Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hey, yáll!

Just wanted to say "hey" and "Finish Well", but Rosh Hashanah is over,
so I'm a chowderhead.

Dogsitting in the greatest hot tub weather ever, and the wretched
thing is leaking like a sieve.  Bollocks!  Oh, well, there's always the
satellite & the DVD player.

Finished HMFJTP last night.  That book was *funny*.  I am now
officially The Crazy Lady Giggling to Herself Late at Night on the
Train.  Not a book one should read in public, if one doesn't like
snorting.  Tara O'Shea was the Princess who loaned it to me, but I'm
gonna have to own my own copy now.   Thank you, Mike.   You totally
rock.

David Bowie is gorgeous.  In the most unlikely ways.....

Mary  (reading Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey) 
  

    
    Mary -- You're welcome.  And thank you.
  

    
ConCat Memories...
Meeting Jinx,Walker and Miss Mousey first [I found my tribe!]
Aussie Thingies...now that's love.
Thingies galore!
Neil saying, "Rocky? What are you doing here?!" [me grinning madly]
Lisa Snelling's husband taught us to play assassin.  Hehe...
Having the world's worst sushi dinner with the best company in the
world
Introducing myself to Ja'Nell by jumping into her lap to escape the
tentacles of e-vil.  [great catch babe! *grin*]
The gnome. 
Finally meeting Charles Vess...[babbling on about how much I love his
art...and who wouldn't?]
Jinx's dead-on Tarot readings [don't ask if you don't want to know]
That deep philosophical discussion about religion in Walker's room
Waiting at the airport for 7 hours, but thinking it was well worth the
aggravation.

Hoping that one day we will all meet again.
  

    
I wish I had ConCat Memories...sniffle.
  

    
Rebecca... I read your post last night, but was too tipsy to dare try
typing... 

I got a cool new description at the clubs... "fetish mermaid"  :-)

-Kelly
  

    
*giggles*

MaryRoane-I just finished HMFJTP this morning; and best, I got it
hardback (bookclub edition) for 50¢ at McKay's friday evening...

I've been hypnotically-seducing-and-shagging-evil (writing some new
short stories), one of which is up on my blog; I start another one
tomorrow, horror I guess, involving lawn gnomes...

Something weird is happening to my brain. I woke Cameron up at 4 am
this morning telling him in my sleep that "we all have millions of
tee-tiny sprites that live on our scalps, and have wars, and when our
scalps itch it's because there are all those dead sprites up there, and
that's why we have to wash our hair, to get them out."
Now, that's without chemical enhancement, folks.
Luckily I just amuse the hell out of Cam; a normal person might be
frightened...
  

    
Neil - Your house is haunted? COOL!! (says she who will spend 5 days
in November tormenting her host with spook stories... he's such a
wuss!)

Will - Great, you made me try to envision Neil saying "who's your
daddy?" and it just plain hurt my brain.

Kelly - I was going to show you the gnome photo from my website, but
Puck's got the same one up at the Dreaming, and JaNell beat me to it.

Pam - Yes, I've seen all four Jameses at the same time. One is a club
regular, one is a club frequenter, one worked at the club with me (we
were both dancers), and the other usually just showed up near the end
most weeks to wrestle with the idiots (<cough> like me) were dumb
enough to think they might win just 'cause he's scrawny-lookin'. Any
way, about once a month they'd all turn up at once. And no Ruths as far
as I can tell, but two of them shared a Rebecca (um, not at the same
time tho'...)

