Caitlín R. Kiernan

Outside, it's 80F and feels like 81F. Inside, 80F. Balance, kiddos.

The last thing I recall saying before I fell asleep this morning is, "Only a dyke would have a crush on Charlie Brown." This is, in fact, a reference to Peppermint Patty. Let's just say I was very tired. Though, that's often when I speak the truth.

This morning, I dreamed I was in some weird sequel to Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." Pretty much all detail is lost to me, but I can assure you it was not the least bit pleasant. The sense of uncleanliness, that it was unsafe to touch, drink, or eat anything, or even to breathe. It reminds me how "The Colour Out of Space" is a perfect parable for environmental degradation.

Yesterday was spent editing Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart and the first four chapters Blood Oranges, finding as many errors in the latter as possible and correcting them. This afternoon, it goes to my agent. Booya. I now know that I'll write an introduction for Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart called "Sexing the Weird." I'm going to ask another author to write an afterword, and I hope to include a lot of illustrations by Vince Locke

Couldn't sleep last night. When I can't sleep, neither can Spooky. So our insomnias align. She read me the first three sections of William Burroughs' Junky (which I've not read since the summer of 1994). Then she turned off the light, about 4:30 ayem. The sky had grown very bright, there on that shortest darkness of the year. I sat at the kitchen table eating leftover pasta salad and watching the dawn. Finally, the pills kicked in, and I crawled away to bed and sleep.

Happy birthday, faustfatale!

Our thanks to Stephen Lubold for the latest care package: Brown Bird's EP "The Sound of Ghosts," and three books: Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and the first two volumes of Mike Raicht and Brian Smith's amazing The Stuff of Legend. As it happens, he also won yesterday's ARC auction.

Good Rifting and rping last night. Thanks to everyone! The guild grows.

And yes, it's Soltice, Midsummer, Lithia, Litha. It is a day that Kathryn and I observe. If you do likewise, I wish you a happy Litha. I won't say blessed. Not sure I believe much in blessings, and even if I did, I would be unable to bestow them. The wheel turns. The shortest night, tonight.

We'll go to this evening to observe the day. We've talked about staying at the shore all night, maybe watching the sunrise over Narragansett Bay. But first I have a lot of work to do.

Comments, kittens!

Traveling the Circumference,
Aunt Beast

I slept more than eight hours last night, which was a great relief, as I was stupid and useless and somewhat ill all day yesterday, due to the two nights before. And I did it without Ambien. Whenever I happen to note that I'm not sleeping well, I'm often met with advice which I understand to be well meaning. But sometimes it can be unintentionally funny. For example, chamomile tea is frequently suggested. Which, if we're talking about run of the mill sleeplessness, the occasional night when it's a little hard to get to sleep, fine. But my insomnia is like unto the Godzilla of insomnia. When even the Ambien's not working, it's a safe bet chamomile tea won't, either. Or hot baths. Or warm milk. Another commonly suggested remedy is the hormone melatonin. And I know melatonin can be a useful sleep aid. Problem is, melatonin use may worsen depression (which I am being treated for) and cause vivid dreams and nightmares (which I am being treated for). It also has the potential to interact with certain drugs I've been prescribed. So, not an option.

Yesterday was, not unexpectedly, and as predicted, a lost cause. Maybe this falls under the heading of self-fulfilling prophecy, but given I was having serious trouble walking in a straight line, I rather tend to doubt it. I spent the first part of the day listening to the audiobook of The Red Tree from Aubile.com. I finished it (first ever audiobook I've listened to start to finish, by the way). Overall, I'm very pleased. The voice of Sarah is not the voice I heard in my head as I wrote it, but it works very well, regardless. After The Red Tree, I downloaded Daughter of Hounds and made it through the prologue and the first two chapters. And then I got dressed and we headed to the Athenaeum.

I had it in my head that I'd get some research done for a short story I need to start, but soon discovered I was too sleep deprived to focus on much of anything. I wound up just sort of groggily prowling the stacks, randomly reading bits of this or that. Books on fish of the Atlantic, the great white shark, sea monsters, the Farallon Islands, Steinbeck's The Log of the Sea of Cortez...well, okay, that doesn't sound nearly so disconnected as it seemed at the time. Though I can't really fit the Tsavo lions in there. At some point, I pulled from a shelf The Story of the Sun by Sir Robert S. Bell (D. Appleton and Company, NYC), published in 1893. I could see from a spidery bit of handwriting on the endpapers that the book had been entered into the Athenaeum's catalog on January 29th, 1894, some one hundred and sixteen years ago. And I imagined all the people who have opened this book in that time, and taken it out, and read it. How many in all that time? It occurred to me that the book was there in the Athenaeum for all of Lovecraft's life, and given his love of astronomy, that he very probably at least thumbed through it at some point in his forty-seven years. It's almost like time travel, moments like those (especially when you've not slept). We left the Athenaeum just before closing (at seven p.m.), stopped by the market, then headed home.

