Do I Actually Have or Need Diplomatic Immunity?

I'm typing this on a plane to Australia where I will hunker down and go back to being a man writing a novel, and life will turn into a long-running battle between man and blank page, between man and what happens next, between man and the people in his book who have other ideas about what they ought to be doing now.

I had a fascinating time on the road, though. I was never not exhausted: Initially I knew that all I had to do was keep going until the second weekend, and then by the time I got to that weekend plans had changed and now I was in Iceland for 36 hours, filming a mini-documentary extra for American Gods. It was wonderful: I love Iceland. But I was tired, and didn't really get to see much Iceland.

(My favourite moment was one where the director asked if I would mind being filmed in an alleyway reading American Gods. I suggested we wander into a bookshop instead, if they didn't mind, and have me look at books in there. So I did, and took the opportunity to sign as many books as I could, in the time we had, racing before the last of the February light went.)

Iceland really is beautiful. And if it wasn't for Iceland, there wouldn't be an American Gods...

I had some really fun times. The BBC radio interviews were all so different and all so much fun. My Royal Festival Hall event was a delight to do, and that lunchtime I showed up as Children's Laureate Chris Riddell's secret guest on the same stage, and I got to meet Posy Simmonds and turned immediately into a starstruck teen.

Chris stayed and drew while I spoke and was interviewed that night:

\

...

Now I'm in Melbourne, Australia and it's two days later and I'm not really sure where the last 48 hours went. I caught up on my sleep (Amanda and Ash are in Adelaide, where she's performing), started to clamber up the email mountain that was waiting for me, spent time with a sick friend, and, today, actually started to write some more of the novel.

Norse Mythology came out on February the 7th and went straight in at Number One on the US, UK and Canadian bestseller lists; in its second week it dropped to Number Two in the US, and has somehow stayed at #1 in the UK and Canada, despite a lot of bookshops running out of copies. The phenomenon of it becoming an incendiary sell-out hit has left me delighted and a bit baffled -- my books always sell, but they usually sell sanely and normally and I'm a bestselling author because they keep on selling in healthy numbers for ever.  It's not usual to see people online talking about visiting five bookshops and getting the last copy (or failing to find any) in whatever town or city they are in. People (friends, family, journalists, even Amanda) tell me that I and the publishers and the bookshops must have expected this sort of response, and I reply that if we'd expected this level of enthusiasm and sales, the publishers would have printed a lot more copies to begin with and the booksellers would all have ordered a lot more copies, and for that matter I wouldn't have taken over four years to write the book...

But then, I think it may be that this book happens to be ridiculously popular partly because it is now and this is the right time for it to have been published.

There have been lots of terrific articles about the book and a slew of amazing reviews.  I really enjoyed this article in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/the-politics-of-retelling-norse-mythology/517422/ and this blog review, which I felt articulately explains what I was trying to do, https://andrewfindlaywrites.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/gaiman-norse-mythology/.

I liked this James Lovegrove review from the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/42fad176-ec96-11e6-ba01-119a44939bb6

Sarah Lyall interviewed me and came to the New York event for the New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/12/books/neil-gaiman-norse-mythology.html

Here's me talking to the New York Times Book Review Podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/books/review/neil-gaimans-myths.html

Michael Dirda starts  his review of Norse Mythology in a way that sent my stomach lurching, and the review itself was something of a roller-coaster ride (but the kind you are glad you have taken):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/neil-gaimans-suspenseful-and-surprising-norse-mythology/2017/02/13/986c0ffe-eef2-11e6-9973-c5efb7ccfb0d_story.html?utm_term=.5b6e58d98428

And I'm now realising that if I keep linking to reviews, interviews and such on either side of the Atlantic this blog will never end...

So here is the cover of a recent Australian Sunday supplement: do not let its 1977 cover date fool you.

....

On public events: If you go and look at Where's Neil  you will see the public appearances I'm doing this year.  Of the events in Spring, Seattle is sold out and so is Santa Rosa and Boston, Costa Mesa is almost sold out,  Mesa AZ is going fast, and there are... still lots and lots of tickets in San Diego.

I don't know why this is. However, if you fancy coming to see me talk and read and answer questions and such, and you can't get in to any of the other evenings, San Diego is a two hour train ride from LA and they even have wifi on the train,  andit's less than three hour's flying time from Seattle. And right now, there are seats. ("San Diego. It's not just for ComicCon.")

I have news on the only New York area event, too: it's on April 15th, at Bard College, where I am a professor. It's going to be all about American Gods, and I'm going to be interviewed by my special guest, American Gods' Executive Producer and co-showrunner Bryan Fuller. We are hoping to show you things on the big screen that night, too. After all, it will only be two weeks before the first episode of American Gods goes out.

It's free to the Bard community, $25 a ticket for the rest of the world. Info here: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/calendar/event.php?eid=132108

...

Which reminds me:


AMERICAN GODS now has a broadcast date: the first episode of the first season will be broadcast on Starz on April 30th in the US, and be watchable digitally too, via Starz on Amazon Prime.

Outside of the US, you can watch American Gods on Amazon Prime Video, from May 1st.

...

And my biggest news of all, even bigger and more exciting than a Number One International Bestseller, or a glorious TV series adapted from my novel launching, is this:

I've been appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees. I even have a certificate. (It is blue and the same size as a passport.) I'm not sure what this means in real terms: I'm going to keep doing the work I've been doing since 2013 to draw attention to refugees, to raise awareness and knowledge, and to help them.

I was disappointed to learn I won't get diplomatic immunity from parking tickets*.

Here's the Facebook Live interview announcement, in which I am interviewed by Jonathan Ross and answer questions from the people watching. The interview begins about 4 minutes and 30 seconds in.

https://www.facebook.com/UNHCR/videos/10156047439338438/





*Joke. Weak joke.  UN Goodwill Ambassadors pay their own parking tickets, air tickets, hotel bills etc.

Labels: ABBA, American Gods, chris Riddell, Iceland, New York Times Bestseller, Norse Mythology, Refugees, the mysteries of San Diego

Robert E McGinnis and the Secret of The New Cover

I've loved Robert McGinnis's covers for a very long time. I remember the first one I was aware of (it was the cover of Ian Fleming's  James Bond book DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, when I was about 9. They put the film poster on the book cover, which puzzled me a bit because the plot of the book isn't the plot of the film.) And I assumed that he had retired a long, long time ago.

About a year ago, Jennifer Brehl and I were talking. Jennifer is my editor at William Morrow, and is one of the best, most sensible and wisest people in my life. I am lucky to have her. We were talking about paperbacks, and how publishers put less effort into them these days. I went off about how paperback covers used to be beautiful, and were painted, and told you so much. And how much I missed the covers of the '50s and '60s and '70s, the  ones I'd collected and bought back in the dawn of time.

And somehow the conversation wound up with me asking if Harper Collins would publish a set of mass market paperbacks of my books with gloriously retro covers and Jennifer saying that yes, they would.

A few days later I was in DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis. I noticed a particularly gorgeous cover on an old book on a shelf. "Who did that?" I asked Greg Ketter.

"Robert McGinnis," said Greg. "Actually we have a whole book of McGinnis artwork." He showed it to me. The Art of Robert E. McGinnis. It's gorgeous. Here's the cover:

I was surprised at how recent the book was. It had been published a few months earlier. "Oh yes," said Greg. "Bob's still painting. Must be almost 90."

(He was 90 in February 2016.)

I sent a note to Jennifer asking if there was even the slightest possibility that Mr McGinnis would be interested in painting the covers for the paperback set we wanted to do. He said yes.

I say that so blithely. But he has retired, pretty much, and he doesn't have email, and it was only because the Morrow art director had worked with him, and he was intrigued by the commission... and ROBERT MCGINNIS SAID YES.

He sent in the first painting, the one for American Gods. It was perfect. Now we needed to make everything that wasn't the cover  feel right.

Todd Klein, the finest letterer in comics, came in to create each book's logo and to help design it and pick the fonts, to make each book feel like it came from a certain age.

Each painting from McGinnis was better than the one before. Each Logo and layout from Todd Klein was more assured and more accurate. These things are glorious.

Now... we were planning to announce these in an much more planned and orderly way. I'm not going to tell you what books we're doing, or to show you any covers but the one.

And that's because the upcoming 2017 Starz American Gods TV series has created a huge demand for copies of American Gods. People who have never read it have started buying it to find out what the fuss is about. People who read it long ago and gave away their copy bought new ones to reread it.

The publishers ran out of books to sell.

So they've rushed back to press with the new paperback edition, which wasn't meant to be coming out for some months (and the text is the text of the Author's Preferred edition in case you were wondering).

And that means the version of the paperback with the new cover is going to be coming out a lot sooner than we thought. And tomorrow it will probably up on Amazon.

And I wanted you to hear it from me first.  You aren't going to see the rest of the Robert E McGinnis covers for a little while (and each of them looks like a different kind of book from a different era). But this is the first of them.

In my head, and Todd's, it's probably from about 1971...

Are you ready?
















Okay....




Here goes...

...and wait until you see the rest of them.

Labels: American Gods, paperbacks, Pulp Covers, Robert E McGinnis, Todd Klein

American Gods TV series News -- and more...

That was interesting. On Friday I recorded and put up  Green Eggs and Ham. I'd actually already recorded a reading at the beginning of January: it was nice and elegant, filmed in an oak-panelled library in Cambridge, with a blazing fire behind me. I was relatively nattily dressed and as coiffed as I get. The only problem with that video was, as we discovered on Friday, the audio track was completely inaudible, and watching someone read something that might possibly be Green Eggs and Ham but might equally be the telephone directory or just me doing whale noises did not seem like a good idea. So, when I heard that Worldbuilders had hit the $500,000 stretch goal, I went for my jog, showered, and recorded myself reading Green Eggs and Ham again, and uploaded it and forgot about it.

It's now had over 315,000 views, it's been written up all over the place, and, having looked at a few of the comments, I suspect that I would have received fewer comments about how I look like a homeless person if we'd used the original inaudible one, but ah, the whole point of hiding out and writing (at least for me) is that I get to grow a lazy tangle of beard and have no idea where in this house a hairbrush might be, I'm not even sure when I last listened to the news, and that as long as I get the words written all is well.

