What I Did to Celebrate National Library Week Part One: Vonnegut and Rollergirls

So...

when last seen, I was on my way to Indianapolis, where I gave the 33rd McFadden Memorial Lecture. I talked about libraries (because it was National Library Week) . This was a bit intimidating, as previous lecturers included John Updike, Maurice Sendak, E. L. Konigsburg, Lloyd Alexander, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut (who had been an Indianapolis resident).

At the end of the lecture I was presented with the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Award for Literature, a national literary award created and administered by the the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library "In celebration of those whose literary works uniquely document and define the human condition". The award itself made me ridiculously happy, as it's a beautiful sheet of metal with a Kurt Vonnegut self portrait on it, and Vonnegut was a writer who meant the world to me growing up: The Sirens of Titan was my first Vonnegut book, read when I was about ten years old, and it changed the way I thought. (We chatted only once, when he was in London, on the phone. He didn't want to do an interview, but was happy to talk, so we talked.)

This is me backstage holding my Kurt Vonnegut Literary Award.

Then I had dinner with a Roller Derby Team (and some of their significant others and offspring). It's the Naptown Roller Girls. They've been sending me wonderful things for a while now, and using the Octokitty from Coraline to bring them luck. Read all about it at Joan of Dark's blog http://joanofdarkknits.blogspot.com/2010/04/meeting-neil-gaiman.html (and she's just posted http://joanofdarkknits.blogspot.com/2010/04/mr-debauchery-talks-about-meeting-neil.html from the lovely people who were my ride to and from the dinner). I had a wonderful dinner, and even got to wear Joan's husband Dill's hat, which I am assured has its own Facebook page.

This is Naptown Roller Girl Joan of Dark. You may remember her from this blog back in January 2009, when she invented a coffee named after me: http://joanofdarkknits.blogspot.com/2009/01/neil-gaiman-needs-coffee.html

I was up more or less at dawn on Saturday, and I went to Chicago for the CBLDF event (the CBLDF has a spiffy new website at http://cbldf.org).

Oops. Someone just arrived to interview me...

And I'll finish this the next time I get a second.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Chicago! Stillwater! The Wrath of the Volcano God!

Labels: Awards, In which it is discovered that I have been transformed into a cup of coffee, National Library Week

Chilly and Statuesque

Ah, I think, for a blog post I really need more than "Coraline has just garnered ten Annie Award Nominations, more than any other animated film". (Variety) (Congratulations to Henry Selick, to Travis Knight, Dawn French, Shane Prigmore, Shannon Tindle, Bruno Coulais, Christopher Appelhans, Tadahiro Uesugi, Chris Butler, and the whole Laika and Focus crew.) But I am feeling extraordinarily blank.

The weather just got cold, and dog-walking tonight was less fun than it should have been; I wore gloves, and solitary crystalline flecks of snow spun into the light of my flashlight-beam and vanished again into the dark. I took Maddy and her friend Anna-Rose to violin tonight, and yesterday I carried the beautiful E. H. Shepard ink-drawing I got myself to celebrate the award in to the framers to be framed. I'm concerned that we should have insulated the beehives by now.

Tickets for the Decatur event on the 14th went faster than anyone expected. More will be released on Monday -- keep an eye on their blog (http://littleshopofstories.blogspot.com) for more information.

...

Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children's area, what would it be?

Thanks!
Lynn

I'm not sure I'd put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I'd just remind people of the power of stories, of why they exist in the first place. I'd put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it's working, and that pages will be turned:

"...and then what happened?"

...

Oh. I nearly forgot. The short film I made, Statuesque, starring Bill Nighy, Amanda Palmer not to mention Becca Darling and Liam McKean, will be broadcast in the UK on Sky 1 at 10:00pm on Christmas Day.(There are eleven films altogether, and they'll go out every night starting on Dec the 21st, and ending on the 31st.)

Master Liam McKean can currently be seen in Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Miss Amanda Palmer is probably fast asleep at home in Boston.

Labels: Awards, Coraline movie, Statuesque, writing on library walls

LOCAL MAN IN HATE MAIL OUTRAGE SHOCK FIASCO

Anything I say about it would sound like bragging, so I'll just mention that The Graveyard Book won the Booktrust Teenage Prize, and leave it at that. I couldn't be there, so Chris Riddell accepted it on my behalf, and read out what I'd asked him to read. (The Booktrust site has an interview with me about it here.)

