Saturday, April 30, 2005
It's done. Frog Toes and Tentacles, I mean, as of about 4:30 p.m. (EST) Friday. Which is to say that yesterday I wrote 2,235 words, beginning and ending the ninth vignette, which is entitled "'Ode' to Katan Amano." It's definitely my favorite of the nine, and I'm surprised it's the one that came to me at the very end, when I was so tired and starting to feel empty. So, today I'll do the acknowledgments and a tiny little afterword. The limited edition (numbered and lettered) will have one more vignette than the trade edition. My thanks to the people who read this journal, because I wouldn't have written this peculiar little book if not for your...what's the phrase...your having "put me up to no good."
Wonderful thunderstorms this morning. It's still raining.
Last night, we rented Blade: Trinity. That is, we made the mistake of renting Blade: Trinity. I think I've just realized that there's absolutely no point writing a scathing review of this movie. I'll just say it was awful, and I was disappointed, because a) I liked the first Blade film and b) I really liked the second Blade film (both surprised me). And David Goyer's not a total moron, so I was expecting this to be something fun, at least. There is a tiny speck of enjoyment to be had. Parker Posey is delicious, and there should have been a whole lot more of her. Ryan Reynolds gets one good line out of all those dumb jokes, the "cock-juggling thunder cunt" crack. But that was about it. Bad script. Bad acting. Bad direction. Terrible editing. No pacing whatsoever. At least two or three plots running headlong into each other. Fully one-third of the film's an iPod commercial. Wesley Snipes spends most of the film looking like he just wants to be somewhere else. I know I did. This film felt so small, after the somewhat epic scope of Blade II. Was this mess the fault of the studio? Who knows. I don't. I even watched the "director's cut." It was still awful. The whole Scoopy-Gang-Angel ripoff thing, I mean, I just don't know how crap like this gets greenlighted. This should have been a Big Dumb Fun movie. Instead, it's a dull, flabby final milking of a previously imaginative franchise. Go frelling figure.
Oh, by the by, May 26th looms ugly on the horizon, and though -1 is not nearly so traumatic a birthday for a nixar as -0, gifts always seem to help to soften the blow. Should you be so inclined, there's this Amazon wish list thing...
And you still have five days to score FULL-COLOUR MONSTER DOODLES (!!!!) with every "But-It-Now" and fixed-price purchase on our eBay auctions. Oh, and the books are pretty good, too.
It's done. Frog Toes and Tentacles, I mean, as of about 4:30 p.m. (EST) Friday. Which is to say that yesterday I wrote 2,235 words, beginning and ending the ninth vignette, which is entitled "'Ode' to Katan Amano." It's definitely my favorite of the nine, and I'm surprised it's the one that came to me at the very end, when I was so tired amd starting to feel empty. So, today I'll do the acknowledgments and a tiny little afterword. The limited edition (numbered and lettered) will have one more vignette than the trade edition. My thanks to the people who read this journal, because I wouldn't have written this peculiar little book if not for your...what's the phrase...your having "put me up to no good."
Wonderful thunderstorms this morning. It's still raining.
Last night, we rented Blade: Trinity. That is, we made the mistake of renting Blade: Trinity. I think I've just realized that there's absolutely no point writing a scathing review of this movie. I'll just say it was awful, and I was disappointed, because a) I liked the first Blade film and b) I really liked the second Blade film (both surprised me). And David Goyer's not a total moron, so I was expecting this to be something fun, at least. There is a tiny speck of enjoyment to be had. Parker Posey is delicious, and there should have been a whole lot more of her. Ryan Reynolds got one good line out of all those dumb jokes, the "cock-juggling thunder cunt" crack. But that was about it. Bad script. Bad acting. Bad direction. Terrible editing. No pacing whatsoever. At least two or three plots running headlong into each other. Fully one-third of the film's an iPod commercial. Wesley Snipes spends most of the film looking like he just wants to be somewhere else. I know I did. This film felt so small, after the somewhat epic scope of Blade II. Was this mess the fault of the studio? Who knows. I don't. I even watched the "director's cut." It was still awful. The whole Scoopy-Gang-Angel ripoff thing, I mean, I just don't know how crap like this gets greenlighted. This should have been a Big Dumb Fun movie. Instead, it's a dull, flabby final milking of a previously imaginative franchise. Go frelling figure.
Oh, by the by, May 26th looms ugly on the horizon, and though -1 is not nearly so traumatic a birthday for a nixar as -0, gifts always seem to help to soften the blow. Should you be so inclined, there's this Amazon wish list thing...
And you still have five days to score FULL-COLOUR MONSTER DOODLES (!!!!) with every "But-It-Now" and fixed-price purchase on our eBay auctions. Oh, and the books are pretty good, too.
It's done. Frog Toes and Tentacles, I mean, as of about 4:30 p.m. (EST) Friday. Which is to say that yesterday I wrote 2,235 words, beginning and ending the ninth vignette, which is entitled "'Ode' to Katan Amano." It's definitely my favorite of the nine, and I'm surprised it's the one that came to me at the very end, when I was so tired amd starting to feel empty. So, today I'll do the acknowledgments and a tiny little afterword. The limited edition (numbered and lettered) will have one more vignette than the trade edition. My thanks to the people who read this journal, because I wouldn't have written this peculiar little book if not for your...what's the phrase...your having "put me up to no good."
Wonderful thunderstorms this morning. It's still raining.
Last night, we rented Blade: Trinity. That is, we made the mistake of renting Blade: Trinity. I think I've just realized that there's absolutely no point writing a scathing review of this movie. I'll just say it was awful, and I was disappointed, because a) I liked the first Blade film and b) I really liked the second Blade film (both surprised me). And David Goyer's not a total moron, so I was expecting this to be something fun, at least. There is a tiny speck of enjoyment to be had. Parker Posey is delicious, and there should have been a whole lot more of her. Ryan Reynolds got one good line out of all those dumb jokes, the "cock-juggling thunder cunt" crack. But that was about it. Bad script. Bad acting. Bad direction. Terrible editing. No pacing whatsoever. At least two or three plots running headlong into each other. Fully one-third of the film's an iPod commercial. Wesley Snipes spends most of the film looking like he just wants to be somewhere else. I know I did. This film felt so small, after the somewhat epic scope of Blade II. Was this mess the fault of the studio? Who knows. I don't. I even watched the "director's cut." It was still awful. The whole Scoopy-Gang-Angel ripoff thing, I mean, I just don't know how crap like this gets greenlighted. This should have been a Big Dumb Fun movie. Instead, it's a dull, flabby final milking of a previously imaginative franchise. Go frelling figure.
Oh, by the by, May 26th looms ugly on the horizon, and though -1 is not nearly so traumatic a birthday for a nixar as -0, gifts always seem to help to soften the blow. Should you be so inclined, there's this Amazon wish list thing...
And you still have five days to score FULL-COLOUR MONSTER DOODLES (!!!!) with every "But-It-Now" and fixed-price purchase on our eBay auctions. Oh, and the books are pretty good, too.
Friday, April 29, 2005
"Perpetual" (Matter and Form) by VNV Nation:
Find it in you, raise your eyes
Look beyond the place you stand,
Towards the furthest reaches
And to the smallest of things
The sound you are hearing
Is the symphony of what we are.
Revelation will not come
With heart and mind closed and divided.
No need of sun to light the way,
Across the ages, we have reigned as we endured
Through the storm fronts we will ever surely pass,
To stand as never ending light
Throw away the mantle,
Awake from your uncertain hesitation.
No way to describe or equate the feeling,
No end to what is at your command.
A million thoughts run through you,
Concentric circles, ever greater.
But you have always known
That this is not who you are;
To your questions there'll be answers
Let there be, let there always be
Never ending light.
So, yesterday I did 2,246 words, beginning and finishing "Untitled 12," the eighth vignette for Frog Toes and Tentacles. I almost titled it, "Oh crap, I'm actually writing a goddamn vampire story after swearing I never would again!" Indeed, about 900 words in, I stopped and Spooky read everything back to me, and we both agreed that it was going in that Anne Rice/Harlequin Romance-with-fangs froo-froo vampire erotica direction. So I chopped off about three hundred words, swapped whatever I had been listening to for NIN, and wrote a story so unromantically para-erotic that I defy any lover of treacly vampire smut to get their jollies from this story. So there. The "v" word is never used, which is something I wish I could have managed in The Five of Cups. You may ask, why did I include a vampire story in FT&T when I clearly have such a negative opinion of vampiric erotica? Well, it's the little paradoxes that make life worthwhile, isn't it? Anyway, I like the vignette. Now, I only have one left to write.
You know, when I finally get back to work on Daughter of Hounds, the daily totals from this past week are gonna make my usual 1,000-1,300 words/day look pretty pathetic.
Yesterday was almost derailed by an unexpected bit of foolishness involving the IRS. To avoid a 21.3% tax on the royalties from the Italian edition of Threshold, I have to request Form 6166 from the IRS, which I can only acquire by first filling Form 8802, blah, blah, frelling blah. I do not do my own taxes, so this is all a mystery to me. Oh, and there's an update on To Charles Fort, With Love: Subterranean Press has decided to push the publication date back a couple of months, to September '05, in order to allow more time for reviews. Which is probably a good idea. It allows me more time for proofreading, as well. We'll be doing the author's photo for the jacket on Sunday. I understand it will involve an umbrella, a sheep's heart, and several dead fish.
I'm very, very pleased with the news that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is still alive and kicking (or flying or whatever). There's one more survivor. Now, if only a couple of dodos and Steller's sea cows would turn up...
Late yesterday, because we had some time to kill before meeting everyone for dinner, Spooky and I stopped off at Border's for a bit. I forget that I really can't tolerate bookstores anymore, that they have become an occupational hazard to me. Which is to say, it was a dumb mistake. I know better. Anyway, I picked up the new Cemetery Dance, in which there are very positive reviews of both Murder of Angels and The Dry Salvages. And then we escaped the bookstore, and next time I'll frelling well know better.
I'd really like to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this evening, but I so fear this film's going to be a disaster that I think I've decided to at least wait on more news of it, if not the DVD.
