Haven’t been doing much around here, have I? Lot of things going on the past week. For one I reckon I’m starting to get the most out of twitter. Like for instance the other night I found out that there were fireballs falling in Houston Texas, and the next day some guy I don’t know ate some meatballs in IKEA, and the cool thing is I knew about these events sooner than probably quite a few people. If you want to feel like a sci-fi supervillain just go to monitter.com, throw in some keywords and then imagine you’re absorbing crazy data streams out of people’s heads. It is not hard to do.
Secondly, there’s a project afoot. Uh. I’m not going to say anything about that yet.
Thirdly, I wanted to mention a nifty event I was at in Chapters on Tuesday – Neil Gaiman reading and Amanda Palmer ukelele-ing. Organisation was a bit dodgy, largely it seems because the staff were too busy shuffling awkwardly and going “Shucks, no one’s gonna turn up at our shop” to properly think it through, but it was a most enjoyable evening. Gaiman was reading from a book they worked on called Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and basically what you need to know is that his old school storytelling mixed with her gleeful sordidness makes for some top-notch material. Grimm fairytales but with hookers and crack, that kind of thing. You can see basically the whole show in five parts starting here.
And lastly, I’m off to Maastricht in… four hours. I’m typing fast here so I can stay awake. Exhilarating! There’s a carnival over there, you see, and I’ve been trawling Dublin’s various vintage shops (and River Island, and Tie Rack, which I don’t understand how they stay in business because surely cravats and cummerbunds aren’t exactly flying out the doors) so that I can bring the magic of Oscar Wilde’s Jakey Nephew to the streets of the Netherlands. On which note, either it’s bloody hard to get hold of a cane in Dublin or I’m just stupid.
Neil Gaiman links to a long, long interview with Alan Moore in which Das Beard talks about the craft of writing. It’s pure gold – he’s not at all shy about going into detail. Plus he comes across as a charmingly down-to-earth sort:
DW: I feel quite awkward doing this ‘cos I’ve never really interviewed anyone before…
AM: Well I’m a doddle for interviewing ‘cos I’m completely infatuated with the sound of me own voice…you just have to say a few basic words and I’ll talk for the next hour or two.
I especially love his description of how the plot and premise for Lost Girls came together. I don’t know how any writer could read that and not want to run off and start maniacally filling notebooks.
Speaking of which…
Neil Gaiman had this yesterday – from Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing:
Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing — good writing — does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder — so eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably… the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying – and often drives us mad.
A cheerful fellow. From now on, if anyone asks me about how to be a writer I’ll just punch em in the face and be done with it.
Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model – apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
Recent Comments