Did a press release/telephone press conference this morning to announce that I'll be doing a 6 issue miniseries for Marvel next year; Marvel are kicking in all their profits to help clarify the status of Miracleman, so that, Lord Willing and the creek don't rise, we can get Miracleman back into print and available and, down the road, Mark Buckingham and I can finish the story we started. The company I've set up to sort all this out will also, if all goes well, not only take care of the original creators of the material, but also use licensing revenues and other profits to benefit comics charities (in this case, the CBLDF, and ACTOR -- a charity to help take care of Golden Age creators -- as well).
The project itself is really going to be fun. It'll have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and feature a cast of dozens. None of whom I'll have written before. (Well, actually, none of whom anybody will have written before in quite that way.)
Also heard that Milo Manara is going to do the Desire story in the Sandman hardcover, which made me enormously happy.
The other thing I did today was, I got a haircut, so I shall look rather less like an old English Sheepdog, or even a man with a mop on his head, at Madison this weekend. Where I shall, with luck, finish a collaborative story with Harlan Ellison that we began at this convention 3 years ago.
The most exciting bit of yesterday was a man coming over (roughly 6 months late) and installing a 2-way satellite Internet thingie, and buggering off again, leaving me to install the software and network up the house and so on. By the end of the day I even had the single iMac working on the system.
Let's see... I promised I'd put in a plug for ConCat, an SF convention in Knoxville TN over the Thanksgiving Weekend (Nov 23-25). Caitlin Keirnan will be there, Yvonne Navarro is the G of H, and if you're extra-nice to the con staff they will send you to the Japanese Restaurant whose speed of service, cold soup and warm sushi was immortalised in American Gods.
Someone on the Well wondered if all the questions on the FAQ page were for real, or if I made any up. I don't make any up -- no need to: there are about 2000 sitting there, unanswered, and around 20 or so new ones coming in every day. I may do a journal entry here every now and again for a few of the questions that aren't FAQ stuff, but that people still want answers to (For example: No, I won't marry you, but thank you for asking whoever you are; yes, I did tell Tori that she had fans in Brazil who would love to see her perform; if you have a reasonably good Japanese restaurant, and you are a first-timer, it can often be a good thing to put yourself in the chef's hands and order an omakase, where the chef feeds you cool things and you get to experiment more or less safely).
Currently reading: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, and am not as impressed as i had expected to be from the reviews, but am still really interested in Trieste as a philosophical entity, so am persevering. I am less interested in Jan Morris than she herself is, I think, which is why it's a bit of a slog.
And in the interesting coincidence stakes, yesterday I was rereading T. H. White's Bestiary in the bath, and marvelling at the entry on the elephant, particularly the strange and wonderful medieval belief about the Insignificant Elephant who turns up to help fallen elephants to their feet after huger and stronger elephants have failed, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to write an Insignificant Elephant story; and then I looked at my e-mail, and Steve Baxter and Garry Kilworth and Ian Watson wanted me to write an elephant story for an anthology to benefit elephants. Not that I have much spare writing time, but that seemed too fine a coincidence to ignore.
Having been less than impressed with most of the 'action figures' done for Sandman, I was fearing the worst on the next lot, and got a very pleasant surprise today when I opened a package to find photos of the sculpts for the Destruction, Death and Destiny toys. They look amazing -- the Death one, based on the Dringenberg drawings of her in her posh frock at the start of Season of Mists, is, in my opinion, better than any of the Death Statues they've done in the past; while the Destruction one, based on a Linda Medley painting in the Endless Gallery, made me want to write a Destruction story.