Return I will to Old Brazil.

(This was yesterday's blogpost.) Spent most of today asleep. Now awake at 4.00 am.

Tom Disch killed himself while I was in Brazil. I wanted to love his novels, and mostly failed -- they were astonishingly smart, brilliant but also cold. (I thought I'd read all Disch's novels, and only realised I'd never read On Wings of Song when I started reading the reviews of it in the obituaries. Sigh.) But when I met him, at ICFA, I got to tell him that his story, "Descending" was perfect, which it is, and that his novel "Echo Round His Bones" was the first adult SF book I bought with my own money, which it was. Few authors resemble their work, but I had imagined Tom Disch would be an icy, intelligently scary, tall sort of person, smart like a cyborg, and was pleasantly surprised to find my mental picture replaced by the reality of a big, ambling, gentleman with a high voice and an endearing awkwardness around other people.

His friend John Clute writes his obituary for him in the Independent, while Liz Hand writes about him at Salon (I'm pretty sure that it's an escalator, not an elevator, in "Descending").

Hi, Neil!
I'm sending you a link with your interview in the most viewed late night's newscast here in Brazil.

http://jg.globo.com/JGlobo/0,19125,VTJ0-2742-20080704-325022,00.html

The story is more in the likes of "who is this Gaiman guy" than something like "the hows and whys of Neil Gaiman prose", but, you know, not everyone here in Brazil knows who Neil Gaiman is (shamefully, I must say).

Good luck in your panel and signing session today.
Greetings from Rio de Janeiro,

JP Cruz

I like the little shots of me talking to a sunbathing Maddy, where I obviously didn't know I was still being filmed.

Hi, Neil,

Just want to say I loved THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS and most recently, THE DANGEROUS ALPHABET. I was wondering if you have plans to write a picture book more catered to younger children like, say, 5-10 years old, which are less sinister?

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy Cai (from Singapore)

Crazy Hair will be out in 2009. It's a poem, illustrated by Dave McKean, and I think that young children will like it. It's not even slightly sinister, anyway. Well, maybe a bit.

Neil,

I can see that The Complete Death is available for pre-order on amazon.com (and other places) but I cannot discern whether this is an "Absolute Death" style/quality product or whether that is being saved for the future. Can you clarify?

Thanks,

Neil

It's not an "Absolute Death" - it won't be in a slipcase, and while it will be oversized it won't be Absolute sized. But it will be a beautiful book. (The cover up on Amazon is, I am assured, just a placeholder.)

...

There's an "agent" named Barbara Bauer -- she's on the SFWA 20 Worst Agents list -- who has sued people who have pointed out that she's not really an agent-who-sells-books, but is instead an agent-who-makes-her-money-from-ripping-off-would-be-writers. Her suit against Wikipedia has been dismissed Her suit against a number of places and organisations that have warned against her (including the SFWA and the Neilsen Haydens, but not against me) continues.

If you want to donate to the legal fees of the people she's trying to gag:
http://authoradvocatedonations.googlepages.com/home

Hello Neil...I know this is rather random but I just found a copy of Enchanter from Eclipse Comics and I was curious if you would know...What ever happened to Mike Dringenberg? He is still my fav Sandman artist...And his work in Enchanter is amazing...Do you know if he still draws or has a website or...? All I can seem to find is a wikipedia stub...The two of you should definately work on a book together again one day...Thanks...Joe

Mike's still drawing and painting. He has a story in the upcoming Tori Amos Comic Book Tattoo comic, for example, and he did Death on the Sandman 20th Anniversary poster.

...

If you're at Comic-Con this year, on the Thursday night, The San Diego Symphony are doing Video Games Live.

Tickets are available at: http://www.sandiegosymphony.com/summerpops/event.php?id=7
...

There's a new Harvey Pekar comic drawn by Rick Veitch at http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/07/comics_ndn.html
...

And finally, a small mystery -- according to http://wiedemerwords.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-news-on-age-banding-conflict.html Phillip Pullman and Celia Rees (among others) had a meeting with the UK publishers who want to impose age-banding on books, led by Philippa Dickinson from Random House:

The discussion continued with the publishers' saying that they had had a very supportive response from "most" of their authors, with no problems being expressed. In support of that claim they produced a pile of books with age-banding figures on the covers. We didn't examine them closely, but one of them, as Celia Rees and I agreed afterwards when we were talking about it, was a copy of Neil Gaiman's 'Coraline'. This was a surprise to us, because Neil Gaiman is a signatory to this statement. Philippa Dickinson has since admitted to me that they were American editions, "which all carry age-guidance information".

And I think, they have to be desperate, to try to claim I'm on their side in the UK by finding editions from around the world with age-guidance information on. http://www.notoagebanding.org/

Feed the Pidgen

Finished proofreading. Added a brood box to three of the beehives. Put together an overdue short story in my head and now have to start writing it.

