Caitlín R. Kiernan

Okay, let's get this over and done with, and then we may proceed to your regularly scheduled blog entry. I expect it will be less painful that way. Well, less painful for me at least, and I know I'll be loads less distracted:

( Booya! )

That said...or shown, or both, whatever...you know the lousy thing about incredible shit happening yesterday? The lousy thing about incredible shit having happened yesterday is that it's not happening today. Nonetheless, today I can lift up the blackness enough to peer out (though I do squint something fierce).

But, still, comment, kittens. And thank you for yesterday's comments.

Yesterday, we read chapters One and Two of Blood Oranges, and I can say, with great relief, that I still like this book a lot. It's about as far from The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir as you can get, but that's not a bad thing. I think I'd reached a point where I had to write something just for fucking fun. And Blood Oranges is fun. And it's even funny. I never fucking knew I had all this fucking funny in me. It's like discovering a strange boil behind your ear, and someone lances it, and out comes humor. I mean "ha ha" humor, not aqueous humour – though lancing a boil behind your ear and getting aqueous humour would be interesting. Anyway, with luck, the manuscript will be proofread and corrected and in Manhattan on Monday morning. I've dragged my feet on getting it to my publisher and editor. Well, no, I haven't. I've been too busy with my work for No Such Agency, and with Sirenia Digest, and with the trailer/still-photo project for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir that Blood Oranges just...sort of got lost in the shuffle. But now it's unlost. Today, we do chapters Three and Four, which will put us halfway through the novel.

I think I've decided to keep Kermit the iPad. He proved himself very useful editing yesterday. And so I'm rethinking this whole thing. But thank you, Cliff Miller. Thank you all the same.

Also, I saw a rough cut of the teaser for the trailer for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir yesterday, and it's all I can do not to link to it here. Imagine the lovechild of Terrance Malick and David Lynch, and you're in the neighborhood. Thank you, Brian and Kyle. This is going to be so fucking wonderful. I also spoke with kylecassidy and kambriel yesterday about shooting additional footage this winter in Philadelphia, and it seems like it'll happen. We'll be holding eBay auctions, props and such (a large moonstone signed by the whole cast & crew, etc.) from the first shoot, to fund that, and I'll keep you posted. Thing is, to quote Imp:

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.
“A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.
I also typed.

Well, we have tons of mermaid/water footage, the Saltonstall stuff, but the wolf part has been sorely neglected, and for that we need winter, and snow, and a big wolf-like dog for the Perrault stuff, and we can make these things happen this winter in Philadelphia. So, yeah. Another shoot lies ahead. Which fills me not in the least with dread. It pleases me.

Last night, we proved that one meatloaf can be stretched out over four dinners and one midnight sandwich. Spooky has some mean Loaf Fu. We played some Rift. I'm obsessed with getting Selwynn glorified with the Icewatch in Iron Pine Peak, so...lots of dailies. Or, in my case, nightlies. Later, I read aloud to Spooky from John Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez. Despite my love for Steinbeck and his Cannery Row books, I've never read this book, but found an old copy at Spooky's parents and borrowed it on Sunday (a copy that sold new in trade paperback for $1.45 in 1962). It begins with Steinbeck's "About Ed Ricketts" essay/eulogy, and, so far, I've managed not to cry. In another life, I might have been someone as good and useful to the world as Ed Ricketts. I like to think that.

It occurs to me, apropos of nothing in particular, that there's no point whatsoever in having a cake if you can't eat it, too.

Wanting Cake, Black Forest,
Aunt Beast

Everyone's on her or his way home now (Boston, Philadelphia, Framingham, Washington D.C.). Three amazing days of work are behind us. Much more work lies ahead, and the first edit of the trailer (there will be several, and yes, a DVD at some point) won't be done until January. But, undoubtedly, many hours of footage was shot for, at most, a four minute film.

I am sore, and sleepless, and my head's swimming, and I went three days and hardly ate. And I haven't yet gotten to see last week's episode of Fringe (spoilers will get you dead). But I wouldn't have traded this experience for the world. I watched moments from the The Drowning Girl: A Memoir brought to life through the alchemy of effort, talent, patience, luck, and persistence. After all my years of publishing, I am not ashamed to say that I learned many things I wish I'd learned years ago. And new projects will happen because I have learned these lessons.

