greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
A day when you wake up two hours later than planned, well, there's not a lot you can do to salvage a day like that. Funny fucking thing is, yesterday I had a sort of panic & epiphany combo meal, realizing it was idiotic for me to think I could take a vacation from December 15th to January 3rd. That I thought the work would wait, or that I wouldn't be overwhelmed as soon as my playing hookey ended. So, I resolved to scrap the plans we had for this week (which included a trip to Yale and a trip to Marblehead, Mass.) and get back to work today.

And then...I didn't wake up until 1 p.m. (CaST).

Which sort of shredded my plans for today good and proper, and which is why it's 2:29 p.m. (CaST), and I'm only just starting my blog entry. I was going to get back to work on "The Lost Language of Mollusca and Crustacea," but now I'm thinking, instead, I'll be lucky to deal with a bunch of email (one of the things I did yesterday, post-epiphany), then sign the signature sheets for the limited edition of A Book of Horrors (to be released by P.S. Publishing). But, in case you're curious (casually or otherwise), below is a list of what I have to have done between now and the end of January, and it ought to be enough to convince you of the folly of the "much-deserved vacation":

1. Produce Sirenia Digest #73, which means finishing "The Lost Language of Mollusca and Crustacea" and writing another and as-yet-untitled science-fiction tale.
2. Editing Alabaster #3, as soon as I have my editor's notes.
3. Writing Alabaster #4
4. Keep track of the pages for Alabaster #2 as they're drawn and inked and colored.
5. Finishing making corrections to the mss. of Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart and The Yellow Book (about three weeks overdue, at this point).
6. Travel to Philadelphia sometime in the second half of January to finish up filming the trailer for The Drowning Girl.
7. Get the front page of my website revamped for the release of The Drowning Girl, and get it done ASAP.
8. Compile a list of suggested panels and other assorted programming for Readercon 23 for Rose Fox.

I mean...what the fuck was I thinking! That I was tired? Sure I'm fucking tired, but that's no excuse. Last week, my psychiatrist was trying to convince me to "drop something" to reduce my workload, and I think I did a pretty unconvincing job of explaining why I can't drop anything, not without...

It's like this. Lots of people have a lot of trouble understanding what it's like to be a "famous writer" who is only just managing to squeak by financially. In this economic climate, you'd think it would be an easy enough matter to understand. But yes, the vacation is over, and I just have to hope there wasn't too much time frittered away.

As for yesterday, there was prune hamantashan, a trip to our storage unit in Pawtucket, a clove cigarette (actually, these days they're clove cigars, technically), short fiction by Norman Partridge, William Browning Spencer, and Michael Marshall Smith. Partridge's "Lesser Demons" is an interesting new take on the tiresome zombie trope, and Smith's story, "Fair Exchange" is just about the funniest Innsmouth story I've ever read. Normally, I don't like funny in my Lovecraft. Normally, I'm violently opposed to it, in fact. But if you read this story, and hear the narrator's voice as Jason Statham, from the days of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, it's a fucking hilarious story. Yesterday, the cold sky over Providence was so blue it was murderous – that wide carnivorous sky of which I've been speaking of for years.

Carnivorous,
Aunt Beast
greygirlbeast: (Starbuck 3)
Before I begin rambling on and blithering on and what not, a wonderful thing (I'll repost this on Monday, because we seem to have fewer readers...or at least fewer comments on Saturdays). One of [livejournal.com profile] kylecassidy's photographs from last weekend's shoot for "The Drowning Girl: Stills from a Film That Never Existed," based on The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. This one is...astounding (inspired by a scene in Chapter 8). You will note the two titular paintings by Michael Zulli. And I owe an unspeakable degree of "Thank You" to Nicola Astes for nailing Imp in this fictional (but true) moment :



Um...the rest of yesterday. Well, there was a great deal of work, and a benchmark was reached, though an infinity of benchmarks lie before me. But when you're working with No Such Agency, there's only so much that can be said, and I've said too much already. The truth is out there, and it's coming soon.

I have this stuck in my head, going round and round:

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to Father Time.
— Death Cab for Cutie, "What Sarah Said"

Maybe by putting it here, and causing other people to read it, I'll let it go. For now.

Nothing else much to yesterday. Leftover meatloaf. Too much RIFT (in silent moments, the futility and vapidness of MMORPGs weighs heavily on me, the whole issue of time displacement, what I could be doing with my life instead).

We watched the second episode of American Horror Story, which I'm on the fence about. There's an interesting trick that's trying to be turned here, straddling a fine line between utter camp and halfhearted sincerity. I'm still trying to decide if the show is very good, mediocre, or actually quite awful. Mostly, I think producers somewhere are hoping to capitalize on the impending release of Tim Burton's film version of Dark Shadows by whipping up this hodgepodge of the supernatural. I do like Tate (as played by Evan Peters), and there was a good scene last night, when Violet is talking to her new "friend," that former-mean-girl-turned-witness-to-true-evil. I think the Jessica Lange character is, unfortunately, very much over the top for my liking, and I hope we're not supposed to have sympathy for Ben Harmon (as played by Dylan McDermott), because he's a total douchebag. There's still potential here, but I'd like to see more focus and less reliance of wearisome horror movie tropes and those shots we all expect. Having said that, I realize that I may be missing the point. But I also realize that missing the point may mean getting the point, which may be a mark in my favor.

We watched more Mad Men, which is excellent, no fence straddling required. We read more of Wildwood, which is delightful in that way that the truly good books we read as children are delightful. It makes me wistful in a good way.

Oh, and I'm regretting having bought the iPad. It's fair astounding, sure, this device. And I need it for work, because the world is going All Digital. But I sort of hate it. And can't help thinking about the infinitude of better ways the money could have been spent, and how easy it would be to let this Thing devour more of my life.

And now I'm going to sit in a corner.

Reticent,
Aunt Beast

Profile

greygirlbeast: (Default)
Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

S M T W T F S
    1 234
56 7 891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
26272829   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 1st, 2025 04:12 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios