Writing Diary: Fungal Acceptances

Fungi

My story "Letters to a Fungus" has been accepted into the Fungi anthology, by Innsmouth Free Press. The complete table of contents is over on their site. This is a good excuse to hug a mushroom.

Goodreads

I've been playing around with my Goodreads account recently. One task was clearing up my book list, as it was mangled due to being imported from LibraryThing. I've also got librarian status, and cleaned up the books I have fiction/poetry in. A lot of them lost cover images and data when Goodreads stopped using Amazon as a source.

Which leads on to the next musing. In the title of every author's page, they're listed as being the author of whatever work has the most ratings. All of my books so far are either single 'zine issues or best ofs from that market. But this year, I'm going to be in two themed anthologies, both from small presses with Lovecraftian names: Fungi (Innsmouth Free Press) and Fish (Dagan Books). They're both likely to beat my current top ratings, based on the ratings they have for previous anthologies. So the battle will be on! Which will win the ratings war and become my title book?

This is probably only a battle in my head... but I have to pass the time somehow. And Fungi versus Fish has a good ring to it.

The Spots of Yayoi Kusama

Context

I went to the Tate Modern for the first time a little while back. I had a mild fever by the time I got home, so I took aspirin, laid down for a bit, then got up and write a story about artists and tentacle monsters*.

The fever wasn't because I was sick. It was sensory overload. When I walk into a crowded room, it's like I've walked into trippy dayglow land. My reactions range from general distraction, to seeing lights and shapes in front of my eyes. I used to think this happened to everyone, but I came to realise that for most people, a busy room is a plain and stationary affair.

Sensory overloads aren't always bad. Art is something that sets it off in a good way. I may well see spots and have fever symptoms, but I enjoy visiting galleries. I'm attracted to bright colours, bold shapes and light rooms (where the room in dark, apart from points of light). Modern art has plenty of those.

This time when I visited the Tate Modern, I looked over the paid exhibitions**. I was immediately drawn to Yayoi Kusama's work, as it it was bright and covered in polkadots. Finding out she had hallucinations***, which led to some of the repeated images, made me even more intrigued. I don't think she sees things for the same reason as I do (there's no discussion of sensory overloads in the interviews), and I've never felt the things I see were real (they're translucent, like an overlay on reality), but I was curious to see how it influenced her art.

Infinity

The art is mostly laid out in chronological order. Her early paintings are smaller abstract works, with a focus on colour and patterns. Once she'd moved from Japan to America, the canvas size gets bigger. One room is taken up with 'infinity nets' - repeated white circles on large canvases. These wouldn't translate well as prints, but full-sized on every wall of a room, they have a calming effect. It reminded me of being on the beach on a calm day, as the infinity nets had a similar sensory impact to waves.

She also moved onto sculpture, being known for covering everyday things with items that caused her anxiety. The ones people focus on represent her anxieties about sex, but I noticed the clothing covered in flowers. Sex is not an uncommon anxiety. The objects with pasta on aren't a surprise from someone risking starvation in a country with plenty. But flowers struck me as a more unusual thing to be anxious about. Some of her interviews mention seeing fields of flowers as an example of an infinite thing - that the flowers go on forever. For me, the fear/wonder that comes with imagining the true scale of things made for a more interesting sculpture. But I guess for most, sex sells more than infinity flowers.

Her later pictures included collages, which have a melancholy feel to them. This shifts slowly into her most recent work - bold acrylic paintings with a cheerful feel (something I've seen criticised... but I don't view happy emotions as less artistically worthy than sad ones).

The highlight of the display were the two room installations (both of which I'd call light rooms). "I'm Here, but Nothing" is a dark room, set up like a room in a house. Fluorescent spots cover everything, lit by a UV lamp. Though you can see the items in the room with the faint light, the glowing spots dominate. From my perspective, it was like an inversion of sensory overloads, where the spots are no longer the overlay. They're the reality, and the room is the unreal layer.

The second light room was "Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life". It's covered in mirrors, with multi-coloured lights hanging down. The lights shift through various colours, creating an endless expanse of lights in the mirrors. Almost like a starscape.

Reflections

Armed with a copy of Alice in Wonderland (illustrated by Yayoi Kusama), I headed home. The family member who came along got a collection of postcard prints (we did the shop before heading in, so also played the game of spot the original in the exhibition). The gnarly mutant polkadot pumpkin cushions were out of my price range, but fun, as only gnarly mutant polkadot pumpkins can be.

It sounds strange to say, but I hadn't considered why I tend to put spots all over things. My spots are much smaller and not of the polkadot variety - often they're smallest dot I can make with whatever media I'm using. But they're there. I suppose because I've always been aware that the spots aren't really there, I didn't consider why I was making them real in my pictures.

-

* This story was "Visions of Destruction Series, Mixed Media". On the first visit, there were a lot of art series on display.

** The Tate Modern itself is free, but the special exhibitions need paid tickets. I recommend booking in advance. The ticket collection queue had about ten people. The ticket purchase queue went all the way to the main door and back again. I was glad we'd booked.

*** One criticism is that Kusama apparently didn't discuss having hallucinations with friends when she was younger. Some take this to mean she didn't really have them. But not only is it difficult to discuss seeing things that aren't there (people don't exactly take the news well most of the time), it's not immediately obvious that it isn't something everyone experiences. We tend to assume we experience the world the same way as everyone else, until proven otherwise. Saying, "Well, of course it's obvious people don't see spots, because I don't," is proving the point.

# The Tate asks for people not to take photographs in the ticketed exhibits, and to only use photos taken in the other galleries for personal use. I'm honouring that request... however, I have included two pictures taken outside the main galleries. The polkadot beach balls were dangling down outside the Yayoi Kusama display and the colourful perspex is the donation thingy at the main entrance. Pictures from the exhibition itself can be found on the BBC website and more information about Yayoi Kusama is on her website.

