Caitlín R. Kiernan

Yeah, here it is. -05. It's pretty much as strange and disconcerting as I expected.

Yesterday, I actually seem to have reached THE END of "Galápagos," though I'd not expected to do so until this afternoon. I wrote a somewhat impressive 1,455 words, and there it was. No one was more surprised than I. But pleasantly surprised, I will add. This is, by the way, the only short-story length work of science fiction I've produced since "A Season of Broken Dolls," back in March 2007. Well, except some forays into steampunk, but that's not the same. At least, not the same to me. As soon as I can, I'll announce the book in which "Galápagos" will be appearing, and its release date.

On a related note, yesterday ardiril asked, "Have you ever tried writing a story backwards in such instances?" Such instances being those cases where I begin a story with some image from the climax fixed firmly in my mind. Short answer, no, I haven't. I can't. As I've said before, I have this thing, this tick I suppose, that makes it necessary for me to write a story from beginning to end (even in cases of non-linear narratives, such as "In View of Nothing" and, more recently, "At the Gate of Deeper Slumber"). On the one hand, I consider this a sort of literary neurosis. On the other, I think I have a sound methodological reason for writing this way. In a lecture, Shirley Jackson once said (and I paraphrase) that one should never begin a story with the ending in mind and write towards it. I believe this very much, even though I sometimes do begin a story with the ending in mind. For me, a story, and the process of writing it, should be organic, somewhat spontaneous. It should mirror our perceptions of the world. Events occur. They follow one after the next (assuming you accept this view of linear time), and they have consequences. The consequences are the climax of the story. Story results from the natural interplay of cause and effect. In ideal cases, one cannot know a story's conclusion at its start, for the simple reason that it hasn't happened yet. The alternative is a sort of fictional predestination, which I find distasteful, even in those cases when I'm the one doing it.

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Last night, the writing had left me pretty close to insensible. I think I was drooling. But we watched a truly bizarre and very funny film, Kit Ryan's Botched (2007). There was a little bit of WoW (though I had to have a Red Bull to manage that level of consciousness), and then Spooky read me another chapter from Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwahl. I'm enjoying this book a great deal. It even works as a sort of companion piece to Dan Simmons' superb The Terror, since it's a story about an attempt to find and rescue Franklin's lost expedition. I'm keen to track down more of Barrett's books now. Turns out, she was a biologist before she gave it up for writing historical sea-faring novels. And then I didn't wake up until about 11:30 this morning, which means I got more than eight hours sleep. Amazing.

And now I should be going, because we're expecting Sonya (sovay) this evening, and there's stuff to be done.

Oh. Here are a few WoW screencaps, including Shah's embarrassing dance during the L80ETC show the other night:

( Suraa, plus Egg Nog and Port Don't Mix )

Seems one of the cracked teeth has refused to heal. Dr. Booth warned me this was very possible. The damage was just too great. I awoke at 5:45 ayem or so, in something at least approaching agony, and it was near 7 am before I was asleep again, and the only thanks to pain pills and Ambesol. So, in all likelihood, I'll be going to have this tooth extracted sometime in the next two weeks, right in the middle of packing and all these deadlines, and I'll be losing at least a few days to recovery when I should be packing and writing.

I've been meaning to mention that "A Season of Broken Dolls" has been selected for a forthcoming trade paperback "sampler" of stories from the online version of Subterranean Magazine.

No writing yesterday, not really. We took Hubero outside on his leash, and it was good to be out in the spring sunlight, listening to the blue jays and the robins. We had someone from United Van Lines coming to give us an estimate on the cost of the move to Providence. He needed access to all rooms, and I knew I couldn't work through that, so I took a book and went to (boo, hiss) Starbuck's (and they may not have enough sense to use the apostrophe, but I do). I don't remember how many months ago it was that I laid aside Chris Beard's The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (University of California Press, 2004), but shame on me. It's a wonderfully written thing, and I sat there and drank a white-chocolate mocha (too sweet, but not bad), and read Chapter 6 ("The Birth of a Ghost Lineage"), which was mainly about collecting fossils of the omomyid primate Shoshonius cooperi from the late Eocene Willwood Formation of Wyoming's Wind River Basin. Meanwhile, Spooky got our estimate from a guy named Ron Goodbub, a retired Pepsico salesman from Kentucky who grew bored with retirement and went back to work (I think it's very suspicious that LJ knows how to spell Pepsico, but not Shoshonius; hell, it can't even spell "Starkbuck's" without the apostrophe). Here's a bit from Chapter 6 of Chris Beard's book I wanted to quote:

