A dented heart-shaped tin, a glass box, and an eraser in the shape of a cat.
The sun is so bright through my window, I only want to be outside. The leaves have reached that part of spring where they seem to blaze with green fire.
It's weird when the day begins with a phone conversation. My agent called this morning and we had an Encouraging Talk which left me eager to read Daughter of Hounds again and even more eager to begin Joey LaFaye. She - my lit agent - is flying away to London this week, and then a week in Florida, and I'm thinking I wish that the rest of my April wasn't going to be spent in this frelling office. But. That's what I do. Writers write. And I cannot write on the road (I've tried). And there is so very much to be written, so here I am.
The proofreading went well yesterday. We got through both "Waycross" and "Alabaster," both of which I still like a great deal. Today we'll do "Les Fleurs Empoisonnèes", and tomorrow we'll do "Bainbridge" and I'll check over the preface, and then it'll be done and I can move along to the next thing. Yesterday, I was utterly baffled at a few of the typos we found in "Waycross," even though it's been published twice already, first as the chapbook (2003) and then in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Vol. 15; 2004). Yet, still, here are these stupid, stupid errors. Argh.
I wonder if anyone's written The Mammoth Book of Mammoths? If not, I want to do so.
After I finished "pas-en-arrière", way back whenever it was I finished it, mid March, I thought I'd be going into Sirenia Digest #5 ahead of things for once. But then "For One Who Has Lost Herself" went from being a vignette to a full-blown short story that I only just finished on Thursday last, and it still hasn't been illustrated...so...here I am behind again. But I shall do my best to get the digest out on the 14th, or at least no later than the 17th. *sigh*
Last night we continued the Star Trek movie binge with Star Trek: The Search For Spock (1984) which was much more fun than I'd remembered it being. I still think Christopher Lloyd totally steals the show as the Klingon commander Kruge. And, truth be told, Robin Curtis made a better Vulcan than did Kirstie Alley, but her take on Saavik was so completely different that I had a hard time seeing them as the same character. And, speaking of that which is both geeky and trivial, my very first date movie was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Yes. I was doomed from the very beginning.
Later, after writing a longish Wikipedia entry for the subfamily Mosasaurinae between midnight and 1:30 a.m., I was lying in bed reading the wonderful Weta Studios book on the fauna of Skull Island, trying desperately to get sleepy, and I'm such a damned nerd I got obsessed with Vastatosaurus rex and how it couldn't have evolved from Tyrannosaurus as the book would have us believe, because the manus of T. rex is functionally didactyl and V. rex is tridactyl. Add in biogeographic considerations, and it must have evolved from some other earlier, less derived tyrannosauroid, because evolution generally doesn't work backwards and character-state reversals are never the most parsimonious explanations...and I'm thinking, you damned dork, it's fiction, and it looks cool, and that's what matters, and why the hell don't you shut the damned brain off and go the frell to sleep.
Anyway, now I must go forth with my red pen and find typos that should have been caught five years ago...
It's weird when the day begins with a phone conversation. My agent called this morning and we had an Encouraging Talk which left me eager to read Daughter of Hounds again and even more eager to begin Joey LaFaye. She - my lit agent - is flying away to London this week, and then a week in Florida, and I'm thinking I wish that the rest of my April wasn't going to be spent in this frelling office. But. That's what I do. Writers write. And I cannot write on the road (I've tried). And there is so very much to be written, so here I am.
The proofreading went well yesterday. We got through both "Waycross" and "Alabaster," both of which I still like a great deal. Today we'll do "Les Fleurs Empoisonnèes", and tomorrow we'll do "Bainbridge" and I'll check over the preface, and then it'll be done and I can move along to the next thing. Yesterday, I was utterly baffled at a few of the typos we found in "Waycross," even though it's been published twice already, first as the chapbook (2003) and then in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Vol. 15; 2004). Yet, still, here are these stupid, stupid errors. Argh.
I wonder if anyone's written The Mammoth Book of Mammoths? If not, I want to do so.
After I finished "pas-en-arrière", way back whenever it was I finished it, mid March, I thought I'd be going into Sirenia Digest #5 ahead of things for once. But then "For One Who Has Lost Herself" went from being a vignette to a full-blown short story that I only just finished on Thursday last, and it still hasn't been illustrated...so...here I am behind again. But I shall do my best to get the digest out on the 14th, or at least no later than the 17th. *sigh*
Last night we continued the Star Trek movie binge with Star Trek: The Search For Spock (1984) which was much more fun than I'd remembered it being. I still think Christopher Lloyd totally steals the show as the Klingon commander Kruge. And, truth be told, Robin Curtis made a better Vulcan than did Kirstie Alley, but her take on Saavik was so completely different that I had a hard time seeing them as the same character. And, speaking of that which is both geeky and trivial, my very first date movie was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Yes. I was doomed from the very beginning.
Later, after writing a longish Wikipedia entry for the subfamily Mosasaurinae between midnight and 1:30 a.m., I was lying in bed reading the wonderful Weta Studios book on the fauna of Skull Island, trying desperately to get sleepy, and I'm such a damned nerd I got obsessed with Vastatosaurus rex and how it couldn't have evolved from Tyrannosaurus as the book would have us believe, because the manus of T. rex is functionally didactyl and V. rex is tridactyl. Add in biogeographic considerations, and it must have evolved from some other earlier, less derived tyrannosauroid, because evolution generally doesn't work backwards and character-state reversals are never the most parsimonious explanations...and I'm thinking, you damned dork, it's fiction, and it looks cool, and that's what matters, and why the hell don't you shut the damned brain off and go the frell to sleep.
Anyway, now I must go forth with my red pen and find typos that should have been caught five years ago...