Seems one of the cracked teeth has refused to heal. Dr. Booth warned me this was very possible. The damage was just too great. I awoke at 5:45 ayem or so, in something at least approaching agony, and it was near 7 am before I was asleep again, and the only thanks to pain pills and Ambesol. So, in all likelihood, I'll be going to have this tooth extracted sometime in the next two weeks, right in the middle of packing and all these deadlines, and I'll be losing at least a few days to recovery when I should be packing and writing.

I've been meaning to mention that "A Season of Broken Dolls" has been selected for a forthcoming trade paperback "sampler" of stories from the online version of Subterranean Magazine.

No writing yesterday, not really. We took Hubero outside on his leash, and it was good to be out in the spring sunlight, listening to the blue jays and the robins. We had someone from United Van Lines coming to give us an estimate on the cost of the move to Providence. He needed access to all rooms, and I knew I couldn't work through that, so I took a book and went to (boo, hiss) Starbuck's (and they may not have enough sense to use the apostrophe, but I do). I don't remember how many months ago it was that I laid aside Chris Beard's The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (University of California Press, 2004), but shame on me. It's a wonderfully written thing, and I sat there and drank a white-chocolate mocha (too sweet, but not bad), and read Chapter 6 ("The Birth of a Ghost Lineage"), which was mainly about collecting fossils of the omomyid primate Shoshonius cooperi from the late Eocene Willwood Formation of Wyoming's Wind River Basin. Meanwhile, Spooky got our estimate from a guy named Ron Goodbub, a retired Pepsico salesman from Kentucky who grew bored with retirement and went back to work (I think it's very suspicious that LJ knows how to spell Pepsico, but not Shoshonius; hell, it can't even spell "Starkbuck's" without the apostrophe). Here's a bit from Chapter 6 of Chris Beard's book I wanted to quote:

"It hardly ever makes sense to refer to a given species — whether living or fossil — as being 'more primitive' than another, for reasons that go beyond any value-laden connotations the comparison carries along with it. Tarsiers are more primitive than humans in having three premolars on either side of their lower jaws and in lacking a complete mandible formed by bony fusion at the chin. Humans are more primitive than tarsiers in retaining a separate tibia and fibula and in having much smaller eyes. The important distinction here is that, while entire species can rarely be arranged from primitive to advanced, individual features usually can be. In fact, paleontologists rely on exactly these trait-by-trait comparisons to decipher the biology of extinct organisms, as well as to reconstruct how they fit on the evolutionary tree."

Myself, I prefer to speak of character states being more and less derived from a given ancestral state than to ever use the word "primitive" or "advanced," as any given organism's evolutionary "status" can only be assessed or judged relative to how well it is adapted to its environment. Tarsiers have been around a lot longer than humans (by tens of millions of years), but they are no less well adapted to their environment than are humans, and therefore no more "primitive" (which, of course, is just another way of saying what Beard is saying above). Yes, that was a tangent.

Mr. Goodbub took longer with the estimate stuff than expected, and it was after 4 pm before I got back to work. I read over the pages I did on "Rappaccini's Dragon" on Monday and Tuesday, made some corrections, and then decided I'd spend the rest of the afternoon packing, give up a Friday off, and plan to finish the story today. I packed something like seven large boxes of books, hardly the tip of the fucking iceberg. Then again, Mr. Goodbub was telling Spooky about having just moved a mathematician who had 500 boxes of books, which makes me feel a little better.

How I'm going to cope with my schedule this month — especially with the bum tooth — is sort of beyond me. I have to finish "Rappaccini's Dragon" for Sirenia Digest #30. I have to do the line edits and introduction on A is for Alien, and an introduction for an Arthur Machen collection that's being edited by S.T. Joshi. I have to get back to work on The Red Tree and make some real progress. I have to go to Birmingham and have a tooth pulled, then recover. And Spooky and i figured out yesterday that it's likely the pace of packing will have become so hectic by the 20th that I'll be forced to stop working. We will probably leave here on May 29th, a Thursday. It's insane, truly. I'd wait and have to tooth pulled after the move, but after the pain last night, that may not be an option.

