Caitlín R. Kiernan

1. Gods, I'm not awake. And to blame we have the Ambien I took at 4:45 a.m., although what we really have to blame is (drum roll, please) THE. BEST. ROLEPLAY. EVER. Which I got in Insilico last night. My thanks to Omika, Abiki, Fifth, Pinbacker...and others. Really, it's like being lodged in the forebrain/motherboard of an early William Gibson novel, this rp. Smart, immersive, simulationist, literate, and exquisitely hard. And to think I spent almost two and half years trying to find a sim that has its shit together, and players on the same wavelength as me, and that I suffered so much lousy rp and silly-ass ooc drama.* Anyway, wow, but I am so painfully not awake. Oh, I'm playing Xiang, a very confused little toaster.

2. Yesterday, I wrote 1,269 words on "Hydrarguros," for Sirenia Digest #50. The story really seemed to find itself yesterday afternoon. And then Jason Statham showed up. On Facebook, I wrote "Gods, I've just realized Jason Statham is narrating my new sf story. That is, the narrator's voice, as I hear it in my head as I write is that of Jason Statham." Sort of Jason Statham as he was in Snatch. Later, also on Facebook, I added, "You have to imagine Jason Statham starring in a film version of David Bowie's Outside, playing Nathan Adler, only it's not a movie about art crimes, but a movie about drugs from Mars." Which isn't precisely right, but somewhere in the neighborhood.

3. Okay, so...I've keep putting off talking about Peter Straub's very wonderful new novel, A Dark Matter (due out February 9th). Mostly, that's because I know enough to know I'm no good at reviewing books (would that more readers knew this of themselves), and I'm not going to do the book justice. I can heap praise upon it, which it deserves, but which is also insufficient. I could, in theory, reduce it to some book-reportish synopsis, but that would be criminal. So, I won't do either. You're just going to have to trust me on this. I've been reading Peter since 1981, and this is one of his very best. There are such moments of surreal, transcendent weird. Worlds bleed together. It is, in a sense, about the price of expanding one's consciousness. In another sense, it's about the charlatans who promise expanded consciousness, and, specifically, about the sorts who peddled those wares in the sixties. More than anything, this is a novel about consequence. In brilliantly inverts many of the readers expectations, turning its plot back upon itself, as we watch its characters struggle to come to terms with an unspeakably bizarre event from their pasts, in order to heal their present lives. You want to read this novel. Spooky read the whole thing aloud to me while I was sick, before she got sick. We expect to read it a second time in a few months. Thank you, Peter. You just shine, man.

4. Last night, we watched Anthony Bourdain in the Philippines (our fondness for this man seems to know no bounds), and then watched Rob Zombies' remake of Halloween 2. I'm still parsing my thoughts on the film. It was, in many ways, a much more ambitious film than his Halloween remake, and it had some fine moments, but, in the end, I don't think it was as good as the first film (and certainly not as good as The Devil's Rejects). Mostly, I think Mr. Zombie needs to a) stop casting the atrocious Sheri Moon Zombie in his films, even if she is his wife, because the woman simply cannot act, and she's holding him back; and 2) I think it's time for him to try something new. We now know he can make very, very good slasher films in the spirit of the '70s and '80s classics. Now, I'd like to see him do something different, because I think he has it in him, and it's time to grow artistically.

5. Email this morning from the woman who'll be reading both Low Red Moon and Threshold for the Audible.com adaptations. They start recording tomorrow, and need correct pronunciations for trilobite names. So, I think all the audiobooks are now in production, which is just amazing.

6. I'm now going to go drink what's left of my coffee and try to wake the fuck up. Excuse me.

*Within a few weeks, Insilico proved itself almost as bad, or worse, than the rest of Second Life, and I had to start eating my words.

So, yes. It has been ten years since my first short story appeared in print, my first published piece of fiction, "Persephone" in Aberrations #27 (March 1995). I had three other stories published that same year: "The Comedy of St. Jehanne d'Arc," "Hoar Isis," and ""Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea." These days, I probably couldn't read any of those stories without cringing a bit here and there, but towards the end of '95, a very black time for me, I was immensely pleased with this small accomplishment, and it gave me the only scrap of hope I was able to muster in those days. Here was this one small thing that I could do. And I spent the next decade doing precious little else. And it has been a remarkable decade. Even with the occassional setbacks and drama and The Dreaming and so and and so forth, it has truly been a remarkable decade. It seems almost impossible that it has only been ten years and makes me marvel at what the next ten might hold (I shudder to think what I might have to say about it all in 2015). Sure, I'm still not a household name (and I've kind of accepted that's never going to happen), and I've never had a bestseller, and I'm still waiting to be interviewed for NPR, and to get that first international book tour (financed by a publisher, mind you) and the first six-figure movie deal....blah, blah, blah...but seeing as how I "only" set out to become a writer, not a celebrity, I think that I've done pretty goddamn well, if I do say so myself. I have gone much farther than I ever imagined would be possible (thanks, in part, to the generosity and good graces of folks like Poppy, Neil, Peter, Harlan, Melanie, and really too many others to mention). And sure, I have days when I wish I'd never set foot on this path, but I'm told most people feel that way about whatever it is they do. All in all, writing has been pretty good to me. I haven't yet died of heroin addiction, starvation, or syphalis in some cold Bostonian back alley or on the floor of some skanky Dublin pub. And sure, when this life sucks, it sucks hard and it sucks deeply, and it sucks far more often than I'd presently like to think about, but the choice was mine. I could have gone another way. Ten years. Wow. That's perfectly, amazingly weird.

I spent hours yesterday trying to find the ending for "Untitled 13," the alien whorehouse vignette, and so far it has eluded me. I'm not sure how much I actually managed to write in those hours. A paltry few hundred words. Hopefully, I'll have much better luck today. I desperately need to put this one to bed (as it were).

Last night, Spooky and I had planned to rent Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as we were in the mood for a pleasantly dumb movie in which Brad Bitt and Angelina Jolie try to kill each other (talk about writing slash). After two Blockbusters, Movies Worth Seeing, and Videodrome, we were forced to accept the obvious, that every copy in this corner of Atlanta had already been rented. So, we rented The Devil's Rejects, instead. I'd sworn again and again that I wouldn't waste my time on another Rob Zombie film. It's no secret that I thought House of 1,000 Corpses was one of worst, most infantile, most pointlessly repugnant pieces of crap ever committed to celluoid. But we rented the sequel anyway. And you can colour me impressed. I find it difficult to believe that these two films were even made by the same man. Clearly, the venerable Mr. Zombie is someone who can learn from his failures and learn fast. The Devil's Rejects gets everything right that House of 1,000 Corpses couldn't even be bothered with. It is, in fact, one of the best horror films I've ever seen. So there. Never let it be said that I'm unwilling to give an aging psychobilly rocker who wants to be a fimmaker a second chance at wowing me. I want more.

And the first person who sends me two "Captain Spaulding for President" T-shirts (one large, one XL) gets a free one-year subscription to Sirenia Digest. No fooling.

I think I've listened to Jethro Tull's "Heavy Horses" about a hundred times in the past two days. It is currently the song that's making everything a little easier. Oh, and here's something very cute — Cthulego.

Please have a look at the new eBay auctions. Silk for only $9.99. Lots of other goodies. In fact, I think I'm going to list a copy of Aberrations #27 sometime today or tomorrow, just to commemorate that first decade. Maybe also a copy of Candles for Elizabeth.