So far my favourite comment is from Entertainment Weekly, which says:

Don’t you wish that Neil Gaiman was your kooky uncle? He would sneak you into the circus and you’d get to hold the Biggest Amazonian Python That Ever Lived (whose name was Lucille). He’d help you put frogs in your sister’s bathtub. He’d keep secrets for you, like that time that you accidentally buried your dad’s favorite watch in the park. He would agree that pirate treasure is only good if it’s buried. To help you cement the fantasy that Gaiman is your favorite uncle, here he is reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham.

Let's see: there's news, as I said in the header. AMERICAN GODS is now being developed for TV by Freemantle Media. As to where you will be able to see it, who is going to be in it, who will be writing or show-running, none of these things have yet been settled. But it already looks like it's going to be a smoother run developing it than it had at HBO, so I am very pleased.

(A few people have asked for more background on this: HBO had an option on American Gods for several years. It went through three different pilot scripts. HBO has a limited number of slots and, after a while, passed it to Cinemax, who are in the HBO family, who decided eventually they didn't want to do it, and the option expired, which unfortunately meant we couldn't work with Tom Hanks' production company Playtone any longer, as they are exclusive to HBO. However, Stefanie Berk, who had been one of the brightest stars at Playtone, had recently moved to Freemantle, and was as determined as she had been when she was at Playtone to bring American Gods to the screen. And I was impressed by her determination.)

Other TV news also came to fruition today, although I do not have anywhere to link you to, so you will have to take my word for it: Anansi Boys is going to be made into a TV miniseries in the UK, by RED, for the BBC.

Yes, I'm really thrilled about both of these things. Freemantle has the harder task, as they are going to have to open up American Gods into something bigger than the book.

Red are just going to have to make an absolutely brilliant faithful version of Anansi Boys.

...

I've been meaning to plug the The Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers (ages 14 – 19). It will be held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg Campus July 25 – August 3, 2014, and this is their fundraising week, raising scholarships for kids who otherwise couldn't afford to go. If you donate, you get a free PDF of flash fiction by Alpha Alumni. It's a great cause...  You can investigate further at http://alpha.spellcaster.org/.

Also, Len Peralta is in the last few days of a Kickstarter to raise money for the second series of his Geek A Week cards.  Obviously, you want a set. Just as obviously, you hope he gets to his $60,000 stretch goal, because then he'll reprint the first season, which has a me card in it, and you can play his Geek a Week card game with it.

And on the subject of Kickstarters, I met Kat Robichaud at the first of the New York Town Hall  EVENING WITH NEIL AND AMANDAs, and thought she was wonderful. Really funny and grounded and nice, with an amazing voice. Also, mega Doctor Who fan. (Here's Kat and Amanda singing Delilah.)

Kat's got a Kickstarter up for her debut album: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/katrobichaud/kat-robichauds-debut-album

...

Dave McKean's illustrated edition of SMOKE AND MIRRORS went to the printer today. All the illustrations are in black and red -- here's the drawing he did for "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar".

and the one for "The Price".

According to Subterranean Press, it's long since sold out BUT they think that when all is said and done there may be an extra 20 copies for sale... http://subterraneanpress.com/news/neil_gaimans_smoke_and_mirrors_at_the_printer
As they explain, "No need to start checking now, but you might want to keep an eye out once we announce the book is shipping."

A book that there are a lot more than 20 copies of is the new hardback edition of Dave and my first book, Violent Cases. He's done an amazing job of, as an adult and experienced artist, essentially remastering the art, to get it to look, for the first time, like the original art he did, 28 years ago.

There is new material too -- here are portraits of us Dave did for the programme of the theatrical adaptation:

(I should probably apologise for the haircut.)

Violent Cases was our first graphic novel. It's, in some ways, a lot like The Ocean at the End of the Lane -- it's an adult story with a child protagonist, that's about memory and powerlessness and identity: it has Al Capone's osteopath in it, and prohibition Chicago, and parties. And like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the most unlikely bits are all true (and Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the science behind  one of the unlikely things to me last year, during the intermission at the Connecticut Forum).

It's available here - http://bit.ly/ViolentCases -- or at indiebound or at your local comic shop.
...

I love this video.  It's a visual interpretation of some interview extracts done to establish what Americans in different parts of America actually say. I remember the first time I heard someone tell me, casually, on seeing rain falling on a sunny day, that the Devil was beating his wife...



SODA / POP / COKE from The Atlantic on Vimeo.

...

In re: your reading of Green Eggs and Ham. I have very conflicted feelings about this book (and not only because I am named Sam and this book came out when I was three and I have had to cope with this all my life). The thing about it I have the most trouble with is that along with the intended message of "don't be closed-minded", it teaches a second and much more disturbing lesson:  "no" doesn't mean "no". It teaches that "no" means "ignore, and pester and wart and nag until you get your way".  And that is a pernicious thing to teach to small children. It teaches them to nag and whine to get toys or candy or whatever the desire-of-the-moment is; when they are older, and in the worst cases, it buys into attitudes and world views that enable rape culture.  As the father of daughters, who will now and forever be put at risk by such a culture, I cannot but worry at such a book teaching such a lesson.

I  agree completely that as a father, you should absolutely definitely teach your daughters (and, if you have them, sons) that No definitely means No, that they are the final arbiters of what happens to their bodies, and that they should be able to make decisions about such things and hold to their decisions in the face of nagging, wheedling, cajoling and even threats.

