The violinist and the gay writer: a cautionary tale

I'm on an intellectual ramble today. If you want to call it intellectual wanking, go right ahead, but this is where the drift of my thoughts has been going!

Here's a new theory for you: all things are relative. Call it the New Theory of Relativity, if you like. I've been reading online interviews with bestselling authors who bemoan the fact that they're only earning six figures instead of seven, and on the other hand, I'm constantly monitoring the strategies of other writers who're self-marketing, like myself, to see what works and what doesn't -- to see, in fact, if there are any tips and tricks that I haven't already worked out for myself.

All things, as I said, are relative. The guy earning the six figure pay check has engineered himself into a lifestyle where anything less than seven figures is baaaad news, because the land taxes and the SUV and the kids' private school fees will gobble down the lion's share of what he's making now ... and his family will soon be betting antsy at the lack of cash to go and do what they used to do -- you know, the skiing in the French Alps, the powerboating in Monaco, the shopping in London and Paris, the opera in Rome. Little things like that.

Before this hypothetical writer became a "name" in literature, he didn't do all these things. Even the greatest endure what Sir Alec Guinness called one's "jam sandwich days," which were the days -- more likely years! -- when your lunchbox was filled with jam sandwiches, and you cadged what you could off your better-off cast mates!

Even Brad Pitt started out in a chicken suit, his first paying job in Hollywood. Good gods.

I suppose the point I'm making in a round-about way (and taking a long time to get to it!) is that when you're self-marketing and you sell 10 books in a day, you go dancing around the room in sheer joy -- on your way out the door to join the commuter crowd on the way to work. It's been a triumph! When you sell 1,000 books a day ... ho hum. When you sell 5,000 books a day, you get dangerously complacent, start to live the lifestyle, think the thought patterns, talk the talk that makes you sound like an ass -- until someone remembers that you've committed yourself to a million dollar lifestyle, your family life is predicated upon this, and your whole world has just begun to unravel with the shrinkage in your pay check.

Being marginalized as a writer is an eye opener. (Writing gay novels, no matter how good they are, lands you in a small(ish) marketplace that used to be keen, hungry, under-supplied, and is currently blase, overfed and oversupplied, with used books for $1 on Amazon, and ebooks coming along for free. You're well and truly marginalized. Believe me.) You very quickly learn that you have your place, your corner where you can flourish like a hydrangea in a small pot; but if you step over your boundary line ...

A short while ago, the Washington Post staged an experiment. You might have heard of it --a short version of the story is circulating as "Violinist in the Metro." I'm assuming you don't have the time to read the whole story (which lives here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?referrer=emailarticle), so I'll paste over the short version, for your interest and amusement:

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work. The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on. In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition. No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

In the full story, Bell says, "It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ." The word doesn't come easily. ". . . ignoring me." Bell is laughing. It's at himself. "At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous. "It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little." Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro? "When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence ..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?referrer=emailarticle

The classical musician is marginalized, where the rock musician is not. The Shakespearean character actor is marginalized, where the Hollywood A-list celebrity is not. The niche novel author ...?

And it's all relative. Joshua Bell can earn $1,000/minute and still be a doodle in someone's margin, while Britney Spears could wear a trench coat to take out the trash, and be mobbed by hoards of foam-fanged paparazzi. Put another way, Joshua Bell's boundary lines are chalked a whole lot closer to his feet than Britney's.

And Mel Keegan's? Well, they're an interesting set of boundary lines; they look more like the old Venn diagram -- do you remember those? (Didn't they drive you bonkers in grade school?)

In the green segment ... the GBLTI community and supporters. That would be the base of the economy, as far as writers are concerned: the broadest book-buying community. In the blue segment ... people who actually like to read -- that's society in this context: reading is the quality that brings people into a social group called Readers. Some of them are gay too (woah ... this is getting deep). In the pink segment, people who can afford to buy a book right now ... this being the financial environment -- and right now, we're going down into winter; they're calling it a global recession. Think financial ice age. (You could add a fourth control group as a subset of the pink people: folks who can afford to buy books and are actually interested in buying one right now.)

