Caitlín R. Kiernan

Today, the meteorological violence of the past two days is gone. The sky is overcast, and the air is cool, presently only 77F.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,738 words on Chapter Three of Blood Oranges. Now, there's a troll in the book.

Much of the day was spent bracing for a storm that I'm pretty sure actually came the night before. But the weathermen freak out when something gets past them, so they were overcompensating, going so far as to warn people to stock up on food and water and suchlike...for a thunderstorm. Spooky did go out to the market, and there were trees down – some of them quite large – from the storm that hit us early on Wednesday morning. Some buildings in our neighborhood took damage from that storm, from the wind and hail. Anyway, here's how things looked about 5:30 p.m. yesterday:



About 6 p.m., as we were eating dinner, the red band swept over us, and it was a kitten compared with the night before.

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Yesterday, something happened that I've been expecting ever since Colgate-Palmolive bought a controlling interest in Tom's of Maine back in 2006 – I opened a box of toothpaste and discovered that the old metal tube had been replaced with a squishy plastic one. And who the hell really knows which is "greener" than the other, metal or plastic. Point is, toothpaste ought come in metal fucking tubes.

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I slept last night, at least. About seven and a half hours. But the Good Worker Bee Pills are making me fat, a side effect that is known and common, so it's not as if I wasn't warned.

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Last night, though the air cooled dramatically after the storms, my office was still too stuffy for Rift, so we finished watching the Burroughs documentary (dir. Yony Leyser, 2010). It was very, very well done. Afterwards, though, we watched William Cameron Menzies' The Maze (1953). Menzies is credited with inventing the role of the film production designer and was involved in the creation of many wonderful films. The Maze is not one of them. It didn't help that it was shot for 3-D, during one of those other times Hollywood fell for that gimmick. Very likely one of the dullest films I've ever slept through. Okay, I only slept through about ten minutes, and apparently I didn't miss anything. It was almost worth eduring the whole silly, wretched mess for two lines:

Kitty Murray (played by Veronica Hurst): Look, there's a strand of seaweed!

Edith Murray (played by Katherine Emery): And a bowl of tomatoes (pronounced toe-MAH-toes).

Anyway, then we watched Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun (2000), which I love, even though it sort of destroyed the man's career. It shouldn't have. Spooky had never seen it. Yeah, that's a lot of watching. I wasn't in the mood for much else.

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Rhetorical Question: How am I not to conclude that, in the end, I am, at best, a forgotten experiment and no one is watching?

Same As It Ever Was,
Aunt Beast

* From Wikipedia: "A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the (often obvious) answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people endure this injustice?", no formal answer is expected. Rather, it is a device used by the speaker to assert or deny something. (e.g.: "Why me?") While amusing and often humorous, rhetorical questions are rarely meant for pure, comedic effect. A carefully crafted question can, if delivered well, persuade an audience to believe in the position(s) of the speaker."

We saved a tree yesterday. Which means I accomplished far more yesterday than on most days. It's the tree right outside my office window, a tree that happens to be on our next-door neighbors property. We awoke yesterday to the sound of chainsaws, one of the ugliest sounds in the world. It quickly became apparent that our neighbor was having all the trees and shrubs in her backyard cut down. But the tree by my window was still standing. I asked Spooky to please go and see what was up, if they intended to cut it down, too. She got dressed and went downstairs. She explained to the woman next door that the tree shades my office, and that in the summer it keeps this room from becoming quite as hot as the rest of the House. She told her we watched the birds and squirrels in the tree, and that the cats like to sit on my desk and do the same. The woman next door was sympathetic and told the man with the chainsaw to spare that tree. And so it's still standing this morning, and I am very, very grateful. I would not ever have been able to look out my window again without that tree; I would have pulled the curtain shut and left it shut.

Though, I did have a nightmare this morning about the tree being cut down.

Three of the seven artists I want to appear in the "Best of" anthology are now on board: Richard A. Kirk, Ryan Obermeyer, and Vince Locke. Four to go. And so far, no title better than Two Worlds and In Between has presented itself.

