In Which It Is Demonstrated that I have become a Woodland Creature

Yesterday I got up early, left the new house I'd barely settled into, and hit the road with the kind of overstuffed suitcase you pack when you'll be on the road for a couple of weeks and you aren't quite sure what you'll need to wear, and you'll be in three completely different climates during that time.

I flew to Philadelphia and went to Rowan University in southern New Jersey, where I met photographer Kyle Cassidy (aka my friend Kyle Cassidy). We did a Master Class together, answering questions, talking about what we do and how we do it, and, at one point, reading stories and showing photographs from Who Killed Amanda Palmer. Then I gave a talk that was also a reading as part of the Rowan University Presidents' Lecture Series, that was as much fun as the talk/readings I did in Billings and Calgary, and the audience seemed to like it, and I loved how comfortable I'm starting to feel on stages in universities and such. I no longer feel, when I'm out on the stage, like I'm faking it, or that I'm there under false pretenses.

As Kyle and I were walking through the campus he pulled out a camera and took these photos...

It was windy. My hair does not normally try to escape.

I look like I was living out in the frozen wilderness, where I was panning for adjectives or something else that wild writers do.

If you go to http://thedeanblog.com/kyle-cassidy-and-neil-gaiman-bring-the-creative-to-ccca/ and read about the day from the Dean's point of view, you'll see a photo she took of Kyle taking the bottom photograph. How unusually recursive.

(The first question to be asked at the talk was "What's up with the beard?" and I expained it was my hiding out and being anonymous beard, but has survived because Amanda wanted to see it when she returns from Australia.)

Then I flew to San Francisco (I finished Monica Byrne's lovely THE GIRL IN THE ROAD on the plane and also proofread the second GRAVEYARD BOOK graphic novel, and went over J. H. Williams' breakdowns for the third part of SANDMAN: OVERTURE.) It was a mostly quiet flight, although it was also the first time I've ever seen the pilot of a plane come out and explain to drunk and unpleasant passengers that if they didn't stop being unpleasant he would have them arrested.

Let's see. Important things... apologies to Detcon 1, I'd wanted to post about their nomination process for their YA and Middle Grade Fiction Award, but I missed the deadline.

I very nearly missed the deadline to tell you that the Coraline ebook is an Amazon US GoldBox special tomorrow (Sunday), and it will be Very Cheap Indeed. (I think the link is http://amzn.to/1fO9R5X but that might possibly be the wrong ebook edition.)(Here is the correct link to get the GoldBox price. -- web goblin)

The folk making the Wayward Manor video game have let me know that the pre-order site, http://whohauntsneil.com, is coming down in a week. So if you want to pre-order the game, the t-shirt, or even attend the pricy and exclusive but incredibly cool haunted Magic Castle dinner with me, you should click over to http://whohauntsneil.com/welcome/#shop and buy all the things with alacrity.

Wayward Manor has just gone up on the Humble Store, where you can also preorder it, and it will remain there for the couple of months until its actual release.

The Guardian has a photoset of the 26 Characters for the Story Museum. You've already seen me as Badger here on the blog, but this is your chance to see Hanuman and Till Eulenspiegel and the Wicked Witch of the West...

and finally...

On April 4th, cartoonist, designer, artist, writer and teacher Art Spiegelman and I will be in conversation at Bard College, NY state. We will talk about comics and MAUS and music and art and being Jewish and life and everything I have ever wanted to ask Art. (Or he will ask anything he's ever wanted to ask me.) Tickets are available now. Please come: It's a big hall and we will be lonely if it echoes.

Labels: kyle cassidy, scary beard, Scary hair, Wayward Manor

A Preamble to a photograph

This is a very long preamble to a photograph.


When Amanda and I were first going out together we would spend a lot of time on the phone, talking about big real things. We don't talk on the phone anywhere nearly as much any more, and when we do talk on the phone we're more likely to be trying to figure out the logistics of where we are in the world and how we can warp space and time in order to be in the same place relatively soon than about our hearts or our lives. That's just the way things are, and when we're together, late at night, in bed, we still talk about all the big real things. 

But we used to talk on the phone. One night I said something to Amanda about my life, and beds, and the sizes of beds, and she got very quiet. I thought she was crying on the phone, which seemed odd, as I'd not said anything (to my mind) about hearts.

A week or so later, she announced on Twitter that she was writing a song. She posted photos of herself after each verse. It seemed like the whole of Twitter was cheering her on.

I got to Boston a few days later, and she played me her song, on the huge grand piano in her cramped apartment. She'd taken a tiny fragment of my life and made it into something else, a story about a couple, from joy to death, exhibited, as in a legal case or at an inquest, as a sequence of beds. I cried when she played it. 

She asked me to give it a title, because I had inspired it, and I didn't want to give it a clever title, and so I called it "The Bed Song", and the name stuck.

It's one of the songs on her new album.

She's asked a number of artists to make art to go along with the book, asked if I would do something for "The Bed Song". I thought about what I wanted to make, realised it was a sequence of five photographs, mirroring the five verses/exhibits in the song. And that, while I love taking photographs (my lomo cameras are some of my favourite possessions) I did not know how I would take these photographs...

Fortunately, a few days later there was a gathering in Barrington Illinois to honour Gene Wolfe, and my friend Kyle Cassidy was there with his beautiful actress wife Trillian. I asked Kyle if he'd like to collaborate on making art: I'd write a script, describing the images, as I would have done if I was writing a comics script. He'd take the photos. Kyle said yes. Then I told him the deadline we were on...

And that we'd need people of all ages, willing to be photographed, in couples (all but one), naked in a bed.

Kyle set off, undaunted.

Kyle is an amazing photographer. We found volunteers through friends and through Twitter. It was relatively easy to find people to pose in their twenties and thirties and forties... finding older models was harder. I was hugely pleased when my friends Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff agreed to pose for the last  photograph we needed. 

Many of the people who had their photos taken told Kyle that it was a life-changing experience for them, and I can believe it.

The photographs were beautiful. The sequence of photographs worked as a story. We were happy, about everything except...  Kyle had taken too many good photographs.

Each photograph was a piece of art. Amanda's doing an art book already, of the art that's been made for the album, but we desperately wanted to see Kyle's photos reproduced at the size and at the same quality as they'll be hung in the art galleries they'll be hanging in this summer, during Amanda's art tour. And we wanted the photos that weren't just part of the set of five, that would hang in the gallery and be part of the art book, to be seen.

And Amanda was putting together a Kickstarter (it's at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour). It was going to need incentives at various levels. And if the incentive level was priced high enough then we could actually afford to make the kind of book we dreamed of -- something with the level of art and craft you'd find in the impressive oversized Taschen photo books. Although there would be significantly fewer photos than the $15,000 Helmut Newton SUMO book (but then, it also wouldn't need to come with its own display stand).

So that's what we're doing. We're making a maximum of 666 of them (to commemorate the % by which the Evening With Neil and Amanda Kickstarter exceeded its level). If the demand is less, we may make significantly less. We want copies for our models, and a few for ourselves. You'll get one if you support the Kickstarter at the $1000 level or above (so each of the 35 people hosting a house party, for example, will get a copy), and you also get all the goodies from lower levels as well.

Right now we're just finalising the specs -- Kyle wants a lock on the box (or slipcase) it comes in, for example, but we need to decide what kind of lock...

There will be photographs,  reproduced at the same size (HUGE -- the book is planned to be the same size as the recent oversized Little Nemo Sunday pages) and quality (amazing) as the actual prints. There will be an essay by me about the song, what inspired it and what it means to me. There will be the script for Kyle and the emails. There will be a reproduction of Amanda's handwritten lyrics. And we will sign it, and limit it, and I very much hope that each of the people who winds up with a copy is made very happy by it.

Of all of the things in the Kickstarter campaign, it's the most likely to ship last, because the production process of objects like this is always beset with nightmares. We want it fancy and beautiful and unique, but each fancy thing we add means there's something else that can go wrong or delay things, and that printers and bookbinders and boxmakers will simply not be able to do what we're asking, meaning we'll have to find someone who can, or wait, or send something back to be redone.

Right now, Kyle is taking the handful of last photographs for the book. And as we were talking about it, I realised, with a creeping horror, that the final photo had, inevitably, to be me and Amanda. Amanda has been in many photographs naked, has no nudity taboo that I've ever noticed. I'm English. I have a nudity taboo. 