I was in bed a little after one ayem, and we read more of House of Leaves, because I needed to hear the words. I was asleep by 2:30, only to be awakened a few hours later, which is where we came in...

Ah, and only a few weeks until I hit -4, on May 26th. I do have that wish list at Amazon.com, even if it does mean more packing. Distractions are always welcome, even when i have no time for them.

Coffee, platypus. Coffee, you fool!

Not a very Samhain or Hallowe'en sort of sentiment, I know. But it's true, and it's the subject line that popped into my head. Hubero, brawny little fellow that he is, says Byron is his Daddy, so it's all okay.

Lots of chaos and fuss hereabouts, getting ready for our house guests, who will be arriving Thursday from Arkansas and Alabama, and also getting ready for the Trick-or-Treaters tonight. I was so, so brave yesterday. Not only did I go outside, I went to bloody, frelling Target. Because the little bratlings must have candy, though I rather like my idea of handing out tiny packets of salt and black pepper, ketchup and mustard and whatever else we could scarf up for free at fast-food places. I mean, condiments are sort of like candy. Sort of. Alas, Spooky said no, so we went to Target. And I did not scream, though the combo Pizza Hut/Starbuck's was almost more than my mind could endure. Oh, and we carved pumpkins yesterday. There are some photos (behind the cut) of this year's jack-o-lanterns. In the photo of the two together, I carved the uppermost one:

( Pumpkolanternia )

Some good thoughts regarding Joey Lafaye yesterday, which is to say that I'm working on the novel, even if I'm not quite working on it at the keyboard yet...

Tonight, if you are so inclined, you are invited to join me in the Second Life steampunk milleau of New Babbage for a Samhain bonfire behind the Abney Park Laboratory. The Professor will be making a brief appearance, just long enough for the ceremony, as she has been busy elsewhere recently...on an extended cuttlefishing expedition. Well, that's the cover story, should anyone ask. I do not have a hard-and-fast time for the event, but the bonfire will be sometime between 9:30 and 10:30 EDT, probably. I may post an update later with a more precise time. As for how to find Abney Park, if you teleport into Babbage Square, the good Professor's laboratory is the first building east of the train depot. I'm trying to decide whether or not I can get away with doing it "virtually" skyclad. Sheesh, last year I celebrated Samhain in the woods around a real bonfire, getting real bug bites in unmentionable places because I was not merely virtually skyclad. The invitation came again this year (thank you, once more), but there was just too much going on to get away. Here's a quote regarding my experience last year which I came across this morning, a response to a question as to why I found working skyclad so liberating:

To put it as simply as I can, I suspect that the reason I found the experience so very positive arose mainly from the knowledge that I stood there before the whole universe, that vast and largely unfathomable cosmos, and nothing stood between me and it. No clothing, no walls, no rooftops. The star-dabbed wheel of the sky, the brilliant waxing quarter moon, our chants, the cold air, the crackle and smoky smell of the bonfire, the knowledge that I stood as all creatures throughout all galaxies have ever stood, naked in every sense, in every way, as perfectly devoid of barriers as I am presently able to be. There was a grand giddiness, an ecstasy. For me, ecstasy is at the heart of Neo-paganism. Ecstasy and celebration and communion, and Saturday night was my most...what word, what word...my most complete experience of all three to date.

Yep.

One of the weird emails from Monday morning was someone wanting me to grant them a "free option" to adapt "Bela's Plot" to the screen. I dutifully passed the request along to my lit agent, Merrilee, and my film agent, Julien, though I knew the default answer to all "free option" inquiries is a polite "no." Here's the deal: If you can scrape up the money to make a film, even an ultra low-budget one, you can also scrape up the cash to pay the author some pittance upfront for your use of the source material.

