TWO BABY PHOTOS! (And, oddly enough, some news too.)

I'm typing this in an airport lounge in Cleveland. It's a 'pay money or use a fancy credit card to get in' lounge, and I have a fancy credit card I never actually use in the back of my wallet, so hurrah, free internet and a cup of tea.

Last night was my first night away from the baby and Amanda since the birth. I spoke at an event at the University put on by the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation and Case Western Reserve University. I enjoyed talking, and managed not to get too wistful about missing the baby.

This morning felt very strange: I woke up in a kind of panic in a hotel bed, wondering how I had slept so long and why I hadn't changed the baby in the night and oh my god where was the baby oh right I'm in Cleveland.

This is what he looks like when he wakes up.

Now I'm flying back to them.

We've spent the last week in the sunshine seeing aged relatives and being on holiday. Real life (and chilly Autumn in the NorthEast) starts on Monday.

This is Anthony. We call him Ash for short. He wears a hat these days.

(I haven't received a full report on the Humble Bundle yet. Will post it here when I do.)

BUT THERE IS NEWS:

On November 9th, I'll be in Brooklyn, in conversation with Junot Diaz, talking about Sandman and such, and afterwards there will be the only Sandman Overture hardcover signing. (The book is officially released on November 10th.)

Tickets are free, but you must RSVP: https://neilgaiman.splashthat.com/

On Nov 7th I'll be in Conversation with Armistead Maupin at Bard. This is the fourth of the Bard talks I've been doing (Art Spiegelman, Audrey Niffenegger and Laurie Anderson were the first three).

Join a public conversation between Neil Gaiman, Bard’s Professor in the Arts, and Armistead Maupin, the best-selling writer and activist. Maupin is the author of 11 novels, including the nine-volume Tales of the City series, three of which were adapted for television with Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. He and Gaiman will discuss their heroes Charles Dickens and Christopher Isherwood, the craft of storytelling, and many other subjects. Part of a regular series of conversations at the Fisher Center hosted by Professor Gaiman.

If you are in the area, you should come. Tickets and info at  http://fishercenter.bard.edu/calendar/event.php?eid=129331.

Me and Armistead in San Francisco in the summer. 

There are a handful of other appearances I'll be doing before I retire from the appearances and talks thing at the end of November and go back to being a full time writer for a while:

On Friday Oct 23rd, I'll be at the West Virginia Book Festival, in Charleston, WV.
http://wvbookfestival.org/

On Friday the 13th of November I'll be in Texas. Will there be masked figures with machetes, or will it be a local chainsaw massacre? Probably neither, given that I'm talking in Austin, reading stories and answering questions and generally having too much fun on stage. It's a big Auditorium, and there are still a few hundred seats left, but they are going fast. http://thelongcenter.org/event/neil-gaiman/

On Saturday the 14th of November I'm doing the same thing, more or less, only with different words, in Long Beach, CA. (There are about 20 seats left, from what I can see: http://www.carpenterarts.org/2015-2016/neil-gaiman.html )

THE SLEEPER AND THE SPINDLE came out in the US and (much to my surprise) went in at #1 on the NYT YA bestseller list. It's now in its 3rd week on the list, and is a really pretty book.

Hayley Campbell's gorgeous book of everything you ever wanted to know about me is coming out in paperback soon, with a faux Victorian cover that doesn't have a picture of me on it. Too many people thought the hardback was just drawings of me or by me or something, so they gave it a title that clarifies what it is and why.

It's called The Art of Neil Gaiman: The Story of a Writer with Handwritten Notes, Drawings, Manuscripts, and Personal Photographs. (link.)

The UK gets a new hardback of GOOD OMENS, a beautiful new cover to THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, and also a (physically) tiny edition of HOW THE MARQUIS GOT HIS COAT BACK, to give people in the UK who have owned the author's preferred edition of Neverwhere for a decade parity with the US, where they only just got it but it had the Marquis story in the back.

I got to see the new UK covers for OCEAN and MARQUIS on Twitter this morning and take joy in posting them here:

And on a final note, the last part of Sandman Overture came out, and people have read it, and the reviews are very kind. I've seen https://comicspectrum.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/sandman-overture-6-dcvertigo/ and http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/09/30/the-sandman-overture-6-review
http://www.comicosity.com/review-sandman-overture-6/ and http://www.comicbookresources.com/comic-review/the-sandman-overture-6-vertigo and when I read them I felt like people actually understood what JHW3 and I were trying to do, and that we'd pulled it off.

It's a strange feeling, revisiting a story and characters you created almost thirty years earlier, and trying to add layers, so that if someone rereads the original story they will see events and characters they thought they knew as well as they knew themselves, in a different light.

I made it back by sunset.

Labels: Armistead Maupin, austin, Baby, Cleveland, Hayley Campbell, how the marquis got his coat back, long beach, Sandman Overture, sunset, The Sleeper and the Spindle

How I discovered I had slipped into a parallel universe

Here's things that people would probably like to know...

