nerves in patterns

and eyes full of tinsel and fire

2012-12-23T11:33:28Z

Well, 2012 was certainly a year that happened. I usually write some sort of reflective thing on the year that was, but I don't have the heart this time around.

Be that as it may, it's my favourite time of year. This festival that is, in theory at least, about kindness and kinship. Peace and goodwill to all men (damn that sentence for just scanning better that way). Halfway out of the dark.

For those friends who celebrate some kind of midwinter thing, Christmas-shaped or otherwise, and are, like me and my little clan, in the midst of preparations, I want to share some things.

My favourite Christmas recipe: these vegetarian 'sausage rolls'. Carnivores, don't be put off by the v-word, these are better than most actual sausage rolls. They are spiced herby cheesy goodness. I make them every year to eat while unwrapping presents.

Two great things from Autostraddle: DIY last-minute gifts and DIY wrapping ideas. I love doing home-made wrapping so much; my own usual thing is to get a newspaper, make potato stamps of stars and trees, and have at it, but there are some even cooler ideas in the link.

And via comments in that second Autostraddle article, I now know about Furoshiki. I am going to try wrapping my sister's presents in this way!

A game: Flap the Kipper. A family tradition is to gather on Boxing Day night, and everyone has to bring a game for the rest to play. The silliest, and therefore best, game is Flap the Kipper, in which everyone gets a kipper-shaped piece of newspaper, and races to flap it across the room - by waving another bit of newspaper, or one's hands, or whatever, at it; the important thing is the kipper must not be touched. As good when you're 25 and drunk on champagne as it is when you're 5 and drunk on plain old Christmas.

For seasonal reading, here is a fun story about the privatisation of Christmas by China Miéville (it's pretty silly, and yet seems a lot less hyperbolic after this year's Olympics copyright shenanigans): 'Tis the Season

And a wish that I'm borrowing from Greg Lake, for anyone who wants it:

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
May all anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart; let your road be clear

What are your favourite Christmas/winter recipes/stories/songs/traditions/things?

Lovely meme

2012-11-28T16:01:58Z

This looks like a lot of fun! Yoinked from tithenai among others.

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I'll give you one sentence from that story.

Help us make VERSE KRAKEN a success!

2012-11-27T12:06:50Z

Hey folks! If I could have a few moments of your time to plug something I'm terrifically excited about...

The absolutely brilliant Claire Trévien (poet, editor, creator of Sabotage and Penning Perfumes, all-round superb human being) and myself want to make an online magazine dedicated to experimental, interstitial, cross-genre, multi-media poetry/art/whathaveyou. We love that kind of stuff and think that it's worth making room for more of it in the world.

We've launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for our first issue - which includes building the website and paying for contents - and in under 24 hours it's nearly reached its target. Which is a) completely dizzy-making oh my god and b) awesome because it looks like we'll be able to move onto our stretch goals of paying more for contributions and throwing a great launch party.

I have really high hopes for this. Claire is an excellent literary poet and among other things we're hoping to straddle the literary/speculative divide - we won't be the only ones doing that, of course, but more can only be a good thing. We want it to be feminist, multicultural, queer-friendly and generally as diverse as possible.

So, please check out our Kickstarter (we're offering some cool rewards), and boost the signal. If all goes well we will open to subs in February, and I hope lots of you will submit - for now though, help us get it off the ground!

Kickstarter link - Verse Kraken: the magazine of hybrid art

THANK YOU

GARDEN PICSPAM

2012-11-23T21:27:39Z

I posted in January about my first forays into growing a (space) kitchen garden, and was all filled up with grand intentions to blog about it through the year. I took photos of everything! But never got around to posting them. That was remiss of me, so here is my ENTIRE YEAR in gardening. It's been a mixed success but I'm super happy with the small harvest I achieved and look forward to doing more next year :)

Late winter:

The balcony of dead things.

The garden, with a plot cleared for vegetables at the back. The thing in the top left corner? Oh, just a WWII bomb shelter. I'm keeping it around in case of an apocalypse. (also it's pretty indestructible)

Inside, baby things are growing in the kitchen:

Tomatoes

Lemon cucumbers

BABY TATERS

Tiny chilli plant

Wee onions

Skip to early summer and we have:

LITTLE COSMIC CARROTS

Golden sunshine tomatoes

Herb garden!

Squash plant - you can see a tiny fruit growing at the bottom

Salad garden, which I built on top of the bunker

Early blackberries om nom nom

And on the balcony:

Lemon cucumber plant

Soon-to-be big red tomatoes

Chilli

Courgettes

And then autumn...

BIG RED TOMATOES

LEMON CUCUMBER

SWEET PEPPERS

SUNFLOWERS

COURGETTES

TATERS

JOY

EVEN MORE JOY

QUINCES

And the one squash that's grown big-ish, harvested today:

I love my garden.

and fire burst and rolled thro' the deep black'ning all beneath

2012-09-30T18:29:14Z

I figure that even if I'm too flaky to post proper updates most of the time, I can put up some photos. So this - I took it when I went for a walk the other morning. Looking down from the hill I live on to the fishing boats of the Old Town, at low tide, with a channel running out through the mudflats to join the rest of the Thames estuary.