Rocky - You're a sick and twisted woman... and could you snag me a
bottle too? It sounds like it would match my favourite eyeshadow. :P

Will - I when people ask me something about the ethics of Babycakes, I
usually just tell them "It's so creepy that it keeps me awake for 150
miles when I'm getting sleepy at the wheel... does it really matter?"

madman - lemme know what weekend you're free. I think it's one of
those situations where I'll just have to declare to work and friends
that "I have plans" and then force them to work around me, instead of
the other way around... I've been trying to work around their schedules
up to now and seem to have missed everything!

mike - have you been having those conversations with Delirium again?

squeaks, who will include a summary of Con Cat experiences in next
post.
  

    
concat memories:

-"Hey Jinx, wanna meet Bob Weir?"
-Everyone signing my jacket (including Neil & Charles)
-Deciding that Rocky is an incredibly sympathetic diva
-Having Charles Vess as my pool partner... and sucking so bad that we
lost. (Margret *is* a pool shark. If she denies it, she's a liar.)
-Lawn Gnome 
-Yet another photo of me n' Neil where you can't see my eyes for the
dumb 'fan-girl' grin on my face
-Thingies in a signing line
-Painfully long sushi... *CRACK*... 
-How much for the napkin?
-Thingie Cheesecake Photoshoot 
-(Walker's favourite line)'It's been an hour...I've got to rinse.' 
-Orange... so much... orange... orange...
-Running into people from San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in
Knoxville, TN (a.k.a. dammit! I still owe Mike a letter!)
-Meeting all the eastern thingies
-Meeting all the southern thingies
-Meeting thingies from 'farther south than you're probably thinking'
-Peculiar religious discussions
-Poor Reg, trapped in a car with 5 women for 14 hours! (or somesuch #)

Um, there's more, but that's the best of it off the top of my head.
Does that help at all JaNell?

-skaeuqs
  

    

Just got back from seeing Stagewalker's show, Hearts in Shadow, and all we
have to say is that you absolutely must find time in your schedule to go
and see it.  Very creative staging, an excellent cast, very fine
multi-media, and well, of course, fabulous material to start
with.  Martha's ghosts are awesome, and the actress who plays Laura is
terrific. 

Dan, I wanted to ask you about The Dirty Donkey sign.  Was that
computer-generated?  If so, was it the only thing in the picture that was
computer-generated, or was the whole building, too?  And why was the Dirty
Donkey completely white?  Had he just been cleaned by the shadowy black
figure in the background?
  

    
E-mail from Maryam:

This is a message for Mr. Gaiman regarding his comment about the Dent
forums:
 
I understand that you were defending Tori by saying what you did about
the forums, and I know that thread that you saw was truely nasty
and topic shouldn't have been open to discussion in the first place
(lapse of judgement, people make mistakes)...  But do you truely think
all people on these forums are bloodthirsty and hateful?  One thread
cannot represent the whole Tori Amos fanbase- and I just wanted to say
that we are not all out to pry into Tori's personal life and make
assumptions. 
 
By the way, I'm a long-time fan.  I absolutely adore the Sandman comics
as well as your books. And I respect your opinion. But please realize
that you and Tori share a fanbase, and some truely great and remarkable
people are included in that.
 
-Maryam Mohseni, Bethesda, MD  
 
 
  

    
JaNell -1729 -- the good thing about doing a handwritten draft is it
forces you to do a secon draft. Then again, there are lots of thngs
I've written straight onto the computer, including the thng I'm doing
with Gene Wolfe, the fun of which is the sponteneity, a bit like a
tennis match. Overall, I'd say it's different strokes for different
projects.

Rocky -- baby Cakes nailpolish... ah...

Linda -- you are very welcome. Burked. Ow. (When you hear people in
English dramas refer to other people as Berks, though, it's just
cockney rhyming slang; short for Berkshire Hunt.)

JaNell -- overall I tend to think that gender is elective. In the case
of Real Men, I think that your question (and answer) is the one that
Tori (and Joe Jackson) is posing.

I'm not entirely convinced that the audio version of Babycakes is read
in the manner you described; I did my best to read it as flatly as
possible, and without affect, so it would just be the words, without  a
"lovely sexy evil sweet" etc overlay. God knows whether I was
successful or not.

I think I've mentioned already that that was the only time I've ever
disturbed myself - came down tot he library one day to find Mike
listening to it, and for a moment had no idea what he was listening to,
just that it was astoundingly disturbing.

pamela -- Tree won't, you know; she promised she never would.

