Yesterday, I did a very respectable 1,277 words and finished "Rappaccini's Dragon," which you may read in Sirenia Digest #30 (May 2008). I do like this story, though its voice and directness, the very matter-of-fact way it approaches plot, surprised me. It's a sort of revenge tale, and I have subtitled it "Murder Ballad No. 5."

There's a wonderful line of storms bearing down on Atlanta. I am tempted to get my willow wand, go to Freedom Park and stand beneath the oaks. I would scream my frustration to the roiling sky and dare the lightning to touch me. Of course, I will sit here, instead, and finish this entry.

I just counted. I've done 43 stories specifically for Sirenia Digest (not counting "Rappaccini's Dragon"). This means I've published, since 1995, about 130 short stories and vignettes (short hardbacks, such as The Dry Salvages, were not included in the count). And fully 33%, almost a third, have been done for the digest. 130 stories in 13 years. That's insane.

What else to yesterday? Well, after the writing, I packed about 4 boxes, mostly paperbacks, in my office. Spooky made her yummy Spanish rice dish for dinner, and pintos. I got a check for $330.17 from Candlewick Press, royalties on "The Dead and the Moonstruck" from Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales (it's a very rare short-story sale that actually earns me royalties). I read Chapter 7 of Chris Beard's book on the search for the origin of anthropoids. I had a long phone conversation with my mother, mostly about moving. Byron had to be at a party in Athens, so we watched the new episodes of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica alone. My tooth hurt, but not as bad as the day before. Then I did just a dab of Second Life. We drove over to Videodrome around midnight, but couldn't find anything we actually wanted to rent. Instead, we read more of House of Leaves, and I got to sleep about 3 ayem. That was yesterday.

Today will be a day off, as will tomorrow. My first days off in nineteen days, and likely my last until after the move. I still have to pack books, but no writing.

Had a short, but interesting, conversation with a fellow New Babbagite last night, who has also, independently, come to the conclusion that Second Life simply is not ready, yet, for "full immersion" roleplay. I would say it's only ready for rp on this level of intensity in very small groups. Three or four, and things seem to go just fine. But large-scale rps inevitably get idiotic. For rp to work, there must be complete suspension of disbelief (as with literature and movies), which means I do not rp with people who constantly slip out of character, or who use 133t, or who stop everything to IM with friends, or to chat ooc with friends who wander by, or who are illiterate, or who are not capable of keeping up, or who think "we're getting too serious," or what the hell ever happens to get in the way of good rp. It's a shame, because I'd love to see epic rp in SL. But there are just too many factors holding it back, the most serious of which may be the average age of SL users, and the tendency towards exceedingly short attention spans. Good rp sessions, I have found, require anywhere from 2-6 consecutive hours, and few I've met on SL (and I have met many) are up to that. Right now, I have a small number of people I can do exquisite rp with, and, as soon as I can get to it, we'll have the "Sirenia Players" up and running, but I am done with sim-level rp for the time being, until SL grows the hell up (which seems an unlikely proposition, at the moment).

I'd still love to hear some thoughts on Sirenia Digest #29.

Okay. Coffee. I've only just discovered that the damned platypus grinds the beans in hisherits bill...

I think the insomnia has reached a point where it's easier to count how many hours I didn't sleep than those I did.

It's spring outside today. It's spring, and it looks and feels like spring. High 60s today, low 70s tomorrow. The trees are going green.

And I keep forgetting to mention that the mass-market paperback of Murder of Angels is out. Indeed, I think it's been out for a week or two. With great luck, you can find it in bookshops. You can't yet get it from Amazon.com, for reasons no one is bothering to explain, but you can get it from Barnes & Noble (just follow the link above). If you can, if you are interested, please pick up a copy. Spooky put a lot of time into the corrections on this edition. And it has a nice cover (and a dubious cover blurb):



By the way, anyone who subscribes to Sirenia Digest between now and midnight (EST) on Sunday will get #28 FREE when they receive April's issue (#29).

Yesterday, we made the 3:15 screening of Carter Smith's The Ruins (based on the novel by Scott Smith). And despite having four or five interchangeable and utterly vapid protagonists, once I got past the sluggish first half hour or so (and my annoyance at the bland glamor of the aforementioned "characters"), the film suddenly comes alive and delivers a deeply chilling bit of weird fiction. Two words: screaming flowers. That ought to be enough, right there. For a short bit, I feared that The Ruins would merely be a crawl through a perilous underworld, such as that already delivered quite well by Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005). Instead, The Ruins turns out to deal with a sort of horror that occurs almost entirely above ground and usually in broad daylight, which, of course, makes its horror all the more horrible. There's something here that harks back to films of the seventies, in the bleakness of delivery, in the wonderful abruptness of the conclusion. I am reminded, in the main, of Stephen King's short story, "The Raft," and in a lot of ways, The Ruins is that story moved from a lake in Maine to the jungles of Mexico. The gore is handled skillfully and never overpowers subtler effects. Graeme Revell delivers a score that helps to move it all along. I can't say this is a genuinely good movie, if only because the beginning fails so completely, but it is a very rare film that juggles darkness well enough to artfully unnerve me. When it was over, I'd had enough, which, I think, is the way a film like this ought to make you feel. I'd even been made to feel sympathy for the idiot American college students, because the Bad Thing waiting for them in the ruins of the title is bad enough, wrong enough, that the threat to life and sanity it poses struck me as something not even those disposable fools deserved. Had the director seen fit to insert actual characters for his carnivorous Cannabis to munch on, I think this might have been a genuinely good film. Regardless, definitely worth a matinée, though you shouldn't pay full price.

