A Spectrum of Stuff

Let's see if this works...

When last heard from I was in Wales, for the Doctor Who table read. And then I was off the world picking plums.

I'm still off the edge of the world right now. I was exhausted when I got here -- more exhausted than even I knew, I think. Too much travel, too much nothing ever quite stopping, too many meals on the road. I felt old and creaky and tired.

I spent my first week catching up on my sleep, eating sensible meals that I made myself, mostly veggies and fruits and fresh-caught fish (courtesy of the neighbours, who would walk up the hill and tap on the window, and give me fresh-caught mackerel and such. I gave them bags of plums). I did a lot of walking. Then I got a bicycle, and started going on daily bike rides, two miles to start with, which turned into six to ten miles each day as soon as I started to get into it. I'd take photos of things I'd pass while bike-riding using my little Nexus 1 phone camera and then knit them together with a stitcher program called Hugin.

An interesting rock.

During the first of the ten mile bike rides, I realised I knew what the next big fictional prose story I wanted to tell is. And that I know the story, or enough of it, but not who tells it, who sees it, how it's told. It may have to go back and forth with different people telling different chapters, and bits in diaries and such. It's tremendously reassuring when that happens - an idea turns up and you know it's big and it has legs and nobody's told that story before. And that if you just get all the pieces into position before you start, the plot will take care of itself. Getting the pieces into place is going to be the hard bit.

It may be a while before I'm ready to start writing it. Lots of thinking to do first. But it's the next big story, I think.

And somewhere in there I lost about 8 pounds, stopped creaking and feeling old and travel-weary and started smiling, and wrote a couple of things that people were waiting for. Didn't write many more things people were waiting for, but I don't feel too bad about it: everything will get written eventually.

On Saturday I stop being a hermit and hit the road. Later in the week I'll arrive in Wales, to see the first couple of days of filming of my episode and be interviewed by Doctor Who Confidential.

News from home:

1) Cabal had an operation to uncompress parts of his spine, as he was having trouble walking. He's recovering. I am still worried. We chat on Skype. Or at least, I talk to him and he tries to figure out where my voice is coming from. Lorraine has done an amazing job of being there and keeping everything going, as has Woodsman Hans, and I am grateful. Now we wait. Lorraine's been keeping things updated on her blog, at http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com.

2) On October the 25th, I'll be on PBS's Arthur. I play a writer called Neil Gaiman.

I'm a writer who's a cat. You can be both.

You can read about it at http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/09/neil-gaiman-gets-animated-on-arthur/.

3) Maddy Gaiman passed her driving test. All of my children can now drive. Ulp.

4) There's an eBay auction going on through http://www.twitchange.com/, to raise money for a Haitian orphanage. Lots of people taking part who will mention/retweet/follow you on Twitter if you win the auction. I've also said I'll call the winner of the "megapack" auction for me and read them a poem or a short story. It seems an easy, sensible way to help raise money for a good cause. The complete list of people offering their services (including Stephen Fry and Nathan Fillion and Rainn Wilson) is up at http://bit.ly/twitchanges....

And you can bid on me, or see where bidding is at, at http://bit.ly/ebayneil

5) Matthew Cheney's been writing about Sandman, chapter by chapter, each week. Here are the links to the first 8 episodes - the whole of Preludes and Nocturnes: http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-preludes-and-nocturnes-cheat-sheet/ while The Doll's House begins with http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-tales-in-the-sand/

6) Over at the TOR website, they've reprinted my story "Bitter Grounds", originally from Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, and later in Fragile Things: http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/09/bitter-grounds.

The illustration is a painting by Rick Berry, working into a painting that he, and I, and my friend SuperKate, were doing in his studio one night (he writes about it here, photos by me).

(And look! Here is that man Matthew Cheney talking about "Bitter Grounds" at the Mumpsimus.)

7) No, that was all. Just six things. There isn't a seventh. It's like the rainbow, where they changed Purple to Indigo and Violet just to make it more interesting.

Labels: arbitrary spectrum composition thoughts, Arthur on PBS, bigger on the inside, do bactera wiggle?, Doctor Who, Dog, seven things, the composition of rainbows

this is the way "Cabal Fortnight" ends...

Web goblin here, one last time for the final post of what I like to think of as "Cabal: Year One", marking an appropriate completion to "Cabal Fortnight". It's been fun, as always. See you around on LJ and FB!

Cabal turns the reins -er- leash of the blog back over to Mr. G.
(photo most likely by Kyle Cassidy)

---

reprinted from Probably the last Dog Photos of the Year (27 December 2007)

It's been a strange year. On the 30th of April I found a dog by the side of the road. This is what he looked like then...

He was wet, a sort of off-brown colour, smelled dreadful and while he didn't seem very bright, he was extremely goodhearted.

It turned out he was very bright, he'd just spent his three years of life on a short chain in a farmer's yard, and no-one had talked to him, or expected anything more of him than barking at visitors as a sort of canine doorbell.

And this is what he looks like now... (with a very scruffy author this morning). (Photos by Holly.)

Cabal is one of the most beautiful dogs I've ever seen. What breed is he?

He is, as the farmer who gave him to me said at the time (and I doubted at the time, because I didn't know that he was white under all that) a White German Shepherd Dog (what we called an Alsatian when I was growing up in England -- the German Shepherd became known as an Alsatian in the UK during World War I in much the same way that French Fries became Freedom Fries in the US a few years back). There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family.

---

For more recent Cabal news, the Fabulous Lorraine posted about him just yesterday.

Labels: Be seeing you., Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog

I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now.

Welcome to the penultimate post in "Cabal Week". I'm your host, the web goblin. (You may wonder why I keep identifying myself. It's because I'm still getting comments on the LJ feed, on Facebook, and on formspring -- where I've had great fun answering your questions -- from people who seem to believe that [a] these introductions are written by Mr. G and [b] that the below reprinted posts are current. Thank you all for the advice on how to help Cabal and Fred get along, but that issue is ancient history now.)

A reader requested more pictures of Pearl and Lola:

Cabal and his friend, Pearl,
visit a disadvantaged youth
as part of their volunteer efforts in animal therapy.
The young man later removed his oversized fencing mask
for the first time in the years since his parents were viciously murdered
by ribbon-twirling Olympic gymnasts.

Cabal and new addition, Lola, go for a wade and a swim, respectively.

