![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
So far, Spooky has rendered this morning a scene from an unmade David Lynch film. Bobby Vinton and fussing about how I clean out the coffee maker were involved. She checked for fish. After all, there are tins of sardines in the pantry. Oh, and it doesn't help that, last night, someone pointed out to me how much Thom Yorke and Tilda Swinton look alike. It's true.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,428 words on the final chapter of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. A pivotal, culminative scene I could not have written (well) had I not gone to the Blackstone River in the snow on Sunday. But I did go, and so I did write the scene to the best of my ability. And I find that, as I expected, this is essentially a novel without climax. There are revelations strewn here and there, but nothing actually ever coalesces into a climax. It's a novel that begins here and stops there, when Imp believes she's done the best job she'll ever do of telling her "ghost story."
As it stands, the manuscript is 96,158 words long. My contract specifies a novel 100,000 words long. Setting aside for the moment that no one should ever tell an author how long or short a novel has to be, I emailed my editor a week back and told her it might go to 120,000. She asked if I could please keep it to 110,000-115,0000. I did some math, juggled scenes, and replied that I might be able to keep it to 110,000, which made her very happy. So, assuming I can do that, I have about 13,842 words left to go until the more or less arbitrary THE END. I've been writing, on average, 1,200-1,500 words a day, which means I'll likely finish sometime between Friday the 11th and Sunday the 13th. Hardly any time left to go, on a novel that I've been working on. in one way or another, since August 2009.
Also, we proofed "Postcards from the King of Tides" for Two Worlds and In Between. It's a story that still works for me, despite having been written in 1997. I don't think that I'd ever seen how much influence "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" had on the story until yesterday.
For dinner, there was spicy beef shawarma and baba ghannoush.
---
Last night, we finished Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Gods, this is a brilliant book. I mean fucking brilliant. Horrifying and sorrowful and poignant and beautiful and strong. Katniss is one of my new favorite literary figures. I'm not going to gush on and on, or risk spoilers, but I will say I was especially impressed at how Collins deftly managed to put us in the mind of someone living in a totalitarian world. There are so many times Katniss Everdeen might have stopped and given the gamemakers or the Capital the middle finger. But she doesn't, even though that's what they do in Big Hollywood movies, because she understands the dire consequences it would have for her and, more importantly, for her family and District 12. She only knows, at this stage, how corrupt and loathsome the world is, and that it may destroy everything it touches. This is how evil men stay in power. And it's impossible not to read this novel and see the Capitol of Panem as the US, and each of the twelve districts (thirteen was obliterated in the late civil war) as all those countries where people live in squalor so that Americans may enjoy an obscenely high standard of living.
---
Gaming consumed far too much of my night. First, Spooky let me use her laptop long enough the level Selwyn to 16. I love the world of Rift so, so much. I love that it awes me, and takes my breath, and frightens me, and that I walk through Meridian and so many people are in character, roleplaying, and so few have inappropriate names (for now, the name police thing is working).
Meanwhile, in that other game, the candy-colored one, Shaharrazad is still grinding away at Loremaster. I've now done 105 out of the 120 Netherstorm quests.
---
Okay, I slept far too late, and now it's time to make the doughnuts. Go to bed at 5 ayem, get up at noon thirty, you must make concessions.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,428 words on the final chapter of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. A pivotal, culminative scene I could not have written (well) had I not gone to the Blackstone River in the snow on Sunday. But I did go, and so I did write the scene to the best of my ability. And I find that, as I expected, this is essentially a novel without climax. There are revelations strewn here and there, but nothing actually ever coalesces into a climax. It's a novel that begins here and stops there, when Imp believes she's done the best job she'll ever do of telling her "ghost story."
As it stands, the manuscript is 96,158 words long. My contract specifies a novel 100,000 words long. Setting aside for the moment that no one should ever tell an author how long or short a novel has to be, I emailed my editor a week back and told her it might go to 120,000. She asked if I could please keep it to 110,000-115,0000. I did some math, juggled scenes, and replied that I might be able to keep it to 110,000, which made her very happy. So, assuming I can do that, I have about 13,842 words left to go until the more or less arbitrary THE END. I've been writing, on average, 1,200-1,500 words a day, which means I'll likely finish sometime between Friday the 11th and Sunday the 13th. Hardly any time left to go, on a novel that I've been working on. in one way or another, since August 2009.
Also, we proofed "Postcards from the King of Tides" for Two Worlds and In Between. It's a story that still works for me, despite having been written in 1997. I don't think that I'd ever seen how much influence "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" had on the story until yesterday.
For dinner, there was spicy beef shawarma and baba ghannoush.
