Caitlín R. Kiernan

1. Dreams give us another reality, realities that are, more often than not, terrible or horrific or surreal. But, always, those dream realities are brilliant. The are radiant, even if they radiate darkness and seethe with violence and fear. Then we awake, and we're back here again. Here, where the world is banal, and all is shit, and there is nothing. (A thought more perfectly realized in the instant of its conception, but, like a dream, it began fading as I tried to write it down.)

2. I have been sitting here contemplating measuring the speed of time as a physical constant. If not in this worldline, then in some other. Light's easy, that c we take for granted, a simple 299,792,458 m/second, but what if time moves? How does one state the speed of time without resorting to circular reasoning?

3. Yesterday, I did only one new page on Alabaster, Page Fifteen, because I realized that I'd set the plot on the wrong pivot (so to speak – pivot, fulcrum, whatever), and the first half #3 was the last chance I'd have to set it straight in the first series, and if I didn't set it right then the wrongness would echo down through many issues to come. Writing comics, plot is one of those things that are first and foremost. When I'm writing prose, I almost always let plot worry about itself. Usually, it accretes naturally out of characterization and mood and theme, those things I prefer to write. Actually writing plot is, I find, agonizing. Like picking buckshot out of your own flesh, then putting it back in another way round, but finding that configuration just as "wrong," and starting over and over and over. Life has characters and moods and maybe even themes run through it, but it has no plot. Which is why a plan is only a list of things that never happen. Like my proposals and synopses for unwritten stories. Anyway, I'll still hit my deadline on #3.

4. Apologies for not posting the "Question @ Hand" last night. Tonight, for sure. I'm dithering.

5. Played more of SW:toR last night (though only about a third as on Saturday), and, as promised, I was going to attempt to explain my thoughts on how it might be that video games make lousy movies, but Star Wars: The Old Republic is the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back (1980). But, slothman has saved me the trouble:

When you get 3000 years away from the main setting, you can ignore 95% of the issues of continuity with the stories from the films and the vast majority of Expanded Universe fiction. That frees up the creators to tell entirely new stories, using the familiar ingredients of lightsabers and the Force and a hundred sentient species. In my opinion, the best Star Wars work takes place at least 1000 years before the films (the Knights of the Old Republic games and comics), and the second best over 100 years after (the Star Wars: Legacy comics).

Which is essentially what I was going to say.

I'm going to play again tonight, then summarize my thoughts on the beta tommorow. But I am still loving it mightily, but also allowing myself to see the blemishes. The one that bothers me the most (she jumps the gun!) is that SW:toR takes us three-thousand years into the past, roughly three-thousand years before A New Hope, and...all the technology is essentially the same. The starships, the shuttles, the weaponry, the speeder bikes, the droids, and so on. Now, this would be akin to watching technology on earth having failed to evolve significantly since, say, the Third Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt (roughly 1060-664 BC), or...well..pick another culture – China, Persia, the Mesoamericans, etc. – they all work in this analogy. Maybe, if I were a bigger Star Wars geek I'd know some bit of lore to explain the reason for this technological stagnation spanning millennia. As it is, I find the phenomenon baffling. Were the creators too lazy to fashion a genuine history for this galaxy long, long ago and far, far away? Do they fear fan backlash? It can't be that. Not after LucasArts unleashed Jar Jar fucking Binks on an unsuspecting world. Sure, later we get death stars and light sabers fall out of favour and whatnot, but nothing really changes in the course of three-thousand years.

6. I just got the news that Ken Russell has died. Truthfully, I hated almost all of his films, with the only notable exception of Whore (1991). But still...damn. As Russell said, "“Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn’t for most people, but I am not interested. There’s too much of it about.”

7. Part of last night was spent catching up on "television" (id est, streaming via Hulu). Very good episodes of both Fringe and American Horror Story. And I read chapters Five and Six of Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus rex before sleep, which didn't come until about four ayem. I was in bed at two, but my mind (despite a literal handful of pills) had other plans.

Here For Now,
Aunt Beast

Spooky and I just made a deal, that we would never again both smile at the same time. It was just all kinds of wrong. And we weren't even really smiling. We were sort of grimacing. So, we're really agreeing never again to bare our teeth like that at the same time.

Kind of muggy and sticky and too warm here in Providence.

I just got the artwork from Vince for Sirenia Digest #58 (and I love it). But it seems very unlikely that I'll be able to find time to get the issue out before we leave for Portland. Again I apologize. I hate being late with anything, ever. Tardiness just irks me. I am a punctual beast.

As for yesterday's interesting email from my agent, let's just say that not all unexpected opportunites are good, and so we move on.

I'm trying to be higgledy-piggledy without the --- dividers. Seems more honest.

Still much too much to get done before we leave in the morning. I have a very long list. Yesterday, we drove to South County, to Spooky's parents' place. We have a housesitter for the days we'll be away, but Spooky's mom will be coming up to give Sméagol the malt-flavored prednisone he takes for his plasma cell pododermatitis. So, we took her a key. On the farm, wild grapes and ferns were going yellow with autumn, and there were autumnal bursts of red in a few trees. It was raining and windy, and I thought about the much worse weather in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut. I visited the steamsquid, who's getting along quite well, a year and a half after we rescued himherit. Afterwards, we drove to Warwick, and I looked for a couple of pairs of pants at the thrift store. I have developed an almost religious enthusiasm for thrift stores of late (in spite of garish overhead lighting). Anyway, I found two pairs, including an absurdly large pair of brown corduroys. I almost got a pair of seersucker pants, but it's late in the year for seersucker.

I read two more stories in Haunted Legends, Steven Pirie's "The Spring Heel" and Laird Barron's "The Redfield Girls." I liked both, but found the Pirie story especially effective. And we finished Kristin Hersh's Rat Girl last night, which is truly excellent, and which I strongly recommend.

I also finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age late last night, when I should have been asleep, but was, instead, awake. My opinion at the end is pretty much the same as it was halfway through the novel. Wonderful worldbuilding, an intriguing (if far-fetched) future, an interesting quasi-Dickens pastiche, but not a single act of characterization in sight. The novel is actually more like a long outline for a novel. It's a great mountain of plot and ideas. This happened, and this happened, and this happened. But...we are never allowed to see into the people to whom all this plot is happening. Sometimes, we're told how someone feels, but we're pretty much never shown. Which makes this only one half of a good novel; I can't even consider it finished. It's sort of amazing, that a book can be so devoid of characterization. Anyway, I think I'll read the new China Miéville next. And probably a bunch of other stuff, because I seem unable to read only one book at a time.

This will be my last entry until after Portland, and I feel like I'm forgetting shit.

I read "Pickman's Other Model" aloud last night. It's the piece I want to use for my reading on Sunday. The reading's an hour long, and reading the story at a leisurely pace, it came in at about fifty-five minutes. So, I don't know. I'll either read it, or something from The Ammonite Violin & Others. Oh, and DO NOT FORGET. This weekend is be kind to Spooky weekend. Oak moss and voodoo donuts. I'm serious. Just don't try to hug her, because she bites.

And while I won't be tweeting, or blogging, or facebooking (???) on this trip, I will be taking tons of photos, and will post a bunch of them afterwards.

Now, I think I need a bath.

Oh, fuck! It's National Coffee Day!

Yesterday evening, just before dusk, there was another house fire on our street. That's two in less than seven months (the first was on November 13th, 2009). We'd just finished dinner, and Kathryn heard the sirens. Moments later, our street was entirely filled with firetrucks and rescue vehicles. I went downstairs and out the front door, and saw that the house two houses down was belching a wall of flame fifteen or twenty feet high. No one was injured, and the fire was under control and out within fifteen or twenty minutes. Fucking terrifying. It left a gaping black hole in one of the most beautiful old Victorian homes on the street. This morning, construction crews are out, boarding the place up. The house next door, the one that caught fire in November, is still undergoing repair and cleanup, so I imagine it will be a long time before the house that burned last night is again habitable.

Spooky got two photos:

( 27 May 2010 )

---

Yesterday, I finally began "The Maltese Unicorn." I wrote only 617 words, but at least it's a beginning. Since May 8th, this story has been kicking about in my head. This week, I wrote many pages of notes for it, actually working through the plot, something I might never before have done with a short story. But it's an unusually complex plot for me, plottier than most of my plots, with all the crosses and double crosses one expects from noir. Plus its a period piece, which makes the whole process several times more difficult than usual. It's a first-person narrative set in May 1935 New York City, inside a frame set in German-occupied Paris in October 1941.

Last night, we saw Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (2009, based on Tony Burgess' novel, Pontypool Changes Everything). A brilliant, terrifying movie that I can't recommend strongly enough. Superbly suspenseful. Every single moment is pulled taut. In a film about a linguistic virus, sound and silence are used to maximum effect. Nods to both Burroughs' language as virus and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. A stunning performance from Stephen McHattie. And no, it's not a zombie movie. It's something worse, but I'm sure people have called it a zombie movie. Exquisitely surreal, claustrophobic, and it wields dread like a scalpel. See it.

