A VERY late Blog, about trying to make art with a lot of people, including you...

I had planned to write this blog early this morning. And then I planned to write it while the day went on. And now the day is half over and the blog is not even begun.

So...

First of all, watch this:

...and not just for the beautiful footage of Cabal in it.

(The film was made in mid-December, and it makes me so happy-sad-happy-again to see it, and see my old dog lolloping through the snow with me.)

Over on Twitter today I've been initiating a strange and beautiful art project. It's about half way through the very first stage, which consists of throwing out questions to Twitter, and seeing what I get back.

Questions like "Why is January so Dangerous?"

or "Where would you spend a perfect June?" with the appropriate Hashtag - #JunTale in this case.

The answers have been amazing. Personal, honest, imaginative, glorious, surprising, strange, unexpected, familiar, magical, wise, funny... all of those things. They can be read over on the BlackBerry Hub for the project, and also on Twitter (just click on the relevant hashtag -- here's April's. Here's June's.)

I've been retweeting them like mad, because I loved them and wanted to spread them.

I'm also using the BlackBerry10 #KeepMoving hashtag, and because BlackBerry are the ones who are helping me do all this I'm also trying to remember to use both the #BlackBerry10 hashtag and to put the capital B in the middle of BlackBerry.

Seeing you are probably wondering: they showed me the phone in question, the Z10, for the first time in Autumn in the UK, I got to play with it, and I really liked it: the swiping the screen with your thumb "flow" things felt really natural, and it's the easiest onscreen keyboard to type with I've ever used. (I always hate onscreen keyboards and I do not hate this one. It is intelligent. I've used the first four of the five features NBC talk about here, and like them as much as they do.) (And no, nobody's asked me to say that last paragraph. If I hadn't have liked the phone I would have said no.)

So they said yes to my idea of using online communities to try and make something cool and special that brought a lot of people together, and I said yes to working with their patronage on the project.

The idea is: I'm going to make a Calendar of Tales. (Yes, I remain as obsessed with the months of the year as I have always been.) I would go to Twitter for story prompts. Then, over a handful of days, I'll write a story, one for each month. Once there are 12 stories we'll go back out to the world to get other people make art of various kinds using the stories as inspiration. One giant artistic ball of wax. Or ping pong game. Or cuddlepuddle. Or pick your own metaphor.

No, you do not have to use a BlackBerry for anything in this, although you might want to follow the @Blackberry twitter account as it would be useful for when they need to DM anyone whose tweets I do happen to use as a story prompt. (But if you don't follow them, I'll wave at you to remind you.)

In the end, we're hoping for a paper Calendar that will benefit charity, and an amazing app (or possibly a website) with all the stories, and all the art of various kinds up for everyone.

I'm enjoying this no end: it's wonderful just to throw questions out, and feel recharged and joyous.  (Actually, December did not leave me joyous. It left me wanting to hug people, and to remember how much we lose when we lose people, and animals, and ourselves from the past as we always do.)

I think I understand a lot more of how Amanda relates to Twitter, when suddenly she'll start retweeting people and use that to create a community, to link people, to make people feel less alone.

I didn't expect this bit of the project to feel like art, but watching the amount of connection it has made between people, I think perhaps it was. I felt like my heart was being broken and healed, all at the same time.

(I also do not know how recharged or joyous I will feel in a few days from now when I have finished writing 12 shortshort stories, mind you. I may be grumpy and glaring and muttering.)

If you go to http://keepmoving.blackberry.com/desktop/en/us/ambassador/neil-gaiman.html they have all the info you could need up, along with more stuff. (Scroll down the page.)

As I said, you can still suggest things: use the month and the #KeepMoving hashtags.

Tomorrow, I have to choose 12 prompts which now seems to me to be a pretty impossible sort of a task given everything that's come in, but I set the rules so cannot grumble. And then on Wednesday I start to write.

There will be a film crew watching me write. This will be VERY interesting, and it is possible I may ask them to go away, or at least to film me from a great distance.

I always envied Harlan Ellison getting to write stories in bookshop windows. Maybe it will be like that.

Labels: Blackberry, Cabal and me, Keep moving, the dangers of Twitter

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

It's nearly Ten

I've spent a lot of time since I got back from Australia getting healthy.

