Journal

Monday, August 04, 2003

Monday Morning stuff...

There's a "Win a Free copy of Wolves in the Walls and a poster" site up at http://www.harperchildrens.com/hch/wolves/.

...

And this came in from the person who was enquiring about monologues...

Hello again -

My apologies if my question opened up a can of worms that ate part of your Sunday morning! I do want to thank you and your journal readers for posting a variety of suggestions. Looking forward to reading some new things and perhaps revisiting some stories I haven't read in years. It must feel special that your work means so much to so many! Thanks to all for sending me off in new directions.

Much appreciation,

Siah


You're welcome.

My favourite female guitar-playing singer-songwriter, Thea Gilmore, writes to say Just thinking, if you know anyone in England who would like to help 'lil old me inch chart-wards, the single "Juliet" is out today!!


She doesn't say that the single "Juliet (Keep That In Mind)" is out as two CD singles, each with a different two tracks on as B-sides, none of which is on the album Avalanche, but I will. Help her inch chart-wards. It's for a good cause... ("Er. Hullo. We're collecting to send this girl to Top of the Pops.")

...

I love the Rotten Tomatoes site, which does all the work for me in finding all the reviews of films, rounding them up, posting links and extracts and deciding whether the majority of a film's reviews were positive or negative. Occasionally I'll disagree with their assessment of whether a review was generally positive or negative (symbolised on the site by a red, ripe tomato, or a green squishy tomato) after reading the review.

Mostly, the reviews teach you something that any writer or creator needs to learn fast, which is that not everybody is going to like everything you do, so keep yourself happy and do your best work and keep going.

I don't ever remember a parade of such delighted squishy green tomatos, and such overjoyed-to-be-able-to-write- something-really-mean quotes as in the case of Gigli. (It also made sense out of this Onion article for me.)

...

Dear Neil,

The Zorya sisters (American Gods) has something to do with some mythology storie? If the answer is positive, what storie?
Darlene, the brazilian girl


and

Being as how there's new improved version of American Gods coming out, has there been any thought about an annotated version? While I can certainly understand people desire for new fiction over retreads of older works I can't imagine any one not wanting to know just who those background characters were or to have a little bit of "real world" history on the characters that take major roles.

both made me think of the site at http://www.frowl.org/gods/, where you can go to find out a little more about the various gods of American Gods (including the Zorya). (And there's more on the Zorya here.)

The Turkish edition of American Gods has a terrific glossary of obscure words in the back, going from the gods to explanations of terms like "Winnebago" and "D.N.R.", which must have taken them ages to do, and probably means that the Turkish American Gods readers have the most instanbtly educated experience.