argh. also oops.

We've gone over to the new version of Blogger, as of the last post. That's why we now have these odd little labels.

There's a small amount of fiddling going on behind the scenes, and as those with long memories may already know, sometimes LiveJournal and Blogger do not play well with each other. So if your inbox just got a month's worth of old blog posts reappearing in it, we're incredibly sorry. (The industrious web elf says that anyone who feels they need a personal apology can write to her at neilwebelf@gmail.com and she will cheerfully abase herself.)

Labels: argh, blogger, cockups, Livejournal

to be greeted by puddles of unusual size

Home. Up too early.

Outside it's raining, and raining and raining, which makes it feel so much more like coming back to England after a holiday than like coming back to the upper Midwest after Christmas, where a weather website tells me the average high temperature for today is about 20 F and the average low temperature is 0 F and everything is meant to be, and usually is, ridiculously cold. Today the online weather charts have lots of cheery messages about record high temperatures, and it's raining on a warmish grey day in the upper Midwest on the last day of December. The ground, however, is still frozen, so the water sits in huge grey improbable puddles across everything.

Right. I had better go and buy food and do all those other things one does on getting back from a week away, which today I think include pretending that the person-high mounds of mail on the kitchen table don't exist.

Labels: rain

indeterminacy

Heigh ho. Miles away from working internet, and the one time I try and get online I discover that Blogger has now updated itself out of Beta and my blog is still on "old blogger" and will be until the person who set it up at Authors on the Web returns and gets the emails asking him to please migrate it to New Blogger, so I'm trying to post this via email, having not a clue whether it'll work or not...

And the reason I'm trying to post is that when I did Internet Cafe my way online yesterday I discovered pretty much all of my FAQ messages were people asking whether I was really going to be writing the Silent Hill sequel with Roger Avary. I'm afraid that I don't think I am -- I mean, it's the first thing I've ever heard of it, and I'm sure that if they make a sequel Roger would want to write it himself.  I am writing Black Hole with Roger (we're one draft in right now), and we already wrote next year's Beowulf. If I get home to find an invitation to write Silent Hill 2 with Roger is waiting for me I'll let you all know, but for right now I think it's a discredited internet rumour.

There. I shall now send this off, and I wonder if it will post or not. Happies. Merries. Jollies. And love.

Ho, etc

Right. So I'm off on holiday today with the family. Back around New Year's. Not sure if I'll be near a web connection between here and there, so it's quite possible that you won't hear from me until then.

Have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukkah, a Delightful Kwanzaa, a Cool Yule, a Slinky Saturnalia, a Funky Midwinterfeast, a Late Solstice, and any other holiday you fancy.

And do not break the Internet while I'm away. Look, I am putting it just up here, on top of the wardrobe, where it will be nice and safe...

answers

This was the first of many... thanks to all of you who wrote in...


I'm sure you've been told by others, but Anansi Boys will be published in two parts in Japan. The character on the orange copy means "above" and is the first volume; the green copy has the character for "below" which indicates the second. (Books in three parts get "middle" for the second volume, and "below" means the third. Books in more than three parts, well, sometimes it varies--above 1, above 2, middle 1-3, etc.-- but usually they just number them.)

And in case you were curious, the title is "Ananshi no kechimyaku" (or "ketsumyaku") which would literally mean something like "the blood inherited from Anansi." For values of blood which are more metaphorical. A nice, slightly uncommon term.

and...

Hi Neil...

I'm sure a bazillion people have caught this (if you didn't!), in the third panel of the first page you posted for Coraline, the dialogue balloon says "CArOline" if I'm not mistaken.

Happy Holidays and thanks for the good stuff!

Mark Del Franco

It's meant to read "Caroline". Misses Spink and Forcible get her name wrong.

and on the subject of Coraline...

When I was in Portland last week, at the Laika Studios, I joked about putting one of the Coraline maquettes under my coat and taking it home with me. It wasn't much of a joke, really, more an expression of mingled admiration and longing.

Today a huge box arrived, inside which were thousands of foofs and a smaller, wooden box, screwed shut. I took out the smaller box, removed the screws and took off the lid, and found myself looking at a handpainted movie Coraline. She's sitting upstairs in the TV room right now, because I felt like it would be wrong to simply put her into a display case and lock her off from the world.

I'd post a picture, but I suspect that that might be a bit dodgy, so I shall wait until the official photos of my set visit surface, and you can see a little bit of what they're doing. Stylistically, the characters look a little like a mashup of early Ronald Searle and UPA cartoons. But you'll see...

Hello Neil, please forgive but permit me to say, that I am an exceedingly large fan, and that I greatly admire your work. Now then. I have been wondering for some time which books, or writers in particular, were some of your favorites when you were my age (that being the formidable age of fifteen), how you feel they influenced your later writing style, and if you had already begun to find an interest in writing as a medium at this particular age. This is just something that I have been curious about, and would be delighted to know. If the answer which I seek is already located within the deep annals of this webpage, please accept my humblest of apologies. Thank you for your time, I appreciate it greatly.-Matthew

Let's see. When I was fifteen my favourite authors were probably Samuel R. Delany, Mervyn Peake, Will Eisner, Michael Moorcock and Ursula K. LeGuin. My favourite book that year, mm. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I think.

the frozen world

We have an ice-storm going on right now. Maddy just arrived home from school an hour early. It's rain, mostly, when it falls, and then it encases everything in ice. I'm about to walk to the bottom of the garden and write...



Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out whether the Amazon.co.jp entries on Anansi Boys shows two different covers or a book that's being published in two parts...

For Your Enjoyment...

A couple of lettered pages from Craig's Coraline... One from near the beginning, one from nearer to the end. (Click on each to open a larger version of the image.)

On the interconnectedness of everything. Also, free stuff.

I haven't made much noise about it, because it's a sort of huge undertaking and I didn't know how long it was going to take or when it would be out, but for the last year and a bit P. Craig Russell has been quietly beavering away on a comics adaptation of Coraline, giving it the same amount of detail and respect and use of the original text as he did when he adapted Kipling stories or grand operas. Right now there are three pages (unlettered) up at http://www.pcraigrussell.net/. It's lovely stuff, and will be out later this year as a graphic novel from HarperChildrens...

And on the subject of Coraline, John Hodgman, who plays Coraline's father and other father in Henry Selick's Coraline movie (but is presently much better known for, among other things, being the PC in the Get a Mac ads) is giving away, for a limited time, free and clear, The Areas of My Expertise as an audiobook at iTunes. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/19/the_areas_of_my_expe.html has the iTunes link. You need this free audiobook. If you think you don't, you are wrong. Trust me. It's funny. Also, it's free.

Mailbags stuff and more librarythings

I love the Librarything unsuggester too! They also have a library suggester based upon your whole library. My question is, why are you NOT one of LibraryThing's list of Authors who Librarything?
http://www.librarything.com/librarything_author.php

Mostly because I've been on the road too much since I discovered LibraryThing, and haven't yet had time to join up and start logging the books. Of which there are rather a lot. However, there is finally librarystuff afoot in this house -- I've recently sighed and admitted there are too many thousands of books for the current basement library to hold, which means that as of today a large former bedroom has begun to transmute itself into a library extension, and I may take the opportunity to LibraryThing and organise. I did buy a Cue Cat scanner recently, anyway. Or I may just put all books of a similar size and colour into boxes and haul them upstairs. (I always liked Chris Cobb's colourful take on bookshop organisation -- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182224)


Neil,I think the unsuggester might be broken. I've tried multiple titles, including yours, and there is always at least one or two items from my library on the list. Either that, or my tastes are simply more varied than they allow for. I may actually use it as a suggester, as it generally is a more varied list than the other, though I won't like many things on each of those lists. Dune by Frank Herbert came the closest, and there's still one or two I've got on my to get to list.Byron Grimes

It's not broken, it's simply pointing out statistical anomalies -- it's not even talking about whether or not you'd like something (as some people have written to me, complaining they like books from both lists). It's simply saying that it ought to be able to find a certain number of copies of book Y for people who own Book X, and it can't. Statistically, people who have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves, for whatever reason, have fewer copies of Terry Pratchett books than might be expected. It may be that all the people with both Mein Kampf and Guards! Guards! just aren't on LibraryThing yet, and once they join the anomaly will vanish. Or it may be that there's something to be learned from that.

