A useful post (honest)

This just arrived in my in-box, and it seems a bit last minute, so I thought I'd repost it here for anyone in the LA area who was wondering what to do on the evening of Wednesday the 19th...

CBLDF Member Holiday Party This Wednesday
This Wednesday, December 19, the CBLDF's Member
Appreciation Holiday Party lands in Los Angeles at the venerable Golden
Apple Comics on Melrose! A sleigh full of great creators will be on hand to
celebrate Free Speech & spread comics cheer, including Percy "MF Grimm"
Carey, Rob (Scud) Schrab, Bill (Simpsons) Morrison, Gerry (Infinite Horizon)
Duggan, Marc (Manhunter) Andreyko, Christos (What If: Civil War) Gage, Larry
(Beanworld) Marder, Rantz (Displaced Persons) Hoseley, and more! Come by for
signatures, sketches & surprises! The first 50 current or new CBLDF members
signing up at the event will receive a gift bag packed with great items,
including preview editions of Frank Cho's Jungle Girl, Alex Ross' Superpowers,
Gerry Duggan's Infinite Horizon, and Rantz Hoseley's Displaced Persons, plus a
variant cover of Sinbad: Rogue of Mars #1, a DJ Spooky Sampler CD, a Will Eisner
graphic novel, and additional signed CBLDF prints!To make the night even more
special, Golden Apple will be providing holiday cocktails & snacks, a CBLDF
benefit auction, and 10% off all purchases made by CBLDF members, and a matching 10% donation to the Fund! Golden Apple has also prepared an exclusive MF Grimm
print, limited to just 25 pieces for CBLDF members coming to the event! The party
starts at 6:00 PM and runs until 9:00 at Golden Apple Comics, 7018 Melrose Ave.
at LaBrea. For more information, visit http://www.goldenapplecomics.com!/

For those who can't be there, there's an online auction at http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQfgtpZ1QQfrppZ25QQsassZcbldf -- and it includes a signed 1996 San Diego Stardust Print.

And then for those of you who want to look further than eBay for CBLDF things, there's the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab CBLDF scents at http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/neverwhere.html is the American Gods and Anansi Boys scents,
and
http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/stardust.html is the Stardust one.

(Sooner or later Beth is going to release her Snow, Glass, Apples perfume which is, I think, my favourite of all of them. People smell like sexy vampire apples when they wear it. Honest.)

And I should post that there's a treasure trove of cool, rare, and (in my opinion) often criminally underpriced stuff ($20 for a signed Frank Miller Sin City Poster?) at the CBLDF store at http://www.cbldf.com/. (And books and comics signed by everyone from Frank Miller and Jim Lee to Matt Fraction and Jeff Smith, often at cover price.) And when the stuff is gone, it's gone -- there used to be an awful lot of stuff up on the CBLDF Neil Gaiman Store page, and I notice it's now down to 7 items. (Admittedly, one of them is the Fiddler's Green Program Book, which I thought long gone and sold out completely.)

Right. Bed now.

(Well, bed once I've posted this link --http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6513517.html -- to a Publishers Weekly article on The Writers' Strike and Comics...)

Party Party

So this is the million words party post, and as with all good parties, I already feel faintly sick from devouring too many sweet things. (In this case, big lumps of honeycomb, the first from the hive. The Birdchick will tell you all about it. with photos, soon enough.)

(Celebratory Party Art above by the Wonderful Web Elf.)

But it's not just Million Words day. It's also Mike's Gaiman's 24th birthday. Mike, for the record, has a real job, at Google, and no longer looks like this:
He is also no longer anywhere near as impressed by monkey-pony monsters as he used to be.

Hi Neil,

not a question as much as a statement. I just want to tell you that the beautiful new hardcover of STARDUST (which I'm very happy about and which looks absolutely amazing on my shelf) has some pictorial problems. I have compared only one image, and by memory only, but at least the picture of the Fairy Market is missing its edges. The slightly familiar-looking gentleman in the dark glasses in the lower left corner is missing in the hc; only his left shoulder and arm is left. So I'm glad I have both versions. :-)

Yr obt Servt,

Martin Andersson

That's pretty much the only change, and it actually dates back to the original 1998 hardback -- because the size -- and the ratio -- is different from the smaller version , the four double-page spreads, which are "full bleed" and go to the edge of the page each lost a little bit at the edge -- in three cases, you lost a little bit of tree or sky, but in the fourth you lost, er, me. So, to make up for it, you get the new drawing of the Fairy Market as endpapers with me (and Charles Vess, and even Maddy) in there.

why are you so concerned about your hair and makeup?
HELLO; you're a master artist! No one expects you to be pretty, witty and
wise, yes but not PRETTY! Besides you're a man, a manly man at that! And
even though you are now more mature, most women (not me - I'm a shallow
as dish water and a sucker for a pretty face) but most young women love
an older man! So stop fretting about your looks, you're on a press junket
not doing glamor shots!

If you do TV, you get made up for it. Otherwise you look washed out, and if you're me your hair covers one eye in a distracting sort of a way, or something similar. It's one of those sort of fact of life things that you just sort of get used to if you're on a junket, where the TV cameras are omnipresent, or if you're doing TV interviews in a studio. The make-up person doesn't care whether you're male or female, old or young; she cares about making you look human on screen. The hardest job in the last few days (for the make-up lady) was when I had to be interviewed in front of a green screen, and she had to make my hair lie down and behave, because otherwise it would have caused bizarre optical effects when they replaced the green screen with Stardust images. I don't fret about my looks. Mostly, I'm amused by them, and by the process of hair and make-up. It's one of those things you don't expect to have to deal with when you start out as a writer.

Hello Neil,

Since you've recently gone from two and a half cats to six, I was wondering if you'd like one more. We've got a feral called Thor who we took in back in January after a nasty injury. He is very likely the world's sweetest cat. The only problem is that we have two other cats, one of which (the 'alpha cat') won't accept him. Well, that and we're technically breaking our lease by keeping a third cat on the premises. We've been looking for a good home for him via both Craigslist and our local daily paper, but have had no luck whatsoever. He'd make either an excellent companion or an excellent barn cat. We're concerned that if we don't find him a home within the next two weeks, we'll end up returning him to the street after having gotten him a lot of veterinary care and habituated him to regular human contact--and it just feels wrong. So while I suspect you won't be able to take him, could I perhaps prevail upon you to ask anyone you might know in the Albany, NY area if they'd consider it? If they want more information, we've created a Xanga blog for him at www.xanga.com/thorstory.

Best regards,

Circus

Good luck finding a home for him...

Hey Neil,
The Official site for Stardust, aside from being a really nice site to visit also has some music playing in the background that is QUITE nice, and I was just wondering if you knew if this was actually bits of Ilan Eshkeri's score for the film.
I do hope it is as I find it quite lovely to listen to, and I can see it fitting the story well.
Thanks
Scott

That's Ilan's score in the background.
...

I just got the galleys of my short story in a book called FOUR LETTER WORD:New Love Letters (Here's the Amazon Uk link) to proofread, and find it rather disturbing that I can't see anything wrong with it. (Rereads again. Okay. I found a gives that should be a give. Whew.)

Right. Now let's carry on with the party. Who's got the Twiglets? Where's the Tizer?