So Holly couldn't decide, and she couldn't decide, and she couldn't decide. The two schools are, as far as she is concerned, both perfect. Even the e-mails that came in from Bryn Mawr or Smith students and alumni were all from people saying "I went to --" or "I'm at --" Bryn Mawr or Smith "and it's wonderful". Nobody wrote about either to say "this place is evil, keep away". Even my own simple, straightforward, possibly brilliant and at any rate fatherly suggestion, of "Er, why don't you go the cheaper one, then?" was foiled when it became clear they were within about $100 of each other.
"This is ridiculous," said Holly, exasperated. "It's getting to the point where I might as well just fill out both applications, take them to the mailbox, close my eyes and post one. Then I'd only find out which place I was going to when the info packet came."
"Well," I said, "If you did that, you'd need a loyal accomplice to destroy the other envelope, the one you didn't post, and not tell you which one it was."
There was a long pause.
"That would solve all my problems, wouldn't it?" she said.
"And add some uncertainty and adventure to the world," I agreed.
"Oh good," she said, with a sort of wicked delight creeping into her voice. "I'll do that then."
She'll take two filled-out application envelopes to the post office tomorrow, close her eyes and post one. She'll find out which one she actually posted several weeks from now. And in the meantime, I have a daughter who's going to Bryn Mawr, or Smith, and I have no idea which. Either way, I couldn't be prouder.
An e-mail waiting for me this morning from a BBC person, asking if I could provide her with Dave McKean's history as a music composer. I thought I'd see if I could find it on the web, and not disturb Dave, who is in the last stages of making Mirror-Mask happen (they're casting, and he's finishing off the last of the animation storyboards). I failed completely to find what I was looking for, but found this interview with Dave at http://www.ugo.com/channels/freestyle/features/davemckean/ and another at http://www.dccomics.com/features/vertigox/mckean2.html.
And I thought I'd post them here.
There's also an image of Endless Nights material (it's from Bill Sienkiewicz's Delirium story) there.
And I should stick in a plug for Paul Dini's Zatanna: Everyday Magic , which I really enjoyed. I loved writing Zatanna in Books of Magic #2, and was delighted to see that Paul was writing the same character that I'd responded to. And it's very funny.
Lots of interesting comments and questions coming in (and Holly still hasn't made up her mind between Smith and Bryn Mawr. Personally, I'd love an excuse to visit Northhampton, but then, I'd also love an excuse to visit Philadephia, so I'm just waiting for her to pick. Several people sent me messages rooting for one college or the other, and they've all been passed on to her. If you think you've got a tie-breaker, send it to me and I'll pass it on). Anyway, deadlines are not my friends right now, so the various things I was thinking of blogging will remain unblogged.
Instead I shall point you at http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002481.html#002481 over at Patrick Nielsen Hayden's journal. Go down to Terry Karney's reply. It made me think of this Observer article on blogs and the war (which I actually found simplistic, or perhaps just badly subbed, with the most interesting bits of the article, the bits that pointed to the way that every shade of opinion can be found on blogs, along with information that you probably won't get from orthodox news-channels, being in there at the end). Terry Karney's report from Kuwait gave me more of an idea of what it was like on the ground than any number of "The atmosphere here is electric. You can almost taste the anticipation in the air..." TV reporter air-fill. (My father, who was in the British Army, doing National Service as a young man, once described war to me as "long periods of waiting around, punctuated by an occasional brief confusion of violence, which was what the waiting was for. Then it all goes back to waiting again". And I thought that probably that was probably how it was for the Roman troops marching through Britain two thousand years ago...)
I thought I would pass along some praise for Dame Darcy--she's touring in March and April and she still has a few stops to make as she heads west for home. I caught her here in Chicago and she read a story from her book FRIGHTFUL FAIRYTALES called "The Queen of Spades" about a graverobbing woman who is likely to murder dogs, meet ghosts, and lapse into comas. She also brought out her banjo and sang some sea shanties and murder ballads, accompanied by her guitarist Skippy. She talked a little bit about her comic book projects too, which include the swell MEAT CAKE and a forthcoming graphic novel called GASOLINE. It's the kind of thing readers of your blog might dig, so I wanted to pass on the info.
Matt.
Very wise. She's got a website at http://www.damedarcy.com/ and the tour details are posted at http://www.damedarcy.com/news.html.
Is there a plan to add a search engine to the site? Nothing fancy just a simple keyword search and results page. Is there any reference anywhere to everything you, Neil Gaiman, have written in terms of literary criticisms, introductions etc. That is, a reference to work you've written that comments in print on the works of other writers?
If you look over to the left of this page you will see a little book with a magnifying glass with, beneath it, an odd sort of squiggly word. If you place your mouse-pointer on the book, it may turn blue, and the word should stop being squiggly and say SEARCH instead. Click on it, and it will take you to the search page.
In the "about Neil" section of the website is a bibliography; there are lots of introductions and articles listed. It's not complete, I'm afraid, but it's a good start.
I've started worrying that the war is becoming entertainment, or at least the way it's being presented is. On each channel tonight, lots of clever on-screen graphics, lots of people who don't know what they're talking about giving the kind of general opinions that can't be proved or disproved. This article from Sue Arnold in the Independent made me feel less alone: http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/
sue_arnold/story.jsp?story=391780
Am currently writing an afterward to the next Steve Brust/Paarfi novel. It appears to be a book review of a many volumed book attacking the supposed author of the Paarfi books, and the sentences are convoluted things that rarely come in under 100 words. It's really fun, reviewing a non-existent book attacking a non-existent author, in a florid and antique style.
(Patrick Nielsen Hayden thought I should write the afterword like a Nigel Molesworth essay, but he is uterly wet and a weed who sa "gaiman you are the only person in the hole WORLD who sa blogger when he mean blog allow me to explane wot I mean at length hem hem" so chiz to him.)
And our bizarre but oracular word for today is gyromancy - 1557, from M.L. gyromantia, from Gk. gyyros "circle" + manteia "divination, oracle." "A method of divination by walking in a circle till the person fell down from dizziness, the inference being drawn from the place in the circle at which he fell."
The Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association will be hosting a conference along with their Annual General Meetings, on Saturday April 5th, In London. I mention this because a) it's interesting, b) this will be the first public screening of the film I made last year, "A Short Film About John Bolton". The event is free to the public, Ian Watson and Kim Newman will be speaking, and below is a link to some more information...
Following the success of Signs of Life last year, the SFF and BSFA
will be hosting another free event, The Goldfish Factor, at The St
Bride Institute, Bride Lane, EC4Y 8EQ on Saturday 5th April 2003,
11am- 6pm. Guests are Ian Watson and Kim Newman. The day will include
AGMs for both organisations, and conclude with a screening of A Short
Film About John Bolton by Neil Gaiman.
Amazon has solicitations for what looks like prose versions of the original Books of Magic miniseries, John Ney Reiber's first storyarc, and The Children's Crusade. You're credited as writing introductions for at least the first two. Is this accurate, and if you've seen the books, how close are the adaptations?
-David Snyder
I certainly wrote an introduction to the first one. They're very solid, fairly close YA adaptations of the comics into books, done by Carla Jablonski, who I had hoped to meet properly when I was in Edinburgh last year, but I was doing a signing when she came over to say hello, so we didn't really get to meet properly. She's also an actress and aerialist.
Hi Neil,
I thought you might be interested in this curiosity: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=38067&item=3215844864&rd=1
I love the conflicting 'expert' opinions on what the doodad actually is.
And thank you for maintaining an online presence with your fans. I feel like I know you now, and that makes your stories much more enjoyable - and "Babycakes" much more disturbing. :)
Theresa
You're right -- it's the conflicting opinions that make it so much fun. I would hazard that it's a transtemporal assassination kit. But I might be wrong.
As I began to mention last week, the most irratating thing about the gemstar ebook was that I couldn't use it to read books that people send me via e-mail, to copyedit or read through my own stuff, or to read public domain material. All you can read with it is stuff you've bought through gemstar. The previous generation of ebooks, the rocket reader, would show you what you gave it, as well as reading bestsellers and so on, and the only time I ever found myself liking the idea of them was when Teller e-mailed me to let me know he would be reading the manuscript of American Gods I'd e-mailed him, on his rocket reader, along with Moby Dick and several other large books, while on exercising machines, in hotels across India, while filming a Penn and Teller special there. I love books, but I also loved the idea of Less To Carry.
The Rocket reader used to have lots of public domain and so forth material, all of which vanished from the websites (FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE!) when they became Gemstar, and went down really to a fairly small selection of available books for sale, so when I was given mine I soon realised there was almost nothing I wanted to read on it. However, I see that Gemstar are now planning to reintroduce the idea of being able to read your own material on the Gemstar eBook. It's probably too late to make something so marginalised useful again, but it shows that they've realised that the other way wasn't working. Details at: http://www.gemstar-ebook.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/eBookstore.woa/wo/0.0.5.0.23.3
For those who don't want to wait, and have unused eBooks sitting on their bookshelves, the following helpful message includes a way to make them more useful again:
Dear Neil,
You mentioned that you have a Gemstar ebook reader, which comes with stupid, offensive software that only allows you to import bought books rather than public domain books.
(Okay, I don't think you used the words 'stupid' and 'offensive', but that may be a British thing.)
There is a way around this: you can download the old RocketLibrarian software for free and use that to import books. Here's a how-to guide that I nicked from somewhere and adapted:
1. Go to: http://www.rocket-ebook.com/Readers/Software/index.html and download the Rocket Librarian.
2. Install the application onto your computer.
3. Open the Rocket Librarian. Press the Insert key and you can import a HTML or plaintext title from your computer; use Control+Insert and you can import a text from a URL.
5. Fill in title and author information.
6. Right click on the title that now appears in your book list and choose EXPORT TO FILE, then save the book wherever you prefer.
7. Close the Rocket Librarian and open the eBook Librarian that came with your RCA 1100.
8. Click on TITLE, then IMPORT TITLE.
9. Navigate to the book you just converted with the Rocket Librarian. Then just follow the normal procedure for sending the book to your reader.
I haven't tried it, since I have one of the old models (and love it dearly) but it should work, as I've heard from other people who have done this.
Hope very much that helps, as you are one of my favorite authors (along with Lois McMaster Bujold, Patrick O'Brian, Dorothy Sayers, Ernest Bramah, Donald Westlake and Jane Austen) and ought to have all manner of good things, including free ebooks to read on the train.
Best wishes,
Katrien Rutten, the Netherlands
You know whenever Terry Pratchett and I get together, we always wind up, at some point in the conversation, often between mouthfuls of sushi, wondering why the USA has never declared Donald Westlake a National Treasure.
And, because I haven't ridden on the Brighton pier ghost train since I was a boy (when it was very very tame indeed) and now, it being history, I never shall, I post this, for all the people, like me, who wonder what they were missing...
Hi,
Just to say hi (which now counts as twice I suppose)and this..
My girlfriend sandra and I (who you might or possibly not remember from your coraline reading in london..the stories long but when you asked who sandra was, i said she was the lovely lady on right and you said 'ah' and still asks me why you did that..i don't know what shes bothered about...) recently (as in about november 2001) took a ride on the afore mentioned ghost train. She likes horror, i don't. It was was actually quite special. The first half lulled you into a false sense of security with things that you would expect in a run down pier attraction..battered rubber masks and string etc.... then, justy as you were dissapoted, got full on acid trip freaky...with a butchering murderer guy animated by wildly flaring strobe lighting in a clinical rrom with a bloody mess on the autopsy table, and a disturbingly almost real prisoner-corpse being shocked into animation and life and smoke about two feet in front of you. The worrying thing was....it seemed very real, and as we were the only two on the ride that night, you were left wondering if it had been all some strange hallucination. Either it was very clever, lulling your defenses down then shocking you...or the train had a darker secret. It looked very real...and we never got to go back and see if it was how we remembered it.
Now I feel like a paranoid muldertype. Have fun.
P.S the guys at Gosh comics near the british museum say hi.
Neil, just a little note that I thought you might find mildly interesting. I'm going to be interviewed on tonight's episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Jay got wind of a zany story that involves our cats, Gilbert and Calliope. It's a bit of a madcap tale. As for how it relates to you, the wife and I have named all of our pets after Sandman characters. So, if you do happen to tune in tonight and see some crazed guy talking to Jay about "Gilbert" and "Calliope"... just know that the names came from you.
Thanks,
Jeremy Bear
PS - the wife and I met you in Dayton, OH a couple of years back. In fact, that's us on your website Gallery:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/gallery/dayton.asp
There. Now anyone watching the Tonight Show tonight can get a warm fuzzy Sandman feeling...
There used to be two piers in Brighton -- long structures that stuck out into the water, made for people to promenade on, back when they promenaded, replete with theatres and whelk stands and dark halls filled with old penny-in-the-slot machines and What The Butler Saw. The West Pier, as I've mentioned here before, has had its share of strange tragedies. The other pier at least had a ghost train at the end, before the fire a few months' back, which I also mentioned.
Yesterday, I got an e-mail to the effect:
Hi Neil,
Went to the Palace Pier (now imaginatively called "Brighton Pier")yesterday.
Sorry to report that the Ghost Train is now completely demolished and gone.
Though, even when I went on it as a kid I never found it scary, just musty
and interesting. Harking back to a time when High-Tech meant doing
remarkable things with brown paper and hairy string.
Cheers,
Mike Graney.
Then I woke up this morning to several messages, letting me know that...
Brighton's West Pier totally burnt down.
Hi Neil, read your journal every day and love it. I took a walk down the seafront today in Brighton to see that the West Pier was ablaze. After all the trouble its had recently I felt really sorry for the poor thing. Here are the local news pics: http://thisisbrightonandhove.co.uk/brighton__hove/
news_features/west_pier_fire/I
have a few shots of the pre-burnt pier on my site too www.KingOfMyCastle.com
Take care!
John King..
and
I think I'm beginning to agree with you on the prospect of being reincarnated as the infamous Brighton pier. It's looking more and more like a really, really bad idea. In fact, it's making coming back as a building in Baghdad look pretty darned good.
- B. Bolander
The news photos are impressive. They made me sad, though: those piers, and Portsmouth's (which is still there, although the original structure was accidentally burned down during the filming of Ken Russell's Tommy and was replaced by something somewhat less Seaside Gothic) were the piers of my childhood. Strange...
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/18/pulpit-spiegelman.php is a link to an art spiegelman "In the Shadow of No Towers". art's been working on these for a while -- they're powerful and moving. I'm pleased they'll be getting out to a wider audience.
...
So, alert readers of this journal may remember that my daughter Holly has been looking at colleges. She's just had in a slew of acceptances (yay Holly!), and is currently trying to make up her mind between her two preferred colleges of the bunch, viz. and to wit, Bryn Mawr and Smith. And I'm sure that in the next few days she'll decide which one she's going to.
Her sister Maddy also has strong opinions on the subject.
"I think," Maddy said, "That she should go to Smith. Because I like the name Smith, and because if she went to Bryn Mawr it's in Pennsylvania, and then I'd worry."
"Why would you worry?" I asked, feeling like George Burns, in a double act with an eight-year-old Gracie Allen.
"Because of her getting her blood sucked. It's in Pennsylvania, you know. Where Dracula comes from."
"Er, Mads. You're thinking of Transylvania. That's in Eastern Europe. Pennsylvania's in the USA."
"Oh. Well, I still think Smith is a nicer name."
...
