still alive

Maddy and Holly and I are in the UK safe and sound. It seems like the house I'm in has a digital phone line which I can't use, so I'm hastily putting this up from the Hensons offices, just down the canal towpath from the place we're staying. It's in Primrose Hill, which I'd previously only known as the punchline to a rude schoolboy joke.

More anon.

I also named Boston Brand's dog Pittsburgh, of course.

Dear Neil,
Thanks for your great journal. I try to check it every day and love the friendliness of it and general just chatting feeling. Question about the Goodies DVD. Did you get that here or is it from England and you have the fancy player that plays both regions? I went to school in England in the 70's and remember the Goodies. Mary Whitehouse and the film festival episode are 2 that I remember still. Just wondered. Thanks for your time if you get to this, Gail

I've got a fancy player -- http://www.dvdshippers.com/itemjaton7611k.html is the one I wound up with after a year's worth of DVDs almost playing on a Sampo 611 with a software hack. (Things stuttered. Region 1 protected things wouldn't play. It was a headache. The Jaton so far has played everything just fine, and allowed me to tape from UK DVDs as well. Dead useful.)

The Mary Whitehouse episode is on the "Goodies at Last" DVD. Maddy thought it was as funny as I did, for a completely different set of reasons.

Dear Neil,

I've noticed while reading through your various interview bits that you seem to hold some sort of grudge against Pittsburgh. Or, to be exact, you said you found it to be "weird and disturbing" the last time you were there, in 1989 (and also "dull", I believe). Now if I'm right, you were just in Pittsburgh again recently, for a comic convention at the Expo Mart in Monroeville. Has your opinion of the city changed any over the years? As a resident of Pittsburgh, I must admit I was pained to read your curt and somewhat dismissive assesment, especially as you are the creator of the greatest comic book of all time and thus, I hold you in high esteem. I am a little surprised by how defensive I'm feeling on this subject. After all, no one is more critical of a city than its residents, but perhaps that is a right reserved for residents alone. Either way, I've been to New York, I've been to LA, and I must say that Pittsburgh has a realness to it that is dreadfully lacking in the larger cities. Pittsburgh has 87 different sections, many of them retaining the same ethnic make up for almost 200 years. You can go to Polish Hill and get REAL perogies, made by little crooked Polish women. You can go to Bloomfield and eat the best veal parmigiana anywhere outside of Italy. We also have 1800 bridges and were voted the third best art city in the US. And it's all accessible. To paraphrase a conversation I had recently at the "Tiki Lounge" in East Liberty with a guy from LA:

Me: Nice bar, huh?

Guy: Bah! In LA we have twenty places like this.

Me: Yes, but can you find a parking spot right in front of them? Can you buy a beer for under $2? Can you watch three bands perform for no cover charge? Do they have a DJ who specializes in weird surf, monster, and novelty music from the past 100 years?

Guy: No.

Me: Then who cares?

As Neal Pollack said, Pittsburgh is the most rock and roll city in the world, if you can find its rock and roll places. And with that, I'll leave you to reconsider your position.

Sincerely,

Randall DeVallance

I don't think I've said anything rude about Pittsburgh in the last four years have I? I've mostly only spoken about it as somewhere that seems to have changed a lot, for the better, in the last fourteen years. When I was there for the first time (in 1989) I found it weird and depressing: walking into the dingy airport bathroom to find a large man beating the crap out of a much smaller man at 6:00am seemed like an appropriate sort of thing to see as you leave.

I'd forgotten I was there in 1993 for the Pittsburgh Convention... well, I didn't really enjoy the convention (in memory at least it was two days of sitting at a table and signing for a line of people which never seemed to get any shorter -- which isn't really my idea of a fun convention. They've probably improved it a lot since then,) or see anything of Pittsburgh except the convention and adjoining hotel.

Then I did the Onion interview reproduced on this site, in January 1999, in which I mentioned that I'd found Pittsburgh weird and disturbing in 1989, but when I went back to it a few weeks after the interview to sign for STARDUST, I found it cheerful, chipper, pleasant with a very impressive airport (and no beatings-up going on in the -- now clean and new and sparkly -- men's toilets), and completely useless for my fictional purposes. And I passed through there touring for American Gods and it remained a very nice place. (You know, I should go and make sure that Interviews on this site at least have dates on them. And having looked at the Onion interview, I'm not even sure that we had John or the Onion's permission to put it up on this site -- we should probably take it down and link it in to the version of the interview on the Onion site. Ah well. I'll stick it on the list of things to do...)

(John Krewson said that it would have been a much better interview if his tape recorder hadn't died half way through, and he hadn't been forced to sort of reconstruct it from memory and scribbled notes.)

...

Watching more MirrorMask dailies. It's really chilling and beautiful, and funny too. It's going to be gorgeous and accessible, and still look and feel like Dave McKean. It'll change how people do children's movies. (Well, maybe not. But it'll certainly expand people's horizons as to what you can do and how you can do it.) I'm used to giving scripts to Dave McKean and getting wonderful things back. It's just up until now they've been on paper.... (bounces happily.)

...

So, I said to Holly this morning, did I ever tell you about the circumstances of your birth?

Only every year, Dad, she sighed. On my birthday.

Ah well, I said, I'll tell you again, then.

And I did, but I improved it greatly this time. It included all the usual stuff about us driving to the hospital at great speed through narrow windy roads in a tiny battered MG Midget (with Mary, my wife driving, and me timing the contractions, on the sensible grounds that she felt safer driving, even when having contractions, than she would with an incredibly nervous me driving), but this time I added in mysterious flashing lights, and several small grey people who came and said "It is given to you to have a child who shall be the dawn of the master-race. And you shall call her Enid. Or Stephanie. I mean, both are nice names," and then got back into the glowing lights and vanished again.

Peculiarly, she didn't believe a word of it. Ah well. I've got another year to come up with something more convincing.

...

With regards to the secrecy surrounding 1602, I have to say that I rather like it! I really enjoy using my imagination to wonder just what you're going to have different characters in the Marvel Universe do, who those characters might be, what the title has to do with it, etc. Nowadays I think too much is revealed too soon about everything. Everyone with the slightest bit of fame or noteriety has their entire personal life on display for the world to see (important or not), movie trailers revealing so much (sometimes up to and including the ending) more than a year in advance of their release date...I don't know...I know I'm going off, but it just seems that no one respects or desires anticipation anymore...I guess I'm just trying to say that, speaking as a deep down devoted reader, fan, wordsmith and, well, let's face it, comic book geek...I'm wholeheartedly content to wait until the day I have my copy of 1602 in my hot little hands before I find out more than the new Neil Gaiman comic published for the first time ever by Marvel.

Jewels

Well, the 1602 cat is now out of the bag.... if you do want to learn a little more, http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=2406 has some images and a capsule description. And if you don't want to learn any more, I'll try and only put 1602 links to interviews and images up, and not actually talk about it here, until the first issue is out.

Happy Birthday Holly. Also Comic-con....

Hi Neil - Not a question for you, but for Dave McKean when he will be at San Diego (which I am SO excited for!! I can't wait to meet you both...well, I met you at the American Gods signing in NYC at the World Trade Center...anyway, I'm rambling.) My question(s) is/are as follows: Will Dave be doing sketches/paintings/etc for fans? How much will he be charging for such, if anything? Will there be a limited number of paintings/sketches he'll be doing due to (I'm sure) large demand for his work?

I just want to be prepared ahead of time, and make sure there's enough money in my wallet and/or checking account!!!
See you in San Diego
Beth

Hi Beth -- see you at the San Diego Comic Con. I think it's very, very unlikely that Dave will be doing sketches. He stopped doing sketches some years ago, mostly because they tended not to come up to his standards, I think. (I may be misinterpreting his motives.) If you're interested in having Dave draw something, or buying something he's already drawn, you could start by contacting his art agent Allen Spiegel at http://www.allenspiegelfinearts.com/ -- Allen also has some wonderful books and CDs by Dave and many other excellent artists for sale through his website. (Recently a cache of Mister Punch posters signed by Dave and me was discovered, and I think Allen has some of those.)

Dave and I will be on the MirrorMask panel on Friday afternoon at Comic-con, and having a Neil And Dave talk about Stuff panel on Sunday Morning.

(I've arranged it so that I'll be doing a signing each day, and at least a panel each day. I'll put a full, finalised schedule up over the next couple of days...)
....

LiveJournal is being very mysterious: it's once again not syndicated anything from here for days, and now it's suddenly splurted out several days of posts at once...

My apologies to any of the people who are subscribed to officialgaiman. We're trying to sort it out, honest.

...

There was something else important in the post-that-vanished, which I should repeat here. Happy 18th birthday to the very wonderful Holly Gaiman....

A test to see if Blog This! now works.... (it does)

Ciao Neil!
Not a question at all, it's just that you are on the front cover of this week's italian music magazine Il Mucchio Selvaggio (www.ilmucchio.it)! Er... not one of your best pictures, but the interview is OK.
Thanks
Gianni

Oh, it's not the worst picture of me I've ever seen (I mean, they can get pretty bad) -- I think it was taken at the Torino book festival, after I'd done the talk and the impromptu mad signing. Hair looks fairly unlikely, though.

Last tuesday I attended the HQMix, which is the equivalent of the Eisner Awards in Brazil. And Sandman won this year as "foreigner monthly comic book" since it has been republished monthly again for a great number of new readers who had never heard of it the first time around, or were just too young to pick it up.

Anyway, during the award presentation, there were no one there to accept your award in your behalf, and I wondered why that was. I found no answer in my mind but a growing desire to get the awaed myself and simply say to the audience "Well, Neil is very grateful for this award and, since I will be attending the San Diego Convention this year, he sent me to get the award and deliver to him. Thank you".

But I didn't.

If I see you in San Diego, I shall greet you empty handed, then.

Not really a question, but many questions crossed my mind during that event.

Thank you for your wonderful work,

Fabio Moon

I wonder where the Brazilian awards go. When I was there in 1996 Sandman won some awards, which I didn't want to pack in my luggage and take home, mostly because they looked like bombs (the black kind in cartoons with fuses coming out of them) and even then airport security people were lacking a sense of humour about such things. Never seen them again...

I hope I get to return to Brazil in the next few years -- perhaps I'll have a cache of awards to bring home.

"I was once found and got by a feral white cat I barely knew who somehow persuaded me to follow her, mostly by taking a few steps at a time and looking exasperated and worried, and eventually led to the place where one of her kittens was strangling on netting."

So did you save the damn kitten or just stare at it or what man?! Honestly...

Anyway, sounds like the new Blogger sucks. Why not just go back to the version you had before you upgraded?

Also, the last post on your journal concerning Bill Sienkiewicz it kinda sounds like he was dragging his bum on the project. Is that how you feel? I remember reading The Sandman Companion where you stated that after one of your initial meetings with Karen Berger and Dick Giordiano that you and Dave McKean went home, you banged out a rough draft proposal for Black Orchid and McKean slammed out three or four paintings for it and I wonder if Dave's ability to deliver art faster has spoiled you. I've always WANTED to see artists and writers take their time with their work rather than bang out a 22 page script or art as fast as possible to avoid the deadline crunch. It just makes for better work overall. To hear you tell of agonizing for weeks over a Sandman script validates this. It is the best comic book ever written. And really, why WOULDN't DC Comics and Warner Bros. relinquish the rights to all Sandman related propoerty to you? Yes, I understand that they still make a significant amount of money from the Trade paperback sales(which I think should continue because they gambled on you as an unknown at the time) but what a hell of a practice. It's just as bad as American comic strips. It's yours. It came out of your head. That's America to me. Cash in as fast as possible, for as long as possible, don't worry about getting an original idea, rather worry about learning the best way of exploiting the creative people responsible who are are too busy thinking about their creative work to bother with such pettiness as accululating mass quantities of money. It makes me want to wave my flag, bigtime.

Got a question about how you were paid for your Sandman scripts. How were you paid? Did they give you more cash as the comic sold more? Was it enough to live on? C'mon, man, I want details!

Gotta jet, I'm at work, blah, blah, blah.

S.K.

I went back inside, and got some scissors, and cut out some of the net, then cut the kitten loose, and expected to bury her. She's now nine years old, weighs about 30 lb, and is fairly affectionate, although not very bright. She's called Furball.

The upgrade is at Blogger's end, not mine, if you see what I mean. They've changed their software and systems, and now the bugs are coming out...

The post about Bill is more relief that the art is in than sighing about how long it took him. And the art was good enough that no-one's grumbling about how late it was, even though it really came in just under the wire, and I'm madly rewriting to make it work.

ENDLESS NIGHTS has already moved over a year from its original planned publication date to take into account getting the artists we wanted, and to give them (and me) enough time to do their best work. Bill just had us biting our nails there, towards the end: there wasn't any more room for the book to be late.

As for ownership of Sandman, it's DC's. They own it like they own Superman. If I'd started doing it about 18 months later, it probably would have been creator-owned, like The Invisibles or Preacher -- or like Stardust was. It was 1987, and it was the only game in town.

Payment for Sandman scripts started about $1500 and I think it crept up to about $2400 a script by the end of the run. But then, they made royalties -- not much to begin with (we were barely at the bottom of the top 100 comics when we started, and slowly crept up the list as the sales of everything else dwindled), but they've sold astonishingly well in hardback and trade paperback ever since. I worked out a few years ago that to have earned the royalties I've made for Sandman in trade paperback over the years, every one of those 75 issues would have had to have sold well over a million copies.

Test post to see if things are any better

Let's see... Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle website is getting going -- I'll link to the front page, but read the message from Neal (a nice man and a terrific writer, even if he spells his first name wrong), and then follow the link to the story of how Todd Garrison cracked the code on the front page (which is, of course, not a code).

Is there an ISBN for "Endless Nights" yet?

Yup. It's ISBN: 1401200893

Hi Neil,

Sorry to hear about the recent lost of a post. I know it's been suggested before, but perhaps you should seriously consider writing your posts in notepad first then copy-pasting it into Blogger? That way, even if Blogger decides to throw its tantrum, you'll still have a copy of the post safely tucked away on your hdd. Not the most elegant of solutions, but it'll save some frustrations. :)

Wai Seng

I know. And sometimes I do. And when things were dodgy, about a year ago, I got into the habit of always copying everything I did before I posted it, just to be on the safe side. Then nothing went wrong for so long that I was lulled into a false sense of security...

Ah well. (This post survives because I blocked and copied it before I posted it, and nothing happened at all.)

I probably ought to write it -- or something like it -- again, if only because otherwise for the rest of my life people will ask my why my hair looks so peculiar on the Endless Nights book cover and PR shot.

Not the post about the hair

I wrote a post last night. It was one of the good ones. It was funny. It was filled with choice images and wry moments. It was all about my photo session yesterday. It would have made you smile. I finished it, feeling that, despite the sad indignities my hair had gone through that afternoon, at least I had a journal entry out of it. I posted it...

And the New Improved Blogger decided that I didn't exist. It needed a password. It needed me to re-enter my ID. It said that yes, I might possibly be Neil Gaiman, but I did not actually have any blogs, and did I want to create one?

I battered my head against it for an hour, and then I went to bed, the post long-since having vanished into the ether....

This morning Blogger seems to be working, more or less. (There still aren't any LiveJournal posts up after Sunday.)

If Blogger improves any more, I'm investigating Movable Type.

metaMORpho, metamorPHO, etc

Kim Newman apologises and says he actually got the Metamorpho Theme Song from http://www.otisfodder.com/365days/365archive.html so don't bother poking around the "Power Records" site looking for it. If you just want to listen to Metamorpho (you don't want to. It's terrible. Why am I posting this?) the link is http://www.otisfodder.com/365days-media2.php?file=365days-06-10.mp3
Then again, poking around on the otisfodder site reveals some really strange mp3s. (Louis Farrakhan singing a calypso song about transsexuality, anybody?)


I hate to be a bother, but none of your journal entries past Sunday's have shown up in my LiveJournal friends list. In the month that I've been reading your journal it has become an addiction, so the loss of your feed has given me a mild case of the shakes.

--Adam

I've already let Harper Collins and Authors on the Web know. If there are any LiveJournal people out there with any ideas about what's wrong, let us know... (According to Blogmatrix, the RSS feed seems to be working....)

...

Several people wrote to say that MirrorMask won't be another Labyrinth because it doesn't have David Bowie in tights. This is true. On the other hand, it has Gina McKee in a black feather mask and Dave McKean designed costume as the Black Queen, something I suspect will have about as much impact on the world as David Bowie in tights did.

We're now at the point in the film where actors are having to interact with creatures that aren't there. If there was ever a test of an actor, it's that.

Biblical Dragons, Metamorpho theme, library filtering, crap rap.

Hello Neil,I was wondering if you knew that unicorns really exsisted at one time? ( I only recently discovered this). I always thought they were a product of mythology,like the phoenix or pegasus... But it turns out that there are several bible references to unicorns:
Nu.23:22,& 24:8-Job 39:9&10-Deut.33:17-Ps.22:21-Is.34:7-Ps.92:10 & Ps.29:6
I was amazed by this & wondered "What happened?! Why didn't they get on the ark!?!" to which someone replied that they most likely did but have since become extinct.
-Lauralynn

I think it depends how you want to translate the word "Reem". Bibles without unicorns in will translate it as things like "wild oxes", just as they'll translate "behemoth" as "hippopotamus", which is singularly unimaginative of them if you ask me.

Give me the imaginative translations any day. Here's a link to someone who has rounded up all the biblical references to Dragons, and a lot of historical dragon stuff, mostly, I think, in order to prove that dragons were dinosaurs, thus finally and terminally disproving evolution. (Although I personally feel that a dragon-proving statement like In the last days" they would be "punished" and God would "slay the dragon that is in the sea!" ALthough that is also symbolic of the coming One World Government and the last Antichrist Worldruler! is a classic case of trying to have your cake and eat it.) Anyway, lots of fun with dragons -- and proof that Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus were gryphons -- at http://www.anzwers.org/free/livedragons/dragon.htm

You just mentioned the work Todd Klein will be doing for Endless Nights, and, as a lettering geek, I must wonder aloud: who will be lettering 1602? I know Marvel has been moving toward in-house computer lettering, but I wonder if Todd's a stipulation for you (I seem to remember some consternation about the lettering on the Alice Cooper book for Marvel, lo those many years ago).

John R.
Downers Grove, IL

Don't remember much consternation -- I'm pretty sure that I got Todd to letter The Last Temptation, and that he did it very well.

Todd's going to be doing 1602. (Hurrah!) It's in the new Marvel upper-and-lower-case lettering style, but we're trying to do some interesting things with it.


