My inner child thinks it’s cool, of course… and it could actually be very useful in the first part of the story… I don’t know if I can resist. It might just have to be. Unless it really screws up the ambience.

So, the editors of Publishers Weekly have made a list of their top 10 books of 2009, and they’re all by men.

“We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” they said. “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male,” they acknowledged fleetingly in the middle of a paragraph of self-congratulatory rah-rah.

Well, it disturbs us here at Chez Bishop, too. Frankly, we are disturbed like Darth Vader was disturbed by Admiral Motti’s lack of faith. If only we had Jedi powers.

Lizzie Skurnick’s essay contra PW’s list is worth reading, particularly for her description of one awards-deciding process, in which, she says, “we have…called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.”

The trouble is, we’re not yet in a position to say that we can ignore gender. (Or race, or culture, or sexual orientation.) Our biases are deep as shit. As The Mumpsimus puts it, ‘ There is no objective, essential “best”. There is stuff we like and stuff we don’t — texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as “great”.’

Which is why I think we probably ditched affirmative action too soon. Patriarchy still informs our tastes and appetites, and we can’t evade it any more than we can evade our own genes.  And it may not just be a matter of taste regarding the books themselves. Skurnick writes: “It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”

Which is even scarier, if it’s true, because it doesn’t speak just about a cultural tendency to prefer men’s writing but a tendency to cut men more slack, to wish them more success, to extend them more compassion and goodwill — in short, to love men more than we love women.

In the interests of honesty, I have to say that I’m a woman who has been helped, encouraged, and promoted by men. I’ve had so much male support, I should be able to insert something witty about jockstraps in here, but I’m getting over a bit of food poisoning and ask to be excused from wit. At any rate, it’s not on my own behalf that I complain. Or rather, it is — if I ever succeed in writing this book I keep failing to write, the one with all the women in it, doing womanish things, though not having affairs, because that would be too sensational.

On to the second part of this post, which is much more ruminatory…
Lizzie Skurnick writes about a group of awards judges finding texts by men “ambitious” and texts by women “domestic”, and rewarding the former even if they fell short of their goals, though the latter may have been better written.

Assuming that this was not the only time that such a finding as been made, it raises some troubling questions. Like, do women actually tend to be timid, preferring to do a good but limited job, where men might take a wild risk? Or do we fail to see where women have been ambitious because the ambition is disguised? Do we simply prefer sloppy-ambitions to skilful-safe because the former seems to inject more new material into the cultural meme pool? Or do wild ambitious works by women go unpublished because publishers know that women’s writing within certain safe bounds is saleable, but when it comes to work that shoots for the moon, the reading public is more likely to look favourably on the flawed efforts of a not-quite-genius man than a not-quite-genius woman?

Perhaps a real genius, a woman who can shoot for the moon and hit it, has equal chances with an equally brilliant man. Or maybe not — maybe there are women out there shooting for a different moon, and finding that no one cares.

As I say, ruminations. Questions, all of them hard to answer.

Coming out of hole to say that Last Drink Bird Head, awesomely imaginative flash fiction for literacy, is available for pre-order:

What Is Last Drink Bird Head?

That’s the catalyst editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer provided to over 80 writers in creating this unique anthology, with all proceeds going to ProLiteracy.org. All each writer got was an email with “Last Drink Bird Head” in the subject line and the directions “Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head? Under 500 words.” The result? Last Drink Bird Head is a blues musician, a performance artist, a type of alcohol, a town in Texas, and even a song sung by girl scouts in Antarctica. Famed designer John Coulthart did the interior, which features bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, so that the antho is also a flipbook.

