I'll be working with Amanda Palmer on the WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER Book for the next couple of days. It's a book of photos of her with occasional words by me, which are currently being written. Some photos were taken over a decade ago, most are more recent and most of them are by photographer Kyle Cassidy, who in between taking proper important shots of Amanda doing book things on the roof this evening, took this photo of Amanda and me. I am wearing socks because I have incredibly painful blisters on my feet because I can be an idiot sometimes. Possibly more information than you wanted to know, but there you go.
Neil, Went to CBLDF booth. Got T-shirt. It smells like your basement. Can I wash this thing without your signature coming off? Also, my Fiance got the New wave hookers shirt. Seriously Neil? A porno? There's gotta be a good story there. You rule, Noelle
You should certainly be able to wash it -- the thick fabric paint I used to sign it says it's washable, anyway. If it's any consolation, that smell is attic, not basement. And more than half of the tee shirts were originally gifts, and many of them were mysteries swallowed by time or never explained even to me: where I got the "New Wave Hookers" tee shirt is anybody's guess. But I wore it happily anyway.
I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman... With Batman in it. Fuck You.
If I'd known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have... actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.
If you think you won't like the Batman comic I'll write, probably you'd be best off not reading it. It'll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you'd bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you're going to...
Dear Neil,
I just wanted to drop a line to pass on this article on the relevance of comics in academia, which you might find of some interest, despite the fact that the author places a line break between every sentence. Some of the facts are old news, but there are some interesting tidbits to be gleaned. Here's the link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0729/p01s06-ussc.html
Sharyn
That took me back. I thought that newspapers had finally given up on variants of WHAM SMASH POW! COMICS HAVE GROWN UP! in headlines...
Hi Neil.
When you talk about "places where you can be arrested for drawing cartoons", surely you don't mean to imply that in the USA you can't be arrested for drawing a cartoon? You can, just as you can for any other art form.
The First Amendment doesn't provide protection for (among other things) incitement to commit a crime, threats, or so-called "fighting words" intended to provoke violence. Any of these things is possible in a cartoon, and could constitute a criminal offence depending on the details and applicable State law.
I'd suggest that cartoons which are indiscriminately hostile to members of a particular race or religion could, depending again on the exact content, constitute any of those three things, and that the police were probably right to at least investigate once a complaint was made.
Whether Nekschot actually did any of them, whether his cartoons would be criminal in the US, and whether they are in the Netherlands, I'm not equipped to say.
Here's a summary of the "fighting words" history: http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13718. I don't believe you could create a cartoon that would, however robust, actually fall into the category of "fighting words" unless it was "addressed to a particular individual" and presented "an actual threat of immediate violence, not merely offensive content".
All the CBLDF black tee shirts are signed ( about a hundred, plus another dozen or so in order that Lorraine has something to send to charity auctions when I'm on the road).
How does one tell "the first black tee shirt I ever owned" apart from a hundred other black tee shirts?
It's an odd tee shirt, not very pretty, with a square and a pattern on it, bought in Brighton walking from the train station to the Metropole hotel in 1987. It's actually a misprint. I bought it because it was a little odd, and very cheap, and I felt sorry for it, little knowing that I was soon going to have to start writing comics to fund my newfound black tee shirt addiction.
Hello Mr. Gaiman--
Where did you get your Disaster Area T-shirt? How might one obtain one of these shirts after the one you have signed is immediately bought by someone with class and taste who is not me, as I will not be near San Diego? Google is not helpful, as the shirts available are not black-on-black.
Actually, my one is one of the very few black tee shirts I kept. (I kept back a handful of beloved ones and ones that had obviously never been worn.) (And will still have Too Many Black Tee Shirts when all this is over.)
I don't remember where I bought it, alas, or where I got it (a science fiction book shop or a convention at a guess, or might have been a gift from a friend or from ZZ9Plural Z Alpha, an organisation of which I have the honour to be a life member, or...). Probably someone reading this will go "You don't remember where you were when you got your black on black Disaster Area Sundive Tour tee shirt? How can you have forgotten?" and tell me.
