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@NeilHimself wrote a nice, sensitive blog post about the position writers are in with their stories and their lives, but the tl;dr punch line is (rot13 for spoiler) Trbetr E.E. Znegva vf abg lbhe ovgpu.

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/...

http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Co...

Have you read the story about the young British boy, who was kind of an outcast and wore glasses, who one day was informed that he was destined to be a great wielder of magic for good?

Gaiman wrote that story 7 years before Rowling. Does he feel he was ripped off? No. There are only so many stories out there, and everybody cribs off of everybody else. Look at Shakespeare – hard to find an original idea in any of his plays. What differs bad plagiarized works and brilliant works is the execution.

Here is Gaiman's take – it the second part of the blog post.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/fair-use-and-other-things.html

Timed release or whatever it's called. And the motorcycle part is just it: Motorcycles were forbidden there, but in none of her pictures was the motorcycle actually shown within the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, which was probably one of the first clues people had that the story of her taking a motorcycle through there alone was bogus. Second clue was when a Chernobyl travel-guide told she'd been on their tour group.
Now you might suggest its a conspiracy of them trying to cover up letting her in against rules, but Elena wrote on the site in response "I am being accused that it was more poetry in this story then reality. I partly accept this accusation, it still was more reality then poetry and it is why this site has millions of people visiting each month from the day when I put it online and I think I have right to say that people love it". If you go to the KiddOfSpeed website, you'll find a disclaimer from the person providing the hosting, "Regardless of what is true, this site has certainly made people think more about Chernobyl and this tragic disaster."
So it would seem the people with "vested interests" to accuse her of making up things include both herself and the person currently hosting the site.
Tours of the are have been available since 2002, and her website appeared in 2004. Wikipedia cites mainly Slashdot has having made the site famous. The site has ofcourse been changed numerous times since then with new pictures etc. Also Mary Mycio (who MAY have a vested interest in it) alleges many of the pictures are from books and different timeperiods.
So in short, yes Elena's KiddOfSpeed story was fantasy. The images were of Chernobyl, but staged and not what they purpoted to be. As it relates to THIS story, the "solitary woman on unauthorized exploration of forbidden area" has a chance of being a fantasy. Looking cursorily over the site it's hard to imagine those pics being from a public tour, though the lack of actual rocket engines on site makes it a remote possibility.

They could, if they worked at it. Writers and other artists have to start working at creating a more personal relationship with their audience again. This is what the internet excels at: blog, tweet, create video's, provide your readers with a place to discuss your work and chime in once in a while. Neil Gaiman seems like one of the few authors who get this, Doctorow is another. When people recognize you as a real human being, one with whom their share a bond through your creations, they will be willing to pay.

May be a good time to post Neil Gaiman's blog entry on why George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

You seem to think that "freedom of speech" is the freedom to say or do anything.

Except for the "do" part, which isn't speech, that's exactly what freedom of speech is. Even vile, icky speech must be defended, because someone else gets to decide what is vile. If it's "freedom to only say things that are not bad" that's just censorship.

Neil Gaiman says it best.

He concludes, "George R. R. Martin is not working for you."

I hate to be cliche, but, Orly? I seem to remember paying for those books.

You may want to read Neil Gaiman's comments on the issue, as it seems the grandparent poster has.

Although I think that R. K. Milholland's take on a similar issue is right on target too.

Neil Gaiman says it best.

She's not a human being!!!


(Old song...)

And a not-that-old award-winning short story. (PDF)
It's entertaining and worth the read for fans of Gaiman, Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft pastiche, and especially Lovecraft pastiche mixed with Sherlock Holmes "fan fiction" written by somebody who happens to be a professional author. OK, if you're a fan of that last one, you've probably already read the story, because as far as I know, it's the only one that falls into that category.
The story is entertaining and short. It apparently won a Hugo Award. It's only 9 pages, but the PDF is 5.1 MB because it's visually entertaining too - it's not just text in the PDF.
The "she's not a human being" reference is on page 3. Read the story. It's fun.

And yes, it's weird to me that songs by the Sex Pistols qualify as "old," but all Sex Pistols songs are now significantly OLDER than the songs "oldies" stations played on the radio were when I heard them on those "oldies" stations in the 1970s. No, I'm not going to tell you to get off my lawn.

Good news for you sir!

Wil Wheaton has evaluated the Author Guild's claim and found it stupid. Other wise authors concur.

The Authors Guild acts more like you'd expect from a Book Publishers Guild, though I'm sure a large number of authors are on their side on this.

"I wonder how the authors -- who are supposed to be served by the Authors Guild -- feel about it."

John Scalzi
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/02/11/hello/

Cory Doctorow
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/25/authors-guild-vs-rea.html

Neil Gaiman
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/02/quick-argument-summary.html

Wil Wheaton
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/02/wil-wheaton-vs-text-2-speech.html

Neil Gaiman has expressed his opinion of this issue in his blog.

My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Check out this story where Neil Gaiman tries to buy one. Indeed it literally doesn't seem to be selling. As in: you cannot obtain one even if you wanted to.

• -He was unpaid for his enthusiastic comments (featured on Amazon's Kindle page)
• -Much of his enjoyment seems to have come of having multiple books to choose from while traveling
• -He thinks it's a bit overpriced
• -He opines that Books:Kindle as CDs:iPods, citing different needs and overall experience between use while traveling and at home

• -He was unpaid for his enthusiastic comments (featured on Amazon's Kindle page)
• -Much of his enjoyment seems to have come of having multiple books to choose from while traveling
• -He thinks it's a bit overpriced
• -He opines that Books:Kindle as CDs:iPods, citing different needs and overall experience between use while traveling and at home

Orson Scott Card is pretty horrible at commentary. It usually comes across as a one-sided, unintelligent, trollish opinion piece. Somewhat entertaining, but does little to further reasoned discourse.
For an example of *good* commentary of the lexicon situation by a professional author, go no further than Neil Gaiman's blog
Here
and
Here
You will find a polite, detailed, and thought-out response (that he most likely whacked together in under an hour).

Orson Scott Card is pretty horrible at commentary. It usually comes across as a one-sided, unintelligent, trollish opinion piece. Somewhat entertaining, but does little to further reasoned discourse.
For an example of *good* commentary of the lexicon situation by a professional author, go no further than Neil Gaiman's blog
Here
and
Here
You will find a polite, detailed, and thought-out response (that he most likely whacked together in under an hour).

They should just shut up and read Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: "Gods on the Discworld exist as long as people believe in them and their power grows as their followers increase. This is a philosophy echoing the real-world politics of the power of religion and is most detailed in the novel Small Gods. If people should cease believing in a particular god (say, if the religion becomes more important than faith) the god begins to fade and, eventually, will "die", becoming little more than a faded wispy echo."

Neil recently posted another story for free:

How to talk to girls at parties

It's a short story that was nominated for a 2007 Hugo award and is -- needless to say -- very good. (more stories here)

And, as long as everyone else is offering their opinions, I thought American Gods was good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as his other stories. My favorite so far remains "Neverwhere". (The Sandman comics are, of course, in a class of their own, and "Good Omens" doesn't count because it was written by a composite entity, the likes of which we will probably never see again.)

Neil recently posted another story for free:

How to talk to girls at parties

It's a short story that was nominated for a 2007 Hugo award and is -- needless to say -- very good. (more stories here)

And, as long as everyone else is offering their opinions, I thought American Gods was good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as his other stories. My favorite so far remains "Neverwhere". (The Sandman comics are, of course, in a class of their own, and "Good Omens" doesn't count because it was written by a composite entity, the likes of which we will probably never see again.)

I also liked what I read from Neil Gaiman.

why an annoucement about a book that has not even been written makes the front page...

Except that the book in question was written ten years ago:

Gaiman said that in 1996 he began working with Michael Reaves on the idea for a story "about a boy who finds himself in the middle of a war between two equally powerful forces, who joins a super-team consisting of versions of himself from different alternate realities to try and maintain the cosmic balance." Soon after, the idea was pitched to DreamWorks and other studios, but was turned down.

Several years later, the duo wrote the novel based on their original idea and once again, pitched it to studios which rejected it. Last year, the authors sent their manuscript to Harper Childrens...

In other words, they wrote an idea, discovered nobody bought it, waited a few years, wrote the novel, discovered nobody bought it, waited, pitched it again and somebody bought it. Therefore it has in fact been written quite some time ago.

FWIW I am looking forward to it, having enjoyed several of Gaiman's novels in the past. Gaiman in the style of a Heinlein juvenile is a nice idea (given that a favourite book of mine as a kid was 'Has Space Suit:Will Travel'). But I'm also not sure why this makes the front page of Slashdot. He announced the news a few days ago on his blog. Maybe this is just Slashdot's way of catching up with the RSS feed.

The novel has not yet been published.

The author is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman

and he is on the Web at:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Thanks, I've already added a couple of those sites to my bookmarks, too bad they don't have RSS feeds. Ill look at some of the rest of them in a bit.

As for me, being Canadian, (but living in Europe) and using a lot of politics with my teaching (English teacher), I try and keep a diversified list. I'll try and list them more by theme than amount visited.

Canadian:
The CBC - Dissapointing RSS feed, they don't have too much/day, but it's always good to see what they have to say on Canadian politcs.
The Globe and Mail - The best site for at least a bit thoughtful Canadian news.
The CTV - OK, pulp, but once in awhile it's interesting to see what pulp has to say about things.
TSN - Sports, got to keep up with hockey and curling, none better.
Macleans - The Canadian equivalent of Time, some of their stuff is really great.

International:
The BBC - Probably the best English language news in the world, enough said.
The Guardian - Better analysis than the BBC, but not the sheer volume.
Al Jazeera - More balanced than what you'd think, at least the English version ... well, except for the editorial cartoons.
NY Times - Amazingly crummy RSS feed, seeing as it's one of the biggest newspapers in the US (but probably still better than the CBC).
Deutche Welle - Not the best site, either, but as I'm living in Germany ...

For actually thinking:
The Christian Science Monitor - I'm not religious, and except for a few things (see their "about us"), neither are they. What they are is the most balanced news in the US I've ever seen. They are thoughtful, honest and as far as I can see don't pander to any particular point of view.
Sign and Sight - This is only if you want to spend some time actually reading, as it's not meant for the masses. It takes articles by thinking people from across Europe and translates them into English.

Others: The Register - Tech news with a British sense of humour, and people think they are biased because of it.
Neil Gaiman's Blog - Not as interesting as it used to be, but I've learnt a lot about the book/publishing world through his blog.

Yes, I'm an information hound, and I like to see as many points of view as possible. I've tried fox news a couple of times, but most of the topics I'm interested in they've just taken things off the wire, so nothing new. What I also do is search google news when I find an article I want to get more points of view on. I don't use the service itself, but they are great for finding out who is saying what about a particular topic - you might even find a new angle that hadn't been said 100 times before.

As an interesting side note, the Michael Gaiman they quote is the son of author Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Neverwhere, American Gods, etc.). I read the article and was surprised, because Neil mentioned his son choosing Google over Apple a month or two back on his blog. Sure enough, visited his blog after reading it and it is indeed him.

Plagiarism is relatively commonplace in journalism. It's a masochistic profession with tight deadlines, and staff writers are more than likely to just copy and paste an AP news wire, change a few words here and there, cite the article, and submit it. The first thing my boss told me about dealing with reporters is that they're fundamentally lazy individuals, and if you give them a leading, poetic way to phrase something (say, about your product), as long as it doesn't sound blatently like a slogan, they'll write it down and use it word for word as if they'd said it themselves.

Otherwise, they'd have to digest the material, think about it, understand it, and regurgitate it. And believe me, wordsmithing takes time. Generally speaking if I have an article to post on Tuesday I'll write it Friday, rewrite it Monday, and look at it again in the morning on Tuesday. This is a luxury jounalists don't really have.

Of course, I'm not saying that all journalists are lazy people willing to appropriate anything so they can go home early. My favorite author used to be a journalist, if I recall, and he has an absolutely enviable command of English. But enough of them are. I'd wager that amongst themselves they're more than likely to look the other way because they're all in the same grind. Blog plagiarism is kind of a culture shock for them, because they've been ripping off people from papers on the other coast for years, and now these geeks are getting all bothered over a few filched words here and there.

What? You put the milk in after pouring the hot water. That way it doesn't curdle. Or explode. Can never remember stuff from Chem class. Besides, when you make hot tea in a quart glass, and give it a swirl as you pour the water in, the milk makes cool cloud patterns. No doubt you also think highly of Neil Gaiman.

THE ANANSI BOYS is read by Lenny Henry who does a beautiful job voicing English characters of Carribean extraction among others. The first chapter (~17 Mb) is available from the Neil Gaiman site.

THE ANANSI BOYS is read by Lenny Henry who does a beautiful job voicing English characters of Carribean extraction among others. The first chapter (~17 Mb) is available from the Neil Gaiman site.