---

reprinted from Sorry. And a short fillum. (10 May 2007)


I took Cabal to Dog Obedience school yesterday evening (at which he cheerfully disgraced himself in a variety of different ways). But it meant that I was armed with the tools to cope when, a little later in the evening, something like this started happening again...


reprinted from Why I Like Russia (11 August 2007)

Cabal the dog is braver than lions. He's braver than elephants and braver than generals. But, I discovered last night, he doesn't like thunderstorms, and turns into a worried two-year old child when the lightning strikes and the thunder roars. Which is why I got very little sleep in the small hours of last night.


reprinted from I just don't see it... (16 September 2007)

Mr and Mrs Wm. Stiteler -- AKA the Birdchick and Non-Birding Bill -- are currently in residence at my place in the US for the weekend, where Bill is trying to figure out why the upstairs Slingbox isn't slinging, and Sharon is checking the bees for mites (I think she may have to coat some 300 bees in powdered sugar, but don't quote me on this). Both of them are providing company to Cabal the dog. You would think that would be enough for them to do.

But nay. Far from it.

Someone wrote to Sharon's blog to say that my dog looked like me.

So Sharon and Bill decided to put it to the test. They just emailed me the results...



Nope. See? Nothing like me at all...

Labels: Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog, I wish we were an old couple.

I'm sweet and I'm cuddly. (I'm gonna kill Scully!)

Your humble web goblin here again. We're quickly nearing the end of "Cabal Fortnight".

I wish I had something fun or witty to say here, but my day job is totally sucking my brain dry today. I had planned to go to Amanda's ninja gig in Bethesda after work tonight but, even assuming I could leave on time, I think I'm going to be too drained. *le sigh*

That said, there's a chance that I'll get a second wind and being feeling witty later, so if anyone wants to ask me a question anonymously, I could try to do something along those lines. (UPDATE: I appear to have #neilwebfail'd formspring at the moment. Oops. Sorry, formspring!) (UPDATE: And now it's back, and has stayed up for the past half hour, so perhaps we're out of the woods.)

HEY GIRL, I MADE YOU BREAKFAST IN BED
BUT YOU WERE SLEEPING SO I ATE IT.
it was so good.

---

reprinted from like cats and dogs (7 May 2007)

Hi Neil! As I'm more of a cat person, I 'feel' for your cats! Are they jealous of your new dog? ~ Cancan =)

Jealous? No. Princess is alternately furious with me and desperately affectionate, Coconut (Maddy's cat) is mostly blase but also a bit more affectionate, and Fred is plotting on ways to get revenge on the dog for having treed him yesterday evening. It's the kind of thing I could be really funny about, but the truth is it's rather worrying -- the dog is convinced he needs to protect us from Fred, and has only actually barked twice since we got him, each time inside the house to warn us that Fred was walking around outside and might get us if Dog didn't protect us, meanwhile Fred on seeing the Dog arches his back like a Halloween card cat, swells to twice his size and makes strangled yowling noises to indicate his extreme displeasure. As far as the two mostly-house cats go, I think we'll be fine at getting them more or less to tolerate each other. Fred, however is a law unto himself, and it's going to be interesting.

Labels: B#, Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog, Fred the Unlucky Black Cat

he's certainly no Buck

Mr. G would like me to announce the following:

EXCLUSIVE WORLD PREMIERE
Neil Gaiman: The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains
Illustrations: Eddie Campbell Music: FourPlay String Quartet
Concert Hall
Sat 7 Aug, 8pm

In a world first, Gaiman will read aloud his previously unreleased story The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains, in the spectacular surrounds of the Concert Hall. Sydney Opera House has commissioned the renowned artist Eddie Campbell to illustrate the story and FourPlay String Quartet to create an entirely new underscore to the story.

The best way to stay on top of such events is to subscribe to the feed.


Kitty took this photograph of Cabal and Pearl:



Her friend, Cyn Moore, who makes the Dream pendants for Neverwear, loved the photograph, and created a painting from it:



And now, on to the reposting. Tonight I reach deep into the vault and bring you excerpts from three different entries.

---

reprinted from For anyone who ever wondered what I look like not in black... (3 May 2007)

Lots and lots of people writing in suggesting dog names. (And convincing me that he really is a white German Shepherd Dog.) Several people wanting to know how Dog's getting on with the cats. (Princess and Coconut -- Maddy's cat -- are wary but fine. Fred, on the other hand, thinks Dog should go back where he came, and keeps him under remote surveillance while reporting in to Feline High Command. Dog thinks we need protecting from Fred, and has made it clear that he is willing to give his life if necessary in saving us from the menace of a small much-battered black cat. It's going to be interesting...)


reprinted from Trousers (4 May 2007)

A deluge of messages, many hundreds of them, and all of them are dog-name suggestions. Some of them I've tried, but they don't seem right -- they sound wrong coming out of my mouth, or, mostly, they are terrific names but don't quite fit him, or, in a few cases, Maddy doesn't like them. (I wanted to go Arthurian, but the front runner, a Maddy pick, currently seems to be Thor.)

(Dog update. Vet today: Dog weighs 78lb and still needs to put on a little weight; is now microchipped; is also on antibiotics to deal with early stage Lyme Disease, and got all the various shots he needed. Also taken into the vet at the same time: Fred the Cat, who, with half of his face shaved and drooling thick slobber from being car-sick, looked like something from a horror movie, the sort of movie that makes you shake your head and wonder whatever happened to subtlety in horror.)

I've walked more in the last two days than I have in months.


reprinted from Responsibility, I expect (5 May 2007)

Hello there, Neil (if I may be so bold),
About the Dog and its name... I had already found it odd before, but now with the deluge of suggestions, it's itching my brain:
What was the dog's name before it was yours? Didn't the former (and farmer, ha ha) owner tell you? Shouldn't you be calling Dog whatever it was? I mean, dogs usually recognize their names, unlike cats (as far as I know, feel free to correct me on that)...

They do if they get called it, but I don't think anyone ever actually spoke to him. He was just tied up in the farmyard. He doesn't react in any way to his former name (it was "Buck") -- if he did, we'd happily keep it the same.

I'm having fun teaching him to sit. (It'd work better if he was more easily bribeable, though. What kind of dog doesn't like treats?) First obedience class Wednesday night.

King Arthur's dog was Cafall and Caval and Cabal and many variants thereon. I'm leaning to Cabal...

Labels: Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog

RT @neilhimself: Possibly not entirely unexpected news

Week one of "Cabal Week", aka "Cabal Fortnight", aka "Cabal: Year One" fittingly ends here.

Cabal: Noble, valiant steed Cabal will carry you across
        this river, m'lady.
Amanda: Aww, does Cabal-dabble need some muzzle scritchies?
Cabal: ...

---

reprinted from Possibly not entirely unexpected news (2 May 2007)


I seem to have acquired a dog.

