Caitlín R. Kiernan

The sky is a deep grey-white, with the faintest hint of that shade of purple that I still know of as "periwinkle," because that's what it was called in my box of 100 Crayolas, when I was a kid. The old power pole outside my window looks like a driftwood crucifix. Most of the snow has melted. It didn't amount to much.

I'm trying to get back to work —— rotting, unpulled tooth or no. That first week of December, the week off during this two-month semi-vacation, it was wonderful. I think the most wonderful and unexpected thing about it was the way that time seemed to stretch. For that span of time, my days did not consist of getting out of bed, sitting down at the computer, having a meal somewhere in the day or night, and then wandering off to bed at 2:30 ayem. I got out of the house. Outside, even though it's not a place I'm generally comfortable being these days. I went as far north as the tip of Cape Cod, and as far south and west as New Haven, Connecticut. There was the ocean, the wreck of a 19th-Century schooner, Pleistocene clay, good movies, the dolls of Elizabeth King, dinosaurs, cities, dunes, small towns, forests, the grave of O.C. Marsh, Yale University, and the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The days were longer, seeming to expand to accommodate these experiences, and somehow spaced farther apart from one another than usual. And it's made getting back into the habit of this chair, this keyboard, this screen, and all the things that go along with writing, it's made that return to the normative state of my life difficult. But, at the beginning of January, I get another week that will be experience, not writing. It's something to look forward too, over the next two weeks.

Solstice is near. The days will grow longer.

It was almost impossible to work yesterday, but I worked. A little. Enough that I only felt guilty. Today I have to do a lot better. I have to find the first vignette for Sirenia Digest #37. I think it will be something wintry. And it occurs to me. It's very odd that I've never really written a story about a cat. They've always been such a part of my life, but, aside from an issue of The Dreaming ("The First Adventure of Miss Catterina Poe"), I've never much written about cats. Not on purpose. It's some weird blind spot in my fiction.

Here is a stack of books I want to read this winter, that I mean to read this winter: Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, a collection of Nabokov, Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and Moonchild by Aleister Crowley. I haven't started any of them. I give myself over to the easier distractions of the internet. I sit in this chair.

The days taste like Ambesol and ginger ale, coffee and dust.

And now it's time to make the doughnuts.

Thanks to everyone who's bid on the current eBay auctions. More items will be going up today.

After a standoffish beginning, Hubero and Linus seem to be making peace. Mostly, I think Hubero just wants to make it past all this getting-to-know-you-chit-chat and play. But Linus is not so sure of Hubero's intentions. And, so, a bit of new-cat stress.

Oftentimes, after the medium-bad to severe seizures, there's depression. It came on hard yesterday. The extreme cold temperatures did little to help.

Spooky and I had plans, to make a day of art galleries. We drove over to College Hill and started off with the Elizabeth King instillation at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. There's a story here. Years ago now, mellawyrden sent Spooky one of King's books, Attention's Loop (Harry N. Abrams, 1999). When I was working on the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles, that book was part of the inspiration for "Ode to Katan Amano" (which will be reprinted in A is for Alien). Of all the pieces in FT&T, "Ode to Katan Amano" was probably my favourite (and still is), and I closed it with a quote from Elizabeth King. So, going to the show yesterday and seeing firsthand so much of her exquisite work displayed in this exhibit ("The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye"), it was sort of like closing a circle. It would be incorrect to say that she makes dolls, or puppets, or marionettes. I'm not sure how I would, personally, describe what she makes. The exhibit was beautiful, and I wish I'd taken the camera. It was a little disconcerting, like stumbling into part of the set of Blade Runner, maybe a museum of automaton evolution that wound up on the cutting-room floor. Sadly, I forgot the camera, but we are planning to see it again before the instillation ends on December 22nd.

We'd planned, next, to visit the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, just down the street. But, turns out, it's closed on Mondays. So, our day of galleries was suddenly cut short, and my day spiraled from there. Very little worth mentioning until after dark. I came home and napped. Or rather, I lay down and fell asleep for a while before dinner. Afterwards, we watched Speilberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence (1999), which we'd both seen only once, when it was in theatres. My opinion of it remains unchanged. It's both beautiful and brilliant, and certainly one of Speilberg's best. I think that it sounded a sour chord with a lot of people because, while it appears as an sf story (and, I would say, works well as sf), it's truly a fairy tale. Many things happen for fairy-tale reasons. Fairy-tale logic governs much of the film, and it strikes out, often, with all the cruelty and viciousness of the best fairy tales. I was very pleased that it's aged so well. However, this is probably not a film for the sort of sf reader/audience who actually thinks that science fiction is (or, at least "should" be) concerned mainly with science and predictions of the future of man and technology.