If you plugged your personal library into LibraryThing it might help smooth over the anomalies you've encountered.

Dear Mr. Gaiman:My name is Chloe Cole. I’m a junior at Marion High School, in Marion, Arkansas. I’m writing you this letter to tell you how I felt about your book Coraline, and ask you some questions.I really enjoyed your book Coraline. I enjoyed it so much, that I’ve read it more than once. I really wanted to ask you about the buttons. I loved how they were used as the other parent’s eyes. Do they symbolize anything for you personally? What do you try to symbolize when Coraline goes into the other world through the old door?I would like to thank you for taking time to read my letter. I hope you can find time to reply to me in an email. My email address is (removed).

Hello Chloe (although unless you're reading this blog you'll never know I replied). Just like it says on the FAQ form, I really don't do homework, so you'll have to decide on the symbolism of button eyes and doors and passages yourself -- but thought that it might be a good idea to point out
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/156/Neil-Gaiman-Coraline-page01.html and the following three pages, which are a conversation from the Well website about Coraline from 2002, and in which I answer an awful lot of Coraline-related questions. (It's practically a Coraline FAQ.)

Hey Neil, I'm doing a piece on how one can make money from blogging. Any comments to share?Happy day, Ariel

Well, this blog has certainly helped this author get onto the New York Times bestseller list, mostly by letting enough people know that I had new books coming out at the point where they came out. Which probably helped me make money in the long term, through increased royalties, but isn't what it exists for.

Beyond that, I've never put up advertising or made any of the kind of links to Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or wherever that pay you a referral fee. And while I'm happy to link to DreamHaven Books' www.neilgaiman.net shop site, I don't get a cut of anything they sell or anything like that -- I figure it helps a comparatively small local bookshop that I like enormously to stay in business, which is enough.

And seeing that I don't have any plans at present to sell www.neilgaiman.com to Google for millions, I'm probably the last person to have any useful ideas on making money from blogging.

(Mark Evanier's method seems like a perfectly sensible one to me... http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2003_06_22.html)

Mr. Gaiman, I sent this to you the other day, but I think I sent it to the wrong place. No offense, but did you know you look like the Corinthian with your sunglasses on? Thank you,Veronica

You know, on the cover of Sandman 14, I even look like the Corinthian with my glasses off. Or perhaps he looks suspiciously like a 28-year-old me with teeth for eyes.

Neil, the link on your webpage for the library unsuggester kept sending me to some internet crime reporting system, useful in it's own right but not the same thing. I was kind of disappointed. Have you been hacked by an over-zealous crime fighter?I absolutely love your books. Gaynel

I've checked the links and they work fine for me. I checked the LJ syndication and they seem to have worked fine for everyone on there. I wonder if your computer mistakenly thinks that LibraryThing is a fraud site or something.


Hi, Neil.
So this face recognition thing. Well. You, apparently, resemble yourself 66%.Please don't fall into an existential pit because of this.
http://andrewscottonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/myheritage-genealogy-software-with.html
Cheers,Andrew Scott

I've never been able to get it to recognise that I resemble me with photos of myself, so I'm very impressed you got 66%. Last time I tried it, it told me I looked like Barry Gibb, Placido Domingo and, er, Terri Hatcher, and at that point I gave up trying for good...

...

And finally, you might want to head over to http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/98 to see what Stardust related sculpting Charles Vess has been up to recently...

Stardust Pictures!

This image is one of three from Stardust that's just turned up on Cinemablend. (The other two show Michelle Pfeiffer and goats, and young Master Thorne embracing Victoria Forester.)

http://www.cinemablend.com/gallery/previews/Stardust-1978.html?tid=8819

Extremely unsuggestive...

I think I have fallen in love with the LibraryThing unsuggester. It's the LibraryThing utility that tells you how unlikely people who own one book are to have another.

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

I am, apparently, the anti-John Grisham, at least as far as Sandman goes. If you have a Sandman graphic novel you are statistically much less likely to be reading John Grisham than the public at large. (http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/861076). The unsuggester of American Gods would imply that if you read Christian dating books, you are very unlikely to own a copy of American Gods, and in fact the unsuggestions for American Gods are Christian books all the way (http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/5678). I thought this was probably to do with the title, but it's also true of Stardust (although if you own Stardust you are also less likely than most people to own Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution -- http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/897410) and of all my other novels. Except Coraline, for which it is also true, but in which unsuggestion list Vogue Knitting On the Go: Socks Two can also prominently be found.

(Incidentally, the unsuggestion for Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-mist is James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/45057) . And what do people who like Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space have against Stephen King? (http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester/17036)

And via Mark Evanier, I learned about this blog, and thus spent far too long reading about corrections made in newspapers and magazines this year... strangely gripping stuff: http://www.regrettheerror.com/2006/12/crunks_06_the_y.html#more

On leaks and buttons

Just to clarify for people who were puzzled and have asked, Henry Selick and his Laika team have already started making the film of CORALINE: most of the voice actors have already recorded their parts. They've cut together "story reels" of the storyboards (storyboards by a team including the talented Vera Brosgol ) for timing of each shot. (As Henry Selick points out, they can't shoot "coverage" on a stop-motion animated film. It has to be right, to be planned and edited, before it begins.)

The Coraline team are constructing puppets and costumes and armatures and they are building sets and making objects -- any single thing you see on the screen has to be made, after all.

They are also doing technical tests -- it's easy enough for me to say in the book, and for Henry to put into his script, that as Coraline walks away from the Other House, the trees are less like trees and more like the idea of trees, but making an orchard turn into a misty abstraction is easier said than done when you have to build it. So they've built one, and are doing their camera tests to see if it will work.

They have walls and walls of production art, posters, designs and so on.

I'm not sure that the difference between pre-production and production is as clear-cut on something animated as it is in a live action movie. March is when the camera starts rolling on the content. But they're certainly making their movie right now.

(Incidentally, my favourite tiny thing about the Laika Studio -- a 151,000 foot warehouse -- was noticing that the "Mission Statements" painted on the walls by the previous occupants have been elegantly graffitied over, with splashes of green paint spray-painted over with big black buttons. )

Incidentally, on the subject of stuff leaking out etc., it is with a certain wry amusement that I notice that the mission impossible team over at Ain't It Cool News has a bunch of art from Beowulf up. It's art taken from the Art of Beowulf book, to which I am currently writing the introduction. And my wry amusement derives from the fact that all I've been permitted to have at home of the material is teeeeeeny tiny images on photocopies, and now, online at aint it cool, they have the real thing and up digitally.

(Probably worth pointing out that this is "concept art" though. Some of it is simply a "what if we try this?", and not the way something will look in the finished film.)

So now I'm hoping that I can get some Coraline stuff up here at least before they put it up on aint it cool news...

[Edit to add: the pictures have now vanished from Aint It Cool, I'm afraid.]

coraline by line #3

I'm home, jet-lagged, pooped, and am now on my way to bed.

Coraline looks amazing. I need to find out what I can say before I say anything here. But a lot of photos were taken, I was shown around, shown stuff, interviewed for the electronic press kit/DVD extras, and even did a two hour signing for the people working on it -- most of whom already had their own battered copies of Neverwhere or Good Omens, or their Christmas Present copies of The Absolute Sandman. I'm hoping that I can get permission to a) talk about some of what I saw, and b) put up a photo or two here.