There's a terrific article/interview in the Guardian about it (I even like the photo, even though I cannot explain the hair) at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/18/neil-gaiman-graveyard-book-awards.

I will not even attempt to explain the hair. It must have known what it was doing.

The Headline for the Guardian article is

Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book buried under awards
As the fantasy world's renaissance man collects yet another award, he talks to Michelle Pauli

I quite like the "buried under awards" joke. (Although The Graveyard Book definitely hasn't won all, or even most, of the awards it's been nominated for. Margo Lanagan's wonderful Tender Morsels and Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year [which may be wonderful but which I haven't read yet] beat it to the World Fantasy Award, just as Graham Joyce's Memoirs of a Master Forger beat it to the August Derleth award, for example.)

When I was a journalist, one of the things that stopped me wanting to spend the rest of my life journalisting was sub-editors who made me feel embarrassed by carefully introducing mistakes or slight distortions into things I'd written, or into headlines. So I felt a twinge when I read the Daily Telegraph interview, in which I was quoted pretty accurately,

Gaiman, 49, said: "I definitely don't write like Kipling but he was a literary hero as a kid.
"I was fascinated when I first started mentioning that I thought Kipling was an amazing writer.
"I started getting – not exactly hate mail – it was more disappointed mail.
"People would tell me, 'How could a writer like you – that we like – like a fascist, an imperialist dog?' "

but with the headline of

Coraline author Neil Gaiman received 'hate mail' for liking Rudyard Kipling
Neil Gaiman, the author behind the surprise film hit Coraline, received "hate mail" for professing that Rudyard Kipling was one of his literary heroes.

I keep forgetting about the new-style sensationalist Daily Telegraph. I like the way that "not exactly hate mail... disappointed mail" in the body of the article turns into "hate mail" in the headline. And was Coraline really a surprise hit? And is mentioning the Coraline film really how the Telegraph audience would go from "Who...?" to "Oh, right, him."

...

Someone wrote to me recently asking,

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

You've often talked about the rights for readers to choose the books they want to read without censorship. What are your thoughts of a library in Kentucky firing two librarians who restricted reading materials to a child?

Raymond

I figured I'd wait until the facts were in before commenting. So, in brief:

Over in Kentucky, a library worker (not librarian) felt menaced by what she felt was the satanic sexualness of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, and kept it checked out for a year so no-one could read it. (Except her: and she had to be prayed over while she read it.) What worried this lady was,

She just didn't want this book in the Graphic Novel section, which is located next to Young Adult Fiction.

She wasn't trying to keep it from kids. She was keeping it from everyone.

Then a customer put it on order, and the computer would no longer keep it checked out to keep it off the shelves. She violated library policy by finding out who had it on order, discovered the person who wanted it was an 11 year old girl (no information has been given as to whether this was with or without parental knowledge, but I don't think that would have mattered to this lady) and she persuaded another library worker (also not a librarian) to help her stop anyone getting the book. Around this point their plan was exposed. They'd violated enough library rules and policies that they were dismissed. Strangely enough, even after they were fired, the original lady who took the book off the shelves still hasn't returned the book, which seems to me to have crossed the invisible line that separates "stopping people reading things you don't like" from "stealing".

(Incidentally, for those who haven't read it, LOEG: The Black Dossier is many things, but it isn't Lost Girls, and it certainly isn't pornography, although it has moments that comment on classic texts, including some pornographic ones. It has a couple of pin-up-y images. It's got comic-book violence in it and some realistic violence too. It has references in it to British children's fiction that an 11 year old girl in Kentucky is very unlikely to get. Pam Noles wrote an essay about race, minstrelsy and the problematic use of the Golliwogg in it. Is it a book I think an 11 year old would enjoy and get stuff out of? Depends on your 11 year old. I'm always surprised when I meet Sandman readers under the age of 13, but I've met some, and they were ready for it.)

The events are summarised at The Beat here, with a two page local newspaper article that presents a fairly balanced picture of the events here.

So my thoughts of a library in Kentucky firing two librarians who restricted reading materials to a child? I think the library did the right thing. And I think they should get their book back from the lady who stole it.

...