Kyle took several shots of us in Philadelphia last week, in our hotel room. Some of them we had the covers over us, in others (the scary ones -- well, scary for me) we didn't.  I held Amanda and did my best to go to sleep and not to think about the camera on a stick far above us.

I've not seen any of the photos Kyle took of us without bedclothes, yet.  I'm nervous as hell about seeing them, but also certain that we'll find the one to be the final image, and glad it will only be in a very limited edition book. But the photo that Kyle just sent over showing Amanda and me together, under the covers, with me mostly asleep, is beautiful.

And this is it.

It's the only one of the photos that's in colour, too. I think we may use it as the image on the limitation page, the one we all sign.

And, with Kyle's permission, I'm putting it up here.

Labels: in which our author is very nervous, kyle cassidy, nudity, oversized books, the bed song

A Picture of the Cat of Doom

It got cold. The air smells amazing, the mosquitoes have gone, the sky is a perfect blue and summer is over.

My friend Kyle Cassidy is out here for a few days to shoot photographs of Miss Maddy, and also shoot Lorraine's first ever Roller Derby Bout on Saturday with the Chippewa Valley Roller Girls. He and I went for a walk in the night and wore warm coats, and played Children of the Corn in the meadow, and you could smell the distant winter on the air.

Actually, I should clarify. The above things are what Kyle is officially here to shoot. Unofficially, he's here for the cats. This is his iphone picture of Princess looking like the Cat of Doom from a horror movie.

...

Tickets go on sale today, Friday the 16th, for the EVENING WITH NEIL AND AMANDA shows we're doing in November, for all the stops except San Francisco, which goes on sale on Sunday. Given the speed with which the tickets released for presale for Vancouver and San Francisco sold out today, you may want to get your orders in early - as near to ticket release time as you can. (10 am for everywhere except Portland, where it is 11 am because they like their mornings in Portland.)

October 31st
LOS ANGELES, CA
Wilshire Ebell Theatre
Tickets go on sale Friday, 9/16 at 10AM PDT.
http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/09004728855F4205

(Costumes! It's Hallowe'en in Los Angeles. We'll suggest that people wear costumes.)

November 4th

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Palace of Fine Arts
Tickets go on sale Sunday 9/18 at 10AM PDT.

http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/1C00472C7527579B

November 6th

VANCOUVER, BC
Vogue Theatre
Tickets go on sale 9/16 at 10:00am.
https://tickets.voguetheatre.com/Online/

November 8th

PORTLAND, OR
Aladdin Theatre
Tickets go on sale 9/16 at 11am PDT.
http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0F004728D41C4F13

SEATTLE, WA

Moore Theatre

Tickets go on sale at 9/16 at 10 AM PDT

http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?pid=7109675

...

Let's see. My old friend and collaborator Dave McKean was made an honorary Doctor of Design in Wolverhampton. I do not think I have ever seen him look so uncomfortable as in these photos. Wish he'd kept the hat on, though.

Which is to say, congratulations Dave.

If you're in the UK, get to Foyles to see Dave's "Magic of Reality" exhibition http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Events/Detail.aspx?eventId=1338- the original art he made for the book he's just done with Richard Dawkins is on display.

...

I meant to link to the One Book One Chicago site. They had people make books, literally: reinvent and rebind the books that were One Book One Chicago choices over the years. Audrey Niffenegger was one of the judges. A Neverwhere won. Read all about it, and see many of the books at http://onebookonechicago.tumblr.com/post/9588689435/one-book-many-interpretations

...

Here's the World Book Night list of the Hundred Best Loved Books in the UK: http://www.worldbooknight.org/your-books/the-wbn-top-100-books

Books of mine got into the top hundred several times. Well, four and half times. (Good Omens being the half, shared with Terry Pratchett.) Which is really thrilling. The books, with links to each book, and the votes they got are at http://www.worldbooknight.org/your-books/the-wbn-interactive-top-100-books

..

Right. Sleep now. How on earth did it get this late?

Labels: an evening with neil and amanda, I do not have an honorary doctorate but am now holding out for a dukedom, kyle cassidy, Princess, world book night

Golden breakfast things...

It's a beautiful day. Kyle my photographer houseguest is off down the creek taking photographs. 

