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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 122 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 September 9 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Another hot day yesterday, temperatures rising to 34 degrees Celsius. The strong winds associated with a typhoon blew for much of the afternoon. Over the last few weeks, the background to daily life has included a succession of earthquakes and typhoons, and a volcanic eruption in Gunma Prefecture. But it just registers as noise, remote from daily concerns, like bombings in Baghdad. The big pleasure to look forward to now is the true cool days of autumn, soon to be with us, surely. Cool days and cool nights of (one may hope) deep and even sleep. Baby Cornucopia, happily, is by now generally sleeping right through the night. She now generally goes to sleep on her side. While finding her preferred sleeping position, she will sometimes turn face-down, which just recently was a major physical achievement. And then, very naturally, she will adjust her position, ending up on her side. Later, though, once properly asleep, she will roll over onto her back. That's kind of interesting. At a conscious level, she prefers to go to sleep on her side, but at a different level, which kicks in when she's asleep, she's been programmed to sleep on her back, arms up in the "hands up!" position. Section 122 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 September 15 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today baby Cornucopia, now almost five months of age, took a big step forward when, for the first time, she ate food in the form of kayu, meaning rice gruel. At least, a little of the kayu disappeared into her mouth and was never seen again, so presumably it was ingested. My wife ("Mama-chan") made this kayu by hand from boiled rice. However, if we get into the business of mass-producing it, our new high-tech rice cooker has a dedicated kayu setting. "What kind of baby food do Western mothers make for their babies?" asked Mama-chan. And I had to say that I didn't know. In partial answer, I said that a lot of people buy baby food in cans from the supermarket, no making required. Section 122 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 September 17 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I had some business which took me to Shinjuku Station, a huge three-dimensional maze in one of the busiest parts of Tokyo. I was trying to figure out which was the right exit for a particular building which I'd never been to before and the scrappy map I was working from wasn't much help. I needed to stop and try to decrypt the map, but there was really nowhere to shelter from the constant, incessant rush of people, Japanese people going in every which direction, so I took shelter by one of the huge pillars which sustain the building, and I was unexpectedly reminded of my very first day in Japan, back in 1989. On that day I ended up at one of Tokyo's really big stations, either Shinjuku or Ikebukuro, map in hand, and withdrew to the partial shelter of a pillar. And here I was again, years later, in the same situation (and maybe even in the same place.) I'm so familiar with my own little patch of Japan by now that it seems totally normal, but there are occasional moments, like the one I had today, when I become aware of the hugeness of the incredibly busy and complex civilization in which I'm living, worlds remote from the simplicities of the New Zealand where I did most of my growing up. Section 122 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 September 18 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Baby Cornucopia is developing steadily and is now, I think, almost on the point of talking. In fact, she said two very distinct words recently, "E boo!" We've heard a moaning version of this "E boo!" almost every evening for months now, as Cornucopia goes through the crying phase which usually precedes dropping off to sleep, so we're always saying "Cornucopia is in her e boo mood." But, this time, the "e boo" was a clear, conversational statement. Baby is starting to talk! "E boo!" It doesn't make sense? Well, maybe not to you. But Cornucopia gives me the impression that she's happily communicating something, even if we don't know what it is. E-boo - "e" as in "echo" and "boo" as in "ghost". Section 122 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 September 25 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The working week just gone was punctuated by a couple of national holidays, these being Monday and Thursday. And, even though I was kept very busy looking after baby Cornucopia, I managed to find the time to finish off a couple of short stories, which I'm uploading today. One is a fairly slight effort called A Better Life, which contains no structural challenges worth mentioning and was very easy to write. It tells about how a man makes a decision (to get an unscheduled cup of coffee) and about how this changes his life. A heartwarming story about everyone's potential for change. The other was considerably more difficult to write since it involves more characters and many more interactions. I thought I was trying to (pretty much) the short story template that I give as a "how to write a short story" formula in the How to Write section of this website. But I didn't actually look at the template. Instead, I consulted my memory, and what I found there was something simpler, this being:- - desire; - effort; - obstacle; - increased effort; - perversion of expectations; - denouement. In the above, "denouement" is simply what happens at the end. This is how the story starts, establishing the desire and giving the reader some idea of the overall arc of the tale:- |
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When she walks into the hotel I know three things: she is beautiful, I am in love with her and she is too young to die. Usually, I try not to get involved with the decisions our clients have made. I'm just a hotel clerk, not a karmic angel, and if someone wants to kill themselves then my job is just to get a positive ID, check that they're good for the cleaning bond, and give them a key. But this time, on the spot, I make a decision: I'm going to try to save her life. |
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The story has the title Suicide Hotel and the setting is the Grand Terminus Suicide Hotel, which specializes in providing effective packages for suicide. A deliberately macabre story.
