Danse Macabre for banjos and clarinet...

So Maddy is sick, and is fast asleep on the other end of the sofa, so I put on Shock Treatment on DVD -- it's been ages since I've seen it (I'm not sure I've actually seen it since it was on in London's West End in about 1981), although I've had the CD (and before that, the LP) for many years, grabbed a computer and thought I should start to catch up on my blogging. I'm way behind on everything (email? returning phone calls? blogging? I'm backlogged on all of them. Let us not even mention anything new I'm meant to be writing). I'm keeping more or less current with the proofreading of Graveyard Book in the various editions, though, and I'm hugely proud of having done the Graveyard Book audio over the last few days.

(Yesterday morning before the reading started I also did an NPR interview about Anansi Boys for the Bryant Park Book Club [you can read the discussion so far here] as a sort of warm up.)

The reading was, in some ways, the hardest I've ever done. I always forget how exhausting doing an audio book is -- sitting in the same position and reading 75,000 words, and getting every word right. The concentration involved is ridiculous. I do them once a year, and admire all the voice actors who do them day after day, reading books they didn't even write! It was hard, and longand somewhere in Chapter Seven I was scared my voice would give out entirely, and then I got to Chapter Eight and it felt like I was flying and could do it forever. (When I finished, I went back and did the very first four pages again, and nailed them.)

Director Michael Conroy flew in from New York. (He replaced the amazing Rick Harris, who recently retired.) He was a fine director -- picked me up on places I flubbed, let me go when I was doing well. We started talking about what kind of music we'd like on it. "The Saint Saens Danse Macabre," I said, "...as long as it isn't a version we've heard before."

By which I meant not a standard orchestral version, or a piano version. Not the Jonathan Creek version either. We started talking about takes on the Danse Macabre that might be odd and interesting, how we should go and find a string quartet version, or a version that's just double basses or accordions, or the danse macabre arranged for banjo and clarinet... and about how hard it would be to find versions like that.

And then we started to wonder whether if I mention it on this blog, we could actually get submissions...

So that's our current plan. No-one's going to get rich from something that's the chapter intro music on an audio book, I'm afraid. And it won't be a competition, more of an easy way for anyone from anywhere in the world to send in audition samples -- and we need to figure out how to do it, and what the technical specs would be. But that's the plan. If you play the Danse Macabre on the musical saw, this may be the opportunity you've been waiting for...

More information as we figure it out.

...

http://www.observer.com/2008/why-jane-friedman-suddenly-not-ceo-harpercollins

thoughts?

There seems to be a little more information at http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/06/jane_friedman_shoved_out_the_d.html and http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-friedman6-2008jun06,0,6511196.story

Honestly, I was shocked and a bit saddened.

Back in early 2002 I was ready to leave Harper Collins, when my then-editor left; Jane Friedman talked me into staying, promised a lot and then delivered on all of her promises. (There were things I wanted that were against Harper Collins policy, like having a trade paperback and a mass market paperback of the same book out at the same time.) I got to spend real time with her last year in Beijing, at the Book Fair, and she really impressed me with her understanding of publishing, of where publishing was going. She's very funny, very practical, ferociously smart. I don't think that Harpers would have been so supportive of the monstrous thing that http://www.neilgaiman.com/ has grown into without Jane -- nor would it have been as easy to push through the free online American Gods a few months ago.

I like Jane -- she's larger than life, and I like larger than life people. I'm glad I was at what turned out to be her farewell party at the Fox lot (even if I did spend much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama) -- and I hope she winds up somewhere that's as challenging for her and as interesting as CEO of Harper Collins.

Hi,

What are your thoughts on the idea of age ratings on books? I personally think it's potentially off putting to children who want to read outside of their "age range".

I saw a discussion about it on BBC Breakfast this morning.

Cheers,

Sarah

I think it's deeply stupid. You can get all the information about who a book is aimed at across to a book buyer with typefaces and design. Putting more or less compulsory coloured bands on books saying what age the reader is expected to be seems like something that's just going to stop people -- of all ages -- reading books. Exclusive, not inclusive.