I also think that, as a father, you owe it to your children, particularly small children of the reading/listening age that Green Eggs and Ham is aimed at, to encourage them to vary their diet and at least taste things they think they might not like: kids are mostly inherently conservative about what they will and won't eat (and not just kids) and encouraging them to try new and different foods and not just eat peanut butter sandwiches for six years is part of your job as a parent. The message I've always taken from Green Eggs and Ham is that, all cajoling and nonsense aside, it's worth seeing if you don't like something before deciding that you don't. Particularly in the matter of food. Because you might like something that looks unpleasant. (Also that if you are going to pester someone, you should do it in rhyme, inventively, using small words that would delight a child, and with interestingly drawn animals and modes of transportation.)

Of course, that was what I thought before I read this comic, which changes everything.

Labels: American Gods, anansi boys, beards, Dave McKean, Green Eggs and Ham, smoke and mirrors, Violent Cases

Author meets world

Hullo world

I'm currently living in a house Amanda and I have rented in Cambridge MA. She wanted to be out here to be able to be here for her friend Anthony, who is going through some particularly gruelling cancer treatments. It's a large, strange house, all oak-panelling and odd-shaped rooms we didn't notice the first time we walked through it. I'm loving it, despite living out of boxes.

Amanda thinks, correctly, that it's too big, but is humouring me. (She's using the Cloud Club as an office home-base.)

The thing I'm missing most being out here is the dogs: Cabal is not doing well physically currently. He has Degenerative Canine Myelopathy and his back legs are liable to slip out from under him and he can no longer do stairs. When I got out here I realised that he wouldn't be able to manage this place and regretfully abandoned my plan to bring the dogs with me. He's got his world that he loves out there, and so I am going to go back to the Midwest and be with him whenever I can. (Lola, on the other hand, could come out here like a shot, but she's his company.)

Thanksgiving was spent at Amanda's mother and stepfather's, but over the Thanksgiving period all of my kids came in from all over the US.

I'm starting to get writing rhythms back, which is good.

I missed the shooting of my next Doctor Who episode, although I've seen a rough assembly already. Warwick Davies is really good in it, and I asked the impossible of Matt Smith and he pulled it off with aplomb. (Watching the rushes of Matt getting gloriously, apologetically, sweary at fluffed takes of some of the dialogue stuff I'd asked him to do made me grin like a mad thing.)

Right now, also due to being in the wrong country -- like this minute -- I'm missing this, which arrived a few hours ago:

That's left to right, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Harewood,  Natalie Dormer, Dirk Maggs, James McAvoy, David Schofield and Anthony Head, all gathered today to record the BBC Radio 4/Radio 4 Extra production of NEVERWHERE.

(It'll start on Radio 4 and then go over to Radio 4 extra.) The adaptation is by Dirk Maggs, who did the last three Hitchhiker's Guide Radio adaptations. He's co-directing it with producer Heather Larmour, who is the one who went off and made this happen after a small enthusiastic chat in a London coffee shop much earlier this year -- the kind of conversation that you have that normally just leaves you feeling happy, but doesn't actually turn into anything real. This time it did.

The cast includes...

James McAvoy                Richard

Natalie Dormer                 Door

David Harewood               Marquis

Sophie Okonedo               Hunter

Benedict Cumberbatch      Islington

Anthony Head                   Croup   

David Schofield                 Vandemar

Bernard Cribbins               Old Bailey

Romola Garai                    Jessica

Christopher Lee                Earl of Earl's Court

Andrew Sachs                    Tooley

George Harris                    Abbot   

Don Gilet                            Fulingous, Ruislip, Blackfriar

Abdul Salis                          Sable, Sump, Clarence, Homeless Man

Paul Chequer                     Gary, Guard 2    

Lucy Cohu                          Lamia

Yasmin Paige                     Anaesthesia, Tenant 2 – female, Match girl

Johnny Vegas                    Lord Ratspeaker

Stephen Marcus                Varney, Homeless man, Letting agent, Guard 1

Karen Archer                      Sylvia, Old Woman, Dream Hawker, Mother...

...and lots more (including an author, who recorded his bits last month). It will go out in six episodes.

Am I excited? I am. Very much so.

(Also, CHRISTOPHER LEE IS GOING TO BE SAYING LINES I WROTE. This makes me happier than I have any right to be.)

It will be broadcast somewhere in the first 4 months of 2013. And you will be able to listen to it wherever you are in the world, using the BBC's iPlayer.

I'm currently listening to Tor Dot Com's AMERICAN GODS MIX TAPE while I work on the HBO American Gods pilot episode. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/11/the-complete-american-gods-mix-tape

Right. Back to work...

Labels: American Gods, Cabal and me, CHRISTOPHER LEE, Doctor Who, Neverwhere audio, this actually is my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful house

One morning with Nebula Nominations

I started feeling last night that real work was happening. I could see it starting to mount. My morale is starting to improve, as it always does when writing happens, and I remember that I actually can do it after all.

Currently I'm mostly writing the HBO American Gods first episode. I'm really enjoying it, partly because a lot of what I've written isn't in the book. It's implied in the book, or talked about generally, or referred to obliquely, but it's scenes I hadn't written. So I feel that I'm doing new work, even if it's not new. If you see what I mean.

And, strangely, it seems to be feeding in to the next American Gods book, which is what I'm sort of working on right now. (Actually, I'm writing a short story that comes after Monarch of the Glen and before The Next Book. But it feels organically needed.) 

