Caitlín R. Kiernan

I'm haunted,
By the hallways in this tiny room,
The echos there of me and you,
The voices that are carrying this tune,
Ba da pa pa...

Yesterday is what happens when chaos and the best of intentions square off and have a good ol' Godzilla versus Gamera boxing match. We're having a couple of moderately warm days here....

WAIT

Yes, in a few more hours, Dark Horse will spill the beans, and the BIG DARK HORSE TEASE will become the BIG DARK HORSE REVEAL. Soon. We're almost there. On the cusp, as it were.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Warm weather. High sixties. So, I'd planned to play hookey yesterday, and slip away to Beavertail, even though I sure as hell haven't the time for such luxuries. I ought to be doing nothing but working on "Ex Libris." But then there was the long conversation with my editor at Dark Horse early in the day, and, afterwards, I realized I needed to have a long conversation with my lit agent (on entirely unrelated matters). But she was at a lunch meeting, and it would be about 45 minutes before she got back into the office. There was no way there'd be enough time to make it to Conanicut Island. So...not wanting to see the day become a total loss (I was far too higgledy-piggledy to get any writing done). So, bored and without especial focus, yet possessed of some odd motivation, I proposed we begin "remodeling" my office, which we've only been meaning to do for about...two years.

(Why does Microsoft Word discourage the use of contractions?)

One shelf and a shelf's worth of books went to the middle parlour, where, I must admit, they look quite handsome. I'd had my doubts.

Merrilee called and we talked, and talked, and talked. Fine things. Over time, I will tell you of these fine things.

There's enough to look forward to on this day. I'll make another post in a few hours. Patience, kittens. OH! Look! I just got a royalty check for $10.36 for the German edition of Threshold (id est, Fossil). Wow. Party time. Yes, the writing will make you rich, Bill Murray!

Anticipatory,
Aunt Beast

UPDATE (1:44 p.m.): Just got word the announcement from Dark Horse should come about noon PST, three EST, 4 CaST. Fuck it, Dude. I'm going to get nachos.

I'm trying very, very hard to make sure that Sirenia Digest #53 goes out to subscribers by midnight tomorrow night. But I have at least a day's work left to get done on the second piece for the issue, "Workprint." Yesterday, I wrote 1,004 words on the story. On Wednesday, I wrote 1,196 words on it. Today, I mean to find THE END.

Audible.com is now offering audio versions of five of my novels: Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree. Right now, I'm listening to The Red Tree. I've made it to the end of Chapter Two, and I'm quite pleased with what I'm hearing. I very much hope people will pick up copies of the audiobooks. By the way, you may listen to samples of the audiobooks at Audible.com.

We've begun a new round of eBay auctions to help defray the cost of my newest (and insanely expensive) anti-seizure medication. At the moment, there are copies of The Dry Salvages, Tales from the Woeful Platypus, and Alabaster. Please have a look. Bid if you are able. The good news is that the new meds appear to be working. Oh, and Spooky has new pendants up at her Etsy Dreaming Squid Dollworks shop, which is another way to help out.

Let's see. What else, quickly? Night before last, we saw Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats, which I liked a lot. Late in the evening, we've been reading Patti Smith's autobiography, Just Kids. Also, though I've seen most of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse and found it barely watchable, on Wednesday and Thursday nights we watched "Epitaph One" and "Epitaph Two," respectively. And they were very good, especially "Epitaph One." They were a glimpse of the series that might have been, instead of the sad mess that was. Had the series begun with "Epitaph One," it might have been brilliant television. Those two episodes made me care about characters the rest of the series could not. Hell, in one scene Eliza Dushku came dangerously close to acting. So, it was delightful seeing them, but disheartening, too.

And now...work. Onwards, platypus!

Which is to say, Monsieur Insomnia came back last night. His return was fully expected. I rarely get more than one good night every two weeks or so. Just enough my heart won't explode and rob Monsieur of his sleepless play pretty. Hard rain lat night, and hard rain this morning. We lay awake last night (my insomnia often means Spooky doesn't sleep, either), listening to a Very Loud Drip somewhere just outside the bedroom window. Today, We hear that New England was stricken with a truly terrible storm last night, and today we have flood warnings, but I can only testify to the ferocity of that one drip. Ah, but there is good news, too. Today the world has returned the Caitlín Standard Time (originally, it was called Caitlín Stabilizing Time). I will no longer be one hour early for everything.

