"And like this insubstantial pageant faded..."

The Tempest wrapped yesterday, after a fine three-weekend run, having reached its peak of greatness right at the end. Which is as it should be.

I'm sad it's over; it's hard to let it go after all this time. It was a milestone for me. But I got very, very lucky with this one. I had a talented cast who worked hard, and they made me proud. (A crew, too, who were consummate professionals, and who deserve as much applause.) I'll miss them; I'll miss seeing the work they accomplished here. I hope they stay in touch.

At strike yesterday, they presented me with Propero's staff (I was sure Brenden, who put all kinds of love and hard work into making it look properly magickal, was going to quietly adopt it) and a facsimile edition of the First Folio (which is difficult to read without getting flashes of Good Omens, unsurprisingly). I was truly, truly touched. Good people all around.

The Vasty Deep remains somewhat behind schedule, if not as grievously so as before. I broke 18,000 last night what with staying up too late (cue Nils Frykdahl) and at least I'm actually at a place where I think I can make it now. More erotica helped. Kind of nice to know, at least for my poor suffering heroine's sake, that it doesn't turn November but Jenny gets laid. All for the word count, baby, yeah!

Also, take Maija's advice and go watch the teaser trailer for the next Harry Potter movie. It's delicious. It looks like a Ted Naifeh comic come to life, and has Gary Oldman in the Sirius Black role, resembling nothing so much as a Songs from the Wood-era Ian Anderson. Hurrah!

"Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys"

Alex sent us this article yesterday, about the apology being given by the villagers of Nabutautau, Fiji to the descendants of the Reverend Thomas Baker for their own ancestors having clubbed and eaten him back when that sort of thing went on more often. They're hoping this will lift what they see as a curse of bad fortunes plaguing the community ever since. I suppose they feel that eating missionaries registers a bit higher on the Evil Meter than just eating your neighbors in the normal run of things, or else all of Fiji would be having "Sorry we boiled your great-great-granddad" parties all over the place, and time for little else.

(I don't know, though - I feel a bit let down by the whole event. Part of me feels like, if there was any poetry in the universe, they'd have gathered all those folks into the village, started to feel the effects of a few rounds of klava, looked around, and said, "Oh, what the hell, for old times' sake. Break out the forks, lads.")

We were in Suva too briefly to go see the Rev. Baker's boot in the Fiji Museum (apparently the only thing left uneaten; waste not, want not), but since we heard that particular nugget of island history I've been wanting to do a Jenny Haniver story set in Fiji, using that incident - one of the few recorded cases of white men being victims of cannibalism, by the way - as the seed idea. I may play with that after The Vasty Deep goes through a rewrite or two.

Speaking of which, since I'm not posting the WIP online this year (first-publication rights, y'know), if you're one of my loyal readers and want to get a load of this travesty while it's still happening, let me know. I won't vouch for the quality of either the plot or the prose, but it does have monsters, and magicians-in-big-coats, so that's good. And I just dropped in the first weird supernatural sex scene last night, right before 10k. Hooray!

His Dork Materials

So I took Quiddity (the new laptop) out for a spin last night at the local Starbucks for an hour or so, and it was most excellent; I sat down with my novel-in-progress and a Venti Caramel Macchiato, and left with several hundred new words and about 10,000 Nerd Points. This is the life.

Battery's a bit wonky so far, and not lasting as long as perhaps it ought, but I'm firing it back up at home even as I write this. We'll see how it goes tonight. (Joy!)

In an entirely different subject, I neglected to give the big thumbs-up to Caren yesterday, who's been doing her part lately to make the world safe for unicorns. Whoohoo! Yeah, Miss Mita! You go, girl!

Acquire Treasure, Level Up

Last night I got my early Christmas ("and birthday and probably anniversary") present from my lovely wife: a truly kickass laptop, arrived, let's hope, in time to save my floundering NaNovel. (I stand at a woeful, if ominous, 6066 words.) I have the best sweetie evar.

Of course, I spent much of last night putting toys on it rather than writing, slobbering all over myself at the thought of having a portable CD burner.

Do I qualify for the Ubergeek Prestige Class now?

It's now a little over a month until we move. That's just weird. Exciting, too - I'm ready to be in our own place, and feeling suprisingly un-nostalgic about our apartment. It was a cozy little place to live, but five years is long enough.

And last but not least, a belated happy birthday (yesterday) to Neil Gaiman, now 43. Dream on, dreamer. Omnia mutantes...

My Life as Little, Big

Those of you who have followed Stacy's blog for the last couple of months may know that we've been in the market for a house. Amid the chaos of the past weekend, we looked at one and made an offer, and found out today that it got accepted.

