Caitlín R. Kiernan

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Spooky just quoted the Agricultural Commissioner of the state of Florida to me. "This snail is one bad dude," she said. Well, she said, he said. These are our mornings.

Yesterday, I didn't work. My body isn't exhausted. I've actually been getting more sleep than I did for a long time (finally having discovered the effective anti-insomnia cocktail...for me), but I've been working so much. For a long time, I was truly too ill to take on more than...this gets sort of funny. Even when I was very ill, I was working a lot. I'm making a living as a freelance, and so there's no choice but to work. Health is not relevant, not really. Regardless, about a year and a half ago, I began getting better, and taking on more work, and conceiving new ideas, and, at this point, I go to sleep working out problems in my fiction and wake up doing the same thing. Okay, more the former than the latter. But it's catching up with me, and my mind and nerves are tired. All thus fucking work. So, I didn't work yesterday.

I suppose autumn is here. I haven't spent much time outside, but it must be here. I feel it. It isn't looking in. Why would it bother? But I feel its dry brown eyes upon me, if only because I'm in the way. Not that I believe the autumn is something that can literally have eyes. And speaking of the autumn, and Hallowe'en, Spooky is having a Hallowe'en Sale (!!!) in her Etsy shop, Dreaming Squid Dollworks and Sundries. 20% off on everything! And if you don't buy something, she'll get sad, and when she gets sad.... Well, trust me. You don't want her sad. So, please...buy something. The necklaces are truly amazing.

Actually, I hate that word. Sad*, I mean. It's a child's word. There at least twenty synonyms in the English language that are far more suitable to mature vocabularies. Of course, if you are a child, by all means, good word. Use it till the wheels fall off.*

I'm having a great deal of frustration as regards futurism at the moment. I don't mean the artistic movement that arose in Italy about 1910 (including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Tullio Crali and Luigi Russolo, plus the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky). I mean futurism in the many senses that it is employed by those who wish to analyze trends and then forecast. But I don't mean those looking for better futures (there are none), and I don't mean those who believe the future can be accurately forecast (that's almost impossible; not quite, but almost). What I have in mind is far simpler: communicating to people that the future will be alien, just as the past is alien. That is, alien to us, from the Here and Now. And convincing people they do not currently live in some incarnation or portion of the future (excepting that this came after that; well, that's bloody obvious, and now you're even older). I mean, the future will be different, and the farther you move into the future, the stranger (less like now) it becomes. That everything evolves, and not just technology, but culture. SF writers have an especial problem with evolving culture, economics, biology, medicine, politics, and especially with evolving language. But...I'm not actually concerned here with writers. Even the worst SF writer is ahead of the curve in this regard. I'm talking about...oh, never mind. You can lead a horse to a fine Bordeaux, but it's just gonna want the oogy, muddy, stinking water in the drinking through, where all the rodents poop. Some will know of what I speak; others will not.

Did I mention that Spooky is having a Hallowe'en Sale (!!!) in her Etsy shop, Dreaming Squid Dollworks and Sundries. I did? Just checking.

Last night, we happened to see a rather good movie, Christian Alvart's Case 39 (2009), with Renée Zellweger, Ian McShane, and Jodelle Ferland. I went in not expecting much, and was pleasantly surprised. You could call this a "horror movie," and maybe it is. But I find it more interesting to think of as a film about terror and horror (and those aren't the same emotions, you know, regardless of how linked they may be). Also, while this film clearly comes from the demonic child/possession tradition, it immediately struck me as a story about a fairie changeling, and (though the word demon is tossed about a couple of times, and we see a crucifix and a Bible, the Xtianity thing is almost absent). So, it may be Alvart had something far less concrete than a "demon" (sensu Xtianity) in mind. It may only be that he understands the American mind, needing something familiar, would fix on "demon." Anyway, Case 39 is not a particularly original movie, so if you're that sort (and I hope you're not), don't waste your time with it. It plays old tropes, but it plays them well. It's not brilliant, but it is good, and it's stuck with me. There are elements it borrows from better films, but it borrows them well. And, even in an ending that might seem hopeful, step back, and you'll see the overwhelming bleakness and horror still in play. It's streaming free on Netflix.

Later, I read a truly awful story in the Halloween anthology, Lyllian Huntley Harris' "The Vow on Halloween." Never heard of Lyllian Huntley Harris? Well, neither had I, and with good reason. The anthology's editor (who freely admits this tale is "pure pulp and quaintly romantic") notes that the story was, in a 1985 anthology, mistakenly attributed to the Irish novelist Dorothy Macardle. Turns out, though, it was published in Weird Tales in 1924, by a Georgian woman (that is, Georgia, USA), and her name was Lyllian Huntley Harris, and she couldn't write for shit. Virtually nothing else is known about her. She died in 1939.

