Caitlín R. Kiernan

Today, the meteorological violence of the past two days is gone. The sky is overcast, and the air is cool, presently only 77F.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,738 words on Chapter Three of Blood Oranges. Now, there's a troll in the book.

Much of the day was spent bracing for a storm that I'm pretty sure actually came the night before. But the weathermen freak out when something gets past them, so they were overcompensating, going so far as to warn people to stock up on food and water and suchlike...for a thunderstorm. Spooky did go out to the market, and there were trees down – some of them quite large – from the storm that hit us early on Wednesday morning. Some buildings in our neighborhood took damage from that storm, from the wind and hail. Anyway, here's how things looked about 5:30 p.m. yesterday:



About 6 p.m., as we were eating dinner, the red band swept over us, and it was a kitten compared with the night before.

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Yesterday, something happened that I've been expecting ever since Colgate-Palmolive bought a controlling interest in Tom's of Maine back in 2006 – I opened a box of toothpaste and discovered that the old metal tube had been replaced with a squishy plastic one. And who the hell really knows which is "greener" than the other, metal or plastic. Point is, toothpaste ought come in metal fucking tubes.

---

I slept last night, at least. About seven and a half hours. But the Good Worker Bee Pills are making me fat, a side effect that is known and common, so it's not as if I wasn't warned.

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Last night, though the air cooled dramatically after the storms, my office was still too stuffy for Rift, so we finished watching the Burroughs documentary (dir. Yony Leyser, 2010). It was very, very well done. Afterwards, though, we watched William Cameron Menzies' The Maze (1953). Menzies is credited with inventing the role of the film production designer and was involved in the creation of many wonderful films. The Maze is not one of them. It didn't help that it was shot for 3-D, during one of those other times Hollywood fell for that gimmick. Very likely one of the dullest films I've ever slept through. Okay, I only slept through about ten minutes, and apparently I didn't miss anything. It was almost worth eduring the whole silly, wretched mess for two lines:

Kitty Murray (played by Veronica Hurst): Look, there's a strand of seaweed!

Edith Murray (played by Katherine Emery): And a bowl of tomatoes (pronounced toe-MAH-toes).

Anyway, then we watched Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun (2000), which I love, even though it sort of destroyed the man's career. It shouldn't have. Spooky had never seen it. Yeah, that's a lot of watching. I wasn't in the mood for much else.

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Rhetorical Question: How am I not to conclude that, in the end, I am, at best, a forgotten experiment and no one is watching?

Same As It Ever Was,
Aunt Beast

* From Wikipedia: "A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the (often obvious) answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people endure this injustice?", no formal answer is expected. Rather, it is a device used by the speaker to assert or deny something. (e.g.: "Why me?") While amusing and often humorous, rhetorical questions are rarely meant for pure, comedic effect. A carefully crafted question can, if delivered well, persuade an audience to believe in the position(s) of the speaker."

Thunderstorms last night. Lightning reflecting off the snow. This morning, the sun's out, it's 41˚F, and the melting seems to have begun in earnest. I feel like we've been locked in a hard freeze for a solid month or longer. Of course, now there's the ugliness of the melt, because humans and snow are a bad mix, and there's the threat of flooding.

Spooky's been down with some sort of crud much of the past week, and yesterday it finally grabbed hold of me. Right now, I feel pretty crappy. But there's work, and I have to try to keep moving.

All of yesterday was spent pulling Sirenia Digest #62 together. It went out to subscribers last night, and hopefully everyone has it who should have it. I'd very much like to hear feedback on the first chapter of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Also, if you're not a subscriber and would like a sneak preview of the novel in progress, subscribe and you'll get #62.

For some damn reason, I get sick and my head fills with random thoughts. Usually, with random, unpleasant thoughts. It's as if a troll with a bucket of nails has been turned loose in my head. Nails and snot.