I saw that the National Book Festival was added to "Where's Neil." Any chance you'll be checking out SPX the following weekend or maybe doing a reading at "Politics and Prose" like you've done in the past? I mean you got a new book coming out, sounds like a great excuse for a reading. PLEASE do a reading!!! You're one of the few authors who's reading voice is just as hypnotizing as their writing voice.
That's very kind of you. The Book Festival will be what I'll do in Washington this year, and there will be a reading in the tent for The Graveyard Book. There will also be a signing.
Tuesday the 30th of September I'll be doing an event in New York.
Weds Oct 1st, I'll be in Philadelphia.
Thurs Oct 2nd, Chicago
Friday Oct 3rd, Seattle
Saturday Oct 4th, San Francisco
(Sunday is an Oakland event just for booksellers)
Monday Oct 6th Los Angeles
Tuesday Oct 7th, Boulder, Colorado
Weds Oct 8th, Minneapolis.
I don't yet know where the events will be (proabably theatres or churches. Probably not graveyards). I do know that I'll be reading a whole story from The Graveyard Book at each stop (except for Chapter 7, which I'll split between LA and Boulder), and the current plan is to webcast each event, which will be long -- lots of reading, Q&A, all that, like the CBLDF Guardian Angel tour "Evening With Neil Gaiman" events we used to do. But while there will be piles of freshly-signed books for sale at each event, I probably won't be doing a signing per se.
"The Price" is one of my all time favorite stories. In fact, I always think of my black Morpheus as the house protector because of it. You've mentioned acat update, though I haven't seen any update on your very interesting cats. What's going on with them? Have you added any new members to your clowder?
I keep meaning to do a cat update.
This is Princess. You can see a photo of her eleven years ago in the back of the Charles Vess illustrated Stardust. She's called Snowflake in "The Price". We think she's about sixteen -- she turned up on Holly's ninth birthday, but we'd seen her in the woods for almost a year before that. She's a blue-eyed white cat and is not deaf, although her two white blue-eyed kittens were. She was feral before she came to us, and is still never to be taken for granted.
She will follow -- or lead -- anyone into the family bathroom upstairs, where they are expected to turn on the tap for her to drink, and wait while she drinks, then turn the tap off.
Also, she can read the Fortean Times with her bottom.
I just read over the galleys of the acknowledgements for The Graveyard Book, written late one night a few weeks ago, and I realised that I'd left people out. Important people. Like, people who helped me type the manuscript and people who sold the film rights. So I've now scribbled all over it, and am hoping that there's still time to fix it. I always forget on acknowledgements and leave people out, but seldom so enormously...
...
I'm going to be at the Library of Congress National Book Festival this year, on September the 27th, for the first time since 2005, this time in the Teens and Children Tent. Harper Collins have kindly agreed to bend the rules and let copies of The Graveyard Book be sold there, because it's the National Book Festival, even though it takes place a couple of days before the official release date.
I'm looking forward to it, but am a little apprehensive, remembering the previous times I was there.
Hi Neil, a friend has written a book and has asked what I think of it. The trouble is that this book is one of the worst I have ever read. It's terrible in so many ways, but I don't want to hurt my friend's feelings because he's so proud of his work. I know that people love books others dislike but this book is really bad. Any tips on how to deal with such a delicate situation? Thanks!
Ow. Yes, I know that one. It depends on whether your friend wants to be a real author one day and learn his craft, or whether he's just proud of having made something. When it's the latter, I just try and find something positive I can say that I mean. If it's the former, I try and tell people how they can make something they've done into something publishable, or fix it, which is going to involve pointing out it's not publishable yet.