Supermarkets in the UK are also now age-banding Barbecue Sauce:

A Tesco store refused to sell barbecue sauce to a customer because it contained
a tiny amount of alcohol and she couldn't prove her age.
Claire Birchell, 25, was told she could not buy the Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce which has an alcohol content of 2 per cent.
Staff at the store in in Flitwick, near Bedford also refused to sell the bottle to her brother-in-law, Philip Dover, 27, who did have ID, because they believed he would just give the bottle to Miss Birchell.

A reminder that I'll be in Tulsa, OK, on the 28th of June: details at http://www.mammothcomics.com/events.php
It seems to be an evening containing a signing, a Q&A and a screening of Beowulf into the bargain. I'm excited to go to Tulsa, because of the R.A. Lafferty connections. And Oklahoma is a state I've never visited.

Hi Neil,

Absolute Sandman Volume 3 will be out in a few hours. Since this volume will include stories from books 5-7 of the Sandman library, I was wondering if volume 4 will include "Endless Nights." I was also hoping that “Dream Hunters” will be part of the final volume but that’s just me wishful thinking.


-Tonichi

I have volume 3 here, and it's as lovely and as heavy as the first two, and I've just been proofreading Volume 4, which comes out in November, for the 20th anniversary of Sandman. (The only way I can make that work in my head is by telling myself that it's the equivalent of a comic I read in 1975, when I was 14 and discovering fanzines and the history of comics, that had a first issue in 1955 and stopped publishing in 1963... it would have been something from a bygone age. Instead we're in this strange world where each year more Sandman graphic novels are sold than the year before, as new generations discover them.)

My main obsession right now is to make sure that the sign in the park finally says Do Not Feed the Pigeons in Hungarian, rather than, um, pidgen-Hungarian. No, Absolute Sandman 4 doesn't contain Endless Nights or Dream Hunters -- it's already over 600 pages and will weigh over seven pounds. The four Absolute Sandmans when released will be over 2400 pages long and will contain all 76 issues of Sandman (including the special) and the four or five other stories from various specials, samplers and Winters' Edges -- all except the Jeff Jones Death short story, which will need to wait until DC does The Compleat Death...

Chris Ewen, of Future Bible Heroes fame, has a personal side project called Hidden Variable (this is their MySpace site -- you can hear the complete versions of lots of the songs here, including Unresolving, by me), of songs with music by him and words by authors, all sung by Malena except for one sung by Claudia Gonson.

Here's a rather lovely video of Kindermarchen, the Hidden Variable song by Gregory Maguire, directed by Kimberly Butler and Elberta Gaither. (You know, if you have a record company, you should release Chris's Hidden Variable CD on it... )

Soon enough a cat post, I promise...

I'm proofreading the galleys of the UK edition of The Graveyard Book right now. Last night, at the exact moment I started to become convinced that these were amazingly clean galleys, there were no typos after the number of times we'd all been through the manuscript, and I should simply sign off on them and get on with my life, one character turns to another and says "Neil, I've broken the next para into five paras for clarity but if you want we can turn it back." Which was a comment from the copyeditor to me that had been written on the previous draft. After that I started squinting at the text and reading verrry slowly....

Philip Pullman in the Guardian, talking about why age banding books is such a magnificently wrongheaded idea, but also talking about what he knows when he starts a book:

When I sit down to write a book, I know several things about it: I know
roughly how long it will be, I know some of the events in the story, I know a
little about some of the characters, I know - without knowing quite how I'll get
to it - what tone of voice I want the narrative to be cast in.

But there are several things I don't know, and one of those is who will read it. You simply can't decide who your readership will be. Nor do I want to, because declaring that it's for any group in particular means excluding every other group, and I don't want to exclude anybody. Every reader is welcome, and I want my books to say so.

Which is pretty much true for me too, and sometimes all you need to know that it'll work is the tone of voice. When that works, everything works, and when you don't have it it's the intangible that stops the thing from being magic.

(On the age banding, from what I can figure out, the subtext of all this seems to be, in the UK more and more books are being sold through supermarkets. People in supermarkets don't have to know anything about what they're selling. They just need to know where to put it on the shelves. If publishers put colour-coded age bands on the books, indicating which books are for 7+ and which for 9+ and which for 11+, then supermarkets will order more books because they won't have to think about putting them out. And after all, the shelf-stackers don't need to know anything about dish-soap to sell that, so what makes books special?)

And now some good news:

Hi Neil,
I think you're already aware of this, but I wondered if you'd mind posting a follow-up to the story of Emru Townsend. I wrote to you back in April about Emru's search for a bone marrow donor and the desperate need for more people (especially non-caucasians) to get on their country's bone marrow registry. Here's the link to your original post for those who missed it:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/my-life-in-green-and-purple.html

Emru and his sister Tamu have been campaigning like crazy to raise awareness for the bone marrow registry. Last week, we got some excellent news:

A donor match has finally been found for Emru! Here's a CBC News article on the story:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2008/06/05/qc-bonemarrowdonor0605.html

I should remind you that there was no match in the registry for Emru when he was originally diagnosed with leukemia. I believe that this match is a direct result of Emru and Tamu's tireless awareness campaign, and of people like you helping to get the word out to as many people as possible. Thank you. And thank you to your readers, many of whom passed on the word and got themselves registered.

