greygirlbeast: (Ellen Ripley 1)
Home again. Well, home again since 5 a.m. this morning (CaST).

And we forgot to take the camera, and I can't hope to reduce it all to mere words. The reading was genuinely marvelous, and my great thanks to Ellen ([livejournal.com profile] ellen_datlow) for having me, and to everyone at KGB Bar, which is still as wonderful as it was in May 2001. I read two short pieces, both from Tales from the Woeful Platypus —— first "Still Life," and then "Untitled 17." And the two worked well together. "Still Life" is funny and sweet, perverse but almost naïvely so. Then "Untitled 17" comes roaring in like a steam engine, all anger and blood and wickedness. And, I swear to fuck, I think my reading of "Untitled 17" last night was one of the two or three best readings I've ever done. I wish I had it on tape. I doubt I could reproduce it. The story combined with the atmosphere of the bar, with the crowd, with my weariness, with everything, to make that reading what it was. Also, I had my first bottle of Baltika 4 (Originalnoe), a dark Russian lager brewed with caramel and rye malt. Delicious. Also also, my thanks to all the folks who came, especially the two guys who came all the way from Toronto (!). I signed a lot of books, when I'd not expected to sign any at all.

We left Providence about 2:30 p.m. (CaST), and made it to Union Station in New Haven about 5 p.m. (CaST). We took the train into Grand Central Station in Manhattan. I'd never seen Grand Central, and my gods, what a beautiful building. I wanted to lie down on the marble floor and stare up at the astrological mural painted on the vaulted ceiling. But we were running late, and it took longer to get a taxi than I expected. My taxi-fu used to be quite good. Last night, it took forever. So, we were almost late getting down to KGB. Benjamin Parzybok read first.

After the reading, we walked over to St. Mark's Place, about four blocks I think (passing a bakery window, and Sonya taught me about hamantashn), and had a delicious and enormous dinner at Grand Sichuan. There were about thirty of us, and a bezillion dishes were ordered. I'm not sure I can remember it all. There was a huge flat-screen television showing Chinese soap operas (or something of the sort) with Mandarin subtitles, and I had serious Firefly flashbacks. Let's see. We had: cold diced cucumber in scallion sauce, steamed pork soup dumplings, Sichuan cold noodles (with a peanut sauce), chicken with string beans, orange-flavored beef, double-cooked pork with chestnuts (my favorite), the braised whole fish with hot bean sauce (yum), the smoked tea duck, sautéed pea shoots, fried pumpkin cakes, and shrimp with salted pepper. Afterwards, we walked back out into the freezing night (it was in the 20sF), to a dessert truck parked about half a block away, and Sonya got the pomegranate macaroons and shared them with me and Spooky. And then we had to say our good-byes and grab a taxi (much easier to hail than the first one), and rush back to Grand Central to make our 11:22 p.m. (EST) train back to New Haven. My feet were numb by this point, and I was very grateful for the walking stick that Spooky's mom gave me last week. I sat down on the floor in GCS and stared at the painted stars. A homeless man gave me a pack of peanut M&Ms.

On the train, Spooky tried to get some sleep, while Sonya and I had a long conversation about Harry Potter, and all the opportunities Rowling missed to make the books truly good (on the way up, we'd talked Firefly and Babylon Five and Farscape, Joey LaFaye, "Tam Lin," and Thomas the Rhymer). I think we made it back to New Haven about 1:30 a.m. I'm not sure. It was all such a blur. We were only in Manhattan for maybe four or five hours. I'd forgotten how much I adore NYC, especially at night. Driving back through Connecticut, we stopped at a convenience store in Mystic, where I apparently left my iPod. My iPod from 2005, so it was sort of a fossil, anyway, the Millennium Falcon of iPods, but it did have all my music on it. We're hoping it was turned in, but won't know until tomorrow. Back home, I went straight to bed.

And that was last night, as best I can translate it into words. I'm sorry I forgot the camera.

I've received news from my sister that a member of my immediate family is seriously ill, and so now I have to go and speak with my mother.

Oh, by the way, yes, I did post the video to the Editors' "An End Has a Start," but it was some autoplay thing, so I took it down again. Sorry. It is, however, my new favorite song.

-2 Eve

May. 25th, 2006 11:38 am
greygirlbeast: (mirror2)
First things frelling first. A very, very happy birthday to [livejournal.com profile] docbrite. You old bastard, who'd have ever thought we'd both stick around so goddamn long, hmmm?