Other than that... I'm looking after myself. The main new thing I've been doing is actually jogging for 37 minutes a day. (It was 37 minutes the first day, and so I've kept it the same every other day to see how much further or faster I get, because my little iPod Nano keeps track of this stuff.)

I will do a proper catch-up blog post later in the week, I suspect. There's stuff I should write about that's been interesting or fun.

In the meantime, I was sent this press release last night. It had me doing a happy dance around the room, for my little bit of it. (Apart from anything else, it was wonderful seeing the other nominees in my category. Woody Allen! Duncan Jones!)

And, because they asked if I'd spread it around, I have cut and pasted the whole of the nomination list. (Congratulations to all the Nominees!)

2011 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Novel

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)

Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)

God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)

The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella

"Kiss Me Twice," Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011)

"Silently and Very Fast," Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)

"The Ice Owl," Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,November/December 2011)

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Kij Johnson (Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011)

"The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)

"With Unclean Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Novelette

"Fields of Gold," Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books)

"Ray of Light," Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011)

"Sauerkraut Station," Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011)

"Six Months, Three Days," Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)

"The Migratory Pattern of Dancers," Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011)

"The Old Equations," Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011)

"What We Found," Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)

Short Story

"Her Husband's Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011)

"Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son," Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011)

"Movement," Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2011)

"Shipbirth," Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011)  

"The Axiom of Choice," David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)    

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011)

"The Paper Menagerie," Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)

Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)

Doctor Who: “The Doctor's Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)

Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)

Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)

The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)

Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder &Stoughton)

Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)

The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)

Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Books)

The winners will be announced at SFWA's 47^th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. As announced earlier this year, Connie Willis will be the recipient of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker.

...

Hi Neil,

I'm assuming you're at least marginally familiar with altered books.

Someone linked to this in an art therapy forum I'm on, and I saw it and immediately thought of you. Specifically I was reminded of Mirrormask. I think it's a brilliant use of out of date reference books.

http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi

Enjoy!

I did.

Labels: American Gods, Cheerful author, Nebula Awards

I bet you think it's easy just to eat a banana and not say anything

You may remember this video. It was filmed by Amanda's assistant, Superkate, on Brighton Beach, at the beginning of September.



Well, this one is the sequel. It's our thank you. Filmed a few days ago in a mall in Cambridge MA by Claudia Gonson. The sound is a bit echoey.



...

Over at http://superpunch.blogspot.com/2011/10/art-inspired-by-neil-gaimans-american.html there's an amazing assortment of art inspired by American Gods. All sorts of styles and kinds of art. Here's one I love, of the Zorya, and Shadow and Czernobog playing checkers.



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Here's an astonishing video of the Evelyn Evelyn song "Have you Seen my Sister Evelyn?"

I was going to write that it was because I wrote something about this song on this blog that I got a "thank you for saying nice things about our song" email from Amanda Palmer that turned into a correspondence, and then turned into me agreeing to write some stories for the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book, and then, a little over a year afterwards, developed into the start of the relationship that we now have, and then I went back and looked for the link, and discovered that actually it was Evelyn Evelyn's "Elephant Elephant" song that I was nice about. Proving that memory is a fallible sort of a thing.

But it's still an amazingly beautiful video.

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Would you like to have lunch with me, in LA or when I'm on the road? Or would you rather have lunch with Frank Miller and his editor Bob Schreck? Or have writer and former DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz review your portfolio and tell you how to make it in comics? Or have Frank Quitely sketch a postcard for you? Or have me do a sketch on a postcard for you? (Frank's will be prettier.)

All these things, and a ridiculously long list of other things, are possible. Details and a list of things at http://cbldf.org/homepage/be-counted/ where the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is having an NPR like membership drive, with some amazing things for people who want to pledge for them. The donations are big, but count as charitable donations, and come off your taxes.

And if you don't want (or cannot afford) one of the big ticket items, you can still - and should - become a CBLDF member at http://cbldf.org/contribute/membership/. Annual membership starts at $25, for which you get a Green Lantern membership card. But no power ring.

Labels: American Gods, banana, CBLDF, Evelyn Evelyn, the fallibility of human memory

Happy Solstice. And Publication Day.

Today is the publication day of AMERICAN GODS - the Tenth Anniversary Edition and the Full-Cast Audio of American Gods. It's ten years and two days since American Gods was published (two days, because publication days are Tuesday. They just are. It is mysterious and inexplicable). Here's the journal from June 2001...

This afternoon - 4 pm Eastern Time -- is a live Webchat. I'm interviewed by Kurt Andersen, and answering some of your questions as well. (Damn. Was off being interviewed and missed the chance to post this. You can watch it again, though, at http://bit.ly/neilandkurt.)

In two hours it's the 92nd St Y talk, where I'm interviewed by Lev Grossman.

Right this minute I have a beard. I do not think there is going to be time to shave it off today. We will see how long into the tour it lasts.

The TOUR details are over at Where's Neil.

I think everything's sold out right now except the Saban Theatre LA event with Patton Oswalt interviewing me. The LA stop will be the last one of the tour and possibly the strangest, in ways I have not even warned Patton about yet. (The Late Late Craig Ferguson Show tickets in LA are also now all gone.) They are also down to the last dozen or so WITS tickets in St Paul. (Me! Josh Ritter! Songs! Heckles by Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett!)