Yesterday was spent figuring out the second half of "The Yellow Alphabet," which I'll begin writing today, with "N is for Naga." It will appear at the end of the month in Sirenia Digest #57. Also, my big box of the new mass-market paperback of The Red Tree arrived via FedEx. I've not yet opened the box. I'd fear this is a sign of being utterly, completely jaded, but I suspect it has more to do with the hideous, inappropriate cover the book is saddled with (same hideous, inappropriate cover as on the trade paperback). I have no desire to be reminded of that cover. The Red Tree is not part of the "PR/UF" tramp-stamp parade, and it still angers me beyond words that it was made to look as if it is.

Also, there was quite a bit of email. There has been lately. Quite a bit of email, I mean.

We began watching Season Four of Dexter last night, and made it through the first three episodes. Also, some good rp in Insilico (which has once again become a part of my daily life).

I also had a moderate seizure last night, my first since June 13th, that day in Boston. It hit just as I was falling asleep. It had been so long, I'd begun to think I'd never have another. Surprise.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions, which include the first painting I have ever offered for sale, Study 1 for Yellow.

I've been making myself go to bed at 2 ayem the last two nights (or mornings), and slowly I am catching up on all the sleep I've lost. Still, here it is 1:12 pm, and I'm still groggy. It's cold in Atlanta this afternoon, but we got marvelous thunderstorms yesterday, and the warm will be back tomorrow, so that's not so bad.

Yesterday. Let's see. It was all about getting Sirenia Digest #28 put together. I did the corrections to "Pickman's Other Model" that I marked when we last read through the story on the 18th, but had not yet made. I have a feeling I'm going to have to read over this one one more time before I send it out into the world. Anyway, that took about an hour and a half. Then I snurched HPL's "Pickman's Model" from Wikisource and spent a bit of time making sure the formatting matched HPL's original (there were some discrepencies), because I want Sirenia readers who haven't read "Pickman's Model" to have it on hand. I gathered up some images I want to use in the issue. I wrote the prolegomena, which is mostly about inspiration. So, it's looking like #28 will go out tomorrow. I still have to do the layout today, and I'm waiting on Vince's illustration. Oh, and this issue will also include, for all those new subscribers, one of the older stories, one of my favourites, "The Sphinx's Kiss" (from #14, January 2007). I think I will be very happy with this issue.

Also, yesterday, the contracts for the German-language editions of Threshold and Low Red Moon arrived. Of course, the IRS still hasn't sent me the forms I need to send to my German publisher to prove that, yes, I really am an American citizen (in order to avoid the hefty German taxes). The post also brought a package from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, because Spooky had ordered a bottle of their Baghdad for me (amber, saffron, and bergamot, with mandarin, nutmeg, bulgar rose, musk, and sandalwood), plus a bunch of "imps" (and I'm not gonna list them all, but her faves are Zombi and Séance). Baghdad is the new smell of me.

Last night, there was Manhattan-style clam chowder for dinner, followed by a pretty good episode of Torchwood and a very good episode of Angel ("Damage"). I started reading another JVP paper yesterday — "Cranial anatomy of Ennatosaurus tecton (Synapsida: Caseidae) from the Middle Permian of Russia and the evolutionary relationship of the Caseidae" — but didn't finish it.

Another casualty of the March 14th-15th tornadoes, one I have not yet mentioned, was the second of the two trees in Freedom Park that played an important role in a dream I wrote of way back on March 8th, 2006. Somewhere, there's an entry with a photograph of the two trees standing, but the journal's gotten so long, I'll be damned if I can find it. Anyway, one of the two trees was already dead and fell in storms last year. These two oaks were a bit special to me, because of the dream, and because we'd done some magick there, and they were just very fine trees in their own right (which is the most important thing). There's a photo, taken late on Thursday, behind the cut:

( Fallen )

My thanks to furrylittleprob for pointing me to more LJ icons by artist Liz Amini-Holmes.

Yeah. I hear ya, platypus. Where's my damn coffee?

Postscript (2:34 p.m.) — Thanks to cliff52 for pointing out that the photo of the two trees can be found in my March 10th, 2006 journal entry (third photo down).