Caitlín R. Kiernan

Hurricane Earl has come and gone. We braced ourselves for a Category 3 or 4 hurricane. We got a low-grade tropical storm, and only a tiny bit of rain, and virtually no wind at all. So, we have candles and jugs of water and cans of nonperishable meat stuff, which we'll consume, by and by. I am assuming this odd feeling I have is relief, and not disappointment, after all that build up. I genuinely was a little scared this time. Down around Florida and the Carolina's, that bastard looked like a monster.

So, yeah. We're fine, except I have a headache. But that's neither here nor there.

Yesterday, as we were realizing there would be no hurricane, and I'd discovered that I could upgrade my iMac's OS to 10.6.3 without putting out $169 (thank you seismickitten and the Cult of Mac website for setting me straight) for the software bundle I didn't want or need and could not afford, we made a trip to the Providence Place Mall, which we tend to avoid at all cost. But that's where the Apple Store is, so that's where we went. I got Snow Leopard, and we also picked up a copy of Kristen Hersh's book, Rat Girl, at Borders. I came home and spent hours updating. Well, an hour or two.

College Hill was pretty below the clouds, in the drizzle. Today, I think we're going to Narragansett to watch the surfers.

About the closest I got to actually writing was suddenly discovering how I think The Dinosaurs of Mars should be structured (which really is no small breakthrough).

Spooky made pasta and sausages for dinner (the sausages were chicken with spinach and feta). But it was really too hot to enjoy eating in the kitchen, or in any other room. The House was still in the 90sF well into the night, though the temp Outside was in the high 70s. It finally cooled off in here this morning.

I would like to end this entry by saying I have not fallen for another MMORPG. But that's not the case. Last night, I tried out the trial version of City of Heroes and Villains: Going Rogue. On the one hand, the game design's not even halfway intuitive, it lacks WoW's eye-candy appeal, and the controls are clunky and excessively complex. But only the other, character design is extraordinary, it's more amenable to rp than WoW, and it's just kind of cool in a ridiculous, campy, oh-look-I'm-a-supervillian way. And I have ice powers. And hurt people. How can that not be fun?

Up since 7:30 ayem, which might not have been so bad, except I didn't get to sleep until sometime after three, probably more like four.

There was snow in Providence yesterday evening, but the ground wasn't frozen, and it didn't stick. In the night, it changed over to rain.

Sometime just before I awoke, I dreamt of collecting fossils on Mars. I very, very frequently dream of collecting fossils, but usually the terran variety. In this dream, however, I was on Mars, in a very lightweight spacesuit. There was someone with me, but I can't recall now if it was someone I know in my waking life or not. We were walking a long river valley, a sort of braided river valley, which ran north to south (and the Ares Vallis comes to mind). Anyway, the ground was a very light grey, almost purple in places, a weathered clay or mudstone or siltstone of some sort. I came upon a small rise in the old riverbed (or flood channel) where an amazingly rich bone bed was exposed. The fossil bone was almost the same color as the stone, though I recall the unweathered parts being purplish and the more weathered surfaces being almost white. All the bones were disarticulated, but looked as though they'd come from Martian analogs of Late Paleozoic sarcopterygians and temnospondyls. Mostly, there were isolated skull bones: frontals, parietals, postorbitals, squamosals, parasphenoids, jugals, etc. I was elated to have come so unexpectedly upon such a wealth of bones, and was bagging them as quickly as possible. Whoever the person with me was, he or she was trying to get me to hurry, as we'd been away from the habitat too long, and there was concern about cosmic rays. Something like that. Still, I managed to fill two specimen bags. Marvelous dream. Maybe this is my subconscious telling me to get back to work on The Dinosaurs of Mars.

---

The last two days are a blur of editing The Red Tree. The good news, though, is that the ms. has to be back in Manhattan by Monday, so this can only possibly continue another four days, at the worst. Though I hopefully suspect that there's only two days work left to be done. I just got an email from Sonya (sovay), who very kindly went through and found all the quotes within the text, quotes from other works. They're all either "fair use" or quotes from works in the public domain (and most are the latter), but I have to provide documentation for each quote for legal at Penguin. Writing all that up will likely require a day. Yeah, see what fun shit authors get to do? And that will be that, at least until the CEM. But, this time, Spooky will be handling the CEM for me, mostly, so that's a relief. She can write "stet" as well as I can ("stet" is a proofreaders mark, Latin for "let it stand," and when one wishes to disregard a copyeditor's mark, one writes "stet" in the margin of the page. My CEMs get hundreds and hundreds of "stets").