I should wind this up. Please have a look at the auctions. Remember, for the next six days, every "Buy It Now" and fixed-price purchase gets you a monster doodle, IN LIVING COLOUR. How the frell can you resist? Obviously, this (very generous) offer applies only to my books and not the various and sundry things Spooky is also auctioning.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
How's this for a peculiar statement? Yesterday, I only wrote 2,269 words. Well, it feels weird to me. In the last three days, I've written more than 6,900 words on Frog Toes and Tentacles, though I usually write no more than 1000-1,300 words a day. Anyway, I began and finished the seventh vignette, which is currently "Untitled 11." Actually, at the moment, most of these pieces are untitled. They may stay that way. It feels okay for them. I neglected, when I wrote about finishing the fifth vignette, to mention that "Untitled 10.1" became "Flicker." Yesterday, Bill Schafer asked me how it was going, what is was like, writing this book, and I told him it was very strange, as I've always pretty much avoided overt sexuality in my fiction. I can only think of a few exceptions: "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun" comes to mind, and parts of The Five of Cups, maybe one or two other things I'm forgetting. Of course, this book is my take on erotica, so it would really be more accurate to speak of the eroticism latent in "Persephone," "Tears Seven Times Salt," "A Redress for Andromeda," "San Andreas," and so forth. Anyway, I told him it was obviously easier than what I usually do, in some sense, as I'm clearly writing much faster. But in another sense, I said, it's much, much more difficult. The necessary reliance on description and action, for example. I cannot imagine what my readers' reactions to this odd little detour will be, but Spooky's loving it, and that's good, since these stories are really being written for her.
After I'd finished "Untitled 11," Spooky and I walked up the street to Starbuck's (if there were a good coffeehouse nearby, I wouldn't have gone to Starbuck's) to clear my head. Then I came back home and found a PDF of To Charles Fort, With Love waiting for me, including the redesigned cover, which I like a lot. I'll post it later. I think this will be a very handsome book. Spooky and I will be receiving 250 of the ARCs to send out to bookstores, hopefully encouraging some of them to carry it. We'll have a couple of days of nothing but addressing envelopes. Ugh. I don't usually take such an agressive role in the distribution end of things, though I probably ought to do so. It was Bill's idea. Also, before dinner, I had to get some work done for Marvel and off to my editor there, so, by seven o'clock I was quite entirely done for. I ate, took a hot bath, watched a Mythbusters blooper episode, and played three hours of Jade Empire. I have been asked to do an review of the latter for a couple of websites, by the way. Details TBA.
Tonight, we have dinner with an rpg friend (well, he's a friend in other ways as well, but lately we mostly see each other during AD&D sessions). We're having Thai. It is no longer in my nature to be social or eat out, so this will be an adventure.
And I really hate to be a goddamn parrot (or minah bird, or echo, or whatever), but I wanted to second this bit Poppy wrote in her blog yesterday:
I doubt I will make any friends by saying this, but one of the things that most sorely tries my patience about the horror genre (though it certainly isn't exclusive to horror) is the attitude that "nothing is happening" if people aren't being gored and eaten in every paragraph. It's as if the characters cannot be interesting in and of themselves; they must be involved in Plot-Driving Suspense Generators at every turn. I enjoy an exciting story as much as anyone, but I also tend to feel that plot is the least interesting aspect of a good story; it's simply a mechanism, an artificial construct for depicting the lives of characters in a way that will be more interesting to your average reader than, "They woke up, they made coffee, they cut their toenails, they went to work, they came home, they had sex, they went to sleep." When plot becomes far more important than character (as in, say, the fiction of Dean Koontz or John Saul), you end up with interchangable cardboard characters and, in my opinion, unreadable books.
Frelling A. Thank you. Bravo. Etc.
Finally, we've started our eBay auctions again. For the first seven days, every "buy it now" and "fixed price" purchase will get you one little monster doodle, AND THIS TIME THEY'RE IN COLOUR!!!!!. It has been many months now since monsters were offered. As always, your generosity will be greatly appreciated.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Yesterday, I began and finished the sixth vignette, which I am currently calling "Pump Excursion," after an H. R. Giger painting. At 2,508 words, it may represent my highest word count ever for a single day. I'm not absolutely sure about this and haven't had time to check, but I strongly suspect it's so. That's six down, three to go. And here I still have four more or less whole days of April left. Ah, the frelling luxury! I also had a very, very good conversation yesterday with my film agent. Perhaps by midsummer I can reveal some details regarding this project. All I can say for now is that it has added more work to my already bloated schedule. I hope to have my first full-length screenplay finished by the end of June.
Most of last night was consumed by Jade Empire, which has become my new favorite time suck. Oh, I remembered the last game I really liked, and it was more recent than late June, when I finished the Riddick game. The last game I really enjoyed was Crimson Skies. Indeed, before Jade Empire came along, I'd pretty much given up gaming. I was actually reading books! The kind printed on paper, even!
Also, it looks like I'll be back in Birmingham on May 2nd, which I see is this coming Monday, to meet with a paleontologist colleague regarding the aforementioned Cretaceous bird that I collected back in November 2001. I want a second opinion before I shelve the pterosaur paper (again) and work on this instead. I suspect it is the more important of the two. I'll post a photo of the specimen as soon as I have some decent ones available.
Meanwhile, as I finish up Frog Toes and Tentacles and attend to promotion for To Charles Fort, With Love, I need to keep Daughter of Hounds not quite at the back of my mind. Somewhere in the middle. I need to be ready on Tuesday, May 3rd, to sit down and begin writing on it again. I'll probably begin with the revisions to the prologue. But I want an outline before I do that. I've never wanted an outline before, so this feels strange. But it will be there more as suggestion than law. I will be free to deviate at any time, but will always have something there to keep me on course, should I need it. It's all about reining this book in. On the one hand, I'd say that if I had my druthers, it would be a 200k-word novel. On the other, writing such a long book would probably only be the sort of self-indulgence I've decried in many other authors. In the end, this will be a better novel for this economy, even if the stop and start over again thing is presently a pain in the eema.
The weather has turned warm again. Hopefully, that was the last gasp of wretched frelling winter. The high today is forecast at 75F.
Spooky's going to be starting a new round of book auctions soon, perhaps as early as today. There will be copies of SIlk, The Five of Cups, the hardback edition of Low Red Moon, copies of In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, etc. I'll post an announcement when the auctions begin.
Finally, something that makes me very happy. because, as Titania once said, "Stories should have endings, don't you think? It is . . . unseemly, that they be allowed to go on and on forever, unfinished." The trailer for Serenity, due out this fall.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
I began and finished the fifth vignette for Frog Toes and Tentacles yesterday. That was 2,107 words in about five hours. These are odd little pieces, even beyond the fact they purportedly exist for a primary reason — to elicit sexual excitemnet. I've found it necessary to approach them in the same way that I approach dream sequences and hallucinations. From the start of this project, I inisisted these would not be stories, per se, and they're not. They're rushes of image and sound and sensation, and I've found impressionism far more useful to this end than any traditional narrative. Also, I'm favouring first-person narratives, which feels odd, but works as long as I stay in present tense and do not question why the vignette is being translated from mental images and stimuli into words. I hope to write the sixth piece today, and, with luck, finish this book by Saturday evening. Then it's back to Daughter of Hounds.
By the way, it's worth noting that while tentacles have figured in more than one of the vignettes, frog toes have yet to make an appearance. I shall have to remedy this.
And I should probably repeat that bit about the ARCs for To Charles Fort, With Love, since more people seem to read this blog during the week than on weekends. If you are a legitimate reviewer, writing for a publication/s (either online or print), and would like to be included on the list of people to receive review copies of the collection, please e-mail me at lowredmail@mac.com, and I'll pass your name and address along to Subterranean Press. Please include "ARC" in the subject line of your e-mail, and tell us for whom you'll be writing the review. Amazon.com doesn't count. Personal websites and blogs do not count. Also, please feel free to snurch the following ad banner and stick it up wherever. All free advertising will be greatly, greatly appreciated. Thanks.
There's not much more to say about yesterday. After the writing, I was pretty much useless for anything else. I did read the type description of Halimornis thompsoni, a Late Cretaceous enantiornithine bird from the Mooreville Chalk of Alabama. But that was about it. Time to write now...
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Currently my favorite track off Matter and Form:
Before me plays the endless film
Relentless splinters I recall
Each living thing breathes life
Only sentiment remains
To liquid born, from patterns formed
The sand descends with blind intent
Where the river takes me will in time be revealed
I cannot turn my feelings down
Beyond my means to turn my thoughts around
Expressed in every word I'll ever speak
Brighter than all the stars combined
More than the waters, earth and sky
All that I wish and all that I dream
Above the waves with my hands raised
Dare the wind lay claim to me
Knowing somehow none could take me
Watching the sun come up in vain
The only reason I can find why I remained
The need to leave the point I came to again and again
It didn't matter how hard I tried
It took so long to claim that I knew how
Or what it meant to let go of this
To ever say goodbye
Call it destiny, call it fate
Chose my direction: running forward
Each life to learn anew, whatever, whatever may come
And I cannot turn my feelings down
Beyond my means to turn my thoughts around
Expressed in every word I'll ever speak
Brighter than all the stars combined
More than the waters, earth and sky
All that I wish and all that I dream
No creed on earth can replace or provide
In my darkest hour, the comfort I'd feel
Leading me to see I can be more than I expect of me
My beginning and my end
The first and last air that I breathe
More than the sum of everything that I will ever be
I did 2,020 words yesterday, starting and finishing another of the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles. So, it was a good day, in that respect. I hope to write another today. This is going to be a curious little book...
It's so cold out (48F, 40F with windchill) that my breath fogged when Spooky and I took our morning walk a little while ago. This sudden reversion to late February is something I could have frelling done without. Things will be better tomorrow, and I'll simply stay inside for the rest of today.
Subterranean Press is now accepting preorders for To Charles Fort, With Love. A number of people have asked in the last few days.
Oh, and I should mention that the second round of Spooky's CD auctions ends this afternoon. Check it out. She says thank you.
This has become a post of brief paragraphs.
Continuing in that vein, the new chapter of Setsuled's Adventures of Boschen and Nesuko is now online.
I'm holding out this desperate shred of hope that the final Star Wars film may not be the drenfest we got with The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Yesterday, I read the articles on George Lucas in the new issue of Wired, in which we are told that, after Revenge of the Sith, Lucas intends to step away from big-budget flicks and make, instead, "highly abstract, esoteric" films. I think we can all be excused if we feel a mild twinge of skepticism at this point. In "Life After Darth," Walter Murch (who worked with Lucas on THX 1138 and American Graffiti), says of the last two Star Wars installments, "For me, those films pummel you into submission. You say, OK, OK, there are 20,000 robots walking across the field. If you told me a 14-year-old had done them on his hoime computer, I would get very excited, but if you tell me it's George Lucas — with all the resources available to him — I know it's amazing, but I don't feel it's amazing. I think if George were here and we could wrestle him to the carpet, he'd say, 'Yeah, I've gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.'" But does he really? Speaking of the economics of blockbusterdom, Lucas says, "There's just an ecology there. If you're a mouse, don't expect to kill a lion, because it ain't gonna happen. If you want to have that kind of power, it's better to be a lion, because the mice are fine — you can have a life and everything — but the lions are the ones out there prowling and scaring the hell out of everybody." I'm sorry, but this does not sound, to me, like a man who is ready to settle down and make art films that are, to use Lucas' parlance, "way out there." It sounds, rather, like the same celluloid Napoleon who gave us Ewok Pez dispensers and Jar-Jar Binks.
