Today I finished the adaptations for Dark Horse of my short stories from Smoke and Mirrors, THE PRICE and DAUGHTER OF OWLS, which will be coming out in one volume by Michael Zulli. Michael already did the art, basing it on the short stories. THE PRICE has the same sort of treatment that Harlequin Valentine had (ie, it's astonishingly faithful), but Michael took a sort of looser, funkier approach to DAUGHTER OF OWLS, partly in telling a three page short story over twenty pages -- but also moving it in time, from a narrative written in the 1640s to a narrative being written in the 1890s. So I rewrote it, to take it out of John Aubrey-speak and move it a couple of hundred years later, and to add in a nun that Michael had drawn, and so on. I came perilously close to bringing some of the Daughter of Owls poem out of mothballs, but it sounded too modern, so I didn't.
It's lovely stuff, but then, Michael Zulli does lovely stuff.
...
I had several sensible and literary links to put up, but I feel like my head is filled with cold porridge, except for my sinuses, which have carefully and delicately been packed with molten lead, so instead I will draw attention to the potential hypothetical danger to (probably endangered, and easily traumatised) tropical leeches of exploding giant minor celebrity breasts. Full details here. .
And I see that Bill Gates apparently thinks that the solution to Spam is a
"payment at risk" system - the electronic equivalent of a stamp - would mean the senders of e-mail would pay a fee if their mail was rejected as spam.
The system would not deter genuine e-mailers, such as friends and relatives, who would be confident their mail would be accepted.
These days I stop in at a webmail site once a day to check the "bulk mail" folder for real e-mails that haven't reached me. For almost a year my e-mails to people DC Comics would, for the most part, not reach them. Eventually we discovered that the word "Sandman" automatically triggered DC's spamtraps... I find myself much less confident that my mail would be accepted than Bill Gates is.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=95142004 gives Chairman Bill's promise to eliminate Spam within the next two years unless he doesn't.