Caitlín R. Kiernan

Cooler and, more importantly, less humid, here in Providence. I actually had to put on a sweater this morning. We had several days of hot, spectacularly humid weather, so this comes as a relief.

Today, I very much need reader comments, if only to help me stay grounded. Thank you.

Not a lot of progress on the book though. On Thursday, I wrote 1,081 words, about normal for me, for any given day. But then yesterday, a combination of self doubt and misbehaving blood pressure (thank you, meds) left me such a mess that I only wrote 14 words (I shit you not). Today, I'll try to do better.

But the truth is, almost a year after conceiving of the story that has, eventually, become The Drowning Girl, and just a couple of months shy of the two-year anniversary of having finished The Red Tree, it isn't going well. It's hardly going at all. Do I know why? I have a bucketful of conjecture, but no, I don't know for sure. I only know it's put me in a truly terrifying place.

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Lots of thoughts yesterday on convention in novels. Conventions in first-person narratives. Such as, how so few readers pause to consider the existence and motivations of the "interauthor." When you're reading a first-person narration, you're reading a story that's being told by a fictional author, and that fictional author— or interauthor —is, essentially, the central character. Their motivations are extremely important to the story. The simple fact that they are telling the story, in some fictional universe, raises questions that I believe have to be addressed by first-person narratives. Why is the interauthor writing all this down? How long is it taking her or him? Do they intend it to be read by others? Is it a confessional? Reflection? A warning? Also (and this is a BIG one), what happens to the interauthor while the story is being written, especially if it's a novel-length work of fiction?

In my case, it takes anywhere from a few months (The Red Tree, Low Red Moon) to years (my other novels) to write a novel. I assume this is the case for most people who sit down to write something that's seventy- to one-hundred-thousand words long. These are not campfire tales. These are major undertakings by their interauthors. So, the narrators stop and start writing the documents over and over and over while it's being written. But rarely are we shown what happens to her or him while the story is being told (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a brilliant exception, and sure there are other exceptions). Some things will almost certainly occur that are important enough that they will intrude upon the narrative.

A first-person narrative occurs in a minimum of two time frames: the present (when the story is being written down) and the past (when the story occurred).

And it baffles me that so few readers or writers pause to consider these facts, and that so few authors address these problems in the text. A first-person narrative is, by definition, an artifact, and should be treated as such. Rarely do I use the word "should" when discussing fiction writing.

The other thing I thought about a lot yesterday was the convention of chapters, especially as it applies to first person and the interauthor. Does the interauthor actually bother dividing her story into chapters, especially if she's only writing for herself? If so, why? It seems patently absurd to me. She might date each section of her manuscript. She might divide sections with hash tags or asterisks. But chapters? No. That's absurd.

If I can ever get The Drowning Girl written, it may have no chapter divisions. To use them would be a ridiculous adherence to convention that makes no sense within the context of the artifact of the story.

One more thing: Most readers do not want to read books that are, to put it bluntly, smarter than they are. Such readers get very pissed, and resentful, and interpret their emotional reactions as a mistake or shortcoming on the part of the author (transference). This phenomenon will never cease to amaze and confound me.

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Last night, we watched Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell (2009). It was appropriate to kid night: over-the-top goofy camp. Not sure if I liked it or not. It was fun, I suppose. Spooky probably liked it better than I did. For me, it was the sort of film I mostly enjoy while I'm watching it, but pretty much forget as soon as it's over. We also watched another episode of Nip/Tuck. We finished Season Two on Thursday night. And I have to say, the last episode of Season Two is one of the best, most-harrowing hours of television I have ever seen. I'm very glad I didn't give up on this show halfway through Season One, as I almost did.

Not much reading. It's almost impossible for me to read fiction while trying to write a novel.

And now...another fucking day...