Steampunk and Sex Ratios

I've often heard comments praising the sex ratio of steampunk authors. Here is a genre that started out typically male-authored, where female authors have achieved success. It isn't just that they're published (as there are women published in every SFF genre), but they've achieved recognition. They're stocked on the shelves and they win awards. Mention favourite steampunk books, and Cherie Priest and Gail Carriger are bound to be mentioned. And they've done so without it being denounced as a 'girly' genre and disregarded (as can happen with urban fantasy, where there are a lot of female authors*.)

But is it true? Do the shelves reflect the idea that steampunk is a genre smiting all the usual discriminations in publishing?

I took the booklist in my post on the steampunk launch at the local bookshop. This is a snapshot in time of what books the shop was actually stocking (because it isn't just about what books are technically published and available, but what books get promoted and stocked). I only looked at novels. Where a book had co-authorship, I counted it as several books each with a single author. And here's what I found...

Female authors to male authors: Female 18.5%; Male 81.5%

Female-authored titles to male-authored titles: Female-authored: 21%; Male: 79%

Equal is something of an exaggeration. This isn't a surprise, as it's a common occurrence. When women take up 50% of a conversation, people will consider them to be dominating the conversation, rather than having an equal share. When a show has several important female characters, people will say female characters are the majority, even though counting the characters shows males outnumber them (Star Trek: Voyager was a classic example of this).

When we're talking about sex ratios and discrimination in publishing, it's important to realise people often see sex ratios though this lens. 1:1 ratios will be seen as women dominating. Less than that is seen as equality. Gut feelings or casual observation are generally wrong. Count the books, because the answer may surprise you.

This doesn't mean it's a bad thing that a few women have gained recognition, but it should be acknowledged that the bar they had to hit was higher than a male author. Steampunk, like other genres of SFF, has a long way to go before women get equal shelf space to men. Which also shouldn't be a surprise, but sometimes it takes a pie chart to bring it home.

-

* Even there though, the author with the most shelf space for an individual author at my local shop... Jim Butcher. Men in genres with high proportions of woman tend to get special attention. Vice versa doesn't really happen. Hard science fiction women are ignored to the point of people saying they don't exist.

# Female authors on the shelf were: Pip Ballantine, Gail Carriger, M. K. Hobson, Cherie Priest and Ekaterina Sedia.

The Hunger Games and New Boots

This counts as a mild spoiler for The Hunger Games, but it doesn't give plot details away: at the start of the games, Katniss is wearing new boots. It's likely they were tailored for her, but they were still new boots. In these boots, she had to run around and wade through water (thus making them wet new boots).

She didn't get blisters. And she's not the only one, because characters in many survival books are roaming around blister-free, without taking any precautions against them. Very few of them are wearing well-worn shoes/boots. Even fewer are used to walking, so wouldn't have hardened feet and would blister more easily (though this is one thing that doesn't apply to Katniss, as she does run around in boots in daily life).

I know what a lot of people will be thinking. When I was around twelve*, I got very bad blisters on a hike**. I had to wear loose shoes for a few weeks afterwards and had a note to get me out of school sports lessons. Most people's reaction: "But they're only blisters." In a world of car drivers, blisters seem like a trivial thing.

In a survival situation, they're not so trivial.

One of the issues is the pain. A bad case of blisters is the same level of injury as sticking your feet in scalding water and then going for a walk. On the aforementioned hike, I was completely listless and no longer speaking at the point where it was noticed something was wrong. The only thing I thought about was pain. There was nothing I could do to relieve the pain, as it'd reached the point where sitting down and removing my boots wasn't enough. It's unlikely that I could have run, and even if I did, it wouldn't be something I'd neglect to mention in a first person point-of-view. Walking was hard enough. Running would have been agony.

All this started from one small blister, because if you're walking, it won't stay small for very long.

Something I didn't face, but survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape would, is infection. It's a much bigger deal in the wilderness. Without access to antibiotics, the smallest cut can kill (something that is noted in The Hunger Games). A basic blister isn't too much of an issue. The damaged skin swells to protect the layer under it, so there isn't a break. But if a person continues to walk, it will eventually burst and can get infected***.

So if they're potential dangerous, why don't they get mention in more survival books? My guess is because most authors take the car to most places, so haven't considered the realities of blisters. They don't need to be mentioned to the point of overwhelming the narrative, but if a character never stops to pad sore places on their feet, and isn't suitably cautious about getting their feet wet, they're going to end up the way I did when I was twelve.

Especially when they're wearing new boots.

-

* In my years, this translates to anything from 10-13. The age will likely vary depending on when I tell the story. Don't expect me to know how old I am (or was).

** In case you want your characters to suffer horribly, here's how it happened: I had well-worn boots and thick socks. I'd even talcum-powdered my feet in case I sweated. But the path had turned into a temporary stream. I waded through the water and my feet were soaked. I should have stopped when I felt the pain, but instead I kept going until the next checkpoint. By then, the blisters were far enough along that no amount of padding would stop them getting worse (it's easier to stop blisters before they start, by padding at the first sign of discomfort). I continued walking for about six more miles.

*** This is why long distance hikers will sometimes burst blisters. It's not recommended in general, but if you face a situation where it's going to pop anyway, it's better to do it cleanly. That said, despite the fact my feet were like a solid blister, they didn't pop. Blisters pop a lot less often than people think they do. (The usual method when it becomes essential is to sterilise a pin in a flame and use that, so the hole is as small as possible... but I will repeat it usually isn't needed, and can encourage infection.)

# Photo is Katniss's boots from the film by Lionsgate / Color Force. If you have boots like this, don't go wading.