Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Erynn - you're not allowed to be self-denigrating. 
that's Martha's job. when she stops doing it, then there'll be an
opening and you can negate yourself all you want.

Squeaks - afn-g Tuesday mode? I know what afn-g is... I know what
Tuesday is. but how do they fit together?
In short... HUH?

got my Harlequin Valentine yesterday. I like it...
I like it quite a bit, actually...
  

    
annie: I might have neglected the house brownies a bit. Will get right on
it. [...]  There.  That might help.

squeaks: well, not sushi... more like some little odd things. Not as odd as
i'd have liked, but they'll have to do. More cannot be said at the moment,
although they're not nearly as interesting as all this mystery is making
them sound.

I hope to go back soon. I bet I'll find more (good) mysterious stuff then.
  

    
It's spring! No. Wait. I'm not sure. It was 75 degrees today, but it's
supposed to be 30 again by Sunday. 

Neil- Thanks. I'll try to find that book. I'm trying hard not to
obsess, but I'm paranoid about looking unprofessional, which, of course
I am...but I don't want anyone else to know that. 

John-Mike- hahaha! That was great! 

Danguy- Good luck with everything:)

Danw- I think that I have a right to more than Martha does. She has,
after all, won awards and stuff. I, on the other hand, have the writing
skills of a second-grader. Okay I'll stop. 

Jouni- My nephew used to speak in some language I didn't understand.
Now that he speaks more clearly, he's come down with Broken Record
Syndrome; he just repeats the same sentence over and over again, as if
you didn't understand him the first time.
  

    
DanGuy - You're trying to be a Neil completionist? Eep! I'm having a
hard enough time just keeping up with the Stardust stuff. Speaking of
which...

Neil - Who's the publisher of the Israeli edition of Stardust and how
do I get hold of them? I believe it's now the only version I'm missing
(er, of the novel... I've still got to track down a mobile and a magnet
set somewhere).

Annie - green & yellow, eh? I'll consult a certain boy-person who may
have to look at me often - if he doesn't totally cringe, then I think
it will be fun. Well, maybe not under the black light - then it would
just be something I'd make fun of. ;)

DanW - a former .sig of one of the posters: 'Welcome to afn-g, where
the women are sexy, the men are lovely, and on Tuesdays they're
interchangeable!' Make of this note as you will. 

Linda - but it's such a cute pseud! :o)

squeaks, off to beddie bye now.
  

    
Neil--congratulations on finishing the recording.  I can't wait to
hear it!  

Erynn--listen to this man.  He's dead on the money about style.  If
you listen to all the rules, you'll write boring glop.  Like acting,
the point of having technique is to forget it.

Linda--brilliant psued!  Mr. Ford is ultimately psued-able, is he not?

Mike--you make me laugh immoderately.  Every time.

OK, last weekend it snowed *all* weekend.  Now it's 60 & we're having
thunderstorms.  This weather is on crack.

Mary (*adoring* Soldier of the Mist) 
  

    
michelle -- Charles still has the magnets for sale I think. Or
Graphitti does. I'll hunt for info on the Israeli Stardust publisher
when I get home again (off into hiding to finish some stuff).

Erynn -- don't worry about looking unprofessional. Worry about writing
great fiction. It's the same amount of worry expended, but in a more
useful direction.

Mary -- Soldier of Arete is just as good. When you see Gene at World
Horror tell him how much the world needs a third Latro book.

Lioness -- did I ever tell you my conviction that Harpo was also
Harpocrates, the silent, instrument-wielding, girl-chasing god? I could
never figure out why they missed Grouchocrates and Chicocrates to make
the set.
  

    
    Neil -- and, of course, Zeppostrate, Assistant Manager of Mirth. 
Gummolochus is said to figure in a couple of lost works of Aristophanes
("A Night at the Agora" and "The Cloud-Cuckoo-Nuts") but I've always
suspected that some of those lost manuscripts were the result of
bathhouse conversation and promises made to publishers -- the best
example being Plautus's "Answered Invocations."

     But as usual, I digress.
  

    
Mr. Gaiman, Mr. Ford--you are both splendidly, unendingly, barking
mad.  I'd write more, but I'm still laughing too hard.  Harpocrates,
indeed.  You should *be* convicted for that one.
  

    
Neil - Yes, the magnets are still up at GreenMan... along with one
other item I had conveniently put out of my mind because I was too
broke to get it back then... and I still am, but I'm getting it anyway.
(grumbles unintelligibly about picking the wrong thing to go all
completeist on)

Mary - Yesterday it was sunny and freezing at work. Today started out
around 70 and all sunny and happy and tourists were everywhere, and
then when I walked out the door tonight to close the shop it was nearly
icy, very rainy, and miserable cold (and BART was full of the most
bizarrely dressed homeless person I think I've ever seen).

squeaks, who is considering renting Marx Bros. flicks as it's still
half an hour before the Blockbuster across the street closes.
  

