• Location: Enipeus Vallis
• Mood: trying to stay focused
• Music: David Bowie, "Hallo Spaceboy"

"What a fantastic death abyss."

2009 is winding down fast. Winding down, wrapping up, whichever. And a strange year it has been. Every year, the years grow shorter— at least when viewed from my subjective personal perspective —shorter and more bizarre. Every year, I feel a greater degree of cognitive disconnect between NOW and THEN, and find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the past with the present; the future, somehow, seems more solid than the present.

No writing yesterday. I did send "The Jetsam of Disremembered Mechanics" to subpress, but it would be a lie to say that was work. Yesterday earns an L, as it was a lost day. However, were I to try to explain why, I'd only get myself into a mood that would make working today extremely unlikely. So, let's just say nothing was written.

The most peculiar thing about "The Jetsam of Disremembered Mechanics" is that it contains no contractions. Not a single one. It was a conscious nod to the style employed by Silverberg when he wrote Nightwings. And it yielded an oddly formal, and oddly innocent, voice. Nothing I would likely ever do again, but it worked for this story.

Yesterday, I had a long hot bath. I napped. Day before yesterday, I finished reading the paper on Tethyshadros and began reading "A new basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the upper Elliot Formation [Lower Jurassic] of South Africa."

There's a photo behind the cut that I took on Monday, of a rather daunting ice/snow formation hanging from the roof of the house next door:





Photograph Copyright © 2009 by Caitlín R. Kiernan.