Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Addendum 2: It has been a terrible, hectic day, and I just want to lie down in some room where there are no computers or television screens. But I wanted to post one last update for the day regarding Poppy. I still have not reached her, and I don't think Christa has either. Calls just aren't getting through, which isn't surprising. I will keep trying, though. I know she's okay, but I'd really feel a lot better if I could hear her voice. When I do speak with her, whenever that is, I'll let you know.
Thanks to everyone who sent me leads regarding possible help with the animals she had to leave behind. I passed all the relevant information along to noahswish.org, and I have just received the following reply:
I have forwarded your request to our people in the field and they will do the best they can. Our thoughts are with you and your friend.
— Dianne Montague
But I don't want anyone getting their hopes up. I've been told that the Humane Society will not be permitted to enter NOLA for the purpose of rescuing animals, and I doubt that Noah's Wish will have any better luck. Speaking with people today and reading posts and comments, I got the impression that a lot of folks online just don't comprehend the severity of the disaster that has struck the city. There's virtually no way in or out. Those people still there will die if they aren't evacuated soon. The water is still rising. I watched a video clip today of the moat that has formed around the Superdome, and there was a man wandering aimlessly through the filthy water, shirtless and dazed, clearly exhausted. It was a terrible, heart-breaking sight, and it seemed, for me, to bring this whole thing down to a single, terribly clear point, though I can't seem to put it into words.
Addendum 1: I'm getting lots and lots of inquiries about whether or not I've spoken with Poppy since the storm hit. No, I've not. Christa and I have been trying to get through on her cell, but the networks are either swamped or down. Darren did speak with her late on Sunday, I believe. I've also been trying her mother's home number, but I'm getting a recording that the lines are out. Given that she's in southern Mississippi, it may be some time yet — days, maybe weeks — before any of us can reach her, but I will keep trying, and if I get through, I promise that I'll let everyone know.
I've also been asked by a number of folks to notify the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries about the animals trapped in her house, because someone seems to have gotten word that they've begun rescuing pets. I've not been able to confirm this yet, that such rescues are happening, and it may be difficult or impossible to do so because there are no phones in NOLA, but we're looking into it, anyway. I'm a little skeptical that there's presently much of an effort being made to rescue animals, given that so many people remain to be rescued and resources are stretched beyond the limit. But there's always hope, and I'll find out what I can.
I woke this morning, hoping that during the night that Army engineers would have been successful in their efforts to plug the breach in the Lake Pontchartrain levee. But they haven't, and water continues to pour into New Orleans.
This morning on Good Morning America, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said, "The National Guard has been dropping sandbags into it, but it's like dropping it into a black hole." She has ordered the city completely evacuated, and Mayor Ray Nagin has said (also on Good Morning America), "We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in." With tens of thousands of people remaining in the city, it's hard to imagine exactly how this evacuation is going to proceed. The numbers I've seen claim that 80% of the city's population left before the storm, but that seems like an excessively optimistic figure, with 20,000 still trapped in the Superdome alone. There are plans to house 40,000 refugees in the Houston Astrodome, people who will be evacuated to Texas by a bus convoy. It's a nightmare, a disaster of proportions I've not seen hit the US in my lifetime, I don't think. And in the flood of information from the internet, newspapers, and television, some of which in contradictory, it's very difficult to figure out exactly what's going on.
I just heard that it's presently 97F in New Orleans.
Once again, I urge you to please donate whatever you can to the American Red Cross (financial contributions to the Red Cross are tax deductible), which is already housing and feeding tens of thousands of people across the Gulf Coast. This things going to get a whole lot worse before it starts getting better.
Also, you may wish to donate to the Humane Society's Disaster Relief Fund. Protecting and controlling the countless numbers of animals, both wild and domestic, displaced and orphaned by Katrina is important not only for the sake of the animals, but is also important as a means of controlling disease in the wake of the storm.
An effort is underway, headed by Amber Van Dyk, to raise money for Poppy, who was forced to leave many pets behind when she left New Orleans on Sunday afternoon. It goes without saying that she has been devastated by this storm. The fate of her pets and her home is unknown and will likely remain unknown for many weeks to come Like me, like most writers, she's not a wealthy person, and I can't imagine how she's going to recover from this. You can find out more by following this link. Poppy is extremely dear to me, and if you can help, I ask that you please do. Donations will be made directly to her PayPal account, as I understand it.
How do I even talk about the writing after all that? I guess I just do, that's how.
I did another 1,337 words on Chapter Eight of Daughter of Hounds yesterday. The first six hundred or so were among the hardest I've done yet for this novel, but then, an especially difficult scene bested, things got much easier. I spent another hour and a half last night working on a cover for the Little Damned Book of Days chapbook, but came up with nothing usable, so that still has to be done. I read Spooky the first half of Nancy Kress' excellent short story, "Shiva in Shadow," from The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Second Annual Collection. Then she read to me from a number of NOLA blogs, including some chilling accounts from people who escaped before the storm hit. I fell asleep to The Return of the King. Jackson's LotR trilogy has become my new comfort film.
Okay. That's enough for now. I gotta write.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Addendum 2: I just got through to my mother, finally. They'd been without power and telephone service (including cell) since yesterday, and much of Birmingham still has no electricity or phone service. But, as she said, compared to the horrific and deteriorating situation in New Orleans and the destruction in Gulfport and Biloxi, they came through Katrina unscathed. So, yes, I'm fine and my family's fine, even if we're all somewhat shaken. Regardless, I may still be heading out to Birmingham late this week, as soon as I finish this chapter. It's one thing to hear someone's voice and be told they're okay and another thing to see for yourself. I'm going to try to reach Poppy tonight, but given that 80% of Mississippi is without electricity and the phones lines are wrecked and cells are jammed, I really don't expect that I'll succeed.
Anyway, I still have work to do tonight. I had dinner in front of the television, trying to catch up on the news. To say that the situation in New Orleans is grim would be a terrible understatement. Once again, I urge people to donate blood or money to the American Red Cross. It's probably about the best thing you can do at this point.
Addendum 1: As anyone who's been trying to learn more about conditions in New Orleans knows, the information presently coming out of the city is patchy and sometimes confusing and contradictory. This morning I said that New Orleans was under martial law, which is what MSNBC was reporting at the time. I heard it said repeatedly on television before I posted it here. But now it seems that only Jackson Parish is currently under martial law, not the entire city. I have no wish to add to the confusion.
I still have not ben able to reach my mother in Birmingham.
I'm trying hard not to watch the news, the devastation of New Orleans. One official has described the city as "a nuclear holocaust without the radiation." Martial law has been declared, and at this hour, there are no civil rights in the city of New Orleans. There's also no electricity, no drinking water, and no sewage. The evacuation continues, though now there are fears it may not be possible to get everyone out of the city. Mayor Nagin has confirmed that overnight a 200-ft. wide breach opened in the levee holding back Lake Ponchartrain "at the city's 17th Street Canal — near the city's center." He has also been quoted as saying, "We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater, with some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet." (quotes via CNN.com). And the water's still rising. I am so grateful that Poppy got out on Sunday afternoon, that's she's safe in Mississippi, but...what the hell do you say at moments like this? That beautiful city. All those people. And that's just New Orleans. There's still Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile. Fuck. I haven't talked with my mother in Birmingham since yesterday afternoon. I haven't been able to get her on the cell or landline. I'm sure she's safe, but it worries me, nonetheless. Here in Atlanta, it's still a little windy (gusts up to 26 mph) and some of the last cloud bands are racing across the sky. We had tornadoes yesterday, to the south, east, and north of the city. Carroll County seems to have been especially hard hit. If you're able to contribute to the American Red Cross, I urge to please do so now.
I spoke with Harlan last night. He'd been trying to contact me and Poppy, to be sure we were okay.
As for writing yesterday, it went better than on Sunday. I did 1,190 words on Chapter Eight and stumbled into an Unexpected Scene (which happens to me too, too often). There were numerous interruptions, but I wrote through them. Proofreading from Subterranean Press arrived (my two stories for the second issue of Subterranean magazine), which I have to get to tomorrow. I spoke with Bill Schafer, and it seems I somehow neglected to do the cover I'd said I would do for the Little Damned Book of Days chapbook that's being offered with the limited edition of To Charles Fort, With Love, and so I have to get to that after I write today.
But it's hard to think of much of anything but New Orleans...
Monday, August 29, 2005
Addendum: Unfortunately, it's become necessary for me to pull out of Dragon*Con this year. Birmingham's in the path of Katrina, and my mother has asked me to be free to make the trip should she need me later in the week. I want to apologize to everyone who might have been planning to attend my signings or reading this weekend. I really wanted to be there. This would have been my twelfth consecutive Dragon*Con (my first was way back in 1994, the year before my first short-story publication). There are friends who I only get to see at Dragon*Con. Anyway, I'll be back next year, if they'll have me.
The rain began here three or four hours ago.
Most of yesterday afternoon and last night were given over to worrying about what Katrina would and wouldn't do, about whether or not this would be the time that the "worst-case scenario" was finally realized, and, mostly, about Poppy. I was tremendously relieved to learn that she'd gone north to her Mom's in Mississippi, though I know how hard it must have been for her to leave the house and most of her pets behind. I'd be hard pressed to do it myself. I slept on the living-room floor with the Weather Channel on. I almost headed for my mother's house in Leeds yesterday. They're going to catch a pretty good measure of the storm later on, but she wanted me to stay here. So, here I stay. I urge everyone who can to make a donation to the American Red Cross. It's still unclear how much damage has been done to New Orleans, but I think it's safe to say that things are going to be bad.
Needless to say, not much was written on Chapter Eight of Daughter of Hounds yesterday. I managed only 527 words. It was the distraction, but it was also the difficulty of this present scene.
I got an e-mail from a fan in Portugal this morning, who mentioned his friends' inabiliy to access my website from school, which had blocked the site because of the nude photo of me on the front page. I'd really never even considered this. It's not like you can even see any of the naughty bits.
Spooky and I took a break from the Weather Channel last night long enough to watch the premiere episode of Rome on HBO. It was good, though I expect it will get better after a few episodes. I was annoyed at the frelling British accents. I know there's a time-honoured tradition of presenting Romans and Greeks with Brit accents, but it would have surely heightened the reality of the story if, in this respect, there could have been more of an attempt at historical accuracy.
Okay, well, I know this is a rather thin entry, but my mind is elsewhere, and I have pages to write.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Yesterday, I wrote for five hours and somehow managed only 1,002 words on Chapter Eight. This chapter...it's a nightmare in more than one sense. It begins in utter pandemonium, and yesterday, finally, after a long prologue and seven chapters, after 98,823 words, the two narrative threads collided one into the other, and I was faced with the fact that there would no longer be Emmie chapters and Soldier chapters. There would now be, instead, Emmie and Soldier chapters. And because the two things have felt a bit different, I'm faced with having to manage this new, third flavour. The Emmie and Soldier chapters will not taste quite the same as the rest of the book. They can't. And everyone who's read it is saying that this is the best novel I've written so far, and now I have to be afraid that it's all going to unravel as the two protagonists try to cope not only with the difficulties of their situations, but also with one another. Yesterday has been, almost without a doubt, the most grueling day I've spent on this book.
With luck, Chapter Eight will be done late on Wednesday (the 31st), and I'll be left with only the final two chapters. That means I'm maybe 30,000 words from The End. But I feel like it's not going to be a dash to the finish line, it's going to be a frelling crawl over gravel and broken bottles.
I do not deal well with "action scenes." And this book has a lot more of what is traditionally thought of as "action scenes" than I'm used to writing. The Five of Cups was full of action scenes, and when I was done with that book I declared I didn't want to write books with lots and lots and lots of action and set out to write other sorts of books instead. Silk was my noble endeavor to avoid those dreaded sequences that are dominated more by the external motion of the fictive world than the internal state of the characters. Threshold slipped back the other way, and people seemed to like it, so I allowed Low Red Moon to be even more "kinetic," and the slippery slope has led me to the last three chapters of this book. There's fire. There's lots of fire. There's rape and hand-to-hand combat and guns and blind flights through tunnels and people having to shout to be heard over the general hullabaloo. There's chaos and confusion. And I have to make you see it. I have to make you hear it. I cannot allow the cacophony to deafen you.
Yet, for all the unease and discomfort it is currently causing me, I love this story and its characters, perhaps more than I have ever loved one of my own novels.
And hey, how bad can things be when there seems to be a nearly invisible universe of real supersymmetric particles surrounding us? All bow before the mighty and wobbly muon — this is drad stuff.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Yesterday, I did 1,214 words on Chapter Eight of Daughter of Hounds. It was the sort of writing day where I had to pay the stunt men overtime, what with all the fire and smoke and violence. It was the sort of scene that left me feeling like I'd not done nearly as good a job of transferring the movie in my head into text. Too many things to see. To smell. To taste. To touch. To many thoughts. And too much movement. That sort of day. That sort of action. Hopefully, readers will disagree with me. Soldier and George Ballou and a bonfire deep below Woonsocket. I go back there today.
Better sleep last night, so my head's a little clearer.
This particular new Age of Me is a daunting place/time to be.
We had this goofy idea that Kid Night this week would be devoted to the Big Dumb SFish Action Films that so dominated box offices in the mid and late nineties, and we finally settled on Independence Day (1997) and the 1998 American version of Godzilla. But we only made it, barely, through Godzilla, which was much longer and even dumber than I remembered it being — at least a third again longer than any Godzilla movie has a right to be. Afterwards, I somehow stoically ignored Yuna and Rikku and Paine and played three straight hours of Darkwatch. On the one hand, the graphics are a little behind the times and the supporting cast is annoying, but, on the other hand, it's still a very entertaining game. Sort of Underworld and Vampire: The Masquerade meets a spaghetti western. Fast-paced, gory, spooky sound FX, campy monsters, responsive controls. I like it. Story mode is apparently quite short, so I expect the finish it in only another day or two, then it's back to Spira.
There's a new chapter of Boschen and Nesuko online, but I've not had a chance to read it yet.
Before I start making the day's doughnuts, the platypus I direct you to the eBay auctions. Bid or buy. Either way. Thanks. Cause, I gotta tell you, the platypus is looking a little ragged.
Friday, August 26, 2005
I think I might have slept five hours. I got in a few good hours before six a.m. Well, except for my eyes, which seem to still be sleeping, and I don't want to wake Spooky to get my glasses out of the bedroom. So, I shall just have to squint and make do. I wonder if there are any statistics on how long it takes to die of sleep deprivation?
