Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<still confused about the duck... but I confuse easily, so pay it no
mind>

streak - I like you're Crowley... though I'd NEVER be able to drink
one!

Len - we thought about lighting it, but by the time we got around to
that point, we were all too floppy to operate the lighter... and I
don't remember much else except the headache (egads, I'm glad I gave up
alcohol!)

ophelia-b - Maybe by "EZ Open", they meant "with explosive devices"?

Neil - Mpls in 2002? Do you know what month? I'll need to start saving
*now* if I'm to go to Oz AND Mpls next year. :)

Tree - Thingies to do, indeed... and you've yet to see the best parts
of San Francisco in daylight! That's okay, when I'm in Oz, I'll give em
what for...

Linda - Check your inbox.

squeaks - who will actually try to catch up on sleep tonight <stop
laughing!>
  

    
Jen -  Forget the EZ Open. Like most products sold after 2 a.m. with a
2 for 1 offer if you..BUY NOW!..they never work. The most effective
way to open a coconut without spilling the contents is by using a very
sharp machete and chopping the top off the husk in one fell swoop. Of
course the milk and jelly are best sipped and eaten directly from the
source and is especially delicious when fortified by a double shot of
overproof Jamaican rum. After your first one I guarantee you won't mind
shimming up the tree to pick your own nut. ;)

Michelle - Didn't Walker come up with cocktail dedicated to Cthulu
using gummy worms as substitute tentacles?  [eek!]

streak- Sounds like even a small sip of Desire might be too addictive.
 I've heard from a reliable source that it is everything you have ever
wanted. No matter who you are. What you are..or some such. 


Neil - I vote for reading Maddy both versions on different nights and
having a lovely discussion regarding the difference.  It is kind of sad
that they felt a need to revise it. Not even Mary Poppins is safe from
the PC police? 

Journalist/writer Stanley Crouch, who happens to be black..tends to
call African Americans "Negroes."  He says it's too tiring to take on
all the appellations that have been used to describe dark skinned
Americans of African decent, so he stopped at the one black people in
America first called themselves. Sure it's a dated term, but certainly
not offensive when you consider the other.

Btw, over at rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 someone asked JMS if he saw
Princess Mononoke and was praising the movie to high heaven.  He said
that he hasn't been able to get into anime, so I dropped a post stating
that you wrote the script for Mononoke, and reminded people that you
wrote Day of the Dead from season 5. I think he'll definitely give it a
look-see now. ;)
  

    
Rocky -- I have no problem with calling anyone what they want to be
called, unless it gets into silliness: I rememeber a book called THE
LONDON HANGED, in which a 17th century West Indian former slave was
described as African American, because it was the right thing to say
instead of Black. 

I think the biggest problem (for Travers, I imagine) with the Mary
Poppins story is not the slightly cliched Indians, Eskimos etc, as they
are simply people out of stories, and all of them are very nice. It's
that when Michael steals the Compass they all come for him with
weapons, no longer nice -- which is quite right, given that we're in a
fairy tale and he's broken the rules. She could have written the same
story into the UK, and they would have visited Brighton, Scotland,
Essex and Wales on their journey, and had natives waving briefcases and
claymores on the final sequence... the equation would have been the
same.

She rewrote it in 1981, at a guess.

What she wrote it into is dull. And even the scene of the animals
coming for Michael has been muted to take out any terror.

Travers was a fine writer, and a good thinker, and I suspect she got
told off about the story one too many times. And I'd guess that she
decided that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to fix it, as she was
probably being accused of being racist from four different directions.

I might read Maddy the different bits, and talk about why someone
would change what they'd written, and why the Native Americans, Inuit,
South Sea Islanders and Chinese might get offended (but probably
wouldn't).

Michelle, it's quite simple. I was given the duck (yellow, rubber,
small) for Luna in Chicago. I took it to New York. I told Luna I had a
duck backstage for her. For reasons I still do not understand she never
got the duck. It stayed in my computer bag. I planned to give it to
you at the CBLDF thing in LA to get to Luna. I must have forgotten.
Where the duck is now is anyone's guess. There.

WORLD FANTASY CON is always Hallowe'en weekend, more or less. This
time it'll be the weekend after Hallowe'en, November 1-3. Which means
I'll have a Guy Fawkes party on the Monday night and it'll be the 4th
of November in the US but the 5th in the UK so that's all right.
  

