Caitlín R. Kiernan

Proceeding as it did from the dreams, yesterday was a Very Bad Day during which nothing was written or edited or even planned. Virtually nothing of note was accomplished. Yesterday got an L in my day planner, whether it earned one or not. The dreams this morning were almost as bad, or as good, depending upon one's frame of reference and desires. Safer to say, the dreams this morning were as segregated from this waking life and as possessed of their own integrity. I need to have the Ambien refilled. At least the Ambien makes it hard for me to remember the dreams.

I cannot afford to lose even one more day over the next two and a half months.

Push it away. Push it all away.

I did get this comment, from shadowmeursault, in response to yesterday's entry, which I thought contained some good questions, so I'm quoting it here:

do you know the "answers" to your own mysteries? do you ever feel the need to justify a suspension of disbelief, even to yourself? or are you content to leave your mysteries as mysteries, even to your own mind? an example being the hemispherical world in Murder of Angels. do you, as its creator, know all of its nuances, or are you content with the little mysteries it gives you?

I cannot think of a single example of me knowing anything much more than what has been revealed in the stories themselves. Which is to say, I'm not holding out. Sometimes, I've sort of felt like reviewers and readers suspected that I was...holding out. But I'm not. If it's not there on the page, I likely am as much in the dark as you. I only find the answers I find as I write. There are very few exceptions. For example, I only learned about the connection between Dancy Flammarion and Spyder Baxter, and the connection between the Weaver and Dancy's "angel," as I was writing "Bainbridge" last December and January. Of course, I still don't know if Spyder's father was "only" schizophrenic, or if Dancy's mother was only "schizophrenic." When these questions are left unanswered, I'm not being dishonest with the reader. I simply never found the answers myself. Usually, that's because I preferred to leave the questions unanswered in my own mind. Maybe someday I'll draw a map of the hemispherical world, but I have not yet. Mostly, it's a big blank for me. The mysteries mean more to me than the possible solutions. I'll take a really good question, filled with endless possibility, over a sterile concrete answer any day of the week.

On that note, while the mini-series was mediocre overall, I was impressed and pleased that so much ambiguity was allowed to persist at the conclusion of The Lost Room. I kept expecting some hackneyed explanation: the Occupant must have had dealings with the Roswell aliens; or Room 10 was the result of a Cold war experiment; or the Objects were the components of a time machine which had crashed in Gallup, New Mexico on May 4th, 1961. But no. We were allowed to keep the mystery. For that alone, The Lost Room is to be commended. I kept wishing that it could have been just a little smarter, just a little less TV, but at least it was halfway decent TV. Which is fortunate, as I gave it six hours and suffered through the same insufferable commercials for three nights running.

Merrilee, my NYC agent, sent me a box of cookies and brownies from Solomon's Gourmet Cookies in Chicago (since 1943). The jelly cookies were especially good.

I'll be adding more items to the eBay auctions today or tonight. Please have a look. Lately, I really haven't felt like dealing with the tedium and frustration that is eBay, but a check is long overdue. A rather large check from a publisher, which was due two months ago. And the guilty party is neither Subterranean Press nor is it Penguin. It's someone else. At this point, I do not expect to be paid until at least January. My need to be paid cannot be allowed to interfere with the vacations and religious holidays of others. So, it's back to eBay. I may even list a second Daughter of Hounds ARC, though I said I wouldn't. Of course, when I said that, I thought surely I'd be paid by Thanksgiving, at the latest. Silly nixar.

In response to one my comments yetserday about NeoPaganism, morganxpage wrote:

I think that this is caused by the same thing a lot of other problems within the NeoPagan (and particularly, the Wiccan) communities: non-conversion. Most NeoPagans never truly convert to their NeoPagan religions, instead holding on to their previously Western Judeo-Christian beliefs, often without realizing that that is what they're doing. NeoPaganism becomes a new surface mask for the previous belief system. So instead of truly appreciating and serving Nature, they hold on to the belief that Nature is meant to serve them, which stems from Biblical teachings.

I think you're right, only I'd not confine the source of the failed conversion problem to "Biblical teachings." This is a problem with humanity as a whole, not soley with those humans with a JudeoXtian background. Humans have always had a tendency to imagine the world as this thing which revolves around humans. I see it in all the world's religions, to one degree or another. The inability to grasp that the nonconscious universe is wholly indifferent to the needs and desires of humanity or of any other species, for that matter. The refusal to view Nature as Nature instead of anthropomorphizing it as Mother Nature or the Goddess or Gaia or what have you. There are no gods and there are no goddesses, excepting our concepts of them. There is only the universe, and humanity is only a component of that system. No one and nothing "out there" is watching out for us. And, looking at Pleistocene and Holocene extinction patterns on Earth, it's clear that most PaleoPagans were ultimately no less anthropocentric and short-sighted, in terms of viewing Nature as something to be exploited. It is a myth that all indigenous peoples the world over held Nature in higher regard than their own immediate well-being. The present extinction event began long before the arrival of Xtianity and the fires of industry, even before the development of agriculture. Ultimately, I am asking that humans stop behaving like humans, not that NeoPagans stop behaving like Xtains (though that would be nice, too). I'm asking people to hack millions of years of genetic hardwiring and reboot (I mean these things figuratively, not in the transhumanist, singularitarian sense). I'm expecting people to let go of the comforting lies. While I'm at it, I'll take the goddamn moon, as well.

Okay. I need to be working on something for the December Sirenia Digest. I need to get moving.

Postscript (2:15 p.m. CaST; 1:15 p.m. EST): Upon reflection, it seems as though, increasingly, this journal has become less about my writing and more about things I'm probably better off not discussing at all publicly. If nothing else, it's hard to imagine that I'm not boring the crap out of some people, while leading others to conclude I am a complete lunatic and alienating still others. So, from here on, I believe I will be confining myself primarily to that subject for which this journal was created — my writing and the promotion of my writing. The rest is likely only white noise, anyway.