Caitlín R. Kiernan

And here is the first day of spring, the Vernal Equinox. Spooky and I will be observing Ostara on March 22nd, partly because at least one Wiccan website places it on the 22nd this year, and partly out of convenience. Regardless, today is the beginning of Spring. Fuck you, winter. The sun's out, it's warm, and the office window's open.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,068 words on a new story, "Houndwife," for Sirenia Digest #52. It's sort of shaping up to be a very peculiar "sequel" to Lovecraft's "The Hound" (1922). I like it.

Late last night, I learned that The Red Tree has made the "longlist" for the British Fantasy Award, which pleases me. My great thanks to everyone who voted for it. And I do hope to see it make the shortlist. There's an online voting form here. All members of FantasyCon '09 and '10 are eligible to vote.

Also, I've been meaning to mention that Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have asked to reprint "A Redress for Andromeda" (written in June 2000) in a forthcoming weird fiction anthology (title TBA), which pleases me a great deal. "A Redress for Andromeda," you may recall, is the first story in the "Dandridge Cycle."

Yesterday, Spooky had to go to her dentist in Wakefield. On the way home, she stopped by Pow! Science! (at Wakefield Mall) and found the new Carnegie Museum Tylosaurus. Finally, someone has made an accurate mosasaur figure! I should make a post about all the not-so-good mosasaur figurines that have come and gone over the years. Anyway, as it happens, the new Carnegie Tylosaurus was sculpted by a Rhode Island artist, Forest Rogers, who does truly beautiful things. You should have a look. If I were a wealthy beast, I would be buying original pieces of her artwork. Hell, if I were a truly wealthy bear, I'd be hiring her to do a Dancy Flammarion sculpture.

Oh, and Spooky has lowered the price of her latest doll, Cassandra, which you may see here, at Dreaming Squid Dollworks. You know you want to give her a good home.

My head is full of random things today. For example, on Tuesday, just after I'd "fired my therapist" (long story, do not ask), I saw a bumper sticker that read, "Annoy a Liberal: Work Hard and Be Happy." Shit like that just fucking baffles me. I am baffled at the sheer temerity of stupid, sometimes. Also, we filled out the Census Form and sent it back. Is it just me, or has the census been simplified nigh unto utter nonsense? I mean, they're collecting so little data this time. It seems like it was once far more complex. I think it took me about four minutes to answer the questions.

This is getting long, and I should wrap it up. Last night, Shaharrazad, my blood elf warlock, made Level 80. I created Shah on September 27th, 2008, and I only had to give up 37 days, 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 6 seconds of my life (890+ hours) to get her to Level 80. Which is the cap until the next expansion is released, which is not to say there's not still tons of "Wrath of the Lich King" left to play (though I am dubious of the people who claim the game "really only begins at Level 80," because they're the same ones who used to say, the game doesn't begin until Level 70. And does this mean that when the next WoW expansion is released, later this year, the game will suddenly stop and resume only when you reach Level 85? Anyway...Shah leveled sometime just after midnight, fighting Scourge-struck trolls in Zul'Drak.

And now...work!

1. I thought, the last couple of days, I was getting to that "pulling myself back together" place, having had two halfway decent nights of of sleep without fucking Ambien. Not enough sleep, no, but no hypnotics, either. Then, this morning, at four-thirty I was still awake, so I took half a pill. At 5:45, still awake, I took another half. I got the sleep around six, but was only able to sleep until about noon (all times CaST). I really cannot take much more of this. I've written nothing all damn month. Oh, and the weather here in Providence is miserable again: cold and rainy and overcast.

