Not nearly as ill this morning as I was afraid I would be. Yesterday, I loaded up on elderberry extract, zinc, Smith Brothers' cherry cough drops, and with the help of two Red Bulls, managed to get through a long and arduous day of proofreading and reformatting.

As soon as the Afterword (it was going to be an Introduction, but now it shall be an Afterword) for A is for Alien is finished, the ms. will go to Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press, and it will be out of my hands. At least until the page proofs. And I can get back to work on The Red Tree. Well, right after I write a 3,000-word Introduction for Joshi's Arthur Machen collection.

Anyway, after we did another five or six hours of work on the AifA ms., Spooky and I took a mountain of books back to the Woodruff Library at Emory, and then had blisteringly spicy Thai noodle bowls for dinner. After dinner, back home, I suffered an absence seizure (which are beginning to seem almost routine). I crashed on the sofa, too exhausted for anything but the passive comforts of television. We watched an episode of Millennnium, "Maranatha," then the new ep of Deadliest Catch, and then the last episode of Season One of Millennium, "Paper Dove."

And there's this email, from Tim Huntley, regarding Sirenia Digest #29:

"I wanted to offer some (very brief) words on 'Concerning Attrition and Severance'. I am pleased this story was not a hidden piece and that it did make it into the Digest. As well as resembling a disturbing twist on Huis Clos peopled with Cenobites, the piece made me think of Pirandello (well, Six Actors in Search of an Author, to be exact).

"And, on today's anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth, an almost randomly located line from Einige Charaktertypen Aus Der Psychoanalytischen Arbeit (1916): 'Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals are to be reckoned among these "pale" ones.' Perhaps not a citation - or a paper - that has anything truly in common with your story, but it seemed an apposite conjunction of sorts.

"'Flotsam' was another splendid brine-soaked piece which lingered with me and spiraled in my thoughts across this May Day weekend. Together with 'Concerning Attrition...' it made #29 feel like an old-style Digest in that it was, as your Prolegomena informed, comprised of two rich vignettes."

The parallel with Barker's Cenobites seems natural, in retrospect, though, with "Concerning Attrition and Severance," I was trying for something a bit more subtle and a bit less concrete than "The Hellbound Heart." Thank you very much, Tim!

Someone else asked for details on Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder, so I thought I'd post a scan of the cover of Spooky's copy (behind the cut, mais oiu):

( Time of Wonder )

Oh, and here's a marvelous little thing, which I can now stare at to my nerdy heart's content, thanks to sclerotic_rings, the Solar System Visualizer. It even includes numerous extrasolar star systems!

And once again, because it is my Royal Birthday Month, the Amazon wish list thing. A mere 19 days until that dreaded -04...

The sort of thing you think you'll not live to see, and having seen it, you can only marvel that you have:

NASA Spacecraft Photographs Avalanches on Mars

A NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars has taken the first ever image of active avalanches near the Red Planet's north pole. The image shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down.

When you click through to the photos, be sure to click the link for the high rez versions.

First, I figure everyone's already heard about the upcoming asteroid near-miss, and how over at the head temple of the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky we've all been gnashing our teeth, but I thought I'd mention it, anyway.

Also, it turns out that African naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are not only "cold-blooded" mammals, they are incapable of feelings various sorts of pain.

Some scientists are calling for the designation of a new geological epoch, the "Anthropocene." Currently, the Neogene Period is subdivided into three epochs: the Pliocene (5.332 million to 1.806 mybp), Pleistocene (1,808,000 to 11,550 BP), and the Holocene (beginning 11,550 calendar years BP, or about 9600 BC). "The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt's design of the steam engine in 1784."

And finally, just to show that human depravity really is a bottomless fucking pit, 53 sea lions (including 13 pups) have been found massacred in the Galapagos. Their skulls were crushed. They were not skinned. No organs, other meat, or bones were taken. They were simply murdered. Anthropocene, indeed.

So, wonderful images continue to reach Earth from MESSENGER:

MESSENGER Reveals Mercury’s Geological History

Shortly following MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury on January 14, 2008, the spacecraft’s Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument acquired this image as part of a mosaic that covers much of the sunlit portion of the hemisphere not viewed by Mariner 10. Images such as this one can be read in terms of a sequence of geological events and provide insight into the relative timing of processes that have acted on Mercury's surface in the past.