Wrapping up a final rewrite of Mirror-Mask, the film that Dave McKean will be making for Henson's. They'll be shooting in the UK. They've already started casting, and Dave's spent the last few weeks doing the storyboards. Today I turned on the Final Draft (screenwriting program, really good one) thingie that numbers the scenes, something I don't start doing until films are actually heading into production. So fingers crossed.
...
And, out of pity for all the people who are now subscribing to the various RSS feeds of this journal, I'm going to try not to do what I've been doing for a while, which was typing and publishing as I went along, just in case Blogger hiccoughed (or even hiccupped), and then going in at the end and cleaning up the stray commas. This means that typos and infelicities are more likely to remain, but that you're less likely to see a post repeated several times.
This came in from our ace webmistress, Julia Bannon, along with a rather thrilled e-mail about how Blogger had phoned her back and were working with her to debug the various issues (they'd found some broken HTML code from february, for example). Anyway, this is the bit she asked me to post.
"Dear NG.com readers - thank you all so very much for your emails about the archives going 'missing'. Turns out they've never really been gone, but due to some sort of time-stamp technical issue over at Blogger, they haven't been feeding correctly to us for awhile. Apparently they will be doing some beta testing of their new version with a fix for this issue in the next few weeks, so hopefully the problem will be solved relatively soon. I can manually fix the archives so they show up in the list, but you can also type in the url for the month or two you may be missing (if you want the May archive, and you see this URL - http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/
2002_06_01_archive.asp, then simply replace the "06" with an "05", and the May journal should pop right up). But every time there's a new post the problem crops up again...so its tough to do all the time. I apologize for not being able to reply to each one of you when you've told me about this problem, but I wanted to make up for it by asking Neil to post this for me. "
Got that?
Hello Neil,
Don't know if you've heard about this yet; but, because it won for best animated feature at the Oscars, SPIRITED AWAY is getting rereleased this Friday (3/28) to a wider market. (I've heard something around 800 screens) Seeing that you did such a wonderful job creating an English script for PRINCESS MONONOKE, I thought you'd like to know in case you haven't seen it.
I really love this film along with all of the other Miyazaki films I've seen. Could you please mention it on the blog at least, so that other people who never heard of it might go out to see it. It sure is a good film that needs our support. (Who knows. In a few years we might get a wide release for HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE when it comes out if this film does well in the coming weeks.)
Thanks and peace,
Joe J.
I was absolutely thrilled for Mr Miyazaki. (I still think it was a pity that Mononoke couldn't be nominated, as it had already been entered in a best foreign film category a couple of years earlier.)
hello, big fan, two questions.
1: you mentioned working on a shadow novella, do you know if/when/how it will come out and how people will be getting it? (IE, will it be hidden in a collection or released on it's own or such)
2: I am attempting to be a writer, and am up to thirteen rejection letters for about ten separate short stories. I have a friend who has made it a goal to recieve twenty five rejection letters this year, I am aiming lower, for around ten. My question for you is, did you recieve any? and if so how many before your first published story/book/comic? (if the answer is zero, feel free to lie and say it's like forty, that would make me feel much better about myself)
please keep up the good work. -jacob.
It'll be in Robert Silverberg's LEGENDS II collection. Which may or may not be called that. Someone sent me a link a couple of days ago to the UK cover on Amazon.co.uk, but I'll let interested people go and find it themselves. According to Amazon.co.uk it'll be out in August, but that doesn't really mean that it will be.
And yes, I got rejection letters. I probably had about half a dozen before I sold my first short story.
Given how popular your blog is do you now feel obligated to blog?
Toby
I was going to say no, but I sort of do. At least, in the old days I'd often not post for a day or so here or there: these days I sort of feel that if I don't post at all, I ought to have a good excuse, because I know how many people are reading the thing, and I feel guilty. Having said that, it's still fun, and it doesn't feel like some kind of genuine weighty obligation. It's still a nice way to warm up my typing fingers in the morning, to share cool news or to answer questions.
A small thing for wordgeeks (who probably knew this already) but I was trying to figure out an etymology today (was fascinated to discover that different dictionaries have utterly different derivations of Quandary -- some derive it from Icelandic and Old English, and some from Latin) and found http://www.etymonline.com/, an online etymological dictionary.
What is cooler and stranger than that, is that you can sponsor a word of your choice, to keep the dictionary going and viable. Herewith some words and their sponsors: http://www.etymonline.com/working/sponsors.htm
You've mentioned that Neverwhere will be available in June for us in the U.S., but I can't find it anywhere. It's not on Amazon.com at all, nor on Amazon.co.uk. Where will we be able to buy this?
I think it's now going to be coming out in September on DVD -- A&E want to do the best job on it they can. I'm meant to be recording a commentary track sometime pretty soon, and I'll post about it when it happens.
For several months e-mails to DC Comics would randomly not get there. There seemed to be no unifying factor -- I'd send them from different e-mail accounts, to different editors and to other staffers, at different times. Some of the e-mails would simply never get there. Recently Dave McKean sent a cover sketch to me and to the DC folk and copied it to me. I got it, they didn't. This was way beyond bizarre, and very discouraging. I mean, if all of the e-mails didn't get through, one wouldn't care, but randomly not knowing why an e-mail would arrive at the other end or not... it made one want to bang one's head against a wall. And AOLTimeWarner's computer people were no help at all.
Tonight, an editor at DC copied me on an e-mail she'd received from their computer people (about why an email took a very long time to get to her) that may go some way to explaining the problem....
And I quote:
I've been informed that the reason why there was a delay in the delivery of this message was because one of several keywords were found within the message. In particular, the word "SANDMAN" was found several times. This has been a telltale sign of one or more computer viruses, so the message was set aside to be investigated by a WB security person.
I'd be willing to bet that every message I sent them that didn't get through had the word SANDMAN in it. And that instead of reviewing them, the emails were simply automatically deleted as probable viruses. SANDMAN.... found several times... dead giveaway really....
Amused sigh. Good night.
This is not a question, more of a random comment really.
Around Christmas I met a real-life Punch and Judy man. (http://www.desktop.demon.co.uk/punch/). He is infamous in Brighton for his x-rated Punch and Judy (although he is more often found on the beach entertaining/scaring children).
He said he had a large collection of Punch and Judy books, and that one of his all-time favourites was about a child watching Punch and Judy out-of-season, and about how frightening the characters seemed.
He said the book was art.
Just thought you might like to know.
Thanks -- I'm always pleased when Punch and Judy Professors like Mr Punch (actually, I'm pleased when anybody likes Mr Punch). I loved his site -- if anyone's ever wondered what Mr Punch sounds like, you can hear his well-swazzled voice by clicking on him on the beach.
and two helpful ones from the same person...
Neil,
The LiveJournal RSS feed is unreliable because they're trying to suck all the items off your main journal page (see http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=gaimanblog - after the 'Last checked' time is a note complaining "Too big").
I got my cobbled together LiveJournal RSS feed of your journal to work by limiting it to 10 entries...although I get multiple versions of each of your entries - it retrieves every item that's changed in the previous hour each hour and so I often get the various revisions of an item.
Of course, -my- feed gives slightly weird output because you use odd characters in your posts (open quotes and open double quotes as spat out by Windows) which don't travel well in XML...
I think maybe it'd just be easier to remember to click an extra link to your journal once in a while. :)
followed by
Okay, having looked at it again and realised LiveJournal should only retrieve the RSS feed from my website once an hour regardless of the number of readers, it's probably okay to mention that http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=neil_gaiman_rss is a LiveJournal RSS syndication that doesn't suffer from being too big for LJ, does parse as a valid RSS feed and now even copes with those pesky Windows-encoded quotation marks I was complaining about :)
which is one of the many reasons why I like you people so much. You're helpful.
First off, let me say what a great blog you have. I never miss a day.
Now as a fan of Neil Gaiman, Sushi, and Food Network, I wanna know when where gonna see the three combined?
I can just see it, Neil takes you on a tour of great Sushi restaurants across America, while stoping at all the great road side attractions on the way.
I'm joking, of course, but we still like to see you do some t.v. appearences. Why not stop by Leno or Letterman sometime?
Thanks,
Bryan
Leno's never asked. Letterman's people are fans and used to ask, and I always said no, because I couldn't figure out what I'd be doing on there, apart from being a personality or something. It's the same reason I've always said no to People Magazine. One should leave fame to the people who want it.
Then again, if the Food Channel asked me to do a Sushi special across America, I'd say yes like a shot, but mostly because I know I'd learn stuff. And get to taste good things.
...
Have decided to take daughters to Walt Disney World for a few days in a couple of weeks. The last time I stayed there was when Maddy was a baby -- we went with our friends the Tebbels, who have Disney down to an art-form, and know what to do when and where to go and how to find edible food and everything, and I was impressed, and just a little scared by the realisation that this was a privately owned county. I've now forgotten all the How to Survive Walt Disney World lore I learned from John Tebbel. I don't even remember which roots are edible.
I'm glad to see you mention blackmask.com on your blog recently. I've been using the site for a couple years now, my only complaint - it dosn't have a copy of The Saragossa Manuscript. Any idea if the text is available online? The only copies I've been able to locate are far too expensive to meet my budget.
I'm surprised you can't find a reasonable copy -- there are some relatively cheap editions out there and still in print. I recommend the Penguin Classics edition (here's an Amazon.co.uk link to it and here's an Amazon canada link) and the Daedaulus Press 'Tales From the Saragossa Manuscript -- Ten Days in the Life of Alphonse Van Worden' is in print as well, ( Amazon.co.uk link here). The latter contains a fascinating foreword by Brian Stableford explaining why some people believe that only the first ten days of the Manuscript are genuine, and the rest of it a mysterious forgery, and is worth reading even if you wind up disagreeing with his conclusions.
Hi Neil:
Found this review in the Irish Times this morning. Thought you (and my fellow blog-readers) might like to see it as well.
Finding the right words to thank you for all you've given me is, quite frankly, impossible; believe me, I've tried. So, from one writer to another, perhaps this will put it best: when people ask me about the influences on my own work, my reply usually sounds something like this: "Woolf...Colette...GaimanGibsonBono." Strange bedfellows, perhaps, but that's one of the gifts you've given me: to embrace all the disparate parts of one's life without fear or shame, those two being the most powerful of human emotions, surpassed only by love, which, as a fellow traveller once said, first caused the sun and the other stars to move.
Affectionately,
Anne Ryan Barton.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/
2003/0325/941528278ATTUEREVIEWS.html
The Day I Swapped My Dad For 2 Goldfish: The Ark, Dublin.
Neil Gaiman's story is so elastic there's room to push out the boundaries and create a magical theatrical experience for children.
That's just what director Eric Fraad has done at the Ark, where the five- to 10-year-olds in the audience were by turns mesmerised and tickled by the ever-changing antics of the actors and the sheer fun on stage.
The story is told by Mathew Dunphy, playing a young boy who's fond of tricks, and Orla Fitzgerald, playing his little sister, who's equally fond of teasing him. The play starts with the two skating and generally messing around while Dad hides, as usual, behind his newspaper. Enter their friend Nathan, with two goldfish in a bowl, and a swap of fish for Dad is eventually agreed upon. Mum's not pleased when she returns, and the children have to go and retrieve Dad. But Nathan has swapped him on, and there follows a chain of swaps that brings a sassy girl band on stage, followed by a snooty posh boy with his butler and a hilariously eccentric family.
Jocelyn Clarke, who adapted the story, has turned it into lively theatre. It's very much a multimedia show, so there's something going on all parts of the stage at all times. David McKean's quirky and dark illustrations are projected on a wall, giving an ever-changing backdrop, while a video screen shows the tired children pounding the streets, so bringing an element of reality to the imaginary world on stage. The superb original music is by Max Tundra.
The cast of seven is made up of experienced, mostly young actors, and when they took their bow my co-critic, six-year-old Harry, couldn't believe that's all there was and wanted to know where the rest of the people were. Niamh Linehan, Simon Jewell, Emma Moohan, Steve Blount and Ailish Symons all played several characters with expert comic timing, characterisation and conviction. The children loved the live rabbit on stage. Bruno Schwengl's set design is as flexible as it has to be, and actors use it with great energy.
There's usually a simple moral to children's books, and here it's that no matter what mistakes you make, they can be put right, although there might be obstacles and it might take some time.
By Bernice Harrison
Runs until April 17th
It sounds really fun -- I wish I could see it. And thanks for the kind words. (And strange bedfellows indeed. But good ones.)
Neil,
Any chance of us getting permalinks on your posts? Now and then I comment on something you have said which I would love to point people towards, but cannot link directly to an individual post. I am sure others would love to do the same.
Adrian
http://www.sevitz.com
I keep asking. Right now, they're still trying to figure out why the journal page and archives are hanging so often, and why last June vanishes from the archives every time I post something, and I think until they've cracked that we won't get permalinks. I'd really like them too -- it would be much more useful for me to be able to link to a specific thing than to point someone to an archived month and tell them the date to scroll down to.
For now, you might want to link to the archived version of the current month, if there's a specific recent post you want to point at, rather than the main journal.
Dear Neil,
My name is Gith, the Eater of Worlds. I was going to eat this world but while sitting in a library in Slough (while digesting a previously eaten world) I stumbled across one of your books and found it so riveting I decided to spare this planet. I thought you ought to know, though you will not believe. Well done. I'll be back though.
Whew. That was a close one.
Those of you on LiveJournal would probably want to know that there's an RSS feed of this blog listed at http://www.livejournal.com/syn/ as gaimanblog. Which I mention here mostly because the more of you sign up for it the less it costs you in LiveJournal points.
(Having said that, this journal seems much more reliable than the feed. At least for the present.)
Hi Neil,
I'm a bit confused by your upcoming tour dates in Holland, it says you'll be in my country on april 24th-28th, but the Elf Fantasy link below those dates says you'll be there on march 20, which was a couple of days ago. So either you've got a serious case of jetlag induced amnesia concerning your whereabouts these last few days or the people who maintain this Dutch site have made a mistake, I'm tending toward the latter but it makes me wish your schedule were more specific as I've got serious plans of stalking you those four days. And while I'm already wasting your time, I might as well ask you another question: I recall you mentioning Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable somewhere, was that in any way a research tool during the writing of Sandman?
Hope to see you soon,
BrilliantMistake (I'll be the guy with the trenchcoat and the newspaper with two holes in it who 'coincedentally' seems to be everywhere you go in Holland.)
I looked at one of the English versions of the pages, at http://www.elffantasy.nl/fairprogengels.html and it seems pretty clear that the Elf Fair is over the dates I'll be there. I think the 20 Maart thing probably refers to the date that page was updated.
And yes, Brewers was an invaluable tool in writing Sandman, and in writing Good Omens and in writing many other things. (My favourite copy is the reprint of the first edition.) Without the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer Terry Pratchett and I would, well, have not known lots of cool oddments.
There are over 11,000 public domain books online, for free, at http://www.blackmask.com/page.php. A lot of absolutely fascinating stuff. Hours of delightful browsing, and it's won't cost you a penny.
(Somewhere I have a Gemstar eBook reader, but it has to be the single least appreciated piece of technology I've ever been gifted with. The previous version of the eBook was capable of reading public domain texts, but the newer models, which I had was only capable of buying them, and from a very limited choice. And I never really managed to finish a book on it, either, although I tried very hard.)
Anyway, there are Dunsany stories there, and Cabell, and Chesterton, and Saki and Arthur Machen, and all sorts of goodies there.
