Right. Let's start all over again.
So I got up early, had breakfast with Julie and Kenny and Julie's sister Anna, proud, fine, upstanding library people the lot of them, started signing at 9.00am, signed for 500 people, finished signing just in time to get a plane that left at 2:20 (and got to the airport at 1:55pm, but the library, seeing that things were going long, had already checked me in and printed out my boarding pass online while I was signing. I like living in the future.) I read and wrote on the plane home -- I seem to have started a very strange short story I wasn't planning to write. Or not to write now, anyway. Read the things people had given me at the signing, including letters and a David Quammen essay.
The new Salt Lake City library is, without any doubt, the single coolest library I've ever been in. It's huge! It has a coffee shop and a comic store in the library! It has giant beanbags in the teen area, along everything a teen would ever want to read and "No SHHH" signs and badges! It has amazing views of mountains and more books than you can imagine and cool librarians and librarian assistants with pierced noses and blonde dreadlocks and Buffy badges (although not all at once). Did I mention it was huge?
Actually, the giant beanbags aren't beanbags, I was told, they're called "Love Sacks". I thought this was useful information, as I really wanted one for my office. (People sort of vanish into them, leaving nothing but a pair of waving legs and arms, like a beetle on its back.) I thought "When I get home, I'll do a web search for "Love Sacks" and find out where you get them." This was a mistake. You don't want to do a search online for Love Sacks. Not if you're after beanbags anyway. The results are not pretty.
Let's see...
Neil;
First the obligatory: great stories, great site, fantastic blog.
That completed, I have a relevant question about Sushi. You see, I live between Uptown, Minneapolis and Downtown. There is an ongoing discussion regarding sushi and, since you don't know us, and are impartially addicted to sushi, I would like to ask you:
What is the best Sushi in Town? I contend that it is Fuji Ya. Others claim Sushi Tango, Origami, Kikigowa, etc.
Your answer won't diminish our sushi endeavors.
By the way I stopped at Dreamhaven and viewed your awards: very impressive. It's motivation enough for me to keep writing and submitting. Thanks.
To be honest, Minneapolis sushi is much of a muchness. There's nothing that's outstanding, like a Nobu, and nothing I've had so far that's been dreadful (apart from Fuji Ya when they first put sushi on their menu, about eight years ago, but they soon got the hang of it). I tend to go to Sakura in St. Paul, because Miyoko and her staff treat me like family, and the food's good.
Neil,
I thought you might like to know that the Internet Book List (http://www.iblist.com/) has been set up, which is the equivalent of IMDB for books. Of the 1300 book titles so far databased, American Gods and Coraline are both in the top 5 most popular books, and you are third most popular author ;)
Hopefully you can plug this site in your journal, because I think they need a few more submissions at the moment!
Oh, and my blog as well if you like! (http://cyoung85.port5.com/blog/) Sorry, just being cheeky ;)
Cathy
I don't just randomly plug stuff, you know. Oh, wait. Yes I do. Right, consider them plugged.
Here's a helpful one for if the page hangs...
Journal Loading...
I've been having "trouble" loading the journal page too, both on my home computer and on several other computers at work. I'll hit the page, see the background load up, and then nothing else happens. _But_, if I hit the "stop" command on the browser, and wait a few seconds, all the text then magically appears. So it's like it's loading all the info, then expecting to load something else it's not getting, and it doesn't want to resolve it all until it's got it all to resolve. Just fyi.
Steve Manfred
River Falls, WI
Well, with luck we'll fix it soon, so that the page doesn't hang at all.
And for the person who was asking about CORALINE awards, I just got this from HarperCollins:
Congratulations. CORALINE has been chosen along with 8 other HarperCollins
titles to appear on the International Reading Association/Children's Book
Council "Children's Choices for 2003" ...
These are among the books that have been voted favorites by about 10,000
children in grades K-8 in five regions of the country who have read, or have
had read to them by a teacher, about 700 books published in 2002 that were
submitted by publishers.
An annotated list of "Children's Choices for 2003" is scheduled to be in the
10/03 issue of the IRA's The Reading Teacher. Meanwhile, our books will be
displayed in the IRA's "Children's Choices" booth and in the HarperCollins
booth at the Orlando IRA Conference, 5/5-5/8/03.
and finally...
Can you please let everybody know about the Neil Gaiman fanlisting site at at http://www.panavatar.net/smoke&mirrors/ ?
Okay. If I have to. There.