Over at Audiofile Magazine there's a celebration of the audiobooks of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (me): interviews with Martin Jarvis, Stephen Briggs, Nigel Planer and George Guidall talking about the ups and downs of reading us aloud. http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/epicks/1109_landingpage.html

...

Thank you to all the people who have submitted International Covers (here's the submission page) to the International Covers Page. I'll try and put a few covers here from time to time. Here's one from Russia:

This is the cover to the Russian Edition of FRAGILE THINGS, which I suppose might contain "The Witch's Headstone", or is just a very Graveyard Booky sort of a cover. [Edit to add, I just clicked on it, saw it full-size and realised they're both boys, and it's an "October in the Chair" cover.]

And finally, someone on the NPR blog wrote about Sandman. It's meant to be a nice review of the P. Craig Russell Sandman: Dream Hunters, and I think it was probably meant to be funny, but if so the author seems to have misjudged the tone, and instead just turned out a series of patronising cliches about somebody's idea of Sandman readers.

Which puzzles me, because I've met hundreds of thousands of people who read Sandman all around the world, and they look just like everyone else: all they seem to have in common is that they are intelligent bipeds capable of understanding comics, who like Sandman. Probably a lot like the person who wrote the article.

[Edit to add, other people don't seem to find it funny either.]

Labels: Awards, international covers, interviews, rogue librarians

Taking stock...

Good morning world.

If you want to watch selected highlights of the me-and-Amanda HousingWorks gig last week (which raised 10K for HousingWorks, hurrah), Spin has them up at http://www.spin.com/articles/watch-amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-live-nyc. (I read "Feminine Endings" aloud for the first time, and I think it works aloud, which makes me happy.)(Also one of my favourite "I Google You"s)

So the last two weeks of madness is over and I am starting to look around and hoping one day to catch up.

Chicago was fun, in a strange, sleepless sort of a way. I got in on an early in the morning plane, sleepily left my garment-bag behind on the plane (my assistant and Maure Luke made this better), had planned to spend several hours working in my hotel room on the speech. But the hotel room, when I got there, was already occupied, and the morning got stranger from there, which meant that my acceptance speech was rather more impromptu than I had hoped, but people liked it.

It had been Decided that I wasn't doing a signing afterwards, something I thought was a bit disappointing when I learned about it. But I crashed shortly after, slept through both the Chip Kidd and Ivan Brunetti panel and the Chris Ware and Lynda Barry one that followed it, woke in time to have dinner with Jill Thompson and her husband, Brian Azzarello, at Katsu.

Breakfast with Chip Kidd, who got to look at the first copy of Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and said nice things, and then to the airport and off to Toronto.

I dined with Mark Askwith, who I have known for 22 years. We met in Gotham City -- literally, on the set of the first Tim Burton Batman movie -- and I would like to say that we have not changed, but we're both mellower and more contented and less spiky than we were then. We were both journalist-explainer-connectory people who loved comics and wanted to write them, and although he would write some comics he went one way, into television production, and I went the other.

Next morning I went off to CBC to record The Hour. In the car on the way I was told that they'd decided the night before not to do an interview but instead to have me read off a list of 5 Crap Superheroes. I looked them over. They weren't funny. I asked the producer about it, when I got there, and wound up rewriting them, very fast, so they weren't quite as not-funny as they had been, but I'm not sure they ever made it all the way to funny. Then up from the deep basement to a radio studio where Sook-Yin Lee interviewed me for Definitely Not The Opera about fathers and sons, and it wound up being one of the most real and personal interviews I've ever done.

The downside of being interviewed a lot is that people ask you the same questions a lot, and you wind up saying the same things over and over. Sook-Yin wanted to know things nobody had ever asked, and that I was happy to talk about. It goes out on the 20th of June.

The Luminato event was really fun and fine. Mark Askwith introduced me. (A quick google found a review of the event here , another with more photos here, and Mark Askwith's blog, with his introduction, here.)

My favourite event was the next morning: I went to Nelson Mandela Park school. I read to the kids and answered their questions, then I was shown around the school and finally was taken to a room where thirteen small actors portrayed scenes from the first chapter of The Graveyard Book. It was delightful.

In other news: Duncan Jones's film MOON opens tonight in LA and New York. I saw a preview back in February and loved it. Really good SF movie of the kind nobody makes any longer.

I have been nagging Mitch Benn to set up an internetty sort of place to sell his songs directly for a year or so, and he now has it at http://www.corporationrecords.com/store/index/104. Please buy music from him, so he does not feel it has been a waste of time.