No writing yesterday, just a lot of writing about writing. We left the House, venturing Outside in the truly foul weather, all the way to the Athenaeum on Benefit Street (ca 1838), because, sometimes, being there helps jog something loose when my brain has seized up. I took the iBook and sat downstairs and stared at the three sentences I wrote on Friday. I know they have to go, that they are, in fact, preventing me from moving on. They must be destroyed, erased, cut and pasted into a morgue file— whatever —so that I can start over. But I could not summon the requisite courage yesterday. So, instead, I sat and made notes, and more notes, and still more notes, and pretended that was writing. At least the Athenaeum is a very pleasant place to be unable to write, unlike this office. Oh, and Spooky found a copy of The Red Tree under "new fiction," which pleased me tremendously, to have one of my books there in that grand old library where both Poe and Lovecraft studied. I took pictures, mostly upstairs (behind the cut):

( 13 March 2010 )

Nothing much to last night. We watched the new Caprica, a series that gets better every week. I bit my tongue, and it still hurts. We played WoW, mostly questing in Coldara and the Nexus. I spent some time editing the roleplay transcript from Friday night (which turns out to be twenty-pages long).

Every now and then, someone writes a review that changes, to one degree or another, the way I look at something I've written. These are the best reviews, the ones that make me sit up and say, "Oh, yes, that's what I was trying to say, only, I had no idea I was trying to say that. But I must have been, at least subconsciously, because there it is, plain as fucking day." I received an email containing one such review last night, of The Red Tree. It also described me as "...Algernon Blackwood’s great-granddaughter describing what happened in the forest behind Hill House...", which, of course, made me smile. I'll release the name of the reviewer, and may post a long excerpt from the review later, after I've spoken with its author. It was the second-best thing about yesterday, right after finding a copy of the novel at the Athenaeum.

Finally, before I sign off and deal with those three sentences, I have a question from the comments to yesterday entry. jacobluest writes, "Just finished Threshold...I've been working my way 'backwards' through your books...question here if you can answer it: did your concept of the ghouls themselves evolve, or have they remained consistent throughout these stories? I'm trying to figure out if the beings of wire and feather, spindle-legged and scarecrowed, are of the same ilk as Madam Terpsichore. Is Threshold's hitchhiker a Soldier, or a Bailiff? Or has the taxonomy evolved?"

To which I reply, no, the "stick dogs" of Threshold (and "Rats Live on No Evil Star") are not the same sort of beings as the ghouls of the later works. That they both have canine features is coincidence, or convergence, or evidence of some underlying phobia or philia I may have for dog-like things. As for the hitchhiker, again, no, he bears no connections to the Bailiff or the Children of the Cuckoo (such as Soldier, Scarborough Pentecost, or Starling Jane). The hitchhiker was an avatar of the thing below Red Mountain, which was also the thing Dancy fought in Shrove Wood.

And now, I try again....

1. We just heard the news that Phil Harris, Captain of the Cornelia Marie, has died at age 53 of a stroke. You may know him as "Captain Phil" from Deadliest Catch, a series of which Spooky and I are oddly fond. And the news is oddly sad. He was our favorite captain on the show. To quote the AP release, "Harris started working on fishing boats at age 7 and started work 10 years later on a crab boat. When Harris turned 21, he ran a fishing vessel out of Seattle, making him one of the youngest to captain a vessel in the Bering Sea."

2. Yesterday, I wrote 1,328 words on "Untitled 35" and found THE END. It was a brutal jog to THE END. And it's a truly brutal piece of fiction. I'm learning not to make apologies for that. Still looking for a more traditional title. Given it was written almost entirely while under the influence of Bowie's Outside, and given it's matter, it ought to be titled "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty)." Today, Spooky and I will be proofing it and the galley pages for the "Sanderlings" chapbook (which comes FREE with the limited edition of The Ammonite Violin & Others).