2. I managed to work yesterday (largely because I was just coming out of the Ambien haze). I signed the signature sheets for the special edition of The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror: Two Decades of Dark Fiction. They'd already been signed by Clive Barker and Stephen King and Peter Straub, though still have to be signed by Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman. On days like this, when I can't imagine pressing even one more verb against another noun, when my desire to write has dropped away to something very near zero, I try to take solace in the fact that, thanks to my writing, I count four of those five authors as friends, and three as dear friends (I've never met Stephen King). Also, I read back through "Werewolf Smile," seeing as how the book that The Wolf Who Cried Girl is becoming will be built, in part, upon that short story. And I was enormously annoyed to discover I'd missed a metric shit ton of typos when I proofed it for Sirenia Digest #45 (August 2009). I'm considering including a corrected text of "Werewolf Smile" in the March issue of the digest. Anyway, I also answered email and tidied up my file cabinet, which has needed tidying up for the better part of a year. I made notes for two short stories or vignettes, both for Sirenia Digest #52. One may be an indirect sort of footnote to Lovecraft's "The Hound," and the other involves a sideshow and herpetological tattoos. We shall see. I desperately need to get a chapter of the novel written before starting in on the digest.

3. Last night, my blood-elf warlock, Shaharrazad, made Level 78. And it "only" took me 35 days, 21 hours, 7 minutes, and 43 seconds of gameplay (I actually rolled Shah in October '08). I will point out that Blizzard has done snazzy things with the Armory, adding character animation and whatnot. You may note that Shah has allowed her usually close-cropped hair to grow since heading out to Northrend.

4. For what it's worth, my beliefs are not beliefs I hold because I need to hold them. And I did not choose to hold them. I rejected that approach to belief decades ago. Indeed, I have often been frustrated that I cannot alter my beliefs based simply on what my mind needs. I've written about this in the past, especially as regards my approach to witchcraft and magick, and the fact that I remain an atheist, cosmicist, and pessimist*. My beliefs arise from personal observation of the world around me, from conclusions based upon those observations. I believe nothing simply because I somehow need to believe it. Desire or need alone cannot ever lead me to belief. Basing belief upon needs or desires is, to me, no more than wishful thinking.

5. Spooky's latest doll is now available via her Dreaming Squid Dollworks shop at Etsy. We call her Cassandra, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious.

6. On Tuesday, we saw Tim Buron's Alice in Wonderland for the second time. If anything, it was more delightful than the first viewing (and we still will not debate its merits here).

* I would deny, though, that I am a nihilist, for a number of reasons.

Several things I want to touch on in this entry (like why there was no entry yesterday), but before I start in on those things, let me mention that we'll be starting a new round of eBay auctions in the next couple of days to help cover the fucking taxes, which Spooky paid yesterday. Your patronage will be much appreciated. Another way you can help out is by picking up something cool from Spooky's Etsy shop, Dreaming Squid Dollworks. Be advised, by the way, that all the Hallowe'en figurines she has up are only available through Hallowe'en. They'll be coming down on November 1st, until next October. Thanks.

---

I have this problem. I can't say no to work. Pretty much never do I say no to work. I blame the poverty of my childhood, coupled with the absurd cost of not being willing to live on the street in a cardboard box. A direct result of this is that I frequently become over-extended. And usually, that only results in exhaustion. And exhaustion and writing go hand in hand, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm always exhausted. That's just the way it is. But...occasionally I push things a bit far, even for me. Which gets back to our subject line, and there being no entry yesterday.

Over the last year and a half, several wonderful editors asked me to contribute to several wonderful books, and I said yes to every single one of them. Never mind Sirenia Digest (usually two stories a month) or the novels, or anything like realistic considerations of the allocation of my time. I said yes. So, I've been working harder than usual, getting these stories written, on top of everything else, including promoting The Red Tree.

The Mars YA short story, "Romeo and Juliet Go to Mars," has become a casualty of my desire to say "yes" to every project I'm offered. But...somehow, I'm not telling this right.