As far as I know, Bloomsbury, my UK children's publisher, has simply decided not to play, and won't be banding. (Bloomsbury are also doing one edition of The Graveyard Book for adults and another edition for children, and none of us have any idea what age group it's aimed at. People who like reading about a boy who was brought up in a graveayard, I suppose, of whatever age.)

There's a web site http://www.notoagebanding.org/ where a number of authors, illustrators, academics, librarians and editors have pointed out how deeply twerpish the banding is. I signed up for it with enthusiasm, endorsing the following statement:

We are writers, illustrators, librarians, teachers, publishers and booksellers. Some of the undersigned writers and illustrators have a measure of control over what appears on the covers of their books; others have less.

But we are all agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived, damaging to the interests of young readers, and highly unlikely, despite the claims made by those publishers promoting the scheme, to make the slightest difference to sales.

We take this step to disavow publicly any connection with such age-guidance figures, and to state our passionately-held conviction that everything about a book should seek to welcome readers in and not keep them out.

Neil--

When you first posted links and photos on your blog about "Blueberry Girl", your collaboration with Charles Vess,I was thrilled. Now, a bit after a month since it was supposed to be published, I haven't see hide nor hair of it. Was it published in late April, or pushed back?

Thanks so much,

~Madeline

It definitely hasn't been published yet. I looked around, and it looks to me like Blueberry Girl is going to be released in February 2009. (You can see pictures from it at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/185)

Still alive (not the song)

I'm off on the edge of the world with almost no internet connection. It's raining, and my hair has gone peculiarly curly. I've got a sore throat of the kind I get when I've been travelling too much for too long, and have slept for much of the last 48 hours, like I do when I get a sore throat and it's time to sleep it off. I just drove to civilisation where I bought lemons, honey and ginger. And, for some reason that made sense when I bought it, but which now seems increasingly distant, celery. And am now internet cafeing.

I'm working on The Graveyard Book.

Jason Webley's new CD The Cost of Living, is mostly playing in the background while I'm working, and his song from that, Almost Time to Go is sometimes on repeat (Here's the first minute from his website.) Up there with the wonderful strangeness of the Amanda Palmer-Jason Webley Elephant Elephant by Evelyn Evelyn. (http://www.jasonwebley.com/music_elephant.html but it is sold out, alas.) He's having a sale -- http://www.jasonwebley.com/index.html -- until the end of December.

Also listening to the new Thea Gilmore CD, but seeing it's not released yet there's not much point in linking to it. But she's started a Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/TheaGilmore), with, so far, one video of her playing a song on her sofa on it. (Also nice picture taken by Thea's husband-and-producer-and-terrific-songwriter-in-his-own-write Nigel Stonier of Thea and me before Beowulf premiere on her myspace blog.)

Here's a summary of what's going on in the Writers' Strike right now.

Charles Vess has just finished the wraparound cover for BLUEBERRY GIRL...




and finally...

I wrote to you earlier to advise that there was far too much fun being had reviewing Bic pens on Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000JTOYLS/ref=cm_rdp_product). There seems to be even more fun too muchly had reviewing Tuscan milk by a factor of approximately 25 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00032G1S0/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top).
What intrigues me most though is through this page, I now know that if I ever need Uranium Ore, a JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, or simply a Fresh Whole Rabbit, Amazon will be my first stop.


To which I can add nothing.

Blueberry Girls

I took Maddy and her friends to the Mall of America today -- they had unspecified preeteenage things to buy and I needed to visit the Apple store to get Final Cut Studio -- stopping only to pick up my friend Les Klinger from his hotel and drag him along. Not content with having annotated all the Sherlock Holmes stories, he's spent the last few years annotating Dracula, and told me all about it while we ate lunch. The two thirteen year olds and one almost thirteen year old went shopping happily, and returned with several bags, including a bag with the Victoria's Secret logo. ("You really don't have to look like that, dad. We only bought sweatpants there.")

Then I dropped Les off at his hotel and spent too short a time with several old friends, including the Sherlockian Michael Whelan, the Roden family and Michael "Langdale Pike" Dirda, the best-read man in America. Then went home. Installed Final Cut Studio...

