greygirlbeast: (Default)
Okay. I am awake. No, really. Just ask the platypus inserting bamboo splinters beneath my toenails.

First, stuff from Friday:

I wrote 1,308 words of Chapter Six of Blood Oranges, in which a new troll – Otis – makes an appearance. I really do not know what to make of this strange, strange book. It is what it is.

Also on Friday, there was a Telephone Conversation of Great Importance, which I am not free to discuss (and let me tell you, these things I can't talk about are driving me fucking nuts).

I received a package from Stephen Lubold containing, among many other wonderful things, two Penguin Classics collections – Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (and LJ can't spell the plural of sorcery) and Lord Dunsany's In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (both edited by S. T. Joshi) – and Denise Gess and William Lutz' Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, It's People, and the Deadliest Fire in American Hitsory (2002). I immediately began reading the latter, as the Peshtigo Firestorm (and associated fires on the night of October 8, 1871) have long been an obsession of mine, but I haven't read this book. So, thank you again, Stephen!

The package also included a copy of Huan Vu's (German, 2010) film Die Farbe, which I now know is the most faithful adaptation of HPL's "The Colour Out of Space" that anyone has made thus far. I did not even know of this film's existence. It moves the events of the story from New England to pre-WWII Germany – which works far better than it has a right to work – and the climax to WWII itself (which really doesn't work). That is, the narrator's story is cut in two, and framed by an American searching for his lost father. As strange as all this sounds, and despite what must have been an almost nonexistent budget, most of it works very well. The move to film in black and white was smart (I've always said I'd do "Colour" in b&w), with a very judicious use of a color effect, that was smart. The acting is decent, the casting good, the cinematography so-so, the SFX uneven, but sometimes very impressive. The sound was awful. I don't know if it was a bad transfer to the DVD, or trouble with sound editing. But...if you're a fan of HPL or the story, it should be seen. It is at least a one-hundred percent improvement over the two previous attempts at filming the story – the laughable Die, Monster, Die (1965) and the unspeakably laughable The Curse (1987).

Oh, I'm also adding a photograph of the "pregnant plesiosaur" to yesterday's entry, for posterity (because it's an amazing fossil, and sometimes links go poof). And thank you, [livejournal.com profile] corucia for sending me the full paper from Science.

---

And now...yesterday.

Whoa, David Bowie flashback. No, I'm better now.

More hookey. Inexcusable, I know. No, it truly is. But, and still, Spooky and I went to Moonstone, because how many more days of summer are left? Not many, that's how many. And it rained all June, and we didn't have a car in July, and...anyway, we went to Moonstone. The air temperature was around 80˚F and the water somewhere in the 60sF. I swam. A lot. I've regained so much strength so quickly that I'm sort of astounded. I floated and dove in deep green water. The sky above me was blue with the white brush stokes of cirrus clouds and contrails and with gulls. There is utter peace, only fifty yards offshore. There were virtually no swells, the water was so calm (except when some asshole in a motorboat roared past). The only slightly spooky moment was when I found myself in a riptide that moved me twenty or thirty feet south in just a few seconds. But I stayed calm, swam to the east, and was immediately out of the current. Back on shore, we saw another osprey fishing. Likely the same one we saw back on July 30th.

I so need an underwater camera.

As we were leaving, I spotted the blackened and sun-shriveled remains of a very young dolphin or porpoise – possibly a newborn calf. The dorsal fin had an orange plastic tag that had been attached by researchers from the Mystic Aquarium, and, oddly, what remained of the carcass was tied to a tiny raft made of driftwood. The aquarium's tag noted it had been dead when tagged...which could have been weeks ago, based on the degree of decomposition. The skull, flippers, and tail fluke were missing (not surprising, as these tend to be taken quickly by scavengers). I wanted to take the whole thing away with me for what was left of the skeleton (in excellent shape), but I took only a single anterior thoracic rib. Anyway, there are photographs from yesterday behind the cut:

13 August 2011 )


Also, some decent RP in Insilico last night, as Grendel enters the yakuza.
greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
Not much in the mood for an entry today. We'll play a nice game of catch up tomorrow.

My thanks to everyone who has donated mine and [livejournal.com profile] kylecassidy's Drowning Girl Kickstarter project. At this point, it's 141% funded, and we still have twenty-eight days to go. And there are some amazing new rewards, soon to be announced. So, it's not too late. Also, people seem shy about those donations between $1-$14, but they ought not. Every bit helps, plus those donations grant access to the project blog.