Cover image:

Order Page

As I said in my earlier post, the contributor list is awesome. Having been given permission to include teasers in this advertisement, my piece is actually 5 short pieces, one of which is a poem that starts like this:

In the land of the thundercloud
on that most open of pinion ayeways, that scraaa-aa-apes down
from Hrim Town of the iron filing cabinets, iron horses, iron heads,
longbows, curfews, depressions, down to Hum,
known for its many used Tarota dealers
(& the astonishing aerial ballétopétomachia, held every June at the Grand Opera),
the goondas’ silver trail, the high and cold
gutter down the roof of the world,
which the gamblers call Rue Misère Ouverte or Miserie op Tafel Straat,
and the shills—not a damn one that speaks except in tongues—
call the Dill’s Doodweg—passes through Last Drink Bird Head,
where the deciduous Marquis, to prove
that a white Borsalino was the real thing…

(The Marquis, Borsalino held over heart, smiles winsomely, bats a silver-sugared eyelash, and whispers that you might like to buy the book…)

* * *

While I’m out of the hole, I’m looking at artist Melli Ink. Glass skeletons, insects, savage plants…  And at the bottom of this page, the poem Blue Horse, by Masako Takiguchi.

I was going to go back in the hole and close comments off this post, but changed my mind. In case comments help sales, or the Marquis needs to say more, or something.

Some of you may remember that Batman lives in our building (Milord met him in the elevator — there is obviously no batpole here). Well, Milord has also seen and identified Batman without his batsuit — he teaches martial arts somewhere in the office section of the building. Yesterday, just outside the construction site across the street, Batman disarmed a guy who was waving an apparent gun around, threw the gun onto the roof of a building, and held the guy down until the police arraved. The gun turned out to be a replica — available on the street here — but hey, it’s nice to know that if the gun had been real, it would have been out of play thanks to Batman. I just wish he’d been wearing his suit at the time of the incident.

Speaking of gunmen, last night I dreamed I was revising The Art of Dying, but it was live action, and Gwynn was wearing a floor-length pink chiffon peignoir over his damask tailcoat. There was some argument about the peignoir, although I can’t remember whether he was in favour of ditching it or keeping it. And his hair was up in an elaborate Edwardian do — probably inspired by Milord having returned from a trip to a friend’s village with his hair in a beautiful braid arranged by a nimble-fingered child of the family. The braids I do are very workaday in comparison — perhaps I need to go to a hairdressing workshop!

On last Friday afternoon I opened the file on the current draft of what I will call that book – the one I’ve been trying to write since I finished The Etched City, the mainstream or very nearly mainstream one.

And it occurred to me that I’m sick of not writing this book, and that I won’t have the stamina to keep on not writing it forever.

I wrote 1500 words in the morning, spent the afternoon with a friend, then went back home and stuffed around. Then, at night, when I was tired, the muse turned up in all his glory and said that if I’d write another 1000 words before bed, he’d come on board for the project.

I wrote the 1000 words. Then he dropped the bombshell: You, O worthless slave, he said, will have to write 12 000 words a week, if you actually want to write the book, instead of not writing it yet again. A matter of momentum, he said, and keeping track of things and maintaining coherence.

I asked him, Will there be much redrafting afterwards?

He laughed and said, You know the drill.

His timing — I have to say, and he agrees with a ruthless grin — sucks. I have The Floating World, and Hearts & Guns or whatever it’s going to be called, and some paid work coming up, as well as teaching (not that that takes a great deal of my time, but right now I have a student on whom I have to spend more time than usual out of class).

But does His Excellency care? I should say not. Caring, he says, is for women and cattle. Or something like that. Right now, it appears, is when he can squeeze me into his schedule. So that book and I have been getting reacquainted, to the tune thus far of some 18,000 words.

And His Excellency the Muse? He is sitting resplendent in silver and blue atop a pile of skulls, all of them mine, relics from all the past lifetimes in which he has killed me in one way or another. Wineglass in hand, he is reading a book by some better writer than me. Indicating a minion who is licking the very soles of his boots until they shine like black mirrors, he infers — baring aposematically luminous vampire teeth — that my lot could be worse.

I can hardly feel him helping me, either. But I’m too afraid to stop writing in case that scarcely perceptible sense of his attention, not so much inspiring as disdainfully commanding, is, for all its icy unloving barely-thereness, necessary.

Bastard.

Flash fiction! Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have curated a collection of flash fiction, Last Drink Bird Head, to be launched at the World Fantasy Convention this year. All proceeds go to literacy charities.

