• Location: Woodstock, NY
• Mood: filled with fucking dread
• Music: Chromatics, "In the City (instrumental)"

"At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet, and a freight train running through the middle..."

So, on Monday we drove back to Providence (I almost wrote Birmingham; make of that what you will) to attend to various matters that needed our attention (the bank, mail, pharmacy, cats, etc.), and yesterday we drove back to Woodstock. We'll be staying on in the guest house at Neil's until after Xmas, probably until the 27th. The trip is about four hours each way, and there's a stretch in western Massachusetts, in the Taconic Mountains, that was blanketed in snow and heavy fog, both days. Beautiful, those snow covered forests, the drooping spruce branches and stark grey birches. I'd like the chance to actually explore the Taconics (known locally in Mass. at the Berkshires) someday, those peaks formed at the dawn of the Paleozoic, between 550 and 440 million years ago. Peering up from the highway, it was easy to imagine them sheltering everything from mastodons to wendigos.

I also returned with Lúthien, my iMac, having found it impossible to actually write on either my Asus or Spooky's Toshiba.

No real progress has been made on Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird, though that's about to change. It has to change, because I have no more time left to dither. It's time, Caitlín, to write this, finish it, and move on to other projects. Which are waiting. Impatiently. My editor and I have agreed that the "ending" will likely be a cliffhanger, which is how I'm going to, inelegantly, solve the problem of having a story too long to tell in five issues. Over the next ten days, I have to make major progress, which will include cutting out and rewriting portions of #s 2 and 3. It's a nightmare. It genuinely is a nightmare.

Night before last, we finished The Newsroom, and I applaud Aaron Sorkin. The series was, I believe, genuinely too good, too smart, too truthful, and too earnest for television. But I'm very happy someone tried and that we got as much as we did. There was a fumble at the opening of Season Two, but recovery was swift and the rest was golden.

Here are photos from Monday, driving through Massachusetts:





3:20 p.m.



3:20 p.m.



3:27 p.m.



3:28 p.m.

All photographs Copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan


Anyway, I should get to it.

TTFN,
Aunt Beast