Livia Llewellyn

This morning I reached for my big leather messenger bag, and noticed something slithering around it. Then the thing slipped inside. FUCK! I immediately did what any sane person would do – I grabbed the bag, turned it upside down, and shook vigorously, while a steady stream of profanity poured from my mouth. Keys, wallet, makeup, phone… and plop. A gigantic SILVERFISH dropped to the floor. I stepped on it: and then I just stood there for a bit, with the squishy body under my sandals, thinking about my life and the quality of it in general and how much longer I think I can stand living like a fucking piece of shit animal and a lot of other much darker things I probably shouldn’t blog about.

So, I’m at work now, and back in my apartment silverfish are eating my books and clothes and papers – the ones that aren’t yet in storage. But will be. Because, it’s become evident to me, that I cannot have books and clothes where I live, except in giant plastic bins that I seal and unseal every time I want clean underwear or a towel or a shirt or a scrap of paper. So, it’s all going into storage. Everything. No more hanging clothes in the closet, or even keeping them in my dresser. BTW, anyone in the NYC area need a nice dresser from Ikea? It’s not like I’ll be using it anymore….

And because silverfish can’t survive in dry environments that are either below 60 degrees or above 80 degrees, this means 1) buying dehumidifiers for every room and keeping them turned on full-blast, and 2) no air conditioning, at all. I will actually need to heat up my apartment to around 85-90 degrees and keep it there until the end of the year, when temps drop down to the 40′s at night and all the insects finally start to hibernate. And I’m going to have to start using boric acid along the walls, instead of lovely non-toxic cinnamon.

THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST SUMMER EVER.

A couple weeks ago, Caitlin Kittredge blogged about Project Unicorn – a list of projects she needs to get through by the end of the summer. And Theodora Goss, together with Nathan Ballingrud and Alexandra Duncan have started the YA Novel Challenge, in which they have all agreed to finish a novel in the next three months. Since both of these projects dovetail with my own goals, I’m doing both, and calling it Project Centicorn! That’s centipede + unicorn, a monstrous mash-up creation of getting shit done with extra legs and horns, because that’s just how I roll. (And no, I will not call it Project Unipede, because that sounds like some kind of genital-revealing spandex onesie that porny retailer American Apparel might market. Believe it or not, I have limits.)

So, below is my Project Centicorn list. Every week (let’s say Monday’s) I’ll repost it with an update as to what I’ve accomplished.

Writing
* first draft of FrankenNovel (80k words max) by end of Labor Day Weekend (Sept 4)
* reread “The King in Yellow” (research for story invite) by end of summer
* reread “Grimscribe” (research for other story invite) by end of summer

Other Shit
* finish moving everything out of the office which has turned into an ant colony/death trap
* move my books into storage – silverfish in the building means they all have to go [::sob::]
* hang new blinds in my kitchen/living room area – the rest of the apartment is a Lovecraftian void of madness and needs major renovating, but I’m a renter, so fuck it
* go the gym a minimum of 75 times from now through September 4 (allowing for travel days and housesitting for three weeks in a neighborhood nowhere near my gym)

FYI, the FrankenNovel may or may not be YA – it has a young protagonist (17), but that doesn’t mean it will read as YA. For now I’m not thinking about it, and just trying to finish the damn thing.

Sunday’s supposedly glorious excursion to the Met was a total bust. But of course it was, you all say! How could it have been anything else? It started downhill when I left the apartment without a jacket, telling myself that it wasn’t really as cold as it seemed to be outside. Well, much like the Rapture-followers discovered, wishing doesn’t fucking make it true. After sitting outside the museum for over an hour, I realized I was getting a cold. Also, the exhaust and fumes from the several hundred tour buses idling on the street made me a bit light-headed – I’d forgotten that the Met has become a world-class dumping ground for thousands of tourists who aren’t as interested in what’s inside the museum as much as taking pictures of themselves outside the museum. Fortunately, there was a small coffee stand open, so that kept me from having to beg for a cup of hot dog water at the other food stand. I’m really trying to cut down on liquids that have so many roach legs and pig anus bits in them.

And then my friend arrived and we promptly ran away! Seriously. It was just too crowded at the Met, so we ended up at Cafe Sabarsky in the Neue Gallery, where we ate brunch in a wood-paneled, old-timey sitting room the size of my entire apartment. Being a peasant sucks.