The whole lot overlaps, integrates, comes to a meeting of minds, in the little swatch in the middle, the purple bit: sustainability. In other words, if there are enough people in the purple zone to keep one's bills paid ... happy, happy, joy, joy. If not -- well, the commuter bus leaves in 15 minutes; better be on it!

In fact, these are the boundary markers are any writer, performer or artist other than the very top-line best sellers, the A-list actors, the rock superstars. Green: people with hearing. Blue: people who like jazz. Pink: folks who can afford to buy CDs. And so on ...if you're a jazz musician, these issues are critical.

Here's the bottom line, and it's interesting -- even comforting. For 99.5% of the whole community of writers, performers, artists, popularity, acclaim, fame, achievement, talent -- these things are contextual. Take any one of us out of his or her context, and we're, uh, well, hard pressed to make it clear what we do, why we do it, and why we're not going to stop doing it any time soon, even though a majority of people appear to think we're nuts!

Mind you, I wouldn't mind being able to play the violin like Joshua Bell.

Ciao for now,
MK

Happy New Year! Start rolling out those barrels...

There's not much to say today except HAPPY NEW YEAR! The old year has seven or eight hours left in it, as I write this. I find myself looking both backward and forward, at the events that surprised, disgusted, delighted and grieved us during 2008, and at the events that ought to get us up on the soap boxes next year.

Ought-eight was the year everybody got rid of George W. Bush; it was the year Americans elected a president of color ... it was also the year when people were hoodwinked by the religious right, into voting against civil liberties and human rights. However, it was also the year when the aforementioned religious right well and truly shot their bolt, and "all came out in the wash." Their lies and perfidy became common knowledge, and as they saying goes, "they can't pull that trick again." Gay marriage rights will be back on the ballot sheet very soon, and this time the people of California will go to the polls with their eyes wide open.

It was the year Heath Ledger died; the year the recession hit the whole world broadside. The Olympics went to China ... China could no longer disguise its air pollution problems. The global climate went bung some more, and did it faster than anyone had ever expected ... but record snowfalls are being taken by some idiots as a sign that there's no such thing as global warming! Apparently, we need to start building "proper" power stations as fast as we can. I read a feature article in the UK's Telegraph online; I read it because I thought the teaser line promised a great joke, and was two thirds through it before I realized, this buffoon is deadly serious, and so are the pea-brains who left comments on the page: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html ... don't you love the title? "2008," it says, "was the year man-made global warming was disproved." O...kay.

Well, it certainly was the year that The Dark Knight showed how much money a movie can make at the box office! It also showed that there's a disturbing large part of the audience that's identifying with the psychos, not the heroes. Woah.

But 2008 was also the year when the Vatican said it was fine and dandy to believe in aliens (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D90KSE100&show_article=1), and at the same time, gay athletes decided not to come out! Of 10,500 athletes in Beijing, only 10 were out, and only one of those was a guy (http://www.theage.com.au/news/off-the-field/10500-athletes-and-only-10-of-them-gay/2008/08/18/1218911546077.html). Statistically, it's far more probably that about a thousand of these athletes were gay or bi, but with the hurricane of Prop 8 going on in the background, who was going to come out?! The time isn't right, not yet, not quite.

Because this was also the year the Dominionists came within tickling distance of the White House. Don't get me started on Dominionists.

It was the year John Barrowman published his autobiography (!), and Aussie TV decided they couldn't show season two of Torchwood because (so they said) there was material which would offend viewers. If you believe a syllable of that.

This year, our prime minister was demonstrated to be a "cradle catholic" with aspirations to build "the great Australian firewall," meaning Aus becomes one of only five countries to deliberately and vastly censor the Internet. The others are China, Iran, Egypt and ... England. Go figure.