Okay. Time to get my kink on...
Saturday, April 23, 2005
We got a wonderful thunderstorm yesterday. I stood on the front porch and watched and listened and smelled it. Lightning. Wind. The new leaves rustling like a swarm of hungry insects. Unfortunately, there was this shitty little blackberry winter waiting behind it, and we have that today.
I've seen the layout for the cover of To Charles Fort, With Love. Ryan Obermeyer's artwork is gorgeous, of course, and the painting is perfect for the collection. As soon as I'm sure this is the final cover, I'll post it here. Also, as I announced on the phorum yesterday, Subterranean Press will probably be sending out the ARCs in about two weeks. If you are a legitimate reviewer and would like a copy, then, well, for one thing, it doesn't matter that I'm not going to explain what "ARC" stands for, does it? Anyway, pro reviewers may request copies of the ARC by e-mailing me at lowredmail@mac.com (please include ARC in the subject line), and be sure to say who you're reviewing for. Amazon does not count. Nether do blogs, livejournals, your private/personal website, & etc. I'm not being stingy. It's just that only so many of these things get printed, and we need the collection to get as many reviews as possible. I'll forward all requests for ARCs to subpress, and they'll be making the decision about who gets copies. Thanks!
Yesterday was the sort of frustration that comes from phone tag. Gagh. But I did speak with my editor at Penguin and with Bill Schafer at subpress about what has to be done with Daughter of Hounds, the backtracking, rewriting, replotting thing. The plan, at the moment, is that I'll spend this last bit of April laying the story out (yes, an actual outline, from me!) and finishing up the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles, and I'll actually begin writing DoH again in May. I'm going to push very, very hard to have the book finished by the end of the summer, which was my original plan, give or take a month. I'm just grateful the deadline is still eight months away.
I started playing Jade Empire last night, and I like it a great deal. Finally, the end to this video-game drought. Really, I've been looking for something that I genuinely like, that will really hold my interest, since, frell, since when? Since I finished The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay way back last June, I guess. Also, we watched a couple of eps from Season One of Farscape.
Okay. I gotta go write something weird and sexy now...
Friday, April 22, 2005
A few unsettling stats for Earth Day 2005. If anyone wants specific sources for any of the following, I'll be glad to supply them via e-mail (lowredmail@mac.com).
The world’s human population increases by about 27 people every 10 seconds. In the first century A.D., there were only about 150-200 million human beings living on Earth. In 1800, the human population had grown to about 900 million. By 1900, it had increased to about 1 billion. As of 19:04 GMT (EST+5) April 22, 2005, the world population had reached a staggering 6,432,227,025. By 2020, the human population may "level out" at somewhere between 8 and 15 billion people (the two extremes of this estimate represent the optimistic and pessimistic views, respectively, of future fertility rates in developing countries — the United Nations currently projects 11 billion). "Carrying capacity" is defined as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it is dependent. For humans, the Earth’s carrying capacity is estimated by ecologists to be about 2 billion people.
A study by Cornell Unviersity ecologists states that nearly one-third of the world's cropland has been abandoned during the past 40 years because erosion has made it unproductive. Meanwhile, urban sprawl is claiming farmland at a rate of 1.2 million acres a year.
Although extinction is undeniably a natural and ongoing process, current and projected extinction rates are estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural background rate. More than 150 bird species, alone, are known to have gone extinct (or are very likely to have done so) in the last 500 years. In the last two millennia, over 2,000 bird species on Polynesian islands may have been driven extinct as a direct or indirect result of human activities. According to World Conservation Union estimates, 25% of all mammals and amphibians are currently at high risk of extinction, with 20% of reptiles and 34% of freshwater fish at comparable risk levels. For example: Of the eight original subspecies of tigers, three have become extinct in the last 60 years, an average of one every 20 years. Only 4,600-7,700 wild tigers remain (that means that there’s slightly less than a million times as many humans as tigers, if we go with the more optimistic estimate of 7,700 tigers). Today, all five species of rhinos are perilously close to extinction. In the 1970s alone, half the world's rhino population disappeared. Today, less than 15% of the population present in 1970 remains, an estimated 10,000 to 11,000 rhinos worldwide. The Earth is presently facing a biotic crisis greater than the extinction event that claimed the non-avian dinosaurs. Habitat loss and degradation due to human activity is currently the primary force driving this extinction. For example: Half of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed. 90% of wetlands along the Mississipii River have vanished.
One pound of beef requires the expenditure of three-quarters of a gallon of oil to produce. The U.S. consumes 7,191 million gallons of oil annually, and this figure is expected to rise by 50% over the next 20 years. The United States consumed 19.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2000, more than half of which (10.4 million barrels per day net) came from imports.
Globally, temperatures are rising. The global average air temperature at the Earth’s surface has risen one degree Fahrenheit in the last century alone. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that rising C02 emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, is responsible for about 60% of the warming seen since 1850. Carbon dioxide has been increasing at a rate of .03%/year, and rates are now 30% higher than before the industrial revolution. Methane levels are also rising, and this greenhouse gas is now 2.5 times as prevalent in our atmosphere as it was in the 18th century. The IPCC predicts that over the next century global average temperatures will increase by 1.8 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. This rise results in, among other things, rising sea levels. The IPCC has projected a sea level rise of 4-35 inches by the end of this century. A rise of only 1.5 feet would submerge 75% of coastal Louisiana. Worldwide, tens of millions of people will be displaced as sea levels rise, further stressing environments. Moreover, temperatures are rising faster at the poles than elsewhere on the planet. Since 1979, the extent of sea ice in the Artic has been decreasing by 9%/year. Some scientists predict that sea ice may be absent from the Artic in summer months as early as 2100. In the Antarctic, the Larsen Ice Shelf is collapsing. A total of about 3,250 km2 of shelf area disintegrated in a 35-day period beginning on January 31, 2002. Between 2000-2004, the shelf lost a total of 5,700 km2, and is now about 40 percent the size of its previous minimum stable extent. Woldwide, glaciers are retreating and vanishing.
Now, let's be very imaginative and pretend that these figures are wildly inaccurate. In fact, let's say things are only half this bad. Hell, maybe the Earth's carrying capacity for humans is actually five billion. Still, we've already exceeded that by 1.4 billion people. Even if many scientists in many disciplines are very wrong, even if enviromentalists are exagerrating (for whatever reason), it still adds up to a worldwide disaster that will impact the lives of all human beings, not to mention virtually every other species presently living on Earth.
Four groups trying to make things less wrong:
World Wildlife Foundation
The Nature Conservancy
Greenpeace
World Land Trust
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Back in Atlanta.
And a few moments ago, half an hour ago, perhaps, my head was filled up with things I wanted to write in this entry, but all those thoughts seem to have deserted me. Er. Hmmm. Well, okay, I know was going to mention the bizarre hair salon in downtown Leeds called Running With Scissors. We wandered past it yesterday afternoon, and I truly wish we'd taken photos. The plateglass is emblazoned with CHOOSE HELL on one side and CHOOSE HEAVEN on the other. Baffled, I peeped through the window and saw that the walls were decorated with bible verses. "Yep," I said to Spooky. "It's Jesus hair." Turns out, the place has recieved some national attention recently, thanks to the street-theatre antics of its Pentacostal proprietor, who's clearly seen The Passion of the Christ at least one time too many. Yeah. I was gonna tell you about that, and now I have. This is Reason #698 why I could never live in Leeds again (I last lived there in December 1989). Sooner or later, I'd run into this fekik, and he'd probably drive a stake through my heart or something. I wanted to sneak back to the place last night and use white shoe polish to write I DON'T TAKE SIDES between the two choices provided by the kind folks at Running With Scissors.
But there were other things, too.
Early today, as we were leaving Leeds, we stopped by the house near the cement plant again, the house that I used as the model for Spyder Baxter's house (see last night's entry), because I wanted to get shots of the rear of the house, back where my bedroom was. The room that was my bedroom became Spyder's, the one she sealed up after Byron and Robin broke in. Spooky drove down the long alleyway, then I got out and quickly took two or three shots. And that sensation I wrote of yesterday, the premonition of a psychotemporal tesseract returned. I half-expected a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old me to look out the window and see me standing there. I actually had a moment of utter terror that precisely this thing would happen. And the overlap, the touching of now to then would instantly change everything. Having, at such an early age, glimpsed the strange androgynous person standing in the alley behind my house taking photos with a weird little camera, my life would be nudged just enough to take an entirely different course. I'd become someone else. I'd never write Silk, so I'd never come back to take that picture, so that me would never see this me, and so on and so forth, thank you Einstein.
I did catch a black cat (with a bit of white about his chin) watching me suspiciously from the end of the alley, but I assume he was part of this continuum.
Anyway, here are a couple of the pix. My bedroom (and Spyder's) was the room at the left-hand corner of the house. When I was a kid, as I've said, this house was a bit of a wreck. It was also white with red trim. It didn't have that big back deck thing, and where the shed is now there was a collapsing barn-type thing. We had a vegetable garden in the very back, and the fence seperating the yard from the alley was sagging chicken wire, not chain link. There was no cute playhouse, either.
I was actually very fond of this house, despite it being a wreck, despite the fact there was almost no heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. It had the aforementioned Caspak woods there in front of it (even though I had to trespass to explore them, as they belong to the cement plant). In fact, next to the beachouse in Jacksonville (Fla), it was probably my favorite place we lived when I was a kid. So maybe it seems odd that I chose it for Spyder's "sick" house. It was a very poltergeist-ridden house, but that may have more to do with me and my sister than imagined mischievous spirits. Anyway...that's enough for tonight. Pretty good, really, considering I forgot everything I was going to write about.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
This entry could go almost anywhere. But it's starting out — here. And we shall see...
I'm still in Alabama.
Last night, after my complaints about the suffocating silence, Spooky and I went for a walk with my mother. It was a fine spring night, only a slight chill in the air. Above me was a sky I've almost forgotten, all those stars, planets, constellations I once knew the names of but have now mostly forgotten. And out there the silence was relieved by the sounds from the woods — insects, frogs, barking dogs, wind. Not the silence imposed by insulating walls. And I remembered, quite suddenly, how much time, long ago, I spent outside at night. Whether just walking about after dark or off in the wilderness on some dig or another. I'd forgotten how much I used to love the night. Which made me sad, that I'd let myself lose the Night Beyond the Cities, but, at the same time, finding it again was joyous. The air smelled of moist earth and growing things.