It's also possible to find ways to say you hated something that won't crush the spirit of the person in question. Phrases like, "It's not my kind of thing, but I bet it's great if it's the kind of thing you like," can be deployed. "I don't really have anything much to say, but I'm looking forward to your next one," are phrases that Miss Manuscript Manners would probably approve of. You can probably come up with better ones on your own.
Or you can take the approach that my friend the wondrous Jane Yolen takes when people ask her to read their manuscripts, which is to say up front, "I'll read it, but I have to warn you that if I do I will be honest, and you probably won't like what I have to say." Which gives them the opportunity to back off, and at least tells them that you are not there to tell them they are very clever for having written a whole book.
And if you do decide to tell them what's wrong with their book then you don't have to tell them everything that's wrong with it. Pick the biggest thing -- "I hated all your characters and kept hoping that they would die and that we would get nothing but a description of the landscape for the rest of the book" or "It reads like you're recounting a D&D game, not a novel" or "All of your characters sound like you" or "Nothing actually happens until Chapter Four by which point anyone who isn't a personal friend of yours would have stopped reading" -- and talk about that. Don't do a laundry list...
Since I seem to have missed the boat on getting something signed at this event, I was wondering if you had any other plans for signings in the San Diego area?
Thank you!
Sorry about that. No, no other signings planned on this trip -- I'm there because it's the tradition that the Clarion Writer In Residence does a Mysterious Galaxy signing, and I love the Mysterious Galaxy people, but I also am in San Diego as an instructor for Clarion. (I'm grateful Mysterious Galaxy have limited the line numbers, as I won't be much good to any of the Clarion students on Wednesday if I've had to sign until midnight on Tuesday.)
Technically I am meant to be reading from The Dangerous Alphabet, and I will, but it won't take long, so I may do a bit of The Graveyard Book or something in progress as well.
And while I won't be doing any signings... about ten years ago I realised I had accumulated more black tee shirts than I could really wear, and I was running out of room for them, and I signed about a hundred black tee shirts with fabric paint and gave them to the CBLDF, who sold them at conventions.
Lorraine has just picked out a hundred black tee shirts from the teetering piles of shirts I don't get to wear as often, and I'm going to sign them all before San Diego.So you could always wander over to the CBLDF booth and see if they have any signed tee shirts or prints or things...
Hello Neil!
You may very well have seen this, or might have even posted it already and I had missed it, but I couldn’t discover this without thinking it would be something you would love. It’s a collection of old Scary Stories read by Vincent Price and Boris Karloff among other classy scary soundtracks. Beautifully written, read and witty to boot. I recommend “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” as a perfect cheer-inducing scary story.
Dave Palumbo, the artist, was hanging with us at the first ever Illustration Master Class and used a bunch of people you may know as Zombies. Irene Gallo of Tor is off to the right, Gregory Manchess (of Conan fame) is in a tie and that’s me in the tank top.
Hopefully someday that will be ME illustrating a book with you in!
Cheers!
Kristina Carroll
It doesn't just have "The Water Ghost Of Harrowby Hall" -- a story I've loved since I was a small boy and read it in, I'm pretty sure, one of the Armada Book of Ghost Stories, and had not encountered in almost forty years -- it also has Vincent Price reading "Thus I Refute Beelzy", by John Collier, who may have been the finest writer of classical twisty short stories of the last century -- the kind of short stories that people put down by describing them as "clever", but they are clever, and the style of each story is perfect for the content it contains.
...
I think we're approaching a blog holiday.
I've been posting more or less daily since 2001 -- 2,741 blog posts so far, according to Blogger and 1,158,002 words -- with only occasional enforced breaks when I was away from a computer, and I'm starting to feel like it's time to stop blogging for a bit and recharge my batteries. (Historically, on this blog, announcements like that are normally followed by a spate of twice a day blogging and a few long essays.) At this point, I think I'll definitely take Clarion off, and possibly longer.
I've got dozens of tabs opened right now with Stardust reviews in them, most of them astonishingly positive, but I think it's time to let Rotten Tomatoes be the place the reviews get posted. If any particularly interesting ones cross the transom I may post them here, but not otherwise.