I'm too tired to say very much, I only want to lie down and shut my eyes. But...yesterday we made it to Rolling Dam (the location that inspired the novel), and watched Sara become the marvelously predatory Siren of Millville. Never mind the water was fucking freezing, and rough enough it's a wonder she wasn't swept away. In time, you will see the beauty of those moments, but later. We can't show all our cards at once.

I sat with Nicola at Thundermist Falls in Woonsocket as the sun set, and coached her on what Imp would be doing and thinking and how she would move. I watched Imp try to drown in a bathtub, and panicked Abalyn carry her down a narrow hallway. In time, you'll see. We shot in the Providence Athenaeum (thank you, Super Librarian Women!), and other locales around the city today.

We've thanked each other, and wished we didn't have to leave, that we could keep working on this thing. But that's not how art is meant to be, is it? No, it's not. A special thank you to our absent genius, Michael Zulli. And to everyone who donated even so much as a single dollar to the Kickstarter crowdsourcing drive that made this happen.

My brains are running out my ears. But before I go, here are a few more shots:

( 15-16 October 2011; SFW? You decide. )

I drank the blood of angels from the bottle,
Just to see if I could call the lightning down.
It hasn't struck me yet, and I would wage my soul to bet
That there ain't no one throwing lightning anyhow. — Brown Bird, "Blood of Angels"

Here in Providence, we've leapfrogged from April, way back on Wednesday, to June. And, actually, four days ago, I had to run the space heater in my office. So! Everything normal here in New England. Last night, at three ayem, the humidity was 100%.

As birthdays go, or, rather, as my birthdays go, yesterday was probably ahead of the curve. I have a Magical Birthday Curse of Doom. Last year, for example, we were supposed to be in Boston, but the car died, it was 90 million degrees (and we still haven't invented AC in Rhode Island, probably never will), and I was a sick as a dog from one of my meds. Sure, last year's birthday began with Garrison Kiellor profiling me on NPR. And that was cool, in the most surreal of ways. If not for Garrison Kiellor, last year's birthday would have scored about 5% on the Birthday-o-Meter®. I give yesterday a 50%. So, yeah. Better.

Truthfully, any birthday that includes watching a school of mermaids drag a pirate ship into the briny deep can't be all bad.

Which is to say, Spooky's birthday present to me was a matinée showing of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. In 2-D, thank you. It was fun, and the mermaids were spectacular. sovay would approve. And Ian McShane was awesome, but it was obvious he was on a short leash. Ian McShane is a goddamn force of Nature, but he must be free to say cocksucker as many times as is necessary. On Stranger Tides could have used about fifty uses of cocksucker. Jack Sparrow is definitely a cocksucker. Anyway, yeah. Fun and pretty movie. Great cast. But this needs to be the last of the series. Time to move on.

As for the rest of the day, well...there was floor cake. Floor cake sort of sums up everything not good about yesterday. But, we had pizza from Fellini's, just like last year. I sat on College Hill, watching the fog roll in from the bay. We played Rift (more on that in a moment). I did not write. There were some marvelous gifts, and my gargantuan thanks to everyone who went to that much trouble and expense. Truly. On Facebook, far more than 200 people wished me a happy birthday (only 32 on LJ, and only 8 on Twitter, and I find this all significant; oh, but rozk wrote me a wonderful birthday poem she posted to LJ). Late, I lay on the floor and watched two episodes of Firefly ("Trash" and "War Stories"), because Firefly on your birthday helps, like washing down a bitter pill with something sweet. This paragraph is horrid, but there you go. Spooky read me If I Ran the Zoo, before the insomnia struck (despite my Good-Worker-Bee Pill), and I couldn't get to sleep until after dawn

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I have spent so much time singing the praises of Rift, that I almost (almost) feel obligated to write about its shortcomings. Which is sort of silly, as Rift at its worst still makes WoW look like the sad mess it is. But. Even so. If you visit Telara, and happen to find yourself in the region known as the Droughtlands, and it feels oddly familiar...well, if you've ever been on Azeroth, in Desolace, that explains the déjà vu. Truly, Trion photocopied Desolace, rendered it a thousand times better, and changed the name to the Droughtlands. You even get the fucking centaurs. Also, Trion does so much right, couldn't they have devised names for regions that weren't all two-word combinations: Freemarch, Moonshade, Iron Pine, Scarwood, Shimmersand, and Silverwood, and etc.? Come on, guys. This is airy-fairy billshit, possessed of all the imagination of a dead mouse. And the yetis? I know, Iron Pine Peak is cold and snowy...but yetis? That's the best you could come up with? As kids these days would say, "falcepalm."

