bees and stuff

I'm home again. (There wasn't a blog entry for the last two days because the hotel in Helena, Montana, had such an intermittently dodgy internet connection -- it would sort of work during the day and then stop working at night, just about the point I'd think "Time to write a blog entry". So I'd sleep instead.)

The Moth event on Thursday night (http://www.themoth.org/) was wonderful and scary -- Pico Iyer, Jonathan Ames, Edgar Oliver, Laila Lalami, and a terrified me telling the last story of the night (about my day on Liverpool Street Station in Easter 1977). A quick google found a review up at http://wordriotpress.blogspot.com/2007/04/moth.html.

I've come away from the PEN World Voices event with a real respect and a great deal more understanding of what PEN is and does. http://www.pen.org/ is their website, and I commend it to you.

Then I went to Helena. Got in late on Friday night. Saturday morning, I talked -- first to librarians about the history of comics and comics censorship and the CBLDF and what it does, then about digital stuff (acknowledging myself to be a pixel-stained technopeasant wretch), then for a lunch I talked to librarians about writing and how I became someone who does that sort of thing, and then I talked to an audience of people from Montana mostly. I read to them, then I answered questions, then I signed books for many extremely nice people, and had to confess to most of them that I hadn't really seen much of Montana, what with being in a hotel talking all day. I have to go back -- what I saw was lovely.

While I was signing books in Montana, Charles Vess was in New York, going to a screening of Stardust.

He writes about it over on his blog...

Posh seats for, at most, 50 people. Filling those seats were several of the
movie’s stars (Robert DeNiro, Clare Danes, Charlie Cox), producers (Lorenzo
DeBonaventura, etc.) and many faces both recognizable and not. Matthew Vaughan , the director, introduced the film and the lights went down. Nervous couldn’t half describe how I was feeling at that moment. What if I found myself cringing at what had been done to “my” story. What if everyone started walking out? What if, what if…

And you can find out what he thought of what he saw at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/153.

I don't think I'm going to see it until the beginning of June at a screening in the UK. By that point everything will be finished, and I'll see a completed print. Like Charles, I'm a bit nervous -- I last saw a test screening with lots of stuff not there and not finished, but Charles's blog entry and Harry Knowles's comments the other day on AICN are extremely reassuring. (The longer UK trailer for Stardust, with ghosts, is up at http://www.stardustmovie.com/intl/uk/).

Charles Vess is giving a lecture in New York on May 2nd at the Society of Illustrators, and signing the new hardcover of Stardust on May 4th -- details at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/152.

I have worn my white bee suit today and gone and met the bees. The plumtrees are in blossom. And I have to make Maddy's dinner now.

Readings and bees and books

Good morning world.

Holly and I got in to New York yesterday, checked in to the hotel and then ran to the MOTH rehearsal. Got there slightly late. I watched someone named Edgar tell a story of Southern Gothic madness that had happened to him, and then I told my much less impressive story. Got notes on it and then Holly and I headed out into the rain to get back to the hotel where my fellow panelists on the YA panel were waiting to be ferried to the Small Press Centre, a library on 44th st I've walked past over the years and never entered. It smelled like dusty books in dream-libraries. Did the panel (on "Leaving home as a rite of passage in children's fiction"), four very different panelists with very different styles, but a good panel nonetheless, and then dashed through the rain to the Town Hall for the reading.

I was sort of terrified -- there's nothing like being part of a sold-out 1500 seat reading with Nobel Prize Winners, Booker Prize Winners, Pulitzer Prize Winners and the star of The Man With Two Brains to make you feel like you're only there by accident and that just before you go on someone will notice and tell you to turn in your pencil and go home.

Backstage everyone was in the same boat, all clutching or shuffling our books or papers. I headed into a quiet corner to finalise what I was going to do and time myself (we had eight minutes. If we went over Caro, the festival organiser, was threatening to pull us off with a hook) and found Don DeLillo leaving the same corner. Half of us were sent to the left of the stage, half to the right. ("I hope this is not a reflection on our political positions," said Nadine Gordimer firmly as she was sent to the stage right gang.) Salman Rushdie was a stage right introducer and a stage left reader. I was sitting stage left, with Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya and Kiran Desai. Kiran was nervous and funny and we chatted quietly while waiting for it all to start.

