Caitlín R. Kiernan

1. More snow. And still more on the way. We should have gone to the market last night and we didn't, so somehow we have to manage that trick today, though the driveway hasn't been shoveled. By the way, in the comments to yesterday's entry— after my quip about it being colder in Antarctica than Providence— amandakcampbell noted "According to the Weather Channel's website, McMurdo [Station,] Antarctica is 12˚F today, with a windchill of -5˚F." Admittedly, it's presently summer in Antarctica, but still.

2. Yesterday, I wrote 1,139 words on Chapter 5 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and reached the far side of the very difficult and pivotal scene. This morning, I feel sort of ambivalent about the scene, and I have no idea whether or not I did it right. But today I will proceed to the next scene. Also, yesterday, my editor and I spoke about the novel, via email. The tentative release date is March 2012. The title is now set in stone.

3. And now, without further adieu: Spooky and I have embarked upon our very first experiment with crowd-sourcing. For a long time, we've been talking about doing a picture book sort of thing based on her raven dolls and paintings. Hopefully, with the help of Kickstarter and your participation, we can make it happen. To learn all the details about The Tale of the Ravens Project, follow this link. It's all pretty self-explanatory, but I'll gladly answer any questions you may have. I've been very impressed, seeing what can be done with Kickstarter, and if this works, there's a second and more ambitious project, a non-publishing project, I hope to be able to fund for 2012, but only if this first effort succeeds. So, please do have a look. Give us all your money, and we'll make something marvelous for you in return.

Note that your card will not be charged until and unless the project is completely funded. Regardless, you won't be charged until on or after March 26th. You also have to register at Kickstarter to donate.

4. The plan had been for readingthedark to drive down from Framingham tonight for a visit, but I think this weather is going to prevent that.

5. After dinner last night, I proofread the text for the Kickstarter page, so Spooky could hit the launch button. Also, I watched the first ten minutes or so of Jaws, as it's relevant to the next bit of The Drowning Girl, to what I'll be writing this afternoon. I'd forgotten that the first attack takes place at sunset. I remembered it happening at night. Which is why we research.

6. Last night started with WoW, and, after about two hours, Shaharrazad, my blood-elf warlock, reached Level 85*. Suraa reached 85 night before last. Anyway, booya and all, but it was a bittersweet sort of achievement, as it occurred during the idiot "Harrison Jones"/Goblin Hitler fiasco. There were a couple of comments yesterday that I thought did a pretty good job of touching on why I've lost patience with Wow. laudre wrote:

I mostly enjoyed the Raiders pastiche, but the things that I didn't like, I really didn't like; by the time I went through it with a second character, I was sick of the nigh-constant deprotagonization and the endless cut-scenes. My characters -- one, a green-skinned dervish of elemental fury, and the other, a shapeshifting master of natural power who stands and holds the line against endless waves of enemies, who have faced down giants, dragons, demons, and eldritch horrors that would shatter lesser minds -- would not cower in fear of a self-important, pissant goblin with a fucking rocket launcher. Let alone need to be "saved" by Harrison fucking Jones.

And lee_in_limbo wrote:

I haven't progressed very far in it, but I find I rather like LoTRO. It's not quite as addictive as WoW, but at the same time, it seems to move at more my speed (something my wife isn't as keen on), and I haven't run into the kind of uber-jock mentality that was putting me off high-end WoW content. I'm sure it's there, but there's less drive to reach end game content in LoTRO for me, because I don't know anybody there, and don't particularly care at this time. I just want to be immersed in an interesting environment with interesting storytelling. WoW keeps almost getting there, but then smirks and ruins the whole thing. I love humour, but this cheeky NatLamp attitude loses its appeal.

The comparison with National Lampoon is apt, as is the "uber-jock mentality" bit. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm isn't a heroic fantasy MMORPG, but an MMORPG that has become, at best, a crude low-brow spoof of heroic fantasy. There's a whole essay in this, about, among other things, the inability and unwillingness of gamers to suspend disbelief and about those who cater to the lowest common denominator. But it'll have to wait for another time.

Anyway, after WoW, I had a few good hours of rp in Insilico, with yet another incarnation of the Xiang AI, who's run afoul of a bounty hunter (thank you, Tracy). Molly and Grendel have, for now, returned to London.

And now...doughnuts (no, not literal doughnuts).

Today's a good day for comments.

Yours If You Can Stand Me,
Aunt Beast

* Total actual time played to reach Level 85: 52 days, 19 hours, 36 minutes, and 18 seconds.

Yesterday I didn't leave the house. The weather was crappy, and I was writing, and then the weather got worse. Maybe this evening. Right now, there's snow on the ground, but the roads are clear. I need the snow. As I've said, it smooths the ugly sharp edges from the bleak urban winter landscape.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,670 words on The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. My goal is to write chapters 4, 5, and 6 this month. Yesterday, I reached ms. page 150. Or 32,206 words. This novel will be only as long as it needs to be. I might be a third of the way through it, or half, or only an eighth. We shall see.

I will be including Chapter 1 in Sirenia Digest #63 (February 2011).

I took a nap in the middle parlour before dinner. Then, this morning I slept more than seven and a half hours. The Seroquel conquers the insomnia, but it's nothing I want to take long term.

Last night, I read the first story in Jacques Tardi's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, 1976), "Pterror Over Paris." Utterly delightful. And it set me to wondering why the hell Luc Besson's adaptation of the comic hasn't yet been released in the US. It premiered in France on April 14th, 2010, and has shown in oodles of countries, but not the US. Anyway, I also watched Herbert G. Ponting's 90° South, a film documenting Scott's second Antarctic expedition (1911). The film has a long and complex history, having begun as a series of silent shorts that eventually became a narrated feature in 1933. Later this year, I'm supposed to write a prequel to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," and I've begun the research.

And there was rp in Insilico last night, and will be again tonight.

That's all for now.

Yours in January,
Aunt Beast

I think that eBay Blogs must be the very sincerest definition of lame.

I mean, really.

eBay Blogs.

Okay...

In the chaos of the last couple of weeks, the last month, I never commented on the discovery of evidence of a gigantic bolide impact in Antarctica. Perhaps a crater, 500 kilometers (300 miles) across, and perhaps another clue to the causes of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event (which made the end Cretaceous extinctions look like no more than a bad head cold). If the Wilkes Land mascon is the result of an impact, the meteor may have been 50 kilometers wide (30 miles). Just the sort of space rock the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky has in mind, of course. No mere Tunguska firecracker, this one. What a fireworks show there must have been, 251 million years ago.

Spooky's become smitten with ditl, or "A Day in the Life." It is a rather oddly addictive phenomenon (though, in truth, I'm much more the exhibitionist than the voyeur). You can see her latest ditl entry here. I'm even in there somewhere.

I think it's time to brush my teeth and crawl away to bed. Perhaps I'll dream of fire from the sky and the glories of the humanless Neozoic Era...