He mentioned the MP3 CD on his website in early August. This doesn't seem to have been a "here's an announcement" post as so much as a "how did I miss that?!?!" post. Some quotes:

I've been lobbying for an MP3 version of books for years -- Harper Audio hesitated for a long time because they were worried about people buying them and then complaining that they didn't play on their CD players

I hope the MP3 CDs work, and retailers stock and sell them -- as I said, I was the one vigorously lobbying for them, because if you're going to put something on your iPod, you might as well not have to rip it yourself. Ah well, we'll see how it works. It may be that people like to buy their iPod content from Itunes and Audible, and prefer audio CDs.

Well my partially sighted girlfriend* certainly prefers them to struggling with the paper versions. I listened to a couple of the Series of Unfortunate Events books that I bought her for Christmas and they are very entertaining. I think a lot of that is to do with the person narrating them. Tim Curry was fantastic and got into all the characters really well. From what I've heard Lenny Henry has done an amazing job with Anansi Boys too but I currently only have the paper version. Actually, I believe there is a free sampler of the first chapter around somewhere... Thanks Google... http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/01%20Harper%20Au dio%20presents%20Anansi%20Boys.mp3

*Please avoid jokes about slashdotters only getting partially sighted girlfriends :)

Sigh... yeah, a few of us actually know Neil's last name is pronounced "Gay man" not "Guy man."

  In any case, he's married, has a couple of kids, and I think was even born when the word gay still predominantly meant happy, so I'm guessing it wasn't much of a problem and he probably didn't get much teasing about it until later in life... like now. I could tell you a lot more personal stuff about him but since he values his privacy, I will only refer you to his web page, where you can read his biography: http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Though he lives in America now, I don't think you can rightfully accuse him of 'Typical American Arrogance', though the movie listings are from Sony's site. Does that make it 'Typical Japanese Arrogance'?

Spawn two weeks AFTER the video release? Please tell me that your theatres in Canada now have color AND sound. :)

It happened with comic books. Now it's happening with games. Ultimately, some new form of entertainment will come along that will attract the eyes of moral crusaders, and the game industry will spend less time in the spotlight.

Less time, sure... but it won't escape entirely for quite a while. You could replace every instance of "video game" with "comci book" (and change the examples to match) and you'd still have a largely factual article. Neil Gaiman made a great comment a few weeks ago about how mainstream coverage of comics books alternates between "Wham! Bam! Comics have grown up!" (which is 20-year old news) and "OMG! This comic book not meant for kids has material unsuitable for kids in it!"

There's an advocacy organization, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, that works to raise awareness and raise funds to help defend comic book authors, artists, retailers etc. from attacks against freedom of expression. Retailers have been arrested for selling adult comics to adults. Artists and publishers get sued for parodies. It doesn't get as much covereage as video games anymore, but what coverage it gets is still as biased as it was in the 1950s.

since everyone bitches about how they have no content, let's see how many present their content, or rather: how many are black text on white background...

EVIL

* underlined+bold
* drop shadow
* cream background, not much of an improvement. some of the header text is glossy (shiney / embossed / see above one / other various "auto-artistic" trash ).
* the tiny images illustrating each entry, are dithered (i guess with a "web palette" [making it look even more horrible], which people stopped doing 5+ years ago) then jpg'd.
* cyan background (the name of 100% green + 100% blue)
* purple text, orange links. no, that's not better.
* yes i really want to be tortured with your family album pics
* half of the people leave directly (or die) with the header
* light yellow (piss-water yellow?) background.
* "I.Mter-
views" ?
i don't get it. dashes in headlines are satan.
* scary vector portrait
* horrible. evil. tasteless.
* scarier than the sixapart girl.
* yellow background.

GOOD

* pear/white background. title with first letter biggie, first line in different font from rest.
* greenish tasty tone over everything ...which i didn't follow. great. thanks. as for the equally bad link-colours being that horrible default-blue/purple, it was only around 10%. this was checking 70% of the a-list. methinks those popular people should hire someone to design their site

good design = pyros, don't remember any other. and yeah, it's not a blog.
says intersting things = ms g33k. who i'm not sure is a good thing to link, i won't link myself.

It was the ducks that finally pushed him over the edge. The world must be warned!

