It seems The Heart of a Mouse won this year’s Aurealis Award for best science fiction short story. I’m really, really happy. Mouse is feigning nonchalance, but I think he’s quite chuffed too.

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and many thanks to the judges and organisers of the AA’s for their efforts, to Subterranean for publishing the story, Jeff VanderMeer for the batshit prompt that kicked it off, and extra thanks to Jeff VanderMeer and Geoff Maloney for reading the first draft, and the inimitable Kyla Ward for being my collector!

This was quite a morale booster for me, as it reminded me that even though I haven’t built anything resembling a career in writing, I apparently haven’t lost my mojo, however much it feels like it sometimes.

I’ve often felt a lack of mojo in Bangkok, I have to say, but it’s better in the new place. I’m inclined to think that the fact it’s an old area helps. There must be more spirits here, and even if they’re not from my culture, perhaps they don’t mind helping out a foreigner. It’s a Chinese district, so they themselves would have been foreigners too — not to mention that ghosts of a Confucian background might be sympathetic to a person trying to follow the way of the pen. Possibly there are more spirits at ground level, too, as opposed to up in the air where the apartments were. And, of course, there’s the god of the street looking out for us all.

This reminds me of something I meant to say about Hong Kong. When I was on the bus going into downtown Kowloon, the bus went past a Sycamore Street. Now, the story in The Art of Dying (that story that seemed to fall into my head from some mysterious place) begins in an opium den on a Sycamore Street. And this Sycamore looked close to the water — like it could have once been the kind of dockside street where you might expect an opium den to be.

There are also a number of places in Hong Kong named after William Jardine of Jardine, Matheson & Co. One of the main characters in The Art of Dying is Vali Jardine. I love coincidences. I looked up Sycamore Street on the net and found an old map showing that before land reclamation it had indeed been a street behind a dock (the Cosmopolitan Dock in Tai Kok Tsui). I went down there, but it was a respectable and nondescript area, and I couldn’t find much historical info about what kind of street it had been, except that the Hong Kong Ferry staff quarters had been there.

I did go to Hong Kong as a kid, just for a few days on the way to England, so it’s possible I picked up Jardine’s name, though I doubt I’d have noticed Sycamore Street. Anyway, while I was walking around, I had the weirdest sense of feeling at home there in Kowloon. I felt kind of teary, as if I had once lived there, although I don’t particularly believe in past lives — although I do like the idea. I suppose I had stirred myself up. I have to admit, my nostalgia peaked at the archival remains of Kowloon Walled City, though I shouldn’t put too much store by that — it was the kind of place that would fire anyone’s imagination, and it was a nostalgic exhibit on the grounds of the park where the place used to be. Anyway, I went to a fortune teller to ask about it, as you do. She told me that yes, I’d had a past life in Hong Kong — she knew what I wanted to hear, of course, but I’d have interpreted the cards I drew the same way. She said I had met a rich man who took me all around the world, and then we came back to Hong Kong. I forgot to ask what my profession had been. Maybe I was a bar girl. I must have looked a bit freaked out, as the guy who was translating kept telling me not to worry and that my past life couldn’t affect this one. (I always thought the point was that it could). He was a fortune teller too, so maybe he saw something to suggest I’d misbehaved a bit in the life under discussion.

I think Hong Kong is the kind of place which, if you had lived there in earlier times, you would still recognise it, because of its distinctive geography. No matter what kind of buildings go up, the hills would stay the same.

I don’t know. For a short while I went to a group that met for the purpose of psychic exploration. One of the exercises was to look at another member and try to see them, or around them, with your inner eye. While I was doing this with a Lebanese-looking girl I saw (ETA: I mean ’saw’ with mind’s eye) thin black figures moving around her. I didn’t say anything, as I couldn’t see why she would have what looked like black ghosts hanging out with her. Later on, she told the group she was part Aboriginal. Coincidence? Maybe. I perhaps too often find Occam’s razor awkward to lift, as it isn’t always clear what the simplest explanation is. ‘Supernatural’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘complicated’. Maybe there’s just a whole lot of stuff floating on the astral airwaves, all muddled up together, and we pick it up unconsciously through personal affinity — perhaps that childhood adventure in Hong Kong turned something in me in that direction.