Oh, we saw the first episode of Season Four of Fringe, and...wow. More, please. I am impressed and pleased. There are points I could get picky about, but I'm not going to, because the show is just too much fun.

Also, here's an interesting bit of trivia. My first rejection slip ever came from the late, lamented Twlight Zone magazine in 1982 (at least, I think it was '82). The story was a stinker, and it deserved the rejection, believe me. Anyway, at the time, the editor was T. E. D. Klein, who wrote the excellent and surprisingly (to me) successful Machenesque novel The Ceremonies (1984) and the shorty-story collection Dark Gods (1985), and, sadly, very little else. But, yeah, my first rejection slip came from T. E. D. Klein, who, turns out, wrote the introduction of the forthcoming Hippocampus Press collection of Arthur Machen stories, which will feature the afterword I wrote in 2008 for a different collection of Machen stories. It's an odd little twist of fate.

Um...well...I have gone on haven't I?

Inveterate,
Aunt Beast

* Then again, there's really nothing wrong with the word sad. Not intrinsically. The problem is people who use it childishly, habitually, with marked naïveté. Usually, these are people with a stunted world view.

Elizabeth would have been forty today. I can hardly even begin to wrap my head around the weirdness of that fact.

1) Bear with me. I'm more awake that yesterday, and not in half as much pain, but this is still gonna be a bumpy ride.

2) Yesterday, I wrote 1,533 words on "—30—", which I'm liking, and which I think Spooky is liking more than I do. It will appear in Sirenia Digest #61. A reminder to subscribers (if you were one, I could be reminding you, as well) that the digest now goes out on the fifth day of the month. So, expect #61 on January 5th.

3) Some time back— like a year or two or something, I don't know exactly —I began making a concerted effort not to reply to the idiotic things that idiots are apt to say online during or after reading one of my books. And, mostly, I've made good on that. Not because I think it's wrong or unseemly for an author to reply to her critics, but just because it gets fucking tiresome, for me and for the people reading this blog (I don't know who convinced so many writers they shouldn't ever reply to their critics, but it's a bit of conventional wisdom that baffles me, and I suspect a reviewer is to blame). Just two days ago I complained about Mr./Mrs./Miss Threw In An Ending over on Amazon. Which ought to be my quota for the month.

But no. From Goodreads, via Twitter, another gem was brought to my attention this morning. Someone who's reading Daughter of Hounds. I won't give her name, but I will note she is a she. It's relevant:

Not liking the angry woman in the story; angry women are not cool.

I shit you not. How does one even reply to anything so utterly, perniciously...wrongheaded? Seriously, I have no idea what to say in response. Everything I think of seems too obvious. Some statements are so perfectly, sublimely stupid— and prima facie so —that they successfully resist any articulate rebuttal.

4) Last night was meatloaf (Spooky does amazing things with meatloaf), and we watched the end of Season Six of Deadliest Catch, and played WoW, and I had a hot bath, and we started Holly Black's Ironside.

5) One year ago today, I asked the readers of this blog a question: If you had me alone, locked up in your house, for twenty-four hours and I had to do whatever you wanted me to, what would you have me/you/us do? The answers were screened, to encourage explicit, honest, imaginative responses, and I promised I'd include the answers I liked best in an upcoming issue of the digest. And there were some very good replies, but, for some reason, I didn't keep my promise. I think it's time that I did so, and the best of the lot will be appearing in #61.

Yours in Anger,
Aunt Beast

No, really. And I blame you, Holly Black.

Speaking of whom, a great quote from her short story, "Virgin," for all the New Age airy-fairy twits who somehow have it in their head that fairies are all about the "positive healing energy":

"Let me tell you something about unicorns— They're fairies and fairies aren't to be trusted. Read your storybooks. But maybe you can't get past the rainbows and pastel crap. That's your problem."

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And here's something nifty. "Your Age on Other Worlds." Not sure which I take more comfort from, that on Mars I'm 24.7 years old or that on Jupiter I'm 41,479.3 years old.

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Yesterday, I wrote 2,035 words on The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. And made it through a scene I'd been dreading. With luck, I'll finish Chapter Three this afternoon. This is such a very different book for me, vastly different from everything before The Red Tree, but different, also, from The Red Tree. It might almost be YA. It's the nearest I've ever come to my Shirley Jackson roots, and quite a bit distant from the influence of Lovecraft.

As for the rest of yesterday, there was more Miéville and Susanna Clarke, and at bedtime, we read two stories by blackholly, "Virgin" (quoted above) and "In Vodka Veritas." Both delightful.

