Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
e-mail from T.S. Valle:

Neil wrote:

"Shira -- well, Michelle is my favorite stalker. I'm just not convinced
that she really is a stalker. (Heck, she only showed up at one CBLDF
stop -- how much of a stalker is that?)"

She's only the favorite 'cause she's cuter, dammit.  I'm the most polite
one.

I'm working on the cuteness factor.

<mutter mutter, grumble>

< thinks to self: Stalker One-Upmanship? That's just creepy. Stopping now. >

Besides all that... thanks for the lovely reading on Los Angeles, Neil. Even
though it was the last (and it certainly had the atmosphere... didn't it?)
....it was still one of the better ones I've been to. Hopefully the Video and
the DAT are useful and in good enough condition to use.

As per the 'Writer's Prayer' questions... I'm not sure if Dave at BD Press
has any more left... I'll check, and post back here.

I really need an account here.

-- T.S. Valle
....somewhere in Eastern California, near the Nevada/Arizona borders (I
think), on the Great Get-The-Hell-Away-From-Life backpacking and laptopping
excursion...
  

    
backpacking and laptopping excursion...?

Oooooh...I want to go on one of those!
  

    
Sorry, I prefer the get out of the state and travel thru a few more
excursions. Only problem is in order to make those economical, you have
to bypass things like hotels, and thus don't get to plug in the laptop
for 4 states... er, days. wait. 3 days. btw, Texas has far to many
miles in it to cross in one jaunt. 

Neil - As for the me-not-being-a-proper-stalker, I'd like to point out
that I'm back in New Orleans, a mere 1000ish miles away from you.
Heck, I did that in one day on my way over here... :) kidding - not
about the 1K mile day tho'. I *am*, however, tempted to go visit Shira.


Shira - <<<HUGS>>>

Walker - :-P

-squeaks
who will get back to posting to afng when she has a free phone line
for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.
  

    
Trevor, once I sent out my Xmas scrolls, I sent the CBLDF five of
them. I think they still have two or three left.

And you long ago convinced me you weren't a stalker.
  

    
And a happy Guy Fawkes day to all our readers. And it's only a year
until my next Biannual Guy Fawkes party.

n

who is home from chicago
  

    
It's Guy Fawkes Day?

I happened to spend it with Canadians.  I don't know what that means.
  

    
        Crap, I failed to remember, remember, the fifth of November.  Didn't
blow up a single thing or burn a single effigy all day.  Damn.  I
always liked this holiday, too, ever since I was in England when I was
seven.  It's like a lunatic version of Independence Day, only
commemerating something much weirder.
  

    

Well, I finally got those Halloween pictures online. These are from
Halloween 1998, at Walt Disneyworld.
http://www.tumbolia.org/halloween/Destiny.jpg
The book is a painted photo album.
http://www.tumbolia.org/halloween/Destiny-Del.jpg
You can't tell in the pictures, but Delirium's eyes are actually different
colors- one blue, one green. And the wig is dyed all sorts of colors, which
only barely comes through.
http://www.tumbolia.org/halloween/Dream.jpg
If you look closely you can see the ruby clasp on Dream's left shoulder. I
considered altering this in photoshop to remove the eyes, but decided not
to.
http://www.tumbolia.org/halloween/Family.jpg
The Endless go to Walt Disneyworld, and no one notices. Here we are at the
It's a Small World ride. I'm Dream, <gorey> is Del, and our then-SOs are
Death and Destiny. They made us take off most of our face makeup before we
went into the park.
I heard the comment "bad hair day!" more often than any other single
comment. Del gave out plastic frogs to anyone that pleased her. One woman in
the queue for the Haunted Mansion cried out "Dear Lord Jesus!" when she
happened to turn around and see me. Death went the entire day without taking
anyone. You can't tell, but my cloak was burned at the bottom to give it a
nifty tattered look. The fabric I made it out of, of course, melted rather
than burned, but you can't have everything, especially as a poor college
student, as I was when I originally made the outfit a year or so before the
trip.
In a fit of creativity, I made a contraption that would allow me to dump a
handfull of sand into my palm from in my sleeve, but I ended up not using it
because I decided it would be rude to throw sand around the Magic Kingdom.
As a final anecdote, Del put a frog in my hair (yes, that's a wig also) just
before we went on Space Mountain, and it managed to stay put through the
entire ride.

