When I was in Chicago Jill Thompson gave me a copy of the Scary Godmother DVD. Maddy and I watched it together this evening -- she's been a fan of the books since she was old enough to have a book placed in front of her. It's really fun -- a slightly wobbly start, but as soon as it gets to the Fright Side it takes off and becomes visually cool and genuinely funny. My main puzzlement was that they didn't get Jill (who, after all, is really the Scary Godmother) to do the voice herself; every time the Scary Godmother spoke I'd think "but that's not what she sounds like". Maddy laughed at the jokes and enjoyed it no end.
I don't do many book reviews here, and I don't normally ever bother with giving things bad reviews (better not to mention them, I normally feel), but seeing that the Holiday Gift-Giving Season is coming up, you may want to avoid buying The Comic Book Encyclopedia by Ron Goulart (Harper Collins) for anyone this year. It has an eye-catching cover, lots of cool illustrations and design work, but is, as an encyclopedia anyway, useless. I browsed through the copy I was sent today, in the way one does with reference books, and I didn't encounter an entry without a factual error or an embarassing typo. It's short on facts, is padded with obscure 30s and 40s characters ("Captain Midnight" and "Captain Tootsie" together get two full pages, while Steve Ditko gets three short paragraphs) and contains several odd moments -- why on earth spend over half a page slagging off the short-lived and now completely forgotten Clive Barker comics by Marvel in the early 90s with a lengthy entry about Clive's lack of success in the comics field, when most contemporary creators don't get mentioned? The author makes it clear that he doesn't like most comics since the 80s, the book isn't really aimed at anyone in particular, and has a sort of attitude of "why should anyone care what year From Hell started or Bone ended, or how one correctly spells Aardvark-Vanaheim or Sam Kieth, or who actually created John Constantine?" It's the kind of book that I wind up resenting because, damn it, there really should be a Comic Book Encyclopedia, on a par with the Clute-Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction or the Clute-Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy. A good one, filled with usable information, not something that reads like it's been knocked together in a hurry from older books, un-copy-edited and unfact-checked. A book like this is going to be useless as a work of reference, and it takes up the space on the shelves and on a publisher's list that a real Encyclopedia of Comics could have used. The comics field deserves much better than this. (And Ron Goulart, who has written with knowledge and passion about the comics of the 40s, and written some decent SF in his day, could have done much better than this.)
Neil- I have been thinking of going to your Anansi Boys reading in Chicago-if I can get my algebra homewrok done. I was wondering what Anansi Boys is about and whether you will do a book signing or not? Erm, if you don't want to answer the first question, that's fine. And if you do do a book signing, would it be before or after your reading??? You response would be much appreciated.Thank You.-Lizard
Signings at the Chicago Humanities Festival are always after the reading/talk. Anansi Boys is about what happens after Fat Charlie's father's funeral. It's quite funny, and scary, and odd. I think it may be a love story. I don't know, Lizard. I've not finished it yet. Maybe when it's done I'll know what it's about.
Another thought on elections, from a Palm Beach County pollworker:
Florida may find a way to be a problem again this election. Once people get their lives scraped back together a bit, I think there may be a mass exodus from Florida. Everywhere I go I hear people ready to sell their houses and get the hell out of Dodge. Which means there will be hordes of people in moving-van limbo during that crucial 29-day period who will be unable to vote.
(Also, forgive me if I'm being nosy, but is Tori's house okay? I know she couldn't have been far from where the two storms made landfall, but I haven't heard a peep.)
--Amanda Coppedge
http://www.amandacoppedge.com
Oddly enough, I asked her that same question this morning. She says that apart from the fifty-foot yacht -- not hers -- that the hurricane dropped in her back yard, and the lack of power, it appears so far to be fine. She, very sensibly, was in Cornwall while the hurricane season came through.
John Kerry's rehearsing for the big debate tomorrow night at The House on the Rock (resort)!! http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=11276&ntpid=0 Has he read "American Gods" then??? - Steve Manfred, River Falls, WI
Probably not. I hope he got to visit the House itself, if only to listen to the Mikado play the Danse Macabre...
Really fast one for Ingrid: I had an import DVD that at first played only in black & white, but I got round it by just bringing up the DVD Player Settings menu and selecting the display option. I then chose, I think, RGB from the three video options that appeared. But if you try each one of those three, that might fix it. Cheers, Pete - P.S: Adored your Miracleman: Golden Age, Neil
There you go, Ingrid. Worth a try.
Hello, I'm currently mired in rewriting a novel length manuscript and I'm wondering: what is your writing process like? Do you agonize and obsess over every word, or do you just hack on through to the end knowing that an problems can be fixed later? Also, do you work very closely with your editor on rewriting? How much professional feedback do you get? Thanks so much. I'll be seeing you at Fiddler's Green. Jeff (Manxom Vroom on the World's End)
It depends. Mostly I just carry on. The bad stuff can mostly be fixed or thrown out. The most valuable thing is the period between finishing it and when you reread it pretending you've never read it before and definitely didn't write it, the few weeks when you allow yourself to forget it. Then when you read it as a new reader, sometimes it's obvious what to do to fix anything that needs fixing. I'll also send stuff out to people whose opinions I trust, explaining that until it's done they aren't really allowed to say much more than "Is there any more?" but once it's complete I'm happy to take all and any input onboard. Just as long as no-one minds me throwing it back overboard as soon as I start rewriting.
(Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.)
hello, we are a group of young fans of your books and as some kind of thanks to you we play a live action role-playing game inspired by your Neverwhere in Prague (Czech Republic). So if you would like to see some photos of Prague Below and it's inhabitants, visit http://www.harald.cz/foto/nikdykde2/index.html I hope you would enjoy it Karmin
I enjoyed it very much -- thank you for sending the link.
Hi Neil, Discovered this little gem whilst voyaging upon the Internet Ocean and thought you might appreciate it:http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1086492.html?menu=news.quirkies.badtaste
Your writing has broadened my horizons, my mind and my philosophy. Thank-you. Best regards,Tim Edwards
That's hilarious.
Students at a Catholic school complained about new Haribo sweet wrappers which they claim portray fruit having sex.
(Click on the link to see the wrappers in question, and the rest of the article.)
I just recently finished listening to American Gods and really enjoyed it. This made me wonder if there is a chance we might see an audiobook of Good Omens. I've read it a number of times and think it would be quite fun to have an audio version of. Are there any chances of this ever existing? Thanks,Gregory Blake http://www.ezoons.com/
I know that Harper Collins very much want to do one. And Terry and I would both very much like to hear it. So I think the odds are pretty good one will happen.
...
Had a good talk with Julia Bannon, webmistress of neilgaiman.com, about the next incarnation of the www.neilgaiman.com site. The biggest problem is that there's an incredible amount of stuff to be read and looked at on the site (did you know that the 1997 Neverwhere website is archived in http://www.neilgaiman.com/gallery/gallery.asp? It's the top window on the right), but it takes a certain amount of poking about to find things (and there are some things that even I can't find without googling for them). I want to open it up, make it cleaner looking, and also make it much easier to access the stories and articles and pictures and so on. It seems silly to have it all, and then for people not to know it's there. The next incarnation of the site is probably still about ten months away, though.
Also talked to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, about finally bringing out a mass-market paperback edition of Smoke and Mirrors, my last short story collection, which I think we'll do when Anansi Boys comes out in hardback next year. Assuming I finish it, of course...
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A couple of weeks ago I was at the Minnesota RenFest, looking after two smallish girls and seeing Folk Underground, and at one point, while I was sitting and watching Bedlam, my photo was taken (by Rick Sachwitz, a former fop) -- I'm sticking it up here mostly because people have written in to complain that I never smile in photos. The beard is slightly less scruffy this week, and looks slightly more realistic. Not much, but a bit.
The location of the crucifixion, which oddly enough was in pretty much the same place as the tomb of Jesus, was revealed to the Emperor Constantine's mum in a vision, and a chapel was built there. For about 300 years the current incarnation of the chapel has been administered by monks of six different denominations, who take responsibility for their own little bit of the place. (Except for the Copts or the Ethiopians, who lost their bit of the church and now live on the roof.) When I first read about this, I imagined that with all the different denominations cheek by jowl it must be like the Odd Couple, only worse. (I learned all about these living arrangements in a book by Giles Milton in which he retraces the travels of Sir John Mandeville up to Jerusalem, The Riddle and the Knight. It's an okay piece of travel writing, but doesn't really throw much light on Mandeville.)
It's probably always difficult to share a house, but I assumed that the sacred nature of the place probably eased the pressure. I was wrong, according to a story in today's Guardian, which tells of a recent bloody punch-up at the tomb, between the Franciscans and the Greek Orthodox clerics. My initial guess was that it was probably over whether or not the Franciscans had eaten something the Greeks had left in the communal fridge, and I turned out to be almost right. It was because the Franciscans had left the door open.
Arrests were made. Faces were bloodied. If anyone turned the other cheek, it was only to avoid a thrown punch. You can read about it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1314466,00.html.
Meanwhile, over in San Francisco, The Emperor Norton's legacy lives on. (Some people who read the Sandman story THREE SEPTEMBERS AND A JANUARY thought that I'd made him up. I didn't.) (I just googled for a nice reference, and bumped into this class Study Guide for Sandman: Fables and Reflections. Who knew there was such a thing as teachingcomics.org? What an excellent resource.)
Anyway, Cheryl Morgan drew my attention to the campaign to get the Bay Bridge renamed the Emperor Norton Bridge. The details are in this comic strip, and this letter. Send your e-mails, if you think it's a good idea. I very much hope it happens. I have a soft spot for the Emperor...
I'm a bit worried that lots of people have sent you this link already, but it seemed interesting. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3696750.stm A book borrowed in Iverness, returned approximately a century overdue via South Africa - the librarians gracefully agreed to waive the fine!
This is because librarians are cool.
Hi Neil, You metioned the DVD player you have, we have a (supposedly) zone free Sony DVD player but our problem is that our DVD's from Europe will only play in black and white. This is quite frustrating and kind of defeats the purpose. Do you ever run into that problem with your player? We really need one to play all of our movies from Norway!Thanks so much, Ingrid
My guess would be that most region-free DVD players automatically shift between the NTSC format (which US TVs are in) and PAL (which most of the rest of the world is in) and in the US they'll output them both as NTSC. Some don't -- I noticed yesterday that a Sony plays them without changing them. You either need a Video Standards converter, or a multiformat TV, or a different region free DVD player.
...
Incidentally, the volume of questions coming in is now up to between 50 and 75 a day. This means that lots and lots of really good questons, observations and so on aren't going to get posted or replied to. Please don't take it personally.
As you we're talking about those limited edition books, I was just wondering that are there going to be any cheaper prints of the extra material in the future? It's hard to find an extra 200 $ per book when you're a student. (Or is the extra material going to be forever hoarded and kept from the poor people?)
I don't know. So far, none of the publishers of the regular edition have asked. It wasn't that Hill House or I decided to add the extra material to get people to fork over the money for the books: Hill House went to Harper Collins and got the license from them to do the gorgeous collectors edition of the books, just as they did for the Neal Stephenson books and the Shirley Jackson and the Ray Bradbury and so on. When Pete and Pete came to me to talk about what kind of limited edition books I'd like to see, I was the one who said "Look, if you're going to do this as the definitive, gorgeous, boxed thing, I'd really like the text to be the one that I'm happiest with." And Hill House are into pleasing people, and they liked the idea, so we did just that, and then we realised when the book came in that we'd created something gorgeous that people would want to read but were going to be unable to read without damaging the gorgeous object, so Hill House printed up the Readers' Editions at their own cost, and sent them to subscribers and bookbuyers for nothing, so that people could read the book while still leaving the object pristine; just as they sent out the "Chinese Emperor" story as a Christmas card to subscribers to apologise for the production process taking so long. Neverwhere's a book that already exists in several variant editions, so again, it's something I'd like to see in an "author's preferred" text. Stardust, on the other hand, is a book that I'm perfectly happy with, so when Hill House do their Stardust the fun will probably come from trying to make the book a really cool object -- I've always liked the idea of Stardust as a very small leather-bound book that looks like it was printed in around 1925. I've not heard that any existing publishers of the books want to go over to the Hill House version of the text. If it happens it may happen when the book is completely reset for a new edition, and I'll let people know if any publisher does plan to bring it into a mass-market existence. (If you want it but really can't afford the Hill House edition, keep an eye on eBay -- there's one up there now -- and on the online secondhand booksellers sites like abebooks and bookfinder.com. You never know.) (I'll probably put the Chinese Emperor story into the next short story collection, though.) And finally...
To: Neil Gaiman
I was not sure if to send you a message, but somebody else broached the topic of the US election on your blog, and you responded, so I thought what the heck.
I wanted to ask you to mention on your blog that the deadline for registering to vote in many states is this Saturday, October 2nd 2004.
A lot of people, especially young people, do not realize that they have to register a month before election day, and they lose their chance to vote.
If you are not comfortable using your blog as a forum for 'getting out the vote', that's okay. As you are not (yet!) a US citizen, I also realize that you might not want to be accused of exerting undue influence on the US election!
Just thought I'd ask. Cheers!
Consider it mentioned.
Woken today by a tree being cut down outside my window. It was an elm, which was not happy -- it had some kind of elm disease, and was splitting down the middle, but the garden looks very empty and odd without it. I wonder what kind of tree I'll plant in the spring to replace it...?
Cool things arrived today. One of them was an advance copy of Barnes and Noble's EDGAR ALLAN POE: SELECTED POEMS AND TALES, a book for which I wrote the introduction. It's gorgeous -- luscious colour drawings and scratchboard illustrations by Mark Summers, amazing production values, and it's priced at $14.95, which seems to be about $10 less than I'd expect a package like this to retail at.
But then, it's published by Barnes and Noble for sale in Barnes and Nobles, which I suspect means that they can afford to price it more cheaply -- as publisher and as bookseller they can afford to make a smaller profit, and still to make a healthy profit (and, of course, the material is public domain).
I'm not entirely sure what I think about B&N becoming a book publisher (according to this NYT article they've been publishing books for a long time). But on the evidnce of the Poe they're certainly making excellent books.
The second cool thing I got was the tape of the 13 Nights of Fright material -- the two Fox promos and the thirteen intros and outros (there are actually a few more that weren't on the tape -- variant versions that we did for the Hallowe'en marathon).
I enjoyed it. I thought that I was kind of stiff at the beginning. Luckily, during the first couple of intros, Malena is wearing The Dress. When she walked onto the set in The Dress, one of the crew took several involuntary steps backwards and banged his head into the camera boom and didn't seem to mind the whole bleeding everywhere thing. Malena in The Dress has that effect on men. (On the evidence of today, women mostly just want to know how it stays up.) Anyway, the point is that many people won't be staring at me for the first few shows. Many of the viewers may not even notice me. And by the time Malena puts on a slightly less jaw-dropping piece of attire, I've become comfortable with the autocue and the studio and her, and it's all very pleasant. (The card on her website shows her wearing the slightly less jaw-dropping dress, which was impressive, but didn't make anyone walk into anything.)
It's kind of fun -- on the 13 Nights material I get to be a straight man (mostly) and Malena functions to make everything interesting and funny, and all without saying anything. (Well, she says one word.) And having showed the footage to everyone at home, it got a thumbs up (Maddy thought that the bits that stay the same from intro to intro were boring, but otherwise she liked it all, particularly when we do the silent movie bit and the magic stuff in the Chandu the Magician intro/outro, and the Phantom of the Paradise intro where I mention her and how much she liked the film.)
Fox Movie Channel are planning to put loads of extra material online, along with the daily competions to win 13 signed sets of all the Harper Collins books. I'll keep you all informed.
On the down side for the day, the place I was going to go to on Wednesday, to hide out and write for a month isn't habitable, thanks to Hurricane Jeanne, so I have to come up with an alternative. This has left me rather grumpy, because I hadn't thought to plan as far as Plan B, because Plan A was so good.
On my political point, I'll be brief: gonna vote on November 2nd? If so, wish to share, or are you sworn to secrecy?Have you run afoul of farmland sheriffs or gained a nickname among them like "that damned Englishman?" I know from my time in Iowa that small-town, county sheriffs love even the smallest problems and quirks. I had one report to my farm with flak jacket, fingerless black leather gloves and an M-16, raring to fight, but that's another story.
Nope. You have to be American to vote here. (I'll vote in the UK elections, though.) And I've never run afoul of any smalltown sheriffs that I know. The local small-town police were very happy to take me on ride-alongs and show me round the jail when I was writing American Gods.
Neil,If you haven't checked out Art Speigelman's "In the Shadow of No Towers" yet...I'd certainly recommend it. I got my copy Amazoned to me today and it is extremely powerful, unapologetically partisan brillance, while also having a subtle humanity ink-brushed amongst the clash and clamor. A. Speigelman honestly and frankly, reveals his own struggle with a threatening mental collapse as he suffers from post-collapse syndrome. This sturdy, generously sized book cannot replace what was lost, but it is certainly a monument to an artist's passion about his country and his attempt to draw our attention to the terror that continues to this day, although from within. Gregory from Midd Tenn
I have it and I love it. While he was creating the "In the Shadow of No Towers" stories, art would e-mail the finished strips to his friends whenever they were done, so I read them all as they were coming out, but I'd read them on a screen much smaller than the page they were going to be printed on, and the cumulative effect of all of the strips, one after another, is stunning.
Mr. G-Speaking of wishes for collections, whatever happened to the planned Death book, collecting both miniseries in one book?I think, last year, you said that they'd planned to publish it in the fall, but you'd convinced them to hold off til spring '04, as you had such an awful lot of stuff coming out at once as it was.Is it still going to happen, some day?Yours cheerily,Mark James Schryver
I don't think it is going to happen. Not sure where the decision not to do it came from, but the last thing I heard was that people at DC were worried that if they did that book then readers would stop buying the individual books of The High Cost of Living and The Time of Your Life. (Someone once pointed out to me that those two books really have each other's title, and whoever it was might be right.) So that's where things are at at DC unless they change.
Hi Neil,Enquiring mothers would like to know: did your Maddy get home safe & sound from her camping trip?