Spooky and I went out this morning and took photographs of houses in Leeds where I lived as a child. We walked through downtown, mostly a ghost town now that Leeds has been swallowed by Wal-Mart culture. But all the old buildings were still there, even though many of them were empty and in poor shape. They were the same sidewalks from my childhood, sidewalks I'd not walked in at least fifteen years. And there's this phenomenen, which I have felt many times before, but today it was with me almost constantly. I'm not sure how to decsribe it. There is the past, and there is the "present" — that moment that is either an illusion or the truest perception of time, pressed between the past and the future. Anyway, there is the past, and there is the present, and there should be the sense of all the time in-between. But all those intervening years fall away, creating a sort of mental tesseract, so that that moment from all those years ago touches directly opon this supposedly present moment. I find it a most disconcerting and yet utterly wonderous sensation. I spent much of today in that state of mind. I saw the old houses, my high school and elementary school, a creek I used to catch snakes and crayfish in, a forest I used to pretend was Pellucidar or Caspak or some other lost world. I showed all these things to Spooky.
And I realized the very frelling obvious — this town is where so many of my stories flow from. This it where it started.
The first house we looked at, one near the cement plant in Leeds, for example, was the model for Spyder Baxter's house in Silk. Sure, I moved it to Birmingham, to Red Mountain, to Cullom Street, and gave it a spooky yard and a wide front porch, but this is the house. I took the floorplan of this house, consciously, for Spyder's house. That's just one of a thousand examples. Anyway, here are a few pix, behind the cut, for those who might be interested in obscure autobiography:
The house where I lived from March 1973 until sometime in 1974.
1974-1975
1975-1979 — This was the inspiration for Spyder's house. It's in much better shape now than when we lived there. And someone cut down the big trees that once lined the sidewalk and shaded the house.
Have these two days away from home done me any good, in terms of getting past or under or over The Wall? Maybe. Maybe not. We'll see when I get back home tomorrow, when I go back to work on Friday. I had a conversation with my mother this afternoon about my books, about all my various frustrations, the wish for a wider readership, the frustrations caused by readers who are incapable of sympathizing with characters who are not Just Like Them. It was weird. I've never once had this sort of converstaion about my writing with my mother, even though she's a retired editor. I helped her set up her own LJ. She gave me a garnet ring that was my Grandmother Ramey's and also an old hardback copy The Portable James Joyce. My sister came by, and my Aunt Pat (my mother's younger sister). I think mostly, this visit has served to remind me of all the things I actually love about Alabama and of all the reasons I could probably never live here again. More on that later. In fact, more on all this later...
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
I have long been a city-dweller, and, as such, I forget the silence outside the cities. I forget the absence of that contsant background rumble and thum and murmur. I'm at my mother's house tonight, here in Alabama, fifteen or twenty miles east of Birmingham. And it is quiet. It is, to me, this person who grew up here but has long been a city dweller, profoundly, disconcertingly quiet. I'd welcome a siren right about now, or the idiot bleat of a car alarm.
I'll be here tomorrow. I might be back in Atlanta tomorrow night, though I may stay here until Thursday afternoon. We'll see. Late this week, there's a mountain of work to face, and phone meetings with my film agent and my editor at Marvel. I have to make a decision about what's to be done with Daughter of Hounds, whether I begin again at the start or what. I suspect that's one reason that I've come here, to try to figure this out. I feel like I have a lot of things, suddenly, to figure out. And I just heard Spooky sneeze. I'd say she's allergic to all the quiet, only I've stayed at her parents' place in Rhode Island, and it's even more ominously quiet than this house.
Okay. That's enough for now. I'm gonna try to go and try to figure out how to make some noise...
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Meanwhile...
Robyn wrote: I'm sorry, this may demonstrate how Decemberist-challenged I am and how Nick Cave owns anything beginning with 'Red Right,' but: 'Red Right Ankle'? Oh, yes indeed. "Red Right Ankle," as follows (just imagine me singing):
This is the story of your red right ankle
And how it came to meet your leg
And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled
And how the skin was softly shed
And how it whispered "Oh adhere to me
For we are bound by symmetry
And whatever differences our lives have been
We together make a limb."
This is the story of your red right ankle.
This is the story of your gypsy uncle
You never knew 'cause he was dead
And how his face was carved and rift with wrinkles
In the picture in your head.
And remember how you found the key
To his hideout in the Pyrenees
But you wanted to keep his secret safe
So you threw the key away.
This is the story of your gypsy uncle.
This is the story of the boys who loved you
Who love you now and loved you then
Some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you
Some just laid around in bed.
Some had crumbled you straight to your knees
Did it cruel, did it tenderly
Some had crawled their way into your heart
To rend your ventricles apart
This is the story of the boys who loved you
This is the story of your red right ankle.
And, while we're at it, Larne wrote: Ah yes, The Other Universe. I sensed a distinct opening to it at 2 am one morning, but it was about the diameter of a quark and I couldn't get through. (Though I'm not sure my The Other Universe is the same as your The Other Universe. Mine has gravity in it — and people discussing quantum theories of gravity in elegant sitting rooms equipped with OLED blackboards).
See "Onion." Willa in the bathroom, which may, or may not, make my comment clearer.
Okay, so don't ever say I'm not interactive. I leave you with this image, to be burned deeply into the quivering jelly of your optic lobes:
What I want to know, personally, is who...or WHAT...is she attempting to summon with her Evil Telepathic (three-fingered) Dance Salute?
Saturday, April 16, 2005
This was one of those mornings when I opened my eyes, disoriented, lost for a moment, and then I remembered, Oh, yeah. This is that world. The one with George Bush, Wal-Mart, gravity, and the goddamn internet. I shut them again, my eyes, and tried to go somewhere else, to no avail.
Here I am. For now.
So...yesterday, Spooky and I read through what's been written on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds, and I may have made a very inconvenient discovery. It may be necessary to stop, take this book apart, put it back together in some slightly different configuration. This has happened to me before. It happened with Silk. It happened with Threshold. It happened with Murder of Angels. A sudden realization, part way through, that the reason I'm having so much trouble is because I'm simply not doing it right. If I'm correct, if reconstruction is required, I can probably still save most of what I've written so far. But there's far too much Sadie, for example. This is not Sadie's book. It's Emmie's, and it's Soldier's. So, most of the Sadie stuff will probably go. I'll stick it in a chapbook for the subpress edition or something. It's a little nauseating, this realization — if it is a realization and not simply a delusion. I've written more than fifty thousand words already, and the book is due in December. Truthfully, there have been too many distractions this past winter, lots of things to get in the way of writing a novel, and I have allowed myself to lose focus. A certain sloppiness has crept in.
I will do it right, or I will not do it.
I may write one of the vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles today, while some other, less lascivious part of my brain works at the problem posed by the novel.
Frell.
Anyway, last night we ate pizza and watched The Incredibles and Shark Tale. I can honestly say that I loved The Incredibles. It was visually stunning, probably the very best CGI film that I've ever seen. It was also a considerably darker and more adult film than I'd expected. I was particularly pleased with the movie's insistence that "If everyone is special, then no one is special," that things which are special should not be forced to settle for mediocrity in order to not make waves. Shark Tale was okay, but we probably should have watched it first, as it pales by comparison to The Incredibles, though it's entertaining enough in its own right.
It's sunny and green out, but there's a nasty, cold wind. I need a good 90F day. I need to move to the south of France, or maybe Greece. On an unrelated note, a bunch of Spooky's CD auctions are ending today. You might want to have a look.
Friday, April 15, 2005
So, all day yesterday went to the Marvel thing. And I have another talk with them on Monday. Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds has been languishing, again. Maybe today I can get back into it. At this point, I'll have to read everything I've written on it just to remember what's going on. I've not worked on the chapter since...crap, since Saturday. A blink of the eye, and an entire week's gone.
There are little red goblins from the moons of Saturn who steal time from me. They live under the bed. I'm quite certain of this. Late at night, I can hear them playing poker and eating Fritos brand corn chips.
Also, I hear Britney's ticked-off because her publicist "leaked" the sex of her baby to the press. Whoops. Clearly, the fact that her child is female plays an important role in her quest for total galactic domination. Or maybe it's the other way round, and Britney's afraid of looking weak in the eyes of the demon hunters that an alliance of Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists are dispatching to end this atrocity before, if you'll excuse the pun, the stars are right again, and the foetus of Britney is pooped out into the world to merge with Bill Gates to form the One True Dollar Sign of the Apocalypse.
Okay. I'll admit. All that's speculation. Especially the part about an alliance between Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists. But, you have to admit, it'd make a pretty good Jack Chic pamphlet. However, you can blame forlorn99 for leading me to discover, via my mystical wooden alphabet of random divination, which some disbelievers and infidels call Scrabble tiles, that Britney Spears is actually an anagram for BAPTISER SYREN. Verily, we are frelled.
Spooky says I'm smoking crack.
Fine. Let's see how long it takes her to change her tune, once the Spawn of Pale and Trashy Popstardom releases the flesh-eating slugs. It's time to get down on your knees and start praying to Madonna, people. Only she and her Cabalistic microdwarves can save us...
P.S. — Thank you, David Lyton of Sydney, Australia!
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Okay, forget all what I just said about the U.S. selling jets to help hasten the day when Pakistan and India will nuke one another into oblivion. That's Little League crap. Small potatoes. A matter of no great consequence.
Because, you see, turns out Britney Spears is frelling pregnant. Isn't there some ancient, secret Jesuit order that's supposed to stop shit like this from happening? Isn't that why we pay our taxes?
I do not often get sick. Which is a very good thing, because I make a poor invalid. I spent much of last night and this morning worshipping at the altar of a certain porcelain god which, if not quite properly nameless, shall go unnamed, and now I feel like a moldy raisin. Fun, fun, fun.
The Bush Administration is selling more F-16s, which can be easily modified to deliver nuclear weapons, to Pakistan. U.S. "intelligence" indicates that Pakistan has been modifying its existing F-16 fleet to carry nuclear weapons since at least the early '90s, in defiance of a Pakistan/U.S. treaty.
As of 16:39 GMT (EST+5) Apr 14, 2005, the human population on planet Earth had reached 6,430,599,484.
Ron Perlman turned 55 yesterday.
Do the math, people. The writing's on the wall. Signs of the Apocalypse and everything.
I'd just go the frell back to bed, but I'd only lie there feeling guilty about not working. I don't know when the hell I went and became so goddamn responsible. Oh, for the careless days of yore, when I could justify missing a chem exam because I had a bit of broccoli stuck between my teeth. It's official. I'm tired of being a grown up.