Which all leads me to wondering how a belief in past lives might affect one’s sense of identity and one’s politics. Which should go in another post.

18 days ago: I’ve slugged my way to the end of another draft, which is nearly 30,000 words with a rushed ending and none of the bits that have to go between the main bits. (They’re written, more or less; I just have to decide what should go where.) It’s lumpy, but at least there are no yawning holes now. Lumps are better than holes, I do declare. Of the various working titles, the one I’m feeling fondest of at the moment is Gunpowder Tea.

6 days ago: Having dithered over whether a certain plot element was to be in or out, I consulted the online runes, which I interpreted as suggesting that it should be left in. And finally my brain has come up with an idea for fixing something that was bothering me. I’m 11,000 words into a further draft, and it’s starting to unlump, though some of the lumpiest bits are ahead (but, at least, so are 3000-odd words of fairly smooth sailing).

Now: About 20,000 in. There’s a saggy, ratty 5000 in the middle, but I think I know how to fix it. Maybe. Leaving that battle for another day, I’ve finally hit that “smooth sailing” spot. After that, there’s the last third, which needs TLC and one or two firm decisions.

Although it’s set in the same (dubiously quasi-real) world as The Etched City, it’s lighter and more farcical, I think, though whether it’s actually a comedy probably depends on how you define comedy. I saw TEC as something of a comedy. The sections of this one that I wrote first and haven’t rewritten much are more serious in tone, which I don’t think stops them from being read as farcical — it’s entirely up to the reader’s frame of mind, I guess.

This story started off quite differently than it’s turning out. It was going to be an impressionistic, illusive/allusive/elusive little piece. It might still be those “-usives” — I won’t know until readers tell me, as I’m too familiar with it to say how un/obvious or un/graspable it is. I’m doing me best to keep a surreal sort of groundplan while also keeping a plot.

I’m going back to Bangkok in a few days, then to Ireland and (briefly) London in June/July. I’ll have about a month in between. Knowing what else I’ll have on my plate then, I’ll be happy if I can just do a decent job of redrafting the last third. One thing I’m vacillating on now is person. It started off all in 3rd person, then midway through a couple of the characters decided they wanted to have their own say. Which I don’t mind at all, and I think the 1st person interjections add life, but it’s still my job to decide which parts are best in which person. And having introduced 1st person, I think it’ll be odd if I don’t return to it at all, so I’m looking for suitable scenes to rewrite in 1st.

So, plenty of work to do. And that mucky spot in the middle worries me. But if I’m not quite at the top of the home straight, I at least know I’ve got enough puff to finish.

I was going to put this novella in the collection, but now I’m thinking of publishing it on its own, electronically. It might still end up in the collection (whether that’s a print book or an e-book), or published in some other way. I’ll need to think about it.

Anyway, got to finish it first!

A toy!
http://iwl.me/

See which famous writer you write like. Or your friends write like. Or other famous writers write like.

I’m sorry to say that as a result of the collapse of Borders in Australia, Eneit Press, Baggage’s publisher, will be closing down. Copies of Baggage are still available from Eneit, and Tessa Kum’s novella Acception — nominated for a Ditmar, as is Baggage itself — can be downloaded for free here. Go on, check it out!

The finalists for the Aurealis and Ditmar awards have been announced. Thrilled to see Baggage on the Ditmar short list for best collected work, and Tessa Kum’s great story Acception, from Baggage, in the best novella/novelette category. Trent Jamieson, my original awesome editor on The Etched City, is on the list for a best novel Ditmar and both a best fantasy novel and best horror novel Aurealis for Death Most Definite. I’m also chuffed to find The Heart of a Mouse in the Aurealis best science fiction short story category. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Gee, that’s an original title for a blog post, isn’t it? Anyone would think I was a writer or something.

