Caitlín R. Kiernan

0. Not gonna write about SW:toR today. There's too much else. I'll come back to it tomorrow. But, in short, it's the best MMORPG I've ever played, though I will temper that estimation with some minor caveats.

1. I haven't had to mark any days L for a long time (thank you, meds), but yesterday was a lost day. There was very little in me but anger. I managed only a flury of email before having Spooky drive me to the Athenaeum. It was peaceful downstairs in the reading room. The comforting, soothing smell of old, old books. Ghosts beyond counting. I am only sorry I committed a blasphemy by using my iPad amid those shelves (I'm not being sarcastic). I proofed the pencils for Alabaster #1, pages 17 through 25, but they were almost perfect, so it wasn't much work.

2. Today is the third anniversary of the day I first saw wintry precipitation in New England. Today, though, it's 52˚F, sunny and windy.

3.* Gonna talk shop. The business of publishing that is. Frequently, people ask me for writing advice, and, almost without fail, I refuse to offer it. But here's something. If a magazine, especially a fairly prominent online science-fiction zine, isn't willing to pay more than 0.003¢/word for a reprint in return for (and I quote from the contract) "digital media rights," which said contract defines as "...all non-physical forms including but not limited to html, Kindle, iTune apps, Mobi, ePub, and others" (id est, everything imaginable) then you need to stay far, far away from these sorts of publishers. They have nothing to offer you. No, not even "visibility." But, though I ought to know better, I just signed such a contract, because I have mountains of stories available for reprint, and when I agreed to the arrangement – several months ago – I had no idea what comprehensive electronic rights were expected in return for the paltry $25 I'd agreed to as an advance. I only saw the contract on November 21st (this is for their December issue), though the reprint request was made by them two months earlier. In between, I had to stop them from rewriting portions of the story. Anyway, point being, I don't care what the online publication is, you and your "digital media rights" are worth more than 0.003¢/word. Last I checked, pro rates were still hovering between 3-5¢/word. And, by the way, this emphatically was not Subterranean Magazine or Clarkesworld, both of whom have always paid me very well for online rights. I feel like, more and more, we're working – all of us, not just authors – in an environment that aggressively discourages dissent, then punishes dissenters, those who aren't so happy to get any work that they'll work under any conditions and for any price.

4. Today, I will do my very best to finish Alabaster. That's just five pages of script.

5. Please don't forget Question @ Hand #5!

6. I lay awake night before last, in the arms of Monsieur Insomnia, and watched George P. Cosmatos' Leviathan (1989) for the third or fourth time. What sort of film do you get when you splice Ridley Scott's Alien to John Carpenter's The Thing, then set it at the bottom of the sea? Well, you get Leviathan, a film which shamelessly steals from both those other films in almost every way possible. When I first saw it in theatres, I was furious. Later, on video, it just sort of bored me. But Monday night, watching it, I thought, Well, if I give Alien and The Thing each an A+ for Astounding, then I ought to give Leviathan a C for Could Have Been Worse, or Competent, or maybe for Cause I'm Only Half Awake. As the film has aged, it's easier to forgive the blatant plagiarism. Leviathan has taken on a questionable charm all its own. Peter Weller is truly fun to watch as he swaggers and scowls and uses the performance to bemoan the state of his career as it swirls round and round the drain. I actually love Peter Weller, and here he seems to be giving Cosmatos a well-deserved middle finger. And, too, Meg Foster autopilots her way through the role of the Tri-Oceanic Ice Queen rep giving the crew the shaft. It's those blue-white eyes of hers. But the rest of the cast is boring as dusty zwieback, though the monster/s is/are pretty cool. The whole thing with the sunken Russian ship and the blurry photos from its infirmary, that's nice, too. The tech is amusingly quaint (but not a tenth as convincing as the "used futures" seen in Alien and Blade Runner). As for the ending, it's clear neither the director nor the screenwriters were even trying to make sense. Still. Watch it if you can't sleep.

7. Tomorrow, I'll post the final cover for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. (It's not the one up at Amazon).

8. Here are photos from a spectacular sunset on Monday:

( 28 November 2011 )

Counting Fractions of Fractions of Pennies,
Aunt Beast

* Postscript (4:47 p.m.): The editor of the unnamed magazine has contacted me and withdrawn his offer to reprint the story for 0.003¢/word. This is really the best outcome. I would have withdrawn it myself, but didn't want them left in a lurch (though they'd hardly treated me with similar considerateness), what with the December issue looming. Now, I only wonder who told them about my post, as I'm pretty damn sure he doesn't read my blog. And I wonder how far the news of my evil treachery will flow through the grapevine, and if I'll be blacklisted by others of this caliber. We take responsibility for the outcome of our actions, if we choose to act.

A freakish bit of weather yesterday. The temperature climbed to 91F or 92F (depending on the source) by early afternoon, and the heat lingered into the evening. I sweated while I worked, and we had trouble getting to sleep for the heat. Today, the high will only be in the low 70sF, and tomorrow the high 50sF. Such is weather in New England.

I received a truly wonderful bit of news last night regarding The Red Tree, but which I am not at liberty to share for another week or so.

Yesterday I wrote 1,009 words on Chapter 1 of The Wolf Who Cried Girl, and may have finally found my way in.

I'm loving Jónsi's Go. This is, so far, my favorite album of the year.

I have an Ursula K. Le Guin quote I posted to Facebook yesterday, and I'd like to include it here. As I've mentioned, I've been rereading her Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979). This bit is from "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie":

Many readers , many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like sugar in a cake, or something added onto a book, like the frosting on a cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot.

I have been saying this for many years, of course, though never so eloquently.

Last night, I tried a bit of rp in Insilico, but I was really to hot and frazzled from writing to be of any use to anyone. So, Spooky and I watched Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes again, and I still adore it. Every frame is a delight.

Now, time to make the doughnuts. But here are the last photos from Sunday, of a building across the street (south) of the Prym Mill. All interior shots were taken through windows (the last two are my favorites):

( 4 April 2010, Pt. 4 )

Another warm and sunny morning in Providence. This chair and this window and this desk are far more pleasant places to be when there is sun coming in through the window, and when it's not freezing outside.

And any day that begins with an email from my agent informing me that a "scary cease-and-desist order" is being sent to an unscrupulous peddler of cheaply printed POD "books," one who has recently been offering an unauthorized edition of one of my short-story collections via Amazon...well, a day like that must hold some promise.

Also, the pastel, leporine horror of Zombie Jesus Day has passed, and that's always a good thing.

So...maybe things are looking up. Never mind that I've already been barraged today with news of the death of the Aral Sea, and of a Chinese oil tanker that's about the break apart on the Great Barrier Reef, and...never mind.

---

Yesterday, it very quickly became obvious that I was too ill from the Ambien and not having slept to hope to get anything written. Instead, Spooky and I left the House about 3 p.m., and retraced the route we'd driven on Saturday night. We left Rhode Island on the Hartford Pike, and drove as far west into Connecticut as Pomfret, in Windham County. Saturday, we'd turned north here, at the intersection of the Hartford Pike and Route 97. Yesterday, we turned south, onto Wolf Den Road, which skirts the western edge of Mashamoquet State Park. For me, this sort of research is pretty much the same as "scouting locations" for a film. That's how I think of it, anyway. It serves the same purpose. Finding the places where scenes in a novel will occur. Standing there, smelling the air, getting to know it as well as I can. We drove south on Wolf Den Road to Brooklyn Road, then circled back north on Valentine Road to the Hartford Pike. The woods were magnificent, just slipping into spring. I spotted white oaks and red maples and mountain laurel. The sky was wide and bottomless, that hungry blue laid out overhead and the sun blazing alabaster. This is where the novel begins.

Before reaching Pomfret, we stopped to examine an old mill in the Dayville district of Killingly. We'd noticed it on Saturday night, but in the darkness it had been little more than a hulking shape. We're both fascinated by industrial ruin, so we had to have a better look. The mill sits just south of Dayville Pond, and Five Mile River winds by on its eastern edge. The site is fenced off, so there was no danger of us actually entering the treacherously dilapidated structure. We did notice that a great section of roof had collapsed. And a little later, when we stopped for coffee, we noticed a local newspaper headline that read, "Part of roof collapses at vacant mill: 40-foot section caved in on Friday." So, the day before we first saw the mill, the roof had collapsed, which seemed somehow oddly ominous. Back home, Spooky found a bit about the mill online. It opened in March 1883, as the Sabin L. Sayles Company, a manufacturer of woolen goods. In 1895, it became the Dayville Woolen Company, which in 1902-1903 was incorporated as the Assawaga Company. Finally, in 1939, the mill was purchased by a German wire manufacturer, "...William Prym and Company and began manufacturing straight pins, safety pins, cover buttons, snap fasteners, and hooks and eyes." So ended its long history as a textile mill. Near as we can discover, the William Prym Company ceased operations in Dayville in 1995, and the mill has sat vacant for fifteen years. It was recently purchased by a Pomfret businessman, who planned its renovation, though I do not know to what end. We took something like sixity photos of the mill, some of which I'll post.