I'd still love to hear more thoughts on Sirenia Digest #23. My thanks to setsuled for this bit yesterday:

Both stories seem concerned with unspoken communion. I was reminded of the Japanese aesthetic concept of Yugen, the idea that certain concepts or emotions can only be transmitted without words. Obviously the "voiceless communion a hundred million years older even than the coming of mankind" in "The Bed of Appetite" would remind me of yugen, but it's also in the mysterious objects left by the ghosts in "The Madam of the Narrow Houses," and the peculiar explanation the ghost offers for the protagonist's state of health.

Both stories deal with characters unmoved or irritated by false affections; the character in the first story is contrasted with the people who don't really care for their own children, yet nonetheless wonder why she doesn't marry. A character is described in the second story as never casually handing out praise. Both characters seem to seek transcending the false world by strange avenues. That the second story is concerned with art is significant, as is the fact one character insists that he doesn't attempt to find a publisher for his writing because he writes for himself. One might say the purpose of art is to find means of expressing what's otherwise inexpressible.

Okay. The year is turning, and there's mischief to be made. Come on, platypus. Let's get to it...

Postscript (5:44 p.m. EST): My modest Second Life Samhain ceremony in New Babbage will begin at 10:30 p.m. EST (which is 7:30 SLT/PST). Hope to see you there.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,210 words on "The Bed of Appetite," a new story for Sirenia Digest #23. Which was a great fucking relief after all those days of not writing anything much at all. And it occurred to me that while it's entirely unremarkable that I've had difficulty writing the last few months — in the wake of the long nightmare of the Beowulf novelization and the mountain of editing/reworking of older projects. No, what is remarkable is that, during this extended period when I've felt all but unable to write, I have in fact written "Outside the Gates of Eden," "The Ape's Wife," "The Steam Dancer," "In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection," "Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Léon Spilliaert," "Scene in the Museum (1896)," "Salammbö Redux" (née "Little Conversations"), "Untitled Grotesque," and "The Madam of the Narrow Houses." That's nine stories during what has felt like one of the most unproductive periods of my writing career. For that matter, I wrote over 15,000 words in The Dinosaurs of Mars before I shelved it in July.

And here's another reminder that Stiff Kitten T-shirts are now available from Ziraxia. I will point out, these shirts are silk screened, not those iron-on decal things like you get from Cafe Press, and that these are high-quality American Aparrel T-shirts.

While I was writing the above paragraph, Hubero precipitated a pet-related disaster of near-apocalyptic proportions, which has rather put a damper on me finishing this entry.

I'm not even sure what I was going to say next. Anyone want a slightly used Siamese/Tonkinese pyschopath?

Well, Byron came over last night, and first we watched a bunch of David Bowie videos, and then we watched Little Britain on BBCA, and then we watched Kill Bill Vol. 2, so at least last night was a good Friday night.

I'm going to go now. I think I need a drink...

If you have not yet read it, "Little Conversations" is now online at Clarkesworld Magazine.

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Hubero P. Wu's arrival. Though we don't know his actual age, we treated it like a birthday. And it's not easy to find those little party hats small enough to fit on the head of a Siamese cat.

I think I've been floundering for the last few weeks, ever since I shelved The Dinosaurs of Mars. Howard Hughes is having a little trouble distinguishing between her left and her right. There seems to be no bottom to this bout of exhaustion, and I wonder if it is only exhaustion. Alas, another thin LJ entry.

Where the hell did the summer go?

I'm so not awake yet. Perhaps, by the time I finish this entry, I shall be awake. There's warm sunlight pouring in through the office window, and I think that's helping. We have clouds heading in later this afternoon, so I wanted to see the sun while I can. This is the first office I've had that I haven't made into a "black box." Or, rather, I did, but then I uncovered one of the windows last year. Or the year before. I don't know. I'm not yet awake enough to access memories that far back. The garbage truck is making a terrible racket outside. Only six hours sleep last night, and I have Mr. Hubero to blame for that. These days, I seem to need seven hours.

