A story for which the world is not yet ready

The Baker Street Irregular in me took great pleasure in learning about the Giant Rat of Papua, Indonesia. All right, it's not Sumatra. But it's still in Indonesia. Yes, Indonesia is a really big place, and Papua is a long way from Sumatra, especially for a rat.

But still.

A Giant Rat! Near Sumatra!


Ahhhh.

...

The cough is no better, although I am industriously trying every remedy people have suggested and am now awash in honey, lemon juice, cider vinegar, chocolate, cayenne, and Guaifenesin-based cough syrup. Also sundry waters and teas and suchlike.

And I'm trying to use a wireless keyboard that randomly forgets to send characters to the computer. This is dead irritating.

...





Hi Mr. Neil,


All of the vlogging nerdfighters from Brotherhood 2.0 (www.brotherhood2.com) are taking part in an attempt to seize all of YouTube today with videos designed to get people to donate to various charitable organizations. I chose the C.B.L.D.F. and I would appreciate it if you'd link to me on your blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRpmypcOv9E


Happy Monday,


Jane





Consider it linked.





...





Dear Neil,


Pending the upcoming release of Stardust on dvd (which I'm most assuredly buying on release day and forcing my family to watch Christmas day), I'm reminded of the videos you posted a bit back about the writer's strike and how you're all lobbying to get a pay increase from dvd and tv sales. That being said, since your name is well-marked all over Stardust, book to movie and all that, do you still only get a miserable $0.02 from each dvd we buy? (and if so, would it be possible for the company to just buy a bunch of wholesale copies, maybe slap a signature - or not!- on them and resell for a higher price off the website, thus making a little closer to the amount you deserve and also happier fans?)


- Dani





That's really kind of you to be concerned. The truth is, if lots of you buy the Stardust DVD it will be regarded as a good thing and success, and probably make my life easier, but Charles Vess and I really got our share of Stardust back when we sold the film rights; and while it might be a really good idea to sell signed DVDs, I'm happier in the authoring business than I would ever be in the selling signed DVDs business. (Having said that, it's really not a bad idea -- and it's one that Peter Beagle did for The Last Unicorn DVD. Which, if you want a copy, you should order from http://www.conlanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc where you will get it signed, and Peter Beagle will get half of what you pay. Such a bargain.)


I'll happily point people at DreamHaven Books' NEILGAIMAN.NET website, which they created because I got tired of answering the question of "Where can I get this thing that you did..." with "From DreamHaven". It's the best selection of stuff by me (and connected to me, and by people who worked with me, and so on) out there, and they are nice people and it's a good shop. (And no, I don't get a cut. I'm just happy that the stuff is out there and I have somewhere to send anyone who asks.)


The thing I'm proudest of that I made this year is probably this:

because I love audiobooks, and it's nice that the first version of the complete text edition to come out in the US is in audio format. The abridged version of Neverwhere that Gary Bakewell read was the reason I've never again said yes to permitting abridged audio books (it started out really well, then you could feel the abridger's desperation in the last half as huge chunks of plot were tossed overboard), but it took a long time until the rights were free and we were able to do this as a complete and unabridged audiobook, with me doing the voices the way I hear them in my head, chewing the scenery as Croup and Vandemar.

...

And finally, Happy 90th Birthday to Arthur C. Clarke!

The only time I ever met Arthur C. Clarke was about 22 years ago, in Brown's Hotel, when he was in the UK to help promote the film of 2010. I'd been reading him since I was a nipper, and some of his stories -- "The Nine Billion Names of God", for one -- were the essence of pure SF for me. It was a story that, even as I read it when I was nine or ten, I wanted to have written. Sense of Wonder, from someone who really is a world treasure.

(And it makes me very happy to see a new edition of one of the books I loved when I was 12 has just been updated and reissued -- Brian Aldiss's A Science Fiction Omnibus is now out from Penguin Classics. It may not be Brian Aldiss's 90th birthday -- he's only 82 -- but he's still writing, and is a treasure too.)

