• Location: Deuteronilus Mensae
• Mood: awake
• Music: The Psychedelic Furs, "My Time"

"For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky"

A good writing day yesterday. 1,221 words on Chapter Eight of The Red Tree. As I have said, this is the last chapter. I would have liked to have paced the book slightly differently, with nine chapters, but it's due at the end of the month (and this is something like the extended, extended deadline), so that's really not an option. I think it will come out well. I see clearly most of the events that lie between me and THE END, which is now only ten or twelve thousand words ahead of me. I am especially proud that not once with this book did I resort to outlining (which I did quite a bit with Daughter of Hounds). I'm guessing there simply will not be time to include the footnotes I fretted over earlier in the summer, which is a shame, as this epistolary narrative would be greatly enhanced by such metatextual details.

Having lunch yesterday, which I rarely do (and yesterday it was a bit of chicken masala), I made the mistake of allowing myself to consider all that which has to be done over the next six or seven weeks or so. It looks like this:

1) Finish The Red Tree.
2) Write and produce Sirenia Digest nos. 35 and 36.
3) Write a short story for an anthology.
4) Make the trip to NYC for my KGB Bar reading on November 19th.
5) Write a couple of short non-fiction pieces for Weird Tales.

If I can just make it through to the beginning of December, I might even get a week or two off. Maybe.

Anything else about yesterday? Yesterday was the official end of the Howard's End sim in Second Life. As we were unable to sell the sim (no big surprise there), it was "abandoned" last night. I got a little sad about the whole thing, considering what might have been, but then I remembered what an ass pain SL had become since at least the implosion of the Dune sim back in February, and that made me feel better. And I know I still haven't written the entry detailing all the reasons Howards End was shut down. I think, at this point, if I ever get around to it, it's going to be more of an entry on why I finally found myself puking sick of SL. I will say, I think humanity is not yet ready for "second lives." Most people can't even seem to manage their first lives.

Spooky made a grand chicken stew for dinner. We watched Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938), which is on that list of my most favorite movies ever. One I watch when I need a certain sort of comfort. There were many jokes about cats with saggy stomachs, made mostly at Hubero's expense. And yeah, I know there are no leopards in Brazil, and that there's no such bone as an "intercostal clavicle" So what. I do always find myself wishing that Baby would just eat George the Yapping Dog and be done with it.

Oh, and here are five photos from October 6th, our most recent trip down to Point Judith:





View to the south, Harbor of Refuge, looking towards the jetty.



I begin to think that Spooky and I should pitch a "coffee-table book" of photographs of dead crustaceans.



A battered bronze triangulation station disc cemented into one of the jetty's granite blocks. This one was placed by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.



Far out on the jetty, looking back to the northeast. A great view of Point Judith (at the right).



View to the southwest, looking into the setting sun towards the end of the jetty.

All photographs Copyright © 2008 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac