Not nearly as ill this morning as I was afraid I would be. Yesterday, I loaded up on elderberry extract, zinc, Smith Brothers' cherry cough drops, and with the help of two Red Bulls, managed to get through a long and arduous day of proofreading and reformatting.

As soon as the Afterword (it was going to be an Introduction, but now it shall be an Afterword) for A is for Alien is finished, the ms. will go to Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press, and it will be out of my hands. At least until the page proofs. And I can get back to work on The Red Tree. Well, right after I write a 3,000-word Introduction for Joshi's Arthur Machen collection.

Anyway, after we did another five or six hours of work on the AifA ms., Spooky and I took a mountain of books back to the Woodruff Library at Emory, and then had blisteringly spicy Thai noodle bowls for dinner. After dinner, back home, I suffered an absence seizure (which are beginning to seem almost routine). I crashed on the sofa, too exhausted for anything but the passive comforts of television. We watched an episode of Millennnium, "Maranatha," then the new ep of Deadliest Catch, and then the last episode of Season One of Millennium, "Paper Dove."

And there's this email, from Tim Huntley, regarding Sirenia Digest #29:

"I wanted to offer some (very brief) words on 'Concerning Attrition and Severance'. I am pleased this story was not a hidden piece and that it did make it into the Digest. As well as resembling a disturbing twist on Huis Clos peopled with Cenobites, the piece made me think of Pirandello (well, Six Actors in Search of an Author, to be exact).

"And, on today's anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth, an almost randomly located line from Einige Charaktertypen Aus Der Psychoanalytischen Arbeit (1916): 'Let us leave it to future research to decide how many criminals are to be reckoned among these "pale" ones.' Perhaps not a citation - or a paper - that has anything truly in common with your story, but it seemed an apposite conjunction of sorts.

"'Flotsam' was another splendid brine-soaked piece which lingered with me and spiraled in my thoughts across this May Day weekend. Together with 'Concerning Attrition...' it made #29 feel like an old-style Digest in that it was, as your Prolegomena informed, comprised of two rich vignettes."

The parallel with Barker's Cenobites seems natural, in retrospect, though, with "Concerning Attrition and Severance," I was trying for something a bit more subtle and a bit less concrete than "The Hellbound Heart." Thank you very much, Tim!

Someone else asked for details on Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder, so I thought I'd post a scan of the cover of Spooky's copy (behind the cut, mais oiu):

( Time of Wonder )

Oh, and here's a marvelous little thing, which I can now stare at to my nerdy heart's content, thanks to sclerotic_rings, the Solar System Visualizer. It even includes numerous extrasolar star systems!

And once again, because it is my Royal Birthday Month, the Amazon wish list thing. A mere 19 days until that dreaded -04...

So, even though there is absolutely no time for being sick, I'm sick. Hard to tell yet just how sick, but sick enough. It started off yesterday morning as a scratchy throat. Thing is, Spooky's been sick for almost a week, and every time I'd ask her about it, she'd tell me it was just allergies caused by the dust we're stirring up packing. To me, she looked sick, not allergic, but hey, she ought to know. So I didn't worry about catching it. But now I'm sick. Last night, fevers and chills. We have to hope this fucker is short lived, because here it is May 6th, and we leave Atlanta on Thursday, May 29th for Providence. And there is all the packing, and a mountain of work, and deadlines and scheduling that simply can not be Put Off Until Later. I used up all my sick time, back in February. And, possibly the worst problem here is that colds and flu often (since the mid '80s) leave me with a severe cough that can last, literally, for months. After I had the flu in February, I coughed an additional six weeks. And the bad tooth cannot be pulled if I'm coughing, because then it won't heal properly. So. Yeah. It's sort of a disaster.

Yesterday. We spent eight hours (1-9 pm) working on the corrections to A is for Alien, and we're still not done. So, that will be today. We also need to take books back to the Emory University library, but that may have to wait until tomorrow. Today, I get more misplaced or missing commas, fact checking, clumsy word repetitions, and other assorted tedium. Oh, and a good example of why sf writers should worry only just so much about the science in their sf stories. When I wrote "Zero Summer" in the summer of 2005, Saturn was believed to have 43 moons, but now, revising the story in 2007, I know that Saturn has more than 60 confirmed natural satellites. But the story is set in the nearish future. By then, we may know that Saturn has 80 moons. Do I stick with 60, knowing that astronomers consider that number provisional? Do I "guesstimate" ahead? Do I revise the story again in a few years? Frankly, the facts are hardly relevant to the truths of the story, so screw it.