I'm so lucky to live where I do, for the views alone. It always looks different. Not usually as Blakean as this!

The New Lizard Adventures

2012-09-16T01:29:34Z

A few years ago, when I was living in Bangkok, I went for a walk in Lumphini park and encountered a lizardfish.

Now that I'm back for a bit, visiting Mum, I've been going to the park as often as possible because it's quite possibly my favourite place in the world. The lizards are part of the reason why. Their lazy bodies that rock side to side as they swim, their perky little dinosaur faces that also, somehow, remind me of cats. Just watching them is tremendously soothing.

Anyway, I was walking around the lake with a friend when I saw a small gathering of people watching something on the grass. We ambled over to take a look, and there was an ENORMOUS water monitor worrying at a dead catfish almost as long as itself.

A bunch of crows (thirteen of them, in fact) were hopping about, hoping to get a bite of the fish, and Lizard wasn't having that. It maneuvered its jaw to the fish's tail, and then started to swallow it whole. This was fine until it got to the head, because monitors have relatively narrow heads and catfish have flat, wide ones. The fish was already partially eaten, so that its head was only hanging on by a flap of skin, but it was stuck nonetheless.

What did Lizard do? Was it daunted by the prospect of swallowing something about twice the width of its own skull? No! It walked over to the nearest tree and started trying to ram the thing down its throat. When it got tired of that, it tried pulling the head off with its claws, and when that didn't work it went back to attempting the tree method.

I could hear a French family on one side of me and a Thai family on the other, having the exact same conversation in their respective languages: "is it eating a turtle?" "no, it's a fish!" "a fish?" "yes, a giant catfish." "woooow."

And the crows were still hangin' round, ever the optimists.

We just stood there, fascinated. I wonder if this is a normal behaviour? I mean, catfish seem to be these guys' main prey. I don't see how our Lizard would have grown so big if it didn't know how to effectively eat one. But it looked so brutally uncomfortable.

We had to leave, eventually, and it was still alternately trying to pull the head off or shove it down via tree-trunk. I hope it triumphed.

art is not an excuse

2012-08-20T17:22:57Z

Remember Weird Tales? I do - not the original original original magazine, I'm too young, but the bloody excellent incarnation helmed by Ann VanderMeer, which published some really wonderful, often progressive strange fiction while remaining engaged with its old-weird roots. It showcased a lot of voices and opinions; it was by turns nostalgic and critical and innovative and totally off-kilter. It was good.

Well, those were the days. The sad tale of the magazine's new direction has now taken a turn for the gut-churningly awful. Heard of Victoria Foyt's Save the Pearls? Here's all you need to know. Anyway, Marvin Kaye, WT's new editor, posted this defence of it today: A Thoroughly Non-Racist Book.

I mean come on, the title of that post alone doth protest too much. Kaye goes on to announce that WT is printing the novel's first chapter in their next issue, and to express a wish that those who have criticised it "acquire sufficient wit, wisdom and depth of literary analysis to understand what they read".

This is disingenuous bullshit, and it disturbs me that I'm seeing the same kind of disingenuous bullshit crop up all over the place - directed at those who critique racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in fiction. It goes beyond the claim of "it's just art" (which is a stifling enough claim, intellectually and creatively, in itself) and into the completely baffling realm of "those who critique on such grounds are incapable of appreciating art!" As if it were as simple as:

If you criticise the racism in this book, it's because you are stupid! Don't you realise it's satire?
If you criticise the exoticism in this book, it's because you are imaginatively stunted! Don't you realise it's beautiful?
If you had your way, Heart of Darkness would be banned! O the slippery slope, O woe is literature!

People, Chinua Achebe wrote an acclaimed essay about the racism in Heart of Darkness four decades ago. That book is still in libraries, is still a staple of university reading lists. It doesn't need protecting! Achebe never called for it to be banned; just for it to be read more critically. Literature students can critique it, argue about it, damn it - and why shouldn't they; what tutor would prefer a seminar without argument? Are those students lacking "depth of literary analysis"? Are they fuck!

These arguments are especially disturbing because I am seeing them come from people who say they oppose bigotry, but who also want to dismiss voices more radical than their own by claiming that those speaking lack imagination, lack an understanding of nuance, lack the ability to see beauty.

As if art floated above everything else, disconnected from the snarling mess of this world. No. It is part of the tangle. And when art hurts people, when it feeds off and into narratives of oppression, why should those who it harms consider artistic merit before their own pain, or anger? Why does expression of that pain, that anger, signify a lack of imagination? How devoid of respect and compassion do you have to be, to believe that?

I like Achebe's response to criticisms of his criticism:

I never said at any point that you should stop attaching artistic merit to Heart of Darkness; if you want to you can. There are all kinds of sophisticated readings of Heart of Darkness, and there are some people who will not be persuaded there is anything wrong with it. But all that I'm really demanding, I'm not simply putting it, I'm demanding that my reading stand beside these other readings... Although he's writing good sentences, he's also writing about a people, and their life. And he says about these people that they are rudimentary souls... The Africans are the rudimentaries, and then on top are the good whites. Now I don't accept that, as a basis for... As a basis for anything.

