Caitlín R. Kiernan

So, yes. Today I can make the Second Big Announcement (you will recall Beowulf was the first). In the spring of 2008, Subterranean Press will release the 3rd edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, as trade and limited hardbacks. I am more excited about this than I have been about any project in quite some while. The book will include all the stories, etc. from the Gauntlet (1999) and Meisha Merlin (2002) editions, plus a new story and a new author's introduction. All Richard Kirk's interior illustrations will be reprinted, and my great thanks to Rick for tracking down good scans these thirteen images, as he long ago sold the original artwork to collectors. There will be a new cover (artist to be announced). It is my intention that this will be, at last, the true definitive edition of the text, and all the horrid errors that somehow crept into the Meisha Merlin edition (despite my painstaking copyediting) will be excised.

That said, many will be asking what then is to become of my plans for a free electronic edition of the book? In short, those plans have been shelved, at least for the life of the subpress edition. In the meanwhile, I will be releasing a free electronic edition of The Dry Salvages instead, under a Creative Commons license. Regardless, my thanks to everyone who volunteered, months ago, to do the annotations for an e-version of Tales of Pain and Wonder.

Yesterday almost felt like a "normal" day. The Beowulf page proofs went back in the mail to HarperCollins (well, back in the UPS). I tried to write, and spent most of the day trying to write, but in the end scrapped everything I'd done. Sometimes that happens. I spoke with my lit agent about contracts, as we have contracts in the works for my next two novels with Penguin, the new edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, and The Dinosaurs of Mars. We had a very good walk at sunset. The sky was filled with swallows, and when we reached Inman Park, Spooky spotted the slimmest silver-grey rind of the waxing moon, just visible in the western sky. Back home, I read more of Chris Beard's book on early primates. I napped and bathed. Later, we spent two or three hours in Second Life, erecting the glass and steel walls of the Palaeozoic Museum's atrium in New Babbage. I'll post some images here soon. It is going to be amazing. blu_muse ("Cerdwin Flanagan") dropped in while we were building, and much virtual silliness ensued. Later still, I crawled away to bed, and Spooky read me Chapter Seven of The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket, which we have long neglected (bad kids). So, yes, a "normal" day. And I even got a good night's sleep.

Spooky just returned from the p.o., and the platypus is chomping at the bit. So I will wrap this up. Oh, my thanks to everyone who bid and bought in the latest round of eBay auctions. Okay. Onward, platypus.

Postscript (3:50 p.m.): Spooky's trying to get back into the eBay habit, as the boxes of my books are beginning to take over the house (and the money's always nice). She had relisted The Five of Cups (trade hardcover, PC), along with one of my last five copies of From Weird and Distant Shores (trade hardcover, PC) and a copy of Daughter of Hounds. Regarding the latter, I have only a very few of these to sell, so there is no "buy it now" feature. All books can be signed and personalised at the buyer's request. Just click here for auctions! Thanks.

I'm a little slow getting started today, but at least I can say I got a full eight hours of sleep last night (even if it didn't start until about 3 a.m.). I cannot even recall how long it's been since I slept eight consecutive hours. A while. I'm groggy as hell, but Spooky's pouring coffee into me, so we have some hope that by the time I finish this entry I will be at least half awake.

Congratulations to "papersteven" for his winning bid in the hand-corrected Silk auction. Thank you very much.

Yesterday, I wrote the first 1,107 words of The Dinosaurs of Mars. But it was a strange beginning, and I am very unsure of myself. I fear that single review of The Dry Salvages still looms large in my mind, and I believe it is leading me to hesitate and to uncertainty. I don't mean the standard to which I hold myself, my own constant self-criticism. That's harsh enough. This is something else entirely. This is what Steinbeck meant by the difference between writing and writing for someone else. Reflexively, some part of me will not stop trying to second guess the likes and dislikes, the prejudices and preferences, of that invisible editor of whom Steinbeck spoke. I know, consciously, that this is folly. That hardly seems to help. Anyway, yes, the first 1,107 words. The bulk of the text is written as the diary of a "civilian observer," a writer chosen to accompany an exploration of Martian caverns in 2132. What I wrote yesterday was the "editor's" fictional "note for the third edition" of the observer's diary, which was recovered near the entrance to a cavern at the base of Apollinaris Patera, a few weeks after the exploratory team lost contact with a nearby base camp. Her diary made it back to an acquaintance at a lunar base, and most of what the world knows about the mission's fate is contained therein. NASA/ESA has so far refused to release most other documents associated with the exploration and are not pleased that Babette Flanagan's handwritten diary somehow slipped through (there are charges of forgery). That's the general idea, and the "note for the third edition" is being written in (I think) December 2148, sixteen years after Flanagan's disappearance.

The idea of having a writer/poet along on a scientific expedition came, I admit, directly from the screen adaptation of Carl Sagan's Contact, when Eleanor Arroway says, "It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I keep saying that, but I can't...my mind can't...words...should've sent a poet." It's been so long since I read the novel, I can't recall if this line is in there or not, but it's something I always loved about the film.

