greygirlbeast: (Narcissa)
The subject line above sort of squiggled out of my brainmeats just now. It's something left unexpressed in my all night conversation with [livejournal.com profile] readingthedark, which ended only as the sun was rising. I do hate sunrise, which is odd, because I didn't used to hate sunrise. There was a time I loved the sight, and it meant nothing more than that the sun was rising. I think it's come to mean, instead, a failure to find the nocturnal sleep of Good Christian Folk. But yes, Geoffrey visited last night. We ate calzones and talked. Mostly, we talked. About books and writing and publishing, drugs and sex and movies, cults and magick and whether or not the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would turn me away (that's not the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of course, not 1888 to 1908, but the New and Improved Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). Towards the end, it all became a blur, but I assume he has returned safely to Framingham.

Gloomy out there. Gloomy and wet. Same as yesterday.

Yesterday.

I think the only work I actually accomplished was of the email variety. I think. Yeah, I'm pretty sure of that. My piercing appointment was at 5 p.m., and before then I went with Spooky, out into the drizzle, to the pharmacy (to get my new meds) and then the vet (to get Sméagol's meds). As for the piercing, that part went very, very well. If you're in the Providence area, and I strongly recommend RockStar Body Piercing. It's very probably the most positive experience I've ever had with piercing. My labret had closed, and had to be repierced, and both my ears were pierced again, because the lowermost holes weren't centered quite right for stretching. I've begun with six-gauge glass plugs, and within a year or so I should be up to the 5/8th of an inch plugs I'm aiming for (about the width of a nickel). It's nice having the labret back. It's my original 1995 labret, not the one I wore for a while later on, beginning on March 5, 2006. As soon as Jef was done with my lip, he asked, "How does it feel?" And I replied, "Nostalgic."

Afterwards, Spooky got some new shoes, and I tried on a pair of boots that I love, but can't possibly presently afford. Spooky says of her new shoes, "I like my new shoes. And they have hot pink on them. Which is a masculine color."

She's such a fucking butch.

The editor for whom I'm writing "Fake Plastic Trees" loves the Story Thus Far, so I have to get back to work on that immediately. I need to speak with my agent this evening, because I seem to have a plan. Which is sort of new for me.

Cold Spring is reluctantly giving way to Spring. Many of the trees are showing a spray of green, and flowers are opening. I heave a twice hourly sigh of relief.

This morning, I slept seven hours, and it was some of the best sleep I've had in weeks. Not perfect. There were the nightmares, and they were bad. But, still, better sleep.

This entry's sort of a muddle, kittens. Yesterday was actually a pretty decent day, as my days go. You'd think I could have made a better entry of it. Alas.

Freshly Perforated,
Aunt Beast
greygirlbeast: (Bowie3)
Yesterday was yesterday. Today isn't.

Which ought to be obvious, but there you go.

People do nice things for me, and it will never cease to amaze me. All I do to deserve this is make shit up.

Yesterday, as I was saying, we did some housecleaning. It was, theoretically, an off day. We went to the market and drugstore ("chemist" just sounds so much cooler, but I bow to regional convention). We stopped Outside of White Electric Coffee on Westminster and bought a marvelous green ceramic bowl from Unkle Thirsty's Cups. They'd set up a couple of tables on the sidewalk in front of the coffeehouse, and it was so bitterly cold...and I needed a good ceramic bowl for the gull and cormorant bones from West Cove and Moonstone. They were playing music and dancing around trying to stay warm. The sky was slate.

Back home, I did more work on my next painting, my painting in progress, Black Ships Ate the Sky, and yes that's a direct reference to the Current 93 album. I used a great quantity of Napthol Crimson and not much else. Thus far, it's about the only color I've used on the painting.

There was more of Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Kraken: An Anatomy, reading and listening. Someone wanted to know if the footnotes are included in Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; they are. After dinner, we watched more of the most recent season of Deadliest Catch. We're taking this season slow, knowing what's coming. I don't think of Deadliest Catch as "reality television." It's much more like an ongoing documentary. Which raises interesting questions, which are probably easily solved. Still later, there was very good rp in Insilico. Grendel is moving towards what may be a very terrible moment or may be her salvation, and only time will tell. She's trying hard not to bolt and run, which is what she's always done before. But before she was never pregnant with a human child. And after the rp, because Spooky and I are bad kids, and because I never want to ever sleep (except I do), we played WoW, and Shaharrazad and Suraa reached Level 82.

