Caitlín R. Kiernan

Today, the meteorologists say we will reach the low eighties here in Providence. Actually, we have already. The temperature has already risen to 81F (up from 74F in the last hour).

Yesterday was, more or less, another fruitless day of staring at the iMac, trying to will into existence words that aren't coming. I can only hope for better today. I can only ever hope. And sit. And stare. I see the beginning so clearly, but the words keep slipping through my fingers. Yesterday, I erased almost everything I'd written on Monday. About 4 p.m., Spooky pulled me out of the House. It was too beautiful a day to spend sitting here, not writing.

Outside, I was pleasantly surprised at how much the city has greened just since I was out on Sunday. It's come on very suddenly, all these blossoms and the sprays of yellow green in the trees. We took one photo, which I'll post day after tomorrow, when I'm done with the photos of the old mill. We drove south, down I-95, and past Warwick Mall, which took so much damage in the flood. The place is surrounded by work crews and machinery. Last I heard, 4,000 jobs were lost in the flood, and this in a tiny state that already had a 13% unemployment rate.

And then I did something I pretty much never allow myself to do. I indulged in "retail therapy" at Newbury Comics. My version of retail therapy is a bit different than most people's, I suspect. For me, it's an issue of spending money I cannot really afford to spend on things I can live without, in an effort to guilt trip myself into working harder. Sometimes it works. Yesterday, Newbury Comics was having its 32nd anniversary sale, so everything was 32% off, which at least minimized the damage. We picked up three CDs— Jónsi's Go (Jónsi is the vocalist for Sigur Rós), the Evelyn Evelyn CD, and Her Majesty The Decemberists, because somehow I didn't have a copy. We also got three DVDs— the new Sherlock Holmes, Enchanted, and the remake of Deathrace. Oh, and the first issue of Felicia Day's The Guild comic from Dark Horse, because you cannot be in the only WoW guild with a comic and not read said comic. I was very good, and did not get the Severus Snape/Bellatrix Lestrange lunchbox...even though it was 32% off.

We made it back to Providence about six p.m. There was leftover spaghetti for dinner. Later, there was cheesecake with fresh strawberries on top. I had some very good rp in Insilico (thank you, Blair) with the twin "daughters" of Xiang 1.0, Nanyah (Xiang 2.0a) and Victoria (now Maajida, Xiang 1.5), and did a couple of battlefields in WoW as Morskalíi, my Draenei death knight. It was an evening of virtual distractions.

As my days go, a bit of fluff, all in all. I'm hoping what I needed was a bit of fluff.

Here are more photos of the old mill in Dayville, CT, and these focus primarily on the collapsed roof. I think I may have a short story about the mill germinating in my head. But now, I go to make another attempt at finding my way into The Wolf Who Cried Girl:

( 4 April 2010, Pt. 3 )

Sure, it's probably not as permanent as a stone tablet, or even the printed page, but here I go again, anyway.

Yesterday, I was a bad, bad nixar. Which is to say, while I was making my blog entry, I became inexplicably angry, and knew the day was blown, so far as the words were concerned. There was a time I would have fought against that certainty. But now I am older, and I know a lot more about myself, and about futility. So, I cast responsibility to the four winds and we fucked off and went to the movies. Two of them, in fact, which I haven't done in ages, gone to two movies in a single afternoon. I'll get to the movies in a moment.

I'm pleased to announce that Penguin has submitted The Red Tree to the nominating committee for the Publishing Triangle Awards. Which is cool, and I hope they'll do the same for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We were awakened about 8:30 this morning by the most amazing thunderclap. The windows all rattled.

Distance fades to stormy grey,
Washed out from the deep of the ocean.
Here I will stand to face your wrath,
While all the others are praying.

Sorry, that Wolfsheim song keeps coming back to me, the last few days.

---

So, yes. Two movies yesterday. The first was Christian Alvart's Pandorum. I did very much want this to be a very good film. And I'm not sure it's precisely a bad film, but it is a terrible, convoluted mess, so far as plot and cinematography are concerned. And maybe that does make it a bad film. Mostly, I think I need to see it again on DVD. It might actually work better on a small screen. The camerawork and art direction are so murky, especially the first hour or so, that it was often almost impossible to figure out what I was seeing. Mainly, the film suffers from having monsters when monsters aren't needed. Indeed, it has this in common with a far superior film, Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007). I love Sunshine, but something always bugged me about it, something about the "third act" that was just off. And one night I was talking with Sonya (sovay), and she put her finger on it. Everything's fine, until the crew of Icaraus II board Icaraus I, and a superfluous monster is introduced, in the form of the mad man Pinbacker. In Sunshine, Pinbacker is a completely unnecessary antagonist. Boyle has already provided us with a number of far more terrible forces that the protagonists have to overcome to succeed at their mission: the isolation and hostility of deep space, human psychology and fallibility, and, primarily, the sun. No monster was needed, but we got one anyway, for whatever reason, and it's a wonder the film worked in spite of it. Pandorum suffers from the exact same problem, in that its mutants are unnecessary. We have the hypersleep-induced psychosis of the title, a bunch of amnesiac characters lost in the bowels of an ancient and enormous spaceship, trying to figure out how they got there, where they're going, and how they're going to survive. The ship's nuclear reactor is shutting down. And we need the mutants...why? They're not even very interesting monsters. Stan Winston Studios pretty much recycled the subterranean mutants from Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005) for a few fight scenes that add nothing much interesting to the film. There are is some good stuff in Pandorum, and it's certainly worth seeing on DVD. But it could have been a far, far better (and smarter) film, if only a few things had been done differently. Mostly, lose the monsters.

Our second feature was Ruben Fleischer's absolutely hilarious Zombieland. It was impossible for me not to love this big, silly slobbering dog of a movie. It does what it came to do, and leaves you wanting Twinkies. Not surprisingly, Woody Harrelson steals the show. However, I will note that, as with Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), there are not actually any zombies to be found anywhere within Zombieland. We are told, straight out, these are living people suffering from a virus that causes them to become enraged cannibals. Not the living dead; the infected living. I'm beginning to think that the definition of "zombie" is quickly changing (again), and soon no one will remember that a very necessary part of being a zombie is being, you know, dead.

---

Back home, we ate leftover chili and watched the new episode of Heroes (rather flat), then played WoW for a bit. My Draenei paladin, Kalií, made Level 46. And that was yesterday.

And here are six more photos from our trip to Stonington, CT on Sunday:

( 4 October 2009 )

I'm going to start this off with a very nice email I received yesterday, because, right now, I need something very nice. Matt Stagg writes:

I rarely do this, but I wanted to email you and express how much I admire your work. Discovering your short stories was a revelation for me: I love the way that they flitter back and forth between the sublime, the horrific and mundane. Your novels equally thrill me. How you so easily and successfully weave the disparate elements of genres as diverse as crime fiction and Lovecraftian weird tales will forever escape me; I must satisfy myself instead with the knowledge that some things are both beautiful and unknowable. Such is your fiction.

Thank you, Mr. Stagg. That sounds rather grimly sexy doesn't it? Thank you, Mr. Stagg.

Now. On to yesterday. As you know, we fled this sweat-box, and ended up at the Peace Dale Library in South County (which is actually in Washington County, for them what do not know). I sat in the wonderful air conditioning, not baking for the first time since Friday night, and oil portraits and marble busts of Mr. Rowland Hazard (1855-1890) beamed approvingly down upon me. But...after ten or fifteen minutes, I grew antsy, restless, worried about Hubero, whom we'd left back in the heat (with a bowl of ice water), worried about my writing deadlines, and so forth. But. The library had a copy of To Charles Fort, With Love, which pleased me inordinately. But it depressed me that they had all of the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson Dune books, but none of Frank Herbert's originals. I tried to do some actual work, reading from books on the history of Rhode Island architecture, the great New England hurricane of 1938, and local sea life. Spooky found Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone (2007), which is a gorgeous, gorgeous book. Honestly, I lost interest in Clive's work somewhere around Galilee (1998), so I'd not seen it. I've not read the Abarat books, either. But I might give Mister B. Gone a try, as it sounds quite good. Anyway, my restlessness increased, and we ventured back out into the heat for lunch. Lunch and tourists. We drove from Peace Dale through Wakefield to Narragansett, and then, after we ate, back to the library. Oh, Spooky took me to a pet store she used to frequent as a child, and they had a gorgeous California kingsnake (Lampropeltis getulus californiae) and also a cornsnake (Pantherophis guttata guttata) that I never got a good look at. I reread the first few chapters of Moby Dick. I always forget how much I adore Melville when it's been a while. Spooky read the first half of Kathe Koja's Stray Dog (2002).