The year Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman starred in a major flop: Australia ... and Kidman has been blamed for it. Well, who could blame Hugh Jackman when the poor man just can't help looking like this:




See what I mean? Not his fault. Couldn't be his fault. Blame Kidman. It's all her fault anyway. (And yes, even Keegan decided to wait for the DVD ... and I'm not usually swayed by critics. I'll talk about the movie when I've rented the disk!)

It was also the year Will Smith was outed, whether he liked it or not! Kewl. Unless you're Will Smith, of course. Then, well, maybe not so kewl. The year Brad had twins ... I expect he had help there somewhere. The year Michael Jackson's nose fell off -- or was that last year? One loses track. The year Whacko Jacko ... and Mel Keegan ... turned 50. Good golly, what happened to time? The last time I looked at a calendar, it was 1997, and I'll bet Jacko would tell you the same.

It's actually been one hell of a year, and the next one will be just as weird and wonderful.

We live in "interesting times," to borrow from the old Chinese curse!

H a p p y N e w Y e a r ! I'll be back next year,

Cheers,
MK

Art, Thanksgiving, and who'll design the future?

Just trivia this morning. Blogging in a vacuum is an interesting experience: nothing is happening here worth writing about ...

Update: we're still waiting for any response from Create Space, and as we go into the time frame of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, we don't expect to have the situation resolved at CS till about next Tuesday our time, which will be December 2! In other words, a javascript hiccup in the shopping cart routine at CS will have taken two WEEKS to resolve, and the whole publication process stopped dead for the duration. *sigh*
[http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/hiccups-in-create-space-process.html]

Anyway: it's all par for the course in the labyrinth of getting a long backlist to Amazon, so ... you live and learn. Tough it our, right?!
[http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/road-to-amazoncom-pavement-is-up-be.html]

Meanwhile -- Happy Thanksgiving to American readers! I actually spent Thanksgiving in the States on one or two occasions, and it's a whole lot of fun, what with the huge meal and the falling asleep in front of the football game. Also a lovely time of the year: late fall, with winter right around the corner, and Christmas in the back of your mind.

And for a dose of Americana, you can't go past the new JC Leyendecker art book. Joe Leyendecker was the conceptual artist who virtually designed what America looked like between about 1910 and 1950, and much of what we still know, today, as the quintessential handsome American male was designed by Joe.

Here's the interesting part (at least for gay readers). For most of his adult life, JC lived with the male model whose face and bod were probably the most famous in the nation ... the young dude who modelled for the "Arrow Shirts" campaigns. The model, Charles Beach, attained superstar status -- he was quite literally the Brad Pitt of his day. And was thoroughly shacked up with the artist. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. See the image right below...

In fact, Brendan Fraser's character of Rick O'Connell is probably based on Charles Beach in the shirt ads. In fact, it's a pretty safe bet that when the productions designers for THE MUMMY movies were trying to nail down the "look and feel" of the era, they made a bee-line for Joe Leyendecker's work. Check this out:

Reminds you of someone you know, right? For a lot more (and a lot of scans!) from the new book, go here: http://jcleyendecker.blogspot.com/2007/08/leyendecker-scans.html

Leyendecker designed the mid-20th century, the way Syd Mead can be said to have designed the age we're living into (or hoping to survive into!) right now now. If you're not familiar with Mead's work, give yourself a serious treat: http://www.sydmead.com/v/01/splash/

It does take a while to load because if the Flash splash, but it's well worth it. I have the old SENTINEL artbook, which was produced by US Steel about, oh, 30 years ago, and I still use it as a source of inspiration for the visual component of SF writings. It's amazing the way a couple of pivotal conceptual artists have literally designed our world. Makes you wonder who the next artist will be, and what 2050 will look like.

