Caitlín R. Kiernan

One of the side effects of one of my new meds (Prazosin) is that it can cause hypotension. And fainting. I've been feeling the former for weeks. This morning, I felt the latter. Violently. I woke about eight a.m., only four hours after going to bed (and taking my night meds). I lay in bed two or three minutes. I sat up and checked the clock. And then I stood up, rather quickly...which I know not to do. Only I was still probably half asleep. And I went down like a sack of bricks. Boom, straight to the floor. As I fell, my right ankle folded under me, and I landed on it. Hard. The pain instantly brought me back to consciousness. And I was absolutely certain I'd broken my foot. This was the sort of pain that makes you want to puke. The noise had Spooky awake in a flash, awake and panicked. I managed to tell her I'd fallen and thought I'd broken my foot.

She got me to lie down, and she took my sock off. I lay there on the floor like a goddamn fool while she held ice on my ankle. We waited for the swelling and discoloration to begin. I thought mostly about how I couldn't afford a trip to the ER. But my foot didn't swell. It's not broken. Eventually, I got back into bed and even managed to get back to sleep. I awoke feeling like I'd been in a car wreck. I have so many sore places I can't count them, and I'm having to hobble about with my cane, and I feel like an idiot. I swear, I have to put a big-ass sign beside my bed that says GET UP SLOWLY, FOOL.

I've had breakfast and Advil, and hopefully that will help.

---

My thanks to everyone (even those I disagreed with) for the many marvelous comments yesterday. I tried to reply to everyone, though I might have missed a few of the later ones. I wouldn't mind seeing a flood of comments like that every day. Of course, the truth is, I rarely provide something interesting to comment on. The act of writing is not a terribly exciting subject (though its end result is). Here are a few bits from yesterday I especially liked (so back to the matter of first-person narration and the interauthor).

I wrote, A first-person narrative occurs in a minimum of two time frames: the present (when the story is being written down) and the past (when the story occurred). And corucia replied:

And the interval of time between those two is also vitally important. If the events are being written as journal entries or the like at a very close remove from the primary action, then the interauthor might be unwilling to write down particularly upsetting events (perhaps only using a "something major happened today I don't think I can talk about" marker) but then bits of the event will creep into the narrative in later entries, possibly with a major unveiling and discussion later. On the other hand, if a significant amount of time has passed and the interauthor is writing down everything to make some sort of record, then she's going to be much more likely to do it in a linear fashion.

To which I can only say, yes, exactly. dragau wrote:

Another question that generally remains unanswered is why the interauthor is such a good writer in the first place.

This is a very, very important point that I've never seen addressed anywhere. In a first-person narration, the interauthor is usually the most important character. Not just a convenient storytelling device, but an actual fictional person. And, as the writer, I have to fully understand who that person is, their fears and desires, their strengths and weaknesses. To assume that all interauthors just happen to be good at expressing themselves in words— because I happen to be, and because I need the interauthor to tell a story —is to fall into a trap that, at least for me, can kill a piece.

Lately, I've been wondering, why are authors afraid to write interauthors who are much less skilled at writing than they themselves are, people who are much less articulate? That is, write a first-person narrative by someone who cannot write. Certainly, it would, in most cases, be far more authentic and realistic. Of course, there's the lazy fallback of having the interauthor be a writer (I might seem guilty of that in The Red Tree, and maybe I was, but it seems to me that Sarah had to be an author for me to tell the story I needed her to tell). But the message here is simple: The interauthor must speak as the interauthor would speak. If she or he is a cop or a stripper or a construction worker, odds are pretty good the narration will not read as if it were written by an author. And the challenge that a good writer must rise to, in these cases, is to write like X, whatever X signifies, instead of writing like a writer. This is lesson I'm still learning myself.

And there was this bit by bbluemarble that I have to quote, simply because it's succinct and very much needs saying:

After reading this post and the prior comments I've come to the conclusion that there are (in effect) two types of first person narratives: First Person Found Artifact and First Person Really Just a Bastardization of Third Person Limited.