Today, I am going to the sea.

Try to go seventy-two hours without using "lol," in any context (unless it's part of an actual word, such as lollipop). Maybe future generations won't thank you, them being doomed and all, but I'll sure be grateful.

Oh! One last thing. From Richard Horton's review of Ellen Datlow's Supernatural Noir, in the August issue of Locus:

Finally, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘‘The Maltese Unicorn’’, which is as stylishly noir as any story here, is about a used bookstore owner who is friendly with a mysterious brothel owner, and thus ends up trying to track down a strange object – a dildo – for her, and gets involved, to her distress, with a beautiful and untrustworthy woman mixed up in the whole business. I thought this the best story in the book, and the story that most perfectly, to my taste, matched the theme.

Booya!

Lastly, thanks to [livejournal.com profile] sovay for news of this wondrous fossil, a plesiosaur found with an unborn plesioaur in its abdomen:

greygirlbeast: (Default)
Chilly, cloudy, rain and wind on its way. I just happened across a photograph I took from the front parlour one year ago yesterday. All was in bloom and the trees were going green along the street. I think, this year, we're at least two weeks behind that. It still looks like February out there. Maybe I'm dead, and this is my hell, a world forever poised at the beginning of spring, a perpetually unfulfilled promise.

Okay, that's starting to sound like Bad Goth Poetry.

But still.

Yesterday was, in theory, better than Thursday. I did some of the last tweaking to The Drowning Girl: A Memoir that's going to be done before I send it back to Penguin on Monday. Then I wait for the editorial letter, etc. and etc. Gods, this routine's gotten old. Anyway, I also sort of tore apart the beginning of "Fake Plastic Trees" and rewrote it. Spooky says it's better now. I don't generally rewrite or write in drafts, and it's unnerving when I do. When all was said and done, though hours were required, I had a net gain of only 248 words.


Nothing else to yesterday worth mentioning. I napped on the sofa for five or ten minutes, the best sleep of the last twenty-four hours. I read "A re-examination of Hauffiosaurus zanoni, a pliosauroid from the Toarcian (Early Jurassic) of Germany" in the new JVP. I missed a phone call from Harlan. That was yesterday.

Probably, I should stop now. This isn't going to get any better.
greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
Yesterday was, all in all, a strange day, possibly an almost good day. Certainly a productive day that was not without merit, and, also, which was shot through with threads of something better than the stressful mess of the last five or six days.

For one, I wrote 1,513 words on "Fake Plastic Trees," the new short story (details TBA). It's sf. But that's all I can say for now. Oh, and I'll be writing at least one more sf story later this year, which I'm currently calling "The Last Martian There Ever Was." Anyway, yes, the new story's off to a good start, though I think I only realized this morning why the protagonist has been encouraged to tell her story. Which is to say, I've only just this morning realized why the story's being written.

Also, some encouraging news from my editor at Penguin regarding the cover of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I'm being told they've decided to take a different direction, away from the ParaRom thing, and I have hopes and my fingers are crossed. So, there's that.

I'm also making some headway getting permission to quote songs in the novel. Radiohead has given me permisison to quote "There, There (The Bony King of Nowhere)." I think I reported that earlier. Yesterday, I talked with Philip Ridley, and was very generously granted permission to quote a verse of a song he wrote for The Passion of Darkly Noon, "Who Will Love Me Now?" which PJ Harvey sings in the film. Yes, Philip Ridley rocks.

---

Meanwhile, Alfred Music Publishing has granted me permission to quote two lines from R.E.M.'s "Find the River":

The river to the ocean goes,
A fortune for the undertow.


...but they want a $380 licensing fee, that would only cover the first printing of the tpb of the book. That means, new fees would have to be paid for a second print of the tpb, and then again for the mmpb (and each printing of the mmpb), and again for the audiobook, and so on and so forth forever.

