A while back there was in Scifi's website a reading of Chivalry. It doesn't appear to be there any more -- I was trying to play it for my mom, again, who loves it -- and I can't seem to find it anywhere on their site. I was wondering and rather hoping that it had moved here. Or moved somewhere.
Is it still around?
I don't think so. The scifi.com web site used to have an astonishing collection of readings by SF authors, but I think they decided they were taking up too much space, so they are now gone. Which is a real shame -- I hope some of them were being saved for posterity: they had some really fine writers doing some astonishing readings.
Chivalry was actually taken from my audio book, Warning:Contains language, which is available from DreamHaven Books. I'll see if it's possible to put a track or two from it up on neilgaiman.com. So that's not gone for good. My reading from Stardust is, though, and I suspect the story from 999, "Keepsakes and Treasures", has gone too.
...
We drove down to Madison for Madcon, tonight, through strong, cold, wintery winds. Stopped off for dinner in the Wisconsin Dells. I'd never been through the Dells before -- yet another unlikely part of the world that must have been secretly created by Bill Finger, oddly charming out of season and in the dark, with leaves and cardboard boxes spinning through the air.
Tomorrow Harlan and I go back to our story. SHOOT DAY FOR NIGHT. Will it get finished over the next few days, in a roped off area in front of an audience? It had better. There are people who paid good money for copies of the finished story three years ago, so I don't have any plans to leave the table at which Harlan and i will be writing without something finished and done. Well, except to go to panels, or to answer various calls of nature.
The Gene Wolfe story is finished now -- I wrote a bibliography at the end of it today. Now I need to reread it, and then send it to Gene, and then it's all over. It's called A WALKING TOUR OF THE SHAMBLES: LITTLE WALKS FOR SIGHTSEERS NUMBER 16. It'll be illustrated by Randy Broeker and will be published by Bob Garcia for World Horror Con in Chicago next year, at which Gene and I are Author Guests of Honour and Randy is Artist Guest of Honour. It's the 11th-14th of April 2002. (Other G's of H include Jo Fletcher and Jill Thompson and Beth Gwinn, not to mention Gahan Wilson.) Details at http://www.whc2002.org/.
I read a little of the Gene story at MIT a few weeks ago, and by the end of the reading a young lady had already registered the fictitious URL for a place in the book, and as soon as I send her some e-mail there will be more to see over at http://www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com/
I share my hotel room with many flies and many more ladybirds (aka ladybugs, lady beetles). And so to bed. (Actually I'm typing this in bed. But "And so to turn the light out" just doesn't have the same sort of resonance.)