National Characteristics

It was one of those moments when you know you're in another country. Specifically Germany.

10:53 am – I'm in my hotel room answering a written interview questions when the phone rings. A woman's voice says,

"Hello. Mister Gaiman. This is reception. You must come down right now. There is someone here to interview you."

I say, "Er. He's actually a bit early, and I'm doing something..."

"Very good," she interrupts, firmly. "Then you will be down here in exactly seven minutes."

And she puts down the phone, leaving me bemused and leaving the interviewer, standing in front of her downstairs, fairly mortified.

I took nine minutes to get downstairs, thinking "Hah. That'll show her," as I did so, which really wasn't very fair on the interviewer.

The day's interviews were fun, the reading (in a Toyota Showroom, of all places) was very enjoyable, and I got to see the outrageously talented Dagmara Matuszak briefly and to learn what's going on with the Hill House Anansi Boys she's designed.

(While I can't tell you when Hill House will actually publish it, I'm happy to be able to say that I just learned from Peter Schneider at Hill House that he's set up a gmail account, with a person who will reply to all emails checking it, at hillhousepub@gmail.com. If you've had problems getting hold of him or anyone at Hill House, send an email there. If there's still problems, feel free to drop me a line.)


Dear Mr. Gaiman,
I had been thinking about the Subterranean(sp?) Press version of "M is for Magic" and it got me wondering. Does it ever bother you that sometimes these beautiful editions of your work are released and a great deal of your number one fans will never get to hold them, let alone own them because of the price tag? I am in no way saying these editions aren't worth the asking price, just wondering if you ever
wished they were more accessible. Hope your trip, family, and cats(especially Fred) are all well.
Thanks,
Troy

Not really. It would bother me if the expensive edition was the only edition of something that there was, that I wanted lots of people to read, but normally the expensive edition is expensive because it's a smaller print run, of a much higher quality, with special illustrations or similar, and they cost money. The Harper Childrens edition of M Is For Magic will be in a loverly affordable hardcover edition, priced for school libraries, and the first printing will be somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000 copies. The Subterranean edition will be in a comparatively tiny edition, and made for people who love books. I quite like the limited editions of things, mostly because I like beautiful books.

In your recent post you mentioned wanting a catapult as a child. In jest I am sure, but it reminded me of a time I was traveling through Europe and happened to be stranded at Heathrow for quite some time. In my boredom I happened upon a funny sign that listed among the things you most certianly could not bring on a plane, a hand catapult. I am not British, and was curious if that is what us Yanks refer to as a slingshot, or if it is something entirely different and much more destructive. =)
-Sean

An English catapult (or hand catapult) is an American slingshot, yes.


Dear Mr. Gaiman,There is a description for this contraption which says that it was made by an eccentric millionaire living in Utah. Seeing as you are eccentric, and at least assumably well-to-do, and living in my state, I was wondering if you could make one? And if you do, could you invite me over? I would bring deviled eggs, and curried chicken salad. http://geekologie.com/2007/01/girl_in_human_sling_shot.php
Much love,Rain

I don't have anywhere to set it up that wouldn't send her crashing into a tree, though...

Labels: A Walking Tour of the Shambles, anansi boys, dagmara matuszak, Germany, hill house, human slingshots, interviews, M is For Magic, National Characteristics

Several dates. Also some places.

I'm starting to put together my movements on the German, Polish and French micro-tour in March. This is assembled from a few different emails, and obviously needs more data, but I thought it might be a good thing for Europeans if I got the word out early:

Cologne
March 16th, 7:30 pm
Toyota Autohaus Yvel, Raderberggürtel 4
Literature Festival "Lit.COLOGNE"
http://www.litcologne.de/va/160307/gaimankoester.php

KRAKOW
Sunday 18th. 16.00 -19.00 booksigning at EMPiK Rynek Główny

WARSAW
Monday 19th. 17.00-19.00 booksigning at EMPIK Nowy Swiat

Hamburg
March 21st, 8:15 pm
Thalia Bookstore, Europapassage, Ballindamm 40
http://www.service.thalia.de/thalia.vorort.php?vst=361&event=5335

Leipzig
March 22nd -
1:00pm - Book Fair
9:00 pm SPIZZ - Jazz & Music Club, Markt 9
http://www3.mdr.de/scripts/leipzig-liest-2007/suche.cfm?s4=name&value=7416

PARIS
Friday, March 23rd from 17h00 to 20h00
Saturday, March 24th from 17h00 to 20h00.

Signing at Salon du Livre, Porte de Versailles, 75015 Paris; Au Diable Vauvert stand #H148

When I'm sure that this is all there is, and I've got all the relevant phone numbers and so on, I'll put it up on Where's Neil (the amazing new, improved and plugged into Google Calendar version of Where's Neil).

...

Incidentally, Hera-from-Iceland is going to be playing at the SXSW Festival (http://2007.sxsw.com/music/showcases/band/33129.html). And then she's coming out here to play a gig with Lorraine at Charlie's in Stillwater, MN, on Sunday March 11th.(http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2007/02/spring-cds-laundry-and-hera.html for details). I'm hoping I'm in town and able to make it to see them.

