Caitlín R. Kiernan

1) Warmish again today, fifties Fahrenheit, but the cold is about to come round again. At last a good bit of the snow has melted. The sun is bright today. Die, snow. Die.

2) I've decided to delay the "sneak preview" of Lee Moyer's cover-in-progress for Two Worlds and In Between. More people read the blog on Mondays.

3) A good trip out to Conanicut Island yesterday. There was sun, on and off. It was much warmer than our visit on Sunday, and much of the snow had melted away. Jamestown didn't get nearly as much snow as Providence (it's always worse inland), and much of it's gone now. On the way down, I read David Petersen's Legends of the Guard and listened to the new Decemberists CD on the iPod. By the way, if you do not yet know, David Petersen is one of the coolest dudes working in comics today. He's brilliant. Anyway...this time we went directly to West Cove— which I have officially rechristened Shuggoth Cove —to search for beach glass and bones and what-have-you. The tide was very low, but there wasn't much to be found, which is unusual. Spooky found most of the good stuff, including the largest piece of lavender glass we've ever found, and a pale green shard with the number 7 on it. I mostly go for the bones of birds and other things you commonly find washed up at the Cove, but pickings were slim yesterday. My theory is that the hard winter has reduced the quantity of beached bones as hungry non-hibernating critters— coons, weasels, skunks, foxes, coyotes, etc. —haul away every scrap for whatever nourishment it may offer. Speaking of skunks, one made its presence known yesterday, and we gave it a very wide berth.

Bones or no, it was a beautiful day. It was good just to lay on the sand and gravel and hear the waves and see the blue sky. The sky which still seems too wide, but not so carnivorous beside the sea. We saw a gull or two and heard a few crows. I halfheartedly picked up an assortment of shells, including Crepidula fornicata (Common slipper shell), Mytolus edulis (Blue mussels), Modiolus modiolus (Horse mussels), Anomia simplex (jingle shells), Aquipecten irradius (Bay scallop), three species of periwinkle— Littorina littotrea (Common periwinkle), L. saxalis (Rough periwinkle), and L. obtusata (Smooth periwinkle) — along with Thais lapillus (dogwinkles), and two genera of crabs, Cancer irroratus (Rock crab) and Carcinus maenus (Green crab, an invasive species from Britain and northern Europe). We watched enormous freighters crossing Narragansett Bay, headed out to sea, bound for almost anywhere at all. A scuba diver went into the water, and was still under when we left the Cove just before five p.m. (CaST). As always, I didn't want to leave. We made it back to Providence before sunset. On the way home, we saw that the salt marsh was no longer frozen. On the way back, we listened to Sigur Rós, our official going-home-from-the-sea band.

4) Back home, Spooky helped me assemble a three-foot long scale model of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton (thank you, Steven!). It has now taken a teetery place of pride atop a shelf in my office.

5) Last night, Neil called and we talked a long time, about many things, which we used to do a lot, but hardly ever do anymore. We both promised to make more of an effort to stay in touch. Later, well...too much WoW again as I try to wrest Loremaster from the game before my last six weeks (or seven, or so) are up. I finished Winterspring and made it about halfway through Azshara. Spooky played Rift until I thought her eyes would pop out, and it's just beautiful. She's loving it, even with all the inconveniences of a beta (mostly, at this point, server crashes). Still later, we read more of blackholly's White Cat (which I'm loving).

6) Ebay! Please have a gander. Money is our crinkly green friend (for better or worse).

7) Today we try to make it through the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Tomorrow, with luck, I go back to work on the eighth chapter. I'm trying to obtain permission to quote a Radiohead song ("There, There [The Bony King of Nowhere]") and a PJ Harvey song ("Who Will Love Me Now")* at the beginning of the book, and we've also gotten the ball rolling on that. Amanda Palmer's assistant, Beth Hommel, is putting us in touch with Radiohead's management (thank you, Beth!), but I'm on my own with Harvey. Which ought to be an adventure in red tape.

Now, comment!

There are photos from yesterday:

( 17 February 2011 )

* Turns out, Harvey didn't write "Who Will Love Me Now." It was co-written by Philip Ridley and Nick Bicat for Ridley's film, The Passion of Darkly Noon, and performed by Harvey. So, now I have to contact Philip Ridley....who also made one of the Best. Vampire. Films. Ever. The Reflecting Skin (still, shamefully, not available on DVD).

