Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Well, I just caught up on 2 weeks of the WELL. Over the past two weeks, I've
read both _Stardust_ and _Neverwhere_. I was surprised- for some reason, I
had gotten the impression that the novel of _Stardust_ contained text that
wasn't in the comics version, but that's ok, because I didn't own the
comics version- I had just borrowed it at the time it was coming out.
Both are, as I needn't tell anyone here, wonderful stories. The house has
just acquired _The Sandman Companion_ but I think I'm going to read _The
Diamond Age_ first, so as not to OD on too much Neil. 
  

    
Michelle -- right. I promise not to sign your mouse.

Jen, my name is smaller in the US edition, but it's embossed in gold
which is just as bad.

Mimi -- did I ever post the German Stardust cover? It's on the german
Amazon. I'm REALLY fond of it. 

Stardust will come out this year as a trade paperback from Harper
Perennial -- the cover is delightfully respectable, a lovely shot of a
forest.

madman -- they are ever so slightly different: mostly the sentences
that got chopped to fit the art on the page were restored. (And a few
lines I cut to fit what Charles had painted were restored.) There's
probably someone who's read both copies side by side and annotated the
differences.

...

Home again. Finished the rewrite of Chapter 16 on the plane today.
  

    
So instead of reading Neil, you're reading Neal?
  

    
oohhh, y'all are making it expensive to be a _Stardust_ completist...

As for differences in text, as far as I can tell (and I only compared
the two side by side for one chapter), there are only a few sentences
added to the novel here and there that tend to explain a bit more.
Probably nothing you'd notice if you'd read one followed by the other.
And there's also a curious change of generic 'vector' words being
changed to specific ones; e.g., 'nearby' changed to 'south' and things
like that. 

And on another topic, anyone here read any Michael Flynn? Daddio
loaned me a collection of short stories and I'm enjoying them rather
muchly, but have no idea where to go from there.

squeaks, who blames madman for her recent synthpop (esp. Alphaville)
kick.
  

    
http://multimedia.fnac.com/multimedia/images_produits/grandes/7/7/0/9782846260
077.gif

is the french Smoke and Mirrors cover.

Michelle -- you're a stardust completist? Tell you what, if you go on
the cruise, I'll give you an obscure foreign edition of Stardust
(swedish? german?) with an additional odd foreign or proof edition for
each other person you sign up. How's that?
  

    
What a bizarre cover... as for the cruise, so it's bribery is it?
Didn't you read that I just got a car? <grumbles>

Alright, I'll scrounge and go <grumbles while smiling at the prospect
of getting stuff 'Walker doesn't have. ;P>

-squeaks, who has no idea where to find the wealthy/desperate people
to go on the cruise with her...
  

    
Neil is not above bribery.  He seems so gentle and polite and then he turns
the screw.
  

    

Well, I now own both the graphic novel and the novel versions of Stardust,
so maybe someday I'll compare. Please don't tell me there are differences
between the graphic novel and the individual issued comics...

And, in other news, I lied. Having not cracked _The Diamond Age_ open at
all, I am over halfway through _The Sandman Companion_, and have learned a
few interesting things that I hadn't noticed in all my rereadings of
Sandman. And one thing that I had read totally incorrectly, evidently.

Specifically, Ethil Cripps' amulet of protection. The _Companion_ asserts
that when Dream won back his Helm, the amulet ceased to have power and Ethil
finally died. However, I had always assumed that the amulet did not have
power over old age, but that when it was passed to Dee _he_ gained its
protection, and _that_ was how he managed to overcome the guards and escape
Arkham.

*wanders off, singing "Forever Young" at <miss-mousey>.*
  

    
Michelle -- absolutely. Bribery. How else are you going to get the UK
proof edition? Or the Isreali edition?


Madman -- wasn't that all covered in the Doll's House intro? I don't
have a copy to hand...
  

    

You're right- it does specifically say the compact was withdrawn. I can only
plead that my copy of Doll's House was on loan to <streak> for a long time
and I haven't reread the intro in an even longer time. Pfah, some Sandman
fan I am, eh?

