Wreckless Entry

�In the early days of Stiff Records, Jake Riviera asked everybody what they wanted to be: rich or famous. I thought the answer was easy � I wanted to be famous because that was what was expected of me and, surely, if I had some hits, I�d be rich anyway. But �famous� was the wrong answer � Elvis Costello, for instance, said �rich�."
(Eric Goulden -- Wreckless Eric, in this article.)

I've been a Wreckless Eric fan for some unlikely amount of time, like twenty-six years. For a long time it was really hard being a Wreckless Eric fan, because I had no idea what he was doing, and suspected he had probably been eaten by weasels. Then the Internet happened, and I started discovering the various identies he'd been making music under, and buying CDs made by such Eric Goulden AKAs as The Hitsville House Band. (When she was smaller Maddy was a fan of the children's music-story Eric did with Ian Dury, Moe Tucker and others, The Slippery Ballerina, and I still like it.)

Anyway, about six months ago I bought Eric Goulden's biography "A Dysfunctional Success: The Wreckless Eric Manual (written by the author)", published by the Do Not Press, and then, because the pile of stuff to read is very high and teetering, didn't read it until yesterday, impelled by the arrival of a sort of a best-of Wreckless Eric made up from BBC sessions, Almost a Jubilee, and a conversation with a friend who interviews Eric on several of the tracks. I think I was hoping for insight into the early Stiff records days, which I didn't get. What I got was much better, and a great deal more interesting: a shambling, acutely observed, very funny-sad-true-sharp autobiography by someone who thought that music ought to be fun, and was sometimes even sober.

As the author explains, "...mostly it's about growing up - life in the sixties and seventies in suburban South East England, being an art student in the frozen North East, renting flats, forming bands, falling over and getting up again. And it isn't the story of Stiff Records though they do get a mention."

Here's an extract, from the publisher's site, for the flavour of the book: http://www.thedonotpress.com/extracts/ericex.html

And seeing that there's a Wrecklesseric.com I went and had a look around -- lots of good stuff, including occasional journal entries. So there you go. A Sunday morning book and website recommendation.

A fraud exposed, and a true thing...

This one left me blinking. Not so much because it was a fraud, as why anyone would bother to create such a fraud...

Found this on the infiltrate.org forum - thought you might find it interesting. You'd wonder why somebody would go to the lengths to fake something like this.
dee

Chornobyl "Ghost Town" story is a fabrication TOP
e-POSHTA subscriber Mary Mycio writes:

I am based in Kyiv and writing a book about Chornobyl for the Joseph Henry Press. Several sources have sent me links to the "Ghost Town" photo essay included in the last e-POSHTA mailing. Though it was full of factual errors, I did find the notion of lone young woman riding her motorcycle through the evacuated Zone of Alienation to be intriguing and asked about it when I visited there two days ago.

I am sorry to report that much of Elena's story is not true. She did not travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend. They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.

She did, however, bring a motorcycle helmet. They organized their trip through a Kyiv travel agency and the administration of the Chornobyl zone (and not her father). They were given the same standard excursion that most Chernobyl tourists receive. When the Web site appeared, Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle trip in the zone. When it turned out that the motorcycle story was an invention, they were even less pleased about this fantasy Web site.

Because of those problems, Elena and her husband have changed the Web site and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which is still misleading.

I would not normally bother to correct someone's silly Chornobyl fantasy. Indeed, correcting all the factual errors and falsehoods in "Ghost Town" would consume as much space as the Web site itself. But the motorcycle story was such an outrageous fiction that I thought the readers of e-Poshta should know.

Mary Mycio, J.D.

Legal Program Director
IREX U-Media
Shota Rustaveli St. 38b, No. 16
Kyiv 01023, Ukraine
Tel: (380-44) 220-6374, 228-6147
Fax: 227-7543

See also http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread.asp?fid=1&threadid=8951 which includes more information from people who actually did go to Chernobyl...

