Caitlín R. Kiernan

Very cold in Providence today; my feet are spun glass.

Most of yesterday was a good day. I only managed about 500 words on "The Lost Language of Littoral Mollusca and Crustacea," because I realized it was a lot longer and a lot more complicated than I expected. Not the sort of thing you can do in a day, but maybe over the course of a week. Maybe. But it was still a good day. Spooky came back from the p. o. box with a letter from Harlan, the Coolest T-Shirt Ever® (see the photos behind the cut), and Solstice gifts from my mother. I saw Brian's final cut for the "teaser" trailer for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. It's truly gorgeous, light-fucking-years beyond what I expect from book trailers, and I wish I could show it to you now. There was a spaghetti for supper, a favorite, because, when it comes to food, I'm pretty easy to please.

And then, early last night, it all went to hell, and it did so violently, a shitstorm to lay any good day low. I'm I'm still not on an even keel. I think it was very after six ayem before I got to sleep. Like maybe six-thirty, but I honestly have no fucking idea, and it probably doesn't matter. I read stuff, like a Peter Crowther short story, "Ghosts With Teeth." Mostly, I sat in the smoking crater that was the night, and tried not to think, and the harder I tried not to, the more I did. So, five and a half hours sleep? Possibly six? I can't even call it insomnia.

So, Two Worlds and In Between keeps making these "best of" lists. Seriously, it seems like it makes a new one each day. Yesterday, it was an article at io9, "Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Books that Make Perfect Gifts" (at least io9 knows how to capitalize a headline). The ironic thing, though, is that the book is, essentially, out of print, and will likely remain so for a while to come. Subterranean Press is sold out. Amazon.com claims to have a few copies (and I stress a few), but I wouldn't trust them as a source for this book, not after they fucked so many people over on the preorder. Better you try AbeBooks or Powell's, both of whom have it in stock, I believe. Point is, it's not like you can't get the book, just that it's quickly getting very hard and expensive to get the book. Which seems ironic. Or maybe I ought take that as a compliment. And yeah, my agent's working in selling another edition (and foreign language rights), but that's something far down the road, if it ever happens at all.

Also, while I very much appreciate receiving gifts, please don't send me ebooks. I didn't even know you could do that, give someone an ebook, until someone did try to give me one, and I got this download coupon thingy from Amazon. For a Kindle. Of course, anyone who reads this journal knows I loathe ebooks on principle, and I do not now (nor ever shall I) own a Kindle. So, while I also know that ebooks are almost as cheap as the air they're printed on, it's probably best not to waste your money on something I'll never see. Or even want to ever see.

As we approach the release of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and the first issue of Alabaster, which is to say March and April, respectively, I'm planning public appearances. Yeah, I haven't made a habit of that, but now I have to. There are a lot of plans, but here are the only two "for sure" dates (times TBA, and more to come, mostly nestled between March 6th and sometime in June):

April 4: North Kingstown Free Public Library, Rhode Island Voices series (reading/talk)
April 18: KGB Bar (Manhattan), Fantastic Fiction series (reading)

And here are the T-shirt photos, which I'm going to trying to believe are all that there was to yesterday (I love my expression of innocence, displaying my ignorance of what was soon to come). Well, it and the finished book trailer:

( Versus )

By the way, if there are typos in the entry, all I can say is you're lucky there's any entry at all.

0. Comments would be very welcome today.

1. Chilly and sunny today. Our little Indian Summer has come and gone. All three days of it. I left the house only once, briefly, the entire time. I expect no more days in the eighties until June.

2. On this day, eighteen years ago, I began writing Silk. Weather-wise, it was a day much like today, though much farther south. Eighteen years, so that means babies born that day are, as of this day, old enough to vote. One of them picking up Silk today, would be like me, on the occasion of my eighteenth birthday, picking up a copy of a novel whose author began writing it in 1964. These are very strange thoughts. Silk is, lest anyone delude themselves into thinking otherwise, a snapshot of a time, culture, and place long vanished. I am not that person anymore. No, not really. There's a faint echo of her around here somewhere.

