Caitlín R. Kiernan

Late yesterday, we drove down to Kathryn's parents' place, where we filmed last weekend. I'd hoped being away from the city might help the darkness that's been creeping back over me the past week or so. I know the meds are still working, even if it feels like they're not. Anyway, yeah, so we went to the farm. And at first I did have hope. I napped yesterday evening in the room I find safe and peaceful. But that was it. There was nothing else about the visit that helped, and that brief lifting of the veil dissolved very quickly.

But I did see a sky with far less light pollution. The stars I half forget are there to provide perspective. Which I suspect is one of the main reasons human beings are spewing so much energy to drive away the night. They know what the stars mean (even if only unconsciously, in that hindmost reptilian-part of their brains), and it terrifies them. At four-thirty ayem, I was watching the moon rise through the trees.

We played with the great beast that is Spider Cat. We fed the chickens. We saw deer. The frog that lives in the koi pond. The apple trees dying for another winter.

None of it did much of anything for the anger and blackness. Every year, there are fewer and fewer things that help. There is a darkness the meds can never touch, and even my psychiatrist knows that. Kathryn certainly knows. I'd burn it out if I could. I'd fill my eyes with the sheep-blank stares I see on most human faces, or I'd fill it with the ancient sanity of starlight.

Okay, enough of that for now. I'd "friends lock" this, except it would still go up on Facebook and Twitter, and LJ seems to have made it impossible to shut off the cross-posting feature I switched on a long time ago.

I still find myself hating the iPad. I think some people have misunderstood. I do not hate the iPad because it is a device somehow substandard to similar mobile devices. I hate that I needed to waste money on it, and that, no matter how hard I struggle to the contrary, it will be the vehicle of additional time displacement. This has nothing to do with Apple. The iPad is all shiny shiny and shit. It works like a dream. It's just something no one* on earth needs (or anything similar manufactured by another company), no matter how much they may "need" it.

I still find myself loving the work we did last weekend, and missing everyone who was here and helped to make the magic.

I'm considering – well, actually in the earliest stages of planning – two more Kickstarter projects, both for 2012. Now that Spooky is entering the final stages of the process of completing our "Tale of the Ravens" project, and now that I see The Drowning Girl Kickstarter yielding such fruits as it is yielding. We have had such amazing success with Kickstarter (thank you). One would be a boxed, two volume limited-edition set of hardbacks of both The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl, with lots of tipped in color illustrations, facsimile documents, expanded text, appendices, and so forth (because, you know, there's time for these projects hemorrhaging from my asshole). It would be a very expensive undertaking, but it would be worth the expense and time, if I could make it happen. It would probably be limited to 500 signed and numbered copies. Maybe 26 lettered copies.

Anyway, the other project is one I actually began working on, conceptually, a year ago. A short film, a vignette of the sort you'd make of a Sirenia Digest vignette. A siren washed up and dying at the end of the world, and it might overlap territory explored in "The Bone's Prayer." That series of personal apocalypse stories. This would actually be a far simpler and far cheaper project than producing the books.

These are maybes.

Oh, we saw Kevin Smith's Red State last night, which I say is an unreservedly brilliant film, and which must be seen. Right now, Netflix is streaming it. It's a terrifying and sobering exploration of belief and the consequences of belief taken to extremes, the consequences of blindly following...anyone or anything. Only following orders. Only following a man. Only following a "god." There is a moment when the film almost veers into the supernatural that is the most genuinely chilling bit of film I've seen since Sauna.

Now...

*Amended to "not everyone."

It's already 1:39 p.m., because I was unable to get to sleep until almost 5 ayem, and because I awoke to fresh sorts of chaos. But what difference does it make, when I'm almost an entire month behind schedule.

Schedule. An idea that is anathema to life.

My head is filled, this morning, with all the colors of anger, and I'm making a conscious effort to let out only as much of it as I wish to release. Otherwise, it will gush forth and drown the...I almost wrote "drown the page." But there is no page, is there? We are moving rapidly towards the Extinction of the Page. Maybe whatever has stolen the page from me – vagaries of history – deserves to be drowned in all the colors of anger. Schedule surely deserves to drown. Sink it all.

