"Neil Gaiman? What are you doing in my falafel?"

Outside it's raining - not hard, but continually - and the wind is alternately gusting and howling. Things that shouldn't be blowing over are blowing over, and I am less inclined to walk the dogs than I ought to be.

Cabal is walking better each day. Lola (who no longer looks like she did in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/06/not-dead-yet.html) is about eight months old and as big as he is, or almost, and bounds through the undergrowth like a special effect of a sped-up weightless rocket-dog. I do not think this makes Cabal happy.

I never wrote about Lola, did I? I should, and will, but not today. But for those who are wondering... we adopted her through Petfinder.com, and we got her to be company for Cabal (we seemed so much happier when we had Pearl staying here). She's growing up, is terrifyingly smart, and in photos you can easily distinguish her from Cabal because his nose is pink while hers is black.

Hang on. Let me find a photo from the day when Amanda and I drove down to the Wisconsin Dells and got her...

Hm. It already seems impossible that Lola was ever that small. Or that it was that warm here or that the trees had leaves on them.

(For anyone going "How beautiful they are. I wish I had a White German Shepherd," right now Petfinder.com needs homes for 193 White German Shepherds. Do not get a German Shepherd (of any colour) unless you have lots of room for it, space for it to run, and are willing to put on your coat and boots and head back out into the wind and rain and walk it... sigh....)

...

This week my ARTHUR episode is up at the PBS site. It's only watchable from the US or with a US IP address, and I do not know how long it will stay up. But right now, you can see me and the Falafel in:

http://to.pbs.org/8Y8A4P

And Steve Fritz talks to me and PBS about it at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5925092/an_animated_conversation_with_neil.html?cat=2
...

The next email came in back in May.

Now, I am very squeamish on all eyeball-related matters, and after I clicked on the links and looked at them, I thought these photos were beautiful, so I asked Alexx if he'd mind me putting them up on the blog. He said yes. Which was just about the point where the blog went onto a sort-of hiatus.

Today he wrote and reminded me (thank you, Alexx...) and I take great pleasure in putting them up here.

I know lots of people get tattoos based on your work -- but how many people get new eyeballs? My wife Kestrell, who is blind, and to whom I read the entirety of Sandman early in our relationship, finally convinced her ocularist to make her Delirium eyes.

I documented the whole process with pictures on my LJ. Some of the pictures may be not for the squeamish, but the whole thing is very educational. And at the end, Delirium eyes!

http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/287659.html
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/287849.html
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/288231.html
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/288472.html
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/289581.html

...

I was thrilled to see Stephen King endorsing the instant All Hallow's Read tradition at http://www.stephenking.com/news.html (thank you, Steve), and to see the Washington Post blog take it up (and ask for #booksthatfreakedmeout on Twitter).

I finished reading Mary Ann in Autumn (here's the Harpers page for it, with lots of extras). It's as sharp and as timely and as humane as all of the Tales of the City books, and a ball that Armistead Maupin tossed into the air in the very first of the books finally comes down here. (And I went and checked my copy of Sure of You to see if he had done what I thought he had done, and he had.)

It goes on sale next week, but you can read the first six chapters at http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061470882.

Labels: Armistead Maupin, Arthur on PBS, Delirium eyes, L-0-L-A Lola, petfinder

Not Wearing My T-Shirt and vibrating ducks

Despite (possibly because of) not living in the UK for most of the year, I remain incredibly proud of the BBC.

It's facing a future of real-world budget cuts (of the kind that leaves me hoping that Doctor Who will not soon be about two people who live in a small flat in Cardiff having a tiddlywinks contest for the fate of the universe).

Mitch Benn is proud of it too. Watch this video to find out why and how...

Here's the story of how he made the video. He sent me my very own Proud of the BBC T-shirt which I would be wearing right now if it wasn't in the wash.

In lieu of me modelling it, I will simply point you to http://mitchbenn.com/proudofthebbc/

where you can get your own T-shirt. You can wear it all over the world to signify your pride in the BBC, or just show that you look wicked in a black T-shirt.

...

My episode of ARTHUR went out today in the US. (There are parts of the US where it has't gone out yet. Check your local listings. It's called Falafelosophy.) PBS have said they plan to get it up online soon - I'll put up a link when it is.