Valentine

You know, the readers of this blog, between you all, know everything. Last year I posted about Joe Hill saying
One of my favourite short stories from last year was called "Best New Horror" by an author I'd not previously heard of named Joe Hill, in PS publishing"s Postscripts #3. His website's http://www.joehillfiction.com/index.htm , and I just noticed that he has a collection out, 20th Century Ghosts. I don't have much time for reading currently, but I'm going to order a copy.
and the next morning I got an email from someone named Jeff saying,
Thanks for your post on Joe Hill yesterday. It happened to be the other half of a coincidence that gave me a fun few minutes of detective work on the web. Perhaps you knew this already and were being coy, but it turns out Hill is actually Joe Hill King and his parents are backwoods Maine hermits who have dabbled in the writing game themselves from time to time.

See, I came home late with a copy of the new Entertainment Weekly and, working from the back, read Stephen King's latest essay wherein he gave a shout-out to a friend of his kids' named Shane Leonard. Good for him. Then I came upstairs to peruse a few blogs, clicked on the Hill link you provided and somewhere on there spotted a nod to Hill's web master -- a guy named Shane Leonard...

Like I say, between you, you people know everything, or you figure it out. It was something that, now I knew it, I decided not to remember or to mention here -- mostly because I could see why Joe was doing it under his own steam, and I thought that was a good thing. I was pleased I'd liked the story first, before realising that the author was the nice young man I'd met at the Season of Mists signing in Boston, fourteen years earlier.

Anyway, I loved Twentieth Century Ghosts, and was then very surprised by Heart-Shaped Box, which I had expected to be quiet and literary, like the short stories, and was instead a terrific roller coaster, almost impossible to stop reading. I loved it, took pleasure in blurbing it, and was extremely pleased to see this New York Times review by Janet Maslin who seems to have enjoyed it just as much as I did.

I see from his website -- http://www.joehillfiction.com/ -- that he's now, as of yesterday -- on an author signing tour. Go and see him if he's coming near you. Tell him I said Hi.

(So far this year, my favourite book is Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg. It's the nearest thing to a sequel to Charmed Lives she's written -- a Chrestomanci novel with Cat in it, and a lot more besides. The sort of book that makes you sad on page 400 because you only have a hundred pages to go and then it'll be done.)


Dear Neil;

Furtherto your comments on "The Land of Green Ginger", I remember seeing it televised in the late '50s. I searched the IMDB and it was Episode 6 of Season 1 of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" shown 18 April 1958. Each episode of the series dramatized a (usually) well known fairy/Arabian Nights/fantasy story. I really can't actually remember the episodes but I do remember the longing for the next episode in the series.

Cheers,

Paul Burrows

Oddly enough, some years ago I bought the video from someone on eBay. It was an odd sort of thing, not really funny, not quite sure what it was, and I wondered if it was the experience of working on it that sent Langley back to the material for what became the 1965 edition of the book, which is much sharper and more knowing and odd. It is out there, and probably pretty soon it'll probably show up on YouTube.

...

This came in from a very happy Elizabeth, the manager at DreamHaven...

42 orders so far. Your fans rock! You can tell them I said so. Also that we will fill orders as fast as possible, but there may be some delay, because the manager is now teary-eyed and it slows down her typing.

Love,
Elizabeth

I'm as grateful as she is.

...and right now I find myself playing, over and over, "When My Ship Comes In" a piece of music I found on the Fabulist, by the North Atlantic Explorers.

And over at http://polloxniner.blogs.com/polloxniner/2006/02/_having_lived_l.html, is the North Atlantic Explorers cover of Lloyd Cole's "I Will Not Leave You Alone", which is a perfect Valentine's Day sort of a song, if you wanted one. (My very favourite Valentine song is probably Thea Gilmore's "Holding Your Hand" but I couldn't find it up online, so I am not linking to it.)