The double-ringed crater pictured in the upper right of this image appears to be filled with smooth plains material, perhaps volcanic in nature. This crater was subsequently disrupted by the formation of a prominent scarp (cliff), the surface expression of a major crustal fault system, that runs alongside part of its southern rim and may have led to the uplift seen across a portion of the crater’s floor. A smaller crater in the upper left of the image has also been cut by the scarp, showing that the fault beneath the scarp was active after both of these craters had formed.

This MESSENGER image was taken from a distance of about 18,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) from the surface of Mercury, at 20:03 UTC, about 58 minutes after the closest approach point of the flyby. The region shown is about 500 kilometers (300 miles) across, and craters as small as 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) can be seen in this image.

And...

A truly gigantic new species of the dinomyid rodent Josephoartigasia, christened J. monesi, has been discovered from the Pliocene of Uruguay. The skull indicates an animal roughly three metres in length and weighing about one tonne, making it the largest known rodent.


Josephoartigasia monesi

On January 14, 2008, the MESSENGER spacecraft observed about half of the hemisphere missed by Mariner 10. This image was snapped by the Wide Angle Camera, part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument, about 80 minutes after MESSENGER's closest approach to Mercury (2:04 p.m. EST), when the spacecraft was at a distance of about 27,000 kilometers (about 17,000 miles). The image shows features as small as 10 kilometers (6 miles) in size. This image was taken through a filter sensitive to light near the red end of the visible spectrum (750 nm), one of a sequence of images taken through each of MDIS’s 11 filters..

Like the previously mapped portion of Mercury, this hemisphere appears heavily cratered. It also reveals some unique and distinctive features. On the upper right is the giant Caloris basin, including its western portions never before seen by spacecraft. Formed by the impact of a large asteroid or comet, Caloris is one of the largest, and perhaps one of the youngest, basins in the Solar System. The new image shows the complete basin interior and reveals that it is brighter than the surrounding regions and may therefore have a different composition. Darker smooth plains completely surround Caloris, and many unusual dark-rimmed craters are observed inside the basin. Several other multi-ringed basins are seen in this image for the first time. Prominent fault scarps (large ridges) lace the newly viewed region.

Days I am glad I have lived so long. Few and far between, but still they do occur.

Things have been crazy busy around here, and it's only going to get worse before there's any hope of it getting better, but I'll make a decent entry in the morning. Meanwhile, a couple or three of tidbits for your consideration:

A large swath of a Carboniferous-aged forest has been found preserved in an Illinois coal mine.

The forest is composed of a bizarre mixture of extinct plants: abundant club mosses, more than 40 metres high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns, intermixed with shrubs and tree-sized horsetails. Nowhere elsewhere on the planet is it possible to (literally) walk through such an extensive swathe of Carboniferous rainforest.

It was discovered by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol, UK, and US colleagues, in the underground workings of a coal mine, in Illinois, USA. The results of this work are published online today in Geology, by the Geological Society of America.

The fossilized forest was preserved following a major earthquake 300 million years ago. The quake caused the whole region to drop below sea level whereupon the forest became buried in mud, preserving it forever.

Also, the long-enigmatic fossil "plant" taxon Prototaxites has been determined to be a gigantic fungus, 20-feet tall, just as Francis Hueber suspected way back in 1919.

Lastly, as you may have heard, a rocky "earth-like" planet, designated Gliese 581 c, has been detected orbiting a red dwarf in the constellation Libra, more than 20 light years from Earth. Of course, one should keep in mind that this definition of "earth-like" would include the planet Mars, and calling the place "habitable" is probably a just a little rash. But it is an awesome discovery, even if it was also an inevitable one.

Okay. To bed with me, even if I can't find sleep.

This is one of those rare mornings when I just want to go back to bed. Grab Spooky and go back to bed. Stay in my dreams, and never mind the goddamn wet tile floors and blinding fluorescent lights and missing syringes and legless albino women. Stay in my dreams, anyway. I'm not awake. Not awake, but not asleep. Ah, well.

