No writing yesterday. I'd fully intended to spend the first half of the day on eBay, then spend the second half writing. But I wasn't done with all the eBay stuff until about five, and then I had to figure out where I want Ted's illustrations to be placed in Alabaster, which sounds easy enough, but in practice took me almost an hour. Which must be why I procrastinated over doing it for the last two or three months. Unconsciously, I knew it would be a tedious ass pain. Anyway, now it's done, and I don't have to dread doing it any longer. I also exchanged several e-mails with
Today, Spooky's handling eBay, and me, I'm writing. Something.
Of course, the threat that the Daughter of Hounds CEM may arrive today and not on Monday looms over me like a great hungry carrion bird.
There's a write up on the aforementioned Virginia-Highland tree massacre in the June 29th-July 5th issue of Creative Loafing. Turns out, eighteen trees were cut, not fifteen, as I'd believed. They were Bradford pears. Now the Virigina-Highland Civic Association is making promises that they'll be replaced by "heartier" Chinese elms once the damn sidewalks are widened. Well, we shall see. The trees that were already thriving there looked pretty hearty to me.
Last night, Spooky and I watched an odd little film, Night Tide (1961), directed by Curtis Harrington and starring a dashingly young and bewildered Dennis Hopper. A sailor on leave from the US Navy falls for a strange woman who makes her living pretending to be a mermaid on the Santa Monica boardwalk, a woman who may, in fact, be an actual siren. The film has its moments, here and there, but lost me at the end, when it abruptly trades its slow supernatural build-up for a clumsy and somewhat unconvincing Radcliffe/Scooby-Doo sort of revelation that all the weirdness was only the product of perfectly mundane, prosaic forces, and there were no sirens after all. Anyway, despite the shortcomings of the ending, it's a peculiar and mostly forgotten film and surely worth a look.
It's getting late, and I need to be working so...please have a look at the new auctions. That's why they're there. Yesterday, I added many things, including the hardback of Threshold: The Writing of Trilobite, a first edition of The Sandman: Book of Dreams, and an ARC of From Weird and Distant Shores Go. Look. Bid. Thanks.