Caitlín R. Kiernan

Hold on for Round Three of higgledy piggledy.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,413 words on "John Four," and found THE END. It's a strange story, maybe even strange for me. Maybe even grim for me, right down to the irony in the Biblical allusion of its title. I wrote yesterday's pages to the Swans' My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It was the perfect soundtrack to the story. The last couple of hours of writing yesterday were pell-mell, a dizzy rush through black words. I almost felt as though my brain was tripping over itself. If this story has a moral, it must be that the end of the world is only merciful if it really is the end of the world, and not the beginning of another. Anyway, the vignette will be included in Sirenia Digest #58, along with reprints of most of my Lovecraft Mythos fiction. I felt I should do a Lovecraft issue, since I'll be heading off to the HPLFF next week, so that's what I'm doing.

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I woke this morning from the most remarkable dreams, though sadly only random shreds remain. But the shreds are dazzling. I was living out a fourth book in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and somehow Saruman's industrial revolution had occurred after all. The landscape was at first Stalin's Russia, then New York City in the Great Depression. I only saw hobbits and humans. The elves would be gone, of course, but there should have been orcs and dwarves. There were refugees in boxcars in a barren snowy place. At one point, there was a frantic climb through the freezing waters of an enormous dam's spillway. There was a climactic showdown in what seemed to me a bank, and it was very Miller's Crossing somehow, only with swords instead of guns. And I woke from this dream wanting so badly to write a fantasy novel set against the backdrop of the first three decades of the 20th Century.

--- (These divisions, in my mind, make an entry less higgledy piggledy.)

Thanks for all the comments yesterday, mostly as regards ebooks and eReaders. Truth is, on the one hand, I don't care if people are using eReaders. If that's how you want to read, it's sure as hell not my business. I can't do it, because for me a book consists of two parts: 1) the experience of reading it (which includes tactile sensation) and 2) the physical object itself. These things are, for me, indivisible. I'm not looking for a "good read," because the process of reading a book cannot be reduced to mere action. But that's me. I think the only thing that scares me about all this is that I feel fairly certain that if the trend continues, we'll reach a point where what remains of New York publishing will ditch most hardcopy books, especially the midlist. It will be far cheaper to rely on ebooks, as they have so much less overhead (especially since the publishers aren't manufacturing the eReaders). The two greatest expenses in publishing would be eliminated: warehousing and distribution. Sure, there will still be hardbacks for best sellers, and also from specialty houses like Subterranean Press, but most authors won't have access to such luxuries. The midlist author will be consigned to ebooks. And if that happens, I'll stop writing. I'll just stop. Because half of my reward for having written is that tangible object, which to me is a work of art— the book —which can never be reduced to zeroes and ones.

Also, books don't usually break when you drop 'em.

I'm not going to get started on the horror that introducing social networking to the act of reading represents for me. No, I never belonged to book clubs, and I hated literature classes. For me, reading is inherently solitary.

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Last night we saw Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009). I am a long-time admirer (that's probably putting it too mildly) of Jordan's films, and this one was everything I'd expect. Brilliant, beautiful, and sublime. Fairy tale and mythology are always there, even when they aren't. Fantasy (truth) is inseparable from reality (fact). It's probably the best film about a selkie ever made, regardless of whether or not there's actually a selkie in it. Yes, even better than The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). Filmed in Cork County, Ireland, the landscape is shades of green and grey and blue that are, at once, perfectly solid and yet too exquisite to have ever existed outside cinematography. Great performances from Colin Farrell (Syracuse), Alicja Bachleda (Ondine), and Alison Barry (Annie). Oh, and how can I not love a film about selkies in which Sigur Rós are integral to the plot! If you ask me, this is a must see.

(We also saw the new episode of Glee, which still rocks.)

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I sat down yesterday and started reading through "As Red as Red" (in Haunted Legends; I don't know why I've started reading my stories in print; I never used to do this). I reached page 80, where the protagonist travels from Providence to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Only, this is what it says:

I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the East Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the West Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport.

This is, of course, backwards. It's akin to being in Manhattan and saying you're going to travel east to New Jersey. It's that wrong. It should read, "I made the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island and then the East Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport." But somehow I wrote it down backwards, and, somehow, despite all the times I read it during editing, the mistake was never corrected. I've made this "commute" more times now than I can recall, and this is just a dumb mistake, one that made it into print. Odds are most readers will never catch it, not unless they're familiar with Rhode Island geography. But I had to point it out, if only in the hopes that the embarrassment will make me more attentive in the future. It was a depressing thing to find.

Okay. That's it for now. How can it already be Thursday? Yeah, I know. Because yesterday was Wednesday....