The Graveyard Book -- and this Blog! -- have been nominated for British Fantasy Society Awards: http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/06/british-fantasy-award-finalists.html

Here's a New York Times article about the CORALINE musical and the way it uses diferent kinds of pianos. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/theater/07Blan.html

This came in from Mike Berry:

Neil -- Congratulations on the "Coraline" musical. Thought you might be interested in this video of Schuyler Rummel-Hudson retelling the story of "Coraline." Schuyler has a brain malformation that inhibits her ability to speak, as recounted in her father Robert's excellent memoir, "Schuyler's Monster." Still, she's a remarkable storyteller in her own right.

Here's the link:

http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/2009/06/storyteller.html

Labels: Awards, bags, blame Canada, coraline the musical, mark askwith interviewing me not in a car this time, sleep

News! I mean real news, honest.

It's SPRING! I mean, it's warm and the trees are budding, the crocuses are blooming and the birds are probably singing although they cannot be heard over the howling and grumbly barking of a large white dog who has just been given his Spring Bath and put out into his pen in the garden to dry, and wishes to alert the appropriate authorities. Definitely spring.

So on Monday the 27th I'm doing a Maryland Event at Washington College, Chestertown, for PEN World Voices. And there was obviously a bit of confusion about the event, and suddenly it was listed as SOLD OUT which upset and puzzled those people who had been going to go there and had just seen it listed as a free event on the internet with no information about reservations, and people started writing in to complain to me by the score, and I asked the fabulous Caro Llewellyn if there was anything that could be done, because it was looking like the number of upset people was going to outnumber the happy people.

And things have now changed: the venue is now in a 1000 seat location. Those of you who already have tickets will get to sit in the front few rows. Now new tickets will go out -- just turn up.

This is the link to the current sold out event, but it may have been fixed by the time you read this: http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3190/prmID/1831

The email from Josh, who is running the event, says:

The event will now be held in the Cain Gymnasium, Washington College,
Chestertown, MD.

Same time and place. Reservations are not required.

I hope this makes people happier.

Please come, because if I'm now talking to a mostly empty hall I'll feel silly for having made them change it.

There -- they just blogged it: Details at http://bitlit.typepad.com/bitlit/2009/04/attention-changes-to-417-night-with-neil-gaiman-event.html

And there will be a free event in New York at 6:30 on Thursday Night April 30th called Leaps and Bounds, Fits and Starts: The Evolution of a Children’s Book Writer with Mariken Jongman, Shaun Tan and me on the panel, moderated by Andrea Davis Pinkney, in the Scholastic Auditorium, 557 Broadway; and a $10 ticket event on Saturday May 2nd Coraline, Sandman: Books and Imagination: A Conversation with Neil Gaiman at The Great Hall at Cooper Union: 7 East 7th Street (and tickets to all three events that afternoon can be had for cheap -- Shaun Tan, Emmanuel Guibert, David Polonsky with Jonathan Ames on one panel, and Adrian Tomine in conversation with Yoshihiro Tatsumi on the other.)

,,,

And the second-biggest piece of news is this:

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK won the 2009 Indies Choice Award as Best YA book. This is the Award that used to be called the BookSense Award, and it's given by the members of the American Booksellers Association.

I was thrilled -- even more thrilled when I realised that I would be in New York around then anyway then for the CORALINE Musical Opening Night, so I'll just head out a couple of days earlier.

http://news.bookweb.org/6759.html

The last time I was nominated, they did not tell you who had won ahead of time, and Michael Chabon and I lost to Cornelia Funke, and were all three of us very happy about it, particularly as we were given huge bags of Levenger swag (you can read about it here but ignore everything in the first paragraph).

...

Right. Now, I have to reread and send off my Newbery Speech, then get back to writing Metamorpho for Mike Allred and Wednesday Comics. The first page of which looks like this:

Labels: Awards, Chestertown, Metamorpho, PEN world voices festival

journeys end

Woke up after three hours sleep in a bed, convinced that I was still on the road, with Jonathan Coulton's song "The Future Soon" going around in my head. But I'm awake, and the day has started...