I went as Dream again this year, but it didn't work nearly as well, as I now
have a goatee and, well, Dream doesn't, unless I go as Dream from that
brief, strange period in history when he did, as we see when he's meeting
Hob year after year.
  

    
        Dude, so do it next year and I'll be Hob.  I always wanted to be
anyway.  And <gorey>, I never realized how ridiculous you look in my
jacket.  It looks like a leather tent. :-)
  

    
Email from Mary Roane:

Saturday was marvelous.  Neil was his usual delightful self, though the
crowd seemed a bit slow catching the humorous bits (first time I've ever
seen a roomful of grownups hear someone proclaim that they wanted to be a
werewolf when they grew up and take it dead seriously).
 
Neil--did you get to see everyone you wanted to see?  And how did the
screening of "Princess Mononoke" go?  And it was the Earl of Rochester
that you were recommending, right?
 
Len--he should publish his talk.  It was terrific. I envy you the Sting
Threepenny.
 
Madman--cool photos!
 
I'll take any sort of Get-The-Hell-Away-From-Life excursion I can get.
 
                                                              Mary Roane
  

    
Email from Tona:

     Hi Neil!
     I've been looking for you everywhere on the internet these days, just
to tell you how much I enjoy your work!  There was also a particular
reason why I wanted to write you, but of course now, I can't remember!  
Oh!  You HAVE to watch The Fearing Mind on the fox family network, if you
haven't seen it already.  The writer on that show kind of reminds me of
you, even though I don't actually KNOW you.  It's just the way his mind
works, how one minute he's in his everyday life, and then suddenly he's in
this whole horror sequence!  That, and he's silly. . .  and English. . .
     Actually I wanted to write you about Query letters!  What's the
secret to writing query letters?  I can write a book, but my mind goes
blank when it comes to sitting down and writing a query letter on why my
book should be published by a particular company.
     Anyway, advice on this particular subject would be geatly appreciated
by you and anyone else here at The Well.

     Thank you,
      Tona
  

    
Mary -- yup, I saw most of the people I needed to. And yes, John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

Tona -- haven't seen it, I'm afraid.

Query letters -- if you mean the ones that ask if a publisher would
like to look at your book, then I think the important things would be:

1) Send the letter to the kind of people who publish the kind of thing
you're writing.

2) Ask them if they would like to read your book, and give a short
precis of the kind that demonstrates it's the kind of thing they might
publish. "I've written an intertemporal spy novel about a retired
politician who discovers that ancient Aztecs are infiltrating the State
Department, planning to take over the world. The only person who
believes him is a glamorous quantum physicist, and a small grey alien
who came here to destroy the planet, and who will have to be persuaded
to help our heroes save it." If they don't publish anything vaguely
like that they will tell you. Otherwise they'll tell you to send it on
in, as they mostly read their slush piles.

3) Make no egregious errors of spelling in the body of the letter.

I can't think of anything else. I only ever sent one query letter,
long long ago, for my first book (which exists only mss in a box in the
basement) and the publisher said yes, and I sent them the book, and
they read it and sent it back with a nice note, and I cannot tell you
how grateful I am. (Memo to self. Find the box it's in, and burn it
before dying.)
  

    
e-mail from Ambar:

From: ambar@clock.org

Shira:

I spent August and most of October in post-breakup mode, so you have my sympathies, and also a handful of cuts from my virtual (meaning I haven't bothered to actually etch media with the thing, so the composition changes from night to night :-)  Heartbreak And Resurgence mix tape:

Concrete Blonde, _Bloodletting_, "The Beast" ("love is the ghost haunting your head / love is the killer you thought was your friend")
barenaked ladies, _Stunt_, "Call And Answer"
Sinead Lohan, _No Mermaid_, "Whatever it Takes..." 
Concrete Blonde, _Still In Hollywood_,  "Free" ("You can't keep me down ... I will never wear your 20th century pacemaker face")
(Also contains, as a bonus, Johnette Napolitano's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows", which, while not strictly belonging on this list, marks the top of my scale for 'bitter and cynical wedged into a 3-minute pop song')


Neil:

Regaled some friends at dinner with the two-part tale of the lemon-scented bats.  When we'd done giggling, Brett said "Hey, if you talk to Neil again, will you ask him to do a sequel to _Neverwhere_?"