Charles Vess talks about BLUEBERRY GIRL, our book for mothers and daughters, and he shows some pictures -- pencils and finished art -- over at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/185. It's a poem I wrote for Tori's daughter Tash, before she was born, and Charles is making it magical. The plan is to donate a percentage of the royalties to RAINN . We announced it a long time ago (in this post) but it's taken a while -- Charles has had so much on his plate, and the paintings have taken him so much longer to do than he expected. But they are astoundingly beautiful.

Talking about raising money for good causes, I got this astonishingly heartening email from Beth at Black Phoenix Alchemy lab...

I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know how the charity drive is doing. =) In the first five days that the Stardust and Good Omens scents were live, we generated $1500.00 for the Orangutan Foundation UK, and $5370.00 for the CBLDF. That brings us to a current total of $15,300.00 for the CBLDF to date!

Which, given the costs of the upcoming Gordon Lee trial (there's an excellent interview with Charles Brownstein about it at http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/features/118336212712690.htm), is a very good thing indeed. Diamond distributors have asked to be able to put a couple of the scents in their catalogue, which Evan Dorkin amusingly interprets as a sign of the oncoming apocalypse. Personally, I think that a better indication of the apocalypse is an entire article on Canadian Comics that manages not to mention Dave Sim or Cerebus. Bizarre. (Incidentally, for those of you who missed it the first time around, I believe Dave's offer at the end of http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/08/lewis-and-clarke-not-to-mention-snuff.asp still stands. Over two thousand people got free comics from him by simply writing in and asking, and I hope that many of them came back and bought the Cerebus collections...)

American Gods Blog, Post 72

So I spent today, as I will spend tomorrow, working on writing a circus. Something I've always wanted to do, which is why I'm currently writing it. (The young lady who runs the circus in question spent a year or so not taking no for an answer from me, and her persistance seems to have paid off. I spent most of today saying things to her like "Can you do this...?" and "What about this...?" and at one point phoning an expert and getting a hasty lecture on the fluorescent qualities of laser beams for something I started wondering about.)

Seeing I plugged a lot of other people's stuff yesterday, I thought I'd point out that The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish makes a really cool Fathers Day present. (Yay! to Amazon.com for featuring it on their kids page.)

And yay! to Morrow for getting out the American Gods newsletter.

Incidentally, if you've received the newsletter with the extract from American Gods in it, I should point out that in that extract, in the phrase "the titter skin-crawling horror" the word "titter" should be "utter", and for that matter that the sentence "He practiced coin tricks from a book lie found in the wasteland of the prison library; and lie worked out;" reads better if you replace the word "lie" with the word "he".

(I hope when they put up the www.americangods.com/excerpt page that they'll put it up from a clean text.)

....

More reviews today -- an enthusiastic one from the Barnes and Noble Explorations magazine, a nice mention from the NY Post, and one from Booklist, where the reviewer, who had loved Neverwhere and Stardust, hated it -- the kind of complete and entire hate where the reviewer doesn't even stop to point out the things he liked about the book, if there were any. He just seemed to wish it was another book entirely, a kind of "this is spinach and I don't like spinach" review: I think Coraline (which comes out next May) will be to his taste.

...

Also brought home several boxes of books, notebooks and such from the office, to compile a sort of core of references I used writing American Gods for NeilGaiman.com. It'll be incomplete, but a good place to start. (The single most useful reference work was probably A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, by Rudolf Simek.)

And I copy-edited a poster of my poem INSTRUCTIONS with art by Brian and Wendy Froud, which will be coming out this summer in a signed, limited edition, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I think it's going to be popular, on the basis that my assistant and my daughter have both extracted a promise from me that they can get one when they come out, from the proof knocking around the office.

(if it's sucessful, we might do a poem I wrote for my goddaughter, as a benefit for RAINN...)

....

Ah, the Chapter One excerpt is up at www.americangods.com/excerpt.html (they left off the html on the newsletter). It's kind of odd -- all the italics have fallen out as well. I'll see if we can get a cleaner copy up...