She did, thanks. I believe she got a bit wet at some points, but when you're ten that's part of the fun.
Dear Neil,I just read that you drove to Chicago in your Mini. I'm wondering how comfortable the Mini is for a long road trip? I really, really want one but I must have a car that is comfortable for driving the length of California every now and then. Thanks,T-
It's comfortable, yes -- actually surprisingly so. I wasn't sure how it would hold up for long trips, but it's really fine. It's worth remembering that the Mini is, at least for the driver, a pretty spacious car. Penn Jillette drives a pink one, and he's 6' 6".
Hey Wordsmith,
Your interview is up on http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue385/interview.html
And aren't you the dashing young fellow?
Regards,
Rick
Not sure about the young or the dashing, but I'm definitely a fellow. Was pleased to see that on the scifi.com site they've put up Eric Frank Russell's story " Allamagoosa". I've long had a soft spot for Eric Frank Russell (I like watching an Englishman of Russell's vintage write in a sort of "american slick" style, and I like his sense of humour). I reread the story this morning, and realised that for 99% of the story, you could make the spaceship a 1940s seagoing naval ship and not notice anything had changed. But then there's the last few paragraphs...
And this is true:
What's Gene Wolfe like, someone asked. Well, thanks to your Last Angel Tour my (now ex-)husband and I got the chance to find out in Chicago, when we won dinner and some time with you at the reading as a CBLDF fundraiser.
Because Gene and his wife Rosemary were there, and Rosemary was not up to climbing the stairs to the second floor where the CBLDF members' reception was held or to the special box where they were supposed to sit. So you asked us to make them comfortable in the front row of the theatre, and to bring them some snacks from the reception and keep them company for a while.
And they were lovely, terribly lovely, to us and to each other. They treated us like long-lost grandchildren, and while they told us a few stories about genre fiction's great lights and their adventures with same, mostly they asked us about our lives - what we were doing with ourselves, how we'd met, what our life was like. They wanted to know all about how we'd come halfway across the country to attend a Neil Gaiman reading and wait on a couple of old romantics who couldn't quite grasp what a gift it was to sit and talk with them.
It was humbling to meet legendary people so utterly uninterested in Being Important. I would have stayed with them all night except that they finally shooed us off to go join the reception, because they were just that gracious, that they realized we might like to join in even though we were having a swell time with them in the otherwise empty theatre.
Sheila Addison, Denver
And that's what Gene's like too, and Rosemary. They're very kind, and very gracious.
(That was the same evening I told Gene -- very proudly -- that I'd finished American Gods in first draft, and that I thought I had finally learned how to write a novel. And he smiled at me and said "You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're on." Wise, wise man.)
You know, I miss doing those reading tours. The 2000 tour was called the Last Angel Tour because it was meant to be the last one ever, but I'm starting to wonder whether people would mind if I did another CBLDF Reading Tour in 2005 or 2006.
...
I got a call from Pete Atkins today. Pete's an old friend, and is half of the two Petes behind HillHouse Publishers, who did the limited edition of American Gods, with the restored material. The next book we'll be tackling is Neverwhere, and we'll try and create the most complete version of the text there's ever been, along with lots of bonus goodies. So I'm sending him all of the drafts of the novel, along with all the drafts of the TV series scripts and the original outline for the story and so forth -- there were files I'd not looked at in twelve years. Pete was my editor on the restored American Gods text, and I deferred to his judgement on whether something should be restored or omitted, except in those rare cases where I didn't, and I'm really looking forward to working with him on Neverwhere. I suspect that the Hill House edition of Neverwhere may wind up like the Rhino Elvis Costello CDs -- a slipcase containing two books -- one book that's the album (or in this case, the novel), and the other containing all the B-sides and rarities (scripts, outlines, character descriptions, all that).
(There's a review of the Hill House edition of American Gods here, by the way, where you can learn about what the people who bought the book actually received.)
In my experience, the time when you can least afford to take any time off, is when you need to take time off most. So I took a weekend off, and it, er, rocked.
Thea Gilmore came in to Chicago to play at the Old Town School of Folk Music -- two gigs in an evening supporting Over the Rhine. And as long-time readers of this blog probably know, I've been a fan of Thea's ever since I heard her song Resurrection Men on an Uncut CD of the Month. She's made four or five CDs since then, and we've become friends in a sort of pleased-to-see-each-other sort of way, but I've never seen her play live -- I've always been on the wrong continent at the wrong time. She's back in the US next month supporting Joan Baez, but those gigs are East Coast, and I'll be in finishing-the-novel seclusion then. So it was Saturday or nothing. I thought about flying then decided that it would be a good thing to go on a road trip in the Mini in the early Autumn, when the leaves are starting to turn. So I drove to Chicago on Saturday, had tea, sushi and a peek in at the Quimby's exhibition with Jill Thompson then saw the two Thea concerts.
Normally, she has a band. This time, since she just flew in for the gig, her backing band consisted of Nigel Stonier, her producer and an excellent singer-songwriter himself, mostly on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, and once using a melodica that had originally belonged to someone in Lindisfarne.
She's as good live as I'd heard she was and as good as I'd expected, which is to say, very, very good.
The most surreal moment of the evening was after the first gig, when I made my way down to the basement, where the dressing rooms are. A helpful man came by. "Do you know where you're going?" he said helpfully. "Yes," I said. "Well, I'm going down to the basement. I don't know where I'm going once I get there." "I'll take you," he said. "You're Neil Gaiman, aren't you?" I allowed as how I might be. "You know," he said, "I just wrote the entry on you for the Encyclopedia Brittanica." And then he showed me, now rather gobsmacked, to Thea and Nigel's room. (His name, it turns out, was Michael, and I think he enjoyed how odd it was every bit as much as I did.)
I think what I like best about Thea as a person is her enthusiasm for music and songwriting. This is someone who grabbed my iPod and went down the "artists" list to see what I was listening to -- "You like I am Kloot!" -- and whose enthusiasm for songs and music and songwriters and songwriting is boundless. Well, I liked that, and her straightforwardness, and most of all I liked the fact that when jammed into the back of a mini, along with two guitars in their cases, she never grumbled once.
Anyway, a total of two wonderful 40 minute gigs, which were worth a 700 mile round trip drive.
(Set-lists, for the Thea fans among you: 1st show: You Tell Me, Rags & Bones, Bad Moon Rising, Red White & Black, Mainstream, Razor Valentine, Juliet, This Girl, Inverigo. 2nd show: Call Me Your Darling, Throw the Bouquet, Bad Moon Rising, Holding Your Hand, Rags and Bones, Juliet, Mainstream, Heartstring Blues, This Girl.)
Thea and Nigel start recording her next album this week.
On the way back the Mini's GPS computer thingie picked a route I'd never taken before, and got me home in five hours. This is, for the record, impossible.
Right. Goodnight.
As someone who is a fan, but spent much more time and effort getting your books, rather than the Sandman series (until I got to college and had a friend who let me borrow his) because I wasn't sure if I'd like it, I really like the idea of Sandman omnibuses. Surely there's a good place to split them, isn't there? Maybe there could be an extra volume with all the mini-series collected? (Yes, DC's getting this suggestion,too) I want to have the entire series, but due to limitations in my funds and space considerations, that hasn't been feasible. Also, there's so much of it that's just hard to find or such a pain to order (even over the net, where prices for some of them are getting drastically overinflated) that it hasn't happened yet. How about starting a campaign through your site to get DC to realize how much people want to see this?
But they are collected. And the two DEATH mini-series are collected as well. Honest. Yes, collecting the comics themselves will cost you serious money, and so will a few of the early hardbacks, but everything else is in print in both hardcover and paperback, and available from DC, in "omnibuses". Honest.
They're $19.95 each in paperback, except for Sandman: Endless Nights, which is $17.95, at least according to the information at http://www.neilgaiman.net/comics.php.
What there isn't is a 2000+ page one volume collection, and there isn't a way of buying them slipcased. But buying them collected, that we can do.
If you'll forgive me for quoting two chunks of Stephen Fry in one day, Tasha Robinson let me know that the outtakes from the Onion Interview she did were up on her journal. Fry talks about acting, and Peter Cook, and Homer Simpson, and then he says the following statement, which gave me something to think about...
Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician, got into terrible trouble by writing quite fearsome articles against the first World War when it began. He got all these letters from people who said, “My child is prepared to lay down their life for their country. Don’t you think that sacrifice demands some respect?” He wrote this extraordinary essay in which he said, “Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice. And we’re seeing that in the Iraq war. That’s what this poor Lynndie England did, this tragic soldier who was shot smugly smiling next to naked Arab prisoners. That’s the chickens coming home to roost. It’s not Americans being asked to die by President Bush. It’s Americans being asked to kill and to torture. Not necessarily by name. He doesn’t say, “I want you to kill this or that one.” Of course, politics isn’t that simple. Essentially that is what society does. It asks its young to kill, and that’s what we all have to live with.
Which reminded me of actor Bill Pilkington's statement when asked if he had killed anyone in the war: "Yes, I shot a nice old lady who was just about to give me breakfast." As long as the google cache holds, you can read the full story here.
Hi Neil,In your blog you mentioned asking DC about doing a complete Sandman in one volume. I was wondering, if you or DC have considered doing a new set of hardcovers, similar to the Ultimate Version of the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen that DC did last year. It would be nice to see larger format, slipcased Sandman books...perhaps with the scripts as a supplemental book. It might also be nice to someday see the trades reprinted in black and white. It's just a thought... Anyway, thanks for everything.
I don't think DC would go for it -- apart from anything else, they're very sensitive to accusations that they're trying to sell something to people twice. And I've been alternately trying to persuade them or rather pathetically to beg them to do two or maybe three slipcases for the books for the last five years. But it's one of those things (like recolouring the first two Sandman books) that everyone agrees in theory should be done, but in practice it just never seems to happen. Feel free to mention it to anyone in DC's marketing department you run into...
Hey, you probably dont have the time, but it would be really cool if you checked out my House of Mystery/Cain the Caretaker site. Its at www.angelfire.com/comics/cainhom I believe it is the only shrine out there to our charming caretaker!
I think it must be. A real labour of love (or quite possibly lust).
Re: Anne Rice and "Returned to Sender"It's worth noting that the address that "Rice" posted in that infamous Amazon.com review is to her famous house... that she sold earlier in the year. It makes me doubt the truth of "Anne Rice"'s review really being from her, but much smarter people than me seem convinced that yes, yes, it really was Anne Rice snapping and writing nastygrams for online booksellers. Me, I must admit that I found it a little fishy. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time a creative type finally snapped, after all. Not by a long shot.
Greg McElhatton www.gregmce.com
Well, she confirms that it was her at http://www.annerice.com/msg092204.htm. Which, I think, ends the subject of Anne Rice on this journal.
regarding "Rob Brydon and Dora Bryan" post. Cor, the picture and your comments made me think of the two oh-so-british parents in Time Bandits. It's one of those 'kid meets crazy friends and goes off on an amazing adventure' movie; did you and Dave get any inspiration from it? sax
Not directly, although the moment in February 2002 that Terry Gilliam looked down at the work Dave and I were doing, spread across Jim Henson's kitchen table, and said "That looks like a movie" was the moment that it all seemed to come together; and Dave and I would use the line Terry Gilliam used to describe Time Bandits as our touchstone for Mirrormask -- Terry famously said he wanted to make a movie "intelligent enough for children, and exciting enough for adults". And so did we.
I think when people talk about MirrorMask they'll probably talk about the stuff that Dave's been making for the 16 months, this amazing animated McKeanish world. And so they should. Still, for my money, some of the best bits in the film are the little quirky human moments in the real-world story that frames Helena's dream (if it is a dream). Here's the excellent Rob Brydon playing Helena's dad (he also plays the Prime Minister) and veteran actress Dora Bryan playing Helena's aunt Nan, for whom I got to write little Alan Bennetty lines. They're watching the TV, and she's saying, "See her? She was in that comedy. Where she was sharing a flat with that other one. I don't know what she's doing in this rubbish. She used to be funny..." (That's what my maternal grandmother always liked to say, whenever she watched television.)
Someone wanted to know what Robert Llewellyn was doing in Mirrormask. Here's a screen capture that may give you some idea. That's him on the left, being magnificently baffled. Out of focus, on the right, is Valentine (Jason Barry). Click on it to see it larger...
Let's see... there's a decent and interesting article on comics/graphic novels at The Age: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/24/1095961824756.html?oneclick=true
There's a quote from Stephen Fry in the Onion that made me nod my head in vigorous agreement:
O: You've written and performed in a wide variety of media. Did you ever decide you wanted an eclectic career, or has it just turned out that way?
SF: It's just worked out that way, really. But I'm pleased that it has. If I'd had a chance to make a conscious decision, I hope I would have made that decision. There's always the danger—there's a very dismissive British phrase, "Jack of all trades and master of none." But who wants to be the master of one trade, rather than having fun doing lots of things?
Excellent interview.
Anne Rice's tirade has vanished from Amazon, along with most of the responses to it. Probably a good thing. But at least it's left one hilarious webcomic in its wake. (My respect for Ms Rice fell somewhat when I heard that the people who had sent back their books to her for a refund were getting them back from the post office marked "Return to Sender". If you're going to make an offer like that, you have to stand by it.)
Here's a strange question of a guy like you, but here goes. I did a search of your journal, and it looks like you have a Aga stove. Do you like it? Have you ever cooked on anything else? I understand cooking on one is fundamentally different from cooking on a "regular" stove. My husband and I are planning to redo our kitchen, and I think I'd like to have one (they look so cool), but they are not cheap, and I don't know anyone who has ever even cooked on one. We don't even have an appliance store where we live that would let me try it out before I made a commitment. So, would you recommend one?-Nikki
I don't have an Aga but my friend Tori has one in her house in Ireland which I was borrowing for a month last year. I loved cooking with the Aga, but I found I needed a different approach to cooking: the idea that the oven was always on, and things would cook at different speeds and in different ways depending on which place you put them, and that you had a very hot stove-top to cook things on, and a less hot one, and that they would always be at that temperature, again was a different way of thinking.
If you're somewhere sort of chilly, where having a large object in your kitchen radiating heat is going to make your kitchen a warmer, more comfortable place, then an Aga is probably a very good thing. There wasn't anything that I couldn't cook with it -- if anything the fact that it was always on, so if it suddenly occurred to me that given all the rosemary in the garden, a leg of lamb on a bed of rosemary would be a good thing to cook, then I'd be quite likely to stop writing and go and prepare it. I certainly didn't encounter anything I couldn't cook using it.
If, on the other hand, you live somewhere that air-conditioning is vital for comfort and survival, an Aga is probably just asking for trouble. And you need to be within the working radius of someone who repairs or fixes Agas, because things can go wrong.
Hi! I was just wondering if there's ever going to be a sort of omnibus (umm... is that the right word? collection thingy?) volume of the Sandman comics? I mean a collection that has all of them. The reason why I'm asking is that it's really tough trying to get the comics here in Finland :D I know I could just order them one by one from the net but that simply is too expensive :( Not exactly the best question to ask from the author, is it?
Well, the 76 comics have been collected together into ten books already. (See this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_%28DC_Comics_Modern_Age%29#Collections)
I recently saw, and fell in love with, the one-volume Bone, and asked the people at DC whether it would be possible to do a one-volume Sandman, even if we just did it in a limited edition. They pointed out that the one-volume Bone is about as thick as a book can be at that kind of price -- a one-volume Sandman, at almost twice the length, would be over 2000 pages long, would need to be printed on paper good enough to take the colour, and thus would be unfeasibly big and heavy and expensive (probably a bit cheaper than the $200 it would cost you to buy the ten Sandman volumes, but it's probably easier to sell people who don't know if they'll like this thing a $20 copy of Preludes and Nocturnes than it would be to sell them a $150, 2,000 page doorstop of a book) (and I think you'd still find it too expensive).
Neil, You may have got several questions like this already, but tuff!!! Do you ever have a browse though your message-board? I've been a poster for over a year now, and find it very interesting that this whole little community has sprung up. Do you ever see what we're up to occasionally? And if so, do you actually ever post?Kind Regards StBarbarella
I kept half an eye on it when it was starting up, but once the inestimable GrandMoffZoe was appointed moderator, a few years back, I stopped even keeping half an eye on it. And no, I don't post there: I can't reply to everything (or even a significant fraction of everything) that comes in at neilgaiman.com -- why make more work for myself?
Hi! I noticed that the film "Shaun of the Dead" opened in the US this week and got rather good reviews. It won't hit the Swedish shores until december, I suppose, but I'm sure a zombie film is perfect setting the mood for Christmas. But how come you already seen it on DVD? Is that one of the perks being a famous writer or to you have friends in high or strange places?Regards: Per
There are many perks to being a famous writer, although for the moment I can't think of any, and I do indeed have friends in high places and many more friends in extremely strange places. But in this case, I simply ordered my Shaun of the Dead DVD from Amazon.co.uk, and it arrived when it came out in the UK on DVD. It's a region 2 DVD, which plays just fine on my multiregion DVD player (a JATON PSD-7611K in case anyone's wondering).
Hullo, Neil. I've received a Cerebus and a form-letter from the delightful Mr. Sim and I'd be happy to catalogue the entirety of the run of form letters for posterity. I'd happily accept submissions at mrbroe@yahoo.com which is my already being spammed to death mailbox that has plenty of space for the incoming files. All those with scanners can send me a commonly sized .jpg or equivalent image and I'll post them after the weekend. Once I see how it's going I'll notify you of the address to which they are being posted. All the best. Dana...
Thanks, Dana.
Long, pleasant day -- watched Shaun of the Dead on DVD in the evening, and it made me happy. Maddy's gone off with her class on a camping expedition of some kind, so of course we got our first thunderstorm in ages. I hope she's having fun anyway.
A couple of odd locational coincidences -- I see from this news article that the New York is Book Country Festival has moved from midtown, where it's been in previous years, to Washington Square Park. Which now makes it incredibly appropriate that the Tara McPherson Morpheus and Death poster that the Festival is selling shows them in Washington Square Park. Which it does because, when Shelly Bond at Vertigo asked for ideas, I pointed out that that's where they were in the Sandman story "The Sound of Her Wings", in the story where we first met Death.
