Another good writing day yesterday. I did 1,590 words on "Untitled 33" (for Sirenia Digest #34), and I should finish the story this afternoon. This is one of the awkward pieces, in terms of length and format. Neither quite a vignette nor a full-blown short story. It's a dream cycle, spiraling through layer upon layer, with Vince's illustration as the terminal point. It never settles on a single theme, but has, instead, touched upon gender, the dissolution of self, murder, the weight of past events on the present, and so forth. Expect #34 either late on Monday or on Tuesday.

I was very pleased to see that "The Ape's Wife" received an honourable mention in the new Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Ellen Datlow writes, "Clarkesworld Magazine has consistently published strong work as they put out their two stories a month. Some of the best work was by Caitlin R Kiernan, Jeff VanderMeer, and Elizabeth Bear..." Not sure whether or not I garnered any other HMs for 2007. I'll have to remember to look next time I'm in a bookstore.

Please have a look at the latest round of eBay auctions. Thanks.

Another rainy day here in Providence, as Category 1 Hurricane Kyle spins past just to the east of us, bound for Newfoundland. I think this one was a narrow miss for us. It would be a wonderful day to be on the rocks at Beavertail, but, alas, I am shackled to this desk.

Yesterday, the mail brought the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, even though I'm not quite finished with the June 2008 issue. I only just got to S. Christopher Bennett's note on ontogeny and Archaeopteryx. It's not often I actually get excited by bivariate scatter plots, linear regression equations, and correlation coefficients, but the Archaeopteryx note is quite good, basically Bennett's defence of his interpretation of the nine known specimens of the taxon as a single "species," following from an awareness of interspecific variation resulting from ontogeny and, also, concerns about parsimony. Anyway, yes, very good stuff in the new issue, including a couple of new dinosaurs, but i'll have to wait until I finish with June.

For last night's Paul Newman film, we chose Alfred Hitchcock's Cold-War thriller Torn Curtain (1966), which is one of the few Hitchcock films I'd somehow managed never to see. But it's actually rather good, classic Hitch, though the spotlight belongs more to a cast of quirky secondary characters than to Newman or his costar, Julie Andrews. This is the film Hitchcock made after Marnie (1964), and he would direct only three films after Torn Curtain.

More WoW last night than I'd intended. Mithwen reached Level 20.7, and that was all fine and good and all, but then I had to go and create a blood elf warlock, Shaharrazad. I immediately fell completely in love with the blood elves. It's like a Disney film on a bad hit of LSD. Sort of Cinderella meets Aladdin, gone horribly, wonderfully awry. Because, you know, evil should be bright and perky. So...Mithwen and Shaharrazad will live their parallel lives, though, of course, they can never actually meet.

Postscript (1:56 p.m.): My thanks to sovay for sending me a list of all my honourable mentions from the new Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. They are

"The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)" (Dark Delicacies II: Fear)
"The Ape's Wife" (Clarkesworld, September)
"The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles" (Thrillers 2)
"Houses Under the Sea" (ibid.)
"Night Games in the Crimson Court" (Sirenia Digest #17)
"A Season of Broken Dolls" (Sirenia Digest #15)

Also, in her summation for 2007, Ellen Datlow writes that "Caitlín R. Kiernan's dark fantasy Daughter of Hounds...is both lyrical and unsettling." Of Thrillers 2 she writes, "The contributors are Gemma Files, R. Patrick Gates, Tim Waggoner, and Caitlín R. Kiernan. Each has at least one very good story, and one, a long one by Kiernan, is terrific." Cool.

So, no small part of the exhaustion which I'm presently trying to recover from resulted from a seemingly endless series of rewrites to the Beowulf novelization, stretching all the way into June (the book was "finished" in February). These rewrites (and cuts) were made at the insistence of the studio folk, who were concerned that the way I'd written the novel gave too much away, spoiling the big reveal. Imagine, then, my surprise at finally seeing a trailer for Beowulf, which does a pretty good job of giving away a lot of the same things I was told the novelization couldn't divulge until the very end (and some not even then). More than that I will not say. No, I'll say one thing more, because I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to demonize anyone. While I was forced to cut a lot of stuff I'd have preferred not to, I was ultimately allowed to leave in a good deal of material that does not appear in the film or in the screenplays.

Yesterday, I did 2,120 words and finished "Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert." I am very pleased with it. Also, I should note this is the most I've written in a single day in a long time. Since sometime back in the late winter, I believe. Please keep in mind, however, that I do not measure whether or not a writing day has been "good" by the number of words written, but by how I feel about the quality of what I did that day. There is no ideal daily word count, and if I have previously given that impression, I'm sorry. More is not better, unless you happen to be able to write a lot without sacrificing quality. Anyway, in this case, it was at least fortunate that I wrote so much yesterday, as I am now able to include "Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert" in Sirenia Digest #20, which will also include "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection," which I wrote earlier this month. And if you are not already a subscriber, you can subscribe this very day and start off with #20. Speaking of which, I hope it will go out this evening, but subscribers will get it tomorrow at the latest.

Also note that Wyrm Publishing has announced a new anthology, Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine, which can now be preordered. Edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace, the book will include a new story from me (as yet unwritten), along with fiction by Holly Phillips, Elizabeth Bear, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherynne Valente, Ian Watson, Sarah Monette, Paul Tremblay, and Many Others.

Not much else to say about yesterday (a familiar refrain). We had a good walk at dusk, when the rain stopped. There was a spectacular number of swallows darting about Freedom Park, and a swarm of enormous dragonflies. Today will be spent reading back over both "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection" and "Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert," and signing a bunch of eBay stuff, and getting the digest ready to go out this evening.

The current eBay auctions end on August 1st, which means it's not too late to have a look.

And I'm once again posting a link to my entry about the Bush Administration's proposed grey wolf hunt and how you can help try to stop it. 700 grey wolves, half the population in the northern part of the Rockies. Let's see — if we were permitted the "harvest" the same percentage of the human population from Idaho and Wyoming, that would be about 893,867 people...