Running Saws

I went to England, where I attended Amanda's art event, and saw her band's first real public amplified gig. (I sang Leon Payne's "Psycho" between two duelling musical saw players.) We went from there to Utrecht to celebrate the wedding of Amanda's sister Alyson, and to spend time with my milliner daughter, Holly, who has just completed her Higher National Diploma in Millinery, and is no longer a 'prentice Milliner.

(Photo by Elliott Franks. The whole photoset is here. L to R,  we are looking at shadowy Chad Raines, Adrien Stout of the Tiger Lilies, me, and Michael McQuilken. And some flowers.)

On the plane to the UK I finished writing the new novel. I'm not sure right now if it's going to be called Lettie Hempstock's Ocean or not. I think it's a good book - or at least, I think it's a real book, and I'm proud of it, and whether it's good or not will be up to other people to judge. Despite the protagonist being about 7 years old for most of the novel, it's a book for adults. Or at least, I think it is.

Now I'm doing things to it, including worrying that there's a better title and rereading it and making it better and clearer and scarier wherever I can. But it's a new book for adults, one I didn't even know I would write until February, and it makes me happy that it exists.

Waiting for me when I got home were some fold and gathers (or F&Gs) of Chu's Day - unbound copies that will go to booksellers and librarians and such people who will decide what they are ordering and how many copies of a book that has not been printed.

Chu's Day is the first book I've ever written for really little kids. Ones who cannot read. Ones who can only just walk. Those ones. I hope that they like it, or at least, that they love Adam Rex's amazing illustrations.

...

This is advance warning that on Friday the 29th, at 8:30 am UK time, Tickets for the Edinburgh Book Festival go onsale.

I'm only doing one event there this year, on Monday the 13th of August, at 8 pm. Chris Riddell is the artist in residence and he and I will talk together about Coraline's Tenth Anniversary. (Here's the UK's 10th Anniversary edition.)

Details at http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/coraline-with-neil-gaiman-chris-riddell

I'll also be playing the Voice of the Book at the Edinburgh Playhouse on July 21st, in the final show of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Live tour, currently going on. (The whole tour is at http://www.hitchhikerslive.com/tour-dates.html and some dates have started to sell out. But not Edinburgh, not yet.)

(There may be one more Edinburgh thing. I'll post details here as soon as I know.)

I'm strangely jet-lagged right now... I was writing this and suddenly the world went all flat and odd, which means, I suspect, that I should stop writing now and either go for a run or go for a nap.

I wish I could do both at the same time. But then I'd wake up and be somewhere I had no memory of running to, and no idea of how to get back...

Labels: Chu's Day, Coraline, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Book Festival, Elliott Franks, Holly graduates, Lettie Hempstock's Ocean or whatever it winds up being called, the perils of sleepjogging

The Simpsons and the Other Mother

Here's the SIMPSONS episode that I'm in. It's called THE BOOK JOB. I'm not sure how long it'll be up for.

If you're not in the US and you want to watch it, I recommend Tunnelbear (downloadable from http://www.tunnelbear.com/). It's what I use to tell the internet I'm either in the US or the UK, depending on where it would like me to be. They have a free service, but I eventually signed up for the paid one.

And, because it is good that you heard it here first, in the UK Bloomsbury are doing a special Tenth Anniversary edition of Coraline next year, illustrated by Chris Riddell. They just sent me his illustrations...



...

Also http://cbldf.org/homepage/cbldf-cyber-monday-25-amazing-graphic-novelists-personalize-your-gifts-in-the-spirit-of-giving/

Fight censorship this Cyber Monday by getting your holiday gifts from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund! 25 of today’s most popular graphic novelists will personalize their books to the fans on your list in exchange for donations to the Fund! Best of all, every item supports the Fund’s First Amendment legal work, and a portion of each contribution is tax-deductible.



As part of the CBLDF’s Spirit of Giving holiday gift drive, donations you make on Cyber Monday will be acknowledged by The Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation who will make a contribution of $1 for every donation and gift order placed on the CBLDF’s website. In addition, they will contribute $5 for each new, renewing or gift membership made from now until December 31!
25 legendary graphic novelists are personalizing books for the CBLDF, including some of the season’s best new gift books.