I never drink before readings, and noticed with a certain amount of surprise that I appeared to have poured myself a plastic cup filled with white wine.

(They are a literary audience, I told myself. They will not have brought rocks. They will not throw any rocks they might have brought. Even if they have brought rocks and plan to throw them, I'm on near the end and maybe they will have thrown all the rocks they have brought before I come on, and I can probably dodge the few remaining rocks.)

Steve Martin came on first, read from a memoir about his early days as a stand-up comic, back when he was figuring out what it was that he did, and he sang and did the napkin trick as part of the memoir, and the audience laughed and loved it and we laughed and loved it over on stage left, and nobody threw any rocks and everything was going to be okay.

All the readings were brilliant and very different. When my time came I read two pages about home from the end of American Gods, and "Instructions", and the audience seemed to like it. I floated offstage and down to the backstage area where we watched Nadine and Salman do their bits on TV (better sound down there than stage left too) and then we were done. Except for signing books.

Soon I realised that everyone else had gone away and I was still signing books. I kept signing books. It went on for a while.

Then Holly and I went back to the hotel where the reception was in full swing. I ate enough hors d'oeuvres on plates going past to make up for the dinner I'd never actually had in all the running around, said thank you to lots of nice people who told me how much they'd liked my reading, and somewhere in there realised that I was not going to be able to stay awake for much longer. Fled to hotel room, lay in bed and thought "I'm so tired. I'm too tired to go to sleep." And then I slept.

...

Hello Neil,

As the article you linked mentions, we've been hearing about the bee losses for a few months. After you first mentioned the bees in your journal I wondered where yours would be coming from because I had wondered what would be done to replace all of the bees that were dying off around the country. Are you importing some of the African bees?

take care,
Cal


I don't think the bee losses are quite as bad as you imagine. There are bees, and there are bee breeders.

Sharon Stiteler explains,


Our bees are Minnesota Hygienic Italian Bees developed by Marla
Spivak at the U of M. She is one of the researchers studying Colony
Collapse Disorder--she said that this has been a problem for the last
15 years and this year the media has grabbed on to the story. has
studied the Varroa mite, which over the past 20 years has become a
major threat to commercial honeybees. First discovered in the United
States in 1987, the mite weakens the bee's immune system. It kills
off most bee colonies within a year or two after invading. Beekeepers
use pesticides to control the mites, but Spivak has studied ways to
breed honeybees that are resistant to it. The bees have been bred to
have a "hygienic" behaviors. They sense when brood is diseased and
cleans them out. They also clean out any dead bees as well. This
behavior cuts down on foul brood and other colony problems. Marla's
website:

http://www.entomology.umn.edu/Faculty/spivak/spivcv.htm

She is also the lady that taught the Beekeeping Short Course that I
took last month on how to keep our bees. Here is a link to an
article she wrote about our bees:

http://www.beeculture.com/storycms/index.cfm?cat=Story&recordID=290

Sharon

You can read Sharon and Lorraine's beekeeping adventure (without me, dammit) over at
http://www.birdchick.com/2007/04/hiving-part-1-panic-at-bee-hive.html
http://www.birdchick.com/2007/04/part-2-enjoyment-at-beehive.html and
http://www.birdchick.com/2007/04/trouble-with-olga.html

...

The most frequently asked question currently, in regard to the photos of the book I'm writing The Graveyard Book in, is (for example) In seeing the post about The Graveyard Book in which you show us your handwritten version in the fancy Italian book, I noticed that you haven't crossed out a word. Did you pick a particularly good page to show us, or do you simply have no need to cross out as you write? If the latter is true, you will make writers everywhere very jealous and variants, like I have a similar one where i write my poetry in, and I was wondering, considering the fact that you're writing a first draft in it, if you scratch out page-length text if you dont feel like they should be included in your story, or rip out pages, or something of the like that would ruin the neatness of the whole blank book and render it less "beautiful", since I myself wouldn't have the heart to.

I found myself mostly remembering Aubrey's comment on Jonson talking about Shakespeare and how much better it would have been if Shakespeare, who didn't, actually had crossed some stuff out.

If I'm writing fiction by hand I'll put a loose line through something that I'm definitely not going to use (but I'd never pull it out, and I'd normally want it to be readable in case I change my mind, or in case there's something there I can use). But it's pure first draft, straight out of the head and onto the page, sort of like this blog. The important thing is moving forward, for me: editing, fixing, tidying, leaving stuff out, that's all for when I put it onto the computer, that's all for the second draft.

