Sunday, February 08, 2004
Today I have to sit down and draw all the monsters for this latest round of auctions. Thanks to everyone who used "Buy It Now" and thanks for being patient while we get the orders ready to go out. The first bunch should go into the post on Monday. Yesterday, I wrote about a thousand words on the new short story. It's off to a good start, and I wish I had time to work on it today. I'll get back to it tomorrow.
This morning I received an e-mail with the subject line, "man arressted [sic] for fondlling [sic] a squirell [sic]." I'm not sure if the bad spelling was an attempt to fool spam filters set to block certain words (would anyone really block "squirrel"?), or if the author was really that atrocious a speller. Maybe it's someone with an acute double-consonant fetish. I didn't read it, because I never read spam, but it haunts me still.
Thanks to Philip Kalmes for the link to the Quiznos site. I'd already seen the Spong Monkeys' Quiznos ad on television, but there's always room for more Spong.
Is it bad form to post fan mail in a blog? Do other people do it? Do I give a frell what other people do? I got a couple this morning that made me feel just a tiny bit better about Low Red Moon, and I think I want to post them. What I said about the way LRM has failed to excite the critics the way that Threshold did, and how that baffled me because I know it's the better book, I swear I wasn't fishing for kind words. Which is not to say that they aren't appreciated. The first e-mail is from Philip Kalmes, who I've thanked once already:
I'd been meaning to write this for some time, but I don't ever write fan letters and couldn't get comfortable with the idea.
That out of the way I'd like to say that Low Red Moon is one of the most effective and satisfying novels I've ever read. There's a quality of scene and atmosphere in it that's rare, and beyond that, it not only draws from but enriches your other work in a way that's hard to describe.
Threshold was the first of your books that I read and to watch Dancy Flammarion's history unfold since has been glorious. Low Red Moon was more so because it met the need to hear what happened after. There is a sense of inevitability, a rightness, in the way that these characters' lives progress and end that makes their stories feel very true. As though everything that comes to pass emerges necessarily from the intersection of their natures and their circumstances. It gives each story a kind of completeness, but when the characters or settings return it's as though that same completeness unfolds intact onto a larger scale. It's something other than the usual simple adding-on that makes a sequel, more like individual cells combining toward a more complex organism. Each story makes each other story greater, and Low Red Moon does this more than any other yet.
So thanks much for Low Red Moon. Looking forward to Murder of Angels.
And from Stephen (who did not include his surname):
I don't know if writers like e-mails like this, but i thought I should say something. I loved LRM. I thought it was great. There were parts that made me laugh and parts that made me cry. I was amazed at how concerned I became over Deke and his drinking after having just "met" him a few short days before when I'd read Threshold. So I don't know who didn't like the book, but I thought it was your best one yet. Just thought I'd let you know.
Thank you both, and thanks to everyone else who's written since the novel was released in November to relay his or her appreciation for LRM. In a sane world, your opinions as readers would mean far more to me than the approval or disapproval (or in the case of LRM, the general absence of either) of critics. Sadly, this isn't a sane world.
|
|
