Caitlín R. Kiernan

On this day, in 1964, in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, almost ten thousand feet down along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, I squiggled forth from beds of giant tube worms and albino crustaceans. I drew my first watery breath, sucking in superheated brine, belched forth by black smokers and loaded with nutritious sulfides and acetyl thioesters, and then wailing with the abyssal cries of newborn whales, I rose.

Since then, though, I must admit it's been a bit anticlimactic. No cometary impact (Jupiter doesn't count). Still no return of the Great Old Ones. And my damned gills won't grow back. But, hey...I get cake.

And wonderful people send me wonderful things. Tomorrow, I'll try to make as full an accounting of that as possible.

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Yesterday, I wrote a very respectable 2,149 words, and found the conclusion of Chapter Two of Blood Oranges. As it stands, I'm on page 83, and have written the first 18,292 words of what I intend to be a 75,000-word novel (at most). Two chapters in eleven days. Booya.

I must tell you – again – that Spooky is having a CRK's Birthday Sale on the jewelry at her Dreaming Squid Dollworks and Sundries Etsy shop, and shipping is FREE, and everything's selling fast, so have a look. You really need to see her new Alice's Adventures in Wonderland glass-vial pendants. There's a coupon code you'll need to use at checkout: CRKBIRTHDAY

Last night, we watched Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977). It came up during conversation with Joshi on Tuesday night. I count it as one of a tiny handful of films that gets Lovecraftian right. Now, here I mean films that express the cosmicism of HPL, as distinct from his "Cthulhu Mythos" tales. Truly, there are only a few. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), and two or three more. But nothing by Stuart Gordon. One day I'll provide an actual list.

Also, yesterday I saw the cover for the Crimson Alphabet chapbook, and it's gorgeous (comes FREE with the limited edition of Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One)).

After the movie, we played Rift, and my necromancer, Selwyn, made Level 42. And, because good pushers always provide FREE samples, there are some Selwyn screencaps behind the cut though, reduced to this size, they don't even begin to do the visuals justice. And I shall remind you, WE HAVE A GUILD, and there's a FREE 7-day trial now available! Fun for boys and girls and everything in between!

Um...I better go now. Spooky's making that face.

( Selwyn of the Spire )

Please do comment; I'll be here all damn day.

It seems that all my family and friends in Birmingham are safe. I know a few people in Tuscaloosa, mostly at the University, and I've heard nothing from that end. But the devastation from yesterday's tornadoes is horrific, and I've had to make myself stop looking at the photographs of familiar places reduced to unfamiliar places. Tornadoes are a part of living in the South that I do not miss.

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Dream images from last night are mostly lost, and those that remain are faint and almost indistinguishable from the background clutter of my mind. There was a beautiful mastodon skeleton weathering from a river bank. There was frozen Stalingrad during World War II.

All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine.
Smolyensk and Viyasma soon fell.
By autumn, we stood with our backs to the town of Orel.

No, the mastodon skeleton wasn't in Stalingrad.

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Work was an odd and scatterbrained affair yesterday. Lots of loose ends and such, and today I have to begin a new piece for Sirenia Digest, because I am woefully fucking late getting to it. Oh, by the way, the snazzy new Sirenia Digest website will go live this weekend or early next week.

I mentioned that the ARCs for Two Worlds and In Between arrived on Tuesday. They include Lee Moyer's cover art, but brightness and contrast are way off, rendering the cover muddy and dark. And it's not the actual layout we're going with, so if you happen to see one of the ARCs, this is not what the final book will actually look like. I spent part of yesterday making corrections to the text, because no matter how many times you proofread a thing, or how many people len their eyes to the proofreading, it will still be filled with fucking errors. The manuscript is 210,209 words long, which breaks down to 965,432 individual characters, all of which have to be checked again and again. Also, it seems that the release date on the book has been moved from January 2012 to September 30, 2011. I had no idea.

I spent a goodly portion of yesterday on the cover for "The Crimson Alphabet," the chapbook that will accompany Two Worlds and In Between. I'd already done a cover, but decided I hated it and started over. The end result is very, very simple.

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kylecassidy has announced the casting call for two projects related to The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. You can see his announcement here, but I'll also post his entry here in its entirety later. A book trailer and a still photography project. It's all fairly fucking awesome.

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Last night, I left the house with Spooky, and we drove to College Hill. Spring is now in full bloom, and the temperatures have been warm enough that I am hereby declaring Cold Spring to have ended and Spring Proper to have begun. We stopped by Acme Video (complimentary Atomic Fireballs!), then Eastside Market, then got cheese burgers from Five Guys in Seekonk, Mass. I'm not used to driving out of state for burgers. That's going to take some time (and it's not something we'll make a habit of doing, either).

Back home, we watched Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009). And I honestly wasn't impressed. If nothing else, the film needs at least 45 minutes trimmed away (running time, a whopping 161 minutes). This film manages to belabor pretty much everything it touches upon. In the hands of a skillful editor, it's possible that something worthwhile could be salvaged. If Lars von Trier and David Lynch had never heard of editing, they might make movies like Enter the Void. Also, it doesn't help that Nathaniel Brown, who plays the protagonist, has all the acting ability of a stalk of broccoli. There are plenty of arresting visuals, and some brutal, beautiful scenes, but even I can only watch psychedelic Tokyo sex scenes, shot from an overhead boom and lit with seizure-inducing, flickering shades of red, for just so long before the yawning begins. I hoped I would feel better about the film this morning, but, in fact, I find that I sort of loathe it; I suppose that's something.

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I have about a hundred other things in my head, wanting to be spoken of in this blog today. Maybe later.

Disoriented,
Aunt Beast