(They will start shooting Coraline in March 2007, with a planned release date of late summer/autumn 2008.)

Coraline by Line part two

I've been given an empty office and a MacBook Pro. But I've also
signed a non-disclosure agreement handed to me when I walked in the
door, which means I can't simply pick up the MacBook and use the
internal camera to take pictures of this place and all the things on
the walls. And on people's desks. And there are such things.

Today I'm going to see film tests and 3D tests, puppets and costumes
and things. But right now I'm going to watch the second half of the
second act story reel.

In case you're wondering whether I'm blase about all this, I can
assure you that I'm faking it well.

CORALINE by line

I'll be spending the day (currently rather a wet and chilly one) at Laika Studios, where I shall learn all about the CORALINE movie. I don't know if I'll be able to post any images or anything here, or what I'll be allowed to say about what I've seen. But I'll tell you and I'll post here whatever I can... (I was slipped some semi-animated story reels last night, and watched enough before sleep claimed me to learn that Teri Hatcher is really good, that French and Saunders are likewise, and that a story reel is a long way from being a movie).

Santa thought

Just a little one to mention that over at www.neilgaiman.net, the DreamHaven Books site, they have the three DreamHaven audio CDs up. (You can see links to the CDs, and to Angels and Visitations, my first short fiction-and-stuff collection on their front page. Go further in and you will find much wonderful stuff -- http://www.neilgaiman.net/signed.php is the first of five pages of stuff they have for sale signed by me or by fellow conspirators of mine.... like Gene Wolfe, here interviewed at Fast Forward, and look, there's an entire edition of Green Man Review devoted to Charles deLint. But I wander from the subject. Audio CDs. Right.)

Each of the pages for the DreamHaven CDs has a sample track up from that CD, in MP3 form.

Warning: Contains Language, which was my first CD (and is actually a double CD), has, as its sample track, me reading "Nicholas Was..." my hundred-word Christmas Card to the world. (No, I'm not linking to the MP3 of it directly. It's DreamHaven's bandwidth, after all, and you can at least do them the courtesy of going and getting it from them directly.)

I was thinking about that the other day, and it occurred to me that if anyone feels like doing a seasonal remix or mashup of "Nicholas Was...", and sending me a link to it through the FAQ line, I'd happily and seasonally link to it here. In theory, at least, you would need to get it done by the 21st of December, as I have plans to be far from computers between the 23rd and the 30th of December.

It might be fun, anyway.

...

Which reminds me, I've been getting messages from all over the world recently complaining either that people can't download audio content from iTunes or Audible in the country they live in, or, more rarely, complaining about the price of downloading audiobooks, or the limited selection, from their local version of iTunes, and asking if I can fix it.

Your faith in me is gratifying, but no, I can't fix it. It's way out of my control. What I can do is point out a fairly simple workaround.

Buy audiobooks on CD and rip them yourself. Anything out there on Audible etc -- with the exception of the complete Maddy Interviewing Me -- is on a CD. In the case of Anansi Boys and American Gods, you can even buy them on MP3 CD. (Sometimes there's even a free streaming audio up of an entire Audiobook.) You can also, if price is enough of an issue, check out places like half.com or eBay -- people are much more likely to sell on audiobooks after they've listened to them.

Wherever you are in the world, CDs will work.

There. I hope that helps.

[Edit to add: Maybe we can do something after all. Ana Maria Alessi at Harper Audio has had an idea about all this, which she is now investigating. For the first time in six years we might actually put some paid content on www.neilgaiman.com -- I'll keep you posted.]

CBLDF fundraisers...

You want to sit on Frank Miller's signed drawing chair? Own the copy of Endless Nights I gave to Will Eisner when I went to see him before his death? Go check out
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2006/12/11/sit-where-frank-sat/ and then get over to the ebay auction and see what you can find that would make a brilliant Xmas present for someone...

With another, just as cool, Auction coming up as soon as this one ends, which should have the new Dave Sim limited CBLDF print #3 in it...

(Also "How to Talk to Girls At Parties" is in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this month. For any of you who wanted to read it but didn't feel like springing for a hardback of Fragile Things.)

the lure of cheap fiction

Let's see... from reading many messages and links, I've learned that while there is an equestrian penknife with a hoof cleaner on it, the thing on Swiss Army knives that most people thought were hoof picks were probably actually leather punches, awls or marlin spikes. Just thought you should know that, because lots of people thought that I should know that too.


Hey Neil.You just linked to the 'Stardust teen paperback edition' on Amazon.com, and I was wondering: Is it just a repackaging of the original book, or an adaptation of the film? Thanks Joel

It's a repackaging of the original book... there won't be a novelisation of Stardust. Titan Books are going to do a Making of Stardust, written by Stephen Jones (which will also include the script).

There will be an Art of Beowulf book coming out, along with a novelisation of Beowulf by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and a Beowulf Script book, which should chart the evolution of the Beowulf film from the earliest scripts by Roger Avary and me, all the way through to the shooting script.

Stardust" the opera
The amazon pic looks more like a poster for a production at the Metropolitan Opera than a movie poster
Something you're not telling us...?

Probably mostly because it's not a movie poster, it's just a still from the movie being used as a temporary cover for a book. It probably won't be the final image for the book, either.

As for a Stardust opera, I'd love to see one, but suspect that it's probably one of those things that can't happen for a certain number of years because of the movie.

Hello Neil,
There's an interesting article in the LA Times, (Posted on Screenwriter John August's website) describing the difficulties arising when the author of a novel being adapted for a feature, is given too much creative control.
Is this why you decided to write your own screenplays? Have you been happy with the adaptations of your work so far?
What are your thoughts about this case, the actions of the Producer's, Cussler?
With very best regards,
Greg L.
http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/clive-cussler-really-really-dislikes-sahara#comments

Mostly I don't write my own screenplays, if you mean that in the sense of adapt my own work. I've done it once or twice, but didn't really enjoy it. These days if it's a matter of making something I wrote into a film I'd rather help pick someone whose work I respect and let them get on with it, and for me as a screenplay, I'd either write original screenplays or adapt things I like and respect but with a willingness to do whatever's needed to turn them into good films. A film isn't a book.

(If it's something based on something I've written that I'm going to direct, I'd rather write my own script, though. At that point I actually have a chance of making the thing in my head.)

The only moment in the article I found myself sympathising with the otherwise-impossible-to-sympathise-with Mr Cussler was over his "Dirk Pitts has black hair" thing, which left me wondering what the Constantine movie would have been like if someone with power could have graven in stone, "Remember John Constantine is English and blond".

...

I love this story -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1969258,00.html. I think I love it most because it reads like the start of a classic detective story. Was the Bishop of Southwark drunk, or mugged, or something more sinister? Why was he seen 'sitting in the back of a Mercedes chucking children's toys out of the window and announcing: "I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do."'?

As the story stands right now the Bishop 'who earlier in the week told a congregation that he could not get his mitre on because of the lump on his head - told the Guardian he could not recollect what had happened. Police were informed the following day that his briefcase, spectacles, a mobile phone and papers were missing.'

I trust that the mystery will be solved by an elderly spinster who has a knack for solving mysteries, and will eventually be found either to hinge on the nature of the toys he was chucking out of the window, or to be part of the Russian spy Polonium poisoning case...

And I am beginning to suspect that whoever is currently writing the world, or at least the English bit of it, is starting to plunder cheap fiction for ideas.

...

In the Dec. 6 post (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/boy-scout-legends.html), Neil mentioned a Gothic Archies ringtone. Where did he get it? Can others buy it?

Best -- C.

I just use a phone (Nokia N-80) that can play MP3s, and can take an MP3 as a ring tone.

...

I just checked out the world66.com map facility and updated it from the last time I filled one of them in. Every time I think I've seen a lot of the world a map like this reminds me how much I still have left to see...