The eBay auctions continue. Thanks to everyone who has bid thus far. Take a look. Bid if you are able and interested.

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One of the many things that needed doing in this round of editing The Red Tree required that I read Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" again. It's really one of the most atrociously written of HPL's stories, and a testament to how stupendously his writing improved from the early 1920s to the early and mid-1930s. Anyway, yeah, I had to read back over the story on Tuesday, because there's a line from it that I'd been trying to recall, that I wanted to use for one of Sarah Crowe's novels (Sarah is the protagonist of The Red Tree). I last read the story back in June, when we were driving up from Atlanta; while we were driving through the Catskills, in fact. And I found this one line, and I thought, That would make a great title for one of Sarah's novels. But, I didn't mark it. Hence the need for a re-read. However, halfway through the story on Tuesday, I could take no more, had not found the line, and decided that The Ark of Poseidon would remain The Ark of Poseidon. I did, however, rediscover a very interesting thing.

I have argued in the past that Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) owes a considerable debt to Lovecraft, in particular to "The Dreams in the Witch House." But I can also point to a passage in "The Lurking Fear." At the end of Chapter Five of The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor and Theo experience another harrowing visit to their bedroom by the entity that "walked there" in Hill House. In her terror, Eleanor reaches out and takes Theo's hand, and she squeezes it tightly. At the very end of the chapter, however, the lights come up, and Nell discovers that she couldn't have been holding Theo's hand, after all, as Theo is still across the room in her own bed. Jackson writes:

"What?" Theodora was saying. "What, Nell? What?"
"God god," Eleanor said, flinging herself out of bed and across the room to stand shuddering in a corner, "God god — whose hand was I holding?"

In "The Lurking Fear," HPL's protagonist has an almost identical experience when he and two companions spend a night at the Martense mansion on Tempest Mountain. Three men fall asleep in one bed. The narrator is in the middle. Though in a sort of fever dream, he is distinctly aware that one of his companions, at one point, throws an arm across the narrator's chest. Then he awakes to find both men dead and horribly mutilated. HPL writes:

Something had lain between me and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly — even that would have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or fore leg on my chest...

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Last night, Spooky and I watched Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, which I wish I'd been able to see in the theatre. I thought it was splendid. And it occurred to me that, unlike the Vietnam War, the great movies about America's war against Middle Eastern nations are being made right now, while the events are still unfolding. Which is an interesting state of affairs. Of course, history could always prove me wrong. Maybe the Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan Apocalypse Now won't be made until 2020 or so.

There. A nice long entry of substance, despite the insomnia. Screw you, "micro-blogging."

I swear to fuck (it's not like I can convincingly swear to god), if it just were not for sleep, this whole being alive thing would be at least hundred times more palatable. But, I'll get back to that in a minute or fifteen.

Yesterday, I did 1,003 words on Chapter Two of Joey Lafaye. Which was just enough that I didn't have to feel guilty. I'd have made 1,200, but the snow was a constant source of distraction. I think it went well, the writing. Having already introduced Ignatius and Joey on Thursday, yesterday I introduced Sweet William, who is Ignatius' brother. It's a scene set just north of Philomath on the road to Athens, and I could not help but take a jab at the South. I swore I would refrain in this book from taking the South to task for all its endless wretchedness, because I'm tired of doing that, and it's not like most of the rest of this country doesn't have it's own fair share of rednecks and scuttlefish. But, I went and did it anyway. I think it's a case of resentment. This novel was supposed to be set in Westerly and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, not Georgia. But, here I am, still stuck in Georgia, and it was such a magnificent bitch setting Daughter of Hounds in Rhode Island when I was sitting here in Georgia, I just couldn't put myself through that again. And there really is some scary-ass shit in the boonies southeast of Athens.

