Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Sorry for the quiet. All has been chaos and idiocy and there hasn't been much to say. Mostly, I've been busy trying to get my website, phorum, and blogger back online after they went down on Friday. We're coming up on the 96-hour mark, since the site went down. A thank you to those who wrote to ask what the frell was going on and to offer suggestions for possible solutions. And to Neil and Poppy, who are probably the reason you were able to find the blog in this temporary port.
With luck, the website will be back sometime tomorrow or Thursday. The phorum will take a little longer to get up and running again. I don't think I'm even going to try to explain how or why this happened, or why it's proving such a pain in the eema to get everything up again. Suffice to say that I had to find a new server and am now having trouble redirecting the URL. I have the new server and will return with caitlinrkiernan.com, which I registered last night. So now all the hundreds of files have to be transferred, etc., etc., and I expect I'll spend most of today on ftp and such. The site will look the same, have all the same content, just a slightly different URL. Later on, caitlin-r-kiernan.com will function as a mirror/forwarding site to the new addy. Anyone who wants to spread the word, your help would be very appreciated. Eventually, the link for the journal will be caitlinrkiernan.com/journal.html, though I may leave a copy up at Blogspot as well, against any future disasters of this magnitude.
Poppy's site, which also went down in Friday's misfortune, will also be back up again very soon.
There has been no real progress with Chapter Seven, thanks to all the aforementioned dren (sorry, I just feel like peppering this entry with all the Farscape jargon I can muster), and the fact that this is the most stuck book I've ever tried to write, besting even Threshold in the difficulties of its birth. I did about 250 words on Saturday, but there's been nothing since. Spooky and I made ourselves even more ghoulish than usual on Saturday night and went to Secret Room at The Chamber, but there were far too many icky tourists and rednecks and other assorted fekkiks, and though The Chamber usually has drad DJs, the music was atypically lame. I have better things to do than be gawked at by Joe White Trash and his skanks. The Chamber needs a) a dress code and b) a discriminating doorman to keep out at the worst of the creeps. But you don't care, because odds are you don't live in Atlanta and don't frequent The Chamber and I'll shut up about it now. I'm in a venting mood.
Yesterday the bound galleys for Low Red Moon arrived from Roc. I was suprised that the book will be significantly thicker than Threshold, though I shouldn't have been. The ms. was much longer. Also, Bill Schafer says the printer is done with The Five of Cups, and I may actually have copies by tomorrow afternoon. That will be weird beyond reckoning. And the editors at Candlewick Press were happy with "The Dead and the Moonstruck," which was a huge relief, as this is the first time I've written a story for a younger audience. Finally, I managed to finish editing the "extra" material for the lettered state of the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon, which consists of notes and blogger excerpts.
Hopefully, by tomorrow I can force myself back to Chapter Seven of Murder of Angels. My doubts surrounding this book are so profound it's making progress almost impossible. Does this suck? Will anyone "get it"? Should I have risked a sequel at this stage of my career? Will this book flop so profoundly that I'll never been allowed to write another? Is it too strange? and so on and so forth, world without end, ahmet, ahmet. But mostly, Does this book suck? That's the biggy. Or is it "biggie"? Some copyeditor would know, I suppose. I'm fighting the urge to stop and begin again, rewrite the whole damn thing from the start. Of course, there's no time for such drastic measures. I have a December deadline and a drenload of other work waiting for me. I simply have to press forward and hope I survive the passage.
I'll keep you posted about the website. As I said, it ought to be up again by tomorrow. Until the forum is restored, feel free to move the conversation back to (urk!) Usenet; alt.books.cait-r-kiernan is still out there, floating derelict in the backwaters of the net. There will probably be trolls, of course. With luck, I'll have a snazzy new discussion forum by this weekend.
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