Slowly, the ice and snow are beginning to melt. Just after breakfast, a great slab came free of the roof and crashed to the driveway. You could get hurt out there.

No day off yesterday. Instead, I wrote 1,654 words, the new introduction for Two Worlds and In Between. I like it a great deal more than the one I wrote back in October. I also did more work proofreading the collection, a task that is far from done and will require much of this month.

The "Someday" antique skeleton-key necklace is still available at Spooky's Dreaming Squid Dollworks and Sundries Etsy shop, though most of the other jewelery has sold. Remember: FREE shipping until Valentine's Day, and this stuff is much better than a box of chocolates.

Though I am entirely at a loss as to why, last night we watched Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables. Yes, I willingly subjected myself to a film directed by Sylvester Stallone. And what a great slobbering penis of a movie it was*, too. Even Jason Statham, Jet Li, and a smirking Bruce Willis cameo couldn't save this one. It was, in fact, the single worst movie I've seen since we made the mistake of seeing Scott Charles Stewart's Legion at the theater this time last year. There's actually nothing good to be said for The Expendables. Stuff blows up. There are guns. There are more guns, and more stuff blows up. Men kick other men in the nuts. Stuff blows up. Unfortunately, there are attempts at dialogue. And there are guns. In fact, that might have been the pitch that sold the penis to studio execs. "Stuff blows up, there are guns, and guys kick each other in the nuts. With dialogue." Bad, bad movie. Please, Jason Statham, don't do this again.

I got Vince's Drowning Girl illustration last night, and it's very fine. I've decided that it'll be the cover for Sirenia Digest #62.

I think the Starbuck icon kick is just about out of my system. I've been wanting to see the whole series, start to finish, again.

Okay...off to make the doughnuts and the negative space within said doughnuts.

*Lest someone say I'm being sexist, there are also vagina movies, and usually I don't like those, either. Or maybe I'm just being some sort of equal-opportunity sexist. Though, I do like good penis movies. This just wasn't one them.

Hold on for Round Three of higgledy piggledy.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,413 words on "John Four," and found THE END. It's a strange story, maybe even strange for me. Maybe even grim for me, right down to the irony in the Biblical allusion of its title. I wrote yesterday's pages to the Swans' My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It was the perfect soundtrack to the story. The last couple of hours of writing yesterday were pell-mell, a dizzy rush through black words. I almost felt as though my brain was tripping over itself. If this story has a moral, it must be that the end of the world is only merciful if it really is the end of the world, and not the beginning of another. Anyway, the vignette will be included in Sirenia Digest #58, along with reprints of most of my Lovecraft Mythos fiction. I felt I should do a Lovecraft issue, since I'll be heading off to the HPLFF next week, so that's what I'm doing.

---

I woke this morning from the most remarkable dreams, though sadly only random shreds remain. But the shreds are dazzling. I was living out a fourth book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and somehow Saruman's industrial revolution had occurred after all. The landscape was at first Stalin's Russia, then New York City in the Great Depression. I only saw hobbits and humans. The elves would be gone, of course, but there should have been orcs and dwarves. There were refugees in boxcars in a barren snowy place. At one point, there was a frantic climb through the freezing waters of an enormous dam's spillway. There was a climactic showdown in what seemed to me a bank, and it was very Miller's Crossing somehow, only with swords instead of guns. And I woke from this dream wanting so badly to write a fantasy novel set against the backdrop of the first three decades of the 20th Century.

--- (These divisions, in my mind, make an entry less higgledy piggledy.)

Thanks for all the comments yesterday, mostly as regards ebooks and eReaders. Truth is, on the one hand, I don't care if people are using eReaders. If that's how you want to read, it's sure as hell not my business. I can't do it, because for me a book consists of two parts: 1) the experience of reading it (which includes tactile sensation) and 2) the physical object itself. These things are, for me, indivisible. I'm not looking for a "good read," because the process of reading a book cannot be reduced to mere action. But that's me. I think the only thing that scares me about all this is that I feel fairly certain that if the trend continues, we'll reach a point where what remains of New York publishing will ditch most hardcopy books, especially the midlist. It will be far cheaper to rely on ebooks, as they have so much less overhead (especially since the publishers aren't manufacturing the eReaders). The two greatest expenses in publishing would be eliminated: warehousing and distribution. Sure, there will still be hardbacks for best sellers, and also from specialty houses like Subterranean Press, but most authors won't have access to such luxuries. The midlist author will be consigned to ebooks. And if that happens, I'll stop writing. I'll just stop. Because half of my reward for having written is that tangible object, which to me is a work of art— the book —which can never be reduced to zeroes and ones.