    
Erynn,... everyone here speaks English, but everyone speaks it in a
slightly different way. Similarly, everyone here writes in a slightly
different way. If we all crossed our i's and dotted our t's in the
precise manner as everyone else, words would quickly become boring,
regardless of the content of what was being written. You're creating,
which means you're an artist, which means you have artistic license. Do
what feels right, not what someone else says is right.

Besides, if everyone wrote the same, I wouldn't be able to skim thru
posts and notice who was speaking/typing when,...  :-)

(Oh, hi. I still live. I just had The Week From Hell. I'll put it up
against anyone elses Week From Hell and have decent faith in coming out
the "winner",... er, as much as anyone can be a winner in that sort of
competition. But, one highlight of the week - I'm taking a class on
freelance writing for newspapers, an eMail telecourse sort of thing,
and it's working out quite well so far. The goal is to have something
published by the end of the class (6 weeks from now). Should be
interesting. And of course I'm tickled pink, because the instructor
likes what I've submitted so far, heh...)
-Kelly
  

    
Everyone,  thanks for your comments on Rusalka. She's doing much
better. Her fins look exponentially better, the white moss cobwebby
stuff is all but gone, she's eating again, and swimming a lot.
Unfortunately, the other fish (Booteelka) looks mostly dead. She's one
of the new ones who may have brought in the problem. She's also very
little, so what Rusalka was big enough to survive, Booteelka may not. 

Terri O'Leary,  your suggestion about the drops worked wonderfully. I
thank you very much for it.

Neil,  I'm sorry about your goldfish.

Mike,  Heck is a word seldom used in my vocabulary, whereas fuck or a
variation thereof makes an appearance at least a few times a week. So,
to me, phrases using heck are extremely funny. It's so off-kilter and
absurdly defiant to yell "the heck with you!" 
  

    

More beams for Rusalka.

Maure, would you tell us about these names, please?
  

    
Linda,  they're the english phoentic spellings of russian words. I'm
not sure how "They" would spell the words using a latin-based alphabet,
but that's how the words sound. I've seen both Rusalka and Vodyanoi
spelled that way. They are both general names for folk-tale creatures
that live in the water. A rusalka is sort of a mermaid. A vodyanoi is a
sort of evil grandfather-looking-type who drowns people when they
disturb him from the depths. Booteelka means "bottle." Boo, who just
died, actually, looked like a two-liter soda bottle to me, hence the
name. Yeh americahnka, but I learned some rudimentary russian while
working with russian children who'd been transplanted in the American
Midwest. It's such a neat language, sort of feral and heavy and lovely
all at once. I let the children teach me for a few minutes a day
because they get such a kick out of it. 
  

    
Whee, what little Russian folk/fairy tales i've seen, I have to say I
adore. They're just neat. Rusalkas are actually a little scarier than
mermaids, at least in the definitions I've been given. They're actually
the spirits of drowned maidens, usually ones who were betrayed by a
lover, and they haunt the spots where they were drowned, luring any man
who comes near to his death. They're also, i think, usually connected
somehow to a tree near the spot? but i could be entirely wrong there
and merely be thinking of C. J. Cherryh's version in her "Rusalka"
trilogy. Neat series if you haven't read it. 
My personal favorite of the Russian folklore figure has to be the
domovoi, the "house thing." Kind of like house brownies, but bigger. 
  

    
Thanks everyone. I certainly don't want to write like everyone else, I
just don't want to use bad grammar. 

Maure- I'm glad Rusalka is doing better.

Last night we saw a comedian/hypnotist J Medicine Hat. It was the most
surreal performance I have seen in a long time...if ever. I thought it
was going to be staged--that the participants would be planted or
something. It wasn't. It was all volunteers (whoever got to the stage
first, was in) and he did all of the hypnosis and talking in front of
the audience. They genuinely fell asleep. Then, I watched for the next
hour as he made them do embarassing, raunchy things in front of us,
turning the girls into lesbians, making the guys dance and take off
their shirts and moon the audience, simulate sex with blow-up dolls. I
was still skeptical until J, while talking to the audience, found that
one of the girl's, who he had given spontaneous orgasms by merely
touching her on the wrist, father was in the audience, and not very
happy. After the show, outside the theater, in the bathrooms and
whatnot, I ran into some of the participants. The were still in a daze
as their friends tried to explain what all they had done. They were
genuinely confused. They weren't acting. 
I've never seen anything like this, live anyway. I don't understand
how you can just tell someone to do something, and then they do it. Is
the mind really that easy to manipulate? Most of the show, I didn't
know whether to laugh or feel sorry for the people. I will study this
hypnosis thing further. It's all very intriguing, however it works. 
  

