I'm really posting because (the people who signed up for the Author Tracker thing already know this) the first three-quarters of the first chapter of Anansi Boys now up online. It's changed a little in small ways since the earliest draft (which is what's up there for you to read) but nothing important's different. You can read it at: http://neilgaiman.com/books/anansi_ex.asp
You can pre-order it from Amazon.com -- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006051518X (or from lots of other places, but that's the only link I can find) and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the MP3 CD is coming out at publication date (no, I won't be reading it. But I don't think anyone will complain when they find out who's doing it instead).
Michael Burstein wrote to say I thought you might be interested in a little experiment I did yesterday. On a whim, I took the first section of Anansi Boys that's been posted on your webpage and ran it through the Word grammar check. I wasn't trying to check your grammar, though. Rather, I wanted to see how the selection scored on the Flesch-Kincaid Readability scale.
I posted my results here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/mabfan/105017.html
I don't know if you consider these results significant or not, but it's certainly fascinating.
It is fascinating, yes. I'm not sure how significant it is -- the kind of book that Anansi Boys is has to be written in that kind of clear prose, or it wouldn't work.
any chance i can find a Neverwhere dvd in switzerland??Fran* honest-liar.blogdrive.comps.
Probably not, but the US Neverwhere DVD is, like the A Short Film About John Bolton DVD, Region Zero (yes, it says Region 1 on the info. It's wrong) which means that if you order them from the US, you should be able to play them wherever you are in the world. Deepdiscountdvd has Neverwhere for sale fairly cheaply.
...
For some reason, most people have decided that now is a good time to ask questions that need long, well-considered answers. All I can suggest is that, if this applies to you, you ask your question again when I'm a bit less crazed.
Meanwhile, here's a blog entry you may enjoy, on smuggling paintings into museums: http://www.woostercollective.com/2005/03/wooster-exclusive-banksy-hits-new.html
A few days ago I asked Mark Evanier to explain to me why Writers Guild West and Writers Guild East are currently squabbling. (I'm a member of Writers Guild East, by a handful of miles -- if I lived a few more miles west I'd have needed to join Writer's Guild West. This mostly means, as far as I can tell, I get invitations to attend things I'm not going to go to in New York, rather than the invitations to attend things in I'm not going to go to LA that I'd get if I lived on the other side of the Mississippi . The one time I had to talk to Writers Guild East about something legal and contractual, they put me through to a legal person who said that he didn't know the answer to my question and it was the kind of thing they mostly dealt with at Writers Guild West. But they take care of my health insurance...)
Mark managed to explain the current dispute in terms that I could understand, at http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_03_23.html#009729. (Mark's blog, by the way, is one of the few I read regularly -- http://www.newsfromme.com/.)
Also, for your reading pleasure, as I learned at The Mumpsimus -- http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/03/greatest-cat-story-of-all-time.html -- Fritz Leiber's short story "Space-Time for Springers" is now up online. It's the best SF cat story there is, and if it catches you right it can break your heart.
I'll be talking this summer at Children's Literature New England's annual Summer Institute: http://www.clne.org/works.htm for details.
Finally, if you ever disagreed with a professor about, well, anything, you'll be delighted to know you'll soon be able to sue: http://www.alligator.org/pt2/050323freedom.php. I suspect that the people who will be complaining that their ideas aren't being respected are the same people who feel that the first amendment goes too far...