Mixed day: personal stuff – and where are the compassionate Muslims of this nation right now?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I had great plans for today, all listed down neatly (because that what you have to do when you are my age), and then I went and lost the list (which is what you actually do do when you are my age).

Just to put some blood on the seal of my day, I parked on a side slope when I went for my morning run at the riverside, and the car door slammed on my hand. Just what you need when you have a report to finish before you go off to enjoy yourself at Convergence…

…three more days and I shall be in Melbourne!
And to make it even nicer, I get a first copy of the Song of the Shiver Barrens delivered to me in Melbourne on Sunday, hot off the Voyager presses, courtesy of the lovely Karen.

I’ll let you in a secret: No writer worth a reading public ever gets blase about holding the first copy of a book in their hand…it is a special moment, like savouring a particularly tasty pie when you are starving hungry. The smooth feel of it, the smell wafting up from the new pages, the taste of knowing it is yours…I’m salivating already.

Anyway, the day was great around lunchtime, because I met up with the mob – my bookgroup – and caught up on everyone’s doings. Good things, sad things, funny things – I really miss these folk when I am over in Kota Kinabalu. (Did I ever get around to mentioning I am back in Selangor at the moment?) They mean such a lot to me.

On a sadder note, the saga of the woman imprisoned for not being a Muslim, when she was raised a Hindu, continues. Apparently, the Arabic TV channel AlJezirah (sp?) ran a spot on her. I didn’t see it, having no TV, but they interviewed her husband, who has been to see her in jail three times. Twice he was refused entry.

[Fantastic. Now they keep her from meeting her own husband – I don’t think they even do that to murderers here!!!!!]

On the third visit, a sympathetic guard allowed them to meet with a chainlink fence between them. Apparently all they could do was touch fingers through the wires…

Their toddler daughter has been stolen from them and given to the Muslim side of her family to raise. [Presumably the same good Muslim family who so cared so much about their daughter’s religious well-being that gave her to a Hindu grandmother to raise…]

And the woman has refused to knuckle under and agree to follow a religion which has torn her family apart and treated her as a criminal and subjected her to brainwashing in a prison environment.

So what have they done to reward such intransigence? Extended her 100 day sentence by another 80 days.

Perhaps the worst thing in all this is the lack of outcry and outrage from Muslims in this country. Are you all so heartless? I have had nothing but gentle consideration from the majority of you in all my years here. Was that all a sham?

If you want this woman to be a Muslim, you have gone the wrong way about it.

Revathi Masoosai, this blog entry is dedicated to you.


I wish I could do more.

Up on the rainforest canopy, or: Who has a head for heights?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I love canopy walkways.
And the best one I have found is this one at Danum Rainforest Lodge in Sabah. It wends its way through the canopy at different levels, and was designed by an 82 year-old Filipino engineer…

It has the best birding of any canopy walkway I have found – in fact, on my second visit, I never got past the second tree, I was having so much fun. I birded up there with a guy from Sydney until it was too dark to see any more. Nuthatches, broadbills, woodpeckers, sunbirds, leafbirds, hornbills, woodshrikes, barbets, with a pitta and a partridge calling underneath … Fabulous.

Song of the Shiver Barrens: out soon

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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As you may have gathered from the preceding post, the Australian Voyager edition of Song of the Shiver Barrens, book 3 of the Mirage Makers, will be out soon: July. And just to cheer those of you over in UK, book 1, Heart of the Mirage is coming out August 2nd, with a fabulous Orbit cover. [What is it about their art/design department? They produce the best covers in the business!] And I see some of you have been pre-ordering too – thanks for having faith in me!

This will be my seventh published book. There is obviously a finality to the last book of a trilogy, and I have mixed feelings. This marks the close of something close to my heart for more than fifteen years. I started this trilogy when I was living in Tunisia, in my study with a view across the city to Carthage, continued it in Kuala Lumpur, and Perth Australia, and Virginia USA, and then finished it in Borneo. I am a little sad that, as far as I am concerned, the journey is over. And happy too, that I have had the opportunity to share it with you – this vision of a world and characters that have been so long part of my inner world.

