In 1934, Maxim Gorky hoped to ask "great writers to tell of one ordinary day in their lives." I don't know what became of this plan, but I can't help but think about how it would go over now. I certainly would be interested in learning about the ordinary doings of writers I admire, not least because such accounts would contain details so utterly mundane that it would humanize the great ones, chip away at the stony edifices of their author portraits and lists of awards.

Far, far from being one of our era's "great writers," I fortunately wouldn't fall into consideration for such an experiment. But bad writers, even decent ones, can often grow by trying the methods of the greats, so I'm forced to consider how I'd fare.

First off, there's fear. Not fear of exposure; I think even ordinary writers like me get over that when they're published. It's a fear of being boring. The very thing that would make reading about Haruki Murakami going to the grocery store or Vikram Seth taking out the trash interesting to me, I would really resent having to share with the world. My own doubts about my work are burdensome enough, but to have people learn about how I don't like loud restaurants, or that I keep putting off taking a particular pair of shoes (which I nevertheless keep wearing) to the shoe repair place just a few blocks away because I'm too busy? I don't think I could handle that. What have I been up to today? I made dinner plans with a friend, dealt with some paperwork, and went to physical therapy. See? Boring.

Call me old fashioned, but I think writers should have a bit of mystique in this world of overexposure, and they (or their notoriety, or their eccentricity) shouldn't overshadow their work. It's better to find out what such creatures were really like posthumously, once they've become legends, with a bit of distance--when there's some arc to it all.

(Incidentally, I just happened to look up Murakami on the Random House site, and they have a little feature, punctuated by weirdly haunting music, that describes what the author eats and listens to while writing. If you're interested, go here and click into "about the author," and scroll down to "behind the books." Signs of things to come? If I stock up on eel, will I be able to produce such masterpieces as The Elephant Vanishes? The site also gives insight into such oddities as the laptops Murakami used to write various books and answer fan mail, each of which he's given a name based in Japanese mythology; paperweights and odds and ends to be found on his desk, including a disturbing porcelain cat and a weird fly-looking thing; and even his cocktail of choice while writing, a vodka-Perrier-lemon concoction that sounds absolutely disgusting.)

So no, I won't give you an "ordinary day" (and do trust me, it would be dreadfully dull), but I will give you something else. I've been working on a peculiar project for some time now. What makes it peculiar? A few things, before I send you there.

It's an exercise in unstructured writing. Structure is absolutely central to my work, and graphic novelists are generally even more obsessed with it than most other types of writers. I started to worry that I might be on the verge of getting too married to structure or writing by rote. I had honestly never tried a totally free-form narrative, one in which I wasn't sure where the story would lead from episode to episode. So it was an experiment in letting the story take its own, rather than a predetermined, course.

I've been composing the whole thing on a mobile phone. Yes, you read that right. Why on earth would I do such a thing? It's an exercise in valuing and considering each word, because there's an investment in time rapping out something as basic as the word "and." Mercifully, I'm doing all this on a phone that has a keyboard (a Treo), but still, until you've gone through digital gymnastics to figure out how to type a parenthesis, you've been taking typing for granted. So I write the episodes--which can be as short as 20 words, or as long as 1,200--on the Treo's memo pad, then I e-mail them to a blog, where they get automatically posted. Then I go in and revise and rearrange later (see below). But everything starts out on the mobile phone, and I only compose when I'm in transit or waiting somewhere for some form of transportation.

It's an experiment in tying theme to form. The story is filled with Buddhist themes, not the least of these being impermanence, dynamic causality, and the simultaneity of past, present, and future. When I go in after the texts are posted and re-title episodes, or move them around, or change what's in them, it makes the substance of the story mutable and impermanent, underscoring some of the basic messages of the story itself.

The story was also (up until now) posted up on the blog anonymously. There was a fair amount of traffic, and perhaps some people were baffled as to who was writing this weird thing and why it kept changing (it would please me if someone suspected a cult)--nothing about the experiment, or that it had been written on a mobile phone, or any other clue to its authorship, was offered. The intent wasn't to generate false mystery, but rather to shift the focus onto the story rather than the writer. But I suppose it's time to own up to the thing.

The plan is to keep writing, in episodes of whatever length feel right (witness long subway rides or airplane trips resulting in longer pieces, cab rides causing shorter ones) until episode 108, an important number in Buddhism, which will be the last, however far the story has progressed by that point. That is one of only two structural rules to the thing, the other one being that some of the titles for the episodes are interrelated by numbers to imply a thematic link, for example "Origin" parts 1, 2, and 3. Beyond that, all rules went right out the window.

So far it's up to about 22,000 words, roughly half the length of a typical short-ish prose novel. Even more amazingly, I still have the use of my thumbs after all that tapping away on a phone keyboard.

I don't know yet if it's any good. I may not know that until episode 108, and I might not even know it then, but I'm enjoying the experiment. If I decide that it is good when it's done, and perhaps it will be after some revisions, it might get published in some tangible form. Anyway, have a look, then come back here and let me know what you think: Kapilavastu.

I have very mixed feelings about the relative scarcity of my magnum opus, that rather long-winded alternate history of Alexander's empire, The Golden Vine.

I'm obviously delighted that there's enough demand for it that it's hard to track down. But I don't want readers to be frustrated nor do I want the availability of the book to be complicated by opportunistic markups because it's (at the moment) rare, as though it were some sort of diamond. I totally ambivalent about "collectibles"--more than enough stuff piles up unbidden without me needing to go looking for more--and I certainly didn't create the book so that it would become an object of fetishistic trading, however much care was put into producing it. I'm also very aware that it's my tyrannical creative direction and unimpeded vision that resulted in it being such an undertaking to print, ship, and otherwise deal with.

Still, some industrious soul has made the most of the situation, and, obviously observing that Amazon has listed the book as "not currently available" due to a shortage of stock, marked it up by about 670% (why that number, I wonder?) from the retail price of $24.99, and is offering it to the public for a rather staggering $168. (The preceding link goes to a screen shot, to preserve this odd moment for posterity. I took the precaution of blurring the seller's name.)

Shoto is working to get new stock in and all will be well, sooner or later. For those of you who have ordered the book and are waiting for it because of the shortages, I can only say that while I'm very proud of it, in no world will I ever claim it's worth $168, and am flattered that anyone would think it could be, but watch me edging toward the phone so that I can make a quick call to the men in white coats.

Something like this happened with Garlands of Moonlight when Amazon kept running out of that book during all the Eisner hullabaloo (I seem to recall that it crept up to $40 or something like that), but $168 is a new and astonishing high.

So patience, please, to anyone who might be tempted to an act of folly. I like my stories; I hope you like my stories; but there's no earthly reason to spend more on one of them than you would on a date. Besides, I've got lots of new stuff coming out, and chances are you'll like that just as much (or, I hope, even better than) The Golden Vine.

So I'd promised a little more background on the two new Malay Mysteries books, Island of Glass and Ashes and Sita's Shadow and Other Stories.

Island is a weird book. I responded with a mixture of sheepishness and bafflement as the first two Malay Mysteries attracted quite a bit of attention. It didn't take me that long to write either Garlands of Moonlight or The Ghost of Silver Cliff, perhaps because all the Malay Mysteries are based on folklore I collected a long time ago and are set in a culture and historical framework familiar to me, so the research that goes into them is more a matter of interest than necessity. That, and actually writing books in that series is usually really easy, in the way any truly joyful task never feels burdensome. So generally they don't feel like a lot of work, certainly not when compared with something like The Golden Vine (which, all told, took five years to create), or newer projects I've already been working on for a couple of years in some form or other.

But, though it involved very little research, Island of Glass and Ashes refused to be dashed off, and it didn't have the tendency to practically write itself as did its predecessors. It was incredibly demanding, and while I have theories, there's no conclusive reason I can give as to why it took so long. True, there were delays in finding someone to illustrate it: I wasn't able to get my calendar synchronized with that of Rizky Wasisto Edi, the Russ Manning Award-nominated artist who did the first two books and acquired, it seems, quite a following in the process. At times I was available to work on Island, Rizky was not, and vice versa, until finally, after playing tag for a couple of years, I decided that the next two books couldn't wait and went ahead with a new and (then) untried artist. (Rizky will return to the series at some point, perhaps as a guest artist, when he gets unburied from his workload. But then, if he weren't so talented, he wouldn't have so much work to begin with, so there we are.)