I stared at him.  "Buh?"

"No, I mean it."

"But, I mean, what /for/?  The girl and the boy have gone off into the sunset, hand in hand.  What more do you /want/?"

He thinks.  "Okay, I don't strictly speaking need a sequel to Neverwhere.  I just want more of the Marquis."

Okay, I can see that. Passed along as requested. :-)

Elise:

You might like my friend James Daugherty's photographs (& occasional words).  [I don't know Well policy on outside links, so I shall simply note: link contains photographs of nude women, sometimes wielding swords, apples, lamps & such. :-]  URL: http://www.jsd.com/disclosure.html

Regards,

Ambar
  

    
"I've written an intertemporal spy novel about a retired politician
who discovers that ancient Aztecs are infiltrating the State
Department, planning to take over the world. The only person who
believes him is a glamorous quantum physicist, and a small grey alien
who came here to destroy the planet, and who will have to be persuaded
to help our heroes save it."

Finally!  The full disclosure on the plot of *American Gods!*
  

    
Hello.  I just found this conversation and am feeling bereft because I
missed so much of it.  It’s such a wonderful opportunity to actually
converse with a unique and inspiring artist.

I am living in Japan for the second time, teaching at a Junior High
School.  I lived in Kyoto three years ago and became enamored of the
fox god Inari because of his great shrine just outside of town.  Since
reading The Dream Hunters I’ve been curious about how it felt to enter
the mythology of a culture not your own.  One of the great attractions
to your work is the recurrent appearance of myth, and the fact that it
is drawn from so many sources.  I always assumed that fairy tales were
part of the blood of a culture, passed on before birth and highly
personal to the country  they are told in.  Do you feel comfortable in
the realm of Japanese “fairy tales,” or did you feel the same cultural
dislocation that might affect you in the real world?  

I don’t remember anything in Sandman or your former novels that went
so deeply into one specific world, however, at least not one drawn from
a culture so alien.  Please tell us about your relationship to the
world you evoked in this particular story!  (A corollary to this
question has me curious about your experience of American folk
tales...)

My second question comes from an interview I read a few months ago,
Yoshitaka Amano on The Dream Hunters.  He said that the collaboration
with you caused him to visit shrines he’d never been to and to really
think about fox stories for the first time.  I don’t remember the quote
exactly, but it was something along those lines.  What reactions have
you received from Japan upon translation of your work?  Have you
provoked the same resurgence of interest in the world of spirits and
monsters among your readers there?  And do you know where I could buy a
copy of the translated work?  My Japanese isn’t perfect but I would
love to read both versions...

-emily


P.S.    If you or anyone in this discussion has an interest, I wrote a
short (one page) description of the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto as a
part of my thesis.  I am fairly sure Amano based his image of the path
to the temple on it and it is a truly magical place.  I’ll try to hide
it in the next message so as not to force anyone to read it.  :)
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Email from mike:

Emily...

Your tale of visiting the Fushimi Inari shrine put me in 
a trance as I sit in front of my computer at work. Now I 
have yet another magical place that I have to visit 
before I die.

Thanks for the story.

--Mike
  

    
Emily, was a lovely, elegant description you've written. Thanks for sharing
it with us. And welcome to The WELL!
  

    
e-mail from Mimi:

Hi again everybody! :)

Emily - Are you on the JET program? ^_- Just wondering... got about 3
friends on it in Japan, teaching junior high school kids english. And
Kyoto!! I encourage everyone who might be thinking of visiting Japan to
give Tokyo a pass and go for Kyoto. Personal fav temple is still
Kiyomizutera... 

