Done with NaNo - won't be long now

I'm already starting to miss writing my Airless Diaries. I see the value of spending my time on 'real' writing (i.e. stories with more than one draft), but it's a lonely thing spending days and weeks crouched over my laptop, polishing the same story over and over again. I miss the immediacy and the rock star feeling of just banging off a fragment of narrative and then hanging out there for the world to see.

It's a good thing, then, that I'm done with my novel manuscript at least for a few months, and I have no immediate short story deadlines. So, starting today, I'll start doing three Airless Diaries a week once again. I'm sort of burned out on the real stuff, so I hope the urgency of the diary will rekindle my interest again.

I guess I'm depressed.

Call for donations: fight the Congo rape endemic

I'm not sure how many people outside of the US saw the recent New York Times article on the horrifying rape endemic currently going on in Congo:

NYT: Rape Endemic Raises Trauma of Congo War

Read that article. Read it again. If the image poorly organised gangs of militia taking turns to violently rape women - then using shivs or bayonets as penetrative rape implements to maim and destroy their sexual organs - doesn't cause your guts to twist then I have no time for you.

The reporter responsible for the NYT article has published a response from a group working out of Panzi hospital in Congo, Female Victims of Sexual Violence, who are the first point of contact for many Congolese rape victims. They provide often life-saving medical attention and then provide vital moral and psychological support for them afterwards.

Congo Rape Endemic, and What you Can Do

I urge everyone who can donate, to donate. Aid organisations such as Red Cross are absolutely overrun in Congo, playing constant catch up behind the chaos and casual atrocities that mark every day life in the country. You'll need to have a US or international bank account to donate directly, but I'm sending some messages about to see if we can get somebody with the correct account to set up a Paypal to smooth things over a bit.

I also urge everyone to pass these links around. There's a Congolese woman having her uterus shredded by multiple bayonet wounds as I post this.

10,000 words...

...and all I need is a knife.

Never mind that I should be closer to 18,000 by this point, or that my plot hasn't developed much further than a strange German man (with no testicles) being horrified by a lot of objects and then fascinated by other people having sex. I'm sure there's more to it than that.

I keep trying to write the more traditionally SF sections and failing, so I guess if they don't fit the tale then they won't. That presents me with a dilemma, however, since my protagonist is based on a historical character who died young in 1943, whereas most of the rest of the novel is in 2007+. Drat.

On the other hand, I've already had another couple of good ideas. One is for a REAL SF story about obesity, tongue-in-cheek. I will write it (when this fucking month is over), and send it away (shock!) to Andromeda Spaceways. I like that magazine. The other is for One Book Many Brisbanes, and it's about social convention and bus drivers, and other oddities.

Inevitably, when I force my brain to focus on one thing for too long, it rebels by throwing other, excellent ideas at me. Wouldn't you rather be writing about conquistadors? Que? Come orn, man...

Still, I'm learning to love Bruno and his odd impassionate ways. Even more I enjoy the supporting characters through his perspective - the compassionate rapist Hermann, the completely insane Cuban lovers Carlos and Eloisa, the self-absorbed Dr. Mrazek, the ever-tired businessman Osamu, ignoring his wife. Good lord: I'm writing too many adjectives again. Curse you NaNoWriMo! Curse you to hell!

Secret evil plan #355: when this month is over, begin preparing manuscript for arts-travel grant application. Go to Cuba. Be a happy person.

Er.

Yes.

News: We're not gone!

Hey all,

Things have been very quiet around here for the last few weeks, and I figure I owe it to anybody who actually reads this thing to explain myself. We're not gone, honest! Actually, I've been keeping myself very busy preparing for NaNoWriMo this year. I took part several years ago and failed miserably, but this year what with all the writing discipline I seem to have accrued, I hope to finish well.

That being said, I'm actually going in with a novel idea and a plan this time around. The novel I hope to write before November 30 is called:

Things I Did On My Space Ship

The title is intentionally vague and naive. Despite what it looks like it's actually only barely science fiction, and has a lot more to do with the recent news about Myanmar, Congo, Darfur, and so on. So there you have it - you all know about my plans and are free to rib me mercilessly should I start lagging on the task or falling behind on my word count.

Airless Diaries will be quiet during the rest of October and November - I won't be posting any new diaries myself, although I'll happily review and post any submissions that come in. In mid December (allowing for the fact I'm also submitting to One Book Many Brisbanes, this year) Airless Diaries is coming back with a vengeance - all that stuff about a real site design, proper submission system, and the like? It'll be there, and it's looking good (even on my drawing board).

