Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

Un-Moroccan Chicken and Un Lun Dun

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It’s Monday morning here, but due to the vagaries of international timezones I suspect there will not be much of Monday left by the time Say Zucchini, and Mean It arrives in my in-box. Such are the drawbacks of living on the other side of the world, I suspect.

Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan.

It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline.

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There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog, which is  not the kind of blog you’d expect it to be from the title and entirely safe for work. I keep meaning to point people towards reviews of my story in Eclipse 4 as well, but every time I think about it I’m writing a bit of the blog during a coffee break at the dayjob, far away from the bookmarks where I group such things together and keep them handy for linkage.

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I kept trying to disappear into the bunker over the weekend, but somehow events conspired to ensure I never really made it there. I kept being distracted by, say, dinner with my sister and our friend VillainousMog who was visiting from London for the first time in two years and made for some excellent company.

On Sunday I was distracted by sleep and goodreads and the search for a good hotdog and the usual Sunday night gaming session, which meant I hit the end of the weekend feeling oddly relaxed and socialised and in possession of about three thousand words to account for two days work.

Which isn’t bad, I’ll grant you that, but isn’t really the stuff of a heroic effort in the word-bunker either. Still, the novel has a shape forming that’s actually novel-like, and the short story I’m working on hit a point where I figured out what it wanted to do, and I suspect that this afternoon I’ll get back hitting 2,500 words in a day, if only because I’ve run out of distractions and large portions of my house are now clean.

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I started reading China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun over the weekened, which was going swimmingly until such time as I hit one of those things that makes me go “oh, really? We’re doing that? Okay, I guess,” and then suddenly be much less interested in the book.

It’s the sort of thing that happens to me and books all the time. I’ll be enjoying myself immensely and then, out of nowhere, there’s be a parenthetical aside in a third-person narration, and I’ll find my enjoyment deflated and listless from there on. Un Lun Dun doesn’t do the parenthetical aside thing, but it introduces a concept and bit of wordplay that’s distracting enough that I can’t get back into the story.

It’s like that moment when you’re at a party, having a good time, then you realise that you’re actually quite drunk and you can’t get your equilibrium back once that realisation happens.

Still, I persevere, slightly less enthused than I was before, but still enjoying myself. And because The City and The City was brilliant and full of words that didn’t alienate me, and so I’ll trust in pretty much anything Miéville does after that.

And because, more often than not,  Miéville manages the opposite thing, where the right word or concept is introduced at exactly the right time, and thus there is a moment of joy to be had.

Shadows

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So there’s a  shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great.

So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story.

The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it.

LONG FICTION

  • Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia)
  • The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications)
  • Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healy (Allen & Unwin)
  • Under Stones by Bob Franklin (Affirm Press)
  • Bleed by Peter M. Ball (Twelfth Planet Press)

EDITED PUBLICATION

  • Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears, edited by Angela Challis & Marty Young (Brimstone Press)
  • Scenes From The Second Storey, edited by Amanda Pillar & Pete Kempshall (Morrigan Books)
  • Dark Pages 1, edited by Brenton Tomlinson (Blade Red Press)
  • Scary Kisses, edited by Liz Gryzb (Ticonderoga Publications)
  • Midnight Echo #4, edited by Lee Battersby (AHWA)

SHORT FICTION

  • “Bread and Circuses” by Felicity Dowker (Scary Kisses)
  • “Brisneyland by Night” by Angela Slatter (Sprawl)
  • “She Said” by Kirstyn McDermott (Scenes from the Second Storey)
  • “All The Clowns In Clowntown” by Andrew J. McKiernan (Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears)
  • “Dream Machine” by David Conyers (Scenes from the Second Storey)

The winners of the Australian Shadows Award will be announced on 15 April 2011.

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Next week I start tutoring for one of the University of Queensland’s writing subjects. It’ll be the first time I’ll have stepped into a university for about two years, and the nerves have already set in. I can tell because I keep having nightmares and waking up in the middle of the night, unsure of what’s going on but unable to get back to sleep.

This isn’t unusual. I always have nightmares the week before I start teaching. Occasionally they involve teaching Hamlet being performed by Gnolls, and being unable to explain exactly why this is brilliantly post-modern to a group of students. Thankfully, they  goes away once the classes actually start.

Sunday Morning

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Picture by Sally Ball 2011
Picture Courtesy of Sally Ball, 2011

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life.

If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form.  It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel.

The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at weird hours, frequently bombed out of his mind. Another was an short, gnome-like older woman in a leather cap who friends used to spot as a patron at the local strip clubs. Someone living in the neighbouring unit block used to keep a black cat that was easily the size of a small Alsatian, which would freak people out when they first saw it and couldn’t quite work out what it was.

I was broke and sleeping on a mattress on the floor and drinking far to much cask wine. It was my first real stint of unemployment, and I wrote poetry and theatre scripts with a kind of haphazard energy that comes from convincing yourself both are viable career paths despite their dwindling audience. I failed to understand the basics of cooking and ate toasted cheese sandwiches instead. I developed futile crushes and pined, rather pathetically. I played the same four chords on a battered acoustic guitar. At least once, while I was elsewhere, the police laid siege to the place in order to corner an prison escapee, although my flatmate managed to sleep through the entire thing.

At some point I started disliking my flatmate intensely, which is probably what led to me moving out after our six month lease was up.

And it’s my favourite place of all the places I’ve ever lived.

I like to think my affection for the place isn’t just the nostalgia for your twenties that comes of being a month shy of thirty-four, ‘specially since I’m well aware of the multitude of things I absolutely hated about that period of my life. Rather, I love the place because it’s where I figured out who I wanted to be, even if I’ve spent whole years since then trying to convince myself that I was wrong. Without that motel I doubt I’d ever have developed the love of noir, or spent years reading poetry and trying to understand the rhythm of language, or developed my love of a particular kind of horror that embraces the sensuality of the other rather than abjuring it. I would never have learned to recognise my privilege, even if my initial response at the time was to deny it, as if embracing the experience of living in the motel could somehow scrub the fact that I was a white male kid with working, middle-class parents and a university education up my sleeve.

It was a horrible place to live, devoid of any real redeeming features. It was also kinda magical.

And I’ve been writing stories trying to capture that dichotomy ever since.