"It hardly ever makes sense to refer to a given species — whether living or fossil — as being 'more primitive' than another, for reasons that go beyond any value-laden connotations the comparison carries along with it. Tarsiers are more primitive than humans in having three premolars on either side of their lower jaws and in lacking a complete mandible formed by bony fusion at the chin. Humans are more primitive than tarsiers in retaining a separate tibia and fibula and in having much smaller eyes. The important distinction here is that, while entire species can rarely be arranged from primitive to advanced, individual features usually can be. In fact, paleontologists rely on exactly these trait-by-trait comparisons to decipher the biology of extinct organisms, as well as to reconstruct how they fit on the evolutionary tree."

Myself, I prefer to speak of character states being more and less derived from a given ancestral state than to ever use the word "primitive" or "advanced," as any given organism's evolutionary "status" can only be assessed or judged relative to how well it is adapted to its environment. Tarsiers have been around a lot longer than humans (by tens of millions of years), but they are no less well adapted to their environment than are humans, and therefore no more "primitive" (which, of course, is just another way of saying what Beard is saying above). Yes, that was a tangent.

Mr. Goodbub took longer with the estimate stuff than expected, and it was after 4 pm before I got back to work. I read over the pages I did on "Rappaccini's Dragon" on Monday and Tuesday, made some corrections, and then decided I'd spend the rest of the afternoon packing, give up a Friday off, and plan to finish the story today. I packed something like seven large boxes of books, hardly the tip of the fucking iceberg. Then again, Mr. Goodbub was telling Spooky about having just moved a mathematician who had 500 boxes of books, which makes me feel a little better.

How I'm going to cope with my schedule this month — especially with the bum tooth — is sort of beyond me. I have to finish "Rappaccini's Dragon" for Sirenia Digest #30. I have to do the line edits and introduction on A is for Alien, and an introduction for an Arthur Machen collection that's being edited by S.T. Joshi. I have to get back to work on The Red Tree and make some real progress. I have to go to Birmingham and have a tooth pulled, then recover. And Spooky and i figured out yesterday that it's likely the pace of packing will have become so hectic by the 20th that I'll be forced to stop working. We will probably leave here on May 29th, a Thursday. It's insane, truly. I'd wait and have to tooth pulled after the move, but after the pain last night, that may not be an option.

I was in bed a little after one ayem, and we read more of House of Leaves, because I needed to hear the words. I was asleep by 2:30, only to be awakened a few hours later, which is where we came in...

Ah, and only a few weeks until I hit -4, on May 26th. I do have that wish list at Amazon.com, even if it does mean more packing. Distractions are always welcome, even when i have no time for them.

Coffee, platypus. Coffee, you fool!

I forgot to mention that on our walk yesterday we realised that the wild violets (Viola spp.) were blooming, and we also spotted a male Eastern bluebird (Silia sialis) flitting about Freedom Park.

Two more chapters of Silk edited today, chapters Ten and Eleven, which means that the Zokutou thingy looks thusly:

276 / 354 (78.0%)

We'll do the last three chapters and the epilogue tomorrow, and then...a couple of days free of proofreading before I have to get to work on the ms. following from the Forced and New Consolidated marches. I do not know how I thought I'd have time to do 15,000 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars this month. Well, yes I do. This reprinting of Silk hadn't been worked out yet, that's how.

"A Season of Broken Dolls" (Sirenia Digest #15) has been reprinted in the new online version of Subterranean Magazine, and you may read it free. Which, among other things, gives non-subscribers a free opportunity to have a peek at what's going on in the Digest. Do note that the formatting has been altered for subpress. Originally, Schuler's journal entries were written as single paragraphs, but Bill thought that would probably be a bit overwhelming online, and he's probably right. I've tried to place the graph breaks as unobtrusively as possible. Also, the story was not originally subdivided into two sections. Anyway, I'm excited about this online incarnation of the magazine, and my thanks to subpress for the reprint. I'd love to hear some thoughts on the piece from non-subscribers and subscribers alike.