Thing is, I do understand where some of these cries of "but ART!" are coming from. A resistance to the idea of limiting one's artistic voice, one's range of expression, one's subject matter - I see how that's daunting. I just don't think it's a very well thought through reaction. I think it masks a kind of laziness.

See, another thing I'm seeing crop up a lot, this time in books or blogs about the writing process, is an emphasis on the artistic usefulness of constraints. It's something I wholeheartedly agree with - that experimenting with technical limits (say, taking away features you overly rely on) can push you to produce much better art, because it makes you work harder, think harder. But for some reason, a lot of writers seem to think that only applies to technique, not content. Sure, I'll try varying my sentence structure, and alright, perhaps I rely too much on flashbacks, but attempt to write without exoticism - nevar!

To which I can only say, if you care so much about imagination... well, use some?

To use myself as an example. I know I have a long way to go in cutting problematic crap out of my own work - it creeps in through the gutters of the mind, and it takes work to recognise it, and clear it out. But doing so improves - without fail - the quality of my work. I have to think harder, be better, get more creative, and that's not always easy but it is always good. Which is not the reason I do it. Decency and respect, and anger at systems of privilege and oppression that have poisoned my brain to the point where I repeat their tropes without a thought - these are the reasons I do it. But that is also a kind of artistic integrity, because it's an attempt to drag art a little way out of the tangling bullshit, to resist laziness and ugliness.

Honestly, I see no good reason not to value angry criticism, on moral or artistic grounds. Unless we're happy to hold ourselves to low standards.

I'm sure there are angles of this that I haven't properly puzzled out, so comments are very welcome. Stupidity or derailing will be ignored, because I have better things to do with my tired mind right now.

Assortment of sort-of related reading:

Aliette de Bodard: Worldbuilding, Patchwork, and Filing off the Serial Numbers
Requires Hate: fight! fight!
China Miéville on Tintin, racism, and straw thought police

ETA: The WT entry has been deleted (but screencapped); and they've apologised here - make of it what you will.

Fundraiser for Mary Kristene Chapa's Medical Bills

2012-06-28T18:39:58Z

UPDATE: as rosefox asks in a comment: "Has anyone verified that that donation site is legit? I found this one linked from an NBC story, and they don't seem connected."

I can't find anything; does anyone know? Disabling the link below in case it's not, in the meantime.

Via upstart_crow

Originally posted by wordweaverlynnat Fundraiser for Mary Kristene Chapa's Medical Bills

(Please repost if you're so inclined)

Many of you may have heard about the teen lesbian couple shot in Texas. One of them, Mollie Judith Olgin, was killed; the other, Mary Kristene Chapa, survived but has hospital bills.

A family member has erected a fundraising site for Chapa's medical expenses. If you can do so, I'm sure she'd appreciate the help.

This entry was originally posted at http://wordweaverlynn.dreamwidth.org/572412.html. Please comment here if you want, or there using OpenID. Or send em a message via carrier pigeon or fortune cookie. I'm dying to hear from you.

Cakeforming

2012-06-08T15:23:31Z

I must post this, for it is tremendous. My friend Eleanor, among other things such as being just lovely and also a Word Ninja, makes incredible cakes. Last year for my birthday she made me a kraken, and this year when she asked what I wanted, I tweeted 'SPACE!'. 'I'm not making a lesbians-terraforming-mars cake', she replied, at which I pouted.

And then this happened:

It's based on my poem Terrunform, published in the boundary-crossing and beautiful magazine Stone Telling, and it made me CRY. I cry at everything, but that's beside the point. Alex wrote a while back about the incredible feeling of getting gifts based on worlds you've created. I don't know how to describe it really. I wrote something from the heart, and someone made it in (delicious, edible) physical form, and loves me enough that she (a serious grown-up journalist) would go into a toy shop and ask for their finest lesbians.

Friendship is magic.

Dear Western SFF: stop it with 'exotic' already

2012-04-10T12:04:52Z

Can we strike the word 'exotic' from the dictionary? Or, at very least, from the dictionaries of white Western SFF writers, critics and fans? Before crying Oh No, Censorship, bear with me. And have a caveat: I'm writing about a problem in which I'm complicit, so there's a good chance I'll not do it justice, or get at least some things wrong.

'Exotic' is a horrible, harmful word, and treating it as a neutral descriptor erases the experiences of those that it harms. It posits the value of a place as how excitingly different it is to outsiders, rather than how it's experienced by local people. It allows outsiders to coo over things we/they find sexy or strange, without giving a fuck about their context. It fetishises. It also carries a ton of racist baggage.

Thailand almost never gets portrayed in the West as anything other than Oriental Exoticland. From early travelogues to The King and I to The Windup Girl, travellers and expats sideline the actual characteristics of the place and the experiences of the people that live there in favour of self-fulfilling fantasies about how weird and different it is. This is so much the norm that many Western writers probably don't think they're doing it at all, and nor do their readers. But the assumption that an expat must be able to write Thailand well - by virtue of having lived a privileged life surrounded by imported home comforts and culture - is total nonsense. Living somewhere for a long time doesn't make you exempt, but it might make you think you are, which is a problem in itself. Just because I grew up in Thailand doesn't mean I don't need to constantly educate myself about Thai culture and the way my own culture promotes damaging representations of it.

