Caitlín R. Kiernan

I'll make no apologies for the tone of yesterday's post. There are no regrets. I will only offer an opaque excuse, that I have been made a party to what is, in my estimation, a sickening tragedy. One that could have easily been prevented. One I tried to prevent. And now I will carry the fact of it in my head for years.

And so, yeah, the fury's going nowhere soon. So, do not attempt to console me. It's amazing how many people on the internet are unable to comprehend that trying to calm a rabid animal only gets them bitten. Oh, and then they whine about how unfair it is they've been bitten. Poor fucking idiots.

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Today there is work, which part of me needs badly. Never mind my having finished a novel day before yesterday. It's not that I love the work; it's that the work keeps me sane by filling a void. So, yes, work, important work, then my psychiatrist before dinner. There's a prescription.

And speaking of work, I have begun to realize there's presently confusion over the two books I've written this year, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and Blood Oranges. The first – The Drowning Girl: A Memoir – took me about a year and a half to write, and is, by far, my best novel to date. The second – Blood Oranges - took me forty-five days to write, and if you think of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir as, oh, let's say a gourmet meal, then Blood Oranges is the tasty, but fluffy and insubstantial, desert that comes afterwards.

The Drowning Girl: A Memoir will be out from Penguin in March 2012.

Blood Oranges hasn't yet sold.

And while I'm at it:

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Me (Volume One) will be out, I think, in September (or maybe October) from Subterranean Press. If you've not ordered, you need to do so.

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart will be released by Subterranean Press sometime in 2012.

And there's a lot more, and it's awesome, but if I told you, I really would have to kill you. No joke.

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Yesterday, I read two stories from The Book of Cthulhu. Used to be, I never read the anthologies my stories appeared in. Don't know why. I just never wanted to do it. But, the last year or so I've been reading some of the books with my stories. Anyway, yesterday I read two of the twenty-seven (I think it's twenty-seven) stories in The Book of Cthulhu. The first, John Langan's "The Shallows" is actually quite brilliant. It's unexpected, and fresh, and comes at you sideways. It's not what you think it is. These are all good things. The other was Thomas Ligotti's "Nethescurial," a very Ligottian take on the Lovecraftian found manuscript and the Lovecraftian malign artifact. And of course it was brilliant. It was Thomas fucking Ligotti.

But I fear there's a lot of this book I'm not going to like, stories I'll skip over. Because the author has chosen to use parody in her or his approach HPL, and that's just not my thing.

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Yesterday, after a lot of work and email, the "day off" began about three p.m. We drove south and west almost to the Connecticut state line, to Westerly and on down to Watch Hill. To the lighthouse at Watch Hill. We took the narrow, winding road out to the lighthouse, and sat on the sea wall. To the west, the protected waters of Little Narragansett Bay were still and quiet. A flock of cormorants sunned themselves on rotting pilings. On the east side of the point, though, the waves were still wild. Now and then, the sun through the spray off the tops of the waves created the briefest of rainbows behind them. We watched surfers a while, then drove east to Moonstone Beach.

As I've said, Moonstone has many moods. And I saw another new one yesterday. I'd expected piles of pebbles and all manner of unusual strandings and flotsam. My expectation is irrelevant. The beach looked stripped raw. I can think of no other way to describe it. There's been a tremendous amount of erosion during the storm. The tide was coming in, and there were odd sandbars and eddies, and the crashing waves – some easily six to eight feet high – were coming in from the west, the east, the southeast, the southwest, in no discernible (gods, the English language is retarded) pattern. The air reeked overwhelmingly of dead fish, though not a dead fish was in evidence. The usual cobbles were almost entirely absent. The waters in the breaker zone were an ugly greenish black, loaded with sediment and all manner of...well...dead things. Mostly plant matter. Only the Piping Plovers seemed to be happy with the state of things, dashing about madly at the water's edge. I could see that the waves had overtopped the dunes and the sea had reached both Trustom and Card ponds. It was the sight of a place you trust as being the incarnation of calm, seen after terrible violence has occurred. But the error is mine. Panthalassa has no interest in my moods, impressions, or needs, and if I thought otherwise, I'd be a fool. Moonstone will heal, in time.