I guess I'll take this opportunity to change the subject and mention a
project that I had been working on a long time ago. It's currently largely
abandoned but I still hope to get back to it some day. It's called
"Gathering," and it's a short story. It came about when I realized that a
lot of my favorite characters from various sources would be very interesting
if they were to interact with each other. I found myself inventing dialogues
in my head between characters who had not only never met, chances are their
authors had never met. So, I started writing a short story in which a bunch
of them got thrown into one room and had to deal with one another.
It started falling apart when I insisted to myself that I needed to
introduce each one individually, showing how they got to the room (nominally
a tavern, making it rather akin to Worlds' End, which I had not read when I
started this project); and it fell further apart when I realized that most
of them were extremely antisocial and I wasn't sure how to start a dialogue
with these folks.
Someday I'll go back to it. Dream is among the people I wanted to introduce-
possibly making this a stopping point for him after issue #69 of The
Sandman. The others, for the curious, were:
Brand of Amber (Zelazny's Amber chronicles); Raistlin of Krynn
(Dragonlance); The Hunter of Erna (CS Freidman's Coldfire Trilogy); Adam
Warlock (Marvel comics and the only character other than Sandman that I
collect obsessively); Ummon of the Technocore (Dan Simmons _Hyperion
Cantos_); Dream (though picking another of the Endless had also occurred to
me- Destruction might well wander through here).

There were a few others. I had a rule that I wouldn't allow more than one
from any single source. I considered bending it by defining source as
"world" so if one author wrote in two different universes entirely, I
could use both. Thus I considered letting Friedman's Zatar in, but he was
so similar to The Hunter... maybe Anzha instead. (Those two are from _In
Conquest Born_.) I considered adding Valentine Michael Smith. Maybe
Poledra from the Eddings books- this mostly because I felt there needed to
be some women in this discussion.

Half the point of the project was for me to see if I could get into the
minds of the characters, and write in the styles they came from to at
least some extent. Adam Warlock's introduction, for instance, has a comic
book feel to it. Or was meant to.

I still think it would be a neat idea. What would Dream have to say to
Brand? Raistlin to The Hunter? What would they say about life and death,
ambition and power? In my head it was fascinating. On paper, I could
barely get started. 
Not to mention copyright issues if I ever did write it- obviously, it was
a project just for my own personal satisfaction.
Also, there were issues combining their worlds. Does Dream exist in all
universes? Is Krynn a Shadow of Amber? Is there Fae in the tavern for the
Hunter to use? Is it outside the realms of the Pattern and Logrus? Can
Death reach it- can they kill one another? With this crowd, threats are
more than likely- they're a dark bunch.

Ah well. Enough rambling- the above is only peripherally relevent to the
topic, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. And, who
knows, suggestions on how to get it going again are welcome. And besides,
now that I've rambled for pages and pages, you've all forgotten about my
mistake concerning Sandman continuity. Aren't I sly?
  

    
Michelle, hold out that you not only get the Israeli edition, but he has to
draw a little picture in it when he signs it.
  

    
LOL!  Nothing like inside knowledge!
  

    
<furrowed brow> Um, I've mentioned the cruise to a few people who all
think it's a fab idea but are positive they don't have the money for
it. Do I get points <and a little picture drawn in the Israeli edition>
for at least trying?

-squeaks, who now has to update her homepage to suck people in...
<counters madman with 'Big in Japan'>
  

    
Hmph.  First I grump that the topic is empty, then my phone line goes
out (snow damage, not unpaid bills, tyvm) and I miss an entire
weekend's worth of cool stuff.  Bugger.

Ah, WELL... to ease my withdrawal I saw "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"
which is wonderful and sometimes transcendent, though I'm not sure it's
as perfect as the sublime Big Lebowski or Barton Fink.

Madman-- sounds like not only a cool story, but a great-- if arcane--
improv game.

Mary-- you have a good friend and I am green with envy.

Michelle-- sorry to question your mouse; I was not raised with pets
and still have to acquire a taste, so to squeak, for them, but the
picture is darn cute.

Neil-- Bebe gives me chills on the Chicago OCR-- what an amazing
casting choice.

I had a dream last night, btw, that I was hanging out with Sondheim on
a cruise ship (we were talking about writing) and I kept trying to
tell him about you because I thought he'd like you... I dragged him to
a comic shop because I was sure he'd at least recognize a Sandman
T-shirt or something, but I couldn't find any-- only Sin City and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the end he wandered off into the
Chicago twilight.  But the point is, I tried.

(In real life, I pestered my friend, Sean, who works with Sondheim, to
get him to go to your NY reading, but Sean assured me that The Master
was busy.)
  

    
"Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" - I really enjoyed it.  It was nice to
see a film that actually got the point that witticism is not all about
narky one liners.  The characters were rather interesting for once as
well.
  

    
Madman -- how cool.

Michelle -- no points for trying, I'm afraid. But if you succeed in
getting people along, you get loaded down with every foreign edition of
Stardust I can find.

I tried to find out online how much a 'starving artist class' cabin
is, but couldn't find it. I did find

http://www.cbldf.org/pr/cruise/000601-cruisereport.shtml

which is the story of last year's cruise.