And, because some of you may fancy a trip back in time for a week or so, there's also http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MayLond.html
which is the online text of the first volume of Henry Mayhew's wonderful "London Labour and the London Poor".
And, talking about Henry Mayhew, he gets quoted, or at least, I get quoted quoting him, in an article written for the Worldwide Friends of Punch and Judy, by Professor Freshwater. who put on the wonderful Punch and Judy show at last year's World Fantasy Convention. She talks about how she was found through this here blog at the beginning...
I asked if she minded me linking to the article (it's a PDF file) and she replied...
I'm glad you enjoyed the article. It would be lovely if you'd link to
it on your blog. Usually only members of The Worldwide Friends of Punch
and Judy get to read Around the World With Mr. Punch, but we'll
consider this a free sample. If your readers find that this article
sparks their interest in Punch and Judy, they can check out the
organization
(www.punchandjudyworld.org) and perhaps join for an
ongoing subscription to the journal (also free.)
So here's the link to her article: http://www.punchandjudyworld.org/WWFPJ/gig.html
and Diane adds...
Speaking of blogs, the other day I was perusing yours with our new
puppy, Koira (aka Toby) on my lap. Koira said to me -- (knowing, as you
do, that my world is populated by vocal inanimate objects, you won't be
surprised to learn that my dogs talk) -- "Mama, if I'm to be a star of
the Puppet Stage, I ought to have a blog!" It seemed like a valid
point. So now she does:
http://freshwaterpearlspuppetry.com/koira/tobyblog.html
Neil, I'm sure as an author you expect to motivate literary endeavors
by your readers, but I'll bet you never expected to inspire a dog blog!
You know, I really didn't.
The Countries and dates of the European Tour are now up at WHERE'S NEIL. Links to details for Holland and Poland are in there -- as soon as we get formal schedules from publishers I'll put them up too. ( WHERE'S NEIL is http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/where.asp -- or click the link above or on the left. Really you're spoiled for choice.)
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
First of all, let me apologize, for this isn't really a FAQ, but I don't know of any other way to contact you.
I am a writer, first, and a soldier second. I am awaiting deployment to Iraq, and have found the anticipation of deployment an excruciating ordeal. Being a writer, I try to make the best of it, and I write. For those who believe that for the ordinary Joe, nothing sharpens the mind like a bullet past the face, I contend that simply the thought of a bullet is enough to sharpen the mind of a writer.
I do have a point. Through these past weeks, I have been reading your journal every day. I wish I could convey to you what your journal and your writing means to this particular writer during these times, but I don't feel capable right now. So I guess all I can say is thank you.
Thank you Neil for being a writer and finding the world interesting enough, and occasionally writing about it, or of worlds like it. I used to argue to my Professors that art is as much the product of the Creator as it is the Recipient's understanding of it. That a son grows beyond the control of his parent and inspires in ways his parent never intended. But I also contend that in no way does this take away the merit of the Creator and his brilliance.
And so, Neil, I want to thank you for everything...for the stories you wrote that have lived on in my own head, revised and interpreted to my liking, and making my anticipation of a probable bullet all the less daunting.
Your fan, and fellow writer and God of Infinite Worlds...
SPC Edward Chang
You're very welcome. I'm glad it helps.
And good luck. Come back safely.
This is a great snapshot (at Scott's site) from the Chicago Humanities Festival. It's me, Scott McCloud, Will Eisner and art speigelman in a hotel lobby. We look like we've been taken from four different photos at four different times, and badly photoshopped together, but were, in actual fact all in that hotel lobby at the same time.
In the Observer today http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,920286,00.html we learn that...
US intelligence officials said there was now a high volume of back-channel communications with officials inside Iraq. American military officers were trying, often by telephone, to coax their Iraqi counterparts into surrendering.
"Often by telephone" is sort of puzzling in itself. Are they also using homing pigeons? e-mails? long personal letters? And how do you telephonically "coax" your Iraqui counterpart to surrender?
�Hi. Mahmoud? That you? This is Al.�
�Ah. Yes. Hi, Al.�
�So, you thought any more about what I said yesterday?�
�Not really. I�ve been kind of busy. We�re fighting a war, you know.�
�Heheh. Tell me about it. So whaddayasay, Mahmoud � ready to surrender?�
�Not, uh...�
�C'mon, man. You know you want to. Didn�t you get the flowers?�
�Flowers?�
�Yeah. I sent flowers. I dictated the card myself � to a Noble Opponent.�
�That was you? They�re very nice.�
�And the photos? You got the photos of the house okay?�
�The house? It looks lovely.�
�It�s a time share in Puerto Vallerta. We�ve got it for a whole month in September but you�re a general, who has time to go to Mexico and knock back the Coronas by the pool? I guess you know how it goes.�
�Saddam, he�s not big on giving us vacation time either.�
�Well, listen, Mahmoud, you surrender, and I can tell you where you�ll be in September.�
�I have to go.�
�Hey. I hope I didn�t say anything wrong.�
�Not at all. But I�ve got an air force colonel on the other line. He�s been sending me pizza and boxes of candy. He says if I surrender his family are taking me to Disneyworld.�
It's probably not like that at all.
Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say "well that's not convincing" the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up.
This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.
I mean, I went looking for tacky caskets. The Last Supper casket didn't surprise me. Nor did the tulips.
Somehow, I don't think I could convince casual readers that I didn't make up this one....
http://www.casketstore.net/link%20pages/special%20caskets/Return.htm#top
I realised I didn't know enough about the funeral I was writing about. So I got a local paper last night and found a likely funeral and went to it, a bit nervously, early this morning, to watch.
I learned a lot of things, some of which will make it into the scene, and some of which will be left out but will still make me feel like I know what I'm talking about when I'm writing.
One thing that may or may not make it into the book, though, is this piece of urgent advice, which I will pass on to all of you: Do Not, even for purposes of researching a novel, Eat Curried Goat For Breakfast. One day you'll thank me.
Nalo Hopkinson's anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories is now out. It's got a story of mine in called "Bitter Grounds", which is one I'm pretty happy with. It has New Orleans in it, and the walking dead.
Michael Chabon's McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales is out in the shops as well. I'm less happy with "Closing Time", which is a ghost story, perhaps, about childhood. It's not a bad story, but it does, on rereading, feel more like a preliminary sketch for something, rather than the thing itself.
Peter Straub tells me that they may be selling Conjunctions 39 as a mass-market anthology, and will I hope call it something other than "the New Wave Fabulists" (I've seen some spectacularly dim reviews of Conjunctions 39, most of which seemed to begin from the assumption that Peter Straub had phoned us up to say "We, the New Wave Fabulists, a hitherto unnoticed movement, in a pitiful bid for respectability, are assembling an anthology and I need your most representative/unrepresentative/mainstream/slipstream story," rather than "Hi, it's Peter, I'm editing an anthology. The pay is pitiful, I'm afraid, but I've got some good people in there. I'll need a story in May if you've got one," which is how it actually happened.) I expect that by the time Conjunctions 39 comes out in mass market, "October in the Chair" will have been collected in the Steve Jones Year's Best Horror, and the David Hartwell Year's Best Fantasy.
The best story I wrote last year was the Sherlock Holmes meets the Cthulhu mythos one, "A Study In Emerald", for the Shadows Over Baker Street anthology, a story that is, I suspect, as good as anything I've ever written. That'll be out in September.
(There's meant to be a sort of theme to the next short story collection of extremely unreliable narrators telling you their stories.)
The phrase 'only write what you know' is continually being drummed into my head by my Creative Writing tutors at University. It's my final year and we have to write 7000 words of publishable quality. I've only just turned 20. I don't know anything. And on an even worse note, I have days when I *think* I know everything. How am I supposed to write when I know nothing and everything, and only have a few months in which to figure it all out? -Reen
Only write what you know is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream making love, and the rest of them.
You've had twenty years of living, and dreaming. You probably have a fair idea of what it's like to experience emotions, and to go places, and to do things, and to change. You've wondered about things you don't know. You've guessed. You've hoped. You've probably lied -- oddly enough, similar skills to those you'll have used in convincing a teacher that you actually did do your homework, but it was stolen by an escaped convict dressed as a nun, will come in useful in writing fiction. Ditto for the skills involved in writing a passing grade essay on something you know absolutely nothing about. Relax. Fake it. Mean it.
And you don't need to figure it all out before you start writing. You can figure it out while you're writing. Or you can fail to figure it out; that's allowed too.
Don't worry about "publishable quality". Just say what you have to say as clearly as you can, and try to enjoy yourself while writing it. Start somewhere, finish somewhere, surprise yourself. And 7000 words honestly isn't really that much writing: a page is about 300 words. If you only write a page a day, you'll have 7000 words in a mere 23 days. And if it really really really really sucks, you'll still have time to write a completely different 7000 words.
(The above owes not a little to Ursula K LeGuin, who I would have quoted directly except that as I write this the sodding journal isn't loading properly and neither are the archives with her quote in -- but it's somewhere in January 2003. The observation that if you just write 300 words a day you have a novel in a year was Stephen King's.)
From Sandman 50 (in Fables and Reflections)... Which was released almost exactly ten years ago, in April 1993.
Storyteller: "Go home."
His question unanswered, Hassan stumbles homeward, picking his way in a series of child's short-cuts across the bomb sites and the rubble of Baghdad.
And, though his stomach hurts (for fasting is easy, this Ramadan; and food is hard to come by) his head is held high and his eyes are bright.
And behind his eyes are towers and jewels and djinn, carpets and rings and wild afreets, kings and princes and cities of brass.
And he prays as he walks (cursing his one weak leg the while), prays to Allah (who made all things) that somewhere, in the darkness of dreams, abides the other Baghdad (that can never die), and the other egg of the phoenix.
But Allah alone knows all.
Neil,
Concerning the question of the credibility of the Baghdad blogger; Paul Boutin has made a detailed assessment of this and concluded that yes, this probably is legitimate. The name Salam Pax, however, is false (the two words mean 'peace' in Arabic and Latin respectively).
and --
Deal Neil:
I found this link at Wil Wheaton's blog. I thought you would appreciate it and might be able to put it up on your website. I don't know how many people will be able to do this but it's a great idea.
http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/
~Jamie
Absolutely.
Dear Neil,
I was just reading through your blogg and I noticed that you have Denmark on your schedule for your upcoming tour of Europe.
Will you be publishing a date, time and place for your Danish appearance in the near future?
Regards,
arni gunnarsson
Sure. I'll put up all the European dates very shortly. I think Denmark is in the second or third week of May, following Poland.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
Thank you for putting up the link of a blog from Baghdad, I've been checking it a few times a day ever since. However, I was wondering how do you know that the blog is written in Baghdad and not by someone with intimate knowledge of Iraq? Or that this could be a propaganda ploy by the U.S. government? I don't intend to stop reading it until I see some proof that it's fake. But how do you know that it's real?
Raymond
I don't. Although it doesn't read like U.S. Government propaganda. It reads like someone blogging.
(Then again, I sometimes get snarky e-mails asking if I'm real; the assumption being, I suppose, that I'm too richandfamousandbusy to do something like this personally, so the journal is probably being written by an underpaid typist in the bowels of the Harper Collins building.)
...
It seems that my own response to the war is to start writing a novel. I opened the large-sized Moleskin notebook today, pulled out my pen and Fat Charlie came puffing up over the hill to push his way to the front of the wrong funeral party. He is about to open his mouth and embarrass himself very badly.
...
I'm going to try and get permission to post thumbnails of the Dave McKean ENDLESS NIGHTS cover and the new trade paperback HarperCollins American Gods cover here. Not sure if I'll get said permission or not. I've made the Endless Nights cover my new wallpaper and told Dave last night how much I liked it.
"It's really gorgeous!" I enthused.
"Er," he said. "Um."
"Mark Askwith says it's the best cover you've ever done."
"Um," he said. Pause. "He was probably being polite."
"You don't like it do you?"
"Erm. Well."
"It is wonderful. Really it is."
"Er. Glad you like it. So. About the Mirror-Mask script..."
I suspect he's too close to it.
Mirror-Mask seems to be rolling. Dave's storyboarding it right now, they've got a casting director and are starting to cast it.
I merely have to take all the different scripts that exist for it and fold them into one draft that includes everyone's notes but doesn't change anything that Dave's already storyboarded. Child's play, he said, with a doomed and hollow tone to his voice. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a notebook with a funeral in it I need to be getting back to.
Dave McKean's cover for Endless Nights just came in. It may be the single most beautiful cover he's done, for any of the Sandman things.
I've asked Karen Berger if we can release it to the web, probably from the Vertigo website, as wallpaper and a screensaver. This is me being selfish, because I really want it as a screensaver, and it's also pragmatic, as I think that it's the coolest possible advert there could be for the book.
I turned on the news.
Male newsreader: "It looks -- for now -- like the Iraqui missiles have stopped dropping on Kuwait, although the all-clear sirens haven't sounded. Tonight should see the beginning of Operation Shock and Awe."
Female Newsreader: "And the Big Question on Everybody's Lips is -- How will all this affect the Oscars?"
Male newsreader (realising that this may be a slight gaffe, trying to fix it): "Er, the big Entertainment Question, you mean."
Female Newsreader (irritated at being interrupted): "Well, it's all we're thinking about in LA."
I turned off the news at that point, feeling like I was living in a rather broadly written satire.
...
Neil -- This article ran in the Washington Post this morning, and immediately I thought of Sandman #50. Under the circumstances, it's one of the saddest things I've read, but I think it would still be terribly sad even if the bombs weren't flying.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56350-2003Mar19.html
-Karin
and
Neil -- You may have already seen this article in today's Washington Post on the glories of Baghdad's past at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56350-2003Mar19.html. I couldn't help but think about your story Ramadan, and Haroun al-Raschid's desire to keep his glorious city just as he knows it. I think that it's appropriate for all of us to remember that what is now Iraq was once the paramount center for learning and science. -- Laura Gosling
I find myself remembering someone telling me off on Genie because, according to whoever was telling me off, Baghdad was virtually unscathed in the Gulf War, and I had the kid who heard the story limping home across a bombsite. I think I'd rather that they had been right and I had been, and remained, wrong. Right now it looks like Sandman 50 will have been more accurate than I knew.
And Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote to say:
I love the story about the talking carp, and you're Quite Right about
the procedures for dealing with them; but alas, I cannot believe it.
A talking carp? Maybe. And if I don't balk at that, a talking
prophesying carp is no big step. But that someone should eat a
talking prophesying carp -- no.
That, or there's a missing part of the story where the proper
authorities are consulted (with much finely-detailed argument) about
whether it's kosher to eat a talking prophesying carp, and what are
the precedents; and along about this time one starts feeling tempted
to invent an ancient numinous known-but-to-a-few and =very= oddly
annotated commentary on which mythic and legendary beasts are
permissible to eat, and how to prepare them...
Well, both Leviathan and Behemoth, the mythic and legendary giant creatures of the sea and the land respectively, are kosher. In one Jewish legend of the future, after the Messiah comes back, there's a tent made of Behemoth hide inside which the Behemoth is roasted, and so is Leviathan, and all the Jewish people fit into that tent. The men eat the pretty much inexhaustible meat and the fish. (The women are in the back, giving birth to sons, I was assured by Rachel Pollack, who is the only other person I've ever chatted to who'd run across that one.)
Interestingly, Leviathan and Behemoth will kill each other, which leaves me with several questions about how a giant fish kills a Behemoth in such a way as to keep it kosher.
Making omelettes with the phoenix egg is not recommended. The subsequent fires can cause problems, for a start.