It just occurred to me that today is not Monday.

I have learned that "Bainbridge" (from Alabaster) earned a spot on the Best American Fantasy 2006 recommended reading list. Only twenty-five stories made the list, and mine is the only one from a single-author collection. It's nice to see so many small/literary magazines on this list, by the way, not just genre publications. Though long since sold out at the publisher (subpress), you can still order the trade hardcover of Alabaster from Amazon.com (for only $16.50!); just follow the link above.

Speaking of Subterranean Press, yesterday afternoon Bill Schafer informed me that twenty copies of the limited of Tales from the Woeful Platypus were recently and unexpectedly located, hidden somewhere in the bowels of their stock. So, just barely, the limited is not yet sold out after all. But I expect it will be very soon, so if you want one of these, this is a "you snooze, you lose" situation. Red leather. You know you want it.

Yesterday was spent recuperating from the trip and answering e-mail, getting ready to descend once again into the words mines today. Now that the object of the long March is behind me, I should proceed at once to Sirenia Digest #16 — do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollahs — because as soon as it's written, I need to get started on The Dinosaurs of Mars, which has been long delayed. I spoke with Bill Schafer about that book yesterday, discussing the matter of illustrations and cover art. That's my goal for March — Sirenia Digest #16 and at least the first 15,000 words of The Dinosaurs of Mars (plus an article for Locus and some proofreading). It will be a busy month, but the good sort of busy.

Let's see. Yesterday. Well, I can say that I'm right proud of my landlord for dealing our noisy tribe of attic-dwelling squirrels by calling a humane "pest" control service, namely Animals B' Gone. Here is their page on squirrels. Were it actually my house, I'd probably just let the squirrels have the damned attic. But I'm like that.

At sunset yesterday evening, Spooky and I headed over to Freedom Park, hoping for a decent view of the lunar eclipse. But there were too many clouds in the east, and we were only afforded glimpses. The temps have turned cool again, and there was a bitter wind blowing. Hopefully, the weather will be more amenable to viewing during the second lunar eclipse of 2007 (August 28th). There's a partial solar eclipse coming on March 19th, but it will only be visible from eastern Asia and parts of northern Alaska.

Last night, we watched Ryan Murphy's Running With Scissors, which I will say, belatedly, was surely one of the best films of 2006, though I don't think the Oscars took note. The Golden Globes did. Anyway, this is a must see, I would say. Oh, I almost forgot. Byron dropped by yesterday. We have made plans to see 300 and The Host next weekend.

Anyway, here's my hard hat and lunch pail. The platypus says it's time for the word mines — down, down down....

Postscript (2:12 p.m. CaST: Two statistics I find fascinating, both from the March 2007 issue of National Geographic. 1) "The size of an average American home has increased 63% over the past three decades." 2) "1,210 U.S. Protestant churches have weekly attendance over 2,000 — nearly double the number five years ago." I don't know which number is more disturbing.

Yesterday was, by my usual standards and even by the skewed standards of this 1,500 words/day forced march, a good writing day. Which is not to say that I wrote well, only that I wrote plentifully. 2,122 words. Which makes it my most prolific writing day in January thus far. I know there are writers on my f-list who write this much or more every day, but frankly, if you told me I had to write 2,000 words/day, I'd drink the purple Kool-Aid.

