Books!

Lancebloke wrote:A professional front and back cover plus spine for a book!

Halfy - no.... mine was lost in the post!!!

Neil Gaiman wrote:Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him.

I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.

In 1987 I wrote a book about Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By the end of it I had learned that I could write in a style I thought of as Classic English Humour. Douglas had science fiction tied up, Terry had fantasy, but nobody was writing funny horror. And an exchange in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, combined with a late night viewing of The Omen and a love of Richmal Compton's immortal Just William stories, had put a story into my head, about a demonic baby-swap that goes wrong, in which the Antichrist grows up to be a nice kid, with a dog and a gang.

I wrote the first 5,000 words of William the Antichrist. It had a demon named Crawleigh. He drove a Citroen 2CV, and was ineffectual. Proper demons like Hastur and Ligur loathed him. It had a baby swap. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. Then my graphic novel Sandman happened, and it was almost a year later that the phone rang.

"It's Terry," said Terry. "'Ere. That thing you sent me. Are you doing anything with it?"

"Not really."

"Well, I think I know what happens next. Do you want to sell it to me? Or write it together?"

"Write it together," I said, because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michaelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him.

Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”

The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”

"I don’t know," Alice answered.

"Then," said the cat, "it really doesn’t matter, does it?"

"Jackass," Alice muttered under her breath.

"Alice has no sense of humour," scoffed the cat.

You think ‘Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst’, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.

– Stephen King, “Joyland”

"To Kill a Mockingbird" will not be Harper Lee's only published book after all.

Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that "Go Set a Watchman," a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, "Go Set a Watchman" is essentially a sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird," although it was finished earlier.

Reactions ranged from euphoria (Oprah Winfrey issued a statement saying, "I couldn't be happier if my name was Scout") to skepticism that the new book will be of the same quality as "Mockingbird." Biographer Charles J. Shields noted that Lee was a "beginning author" when she wrote "Watchman."

The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and her first new work in print in more than 50 years, among the longest gaps in history for a major writer.