In theory, I'm trying again to begin Chapter Five of Blood Oranges this afternoon. But...you, know...the story of how this book's gone sour is far too bizarre to explain here. Maybe someday I'll explain it somewhere. But it's bizarre and long. All that matters now it that I finish the thing, and move on to the next thing.

It's only a string of things.

If I'm very, very, very lucky I'll write today. If there were any other way on earth that I could make as much money as I make now – which is only just barely (and truly not even) just enough to take care of Spooky and myself – I'd stop writing. No, I mean for good.

Hardly any of the anger leaked out at all.

Teeth Bared,
Aunt Beast

The not-sleeping is quickly, once again, reaching a crisis state. It's not even one thing, but a combination of things. My wretched insomnia, and the sleeping pills (I know we're supposed to say "sleep aids" now, but fuck it) that really don't work so well (name one, I've taken it). The morning construction noise from the house next door, the one that had a fire this time last year, and they're only just now getting it refurbished. Our noisy upstairs neighbors, who stomp like bloody elephants and test smoke alarms in the morning. The cats. And on and on and on. I don't think I've had a stretch of decent sleep in about three months now, excepting the days in Portland, and it's starting to show.

Three months. And I don't know, maybe it's been longer. The way I feel right now, you could ask me my name and I'd probably get it wrong.

I spent yesterday working on the prolegomenon for #60. Spooky went down to her parents place in South County. I wrote the prolegomenon. Which is the longest it's ever been for any issue of Sirenia Digest. Over two thousand words. So, I wrote two thousand words yesterday, it just wasn't fiction. It was an odd sort of mystery. All will be revealed— to subscribers (which you could be, if you subscribed) —in the fullness of time.

I've learned a surprising amount of Slovak, Croatian, and Hungarian the last week or so.

I'm behind on almost everything. For example, I was supposed to hand in the ms. for Two Worlds and In Between at the end of November, and that's not going to happen. And then there are things I need to send to people. I have a list. I actually do. The poem I need to send out to everyone who donated for Spooky's birthday present, way back in June. A copy of Silk to the person who won it on the seventeenth anniversary of the day I began the novel. Now, I need to get the blog PDF out the everyone who's asked (hopefully today). I have a painting I began a month ago.

I squander so much of my evenings on MMORPGs because the days writing without having slept leave me too tired to do anything constructive with the nights.

The problem of time displacement enter into the equations.

I just need to sleep.

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Last night, two movies, both surprisingly, unexpectedly good. First, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer (2009), which I think really only works if you've subjected yourself to the idiotic hell of Second Life or the Sims. This is the third time now that I've seen sf, in film, address the SL thing. First in Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates (2009), then in Caprica, and now in Gamer. The latter adds a sort of Death Race edge. But there's no mistaking Castle's "Society" as anything but the SL mainland. Unless, of course, you've been smart enough or lucky enough to have never "visited" the SL mainland. Or SL in general. And, of course, the film had Micheal C. Hall, which never hurts. I will also note that all three— Gamer, Caprica, and Surrogates — fared poorly at the box office/ratings, and I suspect, in truth, this is because the number of people who've experienced what's being criticized is so very tiny. Not sure if I'd recommend Gamer to just anyone, as mileage will vary greatly. But if you're a recovering SL addict (like me), I think it's a must see.

The second film, Don McKellar's Last Night (1998), is a quiet little Canadian affair about the last night before the end of the world, as everyone in Toronto counts down to midnight and the end. Exactly what fate is befalling mankind is never named, which doesn't matter in the least, because this is a film about the characters, not the disaster. The disaster (which can pretty much be puzzled out, if you're paying attention) is only the catalyst. I'd never even heard of the film before last night, which is odd. Also, it had David Cronenberg. I definitely recommend it, unless you're more interested in special effects than characterization. Last Night has virtually no special effects, which makes it all the more effective.

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I suppose I should go drink my coffee— which has gotten cold —and try to salvage the day.