Meanwhile, over at this Sandman fan site an A-Z of Sandman characters has begun. (It's up to issue 4 so far. Sarin's looking for volunteers to help annotate the characters...)
Fascinating review of a book on the history of masturbation, and why the act only became a sin in 1712, and what that has to do with the practice of reading novels...
...
And given the current events, I thought this might offer an unusual, and rather immediate, perspective on events http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/: a blog from Baghdad...
Over at her journal, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is of the opinion that stupidity is fractal: the deeper in you go, the more of it there is.
Submitted for your approval, ladies and gentlemen... The Case of the Stolen Lobster. It's from the Smoking Gun site. It's handwritten, but worth reading nonetheless. Trust me on this.
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR25.6/hynes.html is a marvellous essay on John Crowley's books, made only slightly less marvellous by the assertion that Little, Big is out of print (they link to some Amazon links to out of print editions), which is nonsense. It's very in print, and you ought to read it. Aegypt is out of stock at Amazon, not out of print, and in-print as an eBook, which isn't a bad thing.
Let's see...
I'm the Frederick Gundling of eBay infamy, trying to publicize my upcoming novel DISCONNECTED and my website (www.frederickgundling.com) by selling off minor characters in my first two novels. I'd love for more money to go to charity, but my first novel was delayed by a full year of editing, during which I reduced it from 401,000 words to a screamingly tight 175,000, and I need the extra cash to get a new roof and put a new a/c and furnace into this godawful 1963-contructed house I'm currently living in. I "retired" from The Washington Post at age 28 to write fiction full time, and my wife is going to take an ax to my groin any day now if I can't produce some sort of income. (We moved to the Middle of Nowhere, Texas in order to subsist on her income, so just imagine the burgeoning job market for bitter, sarcastic writers hereabouts.)
Although I've sold five characters for a total of $500, I made more money selling my rare Nirvana albums ($1,000) and my Bloom County comic strip ($750). And they say writers make the best living, among all artists . . .
(signed) a regular blogger reader since (almost) the beginning,
- Fred
PS: Curiously, a bare bones synopsis of Disconnected would look almost identical to a bare bones synopsis of American Gods, although they're both very different novels.
PPS: Why don't you talk about your wife more? Has she forbidden you??
Er, no. Not explicitly. But, unlike, say, Maddy and Holly, she's never once been known to look at me with a disappointed expression and say "Why haven't you mentioned me on your journal recently?"
Currently it's Spring Break at my daughters' schools, so she and Holly are on a tour of New Englandy colleges: they've seen Smith and Hampshire and Union and Skidmore and Bard and Trinity (I think that's the list for that part of the world). Meanwhile Maddy and my-assistant-Lorraine are heading off to New York for a few days, to see A Little Night Music and Hairspray. (And I'm recouperating and getting some writing done.)
Anyway, good luck with the book and the unusual method of raising money.
Dear Neil;
Quick questions. First, do you have any concrete (or at the very least well intentioned) plans to attend any comicons in the six month future? Secondly, is there any thought of doing a reading tour this summer (I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon then listening to Coraline)? And thirdly (and God help us lastly), have you ever thought of doing a chapbook of poetry? I'm sure other stories are elbowing each other as we speak to get onto the page, but it's just a thought. Oh, and (good God, did she not just say lastly???) if you could make up any monniker for yourself to ghost write under, what would it be? Please feel free to answer any or all. Thanks so much. Shalene Shimer
Names I remember using include Richard Grey, Gerry Musgrave (it was a Sherlock Holmes reference that was also a James Branch Cabell reference, I think), and W.C. Gull (it was meant to be W.W. Gull, as the previous reviewer had been M.J. Druitt, but the editor changed it because he said it was funnier that way). Any names I'd ghost-write under in the future I'll keep to myself, otherwise there'd be precious little point in having them.
(On rereading this, I should add that I don't have any plans to do stuff under a ghost-name, as A) My brand-identity as an author is already so hopelessly muddled that I can't imagine something I'd want to write that would have a publisher pursing its publishy lips and saying "Perhaps you should put out the pornographic cookbook under a different name...?" They'd just shrug and say "Oh. A pornographic cookbook. Right," and let me get on with it. And B) I'm not prolific enough that I'd face, for example, the problem Steve King did when he brought out the Bachman stuff.)
I do sometimes feel I ought to gather up all the poetry under one roof. I just need a publisher who wants to make it happen enough, I suppose.
Yes, I'll be at the Comicon in San Diego this summer. No idea what my schedule will be like there -- but in addition to whatever I'm down for I'll try and do a reading for the CBLDF members-only event (last time I was a guest, in 1999, I read 2/3 of Coraline, which was all I'd written at that point, and The Wolves in the Walls). I doubt I'll do a reading tour per se though this summer. I have to do some writing.
I think you'll find this interesting, basically you can now pay e-bay to be in a novel:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?
ViewItem&item=3507688165&category=377
especially the part where its mentioned :
Frederick Gundling, 32, is repped by PMA Literary & Film Agency. His first novel, Disconnected, is expected by many to be a crossover hit. It's the sort of book that might result from David Foster Wallace, Jasper Fforde, and Neil Gaiman being chained together in Clive Barker's basement for 90 days, forced to watch every episode of South Park between bare-knuckle brawls with Chuck Fight Club Palahniuk.
Good lord. Now there's a source of income for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund I'd never considered before. Is this for real? Yes. Fans have paid as much as $17,600 to appear in novels by the likes of Kathy Lette and Nick Hornby. By successfully bidding on this auction, you earn the right to appear as a character in Disconnected AND support a worthy literary charity at the same time. After you sign a simple release form, Frederick Gundling will create a minor character based on info you supply, such as name, age, and physical description. Although normally the charity takes all of the money, not 20%. Anyway, good luck to him -- if nothing else it's a fun way of getting people talking about a book that's not come out and that hasn't quite sold to a publisher yet.
hola neil,
you posted the cover a while ago to "Wolves in the Walls" and said dave had it finished. any news on its release? i heard you read it a few years ago on your last angel tour in chicago and have been waiting with baited breath for this project to come about. i work in an elementary school library and have not only made them order "the day i swapped my dad for 2 goldfish" and "coraline," but my boss (the librarian) has fallen in love with your work (after my incessantly telling her you're my favorite author) and is using your books in some capacity as her thesis for her masters degree. oh, and i told her all about "wolves" and she wants it here too.
sorry, i'm rambling. take care. good morning.
greg
The Wolves in the Walls will be out (from Harper in the US and from Bloomsbury in the UK) in August I believe. I'll find out if we can get a preview up on this site. I think that Harper actually went and got wolvesinthewalls.com so they'll probably be doing a cool, strange website with information on it.
Hullo Neil,
Reading your comment on "screaming meemies" I found I couldn't resist the urge to find out where the phrase came from. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/):
"Screaming meemies is World War I army slang, originally a soldiers' name for a type of Ger. artillery shell that made a loud noise in flight (from Fr. woman's name Mimi), extended to the battle fatigue caused by long exposure to enemy fire."
Though I rather like my visual of gaudily-clad older ladies with horn-rimmed glasses and pink bouffants, who run in circles 'round each other while screaming.
I also wanted to thank you. Thank you for sharing the frightful and lovely things in your head. Thank you for collaborating with other great artistic talents, and not being daunted into inaction by new mediums. Thank you for being polite and charming to your admirers, even when you're feeling off. You are an extraordinary person.
Thank you. I think I'm pretty ordinary, to be honest. I've got a talent for making things up and writing them down, which happens to be what I want to do. And for the rest of it, well, the politeness and such is mostly from knowing how I like to be treated.
Y'know, all the talk about writing and all is swell, really. But what people really are curious about is...Neil, Neil, quite surreal, how does your garden grow? Or is it too soon to regale us with a few offerings from the produce section?
Much too soon, alas. There's still snow on the ground at home.
Writers get freedom to drive sheep through Liverpool blares the Guardian headline.
At last! I thought. Those bloody shepherds have had it their own way for too damn long. It's about time that writers got the right to drive sheep through the streets of Liverpool.
Turns out that it's not all writers, though. According to the article, it's only five liverpudlian writers.
I wonder if Beryl Bainbridge and Carla Lane have their own sheep, or if the council provides them. Oh well. While they're waiting for their sheep to come in they can ride back and forth on the Mersey Ferry for free.
Hi Neil...
I'm sure that your inbox is filled with more FAQ messages than there are books in Lucien's library, but I just read this news story and thought you'd like it:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/03/18/
offbeat.weather.aborigines.reut/index.html
That's wonderful. Although it makes me want to write my Australian megafauna story, and I know it'll be a while before I can get to it. (Sigh.)
Please read me.
Right. I've sent this little idea to you twice before, only to have it either lost in the shuffle or ignored. However, since I'm convinced it's good - or at least interesting - I'm going to try and be clever: I'll send it again, but this time I'll write 'please read me' at the top of the message...
If you send something in and it's not posted here, it's still been read. Honestly it has. On a normal day somewhere between thirty and a hundred messages come in on the FAQ line. On a wild day it can be two or three hundred. Posting them all and replying to them would be a full-time job. The ones that get up do it mostly by whim, or luck. Most messages remain sadly unanswered. (But not unread.)
(Your screensaver idea was a fun one, by the way, and I've forwarded it to DC Comics...)
Dear Neil,
I saw this article in Japan Times and thought it may interest you: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20030301a1.htm
Regards,
Jon Deeming
Absolutely fascinating. It's astonishing how many cities really do have a secret underside...
Hi Neil!
In case you missed this hugely-amazing story from the front page of yesterday's New York Times.... It's the best news item to appear in the Old Grey Lady in months:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/15/nyregion/15FISH.html
Zei Gezunt.
-- DAN
A story I find disturbing only because they killed the carp. I mean, for heaven's sake.... Does no one read any fables any more? You're meant to marvel and then place the fish into a safe place, and take it to the king, not bonk it over the head and turn it into gefilte fish. And then it's brought before the king, and either it talks again or it doesn't. And if it talks it offers a little sage advice, and then it's put in a pool and looked after well until the end of its days, and it never talks again.
I find myself muttering "What do they teach them in these schools these days?" like the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
hi, neil. just a question about a phrase that i didn't quite understand. in american gods, wednesday says that the dead always give him the screaming mimis. could you explain that to me? english is not my native language and web-search turned up some strange stuff. thanks. jack
It's also spelled "meemies". Screaming Mimis/Meemies is a slang term for an attack of nerves or jitters.
Do you smoke? I've never seen you mention it in the blog, as far as I know, and you don't especially seem like the smoking type, but I just recently bought a copy of 'Violent Cases' (which, yes, I enjoyed thoroughly) and the narrator (who looks and talks an awful lot like you) smokes. And smokes rather obviously, too, as it opens with him lighting up.
I realize there's a distinction to be made between Neil Gaiman the person and Neil Gaiman the semi-fictional narrator, but I would very much like this to be cleared up. Thanks very much,
Ted
I used to smoke. I was a really good smoker, and I smoked well, and enjoyed it no end. I gave up smoking almost ten years ago now, and still have the dreams where I'm smoking again. "Oh dear," I think in the dreams, "if I'm smoking again, it means I'm hooked forever." And then I'm relieved when I wake up to discover I still don't smoke. You'd think after nearly ten years the dreams would stop, but they don't, quite.
Lots of people writing in to point out other nice literary female deaths. (I'm not quite sure that Charles de Lint's counts, since the story in question was written for the "Sandman: Book of Dreams" before DC Comics changed their minds about the Work For Hire issue, prompting Charles, Jane Yolen, Martha Soukup and Harlan Ellison to take their stories elsewhere).
I've gone off to convalesce. This should be a lot like being home only with additional sun and lots of walking and swimming and getting fit again, and also some sleeping. This is at least the plan, although two minutes after I got here the hailstorm and driving rain started (I put a much-bigger-than-a-golfball size hailstone in the freezer). And I'll write things too. I've brought pens.
(The only nice side effect of having been so ill is that I lost about a stone -- that's about 14 pounds or 7 kg, and all my trousers are no-longer-tight.)
Several hundred FAQ messages in. I'll try and get to a few tonight.
GMZOE writes to say: re: purity test
The FAQer didn't quite remember the question properly. It wasn't how Gaiman and Jones are related, it's "Do you know the relation between Stardust and Howl's Moving Castle?"
Oh. Right. That's a completely different matter. (The answer, of course, is John Donne. Or part of the answer...)
You know, I should do a photo gallery or something here of the collection of Strange Bunnies I've been sent ever since I asked Windy Lewis to start the Bunny of the Month Club and sign me up as the charter member. Every month I am made happy... Last month's was a centaur bunny. The one before that was a snow white bunny with one huge yellow eyeball, which would pull out from its body on a string with a horrendous ratcheting noise, and then slowly pull itself back. There's the bunny with the single ear and a lightbulb inside its head, and the Baba Yaga bunny with chicken legs, and a gorgeous mismatched patchwork bunny who reminds me of Delirium. They arrive wrapped in cloth, with mysterious notes and, on occasion, props, inside sealed-up coffee cans, to ensure that they don't get damaged on route, and they never do. From this, we can deduce that Windy (a) has a unique imagination, (b) understands packaging and (c) drinks a lot of coffee.
It's the perfect gift for the person who has everything except really disturbing monthly bunnies. (And Windy's ordering instructions, at http://www.morbidtendencies.com/botmc-details.html, are hilarious, as she explains what you get at different price points...
* The Fine Print
$35 is the full Bunny Club membership. You get your choice of bunnies, bears, or some of each (e.g., �I want 5 months: 3 bunnies and 2 bears�), and they are the very best efforts I produce, mailed Priority Mail, possibly in �special� packaging.
You can opt for a lower priced option, down to as low as $5. You may choose any amount between $5 and $35, and prepay the number of months you desire.
Examples of what you can expect for different costs:
� $25�Still Priority Mail, you may get bunnies, bears, even a cow or a penguin. Still very keen animals. They will not be packed in weird materials or unusual boxes.
� $15�Still Priority Mail, these may well not have any arms, or be a shade of pink I didn�t really like all that much.
� $10�Definitely looking like leftovers cobbled together, may have one ear, the bottom half of a fish, or may be perfectly normal except for the weapon.
� $5�By the cheapest possible method, I will send you some mismatched eyes, or maybe a torso, or a set of arms. Who can say?
And that from someone whose website includes a page of art for sale that ranges from an Alien Duck to batskull earrings to the evocatively but accurately named Things in Jars.)
Dear Mr. Gaiman
Many years ago I read a short story that captured my interest and imaganation but have not come across it since then, in spite of all my searching. The story is about an elderly victorian lady of some fame and wealth. Although her friends admirer her greatly, she is tiered of their company and decides to invite Death to a party to generate some excitment. When Death finally shows up, she is a little girl. I was hoping, as a last resort, that you may have come across this story and could tell me who wrote it, or the title, or anything that would help me fide it.
Thanks very much
~michael
Sounds like Peter S. Beagle's lovely short story "Come, Lady Death". Which contains, I think, the only other literary Death who's both female and nice.
your mention of miyazaki and howl's moving castle (squeee, fangirly goodness, pardon me while i spontaneously combust...!!!) ...ahem... that mention prompts me to ask a question i've been wondering about for some time. i once took an online 'neil gaiman purity test' and one of the questions was 'do you know what the connection is between neil gaiman and diana wynne jones?' assuming the answer wasn't 'i really like both their works,' i don't know - and i have always wondered. can you fill me in?