Later we played a bit of WoW, still out in the Arathi Highlands, and Shaharrazad and Surra both reached Level 37. Afterwards, Spooky read The Fellowship of the Ring aloud until we were too sleepy to continue.

But this black mood hangs on.

Someone wrote yesterday, via MySpace (where I don't reply to comments), wanting to know who Spooky is. To which I reply, she's my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, dollmaker and photographer. I thought everyone knew.

I should be getting back to work today, but I don't know whether or not it's going to happen. It may be all that I can do just to avoid going back to bed. The temps are a little warmer —— currently 29F, with a projected high of 44F —— and there's rain on the way. So maybe that will help. I don't know.

I leave you with this Louis C. K. clip, courtesy Blu, who snagged it from Monica Richards:

Having more trouble than usual waking up this morning. Then again, maybe I'm just not pushing myself the way I usually do, because I don't have to write later. I have the luxury of waking up slowly. Regardless, my mind is messier than is normal, this distance from waking up.

Yesterday did not deliver the nothing that I'd sort of hoped for. There were errands that needed running. Usually, Spooky does the errand running, but since I wasn't writing, I wanted to go along, get out of the house. Nothing remarkable. There were supplies I needed from Staples (paper, mechanical pencil lead, etc.). Then PetCo, because Hubero needed stuff (the demanding little bastard), and a trip to the Eastside Market for groceries. We also went to three different liquor stores trying to find a bottle of Smirnoff Pomegranate Martini (vodka, pomegranate juice, Meyer lemon liqueur, and lemon juice), which just looks too tempting not to try; but, alas, no one had it in. It's very new, and we're going to try one of the big booze megamarts in Warwick or someplace. It was late in the day when we headed out, and the sky was beautiful. The day was about ten-degrees colder than Monday, but still, beautiful weather. I had a very brief absence seizure while we were walking on Benefit Street. I've had a few of these the last few weeks I've not mentioned. I call them "blips." Anyway, that was pretty much the excitement that was the daylit portion of yesterday.

Last night, after dinner, we went to the Avon Theater on Thayer Street and saw Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008). It's not often that a film simply leaves me at a loss for words. Or that it's so utterly briliant (as in smart, and also as in bright and shining), that it makes me feel stupid. But Synecdoche, New York pretty much did both. I don't want to heap hyperbole upon it, or resort to mere adjectives. But it's the best film I've seen this year, and it's one of the best films I've seen ever, I think. At the very least, it deserves Best Director. And it deserves a much wider audience, one that I doubt it will get. It's not as "accessible" as Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Being John Malkovich (1999). I'm still trying to decide which "reading protocol" I should employ for understanding the film. It is arguably science fiction, but, then again, this degree of metafictional surrealism short circuits any meaningful attempts at such categorization. The screenplay...I wish I had it today, to read a couple of times. The film unfolds like an unimaginably complex puzzle box, or pop-up book. It's Danielewski's spiraling, labyrinthine narrative techniques, but translated, successfully, to the screen. And Philip Seymour Hoffman is grand. His performance here ranks with his work in Capote (2007) and The Savages (2007). He's just amazing. But the film...the film as a whole...see it if you are lucky enough that it's playing anywhere near you. It needs to be seen on a big screen. So, yeah, I have now officially forgiven the Avon for delaying Låt den rätte komma in by a week.

After the movie, we came home and watched the two most recent episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I continue to be intrigued and entertained. But I think that with the latest episode, "Self-Made Man," the show's creator missed an opportunity to really do some interesting things, and tossed off what could have been a complex, fascinating direction for the story. Though I was pleased that I figured out what those three dots were before we were told.

Oh, and a new cat will soon be coming to live with us. A polytactyl Siamese named Linus, that we're taking from a shelter, because Hubero really needs a buddy. I think I finally feel stable enough to handle two cats.