I did manage to make a start of Chapter Eight of Daughter of Hounds yesterday. I did 1,352 words, after reading over the last bits of chapters 6 and 7 (and, as was inevitable, making numerous changes). It's an odd start, but I suppose that should come as no surprise. Emmie going from here to there, or from there to here, and passing a lot of distracting might-have-beens in the process. And now I have brought my two main characters, Emmie and Sailor, at last, to the same place and time, here on ms. page 445. Oh, how the critics shall complain about how long that took. Also, Spooky's making me a very witchy new black dress for Dragon*Con, and we ventured out into the humidity to get the right trim at a marvelous fabric shop, where I gawked at peculiar buttons, framed photographs of drag queens, and bolts of cloth that sell for $125 per yard. I thought the latter should be under protection of lock and key and rabid guard dog, not right out in the open where nixars like me can lay their grubby palms upon it. I think the cloth for my dress was only about $3 a yard.
I've been wanting to quote something from Fritz Leiber's 1944 essay on Lovecraft, and I suppose now's as good a time as any:
The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft's writings than that stemming from its tremendous distances and its highly probable alien and powerful nonhuman inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," man can hardly bear the realisation that "the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness." In his personal life Lovecraft met the challenge of this hideous realisation by taking refuge in...myths, not because they are true, but because man's mind is habituated to them and therefore finds in them some comfort and support. Recognising that the only meaning in the cosmos is that which man dreams into it, Lovecraft treasured beautiful human dreams, all age-worn things, and the untainted memories of childhood.
Cross reference this with the bit of Jung I quoted on the 22nd, and Ursula K. LeGuin's comments on that which is true versus that which is factual (in The Language of the Night), and you have something very close to my current view of the universe. I would amend Leiber's quote to allow for non-human terrestrial and extraterrestrial minds which also dream meaning into the meaningless universe. All this speaks rather well to my recent thoughts and writings on magick and myth and religion. Again and again, I find myself envying those who actually believe the myths which I can only concede are true, not factual.
But there are always wonders — that which my mind perceives as wonderful — to momentarily distract me from the void. For instance, my thanks to David Lemoine for sending this link to a composite film clip of the Martian dust devils I mentioned on the 24th. It's almost too wonderful for words.
If you've any money left after your latest visit to the gas pumps, please have a look at our current eBay auctions. Thanks.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
First, this wonderful quote from Setsuled: We are living in the Hanna-Barbara era of sexiness. Mass-produced images of scantily clad crashing bores bully their way into the limelight, while only the lucky find out about quality art and porn....All hail the lazy, horny prude. Ah, but at least, in this Dark Age of the Corporate Whore Child, we have the web, where one can find something as strange and wonderful as this (behind the cut, because it's not worksafe — click here if you're not on LJ).
Meanwhile, there was yesterday, most of which I spent putting together the cover for Subterranean Press' chapbook of The Merewife prologue. I began with a photograph of a cave bear skull that I took years ago, and one of Spooky's photos of a half moon, spent a couple of hours in Photoshop and came out with something appropriate that I liked. I considered adding some visual reference to the Midgard Serpent, but was afraid the cover might become too busy. Sometimes, it's nice to work with images instead of words (though, when I work with words I'm primarily concerned with translating them from images into words and back into images). I didn't get Chapter Eight started. Hopefully, I shall today. The book has finally reached that point where all the parallel narrative lines are converging — the stories of Soldier, Emmie Silvey, and the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles. Fire and demons and vast underground spaces. Ghouls and temporal contrarities and a blizzard in Rhode Island. It's a little intimidating, stepping back into all that. But The End is close now, only weeks away.
We took a long walk after sunset last night. At this point, these walks are probably the only thing keeping me from complete physical disintegration. We walked through Freedom Park and watched the bats. We have begun to take great delight in the local Myotis population. We spoke with familiar cats. With the sun down, the heat had abated (though not the humidity). There were jogging yuppies, happy-to-be-out dogs, streetlights, the shadows beneath old trees, dragonflies, and a vacant lot (with piles of flagstones shrouded in kudzu and honeysuckle) that someone had imprisoned behind a chain-like fence. It was a regular adventure.
Final Fantasy X-2, which I am at least as addicted to at this point as I have ever been addicted to a video game, has me running around all of Spira rescuing wayard cacti so that the Cactuar Nation can be saved from a particularly nasty fiend. I look at it this way — FF X-2 is helping to teach me whimsy; to look at it any other way can only lead to madness. Also, I seem to have developed a taste for manga. Last night, when I went to bed, I read Volume 1 of Sang-Sung Park's The Tarot Cafe (TokyoPop), which I quite liked. The girl-boys (this is way beyond androgeny) are delicious. And I was amazed that the intended audience for this book is 13+, but amazed in a good way. In a mere 176 pages,The Tarot Cafe managed to get in bestiality, masochism, homosexuality, and love dolls. Wow. Maybe there is hope for the future, after all!
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Addendum: So — tah dah! — MDS #2 is spoken for. I'll post photos when it's finished. We'll not be offerring #3 until sometime in September, but note that we currently have copies of Silk for only $10, plus The Five of Cups, PCs of the lettered edition of In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, the Low Red Moon hardback, and The Dry Salvages. Bid or buy. Just click here. Books will be personalized upon request.
It's been a long day. I think I shall go lose myself in a couple of hours of Final Fantasy X-2.
These days, I can't keep up with the amazing images flooding in from other worlds. Titan. Enceladus. Saturn. And this new one from Mars, the place I'm most sorry I'll never be able to visit, except via photographs (behind the cut or, if you're not reading this on LJ, click here).
An image like that is almost enough to make up for the wars and waste and hate and stupidity. It's enough to keep me moving.
There's so much work to be done at the moment that I'm not sure where to begin. I have to get back to Daughter of Hounds, to Chapter Eight, but now it seems that may not happen today. I've promised Subterranean Press I'll do the cover for The Merewife chapbook myself, so that's probably what I ought to do today. The editing on "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" (Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth) is finished. There's another enormous editing job waiting to be done. There are stories that need to be written. If you stare directly at this stuff too long, you'll go blind, and nothing will get written.
A new round of auctions on eBay. Since the lettered edition of Wrong Things didn't sell (and what the frell's with that, anyway?), Monster Doodle Scuplture #2 is now being offerred with the copy of "The Worm in My Mind's Eye" chapbook that is currently up. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go slay a few vowels...
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
A hectic and round-about sort of day, and I still have a proposal that I ought to write this evening after dinner. I spoke with my agent this afternoon, and she is indeed extremely pleased with Daughter of Hounds, which she declares to be unlike anything else I've written. She assured me that the two independent and converging narrative threads are not a problem, and that my ability to write children is more than sufficient to the challenge of this story. We talked about my having been asked to write a 150K book instead of a 200K book, and I admitted that it has probably made the book much better by forcing me to focus on Emmie Silvey and Soldier and keep Deacon and Sadie in the background. That was never my publisher's intent. They were only worried about having to charge more for a longer novel (not an unreasonable concern). But, the way I see it, it doesn't matter what their intentions were, so long as the end result is a book that I'm happier with.
We saw a truly marvelous film last night, The Fast Runner (2001), based on an Inuit legend. I recommend this one highly, if you can find it.
I hope to begin Chapter Eight tomorrow.
So, there's fourteen hours and thirty-seven minutes remaining on the Wrong Things auction. And I'll say straight out, if this one goes for the starting bid, someone's going to get a bargain. To reiterate: Spooky has added a PC ("presentation copy") of the lettered, leatherbound edition of mine and Poppy's collaborative short-fiction collection, Wrong Things (Subterranean Press, 2001). The book sold out quite a while ago. This copy comes in a sturdy traycase, signed by both Poppy and me (and I'll personalize it if the winner so desires). It includes my story "Onion," Poppy's "The Crystal Empire," and our collaboration, "The Rest of the Wrong Thing," along with an afterword I wrote and full page B&W illustrations and endsheets by Richard Kirk. Plus, I've decided to offer Monster Doodle Sculpture #2 with this auction, so you'll not only get the book, you'll get one-of-a-kind, squirming, three-dimensional terror from beyond the stars, to boot! Click here to bid or buy it now. Though long out of print, we're beginning this auction at the original cover price for the lettered edition. Plus, we'll even throw in free shipping on this auction. The platypus is feeling generous.
Good news from my agent, Merrilee, today. She's read the first seven chapters of Daughter of Hounds and loves it. She's calling early tomorrow afternoon, and we'll swap questions. But it was a huge relief, her enthusiasm regarding this particular book.
Monday, August 22, 2005
In "Approaching the Unconscious" (in Man and His Symbols, 1964), Carl Jung wrote:
As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isloated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional unconscious identity with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missle. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great daemon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with that has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connexion supplied.
Jung seems ever on my mind these days. That often happens as I approach the end of a novel. But, in this instance — this instance having begun about this time last year — it seems to extend beyond the relationship between me and the novel. I'm drifting away from something, some paradigm of self-identity that no longer quite fits me, towards some Unknown. I am not so alien that I do not instinctually fear the Unknown. But it's one thing to fear something, and it's another to shy away from something you need because you fear what it may represent or the simple fact of its unfamiliarity. Or the fact that it will necessarily entail Change. In my June 21st entry, I wrote, A new Age of Me has begun. Which is a very odd thing to type, especially in a public place. But it's true. Two months later, it's still true. I'm in the first days of a new Age of Me, and everything about me is still in that soft, post-molting state. I'm drifting towards some desired reunification between myself and nature, and I appreciate that I may have readers who aren't comfortable with the idea of the "Caitlín" construct as neopagan or pseudo-Wiccan or literary shaman or whatever it is that I'm becoming, half against my will. That makes two of us — you and I, we can share the discomfort.
And the dreams are loud. The dreams are too loud.
And I'm swinging like a pendulum.
But, anyway...
Yesterday, I edited The Merewife. I made a sketch that I thought might become the cover, but I was wrong. I fretted. I also doubted myself repeatedly. On our evening walk, Spooky and I watched spiders that had built elaborate funnel webs in ivy. Then, last night, we watched Kung Fu Hustle, because Neil said it was good, and it is. It's a very charming film. Then I played three hours of Final Fantasy X-2, in which Yuna sang a truly, unabashedly insipid song to unite all of Spira. The music aside, I am enjoying the game immensely. I am addicted. I've reached Chapter Five. The "dark knight" dress spheres are the best so far. Anyway, that was yesterday.
Here are a couple of links that I've been sitting on so long that they've ceased to be "news," in the sense that they are no longer "recent." But not in the sense that they're no longer relevant:
Key Argument for Global-Warming Critics Evaporates
Warming Hits 'Tipping Point'
Okay. I'm gonna go try to find a way to wake up now...
Sunday, August 21, 2005
First things first. It has been brought to my attention that Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu is not responsible for the insipid music in Final Fantasy X-2. On that account I was mistaken. The insipid music for FF X-2 is to be blamed upon Noriko Matsueda and Takahito Eguchi, with additional insipid music by Jade from Sweetbox. It's their fault, not Nobuo Uematsu's. And, for that matter, Ladytron didn't contribute music to The Velvet Goldmine. The moral? One should refrain from being a mouthy bitch when one is not awake. Thanks to Setsuled and Spimby for setting me straight.
So, anyway, yesterday was spent on the afterword for The Merewife prologue. Yes, it's true. I have written a prologue and an afterword with no actual novel in between. How frelling postmodern is that? Hold on. I feel a moment coming on: The pure space between the prologue and the afterword is preserved as a null set, an unstated instance upon which the perceiver may project his or her own unique, individual vision of the transgressive potential only implied by the author. In so doing, Kiernan has demonstrated that the "novel" itself is redundant and that it's position may be occupied by a functional surrogate. I think one reason that I didn't make a career of Academia is that absurdist crap like that last sentence comes to me far too easily. I once ghost wrote the last portion of a friend's Master's thesis, even though I knew nothing of the subject at hand. I didn't need to. I just needed the right Key Words to add to the Appropriate Jargon. Anyway, yes, the afterword for The Merewife is written (1,854 words), and I hope people will find it interesting. I'll do a little editing on the chapbook today, then send it away to Subterranean Press.
There was a wonderful bit in Poppy's journal yesterday, which I think I'll quote (though I'm pretty sure most people who read me also read her, and, to some degree, vice versa):
...I have decided I believe self-indulgent writing is generally of a higher quality, more enjoyable to read, and likelier to touch a chord in readers' hearts than non-self-indulgent writing. It surprises me not at all that most of the people complaining about "self-indulgence" seem to be unpublished writers. I think they'd have a better chance of becoming published writers if they indulged themselves a little rather than diligently doing the things they were taught to do and avoiding the things they were taught not to do in all those writing classes. That's one of the ways you develop a voice.
I think that a new definition of "self-indulgence," relative to authorial actions, has just occurred to me. The "self-indulgent" authors are the ones who have so little respect for The Reader that they keep colouring outside the lines. The hypothetical non-"self-indulgent" author, on the other hand, rightly understands the lines were put there for a reason and that a good piece of fiction is not unlike a paint-by-number portrait of Elvis Presley.
To wit, and speaking of insipid, this comment on the same subject, which I found yesterday:
And thus the writing is correctly labelled "self-indulgent." Because it's the point where the the writer stopped caring about the reader, stopped caring about fulfilling his part of the reader-writer contract...Now, if you're the sort of writer who genuinely doesn't give a damn about the reader, and considers writing to be inherently self-indulgent, then hey, that's cool. Just please ask your publisher to put such a label on your book covers, 'kay? Because I would rather give my money to writers who are at least trying to earn it.
I know this is probably one of those "it's just me" things, but, for my part, there is no frelling "reader-writer contract." I write stories that I feel compelled to write. I write them precisely and only the way that I feel compelled to write them. The good parts — that's me. The lousy parts — that's me, too. When I have written them, I offer them to readers via publishers, readers who, coincidentally, may like what I've done or may despise what I've done. They may even be indifferent to what I've done. Because these stories have arisen from the interplay of my psyche, my experiences, my particular talent, and my own little corner of the collective unconscious, there's no predicting or controlling how reader's will respond. The only contract that exists is between me and my publisher. And if readers respond in the negative, I do not rework what I've done to make them happy, because, near as I can tell, that would defeat the purpose and would make a lie of a possibly flawed and unpopular but nonetheless true thing. I "earn" my income as a writer, such as it is, by writing as best I can, not by catering or pandering or sucking at the teat of popular tastes or whatever. What this person is asking for is "consumer-safe" books. I suspect that they'd like to see money-back guarantees, as well.
Why is it so difficult for some people to understand that there is a difference between "caring about the reader" and pandering to the reader's desires? Could it be, perhaps, at least in part, because their rampant self-importance is clogging up the works? That is, it's not enough for them to simply read a book. They must insert themselves more directly into the process of composition. They must magnify their importance and attempt to so pervert the act of writing that it is being done for them and to their own precise dictates of what is Good and what is Bad. Make no mistake — I want readers, and I am very pleased when someone is pleased with what I have written. But it is precisely because I respect my readers that I will not try to write what I imagine or am told they want to read, 'kay. The "reader-writer contract," indeed.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
My iPod, my ears and I are currently getting happy to Ladytron, one of those bands I kept meaning to track down and listen to, having first encountered their music in The Velvet Goldmine, then again in Party Monster. But I forget dren. I forget lots of dren. Thanks to subtlesttrap for pointing me to the video for "Destroy Everything You Touch" and thereby reminding me of Ladytron just when I needed a bunch of "new" music (as in, new to me). Check out the video (from their forthcoming third CD, Witching Hour). This would make such wonderful music for Final Fantasy X-2 (which I played until about 4 a.m.), instead of that insipid Nobuo Uematsu elevator crap. Yeah, I know that's some sort of unforgivable blasphemy among Final Fantasy fans, but it's also the truth. The music is frelling insipid. Which is fine and all, if you like insipid music. I'd rather be playing Final Fantasy X-2 to the likes of Ladytron, Radiohead, Catherine Wheel, the 5,6,7.8s, Malice Mizer, Smashing Pumpkins, New Order, Lush, The Sugercubes, and various other appropriate but non-insipid music. Anyway...
Not. Enough. Sleep. Not enough sleep in the whole world.
Er...what next. Oh, yeah. Yesterday. Yesterday I was too, too ambitious. We did manage to proof "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" (for Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth) and read all the way through the finished-after-twelve-years prologue for The Merewife. As regards the latter, I think that I'm very happy with how this piece has come out. But it was an odd thing to do, picking these loose threads up after so many years. So, the oddness is making it a little more difficult than usual to judge my work. And speaking of Beowulf, I think Neil posted a link to this cartoon the other day, but I was reminded of it this morning by mapultoid. Like I said, if Yaweh and the Xtians get a spot in American science classrooms, then so do all the other non-Xtian "theories" of "intelligent design," including the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How the holy hezmanna are Aske and Embla any more (or less) absurd than Adam and Eve, I ask you? But. As I was saying. Yes, the prologue for The Merewife is essentially done. A few tweaks left, and today I have to write the afterword (because I only managed to get it started yesterday, not finished), and I've told Subterranean Press that I'll do the cover for the chapbook. Also, I have to attend to the Great Secret today.
I've mentioned T. S. Kuhn something like three times in that past week or two, and it only just occurred to me last night that a lot of people have no idea who T. S. Kuhn is, because they didn't waste a huge portion of their time in college on philosophy of science classes. T. S. Kuhn is the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962, 1970), one of the most influential works on the history and methodology of science in the last few decades. And sometimes that's good. And sometimes it's bad. I've never agreed with a large portion of Kuhn's central thesis, though I spent a great deal of time studying, dissecting, and writing about his work. He's probably the chief reason that the word "paradigm" is so used and abused in Western culture today. Anyway, that's who Kuhn is. I was always much impressed with his concept of "incommensurable worldviews," though more for its implications for language than for scientific revolutions.
Kid night last night. We watched The Fiend Without a Face, a film that would have probably scared the crap out of me as a little kid, but these days I find the brain-sucking brain monsters more adorable than frightening. Afterwards, we watched the Harryhausen classic, The Black Scorpion, which did scare the crap out of me as a small child.
Lastly, let me remind you (and to quote from a previous post): Spooky has added a PC ("presentation copy") of the lettered, leatherbound edition of mine and Poppy's collaborative short-fiction collection, Wrong Things (Subterranean Press, 2001). The book sold out quite a while ago. This copy comes in a sturdy traycase, signed by both Poppy and me (and I'll personalize it if the winner so desires). It includes my story "Onion," Poppy's "The Crystal Empire," and our collaboration, "The Rest of the Wrong Thing," along with an afterword I wrote and full page B&W illustrations and endsheets by Richard Kirk. Plus, I've decided to offer Monster Doodle Sculpture #2 with this auction, so you'll not only get the book, you'll get one-of-a-kind, squirming, three-dimensional terror from beyond the stars, to boot! Click here to bid or buy it now. Though long out of print, we're beginning this auction at the original cover price for the lettered edition.
Friday, August 19, 2005
I got at least seven and a half hours sleep last night, which is the best I've done in a while, and the nightmares were only moderate. Of course, I had to take an Ambien to make it happen, but there you go. I feel better this morning than I've felt in some time. I feel awake, and my head's not so clouded with ghosts. Anyway, a very good writing day yesterday. I did 1,204 words on The Merewife prologue and finished it. The ending is, I believe, very near to what it would have been had I finished it in 1993. Not precisely the same, but, based on the notes I made twelve years ago, not too far afield from what I'd intended. Today, I'll read through the whole prologue with Spooky, do some editing, and write an afterword for the piece. Also, I got the galleys for "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6," yesterday, my contribution to Steve Jones' forthcoming Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth anthology (Fedogan and Bremer, 2005), and I have to proof that, as well. So, this will mostly be a reading day. I'm also going to try to get together a proposal letter for the aforementioned Great Secret. And the Marvel thing isn't dead, for those of you who may be interested. It's coming along. I have said, many times, that the worst part of writing, for me personally, is all the damned waiting. Also, yesterday I finally got around to updating the archives for the Blogger mirror of this journal, so that people who read it from that site may now access every month's entries.
We walked through Freedom Park at sunset yesterday evening. There'd been rain earlier and the grass was wet. We found a tree that had taken a lightening strike yesterday afternoon, but only lost a limb. We found another that had been hit sometime recently and had a great deal of bark stripped away. Back home, we watched Charles Martin Smith's The Snow Walker (2003), based on Farley Mowat's short story, "Walk Well My Brother." I've always had a soft spot for Mowat's work, and the film was quite good. I had a go at Conker: Live and Reloaded, but the game seemed tedious and silly, and I was in the mood for neither platforming nor hungover anthropomorphics and gave up after about forty-five minutes. I believe that I'll stick with Final Fantasy X-2 until I can lay my hands on a copy of Darkwatch.
Part of my brain wants to return to the issues discussed in the recent "This Only Song I Know" entries — accessibility, self-indulgence (sensu stricto and sensu lato), likable characters, the relationship between Reader and Author, and so on and so forth. But another part of me wants to stay clear of all that foolishness entirely. It has so little, I believe, to do with writing. It surely has very little to do with the way that I write. The last two or three weeks, I've been reading the LJs and blogs of a lot of people, some of whom are writers, some of whom would like to be published writers, some of whom are critics, and some of whom aspire to be critics. Stuff I never would have read if I hadn't followed a link back to Gwenda Bond's journal and discovered that someone had misinterpreted my comments regarding Entertainment Weekly as me blaming "consumers" for not buying my books. Since then, I've seen what seems to me many strange comments about writing and literature, things I just can't quite wrap my brain around. For example, readers and writers and various confabulations of the two loudly, proudly proclaiming that they're "middle-brow" readers.
What?
To be fair, I've read some good journals, too, and I've linked to a number of those authors. But, ultimately, for me, none of this has anything to do with writing. I will not become a better writer by obsessing over the informed and not-so-informed opinions of other writers or readers. I will not become a better writer by allowing myself to be distracted. I will be distracted, inevitably, because I'm so easily distracted. But it's better if I at least endeavor to stay focused for the time being. Spending two hours a day responding to accusations of self-indulgence does not get my novels and short stories written, and it doesn't mean that they'll be better written when I last get undistracted again and go back to work. So, I'm trying to sit this out for now. Too much of it seems to come down to the sort of incommensurability that Kuhn wrote about, world-views so opposed that those on one side and those on the other find it almost impossible to communicate. For instance, someone commented that the things I was saying made writing sound more like shamanism than craft, to which I can only respond (as I did in the Bookslut interview last Novemeber) that, for me, writing is absolutely a shamanistic act. But — look what I'm doing here. I'm prattling on about not prattling on about writing. And it's past time to make the doughnuts...
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The writing went well again yesterday. Slowly, but well. I did 682 words on the prologue for The Merewife. With luck, I can finish it today. But the sense of strangeness has not deserted me, the peculiar nostalgia/disquiet I've felt since going back to work on this piece. Like walking around on a ghost ship. I mentioned the Mary Celeste, right? Thought so. Anyway, I am enjoying working on the piece, regardless of nostalgia and disquiet, as it's forcing me to do a sort of writing I've not done in years. These days, I think of my work as occurring at the sentence level. Sentence-level writing. That is, the primary unit of prose construction is the sentence. In '93 (and until about '99-'00, really), my primary unit of prose construction was the word, which I thought of as word-level writing, and that's what I'm doing here in The Merewife, something a little closer to prose-poetry. I have no idea if these terms — sentence-level writing, word-level writing — have any actual counterparts in the ever-shifting jargon of writing workshops and lit crit, but they're nicely descriptive of what I'm doing. So, yes, it's going well. I've slipped in just a little more Norse mythology than I'd expected to — passing mention of the Midgard Serpent, the Aesir, the giant Hraesvelg, etc. — and the proto-god Aegir and his wife (Ran) and daughters (the urdines) were fairly central to one section. This supposes, of course, within the context of the narrative, the existence of the Nordic pantheon prior to and independent of the existence of human beings. The prologue of The Merewife will be released as a chapbook (cover art by me), including the prologue and an afterword explaining the aborted Merewife project, as a freebie to everyone who buys the hardcover edition of Subterranean magazine #2. This will be the "Caitlín R. Kiernan issue" and includes my new sf novella, "Bradbury Weather" (illustrated by Bob Eggleton), along with "Andromeda Among the Stones" (illustrated by Richard A. Rirk) and a 5,000+ word interview (the first "live," i.e., non-email, interview I've given in years). Plus, there will also be fiction by Charles de Lint, Charles Coleman Finlay, Joe Hill, Jack McDevitt, Robert Silverberg, and an autobiographical essay by Michael Bishop. Good stuff.
I had a very long and wonderful conversation with Neil last night, a big, catching-up sort of conversation. Actually, I think the dialogue was a three-way thing, between Neil, his Mini Coop, and me. For all my futurism, I have not quite yet become accustomed to talking cars. We discussed airports, Peking duck, Australia, fame, Beowulf, They Might Be Giants, Kung-Fu Hustle, stalkers, and, because there seemed no way around it, talking cars. So, my rare telephone day of Tuesday bled over into Wednesday.
Currently, I am being tortured by the fact that Darkwatch has been released, but I haven't yet located a copy for rent (and I virtually never buy a game before I've played it).
Also, it would appear that I have a shot at a dream project, something which I expect will be consuming a great deal of my energy the next few weeks, but for now it has to remain a Great Secret.
Head's up. Some of the eBay auctions end this evening — a copy of the limited edition of The Dry Salvages, one of our very few copies of The Worm in My Mind's Eye (really, this one's gonna be pretty much impossible to find before much longer), The Five of Cups, and a copy of the limited edition of Low Red Moon. Tell you what, kiddos. Whoever wins these auctions today will also get a colour monster doodle, one per auction. I'm kind of in the mood to doodle. Of course, whoever winds up with the lettered edition of Wrong Things we also have up will get Monster Doodle Sculpture #2. And I think that after #2 and #3 are auctioned, I may stop selling these for a little while, as I'd like to make a few for close friends.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Addendum: Poppy has been spillin' da beans about our misbegotten youth and the "butt game." But she didn't say anything about the Beavis and Butthead remote control thingy that I got somewhere (and I believe I still have). You'd press a button and some annoying sound fx or idiotic bit of dialog from the show would play. Loudly. When we went to Ireland together in '96, I took it along, and we kept pressing buttons during the flight — "This sucks! Change it!" or Butthead laughing or "I am Cornholio!" or, my favourite, the sound of breaking glass. These days, having a thing like that on an airplane would probably end with permanent incarceration at Guantanamo Bay or Area 51 or something. Also, her post reminded me of the 2002 World Horror Con in Chicago. Darren and I were sharing a room, and one night, after I'd won two IHGs and he'd thrown a big, drunken Gothic.net shindig, we'd gone to bed, the lights were off, and one or the other of us began replacing words in the title of Lovecraft stories with "poo." You know, "The Poo of Cthulhu," "The Shadow Over Poosmouth," "The Colour Out of Poo," "The Haunter of the Poo," etc. and etc., ad nauseum. I think we giggled until one or the other of us almost puked. So, don't ever say I haven't been honest about my propensity to act like a total dumbass. Because I have.
Hey, Poppy. "It's still there."
Anyway, here's a cool new Cambrian thingy (I'm thinking it might be a primitive chordate, like Pikaia from the Burgess Shale). Several people have sent me the link, and I thought I should share.
Last night, we took an extra long walk, and the bats were out again. One snatched a cicada from the air, and the most hideous cacaphony ensued — the muffled scream of a cicada as the bat flittered about overhead, the insect's cries slowly growing fainter and fainter like the engines of a dying jet fighter.
Another good day yesterday. I did 652 words on the prologue for The Merewife. Normally, I'd not consider 652 words a good day, but when it's me trying to write in the exact same voice I was writing in twelve years ago, and when I actually manage to do that, 652 words is perfectly frelling fine. It's quite a strange endeavor, though. When I stopped working on the piece in '93, I left off halfway through a sentence, ending with the word susurrus and creating for myself a sort of literary Mary Celeste. For twelve years, susurrus sat there, unconnected to anything, not really waiting because I never really intended to come back to the story. Just sitting there. Drifting, derelict, incomplete. And then yesterday I finally finished the sentence. The act left me with an odd feeling, one I'm not sure that I can describe more precisely. Anyway, aside from the writing, I managed to read "A Literary Copernicus," Fritz Leiber's essay on Lovecraft, at the instruction of one Derek C. F. Pegritz. Yesterday was also one of my rare telephone days. I talked with Ted Naifeh about a number of things, including Dragon*Con and his girlfriend Kelly's birthday and the illustrations he's doing for the Dancy Flammarion collection, Alabaster. Then I talked with Harlan, and he said, in response to some writerly complaint of mine, some comment on recent difficulties, "Just remember. The trick is not to become a writer. Becoming a writer is easy. The trick is to stay a writer." And then I seemed to play phone and e-mail tag with Neil all day and night long.
