Caitlín R. Kiernan

More than anything, right now, I am glad to have received the news that Harlan is home and recovering from his recent surgery.

Eight hours sleep last night. Eight hours that, I admit, were desperately needed. Illness, fretting, and insomnia have been working overtime on me this last week, and I've lost days I cannot afford to lose.

No writing yesterday. Much of it was spent lying on my face on the bed, not sleeping, just being fucking angry. I think I have found too many ways to put the anger down, to sidestep it, to muzzle it. I think I have buried it too deeply, and that having done so hasn't been helping my health. The time has come to admit that I still need those angry black days, that anger is as positive as any "positive" emotion. That said....

I do very much hope that you have preordered A is for Alien and Daughter of Hounds, but if not, there's still time to remedy the situation. Thank you.

Herr Platypus thanks you, too.

My congratulations to Elizabeth Bear (matociquala) on having scored a Hugo for her short story, "Tideline." You go, eBear.

Near sunset last night, we had a good walk along Benefit Street, which always calms me a bit. And, home again, after dinner, we watched Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job. A superb heist film, with plentiful twists and turns. And, of course, Jason Statham, who rarely fails to please me.

Okay. Now for the rather exciting news. An extremely generous patron has put up a considerable chunk of the money (no strings attached, even, except the stipulation that hesheit must remain anonymous) I need to purchase my own Second Life sim. This happened yesterday, and I'm still a little unsure it's not just some weird dream. So, Spooky and I will, over the next couple of months, be moving ahead with our plans for a sim set in the Providence of Daughter of Hounds, which will likely be named "Howard's End." The purpose of the sim will be, of course, to contain a roleplay, an interactive "novel," a prequel to DoH. We're talking to builders and such, and, yeah, I'm just sort of freaked about this. I have spent 14 months in SL, wading through lousy builds and broken rps, and I think that in that time I have learned how to fix the problems. There's no guarantee, naturally, and this is to be seen as an experiment, at least for its first year online. The sim will be private —— by invitation only. The rp will be character driven. There will be hounds and a few vampires, changelings and all the other things you'd expect. There will even be occasional NPC appearances by such characters as the Bailiff, Soldier, Odd Willie, Madam Terpsichore, Dancy Flammarion, and so forth. The introductory story arc will likely revolve around an occult research society trying to recover some stolen artifact or another, just something simple to get it all started. I will probably cap the players at 25-30, as one of the lessons I've learned in SL is the larger the rp, the less likely it is to succeed (rp sims often have members numbering in the thousands). The whole enterprise is strictly non-profit. The only cost to players will be the assembly of their avatars. There will be absolutely no out-of-character chat and socializing in the sim, no blingtards, no idiocy, no whining, and no blurring of SL and RL to create ooc drama. Three strikes, you're out. One big strike, you're out. And to anyone who doubts the potential artistic merits of this endeavor, I would simply point you to a number of my recent stories — "The Steam Dancer (1896)," "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection," "The Wolf Who Cried Girl," "Scene in the Museum (1896)," "Flotsam," "Unter den Augen des Mondes," and "Regarding Attrition and Severance" —— all of these began as SL roleplays, and a couple were written pretty much by fleshing out rp transcripts. It has been a tremendous source of disappointment and frustration to me, seeing how almost all of SL's potential as an interactive storytelling device has been squandered, and now I will have the means to at least try to remedy this. If you're interested in taking part, please email me or say so here (and yes, all the "Sirenia Players" will have a shot at this, if they so desire, and if they are willing to abide by the strict and non-negotiable rules of the sim). "Howard's End" will be a beautiful, intricate build, and I hope it will be home to a spectacular series of stories. I'm hoping to have it up and running by November.

Now, I try to get back into The Red Tree. Oh, and riosanmateo asked for screencaps of the my Vietnamese Ravnos antitribu character the other day:

( Another Nareth )

Today, Ray Harryhausen is 88 years old. 1920 all the way to...here. To now.

Yesterday, I did 1,349 words on Chapter Two of The Red Tree, which made it quite a decent writing day. I think I'm coming to that point where the book begins to build the momentum that will carry me to THE END. And yes, all the fears and doubts are still here with me, but the story grows louder, so they become harder to hear, harder to feel. The critics and reviewers and "reviewers" will say what they will say. My agent and editor will react as they will react, and those reactions are beyond the realm of my control. The novel will sell better or worse than Daughter of Hounds, and there's almost nothing I can do to influence which it will be. I have only one part in this affair. I create the book, and send it out into the world.

I have ideas, I think, for the two vignettes for Sirenia Digest #32 (July). I suspect I will not get to them until late next month, which gives them a good long time to steep, to brew.