I'm pretty pleased with this story as an example of the mechanics of the short story in action. I haven't found it easy, learning to write short stories (personally, I find the novel a more congenial form) and I like to think that I'm getting better. Section 122 Entry 0006. Date: 2004 September 13 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Got a question by e-mail: "Do you think of yourself as a New Zealand author still, or a Japanese author? Does such a distinction make sense in your case?" I think the question of identity does make sense, even in the case of a writer who operates primarily in the realms of fantasy and science fiction. The American SF writer Robert Heinlein, for example, is (very emphatically) a particular kind of American, not a stateless person. Similarly, Tolkien is a particular kind of English person. Even after some years in Japan - it's been seven full years - I still have no sense of becoming Japanese. I can speak the language (at a basic level) and I've acclimatized to the point where the world around me seems normative, but I think that one thing you learn from traveling is how deeply rooted you are in your own original culture. That said, I'm aware (at least on an intellectual level) that the New Zealand culture that I "belong" to has, at least in part, ceased to exist. You step out of the stream of your culture and it changes while you stay the same. On my last visit back to New Zealand, for example, back in February, I found out that there was a big problem with something called "P," which turned out to be methamphetamine, a drug which apparently has inspired quite a few crimes of violence and has become a real social problem in New Zealand. That's one kind of change. And I had cause to pause for thought when I paid for two suits with cash, with dollar bills, and the salesman saw fit to query it. Not directly, but he did say that "a guy will usually come in here with a credit card." And that's another kind of change. I don't remember New Zealand having been a credit card country. But the New Zealand I do remember is increasingly remote, increasingly fictional, increasingly a construct of my own imagination. Section 122 Entry 0007. Date: 2004 October 16 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) I got a question about the literary influences on my ten-volume fantasy series, CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS, and I answered "Tolkien". This drew a doubtful reaction, suggesting that my world is the opposite of Tolkien's, ""antithesis to his thesis"". To which I replied, yes, that influence can take the form of reaction. In the text of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, for example (one of the three CHRONICLES novels which is on this website in its entirity), there is a passage describing the treatment of a broken thighbone in the field. This passage was influenced by a photo in one of my mother's medical textbooks (my mother was by profession a nurse) which showed a picture of a seaman's bone which had successfully healed after the thigh fractured while at sea. A huge bolus of bone had grown around the two imperfectly united ends of the broken bone, resulting (against the odds) in a cure. A lot of that kind of research went into the making of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS, and the result is that it contains a lot of life's raw and ragged edges which won't be found in Tolkien. However, the primary influence remains Tolkien. No LORD OF THE RINGS, no CHRONICLES. The following takes us into the middle of the broken thigh incident in THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, in which the treatment of the victim, Morsh Bataar, falls to the wizard Pelagius Zozimus:- |
| Zozimus had ever been a great scholar, and in the course of learning about death he had learnt much about life, for the study of death is necessarily the study of corpses and skeletons, which is an excellent way to learn about the living. In the Castle of Ultimate Peace, a mighty fortress by the flame trench of Drangsturm, the order of Xluzu had long maintained great collection of skeletons, which included the bones of a sailor who had died of rabies after being bitten by his mother-in- law's dog. In youth, this sailor had broken his thighbone after falling from a mast, and had spent four months lying in his bunk while he recovered from the injury. In the course of the sailor's cure, a huge bolus of bone had knitted together the fractured ends of his thighbone, which had been out of alignment by as much as the width of two fingers. The result had produced a very strange skeleton, but when healed the leg had been normal enough to facilitate the bestriding of decks and the kicking of dogs. So Jarl's pessimism was not necessarily predictive. If Morsh Bataar was lugged to Gendormargensis, he would doubtless die from the rigors of the journey, but if he could be kept just where he was, if he could be clothed and cleaned and warmed and fed, sheltered from the elements and - "You know," said Jarl, "while you sit here, Morsh is dying." "So you tell me," said Zozimus. "He's dying of pain, you fool," said Jarl, unable to restrain himself any longer. "Pain is the breaking of men, and kills when wounds alone would not." Jarl wanted to see Zozimus fail and die. But Jarl had ever liked Morsh Bataar for his steadiness and his leisured good humor, and did not want to see him die in a delirium of agony. The relief of his pain would probably not save his life, but might at least ease his parting. |
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