A small fit of madness, or a good idea. Not sure.

Right. I'm trying to get caught up on things, so first of all, just a few hasty links:

Steve Bissette (one of three authors of the book about me and the stuff I wrote) is running a small competition for bookshops at http://srbissette.com/?p=2101

The Graveyard Book has made it onto another few Best of the Year lists: http://www.briankeene.com/?p=887,
http://www.bartsbookshelf.co.uk/2008/10/19/the-graveyard-book-by-neil-gaiman/
Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide list #1 (Books for younger people)
Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide list #2 (Fiction) [Which reminds me -- Damien Walter did a great interview with Cory Doctorow at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/25/cory-doctorow-little-brother]

http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/11/more-on-our-coraline-suitcase.html has the best list so far of mysterious Coraline boxes. (There appear to be eleven of them in the wild so far. Thirty nine have not yet been sent, or reported. I'm enjoying this.)

...

Reading Steve Bissette's blog post gave me an idea...

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab just sent me an extra couple of sets of their Graveyard Book scents. (Eau de Ghoul seems extremely popular on their forum.) (And the very final handful of signed Snow Glass Apples booklets and vials can still be had before the Holidays -- for now -- at the CBLDF shop site.) I have a large pile of lovely two-sided Graveyard Book posters (one side Dave McKean's cover, one side Chris Riddell's cover) that Bloomsbury did.

And I thought, I should DO something with this stuff...

So what I'm going to do is this:

First I'm going to sign a bunch of posters -- probably about 50. Then I'm going to give them and the BPAL Graveyard Book scents to the wonderful Cat Mihos. And I'm going to tell her that we're running something that isn't exactly a competition, but is sort of smaller and more informal and a bit more easy-going. It's this:

From here until the end of the year (and further out than that, if the stuff holds out), if you do something effective to help get other people reading The Graveyard Book, tell Cat, and she'll send you a signed poster.

(Something effective in this case would include persuading your bookshop or library to do a Graveyard Book display, and taking a photo of it and sending it to Cat, teaching it in your school, reviewing it for your local paper or doing something equally as imaginative.)

If you do something Awesome and Amazing to get other people reading The Graveyard Book (for example, talking your whole town or city into having one of those months where everyone in the town reads the same book, and it's The Book In Question...) then you get a signed Graveyard Book poster and you get one of the BPAL Graveyard Book scent collections. And she'll probably throw in one of the Graveyard Book Neverwear tee shirts as well.

(Like this one.)

Possibly even give you a Kendra Stout Graveyard Mousepad.

(Like this one)

Send email, photos, cuttings from your local paper, proof that it was you and you alone who talked Oprah or Richard-and-Judy into doing The Graveyard Book on their TV book clubs, etc., to Cat Mihos, Furrytiger@Gmail.com . Do not send them to me. I will not have the swag. I will not be handing it out. I'm merely going to set this thing in motion and sign fifty posters -- twenty five on the McKean side, the other twenty five on the Riddell side.

Cat's decision is final. She'll blog the things she gets in as she goes along at the Neverwear Blog (http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/). And then every now and then I'll do a round up here.

How does that sound?

Labels: Best Of, cat mihos, Neverwear tee shirts, steve bissette, strange ideas, The Graveyard Book

Snowmen Later

Outside it's a winter wonderland. Look:





I got some wonderful presents from my family. My favourite was a scrapbook that Maddy made of the year filled with photos of the family and brief Maddy-style essays and commentary on the photos. ("Well father, even though we look like a two-headed person in this picture, I would like to say that it's one good-looking two-headed person. Ha :) . Mike's graduation was a wondrous family outing!!") It melted me.

I am afraid that I have somehow forgotten who sent me the link to a beehive-extension-in-a-bell-jar at http://www.hemmy.net/2007/09/16/bees-makes-hive-in-a-jar/ but I am already planning on buying a jar, or similar strange glassy thing and finding out what the bees make of it.

Hi Neil,
Merry Christmas! I was wondering, in the spirit of the season and in honor of your swarms of yellow and black buzzing friends, if you would post a link to Something Awful's evil charity drive to flood the third world with bees VIA heifer.org. http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/bee-charity-drive.phpFor only $30 this holiday season you too can send 12,500 bees to terrorize unsuspecting civilians in places like Uganda and El Salvador, where the brave might try to make an alliance with the bees for their sweet, sweet nectar. By noon we've already given away a million bees to the needy and I figured you might be able to help get us to ten million.Thanks,
Laura

I can do my best. After all, you cannot have a land flowing with milk and honey without bees. And, um, lactating mammals.

(Coincidentally, I just got a wonderful Xmas gift from a friend of a Heifer.org bee donation in my name.)

...