For those of you who haven’t read any of it: what is the trilogy about? Well, it’s about a woman who was born into a time of upheaval, was betrayed horribly as a child, and yet who manages to build a successful life – only to have that life overset by the truth. That’s the beginning anyway. It’s also about a slave who wants to be a free man and yet who chooses servitude. It’s about a boy becoming a man in a time of war, and having to learn what heroism really is.

There’s war and passion and heroism and evil and mystery and magic and love. It will entertain you (I hope) and perhaps make you think, because that’s the kind of books I write.

For Oz readers, just to tantalize you, here’s the opening paragraph of Song of the Shiver Barrens:

Wind gusted and obliterated her whisper, but not before it was overheard. Ligea Gayed may not have seen the man standing behind her rolling his eyes, but she felt his exasperation. ‘It’s true,’ she growled without turning around. ‘I was the worst mother in the world.’

So, anyone out there going to Convergence2?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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If so, please introduce yourself to me! Love to meet you…

I am a real sucker for sff (science fiction/fantasy) cons, since the very first one I attended in Perth, Western Australia. I knew no one there, and I was made so welcome and ended up making some real friends among a fabulous group of people. It was even the place that I met my publisher/editor from Harper Collins Voyager for the first time.

The second sff con I attended (Conflux in Canberra) was even better, simply because I met so many Voyager authors and people from the Purple Zone (the message board of the Voyager website where a lot of crazy writers and readers get together to discuss books and writing and science fiction versus fantasy…)

And so ever since, I have been trying to get to as many cons as I can. Last year I didn’t manage any. Happily, this year, it will be Convergence2 in Melbourne, which is the 2007 National Convention. It has the added attraction of the opportunity to meet Darren Nash from Orbit UK again, who will be publishing The Mirage Makers (first book, Heart of the Mirage, out beginning August). I met him very briefly at the Worldcon in Glasgow…


And then there’s Trudi Canavan and Karen Miller and Gillian and my room-mate and pal, Donna…

I can’t wait.

Sense and nonsense, Malaysian style

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Years ago, we visited a village in rural Malacca, to interview a lass who wanted to be our maid. All I can remember about the place now was that it was poverty-stricken (this was in 1971) and that the girl had a relative, a two-year old boy, who had been born with a severe case of cleft palate/hare-lip. I had never seen anyone like that before: surgery fixed kids up pretty smartly in the West.
We asked why it hadn’t been done with this child, seeing as an operation would have been free of charge at a government hospital. The parents replied, “Oh, pity him, having an operation, going to a hospital. He’s just a little boy. How can we do that to him? He would cry! It would hurt him!”

I tried to explain that the surgery needed to be done early, otherwise it would not be as effective. It was like talking to a brick wall. The maid only stayed 3 months, and then asked to be taken back because she was lonely for her family. I never found out what happened to the boy.

It had a profound effect on me, though. Up until that point I was all certain that one should respect other people’s cultures and not drag them kicking and screaming into a world they didn’t want to inhabit. That was the moment when I realised that ignorance and innocence often go hand in hand, and can have dire consequences. Do you think that boy, now a man of 35 or so, unable to speak clearly because he had an operation far too late (at whatever age they were finally took him to the hospital) thinks his parents were right? I doubt it.

That was the moment I decided ignorance is to be despised, no matter what it’s cultural base. That was the moment I decided that there are some people who need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world, and damn their culture. If it stinks, why tolerate it? And when kids get hurt, it stinks.

When the wife of a Pakistani child-rapist is ordered by a tribal council to be given to the father of the girl he raped in retribution (today’s paper), it stinks.

When 38% of Indian-Malaysian women suffer abuse (today’s paper) it stinks.