In this morning's e-mail, Kim Newman sent me the Metamorpho theme song. Did you know there was a Metamorpho The Element Man theme song? I bet you didn't. Can you guess how pulse-poundingly bad it is? Go on, guess. No, it was worse than that. He included a link to http://www.geocities.com/powerrecordsguy/main1.html which was where he found it. You'll need to go poking around there.

Which reminds me: Hi, Neil. In case you start getting bombarded with "When's the History Channel special going to repeat?" messages, it's currently scheduled to air again on:
Saturday 6/28 @10pm/2am
Sunday 6/29 @6pm
Monday 7/7 @10pm/2am
Thursday 7/10 @10pm/2am

the A&E mole

Thank you mole... and on a different, troubling topic:

Neil,
Knowing you are a proponent of free speech, how do you feel about the US Supreme Court Ruling yesterday that libraries must install filtering on computers? http://www.msnbc.com/news/930166.asp#BODY
The filters are intended to block pornographic sites. The court decided these filters don't impose on free speech because the filters can be lifted if requested. However, from the library standpoint (and other opponents of free speech) the problem is multiple. The filters are by no means perfect and block information that is not remotely sexual. Also, this allows companies who make this software to decide for us where to draw the line. Libraries must install these filters or they will fail to receive federal money. Looking at pornography is not what I'd consider an appropriate library activity, especially not for children, but this seems like censorship. It sounds silly, but if we're not careful it could be that someday searches on the Sistine Chapel might come up without any pictures (naked people afterall!). Granted, people can ask to have the filter lifted, but I'm not sure people should have to ask to not be censored. Perhaps as things stand now there isn't much harm done, but Supreme Court decisions have a huge impact and are used by other courts to make further decisions. I certainly wouldn't want this line of thinking to extend to other parts of the library. Do you think this ruling is cause for worry?
Thanks, Blythe (devoted reader of all things Neil)

Yes, I think it's a cause to worry, possibly a big one. (I might feel differently if there was effective software which simply blocked commercial pornsites without ever intentionally or unintentionally blocking anything else, medical, educational, recreational or political.) Here's a link to the Shifted Librarian, who has many wise links and some sensible things to say: http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2003/06/23.html#a4179

...


I'm glad I'll never be Poet Laureate, otherwise I too would wind up writing things as embarrassing as Andrew Motion's peculiarly dire Rap for Prince William's birthday... strangely reminiscent of the Patrick Marber lawyer rap from the original Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge Radio 4 programme. Why didn't they pick Wendy Cope when they had a chance? Read it and smile wanly: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3008210.stm

Superheroes of History. This thing seems to be working again.

Watched, and enjoyed, the History Channel documentary on comics. (Hadn't realised how much weight I'd lost earlier this year until I saw what I looked like last year.) Maddy put up with it patiently, asking me whether or not I knew everyone who came on and talked (apart from two people, the answer was yes) and asking whether Wonder Woman would be on soon because she was all bored of Superman and Batman.

The only thing I missed really was someone talking, or more than one someone, who wasn't male. (It was introduced for a few seconds by actress Peta Wilson, although Maddy found her a very unconvincing woman.

"Is she a girl?"

"Yes."

"She sounds like a boy. Are you sure she's not a boy?"

"She's a girl."

"Why's she called Peter then?")

But she bore it fairly well, especially bearing in mind that she was hoping I'd show her another episode of The Goodies from the recently released Goodies DVD. She thinks they're hilarious, and watching them for the first time in about a quarter of a century I found them much closer to Monty Python than I had expected -- more cheekily subversive than I remembered.

Neil,
As your website is the only place I've really ever been to where people question copyright, discuss it to better understand the digital media at our disposal, I wanted to let you know the latest, if you haven't already heard. It's already completely changed the way I look at downloading.
As a writer, I've always felt immune to the worries; my books, when published, will be out on paper. It's a book. It's not a video, or a bit of music. It's not something that requires another device to be seen. It's paper, plain and simple, and that will never change. Sure, eBooks and such will complement what's already there, but I just started working as an assistant editor on a medical journal that's recently put all its articles online, too, and its subscription rate has held steady (it had been declining. I wish I could say, hey, went digital, subscriptions jumped), and I asked my boss whether she thought electronic text would ever supplant books.
Nope.
So no worries, right?
But, no, there is.
I just logged on to MSNBC. Just read about pirated copies of the newest Harry Potter book.
And I've just downloaded not one, but several different copies. Two rich-text format, readable via basically any word-processor program, two .pdf's, and two in Microsoft Word (MSNBC mentioned only Microsoft eBook format. I guess more have 'gone to press' since the article). It sounds silly, perhaps cliched, to say I only did it as an experiment, to see if I really could, but that was really the reason; I would've picked up the fifth book Saturday had I not been on limited finances. I will be picking it up next weekend. I'm a completist, and a geek, and I've got the other four, you know.
My point is, this is the first time I've realized a writer can be affected. The first time I realized that it's a legitimate concern. I admit I've downloaded my share of music, and I have probably a gigabyte of songs (about a hundred) on my hard drive for which I didn't pay. Some I've listened to and then been compelled to buy the CD. Some are just single songs I've been looking to do. It's never been much; I have a small hard-drive, and a dial-up modem.
Would I have downloaded CDs, had I the means? Well, honestly, probably not. I've got almost a thousand of them, and I'm the kind of guy that likes the actual, tangible thing.
I'm not going to read *Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix* on my computer, I've decided.
No, I'll admit, I probably won't stop downloading songs, but you know, when the PC equivalent of iTunes comes out, well, I'll be one of the first subscribers. I'll buy the songs I download. Gladly. A buck a song, so that I don't have to spend fourteen bucks on a crappy CD? Where do I sign up? (Part of me wonders if one of the big problems is that record companies haven't given consumers a legitimate way of downloading songs that's as reliable, and intuitive, as one of the more popular shareware programs, but I think it's just a simple, perhaps naive part of me).
Anyway, I didn't mean to rant, really. I just wanted you to know. Because, well, you know from copyright, and you obviously know from being a popular, Best-Selling Author. Any thoughts?
Dream,
Will


Well, as long as it's more pleasant to read a book than a screen we who sell words have a tiny advantage. I was sort of sad to see the Gemstar e-book shut up shop and die this week but am also very aware that the day that e-books truly catch on will probably also be the day that you can download anything I've ever written from somewhere on the web, and that this probably won't prove a good thing...

Scott McCloud seems convinced that a viable and easy micropayments system will prove the saviour of creators in all this, and I sometimes hope he's right.

...

Apropos of not very much, an accordion thief has been caught.

And Sunil from Authors on the Web went in and fixed many of the settings that Blogger had inexplicably changed when they upgraded the Blogger software, so this thing now has a working RSS feed, we hope. (Someone wrote to say that some of the archive links are now pointing to places they shouldn't.)

...

I've been holding my breath somewhat over the last month as we waited -- and waited -- and waited -- for the last Bill Sienkiewicz pages to come in for the Delirium story in Endless Nights. The whole book was done, except for that.

It would be true to say that Bill took us all to the brink of terror and despair. It would also be completely true to say that the pages that were in my e-mail this evening were worth the wait, and contain some of Bill's finest and most imaginative work since Stray Toasters or Elektra:Assassin. I found myself regretting that it was only 17 pages, and wishing it had been a whole graphic novel or something, and then I reminded myself that it took him about 16 months to do those 17 pages...

So now the whole book is done, and I just have to tweak the Delirium story script to reflect what Bill actually did, and then Todd Klein will have to use every trick in his book, and make up some new ones, in order to letter it (should the Henry Dargerish bits be typed, or handwritten on bits of brown wrapping paper?).

Spent most of today being interviewed for Publishers Weekly, which was really fun, because almost none of the questions were things I'd been asked before. Jeff Zaleski from PW explained that the previous authors he'd done in this series of 7,000 word profiles were "Tom Clancy, Elmore Leonard, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, John Grisham and Michael Crichton," which left me feeling faintly like an imposter at the feast. But it was really interesting discussing everything from why I'm returning to Sandman this autumn to how I found my literary agent and why I like writing with fountain pens.

Still apologising hopefully.

Again, apologies to the 3000 plus LiveJournal people who've come by in the last 24 hours to see why I'd suddenly started spamming their friends list, and then, apparently, shut up. I'm hopeful that everything can be made to work properly again, as soon as people who can fix things start talking to each other.

Hey Neil, I was just checking your "Where's Neil?" section on the website and noticed it's not been updated since ... well ... May.
*friendly prod* Oi. :)

I'll consider myself prodded -- I've roughed out a schedule to the end of October, and will stick it up over the next day or so. Several New York appearances, an autumnal Scandinavian/German Tour and the San Diego Comiccon are on there. The most frustrating thing is that it doesn't look like I can do the Washington Post Book World event with Terry Pratchett on Sept 27th, as I will have to be in Finland that weekend. It would have been really good to see Terry, and also to see the Washington Posts's Michael Dirda (whose book An Open Book I'm currently reading. It's autobiographical, charming, funny and honest, about how books shape us. Or at least, how books shaped Michael, but reading it I keep experiencing flashes of happy recognition, understanding how much readers have in common as a breed.)

Everyone else is going to tell you this, too, because we all adore Blogger and adore you, but anyway: There's a new version of BlogThis!, which can be downloaded from the sixth question down on the new interface FAQ.

And while software does not have feelings, software developers certainly do. Carving out pounds of your flesh, bathing it with your sweat and infusing it with your life's blood, and then packaging it up in your self-esteem and placing it before the world's critics--it's not unlike writing.

But I understand your sentiment; the new version of Blogger has ticked me off a few times, too.

I found the new Blog This! just fine, but can't get it to work. The old version worked just fine. I'm sure that there are people hard at work getting the bugs out of these things, he said wearily...

Argh. Also, as always, sorry...

The only immutable law of this journal seems to be, if something is going to go wrong, it will go wrong on Friday Night, for the maximum amount of irritation for everyone until people at Harper and at Authors on the Web turn up on Monday and start to fix it. Sigh...

I'm trying to get the new version of Blog This! to work properly, so here's an article on Rock City from the Tuscaloosa News, posted because American Gods seems to have crept into the fabric of the story of the place. (Nope. The new version of Blog This! didn't work at all.)

And huge apologies to those 1200-odd Livejournal people who found their friends lists clogged by everything I've written in the last week appearing in a 90 second period from last night (which seems to be the point of changeover from the old style blogger pro to whatever we're on now).

Please don't write and tell me I should be keeping this journal in Livejournal or Moveable Type or something. (It's like the people who write to say "Ah, if you had a Mac this would never happen" whenever I mention a Windows machine crashed. It doesn't help.)

Continuing to test things on the New! Imporved! Bolgger!

I see Blogger has completely redone its code. Some weird little frustrations -- no idea why the title for the last entry vanished, and I had to go behind the scenes and try and make sure that everything was set as it should be (it had reset itself for LA time, for some reason, and turned off the RSS feed). And for some reason all of the livejournal postings for the last week seem to have been republished as of 9.01 pm tonight.

Oh well.

On the good side, the archives at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/archive.asp, which have always tended to have missing months, or wrongly labelled months, are now, finally, actually working.

On the downside, the title for the last entry vanished, as I said, and seems to be impossible to replace, and the new "Blog this!" thing for web pages barely seems to work. (Not sure why I'm saying "barely seems to work" when I mean "has completely failed to do anything useful". Politeness, I suppose, although I know software doesn't really have feelings.)

So here's a link sent in by Emil Aalto, carefully polished and inserted by hand: It's deeply strange and wonderful.... You should read it, to find out all about how Jesus went to Japan, and lived to be 106...

...

The MirrorMask dailies today contained all the scenes in Mrs Bagwell's house. Mrs Bagwell is old and mad, and her house is filled with vicious little sphinxes, about the size of housecats, who are slowly taking over, like in this article from Teresa Nielsen Hayden's archives. It's very odd, watching the dailies, of a scene in a small room in the middle of a blue studio, with blue cushion-shapes showing where the sphinxes will be sleeping and reclining and rending things. As Mrs Bagwell says,

"...the kittens do the funniest things. My husband, the late Mr. Bagwell, thought they were a nuisance. He called them moggies. They loved him, though. They were so upset after he disappeared that they wouldn't touch their food for a week."

I'm not sure she's ever quite made the connection.

Neil,

I've just been talking to my friend, Jean. Ostensibly, it was me gloating about having spent far too much money on buying the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen hardback. This led to a slight discretion about hating extras in collections (for example - the paperback version of Jimmy Corrigan, which has a 'previously unpublished' epilogue). This led, naturally, to wondering whether or not to buy the (eagerly awaited...) hardcover version of Endless Nights or to wait for the paperback and the (almost inevitable) scripts and sketchbooks and what-have-you. So, this leads to the question... Are there any plans to add anything to the paperback version of Endless Nights as yet? And do you support this really, fairly annoying practice?

Thanks,
Stephen Mellor.

P.S. Love all your stuff, love the journal and my girlfriend loves her stuffed toy Delirium.

Well, I'd never want to make anyone buy a book twice. On the other hand, I do like the fact that sometimes you get to go in and give people something that's better than the original serial publication of something. DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE has an extra four pages in the book version, which it really really needed as a comic, but there simply wasn't room for them.

There won't be any difference between the paperback and the hardback of Endless Nights. That would be silly. (I can't think of any edition of mine where there's been much difference between a hardback and paperback, other than occasionally getting the chance to fix a few mistakes that slipped by.)

There will be a 24 page comic edition of the Miguelanxo Prado DREAM story taken from Endless Nights coming out when the book is published, which mainly exists so that retailers can sell it to people who have never read any Sandman and who aren't sure about buying a 160 page hardback as their first thing. (The theory being that once they've read that story as a taster, they'll be ever-so-much more willing to pick up the book.) It's not something that retailers are meant to be selling to people who buy Endless Nights as a "collectible" although probably some of them will -- it's just meant to be a tool for someone who's heard about Sandman but can't find anything Sandman related for under $15 out there, and doesn't want to just jump in sight unseen. (Also, it has a few strange little links with the Green Lantern and the Superman mythoi (that's the plural of mythos. Damn, this thing is educational.) Because the 24 page comic is 2 pages longer than the 22 page story, one of those pages will have some of Prado's pencils or character designs or something on them. I'll know next week.

A) On the subject of instrument jokes:

"What's the definition of a minor second?"
"Two oboes playing in unison."

. . . which is only funny if you know enough music theory to know what a minor second is. If you do know enough music theory to know what a minor second is, then it's very funny indeed. Promise.

B) On the subject of photographers:

You never did tell us what the two types of photographers are, did you? Will you, pleasepleaseplease?

C) On the subject of "Neverwhere," the dvd:

Do you remember Cat Pedini? She of the tatoo, designed by you, that looks like a flower and a fish, in a Delerium kind of way? Cat and I work together at the NY Ren Faire (where I also got to work with Jen The Puppet Queen, when she built the puppets for the production of "Comedy of Errors," in which I was Egeon). Cat and I have also partnered a few times for Stage Combat Certification testing (yep, she and I are officially, CERTIFIABLY, crazy enough to play with big, sharp, metal pokey things).

Cat and I are ha-yuge fans of yours. I, being your BBC Mole (don't tell anyone), happened to have been loaned the check disc for Disc 1 of the new "Neverwhere" set. So, Cat and I got together last night, far too late, after work and rehearsals, and watched Episode 1. Or, more accurately, we listened to you, watching Episode 1.

You were great, and we both had a blast. The only sad part of it was realizing how much better both you, and your book, were than the show.

Any chance of you ever issuing the script for sale? Maybe through "Busted!"?

Cheers,
Mark James Schryver

I will take your word for (A). On (B) -- I'll tell you all the next time I talk about photographers -- like the Wednesday May 16th 2001 entry at http://www.neilgaiman.com/archive/2001_05_01_archive.asp (No permalinks on the first 9 months of this journal I'm afraid). It won't be long -- I'm due for a "head shot", with a hair and make-up person, no less, in attendence, in the middle of next week.

(And while I was finding that old archive entry on my day being photographed at the House on the Rock, my eye strayed to an entry a few days later where I talk proudly about how the most people to turn up here in a day was 1200. We can't seem to do "new people" on the current statistics counter (or if we can I don't know how), but there were 274,996 people here in May. Crumbs.)

and on C) of course I remember Cat and her tattoo -- it's the only tattoo I've ever designed, after having nervously explained that, no, I was the writer, was she sure I shouldn't put her in touch with Dave McKean or someone. Last time I was in New York she showed me her wedding photos, and how the tattoo had turned out, and I was impressed by both of them.

Well, Episode 1 is kind of the lowest ebb of the BBC Neverwhere. Much of the fault for that was mine: I wrote an episode 1 for an hour-long episode, and then we had to cut it to half an hour.

Having said that, I liked the original edit of episode 1, and really didn't like what the BBC and various other people edited it into -- it felt like selected highlights. On the other hand, I'm very fond of bits of episodes 2 and 3, really like episodes 4 and 5, and was disappointed by the way the very end of episode 6 was cut and edited. Which was the main reason I wrote Neverwhere the novel. It was the "this is what I meant".

Releasing the scripts? (Blinks.) I hadn't thought there'd be much demand for them. And the novel's there, after all.

DreamHaven did the script book of the Babylon 5 episode I wrote, "THE DAY OF THE DEAD", as a CBLDF benefit, and I think wound up with a fair number of unsold copies at the end of the day.

* * *

Daniel Pinkwater is one of the world's coolest authors, and a Good Thing.

I occasionally send and receive e-mails from him and they always make me feel like someone sending messages to a rotund Zen Master. The following exchange is quoted by permission (as you'll see). This came in from him (F&Gs -- "fold and gathers" -- are the insides of a book without the covers:

F&Gs of WOLVES IN THE WALLS came today, and was waiting on the kitchen
table when Jill and I came in with six orders of well-done fried onion
rings. We turned pages and crunched onion rings and made moronic
full-mouthed sounds of pleasure and amusement. We could not finish the
onion rings, but we finished the book. Excellent! Bravo! We had a
good time.

To which I replied,

That put an enormous smile on my face.

I'm thrilled you both enjoyed it... or more than thrilled. Writing good
stuff for kids, that people who have stopped being kids like too, is
something that not enough people do: that you keep doing it is important,
and I feel anointed by onion rings...

And I added...



... for we have talked about the perfect timing of Laurel and Hardy in the past. (It's a wonderful little image someone e-mailed me a while ago, and I have no idea who or where they got it.) And he replied,

I have no evidence that people who have stopped being kids are able to
like my stuff--but many people who are old in years do. Thanks for the
dancing masters.

DP


Would you mind if I extracted from our correspondence in my journal? I think
your last comment is extremely wise.

to which he said,

Extract away. But I have not yet made my last comment.

Something for which we are all extremely grateful.

But I love his comment about the difference between people who have stopped being kids, and people who are old in years. I'm struggling with a short story, currently called "Susan" but it may change before it's done, about that very thing.

And people keep writing to ask me to gather up all the books I've recommended in this journal over the years, and sooner or later I shall. But if you buy Daniel Pinkwater's FIVE NOVELS and Daniel Pinkwater's FOUR FANTASTIC NOVELS you will, by buying only two books, be the owner of nine novels by Daniel Pinkwater, including THE SNARKOUT BOYS AND THE AVOCADO OF DEATH, which may well be the world's coolest book (it definitely has the world's coolest book title).

Quick post for New Yorkers mostly

I'm sticking this one up for New Yorkers.

This Sunday the second annual MoCCA Arts Festival will celebrate the
robust state of American comics art. A benefit for New York's
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, the MoCCA Arts Festival is welcoming
a vast cross-section of the artists who have made comics the most
powerful medium in today's popular culture.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will help the festival celebrate by
hosting signings by Frank Miller, Jeff Smith, Santiago Cohen and Rich
Tomasso.

The CBLDF signing schedule is:

1:00 pm -- Jeff Smith
3:00 pm -- Frank Miller
5:00 pm -- Santiago Cohen & Rich Tomasso.


CBLDF Members will also be able to get "Man With Pen in Head"
an ALL NEW mini-comic by Frank Miller that will ONLY
be available at the MoCCA Arts Festival! This mini-comic edition
will be strictly limited to a run of 100 numbered copies and will
only be available to CBLDF members. Be sure to bring your 2003 Jim
Lee membership card or sign up at the show to get your copy.

Also at MoCCA, the CBLDF will be releasing original art by revered
underground cartoonist Peter Bagge. To support the Fund's
casework, Bagge donated a small number of his original pencil & ink
roughs. From art scripts for Hate & Sweatshop to quirky character
designs for commercial works, these original pages are fantastic
artifacts from the mind of a bona fide underground comix master.

In addition to Fund guests you'll also be able to meet comix
luminaries including Art Spiegelman, Eddie Campbell, Howard Cruse,
Kim Deitch, Evan Dorkin, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Megan Kelso,
Denis Kitchen, James Kochalka, Patrick McDonnell, Mike Mignola, Bill
Plympton, Ron Rege, Jr., Craig Thompson, Kurt Wolfgang, Brian Wood,
and more!

The MoCCA Arts Festival happens on Sunday June 22 from at The Puck
Building at 293 Lafayette Street in New York City from 11a.m. until
7p.m. For more information visit http://www.moccany.com

I like the idea of doing a mini-thing for CBLDF members only.

(Also, you should know that in Peter Bagge's Sweatshop er, I think it's #4 or #5, he has me in it. I do a scarily pretentious reading for CBLDF, sign a young lady's breasts, and my trousers are set on fire. It's very funny and you should all buy it when it comes out.)

sundries

Hi Neil,

You mentioned piracy and senator hatch so I thought you might find this story at Wired interesting.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59305,00.html

Alan

Yup. I'd been following it over at http://amish.blogmosis.com/archives/012511.html#012511 and was waiting for something like the Wired article. Which is why I was content to leave it at "Twit", really. A world in which it's legal in the US for software that's improperly licensed or in violation of copyright to destroy the computer it's on is a world in which there would simply be too many lawsuits from inside the US and outside the US from, for example, the families of people who died because a bored night-porter in a hospital downloaded an unlicenced song which then destroyed the hospital computer...

A walking tour of Chicago, IL. I know I've seen something about this in a past journal entry...or somewhere on your page, pertaining to the validity of this, but can't remember the details and I can't seem to find the entry.

Did you really write it?

I ask because I recently aquired a copy of Snow glass apples, on e-bay, from a publisher in IL. who asked if I had it. I asked for details, they replied that it is a small booklet, by you, that they published exclusively.
Garcia Publishing Services.

So...as always, I am interested in all of your work...is this really yours?
-Corina

The book is called "A Walking Tour of the Shambles" and I am proud to say that not only did I write it, but I wrote it with Gene Wolfe.

Here's a description of it, from the Garcia Publishing Services website: http://members.aol.com/garpub4/Shambles.html

The book itself has spawned a website, the very wonderful Preserve Us From The House of Clocks at http://www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com/ and a rich vein of strange and marvellous reports from the Shambles is on the House of Clocks Guest Book, at http://www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com/guestbook.html.

In addition to which:

dear mr. gaiman,

erin abbamondi again. the girl from jersey doing the letter writing project on you and gene wolfe.
the project grades came back the other day
and i thought you'd be pleased to know i got an A+
and my english teacher has developed quite a liking for you.

hope all is well.
thanks for the inspiration.

sincerely,
erin.

Oh good. Congratulations on the A+.

Hi Neil,


1. You mentioned that the MirrorMask screening and panel will be on Friday, July 18th in the afternoon. Is this set in stone? Or is this flexible and subject to change, as the somewhat vague "...in the afternoon" would suggest? You've got Henson people there though, so probably not. Still, could you maybe, er, keep Saturday in mind..? ;-)

2. Years ago (it seems), Dave was compiling a DVD of his short film work. Do you know if he managed to get that out of the way before filming for MirrorMask began? If not, I'm afraid it might get pushed to the side and that I may have to go another whole year telling students and fellow faculty about his unbelievable results with film, while only being able to show them stills (not to mention the fact that I can't WAIT to see what a Dave McKean-designed DVD interface looks like).


Thank you for your time and words,
-Jeremy Schulz

You're very welcome.

It's set in stone, I'm afraid -- a 90 minute panel starting at about 4:30 on Friday Afternoon, with me, Dave, Lisa Henson and Mike Polis (from Hensons) on it. Film clips will be shown. Anecdotes will be anecdoted. Things will be learned.

I don't think Dave had finished his DVD thingie before he started MirrorMask. But it may actually make it easier for him to release it commercially, and thus more likely that he'll get it finished. I know that I want a copy for a start.

Incidentally, the cost of Labyrinth was more like $45 million than the $20 million I suggested the other day.


Mr Gaiman:

Do you think JK Rowling is getting a bit carried away with all the security, etc, over the details of the next Harry Potter novel? As a writer yourself, would you go as far as she has in trying to keep all the details under wraps? Online reviews are being taken down due to threat of legal action, etc.

Thank you very much for your time

Steve in Manitoba

I've not seen anything about online reviews being taken down -- but I found the judge's agreement in the Toronto hearing to stop Canadian newspapers printing reviews, based on the copy sold to the woman in Montreal slightly puzzling: as the defence pointed out, they hadn't signed confidentiality agreements. The end-user of a book, having legitimately bought it, is free to do whatever she wants with it, I would have thought, including review it, or talk about it.

I'm not sure that a $100 million suit against the Daily News is going to have any legs either: I imagine that you'd have to prove actual harm caused, and it's going to be hard to prove that the bestselling book of the year sold fewer copies because of the Daily News printing something about it. But it may persuade other newspapers not to say anything until pub date next time.

The secrecy thing... well, put it this way. It certainly works. I'd suggested to Joe Quesada last week that it was probably time to lift the 1602 embargo, because retailers were complaining that they didn't know enough to order it. He pointed out that, while that might be true, the orders for 1602 #1 were already coming in about 70% higher than the bestselling Marvel title for the month.

(Over the next week I think it's a fair bet that the 1602 veil will be lifted somewhat, mind you.)

(I'm writing the last three episodes right now, which is maddening. Several huge climactic sequences, and lots of information to reveal on the way. And I have to fit it all into the final 66 pages, so I'm being very good and figuring out exactly what goes where. Which isn't how I'd write it as one 66 page sequence either -- the fact that these are 3 monthly comics changes the shape of things.)

Hello Neil,
Cal again. As an employee of Waldenbooks, I would request further evenhandedness in your listings. Personally, I usually find both Borders and B&N a miserable experience but at least we own Borders. So here is the Borders link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1401200893 etc

I know it seems silly since Amazon runs it for us, but I get tired of B&N being mentioned and Borders not. And of course, you may feel you've posted enough links. If I lived closer, and didn't work for Waldenbooks, I would go to Tattered Cover when the comic book store couldn't take care of me.
cal

Well, okay. I put it up. It looks just like an Amazon.com link to me, though. Back when Borders had its own website I was always scrupulous about including them in the list of online booksellers. And if I do a New York signing for WOLVES IN THE WALLS it's going to be at the new Borders which replaced the World Trade Centre one -- I signed a the World Trade Centre Borders on the American Gods tour, and it's not there any more, obviously, so I want to go back to the new one. (And they'll happily stay open till everyone's got a signature: there won't be a repeat of the New York Barnes and Noble Coraline signing, where they threw the last 400 people out.)

The Mysteries of Amazon. Nothing about Piccolos.

I pre-ordered endless nights from amazon.com and today they sent me the following e-mail::::::

"We are sorry to report that the release of the following
item has been cancelled:

Neil Gaiman "Sandman: Endless Nights"

Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've
since found that it will not be released after all. Please accept
our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience we have caused you.

We have cancelled this item from your order."

any comment?

Well, they've sensibly replaced the Endless Nights paperback they had erroneously listed as coming out in May 2003 with the Endless Nights hardback that will be coming out in October 2003 (which is the correct information). Seeing that the two books are the same price, and the error was theirs, I would have assumed they could do it without cancelling everyone's orders, but sometimes it's not that simple. Anyway, for those of you who had orderd it from Amazon and need to reorder it, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1401200893/ is the corrected page. And if I'm posting an Amazon link I should be even-handed, so here's a booksense link (so you can order the book from your favourite independent book shop) http://www.booksense.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1401200893, and I'd put up a Barnes and Noble link, except it seems to have vanished entirely from the B&N database. I expect it will come back soon.

You can also check with your local comic shop (online or solid) and the odds are very good that DreamHaven Books's site at http://www.neilgaiman.net will have signed copies of Endless Nights, especially if you get your order in early. (On the other hand, you may well get your copy a week or so after everyone else, because they will have to wait in DreamHaven for me to come in and sign them.)

This is from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, whose Electrolite journal is one of the few places I try and check every day. Patrick is an editor at Tor Books ("One of the most literate and historically aware editors in science fiction" - The Washington Post) and a very fine guitar player (I have no quotes about his guitar playing). He noticed that the subject of writing workshops had come up here, and wanted to let everyone know that:

Viable Paradise is a small, intense, one-week workshop for aspiring SF and
fantasy writers that Teresa and I have been helping teach for several
years. Other instructors this year include Steven Gould, Laura Mixon, Jim
Macdonald, and Debra Doyle. It's held at the end of September/beginning
of October on Martha's Vineyard, a spectacularly beautiful island off
the shore of Massachusetts.

We have a few slots still open this year, so we've extended the
application deadline to July 1. More information can be found at the
worshop web page, at http://www.sff.net/paradise/.

(And any site with such wonders as the Girl Cooties Theory of Literature on it should be visited even if you don't want to do a writers workshop.)

(Always read the comments on Patrick and Teresa's journals -- they're often the best bits. Even Patrick posting my paragraph about Ken Macleod and politics the other day generated several entries on pie-throwing, followed by Ken Macleod himself coming in and saying some fascinating things about politics. And pubs.)

And having already got two queries this morning from friends and family about whether the e-mail they'd got apparently from Best Buy about a credit card fraud was actually a little spammy attempt at fraud itself -- it was -- I thought I'd post the snopes link http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/bestbuy.asp so that you can find it quickly when someone asks you.

...

Spoke to Lisa Henson on the phone last night. "Is it Mirror Mask? or Mirror-Mask? or Mirrormask?" she wanted to know. It's been written every different way, in every place, including the film script and the pages of this journal. We chewed it over for a bit, checked Dave McKean's design for the logo (all one word, but with the third R reversed, which I'm not going to attempt here) and then decided that if people can capitalise all over the place these days, we'd both vote for MirrorMask.

and finally...

I read that thingy about authors being crazy/stupid for wanting to write, and it said that writing is no fun, like building a house, and I thought, well, I built a house and I thought it was very fun. Lots of hard work! Many times I hated it! But all the time, even when I hated it completely, I was having the time of my life. And I thought, maybe, for creative people, it's the same way. It's the hardest most aggravating boring exhausting thing, and it's so fun you never want to stop. Is it thus for you? I rather hope so.


Absolutely spot on. Writing American Gods was like that: even when I hated it completely I was having the time of my life.

Extraordinary piccolo players, and the madness of writers.

The good thing and the bad thing about this journal is the sheer volume of feedback, and sensible intelligent comments and questions and so on. Which is good because I never don't know what to write in here -- I just grab at random a few things from the mailbag and everything takes care of itself.

For example: one offhand comment about authors being a few piccolo players short of an orchestra generated the following:

Dear Neil:

"they've been convinced their father was several piccolo players short of a full orchestra for many years"

Orchestras generally have at most one piccolo player, if that. If the piece doesn't call for a piccolo, the piccolo player can sometimes be found playing the flute.

So you're okay, since you don't need the piccolos for a full orchestra. (And everyone hates the piccolo player, anyway. Prima donna, just flits in and out, with an instrument that get shoved easily in a school bag. Tuba-players really hate the piccolo player)

yours
Sarah
Former clarinet player
PS - I'm finally visiting Manhattan! Any recommendations on weird travel advisory websites?

Well, http://forgotten-ny.com/ is very wonderful (I've plugged it here before).

An orchestra short of piccolo players would be unusually pleasant and harmonious, and you can tell your kids I said so, and I play the damn instrument.

And I was ready to tell them, when this came in, from my son Mike.

"which will undoubtedly make my kids feel vindicated: they've been convinced their father was several piccolo players short of a full orchestra for many years"

I think I should point out that we think you're "several piccolo players short" not because you are a writer but because we know you and you are several piccolo players short...

:-)

Love lots,

your son

Which I thought was hilarious.

Someone else wants to know what I think about the article I linked to that inspired the comment in question.

Hi Neil, I just thought I drop a line, after reading Michael Blowhard's "Read this first" (which, as much as it should have put me off, hasn't...). The question which bubbled to the front of my brain as I read this was: "What would Neil(or Jeff, or Chuck, or Janice, whoever) say?"
I noticed your quiet (very english) semi-evasion of the topic, and it aroused my curiousity - what's your point of view, as a published, "Professional" writer? Is it an impossible dream? Should we all snap our pens, pour black coffee onto our Imacs and go to hollywood to chase a less elusive career?
I'm sure you've recieved many such FAQ questions, but I thought another voice in a crowd couldn't hurt.
Matt

I don't know that I can be objective. On the one hand, in a country of, what, nearly 300 million people, there are a few hundred novel writers, if that, who support themselves only though writing fiction, maybe another few hundred, at most a thousand, who completely support themselves scriptwriting for films and TV, and at a guess somewhere around 50 people who support themselves writing comics. And as someone who is earning more than a decent living wage from all three fields, I know I'm in a tiny, very very lucky minority.

On the other hand, it really is 90% just showing up and doing the work, and doing it as well as you can. (I remember one comics writer, now long gone from the field, telling me I was an idiot for spending 3-4 weeks on a Sandman script. She'd figured out how much her time was worth, and never took more than 24 hours to write a single issue of a comic. On the other hand, all the Sandmans have stayed in print, in trade paperback, for year after year, and have more than repaid the effort I put into them.) A certain, single-minded, idiot persistence in the face of all odds is certainly very useful.

So it's obviously not an impossible dream, as far as I'm concerned. And it probably is for a lot of other people. And some of them may find, as with any dream, that once you've got it, it's not what you want any longer.

And furthermore, when you take away the condition of "making a living" and add in those writers who teach, or doctor, or police, or do another kind of writing, or whatever, to make the money to supplement or to support their writing habits, you get a lot more "working writers" out there -- and a lot more varied author biographies.

And while I was typing that, another message came in about Piccolo players...

several piccolo players short of a full orchestra

As I try to imagine the effect of having more than one person playing piccolo at a time, I pray whatever powers that be that you may indeed be several piccolo players short of a full orchestra. Have you ever heard multiple piccolos? There's a reason for the joke:

How do you get two piccolo players to play in tune? Shoot one.

(I didn't know there were piccolo jokes. I'd heard viola jokes, and banjo jokes, and too many accordion jokes, but no piccolo player jokes.)

Okay. Time to be helpful before bed -- I'm looking for a link you mentioned a while back - somebody that makes very strange, well, teddy bears and plush toys, with big teeth, horns, eyes and so on. I hope that this makes sense.

Thanks. Love the blog and the books, BTW.

Brian

Ah, you're probably thinking of Windy Lewis's Morbid Tendencies site: http://www.drizzle.com/~morbid/art-buy.html is a good place to start, but make sure you click on the info about the Bunny of the Month Club. (The last one to arrive, about ten days ago, was a Bunny-skin Rug. The one the month before that had two heads. "Oh," said my wife. "Finally one that isn't disturbing. Two heads. Well, compared to most of the bunnies she sends, that's kind of sweet." "Yes," said Maddy, happily, who had seen what I had seen immediately. "And look, one of the heads is dead!")

The Onion from the past (today, it's 1957) contains my favourite Onion story: Science Fiction Writers have the Bomb!

In which you lot do most of the work

Good morning....

For Jason who is worrying over writer's workshop woes - he didn't mention if he writes speculative fiction or not, but if he does, a really great online workshop can be found here: http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/ A workshop for science fiction, fantasy and horror writers. I've been a member since 1999 (back when it was sponsored by Del Rey), and before that I was taking writing classes at the college I attended. All of those classes made me feel icky about my writing, but then I joined the OWW and met other authors who were writing and publishing speculative fiction and now I'm published and heading off to Clarion West (in a few hours, actually). The OWW community is very supportive and also very tough. They will tell you exactly what you need to do to become the writer you want to be, but they will also give you a lot of encouragement.

Kim/Temp

Good to know...

And this is being posted because of the tottering, twanging burglar on the bicycle, really...


At 3.30 am this morning My Partner Viviane and I awoke to the sound and bright flash of a burglar, testing out Viv's digital camera in the corridor just downstairs from our bedroom. Of course we didn't know that that was what it was at the time, but Viv smelled cigarette smoke and we don't smoke. To cut a fairly short story even shorter I am this morning a couple of hand made banjos, a beautiful Italian button Accordion, (the most precious object I have ever owned) and several other things lighter than I was last night.

