Mechanical Animals - Two Bees Dancing

Preorder MECHANICAL ANIMALS here and here.

Two Bees Dancing is the first (and only) story I've written since "all that stuff happened". There's a reprint of Acception coming soon, but reprints require exactly zero angst on my part, so in this instance it doesn't count.

Angst, man. What even.

How long have I known the story was accepted for publication? Ages. Um, possibly more than a year.  How long has the cover art been sitting in my inbox, with links to the preorders? Months. Have I advertised the anthology? Nope.

HOW GOOD IS THIS COVER?!?!?!

This is not bog-standard writer insecurity, which I've had. And to be fair, still have, but it is entirely eclipsed by this dread sitting heavy in my belly and choking my words. I just...can't...draw attention to myself.

So this isn't a post letting all know that I've a story coming out. This is a record documenting the evolution of the story, and it's just for me. Just a little bit of sleight of mind.

I'm always surprised when editors solicit me to submit. It's not that I doubt my craft - I'm not winning awards, but my writing doesn't suck - it's just that my publication record is so very thin and sporadic. My rate of production is so low I'm surprised I remain on anyone's radar. But S did ask me, and the theme for MECHANICAL ANIMALS is just, I mean, c'mon. How could I not?

I had no story lying around to cannibalise, so I had to start from scratch. Pretty early on I settled on mechanical bees as a tool of state surveillance. Metadata and the government's desired powers over it were topical at the time, so privacy was high on my mind. I spent months fleshing out the infrastructure of these bees, brainstorming sessions with friends and so many pages in my notebook just thinking in longhand. Concept is my strength. Finding the narrative/plot in that concept is not. The bees were not telling me a story.

I don't remember how or when the narrative actually came to me. I think I recognised that, still burnt and wounded from "all that stuff that happened", the narrative structure needed to be simple, and the voice not so removed from my own. At that point, I didn't have a voice. To a point, I still do not. But this felt like learning to trust myself as a writer all over again. Small steps. Strip the concept down to bare bones and bloody hell don't make the POV some corrupted AI bee-bot.

The conflict between surveillance and privacy remains in the narrative, but now playing harmony with the disempowerment of the disabled and chronically ill.

Because I was, then, just dragging myself out of deep incapacitation. Trying to conjure a future for myself when my present was still open wounds and trauma and the horror of minutes that never end, knowing that if there was only a little more support, I could-

Two Bees Dancing feels like the spiritual sequel to Acception. Actually I look at them and I'm like, Tessa, you've written the same story twice now. Perhaps that's simply because the journey to the end product was so similar. Perhaps because they're both born of deep-welling magma. But they aren't the same story. (THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY WITHIN THE WORD LIMIT. IT IS ACTUALLY A PROPER SHORT STORY. ARE YOU PROUD OF ME I"M PROUD OF ME.)

S gave me a chance to prove myself, to myself. It's surprising to be invited to submit, but also gratifying and humbling that an editor have faith that the story produced will be worthwhile. This opportunity gave me far more than publication. I've no idea how to make 'thank you' convey everything I want to convey. Two words and I'm a writer undone. Regardless, thank you.

MECHANICAL ANIMALS offers a table of contents that is quietly jaw-dropping and promises to offer a deliciously diverse range of interpretations on the theme. And the titles! Gracious, the titles. Not going to lie, a good title will win me over every time, as coming up with even just an 'okay' title is hard. Like this, The Hard Spot in the Glacier. How enticing and tantalising is that? I need exams to be over so I can eat this.

MECHANICAL ANIMALS will be shipped on 27 November. 

Tessa New Year & It's Lack of Importance

Despite talking to mum on Tuesday, and her saying "I'll talk to you Thursday," it didn't stick.
Despite skyping a hot couple yesterday, and them saying, "Happy birthday for tomorrow!" it didn't stick.
Despite my brother sending me an SMS first thing in the morning, and my mum again, and my best friend, it wasn't until dad called and my initial reaction was "Oh shit, something's happened, SOMEONE HAS DIED," that it finally sunk in.