Yesterday was something I don't seem to get very often. Yesterday was a genuinely good day, top to bottom, side to side, stem to stern. When it was over and done and I was lying awake in bed at 3:30 a.m., it occurred to me that I had no complaints. And it had not been merely a neutral day during which the shitstorms had been held at bay, but a day which was simply nice. So, if the Cosmos listens, thank you. May I have another, please? It was also a stellar writing day. I'm no longer sure what my personal best is, my "most words in a single day" count, and some kind soul should scour the journal for me and figure it out. But. Yesterday I did a perfectly astounding 2,404 words between about 1:45 p.m. and 7:12 p.m. and finished the first half of "The Black Alphabet." And, what's still more amazing, it was actually fun to write. I did G-M. I'm pretty sure that "The Black Alphabet" trumps everything else I've done thus far in Sirenia Digest for raw, undiluted, honest kink. That's my soul up there, you know? Reading it to Spooky late yesterday, I was like, wow, I actually wrote this stuff down, and I'm actually going to let all these people read it. Exhibitionist me. So, yeah. A very good writing day. The first half of "The Black Alphabet" comes in at 3,674 words (before proofreading/editing). I'd meant to do only a hundred to two hundred words per letter, but a few, like L, went on much, much longer. The second half will appear in Sirenia Digest #7 in June.

[livejournal.com profile] stsisyphus has suggested I run a poll to help decide which of the vignettes will be selected for the 10,000 words of reprint that will comprise half of Tales from the Woeful Platypus, and I may do that. Thing is, since only half the book is reprint, and since the vignettes have tended to run on a bit longer than those in Frog Toes and Tentacles, I can only choose three or four for reprint. Yet another reason to subscribe (hint, hint). Most of what goes into the digest will not be reprinted in these Subterranean Press volumes. I am considering asking Bill if we can increase the length of TftWP from 20K to 30K words, but we're constrained by the small format of the book, which I do definitely want to keep. As they say on Nebari Prime, Srai' brel yi v'rest ("See we shall").

Neither of us felt like cooking last night, so we grabbed take-away from the Mellow Mushroom in Decatur. I celebrated having mostly finished writing this issue of the digest by watching a favourite ep of Farscape, "Fractures" (poor Hubero is still the cutest), and then we binged on four more eps of Dead Like Me. Sadly, only three remain, and it's painfully clear that there will be many, many loose threads left dangling by the show's untimely cancellation. Alas and alack and all. After dinner, before all the frelling television, we walked over to Freedom Park, the first time we'd braved it after dark. The park doesn't actually close until 11 p.m., and there were still a few dog-walkers out. The stars were surprisingly bright, considering all the Atlanta light pollution. Venus was ablaze. We spotted a satellite. I just wanted to lie down in the grass and spend the whole night there. Perhaps later in the summer. Oh, and I read another JVP article, a description of the cochleosaurid temnospondyl amphibian Nigerpeton ricqlesi. Really, the very worst thing I can say about yesterday is that Spooky and I both ended it with insomnia. She was up until after 5 a.m. I got to sleep about 4, but was awake before 9. And really, that's more about the space between yesterday and today than a reflection on either day.

However, this morning I had one of the worst cherry Danishes I've ever suffered through. Spooky brought it back from Aurora Coffee at L5P (she meant well). Locals, consider yourselves warned. The cherry part resembled nothing so much as candied monkey testicles.

At some point, Poppy was doing a "pet grammar peeve" of the day sort of thingy. Aside from my absolute loathing for l33t and txt tlk, I make a pretty poor excuse for a grammar Nazi. But I did think of one thing this morning which has begun to bug me, as I seem to notice it with increasing regularity — people who do not comprehend the difference between "were" and "was." There is a difference. For a reason. No, really.

Okay. My coffee cup is almost empty. Spooky's getting out of the tub. I have much to do today so that I won't have to work on -2. Well, -2 & 9 months. Oh, and just so you don't think this post has been entirely too cheery, I leave you with this sobering fact: at the current rate of deforestation, the rainforests of Madagascar will be gone, entirely gone, in only another 40 years, and with them will go all the lemurs and the Malagasy civet and the falanouc and all those other last vestiges of the Madagascan fauna will vanish, along with innumerable endemic plant species. By then, if I haven't departed this particular rock, I shall be -42. There. A little gloom and doom to see you through the day...

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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