Thankfully the guy was not interested in computers and I still have my mac complete with a years worth of illustrations for my next book on the hard disks. Suicide, or at the very least the tearful returning of my advance would have probably have been on the cards if they'd been gone too.

Why am I telling you this?
Well A. it's a good sob story and since I read this journal often it felt about as natural as e-mailing the other people who I correspond with over the web.

B. It's keeping my mind off insurance claim forms.

C. I thought it might be nice to let as many people as I can around the world know that Somewhere in Darkest Cornwall at 3.35 this morning there was a man hurtling down a hill on a bicycle, (Yes a bicycle, I Saw the bleeder! This is Cornwall we're talking about). Teetering under the weight of a large accordion and two banjo's making comedy twanging sounds in panic. It's almost worth the sacrifice... Almost.

I have a theory that the neighbours arranged it all.

It would make the day a bit brighter for me if you could post this. And also maybe check out my Jabberwocky book, (which is out in the US now) over at www.moonsheep.co.uk I think it might be up your street anyway.

Sincerely
Joel Stewart, ( in an unpleasantly quiet tumbledown house in Cornwall)

Great looking website, and the Jabberwocky sounds wonderful. I hope you get your stuff back.

Someone was asking about the Edinburgh Fringe production of stories from Smoke and Mirrors. Here's the press release from the theatre company:

Rascal Vanngang are a fresh company from the South East of England made up of committed, professional actors. They work in an amateur capacity within the company to produce stage adaptations of short stories. They are starting this new idea on a firm footing with the world premiere of (Stories from) Smoke and Mirrors. Written by the award � winning author Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, The Sandman, and for the BBC Neverwhere, among others.) These three short stories are wonderfully disparate, and running at an hour they are perfect Fringe viewing.


The Stories.

#1: The White Road �Set in a tavern in an undetermined medieval age, it is the story of a couple about to be married, exchanging stories and dreams with the other guests. However When Mr. Fox�s fianc� recalls a dream she had the mood starts to sour. But was it a dream? And who is the stranger in white?
A tragic tale with many wonderfully unanswered questions.

#2: When We Went To See The End Of The World, By Dawnie Morningside, Aged 11 ��Dawnie has written a school report on what she has done in the holidays. Her teacher invites her to read her story in front of her classmates, however this is like no work Dawnie has written before. It is a tale of Unicorns and broken homes. Of potato salad and roads filled with cats. Slowly we see the truth behind Dawnie. A scared girl, in a far from perfect home, just trying to make light (and sense) of it all.

#3: We Can Get Them For You Wholesale�Peter Pinter is a very moderate man. He never goes to extremes and has no vices, except for the inability to pass up a bargain. (And who among us is entirely free from that?) So when he discovers his fianc� is cheating on him, it is far from in character when he decides to assassinate her. But murder isn�t as simple as that. Especially when you�re Peter Pinter. Anyone could get hurt.

The scenery in the show is kept to a minimum, with all realism (and surrealism) being attained through the acting talents of the cast.
The different stories are comical and tragic, with a vein of subtle, dark humour building as the stories progress.
Though there are no happy endings in these modern day Fairy Tales, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that the audience will leave without smiles on their faces. After all, it�s three plays for the price of one, and you can�t turn down a bargain like that, can you?

Rascal Vanngang: Director, Duncan L. J. Bailey. 72B, Watling Street,
Radlett, Hertfordshire, WD7 7NP, England.
Email: rascalvanngang@hotmail.com

I wish I could be there...


"And in my library, in cases that look like coffins, I have a Sandman muppet and a Destiny muppet, made by the same talented lady who made the Neil Gaiman muppet who used to do storytelling at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. This is Kathleen David, now married to Peter David, Writer of Stuff."

I am quite confused... Did Kathleen do storytelling at the Center for Puppetry Arts, or did the Neil Gaiman puppet? Because if it is the latter, I would very much like to hear about this.

-Alexandra

Er, Kathleen used to work at the Atlanta Centre for Puppetry Arts, before she came to New York, married Peter David, became a book editor and had a baby. She made a muppet of me which she told me they used to use as a storyteller or narrator at the Centre. (She may well have been the puppeteer.) They probably still have it. When I'd do signings in Atlanta she'd bring it, and glowing-eyed Sandman muppet #1 (she gave me #2) to amuse or horrify the crowd...

oddments of all kinds

I really like copyright. I think copyright is a good thing. Copyright is what feeds me, for a start. Still, if there was ever a pro-copyright approach that made me instinctively want to put on a Support Piracy tee shirt, it's this article from the Washngton Post: Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading. It begins...

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

Twit.

Meanwhile I found myself fascinated by the idea of the Pan-African Big Brother uniting a divided continent.

Let's see:

Hi Neil,

Someone asked recently if the Neverwhere DVD was going to be sold in the chain stores. It is now listed in Borders' inventory system but as of yet, no copies have been allocated to individual stores. (This is not uncommon. Most of the time stores won't get stock info. on upcoming titles until 4-8 weeks before the release date.)

Borders Mole

Thank you, mole.

Hey Neil,

Were you ever in a writer's workshop class where your "peers" critiqued your work? If so, how did keep from slitting your wrists after you heard people tear apart your work as if it were nothing? I find that this class is shattering my dreams of wanting to be a writer. I guess what I'm really asking you is why must I fail at everything I attempt? But then again you can't answer that because you don't know me.huh.

Jason Madsen

I was, yes, in the UK Milford SF Writer's Workshop a couple of times in the mid 80s. I learned a lot from the two I went to (I learned more listening to people like John Clute and Rachel Pollack and Lisa Tuttle and Gwyneth Jones talk about what they'd read that I'd also read -- and missed most of what they'd picked up -- than I did from people reading or criticising my stories).

It sounds like you're in either the wrong writer's workshop class, or the wrong kind of workshop for you. While some people respond to criticism with a "hah! you bastards! I'll show you all!", most people respond with a rather sad "oh dear," and often put the story away in a dark place so no-one can ever see it again. You may be better off seeing if you can find a group of likeminded people, in the flesh or on-line, who can simply be supportive of each other's writing.

Or you could console yourself by reading this article, which strongly suggests that writing books is something only crazy people do (which will undoubtedly make my kids feel vindicated: they've been convinced their father was several piccolo players short of a full orchestra for many years).

...

And those of you who asked about "Supernacular" I found this over in the BREWERS Phrase and Fable section of Bootlegbooks.com

Supernaculum The very best wine. The word is Low Latin for �upon the nail,� meaning that the wine is so good the drinker leaves only enough in his glass to make a bead on his nail. The French say of first-class wine, �It is fit to make a ruby on the nail� (faire rubis sur l'ongle), referring to the residue left which is only sufficient to make a single drop on the nail. Tom Nash says, �After a man has drunk his glass, it is usual, in the North, to turn the bottom of the cup upside down, and let a drop fall upon the thumb-nail. If the drop rolls off, the drinker is obliged to fill and drink again.� Bishop Hall alludes to the same custom: �The Duke Tenterbelly exclaims `Let never this goodly-formed goblet of wine go jovially through me; ' and then he set it to his mouth, stole it off every drop, save a little remainder, which he was by custom to set upon his thumb-nail and lick off.�

from which we get "supernacular" meaning the very best, or first rate...

Mostly Mirror Mask. Curiosity is satisfied. The word Supernacular is used.

There are many things I love about this journal, and quite a few of them have to do with how rapidly my idle curiosity gets satisfied. For example:


Hi Neil

From your comment on the shooting of Mirror Mask: On the bus, in the back, there were a couple snogging, much to the disgust of our heroine... How were the couple found? Did they know each other before they started shooting? Will they see each other afterward? How much were they paid?

Can I point you to this LiveJournal entry

http://www.livejournal.com/users/saxey/40158.html

which more or less answers your questions?

Thanks!

Katy (
katyha

and I clicked on it, and discovered it to be an account of the day's shooting by, I presume, one of the two extremely beautiful ladies at the front of the bus at the beginning of the shot. Thank you, Katy.

(If it sets anyone's mind at rest, the live-action stuff at the beginning and end of the film won't be turned into Dave McKean art. So although you may wind up as a face on the cutting room floor, you probably won't have an Ibis head. Anyway, we've already had one person with an ibis head, pushing a tiny perambulator, in the film by that point.)


Well, you're probably awfully tired of hearing Mirror Mask questions, but I'm going to have to apologize before hand and ask another tedious question.

Of all the numrous pieces of info that I can find on your site and other sites, I can't find anything that says how the final incatation of Mirror Mask will be related to Labyrinth. I know the original idea was born from throwing ideas back and forth about a sequel but then, according to most references, it seemed to spawn its own life and not really be a true sequel. But then when you said how you and Dave McKean were writing and conceptualizing your new child, you were playing with many of the Labyrinth puppets and such. So again I wonder, is this a direct sequel? Is it a kind-of-sequel-if-you-can-figure-out-the-references-to- the-first-movie-but-obviously-without- David-Bowie-wearing-skin-tight-pants? Or is it something new created forth from the ideas of old? I apologize for going on as lengthy like I did. I tend to not shut up. As I'm doing now. Hope to see a response when you can. Thank you for your time.

Well, Mirror-Mask started out when Sony noticed that Labyrinth has become a very popular, and very steady seller on Video and now on DVD. They spoke to Hensons about making a sequel. Hensons don't independently control the rights to Labyrinth, though, and it cost about $20 million almost 20 years ago, and the conversation rapidly became "could you do something like that?" Given the tiny amount of money they had to make the film with, Lisa Henson had a bright idea and phoned me to ask if I thought Dave McKean would direct it (she loved Dave's short films, and knew he'd made them for pocket change). She asked if I'd maybe come up with a story, which, as they were doing this on a budget, they'd get someone else to write. I told her flatly that if Dave was directing it, I was writing it.

Then Dave and I got together. He had an idea for a story and I had an idea for a story and they sort of blended in odd ways, and we wound up co-creating the story, and then I wrote the script, and sometimes Dave would do a rough draft of a sequence he'd figured out, when it was easier for him to write it down than to explain it to me. And then we were done in first draft. We had a character with the place-holder name of Puck, and we'd been trying to come up with a better name for him, and then it was February 14th so I called him Valentine, and we were done.

It's a story about a teenage girl on a strange quest through a magical world. It's not a sequel to Labyrinth, or even an indirect sequel. It's more something that came out of talking about how you'd do something like that today. But Labyrinth was all around while we created it -- not only in the ancient puppets, and original Brian Froud Labyrinth concept paintings hanging on the walls. Poking around in a closet of videos, I found a working print of Labyrinth, when it was three hours long, had puppeteer voices instead of actor voices, and lots of genuinely funny Sir Didimus stuff that never made it into the final film (voiced by Dave Goelz -- voice of the Great Gonzo), and Dave and I played it over several evenings, curious and fascinated.


Did you know you are a top time-travel sex object? http://www.livejournal.com/users/epicyclical/142798.html Cheers!

How supernacularly odd.

Macleod. Not Mccloud. Macleod. Not McCloud, 500 times...

On June 16:

"...when I get to chat to proper lefties like Ken McCloud or China Mieville..."

I guess you mean Ken Macleod? That's how he seems generally to be spelt :). How cool to know you're a fan / acquaintance - I picked up The Star Fraction in Oxfam a few months back and enjoyed it immensely. A wry take on left-wing politicking Set In Space doesn't feel like it should work, but somehow does.

Oh, and as a happy footnote to the Radiohead Lyrics Saga I wrote to you about a few weeks ago, it's all been sorted out with no recourse to tears and histrionics - Warner Chappell are going to grant the fan sites free licenses to reproduce the lyrics. So apparently sometimes people can just be nice to each other...how heartening.

-Adam, once more. In case you ever want to place me, I'm the one who's been last in line for the last couple of Manchester signings, with improbably large amounts of stuff. I'm half-hoping you get shunted back into that church next time you're in Manchester, because the reading from American Gods worked brilliantly in there...of course, it'd be nice if they had a more flexible burglar alarm :).

it's Scott McCloud's fault. Scott McCloud is only his pen name. Really, he's Scott MacLeod. Or Mcleod. Or some combination of Mcs or Macs and leods or Leods. And I know this, and make allowances for it, by writing McCloud... But I didn't know it had crept into writing Ken Macleod's name until you pointed it out. All Scott's fault, along with five card nancy.

And Ken is a terrific writer, and a terribly nice man. We met in Finland, of course.

Neil o Neil,
When o when can we see some pictures from Mirror Mask? You're killing me with all the talk about it! Please o please!

keith

I don't know. The moment that Hensons put up a teaser page or an info page, I'll link to it, I promise. Today I saw lots of dailies from the end of the film, and a scene on a bus. Oddly, considering it's been a running topic of conversation on this blog for a year, there were lots of shots of what the Brighton West Pier has now turned into, which is some kind of Dave McKeanesque abstract sculpture, which seemed very appropriate.

On the bus, in the back, there were a couple snogging, much to the disgust of our heroine. I had expected to see them there of course, having written them in the script. But I suddenly felt very out of the process. How were the couple found? Did they know each other before they started shooting? Will they see each other afterward? How much were they paid? Is there an extras agency you call to say "Hullo, I need two teenagers to french kiss each other in the back of a bus. Can you send someone along?"

We may never know.

walking down the street naked, possibly with a mullet

Spoke to Tori, who is in Cornwall remixing and soon-to-be recording for the Atlantic greatest hits CD, and she wanted me to mention that her wonderchef, Duncan Pickford, will soon have his own website up, with recipes and food magic and suchlike on it. I'll put the link up here when it happens. Duncan's amazing ginger throat-soothing drink got me through the Coraline reading in San Francisco... (I also put in my vote for a song I'd like to hear on the CD, and am now keeping my fingers crossed.)

Dear Neil or those responsible for him;

While I've been an avid fan for many years now, and am tickled pink that your blog is so excellently updated, that photo of yourself in the upper left corner appears to have you depicted with a feathered mullet. Furthermore, you seem to be spacing out and unaware that a candle is about to set your bangs on fire.

I have attended a few of your book signings, and I know you to be devastatingly handsome. And, I do think the rest of this website is simply luscious. But that photo! Really!

- stacy.


You're much too kind. Except about that photo, of course.

I think part of the problem with that photo is that it's reversed, and it's also extracted from an image which is easy to misread. The hair's just my normal, shaggy barnet really -- the black line of the TV screen in the background (which you can't really see on the top left of screen) reads as extra hair. With a quick search, I found a website which has the Kelli Bickman photo it was lifted from on it -- the back cover of the US edition of Smoke and Mirrors http://www.gangofpour.com/diary/gaiman/dreaming3.htm -- and you can actually get a much better idea of the actual hair by looking at the image in the TV monitors.

There are some pretty evil mullet photos of me, mind you, but none, I hope, taken later than about 1988. (There's one on the wall of my study, with a bemulleted me with enormous glasses on, with tiny Mike and even tinier Holly, and Dave McKean when he had a full head of hair and had just started growing the pony tail he kept until the mid 90s. No, you can't see it. No, I'm not going to post it here. No, not even for a donation to the CBLDF.)

In regards to the fellow asking about the ISO: the ISO most commonly refers to the International Socialists Organization, at least here on college campuses (or at least here at Barnard/ Columbia). *whisper* I think he's asking if you're a communist. :)

Torie Atkinson

Oh. Cool. Er, no. Of course, when stood next to the choice of American political parties ('So, would you like Right Wing, or Supersized Right Wing with Extra Fries?") my English fuzzy middle-of-the-roadness probably translates easily as bomb-throwing Trotskyist, but when I get to chat to proper lefties like Ken McCloud or China Mieville I feel myself retreating rapidly back into the woffly Guardian-reading why-can't-people-just-be-nice-to-each-otherhood of the politically out of his depth.

You say that being an author is anonymous...(that they are mostly shy & more comfortable with pen & paper than people). I always felt differntly. That by writing a book & one that actually gets published & read, it would seem like a baring of the soul in a way,of secret looks into how someone sees or feels about some things & such. It would feel so naked,I would think, so self revealing,no matter what the topic or story...seems quite scary & demand great confidence...
I was fooling around earlier with pen & paper & came up with this HAIKU for you:
you painter with words
the canvas of my mind is
yours to decorate
-a new fan,Lauralynn

Thank you...

And yes. A lot of good writing is just the willingness to walk naked down the street while you're doing it [this is a metaphor. Please do not try it in your local streets, or if you do, do not blame me for what happens], and that can be very odd and (especially at first) very hard. Ted Hughes once said that most good writing occurs when a writer outwits his inner police force, and he was right. (He also inspired Wendy Cope to one of her funniest poems, which I quoted a line of in American Gods.)

more on manuscripts and minis

For the person who asked about how to format a manuscript - in terms of book publishing, most publishers and agents are not real strict about the font thing or the thing about how many spaces after a period. However, it makes things infinitely easier for most everyone down the line if the author follows the guidelines laid out here: http://www.shunn.net/writing/coach/format.html and this one for novels: http://www.shunn.net/writing/coach/novel.html

I'm an editor myself (tho not of books, I read for magazines) and even though it seems silly and outdated, most editors and slush readers will be happy with you if you format your manuscript that way. I also have a couple of friends who are copyeditors, and if the book gets published and the manuscript sent to a copyeditor, they will lovelovelove you if it's in SMF because it makes their job a whole lot easier.

Kim

Well, that's what my manuscripts normally look like, when they exist on paper. (Although these days, in this strange electronic world, they are as likely to be in whatever font they were typed in, and e-mailed off.)

Film scripts are always in Courier 12 point.


Neil- I thought I would let you know that the darling "Hoggle" from Labyrinth is well and being preserved in Scottsboro, Alabama of all places. He is in a peculiar store called Unclaimed Baggage. Here is the link that references him : http://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/letsshop/museum.asp
They used to have a picture of him on their site but I could not find it. Anyway, it's good to know at least one of the puppets is being looked after (and no, he isn't for sale).
--Aeryn

Many puppets get looked after. I know someone who has an original Yoda, safely preserved...

And in my library, in cases that look like coffins, I have a Sandman muppet and a Destiny muppet, made by the same talented lady who made the Neil Gaiman muppet who used to do storytelling at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. This is Kathleen David, now married to Peter David, Writer of Stuff.