I got a call today to say that the owner of the dog I found on Monday had called the Humane Society and collected him. I was happy Dog was back with his family, but found myself rather sadder than I would have expected -- I realised I'd half hoped that maybe no-one would claim him.

The call went on to say that the dog's owner, a local farmer, who kept him chained up in the yard, and couldn't walk well so couldn't walk him, thought the dog was a nuisance, always getting out and heading onto the freeway and sooner or later he'd cause an accident, and, when the Humane Society lady mentioned that the person who found him rather liked him, he told her that if I came over and picked him up I could have him.

So I did.

The farmer said he thought the dog was a white German Shepherd. I think he's a German Shepherd labrador cross, but I'm probably wrong.

We seem to be getting on very well so far.

I was planning to blog about an amazing morning with bees and haircuts and about how Jouni is illustrating How To Talk to Girls At Parties.

But this entry is just about the dog, who doesn't quite have a name yet, and wouldn't stay still to have his photo taken, so eventually I dragged him into the office and turned on Photobooth...

Labels: Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog

Andre may have a posse, but Cabal has a cabal.

I realized yesterday that, due to quirks of scheduling, I've spent more time with Cabal than I have with Mr. G. On the other hand, Cabal isn't as good about updating his twitter.

Tangential Note: Kitty, she of Neverwear, would like it known that the Cabal postcards, bearing the winning images from the contest, will be a bit delayed, as she is currently working the Lady Gaga tour.

OH HAI. I HAS STICK.

---

reprinted from Infernal Devices (1 May 2007)

The Dog is fine -- we called the Humane Society and he's impounded for a week (which means I couldn't go over and say hullo and take him for a walk). Fred is back from the vet. We still have three goldfish.

...

Dear Neil,

Can you or someone please post pics of that "cool dog" you found? First, I'd just like to see him. Second, maybe (maybe!) someone will recognize him!

Thanks,
Chris

Sure. He wasn't easy to photograph, mostly because he kept moving. This was the best one I got yesterday (you can't really see the wolfy ears, but they are there)...

Labels: Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog, Otter Prime had better watch out

Welcome to Cabal Week!

Greetings from your humble web goblin!

While Mr. G is busy meeting deadlines and fulfilling obligations, I will be posting pictures of Cabal and re-posting Cabal-centric entries.

(NOTE: "Cabal Week" is not actually scheduled to be a week long. As mapped out, it will run for a fortnight, covering a single narrative arc I like to think of as "Cabal: Year One".)

Neverwear ran a contest earlier this year to create a graphic depiction of Cabal. I liked the nominees so much, I decided to create a new set of journal sidebar images, which will randomly rotate for the duration.

photo most likely by Kyle Cassidy

---

reprinted from Some animal thoughts... (Monday, April 30, 2007)

On the way home from the recording, driving through the rain, just as I pulled off the freeway to head home, I saw a large, pale dog on the side of the sliproad. I went in a couple of seconds from a first glance thought of "Oh, he's just wandering around and knows exactly what he's doing," to, on a second glance, "He's absolutely terrified and if he isn't actually lost he's really scared of all the cars and in danger of bolting onto the freeway."

I pulled over, crossed the road and hurried across to where he was. He backed away, skittish and nervous, then came over to me, shaking. No collar or information, just a choke chain. And big. And very wet and very muddy. With cars going past, I decided the wisest thing to do was to put him into my car while I figured out what to do. The car was the Mini. I opened the door and he clambered in. The dog took up most of the Mini that I wasn't in and a fair amount of the Mini that I was in. Big dog, small car.

I phoned my assistant Lorraine, and asked her to let the local Humane Society (really nice people with a no kill policy) know we'd be coming in soon with a dog, then I drove home, narrowly avoiding death on the way (it's amazing how much you can't see when a huge dog fills the car and your field of vision). I ran around the garden with Dog until he'd tired me out. (I really hope he'd just got lost, and his family are looking for him; it would be hard to imagine someone abandoning a dog that cool.) Then I put him into the back of a car much bigger than the Mini and took him to the Humane Society, where they fawned all over him. ("I think he's a husky-wolf cross," said the Humane lady who took him, and she could be right.)

I think he's probably a survivor too.

Labels: Cabal, Cabal: Year One, Dog, webgoblin words

What bears do.

Three years ago a bear showed up here. The first hint we had of its arrival was the metal birdfeeder poles beng bent and the emptying of said birdfeeders. So we took down the birdfeeders and, after a few months, the bear went away.

Last year Hans, who does useful things in the woods like building bridges and removing fallen trees, put up an electric fence around the bee hives, on the theory that it was just a matter of time until a bear returned; we had been told by local beekeepers that an electric fence would keep a bear out in the first place, but that if the bear had discovered an unprotected hive and raided it once, the bear would go through an electric fence to get back to it.

Yesterday, Hans told me, a black bear turned up: wandered out of the woods, was barked at by the dogs (Cabal and his playdate), and retreated.

I was on my way out -- I went into KNOW in Minneapolis to do some interviews for a Morning Edition Special I'm doing on Audio Books and then on to DreamHaven to sign several mountains of books for Greg. (A photo of about 3/4 of the book mountain.) -- and got home by firefly-filled dusk in time to walk the dog.

Walk. The dog. At night. By the woods. Right.

I didn't have a dog the last time there was a bear around.

Mostly I was just sensible -- didn't go through the woods that the bear had wandered out of, made enough noise and carried a light -- but I noticed that Cabal was behaving differently: sticking close to me, either protective or nervous, not nosing off after adventures as he usually does if we're out together in the evening.

I hope the bear simply moves on, leaving the hives unmolested. The last one left, after all.

...

Am now at airport. For the next few days other people will have to decide how to walk the dog through night-woods inhabited by the ghosts of a thousand imaginary bears.

Labels: Dog, the second bear

Head Wounds for Men

As of 7:30 tonight, Stephin Merritt has luggage and a Bouzhouki, and is a happy, happy man.

(Picture of Mr Merritt shortly before his luggage arrived. He was pretty happy then, too.)

I don't really want to talk about the thing Stephin and I are working on yet -- it's early days. A strange sort of thing that's all our own little private project. When it's ready, I'll talk about it. Today was mostly spent filling out little cards of different colours with words like "Decapitation" and phrases like "Strangling is Cheap" . Tomorrow, Stephin starts writing songs...

The Graveyard Book is up for an LA Times Book Award and an ABA Indie World Award. I am up against friends in each case, and don't mind if I win or not but am happy just to be nominated, as any extra awards and nominations after the Newbery are just icing on a wonderful cake.

