Did the big Barnes and Noble signing last night, which I'm a bit ambivalent about: it went really well, but there were about four hundred people there who were simply sent away after the reading and Q&A was done without even a chance to get into line (and even then, B&N kept the store open an hour after closing time for the people who were in line). I'm trying to figure out a way to do something in New York which would get around the problem of just too many people for me to sign for, and discussing the possibility of doing a complete reading, like the one in San Francisco, in December, of the whole of Coraline. Maybe with live Gothic Archies music. Maybe with puppet rats as well. We'll see.
All the Coraline news is good, and better than good: it's in at #10 on the children's New York Times list on its first week of publication, it's in its fifth printing (!) after a week, the people at Harper Collins Childrens books are ecstatic. I recorded a segment for Fox TV's Good Day New York -- not sure when it'll air, did an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, and even squeezed in a visit to DC Comics, and an editorial meeting with Joe Quesada at Marvel to discuss 1602.
The unexpected side effect of not having a computer with me on the journey is that I'm getting a LOT of writing done. A story for Peter Straub, and the last of the stories in Endless Nights, and the second part of 1602.
(The down side is the knowledge that the e-mails are going to be relentlessly mounting up when I finally get home to them -- and Compuserve Classic only has a 250 e-mail limit.)
Dave McKean tells me he's nine pages away from the end of WOLVES IN THE WALLS. "It's kind of... eerie..." he said. "I mean, it's turning out not as warm and fuzzy as The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish."
"Ah," I said. "I bet it's a lot warmer and fuzzier than Coraline, though." And he admitted that there was always that.