After Moreau

Jeffrey Ford

I, Hippopotamus Man, can say without question that Moreau was a total asshole. Wells at least got that part right, but the rest of the story he told all wrong. He makes it seem like the Doctor was about trying to turn beasts into humans. The writer must have heard about it third-hand from some guy who knew a guy who knew something about the guy who escaped the island by raft. In fact, we were people first before we were kidnapped and brought to the island. I was living in a little town, Daysue City, on the coast in California. Sleepy doesn’t half describe it. I owned the local hardware store, had a wife and two kids. One night I took my dog for a walk down by the sea, and as we passed along the trail through the woods, I was jumped from behind and hit on the head. I woke in a cage in the hold of a ship.

People from all over the place wound up on the island. Dog Girl was originally from the Bronx, Monkey Man Number Two was from Miami, and they snatched Bird Boy, in broad daylight, from a public beach in North Carolina. We all went through Moreau’s horrifying course of injections together. The stuff was an angry wasp in the vein, and bloated me with putrid gases, made my brain itch unbearably. Still, I can’t say I suffered more than the others. Forget House of Pain, it was more like a city block. When you wake from a deep, feverish sleep and find your mouth has become a beak, your hand a talon, it’s terrifying. A scream comes forth as a bleat, a roar, a chirp. You can’t conceive of it, because it’s not make believe.

Go ahead, pet my snout, but watch the tusks. No one wants the impossible. What human part of us remained didn’t want it either. It was a rough transition, coming to terms with the animal, but we helped each other. After we had time to settle into our hides, so to speak, there were some good times in the jungle. Moreau could only jab so many needles in your ass in a week, so the rest of the time we roamed the island. There was a lot of fucking too. I’ll never forget the sight of Caribou Woman and Skunk Man going at it on the beach, beneath the bright island sun. The only way I can describe it is by using a quote I remember from my school days, from Coleridge about metaphor, “the reconciliation of opposites.” I know, it means nothing to you.

We all talked a lot and for some reason continued to understand each other. Everybody was pretty reasonable about getting along, and some of the smarter ones like Fish Guy helped to develop a general philosophy for the community of survivors.  The Seven Precepts are simple and make perfect sense. I’ll list them, but before I do I want to point something out. Keep in mind what it states in the list below and then compare that to the dark, twisted version that appears in Laughton’s film version of the Wells’ novel, Island of Lost Souls. Monkey Man Number One and a couple of the others took the boat to Frisco, and by dark of night robbed a Macy’s. One of the things they brought back was a projector and an 8-millimeter version of the flick. I believe it’s Bela Lugosi who plays Speaker of the Law. I’ll refrain from saying “hambone” for the sake of Pig Lady’s feelings. That performance is an insult to the truth, but, on the otherhand, Laughton, himself was so much Moreau it startled us to see the film. Here are the real Seven Precepts, the list of how we live:

Trust don’t Trust

Sleep don’t Sleep

Breathe don’t Breathe

Laugh don’t Laugh

Weep don’t Weep

Eat don’t Eat

Fuck Whenever You Want

You see what I mean? Animal clarity, clean and sharp, like an owl’s gaze. Anyway, here we are, after Moreau. We’ve got the island to ourselves. There’s plenty to eat — all the animals that resided naturally and the exotic beasts Moreau brought in for the transmission of somatic essence — the raw ingredients to make us them. A good number of the latter escaped the fire, took to the jungle and reproduced. There are herds of suburban house cats that have wiped out the natural ostrich population and herds of water oxen that aren’t indigenous.

Actually, there’s also a tiger that roams the lower slopes of the island’s one mountain. Ocelot Boy thought he could communicate with the tiger. He tracked the cat to its lair in a cave in the side of the mountain, and sat outside the entrance exchanging growls and snarls with the beast until the sun went down. Then the tiger killed and ate him. The tiger roared that night and the sound of its voice echoed down the mountain slope. Panther Woman, who lay with me in my wallow, trembled and whispered that the tiger was laughing.

She also told me about how back in the days of the Doctor, when her tail and whiskers were still developing, she’d be brought naked to his kitchen and made to kneel and lap from a bowl of milk while Moreau, sitting in a chair with his pants around his ankles, boots still on, petted his knobby member. I asked Panther Woman why she thought he did it. She said, “He was so smart, he was stupid. I mean, what was he going for? People turning into animals part way? What kind of life goal is that? A big jerk-off.” We laughed, lying there in the moonlight.