My thanks to robyn_ma for pointing out that I can now actually see Isabella Rossellini's "bug porn" (Green Porno) at the Sundance Channel website. Yesterday, the site wasn't letting me in; today it is. Oh, and yes, I have downloaded the new, free NIN, and I'm listening to it now.

At some point yesterday, I left Spooky alone to work on the corrections to A is for Alien. I lay down on the sofa, thinking I could at least read the next chapter of Chris Beard's book on primate origins, but, instead, the best I could manage was an hour of being half asleep, dreaming though I was partly still awake. Later, late last night, Spooky read me more from House of Leaves, the terrible scene on the staircase, Navidson trapped alone at the bottom when it suddenly grows to impossible proportions, Tex's story of the sinking of the Atrocity. Not the perfect thing before bed, so then she read me Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder (1957), which won a Caldecott Medal and is one of my all time favourite children's books. "Where do hummingbirds go in a hurricane?" Beautiful.

I got the following from Alan S. Montroso, via email, "...As was your story "Concerning Attrition and Severance"; its imagery and majesty have haunted me through the weekend. I understand why you felt it belonged in the obscurity of a closed drawer, but I am also grateful such a cruel creature has been unleashed." Thank you, Alan. It's good to see these reactions, because the story's out there now, and there's no pulling it back in. Comments on Sirenia Digest #29 are still welcome, by the way.

I haven't given the list of books in print in a while, so here it is again. And, though it might be cheaper and the "green" thing to do, buying used copies of my novels from Amazon, sadly, in no way helps my sales figures. Sadder still, I have to actually think about shit like sales figures:

Daughter of Hounds

Silk

Threshold

Low Red Moon

Murder of Angels

Tales of Pain and Wonder

And here's the Amazon wish list, because, after all, this has been declared my Royal Birthday Month and -04 is a mere 20 days away.

There's a lot more of substance I wanted to write about this morning, but I feel like unto butt, and somehow I have to make it through the remainder of the corrections to A is for Alien.

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!

I do not want this journal to become a whining catalog of my physical infirmities. But when those infirmities have a direct bearing on my ability to think, to work, to sleep, to fucking write, the one concern overlaps the other. Things that I have always considered too personal to place in a public journal become central to my public endeavors. It has grown very confusing. What to say, what not to say. The worst seizure last night since October, probably, and it must have been about 3:30 or 4 ayem when it happened. Just hit like a jet plane landing inside my head, no warning, and then I was afraid to try to go to sleep. I was up until a little after six. The sound of the mockingbirds finally drove me to bed, and I slept through nightmares until about one, to wake feeling not the least bit rested. To wake feeling even more exhausted than when I fell asleep.

Seizure: "act of seizing," 1482, from seize (q.v.). Meaning "sudden attack of illness" is attested from 1779. Or, Epilepsy: 1578, from M.Fr. epilepsie, from L.L. epilepsia, from Gk. epilepsia "seizure," from epi- "upon" + lepsis "seizure," from leps-, future stem of lambanein "take hold of, grasp" (see analemma). Replaced the native name, falling sickness. Of course, my seizures are not exactly epilepsy, they're just pretty much indistinguishable from epileptic seizures.

More reading yesterday, more of the New England vampire book.

I do think, after looking over yesterday's comments, that I have resolved to make the protagonist of The Red Tree the same age as me, which will be -04 for most of the time I'll be writing the book. How far in the Pit has American publishing sunk when it's afraid of middle-aged and older characters? Afraid or simply disinterested. Whatever. I'll make the weird girl who lives in the attic of the house , the painter — who was going to me a man — a twenty-something. Maybe that'll make people happy. But I discovered, when I wrote "Salammbô Redux (2007)" last summer, that it was something I needed to do, writing older characters. So, there. Thank you for the comments yesterday. You tipped the scales.

Here's a cool little thing. Jeff VanderMeer writes about ghouls (and I get a mention, alongside HPL and Brian McNaughton), and there's a link to an article of the origin of HPL's ghouls (which are, more or less, my "Hounds of Cain"). Thank you, sovay, for bringing this to my attention.

Last night, a sort of half-hearted "Kid Night," we watched the last three episodes of the final season of Angel. Seasons Four and Five were really quite good. The series was just hitting its stride. Wesley's death and that final scene — marvelous, but it was a hard ending to take. And then we watched Battlestar Galactica, which was good, and gods, but I do adore Katie Sackoff. However, I think commercials really do this series grave harm. The suspense builds and is then deflated. I'll likely watch the whole series over on DVD when it's done. Later, some very frustrating Second Life, nothing to write home about.

