Feed the Pidgen

Finished proofreading. Added a brood box to three of the beehives. Put together an overdue short story in my head and now have to start writing it.

Supermarkets in the UK are also now age-banding Barbecue Sauce:

A Tesco store refused to sell barbecue sauce to a customer because it contained
a tiny amount of alcohol and she couldn't prove her age.
Claire Birchell, 25, was told she could not buy the Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce which has an alcohol content of 2 per cent.
Staff at the store in in Flitwick, near Bedford also refused to sell the bottle to her brother-in-law, Philip Dover, 27, who did have ID, because they believed he would just give the bottle to Miss Birchell.

A reminder that I'll be in Tulsa, OK, on the 28th of June: details at http://www.mammothcomics.com/events.php
It seems to be an evening containing a signing, a Q&A and a screening of Beowulf into the bargain. I'm excited to go to Tulsa, because of the R.A. Lafferty connections. And Oklahoma is a state I've never visited.

Hi Neil,

Absolute Sandman Volume 3 will be out in a few hours. Since this volume will include stories from books 5-7 of the Sandman library, I was wondering if volume 4 will include "Endless Nights." I was also hoping that “Dream Hunters” will be part of the final volume but that’s just me wishful thinking.


-Tonichi

I have volume 3 here, and it's as lovely and as heavy as the first two, and I've just been proofreading Volume 4, which comes out in November, for the 20th anniversary of Sandman. (The only way I can make that work in my head is by telling myself that it's the equivalent of a comic I read in 1975, when I was 14 and discovering fanzines and the history of comics, that had a first issue in 1955 and stopped publishing in 1963... it would have been something from a bygone age. Instead we're in this strange world where each year more Sandman graphic novels are sold than the year before, as new generations discover them.)

My main obsession right now is to make sure that the sign in the park finally says Do Not Feed the Pigeons in Hungarian, rather than, um, pidgen-Hungarian. No, Absolute Sandman 4 doesn't contain Endless Nights or Dream Hunters -- it's already over 600 pages and will weigh over seven pounds. The four Absolute Sandmans when released will be over 2400 pages long and will contain all 76 issues of Sandman (including the special) and the four or five other stories from various specials, samplers and Winters' Edges -- all except the Jeff Jones Death short story, which will need to wait until DC does The Compleat Death...

Chris Ewen, of Future Bible Heroes fame, has a personal side project called Hidden Variable (this is their MySpace site -- you can hear the complete versions of lots of the songs here, including Unresolving, by me), of songs with music by him and words by authors, all sung by Malena except for one sung by Claudia Gonson.

Here's a rather lovely video of Kindermarchen, the Hidden Variable song by Gregory Maguire, directed by Kimberly Butler and Elberta Gaither. (You know, if you have a record company, you should release Chris's Hidden Variable CD on it... )

Labels: absolute Sandman, age-banding, barbecue sauce, Hidden Variable, tulsa oklahoma