mailbagggery and links

American Gods will be going live to read on the 28th of February.

Some interesting auditory illusions over at

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13355-music-special-five-great-auditory-illusions-.html

although I didn't quite understand the opening of the article. Apparently the bit on Lady Madonna where it sounds like the Beatles are singing into their hands is not a saxophone, but I don't know anyone who thought it was.

And all the various and sundry comments I've made in this blog about the writing of The Graveyard Book are gathered together at http://quotableneil.blogspot.com/2008/02/brief-or-not-so-brief-history-of.html

Neil,

A few weeks back you posted that you were thinking about going to Tulsa this summer. Are you going to do any public appearances there? And if so, when? I am excited to hear that you finished The Graveyard Book. Looking forward to reading it!

-Megan

I'll be in Tulsa on June the 28th 2008, and I'll be doing a public event there -- details to follow.

I'll also going to be teaching a week at Clarion -- more properly The Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop at UCSD -- this July (rather nervously, I suspect, as I've never taught before, and have no idea if I'll be any good at it). But you've got people like Geoff Ryman and Kelly Link and Nalo Hopkinson who know what they're doing teaching as well, so even if I'm rubbish it'll be okay.(You have four days left to apply for Clarion, if you've been putting it off.)

Hey Mr. Gaiman!

The University East Anglia have this fairly-famous and pretty reputable Creative Writing course, which was set up by Malcolm Bradbury. I have the option of attending this course, but being not being a British citizen, it requires obscene amounts of money. So my question to you is whether or not you think a workshop of that sort would be worth the investment in time and money. And please, this isn't an 'oh-my-god-if-neil-gaiman-says-it's-good-then-i-must-go-come-hell-or-herpes' (or vice versa) situation, it's just that, other than Malcolm Bradbury, I haven't read the work of any of the authors that came out of that sort of course (a similar one is taught at Warwick). And you're apparently rather big in the whole 'writing' business, so perhaps you might have an opinion or two to share.

So is a course like that, or lack thereof, going to make-or-break an aspiring writer?

Wishing you well,

Liam Kruger

No, of course not. (For proof, look at the careers of the many writers who have not attended Creative Writing Courses at the University of East Anglia. It's most of the writers you can think of. Statistically, it's pretty much all of them. They did fine, didn't they?)

I've never done any Creative Writing courses, but someone who had wrote in back in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/11/probably-not-gold-watch.asp and talked about them.

I thought you might like this interview with the God of Fountain Pens:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/interview_with_the_god_of.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

I'm probably not the only one to send you this link, but I couldn't take that chance ;-)

How cool! Here in the US we have Richard Binder of http://www.richardspens.com/ My Christmas present from Henry Selick was a Pelikan pen which Richard had turned into a flexinib, and which I'm waiting for the right thing to come along so i can write a story with it.

Dear Neil, I read with interest that there is a character called Silas in your latest book. I named my son Silas at almost exactly the moment the Da Vinci code came out, and found upon reading it that my son now shared a name with a hulking, blond, albino assassin monk. I am hoping your Silas is of a more child friendly persuasion? I was going to read the Graveyard Book to my Silas if so! Gaby

Silas is our hero's guardian and I'm a huge fan of his.

Hi Neil;

I was wondering, now that The Graveyard Book is done and you have some noodling and minor fine tuning to do, is it smooth sailing to the printers? Or does a book at this stage of it's life have to go through a painful publishing bureaucracy where everyone gives their two cents? Looking forward to the new book.

-Brian

I've given it to my editors at Harpers in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. I've sent it to friends and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. Any comments that strike me as wise or sensible get acted on, any that don't, don't.

Mostly I want it to be the best book it can possibly be. There isn't any bureaucracy. I think there's a general feeling that we're not going to go with the cover of The Graveyard Book that I posted in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/01/for-curious.html
though, because it looks too much like a book that's intended only for young readers, and now it's finished I think we're all realising that this is as much a book for adults as it's a book for younger readers, so I think Dave is going to play around with some different cover ideas...

fact checking 101

I read my copy of New Scientist last week, and was duly outraged that staff at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to talk about the age of the Canyon, and are only allowed to sell a book suggesting that the Canyon was formed during Noah's flood about 4,000 years ago.

This morning I was just as outraged to realise that a) New Scientist just prints press releases without checking them in any way and b) the whole article was bollocks.

The Press Release itself began

HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

People more outraged than I was phoned or wrote to the National Park Service (which is more than New Scientist did)...

and were told that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, that no one is being pressured from Bush administration appointees — or by anyone else — to withhold scientific information, and all were referred to a statement by David Barna, Chief of Public Affairs, National Park Service as to the park’s official position. “Therefore, our interpretive talks, way-side exhibits, visitor center films, etc. use the following explanation for the age of the geologic features at Grand Canyon,” the document explains.

If asked the age of the Grand Canyon, our rangers use the following answer: ‘The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old. The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.’

While the creationist text on the age of the Grand Canyon is actually on sale in the "inspirational" part of the souvenir shop, beside the books on the Hopi and the Paiute legends of how the canyon was formed.

The Skeptic magazine reports here on how they, too were insufficently, er, skeptical and fell for this rot: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-17.html

[Edit to add -- it's the curse of the internet. Post about fact-checking and you'll soon realise you should have checked your facts. Actually I'd mentally conflated the New Scientist article I linked to and the Doonesbury cartoon on the same subject, which I read around the same time. As you'll have realised, the New Scientist article doesn't say that the park people are forbidden to say the Canyon is millions of years old.]