Caitlín R. Kiernan

Here we go with the higgledy-piggledy again. It's a coolish day here in Providence, but sunny. After the anticlimax of Hurricane Earl, summer collapsed like a leaky balloon. Now it's sweater weather again.

I love that William Gibson tweeted "Johnette Napolitano is my Anne Rice. Seriously. Wonderful writer."

Yesterday, I finished writing my story for The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, though it still doesn't have a title. Which, I suppose, means that, technically, it's still not finished. I wrote 1,171 words yesterday. This story has been tedious to write, but I like the end result. It has required the constant consulting of texts, on subjects as diverse as pop culture, bog mummies, Arabian mythology, Irish and French geography, owls, early 20th-Century occultism, X-ray microtomography, the chemical composition of claw sheaths, weird fiction in the 1980s, rogue taxidermy, social constructionism, and Parisian ossuaries.

My new passport came yesterday, so no more worries about photo ID. This new passport is oddly high tech. I know it's being used to track me by satellite. It won't have to be renewed again until I'm fifty-six, and I imagine by then the world will hardly be recognizable.

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Still reading Kristin Hersh's memoir, Rat Girl. There's a bit I want to quote. She's writing about writing music, but it applies (for me) equally to writing prose:

Music's making me do things, live stories so I can write them into songs. It pushes my brain and my days around. A parasite that kills its host, it doesn't give a shit about what happens to a little rat girl as long as it gets some song bodies out of it. It's a hungry ghost, desperate for physicality.

I'm not writing songs anymore; they're writing me.

♋ close your eyes

i'm sliding really fast
my hands are full of snow

i don't understand
i don't understand puzzles

And every time a song is done, you can go now...you aren't needed anymore. -- Kristin Hersh

I like to lie about writing being like this for me. I've often declared that writing fiction is, for me, nothing like this.

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Still reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. And I'm also still thinking about the problem posed by A is for Alien, how it didn't do as well as all my other subpress books (i.e., it hasn't sold out). And between the reading and the pondering, something has occurred to me, and maybe it should have occurred to me before. Stephenson's book is, undoubtedly, marvelous. The worldbuilding is first rate, from the tech to the sociology (even though I think he's slightly too optimistic). And he truly has written a post-cyberpunk pastiche of a Charles Dickens novel. But, I find the book oddly lacking in emotional content and depth. The characters aren't precisely flat. But there's very little insight into how they feel about the world about them or about each other or about themselves. At times, they seem to exist in order to show us the book's technology and history and so forth. They're almost no more than plot and setting delivery devices. I feel like they're all living out a tragedy they're never allowed to recognize as such.

I have often heard it said that science fiction is the literature of ideas. Fair enough. But I don't think it ought to be the literature of ideas to the exclusion of exploring pathos, delight, fear, and so forth. And it certainly didn't used to be. But I haven't read much sf after the cyberpunks of the '80s. So maybe things have changed. Or maybe I'm placing too much weight on a single data point (though that matter of "mundane sf" rears its head). Anyway, my sf is primarily concerned with human emotion, with the characters, and only secondarily concerned with science and technology. Often, the science it is most concerned with is psychology, and I'm just wondering if that's part of what I'm trying to make sense of here. I recognize I may be barking up the wrong tree; but I need to check all of them, all these trees.

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Good rp in Insilico last night. And an interesting ooc conversation right before I logged of SL, a conversation with Blair (the person I'm mostly rping with these days) about living vicariously through our roleplay characters. We both acknowledge that's what we're doing. Me, I'm exploring various issues of identity by having an android pass through various incarnations, becoming progressively human. Anyway, it's mostly interesting because I've known a lot of people who are very resistant to the idea that rp involves this sort of therapeutic vicariousness. But I think it's where the true value of rp lies, in allowing us to explore secret parts of ourselves. Now, admittedly, it can also allow us to view the world through alien eyes, through minds not our own, and try to become people we aren't. But the best we can ever manage in those situations it to try, because all our characters will always only be splinters of us.

