Caitlín R. Kiernan

Insomnia last night, and I finally had to give up and take an Ambien about 4 a.m., so I'm still swimming against that current. It's like a riptide through consciousness and unconsciousness, that damned drug. When this bottle runs out, I will have no more of that shit near me.

But a good writing day yesterday. I did 1,467 words on "The Yellow Alphabet." I was sort of annoyed by having finished I, only to realize that the letter I should have been "I is for Iphis and Ianthe." But I wasn't about to go back and toss out what I'd already written. I may feel differently when I've finished "The Yellow Alphabet," if there's time to spare. So, we'll see. Today, I do L and M, and finish Part One.

So, if you haven't heard, Anne Rice is making a big, fat, hairy deal of not being Xitian anymore...except she obviously still is. Whatever. Maybe her silly-ass Jesus books weren't selling very well, and she's feeling the heat from such literary giants as Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. In case you missed the sarcasm there (after all, I did not end the sentence with "lol"), I will add that at least Rice did write three good books (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned) before drinking her own purple Kool-Aid and devolving into utter nonsense. Which is far more than can be said for Hamilton or Harris, who were pretty much purveyors of nonsense from Day One.

Sorry. Just needed to get that out of my system.

Spooky has started a new round of eBay auctions. Also, check out the very wonderful things in her Dreaming Squid Dollworks & Sundries Shop on Etsy. Really. Cool stuff. Check it out.

Sméagol has another vet visit today, just a check up, to see how his plasma-cell pododermatitis is doing.

More rp in Insilico last night, interesting stuff with Molly, who is no longer Molly, but the Mouse (or so she says). It's sort of fascinating, going away for more than three months and coming back and seeing how all these little plot threads have woven and unwoven, how characters have evolved. Also, so long as Spooky and I have been indulging in Fairly Ridiculous Television (24, Nip/Tuck), we decided to try some Truly Ridiculous Television, and watched the first four episodes of Sanctuary last night. And I don't know. It has a certain lopsided charm, like Tom Baker era Doctor Who meets Torchwood meets The X-Files meets a bunch of other stuff, all smushed together the wrong way round. Sometimes, Bad Television can be unexpectedly entertaining.

The weather is still sunny today, if a bit cooler. But I have the office window open anyway, because rain is coming tomorrow, and I want all the fresh air I can get before things get wet again. Spring comes so slowly to Providence, compared to Atlanta and Birmingham. Of course, it would be equally true to say that spring comes so quickly to Atlanta and Birmingham, compared to Providence. It's all a matter of perspective.

A good writing day yesterday. I did 1,358 words on "Houndwife." I am pleased with how this story is coming along, and where it's going. I did find myself wondering, yesterday, how Lovecraft would feel about someone writing a sequel to "The Hound" to the music of Polly Jean Harvey and Patti Smith, then someone on Facebook pointed out to me that Patti Smith had actually appeared at one of the Lovecraft Film Festivals in Portland, where she read some of HPL's poetry. This doesn't answer my question, of course, but it is cool as hell.

Yesterday evening, before dark, I went Outside with Spooky, as far as the markets on the east side, just to get out of the house. There was a grand sunset. All in all, my mood is much improved. I'm sleeping without Ambien (four nights now), which means the nightmares are worse, but I feel better during the day, not fighting against a zolpidem hangover while I'm awake. I think the warmer weather and the trip to Cambridge on Thursday have done me a world of good (my thanks again to Greer, Sonya, and Chris). I'm riding this peak as long as it lasts, and taking it for all it has to give.

I've been reading the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which arrived sometime last week. So far, I've made my way through papers on the dolichosaur Acetosaurus tommasinii, the cranial anatomy of the basal ceropdan dinosaur Changchunsuarus parvus, and Late Cretaceous snakes from the Maevarano Formation of Madagascar.

Oh, and the octopus has now been sexed, and his name will definitely be Nemo. I suppose, when the name first occurred to me, I was thinking of Jules Verne and Prince Armitage Ranjit Dakkar, but there's also the word's Latin meaning ("no one" or "nobody"). And there's the Nightwish song of the same title, and Winsor McCay's dreamer, and the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, and...well, take your pick. They all work for me.

1. Gods, I'm not awake. And to blame we have the Ambien I took at 4:45 a.m., although what we really have to blame is (drum roll, please) THE. BEST. ROLEPLAY. EVER. Which I got in Insilico last night. My thanks to Omika, Abiki, Fifth, Pinbacker...and others. Really, it's like being lodged in the forebrain/motherboard of an early William Gibson novel, this rp. Smart, immersive, simulationist, literate, and exquisitely hard. And to think I spent almost two and half years trying to find a sim that has its shit together, and players on the same wavelength as me, and that I suffered so much lousy rp and silly-ass ooc drama.* Anyway, wow, but I am so painfully not awake. Oh, I'm playing Xiang, a very confused little toaster.

