Sunday, June 19, 2005
The thing about having a freakishly good day, a day when I write more than 2,200 or 2,300 words, as I did on Friday, is that for some time thereafter all other days pale in comparison, unless I can repeat the same trick. Yesterday, I did a perfectly impressive 1,742 words on Chapter Five of Daughter of Hounds. Nothing to sneeze at, as far as my personal writing pace goes. But I felt like I hadn't done enough, even though it actually took me longer than what I wrote on Friday and was considerably more difficult (lots and lots of troublesome description). Anyway, with just a little luck (and restraint), I should finish Chapter Five today. And, I've discovered, that will probably mean that I've finished Part One of the novel. I'll be halfway done, and the first half will go away to my editor in NYC. I will have reached the top of the hill, so to speak.
While I was working yesterday, I came across the following lines in a preface to an edition of The Arabian Knights: Their Best-Known Tales (edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith):
The Empire of the Fairies is no more,
Reason has banished them from ev'ry shore;
Steam has outstripped their dragons and their cars,
Gas has eclipsed their glow-worms and their stars.
I suspect that it may have been written by either KDW or NAS, or the two in collaboration, but the preface makes this unclear. I love these lines, but I'd very much like to know who the author is. They read a bit like Algernon Blackwood, but I'm pretty sure he's not the author. I tried Google, with no success.
Though it is a sort of a sequel to both Threshold and Low Red Moon, there is very little pertaining to fossils or to paleontology in Daughter of Hounds. However, day before yesterday, I did mention a trilobite, Cryptolithus gigas, which had been discovered and named by Chance's grandmother, Esther (the trilobite is first mentioned in Low Red Moon). I'm not sure how the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (London) treats binomens that are ficticious in origin. Maybe it's never come up before. Here's a photo of a RW species of the genus, C. tessellatus from the Late Ordovician of New York (Green, 1832):
from the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard (MCZ 146480)
Back in the day (as they say), I collected specimens of Cryptolithus from the Ordovician of Red Mountain in Birmingham, but never a specimen this outstanding. At any rate, when the writing was done yesterday, I rushed over to the Emory Library before they closed, because I like working on my pen-and-paper journal over there, and, besides, I needed to track down a particular bio of Charles Fort. Last night, Spooky and I watched Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants, and then I gave Area 51 a try on the PS2 for an hour or so. The design's okay (even if we've seen all this before), the voice acting's better than average (real actors), and the controls are decent, but I just don't think I can stomach another Doom-clone fps right now.
P.S. — Has anyone else noticed that LJ deleted the "stoned" emoticons, but left the "drunk" ones? That's so American...
11:42 AM
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