Neil Gaiman's Journal

We had first frost two nights ago -- but a gentle sort of frost, rather than the killer ones we sometimes get -- which meant that I spent some of yesterday afternoon harvesting things -- lots of eggplants and peppers (jalapeno, cayenne, cherry hots, and various sweet peppers) and squashes, and, of course, the pumpkin crop. Which proved the saddest of all the crops, really -- I'd been on the road too much this year, and dealing with the legal case, and wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, or as much as I normally do. Several of the bigger ones had been nibbled away by mice and bugs. Still, harvested enough for many pies and stews (you can serve soups and stews inside hollowed out, cooked pumpkins, you know) along with enough big ones to do jack-o-lanterny things with. The exotic pumpkin contingent consists mostly of weird orangey ones, and some odd greenish-grey japanese pumpkins.

THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS is all finished. It's a graphic novel, by Dave McKean and me, for young people and those who have to read to them -- like THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH only with more panels, not just single-pages. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Jill Thompson's doing a strange project right now -- it's a manga-style book, based around the Sandman book "Season of Mists" -- a sort of lighthearted fantasia about what Death, Delirium and Despair were doing during that period. I had been holding my breath slightly on it (trusting Jill, and having loved her Little Endless Storybook so much, but still having doubts about whether even Jill could pull this off), until a bunch of pages came out of my fax machine yesterday. She's doing everything herself, even lettering, and she's doing an amazing job. Any time that events overlap with scenes from "Season of Mists", she uses the dialogue I wrote, or extracts from it. The art is a whole new Jill style. Lovely stuff. Happy on the page.)