Yesterday, I wrote 1,103 words on Chapter Two of The Red Tree. Not a stunning writing day, but a decent one. Today, though...well...beginning last night...I realized I'm just not going to be up to writing today. It's just not...there. I don't know if this is exhaustion, depression, or relief, or if I'm just a little freaked out that we are actually here and settling into the new place in Providence. The last month has been a whirlwind. I feel as though it has beaten me to a pulp, and now there is only the work, and it's not so bad, the work...but sometimes I lose my footing. Oh, and there's a mountain of neglected email. There was a brief absence seizure last night.

I should announce that I'll be appearing at Readercon later this month, Friday and Saturday only, July 18-19. I have a reading scheduled. I have grown to hate doing conventions, so don't expect to see me doing much of this, even now that I'm all Yankeefied and social and all. I'll post my itinerary once I know it.

I think we're going to see Wall-E today, because Spooky and I are likely the only two sentient bipeds on earth who have yet to see it.

I was planning a New Moon ritual for tonight, out at Beavertail, but that's another thing I know I'm just not up to. It takes a clear mind —— the rituals —— and focus, and I presently haven't much of either. Better to set it aside until next month, than to botch it. I spent about 45 minutes, yesterday evening, after the writing was done, looking at local covens — the ones that are listed through Witchvox. There were one or two I almost emailed to set up interviews with. But That Little Voice kept pulling me back. I am weary of it being only me and Spooky, this quasi-solitary practice, but I suspect I'd be better off trying to found my own group than attempting to enter one. My issues with the focus of duality will surely cause me trouble trying to enter a coven, and I easily could list half a dozen other things. But, starting my own group, that takes a sort of energy, and experience, I do not have at this time. Maybe I'll look at the Massachusetts-based covens. Maybe something there will seem more "right."

I did manage to finish reading Chapter Four of the Triassic book yesterday. Spooky made spaghetti for dinner.

I think that's all I have for now. Here are the basement photos I promised a few days back. I think, at some point, Spooky and I should find the nerve to spend a night down there. The doorknobs are the best:

( Pickman Lived Here )

Monsieur Insomnia has a talent for finding me at the most inopportune times. I've been sleeping marvelously since coming to Rhode Island (21 days ago now!), until night before last...and last night. I'm no longer 20 or 30, and, alas, I cannot function very well on 6 hours sleep. Which is about what I got last night. Oh, and a very peculiar set of dreams, which I shall not here recall.

Since I began practicing Wicca in 2005, something has felt wrong during mine and Spooky's rituals. We'd have the words. All the material components. Our hearts were in it, our minds focused. And yet, still, something felt wrong. And now I know, for sure, what. Wicca cannot be practiced in a crowded back room that is generally used for dollmaking. It must be practised beneath an open sky. This is to say, the Midsummer ritual last night was exquisite, one of the most remarkable hours of my life. And I know now that my suspicion that the missing element in our rituals was environmental was spot on*.

We left Providence about 4 pm, because we needed to swing by the Kingston Free Library to drop off 5 more boxes of books. We'd already donated 2, so that's a total of 7 we've given for their forthcoming book sale (by the way, no idea why I'm typing numbers as numerals instead of words today...they're just coming out that way). Maybe 200 books, all told. I should have parted with 3 times that number, but, you know, baby steps. After the library, we drove up to Spooky's parent's farm in Saunderstown, because her father has finally returned from his latest anthropological sojourn to some exotic clime or another (I forget just where, somewhere in South America). We must have gotten there about 5 or 5:30, and it was so much cooler in South County than in Providence, with the wonderful breeze. They showed us their new pitcher plant (sorry, don't recall the species), and we talked by the koi pond her mother, Carol, is working on. They're about to install a biofilter, to help keep the water a little cleaner. I think the pond has about 50 koi at this point. Her mother trades the babies for fish food. We played with Spider, talked about birds, and my bad eyes, black bear sightings in South County, and summer, and graduate students, and back doors. A taillight on Spooky's car was fixed by cannibalizing the old blue van. It was a good visit.

