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Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]

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I enjoy reading non-fiction. Sooner or later you have to look up stuff for what you’re going to write, but in between books it’s good just to read anything that comes your way and looks interesting. Sooner or later you can use it – and if you don’t use it directly, you at least feel you know what you’re talking about.

I read New Scientist quite regularly – I’m still making my way through the Christmas/New Year issue, which always has something amusing in it, such as what cheese does to you overnight. I’m just reading the article about robot actors. I got a real taste for layman’s science when I was working on my second book, Potions To Pulsars: Women Doing Science and really had to understand what my heroines had achieved. I used children’s books that could explain it in simple terms and dictionaries of physics, biology, etc. That was around the time I started to read New Scientist and found an article about Hedy Lamarr who, apart from being a beautiful woman and actress, was an inventor. She created a communications thing to help in the war effort, based on the way a pianola works, and while it wasn’t used till after the war, it did end up forming the basis of the mobile phone. She got a much-belated award for services to science.

You never know what you’ll find that helps in the writing and meanwhile you have a lot of fun.

I pick up most of my books in second-hand bookshops, Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne and remainders book stores – you know, the kind which open up a few weeks before Christmas to sell off stuff and close by about February? It’s amazing what you find there. Among other things I’ve found a history of coffee, a history of chocolate, of sweets and a history of tourism. Tourism was fascinating, from Romans trotting around the empire to mediaeval pilgrims and Thomas Cook’s arrangements for people to go to temperance meetings. There was a wonderful story in the book about the White Ship, a ship which was supposed to carry the heir to the throne of England and his mates back to England after partying in France. This was the son of Henry I. The night before the voyage, lots of booze was sent to the ship from the party. The sailors got drunk, the ship smashed on the rocks and the passengers were drowned. They were, in fact, a lot of the young aristocrats of England. As a result of this incident, the new heir was Henry’s daughter Matilda, the mother of the future Henry II. This led to a civil war between her and her cousin Stephen. Eventually, he got to be king for life and her son became the next king, bringing us the Plantagenet dynasty, and what followed on from that. So our European history is the way it is because a bunch of sailors got drunk one night early in the 12th century. I found that delicious and thought, one of these days I’m going to play around with the alternative universe history that comes from this. Not yet, but eventually….

I’m reading a book called Drinking For England, a history of boozing and lechery in England. Oh, that Prince Regent! I recently finished a history of the Roman games, which taught me that in ancient Rome, executions in the arena happened at lunchtime. That stuck in my mind more than anything else in the book, though I am certainly impressed by the rest of it. Think about all those stories of Christian martyrs being thrown to the lions – and then get it into your head that it was just not all that important to the Romans, just another lunchtime event while you waited for the gladiators, who were what you'd really come to see. While the martyrs were singing hymns and facing their deaths, in the stands above people were rummaging in their picnic baskets for the last of the olives and debating whether they should take the chance of losing their seats by going to the lavatory or finding t

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Hey Mr. Gaiman!

The University East Anglia have this fairly-famous and pretty reputable Creative Writing course, which was set up by Malcolm Bradbury. I have the option of attending this course, but being not being a British citizen, it requires obscene amounts of money. So my question to you is whether or not you think a workshop of that sort would be worth the investment in time and money. And please, this isn't an 'oh-my-god-if-neil-gaiman-says-it's-good-then-i-must-go-come-hell-or-herpes' (or vice versa) situation, it's just that, other than Malcolm Bradbury, I haven't read the work of any of the authors that came out of that sort of course (a similar one is taught at Warwick). And you're apparently rather big in the whole 'writing' business, so perhaps you might have an opinion or two to share.

So is a course like that, or lack thereof, going to make-or-break an aspiring writer?

Wishing you well,

Liam Kruger

No, of course not. (For proof, look at the careers of the many writers who have not attended Creative Writing Courses at the University of East Anglia. It's most of the writers you can think of. Statistically, it's pretty much all of them. They did fine, didn't they?)

I've never done any Creative Writing courses, but someone who had wrote in back in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/11/probably-not-gold-watch.asp and talked about them.

I thought you might like this interview with the God of Fountain Pens:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/interview_with_the_god_of.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

I'm probably not the only one to send you this link, but I couldn't take that chance ;-)

How cool! Here in the US we have Richard Binder of http://www.richardspens.com/ My Christmas present from Henry Selick was a Pelikan pen which Richard had turned into a flexinib, and which I'm waiting for the right thing to come along so i can write a story with it.



Silas is our hero's guardian and I'm a huge fan of his.


I've given it to my editors at Harpers in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. I've sent it to friends and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. Any comments that strike me as wise or sensible get acted on, any that don't, don't.

Mostly I want it to be the best book it can possibly be. There isn't any bureaucracy. I think there's a general feeling that we're not going to go with the cover of The Graveyard Book that I posted in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/01/for-curious.html
though, because it looks too much like a book that's intended only for young readers, and now it's finished I think we're all realising that this is as much a book for adults as it's a book for younger readers, so I think Dave is going to play around with some different cover ideas... Read the rest of this post

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I read my copy of New Scientist last week, and was duly outraged that staff at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to talk about the age of the Canyon, and are only allowed to sell a book suggesting that the Canyon was formed during Noah's flood about 4,000 years ago.

This morning I was just as outraged to realise that a) New Scientist just prints press releases without checking them in any way and b) the whole article was bollocks.

The Press Release itself began

HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

People more outraged than I was phoned or wrote to the National Park Service (which is more than New Scientist did)...

and were told that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, that no one is being pressured from Bush administration appointees — or by anyone else — to withhold scientific information, and all were referred to a statement by David Barna, Chief of Public Affairs, National Park Service as to the park’s official position. “Therefore, our interpretive talks, way-side exhibits, visitor center films, etc. use the following explanation for the age of the geologic features at Grand Canyon,” the document explains.

If asked the age of the Grand Canyon, our rangers use the following answer: ‘The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old. The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.’

While the creationist text on the age of the Grand Canyon is actually on sale in the "inspirational" part of the souvenir shop, beside the books on the Hopi and the Paiute legends of how the canyon was formed.

The Skeptic magazine reports here on how they, too were insufficently, er, skeptical and fell for this rot: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-17.html

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