Caitlín R. Kiernan

I just opened the blinds in my office for the first time in days. I can see no evidence of snow remaining out there. The sky is a gentle blue dabbed with swatches of white cloud, and the washed-out New England sun. It's easy on the eyes.

I know better than to look at the news, but I find myself looking, anyway. More and more often. No, I don't know why. Morbid curiosity? Anyway, I was oddly pleased to learn of a study demonstrating that teens who take those silly virginity pledges are no less likely to have sex than those who don't. And, what's more, it appears the virginity-for-Jesus crowd are more likely to have unsafe sex. Which makes sense, really, since their sexual activity is more apt to be spontaneous, and the repression of normal sexual desires will have also required the repression of knowledge about STDs and birth control. Kids, listen...just get laid. If there is some sort of great cosmic boogeyman out there, he has far bigger things on his hands than whether or not you're doing the nasty. If you want it, just do it. But, please, have the good sense and foresight to be safe about it. Anyway, back to news pollution, we have government-sponsored hatred in Tennessee, Canada has at least ruled that seals must be dead before skinning, and I'm not even going to get started on Israel and Hamas.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,112 words and finished the piece that is no longer called "Untitled 34," but is, instead, now known as "Lullaby of Partition and Reunion." It will appear in Sirenia Digest #37, along with a second vignette, which I will write over the next couple of days, based on an illustration by Vince Locke. The platypus says that the 29th of December is a truly excellent day to subscribe to the digest, by the way.

Anything else about yesterday? A last day of isolation before I am forced out into the world. It's been almost a week since I left the apartment. After the writing, there was a nap on the sofa in the front parlour while Spooky made a feast of leftovers from Saturday night's Chinese takeaway. I had a long hot bath and washed my hair. There was more WoW, Shah and Suraa still wandering the sandy desolation of Tanaris. They stumbled upon and into the Caverns of Time, which rather rocked my little ring-tailed lemur world. Later, I nibbled at Turkish delight while Spooky read to me. I got to sleep about three ayem, and didn't sleep enough.

It was a day.

This afternoon, I have the dreaded doctor's appointment.

Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. Your bids are greatly appreciated.

And now...another day.

It's raining here and overcast. The rain came in the night (like Trogdor the Burninator, I suppose —— only wet and cold...and lacking the one big, beefy arm). The temps are in the high forties F, and there might be snow showers tonight and tomorrow. Spooky says it's too early for snow in Providence, but she's already lied about the mooses and the polar bears and the mastodons, so I'm expecting a blizzard. Anyway, the rain is nice. It hides the sky, which has been absolutely crippling in the vasty blueness department of late.

Ernest Hemingway said to write about the weather.

If you've not yet pre-ordered A is for Alien, please do so. Cover by the sublime Jacek Yerka, interior art by Vince Locke, and an afterword by Elizabeth Bear. Remember, the limited comes with a very thick chapbook, B is for Beginnings (which has a cover by Richard A. Kirk). Also, Subterranean Press is now taking pre-orders for the forthcoming trade paperback edition of Alabaster (which will reprint all of Ted Naifeh's artwork from the long-since sold-out hardback edition). I'll plug the Penguin books tomorrow.

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I tend to grow complacent. I tend think that I'm rather well versed in perversity and kink. But then, inevitably, I stumble across something unsuspected, something I should have known about, and I am humbled. Or at least astounded. Or amused. For example, given the subject matter of various bits I've written for Sirenia Digest, Frog Toes and Tentacles, and Tales from the Woeful Platypus, I'd expect people to expect me to know about "vore" (shortened from vorarephilia, and see also phagophilia). But you would have been wrong, before yesterday. Here's this whole fetish I missed somehow. Well, no, I didn't miss it. It's all over the stuff I've been writing. I just missed that it was a fetish. I always think these things are just me. This is why we have the internet. The real reason, I mean. So that perverts don't feel so all alone. And perusing websites devoted to the whole vore thing led me to discover "unbirthing," which I find truly fascinating, and which may have inspired a story for Sirenia Digest #35. And, if I temporarily adopt a Freudian worldview, a paradigm generally alien to me, both vore and the unbirthing fixation make perfect sense. What did not, at first, make perfect sense was why the unbirthing fetish is so closely allied with furries. But there might be an odd sort of logic here. A return to the wild combined with a return to the womb, perhaps? Some psychological aspect of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, or, rather, a sexual manifestation of neotony? But then you run up against the problem that most furries seem fixated not on genuinely becoming less human, in any realistic sense, but with some sort of bent for cartoon animals (anthropomorphic "funny animals," i.e., Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, Omaha the Cat Dancer, etc.). And that rather short circuits the explanation, unless one posits that cartoon animals are first encountered when we are very young, and then it all starts to make sense again. Anyway...I ramble. I find it very odd that, these days, it's actually "my job" to think seriously on such matters.

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I've been listening to a lot of old R.E.M. lately, and, frequently, it's almost painfully nostalgic. Each album is a different year. Of course, I didn't actually come to R.E.M. until the summer of 1986, when I moved to Boulder, Colorado and discovered college radio. That was the same summer that Life's Rich Pageant was released. It will always be my favourite R.E.M. album, partly because it was my first. And R.E.M. always sound like they're singing about the South, even when, say, they're singing about Guatemala. I'm finding myself inevitably, and somewhat annoyingly, homesick. I am so much better off in Rhode Island than I ever was in the South. It's simply a far more tolerant environment, and, the security guard at Swan Point aside, I've not had a homophobic encounter since we arrived. Oh, I'm sure that I would, if I were not careful about where I go. But in Georgia and Alabama, one could not be careful enough. It was inevitable and frequent (though far less so in the part of Atlanta where we lived). I find myself missing the South. Not so much the people, but the landscape, the history (which is, I suppose, the people), the architecture, the food, the Dinosaur of Sinclair Avenue, magnolias. When this homesickness begins to manifest as physical pangs —— when I'm listening to Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) or Automatic for the People (1992) —— I try to focus sharply on particular unpleasant things: NASCAR, the Confederate battle flag, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the football religion, and so on and on. But. Yes. I will admit it, as much as I love being in New England, and knowing I will never again live in the South, I also admit that I find myself missing the place. I think this might be a weird permutation of Stockholm Syndrome.

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I seem to have drifted back towards working on paleontology articles for Wikipedia. For example, day before yesterday, I did this one on the parareptile Colobomycter. And I'm sleeping more than usual, another eight hours last night. I figure it's all part of the post-novelizing thing.

The platypus says it's time to go. And the platypus...well, you know the score.

Do you have an inclination for BDSM? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Masochism Pain just feels good. Nothing like someone hurtinf you or hurting yourself in some cases. Often sadism goes hand-in-hand with this practice because the two personalities work well together. And some people like both. Masochism 100% Sadism 96% Switch 93% Experimental 93% Degradation 93% Exhibitionism and Voyeurism 86% Bondage 79% Domination 71% Submission 71% Vanilla Sex 43%