Nicholas Was Redux and a small public service announcement

I'm writing a short story right now, using the lap-desk that Maddy got me for Xmas. I'm getting older, and while, mostly, I really like getting older -- life is easier and lighter and more fun -- for the first time ever I'm finding it easier to wear reading glasses when I write by hand, and it feels wrong.

But the writing is good, I think.

...



(The "Nicholas Was" art above is from http://acardart.livejournal.com/763148.html)

"Nicholas Was..." is a hundred-word short story that began life as a Christmas Card, which Dave McKean calligraphed for me and I sent out to friends and family in 1989. I still wonder how many of them actually read it.

Hello Neil,

This may be an extremely naive question since I am not a collector, only an avid reader of your work. Do the original Christmas cards of "Nicholas Was" go for huge amounts of money? I'm very much taken with the simplicity and beauty of it and would love to get hold of one, but can't seem to find one at any price on the internet. Any chance you have one lying around that you would like to send me? I know this is a longshot but hey you never know...

Thank you,
Bob

The original Dave McKean handwritten Christmas cards -- as far as I know only one has ever been sold. (The people who got them in 1989 are either still holding on to them, or threw them away once Xmas was done, I expect.)

The one that was sold went to auction this year -- I found a handful of the originals in the attic, and donated one to the Low Key Gathering auction, helping to bring fans in from all over the world who could never have made it otherwise to the House on the Rock Hallowe'en party. The "Nicholas Was" card went for over $1200.

Back in 2002 Dark Horse did some Nicholas Was cards with a Michael Zulli illustration. They'll set you back about $15 for an unopened pack of 5 (according to Bookfinder.com).

...

So, last week, when this "Nicholas Was..." video came out...

39 Degrees North: Christmas Card 2010 from 39 Degrees North on Vimeo.

...I suggested that people might like to make videos of their own (with a deadline of this Xmas), and a few of you rose to the challenge.


David Goecke put this together in his basement:




James Bolan made this...



This one, by Alexander Sovronsky, is beautiful, less illustrative and more meditative.



And this one was not done this week -- it's two years old, by Trine Malde, but I thought it deserved its day in the sun as well.



...

Dave McKean is putting up YouTube of songs he's recorded: an illustration and a song in each case. Lyrics by me (for one of them, tune by me /chords by Amanda) music by Dave McKean. Yes, he can sing, and he can play keyboards and drums as well... Listen to them at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SignorCaligaro#p/a/u/2/CRd-M0RKjP4

...

This is the Public Service bit of the blog:

Over at Kitty Mihos's NEVERWEAR website, she does T-shirts and limited edition prints and suchlike. She gives the money that would be my share of what she sells, to the CBLDF, and an extra chunk besides.

As the numbers on the prints go down, she raises the prices. They tend to keep going up (the last few THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME prints sold for $200 each). This is to encourage people to buy early, at the beginning of the print run, and also because, in the past, as the numbers remaining got lower, Kitty started seeing the same prints she was still selling at Neverwear.net for face value selling for many times what she was still selling them for on eBay.

Numbers are starting to get low on Jim Lee's A HUNDRED WORDS print. In 24 hours -- at midnight on the 27th of December PST -- the price goes up on each print from $38 to $50 a print. Right now you can still order a print for $38:
http://neverwear.net/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=4&products_id=31

And that link is also where you can also go and read the poem for free...

Labels: Age, Cat Mihos and how she prices things, how to find Dave mckean, hundred word things, nicholas was

Is Coraline right for (insert age here)?

Lots of questions like this today...

Hello Neil:

I am planning in taking my 6 year old boy for his birthday party to see your new movie coming out soon "Coraline'
I was wondering in your opinion if this film would be too scary for 6 years old.

Thank you for your response.

Graciela Jenkins

...and the only real reply I can give, is that it's a bit like saying "I'm planning to cook a mushroom omelette tomorrow, and do you feel this food would be welcomed by a six year old?"

Answer: I don't know. I don't know your six year old. They tend to like different things and respond differently. Does your six year old like mushrooms or omelettes?

And the answer to is Coraline right for six year olds is, I don't know. What sort of thing does your six year old like?

I think a good rule of thumb would be, that if your child can cope with The Nightmare Before Christmas and the original Wizard of Oz then they should be able to cope with Coraline just fine.

As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.

...

(For those of you still having trouble with the last post, the author's hands are not visible. Does this help?)