Okay, today marks 33 orbits of the our star for me. It's a birthday, and usually people make a fuss out of these things, and I like to quietly mark them, but honestly, I couldn't attach any weight to this event if it begged me to.

This isn't because I'm distracted, busy or stressed. I think it's simply because there are things I am more excited about, things that a birthday just can't compete against.

I look forward to visiting Melbourne in a couple of weeks and leaping upon people I haven't seen for a year, and people I haven't seen for a month, and seeing my beloved dogs and sitting at the kitchen table and chatting to my family.

I look forward to J coming home every day.

I don't look forward much, to be honest. There's no need.

Every day is pretty nice.

Given the tumult of the last couple of years – not all of it bad – it's really nice to get to a space like the one I find myself in. It's calm and comfortable, and it's precious.

I've love to spare right now, so you can have it. I love you muchly, and I wish warmth upon you. 

Stocktake!

On this, the eve of my...uh...thirty-sec-ond? Thirty-second? Thirty-second, yeah, my thirty-second year of life on Earth.

Dad's right, birthdays mean less and less the more you have.

This time last year I was working a shitty shit shit job in what has become the most precious place in the world to me – Ullapool, in the Highlands of Scotland – with the knowledge that my lover would be at the end of my fingertips within a week after years disguised as month apart. Pretty great way to show in the era.

Since then, we have been a we (we counted and are pretty sure that in the past year we've only spent three nights apart (not counting those nights when either party was perhaps out being a menace and didn't notice the sun come up)), have travelled to the Faroe Islands and seen massive colonies of PUFFINS!!! and watched an ocean of clouds crash against and up over the cliffs while gannets ghosted across the ocean below, and then we got lost on several islands and were rescued by wonderful locals several times. We put a tick beside the "our first flat!" and it was indeed a complete and utter mould and mildew-infested, draughty, freezing, dank, dark, cramped, fetid, stagnent crapbox in a tenement for which the front door didn't lock and the corridor light didn't work and used syringes, bent spoons and half-eaten pizzas were regularly left outside our door and bedroom window. I've managed to not completely suck at freelance editing which my confidence enjoys. We've done Iceland (again!), Amsterdam, Nordland Sweden in deep winter, Paris in a diamond-cut crystal winter, Kiev in a lazy winter and Chernobyl, oh goodness, Chernobyl. Vancouver in a wet but gentler winter.

And home.

And back to the Monday to Friday, and back to the office cubicle and the same bed every night, the same streets and the same trains and friends who were there and are there now.

And gosh it's nice.

And possibly, maybe, I'm actually settling down. Or still riding the adventure high. I just don't feel as restless in my heart and lungs, there's not that same sense of urgency to chase every horizon.

Or, maybe I'm just tired.

Anyway. Got my love. Got my families, my friends, my dogs. Got my happiness. Got a pen and space in a notebook. Got shit to learn. 31 was pretty damn amazing. Looks like the forecast isn't going to change for 32.

Thank you, my sweet random microclimates. 

Cross Section of Strata Emotional and Forgotten

There is a marked difference between the previous two posts. Not in terms of the emotional megaphone confession of soiled laundry and public displays of melodrama, but where they came from. One typed, one dictated. The dictated is the shorter by far. Perfunctory. Concise. Not even attempting to furbish the reader with details or texture because the Dragon is not my voice. It is a translator, and even the best translators lose some ethereal poetry of being when taking meaning and filtering it from one language into another.

In terms of pure logistics, the Dragon cannot keep up. It mishears so many of my words, and so every sentence is broken midstream as I correct and correct and correct. Perhaps the Dragon could keep up with a train of though; it can only fail miserably and watch this crashing satellite flash by.