Not a question, but rather an answer of sorts. To trick out one's car is to add accessories which would be outside of the scope of traditional add-ons to one's car. Things such as GPS, satellite radio, dubs, dvd/playstation consoles inside the headrests, and so on. Also, for the lovely person considering the move to Boston, she may not have to visit that show room just yet - Boston has a comprehensive public transportation system that reaches far into the jungles of suburbia. http://www.mbta.com/ may be a place to start. Hope this helps.

Shalene Shimer

Damn. I thought tricking your car could be so much more fun than that, probably involving false mustaches and maps to places that don't exist. But I thank you...

Tommy the Leprechaun dies. Organs are built.

Dear Neil,

I thought you might be interested in reading this article about the life and recent death of Tommy The Leprechaun, a long-time, well-known and loved fixture around the streets of Missoula, Montana. http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2003/06/14/news/
local/news03.txt

--Matt Bear-Fowler

You know, when it started to get to paragraphs like "For the past decade, Tommy bounced around Montana. He spent some time in Bozeman and occasionally visited Butte, but seemed to stay mainly in Missoula. He reported one bizarre incident at a St. Patrick's Day festival in Butte where someone stole his clothes, which later turned up on the body of a murdered man. That incident has been confirmed, according to social workers who helped Tommy with his affairs in Missoula." I started to wonder if this was someone I'd written once and had just sort of forgotten about... What a strange, interesting, odd life.

This isn't really a FAQ, but I heard from a friend that a friend of hers met you at a comic book convention, and said you were in the ISO. I'm just curious, is that true, or is it just a rumour?

Well, I went to the Acronym Finder at http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=ISO&Find=Find and cannot figure out if I'm being asked if I'm a member of the International Organisation for Standardisation, the Imperial Symphony Orchestra or the International Society of Organbuilders ("Our motto! No Organ too big to be built!") So I remain in the dark...

Actually, the Organbuilders don't have a motto on their website. But if they did it would in English, French and German.

...

A few people asked about the wonderful, and in Internet Years, ancient and long forgotten, early Lord of the Rings movie, at http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/movie.htm as after I posted, it went down (probably from too many people clicking on it). But it's now back up, and Sam is singing "the Road goes ever on..." as I type this, so it's definitely working.

Small things, like puppets and minis and the spaces after full stops

Hi Neil,
It made me very sad to read that the "Labyrinth" puppets are sitting around, rotting. What a creepy image -- Muppets wasting away inside that old house. I'm surprised that they weren't put in a museum or somewhere they would be appreciated. Is there any chance someone could restore them, or at least give them a proper burial?
Amy

The saddest truth about old puppets is that aging latex does not last very long. Cloth puppets last for a good while, but latex loses its stretch and it simply crumbles away. Often it has also been extensively sweated into, back when it was used. Hensons are pretty good about both preserving puppets, and also good about disposing of them (I don't want to know how they do it. the idea of a skip fulled with puppets is a sad one; the idea of an underground tomb filled with quiet, rotting puppets is a deeply creepy one...). Most of the ones Dave and I played with were from a box that had been rescued from the tip, but weren't really ever going to be useful -- or used again -- as puppets.

Neil,

I have asked about NEVERWHERE on dvd at book chains like Borders and Hastings and all I get is a sort of confused and blank stare and though they try to helpfully look it up...there is just no mention of the dvd. Will it be carried at these book chains or will I have to order it online? Please, tell me it will be available somewhere other than just online as I have a mild phobia about shopping online.

Oh, and I did purchase a copy of American Gods tonight. I can't wait to begin reading it as I love all of your other books and comics I have seen so much!

Sean Murphy


If they sell A&E DVDs then they'll be able to sell NEVERWHERE. It's shipping in 4 weeks, but initially only through the A&E website. (See last post for details.) You could print out the product details, and show it to the store, and I'm sure someone there could order it for you...


Neil,

Do you have any survival tips for a Sussex lad uprooted from his native landscape and plonked down in the Twin Cities?

Kelvin Green.

I think most of them begin "If you think you know what cold is, you don't...". Let me ponder the various other "Had I but known...." things from a decade ago, and get back to you on that.

Hi Neil

I'm an Irish writer and I've just finished my first novel. I'm in the process of formatting the manuscript, and I'm slowly losing my sanity as every book I read gives different advice. So, I have a few questions I was hoping you might be able to give me a definitive answer to...

Anyway, my questions are:

1. When using Courier font, what is the standard font size: 10 or 12?

2. Is it one or two spaces after a period?

3. Does the main body of text immediately follow the title, or does it begin on the next page?

Any help would be much appreciated. I'm going to be in New York in Sept, so I hope to get to your signing to say thanks in person.

Cheers

Derek

If memory serves, a Courier 10 pitch on a typewriter is a Courier 12 point on a computer font (and smaller than that is hard to read), but no-one ever complains if the font's not Courier (except in movies), as long as it's a readable font in a readable-sized typeface. Make your title sheet a spare page, and start the book on the next page. I've never used more than one space after a full stop, and no-one's ever grumbled. It occurred to me that Tor books probably have guidelines up on the web, and they are probably fairly sensible, so I googled, and I was right.


Type your manuscript on plain white paper, double-spaced, using only one side of the page. Do not staple or otherwise bind your manuscript; a paper clip will suffice. If you use a computer and printer, do not submit low-resolution dot matrix print-outs; they will not be read. Please do not use a fancy font (this is almost as difficult to read as the palest dot-matrix), and please make sure you use a font large enough to read easily. Please turn off margin justification and proportional spacing; pages with ragged right margins are easier for us to read, and easier for our production department to set.

6. Please indicate italics by underlining and indicate boldface by drawing a wavy line beneath the affected characters. Copy to be typeset needs to be marked in very specific ways, and if you use italics or boldface in the manuscript, they will still need to be marked up by production.

No-one will ever reject a great book because there aren't enough spaces after the periods.

If it's literally too hard to read, though, it may not get read. Tiny fonts, weird fonts, written in crayon on butcher's paper, these are things that put editors off. Tor Editor (and veteran editor of everything from Edwardian porn to comics) Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a marvellous blog, and may well be persuaded to share her wisdom in these matters. Also her book, Making Book, is terrific for giving you an editorial (and copy editorial) point of view on things, and should be compulsory reading for authors to be.

I'm a dedicated city-dweller, but I just got offered my dream job, which is unfortunately about ten miles outside Boston. So I find myself having to a) get my driver's license, b) buy a car, and c) drive said car in a city notorious for its non-Euclidean geography.

So, naturally, I want to buy a Mini.

My questions are: How do you like your Mini? And did you get metallic black with a black roof (which I think would look cool, but doesn't seem to be an option) or is it all-over metallic black?

Thanks,

debcha

It hasn't arrived yet -- I just checked the online "order tracking" thing, and it's built, and apparently is currently crossing the ocean. Its status is "En Route".

I ordered it in metallic black and, to quote the order page description from their tracking website "roof in body colour". And there's nothing on the ordering website to say that they gave me a Union Jack roof instead, so possibly I did something you can no longer do, or just no-one told me I couldn't. We'll see...

(Looking at the web site, it seems to rule out a black roof with a black car. but it lets you do "roof in body colour." And how exactly do you"trick your Mini" as it suggests on the opening page? Loudly pretend you're trading it in for an SUV?)

I'll report back on everything when it arrives and I've had a chance to drive it.

Cheap plugs for friends, mostly

Hi Neil!

I just wanted to ask if you know if the Neverwhere DVD from A&E will also be sold via online stores like Amazon.com. The problem with A&E's webstore is that they don't ship internationally, and thus it's impossible for me (in the Netherlands) to order from them.

Thanks,

Sean van der Meulen

They'll definitely be selling it through Amazon and so forth. The main advantage to ordering it through A&E's Neverwhere page for those in the US, is you get it a month before it ships or goes on sale any other way. (It's probably worth reminding people in PAL zones that the BBC still has the video of Neverwhere for sale... at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004CSV2 among other places.)

Yeah, travel agents have been effectively neutered by the airlines over the last few years. My ex-girlfriend (who used to make the CONvergence travel arrangements before she moved to Toronto), when she began working as a travel agent, was able to get any and every flight, find the lowest price, and still get a commission from the airlines. Then the airlines started lowering commissions until they were pretty much nonexistant or not cash at all (All Nippon Airlines once sent her $150 in gift certificates at the Gap). Nowadays, most travel agencies charge a service fee to book air travel and are unable to get all available flights. They still get commissions for "ground", i.e. hotels, car rental, and tour packages.

So there you go. It's not entirely the travel agents' fault.

- Jeremy from DreamHaven

I never really thought it was -- and I kept using a travel agent, out of some kind of loyalty, long after there was any reason to. (Indeed, it would add complications -- if something needed to be changed or corrected while I was on the road I'd have to call Los Angeles rather than just phone the airline directly.) But I think that the airlines and the websites have now managed to effectively sideline the travel agents.And overall, I think that's probably a pity.

Hello. Is the Adam Stemple you are referring to the Adam Stemple from the band The Tim Malloys? If so, could you remind your MN fans that they play every Tuesday night at the Half Time Rec in St. Paul? They are great-- Local Irish music,with an occasional sheep bleating sound thrown in and its always good to support local bands. And hey, the place sells Guiness and sometimes cheap tacos. What more could you ask for? Pub songs, sheep sounds, and food...

I always wanted to grow up to be Jim Henson. Still do. I've collected so much muppets stuff over the years no one could ever mistake me for a real adult. Labyrinth has always been my favorite movie..."where everything seems possible and nothing is what it seems." Yep, he ranks right up there with Einstein for me.

Yup, same Adam Stemple. Musician, composer, author and member of the Tim Malloys, a wonderful Irish band, consisting, as the best Minneapolis Irish bands always do, of three people whose non-irish national origins would sound like the beginning of a joke, if they all walked into a bar together.

(Adam's solo record "Three Solid Blows to the Head" is available through the Fabulous Records website.)

Rotting latex eyelids, and other sweet memories of Old London

So, the most interesting bits of today were getting air tickets to the UK to spend a week on the Mirror Mask set and get interviewed for the DVD and so on, for me and both daughters. My amazing assistant Lorraine hit the internet and magically produced tickets from Minneapolis to London on Icelandair business class for the cost of coach tickets on Northwest; and I reluctantly agreed that the days of using travel agents were probably over. In the old days I'd use travel agents, and they'd do cool things behind the scenes and find magic upgrades or amazing fares on little known airlines and find great deals and generally make life easier. Slowly they seemed to lose that power, a bit at a time, and seem generally more and more ineffectual. The last time I used my travel agent, on the trip to France in January, they screwed up every way they could possibly screw up, including FedExing the tickets to the wrong address, and wound up, once all the mis-issued tickets and tickets that had to be put down as lost (due to being sent to the wrong place etc.) costing me an awful lot of money on something I was never meant to be paying for in the first place. So it took me a while to be weaned off travel agents, but I've finally, if grudgingly, accepted that Lorraine, armed with the internet and the phone numbers of a few airlines, can probably do everything a travel agent could have done.

Hoping it might be possible for Maddy and me and Holly to stop off in Iceland for 24 hours on the way back to the US.

And I talked to Dave McKean today, who was every bit as exhausted as you'd expect, after two weeks of shooting, but is mostly happy. I have a very odd perspective on Mirror Mask, I think, being on the one hand thousands of miles away from it, but on the other, I'm still watching all the dailies every morning (dailies are the unedited raw shots, take by take). Dave's obviously seeing the gulf between what he sets out to do each day and what he actually does. I get to see the amazing amount of wonderful work he's doing -- that they're all doing -- and glow at how well it all fits together. Given what Dave and his crew have pulled off with the resources at his disposal, they've more or less done the impossible. From here on out they're in the studio, with builds and blue-screens, and I suspect his life will be a great deal easier. Probably by the time I get to the UK they'll all be sane again.

And I wrote Dave a couple of lines of dialogue, to cover for something that had to be shot differently to how it was written, and I felt like I was still part of it...

It doesn't seem like very long ago that I posted http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/
2002_02_01_archive.asp#9329380 this, as I got to Dave McKean's house in Kent, and then the two of us went off to the Henson Family House in London, which hadn't really been touched since Jim Henson died (it still had rotary phones), and we wrote, and Dave drew, and we wrote, and at one point we had a huge sheet of paper with a line on it and lots of tiny notations as to things that could happen, which Terry Gilliam peered at one afternoon and said "that looks like a movie" which was amazingly heartening. And there were the dusty Labyrinth puppets with the rotting latex faces (there is nothing more disturbing than a muppet when its latex eyelids rot and rend just as you're blinking them), and I wrote downstairs in the basement kitchen, where there was a fire and I could get warm, and Dave stayed upstairs, where it was chillier, but he had a piano and lots of light, and we'd sit over tables and scribble and glower at each other, because he wanted to get the structure just right before we began, and I just wanted to get these people talking and moving and find out what happened to them that way. And somehow, despite all that, we made it work.

That we'd ever get to turn this strange dream-story into a film seemed unlikely. But then, most things that happen seem unlikely, especially in retrospect....

And for those of you who've asked, it won't be finished until the spring of 2004. They'll be computer-generating a Dave McKean world, after all.

...

There's an article about graphic novels at Book Expo on the Publisher's Weekly website. It's a pretty decent overview of what's going on, I thought. Despite the v. dodgy photo of yrs truly.

Neverwhere and Mirror Mask and the death of Takako Konishi

A&E are now taking preorders on the BBC Neverwhere DVD. It's a two DVD set. A note from my A&E mole says that the BBC master-tapes they got weren't closed captioned, so the DVDs aren't either, I'm afraid. But they do have plenty of extras.

Just watched some more of Mirror Mask over at Digital Dailies -- the first of the fantasy stuff, and I was so happy. As with Neverwhere, I find myself continually surprised at what the script has turned into when someone actually puts it onto film. The biggest difference I think is that what got onto the screen on the BBC's Neverwhere was so much less than I'd imagined, while Mirror Mask is so much more. Tonight I watched a girl walk into a dream...

There will be a Mirror Mask panel at San Diego, with me, Dave McKean, Lisa Henson and Mike Polis (from Hensons), and stuff will be screened. It's on the Friday afternoon, for anyone who wants to be there.

(Other San Diego Comicon info: outside of the usual panels and so on there will be a CBLDF reception on Thursday night. I'm doing the Eisner Awards keynote speech on the Friday night, and I'll be doing a reading as a CBLDF benefit on the Saturday night -- details on the CBLDF website soon.)

...

Here's a strange and haunting story about something that was reported as a "News of the Weird" item a few years ago: Japanese girl dies in Minnesota looking for the Fargo Millions. Only that wasn't why she died or what she was looking for: http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,970908,00.html

Death, Coraline, and, oh, what's the word for it... Begins with an M...?

Let's see... several people wrote to tell me:


Actually, Death IS in the 20 questions site. You have to register and set it to pg, rather than g.

Drethelin, a bit annoyed that this is the first thing he felt the need to contact a famous author about, but still too paranoid to put his real name.

Ah. That had never occurred to me. It would nervously get up to its twentieth question, and then nervously suggest "a shadow?" or "a hole?" or "the colour black?"

Hi Neil,my name is Coraline I'm 27 and I live in Italy ,actually I'm both french and Italian...i was sure till today that my name was unique! Since my name has always been a mystery to me I'd love to know why and how you choose this name...that's mine...!
Merci!

Well, your name is pretty unique, actually. (And several dozen of the people reading this will shake their heads and go "you can't be pretty unique! there are no shades of uniqueness! either you are unique or you aren't!" and mostly I agree with them.)

It started for me as a slip of the fingers -- I was typing to a Caroline, and it came out wrong. Larry Niven wrote an essay collected in the Bretnor book on writing science fiction where he talks about treasuring your typos as ways to name characters or alien races, and that's the only time I've ever done that. I loved the name -- the way it was like, but not like, the name Caroline, the way it reflected, that it was about coral, which is both beautiful and hard and hidden...

The first time I noticed it as a real name, I was reading the memoirs of Casanova, and at one point, at a ball in Venice, if I remember correctly, he met a young lady named Coraline. "It's a real name!" I thought.

When the book was out in proof editions, I remember checking e-bay to see how much people were selling them for, and discovering that people were selling things connected with Coraline corsets -- and I found the sheet music for a Victorian song called Coraline and paid my less-than-five-dollars for it. It was one of those songs about a sad young lady who had died in unfortunate circumstances that were never really spelled out, and all of the rhymes for Coraline were "een" words, like queen and been and mean. (I pronounce the title of the book, and the name of the heroine, in English, Coraline, to rhyme with Horror-wine, although when I'm in France I pronounce it "corraleen". But am happy for people to pronounce it any way they want to. In Poland they pronounce it Koralina, and spell it like that as well.)

I thought it was an antique name, but have now signed several books for Coralines -- and have been introduced to a handful of very, very small Coralines (named after the book) so I assume that there will be more coming....

And, of course, it's a word for a kind of algae, and for a kind of rock. It's what Stone Town in Zanzibar is made of....

I'm pretty sure this is not frequently asked but for once it is actually a question.

I came down with meningitis towards the end of April. I was pretty wretched for awhile. Pretty wretched = asking nurse at hospital to execute me gangland style if I signed a consent form. I'm feeling much better now and I passed my neuroligical exam.

However I'm still all wrung out and draggy. I've been told it will take months to get my strength back. That's fine. I can deal with that.

What worries me is my memory has developed large holes. I spent half an hour last week trying to remember the word regret. Not even a fun word like persiflage or sinecure - a boring word! My spelling has gone to pot. I used to be a proofreader and now I can't even spell my own stuff.

Did you have any trouble like this? I'm a writer and an actress and I need my memory. I'm working on this very odd horror story and it needs some more humour. I thought of some great stuff while in the bath and forgot it all before I could get to my computer.

I suppose I am hoping you will say that yes, you had some trouble with your memory but it's all just jake now and not to worry. Can you say that?

Georgiana

PS - I was so scared of my spinal tap I took Coraline with me because I thought if she can be brave enough then I can be brave enough. Silly, hmm?

Not silly at all.

It's not "all just jake" now, but it does seem to get better from day to day. I know exactly what you mean: I lost most of my phone numbers, there were words I'd have to triangulate in conversation a lot, "He was in, er... it's a country, they used to have gods, wine that tastes like pine needles, disputes with Turkey..." "Greece?" "Greece. Right. So he was in Greece...", and I'd put chunks of plot together in my head and then they'd evaporate. I do it less and less now. Again, the wrung out and draggy and neckachy stuff does happen, but it has improved. Making sure I exercise helps significantly. So does reminding myself that I'm not simply wearing out early, that it's just the aftereffects of the meningitis, and it will pass.

