Caitlín R. Kiernan

I've just gotten word that The Red Tree T-shirts are now available from Ziraxia, the same alien horde that's already brought you Stiff Kitten T-shirts. Here's the final design (by Spooky and scarletboi!):

The Red Tree t-shirt by Humglum. Check it out at Ziraxia t shirts!

And yes, the Stiff Kitten shirts are also still available. Also, look for new evidence on the website soon. I hear it's going to be something really weird.

Now...I'm off to play WoW, because I am a big geek.

Generally speaking, the icon I choose to use with a given entry says something about the entry itself, just as the subject lines are very rarely arbitrary. I've been sitting here staring at today's icon, wondering what the hell it has to do with what I'm about to say or where I am right now. And I think, perhaps, it's an inverse relationship, and I must have done it unconsciously. Anyway. That's my best guess.

Today, I'll be cleaning up the loose ends on Sirenia Digest #30, and packing. All is packing. We have, for all intents and purposes, four days remaining for packing. This weekend. Monday. And Wednesday. Tuesday, we make the third trip to Birmingham in as many weeks, to retrieve everything I have in storage there. Fortunately, this is the last trip to Birmingham.

I packed until about 9 pm last night, when we stopped and watched the last three episodes of Millennium (as I prefer to imagine Season Three never happened). "The Time is Now" is one of the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most horrifying and beautiful, episodes of any series ever produced for television. I saw it when it first aired, and all these years later, it still caught me off guard, even knowing what was coming. The use of Patti Smith's "Horses" is absolutely exquisite. Laura Means' vision is such a perfect comprehension of inevitability, probability, and man's insignificance in an indifferent universe. And I'm very pleased that, in those last couple of episodes, Frank Black renounces any possibility of his belief in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations. I think this pretty much saves the series for me, which occasionally veers a bit too near actually espousing millenarian Xtianity. Those final shots, Frank and Jordan alone in the cabin, the blood on Catherine's pillow...sublime. And yes, I know there's a season after Season Two, but why continue when the perfect ending has been found? To paraphrase Toni Morrison, art is knowing when to stop.

Lots of thoughts on Panthalassa (and Pangaea, and related concepts), on what I'm trying to do with Wicca, but no time just now to write it all down.

Don't forget the Stiff Kitten T-shirt sale:



My thanks to Beq Janus for actually building a working version of the clock from Soldier's dreams (in Daughter of Hounds). It now occupies a table in the Professor's Abney Park Laboratory in New Babbage (Second Life). You can see two screencaps (warning, they're LARGE) behind the cut:

( The Clock's Face )

Okay. There's work that must be done, whether or not I want to do it, and I still haven't had coffee. I'll leave you with Keith Olbermann calling Hilary Clinton on her latest act of desperation:

Here's my thing, as Laura Means would say. I fled Birmingham five and a half years ago. Being who and what I am, life in Birmingham had proven, after many, many years there, intolerable. Though, at the time I'd hoped to move to New England, financial considerations kept me from getting any farther away than Atlanta. And here we have been, Spooky and I, for five and a half years. Now, to the city's credit, I will say, that compared with Birmingham, I have personally experienced virtually none of the sort of bigotry and hate speech that drove me from Birmingham. Of course, I keep to an area bounded by Kirkwood to the south, Chamblee to the north, Decatur to the east, and downtown to the West. In truth, 95% of the time, I keep to a much smaller area, bounded by Little Five Points to the south, Inman Park to the west, Poncy-Highlands to the north, and Candler Park to the east. I know better than to stray outside the Perimeter. Atlanta is a blue island in a mean-spirited, xenophobic sea of red.

So, yes, Atlanta it is a peculiarly tolerant place. Somehow, however, the price of this tolerance is isolation. Admittedly, I am something of a recluse. But Spooky isn't, and Byron certainly isn't, and they have seen this, as well. Atlanta is not so much an unfriendly city as a supremely disinterested city. In truth, it hardly feels like a city at all (and I have spent time in many very large ones). As many have said before me, it feels more like a conglomeration of neighborhoods strewn willy-nilly across a vast tract of land. What is Atlanta like? I have no idea, and I've spent five and half years here. I don't think Atlanta knows what Atlanta's like, except it has something to do with trendy yuppie bars and restaurants, forgetting your past, making money, flipping real estate, hip-hop, and being as much like Los Angeles as possible. In the end, Atlanta, more than any other place I have ever been to or lived in, has no feeling to it at all. Only the absence of character seems to define it. I do not hate Atlanta, but I certainly could never love it. What would I love? The weather? It gives me an odd, sick feeling that after living here for five and a half years, I have no reservations whatsoever about leaving. Mostly, it feels like it will be this blank space in my life, five and a half years of blankness. Atlanta baffles me.

Next thing, "New Rules."
1) Please, please do not report to me that a very famous author with whom I share several acquaintances is dead unless he or she or it actually is. Dead, I mean. At least be able to link to an article online proving this to be the case.
2) Sirenia Digest is not open to unsolicited submissions. I'm pretty sure I've never said that it is, but if I did, I now retract that comment. Unsolicited mss. will not be returned or acknowledged.

---

Yesterday, I wrote 1,151 words on a new piece for Sirenia Digest #31, hoping to get a little ways ahead. It's a werewolf story, and was suggested to me by tsarina, a while back when I was asking for ideas for vignettes/stories. Thank you, and I'll get the book in the mail to you as soon as we can unpack them again. There is a very good runner-up, who will likely also get a book, as I may use her idea for #32.

