The first and roughest version of the Kingdom in Twilight trailer was out and linked to here, but (it turns out) iMDB jumped the gun in releasing it: so I’m removing the links. Sorry, all.
“The Dirty Fecker, a 24-foot motor launch, was towed safely to Dun Laoghaire Harbour in the early hours of this morning after breaking down off Greystones, Co Wicklow while on a fishing trip.”
And yes, “fecker” is Irish for the word you’re probably thinking of.
Oooooooo.
“Piercing the ubiquitous layer of smog enshrouding Titan, these images from the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer reveals an exotic surface covered with a variety of materials in the southern hemisphere.
“Using near-infrared colors — some three times deeper in the red visible to the human eye — these images reveal the surface with unusual clarity. The color image shows a false-color combination of three previous images. The yellow areas correspond to the hydrocarbon-rich regions, while the green areas are the icier regions. Here, the methane cloud appears white, as it is bright in all three colors.”
Once upon a time, I wrote a book that wasn’t published. (And I mean only once: this has never happened to any other of my books, before or since.) Now, of course, I sold it twice, but — Well, wait a moment, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The book had its genesis in the 1980’s when, with friends, I went to George Scithers’ place in Philadelphia for a fannish gathering. (Was it a PSFS meeting? I can’t recall.) Among various folks there was a young cover artist named Daniel Horne. He was showing George some of his paintings. One of them in particular got my attention — a painting of a young woman on a creature like a horse, but with stag’s horns, against a snowy, mountainous background.
Something about that painting got under my skin and started me wondering just who that girl was, and why she looked so haunted. I went home that evening slightly haunted myself, and the subject burrowed down into my brain and lay there gestating for a good while as other things went on. A story-editing job here, a bunch of novels there, a marriage, a relocation… 
Life did what it does, and the story continued to develop. Finally it assembled itself around a deep-seated passion for the Alpine regions and a fascination with European history, and became a fantasy novel which was bought in the early 1990’s by Transworld UK (that’s Corgi, as well as other imprints). At that time Corgi was bringing out the new UK editions of the Door books, as well as the “Young Wizards” novels: they thought they’d publish this one too, the beginning of a series called “The Raetian Tales”. This first book’s title was A Wind from the South.
Along the way, though, my stalwart editors, Mark and Julia Smith, left Corgi to concentrate on their own writing careers: and not long after that, the publisher decided to change its direction, as others have before, and let many of its “midlist” writers slide, or returned the rights for their books to them without publishing. A Wind from the South was one that suffered this fate.
Naturally the book was offered to other publishers over time, but none of them went for it — the reason I heard several times was that it was “too Swiss.” Uh…okay: much of the book’s action being based in that part of the world, this was hard to rebut. Then, a few years ago, the publishers Heyne Verlag in Germany acquired Wind. I was charmed by the idea that for the first time, one of my books would be having its first printing in a foreign language. But shortly Heyne itself was acquired by a conglomerate which downscaled its SF line (Peter was a victim of this as well: they were preparing to publish his “Clan Wars” books at the same time), and once again Wind was returned to me unpublished. In both cases I got to keep the money…but there comes a point, for a writer, where that doesn’t count. What counts is the book itself in people’s hands.
Between Corgi and Heyne, while the book’s rights were mine to use as I liked, I made an attempt to self-publish it. It didn’t work out terribly well: the technology (mostly my home laser printer, and comb-binding) wasn’t up to it, and didn’t satisfy. But times have changed, and technology definitely has. Things are now possible which I wouldn’t have dared dream of ten years ago, or even five. So —
In September 2004, under the “Badfort Press” imprint, the Owl Springs Partnership will be publishing Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South as a large-format, perfect-bound “trade” paperback (and possibly as an e-book as well) via Lulu.com — and featuring Daniel Horne’s lovely cover, which he has graciously given permission for us to use. The book will be available via online retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, and will also be available for order via chains and local bookstores. Additionally, if we can swing the space and resources, we’ll launch the book officially at Noreascon Four.
As soon as we have the book’s ISBN, I’ll publish it here.
Let’s see how this goes…
It had to happen. Florigene, a company owned by Suntory of Japan, has lifted from delphiniums and other such blue flowers the gene responsible for their color, and inserted it into the rose.
It’s still not sky blue…but it’s really close. And something tells me they’ll keep working on it.
(Once again, thanks to BoingBoing.)
“The archdruid of Wales has called for England’s most famous landmark to be returned to Wales.” (The bluestone from which the sarsens were originally quarried has been traced back to Pembrokeshire.)
“…And, he asked : ‘Since the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland a few years since, and it is clearly only a matter of time until the Elgin Marbles are returned to Greece, may I express a request that Stonehenge be returned to Wales?'”
…Um. I think first we should make him explain exactly how the stones were brought to Salisbury Plain in the first place. No explanations involving Merlyn Ambrosius, please.
From the Hollywood Reporter: “The Top Ten Things Michael Moore Did Right with ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′”
Isn’t this lovely?
The Cassini probe took the image yesterday.
From the team leader at CICLOPS — the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (Now that’s an acronym: they don’t make ’em like that any more…) — a pre-burn message:
“Anticipation is at its greatest. The pulse quickens, the mind races, the soul is grateful. It is a singular privilege to be standing on the threshold separating ignorance and knowing.
“…This is exploration at its finest and is precisely why we have come to this strange and far-away place.
“Step aside, Captain Kirk. This one belongs to us.”
From Ben Hammersley, via Warren Ellis’s crazed and delightful blog Die Puny Humans:
“Is there a bit of film, television or music that you’d really like to have, but which you can’t find on the net? Make a plea to the rest of the internet by writing it on your own blog, and then sending a Trackback ping to the new url: http://culture.lazyweb.org/lazywebtb.cgi
“Just linking to this page usually works. The Culture LazyWeb then creates a page for your request, with a space for others to leave comments, and an individual RSS feed for each request.”
Oooh, wow.
What I’d really love:
(a) For the US-culturally-impaired half of the household: the Alka-Seltzer “At’sa speecy-spicy meatball” commercial. (And about a hundred other things, but that’ll do to start with.)
(b) Jack Benny and the Penguins.
(c) Twinkles the Elephant.
(sigh) However, you need either a Movable Type-based blog, or the TrackBack standalone tool, to make this work. The standalone I should be able to figure out with time — but right now there’s too much going on: it’s going to have to wait a few weeks. Ah well.
(Then again, I have been flirting with the concept of duplicating OOA in Movable Type to see how I liked it. Again, it’s got to wait.)
“Germany’s Federal Supreme Court on Friday rejected a lawsuit filed by leading commercial web RTL Television, which sought to stop the sale of a device known as the Telefairy that blocks TV commercials.
“…RTL had argued the Telefairy threatened its financial interests, but the court said the device posed no illegal threat to the broadcasters.”
RTL says it’s going to appeal the ruling to Germany’s constitutional court. This should be fun to watch…