I had an eight week period where I wrote almost nothing -- I think from February to April I finished three or four introductions, a Fermata rewrite, and a handful of 1602 pages. I've now got enough of a head to write again, but I was really worried there for a bit. It does get better. Hang in there, Georgiana...

...

Several people have written to remind me that I said I'd write about Jack Benny radio shows, and asking how to get them. http://www.otrcat.com/index.html#showlist is the list of American Radio Shows available in mp3 format. The site is of the opinion that the stuff it's selling is public domain, and it may well be. (I bought the Smithsonion CD collection of 20 Jack Benny shows to make up for having picked up about 900 shows in mp3 format a few months ago.)

My fondness for the Jack Benny Show was author Les Daniels' fault -- we got onto the subject of radio, and I started talking about the highs of UK radio. Les told me that the Jack Benny Show was as good as any of the things I was talking about (Round the Horne etc), and sent me a bunch of cassettes to convince me...

But my essay on why I was convinced will have to wait. Or, if I get a spare month, it may turn into a stage play...

some faintly bemusing things

There's an article about first lines by John Walsh in the Independent online here. It has a little quiz in it, asking you to identify lots of first lines, including something it says is the first line of GOOD OMENS, by me and Terry Pratchett.

Only it's not the first line. The first line of Good Omens is "It was a nice day."
...

The online 20 Questions game seems unable to guess "death".

...

http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/spoof/105479348516609.htm is a funny, libellous and untrue interview with Alan Moore, that manages to take some fun shots at me, Warren Ellis and Stephen King along the way.

GMZoe send me a link to some gorgeous Fantasy Coffins from Ghana: http://www.artsonthepoint.org/fantasy_coffins/fantasycoffins.html

While a Sheila writes to say: Remembering how bemused you were by the "Return to Sender" casket, I thought you might also like to know that even if you can't find a theme-casket that strikes your fancy, you can always make one yourself: http://www.rockler.com/ecom7/showdetl.cfm?offerings_id=900&objectgroup_id=203&catid=6&DID=6
The DIY Coffins Book suggested at the bottom of the page promises "Color photos illustrate every step in creating three coffins for pets and three for people. Several different box construction techniques are revealed."

Sheila

Ps.The possibilities of combining this with faux-finishing effects, decoupage, stamping, and various other techniques are legion. The start of a new craft trend, perhaps?



I am amazed, and know not what to say.

You must be this tall to ride this website...

Hi, Neil!

Did you know that looking for this message box to submit a question to you is not the easiest thing to do? It took me a while and finally found it with a little more stubbornness. I think a link directly to this message box placed on the journal page will drastically increase your e-mail.... and then again maybe you receive enough e-mail already as it is.

At any rate, I wrote to ask about "Sandman: Endless Nights". Is this book coming out in paperback as well? I've been wanting to make a pre-order at Amazon but the Amazon listing states that the binding of S:EN is paperback, same with the Barnes & Noble listing.

Also, having noted that the you get the third most number of hits from the Philippines, I realized that Manila would be a sure stop in the event of an Asian tour. Now the question is will there ever be an Asian tour? Is there anything cooking at all with Harper Collins with regards to this? I've never really heard of a book signing in Manila but I do know that there is a thriving comic book readership here so count me in to be on the book signing line if ever your publisher decides to bring you here.

My last question would be about the sequel to Stardust, I've e-mailed you about this before and I guess my 1st e-mail was not worthy enough to be printed but I'm hoping this time it will be. Is the sequel still in the works? Any updates to this? I recall reading about a sequel titled "Wall", how far has this gone along?

Thanks for your time,
Charles


There's certainly no shortage of messages to the site, even with the submission system tucked a little out of the way -- about 15,000 and counting. I'm not sure that making it easier for people to send them in will be a good thing. There's not time enough or space enough for me to reply to everyone, or even a significant fraction of everyone, as it is... (And suppose I like to think of finding the message system on this board as a sort of intelligence test. It demonstrates that you're tall enough to ride.)

Anyway, to answer your question, ENDLESS NIGHTS is definitely only a hardback in its September release. I'm sure that a year or two after publication, it'll be released in paperback. (I just checked, and yes, Amazon does have it listed as a paperback. Barnes and Noble says it's a paperback, that it will be released in May, and that it's for young adults. But they get the title right, and have a tiny picture of the cover.)

No plans at this point for an Asian tour, although I really hope it happens one day.

And I'm not sure about Wall right now. Too much of the book, which I plotted in 1989, resembles large chunks of my life now, and I worry that it would be read as some kind of roman a clef. So we'll see. It'll get written one day, I expect, along with the story about Tristran going to Hell in a hot air balloon.

Neil,

I've been reading your journal quite obsessively for about half a year now, and I've just begun delving into your published works (and how I wish I'd known about them at an earlier age!).

Anyway, this is unrelated to your written work (apart from the fact that the puppets are deliciously dark and playful and spooky), but I wanted to pass along a link to a marionette artist I think you'd like: http://www.scottradke.com/

I recently acquired two of his puppets (I've posted pictures at http://www.zendinou.com/journal.php?date=6-10), and I've been spasmodic with pleasure over them, so I thought I'd pass the link along, in case you haven't visited the url yet.

-Amanda
www.zendinou.com

Gorgeous marionettes, yes... and I loved the photos of the sand sculptures. You might also enjoy the photographs of Asya Schween at http://www.myownself.com/ and at http://www.asyaschween.com/

At what age does a person generally become a professional writer?
And,
Was writing your only idea for a profession when you were young (say, fifteen)?
(I wonder because I seem to be at that stage in school when they start telling you to make "choices"...and I'm not sure if writing counts as a job to these people!)
Thanks for teaching children that words can be pleasant...
(ps, is it possible to send you a piece of writing with the hope that you may read and maybe comment?)

I think you mostly become a professional writer when you're feeding yourself and paying your rent with your words. For me, it was early twenties. For some people, it might be their forties, or their sixties.

And yes, this what I wanted to do when I was fifteen. I think this was what I probably wanted to do when I was five.

If you're going to write, you'll write anyway. Best to learn everything you can about everything else you can in the meantime (you'll need to know something about everything if you want to write, or at least know where to ask for help), and plan to get as much living in as possible. Read a lot. Learn. Meet people. Write. Finish things.

I liked being a journalist. So did Terry Pratchett. It's a good, on the job way to learn to write, and you get to meet people from all walks of life, and learn a lot about a number of things, like never to rely on anything you read in a newspaper ever again.

And please don't send me things to read. I'll feel guilty for not reading them, and you'll just be disappointed that I never reply. Too many people send me too many things to read, and if I read them I'd never get any writing done, and I'd still disappoint most of the people who wrote...


Am I allowed to open a Neil Gaiman-Messageboard in german language for german speaking user? because it would be much more easier to discuss about neils books in their mothertounge, specially when they read them in german. i would make, if i am allowed, a non-profit board for sure, for german speaking ppl.

Absolutely fine. Have fun with it, and I hope you get nice people coming to talk. Harper Collins started the board attached to the Neilgaiman.com website as somewhere for people to chat, and pretty much wound it up and let it start running. Mostly people talk about everything else under the sun, meet, marry, squabble, go on picnics together and ultimately die, just like on most other bulletin boards.


I don't know if it's mentioned in the sequel itself but in the game Enter the Matrix, Morpheus has a phone number that leads to a front so other rebels can contact him in the Matrix. The name of the fake buiness is called The Daniel Institute of Dream interpretation. Now I didn't get it the first couple of times because I went straight from the Morpheus Dream connection it was only the third time or so that I read it that I realised that Daniel was a definite Sandman reference. I admit once I made the connection I was very pleased to see they had made a little shout out for Sandman fans.

Do you know if Morpheus in general was a direct shout out to your Sandman work?

There was an article someone forwarded to me when the first Matrix film came out, an interview where Lawrence Fishburne talked about meeting DC Comics' Head Jenette Kahn on a plane, and how she gave him some Sandman books, which he didn't read until he was cast in the Matrix, and was told by the Wachowskis that his part should be played like Morpheus in the Sandman comics. But that was the only mention I've ever seen.

How is Sandman supposed to sound? You know, black dialogue boxes and all...

Like the voice inside of your head. Or failing that, like the voice inside of my head...

Telling Tales

Many of you have asked about the new CD of me telling stories, recorded back in May 2001. The first of them is really and truly coming out this summer, and you can see the cover and track list over at the DreamHaven.com Neil Gaiman Online Store. It neglects to say that there is weird and wonderful percussion between tracks by Robin Adnan Anders -- the percussive equivalent of what Dave McKean did on "WARNING:CONTAINS LANGUAGE".

Normally all you have to do to get anything you buy signed at DreamHaven is to buy it from them and tell them you'd like it signed, and be prepared to wait a little. (Several people have asked about getting things signed at DreamHaven as birthday presents. I'll always do sign stuff the next time I go in, but there's never any way to be certain when that's going to be. So if you don't mind things being late, then chance it.)

The second DreamHaven audio CD should happen a lot faster -- the musical stuff is being done by the producer, Adam Stemple.

And then, if people like them, it'll be time to go back into the studio and record a lot of new stories (although I'd also like to do a live CD. It's more fun when you can hear the chuckles and the sharp intakes of breath).

No discernable theme or pattern here really.

Jill Thompson let me know that the Scary Godmother animated movie will get its premiere at San Diego. You can see a preview at the mainframe entertainment site.

Perhaps your "interesting" day has come and gone. David Letterman has, in fact, had authors with almost no other tie-ins, such as Sarah Vowell a few months ago. She isn't a poet, but did write a rather nice book called "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" and is a semi-regular on NPR's "This American Life." However, I believe her radio appearances were only part of her introduction, as I remember the interview to focus almost entirely on her, her life, and her book.

Which was why I said poet, really... I suppose I was thinking of those days when poets really were celebrities whose slim volumes sold by the cartload to people who wanted to read them...


I could phrase this as a question to avoid abuse of the function...did you know there was an Edinburgh Fringe show based on 3 Smoke and Mirrors stories? http://www.edfringe.com/shows/detail.php?action=shows&id=SMOKE Haven't been able to find details of which stories yet, but the 'fairytales' mention gives a hint. The Fringe site is good but doesn't have many external links to companies. Should be interesting :)

I did know, but I've forgotten. If Duncan from Rascal Vanngang is reading this, send in a message and plug your show.

...

Coraline won a Bram Stoker award! So did Ramsey Campbell Probably, which I've plugged in this blog before.http://www.horror.org/stokers.htm#winners

...

And two very funny things which need language advisories -- Neal Pollack's interview with Hillary Clinton, and Gollum's MTV award acceptance speech. It's up at http://www.theonering.net/staticnews/1054890864.html in a variety of sizes. (Thanks to Sarah for the info.)

Of course, for so many of us, this will always be the definitive Lord of the Rings. (It's 18.5 megs, so I've not linked to it directly. But if you just want to click and watch (or wait and watch) click here.

What do Authors owe? Apart from the bar tab, of course.

Home again. Got home last night, slept, got up early, wrapped up the TAM LIN outline for Sony. Watched another three days of Digital Dailies on the Dave McKean film, Mirror Mask, with an enormous smile on my face. Every penny he's got is on the screen, and it reminds me a little of Cages, and a little of the "Convergence" sequence of Sandman covers, and a lot of itself. He's getting some stunning performances, and every shot looks like it was designed by Dave McKean. We'll be previewing a little of it at San Diego -- I was worried that, not having any of the animated stuff done by then, it wouldn't look very impressive. I shouldn't have worried...

Anyway. On with the motley...

Two similar questions:

Hello,
I'm not entirely confident that you'll answer this, but you never know. I was wondering if you think you have a duty to your readers in any way. For instance, do you feel you owe it to them to do signings, readings etc? More controversially, do you feel, now that you're a writer with a big following, that you have to keep writing, not just for yourself, but for them? It's something to think about, anyway.

By the way, I've read the first three Sandman books in the last two days - I've never read a graphic novel before, so you must be doing something right.

Rachel
http://members.lycos.co.uk/yorkwriter/


Do I have a duty to my readers? I suppose I do. I imagine a sort of contract with an ideal reader: for my part, I�ll try and write something that will be different from something I�ve written before, and I�ll write it as best I can for whatever it is. (And the reader, in that imaginary contract, won�t necessarily want another half a pound of what s/he liked last time, but will at least go in open-minded to whatever the next thing might be.)

I don�t think I have any other obligations.

Readings, signings, doing this journal, talks, conventions and so forth aren�t obligations. They�re things I do because it�s interesting and often fun, and because I like doing them. If they stop being fun, I stop doing them. (I do very few conventions these days, because they�d gradually stopped on the whole being a way to meet interesting people and have long bar discussions, and to feel a lot more like work.)

That�s the joy of this journal: I�ve been doing it for two and a half years, mostly for my own amusement, and I really appreciate the immediacy of it, and the ability to let people know things reasonably accurately and reasonably fast.

Harper Collins are willing to keep paying for it, so it must pay for itself in some way, mostly intangible, but they make no demands from me on content, so doing anythng for or with the website feels a lot like messing around, and not like work. (In fact, normally it�s the other way around, with regard to Harper Collins and content. They have quite a few essays and bits I�ve given them that haven�t yet gone up.)


Hey Neil-O (Which is your super secret name in the more obscure circles of the literati),

As a writer who is hoping one day to have books enthused about by people other than his loved ones and agent, it occurs to me on several occasions you have mentioned some of the behavior you think is good for writers to exhibit to their fans/public and some that is not.
Which got me to wondering, do you think that a writer necessarily has an obligation to be a Face to the public? One the one hand there really isn't a novelist if there isn't an audience buying and enjoying the novels, but on the other hand, the audience usually values the novels and not the novelist, so how necessary (if at all) do you think the "PR" experience is for writers and what should they do to graciously receive their public (if at all)? I mean, in today's climate, I doubt Emily Dickinson would have been trotted out on David Lettermen and asked to drop a watermelon on Paul, but would that necessarily detract from the quality of her work?

--Shoeless Wayne Santos, Stranded in Singapore

No, I don�t think anyone has any obligations at all on this stuff, apart from writing the books, and making them as good as they/we can.

Lots of authors are shy. Some of them are much happier with paper than they are with people. Being a writer can be the next best thing to being anonymous. You don�t have to do anything that you don�t want to. Nor should you.

I quite like getting out and saying hullo to readers. I like turning numbers into people, and anyway I have some really cool readers. So I�ll do signings from time to time. I like eating interesting foods and seeing strange places, often at the same time, so I try to say yes as much as possible when asked to visit strange places. (I also like being at home and being a dad and that stuff, so I say no to many offers of exciting travel to distant places.)

Publishers tend not to want to pay for big adverts for books, and the cheapest way to tell a lot of people your book is out is to be interviewed.

(Once the late summer madness of everything coming out at once is over, I�ll probably stop doing interviews, for a little while, or a long.)

What an author does or doesn�t do in life certainly has something to do with how their work is remembered. While many of my favourite authors lived colourful lives, just as many of them didn�t. And the day David Letterman starts asking poets onto his show, because they�re good poets (and don�t have a line of greetings cards, or a movie of their life or something coming out) will be an odd day but a good one, whether watermelons are dropped or not.

Does that help?

I keep meaning to post this: a link to the website of the Library Hotel in New York. The only hotel, it claims, to be based on the Dewey Decimal System. Long ago, I decided that the Royalton worked for me as a New York hotel, but I am very tempted to give the Library Hotel a try.
http://www.libraryhotel.com/indexlhres.html

And I thought I was a really good player-with-Google, but this article pointed out several things I'd not known before. (Having said that, I'd disagree with him on the opening a new window preference. Every now and again, a wobbly screw in Explorer would mean it would try to open its new window somewhere an old window was already open, like the one with the blogger entry in it, and would eat it. I think I prefer Google windows where I can keep an eye on them.)

...

Gene Wolfe is writing a new novel. It's a Latro novel, in the Soldier in the Mist series. It's a horror novel, set in ancient Egypt. I'm excited...

A short morning post...

A fun morning. Breakfast with the very wonderful Jill Thompson, and then in the big hall for real writers at the Chicago Bookfair, where I read WOLVES IN THE WALLS, and the Aladdin poem I did for Ellen Datlow and TerriWindling and "Crazy Hair", and I answered a few questions, and then most of the 400 people at the reading trooped over to the hall and I signed their books. Maddy is having much too much fun, although right this moment while I'm checking e-mail she's watching Even Stevens on the hotel Disney Channel...

Which reminds me...

Hi Neil,
this isn't a question, just a quick note to let you know that you are quoted in the July issue of Better Homes and Gardens.
There is a section about fun things to do this summer and the article mentions a book club for kids. You are in there saying that you still read to Maddy and how you use different voices for the different characters. It was a fun article and very surprising to see my favorite author mentioned.

LeAnn
Houston, TX

Sound and vision

Mark Askwith writes to say:

The piece with your interview conducted at the American Book Expo will air
on HypaSpace this Sunday at 5 pm. ET.
On SPACE: The Imagination Station. They've got a clip on the Hypaspace website, I think, but due to weather taking out my satellite link, I can't bring it up. I look really tired, in the photo, which seems right for the Saturday afternoon of Book Expo.

...

Holly was distinctly unimpressed by the auditory illusions at http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/highest_note/fr.about.html although I was much more impressed, and started wondering how you could use them dramatically...

..

And to Chicago to read.

Posters to make people read books...

Neil,

Not a FAQ, but an FYI. I'm not sure if DC had let you know or not, but ALA Graphics (a division of the American Library Association) teamed up with DC to create a beautiful Sandman library poster. If you'd like to pass on the info it can be found at our online store http://www.alastore.ala.org/SiteSolution.taf?_sn=catalog&_pn=product_detail&_op=1226 I'll be bringing you a copy of the poster to the Printer's Row Bookfair tomorrow.

Tina

How cool -- I'd heard from DC that the ALA were doing a poster, and had suggested to them that P. Craig Russell might be an excellent choice for an artist. The result looks wonderful. No idea whether it can be bought by the public or not... (Looks at site) It certainly looks like anyone can buy a poster. (They have some other really fun ones as well -- certainly a few that would make excellent gifts for a child or a school or a bookshop. Or just somebody who likes books. I'm rather fond of the stegosaurus in this one.)

The Miracles of Modern Technology

In England, as I type this, Dave McKean is shooting Mirror-Mask.

I am not in England. I am thousands of miles away.