Len -- I've always turned down opportunities to meet Sondheim: I have
so few heroes left, and it's not always good to meet them.
  

    

Have you had meetings with heroes that did not live up to expectations?
  

    
Linda, yes, a few. And a few heroes who have remained heroes, after
meeting and knowing them.

......

Got a phone call today to say that my poem INSTRUCTIONS has been taken
for the next Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. The guy started to
explain it, and I said "Let's see. You'll give me rather less than the
cost of a good dinner, and a copy of the book in paperback and
hardback," and he said that yes, that was how it worked, how did I
know? And I said because I've had a story in there every year (except
one) for the last 8 years...
  

    
Len - Only dream I've ever had with Sondheim in it involved me as
Little Red in Into the Woods. He was upset because my tantrum wasn't
'tantrum-like' enough. I think I was refusing to scream because it
would mess up my voice or something. 

And I've updated my web page a bit to help plug the cruise (desperate
for foreign editions? me?). The Devil Bunny pages are also coming
together. The New Orleans travelogue is up and I'm working on the Gorey
Ball photos next.

-squeaks, who has learned that being sick is the perfect opportunity
to update web pages.
  

    
On meeting one's heroes - They are not always well behaved, especially
those times when you think they ought to be.  A good rule-of-thumb is
to remember that they're only human. But damn me if there's simply no
excuse for bad manners.  Makes it very difficult to view that person's
work in the same light again. 

Michelle - There is an off-Broadway play based on Gorey's work
currently running in NYC, but for the life of me I can't remember the
name. I'll hit "post" and remember right afterwards. <sigh>

  
  

    
Rocky -- well, yes. Often it's manners. It can be more than that: I
remember talking about one of my heroes with someone who knew him, who
said they'd spent their entire dinner as the hero got drunker and
drunker comparing notes on male escorts, and by the time dessert rolled
around the hero had passed out on the table.

Writers, by our nature, almost always disappoint. 

Actors can be enormously disappointing as well: you expect to meet a
role they played, and instead, meet an actor.

Michelle -- thanks for putting the making Waves plug up. You could
mention it to the altfanthingies. And Slashdot. And, um, I dunno, where
else is the word spread?
  

    
Working on the novel. In a weird place right now. Made chapter 16
chapter 17 for a bit, and then, after a day, put it back at chapter 16.
Neither way made me entirely happy. Cut quite a few bits from the
original chapter 16 and put one in chapter 14, one in chapter 17. It's
a slight improvement, I think, but it's too hard to tell -- my nose is
pressed up against the glass. It'll only be when I've done a printout
of the whole thing that I'll know, I think.

I had an odd idea today. CORALINE probably won't be out as a novel
until May 2002. But it occurred to me that I might be able to get it
out as an audio book before that... what do people think of the idea of
an audio book coming out six months before the novel?
  

    
        I'm curious as to why it would work out that way in this case.  What
are the logistics of the situation, if they're not too dull to recount?
  

    
Simple publishing scheduling. The publisher didn't want to bring out
Coraline before American Gods. It'll be out in July 2001.

Coraline the book will come out in hardback when American Gods comes
out in paperback, in May 2002.

But we have Coraline in hand  (have had since last May) which means
that 14 months before publication the book is in-house. Which is
unusual.

It'll get a certain amount of publicity very soon when it gets
announced widely that it's sold as a movie, and for an incredible
amount of money (for a children's book). Which might be enough for me
to talk Harper into getting something out early....

And I rather like the idea of something being an audio book first.

My editor may well say no to the whole plan.
  

    
On meeting heroes - there's only one person in particular who I hold
in the esteemed position of 'personal hero' and she was my 5th grade
teacher (whom I still talk to and worship). So 'meeting' in my case
would never really apply to anyone else, unless you want to recount
specifics of meeting her outside a classroom, which was the exact
opposite of a disappointment, even if it was at a Lyons...

mor... ?Rocky - Did you remember it yet? Just nosy, as I'm starting to
compile Gorey photos for the web page. Devil Bunny took more time than
I thougth he would, so the Gorey page won't be up until at least
tomorrow. *sigh.

Neil - I plugged it to the thingies (more than once) before it ever
saw my web page... but I'll continue to pass the word along wherever I
can. 

All the cutting and pasting and rearranging has me even more curious
about American Gods. Can barely contain myself to see it in print
already.

As for Coraline, I'm really not very big on audio books, but I still
think it would be neat to release it that way earlier, rather than
waiting... but that could just be because I'm anxious to have *that*
story on my 'Neil Shelf' as well.

-squeaks, currently sporting electric blue hair.