Just a couple of things I wanted to post before I forget...
1) I'm doing a reading and a signing at DreamHaven on September the 18th. What I read depends a bit on what I read on Saturday and how it goes. It may be some of Anansi Boys, it might be something else. Not sure. Normally we try and do signings around new books, and I suppose we could make this a signing for the new THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH or for THE NEIL GAIMAN AUDIO COLLECTION, but mostly it's just a signing because Elizabeth at DreamHaven told me I hadn't done one there in ages and it was time. (She says I'm going to talk about the CBLDF and Fiddler's Green as well, and I'm sure I'll mention them, especially if anyone asks a question, but it's really not going to be A Talk. It'll be a reading & questions.)
2) There's a review of M. John Harrison's wonderful SF novel LIGHT at SFsite, by Jeff VanderMeer. (He likes it as much as I did.) The book has a great big quote from me talking about it on this journal at the top, which makes me wish that I'd been writing a blurb for publication. (They asked if they could use what I said here, and I said yes, but still: it's an amazing novel and it deserves better.) Which reminds me that over at DreamHaven's Neilgaiman.net site there's space for me to recommend books, which I keep meaning to do. So I think I'll begin by trying to compile a list of books I've said nice things about in this blog over the years, like Light and like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (which reminds me: here's a very odd article from the Village Voice on Fantasy and Susanna Clarke and Strange & Norrell. Or rather, here's a fairly good article with a really weird opening paragraph, in which we learn that the English write fantasy well because they need to escape the horribleness of England, while Americans write good SF about going to other planets because, er, America is such a great place. Which seems to be balderdash in a number of different ways. The Mumpsimus lists a few of them here.)
And I'll answer a question before bed:
Hi Neil,
A friend's house burned down a couple of weeks ago. The contents of her hard drive are a mangled mess of melted silicone. Very upsetting to her, but frankly not to very many other people. If that happened to your hard drive, however, lots and lots of people would be most upset. So my question is, you do have a backup of your hard drive, which you update regularly, that you store off-site, don't you? Don't you?
Nikki in Little Rock
More or less. There's an in-house backup of everything. I also tend to copy the directories with things I've written on them to odd places like onto my iPod (it's amazing how little room word processing files take up compared to anything else - zipped, everything I've written in the last 14 or 15 years, in multiple drafts and god-knows what else only takes up around 40 meg), and I've e-mailed them to myself at my gmail account. You know, if I got a slightly larger memory chip, I could store it all on my phone...