• Location: ----
• Mood: ----
• Music: Neko Case, "Whip the Blankets"

"Read between the seasons, under the bridges in valleys..."

I didn't think coming back would be this hard. I genuinely didn't. I thought the visit would give me strength that would help me endure. Help me abide in the coming cold. The cold that is here now. As with very many things, I was mistaken about that. If anything, the trip to Alabama only served to drive home how profoundly alien this place is to me and the sense that in no way do I belong here. It may be that it was a very bad idea, going.

I've been back three days, and, beyond a little email and a conversation with my agent, I've gotten nothing done.

And the anger is coming back at me. I've been living in role-play scenes, sleeping in between, trying not to think about it. But the role-play inevitably leads me to anger all its own, because people piss me off. Sooner or later, almost everyone pisses me off.

I need to find a way to push back the anger and work. Just work. Shut out everything else, but, really, there isn't anything else for me. I need to write a new story for the next issue of Sirenia Digest, which is #104. I need to find enough of the story for Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird that I can get started on it as soon as the digest is out, because, as it stands, the script for part one is due on the twenty-third. The page proofs for Cherry Bomb will be arriving any day now.

More and more, the journal seems utterly fucking irrelevant.

Here's a series of photographs I took our last night in Leeds:

























All Photographs Copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac



Regretful,
Aunt Beast