Caitlín R. Kiernan

It is indeed a little cooler today. The thunderstorms which always herald the spring cool-downs came through about 2:30 a.m., just as we were trying to get to sleep. I lay there listening to the rain and the thunder, talking...I can't recall about what, exactly...and sleep came easily. The sun is bright this morning, but there's wind, and Spooky says it "sweater weather." It's supposed to be back up to 64F tomorrow, gradually warming back up to the 70s. The sky is startling this morning, that blue so clear it could swallow you alive, and when all the digestive work was done, your cloud-etched bones would rain down in the streets of Calcutta.

I just got an e-mail from my agent advising me to pull out of the Amazon Connect thing. I'm not exactly sure why, something about the fine print (which I must admit I did not read). Probably, it says that by participating Amazon.com will heretofore own my first-born child's adenoids or something. Won't they be surprised. Anyway, yeah, I'll just drop it. I have too many online things going on, anyway, and that's surely the least interesting of the lot.

Mirroring the LJ at my MySpace hasn't proved to be much trouble. Before I mirror it at Blogger, I always have to convert any LJ tags to HTML, so the Blogger version is already suitable for MySpace. It adds about five minutes to the whole process. Of course, if I pull back and look at The Big Picture, I see that comes to 1,820 minutes a year or 30.33 hours. Simply by choosing to mirror the LJ at MySpace, I lose more than a whole day over the space of a year, and since I frequently make more than one post a day, the number may be nearer a day and a half. Well, at least this isn't as scary as the time I calculated how much of my life would likely be spent on the toilet.

Yesterday I did, in fact, begin a new vignette, which seems to actually have a title, which seems to be "pas-en-arrière ". I did 1,004 words and spent a lot time reading old Stephen Jay Gould essays and all sorts of other things about babies who've been born with tails, atavistic traits, polydactyl cats, etc. I'll probably finish this one tomorrow afternoon. So far, it's all been conversation, which is nice. However, I didn't get around to resuming the eBay auctions yesterday. Maybe today. Vince sent the final version of his artwork for "Untitled 20," and it's gorgeous. I think it precisely captures the mood of the vignette. And I'm becoming increasingly nervous about my agent and editor's reactions to Daughter of Hounds. Will I be asked to cut the lengthy appendices? Will they think I botched writing child characters? Will they love Emmie and Soldier and Pearl as much as I do? Will they think there's too much reference to Low Red Moon? Too little? These questions will all be answered in due course, but at the moment they're eating at me like hagfish working over the decaying carcass of a humpback whale.

We watched Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers last night, and I liked it a great deal. I think that Bill Murray is fast becoming one of my favorite living actors.

Poking around yesterday, looking for embryological and ontogenetic data, I could not help but notice once again how creationists have well and truly infested the web. This is an audacious sort of hypocrisy, embracing the fruits of science as a tool to pervert and dilute science. But I suppose it's no different than creationists using antibiotics or driving automobiles or watching television or using cellphones. Is "cellphones" one word or two? Never mind. I think most people in this country don't understand the connection between "pure" science and technology. Nor to they understand the interconnectedness of science, that it's really not the sort of thing where you can pick and choose which parts you want to believe. Biology doesn't work without genetics and evolutionary theory and chemistry and physics, and you can't toss in an ad hoc explanation or plead "special case" whenever something threatens a cherished belief. Sure, it's a great way of resolving pesky dilemmas. For example, claiming we can see stars which are 15,000 light years away, when young-earth creationism dictates the whole universe is only about 10K years old, because God created the light already partway to Earth. Sure, it resolves your dilemma, but it also makes you look dumb as hell. Mostly, I think creationists, and fundamentalist Xtians in general, are imagination impaired and more afraid of dying than they are interested in living. I'd simply pity the poor, retarded fuckers, if they'd just shut up and leave the rest of us alone. Anyway, time to pimp the platypus, speaking of poor things...

I have now been silent, aside from a couple of sneezes and the stray cough, for almost twenty-five hours. The first fourteen or so were the worst. Then, an unexpected calm began to settle over me. It's proving a very interesting experience.

The words began to flow again yesterday. It may have been telling the story of Sunday's outlandish misadventure at the market. It may have been something else altogether. All that matters is that they did start coming again. I did 1,286 words on "Bainbridge" yesterday and finished the first section set in Pensacola (which, you'll recall, may turn out to be the third section of the story). Suddenly, Julia Flammarion is a living person. Suddenly, I know her and understand what she's doing and why. To say that I am hugely relieved is an understatement.

Yesterday, my comp copies of The Merewife chapbook arrived from Subterranean Press. It's weird, in a very nice way, to see this thing in print after thirteen years. The Merewife is the prologue to a novel of the same name which I tried to write in the summer of 1993. The prologue was left unfinished until this past August, when I decided to let subpress print it as the chapbook to accompany the hardback edition of Subterranean Magazine #2 (the regular, softcover edition has now sold out, by the way). Only 202 copies of the chapbook were printed, and of those I received only five copies. At some point, once the hardcover edition of the magazine has sold out, I may decide to auction one or two copies on eBay, but then again, I may not. Clearly, The Merewife is destined to be one of my hardest to find publications. This is the ninth chapbook I've done with Subterranean Press since 2003. What noisy cats are we.

Let's see. I have some miscellanea here. The first five legal gay marriages were performed in Northern Ireland yesterday. Today, Scotland will begin recognizing same-sex unions, and in Wales and England couples can begin registering tomorrow. But remember, America is the land of the free. Well, the free herterosexuals, at any rate. Let's not pick nits. Dr. Colin Purrington at Swarthmore College is using the H5N1 strain of bird flu as a example of how natural selection would alter the ratio of evolutionists to creationists if creationists were logically consistent and had the courage of their convictions, that is, if creationists refused Tamiflu and vaccines because they do not believe that the H5N1 virus could potentially evolve human transmissibility. If not for sclerotic_rings, I'd miss half this stuff. He also pointed me to the very exciting news that the seas of Mars appear to have been far less acidic than previously thought, based on analysis of Martian clays. Drad stuff.

Spooky persueded me yesterday to switch from Safari to Firefox 1.5, and today I'm giving it a trial run. I'd begun having awful problems with Safari (slow loads, frequent crashes, sites that weren't compatible). So far, I like Firefox, though it is a little jumpy. We'll see how this goes, if Firefox can best my fierce allegiance to Apple.

I think the war on Xmas must be heating up. Yesterday, I saw a nativity scene surrounded by razor wire. The Baby Jesus was wearing the cutest little army helmet. And I understand that only eight in every ten "holiday" songs played over the PA at Wal-Mart use the "C-word." Clearly, the Xtians are losing ground fast. It must suck, being a pushy, intolerant majority besieged by phony, media-manufactured prejudice. Me, I wouldn't know.