Caitlín R. Kiernan

"Come here. I've got the pieces here."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:16:05 GMT

1) Cold and grey today. Outside as in.

My mother woke this morning with a racing pulse and chest pain, and is in a hospital in Birmingham. I just spoke with her, and she seems to be fine.

Yesterday was swallowed, again, in work that isn't work. Work that isn't writing. And I didn't even get another interview done (though, since my last post, the number of interviews waiting to be done has grown). Yesterday was such a mess, I'm having trouble even recalling it. I saw a few inked pages for Alabaster #2, found a couple of typos that needed fixing. I answered a metric shit-ton of email. Oh, I did refuse an interview with "Paranormal Haven," because the last thing in the world The Drowning Girl: A Memoir needs is people associating it with ParaRom. I don't believe that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Or, rather, I believe there are harmful associations that color perceptions. Predispose us to see Thing A as such and such, even if it's obviously and most emphatically not. Like that fuck-awful cover for The Red Tree. But wait! The Drowning Girl is, in some respects – possibly – concerned with the paranormal, and there are romantic relationships between people (Imp and Eva, Imp and Abalyn). So...isn't it ParaRom?

No.

Anyway...I also discovered I need to find time to write a new steampunk story in the next few weeks (or now), and I started re-reading (with Spooky's aid) At the Mountains of Madness (1931), because I need to write a story inspired by it for another anthology, and I've not read AtMoM in at least...a year? Ha ha fucking ha. But I did not write. I made notes for that latter story. I can't recall much else, which [leaves] hours unaccounted for, which is, as always, disquieting. as is the fact I haven't been Outside the house since last Wednesday.

2) It occurred to me last night, in passing...or not in passing...that I've felt bad about how long it took me to write The Drowning Girl and The Red Tree. Then, I started thinking about Silk and Threshold. I began writing Silk in October 1993 and finished in January 1996. I began writing Threshold in August 1998 and finished in May 2000. Roughly three years per book. Between April 2008 and March 2012, I wrote The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl (each vastly superior to either Silk or Threshold, and never mind the dozens and dozens and dozens of short stories I wrote during the same time, far more than when I was writing my first two novels). Which is to say, a book gets written in the time it takes to write a book, and the last two were actually written very quickly, relative to my early novels, and I should stop beating myself up. At least, I should stop beating myself up about that.

3) Thoughts, too, last night about the end of the day-to-day aspect of this blog. After this day, only five more remaining and I'll have made at least one entry per day for a year. Often, this means 1-2 hours per day spent writing those entries. Never mind. I've done the math before. What I was thinking last night is that – beyond giving me a record of my life for my own personal edification – the return of the time investment is meager. I can find no evidence that the blog has ever increased my book sales. Facebook is, actually, proving more useful for promotion these days, as is Twitter. Comments here have become few and far between (most times, seven or eight a day is a good day), and there's very little discussion of what I'm writing. No dialogue, and invisible blog readers are...invisible. This is not to say the LJ is useless. It's not. It's given me Sirenia Digest, and I'm very grateful for that. When I was sick in 2007, it led to an enormous amount of financial assistance that may have saved my life. And there have been other pluses. I think some people are shocked to learn that, in November 2001, I began writing the LJ as a promotional tool, but it's true, and that's mostly how I've always seen it. Anyway, these are just thoughts.

Last night, I finished reading The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, Shelley Emling's 2009 biography of Mary Anning. It's a bit thin, and I very much wish someone had proofed Emling's manuscript specifically for paleontological errors. For example, "Iguanadon" [sic] appears repeatedly, and apparently no one ever bothered to tell her that a pliosaur is a sort of plesiosaur. But...you could do worse.

Speaking of paleo', the new JVP arrived yesterday, and I'm only about a third of the way through December's issue (never mind December included a huge memoir).

Behind and Inside,
Aunt Beast

comments

"Instead, he sent three angels..."

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:11:42 GMT

Not as much sunny Outside today as cloudy. And 46˚F.

Yesterday, two more interviews. Oh, and this. Which wasn't precisely an interview. But there was no work. No writing that wasn't answering questions. Four interviews (and this) in two days, and we're on the seventh day of a short month – longer by one day, thanks to leap year – and today I have to get back to work, and work means writing, not answering interview questions. Actually, my answering interview questions is probably now a legitimate part of my "job," but it's not writing. Today, I'm going to write. Or something like it. Tonight, after dinner, I'll deal with the next interview.

News from Subterranean Press is that Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart will be out sometime in May.

I have arrived at a curious, but, I believe, useful, new monetary standard to be employed by freelance authors. Forget the dollar. The basic unit of currency is the pizza. For example, someone pays me three-hundred dollars for a reprint, that's ~15P (based on an average large pizza price, with three toppings, of $20). Say your book deal drops twenty-thousand dollars into your lap (minus your agent's 15%); that's ~850P. This new standard will serve us far better. Sell nothing, ever, for less than at least 1P.

Since last summer I've been struggling to explain the relationship between Blood Oranges and its impending sequels (they do impend) and genuine ParaRom. No, do not use the label "Urban Fantasy." Once upon a time, Urban Fantasy had dignity. ParaRom stole the term (I don't know if it was the writers, editors, publishers, or an elaborate conspiracy of the lot). ParaRom, or PR. Anyway, the correct word I belatedly found yesterday is subvert. That is, Blood Oranges et al. is meant to subvert ParaRom. That's asking a lot of any poor book/s, but someone has to throw herself on the grenade.

