Thursday, March 06, 2003
I've been working non-stop since about 10:30 a.m. and I'm pretty sure I haven't really gotten anything of substance accomplished. Fantasies of getting the revised ms. of Low Red Moon printed last night were dashed upon the cruel rocks of my own sloppiness (how's that for purple prose?). Spooky's currently re-reading the entire novel, marking all references to time, so that we can correct the aforementioned continuity frell up. Problem is, originally, the book began on Monday, October 22nd, 2001, but, as I've said, in order that it climax on October 31st and end on November 1st, it was necessary to rewrite so that it began instead on Thursday, October 25th. Jennifer and I did that back in September. Or at least we thought we had. As Spooky and I read the ms. last week and this past weekend, it became clear that we'd missed a lot of things. And you can't correct this sort of systemic disaster with MS Word's "search and replace" features. If one casual, but incorrect, reference to the temporal setting is missed, it's all screwed up. At least as far as I'm concerned. So, we have to go back over every line. This is the tedium that is my life.
Poe's Haunted is on the headphones. It makes a nice accompaniment to my gentle slide closer to insanity.
Other loose ends. I need to write the afterword for the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon. And I need to decide whether or not the chapters shall have titles. They always have before, but this book may be different. I'm debating whether or not to do a glossary of geological and palaeontological terms, as I did for Threshold. A lot of people won't know what a bryozoan is, or when the Mississippian Period was, but this book is much less about the fact that Chance Matthews is a palaeontologist than Threshold was, so I'm not sure the glossary would be as appropriate as it was to Threshold. I suppose I could leave it out and people can either a) use a dictionary or b) keep reading on in blissful ignorance. Anyway, I really do need to have this thing done by Monday night, at the latest, as my schedule is once again beginning to resemble a trainwreck.
Some good news. The CD Our Thoughts Make Spirals in Their World, by the Pittsburgh-based neoclassical/ambient/industrial quartet Nyarlathotep (derek cf. PEGRITZ, Jeremy Long, Alexx Reed, and the disembodied brain of H. P. Lovecraft) is now available! We listened to the whole thing last night, as a thunderstorm pounded Atlanta, and it's really impressive. This is the music you should listen to while reading Threshold. It would make a beautiful soundtrack to the film adaptation. I contributed vocal samples and a sort of micro-essay for the insert. You may purchase copies signed by me directly from:
Cat Dentures Auction
After listening to the disc, Spooky and I watched the American remake of The Ring on DVD and we were both quite impressed. It's certainly the creepiest thing I've seen, to my memory, since M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. I know some film geeks are giving it a cold shoulder, preferring instead the Japanese original, Ringu. However, I think this film deserves to be judged on its own merits (and, besides, I've not yet seen the Japanese film). It starts with a familar trope of the genre, teenagers fixated on an urban legend, then heads off into weird and marvelous places, fools us with the misdirection of a happy ending that isn't actually the end, then gets really nasty. The scene of the horse on the ferry was one of the single most horrifying things I've ever seen in a film. And I mean, specifically, horror, not terror, not gore. Horror.
I should go find some new way to be useless.
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