Make your holiday comics giving a cinch by choosing from books by bestselling masters including Neil Gaiman, art spiegelman, Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, and Scott McCloud; Lit comics lions Chester Brown, Dan Clowes, Los Bros. Hernandez, Seth, and Adrian Tomine; Indy comics icons Jeff Smith, Evan Dorkin, Larry Marder, Carla Speed McNeil and Terry Moore; Superhero visionaries Ed Brubaker, Jonathan Hickman, and Paul Levitz; or Hard boiled thrill makers Robert Kirkman, Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughan, and Brian Wood!

Labels: CBLDF, chris Riddell, Coraline, The Simpsons episode with me in it

Nakedly Commercial Post Sweetened By A Dog Photo

Just a quick post to let those interested know that both Amazon and Barnes and Noble are doing extreme Christmassy discounts on ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS. It's available for 50% of the cover price...

The Amazon.com link is http://www.amazon.com/Odd-Frost-Giants-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0061671738

The Barnes and Noble link is at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Odd-and-the-Frost-Giants/Neil-Gaiman/e/9780061671739

...

There's a lovely New York Times article that says that CORALINE is one of the best films of the year; a great UK Sunday Times roundup of the best childrens' books of the year, that lists Crazy Hair:

There are few picturebook-makers as cool as Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman, and their latest collaboration, Crazy Hair (Bloomsbury £11.99), for 3-6s, is wild. It’s about a father whose hair is so big it contains tigers, pirate ships and carousels. Distortions and magnifications make the images strange and dark, rivalling the text for energy and verve.

I got to amaze and impress my daughter Maddy the other day, using http://us.akinator.com. You may enjoy impressing someone with it. Or perhaps just learn to demonstrate your telekinetic skill (I wish I'd known how to do this when I was twelve. I would have conquered the world with it).

Here's a Czech literary scandal I found fascinating, featuring a non-existent 19 year old Vietnamese girl: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/reports/200912/The-literary-scandal-that-rocked-the-Czech-Republic-884057/.

And in case any of you need photos of worried or screaming children sitting on the laps of Santas who go from inert to terrifying: http://www.sketchysantas.com

Labels: Coraline, Crazy Hair, dog photograph, half-price books

Snowbirds

Cabal's left hind leg is shaved, and has a stitched-up incision. It's so cold outside that he's whimpering when I take him outside to pee; it's so cold outside that it hurts to breathe. And I'm way behind on deadlines. So I'm going to put him in the car and drive south, until I get somewhere it's warm enough for a sick dog and a grumpy author.

I think it's a good bet that I'll be off blogger, twitter, and probably even email for at least a few days.

In the meantime, a fully-browsable version of Coraline, for those of you who want to read the book before the movie comes out....

...and the School Library Journal has done an article on all the various versions of Coraline currently out there.

Labels: cold [the extreme kind], Coraline

[message redacted]

It's too late at night, so this is just to say that I went in to Minneapolis to to see Jonathan Coulton, in company with with Jen-the-dogsitter and Sharon-the-beesitter (although Sharon was actually and inexplicably on the Coulton Merch table). It was a delightful show -- Paul and Storm, the support act (and occasional backing vocals and badinage) were terrific and Jonathan was astonishingly good. They got a standing ovation at the end, and not just because Minnesotan audiences are nice and nobody wanted to go out into the snow.

If you're in Madison, Chicago or St Louis over the next few days go and see him (er, them) --http://www.jonathancoulton.com/shows.

...

I keep forgetting to post about Freerice, a sort of combination of it pays to Improve your Wordpower and the Hunger Site, and I really should, especially because it's more fun than solitaire when you're making a phone call and in front of a computer screen at the same time. Hundreds of people have written to tell me about it, but the first was Rachel Landau back in October, who said...

Hi, Mr. Gaiman! This website is probably far too distracting for you while you're busy writing, but could you post this link up?www.freerice.com
Improve your vocabulary and save the world, all at one website!

...

