Caitlín R. Kiernan

Life will flash before my eyes,
So scattered and lost
I want to touch the other side... (Muse, "Map of the Problematique")

A good writing day yesterday. I did 1,152 words on a new vignette, for which I resurrected the title, "The Garden of Living Flowers." I intend to finish it today. There's really a lot to do today, though. The writing, but also corrections to the untitled collaboration with Sonya (sovay) and trying to get Sirenia Digest 10 ready to go to Gordon (thingunderthest) for PDFing, and a mountain of e-mail, and really, it's probably better if I do not try to see the whole from this point in time. No overwhelm. Not today.

The weather here has turned cool and autumnal again.

I wrote until six o'clock yesterday evening, then took a very hot bath. Spooky had come home with Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys and after the bath I lay down on the sofa to listen to disc two. And immediately fell asleep. The early evening naps are inevitable when I'm writing this much. She woke me for dinner, and afterwards we read all the way through the collaboration (40 ms. pp.!). I'm so pleased with the way this has turned out. Hopefully, Sirenia Digest readers will be, as well. Certainly, this is going to be the longest issue I've put out so far. It was ten o'clock when we finally finished reading and editing, and we watched an ep of Miami Ink we'd missed. Kat Von D, if by some kindly calamity of fate you are reading this, I need you to prick my arms and back a few million times. Then I played two hours of Drakengard 2 and reached Chapter 5. And my thanks to Leh'agvoi (setsuled) for the Manah icons! I've reached the City of Rust and found the mysterious masked man who may hold the key to Nowe's future. Later still, we read another sixteen pages of Z's Only Revolutions. Sam (September 1, 1870-July 2, 1876) and Haily (November 25, 1963-December 27, 1963). A few very obvious things were noted. Sam cites animals; Hailey cites plants. Sam sees the games of boy children, and Hailey those of girls. We experimented with several alternate ways of reading the text. In my head, this book has assumed the form of a transparent polygon. Only, the number of sides to the polygon, which correspond to the novel's many systems of parallelism, are multiplying at an exponential rate. We were up until almost three, working those sixteen pages. And then I couldn't turn off my brain, couldn't sleep, which is what I get for reading that book just before bed. At 3:33, I gave in and took an Ambien, which granted me hardly five hours decent sleep, haunted with dreams which were especially bizarre.

Speaking of dreams, it seems that my prayer stalker has seen fit to lock all the entries regarding me so that I may not see them. She hasn't "unfriended" me, and I'm still listed as an interest. But I'll count this as a truce, of sorts. At least this way, I'll not have to see that she's praying for me whenever I give in to my baser instincts and ego-surf. But it's still creepy as hell. Or heaven. Either way.

And still speaking of dreams, I woke from a particularly strange and somehow terrible one, even for me, at about 8:45 this morning. Because I knew I would forget it later (the Ambien, remember), I scribbled down bits of it in my notebook before I fell asleep again. I may come back to this in a second post today. It was a remarkable thing.

In case you've not heard, Poppy is auctioning a doll she made. You can view the auction here. Check it out.

Also, new albums from both Rasputina and The Decemberists will be out soon.

Okay. Gotta run. Here come the words...