This is my voice. This, unheard and sometimes unseen. Chewing the inside of my cheek as I hammer furiously on the keys and burn up in the atmosphere - is there nothing so exhilarating as choosing your own destruction, brilliant and slashing the twilight sky caught only in the periphery of a stranger's eye, knowing that your end will be to disintegrate without ever touching a soul or crush all those present at your termination - because I am sitting here typing this, this small act this small slight act, and my stomach quivers with old excitement that runs too deep to ignore, and my wrists ache, my neck aches, my shoulders ache, and in doing this I will amplify that pain and the consequences will stretch languidly across the week ahead.

The choice is always one pain over another. I'm tired.

Last night I took myself to the Butterfly Club and saw Tom Dickin's one-man one-hour cabaret show "Fuck Plan B". Despite the fact that I adore simply sitting in and being surrounded by the curios and sweet lights of the place, arrived at the perfect empty time to have the bartender spend 10 minutes making me the perfect ridiculously extravagant red wine/chambord Bloody Mary, I walked out containing ground zero of a nuclear detonation within my rib cage, and watching the shock waves flatten everything and nothing.

Plan A is being a successful artist, travel the world, inspire others, and follow your dreams.

Plan B is the necessities of reality. Rent. Food. Cocktails and socks.

You don't have to follow many blogs of artists to know that it is a constant struggle to maintain balance between A and B, and the odds are stacked against A. It isn't as though writers even have much in the way over overhead; our tools are minimal and not specialist, physical logistics are rarely an issue and there is no use by date in terms of getting too old to write. All we need is time, and it is the one thing in which we are poor.

It is a privilege to pursue Plan A at all. Art is a luxury of the middle class and up, and yet, and yet.

And yet.

For so many artists, the pursuit of their art is not a decision they get to make.

They are artists because they must be. They can be and do nothing else.

















My dayjob was only ever to support a life that would let me do what I want. It was there to pay for the necessities; food and a roof over my head, and exploration and travel, for these too are necessities for me. My jobs have all been proof of this: they do not and cannot follow me home, they do not and I will not sacrifice extra hours to them, and they do not and I will not let them take up any more space in my mind that what is required between signing in and signing off. Some of these jobs have been shit boring, others exciting and interesting, and all of them have only ever been jobs. I am not career orientated in any traditional sense and am not even making eyes at the corporate ladder. Higher paying jobs I've left unpursued because they would ask more of me than I'm willing to give.

But we all know how that ended out. My dayjob was there to support the writing, and the dayjob required the same physical tools as the writing, and the dayjob destroyed those tools, and I had constructed my life in such a way that no amount of small alterations would be enough to correct this balance. Everything is over-balanced. These past months have been the topple. It is all too late. There is nothing to do but watch the fall, that moment between losing contact with the cliff and making contact with the ground.

I'm tired.

Tom said he'd taken out a sizable loan and traveled the world to allegedly study theatre, and instead wound up writing song after song and performing them to strangers in strange places, and that was...right is not the world. True, perhaps. There are so many trees that we forget to be the whole forest.

I've been looking at this 'scuttle your life move to another hemisphere make no plans and see what happens' caper and feeling nothing but dread and nausea, because I'm at the centre of that plan, I cannot escape myself, and where ever I go these aching bones come with me. Nothing is left behind.

I'm tired. Much as my friends feel shut out because I do not speak of these things, I've leaned on them so much, my feet are on the ground and my knees are hanging low. The only reason I'm not face down and blank on a city sidewalk is because they're holding me up. What resilience. What determination. What illusions have I that I will weather the stress and fear of being alone in unknown and survive without them.

















More strangers last night. More strangers the night before.

















None of these people are known to me. None of these people know me. I could be anyone.

I could be someone who is not afraid of strangers. I could be someone who listens to you for a drunken half hour and takes your stories and antics and uses them to attempt to conceal the void I am but a vessel for, and then I could use them again, somewhere and somewhen else, with my voice, instead of throwing them away as useless, as worthless, as having helped me not at all.