For example, never, ever, ever call me "hon." I get this on Second Life constantly, and on WoW, and other places, and it makes me want to wretch. Or, here's another moderately random thing: Yesterday, I read that the average American household includes thirty "always on" appliances. Stuff that never gets shut off. Thirty. Spooky and I sat and counted up our "always on" crap, and we could only come up with eight things*. So, how the hell do people manage thirty "always on" electronic (non-battery operated) appliances? Beats the hell out of me.

When I was done with the digest yesterday, once it had been sent away to be PDFed, I spent some time on Two Worlds and In Between. Mostly, I tried not to think about getting sick, or how it might affect my ability to get all this work done. Later, there was rp in Insilico...which was very good...and comic books, and cookies, and more Krilanovich, the thunderstorm and snuggling with Hubero. And here's a question, while I'm being all random and shit: Why do so many comic-book readers get annoyed at "funny books" when "comic books" means pretty much exactly the same damn thing? I grew up reading funny books, and I usually still think of them as funny books— even after having worked for DC/Vertigo all those years —and I just don't get it.

Ugh.

The platypus says stop here, and I think maybe that's not such a bad idea. Comments welcome, because Sundays suck even when I'm well.

In Phlegm,
Aunt Beast

* fridge, stove, microwave, an alarm clock, coffeemaker, water heater, modem, and router.

A rather spectacular thunderstorm this morning. Now it's cloudy, and cooler than it's been lately.

As for my mood, it has improved. I suspect I just needed a day away from the story. I'd been hammering at it for eight days straight. Hopefully, when I go back to it today, things will make more sense. I can only hope that eight days from now, it's finished.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions, if you've not already. Thanks.

So, yes, yesterday we saw Vincenzo Natali's Splice. I'd hoped that it would be an important science-fiction film, something on a par with, say, last year's District 9 or Moon. Certainly, it had that potential, but it's a potential that's never quite realized. Somewhere near the middle, the film is almost brilliant, but the ending devolves into monster-movie antics, which are fine, if all you are hoping for is a scary monster movie. But this is a film that is, at least ostensibly, about the responsibilities of science and scientists, about the blurring the line between research and commerce, about the ethics and perils of creating genetically engineered hybrids, chimeras, and parahumans, and about making contact with a genuinely alien intelligence (even if the "alien" was created on Earth). You stack these issues into a film, and I expect it to be a little bit smarter. Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody do the best they can with the script. Delphine Chanéac is amazing as Dren. The creature effects are superb. Dren is undoubtedly one of the most amazing creatures ever brought to the screen. And the film is, despite its flaws, often very effective. For the most part, it's an interesting retelling of Frankenstein, and one that understands that Victor's greatest sin was not "playing god," but failing to be a good parent. And still, that ending blows the show, and I'm left wondering at the film Splice might have been if it had taken a few more chances. I don't expect it to last long in the theaters. It's too weird to appeal to most, but not quite weird enough to be brilliant. A disappointment, but still a disappointment well worth seeing.

I keep meaning to write about the ongoing horror in the Gulf of Mexico. I feel like I should be using the blog to write about nothing else. But every time I try, I back away. This thing is too big, and I know if I ever do start talking about it, I'm going to piss off pretty much everyone, because none of us is truly innocent of this crime, and I fear that's something no one wants to hear.

I slept more than eight hours last night. I think I felt too bad to do otherwise. Early this morning, Spooky and I were awakened by a tremendous clap of thunder. A wonderful storm, but I went right back to sleep.

Yesterday was sort of a disaster. I did write, but only 561 words. Two problems prevented me getting any farther. Firstly, I appear to have picked up a cold at the damned doctor's office (one reason I try to avoid doctor's visits). Secondly, I've reached this last third of the story, and suddenly I'm not sure what happens next. "The Sea Troll's Daughter" is a sort of inversion of the storytelling formula derived from Beowulf, but here at the end, I'm lost. I despise trying to be a clever writer, but there's the sense that the ending hinges upon some bit of clever plotting. So...the story's due on Sunday (and this is the very-much-extended deadline), and I'm uncertain how to proceed. It all needs to wrap up in another two or three thousand words.

