So, yes, Sirenia Digest #29 (April) will be going out to subscribers this evening. That said, there has been a last minute change to the line up this issue. It will actually be comprised of two pieces by me this month, instead of one — "Flotsam" and "Concerning Attrition and Severance." The latter is the especially "brutal" piece I was fretting over so much a few days back. It was originally intended for Sirenia Digest #30 (May). However, Sonya (sovay) needed more time on her new piece, and I absolutely cannot stand to rush another author. So, next month, #30 will include the new vignette by Sonya and my "Rappaccini's Dragon" (which I hope to finish writing tomorrow). Also, there will be no illustration from Vince this month, due to a death in his family. However, he'll be back next month. I hope that was something like coherent, because I am nothing like awake.

I received a very nice email yesterday from Mr. Robert Feldman of Manhattan, the sort that keeps me from taking a claw hammer to my skull:

Ms. Kiernan,

I write to you from the dank, dark, and foreboding depths of the New York Public Library (yes, we do have ghosts and they do wear roller-skates!) where I am currently cataloging the new edition of your Tales of Pain and Wonder. I've read Alabaster and your contributions to Wrong Things and am very much enjoying the stories in Tales.... The Salmagundi and Salammbo stories are truly blowing me away because I attended the Storm King School (1971-74) and am very familiar with that part of the Hudson Valley. Your Pollepel Island is obviously your take on Bannerman's Island with it's spooky ruined castle right near Storm King Mountain. I climbed that mountain many, many times, and slept out overnight there; it is very creepy around there and a perfect setting for your stories. The Hudson Valley has many many places like this, certainly Sleepy Hollow inspired Washington Irving to write his tale of the headless horseman. A bit further north there is an island off the town of Staatsburg where wicked old Uncle Aleister Crowley spent the summer of 1918, supposedly writing "Do what thou wilt"....etc...in red paint on the rocks for passing ships to see. Then there is the town of Tivoli, much gentrified now but an extremely haunting place in the '70's when I attended Bard College just down the road from there. Thanks for reminding me of these places; they have an atmosphere that's very misty and otherworldly and I have many memories of them. I am enjoying your work very much and am looking forward to reading more. I've cataloged at the Library for twenty years now but this is the first time I've contacted an author. This is a good day job for an old Punk Rock/Goth guitar player and the perks are I get to discover writers like you and Poppy Brite while I'm working. Best wishes and I'll be looking forward to reading more of your work.

It makes everything just a little bit easier to take, knowing there's a copy of Tales of Pain and Wonder at the central branch of the NYC Public Library, where once I climbed a stone lion. Thank you, Robert.

I did 1,189 words yesterday on the new story, the aforementioned "Rappaccini's Dragon." I'd really hoped to finish it this month, but the mess that was Monday made that impossible. Then I packed four very heavy boxes of books, and Spooky washed more dinosaurs (photos here in her LJ; humglum), including my set from the Royal Ontario Museum and the Boston Museum of Science. Just now, she was making a joke regarding "Bathosaurus," and I checked, because I figured there was surely a "Bathysaurus," and there is, though it's not a reptile, but the Deepsea Lizardfish, Bathysaurus ferox. Anyway, after the packing, we read over "Flotsam" and "Concerning Attrition and Severance" for the sake of line edits. I think we finished that up at 7 pm, then had leftover chili for dinner. I looked over the new National Geographic, which is largely devoted to China and the ecological catastrophe that is China (fully 50% of the Yellow River [Huang He] — the sixth longest in the world — has been declared "biologically dead").

More Millenium last night, episode #9 from Season 1, "Loin Like a Hunting Flame." And then the new episode of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel. And why the hell do I write all this crap down? Some odd compulsion to record.

Tomorrow is Beltane. Already.

I really am loving the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds disc. After last years Grinderman solo project, I had a feeling they'd be headed back this direction after the low point of Nocturama (2003). Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! feels a lot more like Let Love In with smatterings of the earlier albums.

How can a day go badly when, after sleeping a full eight hours, I am greeted with a description of "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" as "Designing Women meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"? No way it can, I say. My thanks to francis_clay for that, by the way. It's from his post to the species_of_one forum (which might get more traffic if I ever mentioned it).

Yesterday was sort of a mess, writing wise. I did not finish "Pickman's Other Model." I only did 748 words. Then I had to stop and walk over to Sweetgrass to have my eyebrows done. I'm trying, frantically, to reconstruct myself after all these months of illness and neglect and reclusivity, so that my physical appearance is not greeted with too much horror and dismay when I show up at the O'Neil Literary House. It's probably only further evidence of my wrongness that I find eyebrow waxings/pluckings to be extraordinarily soothing. Anyway, yeah, eyebrows. Hair on Friday. Not much I can do about the 12-15 pounds I've lost, though (most of it's muscle mass, not fat).

Wow. This is a prattling entry, isn't it? The dextromethorphan is controlling the cough, but my already addled brain is...more addled. Yes, people. I'm the reason all those pharmaceuticals are showing up in your tap water. From my bladder to the glass, no extra charge.

