One interview, two celebrity deaths, two cool links and Gauck

Today I am interviewed by fantasy and YA writer Emily Ann Ward at her blog. Come on over and say hello. All the interviews I’ve done so far can be accessed from the interview page, by the way.

What is more, the world also lost two great musicians in the past few days. Today, Davy Jones of the Monkees died aged only 66. The Monkees were the world’s first manufactured band, created for a 1960s comedy series in the madcap style of the Beatles movies. I never particularly cared for the show, when I saw it in reruns on Sky Channel in the 1980s. The humor was too zany for me, though oddly enough I did like the Beatles films at the same time, probably because Richard Lester, who happens to be one of my favourite directors, was so much better at slapstick humor than whoever helmed the Monkees. But I always liked their music and I knew a girl who was a huge Monkees fan as a teenager.

On Saturday, Swiss jazz musician and bandleader Hazy Osterwald died in Luzern aged 90. Osterwald’s humorous jazzy “Schlager” were part of the soundtrack of postwar Germany. Spiegel Online has an obituary In his memory, here are two of his great hits from the 1950s, the delightful Kriminaltango and Geh’n Sie mit der Konjunktur.

Has Spring-Heeled Jack, the famous Victorian monster, returned to attack a British family? This news site report and iO9 both wonder.

Jeff VanderMeer has a great post on work cycles and why writing a novel a year may not work for every writer. I have a lot of sympathy for this post, because I also tend to work on several works at the same time. And even though I have been called prolific just today, my current one e-book a month schedule is only possible because I have a lot of backlist, both out of print and unpublished.

Finally, regular commenter Laran points out this commentary on Joachim Gauck’s alleged civil rights hero past in East Germany as remembered by Hans-Jochen Tschiche, a genuine member of the oppositional forces in the East German Lutheran church. Tschiche confirms what we have heard before, namely that nobody had heard of Gauck in the genuine religious opposition movement in the GDR. Tschiche did not meet Gauck until March 1990 – apparently, he was a bourgeois conservative even then. He also believes that Gauck is vain and is furious to see Gauck compared to Hans and Sophie Scholl, two university students who wrote and distributed anti-Hitler leaflets and were executed for this act of genuine opposition.

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