a harum scarum life

Off to the UK in a few hours to present some clips from Stardust at the Hay on Wye festival, and then up to London to be interviewed a lot and to see an ALMOST finished cut of Stardust. I've been holding out these last six months against seeing the incrementally more finished versions of Stardust, wanting to see it with all effects and music in place. We aren't quite there yet, but I'm finally going to get to see it anyway, and will report back. Then home on Tuesday. Too much bloody globetrotting going on, if you ask me.

Occasionally I grumble about low standards of journalism out there in the world, but I was fascinated to see how the Independent created their "cell phones are destroying bees" story out of, more or less, thin air. They were obviously proud of their article -- and as they said in a follow up about a town that had banned cellphone masts because of the damage it would do to bees. Last month, The Independent on Sunday reported exclusively that exploratory research at Germany's Landau University suggested the radiation interferes with bees' navigation systems. Read this Herald Tribune article, as they explain that the Independent article was "a good story....

except that the study in question had nothing to do
with mobile phones and was actually investigating the influence of
electromagnetic fields, especially those used by cordless phones that work on
fixed-line networks, on the learning ability of bees. The small study, according
to the researchers who carried it out too small for the results to be considered
significant, found that the electromagnetic fields similar to those used by
cordless phones may interrupt the innate ability of bees to find the way back to
their hive.... cellphones and cordless phones emit different types of radiation and what you learn studying one type is not necessarily significant to the other, according to the researchers.

Which means that it's not science, it's just bad reporting. End of grumble.


And finally, before I leap into a car and drive to the airport, here's a sneak preview of the cover of Smoke and Mirrors that will be out, er, I'm not sure actually. The trade paperback (oversized) US Harper Perennial editions of the books will be getting new covers in a uniform edition. They will all, for the next few years, look sort of like this. Which is to say, both respectable and odd. For reasons that I do not understand (but doubtless some of you do) the colours went utterly weird when I tried to upload it to Blogger, so I imported the jpg into Picassa and tried to wrench the colours back to where they are on the version I was sent, except the picture in the window window isn't blue, it's a sort of a mustard green...



Hang on. I'm going to try again. Maybe if I juggle it between formats....





Hmm. Well, the version I got from Harper Collins was a sort of a cross between the two... perhaps the best thing is for you to use your imagination, and it will look like that.

...

And now I have to run. Or at least, drive.

American Gods Blog, Post 78

Spent a good part of yesterday trying to compile a bibliography of Books Consulted for American Gods for the not-yet-online neilgaiman.com -- a sort of astonishingly incomplete bibliography, because otherwise I would have had to try and catalogue half a library, so I'm trying just to list the books in the boxes I'd put in the boot of the car (that's the trunk, for americans) when I drove down to Florida to work on the novel, and the ones I tried to make sure were on the shelves in the cabin as I wrote the rest of the book... and the ones I filled my suitcase with when I went to spend two weeks writing in Las Vegas (an anecdote, it occurs to me, that I've not mentioned yet on this blogger. Oh well. Feel free to ask me about it if you are at one of the Q & A sessions between the reading and the signing.) I got down a lot of the myth and folklore books. Lots of mini-capsule reviews.Cannot for the life of me find the box of books on confidence tricks or coin magic.

.....

http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm has a review of American Gods up... (the version up earlier was an early draft of the review posted in error).

....

Spent a couple of hours today in the basement, pulling out foreign editions of books for neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure whether I was more amazed by the stuff I didn't know I had -- "Chivalry" and "Snow, Glass, Apples" in Japanese. A box of first editions of Angels and Visitations. A Large Print edition of Stardust. A folder of short stories and poems I wrote in my teens (didn't have the heart to burn them, but the idea of anyone ever actually reading them... ow!) -- or the stuff I knew I had but couldn't find -- The German Hardback of Good Omens, for example -- or the stuff I should have had but had never been sent -- like the swedish editions of Neverwhere, or the Spanish Smoke and Mirrors and Stardust.

American Gods Blog, Post 67

Let's see. In no particular order...

1) Furball the cat is just fine. She turned out to have been asleep under my bed, and will be professionally shaved on Monday. Thank you for asking.

2) The second half of SNOW GLASS APPLES will go up on scifi.com on the 7th of June.

3) Today's mail brought the new paperback edition of Smoke and Mirrors, my short story collection. Which means it will turn up in the shops any time now.

4) Today also brought the audio book of American Gods. I started listening to it, as a quality check, and was swept up into it. George Guidal, who is one of the top people, if not the top person, in the world of audio books, reads it. it's a wonderful little package of about 14 cassettes. (The CD version will be out for the end of the year.) Harper Audio should be pleased with themselves. I'm thrilled... it's unabridged, and it made me very happy. It's not cheap, but I think I'll send some out as Xmas prezzies this year.

Now playing: I Am Kloot's "Natural History". Good band, but I keep thinking of John Clute, the preeminent SF critic, and wondering whether they're fans...

American Gods Blog, Post 64

I just got backstage at the the website for the first time, and have been fascinated by the statistics. For example, did you know that the most new people who've turned up here in a day is a hair over 1200? (mostly it's about 500 new people a day.) I didn't. Did you know that 238 Finns, and 227 Brazilians read it, but only 47 Belgians? Me neither. 4 people read this journal from the Cocos Islands. I didn't even know there WERE any Cocos Islands. See how cool statistics are?

Sean Abbott at Harper Collins ebooks tells me that they are going to be doing an eomnibus of my stuff, to promote the four ebooks that will be coming out in July. SMOKE & MIRRORS will get a couple of extra stories, as a bonus, while AMERICAN GODS will get a bunch of these journal entries as its bonus.

American Gods Blog, Post 61

I'm home. Hurrah... 22 Hours on planes and in airports, and it's just nice to be in my own house, with kids all around, and I got to say things I haven't had a chance to say in two weeks, things like "What do you mean --you're going out? You've still got two English essays to finish, and a hundred-question physics test, and all that homework's due tomorrow. Of course you aren't going out."

I walked in the garden:the asparagus is high as an elephant's eye, and for that matter, so is the rhubarb. (Which is rather unnerving, actually.)

So waiting for me, when I got home, was a finished copy of American Gods.

This made me very happy.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was how much thicker it was than I'd expected. (465 pages plus about 15 pages of front matter. Or to put it another way, it's over an inch thick.) Also, how very much it looks like a real book.

The cover is lovely.

I opened it up very carefully. Black endpapers. Yum...

The first rule of new books is this: when your new book arrives, and you open it to a random page, and look at it, you will see a typo, and your heart will sink. It may be the only typo (er, typographical error) in the whole book, but you will see it immediately.

So I very carefully didn't open it to a random page. I opened it to the first page (CAVEAT, AND WARNING FOR TRAVELERS) and read that instead. Half way down the page I noticed a comma that I could have sworn used to be a full stop...

But other than that, it looks lovely. Wonderful. Really cool. I checked the Icelandic, and that was now right, and all the weird copyediting things seem to be fine. The permissions are all there on the copyright page. Along with the weirdest little library of congress filing thing I've ever seen.

This is what it says:

American gods: a novel /by Neil Gaiman -- 1st ed
p.cm
ISBN 0-380-97365-0
1.National characteristics, American -- Fiction. 2. Spiritual warfare - Fiction. 3 Ex-prisoners - Fiction. 4. Bodyguards - Fiction 5. Widowers - Fiction I. Title

And I wonder, who picks these categories? What do they base them on? I mean, while it is undoubtedly true that Shadow, our more-or-less hero, is an ex-prisoner, and that his wife is killed in a car crash early in the book; but I feel deeply sorry for anyone who goes into it looking for fiction about widowers, ex-prisoners or bodyguards; while all the people looking for the things it has in abundance, like history and geography and mythology, like dreams and confidence tricks and sacrifice, Roadside Attractions and lakes and coin magic and funeral homes go by the wayside.

Still, I like "Spiritual warfare -- Fiction." And 'National characteristics, American". I like that, too, in a weird way.

..............

Also waiting for me were the finished covers for the Harper Perennial (large format paperback) editions of SMOKE AND MIRRORS (my short story collection) and STARDUST. Which are wonderful... Stardust in particular, as it looks... well, grown-up, like a fairy tale for adults and not like a generic fantasy. (I wonder how many people bought the mass market paperback edition of Stardust, and were disappointed because it really wasn't what the cover promised -- and how many were pleasantly surprised by what they read.)

Both published, interestingly, as "Fiction".

I think that both books are going to be out and in the stores for the signing tour. Fingers crossed...

....

If (like me) you've been waiting for the promised "first chapter" and the newsletter, I'm pretty sure that Harper are just gearing to send them out, because they just had me write something telling you how busy they've been getting neilgaiman.com into shape to go and meet the public, which will be going out to those of you who are signed up for the news option.

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And, while I think of it, May 31st is when scifi.com's Seeing Ear Theatre launches "SNOW, GLASS, APPLES" -- the play for voices I wrote based on my short story (in Smoke and Mirrors), starring Bebe Neuwirth as the Queen. She is astonishing, and was a joy to work with, and I'm looking forward to the thing going live. Brian Smith, who produced and directed this (and my story "Murder Mysteries", which, starring Brian Dennehey, went up on the scifi.com site last year, and is still up in the archives section).

Every now and again journalists and people at signings ask me what my favourite medium is, and i tell them "Radio plays". They can do so much, inside your head...