Right. Better get out of bed and stop blogging: Laura Miller will be here in a few minutes to interview me about Narnia, and my hair looks really kind of scary.

Bet you thought I was dead

The best thing about going off and writing, and not having a phone or internets and things, just a tiny rented cottage, pen and paper and stories in your head, is that everything gets sort of simple and I remember why I do this writing thing and why I love it.

When I got stuck, I'd change notebooks and write an introduction or something similar that someone was waiting for. Then I'd go back to the story. I never turned on the computer, except once to check a detail.

Oddly enough the story that seemed the lesser of the two (most of the chapters of The Graveyard Book are also stories), which is called "The Friend" was easy and comfortable to write, while the one I was excited about, "The Hounds of God" (which I may retitle either "Miss Lupescu" or "The Ghoul Gate" on the next draft, or I may not) was sort of odd and lumpy and is going to need a lot of repainting and moving of heavy furniture when it gets typed up. Still, it has some really good bits in, and I love the ghouls, particularly the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the Duke of Westminster.

I'm on page 98 of the book, and including "The Witch's Headstone" I think I'm actually half way through the book right now. Although some of the final chapter-stories are going to be long ones.
I'm writing a poem that runs through the next chapter, a P.L. Travers-like fantasia called "Danse Macabre", which I think is going to be chapter 5, after the already-written "The Witch's Headstone". Then I'm not sure. Then it's a chapter called "Every Man Jack". Then the last chapter, probably.

Probably more than you really wanted to know, but I'm an author who's been writing a book, and mostly it's what my head is filled with, and it's interesting if you're me.

(Most of the spare bits of head are filled with something that may eventually be called Lyonnesse.)

The worst thing about going off to write for a bit is returning to civilisation and finding several thousand emails needing to be read, work mail, personal mail, Blog FAQ mail.... I'm not sure I'll ever catch up.

Thanks so much to the webelf for having fun and posting links in my absence. It looks like she enjoyed herself, and she put stuff up I probably wouldn't have thought of, so that was good, and I am grateful. (I'm still trying to figure out where she got the Holly picture from, mind you.) Amused that she found, and hustled for votes for the blog awards (even more amused when I discovered that I was also nominated as Hottest Daddy Blogger [?]).

I think I've solved a mystery no one even knew was mysterious. The web elf is your wife, isn't she? Don't forget my no-prize if I'm right!

I think only Marvel can give out no-prizes. But no, you are wrong. The web elf is the web elf. I think she looks like Dave Sim's Regency Elf, only more webby, but I could be wrong, and often am.

Hello,I would like to ask you if you are planning to write comic-book series like "Sandman"?Regards - Paweł Deptuch, POLAND

No, I already did that.

Right now I don't think I'll ever do another 2000 page comic story, but as I said, I've been wrong before...

NEIL,

I'm trying to find my place in writing, and I am leaning towards the Screenplay format. Since you write in almost every format, Which is easier?

1. writing a comic

2. wirting a movie

3. writing a novel

Signed,Bob Castle.

I think it depends on which one I'm not doing at the time. When you aren't doing it, the other ones are always easier, and the kind of thing that you're writing is much too hard.

...

We've now overhauled http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/shortstories/partiesstory, the "How To Talk to Girls at Parties" main page, and it now has a bit more explanation of what it is, links to the text version and the audio version of the story, and links to the other Hugo nominated short stories.

http://www.nippon2007.us/hugo_nominees.php has all of the Hugo nominees up, and links to all but one of the novellas, novelettes and stories, and even one of the novels.

There's a small and valid-up-to-a-point controversy going on about not enough women being nominated for Hugos this year. (For example, this from Bookslut.) (The up-to-a point bit for me is where it's implied by some commentators that the Hugo nominations are imposed from outside, rather than simply voted for by fans and readers who are eligible to vote. They're the Hugos, you get to vote for them as a member or supporting member of the WorldCon, and if you want to see something on the list next year, vote for it. Tell your friends to vote for it. Look at the 2004 Nomination details: in 2004 it only took about 25 votes, sometimes less, to get anything shorter than a novel on the list.)

...

An interview in connection with the PEN World Voices Festival next week in New York -- http://www.wildriverreview.com/worldvoices-neilgaiman.php.