After Sweetgrass, we wandered around Criminal Records for a while. Later, we watched Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave (1994), which I'd never seen, but liked a great deal. Christopher Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, murder, greed, mayhem, betrayal, blood, revenge, and all in one movie — what's not to love? Later, there was rp in Toxia (a Second Life sim), with Lorne and Larissa, in which Nareth learned...well, several terrible things. Hearts were torn still beating from chests (but that's okay, I put it back when I was done), a star was forced into premature nova, and the blade of Nareth's thirsty straight razor was satiated (for now). In short, lessons were learned. Good stuff. Oh, and I've been loving Ghosts I-IV so much that I'm now revisiting NIN's Year Zero, which, I realize, I never listened to enough to really let it sink in.

So. That was yesterday. This will be today...

Today will be a day off, as under this new regime, I am not allowed those twelve-day work weeks I have indulged in for so many years.

I tallied it all up yesterday, the work I've done since writing Frog Toes and Tentacles. It's not so much an arbitrary starting point, as a peculiar turn in my career as an author. Anyway, since May 2005 I have written 31 pieces of fiction for Sirenia Digest, and you add in the stories written for Frog Toes and Tentacles (sold out) and Tales from the Woeful Platypus, the number rises to 49. Add to that "Bainbridge" for Alabaster, as well as the "Highway 97" chapbook, and "Zero Summer" (for Subterranean magazine #6), and the sum rises to 52. Then there's Daughter of Hounds and the Beowulf novelization, so we come to 54. I have been too frightened to attempt an actual word count. And the reason behind my adding all this up is not to brag or ask for a pat upon the head. The reason is that I need to step back and see that I have been pushing myself far too fucking hard for far too fucking long. And that after five days of work I may have a day off free from guilt over not working.

Yesterday, we went back to the Tales of Pain and Wonder manuscript, and we read "Tears Seven Times Salt" and "Superheroes," which got us to page 127 of 441+. And to 1995, as well. "Tears Seven Times Salt" strikes me now as a sort of suggestion of what was to come, while "Superheroes" feels mostly like me beginning to lay my adolescence to rest. I'm trying to do as little revision as possible on these stories, but I am doing some, and I did more to "Superheroes" than I expected.

My thanks to the readers who proposed street teams and to those who have pointed out that it's hardly helping matters that my website has essentially been offline for a year. For months now, I've had a very capable and eager volunteer to help me deal with the latter problem, but between work, exhaustion, and a sort of website-specific inertia, nothing has been done. I wanted to have it up in time for the release of the Low Red Moon mmp on August 7th, but I'm about to miss that deadline. Ah, well. At least there's something up there. As for street teams, I have concerns about effectiveness, but I'm open to further discussion of the matter.

Okay, Spooky says this is work, and that I need a bath, so that's all for now, kiddos. Until the morrow.

Yesterday, I got word via Ellen Datlow that "Bainbridge," the closing story in Alabaster, has been nominated for an International Horror Guild award, in the category of Best Mid-Length Fiction, which happens to be the same category "La Peau Verte" won in 2006. So, that was a good way to begin a Friday. If you wish to see a complete list of this year's IHG nominees, just follow this link.

Somehow, I missed the fact that there was a pretty good review of The Dry Salvages (written by Bill Sheehan) published in The Washington Post way back in December 2004. I have no idea how I missed it. These things happen, I suppose.

Yesterday earned a W in the day planner, but I almost feel as though it should have earned a D, for dithering. I looked back at the "editor's preface" for The Dinosaurs of Mars I wrote on Thursday and found it wanting. But I also didn't quite see how to fix it. So, I fucked off to Emory for a bit, because I needed to track down a number of books on speleology and caving and karst topography, and since I need these references for The Dinosaurs of Mars, it was easy to justify the library trip as "work." My thanks to everyone who commented yesterday. There were some especially helpful remarks and suggestions from stsisyphus and corucia, which have actually had some impact on how the book will be written. Feedback can be very useful. Oh, and this question from jtglover:

In re: Dinosaurs, I can't remember if you've said, but will this be Mars á la Bradbury or Burroughs? Something else? Not trying to snoop too much, just curious.

Though the subject of Burrough's Barsoom may come up somewhere in the book, this particular Mars won't seem much like Barsoom or Bradbury's haunted red planet. It's not even going to be the colonized Mars I wrote of in "Bradbury Weather." This will be a very naturalistic Mars, Mars as early Martian explorers will likely find it — cold, hostile, barren, deadly, beautiful, and filled with secrets.

And this comment from stsisyphus, which I found particularly salient:

What I mean to say here is that I think that it doesn't make sense in comparison to her other works to construct a scientific artifice simply to justify how or why the characters managed to trod the Martian soil. The point isn't to demonstrate how it could be that a human could be exploring caverns of Mars, but rather what happens to them once they are there. I don't need to have a long infodump of exposition explaining the bioengineering of "Faces in Revolving Souls" and "A Season of Broken Dolls" to enjoy the stories. In fact, it would been distracting.