3. The snow is just now reaching Providence, and it looks like it's going to be a heavy one.

4. Yesterday, I received my comp copies of the new German edition of Low Red Moon, retitled Kreatur. The translation was, once again, done by Alexandra Hinrichsen. From what Spooky and I have read thus far of the prologue, the translation looks good. This morning, I snapped a couple of shots of my German editions:

( Kreatur und Fossil )

5. You're probably all growing weary of my going on about Insilico. But it's just so damn good.* Last night, everything changed for Xiang, when agents from the Gemini Corporation attempted to kidnap her (trying to take her before agents of the Tokuma Corporation or, possibly, members of the underground Syndicates). She was able to stall long enough to upload to a nearby service droid, before detonating an EMP device, thereby self-destructing. Unfortunately, the Gemini techs have been able to salvage her remains, including most of her mind (Gemini also intercepted the broadcast). Xiang 1.0 may well be dead, but now...I am playing Xiang 2.0a (saddled by Gemini with loyalty software), Xiang 2.0b (created by a Gemini agent named Molly Longshadow, for her own personal ends), and Xiang 2.0c (the copy uploaded to the Abeus droid, and later delivered to Hibiki-O, a cyborg who has done much to keep Xiang alive and hidden from TPTB). 2.0b and 2.0c are currently without bodies. So, yeah, awesome, awesome stuff, though it now leaves me playing three clones of the same robot. But we embrace challenges. There are two screencaps behind the cut:

( Xiang is dead. I am Xiang. We have been divided. )

* We have, here, come almost to the end of that brief time during which I was able to delude myself into believing Insilico was, in fact, especially different from the rest of Second Life. (2/10/11)

1. Gods, I'm not awake. And to blame we have the Ambien I took at 4:45 a.m., although what we really have to blame is (drum roll, please) THE. BEST. ROLEPLAY. EVER. Which I got in Insilico last night. My thanks to Omika, Abiki, Fifth, Pinbacker...and others. Really, it's like being lodged in the forebrain/motherboard of an early William Gibson novel, this rp. Smart, immersive, simulationist, literate, and exquisitely hard. And to think I spent almost two and half years trying to find a sim that has its shit together, and players on the same wavelength as me, and that I suffered so much lousy rp and silly-ass ooc drama.* Anyway, wow, but I am so painfully not awake. Oh, I'm playing Xiang, a very confused little toaster.

2. Yesterday, I wrote 1,269 words on "Hydrarguros," for Sirenia Digest #50. The story really seemed to find itself yesterday afternoon. And then Jason Statham showed up. On Facebook, I wrote "Gods, I've just realized Jason Statham is narrating my new sf story. That is, the narrator's voice, as I hear it in my head as I write is that of Jason Statham." Sort of Jason Statham as he was in Snatch. Later, also on Facebook, I added, "You have to imagine Jason Statham starring in a film version of David Bowie's Outside, playing Nathan Adler, only it's not a movie about art crimes, but a movie about drugs from Mars." Which isn't precisely right, but somewhere in the neighborhood.

3. Okay, so...I've keep putting off talking about Peter Straub's very wonderful new novel, A Dark Matter (due out February 9th). Mostly, that's because I know enough to know I'm no good at reviewing books (would that more readers knew this of themselves), and I'm not going to do the book justice. I can heap praise upon it, which it deserves, but which is also insufficient. I could, in theory, reduce it to some book-reportish synopsis, but that would be criminal. So, I won't do either. You're just going to have to trust me on this. I've been reading Peter since 1981, and this is one of his very best. There are such moments of surreal, transcendent weird. Worlds bleed together. It is, in a sense, about the price of expanding one's consciousness. In another sense, it's about the charlatans who promise expanded consciousness, and, specifically, about the sorts who peddled those wares in the sixties. More than anything, this is a novel about consequence. In brilliantly inverts many of the readers expectations, turning its plot back upon itself, as we watch its characters struggle to come to terms with an unspeakably bizarre event from their pasts, in order to heal their present lives. You want to read this novel. Spooky read the whole thing aloud to me while I was sick, before she got sick. We expect to read it a second time in a few months. Thank you, Peter. You just shine, man.

4. Last night, we watched Anthony Bourdain in the Philippines (our fondness for this man seems to know no bounds), and then watched Rob Zombies' remake of Halloween 2. I'm still parsing my thoughts on the film. It was, in many ways, a much more ambitious film than his Halloween remake, and it had some fine moments, but, in the end, I don't think it was as good as the first film (and certainly not as good as The Devil's Rejects). Mostly, I think Mr. Zombie needs to a) stop casting the atrocious Sheri Moon Zombie in his films, even if she is his wife, because the woman simply cannot act, and she's holding him back; and 2) I think it's time for him to try something new. We now know he can make very, very good slasher films in the spirit of the '70s and '80s classics. Now, I'd like to see him do something different, because I think he has it in him, and it's time to grow artistically.

