Saturday, December 07, 2002
I'm feeling unaccountably depressed and irritable this morning, listening to The Crüxshadows hoping to lift my spirits. Sometimes I just wake up this way.
I think that I'm becoming extremely anxious to start the new novel. I don't mean to write these silly notes, these cheat sheets, but to actually get back to the business of writing. To stand at the beginning, again, and take the first step towards that inevitable, elusive end. Often it seems that my writing is almost entirely about finding endings, shining a light down paths so that characters may survive long enough to reach conclusion (though conclusion may entail their death; Dancy and Elise in Threshold, for example). Standing here at the start and knowing that I shall not be this near the starting point again for many, many months. The books all wind back upon themselves. Closed universes. Einstein had a name for these sorts of temporal loops, but I can't remember what he called them. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning is the end. Again, again, again. I suppose that was very literally true with Threshold and Low Red Moon, but in a deeper sense, it seems always true of what I write. I see the end from where I stand, at the start, forget it in the long walk to completion where I will discover it again, transformed utterly but still somehow exactly the same as when I began. Round, and round, and round. Here I am now, and the characters, my unfortunate actors, are waiting in the wings for the curtain to rise and the lights and the crowd and that first line of dialogue. All this life is in our way, mine and theirs, all this moving and illness and romance and obligation, all these things rob us of the time needed to make the trip from beginning to end. Jealous little gods, these books inside me wanting out. The worlds writhing inside my skull. My skull is small and tight and lacks the space they require.
I am going on, aren't I?
Something I've become curious about, though: people who read my journal, but haven't read anything else I've ever written. None of the novels, or short stories, or novellas, or comics, or non-fiction — nothing but the journal. They write me letters, these people. "Dear Caitlin," they will say. Or, the polite and mannered ones, who are few, "Dear Ms. Kiernan, I've never read your books or stories, but I read your blogger . . ." Something to that effect, always. I never know what to say to these people. Why the hell would anyone want to read this damned thing except as an appendix to my fiction? I mean, who gives a frell, otherwise? I'm a writer. I write books and stories. The blogger was only an idea to promote the books. Nothing more. It wasn't even my idea that I keep one while writing Low Red Moon. It was Neil Gaiman's. And yet I get correspondence from people who seem to see the blogger as an end unto itself. They seem to read dozens and dozens of the web journals, many of them. Is this something more real to them, to replace the annoying and necessary fantasy of fiction? A new specie of voyeurism? It seems that way to me. I especially love the ones who read the blogger, but not my real writing, and then e-mail me to say that I shouldn't complain about this or that or anything, and that they know all about me because they read my online journal. The joke's on them, of course. All of this is lies. Every single word. Of that I am almost quite certain. I save the true things for my fiction. See Ursula K. LeGuin's indespensible distinction between that which is "true" and that which is only "factual." Facts are, of necessity, falsehoods, for they will all change, in time. This blogger is nothing but a pile of damned facts and you'll learn nothing of consequence from reading it. It's only a diversion. A way to mark my mornings. Or evenings. Or whatever.
A way to spill a little of the irritability out into the gluttonous, masochistic world. The world that slows down for car crashes and speeds up for yellow lights. The world that thinks "truth" can be found only in the "real world" and that fiction is just someone trying to make them smile or laugh or scream. Those people.
Oh, I'll stop ranting a moment to heap thanks upon Darren McKeeman of Gothic.Net for running, free of charge, banner ads for Farscape, which returns to the Sci-Fi Channel in January. Darren (or Durwood or Darwin or Derwin) is also organizing SpookyCon in San Francisco and e-mailed me an article this morning, the gist of which seemed to be that all true (i.e., native) San Franciscans talk funny.
I need to go find something useful to do with what little's left of the morning.
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