Today, I have to work.
greygirlbeast: (wookie)
Perhaps I've finally found the one copy-editor on earth who doesn't gripe my ass, or perhaps I'm mellowing in my old age. Either way, I made it through the first 151 pages of the CEM of Daughter of Hounds without having a fit, throwing anything, calling upon the wrath of the Old Ones to smite all humanity, or getting indigestion. Frell, I didn't even have to write stet all that many times. The copy-editor actually caught, you know, mistakes, and there was almost no attempt to rewrite my text. What's the world coming to? If I can't count on copy-editors to screw up my mss., what can I count on? There were only a couple of things that made me groan, and they were minor and easily stetted. The mistaken insistence that both Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops should be lowercased because they are in common usage. No way. Not until the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature says so, and I know they never shall. Even the Chicago Manual of Style (15) defers to the ICZN. Oh, there was one amusing bit, when the ce mistook a quote from Poe (née Ann Danielewski) for a quote from that other Poe and inserted Edgar Allan. But that provided levity, more than anything else. Amazon preorders on Daughter of Hounds are going quite well, by the way, reaching as high as 7,797 yesterday. Like I said, order now if you want a first printing.

Anyway, that was late in the day, the work on the CEM (5 p.m. - 7 p.m.). Before that, I wrote the first 1,124 words on "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ghoul" (for Tales from the Woeful Platypus). I'd not expected it to be set in the 19th Century, which means it'll be my second 19th-Century piece in a row (following "The Cryomancer's Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)," which is set in some unspecified year not long after the American Civil War). And it's a ghoul story, which I suppose is obvious from the title. This is the first time my "multiverse" has overlapped with my erotica. All in all, yesterday was the sort of writing day I needed to be having every damn day for the last three weeks. Then I'd not be so horribly behind.

Only nine short days remaining until we depart for New England.

What else about yesterday? Well, there was much needed rain for most of the day, though the humidity was so high that when we took our evening walk at 10 p.m. it was still uncomfortably warm. I tweaked my vinaigrette recipe and made a second batch. Then, after dinner, we went out to Borders, which has been garishly remodeled, and picked up a copy of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which will be our first trip novel. Somehow, I've yet to read a word by McCarthy, but this shall now be remedied. I did note that there were copies of both Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels on the shelves. I played about an hour's worth of Final Fantasy X between eleven and midnight, in anticipation of FF XII. And that was yesterday.

The drad new icon was snurched from [livejournal.com profile] matociquala (Elizabeth Bear), by the way. Long have I envied it and plotted this theft...

Er...there was something I was going to say about my MySpace page, but now I can't recall it was. Ah, well. Please have a look at the three remaining eBay auctions. Thank ye kindly.
greygirlbeast: (redeye)
I've been up almost two hours now, but I'm not awake. There's a Red Bull in the fridge with my name on it. Tomorrow I think the labret will be sufficiently healed that I can go back to coffee, thank the gods. At any rate, this will ramble, because I'm not awake.

You'd have thought the bowl of leftover chili I had for breakfast would have helped.

Things went well yesterday. I did over a thousand words on "Untitled 20" (because I totally scrapped "Untitled 19" and started over). Then Spooky and I had a long walk. We saw neither woodpeckers nor crows. Spooky found a dime on the street. Back home, there was a package from [livejournal.com profile] docbrite, filled with all manner of wondrous things, including an assortment of Mardi Gras throws, a neon-pink alien finger puppet, two Elmer's Gold Brick Egg Pecan Melt-Aways, and a Le Fée Verte absinthe T-shirt from the Talk of the Cocktail lit fest, all of which helped to keep my spirits up. I went back to the iBook and wrote another thousand or so words, bringing my daily total up to 2,073 words. I'll easily finish "Untitled 20" today. I might even find a title for it.

Later, I did a Wikipedia entry on the basal anklyosaur Gargoyleosaurus parkpinorum, then we had the aforementioned leftover chili for dinner, then we strung blue lights in the hallway. We'd gone out meaning to rent Walk the Line, but all the copies at Videodrome were out and neither of us was up for the hell of Blockbuster. So we rented Tony Scott's Domino instead, which is actually an extremely cool film. Mickie Rourke is, well, whatever Mickie Rourke has become, generally a delight to watch, and Keira Knightly turns in a thoroughly satisfying performance. But the Tom Waits cameo alone was worth the rental price. Maybe we can find Walk the Line tonight. Anyway, after all the writing and walking and the movie we were too tired to wait up for the comet. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps this one will slip past without me seeing more of it than a couple of photographs, which would be a pity.

Oh, I'd meant to say, I was very pleased and surprised to see a clip from The Fifth Element in one of the montages during the Oscars.

Bill Schafer at subpress asked me to mention that we're down to the last 20 copies of To Charles Fort, With Love and the last 29 copies of Frog Toes and Tentacles. Also, I think subpress is still taking orders for the hardbacks of the False Starts and The Merewife chapbooks, but, alas, I have no links for those. Note, also, that I've agreed to do a Dancy vignette that will accompany the limited edition of Alabaster. This will not be an erotic vignette, but it will be a vignette nonetheless.

I have begun to dread the editorial letter for Daughter of Hounds. I was wondering when that would start.

A couple of quick science notes, both courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] sclerotic_rings. A second red spot has appeared on Jupiter, and Berkeley is now displaying the juvenile Triceratops horridus skull discovered back in 1997 (at first mistaken for a pachycephalosaur skull). I'm looking forward to the description which will shortly appear in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Okay. Time for me to go. The platypus isn't going to pimp itself...

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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