"They take apart their nightmares, and they leave them by the door."
The fight for sleep and summer continues here, and both a pretty much losing battles. Currently, it's 58˚F in Providence. Sunny and 58˚F. I slept for shit last night, though I slept very well night before last. At least eight hours, the best night I've had in ages. My body tells me that eight hours is ideal, that's the amount of sleep I need to function. My body also tells me that most nights it's incapable of sleeping more than five or six hours.
The days have been consumed by worry and stress and telephone meetings with agents. My editor at Penguin has announced that she's retiring on July 1st, and that cast a pall of uncertainty over everything. All is uncertainty.
I'm not awake enough to be writing this. Honestly, this spell of insomnia, spanning - so far - the past two months, is the worst of my entire life.
And it's cold here.
Yesterday, I read over "Rats Live On No Evil Star," which is being reprinted somewhere online (I actually cannot, off the top of my head, recall where). It's a story I wrote in 1998, I think, and it's very odd reading back over it seventeen years farther along. It is, I think, one of my better early stories. It holds up, especially given that I've managed to root out all those unfortunate "compounderations." And speaking of reprints, Clarkesworld has reprinted "Riding the White Bull," and you can read it for free, because this is The Future, god bless its shitty little heart. The story wasn't meant to be read with those huge spaces between paragraphs, but that's how we do it in 2015, you know.
Life is currently a blur of disappointing weather forecasts, stress, work, Guild Wars 2, insomnia, and movies. I'm pretty sure we've watched at least forty movies in the last months. I lay on the floor in the front parlour and watch these simulacra of life, these easier-on-my-eyes, unwritten fictions. In just the past three nights: Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent (2003), David Chase's Not Fade Away (2012), Robert Benton's The Human Stain (2003), Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson's The Mule (2014), and Ben Ketai's Beneath (2013).
I'm impressed that I remembered all that. My eyes hurt.
I haven't left the house since Friday.
TTFN,
Aunt Beast
The days have been consumed by worry and stress and telephone meetings with agents. My editor at Penguin has announced that she's retiring on July 1st, and that cast a pall of uncertainty over everything. All is uncertainty.
I'm not awake enough to be writing this. Honestly, this spell of insomnia, spanning - so far - the past two months, is the worst of my entire life.
And it's cold here.
Yesterday, I read over "Rats Live On No Evil Star," which is being reprinted somewhere online (I actually cannot, off the top of my head, recall where). It's a story I wrote in 1998, I think, and it's very odd reading back over it seventeen years farther along. It is, I think, one of my better early stories. It holds up, especially given that I've managed to root out all those unfortunate "compounderations." And speaking of reprints, Clarkesworld has reprinted "Riding the White Bull," and you can read it for free, because this is The Future, god bless its shitty little heart. The story wasn't meant to be read with those huge spaces between paragraphs, but that's how we do it in 2015, you know.
Life is currently a blur of disappointing weather forecasts, stress, work, Guild Wars 2, insomnia, and movies. I'm pretty sure we've watched at least forty movies in the last months. I lay on the floor in the front parlour and watch these simulacra of life, these easier-on-my-eyes, unwritten fictions. In just the past three nights: Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent (2003), David Chase's Not Fade Away (2012), Robert Benton's The Human Stain (2003), Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson's The Mule (2014), and Ben Ketai's Beneath (2013).
I'm impressed that I remembered all that. My eyes hurt.
I haven't left the house since Friday.
TTFN,
Aunt Beast