Where was I? I had to learn to love the water, but otherwise things weren’t bad. I had friends to talk to, and we survived because we stuck together, we shared, we sacrificed for the common good. Do I have to explain? Of course I do, but I’m not going to. I can’t remember where this was all headed. I had a point to make, here. What I can tell you right now is that Rooster Man went down today. He came to see me in the big river. I was bobbing in the flow with my real hippo friends when I noticed Rooster calling me from the bank. He was flapping a wing and his comb was moving in the breeze. Right behind him, he obviously had no idea, was a gigantic alligator. I could have called a warning to him, but I knew it was too late. Instead I just waved goodbye. He squawked bloody murder, and I finally dove under when I heard the crunch of his beak.

Tomorrow I’ve got tea with the Boar family. I ran into old man Boar and he invited me and Panther Woman over to their cave. The Boars are a strange group. They all still wear human clothes — the ones that can do anyway. Old man Boar wears Moreau’s white suit and his Panama hat. It doesn’t seem to faze him in the least that there’s a big shit stain in the back of the pants. I’ve shared the Doctor’s old cigars with Boar. He blows smoke like the boat’s funnel and talks a crazy politics not of this world. I just nod and say yes to him, because he puts honey in his tea. Panther and I crave honey.

The other day, when he offered the invitation, Boar told me under his breath that Giraffe Man was engaged in continuing experiments with Moreau’s formulas and techniques. He said the situation was dire, like a coconut with legs. I had no idea what he meant. I asked around, and a couple of the beast people told me it was true. Giraffe couldn’t leave well enough alone. He was injecting himself. Then a couple days after I confirmed old Boar’s claim, I heard they found Giraffe Man, on the floor of what remained of the old lab — a bubbling brown mass of putrescence.

We gathered at the site and Fish Guy shoveled up Giraffe’s remains and buried them in the garden out back. Monkey Man Number Two played a requiem on the unburned half of the piano and Squirrel Girl, gray with age, read a poem that was a story of a tree that would grow in the spot Giraffe was buried and bear fruit that would allow us all to achieve complete animality. Everybody knew it would never happen but we all wished it would.

When I loll in the big river, I think about the cosmos as if it’s a big river of stars. I eat fish and leaves and roots. Weasel Woman says it’s a healthy diet, and I guess it is. How would she know, though, really? As long as I stay with the herd of real hippos, I’m safe from the alligators. There have been close calls, believe me. When standing on land in the hot sun, sometimes I bleed from all my pores to cool my hide. Panther Woman has admitted this aspect of my nature disgusts her. To me she is beautiful in every way. The fur... you can’t imagine. She’s a hot furry number, and she’s gotten over her fear of water. I’m telling you, we do it in the river, with the stars watching, and it’s a smooth animal.

If you find this message in this bottle, don’t come looking for us. It would be pointless. I can’t even remember what possessed me to write in the first place. You should see how pathetic it is to write with a hippo paw. My reason for writing is probably the same unknown thing that made Moreau want to turn people into beasts. Straight up human madness. No animal would do either.

Monkey Man Numbers One and Two are trying to talk some of the others into going back to civilization to stay. They approached me and I asked them, “Why would I want to live the rest of my life as a sideshow freak?”

Number Two said, “You know, eventually Panther Woman is going to turn on you. She’ll eat your heart for breakfast.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. Till then, it’s roots and leaves, fucking in the wallow, and bobbing in the flow, dreaming of the cosmos. Infrequently, there’s an uncertain memory of my family I left behind in the old life but the river’s current mercifully whisks that vague impression of pale faces to the sea.

That should have been the end of the message, but I forgot to tell you something. This is important. We ate Moreau. That’s right. He screamed like the bird of paradise when we took him down. I don’t eat meat, but even I had a small toe. Sweet flesh for a bitter man. Mouse Person insisted on eating the brain, and no one cared to fight him for it. The only thing is, he got haunted inside from it. When we listened in his big ears, we heard voices. He kept telling us he was the Devil. At first we laughed, but he kept it up too long. A couple of us got together one night and pushed him off the sea cliff. The next day and for months after, we searched the shore for his body, but never found it. Monkey Man Number One sniffs the air and swears the half-rodent is still alive on the island. We’ve found droppings.

