Caitlín R. Kiernan

Yes. I am on a Kate Bush kick.

It's a beautiful autumn-summer day out there, sunny and blue skies, the temperature at 70F. Nice. Have to get Outside today. Getting out of the house is mandatory on a day like this. I'm doing a good job, actually, of not keeping myself cooped up.

At 4 a.m., not sleeping (despite the meds), I was on Rift talking with a friend in Alaska, and he said it was midnight and the sun hadn't set. In Providence, the sky was just beginning to lighten. It was a marvelously surreal moment, especially considering I was doped and half asleep (but only half). By the way, I want to actually calculate the distance across the part of Telara we can see, the size of the landmass north to south and east to west. I don't think many people have paused to think how small it must be. At first, I estimated it might be the size of Rhode Island (37 miles x 48 miles long, 1,214 sq. mi.), but I'm beginning to think it may only be half that size or less. Spooky's worked out a way to get a firm estimate, which we will do this evening (because we are pathetic nerds). A fantasy MMORPG will be truly fucking amazing when it can offer a continent the size of, oh, say Australia.

Where was I?

Yesterday was as tedious as I'd expected. I didn't actually make any progress with the galleys for Two Worlds and In Between (and I'm not going to explain why, because it's a tedious explanation that's all about editing PDFs and Adobe software and me being a psuedo-Luddite). But things did get done. Vince sent me the initial pencils for his "Figurehead" illustration. I did some more tweaking on the ms. for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and sent the Really and Truly Final Manuscript away to my editor. I spent about an hour on the immensely tedious and long guest questionnaire for Readercon 22. I read "Figurehead" and "Untitled 35" aloud to Kathryn, and we marked the pages red. I talked with kylecassidy about what ravens who might be nuns would....

Sorry. Lost my train of thought. Spooky and I were talking about Houdini.

Last night, we did Kindernacht with hot dogs and Tom McGrath's Megamind (2010), which was really a lot of fun, but not as good as Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's similar Despicable Me (also 2010). Of course, one is not supposed to talk about whether or not Kid Night movies are any good, so long as they're fun. We picked the DVD up at Acme Video, since it was an excuse to go Outside. Also, Acme Video gives away free atomic fireballs. After the movie, we did, of course, play Rift. Mostly it was rp for me, though there was also a major incursion upon White Fall and the Chancel of Labors by the minions of Crucia, and Selwyn and Miisya helped to repel the bad guys.

Yesterday, I read the title story of Johnathan Thomas' Tempting Providence (Hippocampus Press). To be sure, it's a weird tale, but it's also a poignant travelogue/walking tour devoted to a finer and simpler and far more interesting Providence than has survived to the present day. I also read "A new unintan horned brontothere from Wyoming and evolution of canine size and sexual dimorphism in the Brontotheriidae (Perissodactyla: Mammalia)" in JVP. Speaking of reading, kittens, tomorrow I'll be announcing the June selection for Aunt Beast's Book Club.

---

On this day in 2007, I wrote:

I have been worrying a lot lately about my writing. It started when I reread Silk and looked through Tales of Pain and Wonder for the first time in ages. Sure, I'm a much, much better writer now, but is what I'm writing inherently better than what I was writing then? More importantly, is it about something more than telling stories? Almost ten years after it's original publication, I see lots of flaws with Silk I couldn't see in 1996 or 1998, and parts of it make me groan, but it has something to say, something it says, and for that I will likely always love it. This is even more true of ToPaW. It's true of The Dreaming. But is the same true of Threshold? Low Red Moon? I think so. And I know it's true of Murder of Angels, but I'm not so sure about Daughter of Hounds, even though I also know it's my best-written novel to date. One may write well — one may write exquisitely, even — and have nothing at all to say. Writing "The Ape's Wife" last month, this all seemed suddenly very important to me again. I fear that in the rush to meet deadlines and write enough to keep all the bills paid, somewhere along the way, I may have forgotten that it is not enough to tell a good story, or even to create characters who ring true. These are necessary accomplishments, but they are surely not sufficient. Art requires more than mere craft, more even than talent. It requires meaning. Heading into The Dinosaurs of Mars and Joey Lafaye, these thoughts will be my Beatrice (so to speak). There's something I feel I might have drifted away from, and I want...no, I need to get back to it again.

So, four years later, I can say I found an antidote for this anxiety and these worries, which was writing The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, no matter how much the effort has exhausted me. Also, it should be noted that, in June 2007, I was still suffering from the trauma of having written that unmentionably shitty novelization for Robert Zemeckis' butchering of Beowulf (2007)*. That Mordorean death-march ordeal (fuck you, Roger Avery) left me unable to write long-form for the better part of a year, until I began The Red Tree in April 2008. By the way, I'm still waiting on The Dinosaurs of Mars to reveal itself to me, and have come to accept that Joey Lafaye will likely never happen. You may always think of Beowulf as the novelization that murdered Joey Lafaye. At least the Beowulf gig sort of paid well. And at least you didn't need 3-D glasses to read the book. Seamus Heaney, forgive me.

So...now, today.

* And as bad as my novelization was, the movie was at least a hundred times more awful.

Some days, I haven't enough for a good blog entry. Some mornings, I have enough for three. This morning is of the latter sort. Full-on spring seems finally to have come to Providence. Sunny with a chance of thunderstorms today, and a bit warm in the House. I have the fan going in my office, and the window open.

There's a very nice new review of The Red Tree up at Green Man Review.

Also, Lou Anders emailed me the Publisher's Weekly review of Swords and Dark Magic, the anthology that includes my story "The Sea Troll's Daughter" (mentioned prominently in the review). Here it is:

Swords and Dark Magic Edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders. Eos, $15.99 paper (544p) ISBN 978-0-06-172381-0

Editors Strahan (Eclipse 3) and Anders (Fast Forward 2) present 17 original stories that recall the classic works of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. To earn the book’s subtitle of “The New Sword and Sorcery,” Gene Wolfe puts on literary airs (“Bloodsport”); Tim Lebbon contributes some of the graphic horror and moral twists of the New Weird (“The Deification of Dal Balmore”); and Caitlín R. Kiernan introduces a complicated heroine rescued by the ostensible villain (“The Sea Troll’s Daughter”). But most of the stories are more traditional tales of apprentice mages coming-of-age and down-on-their-luck mercenaries facing unexpected perils. Fans of the classics will appreciate the tie-ins to familiar series by Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, and Robert Silverberg, plus a “fully authorized” Cugel the Clever cameo by Michael Shea. (July)

And here's the cover from the Subterranean Press limited edition of the book. I'm very pleased that the cover art (by Dominic Harmon) was clearly inspired by "The Sea Troll's Daughter," a story which is, essentially my lesbian/feminist reworking of Beowulf:



---

Yesterday, we took advantage of the excellent weather to get out of the House. I'd not been Outside in about a week, what with all the work on Sirenia Digest giving me such a seemingly valid excuse not to leave. Spooky needed more beach glass for her jewelry-making endeavors, so we headed to West Cove, the best place we've found in Rhode Island for glass. As we made the familiar crossing of the Jamestown Bridge to Conanicut Island, over the West Passage of Narragansett Bay, we could see that the water was rough and choppy. There had been thunderstorms all morning. We drove to the ruins of Fort Wetherill. Instead of immediately going down to our usual spot on the beach, we spent some time exploring the granite cliffs just south of the sprawling concrete remains the fort (ca. 1940). In some places, the bluffs here tower a hundred feet above the sea. There's a clear view south and east to Beavertail. The wind was wild, but I got right up on the edge.

The rock here is a porphyritic granite (porhyritic meaning that the stone has large-grained crystals, such as feldspar or quartz, dispersed in a fine-grained feldspathic matrix or groundmass). According to my geologic map of Rhode Island, the age of the granite here is uncertain, and it's dated only as "?Late Proterozoic," so let's say 1,000 to 542.0 million years ago. That means the rocks are quite a bit older than the Cambrian and Ordovician slate and phyllite at Beavertail, two miles to the southwest.

Heading back towards west cove, walking northeast through the woods, we found a fantastic ravine the sea's cut into the granite, maybe thirty feet deep and some sixty or seventy yards long. The waves rush into it and crash loudly against the walls, throwing spray high into the air. A little north of the ravine, we investigated a beach we'd seen from a distance, but never tried to visit, as the path down to it is steep. I suppose we were feeling intrepid yesterday. The small "beach" (all cobbles, no sand) was alive with tiny wolf spiders, so we dubbed it "Spider Cove." We found a few interesting bits of glass there, before moving on to our usual beach farther north.

I needed to relax, clear my head, and let the sea soothe my nerves. But my mind was too filled with the news of what's happened and is happening and will be happening for a long time to come in the Gulf of Mexico, in the wake of the sinking of BP's Deapwater Horizon rig. I sat on the rocks, trying to hear and see nothing but the wind, the sound of the breakers, the colors of the day, but there was no way to push back the horrors of the oil spill. I felt an odd guilt, sitting there with the bay lapping at my feet. In less than an hour, I'd seen fish crows, cormorants, egrets, gulls, all manner of songbirds, a rabbit, a turtle; the woods and water and sky were alive. How easy it would be, I thought, to lose all this. How quickly a single mishap of technology could devastate and change this ecosystem, possibly forever. I stopped looking for beach glass and sat writing in my notebook:

How do I explain to someone that it is the ocean itself that I worship? Not some deity of the ocean, some anthropomorphic thing that resides in the sea, but the whole of the sea itself (Panthalassa). How do I explain how my "goddess" has been and is being defiled?

Anyway, I have some photos from yesterday (more tomorrow):

( 3 May 2010, Part 1 )

I seem to be unable to wake up today. I blame the Vitamin D from all that unexpected sunlight yesterday evening.

Yesterday, I did 1,123 words on "The Sea Troll's Daughter," which I think I'm almost halfway through. Or maybe a little less than almost halfway. Thereabouts. It's a very different piece for me. The closest I've ever come to doing this sort of "sword and sorcery" fantasy is the Beowulf novelization. Spooky's (humglum) liking it, and Sonya (sovay) is liking it, and that's usually a good sign. I've not shown it to anyone else yet.

I spoke with Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press this morning, before I was quite awake. So there's no telling what I said. I have been told that I can announce (drum roll, please) that subpress will be doing my next short-fiction collection, The Ammonite Violin and Others, which will include an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, and which will be a 2010 release. We also talked about Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, the third (and final) erotica collection, which I think is still planned for 2010, and about The Dinosaurs of Mars, which is, alas, still anybody's guess.

My thanks to everyone who's taken part in the latest round of eBay auctions. Spooky will be listing new items sometime this afternoon.

As I said (or did I?), the sun came out late yesterday afternoon, and that's the only thing that finally got me moving, that got the words flowing. After work, we drove down to Warwick and picked up Spooky's belated birthday present, a new turntable so that she can begin digitizing the squillion or so pieces of vinyl she has stored at her parents. The drive was good, getting out of the House, and seeing the sun and blue sky after all these days without either. It's sunnyish today, though I think thunderstorms are inbound.

Watch for today's micro-excerpt tweet from The Red Tree, over at greygirlbeast

So, yeah. Time to make the doughnuts.

Bad Lortab hangover this morning. The world is slick and gooey, and my stomach wants to rebel. Spooky woke at 6:30 ayem to find the bathroom flooded and water pouring in through the ceiling. As she was trying to mop it up, one of the guys from downstairs knocked. His bathroom, which is directly below ours, was also flooding. This morning, we're really not sure where the water originated from. Not upstairs. And we have to hope there won't be more of it when Hanna actually gets here tonight or tomorrow. So far, we've had only the first outer rain bands. Naturally, I slept through all the drama.

Yesterday, despite the heat (86F inside), I wrote a more than sufficient 1,606 words on Chapter Five of The Red Tree. I have decided, if I can just do 1,500 words a day on the book most days between now at the beginning of November, all will be well. It can't be half as unpleasant as last year's Forced March of Beowulf, since this is a book that I actually want to write (and I will try not to think about the fact that it will sell only a small fraction of the copies that the Beowulf novelization sold, much less will it be translated into umpteen million languages like Beowulf).

This morning, I have not even had breakfast, my stomach is a stormy sea, and all I seem to desire is whiskey and a pack of Camel's.

I did not leave the house yesterday. I'll try to get out this evening. Tuna sandwiches for dinner last night. Then unspeakable frustration regarding terraforming in Howards End. All I want are tunnels. Is that too bloody much to ask? Tunnels. Vacuities in the earth. I hope people in the rp group are keeping up with the notecards, because I've been sending quite a lot of them out. I'm getting a lot of good character proposals. So, thank you for that.

Some decent rp in SL last night, when I could no longer endure the tedium of not-building, so thank you, Joah. Truly, my opinion of Second Life...no, wait. Let me rephrase this. Truly, my opinion of the people who infest Second Life, preventing it from realizing its potential, has dropped to an all-time low. I've been struggling with this great idiot beast since May '07, because I see how SL could be used. Of course, ultimately, the Lindens are at fault, because they surely encourage the multiverse's overpopulation by morons who only want a chat room with a visual interface. What does it matter to Linden Labs, so long as people come. Any people will do. It doesn't matter how they use the place, so long as they do use the place. I suspect that Howard's End will be my last attempt at making SL work. It either will, or it won't, and if it doesn't, I'll nuke the sim and go back to whatever my life was before I slipped into that thunderous mess. Yes, this ayem, I have only pure hatred for most of SL, but for the handful of determined artists and writers and actors who are trying so hard to make it something worth our while, I still have sympathy. Rest assured, Howards End will never be a self-congratulatory, wankfest social club for those without a First Life.

My left arm, the one that I used to break my fall into Lionshead Chasm, it quite sore and stiff this ayem.

Oh, I registered Nebari.net for another two years yesterday. However, that was mostly to stop the domain from being squatted. Nothing's been done with the site since August 2007, and later this month I'm going pull the plug. I'm tired of paying $20 a month to keep it up and running. I fully intended to do this a year ago, and just never got around to it.

And I think that's quite enough for now. Maybe if I stick a fork in my eye...

One of the weirdest things (sensu Lovecraft et al.) about the move from Atlanta to Providence is trying to get used to the much earlier sunrise, brought about not so much by being nearer the eastern border of the Eastern Time Zone (presently EDT), but being at such a higher latitude. For example, tomorrow morning, in Atlanta the sun will "rise" (a misnomer and an optical illusion, of course) at 6:26 a.m. and set at 8:49 p.m. Yet here in Rhode Island, in Providence, the sun will rise at 5:10 a.m. and set at 8:22 p.m. The sunset differential is not so severe —— only twenty-seven minutes —— but the sunrise differential is far greater, a full hour and sixteen minutes. I first noted this in 2006, but it caught me off guard early this morning, when, at 3:45 a.m. Spooky said I should get to bed soon or the sun would be up. Weird. I think I went to bed about 4 a.m., and was asleep almost at once.

Yesterday, finally, I had something resembling a "normal" writing day. I thank the cooler weather, more than anything. I don't believe the thermostat went much higher than about 83F (and I had Dr. Muñoz in the office for a brief spell, so it was quite a bit cooler in here). I wrote 1,165 words on "The Melusine" for Sirenia Digest #31. That's a very decent, if not spectacular, writing day. Word count-wise. Of course, word count is only one way of measuring how successful any given writing day is, and it may be, truthfully, the least important. What matters is that I like what I wrote yesterday, that it was written well, and that I shall not have to do any significant revision on it.

And this brings us back around to the story I linked to yesterday about writers, even us mid-list types, being pushed to churn out a novel a year and the possible effect of this industry demand on quality. By the way, if you're trying to break into this market, if you think you want to be a working author (i.e., an author whose sole income is herhisits income derived from fiction sales, which means largely novel sales), you really, really ought to read this article. Anyway, yesterday jtglover commented:

I read that article and enjoyed it. I found it via a link that indicated that there had been some grousing in some writerly corners of the blogosphere about the article. I'm sure that there are people, even now, complaining about the audacity of any writer to demand the time to try to create art instead of just cranking out the closest-to-good story possible in the super-tight timeframes that All Real, Professional Writers deal with constantly. I get that there are regular timeframes involved when dealing with publishers and contracts and such, but it seems to me that little is more corrosive to a writer than to be told always to hurry, because nobody gets it right anyway, and who's foolish enough to try to "write well" anyway?

To which I replied, Nice. I may address this tomorrow. To which Mr. Glover replied:

I don't want to come across as a sycophant, but that would mean a lot to me. Right now I'm struggling through the first draft of what I hope will be my first completed novel, and I'm regularly torn about how quickly to write. Slowly (4-800 words/day) means I can get inside the characters' heads more easily, but I'm afraid of losing momentum. Quickly (800-1600 words/day) means I finish sooner and can "fix it" in the second draft, but the characters rarely come to life when I'm moving at that pace.

All I can do, of course, is write about this problem from the perspective afforded by my personal experience. I think of myself as a slow writer, though, often, I seem wildly productive. When I was writing for DC/Vertigo, for example, expected to produce a script a month, I sometimes would write three a month. Back then, my daily word count, on novels and short fiction was about 500 words/day. These days, it's up to about twice that, about 1,100 words on average, and my all-time record is something like 2,800 words in a single day. Anyway, yes, all in all, though I write a lot (because I do little else), I write rather slowly, and it is very, very hard, if not impossible, to do this book-a-year nonsense. Partly, this is because I do not write in drafts. I write a single draft, to which I make line edits. That's almost always been the case. What I write the first time around is usually what shows up on the printed page —— usually. First and second and third drafts are fine for people who need to write that way, but it's not the way I taught myself to write. I work on a sentence until it's as close to perfect as I can get it. Same for any given paragraph, and then I move along to the next. Does this slow me down? I don't know, because, after all, it seems to me loads of time is wasted in rewrites by authors who have learned to write in multiple drafts. Below is a list of my novels, to date, and how long I took to write each one:

The Five of Cups (nine months, '92-'93)
Silk (twenty-eight months, '93-'96)
Threshold (twenty-two months, '98-'00)
Low Red Moon (eight months, '01-02)
Murder of Angels (A complicated one, as I started it in '01, then shelved it, and went back to work on the ms. in '03, finishing it that year; offhand, I do not know how long it actually took me to write, but it required about three years to complete the finished ms.)
Daughter of Hounds (about fifteen months, '04-'06)
Beowulf (all told, about three months, '06-07, though the forced rewrites — the "Mordorian Death March" — went on for another three or four months afterwards; and yes, it was a better book before those rewrites)

Now, here you see a great degree of variation, from Silk, at twenty-eight months, to the Beowulf novelization, at maybe three months (I would disqualify the latter, as I was working from a shooting script for the movie and also had numerous earlier drafts of the script and the source material to guide me). Also, my novels usually start out slow, the writing of them, and then I end up doing the bulk of a ms. in the last four or five months, as the pieces fall into place. Point being, for me, the time varies wildly. And I would say, it's all about the time I need to write the book the way it needs to be written. Trying to force a writer to write faster is, in my opinion, idiotic, and it will almost always result in a compromise in quality. I write novels, and whether you think they are good novels or bad novels or mediocre novels, they are novels, not product. This is not manufacturing. There is no assembly line. There is what my mind can do, given the strictures of my health (both mental and physical) and other non-writing concerns and interferences. That's all I can do. If that's not good enough, I'm screwed. So far, it's worked out, though I know my editor would be happier if I could produce more regularly. I know my agent worries about this. I know, in a sense, it has held me back from gaining a wider audience. But it's the best I can do, which is all that can ever be fairly asked of any artist. So, when all is said and done, my advice is take the time you need. Artistically, getting it right is more important than getting it published, even if it means you'll never be published.

However, those of us who have —— I would say unwisely —— chosen fiction writing as a career must to some degree cater to the needs (or perceived needs) of our publishers and readers, and the deadlines they set for us. It is, I would say, a necessary evil, that schedule that comes along with contracts and an audience and money and promotion and actual, printed books. In an ideal world, readers (who i will never, ever call "consumers"), would understand that any given book requires X amount of time to be written, X being an indeterminable variable. So would publishers. And they would be patient and give us the time that is required. This, you do not need me to tell you, is hardly an ideal world. And a working writer must accept these deadlines, on some level, or get out of the game. Unless you're Thomas Pynchon. It's not an issue of whether the publishers are right or wrong. If you are lucky enough to have a publisher (and it is, mostly, luck, luck and perseverance), and if that's where some large percentage of the money that pays your bills comes from, then you accept this and live with it as best you can. I cannot produce a book a year, but I do try. After all, if I could write simply 500 words a day (my old standard), I could write a 100,000-word novel in only 200 days, easy as pie. Much less than a year. Of course, it's not really about the time it takes to put the words down on paper, but the time it takes to find the words in your mind, and there's the wicked, wicked catch.

Not much to say for yesterday, beyond the writing. The cool air was greatly appreciated. I went with Spooky to the market. Pasta salad for dinner. A great deal of unpacking, finally. Just after midnight, I allowed myself to go on Second Life, and I spent most of that time in the library in Toxia, in my usual place on the sofa. That was yesterday. And I need to wrap this up, but I wanted to mention that late today or sometime tonight or maybe tomorrow, I'll be starting our Queerest Auction Ever (QAE; but not, sadly, in the homosexual sense of the word "queer"), which will be two flaps (auctioned seperately) from cardboard boxes used in the move. Bored, I drew on each before we left Atlanta. Monster doodles. Seems a shame to throw them out, especially given how much more the move cost than we'd expected. I'll keep you posted, natch. Also, I want to repost the link to Spooky's Amazon wish list. Her birthday is June 24th this year. And every other year, I suppose...

Slowly retrieving some of that lost sleep from last week. A full eight hours last night. I'm feeling much, much better, thank you. Sleep deprivation is one of the worst things for me just now, and I've made a new resolution to be in bed by two ayem every night. I may not be asleep, but at least I'll be in bed.