Hi Neil, I've seen so many of your posts lately showering your beautiful big white dog with love! Not that there's anything wrong with that, but with stories you've written like "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "The Price" I've always figured you for a cat person. I myself have a fondness for dogs but ultimately I'd consider myself a cat person, and whenever reading your "cat" stories I find myself thinking "Yes, he gets it! He understands cats!" (not that we humans can really ever understand cats). So, I must ask, do you consider yourself a cat person or dog person? And, by the way, your dog is very beautiful and looks to be quite a nice doggy according to your pictures. Thanks for your time on a silly question.

-Andy Christensen

I'm a cat person who got adopted by a dog. Resistance is useless. I definitely didn't pick him. We just sort of found each other when we needed each other. And I carry on being a cat person.

I wish the cats and dog liked each other -- instead the house is now divided into Cat and Dog territory, by a dividing door:

Fred the Black Cat, who had been living out in the garage, abandoned the garage and moved grumpily further and further out into the woods. The rest of the cats just shrugged and got on with their lives. (It's actually easier during the Winter, when the cats tend to stay indoors. In summer Cabal will still tree a cat every few weeks.)

Neil, you say your only convention plans are for something in August. Does this mean you won't be at the ALA in Chicago to collect your Newbery Award in person? We librarians will be crushed if you aren't at the gala (and expensive!) dinner where all youth awards are presented.

Sorry -- I wasn't thinking of the ALA as a convention. Yes, I'll be there -- I'll be giving a Newbery Medal speech (which I have to write by the end of the month argh) and I will also be doing something on behalf of the CBLDF.

Hi, Neil,
A friend of ours just opened a comic book coffeeshop in San Francisco - Caffinated Comics (www.caffcom.com) and I was wondering if you might be willing to give this new venue a plug in the blog. Their grand opening was March 1st and we came home with a Sandman I didn't previously own and Charles Vess' illustrated version of Stardust. It'd be great if you could help them out with a shout out - San Francisco's first green comic book coffeeshop!
Thanks,Mira

Consider it plugged.

Which reminds me, at http://time-shark.livejournal.com/237449.html  and at http://www.mythicdelirium.com/#anniversary you will learn about the next issue of Mythic Delirium. Mike has been asking me for a poem for years, and finally he asked me when I'd written one. In this case, one about a trout heart.

Labels: Cats, Dog, Stephin Merritt

Mostly Amused

I have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do. I know how easy it is to ask a stupid question. But, people...

I'm not actually going to post the letter that just came in that informed me that publishing Blueberry Girl and Crazy Hair was a cheap attempt to cash in on winning the Newbery Medal, because if it was me that had sent it, I don't think I'd want to be held up to ridicule, and I keep promising myself to use this power only for good.

But look, whoever-you-are, http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/11/listening-to-unresolving.asp is a nearly five year old post. It's the one where I announced Blueberry Girl would be a book, and that Charles Vess had started work on it. November 2004. In http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/12/still-alive-not-song.html I post the cover art for Blueberry Girl. December 2007.

March 2009 was set as a publishing date for it well over a year ago, once the art was in.

Crazy Hair goes back even further. Dave agreed to do it in 2003. It was meant to have been out originally in 2005, but Dave fell behind, due to Mirrormask, and didn't deliver his final double page spread until January 2007. The weirdness of publishing schedules (and partly because The Dangerous Alphabet was in the publishing slot it would have taken) meant that it was scheduled in about Jan 2008 to come out in May 2009.

(Click on the picture to be able to see it at a reasonable size.)

To bring the Blueberry Girls out now means the books were printed overseas a while ago, and bound, and placed in containers on big ships.

You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think. 

Okay. I'm done.

My assistant Lorraine always complains that whenever she goes to gigs that I also go to, I get an Access All Areas laminated badge, and she gets a piece of paper or a sticker or something.  So yesterday, while I was signing books at DreamHaven and getting a haircut (from the awesome Wendy at Hair Police, making me look human since October 2000) , they made her a laminated badge.


Nobody else had a laminated badge. Just her. She can be seen displaying it below. You can see me and the haircut to the right. I do not know who the people with buttons for eyes are. They scare me.
 

Here they are again, patting my dog for luck this morning, before they left for Chicago (a city John Hodgman claims is mythical). What were they doing at my breakfast table? Why did I have to play the tambourine last night? Why is there a small Football made of meat in my fridge?

It was his first time off-leash since his operation. Happiest dog in the world.

Labels: Charles Vess, Dave McKean, Dog, dog photograph, facepalming forehead-bleeding, how long things take, Jonathan Coulton, lamination as an aid to enjoying the rocknroll experience, Paul'nStorm

Death, Tentacles and Pip.

Bet you thought I was dead. Well, unless you were looking at the Twitter feed down the side of the blog, and even then I might have been Dead but Still Twittering. It could happen and probably does.

But I am not dead. I am not even sick.  I am home, got home yesterday afternoon, six weeks of mad peregrinations are over, and, because I was asleep by nine last night, I am wide awake at six am, so I grabbed my computer, and am now blogging in bed in the dark.

(Cabal the Dog was very pleased to see me. He's 90% better after his operation -- he still has about ten days until he's allowed to go up and down stairs [so I am still sleeping on makeshift downstairs bed]  but he is allowed to run, and he has -- for the first time ever -- an appetite, like a normal dog, and has thus put on several pounds. He looks more like a white German Shepherd Dog and less like a big white greyhound.

And I was pleased to see him. Here is a smily picture of us saying hello...

So when last heard of, I was blogging in a little hotel in the Highlands&Islands, off on a mysterious errand. (The best bit was throwing chips to the seagulls in a little Scottish harbour.)

Then I drove to Inverness and I flew from there to London, where I saw Holly, sat in the hotel library and wrote, saw friends, had some meetings about films and TV and books, ate more fish and chips, drank tea, and finally, given the choice between seeing Dave McKean for the first time since Hallowe'en and going to the UK Watchmen premiere, I had a lovely dinner with Dave, and caught up with friends who'd been to the premiere afterwards. Their feedback left me a bit more interested in seeing it, though.

(Also, my friend Duncan Jones showed me his upcoming film Moon, and I will blog about it soon. It is a solid science fiction film like they don't make any more.)

Let's see. The Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book continues to do good things. Bookshops are getting their copies with the gold medal on the cover, it's selling like (I'd say hot cakes, but I've honestly never seen people going "are these cakes hot? Then I will buy all of them!" in real life) and it's being reviewed in places that hadn't reviewed it before it was an award-winner:

The San Francisco Chronicle,

Gaiman's ghost story is not just about the thrills and chills, although there are plenty. The book is in fact literary and layered. Gaiman gives reassurance that even sinister circumstance cannot squelch our human capacity to grow and change for the better. So as in all worthy coming-of-age stories, the ending turns out to be a new beginning.