For anyone who's interested in the Japanese version of The Dream Hunters:
there's www.amazon.co.jp -- it was out of stock there when I last looked,
but the ISBN is listed, so I bet you can order it from your local
bookstore. If you do a search, I remember seeing that they've got Japanese
versions of the first 5 volumes of Sandman plus Death The High Cost of
Living, which blew my mind, imagining the Endless speaking Japanese...  No
Chinese versions to my knowledge though. (Oh, and I typo'd up there
somewhere: Niiru Geiman. E not A. ^_^; Gomen! Sorry!)

'(Memo to self. Find the box it's in, and burn it before dying.)' 

You know what my nightmare is? To not finish a book/series I've been
reading when I kick the bucket. I'm not as worried about novels, I guess I
can try to hang on for another little while to finish those 3 chapters
(??), but things that come in installments... "What? I have to wait another
2 weeks before I get the next 30 pages??" ^_^;

Jetlag is better, though I am really tired from company training the week I
got back, and we just got flown to Indonesia for a regional conference. I
think I slept for 16 hours straight when I got back home on Saturday and
now my time is just a little out of whack (go to bed at 10pm and wake up at
6am... which is just *wrong*...).

Halloween! I miss apples and caramel and foliage... and seasons! It's 70
degrees F in Hong Kong, high humidity, with a tropical typhoon close by so
it's raining. Give me fall already! And though we might have been a British
colony for a hundred years, we never celebrated Guy Fawkes Day. ^_^;
(Explosives of any kind have been banned anyway. So no firecrackers. Bleh.)

-- Mimi
  

    

Great, Emily!  Just beautiful.  Now I want to go to Japan and see the
shrine!
  

    
Emily, join us in the Pacific Rim conference (pacrim)! Topic 187  is
on "Kyoto the Old Capital," and the subject of Fushimi Inari comes up.
But we also need another Kyoto resident to give us the news!
  

    
Emily - what a lovely description.

I felt pretty comfortable doing the japanese story. While the tale of
the book in the back of Dream Hunters is entirely specious, I _was_
given a book of japanese fairy tales (probably the 1960 Mildred Marmur
book of that title, from a quick look at Bookfinder.com)when I was
about 8 or 9, and I just remember loving the stories of innocent young
monks caught up in fox spirit tricks and hauntings, and that there was
a contest between a fox and a badger in one story. I read that long
enough that the rhythms were somewhere in the back of my head when I
needed them.

The translated into japanese version of Dream Hunters only came out
within the last few weeks, I believe, so no feedback as yet. I was
going to suggest amazon.co.jp as a possible place to get the book. It
looks very lovely.

Mr Amano sent me some gifts from the fox shrine - a mask, and a small
fox statue. I treasure them. I know he also visited Kyoto for some of
the magician references.

I keep thinking it might be fun to write an American folk tale, but
I'm also painfully aware that, outside of a few folklorists and
anthropologists, nobody would really recognise it. Still...

Mimi - welcome back. And again, it was good to see you. Chris Oarr
still swears that if he'd known how far you'd come he'd've found you
somewhere to sit AND fetched you a cup of coffee.

***

Still a bit sick as we head into the Birthday Zone. Yesterday was a
Sick Day, and I decided I was officially sick of chicken soup.

Noticed today that I was miserable and realised that, between touring
and flu, I hadn't actually written anything since the start of the
CBLDF tour. So I went out to work and finished the SciFi Channel's Snow
Glass Apples audio script, and cheered up.

Now we just have to get The Actress to sign the contract and figure
out the whole when of the recording. (Did I already mention here who
The Actress is going to be? I don't remember. But she'll be perfect.)

And then get Harper Collins or someone to issue that and the SciFi
Channel's Murder Mysteries as a two CD set.

+++

Trevor -- yes, the LA stop had lots of atmosphere. I'm going to be
sent a rough cut of the Portland video this week. And then at some
point we have to put together the live CDs from the DATS of the four
shows. And, thanks to Tom Galloway, we have a DAT of LA. We can make a
live Cd or two...

And then we have to figure out how we'll distribute the CD... I
suppose we need a record label (Rhino? Merge? Ryko?) to make it happen
effectively.

madman -- great pictures.

mary -- it was good seeing you and your friends. 