About 6:30 or so, we headed east to Beavertail, across the Jamestown Bridge to Conanicut Island, and then south to Beavertail. The sun was beginning to set, and the wetlands and thickets of beach roses and other assorted flora were teeming with wildlife. Deer, rabbits, egrets, robins everywhere, all manner of sea birds. We circled back behind the lighthouse, to a more secluded place we found in 2004 (about 1,200 feet northeast of the lighthouse). I'd packed about half our altar for the trip, trying to keep in mind the wind and that the ritual should not be overly complicated or ruined by things one cannot do while clinging to a rocky sea cliff in a strong wind. It was actually cold when we got out of the car, and I put on my sweater, my arm socks, and my cloak, and followed Spooky down the steep erosional ravine leading to the rocks (carefully skirting the ubiquitous poison ivy). There were very few people nearby, mostly fishermen, and the people who were there kindly left us alone. We must have gotten started about 7 pm, and the tide was coming in**, consuming the shore in great foaming mouthfuls. Spooky spotted crabs in a high tide pool. There were bits of dried seaweed scattered about. There were a few gulls, and cormorants just offshore (Phalacrocorax spp.). Spooky said, "They look like little Nessies." There were seabirds I did not recognize. The sky had gone a wonderful assortment of blues, greys, and pinks. To the south, the lighthouse flashed at its regular intervals. I cast the circle, started a small fire in our cauldron, and we set to work. Well, work's the wrong word, I think. It was too delightful to call work. Recall my definition of magick as the "willful invocation of awe." It was that. I adapted Starhawk's Litha ceremony, substituting some of my own phrasing, and tailoring it for only 2 people, instead of a full coven. A handful of salt to the North, a feather to the East, a garlic clove to the south, two fern fronds to the West. The wind and the sea were wild, and this was the wild magick I've been seeking for three years.

About halfway through, we paused to eat the bread we'd brought along and have some of the wine. We were joined by a young gull, who seemed hardly the least bit afraid of people. He landed inside our circle, and Spooky fed him. A Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus), the largest species in the North Atlantic, with wingspans up to 65". This fellow was no more than three winters old. As the breakers crashed over the craggy black and grey rocks (Jamestown Formation, Middle Cambrian age) and rushed noisily into deep places between the rocks, the lone gull added a note of humour to the whole affair. Soon, though, a second, larger gull arrived and swooped over us a couple of times, then sat a short distance away, seeming to caw angrily at our visitor. The two finally left together, and we continued. I finished the ritual and opened the circle. It was getting dark by then, and we had to pick our way carefully along the cliffs back to the ravine. Within sight of the path leading back up the to car, we stopped, stealing a little more time with the sea. Spooky arranged stones in her impromptu mandalas, and I stood on a high promontory jutting out over the rough waters of Narragansett Bay. I closed my eyes and spread my arms, just listening — the birds, the wind, the sea, a bell buoy, a distant foghorn. There was a moment that seemed to stretch on forever. As Einstein said, "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."*** I know there was time in that moment, but I also felt, with perfect clarity, its relativity to my perceptions of it. Beneath my feet, the metamorphosed sandstones and shales were still being laid deposited in trilobite-haunted seas, still being heated in the orogenies that formed Avalonia, crosscut with plutonic intrusions during the Ordovician and Devonian. Offshore, it might have been 500 AD, or 1649, or sometime in the 19th Century. I was unstuck. It was a million years from now, and storms and the tides had washed away those cliffs entirely. I opened my eyes to a distinct sense of vertigo, as I seemed to snap back into the matrix of the moment, and there was the sense that something I'd called up in the circle had trailed after us, lingering there with me on the cliff. But. It tattered and came apart in the salty wind, and I saw the designs Spooky had made on the rocks. She said we'd best be going before it got any darker, and I admitted, reluctantly, she was right. I didn't want to leave the sea and head back to the city. I wanted to sink back into that mental space I'd found, unfixed in time, that place where all the thousand petty concerns of my day-to-day life, all the noise that adds up to Me, was shown to be so perfectly insignificant before the business of this vasty universe.

I should cut this off now. sovay will be arriving on the 1:45 train from Boston, and I should really try to straighten up the mostly unpacked house just a little more. There are a few photographs from yesterday evening (behind the cut):

( Midsummer 2008 )

* No, this wasn't my first outdoor ritual — there was the skyclad one a couple of years back, for example, but it had been a while.
** High tide at Beavertail at 9:46 last night.
*** From a letter (March 1955) printed in the posthumously published Science and the Search for God Disturbing the Universe (1979).

