Circus Fish

The answer to yesterday's question is,

Dave McKean,

(or David Tench McKean, as Wikipedia and thus everyone else now seems to be listing him as, thus turning a small fish joke into an alternate universe fact)

for Dave illustrated The Graveyard Book, and also illustrated (and even made comics for) Hester Blumenthal's Big Fat Duck Cookbook. I saw a copy of the Big Fat Duck Cookbook when I was at Bloomsbury a couple of days ago, and it is unbelievably beautiful. Also unbelievably expensive. My own plan is to be incredibly nice to Dave and see if he'll give me a copy for Christmas.

Which reminds me, Dave McKean is signing in London on Hallowe'en, just as I am. He'll be at Forbidden Planet from 5.00pm to 6.00pm so if you're coming to see me anyway that evening, you could always go and see him first. And if you aren't going to see me, you could go and see him instead.

(Dave did design work for the third Harry Potter film, which links all three authors on the list.)

Graveyard Book UK Tour: London Talk and Signing (31 October)

Hi Neil, I just spoke to Blackwell, and they tell me the event is sold out. *cries* They do have a waiting list with 30 people already on it so I'm not holding out any hope... I thought you might want to know.

NB I love the Graveyard Book very, very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Enjoy the tour!
Susanne (A fan)

I'm really sorry. We stopped doing London events at 600 seat halls back in 2003, because they filled up too fast, and we switched to the 930 seat Logan Hall. This time I was told by Bloomsbury that Blackwells simply couldn't find anywhere of that size free for Hallowe'en, and could only get the LSE Old Theatre, which seats about 550 people... which meant that I was fairly sure we'd be upsetting as many people as get seats. But that's all there was.

Again, apologies.

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

You mention in your latest blog entry you'd be 'so there' for a line of fountain pens. Montblanc has a line of famous author/patron of the arts pens that are to die for, mostly. http://www.penslimited.com/index.html The Semiramis is a particular favorite of mine.

The famous authors/patrons they've honored with pens do tend to be dead which could be a drawback in getting a pen designed for you. If there are any Gaiman fans working for Montblanc perhaps they could whisper a word in the right ear?

Regards,
Laurie

The awkward truth is that, while I love Montblanc ink and their ink bottle design (especially their dried-blood-coloured Bordeaux, which I signed my way across the US with on the recent tour) I'm not a big fan of their fountain pens: the ones I've encountered seem made to look impressive sitting on desks. They aren't things I'd want to write novels with, and the ones I've used or been given skip too much to use as signing pens. (I've got a couple of Montblancs, both gifts.)

On the last signing tour I signed books with a Namiki Falcon until the nib went sproing in Chicago, whereupon I switched to a Lamy. (And I became a convert to the Pilot Vanishing Point Fountain Pen when I was in China, as it was a perfect writing implement for using in notebooks on the run.) I wrote The Graveyard Book mostly with a Lamy 2000, an elderly Watermans flexinib, and the Pelikan that Henry Selick gave me.

...

Neal Hefti's dead. His Batman theme was, I think, the first record I was ever bought (for, I suspect, my sixth birthday) that I actually wanted, and I was deeply offended because whoever had designed the cover had drawn Batman's cloak as a two-piece, wing-like thing.

XKCD vs The New Yorker in a to-the-death-cartoon-face-off. Yes! (Only not actually to the death, because that would be a sad waste of talent and human life.)

Here is a song I like by Vermillion Lies, called Circus Fish.

(I am also now listening to Mitch Benn's Sing Like an Angel)

Peter Straub in Time. (And belated congratulations to Emma and Michael!)

(Also Happy Birthday, Cat Mihos...)

Tasha Robinson at The Onion sent me a link to the Onion AV review of The Graveyard Book.

And looking into the mirror this morning, it occurred to me that as we age we slowly turn into Mort Drucker caricatures of ourselves, and I found that strangely comforting.

Getting out of the Bath

I went to Bath from Bristol. Was trapped in a one way system by the taxi's GPS system and a taxi driver who seemed oblivious to the fact that the GPS system was taking him around and around the centre of Bath in repeating circles, but who was determined to obey his GPS orders anyway and thus ignored all the diversion signs that would have taken him where he needed to go.

But we got there. I printed stuff out. All was ready.

I came on in a huge thingummy of dry ice smoke that rolled across the stage and then lurched into the foggy darkness of what I could only imagine was an audience. You couldn't see much through the smoke but you could hear a few people coughing. It gave me hope.

Then I sat down and read some of the first chapter of "The Graveyard Book", and a little bit of "Odd and the Frost Giants", and then I answered questions. I'd made a promise to myself to try and answer as many questions as I could completely newly, ever since someone in Lund came up to me and said "I was answering along with you, word for word on that" (I think it was my reply to "How Did You And Terry Pratchett Write Good Omens?"). It meant I was a bit more hesitant and probably less funny, but, I hope, a bit more honest-in-terms-of-exactly-how-I-think-of-something-right-now.

They'd advertised the event as "12+ and adult" which meant that we got a mostly adult turnout of about 450 people. The signing went fast and everyone was really nice.

After, Bloomsbury publicist the magnificently pregnant Lucy Holden and I were meant to get the train back to London, but it was first delayed and then, eventually, cancelled, so we bit the bullet and got a taxi all the way from Bath railway station to London.

Stumbled back into my hotel very late and then couldn't sleep until early.


Dear Mr. Gaiman
I am very curious to know what the word "neepery" means. I looked up some of the dictionary's at home and came up with nothing. So i tried the internet and those dictionaries seemed to have nothing, except something about some physic's equation. Which has made my head spin and forced me to lie down, so strange it was. So i tried to just Google neepery and that has lead me to some other writers that write "neepery" and the context its used in didn't help me much. Will you please divulge on this young boys mind the meaning of the word neepery!!
Many Thanks
Sam
P.S. My best friend thinks that you made the word up, just to make yourself look cooler.

I have made many words up in my time, but that wasn't one of them. A quick Google gave me...
http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/neep-neep.html

neep-neep: /neep neep/, n.
[onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers. Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to play games on a PC. The derived noun neeping applies specifically to the long conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties (the term neepery is also in wide use). Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that “Hacking is a conversational black hole!”.

Hope this helps.