Journal

Monday, February 07, 2005

Kids! Free! Locus! (Normal conditions apply, offer void where prohibited.)

If you don't count Dave Sim sending a couple of thousand people a free comic, there's never been a special offer on this website before. But I got an e-mail today from the people at Locus Magazine, who just brought out an issue containing an interview with me, proposing a special offer...



(Locus Magazine looks like this, but is, in reality, much bigger.)

They sent me a jpg of the interior spread, consisting of a photo of me (I forget that I lost a bunch of weight at the end of last year until I see pictures of me taken before I did) and the first page of the interview. (The Locus house style on interviews is to take out their questions and make it appear that it's one long stream-of-consciousness monologue.)I'll try and get the spread posted here.

Most importantly, they gave me a link to a special webpage where you can either order the edition of the mag with me in it (and, much more importantly than me wittering on, their best of the year round-up) without having to pay postage, or where you can get that issue free with a year's subscription.

Here's a link to an overview of the issue in question: http://www.locusmag.com/2005/Issues/02Profile.html

This is the link to the special offer: https://secure.locusmag.com/2005/Issues/02SubscribeGaiman.html
...

And for those of you with no interest in Locus, or who just want to read a Dave McKean interview, there's a wonderful MirrorMask interview with Dave McKean over at IGN filmforce: http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/585/585797p1.html

As for what I've been doing today... well, today I got to remember why I'm not a journalist any longer. I wrote a magazine article about my experiences at Sundance that turned out to be 500 words too long (I'd forgotten to ask for a wordcount, and I guessed wrong). It took every bit as long to cut 400 words as it did to write the original 1700 words. (Yes, I know it was 500 words too long, and I only cut 400 words, but once I'd cut those, it started getting longer again with each edit, so I called it a day and figured the nice people at the magazine can cut the other 100.) Tomorrow I'm back onto Anansi Boys.

Which reminds me, both the US and the UK publishers sent me their cover designs for Anansi Boys today. It ought to be odd, having the cover for a book that's not finished, but truth to tell I found it sort of reassuring: something to hold on to at the moments when you're not sure if the book will ever be finished or if it'll be any good when it is -- a book cover, for a real book, with a jacket blurb that describes the book in question somehow makes it a bit more real.

So, I notice today at my local bookstore that there is an interview with you in the magazine "Gothic Beauty." Hmm... Odd. Very odd.

Odd? Really? Damn. I thought I'd finally hit the big time.

Hello Neil. Did you know Thea Gilmore is coming up to Edmonton for the Folk Fest. You should come up, it's a great 4 day long event. And you could explain to my eldest daughter about the Horses in the Walls.
Cam


I didn't, but it seems like ages since I've plugged Thea Gilmore on this site. And she remains as wonderful as ever.

Hi Neil,

Jukka from Finland here, writing some tech oriented help information. The reason for this is, because of the time difference I tend to miss a lot of the links you post, as the pages tend to be offline or otherwise not available after thousands of your Journal readers have killed the server.

I've got a solution for you, one that will take the stress off those sites/servers. It is called Coral (The NYU Distribution Network) and it is a network of servers around the world which mirrors (read: makes copies) the pages that have high bandwidth (also jokingly called the SlashDot Effect).
Easiest way is to install a Firefox extension for it, after which you'll have a "Coralize This Page" in your Right-Click menu (when clicking on the page in question).
Get it here: http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/plugins/

The other way is to add ".nyud.net:8090" to the hostname, ie. http://www.neilgaiman.com.nyud.net:8090/faq/faq.asp and then using that link as the link on your Journal.

Homepage for the Coral project: http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/

Best regards,
Jukka Kolehmainen a.k.a. Shrike


PS. I'm truly annoyed with iTunes as they wont sell your Audio Collection thingie here in Finland. I was buying it and being all excited and then I got the feared "This item is not available in your country" notification. DAMN THEM!

I'll ask my agent if we can do something to open up the various Audio Books to the rest of the world. And I'll try Coralizing things...

...

Finally, I was sad to see Ryan of http://www.sandman.tv/ has taken his amazing Sandman art collection offline, since scammers (or at least, a scammer) was using it as a source of art to sell forged "original" Sandman drawings. Check out the eBay links Ryan's posted, and marvel at the crudeness of the fakes.