As for the snow yesterday, it must have started about noon and kept up almost all the way to dark (just before 7 p.m. CaST). It stayed warm enough that the road only got slushy, and we never lost power. It had actually started melting before the day was over, but at the height of the storm, we must have had at least two inches. Today, there are still patches, but they'll melt away very soon. Anyway, while I was writing, Spooky took some photos (behind the cut):

( Snow Day #2 )

A phone call from Bill Schafer at subpress this morning, and I hope I was coherent. I'd not been out of bed very long, and I was having trouble remembering how my mouth worked. But, among other things, we talked about Tales of Pain and Wonder, and the generation ship on a water planet story that might replace The Dinosaurs of Mars, and the next erotica collection. I made some grim joke about the uncertainty of life after Joey Lafaye. And so it goes.

---

After leaving me alone long enough that I was convinced it would not be back, the latest recurring dream recurred this morning. All the stuff I've mentioned before: the "space balloon," the orange man showing up with a bullet wound, me taking it out of him, the dining "car"/lounge, etc. But something new, as well. And I wish I'd made notes when I woke, because it's getting murky now. Then again, forgetting is better, most likely. I was moving down one of the balloon's narrow corridors, and there was a very pretty woman in furs and some sort of black plastic respirator fitted to her mouth and nose. It muffled her voice. She stopped me, talking about how "these flights are never on time," and slipped a foil triangle into my hand. Then she pushed past me, and I stood there holding the triangle, watching as it slowly unfolded, becoming a sort of rhomboid. In the dream, I understood what it was, and slipped it into an inner pocket of my coat. After holding it, I wanted badly to wash my hands. And then the "scene" shifted, the way dreams shift, and I was in a bombed-out concrete building somewhere, and it was so cold, freezing. Brutally cold. And the woman with the respirator was holding a knife to my throat and talking about "challenge response systems" (which I know is something I got from Bowie's Outside) and the South Korean Ministry of Information and Communication (and I have no idea where that came from). I could taste blood, and there was lightning, now and then. I sincerely wish that the Ambien had not ceased to have the dream dampening effects (or rather, the effect of causing me to forget dreams immediately upon waking) that I experienced with it for so long. Now I have this dreamsickness, and I'm trying to shake it off.

---

Please have a look at the current eBay. Thanks.

I suppose it's time to wrap this up and beg for coffee,

Yesterday, I wrote 1,154 words of The Dinosaurs of Mars, beginning Section Five, "The Big Grim." I still have no title for Section Four. About halfway through the writing yesterday, I read "Themis characterization of the MER Gusev crater landing site" (Milam, K. A., et al. 2003. Journal of Geophysical Research), because I needed to know the approximate level of Zutphen Crater below datum. The story, and the characters, inch their way towards whatever secrets are hidden beneath Apollinaris Patera. At least I finally got them out of Kayne City. Going back to the novella today, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what happens next. I assume the story will let me know.

And we were up much too late last night reading You Know What, so I can't even blame insomnia for my grogginess.

Just a little more than one day left on two of the current auctions. Have a look, please and thank you.

I think that's all I have this afternoon. It's time for coffee. Because the platypus is a merciful monotreme, or so I am told.

I was just about to entitle this entry "The Wait is Not Over," but then the postman showed up with Spooky's copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And it's a good damn thing, because she hardly slept last night. Now I think she's walking about the house hugging the box, which is marked "Do Not Deliver Until July 21, 2007." I've heard tell there was some eldritch bargain struck between booksellers and postal workers to keep the books from arriving early. I half expected the bloody thing to come by owl. But it is here, finally, and as soon as we finish Lemony Snicket's The Vile Village, we may begin reading it. This is called delayed gratification. It works for me.

Yesterday, I did 1,196 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars, and finished section four, which does not yet have a title. But after much confusion and vain attempts at plotting, I finally understand the essential nature of this story. Like "Bradbury Weather," "Zero Summer," "A Season of Broken Dolls," "In View of Nothing," and "Riding the White Bull" before it, The Dinosaurs of Mars is basically sf noir. I wanted it to be something else, something more akin to The Dry Salvages, but the story gets its way. The story always gets its way, unless I am the worst sort of liar. All writers are liars, but we must always tell the truth. When our lies begin to force stories into places they were not "meant" to go (teleology here is illusory), then we have begun to taint our lies with that which is untruthful. Still, I hope it will be a "ripping good space yarn." I start to suspect its plot is going the way of The Big Sleep. But there you go. Storytelling is a wild magic, and it does as it will.

A typical summer's day here in Georgia. The sun's a demon, and the birds have stopped singing. There's only the rise and fall of the cicadas to break the still.

Please have a look at the latest round of eBay auctions. That copy of From Weird and Distant Shores is one of my last, and I only have a few copies of Daughter of Hounds. And since I have publishers who seem to pay me only when the whimsical mood strikes them (except for Subterranean Press, who understand that writers have bills, too, just like real people), the eBay money is especially welcome right now.

I thought last night's episode of Dr. Who, "Gridlock," was particularly good. In fact, I loved it. Even without Christopher Eccelston, it might be my favourite episode so far. I suppose it just happened to hit all my buttons. But earlier, before Dr. Who, Spooky got us pizza from Fellini's and we had a twilight walk down Sinclair Avenue to see the dinosaur and Daisy Dog. Two perfectly adorable Hogwart's students went traipsing past, waving their wands in the air. I kind of suspect they were Hufflepuffs. Spooky and I are both Ravenclaw, of course. Later still, there was Second Life. The Palaeozoic Museum is actually beginning to feel like a museum, instead of just a great beautiful, empty building. I added code to some of the Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins murals to make them interactive, then we planted a "Cretaceous Garden," which includes ferns, a dogwood tree, and a eucalyptus. It's standing where, one day, our models of Hawkins' Lælaps and Hadrosaurus will stand. By one a.m., I was too bleary for SL, and we went to bed and read The Vile Village. I think we're halfway through. And the platypus says I've "prattled on" quite enough for one morning, so later, kiddos. There's coffee with my name on it.

No writing yesterday. The whole day was spent putting together a new draft of the manuscript for Tales of Pain and Wonder, salvaging a new "typescript" from the old MS Word file that was the basis of the Meisha Merlin Pub. edition. Hopefully, today I will be spent getting back into The Dinosaurs of Mars.

I think I would be somewhat more disposed to look kindly upon the whole "rapture of the nerds" Singularity silliness if I could just find a reliable printer. I sat nursing this one all damn day, printing in 30-page increments lest it became overwhelmed, feeding it paper, extracting jammed sheets of paper, etc. & etc. And it's not like it's some knock-off piece of dren machine. It's a new Hewlett-Packard, still shiny from the box. Oh, how I miss my old Mac LaserWriter 300. What a marvelous machine that was. Never jammed or broke down, and an ink cartridge lasted almost forever. Alas, Apple got out of the printer business, and I had to stop using the LaserWriter when I moved from the venerable Color Classic to the iBook in 2001 (though the printer was still in tip-top fucking shape, mind you, even though it was eight years old at the time). But, yeah, me and this idiot excuse for a printer until about 8:15 p.m. last night, and now I have a 441-page "typescript" that has to be edited, and it doesn't even include the new and as yet unwritten story or the new intro.

My writing schedule has become a nightmare. Again, even with Beowulf out of the way. Somehow, I have to finish Dinosaurs of Mars (only one-third written), keep the digest going, edit this new edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, go over the Silk mmp page proofs, write the new S. Desvernine short story, and get Joey LaFaye started (because it's due in April 2008, and I need at least nine months to write it). All between now and the end of August. I only need one more me, and co-consciousness, so the two Caitlíns do not have to waste time with verbal communication. There are writers who could do this in their sleep, I'm sure. But I'm slow, and rarely good for more than 1,200 words a day. And I have one functional eye. And chronic insomnia that leads to periods of uselessness. And yet, it will all get done, because it always all gets done. I can seek solace in the fact that no matter how awful my schedule might look right now, this isn't anywhere as terrible as the Bad Old Days when I was writing for Vertigo.

Howard Hughes must love her work, on some level, as it's surely not making her rich or healthy.

Spooky made a grand stir fry last night, lots of asparagus and red bell pepper and fresh basil and shitake on jasmine rice. Then there was a thunderstorm that delayed our walk until well after sunset. But Freedom Park was full of bats, swooping and flapping and chittering. We could still glimpse the thunderhead to the east, glowing with lightning. There was a little Second Life, and we are so very near to being finished with the great steel and glass structure that will house the Palaeozoic Museum. You can see some in-progress photos here, thanks to blu_muse (in some of the shots, you can even see me, the grey-skinned, red-haired Victorian hovering in the sky). If I do say so myself, snapshots cannot do the space justice. You have to "stand" inside it, inside the 25-meter-high atrirum. My inspiration was, obviously, taken from the Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Before sleep, Spooky read aloud the next chapter of The Ersatz Elevator.