    

There used to be a night club on Sunset Strip run by Pat Collins, the Hip 
Hynotist, who did these shows every night.  My aunt and uncle took me for 
my 21st birthday.  I was too uptight to allow myself to go under, out of 
fear about everything I'd heard that they would make you do.
  

    
We had a hypnotist at the Senior All-Night Party after my high school
graduation. He had one of the girls he put under go stiff as a board --
and demonstrated by having two of us pick her up and lay her out flat,
with her heels on one chair and her head on another. Her bottom never
even dipped. I'll see if I can track down some of the pictures, it was
pretty phenomenal. I'm even in the pictures, I was assisting.
The funniest bit was when he told our class president that when he
woke up, he would feel the almost uncontrollable urge to urinate, but
that he would make it to the bathroom if he ran. However, when he got
there, he would discover that he lacked the, um, equipment necessary to
complete the task.
  

    
My friend Henry is a hypnotist.  I've let him put me under a couple of
times, mostly to stop smoking (this was about 13 years ago).  I didn't
quit, but I didn't want one nearly as bad, and they did taste
horrible.  I was just too hooked at the time to quit.  Once I let him
put me under at a party & tell me that Julie, my roommate, was not in
the room.  She was, but I could not see her.  When I would look at
where I knew she was sitting, everything would go out of focus.  Very
strange.

It generally requires that you trust the person hypnotizing you.  A
lot, if you're a control freak like me.  Personally, having people do
sexual things they would not normally do seems a little creepy to me,
but they volunteered.  Am I the only person who wonders why it's OK for
the girls to be encouraged to think that they're gay, but not the
boys?  (I'm making an assumption here, but I'll bet they weren't.) 
Americans have the most bizarre ideas about sex.

Maure-- I love the story of the Rusalka, and I'm glad to hear their
namesake is doing so much better.  I'm sorry about the other fish,
though.  I'm going to have to get a larger aquarium, and I was thinking
about getting a couple more goldfish.  I will definitely quarantine
any new fishies I bring home.  And is it just me, or is the combo of
women and water just bad news for men?  Rusalka, Roane, Sirens--there
seems to be a common theme here  ;-)

Neil--sorry about your fish.  How many do you have?

I'm in the middle of a Jackie Chan phase at the moment, and my friend
Debbie (who got a job!  Hooray!!) was asking me about my comics, so I
dug into the boxes that haven't really been opened in 10 years, and
drug out Dark Knight Returns, which I reread today, and Longbow
Hunters, and Elektra Assassin, and scattershot issues of Hellblazer
(Dangerous Habits, anyone?), so it's all death and mayhem here.  Wheee!

Mary (who doesn't care that that was a run-on sentence, 'cause
sometimes you neeeed them, and is off to watch Legend of the Drunken
Master) 
  

    
Hi, I was wondering, since publishersweekly.com says that the first
volume of The Sandman now comes with a CD-ROM that previews 100 books
from DC's backlist, if anyone has any additional info, or knows if the
CD-ROM is cool, or if it's just a list of books.  My little wanna-be
completionist hands are itching, but did the price go up?  Thanks all!
  

    
Maure - really glad to hear it worked.  Just some advice - if you get
any more fish, particularly from a pet shop, put them in "quarantine"
for a week or so after you get them before introducing them to the main
tank - it can be a bit of a hassle, but it is worth it - a small
fishbowl will do since it's only for a week.

All my fish are called Borgle and Rantipole - so we're now on Borgle
III and Rantipole II - Borgle II was an evil fish.  He used to float on
top of the tank pretending to be dead, but if you tapped on the side
of the tank and said "BAD fish" he started swimming.  I know this
sounds surreal but it's true and I can produce independent witnesses!
:)

Oh and just on the profanity thing - I don't know if you've read any
Terry Pratchett but that's covered in one of his books.  Due to a build
up of magic, profanities were turning into rather nasty insects which
led to "the most genteel battle cry in history - "DARN THEM ALL TO
HECK""  I'd actually forgotten about it, but I'm now getting funny
looks because I'm sitting here giggling away to myself - you'd think
they'd be used to it by now... ;)

Neil - sorry to hear about your fish :(

Erynn - Where is your work published?  I'd love to read some.  I don't
really write, but I read a lot - and whilst I do like reasonably good
English, if I'm really enthralled by a story, proofreading and grammar
checking are the last things on my mind.  Also, I'm probably being
naive, but isn't that what editors do?

Dan-Guy - do you have any URLs for your friend's comic book stores. I
find it very difficult to get some Vertigo titles here in Ireland and I
haven't yet settled on a net supplier, so if you can recommend someone
that would be great.