Er...yesterday. I don't know. I read William Hope Hodgson's "From the Tideless Sea," which I thought particularly effective. All else has been blotted from my addled brain. Ouch.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
I was awake at frelling 7 a.m. this morning, tumbling out of some nightmare, leaving some place where something will go forever unfinished because I woke up. This is night five or six of lousy sleep and the Special Bad Dreams. I'm waiting for the Ambien to build up again. At least then, I won't remember the dreams.
Did I write yesterday? No. I did not. My mind was too distracted, my mood too black, so Spooky took me to Fernbank to see the dinosaurs and the frogs, and that helped a great deal. It also helped that the rain we were promised didn't come (until last night). The dinosaurs make things better, help me get back into myself. We walked around spotting fossils in the Jurassic-age Solnhofen tiles that make up the museum's floor: bryozoans, sponges, bivalves, the "pens" of belemnites, ammonites.
Afterwards, we took in a matinee of Sin City. The film left me with mixed feelings. It is, visually, a wondrous thing. There's not much denying that. I was especially impressed that white blood is somehow more disturbing than red blood. It was like bodies were gushing semen or something equally vile. The Mickey Rourke character, Marv, was brilliant and easily stole the show. Likewise, Elijah Wood's cannibal serial-killer was a nice touch. Indeed, I'm quite certain it would have been a much better film if Miller and Rodriguez had settled on this single narrative thread, instead of attempting the complex Pulp-Fictionesque narrative web (which I'm not sure they pulled off). Marv felt like the film's soul, and when he was gone, my interest quickly began to wane. The Dwight/Gail/Jackie Boy/War of the Whores story was almost as engaging (and hey, anything that mixes dinosaurs, tarpits, rougue IRA, and Benicio Del Toro as an undead Pez dispenser is undoubtedly some sort of cool). But by the time we got back around to the Hartigan/Nancy story, the film had lost me, though I was amused by the "yellow bastard" (even though he looked like a jaundiced Ferengi). All in all, I honestly think this movie should have stuck to a single storyline, Marv's. It would have been a better, more solid film. Also, I wish it had worked harder to be genuine noir, a genre I'm very familiar with, rather than a noir pastiche. So, yes, Sin City is a good film, to be sure, but I don't believe that it's a great film, by any means. Certainly, it's not Robert Rodriguez's best film — that's still Once Upon a Time in Mexico. And it could easily have survived losing about half an hour somewhere along the way.
And once more, a film has left me asking why the hell so many genre/comics readers have trouble finding my characters "sympathetic," yet have no problem at all with far more unpleasant people, so long as they are presented in film. There's something important in this contradiction, but my mind is presently to sleep deprived to get at it properly.
Okay. I've got to find some way to wake up. There's not enough coffee and Red Bull in whole frelling world. I'll probably work on the Marvel thing today, if I can achieve consciousness. Poor Chapter Four. Anyway, I'll leave you with a photo I snapped at Fernbank yesterday, looking down on the Giganotosaurus stalking across the Great Atrium:
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Sorry, guys. Not much in the way of an entry today. Just not in the mood. Which means I'll probably make up for it in the morning. Yesterday evening, after Spooky and I sat on the front porch drinking beer and taunting squirrels, we watched the first episode of Farscape, and then we watched the second episode of Farscape. By eleven I was exhausted, inexplicably so, and crawled away to bed, where I managed to read two William Hope Hodgson short stories, "The Mystery of the Derelict" and "The Habitants of Middle Islet," before falling asleep. The latter I found particularly effective in its wonderfully elusive threats. Lovecraft once said of Hodgson, "Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous beseiging entities through casual hints and insignificant details." Indeed. Spooky was up until about two, I think, doing gods know what online.
Got the new VNV Nation bright and early this morning. Truly, Spooky was at Criminal Records just after the doors opened. I've listened three times through, and I like it a great deal, but I'm still considering more specific comments. It's a different album for them. To quote the band's website:
This time Ronan worked alongside German producer Humate who co-produced, engineered and mixed the album. Getting the sound right on this album involved going back to using lots of vintage synthesizer equipment to achieve a warmer more organic sound. The album features many varieties of tone and sound, from the punch of tracks like "Chrome" and "Entropy" to more ethereal soulful sounds of "Endless Skies" and "Homeward" . It is certainly an evolution but still retains, and in some ways accentuates, the emotive soulful and humanist elements that people recognise in VNV Nation's music. Conceptually and lyrically the album deals with transformation from potential into ability or action. Ronan feels this is the best and most comprehensive VNV Nation release to date.
I think, if you can read between the press-release copyspeak, this is a moderately accurate assessment of Matter and Form, — especially the part about a warmer, more organic sound. I'm not sure what the crunchy music bois are gonna think of this, but I like it (though I doubt it will prove to be my favorite VNV Nation disc). I think I'm gonna go watch more Farscape...
Monday, April 11, 2005
Somehow, I have a) survived this cluster-frell of a day and b) managed to check off everything on my little "Do This Today Or Die" list. But the chaos has led to me rescheduling the trip to Birmingham until next week, which is really better, as it's going to rain for the next three days and, this way, I can get back to writing tomorrow. I'm not sure whether it will be Daughter of Hounds or the Marvel project, as they are equally pressing, but, either way, it's work. And right now, I need to be working — my mind needs that occupation.
I wanted to say that Poppy's comments on signings/readings today struck a sympathetic chord with me. I'm asked, from time to time, why I don't do more signings, why I don't tour to promote my books, and the simple truth is because, to start with, my publisher won't pay for it, and, worse still, my past experiences have taught me that it's rarely a cost-effective undertaking. Back before Silk, when I was just getting started with The Dreaming at Vertigo, I was encouraged by my editor at DC to do in-store appearances and signings. So, in 1997 and 1998, I did a number of them, and paid for them out of my own pocket. Trips to Los Angeles, Manhattan, and other places. Without exception, my appearances in comics stores were a bomb. I'd sit at a table for an hour or two while customers filed past and stared at me as though I were some exotic cephalopod on display for their amusement. Sometimes they might stop and pick up a copy of The Dreaming, only to lay it down again. Very often, they'd say things like, "I've never heard of you," and "I liked The Sandman a lot more. Why aren't you doing this more like The Sandman," or, my all time frelling favorite, "Did you write this?" Two years of that was enough. It's not like The Dreaming was some obscure indie title; at that point, we were selling about 25,000 copies a month, and there was advertising in all the Vertigo titles, in Previews and many other places, and still the stores couldn't get people to attend signings. So, for the most part, I don't do signings, and I would only consider touring for a book if the publisher paid all my expenses (and how many copies of a $14 trade paperback would you have to sell to justify a trip to, say, Seattle or San Francisco?).
I'm feeling very frazzled. Perhaps I shall do something insanely mindless, like have another go at the new Lego Star Wars X-Box game. Yep. It's Star Wars, but everything's made out of Legos. It's a cute idea, and it's funny for about ten minutes; then the tedium sets in. If I could ask George Lucas just one question, I think it would be this: "George, whenever you're faced with a creative decision where you either do that that thing which will be truer to your art or do that thing which will open up more chintzy merchendising opportunities, which do you do?" It's rhetorical, I know, and has been answered by the last three Star Wars films, but I'd still like to ask...
The day is fast being consumed by busyness — contracts that have to be read and signed, cons and websites and publishers who all need bios and photos, stuff that I need to proofread for publicity people at Penguin, etc. All that stuff that isn't writing. And I have Marvel at 3 p.m., so I may not make it back to Daughter of Hounds today. I didn't even let this stuff pile up. It just all landed on me, plop, pretty much at once. And it cares not that a frelling book needs to be writen.
The writing went well yesterday, though I cannot yet disclose what I wrote. The "thing" for Marvel Comics.
In case you've not yet seen the first photographic evidence of an extrasolar planet, here it is:
Approximately 400 light-years from Earth, this massive planet (b) orbits a very young star (a), GQ Lupi, somewhere on the order of a million years old (our star, the Sun, is about 4.6 billion years old).
And a big thanks to the people on my phorum for the ost from Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It just arrived in the mail this morning. You guys rawk!
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Yesterday wasn't a good writing day, but not a total loss, either. I managed to eek out 626 words over about four hours. The problem, this time, is that I have finally come to that moment where I lead Soldier down into the Blackstone River Valley to Woonsocket. This scene has been in my head since I first laid eyes on that town last summer (see relevant blog entries for June/July 2004), percolating in my imagination, fermenting, my impressions of that place waiting to be written out even as my expectations built up out of all proportion. This is an important scene to me and to the book, and I have to get it right. Not just good. Not just very good. I have to get it right. As if any such thing as "right" might exist in this world of subjective tyranny. So, each word is picked with undo care, only to be discarded for some other word chosen with equally undo care, only to be discareded, and so on. It does not help that I was in Woonsocket in the summer and, for a reason I cannot now fathom, I chose to set Daughter of Hounds in the winter. This means I have to translate all my summer impressions and memories into simulated or adapted winter impressions and memories. This scene is one reason why it has taken me so long to get this far into Chapter Four.
Today, I have to work on "this thing" for Marvel Comics, but I'll go back to the book tomorrow afternoon.
I did get a good bit of reading done yesterday. I finished Lupoff's unsatisfying Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. I re-read portions of Chris Bennett's "The Osteology and Functional Morphology of the Late Cretaceous Pterosaur Pteranodon," with especial attention to the sections on the hindlimbs and pectoral girdle. I read the new issue of Dame Darcy's Meatcake (Richard Dirt rules!). I read from E. Richardson's 1876 History of Woonsocket. So, I read.
Spooky and I are utterly in love with The Decemberists. They're not a new band, just new to us. I haven't been this excited about a band since the emergence of the Dresden Dolls back in 2002. The Decemberists are joyously geeky in all the right ways, and you should check them out. They'll be doing a show here in Atlanta at the Variety Playhouse (smoke-free!) in May.
And here's one of the many shots I took of creepy ol' Woonsocket so very many months ago...
Saturday, April 09, 2005
A good writing day yesterday. I did 1,133 words on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds, fleshing out the chapter's opening scene, Soldier and Odd Willie and Saben on their way to Woonsocket. Today, I'll work on Chapter Four. Tomorrow, I'll work on the thing for Marvel, then I'll work on Chapter Four again Monday, then I'll be in Birmingham Tuesday and Wednesday.
Walking to the video store late yesterday, Spooky and I were talking about writing, about making your living as a writer (and we really don't talk about this very often, as there are too many genuinely interesting subjects to distract us), and I said, "We all pay the same dues. But we don't get the same benefits in return." Consider that Caitlín's First Law of Publishing. It's the gods' frelling truth. It matters not how good you are or how hard you work. There's no cheating Caitlín's First Law. It's what you'd call a goddamned Universal Constant.