Last night, late, we read all the way through The Merewife again, just to be sure it was working. Back in '93, I was writing the piece almost exclusively to Bjork's first solo CD, and that was one of the tricks I used yesterday, to tease my brain back into that long-neglected story-space — I listened to the album, remembering that summer, everything I could recall about that summer, when I still lived in the little apartment on 16th Avenue South in Birmingham. Music has always worked wonders for me as a sort of associational mnemonic tool. Everything that I write sounds like something, because I always write to music. So, strong bonds form between a story and an album, a song and a chapter. In this instance, it allowed me to work backwards and find the feel of the piece again. We also watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and I fell asleep to The Two Towers about 2 a.m., right about the time Merry and Pippin were escaping from the Uruk into Fangorn Forest.
I'd intended to write something more this morning about the whole "self-indulgence" thing, particularly relating to the issue of accessibility and difficult texts, but now I feel like I'd only be squandering energy that's best reserved for writing the part of the story that has to be written today. Perhaps I'll get back to it tomorrow, as there are still a few thoughts on the matter (and related matters) that I'd like to get out. In the meanwhile, I direct you to some very astute comments by Hal Duncan (thanks, Gwenda), who writes:
The real problem is that such shorthand usage is indistinguishable from the sort of commonplace philistine critique of "show-offery" applied to anything which dares to be difficult, to risk incomprehension and resentment on the part of the reader for the sake of ambition. The critic may well be right. The book may be deeply flawed, it's aesthetic balance way off, because the writer's just plain failed to pull off what they were trying to do. But the word "self-indulgent" doesn't communicate that any more than calling the writer a poncy git does. And as an accusation of a lack of self-awareness on the author's part, of selfishness and unfounded pride even, it's about as personal as that sort of name-calling.
I disagree with him on a number of points, but nothing so profound that it prevents me from appreciating this as one of the most articulate and useful entries I've read regarding the Grand Esteemed Recent Controversy.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Addendum: An update on the new eBay auction. Spooky has added a PC ("presentation copy") of the lettered edition of mine and Poppy's collaborative short-fiction collection, Wrong Things (Subterranean Press, 2001). The book sold out quite a while ago. This copy comes in a sturdy traycase, signed by both Poppy and me (and I'll personalize it if the winner so desires). It includes my story "Onion," Poppy's "The Crystal Empire," and our collaboration, "The Rest of the Wrong Thing," along with an afterword I wrote and full page B&W illustrations and endsheets by Richard Kirk. Plus, I've decided to offer Monster Doodle Sculpture #2 with this auction, so you'll not only get the book, you'll get one-of-a-kind, squirming, three-dimensional terror from beyond the stars, to boot!
Even though I didn't really get any writing done, yesterday was, nonetheless, a productive day. I spent the morning dealing with e-mail I'd been putting off, business relating to the Italian edition of Threshold (the IRS has finally admitted to Italy that yes, I am a US citizen, so now I can be paid for the book), and trying to get moving on the completion of the prologue of The Merewife for Subterranean Press. I spent an hour or so transcribing notes from an old notebook into the iBook, which was weird in that then touching now, time-warpy way. Everything's here that I need to finish writing the prologue. I just have to find that story-space in my head after all these years and somehow manage to switch gears from Daughter of Hounds to Neolithic Denmark and Scandanavia without breaking my frelling neck. Of course, next week, I'll just have to switch right back again. I spent most of the afternoon at the Woodruff Library at Emory, tracking down some necessary critical works on Beowulf, a task made much, much easier by the discovery on my hd of a bibliography of sources referred to in my notes, a list I put together back in '93. I have thanked myself for being so scarred by Academia that I would do such a thing and for being such a pack rat that I still have it. I also grabbed Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. We stopped for dinner at a noodle shop on the way home. At dusk, Spooky and I went for a walk and were delighted to find ourselves beneath a flitting canopy of bats — Little Brown Myotis (Myotis lucifugus), I think. A few of them swooped in close enough for us to get a decent look. Afterwards, we watched Fargo, continuing our Coen Bros. feast. I'd only seen Fargo once before, in the theatre. It has to be one of the bleakest films I've ever seen. And that was yesterday.
Today, I write.
I may write tonight, as well. I've been wanting get back to Nar'eth's story for Nebari.net. I can't even recall how long it's been since I posted Chapter 3. A long damn time.
I came across this image somewhere online a few days ago:
There's a story here, relating to a very early influence on my fiction. When I was a small child, perhaps seven or eight, me, my mother, my sister, and my cousin Jenny (who died in 2001), were on our way from Birmingham to Huntsville, where Jenny lived. And she was in the front seat, telling my mother a story that she'd read or heard somewhere about werewolves (my sister and I were in the backseat), a story about the loup-garou in Louisiana. I can only recall scraps of her story: a man who fell in love with a Creole woman, and he'd meet her at night, and one night she revealed to him that she was a werewolf, and showed him a wall where all the werewolves gathered. And then she killed him, or he became a werewolf, I'm not sure which. Hearing that story, told on a bright sunny day, scared me so badly that it's showed up again and again in my work. I think I used it first in July '96, in "Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun" (Tales of Pain and Wonder):
Used to hang pirates from that tree, someone said, and thieves and run-away slaves, just about everyone got hung from that tree, depending on who you happen to ask, or the one about the Storyville lovers: impossible and magic days a hundred years ago when hooking and gambling were legal, Storyville redlight before the whole district was razed for more legitimate corruption: a gentleman gambler from Memphis, or St. Louis, or Chicago, and he fell in hopeless love with a black girl, or a mulattress, under this very tree, except she was a loup-garou and when she finally showed him her real face he went stark raving bugfuck mad. You can still find their initials carved in the trunk, namescars trapped inside a heart, if you know where to look, can still hear her crying if the moon and wind are right. Can still hear the greenstick snap of his bones between her teeth.
I used it again that same summer for a Death's Little Sister spoken-word piece, "Red." Then it shows up, somewhat less literally, in Low Red Moon, in Chapter Seven ("The Forests of the Night") as a werewolf story that Sadie Jasper's told by a librarian (pp. 148-149, Roc edition). And it also had a considerable influence on my approach to the ghouls in Low Red Moon, "So Runs the World Away," "The Dead and the Moonstruck," Daughter of Hounds, and elsewhere. And it just sort of amazes me, the way things echo through time, the way they ripple, little bits of stories overheard that we weave into our own stories. I'm not sure when I first saw the above illustration, but it was after I heard Jenny tell the story to my mother, and I automatically associated the two. I was still just a kid. It fits pretty well with the description of Lovecraft's ghouls in "Pickman's Model," and I see that, like the HPL story, it directly influenced how I've described the ghul in my own stories. If anyone reading this knows the origin of the illustration, I'd love to be told.
Okay. Like I said, today I gotta write. Here I go...
Oh. Wait. Spooky says to tell you that there are new eBay auctions today. Some are only three-day auctions, so don't dilly-dally. Thanks to everyone who took part in the last round!
Monday, August 15, 2005
Well, yesterday was a dramatic improvement upon Saturday. Spooky and I managed to get through all three unread chapters of Daughter of Hounds, chapters 5-7, which came to 34,979 words of proofreading and reading for continuity and suchlike. We finished about 9 p.m., I think, after dinner. There was another thunderstorm at sunset, but it was a milder thing, not the beast that hit us on Saturday evening. After the reading, we watched Alexandra Cassavetes' documentary, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004), on IFC. Wonderful, but it left me with a terrible aching feeling I didn't want to take to sleep with me, so I played about an hour of Final Fantasy X-2. That was yesterday. Mostly, yesterday was reading, Soldier and Emmie, the daughter of the Four of Pentacles and the Bailiff, Odd Willie Lothrop and Saben White.
As for today, I believe I'm going to try to finish the prologue to The Merewife; hopefully, it will take no more than a few days.
The minor controversy over the utility of the term "self-indulgent" in the hands of book reviewers has led me to read a number of comments online, things I'd not have read otherwise, that have left me deeply baffled. I admit that I don't think a lot about writing. It's just something I do. I sit down, and I tell my stories the best way that I know how to tell them. I make decisions that seem logical to me. Later, they may seem illogical, but from wherever I happen to be standing at the time, they usually seem like good ideas. I think, "Well, that was interesting. So, what the hell happens next?" If I have a "method," that's it. The Kiernan What-Happens-Next School of Writing. And while I've not yet landed on someone's bestseller list, I look back on the last twelve years and feel like it's worked pretty well for me, all in all. Yet, I've encountered, in the last few days, very many people who are published or would like to be published who seem obsessed with the process and the mechanics of writing fiction. I'm not saying that they're necessarily wrong to do so, only that it's entirely alien to the way that I write, and I cannot help but look upon it skeptically. I was reminded of what T. S. Kuhn wrote about the incommensurability of pre- and post-revolution scientific theories, that the former truly cannot comprehend the latter and vice versa, that communication between the two is all but impossible. I cannot comprehend breaking the process of writing fiction down into its constituent mechanics in an attempt to get it all just right. And it may be that I'm just not that sort of magician, or that, for me, fiction writing is magic, not science, and I don't believe that any amount of reductionism, reverse engineering, and theorizing can cough up the secret formula the alchemists crave, the stone or elixir that would make bad prose into good prose. You might get lucky a make a golem, but a golem is only a useful facsimile, not the genuine article.
I don't judge a scene or a line of dialog by whether or not it advances the plot, for example. Imagine an edit of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction wherein only dialog that advances the plot was allowed to remain. I don't obsess over the balance of conflict and interaction. I don't generally fret over the possibility that something I do may cause some reader to experience a "disconnect" (what an odious metaphor). I don't think in dramatic arcs. I don't spend a lot of time wondering if the plot is getting lost in description and conversation. To me, this all seems like a wealth of tedious confusion being introduced into an act that ought to be instinctive, natural, intuitive. I want to say, stop thinking about all that stuff and just write the story you have to tell. Let the story show you how it needs you to write it. I don't try to imagine how the reader will react to X or if maybe A, B, and C should have happened by page R. It's not that I don't want the story to be read. I desire readers as much as anyone. But I desire readers who want to read what I'm writing, not readers who approach fiction with so many expectations that they're constantly second-guessing and critiquing the author's every move, book in one hand, some workshop checklist in the other, and a stopwatch on the desk before them. If writing or reading like this seems to work for you, fine. I mean, I've always said that when you find something that works, stick with it. But, for me, it seems as though such an anal approach to creating any art would bleed from it any spark of enjoyment on the part of the artist (not to mention the audience). It also feels like an attempt to side-step the nasty issue of talent, as if we can all write equally well if we only follow the rules, because, you know, good writing is really 99% craft, not inexplicable, inconvenient, unquantifiable talent.
And, also, I came upon an attempt to define the term "self-indulgent" by one blogger as (paraphrase) whenever the author has fallen in love with his or her fiction, when they're laughing at their own jokes. And all I can say in response to nonsense like this is that if an author isn't absolutely, blindly in love with her characters and the story at hand, if there's not a passion for the act or writing behind every word (even in the absence of a love for the act of writing), then you're in the wrong line of work, so to speak. If I don't think my jokes are funny, how the hell could I ever expect anyone else to do so? You think comedians don't laugh at their own jokes? Wrong. Two things keep me coming back to this keyboard day after day after day: 1) the need to pay the bills and 2) a passion for my stories and my characters and the language I've chosen to create them. To imply that this can be accomplished with some remote, dispassionate aplomb is, to me, patently absurd. It might be worse than absurd. It might be pernicious. Yes, I do love my characters. I even love the really terrible ones. And oftentimes this love rightfully blinds me to the subjective criticisms of others or any hope of looking at my own work objectively. It's the high cost of loving the characters, the words, the stories. Does this hurt my fiction? I seriously doubt it. Does it hurt my chances of tailoring my work to appeal to a larger audience, of clicking with the masses, of "satisfying" the largest possible number of people. Yes, undoubtedly. But I'm not really particularly interested in satisfying anyone but myself. And I rarely ever do that, satisfy myself, because I'm my own harshest critic (no, really). Yet, if I took that other route, fiction via formula and strict adherence to method, I'm pretty sure I'd never satisfy myself, or much of anyone else, for that matter. Since I began keeping this journal years ago, I've been very hesitant to hand out advice to aspiring authors, for a lot of reasons. But in this case I feel fairly confident. Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your characters victories — or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead.
But maybe that's just me.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
We've made it through Daughter of Hounds up to Chapter Five. We'd be at Chapter Seven, but yesterday was a total loss, so far as work's concerned. Anyway, today I hope we'll get through another two chapters. If we could do three (and that's very unlikely), we could be done with the reading today or tonight. The length of the chapters makes this difficult, as they're each twelve to fourteen thousand words in length. But reading over the ms. at this stage was a good idea, and I'm glad that we're doing it. Not only am I making tons of line edits and catching various continuity problems, I'm also getting a better feel — perspective, I suppose — for how the novel will climax and conclude.
I've also been going through an old notebook. The one with all the notes I made for The Merewife back in the summer of 1993 (it also has all my handwritten notes for Silk and early issues of The Dreaming. My handwriting was so much better in those days. You could actually read it. These days, I can't decipher my longhand half the time. That was the summer that I bought Pandora, my Mac Color Classic, and I suspect she played a role in the decay of my penmanship. Anyway, the notes are here that would allow me to finish The Merewife prologue more or less as I'd intended to twelve years ago, and subpress has given me the go-ahead. Now the question becomes twofold: a) do I actually have the time for this, and b) can I write in the voice I was writing in more than a decade ago?
The monsoons here in Atlanta continue. We had such a rainfall yesterday that it actually alarmed me. Down the street, the hexagonal sidewalk tiles were lifted free and transported some considerable distance.
I've been gorging on movies. It often happens when my mind is deeply concerned with a novel. I give up reading almost entirely and get my stories exclusively from film. My eyes need the stimulation. My visual cortex aches. My mind is exhausted and needs someone else to make the pictures for me. It's sort of a blur of video tapes and DVDs, but I'm pretty sure it started with The Big Lebowski on Monday night, because I was in a glum, foul mood and the Cohen Bros. almost always lift my spirits. I remember Grosse Point Blank on Thursday night, as well as Raising Arizona, because you can't get too much Cohen. Our Kid Night movies were the charming Quatermaas II (1955) and the perplexing Creature from a Haunted Sea (1961), and then I played something like two-hour's worth of Final Fantasy X-2. At this point, I think I'm 35% through the game. I keep waiting for the scene where Paine's finally had enough giggling and cow-eyed silliness, goes homicidally apeshit and slaughters Rikku, then has her way with Yuna. If I ever reach that scene, I will be a Final Fantasy addict for life. Last night, I was seized with the desire — nay, the absolute necessity — to see Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life. Alas, it's not yet available on DVD, and the VHS is frelling pan-and-scan. It's far to beautiful a film to suffer pan-and-scan, and I'd have only spent the whole time kvetching about the parts of the film I couldn't see. So, we wound up watching Pulp Fiction instead. It was an odd surrogate, at best. I adore the film and have seen it something like umpteen bezillion times (and my thanks to whoever sent me the DVD for my most recent birthday), but Vincent Vega is a poor substitute for Vincent Van Gogh. I think there may be more Cohen Bros. tonight.
We have three auctions ending tomorrow. They include one of the few copies of "The Worm in My Mind's Eye" that we'll be offerring, as well as a PC copy of numbered edition of the increasingly scarce From Weird and Distant Shores. This might be the last copy I sell. I'm not sure. Take a look. Spend some moolah. Anyway, the cicadas are screaming. I gotta go.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
After my most recent part in the ongoing wankery about likable characters and whether or not reviewers/critics who resort to the phrase self-indulgent should be allowed to keep their fingers, I'm feeling a little guilty for actually writing about writing in a blog devoted to my writing. So, as a remedy, I offer Christopher Walken — the next President of these United States. Frell yeah.
Also, here's a little utter foolishness. Though, I suppose Steve Alten (or his agent or publisher) is to be commended for coming up with such an imaginative hoax...er, I mean promotional strategy.
Lately, the things that I've been saying here have been drawing a little more attention and flak in other online journals than I'm accustomed to my entries attracting. It seems to have begun with my entry of July 24th and the remarks I made about a Kirkus reviewer describing Anansi Boys as "self-indulgent," then continued with my remarks on August 7th regarding the value of Entertainment Weekly book reviews and yesterday's response to readers who complain about "unlikable" characters in my books. I have no wish to become involved in some sort of interblog flamewar, but there are some things I'd like to say. To wit, a response to comments made by Catherine M. Morrison, who has incorrectly identified herself as the primary inspiration for what I wrote yesterday (and be aware that there may be spoilers):
And since Ms. Kiernan seems to be responding to my comment in Gwenda's blog where I said I didn't care for Murder of Angels because I found the characters unlikable and the writing self-indulgent, I might as well define what I mean by unlikable because she is missing the boat on what I mean by that too. When I find a character unlikable it generally means that reading them is a chore - usually it means the characters are whiny or self-pitying or boring or something else that makes me want to gouge my eyes out and I have no connection to them at all. And if there is no empathetic resonance with a character, I am not going to care what happens to them.
The attempt to define "likable" is appreciated, though, having read it, I'm pretty sure that I haven't "missed the boat." To begin with, as I have said many times before, I do not believe that a novel should be easy. I believe the reader has the same responsibility to work at the story and the characters and to work at them just as hard as the writer has. I do not write pabulum or pudding. I don't even write oatmeal. It isn't meant for easy ingestion or digestion. I wouldn't have chosen the word "chore," but it's not entirely inappropriate. I do expect my readers to exert themselves, and if that's not the sort of reading experience you're after, then my books aren't intended for you. Now, as to the matter of characters being "whiny or self-pitying or boring," well, again we run up against issues of subjectivity and the difficulty of defining terms, especially with "boring." I can hardly imagine anyone would find Niki or Daria, Walter or Archer dull, but I can hardly imagine a lot of things that people do every single day, so this should come as no surprise. Are they whiny? It's a criticism that has been leveled at my characters many times before. I've been looking back over the first two or three chapters of the novel, and I'm hard pressed to describe either Niki or Daria (or Marvin or much of anyone else ? except perhaps one of the kids at Stonington Cemetery) as whiny.
Are they "self-pitying"? This is a more problematic criticism and not necessarily one that I wish to dismiss. Yes, I would expect that both Daria and Niki are feeling somewhat sorry for themselves. Likewise, Walter and Archer Day. But let's stick with Niki for the moment. Niki has been branded a psychotic and has become a virtual prisoner in her home, and she's well aware that Daria, whom she loves deeply, is slipping away from her. She lives with terrible memories of the experiences that have led to her diagnosis as schizophrenic. For years, her thoughts have been disregarded as delusional. She knows that her partner is cheating on her. And as the novel opens, the horrors from her past have begun to intrude more directly upon her present. So, yeah, I'd imagine that some part of Niki is feeling a little self-pity. Is that a problem? In a society that promotes self-love, isn't it a little one-sided not to recognize the validity of self-pity? I mean, if I can love myself, doesn't it stand to reason that I can also feel sorry for myself, and if my self-love is valid, then can my self-pity not be equally valid? I would say so. I would even say that, in this light, some degree of self-pity (or self-empathy) is quite desirable. I suppose that one might say that Niki's self-pity is an entirely negative emotion if it were to lead her only to inaction.
But it doesn't. Niki not only confronts Daria, she sets about trying to return to the source of her trauma in order to confront her fears. In Chapter Two ("Wolves We All Can See"), Niki Ky is at last taking charge of her life again, wresting that control from the people who have taken it from her, and setting off on a personal journey that, from my point of view, would require almost unimaginable courage. She believes she's preparing to face monsters, both real and metaphorical, and I would say that part of her motivation arises from recognizing how badly she's been treated by those who either mistakenly believe they're acting in her best interest or who have come to see her as an inconvenience and an embarrassment. Niki Ky may feel self-pity, but she most assuredly isn't wallowing in it. Now, does this make Niki "unlikable"? I can't say, as "likability" is highly subjective and not something a writer should be thinking about (much less worrying about) while writing a novel. In short, whether or not a novel's characters are "likable" is a moot issue as regards the worth of any novel. Novelists are not here to serve up likable characters. Okay. Enough of that. Let's talk about self-indulgence for a moment. Ms. Morrison writes:
Ms. Kiernan does something I particularly dislike when framing her argument. She basically says "If X means Y, it's silly for a critic to complain about Y because it's intrinsic to the nature of writing fiction." (Where X is self-indulgent and Y is "pursuing ones interests".) Except critics clearly don't mean Y when they call a writer self-indulgent. And she knows it. (Because if they were using it to mean what she says it does it shouldn't bother her at all because she's set up a value neutral definition. But it does, so she's clearly pulling a cheat.)
To start with, I have to correct this by stating that my original argument would have defined X as "fiction writing" and Y not as "pursuing ones interests," but as "an inherently self-indulgent act." Of course, I might be splitting hairs here, as writing fiction probably means that one is indulging oneself by pursuing his or her interest in writing fiction. And yes, I do claim that profound self-indulgence is intrinsic to writing, and also to reading, fiction. And, moreover, yes, I would say that it's silly for a critic to object to self-indulgence in fiction, as I have stated the act is necessarily self-indulgent. As I see it, to do so is rather like critiquing a tuna by complaining that it has gills. Have I pulled a "cheat"? No, because I emphatically do not know what a critic means by self-indulgent, unless that critic has bothered to define the term, and, in my experience, they rarely do. So long as the term remains undefined and I am left only with my belief that X (fiction) entails Y (self-indulgence), I am being perfectly honest. I suspect that "when they call a writer self-indulgent" they mean very many things, and often one critic means a thing that contradicts what another critic means. This seems rather obvious. I have come to know something of what Ms. Morrison means by the term. For example, she insists that Tolkien's appendices to The Lord of the Rings are an example of self-indulgence. I wonder what she makes of The Silmarillion, which Tolkien cared about so much more than LotR. Anyway, in the end, as with the word "likable," I find that the term "self-indulgent" is of no particular utility when discussing fiction. It's a sloppy short cut used by reviewers who either aren't sure what they mean or can't be bothered to say what they mean. I kind of suspect it most often means, "this doesn't interest me as much as it interests the author." I also refer you to Matt Cheney, who has some interesting things to say on this subject.
I've had enough of this for one afternoon. I should have been indulging my self-interests and writing. I might have at least managed some rambling nonsense here about Kid Night, blueberry muffins, the sticky weather, feathered Chinese tyrannosaurids, and Final Fantasy X-2. More's the pity.
Lately, the things that I've been saying here have been drawing a little more attention and flak in other online journals than I'm accustomed to my entries attracting. It seems to have begun with my entry of July 24th and the remarks I made about a Kirkus reviewer describing Anansi Boys as "self-indulgent," then continued with my remarks on August 7th regarding the value of Entertainment Weekly book reviews and yesterday's response to readers who complain about "unlikable" characters in my books. I have no wish to become involved in some sort of interblog flamewar, but there are some things I'd like to say. To wit, a response to comments made by Catherine M. Morrison, who has incorrectly identified herself as the primary inspiration for what I wrote yesterday (and be aware that there may be spoilers):
And since Ms. Kiernan seems to be responding to my comment in Gwenda's blog where I said I didn't care for Murder of Angels because I found the characters unlikable and the writing self-indulgent, I might as well define what I mean by unlikable because she is missing the boat on what I mean by that too. When I find a character unlikable it generally means that reading them is a chore - usually it means the characters are whiny or self-pitying or boring or something else that makes me want to gouge my eyes out and I have no connection to them at all. And if there is no empathetic resonance with a character, I am not going to care what happens to them.
The attempt to define "likable" is appreciated, though, having read it, I'm pretty sure that I haven't "missed the boat." To begin with, as I have said many times before, I do not believe that a novel should be easy. I believe the reader has the same responsibility to work at the story and the characters and to work at them just as hard as the writer has. I do not write pabulum or pudding. I don't even write oatmeal. It isn't meant for easy ingestion or digestion. I wouldn't have chosen the word "chore," but it's not entirely inappropriate. I do expect my readers to exert themselves, and if that's not the sort of reading experience you're after, then my books aren't intended for you. Now, as to the matter of characters being "whiny or self-pitying or boring," well, again we run up against issues of subjectivity and the difficulty of defining terms, especially with "boring." I can hardly imagine anyone would find Niki or Daria, Walter or Archer dull, but I can hardly imagine a lot of things that people do every single day, so this should come as no surprise. Are they whiny? It's a criticism that has been leveled at my characters many times before. I've been looking back over the first two or three chapters of the novel, and I'm hard pressed to describe either Niki or Daria (or Marvin or much of anyone else — except perhaps one of the kids at Stonington Cemetery) as whiny.
Are they "self-pitying"? This is a more problematic criticism and not necessarily one that I wish to dismiss. Yes, I would expect that both Daria and Niki are feeling somewhat sorry for themselves. Likewise, Walter and Archer Day. But let's stick with Niki for the moment. Niki has been branded a psychotic and has become a virtual prisoner in her home, and she's well aware that Daria, whom she loves deeply, is slipping away from her. She lives with terrible memories of the experiences that have led to her diagnosis as schizophrenic. For years, her thoughts have been disregarded as delusional. She knows that her partner is cheating on her. And as the novel opens, the horrors from her past have begun to intrude more directly upon her present. So, yeah, I'd imagine that some part of Niki is feeling a little self-pity. Is that a problem? In a society that promotes self-love, isn't it a little one-sided not to recognize the validity of self-pity? I mean, if I can love myself, doesn't it stand to reason that I can also feel sorry for myself, and if my self-love is valid, then can my self-pity not be equally valid? I would say so. I would even say that, in this light, some degree of self-pity (or self-empathy) is quite desirable. I suppose that one might say that Niki's self-pity is an entirely negative emotion if it were to lead her only to inaction.
But it doesn't. Niki not only confronts Daria, she sets about trying to return to the source of her trauma in order to confront her fears. In Chapter Two ("Wolves We All Can See"), Niki Ky is at last taking charge of her life again, wresting that control from the people who have taken it from her, and setting off on a personal journey that, from my point of view, would require almost unimaginable courage. She believes she's preparing to face monsters, both real and metaphorical, and I would say that part of her motivation arises from recognizing how badly she's been treated by those who either mistakenly believe they're acting in her best interest or who have come to see her as an inconvenience and an embarrassment. Niki Ky may feel self-pity, but she most assuredly isn't wallowing in it. Now, does this make Niki "unlikable"? I can't say, as "likability" is highly subjective and not something a writer should be thinking about (much less worrying about) while writing a novel. In short, whether or not a novel's characters are "likable" is a moot issue as regards the worth of any novel. Novelists are not here to serve up likable characters. Okay. Enough of that. Let's talk about self-indulgence for a moment. Ms. Morrison writes:
Ms. Kiernan does something I particularly dislike when framing her argument. She basically says "If X means Y, it's silly for a critic to complain about Y because it's intrinsic to the nature of writing fiction." (Where X is self-indulgent and Y is "pursuing ones interests".) Except critics clearly don't mean Y when they call a writer self-indulgent. And she knows it. (Because if they were using it to mean what she says it does it shouldn't bother her at all because she's set up a value neutral definition. But it does, so she's clearly pulling a cheat.)
To start with, I have to correct this by stating that my original argument would have defined X as "fiction writing" and Y not as "pursuing ones interests," but as "an inherently self-indulgent act." Of course, I might be splitting hairs here, as writing fiction probably means that one is indulging oneself by pursuing his or her interest in writing fiction. And yes, I do claim that profound self-indulgence is intrinsic to writing, and also to reading, fiction. And, moreover, yes, I would say that it's silly for a critic to object to self-indulgence in fiction, as I have stated the act is necessarily self-indulgent. As I see it, to do so is rather like critiquing a tuna by complaining that it has gills. Have I pulled a "cheat"? No, because I emphatically do not know what a critic means by self-indulgent, unless that critic has bothered to define the term, and, in my experience, they rarely do. So long as the term remains undefined and I am left only with my belief that X (fiction) entails Y (self-indulgence), I am being perfectly honest. I suspect that "when they call a writer self-indulgent" they mean very many things, and often one critic means a thing that contradicts what another critic means. This seems rather obvious. I have come to know something of what Ms. Morrison means by the term. For example, she insists that Tolkien's appendices to The Lord of the Rings are an example of self-indulgence. I wonder what she makes of The Silmarillion, which Tolkien cared about so much more than LotR. Anyway, in the end, as with the word "likable," I find that the term "self-indulgent" is of no particular utility when discussing fiction. It's a sloppy short cut used by reviewers who either aren't sure what they mean or can't be bothered to say what they mean. I kind of suspect it most often means, "this doesn't interest me as much as it interests the author." I also refer you to Matt Cheney, who has some interesting things to say on this subject.