Back home, we watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street again, and it's still gorgeous and brilliant and sexy. The rest of the evening is a blur of insomnia and Second Life.

My coffee is cold, which is probably for the best.

I've been making myself go to bed at 2 ayem the last two nights (or mornings), and slowly I am catching up on all the sleep I've lost. Still, here it is 1:12 pm, and I'm still groggy. It's cold in Atlanta this afternoon, but we got marvelous thunderstorms yesterday, and the warm will be back tomorrow, so that's not so bad.

Yesterday. Let's see. It was all about getting Sirenia Digest #28 put together. I did the corrections to "Pickman's Other Model" that I marked when we last read through the story on the 18th, but had not yet made. I have a feeling I'm going to have to read over this one one more time before I send it out into the world. Anyway, that took about an hour and a half. Then I snurched HPL's "Pickman's Model" from Wikisource and spent a bit of time making sure the formatting matched HPL's original (there were some discrepencies), because I want Sirenia readers who haven't read "Pickman's Model" to have it on hand. I gathered up some images I want to use in the issue. I wrote the prolegomena, which is mostly about inspiration. So, it's looking like #28 will go out tomorrow. I still have to do the layout today, and I'm waiting on Vince's illustration. Oh, and this issue will also include, for all those new subscribers, one of the older stories, one of my favourites, "The Sphinx's Kiss" (from #14, January 2007). I think I will be very happy with this issue.

Also, yesterday, the contracts for the German-language editions of Threshold and Low Red Moon arrived. Of course, the IRS still hasn't sent me the forms I need to send to my German publisher to prove that, yes, I really am an American citizen (in order to avoid the hefty German taxes). The post also brought a package from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, because Spooky had ordered a bottle of their Baghdad for me (amber, saffron, and bergamot, with mandarin, nutmeg, bulgar rose, musk, and sandalwood), plus a bunch of "imps" (and I'm not gonna list them all, but her faves are Zombi and Séance). Baghdad is the new smell of me.

Last night, there was Manhattan-style clam chowder for dinner, followed by a pretty good episode of Torchwood and a very good episode of Angel ("Damage"). I started reading another JVP paper yesterday — "Cranial anatomy of Ennatosaurus tecton (Synapsida: Caseidae) from the Middle Permian of Russia and the evolutionary relationship of the Caseidae" — but didn't finish it.

Another casualty of the March 14th-15th tornadoes, one I have not yet mentioned, was the second of the two trees in Freedom Park that played an important role in a dream I wrote of way back on March 8th, 2006. Somewhere, there's an entry with a photograph of the two trees standing, but the journal's gotten so long, I'll be damned if I can find it. Anyway, one of the two trees was already dead and fell in storms last year. These two oaks were a bit special to me, because of the dream, and because we'd done some magick there, and they were just very fine trees in their own right (which is the most important thing). There's a photo, taken late on Thursday, behind the cut:

( Fallen )

My thanks to furrylittleprob for pointing me to more LJ icons by artist Liz Amini-Holmes.

Yeah. I hear ya, platypus. Where's my damn coffee?

Postscript (2:34 p.m.) — Thanks to cliff52 for pointing out that the photo of the two trees can be found in my March 10th, 2006 journal entry (third photo down).

I'd not heard that Oakland Cemetery was damaged in the tornado of March 14th, the one that hit downtown Atlanta and the Fulton Cotton Mill lofts. The cemetery is directly west of the lofts, and, I know now that part of my mind has been trying hard not to consider the possibility that Oakland was hit. Of course, we haven't driven over there, because I didn't want to know how bad it was. Look at me, sticking my head in the sand. But last night I got email from Mike, one of my readers on MySpace, that Oakland was, indeed, hit and badly hit. This is the cemetery where I was interviewed last April for Frank Woodward's forthcoming Lovecraft documentary. Margaret Mitchell is buried there, along with various governors and Civil War veterans. I've read that eighty-six trees were uprooted as the storm passed through Oakland, including crape myrtles, magnolias, and oaks. Some of the trees were at least a century and a half old. And there are not many places in Atlanta that have ever made me feel any sense of peace, that even feel like places, but Oakland is one of them. Back when Atlanta still had a goth scene, lovely Victorian picnics were held at Oakland. It was one of the few reminders of history in a city that has worked so fervently to forget its history. So, I was horrified at the news. And yet, I thought, at least it wasn't the zoo that was hit, or the aquarium, or the botanical gardens. But still. Below is a photograph Spooky took last spring. I do not know if any of those trees are still standing. The cemetery is now closed, indefinitely, to visitors, and an evaluation is underway to determine what will be required for the restoration.