I'm not sure which one they meant, to be honest. I dedicated Books of Magic to Diana (and three other witches), she dedicated Hexwood to me, whereupon I wrote a poem about it which you may be able to find by searching for her name on the search function (as I put up on this blogger a while ago). She put me, as me, on a panel at the convention in Deep Secrets, and gave a breakfasty thing that had happened to both of us to a character in the same book (I was the one who ate the breakfast in question. Not a morning person). I got her a griffin for her birthday last year. My family flew on a plane to Minneapolis with Diana once, and I got to experience her famous travel jinx at first hand. Diana told me a couple of years ago that I was the first adult who wasn't either a teacher or a children's librarian to tell her, back in 1984 or 85, that I loved her books, which still makes me happy. I started reading The Magicians of Caprona to Maddy tonight. Pick any answer or none.
More info on Mr Miyazaki's film of Howl's Moving Castle at http://nausicaa.net/miyazaki/howl/
And the best Diana Wynne Jones website seems to be http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/ at which she answers questions and is generally spiffing.
I know that you said that the Archives problems had been fixed, but the link for May, 2002 still takes one to June, 2002. The link for July, 2002 still takes one to August, 2002, and there is still no way to find May or July other than fiddling with the URL (which I'm happy to do, but what about those that don't think of that option?).
Thanks so much for your work, both on screen and in books, graphic and otherwise. I try to introduce as many friends as I can to your writing, not only b/c I think it will enrich their lives, but also b/c I'm tired of beginning sentences with "Well, Neil says," and getting blank stares (or, in the case of my girlfriend, that look that says, "I love him, even if he's being brainwashed by the internet.") in return.
Thanks again,
jeff
btw, I also sent the Archives thingie to Julia the Webmistress
The problem seems to be that while we can fix it as much as we like, it only stays fixed until the next time I post something, at which point it just reverts to its natural entropic not actually working sort of state.
Our web people (ie Julia and the authors on the web gang) think that the problem is at Blogger's end, and when I last heard they had an ambitious plan involving getting someone from Blogger on the phone to actually help sort it out.
...
I used to love Alistair Cooke's Letters From America. The last one baffled me enough when I heard it on the Radio 4 live feed that I went to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/2839739.stm and read it. In the old days he'd circle a topic, apparently change the subject, then dive back to the subject he started on, often illuminating both subjects. These days it seems like he just picks a place to start and talks until the time is up.
Anyway, reading the new one, which begins with the United Nations, nips over to Philip Larkin and closes with Mr Rogers, the penny sort of dropped for me: Cooke's talks have become more or less the equivalent of blogger entries -- this is what I'm thinking of, reading, wanted to tell you, am reminded of.... And as such they don't actually have to go anywhere. He's old, wise, articulate, and almost never dull.
Over at Jonathan Strahan's blog, at the February 26th entry, is a piece of promotional art for Miyazaki's film of Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. I never quite imagined the castle moving like that, on little luggage feet, but it looks pretty wonderful.
Hi Neil-
I apologize if this isn't the proper form of contact but I couldn't find an email address. You stated in the bit about the laptop that momentarily means "for a moment" rather than "in a moment". I recall that particular question being addressed in an episode of a show called Sports Night, written by Aaron Sorkin, where towards the end someone said that momentarily means both "for a moment" and "in a moment".
I'm more inclined to believe you than a random bit off a tv show, but I thought I'd mention it.
thanks
Matthew
Language is a river, it's not fixed. The meanings of words change, and any rear-guard action to try and keep them meaning what you think they ought to mean is doomed. So momentarily does now mean "in a moment" as well as "for a moment" because that's how people use it, just as hopefully no longer means "in a way that's filled with hope" (as in "We walked hopefully toward the city on the hill") but it also means, and is mostly used to mean "I hope that", and enormity which once meant "monstrous badness" also means "enormousness" because that's how people use it.
On the one hand, grumbling is pointless. Language is a river. Go back a few hundred years and many words would have shades of meaning they no longer have. Go back a little further and you'll find yourself tripped up by the most common and simple words which would mean something quite different ( Silly originally meant "innocent", for example.)
On the other hand, I'm still going to grumble, because as a writer, whenever a word with a precise meaning loses it, I lose a tool.
Neil,
I was reading in your journal about the issue of physical quality of US paperbacks versus UK paperbacks. I buy a lot of Fantasy, and mostly it's perfectly fine a few years down the line. Admittedly, I've only had most of it for 2 or 3 years. The point to this though, is that I am a big fan of Robert Jordan, or at least have been, and so I hang around with some of the communities based on his books online. It's a universal truth among his fans that the American versions of his books (published by Tor) are worthless physically, while the UK versions (from Orbit) are really good. Maybe this is the exception that proves the rule, but all I know is, my one US paperback from Tor fell apart after one read, while my range of UK copies have survived multiple re reads by myself and others. I'm not going to be ordering books from the US if I can avoid it any time soon..
Shaun O' Connor
Belfast, N. Ireland
There are certainly some worst offenders on both sides...
On the other side of the internet, Sharon the Dell Employee cringes behind her monitor. Her only consolation is that she is a very small cog--and not a customer-facing cog, either--in a very large machine, and has nothing to do with Mr. Gaiman's experiences with her company's products or its support agents. She hopes that he will be able to return to his craft soon, free of the burden of technical woes, because a horde of angry fangirl netizens is a terrifying force of nature.
Oh, I'm not really grumbling at Dell. I mean, I've been using Dell computers since about 1988, despite the single worst piece of customer relations I've ever experienced, in around 1996. ( Me: Look, if you really don't want to fix it, I'll buy my next computer from someone else. Dell Support Guy: Like we care? Whatever. You'll be back. Me: Puts down phone and buys a Gateway.) I'm perfectly aware that this one was just random bad luck, and just wanted to vent.
Anyway, I'm almost enjoying the winnowing process of sticking stuff on a clean computer.
Hi Neil,
To begin this letter I was wondering "why tell him he's the best, his books are my all-time favourites along with JRR Tolkien ones if everybody tells him so?" and then I remembered: Because YOU ARE THE BEST.
Anyways, I was wondering (but without much hope as I didn't see your name on the lists) if you've been invited to the 23rd Salon du livre de Paris wich takes place between the 21st an 23rd of March.
Oh and by the way, you can broaden your statement: While the comuputer is still doing what you bought it for never complain for anything happening to it, or if you complain, try to look mad, always worked with AOL's Hotline.
Damien
Nope -- I'll be in France on the European tour in I think the third week of May. (The current sequence is Holland, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Italy and France.)
The morning began with an e-mail from Oliver Morton (Author of Mapping Mars. Read it, enjoy it, vote for it in non-fiction categories whenever you see it nominated.) He sent me this link to Roger Ebert's column, and pointed out the following fascinating exchange:
Q. In "Back to the Future" on TNT, they showed a scene of Marty writing a letter to Doc Brown, warning him about being shot by terrorists in the future. As Marty reads the letter aloud, I noticed that him saying "by terrorists" had been muted. And when they showed a closeup of the letter, the words "by terrorists" had been digitally erased!
Steven Knauts, Atlanta
A. Bob Gale, the producer of the movie, says he is amazed that TNT would take out "terrorist." He doesn't think director Bob Zemeckis knows about it, and it couldn't have come from the studio, so it must have come from TNT. All of my queries to TNT have gone unanswered. A splendid new DVD edition of the "Future" trilogy provides access to the unedited films.
Meanwhile, for three weeks, on Radio 4, Bob Monkhouse is doing a series about "Radio Fun" comics, a weekly british comic that started in the 1930s. Bob Monkhouse is best known as a comedian and game show host presenter with a kind of smarmy public personality, but he's very funny (I believe the line about "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father -- not screaming and sobbing like the passengers on his bus," originated with him) and a huge comics collector and reader. Whenever I used to sign in Andromeda in Birmingham I'd have to sign a mail order copy of whatever comics or graphic novels I had newly out "For Bob". Anyway, I know much more about American comics of the 30s and 40s than I do about their equivalents in the UK, so am looking forward to checking it out on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/radiofun.shtml
And according to http://start.earthlink.net/newsarticle?cat=0&aid=D7PN8GH00_story (which is, curiously enough, not an Onion parody) Congress has renamed French Fries (for people who didn't need any explanation of who Bob Monkhouse was, that's what the Americans call chips. They keep the word chips in reserve for crisps.), er, anyway, they've renamed them Freedom Fries, to signify their displeasure with their perfidious former allies. Coming soon in America: sticking your tongue in someone's mouth will be known as freedom kissing, condoms will be freedom letters, while British Actor, Coraline audio reader and the new Harry Potter, Dawn French, will, for appearances in America, be forced to change her name to Dawn Freedom. In Congress they will breakfast on Freedom toast, smear Freedom mustard on their steaks and drink, well, Californian Wine I expect.
However, at least when shown on TNT, we can assume that the film The French Connection will be shown as, simply, The Connection, and that any specific source for this connection's location will have been digitally erased.
...
I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I'm English, after all. We have a special relationship with the French: we are in awe of their sophistication, their cuisine and their wines, we think their women are beautiful, we like them as individuals, we badly want to go and live in their country when we retire, while at the same time we are deeply suspicious of them. It's like having people living next door to you who may be snappier dressers and better cooks, but who, after all, borrowed the lawn mower sometime in the thirteenth century and never gave it back. Anyway, the English dislike the French. We're really good at it. We've been doing it ever since we got up one day and realised that the Norman Conquerors were now, like it or not, Us, and weren't conquering French people any more. We feel, frankly, that if anyone's going to dislike the French, it's going to be us. On the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines, buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English do it with an English accent on purpose.
These are tactics we've worked out over the course of hundreds of years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its knees. I'm English. I know these things.
Changing the name french fries to freedom fries, on the other hand, will just make them laugh at you.
This in from Rick Mueller, about the film on Douglas Adams, which he made and I narrated:
The inaugural Garden State Film Festival has selected LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND
DOUGLAS ADAMS as a finalist in their Documentary Film competition category.
The film will be screened on April 12th at the historic Paramount Theater on
the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Tickets and showtimes are available at the festival's website www.gsff.org and more information about the film is available on
my website www.pointbreak-productions.com
I hope you can join us on the boardwalk in Asbury Park for an afternoon of
film and fun on April 12th.
Rick also tells me that the greenmanreview site awarded him one of their prestigious but unfortunately-named Greenies for it, along with ones for this website and Coraline.
Two boxes of books arrived today: the Hungarian edition of American Gods, a lovely-looking book, with an extensive (17 page) glossary at the back, defining and informing on everything from Odin to Laphroig to Louise Brooks. It was something I kept thinking about doing while I wrote the book, so was glad that someone had...
The other book was the UK schools edition of Coraline -- a thin hardback with a laminated cover that looked exactly like the books we'd get when I was a school -- sturdy little books, but cheaply enough produced that you could buy enough for a class, rather than one for the school library, and I felt bizarrely proud, and blinked, realising I was going to be taught in schools, and that unwary children are soon going to be picking it up and reading it...
Which reminds me:
Hi Neil,
I was wondering if you had seen this article (http://slate.msn.com/id/2079769/) about how British-made books (the physical books, that is, not the writing) don't hold up compared to their American counterparts. Do you agree and do you have any prime examples? Also, there's quite a suggestive misspelling on the where's Neil page:
Where's Neil:
Friday, March 7 Author Neil Gaiman
and Saturday March 8 Free to the pubic
Hehe! Thanks,
BP
Ah yes, but it was a typo from the website it was cut and pasted from. My favourite typo like that was in a Jeff Rovin biography of Joan Collins I had to review as a very young man. It told us at one point that "Joan was in New York at this time for some pubicity".
Yes, it's broadly true about the books. Not entirely, though, and not always. American mass market paperbacks seem to yellow and fall apart at pretty much the same rate that most UK mass market paperbacks do. But US trade paperbacks always seem to be printed on better paper (it tends to be whites, and possibly to have a higher fabric content in the pulp). UK hardbacks tend to be, but are not always, the paperback insides put between hardcovers, so you have the same paper quality as a paperback. This is because hardbacks are widely considered to be a dead market in the UK. I don't know why this is -- for lots of my books, Neverwhere for example, the publisher would explain that no-one bought hardbacks, and then grudgingly bring out 1500, which would be sold out within a week. Even Coraline was originally going to be a paperback original in the UK ... then it made it to hardback and paperback, then, when the sales reps came back with feedback, into hardback, and then it just kept selling in hardback. But that's not common, so publishers' economics tend to be centred around paperbacks.
Darren McKeenan from Gothic.net sends an e-mail to say...
I don't know if Caitlin told you, but we have a previously unpublished
short story by her up at http://www.gothic.net -- I thought your readers
might want to know. Also, Jilli Venters was picked to be a YAHOO PICK OF
THE WEEK for her http://www.gothicmissmanners.com site -- and of course, it
all started out on gothic.net too.
Which I'm happy to plug, if only because both Caitlin and Jillian are old friends. (Jillian adds a touch of class to all signings and events in the Seattle area by looking, well, perfect, and has, in the past, been the only bodyguard I've ever had with either a top hat or wings. So if I were you, I'd be inclined to take whatever gothic miss manners advice she wants to hand out...)
Also, of course, it's good advice... (I'll cut and paste a delightful sample.)
Rule the First: do not break up with someone over email. Tacky, tacky, tacky. However, even WORSE than that is to not bother breaking up with someone, but let them discover your affections are moving elsewhere via reading a web journal or blogger.
Now, Gothic Miss Manners is sure that ALL of you are horrified to find that she even has to spell that out. Goodness knows Gothic Miss Manners was horrified when she heard about this sort of thing happening. It is her very sorry duty to report that yes indeed, there are shallow and clueless people out there who obsessively update their web journal with their every thought and emotional whim, but seem to forget to tell others in their lives about the thoughts and emotional whims that might have an impact on those others.
Which brings us to Rule the Second: after the break-up, do not post personal details and habits about your ex on your on-line journal. Don�t. That sort of venting and carrying on should be strictly private, and only indulged in where various semi-acquaintences and bored strangers surfing the web won�t run across it. Catharsis is all well and good, but PUBLIC catharsis can be messy. After a romantic flame-out, both parties concerned should try to appear as calm and rational as possible (in public, that is. In private, feel free to vent your spleen, cry, denounce the other party as a loathsome cad. But ONLY do that IN PRIVATE, or in the company of friends who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut).
Why is this such a big deal? Part of it is the Golden Rule of �treat others the way you would like to be treated.� In the event of the dissolution of a romance, would you want the other party to be posting things such as, �My ex was stupid, smelled funny, and laughed at only their own jokes?� Would you want that posted in a forum where anyone with a connection to the internet could run across it and read it?
(Wait, wait, Gothic Miss Manners can see one of you waving a hand. No, leaving out the person�s name doesn�t make it any better, and is a coward�s excuse. Or are you going to try and tell Gothic Miss Manners that you and your ex had no mutual acquaintances or friends who might read your webpage? Oh, you don�t care what they think? Then perhaps you shouldn�t be allowed to have romantic entanglements.)
Read and enjoy.
...
And it's astonishing the number of FAQs that have arrived in the last few minutes that began "I have a Dell Latitude as well, and...."
Other people's Problems with Computers stories are like other people's dreams. Your own are, of course, absolutely fascinating, while theirs are kind of dull, because they happened to them, not to you.
This one's mine. And even I don't think it's one of the really interesting ones.