2. Yesterday, I wrote 1,269 words on "Hydrarguros," for Sirenia Digest #50. The story really seemed to find itself yesterday afternoon. And then Jason Statham showed up. On Facebook, I wrote "Gods, I've just realized Jason Statham is narrating my new sf story. That is, the narrator's voice, as I hear it in my head as I write is that of Jason Statham." Sort of Jason Statham as he was in Snatch. Later, also on Facebook, I added, "You have to imagine Jason Statham starring in a film version of David Bowie's Outside, playing Nathan Adler, only it's not a movie about art crimes, but a movie about drugs from Mars." Which isn't precisely right, but somewhere in the neighborhood.

3. Okay, so...I've keep putting off talking about Peter Straub's very wonderful new novel, A Dark Matter (due out February 9th). Mostly, that's because I know enough to know I'm no good at reviewing books (would that more readers knew this of themselves), and I'm not going to do the book justice. I can heap praise upon it, which it deserves, but which is also insufficient. I could, in theory, reduce it to some book-reportish synopsis, but that would be criminal. So, I won't do either. You're just going to have to trust me on this. I've been reading Peter since 1981, and this is one of his very best. There are such moments of surreal, transcendent weird. Worlds bleed together. It is, in a sense, about the price of expanding one's consciousness. In another sense, it's about the charlatans who promise expanded consciousness, and, specifically, about the sorts who peddled those wares in the sixties. More than anything, this is a novel about consequence. In brilliantly inverts many of the readers expectations, turning its plot back upon itself, as we watch its characters struggle to come to terms with an unspeakably bizarre event from their pasts, in order to heal their present lives. You want to read this novel. Spooky read the whole thing aloud to me while I was sick, before she got sick. We expect to read it a second time in a few months. Thank you, Peter. You just shine, man.

4. Last night, we watched Anthony Bourdain in the Philippines (our fondness for this man seems to know no bounds), and then watched Rob Zombies' remake of Halloween 2. I'm still parsing my thoughts on the film. It was, in many ways, a much more ambitious film than his Halloween remake, and it had some fine moments, but, in the end, I don't think it was as good as the first film (and certainly not as good as The Devil's Rejects). Mostly, I think Mr. Zombie needs to a) stop casting the atrocious Sheri Moon Zombie in his films, even if she is his wife, because the woman simply cannot act, and she's holding him back; and 2) I think it's time for him to try something new. We now know he can make very, very good slasher films in the spirit of the '70s and '80s classics. Now, I'd like to see him do something different, because I think he has it in him, and it's time to grow artistically.

5. Email this morning from the woman who'll be reading both Low Red Moon and Threshold for the Audible.com adaptations. They start recording tomorrow, and need correct pronunciations for trilobite names. So, I think all the audiobooks are now in production, which is just amazing.

6. I'm now going to go drink what's left of my coffee and try to wake the fuck up. Excuse me.

*Within a few weeks, Insilico proved itself almost as bad, or worse, than the rest of Second Life, and I had to start eating my words.

I am, in almost all ways, feeling better this morning. I was in bed before 2 a.m. The first tablet of zolpidem tartrate (the new generic Ambien) only made me very stoned, but the second one, which I took maybe half an hour later, put me to sleep, and I slept well until almost ten a.m., so I got at least seven good hours sleep. I hope for eight tonight. And no nasty dreamsickness; mercifully, I can not even now recall whatever dreams I might have had.

Yesterday, we read over and proofed "The Steam Dancer," and then I made some corrections and sent it to Vince. I still need to tweak the story just a very small bit, and read over "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," but with any luck Sirenia Digest #19 should reach subscribers somewhere in the neighborhood of June 21st. And if you are not yet a subscriber, this issue would certainly be a good place to begin. There will be more than 15,000 words of fiction, delivered straight to your inbox. Just follow the link above, read the FAQ (which is a little out of date), and sign up. Easy.

Today, I hope to begin work on The Dinosaurs of Mars, which I'd like to have finished by the second week of July. I spoke with producer D yesterday about the "Onion" screenplay, to ask if we could put yesterday's meeting off until today (as I was nearing delirium and all but useless), and he proposed we wait until Thursday so that I'd have another day more to recover from the insomnia, which was very kind of him. Anyway, I'll likely be getting back to work on the screenplay tomorrow evening.

Sometime after six p.m. last night, a bank of clouds moved in from the northeast, and Spooky and I sat out on the front porch and watched a vortex of blue-greys and purples and dusky pinks swirling overhead. The wind was wonderful and smelled of rain and ozone. The clouds brought a heavy, cold downpour and a little hail. Today the sun is back, but the temps are much cooler. Hopefully, the drought is over.

The hand-corrected Silk auction has only about 26 hours left to go, so if you're interested, take note. This is not the sort of thing you get a second chance on (unless, of course, you buy it from whoever wins this auction). I'll repost photos of the book sometime this evening. This is, truly, a unique item. There will only ever be just this one.

And I have read the news that Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) has died at 89 years of age.