You can now hear Chris Ewen and Malena Teves' cover of the Death's Little Sister song "Twelve Nights After" at the Hidden Variable page at MySpace. It's very strange listening to this version. I adore it, but it could not be more different from the DLS version, which was all growling, angry vocals and rumbling guitars. You can also hear four other songs from Chris' forthcoming CD, The Hidden Variable, including the track Peter Straub wrote, "Rosemary Clooney." You may know Chris' work from Future Bible Heroes.

Also, I have been told that the kindly, busy aliens at Ziraxia are now offering the Stiff Kitten T-shirt on Hyperspecial, for a mere $12.99. The sale runs all week, and after that the price goes back to $16.99. Just follow the link below:



Today is Jimmy Stewart's birthday.

A so-so day yesterday. The move is beginning to wear on me, I think. The packing. The disorder. The fact that we have but nine days remaining (counting today), until the movers pull up at our doorstep. And Thursday must be wasted on another trip to Birmingham for another doctor's visit. Oh, and the damned doxycycline is wearing on me, as well. So, yeah, stress. Last night we watched two more episodes of Millennium ("Siren" and "In Arcadia Ego"), and then I ran away to Second Life for a bit. Thank you Larissa, Pontifex, and Omega. That was yesterday. This is today.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,210 words on "The Bed of Appetite," a new story for Sirenia Digest #23. Which was a great fucking relief after all those days of not writing anything much at all. And it occurred to me that while it's entirely unremarkable that I've had difficulty writing the last few months — in the wake of the long nightmare of the Beowulf novelization and the mountain of editing/reworking of older projects. No, what is remarkable is that, during this extended period when I've felt all but unable to write, I have in fact written "Outside the Gates of Eden," "The Ape's Wife," "The Steam Dancer," "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection," "Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert," "Scene in the Museum (1896)," "Salammbö Redux" (née "Little Conversations"), "Untitled Grotesque," and "The Madam of the Narrow Houses." That's nine stories during what has felt like one of the most unproductive periods of my writing career. For that matter, I wrote over 15,000 words in The Dinosaurs of Mars before I shelved it in July.

And here's another reminder that Stiff Kitten T-shirts are now available from Ziraxia. I will point out, these shirts are silk screened, not those iron-on decal things like you get from Cafe Press, and that these are high-quality American Aparrel T-shirts.

While I was writing the above paragraph, Hubero precipitated a pet-related disaster of near-apocalyptic proportions, which has rather put a damper on me finishing this entry.

I'm not even sure what I was going to say next. Anyone want a slightly used Siamese/Tonkinese pyschopath?

Well, Byron came over last night, and first we watched a bunch of David Bowie videos, and then we watched Little Britain on BBCA, and then we watched Kill Bill Vol. 2, so at least last night was a good Friday night.

I'm going to go now. I think I need a drink...

The truth is, the only reason I'm making a blog entry today is that I'll be pissed at myself later on if I skip three days in a row. I'm not making an entry because I have good news about progress on a story or novel. Because, truthfully, nothing worth mentioning has been written this week. I could lie and say that it has, and no one would ever be the wiser, but I find that I haven't the spirit at the moment for lies.

Here it is Thursday. It's been a week since I finished "The Madam of the Narrow Houses," and, near as I can tell, my plan for October is bust. Get the two pieces for Sirenia Digest #23 written and at least the prologue for Joey Lafaye. Now, I feel like I'll be lucky to manage the Digest.

The idea for an sf story I was blathering on about in Monday's entry was a stillbirth. And nothing suitable has come along to take its place.

But, let's rejoice, nonetheless, because scarletboi and Spooky have come up with a design for a Stiff Kitten T-shirt, which you may now order from Ziraxia. It's actually pretty snazzy, and you can wear it while reading the 4th edition of Silk. By the way, Amazon lies. There are not 14 "used" copies of the 4th edition of Silk available, because the damned thing hasn't even been printed yet. Nice T-shirt, though.

Let's see. Interesting. Well, we saw Russell Mulcahy's Resident Evil: Extinction on Tuesday. This is not, by any stretch of anyone's feeble imagination, a good movie. But it's only 95 minutes long, and in this instance, that's a big plus. What's really important, though, is that it's not a dull movie — like, oh, Underworld: Evolution or Aeon Flux or The Hills Have Eyes 2. The scene with the zombie crows was even quite nicely handled, I think. And Resident Evil: Extinction gave me exactly what I paid to see: Milla Jovovich blowing the heads off zombies whilst scantily clad. It is, in fact, possibly the best film ever made in which Milla Jovovich blows the heads off zombies whilst scantily clad. As long as those are our sole criteria, I give it two thumbs up. So, even though I swore after the abomination that was Highlander II I'd never see another film by Russell Mulcahy, there you go. The incarnation of the goddess known as Milla Jovovich goes a long way towards redeeming even the crappiest zombie film.

And, besides, it was too far to drive to see Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, because it only seems to be showing on one screen in Atlanta.

Oh, I almost forgot. I got word yesterday that Fangoria reviewed Dark Delicacies 2 and was particularly pleased with my contribution to the anthology, "The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)" (originally published in Sirenia Digest #11). I'm going to assume this is not the same idiot who reviewed Murder of Angels for Fangoria back in 2004. Anyway, I haven't actually seen the review, and I probably won't, but I think that it's in the November issue, if anyone's interested.

Okay. That's enough for now. What fresh hell awaits...