    
Hello Everyone,

I hope you don't mind if I jump into the conversation. I've been
lurking and reading for a few weeks and I finally gave in and splurged
on the Well subscription that I've wanted for years. It took thirteen
days and a few phone calls to get my account working (some
unidentifiable glitch we'll just blame on a computer), so my comments
may be a bit behind the times.

The ankh's in Hot Topic: I went to see these firsthand yesterday. I
got a few stares as I struggled through too-close racks of oversized
pants and Incubus tees with my stroller-bound child in tow. [It's a
tough realization when you learn that you have used up any residual
coolness you had left from adolescence and are now officially
considered uncool.] Anyway... it looked like an attempt to toy-ify the
ankhs. As in: "This is not a real ankh, please do not attempt to use it
at home." This is one instance in which branding should have been
sacrificed for the look of the piece.

Jen - The fact that it was spelled "EZ" should have been a tip-off. Be
wary of things labeled "nite", "rite", and "thru" as well. :)

Neil - I'm in the camp that believes you should read the original
version of the Mary Poppins tale to your daughter. She's certainly old
enough to understand an explanation of why some words and ideas are
outdated. And you know best how much 'scary stuff' she'll enjoy hearing
without being terrified that night.

Tara
Who imagines it must take a great deal of skill to write compelling
animal characters.
  

    
Neil - Right, rubber duckie. Okay. Thanks. Now I'm just finding it
funny that some of us are using you as a courier service! :)

As for WFCon, it looks like I'll be having a much more interesting
Halloween next year than this past one (not that hanging with other
thingies wasn't fun, but it was just an overpacked club night). And if
I don't see Shira before then, at least I can bug her then. Hmmm, it
seems a little desperate to be planning my 'stalking expeditions' this
far in advance... but it is Halloween, so I guess it's alright. 

squeaks - who tends to plan out Halloweens years in advance any way.
  

    

I like the thought of the Cthulhu drinks with gummy worms. But then, I eat
gummy worms. Yum.

> "This is not a real ankh, please do not attempt to use it
 at home."
>

I like this image.
  

    
Greetings and salutations to everyone here.

Neil - Eagerly awaiting June 19th, to say the least. 
About a year ago I had the pleasure of chatting online with you about
an adaptation I directed of your short story Troll Bridge. You were
exceedingly gracious about the adaptation, since it seems that you
hadn't heard about it happening until after it closed. 

Being the raging egotist that I am, I thought it would be nice to let
you know that we almost did a Winter themed show (Troll Bridge appeared
in Naked Fall, the second of three season themed shows) in which
"Witches' Heart", from the Sandman Book of Dreams, was to be adapted.
Sadly, schedule conflicts and issues to convoluted led the company to
leave the series of shows as a trilogy... which really offends my sense
of balance.

Anyway, I'm involved with this company's current show, in which I'm
directing an adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guinn's "Darkness Box". It's
turning out to be a lot of fun and I hope it will be as well received
as "Troll Bridge", and my last effort, an adaptation of the creation
and marriage of Surya, the Hindu sun god, was.
  

    
Hello everyone! I'm so glad I found this place. It was weird. I was at
The Dent to see what was going on with Tori, wading through the
irrelevant information (what shampoo she's currently using, songs that
were once played during a news cast in Rhode Island ect...) to get to
the relevant, when I ran across a post saying that Neil said something
about being a part of her next album on the Dreamhunters topic. It had
a link to it and said something about interpreting what he said
ourselves. I followed the link. Hot Digity! I was surprised and
delighted to find not only that Neil actually posts here often, but
that there are also a lot of other intelligent, interesting people here
as well. I never did find the post where Neil said something about
Tori's next album, but I like to be surprised anyway. So here I am. I
think my bios around here somewhere seeing as though I wrote one when I
registered. I am looking forward to the discussions that come . . .

   Erynn
    
  

    
e-mail from Mary Roane:

Len--is sequel to Bridget Jones' Diary.  Is quite funny.  Am going to
start Ben Elton's Inconceivable next, if can stop writing in style of
Helen Fielding. Ahahahaha! 
  

    

Neil - is Delirium a Deadhead?  There was this little elliptical aside
about when Delirium was very young and a band that was grateful for
something and so I wondered...?  And in the picture of her as this young
woman, she looked like a twirler!

I'm feeling like the kid in the last reading group in the class!  Everyone
in the upper reading groups has finished all the books and I'm just
starting, so...

Delirium used to be Delight and she is going to change again?