5. Email this morning from the woman who'll be reading both Low Red Moon and Threshold for the Audible.com adaptations. They start recording tomorrow, and need correct pronunciations for trilobite names. So, I think all the audiobooks are now in production, which is just amazing.

6. I'm now going to go drink what's left of my coffee and try to wake the fuck up. Excuse me.

*Within a few weeks, Insilico proved itself almost as bad, or worse, than the rest of Second Life, and I had to start eating my words.

Yesterday I did 1,252 words on the new vignette which, as of this writing, is still named "Exuvium."

The weather here in Providence has been grey and chilly and on-and-off rainy for days now. Or so it seems. I can't recall the last time I saw the sun. Then again, I've not left the House since Tuesday. Which really isn't that long, not for me. But the sun would be nice, shining in my office window.

The sea would be nice.

Please consider observing "Black Friday" by bidding on the current eBay auctions, which include a copy of the lettered edition of my long-out-of-print first novel (though it was published after my second and third novels, just before my fourth). Also, check out the Cephalopodmas ornaments in Spooky's Etsy shop, Dreaming Squid Dollworks.

Last night, we had trouble deciding whether to watch Wes Anderson's The Darjeeleng Limited (2007) again, or, instead, watch Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control (2009). The Darjeeleng Limited won out, as we were both in need of a comfort film. Later in the night, we played WoW, our new undead characters, and met up inworld with scarletboi and memkhet.

No sun yet. It's not the sort of thing that comes when you call.

So, it's official. Bill Schafer let me know yesterday that the limited edition of A is for Alien is completely sold out. My thanks to all who ordered the limited (and the trade, for that matter). Last I heard, there are still copies of the trade hardback available, but it's looking like there won't be for very much longer.

Spooky and I were just talking, and the subject of Stephenie Myer came up (like a bad penny). And I said that while it's true Myer can't write her way out of a wet paper bag, it's also true that she succeeded by merely giving the people what they want. I pointed out that this is a thing that I seem pathologically incapable of doing, even when I try very hard, as I often have. Anyway, stray bits of Sunday morning.

Yesterday, my author's copies of Fossil, the German translation of Threshold, arrived. This is the fourth edition of the novel, and the second foreign language translation (the first was Italian), and, to my eye, it's the most attractive of the lot. The cover has a nice retro feel, like a cover from the 1950s or '60s. I am especially pleased with the tiny Dicranurus trilobites used to divide the chapter sections. So, yeah, that was a nice surprise. The translation was done by Alexandra Hinrichsen.

Early yesterday, we managed to finish with the latest round of line edits to The Red Tree. We would have finished on Friday, but I finally reached the point where I'd corrected so many grammatical errors and word repetitions that I could no longer be sure I whether I was fixing things that were broken or merely changing things (and, thereby, breaking them). This series of line edits has been one of the most excruciatingly tedious in my writing career, I think. And I think I know why, and maybe I'll even go into it in tomorrow's entry. Now, I have to begin work on the issues raised by Anne in her editorial letter, actual revisions (though none are very significant). With luck, I can be done in another week. I'm not feeling very lucky.

We headed back to Moonstone Beach yesterday, to try and relocate and retrieve the iron squid we'd found there on Monday. Usually, I leave these things be, but something about the beached ferropetrateuthid called us back. It was sunny here in Providence, and there was at least a little warmth. But as we crossed into South County, the sun vanished behind clouds. When we reached the beach, the day had turned bitterly cold, much more so than when Spooky and Sonya and I were there on the 2nd. The tide was coming in, and there was a strong, stinging wind. Once again, we walked northeast, to the narrow inlet where Card Pond meets the sea at high tide. After a little searching, we managed to locate the iron squid, though it was now partially submerged in the pond. We bundled it up and walked quickly back to the car. Both Trustom and Card ponds were frozen solid, and the geese and ducks all seemed content with the sky. The only signs of life were signs of expired life: fish bones, gull feathers, clam and snail shells, the remains of a variety of crustaceans (Limulus polypehmus, Homarus americanus, Libinia emarginata, Callinectes sapidus, Cancer irroratus, Carcinus maenas, etc.), mermaids' purses, bits of seaweed, and so forth. A lot of the cobbles that had paved the beach on Monday had been washed back out to sea, and there were patches of ice and snow on the sand. The sky was like a lead weight, laid across the angry sea. No, the sea was not angry, but my mind perceived it as such. It was the first time that I've not wanted to linger on Moonstone Beach. The dead of winter, as they say. But, yes, the only known specimen of an iron squid is now in my keeping. The sun had almost set by the time we made it back to Providence.