Mary -- Now you have to find all the other John M. Ford books. They're
all good. They're also all very different.

JaNell --  you're much more coherent than I ever am  at 4.00am...

Michelle -- I don't know if it's haunted or not; it never does
anything weird unless there's only one person here at night, and then
it unleashes its arsenal of weird. Which used to be worse when the
place where music boxes etc would do weird things was the spare
bedroom. Now it's a bathroom,  and we have fewer complaints.

Linda -- can we have a review of the show? Curious authors want to
know about their story (and Martha's. And that russian bloke who used
to be on Star Trek.)

Maryam, of course I don't think that all the people on the Dent Forms
are "hateful and bloodthirsty" and so on. I'm not sure what I could
have posted here that would have given you that idea.  

There are a number of Dent Forum people here in this topic, and I was
replying to one of them about The Dent. (Probably Erynn.) I've met and
signed for a lot of Dent people, and they've *all*, from Mike Why on
down, been astonishingly nice, genuine, people. Tori people -- at least
the ones I've met, and I've been meeting them since 1991 -- have been
good people.

As I recall, I said that the last time I looked at the Dent Forums
there were a lot of  posts by someone who was either mad or pretending
to be, saying that Tori had cancer, that people were responding to as
if they were rational; and there was a long thread (well-intentioned,
I'd say, but still, from my point of view,  disturbing) about Tash
being ill/backward/brain damaged etc.

And I decided that I'd be better off looking for news on the Dent than
on the Forums. Not because I think all Forum people are "bloodthirsty
and hateful" but because it was stuff I'd rather not have read -- and
would rather not have thought people were discussing and taking
seriously.

These aren't names and hypothetical things for me; these are my
friends and their child.  (I'd have been equally as disturbed if I went
to a Scott McCloud Forum and found people talking about whether Scott
has cancer and whether Winter and Sky (my other two fairy goddaughters)
were brain damaged.)

Does this help?
  

    
BTW to all, I think Neilgaiman.com/americangods.com is offline right
now -- and it looks like the whole authorsontheweb is probably down.

Has anyone else heard Thea Gilmore's RULES FOR JOKERS? That and
Gjallarhorn's SJOFN are my two new favourite CDs... Thea is probably
the best songwriter to come out of the UK since Elvis Costello, and
Gjallarhorn sound like an unearthly  Western Finnish combination of
DREAMING period Kate Bush, Steeleye Span and Boiled in Lead.
  

    
David Bowie:  Starman and The Gift of Sound and Vision.



I'm in the Washington D.C. area commuting between my father's house
and Capclave.  I had lunch with some old friends, yesterday.
Capclave is a smaller convention than Disclave.  This year its program
focus is on reading and writing short stories.  I accidentally got into a
van to a different hotel and met one of the protestors at
yesterday's demonstration.  He said that he thought it was
mostly peaceful and well-behaved.  DC TV newscasters appeared to
differ on this point.
  

    
Neil~like I said, a *normal* person might be frightened... but
apparently neither Cam nor you are normal. And I *am* that articulate
at all hours, having had insomnia for my entire life... sleeping is so
lovely and so hard!

The "BabyCakes" voice does come off as chilling and disturbing. But,
you do have an awfully seductive vioce, especially to someone who
speaks in an aggressively growly twang; if this writing thing doesn't
work out, maybe you could try televangelism, politics, or selling
cars... :D
  

    
Neil~This slipped by me at first, but I can't resist...
"I'm not entirely convinced that the audio version of Babycakes is
read in the manner you described".
Now, have I or will I *ever* manage to 'convince' you of anything? I
don't even try anymore. So it's really a moot point, on the top of my
head, most likely.

The handwriting thing...
Mine sucks. And even the print is all caps. It's a vaguely painful
process, physically, for me. So I edit aforehand in my head 'cause I
think much faster than I can write, type, or even talk...
  

