Caitlín R. Kiernan

So far, here in Providence, it's been a shitty, snowless winter. Lots of rain, and days with wide carnivorous blue skies, but fuck all when it comes to snow. Did we piss off the Snow Miser or something?

If you've not seen it already, the ONE AND ONLY auction of an ARC of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir has begun, and it began last night. The ARC is only being auctioned because we went a little over budget on the trailer shoot (and still have another day or so of filming coming up at the end of this month). So, please bid if you are able. Own a collectible ARC filled with uncorrected sentences. Oh, and both of Vince's illustrations for the novel do appear in the ARC. Thank you.

I'm not sure there's much point in recounting yesterday. I didn't write, because there was a sort of endless barrage of writing-related emails and phone calls. There was a good conversation with my publicist at Penguin (regarding The Drowning Girl), and I was sent more inked pages from Alabaster #3 (which I need to proof as soon as I finish this entry), and there were the pencils for the fourth Alabaster cover (beautiful), and a whole bunch of stuff for Readercon. I'm not kidding, working on all these books at once has my head spinning. Two hours of work feels like eight. This is a new thing to me. At least I'm sleeping more; otherwise, I'd probably be dead by now.

Rainy, cold Thursdays in January are good days for comments.

I'm not even going to try and explain the Buffalo-chicken calzones we had for dinner, except to say they're as hot coming out as they are going in.

Oh, I have this peculiar meme-thing from matociquala: Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012. Okay. I'll play along. So..."The templars strode forward, drawing their swords and advancing on the dogmen, who stood to meet them." Make of that what you will.

Otherwise, yesterday...well, not much else. I read "The forelimb carriage in ceratopsid dinosaurs," and my Sith assassin made it to Tatooine and reached Level 26. Oh, and this morning we learned that Rift's next big patch is going to permit in-game "Ascendent weddings," which, I will admit, is just a few thousand miles beyond the pale for me. The lines between pretend and real begin to blur like that, and we're back to the Great Cesspool of Second Life.

Looking Askance,
Aunt Beast

Rainy and overcast again today.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,749 words on Chapter Six of Blood Oranges, and either finished the chapter, or very nearly did.

After five years, almost the entire premise (not plot, just premise) of Dinosaurs of Mars has finally come together in my head, and I've told subpress I hope to be able to write it next autumn (2012). Yes, sometimes it happens this way. I will also likely be writing an SF novelette for subpress, to be released as a hardback – as with The Dry Salvages – later this year, time permitting, details TBA.

A lot of email yesterday and this morning, much of it pertaining to the Drowning Girl Kickstarter project. The last few months, the amount of email I have to make it through has sort of skyrocketed. Which is good, and bad. Good, because it means lots of work. Bad, because it means...lots of work.

By the way, if you're reading this, and you're the sort who likes to interview writers, please note that I do not do telephone interviews, and make no exceptions. Your noting this now saves me having to turn you down later. It is my job to be witty and articulate. I can be neither of these things on the phone.

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Okay, so. Romance in fiction. "Romance" as genre publishing and low-brow culture defines it. I'm opposed. In my own books, there are relationships, in a very rough and tainted form. In that there are people who do have relationships (or who have had relationships). Sometimes, there are exceptions (Soldier comes to mind). Regardless, the relationships rarely end well.* Much of this stems from my fundamental disdain/lack of interest in romantic entanglements as a fictional theme. Hell, my favorite literary romance is probably Wuthering Heights. Or Lolita. Or maybe Hannibal. You see where I'm going with this. Just look at Sirenia Digest. Love songs for monsters** (Do not steal that fucking title or I will disembowel you).

So, we're reading The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. I even made it this month's selection of the book club thingy. And it started out well enough, at first (even though we really, at this point, need more imaginative end of the world scenarios than The Zombie Apocalypse). But it has, after a few chapters, nose-dived into some fairly excruciating romance. And the language used to describe...well...here's an example:

He nods. He understands. And then he takes my hand and presses his lips against my palm. It feels like fire entering my bloodstream and laying siege to my body. He kisses my wrist, and I am an inferno. He starts to move up my arm, his breath tantalizing, and I almost give in as he pulls me to him.