 (click on it for a bigger version) (The posters will be on sale all over NYisBC.)
(You can still get the posters from http://www.nyisbookcountry.org/content/merchandise.asp for $15 plus postage and packing and I notice that since I last posted it they've now put up a note saying that they can't ship them internationally. Ah well.)
The other odd place coincidence came in this message:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/missfenix/6023.html
Thought this may make you smile. By the way, my 3rd and 4th books in The Sandman series have just arrived, they are brilliant.
(The "Aswarby Hall" line, in the panel, by the way, comes from the M. R. James story "Lost Hearts" -- or the version I had, which, I discovered much later, had been extensively edited.)
Dave Sim, of course, has been sending a great many copies of Cerebus out internationally recently. The faxes still arrive, with the day's form letter -- and I hope someone is collecting them somewhere. Here's a sampling:
Hi Neil,
I got my signed copy of Mothers & Daughters today. It sounds like Dave is still getting a kick out of all the mail he's from "busy little Bloggoes and Bloggesses". I blogged about it here http://www.tangognat.com/index.php?p=425 and put up an image of the form letter http://images.tangognat.com/simformletter.jpgI'm looking forward to reading Anansi Boys.
And I'm very much looking forward to finishing it. I just learned that I have an October 4th deadline for all the textual material in the Mirrormask Script-and-Storyboards book -- so I have to combine all the scripts into one big one, then mark the bits we cut, then write intros and outros and notes and things. And as soon as that's done I'll be back on Anansi Boys full time, until it's done.
Do tell us what the OED says about "hopples."-Nikki
Just that "hopple" is a synonym for "hobble", and that "hopples" might mean "hobble-bushes". Dead unhelpful, and nothing at all about piles of stones.
Dear Neil,
I'm very sorry, but the thing I most want to know from you is; what is Gene Wolfe like? sincerely,
Rosalind Finney
John Clute once said he was like Aslan playing Bilko, and that still makes me smile with its aptness, although now he has a magnificent moustache and looks less like Aslan as Sergeant Bilko and more like Aslan as Major-General Stanley.
I once wrote a whole piece for a convention program booklet on Gene Wolfe. I'll see if I can put the whole thing up in the "Exclusives" area. Meanwhile, I'll steal a paragraph from it:
There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.
And that's what Gene Wolfe is like, Rosalind. (Which reminds me, I have yet to write anything here about his upcoming novel THE WIZARD, and how astonishingly good it is. But I shall, sooner or later. And in the meanwhile I'll post here a link to an essay by Gene on Lord of the Rings and Tolkien, which illuminated for me some of the themes of The Wizard-Knight.) Good night.
Let's see... lots of you wrote to tell me that "Venerable" is one of the stages of beatification that ends with sainthood, which is true, but perfectly irrelevant in the Bede's case. An example:
Hi Neil.I'm probably not the only one that is going to write to you about the term "venerable" as in "the Venerable Bede". In Roman Catholicism, and also other similar faiths, "venerable" is the title that a holy person gets before being promoted to "saint". First you are "blessed", then you are "venerable", then finally you are promoted to "saint". Since the time that Brewer wrote his "Dictionary of Miracles", Bede has actually received this promotion, so nowadays he should be referred to as "Saint Bede". All Roman Catholic Saints have to work their way up this ladder, so the title "venerable" does not have anything to do with being very elderly or "barking mad". Saint Joan (of Arc), for example, was "the Venerable Joan" before she was promoted to "saint", although she only lived to be 19.Karl Paananen
I mean, while that's all true, more or less, it has nothing at all to do with the Venerable Bede's Venerableness at all. He was actually sainted in 735 AD, about 1200 years before Brewer wrote his Dictionary. His formal title as a Saint is "St Bede the Venerable". According to one source, someone writing (or possibly carving) Bede's epitaph, immediately after he died, couldn't think of an appropriate adjective, and left a blank in the phrase "the ...... Bede" and went to bed. And then angels, or elves, or someone's room-mate (or a stone-mason) came in the night and miraculously wrote (or carved) "venerable" in the space provided. And so he was.
But there's another explanation given here by Curtana:
Dear Neil,
More on the Venerable Bede and his chatty pile of rocks: the Golden Legend says "Also it is said that when he was blind he went about for to preach, and his servant that led him brought him whereas were many hopples of stones, to whom he made a noble sermon, and when he had all finished his sermon the stones answered and said, Amen." (Also note that the word 'hopples' is excellent).
Another source tells us that this was actually the source of his epithet "Venerable": "...Bede, in his old age, when his eyes were dim, was induced by certain "mockers" to preach, under the mistaken belief that the people were assembled to hear him. As he ended his sermon with a solemn invocation of the Trinity, the angels (in one version it is the stones of a rocky valley) responded "Amen, very venerable Bede." So perhaps some angels impersonating stones, or the other way around?
St. Fursey's bio is at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06324d.htm
No mention of his clock, though...
St. Cuan is also called St. Mochua, and he's known, among other things, for supposedly living to be 100 (so, much more Venerable than Bede) and for teleporting meat:
"And when Easter day had come, and Mochua had said Mass a desire for meat seized the young cleric, and he said to St. Mochua that he would go to Durlus to visit Guaire in order to get enough of meat. 'Do not go,' said Mochua, 'stay with me, and let me pray to God for meat for thee.' And on this he knelt on the ground and prayed with fervour to God, asking for meat for the young cleric. At the same time while food was being served to the tables of Guaire's house, it came to pass through Mochua's prayer that the dishes and the meat they contained were snatched from the hands of those who were serving them and were carried out over the walls of the dwelling, and by direct route reached the desert in which Mochua was; and Guaire went with all his household on horseback in quest of the dishes; and when the dishes came into the presence of Mochua he set to praise and magnify the name of God, and told the young cleric to eat his fill of meat." Poor Guaire, rendered miraculously meatless...
- Curtana
http://www.livejournal.com/users/curtana/
Hopples is indeed a wonderful word. I shall look it up in the big OED with the magnifying glass downstairs, because I can't find a useful definition for it online.
And then there were ones like this:
I just read your latest Livejournal post and I thought you might be interested in this web site if you don't already know about it. It's has massive content on all sorts of religious/strange/UFO related material. It goes through each thing and logically debunks. Perhaps you would rather read strictly about the dream, ie his talking rocks, but since I prefer anything I can get on any number of topics I'll give you the url: http://skepdic.com/... - Ashkah.
Which is helpful, but I do kind of feel misses the point as well. I mean, anyone who's actually going to expend time and energy debunking some 7th century talking rocks (or even a teleporting 1400-year-old meat dinner) is clearly just getting into shape for the much more difficult and important task of demonstrating to the world that, whether or not a cat is playing a fiddle at the time, it's still aerodynamically and physically impossible for a cow to jump over the moon; before continuing on to demonstrate that, a venerable authority to the contrary, blackbirds do not actually peck off maids' noses.
...
Several people wanted to know my opinion on Anne Rice's recent outburst on Amazon.com. ( Here's a summary from the Toronto Star.) [Edit, link fixed] ( Here's a link to the book for the adventurous. You'll have to go and find Anne Rice's review in among the reviews.)
I think that unless a reviewer gets their facts completely wrong, the author should shut up (and even then, the author should probably let it go -- although I'm a big fan of a letter that James Branch Cabell wrote to the New York Times pointing out that their review of FIGURES OF EARTH was bollocks*). As Kingsley Amis said, a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't let it spoil your lunch.
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately an Amazon.com reviews page for one of the author's books is the wrong place to go looking for this. Probably best just not to look.
(On the other hand, the statement "You read it wrong" is not an entirely meaningless one. When I first read Gene Wolfe's PEACE, aged 17, I thought it was a bucolic and sort of pointless set of reminiscences by a sweet old man. When I read it again, aged 26, having spent some years as a writer and critic, I found myself, rather to my surprise, reading a deeply chilling and murderous novel narrated by one of the darkest characters in literature, who was a ghost to boot. But Gene Wolfe isn't going to make people who didn't like or get PEACE suddenly like it by going on Amazon and telling them it was too good or too clever for them, even if it was.)
When you publish a book -- when you make art -- people are free to say what they want about it. You can't tell people they liked a book they didn't like, and there is, in the end, no arguing with personal taste. Different people like different things. Best to move on and make good art as best you can, instead of arguing.
I think Anne Rice going on Amazon and lambasting her critics was undoubtedly a very brave and satisfying thing for her to do, was every bit as sensible as kicking a tar baby, and, if ever I do something like that, please shoot me.
A much better reason to go to Amazon.com is they've put up a new short story by M. John Harrison, set in the world he created in LIGHT. It's called Tourism, and you can read it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/536970/102-5660559-4818530
I think it's a good bet that some of you won't like it at all. (I loved it.)
.........
* The letter from Cabell to the Times, after pointing out a dozen places in Maurice Hewlett's review of Figures of Earth where he had complained of Cabell making up ineptly things which Cabell had actually accurately reproduced from classical sources, ends,
Still, it is not fair that I should profit by Mr. Hewlett's lack of such elementary erudition. Plain honesty compels me thus publically and modestly to admit that when Mr. Hewlett accredits me that invention of (and blame for) all these, and other, matters he honors me beyond my due. And while these deficiencies in Mr. Hewlett's knowledge are interesting, why, after all, should his naive confession of them be printed as a review of a book by someone who does happen to know about these things?
Yours faithfully, James Branch Cabell
For most authors, not being James Branch Cabell, it's probably wisest after reading a particularly stupid or vicious or bad review to mentally compose your letter to the editor, fill it with your sharpest and most cutting and brilliant bon mots, and then, having made it up, to successfully resist the urge to put it to paper, and to return cheerfully to work.
Quick request here -- We're hoping to put the CBLDF's LIVE AT THE ALADDIN video on as a bonus for the "A Short Film About John Bolton" DVD. Charles Brownstein from the CBLDF is looking for e-mail addresses or phone numbers for Louis Broome and R. David Perrson, who shot the film for the CBLDF, bless them. If anyone knows where either of these gentlemen might be found, could you ask them to call Charles at 1-800-99-CBLDF or e-mail him at director@CBLDF.org. Thanks.
So the bathroom reading currently is the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer's "Dictionary of Miracles". And this morning, under the entry Stones Crying Out I learned that:
Bede Preached to a Heap of Stones (AD 672-735). On one occasion, we are told, the Venerable Bede preached to a heap of stones, thinking himself in a church; and the stones were so affected by his eloquence, that they exclaimed, "Amen, Venerable Bede!"
And I immediately began wondering who observed this, in order to report it. I mean, it obviously wasn't the Venerable Bede himself, for someone who can't tell the difference between a heap of stones and the inside of a church isn't going to be a particularly reliable person for reporting back, and anyway in this case "Venerable" is not simply an honorific but also a euphemism for either "barking mad" or "as comically blind as Mr McGoo"... (And what, I suddenly wonder, do those dates mean? If they were the Bede's dates, then he lived to the age of 63, which isn't really particularly venerable, not even for then. On the other hand, if it's how long he preached to the heap of stones for, I'm not surprised they gave him an "amen" at the end. They probably also had chorus of "For he's a jolly good fellow" followed by a whip-round in order to send him somewhere there weren't any stones.) (Right. I just googled, and those were his dates. Ignore that last parenthetical statement.)
Now, I think it's reasonable to assume that if the Venerable Bede mistakenly thought that he was in church, surely the hearty "Amen" from the stones would merely confirm his belief that he was in church, and then he'd wend his venerable way home having completely missed the fact that a miracle had just happened. Which means that either there had to be someone standing beside him, clearing his or her throat from time to time and trying to point out that they weren't actually in church after all, or possibly a particularly chatty rock mentioned it later, from whom the story came down to us...
Sorry. It's just amazing what you can learn from a good Dictionary of Miracles. I mean, did you know that "St. Fursy (A.D. 650) had a clock which an angel brought him from Heaven. One day the monks of Lismore, in Ireland, observed a clock floating in the air, and asked St. Cuan, their abbot, what the prodigy meant. St. Cuan replied, "Oh, it is St. Fursy's clock, come from Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk. As St. Fursy cannot come himself to Lismore, he has sent his clock to represent him." (Which is followed by a note which states that "The clock was shown in the Abbey until 1468" although it neglects to mention whether that was the year that the clock stopped floating in the air, or vanished, or whether that was simply when it flew back to Bury St. Edmunds.)
They don't teach you about Saint Fursy and his incredible floating heavenly clock in school, you know. Hurrah for the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer.
I just thought you should all know that.
Hello,I very much love your work, but let's get right into the question for now. I was reading on IMDb (which admittedly is not the best source for reliable news) that Robert Llewellyn will have a role in MirrorMask. Since I very much enjoyed his work on Red Dwarf, I've been trying to find out how much of a role it is; is it a cameo, or something larger? (I also heard Stephen Fry is involved, which would be excellent.)--Austin Ross
Robert Llewellyn plays a gryphon. It's a larger role than a cameo, although he's not one of the principals. He fails to devour our heroine "bones and all". He's very funny. Stephen Fry plays a librarian, made of books.
Hi Neil, the song from your Polish website is 'History Repeats Itself' by A.O.S. It can be found on the Natural Born Killers OST. By the way, while reading 'The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection' info I was puzzled by this: 'Cinnamon: This charming fable of an exotic princess who refuses to speak currently exists only on Neil's official website' - well, maybe I'm silly, but I can't seem to find it anywhere... Conrad M.R.
That's because HarperAudio got a little confused. Cinnamon is indeed on my official website -- but it's Neilgaiman.net, not neilgaiman.com, which is DreamHaven's mail-order stuff-by-me site. Go to http://www.neilgaiman.net/extras.php to read it. It has marvellous illustrations by the supremely talented Jill Karla Schwarz, too. (And she's still doing online comics at http://attentiondeficitgirl.com/ -- she's just put a new ADDGirl adventure up, called "The Minion", which seems to be a parody of "The Apprentice", although I couldn't figure how to get it beyond page 2. Edit: It's a two pager. I am a twit.) And thanks to all of you who provided the AOS information.
Hey Neil.I followed your link to the BBC Realplayer,but what I downloaded didn't match the screenshots on the BBC site, and a little digging turned up this note on a blog. EDIT 6 May 2004: It looks like this loophole has been closed, alas. I received an e-mail today informing me that the download size has now gone up to 9.75 MB and the file now contains spyware. I haven't downloaded it myself but it looks like what used to be called RealOne Player has now become RealPlayer 10. I am now confused. Have I downloaded spyware or not?Hopefully your readers are clever enough to help.
I don't know. Somebody will, though. This already came in from The Dreaming's Joe Fulgham:
Media Player Classic available for free at http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ will play Real files and iscompletely spyware free. It's great.
For a long time I was unable to listen to Real encoded mediabecause I refused to install their shoddy software. Best,Joe Fulgham
Thank you, Joe.
...
By the way, lots of messages keep coming in which fall under the general heading of, "I have to write something about you or something you've written. Please will you do my homework for me/ answer the following fifteen questions for my paper on you and Restoration Theatre/ explain why you did or wrote A with especial reference to B and I get extra points if you mention either Virginia Woolf or the invention of the printing press."
And the answer to all of them is honestly, I think you can all write your essays without me. Pretend I'm a dead author. I won't mind. I promise I'll never come to your place of education and say, in the hearing of your teachers, "You do not understand me or my work! Your essay on the solar myth and rebirth in Sandman and American Gods with especial reference to the pagan themes and the use of Pan in the works of Kenneth Grahame was utterly and completely wrong. Hah!" Honest I won't. (Remember, in such essays you don't have to be right. Just convincing. Like St. Cuan and the floating clock. Probably he didn't have a clue why there was a clock floating in the air, but he wasn't going to let that on to the monks. He didn't say "Don't ask me, lads. Could be a Fortean phenomenon, or something dodgy about this morning's rye bread." Nope. He told them it was St. Fursy's clock, and they all went back to their cells quite happy. Go ye all and do likewise.)
...
This came in -- Strange Horizons runs some good fiction, and (with a couple of recent exceptions) some good articles and editorial pieces too -- they definitely need supporting. (And I'm including the note before the appeal, because it amused me...)
Neil, If you remember, we've run some reviews of and an article about your work:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020701/coraline.shtml
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020211/harlequin.shtml
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20011015/american_gods.shtml
Help keep us alive and writing about you! :-) This is the note I've been
sending out -- you could post it entire, or an abbreviated version, or a
note of your own. It'd be much appreciated. The fund drive runs through
the end of September.
*****
Hi, folks. It's Strange Horizons fund drive time; twice a year we ask
readers to send a donation to help cover the costs of running the
magazine. Since the staff are all volunteers, the costs in question are
mostly paying for the fine fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art that we
publish every single week.
Strange Horizons is a Hugo-nominated online prozine, run by thirty
dedicated volunteers who keep the magazine running (for 4+ years now).
We have a great staff, great contributors, and great readers, but what
keeps the magazine going financially is donations. Our content (some of
which gets nominated for awards and reprinted in Year's Best anthologies)
is free to the public, and we pay professional rates to fiction authors.
It's all funded by the donations of readers like you.
If you'd like to help keep us going, you don't have to donate a lot. Even
if you give us $5 (not much more than the cost of a single issue of one of
the major print sf magazines), you'll be entered in a drawing for our fund
drive prizes (donated by generous authors). But if you can give us more,
there are other benefits; give $25, for example, which is less than the
cost of a subscription to one of the major print sf magazines, and you
become a member, entitled to a lovely membership card; this fund drive's
card features artwork by Janet Chui.