    
Mike: Did you ever write anything else with Warnke in it? I re-read
"Amy, at the Bottom of the Stairs" and now I'm curious.

Mary: Now you have to come over so you can read "Rules of Engagement"
because it will have context, and "A Little Scene to Monarchize"
because it will make you pee your pants laughing. Then, after I have
hooked you completely on all the Mike Ford I own, you can search the
world over (or, um, get ti used from Amazon or Bookfingers.com) for one
of the 1200 copies of "From The End of the Twentieth Century" of your
very own and Giggle All the Time.

That goes double for everybody. So much the good book. So much. And it
has an itro by Himself. What's not to love?

Neil: I saw "Ghost World" with the mother and the sibling yesterday,
who were visiting from Florida. I enjoyed it, tho it made me sad. or
maybe 'cause it made me sad. Makes me wonder why on earth Thora did
"Dungeon & Dragons" but then, I'll wonder that about that entire cast
for the rest of my life anyway...

Everyone: Don't watch Showtime's new MOW sequel to "The Secret Garden"
if you have any affection for the original novel. It's all wrong and
bad and wrong and stuff. In such the big old way.
  

    
damnit... after trying for 20 minutes to get Tori tickets, and getting
busy signals and "we cannot connect your call." messages I finally ge
through and BOTH shows in Oakland are sold out. Two shows, sold out in
20 minutes. DAMMIT!

*pout, whine, grumble*

Linda - The Dirty Donkey sign was digitally created based on a sketch
I drew for the videographer. (Let me just say that we had the best
friggin production team I have ever seen in my life, especially for a
theatre this small!). It was then edited into a video still  of a brick
building. So, yeah, we had "real" and "virtual" elements in that shot.
The Genealogist sign was a similar deal.
In Neil's original text, when Peter enteres the pub, it states that
the sign has a donkey and that it is indeed very dirty. At the end of
the story, it states that the sign has been cleaned and the donkey
looks more like a pale horse. As brilliant an allusion as that is, the
transformation of dirty donkey to pale horse is a harder one to
communicate visually, so I had them add the black figure of the grim
reaper behind the white horse/donkey. It's still really subtle, since
the reaper is black (so that you couldn't see him when the sign was
dirty) but I'm a bit rabid about being true to the details.

Sorry about being so out of  it last night, btw... there was a lot
more going on than even I let on... it was a very emotional night...
Sorry I can't elucidate more in this forum...

Oh, and please feel free to criticize anything about the show in this
forum. I know/believe that you liked it, but I also have an inherent
suspicion about the "nice show" phenomenon in which people do a lot of
self-censoring. 
  

    
>>
Has anyone else heard Thea Gilmore's RULES FOR JOKERS? That and
Gjallarhorn's SJOFN are my two new favourite CDs... Thea is probably
the best songwriter to come out of the UK since Elvis Costello, and
Gjallarhorn sound like an unearthly  Western Finnish combination of
DREAMING period Kate Bush, Steeleye Span and Boiled in Lead.
<<

Okay, that's one of the odder blender mixes, and Officially intrigues
me. Are such CDs readily available in music-type stores, or is this one
going to have to resort to internet hunting? :-)

JaNell - I've had many odd conversations with Mars at 4am (and he has
with me, apparently)... mostly pretty incoherant things, but then again
while he's awake he happily explains how we can build moonhouses with
large frensal lenses.  :-)

>>
These aren't names and hypothetical things for me;
<<

Sort of random thought/tangent (fulfilling my saintly role for the
day); I recently fell victim to a somewhat common problem faced by
webbloggers - someone who reads what you write, feels they know you and
your story completely, and then that they have the right to comment
With Authority. It mostly pissed me off, because the person (in their
attempts to be knowing and kind and enlightening) really offended me in
their insults of my husband, and some other things...

