Caitlín R. Kiernan

I just figured it out. I'm not an insomniac, after all. Instead, I'm clearly suffering from hypnophobia, which is also called somniphobia. An irrational fear of sleep. Why didn't anyone ever tell me? Hypnophobia sounds ever so much cooler than insomnia.

So, in the weird-shit-happens category, yesterday I complained about some doofus on Amazon.com who suspects I "just threw in an ending" when writing The Red Tree. Which led robyn_ma to make a funny joke about a magical store called Endings where writers buy, you know, endings. Which led to my wanting to write a story about that very store. So, yesterday I wrote 1,010 words on a new piece (for Sirenia Digest #61) titled "—30—". Don't worry...I asked her permission, and she granted it, so I'm not committing the very crime I was complaining about in yesterday's entry.

Speaking of which, teacup_carousel has informed me there's a cosmetics company, Archetype Cosmetics, which has evidently named a number of products for my work: So far I've counted Low Red Moon, Child of Hounds, Glass Coffin (which is perhaps not damning in its self but when you consider that the next one is -)Salmagundi, Salambo, Madam Terpsichore and The Gargoyle Trees.

Thing is, this is all perfectly legit. I'm even a tiny bit flattered. I just wish they'd told me, so I could have been a tiny bit flattered earlier on. Also, a word of caution, apparently Archetype Cosmetics has a history of taking a very, very, very long time to fill orders, so consider yourselves warned and don't count this mention as any sort of endorsement.

My grateful thanks to everyone who took a few moments yesterday to comment on The Red Tree over at Amazon.com. It helps. It genuinely does.

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Last night, we finished reading blackholly's Valiant. Whereas I very much liked Tithe, I actually loved Valiant. Where the hell was this book when I was sixteen? Street kids, magical heroin, junkies strung out on pixie dust, intrigue in rat-infested New York subways, hot troll action, goth baby dykes, murderous fay women with hooves, and a glass sword. It's a YA novel that isn't afraid to let the monsters be monstrous, and that understands that monsters can be heroes as well as villains, and that has the nerve to cast a troll as the male love interest. Not a prettied-up troll, not the whole cop-out "Beauty and the Beast" shtick where the troll turns out to be an ensorceled prince charming, but an actual, factual troll. So, thank you, Holly. Team Ravus! You rock. Now, on to Ironside.

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The hypnophobia has me feeling— pretty much literally —like I've been hit by a train (not that I've ever been hit by a train, but I think this is how it would feel), so I'm wrapping this up. I think I'm going to fill the bathtub with black coffee and aspirin and lie in it a while. There's broken glass and razor blades embedded beneath my flesh.

Yours in Pain,
Aunt Beast

I realized over breakfast (coffee and ramen with broccoli), that I've not left the House since we went to East Beach on Tuesday. I can surely count on one hand the number of days in August and the second half of July I've gone Outside. And if that's not precisely true. It sure as hell feels that way. I have no idea why I've gotten this bad again. The meds have my seizures under control. The depression is in check. The weather's mostly been cooler. I just forget to leave the House. Yet when I do, I'm usually glad I did. This whole thing confounds me.

Yesterday was spent getting through an enormous mountain of email, pertaining to everything from the "Best of" project to "The Maltese Unicorn" to Sirenia Digest #57. I may have finalized the table of contents for the "Best of" volume. If so, there are twenty-nine stories (well, twenty-eight and a poem), including a novella, The Dry Salvages. The word count comes in at ~220 thousand words. For an idea of how big a book that will be, The Ammonite Violin and Others is only about 80k words. Certainly, it's by far the longest book I've ever done.