Now, further thoughts on WoW, but I'm putting them behind a cut, because I know there are lots of people here sick of reading about the game:

( More on WoW and roleplaying )

I am so very not awake, the sort of not-awakeness that seems determined to cling to me for many hours yet to come. But, fortunately, we finished with the galleys for Daughter of Hounds yesterday afternoon and today has been declared a "day off" after eight-straight days of proofreading and the busyness of writing.

Yesterday, we did chapters Nine ("The Bailiff") and Ten ("The Yellow House"), plus the epilogue, and think we were done by five p.m. And I'm pleased to say that I still like this book very much. I doubt I shall read it again for many years, having written it and read it three times in the last few months. I rarely ever read my books once they actually become books, especially the novels. I cannot say why. It's not an excessive familiarity with the material. I think that it has something to do with moving along to the next story. I feel like I'm always being propelled forward, as if on a river or as we move through time, headlong, and what I have done becomes memory while what I must do becomes the urgent present.

What I will say about Daughter of Hounds is that there's more plot contained in its pages than in my earlier novels. Or maybe it's just that the plot is more intricate. My approach to plot has always been haphazard. I don't see plot in the world, in life, and so I am very reluctant to impose it upon my novels. Maybe this is some holdover from my years as a paleontologist, but I am very leery of mistaking actual patterns for patterns that are illusory and vice versa. Most plot is a sort of illusory hindsight, weeding out everything that actually happened and choosing to make a story from the bits that interest us. Synoptic history, I call it. I'm sure it's why I've had to deal with so many "what happened?" complaints. I have always preferred to leave many of the "what happened?" and "why?" and "how?" questions to the minds of my readers, while I concentrated, instead, on giving them real people and places and mood and atmosphere and subtext. I tend to want my books to unfold by the gradual accumulation of happenstance, the consequences of cause and effect, rather than by following some preordained plot. But, that said, yes, there is a bit more plot to Daughter of Hounds. Hopefully, it won't get in the way. The characters are still what matter most, and the mood, and the bigger questions. I've always thought "what happened?" was a pretty small question. And one I had no desire to be enslaved by.

The novel takes place over six days in February 2010, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

There wasn't much else to yesterday. After dinner, well after sunset, Spooky and I took our evening walk. It's much nicer after all the people have gone indoors. As it passed by, Ernesto had cooled things off nicely. Back home, my eyes and brain too weary from reading to read anything more, I watched three more episodes of Firefly ("Out of Gas," "Ariel," and "War Stories").

This evening a new cat will be coming to live with us. It's been almost three months since Sophie's death, and I think I'm ready. There was a great wonderful cat with us while we were in Rhode Island, and he kind of put us back in that place where we need to have a cat about. We're adopting a four-year-old seal-point Siamese. So, I think we're a little nervous in anticipation of his arrival.

It is beyond me (and perhaps that's evidence of my advancing years) how people endure, much less enjoy, MySpace.com. More than anything else, it's the plethora of obnoxious flashing ads that get to me, sometimes as many as three or four on my screen at once. These things are clearly designed to be garish. But there are plenty of other annoying features, such as "Cool New People" and "MySpace Horoscopes." But I'm hanging in there. I am nothing if not tenacious. To stay a writer, one must be tenacious above all else. Tenacity is the key. I have noticed that MySpace seems to run very, very, very slow at times. But I will continue to mirror this journal there for the time being, as long as I can stomach the ads. Here's my MySpace page. I'll friend just about anyone who asks. I don't friend bands, unless I know them personally. But I gotta say, what a gorramn tacky place, MySpace.

I would be remiss in my writerly duties were I not to point you to Poppy's (docbrite) post from yesterday concerning her inability, even with the help of the Author's Guild, to get blood from a turnip, water from a stone, the $4000 she's owed from a magazine called Sacred History. You can read her post here. Note that we may contact the editor in question, Mr. James Griffith, at jgriffith@sacredhistory.org to let him know how we feel about editors who stiff working authors who rely on the income from their writing for survival. Personally, I have no problem with flying monkeys.

Okay. Stuff to do, even though this is a "day off." Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions, especially the PC of the lettered state of subpress' edition of Low Red Moon. If you'd like to see more images of the book and its traycase, just have a look back at my second entry from yesterday.

In closing, as promised, here's the cover image from the mass-market paperback edition of Threshold, coming January 2nd, 2007 (behind the cut). The corrected text, as I've come to think of it. At least Dancy's eyes are pink:

( new cover )

Postscript (3:50 p.m.): The auctions have ended. My thanks to those who participated!