Do please have a look at the new eBay auctions, if you have not already. Or look again. Note that I have only a very few copies of Daughter of Hounds on hand, and as I foresee no signings or con appearances in my immediate future (who has time or money for that shit?), this will be one of your only chances to get a signed, personalized copy.

Where's my brain, please...?

It's Sunday morning, and once again the Xtians are wailing "gospel" through loudspeakers. All the dogs on the street have started to howl. I shit you not.

Yesterday, we read back over "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection" and the first fifty pages of The Dinosaurs of Mars, two very different beasts. Afterwards, I did some polishing on the former, and I think it still needs just a little more, but I went ahead and emailed it to Vince for illustrating. I also attended to some neglected email. I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen today. More of the same, whichever way it goes.

Later, I had a New Babbage town meeting to attend in Second Life, followed by a virtual vaudeville show in the New Babbage stockyards. The trained humans were quite good, and the dancing hippo amused me, as well. Then we installed the spiral staircase in the Palaeozoic Museum and worked some on the mezzanine. And that was my yesterday, near as I can recall.

I get into terrible, senseless funks over hardly ever leaving the house, much less the neighborhood. And then I stop and consider my options, which is to say — my options without burning the hydrocarbons needed to drive a day and a half northeast or several days west, and the funk dissolves into simple despair. And that's somehow better, really.

My life seems less and less part of some objective reality, and more and more like a peculiar tributary in some unfortunate dream. Well, perhaps not unfortunate. Perhaps merely ill considered.

Time to make the doughnuts.

Yesterday, I did 1,218 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars and reached the end of the third section, "The Survivor" (note that in my entry of July 5th I mistakenly referred to the second section by this same title, though in fact that section is titled "The Inquest"). So, that's 10,983 words thus far, fifty pages, and I'm guessing a little less than a third of the book. Having reached a natural pause in the story yesterday, I have decided that today I will go ahead and begin work on a new vignette for Sirenia Digest #20. I am hesitant to set TDoM aside even for the space of a few days, now that it's moving along. But the platypus says that's the way the cookie crumbles. So, I will likely spend today and the next two or three days on something brief and weird and quasi-erotic.

Anything else to yesterday? Ah, yes. This is cool. Spooky was out front of the house doing something or another, and she was fortunate enough to spot a specimen of the terrestrial planarian Bipalium kewense (Phylum Platyhelminthes) as it began an attack upon an earthworm (Phylum Annelida). She came back in and got her camera and snapped the following images (behind the cut), which you might want to avoid if the thought of one squirmy thing eating another alive gives you the willies:

( planarian versus earthworm )

This particular Bipalium kewense was, conservatively, 16-17mm in length, though these beasts may grow as large as 120mm. Originally described from specimens recovered from a greenhouse at Kew Botanical Gardens, near London, England, in 1878, this species is prbably native to Indochina, and has been turning up in America since 1901, an exotic invader inadvertently imported by horticulturists. A remarkable little creature.

Last night, we had a good walk through Freedom Park. There were low pinkish clouds, catching the distant rays of sunset. There were two rather enormous bats. Later, we watched The Fifth Element, which I think I'd not seen in a couple of years. I remain immensely fond of this film.

Michael Brampton writes:

Some time ago you talked about the possibility of writing a literary Science Fiction novel revolving around the idea of the human race being offered the ultimatum from an alien race: if they continued to cause the extinction of species upon the plant, they would in turn suffer huge losses. I thought it sounded like a wonderful idea. Do you still plan to write it? I think you mentioned in the journal that you were advised that there is no audience for literary Sci-fi, but you would perhaps write it anyway. I hope so, it sounds like a fantastic plan for a book.

I haven't forgotten the idea, one I'd still very much like to write someday. No time soon, as my next two novels, under contract to Penguin, will be dark fantasy. It's possible I may someday be able to write this particular sf novel for Subterranean Press. On the other hand, I have already told subpress that The Dinosaurs of Mars may be my last sf novel, aside from some steampunk pieces I want to write. So, we'll see.

