a miscellany

The last time I was in Poland, four years ago, I had a day where food never happened and I got grumpy about it. Everyone is so concerned about making sure this doesn't happen again that I suspect I'm going to leave Poland a rotund and cherubic figure, astonishingly well-fed and pink.

Dinner tonight included, as a starter, a small caviar and rice thing at the centre of the plate, with strangely spermatic tadpoles drawn in purple and brown sauce heading towards it, probably to fertilise it.

And seeing that no-one would believe me without photographic evidence...




Off to Krakow tomorrow morning.

I just got this in from Hera...

Live concert in about two and a half hours.. (8.15pm in Austin Texas..)

the timing has been changed and will start half an hour earlier than first advertised..

You can also contact directly during the concert... send an email to

doug@airplay100.com for requests or questions..

http://www.songwritersseries.com

8.15PM start- Iceland's Hera - http://www.herasings.com/

10:00 PM - L.A.'s Genevieve - http://www.genevieve-music.com/

Do not miss this anywhere in the world. Log onto http://www.songwritersseries.com and view the show that will begin at 7:30 PM (Central Time) (U.S.) We will re-broadcast the edited show the following weeks on our web site http://www.songwritersseries.com

and I learned from Lisa Snellings that her poppet planet is open (and that she's going to do a new set of the Neil Rats... I hope she'll make them in brass and glass and all sorts of strange things) and that the details are up at http://slaughterhousestudios.blogspot.com/2007/03/poppet-planet-is-live-gallery-is-open.html

Neil,
Just a quick question - what happened to your tags? Reading them used to be one of the best parts of the post, but now they actually and accurately identify what you talked about. Creativity is always greater than organization!
Best,
Stephanie

I liked them too.

I was Given a Good Talking To About Them, because apparently people had been complaining that they weren't useful enough, and I was told that I couldn't just put tags up that only applied to the post in question. But hah! it only takes one message like yours and I'm ready to go back to my bad old ways. With, frankly, joy.

"I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful..."

Lots of nice messages from people letting me know about today's New York Times, of which this is an example:

Hi Neil,
Just in case no-one has made you aware of this or you haven't seen it yourself, your son is quoted in an article about Google's bus service. You can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html?ex=1331182800&en=272d04d67d29e1f4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Sounds like he's found himself an awesome place to work! Christopher

It does, doesn't it? (And the people at Google fixed the gmail bug for me, and did stuff to make up for it.) I have rather wonderful children.

Maddy, mind you, while still wonderful, has gone down with influenza, something that we've sort of been waiting for since her two best friends went down with it earlier this week. So we're watching Howl's Moving Castle on the sofa together right now, which is a sensible sort of thing to do when someone is sick and feverish.

Not really a question - I just saw your cuecat/readerware comment. I find for the older books that using the library of congress number works very well. You have to change from just the default amazon service, and you often have to muck with the edition more, but it's a great shortcut for getting author names and titles and whatnot in.Failing an LC number, Amazon also has a surprising number of old editions through their bookseller associates, as does ABE. I find trolling those sites a lot more productive (not to mention interesting) than hand-cataloging.

Good suggestion, and I was thrilled to discover it worked.

I'm finding entering books curiously addictive. I'll pick up a few books and nip into the library to scan them between doing other things.

I've got a sort of a theory about the library -- there are so many books downstairs and scattered around the house that the upstairs library won't really make much of a dent in them. So I've decided that the books I want in the upstairs library are simply ones that I (or someone else a lot like me) might want on shelves if I was just going to pick something up from the shelves and sit down somwhere comfortable and read for an hour. So right now I'm very aware that half the books we've brought up and scanned or entered will go back downstairs again.


Hello Neil, I was wondering if you knew the for sure, official release dates for "Interworld" and "M is for Magic". Amazon is showing July 1st, while Barnes & Noble's website is showing last week of June. Both are listed in the current Diamond Previews which would suggest more like May.Thanks, Cal

I had no idea, but I asked Clarissa Hutton at HarperChildrens, and she said,

The PUBLICATION date for both is 7/1, while the on-sale date is 6/26. So both Amazon & B&N are sort of right, they're just using different bases. Our official pub dates are always the beginning of the month, while release (when the books ship from the warehouse) and on-sale (when the stores need to have the books on-shelf) vary depending on print dates.

Hope this helps.

And this came in recently too:

Hi Neil,

Hope all's well with you. You might be interested to know that The House Called Hadlows will be out next month and that we've added an excerpt from the first chapter to the website - there's a link on this page: http://www.fidrabooks.com/forthcoming.html. I know this is cheeky, but we have had lots of interest via your support for the books and if you were to mention it on your blog that would be fantastic. And you never know - if we sell enough I might be able to wrestle the unpublished third book from Victoria's grasp!!

Best wishes

Vanessa
www.fidrabooks.com

Consider it posted. (I talked about The House Called Hadlows at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/10/i-finished-reading-house-called.asp)

Several people wrote to alert me to this -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6430489.stm , and its consequences for various internet radio stations.

Hello, Mr. Neil Gaiman sir.
There are some rumors that on the 17th of March you will be at the 7th Warszawskie Spotkania Komiksowe (which translates to Warsaw Comics Festival or something similar) in, lo and behold, Warsaw. It's not listed in the "Where's Neil" section but it's been reported by some Polish comic book news portals. Any luck it's true? Izydor Ingwar I.

It's true -- and it should be up on Where's Neil soon -- I'll be there from 5-7 pm, I believe.

Hi Neil, I've seen you mention the new third-floor library in several posts. As someone who is slowly infiltrating every corner of his house with books, I'm always interested in seeing other people's libraries, bookcases and the like. Any chance we'll get a peek at the new library? Blu

Good idea. I'll take some pictures when I get a spare minute.

Several dates. Also some places.

I'm starting to put together my movements on the German, Polish and French micro-tour in March. This is assembled from a few different emails, and obviously needs more data, but I thought it might be a good thing for Europeans if I got the word out early:

Cologne
March 16th, 7:30 pm
Toyota Autohaus Yvel, Raderberggürtel 4
Literature Festival "Lit.COLOGNE"
http://www.litcologne.de/va/160307/gaimankoester.php

KRAKOW
Sunday 18th. 16.00 -19.00 booksigning at EMPiK Rynek Główny

WARSAW
Monday 19th. 17.00-19.00 booksigning at EMPIK Nowy Swiat

Hamburg
March 21st, 8:15 pm
Thalia Bookstore, Europapassage, Ballindamm 40
http://www.service.thalia.de/thalia.vorort.php?vst=361&event=5335

Leipzig
March 22nd -
1:00pm - Book Fair
9:00 pm SPIZZ - Jazz & Music Club, Markt 9
http://www3.mdr.de/scripts/leipzig-liest-2007/suche.cfm?s4=name&value=7416

PARIS
Friday, March 23rd from 17h00 to 20h00
Saturday, March 24th from 17h00 to 20h00.

Signing at Salon du Livre, Porte de Versailles, 75015 Paris; Au Diable Vauvert stand #H148

When I'm sure that this is all there is, and I've got all the relevant phone numbers and so on, I'll put it up on Where's Neil (the amazing new, improved and plugged into Google Calendar version of Where's Neil).

...

Incidentally, Hera-from-Iceland is going to be playing at the SXSW Festival (http://2007.sxsw.com/music/showcases/band/33129.html). And then she's coming out here to play a gig with Lorraine at Charlie's in Stillwater, MN, on Sunday March 11th.(http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2007/02/spring-cds-laundry-and-hera.html for details). I'm hoping I'm in town and able to make it to see them.