If all goes well with inspections and such, we'll be living in Edgewood, just north of Baltimore, by Christmas. It's beautiful.

Special thanks to my mom, who went with Stacy on Saturday's house-hunting expedition and helped with the first look at that sucker, and to Spyder, who was good enough to sit through the brain-numbing process of paperwork with us in the role of, apparently, our good-luck charm.

Huzzah! Huzzah!

"The baseless fabric of this vision..."

Okay, so my projected schedule was a little off. I'm commencing with the wigging-out now.

It's been one of those tech weeks. I'm still missing costumes and pieces of costumes. We have tonight off, and one rehearsal left, and my poor actors are crawling towards the end of their patience. Me too.

Oh, please, please, you gods of artifice, don't let my play look like ass.

I was good, though. I didn't lose my shit, I didn't come home and get drunk and listen to the Smiths, I didn't take it out on random pedestrians. I understand that this sort of thing happens, and that it's better for it to happen now than, say, tomorrow. So I retain at least a workable grasp on my sanity.

On the other hand, as my Faithful Assistant Peter pointed out, this is probably why Orson Welles was all fucked up.

Sigh. In a couple of days the question will be moot, and I'll be surrounded by my adoring and lovely friends, and I can set this puppy free to be whatever gem or disaster it's destined to become. At which point cue the drinking, either celebratory or obliterating, and seeing the new year in with a proper pagan hurrah, not to mention at some point sneaking in hammering out about 3000 or so words of The Vasty Deep. "And all shall be well, or not."

Elephant head.

Elephant head.

I worship a god with an elephant head.

I think I feel better already.

"Gotta go with 'Fuck it,' Bob"

Patrick, apparently furthering some dark Romany plot to get me to spit Seattle's Best coffee all over GWU's fine computers, sent me this this morning. Proceed with caution.

Two delightful items arrived in the mail on Saturday. One was my copy of Sandman: Endless Nights come home safe from NYC, which is as lovely as promised. I read the first three stories last night during a thunderstorm. That was pretty cool.

The other was Current 93's Emblems: The Menstrual Years, which I'd decided a couple of months ago that my collection was incomplete without, right about the same time it became unfrickin'available everywhere. (Strangefortune say they have it, but they lie.) I finally managed to track down a used copy, for a bit more than I'd hoped to pay for it, and it is now mine. It's lovely as well. I've been listening to it at work this morning, thinking how having a version of "They Return To Their Earth" that doesn't have a weird skip in the middle from whoever posted it on Audiogalaxy is worth the wait.

After rehearsal Saturday (a wet tech that went about a hundred times smoother than I had any hope it would), I was off to the Jim's Big Ego CD-release show and picked up They're Everywhere!, the brand-new album, and you should too. It's got great stuff on it, lots of which we Egomaniacs have been waiting to have on an actual CD for the last three years or so. Plus the cover art was done by Jim's Uncle Carmine (as I told Jim, I wish I had an Uncle Carmine - I feel inadequately Italian, somehow) in the style he used to do when the Infantino name meant comics.

The Tempest opens in four frickin' days. That's unreal. I alternate between perfect Zen calm and moments of panicked wigging-out on this. It hasn't even quite sunk in yet. I'll be fun on Thursday night, I bet.

Nine days to go; Inner critic goes apeshit

Been following, and occasionally throwing my two-bits'-worth into the void of, an interesting discussion on Making Light about fantasy genre cliches. It seems to be turning into the sort of thing I should tune out so close to November 1 (much like "The Well-Tempered Plot Device," which is one of the most snobbishly nasty things ever written on genre fiction - so much so that I won't link it here, so Google it your damn self if you're curious), but I'm a masochist, so what the fuck.

Sick since Monday night. Good old stress and change in weather. I have so far managed to avoid throwing hellish tantrums at my actors for not knowing their lines (and truth be told, the improvement between Tuesday and Wednesday rehearsals was both vast and encouraging), so that's alright. But I have been loopy and out of it. More so than usual, perhaps. As an upside, giving notes like "Prospero, hang onto your staff while you're being disrobed" is even funnier than it normally is.

Thankfully, I did get my half-day off on the 31st to attend to all the out-of-town peeps drifting in for Opening Night. So if you're one of those folk, I'll have from noon-thirty or so on to coordinate hooking up. Huzzah!

Oh, and the latest Last Dark Art is now up.

They have reached
The blue gates of death
They are at
The blue gates of death
They shall go through
The blue gates of death

Don't mind me. I'm not even here.