Hey Neil,Been reading this blog for a long time. Always enjoy seeing how ordinary and absurd other peoples lives can be. While I love the pictures you post off the people, animals, and places that are important to you, I have noticed that you never put any up of your son. Is he camera shy like me, or do you omit him for another reason?

I think he's less keen on the limelight than his sisters. But he's certainly turned up from time to time -- I found a few pictures of him at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/Mike.html
for example.

...

It looks like I'm not going to post the 3D Coraline trailer here (mostly because it was made to be seen in 3D). But the good people at Laika and Focus are putting their heads together, and a Coraline Christmas Present is Being Discussed....

...

I just saw that American Films are not welcome in China. I sort of shrugged, but when I then read that,

Four films that would normally have expected to be cleared for release in January or February have been locked out: Disney's "Enchanted," DreamWorks' "Bee Movie," Paramount's "Stardust" and Warner's "Beowulf."

I started to take it personally...

...

And to finish, some robotic Coulton...

Labels: birdchick, completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead, Coraline, Jonathan Coulton, Mike

As Dr Johnson said...

I was meant to be on NPR's TALK OF THE NATION tomorrow. But their schedules have shifted and I'll be on the radio this afternoon -- Wednesday the 8th of August. I think that http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
is their website. I'll be on towards the end of the second hour (the hour that some stations don't get).

John Scalzi writes wisely, as usual, over at his blog about Stardust and how he thinks it'll do:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/08/07/stardusts_chances.html
and I couldn't see anything there to disagree with.

I have no doubt at all that Stardust will do brilliantly around the world, rock out on DVD, and become one of those films that is beloved. But how it will do this weekend... ah, that's a mystery. I was fascinated by this article about success and failure -- and, more importantly, the perception of success and failure -- in movie box office:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/hollywood-where-ignoran_b_59464.html
(link via.)

I remember the first time I went to Hollywood, with Terry Pratchett, in 1992 I learned that you could frame any conversation about something you wanted to do in a plot that Hollywood Execs didn't understand or had a problem with if you referred to another movie that they'd seen. ("So why don't they...?" "Because they forget about it, um -- just like at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK." "Oh. Got it.") And it was useful for talking about the feel of things -- you simply positioned what you were talking about against or with other films.

By 1996, when I went back to Hollywood, something had changed. I remember naming a movie in one of those conversations -- talking about look and feel or about lighting or about something like that -- and having the Exec look at me as if I had something unpleasant on my shoe, and he said, simply, "But that film didn't make any money." He couldn't understand why I would even have brought it up.

...

Over on Charles Vess's blog you can see a photo of us at the end of the premiere, me in a tuxedo and him not, because he forgot his shirt studs.

The birdchick does a honey from our hives taste test over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/08/go-see-stardust-and-little-about-our.html

Hi Neil, I was wondering if you knew what's up with Rich Horton's Fantasy: Best of the Year 2007 Edition. There are three authors touted prominently on the cover of the mass market paperback: you, Gene Wolfe, and Peter S. Beagle. Of the three of you, Beagle is the only one who actually has a story inside. What happened? Was there a story of yours that was supposed to be in it? And what about Gene Wolfe?

It was a screw-up - the publisher reused the names from the previous year, by accident. They wrote to me and apologised, and I told them that somewhere in my basement I have a handful of copies of the UK edition of THE SANDMAN BOOK OF DREAMS in paperback, which proudly lists Stephen King on the cover as having written a story, for reasons no-one was ever able to explain. That time we were lucky, and we caught it in time to pulp the print-run. But sometimes you can't.

Hi Mr G,
Can I download the clip of Maddy's interview of you? I want to hear it over and over again to boost myself. It's just inspiring to listen to a daughter interviewing her dad. It makes me want to write more too, just like you; and just like you, you write for the people important to you.
Thanks,

JPB

PS. Please say HI to Maddy for me. :)

Easy (well, easy after a quick Google anyway). It's at the Harper Collins Digital Media cafe -- http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/ -- and the direct link to the free download is http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/product_details.jsp?productId=807

As you'll ultimately be getting one of the Coraline puppets, I thought you might like to see how they're being made: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/beginning-to-build-coraline/

That would be cool even if I wasn't getting one...