In all ways, yesterday was better than the day before. It was, by and large, unremarkable, as most good writing days tend to be. I did get my contributor copies of Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace, eds.). A truly beautiful book, which reprints (first time in actual print) my story "The Ape's Wife" (voted best short story published by Clarkesworld in 2007, by the way), along with pieces by Holly Phillips, Elizabeth Bear, Jeff VanderMeer, Cat Rambo, Catherynne Valente, Ian Watson, and many others. You should pick up a copy. After the writing, Spooky and I hung pictures until we were too hot and sweaty to hang pictures, and we stopped and played a couple of games of Unspeakable Words. I did an hour of rp in Second Life while Spooky fixed dinner (thank you, Larissa). After dinner, we watched the mid-season "finale" of Battlestar Galactica (via Spooky's laptop), "Revelations." Wow. That was worth the wait, and the episode's ending rather knocked the breath from me. Were I the creator, I would have been sorely tempted to allow that to stand as the ending for the entire series. Later, I carried a table down into the basement, and took some photos down there. Richard Upton Pickman would adore our basement. I'll post some of the photos tomorrow, maybe. Anyway, then I did some more rp in SL. It was a night of oddly sad rp. omegamorningsta caught onto the fact that the Nareth/Labyrinth thing is meant to parallel the Fred/Illyria dichotomy (from Angel, Season 5), and that pleased me. Though, Fred was a far, far better person than Nareth, of course. Hell, I'm not sure Nareth was ever a person of any sort, really, which changes the equation a bit. Anyway, that was yesterday.

It's hottish here in Providence. Presently 89F, though the projected high was only 87F. Without ceiling fans or air conditioning, 89F in the place feels like 95F. The theromstat says it's 80F here in the house, but it feels quite a bit warmer in my office. There should be rain this evening.

Anyway, time to make the doughnuts.

I was an old woman, a very old woman. In my eighties, perhaps, and I had, at some point, inherited a squalid little flat in Boston that had been left to me by Quentin Crisp. I don't know how this had been accomplished, as Crisp died in 1999 and tended to live in squalid little flats and flop houses in Manhattan, not Boston. But there I was, and he had willed it to me, regardless. I had a very clear sense, not only from my advanced years, that this was happening decades in the future (2047ish?). The apartment was cold and dingy, but there was a fireplace (bricks glazed green) with a small fire, and I sat in a ratty armchair not far back from it. There was a party going on in the apartment, and there were very pretty boys in drag, and women with insect heads in elaborate latex and chrome dresses, and there were a few others, just people in Edwardian clothes, if Edwardian clothes were designed for a William Gibson novel.

My hands were so cold, and I sat before the fire, rubbing them together. Outside, it was snowing, and one of the boys kept shouting about the zombies, that the zombies were back again. Someone explained to me, very patiently, that the zombies were not zombies at all, but merely people who'd suffered severe brain damage during a long ago, brief fad of attempting to have one's mind uploaded to the internet or mainframe computers. I thought this very oddly funny, and when I laughed I had the unpleasant sensation that my dentures were loose.

There was Radiohead coming from an antique Victrola.

No one I now know was there, not even Spooky, and there was a terrible aloneness, despite the crowd in the flat. "This is what happens," I kept telling anyone who would listen. "You live this long, and this is what happens. It's just you."

At one point, I looked up, looked back over my shoulder, and Nar'eth was sitting on a chaise in one shadowy corner of the room, talking with one of the insect-headed women. She glanced at me, smiled, then went back to talking with the woman. This is the first time I've ever dreamt of Nar'eth when I was not actually Nar'eth. She'd not aged at all. I recall (it's in my notes) feeling two things upon seeing her: first, jealousy that she'd not aged and, secondly, relief that I was not entirely alone after all.

I was wearing velvet, and I think it was red velvet, but I'm not sure of any more than that, as regards my own clothing.

And then I was approached by one the cyberEdwardians, a man who looked just like a young Aleister Crowley, and he was carrying two hardback books. Both were quite old, and I asked him who read books anymore. There was a joke I can't recall, only that it was very funny, and the two of us laughed so loudly that other people stopped their conversations and stared at us. "Sign this one to Tesla," he said and handed me a copy of the black leather-bound edition of Frog Toes and Tentacles. So I signed it to Tesla. I didn't use a pen. Somehow, I wrote with my fingertip. My index finger. "Now," the man said, "sign this one to me," though I did not know his name. The book had a paper dust-jacket which was in bad shape and held together only with yellowed Scotch tape.

"Where did you find this old thing?" I asked (or I asked something very similar). I could hardly recall having written the book. The title on the cover was Post-Industrial Paganism (Spooky and I discussed just such a book a few nights ago). The man told me that he'd had it since it was published, and he told me how important it had been to him, that he was so glad I'd taken the time to write it. I opened the book and the copyright date was 2015, but it was copyrighted to Nar'eth ni'glecti Mericale, not to Caitlín R. Kiernan. I told him that she was here, at the party, and it would really be more appropriate if she signed it.

No, he insisted. You sign it. I want you to sign it, but I kept stalling and flipping through the pages while he talked.

I noticed a large green parrot sitting on the hearth, nibbling at a muffin.

"Isn't there the sense that American history has ended?" someone said. "What else could possibly happen?" I muttered something to myself about that being bullshit.

There was thunder and lightning and more talk of zombies, and the man who looked like Crowley told more jokes, and at some point someone brought me a neon-blue martini.

"The war can't go on forever," one of the insect-headed women said. "People won't stand for it." And I closed Post-Industrial Paganism and gave it back to the man, unsigned. And sometime right about here I woke up. My mouth was so dry I couldn't speak and had trouble swallowing. I found my notebook on the floor (Spooky had moved it from my side to a stack of books on her side, fearing I'd stumble over it in the night) and wrote down everything I could remember. This is only slightly more vivid and coherent than my dreams usually are. This evening, I've forgotten most of it, thanks to the Ambien (otherwise, I'd probably still be hazy and "dreamsick") and only have the notes to remind me. Make of it what you will. It's had me baffled all damned day.

Maybe my prayer stalker needs to pray a little harder...