So, for whoever's interested: DC has just bound up the last 20,000 previously unbound copies of Endless Nights, and will be sending them out to the stores, bringing the first printing to 120,000, and DC has ordered a second printing, so there should be about 140,000 copies in print in a couple of weeks. It also looks like we can correct the tiny bunch of typos that crept in (the oddest of which, the word "memory" spelled "memery" in the seventh Despair story, is the most mysterious typo in the world, because it was spelled correctly in the files that went to the printer, and in every version before that).
I need to close a bunch of Opera and Explorer windows that are marking things I meant to link to when I got a moment. So...
Here are some strange and beautiful photographic images: http://entropy8.com/greatest_hits/hallucinations/ephemera/
What else? Well, Harold Bloom is a twerp. Steve King's best work -- Misery, for example, or The Body, or the Man in Black short story about the kid who met the Devil, picking a few just off the top of my head -- are as good, sentence by sentence and story by story, as anything out there, by anyone. This LA Times article is just puffed-up snobbery of the worst kind.
Here's a link to some articles on Endless Nights I may or may not have remembered to post: http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/news/106392072887765.htm
It hadn't occurred to us that people who already had the Sandman books would see the new Sandman covers and want them, but lots of people have written in en masse and asked about ways of obtaining them to put on their own books. DC's investigating a way of packaging the ten covers alone, the hardback versions with dustflaps, with a slip of cardboard, for more or less cost, for those people who want them. I'll put something up when it's figured out, if it happens.
Here's the first part of Orson Scott Card's essay on Internet copyright, piracy and MP3s: http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html
There's more on the same subject, some different but equally interesting opinions, and a fascinating look at Harlan Ellison's case against AOL at http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/archive_detail.html?id1=21
There's a short and not particularly accurate review of Wolves in the Walls at the New York Times (you need to register, I think). It's not as good as the outraged Amazon i-have-read-this-book reviewer who complained about a book in which
"Children live in a house with noises in the walls - and the noises turn out to be wolves with blood dripping from their jaws that come out of the walls and attack the family!"
She seems very certain that that no children must be allowed to see these bloody-jawed wolves; I wonder if she'll start a campaign to stamp out this sort of thing, and if anyone will tell her that if she had read the book she'd realise that it was jam...
Interview with art speigelman and Francoise Mouly about Little Lit 3 here at http://www.sacbee.com/content/lifestyle/story/7430851p-8373874c.html
I loved this article about an interview with Johnny Cash that changed someone's life: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1043707,00.html
I'm a Guest of Honour at next year's Mythopoeic Conference: http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon35.html
Someone wanted to know where the expression "safe as houses" came from. I like to think it's because houses are safe places, but really it's from the Victorian middle classes feeling the safest possible investment was in property -- a safe investment was safe as houses.
...
I have seen the Entertainment Weekly photograph, the one I talk about here: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/
2003_08_03_archive.asp#106032199878652529. I don't look like me at all. It's a billowy coat shot, and I look, well, as I suspected, rather like a Bond villain -- one of the normal-looking ones, not one of the creepy bald ones with no earlobes -- in some Matrixy film, who is doing something very odd with his hands...