Everyone - Hi, I'm Terri, nice to be here, if I do bad things, tell
me! :)
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
E-mail from Lady Miss Tree:

Jouni--I have a two year old second cousin who speaks fluent Scribble. It 
doesn't worry him in the slightest that we don't understand, he reckons 
we'll figure it out soon.

Maure--It is important that pets have appropriately fabulous names. My last 
goldfish was called Pfang the Wonder Pfish (the 'p's are pronounced 
explosively and you probably don't want to stand close too me when I talk 
about him.) I think the name allowed him to rise to the occasion.

In Praise Of Mr Gaiman
(In Which Our Heroine, the Lady Miss Tree, Attempts To Demonstrate The 
Subtle & Appropriate Usage Of The Word 'Bugger'.)

When I first heard rumours that Neil was going to collect all his 
introductions, afterwords, lyrics, pomes and other sundries into a book, I 
took one look at my Neilabelia collection and said to myself, "Bugger." (Not 
"Bugger" in the sense of "I'm in a bar in Knoxville and I've just hit that 
billiard ball perfectly except for the small matter of it not potting 
anything for me" bugger but in sense of "I've made it a point to find 
anything Neil's written because, dammit, he's a good writer and by buying 
all this stuff I usually get put onto other really good writers and now that 
it's all in one book all those other girly swots like me will just buy this 
and not read the really good stuff he's introducing" bugger. I hope I make 
myself clear on this point.)

But then I received my copy of 'Adventures in the Dream Trade' (via the kind 
assistance of a number of wonderful thingies), signed by the author 
(complete with scary eyes) and I began to read it.

And I didn't put it down until it was waaaaaaaaaaaaay past my bedtime.

I had a big grin on my face, for a number of reasons.

One of which is that Mr Ford is a very funny bugger indeed.

Another being that Neil IS a damned good writer who knows a bunch of other 
damned good writers and you should go read them all anyway even if you have 
a copy of 'AitDT' or you're all silly buggers.

Another being page 231.

Well, bugger me.

[grin]

Tree
Who keeps showing that page to anyone who will stand still long enough and 
keeps making squeaking noises and giggling like a loon.
  

    
Tree, it's such a joy to read that, and nowI  have a silly grin too. 

There is something inexpressibly good about the feeling one gets when one
sees someone else enjoying some art that one already loves. It's... it's one
of the forms of the anti-jealousy, I think.

"You're all silly buggers" would make a nice addition to the Absolutely 
Barking Mad t-shirt collection, maybe.

Neil: Harpocrates makes perfect sense, while at the same time the concept
makes me want to giggle like Lady Miss Tree doing her happy loon impression.
It's so right it's ridiculous. (Chicocrates is an idea I find a bit 
disconcerting, though that's probably just me.)

There should be a phrase for things that are so ridiculous that they are
obviously perfectly right.

Maure, I'm glad your esteemed piscine companion is on the mend.

I'm prepping for various conventions, so am wandering around the house 
draped in strands of beads and muttering like a madwoman, but I did go 
out to one of the stores carrying my stuff, a bit ago today. (Blue Moon 
Gallery in Minneapolis; they've got some of the fancy stuff, like the 
sterling silver and the gold filled things; Amy Kristine's in Minneapolis 
has the non-precious earrings, the little czech glass flower bead 
earrings, and that line. It is a great relief to actually have places 
besides shows where I can send people when they ask.) Anyhow, we wound up 
having way too much fun talking, the co-owner and I, so I'm behind 
schedule, but it's nice to know that the people handling the business end 
of one's art are congenial folks, I always think.  But now I must go 
upstairs and slave over a cold bead board again.

Oh! And the pixies and the trolls and house brownies have apparently 
formed a coalition, and they have returned Neil's trinkets, so that's all 
right, then.
  

    
And Terri:  *all* the fish having the same two names?  What kind of fish
are these, again?

I knew somebody with a tank full of oscars that were all named Floyd. Big
Floyd, who was about hand-sized, had been corrupted due to an unfortunate
incident with a bottle of hash oil that had been thoughtlessly left on a
shelf above the tank, and ever since then he had cultivated the habit of
swimming either horizontally or on a slight diagonal, slowly and rather
meditatively. Hadn't seemed to affect him other than that, although he did
develop a bizarre fish trick: if you got near the tank and looked in through
the side at him and then opened your mouth really wide, he would make like
he was trying to swim into it, and bump his nose on the glass.
  

    
(eek. third post from me in a row. uh-oh!)

I just found this URL for an article at the Ephemera Society of America
website on the history of goldfish images in advertisements and related
ephemera, or something like that. The writer runs a bookstore specializing
in "fish-based literature", so of course I thought of Maure and all the
other fish-fanciers here.

The article is at:
http://www.ephemerasociety.org/article-finley.html