Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Yesterday, I did a very respectable 1,362 words on Chapter Two, despite being entirely out of sorts. This brings the total for Chapter Two so far to 5,013, which leads me to believe that the chapter is, roughly speaking, about half finished. I may have it done by Saturday. But I am still out of sorts, perhaps worse today than yesterday. The cold isn't helping in the least. Last time I checked the temperature, about half an hour ago, it was only 21F out there. Most likely, I'll not leave the house again today. I have my old velvet coat from Salvation Army, the one with the ugly tortoiseshell buttons, and I have my fingerless gloves, and I will spend the day hunched over this keyboard like something from a Charles Dickens novel, pecking away for a lump of coal. What worry have I of carpal-tunnel or a bad back or my failing eyesight. This might be as good as it gets. Looking back from, oh, let's say 2019, this may prove to be my fondest memory. But I was speaking of Chapter Two. Yesterday, and the day before, Soldier met the Bailiff for the first time. She was only five years old. The constant reader will, hopefully, recall the Bailiff from "So Runs the World Away," In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, and "The Dead and the Moonstruck." He is one of my favorite returning characters. Sort of a cross between Edward Gorey, Santa Claus, and Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter (meaning no disrespect to any of those fine gentlemen, especially Santa Claus).
I would love to love the cold. I would, truly.
Other things that must be done: e-mail my editor at Penguin about the notes he sent me on the prologue of Daughter of Hounds, because I don't have ProEdit and can't read them. E-mail Richard Kirk about To Charles Fort, With Love. Order copies of Silk and Murder of Angels (via e-mail). E-mail Leh'agvoi about his revisions to the storyboards. I never call anyone these days.
I'm quite disappointed in Damon Knight's Charles Fort biography. It started out well enough, but round about Chapter Four, it sort of ceased being a biography and started being a regurgitation and interpretation of The Book of the Damned and Fort's writing in general. I understand that biographical details on Fort's life are scarce, but I'm beginning to get the feeling that Knight just didn't try that hard. Chapter Eight is wasted with an annoying and futile defense of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (and thus the author demonstrates, by seeing Fort and Velikovsky as fellow travelers, that he understands Fort not at all. Chapter Seven is a rather tedious indulgence on the part of Knight, as he attempts to create elaborate graphs demonstrating correlations of one sort or another within Fort's data set, especially during the period of 1877-1892. There are charts and diagrams that made me squint, and even though Knight notes that Fort never used either, that he distrusted and abhored statistics, the author plunges merrily ahead with this "Fortean" statistical undertaking. Some of Damon Knight's thoughts on space-time annomalies are interesting, particularly as they relate to premonitions, but the ideas are recounted in an extremely simplistic, anecdotal manner. I'm at Chapter Ten now, and almost done with the book, and it seems to be getting back around to being a biograpy of Charles Fort. We shall see.
I'm also struggling with The Legacy of Kain: Defiance on PlayStation. I think my biggest problem with the last few games that I've tried to get through (Devil May Cry II, Bujingai, etc.) is that they are, just beneath the surface, nothing more than old-fashioned platform games. Last night, I described The Legacy of Kain: Defiance as Donkey Kong for goths (with some of the most tiresome cut scenes ever written). I'm tired of games that are so obviously games. I didn't even make it all the way through the most-recent Ratchet and Clank, for this very reason. I want a game like Primal or The Chronicles of Riddick that sucks you in and makes you forget that you're playing a game. Otherwise, it's just sports for geeks, and I frelling loathe sports. Ah, well. I am getting a lot more reading done.
Okay, I should wind this up. Spooky's about to leave for the dentist. Which brings me to the last order of business, the eBay auctions. Please check them out. Spend some money. Last night, we added a traycased lettered of Wrong Things, along with one of the lettered hardbacks of Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (letter ZZ).
11:13 AM
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