The Chicago Tribune,

...combines realistic dialogue and fantasy possibilities to tell a story that's not about sensationalized violence but about life's potential for happiness. Take time for this one, as it's quite remarkable; many adult readers, no children attached, have found it quite a compelling read.

The New York Times made it an Editor's Choice, but not The Boston Globe, in the first example of Thumper's "if you can't say something nice about someone don't say anything" motto book-reviewing I can remember. The entire review is:

I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I'll pass on without further comment.

...which just left me wondering how something can be metaphorically ghastly. ("It was ghastly -- and I mean that metaphorically!") and concluding that Liz Rosenberg is probably trying to use metaphorically as the opposite of literally, whereas what she actually meant was that it was ghastly in several senses of the word (ie. filled with dead things and ghosts and she didn't like it one little bit). Ah well. I hope she likes the next thing, whatever that is.

Which reminds me, the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book is, I am told, being printed and should be on its way into the world soon. (Preorder info here.)

Here's a short story from it. The stories are all short and all very different, and an Amanda dies in all of them. This one was a fairy-tale. It starts at about 2:19.

(You can see the photo Amanda is holding up here. And if you want to know what the event looked like from the front, photos, and more photos. Also, a review of her Sugar Club gig. I am tousle-haired. Who knew?)

...

Right. Now on to CORALINE...

It was predicted that it would be the #3 film this weekend. But by the end of the weekend, we were actually #2. Champagne would have been drunk if we weren't losing most of our 3D screens to the Jonas Bros on Friday.

Okay. Coraline tab-closing time:

Here's a great article on Coraline computer modellers, whose modelly creations were then made using 3D printers, saving about four man-years in face sculpting. (Is it still CGI when you press a button and it becomes real?). An interview with me and Henry Selick.

More on Detroit Zoo Snow Globes. An article on Phil Knight and Advertising Coraline.

A review I enjoyed. The reviews from Christianity Today, Catholic News Service, and the Episcopal Life are all sane and positive, although we are all waiting for the Capalert review. (Then again, they thought The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was well dodgy.)

The New Yorker reviews Coraline. Mike Baker draws a new very old book cover for it. Here's the Coraline Sweater knitting pattern pdf. 

Irene Gallo has started collecting links to Coraline design and animation work on her blog (http://igallo.blogspot.com/). And Chris Turnham's design work at  http://christurnham.blogspot.com/ is wonderful. Stef Choi just put some art up at http://stefchoi.blogspot.com/(Again, I'd love to see an ART OF CORALINE book. Steve Jones was limited in his Coraline Film Companion to the art and information that Laika would give him. Now that no-one's actually in the mad final stages of making a film, it would be marvellous to gather together the entire concept art process.)

...

There were many glorious things on the kitchen table waiting for me. I'll try and take a photo. My copy of The Lifted Brow was waiting for me. So was my copy of the DVD of American Scary. (The first ten minutes is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvJYs4Kq_k)

I've talked about Julie Schwartz here a few times. Read this. It's wonderful, in all senses of the word.

March 1-7th is Will Eisner Week. As we learn at http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000386.shtml

Will Eisner Week is intended as an ongoing celebration that will promote graphic novel literacy, free speech awareness, and the legacy of Eisner himself to a broad audience. This first annual celebration is themed "The Spirit of A Legend," examining Will Eisner's seminal Spirit comic, as well as the spirit inherent in his work that has inspired generations of comic readers and artists. This theme will be explored at events in Minneapolis at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in Savannah at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and in New York City.
In addition to events, a variety of academic papers and group activity assignments are available on WillEisnerWeek.com.

And last of all...

On Saturday March 7th, at Books of Wonder in Manhattan, Charles Vess and I are doing a signing. The event starts at 1:00pm. I'll read Blueberry Girl (it isn't very long. Maybe I'll read it twice, or verrrry sloooowly) and Charles will have art on display and prints for sale, and we'll do a Blueberry Girl Q&A, and it should be fun. I was worried that there wouldn't be enough space, but Peter at Books of Wonder reassured me that they've moved into a new shop since last I was there, and hosted J.K. Rowling, so they will have no problem coping with numbers of people who will turn up. So, hurrah, turn up. They'll be donating a percentage of the profits to RAINN, because I originally wrote Blueberry Girl for Tori and her as-yet-unborn-daughter, and that seemed like the right thing to do.

(Click on the poster to make it bigger.) (An early Blueberry Girl review, from a young girl and her mum.)

(Worth mentioning that Please note that you are welcome to bring one book from home to be signed for each book you purchase on the day of the event is a mistake. It may be true for Charles, but it's not true for me. Current plans are that I'll sign three things per person, and if the numbers of people get too big, that may have to go down.)

And this has been a long enough blog that I shall stop here and resume later.

Labels: art of Coraline, bigger on the inside, Blueberry Girl, Dog, dog photograph, Reviews of Coraline Movie, The Graveyard Book, Thumper, words and what they mean

In Just Seven Days I Can Make You A Man With A Dog.

This is what the Carrying a Convalescent Dog Up and Down Stairs Workout Plan looks like. Truth to tell, we're both really tired of it. He knocked over an impregnable barrier at the bottom of the stairs and shot back up on his own, rather than let me carry him back up, and while I've been using my knees to lift, my back is Not Happy About It All. Next time I succeed in finding a shop selling a dog sling, or I borrow a bungalow.

He (and my car, and someone not me to drive it) leave for home tomorrow, while I head off on in different direction for two weeks of Coraline promotional stuff. This is not a good thing, as all the things I was writing have come alive on me, all at once, and all I want to do is keep my head down and write them.

Labels: Dog, dog photograph, where I will be writing today

Batman & bits

A few weeks ago I showed the pencils of a Batman/Catwoman panel from the last Batman/last Detective story I wrote, which Andy Kubert is drawing, and nobody told me to take it down. Herewith some of Scott Williams' elegant inks for the same panel, and a word balloon to boot. (Click on it to see it crisp and clean.) The first part comes out relatively soon, and Andy is frantically pencilling the second even as I type this.

...

I just learned that there's a CORALINE exhibitionright now at Universal Studios in California. According to http://www.universalstudioshollywood.com/attraction_universal_experience.html

The miniature stop-motion animation set pieces and figures in this exhibit are shown courtesy of Henry Selick and the team of talented artists at Laika Entertainment.

If you're in the LA Area, you might want to check it out.