I've had enough of this for one afternoon. I should have been indulging my self-interests and writing. I might have at least managed some rambling nonsense here about Kid Night, blueberry muffins, the sticky weather, feathered Chinese tyrannosaurids, and Final Fantasy X-2. More's the pity.
Friday, August 12, 2005
I have always assumed that reading works something like this: A reader approaches a novel or short story with a desire to be removed from the here and now. They wish, at least for the duration of the story, to be transported elsewhere and to visit the minds of other people. They wish to see things they would not likely see in the course of any given day. One of the things I long assumed about reading, based on my own reactions to books and those of people I knew and talked about books with, was that reading was, in part, a vicarious way of expanding the scope of one's life. Indeed, art in general, I have always believed, is a means of giving one's "soul" (for lack of a better word) breathing space, a tonic against the confining strictures of the day-to-day and the limitations of what we are each capable of experiencing directly. In the closing lines of her poem, "Renascence," Edna St. Vincent Millay writes:
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, —
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
Being an atheist, or at least strongly agnostic, I don't interpret "God" literally, in this instance. Rather, I interpret it, for my purposes, as epiphany and transcendence of mind/spirit. And, for me, the poem has always been about the triumph of imagination over the soul-crushing weight of the mundane. Now, with this mind, perhaps it's a little easier to understand why I often find myself so entirely perplexed at the reactions of some readers to literature which leads them away from the ordinary and attempts to expand their concepts of reality and humanity and so forth and so on. And I'm not only talking about the inability or reluctance of some readers when it comes to fantastic or speculative literature. This applies just as well to the work of writers who don't dabble in alternate worlds. Sometimes, I think that the most alien thing to mankind is mankind itself. The real aliens live next door or across the border or somewhere overseas. Each man and woman defines the world about them, creating a set of those things which they consider "normal" and "good" and "evil" and "sympathetic" and "likable," and these are damned indomitable walls. They are high and thick, and it is the task of the writer to penetrate or scale them. To break in. To shatter preconceptions. To force people to rethink cherished opinions and prejudices.
Yesterday, I ran up against the "sympathetic character" block again. It will never cease to throw me, I think. The thought of finding characters unlike me off-putting is too foreign to my way of reading for me to comprehend this. In this case, readers who approached Murder of Angels and found daunting a fantasy wherein the two protagonists are an emotionally distant, philandering musician with a serious drinking problem and her suicidal, impulsive girlfriend who has been led to believe that she's schizophrenic by a world that can't accommodate her perceptions. Not hobbits with hearts of gold. Not bespectacled English school boys who would be wizards. Not heroes. Not heroines. Just people. Not "likable" people. Just people. It has not yet been my experience that people come in the flavour "likable." I have looked hard and long on two continents and have not found them. Each of us if fallible and in some way broken. Usually, we maintain our sainthood only in our own minds. We surround ourselves with the familiar, equating the alien with disruption, displeasure, damnation, inconvenience, discomfort, unhappiness, and all manner of unpleasantness.
How do such readers cope with the truly great works of American literature, which rarely ever concern "likable" characters? What do they do with Of Mice and Men, Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Catcher in the Rye...and, well, there's no point in going on and on. I simply don't understand. I simply don't. I don't even think I want to, though I have tried. To me, the reader who judges books as "good" or "bad" on the basis of whether or not they find the characters likable is akin to a child who turns up its nose at a vegetable it has never tasted before. That's a best case scenario. Worst case scenario, they're moralists or xenophobes, convinced that all the drunks and druggies and queers and lunatics and heretics and infidels and freaks and bums and killers and aliens exist in some other world, a hell of their own making, sensibly kept apart from "sympathetic" humankind. Who wants to read about people like that? Why be reminded they even exist? Aren't we better off without them? Why "glorify" their unfortunate existence in literature. And do not forget, I am holier than thou. I am holier than thou. I am not a thief. I am not a cheat. I am not a drunkard. I am not a liar. I am not a killer. I am not deluded. I am not ever false or self-pitying or irrational.
I listen and this is what I hear. And it makes me angry. But at least the anger keeps me writing.
To date, I have no working definition of "likable." I can only see people. And if I look too long or too hard at any of them, they become monstrous. Look hard enough and I might find glimmers of the angelic in the more curious angles of their being, but, near as I can tell, angels are at least as treacherous as monsters.
And speaking of "unsympathetic: characters, the new chapter of Boshen and Nesuko is up.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Addedum 2: Yesterday I said that people who ordered the limited edition of Frog Toes and Tentacles would receive both the False Starts chapbook and the Narcissa broadside. That's not true. I screwed up. Here's the deal:
Order the limited edition of FT&T and you get only the False Starts chapbook.
Order the limited hardback edition of Subterranean magazine #2 and you get both the Merewife chapbook and the Narcissa broadside. The broadside will accompany the magazine's limited edition, not that of FT&T. Apologies for any and all confusion.
Also, Gwenda Bond wrote to say that "Beatrice picked up on your post from the other day and publisher Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press puts some numbers (depressing numbers) to EW reviews in service of a larger point." Here's the link. Cheerfull frelling stuff.
Addendum 1: In case you haven't heard, tonight is the peak night of this year's Perseid meteor shower, as the Earth swings through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. Tiny bits of comet dust hit Earth's atmosphere traveling 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a tiny smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light—a meteor—when it disintegrates. Best viewing will be between 2 a.m. (EST) and dawn. Look to the east, and get out away from city lights (this is getting harder and harder, I know). Plus, we get a bonus. Look for Mars in the constellation Aries, very near to Perseus. It's very bright right now.
Bear with me, nixars and gardas. I've been trying to give up Ambien, which I've been taking every night for about eight months, and I slept very poorly last night. I feel as though I hardly slept at all. I have no one to blame but myself. Well, on second thought, it didn't help that Spooky told me a very creepy story just before bed, something one of her exes told her about seventeen years ago. Alone on a dark road somewhere in Rhode Island. Something running along in a ditch, loping on all fours, then standing up and walking on two. I'm pretty sure there are no kangaroos in Rhode Island. A damned thing, most assuredly. Or a lie. Either way.
Last night I asked Spooky to read me the prologue to The Merewife, which I'd not read since I shelved it in 1993. I expected it wouldn't be very good. I was just getting my sea legs back then. But it is good. It's far and away better than The Five of Cups. It's so different from Silk (and most everything else I've written since) that comparison is difficult. I listened, pretending someone else had written this, loving the story and the words, the sum of the two. Something I wrote twelve years ago, something no one's read in twelve years, and it's just been waiting, unaltered, unfinished. When she was done reading, the first thing I said was, "Why the hell didn't I ever finish that?" Surely, if I had, my work would have gone in an entirely different direction. I probably wouldn't have this silly "horror writer" albatross strung about my neck now. Anyway, I'm beginning to think that I should finish the prologue before Subterranean Press publishes the chapbook; I shall ask Bill Schafer's opinion.
I had some grandiose screed in mind for this morning's entry, something angry and perplexed about Amazon.com selling used copies of books right alongside the new copies, how this hurts sales and drives down sales ranks, how I know that books are overpriced and I don't blame anyone for buying a used copy, but, still, Amazon really isn't helping matters for those of us trying to make our living off our writing, etc. and etc. and etc. But I'm too bleary. I'd just sound like a frelling crank. Some other time, then.
We read Chapter One of Daughter of Hounds yesterday. I'm pleased with it. I waded through email, too.
My thanks to David Kirkpatrick for trying his hand at a four-syllable word for "anteater." He posits "formicavore," which isn't bad, but which could fairly be used to describe any animal (or plant or fungus or bacterium or virus or whatever) that eats ants and/or wasps. Myrmecophagid, a taxonomic term referring specifically to the members of the family Myrmecophagidae — which includes all anteaters — would work if it didn't have five-syllables. I'm sorry. I told you I was asleep.
Spooky's dad sent us bits of a dark-grey granite from Little Diomede Island in Alaska, where he did field work this past winter. Yesterday, curious about the age of the rocks, I read "The Age and Origin of the Little Diomede Upland Surface" by Lyn Gualtieri and Julie Brigham-Grette. It would appear they are of Late Cretacous age, these rocks, derived from the Diomede pluton. Feldspar. Biotite. Hornblende. Okay, never mind. Anteaters were probably more interesting. Maybe this will make up for it, especially if you're waiting for Frog Toes and Tentacles (no, it's definitely not worksafe).
Alas, I fear I'm losing patience with Final Fantasy X-2. Last night, I reached the part where Yuna has to "satisfy" LeBlanc with a massage. On the one hand, it's another example of how this game is filled with mind-rendingly mundane side missions (so far, I've had to sell tickets, hand out balloons while dressed as Hello Kitty with bat wings, and wait in a line to register for an interview). I'm reminded of a Japanese game I saw on X-Play where you work in a noodle shop. That's it. You work in a noodle shop. And on the other hand, here's this softcore anime girl on anime girl pr0n scene, the message, and I know damned well that's exactly how the game designers intended it. They even used the word "grope." My brain hurts. Anyway, yeah. Darkwatch comes out in just a few days, and I think I shall be setting Final Fantasy X-2 aside for a while. It's for the best, I'm sure.
I can think of nothing else to ramble about this morning. I guess that'll have to do. Please have a look at our eBay auctions. Bid or "buy it now." Either way. The platypus will be grateful.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Last night, I actually managed to sleep eight hours. It's been a couple of weeks, at least, since I've gotten that much sleep all at once. I feel like a glutton. A sweaty glutton, though, because we just did our morning walk, and it's hot and steamy out there. I don't care if you don't care. Hemingway said to talk about the weather.
Yesterday, I learned that I had two showings on the 2005 Locus reader's poll. Murder of Angels made "Best Fantasy Novel" at #20 and "Riding the White Bull" made the "Best Novelette" category at #30. I'm surprised and pleased with both, even if I personally consider "Riding the White Bull" a short story and not a novelette. MoA and "Riding the White Bull" also both landed on the Locus 2004 recommended reading list. Drad.
A couple of people were confused by the announcement regarding the False Starts chapbook. Sorry. Here's the deal: if you've ordered the limited edition (state) of Frog Toes and Tentacles, you'll be getting the False Starts chapbook and the "Narcissa in the waves" broadside (with a poem from Caroline Snow's diary; the artwork is by Ryan Obermeyer and was used as endsheets in the sold-out subpress edition of Low Red Moon). You get both. And there's still more chapbook news. Those who pony up for the hardbound, limited edition of Subterranean magazine #2 will receive The Merewife, the unfinished prologue to a Beowulf-related fantasy novel that I began writing in the summer of 1993, but set aside that October to write Silk. No one but me and Jennifer have ever read these pages. I've been holding them back for many years. It has always been my "secret novel," and it's a project that I'd love to return to someday. Anyway, yes, order the limited hardbound edition of Subterranean magazine, and you'll also get The Merewife (which will include an essay by me explaining the whole why-I-started-but-didn't-finish-this-thing thing).
Today I have to get back to work. I've been in a bit of a funk the last two or three days, and I've not accomplished much of anything. "Noah's Raven" sort of stalled out, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the strange weather. Spooky's says it's a New England summer. Thank you, global warming. Anyway, today we go back to reading through Daughter of Hounds. Work, work, work. Work or die. Work or starve. Work or be publically exposed as a layabout. I have way the frell too much to not be doing something. These are the perils of being one's own boss. Me: "Er, I don't feel like working. Maybe it's a bad idea to write when I don't feel like writing. It might not be inspired." (*whimper* *whine* *mope*) Me: "Well, okay, but just this once." That ways lies bankruptcy and worse problems than trying to think of a four-syllable synonym for "anteater."
Meanwhile, have I mentioned my conversion to the First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Even Michelangelo knew!
I'm serious. We must all join together and raise our voices as one, insisting that anywhere Xtian "intelligent design" (*snicker*) is being taught alongside real science...uh, I mean the implausible secular humanist "theory" of evolution, then Flying Spaghetti Monsterism must be taught as well. Yaweh gets his day, then so does the damn Flying Spaghetti Monster. Fair is frelling fair. Just because I worship two meatballs and a great pile of airborne pasta doesn't give you the right to force some Xtian dogma down my child's throat. Well, my "theoretical" child. Just because I don't actually have a child is no reason to exclude me from the American pastime of screwing up public science education in the name of organized superstition! What are you? A communist?
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
This morning, I'm not in the best disposition I've ever been in, but, on the other tentacle, I'm not in the worst, either. I, too, am capable of looking on the bright side. Beware, the slippery slope towards optimism.
I have been asked by Subterranean Press to relay the information that all those who purchase the limited edition of Frog Toes and Tentacles (there's a limited and a trade edition) will also receive a free chapbook, False Starts, which contains a number of vignettes I'd intended for FT&T but, for one reason or another, was never able to finish. Oh, and I did the cover, too.
I got word yesterday from Candlewick Press that Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales, which contains my Starling Jane short story, "The Dead and the Moonstruck," and which was originally released in hardback, is being released this month as a trade paperback. The new cover is much better than the original, I think. It's a great anthology of dark YA fiction, and includes stories by Gregory Maguire, Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix, the late Joan Aiken, M. T. Anderson, and others. Check it out.
Not much else this morning. I am going to repost one of the Monster Doodle Sculpture #1 images, as I really frelling love this little guy, and he has to be mailed off to his rightful owners today.
*sniff* *snorfle*
Final Fantasy X-2 is devouring mine and Spooky's lives. Oh, the pink, pink evil. I've played something like 19% of the game so far, making it into Chapter Two, and I paused yesterday to consider how many hours of my life are being dumped into this silliness. So far, about 10 hours, and I'm no quite 20% through, which means I could wind up spending 50+ hours on this thing (assuming that the rate of play remains constant throughout). And already I'm wanting to play Final Fantasy X. Help. This is even worse than my bout with Morrowind. It wouldn't be so bad, if Yuna just...wouldn't...dance. And sing.
Now, go forth to our eBay auctions and bid or buy. There's another copy of The Worm in My Mind's Eye up. Our supply of this chapbook is very, very limited. You snooze, you loose.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Over the last few days, several people have asked to see the Locus review of To Charles Fort, With Love, and since I know that it can be a difficult magazine to find, I quote (with many thanks to Tim Pratt):
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work grows more ambitious every year, and at the same time becomes more compulsively readable. This latest collection is her most impressive yet, providing a fair sampling of her best stories from the past five years, along with a fascinating preface that describes Kiernan’s own brushes with the bizarre, the inexplicable, and – well, the Fortean. Like Charles Fort before her, Kiernan demonstrates a passion for the mysterious coupled with the knowledge that to look closely at the world is to become deeply unsettled.
In her remarkable Dandridge Cycle – a trilogy of stories that includes ‘‘A Redress for Andromeda’’, ‘‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’’, and ‘‘Andromeda Among the Stones’’ – Kiernan ranges across the 20th century to show us visitors to the Dandridge House, a ramshackle, sea-eaten structure on a lonely coast that stands as a gateway to the lethal ocean of another world. The beings on the other side, which clamor to enter our world, are never glimpsed directly, which only serves to heighten their menace – they are known primarily by their effects on their guards. Kiernan brilliantly depicts the corrosive mental and physical consequences of such guardianship on her human characters.
The presence of other worlds is a frequent motif in this collection, as is the notion that the inhabitants of such worlds are not so much malicious as inimical, their utter alienness and indifference to human concerns the source of real danger. ‘‘Standing Water’’ is a brilliant slice-of-life about bookstore employees who find a strange puddle behind their store. Their fascination and fear are equally useless, and understanding eludes them; like the puddle at its center, the story has vast depths. The characters in ‘‘Onion’’ are desperate to reach another world they’ve only glimpsed, which they imagine as a better place; it is reminiscent of M. John Harrison’s ‘‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’’ in its concentrated longing and misery. Other realms brush against our own in ‘‘La Peau Verte’’, a long original story about an actress hired to play the part of a fairylike forest creature at an absinthe party. The experience stirs childhood memories, and she begins to see unlikely connections between her youth and her present circumstances. This story was reputedly written entirely under the influence of absinthe, and if so, the green muse didn’t hamper Kiernan’s voice – it is one of her most moving stories to date.
‘‘The Dead and the Moonstruck’’ is about a secret world that exists alongside our own, particularly the society of ghoulish ‘‘hounds’’ and their stolen human children that Kiernan has explored in recent books. Here, in her first attempt at a young adult story, Kiernan tells of a peculiar rite of passage for one of the Cuckoo children. Other secret worlds brush against our own in ‘‘Apokatastasis’’, where a woman is haunted by something like a ghostly dog, and in the impeccably written ‘‘Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956)’’, where a troubled couple on holiday tangentially encounter a supernatural menace of uncertain origin and motives.
Besides Charles Fort, the obvious influence on Kiernan’s work is H.P. Lovecraft, with his inverted sense of wonder, his stories of primal and cosmic horrors beyond human understanding. But while Kiernan acknowledges and embraces her influences, she is not constrained by them, and her voice has become one of the most singular and recognizable in contemporary dark fiction. While Lovecraft’s lesser imitators focus on the external – tentacles, forbidden texts, ghastly rituals – Lovecraft’s true heirs understand that effective horror stories do not depend on stage decorations but on subtler effects, and Kiernan is foremost among those heirs. When Kiernan contemplates Lovecraft’s and Fort’s visions of a mysterious, dangerous universe, and puts the stories down in her own breathtaking prose, the results are extraordinary.
Also, I've had people asking to see the monster doodle sculpture, which actually came out far, far better than I'd expected. This means I will be doing more of them. I hope to have time to make another sometime this week. They seem to require about four or five days work, total. I'm thinking we'll auction the next one with a book and then perhaps auction a third one without a book, just the mds. All proceeds go to keep the platypus off the street. The photos are behind the cut (if you're reading this on LJ; if not, click here and scroll down).
Apparently, Atlanta is aspiring to be Seattle. This afternoon, it's 78F and the humdity's at 80%. More rain on the way. We've set out pots of dessicant and have the AC blasting to try to make things a little less dank inside. Hopefully, this weird weather will go elsewhere soonish.
And Marilyn Monroe "slept" with Joan Crawford. Who'd have thought such a thing (besides me, I mean).
And thank you, Jerome.
And, also, finally, if you don't already have a copy of my short sf novel The Dry Salvages (or if you have need of a second copy), please have a look at eBay auctions. There's one there, looking for a good home.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
I know where this entry ends, but I'm not exactly certain where it starts. If it were only a spacial question, I would say that it starts here. But it's more properly a question of subject matter, which complicates everything. Okay. Let's be arbitrary. And authoritarian. This is the beginning, because I say so. And because, coincidentally, it's at the start of the entry. This is Caitlín cloaking her not-awakeness behind obsfucation. This is Caitlín not going back to bed.
Everything yesterday was sort of wrecked by the arrival of sales statements for Low Red Moon and Threshold for the most recent sales period. Those things are rarely ever good tidings. The first one for Threshold was, back in '02, and the first one for Murder of Angels wasn't too terrible, but generally, they're cause for the gnashing of teeth and suchlike. Locusts and plagues and smoldering volcanoes. Anyway, I got to talking about the lack of promotion from Roc and how this has been the case since the very beginning, since Silk, how publishers expect books to somehow mysteriously sell themselves, etc. and etc. And that led to the question of whether or not reviews help sell books and then to the question of whether or not only some reviews sell books. Recently, a couple of months ago, I was talking with my agent, Merrilee, and I was lamenting the lackluster sales of Murder of Angels, even after the glowing review in Entertainment Weekly, which, regardless of its merits or lack thereof, seems about as mainstream a magazine as I could ever hope to be reviewed by. And Merrilee said that, in her experience, reviews in EW do not translate into sales. Yesterday, I looked up the magazine's circulation. It's supposedly 1.7 million (this from EW's website). So, I imagined what seemed to me a worst-case scenario. Let's imagine that only 1% of the 1.7 million people who read EW read the review and then bought MoA. That would still be a whopping 17,000 books sold, which is about twice the first printing of the novel. I know that didn't happen. Then I decided to be more pessimistic. What if only one half of one 1% read the review and bought the book? That would still be 8,500 people, which would have sent the novel into a second printing. That didn't happen either. So, what about a mere one quarter of 1%? That's still 4,250 books, a very sizable dent in the first printing. But that evidently didn't happen, either. So, it would seem that even if one is lucky enough to get a good review in a magazine with a 1.7 million circulation, one cannot expect any significant increase in sales from that review. Tons of free advertising can be worthless. On the one hand, this is the sort of thing that all working authors need to spend a lot of time thinking about. On the other hand, it's the sort of thing that shuts me down and keeps me from writing. It's the sort of thing that makes me wish I could afford to confine my publishing to the specialty press. The books that I've done with Gauntlet Publishing and Subterranean Press have either sold out (some before publication) or will soon be sold out. And these are relatively hard-to-find expensive hardbacks, not $14 trade paperbacks avialable at Borders and Barnes and Noble. It's a laughable, ludicrous affair, this "business" of writing for a living.
Yesterday afternoon, wishing to escape the house and the questions I'd been asking, Spooky and I took the digital camera and drove up Oakdale Road, through Druid Hills, where lots of big trees came down on Thursday night. It was amazing, in a terrible, sad way, seeing these enormous trees wrenched from the sandy, clayey soil. We've had far too much rain this year. The Southeast is running between ten and twenty-five inches above average this summer. The ground is saturated, so big trees that are perfectly healthy are falling. I'm half afraid that homeowners may soon take to cutting them down, preemptive strikes, as it were. Some of these trees are a hundred years old. Many are 70+. It's an awful thing to see. Anyway, you can have a look at the photos here, if you're interested.
Yesterday was, of course, the 60th anniversary of America's use of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. No one knows how many people were killed that day. Estimates range from 60,000 to 200,000. Last night, I watched Hiromshima: The First Weapon of Mass Destruction on the Discovery Channel. Despite the lurid, "timely" title, it was a decent documentary, and the interviews with survivors and the reenactments were especially chilling. The makers seemed torn between the horror of the bombing and the fact that it forced the Japanese to surrender and thus ended WWII (though I consider the Cold War an extension of WWII, just as I consider WWII and extension of WWI created by the Treaty of Versailles) and, in theory, saved more lives than were taken in the bombing. It may be true that lives were saved, and it may not. It's impossible to say, for sure, what course the war would have taken had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima. Regardless, I believe there will never be any sane way to justify America's use of atomic weapons against Japan in WWII, just as there will never be any way to justify Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (though, at least it can be said that Japan's target was genuinely military). I snurched the following quote from Barry Graham's LJ. It's part of a speech delivered twenty years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the bombing, by Father George Zabelka, the chaplain with the U.S. Air Force who was the priest for the men who bombed Hiroshima. I have little good to say about Christianity, but these are powerful words, nonetheless, especially at a time when many Christain Americans justify the present war with religious arguments:
War is now, always has been, and always will be bad, bad news. I was there. I saw real war. Those who have seen real war will bear me out. I assure you, it is not of Christ. It is not Christ’s way. There is no way to conduct real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus. There is no way to train people for real war in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.
I was there, and I was wrong. Yes, war is hell, and Christ did not come to justify the creation of hell on earth by his disciples. The justification of war may be compatible with some religions and philosophies, but it is not compatible with the nonviolent teaching of Jesus. I was wrong. And to those of whatever nationality or religion who have been hurt because I fell under the influence of the father of lies, I say with my whole heart and soul I am sorry. I beg forgiveness.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Thursday night's rather freakish east-to-west moving storm took a heavy toll on Atlanta trees, and now I feel bad for having enjoyed the thunder and lightning and wind and rain. It's dumb, I know. It hints at superstition and misapplications of causality, guilt like that. But I have a reverence for trees, especially old deciduous trees, and I can still remember some witless relative or another telling me I shouldn't ever wish for snow, because if it snowed, some people would freeze to death and some others would die in car accidents. So, when it did snow, well, the math is fairly simple. You do it. Late yesterday, while we were gathering the supplies for Kid Night, we saw so many enormous old trees that had come down, great bunches of roots ripped from the earth and clumps of red-orange clay clinging to them. Tree removal trucks all over the place. Chainsaws (one of the ugliest sounds in the world). And, of course, mostly people are concerned about the damage the falling trees did, not the dead trees themselves. Anyway...
Yesterday, I wrote 1,090 words on "Noah's Raven," though I'm not entirely sure I've begun this story the right way or in the right place or from the perspective I wish to tell it from. I guess I'll figure that out today. We didn't get any of Daughter of Hounds read, because I'd only planned to write for two hours, and then I wrote for four and a half. Hopefully, I'll get to that today. DoH, I mean. If I'm going to delay finishing the novel, I have to keep to the plan, get it read, get all these other things done. No improvising.
For Kid Night, we watched The Qautermass Xperiment (released in the States as The Creeping Unknown), because I've been craving more Val Guest since we watched The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and then we followed it with Rudolph Maté and George Pal's When World's Collide. A perfect Kid Night double feature. And, of course, there was also Final Fantasy X-2 after that. Paine is much dradder as a black mage than a warrior. So, good and much needed Kid Night this week.
Revenge of the Sith will be playing next week at the Fox Theatre, and lots of people will be going in costume. Nar'eth wants to go, just to represent and all, but I kinda think she's going to have to sit this one out. More's the frelling pity.
My thanks to Joel Stanley for teaching me to stop worrying and learn to love creationism...er, I mean "intelligent design." All it took was a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'll take His noodly appendage over some old white dude with a handful of clay any day.
And, please, have a look at our eBay auctions, some of which are ending today, I think. No one's bid on that copy of In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers yet. You know it's out of print, right? And you know Dame Darcy did the artwork, and this copy's signed by the both of us, right? You know Gahan Wilson gave it a great review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, yeah? Indeed, I love this book so much that when Gigi Edgley asked for one of my books, this is the one that I gave her. So, you better bid. You'll be sorry if you don't. Trust me. I know about these things. I also know about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Yesterday, I made the grand mistake of looking at the customer "reviews" at Amazon.com for The Dry Salvages for the first time since the book's release, and, of course, I came away annoyed. Even though the book's essentially sold out now, was very well-received by pretty much everyone, etc. and etc., I still came away annoyed. And mostly for the same old reasons. One of the "reviewers" (K. Freeman "reader and writer" [Ben Lomond, CA USA]) states that "I love Kiernan's writing style; I love the concepts here [but]...this book frustrated me to death," and "there just isn't enough -- not enough story, and not enough payoff." Er...right. I want to ask, just how, exactly, could there possibly have been more story in this book. If anything, there may, in retrospect, have been too much. Is two parallel and detailed narratives not enough? And as for "payoff," what the frell does that even mean, anyway? TDS is a book, not a racehorse. I most emphatically do not write stories with "payoffs." The Dry Salvages is not some by-the-numbers Hollywood action film that has to ellicit X number of oohs and ahhhs from a test audience, culminating in some big, crowd-pleasing revelation/explosion. The book is meant to tell Audrey Cather's story, and the tale of the Montelius and the Gilgamesh. And it does that. There are no holes, no missing pieces. If there's not enough story here, maybe Mr. or Ms. Freeman should seriously examine precisely what he or she means by "story" and why he or she reads and how he or she's been taught to read.
Freeman also writes that there are "annoying flash-forwards when I want to get to the real story." *sigh* There are two complete narratives in TDS, a present one (Audrey writing her story in Paris) and a past one (Piros), and they are equally important, equally "the real story." I believe this is obvious. Moreover, there are no "flash-fowards" at all, as the present of the book is contemplating the past of the book and not the other way round.
Moron.
Anyway, there are copies of TDS now available in our eBay auctions. But beware: quasi-literate Amazon.com "reviewers" might be happier with something else, say a nice Stargate: SG-1 novelization?
