Holly and corridors

My daughter Holly is here. She has been persuaded to take her coat off. She says she needs to be mentioned more in this blog. She says that I ruin the whole effect, however, if I actually point out that she just said that I should devote the spotlight to her here. She says she didn't actually say that and that my innocent paraphrase is in fact all hellish lies.

Holly would like to say something.

Maddy Gaiman has the best sister ever. Happy Easter, Maddy.

(Me: That's it? Her: Yup.)

So far today I've been interviewed by the French, done a Kaffeklatch (where 8 people who had their names drawn from a hat had coffee with me, although I drank tea) a Guest of Honour Reading and Talk, and another interview. Still to come today, a Wolves in the Walls reading for kids (and adults who have kidnapped kids and are using them as props to get in with) and another autographing. And an interview with Romanians.

Neil

I was interested in your throwaway remark on navigating the London Hotel. "It's a terrific convention (in a hotel the geography of which I cannot quite grasp)"

My wife and I spent our Silver Wedding anniversary in Vienna, and despite my reading up beforehand, I felt ill at ease using the underground trains as I couldn't get my bearings and felt terribly edgy for the first day and a half.

Once we walked around the inner ring of Vienna I had my bearings and was able to feel psychologically much better. Weird huh?

Have you read "The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton? His practical philosophy is so interesting and makes me realise I'm not alone in feeling edgy on arrival at a new place - not for fear of attack - but insecure in the geography.


Truth to tell, I quite like new places, and don't really mind unfamiliar geographies. This hotel, on the other hand is something else.

I am used to sensible, Euclidean spaces, in which if you go through enough 90 degree angles you wind up where you started. Try that here and see where it gets you. It reminds me enough of the description of the unlikely convention hotel in Diana Wynne Jones's DEEP SECRET that I have to ask her if it was based on this hotel.

From the outside it seems almost normal. Then the corridors begin...

Speak of the devil...

Holly and I had gone to see The Simpsons movie together. We drove back not saying anything.

After a while, Holly sighed. "You brought that on yourself, Dad. You wrote the bit in your blog today about not being recognised and not wanting to be famous. And now that happens. See?"

"I could move," I said. "I could head off to the Scottish Highlands. Or Patagonia. I could absolutely go to Patagonia and leave no forwarding address."

"Oh dad," said Holly. And then she pointed out, "You aren't allowed to vanish mysteriously until Maddy's eighteen."

"I could wear a hat," I said, a bit desperately.

"It wouldn't do any good," she said. And she may be right. And if I brought it on myself by writing my previous blog entry then maybe if I don't actually talk about it on this one it won't happen again...

...


The Birdchick and her husband, "Three Dollar" Bill Stiteler, were over today and we went out to the bees, checked on things, and brought some honey home. I'm sure that Sharon will document our bee day on her remarkable blog -- it's a terrific record of events. I just wanted to say how wonderful the honey tastes, fresh from the hive. And it tastes different to the last batch -- less piney, more fruity. I hope we'll have lots of honey to give to friends at the end of the year, and that we'll have enough to keep us going until next summer.

We're already planning a couple more hives, and today we started to plant wildflowers because, well, it will make the bees happy next year...

I told Sharon I thought she should take her bee-learning experiences and put them into a book. I hope she does.

...

You know, the funny thing is that LOST DANES FEARED FOOLISH DEATH DURING SCOTTISH STROLL could as easily be a headline for Beowulf as it is for Stardust. But the Danes in question here is Claire and not a bunch of Hrothgar's men directionally challenged and in trouble.

And -- for those of you who wrote in wondering about the scene in the trailer where Charlie Cox ("Cox somehow manages to walk a tightrope between matinee-idol dashing and puckish whimsy, as the film veers from a childlike innocence to an absurdist, Candide-style picaresque." L.A. Times) and Claire Danes ("as the short-tempered star, Danes hurls insults with the lethal accuracy of a screwball heroine" L.A. Times) meet for the first time.

They were -- in the trailer anyway -- apparently the best of friends. But here's a taster of the actual scene: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/08/03/exclusive-clip-stardust/

It's educational comparing it to the way the scene is cut in the trailer.

...

The retailer who had over ordered the Charles Vess Stardust statues wrote to let me know that he had sold them all within minutes of me posting the link, and to say thank you. I got the impression that he could have sold his statues many times over, so I went to Charles Vess's site, at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/105
and found the link to
http://www.statuetoys.com/stardustmoonstarstatue.html where they're selling it for $60 off, at $134.90. But that's a pre-order price, and the thing ships very soon, so you may want to move fast.

I also checked Dreamhaven's wonderful Neil Gaiman & Friends shop, at http://neilgaiman.net/ but it didn't look like they had it listed yet.

...

Pam Noles has been my minder at San Diego Comic-Con for almost a decade, and the only reason I survived the last three Comic-cons that I've been a Guest of Honour at is that Pam makes sure that I did.

People think I tell Pam what to do at Comic Con, because I am the writer and she is the one-woman entourage, but actually, it's the other way round. If you ever find yourself a guest at Comic-con and Pam looks after you Do Not Sign Things For People When You Aren't Meant To be Signing Them, otherwise you'll find yourself turning up on her hilarious blog described as "The Occasionally Disobedient Guest". You can read about it at : http://andweshallmarch.typepad.com/and_we_shall_march/2007/08/tidbits-from-th.html

(The bit where I was signing for people while, literally, running, was on the Sunday, as I left the Jack Kirby panel and ran for a plane.) (Which reminds me, a few people wrote in asking about the Kirby story I described as one of my favourites --I just checked and it was The Losers in Our Fighting Forces 153. )

(And my Comic-con "Spotlight On..." panel is described at http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=11485)

...

I'm interviewed in the LA Times about Stardust and other stuff, and they gathered quotes from Matthew Vaughn, Claire Danes and Roger Avary: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-stardust5aug05,1,7113938.story?coll=la-entnews-movies

(The photo was taken through a glass door, which is why the image is refracted so oddly, and the unusual expression on my face is me looking at the photographer and thinking, "Er, is that going to work...?")

And, more interestingly (for me, at least) Charlie Cox is also interviewed in the LA Times -- http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-charlie5aug05,0,1998613.story.