This month started off hectic, but I thought I had everything under control (I usually think that, whether it's true of not). But I'd seriously miscalculated the number of days I'd need to spend copyediting The Ammonite Violin & Others. And I felt things began to slip. And I began to have far more serious headaches than usual, the sort that land me in bed. And, finally, Sunday night I had a very bad seizure. Almost always, the bad ones come when I'm pushing myself too hard. Still, I got up on Monday, near panic, and tried to continue work on the Mars story. But by late afternoon, early evening, we'd finally gone to Code Orange. I was locking up and freaking out. And Spooky told me I needed to set the Mars story aside, that it was just too much, especially given that I still have two public appearances and Sirenia Digest #47 to get through in October, and I still haven't put together the long-overdue proposal for the next novel for Penguin (though I've been paid part of the advance for it). Plus there are interviews. So...with extreme reluctance I emailed the editor for the Mars story on Monday afternoon and bowed out of the book as gracefully as I could (first time I'd pulled out of an anthology in years). And then I went to bed, where I spent most of yesterday.

I may resurrect "Romeo and Juliet Go to Mars" sometime next year, but for now, it's going to have to lay fallow. And I may be bowing out of another anthology before the end of the year.

So, no Mars for me, not right now, and should you happen to see me at the Manhattan reading on the 27th, or at the Brown University reading on the 24th, and wonder why I look a bit more haggard than usual, there you go.

---

Monday night and all of yesterday are a blur of resting and reading and streaming stuff on Spooky's laptop and watching DVDs. I've been working my way through Lovecraft Unbound. Yesterday, I read "The Crevasse" by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, Anna Tambour's "Sincerely, Petrified," "Sight Unseen" by Joel Lane, and "In the Black Mill" by Micheal Chabon. My favorite of the lot was "The Crevasse," which is really superb. I would have liked it to have been longer, but I'm not sure that's a valid criticism. And we watched the rest of Season Three of Weeds, and a documentary about David Lynch.

Yesterday, Spooky made me go Outside for a little while. We walked around Dexter Training Grounds for bit. The air was chilly, almost cold. The trees are rapidly getting their autumn colours. There are some photos below. As for today, I am under orders to get get more rest before I have to begin work on the digest, and mostly, I just have this fucking knot of regret over the Mars story. I think the knot is lodged somewhere in my belly. Regret truly is one of the most loathsome of emotions.

( 13 October 2009 )

The last couple of days have been strange and difficult, and there's not much point in my trying to give an accurate accounting of them. Well, maybe for Sunday, but not for Saturday. Saturday simply spun out of control, and there was one of the worst seizures I've had in a long time, during which I managed to all but dislocate my left shoulder. Saturday was the first day I've had to give an "L" (for "lost day") in my day planner since April 13th. I spent most of the day in bed, and by evening had recovered only enough energy to goof around on Facebook.

Oh, I am quite happy to report that Emma the Beltane Bunneh, late of Spooky's Etsy Dreaming Squid Dollworks, now has a new home in faraway Lancaster, England. Booya.

Yeah, I'm not much for linear today. Sorry.

Yesterday, still recovering from Saturday, I decided it was best to wait another day before getting back to work on "The Alchemist's Apprentice," and that we could use the "downtime" to get started on the trailer for The Red Tree. There was a lot of technical stuff, cameras and editing software and whatnot, but later in the afternoon we managed to get out of the house. The weather was grand, warm, but not really hot (high 70sF, and lots of sunshine, but a few clouds to keep the sky from seeming carnivorous). First, we stopped by Myopic Books over on South Angell Street. No, this has nothing to do with the trailer, I just wanted to spend an hour or so browsing in a good used bookshop. We behaved ourselves, and came away with only two volumes: Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003) and Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (2002).

Afterwards, we headed south out of Providence, and did some location scouting on Conanicut Island. Most of the footage for the trailer will actually be shot in western Rhode Island, out towards Moosup Valley. But we will need a few brief shots of the rocks at Beavertail, and I was in the mood for the sea, not fields and forests. There were a truly annoying number of people, though. Still, I managed to get some test footage below the lightouse, and Spooky shot some a little farther north. We found a dead cormorant shattered on the phyllite boulders. After a while, I spread a blanket on the rocks just northeast (about .03 mi.) of the lighthouse, and we just sat and watched and listened and smelled the sea for about an hour. I wanted to stay and watch moonrise, as last night was the full moon, but it was still hours away and there were things to be done back at the house. But the sea was good while it lasted. The gulls and cormorants, the breakers and the salt air. Two guys were fishing just north of us, throwing bait to a lazy herring gull that waited impatiently nearby.