Right. I am off to the 92nd St Y. There will be a Big Gay Ice Cream Van there -- the official Ice Cream of the American Gods Book Tour (no, I do not know what this will mean either). (except that there will be ice cream.) This is Molly Crabapple's American Gods-Big Gay Ice Cream Poster


Right. Off to the 92nd St Y. Oh, I just noticed a Tweet from @Biggayicecream saying they will be serving American Globs and Loki Lime Pie tonight...

Click post on this and zoom.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Full Cast Audio Competition Thingummy, beards

Blog about SAAPM and baby photo

I'm in Lexington MA with Amanda today, in readiness for tomorrow morning's reenactment of the first shot fired in the American Revolutionary War (Amanda has been giving me a history lesson and a walk around). (Also she is in the New York Times today. And you can buy the Performs the Hits of Radiohead on her Magical Ukulele EP they talk about here.)

I did the Columbia University event at Symphony Space on Thursday Night. I was interviewed by Paul Levitz. He asked questions I'd never been asked before, about the business of comics, about what I did over the years that was different from the way other creators had done things. It was really enjoyable for both of us.

On Friday I recorded my part for the American Gods audiobook. I narrated the "Coming to America" sections, and did all the Author's Notes. (This is the production you can be in too. And you should listen to some of the auditions and vote for people, too. Over 800 people had sent in their auditions last time I checked.)

Yesterday I saw my old friend and Magnetic Field Claudia Gonson, and her baby Eve. Claudia took a photograph of the two of us, and it makes me very happy, so I'm putting it up here.

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I've been really remiss -- April is over half done and I haven't mentioned this...

April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.

Every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. (I don't know what the statistics are internationally. Probably very similar.)

RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network - http://www.rainn.org, is one of the organisations doing something about this. They have a free, confidential helpline - the National Sexual Assault Hotline, the phone number which is 1.800.656.HOPE

In April, up until April 30th, any tax deductible donation made to RAINN will be matched, up to $30,000.

You can donate over at donate.rainn.org.

(And yes, I'm donating. Your purchase of Blueberry Girl still supports RAINN too. And if you donate over $250, RAINN will send you a get a free signed poster from Neverwear.net, while stocks last.)

(Obviously, if there's another support group that you prefer, you should donate money to them... That last redundant sentence was brought to you by the people on Twitter who told me off for supporting RAINN last year, as opposed to their preferred charity.)

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Lots of articles, and requests for me to comment, about the slew of articles that came out about Playtone taking American Gods to HBO. I'm not sure where the news came from or who put it out, and I don't actually think things are at a point yet where I'm ready to comment on it, other than to say that everything's looking really promising so far.

Longer blog soon. Promise.

Labels: American Gods, Blueberry Girl, Eve Gonson, paul levitz, Rainn

The Dog Ate My Homework.

Actually my homework is pretty much all that the dog* hasn't eaten. Shoelaces and shoes are her favourites. The blog was swallowed by a failed attempt to blog from my phone (I wrote a great long blog on the phone today on a blogging app while at the dentist's, and then tried to attach a picture, did it wrong and sent the blog off into the netherworld instead. Probably my own fault for talking about the second book in the American Gods sequence.)

But I'm still doing the giant American Gods Tenth Anniversary Edition proofread and copy-edit. (It'll be out in June.)

I'm going to finish that before I reconstruct the blog entry. So, for your enjoyment and curiousity, I'm reposting the Prisoners of Gravity episode on Sandman from 1993...

If you've ever wondered what Charles Vess or Jill Thompson or Craig Russell or Karen Berger or Dave Mckean looked like 17 years ago (or longer -- Mark Askwith was collecting the interviews for a while), or what baby Neil was like, now's your chance.








PS: Oh, okay. That's not really baby Neil. I was probably 32.

This is Baby Neil.

PPS: the CBLDF has a bunch of original artwork and suchlike up for auction on eBay. Great holiday gifts for other people, or yourself.




* Lola. Cabal does not eat anything he is not meant to. Sometimes he doesn't eat things he is actually meant to eat either.

Labels: American Gods, photo of me holding something, Prisoners of Gravity

Not really much of a blog post, but with the best photo in the world of me on a carousel ever in it so with luck nobody will mind too much

I am on deadline right now.

So...

For the American Gods-House on the Rock weekend, as a fill-in while waiting for me to write about it, I recommend Valya's blog over at http://www.vdlupescu.com/journal/2010/11/joy-and-sacred-spaces/ (Valya is the author of The Silence of Trees.) I stole the picture above of me riding the eagle-tiger from Valya's blog.

I also recommend the House on the Rock Slideshow from the Huffington Post.

And yes, it was as magical and as wonderful as everyone says.

I shot from Wisconsin to New York where I saw The Dresden Dolls for the first time. (They've been on Hiatus since I've known Amanda.) Pictures from the evening - including a couple of me - at http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2010/11/the_dresden_dol_4.html.

From mobile

(Casey and Danni Long at the Dresden Dolls gig.)

I took Amanda to meet the people at Audible.com, with whom I am cooking up some really cool stuff which I am not yet ready to talk about. I talked to them and she played a song on her ukulele. (You can see a shadowy Don Katz, audible supremo, in the background, here.)