Also, books don't usually break when you drop 'em.

I'm not going to get started on the horror that introducing social networking to the act of reading represents for me. No, I never belonged to book clubs, and I hated literature classes. For me, reading is inherently solitary.

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Last night we saw Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009). I am a long-time admirer (that's probably putting it too mildly) of Jordan's films, and this one was everything I'd expect. Brilliant, beautiful, and sublime. Fairy tale and mythology are always there, even when they aren't. Fantasy (truth) is inseparable from reality (fact). It's probably the best film about a selkie ever made, regardless of whether or not there's actually a selkie in it. Yes, even better than The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). Filmed in Cork County, Ireland, the landscape is shades of green and grey and blue that are, at once, perfectly solid and yet too exquisite to have ever existed outside cinematography. Great performances from Colin Farrell (Syracuse), Alicja Bachleda (Ondine), and Alison Barry (Annie). Oh, and how can I not love a film about selkies in which Sigur Rós are integral to the plot! If you ask me, this is a must see.

(We also saw the new episode of Glee, which still rocks.)

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I sat down yesterday and started reading through "As Red as Red" (in Haunted Legends; I don't know why I've started reading my stories in print; I never used to do this). I reached page 80, where the protagonist travels from Providence to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Only, this is what it says:

I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the East Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the West Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport.

This is, of course, backwards. It's akin to being in Manhattan and saying you're going to travel east to New Jersey. It's that wrong. It should read, "I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the East Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport." But somehow I wrote it down backwards, and, somehow, despite all the times I read it during editing, the mistake was never corrected. I've made this "commute" more times now than I can recall, and this is just a dumb mistake, one that made it into print. Odds are most readers will never catch it, not unless they're familiar with Rhode Island geography. But I had to point it out, if only in the hopes that the embarrassment will make me more attentive in the future. It was a depressing thing to find.

Okay. That's it for now. How can it already be Thursday? Yeah, I know. Because yesterday was Wednesday....

The window is open, and though the sun is bright, the breeze coming into the office is chilly. Here we are back to a normal Rhode Island spring.

There was no writing yesterday. I could not even bring myself to try. The very thought brought on an instant panic and a black fury. I spent most of the afternoon in bed.

Spooky read to me from Gregory Maguire's A Lion Among Men, which I'm liking quite a lot. That's hardly surprising, given how much I loved Wicked and Son of a Witch. We watched Glenn McQuaid's I Sell the Dead (2008), which is a truly adorable film. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden both deliver splendid performances, and even though Ron Perlman is pretty much on autopilot, what the fuck. He's Ron Perlman. The art direction and makeup effects show how one can do quite a lot on a tight budget. Much homage is paid to Hammer, as well as to Roger Corman's Poe films. Highly recommended. I can't say the same for Tommy Wirkola's Norwegian splatter-fest Død Snø (aka Dead Snow, 2010). A terrible, silly mess of a film. The Nazi zombies' makeup effects were cool, but there's not much else positive to say about the film. It doesn't even work as a film that's so bad it's good. Just bad.

There was leftover egg salad for lunch. We got pizza from Fellini's for dinner. We watched the episode of Fringe, a series that just keeps getting better. I tried to do a little rp in Insilico, but came away infuriated and confused and determined to disentangle myself from Second Life...again. Maybe if I go so far as to uninstall the software from my computer I can stop getting sucked back in. There was some WoW, in the Storm Peaks of Northrend. We read more Gregory Maguire until I was was finally sleepy, which must have been close to four ayem. And that was yesterday. An "L" in my day planner.

Today...I did try to write. I managed about 200 words (after erasing a good bit of what I wrote on Thursday), and then I gave up for the day. And I'm going to have something important to say on the subject of The Wolf Who Cried Girl tomorrow. I should probably say it now, but I'm just not up to it.