Eating very sensibly, lots of exercising, losing weight (it was the shots of me at the Sydney Opera House with my stomach bulging against the Kambriel waistcoat that did it. It brought home that even if my weight was only a little high, when you get into middle age, it's really not smart to let things get out of hand). I've moved from the tub of size 33 jeans in my closet to the tub of 32 jeans (32 jeans means my BMI is no longer where it shouldn't be), and today I noticed that the 31 jeans tub is filled with really nice jeans, most of which are almost unworn, so I've decided to get down to there, which is right in the weight-place I ought to be to make my doctor happy, and do my best to maintain it.

Which is easy to do when I'm feeding myself, really hard to do on the road.

(Do not expect frequent diet/weight etc. updates, although I'll let you know at the point where the tub of 31 jeans becomes wearable. Also, please do not write in on the FAQ line explaining to me why whatever I am doing is wrong for health or idealogical reasons, suggesting diets or exercise programs. I'm always grateful for the suggestions, which never actually accomplish anything other than to make me shrug, and carry on doing whatever it is I was doing in the first place. Right now it's mostly vegetables in abundance, and jogging through the snow with the dogs.)

...

Because it is February (when this blog was started) the Oracular Orb has, for the next 21 days, become me as a Swami.

And for those of you who were wondering what the Orb is, or why it exists, it all started here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/02/now-we-are-six.html as a sixth birthday present from the blog.

That was four years ago. The blog will turn ten on Wednesday. We're trying desperately to think what to do to celebrate. Suggestions from Twitter include selling to blog to AOL for $315 million and blogging in the nude. (I'm pretty sure I've done that a number of times in the past, I'm afraid.)

Sigh.

I took this photo for Cat Mihos, who sent me an "It was only a lime" sticker I thought was a bookmark and the Mighty Cabal sticker (which exists to support the Valley of the Kings animal sanctuary.

Cabal is doing a lot better.

The U of M were not sure what was wrong with him -- he was falling down a lot, seemed to be unable to coordinate his back legs, and was having trouble running, going up or down stairs, or walking on uncarpeted surfaces. Some days he'd be unable to get up after sleeping, and whimper with pain. They suggested it might be degenerative myelopathy - a sort of MS for German Shepherd Dogs. So I googled it, and found myself on this page... Initially learning about what DM was... and then learning about a diet that could bring it under control. And the site's from the University of Florida. So it's reputable...

The vet took him off the drug regime he was on. He went onto the diet.

And he's a lot better. A hundred percent better on the stuff that was scaring us (the not being able to get up, the cries of pain, the falling over) and about seventy-five percent better on the other stuff. And continuing to improve.

So I'm posting this, mostly to spread the link and the information. And to say it worked for us.


...

Sxip Shirey made the haunting music for Statuesque, the short wordless film I made starring Bill Nighy (Now available on DVD in the UK, Region 2 DVD format. I would have mentioned it here before, but I only just noticed.) He's brilliant. Sxip's band, The Luminescent Orchestrii, recently teamed up with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, to blend two very different types of music and make an EP.

I saw this film of them creating art -- four minutes of the two bands talking, figuring out what they're going to be doing, four minutes of glorious music, and have decided it's just pure joy. I love playing it, love watching them while I listen. It feels magical, like something that will only happen once and we were lucky to catch it.

Watch it. I'm not promising you'll like it -- the song starts at 4.00 -- but I think it's a very good bet that it will make you as happy as it made me.

...

PS: We just added a page to the website, here at www.neilgaiman.com : http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/About_Neil/Patronage I'm Patron of the Open Rights Group and one of the Patrons (with Ursula K LeGuin and space scientist Professor David Southwood) of the Science Fiction Foundation.

Here's me talking about the Open Rights Group. It is less joyful and glorious than the video above:

Labels: Cabal and me, eating right, No label can do this post justice so study it carefully and take wisdom from its teachings for entertainment only offer void where prohibited by law, sxip, tubs of jeans

Nine pictures from my life (and one drawing)

I'm not going to say a lot about Campfire, not what happened or who was there, because it was a very private sort of a thing.



At first I was suspicious. I've seen a lot of late 1960s and early 1970s SF television, and whenever a bunch of creative people are taken off by a private plane to a mysterious location, they are normally either brainwashed or replaced by exact duplicates who are sent back to society with a mysterious and probably fatal agenda.

Private plane. Check. Mysterious location. Check.

Uh-oh.

So I spent much of the journey to, and the first day at, Campfire convinced it was all much too good to be true, and expecting that when I went back to my room there would be my exact duplicate waiting in the wardrobe, holding a silvery gun...

Everything pointed to that. Aha, I thought, when the buses pulled up: THE COMPOUND. I was expecting barbed wire and enormous dogs and no way to let our loved ones know what had happened to us when the robot duplicates returned in our stead.

