Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
No kidding, I mean, I'm rooting them on, just...from a distance.  Chew
all the heads off they want, the ladybugs can.  It can get pretty
bloody, out there in the garden, and I love my roses.  
Oh Goddess, roaches...roaches ARE the devil!!  Has anyone ever been in
the Orkin Bug Museum, or whatever it is, in the Smithsonian?  Surely
it is modelled on some level of Hell that Dante forgot to mention.
Anyhow, they have way too many cockroaches.  One is too many.  But they
had lots.
  
No, i'm not saying I'd want a blue-green beetle dress (must bring that
up in Plumage...), but...
wait...
I DO...

Didn't the Egyptians do that?  Not live ones, of course,
but...something like that?  Maybe just wings, all sewn on to a cape. 
And we are seriously off topic, or maybe not since there's Egyptians in
AG, right?  There's even Khepri, the scarab-headed god.  So there, now
we're on topic.

Rebecca, looking at her sewing machine for a "beetle applique foot." 
  

    
... and you guys say Neil is confusing...
  

    
Neil-- what an odd review from the NYTimes.  Positive and patronizing
at the same time... do you know anything about this reviewer person? 
Ought I to find her and give her a piece of my mind?
  

    
If y'all don't quit talkin' 'bout bugs, I'm gonna go all belle on
y'all & get in a chair & scream!

Mary (who *hates* her friend Debbie right now, 'cause she got her
Aladdin video first, even though I ordered mine *way* before. 
Poop-head.)
  

    
Is there a God of Bugs, and how can I get her/him to visit Mary Roane
some night?
  

    
Well, um, there's a Lord of the Flies... does that count? <ducking>

Course, isn't that how Beelzebub literally translates?
  

    
Kelly -- it tended to be decided very pragmatically  by auctorial
whim.  If I thought someone had a significant belief base they went
into column A (people who are too important to be interested in
Wednesday's Plan) if they didn't they went into column B {people who
might be dragged in).

JaNell -- actually, Ladybirds/Bugs DO bite. Or they can. We have
autumnal swarms of them out this way...


Len -- I think that the NY Times review gives the impression of being
patronising because most of it is a plot summary, which she gets wrong.
And I think throwing around 'sci-fi' at the beginning of a review  of
AG is kind of like calling a Scot "english" on the basis that it's all
the same kind of thing, isn't it?

JaZilla -- I thought you only teased writers. Now you've started in on
poor Mary. (Shakes head, ruefully.) 
  

    
Neil, I tease people I like, or who give me great straight lines, and
you're especially fun...
and the LadyBugs tickled me gently all over. I didn't know them well
enough to allow biting. 
  

    
A friend just got back from a weekend trip to New York with a layover in St.
Louis, and remarked to me that American Gods is prominently displayed
_everywhere_ in airport bookstores.  In those impulse-buy racks in front by
the register.

Only later did it occur to me--AG isn't even a mass-market paperback yet.
That's a heck of an impulse people are having all over the airways.
  

    
wow.
  

    
>JaNell -- actually, Ladybirds/Bugs DO bite.
see? SEE?  What did I say?  Anything that lustily consumes aphid heads
could easily bite you...just don't go wearing your aphid costume when
you're letting them...crawl...on you.  I'll just keep my shiny
beetlewing dress, thanks.  It seems safer, somehow.

And Khepri!  He's an Egyptian guy with a scarab head!  He's the
perfect bug god!    I'm sure if we pray hard enough, and offer up some
smelly Ladybug sacrifices (just like incense...), he'll visit Mary. 
Hopefully we can fit him with a god-cam first.
  

    
Ha ha, I have successfully created at least two new Neil-converts at
the National Press Club.  No doubt it will spread like--ummm...not the
plague, how about wildfire?--throughout, and soon Neil will have full
control of the media gods...One of them (NPC employees, not media gods,
although isn't that ultimately the same thing?) tried to get him to
come speak at the Club, but I think his publicists refused...the same
one reported to me that Borders in D.C. was totally wiped out of _AG_
and is re-ordering rather massively.  That's almost as good as giant
hardbacks selling impulsively in airports...
  

    
Just started reading a Sidney Sheldon book - don't give me that look,
it was one of about fifty I picked up one night in the free bin at
McKay's - anyway, the first chapter starts out with a meeting between
Odin, and Thor, and Baldur, and Tyr...

Among the others were the first Ursela K. LeGiun and Joyce Carol Oates
I've read.
  

    

I've been listening to "Possession" by AS Byatt, thanks to a pointer from
Terry, and I now know the significance of "Ash" in Nordic mythology.  
  

    
So, tell...
and please don't tell me to get it myself. Right now, my life is more
difficult than Shadow's and I need something easy for a change...
  

    

They believed that the Ash tree was so big and strong and its roots so
deep that it held the world together.
  