Labels: France, Germany, Hera, Poland, unusual absence of strange tags, Where's Neil

Seeing you asked for them, a sampling...

I'm on the plane home.

I'm typing this on the plane home, although I won't send it until I get back tonight, by which time I'll already be home, and it'll be out of date...

Let's see. Yesterday I was photographed in the morning, then tumbled off to Gottingen by train. Actually walked around Gottingen for a little bit with Doris-from-Heyne-my-publisher, and bought Maddy some small toys, and bought myself a notebook that looked like it wanted to have a book written in it.

I'll write of Martin Semmelrogge
And talk about him in my blog
As he would do, had he the blog
And were I Martin Semmelrogge

Then we went back to the hotel that Martin Semmelrogge was staying in, and waited for him to arrive. He has a wife, called Sonja, and a dog who travels with them, a polish sheepdog called Crazy, and a fast car, but no driving license any more, so he only drives late at night. It being daytime, Sonja was driving, and there were traffic jams. So he was a bit late.

Martin is a German actor, famed for his bad-boy roles, along with his occasional brushes with the law from moments of Hunter Thompsonian excess. He is an engaging man, with a rattish, raffish grin.

I tell of Martin Semmelrogge
Who travels with his wife and dog.
They call him Crazy. That's the dog.
And, maybe, Martin Semmelrogge.

He's very funny. Our first meeting, over a lunch a few days ago, he explained how to get out of trouble driving fast across America. You need a radar detector, and you have to tell the police that because you are German that you misread the speedometer and thought it was in Kilometers, not Miles, per Hour. Of course, he told me and Gaby-from-Heyne-my-publisher, occasionally the police call each other to say that there's a man in a red mustang doing 120 mph, or you get shopped by a trucker, and then you spend the night in jail.

He thought Gaby and I should drive back with him from Hamburg to Frankfurt, instead of taking the plane.

Zooming through the Rain and Fog
There goes Martin Semmelrogge
In his car his wife, his dog,
but not me or Gaby.

He certainly upped the entertainment quotient for the tour. And when I got too bored or stressed I would make up Martin Semmelrogge poems to amuse myself...

Now in the end I'll pettifog
I've rhymed it "Martin Semmelrogge"
It should be "Martin Semmelrog-ge"
Bogger.

Anyway, the Gottingen reading was enormously fun -- I did the best reading I've ever done of Sam's "I believe" speech. Then train back to Frankfurt, and by 1:00am I was settled down for a night in the airline hotel, where nothing worked properly and I couldn't get online. A previous guest in the room had set the TV alarm for 6:00am, and it worked perfectly, and I cursed him and his ancestors, not to mention his progeny and his camels.

Then the plane.

Alisa Kwitney (who is, in no particular order, a former editor of mine and my friend since about 1990, author of the Chronicle "Sandman: King of Dreams" book [the mysterious Sandman coffee table book that either has or hasn't been published recently, depending on where you look for it], and a very smart and funny novelist) got me a copy of her new book "Does She Or Doesn't She?" and I've been carrying it around for a while now. Somehow the plane seemed a good place to read it. It has a quote from me about Alisa (with an added editorial exclamation mark) on page one and she thanks me in the acknowledgements because every now and again when she was writing it she'd ring me up and chat about her plot, and I'd say "Well, why don't you do something like this...?" without much idea of what I was talking about, given that I hadn't read the book she was writing.

Anyway, apart from the fact that the book's title is not as good as the book, and that all Alisa's books have been lumbered with those identikit Chick Lit covers which show cartoons of sassy women strutting coolly off the page while toting Accessories, it's a terrific book. The heroine has a fantasy at the start of most chapters, each fantasy in a different genre. My favourites were the hilarious Bewitched pastiche, and the Vampire sequence, which showed that Alisa could do the Laurel Hamilton thing brilliantly if she wanted to. And meanwhile the story is something that starts out more or less normally, and then dissolves into a lunatic farce of FBI men, Russian aphrodisiacs, TV Soap Opera, hot water pipes, identity, infidelity and attempted murder. And sex. Lots of sex. Lots and lots of sex. Lots and lots of sex, written by an old friend, which is marginally more embarrassing to read, even when you're really enjoying the book in question, than you might think. Anyway, it's the kind of book that fans of genres (except cowboy fiction. She didn't do cowboy fiction in there...) would really like if it wasn't for the way the cover tells them not to pick the book up.

Which reminds me...

Saw the entertainment weekly photo. Very nice.

I was wondering how many books per year you're requested to write blurbs for. In the past two weeks, I've seen a note by you written for Craig Thompson's Good-Bye, Chunky Rice and Robin McKinley's Sunshine. If things continue at this pace, I'll see 48 blurbs by you in one year.

And I wonder, if you read something you don't like, do you simply refuse to write the blurb?