From mobile

From New York I stumbled to Austin, Texas, where I was caught up in the madness that is W00tstock, standing in for Wil Wheaton. It was madness, madness I tell you...

This is a video of me coming on. That's all I do in it. I come on. You can probably find me doing more than that elsewhere on YouTube.

From mobile

These men are Paul and Storm. Founders of W00tstock.

From mobile

This is Adam Savage. The man from Mythbusters. He bought the drinks.

...

Then I came home.

...

Right. Now I have to go and write, so to entertain you in my absense, here's the New Scientist link to some wonderful forgotten futures;

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/lost-worlds

and here's a link to the info on the New Scientist competition I'll be judging this year 350 word short stories, including the title, on the theme of Forgotten Futures.

Labels: American Gods, dresden dolls, The House on the Rock, w00tstock

How I got to Boston

My son Mike had to be back at work at Google in San Francisco on the 30th. I had planned to get to Boston for Amanda’s New Year’s Eve concert on the 31st, and I had wanted a day in Boston to recover. We were both on 7.00 am flights from the highlands of Scotland – his flight to take him to Gatwick, where he would bus to Heathrow and take a San Francisco plane, mine to take me to Manchester, where I would fly to Amsterdam, and from there to Boston.

So I napped for a couple of hours and we left the house at 3:00 am. I drove for three hours, got us to the airport for 6:00am. Was sort of proud of myself. We checked in. We were on our way through the security line when a voice said “Due to snow, the airport is now closed. Nothing will be landing or taking off until 8:30.”

We ate breakfast. They called me to the ticket desk and changed my flight from Manchester to Gatwick, with the same get-to-Heathrow plan that Mike had, which I didn’t mind. At least we’re together, I thought. Then I noticed they’d made a complete mess of the actual reticketing, went back and pointed it out to the lady who’d done it. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t notice. Not to worry. I’ll make a phone call and tell them what it ought to be.”

My heart sank a little at this. (If it is not actually written in the system you can find yourself screwed as people squint at their screens at what’s written there, and the statement that “a lady said she’d make a phone call” can be met with indifference.) But Lorraine, my assistant, was still awake, and had just emailed me to see if there was anything she could do. And the tickets had been booked through a travel agent with a 24 hour helpline, so I asked Lorraine if she wouldn’t mind making sure that everything was okay.

Since the last time I was in that airport they’d moved and hidden all the plug sockets, but I found one anyway at an office desk and charged my computer. At 8:30 the Tannoy voice said they’d tell us what was happening at 9:30 and at 9:30 they said they’d tell us at 10:30, and I do not know what they told us at 10:30 because I went to sleep in my chair, and slept until midday, when the Tannoy voice told us that we were boarding. From the Twitter stream, it looked like Lorraine was still awake and locked in a hellish battle with the airlines.

“We will still make it,” I told Mike. “It’ll be a close thing, but we will make it.”

I tromped across the quarter of an inch of snow that had fallen, puzzling over how this could shut down an airport, knowing the kind of snow it takes to shut down Minneapolis-St Paul airport. But then, in MSP they expect snow.

We boarded the plane, found our seats. The pilot announced that the de-icing rigs weren’t working and I went back to sleep. My hopes had shrunk from getting to Boston today to just getting out of the airport. I woke up. We were still there.

I walked back into the plane, told Mike that we wouldn’t be getting out of the UK today. “Yeah,” he said. “But we’re together”. And I thought, He’s right. This would be awful on our own. Together it was just some kind of interesting adventure.

We took off at 2:15pm. We landed in Gatwick at 3.45pm

Lorraine called just after we landed, before we were even off the plane. “You’re on the 7:15pm flight from Heathrow,” she said, and did a rapid briefing on what it had taken to get my ticket and its value back from FlyBe and over to British Airways. She’d been up all night and worked miracles. She was ready for bed.

While we waited for our luggage, Mike talked on the phone to United, and got off very glum. “They’ll rebook me, but they’re charging $1900 to do it,” he said. He’d also used his airmiles to do it in business class, and was losing that.

Luggage arrived. Lorraine called to make sure our luggage had arrived. She sounded beyond exhausted. “Can you check Mike’s ticket?” I asked. “They want another $1900 to get him home.” She took the booking number, called back twenty minutes later having got the change fee down to $300 and having got him back into business class. An amazing lady, my assistant.

We took a taxi in the rain from Gatwick to Heathrow, I checked in without problems, hugged Mike a lot. The plane was late taking off due to the new pat-down and bag-examine rules. I was patted down (the pat-down wouldn’t have found any explosives I’d hidden in my inner thigh, where the idiot on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight hid his, because the man was too polite to check there) and my backpack was opened and looked into (it has many compartments that weren’t opened or checked, and the man would have missed a syringe if I had had one, like the aforementioned idiot had). I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.

I landed in Boston 28 hours after I left the house. Took a taxi to Amanda's apartment. I'd taken a hotel room nearby, as I knew she was going to be practising Tchaikovsky for the New Year's Eve gig until late, but was I asleep in her bed in minutes and the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire would not have woken me.

…

Yesterday was spent in the hotel, writing introductions and things. I went out for lunch with Chris Golden and Steve Bissette. Went back to the hotel. Wrote. Went with Amanda to watch her getting her hair done. Back to hotel.