For more information, or to donate, see our fund drive page, at:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/200409/main.shtml
If you can't afford to donate, or don't want to for whatever reason, there
are other things you can do to help out. You can post in your journals,
mailing lists, forums, and other places about the magazine; you can submit
art, articles, fiction, poetry, or reviews; you can even join our staff,
or tell others about our open positions:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/Jobs.shtml
So go forth and spread the word! Or just donate. We take PayPal as always,
and (new for this fund drive) we can now accept credit card donations via
Network for Good.
thanks,
Mary Anne (editor emeritus)
Hi Neil,
Normally I assume that other people will get things to you before I do but as it's 2am UK time and I was surfing the net while nursing my latest work related injury (a Guinness pint glass exploded in my hand while cleaning, such are the joys of bar work -- thank god I'm a two finger typist. :g:) I thought I'd drop you a note to say that you can get a spyware free version of Real Media Player from the Beeb itself. As part of their whole charter and all that, they can not allow outside advertising, so they came to a deal with Real. You can download it from here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp_install.shtml
- Meg.
Which is what I love about you lot. I thought there was a spyware/adware free Real Player, but a search of the BBC site failed to find it. I post this, and promptly two people let me know that it is and where it is.
And I now have a date, a time and a location for the Pittsburgh Signing:
Monday, Oct. 11th at 6:00
New Dimension Comics
Century III Mall Location
Pittsburgh, PA
Directions at www.ndcomics.com
Phone 412-655-8661
Dear Neil, I'm writing in hopes of getting to Tyna from Poland through you. I unfortunatley do not speak (or read) Polish, and cannot ask what the beautiful music on the Polish Neil website is. So I'm hoping that, if I ask you, you could maybe ask her to tell us who the artist is and where we can buy the CD? Thanks for being my message monkey!
Any time.
As I was going up the escalator, on the friday morning at Worldcon, in company with several shady types I'd bumped into in the dealers' room on the way ( viz. and to wit, S. Dedman, J. Clute and T. Pratchett OBE), I noticed that, across the hall, on the escalator going down, was a mysterious figure whose face was obscured by a camera. He was pointing the camera at us. Then the camera came down, revealing the cheerful face of uber-editor David Hartwell. He waved. I waved back.
"That photo'll never come out," I thought, with the prescience and prophetic ability that has made me the talk of the SF-and-futurological community over the years.
The photo is quite wonderful. You can see it at http://www.kathryncramer.com/m2/newarchives/2004/09/men_in_black.html
It looks a bit like it's waiting for the caption competition, or for me, Steve, John and Terry to have a high-profile reunion and release our first CD in decades.
Hi Neil!You haven't mentioned that Banned Book Week is upon us, September 25 - October 1. For more info (and a list of most frequently challenged books) go to http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm Thanks, Neil!Tamara Siler Jones www.tamarasilerjones.com
Is it that time of the year already?
(Whenever I notice that my name isn't on the list of banned and challenged authors, I feel faintly like I'm letting the side down. Although I suspect all I'd have to do to get on the list is to write a book about naked, bisexual, hard-swearing wizards who drink a lot while disparaging the Second Amendment, and I'd be home and dry.)
Dear Neil,I'm writing to you, because I've got page about you and I want to introduce a few your stories on my page... Will you mad if I do this? The majority of people in my country ( I live in Poland) don't know who are you and your books are very hard to get. So... Can I?P.S. My page is one and only in Poland... (http://neilgaiman.xp.pl) I think. I want very much to show people what a great writer you are!Your fan, Tyna
Hi Tyna...
MAG publishing are my prose publishers in Poland, and they control the Polish rights to most of the short stories and novels. I'm afraid you'd have to talk to them.
Neil
Typical BBC Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell review at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/ram/saturdayreview.ram starting 18.30 into the programme.
Also tomorrow on Radio 4 there's the new Hitchhiker's: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/index.shtml
John Blackburne
And it's worth mentioning that for those who don't have a RealPlayer (which you need to play RAM files) that you can get it at http://www.real.com/products/player/download_player.html -- and yes, it's a redundant piece of spyware, but it's what 90% of the BBC content is in.
Neil, With regards to your point of ordering Neverwhere internationally and having it shipped to the U.K.; as someone who did that I should warn you that H.M. Customs tends to slap import duties on it (if you're unlucky). So, it can turn out that the cheap DVD from the U.S. ends up costing more money than the U.K. import.Of course customs do miss some. Caveat emptor I guess. Regards,Jon
How odd -- I've bought dozens of books and DVDs from Amazon.co.uk that were shipped to the US (today Shaun of the Dead arrived), and when in the UK and Ireland I've bought CDs, DVDs and books from various online entities in the US, and I've never been hit with a customs charge yet. But I'm happy to mention this -- if you're in the UK you may want to order it through a UK site and not a US one, to be on the safe side.
...
Over at Levenger.com, I see they are still selling their "bookstop" bookmark. (if the link doesn't work, search for it.)
This is the 11 oz. lead-weighted leather bookmark which caused the recent arrest of a special ed. teacher, who tried to take it onto a plane, probably concealed (at a guess) inside a book. Luckily, they spotted her bookmark at security and promptly arrested her, handcuffed her, took her away and charged her with carrying a concealed weapon. (Details at http://www.newsnet5.com/news/3738885/detail.html for those of you convinced I'm being silly.)
One may safely assume that when bookmarks are outlawed, only outlaws will carry bookmarks.
Took Maddy and her best friend to the Minnesota RenFair today, and am now thoroughly exhausted. Yesterday was the DreamHaven signing, and it was enormously enjoyable.
You'll excuse me if I mainly do a handful of interesting links...
http://www.engadget.com/entry/7313209331031632/ -- finally a pillow for Godfather fans (coincidentally, my son Mike's favourite film. Which may take care of that bit of present shopping, if I can actually find one...)
Several interesting Scottish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell reviews:
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/thereview.cfm?id=1097892004
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1094482004
While Claude Lalumiere reviews it in the Montreal Gazette, at Canada.com.
One of the four-month-old tabs that reopened with the new install of Firefox was http://www.jessesword.com/SF/sf.shtml -- it's the collaboration between SF fans and the Oxford English Dictionary (details on how it started at http://www.jessesword.com/SF/sf_citations.shtml) and might be of interest for those of you with extensive SF collections. Or just those of you who like dictionaries.
Hi Neil!
By the way, the beard looks really good!
I have two questions to ask.
First, how do you find time to write on this journal? I mean, from what I read here, you do a lot of reading, websurfing, you go out, you spend time with your family, you keep in touch with lot of people, you take the time to answer peoples questions, and on top of that, you write your stuff. Where do you find time to write the journal? Is this some kind of pact-with-the-devil thing?
I have a much less active life, and I can`t keep up with my blog, or read all the stuff I want to read... Just wondering if you could share your secret with us fans.
Second: Do you plan on ever writing an autobiography (is that spelling correct?) or have someone to write it for you? Do you even like biographies?
Best wishes
Leila (from Argentina, where your books are very hard to find, sob)
The beard from the photos is from May, although I've started growing one like it again, realising that I'll have to do some media for the "13 Nights of Fright" thing, and I might as well look sort of similar.
As for how I do this journal... well, before the blog I was a much better email correspondent, so it's stolen time from that, and I was better at replying to paper mail, so it's a good bet that it's stolen time from that as well. Apart from that, the knowledge that people are reading it is half of what keeps it going, and having immediate access to so many people and so much knowledge is the other half. And it's still fun. It doesn't feel like work. And on those nights where I'm really tired, you lot do most of the work (like tonight), or I skip it.
I have an idea for a bunch of biographical essays, that would also be a travel book. I don't know if I'll ever get the time to do the travelling that I'd need to do to write the essays, but I hope I will. In the meantime, Mr Punch and Violent Cases contain a fair amount of biographical wossname, as do such stories as "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock". They contain stuff I made up as well, though.
Neil, please shave. You're looking an awful lot like Tom Green.
I am? Ah well, if it's the photo at the top of yesterday's post you're thinking of, that beard was history as soon as the filming was done. I just liked the idea of doing that Cain-and-Abel Horror Host beard and glasses sort of thing (I couldn't quite bring myself to wear a brown safari suit, though).
The current beard started last week and will probably last until Hallowe'en, unless I get rid of it.
if i live in england can i still get neverwhere on DVD before christmas without importing it?
It depends on what you mean by "importing it". The only DVD edition that I know of is the New Video edition. Now, this is a US DVD, but does not have any Region coding, so you can play it in UK DVD players. (I know it says "Region 1" but it's not.)
It's available from Amazon.co.uk and I would expect you can probably also find it in Forbidden Planet and suchlike stores. No idea why it's not available from the BBC (and it looks like the BBC video is now out of print). But if you order from Amazon.co.uk, they'll simply be importing it from the US. (So you might as well buy it directly from the US, from somewhere like http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/ who have it for $23.97 or from http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=475682 who have it for $26.59. )
Hi Neil. I'm a liberal homeschooling mom and I'm about to start a month of Edgar Allan Poe with my two teenage sons. I want to make this fun! While searching materials to use, I came across GRAPHIC CLASSICS VOL. 1: EDGAR ALLAN POE - NEW EDITION 3/2004. I was wondering if you've seen it and have any thoughts about it? Also discovered CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF RABIES: POEMS AND TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. Since you are a multimedia kind of guy, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on presenting Poe in this format. Thanks. P.S. You are on my list for a homeschool study as well!
I've not run across the Poe Graphic Classics before, but the line-up of authors and artists looks wonderful. I do have "Closed on Account of Rabies" but was rather disappointed with it -- I think I like the idea of Iggy Pop reading "The Telltale Heart" much better than I like the reality. On the other hand, I love "The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection", which consists of Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price reading Poe stories, and there have been a number of long drives where I've been accompanied by the CDs.
I wrote an essay about Poe's life and work for a recently-published collection of Poe's stories and poems, called Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Stories and Tales, illustrated by Mark Summers, (it was published by Barnes and Noble Books, and you can read about it here) (actually, I say it was published -- I've not actually seen a copy, so it may not have come out yet)and I mention in the introduction how listening to Vincent Price's reading of Ligeia caused me to miss my exit, late at night, driving through the mountains of Virginia.
...
Mr. Neil,Considering your blog is read by a wide array of people situated all over the world, I was hoping you might post a link for those U.S. citizens currently overseas who would like to make sure their voice is heard in the upcoming election:
http://www.overseasvote2004.com/
Thanks.Jen who gives people ducks
No sooner said than done.
...
And finally, I promised JaNell I would plug her "cool stuff for sale at"
http://www.cafepress.com/jazilla. And now I have. Goodnight.
The above is a picture I just stole from the relevant page of the Fox Movie Channel website. Which is by way of a reminder that I will get to be a horror host for them for the two weeks before Hallowe'en (Jack Chick's favourite festival -- thanks Shanmonster)
Currently you can see more pictures from backstage at the shoot over at the American Scary site (where you can also see a trailer for their film), and read a little about it at Jude Prest's site (Jude wrote the scripts). [Edit: And Jude's site mysteriously vanished in the last few hours, so here's a link to his recent movie instead: http://www.rabbithashthemovie.com/]
Malena (my hilarious-as-she-is-lovely undead assistant on the show) has her own website, and she's just posted the postcard that FMC did (which they gave away at San Diego) -- at http://www.malenateves.com/new.html. (And I see that Malena is on the cover of Inmag,
along with articles on Laser assisted liposuction... it has to be something from LA, doesn't it?)
Expect more stuff and more links and clips and info in the run-up to the show.
(And Fox Movie Channel have just graciously said that people going to Fiddler's Green will get automatic web access to each day's intro and wrap-up -- and they'll screen them all at Fiddler's Green as well. Another reason to head to chilly Minneapolis this November.)
(I've signed 13 sets of all seven Harper Collins books for the show -- Fox Movie Channel will be giving away a set of signed books for each of the 13 nights. And again, I'll post links and information as we get closer, and as I get it.)
...
I've just installed Firefox 1.0. The installation was, in all respects except one, utterly painless. (That one? Well, my Firefox bookmarks are suddenly, and bafflingly, about four months out of date. And when I reinstalled the Session Saver extension, the tabs it opened were, just as bafflingly, from about four months ago as well. If anyone reading has any idea where I could find my most recent bookmarks, I'd be dead grateful.)
...
Now that I have a Hugo award, many people come up to me in the street and say "What a wonderful Hugo Award. Where can I buy one like that?" At which point I always send them to http://www.internet-certificates.com/billboard-awards/hugo-awards.html.
Well, I don't really, because they don't, but there's something wonderful about sentences like:
We have taken the hard work out of your hugo awards shopping and narrowed our list of hugo awards websites down to only those of the very best. Knowing you’re getting value for money is very important in buying hugo awards, so by coming to this web site you can rest with the sound knowledge that you are getting the hugo awards you paid for. By buying through our recommend links you can also rest assured your hugo awards will be of the highest quality. How do we know? Because when we’re shopping for hugo awards ourselves it’s where we go.
(A link I found through a fake blog -- a phenomenon I'd not run into before.) ...
When I was sixteen I bought a Lenny Bruce LP. I'd already read the Lenny Bruce biography, and I had a book of his monologues, and a book of his articles, and I'd seen the Bob Fosse "Lenny" film, and had come to the conclusion, especially from the film, that Bruce was a lot of very cool and worthy things but he wasn't actually funny. And then I saw a Lenny Bruce LP, and despite the fact that I really couldn't afford it, and I thought I knew the material in it, I bought it. It was hilarious. I hadn't expected that. After all, Dustin Hoffman wasn't funny. But Lenny Bruce was amazing. His accents and voices were faultless. His timing was perfect. And it was all in the delivery. I knew I'd never be a comedian, but it gave me something to aspire to. I just noticed that there's a 6 CD set of the essential Lenny Bruce coming out -- Let the Buyer Beware: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/43/film-mckenna.php for details. ...
Hey Neil, I just purchased the DVD "Jim Henson's The Storyteller: The Greek Myths" and saw the trailer for Mirrormask! Holy cow was that good. Just thought I'd spread the news. Also, your readers could do worse than picking up such a good series.Kirk MacLeod, Edmonton, Canada
Agreed. Maddy and I just watched the Daedalus episode ("Cool!" Maddy Gaiman) and the Orpheus episode ("Kind of boring." Maddy Gaiman). And we also watched the Mirrormask Trailer. Personally, I'd not have let that trailer out, but only because it goes "From the Storytelling Genius of Neil Gaiman... and the Jim Henson Company" but somehow omits the person who did most of the work and all of the heavy lifting. But apart from the bizarre lack of any mention of Dave McKean, I enjoyed it -- and it does show you what the film looks like. Or bits of it, anyway. ...
If you've never read any of the Alan Moore and Alan Davis D.R. AND QUINCH material, or if you want to see how to write a perfect short-short comic, the BBC Comics site now has a bunch of classic 2000AD material up:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/comics/2000adstrips/drandquinch/drandquinch01.shtml
...
Neil Buddy,Have you seen the Sin City trailer?It's here:http://www.movie-list.com/trailers.php?id=sincityFrank & Robert did a beautiful job and the casting is bang on.What do you think?I'll see you once again in Toronto,-Aaron Broverman
I think it looks cool enough and spot on enough that it made me want to head down to the graphic novel shelves in the basement and re-read my copies of Frank Miller's Sin City.
And I want to see the film, when they finish it. I did find myself feeling guilty for continually finding the Frank Miller images that flashed up during the trailer more visually interesting than the video reconstructions, though.
Today I nipped out to a local recording studio and recorded the "John Bolton Biography" from Harlequin Valentine as an audio Easter Egg for the DVD of "A Short Film About John Bolton", which New Video will be bringing out later this year. I'm really pleased it'll finally be commercially available.
The recording studio were very sweet. (It's a hi-tech backwoods place, in which I'd recorded everything for " The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection" earlier this year, along with the interview with me that Maddy does on there.) I warned them ahead of time I'd not be longer than 20 minutes, and they told me that in that case they'd do it for free. Thus increasing the odds of my doing my next full length audio CD there.
Michael Dirda, the Washington Post reviewer (otherwise known for touting the "intellectual" flatulence of Harold Bloom) reveals himself to be not so well read. Of course Gaiman did not create the Sandman. But I wanted to ask Gaiman why he spells Christmas as Xmas? Is it some kind of weird "alternative lifestyle" kink?
You know, Michael Dirda's easily the second best-read person I've ever met (John Clute's the best-read person) and an astonishingly sharp and perceptive critic. That we don't agree on everything we read means we have better and more interesting conversations about books.
Anyway, according to Dictionary.com:
X-mas ( P ) (krsms, ksms)n.
Christmas.
[From X, the Greek letter chi, first letter of Greek Khrstos, Christ. See Christ.]
Usage Note: Xmas has been used for hundreds of years in religious writing, where the X represents a Greek chi, the first letter of, "Christ." In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, "Christian." But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (ksms). Many therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.
Bizarrely, it completely omits any reference to alternative lifestyles or kinks of any kind. I bet you could write to the American Heritage people and complain, though. They'd probably like that.
(Sorry to hear I'm not the creator of The Sandman. But please don't tell DC Comics' royalty department -- it sends me quarterly creator royalties, and I'd hate to see them stop.)
Hey Neil, I'm excited to see you at the Book Fair in DC. 1 hour of signing seems like a pretty short time for a Neil Gaiman signing, having been to a couple in the past. I believe your usual bookstore signing rules are that you stay and sign for everyone who's there when you start. Any idea how the 1 hour Book Fair signing will go? Should all us hardcore fans get there around 7 AM to make sure we get through? Thanks!Paul V.
Good question. I don't know. I doubt that I'll be allowed to stay a minute past my signing time, mostly because at 11:00 AM Robert B Parker or E. L Konigsberg will need my chair (h ere's the signing schedule.) It'll probably be an adventure to try and get everyone in the line all signed and happy, but I'll do my best, and that's infinitely preferable to sitting there disconsolately for an hour wondering why the other authors have lines and I don't.
(I'm sure that 7 AM would be too early, but you might want to be there by 9 AM to be on the safe side.)
Hi Neil.I remember you mentioning somewhere that a TPB of 1602 might be out in September. My birthday is in two weeks, and I'd like to tell my friends to get it for me. They can't do that if it isn't out yet. So any word on a release date?Thanks for all the words you write! raven
Some countries have a trade paperback out already, but the official US Marvel edition is actually a hardback. It's going to be oversized (I think) and it has lots of new material in it -- unseen sketches, the script for Chapter One, original pencilled pages, an intro by Peter Sanderson and an another one by me, and a new cover.