A great deal of Ms. Kiernan's fiction has dealt with the effect of otherness upon a humanity which is mostly organic in nature and composition. These are characters that cry, pump blood, puke bile, and occasionally piss themselves (probably one of my favorite details of the kill scenes in tFoC). Kiernan doesn't shy away from making her characters palpable and sensually whole. Her androids, monsters, and such have on the whole been deceptively humanish. Admittedly, there are a handful of stories that have been in Sirenia Digest & Frog Toes & Tentacles which ran counter to this. Even then, however, there is often an organic logic to many of Kiernan's "alien antagonists." While they may not be human in form or consciousness, they are often project the efficient cruelty and instinct of nature. While one could portray the explicit subversion/destruction of rational, technological mastery by nature-chaos or ex-conscious forces - I don't know if it would normally be a CRK kind of story.

There will be many unanswered questions in The Dinosaurs of Mars, and a lot of them will present themselves at the opening of the story. For example, I am intentionally constructing the book in such a way that the reader never learns much at all about Babette Flanagan's trip from the Earth to the moon to Mars or the technology that makes this trip possible. I do have a lot of ideas about that tech. For example, I've been thinking about the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), utilizing ion cyclotron resonance heating, which NASA first started talking about back in 2000, as a means of paring an Earth-to-Mars travel time down to only four months or so. Of course, I could just cut to the chase and envision a fusion engine for the Ascendency. But stsisyphus is correct in his supposition that what's important here is what the explorers find on Mars (and its effect upon them), not the tech that gets there. And yes, I also detest infodumps. At any rate, no new words were written yesterday. And they may not be today, as I have not taken a day off in nine days, and I think I might be due one. Maybe.

Things are going well with my Second Life, though I did relapse and do the stripping thing last night. At least the crowd was small and well behaved and there were decent tips. Spooky says she's become a "Second Life widow."

Oh, and Happy Bloomsday!

Yesterday, I reached the 1,000 mark with MySpace "friends." Does this mean I get a cookie or a gold star or something? I didn't think so.

This will be one of those "I have too much to write about" entries, which means some things must be pared away. If ever there is a DVD release of this entry, all the omitted material will appear thereon.

1. The hand-corrected, drawn upon , etc. Silk auction has a little bit more than three hours until it ends (though by the time I finish this entry, it'll have quite a bit less, so you might want to check it out now and come back here afterwards).

2. Yesterday I wrote the title page, dedication, and epigraph page for The Dinosaurs of Mars, so I know that, at last, the game's afoot. The rest of the day was spent gathering last minute bits of research — never mind that my office currently strains under the weight of Mars-related books. My thanks to Sonya Taaffe (sovay) for the eloquent Rilke translation and to David Kirkpatrick (corucia) for sending me William K. Hartman et al.'s 1999 letter to Nature, "Evidence for recent volcanism on Mars from crater counts." This story has quickly gone through a number of permutations, mostly born from the realization that it should be the sort of story I want it to be, not the sort that might (or might not) make Locus reviewers happy. The setting has gone from present day to near future (though the past weighs heavily), and it has become a story of exploration and discovery, which is what it should have been all along. I'd thought it would be primarily concerned with Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum, but then the six "skylights" were discovered on the slopes of Arsia Mons a little while back, and I could not resist shifting the main action of the story west to the Tharsis Montes. Unfortunately, I need caverns that have been more or less stable for at least 65 million years, and the great Arsia Mons caverns might be as young as 40 million (though they might be as old as 100 million). So, I needed a new locale, which led, yesterday, to me moving the story still farther west to Apollinaris Patera, a roughly three-billion-year-old volcano, three miles high and a mile across. And it shall have caverns, as well, though, of course, no such discoveries have (yet) been made. They are plausible. So, yes, yesterday was spent reading Mars lit, and also emailing back and forth with the book's cover artist, Bob Eggleton (among many, many other things, Bob did the cover for From Weird and Distant Shores). Here's a wonderful rough sketch of the cover (which ought to make this project seem nearer to publication). We've intentionally taken a "retro" route with the tyrannosaurid's design:



3. Good sleep again last night, so thank you zolpidem tartrate. I think I got another seven hours.

4. My thanks to Bob Strootman, who fronts a Minneapolis band with the august title, The Dunwich Whores. They've recorded two songs based somewhat on Alabaster, one which I heard yesterday. Drad.

5. Spooky has finally gotten back to dollwork, and before getting down to a long-delayed owl commission, she turned out an adorable sort of Cthulhu hatchling thing, which you may see here. It's not for sale, though she might make more and they might be. Also, Madam Spooky has a birthday fast approaching, and, conveniently, she has an Amazon wishlist right here, for those who may be so kindly predisposed.