Spooky's proofreading the galleys for the mass-market paperback edition of The Red Tree, which is due back in NYC on the 15th.

If you've not already, do please preorder The Ammonite Violin & Others. Thanks. Remember, only the limited comes with the "Sanderlings" chapbook.

The heat has returned to Providence, and, so we're both holed up in my office with Dr. Muñoz, trying to stay cool. I wish I were at the sea, but it will be awash in mostly naked tourists. I've had a headache since yesterday afternoon, the sort I suppose are migraines.

Yesterday, I did manage to get the last one hundred pages of The Ammonite Violin & Others proofed. Soon, I can send the "final" ms. off to Subterranean Press. Much to my surprise and to my delight, I really like these stories, even though it's been two years or so since they were written. I even fear they're better than what I'm writing now. Anyway, I'm very pleased that this book will be coming out next year.

Spooky's been editing the "trailer" for The Red Tree. Obviously, we've completely missed the projected August 14th release date. Maybe another week. It is coming together, but it will be perfect, or I'll not put it out there. It has to be something that both she and I are comfortable with, because the last thing the world needs is another crappy book trailer cluttering up the interwebs.

But that was about all the work I got done yesterday, the proofreading. However, I did like Distrct 9 a lot. As I said yesterday on Facebook, "Really splendid. Simultaneously triumphant and grim, hopeful and bereft of hope." I won't try to write a genuine review, because that's not something I'm good at. I do strongly recommend it, on many levels. It'll definitely be on my "best of '09" list.

A strange and stressful day ahead. I wish I could fast forward to November, frankly.

Yesterday. Fuck me sideways, but yesterday was a lousy, stinking excuse for a day. And I have the US Postal Service to thank for that. On Tuesday, May 5th, Spooky mailed the corrected galley pages for The Red Tree back to my editor in Manhattan. My deadline was the 7th, so we figured we'd done pretty good. Didn't even have to ask Penguin for an extension. Then, yesterday morning (six days after we mailed the pages), my editor (Anne), emailed to say that she'd not received the pages and production was having kittens. As the package had been sent with delivery confirmation, we were able to see that, as of Friday (May 8th), the package had reached Bethpage, NY. I got another e-mail from my editor's assistant, Cameron, who hoped the missing pages might show up in the afternoon's mail run at 1 p.m., and we began discussing options, in case it didn't. Never mind all the many serious errors (most were formatting) that needed fixing before the ARCs are printed, I'd spent days proofreading the thing. So, it was decided that, if the pages didn't show, I'd have them faxed (of course I made photocopies of the corrected pages before handing them over to the USPS). However, Spooky called the Kinko's on Thayer Street, and discovered that faxing them would cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $160. I'd already spent about $20 to mail the package. Oh, my fax machine died a few years ago, and I never bothered replacing it.

So, other options were discussed as the day slipped away. Perhaps, for instance, the pages could be made into a PDF, only that was also costly, and there might not be time. 1 p.m. came and went. I was losing the day, and nothing had been written on "Fish Wife." And I was starting to get angry and to panic. I pulled Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats down off the shelf and read "Master" and "Lizzie's Tiger," which helped keep me calm and distracted. I got word from Cam that it would be sometime after 2 p.m., not 1 p.m., before we knew if the pages had come in the afternoon mail. I gnashed my teeth. Spooky called New York. There were more emails. Right now, it's really all a sort of blur. Finally, Cam said we were getting no love from the mail room, so I faced up to the worst-case scenario, and began typing out the corrections, with Spooky dictating them to me. By 4 p.m., it was clear I wouldn't be done before the end of the work day, and I emailed Cam and told her so. She said that if I could get the corrections to her by 9 a.m. this morning, we'd probably be okay. So, Spooky and I spent two and a half hours compiling a detailed list of the 170 corrections that needed correcting, and sometime before 6 p.m., I emailed it to Cam (who was an utter saint yesterday, by the way).

And that's how I lost all of yesterday, when I should have been writing a vignette for Sirenia Digest #42, to the incompetency of the postal service. And this isn't the only instance of them giving me grief lately. A much-needed check was sent from my agent in NYC on April 29th (!!!), and has yet to reach me. Yesterday, Jennifer at Writers House declared it missing, and said she'd get with accounting about cutting a replacement. So, yes, thank you USPS. From here on, if I actually need something to get somewhere on time, I go to FedEx (and hope). Better yet, I may take the train to Manhattan next time, and hand deliver the pages.