This is the contributor list:

Daniel Abraham
Michael Arnzen
Steve Aylett
KJ Bishop
Michael Bishop
Desirina Boskovich
Keith Brooke
Jesse Bullington
Richard Butner
Catherine Cheek
Matthew Cheney
Michael Cisco
Gio Clairval
Alan M. Clark
Brendan Connell
Paul Di Filippo
Stephen R. Donaldson
Rikki Ducornet
Clare Dudman
Alistair Duncan
Scott Eagle
Brian Evenson
Eliot Fintushel
Jeffrey Ford
Richard Gehr
Felix Gilman
Jon Courtney Grimwood
Rhys Hughes
Paul Jessup
Antony Johnston
John Kaiine
Henry Kaiser
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Tessa Kum
Ellen Kushner
Jay Lake
Tanith Lee
Stina Leicht
Therese Littleton
Beth Adele Long
Dustin Long
Nick Mamatas
JM McDermott
Sarah Monette
Kari O’Connor
Ben Peek
Holly Phillips
Louis Phillips
Tim Pratt
Cat Rambo
Mark Rich
Bruce Holland Rogers
Nicholas Royle
G Eric Schaller
Ekaterina Sedia
Ramsey Shehadeh
Peter Straub
Victoria Strauss
Michael Swanwick
Mark Swartz
Alan Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky
Sonya Taaffe
Justin Taylor
Steve Rasnic Tem
Jeffrey Thomas
Scott Thomas
John Urbancik
Genevieve Valentine
Kim Westwood
Leslie What
Andrew Steiger White
Conrad Williams
Liz Williams
Neil Williamson
Caleb Wilson
Gene Wolfe
Jonathan Wood
Marly Youmans
Catherine Zeidler

(Fangirly squee for being in a book with Rikki Ducornet, whose The Fountains of Neptune is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.)

And a word for Neglected Topiary, a book of music for which I can’t find any samples, so that you may wonder why I’m mentioning it at all. But listen to this description:

“…the pieces may allow listeners to gradually form the impressions of a repertoire of music, in turns ceremonious, mannered, sentimental, and whimsical, with all of the internal consistancies and differences encountered in “real” repertoires, not like Pinnochio trying to be a “real boy” by learning to behave well, but like a topiary animal in a forgotten garden, which is ultimately no more real than the observer wants it to be.”

I found this paragraph so evocative that it started creating music in my mind, to the visual accompaniment of a film that never was — a grey film wandering between stormy days and quietly cloudy ones, in which the topiary animal, subject and obedient to the laws of  melancholy, inevitably returns to the natural form of a tree.

Well, of the four stories I’d given myself to the end of the year to tidy up, I’ve done two already, more or less. I don’t know if one of them’s going to make the cut, but right now I need it for the word count, so it’s staying. The Love of Beauty shouldn’t take too long, since I can’t really muck around with its storyline, only cosmetic things. The Art of Dying is a different kettle of fish, so obviously I’m leaving that till last.

I definitely want at least one new story, and I’m working on two, so hopefully at least one of them will come through. But I do suck at coming up with ideas — just about every story I’ve written has been in response to a prompt. (Yes, I need a fluffer.)

So, I’m shamelessly soliciting prompts! If I use your prompt and the story gets written and ends up in the book, you’ll get a free copy, signed and personalised with an illustration. And my undying gratitude. And I’ll throw in some chocolate if you want, too.

I love resources like this. Did you ever want to know the proper word for a decorated arch keystone, or those little brackets that run around under cornices, or the water-collection box that discharges into a downpipe? Here they be, at Roberta Barresi’s illustrated architecture glossary. For a more in-depth coverage of medieval art and architecture, there’s a dedicated glossary here.

While I’m linking, some of you might enjoy this short essay by Hakim Bey on Imagination. Bey makes the point that in modern culture, imagination is mediated through “specialists” such as actors and writers, and is not democratically shared. On books, Bey says:

Books appeal to “imaginative” people, perhaps, but all their imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with a book, letting someone else tell the story. The magic of books has something sinister about it, as in Borges’s Library. The Church’s idea of a list of damnable books probably didn’t go far enough–for in a sense, all books are damned. The eros of the text is a perversion–albeit, nevertheless, one to which we are addicted, & in no hurry to kick.

If the eros of reading (as I take Bey to mean) is a perversion, I wonder what the eros of writing is?