Last night, we watched the latest Battlestar Galactica, which I found quite satisfying.

There are a few photos from yesterday behind the cut:

( February 7, 2009 )

Well, truthfully, this year's Jethro Tull Season began at 1:15 p.m. on Saturday, but everyone knows I'm a big fat liar. So, there you go. Screw St. Nick and shopping malls and all those damn dead turkeys! Break out the heavy horses and the locomotives and the dirty old homeless men with pneumonia! Yes, this is how Caitlín copes with winter. Jethro Tull.

Thanks to Elizabeth Bear (matociquala, a fellow Tullite), I wasted over an hour this morning destroying most of the earth's population with a viral pandemic. I failed, though I did manage to wipe out the entire populations of Russia (where it began), North America, Europe, India, Greenland, much of South America, China, and most of Africa, before the disease finally burned itself out. I even bested the attempt to create a vaccine. Every day should begin so triumphantly (even though I failed).

Also, 149 years ago today, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published. 149 years later, we are still beleaguered by creationist numbnuts.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,125 words on "The Collier's Venus (1893)," and I almost found THE END. There will be one last short scene today. It's an odd story, another of my Cherry Creek steampunk tales (this will be the fourth), revisiting much of the territory covered by "In the Waterworks (1889)" and Threshold. After the writing, and a dinner of chili, we read and proofed Chapter Six of The Red Tree. I am pleased to say I like this novel even more now than when I "finished" it last month.

We lit the fireplace last night, for the first time this year. I haven't lived anywhere with a functional fireplace since 1982.

After the reading, we watched Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War, which I found extremely effective and chilling. A study in unforeseen consequences. The more things change, the more things keep getting worse. Meet the new boss, same as the old. You know the score. Tom Hanks was good, but Philip Seymour Hoffman was brilliant. Julia Roberts was just scary. And then, after the movie, there was WoW.

I think that I am finally beginning to become disenchanted with World of Warcraft. That makes what? Almost three months? It's just starting to feel far too much like a game (which, of course, is what it is), and I am too entirely disappointed by its utter failure as rp. I'm going to try and stick with it longer by scaling back the number of characters I'm playing, so there's not so much repetition (part of the undesired "gaminess"). I hate games. I want a simulation. I want roleplay, not gameplay. I want full immersion. I want to lose myself in alternate realities. And, so, I suspect it's time to forsake the visual interface and start reading more again. Reading, at least I am not bombarded by REAL LIVE idiots and by stats and leveling and all those other things that only serve to destroy suspension of disbelief. Last night, Mithwen reached Lvl 35. Scaling back, I'll most likely confine myself to Shaharrazad, my blood-elf warlock, and her little sister, Hanifah (a paladin). Spooky's talking about concentrating on her Tauren shaman, Usiku. Total, I presently have six characters, which looks pretty bad, until you consider that Blizzard permits you to have fifty. Anyway, I will continue to hope that at some point within the next few years a genuine rp "simulation" will emerge from the chaos of SL and mmorpgs and whatnot.

So, yeah, I think my unwillingness to become too deeply mired in human politics has reached the point that I have become functionally apolitical. For example, my first thought upon hearing that McCain had chosen Palin as his running mate was, "What the fuck is Michael Palin doing hanging out with war-mongering Republican assholes like McCain?" So, learning the Palin in question was actually a homophobic, anti-choice former beauty queen from Alaska, and not a former member of Monty Python, came as a huge relief.

Er...anyway. Yesterday. Yesterday was not a writing day. It was, instead, a reading day. Looking at the beginning of Chapter Five, and being rather uncertain What Happens Next, I needed to think. And I tend to think best when reading or when watching movies. So, I reread (Is that actually a word? LJ seems to think so.) chapters 20 and 22 of Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), section 6 of Chapter 4 of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride" (1979). Old favourites that I know so well reading them does not require too much of my attention, but which still manage to hit all the right buttons. And I found the idea I needed to begin Chapter 5 of The Red Tree today.