---
Last night, we finished Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Gods, this is a brilliant book. I mean fucking brilliant. Horrifying and sorrowful and poignant and beautiful and strong. Katniss is one of my new favorite literary figures. I'm not going to gush on and on, or risk spoilers, but I will say I was especially impressed at how Collins deftly managed to put us in the mind of someone living in a totalitarian world. There are so many times Katniss Everdeen might have stopped and given the gamemakers or the Capital the middle finger. But she doesn't, even though that's what they do in Big Hollywood movies, because she understands the dire consequences it would have for her and, more importantly, for her family and District 12. She only knows, at this stage, how corrupt and loathsome the world is, and that it may destroy everything it touches. This is how evil men stay in power. And it's impossible not to read this novel and see the Capitol of Panem as the US, and each of the twelve districts (thirteen was obliterated in the late civil war) as all those countries where people live in squalor so that Americans may enjoy an obscenely high standard of living.
---
Gaming consumed far too much of my night. First, Spooky let me use her laptop long enough the level Selwyn to 16. I love the world of Rift so, so much. I love that it awes me, and takes my breath, and frightens me, and that I walk through Meridian and so many people are in character, roleplaying, and so few have inappropriate names (for now, the name police thing is working).
Meanwhile, in that other game, the candy-colored one, Shaharrazad is still grinding away at Loremaster. I've now done 105 out of the 120 Netherstorm quests.
---
Okay, I slept far too late, and now it's time to make the doughnuts. Go to bed at 5 ayem, get up at noon thirty, you must make concessions.
Too late for coffee, too early for bed.
Jul. 15th, 2006 10:37 pmJust saw Thom Yorke perform "Cymbal Rush" on The Henry Rollins Show. Nice. The Eraser is really such a very, very good album.
It is a night of sirens here in Atlanta. Soon, we'll be lost in deepest, darkest Rhode Island, and the nights will be quiet, and I'll no doubt miss the annoying wail of sirens and kids shouting on the street and the blare of motorcycles and so forth.
Way back on Wednesday night, depressed and trying to cheer myself up, I dragged out some of Nar'eth's old things to see how they've been holding up, packed away for the last two years. But I didn't feel like getting into the boots, so I just put those big, heavy-ass leg shields on over my Eeyore slippers. The result was this bit of silliness:
I got three e-mails today, asking if it's okay to message me from my MySpace page or ask to be added to my friends list. And of course it is. That's why it's there. Well, that and the fact that I have this bizarre love of filling out blank forms.
It is a night of sirens here in Atlanta. Soon, we'll be lost in deepest, darkest Rhode Island, and the nights will be quiet, and I'll no doubt miss the annoying wail of sirens and kids shouting on the street and the blare of motorcycles and so forth.
Way back on Wednesday night, depressed and trying to cheer myself up, I dragged out some of Nar'eth's old things to see how they've been holding up, packed away for the last two years. But I didn't feel like getting into the boots, so I just put those big, heavy-ass leg shields on over my Eeyore slippers. The result was this bit of silliness:
I got three e-mails today, asking if it's okay to message me from my MySpace page or ask to be added to my friends list. And of course it is. That's why it's there. Well, that and the fact that I have this bizarre love of filling out blank forms.
Act 1: Though all these deadlines and the impending trip to Rhode Island have placed me in a situation wherein I need to be writing every single waking moment, and though I said that stuff about Gandalf and Pippin and the deep breath before the plunge, and though I am surely one of the most productive writers I've ever personally met (if I do say so myself, and I do)...still, I'm not an assembly line. I cannot write as an assembly line, no matter how much I may desire to or need to. On Tuesday, I finished "The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)" and had every intention of beginning a vignette for Tales from the Woeful Platypus on Wednesday. When writing on Wednesday fizzled, I resolved it would happen on Thursday. And here I am, and it's getting late on Thursday, and I have only a title — "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ghoul" — and a handful of ideas and about two hundred discarded words. Because I'm not a gaddamn assembly line, though it's not for any lack of trying. Because the words come only when the words come. Maybe by Saturday, I'll be writing again. Please cross your fingers, toes, and/or pedipalps on my behalf.
Act 2: A free (yes, FREE) e-version of my sf novella The Dry Salvages will soon be available from Subterranean Press. I do not yet know all the formats it will be available in. As many as possible, I suppose. One of the things I'll be doing during the trip is reading over the story again and creating a revised text for Bill Schafer. This is what we call an experiment. Hopefully, something good will come of it.
Act 3: Though I have been silent on the subject of late, I continue to practice and identify as Wiccan, but I also continue the search for some branch of neopaganism with which I am much more compatible. Most recently, this has led me to investigate Feri. And I must admit there are some aspects which I find attractive: the general absence of heterocentrism and gender polarity, no general adherence to the "threefold law," an emphasis on ecstasy rather than fertility, and so forth. And yet, it also has much that annoys me to distraction: incorporation of the myth of the "Attacotti" or whatever you choose to call Murray's Pictish "little people," Victor Anderson's preposterous claim to have been initiated into a preexisting witchcraft tradition at the age of nine in the Oregon woods, the inclusion of aspects of Xtian mysticism, claims to antiquity and a prehistoric origin, etc. Mostly, I feel as though I'm chasing my tail round and round. There are days, like today, where I cannot begin to understand what ever set me on this path, why I could not be content with my dogged rationalism, but then I go and have a day (or night) when I understand precisely what precipitated this search.