Driving west, we listened to the Smiths and Massive Attack. Heading home, David Bowie. We made it back to Providence about 7 p.m.

Damn, my coffee is cold, and there are too many sweaters in my office. Five is too many. Anyway, photos behind the cut, and will be more in later entries:

( 4 April 2010 )

1. A sunny day again here in Providence. It's very good to have the sun back after its recent extended absence. The meteorologists predict a high of 57F, which means windows will be opened.

2. The silence of the last two days has followed, largely, from the fact that I'm not getting anything written. Which follows, chiefly, from the fact that I'm still not sleeping. I think this stretch of insomnia is beginning its third week. Mostly, there's been exhaustion, anger, depression, worry, and more exhaustion. Nothing I want to write entries about, and (I assume) nothing anyone wants to read. I'm trying to think of good things from the last two or three days. Friday, I received my contributor's copies of The Mammoth Book of the Best of the Best New Horror: Two Decades of Dark Fiction. I got the year 1997, which was, by the way, the first year I made The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (I've had stories selected for nine of those volumes). Which means it's "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent," though Steve Jones kindly let me rewrite the story a bit, so it's not quite the story that was reprinted in the '97 volume (#9). Those last two sentences could use a rewrite, but I'm not up to it, and trust you've muddled safely through. Anything else worth remembering? Streamed the new episodes of Spartacus: Blood and Sand (still good porn) and Caprica (still impressing me). That's about it, though. Well, except for yesterday.

3. Yesterday was the rain date for my trip to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, to meet up with Sonya (sovay) and Greer (nineweaving), but Sonya was feeling under the weather...so we've postponed again. Instead of Boston, Spooky and I took advantage of the sunny, almost warm day and headed south and west to Connecticut. It's a hideous stretch of interstate, I-95 through western Rhode Island, and much worse this time of year. All stark, leafless trees brown beneath a white-blue sky. It burns the eyes and mind, that sight, slashed down the middle with black asphalt. But it led us across the state line to Mystic. There were already tourists, or so it seemed. We avoided them as best we could. An hour or so was passed in the shops along West Main Street. I found a cast-iron mermaid exactly like one I'd seen in the very same shop back on the summer of '06, and have often regretted not getting. So I bought it for the kitchen mantle. After Mystic, we followed 215 down to Noank, where neither Spooky nor I had been before. Narrow streets and pretty houses, boats and lobster pots. Out across the water we could see Goat Island, and beyond that, Fishers Island. It was quite a bit chillier by the water, but also mercifully free of people.

We headed back to Providence about five p.m. (CaST), and I dozed all the way home. The van is about the only place I seem able to sleep (without the aid of Ambien) these days. We stopped for Chinese takeout (dumplings and beef lo mein). I spent the night with WoW and Insilico. At 4:30 a.m., still trying to sleep, I read Lovecraft's "Dagon" (1917) for the bezillionth or so time. I did manage to get to sleep before five, and I must have slept maybe five and a half hours.

4. Spooky made a new doll, which you may see here. It is a lovely, gloomy doll. It'll be going up for sale on her Dreaming Squid Dollworks Etsy shop once she's finished with it.

5. Geoffrey (readingthedark) is dropping by tonight, and it will be nice to have company for an evening.

6. Not at all happy with the Oscars this year. I may post my own picks later today. It truly was a baffling year, and not for want of wonderful films. I was pleased to see that Christoph Waltz won for Inglourious Basterds. Though Neil was very dapper in his jacket and waistcoat (made by kambriel).

7. Finally, I have thirteen photos from yesterday's trip to Mystic and Noank, behind the cut:

( 7 March 2010 )

Honestly, it was not my intention to offend anyone yesterday with my comments about WoW. Truly. But, that said, those are my honest observations, and I stand by them until such time (if any) as the game shows me that I'm wrong. And, for whatever it's worth, despite what I said, I came home yesterday and spent hours getting my blood elf warlock to Level 35, when I should have just gone to bed. As I said yesterday on Facebook, the machines will win by time suckage alone. And, please, guys. Remember, it's just a game.