My computer, a very nice, fairly new Dell Latitude, wouldn't turn on a couple of weeks ago, while I was sick. I phoned the Dell helpline, sat on hold (actually lay on hold) for an hour while an irritating voice told me they'd be with me momentarily and I thought a) momentarily means for a moment and not in a moment, and b) whatever it means, you're not so why do keep saying that? Eventually I got a person, who told me I should be phoning the Gold Support Line, not the normal line, and I pointed out they keep the Gold Support Line phone number super secret and don't post it anywhere just to prevent things like that happening. And I copied down the number and phoned the Gold line, and it was picked up immediately by someone who fixed the problem over the phone (I had to unplug the battery and the power and hold down the power button for 15 seconds, and then everything would be all right. And it was.)
"Is there anything else wrong?" he said.
I should have kept my mouth shut. Instead I said, "Well, there's a tiny hairline crack in the plastic case on the front. I mean, you can barely see it, but maybe it should be fixed while it's still under warranty..."
"Not a problem," he said. "We'll send someone over to fix it."
Several days later a nice man came over, and swapped the cracked case for an uncracked case. "That's odd," he said, when he had finished. "Did your keyboard used to work?"
"Oh yes," I said. "It worked like billy-oh."
"Well," he said. "It doesn't now. I'll need some more parts."
He came back a few days later with a new keyboard. "That's funny," he said, after a while. "You'd think it'd work now."
He came back a few days after that. "You know," he said, "you'd think that with a new motherboard and new keyboard, and well, pretty much everything except a new hard disk, that the keyboard would work. There's nothing I've not replaced. Had you noticed any other troubles with it, I mean before?"
"No," I said. "It had a little hairline crack in the case when it arrived, but you fixed that."
He phoned Dell, and got authorisation for them to replace the computer with another, just like it only with a working keyboard. And today, a bit late, it arrived, with a slightly off-putting scarlet refurbished label on the bottom. And now I have to roll up my sleeves and will spend tonight and tomorrow loading all the software and files on it.... which is just a bit frustrating, because I ought to be making things up and writing them down.
And the moral of this story eludes me, except it's probably safer, if you have a hairline crack in a case that's never going to be anything else but a hairline crack you can only see if you tip it on its side when the light is right, not to say anything to anybody about it at all ever in your whole life.
Also I had this dream in which I was escaping from a grapefruit farm, pursued by people with hypodermics filled with botox.
....
Hello Mr. Gaiman,
You were reading Wee Free Men to your daughter, and then you took sick. Did you finish reading it and what did you and she think about it? Could you give a review, without too many spoilers? (Although, I will be buying it and reading it no matter if you printed the whole dang book.) Thanks, Dave
Yes, we finished it as soon as I was up to it, at a chapter a night. It's a terrific book: it's funny, but it has tremendous gravitas. Tiffany Aching's little brother has been stolen by a Queen of Faerie, and now, armed with only a frying pan and several thousand small kilted blue pictsies, she's going to get him back. On the way she's going to make her peace with her dead grandmother, and find out what a real witch school is. She's a frighteningly smart nine year old, and is the heroine of a very scary, very grown-up book.
The Nac Mac Feegle talk phonetically in Glaswegian accents, which makes it a joy to read aloud, even without Terry's knack of finding the perfect word at the perfect time for it.
And for those who wondered, I'm back to reading Krabat (aka The Satanic Mill) to myself at night before sleep. I don't think it would work as a book to read aloud to Maddy, but it's really a chilling piece of work.
Hey, Neil--
Glad the Salt Lake City signing went well. The library comics store
where you signed is an offshoot of Mimi and Alan Carroll's Night Flight
Comics in Cottonwood Mall. I know Mimi has been working with the
libraries in the SLC area for quite some time now--I was there in
October for cartooning demonstrations that Mimi organized for Bill
Morrison and Batton Lash (my wonderful husband) at the new SLC Library
and the Park City Library; over 60 enthusiastic kids showed up for each
one. That's when I first heard about the library store, which as far as
I know is the only comics/graphics novel store of its kind in the U.S.
Mimi managed to put the store together in record time (opening last
month, two months earlier than originally planned). Batton and I wish
Mimi and Alan great success with the store, since it offers a great way
for the reading public to be exposed to comics--and maybe even buy some!
Jackie Estrada
According to Julie the librarian, Mimi made an amazing presentation to the Powers That Be that convinced them that comics and graphic novels make literate kids, and that the best possible thing to have in a library was a comics shop.
I just looked at the place in awe. I mean, a library, with a comics store, and food.... at a certain age, I would have gone there and simply never left. I would have slept in the giant beanbags -- lovesacs -- and read everything...
Anyway, thanks for making sure that Alan and Mimi got their credit, Jackie. (Jackie's husband, Batton Lash, does a great comic called SUPERNATURAL LAW, by the way.)
Neil,
I hate to cause trouble, but on your last entry on March 6th, you say that the Green Hand anecdote is in September 27th, 2002's entry. The problem is that this entry doesn't seem to exist, and I don't see the Green Hand anecdote in any of the nearby days, either. So am I just being stupid about something, or is something somewhere wrong?
Thanks,
Teddy
It was a typo -- now fixed. It was Sept 7th, not 27th. Sorry.
I'm quoting this from the US edition of "The Week" for March 14th 2003. It's from their "It must be true... I read it in the Tabloids" column -- although which tabloid ran the story we do not,alas, know.
Stephen King has a surefire cure for writer's block. He pulls a jar from his desk containing the pickled heart of a slave child from the early 1800s. After just one glimpse, says King, "I can get inspired to write truly terrifying prose no matter how blocked I was before." As effective as his muse is, King doesn't rely on it too heavily. "I only pull out the jar on rare occasions."
Originally, the joke was Bob Bloch's -- he said, more or less, "I may write disturbing stuff, but really I have the heart of a small boy... I keep it in a jar on my desk." Steve King would occasionally quote it, usually giving attribution, as in "As Robert Bloch said, I may seem scary, but I have the heart of a little child. I keep it in a jar on my desk."
I just wonder what kind of process happened here -- my guess is that a foreign newspaper found the "jar on the desk" quote, failed to understand it was a joke, and decided to expand upon it, and the story was picked up and repeated. (Although it's always possible that someone asked Steve what kind of heart it was, where he'd got it from and so on, and he decided to test their credulity, as Terry Pratchett and I once did when we realised we were being interviewed by a radio journalist who hadn't realised GOOD OMENS was a work of fiction, and wanted to know more about Agnes Nutter and her prophecies.) But somehow I don't think so...
There's always the Onion, isn't there?
Not a question - just a heads up - I was reading the blog last night to hear about the signing in UT (I very much wanted to drive up, but my spark plugs were, um, dead) and read your bit on lovesacs. Like many others, I'm sure, I checked their site, went, "Ooooh. Pretty. HOW MUCH?!" and went quickly away. But I noticed this morning that overstock.com is having a 54% off sale on them. Might wanna check it out.
Wende
Which is one of the many reasons I love this journal. One minute I'm gasping at the price of lovesacs, the next I'm ordering 'em online at 54% off. Thanks so much.
Mr. Gaiman,
I came across this quasi-interesting article about Google and Bloggers on CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/10/
bloggers.ap/index.html Personally I would rather not see you advertising "Raging Cow" or any other such products in your blog and for those reasons I rather hope blogging doesn't become "mainstream".
Also, if someone tells you that they have traveled far to see you, or that it is his/her birthday, try feeling flattered, I'm sure it's preferable to guilt.
Cheers,
Kathryn
I'll try, but there's always someone who drove down from Alaska or flew in from Hong Kong for a signing, and I'm afraid my reaction is never "How flattering, they came all this way to see me!" but more on the lines of "I wish I was a bit more exciting, I hope they aren't too disappointed". It's then that I resolve to learn to juggle or pick up some useful skills, but I never actually do.
Anyway, I would like to categorically announce that I think that using blogs and bloggers to try and advertise a Dr Pepper powdered milk drink is a disgrace and it undermines the entire spirit of blogging, livejournalling etc, and those who go along with it are unequivocally morally compromised. I hereby declare that this journal will never be used to promote anything as shady as powdered milk drinks in exchange for free samples.
Things I would happily plug here in exchange for free samples, on the other hand, include but are not limited to:
New cars (I'd rather like a Mini, actually. It's a nostalgia thing, if you can be nostalgic for a car that looks sort of similar to, but isn't, a car you grew up with),
Really really nice fountain pens,
and
an island in the South Seas. Or the Caribbean, I suppose. I'm not fussy.
There. I'm glad we've got that cleared up.
A fascinating article at http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,911115,00.html by a documentary maker who wanted to film A.S. Byatt writing a novel. And did. For three and a half years. I felt for A. S. Byatt all the way through. (I said no, when people wanted to do a similar documentary on me a few years ago, and reading this article I'm glad I did.)
And I appear to have an " Author Page" at the Guardian.
Popped in to Dreamhaven books today, where I signed a pile of stuff for their neilgaiman.net website, and I picked up the latest copy of Locus, which contains a marvellous interview with Mike Moorcock. When I was about 15, my friend Dave Dickson and I turned up at Mike's house in Ladbroke Grove to interview him, and if he was taken aback by our age or school uniforms he managed not to show it. He talked for hours, was funny and fascinating and smart and set a chillingly high example of what to grow up to be if you wanted to grow up to be a writer.
Was sent, and read, a copy of Stephen Rauch's book Neil Gaiman's the Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of Modern Myth from Wildside Press. It was good, readable and intelligent, all three of which which came as a huge relief to me. You could probably teach a pretty good SANDMAN class using just that and Hy Bender's Sandman Companion.
I bought a few books at DreamHaven, and it was only when I pulled them out that I realised the titles form a sequence: OUT OF THE DARK, IN THE DARK, and THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS, although they're respectively short stories by Robert W Chambers, E. Nesbit, and a new novel by Ramsey Campbell. A PLEASING TERROR is the last book I got, a huge and definitive collection of the writings of M. R. James... (All links to the publishers pages on the books.)
I stole this link from Teresa Nielsen Hayden's marvellous blog: What They Didn't Teach Us In Library School. The most recent one is:
How to respond when a member of the public approaches the Reference Desk and makes the following statement:
"Excuse me, but there's a naked man prancing about in the gents' toilets."
and the one before that,
That a reader would come in and ask to borrow a shed. 'Because you are always so helpful I thought you might have one.' AND they wanted to take it away, not just store something in ours.
And they just keep going...
...
Hi Neil
Yesterday's Independent had a review of the Coraline audiobook:
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=384810
Best wishes
Tom
...
They're right -- Dawn's reading really is absolutely marvellous.
...
I guess you really can�t send a written reply to the address: "to the Swedish young Lady Anneli Holm who writes a completely no-logic adress the author Neil Gaiman and gets away with it" but does Neil ever personally reply on letters not sent by any other reason than to say "you ruined my writing dreams but go on and keep startle little Swedish gilrs because WE LIKE IT"...? Take good care now!/ Anneli
I always used to answer fan-mail. And I don't not answer fan-mail. There are several large boxes filled with fan-mail I really and truly plan to answer. Part of the problem is that my time is finite. There's only one of me, and if it gets written, I wrote it.
(It's probably also fair to say that this journal now exists in the time that I used to give to fan-mail. I send a lot fewer postcards, but answer a lot more questions.)
Anyway, sooner or later I'll get a quiet day or so, and I'll settle down and write a few hundred postcards.
Several " why aren't you coming to my country then?" messages in. This one really is a frequently asked question, and I've answered it a few times, but it's worth repeating.
Most often it's because I haven't been asked.
The European Tour was put together by my literary agent's foreign rights person talking to all the European publishers of Coraline last year and earlier this year about when they were publishing and whether they wanted me to come and promote the book. Lots of them said yes, some said no. (The Norwegians and Finns and Swedes asked if I could come back in the autumn, and we'll see if it's possible -- I hope so.) Sometimes a publisher doesn't want the expense involved in bringing me in, which is understandable.
Sometimes it's because, although I've been asked, I've already comitted to something else. (I was invited to two Australian Book Festivals this year, but invited at a point where I'd already agreed to be in other places, and I asked if they can invite me again for 2004.)
And sometimes I'll say no (or, quite often, Lorraine-my-assistant or Merrilee-my-agent will say no for me, and not even check with me) because I can't go to every convention that asks. If I did, I'd never be home, and I'd get precious little writing done, and then nobody would have any reason to invite me anywhere.
If you've asked and I've said no (or someone said no on my behalf), ask again, in good time, for the following year.
It's March 2003 right now, and 2004 is already starting to be locked down.
...
I always wondered what happened to the suitcases that airlines lost. It seems they get auctioned -- to people who can't open them to see what's inside. There's a lovely account of it here: http://www.observer.co.uk/travel/story/0,6903,910287,00.html
Good lord, you people are fast.... I go and get a cup of tea, and turn off all the lights (because This Is What Fathers Do, Who Pays The Electricity Bills I Should Like to Know etc etc) and come back up and there's three helpful FAQ messages letting me know that it's lovesacs. Not Love Sacks at all. And that I should go and look at http://www.lovesac.com/ and one of you even found me the address of a local-to-me Lovesac shop. My thanks. (Beams happily.) (And they cost how much?)
Looks like the schedule for POLAND is up -- http://www.kultura.org.pl/notka.php?nid=836. Other countries will get posted soon, here and on WHERE"S NEIL.
As far as I know, in April/May I'll be signing and talking in: Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Holland, Poland and Denmark. There may be another country or two still to come in, but I'll have dates and info soon, I promise.
You know, now that Google has bought Blogger, maybe they'll do something so that randomly opening Google windows don't wipe out blogger entries.
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.
Just did a reading for about 650 people (half of whom were, rather off-puttingly, in another room watching me on a big screen). The start of the signing for Saturday has been pushed back to 9.00am, because we are anticipating a lot of people, and don't want to disappoint them if I have to go and catch a plane.
The journal page isn't loading right now... it's the old Friday Night curse, I suppose. As a tip, if you go into the archives, you can normally bring up the latest journal entries, even if the journal itself is hanging or being weird.
Did you forget to mention the "Books" column in "The Week"?
I just read it last night, but I often get out of sync.
It's there -- scroll down to the 4th. Honest.
Hi, Neil.
My question(s) is/are about the readings you do. I've only recently
found and listened to the audio and video clips on your website, and
(forgive me) I've downloaded a few things elsewhere on the Internet that I
suspect to be snippets from 'Warning: Contains Language,' and I am
impressed by how natural you seem to be on the stage. Was it always this
way, were you a natural for public speaking? Or did it take a whole lot
more to get you to come out from behind the typewriter and read aloud to
a bunch of people you don't know? Were you horrible when you first
started readings or did 'the actor within' pop out and take over right
away? How does it feel to have people come so far (like I will, to ComicCon
this summer) just to hear you talk?
And I have to echo the sentiments from another reader, about how your
journal feels less like your-basic-blog and more like a nice little chat
with an odd sort of fellow in the sci-fi section of a bookstore. It's
sort of a writer's curse (if you can call it that), I think, to
unintentionally-on-purpose make everything sound like a story - even normal
life. I'm very grateful that you take the time out to write in your
journal as often as you do.
Thank you.
