Saturday, October 25, 2003
Nothing new on the story yesterday. It just didn't happen.
Amazon.com has put the entire text of Threshold online. Previously, they'd put up a preview of the first few pages. I wasn't sure they had the right, legally, to do even that much, but it seemed like a good idea, so as long as my publisher didn't complain, I figured neither would I. But the whole frelling novel? It should now be possible, with a little patience, to read the whole book online and, perhaps, even make copies of it. This seems to me like a gross copyright violation, but one never knows what deals publishers are making with distributors and booksellers and not bothering to inform the authors of, because, after all, we only write the things. I sold electronic rights to Penguin-Putnam. They could have granted permisison to Amazon to do this, but I have a suspicion Amazon may not have bothered to ask. But surely they have an all-power, labyrinthine legal department that would have stopped them from doing anything so stupid. Surely.
I will admit that I'm a little cynical as regards Amazon. And I'm not putting a link to this. If you want to see (and learn how many times the word "shit" appears in Threshold), you can find it on your own.
I did spend a few hours working on Nebari.Net yesterday, and may get the Nebari Prime and Encyclopedia Nebari pages up this evening. I'm pretending this is work.
Spooky and I gorged on movies last night: A Portrait of Jennie, followed by The Haunting. Neither of us had ever seen the latter widescreen and doing so was a revelation. The film, beautiful and eerie even in butchered pan-and-scan format, has so much going on around the edges. And, I suspect, this was the intention of Director Robert Wise. Theodora (Claire Bloom) even remarks, in one scene, how nothing ever seems to move in Hill House, until you look away, and then you just get a glance out of the corner of your eye. And there's so much of mirrors, and mirrors seen through mirrors, and ever-watchful statuary, lending to the feelings of disorientation and paranoia, all of which was lost in pan-and-scan. If you've never seen The Haunting (I was probably nine the first time I saw it), it has recently been released on DVD and you should seek it out forthwith. It does something very close to justice to Shirley Jackson's amazing novel.
After The Haunting, we watched the Sci-Fi Channel's purposefully obfuscatory documentary on the December 9th, 1965 crash of an unidentified flying object in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. Is Bryant Gumbel really this desperate for a job? I do not discount extraterrestrial explanations of UFO phenomena out of hand. Far, far from it. But there's probably a lot less mystery surrounding whatever happened in Kecksburg than the SFC is letting on, with its dramatic reenactments, "town meeting" (groan), sloppy science, and rambling witness recollections. The network did grudgingly acknowledge the crash of the Soviet Kosmos 96 probe, which is known to have occurred the same day, in the same hemisphere, and which could have dropped a capsule identical to the "acorn-shaped" object that reportedly fell in Kecksburg. But lost Soviet probes and Cold War hysteria draw fewer viewers than alien spacecraft.
After the Kecksburg thing, we were going to watch Vampyr, but we both fell asleep.
My offer of little monster drawings with eBay purchases has proven much more popular than I thought it would. Which is cool. Click here to visit the auction page. The offer's good through November 1st. And yes, you will get a little monster for each book or CD you buy - 3 books, three monsters, and so forth. Now I shall try to make something useful of my self . . .
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