At one point yesterday evening I found myself talking on the hands-free-bluetoothy-practise-your-shouting-while-driving-phone to a friend who called to tell me he wanted to make me a bit-part murderous monstrous creature in his next movie. I have never killed anyone in a film before and realised at the moment I was asked that this is definitely one of those things I need to do before I die, so I said yes. (If anything ever comes of it I will report back here.) He was thrilled and I was thrilled. "This is the best possible conversation anyone could have," he said. "The only way it could be better is if we invented a new ice-cream flavour that everyone's been waiting for without realising it," I said, and waited for inspiration as to the nature of a new ice-cream flavour that would be nice and necessary to strike, but it didn't.

The first part of the drive contained some beautiful/scary moments: blowing snow turned roads into slow white rivers that would occasionally erupt into something like steam or smoke-whirls on Neptune, that blinded then glittered like mica or diamonds when it hit the sunlight. Sometimes the road writhed with white snow-snakes. I kept driving -- pulled the camera out once, when it got less scary somewhere in Northern Iowa (with windchill minus35) and took http://phodroid.com/a6y4w4.

Slept in car in a rest area in Metropolis Il., phoned in to a radio broadcast  (and now podcast) about, chiefly, the book Steve Jones did about the making of Coraline (the book, the film, the upcoming musical) while parked on the side of Lookout Mountain, which felt a bit American Gods. (The hour-long show is up at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/AuthorsOnAir/TheBeyond/2009/01/15/A-Discussion-with-Neil-Gaiman-and-Stephen-Jones)

The best bit of the drive was that the dog (who is convalescing from hind knee surgery) was forced to just lie down and not do anything else for two days, which is very good for his leg.

Got to my destination about half-past midnight, covered in dog hair and smeared with cream-cheese from an early-morning attempt to give the dog his medicine that, in retrospect may have failed less because of the cream cheese and more because my hands were so numb with cold. Got on line. Learned that this blog was voted Best Literature Weblog in the 2008 Weblog Awards, and was pleased.   Even if it means I may now have to have a pie-eating competition with Jessa Crispin. (And I will now retire this blog from eligibility in future years.) (I just challenged her to sushi eating at Katsu next time I am in Chicago. She accepted. This could get really nasty.) Congratulations to all the winners, and to all the nominees.

Back at home, Maddy told me school was cancelled yesterday because with wind chill it was -50, and you cannot have kids waiting outside in those temperatures. My beekeeping partner has gone mad and started doing science experiments on YouTube.  Megan-from-Clarion-who-lives-in-San-Francisco who was in Minneapolis (and gave me a scarf she had made me, which became invaluable on the travels) told me she had  thought I was making up the so-cold-it'll-kill-you bits of American Gods, and had now learned that, no, I really wasn't...

Which reminds me:

Hello Neil!

Are you going to teach at Clarion again, anytime soon?

I am willing to bet that being accepted to Clarion is a one-time thing. Also, as much as I admire other artists in the field I would love to have you as a mentor. So if you are planning to attend Clarion as a mentor again, say next year, or the year after, I am willing to wait to submit until then.

Thank you so much!

-Ash M.B.

I don't know. Probably, but when in the decade ahead of us I cannot say, and whether it'll be Clarion or Clarion West next I do not know, and the instructors for Clarion are always world class (this years' includes Bob Crais, Kim Stanley Robinson, Liz Hand, Holly Black...) and you will learn different things from each of them. I enjoyed my week at Clarion a lot, and I think most of the students liked having me there, and I know I learned a great deal...

But I can promise you that waiting for me would be the wrong thing to do. If you want to do the astonishing writers' boot camp that is Clarion, start applying: head over to http://clarion.ucsd.edu/... there are less than 20 places and hundreds of applicants. The application period is open until March 1st. It Will, as they used to say on the covers of self-help paperbacks, Change Your Life, but that's because it's Clarion and you're going through it with another seventeen people over six weeks, and not because of a specific instructor. 

(And if any of you, in these parlous economic times, wish to support the arts, you might want to think about making a donation to the Clarion Foundation, which is what pays the scholarships that help some of the students to get there, and to eat while they're there, and keeps the program running...)

...

Much to my delight and bafflement, The Graveyard Book is now in its fifteenth straight week on the New York Times Bestseller list. And the noise around the Coraline movie means that Coraline the book is now selling enough copies that it may go back onto the list as well. This is really fun. 

