Journal

Saturday, March 25, 2006

The Dangers of Godwin's Law

There's a nice article about me and WOLVES IN THE WALLS in The Times -- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22874-2096186,00.html -- don't know how much longer it'll be up though.

A few people wrote in wondering if I'd read this story and what I thought of it: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1737444,00.html -- do I think it's a Freedom of Speech issue or an Online Digital Rights issue or something. And I don't have much of an opinion on it, really. It demonstrates that the Internet is still the real world, which people tend to forget. And it's still, among other things, a publishing medium, even if it's one in which people tend to call each other Nazis in much the same way that they nod casually at each other on the street in real life.

And at least the outline of the case as presented in the Guardian makes sense. (Whether there should be UK libel laws is another question, and what will happen the first time someone from country A sues someone from country B in the UK or in France because what was written was viewable on the internet in the UK or France will be another matter altogether, and I bet it'll happen.)

(If my memory serves, Elton John was quoted as saying, after winning a major libel case against The Sun, "You can say I'm fat, bald and untalented, but you mustn't tell lies about me." )

...

Yesterday I sat drinking tea in the hotel lobby and wrote a big chunk of The Eternals, and then typed it, and then wrote an email to my editor and Mr Romita letting them know I was attaching it, and proudly got on with other things. This morning I got up to find a very friendly email pointing out that I hadn't actually attached anything to the email. Oh well.

While I was writing the Eternals, and carrying on with the FRAGILE THINGS introduction, The Wolves in the Walls team were adding the song Nick and I wrote the other night to the show, rechoreographing the wolf-party, and doing lots of lighting things. I think the show that will go on today will have about 40% of the changes and suchlike in it. It'll still keep evolving until Wednesday night, I expect.

And I had dinner last night with my cousins Sharron and Laurence, which is always a treat.

There's an article in Icelandreview on why Stardust isn't doing lots of major filming in Iceland (http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16571&ew_0_a_id=192388) and a little one from the usually fairly savvy SFX magazine that managed to be the worst-written short article about Stardust I've read, and it's not like there haven't been a lot to choose from -- http://www.sfx.co.uk/news/stars_and_stardust. In it Jane Goldman is described as "oddly married to Jonathan Ross", leaving me to puzzle about what was so odd about their marriage - was the service performed by someone dressed as Pirate Elvis, or is it something strange about the marriage itself we ought to know? -- while the final paragraph about Stardust being a comic-book movie only, er, not actually ever a comic-book, is a little miracle of the art of filling space.

...

We're experimenting with random photos appearing on the blog page, to try and add visual variety. Only a couple right now, but there will be more -- I'll go and ransack the archives. My thanks to the unofficial neilgaiman.com web-elf for actually making it happen.

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I've known David Stemple -- as my friend writer and musician Adam Stemple's father, as my friend writer Jane Yolen's husband, as a wonderful, wise, witty man in his own right -- for as long as I've lived in the US, perhaps longer.

My thoughts and love at this time to Adam and to Jane and their families. Jane tells it better than I ever could: http://www.janeyolen.com/journal.html