I think this happened because every writing book ever written tells amateur writers that first person is easier to write and it's a shortcut to reader empathy. These are lies. Writing first person as found artifact is really hard to do well.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Most young writers make this very mistake. They use first person, think it's easy, or because some idiot writing instructor told them they should, without ever having puzzled through the inherent difficulties of the voice. For what it's worth, I've had such a longstanding suspicion of first person that I pretty much avoided it until 2003, when I wrote "Riding the White Bull" and The Dry Salvages in first person, eleven years after I began writing for publication, and even then I made mistakes. Oh, I almost forgot. In my first novel, The Five of Cups (written in 1992, unpublished until 2003), there are long stretches essentially in first person, and they're rather dreadful. I simply had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, I realized and switched to third person in all subsequent novels, until The Red Tree, sixteen years later.

I'm going to paste in the rest of bbluemarble's response, because it's easier than paraphrasing:

Maybe that's why it's [First Person Found Artifact] all but disappeared in favor of first person bastardization of third. I can't say that I remember the first book I read that didn't explain why it was in first person (remember when that used to be a rule? Explain that this narrative is an artifact and what sort of artifact it is or the audience will be unable to suspend disbelief!) but I do vividly remember the most unrealistic pseudo-explanation for the narrative being in first person that I ever read. It was something along the lines of "I'm thinking stuff. Right now. These are my thoughts that I'm sending out to the world in the hopes that someone will hear them and maybe write them down." Adhering to that convention actually pulled me right out of the story with thoughts along the lines of "What?! She's a vampire that's psychic enough to compel some random person to write her dying-moments memoir but she can't psychic her friends to help her escape? What a stupid superpower." In that case, it would have been better for the story to just dispense with the whole first person construct and do it in third person limited (but I get the feeling that editors/publishers/the powers that be to working writers thought the average teen reader may have trouble empathizing with a sometimes psychotic vampire that goes on occasional killing sprees and feels no remorse so...I know, write it in first person! Instant empathy!).

Really want to be a good writer who doesn't rely on crutches? Want to solve the problems posed by a given narrative, instead of rushing to what appears to be a quick fix? Then listen to all this shit. And think about it.

---

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions, and also at the very cool new stuff in Spooky's Dreaming Squid Dollworks & Sundries shop at Etsy (now including a hand-painted Ouija board!)

Okay. More than enough for now. I hurt, and I think I'm going to take a hot bath and lie down for a bit.

I'm in love with the two songs I've heard from Trent Reznor's new project, How to Destroy Angels. This is the second song/video:

Also, eBay auctions ending over the next couple of days. Note especially the copy of The Five of Cups, as these are now few and far between, as for as my personal stock is concerned.

On this day in 1859, 150 years ago, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was first published (by British publishing house, John Murray). If any single book charted the course of my life, this is likely it. So, 150 years ago Darwin proposed a theory of evolution to explain the fact of evolution, and, of course, the theory is still evolving, which is the nature of science. And the creationists still don't get it. Maybe in another 150 years...well...let's not go there. My inner pessimist always wins. It's enough to marvel that so many years have passed, and we've made countless discoveries that would have dazzled, delighted, and humbled Mr. Darwin.

Also on this date, in 2001, a mere eight years ago, I began this blog. It was over at Blogger at the time. So, here I have eight years worth of online journal. When it began, I was living in Birmingham and just getting started on Low Red Moon. And I thought I knew how my life would go. I could never have imagined all the things that the coming eight years held in store.

So, there you go. Two anniversaries in one.

Yesterday was mostly spent tweaking "Sanderlings." I also made notes for a new vignette, for Sirenia Digest #48, and that hardly ever happens. Oh, and my contributor's copy of Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown arrived a few days back, and I spent part of yesterday watching the extended interviews.

Last night, Spooky and I were trying to get Shaharrazad and Surra through Dire Maul, but there was some sort of cataclysmic server breakdown. I think at least a third of the WoW servers crashed all at the same time. So, we were forced to stop killing ogres and seek intellectual stimulation elsewhere. So, we watched Peter Askin's documentary, Trumbo (2007), which was very good and almost made me glad for the server crash. I spend far too much time on that damned silly game.

