Caitlín R. Kiernan

I realized over breakfast – a cold hard-boiled egg with black pepper and salt, accompanied by iced coffee – that I've not left the house since June 28th. I had no idea I'd hit a stretch of inadvertently going shut-in again, nor had Spooky. The last week and a half has been an utter blur of proofreading, Important Phone Calls, heat, internet porn, cat hair, other people's fireworks, Vincent D'Onofrio, car trouble, and Rift. But yeah, today will have been the tenth day, if I don't go Outside. My record is fourteen days...

My dog and fuck me, it's hot in here. 9O˚F? I don't know. I just couldn't deal with typing in the middle parlor again.

Okay, here's the tentative Table of Contents for Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart: 25 Tales of Weird Romance:

Author’s Introduction: “Sexing the Weird”
“The Wolf Who Cried Girl”
“The Bed of Appetite”
“Untitled 31”
“The Collector of Bones”
“Beatification”
“Untitled Grotesque”
“Flotsam”
“Regarding Attrition and Severance”
“Rappaccini's Dragon (Murder Ballad No. 5)”
“Unter den Augen des Mondes”
“At the Gate of Deeper Slumber”
“The Melusine (1898)”
“Untitled 33”
“I Am the Abyss and I Am the Light”
“Dancing With the Eight of Swords”
“Murder Ballad No. 6”
“Lullaby of Partition and Reunion”
“Derma Sutra (1891)”
“The Thousand-and-Third Tale of Scheherazade”
“The Belated Burial”
“The Bone's Prayer”
“A Canvas for Incoherent Arts”
“Pickman’s Other Model (1929)”
“The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction”
“Fish Bride”
Afterword (author TBA)

Note that "Untitled 31" and "Untitled 33" will have titles when they appear in the collection. And yeah, the ToC is subject to minor changes. This is a slightly longer collection than The Ammonite Violin & Others.

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Yesterday, the heat had me feeling ill, and very little work was accomplished. We proofed "Untitled Grotesque," because I'd realized it would be appearing in the collection. I answered some email. I'm on two meds that increase my heat sensitivity. Last summer it was three, so I suppose I should be grateful (but to whom or what?!) that I'm down to two. I did talk to subpress about tiny design details on the Two Worlds and In Between dust-jacket. But, mostly, I lay in bed feeling vaguely nauseous. Whee!

sovay is supposed to be here this evening. That gives me a focal point.

Do kids these days have any idea of what a telephone operator once was?

Mostly, I need to get back to work on Blood Oranges, and I am beset by a Great Reluctance to move forward. I probably ought not say why. That would be indelicate. So, I'm sweating and spinning my wheels and wasting precious time. Oh, I slept eight hours this morning (beginning at 3:30 ayem). Yesterday morning, I dreamt of excavating an enormous (roughly 90 meter) mosasaur skull from beds of chalky marl (or marly chalk) in central Alabama. I very clearly recall the frontoparietal suture. I think it was of the genus Prognathodon. This morning, I dreamt of Alabama zoos, and subterranean passages beneath zoos that led into vast green rivers, and swimming in those rivers.

Waste is the only sin, and nothing in the world is more precious than time. Someone will tell me love is more precious, but love can be readily reduced to a matter of time.

Sorry, platypus. Not up to sweaty fur today. The dodo will console you. Wait, here's a cool thing: sunrise at Tycho (that's on the moon, yo, located in the southern lunar highlands, named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601).

Secluded in My Secret Lair,
Aunt Beast

Cold here. Very, very cold. Cold and sunny.

Yesterday, I wrote 2,280 words and found THE END of Chapter Three of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. The words spill from me in an almost alarming torrent. Since November 18th, I've written ~31,060 words of fiction, amounting to "The Prayer of Ninety Cats" and chapters Two and Three of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Those two chapters, whose combined word count totals 19,218 words, have been written since December 5th. I know writers who write more than this. However, most of them write in drafts. I expect myself to produce a polished "final draft" the first time through (and, generally, I do). Regardless, I usually write a lot, but not this much.

And I'm exhausted.

No wonder, then, that my reclusiveness is likely worse that it's ever been. The last time I left the House was December 7th, but it was only for a couple of hours to run errands with Spooky. As of today, I've not been Outside for ten days. Before the 7th, I'd not be Out since November 24th, another trip to the market. Thirteen days before the 7th of December, and then ten afterward. Which means I've only been Outside about two hours in the last twenty-four days.

I'm not even sure what to make of this, except I have no wish to be this way. Today, I'm leaving the House, though I have no idea where I'll go. It can't be near the Xmas insanity.

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Good news yesterday from Dark Horse, which I'll share as soon as I am able.

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Spooky is watching a video online about white deer, albino deer...

Last night, Shaharrazad and Suraa made Level 81. Weird to be leveling again, even if it won't last long.

I think that's enough for now. Spooky's going to trim my hair, and I'm going to spend some time squinting at the sun.

We are being made to suffer for the brief hint of spring we had last week. Okay, no. I do not engage in that sort of magical thinking (or any other sort, if I can help it), but it seems that way. As I wrote my blog entry yesterday, the temperature here in Providence was 34F, with a windchill at 24F, thanks to a 21 mph wind. As I write this one, it's once again 34F out there, though the windchill is only 27F. That is a sarcastic "only," in case you're wondering.

No actual writing yesterday. I sat here for hours, searching for a story, after discovering the story I'd thought I was going to write after "Houndwife" isn't yet ready to be written. I dusted two bookshelves in my office. That took half an hour. I stared at the screen some more. I reread portions of Michael E. Bell's Food for the Dead (2001), and might have found an idea, which is currently known only as "Untitled 37." I read about sauropods. I made notes. I stared out the window at a late March that looks like early February. I made more notes. I reread Angela Carter's "Peter and the Wolf" (1982). I gazed forlornly at the screen of the iMac. I did a little straightening up in the kitchen. I fretted about my lousy, rotten feet, and my bad teeth, and not having health insurance, and getting old, and all the grey hair. I drank pomegranate-flavored limeade. I drank lime-flavored ice tea. I made a late lunch of a can of Progresso soup and Saltines and Izze ginger ale. I shelved books that needed shelving. I closed the curtain in my office so I couldn't see the cold blue sky. It was that sort of writing day.

And, at some point, I thought, I ask absurd things of myself. Finish one story on Thursday, begin another on Friday.

Spooky, on the other hand, had a productive day. She's working on a March Hare and sort of cameo thing, both for her Dreaming Squid Dollworks Shop on Etsy.

Oh, a good day to preorder The Ammonite Violin & Others, if you've not already done so. Thanks. It's a simple enough equation: if these books don't sell, there likely will not be future books. It's the vicious maxim by which all working authors live.

Early last night, just after dinner (leftover meatloaf), I had the worst seizure I've had since at least January. It caught us both by surprise, as the seizures have become infrequent. It left me feeling empty and wasted, but no real harm done. Spooky was there to catch me. I lay on the bed for an hour or so, trying to watch the new episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but my head was very full of a fog that only began to lift later in the evening.

I was unable to sleep until sometime after four ayem, and then only with the help of Ambien (first dose in eight nights).

Oh, there are gratuitous photographs of Hubero:

( 26 March 2010 )