Anyway -- this is very much on my mind as I go into the early pre-production work on the new HELLGATE books. I'll be writing both the remaining novels back-to-back, and this will be my pet project for 2009. I might, mind you might, do the HELLGATE novels before I get into the haunted house story. Sorry about this, guys: I know I've been promising you the haunted house book for six months, but -- seriously! -- since I'm not on any contract, I go where the muse takes me. And he, she or it is taking me in the direction of, uh, the worlds of Hellgate.

More on that later.

Many thanks indeed to the folks who have given us feedback on the new calendar. Yes, I am thrilled with the results, and it's kudos to both Jade for the artwork, and Lulu.com for the printing, both of which are absolutely superb:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/mel-keegan-2009-calendar-out-now.html

To answer the most-oft-asked questions: the software used to produce the calendar itself was Serif page Plus 10; and the artwork was produced in Micrographx Picture Publisher 7, and Irfanview. If you want to know more, by all means ask, and I'll bump questions on to Jade. I keep saying, the artist ought to have a blog too, but so far, my words are falling on deaf ears. We can hope, right?




(Yep, that's an affiliate link. Serif is the driving force behind the production work of so much that we do -- when people ask how it's done, and with what, we recommend Serif. So we might as well sell it, right? Forgive the commercial ... in fact, it answers rafts of questions by itself.)

For the moment, Happy Thanksgiving to American readers!

Cheers,
MK

Gay wedding bells can be expensive

It would be accurate, and fair, to say, America worries me ... and I have cause to be worried, because I have family there, in Texas, Alaska, California, Florida, and North Carolina. One tends to worry to a certain extent, about the future into which one's darling little nieces and nephews are growing (pause for violin music, while video-montage of stock market crashing, troops invading yet another corner of some foreign land, forest fires burning, tornadoes whirling, cities flooding, plays in background).

There's a TV comedy in this country. Folks from other parts might never have heard of it, but it's been famous for thirty years downunder. KINGSWOOD COUNTRY. I'm not making this up, and to prove it:




Now, Kingswood Country has nothing whatever to do with price of gay marriage, but the central character, Ted Bullpitt (top left; and you can guess what everyone calls him) used to have a catch-phrase.

No wonder the country's in a mess.

It's a catch-phrase you might hear quite a lot in the US, after November --and especially in California, where little snippets of news like the following (pasted over, verbatim, from Witchita Falls OnLine), can take the foundations on which your life is built, and knock them out from under you:

...California's November ballot initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

It's the first time voters will be asked to ban same-sex marriage in a state where gay couples already have won the right to wed. Same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts and California.

You've just got your life put into order, everything is grand, you're married and settled, licensed and registered, insured and mortgaged, and ... suddenly the pattern of your life is put to a vote. A vote??? Not only that, but tons of money comes pouring into your home state from other states, to fund the campaign to rewrite your life. God-botherers in other parts of the US are apparently paying millions to swing the public vote; it'll all come out in the wash in November.

A couple of posts ago, I was looking at the question of 'human rights' (and gay rights are a sub-set of human rights: we're all human. Except in DC. There seem to be a lot of aliens and mutoids and weird trans-dimensional species there; so many, in fact, that they have a name. "Pohleetish'nz." Also known as "Raypuhbleek'nz" in some, though not all, circles -- and not all of the time).

November looks like being the deadline, when the poop hits the fan, in so many ways. It's about politics both home and away, the domestic economy, the standard of the public health, national security, America's "face" abroad, stopping the spread of diseases like HIV at home (where CDC just announced that the stats for the spread of the disease are 40% underestimated every year), getting kids a better education ... and figuring out if America can still bear the name, "The land of the free."

Freedom is about ... being free. Free to ... well, to be what you are; to do what you do, and do it the way you want to. Freedom is built on that one, single foundation.

There's a saying: Charity begins at home ... justice begins next door.

Here's the news, and you gotta love it:

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Brad Pitt has donated $100,000 to fight California's November ballot initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

And he nails down the case in clear, absolutely transparent terms:

"Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8," Pitt said Wednesday.