The cultures that encourage those horrors should be tossed.

I am constantly amazed that Malaysians, who pay – let’s say 50,000RM plus, and possibly a helluva lot more for a car – will then not bother to pay a couple of hundred ringgit to buy a car seat to secure their small children properly.

Every time I open up the paper and read of kids dead in road accidents, I wonder if it was one of those children I saw standing up in between the front seats of the car, chatting to Mummy and Daddy. Or sitting on Daddy or Mummy’s lap in the front seat.

Brake suddenly, and child goes headfirst into the windscreen, a little flying three-year-old missile hurtling into oblivion … all for the want of a little common sense and a little less ignorance.

But sometimes I wonder if people have any sense. It’s certainly not common. They’ll call in a feng shui specialist to tell them the most ridiculous load of garbage on how to save their marriage by rearranging the house furniture, or how to get rich by flushing the loo a different way so your luck won’t run away. And they believe the con artists who tell them that feng shui is a science and offer to advise them using age-long wisdom…

People get rich on feng shui, certainly. But it’s not the gullible idiot who pays for advice that ends up in the money.

What happened to rational thought? Down with ignorance and the culture that spawns it. Every society (including Western ones) needs to look at itself and decide what is culturally worth keeping, and what should be thrown out.

Tropical Temper Rant over…

[Pix from Danum: a pill millipede and an agamid lizard, plus the rainforest.]

Recovering from one month travelling

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I find myself horribly lazy since I returned from our one month marathon and the many miles we walked over varied terrain, most of it rough. I have stopped taking painkillers, so my arthritic joints (which are just about all of the joints I have) immediately began to screech their protest. I am resisting resorting to the anti-inflammatories again now that I am once more relatively sedentary, but they won’t lie down and be quiet, alas.

And I am endeavouring to write up the project report, but somehow it seems dull after the real thing. Who wants to write about marketing rainforest avitourism when the reality of the forest – the hot, sweaty, damp moulder of the fecundity, the glorious profligacy of the exuberant growth, the fragile perfection of the minutiae of the little things, the sheer wondrous beauty of it all, is there in memory. How can you reduce it down to dry words for a government report?

So what am I doing instead? Putting photos of Danum up on my blog, that’s what… Sharing it with you.

There’s the road into Danum, and the wonderfully lazy bearded pig who wandered out of the rainforest one day and decided that kitchen scraps are much tastier than earthworms rooted for along the forest floor.

Enjoy!

When a book smells bad…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Запах Зла

The Russian translation of Gilfeather (Book Two of the Isles of Glory) is out…in, well, I suppose Russia.

I know this because I found an online site advertising it. They have the blurb up too. So, of course, I babelfished. And found out that in Russian, it is apparently called…

SMELL EVIL

Book Two of the Isles of Fame

No, I am not kidding. For those of you who read Russian, here’s the cover. The resolution is woeful, but that’s all I could find. It kinda looks like a couple of hunks on the front, though. And all dressed in Star Fleet uniforms?

The Babelfish doesn’t do too well with the translation, I fear, because the blurb supposedly says the story “takes place in the archipelago, populated by eleven people” and is all about whether “naemnitsa Bleyz force, which has donated confrontation magic, and her satellites – printsessa-koldunya and fats izgnannik-ubiytsa – time combat forces and Light, and with the strength Tmy? Read the second book of fascinating fentezi-sagi author of “Star of Hope”.

Yes, quite.

Now I know I tend not to write trilogies that have a cast of thousands, preferring rather to dig deep into the psyche of fewer characters, but a whole world with only eleven people? That’s a bit extreme, even for me. And I’m blessed if I remember calling any character “fats izfnannik-ubiytsa”.

I quite like being referred to as a “fascinating fentezi-sagi author” though. It has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?

Update: Thanks to Tsana I have a better translation (see the comments section) and a better pix (see above). I am still trying to work out just who those two guys on the cover are and where they are off to…they look like they just stepped out of a Miles Vorkosigan novel…

And thanks to you, Tsana – I have just discovered that for the first time anywhere, my NAME is larger than the book title!! Wow, I must be doing ok in Russia! As the Russians don’t pay me any royalties, but make an outright purchase of Russian rights, I never have the slightest idea of what the print run is, or how many they sell.

Why I don’t write books set in Malaysia

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Often, I was asked questions structured like this: “In the book you call poor people sad fuckers. Isn’t that anti-poor?” And I’d explain that in the book a character calls some poor people he encounters sad fuckers, and that is different from me saying that of all poor people. Then the next question would be, “In the book, you say that Muslims are terrorists…”

The above quote is from an Lj post by Nick Mamatas about what happened when he talked about his latest book Under My Roof at a US community college. Quite frankly, what he said was frightening – but I know what he faced. I have heard the same sort of thing in Malaysia about my own work from people who really ought to have known better.

I showed my first writing about Malaysia to locals, university graduates – I thought would know what writing a novel was all about. I was staggered to find that they thought everything that the female protagonist thought and did and heard was straight out of my own life, opinions and all. The protagonist was an Australian woman married to a local, ergo, she was me, and her thoughts and prejudices were mine, even though the story was patently fictional.

Malaysia back then was not mature enough to be able to take criticism in its stride, and educated readers, even people involved in university education, were apparently not sophisticated enough to see the difference between writer and what was written, not when there were so many parallels between writer and protagonist. I was nonplussed.

That was when I realised that if I wrote an honest novel (not some fluffy “isn’t it lovely” thing) I would be in deep trouble, both with the my in-laws and in the wider world. So I opted for a quieter life. I set my books in an imaginary place and now rarely discover if the reader sees his own world reflected back at him. (And I have had to learn not to fume when someone, unintentionally insulting, says, “You write so well, Glenda! Why don’t you write a proper book?”)

Have things gotten any better? I don’t think so. Too many people here still don’t think logically. A minister gets upset by what a blogger writes, so he calls all bloggers liars. Criticize anything Malaysian and you get called disloyal and unpatriotic. Tell the truth: “I am not a Muslim” when one of your parents was a Muslim, and you get your 15 month child taken from you while you are incarcerated for a year of brainwashing to make you see the truth. (Does anyone know what happened to that poor lady Siti? I have been out of touch with the news for a month…)

So I cringe when I read Nick’s experience. If they can’t get it right in the USA, what hope has Malaysia got?

More from Nick’s Lj post:

Finally, someone said, “Well, what were we supposed to learn from this book!” and I said “Nothing.” Later I was able to explain that good novels ask questions; they don’t provide answers.

Someone complained,”If a kid reads this, he may start thinking.” (I should say that that last was from an ESL student; he may not have meant to express his comment as an eventuality to be dreaded.)
….

But the best was when someone asked me about research and telepathy and I explained that I didn’t research telepathy as it doesn’t exist, so I just made the powers up and one woman finally blurted out, “So…this book is a FANTASY!!”

Sigh.

And here’s some pix to cheer you up: flowers taken in the rainforest of Kinabalu Park, Poring. No idea what they are, but they were lovely.

Great Argus displaying: a blog entry for birders…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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The photos are a bit out of order I’m afraid, so I have explained what they are as we go along…

Remember what I said about the camera acting up at crucial life moments? Ok, so most of you will not regard an Argus Pheasant practising his courtship dance steps A Big Thing in your progress through life, but then, most of you are not birders.

These are lousy photographs of a wonderful experience. Most of the time I was watching, not snapping photos. And believe me, it was a superb moment in my life, and not one I ever expect to have again.

The Great Argus is a forest bird, not easily seen unless it has been habituated to the presence of humans. This particular bird (photo 5 for my best shot) chooses to clear his dancing ground (photo 2) on a path through the Danum Conservation Area not far from the Danum Rainforest Lodge, which means that he has to put up with people passing by from time to time.

