Friday, February 15, 2002
And finally, Chapter 3 began, the first few sentences rolling into my head while I was walking on a deserted beach near Charleston on Wednesday afternoon. I'm home again and have almost 2,000 words of the new chapter behind me now, so maybe the trip was a good idea. Low Red Moon is going to be a strange, strange book. Maybe not stranger than Threshold, but strange nonetheless.
It was good to be back in Athens for a time. My favorite coffeehouse, my favorite bar, my favorite vegetarian restaurant (which is really saying something, as I am not a vegetarian and view that whole enterprise with a bit of suspicion). I have a few ghosts there, and I bumped into one or two, enough to add a hint of sadness, but it was still a good visit. On the UGA quad, the tulip trees and daffodils were in bloom. I drove by the carriage house where I lived for three years and it looked almost the same. Almost. I didn't make it to the science library to visit the giant ground sloth, or have time for a show at the 40-Watt, but I did drive past Poppy's old place on Pulaski. She left Athens just a couple of years before I moved there, so our Athens periods don't overlap. Everyone I saw kept asking me if I live in New Orleans now. Was that expected of me? "Caitlín? Oh, she writes spooky stories now so she must be living in New Orleans." People seemed disappointed to learn otherwise.
We left town about sunset and drove on to Charleston on I-20 to Columbia, then I-26 to Charleston. It was too dark to see anything much but stars and billboards, but I yammered on about local geology anyway, how the metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont give way to the sedimentary formations of the Coastal Plain. I don't remember the name of the motel (which is curious), but I'm fairly certain it found several new ways to be seedy. The beds seemed to be clean, at least, and there was no dried blood on the walls (that's another story). Old houses, the beach, the aqauarium, then right back home again. I already miss the smell of the sea.
Jennifer's been working hard on the "Sense of Place" page on my website and she put up new pictures today. Check it out.
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