I guess I realised it must be like that Frequently for people who are
celebrities in their own right. However it happens, rumours get started
or people read something and think they know it all, they talk with
other people who have similar passion and insight, exchange the
occasional letter with the celebrity (if they're lucky)... and begin to
feel like they Know the person, are privy to details, etc. And then
begin the kind of speculation and talking and such that generally
[should only] happen among close friends who are actually in the
know... and are surprised, I think, when the actual close friends
disagree and find the speculation upsetting/offensive/whatever.

I guess it seems that with the amount of information (and
misinformation) available to just about anyone nowdays, people learn
Private Things (whether true or not) that normally wouldn't come out
unless you were a close friend. And so knowing these close friend
things, people think they are, and tend to bother the people who really
are.

If that makes any sense. *blinks*

-Kelly
  

    
The Tori shows in Oakland are sold out....

Darn.

Meanwhile, I still have no idea when I might be going to this show and
answering any questions, stagewalker....
  

    
     Tara -- no, "Amy" was a one-off story by intent.  I'm not much of
a sequels person -- the "Alternities" stories are a little different,
since they don't have anything in common but the background, and are
all in different styles.  Of the unwritten ones, one was to be an
outright comedy, and the last, "All Roads," sort of ties things up
without turning the series into a fake novel.
     A parallel thing is happening with "Dateline: Colonus" and "Here
to Get My Baby Out of Jail," which are old stories in stylized modern
drag (pseud, anybody?).  There are going to be more of those, and maybe
even a book's worth, but they don't occupy the same space or have
recurring elements.
     I think it's the idea that series start putting walls up around
the possibilites of the stories -- after half a dozen yarns, you can't
have your characters go to Florence because you already established (as
a colorful throwaway) that Florence is under eight meters of water,
and Thea and Cynthia are -not- going to move out of Oregon just because
Rocinante wants to be closer to Disney-Beijing, and Ada from Decatur's
dead and isn't the haunting kind, and so forth and so on.
     Hey, did that get weird fast or what?

     And, not to discourage Mary from visiting, but NESFA should still
have some TWENTIETH CENTURYs for direct sale (which makes them more
money than buying it from someone else); I would expect to hear when
they're gone.  If they don't, I know Dreamhaven has some.  (The
advantage of Dreamhaven is that they have signed copies, or if they're
out, I can walk over there and sign one.)
     I was just notified that the hardcover of HOT TIME is about to be
remaindered (amawhatsabook.com has been offering it discounted as a
package with something of Spider Robinson's).  The trade paper is due
in December.  I should probably buy a couple of crates.  They make
great end tables.  Occasional furniture in the truest sense.
  

    
Neil, and all the other Gender Question Wellsians~ I ended by writing
about the gender thing on my blog, www.xanga.com/JaNell; and there's a
new story up, too, probably based on that "millions of tee-tiny
sprites" thing.

Kelly, can I have your blog address?

Re: Oakland sellout... I'm not going to be able to see Tori, either...
actually, I've never gotten to see Tori yet. Maybe next tour she'll
come back to Knoxville, or to Atlanta or Nashville but this time I'll
have money for tickets early enough... ToriBat is going to those,
though, if anyone knows how to get backstage passes, she'd love one and
prolly make you a nice piece of art or something in exchange...

Jameson, I know you're lurking-who are those two people in the ConCat
Thingie photo that we can't identify? And leave a message at my blog
next time you shadow by...
  

    

We didn't even try to get Tori tickets this time.  We've seen her at the
Orpheum in San Francisco, the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, and the
Paramount theater in Oakland where we got last minute tickets in the very,
very, very back row and I will never do that again for anybody!  She was
very tiny there in the distance, and I think that it's an absolute must to
be able to see her.

A review of the show, hmmm.

Well, let me say upfront that the only criticism of the show I had was the
fellow who played Peter in Neil's part.  I thought he needed to enunciate
way more clearly, which was something that he managed to achieve by the
final piece of the show.

