Journal

Sunday, August 08, 2004

late night post

Spent today with Scott McCloud and family. Met up with them at DreamHaven, which has copies of Gothic! and The Faery Reel in, and I know this because I signed stacks of both books for them. The story in Gothic! is called "Secret Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nightmare House of the Night of Dread Desire" (I think) and I've read it at more or less every reading for the last eight months and many people who heard it always wanted to know when it would be in print. So, it's in print, and as of lunchtime today there were signed copies at Dreamhaven. Check their neilgaiman.net site for details -- right now it's up at http://www.neilgaiman.net/just-in.php (it doesn't list them, or the Faery Reels as being signed, yet, but they are.)

DreamHaven has an astonishing amount of cool stuff in boxes and on shelves in backrooms -- even more astonishing if you include the stuff they can't find. It occurred to me today, talking about stuff they couldn't find, that I'd lent them, some years ago, a Simon Bisley oil-painting, which Simon gave me, of Batman, which he did as part of a proposal for a Batman one-shot I was going to write. This was in about 1989. The comic never happened, for a variety of reasons. The painting was up on the wall (in a branch of DreamHaven that's since closed). I asked Greg Ketter about it and he hunted briefly, then pulled out the painting, and I realised, looking at it for the first time in several years, that there are probably people out there who would pay an ungodly amount for a Bisley painting of Batman, and the CBLDF could certainly do with the money. So rather than take the painting home, I left it with Greg Ketter to photograph...

And once that was done, a remarkably good day followed, spent hauling three small girls around the crawling nightmare that is Camp Snoopy. Took a short break from that at one point to take Scott McCloud to the Apple shop in the Mall of America. I do believe (for reasons that shall remain unspecified, but you'll have to take my word for it) that the staff in the Apple shop in the MoA are the coolest people in the world. Scott walked out of there beaming.

Tomorrow evening Maddy and I will fly to Italy. Tonight I have a houseful of McClouds.

I thought I was going to write this, hit publish, and then answer today's e-mail. I was so wrong. Bed seems like so much more sensible an option.