You're awfully fine, Rift, but you could be so much more.

And now...fuck it. Sweat and write.

I'm looking at the news, seeing that the South has been walloped with snow and ice. People are saying it's the worst snow in Alabama and Georgia since the winter storm of '93. I was living alone in Birmingham then, on the side of Red Mountain, and I was pretty much snowed in for a week, most of it without power. Long time ago. I was twenty-nine. It was the year before I moved to Athens, Georgia, and it was also the year I made my first short-story sale. Anyway, it appears the same storm front that hit the southeast will reach us sometime on Tuesday.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,753 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. And, as I mentioned yesterday, I'll be including the first chapter in Sirenia Digest #63 (February 2011).

I didn't leave the house.

Not much else to yesterday. I've started reading Shackelton's Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic by Lennard Bickel (2001). We read more of Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters (2009). We watched, of all things, Guillermo del Toro's Blade II (2002), which I think made my third time (one in the theatre, now twice at home). I really wasn't in the mood for a big, stupid vampire movie, but I was too tired for anything else. On the one hand, the visual and make-up FX have aged much better than I expected. And Ron Perlman is still cool (and always will be). On the other hand, this film can stand as proof that you really do need a screenplay and actors to make a film. Explosions and martial arts and mutant vampires, that's all well and good, but dialogue helps, too.

There was some rp in Insilico, mostly a long conversation between Molly and Grendel wherein they tried valiantly to talk about "good things," but kept going back around to all the bad things. But it was good rp. It was, I daresay, sweet. I'm going to step away from IS for two or three days. There's just too much work, and it's just too taxing. Also, I leveled my blood-elf death knight to 64. She's named Shahharazad, which, of course, looks an awful lot like Shaharrazad, my Level 82 blood-elf warlock. I call one Double H and the other I call Double R.

And now, the doughnuts.

Hold on for Round Three of higgledy piggledy.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,413 words on "John Four," and found THE END. It's a strange story, maybe even strange for me. Maybe even grim for me, right down to the irony in the Biblical allusion of its title. I wrote yesterday's pages to the Swans' My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It was the perfect soundtrack to the story. The last couple of hours of writing yesterday were pell-mell, a dizzy rush through black words. I almost felt as though my brain was tripping over itself. If this story has a moral, it must be that the end of the world is only merciful if it really is the end of the world, and not the beginning of another. Anyway, the vignette will be included in Sirenia Digest #58, along with reprints of most of my Lovecraft Mythos fiction. I felt I should do a Lovecraft issue, since I'll be heading off to the HPLFF next week, so that's what I'm doing.

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I woke this morning from the most remarkable dreams, though sadly only random shreds remain. But the shreds are dazzling. I was living out a fourth book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and somehow Saruman's industrial revolution had occurred after all. The landscape was at first Stalin's Russia, then New York City in the Great Depression. I only saw hobbits and humans. The elves would be gone, of course, but there should have been orcs and dwarves. There were refugees in boxcars in a barren snowy place. At one point, there was a frantic climb through the freezing waters of an enormous dam's spillway. There was a climactic showdown in what seemed to me a bank, and it was very Miller's Crossing somehow, only with swords instead of guns. And I woke from this dream wanting so badly to write a fantasy novel set against the backdrop of the first three decades of the 20th Century.

--- (These divisions, in my mind, make an entry less higgledy piggledy.)

Thanks for all the comments yesterday, mostly as regards ebooks and eReaders. Truth is, on the one hand, I don't care if people are using eReaders. If that's how you want to read, it's sure as hell not my business. I can't do it, because for me a book consists of two parts: 1) the experience of reading it (which includes tactile sensation) and 2) the physical object itself. These things are, for me, indivisible. I'm not looking for a "good read," because the process of reading a book cannot be reduced to mere action. But that's me. I think the only thing that scares me about all this is that I feel fairly certain that if the trend continues, we'll reach a point where what remains of New York publishing will ditch most hardcopy books, especially the midlist. It will be far cheaper to rely on ebooks, as they have so much less overhead (especially since the publishers aren't manufacturing the eReaders). The two greatest expenses in publishing would be eliminated: warehousing and distribution. Sure, there will still be hardbacks for best sellers, and also from specialty houses like Subterranean Press, but most authors won't have access to such luxuries. The midlist author will be consigned to ebooks. And if that happens, I'll stop writing. I'll just stop. Because half of my reward for having written is that tangible object, which to me is a work of art— the book —which can never be reduced to zeroes and ones.

