Dear Sweet Filthy World

Sunny again today, but still with some clouds. Our high was, and presently is (so our high so far), 87˚F, with the heat index at 92˚F.

I woke at six this morning, which was earlier than I'd intended. But what the fuck, I'd gotten to sleep by midnight, so I figured I'd get up, have some breakfast, then get to work. And, instead, I fell the fuck back to sleep and woke at 8 a.m. Because I am a creature of excruciating habit, or excruciatingly a creature of habit, this threw the whole day into a less than productive tailspin. I finally gave up and played Guild Wars 2 and tried not the think about the words I did not get written today.

What am I writing? Fuck it, I'll tell you. The novel is called The Night Watchers, and it is essentially a new and more supernatural incarnation of the novel that would have been Interstate Love Song (based on the short-story of the same title). I really like it, all of it that's in my head, and that's a lot of it. If I can quit fucking around, it could be done by the end of the summer. The print and ebook versions will be published by Subterranean Press, and hopefully there will be an audiobook. Likely there will. It's set mostly in and around north-central Alabama, but spans many, many decades. The title is borrowed from Peter Straub's Ghost Story, one of my favorite books of all time, ever.

But you knew that about me and Ghost Story. I mean, if you are one of those Constant Readers.

But I gotta admit, balancing the fiction, no matter how much I like the novel at hand, with the sudden and marvelous paleontology opportunities is a challenge. But. Fiction keeps the rent paid and the lights on and food on the table. Paleontology just, you know, makes me feel like I'm doing what I was put on earth to do. And it's all sort of ironic. For me - as frustrating as I might find it, as much as I would usually rather be doing something else - writing is easy as pie. On the other hand, paleontology is fucking hard work – and I'm not talking about physically demanding fieldwork and fossil preparation. I'm talking about the intellectual rigor, discipline, and plain ol' smarts involved. So, I'm going to be busting my butt to do the fairly easy thing that pays the bills to earn the luxury of busting my butt to do the very hard thing that pays not one red cent. Irony. But, that said, I am just grateful for both opportunities, at this point in my life and at this point in history.

By the way, SubPress has announced Vile Affections (and the accompanying chapbook Cambrian Tales), and you may see the cover. In fact, you can now place preorders! Right here. Note: Only those who bought the signed numbered edition of Comes a Pale Rider may preorder the signed numbered edition of Vile Affections at this time. Anyone may preorder the trade hardcover.

And here's some crap I posted today to Twitter and Facebook:

I'm just waiting for one of these anti-COVID vaccine yahoos to realize that, in effect, every time they use any medication they are – in the eyes of pharmaceutical companies and medical science – essentially guinea pigs or lab rats or Rhesus monkeys, FDA approval or no.

~ and ~

Fact: When you are so afraid that you can only win an election when fewer people vote, so you try to make it harder and harder for folks to vote, especially those whom you suspect won't vote for you, you've failed democracy.

~ and this, which someone else said and which I retweeted ~

Let's perfectly clear...Democrats do not want to de-fund the police. Dems want to demilitarize and de-brutalize the police.

I leave you with my level 80 holosmith (an elite engineering specialization), Mandy J. Wolowitz (née Hansen), at Timberline Falls. Yes, she has a lightsaber.

Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast




3:50 p.m.

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I woke to rain after a decent night's sleep, one of those rare nights when I get almost eight hours. It was cloudy. Currently, it's 80˚F, and our high was 84˚F.

I spent the day trying to read back over a whole mountain of papers of the mosasaur Tylosaurus, preparing for tomorrow's Zoom meeting with Mike Polcyn (SMU) and Amelia Zietlow (AMNH). Seriously, after tomorrow, I've got to spend a week or so doing pretty much nothing but writing. I have to get that novel started.

Oh, hey. The sun just came out. Well, cool.

I talked with Bill today about the cover for the second edition of From Weird and Distant Shores, and I think we've settled on the layout. Art by Bob Eggleton, by the way, a seascape based on the rocks at the Beavertail Lighthouse on Conanicut Island, mine and Spooky's old haunt. It should be a very nice cover.

This afternoon's comfort movie was Martin Campbell's Casino Royale (2006), which is probably my favorite Bond film ever. And that's saying something.

Today's photo was taken yesterday in the parking lot at Office Depot, because I thought might need some blue sky today. It never hurts to have a spare.

Later Taters,
Aunt Beast




11:25 a.m. (yesterday)

Today was a better day. Though is was mostly cloudy. Our high was 87˚F.

But I slept last night, which made all the difference. I passed out about 10:30 p.m., which is almost unheard of for me, and I slept a full eight hours, give or take.