Wherein Shakespeare and I Immanentize the muthafuckin Eschaton

So it's not enough that during production of The Tempest the area has been plagued by Hurricane Isabel and at least two other nights of insane storms; I just ticked off the list in my head and realized that opening night will bring together in my fair city:
my mom and Swampi
Patrick and Bernice
Spyder
and Jeff McCrady and his assorted minions
...on Hallofuckingween.

I tell you, the resulting psychic shockwave of this convergence is bound to have repercussions. If sunken R'lyeh rises out of the Pacific and Great Cthulhu wakes from his slumber to stride across the waves and start eating Los Angeles, I will not be in the least surprised.

And in the case of L.A., not all that sad.

Stacy and I were alloting bedspace tonight for that weekend. I said, "Well, Spyder won't be a problem. We can put her on a shelf, or pull out the sweater drawer."

I am so goin' to hell.

A long awaited update to Full Fathom Five has just gone up.

Exhausted. Stressed. But happy. The Tempest and NaNoWriMo both start in two weeks. Fortunately, I'll be able to more or less let go of the one as I dive right into the other.

Aieee!

Living in a transdimensional phone box... Like ya do...

Courtesy of Patrick, check this out.

Running jumping fighting Daleks.

It seems to me that the only reason not to do this would be for fear of geeks spontaneously combusting with joy. So I'll be eagerly awaiting more news.

Maybe Spyder can ask him herself when she sees him tomorrow night, the lucky wee beeotch.

"Don'tcha see, John? It's you what makes 'em bad"

Frank Beaton in Las Vegas City Life tells it like it is about comics, Hollywood, and Constantine. Give 'em hell, Frank!

The Watchmen movie's starting to sound pretty good, innit?

As you value your sanity, do not go here.

... Dammit, you went anyway, didn't you? After I told you. You get what you deserve.

It's October 1. And, like a moron, I've signed up again.

Anyone who donates me a functioning laptop by November 1 gets written into the novel.

Weirdness abounds. Someone nicked the plates from our car yesterday while it sat in the parking garage. I didn't learn this until I staggered home from rehearsal last night; Stacy had to deal with this nonsense from the get-go of coming off the Metro. (She stayed home today as well to get our new plates and so forth form the DMV. I hear it went alright, and we're more or less fine now, if a bit frustrated.)

Stacy says the car is cursed. I don't know. We've certainly had more than our share of car-related troubles in the last couple of years: rear-ended twice (one of which put her in surgery), a break-in, numerous trips to the shop, lots of parking-lot dents and scrapes, and now this. Still, for the most part, lots of this stuff wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been. We got broken into, but lost nothing of great value; we had to have repair work done, but discovered it before taking a road trip; we had our license plates stolen, but not the car itself. With the exception of Stacy's back injury (which was very serious indeed), most of what we've endured has been inconveniences, not disasters.

Am I a Polyanna for trying to make the best of all this? Maybe, maybe. It would be a fair accusation, I suppose. But I don't see the value in underlining the negativity of it all either. Two years ago, having our car broken into was an afterthought to a year that had already brought losing two members of my family, then enduring the accident and my wife's surgery, and finally September 11. I think I've got a good picture of what a real tragedy is, and this ain't it.

Robert Fulghum has an essay in one of his books about this. It's the one where he says that life is lumpy - but a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are three different orders of magnitude. It's good to be aware of which one you're coping with.

(None of which is to say that it isn't a big pain in the ass to stand in line at the DMV on a Tuesday morning because some miscreant got a wild hair. Which is something that I didn't, admittedly, have to do today. I love you, sweetie.)

Anyway, I suppose the point of all this is that I still feel like life is good today, and that I've been blessed with good fortune. For all the reasons I have to be happy, I can endure an inconvenience or two. So it goes. So it goes.

(Nonetheless, if anyone out there has a good way of de-jinxing a car, let me know...)

"Desire's a terrible thing, but I rely on mine"

It's Recommendations Night here on the Danblog - I've been listening to the Sundays, who I became a fan of eleven or twelve years ago by way of Andy, and thinking about how so much of the stuff in our lives we get from exposure to by our friends. (Also, tangentially, it made me contemplate the implications of being nostalgic about the music of the early '90s. At some point I must have gotten over learning that Harriett Wheeler was already married, but I don't recall when. I wonder what my 17-year-old self would make of that?) In any case, here are a few recent discoveries of mine:

First off, a heads-up to all my gamer peeps - Eden Studios has made their excellently cool Witchcraft RPG available as a free download, so go get it. It's spooky and Gothy and loads of fun - imagine putting Hellblazer and The Craft and Clive Barker and Lovecraft monsters in a big blender with a dash of Foucault's Pendulum and a Changelings soundtrack. Yeah, that kind of kewl. And there's even a way you can play using Tarot cards, for that extra dose of occult-nifty. And now there's no excuse not to have it. Bright Blessings, indeed.