In Imagining Siam*, Caron Eastgate Dann writes about the circular effect of the Western construction of the exotic East:

“because it is presented in this way by writers, readers expect to receive an exoticised description, and because it is expected by readers, writers feel encouraged, and perhaps even obliged, to fabricate tales of the weird, the exotic and the erotic.”

As both producers and consumers in Western culture, we reward this kind of behaviour, and throwing the word "exotic" around as a positive in reviews feeds the circle, as does pandering to the desire for exotica in writing. How do we break the circle? Not easily or immediately, for sure, but by listening to people whose cultures have been exoticised when they say it's shit, by looking long and hard at how and why we use the word, by refusing to use it uncritically, and not getting defensive when we do and are called on it - we might have a chance.

*which uses Said's concept of Orientalism to look at the way Thailand has been written by the West through the ages - I've just started reading it, and it's not a perfect book (some Anna Leonowens apologism, meh), but it seems pretty comprehensive, and very valuable as the first English-language study of its kind.

Good intentions aren't enough, because they can mask all manner of fail, conscious or un-. Case in point: this weekend, I received a Special Commendation for my James White Award shortlisted story, Train in Vain. This is a tremendous honour, and I'm thrilled and hugely thankful to the Award, its judges, and its supporters. I was happy just to be shortlisted, not least because it’s not the kind of story I usually write - an alternate history spy thriller - and I wrote it in part to grapple with some of the issues I had with the steampunk and spy fiction I was reading at the time. I don’t think I did a perfect job of it, but I hoped I'd written something that worked against the usual portrayal of the British in nineteenth-century Thailand as a "civilising" influence - and was glad that the judges thought such a thing was worth their time.

This is what the Award website has to say about the story (bolding mine):

Tori Truslow’s ‘Train in Vain’ is a compelling tale of exotic intrigue and intricate automata, told in breathlessly vivid and evocative prose. There is no let up in narrative pace in this highly believable blend of fantasy and adventure. There’s wit too, and a hint of darkness amid the exotic imagery. We were desperate to know how the story would be resolved and we’re convinced others will be as well.

Now, this puts me in a rather awkward position. As I said, I'm tremendously grateful to be recognised, but I'm also deeply uncomfortable at the language used here, and I can't not say something. Whatever the merits/non-merits of this individual story are, it's another white-filtered representation of a country and culture that only ever gets represented in SFF by white authors, and this is a problem in itself, but especially so when that writing gets valued in terms of its exoticness.

Am I part of the problem here? Of course. I may not have meant to, but I probably did play into exoticism in this story. I contribute – however inadvertently – to the exotification of Thailand, and instead of being criticised, I’m praised for it. And round we go.

Exoticism is by no means the only problem in Western SFF (meet its mutually-enabling twin, "authenticity"), but it is far too commonplace, and if we genuinely want the specfic field to be a diverse one we need to stop letting it go unchecked. Or all we’ll have is false diversity where self-fulfilling Western fantasies forever drown out other cultures’ own representations of themselves.

Penning Perfumes

2012-03-06T13:54:33Z

Yesterday, I went on a poets’ field trip to a perfumers in Marble Arch, London. I came home with a mystery scent sealed in a silvery capsule, and I have a month to write a poem from it.

The commission is part of a project called Penning Perfumes, the brainchild of Claire Trévien and Odette Toilette. The end result will be a pamphlet and a perfume & poetry evening in June. I’m a bit in awe of some of the other poets involved, and swooningly excited about the whole thing.

The project got off to an awesome start. Les Senteurs has some amazing perfumes, and we got to spend an hour playing with them all. I fell in love with a few: Lonestar Memories by Tauer, a cowboy perfume all whiskey and leather and oil; Cardinal by Healey, which smells like a Roman Catholic church; and Bois Naufragé by Pierre Guillaume – figs and shipwrecks. These perfumes are poems in themselves. If anyone ever wants to get me an expensive present… ;) There were other fun ones: chocolate scents, a rose scent that smelled like real living roses, jasmine and cigarettes, nutmeg and pepper (that one even *tasted* nice). I didn’t love them all, but tried most of them – except for one, the male ejaculate scent, because why would you. (Well, some of us did, and reported that it was… accurate.) Here's the shop, with us playing inside:

I went away with a blank brown envelope, containing my mystery sample and a letter with instructions. I love not knowing what my perfume is called, what it contains, what its story is. All I have is the scent. I have no idea what’ll come of this. Here’s to adventure!

Follow the project using the twitter hashtag #penningperfumes. There will also be a Penning Perfumes blog up soon - watch this space.

Signal-Boost: Help Rose get to Wiscon

2012-03-02T15:02:35Z

Because Rose is awesome and deserves this so much:

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at Help Rose get to Wiscon

Hi everyone. As some of you know, I have been hoping to get to Wiscon this year. to be there and do a series of poetry-related things for the release of the Moment of Change, and the release of the first Stone Bird title (as yet untitled, but it will be a collection of queer poetry from Stone Telling). However, my financial situation does not allow me to go. I have fixed medical expenses connected to my child's disability; as I am the breadwinner in the household, this creates an unstable financial situation for us, where I simply cannot spend this kind of money. I was able to go to WFC last year thanks to my Rannu Fund win, but this is not a recurring situation.