But simply by going to the Digital Dailies website, putting in my id and password, I can bring up a menu with everything they've shot since shooting began. I can watch it play, shot by shot, scene by scene. I can listen to it. And if I try to download it in order to watch in my own time I can crash my computer in a variety of strange and interesting ways I'd never dreamed of before.

That's technology.

not a poem

While Comic-Con covers 4 days, I can only attend for 2 days. I would like to be there when Neil is doing something so I can see him, he is the reason I'm going to this convention. I need to make my travel plans, get in on some reduced air fares, so please let me know which of the 4 days of the convention Neil is doing stuff. Thanks, Roxanne Fields.

Er... didn't I already answer this on Tuesday? (Checks.) (Yes I did.)

Anyway, I'm now swapping e-mails with the Comicon people about schedule. As far as any of us can tell, I'll be doing something every day, so it's your call. It'll be different somethings each day. There's also a possibility of a midnight reading as a CBLDF benefit. (I'm very tempted to read the whole of THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN, the new Shadow story from the new Silverberg Legends book.) That's most likely to be Thursday night, or Friday after the Eisners. The schedule still isn't set, except for the Mirror Mask panel.

(Incidentally, Mirror Mask started shooting in the UK on Monday. Dave McKean has shot the hospital sequence, and all the circus stuff. This is both extremely cool and extremely frustrating. It's my first feature film to be shot.... and I'm not there.)

Did my phoning people to thank them for buying over $500 of Fantagraphics stuff this morning, and it was fun. There is now a comics retailer in Halifax who knows the premise of 1602, because he wanted to know how he should order, and if it was the kind of thing that people would like, so I told him, and I think he seemed to think that it was and they would.

The word from Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics is pretty positive:

This grass roots campaign looks to be a phenomenal success: if orders continue at close to the rate they have for the last five days, we project that by weeks� end we will have achieved our immediate goal of the $80,000 stated in this letter. This will get us over our immediate shortfall. If we exceed that figure, we can pay many patient cartoonists the royalties that we have slipped behind on since our previous distributor went bankrupt that much faster, not to mention a few other long-standing creditors whose patience has been understandably eroding. Gary Groth and Kim Thompson are gratified beyond words at the outpouring of support, both financial and moral, as am I personally (I love my job and can�t imagine having another; it is my home more than any place I�ve actually paid rent on in the last ten years). We thank everyone who has and continues to spread the word, and who has encouraged us to hang in there via e-mails and phone calls. Being at BEA this past weekend was, in many ways, the most rewarding experience I�ve had at Fanta, the moral support was unbelievable.

(Nicked from Alan David Doane's journal, via TCJ's Journalista.)

I'll keep doing the phone calls to say thanks for another week, so move fast if you want one. (You have to order $500 worth of stuff from the Fantagraphics site, and tell them that instead of the phone call where Gary phones you up to say thanks for keeping the wolf from their door, you'd like me instead.)

Sorry.

Neil your commentary room flying home at
that. what should
come
to vote on for a
story a clock
for the winning
Eurovision contest, is,
about whether or leave for... me,
but for
my favourite simple Test
For the offending journalentry to
miss it
and ate them to have
given me where
I do, wrong, way, for
permission, to time .bake a lot of comics
landscape of people have a DVD, we get
you get my head while they do,
very excited. to sign something,
of
context, including Dreamhaven have
it going the rat song.

Kelly Sue's journal has a link to a poetry generator that takes URLs and makes poetry out of the web pages. And I thought, what does it turn this journal into? Somehow the above seems to catch the spirit of the last few weeks rather well. You may want to try it on your own favourite website.

A sudden lunatic whim made me wonder what it would do to a Harry Stephen Keeler book, and seeing that Ramble House has the first chapters of many Harry Stephen Keeler books online, I shot over there and told it to get to work on The Case of the Lavender Gripsack (the final book in the Skull series that begins with The Man with the Magic Eardrums). (If you've never heard of him, Keeler was either the worst great writer in American Literary History, or the greatest lousy writer, and I've been fond of him since reading a copy of The Case of the 16 Beans at the age of 11 and realising that no human being except the author could ever have cracked the book's central mystery, and somehow not minding.) The poem somehow manages to give you the flavour of Keeler, punctuation and all, although it's slightly more tightly plotted.

BUY THIS BOOK BUY THIS
BOOK Return to offer!�and far too
large, and , had must face
tonight. Indeed, a private home.
And�proclaimed that,
she
should ever defend moreover, in�his nose was
a man who was at least
not then know
it�and bailiff
combined. And at the latter�s rear,
could only gasp. And
proclaimed that, ancient containing�
her up
the vicious chain which doubtlessly was just
being performed by
a legal
right to the first
surprise�of all things in
the man at the step from
the invisible
wake left by a
forelock hanging down his hand showed that
she wondered unhappily,
some exceedingly important
courtroom luggage: her worn paperoid portfolio containing
her small
freckled hands clutched her in
the October Chicago
air tonight! For his nose
was just turning up into a heavy
gnarled cane, so
thick that man who opened the
high white steps a
client in re grand
larceny and murder in the
first degree!

tattoos in intimate places and an ear infection named Coconut

John M. Ford (Mike, to his friends), writes to say

"... and an ear infection named Coconut."

Yes, I know that by now you've had this pointed out by the entire
English-speaking population of the Earth, but there was a curious
synergy: T'other night I was watching an old Channel Four doc on the
Great Train Robbery, and it contained the line:

"The fireman returned to the cab to find the driver on the floor, his head
bleeding. It was filled with men in balaclava masks that hid their faces."

Obviously, said I upon copying this to Teresa, an inside job.

Not the entire English speaking world, no. There are still people without internet access out there, and several of them decided to just let it go.

Hello! My question is about tattoos. How often do you meet fans with body ink related to Sandman or any of your other work, and how do you feel about tattoos in general?

I ask because I'm am planning on incorporating Morpheus and Death into a design for my back, and I figured that I might ask your permission first.

Much love,

Andrew H.

Pretty frequently. There were some nice Sandman tattoos at Book Expo, not to mention someone who'd had my signature tattooed onto her shoulder (and it had come out looking really nice, in an abstract sort of black-marks-on-pink-skin sort of way).

I think I went momentarily into shock in about 1992, during a signing at Golden Apple in LA when someone got me to sign his arm at the start of the signing, and turned up at the end of the signing having had the signature tattooed on, with the liquid skin sprayed over it, still beading blood. I hadn't expected it, and the idea of seeing my signature as a tattoo took me rather by surprise (although I was used to Sandman tattoos by that point).

But that sort of used up my shock quotient.

I'd say at about half the signings I do, and probably 80% of the readings or events, someone will come up and show me a tattoo, often cheerfully revealing areas of skin normally reserved for loved ones, or at least the beach. (Sometimes, as well, people will look around, and then tell me that they don't really think they can show me where they have their Key to Hell tattooed with quite so many people in the line behind them.)

I've seen some amazingly beautiful tattoos, and some very very proud people. Mostly I just wish that the original artists could see them, or that someone would put together a website on which pictures of them could all be collected.

So yes, of course you have my permission, not that you need it, and I hope it turns out to be everything you wanted.

PS: Having put up the link to Golden Apple, I clicked on it, and discovered it has a photo of me taken about 14 years ago on the website's front page. I was skinnier then, and I have no idea what happened to those shades, but whatever it was they deserved it.

Kill and Quell and Cull and Collect.

Hello Neil,

A few entries back you mentioned a web site that you had allowed to post the Strange Little Girls stories. I was unable to attend the tour and though a friend of mine tried to mail me one of the programs it disappeared in the postal system. So, do you remember what site it was that posted the stories? I'd love to read them.

Sincerly,

Michael

A quick google reveals that the stories are at http://www.strange-little-girls.com/stories.html.

...

For those of you keeping track of the cat population in this house, Buddy (a ragged-eared brown male who turned up here the week after the Black Cat went to his new home, seven years ago) disappeared while I was in Europe recently. This is sad, and Maddy was heartbroken.

Because of the law of Conservation of Cats, we almost immediately found ourselves being presented with a choice of kittens. Maddy picked a small white female kitten with grey blotches, who she called, for reasons that I do not yet understand, Coconut. A quick trip to the vet, and Maddy discovered herself to be the proud owner of a small white male kitten with grey blotches and an ear infection named Coconut.

Watching Coconut move, in a series of unlikely bounces and pounces and springs that defy gravity, I found myself thinking of Fritz Leiber's marvellous short story "Space-Time for Springers", a story that everyone who's ever tried to understand kittens should read. Harlan Ellison sent Fritz a copy of my own "Dream of a Thousand Cats" with a note from me saying it was probably Fritz's fault.

Which reminds me, they are culling (or more precisely, killing) cats in Singapore. (Hm. A few seconds with a dictionary reveals that kill and quell come from the same roots. Cull, on the other hand, comes from the linguistic branch that gives us words like collect.)

Dear Neil:

I would just like to point out that 3,440 people from Singapore, out of a population of 4.5 million, represents 7.4% of the population. Japan, on the other hand, with 2240 out of a population of 126million, clocks in at 1.7%. Therefore, in terms of percentage, Singapore still likes you better.

My FAQ: If all the 3,340 people in Singapore sent you a dollar, would that be enough to get you here?

yours
Sarah
PS - The cat culling is slowing. But it's been an interesting two weeks - Singaporeans as a whole aren't used to the idea of civic protest. (Not anymore, anyway). I'm very excited. We even have a petition, that I'm not in any way pimping - really. http://www.petitiononline.com/cwsasdhr/petition.htmlA summary of the situation: http://www.asdsingapore.com/culling.html

I think there are some misplaced decimal points there, but your point is certainly well taken.

Hi Neil,

On the Radiohead/Thom Yorke subject, I heard Thom being interviewed on Jonathan Ross' Radio 2 show at the weekend. Yorke said that for a while they purposefully didn't include lyrics with their albums as they wanted to make journalists work a little harder when listening to their music. Eventually they found the misquotations far too depressing and so the new release includes full lyrics. You can listen to the show online through the BBC site.

On a connected topic, I know that you used to do a bit of rock hackery yourself, have you come across the excellent Rocking Vicar website (www.rockingvicar.com) and weekly newsletter?

John Innes

I hadn't -- but I just lost much too much time I could ill-afford to lose, reading it. What a wonderfully scurrilous rock site. I'm not sure whether Ronnie Blackmore's wig or Ronnie Corbett's V-sign at the young Captain Sensible amused me more. And it was nice to get an inside look at the famed Brinsley Schwartz in New York debacle.

I should probably mention to anyone that doesn't know that you can listen to Jonathan Ross's show on the web through http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/ross/ -- they keep the shows up for a week. (Full disclosure laws probably force me to add, for purposes of something or other, that Jonathan is my friend, occasionally my landlord, and even crops up in a short story of mine called "The Facts in the Case of the Disappearance of Miss Finch". Also that he's very funny.)

Questions Answered. Neverwhere Commentated. Copyright law entangled.

Several people wrote to say "No, you're wrong, it's trademarks you can lose if you don't enforce them, not copyright," which, seeing I was on the phone to a copyright lawyer about something else fifteen minutes later, I was able to get a definitive answer on. "Yeah, well, it's complicated, they're right and you're right," he said.

(If I understand this correctly, which I may not, you probably cannot lose your copyright, but you could lose any way of making anyone stop infringing it, or pay damages or whatever. And if someone else starts asserting they have copyright on something of yours, while you may not lose your own copyright you may certainly lose the means to stop them if you don't act fast -- copyright in the US has a 3 year Statute of Limitations, remember.)

In the meanwhile, one of the things I love about having this blog is that there are always people who are actually informed about things I merely burble ignorantly about. For example:

On the lyrics question, you might be a bit misinformed. You suggest sites should ask for permission, which is an excellent idea. The problem is that the music industry doesn't work like the writing industry. You own the copyright on your books; you were able to grant the Tori fansite permission to reproduce your stories because you have the right to let them do that. Radiohead fansites can't ask Radiohead for permission to reproduce Radiohead's lyrics (which Radiohead would undoubtedly give), because Radiohead can't grant that right. I'm not sure of the exact legalities of the situation - whether Radiohead technically own the copyright but transfer the right to enforce it to their publisher, or whether the publisher actually owns the copyright itself - but the upshot is the same: the body which has to grant permission is the music publisher, Warner Chappell. It's them, not Radiohead or even Radiohead's record label (EMI), who are sending out the letters (not yet official cease and desist letters) to a multitude of Radiohead fan sites, not just Green Plastic. It's rather like if you didn't actually own the copyright to Coraline, and Harper Collins didn't own it, but some entirely different organisation with which you had only the most distant of relationships did. And they could exercise that right with no reference to you. It's this system which lets Michael Jackson own most of the Beatles songs, for instance - it wasn't the Beatles who sold them on, it was their publisher.

You also raise doubts about the veracity of the reproduced lyrics. Well, the fan sites are very accurate for songs which are actually in a state to have definite lyrics: most of Radiohead's actual released output has official lyrics available in some form (usually liner notes) and the fan sites just reproduce these. Where they aren't available, the sites sometimes get official information by other methods (the Radiohead fan sites already have the official lyrics for Radiohead's new album, despite it not having been released yet).

The real issue here appears to be that Warner are worried about their business publishing songbooks for popular albums. The good news for the sites is it *seems* they might be flexible - what they're mostly annoyed about is the publication of guitar tabs, which Warner thinks stops people paying the rather hefty prices it charges for "official" sheet music (the irony being that Radiohead themselves have complained the songbooks Warner publishes for their material are inaccurate). There are indications they might be flexible with regard to simply printing lyrics, which the fansites point out that no-one in their right mind is going to pay more than the price of the original album for. The songbooks sell on the back of the music more than the lyrics, so it's this Warner really seem to be trying to protect. Hopefully, they might allow the sites to print the lyrics if they remove their archives of guitar tabs for the songs. But it's all rather uncertain at the moment. It's a bit of a sad affair all around, though, and I just wanted to make it clear that it's not the creator of this content behind it - Radiohead have often endorsed the fan sites in interviews, and they certainly support the material they publish.

-Adam (yup, me once more)

Very helpful... thanks.


I just saw on your blog that the Neverwhere DVD is in production. My boyfriend and I are very excited to hear this news, as we've always wanted to see this (without buying pirated copies at the local conventions). A quick question, though....would it be possible at this date to get the commentary closed captioned or subtitled, as well as the movie itself? My boyfriend is deaf due to an illness, and would love to be able to read your commentary while watching. If you could pass this along to the production company I'd really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Kristin Osborn


I asked the DVD producer about this today, and mentioned that several people had asked about it. He's going to find out if the BBC version had captioning, and if A&E can do it.

I sat in front of the screen in a studio in Minneapolis today for the entire afternoon, while all six episodes of Neverwhere played, and talked about whatever came into my head while Neverwhere ran, as a sort of stream of consciousness thing. It's been a long time -- I'd forgotten, on the one hand, how much I disliked the way the first episode came out, and the edit of the last few minutes of the last episode, and on the other, how much I enjoyed large chunks of episodes 4 and 5, particularly the Croup and Vandemar and De Carabas bits.

And I really, really kept wishing that we had all the footage that was shot, and could edit it all back together the way it was meant to be, missing scenes and all...

I also kept wishing I had Lenny Henry, or Clive Brill, or Dewi Humphreys in the commentary room with me, to interpolate when I flagged.


I will be going to the San Diego Comic-Con in July. I can't be there for all 4 days, only 2, and want to plan my trip so I won't miss Neil. What days would be best to be there to see Neil? Thanks, Roxanne.

I can pretty much guarantee I'll be there for the whole time, and doing more than one event every day. We'll figure out the final schedule fairly soon, I expect, and I'll post it or link to it as soon as I can...

In the meantime I can tell you that the Mirror Mask event, with me, Dave McKean, Lisa Henson and Michael Polis (from Hensons) will be from 4:30 to 6pm, on Friday, July 18th. It will have Audio/visual equipment, and with luck Dave should be able to show a few scenes from the film...

Hello, Neil.

I was always happy that to see that you often included or represented lesbian characters in your writing. Is it deliberate and something that you are very conscious of? Is it from any specific influence at all? Interestingly, I don't recall any gay male characters, though. Just like the girl-kissers, huh? Me, too.... ;}

Rassamay

You don't? Let's see, in Sandman, among the characters who reveal their sexual orientation (which tends always to be a minority of characters) and off the top of my head, in the male gay camp you've got Alex Burgess and Paul McGuire (in episode one and The Kindly Ones) , the Cluracan, the Corinthian, Hal Carter, and, depending on your definitions, Wanda. Also several young actors and Christopher Marlowe. In American Gods you've got Salim and the Genie. (One major character in Neverwhere is gay, although you'll not know it until he develops a romantic liaison.) Over in the short fiction, you've got Mr Alice in the 999 story, "Keepsakes and Treasures", the inventor of the reboot drug in "Changes", and a fair number of other characters actually, now I come to think of it.

I tend not to write characters with sexual orientation as a starting point, unless that's how they define themselves. Most people don't.

Who writes are two brazilians girls, readers of your work in general. You�ve probably heard this many times before, however we need to say we love your wonderful and original stories and characters. We enjoy pretty much Morpheus�s family and all Sam�s faiths (American Gods), just to give an example that scarcely shows what we mean. Unfortunately, here, in Brazil, especially in our not too big city (not so small as Lakeside, though), is too hard to get in touch with your books. So, we think you�d aprecciate knowing that there are young fans (18 and 20 years) from a so far place who deeply enjoy your words.

Post scriptium: We�d be extremely glad if you write a few words in answer.

Dreaming farewells,

Darlene e Liany

(One of those occasion times when I thought I'd post something just to make someone's day.) Brazil is one of my favourite countries, and I'd love to go back, and see more than Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero, for once. One day, I hope. Although there are a lot of places I've never been I that I suspect I have to visit first, like Singapore (3406 people) and Japan (2240) and the Philippines (1256) and Hong Kong (1136) and Israel (686) (to take the list of people coming to this site from Asia, according to the stats counter, in numerical order of visits from last month, May). (It drops down to 1 person from Mongolia, and one from Qatar.) (And yes, I know these numbers are very unreliable.)

Hello,

I just read through the FAQ and now have a question that I didn't see listed there, which for some odd reason makes me happy.

I sort of assume you do so much writing that you don't need to do anything to keep sharp. However I was curious if you do or have done any writing exercises?

I'll give an example - Some of my friends and I do a "30 minute rule" where we'll come up with something like "A farmer finds what looks to be a telephone pole on his field" and then set a clock for 30 minutes and see what we can come up with in that time. A lot of time the stuff turns out silly but it's still fun.