As for yesterday, I wound up going outside after all, chilly weather or no chilly weather. I needed to get over to Emory University to find a couple of books I want to read again before writing my afterword for A is for Alien, including John J. Pierce's Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (1994) and Slusser and Rabkin's Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction (1987). At least there were no civil-defence sirens this time. We did hear a chickadee, as we were leaving, but never spotted it. Also, yesterday, I sent a copy of the new edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder to Jeff VanderMeer. Well, actually, Spooky's the one who made the trip to the p.o., not me. She also sent the "typescript" of A is for Alien to Sonya (sovay) and the signed contracts for the same book to subpress. A new issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology arrived. Really not much else to say for yesterday.

A small seizure last night. Not one of the big tooth-cracking ones. I just went somewhere else for thirty seconds or a minute or so. Still, it scares the hell out of me and Spooky both. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue mentioning the fits here. The seizure days.

I have a phone call from my agent at four p.m., and I'm hoping to do some writing first, so I should wrap this up. I have something in mind, a very short piece to accompany "Pickman's Other Model" in Sirenia Digest #28. So, time to gather up my platypus and get to it.

Postscript (3:26 p.m.) — A contest. I'm taking requests for the short second piece, a vignette (approx. 2,000 words), for this month's issue of Sirenia Digest. Something overtly erotic, something sharp, something nasty*. Please leave your suggestions here or email to greygirlbeast(at)gmail(dot)com, suggestions, requests, whatever, and should I choose your request/suggestion, I will send you your choice of either a signed and personalized copy of the Beowulf novelization or the new mmp of Murder of Angels. C'mon, people. Challenge me.

* "nasty" sensu "malicious; spiteful" and/or "painful or dangerous; grave" and/or "morally offensive; indecent."

I think that, when I made my post yesterday, I was not quite yet cognizant of the extent of the damage done to Atlanta by the storms of Friday night. And while it's not as bad as the media hype makes it out to be — not Cloverfield: Atlanta or The Doom That Came to Peachtree Street — it's bad enough. I think the hardest thing to see was the damage done to the Fulton Cotton Mill lofts, as that was such a beautiful old set of buildings. And, I should mention, we thought seriously about moving in there when we left the Kirkwood Lofts and moved in here three years ago. This is, by the way, the first tornado to touchdown in Atlanta proper since March 24th, 1975, when the worst such storm in the city's history ripped the roof off the Governor's mansion.

Not much to say about yesterday. There was the bath, and then, because we thought the weather had calmed down, we headed over to Emory University so I could get a few books and do some research. There was a grand exhibit up at Woodruff — first editions of the works of many poets and prose authors (mostly poets; many volumes signed and inscribed), including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Burroughs (as "William Lee"), and Emily Dickinson. But then, we came back outside and the air was deathly still. No birds. One confused-looking squirrel. No wind. Halfway home, the civil-defence sirens went off and another storm hit. I thought the hail was going to come through the windshield of Spooky's car. The streets around Candler Park flooded in minutes. But by the time we pulled into our driveway, it had passed.

Today, the world is sunny and bright, an early Spring day.

And also today, while I was having my morning oatmeal, I decided that the third erotica collection will be titled Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart.

Spooky continues frantically searching for a place for us to live in Rhode Island (mostly looking at Providence). We've got some good leads, though it's still nerve-wracking, knowing this huge move is a mere two and half a months away. But, it's hard to image that our lives won't be better in just about every sense possible for having made the move. More than anything, I think I dread packing and unpacking the 60 or 70 boxes of books, and all the fossils, and having to find a new doctor, and a new dentist. But then I think about the ocean, and the cemeteries, and the museums, and the Not South, and so forth, and it more than balances out. I believe we've reached the point where it's hard to do stuff like cleaning and tidying up this place, knowing that as soon as we get back from Maryland it's all going to start going into boxes. Which reminds me, the event at the O'Neil Literary house is free and open to the public. I'll post a schedule later.

Not much else to last night. My apologies to everyone (Lorne, Larissa, Omega, Pontifex, Brit, etc.) for having to leave the Omega Institute St. Patrick's Day party so early. I have a keeper (a kindly keeper, mind you). She makes me sleep. Well, she does her damnedest.

Enough prattling for one day...