About the Author

Jeffrey Ford’s most recent novels are The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year (all from Harper Collins). His short stories have been collected into two books from Golden Gryphon Press, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and The Empire of Ice Cream. In September of 2008, Harper Collins will publish a third collection, The Drowned Life. Also in ‘08 Golden Gryphon will rerelease his trilogy, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond with new covers by John Picacio. Ford’s stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and his work has been awarded The World Fantasy Award, The Nebula, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, The Fountain Award, and Le Grand Prix de l’imaginaire. He lives in South Jersey with his wife and two sons and works as a professor of Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College.

Flight

Jeremiah Sturgill

Brow lift. Neck lift. Face lift.

Blepharoplasty — not familiar with the term? Pretend I said eyelid surgery. To make them slant to the outside, that’s all; the exotic look is in. Trust us. You’ll love it. Rhinoplasty — a nose job, that’s all. Not just a reshaping, mind you, but a reimagining. First, we’ll add that beautiful upward tilt (yes, like hers — and hers — and hers), then we’ll reduce the size and narrow the bridge. You may need to breathe through your mouth afterwards, but once we cap your teeth, you’ll thank us for it.

Next is cosmetic otoplasty — that’s for your ears — followed by collagen injections in your lips and cheeks. Removal of your second chin, and the insertion of an implant to help shape the first one. Permanent laser hair removal below your lower lip, above your upper lip, and for your sideburns too (I can’t believe you have sideburns!). We may as well take off your eyebrows while we are at it. You can draw them on in the future, if you want to go retro. Or schedule a follow-up for replacements, if they come back in style.

Liposuction’s next, then abdominoplasty (just another word for tummy tuck, girl, no need to worry). After that, we’ll staple your stomach, reshape your buttocks, and make sure your love handles are all-the-way gone — nip and tuck and all that nonsense. You get the idea.

Of course, there’s still the grand finale, the one no woman would be complete without: breast augmentation. Enlargement and reshaping in your case. In most cases, actually, but that’s not important. All you have to do is show up. We mail you the bill.

The last day comes and it’s done — you’re done, it’s all downhill from there. Just a few months of rehabilitation, followed by a simple maintenance routine. A chemical peel treatment and derm abrasion therapy every now and then for your complexion, along with the daily, oil-free, skin-exfoliating face wash. And that Hollywood all-liquid seven-day miracle diet? Why not. Couldn’t hurt. Fen-Phen and caffeine pills? Sure. If anything goes wrong, you can always file a lawsuit.

All right. You’ve been faithful. You’ve done everything you needed to do, and it has worked. You can hardly believe that beautiful woman in the mirror is you.

Catching your breath in the doctor’s office, you don’t even mind the wait. It feels good just to sit still. Well, not still. Your foot keeps twitching, and you can’t seem to make it stop. But why would you want to? It’s good to keep moving. Helps burn those calories.

They call your name and you walk into the examination room and sit down again. Your foot keeps up its hypnotic spasming, and everything looks like it’s underwater. He comes out, the doctor does, and you lift up your shirt. He pinches you with cold metal on your stomach, your back, your thighs.

“Abigail, I’m sorry,” he says, and you can see it in his eyes: the news is bad. “Your body-fat index is point-oh-six.” He looks like he wants to cry.

You can’t help yourself. You cry. You deserve to feel bad, tubby. Fatso. Whale. Blimp. Pig. Point-oh-six? How could you have been so weak? Too many calories, that’s the problem. You stumble on your way out of the office, ignoring the secretary when she calls out your name. You decide then and there that something’s going to have to give, and isn’t going to be you. You cut you intake in half — three hundred calories a day is more than enough. Decadent, even. You’ve worked too hard for this to end now, for it to end like this, only —

Of course it’s not enough. You’re still not perfect. It doesn’t matter how skinny you are if you’re ugly. Thin and beautiful, that’s the ticket. Only you chickened out at the end, before they were finished. One last procedure, that’s all. One last procedure, and you’ll finally know what it’s like to be pretty.

Dr. Bernstein handles the height augmentation — he always does the best job, gets all the best dwarfs. Not that you’re a midget. Or are they little people now?

Over the course of six months, he breaks each leg three times in three different places. With the help of a special brace while they heal, he gives you another two and one-eighth inches of height. You grin and bear the pain, because it’s worth it. It’s so worth it. It’s gotta be worth it.