About six pm, we headed over to Spooky's parents' place, because her mother had unexpectedly and kindly acquired for us a portable air-conditioning unit. A Sony CB-10NH, actually, which looks a bit like a shiny black Star Wars droid. We visited briefly, and I hugged Spider the Giant Cat (photo below), then headed back to Providence. Turns out, yesterday set a record high for that date in this city, 98F. It was 8:30 pm when we got home, and the thermostat was reading 93F in the house! Hubero looked utterly pathetic. We hastily set up the portable air conditioner (it needs a name), in the central room. At first, the temp dropped rather rapidly, down to 90F in about fifteen minutes, but then it refused to budge any farther. We sat in front of the AC and ate a late dinner of cold pastrami and Swiss, and sulked and sweated and grumped. Afterwards, I retreated to the swelter of my office, and tried to get into a bit of Second Life rp. Thank you, Gloriana, Pontifex, and Merma/Ardere.

Honestly, I am rethinking Second Life a lot these days. I think all the time away from it moving gave me some perspective, and I see that I abused it the last year, because I was so miserable in Atlanta and just wanted to be anywhere else but there (well, no, not anywhere, but New Babbage, Arrakis, and Toxia were all a step up). No, I'm not about to give it up or anything. But. I can't sink so much time into it. I'd already cut way, way back before the move. It's a tool, a wonderful tool that has helped me write several very good stories, but there's so much else to be done, in this First Life. One reason I make a shitty transhumanist. I fall for the real sand and sky and sex almost every goddamn time. I will say that I am deeply frustrated at the inability to construct stable rp in SL with more than three or four people, and at the plethora of illiterate, immature, ill-mannered, attention-deficit morons clogging up the works. Yeah, well, anyway. Just thinkin' aloud again.

When I went to bed at about 2:25 am, the thermostat was still hovering stubbornly in the high 80s. This sort of heat can drive you to murder your beloved. Or cut off another toe. Or alphabetize all your CDs in reverse order, Z-A. I lay in bed, mine and Spooky's sweat commingling, and watched the first part of Alien while I waited for the Ambien to take effect. Space looked so wonderfully, wonderfully cold. The corridors of the Nostromo never looked so inviting. They say this is the last day of the heatwave. But they were wrong yesterday, and I say meteorologists are going to have to bleed and suffer and die, in vast numbers, to appease Helios. We'll take the meteorologists who don't plan to vote Obama first.

Oh, I think I've found the new "art correspondent" for Sirenia Digest. Thank you all.

Oh, yeah. Photos. A bunch of photos, some of yesterday, and some that are just shots of the new place, because I'm not the only crown-molding whore out there (behind the cut):

( Home and Last Yesterday )

So, all these many months after the release of Sunshine, the soundtrack still has not been released because one set of lawyers in not talking to another set of lawyers, or something to that effect...and I have I Am Kloot's "Avenue of Hope" stuck in my head, but can only listen to it on the DVD. And post the lyrics here:

Along the Avenue of Hope
The footsteps falter, the fingers grope
And days, stretch out, beneath the sun
No one's born, and no one dies, no one lives, so no one cries
And we wait to see just what we will become

Don't let me falter, don't let me ride
Don't let the earth in me subside
Let me see just who I will become

You're like the clouds in my home town
You just grow fat and hang around
And your days stretch out beneath the sun

And you don't live, you don't die, you don't love so you don't cry
And we wait, to see just what we will become

Don't let me borrow, don't let me bring
Don't let me wallow, don't make me sing
Let me see just who I will become

Don't let me falter, don't let me hide
Don't let someone else decide
Just who or what I will become

Don't let them borrow, don't let them bring
Don't let them wallow, don't make them sing

Also, how about Martian dunes defrosting?

A bit of advice: if you're the sort of person who lists "white nation" in your LJ interests, the sort who writes of posting to the Stormfront White Nationalist Community, who brags about her hatred for just about anyone who isn't white and heterosexual and believes that hatred is a virtue, who thinks the world is under the thumb of a Zionist conspiracy...you should not be reading this journal. In fact, I'll go one further. I don't want you reading this journal, and I certainly do not want you showing up on the list of people who have "friended" me. I am asking you to please "unfriend" me. Now. You have already been banned from commenting ever again. And no, I do not believe that my tolerance requires me to tolerate intolerance of this magnitude. I am your worst enemy, the thing you hate and rail against, the thing that makes your racist skin crawl — a fact you somehow seem to have missed — and I do not want your eyes on my words. Go away.