After dinner, we watched three episodes of Glee (the new one, plus two older ones Spooky had seen, but I had not). I love "Britana." And we learned last night that the episode which airs in two weeks has been written by Joss Whedon. Later, I went into WoW for the first time in two or three weeks and did a very satisfying battlefield, just Alterac Vally but it went on for almost an hour and felt more like an actual battle than WoW battlefields usually do. After WoW, we read more of Patti Smith's Just Kids, and then I managed to fall asleep watching a comfort movie, Jack Arnold's Revenge of the Creature (1955). Whatever I dreamt, it's mostly forgotten now.

The latest round of eBay auctions will be ending this afternoon (between 3:07 and 3:31 p.m. EST). My thanks to everyone who has bid, or who might yet. Also, Spooky has added a few new pieces of beach-glass jewelery to her Dreaming Squid Dollworks Etsy shop.

Anyway, time to make the doughnuts. I took one photo yesterday morning, from the front parlor, just before six a.m. Yesterday was the first time I'd ever watched the sun rise over Providence:

( 5 May 2010 )

It is no secret that I am not a morning person. So, you'd think someone would have gotten around to telling Hubero this. If they did, he's chosen to ignore it. Which is to say, I finally gave up and crawled out of bed at 8 a.m. (CaST, so that's 7 a.m. EST). I sat here at my desk and watched the last bit of night turn to dawn. It was actually a very beautiful sunrise. All those shades of red-orange and purple-grey through the leafless trees. Bleak, but beautiful. I still would have preferred more than five hours sleep, if I'd had any say in the matter. Having distracted Master Hubero, I let Spooky sleep in until a little after ten. She probably needed it worse than I did, anyway.

I wrote 1,441 words yesterday on "Metamorphosis B" and finished it. It somehow manages to be dreadful and sexy at the same time, which pleases me.

Today, I will begin another new piece. All I know right know is that it will not be "Metamorphosis C," and that it's going to be male-on-male, as I've felt like I've owed certain Sirenia Digest readers a little of that flavour for some time now. Thing is, writing erotica the last year and a half, I have discovered something. It is almost impossible for me to write that which is not one of my kinks. And I have quite an enormous range of kinks, but manly man-on-manly man action is not one of them. I can do bois and girlie boys and so forth, but that's about it. Oh, penises are fine and dandy, especially if they wind up doing things evolution never intended them for, but I suck (so to speak) at the whole manly man thing. Which is odd, because all the cisgendered male lovers I've ever had were fairly manly men. At least, they thought so. And yes, I am straying into TMI territory. Sorry. I will return to this topic, this curious contradiction, some other time, perhaps.

Daughter of Hounds has been selling quite well at Amazon.com this weekend. At one point late yesterday, it made it up to 7,497 in the sales ranking, which is the best I've seen it do. My thanks to everyone who's pre-ordered. And if you haven't, the platypus says...well, never mind what the platypus says...but I would be very grateful if you did so. Thanks.

Also, for those who might be interested, please recall that the eBay auction for the last Daughter of Hounds ARC I have to sell ends sometime just after 10 p.m. this evening (CaST, so that just after 9 p.m. EST, or 6 p.m. PST — I think). That's about eleven hours from now.

Nothing much notable about yesterday. I'd not left the house since Tuesday evening. And it's not good when I get like that, when I get that bad, so Spooky made me go with her to get dinner last night. We watched Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine, which I loved almost unconditionally. Had it done nothing but reveal children's beauty pageants for the twisted freak shows that they are, it would be a fine, fine film, but it has quite a lot more to offer. Alan Arkin, a long time favourite, was brilliant, as was Steve Carell. Later, I played Final Fantasy XII (surprise), and then Spooky read me more of The Hobbit while I looked for inspiration (for whatever it is I'll be writing today) in H. R. Giger's Necronomicon II and a book on symbolist painters. That was yesterday, kaloo kalay.

This morning, while I watched night turn to day, I did some work on a Wikipedia dinosaur article, thus ending my seven-month hiatus from working on Wikipedia dinosaur articles.

And I was thinking, last night, recently both Poppy (docbrite) and Christa (faustfatale) have written about how blogging doesn't take time away from their actual for-real writing, and I was wishing I could say the same for myself. But I come to blogging as I come to everything — a little too intensely. I think I average about an hour a day on blog entries, though it is not uncommon to spend three hours in a twenty-four hour period on the LJ. Not reading other people's entries. Just writing my own. Because I have to write it and proof it and get it all just frelling right and check the facts and etc. & etc. And I've noticed that my entries have gotten rather long lately. So, maybe I'll try to keep them just a little shorter. Thing is, like Wikipedia (something I've also spent too much time on), I actually enjoy writing blog entries.

Okay. Now I need breakfast ramen and wasabi rice crackers and maybe more caffeine.