Today, with luck, I will begin writing The Red Tree. I now have four and a half months to write the novel, and I'll easily lose two weeks of that to the move. Yesterday, I finished Michael E. Bell's Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires (2001), a really excellent book treating the folklore of the tuberculosis-related cases of "vampirism" from Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc. I first encountered the book at the Peace Dale Public Library (one of the most beautiful libraries in South County) in August 2006, while doing research there, and I scarfed a used copy of the book somewhere or another, but it's taken me this long to get around to reading it.

Yesterday, I also read "Ichnotaxonomy* of bird-like footprints: an example from the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic of Northwest Argentina" in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. After dinner (Spanish rice with chicken, pintos with jalapeños, fresh avocados and tomato), I did a nice bit of rp with Lorne, Brit, Nicholette, and Artemisia (er...Spooky) in the library in Toxian City. Then Spooky and I watched Danny Boyle's Sunshine for the fourth time. Later still, I organized the hard-drive on my old iBook (Victoria Regina) while she read me a couple more chapters of House of Leaves (this will be our third time through). That was yesterday, pretty much.

Most of the stress during the last couple of weeks has derived from our trying to find a place to live in Providence, a living space suited to our particular needs and my particular aesthetic. We thought we'd found something good in Elmwood, but it turned out not to be so good after all. Don't even get me started on the three front doors. But yesterday, Spooky's mother looked at an apartment near the Armory District, which we think is going to be the place. It's perfect. So, the stress level has lessened considerably. Now, I just have to contemplate the nightmare of packing and making the actual move. We'll likely leave Atlanta sometime between mid and late May, so, not much time left at all.

I've not left the house since we got back from the Colin Meloy show on Thursday night, mostly because the weather turned cold after the thunderstorms on Friday. The warm-up is coming slower than predicted. It's been a chilly spring. I don't think we've had a single day in the '80s (Fahrenheit) yet. Right now, it's 48F, but feels like 42F with the wind chill.

My thanks to David Kirkpatrick (corucia) for the following photo (behind the cut), taken in a local (for him) Barnes and Noble in Minneapolis. I've always been annoyed at authors who measure their success by how many inches their books take up on the shelves of a bookshop, but, after most of these novels went out of print two years ago, seeing them back, seeing that I presently have five novels and a novelization on the shelves (and that they appear to be in the "science fiction and fantasy" section, not "horror"), is somewhat reassuring, I must admit.

( Shelfage )

Oh, and I have this comment from reverendcrofoot, regarding the age of the narrator in The Red Tree: "See, the thing with age is unless the author says it directly it's really hard to tell. I would have never guessed Dancy's age if you hadn't told me...Make her whatever age you want, but just don't tell us how old she is...avoid it. It would be interesting to see the ages people guess."

It would be interesting, perhaps, but I am far too visual and specific in my writing to allow the age of a central character (or most minor ones) to go unstated. How Sarah Crowe will face the trials of the novel, who she is, and so forth, all that stems from the sum of her life experiences, which can be measured, in part, by her age. A twenty-year-old woman would very likely not cope with these experiences the same way that a forty-four-year-old woman would, and much of what concerns me as an author is how a character acts or reacts (truthfully, I would argue action and reaction are synonyms) in any given situation. That was one of the joys of writing "Salammbô Redux (2007)" for the 3rd edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, having the opportunity to go back and look at a character I first wrote as a preteen, now in her forties. So, interesting idea, but it would never work for me.

Oh, and I think today is the last day to vote in the 2008 Locus Poll & Survey. Many of my short stories are eligible, and Daughter of Hounds made the drop-down menu in the "Best Fantasy Novel" category.

Okay. Time for the juice of the bean.

* An ichnotaxon is a taxon — a family, genus, or species — based solely on evidence derived from fossil footprints (or other traces, such as the burrows left by marine animals). When I lived in Birmingham, back when I was still doing paleontology, I was often aided by Andy Rindsberg, a friend and inchologist, Curator of the paleontological collections of the Alabama State Geological Survey.

I woke about 7:30 this morning to the commotion of the most wonderful thunderstorm, rain coming down in great roaring sheets, lightning. I fell asleep again listening to the storm, but have no recollection of whatever dreams followed.

Yesterday afternoon, still without an idea for another vignette for Sirenia Digest #27, I got in touch with Sonya (sovay) and asked her to please toss a couple of ideas my way. The first few, I could see straight away, were doomed to become actual short stories, but then she gave me one word, "Snegurochka." Marvelous! Unfortunately, then I had the call from my agent regarding Joey Lafaye, and Spooky and I needed to proofread "The Steam Dancer (1896)" for Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, and there was eBay to be done...so, at the end of the day, I still had not begun a second vignette.

Though I'm not making the final decision until tomorrow, I think that Sirenia Digest #27 may be comprised of the one new vignette, plus two reprints from early issues. We have so many new readers this month, that will help to give them a more balanced idea of what to expect from the Digest. Of course, I also might miraculously produce a second vignette today, in which case, #27 would be two vignettes and a couple of reprints. Hopefully, everyone will be cool with whichever way this goes. This month has been a disaster, but it was being sick the last two weeks that really screwed things up good and proper. At any rate, expect #27 on Thursday or Friday.

We had a good walk yesterday afternoon, about a mile there and back again. We walked to Videodrome and rented Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose (aka, La Môme), and now I see that it really is a beautiful, brilliant film. Marion Cotillard's performance is sublime, and the makeup artists were, indeed, deserving of that Oscar.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions, which include a copy of the Japanese edition of the Beowulf novelization. Thanks. And because Amazon, with their "bargain books" boondoggle, is still making it rather difficult to find some of the new editions of my novels, the ones I will be judged by the sales of, here are the links again:

Daughter of Hounds

Silk

Threshold

Low Red Moon

Right, platypus. First coffee, then email...

Generally speaking, when seen from space, the earth is a blue planet. Not a green planet. I was thinking this some indeterminable number of weeks ago, after a barrage of "green" television commercials — everything from "green" house cleansers to "green" automobiles to "green" oil companies. Whatever genuine meaning the word might have ever held for environmentalists, it has now been co-opted and lost to doublespeak and marketing/PR strategists. However, since this world is actually a blue world, and not a green world, the only damage that has been done is that a lot of gullible (if, perhaps, well meaning) people have been suckered into believing that they're doing good when they're only adding more crap to the landfills and more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Yesterday, I did 1,132 words on the story that will not be called "Untitled 33," and came rather unexpectedly upon the ending. It's a vignette, which was, after all, the original purpose of Sirenia Digest. I only partly suspected I'd found the ending, but then Spooky read it aloud, and she said, "That's the end." So, there you go. I went ahead and sent it to Vince Locke to be illustrated. Today, I will try to find a second vignette for #27. Oh, and I've had several people email or comment that they don't mind if the digest is a little late, to which I reply, thank you, it's a kind and generous and appreciated sentiment, but just because my brain has decided to start having these stupid little electrical storms, it doesn't mean I'm going to start slacking off.

Yesterday, sovay asked for photos of the Japanese edition of the Beowulf novelization, and I meant to take some photos, but never got around to it. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow. I'm thinking of adding one copy of the Japanese edition to the eBay auctions. Also, if you intend to pre-order the 3rd edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, which comes with the FREE Tails of Tales of Pain and Wonder chapbook, perhaps you should do so before much longer, as I am told it will likely sell out soon.

Spooky made a marvelous Indian dinner last night — a brown curry with potatoes, carrots, and beef, along with nan and samosas. Later, Byron came by for Torchwood, and afterwards we talked for a while. It was the first time we'd seen him in a couple of weeks.

I take it as some bit of evidence that I have begun to heal from the idiocies of 2005 that I'm actually interested in the Oscar telecast this year. I've always been sort of an Oscar nerd, then in 2006, I just didn't care. In 2007, I simply forgot to watch, which had never happened before. But this year, I'm actually somewhat excited. It probably helps that there are so many good movies nominated, and that I've seen a fair number of them. Anyway, later today I'll do my obligatory Oscar post, my list of who I think ought to win.

Winter finally came with a fucking vengeance, and right when I began having the inevitable trouble with Joey Lafaye. Or there is no coincidence here at all, and the cold weather has brought the difficulties. Bitter cold for Atlanta. And wet and just vile. And this house is a sieve, not good in weather of this sort, no insulation to speak of, so hot baths are the only genuine way to escape the cold for a little while. But, it looks as though we have sun today, which should warm things up a little (even if it also means bottomless carnivorous skies).

As I have said before, I can only write, "Yesterday I did not write" so many times before I start wanting to gouge my eyes out with rusty grapefruit spoons. That's why there was no entry yesterday. But yesterday I think I finally found What Happens Next, which was nothing at all like what I thought would happen next, and if I am right and this is the scene I've been looking for, it will violently change the tone of this novel. It'll also mean I have to do a slight rewrite on the prologue. But, so far, it feels like what happens next. We shall see.

On Saturday, the post brought me six copies of the Italian translation of the Beowulf novelization, and I discovered that in Italy it was printed as a hardcover. Then, yesterday, the post brought a big box from HarperCollins with copies of the Portugese, Korean, and Polish translations. All three are trade paperbacks, and all three are more attractive than the little American mmp edition. But the Korean edition, which does not use the movie poster art for the cover, is absolutely beautiful. It even has glitter on the spine! And no, I have no idea what the hell glitter has to do with Beowulf, but damn it's a pretty book. I should also note that the Korean publisher was the only one who bothered to consult with me during the translation, and that there is, of course, irony in that the book recently had that very vocal Korean detractor on Amazon.com. I've never had any American edition of any of my novels look half so wonderful as this Korean translation (excluding, of course, the beautiful subpress editions). So, yeah, that was a welcome diversion, the novelization in all these many languages. I really want to see it in French and German now.

Last night, Spooky dragged me out into the cold, because I'd not left the house since Friday, before the coming of the snow. We had marvelously hot Thai food, and that helped, and then she drove me past the gargantuan snowman someone built in Freedom Park, which will likely take another week to melt.

Tonight is a big night for me in Second Life, as it is the night that my Dune character, Shahrazad al-Anwar, Fremen Naib, has her Taud, her Water of Life ceremony, entering the Sayyadina, undergoing the spice agony, changing the water for the spice orgy, and so forth. I am actually nervous. Like, stage-fright jitters. Plus, assuming Shah survives, she will have become the first Naib who is also her tribe's Reverend Mother (she's already the first female Naib). And there's all sorts of intrigue and weirdness, and all the factions (as observers) and Fremen from the other two Dune sims are invited...so, yeah, stage fright. So, a big night for Dune:Apocalypse this evening, and hence the Shai-Hulud icon for this entry. The ceremony begins at about 7 p.m. SLT, which is 11 p.m. CaST, so I have about ten hours and twenty minutes until the curtain goes up. I think someone's going to shoot video for YouTube, so hopefully I can link to that eventually.

Note that we have eBay auctions ending today, so please do have a look. Thanks!

Coffee's getting cold, so that's all for now. I must make the words. I must stop second guessing myself and write the words. Meanwhile, may Shai-Hulud clear the path before you.

There were plans for yesterday, a long road trip and "field work" for Joey Lafaye, but the weather turned shitty, and it's still shitty today. There was rain yesterday and last night, something that has become almost mythical here in Atlanta. A cold, stinging rain, and if it did that for a couple of months, it might save us from the Great Water Riot of 2008. Or not. Oh, and I was up way the hell too late on Friday night, until something like 4:30 ayem, and that also messed with my plans for yesterday. No rain today, just cold and grey.

Instead, I stayed in and began proofreading the galleys for Tails of Tales of Pain and Wonder. Spooky and I spent a couple of hours writing out a sort of prospectus for "The Crimson Alphabet," parts one and two. We have a least one word for each letter at this point. Several people said they wanted to see me do "The Crimson Alphabet," and no one said they didn't, so I interpreted that as a vote of confidence. Oh, and I managed to combine three boxes of paperbacks (Silk, Low Red Moon, and Beowulf) into only two boxes. They'll go to storage in Birmingham now. I washed my hair. That was the work I did yesterday instead of the work that I should have been doing yesterday. Oh, and I got a $10.56 royalty check, for "Bela's Plot" in Love in Vein II. Over the years, only a tiny handful of the 100+ short stories I've sold have actually earned royalties, and "Bela's Plot" is one of them.

Last night, we had dinner with Byron at the Vortex, then came back here and watched Badder Santa, which I must confess I loved. Quite a lot of films lately, and I can't recall if I've mentioned them all. Friday night, Spooky and I saw Daywatch (Dnevnoy dozor, 2006), which was beautiful and superbly dreamlike, but which didn't make much more sense to me from a narrative standpoint than did it's predecessor, Nightwatch (Nochnoy dozor, 2004). I think it's something about fundamental conventions of Russian filmmaking and/or storytelling that I fail to grasp. Which is to say, the problem is probably with me, not the films.

The latest round of eBay auctions continue, and please note that the auction for Letter X of Tales from the Woeful Platypus (complete with hand-sewn paisley platypus) ends tomorrow. I think Spooky's going to be listing a couple of new things today.

I learned on Friday that, in light of my recent health problems, my editor at NAL — Anne Sowards — has agreed to extend my due date on Joey Lafaye to June. Which is a huge relief.

Here we are, approaching the long cold death before the year is reborn, and so I must remind you of Cephalopodmas, which falls on December 22nd.

One last thing: Clarkesworld is doing a "favorite story of the year" poll, and if you happened to really love "The Ape's Wife," please take a moment to tick that particular box and let it be known. Thank you.