It is worth it, for the pain pills he prescribes afterward if nothing else.

One day in his office for a follow-up exam, you pick up last month’s medical science journal and see an article about hip replacements. About strong, light, titanium alloys. It seems so obvious. Why hadn’t you thought of it before?

You dip into the trust fund (thankful your parents got that big life insurance policy just in time) and pull some strings, grease some wheels, sign some waivers. Three hundred thousand dollars and seven months later, 88% of your bones have been replaced by man-made parts, some lighter than the original by as much as half an ounce. The doctor even helps you pick out the supplements you need to purchase every month from the local GNC to stay healthy.

“Vitamin D,” he reiterates before you leave. “It’s very important to get your vitamin D.”

You step on the scale and smile.

You’ve done it. For sure, this time. You jump up and down, squealing with delight, and clap your hands. They clank a little mechanically now, but the sound is actually quite musical, once you get used to it. Spots dance in front of your eyes. You begin to sweat. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself so much, silly girl. Take a caffeine pill.

Whew, that’s better. Now... what were you doing?

Oh yes. The celebration!

You go to your favorite restaurant — you sit at your favorite table — and the waiter, the cute Spanish one who always flirts with you, smiles and brings you your regular order. You take a long moment and smell the delicious aroma of the non-fat artificial vanilla flavoring ice cream substitute, and it’s heaven. You’re in heaven. You know it’s the wrong thing to do, you know that it’s bad for you, but you can’t help yourself: you put your spoon into the ice cream, and then inside your mouth!

Oooohhh, everything is so cold and delicious! You let the ice cream substitute melt on your tongue, you let it run over your taste buds, you shiver in delight until —

Enough! You can’t take it anymore! You run to the bathroom and rinse out your mouth with some of the bottled water in your purse. Can’t be accidentally swallowing any, you naughty thing! In your haste to cleanse the badness, you spray water out all over the mirror.

But what if you were too late? What if you already had swallowed some, just a little, so little that you hadn’t even noticed? You go into the stall and shut the door behind you, and you’re proud for a moment that you don’t even need to use your fingers anymore.

When you go to see the doctor the following day, you lift up your shirt and he pinches you with cold metal on your stomach, your back, your thighs.

He frowns. “This can’t be right,” he says. He looks confused. He stares at you. He helps you stand up and takes you over to the scales. He fiddles with the weights for a few minutes, but no matter what he does it still says the same thing. You smile your secret little smile, the one you smile sometimes when your face is too tired for the other one, the one others can see, and you know that the instrument is correct. You know it, but it’s just not official until a doctor says so. No — the Doctor. Capital D. You can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait to hear him say it, you can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait. What the hell is he waiting for?

“Abigail,” he says, finally giving up on the scale, “I don’t understand it. How can you be six-two, weigh only fourteen pounds, and still be alive?”

You smile at him with the other smile, the external one, even though the effort threatens to prematurely wear you out. “I know, doctor. I amaze even myself sometimes.”

You strut a little as you walk out of the office.

Six weeks later, you meet the man of your dreams: a multibillionaire prince in exile, who makes his home in Connecticut now that the royal family of — wherever, you were never good at geography — has fallen out of favor. What makes him so special, though, is that you like him for who he is, and he likes you for who you are. It’s not your body — so perfect now, after all of your hard work — or his money and his title. No, it’s the little things that make the two of you work so well together, like how each of you can’t help but smile when you see the other and how you never run out of things to talk about. You know, the important stuff.

In fact, both of you were madly, wildly, truly in love (with the stars in your eyes and that warm glow in your hearts) well before it registered in your brains: it was the crotch-area that caught on first, you joke to all of your jealous friends.

Someday, if they’re lucky, maybe they can find a catch half as good. The poor plain things.

Two months after you meet him, the day finally arrives. The day, the one you both worked so hard to obtain: your wedding day. You have on a simple white dress, no train, with very little lace work around the top. It accentuates your augmented bosom, and the rail-thin, rock-hard abdomen you sweated blood and tears and money to earn. The one extravagance in the simple ensemble is the veil — so large, airy, and white it looks like a cloud-halo around your head. That’s why you bought it. He always calls you his little angel.

You step out of the limo on the big day and begin walking up the steps to the church. You take your time, resting every few steps and swallowing caffeine pills for energy when necessary. It’s hard to do something so physical now that you’ve perfected your body, but the thought of your prince waiting for you at the top gives your blood all the strength and vigor it needs — until it happens.