- Anna Hight
Let's see... I used to be terrified of speaking in public. Partly, I think, because I was scared of drying up, and partly because I was scared I wouldn't have anything to say. (And, of course, partly because I was worried they'd throw things, which was a faint hangover from my punk-band days). Bryan Talbot talked me into coming to Preston to talk to the SF group there in about 1987, and I got up in front of everyone and had no idea what I'd say or if I'd be able to do it without screaming or evaporating in a small puff of smoke, and just started talking, and I found that I could answer questions and just sort of burble to a lot of people and it didn't worry me. I didn't know I could read in front of an audience until the Dragoncon in about 1991 where I was on a panel and had to read "Chivalry" to an audience, and discovered with a sort of dark, unholy joy that I really really liked reading stories to audiences.
The last time I got real stage fright was in about 1992, when my friend Polly Sampson took me up onto the stage before a Pink Floyd concert, and I looked out over 70,000 mostly empty seats, imagined having to talk to that many people, and was utterly terrified. Wandered out onto the same stage before the Tori/Alanis concert several years later and it didn't bother me at all -- probably because in the meantime I'd done readings and talks for an ever-growing number of people, and none of them had thrown anything.
I'll get a tiny bout of stage fright before going out onto a big stage, but I always figure that's useful.
I think WARNING:CONTAINS LANGUAGE was recorded in about 1994, and LIVE AT THE ALADDIN was taped in 2000, and I hope I got better, but I probably didn't.
How do I feel about people travelling a long way to see me? Er... I don't really know. Whenever people tell me they've come a very long way to see me read or talk I'm normally a sort of combination of amazed and guilty. It's like the people in long signing lines who tell me proudly it's their birthday.
...
The Mariott hotel group is under the impression that you can make a drinkable cup of tea using the hotel room's coffee perculator, a complimentary tea-bag, a thing of creamer, and a sort of a small cut off plastic straw. The Marriott hotel group is wrong.
Hi Neil,
I'd just like to echo your doubts about the web server's statistics. Perhaps you just skipped mentioning those of us who are "Down Under", but I access your site pretty regularly from Sydney, Australia, and I know for sure that my brother in Japan is a regular reader also. Anyway, that's about all... just thought you might be interested in the feedback.
All the best, John (B).
Sorry about that. 0.23% of the sites readers were Australian in Feb (as opposed to 0.02% who were from New Zealand) while top of the Asian Ranking were (in order)
Philippines, Japan, Israel, Malaysia Hong Kong Singapore and Indonesia. If people are interested, I'll stick up the March stats when they come in.
(And yesterday Australia was .96% of all traffic, so you're catching up.)
So I work in a teeny tiny bookstore, right, and we don't have Coraline! And it's one of my most favorites. So I'm trying to convince my boss to get a few copies for the store, and she asks me: "Well, what awards has it won?" And I tell her: "Well, a lot."
I don't suppose you could make a pretty little list of all the awards that Coraline has won or been nominated for? I'd be uber grateful, and I could brag about you more efficiently!
Thanks,
Sarah
It was only published last July, and award season tends to be summer. But let's see -- it's currently on the Carnegie Medal longlist, it's nominated for the Booksense Award (independent booksellers award) as best Children's Book, and for an AUDIE award, ditto. It's nominated for the Torchlight Award. It made at least six major "year's best" lists last year, according to Locus, who keep track of these things. It's on the Bram Stoker Award preliminary ballot. It's nominated for a BSFA award. There's probably a few things I've forgotten. Hope that helps.
This just came in from the eternally helpful GMZoe:
Was just in shops today and saw Archer's Goon is now on shelves. I know this is one of your favorites which has been out of print awhile. I thought journal readers might like this review from the British Fantasy Newsletter from 1984:
Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones. Reviewed by Richard Grey
The field of fantasy, paradoxically, lends itself to unoriginality: It is all too easy for an author to borrow a templet from Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Lovecraft, or from folklore or mythology (often on a 'pick one from column A' basis) and ignore the possibilities inherent in the license to print one's own worlds that fantasy can give. Thus it was with mingled delight and surprise that I read Archer's Goon; although it is set in a standard English town in 1983, the fantasy world it creates is truly original. Seven people - brothers and sisters - run the town from behind the scenes: One 'farms' Technology, another 'farms' Transport, a third Crime, and so on. Howard Sykes and his family only find this out when Archer, the oldest, sends a 'Goon' around to pick up the two thousand words Howard's father has been writing regularly for one of the Family; two thousand words of rubbish that have apparently kept all Seven stuck in the town for thirteen years (or is it twenty-six? Have they really lived the last thirteen years twice?). But which one has been receiving them? And why? As Archer and his siblings launch a war of attrition against the Sykes family, Howard sets out to find what - and who - is behind it all. Archer's Goon is an arresting and impressive book; it deserves to be read more widely than it probably will be. Highly recommended.
I'd forgotten that some of the BFS reviews were by Richard Grey, which tended to be my default pseudonym whenever editors complained that there was too much written by Neil Gaiman in any given issue of a magazine, which used to happen a lot, in a number of publications, back when I was young and prolific (there was one issue of the British Fantasy Society Newsletter that went to double-length back then, mostly, the editor told me at the time, to use up the enormous surplus of book reviews I'd done for her).
Every now again, lines from reviews written under my own name in the BFS newsletter will turn up as blurbs on books published today, as if I gave them yesterday. Which makes me pleased on the whole that most of the book review columns I had in various publications back in the 80s were pseudonymous, and the rest are mostly forgotten.
hello neil,
i read your journal almost everyday, i find it interesting and entertaining. i really enjoy how perfect you write each entry. when i read it, with an english accent in my head, i find that each entry is so smooth, well written and for a lack of a better thought, so conversational.(i dont know if that makes sense). the journal feels as though you are "talking" to me. so my question(s) is this: how many drafts of each entry do you write? does someone proof read it? do you write how you talk? or are you that excellent of a writer that the writing of the journal just comes naturally? i really enjoy all of your work. the comics, the novels, and even, though it may not seem like work, the journal.
sincerely,
bill meakim
I'm pleased you enjoy it. No, no-one ever proofreads the journal, although if I make an egregious enough typo several hundred people will happily -- eagerly -- write in to tell me so. I used to try and make the posts perfect before I posted them (which meant I'd at least reread them before pressing post). Those days are gone: I tend to bang it down, press post and publish, then notice I didn't actually write a sentence in anything resembling English, and open it up, edit it and repost. I think I write more or less how I talk, although I say "um..." a lot more than I write it, and will occasionally in conversation drift off in the middle of a sent....
...anyway. If you poke around on the site I think there's some audio stuff of me doing readings, and answering questions in Q and As, so you can hear for yourself.
...
Almost two years ago I wrote a poem called CRAZY HAIR for my daughter Maddy, as part of an e-mail exchange we were having. I think I wrote it in a sushi restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Maddy did a few drawings to illustrate it as a present for me, but decided I had written too many peculiar things in it and gave it up as a bad job.
I heard from my agent today that HarperChildrens have bought it to be a Dr Seuss-like children's book. I told Maddy this evening. She eyed me suspiciously. "I hope you don't think I'm going to draw the pictures," she told me. "Because I'm not."
"No," I said. "You don't have to draw the pictures."
I think I'll research college funds, and use Crazy Hair to start Maddy's. It seems only fair -- she started it (by writing an e-mail to me which began "Dear Mr Crazy Hair").
...
Heard all the One Ring Zero authors CD. It's lovely stuff, hard to pin down. My favorite song is probably the one with Daniel Handler lyrics "Radio", but there are a lot of really good songs on there, and they all feel different. Most of them are sort of bouncy -- I'm reminded a little of early They Might Be Giants, in that it's sort of eclectic, literate pop and no two songs sound anything alike (and if you don't like one, there's another one along in a minute). The song that they made out of the lyrics I gave them, "On The Wall", is just a voice, piano and cello, and reminds me a little of the songs on the Costello-Brodskies "The Juliet Letters".
On the good side, it looks like we've fixed the archives problem -- they're all there, including the elusive June 2002, and they all load all the way to the end. Or they do before I put this post up.
On the not-so-good side it looks like we have a different problem going on with site searches. Trying to find the Green Hand anecdote (it's Sept 7th 2002, it turns out, for whever was interested) I typed various relevant words in to the post, and nothing whatsoever came up. I tried site searches on Google in case the site was directing it to the whong places for the search, and again, got nothing. So it looks as if Google itself isn't finding half the site, possibly in an act of petty and base revenge for my having failed to capitalise it consistently. (Joke, son. That's a joke I say.)
I think I'll answer a FAQs over at the FAQ blogger, to test that out.
We're on a new server, as of the 4th of February, which gives us lots of statistics we never saw before. Let's see -- in the 24 days of February there were 174,945 users on neilgaiman.com, 4,905,906 hits. The Journal was the most popular thing on the site with 120,546 page views, although only 56,931 views were only of the journal. The tracker thing is under the impression that 24% of the people who came in are from Virginia, which I assume mostly means that 23.9% of the people are coming in from AOL. After Virginia comes California, with 6753 sessions (3.86 % of traffic) which dwindles, state by state down to Wyoming, and North Dakota with 6 sessions each. Moving out of the US (from which 44% of the readers of this site come) we have Canada (2068 sessions in Ontario versus 1 in the Yukon), and South America (which only gives us Brazil, Uraguay and Argentina, which is odd, seeing the FAQ mail that's come in from Chile and Peru). The European ranking is (in descending order) United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, France,Spain, Ireland, Finland, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Estonia, Czech Rep.,Portugal, Croatia, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, (and, in last place) Macedonia, Slovenia, and Slovakia with one session each. The other one session places are Pakistan, Iran, Algeria and Tunisia.
24% of you are using AOL browsers (ah, that was the Virginia people), 54% are using Internet Explorer, and only 1.7% of you are using Opera.
And someone came here through from my drawing of G. K. Chesterton's SUNDAY at http://www.digitalmedusa.com/sgettis/ which is a wonderful site I've not plugged for a year or more, where artists have drawn their favourite literary character or author. Matt Howarth's Dick. Mark Crilley's Pooh Bear. Eddie Campbell's Hemingway. Bill Sienkiewicz's Dr Seuss. Heaps of them. It's as fascinating seeing who drew what as seeing how they drew it.
I was shocked (and fascinated) by the Telegraph story you referenced. Do you feel that this heralds the end of the written word as we (i.e., people who remember a time before email) know it? It may seem extreme, but the acceptance of "thru", "lite", etc makes me fear for the future.
~Ann
That'd be the one about the young lady who wrote an essay in TXT? To be honest, I have no idea what it portends, or even how accurate it was. The essay might signal the decline and fall of literacy, or it might have been written by a bright kid who was bored and wanted to try something a bit different in a routine essay.
Dear Neil,
I know you've been ill recently, but are you still planning to come to Salt Lake City this weekend? I haven't seen an announcement of any changes on the Where's Neil portion or on the library's announcements page.
Thanks,
Jenna
I'll be there, yes. (I've cancelled everything else between now and the European Tour.) It'll be good to get out of the house, and I've not been to Salt Lake City since I did my last signing at Night Flight Comics about ten years ago. (Before the signing Mimi had organised a wonderful lunch in a Japanese Restaurant which was owned by a customer of theirs -- he was closed, but was feeding his family and us.)
...
So we have a room with sofas and a TV in, that gets called the Blue Room because the ancient carpet in there is blueish. It's now the one room that still looks just as it did when we moved in: it still has the old wood-burning stove which no longer gets used since we learned it was installed in such a way as to burn the house down, if it felt like it Over the last few years people in there have started sneezing and sniffling after not much time in there, and we've been using it less and less. So yesterday Lorraine took out the carpet, and discovered underneath it a floor covered with linoleum tiles. I'd planned to recarpet it, but now I'm not so sure... the tiles are cleaning up well, and they look rather sweet, in a 1930s sort of way. And you can breathe in there now.
Meanwhile Terri Windling's wonderful Endicott Studios website -- at http://www.endicott-studio.com/ -- has undergone a redesign and there's a whole load of new content up. Read Terri's editorial for explanations and enlightenment. (There's also a poem of mine, BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER up on the site, in the coffeehouse section.)
And here's one where some did all the work for me. (Hurrah.)
Hi Neil,
I was about to send a question about what, exactly, distinguishes "proper British pancakes, the kind you toss," from mundane, pan-bound pancakes. But Google pointed me to this site http://www.funsocialstudies.learninghaven.com/
articles/pancake.htm, explaining how English, American, and Egyptian pancakes differ. I learned, to my delight, that the pancakes my (Canadian, but only by a generation or so) parents make are British ones, though we don't always toss them.
Thank you for indirectly clearing up one of those childhood mysteries I'd forgotten about, which was why the pancakes in restaurants were always so fluffy and not quite tasty enough.
Christina
p.s. Google also turned up a recipe ( http://www.hwatson.force9.co.uk/cookbook/recipes/
desserts/pancakesshrovetuesday.htm ) and an interesting article about pancake tossing and pi ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/
0,3604,907076,00.html ).
and all I can add to that is that pancake batter for UK style pancakes (which are closer to what the French call crepes) is best made the night before, and is better for sitting in the fridge all night, and that the first ones you make are normally a disappointment because the pan isn't hot enough. Caster (or castor) sugar is what is sold as "superfine" sugar in the US. (Thank you Christina.)
http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/press/pres_car_02.html is the long list for the Carnegie Medal. And Coraline is on it. I hope it makes the shortlist.
Two Plays For Voices has been nominated for two AUDIE awards, and Coraline has been nominated for best children's audio. They, like the Book Sense awards, will be handed out at BEA in Los Angeles.
Had a long chat with Julia Bannon about getting the archives fixed -- we're not sure whether it's our fault or Bloggers, but it's being investigated...
And New Stuff is now going up in the EXCLUSIVE section of the website -- now that we've changed hosts, Julia can simply go in and put content up, so you'll find a piece of Lovecraftian Juvenilia up there now (fan fiction? absolutely. It was published in 1986, but written in 1981 or '82), and essays I've done for convention books on people like Dave McKean and Terry Pratchett should start going up this week as well.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
Sorry to bother you but some friends and I were wondering what ever happened to your 'John Balton' screening that was supposed to happen at the end of March, here in L.A.? Is it still happening? If so, is it open to the public or will people have to pull non-existant connections to see it?
Much Thanks,
Hayley
Hi Hayley
it's been postponed for a while, because I was told to stop travelling so much while I recovered from being ill. As soon as there are dates, I'll post them here, along with how to get tickets. They'll be first come first served, but you'll hear about it here first. Promise.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes to set things straight.
Neil! You're perpetuating a fallacy!
You can google, xerox, drink cokes, and use kleenexes to your heart's
content in anything you write. And you don't need to festoon your
manuscripts with (R) and (TM) symbols, either. The idea that anyone
can successfully "sue" you over this is a vulgar misunderstanding
perpetuated by the arrogance and paranoia of trademark lawyers.
Don't help them out.
What trademark law enforces is Coca-Cola's right to do business under
their own name. What it prevents is you or me selling drinks and
calling them "Coke." Where questions arise is when people wish to
sell unlike goods and services under arguably similar names. If you
opened a restaurant under the name "Coca-Cola" and the Atlanta-based
beverage corporation objected, the courts would probably back them
up. If you sold bituminous rocks as "coke," they might not.
But you can do absolutely anything you want in a short story or a
novel, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Show me the
novelist who's ever lost a lawsuit because someone in one of their
books made a xerox or drank a coke.
More sensibleness abounds at Patrick's blogger, over at http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/.
Neil,
First of all I'm a big fan, and longtime reader of the blog. I admit this is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction message, which is in response to the Google trademark post on the journal, but it seemed like a better choice than walking around grumpy all day.