(I don't count it if I've only seen the place from a train window or sat on the tarmac or stopped somewhere to refuel.)



create your personalized map of europe



create your own personalized map of the USA



create your own visited country map

boy scout legends

I need to post the helpful things people have asked me to do recently. Or at least, some of them. Or anyway, those I can find easily.

Here is one:

I'm not sure if you'll remember this, but, back in
January when you did a reading here in NYC, you
autographed a little tag and took a picture with a
breast cancer bear as part of my Project Teddy Bear to
support the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Well, the auction for your autograph, bear and photo
are (finally) live and I was wondering if you'd be
willing to post a link in your blog? People can get
to your auction (and the 50+ others live right now)
here: http://www.lisawalks.com/ptb2006

In 2007, I'll be walking in my 13th Avon Walk in 6
years. I'm trying to raise $20,000 to bring my
fundraising total over the years to $100,000. All
proceeds from this auction will go toward that goal.

Thanks so much for your help!
Lisa Spodak
http://www.lisawalks.com

and here's a direct link to the auction for the Teddy that I signed. Here's another...

I was wondering if you might do me a small favor, even though you don't know me in the least. A good friend of mine in Athens, Georgia has a little girl named Sabina who was recently diagnosed with a malignant tumor on her brainstem. They are keeping their spirits up, but the burden is huge. Sabina has a web site to raise donations to help with medical bills. I was wondering if you would mind posting a link to her site on your blog. I've already posted it on my own public journal. I was trying to think of a way that I could really get it out to the public, and I thought that you might like to help. If you can't, I understand, but I thought it was worth a shot. The link is http://www.simplysabina.com/. Please check it out and you'll see that it's legitimate.

Best regards,
M.Webster

Easily done.

And this plea for help came in from my eldest daughter, the lovely Holly Gaiman, who decided that having a father with a blog read by a very large number of people with diverse and unusual interests was something she could cash in her nepotism (filaetism?) points for. She's working on a thesis on flipbooks (like these I suppose). I asked what she needed and she said,

Basically, I'm in the very early stages of writing my thesis on flip
books. Knowing your readership, there's probably someone out there who
is a flip book collector, expert, or something like that. I'm
basically looking for any cool flip book tidbits/stories/book
suggestions/any random coolness. Love you dad, and she created an email address -- helpholly@gmail.com -- for anyone who wants to send her flipbook-related information.

...

This came in from Lisa Snellings Clark Poppets are back. Your readers will never forgive you if they miss it. Lisa's Winter Art Sale Also if you're lucky she'll have put up the Poppets on a Book Tour video by now over at http://slaughterhousestudios.blogspot.com/.

Here's a Gothic Archies piece on NPR that's an awful lot of fun. (Click on "Listen"). The lyrics to "This Abyss" are up there too -- that's my current ringtone, mostly.

And finally, according to this Guardian article, Swiss Army Knives never had a device for removing a stone from a horse's hoof. This is like being told there isn't any Santa Claus, only much, much worse. The verities and axioms of the world begin to crumble.

...

Incidentally, this just went up on Amazon. I don't believe this is the actual book cover -- I think it's a sort of a place-holder. But it's still a photo from Stardust nobody's seen before.

By Request...

Everybody who has written in this morning thinks I should now put this up. And I would hate to disappoint any of you. (My only grumble is that I would have left the title the same. It's more fun that way.)

Sell your certainty and buy bewilderment...

(Sorry to anyone who had trouble with yesterday's .M4a file. ITunes or Quicktime ought to play it. Over at the just-put-up http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/audio/stardust they have an MP3 file of the same bit.)

Dave McKean has done 33 new Mirrormask drawings for the lettered editions of the signed and limited Mirrormask Script book. You can see all the drawings here for free (although it will cost you money to buy the book with the actual drawing it). Click on the thumbnails to see the whole thing.

And on the subject of Mr McKean, I am delighted to announce that on Thursday, January 11, 2007 7:00pm at the Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Dave and I will be "in conversation". The Free Verse event "celebrates 20 years of the duo's artistic partnership--Gaiman and McKean will each offer a brief presentation of their own work, then follow it up with an on-stage conversation about the aesthetic challenges they face together and separately."

At http://raintaxi.com/readings/ we learn that "while this event is free, tickets are required. Tickets are available at the Walker box office starting one hour before the performance. This event will also be webcast live and archived at channel.walkerart.org. "

...

It's always odd when you read a piece of criticism that tells you nothing except that the person writing it doesn't know what he or she's talking about. Case in point, a recent New Yorker review of the Mary Poppins stage play (which I saw in London a few years ago, and which had a lot wrong with it, mostly in its desire to be part of P.L. Travers' world while never quite daring to step outside the Disney frame it was built in, and many things, lots of them Disney things, that were right with it). But the New Yorker criticism of it seems to be something completely outside of that. For example: After reading the P. L. Travers books or seeing the 1964 film version, starring Julie Andrews, we wonder if Mary Poppins makes the children she cares for better people by being, as she sings near the start of this show, “practically perfect,” or if she’s a Pied Piper-like fantasist who preys on her charges’ escapist wishes. Is it all about her or all about the emotionally transformative effects of love?
and, of course we don't wonder, if we've read the books, because it's obviously all about nothing of the kind. At the point where the writer complains that At no point does this Mary Poppins get her hands dirty in a sinkful of Dickensian dishwater, I found myself wondering exactly what the critic in question thinks that Edwardian nannies or governesses actually did. They weren't servants. They were of the family yet not part of it. That was sort of the point.

And of course Mary Poppins is not -- in the books -- actually "practically perfect", although that's her own opinion of herself. She's conceited, dangerous, implacable and a force of nature. She teaches the Banks children nothing as banal as moral lessons, and I don't believe that anybody is really emotionally transformed in the books, except for a handful of lucky people in the stories who are given the ability to run away from their lives or are set free from some kind of physical imprisonment (and that occurs more in the stories that Mary Poppins tells the children than in the stories themselves).

(Oddly enough, there's an excellent article from last year's New Yorker about P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins and Walt Disney -- http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051219fa_fact1-- which is much more sensible, and points out that:

The literary Mary Poppins is by no means an untroubling character. Indeed, at the end of the first chapter of the first book—in which she arrives as a shape hurled against the front door in the midst of a gale, assumes the form of a woman, bullies Mrs. Banks into hiring her, snaps at the children, and doses them with a mysterious potion after she gets them alone in the nursery—she earns only a qualified endorsement: “And although they sometimes found themselves wishing for the quieter, more ordinary days when Katie Nanna ruled the household, everybody, on the whole, was glad of Mary Poppins’s arrival.” She is, in fact, very often “angry,” “threatening,” “scornful,” and “frightening.” She calls the children cannibals, jostles them down the stairs, and makes them eat so quickly that they fear they will choke. She has a habit of saving the children from horrifying supernatural experiences, it’s true, but this would seem more of a boon if she herself hadn’t brought them on in revenge for naughtiness. Often, she seems like someone who doesn’t like children much. )

And I wound up thinking about this because I read the extremely dim New Yorker review on the same day that I got my copies of Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins - The Governess as Provocateur, a wonderful and brilliant book-length study by Professor Giorgia Grilli about the nature of the Mary Poppins in the books and about magic and shamanism and what nannies and governesses were, and how precisely and deeply subversive a figure Mary Poppins is.



For some reason Blogger won't let me put a picture of the cover up here [edit to add, but blogger beta did], but you can see it over at http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Poppins-Childrens-Literature-Culture/dp/0415977673. It's probably too expensive for individuals, but if you're interested you could order a copy from your library. (It also has an introduction by me, but do not let that put you off.)

Small giftie taster thing

It just occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give people a little more of a taster of the "Stardust" audiobook than you can hear over at Audible.com. We don't yet have a page up here at Neilgaiman.com for the Stardust audio book.