Spooky and I are still battling Monsieur Insomnia. I got a good night's sleep night before last, then was back to the Ambien bottle last night. It was sometime after five before I got to sleep. It's not just going to sleep, for both of us. It's staying asleep. Spooky seems especially sensitive to Outside noises. They don't bother me so much. But we're both waking a lot. I'm not sure what triggered this cycle, but it's been going on at least a month now, and it's taking a toll.

Yesterday, I helped with housework. Mostly I tried to make less of a mess of my office. I shelved a lot of books, though we have officially been out of shelf space for quite awhile. The time has come to divest myself, once more, of books I know I will never read again. Like 75% of my Stephen King hardbacks. I've actually taken to stacking books on the floor, against the walls. nineweaving assures me this is an old Yankee trick for keeping one's house well insulated. So, yeah. Housecleaning. I also spent about an hour clearing stuff off my iMac's hard drive. I made it through quite a bit more of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which I'm enjoying much more than I thought I would.

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A dream from last night. Recently, the dreams have been more vivid than ever. I suspect the Lamictal is the cause of that. They play like slumbering movies, whenever I shut my eyes. There is no way to distinguish them from waking reality, not while I'm inside them. No amount of deviation from waking reality ever tips me off. Back to my inability to dream lucidly. Sometimes one will recur for days; sometimes not. Anyway, one last night was especially distinct, and I thought I'd write it down here. I haven't written my dreams down here in a long, long time. There's a line from a movie I saw recently, and I cannot now for the life of me recall which one (I see a lot of movies). "No one ever remembers the beginning of a dream." Is that from Inception?

I don't know how this dream may have begun. I was older than I am now, and seemed somewhat more masculine. And yet hardly particularly masculine. I was wearing a finely tailored suit made from silk that seemed both red and black, depending on the way the light struck it. I had a tie that seemed made of the same silk. I was barefoot. I had a walking stick carved of bone, inlaid with something like ebony or jet.

I was walking along a wide quay, and there was a great assortment of ships docked all around me: old sailing ships, new sailing ships, barges, fishing boats, doggers, schooners, dorys, boats that seemed constructed all of rusted gears, boats of sleek chrome that almost blinded me if I looked at them too long. There was a very young Asian girl scattering yellow rose petals across the quay, and I understood she was paid to do this, but that it was also a sort of sacred duty. So, I walked on yellow rose petals between tall ships. People passed me, and either they were dressed like me, or they were women in elaborate dresses that made me think of the thirties and forties, though these were not simply dresses from those decades. They were at home in that time and place, and were of that time and place. There were crisp uniforms and raggedy men and women whom I understood, instinctively, were various sorts of sailors and fishermen.

The girl with her basket of rose petals passed near, and I tipped her, the way I'd seen other people doing. I know I was not of this place, that I was only visiting from somewhere else. No one stared, though. I didn't seem to stand out in any way.

I came near the end of a dock and stood watching as a ship's cargo hold was being loaded with enormous steel containers. A crane lifted them from the dock and set them onto the deck of the ship. The sea sloshed loudly against the stone foundations of the dock. A pretty young woman came and stood next to me. I can only recall a single line of dialogue for certain. She said, "You take such a long time to get anywhere at all."

She was wearing a cloche, and her hair was blonde. Like my suit and tie, her lips were either black or red, depending on the angle of the light. Her eyes were a dark, dark green. I think she was wearing a long fur coat. She wasn't as tall as me (but few are). We stood there, talking, watching the ship being loaded. Back towards the shore, I could hear a brass band playing. Men led a procession of camels and llamas past us, and we turned to watch.

It was a quiet dream, and it seemed to be leading somewhere. But like its beginning, which I can't remember, I can't recall where it might have led. I have this snapshot.

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We played more City of Heroes and Villains last night. We created new characters so that we could play villains in Mercy Island. Most of the missions consisted of fighting a race of humanoid serpents, pretty much what WoW calls naga. I do like this game, but am having a hard time imagining how I can juggle two MMORPGS and the SL rp, and still have anything remotely resembling a real life.

This evening I have to have my passport photo taken, and I look like shit. At least I can wait until early this evening to have it done. By then, maybe the bags under my eyes will no longer have bags of their own.