A glorious day yesterday. We left the house about 1:30 p.m. (CaST), and drove north and east out of Providence and into southeastern Massachusetts, through New Bedford and Fairhaven, heading towards the Cape on 195. It was a brilliant, beautiful day, warm, and just enough clouds that I had something to hang onto. I still have not adjusted to how much farther south the sun seems from Rhode Island (as compared with Atlanta). The light changes so quickly, and it looks like late afternoon when morning is hardly finished. We left 195 near Buzzard's Bay, switching to Route 6, and crossed the Sagamore Bridge (c. 1933-1935) over the canal and onto Cape Cod. There were vast bogs filled with floating cranberries the color of dried blood. We took Route 6 across the upper and mid portions of the Cape, past Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Brewster, Orleans, and so forth. It's hardly the scenic route. In fact, I refer to it as the Massachusetts Turnpike. But, we left so late, we had to make good time to reach Newcomb Hollow before sunset. We didn't leave the highway until the outer Cape, at Eastham, where we turned east towards the sea, down to Ocean View Drive, which carried us past White Crest Beach and Calhoun Hollow Beach. Newcomb Hollow Beach lies at the dead end of Ocean View Drive, east of Wellfleet. The land is all dunes and stunted confiers of a species I don't recognize, limbs contorted by the weather into fantastic configurations. We parked in the mostly empty lot at Newcomb Hollow, and walked down to the beach.

The sea was wild, and the day was slipping away fast. There are tall cliffs here, so the beach was already shielded from the light, but was catching on the waves farther out. As soon as we were on the sand, I realized that I didn't know whether the shipwreck lay to the north or the south of us. But there were high bluffs to the south, and I recalled Sonya (sovay) mentioning bluffs. So, we took our chances and went in that direction. And won the slightly educated coin toss. We found the remains of the schooner maybe 200 yards from the parking lot (that distance is really a guess). It was washed ashore last January (the 28th, 2008). The tide was going out, and the waterline was just below the wreck (it was an hour past high tide), which was mostly buried by sand. Which is to say, there wasn't much exposed for us to see, and because of our timing, we're lucky to have seen anything at all. Follow this link to someone's photos of the wreck (taken just after it appeared) at Flickr, and you'll get a much better idea of the schooner than what our photos (below) show. Worth the drive, nonetheless.

However, I was distracted from the ship almost at once, by great exposures of a blue-grey clay in the cliff behind us. Studded with all manner of clasts, and capped with the dune sand, I guessed the clay must be of Pleistocene age, though, my knowledge of New England geology is still rudimentary. I spent some time poking around in the clay, guessing diligent prospecting might reveal fossil bones. Indeed, when I got home and looked about online, it turns out that these clays have yielded remains of mammoths, bison, and other "Ice Age" mammals. After a while, we headed back towards the parking lot and just sat in the sand and watched the waves. The wind was cold, but it hardly seemed to matter. We were greeted, at some point, by a very enthusiastic little mutt of a dog, who dashed up, bounced over us, and then dashed away again. I didn't want to leave. I never want to leave, of course. But I might have a new favorite beach. The air was so amazingly clear and smelled so clean. Someone had stuck a single red rose into the sand. I stared out at the horizon, thinking of Africa and Europe on the other side of the Atlantic (almost 3,000 nautical miles away).

As twilight came on, we headed, reluctantly, back to the car, and decided to drive up towards Provincetown, to go very near the northernmost end of the Cape. We made it past Provincetown, north to Herring Cove Beach, on the western side of the Cape. It was dark by the time we parked, and there was a truly ferocious and freezing gale off the bay. In the sky, we could see perfectly the alignment of the waxing crescent moon, Venus, and Jupiter. This alignment won't come back around for another 44 years. We made it out to the beach proper, and Spooky even somehow managed to find a shard of beach glass in the dark. We have to head back to Herring Cove in daylight, because it seems perfect for beachcombing, in the winter, when the tourists aren't about. I played Sigur Rós and Portishead on the long drive back to Providence, and I dozed a little, and really, it was just such a perfect day. I have seen few finer places to stand in the presence of Panthalassa than Cape Cod.

Okay. This has gotten long, and I should go. Though it's another day off, I do have some writing-related email to answer. Then...I don't know. Nothing. Nothing sounds pretty good to me. There are photos, behind the cut:

( December 1, 2008 )

All photographs Copyright © 2008 by Kathryn A. Pollnac and Caitlín R. Kiernan

This is my quote for the day, from Victor Anderson — White magic is poetry, black magic is anything that actually works.

Cyd Charisse has died. She was 86, which seems oddly impossible.

Yesterday, though it was no doubt terribly irresponsible of me, what with having this mountain of work, and being not quite unpacked, etc., I had to get out of the house. The day before, Monday, was the first day since we arrived in Rhode Island that I'd not gone outside, and I will not return to those old habits. At least not until the goddamn snow starts. Anyway, about one pm, we took I-95 out of the city, past Boston, and north to Salem and Marblehead. It wasn't a long visit (I was thinking of you, kambriel), and mostly I was trying to find a new and very particular athame, and the witchcraft shop in Tiverton (RI) wasn't open.