5. About 2 a.m. this morning, one of the six or seven Second Life Nareth Nishi's had what alcoholic's refer to as a moment of clarity. I blame my blasted work ethic, but it seemed to make sense to me that I should support my second existence with an SL job, and few SL jobs are as lucrative and as easy to land as stripping. So, that's what I've been doing, first at the Dark Goddess in Dorje, then at Club insureXtion in Bro City. And I have made some decent money. But I've grown sick of the people, most of whom seem unaware they've come to a strip club, and that strip clubs have strippers, and that it is customary to tip the dancers, who are, in fact, working to entertain them. And there's a certain inevitable level of assholery and sleaze and dimwittedness that one finds in such an environment, which I might have been able to tolerate, had the tips been better. Add to this the realization that even my best nights netted me only as many Linden dollars as I might have bought outright for about $5 US, and the fact that I'm dancing so much that I've hardly had time to allow the other Nareths to explore the vastness of SL. So, in short, I think I'm done with stripping. Instead, Dr. Nareth Nishi will be taking up residence in a quiet little steampunk town and having adventures and so forth. My thanks to netdancer for directing me towards Grendel's Children in Avaria, where I got a magnificent gazelle skin, an experience that played a role in the aforementioned moment of clarity. Also, I am smitten with the Isle of Wyrms, with the rambling NeoVictorian splendor of Caledon, and with the sadly abandoned cyberpunk metropolis of Gibson. So, yeah, there will likely be no more titty bars for me...unless they are suitably strange and accommodating to qualify as adventures in their own rights. The experiment continues.

And I wanted to post this comment by blu_muse, in response to the complaints I made on the 12th about the pervasive "normalcy" one encounters throughout much of Second Life, but I'm putting it behind a cut, because this has gone on a bit, I see:

( truer words )

This is why I hang onto books that I will likely never read or consult again. Likely, but nothing's ever certain. Yesterday, I found myself going back to Elaine Pagels' Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988), which I probably haven't read since it was new. But there was this One Last Scene I wanted to add to "The Ape's Wife," and there was this bit of gnostic poetry I could not quite recall, but which I suspected I first encountered in a Pagels book. Turns out, it's "The Thunder: Perfect Mind". So, yeah, there was Elaine Pagels yesterday, and the etymology and origin of Cherubim, and how Xtians went and got themselves so hung up about sex, and so on and so forth. I wrote the new scene, the last new scene, which came in at about 300 words. At that point, the total word count for the story had reached 8,974. I read it aloud to Spooky, which led to a great number of corrections. Before the day was done, I'd put in another six hours on the story, and the total word count had inched up to 9,011. Finally, I have come to a point where I have to force myself to step away from this one. About 10:30 p.m., I e-mailed it to Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press, and also to sovay, because I needed another opinion. Though some very minor line edits may remain, I think that it is finally finished.

Thank you, Elaine Pagels. And Tori Amos.

Yesterday brought my contributor's copy of the May 2007 issue of Locus, the "horror issue." My short article, "Awful Things," can be found on page 56, right next to Ramsey Campbell's short article. There were a number of things in the issue to make me smile. Ed Bryant's comments on Alabaster and Daughter of Hounds, for example. He pronounces the latter "...a terrific contemporary Lovecraftian novel that never parodies or condescends, but pays loving tribute to the Great Old Guy of prolix horror even as the author crafts a tautly pyrotechnic tale of ghouls and wizards, alcoholism and strained family ties, love and violence." Also, jlassen makes reference to "the Baudelaire-ian epics of Caitlín R. Kiernan." It almost seems I'm getting more comparisons to Baudelaire these days than to HPL.

The issue also contains a review by Tim Pratt of Tales from the Woeful Platypus. When I learned of this review, I admit that I was leery. With both Platypus and Frog Toes and Tentacles before it, I asked subpress to please forgo advanced reading copies (which they did), as I really did want to see reviews for these books. I cannot say for sure whether I did this because I saw the "weird erotica" as just a minor and unimportant detour, or if I was afraid that writing it would adversely effect how my "serious" books were perceived, or if I was just being insecure. Regardless, the weird erotica has now become a significant part of my writing, and a part I genuinely enjoy, and I am decidedly not ashamed of it and have seen no evidence of these two books or Sirenia Digest having any sort of adverse effect on my career. And I am glad for Tim's review, which concludes that "...Kiernan has made magic and art from the intersection of sex and haunted lives, magic and secret desires." I was also pleased that he deemed the writing in "Daughter of Man, Mother of Wyrm" to be some of my "best, creating a wonderful derangement of the senses. Of "pas-en-arrìere,' the review says "...and the two [characters] do a dance of circling seduction, advancing and retreating, and delving into unexpectedly treacherous emotional territory; it's a remarkable character study." So, yeah, how could I not smile over all that?

What else was there to yesterday? Somehow, I managed not to leave the house, but I did catch a new documentary on the Discovery Science Channel about NASA's "Starship Orion" project. We read another chapter of The Children of Húrin (Chapter VI, "Túrin Among the Outlaws"). I half watched Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) on TCM, which had some marvelous gender-bending moments and I wish I could have given it my full attention. After Spooky was asleep, I started Jay Parini's 1994 biography of John Steinbeck, but only made it through the prologue before I finally got too sleepy to read any farther. I think that was about 3 a.m.