Of course, my secret dream is for, one day, a proper Universal Hallowe'en Horror Coraline House. (I suppose it's not secret any longer now.)
And I almost forgot:

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20090121/behind-the-scenery is a wonderful article on, well, Coraline behind the scenes.

...

Is Neil Gaiman your cup of cup of novelty coffee? asks the Guardian, making the world wonder just why it's cup of cup of and not just cup of?

And I find myself wondering what a Neil Gaiman coffee ought to taste like, and what ought to be in it. Probably not peanut butter, anyway. If any of you have ideas, twitter them to me @neilhimself (edit to add, use a hashtag of #coffee) or send them in to the blog on the FAQ line if they are more than 140 characters. For that matter if any of you run coffee shops, especially the kind that are also bookshops and want to try out Neil Gaiman coffee on innocent coffee-drinking humans, let me know.

...

The short film we made of me (talking about an innocent article of clothing fastening) on Dec 17 will be released this evening, and I will link to it when it goes live.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to get tired of carrying an 80lb dog (36 kg, 5.7 stones, and if he was distilled water he would be a bushel*) up and down stairs. Which I only have to do for a couple of days. 

I don't recall if you addressed when you set off on your trip, but why DID you take a convalescing dog with you? Wouldn't he be "better off" resting up at home? Couldn't whomever was left at home (Lorraine, Maddie or anyone else at Chez Gaiman) taken care of him?

Actually, it was because of him I hit the road. He'd just had ACL surgery. It was minus 20F outside at home, and getting colder, and he had a shaved back leg with a freshly stitched incision on his back leg, and taking him outside to pee was starting to seem like an act of cruelty.

http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/01/as-many-of-you-have-already-seem-to.html
tells the story of his visit to the vet, and his return at http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/01/warning-wound-pictures.html.

* I know. Volume not weight. Please don't write in and tell me. It was a joke. It wasn't even a good joke. Do not waste the time you could be spending to make the world a better place telling me why my dog is not a bushel.

Labels: Coraline movie, Dog, In which it is discovered that I have been transformed into a cup of coffee, Killing Batman - it's like killing Amanda Palmer, Scott Williams, this is not my beautiful house

Putting off work for the last five minutes

There is no cellphone signal where I am, which makes finding a mislaid cellphone more or less impossible. Sigh.

Phoned in all the lettering corrections on the final issue of BATMAN. I asked the impossible of Andy Kubert and Scott Williams, and I think they gave me what I asked for better than I could have dreamed. I can't wait to see the last issue of DETECTIVE.

I am now on a carry-an-80lb-dog-up-and-down-stairs-four-times-a-day Workout Plan, because I cannot persuade Dog that newspaper on a balcony is something that he could use as a toilet. He says it's grass or nothing. He's actually being remarkably affable about the being carried thing.

Right, back to work.

Labels: Dog, Killing Batman - it's like killing Amanda Palmer, procrastination

Everything you wanted to know about pills and this one dog

The trouble with falling off the earth completely to get work done and take care of a convalescent dog is that there's stuff happens you don't notice. For example, you barely notice weekends -- last Saturday took me completely by surprise, although I have now discovered http://isitsaturday.net/ to miminise future Saturday-identifying problems -- but you notice them just enough to mentally tag that on Monday you need to phone in some Batman lettering corrections. And then Monday comes around and there's mysteriously nobody in the DC Comics offices, and I am vaguely puzzled, but it's not until the phone rings and it's my assistant Lorraine calling to tell me it's Martin Luther King day, and she won't be at work, that I understand why...

The dog, convalescing from fairly major operation to repair his back knee, needs to take pills: pain pills and antibiotics. Getting the pills into the dog has been proving an adventure. I have learned that some things work once.

The dog, whose name is Cabal (pronounced to rhyme with babble) is a white German shepherd who spent the first three years of his life chained in a farmyard (I found him by the side of a road, and, much to my surprise but not to that of anyone reading the blog at the time, wound up adopting him -- the whole story is at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Dog if you go down to the bottom of the page and come up) and when the farmer handed him over to me, about the only thing he said was, "He don't eat much. Don't seem to like food."

He was seriously underweight, and I spent the first few months trying to find out what he would eat. (It turns out he likes raw meat and raw chicken, and we supplement it with kibble, and he's not as skinny any longer.)

Taking him to dog training was harder than I expected, because he's hard to bribe with food: cooked chicken scraps worked best when they worked. Praise worked better than food. He just wasn't that interested.

So. Putting pills into him...

Over the years, encasing the pill in cream cheese has generally worked, but somewhere in the recent operation, he got wise to that, and instead of swallowing the pill, simply sucks the cream cheese off and spits the pill out.

Putting the pill in regular cheese doesn't work. He thinks of cheese as something to nibble not to devour.

Sausages/hot dogs/lunchmeat etc do not work at all as the dog does not regard them as food items. I do not know why this is. He won't eat sausages etc. even without pills in. He has no interest in jerky, although he will gnaw on a dried chicken breast in a contemplative sort of a way (as in the photo below).

Wet dog food or cat food: ditto. As far as I can tell, he would rather starve than eat it. So suggesting mixing crushed pills into it is not going to work.

Someone on Twitter suggested Peanut Butter. It worked brilliantly the first time. The second time, he sucked off the peanut butter and spat out the pills. Ptui ptui plink plink.

"Pill pockets" were suggested. I went and bought some, and again, it worked once, and once only. Pill pockets are soft dog treats you put the pill inside, and press closed. Watching him appear to swallow the pill pockets, then retreat, drop them on the ground and carefully eat the pockets while leaving a clean pill on the floor was actually rather impressive.

Bread (which people suggested) didn't even register as a food item. Ice cream was deposited on the floor and licked up, leaving pill behind. Wrapping it in bacon, pushing it into cooked chicken, equally as useless: food eaten, pill not so much.

At the end of the day it always came down to putting the pill at the back of the throat, holding his mouth closed and stroking his throat and hoping to outwait him, and that mostly worked, but not always. He turned out to be very good at pretending that he'd swallowed it, and also seemed pretty distressed by the whole affair.

And then someone on Twitter suggested butter. And I thought hmmm. I wrapped the pill in a thin envelope of butter and put it into his mouth...

It worked. Gravity and slipperiness were on my side.

And it worked again this morning.

Only two more antibiotics (and three days of pain pills) to go. I shall report back.

Dog, pausing from chewing dried chicken breast, looks at the camera and hopes that today he will be allowed to run somewhere or at least go upstairs.

Labels: absolutely the dog's bollocks, Dog, putting pills into a dog

A Quick One

I twittered about my dog needing surgery. Lorraine has written two blogposts that explain all to the curious...

http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/01/as-many-of-you-have-already-seem-to.html

http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2009/01/cabel-update.html

...poor thing. He won't be able to go up stairs for six weeks, or be allowed to run.