Damn the veil. It would never have happened without the veil. You’re so thin, so perfect! There would have been no purchase for the wind. But you are wearing the veil, and you can’t take it back now even though you scream as the gust of air slams into you from the side and lifts you up into the sky.

The veil spreads out, all fifty thousand dollars of it, and it catches the wind almost as though it had been designed to do so from the very beginning, almost as though you really are an angel and the veil is your wings. You rise up into the air, higher and higher, and for a second your strained heart beats so fast that you are afraid it will burst. So you hold off on the caffeine pill you were about to swallow until it slows down again.

Your prince sees it all happen from the chapel, and he races from the church to his car. His driver speeds off while he makes a call on his cell phone, and for two whole minutes you see nothing of him at all until — it comes. The private helicopter. You smile when you see that your prince himself is there within it, right beside the pilot, shouting orders and gesturing wildly at you, his love. His princess. His angel.

The chopper closes in, but it doesn’t work. You’re far too light now, and the veil is far too efficient at catching the wind. Whenever the helicopter rises up to meet you, the gusts created by its whirling blades do nothing but send you higher and higher into the atmosphere.

Eventually the air is too thin for the helicopter to follow. You watch as it recedes, shrinking beneath you, becoming smaller and smaller — a dot — until finally, it is gone. The whole of planet Earth takes its place in stretching out beneath your feet, and you wave hello.

I’m queen of the world, you think. Smiling, you reach out with your arms and grab hold of the moon, pulling it to your bosom and snuggling close.

You wish mom were alive to see you, but she isn’t and doesn’t, and in fact, no one ever sees you again. Not ever. But late at night, your many friends and the adoring public that fawned so jealously after your fairy tale wedding to the prince of—wherever — often look up into the sparkling sky. Up at your legend, to stare and silently wonder at which light above was added on that blustery, almost wedding day in March.

All of them, you say in your secret voice. All of them.

But they don’t hear you. And every time you think of using your other voice, the one they could hear, it hardly seems worth the effort.

About the Author

Jeremiah Sturgill lives and writes in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Flight” is his second published story. The first, “Songbird,” was published by Baen’s Universe in late 2006. In 2005, he graduated from Mary Washington University and started Son and Foe, a fiction e-zine that crashed and burned a year later with spectacular predictability (but not before publishing a number of really great stories). In late 2007, he stopped talking at parties about this novel he planned on writing, and he began talking about this novel he’d finished. Sometime in the next twenty years, he hopes to actually sell the damn thing.

Not Now, Sweetie, Daddy’s Worldbuilding

Tim Pratt

I’m not a full-time writer. It’s much worse than that: I’m a guy with a day job who also has enough freelance work to keep a full-time writer busy. In the past couple of years I’ve made more money from writing than I have in my job as an editor at a trade magazine, but in my attempts to pay down the credit card debt accrued in my misspent early twenties, I’ve kept the day job even as my writing workload increased. At this point, I do a couple thousand words of non-fiction a week, and I’m almost finished with my current book contract (which required me to write four novels in two years); add in the occasional short story, book review, and articles like this one, and, well, you can imagine, I spend a lot of time typing.

All of which made me a little anxious when my wife (also a writer, Heather Shaw) and I started talking about having a kid back in 2006. The timing was right in a lot of ways; we weren’t quite as flat broke as usual, we weren’t getting any younger, and, more importantly, we wanted our own little bundle of pooping screaming joy. But I’m no stranger to kids. I knew having a baby would utterly transform our lives — mostly, but not entirely, in positive ways. The not-so-positive ways I imagined included sleep-deprivation and a general time-crunch, but I figured, hey, people have been having babies for a few hundred millennia, and it hasn’t spelled the doom of all art and culture and civilization, so I’m sure we’ll cope.

But after my wife got pregnant and we began spreading the news, I started to get the comments. The knowing, nodding comments from other parents, some of whom were also writers. “That’s it for your writing career for a few years,” they’d say. Or, “Get ready to become an appendage to a tiny human,” they’d say. Or, “So long, sense of self!” Well, hell. Seriously? I could live without my sense of self, but having a kid would trash my ability to write? That was problematic, since the only way we could afford to have a kid, at least without switching to an all-macaroni-and-cheese diet, was with the extra money I made from writing. If parenthood and cranking out words were incompatible, I was pretty well screwed.