And Despair and Desire are twins??  Desire is the one who speaks in a
different type face, I now realize.  Despair is definitely female, but
Desire is so androgynous that I'm not sure.

This is so cool.  This is the first book in which I get to meet someone
other than Dream and Death.  Oh, and I think the other book I got was
Death, The High Cost of Living.  (Although, I should add that I really
like Dream and Death, especially Death.)

And I am way too old and uncool for Hot Topic so I love to go in there and
ask lots of questions.  %^)
  

    
Linda: Welcome to the world of Sandman. *grin* 
So, you're reading Brief Lives, eh? You're in for a wonderful ride.
  

    
No really, I love the dent and I wouldn't have found this without
them. Didn't mean to offend if I did.
  

    
Neil -- It's sad to hear what happened to Tavers. So are we going to
revisit each an every story ever written that might be offensive to
some people and require authors to do rewrites to satisfy the offended
parties?  Books would become quite dull and probably as awful as the
new version you mentioned. Sure there are times when you might read
something that sets your teeth on edge, but I wouldn't want to censor a
storyteller's creativity in some futile effort to reach an imagined
level of comfort. Along those lines, haven't some publishers created
book imprints for children that are totally sanitized and devoid of any
reference to violence, controversy or issues that require critical
thinking?  Bleh!

But on a happier note, I visited amazon.com tonight and they've listed
Princess Mononoke in DVD on my personal list of recommendations. They
know me well..which might or might not be a good thing.  *grin*
  

    
Tara -- if it was me I would have found some place that made really
nice silver ankhs and bought a pile from them, and put them in a box
with a Death logo on, maybe with a foldout poster or a very thin
minicomic or something. But there, that's me. Somewhere on this topic
or in Topic 73 I think I talk about the oddness of putting logos on
things that don't have them on in the original.

Michelle -- see you Halloween 2002 then. I suspect that if you and
Shira and Sarah go trick or treating Minneapolis will not know what's
hit it.

Dan -- good to hear from you.

Erynn -- I thought your description of the Dent was very funny. I last
had cause to look around the forum there when there was all the
discussion about the Blueberry Girl poem, and I was very impressed that
nobody (as far as I know) has been bootlegging Blueberry Girl since I
asked them not to.

You'll find the whatever it was I would have said about the new album
in topic 73, now all frozen, in roundabout just before Christmas last
year. I think I was down there for a few days around the 20th of
December.

She's recording it now, and I've heard from Marcel, her engineer, that
it's sounding amazing and it's really working. (She seems happy, but
when we last spoke she was very tired, juggling the new album and the
baby. Not literally, of course. That would be inhuman.)

The American gods journal over at www.americangods.com is fun, too.

Linda -- isn't it fun? You can read DEATH:THCOL in any order, although
you'll first meet Hazel and Foxglove in GAME OF YOU.  I think you'll
enjoy Season of Mists, too, when you get that. 


Oh, let me plug a book for any high school english teachers reading
this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130212806
It's over a thousand pages long, and it's an astonishingly complete
book. (I have a story in there, and they sent me a copy, and I was
impressed.)
  

    
Rocky -- well, I think a writer has every right to rewrite his or her
early work to make it fit with whatever agenda they have at the time
they rewrite it. And to write books in later life that make a mockery
or a mess of whatever they've done earlier. And we have the right to
read the earlier versions of what they've written if we like them
better, or to ignore the later books if we think they're silly.

I got the proof reading copies of American Gods today from Morrow,
only to discover that the last three pages of the novel are missing.
They were very embarassed about it, and only four copies have gone out
so far and they're immediately getting letters containing the missing
pages. I printed out copies of the missing pages for the ones I was
signing and sending back to Morrow/Harper Collins. And was grateful
that it hadn't happened in the finished book...
  

    
Linda - on Dan's comment about the wild ride... just don't get into
the car. :)

Rocky - my first thought was of Disney stuff... but I like some of
that, so while some of it is distinctly 'bleh', at least others have
potential.

Neil - I haven't actually been trick-or-treating in years; well, 4,
but that was sort of a ploy to get candy for the party without going to
the store. Finally spoke to Trevor, he may be coming with.

On leaving out the last three pages - I've discovered that's the only
way I can truly enjoy Anne Rice books lately. When I go back much later
and read the last few pages, I'm always thankful I didn't ruin it
earlier. She's become rather too happy with endings for my taste.