Some kind folks have put my name forward for a Wiscon scholarship, but I have not heard back, and time is running out for me to buy a reasonably priced ticket, register, and register for readings.

With that in mind, I would like to fundraise to cover at least for airfare and registration. If the Wiscon scholarship will come through, that will cover my hotel expenses, and if not, I think I will be able to manage the hotel if everything else is covered. So the minimum I would like to raise is 350$.

If you would like to help, there are two ways for you to help me raise this money. First is to donate. The donation button is below. Second is to bid on a copy of "The Book of Shapechangers." The auction is also below. Note that I will not, realistically, be able to get to this before mid-May. If you are coming to Wiscon, I will bring your copy with me to Wiscon.

Both the donation drive and the auction will only be here for a few days, until Sunday night. Thank you very much for your help and support!

--------------------------------------------

The Book of Shapechangers

The Book of Shapechangers is an artist's book, made as an accordion folder consisting of at least four and at most eight pages with block printed images of people who are shapechangers. The images will be printed by hand upon archival quality artist's paper and bound as a hard cover with decorations chosen by me.

You will be able to choose one of the animals, and I will create a block print accordingly. The other images will be chosen by me. The higher your bid goes, the more images you will get. You can see the style of art you will receive here , as well as my process for creating this art (and please, please make sure you like it, before you bid - I don't want people to be disappointed).

Note: this will be a more modest creation than hani's book, so please bid accordingly.

An even more important note: The Book of Shapechangers does not exist yet. I have ongoing health issues, so please only bid if you are ok with waiting at least a month (and, realistically speaking, more) until this will materialize.

I will make a maximum of six of those books, so the six highest bidders will be able to get one. Minimum bid is 25$.

If your winning bid will be 50$ or higher, there will be words to accompany your image, though I cannot promise you how many or which kind :)

Bidding is open now, and closes on Sunday., 4th of March, at midnight EST.

-------------------------------------

garlic and strawberries (in the mud)

2012-02-29T16:18:29Z

Happy leap day! I think there’s something magic about the 29th of February. The day that doesn't usually exist. A secret day, stolen from time. Just, it should have a special weekday of its own. Lokisday, maybe. It’s warm-ish and sunny and I’ve harnessed the leap-magic to write and garden. Weeded the strawberries, and a patch of soil where I’ll plant some garlic later. I’ve also sown some of my space seeds, but they’re only wee sprout-things yet and won’t get planted out till it’s warmer.

I’ve fallen into my bad old hermity habits again and not kept up with LJ or DW for weeks. Woops. Again. Still think it was a good decision not to have an internet connection at home (except for on my phone and that’s only really good for twitter and quick emails), but I really should make more of an effort not to hermit when I’ve got a lovely coffee shop with free wi-fi nearby. So hi.

Feels like I’m getting better at managing life and my super-fun attention deficit, though. I’m easing myself into a routine and most days it works. I get up at 7-ish (I can press the snooze button like a boss but if I set the alarm for 6:45 I can usually get out of bed by 7:30). I discovered that I write easily and pretty well in the morning, which was sort of a tragic discovery as I hate mornings, but that’s no kind of excuse. If I don’t snooze too long I get to go for a walk. I write, and am managing 500-1000 words before lunch pretty much every day, which for me is TOTALLY AWESOME. And, somehow, I wrote 15K of novel in February! Some of it was even decent! Oh, oh, and I got a workshop booking, which more about soon!

Living by myself is mostly great. Then I do three weeks in a row without seeing anyone and then get surprised when my headspace goes haywire. I sometimes manage to convince myself that loneliness is a kind of perfect beautiful state in which I can exist forever in my flat and drink tea and write and make eyes at the sea and be pure, and I don’t know what the fuck that’s about. So I’m making more trips to London now, even though it’s expensive, because then I might not go crazy.

I also jumped on the tumblr wagon – I’m trillingwire, who else is on there? – initially so I could just geek about stuff without annoying my facebook/twitter friends, but it has also brought Unfuck Your Habitat into my life, which really could have been made for me. And I absolutely fucking adore this idea, but I would need people for that. Meantime I will just try to unfuck my internet habits by using the time I do get at the café to read the good stuff and be more involved, instead of just staring at twitter and reading webcomics.

But right now I have to go buy some garlic so I can plant it. Did you know you can just stick cloves of garlic into the ground and they turn into bulbs?! That’s some awesome Narnian shit right there.

Leigh-on-Snow

2012-02-05T18:18:47Z

It started snowing late last night, after an evening spent in envy of friends up and down the country who'd already had snowfalls. Worth waiting for. I ran outside, even though it was bitterly cold, just to taste it, just to look at the sea - of course, the sea was obscured by snow, and it got in my eyes so I couldn't see much of anything, but it was magical. I went back inside and sat by the window, staring at it and squeaking excitedly to myself.

Woke up this morning to see, of all things, a snowboarding class taking place outside my window (I live on a hill). As well as that, the whole neighbourhood was out with their sleds. The world was bright white and the sea was blue-grey ice. I went for a walk, along the top of the hill and then down to the old town. Everywhere I went there were people out playing, and I didn't see a single person who didn't look like they were utterly delighted. Which in this country is a rare thing. Ended up on the snow-covered beach where the sea-slushed ice rippled against the shore - god, it was beautiful. Today I felt happy to be alive just because it means I got to see this. Photos taken on my phone don't quite do it justice but here are some, anyway.