Yesterday was an entirely frustrating sort of day. There were errands to run, and for some reason I cannot now recall, I determined that I should go along. The bank, the post office, the market, etc. & etc., all of which seriously cut into time that should have been spent on Silk. Still, we managed to get through chapters Five ("Robin") and Six ("Keith"). So, this ayem, the Zokutou page meter looks like this:

143 / 354 (40.4%)

In many ways it's not easy, reading a book written by the me of 1993-1996. But I think the thing that's annoying me the most is simply that I wrote Silk in past tense, which I suppose is the default fiction tense. Only the dream/hallucination sequences are present tense. So, all the flashbacks are past perfect, and I absolutely loathe past-perfect tense. It's one of the main reasons I started writing everything in present tense, to avoid past perfect and all those goddamn clunky uses of had. I remember sometime in 1997 or 1998, a phone conversation with Neil, and I told him that my one major regret about Silk was that I'd written it in past tense. He said something like, "Well, you can write the next novel in present tense." And I did. And I have written every novel (and almost everything else) thereafter in present tense. I have never understood the reliance on past tense by novelists. I find it counter-intuitive. This may be because I view most fiction as something happening now, in the moment it's being read, not a recollection written down. More like a movie. Movies occur, usually, in present tense (though the tense is rarely made explicit). You see things as they happen. I want you to read the things I write as they happen. I want the books to have that immediacy. But, yes, Silk is past tense, and the past perfect is driving me to distraction.

Somewhere after the errands, but before the reading of Chapter Six, we walked through L5P and up and down Sinclair Avenue. The dogwoods are just now blooming. The tulip poplars bloomed about a week back, I think. And all the green in the trees comes as a great relief.

I have decided to take Nebari.net offline next month, so if you want to have a good last look around the place, you should do it soon. The truth is, it's been sitting there neglected for over a year now. "The Girl Who Sold the World" fic seems to have stalled for good, and...I don't know. I just keep not getting back to work on the site. Meanwhile, I'm paying $240 a year to keep it stagnant. I have resolved to keep the domain squatted, in case I should ever want to get back to it, and the costuming page will go up somewhere on my redesigned website (the writing one). My thanks to everyone who has helped out with Nebari.net since it first went online in September '02. I'll be sad to see it go, but sometimes we do finally, reluctantly have to move along.

Last night...what happened last night? Ah, yeah. We read more Cannery Row, chapters XII through XX, and I wrote a Wikipedia entry for Dallasaurus while Spooky worked on a new doll. I think I started on the Dallasaurus entry @ 9 p.m. and finished up @ 11:15 p.m. Also, I read the type description of the marine varanoid lizard Judeasaurus tchernovi and had a hot bath and caught Hubero wearing one of my bras. I have no problem with having a cross-dressing cat, but he's gonna have to get his own damn frilly underthings.

Right. I need breakfast and coffee, ibuprofen and 300 mg. of thiamin. Then it's back to Silk...

I am still not awake.

It is no secret that I am not a morning person. So, you'd think someone would have gotten around to telling Hubero this. If they did, he's chosen to ignore it. Which is to say, I finally gave up and crawled out of bed at 8 a.m. (CaST, so that's 7 a.m. EST). I sat here at my desk and watched the last bit of night turn to dawn. It was actually a very beautiful sunrise. All those shades of red-orange and purple-grey through the leafless trees. Bleak, but beautiful. I still would have preferred more than five hours sleep, if I'd had any say in the matter. Having distracted Master Hubero, I let Spooky sleep in until a little after ten. She probably needed it worse than I did, anyway.

I wrote 1,441 words yesterday on "Metamorphosis B" and finished it. It somehow manages to be dreadful and sexy at the same time, which pleases me.