Between the ponds, there were birdwatchers, and we had our monoculars with us. We spotted a Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea) and three Semipalmated Plovers (Charadrius semipalmatus), both new to us.

We drove on to Narragansett, but there was no power. So we couldn't get dinner at Iggy's or at George's (which is actually in Galilee). We did manage to piss at a Cumberland Farms. Their power was out, but they let us use a Bic lighter. It's amazing how dark a women's room can be. At sunset, we drove past Scarborough Beach, and Narragansett Beach. The surf was heavy at the latter, but not as heavy as I'd expected. There were dozens of surfers in the water, most seeming a bit disappointed. All in all, we saw far less damage than I'd expected. And then we came home.

And that was yesterday. Oh, except for three wasted hours in Second Life. If you tell me you like it dark, and then bale when it gets rough, and without so much as a "good night," you're a simpering weasel, and it's really as simple as that.

Wrathfully,
Aunt Beast

Something like eight hours of sleep last night, and this morning I am much improved.

I wrote only 631 words yesterday. I am amazed I was able to write anything at all. But, here's the thing. When I set this 1,500-word a day obstacle course for myself, I devised a modest sort of cushion. The Word Bank. Each day I must write 1,500 words, all the way to January 31st. But I knew something would go wrong, eventually. So, I try to write as much more than 1,500 words/per day as possible. Those extra words go into the Word Bank. Savings against a rainy day. As of yesterday, I'd accumulated 1,017 words in the Word Bank. That meant that, to stay on schedule, I had only to write 483 words yesterday. And I actually wrote 631. So, while this leaves the Word Bank momentarily depleted, it does mean I am not yet entirely screwed.

Meanwhile, Spooky learned this morning that Book and Tackle in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, has been demolished. Go back to my entries from our trip to Rhode Island in July and August and there's a photo of Book and Tackle somewhere. It figures. Whatever makes a place special, it cannot much longer endure. They also took out Watch Hill Pizza, which has relocated to Connecticut. I predict that next time we're in Watch Hill, a combo Starbuck's/Dunkin' Donuts will have been erected on the spot, there where the road curves towards to lighthouse, and above the combo there shall be condos. That's the holy commercial triptych of early 21st Century America — Starbuck's, Dunkin' Donuts, and condos (from the low 200s). Okay, well, maybe the Dunkin' Donuts part's not true outside Rhode Island (where one of the damn things occupies every other square foot), but you can substitute some other chain, if you wish. Book and Tackle will be mourned and missed.

My thanks to Sarah C., who writes re: Daughter of Hounds:

I just wanted to tell you that I have been reading your work for the past eight years of my life. I've read and reread my copies of The Dreaming because the stories you wrote are some of my favorite of all The Sandman-type books.

So tonight I went to Powell's bookstore here in Portland Oregon and bought a copy of your latest book. It's now four hours later, and one hundred and fifty-seven pages in. I am tired and excited about going to sleep because I want to wake up fresh faced so I am able to read the rest tomorrow. I hope that this book gets a wide audience of readers, and I will push this on all of my friends. Thanks for filling my head with amazing stories.

157 pp.? Let's see. That's the start of Chapter Four ("Woonsocket"). Anyway, thank you, Sarah. And to everyone else reading this journal, I do hope that if you have not already acquired, by whatever means, a copy of Daughter of Hounds, that you will do so today. There's a lot riding on this one.

Yesterday is all delirium, more or less. A murky blur of sleep deprivation. After the writing, I had a half-hour nap before dinner. Spooky got pizza from Fellini's (the one on Ponce, as the Candler Park location is being remodeled). We read the first 85 pages of Christopher Priest's The Prestige. Aside from the annoying present-day frame, it is quite good.

Right. Now, time to get back on the horse, as They are wont to say. A long day of words ahead of me...