I took a break from Tea Master to work on something I’d set aside a while ago, and one or two other things. Back on Tea Master now, feeling somewhat refreshed and a bit more detached from it.

I’ve also been sculpting (or playing with clay, if you prefer). I’m taking classes once a week at a studio here with a good teacher. I’m working on a wax-clay figure and a couple of smaller wax ones. I want to cast them in bronze — or whatever I can afford, resin and aluminium being options — but I think I can run to bronze for the little ones. I’m also finding out a bit about the colours you can put on bronze — there are quite a lot of options, including white.

I now have a Kindle, which I like quite a lot. Since I’ve been in Bangkok I’ve bought fewer books than I would have if I’d been at home, simply because I don’t want to move fifty boxes of books every time we go from one rented accommodation to another. The Kindle solves that problem. Apart from all the free downloads from Gutenberg, so far I’ve bought Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the 19th Century, by Mike Jay; Dr Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock; and The Devil in Amber: A Lucifer Box Novel, by Mark Gatiss. I seem to be attracted to books with double-barrelled names.

I’m also attracted to these graffiti snails by Slinkachu, Paul Rumsey’s fantastical black and white drawings, the visionary art of Guo Fengyi, and this exhibition devoted to the Black Rabbit, the personification of Death in Watership Down (I’m one of those people who was both traumatised and inspired by the rather brutal cartoon movie as a child — clips set here to more appropriate music than that soppy song Bright Eyes. Eagerly awaiting Tarantino remake.)

This fucking noise

engines motors power tools

will it stop when I die?

And another:

Summer heat, bad sleep –

even a cockroach,

scuttling about at noon

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…

It’s cool (23C, maybe less when I went out an hour ago) and rainy this morning. People are walking around in long sleeves, even jumpers and scarves. If I was in Australia I’d probably be in long sleeves and jeans, but here I still went out in shorts and a singlet. Really cool, fresh-feeling weather is too rare to not enjoy to the full!

I got my hair cut yesterday. I’m growing out the layers I got a couple of years ago. My hair looks nice with layers, but since I nearly always have to tie it up or back for comfort’s sake, there isn’t much point in having them. In retrospect, I asked the hairdresser to cut it too short — there’s only just enough for a mini-tufty ponytail — but now I’ve got a good idea of what I’d look like with actual short hair, which I was thinking of going for, maybe — and I can see that I probably look better with it long enough to go up, so in the long run I might have saved myself some angst. (Although “up” and “short’ probably look similar from the front, they look different from other angles, and I like the way “up” looks…) Anyway, this year I’ll get to revisit myself with simple one-length hair and see if I like it. If I don’t, I can always get layers again.

I’ve finally got a first draft of the tea master story. Rough first draft, though — some scenes are more like scribbly sketches, and I realised as I was finishing it up that I’ll have to alter a couple of plot points, which will affect just about every scene. This story has had me on the ropes so many times! It’s on the plotty side for its length, and it has what I think of as “machinery” (magic or science or metaphysics or whatever — stuff that isn’t to do with human relations). It’s the world of The Etched City, so things are fluid and surreal and affected by states of mind — or the world is a state of mind — but in this particular story there’s a system that exists within that fluidity (or some people think it exists, anyway), so there’s that to fit in; and all the characters have backstory, and they don’t know one another beforehand, and POV moves around, and there’s a personal theme and a related social theme that possibly gets short shrift (on the other hand, I don’t want to hammer it), and then there’s the actual writing, which I don’t want to be swamped by plot and machinery, and etc.. Perhaps it should be a novel, but I’m not sure that it has any reason to be a novel — though I’d quite like to come up with a way to turn it into one — but for now I want to write it as a novella and see what happens.

Anyway, today I’m going to paint apples — as in, paint a picture of apples, having bought two apples of different size and character for the purpose. I know, there’s exotic tropical fruit around and I choose apples, but I have a tendency to try to run before I can walk, so this time I’m keeping it simple!

This tea master story has been breaking my balls so much, I decided to take the first page and write it as a poem. This way I don’t have the constraints of prose and its genres and can write what I like! It came out pretty different from the prose version, though I managed to transfer a few lines. It’s a relief to write like this, heh. It’s just for fun, but I have to say it’s closer to what I want to write than the prose version is.

(ETA: The first 12 000 words are basically done, with some polish to go; but they’re not done, because I don’t like it. I like some sections in themselves, but not the overall effect; I don’t think all the pieces are playing nice together. The rest is getting done, and maybe when it’s all done I’ll see how to make it work. Maybe I can use some of this poetic stuff to break the back of the prose and make it more flexible.) Maybe after I’ve finished the story I’ll give the whole thing a verse makeover! Caer Vandwy and the soldiers of Prydain (Britain) are from this poem.

Dandies are often hungry, of course;
it takes discipline to keep a figure,
and corsets are for sissies who can’t live
from cigarette to cigarette –
but not hungry like this,
body clenched around an eight-day nail,
head light as a balloon:
this is hunger for a poet,
or the poor. Not for the titled

Butcher of Ruthven –
a place on a military map –
a fresh title with yell-hounds and crows
hullaballooing in its wake –
but that was another dream, and he
another dreamer, and Glastonbury
in another book, and Caer Vandwy,
and Arthur.

Gwynn, or Fionn – let him be called Fionn
in the place called Usk (for it needs a name too)  –
could speak poetry, but poetry missed the bus
and lingers in a café in that other place
where the soldiers of Prydain were slain
and ravens creamed over flesh (stet the typo?)
waiting for the pub to open.
So what he says is Worth you useless
supernumerary arsehole.

Less than a page, and already
I’ve got hunger and an extra arse.
What does that mean, Herr Doktor Freud?
Note also ravine ahead!
(This whole damn story’s about tea,
ingesting liquid. For balance
I’d better mention peeing at least once:
characters hate it when you forget to let them go!)
But is the brain merely a switchboard, and writing
the secret work of other organs, older,
more important – was the brain, even,
their invention, so that eating drinking
fucking shitting pissing
could have a conversation?

But I’m digressing.
A dandy must be decorated, so
around the half-blind eyes slow-fading
warpaint, red and black, a splash of Japan;
Mad Max or Tom of Finland leather, sword,
pistols, horse, we’re good to go –
just purblind hungry lost!

Between the gorge walls a plenum of linty gloom
swallows the tired-voiced insult as a bird a worm.
Some landscape, now – vertical, many-cloven,
dour greys of some wild-coast fishing town
and darker fog (some battleaxe
old archpriestess’s stockings, or her vapours…)
Some of the fog might be real: subjective
and objective fog for the price of one!

Some minor war and a condottiere
Baba Denard – lovechild I suppose
Of Bob Denard and Sai Baba, or Muktananda.
Sometimes things just make themselves up.
Worth must’ve been a sidekick, hence
supernumerary in the acting sense:
a gentleman ranker
because I like the term,
companion, guide, coke roadie –
probably an own-right hero
out of Haggard, Buchan, Conrad or Kipling,
playing a corpse here like Errol Flynn
in The Case of the Curious Bride, leaving Gwynn

alone as far from Paris as from Dodge City or Troy
purblind hungry lost unhappy with the lousy trail
and the obedient horse too tired to talk
will walk and walk and walk and walk
and the thrill of falling has appeal
and there’s the matter, too, boys,
of getting it right the second time
for the sake of pride that once knew power
lion-curled around the soul’s delighted tower.