Someone sent me a link to Charlaine Harris's blog entry for Jan 11th, and all I could do was think, yup, I know how that one goes. 

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on. I remember back in 1989 Terry Pratchett and I plotting a novel once about a serial killer who kills serial killers, and we had most of the pieces in place, and then both of us realised we'd have to actually write it, which seemed like less fun than making it up, and so we left it.  I would have put him in the Serial Killer's convention in Sandman, but he just didn't fit. And I was pleased when I saw the Dexter books that that pumpkin had finally landed on the head of somebody else, who wanted to write them.  Sometimes you're just lucky that the pumpkin lands on you first.

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it. I remember Jonathan Carroll telling me to "Write it new", when we talked about how I had thrown out a whole Sandman storyline on reading Bones of the Moon. And I'm pleased I went back and wrote A Game of You.  Charlaine's Cemetery Girl, if she writes it and I hope she does, would be different in every way from The Graveyard Book, because that's how it works.

...

The Jim Henson Honours list for 2008 has been announced. Oh all right, Honors. 

(A google shows me holding mine at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/something-im-proud-of.html - isn't it a wonderful object?)

Hmm. That Google also threw up something else: many years ago, I decided not to look at my Wikipedia entry, because that way is madness, and given that, as the person involved I'm not actually allowed to change things, much as I would perhaps like to, I decided that it is best left unlooked-at. But every now and then a google search for something else gives me the first sentence of my Wikipedia entry and I read that my family came to England from the Netherlands in 1916, and it irritates. I really doubt that there was much cross-channel emigration in the middle of World War 1 for a start. (My paternal great-grandfather came to the UK before 1914; and he would have come from Antwerp, which isn't in the Netherlands now, and wasn't then. And I wonder why the paternal line is so privileged...)

And the strange thing is, that if I grumble about it here, then that gives someone editing the Wikipedia entry something to link to, and thus it will be fixed. Until someone finds a link to something that got it from Wikipedia in the first place, and changes it back.

...

The first bloggy people-who-were-there reviews of the Coraline film are starting to sneak out into the world...

Here's one Coraline review.

Here's another.

And my linking to the Ain't it Cool ticket giveaway got a few people in to the Chicago screening, so if you act fast it might get you into a screening in Austin TX - http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39765

...

Just looked in mirror, and was suprised to find that after only two days of driving, unshaven, and with  barely any sleep, I look sort of like a homeless person. This is just wrong.  Luckily, I have a limping dog who thinks I am cool. SoI shall shave, and then drive off to stock up a larder with food, and find a car wash (for my car is thickly encrusted with salt), and call in the lettering corrections on Batman, and get on with my day.

Edit to add -- the day is ending and this still hasn't gone up on the LJ feed. If you're on LiveJournal and curious if I've written anything or not, you may want to check the actual blog at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/

Labels: Awards, Clarion, cold [the extreme kind], Maybe I'll look less like a homeless person if I shave

Oh to Be In England etc etc

In the UK for Eastercon. It's nice to be home (and amazing how comfortingly home it still feels after 16 years away).

I noticed that Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE won the GLAAD award for Best Comic -- congratulations. Somewhere I have the beautiful GLAAD award that Sandman took for the same thing, about a decade ago. And then I read the small print of the Awards Press Release and realised with pleasure that STARDUST took the award for Outstanding Film (Wide Release) -- I was very pleased for Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (and Robert De Niro), but wish that I'd known that it was happening. I called Matthew and Jane and told them. I wonder who accepted the award -- someone at Paramount? It says on the press release the awards ceremony will be telecast on Bravo, so I'll set the TIVO and find out.

The Eastercon is at a hotel near Heathrow, and because I took Silverjet in to the UK (this is the second time I've flown them, and I'm really impressed. The tickets are much cheaper than regular business class, every seat on the plane is business class, and you don't have to worry about checking in for an international flight many hours beforehand, as they have their own little check-in-lounges at the airports. I hesitate in plugging them because right now it's easy to get seat and to change flights) I landed in Luton, where I was picked up by a Taxi from the convention, which was a nice surprise (especially when I saw the lines of stopped traffic outside Heathrow).

I had a bath and then slept some more.

The con is, I am told, pretty full, but there are still memberships and day memberships.

I'm doing a signing on Saturday at 4.00, and my Guest of Honour speech/reading is Sunday at 2.00pm. There's another signing "on scooters" I am assured, on Sunday night at 8:15.

