How to use this Page

The concept of a fanvid is simple: Take clips from the TV show or movie of your choice and synchronize them to a song, any song. With the right song and the right clips, you can tell your own story about just about anything. Some vids are serious, some silly. Lately, my friend Heidi has been doing a series of fanvids using Schoolhouse Rock songs and the main characters of Supernatural, with hilarious results. For your viewing pleasure, A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing:




See, TV is good for you!

crossposted at carlie@bccls

For the past few decades, Lake Superior State University has issued an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” Candidates for “banished words” are nominated by the public at large, and then a committee decides on the final selection, which is released every year on New Year’s Day. The 2008 list is a typical mix of terms deemed by the committee to be clichéd, improperly used, or objectionable in some other way, with a particular emphasis on management-speak, Internet lingo, and youth slang. Of course, the LSSU list is never effective in actually banning words — in fact, some words from years past have flourished quite successfully (“online” in 1996, “9-11” in 2002, “blog” in 2005). In general, the list is most informative as a barometer of pet peeves about language: what is it that gets under people’s skin, so much so that they think words (or particularly disliked senses of words) should be removed from the lexicon forthwith?

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Cabal's cape did nothing to protect him against his encounter with a skunk last night... while I didn't have much of a right hand last night, for reasons you will learn at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/10/mr-neil-takes-one-for-team_22.html, so we didn't deskunk him until this morning.

There's an interview with me in The Independent in which I mention a few things I don't think I've said on the record before...


Neil --
In Ross Douthat's recent column in the Atlantic Monthly concerning the J.K. Rowling press of late (http://tinyurl.com/yq2wz2), Douthat suggests that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this". It seems odd to me that ulterior motives are so quickly suspected -- she was an author answering a question with additional information not previously known. Do you find yourself withholding information during Q&A if it's not already contained in the story? Why or why not?

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

Sometimes even the author doesn't know for sure. (I used to wonder about Lucien the Librarian in Sandman. On the one hand, I strongly suspected he was gay; on the other, he seemed to have a small unrequited thing for Nuala going on. And if it had ever mattered in a story, I would have found out for certain, but it never did, so I didn't.)

And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

As for withholding information... before the Internet, I'd tell anyone anything they wanted to know. ("Who's the missing member of the Endless?" "Destruction." "Oh.") After the Internet, I would try and avoid answering some direct questions because it might spoil things for people. "Why did Delight become Delirium?" "Who's the Forgotten God?" -- they're questions I would happily have answered for anyone who asked at a signing 20 years ago, because it wouldn't have gone any further, not in any way that mattered. Not any longer, because one day I may tell those stories. (If I knew for sure I wouldn't tell them, then I'd happily answer people now.)

Neil, would you please post the best-ever rice pudding recipe you mentioned? Presuming you were able to recreate it, of course. ^_^

Many thanks!

I tried one using the same method but I accidentally used horrible non-fat half and half instead of full cream milk, and the result was sort of grey and had a sickly corn-syrupy sort of background taste. Everything else worked though. I'll try one more, paying attention to quantities, and if it works I'll post it here.

Most of today's mail was about tomato juice, and how I should have covered the dog in it.

There were two reasons I didn't:

1) I didn't want a pinkish-coloured dog,

and more importantly,

2) I watched the Mythbusters episode where they tried a bunch of different things to get rid of Skunk smells, including tomato juice and beer and Skunk Odour Removal Liquid, and they concluded that the most effective thiol remedy was a mixture of Peroxide, Baking Soda and liquid soap.

So I googled last night, with an odorous dog beside me, found the page of the discoverer of this miracle mixture and read about it...

http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/sk00001.htm

Then I put it into practice. (It sounds so simple, put like that. It sounds like the dog cooperated. Hah. There was half an inch of water on the bathroom floor by the end of it...) It worked.

The bees were in a foul temper this morning, which is also probably skunk-related. Apparently, skunks do what they can to upset bees so they'll come out of the hive, looking for trouble... whereupon the skunks eat them like peanuts.

Hey Neil --Wasn't sure that you'd seen the news yet, but the McClouds' car was recently broken into on their tour. Fortunately, not much was lost; unfortunately, what *was* lost included Sky's extensive software and DVD book, to the tune of thousands of dollars. Sky is looking for donations of any extra copies of the items lost -- can you pass the word if you know anyone? The list is at http://tinyurl.com/2mtu2t and mail goes to:
Sky McCloudP.O. Box 115Newbury Park CA, 91319Thanks. Shawn

Happy to post it. Send Sky stuff.

Fortunately, not a question! Just something I thought you might like to know about. Sherman Alexie mentions you in an interview at powells.com, http://www.powells.com/interviews/shermanalexie.html in which he mentions how glad he was to run into someone he knew in Sydney. Loved his description of the two of you recognizing each other. Just thought you might like to see the interview. Thanks for all the information on Stardust. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie this summer. Congratulations on the new dog. He's gorgeous and looks so happy, just the way a dog should look.

That's so true, and it was just like that. He's an amazing author. I loved his upcoming YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and over at http://www.ellenforney.com/blog/2007/05/25/absolutely-true/ you can see the cover and learn about it from the perspective of the illustrator....

...
An edited version of my H. G. Wells The Country of the Blind intro is up for the curious at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1900709.ece

It's just after three in the morning and my dog has been sprayed by a skunk.

This is not a dog who likes being washed at the best of times, and three in the morning is not the best of times.

So here's a link to the Moth event: http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1340/prmID/1412. I'm the last one. They're all fun and interesting, all unwritten, unmemorised, spoken narratives performed before an audience. And if you only listen to one other, you should listen to Edgar's.

Now I'm going to wash a dog now, with peroxide and baking soda and soap...

Pray for me.