And I guess that's it for now.

1. The insomnia continues. Looking back at entries for the last six years, I see just how much a part of my life insomnia has been recently. But this is the worst spate of it I've had to deal with since December 2007, I think. This is the first time since then that it's seemed bad enough to consider seeing a doctor about. I won't, because I can no longer abide physicians, but the urge is there. I did manage more than six hours last night, so I should be relieved, I suppose.

2. We are ten days into March, and I've written nothing (excepting blog entries). This is, of course, an unacceptable situation, but the insomnia has made writing almost impossible. I can say that I've figured out how The Wolf Who Cried Girl can be pared down to a much simpler, more eloquent novel than the plot-heavy thing that I devised a couple of months ago. Something much more like The Red Tree, in it's scope. Simplicity will be my deliverance. Or at least I can hope.

3. Monday night, Geoffrey (readingthedark) came down from Framingham, and we talked, and talked, and talked, until it was almost 5:30 a.m. — Thomas Ligotti's forthcoming The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, my novels and publishing in general, our loathing for the grating noises made by the Internet Hounds of Privilege and Entitlement and Political Correctness (IHPEC), insanity and psychiatry, pizza, Joss Whedon, Sunshine and other sf films of the last ten years, and so forth. Spooky joined us at some point and we watched an episode of Buffy, "Once More, With Feeling," which I never grow tired of seeing (or only hearing).

4. Yesterday, Spooky and I caught an afternoon matinée of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Gods, what a brilliant, breathtaking film. Anyone who reads my novels and short fiction should be well aware of my love for Lewis Carroll. Indeed, The Annotated Alice, with Martin Gardner's extensive notes, is one of the books I keep nearest at hand while writing. And, truthfully, I went into this film without high expectations. I saw so many ways it could go wrong, and many of Burton's more recent films have left me feeling somewhat indifferent. However, all my fears were for nought. I adored the film, without reservation. Indeed, this is not only one of Burton's best films, it is probably the best screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll ever (with the possible exception of Jan Svankmajer's Neco z Alenky from 1988). It isn't often that a film ends and I immediately want to see it again, but that's how Burton's Alice in Wonderland affected me. The cast is flawless, top to bottom. The film's vision comes the closest anyone has come to capturing the frenetic, nonsensical impossibility of Wonderland (and I loved the whole "Underland" thing). I'm hearing all sorts of bizarre negative criticisms, though none with merit. This is a bold and triumphant film, one that finally addresses, without holding back, the darkness and complexity and maturity of Carroll's writing. I will add that I saw it in 2-D (having one eye and all), and was pleased that Burton avoided letting the 3-D thing ruin the movie, as is so often the case with that sadly popular gimmick. The film is a giddy, hallucinatory, unrelenting dance of shadow and light, hilarious and heartbreaking, brash and underscored, possessed of all the marvelously contradictory oppositions that characterize the source material. For the first time, I think, it felt as though Alice were truly an integral part of the landscape, and not just some baffled Victorian tourist passing through. And the climactic battle with the Jabberwocky...just wow. I cannot recommend this film strongly enough. Oh, and because I am not sleeping well, and am also not writing, and so am a bit cranky, if you're one of those who hated the film (especially if you've decided to hate it before seeing it, as so many have) please make any disparaging comments in your own LJ...not here. Thank you. I will not publicly debate the film's merits.

5. My love affair with Insilico (the SL cyberpunk sim) began waning about three weeks back, after that initial two or three weeks of ass-over-tits infatuation. I've not yet pulled out, but I suspect my days there are numbered. More than anything else, I suspect I'm losing interest because most of the players do not seem to grasp that you can't have a dystopian world without, well, dystopia. And dystopia is not a fashion statement, and it's not just window dressing, or the Cool New Flavor of the Week. If one is to approach dystopia, one does not proceed to populate it with optimism and uplifting stories that elevate the human condition and don't risk harshing someone's buzz. Dystopia is not a theme for a chat room. And if you've not read Ballard and Dick and Gibson and Orwell and...well, if you've not read these authors and taken them to heart, don't bother trying dystopian cyberpunk rp. Dystopia is, by definition, heavy and hopeless, dreary and unrelenting. Anyway, yeah. I don't think I'll ever find the SL sim that truly fits my disposition, unless, of course, I am its author, and we tried that once already, back in 2008. I simply do not have the resources to create such a sim. I have only this continuing desire for genuinely dark roleplay.

I'm in your garden, but I want a forest.
I'm in god's garden.
I'll make it a forest... (The Editors)