I think that the trademark issue is a complicated one, and an argument can be made for both sides. I do, however, believe that the debate would be more productive if the initial facts were correct. If you look at the original letter (linked from slashdot) there was no threat of lawsuit - in fact it was pretty polite.
As to which side of the argument I fall on, I think that Google would be in trouble pretty quickly if they didn't defend their trademark ("New! SearchEngineX! We google better than Google!"). However, if they try to change a single line in Pattern Recognition I'll be the first to throw stones. There has to be a middle ground in there somewhere.
I'm not much of a writer myself, and so I hope this comes across in the spirit I intend, which is all good-natured bewilderment and no fist-shaking growliness.
Thanks for listening,
Cindy
You're right as well. Mea wossname...
Hi Neil,
Happy belated Pancake Tuesday (or as we call it in Louisiana, Mardi Gras)! I just received the new McSweeney's yesterday and read your story, Closing Time. I loved it! I just have one question. In it you write about a green hand that haunted the school of the narrator. I am positive I read that story by you somewhere else. Did you post an excerpt with the legend of the green hand on this website or was it published somewhere else?
Cheers,
Michael
Shrove Tuesday... and I never thought to make pancakes either. (Proper British pancakes, the kind you toss.) I posted that paragraph about the Green Hand in this journal when I wrote it.... talking about how I used the Google Search Engine (TM) to look for Green Hand stories, and discovered that the only one out there was written by my art teacher from when I was 9, Miss Krailing, who had gone on to become a children's writer.
I would have given you a link, except a look at the archives of the journal showed that they're kind of broken right now, so I wrote a nice letter to the Powers That Be asking them to repair them instead.
The McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which Michael Chabon edited, is a wonderful book of stories with plots, and I felt like my own story was almost too polite in that company; Michael has asked me for a ghost story, and my preference in ghost stories is for that Robert Aickman feeling that something's wrong but you don't know what it is; shabby genteel rather than in your face.
Terrific Howard Chaykin illustrations throughout (except for Harlan Ellison's story).
I think the mass-market edition should be out in a few weeks.
One of the sequences I really wanted to put into American Gods but that never made it was the Mermaids of Weeki Wachee.... . I wonder if I can squeeze them into Anansi Boys. It's not really about the same things (although it shares one character) but bits of it are set in Florida, and there's something about those mermaids that ought to be in a book...
Bad Neil! Wicked Neil!
Didn�t you know that �to google� is infringing on Google�s(tm)
trademark?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/25/1943247&mode=nested&tid=133
Just teasing, naturally, but would enjoy your thoughts on the matter.
--Bill^2, aka �Bill from the Well�
I wonder if they'll get the worms back into the can. On the one hand, if you don't protect your trademark you lose it. Aspirin and Heroin were once brand names, after all, and Coca-Cola make very sure that no-one gets to enjoy a coke and a smile in books these days. But Google exists in an internet culture where sending this website a letter explaining I'll be sued unless I replace the phrase "I googled but couldn't figure out who the current prime minister of Nauru is" with " I searched using the GOOGLE (TM) Search Engine but couldn't find out who the current prime minister of Nauru is" would be both silly and impractical, simply because the internet tends to be an astonishingly informal medium.
I wonder if they'll make Bill Gibson revise later editions of Pattern Recognition.
My editor at Harper e-mailled me to let me know that Coraline made the editors' list at SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com/columns/best03.htm) and the readers' list (http://www.sfsite.com/columns/best03b.htm).
This isn't really a question, but maybe an answer. I couldn't find another place on the site (okay, I'm lazy and didn't look exhaustively) to write, so here is my attempt to help. :)
I noticed the queries on where to find scholarly articles about you, and since that's what I do for a living (I am a scholar) I looked you up in the MLA database (which any researcher should do if they haven't already-- it's easy, just go to the research librarian and ask for the directions to the databases) and the Academic Search Premier. I found a couple of "hits" on articles published about you-- one, obviously, is an interview, and I guess one of them is by you.... But these might be helpful; you can send folks to find these, and perhaps there are good things to be found on these authors' biblographies, as well.
Morehouse, Lyda. Neil Gaiman. Science Fiction Chronicle: the Monthly Science Fiction & Fantasy Newsmagazine. 20(5 (202)):7, 42. 1999 May
Khoury, George. Gaijin Mononoke: An Interview with Neil Gaiman Creative Screenwriting. 6(6):63-65. 1999 Nov-Dec
Neil Gaiman: Of Monsters and Miracles. Locus. 42(4 (459)):4, 66-68. 1999 Apr
Neil Gaiman's "A Midsummer Night's Dream": Shakespeare Integrated into Popular Culture.; By: Lancaster, Kurt., Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, Fall2000, Vol. 23 Issue 3, p69, 9p
Good idea, and thanks...
I think all but the last are probably interviews with me - but a quick google showed the last one is online at http://www.dawn-joy.com/shakespeare/html/midsummeressay.htm
And for those reading this blog in distant lands, I just got sent the complete list of countries and publishers who are publishing (or will be publishing) CORALINE:
USA: HarperChildrens
UK: Bloomsbury
France: Albin Michel
Italy: Mondadori
Holland: Luitingh-Sijthoff
Spain: Salamandra
Japan: Kadokawa
Germany: Arena
Portugal: Presenca
Sweden: BonnierCarlsen
Norway: Aschehoug
Denmark: Host and Son
Finland: Otava
Iceland: Edda
Poland: MAG
Czech Rep.: Polaris
Bulgaria: Bardon
Russia: Eksmo
Greece: Oxy
Brazil: Rocco
Israel: Opus
Taiwan: Crown
Thailand: Matichon
Korea: Gimmyoung
Serbia: Laguna
Estonia: Tiritamm
I was there in Cleveland in 1999 when said Author X conspicuously made a tiny uproar about the woman buying his book secondhand... it was after I had had my copy of Stardust signed by you (thank you) and I was holding a copy of his book and trying to decide whether or not to purchase it there. That incident made me put the book down and go to the library a few days later. And I didn't even really like it anyway, as I recall... Point is, hooray for reading and spreading the word, hooray for leaving your novels on park benches with tracking devices stuck to them, and hooray for Neil's ever-so-generous link posting history. --Brad Walsh (whose captivating website is located at http://www.geocities.com/raswirl615/journalmain2.html).
Which I put up just because it's nice to know that I didn't imagine it. I can't imagine what author X would have done if faced with those copies of Good Omens that sometimes turn up at signings, read so many times the ink's started to fade, swollen to twice their size having fallen in puddles and barely held together with scotch tape and dried soup. And the people who hand them to me start apologising because the book isn't pretty anymore, and I explain that that's okay, because it's loved, and sign it anyway....
...
And I'd typed that when the evening suddenly took a (briefly) nightmarish turn for the worse, as I got an e-mail from a friend, saying how sorry she was that a good, dear friend of mine (who as far as I knew was in the peak of health) had died. It took about 20 minutes of anguished phoning to establish that she'd googled her way into the obituary of someone else entirely with a similar name... And then, I was emotionally exhausted, and spent the next three or four hours building playlists for my iPod, which is something you can do without thinking at all.
Don't know how you'll feel about this, though I suppose it's no different to lending a book to a mate. www.bookcrossing.com encourages people to release their books into the wild - you get a label from them, slap it on a book, and leave it in a public place. The person who finds it registers it on the site, reads it, passes it on, and so on. You can track your book's progress around the world, and it all sounds very lovely and whimsical. How would you feel if someone passed on one of your books? Pleased it was getting read by others, or annoyed at getting done out of 6 quid?
James Moran
I thought I'd plugged Bookcrossing.com here over the years, but just did a site search and couldn't find it... I think it's a great idea and a wonderful thing that books are in motion and getting read, and getting passed on from reader to reader. And I love the idea of just leaving a book on a bench for anyone to find.
I think I told the story here once of the Cleveland Plain Dealer Literary Dinner I attended in early 1999, along with two other authors, both of whom were on the NYTimes Bestseller list (back when I wasn't). After the dinner, we signed. Very soon I found myself listening to one of the famous bestselling authors as he started loudly chewing out a nice little old lady in his signing line for having bought her copies of his detective stories in a library sale, and he refused to sign them becaase he'd got no royalties on them. At which point I lost all respect for him, as did, I suspect, several of the ladies further back in his line, because they rather ostentatiously stepped out of his line and bought copies of Stardust and got into my signing line.
Booksales are booksales, readers are readers, and the two things aren't exactly the same. I'd rather look after my readers and let the booksales take care of themselves.
About making songs of authors' writing, I recently made a song of the last paragraph from Silverbergs' Dying Inside (http://hem.fyristorg.com/bkhl/elektrubadur/).
How would you feel if I were to do something like that to any of your prose work? (Royalities and suchlike aside.)
/Bj�rn
Actually, I just signed a contract with Dancing Ferret Records to do pretty much that -- they want to put out a CD of songs by various artists (not just people signed to their label) inspired by stuff I've written, using my words and so on. I've said yes, mostly because I'm looking forward to hearing what people come up with.
Several years ago I wound up getting the same birthday present for my son, Mike, as for my father, Rhino's boxed set "The Remains of Tom Lehrer". And the only reason I didn't get one for me was that (a) I had all the CDs already and (b) I knew that if push came to shove, I could always borrow Mike's. When humour works for three generations, you know the humorist in question must be doing somehting right. Here's a recent interview with Tom Lehrer (who is, yes, still alive): http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/28/1046407753895.html
The first time I met Stephin Merritt we wound up talking about Lehrer, as Stephin had just interviewed him for Time Out New York. I remember at one point talking about the way that time changed the songs: "When he wrote the Masochism Tango," I said "It was the masochism that was the transgressive element..." I said.
"Whereas now, it's the Tango," finished Stephin.
I want to let your other readers know that even if signing is work for you, you don't let on during. Even when there are far more people than expected, you spend so much time, and are so gracious with each of us, and add those little custom touches for each different book with colored pens -- I use you as an example, along with Stephen Hickman, as to how Big Name Award Winners in sf/f are just as nice to their fans as can be. So no one should feel as though they might get glared at by Neil just for bringing books to be signed.
Not at all. I don't glare. Well, I can glare (I pride myself on having an excellent glare), but never at people at signings.
Umberto Eco makes some fascinating points about the current international situation.
While on a goofier note...
Hi Neil. Hope you feel better soon. Here's a short article about a long concert in Germany. (639 years to be exact) It seems something you'd get a kick out of. I did.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-nws-con02.html.
Joe J
And then there's my favourite recent article: the obituary for Nadine, Countess of Shrewsbury, which goes into delighted detail on a 1959 divorce, back when you could have two people who disliked each other, and were having relationships with other people (Mr Lowther, and the maginificently-named Nina Mortlock), and still couldn't get a judge to agree to give them a divorce.
A month later, Lord Shrewsbury arranged for Sotheby's to auction the entire contents of Ingestre Hall, and to sell the house itself. While Lady Shrewsbury and the children continued to live there, Lord Shrewsbury sent out letters to tradesmen saying that they were not to continue their credit arrangements. Having sold the house he went to live on Madeira to grow bananas with Nina Mortlock, later moving to Switzerland.
I kind of feel that while I've been sick I've not been dreadfully entertaining. So, to make up for it, if you go to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog you will find links to the blimp story, and to the Jack Kirby "Lord of Light" drawings, and to a real-life story of two of America's Dumbest Criminals, and much, much more. While if you're in the mood for something dangerously surreal (or at least, surrealististically dangerous) then go and read Scaryduck's Guardian Award-Winning Blog. You could do worse than follow his advice for tourists visiting London for the first time. (And remember: in London, when entering an underground train or a red London bus, it's customary to walk around introducing yourself to everyone else in the carriage or deck. Always shake hands, and tell everybody your name in a loud, clear voice.)
Over the last few days I've been entertaining myself by reading Ramsey Campbell, Probably, an excellent collection of essays and introductions and oddments by Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey is from Liverpool. He's probably the most disturbing horror writer out there. Let me try that last sentence again: For over thirty years he's been writing some of the most disturbing horror fiction out there. He's also, like most horror writers, cheerful, level-headed and a terrific dinner companion. Ramsey Campbell, Probably is a book for (a) fans of Ramsey's (b) people who want to read interesting and illuminating essays by a working writer about, quite often, the craft, the business and the sheer putting-one-word-after-anotherness of writing as a profession, and/or (c) people who want to read the definitive essay on 1970s and 1980s British spanking films (apparently a whole low-budget genre in itself), or learn the dark truth about Sean Manchester the real-life-Vampire-Hunter (based on Ramsey's hilarious review of both editions of his biography). It's a long book, of the kind you pick up and read an essay in, and then can't find the essay the next time you look, but you discover a terrific polemic about something unexpected and funny, or odd, or disturbing, instead, so don't mind. (It needed an index, I think.)
You can learn more about the book here, at http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/cat/rcp.htm. (I'm not sure if it's still in print -- I got my copy at DreamHaven. It wasn't cheap, but it's a fairly limited edition, signed by Ramsey himself, and is a sturdy paperback.)
While some of Ramsey's novels have been terrific, it's the short stories that I've always enjoyed the most, I think because they subtly twist the way you look at the world. After two or three Ramsey short stories you start noticing odd movements out of the corner of your eye, and people and things become ominous and dangerous and dark. I wish some enterprising small press (or even more enterprising mass market) publisher would bring out a complete short stories of Ramsey Campbell, but worry that the strain upon consensus reality would be too much, and that once enough people had read it we'd all suddenly find ourselves living in a ghastly version of Liverpool, in a park where the swings have been vandalised and there's almost incomprehensible graffiti on the walls, and in which an old man in a shabby raincoat is walking towards us very slowly, and we cannot see his face... yet.
....
And while I'm putting in a plug for DreamHaven, their Neil Gaiman online shop is starting to look rather nice, and in addition to things you can read and listen to, it now has an awful lot of things for sale that I thought were only available for too much money on eBay these days (Death Prayer Candles, Delirium Stuffed toys, posters etc). Check them out at http://www.neilgaiman.net/.
Greetings, Sire!
I love books. I think it's the greatest creation Humanity has ever devised. And you, sir, just happen to be one of the people whose prose I enjoy reading the most. Keep writing as long as you can, please.
Since I love books, I've decided to start a website project where it's possible to look up books and see what they are about, and even rate them in case one has read it. It's called the Internet Book List, and can be found at http://www.iblist.com/I'd very much enjoy if you'd mention this in your journal, so we can get more people interested in filling the list with books.
Regards,
Patrik Roos
Okay -- consider it plugged. Looks to me like you need a lot more books and a lot more people listing things and giving opinions, so good luck with it. Which reminds me -- have I ever plugged http://www.alexlit.com here? It's a terrific e-book (and short story) website, with the best fiction/author recommending engine I've run into. Rate a few dozen stories, books and authors and it will start suggesting things you'd probably like, and it does it very well.
Maddy says, "Say she thanks all of you out there who sent her nice emails and messages. And she's feeling a lot better. And say she got her ears pierced today." Which she did, and it looks very nice. ... (And I had a needle stuck into me too, but for another blood test.)
From the ABA's Bookselling this week, via The Dreaming Website -- http://news.bookweb.org/1199.html we learn that the nominees for Booksense Children's Book of the Year are
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, by Eoin Colfer, Hyperion
Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, HarperCollins
Hoot, by Carl Hiaasen, Knopf
Summerland, by Michael Chabon, Miramax
The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke, Chicken House/Scholastic
which is good company to be in.
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