If no one around me knows I'm a nothingness, then, I can and will buy into that illusion.








What's that. Determination. Obstinate pig-headedness. The conqueror and king rolled over in her sleep and opened her eyes a moment, she who would view this as only a challenge to be accepted in order to prove herself victorious again, over all things, and would meet that challenge with teeth-bared and eyes-wild and welcoming all the damage that would come from the battle ahead. She who in conquering the world so conquers herself, over and over.

Excitement. Anticipation. Lick your lips and fantasize about the messes you will make for yourself.








It's hope. It's hope. It's hope. Hanging out with all the shit in Pandora's Box because there is nothing so agonising as hope, and my fears cannot decide which is the greater threat; depression or hope.

Spectacular failure, quiet lie. Tedious failure, thin-worn lie. The fish aren't a school.

















But. It was Plan B that got me here.

I'm so tired, and this hurts like this and like that, and I can't remember what point I was trying to make. Pointless. There are no points, on masses of fear and indecision that change shape and colour like so many metaphors you fail to capture because you have strangled your voice enough that nothing it says is worth listening to, but it must be said, it must be said, let it out out out out out.

I was considering not going. I was considering committing myself and spending all my hours staring at wall and waiting for my heart to stop beating as I can't find it within me to do anything else.

I'm tired. So much has died. Death is a cessation that is not wholly encapsulated in medical definitions. Wastelands and deserts. No fish in the open ocean.

Some perverse sense of curiosity is still twitching. The smell of all the stupidity of the past few weeks is coiling thick in the air and it wants to see what other messes we can make.

Some perverse sense of fury will not stop breathing. It will not let the consequences of Plan B be the victor.

There are no winners in this. But fuck it, I'm going to lose on my own terms.

The Year of Vanished Fish

Hey, you.

You're a bit lost right now, a bit bewildered to find your foundations absent and sureties you had taken for granted now unsteady things. There is, abruptly, a fog of uncertainty in your head, obfuscating your present and making a smeared water-colour painting of the future you're trying to aim at. You've never coped well with uncertainty, being a touch too gifted at taking all potential hypotheses into consideration when presented with any decision, but you're doing okay for now. Ish. Okay-ish.

That's all we can hope for, really. The uncertainty is you. Or rather, you are uncertain about all things including yourself. Especially yourself. You do not trust your own judgment, nor your capacity for logic, nor your ability to function. Lately, you've found yourself a startlingly unpredictable creature. Mood swings that have no trigger you can identify, nor any overarching plot to trace too. Violent bouts of crying that blindside you like a brick and disappear just as abruptly, leaving you nothing short of perplexed and confused, because while that violence ambushes you, you don't feel it.

What are you? You are not known to yourself. Not right now. For perhaps the first time. Your mind is now terra incognita.

No idea how people live like this.

In the interests of getting to know you, me, I, us, them, let's try a little exercise. I know it will be tough, because we've already tried this a couple of times with the result being Ctrl+A, Delete. I know your heart isn't in it, because mine sure as hell isn't.

But for the you, me, her, them that come back from the future to read this, some balance is required. This blog has become an unhappy place. You, I, we're only recording the misery. That's no fault of yours, I know. Processing the turbulence is more important than maintaining balance for the readers. But let's just try, okay? For you, me, us, them. For later.

Without further ado; things that made 2010 worth living.

And without further ado; I have deleted the list created.

Partly because it was forced. There is no capacity within me to be grateful for the privileges I've enjoyed the year passed. I acknowledge them, but right now I cannot feel them, and so to speak of them would be an exercise in lying to myself.

Also, I am battered and bruised and flinching. There is no capacity within me to trust the randomness of the world and its enduring capacity for capriciousness. If I were to announce the small wonders I hold close, then the acknowledgment would drive the world to then poison those wonders. Let them stay precious for now. Let them stay private. Let them be only mine.