The artist I ultimately selected, M. Reza Aribuwana, is a young man who, like Rizky, lives in Indonesia, although in a different city. To say that he had some pretty big shoes to fill is an understatement--but I think he's delivered artwork that pays homage to Rizky's style and yet introduces something intangible--a sensibility--that suits the new work perfectly. As it was with Garlands of Moonlight, the two new Malay Mysteries have been the result of a collaboration undertaken across the world, by means of e-mail. I haven't even met Reza in person yet, as I hadn't met Rizky until well after Garlands was published and we'd already received one award and then been nominated for three more.

But before the logistical problems with lining up a new illustrator and then bringing him into a very tight collaboration (read: working with an extremely demanding author on an existing series), there were other things about Island that made it a difficult book to create. The story deals with some very potent themes, some of them so complex that a chunk of the book is in prose (opposite full-page illustrations), a narration by one of the book's characters that was so dense there's no way it could have been pulled off in speech bubbles. It's about love, loss, loneliness; the consequences of thoughtless actions and words spoken too hastily; it's about how we all have a tendency to create around ourselves phantasms of things past (dead? gone?), psychological insulation of sorts, while the world continues turning around us, sweeping us along. The volcanic island in the book is a metaphor for a great many things, so many that not even I, who created it, could list them all. It's about how people can become trapped, by their own works, by their own fears, but also by things they can't change, reverse, or escape--and it's about redemption and salvation.

Rather a full palette for a Malay Mystery, to be sure--there are some bigger ideas I knew I wanted to tackle in the series, though when I wrote Garlands I hadn't envisioned anything like this--but it all seemed to belong in there, so in it went. Island is also peculiar in that it went through so many revisions. The first two Malay Mysteries were basically done with the first draft, and edits consisted of condensing or expanding a bit here or there or (as I shudder at the obviousness of how raw and unskilled I was when I wrote the first two books) trying to get dialogue to sound natural (which has gotten better, I promise you, and will continue to do so). The plots of both stories arrived in my head fully formed, and though the general outline of Island did too at first, it kept growing from there.

As I sat looking at a script that would have resulted in a 200-page book, I realized that it was at least 50 pages too long, and while I was forced to sacrifice (another theme in the story, sacrifice) many details I'd become married to (another theme, marriage), decided it was time to locate the story and simplify it (what story was I trying to tell?), so the revisions began. Nearly a year later, it was finally stable, and of a length that felt right. I was honestly worried that, once the drawing started, I would keep fiddling with it and discover things I wanted or needed to change after the artwork had been committed to the page. To my surprise, and perhaps this is solely a testament to Reza's incredible artistry and his ability to interpret precisely what I wanted, work progressed without me causing any disruptions of that sort or even, amazingly, changing the script after the work was underway (except once or twice to correct or clarify some silly mistake I'd made, like describing too many panels on a page or too few, or an incorrect page number, or some other artifact of the long and seemingly endless editing process).

It helped too that I'd conceived and written most or all of the two subsequent books by the time Reza started drawing, so I was able to work on a fairly large canvas, to be sure of how this new book fits into the larger story of the series. Island of Glass and Ashes is heavy, not unbearably heavy I hope, though some may find it so. I allowed it to get very dark in part because the fourth Malay Mystery, Sita's Shadow and Other Stories, is much lighter and provides a relief from the emotional demands of Island.

Not to say that Sita's Shadow doesn't have its poignant moments, but what it doesn't have is the sheer amount of horror and gruesomeness that made its way into Island. So let the squeamish or easily upset be forewarned. I'm told this book makes Garlands look like a cakewalk, and that parts of it are genuinely depressing. If it helps, keep in mind that the terrors are metaphorical. (That's mostly how I ultimately got myself through the ordeal of writing it.)

Island, incidentally, is dedicated to the members of a writing group that I'd joined who slogged through half a dozen drafts of the story, and were kind enough to keep encouraging me through it.

