bushy tailedErnest Hemingway said to write about the weather.
If you've not yet pre-ordered A is for Alien, please do so. Cover by the sublime Jacek Yerka, interior art by Vince Locke, and an afterword by Elizabeth Bear. Remember, the limited comes with a very thick chapbook, B is for Beginnings (which has a cover by Richard A. Kirk). Also, Subterranean Press is now taking pre-orders for the forthcoming trade paperback edition of Alabaster (which will reprint all of Ted Naifeh's artwork from the long-since sold-out hardback edition). I'll plug the Penguin books tomorrow.
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I tend to grow complacent. I tend think that I'm rather well versed in perversity and kink. But then, inevitably, I stumble across something unsuspected, something I should have known about, and I am humbled. Or at least astounded. Or amused. For example, given the subject matter of various bits I've written for Sirenia Digest, Frog Toes and Tentacles, and Tales from the Woeful Platypus, I'd expect people to expect me to know about "vore" (shortened from vorarephilia, and see also phagophilia). But you would have been wrong, before yesterday. Here's this whole fetish I missed somehow. Well, no, I didn't miss it. It's all over the stuff I've been writing. I just missed that it was a fetish. I always think these things are just me. This is why we have the internet. The real reason, I mean. So that perverts don't feel so all alone. And perusing websites devoted to the whole vore thing led me to discover "unbirthing," which I find truly fascinating, and which may have inspired a story for Sirenia Digest #35. And, if I temporarily adopt a Freudian worldview, a paradigm generally alien to me, both vore and the unbirthing fixation make perfect sense. What did not, at first, make perfect sense was why the unbirthing fetish is so closely allied with furries. But there might be an odd sort of logic here. A return to the wild combined with a return to the womb, perhaps? Some psychological aspect of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, or, rather, a sexual manifestation of neotony? But then you run up against the problem that most furries seem fixated not on genuinely becoming less human, in any realistic sense, but with some sort of bent for cartoon animals (anthropomorphic "funny animals," i.e., Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, Omaha the Cat Dancer, etc.). And that rather short circuits the explanation, unless one posits that cartoon animals are first encountered when we are very young, and then it all starts to make sense again. Anyway...I ramble. I find it very odd that, these days, it's actually "my job" to think seriously on such matters.
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I've been listening to a lot of old R.E.M. lately, and, frequently, it's almost painfully nostalgic. Each album is a different year. Of course, I didn't actually come to R.E.M. until the summer of 1986, when I moved to Boulder, Colorado and discovered college radio. That was the same summer that Life's Rich Pageant was released. It will always be my favourite R.E.M. album, partly because it was my first. And R.E.M. always sound like they're singing about the South, even when, say, they're singing about Guatemala. I'm finding myself inevitably, and somewhat annoyingly, homesick. I am so much better off in Rhode Island than I ever was in the South. It's simply a far more tolerant environment, and, the security guard at Swan Point aside, I've not had a homophobic encounter since we arrived. Oh, I'm sure that I would, if I were not careful about where I go. But in Georgia and Alabama, one could not be careful enough. It was inevitable and frequent (though far less so in the part of Atlanta where we lived). I find myself missing the South. Not so much the people, but the landscape, the history (which is, I suppose, the people), the architecture, the food, the Dinosaur of Sinclair Avenue, magnolias. When this homesickness begins to manifest as physical pangs —— when I'm listening to Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) or Automatic for the People (1992) —— I try to focus sharply on particular unpleasant things: NASCAR, the Confederate battle flag, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the football religion, and so on and on. But. Yes. I will admit it, as much as I love being in New England, and knowing I will never again live in the South, I also admit that I find myself missing the place. I think this might be a weird permutation of Stockholm Syndrome.
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I seem to have drifted back towards working on paleontology articles for Wikipedia. For example, day before yesterday, I did this one on the parareptile Colobomycter. And I'm sleeping more than usual, another eight hours last night. I figure it's all part of the post-novelizing thing.
The platypus says it's time to go. And the platypus...well, you know the score.