Okay. Time to make the doughnuts. Or bagels. Or what have you. You know, things with holes.

Nothing was written yesterday. Nothing that counts.

It has become necessary to bow out of this year's Alabama Bound. I've held off until the last possible moment before announcing this, hoping that the situation might change. It hasn't. To those who were planning to see me there, I apologise. Next year, perhaps. I am beginning to think it would be wiser to simply abandon the idea of any future public appearances altogether. For the record, I am officially not officially appearing at Dragon*Con this year. At the very least, this saves me the trouble of having to cancel farther along.

I have this email, entitled "suffering fools," from Matthew Williams:

Unfortunately, when you started Sirenia Digest, you switched Muses. Some of your work fell into Erato's domain, whereas before you were under the patronage of Melpomene (tragedy) and Polyhymnia (sacred song). And Erato's contract quite clearly has a "suffering fools" rider.

While I find this an interesting observation, the truth is that I have always listened and been accountable only to Madam Calliope. I don't do subcontractors.

And then there's this one from Christopher Wayne, which I thought was rather sweet:

I came across your work late. I started with Alabaster, followed by Threshold, Silk and Daughter of Hounds.

Your writing is wonderful. I read your journal and your characters are true. Some of your characters I can feel a kinship with, or maybe a kinship with me 20 years ago. Especially Silk and Daughter of Hounds. I felt bad for all of them. They try to do their best, but they are human (mostly). Your characters are not just true, but interesting. This is going to sound funny but almost all of them I would love to have coffee with. Except Dancy.

Trouble seems to follow her just a little too close...

Thank you for your writing, and you take care.

p.s. Ok, I was mean. I would have coffee with Dancy too, just at a coffeehouse that I would not mind losing....

Poor Dancy. Sometimes I think that I should sit down and write an alternate universe wherein Dancy was never stricken with the charge of fighting monsters and almost getting eaten in Savannah and being harassed by angels and all, where she lives a quiet and peaceful and uneventful life. Maybe one day I shall. Thank you, Christopher.

Yesterday...well, there was a nice walk down Sinclair Ave. and back. The weather was much better, though there was still a nip in the air. I frelled around with my MySpace page some more. I exchanged email with my agent and with my editor at Roc. Last night, Spooky made spaghetti. We watched Ace of Cakes and then watched Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, because having just finished the first three books, we both wanted to see it again. Spooky remembered that she had a MySpace page that she'd never done anything with, and we messed about with that a little. I think I went to bed at 2:30 a.m. And that was yesterday, kiddos.

Now, I'm gonna kick the platypus 'till hesheit bleeds daylight...

Postscript: Does anyone out there know anything about MySpace Books? I can't for the life of me figure it out and help would be appreciated.

Oh, and today is Samuel Beckett's 101th birthday, and Ron Perlman's 57th.

So, yesterday we made it all the way through Chapter Four ("Yer Funeral") of Silk. It was a little annoying to discover that the photostat I'd been sent was missing several pages near the beginning, but it's nothing that isn't easily remedied. Anyway, as of the end of the day yesterday, this is how the Zokutou page meter looks:

93 / 354 (26.3%)

Having not read this novel in at least a decade, I am pleased to say that I still like it. I was afraid that I would not, that who I am now and how I write now and how I view the world now would have deviated to such a great degree from the me who wrote Silk that our worldviews — this me and that former me — would have become incommensurable. But this isn't the case. The book holds up well, and I'm proud I did such a good job with what was only my second novel. I am making quite a lot of minor changes, more than I'd thought I would, primarily smoothing out the grammar a little, standardizing commas, hyphens, semicolons, & etc. I'm dividing the more visually jarring "compounderations" with hyphens or simply making of them two words. Anyway, yes, it's going well.

One thing that struck me in particular yesterday was this passage:

And when she was thirteen she'd run away the first time, had been picked up by Florida state troopers, hitchhiking a few miles from the Alabama state line. Had finally spent a little time in juvie, and no one had really bothered to argue when she turned sixteen and dropped out of school. No one had come after her when she'd bought the bus ticket back to Birmingham with her own money. She'd walked from the Greyhound depot downtown, dragging an old duffel bag behind her. Military canvas crammed full of her ratty jeans and T-shirts and comic books like some gigantic olive-drab sausage. (p. 57, Roc mmp)

I have remarked more than once of the sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional recurrence of "the white woman" in my stories and novels, beginning with Virginia Percel in The Five of Cups on up the legless albino in "the white dreams" and "In View of Nothing." However, this parallel with Spyder's return to Alabama and Dancy's exit from Florida in Threshold, and then "again" in Alabaster, was, I can honestly say, entirely accidental. It gave me pause, seeing it yesterday. Was Spyder a dress rehearsal for Dancy? Is Dancy merely Spyder Baxter seen from some other perspective? Then, when you reconsider "Bainbridge" in light of this passage, "Bainbridge" being the story where the events of Silk, Alabaster, Threshold, and Murder of Angels are finally brought into direct contact, all sorts of wormholes and literary Möbius strips and new resonances emerge. Most of the interconnectedness in my stories is intentional, but this parallel certainly was not, which probably makes it all the more meaningful.

