Now We Are Nine

Now we are nine.

I keep doing things I think are temporary and then most definitely aren't. I don't really know how much longer this blog has to go -- time enough to tend it and keep it growing and flourishing the way I know I should gets harder and harder to find -- but when I started I never expected it to last nine years.

To celebrate, http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/9th_Blogiversary is the page where you can post your own photo of you doing something with a nine in it.

The last time we did something like this, the day I had 666,666 followers on Twitter, it became http://www.neilgaiman.com/extras/6by6/mosaic01.jpg, and then it became this extraordinary The Garden of Earthly Delights at http://www.uslot.com/neilballoons/ (You will need Silverlight to view this last one properly. I mention this because, for reasons on which I have never been entirely clear, people who will happily download and install all manner of other software, apps and plug-ins will lurch into righteous 'But it needs Silverlight -- how can you DO this to me?,' mode without warning.)




Above is Maddy Gaiman, occasional contributor to this blog, wishing it a Happy Birthday.

And this is me, doing likewise, and a little bit more, in my first ever video journal entry.

(I was wondering about what to film these on, and wound up doing them on the Nexus 1. The sound quality outside in the snow is a bit dodgy, but it's not bad. Maddy filmed it. It is she you can hear going Yay at the end of mine.)

A few thank yous seem appropriate:

Dan Guy, the Web Goblin. Danger is not his middle name, but he's only two letters and a space off from having it be his first.

Former Web Elf Olga Nunes. Nobody else could have persuaded me to bounce on a trampoline and whisper in a library in praise of xkcd, as she did at http://www.olganunes.com/xkcd

(You've all seen

...haven't you?)

I want to thank Lisa Gallagher, my former publisher at William Morrow, and everyone at Harper Collins, for their support for this entire website (and for www.mousecircus.com, the junior version). I want to thank Authors on the Web, who started it off, nine years ago, with the now long-defunct Americangods.com.

And, as always, I want to thank my agent, the redoubtable Merrilee Heifetz, who phoned me about a decade ago and said "There's something called Blogger I just heard about that sounds like it would be right up your street..."

And it was.

(The picture of the cover of Instructions is at the top of this blog because it looked prettiest there. But really it should be down here, with me telling you it'll be released at the end of April. [Amazon link, given that they seem to have reinstated the ability to buy books from them by authors published by Macmillan.] You can see some sneak images at Irene Gallo's blog, here.)

Labels: birthdays, blogging about the blog in a strange mirror-like pattern that leads into infinity