Also if you do respond with an exercise would it be alright if it's put into a list I am making for my site of different exercises people come up with?

Thanks for your time,
Jerry

I'll try to write in formal verse forms, every now and again -- I'll try and make a Sestina work, or a Villanelle or a Rondel. But not very often. For the rest of it, most of my writing exercises consist of writing.

Hey Neil!
A brief question - will the all singing all commentating Neverwhere DVD be availible in region 2? It seems a little strange if it was just region 1 as it is a BBC production.

Love
Celia

It'll be Region 1 I'm afraid -- the BBC only sold A&E the rights to do it into the US. If it does well in the US, perhaps the BBC will bring it out on DVD. (Although they still have it for sale on PAL VHS, I believe.)

Lots of recent variants on,

The Suicide girls love you! Dude I would kill myself if the Suicide Girls loved me! Way beyond cool! Are you a member?!?

Marvel releases books soon after the comics come out these days. Should I buy the comic (1602) or wait til the book comes out?


Not a Suicide Girls member, I'm afraid, although considering the number of people they've sent here in the last week I'm starting to feel like I ought to be, if only to say thanks. (The only place to send more people over here recently is Gothic.net, while they're closed for refurbishment, and I won't link to them as there's just a message telling you they're closed right now and if you want something to read, come here. But when they're back in business, hoo boy will I link to them.)

Where 1602 is concerned, it's your call on comic vs. trade paperback. (Remember, though, if nobody buys the original comic, then there probably won't be a trade paperback.) We're also doing some strange things with the introductory "story so far" page in each comic, which I can't imagine would ever be reprinted. (The last one I wrote was extremely loosely based on the way Mike Sekowsky used to design 1960s JLA opening pages, with the addition of a little cartoon of me telling the story so far, while a bemused cartoon of Andy Kubert sits at his drawing board next to me and is concerned.)

Good morning...

Several people have sent in this article on the Salam Pax Baghdad blog: Salam Pax Is Real - How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me. By Peter�Maass

Well, this is my first FAQ, and certainly not the deep, meaningful question I thought I would ask, but I was curious about your opinion on something.
http://www.greenplastic.com is a site dedicated to the band Radiohead, and a very good one at that. The site is currently being ordered to take down its lyric and tab archives by Radiohead's record company, Warner Chappell, citing "copyright infringement". [You can read the letter sent to the webmaster at http://www.greenplastic.com/news/dusty/000575.php]
So my question is this:
Do you, as a professional writer, or just as a music fan, think that it is indeed copyright infringement to post lyrics on the internet? Or do you think that fan sites such as greenplastic.com do more good than harm?
Thank you for your time (anf for being an amazing person),
Acia


Do I think it's copyright infringement to post lyrics on the internet? Not if you own the lyrics, or have the permission of the people who do.

But copyright is about who has the right to copy something, or to publish it...

Beyond that, one of the problems with copyright laws for the person who owns the copyright is that you need to vigorously defend your copyright in order to hang onto it, to stop your work tumbling into the public domain and being owned by everyone or nobody.

And one of the problems with people who post lyrics and poems on the Internet is that they get things wrong, or that they feel they have a right to post things they don't own.

I'll occsionally send e-mails to people saying "please take down this story/essay/poem/novel of mine". In several worrying cases I've had to send e-mails saying that such and such short story wasn't a mysterious anonymous thing in the public domain, but was written, and is owned, by me.

I think fan sites do more good than harm. Much more good. But I think that if anyone is going to post the songs, or the lyrics (or in my case, the essays, novels, short stories) it should be the person who owns them or someone with their permission. It's not like linking is difficult, or asking permission is hard. (I remember a Tori Amos fan site asked if they could put up the "Strange Little Girls" stories I wrote for her tour booklet, and I was happy to say yes.)

Good news...

A Scott just sent me a link to this: State Supreme Court: Winter brothers comic book protected which should come as a sigh of relief to many writers and artists out there.

Scott says Since DC has big-money lawyers, I'm unsure of how much the CBLDF was involved in this one, but it's probably another good time to plug them regardless.

Originally DC Comics declined to defend Joe Lansdale, Timothy Truman and Sam Glanzman, and they came to the CBLDF who immediately took on the case. Later, DC Comics changed its mind, and defended them through its insurance company, but the CBLDF was certainly there all the way -- and we filed an amicus brief on this current round. Check out http://www.cbldf.org/casefiles/winterbros.shtml for the original case file.


Which leads me to an actual question you may or may not be able to answer. The other day I was in the grocery store and they had the Archie comics in the check-out isle. I couldn't help but notice they retains the "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" seal on them. I didn't think the CCA still existed, they certainly haven't "approved" most of the Comics/Manga I read, and I'm grateful for that.

Thanks
-Scott

The comics code authority is certainly still in existence, but who they are, what they do, and what the current terms of the code are, I do not know (I asked once, when I was working at DC Comics, and no-one there seemed to know either). Here's a link to the original 1950s version version of the Code...

Incidentally --

1) No comic magazine shall use the word "horror" or "terror" in its title.
2) All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.
3) All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.
4) Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.
5) Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

just bits and bobs really.

Pinched from The Dreaming Website;

http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2003/Art/0508/featu1.php is an article in English about comics in Prague, with a lovely bit at the end about the problems of translation. "It's like interpreting Baroque music," he says. "It will never sound like it did in the Baroque period. But you're also not performing it for Baroque listeners."

And here's one from Warsaw, in English: http://www.warsawvoice.pl/view/2300 If memory serves, the event was a sort of afternoon comic convention (the reporter seems puzzled about all the comics questions), and while I've been compared to a lot of people in my life, Martin Short has so far not been on the list.

(On the other hand, lots of people have been sending in e-mails recently to let me know they've seen people who looked like me -- but weren't -- in the strangest places.)

....

And here's a fun article: http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=62429 (Harlan is the only person who has a copyright notice in the MAMMOTH BOOK OF THRILLING TALES because he was the only person who, sensibly, made a fuss about it. The rest of us assumed the copyright information would just be on the book, and correct.)

STARDUST will be coming out soon in a mass market paperback edition, with a cover that is meant to look like an old brass-bound diary. It's a good idea, but I'm not sure it works. On the other hand, here's a nice reproduction of the cover of THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS. Both of them found while trying (and failing) to find the covers of the new, trade paperback Perennial editions of Neverwhere and American Gods online. (No, the mass market editions won't go away. But there are too many places now that don't sell mass market sized paperbacks.)

And I forgot to mention that I ran into Chris Moore at BEA. Chris Moore writes very funny books, and one day we will have time to spend an evening together talking about pushing words around, and how the little buggers never do what you tell them to.

An eBay mystery solved

Hi Neil,
What, if anything, do you know about the copies of 1602 that are available on eBay?
Thank you,
April

Whew -- you had me puzzled there for a moment: I figured someone must have stolen a printout of the first issue from Joe Quesada's office, and was wondering if Marvel would be calling in the FBI... Anyway, a hasty look at eBay indicates that lots of people are preselling individual copies or boxes of 1602 #1 there. Preselling being the operative word -- it still won't be out until late August. They just want you to buy it from them now.

My own opinions, which probably won't endear me to any retailers, are that I hope no-one plans to invest in the comic, just as I never wanted Sandman to be something that people invested in. I wanted it to be something that got read. 1602's a story, for heaven's sake, not a collectible. Read the first one. If you enjoy it and want to know what happens next, read the next one. (By the same token, it's not "the most important Marvel story ever told" or whatever these people are saying. It's a story, and I hope a good one, and whether or not people like it will depend on them. So far, I like it, except when it threatens to get too big and I have to remind myself that I don't have 75 issues to tell this story in, or even 20, just eight.)

Spending tomorrow in Minneapolis, doing the commentary for the BBC NEVERWHERE DVD.

An inordinately long post: questions are answered and you learn too much about Book Expo.

Neil

You can't believe how happy I am to have stumbled upon your blog. For the last four years now I've been running a site about travelling on the London Underground http://www.goingunderground.net but with no trainspotters in sight. The site seems to have struck a chord with the public and gets around 300 visitors a day and has had over 200,000 visitors in total. Recently it became one of FHM's top 100 sites mainly due to a page which has recorded "humorous" driver announcements sent in by visitors to my site over the years. http://www.goingunderground.net/#heroes

Anyhow, with bits on animals on the tube, buskers, celeb spotting, I obviously had to feature the tube as an icon itself and have had a feature on Neverwhere from the very early days. http://www.goingunderground.net/tubecelebs.html#neverwhere

It's in need of updating but I will be prompted to do this now as I've just secured a book contract based on my site - http://www.mindthegapbook.com due for publication in Autumn 2004. I'm still writing it, but it would be great to get some comments from you Neil or maybe do a little potted interview for the book.

Please let me know what you think.

I've taken the liberty of linking to your journal from my own blog http://www.london-underground.blogspot.com
Thanks for taking the time to read this and it would be great to hear from you about the above.

All the very best,

"Annie Mole" (my pen name)

Congratulations on the book contract! I'll be in touch about the comments or interview, but I put the e-mail up here on the journal as I've been meaning to link to Going Underground for ages, and you plug the site better than I could. Lovely site filled with odd, London underground things. The weblog is an excellent place to begin -- lots to read. Learn about commuter pigeons, for a start.

...

Hi, Neil,

I realize that you've probably heard this question about a million times before, but I think I'll make it a million and one, thus ensuring its status as an FAQ.

Do you have any idea when a DVD version of Neverwhere will be available for purchase in the US? I used to be able to get my fix from the nice people at college who had taped copies off of PBS, but I had to graduate, so I have been without the original Neverwhere for about a year and a half now, and I miss it dearly. Additionally, my boyfriend is a film/TV buff who loved Good Omens. When I told him that you did a miniseries, he decided that he simply had to see it.

Please help.

Sincerely,
Susan Levitt, formerly of Beloit College

Later this year. I record the commentary for it this week, which should be interesting, as I've not looked at it in a very long time. Probably September/October, as so much is coming out then.

Hi

Can I ask you if you are still doing stuff with the guys at The Dream Project (http://www.thedreamproject.org)?

Initially I thought that was your site, or an initiative you started, as I followed a link from (gasp) an ad banner on Blogger, but at the site it says the project was started by a lady named Olga. So if it's not too much of a hassle, please let me know which is which.

Charlene

It's definitely Olga's site, not mine -- although, with my permission, she's animated a dream of mine which I had put up on this journal.
...

E-mails have started coming in from Gary and Kim at Fantagraphics letting me know that I need to make some phone calls to thank people for buying Fantagraphics merchandise... Which reminds me: some answers arrived to two of my questions...


Hello, Mr. Gaiman. My name's dirk Deppey, and among my other duties, I'm catalog editor for Fantagraphics Books. I'm not here to ask a question, but rather to answer a couple of yours, which you asked in the course of writing about our recent troubles:

1) Stocking the Fantagraphics shopping cart with text and pictures is my responsibility; it's the way it is because it's just one of my _many_ responsibilities, I'm afraid. My official task -- the one for which they pay me -- is to make the various Fantagraphics/EROS catalogs and mailers, which takes up most of my time. In addition, I also run The Comics Journal's website, write its weblog and curate the Audio Archives (more on that below), in addition to the aforementioned shopping-cart duties. What can I say? We're a small company, and therefore understaffed.

There's literally thousands of items in our catalog, and consequently I simply don't have time to scan every cover; the shopping cart is progressively updated after every catalog, and new text and images are posted as I generate them for print. I'm hopeful that it'll get there eventually, though of course there's still a ways to go. Anyway, that's why the cart looks the way it does; in my defense, I'll only say that when I got here three years ago, it looked like an endless, blank accountant's ledger -- a big column of names, prices, order buttons and nothing else.

2) The Comics Journal Interview CD is a sampling from the original tapes of four classic Journal interviews: Gary's conversations with Charles Schulz and Jack Kirby, a 1969 interview Gil Kane conducted with Pogo creator Walt Kelly at a National Cartoonists Society meeting, and a convention panel with Kane and R. Crumb. In the magazine's 27-year history, Gary and Kim have never intentionally thrown a tape away -- there were some seventeen boxes of tapes in the Fantagraphics basement when I stumbled across the collection just over a year ago. So far as I know, it's the single largest oral history of the American comics medium in existence. In my spare time, I'm trying to digitize it all to compact-disc format before it all melts to magnetic mush. It's slow going (for the same reasons as the Fanta.com shopping cart), but I've currently got about 170 hours digitized and counting.

As a side-project to this side-project, I've been running excerpts from the tapes on the Journal website in downloadable MP3 format. Go here to see for yourself:

http://www.tcj.com/listen/listen.html

I usually post about an hour's worth of excerpts per month, then take each selection down to make way for the next one. At the moment, it's Gary's 1998 interview with Frank Miller, with whom we're working to produce a coffee-table book of interviews and critical essays (interview excerpts are posted only with the permission of the interviewer and interviewee, so yeah, Gary's with it, and TCJ managing editor Milo George assures me that Frank is, too).

All of this is probably much more than you wanted to know, but... well, you did ask. Anyway, thank you very much for plugging our recent fundraising efforts in your weblog. It's much appreciated.

- Dirk Deppey,
Fantagraphics Books

Thanks Dirk. For some reason, I felt very reassured knowing they still had all the tapes of the interviews they've done. I really wish I'd kept all the tapes of all the interviews I did as a journalist. I was happy to find a number of tapes of Alan Moore interviews, which I gave to George Khoury for his book on Alan, but there were so many great interviews which were taped over after the interview was published (or, in the case of the Kenneth Williams interview, rejected by an editor who suddenly decided, after I'd done the interview, that Kenneth was just "too gay". Sigh.)

...

And one last note about the mysterious line break problem. (Yes, I know I failed to fix it the night before last, because I quoted the offending line in full while fixing the original version. No, this wasn't a clever form of sarcasm on my part, as several of you assumed, but the kind of braindead thing you do very late at night after a full day of meetings and bookfair when you try and post something. Apologies.)

Dear Mr Gaiman,

To answer this problem:

> Don't know about the FAQ's margins, but the Journal proper was
demarginated
> by the line about
>
"so-bad-it's-well-not-good-but-everyone-will-at-least-remember-this-show-as-
> opposed-to-most-other-Eurovision-entries"

Mozilla, Netscape and other Mozilla-based browsers don't break hyphenated
"phrases". Internet Explorer doesn't have this problem, and I suspect Opera
is fine too (I don't have it installed ATM), hence some people getting it
but not others. Solution: remove hyphens, or wait for the offending journal
entry to disappear in the archives.

Regarding the Balmung-Mablung connection, I believe it's merely coincidence.
Balmung predates Tolkien, and "Mablung" is Sindarin for "heavy hand", and as
such unlikely to be an intentional anagrammatic reference. If it is, then
it's a pretty convoluted one.

Best,
Lu�s


...

Let's see. Yesterday began early with breakfast with my agent Merrilee and my Harper Children's editor Elise, followed by a CBLDF Board meeting. Lots of fun plans for this year. [Incidentally, for those who did not know, there's a CBLDF online store at http://www.cbldf.com/ and there's lots of cool strange exclusive things there you can get in exchange for a donation.

Also, remember to get a membership, especially if you're planning to be at San Diego comicon this year. The CBLDF member events are legendary (the last one I was at was in 1999, and half way through the party I took anyone who was interested -- about 40 people at most -- into a room and read them all that was written at that point of Coraline, and the whole of The Wolves in the Walls).

Memberships range from rock bottom $25 annual memberships, up in stages to the $1000 "angel" level. Penn and Teller are both angels...]

Then to the Convention Centre and Book Expo. Saw my adult books editor Jennifer Brehl, with the awesomely wonderful Ray Bradbury, who was cheerfully signing his name for a long line of happy people. Did a one hour signing for many hundreds of people, and was only able to sign one thing per person, but pretty much everyone got something signed. Then spoke to Vertigo supremo Karen Berger and we caught up, and on to the DC Comics Booth to be interviewed for Canadian Book TV.

[At the DC booth, I noticed that according to the Diamond Comics Previews Book, SANDMAN: ENDLESS NIGHTS, which is on the cover, is a 96 page hardcover. Which was odd, as it's a 160 page hardcover. No-one seemed sure whether DC or Diamond was to blame for the cover info.

Then again, despite having a big plug for THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS, the Diamond Previews mentioned seemed oblivious to the fact it was a 64 page full colour Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean graphic novel, and just listed it as the next Neil Gaiman children's book, illustrated by Dave McKean.

(They have a nice link to 1602, as one of their gems of the month.)

If you know any comics retailers, please let them know that Wolves in the Walls is a graphic novel...]

From the Interview to room 403A where I did a slide show reading of Wolves in the Walls, showed some sneak preview art of Endless Nights, answered questions, and even, when asked, sang one verse of the Rat Song from Coraline.

And into the car, with editor and agent in tow, to the Harper Collins party on the 20th Century Fox lot. Saw lots of old friends, including Daniel Handler and his wife Lisa. (They are expecting a baby, due the day before my birthday, and proudly presented me with a hilarious pamphlet called "IS YOUR BABY DUMB?", which they had made as an antidote to the kinds of fliers they give you in doctors' offices. It includes Five Ways To Tell If Your Baby Is Dumb, and a Simple Test For Determining If Your Baby Is Dumb.) Also met a number of people I've always wanted to meet and chat with, just not in a loud-party-in-a-hot-room sort of context, including Neal Stephenson, Gregory Maguire, and the extremely tall Michael Crichton, and had the kind of small conversations you have in a hot room filled with hundreds of people when a jazz band is playing just loudly enough to make conversation more or less impossible.

Francoise Mouly gave me my own personal copy of the next Little Lit book, which made me really happy. I wrote a story for Gahan Wilson to draw in there. It's called "It Was a Dark And Silly Night." (Here's the cover.)

Then a hasty bite to eat, and on to the airport. Got a 12:45am flight home, landed in Minneapolis at a little after 6:10 am, and went home. All without incident, except the airport security people took all of my stuff apart, looking for a mysterious and dangerous thing which turned out to be the Audie Award. "It's crystal," said the security guy, when he found it. "The real stuff. That shows up black on the X-Rays. If it was glass it wouldn't show up."

And then I slept for a few hours, and woke up and went to Holly's Graduation Ceremony, which was more or less what you'd expect, only with a lot more quotations from Dr Seuss.

And then home, with hundreds of unanswered e-mails. I gave Maddy the copy of Tony DeTerlizzi's wonderfully creepy retelling of the Spider and the Fly, a gift from Tony and his wife Angela. And I wrote this.