I'd go into court with that. I'd go to the polls with it ... in fact, California will, in about six weeks' time.

It's not about being gay, or having gay friend or relatives, or even finding gay culture chic. It's about recognizing what freedom actually means.

George Bernard Shaw wrote (I think, in Man and Superman, but I could be dead wrong there, it could have been any one of a dozen other plays; so don't quote me on the source), "I might not agree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it."

Same difference. The problem is (as I was saying in "Here comes Damocles with his chainsaw") that right of free speech cuts both ways and draws blood no matter where it lands. It might be your right to be gay and have a big, white gay wedding ... it's also the constitutional right of those God-botherers to speak up, and out, against you.

The next six weeks in California are going to be interesting -- for me, more interesting than the presidential campaign. Why is that?

Who lands in the White House is critical for the long-term survivability of the rest of the planet. Example: the US owes seven and a half TRILLION dollars to China (!), and Palin and McCain look forward to Armageddon; why not go pick a fight with the Chinese, so you don't have to pay back the $7,500,000,000,000.00 (goddamn, that's a lot of zeroes), and the missile exchange would be sure to bring Jesus back to take the righteous to heaven, so it's a win/win situation. Right? Omigod). However --

What the people of California decide regarding gay marriage rights in November is, in fact, more important, because an official referendum if a very accurate barometer of the public mind, public sentiment, the "collective consciousness," if I might be forgiven for misquoting Jung.

Presidents come and presidents go. Some get shot. Some start wars. Some pay off the national debt (come back, Bill, all is forgiven!) while peace spontaneously breaks out all over he world. No matter how foolish, hidebound, corrupt, or even wicked a government might turn out to be, four years later, the whole thing goes back to the country. The sandcastle gets turned back into slush, and you can start over.

[Incidentally, in Australia -- where we have what's known as a "Washminster Democracy" -- we have an additional safeguard. If or when a government has, frankly, gone bonkers, the Prime Minister can be sacked. Yes, you read that right. Dismissed. Fired. Chucked off the job. Given the bum's rush. Thank gods we have this safeguard, which is a leftover of our British Commonwealth days ... it helps to keep some of the bastards honest. And yes, it's happened: a PM was sacked, about thirty years ago.]

However, though presidents and governments come and go, the PEOPLE are the backbone, heart and soul of a nation, and it's what they think, feel and believe which counts ... because this is the quality we all have to live with. You can't vote it out in four years. You can't assassinate it. You can't debate it, impeach it or imprison it. The PEOPLE are the force which drives a nation.

And it comes down to this: Can America still wear the laurels of the "land of the free?" Or do strict, rigid conditions apply to freedom? And who sets those conditions, on what terms?

The rest of us are watching with baited breath, waiting to know how it turns out ... not what air-head in eye-glasses is going to giggle her way into the oval office when a geriatric nitwit has had a heartattack under the pressure and died ... but, what do the PEOPLE think and feel and want?

Thanks to Brad Pitt, and celebrities like him -- though it seems they haven't been as generous with their contributions (maybe they're feeling the sting of the current economic collapse?) -- there's some funding in the kitty to pay for a pro-freedom campaign. TV time, pamphlets, posters, whatever it takes.

The issue might be dressed up as "gay marriage rights," but that's just the costume it's wearing. The issue is human rights ... freedom, in the land of the free.

Fingers, toes and eyes crossed. We can only hope. If the vote goes south and it turns out there's no right of marriage for millions and millions of Americans, while there's an air-head in eye-glasses giggling and simpering and posturing in the oval office, then it will certainly be time to dig out and dust off Ted Bullpitt's catch-phrase.

Say it with me, now. Let's all say it together and get it just right ... can't hurt to practise a bit on the inflection and tone. You don't even have to say it in an Aussie accent (unless you want to). Here we go. On three: One, two ... no wonder the country's in a mess.

