I phoned producer Steve Starkey who assured me that BEOWULF did indeed start shooting yesterday (yesterday Beowulf and his men came ashore; today they meet the Skylding's Watch), and I learned that by the time I get to the set Anthony Hopkins will have wrapped. I also got the possibly mistaken impression from him that Crispin Glover is now mainly talking in Old English.
Book People in Austin was great -- hundreds and hundreds of people, amazingly well organised signing line, and only slightly marred by them running out of books and having to send people out to raid other bookshops to grab another 50 copies, and it turned out even those weren't enough. (They had figured, sensibly, that 600 books would be enough, and they were wrong.) And if you need a problem with your signing, that has to be the best one of all.
Here's a really good MirrorMask review.
Author Meg Cabot (who is one of my daughter Maddy's favourite authors) is now blogging, something I only noticed because she linked in to Neilgaiman.com, and I really enjoyed her LEFT BEHIND rant, and her advice for people in Her Lines -- http://www.megcabot.com/blog/blogger.html
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/entertainment/books/s_376230.html is an interview with me about ANANSI BOYS mostly.
I actually signed (and saw) my first copy of the book for kids with the very long title last night, and discovered something very important that you should know if you like Children's Fiction. (It was actually something I suggested to them, and which I had forgotten about, but it happened and it has made me happy.) Which is: in addition to containing short fiction by me and Nick Hornby and Mr Snicket and the like, it also contains, in, I hope, its entirety, GRIMBLE by Clement Freud. This is a story I have loved since I was seven and which has been out of print for a very long time indeed. And now it's back in print, in noisy outlaws etc and you can read it. (I'm not the only Grimble fan in the world. In an Amazon.com interview J. K. Rowling described it as "one of funniest books I've ever read" -- which you would think would have been an incentive for a publisher to bring it back into print before now.)
Here's a MirrorMask interview that quotes me accurately -- http://www.comics2film.com/FanFrame.php?f_id=15363 -- and here's one done on a cellphone in a moving car on the way to a signing that gets a few things sort of upside down on the what-was-me-what-was-Dave-McKean of it all (given the circumstances and how hard it was to hear each other, not the interviewer's fault I'm sure.)
Boing-Boing mentions the MP3 CDs of ANANSI BOYS and AMERICAN GODS now being available at http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/26/gaimans_book_availab.html. (Between ourselves, I don't think that the whole MP3 CD thing is working yet -- lots of people getting ANANSI BOYS in CD, and lots of them downloading it cheaply from Audible.com, but I've only signed one solitary MP3 CD so far.)
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At last, the information on the Vancouver Library Reading I'm doing, that people can only get to by winning tickets -- details at http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=13049 --
Enter now for your chance to win two free tickets to a reading and Q&A at noon on October 6 at the Vancouver Public Library with Neil Gaiman.
THE ONLY WAY TO ATTEND IS TO ENTER.To win, email contest@straight.com and answer IN 200 WORDS OR LESS why you are one Neil Gaiman fan who absolutely has to attend.
One prize per winner. One prize is two tickets. Contest deadline: Sunday, October 2, at midnight.
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Is Hollywood Ready For Neil Gaiman? asks http://www.zap2it.com/movies/news/story/0,1259,---26868,00.html but alas, according to the Village Voice the answer is WAKE UP! PEOPLE! THE DUDE USED TO WRITE COMICS! I'm honestly not sure when I've enjoyed being patronised by a bad review more. It begins "The contemporary zeal for graphic novels�fiction, let us remember, equipped with drawings and speech bubbles�has, to this spectator, encouraged the emperor to parade before an adoring public in a threadbare Speedo, if that," and continues on from there.
There's a sweet interview with the wonderful Stephanie Leonidas at http://www.ugo.com/channels/filmtv/features/mirrormask/interview.asp along with another MirrorMask clip.Here's the Onion Interviews with me and Dave McKean at
http://avclub.com/content/node/41034/1/1 (me)
and
http://avclub.com/content/node/41034/1/2 (Dave)
and some of the outtakes from the ONION interview -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/rollick/423627.html
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Finally, and most importantly, it's Banned Books Week, something I kept meaning to write about except, given the tour schedule, I fell asleep instead. http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm#mfcb