On this day last year, The Red Tree was released. And here I am, a year later, with no Next New Novel finished. Indeed, it's only barely begun. Of course, I know I have perfectly valid reasons for this. But the little voice in my head, the one that keeps me awake nights, keeps telling me I'm a bum, and there's no excuse, and anyone can write a book in a year...and so forth. But I can only do what I can do. I suspect the little voice believes I have it within me to be a factory. I wish it were right. However, I know I don't. But there's not much point in bemoaning this long, slow composition. It comes when it comes, and all the threats and deadlines on earth can't make it come sooner. This is the best I can do, but I still have to try to do better, and hope for patience from my editor.

Mornings and most of the afternoon, for weeks now, I've been struggling with very low blood pressure. I spend half the day sick, and only start feeling okay towards sunset. Turns out, it was because two of my meds cause low blood pressure, and I've been taking both at bedtime. Last night, I only took one, and I woke up feeling fine this morning. I'll take the second drug around 2 p.m., and hopefully the problem will be solved.

We begin to grow old. We talk about medication in our blogs.

Yesterday was an oddly productive day for someone who was supposedly taking a day off. After the journal entry, I answered email. After that, I went back to work on the painting I've been trying to finish. And then I spent about an hour on the Table of Contents for the "Best of CRK" volume. Turns out, my very tentative ToC is already up to 181,203 words (out of a target word count of 200k). So, I'm going to have to shuffle, and choose carefully from here on. Then I went back to work on the painting. Then the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology arrived. I read for a while and almost fell asleep. I went back to work on the painting, and feared I'd made a horrible mess of it. I stopped and took a bath and washed my hair. I went back to the painting again, and fixed what I'd hated (I dither as much while painting as while writing).

After dinner, I overindulged in rp in Insilico. But there were two great scenes, and my thanks to Nina, Hibiki, and Dr. Ang Faith (and Jake the hovering robot). Before bed, we watched two more episodes of Nip/Tuck. This show confounds me. Every time I think I'm fed up with rich white people whining about their problems, Nip/Tuck gets amazing again. I got to bed about 3 a.m., and dozed off to Blade Runner.

And that was yesterday.

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The new JVP (Vol. 30, No. 4) includes the paper "Torosaurus Marsh, 1891, is Triceratops Marsh 1889 (Ceratopsidae: Chasmosaurinae): synonymy through ontogeny" by John Scannella and Jack Horner. Unlike most papers in JVP, this one's been getting a lot of press, and like most science that gets a lot of press, the story has often been misinterpreted by the media. Late last night, William Gibson tweeted, "No, Virginia, there never was a Triceratops." And I found myself correcting him, which was surreal, indeed.

Two things about this paper (since it seems to have caused such a fuss). First off, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, by which all biologists (neobiologists and paleobiologists) have to comply, dictates that whenever a situation like this one arises— one where a single animal has been given two or more names —the first proposed name has priority over all later names. Later names become junior synonyms. The object of this is to preserve taxonomic stability and avoid confusion in the scientific literature. So, in this case, the name Triceratops, erected in 1889, is conserved, and the name Torosaurus, erected in 1891, is abandoned. Which is to say, "No, Virginia, there never was a Torosaurus." Only, this isn't really an accurate way of looking at the problem.

People are used to looking at species as static entities. But biologists work with species (and all other taxonomic units— the case of Triceratops is a genus-level problem) as hypotheses. And any given hypothesis may be discarded by future discoveries. That is, the name Triceratops is a hypothesis seeking to explain a collection of seemingly related fossils of a Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur. The hypothesis says that all specimens of Triceratops are more closely related to one another than they are they are to any other genus of chasmosaurine dinosaur. But, like all hypotheses, it can be falsified in light of future discoveries. In this case, the discovery of new fossils giving us a more complete picture of Triceratops as a living population of animals, and allowing us to realize that the morph we used to call "Torosaurus" is actually only the very mature form of Triceratops. As an hypothesis, "Torosaurus" appears to have been falsified. Now, it's possible that Scannella and Horner are wrong, and that future discoveries and/or research of old discoveries will show that Triceratops and "Torosaurus" really are two taxa (though I've read the paper, and this seems unlikely). All hypotheses are provisional. Nothing is ever certain. Never. The best argument may be in error. That's how science works, even if the press seems unable to grasp this.