Now, if US Copyright Law were not printed on wet toilet paper, quoting two lines from a song would qualify as "fair use." But there have been successful lawsuits rendering "fair use" meaningless in many cases, making publishers gun shy. It all comes down to the lawyers and corporate greed, and has nothing to do with the musicians (who wouldn't see a penny of this licensing fee). In 1996, when I was working on my second story arc for The Dreaming, I wanted to quote one line from another R.E.M. song: It's a Man Ray kind of sky. (from "Feeling Gravity's Pull"). Gods, this is a dull story. Short version: Michael Stipe told me I could use the line, and then Warner Bros. stepped in and said no. At the time, Warner Bros. owned the lyrics, but, in 2005, Warner Bros. Publications was purchased by the aforementioned Alfred Music Publishing.

I can either try to pony up the licensing fee, and keep ponying it up every time some new printing or incarnation appears, or I can remove the quote and figure something else out. I'm loathe to get into the eternal loop of licensing fees (I never have before). If I were a bestselling author with six-figure advances and fat royalty statements, maybe. But not on what I make. I've considered trying to find something in public domain with which to replace the quote. Right now, though, I'm undecided. I have two months to make up my mind. I suppose one option would be to pay it once, let one edition of the book appear as I want it to, then remove the quote from all subsequent editions.

Maybe I'll give a nickel to someone who spots all the fucked up contradictions as regards copyright and licensing in this post. Only, that would require I know each and every one, and likely I don't.

---

What else about yesterday? Besides work, I mean. I'm tired of talking shop. Played Rift. Selwyn made Level 23. Did a good and peculiarly sweet rp scene with [livejournal.com profile] omika_pearl. Drank Pepsi Throwback. Oh, Spooky didn't have to walk in the cold rain to get the car, because it wasn't ready. It's supposed to be ready today; it's been in the garage since Sunday. I read another paper in the new JVP, "A new skeleton of the cryptoclidid plesiosaur Tatenectes laramiensis reveals a novel body shape in plesiosaurs." We read more of The Book Thief. That was yesterday.

---

A reminder: I'm auctioning the keyboard that came with the iMac I bought in April 2007 and used continuously until getting a new keyboard in October 2010. So, that's three and a half years I used that keyboard. And it's perfectly functional, if a little schmutzy. It's signed and dated (on the back). The Red Tree and issues #17 through #58 of Sirenia Digest were written on this keyboard.

Here's the link to the auction.

---

Okay. That's it for now. Just got an ominous call from the mechanic. Later, kittens.
greygirlbeast: (Default)
Rainy and cold here in Providence. The sky is the color of the way I feel.

Comments always welcomed, especially on Mondays.
---

To-do list for April (with three days already behind me):

1. Story for Dark Horse (TBA)
2. Story for sf anthology (TBA)
3. Sirenia Digest #65
4. All that other stuff.

---

Yesterday, I pulled the manuscript for The Drowning Girl out again and added a new page of text to the "epilogue." It's not actually a conventional epilogue; it's a section at the end called "Back Pages" which contains various oddments and loose threads, after which I(mp) typed THE END. Then I rewrote and expanded a portion of pages of 281 and 282. And then I read aloud to myself the section of the novel which I think of as 7, though I think the actual title of that section is:

7/7/7/7
7/7
7
seven
7
7/7
7/7/7/7


Then I read aloud to myself all of "Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash," and I made a great deal more line edits than I'd have expected would be necessary.

Today will be spent pulling together Sirenia Digest #64, in hopes that I can get it out to subscribers this evening. I have Vince's illustration, which I'm very pleased with.

---

A preview of the photos taken by [livejournal.com profile] kylecassidy on Saturday. This is undoubtedly the best photograph anyone's taken of me since...2003, I think. The creature behind me is Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a gigantic short-necked plesiosaur from Australia.


Dr. Caitlín R. Kiernan, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology & Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology*

Photograph Copyright © 2011 by Kyle Cassidy


---

The evening was spent with roast turkey, recreational Vicodin use, and more Californication re-watching, and then, late (or early), because I couldn't sleep, Rift on Spooky's laptop. I played my Eth warrior, Indus. I think I got to bed about 4:00 ayem. There were elaborate, apocalyptic nightmares I thankfully can't now recall. I think the only time I actually sleep restfully these days is when I doze off in the car or take very short naps directly after work. Oh, also last night, lots of listening to the new Radiohead, The King of Limbs, which is, as expected, brilliant. Thanks, Steven.

Now, time to edit and format, and also write a prolegomenon.