The new Airless Diaries site will be hosted at www.airlessdiaries.net - the domain is already registered, but it simply links back to this blog for now.

Anyway, keep us in mind and don't forget about us. Ta for now.

Cheers,
Justin

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Airless Diary: Calcify

We freeze up in the winter, for six months of darkness, slow all the way down until we barely breathe, then thaw out in the spring, and turn our faces upwards like sunflowers. We - my wife Anna and I - cannot afford to pay a man four hundred dollars every few months to drive the treacherous path to our house on the plateau, so instead we freeze with the rest of our estate. I used to chop trees all summer and autumn, but since I started to calcify I don't chop as well anymore.

Freezing up isn't so bad. It's a long process and you can't move much, but I have been holding Anna's hand through it for so long that we've learned to talk, sort of talk, through the sluggish, trickling blood in our fingerbones. Freezing up is easy, and waiting is fine when you're used to it, but thawing out isn't as easy as time goes by. I think there are two types of turning to stone. One is the ice way, we've been doing the ice way for years and it hurts but it's fine. It's quick: as the snow sets in and the sun goes down you sit yourself up on the edge of your bed, keep perfectly still (so you don't crack half-way through freezing, that would be a disaster), and let the ice take you. The other is to calcify, and that comes on much slower, slow enough that a few years ago I would have laughed to hear you talk about it.

To calcify saddens me, because I know it's a process with no renewal. When it's done it's done, and afterwards we may never be seen again, unless a mountaineer stumbles upon our cottage to find maybe a pair of stalactites, or pillars of salt. Mostly I'm saddened to see it happen because Anna didn't ask for it.

"Anna," I might say, our hands enmeshed like pilchards caught in a net, "should I light the fire tonight? It's colder'n ever."

"It's as cold today as it was yesterday, hubby."

"It feels colder."

"It's not. It's not ever colder, hubby, and it's not ever warmer. Things are as they are."

"Anna I've got some wood left over from last year. I should light a fire, just for tonight. Whatt'dya say?"

"Hubby if you light a fire tonight it will just seem colder again tomorrow when it dies out."

"It might not seem that way. It might, but it might not."

"Hush up, hubby. It gets awfully close in here. You should open the window and come sit here with me, again."

"If I light a fire tonight I'll be able to chop some wood tomorrow. I can sit by you and sharpen the old axe. Whatt'dya say?"

"You aren't lighting a fire, hubby, and you certainly aren't gonna sharpen no axe with those slow fingers of yours. Sit here with me and let it happen."

So that's what I do. I let it happen and we freeze together in the icy hush and angry whoosh coming now and again through our open window. In the spring we'll thaw back out and eat sunlight again.

THis is our way, our unbreakable habit. Every year I rail against the freeze and I try to find a way to keep things warmer for lack of a bottle of gas, and I moan and I fight and Anna sits still where she is and calmly lets it all happen. And when I'm done railing she'll take my hand and talk to me through my fingerbones, and I'll calm right down and let it happen too.

Anna always lets it happen. I don't understand it. I brought us here, to this plateau, chasing goats. She only came because it looked important to me.

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Airless Diary: Hunching Shoulder One

I like the shoulder forward ones, the hunching ones, the alpha-beta males. The big ones who don't want to be as big. The gentle giants, the powerful ones, the ones who could beat cancer.

I met one who asked me which bus he might get that would take him far, far, out of this town. His nose was whorled. He was a gentle giant, a big one, an alpha-beta. I stared all, all, all the way up and he stared all, all, all the way down, and he bent his back crooked and leaned his shoulders in towards his tummy, and got smaller. When he spoke, it was constrained. He had a voice made to bellow yet crafted ever so carefully into something small enough for public conversation. I almost wanted him to yell; I was like a child squeezing a balloon, wincing and cringing at the pending whip-crack, but wanting it to happen.

I told him: "Mister any bus will take you all, all, all the way out if you've got the patience to stay the course. It's kind of a secret."

He stared into me to see if I was lying, which of course I wasn't. Plenty of secrets that a small guy knows if he's got enough time. And time I've got all, all, all of it.

One like he was, if he had the mind, could heave on a mans shoulders and remove his head. One like he was, if he wanted it, could put his fist through the eggshell steel panel on the bus as it pulled up. But he didn't want it, you could see. He just wanted a bit of peace for his very own, and he wasn't getting any here.

I figured I would be of use to this big one, this hunching shoulder one. I figured I might not get him some peace, but I could get him out. Show him the right buses to catch, show him the ways around the checkpoints so he might not get hassled by the nosy rent-a-cops. I wanted to take him by the hand, or I should say, have my small fingers disappear in his paw. But of course he didn't know me, shouldn't trust me. Such as it is.

I gave him a poncho, came down to my ankles, to throw over his stupidly obvious t-shirt, and we got on board the bus he could have dismantled but didn't, and rode out of the terminus. He had no money, I guess he'd been robbed, so I paid for him. I can futz with the machine and ride for free, but for a reason or two I decided that I was a citizen today. I think, I wanted to show him that we weren't all heartless grubs who don't show gratitude if we get a free lunch.

It wasn't broad daylight, but it wasn't dark, it was, what do you call it, gloaming, when he wondered in his grumble grumble if perhaps I was lost. It might have seemed that way, for sure, sure, but it wasn't so. We had backtracked onto a subway train, or in and out of a suburban complex, so many times that I couldn't blame him for thinking so. But the nature of secrets is that they tend to be obscure. I told him so, this gentle giant. He didn't have to trust me, but he did. This gentle giant, I liked him the most.

The gloaming and the back and forth, it was all for a reason, and that reason is to confuzzle the checkpoint operators. Keep the rentacops off our case long enough for a big, obvious hunching shoulder one to get on out before somebody decided he didn't belong. Duck into a subway car, run up on a bus, get onto a ferry and off again, then go back the way you came. There are scanners and scanners and scanners and you each and everyone knows its you they're watching. So make it look like you is you is you and that you are just wandering about. Just a day in the city, a day in the sun.

He could fight his way out, this big one, this hunching shoulder one, this belly where my face is one. Bullets might bounce off him. Cameras might forget who he was, but probably not. I wanted to make it so he might not have to.

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Airless Diary: Chim Chim Cheroo

There is this guy, right, and he just can't get enough sex. Problem is he isn't really good looking enough or charismatic, so he has this idea where he'll get a loan for a house or something, sell all his furniture and stuff to look like he's saved a real down-payment, then see how long he can go paying for it until the money runs out. When the money runs out, he figures he'll have screwed enough for one lifetime and won't care too much if he ends up in jail or dead.

Only when he gets the loan he figures he can maximise on this, so instead of going right down to the whorehouses he hits a footy mate up for a serious stash of date rape drugs, tracks up and down until he's got every loosener, whistler, horse tranquiliser, and 'hipnol he can scrape out of the suburbs. Then he goes on a spree, you know, driving to a new town every night a balling a few, then moving on. This goes on for a good six months, and its good for him, right, 'cause he's only spent a couple of large and he's got the price of a house sitting pretty in his bank account. He's, well, he's happy. He's living like a see-saw; bum back, bum forward, never has to get himself off except when he's inside some doped up teenager.

So he is really going places, even goes on a tour of south east asia (only costs him a couple of grand) and bangs everything and everyone. He does them all, and never asks their age because it's not that he's a pedo, no not at all, he just doesn't have time to care about that shit. It's turning in to a big job. It looks like he's really on target to fuck the world.

Except, he doesn't. He walks into the wrong bordello, this outfit in Thailand run by one Mdm Soon, who is some sort of avenging crusader against all men, especially the ones who don't ask questions about how old his lay is. She runs it like a test, does the thing so many black market whorehouses do, with all the girls lined up, bored and maybe a bit scared, until the customer makes their choice. Only at Mdm Soon's, if you choose the wrong girl she takes you into a room, undresses you sensually, then Mdm Soon cuts your dick off and they hang you up on a hook and bleed you, abbatoir style. So that' what happened here.

Chim Chim Cheroo. Poetic justice in the classic sense.

***

There was another guy who was exactly the opposite. He didn't fuck anybody. He wasn't a deep repressed homosexual or someone who's libido was so inside out that they needed to be tattooed or scarred by a stiletto before they could get a hard-on. It wasn't anything like that, it was weirder. You would start looking for the join since he must've been asexual.

Now you might think a guy with no testosterone, no bubbling pot of urges driving his every move, would be the sweetest fellow. But you'd be wrong. This guy was cold, and spiteful, and every bit as apathetic as the last guy. This guy had sort of fallen into the priesthood since he had a lot more time to read during his teenage years, of course, and always kind of liked all the bible stories.