Meanwhile lots of you pointed out that SNOPES.COM has just weighed in on the "Childless married couple told to have sex" story (http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/nosex.asp)and they think it's an urban legend. I wasn't very clear when I posted yesterday -- I think what I meant was that that story looked like an Urban Legend (due to being written like an urban legend -- the no spokesperson being named for a start), and I expect that this version of it is, but that I was assured that this has happened by Jack Cohen and thus I believe it.

And lots of you also wrote in to assure me that lizards have two penises, which was nice of you, but I already believed it because Jack Cohen told me. I even believe the thing about the mill-foreman.

Hi Neil,

In case you hadn't heard, Wil Wheaton'ss second book "Just a Geek" a story based partly on some of his blogging is coming out in early July. Wil showed a cover shot on his site with a link to the Amazon pre-order page, and JAG is now #23 on Amazon's orders page. As a huge fan of yours, I think he would find it too cool to get a congratulatory note from you, an established author and someone he admires greatly.

Sincerely,

Craig Steffen

Well, yes, he'd probably like a congratulatory note, but I think he'll be a lot happier if I finish and send him the introduction instead. (I told him that a Patrick Stewart introduction would probably sell more copies.) It's an eminently readable book, anyway, honest and good-natured. When I post this journal entry (which has sat here unfinished for two days now) I shall go upstairs, bang on one of the recent DVD arrivals, the kind that I can watch with half an eye, and I shall write an introduction.

(Yesterday I wrote an 800 word introduction to a 200 word Harlan Ellison short story. And I got 1000 words of novel done too. Then again, so far today I've done nothing noteworthy, except survive a test-drive of my son's new car-to-be.)

Hey Neil, have you seen Reed Waller's new blog at http://rwaller.blogspot.com/?

I hadn't but I was pleased you sent this in.

Kate Worley (who wrote, among other things, the very wonderful graphic novel/comics sequence Omaha the Cat Dancer, which Reed Waller drew) is married to Jim Vance (who wrote, among other things Kings in Disguise). They have two young children. As Reed mentions in his blog, Kate, who is working on Omaha again for the first time in many years, has cancer. It's not good. You can read some more details at this thread.

The news that she had there's going to be a collection in French, of the complete story, and, seeing the the story was left incomplete, Kate and Reed are going to finish it

Jim and Kate are pretty much up against the wall right now, with wolves baying at the door. If they can keep going for a few more months, the wolves may calm down -- the new Omaha material will start coming out and so on. But right now she's fighting cancer and fighting to stay in the place they're living, and they're out at the edges of losing their home while Kate's working very hard to write and to get through this. (It can't be much fun for Jim or the kids, for that matter.)

I spoke to Kate, who confirmed just how bad things are right now, and said, yes, they need help, badly. Donations can be paypalled to Jim at jim1vance@aol.com. Donations, get well-cards, or nice things of any kind can be sent to Jim and Kate at 323 S Yorktown, Tulsa OK, 74104. Kate's e-mail is scriptist@aol.com. And if some well-intentioned person with more time and ability than I have decided to do a benefit comic or something to help them, I think that would be an excellent idea.

(And feel very free to pass the word along.)

Toad Mating Balls. Who knew?

I got an enforced day off from blogging yesterday, while little gnomey men with long whiskery beards and hammers and crowbars and serious swiss army knives clambered about behind the scenes here at neilgaiman.com hammering and banging and taking blogger archive URLs apart and inspecting them with pursed lips and shaken heads and the occasional muttered "'oo put this together then, eh? some cowboy? cor struth. It's a wonder it's lasted this long," before putting them back together again with all their grommets refitted and their wicket-hasps rebored.

But now it's all working again, without having dumped another fifty thousand words of me-burble into people's friends lists and RSS feeds, and I should thank Sunil and Julia, gnomewranglers, for making it all happen. (And I just checked, and now the old-style long numbery archive entries still work, as do the new Blogger format ones. So all's well. I hope.)

I'll just post stuff for now so I can close some windows, and tomorrow I'll try and answer some questions, and put up several things I've been waiting to post until I had a quiet few minutes.

http://www.bwibooks.com/news1/item160 is the front page of BWI books, who have a long interview done with me at the ALA convention in Atlanta in 2002, mostly about Coraline. (link via the Dreaming.)

I wonder whether this news story about a couple's failure to conceive is an urban legend or not, and suspect not -- I think Professor Jack Cohen once told me the same thing. But then, he also told me that the foreman of a cotton mill in the early eighteenth century was expected to have sex with the senior female millworkers, and would be demoted when he could no longer perform. And that lizards have two penises. And the thing about seagulls being able to mate with the breed to the east (or the west, I forget).

While I wasn't looking, Jill Karla Schwarz added another three adventures of Attention Deficit Girl over at http://www.attentiondeficitgirl.com/index.html -- they're on the interface of comics and cartoons, with Jill playing ADDgirl herself.

As far as Sandman fanfiction tributes that are also excellent kids' comics go, this is the bees knees.

Now that Spring is here, parents among you should keep in mind the numerous Spring Dangers that abound -- otherwise you too may be bereaved of your little bundle of joy. (Indirectly from Shanmonster I expect.)

Waiting for me when I got home were my copies of the Literary Life collection and of Gemma Bovery both by Posy Simmonds (interviewed here), and London Orbital by Iain Sinclair (profiled here). Faintly (pleasantly) surprised to find a lovely sequence in London Orbital about my Sweeney Todd prologue with Michael Zulli, of Mike Lake and I finding Wren's Temple Bar in the woods in Cheshunt. Beware Falling Masonry indeed.

If you can't be bothered to register at news sites that want you to, then http://www.bugmenot.com/ is the website for you -- and probably already has an ID and password for the newspaper you want.

There may be people who haven't read the Lileks article on BIG LITTLE BOOKS. It made me laugh out loud, partly because several of the books in question were dreadfully familiar. Or familiarly dreadful. Well, one: as a small boy I owned the Fantastic Four book. I have no idea how I got it -- did they sell Big Little Books in the UK?

You know that thing you do where people tell you not to click on things and you do anyway and then you have an image that you can't get out of your head, not even if you scrub it with wire wool until it bleeds? Well, this will be, for some people anyway, one of those images: it's a toad mating ball. If you think you might want not to have seen it, then just don't click on it. Instead read all about frog amplexus and why those two- and three-headed frogs they find always seem to turn out to be two or three frogs getting friendly.

I bet Jack Cohen knows all about toad mating balls...

I don't remember if I ever posted a link to these photos (I meant to, months ago) by Loretta Lux. They're of children, posed in a studio then digitally given backgrounds and worked into. Creepy, beautiful images. They might also help if the toad mating ball got to you.

Currently listening to three CDs by Hera, who sent them to me (thank you Hera). She's good -- the Icelandic one is getting an awful lot of play around here.

Free stuff

Quick helpful one: Over at http://www.bookslut.com/blog they're giving away five free ALA Sandman posters and five free ALA Neil Gaiman posters to people who sign up for their mailing list (send a blank email to list@bookslut.com). The draw is tomorrow, so sign up fast... (I only just noticed this or I would have mentioned it before.)

(My copies of the poster arrived today. I'm normally embarrassed by photos of myself, but I like this one -- Kimberly Butler did a great job. And that was the normal photo from the session...)

three things

Let's see...

1) I'm home again. Typing this on a new computer I'm just starting to get used to.

2) Seeing that the Fox Movie Channel thing is all over and done with (although it won't be broadcast until the thirteen days before Hallowe'en 2004), I shaved off the beard last night. I think it'll stay off for a while now. (Under the Stephen King Rules, authors are allowed to grow beards and then shave them off again, though.)

3) Er, that's it.