Emru is still a long way from being healed. He must get into remission, stay in remission, be prepared for surgery, have the surgery, resist or fight off infection, risk the donation attacking his body or his body attacking the donation, and get through the first 100 days. Plus, his anonymous donor has the option of backing out at any point and there is currently no backup.

Still, this is a crucial first step. Our friend now has a good, fighting chance.

To your readers: Don't see this as the end of the story. There are still massive shortages in the registry and many, many people are still waiting to find matching donors. Emru and Tamu have already committed themselves to continuing their awareness campaign.

Emru's story shows that this isn't a lost cause; it's a solvable problem. You can save lives just by registering and getting others to do the same.

For more information, visit

http://www.healemru.com

Thank you so much!
--Jeff LeBlanc
and several other well-wishers...
Pasley Preston
Beverly Preston
Driss Zouak
Ceri Young
Arin Murphy Hiscock


I talked about the NPR interview I did during the Graveyard Book Audio recording a few days ago; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91303720 is the Anansi Boys Bryant Park Book Club radio interview.

(I have to go back into the studio on Thursday -- we only realised this morning that there were no alternate takes for the UK of sentences with words like crib, diaper and flashlight in them, so I will go and replace them with sentences containing cots and nappies and torches.)

Just got an email to tell me that a pre-eminent banjo player would really like to play the Danse Macabre, which left my jaw on the floor with delight.

And here, for the people who asked, is a photo of a dog in the woods, yesterday. He's come a long way in a little over a year. I suppose I have as well...

Much Harry Clarke stuff, and more...

More information on the UK publishers age-banding proposals :

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/news-flash-soapbox-special-darren-shan-on-age-branding-in-childrens-literature/
is Darren Shan telling it like it is, while Philip Pullman talks to the Telegraph over at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2074620/Philip-Pullman-leads-author-revolt-against-age-banding-for-children.html
(I got a crazy thrill seeing Alan Garner in the comments -- an author whose books work if you're nine and work if you're twelve, and work if you're seventeen, and work if you're forty: they just work in a different way each time.)

I talked about my love for Alan Garner's books in this recent Australian interview -- http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2260549.htm. It's a nice interview even though it begins with someone saying, "Neil Gaiman has been described as 'the father of the graphic novel'," which I complete in my head with "But only by people who know nothing about graphic novels and fatherhood, who don't know who Will Eisner was."


....


Hello there.

I just came across an old journal piece of yours (journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/06/harry-clarke-and-small-gift-from.asp) whilst searching for an article someone told me about on a discovery of two new Clarke drawings.

I've a rather large interest in the man, so much so that I feel cursed for not being born early enough to write my thesis on the man. Yoshitaka Amano at least appears as a silver lining.

I'd equally imagine I'm not the only Clarke fanatic in the art history community - and wonder if you mean to scan or otherwise make available the drawings you discovered?

I'd doubt any great insight into his work, any more than any other drawing of his might provide as to method, but it would be a treat for those of us who would pursue completion with fanaticism.

Which struck me as a very good idea, the putting them up on line. I had meant to get in touch with Clarke expert Nicola Gordon-Bowes when I was in Dublin last, but it never happened... So I got the Clarke drawings scanned.

You can read the whole of The Year's At The Spring at http://www.archive.org/details/yearsatspringant00waltrich.



This is the one that was face out when I bought it -- it's from the illustration facing page 74, If I Had a Broomstick. The finished version looks like this:

Above is the rough for the illustration on page 109 of The Year's at the Spring, showing the two mermaids (three in the finished version); and also sketches for the details on page 93 and 74.

Finished, the one on page 109 looks like this:

On the reverse of those two are these are sketches for two Clarke drawings I don't recognise -- the cottage on the left, the dancer, the bearded man and the clown on the right. (Click on them to see them larger.)

(No idea why they've uploaded blue.)

...

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

With the number of young writers who look to you for advice, I thought that they might be interested to hear about a creative writing program called "Shared Worlds" being offered this summer at Wofford College. My friend, writer Jeff VanderMeer is serving as assistant director. Jeff, along with writers Ekaterina Sedia, Tobias Buckell and a host of tabletop game designers and other creative types will lead high school students through a very "hands-on" experience in creating their own worlds, learning valuable creative writing lessons in the process. Here's a link, if you think your readers might be interested:

http://wofford.edu/newsroom/content.aspx?id=27822
Thanks,

Matt (a reader and fan).

Consider it plugged.

Talking about which, the Memorare For the Hugo sticker on the right of the page is for this story -- http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/gw01.htm -- and is there because Gene Wolfe has never, ever won the Hugo Award. And he should.

There's an English ceilidh band called Florida - http://www.zen21456.zen.co.uk/florida/ - who do a wonderful version of Danse Macabre. They have a clip of it on their website - http://www.zen21456.zen.co.uk/florida/samples.htm

That's terrific -- and a brilliant start...