okay---
One year ago today, "principal photography wrapped" on the book trailer/still-photo project for The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I'll come back to this tomorrow. Or it might have to be Thursday. Or Friday...
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Once again – annoyingly – the Alabaster: Wolves hc. Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am, this is the week that comic shop owners (and other retailers) place their orders, solicit, whatever, based on Diamond/Preview...stuff. Look, I'm not fucking industry. I'm a writer. Don't ask me to get into the tiny details. But let's pretend I do know what I'm on about, and proceed accordingly. Okay. Good. Now, that makes this the week to call your local comics shop and preorder the book. Unless you've PREORDERED from Amazon. Or somewhere else.
Also, libraries. These days, lots of libraries carry lots of graphic novels. Call your local library. Ask them to please order a copy. Remember, our modest target, only 2,500 copies. We can do that, yes?
Thank you. The bird also thanks you.
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Yesterday...well, it would make as exciting a checklist as a paragraph. I suppose if you'd just spent the last six years in a maximum-security prison – in solitary – my day yesterday would have seemed like a pretty lively affair. Well, my day almost any day. They sort of bleed together.
1) Email! (Vince Locke, my agent, my editor at Penguin, etc.)
2) Nailing down the ToC (Table of Contents) for the next short-story collection (details TBA).
3) Heavy editing on that SECRET PROJECT of which I spoke yesterday.
4) The last bit of marks I needed to make on the galley pages for Blood Oranges.
5) Writing the biography for Kathleen Tierney, which was actually sort of fun.
6) Noodling over a chapbook for the above-mentioned collection.
See, like that. I left out the part about paperclips. Dude, that was fucking epic, me against the paperclips. But. Finally, I grew sick of the epic tedium and went with Spooky to UPS to send the galley pages back to Manhattan. Where they should arrive today. Or tomorrow. I refuse to pay forty dollars for fancy fucking mail, so maybe tomorrow. Whatever. Who cares. Not me.**
Last night, I read a very fine story by Wilum Pugmire, "The Hands That Reek and Smoke," in The Book of Cthulhu II. What I most appreciate about this book so far is that there really hasn't been a story about Cthulhu. Good for us, contributors. Oh! And caramel-flavored candy corn!
Today, I'm going to get Sirenia Digest #82 ready and send it away to be PDF'd, so, hopefully, subscribers will get that late this evening. And I'll be doing other...things...today.
Here in Providence, today, the sky is wide and carnivorous, and it's a blustery day. But at least the tree Outside my office window is still green.
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Oh, and here are photos from last night. Unpacking the Tylosaurus proriger model sent to me by sculptor
esanko. The scale on the model ~1:10. Bob Eggleton has agreed to paint it for me. When I was doing vertebrate paleontology in Birmingham, I spent a lot of time on this particular species of mosasaur. I worked on a thirty footer, and I discovered and prepared a juvenile not much larger than this model, a specimen which I described in a presentation at the 45th annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Rapid City, South Dakota (Autumn 1985)*. T. proriger, was, and is, one of my favorite beasts. Just imagine, a marine Komodo "dragon" the size of a killer whale. I'm not a happy person, but this, this makes me happy, at least briefly. Ah, but photos (unpainted, with a kitten):All photographs Copyright © 2012 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac
COMMENT!
Old and Scaly,
Aunt Beast
* During the same presentation, I debunked the existence of a "miniature" species of Tylosaurus, T. "zangerli" (Russell, 1970), demonstrating that it's holotype is a juvenile individual and the taxon actually only a junior synonym of T. proriger.
** They arrived today. So says an email I just received from my editor.