the day before tomorrow

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I wrote only 1,268 words, which filled me with hope that maybe the Forced March hasn't warped my daily word count after all. I might still be a tortoise. I'll be a glacier, and someone else can be a babbling brook. This new piece for Sirenia Digest, this grim new piece, it still has no title, but I don't want it to be "Untitled 24." I suspect I shall finish it tomorrow. I think I know what the second piece for #15 will be, and I think it's not erotic, nor grim, and I think it's a short bit of something from that flat half-globe world in Murder of Angels. I do not yet know this for a fact. I only think it might be.

I was reading Mind Fields last night, because Harlan sent me a copy this week, and came across this marvelous quote at the beginning of the book:

"Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution." — Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

I've spent long, circuitous paragraphs trying to say what is here said with such beautiful and precise brevity. So I will only add yes, exactly.

And here's an odd thing that occurred to me after yesterday's post. May one be both an iconoclast and an icon? Here this new review of Daughter of Hounds labels me an iconoclast. Yet, many times in the past, in various contexts, I have been called an icon. For example, in his introduction to Tales of Pain and Wonder, Doug Winter called me an icon of Gothic literature. So perhaps icon and iconoclast are entirely context dependent terms, completely relative, subjective. Based upon one's point of view. One woman's icon may be another man's iconoclast, etc. In fact, this seems rather obvious. Besides, I have long grown used to existing as a contradiction.

All the new Sirenia Digest subscribers who are due signed copies of the Silk trade paperback, the books went into the mail yesterday evening. You should have them sometime next week.

Despite his poor showing early on, Raven Blue has now taken the lead in the Ravens Four auction and has spent the morning gloating and casting all sorts of perfectly pointless charms. Raven Red is livid. Raven Green is sulking. I guess this is what I get for telling them popularity contests are for the birds.

Last night we had a truly bizarre double feature: John Shiban's Rest Stop and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves). The former was dull, artless, and as entirely devoid of imagination as any film could hope to be. I'm tempted to say that Australian filmmakers need to step away from this sort of thing, but then someone will immediately cite a good recent Australian thriller to prove me wrong. Anyway, The Science of Sleep was in all ways brilliant and delightful, and I loved it pretty much unreservedly. It tread very near the dreaded subject of dreamsickness. Afterwards, I went to bed and read chapters three and four of Joan Druett's In the Wake of Madness. And that was yesterday.

Comments

[wolven.livejournal.com]

May one be both an iconoclast and an icon?

I think you hit it, most certainly, in the terms of the ocntradiction. Also, there are many who are Iconic for being Iconoclastic. I was given that dubious honour, by someone, not long ago, and, as i said, I can think of several others.

Maybe you find yourselves in their company?

Daughter of Hounds

[kendare-blake.livejournal.com]

I've just finished reading Daughter of Hounds. It is, as I suspected, and as most others have said, fantastic. And the ending is, as I think you mentioned in an earlier journal entry, much less ambiguous than the endings to your other novels. I gather that some people have complained about that. While others have raved. I'll do neither. Daughter of Hounds seems to have ended where and how it must.

Of course, I was more than half expecting you to kill Deacon, or someone else that I loved. You have this heartbreaking habit of killing off my favorite characters. I instantly liked Soldier too, so I figured, 'well, she's toast', just like Daria and Chance and Salmagundi and Jimmy De Sade. But, she survived! For now.

I could blather on and on about the various virtues and beauties of this book, but frankly you've got professional reviewers doing that already, and they have a lot more clout than I do. So I'll just say that I was reluctant to leave Emmie's world, even though my butt was fast asleep from being sat upon for five hours, and I still love the way that you manage to make the ordinary menacing. And yet, pretty. I particularly enjoyed your description of the dying hurricane, early on.

And lastly, I know that you don't LIKE writing novels. But every time one manages to free itself from you mind and eyes and fingertips, though it might be a bloody and unpleasant thing for you, is a day of rejoicing for us. So. Thanks.

-Kendare

[sovay]

I think I know what the second piece for #15 will be, and I think it's not erotic, nor grim, and I think it's a short bit of something from that flat half-globe world in Murder of Angels. I do not yet know this for a fact. I only think it might be.

I would read that gladly.

[corucia.livejournal.com]

I might still be a tortoise.

Tortoises are good. Tortoises (and turtles) helped keep me in books all during my graduate school days. I like tortoises...

[styggian.livejournal.com]

I don't have internet right now and one of the things I miss most about it is not reading your lj.