So this post is temporary, and it may vanish soon...

1-02%20Stardust%20Chapter%20One.m4a

Not quite so bloody really

The phone just rang and it was Brendan from Final Draft, who reactivated my authorisation and was baffled at why or how it happened ("There are lots of reasons for losing authorisation. Yours just doesn't fit any of them.") So I can open the script again, and am reminded of why I stick with them. Lots of people wrote in suggesting different screenwriting programs, and I'm grateful, but for now I'm more or less happy.

Way behind on about five different things, but happy.

And it's snowing.


Hi Neil
You were on the wireless on Sunday 3rd December, contributing to a Radio 3 documentary about H.P. Lovecraft. It should be available via Listen Again until Sunday 10th. Here's the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/pip/t8iz3/
Tom

Bloody Final Draft

You know, if I was ever going to write a screenwriting program, I would make sure that the bloody thing didn't hiccup, randomly "lose authorisation," and stop working when an author was on deadline. And if it did suddenly decide it wasn't authorised, I'd at least have some way to fix it if it happened late at night, when the nice support people are home in bed and authors are on deadline.

Sorry. Just wanted to grumble. Final Draft isn't cheap. I really think it ought to work.

closing tabs

I didn't get to the Stardust test screening in Pasadena, and won't be at the screening in Sherman Oaks in an hour, but the first of the reviews have already started to surface from the first screening, and they're up at ain't it cool... http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30863. They aren't spoiler heavy, but there are a few.

[Edit to add -- And also a much longer review now up at http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30866 ]


(From these screenings they learn things that will influence the edit and so forth. I think so far the biggest thing they've learned is that everyone seems to love Robert Di Niro.)
...


I love it when the underground goes mainstream in odd ways. Here's my favourite disturbing photographer, Joel Peter Witkin, doing a hat fashion shoot for the New York Times. I sort of wish he'd had a few more women with three breasts or extra heads, but the images are beautiful, and pure Witkin.

...


There's an interview with me in the Minneapolis City Pages at http://www.citypages.com/databank/27/1356/article14921.asp, and from this City Pages review (http://citypages.com/databank/27/1356/article14926.asp) I learned that Susanna Clarke "exploits her gift for the creation of tiny fictional packets of dread, one she honed during the years she spent writing episodic tales for Neil Gaiman's masterful Sandman graphic novel series," which is the kind of thing that makes me point out she only wrote one story, "Stopp'd Clock Yard" in the Sandman: Book of Dreams short story collection, and it is very good, but it wasn't very episodic.


...

Over at The Comics Journal website, Art Spiegelman writes a terrific gift list --
http://www.tcj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=470&Itemid=48
-- and I'll try to suggest a few cool gifty book things over the next few days.

Until I do, a small gift for anyone reading. Daniel Pinkwater's latest novel, The Neddiad, is a wonderful thing. I know because his publisher sent it to me, and I read it. I really liked it (I am a sucker for Pinkwater, and this is grade A+ Pinkwater) and I mentioned it in Forbes Magazine.

Mr Pinkwater is currently serialising it online, prior to publication. We're now up to Chapter Nineteen, with a new Chapter going up every Tuesday. It's getting exciting. Go and read the first nineteen chapters. Mystery! Travel! Shoelaces! Shamans! Turtle! Thrilling Air HighJack Foiled By Simple Conjuring Trick! http://www.pinkwater.com/theneddiad/

Replacing something that doesn't exist

Just realised that the long blog I did yesterday evening about Maddy's tendency to leave self-referential notes about wherever she's been sitting ("This is a post-it note" "Maddy Gaiman wrote this" and, on a notecard "Hello. This is Maddy. I love notecards. They look very official when you write on them." They can also contain her name, practice signatures, casual good wishes to the person reading the note such as "have a magnificent evening", and, occasionally, drawings of a girl's face), and which also talked about the Stardust Focus Group screening last night, didn't post. I think that's the last time I'll use the Picassa blog feature -- it's crashed or failed too many times. (I used it in order to upload a photo of the whiteboard that Maddy had written all over last night while I was on the phone to Tarquin-from-Stardust, which amused me because it was quintessentially one of those notes, only more so.)

What makes the vanishing blog entry even more frustrating is that I'd copied the text from the Picassa entry, because I knew it sometimes crashed, but that it crashed anything I tried to copy the content to. Memo to self: do not blog with Picassa. Just don't.

It may be the fault of the computer, which has just decided that it no longer has a sound card because of what the readme file describes as a "known issue" which it tells you to solve by simply uninstalling and reinstalling the software, said software being, according to the computer, un-uninstallable.

This is the magnificently self-referential whiteboard in question, photographed by my phone...


And as I said in the vanished blog entry, in a few years Maddy will forget that she had ever existed in a flurry of self-referential notes, and I will forget as well. And sometimes this Blog is just a diary, or a reminder. You forget the things you were certain you would always remember, especially the tiny things, and all too often they're the things that matter.

it's a coffee percolator going "wheeee"

Just a quick note to say that the industrious web-elf is currently overhauling www.neilgaiman.com to make it a palace of unbearable delights, or at least a place that's better laid out and in which it's easier to find things. (Our new motto: less wood, more trees. Or something like that.) It's still a work in progress, but we've now replaced a morass of links with http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/films/ which needs more information, but is nice and easy to get about on.

And just so you know, I cannot get this song and video out of my head.

Also, this Galactus Jack Chick tract made me smile. Not quite as much as this pitch-perfect parodic use of Jack Chick tracts to warn us about the Elder Gods, which took a few seconds of googling to find. (Oops. Killed it. Try this one: http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=135)


Not a question really, more of an observation of my recent reading. After purchasing "Fragile Things" in audiobook format off of itunes(read by yourself), which I probably spent too much time listening to and not enough time doing schoolwork, and subsequently rushing to buy and read "American Gods" prior to listening to the novella, I've found that now anytime I read anything you've written, novel or otherwise, it always seems to sound in my head like your voice. I find it interesting, a bit creepy, somewhat reassuring, but always enjoyable. So, thank you

Yours Truly,

Will Swan

You're welcome, I think.

(I just discovered that Iamplify.com have the free downloads of me being interviewed about Stardust and the Stardust audio book, and the (really sweet) interview that Maddy did with me that was edited down for The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection both up for free -- they're in the Downloads section on the front page, mingling uneasily with the audio books on Weight Loss and Conquering Your Fear of Flying.)

Hi Neil,

I have seen on ebay a collection of Sandman, the full run, on a DVD with "comic reading" software that you install on your computer and read on your screen.

The price is redicullusly low, so I wanted to ask if this is official? It certainly doesn't look it, but always best to check!

Nope. All DVD/CD versions of the comics I've done are pirated. Personally, I wish that DC would do legitimate versions, as there's obviously a demand, and we could do it better than the pirates.

Hi Neil,

Just wanted to let you know that Rocketship in Brooklyn will be hosting a signing/reception for "Big Fat Little Lit," which includes, as you know, your collaboration with Gahan Wilson. Your NY area readers may enjoy attending this event (the open wine/beer bar may serve as an additional enticement). Full event info:

"Big Fat Little Lit" signing and reception with Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Kim Deitch and David Mazzucchelli
Friday, December 1 at Rocketship
208 Smith St., Brooklyn (F or G to Bergen St.)
8pm
free

store website: http://rocketshipstore.blogspot.com
book website: http://www.little-lit.com

--Bill Kartalopoulos.


It'd make a good Xmas present for kids too -- Gahan Wilson and I did a story for the third volume (It Was A Dark and Silly Night) that's reprinted in the Big Fat Little Lit.
(http://www.little-lit.com/bfll_artists/gaiman_wilson.html)

Small copyright puzzle...