3. My mood is lower today than it's been in, I don't know. Months. These things happen, and we stay on our meds, and we speak of ourselves in the third person, and we ride them out.

4. Yesterday, you might have seen a news story with a sensational headline something like: "Giant 'Kraken' Lair Discovered: Cunning Sea Monster That Preyed On Ichthyosaurs.". People kept sending me links to it yesterday. And the best I can say about this affair is that if I were still teaching, I'd point to this as a sterling example of Really Bad Science. One does not find a peculiar pattern (in this case, the arrangement of ichthyosaur vertebrae) and invent an outlandish explanation with no evidence whatsoever. And call it something lurid and ridiculous like a "Giant Kraken." There's zero evidence for the existence of a giant Triassic teuthid (squid). Zero. No fossil evidence. So, to posit that one was moving ichthyosaur bones around is very akin to the Weekly World News having once blamed "Alien Big-Game Hunters" for the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. In short, it's silly. I could write a long essay on this, but I won't. Even if Mark McMenamin could find fossil evidence for a giant squid of roughly the same age as Shonisaurus popularis, it would still be almost impossible to say it was responsible for moving those bones into that pattern.

5. Yesterday...I worked. Not as much as I should have, because...sometimes it's hurry up and wait. But I did work. Mostly, more planning for the book-trailer shoot this weekend. Only three days to go. And it looks like there will be rain on Friday, which is going to play merry havoc with our schedule.

6. Want to see the American Consumer at its least rational? Just look back over the recent fiasco with Netflix, and the damage its done to the company (a two-thirds stock drop since July, and still going down). Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has apologized for the proposed Netflix/Quickster division for rental/streaming services, which is absurd. That he apologized, I mean. People need to cut the entitlement bullshit. Better streaming services will cost more, and the industry is moving towards streaming. Period. I am far from being a financially stable person, but the original Netflix business model won't work forever, and it's wasteful, and is costing the USPS a fortune.

7. Frequently, people have asked me to blog my Second Life roleplay. Usually, I don't do this, because doing so leads to spending time writing that could be spent RPing. But I have begun keeping a journal of Ellen "Grendel" Ishmene's trials and tribulations in Insilico, the life of an illegal Level A clone/Class V AI. It's an excuse to keep myself limber with cyberpunk narratives. If you're interested, you can follow the journal here. Oh, and there are pictures. These days, about the only reason I can find to bother with SL is Insilico, and it's far from perfect. But the build is exquisite, and the RP is probably about the best ever in SL.

8. As for the non-work part of yesterday, I read two articles in the September 2011 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: "Variation in the skull of Anchiceratops (Dinosauria, Ceratopsidae) from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation (Upper Cretaceous) of Alberta" and "A sauropod dinosaur pes from the latest Cretaceous of North America, and the validity of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis (Sauropoda, Titanosauria)."* And we read two more chapters of Shirley Jackson's The Sundial (we're nearing the end of the book), and played some Rift, and I read a rather awful short story by F. Paul Wilson, "The November Game," an extremely unfortunate "sequel" to Ray Bradbury's classic "The October Game." If you're going to attempt a sequel to one of the best spooky stories of the 20th Century, at least have the respect and good sense to mind the mood and tone of the original. And that was yesterday.

Twiddling Her Thumbs,
Aunt Beast

* Looks as though there's only a single species of Anchiceratops, A. ornatus, and that Alamosaurus is a valid taxon.

I awoke about nine p.m., hot and sweaty and sick from having taken a Valium and two Sonata, but then only slept five hours. I awoke to relive, it seems, an especially grotesque day from October 1990.

It's just me, or it's everyone, or it's only some people, but even after forty-seven years, I've no idea whatsoever.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,236 words on a new vignette, "The Granting Cabinet."

I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to keep up these journal entries during Readercon. Back in March, I promised myself I'd make an entry every day for six months. But I'm not about to pay the hotel's exorbitant charge for internet access, so I really have no idea how I'm going to make it happen. Not that anyone much still reads LJ – they're all too busy with the easy, instant gratification and minimal compositional prerequisites of Twitter and Facebook – but it's important to me, if only because it's a promise I made to me.