The Next Stage theater is a tiny space that is part of a Greek Orthodox
Church in San Francisco.  It's a very Gothic-looking space with huge
double-doors in arched frames that are opened by pulling on a big iron
ring.  There is a small lobby, and then you enter the space.  In front of
you and to the left is the stage, which is not raised, it is also the
floor you walk in on and you must skirt it to get to the three tiers of
seats to the right.  There is a center aisle.

Hearts in Shadow is a staged version of four stories by different authors
- I believe that the last, The Little Apples by Chekhov is the only one
that started as a play, but I am not sure about that.  The four stories
are "We Can Get Them For You Wholesale" by Neil Gaiman, "The Scarecrow" by
Don Nigro, "The Abitrary Placement of Walls" by Martha Soukup, and "The
Little Apples."

There is a cast of five or six actors, many of whom are in all the pieces.

When you walk in initially, the stage is set with a bed and side table and
a table and two chairs.

There is a unifying multi-media element common to all the pieces.  The
projector that was specially-built for the show displays a title graphic
at the beginnning of each part, and then is used in different ways
throughout the part; in Neil's piece there's a video showing Peter in the
Dirty Donkey, the Dirty Donkey sign used thereafter to indicate that the
location has changed, and as each candidate is discussed (I don't want to
give the story away, so I won't say candidate for what) each name displays
on a tombstone, accompanied by the sound of a cash register as the
tombstone appears.  Also, Peter's dreams and fantasies are shown on the
screen.

And, there is a recorded musical soundtrack that accompanies parts of the
action.  In Neil's part it's...I forget the first one...the second one is
Vangelis' Chariots of Fire which accompanies some of Peter's dreams, and
according to the program, The Teletubbies Theme Song, but I'll be danged
if I know which one that was.  Was it the music on hold, Dan?

And, I gotta go right now, I will continue later...is this enough detail,
too much detail...?
  

    
ConCat... Hearts in Shadow...  Boy, am I jealous; all the action is
far away from me.  Perhaps the best thing about this list is how it's
disabused me of the belief that NYC is the center of the universe.

My wife and I spent a good chunk of yesterday at the theatre. As you
may have heard, Broadway shows have been closing like crazy since the
attack and many casts and crews are taking major pay cuts just to keep
their productions afloat.  The revival of Assassins has been pushed off
indefinately because of the political climate, which really sucks
since its first run was cut short by the political climate during
Desert Storm.  That show just can't get a break.

Anyway, we saw Kiss Me Kate, which was ok but feels dated (Cole never
really got the hang of writing for character), and Music Man, which was
just fantastic. I never thought Robert Sean Leonard could play Harold
Hill, but he does a great job, in a quiet, House of Games/Spanish
Prisoner sort of way.  Everybody talks about how innocent and corny
Music Man is; nobody talks about how utterly sophisticated the score
is.  It could have been written yesterday.

It's cold and cruddy out in Queens.  My wife and I are staying in and
reading/watching TV; a turkey soup is simmering on the stove, using the
rest of our night-before-Yom Kippur leftovers.  I am summoning up a
ConCat hotel room of the mind and wishing I was there. 

Stage-- congrats on your success!  It sounds like it was great.
  

    
Just called the local Afghani restaurant to order dinner (the turkey
soup is for tomorrow); heard the guy on the other end talk Afghani to
one person, fluent Spanish to another, then in English to me.  Despite
my glum mood, I do love Queens.
  

    
Martha - Matt asked me last night if he should e-mail you Monday, and
I said to e-mail you immediately because you're trying to plan your
schedule. I believe he's going to tell you to choose your date and
he'll do the Q & A for that night... sorry about the flakiness of
this... I think his brain has fried...

Linda - let's see. We've got original music for Peter's nightmare,
Chariots of Fire for Peter's "surprisingly unmurderous dreams", the
teletubbies playing while Peter fantasizes about Archie's destiny, and
Pink Floyd's Money at a couple of different points. 
All the music in Arbitrary Placement of Walls is original.

And I agree on the diction issue... it's been the biggest obstacle and
a frequently given note.