What I am going to do today: write, (blog in bed which I am doing now), wear a tuxedo, do a brief reading at Amanda's show tonight, play an instrument. I am not looking forward to the latter bit.

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Lots of interesting stuff creeping out at the end of the year. I'm probably proudest of this:

The theme of National Library Week is "Communities thrive at your library". Lots of details and a poster at http://www.ala.org/nlw.

AMERICAN GODS was named one of the ten best books of the decade by Time Magazine. This makes me happy -- American Gods tends to be a bit of a marmite book for people: they either love it or hate it. And the ones who hate it tend to be so vocal that I often forget how much the people who love it love it.

The Coraline film is turning up on Best of 2009 lists all over the world. But this one is particularly heartwarming.

My story I, Cthulhu is up on the Tor website. What's that you say? It's up at Neilgaiman.com? Well, yes, it is. But Tor have a wonderful illustration by Brian Elig (and some of his roughs up at Irene Gallo's blog).

Right. Time to stop blogging in bed and go and grab some breakfast.

Expect one more post, in a few hours, with a wish for 2010 in it...

Labels: Airplanes, airports, American Gods, Cthulhu Loves You, National Library Week, The Fabulous Lorraine, travel, What Lorraine does in the evenings

The awful truth

I am easily made happy. Today's mail brought a letter from AudioFile Magazine, with copies of the magazine along with Certificates saying that The Graveyard Book audio had won an Earphones award, and another certificate which said nice things about my reading aloud skills (Here's the full list of their Best Voices of 2008.)

I think, more than anything I do, I get concerned about the audiobooks, and made happy when they (and I) get recognised. They're hard work; I'm very aware that I'm not a professional reader-of-books-aloud; and, most of all,  they're personal. If you don't like a book I've written I won't take it personally: I'm not the story, after all. But if you don't like a recording of me reading something... well, it was me sitting in that studio for three days reading aloud to a director and engineer in another room, for an imaginary audience, and yes, it's personal.

So, right. Big happies all around.
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Several ones like this in today...

Kevin Murphy (Mystery Science Theater 3000's Tom Servo, and now of Rifftrax fame) wrote today that you are secretly Leonard Cohen. Are you? Photographic evidence points to yes: http://blog.rifftrax.com/2009/01/06/okay-now-what-the-hell/

Or to quote Kevin Murphy,

Why didn’t anyone else see this coming?  Why am I the only one to realize that Neil is actually groaning, tortured, half-mad folk-rock poet Leonard Cohen, who maintains his astonishing youth and beauty by feasting on the pineal glands of innocent women?!

I dunno. 

You spend your adolescence dreaming that you'll grow up to be Lou Reed, and then you grow up to be Leonard Cohen. Having said that, 'Tower of Song' is one of the songs I would take with me to a desert island, even if, in Manila, my fingers once typed John Cale when my head thought Leonard Cohen.

(Strangely, as I write this, I'm sitting on the sofa with Holly watching Lou Reed introduce Leonard Cohen at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as we clear out unwatched stuff on the TIVO).

Excuse me. I must pause to nibble a pineal gland.

I was wondering if you'd seen any of the coverage (boingboing, Ebert, QuestionCopyright) about Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues?

On the one hand, I think an artist using another artist's work as the basis of a movie should get permission/compensate that person. On the other hand, the creator in this case has been dead for twenty years, and forgotten for more. Meanwhile Nina is arguably generating value for the corporations that currently own the rights.

I also thought it was interesting that she's come to the conclusion that physical distribution is more likely *limit* the audience that can view her work.

It's a bitch. The film looks amazing from the description and the online bits I've seen. Music rights clearance issues are always a bitch. (Dave McKean ran into something similar with the Django music on The Week Before, which is why Keanoshow is only legitimately available outside the US.) I love Nina Paley's work, love the Ramayana, and would very much like to be able to see this.

Still,  at least Nina Paley has a plan.

Now that you have a Wii, will you be playing the Coraline Wii game? Or would that be incredibly boring for you since you created the world it is set in?

The Coraline Wii is a mystery to me. (It might be less of a mystery if I asked anyone at Laika about it, mind you.) Then again, I seem only to be using the Wii as an exercisey fitness thingummy at present. Weight is dropping, waistline shrinking, and scores are going up for the most part, I'm loving the yoga and the balance stuff, and my trainer was impressed yesterday at stuff I seem to be able to do I couldn't do before, like snowshoe up the side of a hill without getting out of breath. (My first time in snowshoes. Interesting things. I thought they'd look more like tennis racquets.)

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I liked http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04gough.html?_r=1&ref=books so much I followed it back to http://www.juliangough.com/journal and then I clicked on http://www.juliangough.com/journal/american-gods-and-london-literary-novelists.html and was chuffed and impressed.

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Won't you please pimp yourself out on the blog awards? Everybody's doing it....

http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-literature-blog/

Consider it pimped. Nice competition, though. I'd probably vote for Bookslut, but Maud Newton and Arts and Letters might edge them out... and then there's Mr Pepys... it's all good stuff.

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And finally, The Office gives us http://princessunicorndoll.com/legend.shtml. They sell the t-shirts too.

Urk. Bed.

Labels: American Gods, completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead, My Horn Can Pierce The Sky, tower of song, yes the neilhimself twitter account is me