I have held off on making this announcement until I had my schedule, but yes, I will be appearing at the Birmingham Public Library's Alabama Bound lit festival in April. Specifically, at 12:30 p.m., Saturday April 14th. It will be a very short sort of a thing, hardly even a real reading (as that's the way Alabama Bound works), but I will be answering questions afterwards and signing for a bit (I think a local Barnes and Noble will be providing copies of Daughter of Hounds and Threshold for sale). This is my first public appearance since November 2004, and I currently have no others planned.

Last night, Spooky and I watched the three-hour Galápagos special on the National Geographic Channel. Beautiful.

Okay. Back to the word mines...

There was work yesterday. Tinkering with the proposal for Joey LaFaye, which I've sent to my agent. Today I'll need to begin work on the proposal for the book after Joey LaFaye. As yet, it has no title. Yesterday, I looked at the proposal we used to sell Daughter of Hounds and was a bit astounded and embarrassed at how awful it was, and at how little resemblance it bears to the novel it spawned. I'm tempted to post it here, behind a cut, as it certainly illustrates what I've said before about the proposals I write for novels having very little to do with the forms the novels eventually take. But it's three pages long. Maybe I could post excerpts. Mostly, I'm just glad I didn't feel the need to adhere to that proposal, but, instead, allowed the story to unfold organically. Let it happen, which is how I usually think of the writing of novels.

Also, I wrote a poem yesterday, "Nest." Presently, it exists in two forms, the original and a cut-up "remix" version. I've been wanting to do something with cut-up for a while now, and I am impressed with the results. Anyway, the poem was inspired by the five raven dolls Spooky's just finishing up. Four of them will be going to eBay sometime next week (I think), and each one will be accompanied by a signed and numbered copy of this poem. As I said earlier, the poem will not be reprinted anywhere for at least two or three years. Two of the ravens will be auctioned with the original draft of "Nest" and two with the remix, though buyers will not know which version they're getting until the auctions are over. I was so pleased with this poem that I've resolved to write more poetry and continue working with the cut-up technique.

Also also, it's once again time for the annual Locus Poll and Survey. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if Alabaster got a few votes...

Last night, in an effort to make up for Friday's missed Kid Night, we watched Ivan Reitman's My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Roger Allers and Jill Culton's Open Season. While My Super Ex-Girlfriend wasn't half as good as it might have been, I did enjoy it quite a bit more than I'd expected I would. Uma just keeps rocking my world. I think it's her feet. On the other hand, Luke Wilson has all the charisma of an old tennis ball, and maybe that was the point, but I wish someone more interesting had been cast. It would have made a big difference. As for Open Season, it was really quite wonderful, and I hadn't expected to like it at all, given how much I dislike Martin Lawrence. So, yeah, two fun films in one night. Not bad, and I think it helped get the taste of The Black Dahlia out of my mouth.

Yesterday, I wrote 0 words. Go me. For now, the Forced March has halted. There is other work that must be done. The Forced March may resume, in a weakened strain, later this week. The less said about Wednesday, the better. But I did 1,573 words, there on that last day of January, that month when I'd pledged to write at least 1,500 words every damn day. It's not a pledge I'd expected to come anywhere near to keeping. I thought, surely, by the 3rd or 4th, I'd have come to my senses. No such luck. Out of 31 days, I wrote on 28 of them. I worked 30 of them, with only one day off (on the 21st). Two were days given over to writing-related work during which no actual writing was done. I managed to write 1,500+ words 27/31 days (one day — Tuesday, the 9th — I wrote "only" 631 words). My total word count for the month was 47,826 words, exceeding my goal of 46,500 by 1,326 words. The Word Bank closed out in the black with 3,593 spare words. So, all things considered, the experiment was a success, but a success I intend never to repeat again so long as I live. I cannot write this way, not if I mean to write well. Mark this as one of the vilest months of my life. And move on.

Yesterday was a sort of mandatory day off. I spent most of it in bed. We did our Imbolc thing late in the evening. Spooky had picked more Narcissus on Tuesday, and they all blossomed. Early last night, we watched Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. Previously, the only De Palma film I've ever actually liked was 1987's The Untouchables, and I can say today that's still very much the case. The Black Dahlia is a confusing mess of a film, and I have no idea what Scarlett Johansson was thinking.

I hope people found Sirenia Digest #14 to their liking. Feedback is, as always, welcome.

Alabaster has made the 2006 Locus Recommended Reading List, I am pleased to report.

