1) I slept eight hours, and I'm still not exactly what passes for awake.

2) We've laid in supplies. The snow is coming. It should arrive around midnight tonight. Heavy, heavy snow. If I were still in Birmingham or Atlanta, this sort of snow would spell the beginning of a week or two of havoc. Here, we may be unable to leave the house for one day, maybe. By "leave the house," I only mean get the car out of the driveway.

3) Yesterday, I wrote 1,142 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I'm starting to suspect I'll finish the chapter on Thursday. I'm on manuscript page 162. But, even as I begin this seemingly marvelous progress, the insecurity mounts. The fear that I'm not even half smart enough to write this book, and that there's no audience who wants to read a novel of this sort. I have begun heavily second guessing the reader.

Fuck the so-called wisdom of writing workshops, of instructors, and fuck all that shit about reader/writer contracts. This sort of anxiety is poisonous to good fiction. One does not write for an audience, unless one only wishes to pander. One writes. The worth of a novel is not determined by the opinions of those who read it, collected and averaged to yield an objective rating that may be expressed in stars given and stars withehld. It's all a lonely mess. The book's "worth" lies in the mind of the author, and in the mind of each reader. Each is alone with the book, and everyone who reads it is subject to their own unique experience. Nothing is generally true. That said, I sit and try to just let Imp speak and tell her story, but I begin to hear the complaints to come. The shitty Amazon and blog "reviews" it may receive in 2012. These things shouldn't occur to me, and certainly they shouldn't give me a moment's pause, but they do. "It takes forever before anything actually happens." "It's slow." "It rambles." And so on and on and on and so forth.

4) Yesterday, after the writing, we had to go to our storage unit in Pawtucket. Outside, the world was bitter cold, scabby, too sharp around the edges. Anyway, we needed to drop off those files I mentioned having boxed up back on the 7th. That was the easy part. I also needed to find the missing files for The Dry Salvages, which I'm revising a bit before it's reprinted in Two Worlds and In Between. The files weren't in my cabinet, or anywhere in my office, or in the house. So, it stood to reason, we'd find them in the storage unit, where most of my old manuscripts and notes are kept. Nope. They may be there, but we didn't find them. Which is going to make revising The Dry Salvages much more difficult. I'll say more on this later.

It was depressing, seeing all my paleo' stuff, my Lane cabinet and all the rest. Things that have been in storage since August 2001, when I only thought I was briefly putting my paleo' work on hold.

5) Few things are so capable of filling me with despair as the paperback rack at the market. Who actually reads this crap? I mean, clearly lots and lots and lots of people do, because every one of those books has some bestselling pedigree slapped across its foil embossed cover. These are the forgettable books that everyone reads. Maybe not me, or you, or you, but everyone else. They all seem to amount to little but a combination of fourth-grade reading-level prose and woozy melodrama with bland, idealized characters. They are not meant to be good books. They are meant to be easy reads. Good reads (a phrase I loathe, a dismissive, backhanded slap of a compliment). They are meant to be consumed and then disposed of, like all the best products of this society. I know the money would be heavenly, but I don't think I could sleep at night. Okay, touché. I already have trouble sleeping.

6) I'm starting to think I'm sitting in a great empty room, talking to myself, listening to my hollow voice echoing off the silver walls.

7) Last night we watched Michael Winterbottom's excellent The Killer Inside Me (2010; based on Jim Thompson's 1952 novel). A few lapses in logic aside, I liked it quite a lot (and the lapses are only problematic if we assume the characters are especially bright people, and mostly they don't appear to be). Western noir set in the 1950s. It felt a lot like what you might get if the Coen Bros. and David Lynch made a film together. As usual, Winterbottom doesn't pull his punches, and so the brutality and loss rings true. Casey Affleck delivers a chilling performance as a small-town sociopath who also happens to be a deputy sheriff. Highly recommended.

8) I ordered my new iPod Classic yesterday. My thanks to Steven Lubold, who made it possible for me to get a new iPod. I've been trying to decide what I'll name it. My first iPod (the one from 2005 that recently died) was Moya. This one may be Inara. I always name my computers. Anyway, right now I see it's in Shanghai, because, you know, that makes sense. My iPod and the ramen I had for breakfast have traveled more than I ever will.