I'm a bit puzzled by an article on the BBC website about copyright terms in the UK for recorded music that seems to claim that the day after the copyright term expires, the people who made the music will no longer be paid for it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6186436.stm

Music journalist Neil McCormack told BBC Radio Five Live that this outcome would be a blow to the industry. "This was set before the advent, the big boom, of rock 'n' roll - the boom in popular culture which has led to a whole vast number of people making their living from these royalties.

"You can make a record in 1955 and have been getting royalties," he said. "Suddenly they're gone."

...but if you were getting royalties from a record you made you would, I assume, still be getting money from records sold through that record deal. The difference is that other people could now also bring out or use the material without paying a licensing fee to the record company who wouldn't pay you.

So if the Beatles material is going to wander into the public domain in the UK in 5 years, as the article says, someone could put out a CD in the UK containing 1961 Beatles songs. And a few years after that they couldn't pass off their CD of 1963 Beatles songs as being "Please Please Me", or use the photographs or packaging of the original LP. While EMI could put out a set of either cheap Beatles records, or of added value reissues of Beatles records, which would still make sure that the surviving Beatles would still get paid by EMI... wouldn't it?

The Good News! post.

I don't think that I was really surprised to learn that Anansi Boys had a review over on myspace books. On the other hand, I was quite surprised to learn that Anansi Boys has its own myspace page -- http://www.myspace.com/anansiboys. It has eighty friends as I write this and is, apparently, twenty years old and a Capricorn.

Meanwhile The Absolute Sandman, I was delighted to learn, tops the Detroit Free Press list of Best Spiritual Books of 2006. I somewhat doubt that it will befriend Anansi Boys on Myspace, and I expect it will now probably start hanging around with The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Chesterton's Orthodoxy, and would be deeply embarrassed to learn that Jessa Crispin has described it as "the ultimate comic book fetish object" .

Given the recent run of bad news on this blog, I want to congratulate my friends and ace rockers Thea Gilmore and Nigel Stonier on the arrival of baby Egan. Thea's myspace page is at http://myspace.com/theagilmore and she has 4,607 more friends than Anansi Boys does. Nigel's webpage is http://www.nigelstonier.co.uk/ and according to http://www.nigelstonier.co.uk/free_cd.html he's getting ready to send anyone who asks for it a free sampler CD. Seeing two of his songs "Tricks" and "Me and St Jude" are two of my favourite songs by anybody, you might want to send him a stamped self-addressed envelope and see if you like what you get.

And equally deserving of congratulations, my friend Anna Sunshine Ison has just married her Mr Cavin in Las Vegas. This is a fine thing, and to celebrate I'm posting the Lexington Herald Leader's two minute long audio-visual feature on Sunshine's father's art. (He is a forensic anthropomorphologist.) It makes me smile: http://www.heraldleaderphoto.com/multimedia/cecil/ison.html

I met Yunyu at Continuum 3 in Melbourne and she gave me a CD -- she's just sent me her latest CD, Spiked Soul, and I really enjoyed it. You can see two of her videos at http://www.yunyu.com.au/home/music#videos.

Matt Cheney has discovered the Rules For Writing, and lays them out for us. Finally. http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2006/11/rules-for-writing.html

And finally, I would like formally to welcome Mr Eddie Campbell to the blogosphere. He can be found at http://www.eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/ and is taking callers.

Dave Cockrum

I wrote this two years ago, for a benefit book for Dave Cockrum:

For Dave Cockrum

The golden age of comics is when you’re twelve. The silver age is around fourteen, fifteen – that nebulous zone when comics still matter, but so does rock music and so would girls if you could only get close enough to one to actually do anything more than blush and stutter. After that comes the slow fall from grace, and then all the ages run together in one dark gulf. Nothing quite makes the magic happen in the way it did, back then, when the summers lasted forever, and the girl next door still had a pug nose and pigtails (the safety-pin in her nose and her mohawk wouldn't arrive for several more years).

I never quite clicked on Superheroes (TM Marvel and DC and how weird is that?) as a kid. I liked them well enough, but they always seemed to be slightly problematic. They didn’t do the important stuff.

The important stuff, the way I saw it was that super powers would allow you to survive school more easily. If I were secretly the Fastest Man Alive I’d never be late for school ever again. If I were invulnerable (and I could spell it and I knew what it meant) I wouldn’t be miserable and frozen out on an arctic football field, out in some defensive position where I could do the least harm. Even Aquaman didn’t seem to have it too bad: the hellish compulsory swimming classes in the unheated open air pool left me convinced that I would be prime drowning fodder without his powers, even if I couldn’t telepathically communicate with any of the local sticklebacks.

I think that was why I loved the Legion of Super Heroes, back in my own personal golden age. There were lots of them. They lived in the future. And their powers seemed made for surviving school with. (There were school meals put in front of me that only Matter Eater Lad could comfortably have disposed of.) They had a clubhouse. They didn’t fight bank robbers, either. (Mostly they seemed to fight each other, even if they had been brainwashed by intergalactic evildoers. This also made sense to me. I had lived twelve years, and had come to the conclusion that bank robbers turned up more infrequently than they did in the comics.) And, most of all, for just a little while – oddly enough, while I was twelve – they had Dave Cockrum.

I kept waiting for a time sphere to turn up, and to be invited to join the Legion. I had no particular power, not that I’d noticed, but then, you never know, I might get lucky.

I ought to Google and find out what the first Legion story Dave drew was; on the other hand, I still know the first of his stories I read. It was called “Curse of the Blood Crystals”, and it was inked by Murphy Anderson. (I have always been a sucker for Murphy Anderson’s inking.)

And, almost immediately it seemed, Superboy’s comic had become The Legion’s, and Dave Cockrum was the Legion artist (Cary Bates was writing), and suddenly it was cool...

When Dave started drawing the new X-Men, I already felt proprietorial, in a way that only comics readers can feel about artists whose work they love. I owned Dave Cockrum, just as I owned Neal Adams and Berni Wrightson and Jack Kirby and Jim Aparo. He was one of mine, and he owned a small part of my soul.

I was made foolishly happy, many years on, during the early Sandman years, at a New York convention, to be told by Paty Cockrum that she and Dave liked what I did. And, somewhere inside me, a twelve year old exulted: if I couldn’t join the Legion, this was easily the next best thing, and, for a moment, I was back in the Golden Age...

Neil Gaiman

March 5, 2004

...
Dave passed on today, from complications of diabetes.

http://www.nightscrawlers.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=6539
http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2006_11_26.html#012477

Stardust Movie news and Answers

There's a photo of Michelle Pfeifer about to do a spot of goat-transforming in Stardust up at http://www.michellepfeiffer.us/images/magazines/1206premiere.jpg -- there's also an article beneath it...

Meanwhile, over at http://www.stardustmovie.com/ the first signs of life have been seen. If you head over there you'll see a photo of me on set, and a form to fill in if you have any Stardust questions. For now, I'll be the one answering the questions.

(Next week will be the first "test screening", where we find out what an audience thinks of the film, what it likes and what it doesn't. I've never been involved in one of those before. Fingers crossed.)

Sur(thanksgiving)realism

Yesterday was long -- Holly got in to the airport two hours after me, Mike two hours after her, so we never left the airport really, except to grab a little food and raid the Apple store at the Mall of America (which is very close to Minneapolis airport). At this point all of my family have Macbooks except me.

The best thing about coming home (apart from family) is the stuff waiting in plastic tubs on the kitchen table for me to read, look at, play with, watch, sign or inspect.

This morning, with a scratchy too-much-travel throat and hair that looks like some kind of mad tonsorial octopus, I pulled on my dressing gown and went downstairs and looked at the stuff that had arrived in my absence.