If awake were a foreign country, I'd be the farthest point from it right now. Or something like that. I'm asleep, typing. Last night, about midnight (I think), we had a glorious cacophony of a thunderstorm, but it knocked out the power. I got up twice in the night, disoriented, uncertain of the time, and somehow the uncertainty seems to have adversely affected my already off-kilter sleep. Blah. I just want to shut my eyes. But we must work. We must all work, else what is our worth to the world? And what greater concern have I than my worth to the kindly, loving world, I ask?
Anyway...yesterday I made pages and pages of notes for a new sf story, which I think will be titled "Noah's Raven" (the one who didn't find land). It's set on Mars, because Mars just keeps sucking me in. I read a paper on the discovery of what appears to be pack-ice on the Elysium Planitia, south of Elysium Mons ("Evidence from HRSC Mars Express for a frozen sea close to Mars' equator," 3/2005). The field of pack-ice will likely be the setting for the story. I had an e-mail conversation with Bill Schafer at subpress regarding the plot of the story and other novels and short stories that have touched on a similar theme. I am frustrated, at times, by the futile insistence of many sf readers, writers, and critics that innovation and originality is important to the "genre," as it seems fairly impossible to conceive of any new story, some story that's never been told before, and if you think it's about the hardware and the software and the science and the "high concept" — as opposed to the characters — and that that's where the innovation lies, I would say you've missed the point entirely. The science is only ever backdrop. If you ask me, and, of course, no one actually has. Also, yesterday, I signed off on the final galley and dustjacket layout for To Charles Fort, With Love. It's been almost a year now since I delivered the intial ms. for the collection, and it's good to be "putting this one to bed" (as, I understand, journalists are wont to say). And Spooky and I read the prologue of Daughter of Hounds, which is much better than I remember (if I do say so myself). The ghouls delight me, and there's just something nicely askew about the whole prologue. If Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino made a film together. Something like that.
I hope to actually begin the new story today. And read Chapter One of DoH.
And maybe wake the frell up.
Spooky found a beautiful dead wasp on my office floor yesterday. I've not had a chance to identify it to species, but she stashed it in our Dead Bug Box, which is kept on a bookshelf in my office.
In Final Fantasy X-2 there's a type of fiend, a sort of horned flying fish thing, called a Xiphactinus. Of course, those of us with some knowledge of Creatceous ichthyofaunas will at once know this name. I have excavated several Xiphactinus, one of the great predatory teleosts of the time. You can see photos here. The name is pronounced zi-FACT-in-us (also known by the junior synonym "Portheus"). In "real" life, they didn't have horns and they didn't fly, but still. It was cool, seeing it in the game.
I've heard news that the video game version of Peter Jackson's King Kong is being made by Ubisoft, who did the spectacular Beyond Good and Evil. It will be filled with dinosaurs, and, from what I've seen of the graphics, it's gonna be drad.
Last night, we watched Michael Radford's recent adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. For the most part, it was very, very good, superbly acted, gorgeous cinematography. The trial scene was taut as taut could be. But I have to admit a strong discomfort at the play's undeniable anti-semitism. It's not something that you can pretend isn't there. However, as Roger Ebert pointed out, Shylock was perhaps the first time a Jewish character was given a chance to speak for himself and in his own defence. Shakespeare's money-lender is surely a caricature drawn from second-hand sources, but there's a fire in the character, nonetheless, and I think, at least in the first half of the film, Shylock is handled more sympathetically than in most stage productions. There are other respects in which this film suffers from the weaknesses of Shakespeare's text, namely the peculiar juxtaposition of the Shylock/Antonio affair with the antics of Portia and Nerissa. Ebert sums it up nicely, so I shall not try to paraphrase: ...watching it is like channel-surfing between a teen romance and a dark abysm of loss and grief. Shylock and Antonio, if they were not made strangers by hatred, would make good companions for long, sad conversations punctuated by wounded silences. Besides, Jeremy Irons is a babe.
Okay. I think I'm about 12% more awake than when I began this entry. Before I go forth to slay vowels and consonants and the wild punctuation, might I ask, again, that you please peruse our eBay auctions. Thanks. As the Nebari say, may you never be sucked out a faulty airlock and die horribly in the near vacuum of deep space.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Addendum: Speaking of eBay, Spooky has just added the more affordable trade edition of The Dry Salvages to our current eBay auctions.
Here in Atlanta, it's High Summer, and it feels like it. As much as I love summer and detest cold weather (Spooky and Nar'eth both say I'm an idiot), this is the time of year when I begin to wish for a few October days — cool and dry. Presently, the humidity is a mere 64%, but it feel at least twenty degrees damper. One never feels dry in weather like this.
Yesterday there was a lot of email, including business with my agent, and we did the final read through on "Night" (I made a few more changes). Lots of work, but I've not written, sensu stricto, since the 29th when I finished Chapter Seven of Daughter of Hounds. So, I should begin something new today. If I'm truly going to wait about finishing the novel, and I think that I am (for all those reasons previously stated), then today I need to begin work on a new short story. No museums, no seedy bars, no afternoon matinees, no internet porn (er...pr0n), no lying around complaining about the humidity all day long. I have to write something. It might be sf. It might not. It might be anything at all.
I've just learned that The Decemberists will be here again on the 29th of September, playing The Tabernacle, and I really, really want to go. It's rare, these days, that a band moves me to a) want to leave the house and b) put up with a crowd of people to see them play.
Has anyone else noticed that Yuna, Rikku, and Paine (Final Fantasy) are alternate-reality counterparts of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup (The Powerpuff Girls)?
I've been meaning to repost a link to the Bookslut interview, just because.
I haven't mentioned eBay in a couple of days, so I suppose that I shall have to mention it now. eBay. These days, it's really helping to keep the bills paid, keeping the proverbial platypus off the streets, allowing me to turn down those lucrative offers to write Star Trek: Enterprise novels, and so on and so forth. So, have a look, please. Bid, if you are so inclined. "Buy it Now" if you're that sort of nixar (or garda). Marvel at our speedy and friendly service. Tell all your friends. And I will sit here and begin a new story, and the world will spin, and Great Cthulhu sleeps, dreaming in his palace in R'lyeh, and all will be well and good and anguilliform. Thank you.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
I sort of felt I owed you one, after this morning. So, I give you...methane! Well, more precisely, I give you "Methane on Mars: the plot thickens".
Also, my thanks to Tim Pratt for emailing me his very, very generous Locus review of To Charles Fort, With Love. Now I couldn't care less when the slackers at Borders get around to putting the new issue of the zine on the racks. Okay, I must go make Kabuki faces at Spooky...
I think I may have made an unexpected decision regarding Daughter of Hounds. That is, it's a decision I'd not expected myself to make. I'm thinking that I may set the novel ms. aside for three weeks or so and take that time to read through all of it that's been written so far and to write a couple of short stories. I'd intended to have the book finished by the end of August or the beginning of September, but the actual deadline isn't until December. And now that I'm only three chapters away from THE END, I know that I'm only a few weeks away from being done. But I feel like I'm rushing towards the last page, and I fear that in doing so I might be missing lots of things, that the rush may be harming the story. So. Yes, I think this is what I shall do, set it aside, read it, let it steep a little, get other work done. I may write "Bainbridge," the "last" Dancy Flammarion story for the Alabaster collection. I may write something I've not thought of writing yet. Then come back to Emmie and Soldier is September and make an end of it. I'll decide for sure today or tomorrow. It will definitely be a different book if I wait. The question is, will it be a different book for the better?
I've been told that Tim Pratt's written a very positive review of To Charles Fort, With Love for Locus magazine. However, I likely won't be able to see it until next week sometime, as Borders here is atrociously slow about getting new issues of Locus out. My agent is hoping that the starred review in PW will translate to sales of foreign language edition of the book (okay, that pun really was unintentional). I'm kind of wary of translations, though. Sure, the money would be nice and welcome, and it'd be kind of cool to see those stories in French or Italian or Czech. But they wouldn't really be the stories that I wrote. They'd be a rough approximation of my stories in another language. It is not possible to divide a story from the language in which it was written. The language is the story. By placing it in another language, the story changes inevitably, even if only by slight degrees. Part of me is protective and almost feels that translation violates the integrity of my work and is a thing to be avoided. There are novels and authors that I've never truly been able to enjoy because I'm not reading them in their original language: Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Homer, Gabriel García Márquez, Tolstoy, etc. It's a long list. It's not that I don't appreciate the translations, just that I understand, a priori, that I'm missing the true text, that the true text is not accessible to me and has been obscured behind a translation.
Yesterday afternoon, I signed my name. I don't know how many times. I signed my name from about two 'clock until five. So, the signature sheets for both To Charles Fort, With Love and Frog Toes and Tentacles are done. Never again will I sign signature sheets for two books on the same day.
Shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, I stopped watching the news and swore to stop talking about its content online (see, for example, my blog entry for Wednesday, April 02, 2003). I also stopped reading newspapers. I still follow science news online, but that's about it. I still catch an occassional news story, here or there, mostly by accident, but, generally, I've found I'm a slightly saner person if I just stay away from "the news." Oh, I know there are lots of good arguments as to why this is a wrongheaded thing to do, purposefully keeping myself in the dark, as it were. I just can't stand to watch the awful, sickening carnival tilt and sway of the human world on a daily basis, nor can I trust that any of the sources from which this information is flowing are not strongly biased in one direction or another. So I try to keep my eyes averted. I used to be a news junky, and now I keep my eyes averted. I know how bad it is out there. I can't really see how much more educated in the depravity of mankind I need to be. I can't see the point in it. Nonetheless, stories slip over the fence now and then, second- and thirdhand. They rarely do more than confirm that I've done the right thing, the thing that's right for me.
A man beats his three year old son to death so he won't grow up gay. That's a good one. The death toll in Iraq, that's another. W signs CAFTA and proclaims he wants "Intelligent Design" taught in American schools.. At least that last one's good for a hollow laugh. Anyway, this was on my mind this morning, for some reason. I don't talk poilitics or "current events" in the blog/LJ nearly as often as I think about them, because the conversations always seem as futile as watching manufactured news published and broadcast to generate ratings and profit and control. But it was on my mind this morning, and the possibility that I might be wrong. I know that ignorance isn't bliss. I know that knowledge is power. I know. So do the evil men who run the world.
See. That's why I don't talk politics. Or watch the frelling news.
I'm not "looking the other way." I'm just not looking.
Ash: Last word. I can't lie to you about your chances, but...you have my sympathies.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Most writers have very dull lives. This is a true thing. The lives of most writers do not, in general, make for particularly interesting copy. I am constantly encountering people who think otherwise. Many of them want to be writers, and they say things to me like, "It must be so interesting, being a writer." Which is to say, yesterday was dull as dishwater, yet filled with writerly stuff, just like the day before, just like the day before that, etc. and etc. Yesterday's grand moment of suspense was learning whether or not Wolf Camera on Highland (we gave up on Wolf over in Decatur) had finally managed to crop the author's photo for To Charles Fort, With Love as per my request — having failed four times previously. They hadn't. And there's no more time to try to make them do it properly, so the photo that appears on the jacket of the collection will be almost as I wished it to be. Would that I could get away with doing a half-assed job. It must be so interesting, being a photo developer. Oh, wait — I did get an interesting email from Jeff Lyman yesterday about a dig on the Hell Creek/Ludlow formation contact in North Dakota where he excavated the remains of a trionychid ("softshell") turtle. Thank you, Jeff. At least I know someone out there's having fun.
Bookslut.com has posted its review of To Charles Fort, With Love, which you can read simply by clicking here. This is, truly, one of the best reviews that I've ever received, anywhere. And once you've read it, if you happen still not to have ordered a copy (or two) of the book, that's easy enough to remedy. Just click here. I was especially pleased that Colleen Mondor's favourite story of the bunch was "The Road of Pins," as I count it among both my very best and least recognized stories.
A number of people have asked about the release date for Frog Toes and Tentacles. It has been delayed and will be released next month. So, you'll be getting two books from me in September (which is a little overwhelming on this end).
Last night, after that extremely underwhelming day of which I've already spoken, I did nothing more (or less) than watch a couple of episodes of Farscape ("Taking the Stone" and "Eat Me"), because it had been two or three months since I'd last watched Farscape. And then I watched To Have and Have Not on TCM. It's the sort of movie that really makes me miss actual movie stars.
And speaking of Frog Toes and Tentacles, here's another not entirely inappropriate image from _octopus_:
Monday, August 01, 2005
I'm pretty sure there's nothing the least bit interesting to be said for yesterday. So, I shall proceed directly to today. There's a starred review of To Charles Fort, With Love in this week's issue of Publisher's Weekly. I quote:
Kiernan ranks as one of today's finest practitioners of "the art of disquiet," as Ramsey Campbell notes in his perspicacious afterword to this remarkable collection. Her enigmatic short stories are written in lyrical prose that sweeps the reader completely into strange dark worlds where characters choose to embrace madness over the mundane and nightmares offer guidance as well as fear. Even when subtly alluding to H. P. Lovecraft, as many of these stories do ("So Runs the World Away," "The Dead and the Moonstruck," etc.) Kiernan's voice remains unique. In these evocative tales, bathrooms can transport you to an alien sea ("Onion"), paleontology can lead to damnation ("Valentia"), and even a mud puddle can touch on the unknowable and its terrors ("Standing Water"). The volume's sole original entry, "La Peau Verte," weaves a multiplicity of truths and the attractions of the forbidden into a small masterpiece of mystery. Exquisite interior illustrations by Richard Kirk enhance these 13 "love letters" to Charles Fort, collector of strange and anomalous phenomena.
It's one of the best ways this week could have begun, getting this review. And its coveted star. Also, it's the very first review I've seen of TCF,WL, and hopefully it will set the tone for those to come (though this is arguably the most important of the lot in terms of sales). It even triggered another peculiar smidgen of Hollywood interest, which I am quickly learning to ignore. Anyway, there it is, and I am very pleased. This book probably means more to me than any other I've published so far.
I have a feeling I won't be getting back to Daughter of Hounds today, if only because there's a number of smaller matters that must be attended to, including an offer regarding a Finnish translation and reprint of "Anamorphosis" and another round of corrections to "Night." Other things, too, and I'll have to get to two sets of signature sheets tomorrow, and I've begun to wonder if I shouldn't read back over all of DoH (for continuity and everything else) before proceeding to Chapter Eight and the beginning of the end of the novel.
And if you're one of the people awaiting the release of Frog Toes and Tentacles, here's something appropriate to make the wait seem a little shorter, or at least occupy you in the meantime — _octopus_. This bit seemed especially apt (thank you, Llar'en):
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