The lion's share of what I saw of both Salem and Marblehead was beautiful. Had I known how gorgeous the area is when we were looking for a place, I might have settled there, north of Boston, instead of in Providence. Anyway, though I had been repeatedly warned, I was unprepared for the experience of Salem. On the one hand, as I said, beautiful place. And we walked up Liberty Street from Derby to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial Park, which wasn't founded (by the way) until 1990. It sits at one edge of "The Burying Point," where graves date back to 1637. The sense of time here still plays havoc with my mind. Which is odd, given how comfortable I am with Deep Time, with geological time. In the South, history only goes back so far — that is, the history of the Europeans who came to this continent long after the coming of the Asians who became the Native Americans. It's unusual to see gravestones or buildings dating back past the middle part of the 19th Century.

So, yeah, all that time. And coming unexpectedly upon the Memorial, I was taken off guard. By it, and by my emotional reaction to it. A small park whose stone walls are lined with stone benches, each one engraved with the name and date and means of execution of one of the many who perished in the Salem hysteria between 1692 and 1693. Some 150 were arrested, and twenty-nine were convicted of "the capital felony of witchcraft." Of those (according to Wikipedia), "Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison." The man who was crushed to death, Giles Corey, he has a bench, as do Rebecca Nurse and Susannah Martin. I was familiar with the latter two names, as the former figures in Arthur Miller's The Crucible and the latter was written of by John Greenleaf Whittier (and is the subject of a folk song I've always loved). Coming upon familiar names, it was somehow even more disquieting.

We walked in the old graveyard a bit. There was a fantastically twisted old oak (a Swamp White Oak, Quercus bicolor, I believe). I found two silk roses, blown off some plot or another — one red, one white — and carried them back to Susannah Martin's bench, where I left them.

We walked from Liberty, past the Peabody Essex Museum (founded 1799 as the East India Marine Society), to the array of shops along Essex Street (closed to motor traffic). Here's where the weirdness began. Salem's relationship to the witch trials is somewhat schizoid (and I say this as an outsider who has visited once). Visit the Memorial, and there's a distinct sense of solemnity regarding those murdered men and women. Stroll along Essex Street, among the tourists, and one encounters a different attitude, that the trials are to be treated as a bit of grotesque hilarity, a cultural oddity good for a few chills and laughs. Trolley-shaped buses (open air) drive loads of tourists to and fro, and people gawk and point while tour guides relate horror stories. I lost count of the cheesy museums devoted to witchcraft, with their leering, snaggle-toothed crones, their waxwork terrors to give upstanding Xtian folks a good-natured fright. The mountains of kitsch and tschotkes being sold, the T-shirts with witty slogans, and so forth.

And maybe I'll seem humourless, and maybe I'll seem to suffer from my own brand of hysteria, but...even given that most of the people accused of witchcraft in Salem Village probably were Xtains and certainly not witches, and that it would still be more than 260 years before Gerald Gardner invented modern Wicca...how does this differ, in its fundamental nature, from an amusement park at Dachau or Buchenwald? This is how it struck me. I don't know that it could have struck me any other way. And I'm not one of those Wiccans who's offended by Halloween and the Wicked Witch of the West and Harry Potter (I rather love all three, in fact). I am not humourless. But those leering faces, the carnival atmosphere, the exploitation, it got to me. And Spooky says it wasn't even a bad tourist day.

Anyway, we found the shop we'd come to find — The Broom Closet on Central Street. They didn't have the athame I was looking for, though we did get a couple of books and a new chalice. One of the books, Sea Magic by Sandra Kynes (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2008), impressed me simply because it's author uses footnotes and cites her sources, and good scholarship is all too rare in Pagan publishing. In fact, it's mostly nonexistent. I also picked up a copy of The Witches Almanac. The day was hot, and my feet hurt, and we headed back to Providence about four pm or so.

There's not much else to yesterday. Last night, leftover chili for dinner, and more unpacking. But we're almost done. I learned that sovay will likely be visiting us this weekend, which is cool. I baked an apple pie (it's good to have a kitchen again, one that doesn't make you want to scream). I worked on the review I'm writing for Publisher's Weekly. We went to bed rather early, just a little after one ayem. As for Monday, it was all spent putting together Sirenia Digest #31, which I hope to send out to subscribers on June 26th. Oh, there are photos from yesterday (behind the cut). But wait! Only a couple of days remain on the "cephaloflap" and "doodleflap" auctions. You snooze, you loose. You loose big cardboard monster doodles from my Great Northward Transmigration, in this instance. Anyway, photos from yesterday:

( June 17, 2008 )