Wow. Hey! Why have you stopped putting a "stardust"/"stardust movie" label on posts that involve Stardust? (Of course the choice of labels is completely your prerogative, but it would make it a lot easier to find certain posts, and it seems like this would be an ideal time to make use of the label function - is there a particular reason you have stopped using the labels in this case?)

Ignorance, madam. Pure ignorance. Or at least, ineptitude when it comes to labelling.

Labels: Coraline, honey, John Scalzi, labels, more Stardust mostly, one of those posts that covers lots of things I can't be bothered to label, radio, Stardust, Stardust movies

famousnessness

There's an interview with Dave McKean in the Star Tribune, setting up for Dave and Me Doing Stuff Before An Audience at the Walker in Minneapolis on Jan 11th (Details at http://www.raintaxi.com/readings/). I'm uncomfortable with the "Dave's the less famous one of the Gaiman-McKean partnership" editorial approach -- there are many worlds in which I'm very-famous-artist Dave McKean's less famous collaborator.
The interview's at http://www.startribune.com/384/story/916130.html

I did a quick Google to try and find a few Dave McKean articles pointing this out, and I found this article -- http://www.mpr.org/www/books/titles/gaiman_coraline/mckean.shtml -- at MPR's Talking Volumes. While the article on Dave is actually up on http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/essays/essaysbyneil/ , there's some terrific stuff in the MPR article sidebar -- lots of radio interviews, and the entire Talking Volumes radio special on CORALINE with Katherine Lanpher at the Fitzgerald Theatre.

Labels: Coraline, Dave McKean, Katherine Lanpher, unlikely made up words with extra nesses at the end, Walker

American Gods Blog, Post 90

Blogger.

Dateline American Gods plus one.

I'm in New York in a car on my way to the Huntingdon signing, with the libretto on my lap. So...

This is what happens two days before publication: you fly in to New York, and do a gig with the Magnetic Fields. Two sets. I did two completely different readings - lots of short stuff, some new stuff, some weird stuff. Afterward it occurred to me that I did the readings completely for Neil Gaiman fans, and that the people who were solely Magentic Feilds fans (Stephen Merrit says that's how their name is most often misspelled) were probably very puzzled and perplexed. The readings I'd do for an audience entirely consisting of people who have no idea who I am or what I do would be very different from one I'd do for people who want to hear B-sides and rarities...

And I got to watch both sets of the Magnetic Fields - who also did two very different sets early evening and late. Which made me astonishingly happy. It 's a very good thing to have your favourite band in the whole world be people you like to spend time with as well as people you like to watch. Highlights for me were Stephen`s performance of Papa Was a Rodeo (first set version) and Claudia's Acoustic Guitar (second set version) and the second set duet of Yeah, Oh Yeah.

Next morning - Monday - I slept in, for the last time for a long time, then went up to the Harper Collins office and Met People. Meeting People at your publishers is part of being an author they don't tell you much about. It's fun. People are in publishing because they love books. This is an important thing to remember. (a very few of them are in publishing because they once loved books. This is sad when it happens.) I met the e-book division. They love e-books, which is harder to do. Now, I have recently acquired an e-book and haven`t had much a chance to play with it - so far I think the best thing about it will probably prove to be that you can read in the dark without waking up the person next to you. I will report back on the crop of e\books by me, which come out next week, and which I will look at on my new toy. After I met the e-book people I met the people who run HarperCollins.

(It's now half a day later, and I'm typing on the way to Newark.)

Let`s see. Monday. Okay... so, I signed books for people at HarperCollins. I had dinner with people from HarperCollins. I went to bed. I went to sleep. After about half an hour I woke up completely and unexpectedly. As the e-book was by the bed, I read the instructions for the e-book in the dark, and practised the alphabet for making notes in the dark. If I had been someone in the bed next to me, I wouldn`t have woken up, if you see what I mean.