Here's a short bit I filmed down below the lighthouse. This wasn't done with the camera that'll be used for the trailer, by the way. It's awfully murky footage, but, in some ways, it gives a better impression of Beavertail than all my still photos. Oh, and there's my shadow at the end. And sound. You can hear the foghorn.

So, that was Saturday and Sunday, more or less (mostly less).

Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions, if you are able and so inclined. Thanks. The platypus says I must go now. Doughnuts and all, you know.

Summer is almost upon us. A very hot day in the house yesterday, and the inside temperature reached 84F, I think, and was still at 81F when I finally got to sleep around 4 a.m. Today, however, it's cloudy, and there was rain. Today's high will only be in the 70s.

Despite the heat, I managed my best day yet (in terms of word count) on "Galápagos." I wrote 1,289 words. I might have written more, if I'd not had to spend so much time reading and researching and answering questions about astrochemistry,spectroscopy, exogenesis, organic chemistry, and South Korean history. But, yes, heat or no, a good writing day. The story is presently 5,836 words long, and I suspect will go near 10,000 before it's done. This story is helping me to remember how to write at a more leisurely pace, and that's a good thing.

---

It's been more than a month now since I left Second Life (31 days as of Thursday, May 21st). I think this time it's going to stick. Not only have I gotten back an enormous portion of my life that was vanishing into that time suck, I've also been freed from the never-ending stress, drama, and idiocies that are part and parcel to trying to wring good rp from SL. Next Sunday (the 31st) would have marked my second "rez day" (two years in SL), and I am very glad to say I won't be there to celebrate. We've also managed to scale way back on the amount of time going into WoW. Suddenly, there's time for, you know, life. Oh, and I am actually very relieved to hear that there's a mandatory update coming to SL, and that my iMac's OS doesn't meet the minimum requirements. This means there's no danger of backsliding. So, screw you, SL, and screw all the whiners and asshats that have made of it such a nightmare. Now, if only I could take back all that lost time. Though, I am grateful for my memories of Dune, while it lasted. And my time in New Babbage, before the furries invaded. Nothing on earth kills the illusion of a NeoVictorian steampunk dystopia quicker than candy-colored anthropomorphic rabbits and foxes who can't be bothered to stay in character or speak anything but l33t.

---

Last night, we got in some WoW for the first time in days, and Shaharrazad and Suraa quested in Nagrand and both reached Level 69. Of course, this means we have only one level remaining until we reach the cap for "The Burning Crusades" (though we still have hundreds of quests left to do in that expansion), and I doubt we'll be picking up "Wrath of the Lich King" for at least a couple of months. Which means we'll be spending a while at Level 70, but that's cool. We still have to go back and garner reputation and do all the lower-level dungeons on Azeroth that Blizzard makes impossible for solo players and duos to do at the levels when it's actually appropriate to do them.

---

Spooky has listed new stuff, including a fine green cat, over at her Etsy shop, Dreaming Squid Dollworks. Please do have a look.

Also, if you don't yet have a copy of Alabaster, remember that the new trade-paperback edition is now available from subpress, and includes all Ted's artwork from the hardback, including the gorgeous wraparound cover.

* Translated from Baegu, "Though you are crying and crying, who else will carry you?"

This will be one of those "I have too much to write about" entries, which means some things must be pared away. If ever there is a DVD release of this entry, all the omitted material will appear thereon.

1. The hand-corrected, drawn upon , etc. Silk auction has a little bit more than three hours until it ends (though by the time I finish this entry, it'll have quite a bit less, so you might want to check it out now and come back here afterwards).

