awakeNo actual writing yesterday. I sat here for hours, searching for a story, after discovering the story I'd thought I was going to write after "Houndwife" isn't yet ready to be written. I dusted two bookshelves in my office. That took half an hour. I stared at the screen some more. I reread portions of Michael E. Bell's Food for the Dead (2001), and might have found an idea, which is currently known only as "Untitled 37." I read about sauropods. I made notes. I stared out the window at a late March that looks like early February. I made more notes. I reread Angela Carter's "Peter and the Wolf" (1982). I gazed forlornly at the screen of the iMac. I did a little straightening up in the kitchen. I fretted about my lousy, rotten feet, and my bad teeth, and not having health insurance, and getting old, and all the grey hair. I drank pomegranate-flavored limeade. I drank lime-flavored ice tea. I made a late lunch of a can of Progresso soup and Saltines and Izze ginger ale. I shelved books that needed shelving. I closed the curtain in my office so I couldn't see the cold blue sky. It was that sort of writing day.
And, at some point, I thought, I ask absurd things of myself. Finish one story on Thursday, begin another on Friday.
Spooky, on the other hand, had a productive day. She's working on a March Hare and sort of cameo thing, both for her Dreaming Squid Dollworks Shop on Etsy.
Oh, a good day to preorder The Ammonite Violin & Others, if you've not already done so. Thanks. It's a simple enough equation: if these books don't sell, there likely will not be future books. It's the vicious maxim by which all working authors live.
Early last night, just after dinner (leftover meatloaf), I had the worst seizure I've had since at least January. It caught us both by surprise, as the seizures have become infrequent. It left me feeling empty and wasted, but no real harm done. Spooky was there to catch me. I lay on the bed for an hour or so, trying to watch the new episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but my head was very full of a fog that only began to lift later in the evening.
I was unable to sleep until sometime after four ayem, and then only with the help of Ambien (first dose in eight nights).
Oh, there are gratuitous photographs of Hubero:
Hubero has decided to begin his memoirs, Confessions of an Affectionate Bastard. He insists that, in the inevitable film adaptation, he will be played by Jack Black.
One must not rush into these things.
Photographs © Copyright 2010 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac.