Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Len -- let me know what you think of 69 Love Songs. I'm at Steve
Brust's house tonight -- I gave him 69 Love songs for Xmas, and it
seems to have had deep and far reaching effects.

It doesn't matter if you love Las Vegas or hate it. It just carries on
being Las Vegas. But it isn't like anywhere else.

Martha... um... what is rotisserie thing?

Michelle -- that is, of course, the April 1st post...
  

    
Rotisserie baseball is a game that you play, using the playing statistics of
real-life big-leage baseball players over the course of a season.  At the
beginning of the season, everyone has a set budget with which to "draft", in
an auction, a full roster of baseball players, covering all the positions
you need on a full baseball team.

Then you just hope the people you "own" hit home runs, pitch strikeouts, do
all those good things, more than the people your competitors "own" do in
aggregate.  Last year was my first year, and I came in 8 of 14 in a 14-team,
NL-only roto league, so if I improve at all I'll be in the top half of our
little league.

It means you have to do a lot of research about how well every player in the
National League (or the AL or some draft from both, but then you get to
ignore all the not-so-good players because no one will need to draft them to
fill out their roster).

Are you glad you asked?  Oh, and it's called "Rotisserie" because that was
the name of the bar the guys who invented it frequented; and Mike will be
glad to know that Mike Piazza is a founding member of my team (but he's no-
option--I have to let him go after this year).
  

    
i loved the harlan ellison gag.  when i first read it, i chuckled
because i believed it.  then i got towards the end, and it was just too
much, and i happened to glance at my desk calander, which reminded me
what day it was, and then i laughed even more.

so i wake up this morning to find that a good friend's e-mail april
fools joke backfired, and caused another good friend to announce,
before she wanted to methinks, that she's been pregnant for months. 
this is problematic because she's been going out with a good friend of
ours (and one of my roomates) for about two years, but i'm about 98%
sure it's not his.  and she didn't know about it herself for quite a
while because she's got 2 uterises (uteri?), which will also lead to
many problems in the month to come.  sigh . . . maybe i've got the
material for that first book of mine.

re fantasy baseball: the one i'm in sets us up in games - so we play
someone new from our league every 3 or 4 days.  over the course of the
3 or 4 day game, all our players' points are added up, and at the end
of the 3/4 day game, the one with more points gets a win.  we then get
ranked by win/lose records, with total points only coming into play as
tiebreakers.

ok - off to drink some sencha to fully wake me up (the pregnancy post
did most of the job) and then off to go learn things that none of you,
nor i, ever wanted to learn about patent law . . . .

  --  s
  

    
Neil-- 69 Love Songs (vol.1) is amazing.  I'd heard about this album
about a year ago from a friend of mine, who ordered me to get it right
away, and who I foolishly ignored.  But between his praise and yours,
eventually I went for it.

I love the idea of doing 69 love songs-- it seems to be a kind of
writer's boot camp exercise-- a bit like the 24 hour comic.  Merrit's
writing is amazingly intricate and precise... I read a comparison
between him and Cole Porter or Ira Gershwin, but his colloquial quality
and ambivalence remind me more of William Finn-- you feel like you're
listening to someone articulately expressing his feelings, then you
look back and there's a carefully crafted underlying structure.  The
disc is a strike against the idea that lyrics that are too precise and
perfectly rhymed don't belong in rock-- I mean, he's up there with
Elvis Costello in sheer lyric craft.  Is he planning to do a musical?

I feel like I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of the songs--
the cd's going take up residence in my discman all week.

My one tiny quibble-- he obviously pays a lot of attention to his
scansion, so when a syllable is mis-stressed, it sticks out like a sore
thumb... and I'm not always sure it's intentional.  That bugs me-- I
have the visceral impulse to take an iron and flatten the line back
into shape.
  

    
Neil - On Placebos
The connection between mind/body is one that I continue to be
fascinated by. The relationship to "faith healing" is one that I've had
my eye on for some time, especially as Jesus himself made references
to his ability to heal being connected to the faith of those he was
healing. The Rogaine story's really interesting in that capacity.
(suddenly wondering if faith healers will make an appearance in
American Gods, and hoping so)

- On Borders Fiasco
I had the pleasure of seeing Patrick Stewart in The Ride Down Mt.
Morgan in NYC last summer, and during one of his firey monologues, a
police or amublance siren starting going off right next to the stage
door and apparently wasn't making much forward progress, since it
continued throughout the next few minutes while he doggedly performed
over it. It seems that the Horribly, Horribly Wrong fairy visits us all
from time to time. ... and if you were able to sign a big fuzzy snake,
then you've obviously become very adept at signing strange things.

-On Vegas
Didn't Tim Burton claim that Las Vegas was the Heart of America, and
not the midwest? His point being that Vegas epitomized everything that
was truly and uniquely American. I'm not sure it was a compliment,
although with him, it may have been.

Michelle - Yeah, I had tentative plans to catch that show, but after
doing my own show that night I decided that I'd rather go hang out
quietly with friends than deal with a jam packed club. 
As for the depression... I think that music and stuffed animals would
be a better investment than shrinks and prozac. Then again, I have a
predisposition towards avoiding legal pharmaceuticals in general.
  

    
Something that came up in Medical Anthropology class was the concept
of the nocebo effect.  It's essentially the opposite of the placebo
effect in that illness is found to be caused by the belief of the
person.  It has ties to sympathetic magic like voodoo and also reported
cases of people getting sick because they believed so strongly that
they would.
  

    
Just wanted to let you know that I am having some sort of weird e-mail
snafu, so if you send something to be posted to this topic please
address it to inkwell-hosts@well.com, not just to me, because I won't
be seeing it for a while.

And thank you so much for reminding me that the Locus thing was posted
on April 1 because I absolutely believed every word of it.
  

    
Yeah, I was sucked in too.
  

    
and just returned from an exhausting and inspiring drive across a big
chunk of the U.S., Nick Cave + 2/3rds of the Dirty Three concert to
boot..I am now convinced that all northern small towns from the Rockies
to the west subsist on casinos as the ones east of the mountains seem
to rely on antique stores.  At least you can always find animals
constructed out of machinery and tractor entrails.  
And now a week's worth of Well posts gets me through an slow night at
work.  Yay!

Neil-  I'd forgotten about your Steve Brust connection.  A good friend
of mine/ex-RenFest choirgirl is friends with Steve Brust's daughter. 
Shira, you met her at Renfest.  *small world after all*
  

    
re: April Fools - Of course the Harlan Locus thing was an April Fools
day gag. I just meant that I wasn't surprised they poked fun at Harlan,
and in the silliest way. :o) One of my co-worker's was telling me
today that he planned to move his truck around the corner, wake his
girl up and tell her that it had been stolen. He woke up, instead, to
her poking him frantically and telling him the truck had been stolen.
Then she started laughing. How sickeningly cute is it that they wanted
to play the same prank on each other?

Martha - Sounds odd, but fun. :)

Len - "Chicken with its head cut off" is still my fave of the bunch. 

Dan - Well, you missed a good show (aren't I mean?). As for stuffed
animals and music; after 12-13 years of trial and error, they just
aren't quite enough. 

squeaks, who just bought plushy duckies and bunnies, just in case.
  

    

squeaks- that is, truly, about as sickeningly cute as I've EVER heard. Very
amusing!
  

    
Re Rogaine: I wonder if anyone who took the placebos experienced any
sexual side-effects?

Sarah- isn't Nick Cave great?

Neil- On the Borders fiasco: I think you should have gotten up on
stage, told the folks (in your cute accent) that "sorry, there are no
books, it seems that the Leprechaun and the penguin ran off with them."
and then proceeded to form a conga line and insist that everyone join
in. It would have most definitely stirred up a great deal of media
attention, not to mention confuse people to the extent of forgetting
that they had only heard of you from a so-and-so. That's what I would
have done.

I have no idea what I'm saying....

Goodnight from Erynn, who thought that Day light savings time was some
kind of sick April fools joke...but is sadly mistaken.
  

    
Michelle- Shrinks are okay sometimes...but don't do the drugs...they
just make you feel numb....and that's worse than blue.
  

    
Rotisserie baseball is such a big thing that there are magazines published,
for-pay websites, and even cable TV programs for the roto player.  It's
always a surprise how many people you may find when you pick up this rock or
that rock to look.
  

    
        The phenomenon of human subcultures never fails to fascinate me. 
There are people who have major, major portions of their waking lives
consumed by things you and I have never even heard of.  Their whole
social circle runs around these things, it's the gravitational mass
that distorts their life and all their affairs, and we are completely
innocent of its existence.  And there are untold thousands of these. 
The obsessive sexual kinks _alone_ are something I've studied for years
and keep being surprised by.  It really makes me love people.
  

    
Streak--  That's why I love going to really big magazine stores... the
number of big, glossy magazines celebrating interests I've never heard
of is truly astounding.  FerretFancy... Crossbow Hunter Digest... it's
a big world out there.

Sarah-- very jealous about Nick Cave.

Michelle-- I like "Chicken..." too.  Too early to have a fave yet...
  

    
Martha --oh. I see. Well, good luck.

Len -- Stephin wants, among other things, to do 69 Love Songs as a
stage show. We've talked about working together -- it's the mutual fans
thing, -- but haven't done any more than that yet.

Dan -- no faith healers in American Gods. I wrote one in Good Omens,
though, many years ago.

Sarah -- yes, it really is.

Erynn -- good lord.
  

    
Did I mention that I finished the first draft of the Death movie? No?
Well, I did. 
  

    
Neil-- Congrats on the first draft!  Yahoo!  If you should ever choose
to adapt it to stage, I think Stephin's writing would be a dead-on
match... and maybe even a better match to D:The Time of Your Life.
  

    
Neil--  Well, you asked.

Congrats on the draft!  Do you like it?
  

    
Email from JaNell:

Michelle-regarding those packages at ConCat(post 687), yes, the desk staff
apparently kept telling NightWalker that they weren't there, but then they
were, right after the auction...

Linda-sorry your email's messed up, but glad to know I wasn't being
snubbed. Did you get the gnome-related email?

Neil-I got the answer to my serious question at the tour dates link, so
Lexington is a possibility to get things signed and say "Hey" and all.

Another question, maybe more-

Do authors get any say-so about the cover art? Have you been happy with
the cover art on your books, in visual/artistic quality as well as ability
to represent the contents?

JaNell
  

    
JaNell -- we get input. Ever since I designed my first book cover on a
table-napkin in a pub and gave it to my editor, who didn't know that
authors weren't meant to do that, so gave it to the head of the art
department, who gave it to the artist who painted it. (That was GHASTLY
BEYOND BELIEF).

The only one I didn't like was the Avon Stardust -- which I lied as
one of a set of three covers (as it was designed). When they threw away
that concept, it was too late to start from scratch.

American Gods was a cover I loved before ever I'd written the book --
they sent it to me as a rough design after they'd read the outline.

Thanks, Len and Martha. I'm much happier with it than I was when I was
in the middle of it. Looking forward to the second draft...
  

    
"...which I liked as one of three covers." Not lied.  It was one of a
tryptych.
  

    
(Note that when I posted JaNell's comment, I typo'd her name in the
pseud... it's not now, nor has it ever been, JanNell. I firmly retract the
extra 'n.' Sorry, JaNell...)
  

    
Neil - You mentioned a little while back a possible doing-something
with Stephin . Any idea on what sort of thing you might be doing
together ? Would it be the mentioned stage take of 69 Love Songs maybe
or something else ? And just what is this Snow Glass Apples CD ? Is it
easy to find ? I don't think I've ever heard of that one . . .

Sarah ( or anyone who went to those recent NCave shows ) - How was it
? I really wanted to go , I've only been lucky enough to see him the
last time around . But when I saw that the Bad Seeds weren't going to
be playing with him , I didn't want to risk going and being
disappointed . One of the things I hate most is being disappointed ,
especially when it might make me think twice about seeing him again
live . Did they play much off the new album ? I've only seen the
setlist of the Los Angeles gig and it didn't look like they did but
maybe two songs from it .

sined me .