(if you don't get it, look at Neil Gaiman's journal for January 20, 2004)

People actually like comics? Could someone tell me why? They can't have the epicness of movies, or the interactivity of games, or the story of books. Not meant as a troll, I just want to know why.

Both my best friend and my girlfriend, extraordinarially cultured people, are really into Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. The good ones apparently like to be called graphic novels, which I guess is a pretty good term. They're intense, long, involved, and very artistic. Or so I'm told.

Oh, and there's Blankets, a sweet and bitersweet story that said GF gave me. Very good, certainly on par with any book of the sort I've read. Though I'm not usually one for the touching-autobiographical-narrative-of-first-love- while-growing-up-among-families-with-issues sort of story.

Anyway, from what I hear, this is an up-and-coming genre. But I'm not sure how much these are the comic books referred to in FCBD.

Any of y'all know?

Ahhhh, thanks for the memories!

I'll second the notion of Gibson is crap. I've read several of his books and they were boring, contrived and incoherent. Stephenson was riveting, intelligent and didn't cheat. I haven't read the Baroque Cycle yet, but Cryptonomicron was fantastic.

I've only heard two complaints levied against Stephenson. One, that his endings can be abrupt. I would have loved for Snow Crash to go on for another 20 pages. Second, that he has a large number of characters, as he does in Cryptonomicron. I chalk that complaint up to those who don't like to be challenged. Or read.

I highly recommend Stephenson's works. But then, again, I also like Neil Gaiman, so who am I to judge?

"We like your idea of chocolate chip ice cream, but we don't like these dark crunchy things in it."

Neil has also been through the same process as Adams (With Terry Prachett), and says he would ammend Adams' description thus:

"We like your idea of chocolate chip ice cream, but we see it as a bread type base, a tomato puree covered with cheese, pepperoni, maybe olives."

This is why Good Omens will not become a film (unless Terry Gilliam does it).

From his site mentioned in summary:
...are you going to be keeping veto power over the name?

I think we can burn that bridge when we come to it....it's remotely possible that someone at Miramax or Lamy Pens or TeaDirect Tea may decide that this is a heaven-sent opportunity for cheap product placement, and it'll suddenly become the USS Latest Lindsay Lohan Movie or the SS TIVO RULES. But I sort of doubt it'll happen like that.

Sounds like he could be setting himself up for a lot of hurt.

Other than that, here is an interview with Neil Gaiman talking about this book and his previous one called American Gods and here is Google's Print of American Gods.

As for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, here is a site with some highlights of cases that they have helped.

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

If the President of the ALA has such a low opinion of bloggers, perhaps his organization should stop giving so many major awards to them.

I think what he actually meant to say was something along the lines of:

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable -- except for ALA literary award winners such as Orson Scott Card or Neil Gaiman or Sherwood Smith or David Brin or Jane Yolen or Dianne Duane or, oh, bugger, you know, all those other ALA award-winning authors who also blog, not that I want to imply that ALA award-winning librarians who blog, like Kathleen de la Peña McCook, are bad either, and oh, yeah, I definitely don't want to seem to be criticizing PLABlog, the brand new blog of the Public Library Association, especially not when we put out a nifty little press release crowing about it, just last month, because that would look pretty stupid, now, wouldn't it -- er, um, what was I saying, again?"

The Complete Guide to the Publishing World, by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

You have to scroll down a bit, and there's a lot there to read, but believe me, it's worth it. Teresa knows what she's talking about.

Tell you what, read Neil Gaiman's blog on this, which the terrifyingly sane and sensible first poster linked.

And then retract your initial comments, when you realise that a. Gaiman is one of the two writers, b. he wrote it a while ago and Dreamworks rejected it, c. Bob Z. is making it because he was blown away by Gaiman's script.

Then start to midly freak out because it's going to be motion capture. Like Polar-Bloody-Express.

Neil Gaiman just posted about this in his online journal.

Google for "mother of the matrix".

I did, and I found this.

Who do you think has more credibility - an unknown woman who is apparently rather reluctant to provide actual clear proof of infringement, or someone well known to be intelligent and clued-up like Neil Gaiman? In one brief comment he pours cold water on all the speculation that she has a good case.

"So, for whatever it's worth, and for the record, and as long as it's not-for-profit, people can always do readings of my stuff, if they want to, in public, in private, in school, in front of small invited audiences of marsupials, or even in Dublin. No permission or payment will ever be required. And my unborn grandchildren will just have to learn to live with it."