I got up early this morning and went into a recording studio, and recorded audio versions of each of the twelve stories in the Calendar of Tales I'm doing, under the patronage of BlackBerry (you can read about it here).
Which means, the hard bit is now done.
I chose the twelve tweets (actually -- with one exception, March, which I fell in love with, and never had any competition -- I chose three tweets for each month, as the people whose tweets were chosen had to be okay with me having chosen them, and they had to tell BlackBerry it was okay for me to use them, and some people never got back to them, so it was good to have fallbacks).
And then I spent a couple of days when I thought I was going to be writing, being filmed and interviewed for the project. There was an entire film crew based in my garage. (It is a big garage, but it took me by surprise to see it transformed into an ops room.)
And then the film crew left, and I grabbed a pen and a blue book of blank pages, and I started scribbling: March first, (that was the one I fell in love with, as I said, and is piratical) then April (which is funny) and November (which is sad), then January (sort of exciting and things go bang), October (funnyish) July (heartbreaking and hopeful, my favourite of all of them, but different people have different favourites), September (magic), June (funny), May (WEIRD), February (strange), August (short and very hot), December (sad, but I ended it on a less sad note than I had planned when I remembered that it would be the last one in the sequence).
Logan Airport in Boston had closed because of a Blizzard. I flew home in the few hours between it opening and Minneapolis St Paul airport closing in an ice storm.
Then I typed the stories out, and sent them off to BlackBerry, and waited nervously to find out if they liked them (they did, which was nice, as there was no fallback plan for what we'd do if they didn't). I dashed into a recording studio, recorded them, even did some of the voices I shouldn't have had to have done.
...
And that was as far as I got blogging two days ago, and then life grabbed me and I haven't looked up until now. I'm not really even looking up now -- I have my head down and should be working. There are not one, not two, but four drop dead argh now now now deadlines in my life this week, so whenever I write anything I feel guilty for not writing something else.
("Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gaiman?" whispers an imaginary Duke of Gloucester in the back of my head.)
("Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gaiman?" whispers an imaginary Duke of Gloucester in the back of my head.)
My excuse for getting back to this incomplete blog entry is, Headline books has released the UK cover to THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. It looks like this:
Like the US edition, it will be released on June the 18th.
(Here's the US edition for those of you who need your memories jogged)
and yes, a boy on the cover of the UK edition, a girl on the cover of the US one, and both of them are accurate.
June 18th. In the US you can preorder a signed first edition books from Porter Square Books in Cambridge or now through Barnes and Noble. It's a While Supplies Last sort of thing -- the window to order will close in a few weeks, then I will be sent a lot of sheets of paper to sign, which will got to the printers and be bound in to the relevant copies of the first edition. (Oops. I got that wrong. It looks like you can pre-order signed copies up to publication date.)
(Also, there are people who have read advance copies now talking about it on GoodReads. No spoilers, so I do not mind linking to the page in question.)
Labels: A Calendar of Tales, The Ocean At The End of the Lane