Caitlín R. Kiernan

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)

Exquisite bits from 1st Avenue Machine, with Sirenia Digest subscribers in mind. Yes, they are car commercials. You're welcome.

I'm sitting here, trying to wake up, and David Bowie's singing "Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do," and that sent me straight back to the continental-drift dream (see yesterday's entry), and somehow that got me thinking about James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis (and really, hypothesis here should appear with quotation marks), and that led to thoughts of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, who was hypothesizing along these same lines long before Lovelock, and thinking about Vernadsky led to thinking about a song on the new Decemberists CD, "When the War Came," which inevitably led to thoughts of Vavilov (Nikolai Ivanovich), and then that reminded me of Vavilov Crater in the Hertzsprung Basin on Mars, which led me right back around to thoughts of the continental-drift dream. All in about five minutes, which is a fair look at how my brains rolls round and round before the coffee comes to rein it in.

By now, though, I've moved along to the Smashing Pumpkins:

Time is never time at all.
You can never, ever leave without leaving a piece of youth.
And our lives are forever changed,
We will never be the same.
The more you change, the less you feel.

Anyway...

Yesterday isn't a blur. It's a smudge. There are hardly any bits worth saving, much less mentioning here. I never did say anything about coming upon Eryut Village in Final Fantasy XII, did I? That was Saturday night...or Sunday morning. Oh, and thank you, Leh'agvoi, for all the drad new Fran icons. But I was saying, Eryut in the Golmore Jungle. Think Lothlórien relocated in the Amazonian canopy, if the Amazon were on some other planet where everything wants to kill you, and if the elves were digitigrade and had long rabbit-like ears. The place from which Fran came. A whole frelling forest full of Viera. If I am entirely mistaken about the mortality of mind and some conscious portion of ourselves remains after death, I should very much like it if Eryut were my Heaven. Gorgeous. The trees dripped with their haughtiness. I never wanted to leave. But leave I did, last night, to journey on through Golmore, fight a dragon thingy that looked like a moldy, moss-covered ankylosaur, and wind my way through the high, snowy wastes of the Paramina Rift to Mt. Bur-Omisace. By then it was two a.m., bedtime for nixars. That was the only bit of yesterday worth not forgetting.

There was a bit of talk here recently about how I'm not keeping this blog to pass on Sage Advice from the trenches regarding How To Become A Published Writer. However, I think I will now break with my own tradition and offer one unsightly dollop of advice. When you begin to sell stories and maybe even novels, you will be asked to write biographies of yourself. No, it's true. Generally, writers write their own little bio blurbs, the ones that you see on the dust jackets and so forth. It's sad, but true. But that's not the point. They point is that when — or, rather, if — you find yourself writing such a fifty -word encapsulation of your Life Until Now, take care. Think before you commit those thoughts to publication. Choose your words carefully. In parsing the fiction that is your personal history, consider how This May Look a few years further down the road. For groan you will, kupo, if you stumble into this all willy-nilly and topsy-turvy (as did I). For example, if you've worked as a hooker and intend to include that information, say that you were a hooker, not a "sex industry worker." If you were a stripper, do not say you were an "exotic dancer." And if you were a drag queen, do not say that you were, instead, a "female illusionist." Likewise, if you were a garbage man, do not say you were an "urban sanitation technician." If you were a drug dealer, resist the urge to say you were a "freelance recreational pharmaceutical consultant." Do not try to pretty up the past with double-speak. Just open your mouth and spit out the dirty truth. In the long run, you'll be glad you did. Better yet, just leave all this silly dren out and stick to the pertinent facts. Well, the "facts." No one wants to read the Truth, but neither do they want to read wordy attempts to dodge the truth. Avoid that which is irrelevant.

(Reading this back to Spooky, she just asked, "Now from whence to did that come?" to which I replied, "Shut up, you'll see in a moment.")

Do not include the name of your pet hamster, unless you want a terrifying phone call from Harlan Ellison.

Avoid politics.

And pause to consider, when making soaring declarations and proclamations of personal belief that will be printed in these bios, that fifteen or twenty or fifty years from now, someone may read said bio, and even though you are no longer head-over-hills in love with, oh, say Discordianism or the South Beach Diet, that's still what it will say, if that's what you wrote. And most readers perceive an author's bio, regardless of the year it was written, as The Present. Case in point, in the biography for To Charles Fort, With Love, I say that I am a transhumanist. I put it down for the benefit of all posterity (if any). And yet, having now read much more widely from transhumanist literature I discover that I am not a transhumanist after all. Indeed, I discover that, ultimately, I find transhumanism such a generally loathsome, damn near idiotic -ism, almost completely at odds with my deepest beliefs, that I feel I owe the whole world an apology for ever have included myself among them. I may have meant parahumanism (we'll see), but really, what I may have meant is neither here nor there, because it says "transhumanist" and it always will. It's in print, at least until the big space rock vaporizes all examples of The Written Word and I am at last freed from my unfortunate association with that spot of anthropocentric Apollonian nonsense. Stop and think. Blogs may be deleted or revised*. Printed author's bios are forever (or at least until the coming of said space rock).

You don't have to thank me. At least not all of you at once.

Yes, it's going to be an absinthe day...

*Unless they are illegally archived somewhere you cannot access. Ahem.