With that said...

Here in Atlanta it is dangerously hot. The ozone's in the red. Right now, it's 95F with a 101F heat index. Same as yesterday.

As for yesterday, I didn't write. I didn't even try. Spooky and I escaped the worst of the day's heat in a matinee screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine at Midtown Arts Cinema. Gods, how I love this film. My admiration for it was only increased by a second viewing. Used to, at least once a year there would be a film I loved so much I'd pay theatre prices to see it again and again and again: Pulp Fiction (9 times in the theatre); Dark City (4 times); The Matrix (5 times); The Fifth Element (9 times). My all-time record is The Empire Strikes Back (because I've always been a dork), which I managed to see no less than 20 times in the theatre. The last time this happened was in 2001 with Moulin Rouge (5 times). It's been six years since I've paid to see any film in theatres more than once, a change in behaviour that has mainly been due to rude, noisy audience members and high ticket prices. But yes. Sunshine. See it on a big screen while you can. Undoubtedly one of my favourite sf films of the last decade. The DVD will be along shortly, but there's no way it will be as spectacular an experience as seeing the film at the cinema. This time through, I think what struck me most about Sunshine is that, when all is said and done, it's a story about joy. Even through all the death and mishap and horror, joy is at the white-hot heart of it. Joy and awe.

After the movie, back out in the scorch, we stopped by Borders on Ponce and I thumbed through Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction 24, which I'd not bought yet. I was extremely pleased to see both "Bradbury Weather" and "The Pearl Diver" singled out and praised in "Summation: 2006," as well as getting honourable mentions at the back of the book. Also, I was unaware that "Faces in Revolving Souls" had received an honourbale mention in last year's volume. Maybe this will help me to get over that Locus review of The Dry Salvages I've spent the last three years fretting about (never mind that "Riding the White Bull" was chosen for The Year's Best Science Fiction 22). Anyway, yes, that was nice.

Later, last night, Chapter 26 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and some good freeform roleplaying in Second Life. Thank you, Molly Underwood.

And today is the release date for the mmp of Low Red Moon, which I hope you'll get, even if you've already read the book. This text differs slightly from the 2003 tpb, mainly in having many, many corrections. Thank you.

Okay. It's 2:06 p.m. and the words need to flow again. Later, kiddos.

Subterranean Press is now taking orders for the forthcoming 3rd edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder. Just click here to place your order.

Today I'm going to try to actually write something.

And Spooky will be finishing with the Silk page proofs, I think. And there was rain this morning, and more is on the way.

Yesterday evening, we saw Danny Boyle's Sunshine. I loved it. No, it's not the sort of hard sf that comes across like someone's astrophysics dissertation with a plot. This is a story primarily concerned with psychology, not physics or astronomy, and it should be viewed as such. Even if it fell flat emotionally — which it doesn't — Sunshine would be superb eye- and ear-candy. This is a film about awe, about the mind's struggle to cope with the vastness of space and time and consciousness, about loss and mortality and isolation. A lot of what I was trying to do in The Dry Salvages can be found in Sunshine. But if you go into it grousing about the absurdity of the premise or the fact that we never find out how the Icaraus II generates its gravity or that the bomb's far to small or anything else of the sort, you might as well save your money and stay at home. Because you've missed the point. This is a "wonder tale," not too far afield from the best of, say, Bradbury. Indeed, it's impossible not to think of one of Bradbury's most "outlandish" (and satisfying) tales, "The Golden Apples of the Sun." I found this a beautiful and deeply moving film. Not as good as the remake of Solaris, though it treads much of the same ground, but quite marvelous, nonetheless. The cast is superb. I'm not sure I could point to one particular actor and say she or he was the best of the lot. The visual effects alone are worth the ticket price. When the crew gathers to watch the black silhouette of Mercury crossing the face of the sun, for example. The soundtrack is exquisite. I strongly recommend this film, but only with the caveat stated above, because a lot of what's wrong with contemporary sf is right with Sunshine.

Later, Byron dropped by and stayed until well after midnight.

Now, I need to go see if me and the platypus are still on speaking terms.