By the way, looking back over The Haunting of Hill House yesterday, I became angry all over again at the insistence of so many publishers, and the expectation by many readers, that novels must be great long things. The Haunting of Hill House is about 240 pages long, quite a bit shorter than, say, Daughter of Hounds (which is 431 pages long, in the tpb edition). Now, I do agree that a novel should be as long as a novel needs to be, but included within that maxim is the corollary that a novel should never be longer than it needs to be. Many novels today, especially bestsellers, are absurdly long (or at least the font size is increased to give that impression), and this follows largely from books being thought of as only another product marketed to consumers looking for their "best value." Longer books are better than shorter books, since a long hardback and a short hardback (or paperback) tend to cost about the same. Novels have been "supersized," as it were. Regardless, I suspect The Red Tree will be no more than 80,000 words at the most (Daughter of Hounds was, by comparison, 133,000+ words in length, but then, it needed to be). Books are not to be judged by page count any more than they are to be judged by their covers. And, as long as I'm titling at windmills and speaking of excessively thick books, if Laurell K. Hamilton is the idiot stepdaughter of Anne Rice, then Stephenie Meyer is, at best, Hamilton's parthenogenic hysterical pregnancy (and I think we've taken this metaphor as far as it can possibly go). Truly, it amazes me, some of the shit people send zipping to the top of the bestseller lists. Truly, crap floats.*

Oh, and I also read "A ceratosaurid [Dinosauria; Theropoda] from the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous of Uruguay" in JVP, but it really had no bearing on the novel.

As for last night, for dinner Spooky got pizza from Pizza Pie'er on Wickenden, because we had a Howards End build-team meeting at 7 pm. And afterwards, I had my first real rp in days, but, sadly, it was at Toxian City, where I'd sworn I'd never, ever go again. I really will be glad when the HE rp is up and running, and I can discover, once and for all, if I am capable of fixing all the things that are wrong with SL roleplay. Maybe I can't, but at least I can try. And if I can't, I can step away from the whole sorry mess knowing that I gave it my best.

A comment and question from a reader:

I liked The Five of Cups. You don't have any intention of re-releasing any other books (Murder of Angels, Threshold or The Dry Salvages) in hardback by any chance? or know where it might be possible to procure a copy of said magnificent books?

You have to forgive my disdain for The Five of Cups. I was 28 when I wrote it back in '92, and that was a long time and a lot of words ago, and neither the novel nor I have, in my estimation, aged well. All novelists are allowed to feel discomfort at their early efforts. It comes with the job. As for the other books, there has never been a hardback of Murder of Angels and probably never will be. There's not yet been a hb of Threshold, but there has been some talk of subpress doing a tenth-anniversary edition in 2011. And while The Dry Salvages is probably out of print for good, there will be a revised version released next year as a free ebook (to coincide with the release of A is for Alien).

* It occurs to me that i have to write a response to myself tomorrow, since the scatalogical generalization "crap floats" is obviously flawed.

It's an odd way to start the day, reading Shirley Jackson, but that's how today has begun. I sat here and nibbled at my crumpets with blueberry preserves while Spooky read to me from Chapter 6 of The Haunting of Hill House. I'd awakened with that scene in my mind, frustrated at the similarity between that scene and the scene I have to write today for The Red Tree. So, I had to hear it, no matter how many times I've read The Haunting of Hill House, because I needed to know exactly what Jackson did and how she did it. Theodora and Eleanore getting lost where they shouldn't be able to get lost. And I know that Sarah Crowe, my own narrator, has surely read Shirley Jackson, and she will be reminded of the scene herself, and when writing about what's about to happen to her and Constance Hopkins, it would be unrealistic not to have her draw a comparison with that scene. Also, I'm once again baffled that Danielewski, in House of Leaves, never once references The Haunting of Hill House*, when he references almost everything else, and here the comparison is obvious (and, for that matter, so is Bilbo and Company wandering about in Mirkwood, and he never references that, either). But I digress.

Yesterday was a very good writing day. I did 1,244 words on Chapter Four. Also, I received the flap copy of The Red Tree from my editor at Penguin, and I have to write back to her about that before I begin work on the novel today. It's not bad flap copy, largely because I haven't deviated very far from the "proposal" I made back in April (it wasn't really any sort of formal proposal, just a paragraph or two). It makes me even more nervous seeing flap copy for an unfinished book than it does to think about seeing the cover of an unfinished book. The cart seems to get in front of the horse. But, like I said, it's pretty good flap copy, as flap copy goes. It's one of those necessary evils of publishing, because people insist on synopses, even when the matter in question cannot be accurately synopsized.