Last year everything clicked into place. It was as though you had finally reached the age you have always been, and fit your skin and personality for the first time. You're a school of fish, and last year the fish swum out of their chaotic lack of coordination and began to move as one.

If you are composed of a million pieces, and those million pieces move as one, then that is almost the same as being composed of one single piece.

Almost.

Here and now, some of the fish are missing. Not eaten, not fled, simply disappeared. The remaining fish do not roil in confusion, although they are confused. They are lost. They don't know where they are going, and so they are not going anywhere.

You're a school of fish, full of holes and still in the water.

Sharks will find you if you stay like this.

2011 is going to wear me down. The decisions I've made will involve a great deal of fenangaling, and I expect to melt down often and with significant fallout. Even from out here the plans scare the shit out of me, but, scary things are worth doing. Remember that.

I wish I could go sailing into this year hollering and wild-eyed with some misguided sense of glory, delirious anticipation of the mistakes and messes I am to make, impatient for my triumphs and awards, and full of hunger for all that is unknown ahead of me. I wish I still had that strength, that willful heedlessness to all that might rend and scar. I wish I still knew that I would conquer the world.

It's come to three letters, two nested, each responding to the last, because by all that is infuriating and exasperating, THERE IS TOO MANY ME. We are an arrhythmic school of fish, and every damn fish has something to say. We, Planet Tessa, a fucking hivemind of one.

We have something to say to ourselves.

Maybe I'm not a school of fish, maybe I'm a migration of Golden Rays, or Blue Fin Tuna, or Wilderbeast. Maybe parts of me are meant to split off. Maybe my identity is meant to diverge and separate and be a fractured thing that will, later, come together again as something new.

It's 12.34am, and my ears are ringing with the memory of music. Music = mountains. There's mountains in me now, as intangible as music. This duality of being both immense and macroscopic in their extremes simultaneously is rare these days, it doesn't sweep through and out my head as often as it used to. But it is here now, and so I will ride it and say this.

You will not escape this year resolutionless. I had thought to let you off the hook this time, as the pressure of promises won't help you right now, and there are so many things you want to address, the size of the list alone will choke you.

You choked a lot in 2010. You're scared.

Now, now, now you'll be the spread lace of the Frilled-Neck Lizard, the raised quills of the Crested Porcupine, and the rampant fluffage of the White-faced Scops Owl. You're not dangerous, but you can pretend to be.



What do puffer fish do when they are frightened?

They make themselves look a damn sight sillier, but the point is made. In taking damage, they defeat their adversaries.

You are not strong, little fish, but you will be brave.




Also, you need a haircut.

Today, I flew my kite.

this bitter pill and apathy my shield

Monday
Enough said.

Tuesday
Insomnia. Still reeling from the previous days' episode. Fear of taking pill = not taking pill = day spent in pain. Headache. Phone call. Doctor's appointment booked a month prior now canceled due to doctor calling in sick.

Wednesday
Insomnia. Fear of taking pill = not taking pill = day spent in pain. Headache. Shittest job interview ever, for the job I'm doing now no less. Anxiety and despair. Single most painful physio experience of my life. Spilt whole cup of tea on my phone.

Thursday
Insomnia. Have bruises from previous day's physio. Take pill. Have a lesser episode on train in to work, but still an episode. Remain at work. Headache remains in head. Visit cobbler's to pick up boots put in to have the soles repaired, and discover cobbler has given my favourite pair of boots to some random other customer. Paid, and so pay my bills and rent and am left with less than a third of my pay.

Friday
Insomnia. Take pill. Have lesser episode. Remain at work. Headache remains in head. Rescheduled appointment with doctor = talking about RSI = dredging up a lot of things I expend a great deal of energy not thinking about. Cry in public. Wear sunglasses indoors. Cyclist hits me so hard I leave the ground. The impact from finding the ground again knocks my vision black. Too stunned to get his details. My right arm took the brunt of the collision, and I landed on my left elbow. They are starting to hurt.