We had an excellent kindernacht last night. Imagine, if you will, Gilligan's Island written as a killer mushroom flick and directed by Ishirô Honda for Toho Studios, and you will begin the appreciate the bizarre wonder of Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963). It's based, very loosely, on William Hope Hodgson's short story, "A Voice in the Night," and, goofy acting aside, the film has some very fine moments and manages to conjure its weird atmosphere very effectively. Check it out. Also, we watched Dead Leaves (2004), a short anime directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi. Extraordinarily messed up. I mean, we're talking early Ralph Bakshi messed up. Indeed, this film could be a litmus test for freaks. For example, if you know you're a total freak, and you happen to meet someone but you're you're afraid they might find you too freaky, just rent Dead Leaves and watch it together. If they haven't made for the door before the end credits, then you'll know that they're a freak, too. Spooky fell asleep halfway through, so I know I'm cool.
Check out the new chapter of Boschen and Nesuko, courtesy Leh'agvoi (Setsuled). The new one's #17, in case you haven't been keeping score.
Here in Atlanta, the partly sunny morning has given way to an overcast afternoon with a chilly breeze. So, no sun for me today. Perhaps tomorrow...
Friday, April 08, 2005
Thank you very, very frelling much, Poppy. I love you like a brother, but now, because you went and twisted my arm, and because I have enough guilt already I must admit, before all these good people, that last night I went and fell off the wagon. Well, okay, truthfully, you only actually twisted my arm, literally, to get me to have that second cosmopolitan. The meat was a weakness of my own sorry "soul," and I know it. Don't worry. I'm paying the price. Last night I dreamt I was accepting a Hugo award but couldn't give an acceptance speech for the glazed apple stuffed in my mouth. Today, I am back on the wagon. Oh, and it's not that the restaurant in question, Rathbun's, didn't have lots of good veggie options. It most certainly did. I was just a bad, bad nixar. Sigh. Hello, my name is Nar'eth, and I love meat.
For a less pathetic review of the dinner, you'll have to read Poppy's blog (the link above, you dullards).
As for work, I didn't write yesterday. But there was plenty else to keep me busy. Despite the best efforts of my agent, Penguin insists that they will publish no more than 150K words worth of Daughter of Hounds. And since I suspect it will be quite a bit lengthier than that, I can pretty much promise that the Subterranean Press edition will be longer ("unexpurgated," as they say) than the trade paperback. I told my editor this. They say they understand, and understand too that it will bestow a marketplace advantage upon the subpress edition, but if they go over 150K words, the trade paperback will cost book buyers more than $14, becasue of printing costs, and they're afraid to price my books higher than $14. So, there you go. I will write my book as it needs to be written, then remove however much must be removed for Penguin to get in under the 150K-word wire, and the whole thing will go to subpress. In the end, this is all about sales figures and return rates and, frankly, I'm sick nigh unto puking death of publishing. But, to quote the very wise Sam Gamgee, there's nothing for it.
In better news, I had a very good long talk with my editor at Marvel. With luck, I can spill the beans in another week or two.
Today, I have to send the first four vignettes for Frog Toes and Tentacles to Vince Locke, so he can begin work on the illustrations. And I have to get back to Chapter Four. And there's some publicity stuff for Penguin I have to attend to (to which I have to attend, whatever).
Hopefully, I'll have a little time this weekend to work on the pterosaur paper, and the Prophecy extras for Nebari.net. We shall see.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Busy, busy, busy, but somone just brought this recent Scientific American editorial to my attention (thanks, Jada), and I wanted to spread the joy. You may read it at the SA website by following the link below, but, I've also pasted the full text of the editorial below the link:
"Okay, We Give Up
Okay, We Give Up
We feel so ashamed
By The Editors
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American , or Scientific Unamerican , or even Unscientific Unamerican . But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Yesterday went extremely well. I did 1,742 words on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds. Now it's time to backtrack and rework and expand the first scene in the chapter. I'm not sure how much work I'll get done on it today, however. Yesterday, I rescheduled the meeting with Marvel for today, and I'll also be having dinner with Poppy before her reading at OutWrite Books. She's picking the restaurant, of course. This is going to one of those times when the vegetarian thing is especially hard (Spooky and I have been staying clear of restaurants for the most part since the End of Meat — it's sort of like being a reformed alcoholic and staying out of bars). Anyway, I've not seen Poppy since she was in Atlanta last year, so I'm looking forward to it. But, first, there's work, the writing, and I have to talk with Marvel (because I didn't do it yesterday), and I need to speak with my agent, and I need to speak with Bill Schafer at Subterrean Press.
We had another nice walk in Candler Park yesterday. No more golfballs, but there was a "herd" of robins, a chipmunk, and baby raccoon tracks in the mud. There was also an hilarious bit with a mockingbird trying to immitate a crow. After Mythbusters, I spent about an hour on Nebari.net, working on the "extras" for Prophecy. This would be coming along faster, but most of the files I need weren't on my iBook, though I'd thought they were, and I had to have Leh'agvoi e-mail them to me. I got most everything uploaded last night. Now I just have to layout the pages and upload those. All in all, yesterday was marked by the sort of productivity I need six days a week, three hundred and thirteen days a frelling year.
It's cloudy today, but still warm.
After Poppy's "I am not a liberal!" pronouncement yesterday, I almost feel the need to proclaim that I am a liberal, dyed in the wool, card-carrying, and so on and so forth, the sort your morning talk-radio host warned you about. Then again, it should be fairly obvious from the things I write and the things I say in this journal. No need to recount the particulars. I don't tend to think of it as "liberalism," though. I tend to think of it as common sense. There is, of course, nothing common about it. If there were, we'd not have a turnip for a President.
Gotta run. Maybe I can still squeeze in some writing today.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
I did a modest 1,076 words on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds yesterday. The need to do research regarding Providence that should have been done months ago wasted time that might have been spent actually writing. Also, I determined that the scene I wrote on Monday, the opening scene for the chapter needs more work — the dialogue needs polishing and the whole thing should be expanded by about a thousand words. But first I have to finish the scene I began yesterday. I was very slow getting started. First I wrote:
The night before, Saurday night, after Soldier had driven Saben White to see the doctor on Federal Hill, the greasy old croaker who sewed them up whenever something went wrong, after she’d left Saben at her apartment across the Seekonk in East Providence, after those things that were her responsibility, she’d had dinner...
...which I hated, so I erased it and wrote:
The night before, Saturday night, Soldier sat at home, waiting for Odd Willie to call and tell her that he’d taken care of the priest’s body and everything was right as rain...
...which wasn't any good, either, so I wrote:
"Your responsibility," the Bailiff had told her, no uncertain terms there, so after Rocky Point, Soldier drove Saben White to see the greasy old croaker over on Federal Hill who sewed them up and set broken bones and extracted bullets whenever something went wrong.
...which, it turned out, was the bit I'd been looking for, and the chapter progressed.
Later, Spooky and I took a walk in Candler Park, and I found a golf ball. Later still, and thanks to "the dethbird," I read the unexpurgated text of Clark Ashton Smith's "The Dweller in the Gulf," which is online if you'd like to take a look. This is the text from the Necronomicon Press edition. Previously, I'd only encountered the story in the bastardized version that appeared in some Arkham House collection or another. I am not a huge fan of CAS. He has his moments, but they are few. Take "Dweller in the Gulf," for example. There are far too many atrocious phrases like "mephitical effluvia" and far too few genuinely powerful sentences like "There was no light anywhere—and not even the recollection of light." Generally, I think his prose would have greatly benefited from much more attention to characterization (it's almost entirely absent in this story) and a little less forceful hand when it comes to letting us know about the dark and creepy stuff, in that he all to often tells instead of showing. And without characterization, all the atmosphere in the world is only window-dressing. I do admire what CAS was trying to do, in his efforts to avoid quasi-scientific exposition and explanation, and his desire at drawing us into the Unknown, but I find that the actual writing leaves far too much to be desired.
I have a meeting with Marvel at 3 p.m. this afternoon. Hopefully, soon I can release some details about this project.
Okay. Must. Go. Write.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
By about 6:30 yesterday evening, I'd written 1,140 words on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds, completing the first section of the chapter. It was a profound relief. I only hope I can do as well again today. This will be a shorter entry than the mammoth things I've been posting the last few days, because I want to get back to it. The day is beautiful here, and I'd like to have time for a walk after I get my "words" done. My agent called from NYC this morning to see how things had gone last week when I spoke with my new editor at Penguin. I was out on the front porch, reading Robert R. Bellrose's Woonsocket, and we talked for a little while about her walk through Central Park this morning and some absurd football stadium that Michael Bloomberg and the Jets have managed to finagle. Manhattan needs a frelling football stadium about like I need a few more deadlines. She was glad to hear that I was writing again.
I forgot to mention that Spooky and I saw Steamboy on Saturday. I think it's probably the best anime I've seen since Rintaro's Metoroporisu. And it managed an almost flawless fusion of cell animation and cgi that I've seen a lot of film's make a mess of recently (Ghost in the Shell 2, for example).
Here's something incredible that brokensymmetry dropped in the comments yesterday. These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions. But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it. Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations. What does one say to such a thing? Wow. Drad. Oh, shit. & etc.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, which I'd thought would be a biography has turned out to be more of a very annotated bibliography, and the author, Richard Lupoff, is, to put it plainly, a bit of a dork, but I am finding some interesting bits, here and there. This for example:
Burrough's influence on the development of science fiction has been an odd one. For some years, particularly in the 1920s and 30s, there was a great deal of Burroughs-type material produced, but as the years passed and science fiction 'matured,' the adventuresome themes of scientific romance, the wonder tales, gave way largely to introspective, social-satire material. It seemed that Burroughs was totally outdated.
This was written in 1965. Anyway, it struck a chord with me because a good portion of the sf I want to do owes a lot to that old Burroughs school of sf, stuff that today tends to get called "space opera." I want to write sf stories that make people think about the things they need to think about, personal and poltical and existential, but I also want to write sf stories that make people say "Wow." I think the wow thing has largely been relegated to film these days, perhaps because film is simply better at evoking wonder (many will disagree). But. Still. It's what I want to do.