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I'm sleeping somewhat better, now that I'm taking the Lamictal at noon instead of midnight. Not great, but better.

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Because my terrifying nerdiness knows no decent bounds, last night Shaharrazad (my blood-elf warlock), earned the title, "the Seeker" in WoW. Which means I've done 3,000 quests. Which took a total of (in game play) 49 days, 19 hours.

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After dinner last night, I had a grim talk with Spooky about the current state of my career, and my life, in general. Sometimes, we must have grim talks, if only to keep us honest.

It's time to make the doughnuts.

Ice and rain in the night, but only rain Outside now, in that slushy grey Purgatory of winter. Tiny icicles hanging from the power lines. Rain falling on week-old snow.

Spooky spoke with my dentist yesterday, and the Bad Tooth is coming out tomorrow at 1 p.m. (CaST). So, I'll likely be in bed a day or two afterwards. But the pain will be gone.

I've been trying to find a piece for Sirenia Digest located at the place where cannibalism and tooth pain intersect. A ritual cannibalism, but one in which the devoured is a willing participant. Indeed, in which he or she is venerated in the act of being devoured. But, I've already touched on this very subject in both "Beatification" (Sirenia Digest #27, February 2008) and "The Bed of Appetite" (Sirenia Digest #23, October 2007). Of course, I can list five or six stories wherein Angela Carter worked through the "Little Red Riding Hood" theme. Also, I'm considering the possibilities of "Hansel and Gretal," and it's relevance to cannibalism. I'm trying to distract myself from the pain in my mouth, and all the worries about work that isn't getting done, and from thoughts of the dentist, with thoughts of willing feasts and aching teeth.

Most of yesterday is not worth repeating.

I should be making corrections to The Red Tree and working on it's epilogue. I should be working. Instead, I'm losing time that I cannot afford to lose, to a tooth that should have been pulled a year ago. I should be doing reserach for Joey Lafaye. Anyway, we have a couple of auctions ending tomorrow, and if you've not had a look at them, please do. Thank you.

Booya! I just heard that the goddamned Xmas trees have vanished from Undercity and Silvermoon, so Shaharrazad's exile to the wilderness can at last be ended. I think I would have been less annoyed if Blizzard had admitted this was catering to Xmas, instead of trying to pass it off as something called "Winter's Veil."

Yesterday, I wrote 1,087 words on "Murder Ballad No. 5," but didn't find THE END. I came near, but began to feel that I would have to push to find it, and in pushing, would run the risk of ruining the whole thing. So, I'll finish it today. This is one of those stories that I realize I'm writing in response to the "good fairies/healing energy" idiots. I don't start out to write a response. I try not to even think of those people. But then it happens anyway. Ever since I heard about people at Faerieworld complaining because the organizers had chosen Rasputina to play, and the claims that Rasputina were spoiling the affair by releasing "dark" or "negative energy," and never mind all the fluffy-bunny fairy crap you have to see in so many witchcraft shops. Anyway, I'll finish it today, and we'll put Sirenia Digest #37 together tomorrow and send it out to subscribers tomorrow night.

The sun's shining, and the temperature is finally supposed to climb above freezing today. Maybe the snow will start to melt, though we do have snow showers forcast for today. Too bright Outside for my eyes, the sun off all that snow.

Last night, I helped Spooky fix our traditional New Year's Day dinner of black-eyed peas, collards, and macaroni and cheese. We both ate far too much. And there was WoW. And when I finally went to bed at three, there was insomnia. I got up and puttered about the house, then came online and posted my list of favourite films of 2008. I got back to bed about five, and managed to sleep almost seven hours, which is better than I've been doing.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. We've added some of the new mass-market paperback editions of the novels. Also, you can see Spooky's latest work on Etsy. Thanks.

Time to write.

After a standoffish beginning, Hubero and Linus seem to be making peace. Mostly, I think Hubero just wants to make it past all this getting-to-know-you-chit-chat and play. But Linus is not so sure of Hubero's intentions. And, so, a bit of new-cat stress.

Oftentimes, after the medium-bad to severe seizures, there's depression. It came on hard yesterday. The extreme cold temperatures did little to help.

Spooky and I had plans, to make a day of art galleries. We drove over to College Hill and started off with the Elizabeth King instillation at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. There's a story here. Years ago now, mellawyrden sent Spooky one of King's books, Attention's Loop (Harry N. Abrams, 1999). When I was working on the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles, that book was part of the inspiration for "Ode to Katan Amano" (which will be reprinted in A is for Alien). Of all the pieces in FT&T, "Ode to Katan Amano" was probably my favourite (and still is), and I closed it with a quote from Elizabeth King. So, going to the show yesterday and seeing firsthand so much of her exquisite work displayed in this exhibit ("The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye"), it was sort of like closing a circle. It would be incorrect to say that she makes dolls, or puppets, or marionettes. I'm not sure how I would, personally, describe what she makes. The exhibit was beautiful, and I wish I'd taken the camera. It was a little disconcerting, like stumbling into part of the set of Blade Runner, maybe a museum of automaton evolution that wound up on the cutting-room floor. Sadly, I forgot the camera, but we are planning to see it again before the instillation ends on December 22nd.