And here's an interview done by the Ace Hotel in New York when I stayed there. The interview includes vibrating ducks and the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. Also a photograph of me playing the ukulele.

http://blog.acehotel.com/post/1384480881/ace-hotel-new-york-neil-gaiman-interview

...

I loved this:

I have no idea whether this is the proper way to comment on blog entries. If it's wrong then just pretend that I didn't send it. :-)

A comment to the latest blog entry:

"You know, there aren't enough traditions that involve giving books."

When I and my husband moved in together, we joined our libraries. But we had one problem: all the books we both liked, and now had two copies of. In the beginning, we didn't do much about it. I mean - what if you decide you don't belong together anyway, then you want to take your books with you when you split, right? But after a while, we decided that we wanted to get rid of the duplicates - as a sign that we would live together forever, and not ever need two copies of Neverwhere again.

So we arranged our wedding according to this idea; we gave each of the guests one book (or cd) from our duplicates, so that they could share this decision with us. Also they got a good book - obviously it was a book that both me and my husband liked (Well - with the exception of The Sword of Shannara, which we would have given away both copies of if we had found anybody who wanted them. :-) and would have it as a memory of our wedding.

And yes, we've lived happily ever since (nine years now), I don't ever see the need of reacquiring any of the duplicates we gave away, and I like it as a ceremony; it had a lot more meaning to us than most kinds of wedding ceremonies.

Regards (and thanks for all those great books!)

Monika

and this:

Dear Mr Gaiman,

After reading your post about more book giving traditions I just wanted to point out (as I imagine a lot of other people will as well, but just in case they don't) that there is a Norwegian tradition of giving/reading detective/crime stories at Easter, known as påskekrim; this literally means 'Eastercrime'.

Best wishes
Solveig Felton -- Swedish, not Norwegian, just in case you actually read this far and wondered.

P.S. Thank you for writing! While I don't love everything you write (sorry!) I like most of it enough to always be willing to try a new book of yours and I love some of it to the point of plotting excuses to give the books to my friends.

And the idea of the All Hallow's Read has got some wonderful responses from bloggers. Monica Edinger talks about it over at the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monica-edinger/my-response-to-neil-gaima_b_772941.html

...while The Bloggess not only blogs about it but includes a photograph of herself in the bath in The Shining at http://thebloggess.com/?p=8787

And Joe Hill, who wrote one of the scariest books of recent times in Heart-Shaped Box, endorses it and makes some suggestions over at http://joehillfiction.com/?p=1678

(Lots of excellent scary book suggestions over at http://www.facebook.com/neilgaiman as well.)

To clarify, I'm not proposing that you give books or comics instead of chocolate bars or razor-stuffed apples (if you're in a country that hands out candies on Hallowe'en). (Although some some people do that, and with success -- I've already heard from people who have gone down to charity shops and walked out with boxes of vintage R.L. Stine books that they plan to hand to kids).

I'm proposing something slightly different.

That you give someone a scary book this Hallowe'en.

You certainly don't have to give everyone you know a scary book. Just pick someone, or a few someones, you care about. Then give them a book this week that'll scare their hair white.

Labels: All Hallow's Read, Arthur on PBS, BBC, Mitch Benn

Nine pictures from my life (and one drawing)

I'm not going to say a lot about Campfire, not what happened or who was there, because it was a very private sort of a thing.



At first I was suspicious. I've seen a lot of late 1960s and early 1970s SF television, and whenever a bunch of creative people are taken off by a private plane to a mysterious location, they are normally either brainwashed or replaced by exact duplicates who are sent back to society with a mysterious and probably fatal agenda.

Private plane. Check. Mysterious location. Check.

Uh-oh.

So I spent much of the journey to, and the first day at, Campfire convinced it was all much too good to be true, and expecting that when I went back to my room there would be my exact duplicate waiting in the wardrobe, holding a silvery gun...

Everything pointed to that. Aha, I thought, when the buses pulled up: THE COMPOUND. I was expecting barbed wire and enormous dogs and no way to let our loved ones know what had happened to us when the robot duplicates returned in our stead.

The Compound turned out to be a really nice local restaurant.

You could bring someone, and (as Amanda is still in Cabaret, and Maddy was on a school field-trip) I brought my literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz, not as my agent but as my friend of (now) 23 years. She had as good a time as I did.

Photo by Seth Godin

I left Campfire reinvigorated, excited about art, and looking forward to getting back to work and happy to be writing again. I saw some old friends, made a number of new friends, learned so much about so many things, and was happy.

These are two of the new friends I made -- Aubrey de Grey (on the left) and Dr Sarah Marr (who blogs at http://scidoll.com). Aubrey, who has a beard that rivals the young Alan Moore's, is an astonishing speaker and advocate for treating aging as a curable disease, and I spent most of the four hour flight from New York asking him hard questions and enjoying his answers. Their website is http://sens.org/, and I'm hoping to write more about Aubrey and Sens.org at some time soon. (And Sarah's promised me my own special link from here to sens.org when I do.)

And then I came home. (I came home with a signed copy of Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in the Autumn, having told Armistead Maupin how much I felt Sandman had owed to Tales of the City. I'm reading it now and loving it.)

In the time that I was away, Maddy had grown even more, had a haircut and turned into a self-assured young woman....

Seen here with her actual and original dad, and almost definitely not a brainwashed or android duplicate sent back into the world to wreak havok:

Cabal is still recovering from his operations: his spine was decompressed, and now he's walking again. He can't run yet, and so he's always on a lead (er, leash to Americans) to stop him dashing off after an interesting rabbit.

Last night, in the small hours, he couldn't get up, and started screaming with pain. I've never heard him do that before. I know that German Shepherds have ridiculously high pain threshholds, so if it was hurting, it was hurting him more than anything has before. This was bad. I held him until he was able to stand, then gave him his medicine, and then worried about him, and still do, and will continue to do so until he's walking and running again without difficulty.

Meanwhile, Lola has grown several inches and put on many pounds (mostly by eating both of their dinners, I am convinced) and is beautiful and fast and incredibly smart.

But Cabal is still My Dog, and she is, well, not my dog in the same way. She's a good friend, he's family.

...

A couple of quick reminders: If you know what W00tstock is, you won't need to go to http://w00tstock.net/ to have it explained. If you don't know, you should go to http://w00tstock.net/ and read what you find there.

On November 2nd, I'll be standing in for Wil Wheaton at the Austin Texas W00tstock. There is much information on the evening and ticket-ordering information at http://www.austintheatre.org/site/Calendar/250633393?view=Detail&id=24581 I believe tickets are going extremely fast. And if you don't want to see me, there will be other people there, people of talent and humour. And if that isn't enough, I'm afraid Paul and Storm will almost certainly sing their Captain's Wife's Lament song.

Austin. The one in Texas. Three days before Guy Fawkes Night. Which they probably don't actually celebrate in Texas.

...

Here's a huge interview with me in the Vulture - http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/10/the_vulture_transcript_neil_ga.html

At one point I'm talking about the nature of privacy and blogging, and mention Amanda, who ponders (and, I think, in the end, disagrees with me) over at http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/1344925312/the-mutation-of-embarrassment-art-random-thoughts-of in the kind of blog entry that has as much interesting stuff in the comments as in the journal.

...

And I got to see "Falalafelosophy", the episode of ARTHUR with me in it, playing a walking talking authory black cat named Neil Gaiman. It airs in the US on the 25th of October, although it's already crept out into the world in Australia and (I think) Canada.

It's funny and sweet, and it says things I believe in. I hope that every kid who watches it decides to make his or her own graphic novel.

Labels: Arthur on PBS, Cabal and me, L-0-L-A Lola, nine photographs, Paul and Storm, the blogs and the twitter and the public and the private, w00tstock

A Spectrum of Stuff

Let's see if this works...

When last heard from I was in Wales, for the Doctor Who table read. And then I was off the world picking plums.

I'm still off the edge of the world right now. I was exhausted when I got here -- more exhausted than even I knew, I think. Too much travel, too much nothing ever quite stopping, too many meals on the road. I felt old and creaky and tired.

I spent my first week catching up on my sleep, eating sensible meals that I made myself, mostly veggies and fruits and fresh-caught fish (courtesy of the neighbours, who would walk up the hill and tap on the window, and give me fresh-caught mackerel and such. I gave them bags of plums). I did a lot of walking. Then I got a bicycle, and started going on daily bike rides, two miles to start with, which turned into six to ten miles each day as soon as I started to get into it. I'd take photos of things I'd pass while bike-riding using my little Nexus 1 phone camera and then knit them together with a stitcher program called Hugin.

An interesting rock.

During the first of the ten mile bike rides, I realised I knew what the next big fictional prose story I wanted to tell is. And that I know the story, or enough of it, but not who tells it, who sees it, how it's told. It may have to go back and forth with different people telling different chapters, and bits in diaries and such. It's tremendously reassuring when that happens - an idea turns up and you know it's big and it has legs and nobody's told that story before. And that if you just get all the pieces into position before you start, the plot will take care of itself. Getting the pieces into place is going to be the hard bit.

It may be a while before I'm ready to start writing it. Lots of thinking to do first. But it's the next big story, I think.

And somewhere in there I lost about 8 pounds, stopped creaking and feeling old and travel-weary and started smiling, and wrote a couple of things that people were waiting for. Didn't write many more things people were waiting for, but I don't feel too bad about it: everything will get written eventually.

On Saturday I stop being a hermit and hit the road. Later in the week I'll arrive in Wales, to see the first couple of days of filming of my episode and be interviewed by Doctor Who Confidential.

News from home:

1) Cabal had an operation to uncompress parts of his spine, as he was having trouble walking. He's recovering. I am still worried. We chat on Skype. Or at least, I talk to him and he tries to figure out where my voice is coming from. Lorraine has done an amazing job of being there and keeping everything going, as has Woodsman Hans, and I am grateful. Now we wait. Lorraine's been keeping things updated on her blog, at http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com.

2) On October the 25th, I'll be on PBS's Arthur. I play a writer called Neil Gaiman.

I'm a writer who's a cat. You can be both.

You can read about it at http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/09/neil-gaiman-gets-animated-on-arthur/.

3) Maddy Gaiman passed her driving test. All of my children can now drive. Ulp.

4) There's an eBay auction going on through http://www.twitchange.com/, to raise money for a Haitian orphanage. Lots of people taking part who will mention/retweet/follow you on Twitter if you win the auction. I've also said I'll call the winner of the "megapack" auction for me and read them a poem or a short story. It seems an easy, sensible way to help raise money for a good cause. The complete list of people offering their services (including Stephen Fry and Nathan Fillion and Rainn Wilson) is up at http://bit.ly/twitchanges....

And you can bid on me, or see where bidding is at, at http://bit.ly/ebayneil

5) Matthew Cheney's been writing about Sandman, chapter by chapter, each week. Here are the links to the first 8 episodes - the whole of Preludes and Nocturnes: http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-preludes-and-nocturnes-cheat-sheet/ while The Doll's House begins with http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-tales-in-the-sand/

6) Over at the TOR website, they've reprinted my story "Bitter Grounds", originally from Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, and later in Fragile Things: http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/09/bitter-grounds.

The illustration is a painting by Rick Berry, working into a painting that he, and I, and my friend SuperKate, were doing in his studio one night (he writes about it here, photos by me).

(And look! Here is that man Matthew Cheney talking about "Bitter Grounds" at the Mumpsimus.)

7) No, that was all. Just six things. There isn't a seventh. It's like the rainbow, where they changed Purple to Indigo and Violet just to make it more interesting.

Labels: arbitrary spectrum composition thoughts, Arthur on PBS, bigger on the inside, do bactera wiggle?, Doctor Who, Dog, seven things, the composition of rainbows

Playing a small imaginary me

I'm so behind.

In LA. Working hard, meeting people, sorting things out, the usual. Woke up this morning to a phone call from my agent, letting me know that CORALINE had been nominated for an Oscar. It would be nice if UP won Best Picture and CORALINE took Best Animated Picture, but truthfully, I do not believe that will happen.

Then went to record my part in PBS's "ARTHUR". I play me. And I also play a tiny imaginary version of me. (This is me recording my part, above. I am just wearing a black tee shirt, but it looks like I am wearing something much more interesting.)

Today, more meetings, then being interviewed for a documentary on the history of DC Comics.