Meanwhile, there's a photo of him, and me, and snowshoes from the other day, at http://twitpic.com/107mi.

And James Vance sent me a link to his blog that I wanted to pass on. I feel guilty as I don't post all the appeals for help that come in to the blog, mostly because if I did each blog post would contain a link to one or more appeals for people who need medical or other help... But I post some. And they make a difference.

...

I'll be doing, with Steve Jones, a live chat on the 15th. Details at http://www.fearnet.com/news/b14268_chat_with_neil_gaiman_about_coraline.html (I just saw a wonderful Coraline trailer that made  it look more like what it is and less, well, sweet and innocuous. I really hope it makes it out into the world, even if it's just onto the web. (Here is a Washington DC Coraline Wall.)

Labels: and yet more snow, appeals, Dog, online chats

it was just meant to be some snow photos but i kept adding to it...

A handful of photos from the last two days. The first two were taken while it was snowing, the others the next day, after the snow had stopped. They tend to have a dog in them, because if I'm walking anywhere, he's off ahead, scouting for danger and potential rabbits.

 

 

 

 

 

...

Hi!

Have you seen/heard about the Coraline keys yet? I was on my way to work yesterday and walked past a boarded up building that is usually covered by posters and pretty wonderful street art.

Yesterday it was covered with keys. I looked closer and realized that the tops of they keys were buttons, and grabbed one because they were lovely looking. They were also made of metal, and had a good heft. Once I realized that they were for Coraline, I grabbed a BUNCH (there were literally at LEAST a hundred).

I can send along a picture if you like.

Just wanted to let you know! (I'm in Chicago, by the way). I also have a couple to customers at the bookshop where I work, and was especially happy to give one to the couple who bought a copy of Coraline. That was nifty.

-Lauren

So I wrote back and said, No, this was a new one on me, and yes, I'd love to see pictures.

Hi again!

Here are links to the last few keys left on the wall. Also, a photobooth picture so you can see the key up close (albeit backwards).

http://flickr.com/photos/bibliogrrl/3122751843/in/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/bibliogrrl/3122756337/in/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/bibliogrrl/3123571466/in/photostream/
http://flickr.com/photos/bibliogrrl/3123563662/in/photostream/

Hope you're not buried in too much snow up there - we keep getting waves of it here.

Thank you again for everything you do. You are one of my favorite authors to handsell at the shop where I work (and have been for years) - I'm always trying to convert new people.

Happy holidaze!

-Lauren Vega
bibliogrrl.livejournal.com

Thank you Lauren.

...

At the end of the Coraline screening, two code words turned up on the screen. I learned from http://www.sneakerfiles.com/?s=coraline&x=0&y=0 that they have to do with a limited edition of a thousand pairs of Coraline sneakers, that you win, rather than buy.

...

Dear Neil

if I click on your name in Amazon.com, I get one set of bestselling books. If I type your name and search for you I get a completely different set of bestselling books.  Why is this?

Joe

That's a bit mad, I thought. So I tried it. Clicked on my name as the author of The Graveyard Book, and got this set of books (with Absolute Sandmans 3 and 4 in the top ten), then tried typing in my name,  which gave me a whole Amazon Store of me, with no Absolute Sandmans to be seen anywhere, and a completely different bestselling order.

As to why is this... I have no idea. With luck, someone at Amazon is reading this and will write and enlighten us all.

...

Jouni Koponen's amazing prints arrived. I thought about it, and decided that I'd have enough to send out as New Year gifts, and, given that a lot of people were about to be disappointed, I could forego the copies that would go into my basement (or possibly attic) to be pulled out in the years to come as gifts to charities who need things to be auctioned. So I've sent 250 of the Jouni prints to Cat... (she blogs it at http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/, 

and you can order them at http://www.neverwear.net/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=27)

Meanwhile, my Xmas card from Jouni arrived. And he's put it up on his blog...

http://jounikoponen.blogspot.com/2008/12/merry-x-mas-2008.html

...

When things get quiet I'll sign things. (I ought to do it while I'm on the phone. Sometimes I do.)  http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/472660.html

is the saga of one man's autographing Odyssey.

Over on the FPI blog, I am interviewed and eat lunch. 

http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=10826

Also you get a nice link to Todd Klein's wonderful prints. Todd has now sold the last of the first printing of the print we did together, and is on to the second printing. He's selling them signed (by me and by Alan Moore and Alex Ross respectively) for $20 each. Details at http://kleinletters.com/BuyStuffTop.html

...

Hi, I was sort of wondering about your thoughts of 'literary fiction' and 'genre fiction' and the mixes of both. I would classify your work as something of a mix, leaning towards the literary side.

This has actually been something of concern to me. I'm writing stories and I'm working on a novel (that hopefully I'll complete) and I've sort of been thinking about that a lot lately, about how such a work as mine would be received and looked at critically and all those sorts of things.

Thanks.

I don't worry about it. I don't think about it. It's not something I feel I need to bother with. People put the books where they want to put them, but the books don't change. As long as I have covers that make the books like they might be pleasant reading experiences, as long as people mostly find out about them from other people who liked them rather than being told they needed to read them as a chore, I'm happy. (I'm easily satisfied.)

From where I stand, worrying about how something you are writing is going to be received critically while you're writing it is a whole lot of wasted worrying: there's nothing you can do about it anyway. Why not worry about making what you're writing the best thing that it can be, which is something you can do something about?

Labels: amazon mysteries, Coraline keys, Dog, posters and prints, signing sheets of paper, snow, worrying

Soon enough a cat post, I promise...

I'm proofreading the galleys of the UK edition of The Graveyard Book right now. Last night, at the exact moment I started to become convinced that these were amazingly clean galleys, there were no typos after the number of times we'd all been through the manuscript, and I should simply sign off on them and get on with my life, one character turns to another and says "Neil, I've broken the next para into five paras for clarity but if you want we can turn it back." Which was a comment from the copyeditor to me that had been written on the previous draft. After that I started squinting at the text and reading verrry slowly....

Philip Pullman in the Guardian, talking about why age banding books is such a magnificently wrongheaded idea, but also talking about what he knows when he starts a book:

When I sit down to write a book, I know several things about it: I know
roughly how long it will be, I know some of the events in the story, I know a
little about some of the characters, I know - without knowing quite how I'll get
to it - what tone of voice I want the narrative to be cast in.

But there are several things I don't know, and one of those is who will read it. You simply can't decide who your readership will be. Nor do I want to, because declaring that it's for any group in particular means excluding every other group, and I don't want to exclude anybody. Every reader is welcome, and I want my books to say so.