There's stuff I'm excited about reading -- John Clute's book The Darkening Garden, subtitled A Short Lexicon of Horror, thirty subjects from "affect" to "vastation" that will probably influence the critical discussion of horror for a good while to come, and volume 1 of the new Fantagraphics Segar Popeye collection, -- and there's stuff I've already read, sort of, like the Drawn and Quarterly Tove Jansen Moomin volume 1 (you can read the Moomin daily strips on the D&Q website, at http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/moomin/), which is one of the sweetest, strangest surrealist strips in history, and which I read earlier this year, because I wanted to write the introduction to it, and then time got away from me and it was something I didn't write this year, but the D&Q people seem to have forgiven me, for they sent me a copy anyway, and you should read it anyway, for it will make you happy.

(To read the Moomin strips in order online, you should start at #1, http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/moomin/index.php?id=1)

There's stuff waiting I have to listen to (now playing, the reissue of Lou Reed's CONEY ISLAND BABY, with three previously unheard tracks), and to watch (a pile of illicit Torchwoods, the Mighty Boosh Live DVD, and suchlike).

And there's a didgeridoo.

It's significantly taller than I am.

Someone sent me a didgeridoo.

I suppose now I'm going to have to get didgeridoo lessons.

Also, I made the cranberry jelly.

bleary eyed and somewhat slightly travel-stained

This ought to be a post about everything I've done and gone in the last few days, finishing with going to see WOLVES IN THE WALLS in Oxford last night, but the alarm clock just went off I'm too short on sleep and running for the train in 20 minutes to get the plane to get home for Thanksgiving, so this is really just more of a sort of a wave before I start frantically packing and get back on the road again.

wave.



wave.

what I did today more or less

Let's see... took Gatwick Express to London (read the wonderfully wonderful graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious by Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa on the way), went to hotel, worked happily in hotel library until room was ready, saw Mitch Benn, discussed Mysterious Project, and burned seven Mysterious Project reference mp3 CDs for him, met daughter Holly and her friend, ate conveyor belt sushi with daughter Holly and Mitch Benn and daughter Holly's friend, saw renowned film director T.V. Gilliam and bought him whisky sours because he had a cold and he thought whisky sours probably have vitamin C in, not to mention the cold-fighting properties of preserved cherries, and we all talked (me, r.d. T.V. Gilliam, d. H. and d. H.'s f. but not Mitch Benn because he'd already gone off to do a gig) and then, evening almost over and all his whisky sours drunk, I waved goodbye to r.d. T.V.G. (having pointed out that he owes me and Terry Pratchett a groat each) and I set off with d. H. and d. H.'s f. to see Mitch Benn in his second comedic gig of the evening performing at the Chuckle Club, which by some strange coincidence was run, I discovered, by Paul Jay (aka Eugene Cheese), who I'd met twenty years ago at a meeting of the Society of Strip Illustrators, and who did a comic called George, The Toad and the Rock, which I loved as a teen and still consider one of the finer surrealist comics.

And tomorrow morning I'm leaving London for a few days and don't know if there will be any internet where I'm going or not. We'll all find out tomorrow.

what i did next

As I've commented here before, the problem with blogging is that when things get interesting, you don't get time to write about it. So suffice it to say I went to Little Rock and on to Conway where I did a Q&A for students, read a poem, gave a speech and read a story and answered questions and signed until midnight and then wound up with Writing Professor Terry Wright and his wife Cindy in an Arkansas Denny's at 1.00am eating breakfast during a thunderstorm so violent that the wiring made crackly sizzling noises when the lightning struck (the manager had a remarkable memory and the least convincing wig I've ever seen), and from there I went to San Jose, where I was interviewed by writing Professor Mitch Berman, ate sushi, then read a short story and a chapter of The Graveyard Book, answered a handful of questions and again signed until midnight. Then I got up too early, flew to Minneapolis, went straight in to DreamHaven Books where I signed a lot of stuff for them (including, I was told, a quarter of a ton of Absolute Sandmans), back to the airport to check in, off to a hasty dinner with Mary and now-with-new-purple-braces (and only able to eat soup) Maddy, and dashed back to the airport, onto a plane and off to the UK.

Which is where I am now, for a couple of days. I'll probably just about get over my jetlag by the time I fly home.

San Jose reminder

Just a hasty reminder that I'm in San Jose and will be giving a talk and signing and stuff tonight...

Details at http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/2006/11/16-nov-2006-san-jose.html

grey walls

I'm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and have spent the morning doing Beowulf movie rewrites. From the hotel window, Little Rock looks a lot like a large block of grey concrete, but if I get over to the edge of the window I can see past the grey concrete to a grey sky, more grey hotel and the top of a charcoal-grey bridge.

I'm just reading the introduction to Fragile Things, and I'm intrigued by your mention of a computer program called Babble that you used in the writing of "Diseasemaker's Croup". I'm really curious about what the program is and how it works, but I'm not able to find other references to it online. What can you tell me about Babble, and how can I get a copy?

A quick Google found me a copy of Babble up on http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2003/07/08/lyric-generators/
It's strange that no-one's updated or reinvented it in the last 15 years, isn't it? It can make some wonderful things.

...

Just to let you know that Jonathan Browne, who runs the Richmond comic shop They Walk Among Us is doing a sponsored cycle up the Mekong to raise money for Diabetes UK. The link is
http://www.justgiving.com/jonathanbrowne
and any attention you can direct that way would be most welcome.
(There's actually an account of a signing you did at TWAU back in the day at http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=1185 . It's mostly about Graham Higgins' short story 'Helicopters', though - you only get a walk-on role.)

...

I won't embarrass the friend who thought I'd be amused by this by naming him, her or it.... but I was amused -- I am as much of a sucker for iPod accessories as the next person, but I think this one (possibly not safe for work, depending on your workplace) goes beyond what I'd imagined necessary.

...

Puzzling over why the Guardian thinks that Google Videos posted by tourists have anything to do with Google per se, and happy to see the return of the fountain pen. (I stopped travelling with fountain pens when you couldn't take ink on planes. I suppose you can again, now.)

Read The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl yesterday. I enjoyed it, as much as one can enjoy a book where you're half-way between landscape and an offstage character, but found waves of empathy with the fictional version of Mr Bendis at his signing in the story, as he has to explain to our hero that he can't read his graphic novel now, and won't make him famous, and has to get on with the signing because he has a line of people....

Oops. Got to run.

Suomeksi song of disgruntlement

Jonathan Carroll (he has a blog, you know) sends me the strangest and most wonderful things in email. Photographs and websites and links and allsorts.

This is one of them... It's the Helsinki Complaints Choir. I watched it twice, then made Miss Maddy watch it too, and she's now wandering around singing in pidgin Finnish.

Some of it is universal, some of it is Finn- and Helsinki-specific...



It made me miss Finland. Mostly it made me smile.

bits, oddments, and, you know, stuff...

Lots of writing going on at this end. I found my cellphone, though (it promptly crashed, although I discharged and recharged it and it now seems to be working again). Also finished reading the Charles Addams biography, and I can report that his second ex-wife stays evil to the end -- indeed, she appears to have forged a document giving herself 75% of the Addams Family as soon as Mr Addams was dead. The book itself was a disappointment, though -- I didn't feel I came away with any real insight into Addams as a person or as an artist.

Here's an article from the British Medical Journal I like the idea of...

An odd New York Times article about copyright and art...

Jack Williamson passed away, aged 98. I think the first SF novel I ever read was his book Seetee Shock, although it wasn't until I read his novel of shapechangers, Darker than You Think, as a teenager, that I knew I was a fan.

My story "How to Talk to Girls At Parties" has been picked up by Jonathan Strahan for his Year's Best SF anthology

Neil,Could I borrow your readers for a few weeks?I am currently touring the USA in a MINI convertible visiting the smallest town in each of the contiguous 48 states. I was wondering if you would publish my web address (www.usain80days.com) on your site so that I could temporarily avail myself of the tasteful and learned throng that seems to accumulate around NeilGaiman.com?
Many thanks in advance.Terence

I really liked the photos, so sure.

...