But I'm glad you've got the problem. It would be devastating to read
AG through and then be left hanging, after waiting so long to see it in
print in the first place.

squeaks, who is far too hyped on carbos and sugar! Go oatmeal!
  

    
Neil - Oh, I totally agree, but my concern regarding Tavers' rewrite
was regarding self-censorship. That an author might feel forced to
rewrite a published work not necessarily because they want to, but
because of pressures by others to submit to a particular social or
political agenda, or because some group just didn't like what they
wrote. If the rewrite is wholly of the author's own volition then no
one should impede that right. It is the spectre of censorship of any
kind that gives me pause.

Belated congratulations to you and Mr.Miyazaki for being nominated for
the current Nebula Awards for "Best Script," for Princess Mononoke.
I'm crossing all sorts of things but the work speaks for itself. 

Re AG's missing pages...*ack!*  I hope you decided to include that
lovely story you read for the last Guardian Angel tour in NYC. Even so,
I foresee me desperately trying not to read it in one sitting when it
hits the shelves this summer.  Might as well give up. 

One more thing, THE LONDON HANGINGS was it about criminals or slaves?

Michelle - Please give Trevor my regards and tell him there's a Sifl&
Olly convention this August in Nashville, and the unaired episodes of
season 3 will finally be released. 

Jeeze..we Scorpions tend to drop out and turn up like bad pennies once
remembered.;)
  
 
  

    
Neil -- That Prentice Hall book looks great.  I have a couple of their
high school lit books I managed to pilfer.  The freshman and sophmore
ones, cause after that I really wasn't in school often enough to end up
with complete set.

I was wondering if you pick the authors who read the proof or if it's
done for you?  And if you do pick em how exactly do you decide, and how
many do you get to pick?
  

    
Neil- Mikewhy is usually respectful when it comes to the wishes of the
the artist, from what I can tell. If you or Tori asked him not to post
something, or to take something down, I'm pretty sure that he would
cooperate (as he seems to love you both very much, as you can see.) I'm
happy to hear that she is good and well and that her album (and
daughter) are coming along.
In regards to the missing pages: that would be such a travesty if it
WERE the final copies! Imagine: "What is this!? The last page ends in
'But'!"

Erynn
  

    
Re: missing pages...
Last summer I decided to re-read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, as I
hadn't read them since I was a pre-adolescent (am currently 30) and
wanted to be up on them when the films started coming out.
So I get through Fellowship, and Two Towers, and reach that crucial
point in Return of the King, when Frodo is about to throw the ring into
Mordor and Gollum shows up and...

The next two pages were bleached and illegible.

That's just not right, man.

Re: New Tori CD
YAY! 
Neil, I know that you're mentioned by name in Little Earthquakes and
Under the Pink, and I believe that there is a mention of the Velvets of
Neverwhere in Boys for Pele... but near as I can tell, Choirgirl Hotel
and to Venus and Back were sans Gaiman. Not that you have to be on
every Tori album... but I was wondering if you two just got tired of
hiding away these little easter eggs for your mutual fans to find and
intentionally stopped doing them. (or did I just manage to miss them
entirely)

*exiting obsessive geek mode....... ... now*
Dan
  

    

Boys for Pele has "if Neil made me a tree" in "Horses".
I think you're right about Choirgirl and Venus, though.
  

    
Dan--Never fear.  The refrence to the Velvets was in From the
Chiorgirl Hotel in the song Hotel.  The Boys for Pele refrence was in
Horses.  I don't recall a To Venus and Back one, but I could be wrong,
or it might be a hidden one.  I'm pretty sure Neil is thanked in the
notes though.

Erynn--Don't worry, I know just what you mean.  Its not so much
Mikewhy as it is the more frightening fans who write him Tori tidbits. 
"Okay, Okay!  I now know that Tori smelled like grapefruit soap on
such and such a day, but what does this have to do with ANYTHING?"  
  

    

Cool about the Velvets reference- I haven't listened to Choirgirl since
reading Neverwhere, so I didn't know about that one.
  

    
Neil--I just read your post about World Fantasy Con. being near
"Hallowe'en" which freaked me out very much for a moment because I had
just finished reading something that used that spelling (which I had
never seen before).  Then I realized that it was "The Last Temptation"
by you, and stopped freaking out.  :)  On that note, is there some sort
of significance behind the spelling?  
  

    
Well, the word is a contraction of All Hallow's Eve, so the "e'en" part is
short for "evening."