Leigh was originally a fishing town and still has a thriving cockling industry. This photo shows the area where the cockle boats unload - the shore here is made up of cockle shells. This boat is kind of a local celebrity, the descendant of a fishing boat lost on the way back from the Dunkirk evacuation.

Boats and snow. Snow and boats. New favourite thing.

I saw a lot of jolly good snowmen, and a few creepy ones, and this was the creepy winner.

The beach. I'm pretty darn pleased with this photo, actually.

And finally, because lol...

amagiclantern @ 2012-01-26T19:14:00

2012-01-26T19:14:49Z

Have a cold, bleh, but working, and emerging just to W00T because in the last 3 days I have done a serious plot overhaul and re-plotted the remaining 2/3 of the novel, scene-by-scene, and I love it, and am excited about it , and it is so going to be a draft by the end of summer, it is it is it IS.

amagiclantern @ 2012-01-23T20:45:00

2012-01-23T20:45:56Z

I graduated last week. The ceremony was a dull PR event for Warwick, Inc., but as an excuse to go back to my spiritual home and see my MA buddies and some of my teachers it was great. I didn't get to catch up and annoy ~all my old tutors with my needy fledgling writer blues, but I did get to have lunch with China Miéville, who is an inspiration and a gent. So I poured out my needy fledgling writer blues and he told me the thing I needed to hear, the thing I already knew but was hiding from: stop messing around, and write your fucking novel.

Which is not the right advice for everyone, but for me and in my circumstances, it really is.

I said at the beginning of the year that I would write a minimum of 500 novel-words a week. A nice, low-pressure, easily met target. This is how that's gone:

First week of the year: 400 words
Second week: 250 words
Third week: 0 words

HOWEVER, that's not to say I haven't been working. In the second week, I wrote a 4000-word story draft. Last week I did a bunch of the soul-destroying SEO articles that keep my body alive (and also graduated and merry-made, which re-kindled the soul). These days, when I'm at home, I can wake up at 7 and get up and start working and keep working and write 500-1000 words a day. For several days in a row. I've never been able to do that before.

Why now? Growing up, or practice, or...

A big change occurred in my life over the new year, and I can't talk about it publicly yet, but it seems to have shifted something in me. I'm more focused. I hope this is a lasting change and not a temporary coping mechanism, a way of blotting out my rage and helplessness in the face of things that I can't change. I hope.

But there is no excuse, now, not to spend every free day I have on this novel, this sprawling difficult tribute to the city I love, except for fear. And I told myself that this year would be about facing fear.

So in the light of this strange new ability to make myself get up and work, I think a re-assessment of my 2012 goals is in order. I am going to stop messing around, and write my fucking novel.

amagiclantern @ 2012-01-15T20:23:00

2012-01-15T20:23:47Z

Spurred on by discussion on twitter after mentioning that I was thinking of changing the author photo on my website because I look way young in it, a small rant. It's of little enough consequence to the world at large, but fuck, I am so sick of a) being assumed to be several years younger than I am and b) all the variations on 'it's a compliment'.

It is no fun being assumed to still be in my teens when I'm 24. I know I am young, but getting taken seriously as a woman in my early twenties is hard enough in many quarters, and I'd rather not have people mentally subtracting years. I don't make assumptions about age when I meet someone - partly because I'm just really bad at telling, but also because I know how annoying it is - but I know it's not a conscious thing on many people's parts. There's making a mental judgment of someone's age and then there's being downright skeevy about it, though.

A charming little anecdote: couple of years ago, I went to watch a good friend act in a play. Said friend is a year younger than me, but looks older. I hung about afterwards so we could go for a drink, and he invited me up on stage to check out the set. The director and other actors saw me; the director told me I could look but not "play". Then my friend and I left. He told me that when he showed up the next day, the crew went all "wahey" at him, assuming he'd picked up a teenager; the director mock-berated him: "I hope you didn't take that little girl home". Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Why would you do that? There's so much wrong going on here. Infantilisation, whatever he thought my age was. Snap judgments based on my appearance. Approval when he thought my friend had picked up a high-schooler, what the fuck?

But whenever I complain about things like this, the response is almost always: it's a compliment! you'll be grateful when you're older!

Because no one wants to look their age, right? It's better to look younger, because why? Age is ugly? "You look so young" as a compliment has always creeped me out. Granted, I can't speak for older women, but think I'd rather look like I'd lived all my years, felt all my feelings, thought so many thoughts. I don't know if I'm making any kind of coherent point here, but just, enough already. I'd take it as a courtesy not to be told I'll look 30 when I'm 50 like that's something to aspire to.

looking for recs: art in fiction

2012-01-07T15:00:03Z

I wonder if anyone knows of some good fiction that deals with visual art and/or the artistic process? Speculative, preferably. Art as a player in the narrative, an important thematic focus or filter, or part of a character. Off the top of my head I've come up with KJ Bishop's excellent The Etched City, also Blake, and Alex has recommended me Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss. I'd be glad of more recs.