I've just gotten word that Steve Jones is taking "The Ape's Wife" for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (#19). This will mark my ninth appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror since 1998. And I love this particular story so much, I'm very glad to see it make the cut.

And, in case you've not already figured it out, no, the tornado did not suck us away to Oz last night. But we did lose power for a while. Most of the damage was downtown and to the west, south and east of us. We got a terrific thunderstorm, with hail. Even as I type this, a new line of storms is bearing down on the city, but hopefully nothing like what came through last night.

Not much to report about yesterday, except that my hair is all red again. And my editor is as baffled as I as to why you cannot yet order the new edition of Murder of Angels from Amazon.com, and she's looking into it (but, hey, that's why we have Barnes & Noble). Oh, and last night we watched Alison Chernick's documentary, Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006), about the making of Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 (2005). Fortunately, one of the iBooks had enough juice to play a DVD, so we did not perish of boredom.

On Thursday, well, tons of the busyness of writing, including an interview for the Fearzone website. The uncorrected draft of "Pickman's Other Model" was sent to Vince to illustrate for Sirenia Digest #28. I think the rest was too dull to bear mentioning, no matter how much of it there was.

And if you're an SL steampunk, do not forget that Monday is Air Kraken Day. Don't worry. I'll take pictures.

Okay, well, Spooky says I need a bath, and she's willing to help, so shut up, Herr Platypus, it'll all still be here waiting for me afterwards...

Here are the links to the latest editions of all my books, the ones I need to sell so that there will be future books:

Daughter of Hounds

Silk

Threshold

Low Red Moon

Murder of Angels

Tales of Pain and Wonder

So, Spooky — or rather her avatar, Artemisia Paine — was given the task of finding the internet radio station we would stream into the Palaeozoic Musuem on Second Life. And she found a gem: Mixing of Particulate Solids Radio, out of Bratislava, Slovakia. Have a listen. Experimental, ambient, electronica, etc. The other night, working in the Museum, I was able to listen to all of Henryk Górecki's Symphony 3, Symfonia pieśni żałosnych. Now I've started streaming the station through Arwen (the iMac) while I write, and I think Moya (the iPod) feels neglected.

The weather has turned mercifully cool here in Atlanta. Right now, it's cloudy and 73F outside. Of course, the humidity is 76%, and feel as though I have one big hair, but after all the sun and heat, it's a still a relief.

Yesterday, I wrote 893 words on The Dinosaurs of Mars. Turns out, what I wrote on Friday was not actually the end of Section 4. I found that yesterday. Though I still have no title for the section.

My thanks to everyone who has bid in the latest round of eBay auctions. Two of them, From Weird and Distant Shores and Daughter of Hounds, end on the 24th, so take note. Along with Sirenia Digest, eBay helps to fill in the leanish times between checks.

Last night, we actually managed to finish The Vile Village and then begin Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At about 3:30 a.m., Spooky declared it was time to sleep, so we only made it two chapters in, but still. Actually, I want this book to last at least a week. This is the end, and I think endings should be savoured. Oh, and I finished Chapter Four of Chris Beard's book, which was mostly about the anthropoids and paleoecology of the Oligocene Fayum deposits of Egypt. Lots of reading yesterday. And I don't care if the (nameless) television feels neglected. We did squeeze in about an hour of freeform rping on Second Life. I haven't been doing much of that, and Nareth E. Nishi's story had sort of stalled out on me. But now the game is afoot once more. With dragons.

This morning the weather has turned just a bit nasty. It's only 51F out there right now, with a projected high of only 63F, about ten degrees cooler than yesterday's high. And it's cloudy. But. Truthfully, hearing how awfully cold it is at Spooky's parents' place in Rhode Island, I shouldn't complain about 51F. When her mother woke this morning, it was 8F. Ugh. That makes 51F seem positively balmy.

I am taking the day off. The writing went very well yesterday, 1,831 words on "In View of Nothing." I think I finally found my way into the story, and yesterday was the first day I've worked on it that I wasn't left feeling frustrated and depressed afterwards. I will finish it on Saturday, I suspect. But not today. Today, I think Spooky and I are going to see The Host and then meet up with Byron for 300 later on (I was encouraged by curt_holman's reviews of both films in the new Creative Loafing). We might even have dinner, somewhere in there. I am glad to be done with the March, so that my writing may now resume its usual pace, and I may only write too much, as opposed to writing too, too much.

Drinker (the chosen name) ate at least one snail yesterday, so it looks like sheheit is here to stay, at least for now. Sheheit is named for Prof. Edward Drinker Cope, one of the preeminent herpetologists, paleontologists, and ichthyologists of the 19th Century and long a personal hero of mine. Also, there is a genus of Late Jurassic hypsilophodontid dinosaur named Drinker (also in honour of Cope, natch), so I can say sheheit's named for both Cope and the dinosaur genus named for Cope. Spooky just came in with another snail and a slug, a regular Storeria dekayi molluscan buffet!