Yesterday, I did 1,282 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars, which brought me to the end of the second section of the story, "The Survivor." I'm actually considering placing a sort of disclaimer at the front of this book, something like this —

WARNING! This is strictly a work of fiction, and therefore should be regarded as fantasy, not an attempt to forecast some possible human future. The events in this novel are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to any actual future is purely coincidental. It was the sole intent of the author to write a story, a "ripping good space yarn," something fun and thoughtful and exciting about highly evolved dinosaurs inhabiting volcanic caverns on Mars — not to play Nostradamus. Take note: the author could not care less about mankind's future. If this is not the sort of book you're looking for, then you should stop NOW while there's still time. No, really. Oh, and all that stuff you've heard about "the Singularity" and ">H," that particular fantasy will not be found anywhere herein. Apologies. — CRK

Or maybe it'll just say something to the effect that I'm intentionally writing a novella that would be perfectly at home in the pages of a mid-20th Century pulp magazine. Let the critics sit and spin and write their own gorramn books. Thank you, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thank you, Ray Bradbury.

The baby robins in the holly bush below the kitchen window fledged yesterday. There was a bit of a kerfuffle when a male cardinal tried to move in before the last robin chick was out. Spooky snagged a photo (behind the cut):

( peering from the green )

A very good walk through Freedom Park just after nightfall. There were lots of bats. Back home, my Second Life was occupied largely with real-estate speculation in New Babbage, as I'm looking to buy a couple of parcels of land so that I can begin building Hawkins' Palaeozoic Museum. I am envisioning a great glass and steel structure, not unlike the Crystal Palace. The second parcel will, I hope, become Jules Verne Park, because even Babbage needs green space. Sir Arthur and his accountant, Mr. Swindlehurst, showed me some of the ins and outs of owning land in SL. Now, I just have to find the right lots and get my virtual finances in order. Oh, and for them what might care, here's the link to Professor Nareth E. Nishi's journal, the writing of which is becoming another minor obsession of mine.

Late, we watched another episode of Firefly ("Shindig"). Then, of course, it was time for my nightly dance with Monsieur Insomnia. He had me up until about 4:30 a.m. But, in the end, two Ambien (20 mg) bought me six and a half hours sleep. Boy howdy.

Platypus says it's time to go. I am helpless to resist.

Last March 28th, my lit agent, Merrilee, called to ask if I wanted to do a novelization. In particular, would I want to do a novelization of the forthcoming Robert Zemeckis Beowulf. All I knew of the film was that Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman had written the screenplay. And, truthfully, I've never had any interest in writing a novelization. But the timing was right, and, as Neil and Merrilee knew, I'm something of a fanatic on the subject of Beowulf. Indeed, many years ago (I think it was sometime in 1997), Neil and I had a phone conversation about what we'd each do if either of us ever got the opportunity to write a screenplay for Beowulf. Anyway, I said yes, though, for one reason and another (and a few others after that), I was not actually able to begin work on the book until October. I finished the "first draft" back in February, and then had to do two rounds of rewrites for Paramount and my editor at HarperCollins. This morning, the first-pass page proofs landed on my front porch. I'd have announced this long, long ago, but was only told yesterday that I could finally do so (though, I will point out, Neil leaked the news quite some time back, and its turned up in a couple of Wikipedia articles). So, that's what I spent the winter on, and much of the autumn and spring. On Friday, I got the very good news that Paramount had given my manuscript (based on Neil and Roger's screenplay) the green light. I believe the novel is due out in October. There are some differences between it and the film, mostly my inclusion of a great deal more Norse mythology and suchlike, because that's the sort of thing that there's more time for in a novel than a film. I presently have no interest in doing another novelization. I think this was probably a one-time thing, a special case, but it has been a learning experience. I'm not sure when the film is due to be released. Ah, wait. IMDb says November 16th, 2007. It's an animated film, by the way.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,270 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars. But I stopped at 574 words, because an inquest was coming up, and I needed to read Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing" again to be sure I didn't borrow too heavily from it. There's not much else to say about yesterday. Spooky's iPod arrived, and she named it Shiny!, as we having been working our way through Firefly again. Late, we watched Bram Stoker's Dracula, because I'd not seen it in a couple of years and had that urge. The day was cool and rainy, as today appears to be, a welcomed relief from the summer heat.

Oh, and I was very pleased to see that Farscape landed at #4 on TV Guide's list of the 30 "Top Cult TV Shows Ever."

And today is mine and Spooky's fifth anniversary. Yes, we are five, or, as she said, "a whole hand."

Okay. The platypus is getting out the bull whip. Later, kiddos.