Yesterday, I wrote a very respectable 1,531 words, finishing "The Melusine (1889)," which weighs in at a total word count of 5,099 words. Together with "Unter den Augen des Mondes," this means that Sirenia Digest subscribers will be getting over 7,500 words-worth of new fiction from me this issue, plus the new "weird artist" of the month profile feature by Geoffrey Goodwin. It was a long writing day yesterday, and the story took a slightly unexpected and, for me, unusual, turn. It rather knocked the wind from me, I think. When "The Melusine (1889)" was done, I was left with that depression that completing a piece usually brings — though that mood usually has the decency to wait until at least the next day to hit me. It was compounded by the fact that it seemed I'd played an even crueler trick than usual upon the story's protagonist, Cala Mornroe Weatherall. It's a brick wall, the end of that story, and you hit it at fifty miles an hour. If I believed in gods who passed judgment on "sinners," I'd envision a special hell for authors, for the lifetimes we spend breaking the lives and minds of our characters, trapped there in their sooty little universes.

When I was done, I just wanted to lie down and cry or something, but Spooky made me get dressed, instead. She took me down to Narragansett, to Iggy's, for dinner. We got our food, then went to the Point Judith lighthouse to eat. The wind was cold, but bracing and filled with the smells of the sea. On the way down, we saw a doe grazing. And a crow pursued by an angry mockingbird. I ate far too much — fried cod and chips, clam cakes, Manhattan-style clam chowder, cole slaw, root beer — and afterwards we sat by the sea and watched the lights on passing boats, the low waves crashing against the rocks. And I began to come back to myself.

Back home, unpacking, always with the unpacking. The big display case is mostly sorted out, and I got the altar set up again. I need to go to a shop over in Tiverton and get a new athame. There's one there I like. An athame, I mean. Later still, I had a date on Second Life for rp with the Omegans, and my thanks to Larissa, Abigel, Pontifex, Bellatrix, Joah, Merma, Omega, and Denny for a great scene (or, rather, series of interconnected scenes). It was late before I got to bed, just before 4 ayem. The damned birds had started singing.

Spooky's looking at local Pagan gatherings associated with the Solstice. Part of me wants to become involved with a nearby coven or circle — I've never liked the solitary practitioner thing — and part of me knows it would just be asking for trouble. All this foolish nattering about "dispelling negative energy." Whatever happened to paganism as a road to balance? Never mind that the word "energy" should be forever stricken from the pagan lexicon, for the perpetual abuse and complete lack of definition it endures. One reason I came to Providence was to find like-minded pagans, hopefully Wiccans, but I fear they'll all think I'm some spooky left-pather, a bête noire to be avoided lest my "negative energies" taint their rituals "of light and purification." Pfft. Sometimes, it seems to me so many American Wiccans are devolving into happy-crappy, pseudo-Xtianity, afraid of their own shadows, struggling to recreate the religion that drove them to paganism to start with. But I rant. Don't fear the darkness, kiddos. It's one half of the equation. Without it, there can be no balance. And balance, I believe, is the key, here.

Anyway, the "Cephaloflap" and "Doodleflap" auctions are off to a grand start. Keep in mind, these are the first monster doodles I've offered in something like two or three years, and they're the largest I have ever offered. And they're part of HISTORY, my Grand Transmigration from the South. All proceeds will likely go towards a birthday present for Spooky. Speaking of which:



Anyway, I've declared today an unpacking and hygiene day, because I'm sick of these boxes, and writers must bathe, too. And after "The Melusine (1898)," I need a day away from making words. I need a day away from unpacking, too, but that's not going to happen for at least another week or so.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,048 words on the sf story/dream cycle that is still, for the time being, called "In View of Nothing." At this point, I'm so far into the thing, having already spent three days on it, that I may as well see it through to The End. Spooky likes it. To me, it just seems like I'm working extra-extra hard and coming nowhere close to what I'm trying to say. I will be amused, in a sad, sick sort of way, if I finish this literal "telling" of the dream, only to discover that the metaphorical approach of "A Season of Broken Dolls" worked better. Imagine that you have met someone who has been blind since birth, and they were also born without the ability to taste or smell, and yet you must explain to them all the subtle colours and flavours and aromas of a lime. That's what this feels like, exactly. Also, I have done something which I never do — I have gone so far as to produce an outline for this short story. It will be divided into nine sections. Anyway, it will appear in Sirenia Digest #16.

I should have had a walk yesterday, but I didn't. The weather is beautiful. All the way up to 70F today, and it's all I can do to make myself sit at this frelling chair and frelling type when I could be out there.

But I will at least have a walk.

Not much else to yesterday. Spooky and I played Scrabble. We watched Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), which I love despite the almost unfathomable convolutions of the plot. Then bed and reading until about 3 a.m., when I finally laid the book down and faced the ugly necessity of sleep. Oh, TCM is airing four of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films tonight, beginning, I think, at 9 PM (Eastern). If you're into that sort of thing. I used to carry such a torch for Basil Rathbone.

Meanwhile, More than 30 Vermont towns passed resolutions on Tuesday seeking to impeach
President Bush, while at least 16 towns in the tiny New England state called on Washington to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. While it seems extraordinarily unlikely this will ever have much effect on President Asshole, it's still some shade of heartening. Then again, Sauron never worried himself too much about the Shire...

Also, because I apparently needed something else to piss me off today, we have further proof here that the editorial standards at WitchVox remain as low as ever, and that witches and pagans can be just as hateful and prejudicial and wrongheaded as Xtians. My thanks to morganxpage for the link. Frankly, I stopped reading WitchVox many months ago, as, more often than not, I find the "articles" are barely literate, rarely thoughtful or well researched, and frequently serve only to illustrate the many ills of Neopaganism. I think I'm actually less annoyed by this idiot's crypto-heterosexism, transphobia, and fear of androgyny than by his insistence that some murky idea of "spirit" must be the focus of paganism, his belief that he is anything more than carnal, anything grander than a meatbag held back by too much wishful thinking. Mind and body are one; "mind" is a function of brain. I see no evidence that there exists anywhere a "spirit" or "soul" or "lifeforce" divided from the flesh. And if the Divine Androgyne exists, then I say it exists most genuinely in temporary corporeal incarnations, not some sterile, intangible abstraction. Okay. Enough ranting for now. Time to stroke the platypus, that fine old androgynous whore.

Proceeding as it did from the dreams, yesterday was a Very Bad Day during which nothing was written or edited or even planned. Virtually nothing of note was accomplished. Yesterday got an L in my day planner, whether it earned one or not. The dreams this morning were almost as bad, or as good, depending upon one's frame of reference and desires. Safer to say, the dreams this morning were as segregated from this waking life and as possessed of their own integrity. I need to have the Ambien refilled. At least the Ambien makes it hard for me to remember the dreams.

I cannot afford to lose even one more day over the next two and a half months.

Push it away. Push it all away.

I did get this comment, from shadowmeursault, in response to yesterday's entry, which I thought contained some good questions, so I'm quoting it here:

do you know the "answers" to your own mysteries? do you ever feel the need to justify a suspension of disbelief, even to yourself? or are you content to leave your mysteries as mysteries, even to your own mind? an example being the hemispherical world in Murder of Angels. do you, as its creator, know all of its nuances, or are you content with the little mysteries it gives you?

I cannot think of a single example of me knowing anything much more than what has been revealed in the stories themselves. Which is to say, I'm not holding out. Sometimes, I've sort of felt like reviewers and readers suspected that I was...holding out. But I'm not. If it's not there on the page, I likely am as much in the dark as you. I only find the answers I find as I write. There are very few exceptions. For example, I only learned about the connection between Dancy Flammarion and Spyder Baxter, and the connection between the Weaver and Dancy's "angel," as I was writing "Bainbridge" last December and January. Of course, I still don't know if Spyder's father was "only" schizophrenic, or if Dancy's mother was only "schizophrenic." When these questions are left unanswered, I'm not being dishonest with the reader. I simply never found the answers myself. Usually, that's because I preferred to leave the questions unanswered in my own mind. Maybe someday I'll draw a map of the hemispherical world, but I have not yet. Mostly, it's a big blank for me. The mysteries mean more to me than the possible solutions. I'll take a really good question, filled with endless possibility, over a sterile concrete answer any day of the week.