Congratulations to faustfatale and nathan_long on the occasion of their Scribe Award nominations!

Last night, we watched Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration (2006), a marvelously wry look at Hollywood and hype, and we also watched Ace of Cakes, because Geoff is just so damned cool. And then I read, more of Lewin's Bones of Contention. Soon, I have to set aside the paleoanthropology and get back to my Mars reading, as The Dinosaurs of Mars looms ever larger on the horizon.

Okay. The platypus say if I'm not gonna work today, I have to get off the iBook so sheheit can "surf the web for sizzling monotreme porn." Also, says the platypus, if I'm not gonna write today, doing anything else at my desk is just mocking the poor beast.

But...do please pick up a copy of Daughter of Hounds, if you have not done so already. Thanks!

If I was not on an even keel yesterday morning, then today I am capsized, I suppose. Too dreamsick, too tired, too cold, too weary of waking. I slept too late this morning, so I'm about an hour behind. I'm sleeping too much lately. Too much and yet still somehow not enough. I seem to drift off whenever and wherever I allow myself to be still for four or five minutes at a time.

Work yesterday, work that had to be done, but no writing. Just a W. Nothing worth recording here, except that I did finally manage to wring what I needed from the Great Confusion of Photoshop.

The weather remains cold and dreary, and if the meteorologists are correct, will remain so on past Imbolc. So there's really no reason to continue commenting upon it. The Future Me reading this may rest assured that I have not neglected Mr. Hemingway's wise suggestion by neglecting the weather. I have already noted the weather, repeatedly, and will do so again when it ever does something different.

Still undecided re: the magick/neopaganism filter. Not quite forty people expressed an interest in being included, but that's still a very small fraction of the journal's readers. Which might mean that it's best to avoid these subjects altogether, especially given that my entries are rarely ever focused on a single subject, making filters impratical.

Last night, we watched John Ford's adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley (1941), as Spooky had never seen it and it's a film which I very much adore. We read some on trance states and scrying.

—————

The white room with flickering fluorescent bulbs. The book of seemingly identical photographs lying open on damp sheets. The photographs are numbered beginning with 0001. And beside each number there are clusters of upraised dimples which I take to be Braille. Marlene Dietrich singing "I May Never Go Home Anymore." Scratchy vinyl. The sound of rain at the windows. The albino woman talking on the black Bakelite telephone.

—————

Atqui nunc certe vigilantibus oculis intueor hanc chartam, non sopitum est hoc caput quod commoveo, manum istam prudens & sciens extendo & sentio; non tam distincta contingerent dormienti. Quasi scilicet non recorder a similibus etiam cogitationibus me aliàs in somnis fuisse delusum; quae dum cogito attentius, tam plane video nunquam certis indiciis vigiliam a somno posse distingui, ut obstupescam, & fere hic ipse stupor mihi opinionem somni confirmet.

At the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.

— René Descartes

—————

It's getting late, and today I have to write. If you've not yet picked up a copy of Daughter of Hounds, I would be thankful if you'd please do so. I promise it makes a great deal more sense than this blog entry.

There may be ice on the way. There may not be. Likely, we'll just see a little sleet, rain, clouds, this dreary, deceptively appropriate January weather. The sun won't show her face tomorrow. In the house, the air is cold and very still.

It came closest to midnight — just two minutes away — in 1953, following the successful test of a hydrogen bomb by the United States. It has been as far away as 17 minutes, set there in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union.

That would be the Doomsday Clock, maintained since 1947 by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, which has now been moved from 11:53 p.m. to 11:55 p.m. Only five minutes left until midnight. Just enough time to count to 300. The clock keepers have deemed this "the most perilous period since Hiroshima," citing "nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere and 25,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia, including 2,000 that are ready to launch."

But. And also.

The BotAS notes that environmental degradation due to global warming "poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons."

So. Take your pick. Because I don't see Peace and Love and the End of Greed and Hate anywhere on the horizon tonight.

The Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky has not decided whether or not to make a formal statement on this latest advancement of the clock, but does point out that the Big Space Rock would be quite a bit less messy and more efficient, with the added plus that there would be no lingering thermonuclear fallout to muck things up for whatever species might survive into the coming Neozoic/Posthomozoic Era.

Bedtime for nixars...

Quite a good writing day yesterday. 1,801 words, which means the Word Bank is looking good at 1,896. Technically, I could now lose a day. Or even take a day off. But I shall endeavor to do no such thing, as there may yet be some emergency. But here I am — 15 down, 16 to go.

