A March of Little People
Mar. 6th, 2006 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastComet Pojmanski (C/2006 A1) , discovered on January 2nd, had its closest approach (115.4 million kilometers) to earth in the pre-dawn hours yesterday. I may stay up tonight and try to catch a glimpse of it. I've never seen a comet with a turquoise tail.
I've set aside the Mina story. Someday, eventually, it'll be the novella or long short story it wants to be. Fortunately, a more manageable subject has occurred to me that should work for Sirenia Digest #4. With a great deal of luck and some considerable determination, I hope to begin and finish it today. I thought I'd begun it yesterday, but looking back over the pages, I think it was heading off in the wrong direction. Today I shall steer it as best I can.
Saturday was a good day. The labret's healing better than I can ever recall one of my piercings having healed. Early in the day, Spooky and I did a read through on "La Peau Verte," she on my iBook and me from the actual book, and I discovered that a number of annoying typos had made it into print in To Charles Fort, With Love. These things seem inevitable at this point. I've become so obsessive about copyediting and proofreading, but still the typos find their way past me. Anyway, I still love this story the best of everything I've done, better even than any of the novels. What I'm trying to do in dark fantasy, this story does almost exactly right. If only I knew how to do it that well every single time. Anyway, afterwards, we went for a long walk. There are at least two species of woodpecker now living in the park, hairy woodpeckers (Picoides villosus) and red-headed woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), and the past couple of days, we've been besieged by crows. I spent the remainder of the day on the new vignette, which may be called "Untitled 19." Or it may not. Spooky made chili for dinner.
We watched the Oscars, and I was mostly pleased with the outcome. It was good to see Best Actor go to Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom I've admired since The Big Lebowski (1998), and I was cool with Reese Witherspoon getting Best Actress. It was an interesting year. Nothing swept, which actually felt kind of nice. I was especially pleased that Best Visual Effects went to King Kong, that Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit got Best Animated Feature, and that Best Make-Up went to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But my favourite moment was during the presentation of Best Adapted Screenplay, when Vince got a mention for A History of Violence. And I'd somehow missed that Ismail Merchant had died this year. Afterwards, Spooky read Dracula to me until I was too sleepy to listen and she too sleepy to read farther, so we stopped just after the Demeter ran aground at Whitby.
And now I must go forth with my vorpal blade and slay the frumious doughnuts...so to speak.
I've set aside the Mina story. Someday, eventually, it'll be the novella or long short story it wants to be. Fortunately, a more manageable subject has occurred to me that should work for Sirenia Digest #4. With a great deal of luck and some considerable determination, I hope to begin and finish it today. I thought I'd begun it yesterday, but looking back over the pages, I think it was heading off in the wrong direction. Today I shall steer it as best I can.
Saturday was a good day. The labret's healing better than I can ever recall one of my piercings having healed. Early in the day, Spooky and I did a read through on "La Peau Verte," she on my iBook and me from the actual book, and I discovered that a number of annoying typos had made it into print in To Charles Fort, With Love. These things seem inevitable at this point. I've become so obsessive about copyediting and proofreading, but still the typos find their way past me. Anyway, I still love this story the best of everything I've done, better even than any of the novels. What I'm trying to do in dark fantasy, this story does almost exactly right. If only I knew how to do it that well every single time. Anyway, afterwards, we went for a long walk. There are at least two species of woodpecker now living in the park, hairy woodpeckers (Picoides villosus) and red-headed woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), and the past couple of days, we've been besieged by crows. I spent the remainder of the day on the new vignette, which may be called "Untitled 19." Or it may not. Spooky made chili for dinner.
We watched the Oscars, and I was mostly pleased with the outcome. It was good to see Best Actor go to Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom I've admired since The Big Lebowski (1998), and I was cool with Reese Witherspoon getting Best Actress. It was an interesting year. Nothing swept, which actually felt kind of nice. I was especially pleased that Best Visual Effects went to King Kong, that Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit got Best Animated Feature, and that Best Make-Up went to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But my favourite moment was during the presentation of Best Adapted Screenplay, when Vince got a mention for A History of Violence. And I'd somehow missed that Ismail Merchant had died this year. Afterwards, Spooky read Dracula to me until I was too sleepy to listen and she too sleepy to read farther, so we stopped just after the Demeter ran aground at Whitby.
And now I must go forth with my vorpal blade and slay the frumious doughnuts...so to speak.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:24 pm (UTC)You forgot to mention the "Pimp" song, though. *LOL*
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 05:06 pm (UTC)I've long wanted to see Whitby. Both for the Dracula connections and because it was important in 19th-Century palaeontology. There are some wonderful Jurassic rocks exposed at Whitby.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 05:33 pm (UTC)Cool. There have also been pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs found there. And plesiosaurs, too, I think.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:56 pm (UTC)Thank you for posting about the comet! It's a pretty one..! Nice to know these things can still sneak up on us from time to time.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:24 pm (UTC)a bit OT, but there ya go.