The Compound turned out to be a really nice local restaurant.

You could bring someone, and (as Amanda is still in Cabaret, and Maddy was on a school field-trip) I brought my literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz, not as my agent but as my friend of (now) 23 years. She had as good a time as I did.

Photo by Seth Godin

I left Campfire reinvigorated, excited about art, and looking forward to getting back to work and happy to be writing again. I saw some old friends, made a number of new friends, learned so much about so many things, and was happy.

These are two of the new friends I made -- Aubrey de Grey (on the left) and Dr Sarah Marr (who blogs at http://scidoll.com). Aubrey, who has a beard that rivals the young Alan Moore's, is an astonishing speaker and advocate for treating aging as a curable disease, and I spent most of the four hour flight from New York asking him hard questions and enjoying his answers. Their website is http://sens.org/, and I'm hoping to write more about Aubrey and Sens.org at some time soon. (And Sarah's promised me my own special link from here to sens.org when I do.)

And then I came home. (I came home with a signed copy of Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in the Autumn, having told Armistead Maupin how much I felt Sandman had owed to Tales of the City. I'm reading it now and loving it.)

In the time that I was away, Maddy had grown even more, had a haircut and turned into a self-assured young woman....

Seen here with her actual and original dad, and almost definitely not a brainwashed or android duplicate sent back into the world to wreak havok:

Cabal is still recovering from his operations: his spine was decompressed, and now he's walking again. He can't run yet, and so he's always on a lead (er, leash to Americans) to stop him dashing off after an interesting rabbit.

Last night, in the small hours, he couldn't get up, and started screaming with pain. I've never heard him do that before. I know that German Shepherds have ridiculously high pain threshholds, so if it was hurting, it was hurting him more than anything has before. This was bad. I held him until he was able to stand, then gave him his medicine, and then worried about him, and still do, and will continue to do so until he's walking and running again without difficulty.

Meanwhile, Lola has grown several inches and put on many pounds (mostly by eating both of their dinners, I am convinced) and is beautiful and fast and incredibly smart.

But Cabal is still My Dog, and she is, well, not my dog in the same way. She's a good friend, he's family.

...

A couple of quick reminders: If you know what W00tstock is, you won't need to go to http://w00tstock.net/ to have it explained. If you don't know, you should go to http://w00tstock.net/ and read what you find there.

On November 2nd, I'll be standing in for Wil Wheaton at the Austin Texas W00tstock. There is much information on the evening and ticket-ordering information at http://www.austintheatre.org/site/Calendar/250633393?view=Detail&id=24581 I believe tickets are going extremely fast. And if you don't want to see me, there will be other people there, people of talent and humour. And if that isn't enough, I'm afraid Paul and Storm will almost certainly sing their Captain's Wife's Lament song.

Austin. The one in Texas. Three days before Guy Fawkes Night. Which they probably don't actually celebrate in Texas.

...

Here's a huge interview with me in the Vulture - http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/10/the_vulture_transcript_neil_ga.html

At one point I'm talking about the nature of privacy and blogging, and mention Amanda, who ponders (and, I think, in the end, disagrees with me) over at http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/1344925312/the-mutation-of-embarrassment-art-random-thoughts-of in the kind of blog entry that has as much interesting stuff in the comments as in the journal.

...

And I got to see "Falalafelosophy", the episode of ARTHUR with me in it, playing a walking talking authory black cat named Neil Gaiman. It airs in the US on the 25th of October, although it's already crept out into the world in Australia and (I think) Canada.

It's funny and sweet, and it says things I believe in. I hope that every kid who watches it decides to make his or her own graphic novel.

Labels: Arthur on PBS, Cabal and me, L-0-L-A Lola, nine photographs, Paul and Storm, the blogs and the twitter and the public and the private, w00tstock

It Snowed This Morning

It snowed this morning. I thought it had all melted by the time I went out walking with a camera, but here's a sprinkling of snow on a tree-fungus. It's just wrong. I am not ready for winter. Not yet.

And below is Cabal and some leaves (and Maddy). Many of you have written in to ask why he's not wearing his Go Away Hunters And Do Not Shoot At Me orange cape. It is because he dashed off into the woods the other night after a deer, and returned without it.

Probably the deer is now wearing it to bamboozle hunters.

I'm madly trying to finish things before I head out to China for a few weeks, to wrap up the research on my Journey to the West project (this trip was meant to have happened in Feb/March, but the one-two good-bad punch of winning the Newbery Medal and my father dying threw the whole planned shape of the year out of whack, and it's not back yet).

I finished a short story called "The Thing About Cassandra" and the editors accepted it (hurrah, especially because they were most gracious earlier this year when a story I was writing for them crumbled into dust and ash in my hands before it was done). I'm trying to finish a short story about a cave on the Misty Isle before I leave, and I'll be recording my stuff for my NPR Morning Edition piece. Sxip Shirey is working on the music for my short film soundtrack and every day he sends me bits of music and I play them, and send back a yes, or a no, or a why don't we try this?

We harvested the honey on Thursday, and Cat Mihos chronicled it all on her blog (http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/2009/10/bees-glorious-bees-title-suggested-by.html) including film footage of me shaking bees off a frame, so I refer you there for photos and an account of our day's Beeing. Strangely my favourite moment was when the bees from the Green hive got upset, and suddenly I found myself crouching by the hive in the middle of a storm of very angry bees... and found myself feeling very peaceful and placid, and didn't move and I let them stop being grumpy, and all was good. (Except for Hans and the Birdchick both being stung on their ankles and through their bee suits).

Let's see. Here's an account of the Toledo talk http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091006/ART02/910060367, and of the Cleveland talk (http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2009/10/05/a-geek-heros-welcome-for-author-gaiman).

Both were fun, and started giving me ideas for how to do the CBLDF Reading Tour next year.

Hi Neil,

I know Banned Book Week is over, but since you discussed it on your journal, I hope you won't mind one more question about it.

When is it OK to challenge a book? Should a book be challenged at all if it seems inappropriately placed? For example, I read a lot of young adult, and I found myself reading a book that was distasteful to me, as an adult. (I thought the language and sexual incidents were gratuitous to the story, and beyond what I would want a teenager reading.) I pointed this out to the children's librarian, and she said it would be reviewed. Afterward, I panicked a bit. Had I done something wrong, I wondered. Had I just banned a book?

In your opinion, is there ever a time to challenge a book's placement? For the record, I still don't believe in outright banning a book from a public library, but now I'm not sure how I feel about challenges to young adult sections.

Sincerely,

Amanda R., Louisville, KY

I'm not a librarian or part of the ALA, so you're getting one author's opinion here.

I don't think drawing a librarian's attention to a book, or even suggestion that it's been mis-classified is in any way wrong, or an attempt to ban books. My collection M IS FOR MAGIC exists mostly because I'd noticed some middle schools had begun to buy Smoke and Mirrors and really wasn't comfortable with that book, which contains some stories that really were just intended for adults, being in middle school libraries. (I don't have a problem with it being in High School libraries.)

I think librarians make judgment calls all the time, judgment calls based on community standards, on what they believe about books, and about those books that exist in the grey areas between Children's Books and YA, between YA and Adult Fiction. (Occasionally, as when I hear about The Graveyard Book being kept under the counter, or away from kids under 14, I find it irritating. But, as I say, I also think that librarians are allowed to make judgment calls.)

At the end of the day, I don't think the problem is the people who want to figure out where books get shelved. It's people who want to remove the books entirely, and would very much like to burn them. It's people stealing books as a way of making sure that other people don't read them.

(Here's an excellent article from the School Library Journal about the dilemma of shelving The Graveyard Book - http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6635766.html?q=graveyard+book+children%27s+collection -

which concludes,

Are some libraries shelving Gaiman’s book in the YA section because of its disturbing opening scene? If so, then that “clearly smacks of self-censorship,” says Pat Scales, president of the Association of Library Services to Children. Scales, who says that although determining what materials belong in the children and young adult section is oftentimes difficult, “Anytime you keep something from its intended audience or make it difficult for them to find, that’s self-censorship.” And that’s against professional ethics.

Scales’s advice is to buy one copy for the children’s section and another for the YAs. “Kids have loved ghost stories from the beginning of time,” she says. “What are you going to do? You can’t keep all ghost stories out of the children’s room.”

but truthfully, I wouldn't blame any librarian who decided they wanted The Graveyard Book kept in YA. I would get grumpy if confronted with librarians who had decided not to get The Graveyard Book for their libraries, despite the Newbery Medal, because they thought kids should be protected from it.

Dear Neil,

I’m sure you get loads of nice mail from lots of people around the world. How much nasty mail do you get, though, and does it make you feel bad? If it does, how do you deal with that? I’m a beginning author and I just got my first piece of nasty mail, wherein the writer said she had an absolute “hate crush” on me. I consoled myself with cake and wine but the effects were predictably fleeting.

Thanks,
C.B.

There are mean and crazy people out there, and the relative anonymity of the Internet means that there are always those who will glory in their ability to do the online equivalent of pushing a dead rat through your mail box and running away. You just have to pay attention and you rapidly notice,

a) they're a bit mad.

b) they are very few in number and

c) it's only the internet.

I get well over ten thousand FAQ messages in on this site every year. Most of them don't get posted, because most of them are people saying, in various ways, thank you. Out of that ten thousand there will be a handful, no more than a dozen or so, of weird, poisonous, creepy or crazy ones that come in (from a distinctly smaller number of people than there are email addresses). Most of those get filtered before they reach me. And the ones that make it through normally leave me with a strange, joyous feeling that I must be doing something right if those people don't like me. I'm fascinated by how much more upset they get whenever I get a big award or something good happens.

(On Twitter, I learned very rapidly that any people who posted something nasty, to whom I gave a second chance, would then post something REALLY nasty. So I learned to block first offenders without any troubling of my conscience.)

My advice to you would be to do with creepy emails what Kingsley Amis used to say he did with bad reviews: he let them spoil his breakfast, but didn't let them spoil his lunch. Let the effects of the creepy people be fleeting too. And keep writing, and keep doing well, because it really seems to irritate them.

Which reminds me, The Graveyard Book was made a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honours book, this year, and you can see video footage of the awards ceremony at http://www.hbook.com/bghb/video09.asp, including my editor Elise Howard reading the actual speech I wrote, and the video I recorded for them just as I went down with the hell-flu of last week.

...

Right, more Tabs closing:

I was sorry to learn that Henry Selick and Laika, the director of and studio who made the Coraline movie, are parting company. They were an unstoppable combination, and I wish both of them extremely well in whatever they do in the future.

Why you should dress up as Delirium for Hallowe'en.

Was thrilled to see One and a Half books by me on the Australian Favourite Books of All Time list.

Was fascinated by this New Scientist article -- I've been interested in this ever since I read Ann Hubble talking about the experiment breeding Arctic Foxes for tameness, which, in a couple of decades, produced an animal profoundly doglike. (And the footage of the tame vs aggressive rats is a little chilling...)

...

I just noticed that to celebrate our Year On The Bestseller Lists, over at http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx, where you can still watch me read ALL of The Graveyard Book for free, new Q&A videos have started appearing.

(It looks like they've been going up for the last 5 weeks. I should have mentioned them here, sorry.)

If you head off to http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx?VideoID=16 you will see lots of me answering questions. It's surprising to me how tired I look in them -- I'd forgotten just how gruelling the schedule was, and now all I remember is how immensely enjoyable it was to read stories to and answer questions from so many people across the USA.

Labels: bees, Cabal and me, dog photograph, mad people, the unbearable whiteness of beeing, videos

zoom. zzzzoom.

In Minneapolis Airport. En route to Atlanta airport where I change planes for Dublin.

My dog has now learned the signs of me leaving -- a bag coming down from upstairs, the kitchen table with travel-stuff piled on it (coat, pens, ink, passport) -- and he doesn't like them. Walks around trying offset the inevitable, ears back, worried...

On the good side, he has a week to go before he is allowed off-leash, and can go up and down stairs, and run, and do all the stuff that he is convinced he ought to be able to do right now anyway. So when I come home he will be a much happier dog.

...

For the record on the last post, I have a terrific agent, who looks out for me and whose job it is to make sure that a) I make money by writing and b) that I don't somehow wind up having sold the same rights to two different groups of people. So her concern that text to speech violates audio book rights is natural and sensible.

And when I got this,

I'm glad to know that you support the Kindle text to speech capability. As a C-4 quadriplegic due to a spinal cord injury a few years ago recent improvements in technology allow me the independence to write this e-mail with assistance only from my computer, software and a microphone. However the technology is still young, clunky and not without drawbacks. (It will probably take longer to "write" this short e-mail than it did to listen to my friend read me the first chapter of Coraline!) (Don't ask how long it took me to write the word Coraline either-twice even!) Because there isn't big money for marketing products for para and quads we have to rely on technology progressing just for the sake of technology progressing. I think it would be silly and sad to slow improvments just because of money issues. Thanks for supporting technology and hope to see you at comic-con. -Brook McCall

her reply was,

Well. Okay. Yes. (sound of agent with no argument)

Because she is a wise woman.

oops. gotta board. Happy Friday the 13th. Watch out for lovcratian beasties coming up the argh...

Labels: agent, Cabal and me, copyright, merrilee Heifetz, zoom