Also, books don't usually break when you drop 'em.

I'm not going to get started on the horror that introducing social networking to the act of reading represents for me. No, I never belonged to book clubs, and I hated literature classes. For me, reading is inherently solitary.

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Last night we saw Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009). I am a long-time admirer (that's probably putting it too mildly) of Jordan's films, and this one was everything I'd expect. Brilliant, beautiful, and sublime. Fairy tale and mythology are always there, even when they aren't. Fantasy (truth) is inseparable from reality (fact). It's probably the best film about a selkie ever made, regardless of whether or not there's actually a selkie in it. Yes, even better than The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). Filmed in Cork County, Ireland, the landscape is shades of green and grey and blue that are, at once, perfectly solid and yet too exquisite to have ever existed outside cinematography. Great performances from Colin Farrell (Syracuse), Alicja Bachleda (Ondine), and Alison Barry (Annie). Oh, and how can I not love a film about selkies in which Sigur Rós are integral to the plot! If you ask me, this is a must see.

(We also saw the new episode of Glee, which still rocks.)

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I sat down yesterday and started reading through "As Red as Red" (in Haunted Legends; I don't know why I've started reading my stories in print; I never used to do this). I reached page 80, where the protagonist travels from Providence to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Only, this is what it says:

I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the East Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the West Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport.

This is, of course, backwards. It's akin to being in Manhattan and saying you're going to travel east to New Jersey. It's that wrong. It should read, "I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the East Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport." But somehow I wrote it down backwards, and, somehow, despite all the times I read it during editing, the mistake was never corrected. I've made this "commute" more times now than I can recall, and this is just a dumb mistake, one that made it into print. Odds are most readers will never catch it, not unless they're familiar with Rhode Island geography. But I had to point it out, if only in the hopes that the embarrassment will make me more attentive in the future. It was a depressing thing to find.

Okay. That's it for now. How can it already be Thursday? Yeah, I know. Because yesterday was Wednesday....

The heat comes back today. And we have a yellow air alert. The public transit system is running for free in hopes of discouraging drivers. In Birmingham and Atlanta, "yellow-alert air" is what Coca Cola bottles and sells for the three months of red air alerts that are the summer. Regardless, we will not be joining the hordes of skanky tourists filing to and back from the beaches.

Yesterday was a rather exceptional writing day. I did 1,844 words on the Next New Novel. More importantly, I think I finally found my way into this book that's been eluding me for the better part of a year. Which leads to the announcement about the novel that I've been avoiding making. Remember when I said that there was a sort of impromptu workshop late one night at Readercon 21, during which lots of folks (Sonya Taaffe, Geoffrey Goodwin, Michael Cisco, Greer Gilman, Erik Amundsen, and Gemma Files) helped me talk through some of the Big Problems I was having with it? Actually, looking back, it was really more like a literary intervention.

This arose, basically, from realizing that the "werewolf" book I was trying (and failing) to write could just as easily be a "mermaid" book. That the story would hardly change at all, swapping the wolf for a siren, and that several of the narrative problems I was having would be eliminated by jettisoning the wolf. Plus, there's my strong affinity to the sea to help drive the book. And so, that Saturday night, that Sunday morning, I made the decision.

And The Wolf Who Cried Girl became The Drowning Girl.

My only real regret is losing the original title, but I did use it for a short story long before I began trying to write the "werewolf" novel. (Note: There's a reason for those quotations marks. The "werewolf" in The Wolf Who Cried Girl was to have been about as close to people's conceptions of a traditional werewolf as the eponymous tree of The Red Tree is to traditional vampires. Likewise with the "mermaid" of The Drowning Girl, which begins not at the ocean, but a river in Massachusetts. Well, actually, it begins in an art museum.

Anyway, yes. The Next New Novel has undergone a necessary metamorphosis. Though, I will, in some sense, be preserving elements of The Wolf Who Cried Girl within The Drowning Girl, perhaps as an Albert Perrault exhibition.

Not much else to say about yesterday. But do please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks.