I never knew how to say Michael Chabon's last name. I always said "Chuh-bonne". According to The Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0335/wordsalad.php) it's pronounced Ka-BONE. I doubt whether that's really true because they say Updike is really pronounced Oop-decay (which makes me think they're taking the piss).
You know Michael, so when you introduce him to someone else, you said, "Hello, this is Michael ------."
Shayb'n.
It's probably worth pointing out that the entire Village Voice article is a joke.
Incidentally, Entertainment Weekly liked the first issue of 1602 a lot, according to a mini review quoted over at The Dreaming.
I don't think I've ever mentioned Maddy's dwarf hamster, Creepy, here before. This is partly because much of the time he barely exists -- he just sleeps. And it's partly because the hamster wheel in his cage didn't work until recently. Now it's been fixed, he's making up for lost time, during his nocturnal waking hours working out on what must be the loudest hamster wheel in creation.
You know that noise that the TARDIS makes, when it's materialising somewhere? It's a noise an awful lot like that. It's a noise that can, I am discovering, be heard through thick brick walls and through several closed doors. A grinding, graunching, rattling, continual noise that sits at the threshold of perception like a toothache and only stops, for a minute or so, if you're actually starting to get used to it enough to begin to tune it out.
No, I'm not asleep, yet. Why do you ask?
Did a reading today at the con -- read 95% of my story "A Study In Emerald" to a really nice audience, and then had to stop, out of time, and off to the airport...
Now I'm home, and pretty tired. The flight was okay, but transportation back from the airport sort of didn't happen as it was meant to, and by the time I eventually got home I was sort of done, so I will save my comments and thoughts and so on about the convention and Hugos (no, I didn't say it again, although the time I had planned to write a thank you in got eaten by the Chapters signing, so I really just thanked all the editors over the book's lifetime)...
So a couple of things -- first of all, I finally got around to paying my 25 cents and reading Scott McCloud's THE RIGHT NUMBER tonight. I thought it was the best thing Scott's done since the lovely black and white Zot "Earth Stories", and hope the Eisner Committee are prepared to do their micropayment bit.
The biggest problem right now with the Bitpass thing is that there's not enough to spend the micropayments on yet. (And I understand why Scott keeps suggesting I put up something for a micropayment. Maybe something for the CBLDF...)
I sometimes think that anyone who blogs or livejournals should be pointed at Mr. Charles Pooter, hero of the extremely funny, in a dangerously understated sort of way, DIARY OF A NOBODY. Which was written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon, first published in the 1890s, and which you can read here, at http://www.kokonino.com/DiaryOfANobody/. Think of it as a Victorian Blog...
And my Neverwhere DVDs arrived. So they do exist, and should be shipping any moment.
What I did today: I signed at Chapters for around 700 people. It was fun, although it lasted a bit over seven hours, and I was a bit dazed toward the end.
Then I went straight from the signing to the Hugo ceremonies, and was entirely chuffed and grateful to win the Hugo for Best Novella.
And tomorrow (Sunday) morning I'm doing a reading at Torcon in room CC 104A. It won't be followed by a signing, as I'll have to get on a plane almost immediately afterwards.
For those of us not leaving the TorCon area (convention center, hotel, etc.) is there a place where you might be found before the Hugos or after the Hugo party that lowly folks like me might have access to?
K
I honestly don't know. Before the Hugos I'll be at the pre-Hugos reception, where I shall admire China's suit. Afterwards, I'll be around. (Last year I was mostly sitting in the hotel lobby drinking and chatting with Terry Pratchett and Janis Ian and several other nice people and saying "thank you" a lot when people congratulated me.)
I know I'm doing a reading at Torcon at 11:00 am on Sunday. I don't yet know which space it'll be in -- keep an eye on the daily updates. I'll read an unpublished story, though.
...
Fascinating interview with Elvis Costello about life, love and North -- his new album -- in the Guardian.
Mr Gaiman,
This is kind of a strange request. You know the speech in American Gods where Sam tells Shadow what she can believe? May I have your permission to use it as a monologue for an audition?
Either way, thanks for your time.
Toni
Sure. I'm happy for anyone to use anything I've written as an audition piece -- it's not like anyone is paying to see it, after all...
& so to bed.
I'm in Toronto. Should spend this afternoon being interviewed ( Macleans, CBC Newsworld and the Globe and Mail) and signing stock, and such.
...
Hi Neil,
I know you're aware of Jess Nevins excellent 1602 Annotations, but I was wondering if you'd read this peice (http://comicworldnews.com/forum/ib3/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=19;t=1722) by Ed Cunard at comicworldnews.com. He goes page by page and sort of makes plain talk of the various puzzle peices. I just thought you'd find it fun to read how people are trying to unravel your ball of twine so early, and maybe even make you think "Hmm... I hadn't thought of that" a few times.
To Maddy: Happy Birthday! I hired a copy of The School Story from my library to read to my young cousin today in your honor.
- Phil
Thanks. I think the article is actually by Jason Pomerantz.
There's another interesting set of annotations occurring at http://continuitypages.com/marvels.htm, while Jess's annotations are growing in leaps and bounds at http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Jess%20Nevins/1602/16021.html
...
Right. Toronto signing at Chapters tomorrow (saturday) in case anyone came in late...
Oh, and finally...
Hi Neil,
You might find the following comic very interesting, especially since it has a drawing of you:
http://www.thegeekout.com/comics/tlt/tlthtm/082803.htm
It's all true, by the way.
Sincerely,
Nicole Lee from San Francisco
Congratulations to both of you! (Nicole was one of the first people in line at the Thursday DC signing, and she says I should come and sign in Malaysia. And I should.)
Washington DC people should know that on Sept 30th at 6:30pm, Terry Pratchett will be in conversation with Michael Dirda, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, talking about Good Omens, which is the Washington Post Book of the Month. Undoubtedly also answering audience questions about everything under the sun, and signing books as well. I ought to be there, but I spectacularly failed Bilocation at school, so although I will be in Finland (possibly even in Sweden by that point) I won't also be in Washington.
And while this journal isn't a personal column, or a help wanted, I wanted to put in a plug for Randi, AKA Lucy Anne, who is the tireless finder of cool stuff over at the Dreaming website ( www.holycow.com/dreaming). She's looking for a new job -- her resume is up at
http://resumes.hotjobs.com/research_please/research
And given that an awful lot of people read this blog, I thought I'd see if I could help get her gainfully employed again.
She says that, ignoring the resume-speak, what I
do is find needles-in-haystacks using the Internet, phone
contacts, print sources, and news aggregators like Factiva
and Nexis, on topics ranging from pharmaceuticals pipelines
to consumer product trends to technology predictions.
Oh yes, and in my spare time, I'm library administrator,
magazine coordinator, and trainer for information services.
I'm looking to do the same for a corporation that needs an
quick and organized research librarian, but will happily
work as an administrative assistant if the position allows
me learn new skills.
Let's see -- today's big news is MADDY GAIMAN IS NINE TODAY. (And on the subject of birthday parties, why is there a plastic box filled with wobbly water-balloons in the kitchen? Do I have anything to worry about?)
I promised her that I would tell people at some point that Maddy's current favourite book is "The School Story" by Andrew Clements, a book she found on her own and loved so much that she read it over and over and made everyone else in the house read it -- and we all really enjoyed it. It's a book about a twelve year old girl who has written a novel she wants published, and her best friend, who is a natural born agent. It's also a pretty good portrayal of the New York publishing world.
And Maddy thinks everyone should read it. Especially people who want to know about being published.
...
There's a nice article about me in the Toronto Star, although the article is peculiarly certain that I've already got the Hugo award for best Novella for Coraline. And while I'm happy to be the favourite, I'm nowhere near as confident about it as the journalist. (My favourite of the novellas is Paul Di Filippo's "Year in the Linear City".)
The Hugo, incidentally, is not the kind of award that makes meaningful phonecalls of the "We just thought you should know that you REALLY OUGHT TO COME TO CLEVELAND FOR THE AWARDS CEREMONY. We can say no more than that," variety. Or the "You've won, you won't be there, please write a speech so it's not embarassing," kind of award. In the case of the Hugos, nobody knows who's won, except the awards administrator and whoever's getting the plaques made.
China Mieville says that he will be wearing a suit to the awards. I hope he gets to go up onstage and wear it while getting a Hugo.
Lots of fun ballot-stuffing going on at the SFWeekly Hugo site now... http://www.scifi.com/sfw/hugo/2003results.php Or possibly David Brin really is that popular.
...
"So I spent from 6.00am until 1:30pm standing in lines, and then 1:30 until 4:00ish sitting waiting"
MWAHAHAHAHA! Now you know what the fine folks at your SIGNINGS go through...but then, the people in line at your signings actually want to see you.
SK
The comparison had not entirely failed to cross my mind. Although I hope nobody's ever had to get into line for me at 6:00am for a 4:00pm signing...
...
And for those people wondering about the signing on Saturday:
Having already arrived at Torcon, I scouted out the Chapters where you're doing the signing. They have signs up saying that you'll sign any number of Wolves and Coraline, and two other items, presumably per person.
Tom Galloway
...
Hi Neil:
How do the profits work for an author when it comes to hard cover vs. paperback? I ask now because I just bought Coraline in paperback, after waiting these many months for it to be issued that way. I just can not justify spending the extra money for a hard-covered book, even when I want to read it when the book first comes out.
In fact, I should confess that I borrowed American Gods from the library since I didn't want to wait for the paperback. Sorry about that your loss on that one, but there is a back-handed compliment in there somewhere!
Thanks for everything (the blog, the books, the comics, etc)
Matt
Well, mostly an author will be getting something between 8% and 15% of the cover price of what you pay. (In comics that 8% is being split with an artist, so the writer will be getting something closer to 4%.) So that's how it works.
The idea with paperbacks is that they're cheaper than hardbacks, but the publisher is selling more of them because more people can afford them. So don't worry. These things work themselves out.
Beyond that -- don't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...
I had a long sort of day. I learned that while the INS tell you to be there at 6:00am and they deal with the first 300 people, you actually should be in line outside their offices at 4:00am if you want to be certain to be seen, and right now they're only seeing the first 150 people. Arriving at 6.00 am, and seeing a fairly long line, I got on the back. When they opened the doors at 6:30, I was around #180, and was in the group that was going to be sent away, but they made a final check for people who had Come A Long Way, and I had, and was admitted, along with a couple who had had a death in the family and had to fly to France.
So I spent from 6.00am until 1:30pm standing in lines, and then 1:30 until 4:00ish sitting waiting. And then, at 4:00pm, I spent about a minute showing a helpful INS officer my passport and getting the stamp in it that will let me go to Canada and come back.
I got some writing done, but it's hard to write standing up shuffling forward an inch at a time for hour after hour, so mostly I just wished I'd brought a book. And I wished my cellphone didn't have a potential camera attachment, thus making it something that wasn't allowed in a government building. And I wished I'd thought to bring something to eat...
But, at the end of the day, I got my stamp. It's valid for a year, and by October, I was told, I should have my new green card.
...
Phill Jupitus interviewed Thea Gilmore recently on Radio 6 -- the interview (with songs removed) is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/presenters/phill_jupitus/ram/pj_theagilmore.ram. It's a fun, burbling sort of chat, during the course of which I discovered that Thea used to do cover versions of Jake Thackray's song "Lah-Di-Dah", something I'd love to have heard. (She also used to do Jake's "Castleford Ladies' Magical Circle".)
Thackray was a very individual singer-songwriter, with a delivery half-way between a sort of North Country Noel Coward and Jaques Brel, who could do some remarkable things with poetry and humour and the places he put his rhymes and the way the words worked. I keep meaning to ask Terry Pratchett whether Jake's song about Old Molly Metcalfe informed the shepherdess stuff in The Wee Free Men.
Neil, I hate to do this but I'm going to keep bugging you and bugging you until I a) get an answer to my question somewhere in your journal or b) it eventually turns up on the Vertigo website. I kept hearing about a Sandman: Endless Nights Special that was supposed to come out at the same time as the hardcover. This individual comic supposedly is an extra Dream story published separate from the Endless Nights collection. Please, if you can find just a moment to address this it would mean the world to several dozen comic book geeks and geek-ets in the suburban Detroit area. Thanks!
Always in love with your work,
Jewels
Thanks. It's not an extra story -- it's the Miguelanxo Prado Dream story from Endless Nights, reprinted in comics format (which is a smaller size than Endless Nights) so that comic shop people will have something to sell customers who find the idea of buying a 180 page $25 oversized hardback sort of scary. If you're getting Endless Nights anyway, you don't need it, unless you want to give it to your friends as a present.
Hey
Sandman: King of Dreams arrived through my mailbox today. Today.
Today not being early november, I found that a little strange. Amazon.co.uk sent it to me in Scotland, so do us Rule Brittania Kids get it first? Or do Titan publish it here and then DC print it for the U.S in November? Just Curious, but its a great book, and I can't believe you almost killed Matthew!! Shame!
Hamza Khan
Well, Titan don't publish a separate print-run -- they tack on to the back of Chronicle Books (not DC)'s printing of the book. But it certainly looks like they got it out first, which makes me sort of happy -- it's nice when the UK gets something before the US. And very unusual.
And finally, the last word (I hope) on the subject of ...
Kittens & Nostrils --
Alas, I am sad to report that my formerly-feral cat, Buddy, an all-black mongrel found on the streets when he was about eight months old, is now nearly three years old and STILL trying to insert himself into my nostrils at night. He has also discovered that a singular claw, inserted delicately into a nostril, hooked around the edge of the skin and then yanked back forcefully, will indeed make me jump out of bed screaming like a banshee.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is it will only get worse. Once a nostril-abuser, always a nostril-abuser.
Cheers!
Colleen @ Del Rey Books
Info in from Felicia Quon, she of the Coolest Girl's Name (long time readers of this blog will remember that Owl Goingback has the coolest boy's name)...
This Saturday (30 Aug) at 1:00 -- i'll beSigning at Chapters Festival Hall 126 John Street (416.595.7349). No, I don't know if there will be a reading or a Q & A. There may be.
(At the last signing I did, I signed all the copies of WOLVES IN THE WALLS that people wanted, along with a couple of other things.)
Then I'll be at the Hugo Ceremonies. And I'll be wandering about afterwards, either clutching a Hugo with a bemused expression on my face, and hoping they'll still let me into the Hugo Losers Party, or nibbling crisps happily in the Hugo Losers Party. (If you happen to have something you want signed and you happen to run into me, and you ask nicely and there's a pen around, yes, I'm sure I'll sign it. Pick your moments wisely, though.)
Then on Sunday the 31st, I'll be doing a reading at Torcon. Place to be figured out. It won't be followed by a signing, cos I'll have to get in a car and go to the airport to go home. (This one is just for people attending Torcon, as a thank-you-for-having-me.)
...
This is assuming that I get the stamp in my passport tomorrow that lets me out of/into the US. I'm writing this from a hotel near the INS in Minneapolis, and just put in for my 5:30am alarm call. 6:00 am I'll be there, with a notebook, and I'll write 1602 #7 while I'm waiting...
......
And this one stands in for several dozen received today. I thought there was only one nasal cat in the world. I was wrong. They seem quite likely to be the Next Big Thing...
Not a question but more of a thank you. I rescued a runt barn kitten about a year ago from a farm up by my sisters place in Brainerd. Ever since when ever I fall asleep this cat has been trying to take up residence in my nose. All along I have thought that my cat was a little lose in the noggin and now through your entry I know that odds are that it is because he was ripped from his mother far to early. I sat Oswald(the Cat) down this evening and explained to him that he could stop worrying about his mental state that he just suffered from seperation anxiety. hopefully this little talk will prevent him from trying to move into my nostril tonight.
Charles
You are not alone, Charles.
Regarding the Novello Festival of Reading in Charlotte, North Carolina, October 18th - will there just be a reading and perhaps a Q&A session, or will you be signing anything as well?
-Sarah H.
I'll do a reading and a talk and some Q & A as well. There's normally a signing at these things, although I don't have details. Assume there will be. I'll post info as I get it.
And now I'm going to try and have an early night.
It looks like everything's working again -- thanks to all of you who helped in identifying problems.
So a hasty late night post, being typed around an asleep-on-my-keyboard medium-sized tabby kitten who rejoices in the name of Captain Morgan. He looks a little like Buddy-who-vanished, being sort of brown and sort of stripy, and was found by Lorraine hanging hungrily and miserably around the house a month or so ago. He and Coconut, Maddy's kitten, immediately became inseparable. Captain Morgan is a sweet-natured kitten, who has only one failing.
He waits until you're asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
It never works, a hefty kitten being much larger than the interior of a nostril, but he keeps trying until you open up an eye and pick him up and drop him onto the floor. And then he bounces back onto the bed and tries to stick his head into one of your nostrils again. So you sweep him unceremoniously onto the floor, and bury your face in your pillow; and he sneaks back onto the bed and waits patiently while you go back to sleep and roll over, or just come up for air, and all of a sudden there's a small brown cat patiently trying to push its head into your nose.
Sooner or later he'll wake you up enough that you'll get up, carry him into the hall, and shut the door firmly, with him on the other side of it, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
I commented on this peculiar habit to my assistant Lorraine today, in the casual way you do when you don't want someone to think you've gone mad. "Er, Captain Morgan the kitten keeps trying to push his way into my nose while I'm asleep," I told her. She looked relieved. "Yes, he does that to me as well," she said. "I think it's because he probably wasn't weaned properly."
It's possible, I suppose, although I thought that misweaning just meant they sucked and chewed on things, not that they had grandiose fantasies about being nasally insertable, small wet muzzle first.
Sometimes I worry that one night I won't wake up, and he'll succeed in his bizarre quest, and in the morning there'll be nothing but the tip of a kitten-tail sticking out of one nostril to tell me he was ever here at all.
Which wasn't what I meant to type when I sat down to do this -- I thought I'd just stick up a bunch of interesting links before bed...
...
Let's see: Some Wolves in the Walls reviews -- one from the Cooperative Children's Book Centre, and one from the Toronto Globe and Mail (Which also reviews Little Lit 3.)
The Guardian talks to Scott McCloud about Micropayments. And I kept putting off posting that until I'd used my 25 cent micropayment to read "The Right Number", but I still haven't got around to getting through the whole credit card number thing to actually sign up to pay my 25 cents...
I shall, and then I'll write about it. Honest.
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/434/434940p1.html?fromint=1 is an excellent article by Peter Sanderson about the Mirrormask panel in San Diego.
A couple of minor errors worth correcting (mostly because it is such a good article) -- Lisa Henson explained that The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth had each "cost more than $4 million twenty years ago. No, they cost more than $40 million each, twenty years ago. Henson and Gaiman discussed a short film that McKean had made, called "N[eon]." "It's a very wonderful short film that Dave made for nothing in his mum's barn and on her pond," Actually, that's Dave's film "The Week Before". "N[eon]" was shot partly in Venice and partly in a town square that was entirely in Dave's imagination.
Yet, either because I missed hearing it or because it was not made clear, not until I got back from San Diego did I learn that MirrorMask is actually intended to go direct to video in 2004 without theatrical distribution. That means that the majority of film critics will probably end up ignoring it or being oblivious to its existence. Not true, I'm happy to say. Currently the release plan involves opening it small theatrically in major US markets.
Information's here, at http://us.imdb.com/Title?0366780.
...
I think this might, potentially, be the single coolest piece of news in a long time; the BBC plans to make its radio and TV archives fully downloadable. The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes.
(And Maddy will be more than happy to learn that she'll be able to listen to more than just the latest week's episode of "Just a Minute".)
...
Incidentally, http://www.etiquettehell.com/ has a dangerously moreish quality -- particularly the wedding stories... It's hard to read just one.
I am with Maddy at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. It is very hot today, and everywhere one looks one sees sweaty cleavage. Acres of sweaty cleavage. Not that I am complaining of course...
[later edit -- this was me testing the whole mobile phone blogging thing, in the downtime between Lorraine's band FOLK UNDERGROUND leaving the stage and Puke and Snot coming on. And I was surprised, on getting home, to discover that I'd got it to work, using blogger's e-mail function (which had never worked for me before). Which means that, at least in theory I can now get here from anywhere I can get a GSM signal.]
I'm currently reading a book called THE TURK, about the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton (the book has a website -- the preface is here at http://www.theturkbook.com/preface.php). Chapter 1 (also on line on the site) talks about John Cox, an Englishman, who made a mechanical, moving, elephant, a tiger, and a swan. Coincidentally, a friend just sent me a link to a museum site with Cox's silver swan on it. It still exists (although it's now pretty fragile) and you can watch a real video of it preening, moving its head, and swallowing a silver fish. Check out http://www.bowesmuseum.org.uk/collections/swanfacts.html for a little sense of wonder at the movement and grace of a quarter-of-a-millennium-old technology.
(The next book to be read will be Martin Millar's just finished novel Lonely Werewolf Girl, which my assistant Lorraine has already read, and tells me is quite possibly the best book that anyone's ever written. This is high praise, and even if it doesn't manage to clear that particular hurdle I'm still really looking forward to it.)
Once again the Live Journal feed has stopped feeding. It seems to do that when the RSS feed doesn't validate -- last time we had this problem someone helpfully forwarded me a link to the feed validator at http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.neilgaiman.com%2Fjournal%2Fblogger_rss.xml and I'd go in and clean up stray ascii characters it couldn't parse until everything worked. This time I haven't got a clue what's wrong with the entry it's marked up as not validating.
And the FAQ line seems to have gone down yesterday afternoon and not come up again. Which is a good excuse for me to go back and answer lots of the things that came in over the last few days. But not tonight.
From Saturday morning US Time "I Have a Cunning Plan" will be available to listen to, probably for the next week -- it's a half hour radio documentary: Twenty years after the wily Edmund Blackadder first appeared on our screens, the series' producer John Lloyd tells the inside story of one of television's classic comedies.
And there's a new Brian Aldiss short story in the Independent. (I got more of a kick from the idea of a Brian Aldiss story in an English quality newspaper than I think I did from the story itself, which read more like part of something much longer than like a short story in its own right.)
And it seems that Diamond will be making busts of the 1602 Dr Strange, which is fun.
Wolves in the Walls is on the New York Times bestseller lists for the second week running, and now Coraline's joined it in paperback. Which is nice, particularly because I believe that Wolves is a comic (I think the publishers are calling it a graphic novella. Not that that means anything at all.) Your mileage may vary, but I like the idea that I've finally written a comic that made it onto the Times list...
Not a question, but I can't seem to find anywhere else on the site to input my ideas.
I was re-reading Stardust for the nth time, and I couldn't help realizing how similar it was to Great Expectations. I found all the characters and plot points.
I thought it was ironic how you put in the bit about Dickens being a young man in the first part of the book.
Great stuff. Myself, I hated Great Expectations, and had Stardust been dubbed a re-working, I never would have picked it up.
Thanks for writing such marvelous books, and do keep writing them, else I will run out of things to read.
Yours,
Amelia
I don't think I'd call it a reworking; but there are definitely a couple of places where Stardust and Great Expections wink at each other from across the room, yes.
...
I should be able to post details for the Sept/Oct mini tour of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Croatia and Germany very soon. And there will be a UK signing tour in early November -- again, I'll put up the details as soon as they're finalised.
...
As far as I can tell, the Fox suit against Al Franken seems to have presold more than enough extra copies of his book to pay the legal fees he'll have incurred defending it, but it's still nice to see the judge's comments:
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030823/D7T3BLEG0.html
"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," the judge said. "This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally." ... In addition to denying the injunction, the judge took direct aim at Fox for bringing the case.
"It is ironic that a media company, which should be protecting the First Amendment, is seeking to undermine it," Chin said.
The judge also said the "Fair and Balanced" trademark itself is weak, considering those words are used so frequently "in the context of the public marketplace."
Spent the day being interviewed by Scott Brown from Entertainment Weekly...
So here's a link to the fascinating Gender genie. I tried it on several pieces of mine, and it was convinced the author was male in each case. Tried it on writings of other people, and it called gender correctly each time. Then, because I wanted to make things harder for it, I went and checked the writings of several transgendered people, and in each case it accurately called the gender of the writer as the one that the person had elected.
Apparently it only calls it correctly about 51% of the time, according to the "Am I Right?" stats, which may mean that I just got lucky...
Have fun playing with it.
http://www.newsarama.com/forums/
showthread.php?s=&threadid=5192 is a Newsarama page, where you get to see some of Andy Kubert's 1602 pencils, and what Richard Isanove does to them.
This one cheered me up no end...
Thank you, Neil.
After an evening of feeling saddened by the ugly side of the comics industry that I love (seeing sooo many internet trolls spewing vitriol all over Comicon's Pulse site, specifically), I came to your journal seeking relief. As I so often do...
..And there was the recent posting about the CBLDF and it's "suspicious intentions." Are the rumor-mongers everywhere? This is depressing; what can I do to help stem the flood?! What would Neil suggest...?
I just joined the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
There, feeling better already. Thank you, Neil!
Scott Challman
...
And Scott Brown from Entertainment Weekly has arrived to do the interview, which will take up most of my tomorrow, I expect.
...
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
I just read on ICV2 http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/3275.html that there a book Sandman: King of Dreams by Alisa Kwitney is being released in November. How different is this book from The Sandman Companion that was written by Hy Bender released 4 years ago?
Raymond
Well, Hy Bender's book is a Sandman companion. It's an inside look and commentary on Sandman, and an excellent one. If you've read Sandman, or plan to re-read it, it may point out things you'd missed, or illuminate things you'd forgotten. Alisa Kwitney's King of Dreams is a big illustrated, full colour book that's a sort of an overview, and an introduction -- for someone who's read Sandman it's a souvenir, while it's probably a good introduction if you haven't.
They're very different books, and they cover completely different ground.
The Hallowe'en horror-hosting gig has unfortunately fallen through: the movie channel in question (and I'll not embarrass them by naming them, for they're big enough that you'd think they'd have some money) realised that their budget didn't stretch to actually flying me in and putting me up for the couple of days that it would have taken to film it, and were apparently shocked and disappointed by my negligence in failing to live in Los Angeles.
Oh well. Maybe next year.
And Dirk Deppey adds some sensible points to the anonymous Oklahoman note at Journalista! http://www.tcj.com/journalista/zarch200308C.html#other3
I've never had a very high opinion of people who talk loudly in comic stores. I'm not talking about the customers, and I'm not talking about the staff. It's the other ones -- the ones who hang around the front counter -- normally really irritating the staff, and getting in the way of the customers -- talking loudly about the secret world of comics. Because these guys know the secrets. And they tell everyone. That they know nothing is no impediment to them talking...
Jo Duffy, a very nice lady, overheard one of them claiming intimate knowledge of a number of writers, ending with "Now that Jo Duffy -- that guy is a bastard. Let me tell you about him..."
My cousin Adam Gaiman told me about listening to one of them telling a comic shop in Newcastle everything he knew about me. Adam thought it was particularly hilarious, because none of it was even remotely true. At the point where the gentleman announced that it was common knowledge in the industry that "gaiman" was a pen name chosen to proclaim my sexual preferences to the world, Adam went over and showed him his bus pass, with his name on it.
Sometimes I worry that the Internet is in danger of giving the loud guy at the front of the comic-books store an audience rather larger than a couple of kids and the manager. Case in point...
Dear Neil,
I'm not certain if this is the appropriate avenue by which to raise this question, but I could not find any other contact information (such as e-mail).
I've been at turns entranced with and nauseated by the Jesus Castillo case in recent weeks. Your relationship with the CBLDF is well known, and their association with you has been enough to engender my trust and support even were I NOT already the sort of person that gets passionate about censorship and freedom of speech issues. But I just found this posted over on Steven Grant's "Permanent Damage" column (http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=10) and I would be very interested in your thoughts.
(To be clear, this is NOT Mr. Grant's opinion, but rather a letter he received from one of the readers of his column.)
" You mentioned the Castillo case briefly in this week's PERMANENT DAMAGE. One interesting thing I don't think a lot of people are aware of - in fact, I think a lot of people are trying very hard not to talk about this - is a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the current administration at the CBLDF.
I've heard a lot of things and I've tried to put a bug into a few people's ears about this - because one day this is going to be a big story. But the CBLDF is apparently the holiest of holy cows in our industry, because no one is even questioning this.
Basically, I live in Oklahoma, in Tulsa, and I've heard more than one lawyer in our local comic book store speak at about the Fund's deficiencies. These are people who have done pro bono volunteer work for the Fund and been staggered by the lack of coordination and perspicacity on the part of the fund's leaders. They say that the fund is run by unqualified politicos. They say that the fund has been derailed by pro-pornography interests and funding (always a tricky subject in OK - you never know if someone is mentioning pornography because they are a Bible thumper or not). They say that the representation in the Jesus Castillo case consisted of a bunch of New York First Amendment lawyers who had no real interest in actually getting Castillo off on what would have been an open & shut criminal argument, but instead wasted their resources on the boondoggle of trying to prove that the 'Legend of the Overfiend' or whatever kind of tentacle love book it was was considered art - which backfired immensely in the jury room. They say that the Fund is basically dedicated to the defense of more abstract political freedoms as opposed to the actual nitty-gritty of getting people like Castillo out of trouble and keeping their businesses alive.
Now, of course, there's a lot of unsubstantiated stuff up there - but I've heard this from numerous sources. This is all rumor - but - if there's one thing the Nixon administration taught us its that where there's a stink, there's probably shit. There's nothing wrong with defending the First Amendment - of course not - but if it's a choice between defending a simple criminal case where a member of our community has been endangered and trying a longshot First Amendment precedent-setting argument, a lot of people think that the Fund has its priorities shot.
Of course, most people in comics are not lawyers, they don't know what's going on, they only see the Fund as the Good Guys and would never think anything bad about a not-for-profit foundation which effectively positions itself as the last line of defense against the forces of evil. But maybe someone needs to ask some tough questions in the legal community and see if the comics community's perceptions of the Fund's priorities match the realities."
I a bit uncomfortable with this author's take on the situation, and given that I plan to be a comics writer and my fiance is an intellectual properties attorney who does work for the occasional comics creator (to say nothing of my aforementioned passion on the subject) I would love to know what you think.
Sorry if this is not the proper way of contacting you. Let me know (if possible) how best to address you at this site in the future.
Thanks,
Haunt
Er... not sure what I can say about that. It's not even "Do you still beat your wife?" It's "The Oklahoma lawyers who hang around a comic store I go to say you rape your wife every night. Does she bleed a lot? Hey, where there's smoke, right? And they say you killed and ate your kids. One day it'll all come out."
So...
They say that the fund is run by unqualified politicos.
The fund is run by Charles Brownstein, who is the the Exec Dir, along with a couple of part-timers and a bunch of volunteers. It's overseen by a board of directors consisting of two retailers, one publisher, two writers, one lawyer, one former publisher (who is also an artist and agent), one retailer website person who used to be a distributor, and one distributor. It also has a general counsel on retainer.
Here's a Who's Who at the Fund. (It needs to be updated -- it omits newest board members Chris Staros, publisher of Top Shelf Comics, and Milton Griepp, from the ICV2 website.)
They say that the fund has been derailed by pro-pornography interests and funding (always a tricky subject in OK - you never know if someone is mentioning pornography because they are a Bible thumper or not).
If it has been, I have no idea who the pro-pornography "interests" are. To be honest, I kind of wish there was "special interest" funding out there -- it would make the CBLDF's life a lot easier.
The CBLDF publishes its accounts at the end of the year. Since I've been on the board, every dollar that's come in has come in the hard way, one at a time, from memberships, from selling things at conventions, from eBay, from readings, and so on.
(This is why the CBLDF is always fundraising.)
Is the CBLDF going to wind up supporting material that someone considers "obscene"? Yup. Quite often. Is it what you'd consider obscene? That depends on who you are. Ask the Virginia man who spent the night in jail for selling a kid a copy of Elfquest.
They say that the representation in the Jesus Castillo case consisted of a bunch of New York First Amendment lawyers who had no real interest in actually getting Castillo off on what would have been an open & shut criminal argument, but instead wasted their resources on the boondoggle of trying to prove that the 'Legend of the Overfiend' or whatever kind of tentacle love book it was was considered art - which backfired immensely in the jury room.
The representation in the Jesus Castillo case was a local lawyer, who bought his comics at the store in question.
There were no New York lawyers involved. There were no lawyers with agendas.
The CBLDF has nothing to do with directing the details of the case (as these lawyers would know, if they were involved in the only case the CBLDF has funded in Oklahoma. A case the CBLDF stopped being involved with, if I remember correctly -- it was long before my time -- at the point where the lawyers, and the accused, started plea-bargaining, and pled guilty, which we don't do). We find lawyers, work with them to find expert witnesses, and write cheques. We get other organisations involved where necessary.
The Jesus castillo case wasn't tried as a 'precedent-setting" case. It was a comic-store manager being tried for selling an adult comic to an undercover cop. Given the shape of American obscenity laws, one of the things you need to do is bring in expert witnesses to explain to a jury that the material has merit. We did.
Nobody has any idea what "backfired in the jury room". It's very easy to be a monday morning quarterback, where legal cases are concerned. The lawyers succeeded in getting the second case against Jesus thrown out. They lost the case, and the local DA won it.
They say that the Fund is basically dedicated to the defense of more abstract political freedoms as opposed to the actual nitty-gritty of getting people like Castillo out of trouble and keeping their businesses alive.
I think abstract political freedoms are a very good thing, personally. The CBLDF was founded to support a specific abstract political freedom, the First Amendment, along with an abstract idea -- " that comics should be accorded the same constitutional rights as literature, film, or any other form of expression". Mostly, the way I've seen the CBLDF support these abstract political freedoms is by keeping people like Castillo out of trouble.
Sometimes it supports them by opposing legislation that would make it much easier for the guys working in the comic stores to get in trouble. The current Arkansas proposed legislation is a good example of this. It's easier to stop legislation that would criminalise keeping material that might be "harmful to minors" -- which could include, under the proposed law, superhero comics and novels that aren't for kids -- in the same space as kids' material, than it is to fight the court cases afterwards.
The fund has a pretty good success rate. It has an excellent success rate in the cases you never see, because they get sorted out before they ever get to court. In the ones that do get to court, it has a solid success ratio -- we've won a lot more than 50% of the cases we've been involved with. We'll win more as the years roll on. We'll lose some more, too, in all probability.
I think it's worth pointing out that, over the years The Comics Journal has never shown any reluctance in investigating the CBLDF's handling of individual cases, or really investigating anything to do with the CBLDF, and exists as a sort of de facto watchdog. It's definitely given the CBLDF a seriously hard time in the past over internal problems and on ways that cases have been handled -- and hasn't given the CBLDF a free ride. (I've always felt this was a good thing.)
And beyond that, I'm not sure what to say. There's nothing in that letter that has any truth to it. The subtext of the letter would appear to be that either the mysterious author or the unnamed lawyers think that the CBLDF would be better employed in telling retailers not to sell dirty books (that's dirty like real dirty, or dirty like Cherry Poptart or Omaha the Cat Dancer). Or Death: The High Cost of Living. Or Frank Frazetta posters. Or anything else that local police have ever objected to. As former CBLDF Exec Dir Chris Oarr pointed out, "One thing I have learned since working at the Fund is how many incidents of store harassment involve "bread and butter" titles you would never think of racking in the adult section. Sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero comics account for the bulk of complaints that we deal with at the CBLDF. Most of these are dispelled with a letter or phone call from our attorney, so they don't end up in court. But the fact remains that the complaints we encounter involving mainstream comics far outnumber those involving explicitly adult or "underground" themes. "
Here's a brief history of what the fund is -- how it came into existence and what it does.
Does that help?
...
Also e-mails in this morning to let me know that someone (again, doing the internet equivalent of talking loudly in the front of the comic store) is planning to organise a boycott of 1602 for a reason that would make them look kind of silly when the whole story is told. (C'mon, give me credit for having some kind of brains. 1602 may not be high art -- nor is it intended to be -- but it plays fair.)
Several more saying of 1602 "well, it's an Elseworlds really isn't it?". Not really. As I tried to explain in the press conference, you can certainly read it as an Elseworlds, but it's not a narrative strategy that will repay the biggest dividends. Part of the fun of the story is, I hope, "how did we get here?" and "how can we get back?"
...
Dear Mr Gaiman
This, I swear, will be the last time I bother you. I
just wanted to let you know that 'Nice Hair' is back
up and running at:
http://www.yinepu.net/nicehairindex.html
Your lookalike is in today's strip, so I figured it'd
be polite to let you know before I vanish back into
the fog.
Oh, and I also wanted to tell you I really enjoyed
1602. I didn't think it was possible for anyone to
make Daredevil even remotely cool, but you did it.
Take care of yourself!
-Mandy Mauchline
PS: I really think I'll have to draw you as a
washerwoman now. Very sorry.
Dear Neil:
Yet another "Cannot Find Server" page
Enjoy! http://silverhammer.sorayume.net/error.htm
Sarah
Yup. That made me laugh. I think we need more pages like that on the internet...
If anyone wants to hear a little bit of Dawn French reading Coraline, Bloomsbury have a little of it up at http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/media/extract_cor.mp3. It's the scene where Coraline meets her other mother for the first time.
Hi,
I was just wondering whether there will be copies of Sandman: Endless Nights available for purchase at the NY Is Book Country talk/signing. Need to find out whether I need to plan to acquire it ahead of time or not!
Thanks,
Dan B.
It'll be for sale there.
Every now and again people send me messages about how rude I was about mead in American Gods. So to make up for it, however inadequately, let me proffer the Got mead website.
...
The best thing about writing in notebooks is that you don't have to worry about the power going out, or people telling you that we'll be landing in a few minutes and you have to put anything electronic away now please or we shall crash and yes sir that means you I don't care if you're writing a story or not put the bloody thing away now.
The worst thing is spending several hours doing search after search on your computer for every name you could possibly have titled a missing file containing a half-finished introduction you desperately need to wrap up, and then searching for every word that you remember in the file itself... before it finally occurs to you that you might possibly never have actually typed it.
...
Every second e-mail I'm getting this evening is a w32.sobig.f.mm virus. Nortons is earning its keep. Beware.
hi neil. i loved 1602 issue #1, however, i was wondering when the next issue was coming out. i remember reading in your journal that you were working on issue #7, but i didn't find any info on issue #2 on the Marvel website. as i am not a patient person, i thought i'd ask you. thank you for all your wonderful dreams.
sincerely,
pepper reed
It's monthly, which means there should be a new one along every four or five weeks.
(Some comic shop owners have grumbled that they've had readers who've come in, bought their 1602 #1, and left. It's worth reminding those store owners that, if they didn't hate it and want to know what happens next, those people will be back at least 7 more times, sometimes just hopefully asking if the next issue's out yet. Which is 7 more chances to get them hooked on other comics and other creators. They're new customers. This is not usually considered a bad thing by shops.)
There's already a 1602 website up at http://www.shadowcatblue.com/1602/index.html.
Part 3 of 1602 arrived today, all lettered for me to proofread. It's the first one I've enjoyed reading so far -- the plot's started, and we've met all the characters, and I'm comfortable with Andy and he with me, so the whole thing's a lot less stiff than the first two. Of course, that's almost eight weeks into everyone else's future.
Also had a long conversation with Andy Kubert about page 22 of 1602 #6, mostly having to do with me having written two panel 3s on that page in the script, bringing an already impossibly-crammed page up to an impossible ten panels. (In the end we slipped a few of the panels over to the previous page, where there was room. More or less.)
...
And as a little follow-up to yesterday's Batman-beating-someone-up-in-Oxford-and-running-away story -- possibly in reaction to it -- the Australians have decided that it's something in the costumes. Ashburton Child Care Centre director Madeleine Kellaway explains, "You get a little gang of Batmans and Supermans and they need a victim." http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6995255%255E2862,00.html for details...
Hi Neil,
I got myself a new boyfriend almost a year ago. He's a great guy and has introduced me to whole new worlds such as computer games, Japanese animation, bipolar depression and your work. Previously I spent most of my time in art galleries and socialising.
His birthday is coming up and I want to give him something special - Endless Nights & Death: The High Cost of Living. I'm quite proud of myself for finding out about Endless Nights and your website. Frustratingly the release date for Endless Nights has moved back to October (his birthday is in Sept) so he'll have to wait a little for that. My question is, is it possible to order/buy signed copies of either of these from you (or elsewhere)? I'm assuming you have no immediate plans to come to Australia for a bookstore signing.
Any advice greatly appreciated,
Liz
Well, firstly, don't worry about ENDLESS NIGHTS coming out in October. There are mighty engines rumbling to make sure that the book is published in time for New York is Book Country. The official publication date is September 17th, I believe. Whether that means bookshops will have their copies that week, or just comic shops, I don't know. But it won't be late. (They started printing them a couple of weeks ago. I think the books are being bound currently.)
As for how to get signed copies of things...
The easiest way is DreamHaven. It's my local bookshop in Minneapolis -- a huge purple building, filled with all manner of books and comics and magazines, with toys and statues and CDs and stuff. It is a dangerous place to go with a full wallet, and a dangerous place to take a friend (I took Michael Chabon there. His eyes lit up when he saw their display case filled with pulps, and he started to buy...). It's where I get my books and comics.
They run the neilgaiman.net, which was a site-name I owned, and was happy to give them, so I'd have somewhere to point people who asked "Where do I get a copy of..."
(And yes, I've noticed that the .net site is now the commercial site, while the .com is the uncommercial one, but what can you do?)
Anyway, when I do stop in at DreamHaven, an evil grin spreads over the face of Elizabeth-behind-the-cash-register, and I am rapidly ushered into a back room (DreamHaven has more back rooms than any other bookshop I know) and pointed to a table on which there's a pile of books (many of them with post-it notes on saying things like "For Bernard, it's a birthday present"), some pens, and a chair. Then I sign stuff for a while, and eventually escape by climbing a wall disguised as a washerwoman, or by digging a tunnel.
(If people send them a book or two, and ask them to have me sign it, and enclose postage and a self-addressed envelope and such, then they are also happy to add that to the pile of stuff I'm meant to sign.)
(But there's no guarantee when I'll next be there. If I'm out of town, or hiding and writing, it can be months.)
The other alternative is, if you see that I'm doing a signing somewhere, write to them or phone them, and reserve a signed copy. Almost every bookshop that's doing a signing assumes that this will happen, and they make the authors sign books before the signing starts, or after it's done, or both.
(It's a good bet that Borders on Wall Street still has signed copies of WOLVES IN THE WALLS, for example. And if they don't, Books of Wonder does.)
In this case, I'll be doing a signing at New York is Book Country in a month. I'll post the details as soon as I have them -- but I'm pretty sure I'll be doing it with whatever bookseller is sponsoring the festival, rather than at the DC Comics Booth, as DC doesn't sell their books directly. And if you need a signed Endless Nights, you could possibly order it from them.
(DreamHaven's probably a safer bet, as they're less likely to be nervous of posting things to Australia. Another alternative might be for you to e-mail Justin Ackroyd at Slow Glass Books, in Melbourne. Justin closed his doors and moved his bookstore onto the web, at http://www.slowglass.com.au/ and he and the Dreamhaven people have been known to indulge in peculiar forms of barter; I can say no more about it, but Justin sometimes has signed-by-me-things for sale, while the people at DreamHaven probably have thylacine skulls, opals-as-big-as-your-fist, and the occasional bottle of 1972 Penfolds Grange Hermitage.)
...
and a couple on previous topics --
Hello Neil,
And even another 1602 message for anyone still needing a copy of #1. There are presently over 100 listings on Ebay for single copies to multiples of 10,25 and 100 copy lots.
There are a lot of copies out there and should not be more then cover price.
It is rather odd that retailers are sold out beyond the demand. Two Comic shops in my area, which has a large comic buying population only ordered 50-70 copies. This is a book I would have ordered 150-200 copies (depending on the store and location. when I was working in a comic shop and doing the ordereing.
Anyone who has ever worked a comic shop should know it is just math. Add the monthly totals sold of an issue of Sandman with the monthly totals sold on say Wolverine Origins which was also by Kubert and Isanove, add a little adversment and a dash of word of mouth and you have a sell through total that meets the demand. Quite simple really.
Jon A.
Sonoma County CA
and
Regarding the flavor of Blue Moon ice cream -- as a pastry chef who has made dozens and dozens of flavors of ice cream down through the years, I'm pretty sure this flavor is derived from orange, lemon and possibly lime or tangerine zest or oil, probably with a bit of Cointreau thrown in for good measure (often commercial ice cream makers will use Cointreau or triple sec flavors, not the real thing). I'm going to experiment with this myself, but I'm pretty sure it's just a combination of citrus peel flavors, something we in the dessert business refer to as the "Trix" or "Froot Loops" effect. Sandy
...
Ok, I'm almost positive this isn't in the FAQ somewhere:
What are the chances of The Children's Crusade ever being reprinted and bound in a book form? It's probably a copyright nightmare but, really, it would be worth it. It's very difficult to find all of it. Pretty please?
(Though between that and The Sweet Hereafter, "The Pied Piper" is forever a dark and terrifying story in my mind. Almost wrecked the new Pratchett version for me, though not quite.)
Thanks,
Liz
it's not a copyright nightmare -- all the books were DC/Vertigo, and not creator owned -- but I'm not sure that anyone's ever been very keen on making it happen. There was a Spanish or Italian version that collected the "bookends", and I think I've seen a version that collected the bookends and the Books of Magic story, but the crossovers were annuals (which were 48 page stories, if I remember correctly) and there were several of them, and some of them were more successful than others.
It's not impossible that some of the material might be collected, but you're probably better off trying to collect it all, rather than waiting.
To buck the trend on 1602 messages, then, here's one saying...I've read the first issue, and I like it, BUT! WHOSE idea was IT to EMPHASISE every other WORD any CHARACTER says to ANOTHER CHARACTER? because IT gets REALLY really REALLY annoying SOMETIMES. Y'know, novels generally just assume the reader can figure out where the emphasis is, and this doesn't seem to happen so badly in your other comics...so why in this one? It really breaks up the flow of dialogue, unfortunately.
Adam
Actually, I pretty much agree -- if I'd known it was going to be in upper and lower case lettering when I wrote the script, I certainly wouldn't have used so many stressed words. I actually like them when you're doing all-upper-case lettering; I can use them to show what the stresses are, and try and push the words over into something that you hear rather than see. (Look at classic Eisner's SPIRIT lettering, or some of Dave Sim's Cerebus lettering to see what I mean.)
Once it moves into upper and lower case (it was an edict from Marvel, not something I chose), I think you read it more like prose, and the stressed words tend to attract attention, rather than disappear into the balloon. So there's an awful lot less stressed stuff later on in 1602.
(There was a reason why Dream, who spoke in upper and lower case, rarely stressed anything after the first couple of issues, when I saw what it looked like, in Sandman.)
...
Let's see...
WOLVES IN THE WALLS reviews have started showing up -- I keep meaning to post some (and may indeed already have):
http://www.kidzworld.com/site/p3727.htm
http://www.asmallvictory.net/archives/004187.html
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_gaiman_wolves.html
...
And for anyone wondering about the Edinburgh Fringe production of Smoke and Mirrors here's an on-the-spot review...
Hi Neil,
I sent in a few months back on this line about Smoke and Mirrors at the Edinburgh Fringe. Just back from a weekend in Edinburgh, and caught the Saturday night show. Was slightly worried it'd be empty (the perennial risk of attending any Fringe show) but it was quite busy. Maybe 70% full. It was only when I got into my seat I realised I might not want to see the stories interpreted by someone else. But it turned out fine :)
The White Road was very well paced, with some minimal set dressing giving it a nicely antiquated feel. I had forgotten the exact details of the story, but the tone suited my memory of it. The details came flooding back as it progressed. Mr Fox came off innocent and victimised, and the fox-lady was devious and sneaky :) As I said it was well paced; Fox's fiancee built her story up effectively - her account of her dream conjured up the imagery with great effect - and the climax was frenetic but very very very good. The way you noticed Mr Fox trying to point out that the 'hand' was indeed a paw, but the innkeeper was too quick for him. Mr Fox's closing monologue was done in near-darkness, after he had been attacked and the fox-lady was leaving. The delivery was careful and measured, and when I checked my book again today I realised that you had written it as poetry, which was appropriate.
When We Went To See The End Of The World was done with just Dawnie standing in front of the audience with a jotter in hand. It was the same actress that was the fox-lady, but you wouldn't have really noticed. She mixed some cutesie cutesie laugh moments in with some chilling moments. I really liked how the fantastical elements of the story (such as crossing twilight or the unicorn encounter) just came off commonplace. One of the things I always liked about the story and it came across really well in the show.
We Can Get Them For You Wholesale started off much more for laughs than I imagined, with Peter being very very geeky :) But this all made sense too, especially considering his nature. The ending was necessarily changed, with 'the thing' becoming a ice-hockey masked, boiler-suited chainsaw-wielding maniac. This was the only thing throughout the whole show I wasn't so keen on, but it certainly gave shock value to end your night on (and send you out into some gothic streets thinking about...)
All in all very worth it. Actors were all really good, especially the guy who played Mr Fox/Burton Kemble, even though he didn't have a lot of lines. The sight of his grinning paled face sitting in the dark while Peter was compiling his lists was quite eerie :)
I've never experienced your words read out loud, and this show didn't disappoint. Moving, chilling, grin-making, lots of things. I know they've done the work in staging all this and financing, and they should be proud of what they've done, but it's your words and the show works well because of what you gave them
Kevin
Which certainly makes me want to see it.
And when this came in I assumed it would be the last word on Blue Moon Ice Cream...
I just read your journal entry that mentioned Blue Moon ice cream. Blue Moon has been my favorite flavor since I was very young. I always thought it tasted like the milk that's left in the bowl after eating Fruit Loops. I've tried several brands, and I think The Chocolate Shoppe in Madison, WI has the best. Babcock Hall Ice Cream (served at the University of Wisconsin's Unions and food service) has a decent blue moon as well. The flavor is stronger than the Chocolate Shoppe's, but less creamy.
Your remark made me curious about what that flavor really is so I did some not-very-in-depth searching. I never did come up with a definitive answer, but there are certainly are a lot of people out there who like it! Here's just some of what I discovered in my fruit-loops-ful search:
icecreamsource.com calls it "Smooth and creamy and a very popular flavor, spend a little time under the night sky and try some Blue Moon!"
http://www.icecreamsource.com/app/site/site.nl/site.ACCT112241/
mode.items/sc.12/category.18/.f
The Chocolate Shoppe's blue moon is "creamy ice cream with a "Fruit Loops" cereal flavor and a wacky blue color."
http://www.chocolateshoppeicecream.com/flavors.cfm
Here's a recipe for a home version. It contains pineapple and blue curacao. I may have to try this and see how close it comes.
http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/getrecipe.zsp?id=65455
The Cedar Crest site describes it as "Sky-blue Cedar Crest Ice Cream, with a blue flavor to match." http://www.cedarcresticecream.com/virtualfreezer.html#Blue%20Moon
But according to an article by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online "the Blue Moon flavor in Cedar Crest ice cream actually is almond." (This article also mentions a slew of other Blue Moon flavored foods and beverages.)
http://www.jsonline.com/food/0324blue.asp
Almond doesn't sound right to me at all, I think I'll have to see if I can track down some of Cedar Crest's blue moon. I'm off to the store, wish me luck!
-E
P.S. Good luck to Holly in college--although anyone discerning enough to like Blue Moon will certainly do just fine.
******************************************
www.bordfans.com
Madison Punk Rock!
Now, I'm thinking that pineapple and almond taste nothing at all alike, even when coloured a particularly violent shade of blue, when this arrives, to shed more light on it. Or less...
Hi Neil,
Blue Moon ice cream is made from cantaloupe. At least, it was at Canon's on the south border of Cleveland, where I grew up. And I've found an indicator that this is the case elsewhere: http://www.peckfoodservice.com/pfd%20files/Ice%20Cream%20Formulas-1.pdf
So, enjoy. It's good for you!
Cheers,
-joe in San Rafael, CA
and I'm just pondering the canteloupe possibilities, when I read this:
hello neil,
blue moon ice cream! i've only seen that once, and it was while on vacation at a tiny ice cream shop in manistique, michigan. i was wary of doing a search on it because i always thought it was one of those quirky midwest/upper peninsula things but, according to this website (http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/mtarchives/000251.html), that's exactly what it is. most people can only find it in the UP and wisconsin. i think it tastes faintly of marshmallows, though it's been years since i've had any. i paid a dear price for it, too, since it was gotten on a bit of adventure my cousin and i weren't supposed to be having (i was all of 14 at the time) and almost had to walk the twenty miles back to our house in gulliver. so that is blue moon ice cream, and the mystery still holds.
andrea norstad
and now marshamallows enters the picture, and I realise there's also a whole website filled with comments from people who also don't know what flavour Blue Moon is....
Several people wrote to say "It tastes BLUE" but it doesn't, not really, not in the way that certain pink desserts taste pink, anyway. I suspect that the genius of Blue Moon ice cream is that if it were, say, canteloupe orange, you'd go "Ah, it's canteloupe flavour" (if it was) and never think about it twice. Whereas it's the gulf between the vivid blueness of the colour and the pineapple flavour (or the marshmallow-almond. Or whatever it is) that makes it work.
...
Nice Hair is pretty damn funny webcomic that makes fun of you and Tim Burton. Don't sue anyone. http://members.tripod.com/~Yami_no_Miko/nharchive.html
Okay. I won't sue anyone. That was easy.
Holly leaves to go to college in about a week, so today we went off on a very small road trip together, down the Mississippi Valley. At one point we wound up at the Lark Toys Carousel, and we ate Blue Moon flavoured ice cream together.
I don't know what flavour Blue Moon is. (The only places I've encountered it were at the Lark toys place, and at the Baraboo CircusWorld Museum.) It's sort of vanilla-citrus flavour, is an extremely bright blue in colour and smells (Holly says) of fruit loops. I bought her a glow-in-the-dark rubber duck, and a new copy of a book I used to read her every night when she was tiny ( Outside Over There, by Maurice Sendak, a book Maddy found much too disturbing and weird, when it was her turn to have it read to her.)
We had a wonderful time, in a quiet sort of ohmigodmydaughter'sactuallyleavingforcollegenextweek sort of way.
...
Dear Neil, I have read "The Wolves in the Walls" to my three year old daughter. We both enjoyed it very much. She has informed me that there are horses in our walls and that we need to use tools to open the walls up and have a look.
Please let me know if I should send the bill for damaged wallboard directly to yourself or to your publisher.
Sincerely,
Cam
Let her know that she won't need to open them up and look inside. She just needs to wait until the Horses Come Out of the Walls...
Hello favorite author,
I will be attending the NY is Book Country thing which you are doing on the 20th (the day before my birthday), and was wondering whether you were reading AND signing, or just signing, and how many things you would sign for each person, etc. Oh, and ON my birthday the following day I see you are doing something with Mr. Speigelman at 92 and Y. Will that be a panel, just so I can organize my day around it. Thank you Neil.
Beth
Not a problem...
I'm reading and signing on the 20th, for anyone who has a ticket.
I'm signing on the morning of the 21st as part of the street festival.
I'm doing a panel with art spiegelman that evening at the 92nd St Y. (As part of the promotion for Little Lit 3 "It Was a Dark and Silly Night".) We'll be talking about writing for adults and for children. Not sure if there's a formal signing at this one -- I'd assume there isn't, if I were you.
As for what I'll sign for each person, it'll probably depend on how many people there are and how long they let me sign.
Dear Neil,
You're on the board of the CBLDF, so you'd know the answer to my question as well as anyone.
My question is in regards to the supreme court declining to hear the case of Jesus Costello. I am a cartooning student at SVA, the only college in the country with cartooning as a major. There are alot of students and faculty there, cartooning majors and not, that care deeply about comics. I was wondering if perhaps we could be of help in some way, by some form of petition perhaps. I was thinking something along the lines of writing the supreme court, letting them know that there really is a large, concerned group of americans who really think this ruling was wrong. I could easily get a large portion of the school involved in canvassing comic shops and getting signatures. It would be easy to get thousands of signatures. I know the CBLDF has pretty much chalked this up as a loss, though, so I was wondering if you thought this was a worthwhile endeavor at all. I just feel like I can't sit by as a citezen in a citezen-participatory government and let this happen. I have a great need to DO something about this. If you think I and my classmates could be of help, or have any reccomendations on how to go about it, I'd appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Matthew Smith Bernier
Well, I can give you my answer -- it's not me speaking for the CBLDF, just a private individual, though.
The Jesus Castillo case is over. The Supreme Court is under no obligation to hear any case, and they've said no. Personally, I don't think that we ever had much chance to get the Supreme Court to hear this case (although I still think that it was a wrong thing that they refused to hear the Mike Diana case). It's done. It's not the end of the world. We got one entire case against him thrown out, he won't do jail time, the fine is paid, it could have been a lot worse.
It's a battle. It's not the war.
But yes, there are lots of things you can do. None of them are about the Jesus Castillo case directly.
The biggest one is, get yourself educated. The CBLDF's features page is a place to start. Follow the links...
Dave Marsh wrote an excellent book called "50 Ways to Fight Censorship", which is now out of print (although still floating around used). Here's the Amazon page for it. I wish some publisher would get Dave to update it, and bring it back into print.
You can get a pretty good idea of the approach that Dave Marsh was suggesting (and of things that you can do) with the chapter titles...
1. SPEAK OUT!
2. Register and Vote!
3. Send Your Senators and Congressperson Letters or Mailgrams.
4. Teach Your Children How to Know When Censorship Appears in the Classroom, or Elsewhere.
5. Oppose De Facto Censorship of the News Media by the Wealthy and Powerful.
6. Get Involved With Your Library.
7. Make Art That Fights Censorship.
8. Speak Out About Freedom of Speech at Schools, Churches, and to Youth Groups in Your Town.
9. Write a Letter to Your Local Paper in Defense of Free Speech.
10. Call Your Radio Station Talk Show.
11. Support Those Retailers Who Fight Against Censorship.
12. Read Banned Books. Read Everything About Censorship and First Amendment Issues.
13. Gather Information and News Clippings on Censorship and Send it to a Central Clearinghouse.
14. Buy Banned Records.
15. Write and Perform Songs About Free Speech and the Perils of Censorship.
16. Write Movie Moguls and Tell Them to Eliminate the MPAA Ratings Code.
17. Watch "The Simpsons" and Other Controversial TV Programs.
18. Contact Your Local Cable Outlet to Find Out if It's Being Pressured to Censor Its Programming.
19. Join the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
20. Join the Freedom to Read Foundation.
21. Stop the Attack on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
22. Join Article 19.
23. Support the American Booksellers Association Foundation for Free Expression.
24. Get to Know the Censorship Groups. Study Their Literature, and Expose Them to Public Scrutiny.
25. Investigate the Tax-Exempt Status of Pro-Censorship Lobbying Groups.
26. Find Out Your State's Requirements for Purchasing Textbooks.
27. Run for Public Office On a Platform Supporting Freedom of Expression.
28. Write to Your Favorite Artists; Find Out What They're Doing to Help Preserve Freedom of Expression.
29. Make an Anti-Censorship Home Video Showing the Various Benefits of Free Speech in Your Community
30. Write About Your Positive Experiences with Art.
31. Become a Voter Registrar. Organize a Voter Registration Drive.
32. Form a Group That Establishes a First Amendment Litmus Test for Politicians.
33. Start an Anti-Censorship Petition Campaign.
34. Boycott Products Made and Marketed by Companies That Fund the Censors.
35. Start a Grassroots Anti-Censorship Organization.
36. Start an Anti-Censorship Newsletter.
37. Contact Local Arts and Educational Organizations; Persuade Them to Stage a Free Speech Events.
38. Set a Good Example by Starting a Parents Group to Combat Censorship.
39. Contact Local TV Stations and Propose a "Censored Films Festival."
40. Use Community Access Cable or Community Radio to Raise Awareness of Free Speech Issues.
41. Stage a Mock Trial on Censorship.
42. Sue the Bastards!
43. Create a Public Service Announcement to Be Aired Over the Radio.
44. Make Sure Local Schools Have a Course on Freedom of Speech.
45. Contact Others Concerned About Censorship--Use the Classifieds!
46. Talk to Teachers About What They're Doing to Ensure Free Speech.
47. Picket the Censors.
48. Have a Moment of Silence to Keep Speech Free.
49. Have a Speak Out Day.
50. Make the Real Obscenities the Real Issues.
(And yes, when he wrote the book, The Simpsons was indeed a controversial TV programme.)
...
Jess Nevins is annotating 1602 at http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Jess%20Nevins/1602/16021.html.
...
and lots of messages coming in that are more or less evenly divided between ones like this:
You write:
>And enough e-mails and messages come in from people who just like
>having it here (some of them read my books and comics, and some of
>them wouldn't if you paid them, but they like coming here and reading
>the journal) that I feel like it would be missed if I stopped.
I certainly enjoy reading it and would miss it. I am, on the other
hand, confident that the enjoyment of a new Neil Gaiman novel would
more than outweigh any sadness from missing journal entries. Therefore
I say that if putting the journal on hiatus would be needed in order
to write a novel (or even just would make it better) then by all means
do that. I'll understand, and I bet most of your other readers will too.
David Goldfarb
and ones like this:
DEAR Neil,I read the suicide girls interview & nearly died at the thought of not having this journal up for any long period of time. Then I thought well he has to do what he has to do & if in order to write a new novel that means no journal for awhile... I can certainly understand the need for no ,or rather less, distractions. Then I remembered how long it took you to write American Gods & started hyperventilating all over again! Now after having just read the latest journal entry by you it seems there's a CHANCE that it may not "go on hiaitus"....PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE don't take this journal away!!!!!! (that's my true heart's desire speaking...now my sensible brain part will wrest control away long enough to say )- forgive me for asking anything of you because you already do give soooo much of yourself to your fans & God bless you for it,& if that's what you need to do I will understand & will survive...I will try...honest.....but,oh God!Please don't!!! (sorry)
-Lauralynn
Well, the next novel won't be as long as "American Gods". It's not that kind of book. Beyond that, I haven't really decided anything yet. And when I do, and if I do, I'll put it up here. So don't start hyperventilating yet. I'm still here. Unless, of course, I'm actually Tom Clancy. (I think I'd rather be me, really.)
Dear Neil,
Just in case you missed it going up today, Fantastic Metropolis has just posted Jeff VanderMeer's amazing Survey on the "Physicality of Books," where he interviewed about 70 authors, including you and me, by asking 5 questions about books and posting everyone's fun responses.
Here is the URL:
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?iw.books
Enjoy!
Vera Nazarian
http://www.veranazarian.com/
...which was a good excuse to look at Fantastic Metropolis again. There are undoubtedly lots of you who won't care one way or another that Alan Moore's Jerry Cornelius introduction/essay/pastiche for Moorcock's "Firing the Cathedral" is up on line. But it made me enormously happy. I met Jerry in pretty much exactly the same way that Alan did, only I was 11, not 14...
Over at Newsarama there's an interview with RICHARD ISANOVE, who is currently doing a wonderful job on 1602. The art style is fascinating: Andy draws completely finished pencils, then Richard goes in over the top and colours them, using, among other tools, the computer.
First of all, thank you for linking to the Victorian Sex Cry generator on my site. I'm flattered, and will continue to be so even after I get home and see what sort of ravenous beast my bandwidth has become.
However, you may wish to add the disclaimer that HootIsland.com is indeed an adult site, if a frivolous one, with nekkid pictures and whatnot. Dunno how you customarily handle such things, the only adult site I've seen you link to in recent times was suicidegirls.com, which is almost too classy to need a disclaimer...
Anyway, thanks for dropping by. Should you ever feel the need for a book of silly sex stories, I'd be honored to send you a copy of mine.
Yours,
Chris Bridges
Good point. I meant to, but forgot. People should consider themselves properly warned...
...
Lots more phone calls and e-mails about 1602 #1. Mark Askwith made a sensible suggestion -- that if your local comic store is sold out, you may want to call or e-mail stores on the US East Coast - Toronto sort of area, many of which have simply had to lock their doors since the power blackouts started, and which haven't been able to sell anything to anyone.
Please don't ask me for them. I don't have any.
So far, one retailer has asked me to please ask Marvel to go back to press on it. (I really don't think they do that any longer.)
Hi:
I am a writer that runs a daily humor/blog site called fiveforthefamous.com and brianlewandowski.com. (I changed my name to Brian Lewandowski just so I could get that URL.)
Anyway, I am doing something I call "Five for the Famous." Basically, I send 5 questions, serious or funny, to famous folks and let them respond via email. I post it. I get the glory.
Are you interested in being "a famous person?"
Yours,
Brian Lewandowski
http://www.fiveforthefamous.com
http://www.brianlewandowski.com
I'm afraid not. The same goes right now for every other comics/chat/humour/SF site that's asked me to answer five or ten questions. I know that answering five questions isn't a very long thing to do. But when you multiply it by the number of sites who've asked, I could spend several days just writing answers for people's websites...
So it gets easier to say no to everyone.
Hullo! It seems you prefer to handwrite a lot of your ideas, so you need a good notebook right? Well here's a few questions about your notebook habits- do you have a different notebook for each thing you're working on at the time? (Does this mean carrying several?) and where do you get a good notebook from? I've recently filled one and nowhere can I find a cheap, narrow lined and well stocked notebook... I know this all seems a little strange and maybe inane but notebooks are very important when it comes to being a writer... (or at least someone who is making a firm attempt at being one, in my case)
I tend to mostly use Moleskines for carrying around with me (they aren't cheap, but they are nice objects, with covers strong enough to use to use as a writing surface, and they fit into pockets) and big cheap old things for writing stories in -- I like to be able to see enough at one time that something feels like a page. And I tend not to use lined paper, just because I tend not to. (Dream Hunters was written on lined paper, in a notebook I bought in a posh paper shop in Venice, and I felt almost guilty soiling it.)
When I'm novel-writing, the novel tends to be the only thing in the notebook. Otherwise, once I've written a short story or something there's still plenty of space, and I'll use it.
The best advice I can give is try different notebooks and see what you like. I tend to swoop on art supply shops in the process of going out of business, or on big chain bookstores having their sales, and just load up on things with lots of blank paper in them.
...
The Writer's Guild is looking for suggestions in the trademark area, to help in the Al Franken- Fox news "fair and balanced" suit.
In with the various comments and suggestions of book titles which use trademarks is the rather wonderful statement from a twit:
The Authors Guild has lost its sense of humor. Fox News is transparently bringing this lawsuit claiming infringement of its proprietary "fair and balanced" as a publicity stunt. Brothers and sisters, lighten up! Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D.
which suggests that, at least in someone's mind, it's perfectly reasonable for a large corporation frivolously to sue an individual author (said suit requiring the expenditure, by the sued author, of obscene amounts of money on lawyers, and taking up the time of an overstretched judicial system) in order to bring itself publicity. And that the Author's Guild shouldn't attempt to defend their author (along with the right to use allegedly trademarked phrases in book titles), but should instead take a "Boys will be boys" and "that Rupert Murdoch, what a loveable scamp he is" sort of position on it instead. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so, the twit in question appears to be a lawyer.
Finally, a message from Jill Thompson:
Dear All,
The Scary Godmother dvd is available for preorder at www.amazon.ca. It goes on sale September 2nd. That's ca for canada, not com. It's all region 1 so the dvd will work in our dvd players.
Please help spread the word, or get a copy for yourself. I thought I was going to have to go to everyone's house, one at a time, to show it myself. Still no broadcast date for the US, but at least people can get a copy.
Sincerely,
Jill
The Drive-in was... well Freaky Friday was a great film for an eight-year old (the one in the car next to me laughed a lot anyway. She also hid her face whenever there was any kissing, and ordered me to tell her when they'd finished.) It was solid, had several good jokes, and not-bad performances, although i should warn you, it does have kissing in it. And Holes looked pretty decent, but a week of travel and not enough sleep caught up with me, and I only saw the first twenty minutes... I'd like to see it all the way through.
Woke up, drove home. Slept for a very long time.
Today I learned something about listening to other people...
I wrote a story back in 1983. I showed it to a couple of people whose opinions I respected. One sniffed and said it was facetious rubbish and she thought I should try to grow up, and one said that it wasn't very good and that he couldn't think of anywhere that would publish it. So I put it in a drawer and forgot about it. When I thought about it, which was seldom, I remembered it as facetious rubbish, and felt faintly embarrassed to have written it.
A few weeks ago someone asked me for a Gothic story for an anthology -- let's call it Anthology B. In addition, I'd already signed a contract last year to write a Gothic story for another anthology -- which we can call Anthology A. I started thinking about the great Gothic titles -- Melmoth the Wanderer, The Castle of Otranto, and so on, and every book with a lady in a nightgown on the cover, clutching a candelabra and running away from a house with a light burning in the topmost room. And I found myself remembering the story I wrote all those years ago -- Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire it was called. I wondered if there was anything in that old story that could be rescued...
My assistant Lorraine found the first two pages in a box in the attic. I found the rest of it in another box nearby. I read it through: a blue-typed carbon-copy typescript.
It wasn't bad. The funny bits were pretty funny, the style was solid, some of it prefigured things I'd do in Sandman four years later. It's about what fantasy is, and why we write it, and what it would mean to write fantasy if you lived in a Gothic universe. It contains lines like
"And Sir Frederick's first wife...?"
He shook his head, sadly. "Hopelessly insane, and but a mediocre harpsichord player. He put it about that she was dead, and perhaps some believed him."
and has a talkative raven, and a young man writing fantasy, or failing to, in it.
So today, after reading it, I ran it through the computer. It wasn't the big rewrite I'd expected to do -- some tweaking here, and tidying there. But mostly while I typed I was just proud of the nervous young man who wrote it, and wished I could have gone back in time and told him not to listen to two people who didn't like it. That he'd just shown it to the wrong two people. (It was better than many things from that period that did get published.)
Not sure that there's a universal lesson to be taken from that -- but I realised that, if I was fairly happy with what I'd done, then listening to someone who disliked it for reasons that had nothing to do with what I was trying to do and whether I actually got there or not was a deeply silly thing to do, as was deciding, because two people didn't like it, to shelve the story for ever.
So now I have a Gothic Story to write for Anthology A. If a new story gets done in time then "Forbidden Brides..." will go to Anthology B. If not, it goes to Anthology A. Either way it'll see print next year, a bit late.
...
The FAQ message system seems to be down right now -- I assume it's because the host is based in New York.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
My friends, who know I adore your work, keep teasing me by claiming that you and Tom Clancy are actually one and the same person. Could you perhaps post a disclaimer so that they will have to find something new to tease me about? Thanks ever so much!
Love and stuff,
Katie Cowden
I'm just amazed that your friends figured it out so easily. What a pity. Now they must be killed.
1602 messages so far coming in seem to be split between people who read number one and enjoyed it, and people whose comic store had already sold out when they got there, and would like me to tell them where they can get a copy. (I have no idea, I'm afraid. But it was Marvel's highest-ordered title for the month, and it's only been out a day. There must be lots of copies out there.) One grumpy and too-long-to-post-here letter from a retailer complained in what English Newspapers used to describe as 'the strongest possible terms" that he didn't have enough information to know to order enough copies, that he thus could not have expected the demand for it, which he was unable to meet, and that he would be complaining to Marvel about this and my complicity in it.
Hi Neil,
Just spent a couple of hours reading through your journal and I'm impressed/amazed at the sheer amount you post. As you are primarily a non-blog writer (in that your primary writing is for other mediums), I'm wondering: why such commitment to it? Is it part of a larger commitment to write every day, regardless of projects or specific pieces, or do you consider it more of an outreach channel to your admirerers, or something else entirely?
I'm certainly not complaining, by any means, but as someone who finds writing online no faster than with pen&ink and can therefore find an hour's gone by writing an email to a friend, I'm stymied as to where you find the time to add to it at the rate you do, nevermind the why. It is A Project in its own right and must perforce give something back to you of comparable worth for your effort, and I'm curious about that.
I suppose one could ask why write at all and what do you get out of it, but the dedication to the blog amongst all the other demands on your writing life strikes me.
Joan
Well, it's easier and quicker than sending dozens of e-mails to people letting them know what I'm doing. Family and friends use the journal to keep track of my movements. It's the nearest thing I have to a diary. And it's a nice morning warm-up exercise, or a last thing at night note.
It's useful when things need to be announced fast. And enough e-mails and messages come in from people who just like having it here (some of them read my books and comics, and some of them wouldn't if you paid them, but they like coming here and reading the journal) that I feel like it would be missed if I stopped.
And I enjoy it, which is its main reason for being.
But it does have its downside. (I talk about part of that in the recent suicidegirls interview.) And it may go on hiatus in November when I move full-time into next novel mode (or it may not).
How do you work through gaps in your plots (assuming you experience them)? I'm trying to write my first novel, and it's the small, less significant, often transitional sections of plot that are giving me the most trouble and making me want to toss my computer out the window and switch my major to Art.
I'm a great admirer of your work, by the way. I'm sure you hear that all the time, but I know I wouldn't get tired of it, so....you're hearing it again. --Theresa
I know what you mean, and have no solutions to offer, other than, you do it. The only comfort I can offer is that the "small, less significant, often transitional sections of plot" may be obvious to you while you're writing the book, but by the time you've finished it you normally can't remember what was a bit of plot that only existed to link two scenes where you knew what you were doing, and what was an integral part of the story from the start. And often some of the best bits turned up in the transitional places.
How do you do it? You grit your teeth, and you do it. Some days it's about as romantic and magical as ditch-digging, but you carry on, because that's how you make it happen.
...
There's a Victorian sex-cries generator. Online. Honest. A Victorian sex-cries generator. It's at http://www.hootisland.com/cgi-bin/victorian.cgi .
San Franciscan retailer Brian Hibbs writes to say:
N:
Just cuz' I didn't see it on the Journal, and I'm not sure if Marvel is telling you these things, 1602 [part 1] came out today.
Since it's less likely to be found outside of comic book shops until the Trade Paperback comes out, you might want to tell your readers they can find a nearby comic book shop at either http://csls.diamondcomics.com/ or http://the-master-list.com/
-B
So part one (of eight) is out. And I start writing part seven tomorrow.
Drove home from Chicago through the night, last night, and was woken this morning by my assistant handing me the phone. Merrilee, my literary agent, wanted to tell me that THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS has gone in at #2 on the children's picture book bestseller list at the New York Times. I croaked something appreciative, then went back to sleep.
Later, and more or less properly awake, I went up to the attic and found an unpublished short story I wrote 20 years ago, late one night on a deserted railway station, in a box of forgotten papers and stories and such (including an English exercise book from age 13). I had had a feeling that it wasn't as bad as I remembered, and I read it, and it wasn't. Some bizarre punctuation, and some overkill, and one place where I should have made the relationship between two characters explicit. But it was funny, and it prefigured a bunch of things I'd do in Sandman.
I think I'll type it into the computer and see what I think of it then.
The details of the event at the 92nd Street Y on September 21st are at http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?catalog=92y%5Fcatalog&productid=T%2DLC5CN01. Me and art spiegelman in conversation, taking Little Lit 3 as a starting point, I expect.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ is always interesting, odd, and dangerously eclectic. I don't want to know how she finds things like this , but then, I never know how she finds the things she finds.
Cody's books in Berkeley is the only bookstore with a blog that I've run into so far. They've got authors passing through Cody's to recommend books they've enjoyed, which is rather fun.
And Poppy Z. Brite has a livejournal -- who knew? (Well, Caitlin probably.) I raved about her cooking-in-New-Orleans-novel LIQUOR on this blog several years ago -- really pleased to see it's finally coming out.
...
And I've been talked into taking daughters to the Drive-In. Freaky Friday and Holes. So adieu.
It's late at night, I've been to three Tori concerts in two days, and I have music to listen to before I go to sleep... in the meantime:
Just a link to Carol Lay's recent comic on Salon.com. It's about the comic book store case in Texas. With your untiring and much appreciate efforts for the CBLDF, I thought you might be interested.
http://www.salon.com/comics/lay/2003/08/12/lay/index1.html
Thanks for all the support,
Geoff Scott
it's a great comic. I wonder if Carol would let the CBLDF do it as a t-shirt or a poster.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
I'm sorry to direct this to you, as it does not involve you in the slightest, but I've noticed that in the past, you have linked to Ms. Caitlin Kiernan's website. Recently, if you haven't noticed, her site seems to be experiencing some technical difficulties, i.e. "Page cannot be displayed." If you know the reason for this disruption, could you please post a little bitty note on your blog. If not, don't worry (I'm sure you won't, but it's the niceties right?) I'll just wait and hope she comes back.
Thanks much. Miriam. again, still in Nashville.
p.s. I just finished American Gods the other night. I loved it. And the ending at Rock City...well, I'm glad someone else can see TN's lovely world wonder for what it truly is. And appreciates the scary plastic elves.
Which arrived, along with an e-mail from the Queen of Cool, Caitlin herself, saying:
Dear Neil,
My website and discussion forum and blog *all* went down on Friday morning, which will teach me to trust friends with dubious, free server space. Hopefully, the site will be up again by Wednesday or Thursday - I'm having to have the URL redirected to a new server, which may not be free, but is in no way dubious. Meanwhile, the blog has been placed, temporarily, at http://lowredmoon.blogspot.com, and I'll keep people posted from there about the restoration of the website and the creation of a new discussion forum.
Could you please post something to this effect is your journal? Or just quote the above? We have a lot of readers in common and I'm having a hell of a time getting the word out. I would appreciate it enormously and show my appreciation with something wonderful whenever I see you again (it will happen, eventually).
There. A public service performed.
Lots of messages in from people who didn't come over and say hullo at the Chicago gigs....
Patrick Nielson Hayden writes to say:
-- SLATE elevates you to an interesting status, in a piece about e-text
book piracy:
"Now, academic texts aren't likely to fuel a roaring black market trade.
And it's hard to imagine anyone going out of their way to pirate
collections of literary short fiction or novels (bar the occasional cult
figure like Thomas Pynchon or Neil Gaiman)."
(http://slate.msn.com/id/2086800/)
-p.
and to finish, something wonderfully trivial...
Neil,
Sorry to bother you again, but I've just finished Good Omens, a book I've been meaning to read for about eight years. I've long been a fan of Terry Pratchett's although I've not read anything of his for years, and when I first encountered the book, I didn't know who you were, so I was a bit supsicious about one of my favourite writers collaborating with some unknown fellow.
Greatly enjoyed it, but what I really wanted to ask was which one of you came up with the scene at the beginning of "Saturday", which is set in/near my home town of Uckfield? I suspect it's you, based on all those Pooh Corner references in Sandman, but I wanted to make sure.
Thanks and sorry again for bothering you,
Kelvin Green
That was me. Between 1987 and 1992 I lived in Nutley, the next village along (in a building which is still there, and can be found in Coraline...)
Let's see.... so, yesterday was long. Village Voice interview over breakfast, then I flew back to Minneapolis. Lorraine and Maddy picked me up, and we stopped in at DreamHaven and signed several boxes of WOLVES IN THE WALLS and a lot of TELLING TALES. Then watched Charlie Bethel's terrific one-man Beowulf at the Minnesota Fringe, which really made me want to change one thing in the last part of the Beowulf Script I did with Roger Avary to make it even closer to the original tale. Fast food falafel with John M. Ford and Elise, and down to the Northrop Centre to watch Tori.
I had a complete set of children there, which made me very happy.
Went back before it started so Maddy could play with Tash (who is, for the record, the single funniest nearly-three-year-old on the planet.). Asked Tori about the Snow Cherries song, as in "Er, didn't you say to tell people it wouldn't be on the Best Of CD but you'd do it during Lottapianos?" And she said, "Yes. But then we recorded it... it's going to be on the Best of CD." So there'll be two songs people haven't heard, "Snow Cherries From France" and the completely new one (which is political in nature, and is about now and also goes back to the days when Tori used to play as a young piano girl in Washington to congressmen, and to their call girls). Although it sounds like some of the old tracks are going to be amazing as well -- they went back to the original tapes, and have done the mixes they would have done back then, if they'd had the time...
Then the gig -- I missed all the Scarlet's Walk gigs, due to being in the wrong place, and was very happy to hear songs like Carbon live-in-a-big-hall for the first time.
Then Maddy and I drove through the night to Chicago, in my first road trip in my Mini (and the GPS system brought me straight to the hotel front door). (Well, I drove, and Maddy mostly slept.) I'll be at the next two shows -- if you see me there, feel free to say hi. If I'm on my own, I'll probably stop and say hullo back, and if I'm escorting an almost-nine-year-old daughter who is having an adventure around, I may not.
I'd promised myself (and my assistant Lorraine) that if I got tired on the drive, I'd stop at a motel. What hadn't occurred to me was that the point where the drive would become Hell would be the last 20 minutes, where stopping at a motel really wasn't option. But I made it.
Tori had a room waiting for us. I slept the morning away, while Maddy went off with Tash and grown ups. And I'm posting this mostly for all the people who said "you're driving through the night? After a marathon in New York? Is that wise?" to agree that, possibly it wasn't. But it was really fun. Except for the last twenty minutes.
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There's a great interview with Grant Morrison over at http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=2662.
Over at http://www.smallblue.com/ you can get Endless Cursors.
And I have several hundred FAQ type messages to go through... please accept my apologies if your question or message hasn't been put up or replied to. There's only so much space, and only so much time....
Got up when the phone rang and I was told by the lady on the front desk that Andy Kubert was waiting in the hotel lobby to have breakfast with me. "Er, weren't you meant to ring me half an hour ago to wake me up?" I said. The lady must have looked at piece of paper, because she said "Er, yes. Oops." So I got dressed very fast and had breakfast with Andy and I told him stuff that's going to happen in the last two parts of 1602, and he was very happy. It was really good to chat face-to-face...
Then to Books of Wonder where I signed several hundred books -- WOLVES IN THE WALLS, and CORALINES and LITTLE LITS.
A hasty, very light lunch with Harpers people and on to Borders by around 2:30. Went downstairs and signed stuff for the staff and signed a few hundred pre-ordered WOLVES, then upstairs, where I read WOLVES and answered questions (on little blue cards), and then signed and signed and signed and signed and signed....
Lots and lots of really nice people, and lots and lots of drawings of Wolves, and about six hours later, I was done. Also completely fried...
Then I signed the rest of the WOLVES as someone had phoned in an order for 60 signed ones. Then I was done...
Stumbled back to hotel in a daze. Checked e-mail. There's a fun long interview with me up at Suicide Girls. And the World Fantasy Award nominations have been announced: http://www.locusmag.com/2003/News/News08Log1.html and, whether I get one or not, they are very good things.
And the tip of my tongue is sort of numb. But it's better than it was last night. Thank you for asking.
You know, it's been a long time since I ate anything, now I come to think of it. I should probably see if they're still doing room service.
And sleep. Sleep would be a good thing.
Today I got my photo taken for Entertainment Weekly. It went on for four hours and was several million times more pleasurable than the last time I had my photo taken for Entertainment Weekly (in the Carousel Room at the House on the Rock, for American Gods).
They had clothes for me -- coats and boots and shirts and such, all black -- and there was a lot of being told to "Lower your jaw, okay, now scowl furiously -- okay, clench your teeth together hard -- really hard -- and look really angry -- menacing. That's good. No, we have to see it in the eyebrows."
So I clenched my jaw like anything for a couple of hours. Clenched and clenched and clenched. Then I went into the make-up room, while the photographers were moving some lights, and took a bite of some sushi with my freshly unclenched jaw, and nearly took the tip of my tongue off.
The shoot carried on with me sucking ice-cubes for my bleeding tongue, and scowling even more convincingly, and talking even less.
They showed me some of the photos on the computer screen. They're really good -- I didn't look like me at all. I looked, I decided, like a James Bond villain.
Then they put a big coat on me and stood me in front of a high-powered fan to make the coat billow, and took more photos. I now looked like a James Bond villain who had been cast in The Matrix.
In the evening I went, accompanied by Stephin Merritt, to see my friend Jennifer Barnhardt and the rest of the company, in "Avenue Q" -- a sort of Sesame Street for Grown-Ups. The show has recently transferred to Broadway, and is really fun -- watching the puppeteers on stage with the puppets is quite magical. In addition to which, songs like "The Internet is for Porn" and "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" teach life valuable lessons...
The tip of my tongue is currently black and swollen -- I'm not actually sure whether I'll be reading the Wolves in the Walls tomorrow, or the Wolveth in the Wallth. Well, I'll find out...
I read on the Dreaming website that the ad for the Borders signing in Time Out New York says I'll only be signing WOLVES IN THE WALLS. That must be a mistake. We've told Borders that I'll sign unlimited copies of WOLVES and of CORALINE, and I'll sign up to two Other Things.
And I will.
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I'm in New York.
It occurred to me today that the biggest problem with the way the future is visually presented is it's either hi tech or low tech; whereas most things are a sort of hodgepodge. This is the kind of revelation that occurs to one when staring at an iPod that only works properly when the headphones are attached by a rubber band to a piece of plastic cutlery, which pulls the connector into the right position....
RE: your excerpt from the book of Judges-is it an exact quote & what version does that come from? Thank you.
-Lauralynn
It's cut and pasted from one of the online bible sites -- I think it's "Revised Standard Version", only because that was the first Online Bible Site I found with a google, and I wasn't too concerned with the poetry of the passage. It's all in chapter 19.
And here's a written version of the Occult Saddam and his Genie news story that I put the audio link up to the other day...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0806/p01s04-woiq.html
Right -- next post will be from New York, I expect.
I should probably mention the reading and signing I'm doing for New York is Book Country next month again -- it's a ticketed event for NYIBC, and once the tickets are all gone, they're all gone. Tickets are available here. ("Neil Gaiman! He's Cheaper than Steve Martin!")
Also a reminder that I'll be talking and signing at the Novello Festival in Charlotte NC, on the 18th of October. Tickets and details are here for that one. ("Neil Gaiman! He's also Cheaper than John Grisham!")
And once that I don't think has been mentioned before, for the West Coast: I'll be in San Jose, at the Center for Literary Arts, on October the 16th -- "in conversation" in the afternoon, and then doing readings and suchlike (and a signing) in the evening. Details here at http://www.litart.org/.
And that's probably that for appearances this year in the US.
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I'll be signing in TORONTO at Chapters Festival Hall, 126 John Street, Toronto ON
(corner of Richmond/John) 416.595.7349 Saturday August 30th at 1 pm
Hurrah for Felicia Quon from Harpercollins Canada who organised it...
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Dear Neil,
Regarding the case of Jesus Castillo. Have you found that things like this happen just as often outside of the United States? Or is this country really as conservative as it seems? Do things like this ever make you want to leave and move back to England? It's disgusting that something like this could happen in the 21st century, will we ever grow up and join the enlightened people in this world?
Yes, things like this happen elsewhere. What's important is that, in the US, you have a First Amendment -- freedom of speech is a human right. And it's down in writing. Guaranteed by law.
You also have people chipping away at that, continually. From the California Tax Authorities who decided that Paul Mavrides would make an excellent test case for their redefinition of comics from literature to sign-painting, to the nightmarish Kafkaesque judgement on poor Mike Diana (among the things that the judge ordered were that Mike be fined a thousand dollars, sentenced to a year's suspended sentence, forbidden to be within ten feet of anyone under 18, and, most scarily, forbidden to write or draw anything anyone might find obscene even for his own amusement -- with the local police ordered to make random unnanounced 24 hour spot checks on his place of residence to make sure he wasn't secretly creating art and disposing of the evidence...).
You also have people who redefine Freedom of Speech as Freedom of the Sort of Speech that doesn't make them uncomfortable. (As in "Well, yeah, I'm for Freedom of Speech, but Mike Diana's comics are just icky.")
There's a reason why some of the fund's biggest supporters have been foreign, I suspect, which is that we know what it means not to have Freedom of Speech guaranteed.
I like the First Amendment. I think it may be one of the best things that America has. It's an ideal, and like all ideals, it may be let down by individuals (there's a reason why the ALA has a Banned Books Week page -- and it's an eye-opener) but that doesn't make it any the less important or meaningful or less worth fighting for.
I very nearly sent a publisher in Sweden to prison, for printing a bible story I had retold (the story, from the Book of Judges, contains a very nasty rape and murder*, which we depicted as a very nasty rape and murder) which fell foul of a Swedish law forbidding the depiction of violence against women. Sandman was seized several times by the police in the UK (where the UK Customs were seizing Robert Crumb books as obscene at the same time that BBC2 was screening a documentary on Crumb's art). It's no better elsewhere, and often it's worse...
I don't recommend leaving -- or at least, not because you see the walls closing in. I recommend making your voice heard, instead. Writing to your representatives and voting are two really good ways to start. Support organisations that stand for the same things you do.
The most interesting thing about the CBLDF is that it is an unbelievably broad church politically -- from far left to far right to Moderates and Don't Knows and Out on the Absolutist Fringes; the only thing that unites the members (and the board, and the board of advisers) is faith in the medium, and in the First Amendment.
........
*
From the Book of Judges...
A man and his concubine are stopping off on the way back from Bethlehem. An old man has given them shelter, but the men of the town have come out and are demanding of their host that the man be thrown out to them, so they can rape him. The old man has a better idea....
22: As they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, base fellows, beset the house round about, beating on the door; and they said to the old man, the master of the house, "Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him."
23: And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, "No, my brethren, do not act so wickedly; seeing that this man has come into my house, do not do this vile thing.
24: Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you; but against this man do not do so vile a thing."
25: But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine, and put her out to them; and they knew her, and abused her all night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go.
26: And as morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man's house where her master was, till it was light.
27: And her master rose up in the morning, and when he opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold.
28: He said to her, "Get up, let us be going." But there was no answer. Then he put her upon the ass; and the man rose up and went away to his home.
29: And when he entered his house, he took a knife, and laying hold of his concubine he divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. .
(Whoa, sticking a chunk of bible at the bottom of a post. I feel spookily like Dave Sim, all of a sudden. )
A little more pirate fun:
http://www.fidius.org/quiz/pirate.php
~ Culufinwen (aka Mad Ethel Flint)
Er -- Black Tom Flint, meself. Arr.
This isn't really a question but a comment really. I read with some interest your comment about the CBLDF case for Jesus Castillo and wasn't to surprised to see that it was in Texas (my home state) but I assumed it was in one of our smaller, more out of the way, rural communities. Needless to say I was shocked, if not totally surprised, to find this case took place in Dallas. I know that comic book store! When I was a more avid reader, I spent more than a couple of days shuffling through their boxes looking for some missing piece of my collection. They have long been one of the most respected stores in the area. This kind of decision coming from a city that has one of the highest concentrations of "gentleman's clubs" in the USA is kind of surprising but again not totally out of character for Dallas. I wish I could say that the prosecuting DA has lost my vote in the upcoming election but I live in a suburb and so don't vote in that district but believe you me everyone I know in Dallas will here about this during the upcoming election year. I've read your blog for some time now and so was aware of the existence of the CBLDF, but this happening in my own backyard, a city I dearly love with all its faults is just a bit more than I can bear so I will be donating to the CBLDF at least, and will find ways that I can more actively participate to the cause.
On another note. When the heck are you coming to Dallas or the North Texas area? I know I'm not the only Neil fan down here and we deserve a chance to redeem ourselves and show you what a wonderful place this is and can be.
A long time fan,
Larry L. Johnson, Jr.
One of the points raised in the trial, I believe, was that there are more eye-watering hardcore porn outlets in Dallas than anywhere else in Texas. But then, comics are for kids.
The comic in question (er, Legend of the Overfiend #2, I think) had been special-ordered by a customer who hadn't picked it up, and it had somehow got onto the shelves in the adult section. The undercover cop went into the adult section and went hunting...
As you correctly observe, it's not the bad shops, or the rural places that have the most to fear. The scary bit is that it can happen to good shops, and it can happen anywhere.
But there's nothing to stop you, as a local, writing to your local paper and protesting things like this, or writing to the DA and police force. Or suggesting that your friends in the area find out where your own local officals stand on first amendment issues, and voting accordingly.
And if you're involved in comics -- as a creator (on the web or on paper), a retailer or a publisher, at the first sign of something going wrong, call the CBLDF. Call fast: 1 800-99-CBLDF. Write down the phone number. Keep it near the phone. Please don't wait until you're in jail, or after you've given a deposition, or once you've decided that representing yourself might not have been such a great idea (all things that have happened, and that have made it much harder to defend people).
And if things go a little weird, call us. There was a retailer in Jacksonville a few years back, who got a visit from a police captain who told him that unless he removed several books from his shelves she would close him down. (One of them was DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING, because of the safe sex bit in the back. I forget the other two.) He immediately contacted the CBLDF, and our attorney, Burton Joseph, fired off a letter to the police department, explaining the concept of the First Amendment to them, and that it applied to comics. And nothing more was ever heard from them -- because they realised this wouldn't be a pushover.
And check out cbldf.org. There's an interview with Jesus here at http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/3267.html, and with Charles Brownstein from the CBLDF.
The hardest thing about being on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is that I take very personally the ones we lose. Jesus Castillo sold an adult comic, from the adult section of the store, to an adult police office, and was successfully prosecuted for obscenity by a DA whose summing up explicitly stated, and managed to convince the jury that Comics Were Just For Kids.
The CBLDF managed to get a second charge -- and a second, separate trial -- thrown out, and got the penalties reduced, and local fundraising paid his fine. But we've just learned that the appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected...
http://newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4953 is the article.
You know, next year is an election year. I suspect that things will be getting worse.
Over at http://cbldf.safeshopper.com/13/cat13.htm?179 they have a bunch of my stuff available in exchange for a donation, much of which you'll not see anywhere else. If there's nothing there that strikes your fancy there are a lot of things on the site -- this scary Peter Kuper poster, for example
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And meanwhile, Maddy decided that really, I had to take her to see Pirates of the Caribbean for the second time (my first). So I took her, and her friend, and my assistant Lorraine who had also already seen it but wanted to see Johnny Depp in eyeshadow again -- and it was a lovely movie, beautifully done by Ted and Terry (Elliott and Rossio), and stolen most wonderfully by Johnny Depp. Maddy is starting to get used to my weird behaviour at movies, which consists of staying to watch the end credits, which is embARRassing because everyone else leaves and only her dad sits and watches all those names scrolling by. On the other hand, no-one else except for us saw the final zombiemonkey sequence, so she may forgive me.
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And it looks like the livejournal feed is now several posts behind.
There's a "Win a Free copy of Wolves in the Walls and a poster" site up at http://www.harperchildrens.com/hch/wolves/.
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And this came in from the person who was enquiring about monologues...
Hello again -
My apologies if my question opened up a can of worms that ate part of your Sunday morning! I do want to thank you and your journal readers for posting a variety of suggestions. Looking forward to reading some new things and perhaps revisiting some stories I haven't read in years. It must feel special that your work means so much to so many! Thanks to all for sending me off in new directions.
Much appreciation,
Siah
You're welcome.
My favourite female guitar-playing singer-songwriter, Thea Gilmore, writes to say Just thinking, if you know anyone in England who would like to help 'lil old me inch chart-wards, the single "Juliet" is out today!!
She doesn't say that the single "Juliet (Keep That In Mind)" is out as two CD singles, each with a different two tracks on as B-sides, none of which is on the album Avalanche, but I will. Help her inch chart-wards. It's for a good cause... ("Er. Hullo. We're collecting to send this girl to Top of the Pops.")
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I love the Rotten Tomatoes site, which does all the work for me in finding all the reviews of films, rounding them up, posting links and extracts and deciding whether the majority of a film's reviews were positive or negative. Occasionally I'll disagree with their assessment of whether a review was generally positive or negative (symbolised on the site by a red, ripe tomato, or a green squishy tomato) after reading the review.
Mostly, the reviews teach you something that any writer or creator needs to learn fast, which is that not everybody is going to like everything you do, so keep yourself happy and do your best work and keep going.
I don't ever remember a parade of such delighted squishy green tomatos, and such overjoyed-to-be-able-to-write- something-really-mean quotes as in the case of Gigli. (It also made sense out of this Onion article for me.)
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Dear Neil,
The Zorya sisters (American Gods) has something to do with some mythology storie? If the answer is positive, what storie?
Darlene, the brazilian girl
and
Being as how there's new improved version of American Gods coming out, has there been any thought about an annotated version? While I can certainly understand people desire for new fiction over retreads of older works I can't imagine any one not wanting to know just who those background characters were or to have a little bit of "real world" history on the characters that take major roles.
both made me think of the site at http://www.frowl.org/gods/, where you can go to find out a little more about the various gods of American Gods (including the Zorya). (And there's more on the Zorya here.)
The Turkish edition of American Gods has a terrific glossary of obscure words in the back, going from the gods to explanations of terms like "Winnebago" and "D.N.R.", which must have taken them ages to do, and probably means that the Turkish American Gods readers have the most instanbtly educated experience.
The BBC radio piece on the belief in Iraq that Saddam is being protected by Genies is in Real Audio at http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/realmedia/sunday/s20030803d.ram and lasts about 3 minutes.
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More Monolgue ideas: A pair of my Drama students used excerpts from Mr. Punch (a very creepy coupling of monlogues about how puppets come to life when you put them on...) and The Queen of Knives (it nearly brought tears to my eyes at the end.) They each recited their monlogues as a part of cabaret-esque talent show (not competetive) we put on each year. Q.O.K. earned the actor a standing ovation. I reccomend simply picking up any piece by Mr. Gaiman and finding a lengthy passage of dialogue that holds your interest. He has such a gift for engaging the reader with intense and realistic speech about the most bizarre, arcane, and hauntingly in-depth topics. Monologues are a true storytelling artform, as in actual storytelling around the campfire, and Neil seems to be more of a teller than a describer. Its like he's there, nudging you in the ribs, winking about the events of the story as you witness them, and pointing out the good bits. Although, his descriptions of individuals and exotic locales would seem effective as monologues as well. Stardust is ripe with imaginative and whimsical speeches, as are most of Death's dialogues when she appears anywhere. I would actually have loved to see a large-scale staging of Mr. Gaiman's short stories as a night of theatrical storytelling.
Which is being done in Edinburgh currently (well, 11th - 23rd August ) -- and it occurs to me that one of the Edinburgh Festival "Smoke and Mirrors" is a solo monologue version of "When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside...".
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Hello Mr. Gaiman!
In light of the discussion about the "author's preferred version" of American Gods in leather, I happened to re-read an old interview with you about American Gods. In it you said that there were two large cuts--Shadow on the train meets Jesus/Spielberg, and the other scene being Isis, who explains a theory--that you hold yourself--how things begin as sacred mysteries, then become myths, and finally end as fairy stories. In both instances, you said they were cut because they did not "fit" into the story line. So, these two orphan stories are--1)filed away for posterity to unearth 2)going to be published someday as short stories in their own rights 3)you are just totally undecided 4)inserted back into American Gods in leather edition? (although if they did not fit before, they still will not fit contextually) 5)you totally forgot them and have moved on to other things. Just curious about it all. Dave
Well, the Isis plot bit dead-ended and never made it out of handwriting, although it was pretty long, and the Jesus bit simply didn't work where it was (as a vision of Shadow's on the Tree -- and there wasn't anywhere else it could go), so they won't be back in the book, and neither will the story about the Emperor of China and his model city. The latter was my Christmas Card a few years ago, and will probably show up at some point, maybe in a short story collection, or a book, or a magazine, or something (actually I'd forgotten all about it until now).
Hey Neil,
Perhaps a stupid question, but I was talking with my friend about August 8th and she was wondering about what she should bring or buy to have you sign. Now, I always figured I'd just buy The Wolves In the Walls and have you sign that and it would be a nice thing, being able to point to it and say i bought it and heard you read it and then you signed my copy; but now I'm wondering if I would like your signature on a work of yours that I appreciate more, on the low chance I don't completely connect with Wolves.
I don't know if there's really a question in there, but I guess I'm asking which you'd prefer. I realize this whole business is for promotion of your new book so I was wondering if I should feel jerky(or the UKish equivalent...shirty?..no..oh well) just bringing along an old thing and not buy the new thing since I don't know how poor I'll be on the day(also you would have just read it to me nicely), or if its fine and the signing portion itself is just a completely different entity.
Forgive me for the headache.
Not a headache at all -- perfectly legitimate question. Depending on the number of people there we'll limit the number of things I'll sign, in order that everyone gets something signed. But if you have a best-beloved something you want signed, feel very free to bring it along. Some authors will only sign The New Thing. I'm not one of them. (I normally try and do something whereby it's 1,2 or 3 things that get signed PLUS as many copies of The New Thing as you want.)
Some stores are especially nice to people who buy the New Thing, or buy the New Thing from them -- they have special lines or put you to the front or something. I don't believe Borders does.
Back in April 2001 in the original American Gods blog I scribbled out a bunch of suggestions for people going to signings -- I'll repost them here, partly so that they're in a journal entry with a permalink.
I have been asked to give some dos and don'ts for people coming to signings. And although I've written do's and don't's and suggestions for stores before (and may possibly reprint them here, for contrast), I don't think I've ever written any suggestions for the people who actually make the signings possible.
If you've never been to any kind of signing with me, the first thing you should know is, wherever possible it'll start with a reading and a question and answer session. Then you'll be herded into lines (or, the first 50 people will be called, just like at a deli counter) and I'll start signing stuff for people. And that will go on until everyone's done, and happy, and out the door.
So here you go... Some dos and don'ts in no particular order...
1) It can be a good idea to call the store first and find out if they have any specific ground rules. Some do, some don't. Will they be handing out numbers? Will you have to buy a copy of American Gods from them in hardback to get prime place in the line or will it be first come first served? What about books you bought somewhere else? Can you bring your ferret?
2) Get there reasonably early if you can. I'll always try and make sure that anyone in line during the posted signing times gets stuff signed. At evening signings I'll always stay and make sure everyone goes away happy, but on this tour there will be several places where I'll need to go from a signing to another signing, so don't cut it fine.
3) You may own everything I've ever written. I'm very grateful. I'm probably not going to sign it all, so you had better simply pick out your favourite thing and bring that along.
4) As a rule, I tend to tell stores I'll sign 3 things people bring with them � plus any copies of the new book you buy (if you have six brothers or sisters and buy one each, I'll sign them all). But stores may have their own policies � and we may wind up changing the rules as we go in order to make sure that everyone gets stuff signed.
5) Eat first. I'm not kidding. If it's a night-time signing of the kind that can go on for a long time, bring sandwiches or something to nibble (some signings with numbers handed out may make it possible for you to go out and eat and come back. Or you may be first in line. But plan for a worst case scenario of several hours of standing and shuffling your way slowly around a store). (If it's a daytime signing somewhere that a line may snake out of a store into the hot sun, bring something to drink. I always feel guilty when people pass out.)
6) You may be in that line for a while, so talk to the people around you. You never know, you could make a new friend. I've signed books for kids whose parents met in signing lines (although to the best of my knowledge none of them were actually conceived there). And while we're on the subject, bring something to read while waiting. Or buy something to read � you'll be in a book shop, after all.
7) Don't worry. You won't say anything stupid. It'll be fine. My heart tends to go out to people who've stood in line for hours trying to think of the single brilliant witty erudite thing that they can say when they get to the front of the line, and when it finally happens they put their books in front of me and go blank, or make a complete mess of whatever they were trying to say. If you have anything you want to ask or say, just ask, or say it, and if you get a blank look from me it's probably because I'm slightly brain dead after signing several thousand things that day.
8) The only people who ever get short shrift from me are the people who turn up with tape recorders who try and tape interviews during signings. I won't do them � it's unfair on the other people in the line, and unfair on me (and I was as curt with the guy from the LA Times who tried it as I am to people who decide on the spur of the moment to try and tape something for their college paper). If you want to do an interview, ask the bookstore who you should talk to in order to set it up.
9) Take things out of plastic bags before you reach me. Firstly, it speeds things up. Secondly, I once ripped the back off a $200 comic taking it out of a plastic bag, when the back of the comic caught on the tape. The person who owned it was very sweet about it, but tears glistened in his eyes as I signed, and I could hear him wailing softly as he walked away.
10) Yes, I'll happily personalize the stuff I sign, to you, or to friends. If it's a birthday or wedding present, tell me.
11) Remember your name. Know how to spell it, even under pressure, such as being asked.
[If you have a nice simple name, like Bob or Dave or Jennifer, don't be surprised if I ask you how to spell it. I've encountered too many Bhob's, Daev's and even, once, a Jeniffer to take any spelling for granted.]
12) No, I probably won't do a drawing for you, because there are 300 people behind you, and if I had to draw for everyone we'd be finishing at 4.00am � on the other hand, if you're prepared to wait patiently until the end, I may do it then, if my hand still works.
13) If it means a lot to you, yes, I'll sign your lunchbox/skin/guitar/leather jacket/wings � but if it's something strange you may want to make sure you have a pen that writes on strange surfaces legibly. I'll have lots of pens, but they may not write on feathers.
14) At the start of the tour the answer to "Doesn't your hand hurt?" Is "No."
By the end of the tour, it's probably going to be "Yes."
15) Yes, you can take my picture, and yes, of course you can be in the photo, that's the point isn't it? There's always someone near the front of the line who will take your photo.
16) I do my best to read all the letters I'm given and not lose all the presents I'm given. Sometimes I'll read letters on the plane to the next place. But given the sheer volume of letters and gifts, you probably won't get a reply, unless you do. (On one previous tour I tried to write postcards to everyone who gave me something at the last stop on postcards at the next hotel. Never again.) If you're after a reply or to have me read something, you're much better off not giving it to me on a tour. Post it to me care of DreamHaven books in Minneapolis.
(And although things people give me get posted back, on the last tour FedEx lost one box of notes and gifts, and on the tour before that hotel staff lost or stole another box. So smaller things I can put into a suitcase are going to be more popular than four-foot high paintings done on slabs of beechwood.)
17) No, I probably won't have dinner/a beer/sushi with you after the signing. If it's a daytime signing I'll be on my way to the next signing; and if it's an evening signing I'll be heading back to my hotel room because I'll be getting up at six a.m. to fly to the next city. If there actually is any spare time on the tour it'll've been given to journalists, and if there's any time on top of that old friends will have started e-mailing me two or three months before the tour started to say "You'll be in the Paphlagonian Barnes and Noble on the 23rd. That's just a short yak-hop from my yurt. We must get together," and would have got themselves put on the schedule. (Still, it never hurts to ask.)