"...and I am a doggerel bard..."

PEN WORLD VOICES NEW YORK has announced its schedule. You can find the stuff with me in it at http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/36

On April the 25th is the event that gives me butterflies...


April 25 | Town Hall Readings: Writing Home When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: The Town Hall: 123 West 43rd St.
What time: 8 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, Saadi Youssef

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members
Purchase tickets from The Town Hall, (212) 840-2824 or Ticketmaster, (212) 307-4100

Which is preceded by

April 25 | Leaving Home as a Rite of Passage
When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: Small Press Center: 20 West 44th St.
What time: 6–7:30 p.m.

With Neil Gaiman, Isabel Hoving, Janne Teller, Markus Zusak; moderated by Robert Lipsyte

Free and open to the public. No reservations.

And then on April the 26th there are a couple of events

April 26 | Conversation: Neil Gaiman & Marguerite Abouet, with Sean Wilsey When: Thursday, April 26 Where: 37 Arts: 450 West 37th St. What time: 6–7 p.m. >> More information & buy tickets

and

April 26 | An Evening with The Moth
When: Thursday, April 26
Where: 37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
What time: 8–10 p.m.

With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and John Hodgman as your MC

>> More information & buy tickets

(Was thrilled that my daughter Holly is taking time off from school to come up to New York and make sure I don't embarrass myself too badly, or that, at the least, if I do there will a member of the family to remember it and never let me forget.) ("Hey Dad. Do you remember that time you made a complete idiot of yourself in front of Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Steve Martin, Nadine Gordimer...")

If you want to go to any of the New York events, buy your ticket now. They famously sell out really fast.

And then on the Saturday, April the 28th, I shall be in Montana, talking first to librarians at an author lunch and then to and probably signing for the public...

Details -- along with downloadable bookmarks and things -- at...

http://www.mtlib.org/conf/mla2007/index.htm#gaiman

...

Several people have written in to point out that the excellent Gerd Köster is the Tom Waits of Cologne. I know this, but he still doesn't have those wonderful barking mad qualities that Martin Semmelrogge had, that made him such a joy to write about. Or to put it as a sort of a doggerel Clerihew...

Martin Semmelrogge
Is a gift to a blogger
While Gerd Köster
Is a disöster.

Cat scans

Lots of people wrote to let us know that yesterday's mystery Russian alien was... a guitarfish (although there was healthy disagreement on exactly which kind).

Hi Neil,

I'm a big fan of your work, and I am a big fan of ampersands, so when I decided to get a tattoo of the latter, I wanted the one from the softcover editions of "Preludes & Nocturnes" and "Fables & Reflections". The only problem is, I don't know which font they're in. So, instead of feverishly searching (actually, I already did that), I decided to go right to the source. Do you know what font it's in?

While I didn't know, I figured Dave McKean would, so I asked him, and he said,

The answer to your blogger question about the ampersands:
Which PB editions? Since DC have released 57 versions, I'm not sure which one you mean. If you mean the recent SANDMAN LIBRARY editions, I have a copy of Fables... and this lovely scrolly fancy ampersand is set in MISSIONARY, a font available from Emigre designed by the brilliant Miles Newlyn (if memory serves me correctly). If you don't mean this edition, then can i recommend this empersand anyway, it's the best one.
...

Seeing the Village Voice has just leaked it, and a few of you have written to ask about it, yes, I will be a Guest at the PEN World Voices Festival at the end of April. I can't give you any other details right now, but the curious should go to http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1096 and sign up for the Festival mailing list for more information.

I just finished Peter Beagle's I See By My Outfit, a book I've wanted to read since I was a teenage Beagle boy and learned of its existence in the back of A Fine and Private Place, and I loved it. It's the true story of a two man road trip across America on motor scooters, and it's as much a journey across time now as it is across space: funny, heartwarming and wise. The kind of book you feel a better person for having read.

Too much fun is being had with Readerware (http://www.readerware.com/rwFeat.html) and a cuecat scanner, as books are brought up to the new library upstairs and scanned in or ISBNd or entered by hand before being put on the shelves. Mostly I wish, given the number of old books here, that someone had thought of ISBNs before 1966... And then I wish that the library upstairs was three times the size, as I don't think it's going to make the dent in the basement library that I hoped it was going to.