Maybe I'll spend the day lying on the kitchen floor. The view from there isn't so bad.

Here are the photos from Saturday that I'd wanted to post yesterday.

( 9 July 2011 )

(No one's going to read all this...)

Last night, I dreamt of playing the accordion.

---

Really, beyond seeing Lee Moyer's almost finished cover for Two Worlds and In Between, it was a pretty shitty day. That was the only bright spot. Wait, there was one other. Anyway, for some reason, I recorded the whole crappy day in photos, nineteen of them, below and behind the cut.

I've not spoken for thirty-three hours now, and I'm going for forty-eight, and then, then we'll see.

Much (but by no means all) of what went so wrong about yesterday was thinking I might be ready to finish the final chapter of The Drowning Girl, then discovering another scene that needed to be fitted it. I wrote the new scene, then struggled to insert it without disrupting the chapter's established flow. This is one of those things I can't understand about writers who write shit out of order. I write, I establish flow, and it's pretty much unidirectional. Try to go back and stick in new stuff, it all goes to shit (plus, you're swimming upstream the whole time). But, I wrote the new scene, like I said, then proceeded to the last scene (I only wrote 691 words yesterday). Then decided I needed to hear all of the final chapter, and an earlier part of the book, before wrapping it up. So, I asked Spooky to read it to me.

But I dozed off while she was reading to me, so we have to finish today. After I write the journal entry. Then I have to write another extra scene, once I figure out if it belongs in the ninth or tenth chapter. Maybe Monday and Tuesday I can write the last two scenes. Of course, I also have the deadline for Two Worlds and In Between a mere nine days from now, and there's still so much work left to do on that it boggles the noggin. And there's the work for SuicideGirls that I took on last week.

A nice piece of mail (the real sort, on paper with stamps) from Leeanne O'Sullivan in Lancashire, England. Thank you, Leeanne. You were that other bright spot.

---

After dinner, I had a hot bath. And a meltdown. A silent meltdown.

Later, when I'd been scooped into a Caitlín-shaped bowl, we watched Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel, a pretty faithful 1998 film adaptation of William Gibson's short story of the same name. If nothing else, the movie nails the mood of Gibson's story. Christopher Walken is wonderful. Willem Dafoe is a little on autopilot. And Asia Argento is...um....hot. But you already knew that. Yoshitaka Amano (yes, that Yoshitaka Amano) plays the mark, a geneticist named Hiroshi, and there are cool cameos, such as Ryuichi Sakamoto. Definitely recommended, and you can stream it from Netflix.

Laterer, played Rift. Selwyn didn't make Level 19, because I tried to rp instead. And it wasn't bad, but after two attempts at rp in Rift I see that one has to know the canon, and that all the players have to be on the same page in interpreting the canon. Most rpers won't even realize this, of course, but then most rpers suck. Which is why you must rp in tiny groups (4-5 at most).

Latererer, Spooky read me chapters Four and Five of Catching Fire, and I'm relieved to say it gets much better. I think the first three chapters might have been condensed into a paragraph. But I also think, when we're done, I'll be of the opinion it should all have been written as a single book, not a trilogy. We are chained to trilogies. Fuck you, Trilogy Tyrant. Fuck you, Despot of Series. Fuck you.

---

My thanks to people who commented on the problem of gay protagonists in YA novels. I'm not going to get into all the details, because they are many and some of this is private stuff between me and others. And because there's the ugly issue of money. But, I will say, my first YA protagonist will be a lesbian. The worst that can happen is that I can fail, and I've sort of done that already (if we're talking about financial success and mass appeal, and I am).

Comments on #63? Bueller? Bueller?

Now...the photos:

( 5 February 2011 )

Yesterday, I killed a loaf of bread. Such was my anger, and such was the nature of the day. A shitty, shitty day, but the loaf of bread had done nothing. It was a little stale, sure, but aren't we all? Spooky's buried all evidence in the trash.

Turns out, on July 10th, some cisgendered, homophobic snot at Readercon was twatting rude little missives about my person (that's only one thing that led to yesterday being a shitty day). Hashtag #readercon. You can probably find him, if you try. He consistently misspelled my name as "Kaitlin." I'm still debating whether or not to unleash the flying monkeys upon his sorry ass. Whether or not to call him out. A loaf of bread has already died for his sins. Oh, and he also complained about Chip Delany reading "raunchy gay PORN." Ignorance and hatred and fear are the roots of all evil, if there actually is evil in the world. Blessed are the narrow-minded shit weasels.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,086 words on a new vignette. An erotic vignette that begins with a discourse on 4th-dimensional geometry, tesseracts, orthogonality, three-dimensional shadows, and so forth. Truly, I write smut for nerds. Right now, the piece is called "Vicaria Draconis" (thank you, sovay). And I could finish it today, I suspect, only it's so bloody hot in the house, and I'm still a bit too angry to make the doughnuts.

We hit a fairly serious last-minute snag yesterday, as regards the book trailer, and right now, we're scrambling to sort it all out.

Also, I'm pulling out whatever stops I can pull for promotion. We're going to have Red Tree fliers up on the website soon (they were out at Readercon), that can be printed from your computer and distributed wherever seems appropriate. We're talking posse, street team, etc. I've also begun a contest. Send me tree photos, any tree, anywhere, and my favorite gets a free, signed copy of the novel. Email photos to greygirlbeast(at)gmail(dot)com, naturally. Now, I would much prefer you take these photos yourself, and not snurch them off the interwebs, please. They may be posted on the website, and I'd prefer not to violate someone else's copyright. We're also talking stickers, because any good posse needs to be able to deface public property and restroom stalls and so forth.

And there's the ongoing auctions.

I don't think I can sit here, baking in the heat all day. It's ten degrees (F) cooler outside than inside.

I want to say, "Read the Tree," but Danielewski beat me to that one. This posse needs it own slogan. "Feed the Tree"? Yeah, I know it's from a Belly song, but so was Low Red Moon

Yesterday. Fuck me sideways, but yesterday was a lousy, stinking excuse for a day. And I have the US Postal Service to thank for that. On Tuesday, May 5th, Spooky mailed the corrected galley pages for The Red Tree back to my editor in Manhattan. My deadline was the 7th, so we figured we'd done pretty good. Didn't even have to ask Penguin for an extension. Then, yesterday morning (six days after we mailed the pages), my editor (Anne), emailed to say that she'd not received the pages and production was having kittens. As the package had been sent with delivery confirmation, we were able to see that, as of Friday (May 8th), the package had reached Bethpage, NY. I got another e-mail from my editor's assistant, Cameron, who hoped the missing pages might show up in the afternoon's mail run at 1 p.m., and we began discussing options, in case it didn't. Never mind all the many serious errors (most were formatting) that needed fixing before the ARCs are printed, I'd spent days proofreading the thing. So, it was decided that, if the pages didn't show, I'd have them faxed (of course I made photocopies of the corrected pages before handing them over to the USPS). However, Spooky called the Kinko's on Thayer Street, and discovered that faxing them would cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $160. I'd already spent about $20 to mail the package. Oh, my fax machine died a few years ago, and I never bothered replacing it.

So, other options were discussed as the day slipped away. Perhaps, for instance, the pages could be made into a PDF, only that was also costly, and there might not be time. 1 p.m. came and went. I was losing the day, and nothing had been written on "Fish Wife." And I was starting to get angry and to panic. I pulled Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats down off the shelf and read "Master" and "Lizzie's Tiger," which helped keep me calm and distracted. I got word from Cam that it would be sometime after 2 p.m., not 1 p.m., before we knew if the pages had come in the afternoon mail. I gnashed my teeth. Spooky called New York. There were more emails. Right now, it's really all a sort of blur. Finally, Cam said we were getting no love from the mail room, so I faced up to the worst-case scenario, and began typing out the corrections, with Spooky dictating them to me. By 4 p.m., it was clear I wouldn't be done before the end of the work day, and I emailed Cam and told her so. She said that if I could get the corrections to her by 9 a.m. this morning, we'd probably be okay. So, Spooky and I spent two and a half hours compiling a detailed list of the 170 corrections that needed correcting, and sometime before 6 p.m., I emailed it to Cam (who was an utter saint yesterday, by the way).

And that's how I lost all of yesterday, when I should have been writing a vignette for Sirenia Digest #42, to the incompetency of the postal service. And this isn't the only instance of them giving me grief lately. A much-needed check was sent from my agent in NYC on April 29th (!!!), and has yet to reach me. Yesterday, Jennifer at Writers House declared it missing, and said she'd get with accounting about cutting a replacement. So, yes, thank you USPS. From here on, if I actually need something to get somewhere on time, I go to FedEx (and hope). Better yet, I may take the train to Manhattan next time, and hand deliver the pages.

So, lots of stress and work, but no writing yesterday.

As for last night, after pizza from Pizza Pie-er on Wickenden Steet (Spooky got takeout while I sorted through ancient photographs on my iMac and did some Wikipedia editing), we watched more of Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I drank pomegranate martini's and got mildly inebriated. Later, we played a little WoW, and Shaharrazad got a shiny new wand. There's a screencap (BIG) of Shah on her felsteed, behind the cut, taken when we were wandering along the border between Zangarmarsh and the Blade's Edge Mountains. It's a very Vernian sort of landscape.

( Beneath the 'Shrooms )

A glum morning. The sky is overcast and we have more snow (or sleet or freezing rain) inbound. Outside looks like the space inside my head. We match, the weather and I.

It's never good when I take days off without having very solid plans. I can't simply rest. As long as I'm writing, I can hang onto an illusion that by writing I'm managing to stave off some sort of inevitable catastrophe. The nature of this catastrophe is always vague, but usually begins with homelessness, then explores the nether regions of destitution. This is one reason that I write so much. I imagine writing keeps the wolves at bay. I stop writing, and there's nothing but my thoughts, unless I remain mentally active. So, there's never really any rest, not really. I've just been trying to catch up on all the sleep I lost in December, but I didn't leave the house yesterday, and may not today, and the thoughts of catastrophe are pressing in at me. I don't know how people rest, how they take time off, how they stop. My rare "vacations" are rarely restful, as rest of the "not doing anything" sort only stresses me out more.

And it's all sort of beside the point, what I may have hoped to do this week and how the weather is making a shambles of those plans, as the coughing has stopped, finally, and the Bad Tooth has become excruciating again. Spooky's calling the dentist today, and I expect it will be pulled in the next few days. Good riddance.

I have no solid plans for today. But I will fret. I begin to think I should spend today and tomorrow starting something for Sirenia Digest #38.

Something nice yesterday in the mail, something from Neil. I think that was yesterday's one bright spot.

The low point was discovering that there's a very minor error in the header of Sirenia Digest #37. I asked Gordon to correct it, and Spooky's has just done a second mailing to subscribers. The only difference is the correction to the header.

I wonder if I could find something erotic about tooth pain?

Oh, I almost forgot to include something cheerful. (Sarcasm, people.)

Yesterday, despite the fact that I spent all day at the keyboard, I managed only a paltry 675 words on "The Collier's Venus (1893)." The story continues to confound me. A locked box to which I seem to have never received the key. Or, I have the key, but can't quite figure out how it works. I sent the first three sections to Sonya last night, and she likes it. Spooky likes it. But I am entirely uncertain. It will be finished, because there is not now time to begin a new story. I see this story so clearly in my mind's eye, and yet the words escape me. I think the last time I had this sort of frustration was with "The Ape's Wife." And, I should admit, that turned out quite well, in the end. Or, in THE END. There are precious few mornings when I sit down in this chair and actually look forward to writing. But, usually, at least I do not sit down with an utter dread of the story I'm trying to write. That's the present situation. But I am the sole creatrix of that world, that fictive reality, and, in time, I'll unlock the box. There's just so little time.

Yesterday, I came to a sort of resolution. In large part, it stems from the trouble I'm having with "The Collier's Venus (1893)." In large part, it's just common sense. I'm going to set December and January aside for a "semi-vacation." That is, I'm scaling back work for those two months, limiting myself to Sirenia Digest and the editing of The Red Tree. This means I'll be pulling out of a couple of anthologies I've agreed to write stories for. But it simply cannot be helped. I am too tired. No, I am bloody exhausted. There's been no break since...the move, and that was hardly a break. I didn't even take any sort of decent breather after finishing The Red Tree*, and I simply cannot keep this up. I will be sick again, if I do.

So...I just have to survive writing "The Collier's Venus (1893)," all of Sirenia Digest #36, and the trip to Manhattan next week, and then maybe I'll be fine.

Ah, but there is a little good news. Stephen Jones has selected "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent" for a special Twentieth Anniversary "very best of" The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. This story and I have a long, long history. It was originally written in November 1993, my third story ever intended for publication. It's probably one of the more interesting pieces of my "naïve period" (let's say '93-'95). Originally, the story placed with a small press zine called Eldritch Tales (long deceased). However, four years later, it still had not been published. Then, at the May 1997 World Horror Convention in Niagara Falls, Steve Jones asked me to write a Dracula-themed story for the '97 World Fantasy Convention souvenir book, Secret City: Strange Tales of London. So, I sent a letter (we still wrote actual letters back then, on paper, with ink) to the editor of the obviously moribund Eldritch Tales, withdrawing the story. I wrote a second draft, adding 1,100 words, and sent it to Steve, who loved it. Later, it was selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Vol. 9, 1998), and then was reprinted in my second collection, From Weird and Distant Shores (2002). And now, it will be reprinted again, sixteen years after I began it. The book will be released by Earthling Publications as a signed, limited edition, and will include one story from each volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. More details TBA.

Last night, after Chinese leftovers, we ventured out into the wuthering evening, because I couldn't stand to be shut up in the house with all that wind pressing in at the walls. And I needed more Yacht Club ginger ale. Yacht Club is my new beverage addiction (they also make excellent root beer). Anyway, last night our cashier at Eastside Market just happened to be the girlfriend of the son of the owner of Yacht Club Bottling Works (located in Centredale, RI), which was sort of weird and cool. Back home, there was WoW. Shaharrazad and Suraa slew kobolds, dromaeosaurid theropods, giant spiders, ogres, (at Boulderfist Hall) and laid waist to countless humans at a Syndicate encampment (at Northfold Manor), all in the Arathi Highlands. I posted another entry to crk_blog_vault. Later, we watched the first episode of Deadwood for the zillionth time. And it's still brilliant, and still makes me sad that the idiots at HBO saw fit to cancel what is possibly the best written series in television history. I think we got to bed just before 3:30 a.m.

* I was just looking back over old journal entries, and it appears the last time I took an actual vacation was the first week of June 2007.

Well, the whole verse would be:

When the world is a monster,
Bad to swallow you whole,
Kick the clay that holds the teeth in,
Throw your troubles out the door.

But, somehow, having put that quote down, it looks far more positive than I feel, and, more importantly, it implies that I myself am anything but monstrous. And look, I haven't even started the entry, and already I'm digressing. It's a quality that Sarah Crowe —— the protagonist of The Red Tree —— and I share in common. We both digress, endlessly. And speaking of The Red Tree, yesterday I wrote 1,718 words —— a very respectable writing day —— and finished Chapter Seven. That means I have only one chapter to go to reach THE END. At this point, the ms. stands at 78,732 words. And I can see that the book was begun April 15th, but almost all of it has been written since July. And I can see THE END from here, and I only hope that I am doing this the way that I need to do it. There is no "right way" to write a book. There is only the way that the author needs it to be written, because the novel serves the author, even as the author serves the story, and failure is the act of failing to pull off that trick. I will begin Chapter Eight today, because, you know, no rest for the wicked.

---

Please have a look at the current round of eBay auctions, which began just yesterday. Thanks.

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I'm still not in a position to say exactly what happened on Thursday that sent me into such a funk that I seriously, seriously considered shelving The Red Tree indefinitely. It might be, in the days that come, that I decide I overreacted, and it might be that I don't. Regardless, on Thursday I was too angry to even consider work, and it seemed like a good idea to get out of the house. We headed south and west, for Stonington in Connecticut. We did actually make it to Stonington Cemetery, but, I'd underestimated the effect of the blue-white sky bearing down on me, and how raw all that sun would leave my eyes. We did not linger, but boomeranged right around and headed home. It was a day wasted on an ugly road, beneath a merciless autumn sky. A few clouds might have saved the day.

On Friday, again there was no work on The Red Tree, as I was still laboring under the resolve that I would leave it uncompleted. Instead, we went to the movies. But I'll get back to the movies. There have been a lot of movies the past four days. We didn't make the mistake of another road trip. The grip of autumn is too absolute, and my agoraphobia-like dread of all that blue emptiness above me had done enough damage the day before. I learn my lesson, if only for a little while. On Saturday, after speaking with my agent, Merrilee, I went back to work on The Red Tree. Nothing had changed, except that indignation began to take on the characteristics of resignation. So, on Saturday, as I've already said, I wrote 1,412 words.

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In all this mess, I neglected to wish sovay a happy birthday, though her birthday was on Thursday. So, here it is, belatedly. Also, my thanks to stsisyphus for the T-shirts. Spooky adores her steampunk DJ, and my cephalopods are very fitting.

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Yes, there have been a lot of movies, helping to keep me from breaking things. Thursday night there was Matt Damon in The Bourne Monotony or whatever it is they called the third film. A murksome mess that proceeds with all the inspired pacing of a television commercial. Though, I will admit, the last half hour or so are almost engaging. And then, on Friday, we made a matinée of John Erick Dowdle's Quarantine, which we both liked quite a lot. Of course, this film's going to be judged as a zombie film, even though it isn't. It did get me to thinking how the "zombie film" has edged away from the collective human loathing of their own dead to a fear of contagion and the damage that unrestrained nature can do. Like Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), Quarantine is a film about a genetically engineered rabies-like plague, not the living dead. But, somehow, the two things have been run together in the minds of moviegoers. Maybe it's the shared element of cannibalism. Maybe what humans fear most of all is not death or the dead or even plague, but being eaten alive by their own. Or things that used to be their own. Anyway, Friday night we watched Tarsem Singh's The Cell (2000) again, because I wanted another look at it after seeing The Fall. It's truly a gorgeous film (and, if you're me, a damned sexy one), but the script is slipshod and Jennifer Lopez is a walking disaster, whispering her way from line to line as though that will disguise the fact that she simply cannot act. Then on Saturday night, we got stoned and watched Julie Taymor's Across the Universe again, and it's still amazing. Finally, last night, we watched Fred M. Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956), because it's one of those films that soothes the monsters of my id.

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I didn't really get much reading done. Mainly, from the September 2008 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, "New information on Stokesosaurus, a tyrannosauroid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from North America and the United Kingdom." It's clear now that this lineage of theropods reaches back at least to the Late Jurassic, and that the smaller, more gracile predecessors of Tyrannosaurus lived alongside such classically Jurassic theropods as Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus.

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Finally, there has been a good deal of World of Warcraft, which has proven itself a great "pressure valve," as the consequences of slaughtering virtual beings are far less worrisome that doing the same thing in the here and now. Mithwen, the night-elf warrior, is now at Lvl 28, and running missions out of Menethil in the Wetlands. She was rather shocked to learn that humans are so tiny, and the Sin'dorei even smaller. Honestly, I cannot fathom why anyone plays a human. But I digress (again). Shaharrazad, the blood-elf warlock, has made Lvl 21, and has been enjoying the company of her minions. She's mostly keeping to the Ghostlands and Undercity for the time being. There'a third character now, and you can blame Spooky for that —— a Draenei, a Lvl 10 huntress named Voimakas. That's Finnish for "strong" or "powerful," "fierce" or "intense," in keeping with our impression that Draenei words look Finnish, and Finnish has always seemed a very alien language to me. Frankly, I think the Draenei are possibly the best designed and executed part of the game I've seen. And the interjection of such an explicitly sf element into the faux-Tolkien stew is much appreciated. So far, Voimakas has made it only as far as the Bloodmyst Isle.

Okay. That's more than enough for now. Time to make the doughnuts.

So, I didn't set out yesterday not to write. I had every intention of writing at least a thousand words. At least. But. The distractions —— the heat, some minor pain, insecurity about the book, and then the asshole from Cox Cable. On the latter, the least excusable (least excusable that I let it ruin my day, I mean) of the lot. After a month without cable, the Cox installation guy shows to hook up the cable.

I'd already determined that neither of the two jacks were suitable, one being in Spooky's sewing room and the other in the second parlour (which we are using mostly for ritual space). So, I figured, no problem. It's a short distance from the sewing-room jack to the television, maybe ten or fifteen feet, at most. But he refused to do it, because (get this), we might trip over the cable and sue Cox. He was summarily dismissed from the house. We shall live without television. I'm sure we will be better people for it. There's not even that much I'll miss, and what I do miss will mostly be made available via the internet and DVD, anyway. Also, we'll save $70 a month. But I am sick to puking death of the idiots who run Cox. They have something of a monopoly up here, and they act like it. At least they're aptly named.

By the time the Drama of the Cable was done, the day was fading. I was fading. It was very hot inside and outside, despite Dr. Muñoz' best efforts, and obviously nothing was getting written. So. Though it was the wrong thing to do, the most wrong thing I could have done, I wrote the day off as an L. Must have been about 4:30 p.m. We left for Beavertail about an hour later, fleeing to cooler weather and a calmer environment. I climbed down onto the tilted beds of Cambrian phyllite and just sat and stared into the wild, rough sea. We'd had a steady wind all day (hot wind in Providence), and the surf was whipped into a frenzy. It seemed a frenzy to match the noise in my head. I sat in the sun, the salt spray on my face, the sea tumbling over the rocks and rushing through a rift worn in the rocks below me. Too often, I go to the sea and become fascinated by the constituent parts — the rocks, the birds, the sea life. Yesterday, I sat and tried to think on nothing but the whole, all at once. And slowly, I grew less agitated, and then, as the sun was replaced by clouds from the west, I grew calm, and then ecstatic at the sea. Only the cormorants distracted me from the incoming tide. I think cormorants have become my favourite coastal bird...er, glorified dinosaur. By the time we left, it was getting dark, maybe 7:30 or 8 p.m., and we were both shivering and very damp, a little sunburned. We'd stopped, on the way down, at McQuade's, a market in Jamestown, and, because someone had remarked that on sixth anniversaries it was traditional to give candy, I got Spooky a pack of NECCO wafers and she got me a pack of plain M&M's. We're cheap dates, what can I say. There are photos behind the cut:

( Beavertail, July 3rd 2008 )

Back home, we had tuna sandwiches for dinner, then escaped into Second Life for a while. Some good rp in Toxia (thanks Cerdwin and Bellatrix) as Labyrinth. blu_muse has some really wonderful screencaps from last night up. Just click here. To see them full size, click twice to reach the largest version. That first one — Labyrinth showing Cerdwin the light of a dying star, a star slain by Nareth — wow. Oh, and I should mention, I'll likely be putting out the first official call to the Sirenia Players this evening, so if you are on the list, you might want to be on the look-out for a communique. Sadly, there was also some very, very annoying out-of-character crap in SL last night, because some people simply cannot grasp that SL is not RL ("Real Life"), nor should it ever be used as a substitute for RL, and that the Story is god. When rping with me, everything serves the story. Everything. So, yeah, annoying. But, you have to let that crap roll off you and just keep going.

It's chilly and wet here today. So maybe I can avoid the distractions. All I have to do is write. The rest is irrelevant.

And yes, I am ignoring Independence Day, which should have been replaced this year, again, by a day of national shame, not pride.

Postscript (1:10 p.m.) — My thanks to robyn_ma for pointing out that Jesse Helms, the bastard from North Carolina, has died. Now that's something I can celebrate.