I didn't find THE END of "The Madam of the Narrow Houses" yesterday, but I did do another 1,058 words on the story. It was a particularly difficult writing day, every word coming only after great resistance. I really must find the story's conclusion today. If only because it is already Thursday. Also, I will note that, for me, ghosts are the most difficult supernatural entities to write about well.
Not much else to yesterday, really. The writing. No walks the last couple of days, because I've been slacking off on exercise again. Bad me, I know. We went out to Videodrome last night about nine and rented Marcus Nispel's somewhat less than awesome Pathfinder (2007). I think Spooky enjoyed it more than I did. The alternating cyan and sepia color palettes seemed to render most of the action scenes incomprehensible to my eyes. And it's not often I'll say a film would simply have been better off had they skipped the dialogue altogether, but most of the dialogue was that bad. There were a few cool moments here and there, a few. Karl Urban was not nearly as interesting as he was playing Eomer in The Lord of the Rings, or even as interesting as he was playing Vakko in The Chronicles of Riddick. Anyway, as usual, your mileage may vary.
Oh, my contributor's copies of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Volume 18; edited by Stephen Jones) arrived yesterday, which reprints "Houses Under the Sea." It sort of odd, getting a "year's best" reprint before I've received the volume the story was first printed in (Thrillers 2, released last December), but there you go. This is, by the way, my eighth appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (my first was in Volume 9). Also, I got an email from ST Joshi informing me that the Penguin Classics title American Supernatural Tales, which reprints "In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)," is now available in bookshops.
Someone asked a while ago (and I never answered) whether I would be keeping an online journal for my Second Life Dune rp, as I recently did with Professor Nareth E. Nishi. The short answer is no, I won't. It was a lot of extra writing, keeping Nareth's blog, and I found that while it added considerable depth to the roleplay, it managed to take of lot of the fun out of it for me. Anyway, my Fremen character, Shahrazad, is all but mute and just shy of schizophrenic (there's a long story there), and I cannot imagine how she would keep any sort of a journal. However, there is
a short entry for her in our Dune: Apocalypse wiki. It even has a "photo."
And I think that's all for now. The coffee is here...