(One oddness, for whatever it's worth: audiences, and most of the people-just-posting-about-how-they-saw-a-preview, really like, and make a point of mentioning how much they like, De Niro. They like Michelle Pfeiffer, but they love De Niro. Professional film reviewers, on the other hand, adore Michelle Pfeiffer while most of them seem uncomfortable with De Niro.)
So.... last year there were Neil Gaiman shop and product discussions, started initially by the fact that people were already making their own tee shirts, mugs, mousepads and suchlike on Cafe Press. Many of you sent in suggestions.
And now, in a small way, we've started the thing up. We're already talking about the next wave of stuff, but right now there are two tee shirts: a limited elegant grey Anansi Boys shirt drawn and designed by Dagmara Matuszak, and an unlimited black "Scary Trousers" shirt designed by Kendra Stout. (I look very grumpy on this one.)
For some reason blogger isn't uploading pictures, so you will have to go to http://www.neverwear.net/ and check them out for yourself.
I woke up to an emailed warning that I might be about to have spammed LiveJournal again. As the Webelf explained, the good news was she'd fixed one of our Blogger problems, and turned off the Feed while she was doing it-- "The bad news is I'm fairly sure that when I turn it back on again, it will spam Livejournal and cause lots of hate mail for you. (And lots of happy letters to me about pink mink whips, if precedent holds.)I'm not entirely sure how to avoid that, at the moment.. should I offer myself up to send pre-emptive apologies?" but as far as I can tell, it's only randomly reposted one entry, and not even a long one at that.
So we're now on new Blogger and things should be working. Fingers crossed. Toes crossed. Touch wood. Not that I'm superstitious or anything but where Blogger is concerned (spits over left shoulder, flings salt on the lucky goat-talisman, does the good-luck jig, pockets his powdered imitation rhinoceros horn and a bottle of coloured sand from the Isle of Wight) you never know...
In the '50s, there was a particularly enjoyable kind of SF in which present day people were abruptly confronted with beings whose enticing alienness threw contemporary society into goofy relief -- Henry Kuttner wrote this way a lot, sometimes with C.L. Moore, and William Tenn did a good job of it too. Neil Gaiman's brilliant story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", collected in Fragile Things and reprinted in F&SF in January, pleasurably recalls such tales, as its teenage male protagonist and friend, wandering London streets a few decades back on quests gregarious and hormonal, stumble on a party where foreign girls -- really foreign girls -- are to be found in numbers. The eerie confidences vouchsafed by these girls, masterfully weird, gradually impress on the testosteronized consciousnesses of the boys that something very odd is going on. Several sorts of longing are engaged here, all familiar to a genre audience. Gaiman knows his readers well, and depicts their younger selves heart and soul. A superb, disconcerting portrait.
which made me happy, not because it's a good review, but because the story got compared to Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore). I'm pretty sure their story "Vintage Season" was somewhere in the back of my mind for taste and texture when I was writing HTTTGAP. It's a story, like "All Mimsy Were the Borogroves", that is there in my head from when I was a boy, and that I've not gone back to for so long.
(That's interesting -- a google tells me that "All Mimsy..." has been filmed -- http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/thelastmimzy/ and the Best of Henry Kuttner is coming back into print as The Last Mimzy And Other Stories, which a small cause for celebration. (The back in printness, not the retitling.)
No, I didn't. But I'm glad they can. Only female people, though, obviously. Male characters would still have to write it on their hands in felt-pen.
Incidentally, I learned (via Mark Evanier) about Amazon's 30 Day Price Guarantee -- http://www.slate.com/id/2156900/ -- and was as thrilled to see a phone number for Amazon customer service (1-800-201-7575; to get a human right away, dial extension 7) in the article. I don't think I'm ever going to go and check the price of things I bought over a 30 day period, but there are now services that will do that for you...