So, lots of stress and work, but no writing yesterday.

As for last night, after pizza from Pizza Pie-er on Wickenden Steet (Spooky got takeout while I sorted through ancient photographs on my iMac and did some Wikipedia editing), we watched more of Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I drank pomegranate martini's and got mildly inebriated. Later, we played a little WoW, and Shaharrazad got a shiny new wand. There's a screencap (BIG) of Shah on her felsteed, behind the cut, taken when we were wandering along the border between Zangarmarsh and the Blade's Edge Mountains. It's a very Vernian sort of landscape.

( Beneath the 'Shrooms )

Running late this morning (nope, it's afternoon already), because I didn't get to bed until after four ayem. But it's rainy, and I find myself having trouble caring about running late. Better to sit here and drink my coffee, make my journal entry, and listen to R.E.M.'s Reckoning (1984), which has always seemed like a rainy-day album to me.

Yesterday, we made it through chapters 8 and 9 of The Red Tree, and the "Editor's Epilogue" (an execrpt from one of Sarah Crowe's novels), and finished with the galleys. Except for the long letter I have to write today, explaining some of the corrections. All in all, the galleys were pretty clean, mostly formatting problems. It was good to read through the whole novel again. It has left me resolved to be better than my best next time out. I am always chasing my own tail.

Last night, I got an email from my German translator, Alexandra Hinrichsen, asking for assistance with the Jung quote that opens Low Red Moon.

Spooky and I are very impressed with The Hunt for Gollum, the "fan film" directed by Chris Bouchard. It really is quite well done, and I'm amazed that it was made for a mere £3,000 (roughly $4,534.27 USD). Well, I'm sure having 160 volunteers at his disposal helped a great deal. I've seen films with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars that didn't look half this good. My only caveat, really, is with the sound quality. We couldn't hear it at all on Spooky's laptop, so we switched over to my iMac, and it was still difficult to get decent volume. But, it's a small complaint. In my mind, the film works rather nicely as a "missing scene" from Peter Jackson's three films (and I think it was very smart of Bouchard to follow Jackson's visual cues). Marvelously atmospheric. I am impressed that Tolkien Enterprises gave their approval to the project. I hope to see more from these guys.

We've been getting back into WoW, which has suddenly become much more entertaining since Shaharrazad and Suraa moved along to Outland. We both made Level 66 last night. I've leveled more in the last two nights than in the last two months. We're both based in Shrattrath now, working with the Scryers.

A mere 21 days remaining until birthday -05, which is more than a little horrifying. For me, anyway. Horrifying and astounding. I do, as it happens, have an Amazon wish list, if you are given to such things. Thank you. Anything that distracts and helps to take away the sting. And, yeah, used books are just as welcome as new books. Oh, and for anyone not using Amazon, the address is P.O. Box 603096, Providence, RI 02906.

Here are a few photos from yesterday, nothing terribly exciting, which is reasonable, as it wasn't a very exciting day:

( May 4, 2009 )

The insomnia has been bad the last couple of nights, which is to say it has been worse than usual. I didn't get to sleep this morning until the sky was already brightening, sometime after 5 ayem.

Yesterday, we read chapters 4 and 5 from the The Red Tree page proofs, and today we made it through chapters 6 and 7, which means we should be able to finish tomorrow. I am abysmally slow when it comes to proofreading galleys (or any other sort of ms., I suspect). I know many authors are much quicker with these things. I recall, back in May of 2001, I was staying with Peter and Susan Straub in Manhattan, and Peter was going over the galley's for Black House. I seem to remember him doing it in a single day. If I can get through a set of galley pages for a novel in anything less than a week, I consider myself lucky.

I'd love to hear feedback about Sirenia Digest #41.