After the writing, I collapsed onto the sofa in a useless great lump while Spooky made dinner, which was one of her very fine homemade pizzas with basil and red peppers and such. Waiting for food, I watched something astronomical on the National Geographic Channel. I pondered Triton and a world of frozen nitrogen, methane, hydrogen, and so forth. I do not ponder Triton often enough, bewitched as I am by Mars and Europa and Titan. After dinner, we watched a new ep of Mythbusters. Then I went back to work and spent an hour and a half contemplating Stories to Come. This is not how I usually work, and it irks me somewhat to be planning stories I will not write for a great while, and I know they're just gonna change anyway, but my bloated schedule has made this inconvenient forethought necessary. Spooky helped and kept me focused and awake. Sometimes she has all the good ideas, and I just want her to be the one who has to sit down at the iBook every day and Make Shit Up. But then who would make the dolls? Not me, that's who. About 10:30 p.m. CaST I decided enough was enough for one day and went back to the television for a couple of hours of Final Fantasy XII. Having finally reached Archades, I am now trapped in the bowels of the Draklor Laboratory, throwing switches, red and blue, blue and red, fighting soldiers of the Empire, trying to find that inevitable Cid son of a chocobo. Who knows how long that will go on. And later still, after the "Revenge of Bride of Nite Science" post (LJ only), I brushed my teeth and read some of the author's commentary in The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka (2000), as translated by Anna Lukaszuk and gifted to me by the "kindly but anonymous ichthyologist." That was yesterday.

If you have not yet ordered Daughter of Hounds, or have purchased just one copy, or just two, I remind you that it's not to late to make amends.

—————

Sirenia Digest #14 will be along shortly. At this point, I'm only waiting for sovay's piece, which has been giving her some difficulty. I have Vince's art. And as I've noticed a number of new people are reading the LJ (and MySpace, for that matter), I shall remind all that you may get the digest for a mere $10/month, a bargain at twice that price. New fiction every damn month, sometimes weirdly erotic, or erotically weird, and sometimes just weird. These days, almost all my short fiction is being written for the digest. The platypus implores you to give it a try. Just follow the above link, read the FAQ, subscribe. Easy as pie (whatever that means). Also, subscribe before midnight on Sunday, and I'll send you a free signed copy of the trade paperback edition of Silk.

—————

Late last night, wolven asked:

You reference your dreamsickness, often; is this meant as a phenomenon similar to homesickness? The reluctance to travel back to the waking? This is the sense that I get from it, but, not being able to find a direct explication, I worry that i'm just imposing my influences on your experiences.

Usually, when I say dreamsick, I am referring to a frequent inability upon "waking" to completely disengage from that dreaming "reality" and reintegrate with this waking "reality." I am left neither here nor there. Sometimes, the dreams continue to seem more real than those things vying for my waking mind. Sometimes, both states seem equally unreal/real. I use the word sick because there are actual physical symptoms which accompany this phenomenon, and they are generally unpleasant. I suspect that this follows, at least in part, from the fact that I am almost entirely incapable of that thing called "lucid" dreaming. My dreams seem as real as anything else, and while they are occurring I never suspect them of being subconscious figments of a sleeping mind. Add to this that I have extremely vivid dreams, which I can usually recall in great detail. It all means that waking can be quite jarring — violent, even — and fully waking may requre hours. As for equating it with homesickness, well, there have been dreams I've wished I could return to, remain in, whatever. There have been those terrible urgencies upon waking, the conviction that I must somehow get back "there." But no, generally, when I say dreamsickness I am not referring to something which resembles homesickness.

—————

A number of people have wondered aloud why I would feel the need for a magick/neopaganism filter, or they have expressed dismay that I would willingly censor myself in this journal. To which I can only reply, bills must be paid, rent must be covered, etc., and the primary reason this journal exists is to promote the writing by which I make my living. So, while I try my best to "be me" here, I do also try not to offend or annoy more people than absolutely necessary. Because it's more important that the books sell than that I wank off on LJ about Wicca or the problems I have with "magical thinking" or how I really wish when people say they practice a "Nature" religion they meant a Nature religion and not just another variety of anthropocentrism. That sort of thing. Also, there are people who will decide, upon hearing that this Caitlín R. Kiernan person calls herself a witch, that they are better off reading someone who is merely an atheist or an Xtian or a Jew or maybe someone who has the presence of mind not to talk about religion publicly. And no, I am not better off, as a writer and someone with considerable living expenses, without those people. I do not wish to alienate readers I can avoid alienating. This is why I now so rarely talk politics here. It's grief that I don't need. That said, I shall likely continue on the present course, filterless, unfiltered, speaking of these occult matters from time to time, as it seems important that I do so. Clearly, a lot of you are interested, but not so many as to call for the setting up of a filter. And, as I have said, I don't have time to segregate that material into separate entries, anyway.

I shake
And stare at the watery moon
With the same desire
As the sober Philistine.
And I shake
(Turn and turn again)
Worm, the pain and blade
Turn and turn again. — David Bowie

(You get the gist of the song now?) — Poe

Some days, I almost feel there is no wonder left to be found. Others, I trip over it at every turn. Fortunately, today was a day of the latter sort. To wit:

Titan Has Liquid Lakes, Scientists Report in Nature My thanks to corucia for the PDF of the full Nature article. And there's a photo from the JPL (behind the cut), a most amazing photograph, indeed:

( Lakes of Titan )

Also, the famous Eocene-aged Messel oil shales of Germany have given up another gem, Eophyllium messelensis, the earliest evidence of a leaf-mimicking insect.

Also also, it's not too late to vote in the second Cassini photo contest, to help pick the most spectacular image yet captured by the probe as it orbits Saturn and her moons. For my part, I'm torn between "Mapping Titan's Changes" and "Ringside with Dione."

A couple of wonderful things...

Thanks to sclerotic_rings for posting news from Titan:

Massive Mountain Range Imaged on Saturn's Moon Titan

A mile high and built on water-ice bedrock.

Also, thanks to chris_walsh for news of the remains of a juvenile plesiosaur recovered from the Cretaceous of Antarctica.

Actually, I knew about that last one already, from an abstract in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, but it's always the thought that counts. And this is a somewhat better account that the one that Reuters was running. No mention of "Nessie," for example.

As I mentioned in in my last entry, the latest issue of Nature includes the description of a new theropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of Germany. Like most vertebrate finds made in the Solnhofen, the same geological formation which has preserved Archaeopteryx lithographica, the holotype of Juravenator starki is a spectacularly beautiful and well-preserved fossil (Jura = after the Bavarian Jura Mountains venator, Latin, meaning "hunter'; the species name honours the quarry owners). It's been placed in the Compsognathidae, along with the genera Compsognathus (also from the Solnhofen), Sinosauropteryx and Huaxiagnathus (both from China). Juravenator starki is the most complete non-avian theropod known from anywhere in Europe. And it's a tiny beast, just a little more than two feet from the end of the snout to the tip of its slender tail, but as this specimen is clearly a juvenile, the size of an adult Juraventor remains unknown. Unlike many (if not most) other theropods, Juraventor appears to have lacked feathers:


Juraventor starki

Artist's restoration.


Also, new data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is giving astrophysicists new clues as to the nature of the universe in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. The findings support "inflation," first proposed 25 years ago as part of the Big Bang Theory, and indicates that during this initial fraction of a second, the universe expanded from an object the size of a marble to an object larger than the entire visible universe.

Meanwhile, there's pink snow falling in Russia...which must mean it's time for me to go to bed.

Hopefully, everyone now has Sirenia Digest #4. Thank you, Gordon. Thank you, Spooky. Thank you, Vince and Ted and Bill. And a big thank you to all the subscribers. If you're not a subscriber, you may yet remedy that simply by following this link.

Lately I've been feeling like I'd miss at least half of everything interesting that's going on in the world were it not for attentive bloggers like Paul T. Riddell (sclerotic_rings). I sit in this little room surrounded by mute and memorized books. I tell my stories. And it often seems that the real wonders are passing me by while I try to spit up their surrogates. Today, for example, the news of red rains over India way back in 2001 and the scientific investigations thereof, and you'd think I'd have heard of this before now. Red rains were quite close to Charles Fort's heart, and in The Book of the Damned (1919), after cataloging documented example after documented example of red rains, he speculated, in his marvelous and brazen and inflammatory way:

Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages —

Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in the oceans —

Or some one especial thing: an especial time: an especial place. A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's alive in outer space — something the size of Central Park kills it —

It drips.