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The last few weeks, I dream about the white room and the albino amputee more nights than not. I've never had a "recurring" dream that came with such frequency and clarity. I am starting to detect minor variations, whereas I was almost sure, for a while, that the dream was identical every time I dreamt it. But it's not that things are different one time to the next. It's more like I notice things I may not have noticed before, or upon waking I recall things I did not previously recall. Were I capable of lucid dreaming, there are things I would look for. One thing that I have slowly become aware of is that, in the dream, I do not have use of my left arm. It seems shriveled and numb. So, maybe that's one thing the albino woman and I have in common. We are both cripples, though she more dramatically so. I still do not know why I'm looking for missing syringes or what the photo album means, exactly what I'm being asked to find. There is a question I ask sometimes — "What am I seeing?" or "What is it that you want me to see?" I see now those are actually two very different questions. There's talk of "the war in Taiwan," but I have no idea where or when that white room is supposed to be. The dream does not seem to be leading anywhere. It's more like a loop, or an echo that grows stronger instead of fading.

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Watching them come and go,
Tomorrows and the yesterdays,
Christians and the unbelievers,
Hanging by the cross and nail.

Is there anything good I can say about 2006? It would be nice if there were, given that 2005 was such a fiasco. It would be good to think that this year went better than last. There were the two World Fantasy nominations. There was Alabaster. There was the visit to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, back in August. There were private moments. There was news of liquid water on Mars within the last seven years. There was Hubero. There was the They Might Be Giants show. Mostly, though, I find myself falling back upon films. Films are the "fond things" I remember. These are my favourite from 2006:

1. The Fountain
2. The Prestige
3. Lady in the Water
4. Marie Antoinette
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
6. An Inconvenient Truth
7. Tideland
8. The Departed
9. A Scanner Darkly
10. The Ant Bully

There are films I know should be on this list, but are not yet, as I've not been able to see them (for example, Pan's Labyrinth will likely be my fave of 2006, if it ever opens in Atlanta).

When all is said and done, 2006 is a blur, an instant, the blink of an eye.

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Nothing to say about yesterday, work-wise, that would be the least bit interesting to hear. The day earned its W.

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We watched Richard Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly last night, and I found it brilliant and almost impossible to sit through. I cannot say that the rotoscoped animation was not effective, as it certainly kept me disoriented and ill at ease, but I'd prefer never to sit through another film executed in that hideous paint-by-number style.

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My thanks to Elizabeth Bear (matociquala) for this link. It's a map created by the National Arbor Day Foundation, illustrating changes in "hardiness zones" from 1990-2006 as a result of global warming. It was compiled based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States. And it explains why the dogwood trees are budding in Atlanta and Birmingham in December. What is a hardiness zone?

The Plant Hardiness Zones divide the United States and Canada into 11 areas based on a 10 degree Fahrenheit difference in the average annual minimum temperature. (The United States falls within Zones 2 through 10). For example, the lowest average temperature in Zone 2 is -50 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit, while the minimum average temperature in zone 10 is 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.)

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I decided, almost at the last minute, to include a sneak preview of Daughter of Hounds in Sirenia Digest 13. So, you get "The Voyeur in the House of Glass" and "Metamorphosis B," plus the entire prologue of the novel. I'm hoping this will sell a few more copies. It's also resulted in the longest issue to date, at (I think), 56 pp. Spooky will be sending Sirenia Digest out later this afternoon. We're running a little slow, what with just the one iBook and all.

Meanwhile...

There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.

We came across that sentence while reading The Hobbit last night, the scene where Bilbo first gets a good look at Smaug's hoard, and it just floored me. Not only is it a grand sentence in its own right, but it struck a nerve with me, as too often I am writing and come to some marvelous or terrible thing...and the words just are not there. I know they should be. I sense they may once have been. Anyway, nice.

The thing about days off when one is actually expected to rest, they do not make for interesting blog entries. Because, as I have found, resting is generally boring as hell. And there are few things I hate as much as boredom. Republicans, polenta, NASCAR, Christina Aguilera, leafblowers, Stargate SG-1, and boredom. So there was not nearly as much pure and unadulterated rest yesterday as there should have been. I'm just no good at it.

We had a really nice, long walk, though, as it was bright and almost warm. Warm enough the dogwoods are budding, which is, of course, all sorts of wrong. We walked west as far as Inman Park, crossing Austin Avenue down to Euclid, which we followed back towards L5P. We played with Daisy, a very friendly black dog. It was about 3:30 p.m. (CaST), and the moon, one day past first quarter, was already high in the southeastern sky. We spotted a Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens). We saw a mysterious trail of fresh bloody dog prints on the sidewalk.

Back home, instead of resting, I worked at cleaning my messy office. It looks much better today. About 6 p.m., I did finally lie down and read for a while, from Janus and Brashler's The Search for Peking Man (1975), but that's as close as I came to doing nothing. I cannot do nothing. I will do plenty of nothing when I am dead. Later, Spooky made soup for dinner. We watched Anthony Bourdain in Indonesia. I did a Wikipedia entry for the new sauropod clade Turiasauria. Spooky rescued the neighbor's chihuahua, as it had somehow gotten outside without them knowing. Then we read The Hobbit, which is where all this began.