Breakfast with the Harper Children`s Publisher, my Harper Editor and my agent about Coraline. It'll be published in 2002 - they want to move it from Spring to Fall, to get more attention for it. I say okay. (American Gods will still come out in paperback in May of 2002) Then we run, my agent and I, to her office, to meet my UK editor on Coraline, who is in New York. She`s from Bloomsbury, and I like her immediately, and look forward to working with her.

The day spins and whirls and somewhere in there I eat lunch (Onigashima on 55th St., really really good sushi) and somewhere a bit later I turn up at Borders in the World Trade Centre for the reading and signing.

A host of friends turn up before the signing as I sit in a back room signing books for staff, and I say my hellos and check my pens... and by a little after 7.00pm I'm out there in front of the people.

It`s been years since I felt nervous at a signing. This time I feel nervous: it`s publication date. It`s the first signing. I don`t know.

Borders World Trade Center is a good store. I did a signing there for Neverwhere in 1997 and it was a tight squeeze then... and there are a lot more people there now. Over 500 of them, at a guess. Seating for about 80 people at the reading, which meant that three-quarters of the people couldn' t see what was going on. (My apologies if you were one of them.) Surprised, as I said, to find I was genuinely nervous. Read the opening of the book as the nerves slowly dissipated, answered audience questions about an odd assortment of things (including, rather to my surprise, pumpkin-growing) and off we go signing...

Finished around 11:30 with over 450 AMERICAN GODS signed. (Rule here - any copies of American Gods plus two other things.) Hurrah for Daryl and the staff...

Walk out of signing to find a few friends hanging around, including my friends writer Andy Heidel (former HarperCollins publicist, now sci-fi-channel man) and his fiancee Jen the Puppet Queen (Mama Lion on Between The Lions) and the wonderful Claudia Gonson (sings, plays keyboards for and manages the Magnetic Fields). They had been hanging around for hours to say hello and maybe even buy me a drink. I haven't eaten since lunchtime, and tell them so, and we wind up eating upstairs in a little Japanese place somewhere half a Manhattan away from Borders World Trade Centre. Where we immediately bump into someone who had been at the signing but had, after three hours, given up and wandered off...

Get back late to hotel. Bath. Sleep. It`s late. That was publication day.

Wake up rather in need of a shave to learn that I forgot to pack a razor. Right. I'll buy a razor. Run for breakfast with my agent, and from there to a meeting with a booking agency who want to represent me as a public speaker. Am kindly disposed to them because they represented Douglas Adams and had already approached me before he died - in fact I'd been ready to call him and find out whether he liked them... Not that I want a career as a public speaker I should add, but I need somewhere to send all the requests that are always coming in for me to go to universities and cutlural festivals and such, and these guys are probably going to be better at saying "No" than I am.

On the way out I learn how many copies of American Gods were sold on the first day of publication at Borders, at Barnes and Noble, at Waldenbooks. ("Is that good?" I ask. I'm told that, yes, it's good. It's bestseller numbers. Now we just have to hope it keeps up for the rest of the week.)

Lunch at Yamaguchi on 45th St (their prices are twice what Onigashima was for worse food.) An afternoon of drop-in signings.

Drop-ins are just that. Hit and run attacks by an author, where you go in, sign the shop stock, go away again. This can be an unpleasant experience, or a pleasant one. Ever since a store in San Francisco had a line of 60 people waiting for me at one of these, I've forbidden publishers to tell bookstores any more about drop-in times than than "He'll be in in the afternoon". But frankly, for as many places as you drop in and they're excited and have alerted their favourite customers to hang around the store all afternoon to meet you, there are as many stores that you get to be met by blank looks from store assistants and they explain that they aren't sure where Dave is, and Dave is the only person who knows where the single copy of your book that they are sure they have somewhere was put.

I sign a heap of American Gods at the Barnes and Nobles in Astor Place and Chelsea.(if you`re in New York and you want a signed copy, that might be the best way to go.) Realize I`m not going to have time to buy a razor before the signing.

Out to Huntingdon Long Island to Book Revue. Sign staff stuff. Eat a hasty tuna salad (I`d learned my lesson on not eating at all the night before). It 's a medium-sized signing in a thunderstorm, although lots more people can sit and see what's going on than at Borders. I read The I-Love-Lucy scene. It must have been a unique experience for the audience, hearing a bemused English author doing his Lucille Ball impression accompanied by ominous thundery rumbles. I'm not saying it was any good, mind you. Just that it's not an everyday occurrence.