And I found out today when it's going to be on sale, when Marvel sent me a link to their 1602 Wallpaper, which shows the cover, along with an on-sale date of October 6th: http://www.marvel.com/wallpaper/papers/1602_hc_1024.jpg (it's available in different sizes at http://www.marvel.com/wallpaper/index.htm.)
any chance we can find out what's in your Top 25 Most Played playlist on your iPod?
It's not much good to you, because I also use my iPod as an alarm clock, which means that it usually wakes me up -- especially if I'm in a hotel room somewhere -- with the Thea Gilmore playlist, because I like waking up to Thea Gilmore and I'm too lazy to change it. As a result of which my 25 most played things on my iPod are all from "Songs From the Gutter" or from "Avalanche".
I need to close a few windows, so here's an article about Fantagraphics. Nice photo of Kim and Gary and Eric as well.
More lego comics characters.
This is a link to a website on turning a fountain into ambient information. It's all bright and cheerful about ways to make financial information appear in sprays of water until you get to the end and it suddenly turns deeply creepy:
"In the park next to my home is a fountain. I can see it from my window. Day in day out it sprays its water in the same boring fashion, no information in there. I connected this fountain to the cell phone of my secret lover. The fountain now sprays high when she's in neighborhood and low when she's far away. It sprays wild when she is receiving many phone calls. Not spraying at all when her phone is off. People in the neighborhood think it's just a randomly programmed fountain, but they are not into ambient information like I am."
Brrr.
...
Incidentally, I got to see some interesting web-browser oddness last night and this morning. An HTML tag apppeared to be broken in yesterday's post, turning everything into bold type. But only in Firefox. In Explorer and Safari it was just fine (and couldn't be found or fixed.) (I forgot to check it in Opera.) Finally I realised I could fix it from Firefox, and I did. Sorry for anyone who was inconvenienced...
There. Now off to make Maddy a tapioca pudding, and watch an episode of The Goodies.
I went to the "New York is Book Country" site, to order the poster for Jordan and Jack's rooms. In the blog, you mentioned that the posters were only $10, but on the site they tell me that they are $15. Do you have a special, inside link that gets the $10 rate, or did they raise the poster price in the past few days, or was it a "Gaiman glitch"? I would surely like to save the extra $10 for the two posters, if it's possible...
Has anyone else asked about this?
Many thank-yous,
J's mom
Nope. It looks like they've put the price up today (it was $10 before, honest) (which I thought, given the stiffness of the paper and the size of the posters, was a bit of a bargain). But at least they've kept the autographed art spiegelman posters at $20.
Dear Neil,My mother teaches 7th and 8th grade children who suffer from behavior/learning disorders which makes finding something to read to the entire class a bit of a chore for her. Last autumn I recommended Coraline to her (as I recommend your books to nearly anyone who will listen to me speak) and her students adored it. Naturally she asked if you had written anything else that was appropriate for her students and I found myself drawing something of a blank. Your other children's books are a bit on the brief side for a classroom reading project while your other novels aren't exactly stories I'd encourage my mother to read to her class of 13 and 14 year olds.Which leads me to the question I'm sure you're bored to hear at this point:Are there things that you have written which you discouraged (are still discouraging) your children from reading until they're a certain age? What were their reactions to some of the mature subjects their father portrayed? Or do they simply not think about it one way or another?Curiously yours,Courtney W.
In my experience most kids are incredibly good at selecting what kind of books they're ready for. I'm not sure it has much to do with age: I've met 13 year olds who loved Sandman and 25 year olds who couldn't cope with it.
My parents never stopped me reading anything, for which I shall always be grateful. This occasionally caused trouble (there was at least one book -- AND TO MY NEPHEW ALBERT I LEAVE THE ISLAND WHAT I WON OFF FATTY HAGAN IN A POKER GAME, by David Forrest -- which was confiscated, when I was 11, by the headmaster, because of the naked lady on the cover, and I only got it back after pointing out it was my Dad's, and yes, he knew I was reading it, and no, of course he didn't mind); and there were several books -- Moorcock's A CURE FOR CANCER springs to mind -- which I'm not sure how much I got out of them at the age of twelve. (Although my memories of reading that book then tend to inform my views on the situation in Iraq now.) My local library encouraged me out of the children's section when I was around 12, and gave me free run of the adult shelves, with pointers to things I might enjoy, and again, I've always been very grateful.
I think kids, like adults, are very good at looking at a book, eyeing the cover, looking at the jacket copy, reading the first few lines and deciding if it's a book for them or not. They may, like adults, miss out on a few things they'd really like if only they knew.
Stardust -- with the exception of one very very small rude word, and a sex scene that's only a sex scene if you know what's going on -- works pretty well for young teens. (I don't think the young teens mind the small swear or the implicit sex, either, but those things might embarrass adult readers when reading it out loud.)
Dear Neil-
In the Washington Post's review of Jonathan Strange, the reviewer, Michael Dirda, pointed out that given your back cover blurb, "the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years," it follows that "the very well-read creator of The Sandman regards this epic tale of magic in early 19th-century England as a greater achievement than Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan trilogy, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and T.H. White's Once and Future King."
Care to respond?
Not to be one of those people ("what? you don't like X? what the hell is wrong with you, you wrong, wrong person?"), but I would honestly be astounded to find out that you hold Tolkien's masterpiece in low regard.
thanks
erik
To be honest, I can't quite figure how you get from the following quote
'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years. It's funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical, a journey through light and shadow - a delight to read, both for the elegant and precise use of words, which Ms Clarke deploys as wisely and dangerously as Wellington once deployed his troops, and for the vast sweep of the story, as tangled and twisting as old London streets or dark English woods. It is a huge book, filled with people it is a delight to meet, and incidents and places one wishes to revisit, which is, from beginning to end, a perfect pleasure. Closing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after 800 pages my only regret was that it wasn't twice the length.' NEIL GAIMAN
to "I hold Tolkien's masterpiece in low regard"? I can't make the jump. I would say that I don't regard Lord of the Rings, except for possibly the opening chapter and "The Scouring of the Shire", to be an English "novel of the fantastic". (I'm not quite sure I regard it as a novel of the fantastic, either. It's certainly an epic fantasy, though, and the finest one ever written, and as such is a much better epic fantasy than Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.) What I was trying to emphasise in the blurb was the Englishness of the book (see also the second sentence of the blurb) (Or to put it another way, I don't regard "the finest English novel of the fantastic" and "the best fantasy written in English" to be identical statements. I think the first is, or can be, a fairly precise statement about a kind of fiction that invokes a number of things, including sense of wonder and sense of place, and the second is an invitation to sit in a bar and start making lists of favourite books. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with that.)
(For the record, I think The Once and Future King starts off incredibly well, but limps its way to the end, and T. H. White's various rewritings of the four books into a whole mostly didn't help, although it's definitely English enough, and there are sequences, particularly in The Sword in the Stone, that are as good as anything anyone has written; and the 'Titus Groan Trilogy' isn't a trilogy at all -- it's two wonderful books, followed by a book written by someone who was not in shape to write it and assembled posthumously, three books which were not meant to be a trilogy but an entire sequence of books, and is, by default, only a trilogy because the author did not live long enough to continue it.)
1: Who is the Y. T. Ozaki you mention in the end note of 'The Dream Hunters'? What notebooks did you draw upon? The web knows naught of him, nor do the fan groups.2: In 'American Gods', what's with Loki and fire? My understanding was that Surt was the pre-eminent fire demon dude, and the identification of Loki with fire ('logi') was a spurious one perpetuated by Wagnerian retellings.
1. Have you tried www.abebooks.com or www.bookfinder.com? If you're searching for authors it's much smarter than googling. Of course, you could also check Amazon.com, as I just did, and I was delighted to see that Ozaki's Japanese Fairy Tales is now back in print. (I am amazed that the massed minds of the web and fan groups did not think of this. Ah well.) 2. Surely that's the point; it's all about belief. (You might want to look at the epilogue again, as well. I rather doubt that an Icelandic Loki would have been anything like his American counterpart.)
This one was too cool not to share:
Not a question, but some cool historical information that I thought You Ought To Know.I've been reading Checker's series of books reprinting Winsor McCay's early work. Production values aren't great, but I don't know any other source for this stuff that's remotely as complete or convenient. I read one 1907 "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" strip a few days ago in which a man just missed a boat that he *had* to be on. A helpful person suggests that he catch up to the boat by having himself sent by wireless telegraph. He goes to the telegraph office ("messages to the left, sausages to the right"), where he is ground up into sausages; the sausages are sent over the wireless; the people at the receiving end then reassemble the sausages into the original person. He then proceeds to get into an argument over the transit fee :-)
Naturally, I noticed the similarity to the classic science fiction teleportation device. Imagine my surprise when I noticed, in small print at the bottom of the last panel, the words "thanks to Huck Gernsback"! A little googling showed that Hugo Gernsback, arguably the founder of SF as a distinct genre, did in fact adopt the nickname "Huck" in 1904. In 1907, he would have been 22 or 23 years old, and still at least a year away from founding his first magazine ("Modern Electrics"), and almost two decades before founding the first magazine devoted exclusively to SF ("Amazing Stories", in 1926). But clearly, even at such an early age, he was thinking about SFnal concepts. I don't know if he knew McCay, or if it was a mailed-in story concept (I suspect the latter; about once a month this strip had a "thanks to " at the bottom, and there don't seem to be any repeating names).As someone who has referenced Winsor McCay in your own work, and has just won another "Hugo" yourself, I thought you'd like to know.Nor is that the only connection between Winsor McCay and early SF to be found here; later in the same book (Volume III), there are many reprints of story illustrations that McCay did for stories written by John Kendrick Bangs -- the same one who showed up as a character in Alan Moore's Promethea! Judging from the titles, many of these stories were futurist predictions, or proto-SF.
And this one...
MovieHole is reporting that "David Fincher is apparently a lock to direct the big screen adaptation of American Gods. The hunt is now on for a screenwriter."
http://www.moviehole.net/news/3926.html <- Its the second bullet point.
This could possibly be the best news I've ever heard in my life! Are you in the loop in regards to this project? I'm interested to know if your in a position to confirm this or not.Thanks
I've asked around on this one, and am fairly puzzled. No-one seems to know where this rumour comes from. I think it's an internet made-up thing. And while I was sent a script last week for American Gods Part 1 by a director who loves it and very much wants to make it, it wasn't David Fincher (of whom I am an enormous fan). Sorry.
Let's see -- some of you have kindly written in to let me know that Grant Morrison and Alan Moore and I are now Lego. http://members.cox.net/djoakes/legoga63.htm is the link. Fame at last.
Autumn has started out here: leaves are flurrying down, or quite frequently, across (and as I type this, many of the leaves are falling, slightly worryingly, up), it's chilly and sometimes sunny and sometimes rainy and always astoundingly blustery.
Yesterday we picked tomatoes and peppers and onions (we'd already harvested the garlic) and I started making salsa. After making several gallons of salsa, in different kinds and colours and hotnesses, it became apparent that I hadn't even made a small dent in the tomato crop. Ah well, this is the time of year that people in this part of the world start locking their cars, because if they don't someone will leave bags of vegetables on the front seat. I'll think of something.
(As an experiment this year we grew heirloom tomatoes from seeds, doing one of the "13 varieties for $12.99" things from http://www.tomatobob.com/. Overall it worked -- the Green Zebras were amazing, and most of the others either looked or tasted impressive. On the other hand half of the "White Wonders" rotted, because we kept waiting for them to ripen, before we figured out that they were meant to look like that.)
"Mike also put me into a Star Trek novel, called HOW MUCH FOR JUST THE PLANET?" Speaking as somebody who adores that book... where are you in it?Thanks, Shmuel
I'm not hard to find; look for the anagram.
Hello again Neil. I just have a favor to ask of you. My old english teacher is a huge fan of yours. Could you call him at school and tell him that your good friend Jen thinks he looks like Sonic the Hedgehog? I don't think he will believe this unless he hears it from the Sandman himself. Thanks Neil. Call David Surlak at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Thanks!Jen
No, Jen.
Hello Neil,I noticed you mentioning reading bits and pieces of Anansi Boys at various conventions and such...unfortunately going to school and living in NJ prevented me from going to any of these conventions (or to Fiddler's Green) So i would love it if i could see some of these bits and pieces or a preview of Anansi Boys up here (I can't wait to read it personally)
And, for the time being, that's a no too. (I'm happy to try out bits of Anansi in front of a real audience while I'm writing it, because I learn things about it and how it works as I read. I'm not really comfortable with putting any of it up for people to read until the whole thing is done, and I've decided it isn't all some kind of horrible mistake.)
Have you ever thought about the trace you're leaving on the internet for future scholoars of your work and how what is you will be determined by what you write on your blog, message boards or forums?
No, I haven't. Occasionally I've regretted that the old Genie RTs have vanished as far as I can tell without trace, because there was an awful lot of interesting stuff posted on there. But if future scholars of my work want to write monographs examining my manifold reasons for not phoning up Jen's old English teacher and telling him he looks like Sonic the Hedgehog, I suppose they're welcome to it.
hi neil. i just wanted to ask, how old is coraline cause her story about the girl called "apple" was well weird
She's the same age Alice was, in Through the Looking Glass.
Hi Neil, you did a great job as Hugo MC and congrats on the new Hugo! Do you have any insights into the way that Susannah Clarke's book is being promoted? Jim found it at Borders the other day, was intrigued by the premise (we're both major fans of British history) and bought it immediately. What puzzles us is that we saw no mention of the book at Worldcon. Given that the book was published in September 2004, and that the publisher is sending the author on months of world-wide book touring, it's surprising the book wasn't given some kind of launch at Worldcon.Laurie MannAwardWeb - http://www.awardweb.info
Probably because (a) it didn't occur to them -- Bloomsbury do very little SF or Fantasy, don't have editors who normally go to conventions, and they probably have no real idea, as a publisher, what Worldcon is, and (b) if I were Susanna and someone had suggested to me that I'd want to start a long and arduous signing and media tour with a six day WorldCon, I'd decline gracefully (and if they'd asked me, I would have advised against it). (They didn't.) At the end of Worldcon, most people go home to recover. She'd get no recovery time at all before heading out onto the road.
Yes, Bloomsbury probably should have promoted Strange and Norrell at Worldcon -- although as the latest Locus list shows, it's doing amazingly well, despite that oversight: http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Monitor/Bestsellers0913.html
I love the image of the deconstructed Hugo on your site, by the way.
(Which reminds me, Anne Murphy, who was my minder at Worldcon, writes a very funny and accurate account of the backstageness of me preparing to MCing the Hugos at http://www.livejournal.com/users/netmouse/113635.html.)
I've updated WHERE'S NEIL. The only major thing it's missing is the Pittsburgh signing on October the 11th, the details of which I should have in the next day or so. (And a reminder for anyone in the Minneapolis Area, that there will be a reading and a signing this Saturday, the 18th of September, at DreamHaven Books. You can also order stuff for me to sign from them through http://www.neilgaiman.net/news-home.php. This is the point in the year where I wind up drawing lots and lots of little holly leaves on things I sign that will one day be Xmas presents.)
John M. Ford -- Mike Ford to his friends -- wrote a poem shortly after the events of 9/11, which has been mentioned (and linked to) a few times on this blog. It's called "110 Stories". You can read it at http://www.110stories.us/. Now Glenn Hauman has made it into a film (just click on the link at the top of the 110 Stories page, or watch it directly at http://110stories.malibulist.com/110Stories.mov.) It's very cool and very moving. I wished, though, that some of the people reading the lines hadn't known it was poetry -- several of them do that odd sing-song thing that some Americans adopt when faced with iambics [I'm quite sure that other nationalities do this as well, but I've only noticed it from American readers], and they sound dreadfully like English teachers rather than like human beings; it works brilliantly whenever people simply say the words as if they're saying them for the first time, or just as if they're saying them, and then the rhythms of the poem carry you through.
(Mike wrote my favourite out-of-print-in-the-USA novel, THE DRAGON WAITING, which is, despite the title, a dragonless alternate history novel, set in and around the events in Richard III, with vampires in it. Here's a review. In the UK it's available in Jo Fletcher's excellent "Fantasy Masterworks" series, which means if you don't live in the UK you can order it from amazon.co.uk, or any of the other UK booksellers. If you do live in the UK you can get it from your book shop. Mike also put me into a Star Trek novel, called HOW MUCH FOR JUST THE PLANET? and I wrote the introduction to his NESFA Press collection, FROM THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. And I am currently reading his new short story collection, HEAT OF FUSION, doling myself out a story every couple of weeks, like chocolates. And I just googled Mike and found this interview.)
Mike's going to be at Fiddler's Green, BTW, the CBLDF-benefitting Sandman-and-things-related convention in Minneapolis on the 12th to 14th of November this year (details at http://www.fiddlersgreencon.org/).
Several people have written to ask how available I'm going to be at the con, whether I'll be a quickly-moving figure spied zooming to panels and then ducking back into my hole, or whether I'll be hanging around for the whole thing, chatting in the con suite, or sitting in the bar having a single malt with Charles Vess and aimiably talking and signing things and so forth, and I've told them it'll be the latter -- lots of hanging around and chatting and answering questions and doodling on people's books and all that sort of thing.
No, you don't have to specifically be a Sandman fan to come to Fiddler's Green. There will be some amazing Sandman-related stuff there, but we're trying to make sure there will also be a Mirrormask Preview there, Anansi Boys related stuff, and so on. And the auction should be pretty mindboggling on its own.
There will also be cool swag for con members (a $50 supporting membership will get you the cool swag). (But you'll have more fun if you turn up.)
Currently, the guests include me, Vertigo editor-in-chief Karen Berger, letterer Todd Klein, artist/writers Charles Vess, Jill Thompson, and author Caitlin R. Kiernan.
Davey Snyder, the Fiddler's GreenQueen just dropped me an e-mail filled with useful details. She says:
..The convention is 12-14 November at the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis -- this is the web page that describes it -- (the links from the con web pages all work, too). The hotel is connected to the Minneapolis skyways system so it's possible to walk from there over (or through) more than half of Mpls downtown without actually setting foot onto a cold sidewalk, even in November.
The hotel's sleeping room rate for FG members is $115/night (plus tax) for 1-4 people sharing a room, but rooms may only be booked at that rate via the convention, so everyone planning to have a hotel room should certainly become a convention member sooner rather than later. Also, we must receive hotel reservations forms by *October 6* to be sure of getting that special rate for every member who requests it. (The group rate is only available until October 11.)
The convention registration form is at http://www.fiddlersgreencon.org/fg%20member%20regform.pdf
The FG hotel room reservation form is at http://www.fiddlersgreencon.org/fg%20hotel%20regform.pdf
The hotel's parking garage rate is $13/day for guests, with unlimited in-and-out privileges. From and to the airport (MSP) the Mpls SuperShuttle charges $14 one-way (there's a small discount for buying a round-trip ticket), or a taxi is ~$30.
The M has several spaces for comfy socializing, as well as all the space we're using for program and exhibits, and a great top-floor space where we'll be hosting the con (hospitality) suite. We're also currently holding first option on all of the suites in the hotel, so anyone interested in hosting their own party should please contact innkeeper@fiddlersgreencon..org.
By the way, we'll have this on the web site shortly but since people are asking: We expect to open the convention's registration desk and con suite at ~3:00pm Friday, with a few program activities also starting about then. Main program won't start until Friday evening, and will run all day Saturday and continue through early afternoon Sunday, probably ending at ~2:00pm.
More at the web site as we develop it -- www.fiddlersgreencon.org -- and on our announcements email list (it's a yahoo!-group list, announcements only; there's a clickthrough link on the convention's front page to join).
(I've also heard from a few people that they've had problems getting replies to queries about Fiddler's Green; those communication problems should be solved now, so if you've been waiting for a reply to something, ask them again.)
(And a couple of people have old me that they'd like to come to this one, but they're too busy or too broke, and plan on coming to the next Fiddler's Green; and I've had to explain that there really aren't any plans for a next one. This is it. It's special.)
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Several people have written to me with instructions about ways to insert LJ cuts into Blogger. For me, though, the most significant sentence, following a set of very detailed instructions on how to do it from a Jennifer in the rainy UK, was However, if you mistype that, it causes all sorts of hassle to Livejournal users and takes ages to re-sync with Blogger if you correct it. (Guess who's been shouted at for it, many a time...)Hope that's of some use to you; I'm also working on other ways of making Blogger and Livejournal play nicely :) which sent the cold chills down my spine that brought back evenings spent trying to find some oddment of code or some unfortunate extended ascii character that had caused everything to break, or trying to figure out why the LJ feed had decided to randomly excavate a week's worth of ancient posts and send them to everyone's LJ friends list. LJ and blogger do not play well with each other at the best of times. So I suspect that, for now, for everyone's peace of mind, I'm most likely to leave things as they are.
Not content with stealing a slice of birthday cake, Batman has now invaded Buckingham Palace. There's video footage here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/40066000/rm/_40066094_f4j16_wilcox13_vi.ram
Personally I'm starting to suspect that these people aren't really Batman at all. In fact, it all sounds like one huge joke. A joke aimed at discrediting Batman. But what warped mind could possibly come up with something so fiendish and so funny at the same time...?
I won't be at New York is Book Country this year (mostly because I'll be at the National Book Wossname in Washington D.C. the following weekend along with many other authors), but I thought people would probably like to know about the poster that NYIBC and DC Comics have produced. It benefits New York's Children's Library Services, and was done by Tara McPherson, who has been doing some very lovely covers for Vertigo recently.
It looks like this:
It's huge, is on card stock, and only costs $10. (Plus $1:50 for shipping --probably a bit more if you're outside the US.)
You can find out about ordering it, not to mention the ones from previous years (two by Maurice Sendak, and a lovely art spiegelman one that I've got up on the wall out at my writing place) from http://www.nyisbookcountry.com/content/merchandise.asp
There.
Maddy has a very odd relationship with the English TV show Jonathan Creek. She likes it, but tends to avoid it because, she says, it gives her nightmares. Last night she and I agreed that we should watch some TV, and she decided that I needed to put on a Jonathan Creek for her. But, she said, not a scary one. So I carefully hunted through the DVDs for the most innocuous one I could find ("Time Waits for Norman"). We watched it together. At the end of it, she was extremely unimpressed -- no murders, no evil disappearances, nothing weird at all. She told me it was the most boring episode of Jonathan Creek she'd ever seen, and could I please put on a better one? So I did. This one ("Danse Macabre") had murderous skeletons, a shooting, an excellent disappearance and a rather gruesome posthumous beheading. Maddy loved it, and informed me when it was done that I would now need to put on something extremely reassuring and funny, and by the way she'd be making up a bed in my bedroom because she wouldn't dream of sleeping in her own room that night.
I put on 'The Con Men" episode of Sergeant Bilko for her, and then made up a bed for her on the lovesac in the corner of the bedroom, and she was perfectly happy. And didn't have any nightmares, as far as I know.
It's fascinating how much at that age consists of testing your boundaries in fiction, in figuring out what you want and what you need from what you're watching and reading, and then going a hair further.
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Very late last night, having told me quite definitely that she had decided not to, and that it was just a rough mix, and it wasn't anything I ought to hear yet, Claudia Gonson had a change of heart and sent the "Unresolving" song to my gmail account. I've promised I won't play it to anyone until there's a mix she's happy with, but it's deeply wonderful. Chris Ewen (of the Future Bible Heroes) decided to make an album by and called "The Hidden Variable", with lyrics by his favourite authors -- so far he's got me, Peter Straub, China Mieville, Daniel (Lemony Snicket) Handler, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, Charles de Lint, Gregory Maguire, Steven Brust and Martha Soukup. He says he wants the album to be "mysterious, slightly creepy and beautiful", and I think that describes the track Claudia sent me perfectly. I have no idea when it will all be done or when it will come out, but I promise I'll mention it here when I do.
Hi Neil
I just wondered if you'd spotted this: an update on that underground cinema in Paris.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1302249,00.html
Personally, this has restored my faith in the world - it can't be so bad if weird and wonderful stuff like this happens!
Keep up all the wonderful work.
Cheryl Holland
Given my encounter with the nice catacomb-exploring people in Paris, I'm not at all surprised. (Someone asked me if I could give them the details of the book of catacomb photos I mentioned -- it's on a bookshelf somewhere, but a quick Google turned up http://www.urban-resources.net/pages/decouverte_souterrains_75.html which looks like the book.)
So Locus photographer Beth Gwinn has a blog, and on the Sept. 5 entry there is a pretty nice picture of you and your new Hugo that I bet your readers would love to see:http://journals.aol.com/bg1818/BethGwinnsdailythoughts/entries/1047
I'll take your word for it (and Cheryl Morgan's -- and it did my heart good to see the Emerald City team of Anne, Kevin and mostly Cheryl with their own Hugo in the photo on the site. It's an enormous improvement over last year, when they did all the posing-with-a-Hugo-shots with my Hugo, wrongly convinced it was the closest they would ever get to the real thing). For some reason all I get is a blank place where a photo should be.
Hi Neil!...this is in response to Amy who just wrote asking about Mr. Nancy and the hurricane. A well built wooden house will withstand a hurricane better than those cardboard (drywall?) homes most people have in the states. Here in Puerto Rico most homes are built of concrete, but wooden houses fare well if they are well built, especially the older ones that have already survived San Felipe, San Ciriaco, Hugo and Georges. I've seen wooden homes that have been around since the 20's. Around here we lose power and running water, windows are broken, the place becomes a mess, but most of the damage is flood damage and most of the losses are strictly Darwinian (say the man who decided he to go hang on grab the satellite dish he'd forgotten to take down, the tourist who went out to the beach to take pictures and so forth.) I have a feeling Mr. Nancy would do just fine.Elizabeth in Puerto Rico(who hopes she doesn't offend anyone with her distaste for stateside construction methods)
I love having this journal. I learn so much. I even got a poem, from one of the Mysterious Three At The End of the Line, pointing out how useful a hat with an umbrella on it is during a hurricane.
You're a pretty imaginative guy. What's your view on life?
I think, on the whole, it's infinitely better than the alternatives.
Neil,Sorry that each time I send you a question it is to complain about a french translation of your texts (first time it was about American Gods'), but I've bought Smoke and Mirrors in french yesterday, in order to use some of its shortstories with my class (I am a French teacher), and I can't find In the End in it, nor read anything about it in the translation of your introduction... I'm quite puzzled : was In the End's disappearance a choice when the book was translated, or is it a publisher's mistake ? Take care,-Anne- (Lille, France)
Sorry, Anne. There are three or four stories which crept into the English edition of Smoke and Mirrors, that aren't in any of the others, and "In the End" is one of them. It's the kind of thing I hated (and hate) as a reader. Probably the next short story collection will have the extra stories in everywhere but the UK.
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NEIL OH NEIL, why can't you do a Live Journal LJ CUT? It's so much more polite. I know you have hundreds of LJ friends but still.
Because, like it or not, what you are reading on Live Journal is a feed from Blogger journal up at www.neilgaiman.com. There are over 4000 Live Journal accounts signed up to the feed over at officialgaiman. (I didn't create the feed, cannot modify it or change it or control it, cannot even add a little picture of me to it should I feel the need. ) It mostly works, except when Blogger and Livejournal rub each other the wrong way (and something as simple as an accented e in China Mieville's last name can do it). But I can't do Livejournal cuts or anything clever like that, so if I witter on, or answer a lot of questions, it'll take up space. Sorry. The last time this came up someone wrote in to say that Livejournal allows you to make special friends groups, where you can just stick this journal, if it's cluttering up the place and getting in the way of finding out about people you actually know; but I can't find the message now, and can be no more helpful than that.
If you want to add officialgaiman to your friends list, or check the statistics or anything, the details are at http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=officialgaiman.
This one came in in the early hours of this morning, and made me feel guilty, because I've not put in much of a plug for them in a while:
This isn't entirely about you, but -- Do Folk Underground have a CD, and how can I get a copy if they do?-Steph Drinkard
They do -- they have one CD "Folk Underground" which you can get from their website, and another one, a Live in the Studio thing, which may be on their website and may only be for sale at the Minnesota RenFest, which is where you can see them playing for the next two weeks (and for the last four weeks). They've been supporting Puke & Snot, and I think their CDs are for sale at the Puke & Snot merchandising place. Anyway, all details are at:
http://www.folkunderground.com/
(And just as I'd finished typing that, this arrived: Neil - Sorry about the slightly asanine Folk Underground question of yesterday. Last night when I googled them, their site wasn't working - but voila! Today it is. Questions answered. Sorry to waste your time.-Steph Drinkard Not a problem.)
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And in regards to yesterday's extract from the Baltimore Sun:
Dear Neil, The passage that you have quoted is really terrible - I was particularly impressed by the sentence "But Kulbert can write, too, a fact obscured by his first skill". As a teacher of English, I would give him a D or E for the review. Not to mention the fact that he mistook Warsaw _Ghetto_ Uprising (April 1943, that's right) and Warsaw Uprising (August-October 1944). It seems that his knowledge of history is even poorer than his command of English.Yours, Anna from Poland
I'd completely missed that. I thought the strangest goof was that he lists "Between Hell and a Hard Place" as a compilation of old Sergeant Rock material by Joe Kubert (who Danziger keeps calling Kulbert), when actually it's a completely new graphic novel -- one story -- and written by Brian Azzarello, who is not even mentioned. I think it's safe to infer that the reviewer "only looked at the pictures", or at least, intended to, before writing the review.
Bizarrely, the writer of the article, Jeff Danziger, is a decent editorial cartoonist, of the not-actually-funny-but-well-drawn-in-a-mostly-earnest-sort-of-way school. Jessa-from-Bookslut was right; he really should have known better.
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Hello, Neil!
I have been a bookseller for about six or seven years, and I just wanted to let you know that people are indeed reading for pleasure. Profits have risen every year since I began in this business, and not just at my store. I read the trades and I will tell you it's across the board. Right now the trend is non-fiction (History and Biography in particular) and Political Science, which, as the Village Voice piece pointed out, were not included in the NEA's interrogation...I mean questionnaire. Fiction still sells incredibly well. Since Harry Potter became a phenomenon I have seen more young people in my store than ever, searching for other great works of fantasy and science fiction. You knew this, of course, but I thought you might like to hear it from somebody who sees it happening every day. If the NEA wanted a truly accurate picture, they should have looked at it from the business end of things, instead of randomly calling people. I suppose if they had done that, they'd have nothing about which to complain. One could argue that just because people are purchasing books doesn't mean they are reading them, but that would be false as well. I have more regular customers than you can shake a stick at, and what they buy, they read. Then they come back and we discuss the books they bought the last time, and try to find them more. It's a beautiful thing. I just wish organizations like the NEA would pay more attention to the truth instead of publishing ridiculous and wholly innacurate reports based on nothing.
Love your work, sir. You keep doing what you do, and I'll keep recommending (and reading) you.
Sincerely,
Gweneth K. Brown
I'm pleased. My sense is certainly that people are reading; and that if anything's suffering these days, it's broadcast TV.
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With regards to the Mirrormask trailer on Jim Henson's Storyteller DVDs, the word is that it wasn't something anyone was happy with, and it was put together (not by Dave) when only a little rendered footage had actually come out of the "render farm", which is why no-one's said anything about it. It is there, though, and when I've seen it I'll say something. In the meantime, I'll hunt for the CD with images from Mirrormask on it, and put a few new ones up here.
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There's an enthusiastic review of Mike Harrison's LIGHT in the New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/books/review/12SCIFIL.html. It's a good review, and it makes the point that this is a book that rewards close reading, and pays back the work you put into it. Which is true of many books, and while I don't find reading Mike Harrison "work", he certainly is writing for intelligent readers who are going to treat the words as important (not to mention beautiful) things. LIGHT is, I'm pretty sure, the kind of novel people will either love or Not Like At All. Chacon a son gout, as Flanders & Swann put it.
On your kind recommendation I purchased "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" yesterday morning and have not at all been disappointed. It has, however, resulted in an unfortunate domestic clash: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ame_no_heisei/26530.html
That's very sad. I advise saying "Now you must BUY YOUR OWN COPY" as firmly as if you were training a dog. (All authors would advise this.) Which reminds me, I enjoyed this commentary on Susanna Clarke's newfound famousness.
I should be thinking about things like bags of ice and FEMA lines and
generators and insurance adjusters and chainsaws, but instead, I'm wondering
how Mr. Nancy fared through hurricane Frances. I remember he lived near Ft.
Pierce. I have family who live in Ft. Pierce, and I know how they did.
(water damage, but walls and roofs are still intact). But I'm wondering
about Mr. Nancy. I was re-reading that chapter in American Gods towards the
end where he's in Ft. Pierce getting Shadow drunk, and I see that while he
has hurricane shutters, he has a wood house. That's not so good.
On one hand, he would know ages in advance that the storm was coming, and
he'd have enough time to go away. On the other hand, I suspect he'd love
nothing more than a hurricane party.
So I have to ask. What did Mr. Nancy do?
Thank you,
Amy
(who just got electricity yesterday)
Stuart, FL
aitapata
board moderator
You know, it's something I've been giving a certain amount of thought to as well. The current answer is that it depends whether I decide Anansi Boys is set, before or after Hurricane Frances. Which may in itself depend on whether or not I get down to that area in the next few months. But the simple answer to what Mr Nancy did, is that Mr Nancy did just fine.
Hi Neil-
If you have any female chicago area fans between the ages of 10 and 17 who've always longed to play Macbeth, you might want to let them know about the Viola Project (http://www.violaproject.org). TVP is a non-profit Shakespeare performance workshop for middle and high school girls with gender-blind casting in some of the juiciest roles in history. We're starting our second fall session in a few weeks- all the info's on the site. I know writing you is a bit of a long shot, but it's an amazing program, and we could use some help getting the word out.
Thanks for everything,
Reina Hardy
Consider the word gotten out. That was easy. By the way, on my birthday this year I'll be doing a reading in Chicago and also interviewing Gene Wolfe, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. http://www.chfestival.org/november/index.cfm (They've got a strong SF track this year, which, in addition to Gene Wolfe, includes William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and John Crowley and Peter Straub being interviewed by Gary Wolfe. Tickets are incredibly cheap, and there's always a signing after the panel.
GENE WOLFE: Master of Time
Wednesday November 10, 2004
7:00 to 8:00 PM
The hugely admired “dean” of science fiction writers and award-winning author of The Book of the New Sun and, most recently, The Wizard Knight, discusses his career-long exploration of other Times, and other worlds. Wolfe is interviewed by author Neil Gaiman.
Student Center, DePaul University (Lincoln Park)
2250 N. Sheffield (at Belden)
NEIL GAIMAN: New Stuff
Wednesday November 10, 2004
8:30 to 9:30 PM
A master of fantasy writing, Gaiman is author of American Gods, Neverwhere, the Sandman series, and the young adult fiction Coraline, among other books. He reads from and discusses his work-in-progress, a comedy (“scary in bits”) for adults entitled Anansi Boys.
Student Center, DePaul University (Lincoln Park)
2250 N. Sheffield (at Belden)
...
From the latest fax from Dave Sim it sounds like the letters asking him for a free signed Sandman-parody issue of Cerebus are beginning to trickle off. He said the letters from across the world outnumbered those from the continental USA yesterday.
On the other hand, the letters from people who are thrilled to have recieved their comics (not to mention their Form Letter of the Day) have been coming in to me in a steady stream, including several telling me about acts of unexpected generosity on Dave's part (there's a New York Librarian whose library just got a complete set of the Cerebus graphic novels who is over the moon about it).
So just to remind everyone: if you want a free signed Sandman period Cerebus, you have to write to Dave Sim at
Dave Sim
Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674 Station C
Kitchener, Ontario,
Canada N2G 4R2
Write him a letter. Tell him why you want him to send you a signed comic. Put enough postage on the envelope to take your letter to Canada. (That's a 60 cent letter or a 50 cent postcard from the US. $1.80 from Australia. Probably 47p from the UK. You get the idea.) He's getting letters from all over the world.