All that sleepy left me a little groggy, but I did get some work done. I read back over "Strandling," the story I've written for an Ellen Datlow anthology, and I made line edits. It's a better story than I'd thought, and it is grimmer than what I usually allow myself to do (no, really).

I read "Redescription and phylogenetic assessment of 'Prognathodon stadmani': implications for Globidensini monophyly and character homology in Mosasaurinae." The paper erects a new genus, Gnathomortis ("jaws of death"), and places 'Prognathodon stadmani' in that genus.

I have not been farther from the house since July 9th, 2020 than the 1.34 miles between here and my doctor's office. That's just a month shy of a year.*

Please have a look at Spooky's wishlist on Amazon. Her birthday is impending, on the 24th, and she will be mighty grateful, as they say. Thank you.7

Later,
Aunt Beast




10:30 a.m.


* A few hours after I posted this yesterday, Kathryn ("Spooky") pointed out that when we got our COVID-19 vaccinations in Forest Park (on the other side of Red Mountain), I'd gone quite a bit farther than 1.34 miles. So, I pulled up Google Earth and checked my calculations, and...actually...my doctor's office is only about 1.27 miles away (I was off yesterday), and the Walgreens in Forest Park is, oddly, just about 1.34 miles from here. So, my original statement stands, so far as distance traveled is concerned, but the farthest point I've traveled from home was not to my doctor's office, but Walgreens.

I actually had a good day today. That doesn't happen very often, genuinely good days.

It started with me somehow sleeping until almost 9 a.m., when I should have been up at 7, and that threw everything off, and I got virtually no work done, and yet...it was still a good day.

For one thing, I got an early birthday present with today being the release date of the new Lord Huron album, Long Lost, and my vinyl copy arrived this afternoon. And it's possibly their best yet. So, there was that. And my afternoon movie was a favorite, Ridley Scott's Prometheus 2012 – one of the only things about that year that didn't suck. To all those people who complain that Millburn (the biologist) and Fifield (the geologist) are unrealistic because, you know, scientists never do stupid shit (the stories I could tell...), the real problem is not that the two characters are incautious, it's that they're incurious. Neither of them wants to be there. They're looking at the first evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization, and they just want to got back to the ship and sit out the whole thing. Scientists are just like everyone else and they do dumb shit all the time, but usually it's from an overabundance of curiosity. Oh, and every time I see this film Charlie Holloway seems like a bigger asshole than the last time I saw it. I suppose he gets points for his willingness to sacrifice himself once he's infected, but...Jesus, the dude's an asshole. In the end, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, and Idris Elba steal the show. Oh, speaking of Charlize Theron, I forgot to say that yesterday's movie was David Leitch's Atomic Blonde (2017), an endless delight of a film with just about the best fight scene ever (the one of the stairs in the East Berlin apartment).

Jun Ebersole brought by the third batch of Pleistocene matrix to be processed (photo below), which is actually seven samples from seven different levels within the same cave. And this is material that we collected in the summer of 1987 when I was with the Red Mountain Museum, when there was a Red Mountain Museum (it closed in 1994, and the collections went to McWane), and only now is it being processed, thirty-four years later. So, that was another good thing. And we got Chinese takeout!

Tomorrow, I gotta get back on the horse, because I have to layout a new edition of From Weird and Distant Shores and make some minor edits to the introduction to Vile Affections before I send it to Subterranean Press, but..dammit, today was a good day.

Our high was 84˚F. It's still 84˚F.

Later Taters,
Aunt Beast




4:46 p.m.

A sunny, warm day today. We may it to 84˚F, and it's still 81˚F, with the heat index at 82˚F. I had a good walk in the sun and a fine light bath.

Thank fuck, I slept last night, thanks to a little extra CBD, and I felt human again today, as human as I ever feel. I was able to write the 784 words needed to finish the introduction to the next short-story collection, Vile Affections, due out from Subterranean Press either late this year or early in 2022 (I cannot remember). It was kinda momentous, writing this introduction, as it is the first time I've written an introduction for one of my collections since 2010, when I struggled with (and finally completed) the intro for Two Worlds and In Between. So, that's more than a decade between intros, but as this one says, after surviving 2020, I felt sorta obligated. All of the stories are pre-COVID-19.

Last night we watched Christopher Nolan's Tenet (2020). You should know, before I say more, that I adore Christopher Nolan. And yet, having said that, I'm really not sure what I think of Tenet. I noted on IMDb that it has a rating of only 7.4, while Inception (2010; my second favorite Nolan film after Dunkirk) has a rating of 8.8, which sorta reflects my own reaction – though I would say, personally, that Inception is a solid 9. Frankly, I suspect that Tenet might be one of those films – like The Fifth Element and Mad Max: Fury Road – I discover like a lot more the second time around, once my mind is cleared of expectations that got in the way. But maybe not. I was not impressed with John David Washington, though Robert Pattinson almost made up for it. The script was so-so. Kenneth Branagh's role was so oddly Bond villain that it seemed to have wandered in from a different movie. I was not crazy about Ludwig Göransson's score. The science and the science fiction were cool, but the story was labyrinthine even for Nolan, and there's a point at which a maze just starts to bore. So...yeah. I was really looking forward to Tenet, and I owe it at least one more viewing, because it might only have been me. But maybe not.

Oh, and we watched two more episodes of The Nevers. Episode Two was not much better than the pilot, but then Joss Whedon got out of the way and there was a different writer and different director for Episode Three, and suddenly the show felt like something. I'm not saying it's very good. I'm just saying it seems to be getting better.

I finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness today, and it was a good novel, yes, but I think it was likely a far more powerful novel when it was published in 1969. Next, I'm reading The Lathe of Heaven.

Later Taters,
Aunt Beast




6:05 p.m.

Well, Selwyn is, anyway. Today, we celebrate his ninth birthday.

Unfortunately, like yesterday, I overslept. This time until 9 a.m. I'd awakened at 5, because I heard something strange, which I became convinced was a coyote dashing manically up and down the backstairs. And for some reason that gave me the creeps and kept me awake half an hour. The sun was rising as I got back to sleep, and then, suddenly, I was dreaming about Kathryn waking me up, and it was 9 a.m. Which is when I wake her up. Anyway, I did not get anything written on "Strandling." I did not work on the Secret Project or Winifred. That hour and a half of extra sleep threw my schedule into disarray, again, and...I have to become more flexible. What did I manage to do today? Not fucking much. I watched two aviation documentaries and read part of Wiley and Lieberman's Phylogenetics. This is not to say it was not a slightly momentous day, it just was not a productive one.

Kathryn and I went for a short walk and actually spoke to a neighbor, and none of us were wearing masks. And that was so very, very strange. For me, it has been many, many months since I have spoken to anyone face-to-face who was not masked. Oh, I also talked with a towhee and found a dead chipmunk. And then, for dinner, Spooky got us burgers from Five Guys. My first takeout since my self isolation began in mid March 2020. It was motherfucking sublime.

It was sunny and warmer today. We made it to 78˚F, though low eighties had been forecast. We are supposed to reach low eighties tomorrow, and I guess we'll see. Currently, it's 77˚F.

Tomorrow there will be work. I will get up at 7 or 7:30 in the morning, and there will be work. Things will happen when and as they should. Dammit.

I leave you with Himself, below.

Full of Beef,
Aunt Beast




1:14 p.m.

A sunny, bright day, and it was a little warmer. Currently, it's 76˚F (heat index 77˚F). And it looks like that was our high.

But I slept very late – because apparently I was exhausted. I did not get up until 8:30. Actually, I woke at 7 a.m., when I ought have, and then I looked at the clock and it was 8:30, and so either I was abducted by aliens or I dozed off for another hour and a half. All told, I slept more than eight hours, which almost never happens anymore. For me, six hours is a good night. Anyway, oversleeping had a sort of cascade effect that meant I got no writing done. I got no paleo' done. I got none of the mountain of reading done I need to get done. The schedule is the schedule and I cannot waver. Or I lose a day. Hopefully, I'll do much better tomorrow.

I did write long emails to Mike Polcyn and Jun Ebersole today on prospective research projects, and that was something, at least.

And I made this post to Twitter, and I know it's a little cryptic, and maybe someday I'll explain what I am referring to, what led to me making the post. But maybe I won't. The particulars do not change the truth of it.

What I know at 57: Being a good scientist means there will be a moment when you must admit the greatest scientific accomplishment of your life has been proven inadequate & someone younger, smarter, and/or with better technology has gotten much nearer the truth. And you accept it with dignity.

Anyway, that was today. Last night, we continued our re-watch of Hannibal by starting Season 3. But I was so sleepy, and the two episodes were so beautiful and quiet and the music was so nice that I kept dozing off. Yes, Hannibal works as a lullaby for me. I also became obsessed last night with the idea that Bryan Fuller could make an unbelievable Angela Carter mini-series. Indeed, those two opening episodes of Season Three are pretty much a Carteresque affair ("Apéritif" and "Amuse-Bouche") and work very well, at times, as a "Beauty and the Beast"/"Bluebeard" retelling, two fairy tales of which Carter was especially fond.