What's Sita's Shadow about? Glad you asked. Much more cheerful subject. I've ripped off Boccaccio and Chaucer shamelessly, and created a story in which multiple characters within a framing narrative tell stories of their own, and some of their characters tell stories...and so on. It sounds structurally complex, and it is at times, with a story that goes four levels deep into retold tales at one point, but guest artists (including one photographer, a first) have been brought in to illustrate each character's story, so there are visual clues as to where you are and who's talking. Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Boccaccio's Decameron, circumstances in the story bring all the narrators together, and each character tells his or her story for a particular reason and from a particular perspective, and often the stories reveal as much about the characters telling them as they do about the characters in them.

The main story, which frames the embedded short stories, picks up from a benign cliffhanger introduced at the very end of Island, and provides the occasional counterpoint to each character's narration. In the end a couple of central mysteries are solved, but not before everyone has had a chance to tell a story. And Hidayat has another one of his seemingly prophetic dreams, so we're going to start seeing what's up with all that.

The three stories are told by Marsiti, a traveling merchant, and the old dukun of the village Marsiti and Hidayat find themselves in at the end of Island. Marsiti's story is quite special, at least in its sentimental value to me and my family. I've adapted it from a hair-raising story my great uncle once told my sister, a couple of cousins, and me, leaving us shaking with terror. Our one consolation was that the whole thing must have been made up--but then my grandmother, who had absolutely no interest the supernatural and was a very rational woman, chimed in and confirmed that the events had taken place exactly as described. In Sita's Shadow, I've put a bit of a post-colonial spin on it, and the person who relates the story of the haunting is a Dutch plantation owner. This chapter is called "The Dutch Woman's Aunt," and was illustrated by a wonderfully talented fellow named Randy Valiente, who lives in the Philippines.

The merchant's story, "Nyai Loro Kidul," concerns a fisherman, who (through circumstances that the story makes clear) winds up marrying a Chinese woman who has, along with her father, been exiled from their homeland. In part because of her unavoidable ignorance of the customs of the islands, she inadvertently gets her husband and his brother into a spot of trouble with a local sea goddess, who then (as sea goddesses sometimes tend to do) sends a demon to punish them. This chapter was illustrated by Anzu, a very talented Indonesian manga artist from Surabaya, who was quite pleased to draw this chapter since she's been familiar with the sea goddess legend since she was a girl.

The final chapter, the dukun's story ("Sita's Shadow"), gets into the mystery of the village Marsiti and Hidayat have stumbled into, and explains the oddities about the place that our two protagonists have observed. The story revolves around a shadow play in which the sacred epics are presented in a most unusual way. One feature of this part of the story is that I managed to condense the key points of the Hindu Ramayana epic--which, along with the Mahabharata, forms the core of stories used in Malay shadow puppetry--into 13 pages. Don't ask me how; I'm still a little surprised that I managed it, given that the original epic is some 24,000 verses long.

This bit was illustrated by Ronny Hardyanto, who, like Anzu, lives in the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Ronny works with inks as well as pencils, a deviation from the norm in Malay Mysteries, which are customarily done only in pencils to bring out the black and silver duotone. But, given all the visual variety in play in this book, I thought it could work nicely, and it did. The shadow play itself is photographed by Alison Grippo, an up-and-coming New York photographer whose work I greatly admire. Shooting the actual shadow puppets was made possible thanks to Reza (the artist for the main story) sending me the puppets I needed from Indonesia, so I got to be the puppet master for this sequence (and now have a lovely collection of the things to display on my wall).

There's something eerily beautiful about Indonesian shadow puppets, which are exquisitely delicate but also oddly grotesque at the same time, and certainly the experience of seeing them in the context of a performance is an unforgettable one. Typical performances go on through the night, but I have never failed to be riveted by the spectacle, which is made even more haunting by the wailing song of the puppet master and his supporting orchestra. (You can see a couple of examples of this artform in the film "The Year of Living Dangerously," which I highly recommend. It dates back to when Mel Gibson used to be an actor, before he decided to turn to his new career as a raving lunatic.)

There are, as with most of the Malay Mysteries, continuing and convergent themes between the stories, but in each story within Sita's Shadow we get a glimpse of something unexpected. The Dutchwoman in Marsiti's story is a far cry from the colonists we've seen in other episodes of the series, and gives us an idea of what it must have been like for the Dutch to be in such a foreign, haunted place so different in customs from their home country. The sea goddess in the merchant's story has many layers, which we learn through the legend of how she came to be the sea goddess in the first place--a tragic tale if ever there was one, and, like all my most favorite Malay folktales, so nuanced in its treatment of good and evil that there is something truly poignant in it. And the dukun's story, which revolves around the epic character of Sita, while told through the dukun's bitterness and bluster, contains a coda that turns his whole understanding of what he's witnessed on its ear. All three stories can be said to be about women, which was intentional; they're also about foreign women, or at least women out of their own time and place, which was also intentional.

And, like I said, overall they're a huge relief from the heaviness of Island of Glass and Ashes.

The book was, in short, enormous fun to write and weave together. Here again I was going from a skeleton of ideas I already knew I wanted to use, but unlike Island, Sita's Shadow brought me back to being able to write Malay Mysteries with a sort of breezy ease. Sita's Shadow is nevertheless the longest Malay Mystery so far, clocking in at around 200 pages, since it's comprised of three inner stories. I'm happy to report that the fifth book in the series (working title: The Inheritors) is behaving itself too, so readers won't need to wait as painfully long (for the next three books, at any rate) as they had to for Island. That said, I do think Island is better for the extra work and the new artist, and so I stand by it, with (once again sheepish) apologies to anyone who was waiting for it. Sita's Shadow, incidentally, is nearly complete illustration-wise, and will be released some time in April.

Right. A new year, a new book, a new blog, a new web site for Shoto Press--everything is new again! As you can see, a lot has been retooled around here, vastly for the better, as far as I'm concerned.

This new blog is a tabula rasa. The only reason to keep the old stuff up was so I could boast that I was one of the first bloggers (my first post all the way back in 2001 even had to define "blog" since it was such a new term), but most of it was rubbish, so I've started afresh. There are some pieces I genuinely liked and was proud of, and which, I hope, have withstood at least a few of the ravages of time. And some (like "Sharky's Machine" or "Good old Garuda" or the account of mischief my niece and I got up to in "Bruce Jones, the Dead Damn Rat, and other pranks") are just so absurd that I had a good time writing them, and so they have been preserved. All the old posts that can make the cut, I'm excavating, and will periodically link up on the left. The rest all looks forward. 2007 is as good a starting point as any. (I've always done better in odd-numbered years, something I'm trying my best to keep from hardening into a full-blown superstition, but 2006, unfortunately, did little to unseat the pattern.)

Where have I been? There's that famous adage (John Lennon, I believe) that goes, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." So I've been living, give or take, dealing with this and that, and I've been writing. Writers do that; we vanish for periods while we write and/or attend to the various tribulations we get caught up in that fall under the general rubric of Life, and then we reappear when we have something to show for it.

And occasionally when we don't, but more often, at least in the case of this writer, the former. Encountering us in either state guarantees that you'll get your ear chewed off about what we're working on now, or some seemingly brilliant idea we just had that we simply must tell you about right away before it goes (and how are you, by the way?), so be careful of people like us.

You'll be seeing the (distilled) fruits of my labors of the last couple of years here before you see them anywhere else. In fact, I can show off the first of them right now: the third Malay Mysteries book, Island of Glass and Ashes, is now available to order through this site, and will soon be appearing in book stores and in Diamond's Previews, if that's where you'd prefer to get it (I'll post details on when everyone will have the book in stock as I get them).

In an upcoming post, I'll talk a bit more about Island--quite a lot went into creating it--and the fourth book in the series, Sita's Shadow and Other Stories. There's lots of other stuff going on in the world of my projects besides the Malay Mysteries, but lots of time to get into all that later.

For now, welcome to the new Shoto Press site (feel free to poke around), and my new blog, where I promise to go on and on just as tediously as I did on the first one, so much so that you'll never miss the original, and I can aggregate another few years of musings before tearing it down and starting something new, this time without, perhaps, leaving it to lie fallow for a year before deciding to soldier on. Check out Island of Glass and Ashes, give yourself an excuse to reread Garlands of Moonlight and The Ghost of Silver Cliff, and happy 2007.

I think it's going to be a good year.