And it's time I get to work. The platypus is growling, and the mothmen are livid. Here are a few more photos from Monday, taken at Spooky's parents' farm:

( 2 August 2010, Part Two )

I am painfully not-yet-awake. I seem to have suffered some bizarre reverse insomnia. I got to sleep just fine, around three a.m., but woke around nine, and only dozed fitfully afterwards, jerking awake every five or ten minutes, until I finally got up about ten. Blegh. Not how I needed to begin this day.

It's going to be a scorcher here in Providence today.

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Yesterday, I wrote 1,143 words on Chapter One, falling somewhat short of my 1,500-word-a-day goal. Mostly, this was because I spent an hour and a half reworking portions of what I wrote on Thursday. The novel has been entirely changed by the impromptu "workshop" at Readercon last weekend, and hopefully for the better. I'll post details when I am farther along, deeper into this first chapter and more certain this new direction is working.

My hands are so dry.

I have not yet received my copies of The Ammonite Violin & Others, but I'm told they started shipping from subpress yesterday, so if you preordered, your books are on their way (unless you preordered from Amazon, which is always a little slower on deliveries).

I think that I may be writing "The Yellow Alphabet" this month, for Sirenia Digest 56. I've been wanting to do it for quite some time, to complete the triptych I began with "The Black Alphabet" and then continued with "The Crimson Alphabet." But first, I need to make substantial progress on Chapter One of the novel.

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About six-thirty p.m., When the writing was done yesterday, and also the reading aloud what had been written, Spooky and I drove north and west to Woonsocket. I've always needed to "location scout" for stories and novels, to ground at least some part of them in a place I have actually visited. We'd not been in Woonsocket since the summer of 2004, when I was scouting locations for Daughter of Hounds. We stopped at Thundermist Falls, though the sun was setting fast, and I knew Thundermist Falls wasn't the spot I was looking for. Still, the Blackstone River crashing down from the dam's spillways to the rocks below is irresistible. On the south side of the bridge we spotted a large turtle (Deirochelyinae incertae sedis) getting the last rays of the day, and also a muskrat clambering about on the rocks.

We left Woonsocket and followed the river, driving a little farther north, across the state line into southern Massachusetts to Millville. We stopped on a bridge between another (smaller) dam and two railway trestles. Then we drove on through Millville, a town very possessed of that decayed, haunted New England feel. We followed dark, tree-shrouded roads to the Blackstone Gorge, which we reached just before sunset. And as soon as I saw the little dam and the wide, still river backed up behind it, the woods pressing in on either side, the marshy banks, I realized I'd found the place I was searching for. Eerie and beautiful in equal measure. Something deeply unsettling about the glassy surface of the river above the dam. This is where the novel begins, or at a spot just northwest of here. We sat a while, watching the crescent moon rise over the trees. We'll be going back, this evening or maybe tomorrow, because there's more I need to see. But it was a very successful trip. We left Blackstone Gorge about eight p.m. and headed back to Providence. I took fifty-three photos, and there are six behind the cut (they're a little hazy, as the camera settings were off). I'll get more up later:

( 16 July 2010 )

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Back home, after dinner, we watched Niels Arden Oplev's Män som hatar kvinnor (2009; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), which was very, very good. I'm very taken with Noomi Rapace. And after the movie we read through what I've written so far on Chapter One once more before bed. Just before sleep, I read some of S.T. Joshi's The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008); I'm having dinner with Joshi next week.

A rainy day here in Providence, and the high today is forecast at 58F, which is something of a change from the freakish low nineties of Wednesday. The sun will be back tomorrow, and the world is going green.

Yesterday, I wrote only 581 words on Chapter 1 of The Wolf Who Cried Girl. I'd have probably made it past a thousand, had I not felt the need to rewrite Everything Thus Far, so that the narrator is delivering her tale in past tense, instead of present tense. "This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She is walking down the road." became ""This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She was walking down the road." These are not actual sentences from the book, but rather rough approximations to illustrate the edit. I intended to explain here why I made the change, and how it was not necessarily the right thing to do, but I find I just don't have the requisite motivation. Too few people comment, which leads me— perhaps fallaciously —to suspect far fewer read the blog than once did. And, besides, I've never been much for talking shop, talking the mechanics of writing.

And there's this other matter. For the record, speaking as the author, The Red Tree does not have a "twist ending." Of course, that fact, and my stating that fact, will not prevent Amazon.com "reviews" of this sort:

I was able to figure out the twist ending less than halfway through.

Which is a neat goddamn trick, I'll admit, given that even I don't know precisely what happened to Sarah Crowe. I'm not usually fond of "twist endings," and I almost never employ that device in my own fiction. At the end of the novel, the reader is left, quite intentionally, with an inability to determine what has and has not been experienced by Sarah, what she might have imagined and what might be "real," where reality begins and ends, and all manner of other things. But a twist ending would require a concrete outcome of one sort or another (Bruce Willis is dead, To Serve Man is a cookbook, etc.), and that sort of ending is plainly lacking, by design. So...this "reviewer" is, at the very least, mistaken. Revelations of uncertainty do not a "twist ending" make.

I fucking hate snitty readers who are more interested in appearing world-weary and cleverer-than-thou than in paying attention to the book they're reading. I do not write books for these sorts of people.

I should wrap this up before I dig the hole any deeper.

Here are a couple of photos from Tuesday, a breath of spring after a hard winter:

( 6 April 2010 )

Today, the meteorologists say we will reach the low eighties here in Providence. Actually, we have already. The temperature has already risen to 81F (up from 74F in the last hour).

Yesterday was, more or less, another fruitless day of staring at the iMac, trying to will into existence words that aren't coming. I can only hope for better today. I can only ever hope. And sit. And stare. I see the beginning so clearly, but the words keep slipping through my fingers. Yesterday, I erased almost everything I'd written on Monday. About 4 p.m., Spooky pulled me out of the House. It was too beautiful a day to spend sitting here, not writing.

Outside, I was pleasantly surprised at how much the city has greened just since I was out on Sunday. It's come on very suddenly, all these blossoms and the sprays of yellow green in the trees. We took one photo, which I'll post day after tomorrow, when I'm done with the photos of the old mill. We drove south, down I-95, and past Warwick Mall, which took so much damage in the flood. The place is surrounded by work crews and machinery. Last I heard, 4,000 jobs were lost in the flood, and this in a tiny state that already had a 13% unemployment rate.

And then I did something I pretty much never allow myself to do. I indulged in "retail therapy" at Newbury Comics. My version of retail therapy is a bit different than most people's, I suspect. For me, it's an issue of spending money I cannot really afford to spend on things I can live without, in an effort to guilt trip myself into working harder. Sometimes it works. Yesterday, Newbury Comics was having its 32nd anniversary sale, so everything was 32% off, which at least minimized the damage. We picked up three CDs— Jónsi's Go (Jónsi is the vocalist for Sigur Rós), the Evelyn Evelyn CD, and Her Majesty The Decemberists, because somehow I didn't have a copy. We also got three DVDs— the new Sherlock Holmes, Enchanted, and the remake of Deathrace. Oh, and the first issue of Felicia Day's The Guild comic from Dark Horse, because you cannot be in the only WoW guild with a comic and not read said comic. I was very good, and did not get the Severus Snape/Bellatrix Lestrange lunchbox...even though it was 32% off.

We made it back to Providence about six p.m. There was leftover spaghetti for dinner. Later, there was cheesecake with fresh strawberries on top. I had some very good rp in Insilico (thank you, Blair) with the twin "daughters" of Xiang 1.0, Nanyah (Xiang 2.0a) and Victoria (now Maajida, Xiang 1.5), and did a couple of battlefields in WoW as Morskalíi, my Draenei death knight. It was an evening of virtual distractions.

As my days go, a bit of fluff, all in all. I'm hoping what I needed was a bit of fluff.

Here are more photos of the old mill in Dayville, CT, and these focus primarily on the collapsed roof. I think I may have a short story about the mill germinating in my head. But now, I go to make another attempt at finding my way into The Wolf Who Cried Girl:

( 4 April 2010, Pt. 3 )

Another warm and sunny morning in Providence. This chair and this window and this desk are far more pleasant places to be when there is sun coming in through the window, and when it's not freezing outside.

And any day that begins with an email from my agent informing me that a "scary cease-and-desist order" is being sent to an unscrupulous peddler of cheaply printed POD "books," one who has recently been offering an unauthorized edition of one of my short-story collections via Amazon...well, a day like that must hold some promise.

Also, the pastel, leporine horror of Zombie Jesus Day has passed, and that's always a good thing.

So...maybe things are looking up. Never mind that I've already been barraged today with news of the death of the Aral Sea, and of a Chinese oil tanker that's about the break apart on the Great Barrier Reef, and...never mind.

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Yesterday, it very quickly became obvious that I was too ill from the Ambien and not having slept to hope to get anything written. Instead, Spooky and I left the House about 3 p.m., and retraced the route we'd driven on Saturday night. We left Rhode Island on the Hartford Pike, and drove as far west into Connecticut as Pomfret, in Windham County. Saturday, we'd turned north here, at the intersection of the Hartford Pike and Route 97. Yesterday, we turned south, onto Wolf Den Road, which skirts the western edge of Mashamoquet State Park. For me, this sort of research is pretty much the same as "scouting locations" for a film. That's how I think of it, anyway. It serves the same purpose. Finding the places where scenes in a novel will occur. Standing there, smelling the air, getting to know it as well as I can. We drove south on Wolf Den Road to Brooklyn Road, then circled back north on Valentine Road to the Hartford Pike. The woods were magnificent, just slipping into spring. I spotted white oaks and red maples and mountain laurel. The sky was wide and bottomless, that hungry blue laid out overhead and the sun blazing alabaster. This is where the novel begins.

Before reaching Pomfret, we stopped to examine an old mill in the Dayville district of Killingly. We'd noticed it on Saturday night, but in the darkness it had been little more than a hulking shape. We're both fascinated by industrial ruin, so we had to have a better look. The mill sits just south of Dayville Pond, and Five Mile River winds by on its eastern edge. The site is fenced off, so there was no danger of us actually entering the treacherously dilapidated structure. We did notice that a great section of roof had collapsed. And a little later, when we stopped for coffee, we noticed a local newspaper headline that read, "Part of roof collapses at vacant mill: 40-foot section caved in on Friday." So, the day before we first saw the mill, the roof had collapsed, which seemed somehow oddly ominous. Back home, Spooky found a bit about the mill online. It opened in March 1883, as the Sabin L. Sayles Company, a manufacturer of woolen goods. In 1895, it became the Dayville Woolen Company, which in 1902-1903 was incorporated as the Assawaga Company. Finally, in 1939, the mill was purchased by a German wire manufacturer, "...William Prym and Company and began manufacturing straight pins, safety pins, cover buttons, snap fasteners, and hooks and eyes." So ended its long history as a textile mill. Near as we can discover, the William Prym Company ceased operations in Dayville in 1995, and the mill has sat vacant for fifteen years. It was recently purchased by a Pomfret businessman, who planned its renovation, though I do not know to what end. We took something like sixity photos of the mill, some of which I'll post.

Driving west, we listened to the Smiths and Massive Attack. Heading home, David Bowie. We made it back to Providence about 7 p.m.

Damn, my coffee is cold, and there are too many sweaters in my office. Five is too many. Anyway, photos behind the cut, and will be more in later entries:

( 4 April 2010 )

A sunny morning here in Providence. The office window (well, one of two) is open, and there's a Siamese cat sitting on my desk, watching whatever there is Outside to watch.

Today will be a day on which I make a new beginning for the Next Novel. That's my hope.

Yesterday, conversation about The Wolf Who Cried Girl, and I answered a great mass of accumulated email, and agreed to do an interview for Clarkesworld, and I bowed out of two anthologies (because, presently, there's only time for the novel and Sirenia Digest), and I lay on the bed with Hubero while Spooky read me the first chapter of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962; one of the most beautiful books I know).

This morning, I am weary of modernity.

And I'm wondering how the new crop of teens and twentysomethings became so afraid of emotion and the expression thereof.* Did their parents teach them? Did they learn it somewhere else? Is this a spontaneous cultural phenomenon? Are they afraid of appearing weak? Is this capitalism streamlining the human psyche to be more useful by eliminating anything that might hamper productivity? Is it a sort of conformism? I don't know, but I could go the rest of my life and never again hear anyone whine about someone else being "emo," and it would be a Very Good Thing.

Could anything be more inimical to art than a fear of emotion, or a fear of "excessive" emotion, or a reluctance to express emotion around others? No, of course not. Art can even best the weights of utter fucking ignorance and totalitarian repression, but it cannot survive emotional constipation.

I want a T-shirt that says, "Art is Emo." We live in an age where people are more apt to believe a thing if they read it on a T-shirt.

Last night we watched the new episodes of Fringe and Spartacus: Blood and Titties. Very enjoyable, on both counts.

Now, the platypus calls my name. Here are three photos from Thursday:

( 1 April 2010 )

*The suggestion has been made that they are so much expressing fear as contempt, and I am open to that possibility, though fear and contempt often go hand in hand.

Which is to say, Monsieur Insomnia came back last night. His return was fully expected. I rarely get more than one good night every two weeks or so. Just enough my heart won't explode and rob Monsieur of his sleepless play pretty. Hard rain lat night, and hard rain this morning. We lay awake last night (my insomnia often means Spooky doesn't sleep, either), listening to a Very Loud Drip somewhere just outside the bedroom window. Today, We hear that New England was stricken with a truly terrible storm last night, and today we have flood warnings, but I can only testify to the ferocity of that one drip. Ah, but there is good news, too. Today the world has returned the Caitlín Standard Time (originally, it was called Caitlín Stabilizing Time). I will no longer be one hour early for everything.

No writing yesterday, just a lot of writing about writing. We left the House, venturing Outside in the truly foul weather, all the way to the Athenaeum on Benefit Street (ca 1838), because, sometimes, being there helps jog something loose when my brain has seized up. I took the iBook and sat downstairs and stared at the three sentences I wrote on Friday. I know they have to go, that they are, in fact, preventing me from moving on. They must be destroyed, erased, cut and pasted into a morgue file— whatever —so that I can start over. But I could not summon the requisite courage yesterday. So, instead, I sat and made notes, and more notes, and still more notes, and pretended that was writing. At least the Athenaeum is a very pleasant place to be unable to write, unlike this office. Oh, and Spooky found a copy of The Red Tree under "new fiction," which pleased me tremendously, to have one of my books there in that grand old library where both Poe and Lovecraft studied. I took pictures, mostly upstairs (behind the cut):

( 13 March 2010 )

Nothing much to last night. We watched the new Caprica, a series that gets better every week. I bit my tongue, and it still hurts. We played WoW, mostly questing in Coldara and the Nexus. I spent some time editing the roleplay transcript from Friday night (which turns out to be twenty-pages long).

Every now and then, someone writes a review that changes, to one degree or another, the way I look at something I've written. These are the best reviews, the ones that make me sit up and say, "Oh, yes, that's what I was trying to say, only, I had no idea I was trying to say that. But I must have been, at least subconsciously, because there it is, plain as fucking day." I received an email containing one such review last night, of The Red Tree. It also described me as "...Algernon Blackwood’s great-granddaughter describing what happened in the forest behind Hill House...", which, of course, made me smile. I'll release the name of the reviewer, and may post a long excerpt from the review later, after I've spoken with its author. It was the second-best thing about yesterday, right after finding a copy of the novel at the Athenaeum.

Finally, before I sign off and deal with those three sentences, I have a question from the comments to yesterday entry. jacobluest writes, "Just finished Threshold...I've been working my way 'backwards' through your books...question here if you can answer it: did your concept of the ghouls themselves evolve, or have they remained consistent throughout these stories? I'm trying to figure out if the beings of wire and feather, spindle-legged and scarecrowed, are of the same ilk as Madam Terpsichore. Is Threshold's hitchhiker a Soldier, or a Bailiff? Or has the taxonomy evolved?"

To which I reply, no, the "stick dogs" of Threshold (and "Rats Live on No Evil Star") are not the same sort of beings as the ghouls of the later works. That they both have canine features is coincidence, or convergence, or evidence of some underlying phobia or philia I may have for dog-like things. As for the hitchhiker, again, no, he bears no connections to the Bailiff or the Children of the Cuckoo (such as Soldier, Scarborough Pentecost, or Starling Jane). The hitchhiker was an avatar of the thing below Red Mountain, which was also the thing Dancy fought in Shrove Wood.

And now, I try again....

Scary stuff for a Thursday morning. "An unprecedented extreme in the northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation has driven a strong direct connecting current between the Gulf Stream and the West Greenland current."

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This is me writing about not writing. Four days after I "typed" the title page for The Wolf Who Cried Girl, I've still not found my way into the beginning. I cannot even figure out if there should be a prologue or not. I suspect not, though omitting one, in this instance, creates a cascade of structural problems within the novel.

Still a great deal of ice and snow here in Providence.

I'm not sleeping well, though I am, at least, sleeping.

I'm back to that place where I'd rather be anyone but me. Withdrawal into alternate lifelines and avatars. Not into easier lives, or personalities, mind you; a withdrawal into those not so choked by this particular monotony.

The Audible.com contracts were located at the offices of the Audible.com editors. I think that's what I have to show for good news for this week thus far. And I cling to splinters these days.

Swings through the tunnels,
And claws his way.
Is small life so manic?
Are these really the days? (David Bowie, "A Small Plot of Land")

And then there's that other sort of unproductive writing day. The sort when you do actually write, only to discover, often on the very same day, that what you've written is not suitable to your present needs. That was yesterday. I spent a couple of hours producing more than three hundred words. They were even good words. Just not the words I needed for the story I'm trying to find my way into. So, I discarded them. I'd written:

There are stories that have no proper beginning. Stories for which no convenient, familiar “Once upon a time…” praeambulum exists. They may, for instance, be contained within larger stories, interwoven with the finest of gradations, and so setting them apart is a necessarily arbitrary undertaking. Let us say, then, that this story is of that species. Where it truly began is not where we will start its telling, for to attempt such a thing would require a patience and the requisite time for infinite regression. I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent every day of her life on dry land. At once, the tumult of a hundred questions about how such a thing ever came to be will spring into the reader’s mind. What is the nature of the sea’s womb? With what or whom did she or he have congress to find himself or herself with child? What of the midwife? What is the gestation time of all the oceans of the world, or its sperm count, when considered as a single being? And, while we’re at it, which being, and from which pantheon, do I mean when I say “the sea”? Am I speaking of the incestuous union of Oceanus and his sister Tethys? Do I mean to say Poseidon, or Neptune, Ægir and Rán, or Susanoo of the Shinto, or Arnapkapfaaluk of the Inuit?

I mean only to say the sea.

The sea had a daughter, but she was orphaned. She grew up in a city of men, a city at the mouths of two rivers that flowed down into a wide bay, fed by other rivers and dotted by more than thirty rocky, weathered islands. Here she was a child, and then a young woman. Here, she thought, she would grow to be an old woman. She’d never desired to travel, and had never ventured very far inland. She had seen photographs of mountain ranges, and read descriptions of the world’s great deserts, and that was sufficient.

And I do quite like that. I expect, someday, when the digest is not running so very late, I'll come back to it. It is the beginning of a story I haven't presently got the time to write. So, like I said, I discarded it. I have a "vignette morgue" file into which such things are consigned. It's an orphanage for sentences. And then I wrote an additional six hundred words or so on a piece I'm calling "The Bone's Prayer," and it has a good beginning, and a nice epigraph, so I'm hoping it's going to prove, today, to be what I need it to be.

I've got to get to work. By some damnable miracle, I slept until 11 a.m. this morning. I desperately needed the sleep, almost eight hours, but not at the expense of time that should be spent working. Oh, and Spooky has posted photographs of Sméagol, doing Sméagol stuff (or something).