Two Authors in Need of a Shave

Let's see -- Stardust stuff first:
There are more Stardust photos up at moviesonline.com -- here's Dunstan Thorn at the market, at the start of the film, meeting a young lady over a stall that sells glass flowers...



Click on the picture to see more photos...

Those of you in London or the UK might want to go and check http://www.forbiddenplanet.com/comp/stardust/ and investigate the competition for Forbidden Planet screening. The question is impossibly difficult, mind.

(I've heard that the Stardust screening at Hay on Wye probably won't be a full screening, given some technical limitations, and I'll instead be presenting some of my favourite sequences and answering questions.)

...

Dinner last night with Michael Chabon, and then I got to sit in the audience and watch the Talking Volumes interview at the Fitzgerald Theatre -- herewith a picture of us backstage trying to get the damnable cellphone to give us a decent photo, after several blurry failures. Michael is still smiling. I am glaring at my cellphone going "work, damn you".

I am holding his book as a prop -- but am really looking forward to reading it... (this is John Clute's review).

Not quite authorised, not quite not

[Edit to add -- right now if you click on the link you'll just get an Error message, as it wasn't ready to go public and it was running too slowly and so on and has been taken offline. I'll put something up as soon as it's back. Sorry.]


[Later Edit. It seems to be back up -- give the video a chance to load before playing, though, or it will be a bit stuttery...]


I'm not quite sure how widely this is meant to be spread, but Paramount have decided to change direction on their Stardust website at www.stardustmovie.com. Which means the website will take a bit longer to come out, and be a bit different when it does.



Meanwhile they've had a finished version of the early website ready to go for some weeks, containing a few video interviews with me, some answers to Stardust questions, Stardust wallpaper and even a do it yourself Charles Vess colouring thing (which is much too much fun). So we talked to them and they talked to us, and the webelf did webmagic, and if you just happened to click on



http://neilgaiman.com/stardust/



you might find yourself somewhere that looks very different and has Paramount copyright notices and things all over it, but is actually here on www.Neilgaiman.com.

I'm not sure how long we're going to be allowed to keep this up, so if you're interested you should probably go and play with it now, and tell anyone who might be interested that it's here.

Mostly pictures

I was sure the Stardust Movie website would have gone live by now, but it's still a holding page. In the meantime, I was just sent a link to a Russian (I assume) site with a bunch of stills on it -- some seem scanned from magazines, but there are a few I wonder how they got their hands on... http://kino-express.ru/stills/stardust

I've grabbed one of the witch-queen's first meeting with Ditchwater Sal...



And one of our heroes dining airborne with Robert De Niro...

This is going to seem a stupid question but where are you when you write your blog? I don't have a mental picture, and I wish I did. Can you describe it? Lynn.

It depends. Sometimes I'm in bed, or at least on the bed, sometimes I'm in the downstairs office (that's where I am right now) sometimes I'm on the road and then I could be anywhere. Recently I've mostly been posting from the TV room upstairs, where I set up while we were moving the office around.

(Photos taken today by Mystery Aide. This is how I look when someone says "Are you writing?" when I am...)

And this next one was a bit more posed, because we need some current photos. (Look! Now I do not look grumpy!) Not sure how long the beard has to live right now. Probably a couple more weeks...

I've had the sushi pillows for two years now. They've held up well (except for one of the shrimps, which had to be sewn up) and I recently went back and got their yellowtail and edamame). (Their website: http://www.theoriginalsushipillow.com/.)