Rob - be my guest. I remember it, but would love to see it again too.
Rob -- I remember meeting Stu with you, so my guess is that it was done in the pub that evening. I'm pretty sure I didn't do it at UKCAC. I interviewed Alan and Dave about Watchmen there, though. In a suit, as befitting the occasion.
I'm just glad the picture is still up on the board and being looked at.
One of the things I always loved, and love, about the field is that fans are in some cases pros and pros are in some cases fans. I found fandom and conventions because I was sent to interview Gene Wolfe and Bob Silverberg at the British Fantasy con in '83. And I liked this thing that I had walked into and kept coming. I remember long conversations with Charles Stross in the bar in Glasgow in (I think) 1985 about books we were going to write and worlds we were going to conquer, and have no idea if Charles had sold any fiction at that point or not, and I'd only written Ghastly Beyond Belief (a most fannish sort of a book anyway) and a very few short stories. I was also a journalist, and some of what I made my money from was interviewing SF writers. I went to cons because I wanted to and because I enjoyed the conversations, and not to make contacts or anything. Most of the friends I made back then are either famous and important professionals and suchlike these days, or they aren't, but that's just the effect of time, and wasn't because I was making contacts. I'm pretty sure my first published illustration was a Watchmen gag in an Avedon Carol fanzine, unless my memory has gone...
Which is a burble, mainly because I don't remember it ever occurring to me that fan and pro were mutually exclusive states or conditions. Nor does it now. They are quantum states. You can move between them, you can be both at the same time, even after they open the box...
That's a shock and a tragedy. My condolences to Alexandra.
I'm still trying to figure out
"There's no doubt that it will be front page news if and when (an indictment) happens. But eventually it will become old news quickly."
Is a Snail a Dangerous Animal was probably my favourite Misleading Case...
Has anyone looked at the 9/11 poetry on Barbara Bauer's site? I mean.... (words fail me)
When I was about 20 I read a book from the 1950s that I bought in a jumble sale on how to write and sell fiction. All manner of sensible advice, which washed over me and I've forgotten, all except one thing. "Everything in a contract is negotiable, including the date," it said, somewhere in the chapter on what to do once you've sold something. And it's pieces of advice like that that get you through a career as a writer with your sanity intact.
This is sort of a corollary to the old adage about how to tell whether a group of writers are newbies or professionals: When newbies get together, they talk about writing. When pros get together, they talk about money.
It may be an old adage, but that doesn't make it true.
You know, I've been a professional writer for over twenty years.
Mostly, in my experience, when professional writers get together they talk about each other, or about people they know, or books they've read, or cool things they've run into while researching other things, or food, or the weather, or the gardening, or Making Light, or movies they've seen.
On the whole they don't talk about the mechanics of writing, because they've been doing it long enough that the questions people ask at the start are more or less answered, at least to their satisfaction. But they talk about what they've enjoyed...
And while I can remember many conversations about Problems with Agents or Problems with Publishers, over the years, I don't remember any conversations about money. (Apart from Steve Brust, over the weekend, saying that he'd like more of it. But he was also talking about the mechanics of writing at the time, so I think those two cancel each other out.)
Nerdycellist -- I knew there was a good reason to hand out the Mirrormask pins...
...
I have a Jenny Holzer tee shirt, covered in small and interesting Jenny Holzer one-liners, which I tend not to wear at cons because when I do, people have entire conversations with me while staring intently at my chest.
...
I think those are all excellent suggestions (and the How to Humidify Hotel Rooms information will undoubtedly be tried at the next con I go to).
Even so, I'm very likely, especially at conventions where I'm not a Guest of Honour but am just visiting, to wear a badge in such a way that it's not that easy to read, which can, in some circumstances, buy me a little more freedom of movement than I'd have if it was obvious that I was me. On the other hand, I've declined several offers from cons of Name Tags with other people's names on, which seems somehow silly.
Teresa -- yup. It's fascinating.
If you're interested, the judgement is at http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/op3.fwx?submit1=showop&caseno=03-1331.PDF
Kevin, in the US copyright statute of limitations is from three years after a reasonable person would have found out about it. (From the 7th circuit judgment in my own recent legal case, suing Todd McFarlane, you'll be happy to hear that a reasonable author is not expected to check the copyright notices on reprints to see if the publisher has tried to sneak in a copyright claim he's not entitled to, nor expected to check the copyright office to see if fraudulent copyright notices have been filed.)