One of the more difficult aspects of this, so far, beyond simply choosing the stories, has involved dating the older stories, those from the nineties. Back then, I wasn't so good at keeping records. When you've only written maybe a dozen short stories, it's easy to recall precisely when you wrote each one. But many, many years later, when you've done over two hundred short stories, those memories fade to the point of invisibility. Much of yesterday was spent trying to date "Tears Seven Times Salt" and "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun." I genuinely thought that the former had been written late in 1995, maybe in December of that year. But searching through old correspondence (at least I have that), I discovered, no, it was, in fact, written in the summer of 1994, late in June or very early in July. It was the first story I wrote after "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)," and the third story I wrote after moving from Birmingham to Athens. So, my memories were off by almost a year and a half. As for "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun," I'm still trying to date it. I thought it was written in 1995, but it's beginning to look as though it was actually written during the first half of 1996.

Oh, by the way, while I chose "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun (Murder Ballad No. 1)" over "Lafayette (Murder Ballad No. 2)," both "Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956)" and "The Road of Pins" made the cut.

I have tried to select at least one story for every year between 1993 and 2007, but it's starting to look as if there won't be a 1995 story. Which, given the wretchedness of that year, might be just as well.

As for a title, I've been trying for days to think of one. I certainly am not going with nothing but The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan: Volume One. Then last night, Spooky and Bill Schafer both made the same suggestion, independently, which still has me a little freaked out. Both have suggested I call the book Two Worlds and In Between (a line from the Sisters of Mercy's "Lucretia My Reflection"). The book does happen to contain my zombie story "Two Worlds, and In Between." And maybe this should be the book's title, if only by dint of the peculiar coincidence of two people suggesting that same title on the same night. Also, the title is not inappropriate, having more than a single relevant interpretation relative to the book and my work in general. So, maybe, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Volume One.

I'll post the table of contents tomorrow.

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We began two new auctions yesterday. Both are a bit special. The first is the auction of the first painting I have ever offered for sale, Study 1 for Yellow. The second is for a lettered copy of Tales from the Woeful Platypus (you can choose from M, R, or Z), which comes with a hand-made Beanie platypus (made by Spooky). Please have a look. Thanks.

1. I'm sort of sorry we're not able to see the Winter Olympics, having chosen to forgo cable and all back when we moved in here. I haven't really missed television, and I generally despise sports, but I enjoy the Olympics, especially the winter games. I suppose, for me, it's closer to what I consider genuine athleticism than the macho parade of mainstream team sports.

2. Yesterday, we made it through the galley pages for "Sanderlings" and the typescript of "Untitled 35" (which I may retitle "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction [as Beauty]"). I'm very fond of both pieces, though they are very, very different sorts of things. In "Sanderlings," I'm sort of leaning in my Shirley Jackson direction (had she ever written Lovecrfatian sf), while in the latter I'm leaning more towards my William Gibson/William Burroughs/Philip K. Dick influences. Yet, both stories treat the pollution of the human body, as an extension of environmental pollution. They're almost the same story, told in radically different ways. It's hard to believe I wrote them only a couple of months apart. They sound like they were written years apart. "Sanderlings" is all soft-spoken, lonely despair, and "Untitled 35" is a clamorous, clanging cacophony of violence. I will say that I think "Sanderlings" is my best short story in quite some time, and I hope it gets some recognition.

3. Yesterday afternoon, Spooky drove over to the East Side, and I asked her to get more photos of the Bridge Street Bridge demolition. Andy Warhol and his soup cans are gone now. There are photos behind the cut:

( 12 February 2010 )

4. So, as promised, I now have a transcript of one of my Insilico roleplays online. You may see it here. It's a very odd one, not the usual Insilico fare, but that's what you get when you trap an AI in a microcomputer inside a briefcase (in this case, Xiang 2.0a). So, here you go, "In Which Molly Longshadow Spawns a 'God.'" Also, the backstory for the Xiangs is up*. Of course, as these things go, I bother to put up all that backstory, and immediately things change. Last night, the Internal Affairs Director of Gemini Corporation decided X2.0b was too great a liability (i.e., she was incapable of reconciling her directives with the inherent contradictions of the Gem loyalty imprinting, looped, and went a bit bahooties; can't have a robot trying to enforce the letter of the law when you're not really trying to enforce the law, just trade one set of corruptions for another, more profitable, set). So...the X2.0b AI was shunted and boxed, and its body was...disposed of in a manner Gemini Corp. saw fitting. However...because plots must thicken...it is being replaced with a cyborg cloned from bits of Nareth Nishi's DNA (no, no connection to the old New Babbage Nareth) and an elaborate mnemonic imprinting and conditioning. A brain-in-a-bot cyborg built better suited to black ops (kept on a very short leash), the same serial killer that led to the creation of X1.0. Of course, Nareth 2.0 thinks it's the original Nareth, with it's brain in a robotic body. Round and round the mulberry bush....