In musical (but equally spooky) realms, Live at St. Olave's - recorded from the Current 93/Antony and the Johnsons 2002 London concert, which I picked up last weekend at Kim's in NY - is pretty good, if all too short. It's my first real exposure to Antony and the Johnsons, who do some weird and lovely stuff to judge by this; their second of three tracks on this CD is a musical rendition of Poe's "The Lake" that is certainly both of those things. Antony has a really gorgeous voice - angelically so - and the songs on here reward repeat listenings. C93 also do three tracks here, one of which is a truly incredible short version of "Sleep Has His House" that takes my breath away every time I hear it, and a performance of "Walking Like Shadow" that has some exquisite and gorgeous guitar work from the uber-talented Michael Cashmore. It's more of an EP than an album proper, and falls maybe more towards the "get this if you're a completist" end of the C93 canon, but I've no regrets in giving one a home. If you liked the melancholy, contemplative turn Tibet's taken the Current in the last few years (Soft Black Stars, Sleep Has His House) you won't either.

On the comics front, I've become a big fan of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder of late. Genre-wise, it's a kind of folkloric SF - imagine a bastard child of Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, set in a weird future of domed cities and insular ruling clans. Through this landscape wanders Jaeger, sin-eater and Finder (a kind of tracker-cum-detective), who's a bit like a bishounen Wolverine; he has amazing powers of healing and sensory acuity, and a good dose of angst by way of his conflicting obligations and a troubled past. The first two volumes deal with Jaeger's connections to a divided and disfunctional family who share part of that past in various ways, and the hard decisions he makes about what his duty to them is. Great stuff - intricate and interesting world-building, solid characterizations, and art that just gets better as it goes (and a great example of what can be done using a fairly simple style in black and white, which I imagine might be inspiring to one or two of you out there; yes, Maija, I'm winking at you).

I've managed to consume quite a bit of slack of late on Making Light, the weblog of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who (along with her husband Patrick) edits at Tor Books and does other fine things besides. There is much good stuff to be found here, both onsite and as a goldmine of fascinating links, and the little community that springs up in the comments is a fascinating bunch of folks. (And speaking of which, I should also wave here to Space Waitress, who was nicer to me than I deserved when I derailed a recent thread with some Shakespeare-pastiche doggerel, and who also has a site well worth visiting.)

And, finally, if you haven't found your way over to gaze in wonder at iLevel, our own Vishal's fascinatingly quirky camblog - you really ought. With the same sense of slightly askew whimsy he brings to his Savant stories, Vishal opens the camera eye on the small, sometimes disorderly details of commonplace things so that they seem like the artifacts of some alien world. It's found-object art of the sort only truly weird minds can produce, and I love it. It's both reassuring and unnerving to know there are folk like this on my friends-and-relations list, which is of course exactly as I would have it.

Autumn is officially here today. It sort of feels it. Happy Equinox.

And speaking of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the big news is that while we were in NYC last weekend, Spyder and I went to see Neil Gaiman's talk at New York is Book Country and got to meet the mop-headed dreamer himself at the signing afterwards. He is absolutely as nice as everyone says - very warm, very genuine, very kind to his adoring legions of fans. He drew a Morpheus in silver pen on the endpaper of my first-edition hardcover of Season of Mists (carrying which earned some appreciative looks from my fellow geeks) and shook my hand when I mentioned I was directing The Tempest. And I didn't even make too much of an idiot of myself right then. So that was alright.

It's really cool as hell to go to that sort of thing with Spyder, who as a Jim Hanley's Universe employee is plugged into the NY comics scene enough to be recognized by folks at such events, making me feel much less like a random dork (not that Gaiman fans don't know their own anyway; before the reading, I was waiting outside the Equitable Center and got asked by a stranger "Where are we going?" and when I looked confused he said, "Okay, you're wearing a Sandman shirt and smoking a clove. Where are we going?"). Spyder, for her part, is an excellent partner for doing geeky things with, and maintains an almost zenlike balance of enthusiasm and calm, which I guess is one of the things you learn when you attend on Mike Mignola for four hours. Still, my hat's off.

Saturday night was a big slumber party at the Marthas', who put their big bottle of Fijian rum to good use almost immediately for a round of I Never (and I got to tell the usual round of embarassing stories about myself, some of which I'd almost managed to block from memory, hurrah). We do miss the Marthas something terrible. But it was really excellent to spend good quality time with them, if only for a couple of days. More often, more often - NYC's not that far, and family's family, after all.

Back home, Isabel has left us without air conditioning or hot water (but with electricity and cable, and got us out of work for two days, which is a pretty fair trade-off) for what looks like the rest of the week, so it's weenie-shrinking cold showers for the next few days. I almost envy Matt's T&D excursion into West Virginia this week. Almost.

Rehearsals progress apace, though I'm all too aware that Full Fathom Five badly needs an update, not to mention I have a Last Dark Art long overdue. So it goes. For now, I ride out the whirlwind. I'll catch up when I get a chance to grab hold of something.

There is a wait so long (so long so long)
You'll never wait so long...

Wasn't I just making wiseass cracks about this, it having been the "when pigs fly" event of alternative rock for the last dozen years? "Now I will believe that there are unicorns."

Nothing more to say today than this.

Moce Fiji

Back in La-la Land now, where I write this at an internet station in LAX and we await our flight out at 10 tonight. I slept for much of the 11-hour Air New Zealand flight in, but we managed to score a direct flight back, so the wait's worth it. Huzzah!

It was tough leaving, but it's good to be almost home.

Report, Mr. Sulu

So, Fiji. Fiji is a delight. Our room faced the ocean, which we could hear crashing nearly at our door at high tide. At low tide, we could walk out nearly to the edge of the reef (the ground underfoot was sand and mud and shelss and crushed coral) and see the wondrous miniature wolrds in the tidepools: turquoise fish like little jewels, sea urchins in crevasses, electric-blue starfish. There was some kind of bizarre black sea-slug or worm that was everywhere; they looked like machine hoses jutting out from under the rocks, groping slowly around their shallow pools. And in the deep places, brilliant coral was everywhere, branches and clusters and knotted brains.

The Fijians are great people - a touch conservative, but warm and friendly almost to a fault. Even the con-men are nice enough to strike up more or less genuine conversations before they try to filch you. The population is about 53% native Fijian (a racial blend of Melanesian and Polynesian), 40% Indian, and the rest "other" (mostly Australians, New Zealanders and Chinese), with a few pockets of racial tension but more harmony than you might expect.

Everywhere you see the sulu, the skirt that's the national garment (unisex, though men favor a version with pockets and a beltlike strap - I bought one, naturally, and wore it to happy hour). Every city has handicraft stalls selling local wares made by the villagers - baskets, beads, penadants, and the ubiquitous war clubs and cannibal forks. (I didn't leave with a club, alas, but we made off with quite a few forks and other neat things.) And Fijian beer, both Fiji Bitter and the lighter Fiji Gold, is quite excellent. I could go on at some length about the food (and the best calamari I have ever, ever had), but I risk tedium already, so I'll stop.

Got just a touch homesick by the end of it all, wishing for my big fearsome cosmopolitan city. So it goes. We're almost there now, and happy to be so.

I'm sure I'll be missing the sea all too soon (and spending days on our villa porch, smoking Silk Cut like my literary heroes John Constantine and Bridget Jones), but for now - it's nice having home in sight.

Bula all and sundry from lovely Nadi, Fiji, where I write this from the Cyber Net Space Cafe. It's wonderful here.

Our resort is right on the beach, where we watched the sun set over the ocean last night before falling asleep (bloody jetlag). It's winter here, which means it's warm but dry, and cool at night and in the morning. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

Too much to tell all at once, so I'll write a more detailed account when it's all over.

In the Hills, the Cities

Los Angeles is not a city. Los Angeles is a veritable world, like Faerie. It's hard to appreciate how huge it is until you fly into it and see it coruscating beneath you, consuming the horizon in every direction. L.A. is vast, it contains multitudes.

I was ultimately underwhelmed, though. Something about the culture of California puts me off. I think L.A. and I are at odds in philosophy. It's a fine place to visit, but... well, you know.

It was actually quite a relief to come from there to a place where the people are about as real as can be imagined. Fiji is a jewel, and full of exactly the sort of kind and open people you'd hope would be there. You should go.

That's all for now. More later.

HOLYLIVINGFUCKI'MGOINGTOFUCKINGFIJIOHMYGOD

Er. Um.

Leaving shortly for L.A. Lot of flying very soon.

September will find me in a whole other hemisphere. Not wrapping my head around that very well.

So, anyway, this is zai jian for a little while. I may post from the other side of the world if I get a chance.

Meanwhile, take care of yourselves back in the real world. I'll be on a beach in cannibal country, doing lots of nothin'. My love to you all.

Huzzah!