On that note, while the mini-series was mediocre overall, I was impressed and pleased that so much ambiguity was allowed to persist at the conclusion of The Lost Room. I kept expecting some hackneyed explanation: the Occupant must have had dealings with the Roswell aliens; or Room 10 was the result of a Cold war experiment; or the Objects were the components of a time machine which had crashed in Gallup, New Mexico on May 4th, 1961. But no. We were allowed to keep the mystery. For that alone, The Lost Room is to be commended. I kept wishing that it could have been just a little smarter, just a little less TV, but at least it was halfway decent TV. Which is fortunate, as I gave it six hours and suffered through the same insufferable commercials for three nights running.

Merrilee, my NYC agent, sent me a box of cookies and brownies from Solomon's Gourmet Cookies in Chicago (since 1943). The jelly cookies were especially good.

I'll be adding more items to the eBay auctions today or tonight. Please have a look. Lately, I really haven't felt like dealing with the tedium and frustration that is eBay, but a check is long overdue. A rather large check from a publisher, which was due two months ago. And the guilty party is neither Subterranean Press nor is it Penguin. It's someone else. At this point, I do not expect to be paid until at least January. My need to be paid cannot be allowed to interfere with the vacations and religious holidays of others. So, it's back to eBay. I may even list a second Daughter of Hounds ARC, though I said I wouldn't. Of course, when I said that, I thought surely I'd be paid by Thanksgiving, at the latest. Silly nixar.

In response to one my comments yetserday about NeoPaganism, morganxpage wrote:

I think that this is caused by the same thing a lot of other problems within the NeoPagan (and particularly, the Wiccan) communities: non-conversion. Most NeoPagans never truly convert to their NeoPagan religions, instead holding on to their previously Western Judeo-Christian beliefs, often without realizing that that is what they're doing. NeoPaganism becomes a new surface mask for the previous belief system. So instead of truly appreciating and serving Nature, they hold on to the belief that Nature is meant to serve them, which stems from Biblical teachings.

I think you're right, only I'd not confine the source of the failed conversion problem to "Biblical teachings." This is a problem with humanity as a whole, not soley with those humans with a JudeoXtian background. Humans have always had a tendency to imagine the world as this thing which revolves around humans. I see it in all the world's religions, to one degree or another. The inability to grasp that the nonconscious universe is wholly indifferent to the needs and desires of humanity or of any other species, for that matter. The refusal to view Nature as Nature instead of anthropomorphizing it as Mother Nature or the Goddess or Gaia or what have you. There are no gods and there are no goddesses, excepting our concepts of them. There is only the universe, and humanity is only a component of that system. No one and nothing "out there" is watching out for us. And, looking at Pleistocene and Holocene extinction patterns on Earth, it's clear that most PaleoPagans were ultimately no less anthropocentric and short-sighted, in terms of viewing Nature as something to be exploited. It is a myth that all indigenous peoples the world over held Nature in higher regard than their own immediate well-being. The present extinction event began long before the arrival of Xtianity and the fires of industry, even before the development of agriculture. Ultimately, I am asking that humans stop behaving like humans, not that NeoPagans stop behaving like Xtains (though that would be nice, too). I'm asking people to hack millions of years of genetic hardwiring and reboot (I mean these things figuratively, not in the transhumanist, singularitarian sense). I'm expecting people to let go of the comforting lies. While I'm at it, I'll take the goddamn moon, as well.

Okay. I need to be working on something for the December Sirenia Digest. I need to get moving.

Postscript (2:15 p.m. CaST; 1:15 p.m. EST): Upon reflection, it seems as though, increasingly, this journal has become less about my writing and more about things I'm probably better off not discussing at all publicly. If nothing else, it's hard to imagine that I'm not boring the crap out of some people, while leading others to conclude I am a complete lunatic and alienating still others. So, from here on, I believe I will be confining myself primarily to that subject for which this journal was created — my writing and the promotion of my writing. The rest is likely only white noise, anyway.