Tuesday, November 18, 2003
I woke this morning and stretched...and pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve in my neck. The last hour and a half have been suprisingly, excruciatingly painful. The kind of pain that makes you want to puke. I've medicated and hopefully this will quickly get better. I'm obviously getting old. I can't even wake up without injuring myself.
There are storms bearing down on us from the west and it's blustery weather outside. This is a good thing. I want to spend the day walking in a park, surrounded by swirling leaves and swaying trees, watching the sky turn darker and darker. Instead, I'll spend it proofreading. We were only able to get through Chapter Seven yesterday. It was just too frelling long and there was too much work to be done on it. We started work on the chapter about 2 p.m. and finished just before 6. And there were distractions.
I have a new editor, John Morgan at Berkeley (Penguin-Putnam). He replaces my longtime editor, Laura Anne Gilman. I'd been with Laura Anne since Silk, so this is a little weird, having a new editor, but we had a phone conversation yesterday and I think it will be a good pairing. He likes dinosaurs and Lovecraft. What more could I ask for? Laura Anne will be missed.
Check out Zoe Keating's "Mouse on Tour", the adventures of Taxidermy Mouse (Taxi to his friends), as he travels the country with Rasputina. What is it with goth bands and dead mice? For a while, Bella Morte had a dead mouse they'd found somewhere. His name was Mr. Pants and they kept him in a shoe box when they were touring with The Cruxshadows. Sadly, Mr. Pants disintegrated and was lost when someone opened his box in front of an air conditioning vent in the tour van. Cruxshadows dancer Beth tells me that a good bit of Mr. Pants was then inadvertently inhaled, thus they feel he's still with them, in a sense. Anyway, this really has nothing whatsoever to do with the thoughtfully-preserved Taxi.
I was just reading Poppy's livejournal, her account of the asshole in Texas who shot a whooping crane. If there were justice, not only would he be fined and then jailed for the rest of his life, but he would be forced to eat the bird. And I don't mean eat it cooked. I mean eat it raw - feathers, bones, beak, skin, muscle, everything - at gun point. If he survived that, then he could then do the jail time. Poppy apologizes for sounding misanthropic. I won't. I am exceedingly and proudly misanthropic. There are six billion-plus humans on this planet, and only 40 wild whooping cranes left in North America. Well, make that 39 wild whooping cranes. Humans are highly expendable. Anyway, before I get too angry, here's an e-mail from yesterday:
Dear Miss Kiernan,
When can we expect a children's book from you? Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Naifeh, Kathe Koja, and Madonna have done them - so why not you? Will we see one before the decade is out? And a personal question, which Vast album do you prefer? His first or his second? Good luck with the next book.
Cordially,
Andrew Bishop
I've been talking about doing a children's book for the last couple of years, but I have to find just the right artist before it can happen. More recently, my agent in NYC has been encouraging me to consider a "young adult" novel, and I'm giving it serious thought. So, I think it's only a matter of time, at this point. As for Vast, I think my favourite is definitely his first CD. I did a lot of writing to that disc.
Last night, exhausted from a day of proofreading and phone calls and such, I fixed a huge pot of beef stew and spent some time working on Nebari.Net, getting up some of the cosmological data that Llar'en's spent the last couple of weeks working out. You'll find it near the bottom of the Nebari Prime page. Then Spooky and I watched a Farscape episode ("Loosing Time," 3:9). then we went to bed early.
And speaking of Farscape, here's the latest, from TVGuide.com: SO NEAR, SO FARSCAPE: Frellin' awesome!! As reported in next week's TV Guide magazine, the Jim Henson Company is producing a four-hour Farscape miniseries that will tie up the loose ends left dangling when the cult hit was prematurely axed last year by Sci Fi Channel. "It's an epic conclusion to the series," confides a source. The project — which will reunite leads Ben Browder and Claudia Black — will start shooting in December in Australia. Since the telefilm is unlikely to air on Sci Fi, word is it may be sold into syndication. So there!
So there, indeed.
And now I really have to sign off, because we really must get through chapters Eight and Nine today.
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