Caitlín R. Kiernan

On this day in 1965, the stars were right, and the Old Ones dropped some especially gnarly acid and, in the throes of their LSD-induced mischief, delivered unto Iceland the sparkly, polymorphous girl-thing duly named Björk Guðmundsdóttir. So don't tell me we don't have proof of alien civilizations. Hamingjusamur Björk Day!

Today is going to be weird. I feel it coming, like a great black tsunami.

As for yesterday, well...let's put it this way: Fuck me dead. After spending three days I could ill afford to lose trying to write "Sexing the Weird" I realized (about 6 p.m. last night) that I was writing shit and, at least, had the good sense to stop. Eighteen pages of shit. And if I'd kept going, I'd have wasted another day or two, and have thirty-two pages of shit. So, I've just emailed Bill Schafer to tell him there will be no introduction to Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, or if there will be, it will be very short. Something like, "This is my weird sex book about weird sex." Only I'll have it translated into Icelandic first. Or Finnish. Or maybe Basque. Basque is suitably weird. But yeah, washout. And throwing away words is among the most distasteful things I have to do as a writer, which is one reason I do not write in drafts. But better to know when you've made a horrid mess of things than to be such a moron that you just keep on keeping on.

Last night, I took a hot bath and tried to drown my horror at all those lost words in innumerable hours of Rift. Iron Pine Peaks was hit by the Endless Air Invasion®. No, really. I think one of the programmers spilled his Cheetos and Mountain Dew in a server. The baddies just kept fucking respawning, and there were no air rifts to close to stop the attacks, so an impromptu alliance of Guardians and Defiants were forced to band together to protect the imbued wardstone outside the Chancel of Labors against the merciless forces of Crucia's Storm Legion. This insanity continued about an hour and forty-five minutes before we realized the game had burped, and the "boss" was never comin' round to end the event. But, hey...stuff blew up. Thank you, Mountain Dew.

Just this second got word from Subterranean Press that preorders on Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart "will start soon, likely in a few weeks." So, there you go. Ba da pa pa. Oh, and signature pages are on their way to me. Whee!

Er...I guess that's it for now. But you should join us in Rift for RP and party favors, ice cream and yetis. Defiant side, Faeblight shard. Watchers of the Unseen. Our guild especially needs warriors. Bahmi make good warriors. But, yeah. Come. Play. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it. I shit you not, kittens.

Meanwhile, I have an obsidian tsunami to face.

Virðingarfyllst,
Föður–Eða Móðursystir Óþokki

I've been looking at the images and reading the news coming out of Japan for the past hour, and I can't do it anymore for now. This is what an 8.9 earthquake and a 33-foot tsunami does when there are people and cities (and nuclear power plants) nearby. I have no friends or family in Japan, but I know those who do. Absurdly, I keep thinking, this might have been so much worse. And, not so absurdly, I think, "It may yet be."

George Takei just tweeted, "Today we are all Japanese. Give $10 to help." He included a link to the American Red Cross' donation page. Also, you can text REDCROSS to 90999.

---

Yesterday was all proofreading. Spooky read me the first four chapters of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Which amounted to 7.5 hours reading time, 218 pages, 48,631 words. Today, we read the next three chapters. We were reading until 11:30 p.m. (CaST).

Hearing it, yes, I know that this is the best novel I've written. I feared I'd never write one better than The Red Tree. Yet, here it is. And I have no idea how readers will react, and part of me truly doesn't care. The other part of me cares, but that's mostly because I spend so much time worrying about money. This is my book, and Imp's story. There is little to be gained, at this point, by fretting over the things that it's not, or the minds that won't be open to how I've told this very weird tale.

There was no time for work on Two Worlds and In Between yesterday. All we have left to read over is the thirty+-thousand words of The Dry Salvages, and I expect we'll do that on Wednesday.

sovay will be arriving Saturday evening, and will be here until Tuesday, to assist with making all these line edits, getting both these mss. ready for their respective editors. Whether or not she knows it, it's a rescue mission. Hopefully, with Sonya's help, both of these mss. will be out of my hands by next Friday (the 18th). Then, I get a couple of days off before I have to start work on Sirenia Digest #64.

Still coughing. The less I talk, the less I cough, but you know how that goes.

---

ellen_datlow has posted the "honorable mentions" list to her annual year's best, and I'm pleased to see I'm named nine times, and all but two from the digest:

"As Red as Red," Haunted Legends
"Exuvium," Sirenia Digest 48
"Fairy Tale of the Maritime," Sirenia Digest 57
"O is for Oyster," Sirenia Digest 57
"R is for Radula," Sirenia Digest 57
"On the Reef," Sirenia Digest 59
"Sanderlings” (Subterranean Press chapbook)
"Tempest Witch” Sirenia Digest 54
"The Prayer of Ninety Cats,” Sirenia Digest #60

---

After all that reading yesterday, we were too tired for anything but a movie (and, probably, we were too tired for that). We watched Ivan Reitman's Stripes (1981), which seemed quite a bit more ridiculous than when I was seventeen and saw it for the first time (theatrical release). Then again, it's still very funny, and compared to most comedies released today (Adam Sandler, I'm looking at you), Stripes is fucking Mensa material. I think the weirdest thing about watching Stripes again was seeing Sean Young the year before she played Rachael in Blade Runner (three years before she played Chani in Dune).

Okay. Time to make the doughnuts....