Hey, sounded great from here!

Cheers,

MK

The cruellest cut...

Last night I was writing a quick column about the way DEATH'S HEAD was cut by 15% of its running length, according to publisher requirements; I was asked, how do you go about doing thr work, and stretched my memory back over more years than any of us care to tell, to actually remember doing it (shiver). Then, later in the evening we played the DVD of the director's cut of TROY, which is about a half hour longer than the theatrical release ... and I was struck by the similarity in the two editing jobs.

On one hand you have the writer who has to cut the heart and soul out of a book to make it fit covers which had been pre-printed; on the other hand, you have a director who's been told to bring the story in at a certain length, and s/he has to rip through the film and find a way to cut it by about 20% of its length, and do it without compromising the story.

Well, maybe the cuts to TROY didn't compromise the plot, but they certainly chewed into the 'integrity' of the characterization. The director's cut is extremely good. I'd actually missed the movie on the big screen because I was (!) dumb enough to believe the critics, who had nothing good to say about it. I suppose it depends what you want to get out of a movie for your $14 ticket (yup; that's what we're paying locally ... and you bet, a movie's got to be good to be worth the asking price ... it's not like buying a paperback, where you get days of entertaining for your $24, or whatever. With a movie, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, the whole thing is over in a couple of hours).

Maybe the critics who went to TROY were wanting something more, or different from it. More of Helen, less of Achilles? More female nudity, less of Brad Pitt's physique dramatically undraped for the cameras? Okay. I can see how a troupe of het film critics could get upset at the scarcity of female nudity in the theatrical version, while Brad and Orlando get to romp around in sun tan oil and smiles. I can just imagine the puffs of steam, or smoke, coming out of these critics' ears as they sit beside wives or girlfriends who're oohing and aahing over the cinematic beefcake. So TROY was always destined to be rubbished by mainstream movie critics!



There's a little more for these guys in the director's cut. Not only is the movie a lot more bloodthirsty (though nowhere near 300 or PATHFINDER. I'd put it on a par with THIRTEENTH WARRIOR), but there's enough nudie shots of Helen to woo the other side of the fence. There's also a lot of Mr. Pitt, who broods all over the screen and leaves the viewer with a lingering impression of animal magnificence, and also a kind of madness. Was Achilles thoroughly nuts for a while? I'd have to say so -- and if you've read your Homer, the original text of the ILLIAD only underscores the idea. This seems to come across in the director's cut more keenly than in the theatrical cut. Kuods to Brad Pitt on many levels. For having the guts to actually portray the 'hero' as a blood-hungry maniac for a while ... for being a major investor in the movie ... and for living in the gym for months. That physique didn't just happen. One can imagine the buckets of sweat spilled to make it happen.

And as a writer I can also imagine how directot Wolfang Peterson would have wept tears of blood in the cutting of it. A couple of shots, I could have lived without --basically, seeing people's heads get cut in two isn't high on my day's agenda. But violence was only part of what was added back in, in the process of restoration for the DVD.

Cutting DEATH'S HEAD was the same kind of 'tears of blood' chore, a trial by ordeal. (What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Yeah, right. You know that the guy who said that ended his life insane, locked up in a loony bin? What doesn't kill you can also turn you into such a head-case, the nice men in the white coats come to collect you one day!) Which isn't to say that I went bonkers while cutting DEATH'S HEAD. (Okay, I almost did; but enough sanity hung on by the proverbial thread for me to get to the post office with the manucript!)



Incidentally, if the writers among you would like to know more about how the whole thing was done, you can find the story on the NARC page, on the website.

Speaking of the website, it's actually up at this moment ... still under test in a couple of places, but it's been debugged and is running smoothly enough for me to invite you to visit. The address hasn't changed:

the main page.

The official launch will be in a couplre more days, because there's still a few details to be added in; but it's looking very, very good.