Probably the Last Martian,
Aunt Beast

* A little wishful thinking never hurt anyone.
greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
Yesterday, I wrote a very respectable 1,414 words on the Frazetta-inspired "Tempest Witch," and found THE END. I have some concern that the story may be a bit rough about the edges, but, all in all, I'm pleased with it. Today will be a day off, and then, tomorrow I'll be getting back to work on "The Maltese Unicorn." Likely, there will be several days of reading and research before I can begin the actual writing part of writing the story.

If you've not yet pre-ordered The Ammonite Violin & Others, there are still copies of the trade hardback edition left (though the limited edition is sold out).

The 2010 Nebula award winners have been announced, and while I do not usually take note of who does and doesn't win the Nebulas, I was pleased to see Catherynne M. Valente ([livejournal.com profile] yuki_onna) received the Andre Norton Award for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Congratulations, Cat.

Aside from the writing, there was noting especially remarkable about yesterday. When I'd finished the story, and read it all back to Spooky, I was too tired to do much of anything. Spooky had discovered an odd concoction at Eastside Market's deli, baked macaroni and cheese with pulled pork, and that's what we had for dinner, along with Brussels sprouts and baked beans. And now I know that macaroni and cheese with pulled pork BBQ cooked into it is actually absurdly delicious. After dinner, there was WoW, and Gnomenclature is now most of the way through Level 10, and Shaharrazad is not a happy camper. Later, I read a chunk of Charles Burns' Black Hole (a gift from [livejournal.com profile] corucia) before bed. Oh, I also made it through two articles in the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology yesterday, "Generic reassignment of an ichthyosaur from the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Northwest Territories, Canada" and "A remarkable case of a shark-bitten elasmosaurid plesiosaur." The reading makes me feel a little less guilty about squandering so much time leveling a gnome.
greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
At some point this morning, I dreamed of finding a very small plesiosaur vertebra, no larger than a quarter. It was jet black, and I could tell that the vertebra was from a very young plesiosaur, as the articular facets of the bone were so poorly ossified. Later, I dreamed of a concrete pond filled with baby sea turtles, and I held one in my left hand.

Yesterday was mostly a reading day, a day when there seems to be little else but reading. We finished Robert Silverberg's Nightwings (1968), in preparation for this next story I have to write (I'm shelving the zombie story, "(Dead) Love Among the Ruins" until later in the month). I signed the contracts for the Audible.com editions of five of my novels (those go back in the mail to NYC today). I finished the crossword puzzle in the November '09 National Geographic, and then began the one in the October issue. For dinner, Spooky made pizza with basil and sausage and soft white lumps of fresh mozzarella cheese. Late last night, I read to Spooky from Greer Gilman's ([livejournal.com profile] nineweaving) Cloud and Ashes. Those were, I think, the best parts of yesterday.

And today, I have to write. I'm thinking I need to do a minimum of 1,200 words a day almost every day for the remainder of the month. Then I will only be behind.

Please consider pre-ordering The Ammonite Violin & Others if you have not already done so. And don't forget that the numbered edition (limited to 300 copies) comes with the chapbook "Sanderlings."

Time to make the doughnuts....
greygirlbeast: (Default)
A couple of wonderful things...

Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] sclerotic_rings for posting news from Titan:

Massive Mountain Range Imaged on Saturn's Moon Titan

A mile high and built on water-ice bedrock.

Also, thanks to [livejournal.com profile] chris_walsh for news of the remains of a juvenile plesiosaur recovered from the Cretaceous of Antarctica.

Actually, I knew about that last one already, from an abstract in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, but it's always the thought that counts. And this is a somewhat better account that the one that Reuters was running. No mention of "Nessie," for example.
greygirlbeast: (mirror)
A new plesiosaur, named Umoonasaurus, has been described from the Cretaceous rocks of Australia, a relatively small rhomaleosaurid measuring only about 2.4 meters in length. This unusual plesiosaur possessed elaborate crests on its skull and survived in relatively cold waters at a time when Australia was a Southern subpolar continent. Anyway, here's an artists reconstruction of the beast:


Copyright © 2006 by Josh Lee


Also, a new meme sort of thingy (behind the cut), snurched from [livejournal.com profile] oneirophrenia. It comes with the following rules: "Quick Rules: Put down the first thing that pops into your head. Don't Delete and try again. Stick to your first answer!"

Word associations. )

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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