I spent much of yesterday in bed, listening to Spooky read to me. There just wasn't energy for much else. I feel quite a bit better today. With luck, I'm past the worst of whatever it is I've contracted. I'd really like to stop writing blog entries about illness.

I found something I wrote last year on July 1st, regarding the length of novels, that I thought I'd repost:

This is an old gripe with me, and one that has direct bearing on the writing of The Red Tree. Many of my favourite novels are, in fact, quite short, and certainly far under 100K words. For example, The Haunting of Hill House, Cannery Row, Grendel, The Wasp Factory, The Road, Billy Budd, Turn of the Screw, and Ironweed. The list could go on and on. Great novels, many under 75k, or even 50k, words in length. But I was made to sign a contract that specified a novel that would be 100k words in length. So, rather than allowing the novel to be as long (or, rather, as short) as is needed for the story at hand, I must attempt to push, to pad it, stretch it, or try to convince my publisher to accept a shorter book. And one should never, ever force a story to do anything that is not required of it. There, that's an actual piece of writing advice. I will confess that, being generally disinterested in the ins and outs of publishing, the reasons for this bloating of the American novel escape me. If I had to guess, though, I'd point back to the rise of the blockbuster novel in the 1970s and 1980s. Often, these were thick books. Very thick books. Obscenely, unnecessarily thick books. The example that leaps immediately to mind is Stephen King's It (1986). Could have been half as long, and would have been better for it. But then I still maintain that the original version of The Stand (1978) was far and away better that the longer 1990 publication (which, among other unwise things, "updated" the story from 1980 to 1990). Or look at J.K. Rowling. The books get fatter as the phenom of Harry Potter grows, and that last one is so flabby as to be almost unreadable. Anyway, if I point to the oft-bloated bestsellers as a trend, then maybe I can also suggest that this led to a sort of reader expectation. "Good books are long." Something like that. "I want my money's worth." Along those lines. I can easily imagine many indiscriminate readers buying into (and/or actually creating) this expectation. It becomes, in a consumerist world, a question not of quality, but of quantity. Books have become, in the last twenty or thirty years, unreasonably expensive. So, who wants to spend the same amount of money on a "thin" novel when they can "get their money's worth" with a fat one? Frankly, I think that people thinking of novels the same way they think of pizzas is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Regardless, I'm looking at where I am at this stage of The Red Tree, and I'm guessing that it's a 75k-word novel, maybe. I've written a little more than 20k words at this point, which means I'm getting a feel for its length. Which leaves me with difficult decisions ahead of me. And, I should say, I am not inherently opposed to long novels. Not at all. If they need to be long. Moby Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, Dune. It's just that I am opposed to the idea that novels must be long. Bigger is not, we are beginning to see, better. All-you-can-eat-buffets, Hummers and SUVs, those grotesquely vast McMansions, the human population, and the bloated novel...all these things rely on the lie that more is, by definition, better, when, in fact, many times, it's disastrous.

As it turned out, for better or worse, The Red Tree eventually ran to 100,860 words.

Okay, need to try to go get some work done now, says Herr Platypus. But please have a look at the eBay auctions. Thanks!

First, the fact that there is Good News should be acknowledged. My lit agent (Merrilee) and I received this e-mail late yesterday from Liz, my editor at Penguin:

Good news for you - the print order just came through and we're printing a very respectable 7,000 copies of Daughter of Hounds. (Your pre-order campaign worked beautifully, Caitlín!)

Which is to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered the novel. See, you can make a difference. My "street team" is the draddest. And if you haven't already pre-ordered, this is to ask you to please consider doing so soon. The initial print order is an important battle won, but just a battle, not the war, which still yawns before me.

Anyway, good news aside, yesterday was a somewhat awful and excruciating day, having begun with an earlier e-mail from Liz, telling me that we couldn't use the four Emily Dickinson quotes in Daughter of Hounds because, even though Dickinson died in 1886, they're under copyright. She asked if I wanted to replace them with something else. No, I said. I want to use those quotes, which I was very, very certain were not actually under copyright. And this all gets quite muddled and complicated. Let me see if I can perchance explain (and any Emily Dickinson scholars reading this will be excused for skipping ahead):

Upon her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson had published very few of her poems. Something like ten. After she died, however, two friends — Mabel Loomis Todd and literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson — published three volumes of her poetry between 1890 and 1896. Then, early in the 20th Century, Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, produced further collections, reprinting much of the Todd-Higginson books, as well as previously unpublished material, in The Single Hound (1915), The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), and Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929).

