Caitlín R. Kiernan

Any email that begins "Dear Beloved Friend" (or that has those words in its subject line) is either from a funeral parlor, evangelical Xtians, or an East-African money laundering scam.

I managed to get to sleep by three ayem this morning, and slept eight and a half hours, which is all but unheard of, as me and sleep goes. Yesterday's mood was so black, just before midnight I gave up trying to do much of anything. But, I'm getting ahead of myself, having begun the wrong way round.

It's raining today. I already miss the sunlight of yesterday. I didn't used to mind the rain.

Yesterday I was supposed to write more on Blood Oranges. Instead, I spent pretty much the whole afternoon dealing with the bonus section of illustrations that will be appearing in the limited edition of Two Worlds and In Between. I'd not been told we couldn't use color illustrations (because they have to be mechanically tipped in, etc. and etc.), so I'd included Ryan Obermeyer's marvelous cover for The Dry Salvages (it's there on his website; just use the menu until you find berliner dom). So, as I wasn't about to do the painting injustice by having it reproduced in black and white, I had to find a new piece to replace it (which wound up being a second Dame Darcy drawing from In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers. And there was more to dealing with the art, and more, and more.

And then my agent called...and we talked a lot. About the NEWS THAT IS SO GOOD, SO COOL I can't talk about it yet. After that, I was shot for the day. We had an early dinner, then headed out to the RISD museum for a FREE showing of Stanley Donen's Funny Face (1957). And then we strolled through the museum's temporary "Cocktail Culture" exhibit, and then we came home again.

I tried to rp, but the scene just kept feeling flatter and flatter, and I knew it was my fault and finally bowed out. I lay on the floor in the front parlor for a while, watching Spooky playing Alice: The Madness Returns, which is actually very beautiful. But the black mood grew blacker, and eventually I crawled off to bed. My pills let me sleep.

And that's yesterday, kittens. Today, the black mood is still with me. I'll sew something from it, which is usually the way of things.

Whiner: "Why are your stories always so dark?"

Me: "I make the best I can of what I'm given, that's why."

Whiner: "You're just not trying hard enough. You dwell on the darkness."

Me: "Go fuck yourself."

Now, that said, please do have a look at Round 2 of the Big Damn eBay Auction. Thanks.

Comments would be a kindness, here in the fading, last days or months or years of LiveJournal. Then again, now that we have Facebook, where communication apparently thrives in the absence of capitalization, proper spelling, and punctuation....*

Bound and Gagged,
Aunt Beast

* I'm not talking about people who misuse punctuation and capitalization. I'm talking about people who can't be bothered to use any at all.

So, the insomnia is back. This time it's got its hooks into me and Spooky both. She got to sleep about 4 a.m. I followed sometime thereafter and then was wide awake at 9 a.m., after some asshole decided to rev his engine for five minutes out on Moreland. Further evidence I have not yet mastered head-explodey. Or, if I did manage to burst his cranium with the explosive power of my sleep-deprived brain, I never heard the sirens. There would be sirens, wouldn't there? Eventually? Anyway, there were wild dreams that are fading quickly. The discovery that the "Loch Ness Monster" was actually an extant species of giant placoderm fish, a list of deaths that had been wrongly attributed to drownings, glimpses of vast, fishy shapes beneath black water. I haven't had a Loch Ness dream in ages. Also, there was a bit in there somewhere that had me collecting fossils from a limestone deposit on a terraformed Mars. But, yeah, this is the second night of too-little sleep, since I only got about five hours night before last.

The writing went well yesterday. I did 1,187 words on "For One Who Has Lost Herself," which brings the story's total word count thus far to 3,472. I'd hoped to finish it yesterday, but it had other plans. Perhaps, I hope, today.

Er...what else? *blink* *blink* Oh, yeah. I neglected the mention in that list of things I've let pile up on me that I've agreed to write a Dancy vignette for a chapbook to accompany the sold-out limited edition of Alabaster (there are still copies of the trade hardback available). I may do that as soon as I've finished "For One Who Has Lost Herself." I sort of have something in mind, something that I'd thought would make it into "Bainbridge" but didn't.

I caught a documentary last night on the new basal hominid Sahelanthropus tchadensis ("Toumai"), a really marvelous discovery from the Miocene of Chad (6-7 million years old). Sahelanthropus might represent the earliest known hominine and may not be too far removed from the chimp/human common ancestor. The documentary managed to turn out decent despite the fact that some fool thought it would be cute if the whole thing were narrated by the disembodied voice of "Toumai" (who apparently sounded a great deal like the Travelocity Roaming Gnome®).

Also, Spooky's finished the latest faerie, Sweetgum. There are photos up in her LiveJournal. Have a look. This one is on beyond cute (but not for sale). She says she's doing a ghoul next. That one will be auctioned.

It occurs to me now that in reacting to accusations that my writing is "too dark" and that I do not "create from heaven’s breath," I might have overstated my case. In truth, I do believe that writing about the darkness, as a thing unto itself, not merely as a means of finding light, is an entirely legitimate endeavor and one that is too often neglected. There is a terrible, wonderful beauty to be found in the darkness, and those who never stop to examine and embrace the darkness within themselves will never truly know the light, because they will never know balance. And yes, I may have more darkness in me than do many others, but it's nothing I'm trying to hide from. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about, for example, when I say that it's wrongheaded to view Narcissa Snow as no more than a "villain," created as a foil to Deacon and Chance, Scarborough and Starling Jane and the Benefit Street ghouls. Looking back, I know that I love Narcissa as much as the rest, and not in spite of who and what she is or what she's done. I might say the same thing of Spyder Baxter. Or Jimmy DeSade. Or Odd Willie Lothrop (you'll meet him soon, don't worry). I'm at least as much a thing of the darkness as a thing of the light, and it's only right for me to say so and reflect that equity in my fiction. Anyway...

Time to make the doughnuts. But first, don't forget that a mere nine hours remain in the "choose your own letter" Frog Toes and Tentacles auction. As always, your generosity will be greatly appreciated. Which is to say, bid please, if you'd like such a sumptuous thing as the leatherbound edition of FT&T with a black velvet and red silk "cozy" sewn and embroidered by me and Spooky. The power of the "cozy" compels you.

Wow, it's sunny outside...