Yesterday was both an extraordinarily good writing day and a very confounding writing day. I did 1,674 words on "To One Who Has Lost Herself," bringing the current total word count for the story to 5,348. Once or twice I came so near to THE END that I could almost see it, but then the story would reveal some new wrinkle, some new bit of dialogue, and I'd realise that my sighting of THE END was only a mirage. In that way, it was a very frustrating day. Finally, about 5 p.m., too bleary to trust myself with so many nouns and verbs and adjectives, I called it a day, admitting defeat, admitting I'd not be finding the last sentence until today. This story (and, at this point, it isn't a vignette, but an actual short story) will go where it will. I can only follow. When it's ready, it'll make an ending for itself. I just hope it's ready today. As it is, the piece will go to at least 6,000 words. And I suppose I should say, in case I haven't said it already, my, what a different sort of story this is for me. I'm not sure just how to quantify these changes in my writing. A softening of voice, perhaps. An opening up. Not a "lightening up," but the prose is clearly less dense.

Oh, and even though all those hours of writing left me cross-eyed and foggy, I still managed to write a Wikipedia entry for the Argentinian ceratosaurian Genyodectes serus. Go figure.

My thanks to stardustgirl for hearing my poor antique heart's longing for the sound of clacking keys and pointing me towards Typewriter 2.10. Now the iBook has a voice not too dissimilar from the ancient Royal I grew up on (which had been my mother's before me). I loved that typewriter, despite the tangling ribbons and the jamming keys and the keys that sometimes punched straight through the paper. Sadly, the Royal fell prey to some part of my tumultuous twenties. I last saw it about 1987, I think. At any rate, I can now clack clack clack to my heart's content.

And speaking of changing prose, last night I was talking to Spooky about the ways that Daughter of Hounds is different from the novels and short stories that have come before. There is an undeniable difference, but I've been a little at a loss to explain to myself or anyone else the nature of that difference. Last night, I finally hit upon it. It's about avatars, sensu "An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype," et also sensu "A temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity." And, perhaps, as well, "The distillation of some aspect of myself." In all my novels, up to DoH, certain characters have functioned as my avatars. I'm not sure I was even aware of this on a conscious level until Peter Straub wrote his afterword to Tales of Pain and Wonder and declared Salmagundi Desvernine to be my avatar. And it's true. She was. But only for a particular part of myself, not the whole. Salmagundi was my longing, my nostalgia, my despair at the meaning and civilization which mankind cast aside in its race through the 20th Century.

I've had many other avatars. Deacon Silvey was my avatar, too. He has been that viciously self-destructive part of me which always means well, always intends to do the right thing, and yet which usually succumbs to the weaknesses and shortcomings of my personality. He's the hopeless fuck-up side of me. Spyder Baxter was the incarnation of my unsane mind and my unceasing fear of abandonment. Chance Matthews, she was the part of me which cannot escape a blind adherence to mechanistic rationalism, even when faced with its occassional shortcomings, and the part of me that would have remained a paleontologist even though the world decided to push in some other direction. Chance was also my regret and my mourning. Narcissa Snow was the alien in me, the outsider and inhuman which is neither this nor that nor the other, but which is ever seeking to take a side, which is to say that she is the avatar of my monstrosity. Even Gin Percel, way back there in The Five of Cups, she functioned as an avatar as well. She was my seemingly bottomless anger at and despite for the world around me and the circumstances of my life. Later, Dancy Flammarion became a more refined version of that same avatar. Niki Ky was the most vulnerable and strongest bits of me, and Daria Parker was all my stubbornness and perseverance and passion and the razor sharp corners of my self which will never soften. And, finally, Sadie Jasper has been, three times now, an evolving avatar who first appeared as the younger, headstrong, sulking goth bitch I was during those years in Athens, and then she was the resigned writer, writing for herself and herself alone, and the part of me that knows better than to lie down and die, even when the wolf has me by the throat, and then, finally, in Daughter of Hounds, she became...well, you'll see. I shall not spoil it.

In each case, the avatar has served as my route into and through the book, and they have also made of each book deeply personal artefacts. Now, I look at Daughter of Hounds and see that the only personal avatars I seem to have placed there are Sadie and Deacon, the old standbys, but only in supporting roles. They are never allowed to take center-stage. That space is reserved for Emmie Silvey and for Soldier and for the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles. Even Odd Willie Lothrop and Saben White and Esmeribetheda are more central to the novel than are Deacon and Sadie. And last night as I was talking through this with Spooky, I understood, at last, that DoH is the first time that I've taken a backseat to the story. And that this isn't a Bad Thing. It's merely my inevitable evolution as an artist. Finally, my psyche was strong enough to relax and tell a story, instead of putting myself through another round of public psychoanalysis via my fiction. Deacon and Sadie are there, and just a faint hint of Chance, and they are still my avatars, but they're watching from the wings, unable to directly act upon the course of the play. And this is my epiphany. And I feel somehow freer for having had it. Make of it what you will.

So...with that out the way, I should mention that echidnas and hedgehogs everywhere agree that Thursday, April 6th, 2006, is a stellar day to subscribe to Sirenia Digest. The way things are going, Issue #5 will feature close to or in excess of 10,000 words of new fiction. Do not deny the wisdom of spiny mammals. Subscribe today!