Labels: a useful post, Age, inappropriate food metaphors, What children like

public service announcements

Dave McKean, for too many years now a man without a website, wants me to tell you that things are finally stirring at the unusually-named http://davemckean.com/ (and that Allen Spiegel will be selling original art from The Graveyard Book at Comic-Con.)

Ah, the city with the most observant Jews (New York) gets you on Rosh Hashana. Alas.

Maybe next time. These events you just listed, including the Sep 30 event, aren't the official Graveyard Book Tour, right? Ordinarily I'd assume the Book Tour wouldn't be until the book has come out, but I know that this tour will be more of a reading/Q&A tour rather than a signing tour, and if it's not a signing, then the tour can start before the book is available.

It would be awesome if all publicity/scheduling people had a big calendar with every religion's holidays, along with demographic maps showing which places have a lot of which religion.

A few years ago Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket's ammanuensis) and I were grumbling together about the way that, probably thousands of years ago, it was decided that the Jewish High Holidays would fall in High Publishing Season, and how unfair this was to Jewish authors and their readers and, nu, what were you going to do about it?

To answer your question, No, the events I listed will be the US Graveyard Book Tour events. The US publication date is September the 30th. (The UK pub date is Hallowe'en, and I'll be signing and/or reading in Dublin and Scotland and elsewhere in the UK and London.)

But there is an event to make up for my being in New York on Rosh Hashana: On November the 9th, which is a Sunday, I'll be In Conversation With the amazing Chipp Kidd, at the 92nd St Y, talking about 20 years of Sandman. And I'll be signing stuff afterwards, if the last events I did at the Y are anything to go by.

...

I ran into this quote in the New Yorker, about reviewer Katherine White. The first paragraph is from the article, the second is a quote from White:

Then, as now, some of the best prose and poetry, not to mention the best
art, was to be found in books written for children—disciplined, inspired,
elevated, even, by the constraints of the form. Katharine White loved many books
for children; above all, she admired the beauty and lyricism of picture books
and readers for the under-twelve set. But she had her doubts about books aimed
at older kids:

It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt
begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every
book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good
ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder
how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely
announcing their works as “suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.” Their
implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows?
Suitability isn’t so simple.

The full article -- the birth of Stuart Little compared and contrasted with the rise and fall of the first influential children's librarian -- is wonderful. It starts at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=1

I was interviewed in Locus this month (the one with Garth Nix on the cover), and tried to say something very much the same about Young Adult fiction: that young adults (and older kids) should be reading everything, relentlessly. They should be reading outside their comfort zones, because the training wheels have come off, and that's the only way they'll find out where their comfort zones are, reading everything.

(Also learned from that Locus that Michael De Larrabeiti was dead. I interviewed him once, as a journalist, and loved his three Borrible books -- they were (especially the first two) hugely influential on Neverwhere.)

...

There's an article about the revised and retooled theatre production of Mister Punch in LA today at http://www.latimes.com/theguide/performing-arts/la-gd-perf17-2008jul17,0,4577290.story -- with a marvellous photo, which looks strangely McKeanish (see below). It's an interview done with me last week when I'd just got back from Brazil and was slightly under the weather, but the reporter has made it sound like I was still making sense.




WHERE: Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Fri., 4 and 8 p.m. Sat., 4 p.m. Sun.; ends Aug. 31. (no perf Aug 8-10).

PRICE: $25 ($50 opening night gala)

INFO: (800) 838-3006; www.rogueartists.org

...

And, because all questions posed on this blog are eventually answered:

ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha did a run of 50 black on black Disaster Area t-shirts in the late 1980s. There were also yellow on black and white on black versions but the last was sold around 2001, and they have not done a reprint since then.

Someone asked what sizes the various tee shirts are. They range from xxl down to the ones where I'm not sure how I used to get them on and am certain either the shirts have shrunk or I used to be a lot smaller. So from Too Huge For Me To Wear down to Really Bloody Small.

...

My friend Kelli Bickman has a mother named Connie. Last time I saw Connie she came over and gathered up all the accumulated bags I'd got from planes over the years, the ones with the mini toothbrush and the eye-shade in, that had built up into a small mound at the back of a cupboard, and she took them away to do something good and worthwhile with them for kids. Kelli wrote the other day to say,

My Mom is the volunteer creative director for Children's Culture Connection (CCC), a non-profit organization working with 12 international charities to help children in America, Haiti, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, India, Peru, Kenya, Nigeria, China, Bulgaria and Russia. CCC has raised thousands of dollars to help empower and connect the children of the world, built houses in Vietnam, installed water pipelines in Sri Lanka to bring clean water to orphanages, sent kids to school, helped with medical supplies in the Amazon jungles, organized art projects with children in seven countries. and more...it is really amazing.