Fortunately I saw a few counterexamples. Creative parents who’d managed to keep producing work, while still enjoying their kids. Many of them used resources I didn’t expect to have, though — nannies, for instance. Or babysitters who came in to watch the kids for a couple of days a week. Or, and this seemed crucial, not working the equivalent of two full-time jobs. I knew writing and parenting an infant could be done — I just wasn’t sure how I, in particular, would do it.

Our son River was born on November 8, 2007. The birth experience was harrowing and transformative, and once everything was settled down and mom and baby were okay, I was as happy as I’ve ever been. We spent the next few days in the hospital, where my wife slept in a hospital bed, my son slept in a little tiny baby bed, and I slept — or, rather, failed to sleep — on a cot that was essentially a large block of wood with a yoga mat stapled on top of it. At one point, having gone a day and a half without rest, but unable to sleep, I thought, “Okay, let’s do a proof of concept. Let’s write something.”

I’d done that kind of ritual psych-yourself-out magic before. I went to the Clarion writing workshop in 1999, right after college (remember that debt I ran up in my misspent twenties? Spending six weeks at a workshop was one of the causes of that). At the workshop, I heard about the “post-Clarion slump” that afflicted many writers. After spending six weeks being hyper-critical, a switch got thrown in some people’s heads, and they couldn’t write a damn thing for six months or a year or two years or four, because they couldn’t turn off the internal editor. I was terrified of something like that happening to me, so immediately after returning from Clarion, I wrote a novel. In about 90 days. I didn’t sell the novel or anything, ever, but I proved to myself that I could still write, at least as well as I ever could.

So while my wife slept, and my son slept, I sat in the hall outside the hospital room, and I wrote. When I finished the story, and my wife woke up, I read it to her, and to our son (he wasn’t much of an audience then, but I don’t hold it against him). The story was called “The River Boy,” and it appeared in this very magazine in January. I proved to myself that I could still write (salable!) fiction, even after not sleeping for 36 hours, in terrible conditions. That was an important moment. That got me over the psychological perils of writing as a new father.

At the time, I thought, “Ha! I showed you, assorted naysayers!” Boy, was I dumb. Sure, I’d overcome any potential psychological block — but that didn’t help much with practical matters, did it?

I am, by nature, a binge writer. I like sitting at my computer, cranking up iTunes, and tippy-tapping the keys for six or eight hours at a go. (With breaks to occasionally stare out the window or eat a cheeseburger.)  A couple of years ago I finagled things at my day job to get a schedule that’s perfect for me. I work four days a week (nine-hour-days, no less), and get every Wednesday off. On those Wednesdays, I would write — freelance non-fiction stuff in the morning, then I’d take a walk (both an attempt to exercise my sedentary corpus and a chance to think about the afternoon’s work), and then I’d work on fiction for the rest of the day. I was crazy productive. I kept on top of my book-every-six-months deadlines, never turned in a review or column late, and even wrote the occasional short story, just to keep my hand in.

But with a kid, everything changed. My wife was on maternity leave for a while, and when I got home from work, she was justifiably exhausted and ready to have me take over the kid for a while — something I was happy to do, having missed him all day. As a newborn, he didn’t have a sleep schedule so much as a series of randomly-occurring naps of no set duration, which made it tough for me to get enough sleep to function as a human being, let alone compose words of deathless (or even usably disposable) prose. I could usually scrounge a couple of hours each week to get work done, which was enough to stay on top of my freelance deadlines... but what about my novel, the fourth and final one on my contract, due shortly before my son turns six months old? And what about after my wife’s maternity leave ended and she went back to work, too? We wrangled our schedules such that we could avoid day care — I take the kid into the office with me a couple days a week (it’s a small office, and baby-friendly, which helps), and my wife works from home a few different days a week, so between us, the kid is always taken care of. But that means a distinct lack of what you childless types call “free time.” Where was I going to get seven or eight hours in a row, ever, to binge-write fiction?

Well, nowhere. With a kid, long chunks of time to write is like perpetual motion or zero point energy. You just can’t get it, at least, not without putting more energy into the system than you get out. I was seriously contemplating hiring a babysitter for a few hours just so I could write — but  with the kind of money fiction writing pays, that quickly becomes a losing proposition, economically speaking. So... I adjusted. Turns out, that’s what being a parent requires. Yes, I’m a natural binge writer. Yes, my preferred technique is to slip into that wonderful zen state of flow for several hours and emerge with twenty or thirty pages of prose. But you know what? Too bad.

Let me tell you how I write now: in ten or fifteen minute increments. Sometimes a whole half hour on my lunch breaks at work. Or, when my kid wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and wants to eat, and I pour a bottle down him and know he’ll sleep for a couple more hours, I don’t go back to bed — I take advantage of that two hours, and sleep-dep be damned. We’ve got this toy — we call it the “sun spinner” — that’s basically a colorful mat with some toys dangling above, and big mirror, and it spins and sings and talks. Our kid loves it. Put him on his back under the mirror and he giggles and coos for ten minutes, or 20 minutes, or even 30 minutes. That’s when I write — hell, that’s when I wrote most of this. Now, at four months old, he’s finally getting into something resembling a sleep routine, with a morning nap and an afternoon nap. The naps don’t always happen, and they aren’t of dependable length, but on a good day he’ll snooze in the swing for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, and if I’m home from work that day, I get into work-mode and I crank.

I am no longer thrown off my game by interruptions, phone calls, knocks at the door. Such things, once enough to distract me and wreck my productivity, now don’t even rate notice. I can pick up a plot thread abandoned two weeks ago mid-sentence and make it work again. I can type one-handed with a baby hanging on my other arm, gnawing on my bicep and kicking my keyboard tray. I plot while I push him in the stroller. I read page proofs while bottle feeding. I check copyedits during tummy time. I put him in the baby harness on my chest and type while he hollers about how incredibly bored he is just watching black marks appear on a white screen.

I just do it. It helps that I have no choice. Deadlines have a way of concentrating the mind. Is my writing as good now as it once was? I have no idea. It’s definitely different. I worry about the flow of the language, that it might have lost something since I’m producing prose in such short bursts. I worry about having less time to revise, and about having more typos and continuity errors than I used to, and producing generally rougher and more hideous first drafts. And it’s not like I’ve got this thing figured out for all time; I mean, my son is four months old right now. He’s tiny, he pretty much stays where we put him (flailing and early attempts at rolling aside), and he’s overall easygoing. What will I do when he can get out of the swing on his own and do himself bodily harm if I don’t keep a close eye on him? What happens when the terrible twos start and he begins testing limits? When he needs help with his spelling homework? When I’m trying to work and he comes in after school and says, hopefully, “Daddy, will you play with me?” Will I really be able to look at him and say, “Not now, kiddo, daddy’s plotting?” I don’t know. I don’t know how it’ll work. I just know it will, somehow. Learning that I’m capable of absorbing major disruptions to my beloved routines, that I can make adjustments to do what’s necessary, is the first thing my son taught me. (Because I already knew how to change poop-filled diapers.)

About the Author

Tim Pratt lives in Oakland California with his wife Heather Shaw and their son River. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and last year his story “Impossible Dreams” won a Hugo Award. Just lately he’s been publishing a series of urban fantasy novels under the name T.A. Pratt, starting with Blood Engines in 2007, with Poison Sleep and Dead Reign to follow in 2008.

Refusing to Be the Same: An Interview with K.J. Bishop

Jeff VanderMeer

K.J. Bishop’s first novel, The Etched City, was published by indie press Prime Books and then picked up by Bantam as well as Pan Macmillan, in addition to foreign language editions. It garnered excellent critical attention and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, in addition to winning the Crawford Award for best first novel. Bishop has also had stories in Leviathan 4, The New Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and several other publications.

For those who aren’t familiar with Bishop’s fiction, she writes in a somewhat surrealist, almost Decadent vein, with The Etched City being a kind of dark urban fantasy. Her writing can be lush, but also sparse and minimalistic when she wants it to be. She, perhaps more than most others, strikes me as someone who could go in any direction as a writer.

Bishop and her husband currently live in Bangkok, Thailand, after moving from Australia. From Bangkok, she keeps up a lively and sometimes controversial blog (http://kjbishop.net/). Since The Etched City, Bishop has been splitting her time between a variety of different projects. Although a new novel may be a year or more in the offing, she is working on short fiction. I decided to check in on Bishop and find out what she’d been up to...

How did the publication of The Etched City change your life?