Date: 2006-03-06 05:28 pm (UTC)wow.
thank you.
Re: a bit OT, but there ya go.
Date: 2006-03-06 05:35 pm (UTC)just finished reading "Untitled 17" from SIRENIA DIGEST #3...
wow.
thank you.
You are very welcome. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:07 pm (UTC)You know, this all makes me wonder as to your currently current opinion on crafting vampire fiction. You've rather famously disdained it in the past, but several of the erotica pieces seem to be heading in that direction. I was surprised to see the number of them in your work that you mentioned yesterday (in addition to "The Drowned Geologist" [tangentially related to Dracula] and the Joan of Arc-related short story I happened to discover over this weekend while recovering from a hangover at a friend's house). I don't mean to be bitchy, it was just something I assumed to be less prevalent. As there been a change of heart on the matter?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:31 pm (UTC)It is less prevalent, ceratinly, though there are the vampires in the yellow house on Benefit Street, vampires in "So Runs the World Away" and "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers," Low Red Moon and Daughter of Hounds. It's not that I ever really stopped writing vampires, so much as that I toned them way down and moved away from most of the modern clichés, vampires sensu Rice and Collins and whoever else. Then, when I began the vignettes, well there's no point in denying that vampirism is one of my kinks, so it was prety much impossible and pointless to try to stay away from them.
Look at it that way, and it's not really that I ever stopped writing about vampires (regardless of what I might have said to the contrary). It's hard not to be reactionary about vampires. There's so, so much shit out there.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 08:20 pm (UTC)And I appreciate the downplay, not to mention the intentional muddying of what/who qualifies as a vampire: the vampires in Five of Cups are different from the Vampires in the Benefit St. house are very different from the "youthful" ones we meet in "So the World Runs Away" are so very very different than the ones we meet in the vignettes and FT&T. I like it, I just hadn't put it all together.
Well there's no point in denying that vampirism is one of my kinks
No need for shame in your game. When the vignettes are hot, they're freaking hot. When the eroticism moves away from my personal kink, well, they're still pretty, entertaining stories. I'd be curious to see at the six-month mark which story the readers found most successfully erotic (as opposed to just well-written, imaginative, or whatever). I don't know whether it would be of any use or interest to you, but it might be amusing to see which particular stories got us hot under the collar/waistband. Maybe it's a poll better suited for Species of One or something. Dunno.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 08:42 pm (UTC)And those are the sorts of vampires I'm not sure I could ever write again. The post-Ricean vampires. Whatever we should call them. I'm glad that I did, when I did, but I'm not sure I could take them seriously again.
'd be curious to see at the six-month mark which story the readers found most successfully erotic (as opposed to just well-written, imaginative, or whatever). I don't know whether it would be of any use or interest to you, but it might be amusing to see which particular stories got us hot under the collar/waistband.
I agree. This would be interesting, and maybe even helpful. At the seventh month mark, there shall be a poll. I say the seventh month, because issue 0 was the bit from Daughter of Hounds.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:32 pm (UTC)Thank you. :) However, someone else kindly sent me a copy a while back.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:04 pm (UTC)I've noticed that a number of the vignettes in both Frog Toes and Tentacles and Sirenia are "Untitled . . ." Do your stories usually come with titles attached (or do titles usually provoke stories) or are they more on the order of afterthoughts? This may be an unanswerable or a badly phrased question; mostly I am wondering how intrinsic or separable a title is to or from a given story.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:36 pm (UTC)I've noticed that a number of the vignettes in both Frog Toes and Tentacles and Sirenia are "Untitled . . ." Do your stories usually come with titles attached (or do titles usually provoke stories) or are they more on the order of afterthoughts?
The untitled thing really only began with the vignettes. Normally, I insist upon having a title before I begin writing a story, though, sometimes, the title may change later on. I wanted to approach the vignettes differently. At the start, I very much thought of them as word paintings, so the untitled thing seemed appropriate. Titles have always seemed such odd things to me. I seem to need them, but they much surely be one of the most artificial elements of literature.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-08 04:05 am (UTC)Hm. In what sense?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-08 01:24 pm (UTC)I'm not sure it's something I can explain. It's just hard to begin a story unless there's a) a title or b) a place-holder for the title. Leaving that space blank drives me nuts and distracts me from the writing of the story. All those years as a palaeontologist left me very systematic.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:35 pm (UTC)Not to jump topics but...
Date: 2006-03-07 05:09 am (UTC)Re: Not to jump topics but...
Date: 2006-03-07 02:38 pm (UTC):) You're welcome.