This morning, before Shirley Jackson, I got an email from Jennifer Escott at Writer's House in NYC, forwarding an email from Maja Nikolic in Munich (at the Thomas Schlück GmbH, the agency that handles my German rights), with the PR information from Rowohlt Taschenbuch's (my German publisher) catalog announcement of the forthcoming German-language edition of Threshold, which is titled Fossil (which is somewhat closer to the original English title, Trilobite). They even used an image of Dicranurus for the cover, and it always makes me happy when someone gets the trilobite right. I now know that my German translator's name is Alexandra Hinrichsen. Anyway, the German edition will be out in January.

Spooky has begun another round of eBay, so please have a look. Danke. Also, I will remind you again, again, again that you may now preorder both A is for Alien and the mass-market edition of Daughter of Hounds.

The rest of yesterday: Spooky spent a great deal of the day talking with our SL builders, beginning to realize the zillions of details that will have to be juggled to get Howards End (Linden Labs won't let us have an apostrophe) up and running. I finished the final chapter of Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Life in the Triassic, which deals mostly with the question of whether or not the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic was an actual mass extinction, and if so, what the agent responsible might have been. There are beautiful paintings by Douglas Henderson of asteroid impacts as seen from space. I'll probably make myself read the appendices before going on to the next book in the stack. Also, I read "A Positive Test of East Antarctica-Laurentia Juxtaposition Within the Rodinia Supercontinent" in Science (Vol. 321, 11 July 2008) and wished I were a paleogeographer. There was leftover spaghetti for dinner. We made a run out to our storage unit in Central Falls, and the Blackstone River (which runs down from Woonsocket) smelled clean, of algae and fish. The clouds were breaking apart, and I watched the night sky for Perseid meteors, but between the light of the moon (four nights from full) and the city light pollution, I saw no meteors. Quick stops at PetCo and Whole Foods, and back home about 9 p.m. After that, it was all Second Life, until...gods...4:30 ayem.

My thanks to Ieva Lutrova for a rather marvelous beginning to a scene, which might turn into a vignette for Sirenia Digest #33. An abandoned sector of some future city. An android who was somehow missed in the evacuation, and for fifteen years she has continued to dance to nonexistent patrons in an empty strip club. The wandering tech who strays across her. It has potential, and is a wonderful example of how I'm using SL to create fiction.

A few more thoughts on the Howards End sim before I wrap this up. stsisyphus (and thanks for the email) posted some comments to my entry yesterday that made me realize that there is something I haven't clarified. Though I use the phrase "roleplay," because it is familiar and convenient, in no real way will we actually be "gaming." No dice. No stats. No experience points. None of the tedious stuff. This is to be something more akin to improv theatre, which is what I've always striven for in SL. Improv theatre, where the only audience is the players on the stage. So, truthfully, I'm even more interested in people with theatre background than hardcore gaming nerds. I will not tolerate arguments about what does and does not constitute fair or good or satisfying rp from people who have been into pen-and-pencil rping since Gary Gygax was in diapers. Nor is this rp in the sense that the videogame industry often uses the term. This is something new. This is something different. We have set up two groups so far, "Denizens of Howards End" and "Architects of Howards End," and if you express interest (here or by email or inworld via an IM) you will eventually receive an invitation to join the former (unless you are a builder). But please do note that entry into "Denizens of Howards End" does not automatically guarantee a slot in the story, as we'll need to talk to everyone to determine if they're really right, and if they'll actually enjoy the experience. What I am offering here is the opportunity to be part of an interactive, spontaneously generated novel, to walk and talk and change the course of events in the Providence of Daughter of Hounds. Only this is set before DoH, but after Low Red Moon, which puts it somewhere around 2005, I think. Also, if you'd like to donate towards the cost of this endeavor, just speak up. This whole thing is strictly non-profit, but we won't turn away additional donors.

Okay. Herr Platypus it pointing at the clock and preparing to kick my ass, so I'll wrap this up. Time to make the...well, you know.

* Thanks to wolven for pointing out that The Haunting of Hill House is, in fact, mentioned by Danielewski in footnote #167.