It made me decide to try to learn to be a writer. I didn’t have much of a literary vocation beforehand. I wrote the book without thinking of it as the beginning of anything. Afterwards, I wasn’t sure whether to continue with web design or do something else. The publication made me decide on the “something else”, which was writing. So it changed my direction. It brought me a whole lot of new friends and acquaintances. It also made me face and fight the people-pleasing side of myself.

Did your view of the novel change after the reviews and reader comments?

Not much. Reviews and comments were so diverse that if I’d listened to them all my views would have had to change in several contradictory directions. I took certain technical criticisms on board; that was about it.

If you had the whole experience to do over, is there anything you would have done differently?

Regarding the book, I’d have given more story to Raule. If I’d had my Bangkok experiences then, I could have added more detail to Ashamoil. In my general life, I might have decided much earlier to keep up a second job (I now teach English) rather than try to write full-time, which didn’t work for me.

Have you any contact to other writers in Bangkok? And have you been exposed to Pacific Rim or Southeast Asian writings/writers you weren’t aware of before?

I haven’t tried to meet other writers here. I have writer friends online, but in my real social life I like to get away from the writing world and hang out with people who do other things. There’s a sort of local genre about farang (foreign, white) men in Bangkok and their adventures with bargirls and hustlers and so forth, which I didn’t know about before. I’ve been getting into Japanese authors a bit more — but famous ones, like Mishima, Kobo Abe, Natsume Soseki. I have fuddy-duddy tastes, I guess.

Has the move from Australia to Bangkok had any effect on your writing — tone, subject matter, process?>

It’s starting to have an effect, mainly on subject matter. But since I came late to writing and have been trying out different things these past few years, I think it’s also just a natural process of change. The Iraq war has probably had an equal effect. I’ve become more interested in morality, justice, kindness — the person who is trying to be good, and the difficulty of doing the right thing, or even working out what the right thing is.

You’ve worked on and off on different follow-up novels to The Etched City. What are you currently working on?

I’m superstitious about talking about long-term projects. There’s a fantasy novel, a collaborative novel/non-novel, and a couple of stories. I’m getting closer to enough material for a story collection. I can talk about one of the stories, which, as you know, since you inspired it, is about a giant mouseman slogging through a post-apocalyptic world. For the past year I’ve also been writing a ridiculous doujinshi, based on The Etched City, which I post on my blog. It was sparked by a reader’s remark that the book was “surprisingly heteronormative” for a decadent-influenced work, and snowballed from there.

How difficult is writing, for you? Do you get joy out of the act of writing itself?

Writing is easy. Writing well is a bit harder. I’m not good with plot, and I doubt I ever will be. I like to write in different styles. Some are easier for me than others. I love it when the surrealist muse strikes and I can just sit back and channel something bizarre. But there’s also pleasure in consciously crafting normal sentences and paragraphs. I nearly always get pleasure out of writing. What I hate is looking back over it and realising that what I’ve written is awful.

What’s your dream project? Something you’ve had in mind for a long time but it’s just not ready to be brought out into the world yet?

I would love to do a graphic novel, but my art skills aren’t good enough. I’m giving myself a few years to improve. If I just can’t get there, I’ll look for an artist to work with. I also have a mainstream novel that I keep trying to write. I think I’ve stacked up about 500,000 words of horrible writing. I’ll probably still be fiddling around with it when I’m 90. I want to resurrect Patrick White and get him to write it, so maybe at some point I’ll give up writing and turn to necromancy.

Tell me about the Mouse Man. What is he all about? Is he happy or not so much? Does he know how to dance? Does he know what dancing is?

The Mouse Man (ha, I just typoed “Muse Man”) is all about keeping him and his hairless long-nosed gopher-thing son alive from one day to the next. He isn’t happy. I’d say he’s traumatised and possibly insane. He was once human, before reality broke. Yeah, he does know how to dance. In fact, I’m just rewriting a bit where the addition of some dancing would be perfect. Thanks for the serendipity! He’s in my head. I love him. When I love a character, I become that character’s slave. I have to do things their way.

Finally, are you a New Weird writer, or just an amiable eccentric who happens to indulge in Lautreaumont from time to time?

Tee hee, the latter. Maldoror is an astral virus that infected me years ago. Now I have chronic Maldoritis. Or Mal de Writers.

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning writer with books published in over 20 countries. He has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog, io9, New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among others.

Jeff’s novel Finch and writing book, Booklife, are forthcoming this fall.