Friday, August 15, 2003
Today I have to write. I mean really frelling write. I have to do a minimum of 1,071 wds. a day from now through August 28 just to make up for the time I lost to the website disaster and to have chapters Seven and Eight finished before Dragon*Con.
This morning, I looked at still photos of the blacked-out New York City skyline at sunset. Surreal. Terrible and beautiful at the same time. I spent the evening hoping that everyone I know in Manhattan would be safe until (and beyond) sunrise.
I've started reading Poppy's livejournal. I don't generally read blogs and livejournals and such. They just don't interest me. I write this one as a means of a) keeping myself in line, b) venting, and c) spreading news about my work, but no, I don't really read anyone else's very often. Anyway, as I've said, I started reading Poppy's and it's an odd and interesting thing, reading the details of a friend's life that way. And it has served to again underscore the intensity of my isolation from the "real world." For example, I had no idea Poppy was such a basketball fan. It kind of perplexed me. I'm sure she feels the same way about my endless Farscapery.
I think I've lived so long in this isolation, self-imposed, that I've become the equivalent of a Madagascar or a New Zealand, a Galapagos Islands or a Tasmania. The world goes on about its business, which naturally involves a great deal of change, and I go on about mine, which involves somewhat less change, and we diverge, the world and I. Where you are it might be the Holocene. Where I am, it's still the Early Cretaceous, and I've forgotten all about those other continents that have long since drifted out of sight, beyond the horizon. In a world chockful of elephants and pronghorn antelope and (shudder) hoo-mans, I'm just a tuatara or a playtpus. Something small and antiquated, typing in the shadows, creating my stories from bits of my past and the limits of my present island. I watch the news, of course - outlandish stuff, really - but I'm not sure I believe any of it.
I'm thinking I should look for a land bridge, less the genetic pool grows too small (or this metaphor too extended), but, on the other hand, island sanctuaries never fare very well when they make contact with the "real world." Their rarified enviroments often collapse in the deluge of exotic vermin. There are no rats here.
Christa used to say (and maybe she still does), "Nothing in, nothing out," and perhaps that's one reason why Murder of Angels is proving such a chore.
"You need to get out more often, Kiernan."
Shhhhhh. Now, let's not get carried away . . .
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