2. Yesterday I wrote the title page, dedication, and epigraph page for The Dinosaurs of Mars, so I know that, at last, the game's afoot. The rest of the day was spent gathering last minute bits of research — never mind that my office currently strains under the weight of Mars-related books. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe (sovay) for the eloquent Rilke translation and to David Kirkpatrick (corucia) for sending me William K. Hartman et al.'s 1999 letter to Nature, "Evidence for recent volcanism on Mars from crater counts." This story has quickly gone through a number of permutations, mostly born from the realization that it should be the sort of story I want it to be, not the sort that might (or might not) make Locus reviewers happy. The setting has gone from present day to near future (though the past weighs heavily), and it has become a story of exploration and discovery, which is what it should have been all along. I'd thought it would be primarily concerned with Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum, but then the six "skylights" were discovered on the slopes of Arsia Mons a little while back, and I could not resist shifting the main action of the story west to the Tharsis Montes. Unfortunately, I need caverns that have been more or less stable for at least 65 million years, and the great Arsia Mons caverns might be as young as 40 million (though they might be as old as 100 million). So, I needed a new locale, which led, yesterday, to me moving the story still farther west to Apollinaris Patera, a roughly three-billion-year-old volcano, three miles high and a mile across. And it shall have caverns, as well, though, of course, no such discoveries have (yet) been made. They are plausible. So, yes, yesterday was spent reading Mars lit, and also emailing back and forth with the book's cover artist, Bob Eggleton (among many, many other things, Bob did the cover for From Weird and Distant Shores). Here's a wonderful rough sketch of the cover (which ought to make this project seem nearer to publication). We've intentionally taken a "retro" route with the tyrannosaurid's design:



3. Good sleep again last night, so thank you zolpidem tartrate. I think I got another seven hours.

4. My thanks to Bob Strootman, who fronts a Minneapolis band with the august title, The Dunwich Whores. They've recorded two songs based somewhat on Alabaster, one which I heard yesterday. Drad.

5. Spooky has finally gotten back to dollwork, and before getting down to a long-delayed owl commission, she turned out an adorable sort of Cthulhu hatchling thing, which you may see here. It's not for sale, though she might make more and they might be. Also, Madam Spooky has a birthday fast approaching, and, conveniently, she has an Amazon wishlist right here, for those who may be so kindly predisposed.

5. About 2 a.m. this morning, one of the six or seven Second Life Nareth Nishi's had what alcoholic's refer to as a moment of clarity. I blame my blasted work ethic, but it seemed to make sense to me that I should support my second existence with an SL job, and few SL jobs are as lucrative and as easy to land as stripping. So, that's what I've been doing, first at the Dark Goddess in Dorje, then at Club insureXtion in Bro City. And I have made some decent money. But I've grown sick of the people, most of whom seem unaware they've come to a strip club, and that strip clubs have strippers, and that it is customary to tip the dancers, who are, in fact, working to entertain them. And there's a certain inevitable level of assholery and sleaze and dimwittedness that one finds in such an environment, which I might have been able to tolerate, had the tips been better. Add to this the realization that even my best nights netted me only as many Linden dollars as I might have bought outright for about $5 US, and the fact that I'm dancing so much that I've hardly had time to allow the other Nareths to explore the vastness of SL. So, in short, I think I'm done with stripping. Instead, Dr. Nareth Nishi will be taking up residence in a quiet little steampunk town and having adventures and so forth. My thanks to netdancer for directing me towards Grendel's Children in Avaria, where I got a magnificent gazelle skin, an experience that played a role in the aforementioned moment of clarity. Also, I am smitten with the Isle of Wyrms, with the rambling NeoVictorian splendor of Caledon, and with the sadly abandoned cyberpunk metropolis of Gibson. So, yeah, there will likely be no more titty bars for me...unless they are suitably strange and accommodating to qualify as adventures in their own rights. The experiment continues.

And I wanted to post this comment by blu_muse, in response to the complaints I made on the 12th about the pervasive "normalcy" one encounters throughout much of Second Life, but I'm putting it behind a cut, because this has gone on a bit, I see:

( truer words )

Whatever my present state of consciousness might be, it certainly isn't awake. Somehow, I've gotten onto a schedule where I can't fall asleep until just after 4 a.m. and havoc is being wrought. Or wreaked. Or what the hell ever. Spooky drew a pickle on my engagement calendar yesterday, but to me, this morning, it looks like a Triceratops scapulocoracoid.

