The Remnants of Kitty

Those of you who have been following the saga of The Bees over at the birdchick blog (http://www.birdchick.com/labels/beekeeping.html) will know that of the two hives we started out with, which we called Olga and Kitty, Olga has thrived, while Kitty did so well that she swarmed in late summer and took off to see the world. We got a new queen, but the remaining bees in Kitty never got her population back up in time for winter.

Which meant that when it got really cold this year, Olga had enough bees to keep the hive warm and Kitty simply didn't. I went out in January and noticed that the snow had melted around Olga, she was removing her dead and, on warm days, bees were nipping out and pooping yellow in the snow, whereas Kitty was just a green box with nothing going on.

So I did what anyone would do. I sent a few thousand dead bees to Lisa Snellings, to make into art.

A couple of days ago I noticed that someone -- probably a raccoon -- had tried to get in to Kitty, and clean out the honey, which meant it was time to do something. I called Sharon, who was down with hellflu, and got the greenlight from her.

Lorraine and I moved the empty kitty hive into the garage.

And then I had to decide what to do with the honey in Kitty. I went onto the Internet to find out if there was anything I could do that didn't involve buying centrifugal honey extractors, and learned that if it was honey I wanted, a bucket and some cheesecloth would do just fine...



So I mashed up the leftover comb and honey into a bucket, tipped the resulting scary-looking gloop into the cheesecloth at the top of another bucket...



Then nipped out to the garage every three or four hours to add more gloop as the honey trickled through the cheescloth into the bottom bucket.



And this morning Lorraine came over and we took the cheesecloth off bucket #1 and poured the honey into jars. Astonishingly, the cheesecloth had done its job, and we had wax and crud on the outside of the bucket and clear honey on the inside.



There's probably the same amount again still in the garage right now trickling through the cheesecloth into buckets.

The honey is wonderful. It tastes like wildflowers and spring. I'd rather have Kitty out there filled with bees (although the Kitty hive that swarmed is undoubtedly fine, in a hollow tree somewhere), but the honey's good too.

...

The Graveyard Book is pretty much ready to be copy-edited now. I was scared that my editors in the UK and the US would point out somewhere I'd messed up that would need a whole new chapter (much as Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury did when she read Coraline in manuscript and said, "It needs a chapter where she confronts the Other Father, who in what you've given me just goes offstage and stays off," and I said "oh Bugger it does, doesn't it?" and had to go and write it. I mean, I knew about the scene in the cellar. I just thought I could get away with not having written it.).

But nothing like that happened. Sarah's biggest concern was a scene where a fifteen-year old girl accepts a ride from a stranger (obviously, she shouldn't have, but Sarah wanted it to be convincing that she did) and Elise only had small points -- the biggest change was that she wanted a sentence removed that spelled out how ghouls got their names, which I'd put in slightly under protest because a few people had been confused as to whether the small, leathery corpse-eaters were the real Duke of Westminster, 35th President of the United States, Bishop of Bath and Wells, or not, and I was happy to see it go away again.

I got an email today from Diana Wynne Jones saying "It is FABULOUS, WONDERFUL, TRIFFIC. One of your best! I love it," which is better than gold and rubies (and if Diana doesn't like something, she tells me). Jon Levin at CAA, my long-suffering movie agent, is starting to fend off the phone calls as people call him wanting to see it, and we have to decide who we're showing it to, which is a good problem to have.

Everything's sort of accelerated right now. The book comes out in six months (30 Sept in the US, a month later in the UK), and there's not really much time for the normal routes of book promotion.

I'll see if we can get a countdown to publication date timer for the front page of the website. I don't think I've had one of those since American Gods.

As Dr Johnson said...

I was meant to be on NPR's TALK OF THE NATION tomorrow. But their schedules have shifted and I'll be on the radio this afternoon -- Wednesday the 8th of August. I think that http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
is their website. I'll be on towards the end of the second hour (the hour that some stations don't get).

John Scalzi writes wisely, as usual, over at his blog about Stardust and how he thinks it'll do:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/08/07/stardusts_chances.html
and I couldn't see anything there to disagree with.

I have no doubt at all that Stardust will do brilliantly around the world, rock out on DVD, and become one of those films that is beloved. But how it will do this weekend... ah, that's a mystery. I was fascinated by this article about success and failure -- and, more importantly, the perception of success and failure -- in movie box office:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/hollywood-where-ignoran_b_59464.html
(link via.)

I remember the first time I went to Hollywood, with Terry Pratchett, in 1992 I learned that you could frame any conversation about something you wanted to do in a plot that Hollywood Execs didn't understand or had a problem with if you referred to another movie that they'd seen. ("So why don't they...?" "Because they forget about it, um -- just like at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK." "Oh. Got it.") And it was useful for talking about the feel of things -- you simply positioned what you were talking about against or with other films.

By 1996, when I went back to Hollywood, something had changed. I remember naming a movie in one of those conversations -- talking about look and feel or about lighting or about something like that -- and having the Exec look at me as if I had something unpleasant on my shoe, and he said, simply, "But that film didn't make any money." He couldn't understand why I would even have brought it up.

...

Over on Charles Vess's blog you can see a photo of us at the end of the premiere, me in a tuxedo and him not, because he forgot his shirt studs.

The birdchick does a honey from our hives taste test over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/08/go-see-stardust-and-little-about-our.html

Hi Neil, I was wondering if you knew what's up with Rich Horton's Fantasy: Best of the Year 2007 Edition. There are three authors touted prominently on the cover of the mass market paperback: you, Gene Wolfe, and Peter S. Beagle. Of the three of you, Beagle is the only one who actually has a story inside. What happened? Was there a story of yours that was supposed to be in it? And what about Gene Wolfe?

It was a screw-up - the publisher reused the names from the previous year, by accident. They wrote to me and apologised, and I told them that somewhere in my basement I have a handful of copies of the UK edition of THE SANDMAN BOOK OF DREAMS in paperback, which proudly lists Stephen King on the cover as having written a story, for reasons no-one was ever able to explain. That time we were lucky, and we caught it in time to pulp the print-run. But sometimes you can't.

Hi Mr G,
Can I download the clip of Maddy's interview of you? I want to hear it over and over again to boost myself. It's just inspiring to listen to a daughter interviewing her dad. It makes me want to write more too, just like you; and just like you, you write for the people important to you.
Thanks,

JPB

PS. Please say HI to Maddy for me. :)

Easy (well, easy after a quick Google anyway). It's at the Harper Collins Digital Media cafe -- http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/ -- and the direct link to the free download is http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/product_details.jsp?productId=807

As you'll ultimately be getting one of the Coraline puppets, I thought you might like to see how they're being made: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/beginning-to-build-coraline/

That would be cool even if I wasn't getting one...

Wow. Hey! Why have you stopped putting a "stardust"/"stardust movie" label on posts that involve Stardust? (Of course the choice of labels is completely your prerogative, but it would make it a lot easier to find certain posts, and it seems like this would be an ideal time to make use of the label function - is there a particular reason you have stopped using the labels in this case?)

Ignorance, madam. Pure ignorance. Or at least, ineptitude when it comes to labelling.