If you click on http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/513410.html

you will see a photo that he took of me and my dog the evening before last, when the light was golden and it turned the dandelion clocks into sparkles. (Probably Bill Stiteler will turn it into another of his toe-curlingly evil "Hey Girl" pictures.)

(He is out to get art made, as you will learn from the caption.)

I think that this amateur Wolves In the Walls fanart is my favourite photograph of recent vintage though.

And the Chicago Tribune did an article about me at http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-090524gaiman-column,0,1101532.column

which begins,

You are inside Neil Gaiman's mind. (Hands and feet must stay within the car at all times. Management not responsible, etc.)

Please note -- now coming into view on your left -- a highly unusual conglomeration. The phrase "a jumbled, jammed-together mess" might be an apt way to describe it, as would the adjective "higgledy-piggledy." There are fantastic creatures of every size and shape and color; a flaming arch leading into 37 alternative dimensions; a button; a crumbling staircase; a battered-looking witch's hat; a row of brooding Doric columns; a headless doll; a few hounds of hell, snapping and straining at their leashes; a peanut butter sandwich; a talking cat; a disembodied bloodshot eye; and the occasional troll.Currently visible on your right, my friends, is an ancient scroll upon which is written the minute particulars of your destiny -- yet sadly, another line of it disappears each time you lean close and try to make out the words. (Sit down, please -- you have been warned!)

Which is a fine way to start a newspaper article, if you ask me. Possibly the best way.

...

And I am getting emails from people who have found copies of CRAZY HAIR in book shops, so I think it has started to trickle out into the world, although according to Amazon the official release date is Tuesday. 

...

Oops. They're all back from the creek. Gotta go.  (I've made bubble and squeak and poached local duck eggs for breakfast.)

Labels: author photos, Crazy Hair, kyle cassidy

How to Order WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER and why outer space tastes of raspberries

Click on this now:


Bohemian Rhapsody played on old computer beeps. Found on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/20/hp_scanjet_3c_bohemian_rhaposdy/, with thanks to Mistress Mousey for the tip-off. Have you clicked on it yet? You know you want to.

I said that everything turned into the Best of Queen...

...

Andrew Sullivan comments on Bush policy with an apt matching quote from the Sandman book Season of Mists at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/the-sentence-i-cant-get-out-of-my-mind.html

I'll let you go and read it for yourself.

Over the years I've got very used to being asked in interviews about Why Sandman Wasn't Political. Normally journalists would point out how very filled with politics all the other British writers of the school of eighty-something were, and that Sandman wasn't. And why is that? And I would hesitantly suggest that I thought that Sandman might have been a bit more political than they thought, and they would say no, it definitely wasn't; where was Margaret Thatcher, after all, and why hadn't I shown her eating babies with her vampire teeth?

So ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when journalists started talking about Sandman #50, I've felt, well, not vindicated, because I never thought I had anything to vindicate, but sort of like, yes, the personal really is political. I thought it was.

(Also, if memory serves, the line from the victim in Season of Mists, after the line that Andrew quotes is, "But that makes it so much worse...")

...

Right. So last August I went out to Boston for a few days to meet musical phenomenon Amanda Palmer. I'd loved her Dresden Dolls work, had been introduced to her in email by Jason Webley, had met her for an hour in March 2008 at the New York Comic Con just before my CBLDF event, where I introduced her to Bill Hader and Stan Lee, because they were int he green room too.

She had sent me her then-forthcoming CD WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER, which I'd loved, and I'd agreed to write the back cover "liner notes". And then Amanda sent me an email telling me that she had been taking photographs of herself dead for about 14 years, that the original idea had been to use some of those photos for the CD sleeve, but that would not happen, and she was making it into a book, and asking if I'd be interested in writing some words to go along with them.

She sent me many of the photos. I was intrigued. Nobody had ever asked me to do anything like that before, and the photos were small frozen stories, so I said yes. I went out to Boston in August and spent a few long-but-good days with Amanda and with photographer Kyle Cassidy, who is astonishing, with Amanda's then-boyfriend Michael and with Beth Hommel, her assistant. It was like a combination of mad improv theatre and instant film-making as we created scenarios and Kyle shot them. Mostly I was somewhere off to the side, scribbling in a notebook while everything happened around me, but occasionally I was dragooned into helping, or even being part of a shot. (There was one night where I staggered back and forth down an alley at 2.00am, with a dead Amanda over my shoulder, while nearby my friend Kira made imaginary cell-phone calls, and I waited for a squad car to pull up and find out what was going on. No squad cars turned up. People in Boston are very blase about dead people in alleys. The photo made it into the book, I think.)

