Yesterday was a somewhat better day off than was Sunday, thanks primarily to Spooky's insistence that we actually do something. Many ideas were bandied about, but we finally decided to head up to the Phoenix and Dragon on Roswell Road, where we get most of our witchy-type supplies. It's a pretty cool place, if you manage to ignore all the fluffy New Age junk. So, that was productive and mostly enjoyable. For dinner, we wound up at the Vortex at L5P with Byron, who stuck around for Heroes. Unfortunately, this week's episode wasn't nearly as intriguing as last week's. Clearly, the show's creators have heard of science, they just don't seem to understand it very clearly. I admit, though, I did sort of enjoy watching Sylar go all Carrie White on his mother; I'm pretty sure Sylar and Hiro are the only reasons we continue to watch this series. Fortunately, there was also strawberries and vanilla ice cream, which made the mediocrity somewhat less insufferable.

We made plans to meet up with Byron later this week for a matinee of Spider Man 3, and to see 28 Weeks Later on Friday, and then he left, and about 11:30 p.m. we drove over to Videodrome and rented Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999), because we were both in the mood for something of that sort. I'd forgotten what a really wonderful film this is, certainly one of the best pieces of cinematic dark fantasy/weird fiction of the last decade. Grand performances from Robert Carlyle, Guy Pearce, and Jeffrey Jones, and Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn's score is exquisite. Plus, it's hardly even possible to tell that it was filmed in Slovakia, nowhere near the Sierra Nevada.

So, yeah, that was yesterday.

Except, also, after I posted the lyrics to "Bouncing Off Clouds" and stated that they'd had no influence whatsoever on "The Ape's Wife," I got to thinking about the words to the song and about the short story. And there might be some points of contact after all. This verse:

Well, you can stare all day at the sky
But that won't bring her back,
That won't bring her back.
You say you're waiting on fate,
But I think fate is now.
I think fate is now
Waiting on us

I have realised that the four copies of Silk I promised to four new Sirenia Digest subscribers way back in mid-March have never been mailed out. In all the writing and busyness and chaos, I simply forgot. Apologies. Anyway, if you were one of those four subscribers, please e-mail Spooky at crk(underscore)books(at)yahoo(dot)com and we'll get the books out to you. Or you can comment here. Either way.

Today it's back to work. The platypus will have no more of the downtime nonsense. Wisely, hesheit points out that the days off only make my nightmares worse. So. I have to tweak "The Ape's Wife" and send it to subpress, have a look at exactly what's being asked of me re: revisions to the child of the Forced and New Reconsolidated marches, and start thinking hard about Sirenia Digest #18. Tonight, it's back to work on the "Onion" screenplay. That will be today. You kids play nice. Tonks is watching.

Yesterday, I wrote 885 words on "The Ape's Wife," finally finding THE END. The total word count for the story comes to 8,683 words. But, fortunately, I have a very understanding editor, and he was cool with the extra 683 words. I am not yet entirely certain how I feel about the ending. This story first occurred to me as a 2-3k-word vignette for Sirenia Digest and, in the writing, became a sort of hallucinatory mini-epic of the weird. Sort of like what might have happened if Lord Dunsany had written a sequel to the 1933 King Kong. Anyway, after dinner, I did four good pages on the "Onion" screenplay, so the Zokoutu page meter looks like this:

8 / 115 (7.0%)

Which gets me almost to the end of Scene 3. Frank and Willa in their horrid little apartment above the Chinese apothecary. But. Today is a day off. Spooky finished with Murder of Angels yesterday, and I need to put some distance between myself and "The Ape's Wife" before I can determine if and how and why it might need to be tweaked. Plus, now that the short story is finished, I must proceed to the revisions of the spawn of the Forced and New Reconsolidated marches, which will likely consume most of next week.

I never did mention that I thought last Monday's episode of Heroes was somewhat less mediocre than usual, and it caused me to suspect that maybe some part of the problem is that they started the story in the wrong place.

A good walk yesterday, continuing our exploration of the parks along Ponce de Leon. We crossed Springdale and Virgilee to Oak Grove Park, which used to be Brightwood Park. It is shown as Brightwood on Olmsted's blueprints for the five parks, and I cannot imagine why the name has been changed. Except that Atlanta seems allergic to its own history. Spooky spotted a luna moth (Actias luna) chrysalis hanging in a tree. There were squirrels and robins. A very pleasant stroll. Back home, after dinner and screenplay writing, we watched Steve Anderson's hilarious documentary Fuck (2005), followed by an old favourite of mine, George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973).