As a sort of general thing at the con, if you see me and I don't seem to be doing anything, and you have something with you you want signed, and you sidle over and mutter "It's for Norman" (if your name happens to be Norman) then I'll probably scribble on it for you.

Right. About to wander out into the world to see old friends and make new ones.

I have noticed that you look identically cool-writery in all your photos. I would like to know how this is done, please. When I'm in family photos whoever's taking it looks at the camera screen and gets a little frown and then they say "we'll just do that one again." I'll say sorry and then they say "That's alright, dear, you can't help it." and they take four or five and then just give up and email whichever one had my eyes most open and my mouth most closed.

Is there some trick?

Yes. You don't let anyone put the photos of you with your eyes shut, or with a goofy grin, or looking like you just dropped something, or drooling, on the back of a book or in a newspaper. Then people think that you always look like that.

Hey Neil,

I love your audio books. Listening to you reading is like having my Dad read me a bedtime story. Will you be reading The Graveyard Book and if so when will it be available?

Looking forward to it...

Thanks

Claire
I'll record it within the next month or so and it should be out in September when the book comes out.

I'm also planning to collect together all the live readings of chapters from the Graveyard Book as well... maybe make them downloadable or watchable from http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff.

So probably a thousand people have asked by now, but what does coffee which has been partially digested by a civet cat taste like? I've never quite been willing to shell out the extra money to find out. Is it worth it?

It was a perfectly nice, fairly mild, not-at-all acidic coffee -- with an astonishing caffeine kick to it. But I'm a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker, and while I could probably describe different teas in ways that might communicate things to other tea drinkers, when it comes to coffee it was a very nice, not-bitter, not-acid, cup of coffee, and someone else will have to describe the underlying notes of cinnamon and vanilla and red wine in civet-coffee, for it will not be me.

Labels: Awards, civet coffee, eastercon, photos, you know I'm starting to worry that the labels are all getting sort of normal these days

A miscellania of things to click on

On the subject of all things Terry Pratchett, there is a North American Discworld convention in "Phoenix, Arizona over Labor Day Weekend, 2009 (Sept 4-7, and maybe September 3 as well)" -- details at http://www.nadwcon.org/.

(Terry's also noted that while Matchitforpratchett is unofficial, this link isn't: https://www.committedgiving.uk.net/art/public/donor.aspx?id=cc)

A first review of The Dangerous Alphabet, the odd alphabet book by Gris Grimly and me, at http://editoon.com/sandbox/?p=849.

You can watch Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman collecting an award for Stardust at the Empire Awards. (It took Best SF/Fantasy film, beating some very worthy contenders, so worthy that neither Jane nor Matthew had thought to even jot down an acceptance speech.)

Susanna Clarke's short story Mrs Mabb can be listened to for the next 6 days via http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml click on Tuesday.

I really loved the New Yorker article on Jamy Ian Swiss and magic (Jamy was my coin magic adviser on American Gods -- see http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/03/american-gods-blog-post-10.html). It doesn't seem to be online, but you can hear Adam Gopnik talking about it at http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/03/17/080317on_audio_gopnik

--again, just trying to close some tabs before I head off to the UK in the morning, for Eastercon (http://www.orbital2008.org/). Hope I get to see you there...

...

Apologies to everyone who wrote from the Portland area asking if I would be doing a signing and if not would I sign just for you. Nope. Maybe next time (as it was I spent a couple of hours signing for all the hundreds of modelmakers, animators, costumers, carpenters and other wonder-workers at Laika. Mostly people's books and Coraline posters, but a few odd things including a naked Miss Forcible).

Labels: Awards, magicians, Susanna Clarke on the Radio, Terry Pratchett, the dangerous alphabet

Gallivant's travels

It was fun.

(I'll do a slightly dessicated version here, because I'm in the lounge at Narita and don't have long before my plane boards now...)