In your example, I would have thought that the second publisher could well claim he was publishing the first book, which violated your copyright, you already knew about it and did nothing about it, and might well get away with it too.
That was really beautiful. Thank you...
Mitch -- you're too kind. I'm glad you're enjoying it. And it does get better as it goes along, as well.
As for the future in writing... I dunno. It's a dodgy business. Look at what happened to Kingston Dunstan, over at http://www.johnnyalucard.com/quetz.html (Kim Newman demonstrates what it is to be loved by fans)
I remember being shown around Norway (well, Oslo and Bergen and a few bits in-between), and being initially very impressed with the size, organisational skills, and general unpleasantness of the Norwegian Satanists, because my guides would keep saying things like "This is now the oldest stave church in Norway. It *was* the second oldest, but the Satanists burned down the oldest," and "Oh, Bjorn left Bergen after the Satanists murdered his sister" until I realised that the church-burning & the murdering people were a) the same people and b) there were only a tiny handful of them.
Then again, I once told a Norwegian friend that the bit in one of her short stories about teenagers holding up small-town norwegian banks and post-offices, with guns, to alleviate the gloomy rural boredom, wasn't very realistic or likely. "Possibly not," she agreed, "But we did it anyway."
Well, if I posted over at the neilgaiman.com board I'd expect the same amount of respect and politeness that anyone gets; and if I was out of line (eg "How dare you all say that A GAME OF YOU was not the single greatest work of literature of all time! I shall hunt you down one by one and you shall die unspeakable yet appropriate deaths! hahahahaha!") I'd hope at least for a gentle "that's not how we do things here" warning before being banned from the playground.
I long ago -- probably around 1991 -- decided not to post places that people gathered to talk about what I wrote, because it seemed easier and more sensible that way. But that's me. I certainly think that an author has every right to talk to people talking about the author or the work, and no obligation to suffer nobly and in silence the criticism of twits or the wise. Still, it's not a battle any author will ever win (I've watched many of them try and fail), and it's much easier to just shrug and think "the dogs bark and the caravan move on" or something equally reassuring, and go back to work. No-one's ever going to like everything you do, nor should they. (I would take much more seriously the repeated criticism of "ENDLESS NIGHTS" that it's 3 or 4 good stories and 3 or 4 sub-par ones if there was any kind of consensus on which the good ones were and which the bad.)
On the Poppy Z Brite front, I *highly* recommend her forthcoming novel, Liquor, which is a very readable, funny novel about two young chefs trying to make a go of things in the restaurant business in New Orleans. No cannibalism, vampirism, gothiness or dark. It's more like one wishes the novels of Anthony Bourdain were (rather than his non-fiction, which it feels a lot like).
"Richard Curtis, who infamously uses Hugh Grant as his Marty Stu in his movies..."
Not at all; Hugh Grant plays the lead character as Richard Curtis in those movies, helped by the fact that Dick tends to write lead characters based on himself, most interestingly in "The Tall Guy",in which Jeff Goldblum didn't try to imitate him in it at all.
("Notting Hill" was based on something that happened to a friend of Richard's, who found himself in a releationship with A Star.)
Hugh may look more like a movie star than Richard Curtis does, but beautiful, brilliant, funny women threw themselves routinely at Dick's feet until he found Emma Freud, and he is every bit as nice as the version of him Hugh Grant played in "Four Weddings...", if rather harder-working, and more talented.
Which I only mention, because just because a lead character is smart, good-looking or whatever doesn't mean that s/he's a Mary Sue. And a character who's obviously based on the author in some way, or uses chunks of the author's life, isn't necessarily (or even ordinarily) a Mary Sue either. That's where you get fiction from...
...
Articulate, talented losers and screwups -- I thought they were all over SF... there's more or less the complete works of Robert Sheckley, not to mention Mike Moorcock, M. John Harrison (well, less-articulate, or less vocal), huge swatches of Brian Aldiss and Chris Priest and Bob Shaw...
"It?s the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and going na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na..."
Wait. I think I am inspired to write a song.
Hang on. No, I already did.
Hugely relieved the tipjars worked.
Ben is quite right. The Gospel of the Infancy of Christ is like the childhood of Superboy, without any rules about not killing people.
He does some great infant miracles too -- raising a dead schoolfriend from the dead to let everyone know that it wasn't Jesus but another kid who had pushed him off a roof is another great bit.
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