Yesterday, after all the "you're not a kid anymore" crap, a couple of people asked about Kid Night, if we still do Kid Night. Truthfully, things have been so crazy the last six or eight months, that Kid Night has been allowed to fall by the wayside. However, inspired by these questions, we resolved to have a proper frelling Kid Night this evening, and maybe it will help. I think we're going to watch The Descent, which must surely qualify as Kid Night fodder. There will be mac and cheese.

My thanks to Tim Pratt, not only for writing that marvelous review of Daughter of Hounds for Locus, but for sending me the full text yesterday. And that reminds me, Spooky pointed out that if you buy Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster together from Amazon.com, you not only save $10.55 off the cost of the books, you also qualify for FREE Super Saver shipping. And hey, you could always toss in the mmp of Threshold for just $6.99 more! But wait! There's more! Well, actually there isn't. But that what they always say of television, so...

Meanwhile, if today is going to earn a W, I must attend to some editing and get back to Vince Locke about the sketch he sent me last night for "The Voyeur in the House of Glass."

Eight hours sleep last night, and nothing was stolen, and nothing exploded, and we were not visited by a second deluge. So, I guess things are looking up. The basement lake sat there all night, and some guy in a white van showed up this ayem to pump it out. I was just sort of getting fond of having my own lagoon.

I keep finding new reasons to hate MySpace. For example, there's this little drop-down menu thingy that lets you categorize your entries. There's something like 27 categories to choose from, including such very important subjects as "Fashion, Style, Shopping" "Parties and Nightlife," "Goals, Hopes, Plans," and "Automotive." Heck, there's even "Religion and Philosophy" and "Writing and Poetry," which does seem to indicate that MySpace has not entirely discounted intellectual pursuits. However, out of all these categories, there's no "Science" or "Science and Nature." Which, I think, says a lot about public attitudes towards science in America. Anyway, TypePad is looking like a much better mirror, so I may soon abandon the blight of MySpace completely. What a relief it will be to never again have to look upon the oddly shiny faces of drunken college students posing for pix with drinks in hand, and I can stop getting spammed with "friend" requests from hookers and indie bands. No, it's true. I really do hate MySpace.

I'm going to try to begin a new story today, something that will likely appear in Sirenia Digest 14 in January. I'd intended to spend the entire day in bed, observing Global Orgasm Day in a manner most befitting. But, then, I'd not counted on losing yesterday. So, the orgasms will just have to wait a while longer. By the way, Global Orgasm Day has been organised by the Global Consciousness Project, which I think is actually based out of Princeton U. (at least, their website is anchored there), in hopes of measuring "changes in randomness during global events." The "science" here is, to say the least, highly questionable in its validity. But I just can't resist something called Global Orgasm Day, even if it is a front for bad science hoping "to effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm. There are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti-submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, so the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!" Er...right. I suppose this gets filed under "Noble Yet Idiotic." Still, any excuse for an orgasm or five, and maybe we'll get lucky and the "surge of human energy" will at last awaken Cthulhu, who will promptly destroy the whole silly world by Xmas.

Don't forget that the current eBay auctions end later today, this evening, including a hand-corrected galley for Daughter of Hounds and an ARC of the same. So, have a look. Bid if you've a mind to do so. Oh, and I never did congratulate kiaduran for snagging the green-haired boy doll and lettered copy of Alabaster the other day. She's the same kind soul who gave Snapdragon a good home. Oh, wait, only the galley auction ends today. The ARC ends on Xmas Eve. Thank you, Spooky.

And if you have not pre-ordered already, the platypus assures me that Cephalopodmas is the best day of all, after Samhain, for pre-ordering Daughter of Hounds

We did, belatedly, get in a little something nice for Solstice last night. Despite the drizzle, the cold, and the cloud cover, we walked over to Freedom Park sometime after midnight. It was deserted, and we sat under the oaks and pecan trees at the top of the hill, shivering and damp, but happy for the sky and the solitude.

And now, as my Cephalopodmas gift to you, this exquisite photo of the hooked suckers of one of my favourite teuthids, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the Colossal Squid. If this doesn't a) put you in the holiday spirit and b) get you ready for the sychronised global orgasm, well, I don't know what possibly ever would.

I think this entry gets subdivided. Otherwise, I'll never find my way from one end of it to the other.

I did a very satisfactory 2,110 words today on "The Voyeur in the House of Glass." 10 pp. in four or five hours. Much better than my average. But it's a hard piece, harder than usual. Still, I hope to finish it tomorrow afternoon.

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Somehow, I managed all those words today despite an especially acute case of dreamsickness. I can't recall most of it now. I've spent much of the day willfully forgetting. But since I brought it up, and that always leads to questions if I don't follow through, since I do not wish to frustrate, this is what I do remember. This must have been near the end of it all, just before I woke. Being on the street of an Asian city, maybe Tokyo. I've never been to Asia, so likely it was only a conglomeration of images from photos and films. Night. Neon and cosplay