Sure. Or if I don't have the time or the inclination to read something. And I'm actually on a sabbatical from doing blurbs, because it makes it easier to just say no to everyone. But people still send me advance manuscripts or proofs of books, and lots of the blurbs that have come out on book covers in recent months � Robin McKinley's, Nick Sagan's and the latest Greg McDonald Flynn novel, for example, have just been my comments on what I'm reading, taken from this blog. I'm not sure if the Craig Thompson blurb (it was for Blankets, by the way, not for Goodbye Chunky Rice) was from this blog or not.

I keep running into the problem of not knowing whether to say nice things about books here or not. Mostly I still do, because it's fun to recommend books to people. But if I put something up here on the journal I tend to qualify statements, and write something like"If he'd paid more attention to details this would have been a perfect book. As it is, it's only unmissable if you have nothing else to read. Still, the description of the Assassins Anonymous meeting is absolutely gripping and if the rest of the book were this good it would have been magnificent," which publishers then leave out the qualifying bits of, and I find myself saying "a perfect book... unmissable... absolutely gripping and... magnificent!" on the back of someone's book.

Whereas something that's meant to be a blurb normally stays a blurb.

Labels: Alisa Kwitney, blurbs, Does She Or Doesn't She, Germany, Martin Semmelrogge, tour

Frankfurt Bookfair: Day 112.

I think I'm very done on interviews at the fair. They seem to be turning into a hellish blur, during which I've run out of nice, and polite, and cheerful. Today's penultimate interview, for example, from a radio site, done by someone who explained at the beginning that he had read my all comics but not my books, contained bits that went more or less like this:

--I have read your comics, and Sandman, and the theme of them is Personal Failure. What is the theme of your new book?

--Personal Failure.

--This failure. Is it yours?

--No, the readers.

--And your other books? What is their theme?

--Personal Failure. It's all I write about... actually, I can't ever remember writing about Personal Failure as a theme. What exactly were you thinking of?

--Er.

--Is there a specific story you're thinking about? That I wrote?

--Uh. The story, well, the one with the magician who gets the tattoo on his chest, a scorpion, to stop him doing bad magic...

--That's John Ney Reiber's Books of Magic. I didn't write that.... Look, have you actually read anything I've written?

I think we established that he hadn't -- he owned Death: The High Cost of Living, but admitted he didn't know what it was about, as he had only looked at the pictures and not tried to understand the story. It's not that I mind if an interviewer hasn't read anything, but I can't see why you'd do an interview trying desperately to give the impression that you have. Surely it just sets you up for trouble. It was certainly a lively interview after that.

Normally I'm very good at saying things like "Well, that's a very interesting question. Let's look at it another way..." when an interviewer says something dim. I was an interviewer once, after all. But I'm getting grumpy and impatient, and it's time to go home...

("What do you think of the Frankfurt Bookfair?" asked another interviewer.

"I think if I am a very evil man while I live, when I die I will be sent to a Frankfurt Bookfair that will go on forever in every direction, and will never end, and the interviews will never stop," I told him, honestly. I don't think that a multiple choice exam of possible correct answers to give journalists in answer to that question would have had that one listed.)

Ah well. The main lesson I'll take from this is to insist I actually get the occasional day off on tours like this. I've not had one, unless you count travel days, since I left for Washington some weeks ago, and I suspect that even if I'd just had one day of sleeping in, wandering a foreign city, buying presents and writing postcards home, in all this, I'd be a lot more chipper and less stressed. After all, you know that you're getting desperate when your main source of amusement is writing four-line poems about Martin Semmelrogge.

Labels: A Walking Tour of the Shambles, Best Of, frankfurt bookfair, Germany, interviews, Martin Semmelrogge

No Sleep Till Minneapolis

I am very, very tired. Up at 6:30 am to fly to Frankfurt, which wouldn't have been so bad if the "late dinner" last night in Hamburg scheduled for 10:00pm had happened at 10:00pm, but I was still signing then, so I didn't get to the restaurant until midnight, and got precious little sleep.

Did a lot of interviews today. Most were okay, but one interviewer asked such strange questions it started feeling like some kind of weird wind-up. And I was very tired. But that's still no excuse... (The real answer to "Did you ever meet or interview Douglas Adams when you wrote the book about him?" should actually have been "Of course I did. I interviewed him extensively between 1983 and 1987", and not, as I heard my mouth saying, "No, we never met. I think he was scared of me. I spoke to someone through a closed door at one point who claimed to be Douglas, but I think it was really one of his friends pretending to be him. It was all extremely disturbing.")

Lovely review of Wolves in the Walls in the Guardian.

Finished Will Birch's book "No Sleep Till Canvey Island" on the plane back to Frankfurt, the history of the London Pub Rock scene of the early 70s, and played the first Stiff Records Boxed Set on the iPod, which seemed about right. Good book, filled with excellent anecdotes, including a wonderful lesson in how unrelated people and events can create unintended consequences (in this case, a hippie film-editor with a dream of making a "pleasure dome" on an abandoned Martello Tower who hooked up with a con-man...) although the doomed New York Brinsley Schwartz launch hype is the best set-piece.

The web-site's down right now, so I have no idea when this will go up.

And now I'm going to bed.

Labels: Douglas Adams, Germany, interviews, tour, Will Birch