Caitlín R. Kiernan

Spooky and I are not accustomed to large, heavy breakfasts. Normally, I have coffee and an hour or so later, a bowl of ramen with fresh 'shrooms and broccoli tossed in, maybe a few wasabi rice crackers. Spooky has coffee and nothing more. Neither of us are much for lunch. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, yeah, we're breakfast lightweights. Therefore, I cannot adequately explain what drove us from the house at 10:30 this morning for gigantic breakfasts at the Flying Biscuit in Candler Park. Okay, that's not quite true. It was the damn grits. At least, for me it was the grits. In all the long and vaulted history of gritdom, no grit has ever been so marvelous as the rich, creamy, ever-so-slightly sweet grits they serve at the Flying Biscuit. Mystery solved. It was the grits what lured me out into the blazing sun. And the grits were wonderful, as expected. If only I'd stopped at the grits. If only there'd not also been the eggs and biscuits and cranberry-apple butter and huge oatmeal pancake with peach compote that I honestly did not even mean to order. I simply wasn't cut out for breakfast.

No writing yesterday. I'd fully intended to spend the first half of the day on eBay, then spend the second half writing. But I wasn't done with all the eBay stuff until about five, and then I had to figure out where I want Ted's illustrations to be placed in Alabaster, which sounds easy enough, but in practice took me almost an hour. Which must be why I procrastinated over doing it for the last two or three months. Unconsciously, I knew it would be a tedious ass pain. Anyway, now it's done, and I don't have to dread doing it any longer. I also exchanged several e-mails with sovay regarding her stories for the July and August issues of Sirenia Digest. It was a full day of work, and yet not one word of prose was written. Which just seems ridiculous.

Today, Spooky's handling eBay, and me, I'm writing. Something.

Of course, the threat that the Daughter of Hounds CEM may arrive today and not on Monday looms over me like a great hungry carrion bird.

There's a write up on the aforementioned Virginia-Highland tree massacre in the June 29th-July 5th issue of Creative Loafing. Turns out, eighteen trees were cut, not fifteen, as I'd believed. They were Bradford pears. Now the Virigina-Highland Civic Association is making promises that they'll be replaced by "heartier" Chinese elms once the damn sidewalks are widened. Well, we shall see. The trees that were already thriving there looked pretty hearty to me.

Last night, Spooky and I watched an odd little film, Night Tide (1961), directed by Curtis Harrington and starring a dashingly young and bewildered Dennis Hopper. A sailor on leave from the US Navy falls for a strange woman who makes her living pretending to be a mermaid on the Santa Monica boardwalk, a woman who may, in fact, be an actual siren. The film has its moments, here and there, but lost me at the end, when it abruptly trades its slow supernatural build-up for a clumsy and somewhat unconvincing Radcliffe/Scooby-Doo sort of revelation that all the weirdness was only the product of perfectly mundane, prosaic forces, and there were no sirens after all. Anyway, despite the shortcomings of the ending, it's a peculiar and mostly forgotten film and surely worth a look.

It's getting late, and I need to be working so...please have a look at the new auctions. That's why they're there. Yesterday, I added many things, including the hardback of Threshold: The Writing of Trilobite, a first edition of The Sandman: Book of Dreams, and an ARC of From Weird and Distant Shores Go. Look. Bid. Thanks.