Thursday, July 14, 2005
Yesterday, I did 1,811 words on "Zero Summer," so it seems I'm back on track. This story is coming out with what seems to me a curiously flat, yet very tense voice. It's the effect I was aiming for, more or less, but it's still strange not to be writing in the old baroque. There was great relief yesterday when the words began to come.
Not much else to be said for yesterday. It didn't rain here, which seemed a minor miracle. Spooky finished Destroy All Humans. I read another paper in the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, "The vertebrate fauna of the Upper Permian of Niger—III, morphology and ontogeny of the hindlimb of Moradisaurus grandis (Reptilia, Captorhinidae)." Captorhinids were neat beasts. A shame the P/T extinctions wiped them out. Later, I read William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" aloud to Spooky, and it made me want to see William Cameron Menzies' beautiful, sweeping 1939 adaptation of Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. I fell asleep to This Mortal Coil's Filigree and Shadow, which has long been one of my "sleep" albums. That was yesterday.
We have less than five and a half hours remaining until today's Cassini flyby of Enceladus, surely one of the draddest of Saturn's many drad moons, a moon with a self-replenishing atmosphere.
I do hope that the people who missed "Riding the White Bull" in Argosy #1 last year will pick up The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Second Annual Collection, which reprints the story, along with fiction by Michael F. Flynn, Vernor Vinge, James L. Cambias, Brendan Dubois, Kage Baker, Christopher Rowe, and lots and lots of other authors. You can find it at most chain bookstores or order from Amazon.
Okay. That's it for this morning. It's time to make the frelling doughnuts.
11:04 AM