We'd planned, next, to visit the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, just down the street. But, turns out, it's closed on Mondays. So, our day of galleries was suddenly cut short, and my day spiraled from there. Very little worth mentioning until after dark. I came home and napped. Or rather, I lay down and fell asleep for a while before dinner. Afterwards, we watched Speilberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence (1999), which we'd both seen only once, when it was in theatres. My opinion of it remains unchanged. It's both beautiful and brilliant, and certainly one of Speilberg's best. I think that it sounded a sour chord with a lot of people because, while it appears as an sf story (and, I would say, works well as sf), it's truly a fairy tale. Many things happen for fairy-tale reasons. Fairy-tale logic governs much of the film, and it strikes out, often, with all the cruelty and viciousness of the best fairy tales. I was very pleased that it's aged so well. However, this is probably not a film for the sort of sf reader/audience who actually thinks that science fiction is (or, at least "should" be) concerned mainly with science and predictions of the future of man and technology.

Later we played a bit of WoW, still out in the Arathi Highlands, and Shaharrazad and Surra both reached Level 37. Afterwards, Spooky read The Fellowship of the Ring aloud until we were too sleepy to continue.

But this black mood hangs on.

Someone wrote yesterday, via MySpace (where I don't reply to comments), wanting to know who Spooky is. To which I reply, she's my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, dollmaker and photographer. I thought everyone knew.

I should be getting back to work today, but I don't know whether or not it's going to happen. It may be all that I can do just to avoid going back to bed. The temps are a little warmer —— currently 29F, with a projected high of 44F —— and there's rain on the way. So maybe that will help. I don't know.

I leave you with this Louis C. K. clip, courtesy Blu, who snagged it from Monica Richards:

I've likely said this before, any number of times. But it bears repeating. If only it were possible to run some sort of cable from my brain directly to my laptop, then my dreams would take care of all the writing. I'm not sure anyone could or would read the results, but they would be much truer than any of the watered-down shit I write while awake. Which is to say, bad dreams this morning, worse than usual, and I slept late (almost 11 a.m.), which means they went on a few months longer than usual. I needed that sleep, though. I was awake until at least 3:30 a.m. this morning. But sleep comes at a price. Nothing's free.

Well, except for the air, and you've got to be out of your mind to breath the stuff they call "air" here in Atlanta.

I did finish "Untitled 23" yesterday, which is why Spooky let me sleep in this morning. I'm not yet certain how I feel about the piece. I knew it would be dark, but it came out several shades dimmer than I'd expected. All those people who eschew Fairie as anything but a realm of healing light and positive "energy" or whatever nonsense will do well to stay clear of this piece. This is my Fairie. I think you may have already glimpsed it, from this side of the mirror, in "La Peau Verte", but this time the view is from farther in, deeper down. It is a "fairy tale" in the classical sense, though hardly in the sanitized Victorian sense. I'm a little uneasy about sending this one out into the world. I say that now, knowing that it'll be right there in Sirenia Digest #10 and knowing, too, that most readers probably won't understand what all the fuss is about once they've read it. What frells with me will not necessarily frell with you. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, yes, we'll read through the whole thing this afternoon, and I might tweak here and there. I do not know if I'm going to ask Vince to illustrate this one. Tomorrow, I'll begin work on the piece that Sonya (sovay) and I will be writing together, also for Sirenia Digest #10. I cannot presently recall whether or not it has a title yet. I think it might. She's written the first bit, and now I'm to write the second bit, and then it goes back to her, and so on and so forth until we find THE END together. I did only 477 words yesterday, but that was quite enough.

I'm not sure what I'll get done today. Already it's 12:31 p.m., and we have to get Hubero to the vet by 5 (just a check up, meet the vet sort of thing). And we have dinner with Byron at 7. And I'm nowhere near awake. If awake were Madagascar, I'd be somewhere in Polynesia just now, with all the Indian Ocean in-between.

Last night, Spooky and I watched Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (2005) and found it quite entirely delightful. A fine comment on never getting to the point wrapped within a fine joke about losing one's way. Or something like that.

It has occurred to me that Joey LaFaye might be set in 1975. It's a strange revelation, but not one I'm shying away from. More later...

Postscript: This is frelling brilliant.