(no subject)

Today is just a little bit warm and so I plan to spend it melted. I have chocolate to make for friends and was thinking I could just let it sit outside for a few minutes and it would melt quite perfectly.

The odd thing is that it really isn't impossibly hot. I have the aircon on right now in the loungeroom, for my computer sulks when the temperature inside goes above 25 degrees, but outside is only 31 degrees. It's not the level of heat: it's the nature of it. I discovered this years ago. I'm much better off when it hits forty than when it's in this range. So I shall puddle now and be strangely chipper in February.

When it became almost unhot last night (technically it became quite cool last night, in fact, but there was no breeze, so the coolness was more theoretical than in my flat) I caught up with Aurealis stuff. It as a real catch up this time. I've now entered everything I have been sent onto the judge's spreadsheet (our panel has a spreadsheet this year, with many columns!) and given scores and comments to, I think, 46 books. I have maybe ten more minutes on the spreadsheet today (for I forgot just one thing) and then I'm caught up until I've read some more.

I woke up at an unholy hour to close the windows and checked my email and my BiblioBuffet article was there, with comments from my editor, ready for me to think about. So that's done.

I forget what remains in my day (except that it's a lot, for today I enter my "how much can I get out of the way while things are quiet" mode. I need to go on a bear hunt. No, a list hunt. It's too hot for bears.

KJ Bishop visits

I'm rather lucky. I got to edit a short story by KJ Bishop. That's led to this, via a circuitous route. And so you get a guest post, introducing her new book and the e-book of The Etched City (which is such a glorious novel).

Gillian (sharing her good fortune)

Hi folks. Many thanks to Gillian for lending me her blog. I promise to leave it just as I found it!

Product placement first: I’ve just published That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote, a collection of short fiction and a couple of poems. It’s currently only available as a Kindle ebook, on Amazon and Amazon UK, but I plan to put out a print version next year, one way or another.

All the stories are in some way fantastical, ranging from hallucinatory surrealism to human dramas tinged with the strange, taking in fantasy, fable and science fiction on the way. The collection includes Aurealis Award winner ‘The Heart of a Mouse’ and two stories in the world of my novel The Etched City.

I decided to go the self-publishing route for the ebook as an experiment. I formatted the book myself and also did the cover. Most of the stories are previously published, but I wanted to polish/revise them for the collection, in which I had the indispensible help of beta readers (of whom Gillian was one).

The title comes from a line in one of the poems: ‘handsome twits and twats from that erotic book your mad ancestor wrote’. If I’d left ‘erotic’ in it might have given the wrong impression, so it’s just ‘that book’. ;-)

The Mad Ancestor took on a life of his own in my mind. He’s on the cover, in a frock coat and gas mask, taking a creature for a walk. I think of him as a whimsical, more benign relative of Gwynn, the gunslinger, dandy and walking troublespot from The Etched City.

Gwynn had been around in my head for a long time before I wrote the book, in one guise and another. As some people know, for a while he seemed to be an almost tangible ghost whose presence I could feel when he was around and whose voice in my head, though not actually an auditory hallucination, felt strongly distinct from my own thoughts.

Lately he’s been back again, though as a less palpable presence.

He appears twice in Mad Ancestor, in the previously published ‘The Art of Dying’ and in a new story. In the latter he’s going by another name, but I’d be surprised if The Etched City’s readers don’t recognise him. Some people might be surprised at the position I’ve put him in in the story, but he’s nothing if not an actor, and it was simply a role that he wanted to play.

One of Gwynn’s own literary ancestors, the incomparable Maldoror—created by Isidore Ducasse, aka the Comte de Lautréamont, in Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-9) —also has a story, ‘Maldoror Abroad’, which I wrote as a love letter to Ducasse’s book. I urge anyone with a love of surrealist literature, or of bad guys and antiheroes, to try Les Chants de Maldoror for yourself. It’s a reading experience quite unlike any other. The proto-surrealism of Ducasse’s writing grabbed me and never really let me go. Fiction is famously known as ‘the lie that tells a truth’, but surrealism doesn’t have to lie. As I see it, surrealism expresses the truth of whatever is in the mind at the time—wherever the mind wanders to—and I find the surprises inherent in that mental journeying make surrealism a fun way to write.

And then there’s the Marquis. The Marquis floats around the edges of my thoughts, making quick appearances here and there (he turns up three times in Mad Ancestor), though I’ve never gotten past an early draft of a proper story for him. He’s supernatural, perhaps a demon, or one of the Unseelie Court—a third brother to Gwynn and the Ancestor. I hope I’ll find a way to write more about him in future.

The idea of the fairy or spirit world has a perennial appeal for me. I’m enchanted (literally?) by the possibility that there really are other beings—fairies, angels, the dead (who knows how to name them?) inhabiting the same space as us, unseen by most of us, but perhaps not unfelt.

In Thailand, where I currently live, the belief in a spirit world is widespread. Most houses have a spirit house, and ghosts are frequently sighted. And in Australia, a more secular country, Aboriginal beliefs nonetheless mark the land with the presence of powerful spirit beings that inspire wonder and provoke questions about the realities of different worldviews. But it was the six months I was fortunate enough to spend in England as a child that really gave me the idea of an Otherworld as a lifelong keepsake, since almost every weekend we went out and visited some location of significance in legend or history. From that experience I retained the feeling of ghostly and imaginary influences lingering in the physical world; and where to draw the line between ghostly and imaginary, I’m not sure.

Many of the stories in Mad Ancestor include in some way the idea of a mythic, supernatural or imaginary world having a presence in reality (not necessarily our own reality, but someone’s). The idea of a story world intersecting with reality is particularly charming for a writer, I suppose, unless the story world is horrific—though even that may suit some people’s tastes.

One can follow the Buddhist logic that the individual self, which feels so real, is an illusion. Therefore, is a dreamed-up character any less real than the writer? And what about characters with long histories, who have survived through hundreds or even thousands of years, their stories retold and altered and used as inspiration for other stories, bandits becoming heroes and then gods, gods becoming fairies and then demons, gods and angels being recast as evil spirits by conquering peoples? If those characters were real (let’s say they are, somewhere in spacetime) what would they be like?

Whatever else my Mad Ancestor is, I think of him as a walker between worlds, in one way or another—appropriately enough, since an ancestor’s existence stretches across time and the dimensions of memory and story.

Thanks for reading these meandering thoughts of mine. Gillian, thanks again for letting me post here. Best wishes to all,

KJ Bishop

P.S. Returning to Gwynn for a moment before I go, I’ve been writing a story set in Ashamoil, prior to The Etched City, on my blog. Since it happens before things in the city started getting very strange, it has a different flavour than the book. It starts here, and subsequent posts can be found on my blog by searching for ‘fragment’. Also, UK rights to The Etched City having reverted to me, it is now available as an ebook on Amazon UK.