The thing about bible stories is, they are this huge, multi-authored summary of all the worst urges and greatest highs of the human race (or well, part of it) but they've been edited and disseminated and 'perfected' so many times by so many people that the humanity in all of the stories, in each character's actions, have been leeched away. So you've got women putting tent pegs through men's heads and other guys killing their servants and parables about wilting trees and so, so many laws about what a man should do if his knob gets wet in the night-time, but no context or reason as to why these things might have gone down.

It's a completely blank canvas of narratives for a man to project his own ideas onto, and this guy, this asexual guy, had plenty of ideas. He was into social darwinism, you could say, since he hadn't been distracted and driven by his knob, he couldn't help but feel superior to all of his peers and their lecherous, single-minded ways.

So this guy didn't

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Airless Diary: The Home to End all Homes

As Cath parks the family's four-wheel drive in one of the 'family friendly' spaces, she thinks about the noun 'homemaker'. It implies a verb, 'to homemake'. 'To make home'? Regardless, what should be - at least as far as she was concerned - a passive activity, a slow accumulation of the trinketry that defines a home, homemaking has become a verb, and an active one, too. Her husband has demanded a home, and even though she's uncomfortable with stereotypical gender roles - she has a PhD in gender studies, an Althussierian deconstruction of the phantom male in Judith Butler's theory of performativity - she has acquiesced. He wants a home, and she will make one.

So, IKEA, then. Her children - Todd, a rambunctious five-year-old with a penchant for red and, possibly, attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome; Kelly, a worrisome, pale-faced four-year-old she sometimes finds, as much as she hates to admit it, boring and somewhat annoying; and Mark, her angelic two-year-old who still hasn't learned how to approach the world with anything other than wide-eyed awe - accompany her. As always, she promises them each a hot dog and a block of chocolate to share if they behave themselves during the trip. After some faffing about with Mark's stroller, they enter.

They stroll through the display homes, looking at the Swedish goods. Cath is quietly impressed by their rationality, the way in which each part is made with a minimum of fuss and the whole edifice is packed into a flat case for transport and self-assembly. She imagines the lives of the kind of people who might live in these display apartments and homes - there's Anna, a twenty-something year-old postgrad at the university of Stockholm writing a dissertation on the sex lives of snails and having vigorous, athletic sex of her own with a heavily-tanned forty-something married woman named Marta. Anna is still convinced she, Anna, is really bisexual, or maybe that the whole thing is a phase. Still, Anna is, as always, glad that her IKEA bed is made of quality materials. Another display (bookcases, this time) gives her Torbjörn, a thirty-something marketer who begrudges the high level of tax on alcoholic beverages and spends his weekends buying books that he will never read. He only does it to score with arty intellectual types, like a girl named Anna that he's seen at the university ...

It's only then that Cath notices that Kelly has gone missing somewhere. She asks Todd to mind the stroller and Mark, making a solemn promise that if he stands and watches over Mark as cautiously as he can, he will get a shiny new red toy. Then she sprints off, cursing herself. How could she have failed so much as a mother? When the police question her - and question her they will, she has no doubt about it - she will have to tell them that, instead of being a good mother, she has been fantasising about the sex lives of two imaginary young Swedes named Anna and Torbjörn. They won't press charges, of course - they reason that her own conscience will be punishment enough, and that nothing will bring back her dead (or raped, or mutilated, or eaten) child. She rushes through the displays, looking through the rational house-goods, cursing the Swedes, cursing herself. Tears have formed in her eyes; her breathing is shallow and irregular.

Then she sees Kelly: she's lingered on, fascinated by some plastic plaything in the children's section. Cath takes her by the hand, and smacks the child's wrist - not playfully, but seriously. Dull, painfully boring Kelly will now have an exciting purple bruise on her wrist, but being the dull child that she is, she won't (Cath thinks) be able to make up an exciting story for her preschool friends about how it happened.

They return to Todd and Mark. Mark has soiled himself in the stroller, and Todd seems not to have noticed this, although he has remembered Cath's promise of a shiny red toy. They continue shopping. Later, when she backs the car out of the 'family friendly' space, Cath will remember the way her heart pounded in her chest and her breath was squeezed out of her lungs as if by an iron hand when she thought of what could have happened to Kelly. She will curse Kelly for her dullness and stupidity, and curse her own lack of wariness. But, most of all, she will think of that moment as something truly wondrous - the first time she ever got to feel like a real mother, but only for a moment, before the edifice of her motherhood come crashing down around her like so much cheap, flat-packed furniture.