Last night, I made the extraordinarily unlikely discovery that Species 4: The Awakening (2007) is the most watchable of the series. Not a good movie, no, but a perfectly watchable cheesy monster film (doubling as soft-core porn for those of us with a thing for alien sex). Also, I reread William Gibson's "The Hinterlands" (1982), which never ceases to amaze me. It had an enormous influence on The Dry Salvages, though I don't think I was aware of the influence when I was writing the novella. It certainly is a marvelous expression of the sort of cosmic horror that is so often called "Lovecraftian," though I doubt HPL was a direct inspiration for "The Hinterlands." Then again, without asking Gibson, I can't be sure (and we've never met). If I could ever write a story as perfect as "The Hinterlands," I think I'd finally be satisfied with my work. And no, it's not the search for perfection that keeps me writing. Most times, I feel like, more than anything else, it's force of habit and the need to pay the bills.

There are three photos behind the cut, just some mundane stuff from the last few days:

( Days and Days )

Today, Byron (one of our Atlanta friends) turns -0. May he have a day filled with good food, strippers, and minimum frustration.

Yesterday, I finally got past whatever's been in my way, and wrote 1,058 words on a new vignette, which will appear alongside "At the Gate of Deeper Slumber" in Sirenia Digest #41. At the moment, it's called "Untitled 34," but I don't know if it will stay that way.

After the writing yesterday, I washed my hair, and we got to work on the page proofs for The Red Tree. I'm finding a few annoying errors, the most annoying of which seem to have been introduced by whoever did the typesetting. The worst was the discovery, in the "Editor's Introduction," that footnote 1 has been made identical to footnote 2. That is, the text for the first footnote was deleted, and the text for the second put in its place (which means we get #2 twice). I checked the .rtf I sent to Penguin, and the mistake wasn't mine. I have to write the production manager about that as soon as I finish this entry. After dinner (Spooky made chili), we got back to work on the page proofs and made it as far as the end of Chapter One (pg. 58). And, afterwards, we watched the season finale of Heroes.

And that was yesterday. It was a hot day, and as glad as I am to see winter gone, I was not happy to see the house heat up again. The high yesterday in Providence was 88F, and the temp inside stayed in the 80s long after the sun went down and the temperature Outside had cooled off. Much cooler today, with a forecast high of only 60, 28 degrees cooler than yesterday.

Must go. The platypus calls....

Today, Gary Oldman is 50 years old. That's why you get the Vlad and Mina icon, because one of my Hollywood fixations is now half a century old.

---

And now it is spring. And, here in Atlanta, a bright, sunny spring day it is. I pulled back the curtain in my office to let in the sun. I have survived another winter. And if you are someone who observes the Wiccan sabbats, I wish you a fine Ostara (though, of course, the actual equinox was yesterday). For me, spring is hope, the nearest I come to hope, hope and a balm against the hardness of winter, a season that more closely approximates my usual mental state — and it is a promise of the coming of summer.

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Spooky (humglum) is feeling pretty miserable, and she still has six days left on her antibiotics. We've been trying to work around her being so under the weather. But it's all editing, proofreading, etc. Wednesday, we read through "The Ape's Wife," because I wanted to go over it again before sending a "fresh" e-copy to Steve Jones for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (#19). Also, I started printing the manuscript of A is for Alien, though I didn't finish printing it until yesterday. On Thursday, we started proofing that, and made it through "Riding the White Bull" and "Zero Summer," a little better than the first 100 pp. Reading "Riding the White Bull" was rather annoying, as I'd somehow managed to print out a version that was neither the draft that sold to Argosy nor the reprint draft, and whole passages where missing. Anyway, I hope to have finished this read through by tomorrow evening, at which point I'll send the manuscript away to Sonya (sovay) for a proper proofreading.

Not much to report, aside from work. In a fit of annoyed depression over not being able to make the appearance at the O'Neil Literary House, I think I tried to do myself in with Second Life on Wednesday evening/Thursday morning, at least twelve hours, and I didn't get into bed until about 5:30 ayem. Insanity. We've finished Season Four of Angel, and last night began Season Five with "Conviction" and "Just Rewards." And I'm having to be annoyed all over again that such a rare bit of wonderful television fantasy was canceled in its prime (despite good ratings and rave reviews). The suits rule the world; we just dance here.

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We've taken a short break from eBay, but expect to get it going again in the next few days, because the medical bills are still here, and I'm no closer to having any sort of health care than I was a month ago (and the blasted taxes are looming just ahead). In the meanwhile, if you have not already subscribed to Sirenia Digest, the first day of spring, says Herr Platypus, is just about the best time to do so. This month, you'll get "Pickman's Other Model," and, well, something else, most likely.