Yesterday was one of those days which forces me to be keenly aware of the conflict between commerce and art, between writing enough to keep the bills paid yet also remaining true to my art and writing the best that I may possibly write. In my case, these two things are almost always diametrically opposed, commerce and art. I may do one, or I may do the other. Most times, I struggle to maintain some semblance of balance, which is to say that I write the best I can under these conditions, the best I can write while still managing to keep the bills paid. Writing is surely my "job," if I may be said to have a job in the conventional sense, but I cannot shake the conviction that writing ought never be considered a job. It may well be considered difficult, certainly the hardest thing I've ever done, but that's not the same thing. I think that's one reason so many American writers are more comfortable calling writing a "craft." Those two words — craft and job — are not divided by the same sort of gulf as art and job, and this is a society wherein Job is the most sacred of sacred duties, as Economy is the one true and consensual religion. There are at least two other reasons the word art scares or repulses many writers, but for now, I'll make do with just that one.

There is an ideal state, if one is successful enough, when writing may largely escape the warping effects of commerce. But, for this to happen, each novel or short story must not only pay bills. It must also bring in enough money to buy enough time that whatever the next bit of writing to be done is, it may be written in the time required for its writing. Not the time I can afford to give it, but as much time as is needed. For me, at least, those two things are rarely ever the same. The less commercially successful a writer is, the more a writer must produce (assuming here that writing is the sole source of income). And this is one of the things I spent yesterday thinking about. It is something I spend many days thinking about. Some will find these thoughts poorly articulated, or missing some authorial jargon that would make them more seemly. But I'm not the sort of writer who ever enjoys talking about writing, so I don't make a habit of it. I don't take part in those endless and subjective debates from which one learns jargon and so forth. I just write, to the best of my ability in the time allotted, which means I am rarely ever allowed to write to the best of my ability.

How can it be 12:40 p.m. already?

Spooky has added Raven Green and Raven Blue to the auctions. All four of these are splendid pieces. Were this summer and I had no heating bills to fret over, I would have thrown some sort of tantrum to stop Spooky from selling them. Ah, well. At least I have Hieronymus Borscht. These are wonderful, handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces, the result of more than a month's work, not something PVC scraped from the innards of an automated injection mold at the behest of Todd McFarlane. I do hope you'll have a look.

12:49 p.m. (CaST).

Two movies I have recently seen but not commented upon. Quick comments only, though. We saw Woody Allen's Scoop on Sunday, and I loved it. A funny, charming film, and it redeems Scarlett Johansson for the Brian De Palma debacle. Last night, we watched Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder. I should say that I adore pretty much everything Herzog has ever put to celluloid. But I'm still contemplating The Wild Blue Yonder, a "science fiction fantasy" constructed of stock footage from the NASA shuttle expedition that launched the Galileo probe, lectures given by mathematicians, and dives beneath the Antarctic ice shelf, all tied together with bits of narration courtesy Brad Dourif. Here's the thing: the film works wonderfully so long as Dourif's Andromedan refugee is actually only a crazy man rambling delusional thoughts in the desert, creating a collage from the stock footage to illustrate his insanity. But if I try to view the film the way that Herzog intended it, as a story of aliens arriving on Earth, deadly microbes released from the Roswell crash, a human expedition back to the aliens' homeworld in Andromeda, etc., the whole thing falls apart. If only because the science is too wonky to ever be anything but the ravings of a mad man in the desert. Still, it's a beautiful film, superbly scored, and in its best moments it presents the sort of awful beauty and wonder we experience in, say, Alien, as Lambert, Kane, and Dallas walk across that alien planet towards an even more alien derelict.

1:00 p.m.

Today the temperature is supposed to go as high as 57F and no windchill. So, I shall have my first genuine walk in more than a month. I'm not going to miss the opportunity, because the cold weather returns tomorrow.