There were some thoughtful comments to this mornings entry, and I figured I post a few of them, as I know some people don't read the comments (though they should):

sovay writes: It is incredibly painful to watch people self-destruct, but I found that to be one of the truest aspects of the book.

And yes, I think that painful sense of helplessness, as felt by Niki and Daria both, and to a lesser degree by Spyder, was something I was trying to capture in the book. Cthulhu knows, I had to watch enough of my friends self-destruct back in the early '90s, and no small number of my friends had to endure my own self-destructive binges (the stuff of bar-room legends and sea chanteys).

docbrite writes:

I mean, when I look at Lost Souls now, even I want to smack Nothing around and tell him to go mow the lawn or something. But that's old-farty 40-year-old me with years of experience and hard work behind me. Nothing was 15 and, it seems to me, a fairly realistic disaffected suburban 15-year-old who knows he isn't where he belongs. It's as if there is no room in some readers' worldview for realistically broken children, for young people who don't fit any mold and feel certain that ONLY THEY have ever felt this way, for characters who simply haven't done their growing up yet. It makes me suspect such readers were the kind of people who have a great time in high school -- "These are the best days of our lives!" -- and are bitter forever after that they're no longer the prom queen or the Chief Beater-Up of Geeks, Faggots, and General Losers.

and

...I didn't mean readers had to have lived lives identical to Cait's (or my older) characters in order to sympathize with them, but only that an intelligent reader of any fiction must have the compassion and imagination to identify with characters outside his range of experience, characters who might tax his patience in real life (anybody wanna hang out with Madame Bovary? Spend a weekend on the Lido with Gustav Aschenbach, perhaps?), but who nevertheless have a great deal to teach the reader about human experience and emotion. I believe Cait's characters fit this description very well.

There is a certain type of reader, generally with a certain background, who will immediately recognize, identify with, and cherish the characters of a novel like Silk. However, you needn't be this reader in order to appreciate the novel or learn from the characters, and I maintain that people who dismiss them as "soulless conformists," "whiners," etc. have a deeply limited and — I daresay — prejudiced worldview.

And I do not think I could have said that much better. This afternoon, I was saying pretty much the same thing to Spooky, only I was citing William Kennedy's Ironweed as an example of an outstanding novel with characters that a) exist in a world I've never experienced firsthand, b) endure a good deal of suffering and self-destruction brought on, to greater and lesser degrees, by their own actions, and c) with whom I can nonetheless identify and certainly sympathize. Sure, Francis Phelan is a bum and a drunk and he can be a total asshole and he once murdered a man and he cowardly deserted his family when he accidentally killed his infant son, but, still, he's a better man than most. I think too, too many readers have no interest whatsoever in learning anything at all about "human experience and emotion."

jtglover writes:

With so many people coming to horror or fantasy looking to have Evil and Chaos beaten back, it's no wonder some of them dislike Silk, or Naked Lunch, or Wraeththu, or Fight Club, or whatever. Not that I think of Silk as an explicitly "transgressive" novel, but I think it meets that same kind of incomprehension among readers who get something completely different from it than what they're used to getting.

And embereye writes:

I don't agree that you necessarily have to have lived that particular lifestyle (goth, depressed, addicted or any others) to understand and empathize. I certainly did not (although I loved some of the influences and music and some of what's come out of it and oddly many of my friends are former/current goths these days). I think the main point is that your characters are human with all of humanities foibles and weaknesses and strengths, and those who are saying that they had no empathy for them perhaps came into the story expecting characters that at the end of the long drive of pain and anxiety and fear just stood up, brushed the dust off their shoulders, said "well, that's all right then" and strode off into the sunset with their trusty steed at their side. I don't know, but maybe it's just that they came to the story with expectations of how the characters should act based on how they themselves would act. I guess that's just a very limited way of reading a story, isn't it?

Yes, indeed. Those sorts of expectations, I would say, entirely defeat the purpose of reading fiction. And I wish this entry were not getting so long, as there are other comments I would like to quote. Anyway, they're there if you want to see them.

