Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Michelle - re Bob: any chance you've seen the Reduced Shakespeare
Company?

Wine and other intoxicating stuff: Is it an acquired taste? I've tried
red wine, white wine, fruit wines, sake... it all tastes rather foul
to me. At wine occasions (be they dinners or whatever), I just take
polite sips from the glass. I can stand champagne... but I don't think
I enjoy it as much as my friends who would be glugging the stuff. I do
like certain cocktails, but those tend to be very very fruity. ^_^;

Anyhoo...

-- Mimi, who's just glad to be home after working a couple 10pm nights
  

    
Well, as long as we're discussing booze...

As a HS teacher I have friends with access to large amounts of liquid
nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen evaporates on contact with water, right, after
freezing it...
And alcohol has a lower freezing point than water.
And gin is 17% alcohol.  And vermouth is about 30%.
So I am working-- at least as a thought experiment-- on the...

SCIENCE MARTINI!  3 oz Gin, .5 oz vermouth, a minute amount of liquid
nitrogen and an olive.  Serve in a pyrex cocktail glass.

Can you imagine the possibilities?  Spread the word, and if anyone
tries it, let me know if it's any good.
  

    


Glen Seymour writes:



In post #1702 Len stated "alcohol has a lower freezing point than
water"

Be careful!  It is possible to get the alcohol colder than the
freezing point of your stomach's juices.  Freezing the interior of
your stomach is very bad for it.

I clearly remember reading a comic with this piece of wisdom, "If
your spit freezes before it hits the ground, it's to cold to drink
from your flask."

The Other Glen - who keeps having GEnie flashbacks while reading this topic.
  

    
Michelle - After attending The Vagina Monologues with Lady Miss Tree
way back when, I can assure you that being called "Bob" is a good
thing! ;)

Len - That sounds quite painful. I lost the ability to drink alcohol
two minutes after turning 40 and wasn't even abusive prior to that.
Something just snapped and it's been Hail the Porcelain Gods ever
since. I really miss those tequila shots.

Jinx - Yeah, but especially when there's no hot water! Brrrr... 
  

    
Mimi -- my theory on everything says, Try The Good Stuff.  That way
you know if you like it or not. It's amazing how many people dislike
things, from sushi to caviar, from scotch to mangoes, having only had a
really nasty version thereof. I thought I hated caviar till I had some
good stuff, and realised that what i didn't like was the salty black 
version. 

Buouyed by my wine experience in ireland, I said yes to red wine on
the plane home. It tasted like grape juice that had gone off. And I
thought "ick" and didn't finish it.

Sometimes one tries the good stuff and THEN doesn't like it.  Fair
enough, and now you know. 

Rocky -- how odd. I lost the ability to drink booze in any kind of
quantity when I turned 30.  Having been a London journalist in my 20s,
and having spent most of my social and business time in pubs, it was a
very strange  sort of sea-change.

I'm home. Tired but happy, and with a book that's now going through
edits (here and in New York) and will, as soon as editorial requests
have been implemented or declined, be in print-up-the-proofs shape at
the end of the week.


The old modem I put in on my laptop broke as I left ireland -- the
little bit of wire that connects to the phone broke off, so I have to
try and reinstall the nice modem that came with the computer that
stopped working a couple of months ago...  (Using an office computer to
phone this... but I've still not caught up on my e-mail backlog when
the modem went down the first time.)
  

    
Of course, you can save a lot of money by avoiding the good stuff!

End of the week.  Wow.  That is so quick.
  

    
Am reminded of the New Year's street party at the start of 2000, when
someone gave me hell for not even wanting to *try* the expensive
whiskey. I hate nearly all alcohol, and even the stuff I like, I can't
have much more than a taste of before the allergies start. So I cave
(read: was guilt tripped) and finally down the shot... ICK!!! so I'm
standing there with this squinty face, trying to find anything to wash
out the ick in my mouth, when my other friend hands me a glass of
something that smells much better to drink. And I down the chaser of
Midori. I think I drank a gallon of water and Coke after that, trying
to get the nasty aftertaste out of my mouth. Ew.

Rocky - the good tequila, you don't drink in shots...

Neil - I'm surprised that the turn-around is so quick. Is that just
because you know what you're doing? Or because they're that anxious to
get it printed and working that quickly? Just nosy.

squeaks, NP: W.A. Mozart/Requiem - Lacrimosa <-It's been stuck in my
head all week.
  

    
I agree with Neil on this one-- trying the good stuff is the best way
to go. More philosophical backing for this comes from David
Rosengarten, the TV Food network guy-- his take is that if the good
stuff is really expensive/fattening/illegal, simply don't have very
much of it.
  

    
btw, just saw the play Copenhagen about Nils Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg.  Mentally exhausting, but utterly amazing.
  

    
e-mail from Margret Rodas:

Hi Neil,

Glad to hear you have finally finished American Gods.  It must be quite
a relief.  I was wondering if the Icelandic bit made the cut.  I hope it
did, because it would be nice seeing it in print. If not, could you
please send me a copy of that part like you mentioned you would.  I
would be most appreciative.  I can't wait to see how it all fits in the
grand scheme of things.

Thanks,
Margret
  

    
Margret -- as of right now, the Icelandic bit astonished everyone,
well, me, by making the cut. Don't want to say too much more about it
-- other than I just put your name on a post-it note to remind myself
to put it into the final acknowledgements.

Martha -- I suspect that a good bottle of wine once a year winds up
costing me much less than someone drinking a poor or even a fair bottle
of wine every week or so.

Michelle -- well, they really really want to get reading copies off to
Barnes and Noble and people, to the Harper in-house reps, and not to
mention copies to people for blurbs and so on. The book is going to be
a Harper Collins lead title in June/July and that is going to need a
lot of pushing, digging and building.

So we're a little way away from doing the galleys and so on, but we're
certainly at the point of handing a finished, finished and aproved mss
in.

Expensive whiskeys are an odd sort of thing. So are expensive
whiskies.

I normally bring my asssistant Lorraine an interesting single malt
back from foreign parts when i've been traveling. In the Irish duty
free instead I bought her a bottle of Potcheen "NOT FOR SALE OR
CONSUMPTION IN IRELAND. FOR EXPORT ONLY." made by the only legal
potcheen company in Ireland.

Smells like a fruity industrial cleaning fluid, tastes like industrial
cleaning fluid, and then, after one sip, just as you've decided that
it's something that will never go in your mouth again, you realise
you're wandering around with a silly grin on your face, and you might
as well have another sip.
  

    
Well, I can _see_ buying an expensive bottle of single malt.  I don't know
about this potcheen business though.
  

    
Martha - Maybe if it *doubled* as an industrial cleaning fluid? 

squeaks, who would rather the fruity smell than fake pine any day.
  

    

Ack.
I just got the book (Season of Mists) that I ordered a few weeks ago, on
advice from here. It's the wrong cover. Grr. Now I need to deal with a used
book store in the UK in an attempt to either get a copy with the right cover
(which they probably no longer have) or my money back.
  

    
Email from Bill Williams:

Noted on DreamHaven's website that they are taking pre-orders on the US
and UK versions of American Gods... will the two editions be as different
as the BBC and US editions of Neverwhere?
 --Bill
  

    
        There is a liquor store a mile from my house that has three (3)
bottles of the hard-to-find Laphroaig 30-year for a measly $210 each. 
I am trying to find $210 now.  I've said for years that the way I avoid
 alcoholism is to never drink cheap stuff.  I figure to be an
alcoholic, you have to drink a lot, and I simply can't _afford_ a lot. 
Poverty forces moderation.  Of course, in the case of the Laph 30
sitting seductively in that glass case, I can't afford any.  Dammit.
  

    
Martha --  well, the potcheen wasn't that expensive. Cheaper than
finding a good single malt, anyway. And I figure that, if it lasts that
long, and if Lorraine does one, it'll be the hit of next year's
renfest. 

Madman -- sorry to hear about the cover mix-up. I hope the bookstore
makes good, and it doesn't cost you the world in postage. (You're after
the softback Season of Mists, or the Leatherette hardback?)

Bill -- It won't ever be as different as the original US and UK
versions of Neverwhere, which were, more or less, first and second
drafts of the same book.

This is because the book is now in second draft.

It's possible it might be as different as say the original Gollancz
and the US edition of Good Omens, where we changed a bunch of jokes
simply to make them funny in the other country:

a demon dances like the british group on the Eurovision Song contest
(UK) and a demon dances like a white band on Soul Train (US) for
example.

We'll see. They might also, like Stardust, be exactly the same book.

Right now it's with my US editor (who, on finishing the book
yesterday, realised there was a lot less fat than she had thought while
reading it), and with my UK editor (who is reading as fast as he can,
I expect).  I'll report back as I know.

If I can get them to get the novel's website running, I'll even start
an online editorial and getting a book done journal there.
  

