You never know where inspiration will strike. Author Neil Gaiman told SciFiNow that the idea for Statuesque, one of Sky1 TV's 10-Minute Tales, came when he "was at the bookstore Housing Works in New York, who had asked me and Amanda Palmer to do an event together.
"So we were in the middle of our event--she had been playing songs and I had been reading and in the middle we did a Q&A with the audience. People had handed in some questions and I had just read a short story that I had written and we were talking about some of the coincidences in knowing each other, in that Amanda had been a human statue and I had written a very creepy short story about a human statue. It’s a story that got picked up in Best Horror and stuff like that so it was definitely not heart-warming, about a human statue that essentially begins stalking somebody. We were just talking about things and there was one of those weird moments when words come out of your mouth and you’re barely even listening to the words that come out of your mouth. You’re just talking and I found myself saying: 'I wonder if statues have bird watchers? People who go and look at them and people who tick them off and have statue fanciers?' And there was a certain moment when I realised that I had a movie in my head and I had this short film, so I said: 'Excuse me,' and I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down, because I knew it wouldn’t necessarily be there if I didn’t. So that was really where it all began."
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Another book that will be published in conjunction with HBO's 10-part miniseries, The Pacific (Shelf Awareness, December 21, 2009) is Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific by R. V. Burgin (NAL, $24.95, 9780451229908/0451229908, March 2, 2010). Burgin, who will be portrayed by Martin McCann in the series, served as a sergeant in the First Marine Division during World War II, and is a veteran of the campaigns for New Georgia, Peleliu and Okinawa.