Journal

Thursday, December 20, 2007

winter butterflies



I don't know where the butterflies come from. It's a big empty house, and it's winter. There aren't any flowers or greenery inside the house. Outside the trees are bare. The doors and windows are all closed. But every day or so there's another butterfly, fluttering through the house like a flower, sitting by the windows or fluttering crookedly through the kitchen.

I'm getting better, just in time to go home with rather less work done than I was hoping for. I've slept a lot, and consumed several pots of honey, two whole ginger roots and a dozen or so lemons, though. And I've coughed a great deal. ("Was that you coughing was it?" asked the occasional housekeeper, passing through the other day for the first time in a week. "I thought it was a dog barking.")
...

Nothing to add to what Warren Ellis said about this astonishingly disturbing Westboro Baptist God Hates The World song video, so I'll link to Warren's post at http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5361.

(Well, actually, I'm also fascinated by the idea of a God who is so consumed with disgust with humanity for, amongst other things, not universally making homosexuality a capital crime, that he would, literally, hate the world (except for about 60 people, and a really cute, scary baby girl). And the idea of a group for whom every disaster, natural or manmade, happening to anybody, is a visible, magical, literal demonstration of their rightness and God's hatred for the world.)

...
I see that Beowulf is coming out on DVD in February:



Really interesting article on where we re right now with the Uncanny Valley, talking chiefly about Beowulf and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at http://www.vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=3494.

...
A couple of people have written to ask me why the audio books I did of Neverwhere, M is for Magic and Fragile Things are up on the US iTunes store, while Stardust isn't. I have no idea.



(And you can get an MP3 of Miss Maddy interviewing me for 15 minutes there as well.)

I was already starting to feel remarkably ignorant about my own stuff. Then this came in...

I hadn't seen any ads for Stardust coming out on DVD so the first I saw was here. Lucky for me I was going shopping anyway, so I picked it up. I thought people would be interested to know that at Borders they have an exclusive (or they say it is) version. For $3 more you get a 10 page book of Charles Vess's drawings which, for someone like me who doesn't have the graphic novel, is really great to have. I figured people would want to know. :)

and I had to write to Charles Vess to see if he knew anything about it.

Charles says

Yes, it is true. I'm holding several copies as DC just sent me a batch of
the pamphlet inserts.It's a bonus item which reprints 8 pages of 'sketches' from
the supplemental material in the new edition of our book along with one now
fully painted image that acts as a cover (to the insert). I believe that it's a
Border's exclusive.
That cover image will also be featured as one of the next three s&n
prints in the deluxe Stardust box set (available only from GMP) but, of course,
printed ever so much better in that form. All of the next six and final prints
in the set will be newly painted images rather reprints of already existing
illustrations.
Here's a jpeg of the cover art so you can take a gander at it...

And I include it here so that you can gander likewise.

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