I loved trying to turn the photos into stories. Some big stories, some very small stories, even a new-old fairy tale, each story odd, each story fun to write, and each story, invariably, fatal.

The most fun I think were the ones where the photo created more questions than it answered (a dead woman on some waste ground, her head crushed by a manual typewriter, apparently dropped from a very high place just left me going WHY? and produced one of my favourite stories as I got to explain...)

I've said it before on this blog: Writing is (like death) a lonely business, and it was enormously fun for me writing surrounded by creative people busy creating. I wrote several of the stories sitting in a corner of a room while Amanda practiced for her upcoming tour, tuning in and out of reality while songs were being played. It was fun.

There are about a dozen stories altogether, and a few shorter things by me in there. And there are lyrics by Amanda. And photographs. So many photographs.

The book was designed by designers in association with Beth Hommell, Amanda's assistant (I've been assured by the designers that my previous statements here about how good or timely a job they did were erroneous, and that I was misinformed, which I'm happy to correct here.)

The book is being printed right now, in Hong Kong. This is a good thing. There will be 10,000 copies. People have asked if any of the stories will be reprinted in any short story collections in days to come -- possibly, but some of my favourites are dependent on the juxtapostion of the image and the words, and my short story collections tend to be almost a decade apart.

I should probably warn people about the nudity. There are lots of photos where Amanda is fully dressed, but she doesn't seem to have anything resembling a nudity taboo, and is fearless when it comes to getting the photo she wanted, so is fully or partly naked in some of the strangest places (my favourite nude Amanda shot, taken way before I got there, was her naked and apparently dead on a golf course, early one morning, as the golfers, unconcerned, played on and around her). It's definitely art, not porn, but there, such warnings are useful.

And there are many photographers in the book, but Kyle Cassidy is The Man.

So the book can now be ordered. It actually went live for orders a couple of days ago, and promptly was crashed by the number of people trying to order immediately. Seeing that this blog has the power to crush websites (what they've taken to calling a #NeilWebFail on Twitter) I wasn't going to link to it until the site was robust enough, but they've now beefed it up and added phone lines, so if you want to order a copy, you can.

It's a big, full colour, coffee table Who Killed Amanda Palmer Book. Copies arrive from the Hong Kong printer in July and will go straight out to people who have preordered them.

A few bookshops around the world that are friends of mine or friends of Amanda have enquired about selling the books. My understanding is that Amanda is waiting until the preorders are done, and everyone who has had a chance to preorder has ordered, before seeing a) if any are left and b) if any are left, how many of them will go to places like Chapters in Dublin or DreamHaven or Newbury Comics, or further afield than that.

I still wish I'd been able to come up with a story for the one of her dead among the wallabies, mind.

It was a fun project. I made some fine friends out of it, with Amanda foremost among them as we discovered that we agreed about pretty much everything to do with making art and the way you treat your fans and readers, and such (although not, oddly enough, about getting naked and pretending to be dead on golf courses, which is definitely Her Thing). I already knew she made good music, and I learned that she's really nice, and fearless, and very, very funny, and the sort of person who, at the end of an exhausting seven month world tour, would spend a month working for free with the kids at her old High School to help them put on a show.

And after all that preamble: you should pre-order the book from http://jsrdirect.com/bands/amandapalmer/wkap.html



Picture of Kyle eating Amanda's brains while I, er, hold a pen not very menacingly, above borrowed from Kyle's excellent Livejournal, where I also discovered there's a win a copy of the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book or something cooler competition on the go, and a photo of Chip Delany Where He Works.

....

I learned the other day that the galactic centre tastes like raspberries and smells of rum.

Oh, right, I thought, Space: the Final Cocktail.

...

And almost forgot to say there's a good article in Wired about my final Batman, but it's a bit too spoiler-filled for me to comfortably link to on the day Detective 853 comes out. Read that first.

Labels: amanda palmer, honestly who didn't kill Amanda Palmer at this point, kyle cassidy, making music on old computers, rum and raspberries