Okay. That's it for now.

Spooky's put the first of the Ravens Four up this evening. Here's the link to the auction, and I'll have more to say about this in the ayem (or early peayem). Also, you can see new photos of all four at squid_soup. The other three auctions will begin tomorrow.

I have a feeling this is going to be one of those "just me" things, but isn't anyone else out there a little bit weirded out by all the frelling hoopla over frelling Super Bowl ads? I must have seen stories on them and links to them in at least four places online today (Yahoo and MySpace, I recall). Are there really people who want to watch the ads that ran during the Super Bowl the day after? I mean, personally I loathe football and all football-related phenomena, and given that my interest in the Super Bowl is way less than nil, I cannot personally even begin to imagine why anyone should give a crap about the ads.

Meanwhile, I think my musical obsessions might have cycled back around to She Wants Revenge.

-----

An odd dream last night. This morning. An odd one for me, at least. I scribbled some notes after I woke up, almost posted about it this morning, decided not to, then changed my mind about the whole thing about half an hour ago.

A long climb through a tower of steel and concrete leading through and then above a roiling cloudbank. And I wasn't alone, though I recall nothing about those who were with me. We were trying to reach something, and finding ourselves in a sort of dome at the top of the tower, everyone was furious to discover the tower was such a stark and hideous thing. And later, I was walking on a broad plain and a girl offered me a small piece of shale as a gift. Preserved on the shale was the carbonized imprint of the front half of a scorpion. "Because you already have the other half," she said, seeming tremendously pleased to give me the gift. I took it, and thanked her, and struggled to recall if I really did have the other half of the fossil. It almost seemed as though I did, but the memory kept slipping away.*

And later still (and really, here's the odd-for-me bit), I was arguing with a very thin, genderless, turquoise-skinned humanoid about "god." We were drinking hot tea from cups shaped like stars. And finally, the turquoise-skinned thing began talking about the memory of the universe, and it reminded me how often I've said that the only true "evil" is waste, and that all evil can be reduced to a wasteful act. I asked what one thing had to do with the other, and it told me that if the universe is conscious, it would be a waste to lose the memories and experiences of any living creature. The repeated evolution of consciousness, it said, allowed the universe to gather to it innumerable memories. "Like a computer's hard drive," it said. "Nothing is wasted. Nothing is deleted. The universe remembers everything." I asked if we were talking now about life after death, about consciousness surviving death, and it said no, not really, that data does not necessarily entail consciousness of itself. And I asked what about the experience of any given consciousness? If that experience of consciousness were lost, data would be lost, and a wasteful event would have occurred. It sat and stared at me a long time. It had green eyes. It smiled and pointed up at the roiling clouds and that tower of steel and concrete. "The other half of the scorpion," it said.

And that's all I recall. I know I woke soon after seeing the tower that second time.

* While I have many thousands of fossils, I do not, in fact, have even a single fossil scorpion.

So, after two wonderful months away from the increasingly annoying world of eBay, we're back with a pair of special auctions. The first is an authorized auction of one of the advance-reading copies of Daughter of Hounds. The second is for a copy of the previously unannounced lettered state of Alabaster, which is being auctioned with Spooky's latest doll — the green-haired boy who brings Dancy the bottle in "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées — and a copy of the "Highway 97" chapbook. All books come signed and can be personalized at the buyers request. The doll comes with Spooky's maker mark plus my initials.

I do not expect to be able to offer another copy of the Daughter of Hounds ARC, and obviously the Alabaster auction is a one-of-a-kind affair.

The lettered state of Alabaster was never offered (or even mentioned) by Subterranean Press, and the 26 copies, A-Z, were split between me and subpress. I got N-Z (thank you, Bill), and I'm keeping Z for myself, which means the winning bidder gets to choose from N-Y.

Here are the links:

Daughter of Hounds ARC

Alabaster lettered with doll and chapbook

Meanwhile, I'm sick as a dog. A sick dog.