One of my novel's protagonists, Pine, is an experimental photographer/mixed media artist, and his work is one of the filters I want to look at the city through, as well as being plot-relevant because he's photographing haunted places and we all know how well that usually turns out. I also have a musician/performance-artist character, Kannika, and her art is also about the city, so offers another filter/lens.

I'm wary of luxuriating in imaginary art for its own sake, and aware that this is easy to do ham-handedly and hard to do well. I've already noticed myself getting trigger-happy with the photography/film metaphors. And telling bits of story through descriptions of half-developed photos or projected films is fun but precarious. Experimenting by writing about experimentation and hoping it doesn't eat itself.

I think I love the art in The Etched City so much because it's almost a character in its own right, as well as performing narrative and character-enhancing functions. But it's also very well-described and kind of numinous without being too nebulous. Something to ponder.

But this is a procrastination. I should get back to writing.

space gardening!

2012-01-05T16:23:35Z

One of my projects for this year is to start growing my own fruit and vegetables. It's something I've always wanted to do, and now that I'm more-or-less settled in the south-east and have a fairly spacious back garden, now seems a good time to give it a go. In the autumn I dug up a plot and started a compost heap. My granddad donated a small rosemary cutting and gooseberry bush, and several strawberry plants. I have an aunt who keeps an allotment and now that I'm back in the area will go and see if she has any spare seeds. I know as a beginner I should stick to sensible and straightforward things...

However, the seed merchants of ebay have an awful lot of pretty things on offer. I was mooning over them and then had an IDEA.

So I recently had my second-ever poem published, after a 2-year poetry hiatus, yay! And it's about Mars and I'm very proud of it. When Stone Telling's ever-awesome editors paid me for it I thought I'd buy myself a celebratory drink with the money. But! Then I thought, seeds are cheap, I could get a bunch of packets with this. And when I plant and harvest and eat them I'll know that these things were earned with only the sweat of my back and the ink of my pen, and that has to be an awesome feeling. Then I thought, sensible vegetables be damned, I shall buy SPACE-THEMED varieties, because the poem was about space. Yes, there are several vegetables that fit the theme! If tenuously, in some cases...

So I've just ordered:
Cosmic carrots (they are PURPLE!! and cosmic.)
Romanseco broccoli (a thing of SF'nal beauty)
Lemon cucumbers (they look like little suns!)
Mooli radishes (er, they are moon-coloured? whatevs, I like them)

So, I shall grow science fiction vegetables, paid for with poetry. I hope to share them with anyone who wants to come visiting at harvest-time.

I aim to:

2012-01-01T03:39:43Z

finish a draft of my novel
(write at least 500 words towards it every week)
write stories that challenge me
sell stories
start an online post-MA workshop for my MA peeps
be bold
be true
get involved with local life & arts
grow a vegetable garden
get a part-time job
do more journalism
read well
stand by my people
work hard, but
not beat myself up for going at my own pace

I wish everyone a fulfilling 2012. Onwards and upwards, folks.

Signal Boost: Stone Telling 7 subs

2011-12-26T19:33:44Z

From the Stone Telling livejournal community, a call for submissions for ST 7: the queer issue. Rose says:

We're now open to submissions, and reading for the Queer issue. We want poems with the queer content explicit, rather than implicit; we want to see queer identities or relationships.

Read more about what they want at rose_lemberg's post.

This is exciting.

What I did and did not do in 2011

2011-12-24T09:37:27Z

2011 Goals and what I did with them:

Write a novel draft
Wrote a third of a draft. Lots of research and planning and development. And I'm pleased with what I wrote.

Write, submit, sell more stories
Wrote 4 new stories - by the end of the year I hope I'll have one more drafted. Rewrote and edited several. Also wrote new sections for a languishing novella. Submitted 9 stories, which is less than one a month. 3 stories published, though one was technically self-published.

Read more & more widely
Totally fell off this horse. Prioritised books I was being paid to review. But I did read some good stuff, some of it outside my usual genres.

See more of my friends in other parts of the UK, & go to more local social events
The first I did well enough, the second only somewhat - damn my shyness.

Get more part time work
Did this. Thank fuck.

Keep my brain in check/look into ADD
Trying to get a diagnosis or even just a modicum of respect from a medial professional was a hilarious disaster. Didn't chase this up enough, because painful. Improved my coping strategies somewhat, but they tend not to hold.

Stuff I feel good about that doesn't fall under the above:

Completing my MA. Getting a distinction in my MA. Because hot damn. Even more than that, though, the comments I got on my Long Project, and from my tutors in general. Especially China. Because *___*

Publishing an anthology of MA stories. It wasn't a perfect project, but a good learning experience, especially the fundraising and publicity work, and organising the launch. I could put that experience to good use with some energy, if I find a hidden stash of it somewhere...

I think I've come on a fair bit in my writing. I don't have much finished work to show for it, but I have experimented a lot, challenged myself, and thought well. I am not satisfied with the level I'm currently working at but I can feel myself pushing towards a level I can be satisfied with. A totally unexpected thing that happened is a renewed faith in my abilities as a poet. I had kind of written myself off as a poet, but writing 'Terrunform' and selling it to Stone Telling turned that right around.

I also made a successful foray into journalism, which was a boost. I'd like to do more although it is an energy-burner.