In between times, he industriously cleans his stage, and flicks away the leaves that fall on it. (photo 4) He’s a rather inefficient housekeeper, flicking leaves upwards until they more or less accidentally fall outside his performance area (bit like like a guy who has never handled a broom tackling a dusty floor…)

Then he hops up on to a log and calls, throwing his head back and giving vent to a repeated loud ringing wow-wow that would be enough to have you jump out of your leech socks if you weren’t expecting it. (Photo 3)
And that, really, is about the very most a birder could ever expect to see.

So it was an enormous privilege to be able to watch – repeatedly – a male practice his dance for an absent female, possibly prompted into this display by a rival male approaching, calling as it came.

He started with a sort of ballet-dancer run, shivering his feathers out fluffily as he went. (For some absurd reason I was reminded of the dance of the cygnets from Swan Lake when the dancers skitter along on their toes n tiny steps…)

And then he began his dance.

(Photo 1. In this photo he is facing me, with his head visible as a whitish spot. His wing feathers – right side outwards with ocelli displayed – surround him, while his tail feathers are visible to the left. Photo 7 is next in sequence, where he has turned side-on, to the left, lowering his head.)

He bowed his head and raised his magnificent wing feathers to display the ocelli, whipping his long tail feather backwards and then straight upwards like a banner over his back….then he flexed his feathers so that I think we are looking at the underside of the feathers (photos 6, 8 & 10 ) He was suddenly no longer bird, but a galleon under full sail, a magnificent vessel with all flags flying, turning this way and that, offering his splendour to an enraptured audience of four, for whom he cared not a whit – alas, the true object of his dance, a female, was nowhere in evidence.

For an hour we watched as he danced, not once, but four or five times. I’d love to think he did it for me, even as I know that’s not true – because perfect moments are things you will carry with you the rest of your life, and for me, this was one of them.

And there are people who would destroy the rainforest?
They know not what they do.


Two final photos : enlargement s of the previous one, showing the tail feathers raised on the left and the wing feathers to the right, also seen in enlargement. The birds’s head is hidden. Alas, the true technicolour of the display was lost in my camera’s attempt to cope with dark understorey conditions.

Untitled Post

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I am back In Kota Kinabalu. For a while.

After one one month of continuous travelling – no more than 3 nights in any one place – from the Thai border to Borneo and nine states of Malaysia (missed out Terengganu, Perlis, Kedah and Penang), I have made the following discoveries:

  • Staring out a plane window and seeing what Mankind has wrought can be a sobering experience.
  • Don’t buy teh tarik at Lahad Datu airport – they use tea bags. Sacrilege!
  • FAX airlines alters the time of departure of flights with monotonous regularity.
  • Bornean leeches are worse than Peninsular ones.
  • Sand flies don’t need sand to survive.
  • Horse flies don’t need horses, either.
  • Sarawak should never have been called the Land of the Hornbills.
  • Mulu has the loveliest dragonflies. And their butterflies aren’t bad either.
  • Don’t ever accidently lean your forearm on top of a hairy caterpillar.
  • My knees like climbing mountains a lot less than I do.
  • Cold water showers at 1,500m (5,000′) are no joke.
  • If a camera is going to give you problems, it will be when you are trying to photograph an experience you will never have again, especially one that very few people ever get to see.
  • The harder you work to see something, the better it seems when you see it.
  • Dawn is the best time of day.
  • If you want to lose weight, don’t travel with two guys who like biscuits.
  • Frustration is going to an internet cafe and trying to open up a file from your publisher of your new book cover – and discovering the computer won’t let you.
  • Mount Kinabalu is a very large mountain.
  • Sunset on a canopy walkway is a magical moment.
  • One month of travelling is VERY tiring.
  • Malaysia is truly one of the best places on earth when it comes to natural scenery and fascinating things to see.