Which is pretty much true for me too, and sometimes all you need to know that it'll work is the tone of voice. When that works, everything works, and when you don't have it it's the intangible that stops the thing from being magic.

(On the age banding, from what I can figure out, the subtext of all this seems to be, in the UK more and more books are being sold through supermarkets. People in supermarkets don't have to know anything about what they're selling. They just need to know where to put it on the shelves. If publishers put colour-coded age bands on the books, indicating which books are for 7+ and which for 9+ and which for 11+, then supermarkets will order more books because they won't have to think about putting them out. And after all, the shelf-stackers don't need to know anything about dish-soap to sell that, so what makes books special?)

And now some good news:

Hi Neil,
I think you're already aware of this, but I wondered if you'd mind posting a follow-up to the story of Emru Townsend. I wrote to you back in April about Emru's search for a bone marrow donor and the desperate need for more people (especially non-caucasians) to get on their country's bone marrow registry. Here's the link to your original post for those who missed it:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/my-life-in-green-and-purple.html

Emru and his sister Tamu have been campaigning like crazy to raise awareness for the bone marrow registry. Last week, we got some excellent news:

A donor match has finally been found for Emru! Here's a CBC News article on the story:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2008/06/05/qc-bonemarrowdonor0605.html

I should remind you that there was no match in the registry for Emru when he was originally diagnosed with leukemia. I believe that this match is a direct result of Emru and Tamu's tireless awareness campaign, and of people like you helping to get the word out to as many people as possible. Thank you. And thank you to your readers, many of whom passed on the word and got themselves registered.

Emru is still a long way from being healed. He must get into remission, stay in remission, be prepared for surgery, have the surgery, resist or fight off infection, risk the donation attacking his body or his body attacking the donation, and get through the first 100 days. Plus, his anonymous donor has the option of backing out at any point and there is currently no backup.

Still, this is a crucial first step. Our friend now has a good, fighting chance.

To your readers: Don't see this as the end of the story. There are still massive shortages in the registry and many, many people are still waiting to find matching donors. Emru and Tamu have already committed themselves to continuing their awareness campaign.

Emru's story shows that this isn't a lost cause; it's a solvable problem. You can save lives just by registering and getting others to do the same.

For more information, visit

http://www.healemru.com

Thank you so much!
--Jeff LeBlanc
and several other well-wishers...
Pasley Preston
Beverly Preston
Driss Zouak
Ceri Young
Arin Murphy Hiscock


I talked about the NPR interview I did during the Graveyard Book Audio recording a few days ago; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91303720 is the Anansi Boys Bryant Park Book Club radio interview.

(I have to go back into the studio on Thursday -- we only realised this morning that there were no alternate takes for the UK of sentences with words like crib, diaper and flashlight in them, so I will go and replace them with sentences containing cots and nappies and torches.)

Just got an email to tell me that a pre-eminent banjo player would really like to play the Danse Macabre, which left my jaw on the floor with delight.

And here, for the people who asked, is a photo of a dog in the woods, yesterday. He's come a long way in a little over a year. I suppose I have as well...

Labels: age-banding, audio books, bone marrow, Dog, philip pullman

Probably the last Dog Photos of the Year

It's been a strange year. On the 30th of April I found a dog by the side of the road. This is what he looked like then...

He was wet, a sort of off-brown colour, smelled dreadful and while he didn't seem very bright, he was extremely goodhearted.

It turned out he was very bright, he'd just spent his three years of life on a short chain in a farmer's yard, and no-one had talked to him, or expected anything more of him than barking at visitors as a sort of canine doorbell.

And this is what he looks like now... (with a very scruffy author this morning). (Photos by Holly.)

Cabal is one of the most beautiful dogs I've ever seen. What breed is he?

He is, as the farmer who gave him to me said at the time (and I doubted at the time, because I didn't know that he was white under all that) a White German Shepherd Dog (what we called an Alsatian when I was growing up in England -- the German Shepherd became known as an Alsatian in the UK during World War I in much the same way that French Fries became Freedom Fries in the US a few years back). There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family.

Hi Neil,

Santa was good to me this year and gave me the latest Steven Erikson novella from PS Publishing - http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/ I just went tonight to have a look at the site and ended up with five books since they have a sale on. Any pre 2007 books in their catalogue are half price. I thought of you since you did the introduction for the Mark Chadbourn book I just got from them!

P.S. I got a t shirt from my brother I thought you would like. The logo is 'I'm only wearing black until they invent a darker colour'.

They are a wonderful publishing house, and with only a few days left I would be remiss not to point to their sale. (Here's their current catalogue.) I should dig up the thing I wrote about Pete Crowther for the World Horror Con programme book, while I'm at it...

Neil,
I've got a story you might be interested in. A while back, a bar called Gandalf's in Frostburg, Maryland burned down (no one was hurt). Up the street was a local independent bookstore called Main Street Books. During the fire, one of the employees was watching, when a sheet of paper fluttered out and was found by the employee. What was it? A charred page from Good Omens. It's currently hanging up being displayed in the bookstore.

That's delightful. And, of course, appropriate.

Hey Neil

So what is up with Hill House? Back in October they posted an update PDF on the Anansi Boys but nothing on Neverwhere. Neverwhere was ordered in 2003 and suppose to come out in 2005 and we are still waiting.

Is this something that I should start to worry about or are they just too overwhelmed and not given to responding to inquires any more? I love their work and everything I have gotten is amazing, I just want the books that I order all those years ago or at least to know they care.

Also Cat was trying to help me get an answer on the MELINDA Triptych but got the same response I did. Zip.

Anyway sorry to ramble and thanks in advance,

John Mooney

To be honest, I'm really hoping that the bringing out of Anansi Boys means that things are turning around for Hill House. They've had a rough year or two, including some illness, and I really wasn't sure what was going to be happening. But the first copies of Anansi Boys are in and look like a triumph of the bookmaker's art, and should now be going out to people. I'm not sure what's happening next.

Pete Atkins at Hill House did the work on helping create the Neverwhere Author's Preferred Text some years back, and then he and Pete Schneider assembled every Neverwhere memo, outline and BBC script draft for their Neverwhere Supplementary Volume (not that it'll contain every draft of everything, for it would be very dull if it did). Like you, I'm hoping that Hill House is back in the game.

They've now got the correct phone number up on their website.

...

A few people wrote to say that it was unusual, European Butterflies in the American Midwest. And it would have been if that was where I was, but the butterflies were in Europe, as was I.

Labels: burning galdalf's, butterfly of love, Dog, hill house