There is a trailer for Hellboy: The Golden Army up at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hellboy_2_the_golden_army/trailers.php
Hurrah.
(And this may mean that I can post a couple of photos from my time on the set that I've kept under wraps until now.)

...

I just discovered this site, forgive me if it's old news, but I was wondering if the idea for this originated with The Corinthian, or if you drew on a previously existing "nightmare image" when you created him.
http://www.freakingnews.com/Mouth-Eyes-Pictures--1741.asp

Good question. I think that the Corinthian was pretty definitely the first actual comics character to have mouths for eyes, although Steve Bissette (I think) drew a Swamp Thing Cover showing Swamp Thing with mouths for eyes a few years before Sandman. And I'm sure that you could go and find other occasions that people did the image over the years -- let me know what you turn up if you want to go looking. Mouths for Eyes has definitely become a lot more common since the Corinthian turned up, but that probably has a lot more to do with ease of photomanipulation than with the character creeping into the popular consciousness.

Honestly, I'm just glad to see how disturbing it is.

(Which reminds me. A chapter of Steve Bissette's from the Golden/Wagner/Bissette Companion, all about the NEIL GAIMAN'S MIDNIGHT DAYS collection, is up at http://srbissette.blogspot.com/2007/12/save-me-from-myself-i-am-going.html)

What are your thoughts about the US Library of Congress classifying all Scottish authors under the English literature heading? I can see smaller libraries trying to save space, but shouldn't such a large and respected library concern itself more with accuracy? I've included the link to the artice at the BBC below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7157708.stm
Sincerely,
Christina

On the one hand, it's silly: Scotland is its own country, with its own traditions and its own literature, a literary tradition in English and Gaelic. On the other hand, it's less work for the Library of Congress. But then, they'd have even less work if they just filed them all under Books.

Re: winter butterflies This is actually not a question.Your entry with the picture of the butterfly last December 20 is actually not a butterfly but a moth. Moths when they rest have open wings, while butterflies sort of fold them vertically.

No, I'm afraid it was a butterfly... as to which one, the first person to identfy it was Heather, who said,

Dear Neil,
Intrigued by the butterflies, I did a bit of research. It looks to me like a male small tortoiseshell, which is evidently very common in Britain. It seems it likes to hibernate in houses and may wander out if the walls are warm enough. Lots of information here and some wonderful pictures of the chrysalis: http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/species.php?vernacular_name=Small%20Tortoiseshell
Happy writing!
- Heather

...

Hi Neil,
I am the Animation Supervisor on Coraline. We met briefly when you visited the Coraline studio awhile back.
Anyway, the clip you posted is causing quite a (positive) stir on my website. Check out what they are saying here:http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=25&topic_id=4688&mesg_id=4688&listing_type=read_new
We are now employing about 25 animators with over 37 stages in operation. When/if you have time, you may want to pop in and see the sets. There are many more cool things to see at this stage of Production.Happy Holidays & thanks for hosting the clip on your website.
- Anthony

It's lovely seeing people begin to talk about it. It's over a year since I went out to Laika and saw them beginning to work on Coraline, and I've been really impressed with everything I've seen since then.
...

And waiting for me here when I got home, only a year or so late, were my own two copies of the Hill House limited edition of Anansi Boys. It is absolutely gorgeous. Possibly even worth the wait...

Labels: bees, butterfly of love, Coraline movie, Corinthian Eyes, hellboy, Is Scotland Really England Or Not?, steve bissette, two photos, Winter

The view from Bissette

Over at Steve Bissette's blog, at
http://srbissette.blogspot.com/2007/11/brief-before-bedtime.html
and
http://srbissette.blogspot.com/2007/11/visit-with-neil-part-iii-much-to-tell.html
you will get a Steve's eye view of our last three days, including the Fantasy Matters conference I spoke at. (It was fun -- I spent time with Jack Zipes, and got to meet a bunch of authors, including Pat Rothfuss and Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu.)

It's been great having Bissette and Hank here. I'm not sure I had much of a brain though...

On Friday last you wrote about Steve Bissette and Hank Wagner interviewing you for an unauthorised book, and said "I'm happy to help, although am also happier that it's unauthorised --"If you are helping, isn't that a sign of authorization? Have I misunderstood what an "unathorised biography" was all these years?I love learning new things.
Siri

I suppose that if it was authorised I'd have to read it and sign off on it and approve of any opinions or inferences and so on. As it is, I'm happy for them to write their book and, because I like Chris Golden and Hank Wagner (and Steve Bissette, but he only got involved recently) I was willing to be interviewed for it, but it's nothing to do with me, and thus I don't have to think about whether or not I'm comfortable with people writing books about me (I'm not really, but that's just me).

...

And I leave in about 18 hours for the Philippines.

Labels: biographies, steve bissette