(That last bit was typed in Newark airport. Now I'm writing sitting in Chicago O Hare airport, waiting for Jennifer Hershey, my editor, who is doing this leg with me.)

Book Revue was a pleasant signing - nice staff, nice store - huge as a Barnes and Noble superstore, but it smelled like books, like paper and wood and old binding glue - and, as always, the people in the line were nice people. Finished a little after eleven. 170+ copies of American Gods were sold, many hundreds of people were made happy.

In the car on the way there and on the way back I got to talk to the book`s publicity team, Jack and Dee Dee. It was good

Got back to my hotel by around 1.30 am. Put in for the 6.30 wake-up call, ate a banana, did some packing. Noticed a message on my phone and called and discovered a package of images had arrived for me from England, so called down for them, and waited.

Package arrived. It made me happy. I slept.

And the wake-up call stumbled me out of the hotel and there was the driver. "Off to Newark," I said. "No, to La Guardia," he said. I panicked. We checked our papers, and I was right and he`d been given the wrong information. And I started typing this.

They may have served breakfast on the plane. I don`t know. I was asleep. Now I`m in Chicago. A few minutes to post this and run. Then I really have to find a razor.

Labels: A Walking Tour of the Shambles, American Gods, American Gods Blog, Coraline, Magnetic Fields, sushi

American Gods Blog, Post 72

So I spent today, as I will spend tomorrow, working on writing a circus. Something I've always wanted to do, which is why I'm currently writing it. (The young lady who runs the circus in question spent a year or so not taking no for an answer from me, and her persistance seems to have paid off. I spent most of today saying things to her like "Can you do this...?" and "What about this...?" and at one point phoning an expert and getting a hasty lecture on the fluorescent qualities of laser beams for something I started wondering about.)

Seeing I plugged a lot of other people's stuff yesterday, I thought I'd point out that The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish makes a really cool Fathers Day present. (Yay! to Amazon.com for featuring it on their kids page.)

And yay! to Morrow for getting out the American Gods newsletter.

Incidentally, if you've received the newsletter with the extract from American Gods in it, I should point out that in that extract, in the phrase "the titter skin-crawling horror" the word "titter" should be "utter", and for that matter that the sentence "He practiced coin tricks from a book lie found in the wasteland of the prison library; and lie worked out;" reads better if you replace the word "lie" with the word "he".

(I hope when they put up the www.americangods.com/excerpt page that they'll put it up from a clean text.)

....

More reviews today -- an enthusiastic one from the Barnes and Noble Explorations magazine, a nice mention from the NY Post, and one from Booklist, where the reviewer, who had loved Neverwhere and Stardust, hated it -- the kind of complete and entire hate where the reviewer doesn't even stop to point out the things he liked about the book, if there were any. He just seemed to wish it was another book entirely, a kind of "this is spinach and I don't like spinach" review: I think Coraline (which comes out next May) will be to his taste.

...

Also brought home several boxes of books, notebooks and such from the office, to compile a sort of core of references I used writing American Gods for NeilGaiman.com. It'll be incomplete, but a good place to start. (The single most useful reference work was probably A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, by Rudolf Simek.)

And I copy-edited a poster of my poem INSTRUCTIONS with art by Brian and Wendy Froud, which will be coming out this summer in a signed, limited edition, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I think it's going to be popular, on the basis that my assistant and my daughter have both extracted a promise from me that they can get one when they come out, from the proof knocking around the office.

(if it's sucessful, we might do a poem I wrote for my goddaughter, as a benefit for RAINN...)

....

Ah, the Chapter One excerpt is up at www.americangods.com/excerpt.html (they left off the html on the newsletter). It's kind of odd -- all the italics have fallen out as well. I'll see if we can get a cleaner copy up...

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, Blueberry Girl, book reviews, Brian and Wendy Froud, circuses, Coraline, Instructions, Neverwhere, Stardust, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish