Caitlín R. Kiernan

Comments!

The thing about waking up without a house full of photographers, actors, and "oh shit!" girls is that you soon realize you have to make your own coffee. Well, Spooky has to make our own coffee. She won't let me near the Amazing Hal 9000.5 Caffeinator. Or maybe I'm just afraid of that huge and glowing blue camera eye. Point is, we had to make our own coffee. Spooky came near to violence.***

Here are links to this weekend's entries, because I know most people missed them, and there's some grand "sneak peeks" at what we were doing and what will eventually be the book trailer for The Drowning Girl and kylecassidy's Stills From a Movie That Never Existed. First, we have Friday. And then there's Saturday. And, at last, Sunday. Understand, these stills are only a hint at the incredible coolness of the weekend and what was accomplished, and you'll begin to understand.

I think my favorite moment of the weekend, though, was at Rolling Dam in Blackstone, Massachusetts. In our enthusiastic foolhardiness, Brian, Kyle, Sara, and I had crawled down the steep rocky bank to a "relatively" calm bit of water behind a fallen log, and Sara had emerged nude and reptilian from the freezing tanin-stained depths, and we'd packed up all the cameras, and were breathing a collective sigh of relief that no one was swept away by the wild river. And then Kyle, he triumphantly declares, "We rule the toads of these short forests and every newt in Idaho!" I think he was quoting someone or something else, but they were appropriately cryptic words, all the same. Yeah, our afternoon by the Blackstone River even beat out standing in a torrential rainstorm Friday night, trying to get a shot, looking and feeling like maybe we were stranded in the jungles of Manila in an outtake from Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) while Typhoon Olga did her best to drown us. Though, the afternoon at Moonstone Beach was pretty goddamn special, too. Especially when the rainbow appeared over Imp and Eva's heads.

Oh, and the eBay auctions to come. Begin drooling now. Props! Signed!

Again, and again, and again, thank you everyone.

Last night, after readingthedark departed (the last to go), Spooky and I were too tired to breathe. I made a blog entry, we did a little halfhearted straightening up of the house. But we soon discovered we were too tired to move. So, we crawled off to the bedroom and streamed last week's episode of Fringe (fucking marvelous!!!), then the first episode of American Horror Story (there's potential here; we'll see), and then another episode from Season Four of Mad Men (we're trying to make Season Four last as long as possible, rationing after gorging on Seasons 1-3). Then we read, each to ourselves, until we fell asleep, sometime after three ayem.

And now that the grand troupe of people is gone, I have to begin to get my head back into work. Maybe take today to decompress and reorient myself. But, yeah. Work. A lot of work. Immediately. Well, if tomorrow counts as "immediately."

Laurie Anderson is playing in Providence on Saturday night, and we're debating whether or not we'll go. Spooky's seen her live twice, but I never have.

Oh, and thanks, Steven, for the new Brown Bird CD (and T-shirts!). And thank you, niece, for the care package. It reached me.

Also! Just got an email from Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press, who writes: "We *should* start shipping copies of Two Worlds and In Between late this week, if all goes well. You might want to let your readers know that we're now down to the last 50 copies of the trade hardcover." Listen up, kittens. These are the final hours!

And now..this day.

*** NOTE: I do not actually drink coffee anymore, having forsaken it for Red Bull; but Kathryn can't live without it.

I want T-shirts made to promote The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. They'll read "Imp didn't die for your sins. She had better things to do."

But that's too wordy, isn't it? No, wait. It's only forty-seven characters, or fifty-eight with spaces. I figure the attention spans of human beings are still capable of handling anything shorter than a Twitter message.

Thanks for the eBay love. Someday, Spooky and I will be well-provided for, and we'll live on a little farm on a remote little island in Maine (Peneboscot Bay will do), and have two goats and two chickens and a big dog and three cats. We'll grow blueberries and apples. And we won't have to deal with eBay anymore ever again. Such dreams keep me alive.

Yesterday, after much book talk with Spooky, I tore apart the eighth chapter, and then wrote 1,417 words. 8 has gone from being a speed bump to being a wall. I know pretty much everything on the other side of the wall, all the way to THE END (which isn't really THE END, but only the place Imp doesn't have to say anything else). If I were capable of writing books out of order (and I emphatically am not, so don't suggest I try), I'd skip 8, write 9 and the epilogue, then decide if 8 is even necessary. But I can't do that.

The horrid cough I almost always get after any cold is here. No doctor has ever figured this cough out. It's a dry, wracking cough that leaves me exhausted and sore and wheezing. It usually hangs around for about a month (three months is the record), then leaves. This has been happening since the mid-eighties. The only thing that's ever seemed to help is Altoids peppermints, but they only help so long as one is in my mouth, and gods I get sick of Altoids fast. By the time I was done writing yesterday, the cough had me so exhausted that I lay down on the sofa in the front parlor and slept until dinner. Obviously, I've stopped smoking again.

Last night, there was, once again, far too much WoW. I finished the quests in Desolace and moved along to Feralas. It's the height of tedium, but I will leave that game with the title "Loremaster." To make things worse, Spooky let me actually play Rift last night, and fuck, but it's wonderful. I leveled Selwyn, my Kalari mage (necromancy, pyromancy, and chloromacy), to six. The world is so fully realized. Tomorrow's the end of the beta, and the game won't be released until March 1st, so...long wait for more wonderfulness.

I'm gonna go finish my coffee. But I leave you with photographs of Sméagol having a snooze in the sun:

( Sméagol, 19 February 2011 )

Yesterday, I wrote 1,020 words on "The Prayer of Ninety Cats."

Very cold morning here in Providence. I dreamt of snow last night. Well, not last night, but, rather, this morning. The insomnia had me awake until about 5 ayem. It finally took Sonata for me to find sleep.

Not enough milk for the coffee this morning, so it's sort of blackish. And I hate black coffee. Mostly, I hate coffee, but milk (or, preferably, half and half) makes it bearable. Anyway, there would have been enough milk, but we made pumpkin muffins last night. Not that I'm that fond of pumpkin muffins.

Last night, Spooky read me Kelly Link's "The Constable of Abal," which is another amazing story. It's like this woman is incapable of getting it wrong. There's a passage I want to quote:

You could kill a man and you could lie and steal as Zilla had done, and if you lit enough candles at the temples, you could be forgiven. But someone who ate little devils and caught ghosts with ribbons and charms was a witch, and witches were damned.

Which pretty much sums up my sentiments on the hypocrisy of...well, lots of stuff.

Right now, winter is a stone about my neck.