So far Dave's sent out about 1200 signed Cerebuses. He's also hatching some kind of CBLDF-benefiting scheme that I am not actually yet privy to. But he's enjoing hatching it, whatever it is.
Jessa at Bookslut read a recent review/round up of new graphic novels in the Baltimore Sun, and despaired. I, on the other hand, found myself almost enjoying it -- there's a certain sort of journalism, in which people who know actually nothing whatsoever about a subject pontificate about it in a way that gets absolutely everything utterly wrong, and which becomes increasingly funny the more of it you read. The amazing spelling mistakes the author of the piece commits on people's names -- Windsor McCay, Joe Kulbert -- only add to the suspicion that it was written while drunk or a long way from the source material, while the sentences, on a word-by-word basis often hover at the edge of sense without ever actually getting there.
And even while he's praising things, the author seems to be putting his foot in his mouth. How many simple errors can you count in the following paragraph?
Lastly, two books from the great artist Joe Kulbert show he is still going strong. The first is a compendium of his Sgt. Rock stories. Kulbert has drawn the gruff old master sergeant for years, and his bold authoritative line matches the mood of the war tales. The pages of Between Hell and a Hard Place, from Vertigo Books, practically jump with action during the battles. But Kulbert can write, too, a fact obscured by his first skill. Yossel: April 19, 1943 is a tale of the Warsaw Uprising, a masterpiece drawn in pencil on a gray background with such commanding graphic talent, such knowledge of anatomy, architecture, and action, that it puts the rest of us to flight. There is no doubt that the Holocaust has been nearly exhausted as a subject, but this treatment brings it alive.
The article is here but you'll need a bugmenot id to get into it, if you're curious.
...
Those of you with memories like particularly sharp elephants will remember that last month, I talked a little about the next project from Alan Moore and his collaborators, in which we will see the return of many of the old IPC characters. I don't know if this will mean much to anyone who isn't a) British and b) of the right kind of age. Nor do I know if Dare-A-Day-Davy will actually be coming back. But I do know just how much I am looking forward to it...
Shane Oakley is drawing it (many, many years ago, Shane drew a story I wrote called THE GREAT COOL CHALLENGE for a magazine called BLAAM! [er, I think] and is a really good guy) and Leah Moore and John Reppion are writing it. Alan is plotting the stories and overseeing the results.
It's called ALBION.
Now, Leah Moore is one of the few people in this world who I sort of figure has a perfect right to call me Unca Neil, given that I've known her (and her sister Amber) since back when she was still in single digits. (And she does.) She wrote to me today to let me know that she and John now have a website up, filled with useful information about Albion, and also about Wild Girl, their new Wildstorm comic.
If you head over to http://uk.geocities.com/moore_reppion@btinternet.com/news.html and click around a bit, you'll help to make John and Leah feel loved, and you'll be in on the very beginning of something fun. Then when Albion comes out you can be the one explaining the significance of Fatty and the Nervs to those around you.
...
This isn't a question. *g* I just wanted to say that I enjoyed "meeting" you this weekend at World Con (well, getting an autograph anyway - lol) and that you did a fantastic job as MC for the Hugo Awards! This way my first World Con and previously I didn't know such a convention existed! (I'm fairly new to the convention fandom phenomenon though I've been a fan of science fiction and fantasy since I was a young child.)Congratulations on your Hugo!
Sincerely,Danielle Cormier
You're very welcome. It's always an adventure heading off to your first Worldcon (or your first SF or Fantasy or Comics or Anime convention) and, for most people, it's a pretty good adventure. Next year, the Worldcon will be in Glasgow, where articles even stupider than the one mentioned above have already started to appear...
(Well, one article anyway. It's possible that it's meant to be humour, only the author hasn't figured out the whole being funny thing yet.)
Anyway. I mention this because, instead of commissioning an artist to design the Hugo base (which is a different design every year -- there are a few examples at http://www.emcit.com/hugo_photos.shtml) the base design is an open competition. So if you -- wherever you are in the world -- want to see the winning artists and writers carrying around their Hugos on your base, check out the competition details at http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/hugocomp.htm.
...
A few people have written to let me know that there's some kind of Mirrormask trailer on the DVD release of Jim Henson's STORYTELLER, by the way. I'll post more information when I get it from Hensons.
Let's see...
While at Worldcon (actually at the end of Martha Soukup's reading) I ran into Johanna, who runs the House of Clocks website( http://www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com/), and who told me that they've now got rid of the Guestbook Spam invasion. This is good news, because the Guestbook of the House of Clocks contains the strangest assortment of stories and people you are ever likely to encounter. It's at http://www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com/guestbook.html. There now appears to be some strange crossover between the people who report strange doings from the House of Clocks and those who are creating Johnny Theremin stories at http://www.johnnytheremin.net.
...
Those in the Minneapolis area may want to be reminded that I'll be doing a reading and a signing at DreamHaven next Saturday, September the 18th. I'll sign two things you've brought with you, and anything you buy on the day. They'll start handing out numbers at 11:00am and the reading bit will start at 3:00pm, and the signing bit will probably start around 4:00pm and go on until everyone's done. Details at http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com/.
(I believe people can also order stuff to be signed over the web from DreamHaven's www.neilgaiman.net.)
...
Was pleased to see that M. John Harrison's remarkable LIGHT (as mentioned here several times) has a website of its own: http://www.mjohnharrison.com/light
...
Several people wrote to say more or less this:
Hi Neil, Although Henry Selick did direct NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, the story & characters credit goes to Tim Burton (with additional writing credits to Michael McDowell for adaptation, and to Caroline Thompson for screenplay). Burton was also executive producer, and had considerable control over art direction, etc. Burton also has a background as a traditional animator, and had worked in stop-motion as well (see his 1982 stop-motion short VINCENT). Just a minor correction for you. ;) It's awesome to hear about CORALINE and I can't wait to see the film!!Yours truly,Jessica C. Adams
I'll stand corrected. (I said he didn't write or direct it, though, not that he didn't come up with the characters, or originate the story. Caroline wrote the script...) ... OK Mr. Sand-Man (A.K.A. Mr. Swoon-Man) Why Haven't you written about the letters you got from the Yahoo Cerebus group asking for FREE SANDMANS??? Maybe you don't have a sence of humor? Possibly, because I haven't received any and I have no idea what you're talking about. (Goes and looks at the Yahoo Cerebus Group to find out.) (Er, you know, you've rather spoiled that gag for them.) ... The main reason I didn't say anything much about the NEA report a few months back which announced that people weren't reading any longer was because I thought it was utter bollocks.
I enjoyed this Village Voice article, mostly because it agrees with me: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0436/essay.php
...
Maddy has just got a much bigger goldfish tank in her room, which needed more goldfish in it, because the four she has were looking rather lonely. So she and I went out and bought four new goldfish. She named them, each in its plastic bag, as I drove us home:
Maddy: The black one's called Jelly. The smaller one is called Cheesy Popcorn. The middle one is Salsa. And the very little one is called Bubble.
Me: Cheesy Popcorn? Why Cheesy Popcorn?
Maddy (as if talking to someone very, very slow on the uptake): Because I really, really like Cheesy Popcorn.
Me: Well, you like Macaroni and Cheese. Why don't you call it Macaroni and Cheese?
Maddy (raising an eyebrow): Da-ad. Mac and cheese is SO two minutes ago.
To which I was unable to find a reply. Maddy has a goldfish called Cheesy Popcorn.
...
"(Actually I do suspect that Worldcon Fandom is ageing -- but I think that has a lot more to do with the con's location moving around the world year by year than with a general ageing of Fandom per se.)"From my experience, I'd say the high average age of Worldcon attendees might have more to do with the *cost* - it's $200ish for a full pass, which might be kinda tough on teenaged pockets, not to mention trying to convince parents into permitting road trips to a convention where people have a different Star Trek uniform for each day of the week.
That, and the younger set seems to be far more interested in anime and comics, of which there isn't enough to justify a trip to WorldCon as opposed to ComicCon.
Just my observation, especially having survived Otakon here in Baltimore last month, with a significant fraction in costume!
Jaime
Sorry -- that was me not making myself clear. Yes, Worldcon's a costly convention as far as registration goes. It's also going to have to be in Worldcon sized hotels, which means you can't always get cheap hotel space. It's also a costly convention you have to get to. And it's a con which, by definition, is often far away enough that even affluent authors, or people with hundreds of thousands of saved airmiles, balk. (I'd love to go to Japan for Worldcon 2007, especially because Yoshitaka Amano is the artist G of H, and it gives me a reason to finish the "Return of the Thin White Duke" story for him. But still, it's a long way away...) And a Worldcon can be a crapshoot as well: it may be great, it may be a disaster. Local cons, or cons like Dragoncon, are going to be more or less in the same place every year; if you go to one one year, it'll be there (and so will the friends you made) the following year. You can probably do it cheaper, leaving aside things like registration fees and so on.
(I keep hearing that fandom is ageing, but I normally hear it from fans (many of whom are also pros) who tend to hang around with other fans of their own age. I tend to go by the people in my signing lines, who start pretty young and go, incrementally, all the way up, and I don't see that they have any tendency to age. Except year by year, like the rest of us.)
And I tend to find that comics fans read books, and that anime fans also watch other things. Most people don't just like one thing.
...
Neil, regarding the jail journal, there is a link in the comments of one of the more recent entries that links to a story in a phoenix newspaper, and it tells what 'jon' is in jail for.I almost felt bad for him, until I read what started it all.
( Here's the article, for the curious.)
Jail is the place that you hold people who are awaiting trial, at least some of whom are going to be found not guilty (and some of whom, whatever the verdict, won't have been guilty; innocent people go to trial too, that's what trials are for), which would tend to suggest that, no matter how you feel the guilty should be treated, that holding innocent people in conditions like that is a pretty horrific thing to do. In Jon's case, he did it -- and, interestingly, and from the blog, is now relieved to be in prison, where the conditions are less nightmarish than in that jail.
Given that I personally know at least one person in the US who has been awaiting trial for over four years (and if I know someone, I tend to assume it's not an entirely uncommon phenomenon) I think it's a bad thing for human beings who may or may not be guilty to be kept in such conditions that arriving in prison is seen as a significant improvement.
...
I keep meaning to link to the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell reviews that are appearing:
Here's Michael Dirda misunderstanding my use of the word English in the blurb.
Here's John Clute understanding it (although he has problems with the book I simply didn't have).
Here's a review by someone who read the same book that I did.
Susanna Clarke's schedule in the UK, Canada, the US and Germany is up over at http://www.jonathanstrange.com/events.asp. If you're in the US she may, like the Monkees, be coming to your town in the next few weeks. Go and see her read, and say hullo from me. If you're lucky, she may even have Colin Greenland with her, reading the footnotes...
Susanna Clarke's US Events
PHILADELPHIA, PA
Date: 13 September 2004
Philadelphia Free Library 7PM with Emma Donoghue
NEW YORK, NY
Date: 14 September 2004
Barnes & Noble Lincoln Center 7PM
NEW CANAAN, CT
Date: 15 September 2004
Elm Street Books Event at the New Canaan Library. Please call Elm St Books for information.730PM
WASHINGTON, DC
Date: 16 September 2004
Olsson's 7PMArlington Courthouse location with Emma Donoghue
NASHVILLE, TN
Date: 17 September 2004
Davis-Kidd Booksellers 6PM
OXFORD, MS
Date: 18 September 2004
Square Books 5PM
CHICAGO, IL
Date: 20 September 2004
Borders (State Street) 12:30PM
MILWAUKEE, WI
Date: 20 September 2004
Harry Schwartz 7PM2559 N. Downer Ave
CHICAGO, IL
Date: 21 September 2004
Arts Club of Chicago luncheon 12PM
LOS ANGELES, CA
Date: 22 September 2004
Book Soup, West Hollywood store7PM
BERKELY, CA
Date: 23 September 2004
Cody's 7PM
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Date: 23 September 2004
Stacey's 12:30PM
MENLO PARK, CA
Date: 24 September 2004
Kepler's 7:30PM
SAN MATEO, CA
Date: 26 September 2004
M is for Mystery 2PM
CORTE MADERA, CA
Date: 26 September 2004
Book Passage 7PM
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Date: 27 September 2004
Booksmith 7PM
PORTLAND, OR
Date: 28 September 2004
Powell's 7:30PM
SEATTLE, WA
Date: 29 September 2004
King County Library 7PM
SEATTLE, WA
Date: 30 September 2004
Elliot Bay (TBC)
I forgot to mention here that on the first day of Worldcon, I learned that the film option for CORALINE has been exercised.
The way that these things work, books get optioned. Producers pay a percentage of what it will cost them to buy the whole thing to the author, when they option something, and then, as time passes, after a certain amount of time the producer and the author can elect to renew the option or not. And one day the option either lapses (because the author doesn't want to keep selling the book to that producer, or the producer doesn't want to keep going on it, or whatever) or, much much more rarely, the option is exercised. And when it is, it tends to mean that someone's now making a film.
In this case, the person making the film is Henry Selick, who will be making an entirely stop-motion version of CORALINE (all stop-motion, like his most famous film, TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, which some people mistakenly think that Tim Burton wrote or directed). Here's Henry's page at Vinton Studios.
Henry and I got to talk last night. It's been a long few years -- Henry read the book a year before it was published, and has been holding his breath for the last six months to find out what would happen. Right now he has ideas about, well, everything really, from the cast to the songs. He wants it to be faithful and funny and smart and spooky. I've told him he can use me, bounce ideas off me, or whatever, but that ultimately it's his movie. I just want to sit in the audience at the premiere, with a thing of popcorn on my lap, grinning like a goof.
...
Dear Neil, From today's blog entry: "I do feel that SF right now, like SF then, is waiting for new paradigms..." Would China Mieville count? I'm nearing the end of The Scar, and it has been utterly breathtaking. The imagery, the ideas, the combinations of magic and tech and cities and aliens (sort of) and politics, the writing! Man, the writing. Shivers. best,Adam
I'm not sure that China counts in the way that they're talking about in the article -- if anything it confirms the argument that the place where the most interesting work is occurring is not in pure science fiction but on the borders of fantasy; but then, for my money, the best SF novel of the last few years is unquestionably M. John Harrison's LIGHT (which will be eligible for a Hugo next year, and I very much hope it gets it) which combines hard SF, space opera and a horror-fantasy thread to produce something new -- and Mike Harrison and China are definitely out there exploring the same continent.
Hi Neil,
A musician I very much respect and admire recently ran into a situation concerning a musical video he created and posted on the net.
Needless to say, the video is sensational and was quite popular... so much so that now because of a mixup with his ISP, he is on the receiving end of a $4800 bandwidth bill. All for just trying to share something beautiful with others, for free.
You'll probably recall the video in question: Sad Song, by Fredo. You had even posted a link to it in your blog, last month I believe.
Now, I am not in the slightest suggesting that your post was responsible for the links. After all, there are a myriad ways popular links can spread throughout the Internet. I know I myself passed out the link to a number of friends.
What I am suggesting (well, humbly requesting, really) is that you make mention of Fredo's plight in your blog, so that others who have enjoyed this video as much as you and I did can help Fredo out with this crippling expense.
Fredo's blog can be reached at:
http://fredo.em411.com/show/blog/2371/1
He mentions a PayPal link there for anyone who might want to help.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-Anonymous Fredo and Gaiman fan
I feel a bit guilty about this. Not quite as guilty as I ought to feel, as I did check with Fredo before posting the link, and warn him that he would be getting traffic if I did, but still pretty guilty, as I doubt either of us would have expected him to get an initial bill for $10,000 from his ISP. So if any of you enjoyed Fredo's "Sad Song" song and video, yes, please go and help bail him out. Or offer to mirror it for him. Or something.
(Suddenly I'm very very pleased that Harper Collins hosts and runs and pays for Neilgaiman.com.)
Dear Mr. Gaiman
In the introduction to Sandman Endless Nigths you wrote: "I met Miguelanxo Prado in the Andalusian town of Gijon.". I just wanted to let you know that Gijon is located in Asturias and not in Andalusia. I don't pretend that you have to know about Spanish geography, but if you use and explicit reference to a city you should confirm that It is correct.
I met you some years ago in Barcelona I just hope that if you name Barcelona in one of your books you say that It is located in Catalonia and not in Asturias or Andalusia.
Best regards,
Vicente Castán
Sant Cugat del Valles
A Catalonian town located in the Barcelona province.
I know, I know. We caught this almost immediately when the hardback came out, and it's meant to be corrected sooner or later (as are several other things in Endless Nights). Alas, economies of scale mean that when they printed up the hardback of Endless Nights, they also printed enough extra insides to see them through the first printing of the paperback...
(As an aside -- I learned from DC that the orders of Sandman: Endless Nights in paperback from bookshops took up 2/3 of the initial orders, while the comics shops "direct market" were 1/3. For years the balance has hung around 50/50. Now it seems to have tipped. Interesting.)
Which reminds me: for those of you who were waiting for the paperback of Sandman: Endless Nights, it's now out. And for those of you who've been waiting for the hardback of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, that's now out as well.
...
According to Wired:
"Attendees overall were once much younger," said O'Brien, referring to past World Science Fiction Conventions in Boston. "And a third of them wore costumes inspired by their favorite films, comics and TV shows."
I think we can take it as a given that attendees of cons were once much younger. Most of them started out as teeny tiny babies, after all. But I don't recall a world in which a third of the people at Boston Worldcons (or was this all worldcons?) were in costume. I've been to a lot of conventions of all kinds, and people in costume tend to be a very small -- if impressive and memorable -- minority.
(Actually I do suspect that Worldcon Fandom is ageing -- but I think that has a lot more to do with the con's location moving around the world year by year than with a general ageing of Fandom per se.)
...
And finally, given this journal's experiences over the years with the INS ( here and here, for example) it's nice to know that it can be just as Kafkaesque and silly for Americans. Read it and sigh...
When I was in Paris in January 2003, I did a signing at Mille Pages. During the signing I received two gifts: an oversized Moleskine notebook (in which several chunks of Anansi Boys have since been written, not to mention several dozen afterwords, introductions and speeches) and a book of photographs of the Parisian catacombs. I also learned that evening from several people who had firsthand knowledge of the matter that Paris -- and particularly what one might call Paris Beneath -- contains a number of individuals for whom Neverwhere is less of a novel and more of an instruction book, or a manual. Alas, due to logistics, I didn't manage to get taken on a French catacombian journey (you can read about it in the middle of http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/01/i-am-typing-this-on-train-to-angouleme.asp).
So I wasn't very surprised to learn from the Guardian about the secret cinema beneath the streets of Paris...
Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said. (Check it out. And thanks to all of you who've let me know about it.)
...
I've put up details on the Washington Library of Congress Book Festival on October 9th over at WHERE'S NEIL -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/where.asp . There will be a reading and a Q&A, and a signing earlier in the morning. It's a marvellous line-up of authors as well.
...
I think Robert Sawyer is a smart man, and am familiar enough with the ways of journalists to know that quotes from an article like this one in the Globe and Mail can be dodgy enough things at the best of times.
Still, these paragraphs fascinate me:
Take the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Stanley Kubrick's film was released in 1968, it had a vision of the future that included commercial space stations and widespread cryogenics. By the actual year 2001, however, the movie proved to be light-years ahead of available technology. "Regrettably, with 2001 having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying: 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year and we didn't get anything at all like that . . .," said Sawyer. "So part of it is that the readership has bailed." I am, I pride myself, old enough to remember 2001 (the year, not the movie) and, although I was looking quite carefully, I completely failed to notice people announcing that since there were no orbital space stations and Black Monoliths, they would now, disappointed beyond endurance, be "bailing" and no longer read science fiction. But then I'm also old enough to remember readers not giving up reading SF in 1984 despite a peculiar lack of Big Brother, the non-appearance of the Anti-Sex League, and Margaret Thatcher's obdurate refusal to rename the British Isles "Airstrip One".
"I would not be encouraging a young person today to be entering science fiction as a profession. I do have a fear that the science-fiction novel is as much an artifact of the 20th century as Victorian literature was of the 19th," said Sawyer.
For myself, I'd happily encourage any young person to enter SF as a profession. I don't believe SF is dead, or any deader than it was in 1983. I do feel that SF right now, like SF then, is waiting for new paradigms, for some new fiction that brings the same fresh buzz that Bill Gibson's "Neuromancer" did when it was published in 1984, the same sense that this was Today's Future, rather than Yesterday's; and that we'll get that from the young writers who, today, just have dreams that one day they could, possibly, make a living from making things up...
...
Reading, with horror and fascination, http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/
...
The fax machine downstairs had almost become a dusty antique, but recently Dave Sim has been sending daily faxes of each day's Cerebus mass-mailing. Some of them are really, really funny. I'm hoping there will be a place for people to read them all.
It's also becoming obvious that Dave is Planning Something. I have no idea what, but he seems to be enjoying planning it no end.
Let's see. I did lots of cool things in the last few days. I'll forget some of them, I'm sure. But in no particular order, things that I really enjoyed included,
Meals with old friends I don't see often enough, like Jack Dann (with Jonathan Strahan, who casually asked if he could have "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves of the Nameless House in the Night of Dread Desire" for the Haber-Strahan Year's Best Fantasy. You'll be glad to hear that after giving it my full consideration for an infinitesimally small amount of a millisecond, I said yes), and Colleen Doran (who is amazingly funny), John and Judith Clute and Elizabeth Hand (somehow John and I had a whole conversation without either of us ever mentioning Jack Benny, and Judith has agreed to write a guest entry on What To Do When You're Visiting London for this blog); and the mythical Jon Singer, Claudia Gonson and Chris Ewen (not to mention John M Ford and Elise Matheson, but I eat with them back home too). I got up early this morning to have breakfast with Harry Harrison, who I've known for over twenty years, and who says that all SF and fantasy writers are mad...
Sitting in the hotel bar with Nick Sagan, Michael and Nomi Burstein, with Rick Berry and Shawna McCarthy and Martha Soukup, learning cool bits of Judaica and looking at amazing Rick Berry images...
The Hugo Awards. I had a great time. I don't remember enjoying either of the other two Hugo Ceremonies I attended, because I was so nervous about being a nominee. I had no idea if I'd be a good MC or not, but wanted to see, and I loved doing it, and trying to make it work and be as comfortable as possible an experience for everyone involved. (When it came to the category I was a nominee in, I declined to hold the award, because I didn't want to glance down at the little plaque on the Hugo which says who won, before it was announced. It seemed the right way to do it.)
Briefing Phil Klass -- William Tenn -- before the Hugos on what he'd be doing. He's slightly deaf, and cheerfully curmudgeonly, and when I told him he would read the nominees for best novel, open the envelope and announce the winner, he said "Denounce the winner? Why would I do that?" and then he said "I will if you want me to, though." And I suspected that he might have done. He wrote some astonishing stories, of which the one that feels more and more relevant these days is one called THE LIBERATION OF EARTH. (I just googled it, but found only a Mumpsimus essay on it by Matthew Cheney, who I met at a hot, sweaty room-party and who was, unsuprisingly given his blog, both smart and nice.]
Leaving the con for half an afternoon to watch (and listen) as Claudia Gonson sang an astonishingly lovely scratch vocal track to a Chris Ewen melody I wrote words for, called "Unresolving (The Way We Used To)" � I sort of think of it as a 1950s Death Song, sung by the girl in the car crash several months after she's died. Until Claudia sang it, the only person who had sung it was me, and the nature of the melody is that I can't really sing it, as every now and again the tune nips up a couple of octaves to make sure you're paying attention. I'd hoped it worked, and was overjoyed to discover, listening to Claudia, that it did. Chris Ewen has two small black dogs he's convinced are chihuahuas, called Tesla and Edison ("Ah," I said, "they're AC/DC."). I think they look like miniature alien rottweilers, orange eyebrows and all. Also he has lenticular postcards all over his bathroom.
Reading the first chapter of ANANSI BOYS to about 500 people, who all laughed in the right places (ie pretty much anywhere) and who seemed to enjoy it. I learned a lot about the text by reading it aloud to a roomful of people (I learned enough that I plan to read a whole lot more of ANANSI BOYS aloud at the Fiddler's Green convention in November.)
The panel on Death (and on characters after Death) was really enjoyable. One of the last things in the convention, with Terry Pratchett, Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Uncle River, Scott Edelman, and an enormous and enthusiastic audience participating. (In my last 5 minutes at the con I ran into several old friends from all over the world I'd not seen in the previous 5 days.)
Coffee with Tor editor Beth Meacham this afternoon, which was just meant to be a quick hullo, and which turned into me agreeing (to both of our surprise) to coedit a book of someone else's stories; running into editor Betsy Wollheim and her husband Peter Stampfel in the elevator, and telling Peter that I owned his 1996 "Hello CD of the Month Club" CD, and how much I liked it, and him offering me more CDs...
Talking Fiddler's Green with Davey Snyder (but that's an entry that can wait a couple of days)...
...
And by the magic of computers, I'm now in New York for a day of meetings, and then a flight home, but in the meantime I should go to bed. So this post will simply stop, just like --
Right. So...
It's been a long, chocabloc and very hectic day which has not finished yet, but I've grabbed a couple of minutes to let you know that
a) I was Master of Ceremonies for the 51st Hugo Awards this evening. It went really well. (I can't post my speech, because it only exists as a bunch of very odd notes to myself about things to talk about, and I no longer remember what I said.) The evening went really smoothly.
b) I won the Hugo award for Best Short Story for "A Study In Emerald". I didn't swear at all in my acceptance speech. I remembered to thank my editors (Michael Reaves and John Pelan) and Kim Newman and Alan Moore, who were my intended audience for it. I forgot to thank H. P Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, without whom there would not have been a story at all.
If the truth be told, it's a lot easier being up for a Hugo when you're MC. You don't worry about whether you've won or not, you don't sit there with slowly rising panic as your category nears. Instead, it's just one very minor thing to worry about in the giant process of making sure the evening runs like clockwork -- some minor logistical worries involved in being the MC and a nominee, but I probably cared less whether I'd won or lost this evening than anyone else in the audience, just because I had so many other things to care about. I cannot recommend being Master of Ceremonies highly enough, for those who suffer from nominee stress.
Lots of people came over and congratulated me on the way the evening had gone, and I told them about the convention staff they couldn't see, who made sure it worked so smoothly while I got to be a sort of ringmaster.
My favorite moment on the stage this evening was Robert Silverberg reminiscing about 50 years of Hugo Awards. He's been to all of them. In the photos I've seen, the younger Bob Silverberg used to look like Jesus. When I first met him, over twenty years ago, he looked rather like I imagine the Devil must look. Now, in his Grand Masterhood, with his beard pure white, he looks rather like God. It's dead impressive.
(And I'd like to insert a small thank you here -- I'm not a great one for formal wear, so it was not that astonishing to discover that I'd packed a shirt that needed cufflinks, but no cufflinks. So while I scribbled notes for my speech and biographical bits on the night's presenters, Anne and Bill Murphy (Anne is helping make sure I'm where I'm meant to be, while I'm here) set off on a cufflink expedition, and came back with a gift of free cufflinks from "Classic Tuxedo" in Boston. So my grateful thanks to the people at Classic Tuxedo. There.)
G'night.
I'm in Boston.
Just a couple of things I wanted to post before I forget...
1) I'm doing a reading and a signing at DreamHaven on September the 18th. What I read depends a bit on what I read on Saturday and how it goes. It may be some of Anansi Boys, it might be something else. Not sure. Normally we try and do signings around new books, and I suppose we could make this a signing for the new THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH or for THE NEIL GAIMAN AUDIO COLLECTION, but mostly it's just a signing because Elizabeth at DreamHaven told me I hadn't done one there in ages and it was time. (She says I'm going to talk about the CBLDF and Fiddler's Green as well, and I'm sure I'll mention them, especially if anyone asks a question, but it's really not going to be A Talk. It'll be a reading & questions.)
2) There's a review of M. John Harrison's wonderful SF novel LIGHT at SFsite, by Jeff VanderMeer. (He likes it as much as I did.) The book has a great big quote from me talking about it on this journal at the top, which makes me wish that I'd been writing a blurb for publication. (They asked if they could use what I said here, and I said yes, but still: it's an amazing novel and it deserves better.) Which reminds me that over at DreamHaven's Neilgaiman.net site there's space for me to recommend books, which I keep meaning to do. So I think I'll begin by trying to compile a list of books I've said nice things about in this blog over the years, like Light and like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (which reminds me: here's a very odd article from the Village Voice on Fantasy and Susanna Clarke and Strange & Norrell. Or rather, here's a fairly good article with a really weird opening paragraph, in which we learn that the English write fantasy well because they need to escape the horribleness of England, while Americans write good SF about going to other planets because, er, America is such a great place. Which seems to be balderdash in a number of different ways. The Mumpsimus lists a few of them here.)
And I'll answer a question before bed:
Hi Neil,
A friend's house burned down a couple of weeks ago. The contents of her hard drive are a mangled mess of melted silicone. Very upsetting to her, but frankly not to very many other people. If that happened to your hard drive, however, lots and lots of people would be most upset. So my question is, you do have a backup of your hard drive, which you update regularly, that you store off-site, don't you? Don't you?
Nikki in Little Rock
More or less. There's an in-house backup of everything. I also tend to copy the directories with things I've written on them to odd places like onto my iPod (it's amazing how little room word processing files take up compared to anything else - zipped, everything I've written in the last 14 or 15 years, in multiple drafts and god-knows what else only takes up around 40 meg), and I've e-mailed them to myself at my gmail account. You know, if I got a slightly larger memory chip, I could store it all on my phone...
Very very quick one: the signing at the NESFA table is at 11:00am on Saturday (immediately after the reading) NOT on Sunday.
There.
Just received my Worldcon public schedule, for anyone who's interested.
(I've taken out things like the Hugo rehearsals, and the outing with Claudia Gonson and Chris Ewen to lay down a guide track for a song called "unresolving". This is just signings and panels and such.)
Friday
Friday 11 am Locus Awards -accept the Locus award for NOVELETTE
"A Study in Emeralds", as well as for SHORT STORY "Closing Time" and NON-FICTION/ART for Sandman: Endless Nights.
Friday 5 pm (I-hour) Autograph Session
Hynes Convention Center, in the second floor Boylston Hallway
Saturday
Saturday 10 am (1-hour) Reading
saturday [Not Sunday] 11 am Autographing NESFA book (Adventures in the Dream Trade) at NESFA Press Table.
Saturday 5 pm The Monster in the Maze
Neil Gaiman Stephen Dedman Simon R. Green
Yves Meynard Robert Sheckley
Saturday 6:00 PM through 7:45 Hugo Nominees Reception
Saturday 8 pm to 10 pm (roughly): MC Hugo Awards
Sunday
Sunday 1 pm (1-hour) Autograph Session Hynes Convention Center, in the second floor Boylston Hallway
Monday
Monday 2:00 pm How Do You Know When You're Dead?
Neil Gaiman
Scott Edelman (M)
Larry Niven
Terry Pratchett
Uncle River
Connie Willis
No, I have no idea what I'm going to read on the Saturday Morning. Maybe some ANANSI BOYS?
You know, when I read something like this...
A 6-foot-tall, 275-pound bearded man crashed a children's birthday party in Oak Forest, identified himself as "vengeance," then helped himself to a piece of cake, police said.
The incident occurred earlier this month at a home in the 14800 block of South Landings Lane in the south suburb, Deputy Police Chief Nick Sparacino said.
When the owner of the home asked the man who he was, the intruder replied, "I am vengeance. I am the knight. I am Batman." Then the man went into the kitchen, cut a piece of birthday cake, took it into the living room and ate it.
After continued questioning by the homeowner, the man left the house and drove off in a red 1988 Cadillac.
...I don't find myself wondering the obvious things (how do they know he's 275 lbs, wouldn't Batman be more likely to hunt down cake-stealers than to help himself to cake, etc etc etc). I don't even wonder about the "continued questioning by the homeowner" (probably questions like "how much do you weigh?" and "so what happened to the Batmobile then?"). No, I just keep wondering whether the mysterious stranger said, as reported, "I am the knight" or whether he actually said "I am the night". Bet it was the latter.
...
I've found some clothes to wear while MCing the Hugo Awards. Now I just need to figure out what I'm going to say. (Probably, given the length of the award ceremonies, the less the better.)
Yes, I'll be doing some other things at Worldcon. I'll put them up in a separate post.
...
Every day, for the last few days, the fax machine has extruded letters on Dave Sim's Aardvark Vanaheim stationary. These are mostly form letters to accompany the signed Cerebuses he's sending people, with occasional personal letters, but Dave is writing a completely different form letter every day (and a few people have sent me transcriptions of other form letters, so I know even I'm not getting the full set). They're very funny.
Here's a letter from someone who got a personal letter...
Dearest Mr. Gaiman, After receiving this reply by Mr. Sims: http://members.cox.net/winkel/sims.JPG (please excuse the upsidedowness, we read while standing on our heads during yoga class whilst drinking a soy milk chai latte in California) I regret to inform you that you are no longer my "Most Favorite in the Whole Entire World". That honor has now been bestowed on Mr. Sims exclusively (at least for the next 24 hours). I hope that we can still remain friends and you shall always reside in a nice warm cozy place in my heart. Fondest regards,
Manuscript Winkelman
and if you stand on your head you can read it.
Nearly a thousand people have written real paper letters to Dave askng for a signed Sandman-parody Cerebus. It's possible that more of them have written than that, but that they did not know that it's a 60 cent stamp to Canada, not a 37 cent one. (Sorry.) Dave pointed out in some of the letters that when he did a 1000 shop mailing to comic stores he got just four replies back, so I think he's pleased by the response.
The how you can get your Free Cerebus info is at the bottom of this post. (And I've just realised that the version of that link in the previous post was broken. Sorry.)
...
Hi Neil, I have a question for your blog. When ever you talk about being on the road, and other times, you merntion your beard or facial hair. It seems when ever you post a picture of yourself from the road such as "here is me after 3 days" yoou look like a mountian man. How fast does your beard grow????Jocie (I know it's an odd question)
Yes, it is an odd question. But (shrugs) I can grow a pretty convincing beard in about a week of not shaving. It grows pretty fast. (So does my hair, which is why I mostly look like a mop, and will be getting Wendy at Hair Police to make it look less mop-like before I fly to Boston tomorrow.)
Neil, Any advice on doing my first public book reading/signing?I'm figuring an old bit, a bit from the current book, and something a bit more recent is the way to go. That and I'm having it in a bar, so the audience will have a chance to get liquored up before I go on, which can only make me funnier.Other than your accent, which I can't do, what works well for you?-Todd Allen
Start with something funny, and don't outstay your welcome.
Have fun with it (that way, at least one person will be enjoying it). And make sure they can hear you.
Bad readings tend to be a) dull b) inaudible and c) interminable. If you can avoid these crimes against the audience, you're most of the way there. Don't gabble. Breathe. Answer questions if people have any. And stop while they're still enjoying themselves.
Let me know how it goes.
This is a helpful one...
In your blog entry of August 29, you used the word 'tulpa'. I was confused. My dictionary dumbfounded. Google, however, was both overassertive and (uncharacteristically) forthright: This link "http://www.tulpa.com/explain/tulpaexplain.html"might help people like me, who read your blog but were nevertheless confused. The dictionaries are on their own.yt,ralf
and, finally, a beautiful one...
Hi. I have finally got around to putting my Snow, Glass, Apples project onto my website.
If you are at all interested in seeing my photographic interpretations of your short story please feel free to have a look at the link below which will take you to the images.http://www.darkendstar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/snow.htmI will be graduating with a HND in photography on the 10th of September.
My Snow, Glass, Apples images were my final major project for the HND course, I hope you'll be pleased to learn that I received a distinction for them and I'd also like to thank you for your unwitting help in my obtaining my qualification.
Yours GratefullyJoanne EarpBirmingham UK
You're very welcome.
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