    
Ah.
I love tree symbolism...
  

    
JaNell--ROFLLOL!  You are too funny!

My e-mail was visited by Khepri, apparently.  He didn't introduce
himself, just said "Bzzzzz".
 
Neil--thank you for your kind thoughts.  I'm bein' ganged up on!  :-)

Oh, and a real question, for a change (Me?  With something to say?)
Neil--my friend Alia, who is a writer, sort of jokingly said "Gee, I
wish you'd ask him what to do  when the story is headed to an ending
you don't like".  I've been thinking about it, and I thought it's a
good question.  She's having this problem with a serial she's writing
on the 'net.

And a silly question--how did you wind up on a stage with Julie
Andrews?  Cool, though.

Mary, who finds John Irving even more entertaining when writing about
writing.
  

    
Mwa-ha-ha-bzezzz.
  

    

Mary, I don't want to pre-empt whatever Neil might have to say on the
subject of what to do when the story you're writing turns out to have an
ending that you don't like, but I do want to share with you something that
Tim Powers said (in topic 48) when asked a similar question:

 "Right, Linda.  I never can comprehend it when writers say, "My
 characters are real people, they have lives of their own!  I just watch
 them go, amazed, and type down what they tell me!"  (I think of hiring
 a guy to make a smoking pipe -- you go over to his house a week later
 & there's a thing like a wooden squid on his table.  "Oh, that's your
 pipe," he says; "the wood had a mind of its own, I just watched,
 bewildered, as it took shape."  You look at it, and say, "It's got no
 _hole_ in it, man."  And he says, "The wood didn't want to have a
 hole.")  Once my outline's written, my characters do what I tell 'em;
 if they show any spark of spontaneity, I go over with a bucket of water
 and put it out."
  

    
Still, writers are different.  And you can be a carpenter who realizes as
he's working with the wood that it's better suited for a different kind of
shaping than the first idea you had in mind.  Not that you stop making the
table a table.
  

    
Ladybugs - Hmmm, seems like every couple of months a Neil conference
makes me go look up stuff on the little critters.
http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/MES/notes/entnotes6.html
Had some interesting info, pictures and links.  I have a sudden urge
to become a ladybug expert.

Writers - If I told my characters to shut up I'd never write anything.
 They have the interesting lives to talk about, not me.

Attempt to bring on topic - I've taken to going into bookstores and
when no one is around I rearrange books so that AG is in the most
prominant spot.

Jen, who feels very quiet this summer.
  

    
Okay, I have to chime in here, on writings, and endings.  I finished a
novel a while back in which the characters utterly surprised me and
took the whole thing out of my hands.  I'd known how it would end for
years, as soon as I had the idea, in fact, but didn't know how it got
there until it went.  One of the characters, in fact, said something,
seventy pages in, that veered the story into a place I had been
hesitant to let it go.  After that, well, they were off, and had I
wanted other things, well, I would have had to write a different story.
 On endings; I don't think I've ever really ended everything.  The
characters just do all they have to do, and I stop writing after a
while, when I'm satisfied with having watched them; there's always
more, but my job is to know the story to tell, and then know when to
stop telling it.  Just because I've stopped, though, doesn't mean it's
kept going.  Which ultimately means, I guess, that if a story's ending
surprises you, well, then so be it, and if you want a different ending,
well, then you just have to tell a different story.
On pipes, and wood; well, if there was no hole, it wasn't a pipe, was
it?  It's just a carved piece of wood.  Perhaps the wood hadn't wanted
a hole, but, well, then it didn't want to be a pipe, either.  I do
believe in organism; the best I've ever heard was Stephen King, when he
said that it wasn't so much writing as it was revealing a fossil. 
Yeah.
All of which is basically agreeing with Martha; there are different
shapes of tables, but they're still tables.
  

    
I seem to have a thing where projects gestate... sometimes for years.
And the people in a short story I'm working on were talking very
loudly to me, but have now gone off for coffee or something...
  

    
Rebecca -- I thank you so much. Do they still have that nice high
definition TV thingie at the Press club as you go in?

If ever you want me to speak at the press club, it's not out of the
question, as I'll have a son at school out there, and will have to go
into DC from time to time.

JaNell -- no-one here will give you strange looks for reading Sydney
Sheldon. He created I Dream of Jeannie, after all...

Mary -- depends. If it's a short story, then everybody more or less
behaves themselves. At novel length, I like to see what they're going
to do, and if there's an ending that seems to be taking shape then I'll
let it go there. You learn things as you write.

Linda -- well, up to a point. But then, if you sculpt driftwood, you
may be pleasantly surprised by what you start out with and what you
get. Tables stay tables and pipes stay pipes and walkign sticks stay
walking sticks, but the way they turn out is something you may find on
the way.


Jen -- and you'll never know how much I appreciate it.

JaNell -- they do that.