Act 4: Yes, of course I'm watching Project Runway 3. But so far, I have no clear favourites, and all I know for sure is that I loathe Malan Breton with a passion. I believe the word which best describes him is oleaginous, both in the sense of a thing being oily and in that other sense relating to smugness and all that is unctuous. Put another way, ewww. The man makes me want to bathe, and I fear he'll be around most of the season.
Act 5: I spent part of yesterday listening to Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, which I quite like.
Act 6: Also yesterday, Spooky and I made a second trip to the "pet sematary" to get more photographs, and this time we discovered it seems to have some peculiarities relating to our perception of its overall size. When I wrote of it on the 11th, I said that is was "maybe three feet across at its widest point." The first thing that struck me upon seeing it the second time was that it was considerably larger than that, perhaps four feet wide. However, I paced it off and Spooky and I were both astounded to discover that it is actually about eight feet at the oval's widest (east-west) dimension. I paced it off again. Again, eight feet. Looking at it, it really appears no more than four feet wide. I'm assuming there's some perfectly ordinary explanation for this discretion between our perceptions and our measurements. We'll be going back with a tape measure to try to figure it out. Meanwhile, more photos (behind the cut):
( five-and-a-half-minute hallways )
Act 7: Simian Publishing has posted the cover for Into the Dreamlands, which will reprint "So Runs the World Away." It looks like this:
Act 8: Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. We'd have listed more items, were we not presently so busy. Note that the copy of the subpress hardback of Low Red Moon is one of the few I have, which means it's one of the very few I will be auctioning. So, if you want to get this particular edition of the book from me, you really might want to bid. And, as always, thanks muchly.
Act 2: A free (yes, FREE) e-version of my sf novella The Dry Salvages will soon be available from Subterranean Press. I do not yet know all the formats it will be available in. As many as possible, I suppose. One of the things I'll be doing during the trip is reading over the story again and creating a revised text for Bill Schafer. This is what we call an experiment. Hopefully, something good will come of it.
Act 3: Though I have been silent on the subject of late, I continue to practice and identify as Wiccan, but I also continue the search for some branch of neopaganism with which I am much more compatible. Most recently, this has led me to investigate Feri. And I must admit there are some aspects which I find attractive: the general absence of heterocentrism and gender polarity, no general adherence to the "threefold law," an emphasis on ecstasy rather than fertility, and so forth. And yet, it also has much that annoys me to distraction: incorporation of the myth of the "Attacotti" or whatever you choose to call Murray's Pictish "little people," Victor Anderson's preposterous claim to have been initiated into a preexisting witchcraft tradition at the age of nine in the Oregon woods, the inclusion of aspects of Xtian mysticism, claims to antiquity and a prehistoric origin, etc. Mostly, I feel as though I'm chasing my tail round and round. There are days, like today, where I cannot begin to understand what ever set me on this path, why I could not be content with my dogged rationalism, but then I go and have a day (or night) when I understand precisely what precipitated this search.
Act 4: Yes, of course I'm watching Project Runway 3. But so far, I have no clear favourites, and all I know for sure is that I loathe Malan Breton with a passion. I believe the word which best describes him is oleaginous, both in the sense of a thing being oily and in that other sense relating to smugness and all that is unctuous. Put another way, ewww. The man makes me want to bathe, and I fear he'll be around most of the season.
Act 5: I spent part of yesterday listening to Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, which I quite like.
Act 6: Also yesterday, Spooky and I made a second trip to the "pet sematary" to get more photographs, and this time we discovered it seems to have some peculiarities relating to our perception of its overall size. When I wrote of it on the 11th, I said that is was "maybe three feet across at its widest point." The first thing that struck me upon seeing it the second time was that it was considerably larger than that, perhaps four feet wide. However, I paced it off and Spooky and I were both astounded to discover that it is actually about eight feet at the oval's widest (east-west) dimension. I paced it off again. Again, eight feet. Looking at it, it really appears no more than four feet wide. I'm assuming there's some perfectly ordinary explanation for this discretion between our perceptions and our measurements. We'll be going back with a tape measure to try to figure it out. Meanwhile, more photos (behind the cut):
Act 7: Simian Publishing has posted the cover for Into the Dreamlands, which will reprint "So Runs the World Away." It looks like this:
Act 8: Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. We'd have listed more items, were we not presently so busy. Note that the copy of the subpress hardback of Low Red Moon is one of the few I have, which means it's one of the very few I will be auctioning. So, if you want to get this particular edition of the book from me, you really might want to bid. And, as always, thanks muchly.