Preparing to write this novella, I have so concerned myself with getting to know Mars inside and out, that, until yesterday, I'd hardly spared a thought to what, in this story, has happened to human civilization and the Earth since 2007. And all those questions came rushing up at me yesterday. What wars have there been? Plagues? Political upheavals? Technological advances (this is manifestly not a "post-Singularitarian future," as has been the case with all my sf)? Ecological degradation? Population growth or collapse? Will print have vanished and all "books" be published via some electronic means? Will the internet have been replaced or evolved into some new medium of communication? Etc., etc., & etc. And then there's the problem of language.

I have always felt this is something that most sf writers gloss over*, and mostly for the reason that however much the English language might drift and/or evolve, the book that's being read is meant to be comprehensible to a present-day audience. This, I believe, is a great flaw in most science fiction, even great sf. Only a few authors have a) been up to the task as linguists and b) risked alienating their potential audience and/or publishers. Anthony Burgess springs to mind as an exception to this rule. One of the (I thought very peculiar) criticisms leveled at The Dry Salvages concerned its occasional use of a sort of future slang (my tip of the hat to this very legitimate problem), which was described as a "facile use of shorthand TV-series lingo." It seems to me that one either a) uses present-day language and simply ignores the problem that language evolves, b) meets the problem partway, adding at least some unfamiliar elements to the vocabulary of the characters (as I did in The Dry Salvages), or c) goes all the way and creates a new and evolved language through which the first-person narrative is told (this problem is far less of a problem if one is writing a third-person narrative). I might add a fourth solution, which would be to employ a highly unlikely "retro" language shift, such, as, say, a 22nd Century Dickensenian vogue that has everyone speaking as though they were in 19th Century London. For whatever reason, it has always annoyed me that most sf writers ignore this problem, and it is one of the points I'm struggling with in the opening pages of The Dinosaurs of Mars (especially given the above criticism of my attempt to solve it in The Dry Salvages). How might people speak and write in the early to mid 22nd Century? All I can say for sure is that it will be somewhat different from how we write and speak today.

I suppose this is one reason that so many sf writers seem addicted to conventions geared towards sf writers, where there are panels where these very problems are discussed. But I find such conventions to be prohibitively expensive, cliquish, and I just don't happen to particularly enjoy the company of other authors. Moreover, and this is the most important part, I want to find the solutions for myself. Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls.

Anyway, I am going on, and it's almost 1 p.m.

I'm supposed to speak with producer D today, but I cannot imagine how I will extract myself from The Dinosaurs of Mars and all these questions and switch gears to "Onion," then switch right back to The Dinosaurs of Mars. No idea at all.

*Postscript (6:17 p.m.) — Reading this paragraph five hours later, I think I was indulging in excessive generalization and exagerration, exacerbated by grogginess and the side-effects of generic "Ambien." So, apologies to anyone I might have offended, annoyed, perplexed, etc.

We made it through two chapters of Daughter of Hounds yesterday, as planned, chapters Two ("Soldier") and Three (as yet untitled). Today, we're gonna try to do two once more, though the chapters are beginning to get long. I need every spare moment I can get, as I have only 16 days (counting today) remaining until the ms. is supposed to be delivered to my editor. And reading back over it again, I love this novel so very much. I want to do right by it, and I want it treated right by the people responsible for getting it to readers. I haven't seen the cover yet. Anyway, here's today's Zokutou Page Meter thingy:

222 / 691 (32.1%)

My thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in yesterday's poll and/or post a comment re: e-editions of The Dry Salvages. I've read all of them, your comments. Some of them, I will admit, set me to considering factors I'd not previously considered. I think I'll probably tell subpress that I'd like to go ahead with the e-version of the novella now instead of waiting. It's a small risk, but I haven't taken nearly enough risks lately. I'll post updates here as they are available. And yes, it would be available in more formats that PDF. I was just using (sloppily) PDF as a short-hand meaning all e-versions.

Jeff VanderMeer has very nice things to say about To Charles Fort, With Love and Alabaster in his blog and has also posted a short and peculiar interview sort of thing we did. Just click here. It's all true, I'm afraid, but at least now I can stop worrying about amphibious hybrids off the coast of Massachusetts.

Tomorrow is Beltane, and I have to admit that Spooky and I have been so swamped, what with the trip to Birmingham and getting the novel proofed and a dozen other things, that we've not had much time to prepare. After we read today, we'll finalize our plans. This is sort of where I was going when I mentioned the bit about the difficulties of being a more or less solitary practitioner of Wicca. Spooky and I are entirely responsible for all our rituals and ceremonies and celebrations. Any details that must be attended to, we must attend. And that means that time must be set aside to prepare all that which needs to be prepared. And we have to make sure that, during that set aside time, we're in the right state of mind and not too exhausted and so forth. Right now, I sort of wish there were some wonderful big Beltane celebration going on somewhere near Atlanta that we could take part in. But there doesn't seem to be. It's strange, having recognized the need for ritual in my life, and now being hard pressed to insure that the time is there when I need it to be there and that I'm not too tired to devote the energy to it that's required.

Now I should have breakfast and coffee and get my head into the Daughter of Hounds space. I need to be much more awake...