    
Email from Margret Rodas:

Thanks Neil, now I really can't wait to read the book.  In fact, I'm
positively giddy!

Thanks again,
Margret (grinning ear to ear)
  

    

I'm after the softback with the original cover.
I'm vaguely considering becoming considerably lazy and just keeping this,
continuing my search for the one I'm looking for, and giving this to a
friend as a gift. We'll see.
As is, since I've got it at the moment, I'm rereading it before I do
anything with it.
  

    
Neil, if you ever get a spare minute, you might want to do a
quick flit over to Robert Hunter's website archive at:

http://www.dead.net/RobertHunterArchive/files/majorlinks.html

I consider this to be the single greatest use of the World Wide
Web in all of its brief history.  If absolutely nothing else,
click on the Cupful of Rain link.  (Choose Cupful 2 or 3 to get
the full, Timothy Truman illustrated version.)
  

    
Pretty out of it so I figure I'll post.  I can't stand anything with
alcohol in it.  Everything I've tasted is just plain icky.  I've tried
several good wines but I can never get past the first sip if something
has alcohol in it.  I don't mind though, even if I liked the taste I'd
still be a teetotaller, I grew up in a very drunken town and so have
also developed a mental aversion to all alcohol.

Madman - I just ordered some sandmans off of ebay to start a lending
library, but since this would give me and my roommate four copies of
season of mists total I'll see what condition it's in and if it's
acceptable pass it on to you.

My roommate got the princess mononoke dvd.  Just watched it and liked
it even better the second time around.  I remember being utterly amazed
when it came to a theatre three minutes from my then new apartment.  I
had thought I was going to have to drive four hours to cleveland.  I
must say I really don't envy the chore it must have been to match the
words to the mouth flaps.  I'm really loving this theatre though,
watched crouching tiger, hidden dragon there on friday and loved it.

My brain hurts:  I'm taking a class in getting published this quarter.
 Basically you have to send things out to pass so it's a big help to
lazy folk like me.  Of course today my group tells me that the old
ending I had would work great when friends up to this point had been
telling me it was crap and now I have to decide between them in a
couple of days to get it in before deadline.  ack.  ack.  ack.  I can
barely finish a two page story.  I am utterly in awe of people who can
write books.  It makes me so happy to see American Gods on the horizon.
 :-)  Me go sleep now before start babbling.

Jen, who got to see her godson yesterday.  He's standing!  He has
hair!  
  

    
ok, posting after having lost/forgotten my password then being too
busy with school to get around to sorting it out.  And I still missed
the deadline for degree application.  crap.

Have been a big fan of hard liquor for a number of years but haven't
had much lately as I took a shine to beer only about a year ago (after
loathing it for a long time) and have spent time getting to know it. 
Like whiskey and vodka straight, though gin never really appealed to
me.  Too much juniper taste in it I think.  I think the weirdest thing
I ever tried was some kind of Dutch equivalent of Everclear.  Whoo!

Neil -- Potcheen sounds interesting, what brand is it?  I looked up
one called Bunratty on the web and there seemed to be a "Now Legal!"
bit to the label.  

Also, I think I got from here, as well as other places, that you are
eventually working on a Death script but that a Sandman movie is out of
your hands, correct?  I only ask cause Wizard keeps putting blurbs in
about how you are 'set' to direct Sandman from your own script, and
only 'may' write and direct Death.  I just figured they got it mixed up
or something, which wouldn't surprise me much.  Anyway just wondering.

And congrats on the book finishing.

Daniel
  

    
Streak -- I've had the 30 year old laphroig. It's a fine drink for
sharing.

Madman -- good luck with finding the original cover. At least you
aren't trying to find the original hardback.

Jenny  -- finishing things is the hardest part of learning to write, I
think. Anybody can start a novel...

Daniel -- it was Bunratty.

I looked at their website and saw the Now Legal bottles, although
everything else I could find seemed to indicate the stuff was still
illegal in ireland and their stuff was export only...

No, I'm not involved with the SANDMAN movie, nor do I want to be:
nothing's changed on that in the last  decade.  I'm writing Death, and
if they like the script I may direct it, we'll see...
  

    
        Tell you what, Neil, you spring for a bottle and I'll share it with
you. :-)
  

    
I had a bottle of Bunratty mead once; it was kinda sweet, but not as
bad as Kedem.  (Can you believe that Kedem makes mead?  Did they think
that regular kosher wine was too dry?)

And then there's Ethiopian honey wine, which is fairly foul in its own
right.