• Location: Isidis Dorsa
• Mood: slightly pressed for time
• Music: Editors, "I Want a Forest"

"Your new gods, your new ways, all seek to dispel me."

My head is filled with random bits of Saturday night that I've not written down, or written down nowhere but my Moleskinne notebook. The "rickshaws" along Massachusetts Avenue, for example. Or leaving Boston after the show, and Mass Ave being littered with scattered pods of drunken idiots trying to hail cabs. Passing MIT in the night. On our way back down I-95 to Providence, and the moon shining through a thin cloud cover, reflected on the glassy black water of Manchester Pond just before we crossed the state line into Rhode Island. Impressions, most of them already lost or remembered only by my unconscious mind.

On Sunday, I proofed the galley pages for "As Red as Red" (written about this time last year), which will be appearing later this year in Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas' Haunted Legends anthology (Tor Books). I still like the story much more than I expected. A year is usually long enough for me to begin disliking what I've written. But, anyway, nothing new was written on Sunday.

Nothing new was written yesterday, either. Though I sat here all damn day, staring at the screen, staring at Vince's illustration (which this next vignette will be based upon), reading things that ought to inspire, looking at art that ought to inspire. I have to have better luck today. Even so, subscribers should play it safe and expect Sirenia Digest #53 to be a day or two late this month. I'm hoping it will go out on May 2nd. Still, we could get astoundingly lucky and get it out on the night of April 30th. I'm just not going to count on that happening.

A wonderful package arrived yesterday, from Steven Lubold of Laughing Ogre Comics in Fairfax, Virginia. Literary care packages are always much appreciated. This one contained the second issue of The Guild comic, along with Patti Smith's Just Kids, Mark Miller and John Romita, Jr.'s Kick-Ass, and Patagonian Mesozoic Reptiles. So, many thanks, Mr. Lubold. You rock. We began reading Just Kids last night, because, currently, my superpower seems to be reading too many books all at once. Currently, I'm also trying to finish Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes, Gregory Maguire's A Lion Among Men, Matthew Goodman's book on the 1835 moon hoax, and the third volume of E. C. Segar's collected Popeye strips. That's at least three books too many.

Yesterday, the mail also brought a book looking for a blurb. At the moment, I have two of those waiting for me to get to them. Even after all these years, I am still unaccustomed to editors asking me for promotional blurbs.

Sunday night, we watched Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio. An oddly adorable movie that proves, yet again, that Philip Seymour Hoffman can do no wrong.

And here are thirteen photos from the Faith and the Muse show on Saturday night, as promised. It wasn't easy choosing thirteen from fifty-eight (well, except for those showing only the backs of anonymous heads):





























All photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac.