You never will be simplified and never will be synchronized

We saw exactly three meteors for forty-five minutes of freezing our asses off under the autumn stars, but the constellations glittered sharply while we were out and the clouds moved in almost as soon as we got home, whereupon we declared this year's Leonid expedition a success and I discovered that Paula Guran had said nice things about "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" in the October issue of Locus:

Sonya Taaffe's "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" is a haunting ghost story but also enough of a paean to and description of the environs, architecture, and waterways of Cambridge and Boston MA to serve in (an extremely poetic and slightly weird) tourist brochure . . . Sid is haunted by her ghost, not so much in any traditional sense but at least partially by the question: "When the dams failed at last and the tide rolled up the Charles, would he still be there on his dock of weeds and heavy metals, his cigarette glowing under the dusk-blue water like a phantom light?" This is a fine modern eerie tale.

I can live with being an extremely poetic and slightly weird tourist brochure, actually. spatch got a suitable picture of me on a streetlit corner.

What do you need? Where do you go? What is this constant whispering?

I must use this week to remind myself that it is not at all true that I write something and then it falls into the unrecoverable gulfs of history, because "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" has been beautifully reviewed by Anne M. Pillsworth and Ruthanna Emrys at Tor.com's Reading the Weird:

Because the necessity—the obligation—of painful knowledge is a theme woven through this story's core. Knowing hurts, and knowing is dangerous. But not-knowing doesn't make you safe either, and certainly doesn't make you a better person. Sid's haunted by Hilary's life and death, and by his fear of attackers who would have been equally dangerous to her and her lover. But even before Hilary, she's haunted by the shadow of climate change, of a future in which the sea will take back a city that she knows deeply and intimately. If you know that someday Cthulhu is going to rise and overturn all, what should you do? Why speak the names of the dead, the murdered, when larger horrors await? You can't make the problem never-was, can't return to a pre-anthropocene, pre-knowledge innocence—you have to work with the present you've got and the futures it leaves open. So this is a story about little fixes—or even just changes, getting things moving that were held in stasis—amid huge, terrifying realities that aren't going away . . . This story is gorgeous and painful, and achingly appreciated during a time when eldritch horrors sometimes come perilously close to being worse than fiction.

I had been having a rather discombobulated afternoon caused by sleeping much later than planned despite the sunlight flooding our street, but this review makes up for all of it. For the record, the three pieces of Elise Matthesen's jewelry that contributed to the fictional item in the story are the necklace-crown "Remember What You Say in Dreams #4" (silver wire, silverleaf jasper, driftglass and freshwater pearl) and the pendants "Was Ice, Am Ocean" (silver wire and labradorite) and "The Sea That Marks the Heart" (silver wire, abalone, nazar-blue seed beads). Have some links!

1. I had no idea the U.S. Navy maintains a grove of white oaks strictly for repairs of the USS Constitution, but I am delighted to find out. I like that it is a conservation project, too.

2. Both environmentally and aesthetically, I love the underwater museum of Paolo Fanciulli.

3. I didn't know Climate Mayors existed, either, but I am glad to hear that Boston's own Marty Walsh has just been named chair of the coalition. Because we have tides like this. And so I write the stories I do.