* Note that it took me more than an hour to write this transcript, which is why I won't be doing much of this.

Yesterday, I did 1,031 words on the story that was, previously, titled "Teratophobia." Now, thanks to cliff52, it will be titled "Sanderlings," as he pointed out what a nice title that would make, not even knowing how well the title fits this story. It had not occurred to me until his comment to yesterday's entry.

Not a whole lot else to say about yesterday. It was cloudy, then sunny, then cloudy, then sunny. That sort of day. It's chilly here in Providence (sunny today), but nowhere near as cold as this time last year. I signed books for eBay customers, and Spooky went to the post office. We shared a marvelous corned beef and cole-slaw sandwich for lunch (which I only occasionally eat). While I read, she got Chinese takeout for our dinner. Later, we watched Fight Club again, which was, not inappropriately, the first movie we ever saw together at the theatre. And that was a decade ago, which just fucking astounds me. Anyway, I got to bed about 2:30 a.m., and slept until 11:30, something like nine hours (!!!), the most I've slept at a stretch in..well...a very long time, and I did it without Ambien.

And now, here's a third set of photos from our trip to Green Hill on Wednesday. This one I call, "In the Bunker":

( 18 November 2009, Part 3 )

The LJ will now be known as "Unfit for Mass Consumption," until I grow weary of that title. At least it's an accurate description of the blog, and its author, and her writing. By the way, if you can tell me the film that title references, you win...absolutely nothing.

I've just received the illustration for "Shipwrecks Above" from Vince. So, I'm hoping that subscribers will have Sirenia Digest #46 by midnight EST.

As for yesterday, and the night before yesterday, and the day before that...

All of Monday was spent tweaking the ms. for The Ammonite Violin & Others, getting it ready to send to Subterranean Press. It needs at least one more day of tweaking, which I expect is what I'll be doing tomorrow. I did decide that the collection will be dedicated to Diane Arbus, and that the next one will be dedicated to Henry Darger, because it just seems right. Oh, there was also interview-related business on Monday. Turns out, I have two more to do, both in October, and then I'm saying "no" to everything until after I write the next novel. Well, unless it's Oprah fucking Winfrey or The New Yorker or something of that stripe. Not that The New Yorker and Oprah fucking Winfrey are of the same stripe, but there you go. Anyway, here's a link to one of the most recent interviews. I think it's actually one of the better I've given recently, if only because I'm so sick of doing them that it's a bit more "open" than usual.

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Monday night, we discovered that Netflix is streaming Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (1990). I'd not seen it since the original theatrical release, and I wanted to see how well it had aged over the last 19 years. It's not too dated, and I still find it enjoyable. But I do think a really sublime premise was wasted on this film. One gets the feeling that the director or writer or who the hell ever got his paws on this rather grand premise (med students exploring what lies beyond brain death), but had absolutely no idea what to do with it, and so coughed up something flaccid (after death, we will all be haunted by our guilty consciousnesses).

