Caitlín R. Kiernan

(All times CaST = UTC/GMT -4 hours)

I woke this morning at a few minutes past five. After having gone to sleep about two a.m.. And I did not get back to sleep. I awoke wide awake, my mind working at some problem in some story. Ambien didn't even put me back to sleep. I sat at my desk and watched the sun rise. I edited some paleontology articles on Wikipedia. I talked to Hubero. So, three hours sleep. And with this schedule, there can be no missed days, no sick days, no days off, no lost days. This keeps up, and there will be another trip to the doctor, which I can neither afford nor tolerate. Whatever shade of insomnia this is, I don't know. Sometimes I think on the dreams and consider clinophobia, but that doesn't explain these awakenings. Anyway, I've been up for six and a half hours now (as of 11:31 a.m.) and the day has not even begun.

Ugh.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,658 words.

There was good news from my editor at Penguin, that Daughter of Hounds debuted at #21 on the Barnes & Noble science fiction/fantasy trade list. So, someone's buying it, somewhere.

So what else was there to yesterday. I would say there was nothing else at all, only, lately, I've had more than one reader of this journal tell me they like the minutiae, that it's the little things, elevate the mundane, and so on and so forth, as they say. So, from that perspective: the weather finally turned cold, and I left the house near sunset, but the wind was bitter, and my walk lasted less than a block. After dinner, I watched an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, then there was another ep, and I tried not to doze. I read "Onion" aloud to Kathryn (this will be explained at some future date). There was hot cocoa.

After the aborted walk, we went to the B&N on Moreland to see how many copies of Daughter of Hounds and the Threshold mmp they had on the shelves. I looked at the 2006 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (Vol. 19) for the first time. I'd not known that Kelly, Ellen, and Gavin had said such nice things about To Charles Fort, With Love. I also did know that "Bradbury Weather," "La Peau Verte," and "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" had all received honourable mentions. We browsed about the bookstore a bit, which I hardly ever do these days — browse through bookstores.

We finished reading Gregory Maguire's Lost last night, and I am pleased to say that it won me over in the last 75 pp. or so, and I wound up finding it quite effective. I think perhaps I came to the novel asking it to be something it was not, possibly the least fair treatment any novel may receive. A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be. Next we read The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

My thanks to setsuled. I snurched the wonderful new icon from him.

A couple of things before I go forth and try to salvage this day:

'Irreversible' global warming claims its first victims of the New Year. Not so bad, if you aren't bothered by the loss of Lake Qinghai and the death of hundreds of baby hedgehogs.

And at dawn and dusk, you might want to keep an eye out for Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), which is proving to be one of the brightest of the last one hundred years.

I will not go back to bed...

So, yesterday was an amazingly productive day. We did a read-through on "Highway 97," and then I wrote an afterword for the chapbook (1,206 words). I talked to my agent and caught up on e-mail. We read the prologue of Daughter of Hounds, and I discovered it takes about nine hours on my cranky old Epson inkjet jalopy to print a 691 pp. ms. (continuously, no breaks). This morning, the Zokutou page meter looks like this:

68 / 691 (9.8%)

Which is an improvement. Today, it's Chapter One ("Emmie"). Tomorrow, we may try to do two chapters, as the earlier chapters are shorter than the later ones, and it would be nice to have the safety net of an extra day. Today, I also need to do the last little bit of tweaking on "Highway 97" and its chapbook. But, mostly, the day will go to proofing Daughter of Hounds. This evening, we may see a movie with Byron.

When we got home from Birmingham on Wednesday, the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was waiting for me (somewhat mutilated somewhere between the Sheridan Press in Hanover, Pennsylvania and my mailbox, but still...). I've been eagerly awaiting this issue, as it includes a description of a juvenile Triceratops skull from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. However, I was distracted almost at once by an article on plesiosaur remains from freshwater deposits in Australia. The deposits in question are not only non-marine, they're high latitude, 60-80 degrees S., dating back to a time when Australia and Antarctica were beginning to drift apart. Indeed, the fossils were found in rocks deposited in the old rift valley. I love the idea of plesiosaurs swimming about in icy sub-polar waters. There's an echo of Lock Ness here, which got me to thinking about "paleo-cryptids," how it's often not so much that the beasts the cryptozoologists and monster hunters seek so fervently have never existed, just that they no longer exist. Gigantopithecus blacki, for example, makes a marvelous yeti/sasquatch, but all the evidence points to its having become extinct at least 100,000 years ago. Anyway, I should also note that the cold-loving, freshwater plesiosaurs all appear to have been short-necked pliosaurs, not the long-necked sort of plesiosaurs popularly fancied to persist in lakes like Loch Ness. Still, it's a marvelous image.

I wanted to link to Cliff Bostock's column in this week's Creative Loafing, sensibly titled "To Ruth Malhotra: Kiss my ass, I'm a fag." So follow the link. Ruth Malhotra, a student at Georgia Tech, has filed a lawsuit seeking to revoke GT's "'tolerance policy', which forbids harassment of gays, including the use of intolerant speech." Ms. Lahorta is a repeat offender. She's played the hate card before. Anyway, read the article. How do you convince someone whose religion fosters and encourages prejudicial attitudes that the consitutional protection of religious liberties does not also protect her "right" to treat fellow students like shit? The child has a website, of sorts, including her e-mail addy, though looking at it will only give her the attention she craves. Velour. That figures.

Meanwhile, the bad news is that NASA has officially declared that Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 won't be raining fiery death upon the Earth anytime soon, and therefore isn't the one the IOFS is waiting for. The good news is, a) they've been wrong lots of times, and b) the sky is filled to bursting with earth-crossing comets and asteroids. Personally, I think NASA's just spreading around a little anti-IOFS propaganda, hoping to avoid a panic. Oh, and I found this bit yesterday from The Book of the Damned:

That there was never a moment when there is not some comet in the sky. Virtually there is no year in which several new comets are not discovered, so plentiful are they. Luminous fleas on a vast black dog—in popular impressions, there is no realization of the extent to which this solar system is flea-bitten.

So buck up, kiddos. Hope springs more or less eternal.


Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 and all her forty fragments.