Okay. Enough. I don't care who blurbs this, or likes it, or buys it, or publishes it. This is overwrought dreck. Or smarm. Or both. It's pedestrian porn for bromidic teenagers. If this is the best Ryan has to offer, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. If it gets you wet, fine. I'd mourn for your libido, but I'm not that altruistic. I expect we'll finish the novel, but only because it's hard for me to leave books unfinished, even lousy ones.

There's some good stuff at the start of The Forest of Hands and Teeth! People who don't remember that the Earth has an ocean. That's good. Go with that. Besides, Ryan is trained as a lawyer. She has this other fucking way of making lots of money. She could keep her bad prose to herself, and no one would starve.

And in the future, I will try to do a better job of picking books. Spooky says we have to read at least fifty pages first. Good advice. What have I learned, kittens? Sometimes, I fuck up. But I knew that already.

Oh! Also good RP in Insilico last night. Thank you Joah, Sayer, and Fifth. Also, slowly wading back into Rift. I had to take a break, to avoid burn out.

Enough for now. The words, which I promise will not be dreck, await.

Dreckless,
Aunt Beast

* Note: I am in a very satisfactory, long-term relationship.
** Copyright © 2011 by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Grateful thanks to everyone who said that yes, they could see the test entry. I think I had to make a new entry to prime to pump, so to speak. The test entry seemed to fix everything. It's reassuring to know that the CEBS actually works. And on a Sunday morning, at that.

I think I was one of maybe seven people who were actually able to make an entry on LJ yesterday. If you want to read it (hawks, crows, Terry Gilliam's Tideland, spider bites, writerly isolation), just click here. I'll be watching it for comments today. Clearly, someone at Six Apart needs to buy Frank the Goat a muzzle.

Anyway...

It's colder today than yesterday. Still, we took a walk before I settled into my freezing office to bang away at the keyboard all day. Saw one of the hawks, soaring over North Ave., looking for pigeons or starlings or rats. Not much else. Spooky contemplated going down to Grandma Luke's for a fried banana and peanut butter sandwich, which almost sounded too good to pass up. My right shoe kept coming untied.

We ended up at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History late yesterday afternoon, because Spooky's been wanting to see the Roman exhibition. I wish someone could have warned us it was "girl scout day." I'm just glad it wasn't "boy scout day." I said hi to the dinosaurs and we saw an IMAX film, Deep Sea. Then we had to go to the pet store, because Hubero was out of cat litter. And then we went to our favorite Thai place, because we were both in need of comfort food and the spicy basil rice bowl does the trick every time. On the way, we spotted a beautiful, huge white full moon rising over the tree tops and a few low purple-pink clouds. I checked the clock in the car; 6:41 (CaST). It was not a bad day.

Back home, we watched Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential and Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim. I liked the former, though not quite as much as I thought I would (I think I've ODed on irony), but was a bit disappointed with the latter. It just wasn't nearly as good as Tree's Lounge, and I'd hoped it would be. It didn't help that Casey Affleck acted as though he was in a high-school play. But it was oddly consoling to discover that I do not actually think Liv Tyler's hot. It was just the ears. That was a huge relief, even if I'm not sure why. After the movies, a little past midnight, I called Poppy (docbrite), because she'd left a message on my poor neglected answering thingy. I'd not talked to her in ages, and we wound up talking until 2:30 a.m. (CaST). Assorted topics of conversations included, but were not limited to, getting old, health insurance (and the lack thereof), cats, spider bites, tattoos, sex, lit agents, editors, reviewers, New Orleans, Realtors® (snork), Daughter of Hounds and Dead Shrimp Blues, wikipedia, MySpace, kids these days, how much I hate writing novels (but will always have to write them, anyway), Athens (GA), and self medication. We'd have talked longer, but my cellphone was overheating and I making my ear hurt, and I fully expected it to explode and bury shards of molten plastic in my brain.

Then we went to bed and Spooky read to me from House of Leaves until 3:30 (CaST), and I do not seem able to get it through my head that this is not the book to read Right Before Sleep.

Tilda Swinton, who rocks my world (even without ears), is 46 today.

Okay. There are words that must be written and no one to write them but me. Oh, and there's this photo (behind the cut), because the pink house (see 6/2/06 05:23 pm), the one that was being used to pimp that idiotic Paris Hilton show, was unpinked a couple of months ago and I keep forgetting to post a photo. Spooky got this one on our walk today. I don't go in for the whole southwestern sunset thing they have going down, but still, it's better than frelling Barbie pink.

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