Last night, Spooky and I played Rift for the first time since, near as I can tell from my notes, December 19th. That's, what, forty-nine days ago? The game remains beautiful, and it was good to be back. A good break from SW:toR. See, I didn't leave Rift because I was bored. I left because trying to run an RP guild – which meant writing more after I was done writing for the day, plus trying to get people to show up for RP – had sort of soured me on the whole thing. And then SW:toR arrived, all fresh and shiny and unsullied. Last night, I realized how much I'd missed Rift. BUT, because of the "free-to-play" Rift-Lite, our server has been overrun by idiots who cannot comprehend that it's an RP server, and there was a serious (and reasonable) fucking case of Gnerd Rage going down in general chat last night. I ignored it (I ignored everyone), and Indus (my Level 43 Eth warrior) and Dancy (Spooky's Level 43 Kelari cleric) quested and closed rifts in the Droughtlands and Shimmersand. What I didn't see was any evidence that there's been an exodus of players. There were high-level players everywhere. Many more than when I left, so the news of the game's recent troubles may have been...exaggerated. Anyway, for now, I think Spooky and I will be jumping back and forth between the two games – since we have no actual social life.

The no-sleep demons found me last night. Monsier Insomnia kept me awake until after five ayem (though I was in bed by 2:15 ayem). I didn't wake until after noon (or afternoon, if you prefer).

And one last thing. I'm missing the South fiercely. Part of it's this shitty Providence winter. Part of it is...well...complicated. I do not miss the people or the culture. I miss the land. And I'm sick of missing the South, because there is no dividing the people from the land. In the main (though not universally), the people are not worthy of even the smallest fraction of my longing. They showed me hatred, with rare bits of tolerance. By comparison, in New England I have found a mix of acceptance and people who simply know how to mind their own business. In the South, very few people know how to mind their own business. Indeed, throughout most of America, this is the case. Anyway, last night I got to thinking on the silly phrase "Southern hospitality" (which always baffled Spooky). It's not that "Southern hospitality" doesn't exist; it's that it's a highly conditional phenomenon. Conform, and we'll be relatively hospitable. Fail to conform, and we'll bedevil you. At last I left, and I am better off for it. But I cannot shake this longing for the land.

I've written far too much, says the platypus. I've written nothing at all. Gotta try to work.

Here, There, and the Other Place,
Aunt Beast

comments

"And I find it kind of funny. I find it kind of sad."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:29:24 GMT

Yesterday, the temperature climbed near 60˚F here in Providence. Today, we'll be lucky to reach 44˚F. Presently, it's mostly cloudy and 43˚F (36˚F if you factor in the windchill). I noted that in Atlanta the temperature is currently 68˚F, and, yet, I'm still glad not to be there. I have rarely lived anywhere so bereft of a "soul" as is Atlanta. By soul, here, I suspect that I mean "a sense of place," or, more simply, an identity.

---

My inbox reveals that I have almost ten interview/Q&A things to give (with Steve Lieber) before Dark Horse Presents #9 is released on February 22nd. And I'm wondering, given that we'll pretty much be getting the same set of questions over and over again, will anyone notice if I resort to a "cut and paste" approach?

We currently have a few eBay auctions up. Please have a look! Thanks, kittens.

Er...other stuff. After this entry, and the eleven daily entries that follow it, I will have made at least one post per day to LJ for an entire year.* Yesterday, I began the arduous process of backing my whole LJ (2004-now) up at Dreamwidth (DO NOT YET LOOK FOR ME THERE). Everything has been transferred except the comments, and they've been sitting in a queue for the past fourteen hours or so. We're talking millions of words, the comments alone. Of course, if I want all this text to be safely archived, the only genuine solution is to put it all in an MS Word file, and/or PDF, and then print the whole monstrous thing out (I'd sacrifice the comments) and put the boxes and boxes of paper in safe, climate-controlled storage. Eventually. I already have all of my Blogger (2001-2004) backed up as a PDF. I can't stand the thought of losing more than a decade of writing, and there exists no technology but print to even begin to insure it's preservation. I want to be able to look back at this text in twenty years. Right now, I have twenty-year-old diskettes filled with invaluable data I can't access without a lot of effort, and twenty-five-year old floppy disks I can't access at all (including unpublished fiction). I won't have that happen again.**

I am very pleased to see that I have three works on Locus Magazine's 2011 Recommended Reading List. Of the three, I am most pleased that "The Maltese Unicorn" made the novelette category. The other two works on the list are "Tidal Forces" (short story) and Two Worlds and In Between (collection). Of course, I'm also very happy to see that "Tidal Forces" made it, as it originally appeared in Sirenia Digest #55 (June 2010). If you're a fan of my work and you're missing the digest, you're missing a lot more than weird erotica. You're missing some of my best writing.

And here are two more photos from the Sunday shoot in Pennsylvania. Remember, kylecassidy is running a special on this print, as we try to cover overages incurred while filming the trailer for The Drowning Girl.

( What India Found in the Forest II )

---

I'm running out of time, as there's so much work to be done today. But yesterday was an unexpectedly good day off. Lunch at Tortilla Flats, and then we visited Providence's only fetish shop – Mister Sister on Wickenden Street. Very bow tie. Now, I will sit here in my Small Beer Press T-shirt and pull words out of my butt.

Just Call Me Bullwinkle,
Aunt Beast

* The plan is still to reach February 13th, complete the one-year blogging marathon, and then cut back drastically on the amount of time I spend on these entries. I expect the blog to become, primarily, a place for news, book and eBay announcements, photographs, occasional con reports, etc.

** I'm going to be "moving" to Dreamwidth, ASAP, but entries will be mirrored here, and I'll still be answering comments here. So, though "moving" there, I'll still be here. Right.

comments