No, I'm not awake. But that's never stopped me before. Yesterday, I spent an hour and a half transcribing all the corrections for "Houses Under the Sea" and "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," then e-mailed them to Robert Morrish. So, the stories should be in decent shape when they appear in Thrillers II (as far as I can tell, Cemetery Dance is not yet taking preorders on this book). These are two of the very best short stories/novellas I've written to date, and I do hope that people will seek out the anthology. Afterwards, I tried to start work on the story for John Pelan's The Cthulian Singularity, only to realize that I had no idea what I wanted to write. See, I get in this frelling, idiotic mindset that fools me into believing that good fiction can be produced on an assembly line, that it can be pooped out, workman-like, on demand, quickly, without mess or bother or lengthy contemplation. It comes from having worked for DC Comics for so long, I think, and from a number of other places, including my waning love affair with the Puritan work ethic. It was a short love affair. I really wasn't infected until about 1994. Anyway, I spent most of the afternoon researching one of Saturn's moons, Mimas, which I believe will be the focus of the new story, which I'm call "Zero Summer" (from T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding"). But I do hope to write the opening scene today. Late yesterday, Spooky and I got back to proofreading To Charles Fort, With Love; we made it through "Apokatastasis" and "La Peau Verte," pp. 143-184. It was a long day.

For Kid Night, we rented John Polson's Hide and Seek and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. Polson's film was a disappointment, though I really can't say I had any expectations (well, then you shouldn't say you were disappointed, Kiernan). Sort of a Made-for-TVish, Shiningesque thing that managed little sense and came with five alternate and almost equally unsatisfying endings (four alternates, five endings counting the original theatrical one). I still admire Dakota Fanning, and she's still my pick for Dancy, but I do hope she gets better roles in the future; she was just about the only thing that halfway worked in this film. As for In the Mouth of Madness, a film whose charm has always eluded me, we rented it because neither of us had seen it in a while. It seemed longer and more fleshed out than I remembered, though I can no find evidence that the DVD included material omitted from the theatrical or VHS releases. Regardless, I was still soundly unimpressed. It's a film that plays more like half-assed camp, more a parody of Lovecraft than a Lovecraftian film. It's more often funny than creepy, never actually frightening, and lacks even an ounce of dread. The makeup and creature effects are shoddy and unconvincing, the story's muddled and absurd, and Sam Neil spends the whole film looking sleepy and vaguely bemused to be stuck in such a mess. So, I still don't see why anyone admires this film.

Right now, I wish someone would ask me to do a convention in Greece. Or maybe southern France. Somewhere warm and dry and Mediterranean and at least seemingly far away from American politics. And Spooky gets to come, too. I'd take them up on it, deadlines or no deadlines.