The perfect job

Sometimes people ask me what I would like to do, if I wasn't a writer. Normally, I do not know. There's not much that I'm good at apart from making things up. But today, I read about the other job I could do.

No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

I want to certify places as elf-free. Or, sometimes, not elf-free, just because I can.

...

And while I have you here, a reminder about the pre-show for those of you coming to the signing at Books of Wonder on Saturday, here cut and pasted for your delight in all its multicoloured glory from http://www.booksofwonder.com/events030709.asp:

Blueberry Girl Art Show

Private Preview Saturday 11:00 am - noon
Public Viewing Saturday  noon  -  Sunday March 29th 

To celebrate the publication of Blueberry Girl, Books of Wonder will also be hosting a show and sale of the stunning original art from this new book, as well as several signed prints of the art byCHARLES VESS. The art show will run from Saturday, March 7th through Sunday, March 29th. 10% from the sale of each painting will be donated to RAINN. 

A PRIVATE PREVIEW of the art show with the artist will be available to the first 100 people who make a $10 donation to RAINN. This PRIVATE PREVIEW will be from 11am to 12 noon on Saturday, March 7th and those attending will have the exclusive opportunity to purchase the artwork before anyone else has seen it. The show will then be open to the general public from 12 noon on. If you wish to make a donation and attend the PRIVATE PREVIEW, please contact the store at (212) 989-3270.

Rainn, incidentally is at http://rainn.org/

& so to bed. 

Labels: Rainn, where are the elves when you need them

Elfless in Gaza

I am, for the record, having one of those days where I really wish that I could get hundreds of tiny elves to come in the night and do the mountains of overdue writing for me, and more elves to sign the pile of 2000 sheets of UK Graveyard Book limited edition papers with my signature, and maybe a couple of tallish elves who look an awful lot like me to come in and take over all of my possible personal or professional commitments that might involve traveling anywhere in the world, and frankly while we're on the subject I'd like a handful of elves to deal with the email backlog, the towering piles of things I really need to read, and even someone to blog for me. And don't even get me started on things that want blurbs or introductions. (Looks around balefully.)

I was convinced that all was doom and despair and hopeless and I would never write my way out of this and there weren't enough hours in the day or days in the week or anything when I finally got out of the house and went down to the bottom of the garden to write, and discovered, on the way, masses of late and forgotten raspberries on the raspberry canes. So I stopped and ate raspberries, and you can't be properly miserable or grumpy eating sun-warmed raspberries you're picking and eating yourself.

I'm just saying. You can't.

.....

Tor.com has gone live. This is a really good thing. Lots of excellent writers blogging. Much stuff to read. I learned that illustrator Pauline Baynes was dead from Tor.com, and I was saddened. I read Jo Walton on Eric Frank Russell and found myself posting a reply. I suspect that Tor.com will become what Patrick Nielsen Hayden said he was hoping it could be about when he first mentioned it to me at Eastercon -- a social and professional hub for SF on the interwebs. The automatic place to go if you're interested in genre, immediately after you've checked Locus online -- http://www.locusmag.com/.

....

iTunes has the latest Best of The Moth Podcast up. You can hear me telling my story of my sixteen-year old self's travel trouble, and also, from the same event, you can hear Edgar Oliver telling what happened when he returned to Savannah, which was my favourite of all the stories told that night. The open iTunes instruction (the downloads are all free) is http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275699983. Sometimes these things do not work out of the US.

But here's some Edgar Oliver in conversation (and reading a poem) on YouTube. Yes, he really talks like that, his voice and accent musical and strange:



Hello
i went to Kyle Cassidy's live journal to see what was so objectionable with the photos (was it the t-shirt?...shrugs...they didn't look so evil to me) and i happened to see: NEIL FREAKING GAIMAN singing "i google you". Any chance of an audio clip of that being put up on your site? pretty please? i'm sure i'm not the only fan out there that would love to hear it!

Well, that was me actually singing while Kyle was blogging. Shortly after that Amanda went off and came back with a small recording device and said "Sing that again into this," so I did. And I don't think anyone will ever hear that recording except her. On the other hand, she apparently sang "I Google You" last night in LA... so I imagine that it'll be out on the internet soon enough, sung by someone who can sing much better than I can.

(Goes and looks on YouTube.)

It's up already. (Warning: It's a very dark film, more or less an audio track, and the last two words of the song are cut off.) I love what she's done with the chords...



Edit to add -- I promised Amanda I'd replace this with a better version if one shows up on YouTube.

Edit even later, try this one:


...

Okay. I'm going back to the bottom of the garden to write about Selina Kyle and Joe Chill.

Labels: edgar Oliver, i google you, the astonishing comforts of raspberries, The Moth, tor dot com, where are the elves when you need them