9) Last night, Shaharrazad reached Level 83.

And that's more than enough for now.

I think I'm reaching that place where exhaustion is replaced by an abiding desire to simply punish this meatsack and the consciousness it has spawned, see how much the whole wet, bloody mess can take before it begins coming apart at the seams. Kick it until it doesn't even try to crawl.

Yesterday, I wrote 2,146 words. And that makes yesterday the second "best" day of this goddamned Forced March to THE END.

There was a question from the comments to yesterday's entry, and it was a good question, so I'm reposting it here. anthologie asked:

Caitlin, you have said you are a slow writer, that writing as much as 1,500 words in a day is a real struggle. If you'll forgive the question, I was wondering something: How long are your workdays, roughly? Eight-ish hours? I was wondering this because I am a fairly quick writer — 1,500 words takes me two to three hours, which feels a little slow to me, but really isn't. However, even if I have a whole day to do nothing but write, I can't really squeak out more than 2,500 or 3,000 words because once I start going beyond that, the writing starts being really shitty, I start making lots of typos and mistakes — all signs that my brain is completely done. That's frustrating because I have all those hours left in which I could write more, but it just won't come out.

Over the years I have become a faster writer, in the sense that it takes me less time to write X amount of words. But the only significant increase in my daily average word count occurred sometime in 2002, while I was writing Low Red Moon, I think (this could be falsified or confirmed by scanning old blog entries, an effort which is presently beyond me), when I went from about 500 words a day to 1,000. To this day, I doubt I've ever written more than 2,850 words in a day. But, what I wanted to say is that yes, I know what you're talking about, precisely. These days I may write faster, but it feels like I'm simply compressing the same amount of work into an ever smaller space. It seems to have more to do with how much I write than how long I spend writing it. Ignore the Forced March. The Forced March is an aberration. On a normal writing day, when I do 1,000-1,200 words, I usually start writing about 1 p.m. and finish any time between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. So, on average, I'd say I write 4-6 hours a day. Sometimes the words come all in a great rush (those are the good days), and I might do that 1,000-1,200 in only two or three hours. Sometimes, it takes me six or seven. And lately, there is so much work that needs doing, so much that needs writing, I wish I could use every waking hour, as almost every hour in any given day is a waking hour. But most of them feel "wasted." Last night, after dinner, after a very hot bath, I wanted so badly to go back to work. And I tried. But that 2,146 words, written in only about three hours, that was all I had for yesterday.

Gods, this is dull stuff to be writing down.

I have agreed to write a short piece for a forthcoming issue of Weird Tales, just 800 words or so; details to follow.

I did go outside yesterday, very briefly. Just long enough to cut a couple of Narcissus for the altar table, because there should be flowers for Imbolc, and the cold has not yet killed the Narcissus. I stood out front and breathed in the cold air, trying to feel clean, and stared up at the waxing moon, white in the blue sky. Last night, when I had at last given up on getting any more work out of me, I collapsed into a useless lump in front of the television, played a bit of Final Fantasy XII (trekking from Balfonheim Port northwest to the Cerobi Steppe, then west to the Tchita Uplands, then southwest, ending up at the save crystal where the Phon Coast begins), then watched a new ep of Miami Ink and then a documenatry on the Science Channel, Voyage to the Planets and Beyond, a rerun from 2005 I'd somehow missed the first time around. It originally aired in the UK as Space Odyssey. At some unspecified future date, five astronauts attempt a seven-year "grand tour" of the solar system aboard an ESA ship called the Pegasus. The science was a little wonky here and there, and naturally the planetology was already out of date (especially as regards Mars and Titan). But I still thought it was actually pretty good. It's heart was definitely in the right place. It really should have been four hours long instead of two.

I made it to bed sometime after two. I found sleep (or it found me) sometime after four. I woke at 10:30 a.m., more tired than when I fell asleep, with a song from 1994 stuck in my head, Billy Pilgrim's "Insomiac." I'm putting the lyrics behind a cut:

( Insomniac )

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