Caitlín R. Kiernan (
greygirlbeast) wrote2011-01-11 01:31 pm
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Entry tags:
The Pink Zone
1) I slept eight hours, and I'm still not exactly what passes for awake.
2) We've laid in supplies. The snow is coming. It should arrive around midnight tonight. Heavy, heavy snow. If I were still in Birmingham or Atlanta, this sort of snow would spell the beginning of a week or two of havoc. Here, we may be unable to leave the house for one day, maybe. By "leave the house," I only mean get the car out of the driveway.
3) Yesterday, I wrote 1,142 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I'm starting to suspect I'll finish the chapter on Thursday. I'm on manuscript page 162. But, even as I begin this seemingly marvelous progress, the insecurity mounts. The fear that I'm not even half smart enough to write this book, and that there's no audience who wants to read a novel of this sort. I have begun heavily second guessing the reader.
Fuck the so-called wisdom of writing workshops, of instructors, and fuck all that shit about reader/writer contracts. This sort of anxiety is poisonous to good fiction. One does not write for an audience, unless one only wishes to pander. One writes. The worth of a novel is not determined by the opinions of those who read it, collected and averaged to yield an objective rating that may be expressed in stars given and stars withehld. It's all a lonely mess. The book's "worth" lies in the mind of the author, and in the mind of each reader. Each is alone with the book, and everyone who reads it is subject to their own unique experience. Nothing is generally true. That said, I sit and try to just let Imp speak and tell her story, but I begin to hear the complaints to come. The shitty Amazon and blog "reviews" it may receive in 2012. These things shouldn't occur to me, and certainly they shouldn't give me a moment's pause, but they do. "It takes forever before anything actually happens." "It's slow." "It rambles." And so on and on and on and so forth.
4) Yesterday, after the writing, we had to go to our storage unit in Pawtucket. Outside, the world was bitter cold, scabby, too sharp around the edges. Anyway, we needed to drop off those files I mentioned having boxed up back on the 7th. That was the easy part. I also needed to find the missing files for The Dry Salvages, which I'm revising a bit before it's reprinted in Two Worlds and In Between. The files weren't in my cabinet, or anywhere in my office, or in the house. So, it stood to reason, we'd find them in the storage unit, where most of my old manuscripts and notes are kept. Nope. They may be there, but we didn't find them. Which is going to make revising The Dry Salvages much more difficult. I'll say more on this later.
It was depressing, seeing all my paleo' stuff, my Lane cabinet and all the rest. Things that have been in storage since August 2001, when I only thought I was briefly putting my paleo' work on hold.
5) Few things are so capable of filling me with despair as the paperback rack at the market. Who actually reads this crap? I mean, clearly lots and lots and lots of people do, because every one of those books has some bestselling pedigree slapped across its foil embossed cover. These are the forgettable books that everyone reads. Maybe not me, or you, or you, but everyone else. They all seem to amount to little but a combination of fourth-grade reading-level prose and woozy melodrama with bland, idealized characters. They are not meant to be good books. They are meant to be easy reads. Good reads (a phrase I loathe, a dismissive, backhanded slap of a compliment). They are meant to be consumed and then disposed of, like all the best products of this society. I know the money would be heavenly, but I don't think I could sleep at night. Okay, touché. I already have trouble sleeping.
6) I'm starting to think I'm sitting in a great empty room, talking to myself, listening to my hollow voice echoing off the silver walls.
7) Last night we watched Michael Winterbottom's excellent The Killer Inside Me (2010; based on Jim Thompson's 1952 novel). A few lapses in logic aside, I liked it quite a lot (and the lapses are only problematic if we assume the characters are especially bright people, and mostly they don't appear to be). Western noir set in the 1950s. It felt a lot like what you might get if the Coen Bros. and David Lynch made a film together. As usual, Winterbottom doesn't pull his punches, and so the brutality and loss rings true. Casey Affleck delivers a chilling performance as a small-town sociopath who also happens to be a deputy sheriff. Highly recommended.
8) I ordered my new iPod Classic yesterday. My thanks to Steven Lubold, who made it possible for me to get a new iPod. I've been trying to decide what I'll name it. My first iPod (the one from 2005 that recently died) was Moya. This one may be Inara. I always name my computers. Anyway, right now I see it's in Shanghai, because, you know, that makes sense. My iPod and the ramen I had for breakfast have traveled more than I ever will.
9) Last night, Shaharrazad reached Level 83.
And that's more than enough for now.
