dogpoet

I think that there was a real plot but that the danger we faced has been exaggerated for political reasons.

 

Even if the plot went as planned (to the extent that it was supposed to have) there was no way it would have been "loss of life on an unprecedented scale" as Home Secretary John Reid put it.

They all spout this nonsense at the moment though, don't they? You wonder what the hell people with no grasp of history are doing in high office. (Ignoring the facts to endear themselves to Blair, hopefully: the alternative hardly bears thinking about.)

I also hate fan-fic.

 

I just don't see the point.

It provides harmless amusement for the authors, those fans who want more fiction about their favourite characters than the copyright holders are producing and anybody else who wants to read overwritten accounts of torrid lesbian flings between Buffy and Willow.

No, only stealing from them coming up with a very similar idea shortly afterwards.

It's an idea that's been floating around children's literature for a long time, to be fair: Edith Nesbitt used it a few times as did Ursula LeGuin. Mind you, neither of them has ever claimed that they're satirising fantasy fiction's pomposity by dumbing down cliches for the mass market, unlike Rowling.

L'Etranger. I've seen that title translated both ways.

At least you can be reassured that Bush has moved on from The Very Hungry Caterpillar...

Given Vertigo's obsession with "proper" writers, it might well be JK Rowling.

Nah, she'd never lower herself to writing comics, would she?

Cunning.

Not Andy Diggle?

It's true.

 

I know where I live but am sworn to secrecy.

That must make dealing with taxis a bit of a pain.

Talk Radio. Anybody else seen it? It's an amazing movie. I had no idea its location was Dallas. But it's pretty current even though it was filmed nearly 20 years ago. Directed by Oliver Stone, it stars Eric Bogosian, John C. McGinley, Alec Baldwin, Michael Wincott.

 

Yeah, I've seen that one. Wonderful film. Probably the best thing Stone's ever done.

More bragging about the book, I'm afraid: telos have managed to arrange some sort of competition with zonemedia (aren't they a television company?) so I've just signed five copies and posted them off.

Hopefully they're not runners up prizes for whoever hasn't won the big zombie encyclopedia they've just published...

I've seen Christian use the words "please" and "thank you" though: there are no words for "please" or "thank you" in Klingon. Small wonder they're such stroppy bastards.

I somehow expected to see my name come up when I searched on "failure". :rolleyes:

Everyone's prone to fits of this type of insecurity, josh.

Apparently Mike Carey knows but is sworn to secrecy.

I think Adrian knows where he lives: we can warm up to extract the information from him by torturing his address out of Ade...

Just gone through that Marvel Boy miniseries. Not quite Morrison at his best, but I liked the Doctor Doom joke.

...but do a quick search with Google for "failure". The result is unsurprising on reflection, but still slightly amusing.

What is the least likely book you could possibly imagine Bush reading during his downtime?

 

Agence France Presse reports that Bush read French existential writer Albert Camus's "The Stranger."

 

"White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English."

I particularly like this one: The Outsider is a very short book. It's under 150 pages. That's the only book chimp boy read while taking ten days off so that he could ignore the latest terror scare?

That was the gist of it. Given the amount of accusations I've received about having a chip on my shoulder about Gaiman, I thought that might be an amusing way of putting it. Obviously it wasn't. One lives and learns. Next time I'll go into lengthy and tedious detail about not finding Dream a sympathetic enough character to get upset over instead.

I almost cried during that sequence with Death & Dream at the end.

I didn't: Gaiman was obviously pulling for this with all his might and I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

 

Go forbid an author should try to make you feel something.

He's entitled to try, I just thought I'd mention that it didn't work in this case.

Which goes to show that I've never had any experience with agents.

I need to look into getting an agent now I've got a book in print, but annoyingly I have to get something finished enough that they can start hawking it around a few publishers first: I do have a book on comics, but I finished the last draft of that back in 2000 so large chunks of it need a wall to wall rewrite before I let that one out.

At least the wankers have stopped throwing grapefruit and melons these days: there were a few cases of people getting seriously hurt when that was going on.

I like the first volume of Sandman a lot, but it feels to me like a book struggling to find an identity. There are some very good stories in there, but it doesn't have the same cohesion or focus as some of the better volumes in the series.

That's largely down to Gaiman doing a Moore impression rather than his own thang: I've seen a few interviews where he claims as much, though he tends to gloss over the fact that his Moore impression was a lot better than his own thang on A Game Of You.

So precisely how is Bush going to gain capital from the fact that the UK security services are far more competent than their US equivalents under the pseudo martial law he's imposed since 2001? Okay, Blair is clearly his bitch, and nobody's arguing otherwise, but the wanker hasn't pissed about any with Scotland Yard.

(That's leaving aside the fact that all those who love freedom wish to piss on Bush's grave, which is an entirely diffferent argument deriving from the horseshit he's quoted as spouting above.)

I have an intense hatred for editors and attempt to avoid talking to them when at all possible (which is usually).

If only I were a novelist instead of a short story writer, I'd have an agent and not have to deal with editors at all.

I don't think it's that easy, possibly because agents are even bigger bunch of fuckwits than editors.

I don't know, it just has many of my favorite Sandman issues in it. The first Death appearance, 24 hours, #3, um.. a few others.

There's Imperfect Hosts as well. The last page of that one is utterly devasting...

I almost cried during that sequence with Death & Dream at the end.

I didn't: Gaiman was obviously pulling for this with all his might and I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

Sandman VIII did just about nothing for me, except for the story about the English "boy" sailor. I'd like to own that single issue. Aside from the best story in VIII, it also had the best art. Anyway, in general, I'm wondering how likely I'll be to like much else of Sandman. But happily, I won't have to pay for it, just pick the issues up, and get them back before they're overdue.

Was that "World's End"? I loved "A Tale of Two Cities" and the Prez story. I will admit, though, that this volume could have never existed, and it would not have hurt the series one bit.

Yes, Sandman VIII is World's End.

 

None of the other stories, definitely including the Prez story, did much for me. Basically after the early part of the book that showed how the man and woman ended up at the inn and maybe the first person's story, I lost the ability to read the rest of it word for word and page by page. I'm glad that something drew me into the Hob's Leviathin monthly issue, though. (I wish I knew its original issue number.) Otherwise, most of the book was so cute and "whimsical" that I just couldn't bother to follow it. Gaiman's clearly a good writer, but I didn't like most of what he wrote in World's End.

 

Are the other Sandman trades substantially different or better?

Most of them are better (Dream Country is a far finer collection of short stories, for a start) but a couple at least (A Game Of You and The Wake) are rather worse. Mind you, World's End is a long from being one of my own favourites.

He read and loved Oscar Wilde as a youth, no symbolism needed.

Though there is a scurrilous rumour that at the point when other Mancunian punk rockers were reading (or at least pretending to read) Proust and Burroughs and whatever else Howard Devoto/Ian Curtis/Whoever had been talking up in the NME that week, the Mozzer to be could be seen reading Sven Hassell in public...