The Princess Mononoke screening fell victim to the curse of the
Chicago Humanities Festival ticketing methods: oversold by 50 seats.
they ran out and rented the video from blockbuster and showed it in the
Video theatre next door.

Ambar -- Oh, the next Neverwhere story will probably be How The
Marquis got His Coat Back. The next novel is probably The Seven
Sisters. And how and when either of them will be written is something I
do not know, but I hope they reassure your friend.
  

    
I see from a post on the Dreaming that I did an "appreciation" on the
Kaluta sketchbook. Hmph. I gave a blurb for the book, and that only
because of a personal plea from Mike Kaluta, as the gentleman editing
or publishing the book hadn't thought to get me the material he wanted
me to write a blurb for, and Mike -- whose art I've always loved --
sent me a pile of stuff in e-mail and a heartfelt plea.

That's the second recent book to solicit a blurb and print it as an
introduction (and someone else I'd agreed to do a blurb for phoned me
last week and said "My editor wants to know if we can print your blurb
as an introduction" and I pointed out that I still hadn't seen the book
in question and wouldn't say ANYTHING about it if I didn't like it).

I think I'm moving back into an automatic No-Zone for blurbs.
  

    
Mike, Cynthia and Linda -- Thanks for the compliments!  I am glad you
enjoyed it.  I don't know if I have the wearwithal to write fiction, or
at least not to write it well, but I DO like describing the fantastic
places the world has to offer.  Wonder if there's a career in
travelling on behalf of people who can't go themselves.  :)  That would
certainly be a good job!

Mimi -- yes, I am on JET.  Not three years ago, when I went to
Fushimi, but after graduation the money looked good and it seemed a
good way to get back here and practice my Japanese.  Plus the kids are
as close to elves as any humans on earth, which makes them a particular
joy to teach.  Sometimes my brain skips back in time a bit, and the
situation I'm in suddenly surprises the hell out of me, but mostly life
seems strangely mundane.  I can empathize with you about caramel and
apples though, and the whole lovely madness of Halloween, but Japan
luckily has both seasons and bright fall leaves.  And you're right,
Kiyomizudera is awesome.

Neil -- Thanks for your answers... I would be interested in hearing
more about Japanese response as time goes by.  Maybe fairy tales are
all cut from the same archetypal cloth, and all it requires is early
exposure to internalize their imagery.  Now that I think about it all
the stories I read as a child, including Greek myths and some Japanese
stuff, seems fundamental and familiar.  It's stories about things I
have discovered later that have a jarring effect; water creatures with
dishes on their heads and a particular fondness for cucumbers, for
example, just seem like they come from another planet.  

I'm glad you liked the description of Fushimi.  So sad that the
previous post bars me from putting a quote from you saying "Lovely." on
my thesis if I publish it.  :)

I have seen no live foxes in Japan, but I DID see a badger two days
ago.  It dropped a fish it had caught when it saw me.  The fish was
then tragically struck and killed by a passing car.  I think I may be
one of the only people on earth to witness a hit-and-run piscine
casualty. 


-emily
  

    
Email from Mary Roane:

Emily--beautiful description!  Now I want to go to Japan, too....let's all
go!  It could be the Dreamhunters' Tour of fox shrines & good restaurants.  
:-)
 
Ambar--I'm with your friend.  I adore the Marquis.  Thanks for asking that
question, I'd been wondering about a sequel....
 
Neil--speaking of the Marquis...any chance at all that the wonderful
Paterson Joseph will be back for the film?  And has anybody seen him in
anything else? Sorry to hear about the screening snafus.  I sort of
wondered what was up with them putting you in that relatively small room
for the lecture & doing no publicity, 2 weeks after you sold out the Vic.  
Odd.  They could easily have sold out a much larger theatre for the
screening as well. O.K., The Actress thing is almost as bad as the time
you were here signing for Stardust & said the perfect director was being
lined up for "Good Omens" and I had to wait *a year and a half* to find
out if my guess was right. (It was.)  You are too good at keeping secrets.
Very sorry to hear you're not feeling well.  You have 2 days to get
better. ;-)
                          
                                                Mary (reading the Earl of
Rochester)