The first time I read these lines, they gave me nightmares. They still give me chills. But beyond the power of the prose the mystery remained. Why do red rains fall? And now, eighty-seven years after the publication of The Book of the Damned, it's possible that an answer may have been found for at least some of these skyfalls. And, even more surprising, it at least echoes those lines that Fort wrote all those decades ago. Today Paul wrote of a cover story from New Scientist a couple of weeks back:

A beautiful example of the humanity of science came with a cover story a couple of weeks ago on a red rain in India in 2001: according to researchers involved with studying the contents of that red rain, the coloration was due to living cells in the rain, and the suggestion in the upcoming paper is that these cells may have been brought to Earth in a meteorite airburst. You have it all: an extraordinary theory that awaits the extraordinary evidence to prove it, countertheories that are more outrageous than the original theory, and the understanding, all the way through, that what's needed is more study before anyone can make a final evaluation. Even if the red rain has a prosaic explanation, half of the fun is knowing instead of shrugging.

Too often many of Fort's readers, including self-professed Forteans, paint him as an arch-enemy of science. That's a lie, of course. Fort was only an arch-enemy of shrugging.

The scientific paper which Paul speaks of is titled "The red rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin," by Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar (Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, India). It has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, Astrophysics and Space Science. Here's the abstract, which surely would have made Fort give up a wry smile:

A red rain phenomenon occurred in Kerala, India starting from 25th July 2001, in which the rainwater appeared coloured in various localized places that are spread over a few hundred kilometers in Kerala. Maximum cases were reported during the first 10 days and isolated cases were found to occur for about 2 months. The striking red colouration of the rainwater was found to be due to the suspension of microscopic red particles having the appearance of biological cells. These particles have no similarity with usual desert dust. An estimated minimum quantity of 50,000 kg of red particles has fallen from the sky through red rain. An analysis of this strange phenomenon further shows that the conventional atmospheric transport processes like dust storms etc. cannot explain this phenomenon. The electron microscopic study of the red particles shows fine cell structure indicating their biological cell like nature. EDAX analysis shows that the major elements present in these cell like particles are carbon and oxygen. Strangely, a test for DNA using Ethidium Bromide dye fluorescence technique indicates absence of DNA in these cells. In the context of a suspected link between a meteor airburst event and the red rain, the possibility for the extraterrestrial origin of these particles from cometary fragments is discussed.

If you'd like to read the full paper, you can download a PDF here. And on that note, it's time for me to wander away to bed and dream of the things which may well live between the worlds.

Riddle me this: What do Albert Costello, Gilberto Elmore, Lucy Beatty, Millie Peoples, Hugh Murphy, Stewart Landis, Sondra Dolan, Leola Kim, Lethia Schafer, Blake Woodruff, and Juliana Overton have in common? Well, here's a hint: I've received spam "from" each of them in the last 24 hrs., generally trying to sell me Viagra, hoodia, or offering some surefire method to bilk my creditors. This is why I switched from the lowred.mail@mac.com account to the new gmail account. For a couple of months now, I've been getting about thirty of these a day. And I do have to wonder if, somewhere, some poor sap has received e-mail from Caitlín Kiernan trying to sell them weight-loss drugs, or if maybe someone else has e-mail from Nar'eth ni'glecti Mericale offering to get him (or her) stiff for half the price?

By the way, today is International Women's Day, first observed in 1909 "in accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America." So, today I shall endevour to pretend that it isn't true that nationwide, as of 2000, women were making only 77.6 percent as much per hour as men, or that the same year, Georgia ranked 47th in America among all states in progress in closing the hourly wage gap between the sexes. I shall pretend things aren't a lot worse for women in much of the world, and that the present administration in this country isn't doing its damnedest to rob women of reproductive choice (in a nation of 300 million and a world of 6.5 billion). I shall try. And then tomorrow I'll go back to all the dingy realities.

Not a bad day yesterday. I wrote 1,118 words and finished "Untitled 20." It's total word count stands at 3,234 before I begin polishing it today. I've already sent it along to Vince. This means that this month Sirenia Digest subscribers will be getting almost ten thousand words of fiction (not counting the little prologue thingy). I'm happy with the new vignette. Spooky likes it a lot. It bounces from golems to Paracelsus to Frankenstein, and I'm curious what readers will make of it all. My lit agent called yesterday afternoon. She's been ill. We talked briefly about Daughter of Hounds and the feared What Will I Be Doing Next? beast.

Other good things about yesterday? A very nice walk. Warm weather. E-mail from my mother. Pete Crowther sent me copies of the signed PS Publishing editions of Bradbury's R is for Rocket and S is for Space. These are absolutely gorgeous volumes, and they remind me that soon I must begin my introduction for The Day It Rained Forever. These good mail days are spoiling me, I fear. Today and tomorrow, no doubt, it will only be bills and adverts once again.

Last night, we watched Sam Mendes' Jarhead (adapted from Anthony Swofford's book of the same name). Whether or not it's wrong of me to do so, I've come to look at war movies as being of two classes: those that serve as little more than recruiting propaganda (John Wayne's The Green Berets is a classic of this subgenre) and those that honestly depict the horror and absurdities of modern warfare (Apocalypse Now, etc.). It's difficult for me to imagine humanity has much use for the former (no matter how much they might serve TPTB), while it should have a tremendous hunger for the latter. I wasn't sure where Jarhead would fall, but was pleased to see that it belongs very soundly in the latter camp, and is a fine film, to boot. We'd intended to rent Walk the Line, but once again no copies were in at Videodrome, and we do our best to avoid Blockbuster.

I also caught a documentary on the Science Channel on supermassive black holes and their role in the creation of galaxies. It contained an equation that struck me as being so perfectly beautiful as to be divine: the mass of supermassive black holes located at galactic cores are = to 1/2 of 1% of the total mass of their galaxies. To date, no exceptions have been found.

Tonight, the final episode of season two of Project Runway. Viva Santino!

Spooky's posted new photos of Sweet William. Unfortunately, you can't see the colour very well, because they were taken under tungsten light instead of sunlight. He's a sort of grey lavender, with a pink nose and pink paws. We've been chatting, he and I, and I know now that after the loss of his legs in a freak vacuum-cleaner accident, he was a world-renowned amputee unicyclist. However, carpal-tunnel syndrome and a weariness of public appearances led to his early retirement and these days he's a simple beggar, which, if you ask me, is more honest work than platypus pimpage.

Postscript: There shall be a second entry, later today, because you guys said you wanted to hear about some of the Wicca stuff, and because there was a dream last night. Also, I just got word from subpress that the limited of Alabaster has sold out, though copies of the trade edition are still available for pre-order.

Well, first off, I'm sorry that we haven't yet begun the letter "S" auction. Tomorrow, I promise. This one's to pay the gas bill, so please bid generously. I'll make an announcement here just as soon as the auction begins.

Nextly, Spooky and I have been on something of a Guy Maddin kick this week. We watched Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1990) on Monday night, then Archangel (1997) last night. Tonight, it's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002). Someone described Twilight of the Ice Nymphs as the Gotterdammerung meet's Pee-Wee's Playhouse, which was surely as inept a comparison as ever I've read. The film is quite wonderfully surreal and dizzyingly colourful, however. Shelly Duval, Alice Krige, and Frank Gorshin make for a wonderful cast. But I loved the hauntingly black-and-white Archangel even more. There are curious elements uniting both films: wooden legs, lost husbands, fatherless children, mesmerism.

And I've been trying to catch up with news of things astronomical, such as the 2,175 mile-wide electrical storm rasging on Saturn. I was especially taken by the photo below, captured by the Cassini imaging system on January 27th, with the storm assuming a configuration eerily reminiscent of a Celtic triskele or triskelion. Charles Fort would appreciate the similarity, and Jung would appreciate that it's a bit of a "meaningful coincidence" for me. Regardless, it's an awesome, beautiful sight.



Also, click here for an astounding rotating composite infrared image of Titan, more of Cassini's handiwork. Note that, and I quote, Titan has numerous areas of light terrain with some large areas of dark terrain visible near the equator. Small areas of brightest terrain might arise from ice-volcanoes and have a high amount of reflective frozen water-ice. What fascinating worlds we are just beginning to glimpse, these mini-solar systems orbiting Jupiter and Saturn!

Okay. I was going to write about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but Spooky's calling me to dinner, so that shall have to wait until tomorrow morning. Did everyone get there copy of SD #3 okay?