I did manage to get out of the house yesterday for a short walk, just over to Freedom Park. Everything is blooming — daisy fleabane, clover, dandelions, etc. There was a wonderful wind from the northwest and spectacular clouds heralding the change in the weather, the sort of sky that makes we want to climb to the top of an especially tall hill, raise my arms, and howl at the sky. The low last night was 52F, which is today's forecast high, with a low of 27F. So, we shall have a taste of winter after all. Spooky made spicy Thai food for dinner. There was not much more to yesterday than that.

We also finished Christopher Priest's The Prestige (1995) last night. On the one hand, it is a fine novel. On the other hand...I find that I have recently acquired an odd reticence to actually criticize the work of other living writers. My reasons, as best I can discern, are twofold:

1) The author might be reading this journal. It's happened before.

2) I've been making my living, such as it is, as a writer since the mid nineties, and it has caused me to look more kindly on the perceived shortcomings of others.

Basically, I wish I could read the way I used to read. I did not dissect as I read. I simply became immersed in the story and let it sweep me happily along. Now I cannot help but dissect. I try not to, but I do anyway. I cannot help but see "flaws" and all the ways I think I could have done this better. I would suspect that all writers are like this, to one degree or another. Writers are the gods of their universes, and we are never at a loss to suggest how some other god might better run herhisits universe/s. At least, this is true of me. It is one reason I read so much less fiction than I did fifteen years ago. And, actually, stage magic is not a bad metaphor for this problem I now have as a reader. I am precisely like a magician watching another magician's act. I should be suckered in with the rest of the crowd. I passionately desire to have the wool pulled over my eyes. Only it very rarely happens, as I'm too busy figuring out how it's all being done and how I could improve upon it.

Which is to say, The Prestige is a fine novel. But I would have done it differently, and I think that means I would have done it better. I cannot help but think that. I also wonder how seeing the film first changed my perception of the novel. Personally, I think it's a book that could stand to lose the first twenty eight pages and the final eleven — the whole present-day frame. It is neither needed, nor are those characters sufficiently well-developed to compete with the meat of the book, the story of the feud between magicians Angier and Borden. If the frame is to be part of the story, at least another one hundred pages is needed to truly make those characters real to the reader. And if the frame goes, I'd also cut Part Three, Kate Angier's diary. Pare this down to the story of magicians Angier and Borden, as the film wisely does, and you do not have a fine novel, you might have a great novel. Or that's the way it seems to me. As it stands, Andrew Westley and Kate Angier and the late 20th Century are only a distraction and the source of a number of problems with the internal logic of the novel. I would also suggest that the story might have been relayed more effectively had "Alfred" Borden and Rupert Angier's journals been broken up and presented in alternating sections. I adore epistolary storytelling, and I usually point to Stoker's Dracula as a stellar example of how this is done well. Alternate between characters.

Nonetheless, it is, as I have twice said, a fine novel. I am not seeking to damn it with faint praise. I just can't help but read it as a novelist. This is, from my perspective, unfortunate. I don't want to know how the trick works. I want to be amazed. I want to be convinced of the magic. But this is what I do. I spend my days gluing words together to try and fool other people. And I can't help but try to see how other writers, especially writers who have found more commercial success than have I, make it work. Sadly, I don't even find the mechanics & theory of fiction writing remotely interesting, which makes this doubly frustrating. It's just a reflex.

Now, it's time to write.

Today, David Bowie is 60 years old. Which makes my -2 seem utterly insignificant, and I can only hope to age with such grace and dignity. The regular infusions of alien DNA help.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,693 words, and so made it through seven consecutive days wherein I wrote at least 1,500 words. Seven down, twenty-four to go.

It rained here all day yesterday, then just before dark, about 6:30 or 7 p.m. (CaST), a line of intense thunderstorms passed through the city. I watched their progress on Doppler, which remains a fascination for me. But mostly I sat here at my desk, watching the steady rain outside, the blue-grey day. I did not leave the house.

Spooky baked blueberry muffins.

While she fixed dinner, I did manage a hot bath. Then I watched a documentary on the geology of the Great Lakes, dozed, snuggled with Hubero, played a bit of Final Fantasy XII, ate a few Skittles, then went to bed and Spooky read to me from Gregory Maguire's Lost. I am sad to say I do not find this novel anywhere near as agreeable as Wicked or Son of a Witch. It is burdened with a central character who is so painfully humdrum, ordinary, unremarkable, & etc., and though there have been moments of brilliance, the overall effect of the novel is not so very different from Winnie herself. Winnie's only outstanding character flaw is that she's a bit of a compulsive liar, but given that she's a writer, that's hardly surprising. The weight of the ordinary drags me down. But there is yet dim hope that some peculiar and grim revelation may present itself. Genuine mystery and awe have been hinted at. We are nearing the end of the novel, though, so it'll have to happen soon if it's going to happen at all. I hate to say unpleasant things about another author's work, especially one I do generally admire, but what the frell. He's rich. My comments will have no effect whatsoever on the course of his career. I bear Gregory Maguire no ill will, but this protagonist needs to get a life. As it were.

People (writers, editors, people) talk about "flawed" characters and "difficult" characters as though they are a problem. Personally, I cannot imagine literature without them. Who else would I ever write about? Who wants to write about unflawed, easy people? Not me. Nor do I wish to read about them. Give me Merricat and Francis Phelan, Elphaba Thropp and Deacon Silvey. But maybe that's just me. Unflawed, easy people bore me, and they always have.

Spooky is working on a series of bird dolls. The first that she has completed is wonderful. I at once discovered the doll is another Joey LaFaye character and named her (for a her it is) Hieronymus Borscht. Spooky will post photos soon, I think. This will be known as her "Bird Phase," her Ornithaceous Period.

If you have not yet procured a copy of Daughter of Hounds, I hope that you will do so today. Please. It is filled with difficult, flawed characters whom I love.

Maybe I will leave the house today. I have not yet begun to write, so it is too early to say. We shall see.

Postscript (1:21 p.m. CaST): I just saw that Daughter of Hounds has been honored in the Sinister Sixth Annual Tropism Awards, receiving "Best Standalone Novel." Also, Alabaster gets "Best Story Suite/Mosaic Novel." Oh, I love specificity! By the way, MySpace readers do not get addenda and postscripts and the like. Count yourselves lucky, kiddos.

I do not know why it happened, but last night's sleep was accompanied by the sort of delirium that usually requires a 104F fever or a dose of some unpleasant entheogen to produce. So, I'm a bit off my feed this morning, so to speak.

Yesterday, I wrote a perfectly respectable 928 words.

During our walk in Freedom Park, we were passing by one of the big oak trees and realised that it was filled with blue birds (Sialia sialis). I'd not seen even one blue bird since...I'm not even sure. Maybe the late 1980s, at my mother's old place. She put houses up for blue birds and lived at the edge of woods and pastures, so blue birds were not uncommon. But I never saw more than two at a time, even then. There were at least four or five in this oak. We watched them for a time.

That was likely the best thing about yesterday, the blue birds.

A number of people have volunteered to work on the hyperlinks for stories for the e-version of Tales of Pain and Wonder. Below is a list of all the stories. The ones that have been spoken for already have been struck through:

"Anamorphosis"
"To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)"
"Bela's Plot"
"Tears Seven Times Salt"
"Superheroes"
"Glass Coffin"
"Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun"
"Estate"
"The Last Child or Lir"
"A Story for Edward Gorey"
"Paedomorphosis"
"Salammbô"
"Postcards from the King of Tides"
"Rats Live on No Evil Star"
"Salmagundi"
"In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)"
"The Long Hall on the Top Floor"
"San Andreas"
"Angels You Can See Through"
"Lafayette"
"...Between the Gargoyle Trees"
Epilogue: "Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire"

A few people said they wanted to help out, but then didn't choose a story. Please, if you're interested, pick a story. I don't want to assign them. And if you volunteer to work on a story, be sure to leave an e-mail address. Also, the question of whether the e-version would be offered as something other than a PDF was raised, if it would be available in other formats. The answer is, "Not unless someone comes forward who wants to do all the work on those conversions." I understand PDFs, and I can see how this book can still look and feel something remotely like a book as a PDF. I can't say the same for a version that could be read on, say, a cell phone. I think that's just a little too 21st Century for a collection of short fiction concerned in part with the deleterious effects of industry and technology upon cilvilisation and art. I would like to at least pretend that people will download the PDF and print it out and read it as hard copy. However, I'll consider other formats, if there's someone to do all the work required. And if subpress is amenable to hosting more than a single format. I haven't yet asked. Thanks, by the way, to everyone who has volunteered so far.

The weather here is very warm. The high today is supposed to be near 70F. But I just checked weather.com and saw the headline "Strong cold front slams door on warmth." I knew that was coming, the rain and then the long cold, but I wish it were not so.

Speaking of cold, we watched Ice Age: The Meltdown last night, but I think the first one was much better.

I should wrap this up. The day is slipping past...

Old Business: It was not a nutria. It didn't even look like a nutria, but I do appreciate the suggestions that it might have been a nutria. However, the genus hasn't been recorded in northern Georgia, and there's no significant body of water nearby. Actually, the mystery of the Candler Park Wombat may have been solved. Yesterday, on the way back from getting dinner, Spooky spotted a dead possum just a few streets over from our house. "It's a black possum," she said, and so I asked her to please turn the car around so I could get a better look. And yes, it was a mostly black possum. It was dead, hit by a car, lying at the edge of the street on its left side. Its tail was curled up into a ball. It's face was white. Sad, really, as I've always had a soft spot for hideous little things, a category which certainly includes possums. But I began to see how what I saw early Saturday morning might only have been a possum, perhaps this very same possum lying dead on the street. In the shadows and streetlight, there could easily have been a trick of contrast. I might have seen the dark trundling body and missed the lighter tail and face (the face was turned away from me). This could have presented the illusion of a stockier, tailless, short-faced animal. So, perhaps not one marsupial but another. One that was not misplaced.