Okay. I should get to work. But, since some of you have expressed an interest in my paleo' research, here's a photo of a specimen that I'm finishing up a short paper on (the paper was begun a couple of years ago and shelved):
It's the proximal (upper) half of the femur of an extraordinarily tiny pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous Mooreville Chalk of Alabama. The white scale bar in the photo is divided into 1 cm. sections. This fossil probably represents a hatchling belonging to the Pteranodontidae, which includes such familar pterosaurs as Pteranodon. Remains of young specimens are very rare, and this one was found in sediments preserved in moderately deep water, at a considerable distance from shore. The adult would have been a pterosaur with a wingspan of 9m, if this is indeed a juvenile Pteranodon. It's also an example of how much time may pass between the discovery of a fossil and its description; I actually collected this femur way back in 1983.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Today I will write 1,000 words on Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds. They may not be very good, and I may have to toss it all out tomorrow and begin over again, but I'm writing a thousand words today regardless. Also, as I've discovered that the presence or absence of comments to my LJ seems to have no bearing on this writing difficulty, and because I actually miss the comments, I'm restoring them.
If you're into interviews, that's another reason to pick up Subterranean #2, as it will include the first interview I've given "live and in person" (as opposed to dead and channeled by a medium, I suppose), in many, many years. Indeed, I could probably count on one hand the number of interviews I've given that I didn't insist were done by e-mail. I know one was to Writer's Digest, way back in November 1995, and I think there have been a couple more. I dislike doing them. I'd prefer to be able to choose my words more carefully. Anyway, like I said, if you're interested, order the zine. It'll also, of course, include the new sf novelette, "Bradbury Weather," and "Andromeda Among the Stones" (the latter with a new illustration by Richard Rirk), along with fiction by Charles de Lint, Robert Silverberg, and others.
Er...what else?
I stumbled across the following comment online the other day (online I stumble a lot, and, in fact, offline, too): There are, unfortunately, plenty of bad writers clogging the shelves of bookstores throughout the country like fat hardening on the walls of arteries... Well, yeah. This is no grand revelation. But then the individual in question proceeds to include me in this list. Just when I think I've heard all the possible bizarre comments about my work possible, here some genius compares me to arterial plaque! Wow. Anyway, I do take issue with the comment, if only because I seem so unlikely a target for someone complaining about writers who get more than their fair share of shelf space in bookstores. I mean, honestly. If you walk into a bookstore and find that it has a single copy of each of my four novels from Roc, you're doing really well. And together (I just measured) they take only about 3.5 inches of space. So, I've hardly earned the right to be included alongside the likes of Stephen King, Laurell K. Hamilton, Dean Koontz, and Robin Cook. I can only aspire to someday so clog the arteries of bookstores. I shall have nothing before it's due me.
Reader reactions to my comments regarding What the [Bleep] Do We Know have been curiously mixed. On the one hand, I've had some very nice, considered, articulate e-mails (one of which I will quote from in a moment). On the other, some people were angry enough to unfriend me. I have received a number of e-mails asking that I not give up seeking truth and mystery and suchlike, to which I reply, I will only be able to do that when I am dead. But I thank everyone for taking time to write, even if we are at loggerheads on the worth of the film. In the end, though, there's seemingly no denying the dishonesty of the filmmakers, in their misrepresentation of Dr. David Alberts, if nothing else, and on that score alone the film loses almost all credibility.
Dr. David T. Kirkpatrick, a biologist at the University of Minnestota, writes (it's long, but worth the time):
I read with interest your posts today about ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’, and some of the reasons behind your initial acceptance of their assertions. I was also taken with Anne Sexton’s phrase; I had not heard it before. Your discussion of needs, beliefs, and the desire for meaning strikes a chord with me, as I have been mulling over similar issues recently. Some thoughts I’ve had, as they pertain to your posts:
Humans are adept at seeing patterns in everything, even if the patterns aren’t actually there. This tendency is often coupled with our propensity to see everything in a human-centric manner. I think that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, feels (or hopes) that there is more to the universe than is readily apparent to us. All of this combines to make us believe that those mysteries are linked to us. Unfortunately, I doubt that is the case. The universe is still much more complex than we understand, and probably much more complex than we can even currently imagine, but that complexity is not directly tied to humanity. This outlook is inimical to many, because their world-view requires that they remain at the center of the action, and thus act as a controlling element, rather than a peripheral component with no way to impact the larger universe.
I’ve always felt that, consciously or subconsciously, your writing reflected this knowledge. The majority of the beyond-normal events/situations that are introduced into your writings are not particularly human-centric, except those that flow directly from a character’s mental state. I’ve thought that this outlook was tempered by your paleontological training, which had to demonstrate that humans are not likely to be immune to the forces that act on all organisms that have been spawned by this planet. One might argue that we are unique in our ability to reflect upon our own actions and their motivations, but this ability doesn’t necessarily mean that we have control over any of those external forces acting upon us. (And, in fact that ability may be the ultimate reason for our demise as a species, because it allows us to ignore the natural forces that we disrupt, pretending that we are above them and therefore immune to them.)
People either choose to continue learning and advancing throughout their lives, or they accept themselves as they are, and stop questioning. You’ve chosen a profession that requires a constant assessment of your ‘being state’, both physical and mental, and then the translation of that assessment into a delivery system, with the goal of informing those willing to expend the necessary mental and physical energy of the outcome of your assessments. It’s a horribly complicated procedure, but you make it look easy – your prose is compelling, intriguing, and lyrical. Don’t berate yourself over perceived lapses, as they’ll just be incorporated into the future body of your work, and hopefully inform the rest of us in a wonderful story or novel.
There ARE enormous gaps in our understanding of the workings of the universe, at any level at which you care to think about it. Careful evaluation of the data already collected, coupled with careful, rigorous, and intelligent scientific experiment, will hopefully continue to reveal aspects of those gaps. If we as individuals or as a species benefit from those revelations, it will not be because the universe was set up to benefit us, but rather as a consequence of us existing in a universe that is ordered and has rules that apply equally to all. Quantum theory (or some as yet unnamed and unknown mechanism) may eventually give us those connections and abilities that chaos magick and the like seek to provide. I personally rule very little out; the universe is an infinite place, and more things may be possible than I can possibly imagine. Molecular biology (my field of endeavor) offers a salient example: It has become apparent that there is a species of RNA molecule that has an enormous range of function, but was undetected until the late 1990’s. These microRNAs (as they’re called) are very short RNA chains that appear to act as regulatory molecules for a very diverse range of cellular functions. The genome has always encoded them, but they were overlooked – thought to be part of the large stretches of non-coding DNA that had no discernable function (‘junk’ DNA). The scientists who first identified them are likely to win a Nobel Prize within a decade, I’ll bet. The microRNAs have always been there; we just failed to perceive them. Who knows how many other fundamentally important processes are going on, unperceived by us, in biology, chemistry, physics, etc?
Finally, I would like to thank you for continuing your journal posts. I find your writing, whether it be in the form of a book, short story, or journal entry, to be insightful and stimulating. You make connections and linkages that I have not considered, or address issues from an angle that is novel to me. You make me think, and that is a quality that I value highly. Having your thoughts and musings available on a daily basis increases the rate and breadth of that stimulation relative to your output in novels and short stories. The latter two forms allow for a greater depth, and an expansion upon a theme, but cannot match the journal for sheer number of topics addressed.
Thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick. But now I have to go. I have arteries to clog...
Sunday, April 03, 2005
I am very, very pleased that I actually managed to almost entirely ignore the time change this past October. And finally the world is back on my time. I can stop being an hour early for everything.
The writing is not going well. Indeed, the writing is really not going at all. I'm still stuck here at the beginning of Chapter Four of Daughter of Hounds. I'm not sure the last time I felt this seriously stalled. But it's getting scary. When this is how you make your living, and you have deadlines which missing may result in you not making your living at this after all, and, still, the words just are not coming, when these things are all true, things get scary. And scared people have more trouble writing. Round and round. I have to somehow step outside the vicious cicle without breaking my frelling neck.
I may stop trying and do a short story. I don't really have the time to spare, and there's no assurance I could write a short story, the way things have been, but it seems that trying to do that is better than all this nothing.
Does anyone know whatever became of Mark Schultz? You know, the guy who did Cadillacs and Dinosaurs? I suppose I could run his name by Google and see what I find. I so do not keep up with comics these days. Anyway, I used to be a huge fan of C&D, and I was looking over the trade paperback collections last night and just started wondering what he's been doing recently.
Of course, I've now asked a non-rhetorical question in an LJ where I've shut off the comments feature. If anyone actually wants to answer, do so by e-mail or via the phorum (which has had a bit more traffic since the End of Comments).
There seems to be a storm behind my eyes, and if I could see through that storm, I could continue Chapter Four.
I spent about an hour this afternoon looking through photographs from the ESA Mars Express mission. It all leaves me so...maybe there's no one word for what it leaves me. Here's a photo:
The image above is Kasei Valles, one of the largest outflow channels on Mars, and contains a lot of evidence for glacial and fluvial activity over much of the planet's history. Kasei Valles has been imaged before by the HRSC during orbit 61 from an altitude of 272 kilometres. These images are located about 29° North and 300° East.
I think that the photo was taken on February 25th of this year, but I'm not certain.
Anyway...
Words. Thin air. The need to pull the former from the latter.
Maybe vomiting would help.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
I will now tell you something true, or, rather, something factual. As I was going over my notes on Emoto's water "experiments" as described in What the [Bleep] Do We Know !?, Kathryn came running into the house, into my office, rather excited. "It's snowing," she said breathlessly. I glanced out the window and saw that, indeed, large white particles were falling from the sky. This was not just a few white flakes, but a heavy shower. And there was then, no fooling, a chill along my spine. I got up and went to the front porch. I saw that the snow had changed over to sleet, apparently, and I raised my arms into it and said, "And now it's going to stop." And it did, completely, within seconds. I looked up at the sky and saw that a small black cloud was passing on eastward, the cloud that had obviously produced the icefall. I felt deeply, physically, ill, and went back to my office, reading over what I'd written about Emoto's photographs immediately before Kathryn entered my office.
Sounds pretty creepy, doesn't it? I said something like, "Well, the universe is going to have to do more than that to get my attention." I was litearlly shaking at that point. But I finished my entry on the film. And I allowed the initial weirdness of the event to percolate in my mind, looking at it not as someone who needs to believe, but as rationally as I could. Did my actions regarding the film and Emoto's ice crystals cause an alteration in the universe, some manipulation of the quantum foam meant to impress something upon me? No. I was writing about ice and bad science, and ice fell from the sky. This is well within the bounds of Jungian synchronicity, but there's nothing genuinely mystical about it. Even Jung would have not said that a causual connection existed here. It was a coincidence, albiet a meaningful coincidence, at least meaningful to me. It was somewhat significantly less so to Spooky, who was surprised at my physical reaction. It would mean nothing at all to Jennifer.