Today, I will begin another new piece. All I know right know is that it will not be "Metamorphosis C," and that it's going to be male-on-male, as I've felt like I've owed certain Sirenia Digest readers a little of that flavour for some time now. Thing is, writing erotica the last year and a half, I have discovered something. It is almost impossible for me to write that which is not one of my kinks. And I have quite an enormous range of kinks, but manly man-on-manly man action is not one of them. I can do bois and girlie boys and so forth, but that's about it. Oh, penises are fine and dandy, especially if they wind up doing things evolution never intended them for, but I suck (so to speak) at the whole manly man thing. Which is odd, because all the cisgendered male lovers I've ever had were fairly manly men. At least, they thought so. And yes, I am straying into TMI territory. Sorry. I will return to this topic, this curious contradiction, some other time, perhaps.

Daughter of Hounds has been selling quite well at Amazon.com this weekend. At one point late yesterday, it made it up to 7,497 in the sales ranking, which is the best I've seen it do. My thanks to everyone who's pre-ordered. And if you haven't, the platypus says...well, never mind what the platypus says...but I would be very grateful if you did so. Thanks.

Also, for those who might be interested, please recall that the eBay auction for the last Daughter of Hounds ARC I have to sell ends sometime just after 10 p.m. this evening (CaST, so that just after 9 p.m. EST, or 6 p.m. PST — I think). That's about eleven hours from now.

Nothing much notable about yesterday. I'd not left the house since Tuesday evening. And it's not good when I get like that, when I get that bad, so Spooky made me go with her to get dinner last night. We watched Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine, which I loved almost unconditionally. Had it done nothing but reveal children's beauty pageants for the twisted freak shows that they are, it would be a fine, fine film, but it has quite a lot more to offer. Alan Arkin, a long time favourite, was brilliant, as was Steve Carell. Later, I played Final Fantasy XII (surprise), and then Spooky read me more of The Hobbit while I looked for inspiration (for whatever it is I'll be writing today) in H. R. Giger's Necronomicon II and a book on symbolist painters. That was yesterday, kaloo kalay.

This morning, while I watched night turn to day, I did some work on a Wikipedia dinosaur article, thus ending my seven-month hiatus from working on Wikipedia dinosaur articles.

And I was thinking, last night, recently both Poppy (docbrite) and Christa (faustfatale) have written about how blogging doesn't take time away from their actual for-real writing, and I was wishing I could say the same for myself. But I come to blogging as I come to everything — a little too intensely. I think I average about an hour a day on blog entries, though it is not uncommon to spend three hours in a twenty-four hour period on the LJ. Not reading other people's entries. Just writing my own. Because I have to write it and proof it and get it all just frelling right and check the facts and etc. & etc. And I've noticed that my entries have gotten rather long lately. So, maybe I'll try to keep them just a little shorter. Thing is, like Wikipedia (something I've also spent too much time on), I actually enjoy writing blog entries.

Okay. Now I need breakfast ramen and wasabi rice crackers and maybe more caffeine.

I think it's official. I'm delirious from exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I hardly got five hours last night. The last thing I recall before finally falling asleep at 3 a.m. was spinning some crazy yarn about Hubero Dick and Ahab the five-legged cockroach. Don't ask. Just call me Ishmael. But, I fell asleep with visions of the cat charging down the hall with a one-legged roach clinging furiously to his back. Which might explain the dreams. And, in turn, the dreams might explain why I was awake before 9 a.m.

But. This is a day on which there will be no writing. Nor will there be the busyness of writing. I could take a hot bath, get drunk, and go back to bed. Except, we finished the Bailey's last night, and it's the frelling Xtian sabbath, so the goddamn liquor store's closed. I could switch over to absinthe. Or Grand Gala. Or that unopened bottle of Puerto Rican rum we've had for the last three years. But Spooky wants to go to Fernbank and see the Roman exhibit. I'd be a lot more enthusiastic if there were an interactive Roman orgy involved. Or at least a decent blood sacrifice to Minerva or Diana or someone interesting.

I'm not even trying to make sense.

