Caitlín R. Kiernan

0. Comments would be very welcome today.

1. Chilly and sunny today. Our little Indian Summer has come and gone. All three days of it. I left the house only once, briefly, the entire time. I expect no more days in the eighties until June.

2. On this day, eighteen years ago, I began writing Silk. Weather-wise, it was a day much like today, though much farther south. Eighteen years, so that means babies born that day are, as of this day, old enough to vote. One of them picking up Silk today, would be like me, on the occasion of my eighteenth birthday, picking up a copy of a novel whose author began writing it in 1964. These are very strange thoughts. Silk is, lest anyone delude themselves into thinking otherwise, a snapshot of a time, culture, and place long vanished. I am not that person anymore. No, not really. There's a faint echo of her around here somewhere.

3. My mood is lower today than it's been in, I don't know. Months. These things happen, and we stay on our meds, and we speak of ourselves in the third person, and we ride them out.

4. Yesterday, you might have seen a news story with a sensational headline something like: "Giant 'Kraken' Lair Discovered: Cunning Sea Monster That Preyed On Ichthyosaurs.". People kept sending me links to it yesterday. And the best I can say about this affair is that if I were still teaching, I'd point to this as a sterling example of Really Bad Science. One does not find a peculiar pattern (in this case, the arrangement of ichthyosaur vertebrae) and invent an outlandish explanation with no evidence whatsoever. And call it something lurid and ridiculous like a "Giant Kraken." There's zero evidence for the existence of a giant Triassic teuthid (squid). Zero. No fossil evidence. So, to posit that one was moving ichthyosaur bones around is very akin to the Weekly World News having once blamed "Alien Big-Game Hunters" for the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. In short, it's silly. I could write a long essay on this, but I won't. Even if Mark McMenamin could find fossil evidence for a giant squid of roughly the same age as Shonisaurus popularis, it would still be almost impossible to say it was responsible for moving those bones into that pattern.

5. Yesterday...I worked. Not as much as I should have, because...sometimes it's hurry up and wait. But I did work. Mostly, more planning for the book-trailer shoot this weekend. Only three days to go. And it looks like there will be rain on Friday, which is going to play merry havoc with our schedule.

6. Want to see the American Consumer at its least rational? Just look back over the recent fiasco with Netflix, and the damage its done to the company (a two-thirds stock drop since July, and still going down). Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has apologized for the proposed Netflix/Quickster division for rental/streaming services, which is absurd. That he apologized, I mean. People need to cut the entitlement bullshit. Better streaming services will cost more, and the industry is moving towards streaming. Period. I am far from being a financially stable person, but the original Netflix business model won't work forever, and it's wasteful, and is costing the USPS a fortune.

7. Frequently, people have asked me to blog my Second Life roleplay. Usually, I don't do this, because doing so leads to spending time writing that could be spent RPing. But I have begun keeping a journal of Ellen "Grendel" Ishmene's trials and tribulations in Insilico, the life of an illegal Level A clone/Class V AI. It's an excuse to keep myself limber with cyberpunk narratives. If you're interested, you can follow the journal here. Oh, and there are pictures. These days, about the only reason I can find to bother with SL is Insilico, and it's far from perfect. But the build is exquisite, and the RP is probably about the best ever in SL.

8. As for the non-work part of yesterday, I read two articles in the September 2011 issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: "Variation in the skull of Anchiceratops (Dinosauria, Ceratopsidae) from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation (Upper Cretaceous) of Alberta" and "A sauropod dinosaur pes from the latest Cretaceous of North America, and the validity of Alamosaurus sanjuanensis (Sauropoda, Titanosauria)."* And we read two more chapters of Shirley Jackson's The Sundial (we're nearing the end of the book), and played some Rift, and I read a rather awful short story by F. Paul Wilson, "The November Game," an extremely unfortunate "sequel" to Ray Bradbury's classic "The October Game." If you're going to attempt a sequel to one of the best spooky stories of the 20th Century, at least have the respect and good sense to mind the mood and tone of the original. And that was yesterday.

Twiddling Her Thumbs,
Aunt Beast

* Looks as though there's only a single species of Anchiceratops, A. ornatus, and that Alamosaurus is a valid taxon.

And today, is Ray Bradbury's 91st birthday. Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for Mars, Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, bottles of dandelion wine, that foghorn, the Elliot family, and a thousand other wonders.

Sunny and cool here in Providence, thanks to a low humidity and dew point. Very windy.

Turns out, as of yesterday, we're moving the entire shoot for The Drowning Girl book trailer and The Drowning Girl: Stills From a Movie That Never Existed from Boston the Rhode Island. This happens this coming weekend, so things here will grow increasingly chaotic. kylecassidy and crew will arrive on Friday evening, and as we only really have about a day and a half to shoot, it's going to be intense. But, hopefully, fun intense, and hopefully many wonderful things will come of it. Oh, and yesterday Michael Zulli showed me the underpainting of his version of G.P.S.'s The Drowning Girl (1898), and, even at this unfinished stage, it's beautiful. A part of the novel is coming alive and will exist beyond the printed page, and I thank him so much for that.

As announced, yesterday was a "day off." I still spent about three or four hours working, but there was no writing. What we did do, though, is go to Swan Point Cemetery for the first time since the ugly fiasco of the 20th of August 2008. I do not know if it was my post, then Boing Boing picking up the story of the verbal assault against me and Spooky, and the story spreading across the interwebs that led to a major change in Swan Point security, or if it was that combined with other incidents, or if it didn't involve my experience at all. But it has changed, and wonderfully so. There are visitors again, and bicyclists, and the air of oppression has been lifted. For the first time in three years (!!!) we were able to visit Lovecraft's grave. Likely, things have been better there for a year or two, but I've just not been able to return, that incident in 2008 was so upsetting. There was a big gathering on Saturday to commemorate HPL's birth date, but I didn't want to be a part of the crowd, so I waited until yesterday (I don't think the Old Gent would have minded my tardiness). We walked around the beautiful cemetery, me making notes, recording names for future stories and novels, getting mosquito bites, and marveling at trees. We found a huge red oak (Swan Point is also an arboretum) , and I took a single leaf and pressed it in between the pages of my Molskine. The cemetery was so, so peaceful: bird songs, the wind through trees, insects, the Seekonk flowing past to the east, and very little else. It was at least part ways as grounding as the sea.

We saved HPL's grave for the last. There were many a wonderful offering carefully laid above the grave. I left a tiny button in the shape of a black cat; knowing his love of cats, it seemed very appropriate. Anyway, hopefully we are now all free to visit the grave whenever we like, and I can only hope that asshole security guard was fired. Yesterday, I felt like I'd gotten back something very grand and important to me. There are photos below, behind the cut.

Afterwards, we had an early dinner at Tortilla Flats.

And I have a long day ahead of me. Spooky's begun cleaning the apartment in anticipation of the arrival of photographers (and all their gear) and models/actresses on Friday. I have to begin Chapter 8, the final chapter of Blood Oranges, which I hope to make very significant progress on this week and finish early next week.

( 21 August 2011 )

I neglected, yesterday, to give the title and publisher for the anthology that will be reprinting "Pickman's Other Model." The book, edited by S.T. Joshi, is Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. It will be released late this year by PS Publishing, who are doing some genuinely gorgeous books, including the new edition of Bradbury's The Day It Rained Forever for which I wrote an introduction.

Yesterday was an especially frustrating writing day. On the one hand, I wrote 1,211 words, part of a new scene for The Red Tree. This is a scene I was adding at the suggestion of my editor, and when she made it, I thought it was a very good idea. However, yesterday evening, having almost finished it, I realized that adding it would entail a good deal of restructuring to the last two and a half chapters of the novel. Because all changes, no matter how small, create ripples. And given that I have only ten days or so remaining to get the corrected ms. back to NYC, there simply isn't time to deal with those ripples. Moreover, the changes to text and character that the new scene would create would, in some ways, be undesirable. So...I spent half an hour this morning writing a detailed letter to Anne (my editor), explaining why I'm skipping this edit, and ditching everything I wrote yesterday. Today, I have to try to add another scene, but I'm hoping this one will create very few, if any, ripples. For me, attempting revisions on a novel that I have come to consider, for all intents and purposes, finished is not unlike time traveling. You cannot even step on a butterfly (thank you, Mr. Bradbury), without changing everything that lies downstream of said butterfly. I don't know how many metaphors I just mixed, but there you go.