After brunch, we went down to the start of the High Line, and walked the length down to Kava Cafe in the Meatpacking District. It’s a beautiful little park, and I think I’ll be going back a number of times over the summer – there’s lots of covered spaces where you can sit and read or write, and look out over the Hudson River and the very raggedy, industrial edges of Chelsea. Of course, though, after six hours spent largely outside in cold air and drizzley rain, I sort of fell apart – I went home, took some flu meds and promptly fell asleep for three hours, then woke up and spent the rest of the evening being violently ill in all kinds of ways I’m far too ladylike to describe. And another lovely Sunday came to an end!

And here’s my word count meter for FrankenNovel:

Yes, it’s a small number, extremely small for the amount of time I’ve spent working on it (well over a year). However, I have approximately 100,000 words worth of backstory, character sketches, plot points, chapter outlines and world building that aren’t included in that little 12k word count. And a lot of those backstories and sketches will (hopefully) go into other novels featuring this particular protagonist. So there you go.

Only 151 more days until the next Rapture! I know, it’s like I swear we just had one…

But you all knew that already, right? Yeah. I think it’s kind of too late to post a WHC report, but to be honest, it was a pretty low-key affair for me. I spent much of the time battling a massive migraine, and losing the battle – I missed almost all of the panels and parties because I was in bed with tears streaming down my face, trying not to 1) move, or 2) kill myself, because the pain was actually that bad. My reading went very well, though, and my panel was fine – I didn’t hog the discussion, nor did I freak out and hide under the table. Someone told me how much they loved my story Keep Calm and Carillon. The look on their face when I corrected them was delicious. I met a lot of awesome people, didn’t spend enough time with them, and I expect next year’s con to be much the same. End of report!

The novel -which I am officially calling FrankenNovel (until it has an official title), is coming along slowly but surely. Other than that, not much to report here. Still getting ready for the Wolfram & Hart “Run Till You Drop Like a Sack of Shit” walk/race. Still covered in ants, and getting ready to be covered in summer bees. This is my life. It sucks all kinds of ways to Sunday, but it’s the only one I’ve got. Unless, you know, I haunt the fuck out of this planet, and I’m still enthusiastically planning on that. It’s good to have at least one thing to look forward to.

Lastly: here’s a new review of Engines.

This is the Table of Contents for Demons, an anthology edited by John Skipp, to be published later this year by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. Again, I say HOLY FUCKING SHIT – look at those names! Look at them!! Also OMFGBBQ: I’m in an anthology with Poe and Lovecraft. I just peed myself. For realsies.

CHERUB – Adam-Troy Castro
THE DEVIL – Guy de Maupassant
THE BOOK – Margaret Irwin
THE MONKEY’S PAW – W.W. Jacobs
THE HOUND – H.P. Lovecraft
…THE BLACK CAT – Edgar Allen Poe
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER – Stephen Vincent Benet
NELLTHU – Anthony Boucher
THE HOWLING MAN – Charles Beaumont
THE EXORCIST (excerpt) – William Peter Blatty
HELL – Richard Christian Matheson
VISITATION – David J. Schow
…BEST FRIENDS – Robert R. McCammon
INTO WHOSE HANDS – Karl Edward Wagner
PILGRIMS TO THE CATHEDRAL – Mark Arnold
THE BESPELLED – Kim Harrison
NON QUIS, SED QUID – Maggie Stiefvater
DEMON GIRL – Athena Villaverde
HE WAITS – K.H. Koehler
HAPPY HOUR – Laura Lee Bahr
…STAYING THE NIGHT – Amelia Beamer
DAISIES AND DEMONS – Mercedes M. Yardley
AND LOVE SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION – Livia Llewellyn
MOM – Bentley Little
20TH LEVEL CHAOTIC EVIL ROGUE SEEKS WHOLE WIDE WORLD TO CONQUER – Weston Ochse
CONSUELA HATES A VACUUM – Cody Goodfellow
OUR BLOOD IN ITS BLIND CIRCUIT – J. David Osborne
EMPTY CHURCH – James Steele
…ANGELOLOGY (excerpt) –Danielle Trussoni
THE CODA OF SOLOMON – Nick Mamatas
THE LAW OF RESONANCE – Zak Jarvis
STUPID FUCKING REASON TO SELL YOUR SOUL – Carlton Mellick III
HALT AND CATCH FIRE – Violet LeVoit
SCARS IN PROGRESS – Brian Hodge
THE UNICORN HUNTER – Alethea Kontis
OTHER PEOPLE – Neil Gaiman