Today's photo isn't supposed to be about my two World Fantasy awards (though they still make me a proud beast). It's more about my Tylosaurus proriger plushy slithering between the silver Easter Island-like monoliths of Lovecraft's head. I adore my Tylosaurus plushy, made by Scots artist Rebecca Groom. You should check her out. She's a cool and talented lady. One day, I will have the money and a moment of weakness and get her coelacanth (Latimeria sp.).

By the way, it still isn't anywhere near too late to have a look at my Amazon wish list and maybe make my wretched 57th birthday less wretched.

Later Tater,
Aunt Beast




11:17 a.m.

I should have been in bed two hours again...and yet.

Today the high made it to only to 91˚F, and it's currently 74˚F.

I began reading Lukas Rieppel's Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of Spectacle.

You know...nothing happened that can't wait until I'm awake tomorrow. Blame a Brujah biker named Hannibal and a rat named Benji.

No, really.

Oh, look. Selwyn's foot.

TTFN,
Aunt Beast




10:53 p.m.

Today was better, all in all. I slept a little more last night, for one thing. It was a little warmer, 87˚F with the heat index, and that helped, too. Currently, it's 72˚F.

I went back to avoiding the news, and that also made a difference. It always does.

I was even sort of productive. I read over and did some revision to "Standing Water," a story that I wrote way back in 2000. A twenty-year-old story that Tor.com is doing an audio version of, and I got them to let me tidy it up a little more first. I'm still not crazy about the language. I mean, I don't write like that anymore, and I look at a story from then and, well, at least I was writing better in 2000 than I was in 1994. Still, the core of "Standing Water" is good and solid weird. I still love the concept, almost enough to rewrite the story (and I pretty much never rewrite anything). And the mood's good. And it's a snapshot of a Birmingham that no longer exists, a much more authentic Birmingham, the one I loved.

So, there was that, and then Kathryn helped me get the new exhaust fan in the window, so the prep area is pretty much fully functional now. And why has it not occurred to me before today to call Winifred "Winnie"?

There was more GW2, and that was actually good, too. Oh, and a new Phoebe Bridgers album, Punisher, released to Spotify (and maybe other places) one day early. I listened to it all day. I'm listening to it right now. I'm not sure I love it as much as Stranger in the Alps, but it'll probably grow on me. And I went outside for about five minutes. I washed my favorite Frozen t-shirt by hand. Kathryn and I spent the evening watching television.

I've had much worse days recently.

Later,
Aunt Beast




5:04 p.m.

The cool stuff first: My agent and I closed a two-novel deal today, and I will post details when I've signed the contracts and the publisher says I may make an announcement. That likely won't be long. Right now, it's good to have work lined up, in a time of such profound uncertainty. I will say that it's a deal that I am very happy with.

Meanwhile...well...there's really not much else. I talked with my agent in far away Maine, where I think she may remain through the summer. I went for a walk with Kathryn. For dinner, I had a can of pintos with cheese, salsa, and guacamole, along with two fried eggs, over easy. The day was warm, almost hot. We made it to 86˚F. Currently, it's 75˚F, and my office window is still open.

I'm craving black-eyed peas and collards and jowls and cornbread. It's good to be craving anything, the way my appetite's been.

From my Facebook this evening:

I think we need more people saying that it's okay to be very, very worried about the economy and the psychological effects of the quarantine, that giving voice to those worries should not brand you a Trumpian Covid-denier, not so long as you are simultaneously doing everything you can reasonably do to protect yourself and others from the spread of the disease. That's where I find myself, and I have often, in the last two+ months, felt that daring to give voice to long-term economic worries and to questioning the psychological and sociological repercussions of quarantine, I have often been wrongly lumped with the deniers and those who flatly refuse to shelter in place and wear masks and etc. Recognizing the economic disaster unfolding around us, and that it may prove to be as destructive, ultimately, as Covid-19, it's a realistic, valid position. This isn't a "money" or human lives scenario. We need to keep all aspects of this crisis in mind going forward. I want to live through this, but I also want a world left that's worth living for.

~ and ~

I'm going to be running a special eBay auction to raise money for the McWane Science Center, the museum I'm doing my paleontology work from, which has now been closed since March 16th. I'll keep you posted. It will begin sometime in then next day or two.

Oh. I almost forgot. I slept more than nine hours last night. I'm averaging five or six hours a night. Anyway, bedtime.

TTFN,
Aunt Beast




6:02 p.m.