A reminder for anyone in the Minneapolis area -- I'll be doing a signing at DreamHaven on Saturday, Dec 3rd. And I'll do a reading and a Q&A first. The event starts at 2.00pm (details at http://www.neilgaiman.net/news-home.php). This will also be the release event of the extremely limited edition Jouni Koponen-designed wall poster of A STUDY IN EMERALD (which is the story that won the Hugo last year and is up somewhere on this site). I've wanted to have a poster that was a complete story ever since I saw a complete Shakespeare Play done as a poster, and I realised how many words you could get onto a large piece of paper. Jouni's done it as a front page of a newspaper, complete with turning the ads in the text into adverts. DreamHaven is doing a thousand unsigned ones and 200 deluxe signed and numbered. I doubt they'll all go during the Saturday signing though.
In addition, Lisa Snellings-Clark is coming out to install the refurbished, repairedd and repainted statue in its nook (http://slaughterhousestudios.blogspot.com/2005/11/lucks-dancer.html) and she may well be at DreamHaven as well.
Now, it's started to snow...
(A number of people have written to me, some at length, pointing out factual errors in the New Yorker C.S. Lewis article, while one person, much more sensibly, copied me on his letter to the New Yorker. )
Lots of people, mostly different ones, also wrote in to let me know that MirrorMask has, according to Amazon.com, a US release date of February 7, 2006. (Here's a recent review by a film reviewer who liked it. And here's another.)
And on the subject of truth and rumour, I was fascinated by http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1653120,00.html -- when urban legends get deadly.
Thea Gilmore is one of my favourite musicians in the world -- I love her music, and having spent time in her company (she wrote to me through the website some years ago after I said something nice about her) I think she's also a very good person to have as a friend. She's interviewed over at http://www.guernicamag.com/interview/232/this_girl_is_taking_bets/.
Hi, Neil! According to Google, since Sep 19th you have not talked about the foreign editions of Anansi Boys. Could you possible have forgotten to tell us any news? Or is it just like it is, no news at all?-Alvaro Cavalcanti.P.S.: Hey, if you could tell us specially about the Brazilian edition, it would be really nice. :o)
I finally got the list of foreign Anansi Boys publishers in. As of today it's as follows:
US: Morrow; UK: Headline (the imprint in hardback, and in "export" paperback is "Review"); France: Au Diable Vauvert; Germany: Heyne; Italy: Mondadori; Holland: Luitingh; Japan: Kadokawa; Finland: Otava; Portugal: Presenca; Spain: Roca; Brazil: Conrad; Czech: Polaris; Polish: Mag; Russian: AST; Romanian: Tritonic; Israel: Opus
I was about to post the link to the terrific Crooked Timber Susanna Clarke Seminar when this email came in:
Dear Neil,
fyi, the Strange and Norrell seminar is up at
http://crookedtimber.org/category/susanna-clarke-seminar/ (PDF at
http://www.henryfarrell.net/clarkeseminar.pdf). Susanna's bit of it is
at
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/29/women-and-men-servants-and-masters-england-and-the-english/
.
Cheers
Henry
The snow's stopped, slightly disappointingly. That was fast. Still, the sky's gunmetal grey once more...
This is probably a really stupid question, but... how tall are you?
Five feet, eleven inches (180 cm). And shrinking fast.
...
Almost twenty years ago I managed an astonishingly short interview with Ken Campbell when I was researching Don't Panic!, talking about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy stage show he put on. The HHGTTG show doesn't get mentioned in this entertaining article about him -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1650710,00.html -- but it does talk about his eight to twelve hour long (depending on who you believe -- a quick google gave me 8, 10 and 12 hours) Illuminatus Trilogy adaptation. (Pictures of it, including an amazingly young Jim Broadbent, and intervews up at http://www.frogboy.freeuk.com/illuminatus.html.) (Then again, if each of the five plays did consist of five sections of 23 minutes, as mentioned on the previous link, then it would have been nine hours and thirty five minutes long altogether...)
Hello, I was wondering how a person would go about doing a book of quotations, in this case, one based on you in this blog. Every so often you write things that I find fairly intellegent, and memorable, and that I think ought to be remembered (fancy that). A lot of them are in the vein of writing advice, and I've taken to snagging little 'bytes' of your advice, and/or your off-hand comments, and/or or other little things, and doing little photo-shoppy type things with them and then putting them up on my computer desktop, to inspire me.
This may sound like a compliment. Please contain yourself.
But I thought about "The Quoteable Sandman" and what a nice little book that ended up being, and I wondered if some of the quotes I've collected wouldn't lend themselves to something similar.
MY QUESTION IS THIS:
How would I go about getting something of that nature started up? Would I ask your permission first, since these are your quotes? Would I assemble a collection and go to a publisher and then get them to get your permission (if they give a fig, and assume that others would too, about what you have to say on the topics of writing, and fiction, and life)....
Well, yes, you'd ask my permission first. And then I'd say no, but I'd add that if you want to do a web page of quotes that you've collected that you like, I'd be fine with that and happily link to it.