18) If you can't read what I wrote, just ask me. After a couple of hours of signing my handwriting can get pretty weird.
19) If I sign it in silver or gold, give it a minute or so to dry before putting it back in its bag or closing the cover, otherwise you'll soon have a gold or silver smudge and nothing more.
....
Lots of responses from people about audition monologues. Here's everything in so far this morning...
Hey Neil!
In answer to the question about good monolouges - I've had a lot of good luck with the dialouge about eternity from "Good Omens" - I simply cut out Aziraphale's responses.
Another one that I really enjoyed and found success with was Wendsday's charm speech. It can get very, very intense.
And finally, Mr. Ibis' speech on changing times and how he arrived in America when he meets Shadow. Again, omit the responses.
Micala Setsrle
RE: your written work as theater monologue. In a drama class I took last year I used "Being an Experiment..." to quite a healthy amount of laughter. Although it's not exactly beautiful or dark... But it is damn funny to hear aloud.
Hi Neil,
This is my first ever question, and its more of a comment really.
I used your wonderful Babycakes story as a monologue for a stage directing assignment at uni. I had my actress surounded by a whole heap of cutsie little baby statues, and cutsie stuffed animal toys. It went very well, and I got a good mark.
Anyway the person asking about monologues reminded me, and I thought i'd thank you for your contribution towards me getting my useless arts degree (useless, but nevertheless very interesting and fulfillng).
Thanking you.
Mark Brown
PS. Love your work....yada yada
Hi Neil -
Re: the question on theatrical monologues, I've been using Brant Tucker's funeral procession speech from 'Worlds' End' as an audition piece for years (slightly adjusted, since I'm a girl-type). Works pretty well, as does Tori's essay dealie on Death. Hope that helps, thanks for all the wordly fun! - Bethany (A.K.A. the girl who squeaked at you in a Stardust tour signing line, to whom you squeaked back, then looked abashed for making fun of)
Hey Neil,
In a college Oral Interpratation class, where we had to dramatasize literary works, I did Hob's speech in the graveyard to his dead wife and it was my professor's favourite out of the bunch, and she despised swear words, and she said that the use of the "f word" didn't bother in that piece. I think that would be a wonderful piece for someone to use.
Rob Dietz
Hi Neil - love your stuff...(does it get boring hearing that?!) Read that someone was looking for monologues and thought I'd write in. From Sandman, I've used the story Loki told to Puck about Thor being pregnant many times and am happy to report that it has landed me at least 3 roles!! It's funny, full of energy and weird! Keep up the great stuff.
Jay Cormier
I use Hazel's conversation with Death from Death, The Time of your Life.
Meloney
Which tells me that a lot of you act, and makes me suspect that finding a monologue is something limited only by your imagination...
It looks like Live Journal and Blogger have just done that thing that they did once before, where Live Journal decides to repost a week's worth of Blogger posts at once. I'm really sorry if I've just clogged up your live Journal friends page with stuff you've already read.
If any of you have any ideas why it's happening (and how it can be fixed), please let me know.
In the meantime, my apologies.
.....
Over at Readerville.com the month-long discussion about American Gods has just come to an end. I answered a few questions, but they really didn't need me.
Fascinating segment on Radio 4's SUNDAY program about the Iraquis who believe that Saddam has power over a Djinn that he keeps in a stone, which is how he has remained alive this long...
...
Hi Neil,
I was wondering if you have written anything you feel would be appropriate as a theatrical monologue. I am an actress frustrated with the ordinary and mundane nature in which most writing for the stage seems to occur these days. Currently, I am seeking material which is, beautiful, dark, thought provoking, and imaginative to take to a workshop entitled "Choreographic Theatre". Anything spring to mind that you have written or admired from another writer?
- Siah
Well, I've had several e-mails from people who've done Sam's "I believe..." speech from American Gods as audition pieces and monologues, and others who've had success (or extreme failure) with "Babycakes" from Smoke and Mirrors... If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know...
I learned from Puck at the Dreaming that the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game is online in a java version at http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html. You can't save, unfortunately.
This evening only got surreal when I found myself being driven along winding country roads at high speeds, while listening to a CD (belonging to the driver) of a lady making Bigfoot noises with what she said was a distant Bigfoot yelping back at her, followed by her teaching us words in elementary Sasquatch.
(I've failed to find the CD online -- although I'm sure it, or a page about it, must exist somewhere on the web. I did just find this though -- a definitive bigfoot site at http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/.)
...
An alternate, rather longer, version of American Gods you say? How much longer, if I may ask? Are we talking twenty pages (meh), one hundred pages (well... HOW much did you say?) or two hundred pages (where's my wallet?!)?
hs
Oh, probably about twenty or thirty pages. Maybe a bit more. And there really won't be any surprises, or whole missing scenes or anything. If you go to http://www.neilgaiman.com/faq/blog.asp and go down to Nov 28 2001 you can compare a before and after version. The big leather version of American Gods will have most of that Before material restored. And it's really not about sending people who already have the book out to buy it again; more just that if it's going to be the gorgeous archival version, I may as well establish an "author's preferred text". I'll probably do the same for Neverwhere. Stardust is exactly what it is, though, and so are the short stories -- they won't change... So don't worry; your wallet won't sustain any damage.
...
Had a chat with my son Mike yesterday about GPS systems and speed limits. He thought that we weren't too far away from cars recognising speed limits and not breaking them, even if the driver wanted to. I suggested that the revenue generated by speeding motorists was too important: According to the Observer: Drivers face automatic speeding fines without being caught by the police or roadside cameras under a proposal being studied by the Government to fit all cars with satellite tracking devices for road tolls. ... and later: In Britain, the Freight Transport Association went further. It believes the equipment will be used to put speed limiters on every car. 'You won't be able to go faster than the limit, no matter how hard you press the pedal,' said Gavin Scott, the association's policy manager.
Echoes of an SF story I read as a boy called "The Speed that Kills" about motorists who snuck off to unregulated places and drove fast. I suspect that in the end the brave rebel speed-limit breakers may have murdered a traffic warden.... but I've not read it for well over thirty years, and may well be wrong...
There's a review of Swan Sister, the new Datlow/Windling collection of retold fairy tales, up at Greenman review. I've got a poem in the book called "Inventing Aladdin".
Which reminds me....
It seems to me that about half the people who read Smoke and Mirrors, my short stories-and-stuff collection, liked, or at least were willing to put up with, the story-poems I put in there, along with the more normal short stories. And half the people shrugged, or sighed, and flipped the pages until the next story started. We're probably a couple of years away from a new story collection (because Morrow want to publish a novel next, then another story collection) so I've a while to decide what goes into the next book (which has, readers of this journal, may remember, two titles, depending on my mood: either "These People Must Know Who We Are And Tell That We Were Here" -- it's a quote from a Little Nemo comic -- or the shorter "Fragile Things". Then again, it's two years away, so who knows. By the time it's published It'll probably be called "Cornflakes.").
Anyway, I've still not decided whether to put the story poems written since "Smoke and Mirrors" into the next collection. I may. Or I might keep it prose only, and do a separate poetry collection. Not sure. (One reason for putting the poems in is that people who would never, not in several million years if stranded somewhere with nothing else to read, pick up a poetry collection, might find their eyes straying across the page in a story collection, and find themselves reading something they enjoyed, but didn't think they would.)
Hill House Press, who are in the process of doing lovely leather-bound collectible cool definitive editions of my prose, suggested that instead of doing "Smoke and Mirrors" they might do "The Complete Short Stories of Neil Gaiman Volume I" and so on -- something I said no to, in the end because a) I'm not dead yet, b) I'm picky. There are a handful of early short stories that aren't collected because I don't think they're very good. If we did a "complete short stories" I'd be under obligation to put them in; and c) it's hard enough for collectors and readers already without sending them out to buy masses of alternate editions of books they already have...
Anyway. We'll see. They're doing American Gods first, so we've got a while.
(And yes, it'll be an alternate, rather longer, version of American Gods, with lots of bits cut for space reasons restored. And given the end of the paragraph before last I know I'm already contradicting myself -- but I sort of felt that if I was going to beam down at a leather-bound edition, I wanted it to be as close to the book I had in my head as possible.)
...
I've been asked if I can go to Toronto in August to sign WOLVES IN THE WALLS, especially because I didn't get to Canada at all for CORALINE.
Meanwhile, Coraline herself is up for a Hugo award for best Novella.
(Yes, Coraline is probably the front runner, judging by the straw poll over at SF Weekly -- http://www.scifi.com/sfw/hugo/2003results.php. But that doesn't mean it will win: "Australian Rules Voting" is what counts here, which at first look can be counterintuitive -- and if you have any questions, why don't you go and look here, where the whole thing is explained, using unauthorised Muppets.)
It would be nice to be there for it; and I'll even write a speech this time. I wonder if I can make the two things happen together...? A signing and turning up for the awards. It'll probably depend mostly on HarperCanada...
...
Neil, will you be reading the audio version of The Wolves in the Walls as you did for Coraline? That was fabulous reading and I'd love to get my hands on an audio version of wolves.
Julie
The plan is to do a CD with WOLVES IN THE WALLS and THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH, and probably CINNAMON on it. I should ring Carrie Kania and HarperAudio and find out when I'm recording it, and when she's releasing it. I hope that Stephin Merritt can do the music.
...
Not sure if I mentioned this before, but if you preorder the NEVERWHERE DVD from the A&E site, you get a rather cool Dave McKean poster (and get the DVD a month before everyone else).
...
Interesting article by Suzette Chan over at Sequential Tart, about the GLAAD awards. Normally when I link to an article because I think it's interesting, I'll assume that unless I say something like "And I agree with every word of it!" most of the people reading will not assume that Opinions Expressed In Links Are Automatically the Viewpoint of the Management.
On this one, it's probably worth my pointing out that, firstly, I've already got a GLAAD award for best comic (for DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE -- it was the only time I've ever seen a roomful of people applaud the correct pronunciation of my name), and that, secondly, all the reasons Suzette cites for Murder Mysteries to have got the award and Judd not to have got it swing the other way as well: part of the point of the angels is that, while I refer to them all as he, and Craig draws them all male, that's fundamentally irrelevant to sexuality -- it's about emotion and love and lust and death, and that, well, Green Lantern got Judd onto Larry King to talk about gay-bashing; while Murder Mysteries probably wouldn't have got P. Craig Russell (whose comic it was 100% -- he took my story and radio play, and turned it into pictures and made it sing) on to talk about angels and opera. So I can see why their judges went the way they did.
(I wanted to go to the GLAAD reception at Comic-Con -- and was looking forward to chatting to them about their new rule restricting their awards to the "Big Four" of Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image -- but wound up missing that, along with a dinner and a Dark Horse event, in favour of grabbing a couple of hours of desperately needed sleep before the CBLDF Reading on Saturday Night.)
Okay. First of all, a half hour English radio show you ought to listen to. It begins with stuff about the Radiation mania of the 1930s -- people would use Radium Suppositories, hold Radium Parties where you'd drink Radium drinks from punchbowls in darkened rooms and glow in the dark and giggle a lot. And Radium-dissolved-in-water was sold as a 1920s Viagra -- which was fine until bits of you, literally, started falling off. Then, as the show goes on, we get Perpetual Motion, and the concept of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s as giant Ponzi scheme. Lovely stuff.
I must be completely mad and/or blind, but I can't seem to find a "search" button on your site. Is there one and I just can't find it, or isn't there one? It's driving me nearly insane trying to search your journal archives.
It's the magnifying glass on a book, over on the left hand side of the page: it takes you to http://www.neilgaiman.com/search/search.asp
Neil -
(Regarding your blog/journal entry from the 31st about which order to read Sandman in...)
An English teacher of mine was incarcerated in Fall of 1998, and I merrily took his stuff to hold onto. Included were The Kindly Ones, The Wake, and Worlds' End. Well, none of them were packed together so I found them in that order and read them in that order.
Just 3 short years later I mustered up the courage to go on Ebay and buy the whole damn series hardcover. I actually thought it was incredible to go back and see how everything led up to those. You really cannot fathom a number high enough to match the amount of times I went "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, THAT'S who that is!/how that happened!/why s/he said that!". It was terrible fun, and would like to make a bet that regardless of what order you read them in, the last Sandman book you get to will blow you away.
My best friend got them one at a time, totally out of order, and I think finished with Brief Lives. It just makes us go back and re-read the whole thing IN order, I hope you know. ;)
At any rate...Not to disagree with the creator, but reading them out of order did for the series what the lack of chronology did for Memento, Pulp Fiction, and most film noir.
And through the thousands of movies, books, comics, jokes, anecdotes, and other pieces of fiction I've worked my way through, The Sandman remains the single best story I've ever heard, by far.
Finally and most importantly...Did you know where you were going with it by the time you got to The Doll's House? You said by then you "knew what you were doing", but did you know where it would end? This question has plagued me for YEARS, and I would so greatly appreciate you replying to it. Please please please? :) Thanks.
Indebted to the life lessons I've learned from your pages,
-jonny in atlanta, GA.
I always knew where I was going. I didn't actually know everything that would happen on the way.
And I'm pleased that Sandman works out of sequence (although I suspect you'd then have to read it in sequence for some things to add up.)
Dear Neil,
Hi - hope you're well!
I think you made a fair point about "Assassins", one of the most misunderstood works of musical literature (and I truly believe it deserves that title). But I think "Assassins" is much thornier ground than that cartoon.
As it happens, the musical always DID suffer from exactly those kinds of allegations - that it was encouraging assassination, not examining it as a symptom of national disarray. Not so long ago Sondheim was planning to take it to Broadway - something he didn't manage with the original 1991 production - and everything seemed set to go, on the evening of September 10th, 2001 ... the next day, however, a musical which contained Sam Byck's monologue about crashing a plane into the White House, ending with the phrase "we do what we have to ... we kill the president", suddenly didn't seem so viable.
I think that cartoon was just a little confusing, though innocent enough when explained - not so "Assassins". It contains a lot of unpleasant, even vicious home truths, which definitely make for compelling, informative and provocative musical theatre - but I guess there are times when that has to be sacrificed for plain tact.
Hope this doesn't come across as preachy - it's more intended as a thought-out response to your comments.
Hope everything is proceeding smoothly! All the best,
Matt
Doesn't come across as preachy at all.
I don't think Assassins glorifies the act of murdering presidents; the biggest message I took from it is that these are small people, sad people, crazy people, in a country that has a history of shooting at its presidents...
It's good art, and it makes you think. I don't really think that one should sacrifice art for tact; although the demands of the marketplace may mean that less people see Assassins than other things that Sondheim has done. (And not taking it to Broadway September 11th was wise, given the national mood -- not because of Sam Byck's prescient monologue, but because people in New York really didn't need it just then.)
At this point, given the times we're living in, I think that staging Assassins and letting people argue about what they've seen has to be a healthy thing to do.
...
Here's an interview about Wolves in the Walls.
I'm a huge fan of early Peter Greenaway movies -- there's a Guardian article by Greenaway about The Draughtsman's Contract, which may be useful for anyone who got to the end of that film and went "What?"
The ALA have a press release about their Sandman reading poster here -- It's only available through the ALA, but you might want to encourage your local bookshop/library/comic store to get one to put up (or get one yourself).
It's by the immensely talented P. Craig Russell. It looks like this:
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The
Graveyard
Book
is now available
in the US
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