There are still a few copies of the regular trade edition of A is for Alien available, and I hope that you'll pick one up.

Last night, after a meal of won-ton soup and particularly hot Szechuan beef, we started reading Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (as translated by Ebba Segerberg). And my new Colman-Rider-Waite deck came yesterday, and I spent part of the evening making good on my resolution to hone my Tarot skills. Later, we ate Klondike bars and there was WoW, but it was all spent running about getting the "25 Coins of Ancestry" achievement. In the process, we also managed to score the exploration achievement for exploring Elwynn Forest, though it meant charging past the Level ?? guards and in and out of Stormwind City. There was a PVP skirmish at Sentinel Hill in Westfall that we sort of started. I'm beginning to get a rush off the PVP stuff. And that was last night, pretty much.

I would think that by just about any sane measure, I would count as a very prolific writer. At times, somewhat too prolific for my own good. And with this in mind, it seems inevitable that there will be these dry spells. These times where I sit and stare at the keyboard until I must either find some suitable diversion, some work substitute, or start breaking things. Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day trying to write. I found a title. I found a good portion of the story — here, behind my eyes. But all that made it from my brain to the screen of the iMac was the title: "The Ape's Wife." This is the aforementioned Kong story, which I have decided is not destined for Sirenia Digest, but for the pages of Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, an anthology which will be published by subpress. So, there, I have a title and I know some part of the story, and today, with luck, it will not rain, but the words will come, which is really the same thing.

When I could no longer stare at the keyboard (I think it was about 5 p.m.), I distracted Spooky from working on the taxes (gathering receipts for Herr Accountant) and read her an Angela Carter story, "Wolf Alice," one of my very favourites. Then I read her one of my favourite Bradbury stories, "Tyrannosaurus rex" (originally published as "The Prehistoric Producer"). And then we had a walk. I needed a sweater, which seemed odd as we've been having days in the high seventies and low eighties (and it's even cooler today). Nothing remarkable about the walk. Down to the end of Seminole where the skateboarders hang out, where their ramps, geometrical oddities of plywood and particle board, sit abandoned on days they're not using them. Days like yesterday. There was a chilly wind, but the sun was bright and warm. We walked as far as Videodrome, which really wasn't very far, not as far as we should have walked. I'm trying to do better with this whole exercise thing, dull though it may be.

Back home, UPS delivered the signature pages for the hardback edition of Subterranean Magazine #6, which includes a new sf story by me, "Zero Summer." I decided I would wait until tonight to deal with the signature sheets. After dinner, we watched Brian W. Cook's Color Me Kubrick, which I found wonderful in a ghastly way, or ghastly in a wonderful way — one or the other. I downloaded new wallpaper for the Unnamed iMac from the National Geographic website. At midnight, we watched a new Nova documentary on cuttlefish. And that, near as I can recall, was yesterday.

I have yet to decide how I feel about the news of a film adaptation of Edward Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest." I see so many ways this could go very wrong.

In yesterday's entry, I forgot to mention that on Tuesday I had to proofread the galleys for a reprinting of "So Runs the World Away." I am still very fond of this story, and I found myself wondering if I might want to write a story about Dead Girl and Bobby after they leave Providence. I still am undecided.

The Canon has been repaired and, even now, is on its way back to us, so soon there will be photos again.

And I think that's it for now. But, wait...the platypus says this would be an exceptionally good day to pick up a copy of Daughter of Hounds, and the platypus, it should be noted, has a damned uncanny sense about such things.