Friday, April 16, 2004
First, from the Dept. of Corrections: When I screw something up, I do a righteous job of it. I'm referring to my Nowhere-AL rant from Tuesday (April 13), wherein I stated: "I have come, instead, to believe that in another decade or two America will view the men and women trying to deny equality to gays, lesbians, and transsexuals with the same revulsion as it now generally views the men and women who tried to end segregation." I can only hope that my meaning was clear from context. As soon as Jennifer discovered the error last night (and as soon as I stopped screaming about being such an idiot), I amended the entry to read: "I have come, instead, to believe that in another decade or two America will view the men and women trying to deny equality to gays, lesbians, and transsexuals with the same revulsion as it now generally views the men and women who tried to preserve segregation." Which is, more or less, exactly what I'd meant to say in the first frelling place.
Moving along...
Yesterday, Spooky and I read through "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," which she likes very, very much. It's an odd story, by turns extremely innocent (almost a children's story) and extremely horrific. It's interesting to look at these two stories together (and, I assume, a lot of you will eventually do that), as they were written one immediately after the other. "Houses Under the Sea" is almost entirely different, in tone and style. I'm glad that my two stories for Thrillers 2 aren't just variations on the same note. Anyway, I also worked on other material for Thrillers 2 yesterday, and dealt with a lot of backlogged e-mail, and the cover for The Dry Salvages, and so forth. Today, we move on to the proposal for the next novel (which I will hopefully soon have a title for so that I can stop calling it "the next novel").
When I was writing Silk, I truly didn't think I'd go on to write many more novels. I thought I'd do one or two and that would be that. I'd already done The Five of Cups, after all, and two novels seemed like a lot for any one person to produce in a lifetime. Yet, here I am preparing to begin my sixth novel, in only about twelve years. I never would have imagined such a thing, back in January '96, as I was putting the finishing touches on Silk. Standing here, at the place just before The Beginning of a novel, having already done it five times before, it's like preparing for a familiar and totally unknown nightmare. It's beginning to look as though a good portion of June will be spent in Providence, gathering background material for this book.
Last night, we forced ourselves to sit through a whole episode of Sci-Fi's Tripping the Rift. Well, actually, it's more like I forced Spooky to sit through a whole episode. But I had to know if it was as awful as I suspected. It's worse. If your appetite for moronic television has not been sated by the Sci-Fi Channel's recent offerings of Tremors: The Series, Mad, Mad House, and Scare Tactics, then I suppose you're the target audience for Tripping the Rift. It's sort of like the Anti-Futurama. Masquerading as a spoof of space operas, this badly-animated stream of not even remotely funny fart and titty jokes (drum roll, as I utter the proceeding words for the umpteenth time) marks a new low for the SFC. Too lowbrow for burlesque and too dumb for parody, Tripping the Rift is kind of like watching a fourteen year old boy play with his own dren while masturbating. I don't think I'm exaggerating. It made me long for the wit of the early episodes of Lexx, and made me thankful that we have Futurama in syndication.
Gotta go write now...
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