I've gotten a little more confident. Tori-vs-Tori's-self-loathing is a long battle and I don't know if it'll ever be over, and I still have very bad days, but I'm getting closer to honestly believing that I have worth as a person and a writer. This was a very strange year, emotionally, but at the end of it I like myself better than I did at the start. I may have got a little more selfish in the process, but I've stopped believing that selflessness is something I should aspire to - that's a Catholic hangover and tied up with guilt, and I can still aspire to being a good and generous person while jettisoning harmful and unrealistic ideals I internalised as a kid. I hope.

There are many areas in which I Could've Done Better, but aren't there always? And there were good enough reasons for not managing everything I wanted. I know I want to do a whole lot better at various things in 2012, but that's a different post.

Stone Telling 6 is live!

2011-12-21T19:58:14Z

Hey everyone, look, a new issue of Stone Telling, the magazine of boundary-crossing poetry! I have a poem in it!

So the thing you need to know about this issue is that it is full of science and science fiction poetry, and that many poems therein look at women in science and SF, and that it's awesome. I've just started reading it through and so far, aaaaugh, yes.

My poem is called 'Terrunform' and is about Mars and also gender. It came about in a lighthearted enough manner, with alankria and I idly daydreaming about the future and wouldn't it be nice to be lesbian robots on mars with changeable bodies. And then I tried to write a fun poem about that and all these things welled up out of my heart and brain. I talk about those things a bit more in the roundtable with several other poets from the issue - that was a marvellous thing to be part of.

So grateful to shweta_narayan and rose_lemberg for being such excellent and sensitive editors. With ST in general and this issue in particular they are real pioneers. Julia Rios is a fabulous interviewer, also. Thank you thedinglestarry and deboires for advice and encouragement on this. And to Alex, for whom the poem was written (and who also has a poem in the issue, lesbians-in-space represent!).

This is just an awesome thing and I'm deeply proud to be a part of it.

3... 2... 1... READ IT!

ETA: if you like what you read and have spare pennies, all I want for Christmas is for you to toss 'em into the ST tip jar!

poetry spasms: southend-in-the-mist

2011-11-10T15:17:31Z

I'm starting to think poetry is just some kind of weird function my brain has to perform sometimes, and I'll never know how it ticks (though I love it), and it's rarely sophisticated enough to do anything with. Just spasms of words in reaction to the world, whereas fiction is my vocation and my craft. I don't think they're diametrically opposed as disciplines, not at all, but maybe my writing brain does. Who knows!

Today:

Skinless rock eels, faceless skate
sleeping, glistening, on chipped-up winter:
salt, slime and ice

hidden, the sea laps up
silently on the town -
the palm trees rust

lager bottle left like an offering
in a whitewashed alcove
- a candle to the swallowed sun

and it's breaking over me

2011-11-07T12:30:36Z

So I'm using NaNoWriMo to try getting Act II of [Bangkok Ghosts Novel] written, at about 20K. So far I've managed 1600, but it's early days, and I have other things to do as well, so no beating myself up about this. I'll be happy if I write *something* for it every day, and hopefully the momentum will build.

Anyway! I realised a lot of this novel is very slow and melancholy and all about memory and history, which is what happens when you write about a lot of ghosts and sentient abandoned buildings (and also maybe when you're writing from a position of homesickness), but the whole drive behind it is to write a fitting tribute to the city, and it's not a slow or melancholy or backward-looking place. So I wrote a festival bit this morning, about Chinese New Year 2010, which was this amazing, fizzing, buoyant night. Writing it was great fun, but it made me even more acutely homesick. Oh well. Here it is.

I am the New Year and my name is Tiger. City, I hear you calling my name, I am coming! You are lit up like an animal made of stars, paper stars and glass stars and gunpowder stars, flashing and clashing, my landing lights! Streets cloaked in red, tasseled gold, budding lanterns! I hear the pounding of drums and the snapping of firecrackers. I breathe the clouds of hot sugar that billow from sweetmakers’ stalls, lick the taste of dough and chestnuts and strawberries from the glowing air. Candied persimmons, chocolate wrapped up in gold, I would stop and gobble them all but I have prey to chase. The old year, stale and sore, skulking in the shadows beyond the lantern-light, clutching its ghosts and garbage jealously to its unbeating heart. The fat and goodness and life of last year are all gone, the Ox has gone to await its next twelveyear turn, and all that’s left is the skin it left, dull with the year’s losses and ill-luck, curled up in corners. I’ll rout out every last scrap of it! City, you are filled with me. I whirl and leap in your streets, worry at the dark with my flapping jaws and flaring eyes. There are hundreds of me, tiger-skins worn by dancers, shaking the life out of darkness. Changed from lions to tigers in my name! I am everywhere that your people invoke me. I shine in the markets where they sell golden tiger figures, I roar in the hearts of revellers wearing tiger t-shirts, I frisk in go-go bars where the boys wear ears and striped pants. All that is Tiger is a blessing on you, City! But most of all I am in the drumming heart of Chinatown. Yaowarat is a great tiger tonight, lantern-striped, and China Gate is my hollering mouth. Come celebrate! I have swallowed up the old and I wear the red-black night like a skin and if you touch me you will have boundless luck. I am the New Year, and my name is Tiger!