Despite a bit of panic here and there — because I always go and wait until the last possible handful of minutes on these sorts of things, and then there's always panic — I wrote my piece for Locus yesterday. My gracious thanks to the three folks who kindly read the article for me. Today, I will send it away to the magazine and move along to the next thing (mostly, lots and lots of proofreading).

There has been a good deal of feedback regarding "A Season of Broken Dolls" (Sirenia Digest #15), which pleases me. It also pleases me to announce that the story will be appearing in an upcoming issue of the free online version of Subterranean Magazine. I do not yet know just when, but quite soon, I think. I shall keep you posted.

I am also very, very happy to announce that Bob Eggleton will be the cover artist for The Dinosaurs of Mars, with interior art by J. K. Potter.

My thanks to Samantha Collett of Shropshire, England for sending me the complete set of UK marine life stamps, along with a fabulous page of sea creature stickers, four of which now adorn the "lid" of my iBook (the Giant squid, Architeuthis dux; a viper fish, Chauliodus sloani; a dragonfish, Grammatostomias flagellibarba; and an angler fish Lophuius priscatorius). Also, congratulations to the industrious tjcrowley on landing the new job! Also also, the four new Sirenia Digest subscribers to whom I owe copies of the Silk tpb — you guys need to email your snail-mail addys to Spooky at crk_books (at) yahoo (dot) com. Thanks!

Yesterday evening, when all the writing and writing-related work was finally done, Spooky and I had a late walk from Candler Park east down McClendon Avenue NE, turning north onto Clifton Road NE, then west again onto Marlbrook Drive NE, which we followed back to the park. A nice sunset walk. After dinner, there was Scrabble, then I sat up later than I should have and watched Nancy Drew — Detective (1938) and Nancy Drew - Reporter (1939) on TCM, neither of which I'd seen before. It was sometime after four before I finally got to sleep. "What a dorky evening," says Spooky.

Anyway, I must now go polish the Locus article one last time and attend to other authorial tasks.

I'm pretty sure that I do not actually hate Alabama. It terms of physical geography and wilderness, it's a beautiful place. Fabulous geology and paleontology. For an area its size, Alabama has the greatest diversity of turtle species found anywhere on Earth. I think what I hate is all the goddamn Alabamians (the ones who aren't turtles). And Alabama culture, which, of course, is merely the primary and highly toxic waste product manufactured by all the goddamn Alabamians. Georgia's not much better. It's just that most of Atlanta exists in a weird dimension somewhat out-of-phase with Georgia proper. You can live here and pretend you're somewhere else. Some of us pretend we're in LA, and others of us pretend we're in San Francisco or Boston or Chicago. Being pretty much devoid of any identity of its own, Atlanta is ideal for this sort of thing. I think a few people have even managed to convince themselves Atlanta is Miami. Me, I just pretend it's not in Georgia. But, sadly, Alabama has no Atlanta equivalent. Anyway, regardless, I have to go to Alabama today. The trip has been delayed as long as I can possibly delay it. I have not been back there since April 2006. I'd hoped to go a full year this time between visits. Alas, that is not to be. It has become a Necessary Expedition. We may be back tonight. We may not be back until Friday evening. I cannot yet say.

stsisyphus has written some very cogent observations on "A Season of Broken Dolls," one of the two stories from this month's Sirenia Digest, which you may read at species_of_one (the cogent observations, not the story itself). It's quite useful when, as happens only very occasionally, a reader or reviewer writes something about one of my stories that teaches me something about what I've written. I have a feeling that's the way it's supposed to work, but hardly ever does.

Not much to yesterday worth writing down here. The end result of the Forced and New Consolidated marches was sent off to my editor at HarperCollins. Kathryn and I had a decent enough walk. Last night, we watched E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire for the first time since we saw it together way back on February 2, 2001. It's still a wonderful film, an utter delight for the eyes. And I started reading Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins by Roger Lewin (1987). Not much else worth reporting.

Two of the current eBay auctions will be ending tomorrow, including the copy of Candles for Elizabeth and "On the Road to Jefferson." It will likely be a while before I can offer either of these again.

Okay. I have to go help Spooky pack and get Hubero ready for cat gaol. And ram a fork in my left eye.