• Location: Icaria Planum
• Mood: bound and determined
• Music: The Cocteau Twins, "Domino"

Tea and crumpets with the Conqueror Worm

As predicted, most of yesterday was spent re-reading stories and poetry by Poe, looking for Sirenia Digest #38. I read aloud for the first time since the Epic Extraction on the 10th, beginning with "The Premature Burial," then "The Facts of M. Valdemar's Case," and proceeding to "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade," with a few poems strewn in between.

I see now what I intend to do for #38, and they're both "Yellow House" stories, I think. The first concerns initiation via elaborate premature burial, and the second is a tale told by the ghouls, something from the Red Book of Riyadh (last mentioned in Daughter of Hounds). So, by an odd route, these stories of mine with their roots in Lovecraft, will come back around to Poe. Anyway, I think it's going to be an especially interesting issue, if I can just get it all together.

Have you ordered A is for Alien? If not, I ask you, kindly, to consider doing so today. This really is some of my very best short-story work. Plus you get the cover by Jacek Yerka, interior artwork by Vince Locke, and an afterword by Elizabeth Bear. And blessings from the Platypus. I'm reposting the banner ads below, and anyone who puts those up on hisherit's blog or website or whatever, as a link to any place the book can be purchased, will not only be smiled upon by Herr Platypus, but likely also earn points with Her Grand Extinction, the New Haven Dodo, who seems to have joined the former in permanent residence upon my writing desk. Thank you:





A tiny bit of WoW last night, though I was really too sleepy. Shah remains mired in Lvl 55, since she's presently more interested in trying to get exalted status with Undercity than in leveling. This torch Shah is carrying for her Dark Lady Sylvanas is really starting to annoy Suraa. Anyway, they did the embarrassingly low-level Shadowfang Keep last night, to claim the head of Arugal. It took about 20 minutes. But then we got back to The Sepulcher and realized that Shah had forgotten to actually take Argual's head. So...we had to go back. Fortunately, everything was still dead and it only required about ten additional minutes. Now, I may be mostly sitting out WoW until after the new issue of the Digest is written.

Okay. More coffee. Oh, wait, there's a photograph. I think I took it on January 16th, because I love these little bottles, two filled with beach glass, that sit together on one of the windows out in the front parlour:





Photograph Copyright © 2009 by Caitlín R. Kiernan