I did not leave the house yesterday.

I'm going to go now and try to get some reading done.

Yesterday was a seizure day.

And today, I find myself not in the mood to write an entry. But I'm trying, anyway, as I want a normal day. There is work to be done. Work that is piling up. Tuesday and Wednesday were mostly spent reading, not writing. "The Man-Eating Tree" by Phil Robinson (1881), "The Ash Tree" by M. R. James (1904), "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner (1974), and "The Hole at the Bottom of the World" by Thomas Ligotti (1991). And other things. We've watched more Angel, nearing the series' end now, and last night was "A Hole in the World," which was quite a bit sadder and grimmer than I remembered.

More feedback on Sirenia Digest #28 would be nice.

Very warm yesterday, but rather dreary and chilly today. The warm will be back tomorrow. We had a good walk yesterday along Sinclair Avenue. Saw the Daisy Dog. Enjoyed the flowers and the trees going green. And I think that's a natural lead-in to my very short list of things I will miss about the South (in no particular order):

1. Spring beginning in late February or March
2. Real barbeque
3. Byron
4. Magnolias (though there's one at Edward Gorey's house on the Cape that we can visit)
5. Long hot summers
6. Lizards
7. A certain quality of light
8. The dinosaurs at Fernbank (even though they are only casts)

Not much of a list, I know. Maybe something else will occur to me later, and I'll add to it. But, the truth is, I've been trying to escape the South — for good — all my life.

Nothing else much to say about yesterday or the day before. Sent a big box of stuff off to Joshi. Wrote up some notes on the writing of "The Ape's Wife" for Steve Jones. Did a sort of micro-interview thingy for a journalist in Birmingham who's doing a story on Quinlan Castle. I have a tiny sperm whale I need to send to a friend in Chicago.

Second verse, same as the first...

Well, this is going to be very short, because, as it turns out, I'm sick as a dog. Whatever that means. I mean, why dogs in particular? Wait a second...with a quote, I attempt to answer my own question:

There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin — big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one Nineteenth-Century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

Er...anyway. When we left for the dentist on Wednesday, I had a cough. Thought nothing of it. I never get sick. I mean, not germy sick. By the time we got back to Atlanta that evening, I had a sore throat. By Thursday night, I was achy and running a fever of 100F, which feels like 101F for me, because I'm a freak and my normal body temperature is actually 97.7F (Spooky, also a freak, averages 97.3F). And since then, I have bounced feverishly up and down, mostly slept, moaned, bitched, cursed microbes, and annoyed Hubero with my mountains of snot rags. Too woozy to sit up for very long, I have not written. This is officially my worst "flu/cold" sort of crud since 2003. Anyway, at some point, Spooky took the following humiliating photograph:

( Sick, with Mr. H )

Erg. Here comes gravity again. Maybe by tomorrow I'll only feel like ass.

No writing yesterday.

Nothing much yesterday but sick, really. I do not do sick often, which is good, because I also do not do sick well.

Last night, we watched Julian Jarrold's Kinky Boots (2005), which was very funny and sweet and made me want to visit Milan. I've never given Milan much thought. Previously, I'd only seen Chiwetel Ejiofor in Serenity, I think, so his performance as Lola was a bit of a (pleasant) surprise.

Nothing else much. Mostly, I'm just trying to breathe. And so, I think that I shall now repost the eBay announcement from yesterday and go the frell back to bed...

So, after two wonderful months away from the increasingly annoying world of eBay, we're back with a pair of special auctions. The first is an authorized auction of one of the advance-reading copies of Daughter of Hounds. The second is for a copy of the previously unannounced lettered state of Alabaster, which is being auctioned with Spooky's latest doll — the green-haired boy who brings Dancy the bottle in "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées — and a copy of the "Highway 97" chapbook. All books come signed and can be personalized at the buyers request. The doll comes with Spooky's maker mark plus my initials.

I do not expect to be able to offer another copy of the Daughter of Hounds ARC, and obviously the Alabaster auction is a one-of-a-kind affair.

The lettered state of Alabaster was never offered (or even mentioned) by Subterranean Press, and the 26 copies, A-Z, were split between me and subpress. I got N-Z (thank you, Bill), and I'm keeping Z for myself, which means the winning bidder gets to choose from N-Y.

Here are the links:

Daughter of Hounds ARC

Alabaster lettered with doll and chapbook