Now, here's the deal. Dickinson poems published prior to 1923 are in public domain and may be quoted without infringing upon anyone's valid copyright. And, in truth, most of her poems were published after her death, but well before 1923.

However, here's where things get confusing and sticky — in 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which presented new transcriptions of the poems first published by Todd, Loomis, and Bianchi. Todd and Loomis had made changes in Dickinson's punctuation, standardizing it and sometimes misinterpreting it. Johnson corrected the texts, and his The Poems of Emily Dickinson has been adopted as the standard for Dickinson scholarship. A division of
Harvard licenses the Johnson copyright from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (or maybe it's Amherst College, I'm not entirely sure which). And they have a reputation for suing anyone who reprints Johnson's versions of the poems without permission. I cannot claim to say exactly how this works, since Johnson merely reprinted Dickinson's work, and I cannot even begin to see how that makes it his own, but there you go. US copyright law says it's so, so it is so.

However, as I pointed out to Liz early yesterday, I'd not quoted from Johnson, but thrice from the Loomis and Todd texts and once from one of the Bianchi books. And since the Bianchi book was The Single Hound (1915), I was in the clear on copyright. But legal wanted proof, in the form of photocopies from those original editions demonstrating that my quotations had not drawn upon the Johnson text. So, this meant I had to go back to Emory University, back to the Woodruff Library, for the second time in as many days (having finally gone on Tuesday), and show my ID to the security guy, etc. & etc. Which I did, though it ate up the entirety of a day which should have been spent either writing or preparing to write. I'd chosen those four quotes carefully, and I wasn't going to give up on using them without a struggle. To my great fortune, the Woodruff Library has copies of both The Single Hound and the first of the Todd and Loomis volumes (1915, Poems). Between these two books, I had all four of the poems I'd quoted. The texts as they were printed pre-Johnson, pre-1955, pre-1923. Today, Spooky will photocopy the pages and send them to Penguin, and the four Dickinson quotes will appear in Daughter of Hounds as per my original intent. No copyrights, however dubious, will have been violated. Only a day lost. And I even took photos of the adventure, just so I could share the splendid tedium with my readers. They are not exciting photos. They are behind the cut:

( A Day in the Library )

After Emory, we got some hot and spicy Thai for dinner, then headed home just as a wonderful thunderstorm stuck Atlanta. We've been needing the rain. There's not much to the rest of the evening — I played more Drakengard 2 (the world has ended, but the end was only the beginning), watched Project Runway (and I am sick and disgusted at this whole mess with Jeffery), and read and read and read. I have this habit of reading many books at once, mostly non-fiction because I mostly read nonfiction. Currently, I am reading, simultaneously, the following:

Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
Visions of Mars by Olivier de Goursac
The Monuments of Mars: A City of the Edge of Forever by Richard C. Hoagland (the less said about this awful book, the better; research for The Dinosaurs of Mars)
Cauldron of Hell: Tunguska by Jack Stoneley
The Amber Forest by George Poinar, Jr. and Roberta Poinar
The Geology of Mars edited by a bunch of folks
Mars: A Tour of the Human Imagination by Eric S. Rabkin
Tyrannosaurus SUE by Steve Fiffer
Magnificent Mars by Ken Croswell
The Spiral Dance by Starhawk (20th anniv. ed.)

Danielewski, planetology, palaeontology, pop culture, and Wicca — all at once, and I can still walk a straight line.

Okay. Must go attend to busyness, e-mail, and maybe even some actual writing. Oh, wait. The platypus says sheheit will be looking for comments today (and perhaps answering them), because I'm boring herhimit sideways, so, yeah. Surely there's comment fodder here somewhere. Don't be shy.