It's bloody frelling cold here, but at least the coffee has arrived. The good news, heating costs in Atlanta have dropped by 15% over last year. Still, I refuse to run the gas heat.

New Business: The writing went well yesterday. I did 1,078 words on "The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad #4)." I am, however, just shy of panic. Too many deadlines pressing in on me. None that I can cut loose. No sacrifices. Each thing is equally important. It's a bit terrifying.

The "story" behind The Dinosaurs of Mars continues to elude me.

I did get caught up on my e-mail, at least.

Last night, when I should have been reading, we watched David Slade's Hard Candy (2005), a remarkably tense and well-executed thriller. Little Red Riding Hood as 14-year-old vigilante. Superb. Unfortunately, we followed it with David Schmoeller's Crawlspace (1986), a film so insufferably dull that it made 80 minutes seem like three hours. Even my Klaus Kinski fetish couldn't redeem this one. At least it was showing on IFC, so it's not like we paid for the rental. It is hardly surprising that Schmoeller's career since Crawlspace has consisted almost entirely of churning out those ridiculous Puppet Master films (nine of them, according to imdb).

I did make it most of the way through Eric S. Rabkin's Mars: A Tour of the Human Imagination, and was especially taken with the section devoted to Evangelista Torricelli, who, in 1644, with a single experiment, discovered, that nature does not abhor a void, that vacuums do exist, and that air has weight. He also invented the barometer. Not bad for one experiment.

Okay. I'm stalling. Time to frelling write.

It doesn't look like mid-May outside. It looks like early April. Only greener.

Yesterday was very productive. Though I'd thought I'd only make it halfway through the third pass on the Daughter of Hounds typescript, I made it all the way through. There was even some actual writing involved, which I'll admit was a relief after days and days and days of line edits. I expanded an important scene between Emmie and Odd Willie. But yeah, that was work yesterday. Today, Spooky and I tackle all the notes I made during the most recent read-through. I fear them. Also, I've decided that the appendices stay. Or rather, that I'll push for their inclusion. And anyone with a morbid fear of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and House of Leaves should be warned, a number of pages in DoH employ the sort of non-traditional layout I used in Murder of Angels (pp. 150-159, 320-321, 323). So, if you're the sort who considers standard paragraph and sentence layout sacrosanct and deem such Carrollian devices to be artsy-fartsy or pretentious or just plain silly, well, you've been warned.

My thanks to David Lynton of the Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney. Australia for his kind e-mail.

Last night, we watched Munich. A brilliant, complex, important film, and yet another reason to be baffled by Crash having won Best Picture at the Oscars this year.

I feel as though there's something more I want to say. That there's something, as they say, right here on the tip of my tongue, but it keeps slipping away from me.

I didn't want a foul black mood today, but it came upon me last night, and it's still here this morning, and I think it means to hang around a while.

Sometimes the words won't come because the words won't come. There's no knowing why. Sometimes the words simply will not come. And other times, the words won't come and I know the reason why. Yesterday was a day of the latter sort. I meant to finish the new vignette, "pas-en-arrière, " and I knew that I was probably only a few paragraphs from the conclusion. But my mood was beginning to darken, because of the frelling weather, the weather that's not even here yet, just the weather that's coming, and I realised that I didn't trust myself. I want the ending of this one to be so right. I don't want to settle because I don't feel up to spending however much time and effort is required to get it that way. It all rests on those last few paragraphs. If they fail, they pull the whole thing down.

I received the Alabaster ARCs yesterday. I guess that means I can't put off the proofreading very much longer.

I believe that I'm already growing disenchanted with my MySpace. Mostly I just don't see the point. I have LJ and Blogger and so many damned e-mail addys I've lost count, so why do I need MySpace and their ugly, flashing ads? It just seems awfully redundant. What is it that MySpace does any better than Blogger or LJ? Anything?

I have to find the road leading out of this vile mood. I have to do that first. Perhaps I need to do some magickal work, getting ready for Ostara, spending more time with the Ogham and our altar and the trees. Maybe I need to write a few Wikipedia entries. I haven't done one in several days. Maybe I need to get drunk and not think about any of it.

It is St. Patrick's Day, the only thing even remotely resembling an Xtian holiday that I'll observe, and I'd prefer it were called Eire Pride Day or something. Will I wear green today? Maybe I'll make a garland or crown of clover and that will be my green. Tá an aimsir go h-álainn inniú. I shouldn't waste my life thinking about weather that isn't here yet. Amárach beidh ceathach. I can moan about it all then. Ugh. My Irish's no better than it was last March.

Please have a look at the eBay auctions, if you've a mind to do such a thing. There's only four da