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Yesterday, not much work. There was a veil of anger I could not seem to think through (it's been with me a lot lately), so we took in an afternoon matinée of Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates. Again, great idea, not so stunning execution. Yes, someone needs to make a good sf thriller about the logical consequences of Second Life and the concept of robotic avatars, but, sadly, this is not it. Which is not to say that Surrogates is a bad film. But it's not very bright (which is what it most needed to be). Mostly, it's an okay sf/action flick, and I'd say wait for the DVD. It has some good moments here and there, though they mostly serve to remind one of the unrealized potential. There are some good visuals, and Bruce Willis rarely bores me. But the science has holes you could toss a small planet through (I'm thinking Mercury). We're told, for example, that something like 98% of all humans on Earth (about fourteen years from now) are using surrogates. And I immediately thought, how much do these things cost? Surely, inflation will continue in this future, and a surrogate is an infinitely more complex piece of technology than is, say, an iPod, iPhone, or the best available laptop. So, what charitable organization saw to it that the three billion or so people worldwide living below the poverty level (working from the World Bank's current estimate of people now living on less than $2/day and projected rates of population growth in developing nations) were provided surrogates? Now, maybe this is a future with far fewer people, and one without rampant poverty, but if so, we're not privy to that information.

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Last night, we watched Dominic Sena's Kalifornia (1993), again because I was curious to see how well the film's held up after so many years. Much better than Flatliners, but then, it was a much better film to begin with. Neither Spooky nor I had seen it since it was new. But it still packs a wallop. Brad Pitt's Early Grayce is a joy to watch (a disgusting joy, admittedly), and utterly overshadows poor David Duchovny, who'd not yet grown much of a personality. Juliette Lewis gives one of her best performances, and Michelle Forbes (of whom I'm oddly fond) rounds out the foursome with one of her few genuinely good performances. The cinematography tries a bit too much to look like a Tony Scott film, but the script is sharp enough to make up the difference. So, yeah, still a very fine film, even with the unnecessary epilogue and Duchovny's sleep walking.

We also watched the new episode of Heroes, and another episode of Pushing Daisies. Yesterday, I really wasn't up to much but watching.

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I had a fairly severe seizure yesterday at the market. It's one of the few that's happened any place public, and it left us both deeply shaken. It was violent, but brief. No one did anything stupid, like call an ambulance. Back home, I slept an hour or so, and felt a bit better.

And now, I take my platypus in hand and....

Yesterday, I wrote 1,461 words on the new piece for Sirenia Digest. Which, combined with the writing day I had on Wednesday, leads me to fear that the Forced March of January might have permanently upped my daily word count. The new piece still has no title. I've been more concerned with the narrative fabric than with finding a title. Titles are odd things. If anything harms "suspension of disbelief," I should think it would be the simple fact of a title. I like titles that are poetic and easy on the ears, but more than anything, I see them as an arbitrary means of easily distinguishing one story from another. Humans must name everything, fashioning some false but comforting sense of discretion and walls within a system which is by its nature continuous. Titles and THE END, brackets so one story does not bleed inconveniently into the next. I expect to finish this piece — and find its title — by tomorrow evening, and I need to have the digest finished by, oh, say Tuesday, if I am to avoid drowning in the month's responsibilities.

The new issue of Fantasy Magazine arrived yesterday. There's a review of Daughter of Hounds on p. 50. I believe that I am pleased, or at least somewhat satisfied, to be called "An iconoclastic writer whose work resolutely resists pigeonholing..." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition, 2000) defines iconoclast as 1) One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions, and 2) one who destroys sacred religious images. I wonder what my life would have been like had it gone another way. What's an antonym of iconoclast?

We walked yesterday, though it was a shabby thing compared to our walk on Wednesday. Hardly any sun and a bitter breeze. We walked some ways down Euclid. Spoke with two of the neighborhood cats, who both had feared me perished in the depths of January and were glad to see me alive and shivering.

stsisyphus asks, "Are expatriated extraterrestrials given more or less security clearance?"

More, but only because TPTB know no one is going to believe a word we say.

kiaduran writes, "I turned the final page of Daughter of Hounds last night and wept. It is a magical and unnerving book. Your language is beautiful, vivid and haunting; I simply cannot stop thinking about Soldier and what she found and what she gave up. This is a world I will treasure. Thank you."

You're welcome, and thank you, Rev. Margo.

Tonight is Kid Night, and Spooky has put her foot down and declared it will be Kid Night, so, alas, no lesbian-friendly titty bars this evening. No drunken me. No morning after regrets. It all works out in the end.