All the e-mail and notes and things are on another computer, one I'm not typing on this minute, so before I go to bed I shall simply point out that there's now a Sandman script up over in Exclusives. It's the script for Sandman 24 -- the third part of SEASON OF MISTS. Very shortly after it was written, I posted it to Compuserve's comics forum library, because people were asking what Sandman scripts looked like (I'm pretty sure that DREAM COUNTRY hadn't come out yet), and had, in the thirteen years since then, I'd pretty much forgotten it was up there. Recently I was alerted to the fact that some people had started selling the printout of the script on eBay for lots of money. This seemed wrong, so I asked Julia Bannon if she'd put it up here at neilgaiman.com, and she has: http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/SandmanEpisode24.asp

good night.

If this is Saturday it must be... where the hell am I anyway?

I was on the West Coast yesterday, am on the East Coast today and will be home again tomorrow. Yes, I travel too much.

There are links to all the Hugo Award nominated fiction that's on-line up at http://is.rice.edu/~pound/hugo.html. Lots of really good reading there.

The site of the Library of Alexandria has been found: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3707641.stm

Jason Ahlquist has an interview which he wanted to do just before Penguicon, only nobody told me about it, so I wasn't there yet, which meant that he did it at the very end of Penguicon, when I was exhausted. He did an excellent job, though: it's at http://www.marsdust.com/neilgaiman.htm. The beard is still on -- I wanted to keep it until the horror-hosting thingie was done with. I think it probably comes off today or tomorrow...

Hey Neil. I just read something about directors being found for the film adaptation of "The Books of Magic," and I was wondering if you had any information about the project.

Also, and I'm not sure if you'd know this, but the article I read mentioned two guys as directing the movie, and I thought the Director's Guild has a rule stating that only one person can get the "Directed By" credit, which is why, if I remember correctly, Robert Rodriguez dropped out of the Director's Guild, because they wouldn't allow Frank Miller to share a "Directed By" credit for the upcoming "Sin City" movie...or maybe they wouldn't allow Frank to have a credit because he's not a member of the Guild...I might have just answered my own question.

Still curious about "The Books of Magic," though.

dave golbitz

As far as I know, the Director's Guild lets you co-direct films if you started out as a directorial team -- like the Wachowski brothers. Here's an article about the Sin City Film -- no idea how accurate it is.

I signed on as Executive Producer of the Books of Magic film about five years ago, which meant I got to read the scripts, and offer opinions. It didn't mean they had to listen to my opinions.

My current opinion is that I hope that they make the Books of Magic movie closer in spirit to the comic than it currently is, otherwise they'll have a lot of very grumpy comics fans and me. But it's still in the development process, and now they have directors on board we'll see what happens.

Hey Neil, just a note: The feed you recommend in the RSS link at the top of your journal (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/blogger_rss.xml) is now offering bizarre URLs for all of your entries (the latest is http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/05/sorry-again-i-hope-thats-last-sorry.asp) which results in an Internal Server Error:

The include file '../asp/css.asp' was not found.
/journal/2004/05/sorry-again-i-hope-thats-last-sorry.asp, line 5

Since you claimed in this latest entry that everything was now worked out, I figured I should let you know about this problem. Good luck!

Oh dear. Well, I'm sure that Blogger will fix it -- they're incredibly helpful -- and I'll try and get them to do it without dumping another dozen posts into people's livejournal friends list.

Sorry again (I hope that's the last sorry for a bit)

Argh. Well, Blogger needed to fix some changes in the way that it did URLS, so that my permalinks would work again, and they did, but it meant republishing the blog with the correct URLS, which dumped another slew of old entries into people's Livejournal feeds. That should be the last time that happens for another year or so. I'm really sorry, but it should be safe to keep (or put) OfficalGaiman on your livejournal friends list, at least for the time being.

So I did another long, long day, and Fox Movie Channel's 13 Nights of Fright is all in the can. It'll be shown on Fox Movie Channel for the 13 days before Halloween. And while I don't know how people who a) don't get Fox Movie Channel or b) live in countries where they don't have Fox Movie Channel will be able to watch it, I do know that Fox Movie Channel are planning to put up lots of outtakes, trailers and bits, not to mention screensavers and god-knows what else on their website. Some of it will be guarded by passwords, which they don't seem to mind me giving away or linking to from my journal. So I'll try and give you information as I get it.

So I read my autocue today, and Malena continued to be very funny. She's silent through the whole thing, and a terrific silent comedian, which means she got to steal every scene she's in, which was pretty much all of them. Spent more time in the coffin today, as did she. (Not at the same time, though.) Also appeared magically in a crystal ball, produced something from a top hat during a silent black and white sequence, and did lots of other extremely silly things.

And now I'm really tired. It's the whole second twelve-hour days without any real breaks, in front of the cameras, I think. It was fun, though. And very silly. And I'm glad I did it.

Do you ever worry that future generations will remember you only for some utterly irrelevant act of yours instead of your writing? Does the thought of your obituary reading "Neil Gaiman, noted horror show host, died October 11th, 2037. He was also a writer." send shivers down your spine?

This is Dylan.

No. But I think I should probably avoid dying for the next six months, otherwise the photos of me in the coffin that I hope to post here next week will be widely perceived as being in absolutely terrible taste.

...

Good news in from Julia Bannon, the neilgaiman.com webmaster: by kind permission of Del Ray books, my short story "A Study In Emerald", from the book "Shadows over Baker Street", is now posted at http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/StudyinEmerald.asp. It's up on line because it's nominated for a Hugo Award, which allows the people voting to read it, and everyone else besides. (I'll post the URLS for the other Hugo-nominated stories that are up online, if I can find them.)

An apologetic horror host writes...

Apologies for all of you who subscribe to the LiveJournal OFFICIALGAIMAN Rss feed. It looks like the Magic New Version of Blogger assigned new URLS to the RSS feeds of the last dozen posts, and flooded your friends lists with them.

Long, long day. Tomorrow will be longer.

The biggest problem with blogging is that when things get really interesting I'm too exhausted to write about it.

Suffice it to say that I got to lie in a coffin today, that my "assistant", Malena, is hilarious, and that I now understand exactly why Barry Norman sounded like that. I suspect the funniest line of the day, a half-puzzled, half-disgusted "I can't believe she ate that fly" probably won't be used, 'cos it was in a take that didn't work.

Coffin, candles and skulls

I turned up at the studio today to learn how to read an autocue (turns out it's not hard. What's hard is reading an autocue while not sounding like Barry Norman, or even Alan Partridge) (british references I'm afraid).

The set is gorgeous: ancient abbey walls, a bank of television screens, a desk covered with candles and skulls, a mouldering bookcase, and a really nice looking brown coffin, which I'm rather looking forward to getting out of. (Getting out of coffins is why I said yes, after all.) Oh, and a chandelier.

There's all sorts of odd stuff that Fox are going to be doing for the 13 Nights of Fright thing, which include a daily giveaway of signed stuff, and an exclusive web-interview (which they did this afternoon). But you'll have to wait until October...

Tomorrow I get to meet my mysterious, silent assistant.

And I have to get an early night as I have to be in make-up at 8:00am.
(According to New Improved Blogger I've made over 1300 posts in this journal. Good lord.)

night

Several of you have written to ask if I'll be around at the Rio tomorrow. Nope, I'll be checking out much too early and flying on to the next city. I'm sorry.

Just spent the last many hours talking to Teller, who is astonishingly wise. He's writing a book about magician David P. Abbott, and I look forward to reading it. I've plugged Teller's writing on this blog over the years. Why don't you read about his search for Donna Delbert? Or about his meeting with the man who cannot be hung?

...

You stated in a message that:
(...)the international movie data base at www.imdb.com (...)lists a 1997 film version of Signal to Noise directed by a "Boris Le Bouffe" that never actually existed).

I've got news. That film does exist. I made it. Got nothing to do with your comic book though...

! boris.

That's good to know.

Goodnight.