Feeling very inspired by the lessons learned from my mother and her spirit of giving, I am working to help Children's Culture Connection raise awareness, as well as send art supplies to the children of the world. I've just re-developed my website (www.kellibickman.net) and will donate 20% of the sale of any works of art to buy art supplies for these children and help them to expand their imaginations and their world.

Can you put this link on your blog? It would be greatly appreciated...I am eager to spread the good news. Of course, if anyone is interested in getting involved or donating directly to the CCC, that is most welcome. www.childrenscultureconnection.org

...

And everything in this whole post pales into insignificance when placed beside...

Mr Toast as Sandman.

Labels: Age, Dave McKean, Kelli Bickman, Mister Punch, rosh hashana, toast

What authors don't do, and other digressions

Jonathan Carroll just sent me a link to these haunting little photographic studies of age and time: http://www.bobbyneeladams.com/age.html and I stared at them and thought, I should pass this one on.

Do authors, if ever, read their own work for pleasure? Especially you, Mister Neil Gaiman.

I'm sure some of them do, just as some singers probably like listening to their own albums for pleasure and some filmmakers leave their films on. For the rest of us, by the time you've finished making something like that, you probably don't want to read it/hear it/watch it again.

I was once stuck in a house where there was (literally) nothing to read but a battered and elderly paperback of American Gods, and rather than have a bath with nothing to read, I picked it up, opened it to the Cairo scene and had a long bath reading my own book, and found it not as mortifying an experience as I thought I would. But given that that's the only time that's happened in almost a quarter century as a writer, I think it's a no. (I don't listen to my audio books for pleasure, either.)

Just to let you know, there is an English version of the Apple Mac adverts with the Mitchell and Webb guys from Radio 4 and Peepshow, have a look at http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/ - now will you get a Mac? all the best for the new year, pete

But I've got a Mac, honest. I've got a couple of them. And I got all my family Macbooks. I'm just not interested in using one as my main travelling and working computer until they weigh a lot less.

Hiya, Neil:I thought you and your readers would find this amusing, if not downright fantastic. In Vegas, on October 5-7, there will be the first ever International Alchemy Conference: http://alchemyconference.com/ According to the site, it will be the largest gathering of alchemists in 500 Years. Made me think a bit of the Cereal Convention in The Doll's House, though this will, presumably, be a bit less threatening. Then again, maybe not. :-)Pam (http://www.phantasmaphile.com/)

I just think it's really cool. I just wonder how Las Vegas will cope.

i think the million words count is misleading. does it include faq line questions, emails, etc that you've posted?

I'm sure it does. I can't see any way a word counter could figure out which words were mine and which were other people's, can you? I'm sure that wordcount also includes the occasional essays and speeches I've posted here, and, in all probability, the captions to photos. I suppose if you're worried about having been misled you could mentally change "I've written" to "I've written, reposted or cut and pasted".

Dear Neil,
Your mentioning of bangs vs. fringe was the tipping point of my curiosity and I finally had to look it up. The word "fringe" is fairly obvious visually, as that's what it looks like, but apparently "bangs" comes from "cut bang-off" which is a way of chopping the tail of a race horse so the hair is flat straight across. Or something.Being from North America I would rather my face did not reference the back-end of a horse, but I suppose there's nothing I can do about that. Especially since I've been known to wear ponytails now and again. Candace

I love it when I learn something.

Incidentally, I am reading Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory (subtitled Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends. Actually the title page is much longer than that, but I'll leave it to you to find one) every spare second I can grab reading time, and can unhesitatingly recommend it to any of you who have ever thought about being authors, or wondered about the origins of such things as Dragons or Mandrakes or where Sindbad actually sailed to, or who have ever dreamed of being sat down and told wonderful cool arcane and true things from a brilliant, crusty old author who thinks you're just as smart as he is, or you will be, once he's finished telling you something, in his own way and in his own time and the journey is always the destination. It's a maze of delightful digressions and bizarre wanderings. Wonderful stuff.

(If you're wondering if it's the sort of thing you'd like, here's the LA Times review.)

Labels: Age, Alchemy in Las Vegas, Avram Davidson's Adventures In Unhistory, bang bang fringe fringe, Macs vs Pcs, whether authors read their own work for pleasure, wordcounts