Wednesday, June 18, 2003
I have a new Crest SpinBrush Pro toothbrush, which truly does get my teeth amazingly clean, but which also sounds and feels like someone's inserted a didgeridoo into the farthest recesses of my skull.
Jim and/or Jennifer and/or Tasha (bark) and/or Cleo (bark bark), if you're reading this, I apologize for inflicting the Janovian primal scream thing on your answering machine yesterday.
Though I will admit that I felt better afterwards.
Much of yesterday was consumed by the sun-baked quest for a copy of the June issue of Locus magazine. It was found, at last, and I was amazed at Ed Bryant's long and very complimentary review of The Five of Cups, and only a little less amazed at Tim Pratt's not-so-long and almost-as-complimentary review of the same. I honestly thought this book would make the critics groan and roll their eyes. I am pleased and endlessly surprised that I was wrong. I don't know why I was suprised. I am often wrong. Oh, the issue also includes the worst photograph of me ever printed. I look sort of like I'm auditioning for a 1974 porn film.
Yesterday's screenplay meeting was postponed until this afternoon.
And Murder of Angels is, once again, at a standstill. It's determined to be an even bigger pain in the ass to get written than was Threshold (and that's saying something). Silk took a long time, but wasn't difficult. Low Red Moon was fairly easy. This book is impregnable. By that, I mean it won't let me in, and when it does, it kicks me right back out again. And it has to be written, whether it or I like that fact or not, and it has to be written in the next six and a half months. It's just a fucking novel, for Christ's sake. I've done this thing four times previously. Peter Straub says it never gets any easier. Evidently, he's correct. I've actually spent some time contemplating how suicide, or at least a decently botched suicide attempt, would rescue me from writing this goddamned, stinking novel. We are in a state of war at the moment, this novel and I, and that can't be good for either of us. Well, it can't be good for me. The novel can go to hell, alone and without an electric fan.
It's just a novel. Just a bunch of words strung together into pretty, terrible, fantastic lies. I do this in my fucking sleep!
The psychologist who works with schizophrenics may be a schizophrenic herself. I'm hoping that's the trick that lets me back into the book again. It's a greedy god, this one, and it demands backflips and leaps through flaming hoops and contortionism and sexual favours and exotic beasts and gold and death-defying highwire stunts and my nails chewed ragged.
I have no allies, save the bottle of absinthe on my desk and my addled wits.
Clearly, I am doomed.
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