I will not be writing today, because I have a doctor's appointment.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. The copy of The Five of Cups that we're offering is the lettered edition, filled with extras. Also, Spooky has sold all of her non-winged Cthulhu ornaments (Cephalopodmas is just around the corner!), and only has the winged version remaining (the one I happen to prefer). Five of those remain. You can see them in her Dreaming Squid shop.

Now I'm going to finish my coffee.

Yesterday...I wrote. I don't know how many words. Less than a thousand, and that took all day. The good news is that my editor for "As Red as Red" has kindly consented to extend my deadline by a few more days, so perhaps I will actually be able to finish this story. The bad news is that this means "As Red as Red" is going to start eating into time that needs to be spent working on Sirenia Digest #40, and my next day off lies somewhere in early April. I'm trying hard not to look at the big picture. I'm trying to get from one day to the next, and that's about all. Baby steps. No grand plans. No foresight. It just locks me up these days.

Our latest round of eBay auctions will be ending this evening. I'd be grateful if you'd have a look, and bid if you are so inclined and able. There are copies of two subpress chapbooks, The Little Damned Book of Days and Mercury, a copy of the mass-market paperback of Daughter of Hounds, and a PC (author's) copy of the numbered hardback edition of The Five of Cups. I don't have a lot of these left, and I can pretty much guarantee that this is a book that will never see print again. Please have a look, and thanks.

The weather here remains very cold, 31F at the moment, but the wind chill has it feeling like 20F. It's sunny, but, somehow, that only makes it worse. Most of my life, March has been the month when the world goes green again. I'm having to learn to think of it as the end of winter, not the beginning of spring.

Last night, we watched the last three episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I'm going to withhold any detailed commentary until sometime later, after I'm certain that everyone's had a chance to see the finale. I will say that I was very pleased with the conclusion. I still feel like the series was at least a season too long (season three, I'm thinking). But the ending pleased me. Sure, I have scientific quibbles, but this is space opera, not hard sf. If I fixated too much on the bad science, I'd never have been able to make it through the series premiere, much less all the way to the story's conclusion. The story being told and the characterization outweighed the bad science, which is what good space opera does. It's not about the nuts and bolts, or how well the writers can handle physics, astronomy, engineering, biology, and what have you. It's about telling a good story with the trappings of sf. I would say that's what Battlestar Galactica managed to do. I was especially pleased with the first hour of "Daybreak," which I suspect I'll watch again and again, but the second half also managed to hit a lot of good buttons. I was even pleased with the way the writers handled the "god" problem. A shame that the "SyFy" channel is apparently embarrassed by the likes of Battlestar Galactica. Or rather, embarrassed by the viewers it attracts.

Time to make the doughuts. So say we all.

Oddly enough, the three bands we listen to the most, by far, when playing WoW are the Psychedelic Furs, R.E.M., and Radiohead. To wit:

Also...

If you haven't already, please have a look at the current eBay auctions. And, for those who may not know, I will point out that my author's photo on the back of the dust jacket of The Five of Cups is from a nude photo shoot I did in 2003. That's called "extra incentive."

The snow should begin in another half hour or so. I'm sitting here, sipping coffee, staring out my window, waiting. There are small birds out there, flittering busily about. At least, their flittering presents the illusion of business. The illusion or the impression. I appears we may be snowed in all weekend.

I have my pain pills, and coffee, and the peppermint Altoids that make the cough better. So, there you go.

I think this is the most exquisite bit of song lyric, from the Editors' "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" (probably, I've already quoted it in an earlier entry):

Pull the blindfold down,
So your eyes can't see.
Now, run as fast as you can,
Through this field of trees.

Those lines, they might be the first words whispered to the first woman by a sadistic god trying to explain what it will be like to live. Or they might be the mercy of a serial killer. They might only be a fraternity game. No, this isn't headed anywhere in particular. This day isn't headed anywhere in particular. Except for the snow.

I'm trying to find the first vignette for Sirenia Digest #37. I've been trying to think about cats, but keep coming back to vampires. I think it's the tongues. I have always thought that vampires would have rough tongues (and I wrote them that way in The Five of Cups). It just makes sense. Werewolves do not have rough tongues.

We went out for groceries yesterday afternoon, and I was amazed to see that, here in Providence, the first mention of snow does not lead to markets bereft of bread and milk.* And the cold Outside rendered everything so amazingly still. Even the cars on the road, though moving, seemed perfectly still. The river seemed still. I watched a woman sitting on a corner; she was smoking a cigarette, and even the smoke she exhaled seemed still. Few things are as ominous as this sort of pervasive stillness. But, it was peaceful, too. Ominous peace, I suppose. The sunlight was like spilled orange juice.

Last night, we read the first two chapters of The Historian, which I'm quite pleased with, so far.

Nice and much appreciated emails yesterday from a reader in New Hampshire and another in Roskilde, Denmark. The email from Roskilde came from Lars Ahn Pedersen, who knew the name of the woman who took the photographs for the Locus interview. Apparently, she's Amelia Beamer, which I should have remembered on my own. Oh, the New Hampshire email was from "Michael B in frozen Manchester." Everywhere, it's still.

I should wrap this up. Please do have a look at the current ebay auctions. Spooky has added Letter V of Frog Toes and Tentacles. The book comes in a handmade (by Spooky) crushed velvet "cozy," lined with red silk. Only a few of these cozies exist...maybe six...and we've not offered them since 2006, I think. We will likely offer only one or two in this round of auctions, and then there will be no more for a long time. Have a look. Bid if you are so disposed. Thanks.

Oh, and there's this peculiar jot of frippery:

Haiku2 for greygirlbeast
of the forsaken it's good to me it's very odd that i've
@ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

* Spooky just informed me the situation would have been different had we gone to Stop & Shop. So, never mind.

One of the weirdest things (sensu Lovecraft et al.) about the move from Atlanta to Providence is trying to get used to the much earlier sunrise, brought about not so much by being nearer the eastern border of the Eastern Time Zone (presently EDT), but being at such a higher latitude. For example, tomorrow morning, in Atlanta the sun will "rise" (a misnomer and an optical illusion, of course) at 6:26 a.m. and set at 8:49 p.m. Yet here in Rhode Island, in Providence, the sun will rise at 5:10 a.m. and set at 8:22 p.m. The sunset differential is not so severe —— only twenty-seven minutes —— but the sunrise differential is far greater, a full hour and sixteen minutes. I first noted this in 2006, but it caught me off guard early this morning, when, at 3:45 a.m. Spooky said I should get to bed soon or the sun would be up. Weird. I think I went to bed about 4 a.m., and was asleep almost at once.

Yesterday, finally, I had something resembling a "normal" writing day. I thank the cooler weather, more than anything. I don't believe the thermostat went much higher than about 83F (and I had Dr. Muñoz in the office for a brief spell, so it was quite a bit cooler in here). I wrote 1,165 words on "The Melusine" for Sirenia Digest #31. That's a very decent, if not spectacular, writing day. Word count-wise. Of course, word count is only one way of measuring how successful any given writing day is, and it may be, truthfully, the least important. What matters is that I like what I wrote yesterday, that it was written well, and that I shall not have to do any significant revision on it.

And this brings us back around to the story I linked to yesterday about writers, even us mid-list types, being pushed to churn out a novel a year and the possible effect of this industry demand on quality. By the way, if you're trying to break into this market, if you think you want to be a working author (i.e., an author whose sole income is herhisits income derived from fiction sales, which means largely novel sales), you really, really ought to read this article. Anyway, yesterday jtglover commented:

I read that article and enjoyed it. I found it via a link that indicated that there had been some grousing in some writerly corners of the blogosphere about the article. I'm sure that there are people, even now, complaining about the audacity of any writer to demand the time to try to create art instead of just cranking out the closest-to-good story possible in the super-tight timeframes that All Real, Professional Writers deal with constantly. I get that there are regular timeframes involved when dealing with publishers and contracts and such, but it seems to me that little is more corrosive to a writer than to be told always to hurry, because nobody gets it right anyway, and who's foolish enough to try to "write well" anyway?

To which I replied, Nice. I may address this tomorrow. To which Mr. Glover replied:

I don't want to come across as a sycophant, but that would mean a lot to me. Right now I'm struggling through the first draft of what I hope will be my first completed novel, and I'm regularly torn about how quickly to write. Slowly (4-800 words/day) means I can get inside the characters' heads more easily, but I'm afraid of losing momentum. Quickly (800-1600 words/day) means I finish sooner and can "fix it" in the second draft, but the characters rarely come to life when I'm moving at that pace.

All I can do, of course, is write about this problem from the perspective afforded by my personal experience. I think of myself as a slow writer, though, often, I seem wildly productive. When I was writing for DC/Vertigo, for example, expected to produce a script a month, I sometimes would write three a month. Back then, my daily word count, on novels and short fiction was about 500 words/day. These days, it's up to about twice that, about 1,100 words on average, and my all-time record is something like 2,800 words in a single day. Anyway, yes, all in all, though I write a lot (because I do little else), I write rather slowly, and it is very, very hard, if not impossible, to do this book-a-year nonsense. Partly, this is because I do not write in drafts. I write a single draft, to which I make line edits. That's almost always been the case. What I write the first time around is usually what shows up on the printed page —— usually. First and second and third drafts are fine for people who need to write that way, but it's not the way I taught myself to write. I work on a sentence until it's as close to perfect as I can get it. Same for any given paragraph, and then I move along to the next. Does this slow me down? I don't know, because, after all, it seems to me loads of time is wasted in rewrites by authors who have learned to write in multiple drafts. Below is a list of my novels, to date, and how long I took to write each one:

The Five of Cups (nine months, '92-'93)
Silk (twenty-eight months, '93-'96)
Threshold (twenty-two months, '98-'00)
Low Red Moon (eight months, '01-02)
Murder of Angels (A complicated one, as I started it in '01, then shelved it, and went back to work on the ms. in '03, finishing it that year; offhand, I do not know how long it actually took me to write, but it required about three years to complete the finished ms.)
Daughter of Hounds (about fifteen months, '04-'06)
Beowulf (all told, about three months, '06-07, though the forced rewrites — the "Mordorian Death March" — went on for another three or four months afterwards; and yes, it was a better book before those rewrites)

Now, here you see a great degree of variation, from Silk, at twenty-eight months, to the Beowulf novelization, at maybe three months (I would disqualify the latter, as I was working from a shooting script for the movie and also had numerous earlier drafts of the script and the source material to guide me). Also, my novels usually start out slow, the writing of them, and then I end up doing the bulk of a ms. in the last four or five months, as the pieces fall into place. Point being, for me, the time varies wildly. And I would say, it's all about the time I need to write the book the way it needs to be written. Trying to force a writer to write faster is, in my opinion, idiotic, and it will almost always result in a compromise in quality. I write novels, and whether you think they are good novels or bad novels or mediocre novels, they are novels, not product. This is not manufacturing. There is no assembly line. There is what my mind can do, given the strictures of my health (both mental and physical) and other non-writing concerns and interferences. That's all I can do. If that's not good enough, I'm screwed. So far, it's worked out, though I know my editor would be happier if I could produce more regularly. I know my agent worries about this. I know, in a sense, it has held me back from gaining a wider audience. But it's the best I can do, which is all that can ever be fairly asked of any artist. So, when all is said and done, my advice is take the time you need. Artistically, getting it right is more important than getting it published, even if it means you'll never be published.

However, those of us who have —— I would say unwisely —— chosen fiction writing as a career must to some degree cater to the needs (or perceived needs) of our publishers and readers, and the deadlines they set for us. It is, I would say, a necessary evil, that schedule that comes along with contracts and an audience and money and promotion and actual, printed books. In an ideal world, readers (who i will never, ever call "consumers"), would understand that any given book requires X amount of time to be written, X being an indeterminable variable. So would publishers. And they would be patient and give us the time that is required. This, you do not need me to tell you, is hardly an ideal world. And a working writer must accept these deadlines, on some level, or get out of the game. Unless you're Thomas Pynchon. It's not an issue of whether the publishers are right or wrong. If you are lucky enough to have a publisher (and it is, mostly, luck, luck and perseverance), and if that's where some large percentage of the money that pays your bills comes from, then you accept this and live with it as best you can. I cannot produce a book a year, but I do try. After all, if I could write simply 500 words a day (my old standard), I could write a 100,000-word novel in only 200 days, easy as pie. Much less than a year. Of course, it's not really about the time it takes to put the words down on paper, but the time it takes to find the words in your mind, and there's the wicked, wicked catch.

Not much to say for yesterday, beyond the writing. The cool air was greatly appreciated. I went with Spooky to the market. Pasta salad for dinner. A great deal of unpacking, finally. Just after midnight, I allowed myself to go on Second Life, and I spent most of that time in the library in Toxia, in my usual place on the sofa. That was yesterday. And I need to wrap this up, but I wanted to mention that late today or sometime tonight or maybe tomorrow, I'll be starting our Queerest Auction Ever (QAE; but not, sadly, in the homosexual sense of the word "queer"), which will be two flaps (auctioned seperately) from cardboard boxes used in the move. Bored, I drew on each before we left Atlanta. Monster doodles. Seems a shame to throw them out, especially given how much more the move cost than we'd expected. I'll keep you posted, natch. Also, I want to repost the link to Spooky's Amazon wish list. Her birthday is June 24th this year. And every other year, I suppose...

Spooky says this is a day off. I haven't yet written the O on my engagement calendar, though. In fact, we already did some work that had to be done (sending the corrections on "Zero Summer" to subpress). But I am not writing. For the first day in twenty days, I am not writing.

Yesterday, though, I wrote 1,558 words. Which brings my total since January 1st to 32,229. Which is likely a personal record.

Tomorrow, I have to work on Sirenia Digest, getting #14 ready to go out on Wednesday. Though I have not seen the final version, I am extremely happy with Vince's illustration for this issue. Gorgeous. Perfect for "The Sphinx's Kiss," as you shall see. Unless you are not a subscriber. In which case you will miss out and be sad.

I should not do journal entries on days off, as HTML definitely feels like work.

Anything else about yesterday? We read a great deal more of Ironweed, all the way past 2 a.m. we were still reading. docbrite called last night, and we talked for almost an hour, which is the most social contact I've had with anyone but Spooky since New Year's Day, when Byron came for dinner. I washed my hair. We set out to take a walk, but only made it as far as the southern edge of Freedom Park before the cold convinced me that exercise can wait until warmer weather. I put more Concrete Blonde on the iPod (Walking in London and Concrete Blonde). That was yesterday.

Okay. Now for something that is actually important. Today (Sunday) and tomorrow (Monday), Subterranean Press is running a benefit book sale to help defray costs of medical treatment for Sam Jones, a preschooler who has been diagnosed with cancer of the brain stem. Here's how it works:

"The special we’re running is very simple. To make it an appealing offer to you, every in-print title is 25% off if bought January 21 or 22.

For our part, we’ll be donating 25% of the retail price of each sale book bought on Sunday or Monday (Jan 21-22) to Sam’s family to help with their expenses while he’s in treatment, and will guarantee a donation of at least $2000."

So, if you still haven't picked up a copy of Tales from the Woeful Platypus, The Five of Cups, or "Mercury" (all my other subpress books seem to be sold out), today would be a very good day to do so. There are so many talented folks publishing with subpress these days, there's bound to be Something by Someone you'd like.

Let's wrap this up. Because it is manifestly not time to make the doughnuts. I've locked the platypus in hisherits carrier until tomorrow morning.