Okay. I think that's all for now. I should get out of here before the dozing platypus awakens and slaps the manacles on me once again. I leave you with this image, Merian C. Cooper dreaming of Kong, which seems appropriate the day after finishing "The Ape's Wife."

Not having managed to die in my sleep, I screw up my courage and face another goddamn day. A day when I have to buy clothes, something new for the filming on Saturday (the Frank Woodward HPL documentary). I haven't bought new clothes in...almost forever, it seems. It could be years. It surprises people, but I loathe shopping, especially for clothes. Yes, there's another contradiction. But today I have been ordered to find at least one presentable outfit. So, I fear there is a mall in my immediate future. I'd rather not. Malls make my skin crawl.

Yesterday was spent polishing the new "Yellow House" story for Sirenia Digest #17, which now has a title, "In the Crimson Court of the Grey Lady." Total word count, after polishes, 7,320 words. We read through the story from start to finish for the first time. And then I tweaked and snipped and polished. Sometime after seven I stopped so that we could have a walk (Candler Park), and then I came back to it after dinner. Finally, I had to remind myself what Toni Morrison said, that all art is knowing when to stop. I hope people like this one, as it did not come with anything like ease. Sirenia Digest #17 will also include a new sf story by Sonya Taafe (sovay). This morning, I have to send my story to Vince so he can start on the illustration.

Apparently, someone told Locus that I'd sold an sf collection to Subterranean Press, as I learned yesterday from Bill Schafer that the announcement appeared in the magazine a few issues back. Setting the record straight, Bill and I have long been planning for me to do a collection of sf short stories for subpress. I have promised it to him, and it will likely happen in 2008, but it has not happened yet. No deal has been made, no contracts signed, no book sold. Bill and I had a long and pleasant talk, mostly about The Dinosaurs of Mars. Note that there will be a third (and perhaps final) erotica collection sometime next year. It is my decision that it will likely be the last of these pretty little books. If I keep this up too long, the whole thing will lose its appeal for me. And three is a good number.

I broke my glasses. The frame snapped at the nose piece while I was cleaning them. They're at least fifty years old, and the Bakelite has been outgasing, so it's no wonder. Right now, in true geek fashion, they are held together with a bit of Band-Aid.

Whoever's been working so diligently on my Wikipedia entry has stated that I have written "more than one hundred published short stories, novellas, and vignettes." At first I balked, because that number looked absurd. It could not possibly be correct. Then I started adding it all up, my short fiction since that first sale in the summer of 1993 ("Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea"), and goddamn if the number doesn't exceed one hundred. I had no idea. It's sort of horrifying.

Last night, we watched Heroes, and I'm glad the series will be ending after another four or five episodes, because I have no idea what compels me to watch this exercise in bad science, melodrama, and mediocrity.* Then we watched Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), which I adore almost unconditionally, but had never seen with Spooky. Then I downloaded astronomical screensavers from NASA/JPL. Then I went to bed and finally finished Steven Bach's Final Cut. I think I got to sleep just after four. I managed to sleep until just before eleven, which seems like some sort of minor victory. Seven hours ain't so bad at all.

Anyway, I must stop this and get dressed. How I do dread this day. I'll take bossy platypi over shopping malls any day of the week.

* Sigh. I have just been informed, and rightly so, that Heroes has, indeed, been picked up for a second season. Someone should have told the tv announcer guy, because last night we quite clearly heard "final four episodes," not "final four episodes of the season." Ah, well. I'm only watching so far as the end of this season. It's already gone on too long.

This morning I'm not exactly on what I believe is commonly referred to as an even keel. I hope that this changes in the next hour or so.

I just saw the Oscar nominations. I'm an Oscar geek from way back, and a forgiving sort of "soul," but I think maybe this is the year I've finally had it with the awards. I shall not get into particulars. Maybe later. I suspect this is merely one aspect of my growing disdain for popularity contests of all sorts. I shall, instead, reflect upon the percentage of Oscars that wind up in thrift stores, antique shops, at yard sales, hidden away in attics, sold on eBay, & etc. & etc., and let it go at that.

Yesterday was an unexpected sort of mess. Nothing I was supposed to get done actually got done. Not a bit of eBay. A lot of time was wasted on Photoshop, but that also came to little or nothing. Then my agent called about three p.m. or so, and we talked for almost an hour. That was the best part of the workday. Making concrete plans for What Happens Next, what the Next Thing will be, and the Thing After That. It was an encouraging sort of conversation. Ultimately, it means more work, but what else would I do with this life? At four fifteen or so, I called it a day and fucked off to the cinema to catch a matinee.

And it is a testament to the genius of Guillermo del Toro that I managed to love Pan's Labyrinth despite the fact that the air temperature in the theatre must have been hovering somewhere just above freezing. Fortunately, I had my gloves, though it was very annoying the way my glasses kept fogging up. Oh, and we also had to endure the atrocious yodeling agony of the Dreamgirls soundtrack for the half hour we sat in the icebox before the film began, and still it was worth it.

Pan's Labyrinth is an amazing film, and if you have not already seen it, I urge you to do so. I kept thinking about Algernon Blackwood. Only Blackwood would likely have pulled a lot of those punches. I should have more to say, but I think my head's still too full of the wonders. Something that comes this close to perfection, it speaks for itself.

Back home, I tuned in for the new episode of Heroes. I'm still fence-sitting on whether or not this series is actually Very Good or merely Sort of Interesting. But last night there was Christopher Eccleston, so what the hell. And then, a few minutes past midnight I went back to work, and an hour later, Photoshop still had the last laugh, and all I had was a bloody nose and clenched fists. I would do better to get back to the 1,500 words a day, back to the writing. Still, at least yesterday earned a W. It might have earned an L, which would have been a shame after the first twenty days of January.

I'm considering setting up a magick/neopaganism filter. If you want in, speak up. However, it's not a done deal. I might change my mind. So rarely do I ever write an entry that's devoted to less than a half dozen things, I can't really see how a filter's gonna help. If only there were LJ tags that allowed you to filter parts of any given entry, that would be far more amenable to my present needs. We shall see. Time to make the goddamn doughnuts.

I made it into bed, in the strictest sense (that is, I was technically, bodily, in the bed), by 1:30 last night, but Spooky and I sat there talking until almost three. Something woke me at four. Spooky claimed it was her stomach making noises, but I have my doubts. I awoke again at nine, from nightmares I had no wish to go back down to, so I decided I would make do with six hours sleep (give or take; take mostly). Spooky got up at ten, when the alarm went off.

Upon waking, I wrote down as much of the dream/s as I could recall. That part of the dream nearest to the waking event (what is the geometry/geography of dreams?). That part most recoverable by my conscious mind. Too much to write down here. You wouldn't want to read it all. I wouldn't want to write it down again. But there was part that might have been a road trip, or a forced march, or an exodus, or somehow all these things at once. The sky was burning, and the whole world was shades or orange and red. There was a man on stilts. There was something I kept hidden that I was always afraid would be discovered. There were wastelands of twisted steel and the charred corpses of automobiles piled up along the highways. There were bones, too. There were bones everywhere — bleached white, burnt black — and at one point I was explaining to someone traveling with me (I can't say who, because I do not know) which ones were human and how you could tell. There was an old house where I stopped to rest, a house surrounded by dead trees. I sat for a long time on the stairs, listening to the wind and to people talking. A girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, asked me if I was thirsty, and I told her no, though I was very thirsty. There were bloody handprints on the wall beside me. The blood was dry and looked more like rust. Etc. and etc.

The writing went very well again yesterday. I did the first 1,424 words on a new piece for Sirenia Digest which I am calling "Metamorphosis A." I expect to finish it today.

We watched "Heroes" last night, instead of waiting for the Friday night rerun on SciFi. I'm losing patience with the show. The hope I had for it at the start is fading fast as it seems to dissolve into too much of the usual television foolishness. I think, at this point, I'm only watching it for Hiro. I'll likely give up and see the rest on DVD. The commercials drive me crazy. They defeat whatever tension the scripts manage to build. Oh, wait. We'll be back to our story in a moment. But first, listen to people scream at you about new cars and insurance and breakfast cereal and all our other crappy shows (Friday Night Lights????). I'm pretty sure the reason I liked Season One of Battlestar Galactica so much more than Season Two or Season Three (thus far) is that I saw it on DVD, where there were no commercials to undo the tension.

Read chapters IXX and XX of House of Leaves.

I'm excited about the new Pynchon novel, Against the Day. Given the teaser, how I can I not be excited? To wit: Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

Besides, I've never not loved a Pynchon novel.

I suppose that's it for now. That's enough. Do recall that the eBay auctions end this evening, late this afternoon, whichever. The Daughter of Hounds ARC and the lettered copy of Alabaster with chapbook and Spooky's doll. The latter, especially, involves one-of-a-kind items. There will never be another green-haired boy doll. This is the one and only. You'll not regret it.