Our weather has been very unstable since yesterday. Cold air coming down from the northwest to collide with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. Whether it was hail or sleet, what fell from the sky was a perfectly natural, probably inevitable consequence of climate. It would have happened even if I'd been writing about kangaroos or the French Revolution, and it would have seemed a little odd, because the weather's been mostly warm until today, but it would have not been that meaningful coincidence. It would have just been a mild oddness. It was improbable that I would be writing what I was when it happened, but improbable things happen with great regularity. Improbable doesn't mean impossible, it only means "less likely than statistically more probable things."
I put it out of my mind and went back to work. But I thought I'd write the whole thing down here. It's an example of me almost misinterpreting a perfectly natural event in a way where I become the agent responsible for that event, which would, of course, have made me a pretty important person. It makes us feel good to think such things, no matter how outlandish they might be.
Anyway...
My thanks to Chris Walsh for this article on the connection between the Ramtha cult and What the [Bleep] Do We Know !?. If the whole Ramtha thing is a mystery to you, have a look at this.
Also, it's worth noting, at least to me it's worth noting, that one of the men interviwed in the film, a psychologist and physicist named Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, is also the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth and " supports reparative therapy for homosexuality."
There's something I want to stress. More than anything, I am criticizing this film for lying, for misleading, for manipulating, for promoting mysticism as science. At this point, it's impossible for me to deny that the makers of What the [Bleep] Do We Know !? have done these things, and that they've probably done them knowingly, regardless of whether or not some parts of the film might be worthy of consideration on some level. They might have done otherwise. They might have communicated the wonders of quantum mechanics without lying to us. But, personally, I don't think that was ever their goal.
If I had enough Twinkies, I could rule the world...
In her poem, "With Mercy for the Greedy," Anne Sexton wrote, Need is not quite belief.
For many, many years, that was as close as I came to having a motto. On more than one panel, at more than one con, I quoted it when asked about my personal beliefs regarding the supernatural and religion. In more than one interview, I quoted it. It gave me an odd, cold comfort for many years. And I would have done well not to have allowed myself to drift from the sense of it. But I have drifted, these last two or three years. Because this journal is public, it's not the place to get into all the whys and wherefores, because they are mostly very private things.
But I do have to say something, as I come suddenly back to myself.
Need is not quite belief.
Four days ago, in my entry for Tuesday, March 29th, I praised What the [Bleep] Do We Know !? I called it a "wonderful, brilliant film." I've spent the last four days thinking of little else. But my thoughts became increasingly doubtful, as the film began to unravel in my mind. The last couple of years have done much to try and drive the skeptic from me — or, rather, my response to the last couple of years has been the Easy Way Out, a gradual relinquishing of my skepticism, though it has guided me well for most of my life. Because I needed to believe. And this need has made me weak. And it has made me often not see obvious holes in ridiculous arguments, preposterous claims, wishful thinking. This past September, I approcahed writings on chaos magick in the hope that it might offer a rational solution to my need to believe, only to discover the worst sort of mish-mash of illogical thought. I allowed myself to replace Need is not quite belief with Nothing is true. Everything is possible. Even after my disillusionment with CM, even after I'd come to fully understand that it is most emphatically not a marriage of science and magick, that it is only a new superstition latching onto disciplines it doesn't seem to truly understand, I still needed to believe. I still allowed need to become just cause for belief.
Yeah, cut to the chase.
My comments regarding What the [Bleep] Do We Know !? were not made by the person I am, but by the person who I've been trying to become, despite my deeper knowledge that there is more wisdom in Anne Sexton's statement, Need is not quite belief., than in all the circular logic ever uttered. As I've investigated various claims made in the film, and the structure of the film itself, a number of things have come to light. They have not so much caused me "to see the light," as forced me to acknowledge that I was seeing the light all along, but had my hands clasped firmly across my eyes. Consider the following:
1. The "experiments" of Dr. Masaru Emoto, which state that water is sympathetic to positive thoughts, music, etc, as well as to negative emotions, and that its reactions, an "imprinting," can be observed and photographed, are central to the film's thesis. Yet Dr. Emoto's experiments are the worst sort of pseudoscience, and an examination of his results, published in his book Messages of Water will reveal very little of the scientific method. The film does not actually examine his experiments and how they were conducted or whether or not they have been successfully replicated, it merely states his purported discoveries.
2. Likewise, the claim that a mass meditation exercise led to a drop in crime in Washington D.C. during the summer of 1993 is made in the film, serving as its second instance of the mind having an extraordinary effect upon reality. However, the results claimed by the filmmakers cannot be substantiated. It is true that thousands of followers of the vedic "science" of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi did in fact come to Washington that summer, and they did meditate, but that's as far as it goes. By some accounts, the crime rate actually rose that summer and, regardless, in no way would the parameters of this exercise, lacking any sort of control and failing to account for innumerable variables, have qualified as a scientific experiment.
3. A central element of the film's "fictional" narrative is Marlee Matlin's character's encounter with a 15th-Century American Indian shaman, as we are told an apocryphal story about how Native Americans were unable to see Columbus' ships as they sailed nearer, because they had no conception of a sailing ship. Setting aside for the moment the fact that we are all perfectly capable of seeing things we've never encountered before, and I have no reason to suspect that Native Americans were handicapped in this regard, there appears to be no historical evidence to back up this claim. It should also been noted that though the film describes Columbus' ships as "clipper ships," such ships had not yet been invented, My own hasty research seems to indicate that the first clippers were built in the 1840s, about three hundred and fifty years after Columbus' first voyage to the New World.
4. The role of J. Z. Knight, the spiritualist who has long claimed to channel a 35,000-year-old Atlantean warrior named Ramtha, and who has made a lot of money doing so, was considerably greater than we are led to believe by her interview segments in the film. Joe Dispenza, the chiropractor who speaks in the film of creating his day is a devoted Ramtha follower, as is the former Catholic priest, Michael Ledwith. As are all three of the filmmakers. The film never discloses this information. I strongly suspect that the film's financial backer is also a student of Knight's, though I've yet to find direct evidence of this.
5. What is, for me, the most damning bit of all is the fact that Dr. David Albert, one of the physicists interviewed in the film, has gone to lengths to distance himself from the project. The following quote is from the Popular Science website (www.popsci.com): One of the few legitimate academics in the film, David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, is outraged at the final product. He says that he spent four hours patiently explaining to the filmmakers why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality, only to see his statements edited and cut to the point where it appears as though he and the spirit warrior [Ramtha] are speaking with one voice. “I was taken,” Albert admits. “I was really gullible, but I learned my lesson.”
I could go on, because there are plenty of other problems, but I won't. These five points are enough to force me to retract my earlier comments about the film. Indeed, I feel I should apologize, especially if my own need to believe has led anyone to rent the movie. If I had been looking at this film with the critical eye that it and all other claims of the extraordinary warrant instead of coming to it with a desire to be convinced of something that would make me feel better about my place in the cosmos, I would never have written those things I wrote. In short, I frelling know better.
It's true that quantum physics is revealing amazing, weird, revolutionary things about the universe, about time, and the nature of reality. But this film is only peripherally concerned with that science, misusing it in an attempt to bolster fantastic paranormal/religious convictions, in exactly the same way that, say, creationists have often misinterpreted thermodynamics as evidence of Divine Creation.
I'm deleting my earlier comments on the film.
More later...
Friday, April 01, 2005
After all these years of writing and publishing and the often outright stupid things people say, I have come to understand that many readers have been taught to be impatient. It's entirely counterintuitive, I know, but that's neither here nor there. High-school teachers, college composition, lit, and "creative writing" professors, all of them, they've sold readers on some stripped-down, minimalist, post-modern school of prose. They've led readers to think that anything with a voice is "overwritten," that the presence of style is "pretentious," and suchlike. I am happy to disappoint, though, sometimes, I do get tired of hearing it, all the crap people have heard, that they've scribbled down in notebooks because it might be on the test, because it might help them get published, because someone else said it, someone with authority, because they'll have need to parrot it back in the future so that other people will think they're oh-so-erudite, and Heaven forbid one should think for his- or herself.
Just something annoying I woke up with, like bees inside my skull.
Okay. So, announcements first. Well, second. I will not be attending the 2005 World Horror Convention after all. I know that I've probably gotten a reputation as the writer most likely not to appear at a con that she's said she'll be attending, but it can't be helped (it never can). I'm two months behind on Daughter of Hounds, have the erotica collection to finish, a bunch of editing, work for Marvel, a chapbook to put together to accompany To Charles Fort, With Love, and there's just no time. Back late last year, when I decided to attend, the novel was on course, going well, and I thought I'd have the time. My apologies to anyone who's attending with thoughts of meeting me. Maybe next time. These days, truthfully, I'm having a lot of trouble justifying the inconvenience and expense of conventions. I'm not sure how some writers do it, attending all the big cons every year. These things are expensive, between travel, hotels, con registration, and all sorts of miscellaneous expenses. Only rarely, as was the case with Fiddler's Green, is a con willing to foot the bill. Cons always wind up costing me somewhere between $500 and $1,000, and I rarely ever enjoy the damned things. I mean, it's nice meeting readers, and I enjoy doing readings, but I hate sitting on panels — the same panels they've been doing since I started appearing at cons in 1994. I hate being in wonderful cities, but not having time to explore, even though I'm the one paying to be there. In the future, I have decided, I shall only be attending cons that are willing to cover the expense of my being there. There are just too many things I'd rather spend money on.
The talk with Liz Scheier, my new editor at Penguin, went well yesterday. What else about yesterday? Not much. I tried to write and didn't. I need to spend the weekend working on something for Marvel. I feel like there's just no getting back into this novel, between the other projects and the difficulties I'm having with the book.
I definitely should not have decided to kick my Ambien habit at the same time I decided to give up meat. But I'm doing it. It sucks, but I'm doing it.
I got the Nebari.net "winter special," Prophecy uploaded last night. Just click here, unless you don't like blue gore and naked aliens. I'm very pleased with these little stories. Sometimes they please me more than the "professional" stuff. I do these just for me. They only have to make me happy. No one gets to tell me anything should be any other way than the way I want it. I don't have to listen to anyone whine about how it ought to be and then worry that, for my own well-being, maybe I should listen to them. Frell them. This one's just for fun. I remember a time, long, long ago, when it was all fun, the writing. Anyway, at this point, we have three seperate Nar'eth narratives going — "The Girl Who Sold the World," the prose story that deals with Nar'eth's escape from the Velbidar; the manga written and drawn by Leh'agvoi, set many years later, which deals with Nar'eth meeting Syraeyn; and now this story which begins with Prophecy and will lead to Nar'eth being reunited with her two-thirds sister, Tai'lah. It's complicated, probably confusing, entirely devoid of exposition, and I like it that way.
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