I was brought in for the Ad Congress -- I gave a talk about the imagination and why it is a good thing, and then, on Saturday morning, did a reading of the complete first chapter of The Graveyard Book, an interview and a signing for about 200 people (it was only meant to be for the first 100 in the line -- some of whom started lining up at midnight -- but I added in about an extra 45 minutes signing at the end). Then to Manila -- on the way I read the finalists for the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards, and was really impressed by the quality of the prose stories. Fully Booked runs the awards, and on Saturday morning I found myself sitting in Fully Booked while stacks of copies of Expeditions were put in front of me to sign. These were the two collections (prose and comics) of winners and runners-up from the first Award, last year. Many interviews followed, and a mass press conference. And then, in the afternoon, I had the odd experience of being a magician's assistant (for local magician Erik Mana) and awards presenter, in front of a large crowd (and despite the rain), and I announced the thing we're adding to the awards for next year (a short films category), and at one point I dragged Mike up on stage with me (when I was asked about being a children's author and having children), and I sort of promised I'd come back for the third round, and that I'd do a signing if I did...

(I loved the whole trip but it was made much more fun by having a son with me.)

Then dinner with the winners and judges from this year and last year's competition.

Back to the hotel, and up at 5.00am to leave Manila. And now I'm here.

Expect postings to decrease between here and Xmas. I have a book to finish, and I'm done gallivanting, I hope...

Labels: airports, Awards, Erik Mana, Fully Booked, Mike, Philippines, signing as much as I can

Horse races and horse trading

It's an electronics not working kind of a day. My voice mail isn't working, for example. Meanwhile, right now I'm waiting for an Internet tech support man to ring back. I told him that the internet was slow, and he sounded very doubtful and suggested that I do a speed test. I did. It's running at 6K, which was about half of what I'd guessed...

Anyway. Just a quick, happy post to say that Fragile Things was just nominated for the Edge Hill Prize for the short story.

According the web site (http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/Faculties/HMSAS/English/CreativeWriting/NWShortStory.htm)


The Edge Hill Prize is an exciting new award for excellence in the short story.

It will be bestowed annually by Edge Hill University on the writer who, in the opinion of the judges, is the author of the best collection published the previous year from a writer born or based in the UK or Ireland.

The winner in the inaugural year will receive a cheque for £5000 at an award ceremony at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester on 20th July 2007.

We are pleased to announce this year’s shortlist:

* Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things (Headline Review)
* Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here (Picador)
* Nicholas Royle, Mortality (Serpent's Tail)
* Colm Tòibìn, Mothers and Sons (Picador)
* Tamar Yellin, Kafka in Bronteland (Toby Press)

All the authors on the shortlist have been invited to read at the 2007 Short Story Conference at Edge Hill University on 21st July.

It's a really diverse bunch of nominees, and I'm thrilled that Fragile Things made it onto the list. I think people mostly think I'm exaggerating when I tell them that for me the fun is in being nominated for awards, not in winning, but overall that's true. (There have been exceptions. I loved winning the Hugo for American Gods, mind, because it was so unexpected, and I loved winning the World Fantasy Award for Sandman 19, because it was a recognition for the medium). I guess it's because I've been an awards judge and have watched what happens (all too often, everyone's second choice wins, because everyone can agree on that), and because the gap between win and lose is so small. I like being nominated -- it makes me feel like I've hit an award-nominated level of quality, and that feels good. Beyond that, it's a horse race and the end result of the horse race doesn't matter. I realise that there aren't a lot of people who feel like this about awards, and I'm also aware that it's easy for me to say, because I've already got my fair share of awards and more, so talking about not caring about the actual winning can sound, frankly, smug. But it's still how I feel.

And this is a good award: there's not enough attention paid to short stories. They're seen as trivial, or not as good as novels. They have that whiff of unreality about them that means that people who only write short stories are always being asked when they will be writing a real book. I've not seen another award given to single author collection regardless of genre.

I wish I could be in the UK for the announcement and to take part in the reading, but I'll be doing Stardust stuff in preparation for the San Diego Comic-Con on the following Wednesday, which means I'll be in the wrong country that week.

Okay. The tech support man phoned back (he said I should phone another tech support line instead). Now I can take the dog for a run.

Labels: Awards, Edge Hill Prize, short stories

American Gods Blog, Post 18

Hey. I'm nominated for a Nebula, for best screenplay. Isn't that fun?

http://www.sfwa.org/awards/

(I'm not sure that my part in Mononoke was screenplay-worthy, and if it did get it, Jack Fletcher, the English language voice director, deserves as much of it as I do. But still, it's always fun to be nominated for things.)

Labels: American Gods Blog, Awards, Nebula Awards, Princess Mononoke