The most important news this week is that Alan Moore (now legal in Canada) will be a guest on The Simpsons. (http://www.northantsnews.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=317&ArticleID=1865011)


Hello Mr Gaiman. I heard that the project you're working on with Penn Jillette is a film adaptation of the book 'The Road to Endor' by EH Jones. Is this true? And is it likely that the book will come back into print as a result? Regardless, I'm looking forward to it. KJ Forrest.

True and I hope so...


Hi my eternal idol, er I mean, Neil. I read your entry on wills and thought you might like to add this link to it. The link is from LAWCHEK® & Lawsonline™ and gives a listing of which states accept or do not accept a holographic will. I'm so glad mine does, because at this time I can't afford a real lawyer.
http://www.lawchek.com/Library1/_books/probate/qanda/holographic.htm
Michele Lee

Thanks Michele. That's really useful.


And one I've been puzzling over for a couple of days...

Though I appreciate that few books are entirely without typographical errors, I was sort of hoping The Absolute Sandman might have been one of them.

The Absolute Sandman, p.34:

"Alex hands over the reins of organization to Paul McGuire, ..."

Did this really go unnoticed all these years, or did the correction slip through the cracks?

A dedicated reader,

Kevin Yank

I've read it a dozen times and can't work out what the typo is. Let me know if you can figure it out.

Pumpkin things mostly

This was the pumpkin I carved the day before Hallowe'en, when it was done...


Time passed. As is the fashion among pumpkins, they slowly rotted and started to look really interesting and disturbing. This was taken about four days ago:




I'd planned to take more photos of them today, but the snow sort of threw everything off, as did the fact that people who didn't know that I meant it when I said I was keeping them around to photograph as they rotted threw them out. I went and found them and took a photo anyway.



Birthday portrait of an author trying -- and failing -- to take a photo of himself and some disturbing pumpkins without falling into the snow.



And -- authoring be damned -- this was undoubtedly the most important thing I was involved in today.

Dreaming of a White Birthday?

I woke up and the world is white. It snowed in the night and it's still snowing. How odd.

Lots of people have been sending in nice birthday wishes, and sending me links to the http://syndicated.livejournal.com/officialgaiman/ feed where more people are leaving happy birthdays...

Thanks so much to all of you.

squashed tomatoes and stew

As of five minutes ago, I am apparently now 46 years old. (It says so at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/11/06/ so it must be true.)

I've never been 46 before.

It's a really grown-up sort of age when you see it written down like that. It's filled with numbers.

I don't think I'm a grown-up in my head. Not yet...

Stardust news

So the Stardust Movie News is that the head honchos at Paramount saw a rough cut two weeks ago, and decided that it was strong enough to be a "summer tentpole" movie. So it's been moved from March 2007 to July 2007. Which I think is mostly a good thing, as it means they have confidence in it and will get their mighty marketing machine behind it, but is a bit worrying as there's an awful lot of competition in the Summer, whereas around Easter we would have been the only thing like that around.

Quick One

It's always an odd moment to discover yourself (or, some years back, your assistant) as a corroborative detail in an Onion story...

This is today's:

Area Man Achieves Your Dream

Although it was odder by far the first time it happened.

I just got a CD filled with stuff -- art and characters and so on -- from Henry Selick of material from the Coraline movie, which looked really quite marvellous, particularly the tests of the way that the character of Coraline herself walks and moves. The maquettes of the other mother look really unsettling. I can't wait till, er... probably Hallowe'en 2008 actually...

Also I have somehow mislaid my mobile phone. Just thought you'd want to know that.

...

And when I was about seven years old my favourite SF story, found in an anthology belonging to my friend Christopher Harris's father, was "Mr Mergenthwerker's Lobblies". Some years ago I was lucky enough to meet Nelson Bond, the author of that story, at a convention. Later, we corresponded about James Branch Cabell. Nelson Bond just passed away, aged 98 -- http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/90254.

born to trouble

Had a very small bonfire last night, and watched the sparks fly upwards.

A few people asked about prints of the Charles Addams Boiling Oil cartoon -- they still sell them on the New Yorker cartoonbank site, currently at this link.

Hello Neil,

I hope to get something published one day. Due to some rather unfortunate events in my life, I am extremely protective of my family's privacy (as well as my own). Any work I release would (hopefully) not have my real name associated with it (I'd use a pen name). How possible is it to be a well known author, say, like yourself, and remain completely anonymous? I am talking anonymity to the extreme-- no photos, appearances, chances at being photographed, no information anywhere about my children, etc.

Thanks,

Anonymous Australian

It's not impossible, but to be successful you'd have to plan it out well ahead of time, depending on how anonymous you want to be. It's probably easiest to do if nobody cares who you are. The more successful you become, the more you would need to plan ahead (where does the money from the publisher go? Who do they make the cheque to? What name and address is on the copyright registration forms?).

Can you get away with not having an author photograph, signings etc? Yes, although you may have to write better to make up for what publishers could perceive as a problem. (If the book is good, though, they won't mind, although you might have to write answers to interview questions and so on...)

You might want to study the careers and secret identities of such people as Thomas Pynchon, Richard Bachman, James Tiptree Jr. and J.T. Leroy (who I tend to confuse with British Western writer J.T. Edson, rather embarrassingly), not to mention Lemony Snicket, and remember that, in the words of Ben Franklin, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Hi, Neil! I've wanted to ask this for awhile: how do you like the convertible? How does it compare to the old Mini? You're the only person I know who has owned both, and I'm toying with the idea of buying a convertible, so I want to hear your review.
Mary Roane (missing Chicago after that last post)

There are a couple of real downsides to the Mini convertible -- a lack of trunk/boot space, and limited rear visibility. The upsides mainly consist of pressing the button that opens the roof and then pretending you're in a Japanese Robot movie, and of driving round in a Mini with the top down. I've definitely started toying with the idea of getting something bigger for getting groceries or driving to Chicago in, while keeping the Mini, which was not something I thought about with the old Mini. I wonder how soon until we see the Mini Traveller (or indeed the Mini Hearse).

Mr. Gaimain, I've heard a story that you once (accidently) launched a firework at Gene Wolfe's head on Guy Fawkes day. Considering today is November 5th, I thought it would be appropriate to ask if this is indeed true. So is it?~Kat

Yup. (Well, at a Guy Fawkes party about 13 years ago a firework shot rather close to Gene's head, although I don't remember now whether or not I was actually the one who lit the blue touchpaper. Astonishingly, Gene's come back to every Guy Fawkes party I've had since, though -- they happen every now and again, not annually -- and he seemed to relish the excitement and not to mind his escape from sudden death, which proved, to my mind, that Gene Wolfe is the last of the gentlemen adventurers.)

(Edit to add that although Gene was first menaced by Fireworks after World Fantasycon in 1993, my friend Medge points out he and Justin Ackroyd came all the way from Australia to fire the Infamous Firework of Death at Gene's head at the Guy Fawkes Party after World Fantasycon in 2002.)

...

And finally, a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly, for the STARDUST AUDIOBOOK, recorded back in http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/01/stardust-audio.html

Tristran Thorn falls in love with the prettiest girl in town and makes her a foolish promise: he says that he'll go find the falling star they both watched streak across the night sky. She says she'll marry him if he finds it, so he sets off, leaving his home of Wall, and heads out into the perilous land of faerie, where not everything is what it appears. Gaiman is known for his fanciful wit, sterling prose and wildly imaginative plots, and Stardust is no exception. Gaiman's silver-tongued narration vividly brings this production to life. Like the bards of old, Gaiman is equally as proficient at telling tales as he is at writing them, and his pleasant British accent feels like a perfect match to the material. Gaiman's performance is an extraordinary achievement -- if only all authors could read their own work so well. The audiobook also includes a brief, informative and enjoyable interview with Gaiman about the writing of the novel and his work in the audiobook studio.