Okay, but only for a microt. Pursuant to being done with Tales from the Woeful Platypus, yesterday we made it through "Untitled 17," "Pony," "Untitled 20," "pas-en-arrière," and "The Black Alphabet" (both halves). Then I fashioned it all into an actual manuscript. Well, an actual virtual manuscript. Spooky helped me settle on the final order of stories for the Table of Contents, which is as follows:

1. "Untitled 17"
2. "Pony"
3. "Forests of the Night"
4. "Daughter of Man, Mother of Wyrm"
5. "Untitled 20"
6. "Still Life"
7. "pas-en-arrière"
8. "The Garden of Living Flowers"
9. (limited edition only) "Excerpt from Memoirs of a Martian Demirep"

I finished up about 7 p.m. and mailed it all away to Bill Schafer. And the platypus crawled off somewhere, mumbling about eyestrain. I haven't seen herhimit since.

I need a bath.

I need nine hours of dreamless, unbroken sleep.

Hubero says he's gonna drag that crazy gimp cockroach down to the briny deep. I assume he means the basement.

So, about six o'clock yesterday evening, we met Byron at our favourite Thai restaurant, as Thai seemed the appropriate choice for the dinner before one adopts a Siamese cat. Afterwards, the three of us ventured well outside the protective confines of the Perimeter, down I-20 west to Route 6 north through Powder Springs to Hiram (about a thirty-minute drive). Atlanta Persian and Siamese Rescue was holding its daily adoption thingy at the PetSmart in Hiram, otherwise I never would have considered going so far OTP. The sun was setting. I rode in the backseat, which I hardly ever do, and we reached the pet store about seven-thirty. Within moments, we met the cat we'd looked at online, and it was love at first sight. Really. Spooky held him and immediately he put his arms about her neck. So, we loaded up on cat supplies, filled out adoption paperwork, and returned home with our new Siamese boy (the first I've ever had, and my first male cat since 1990 — though in truth, Elvis was Elizabeth's cat, not mine).

He spent the evening roaming about the house, getting to know the place, and, eventually, he finally came to bed and curled up between me and Spooky, where he spent the rest of the night. He's a beautiful seal point, possibly part Tonkinese, with vivid blue eyes, and at some point someone took a small nip out of his left ear. I have only rarely met such a personable Siamese. He was a refugee from somewhere in Illinois, and is about four years old. We named him Hubero, a good solid Nebari name, though his full name is Hubero Padfoot Fuckin' Wu (managing to draw off three different fandoms simultaneously). Here are some photos (behind the cut):

( Hubero Arrives )

This morning, the cat-shaped hole does not gape quite so frelling wide. And, after three months, that's a very good thing.

Not much else to say for yesterday. I took a long bath and washed my hair. I spent some time trying to customize my MySpace blog, but the improvements were minimal. It's still f'ugly. I thought about cleaning my messy office, because Spooky was cleaning the rest of the place, but something distracted me and it remains messy. Last night, while Hubero wandered about, we watched more Firefly ("Trash" and "The Message"). Only two left. I think I got to bed about two.

By breakfast, my dreams had been mercifully forgotten.

I've just noticed that on Amazon.com you can pick up Daughter of Hounds with Alabaster for a mere $27.70. Also, this morning FedEx delivered the galleys for the mass-market paperback of Threshold, and I see that Penguin has slipped in a preview of Daughter of Hounds at the back of the book, after the glossary. It's just a few pages from the prologue, and it ends rather abruptly, but I think it was a smart idea. I expect they'll do the same with the mmps of Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels.

Also, here's a heads-up that the amazingly versatile Peter Straub will be reprising his role as Detective Pete Braust on One Life to Live on September 21st (2 p.m. EST).

Today or tomorrow, we'll be beginning another round of eBay auctions, including a couple of special items. For one, I'm auctioning an unbound, hand-corrected copy of the Daughter of Hounds galleys, and we'll also be offering a lettered copy of Frog Toes and Tentacles, complete with handmade silk and velvet "cozy," the first we've offered since early in the summer. But now I must go write. Today I'm going to begin work on the introduction I've been asked to write for the forthcoming PS Publishing edition of Ray Bradbury's The Day It Rained Forever, as I need to get that off to Pete Crowther ASAP. Hopefully, I can finish it this afternoon.