2) We've laid in supplies. The snow is coming. It should arrive around midnight tonight. Heavy, heavy snow. If I were still in Birmingham or Atlanta, this sort of snow would spell the beginning of a week or two of havoc. Here, we may be unable to leave the house for one day, maybe. By "leave the house," I only mean get the car out of the driveway.
3) Yesterday, I wrote 1,142 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I'm starting to suspect I'll finish the chapter on Thursday. I'm on manuscript page 162. But, even as I begin this seemingly marvelous progress, the insecurity mounts. The fear that I'm not even half smart enough to write this book, and that there's no audience who wants to read a novel of this sort. I have begun heavily second guessing the reader.
Fuck the so-called wisdom of writing workshops, of instructors, and fuck all that shit about reader/writer contracts. This sort of anxiety is poisonous to good fiction. One does not write for an audience, unless one only wishes to pander. One writes. The worth of a novel is not determined by the opinions of those who read it, collected and averaged to yield an objective rating that may be expressed in stars given and stars withehld. It's all a lonely mess. The book's "worth" lies in the mind of the author, and in the mind of each reader. Each is alone with the book, and everyone who reads it is subject to their own unique experience. Nothing is generally true. That said, I sit and try to just let Imp speak and tell her story, but I begin to hear the complaints to come. The shitty Amazon and blog "reviews" it may receive in 2012. These things shouldn't occur to me, and certainly they shouldn't give me a moment's pause, but they do. "It takes forever before anything actually happens." "It's slow." "It rambles." And so on and on and on and so forth.
4) Yesterday, after the writing, we had to go to our storage unit in Pawtucket. Outside, the world was bitter cold, scabby, too sharp around the edges. Anyway, we needed to drop off those files I mentioned having boxed up back on the 7th. That was the easy part. I also needed to find the missing files for The Dry Salvages, which I'm revising a bit before it's reprinted in Two Worlds and In Between. The files weren't in my cabinet, or anywhere in my office, or in the house. So, it stood to reason, we'd find them in the storage unit, where most of my old manuscripts and notes are kept. Nope. They may be there, but we didn't find them. Which is going to make revising The Dry Salvages much more difficult. I'll say more on this later.
It was depressing, seeing all my paleo' stuff, my Lane cabinet and all the rest. Things that have been in storage since August 2001, when I only thought I was briefly putting my paleo' work on hold.
5) Few things are so capable of filling me with despair as the paperback rack at the market. Who actually reads this crap? I mean, clearly lots and lots and lots of people do, because every one of those books has some bestselling pedigree slapped across its foil embossed cover. These are the forgettable books that everyone reads. Maybe not me, or you, or you, but everyone else. They all seem to amount to little but a combination of fourth-grade reading-level prose and woozy melodrama with bland, idealized characters. They are not meant to be good books. They are meant to be easy reads. Good reads (a phrase I loathe, a dismissive, backhanded slap of a compliment). They are meant to be consumed and then disposed of, like all the best products of this society. I know the money would be heavenly, but I don't think I could sleep at night. Okay, touché. I already have trouble sleeping.
6) I'm starting to think I'm sitting in a great empty room, talking to myself, listening to my hollow voice echoing off the silver walls.
7) Last night we watched Michael Winterbottom's excellent The Killer Inside Me (2010; based on Jim Thompson's 1952 novel). A few lapses in logic aside, I liked it quite a lot (and the lapses are only problematic if we assume the characters are especially bright people, and mostly they don't appear to be). Western noir set in the 1950s. It felt a lot like what you might get if the Coen Bros. and David Lynch made a film together. As usual, Winterbottom doesn't pull his punches, and so the brutality and loss rings true. Casey Affleck delivers a chilling performance as a small-town sociopath who also happens to be a deputy sheriff. Highly recommended.
8) I ordered my new iPod Classic yesterday. My thanks to Steven Lubold, who made it possible for me to get a new iPod. I've been trying to decide what I'll name it. My first iPod (the one from 2005 that recently died) was Moya. This one may be Inara. I always name my computers. Anyway, right now I see it's in Shanghai, because, you know, that makes sense. My iPod and the ramen I had for breakfast have traveled more than I ever will.
9) Last night, Shaharrazad reached Level 83.
And that's more than enough for now.
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One thing though, whatever impatient critics you face with this one - they don't know how to savor the best things in life.
My two cents.
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7.) This was one of my favorite movies I saw during 2010, and it pleases me that you enjoyed it as well. I recognize that man, his terrible face and those washed out colors. It's rather frightening to see such an accurate portrayal of the evil you know. It made me sort of glad too that I didn't end up buying one of those beautiful old houses in the small towns scattered around Texas. With my luck, I'd end up with some bad ghosts.
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As you said.
Type of folks who'd vote Transformer's 2 as Movie of the Year.
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As far as the "nothing much happened" complaint, I'm reminded of Neil Gaiman's "The Problem with Susan." Nothing much happens in that story, does it? An old woman is interviewed and reminisces - in terms of "action" that's about it, really. But what an amazing story it is!!! So as far as I can tell, people who are worried only about what "happened" aren't putting in the work needed to get everything from the story.
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I'm sure I could write a book about a love triangle involving a vampire and a werewolf if I really tried, but since my favorite werewolf has always been the man with the dull, grey voice from Prince Caspian, I doubt I'd have a run away best seller on my hands.
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I once had a friend present me with a Harlequin Romance as part of a gift. I was -sure- he was just poking fun at me, so it never occurred to me that he'd be hurt when I laughed and carried it by two fingers to the trash can, but that did hurt his feelings and I had to apologize. Your mention of the paperback rack at the market brought this memory up for some reason, and it only just now occurred to me that he -might- have intended that gift suggestively as a sort of foreplay. That was a very strange relationship and I never for even one second knew what we were to each other in all our years together. Oh well. If he had been paying sufficient attention, he would've known that my affections and my libido require far more intellectual stimuli.
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Cruising around me, the flames burn my body...
We prick you we prick you we prick you.
Re: Cruising around me, the flames burn my body...
Finding what we like to read
But who knows what the future will bring: When I was growing up, you couldn't find most fruits or vegetables (or yogurt) in the grocery stores we shopped in. Our generation's biggest contribution to the world: easy access to a greater variety of food, both healthy and unhealthy.
Re: Finding what we like to read
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All tangents aside, I am very much looking forward to 'Drowning Girl'.
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your #3. In spades. Right now. Right here. Am wading through the same mud'n'molasses. I have been spectacularly unlucky with things in my last publishing foray out there - I lost THREE editors and two publicity people over the lifespan of a trilogy, with predictable consequences on promotion publicity and sales - and right now I'm writing something new, but out of contract, and wondering if anyone ever will take a chance again. Second-guessing the reader? I'm second-guessing the INDUSTRY...
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I am so thrilled you will include Chapter 1 of "The Drowning Girl: A Memoir" in the next SD. If that's not incentive for other folks to subscribe I don't know what is.
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I will, however, be looking for a copy of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, when it becomes available, and when I can afford the purchase. That will probably be one of the few books I read that year. It looks like the kind of fiction I am very keen on. And so it goes.
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Can I request this as a Sirenia vignette? So long as it is not written for me.
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Empty Rooms and Empty Tomes
The real hollowness is the emptiness of all of that disposable fiction, without anything solid to send the echo back to you. There's nothing wrong with books as fast food, just sometimes you want something more substantial. Looking forward to The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.
Re: Empty Rooms and Empty Tomes
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Hmm, I finished reading the book a few months ago, but didn't realize there was a recent adaptation of it. Something to look for... thanks!
I'm starting to think I'm sitting in a great empty room, talking to myself, listening to my hollow voice echoing off the silver walls.
Oh, I suspect there's a lot of us in that room with you - we're just hard to see, and don't make much noise until it seems appropriate to do so... I'll add some comments or send you a small review when I can, but you shouldn't mistake the interval between those instances for a lack of attention or interest.
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I WANT to read it
-Conor Oberst, "...To Love..."
///I like to read, you know? I know it is hard for you to believe that I would read it just because you wrote it, but it is kinda true.
Re: I WANT to read it
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I really appreciate the recommendation.
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Cab driver! Follow that muse!
Just one more long-time reader (but infrequent poster here) joining the chorus: please, just follow your muse, because you are right; everything else is bullshit. All art, be it writing, painting, or music or what have you, is best when the artist follows their muse to the exclusion of all else. Everything else is Dan Brown-ish/Stephanie Meyer-esque pablum. The fact that the masses appreciate pablum the most is unfortunate, but it was ever thus – lowest common denominator, and all that.
And while it certainly is a long, lonely uphill battle, one that only you as the artist can fight, please know – and I'm sure I speak for more than just myself here, but won't presume – know that there is nevertheless at least one person, sword in hand, who is behind you, watching your back and guarding your flanks as you fight.
P.S. Finally got around to renewing my MErVISS subscription after a year or so away, for what it's worth. Figured if I was gonna talk the talk ...
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