Special thing: the people at Fantagraphics have put up a secret web-page to give readers of this blog a discount ($100, reduced from $125) on the Huge, Wonderful Three Volume Complete Playboy Cartoons of Gahan Wilson book they are publishing, and in addition are offering the first hundred people who sign up from here, free, a signed three-colour Gahan Wilson print, into the bargain. I wrote the introduction to one of the books, and am getting nothing back from this (in case you were wondering) but the warm feeling of getting 50 years of glorious, scary, disturbing and wonderful Gahan Wilson cartoons into the hearts and minds of the world.

The link is at: http://www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3750&Itemid=190

Labels: Arthur on PBS, zoom

A SMALL CAT STORY, and tabs to close

About twelve years ago it became very apparent that my house was going to fall down unless Something was Done: the rear part of the house, built about 30 years after the main house (which is about 120 years old), had no foundation and was pulling away from the main house, but shared a roof with it. None of the things we could do to fix this was cheap, so we gritted our teeth and let builders demolish the rear of the house and put up four storeys of new-old house behind. We added bedrooms and basement rooms, and, given that the upstairs bathroom had been tiny, we had a big bathroom put in.

(I just found a photo of the bath in question, taken immediately following my discovery of LUSH bath products, at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/10/teabreak-over-back-on-my-head.html)



For months, the house was a building site. The place where the bath was going to go, a mass of water pipes and insulation, was also the place where Zoe liked to bed down -- the hot water pipes warmed the soft insulation and created a perfect sort of a cat nest.

The builders put in the bath on a friday afternoon.

Zoe doesn't mew. She does a sort of a "mwelp?" noise, as if she's talking to herself about things that puzzle her or that she's trying to remember. It's not very loud.

Truthfully, I don't know which happened first, whether I noticed that Zoe wasn't around, or I noticed that the bath was going "mwelp?".

I didn't know how to find any of the builders, but I knew how to find their boss, dragged him away from his dinner, and together we uninstalled a large bath. It took a while. And when, finally, we lifted it up, deep down in the pipes and insulation, blinking at the light, was Zoe. I picked her up, and she chewed happily on my chin, and said "mwelp?", and went back to sleep.

Which I write down here because it is a small story that I would hate to die with her.

Lorraine is bringing her home tonight.

Thank you all for your good wishes (and spare some for Olga -- http://olganunes.com -- who always planned to come and take Zoe home again, as soon as Olga was in one place long enough.)

...


Amanda's nominated for both best-dressed and worst-dressed at the Golden Globes, at http://gofugyourself.celebuzz.com/go_fug_yourself/2010/01/globes_bestworst_012210.html. I'm pretty sure that either would make her happy, so I voted for her in both categories. (Here's a link to a picture of us, with her wearing the lovely Kambriel dress she was photographed changing out of after that after-party.)

(She's on a plane to France right now, for the Midem Conference, then on to Australia. We rendezvous in New Zealand, mid-March...then I'll go to the Philippines without her for two days and rejoin her in Poland. And, between now and then, I will miss her.)

...

I think I may abandon Chrome on the Office Mac Quad thing until it comes out of Beta. I am tired of waiting for up to half a minute while a "resolving host" message comes up, almost every time I open a page, and then quite often it telling me that pages that do exist don't, while the various online suggestions for ways to fix it have made not a blind bit of difference.

Back to Camino and Safari, and I think I'll play with Opera for Mac as well. (Which I just have, getting links for this post, and it's blazing.)

...

I wrote two out of the eight books on the Library Journal's best Graphic Novels 2009 list, which was very kind of them. I was glad they had the Crumb Genesis on there. It's an amazing work.

...

It's probably still a secret, but what the hell, it cheered me up today and I will tell you: I'm going to be in an upcoming episode of ARTHUR. Today they sent me the script, and it's a delight: with luck it'll have kids all over the world making their own little graphic novels, and will usher in the dawn of a new golden age of comics and creativity. And without luck it'll still be a really good PBS kids' cartoon but with me in it. (No, I do not know what kind of animal I am going to be.)

...

And finally, a photo, taken by Amanda, of the Golden Globes afterparty CORALINE contingent (L to R; John Hodgman, Henry and Heather Selick, some author):

Labels: Arthur on PBS, bestyworst dressed fiancee, browsers are not really very interesting, mwelp?