This is the poster for TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS Reading Event at the Carnegie Hall (and it lists the other gigs too. I think there may still be a handful of Barbican tickets available on July 4^th and 5^th, I'm pretty sure the Warfield is Sold Out, although they may release a few closer to the date, and right now Usher Hall in Edinburgh, which was the last concert to go on sale, still has plenty of seats, and even has some in the Stalls).

Please feel free to spread it around...

If you can't afford to come, or feel like chancing your luck, there is a Facebook competition where you can win tickets, at the William Morrow Facebook page:

William Morrow

Enter for your chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to see Neil Gaiman live at Carnegie Hall with FourPlay String Quartet on June 27th! Prize package includes a meet & greet and photo opp with Neil himself.

More details, and to enter: http://a.pgtb.me/5W9dcb

(And, of course, you can order tickets for the Carnegie Hall on June 27^th via http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2014/6/27/0800/PM/Neil-Gaiman-The-Truth-is-a-Cave-in-the-Black-Mountains/ - click through and you can decide where you would like to sit.)

...

The biggest publication news of recent weeks is that Hayley Campbell's book THE ART OF NEIL GAIMAN is out. You can learn who Hayley Campbell is, and all about the book and how it came to be, in this delicious Comic Beat interview. It's filled with glorious details. I like the bit about me and kids and Alan Moore and kids and Custard Creams vs. Bourbon biscuits best. Here she explains the interviewing process:

He would give me all the answers I wanted plus loads of things that were entirely irrelevant because it was just me and him talking in a room and we do that all the time. It was a weird interview to do. I only noticed this was happening when I had to transcribe 17 hours of it back in London, and sat there listening to us trying to save a bumblebee who’d got caught in the fireplace. For half an hour. ‘Ooh he’s got soot on him. Look at his giant cardigan. Shall we put him outside on a flower?‘
Honestly I think I have to burn the tapes.

(Useful Warning. DO NOT CLICK ON THELINK AND READ HAYLEY'S INTERVIEW IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED BY SWEARING OR BY ANY DISCUSSION OF THE GREAT WALL OF VAGINA.)

I read the book a few months ago, and really liked it, as much as it's possible to like something where one is too embarrassed properly to relax and enjoy it. I was reading it to approve the text, but I loved the text and spent most of my time trying to fix the dates on the picture captions.

Hayley is a really funny writer. She's observant and interested. I'm really looking forward to her novel, when she writes it, and am also a little bit scared.

Salon has some hitherto unseen drawings by me (and a couple by Jill Thompson) up at http://www.salon.com/2014/05/20/the_fantastic_world_of_neil_gaiman_take_a_peek_into_the_authors_personal_archive/

And you can go and check it out at Amazon.com, where the poor guy whose entire reason for living seems to be giving everything on Amazon a one star review has already given it one star review. http://amzn.to/1vxTAYK

Hayley's going to be taking over the role of interviewer from her father, ace illustrator Eddie Campbell, for the Barbican and Edinburgh TRUTH IS A CAVE gigs on July 4^th and 5^th.

…

There's a really sweet little photo spread and interview in Boston Common magazine about Amanda and me in which they list us as one of Boston's most Stylish Couples. 

Quite when I slipped into this parallel dimension in which I can be described as “stylish” without anyone in earshot actually sniggering, I do not know. But I am going to make the most of it while I'm here.

Labels: Eddie Campbell, fourplay, Hayley Campbell, The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, what style is

Secrets, a quiet life, and several random books by other people

Life is quiet. I'm jogging daily, enjoying juicing fruits and vegetables, playing with my new phone, writing, being proud that Amanda is getting all the five star reviews in Sydney but have got quite used to not being in Sydney myself.  I'm shifting the weight I put on during the May to October signing & promotional tour, and, I hope, getting back into the kind of shape I stopped being in when the tour started in May.

I love toys that help and encourage me: I just got a heart-rate monitor that talks to my ipod Nano while I run. I'm just getting to the point where I need a whole slew of new music to jog to, though, as my exercise playlist, which is about 20 years old, is starting to feel too familiar. (But it will always start with Sondheim's Something About a War. And it must always have Elvis Costello's Waiting For the End of the World on it. Otherwise the pillars of the universe might collapse.)

My not being currently on Twitter meant that you did not have to endure any grumbles from me about Federal Express leaving packages at houses they were not addressed to, or, alternately, handing over packages to the US Mail service, who then stoutly maintain that the house I'm in does not actually exist and returned said packages to the sender.

Lots of long phone calls happening, each of them about something really interesting I can't officially announce yet. I think there must be about half a dozen of these, now. I'm looking forward to being able to talk about them all.

Normally, the reason I don't talk about them is simply that the deal to make the thing isn't quite done. Although sometimes it's because the wait between the thing being announced and the time it's going to be available is so long as to be silly.

Still, in case you were wondering whether or not Fortunately the Milk artist Chris Riddell was quietly and secretively working away on a secret sort of thing by me that I'm not even going to even allude to, why, yes, he is.  There are many clues as to what it is in this picture, from Chris's tumblr blog.

Lots of book-related things out there. Let's see...

Headline Books have just found that the links to allow you to buy their ultra-deluxe signed edition of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE had all been taken down over the last six months, which explains why they still have a handful left. They've remedied that, and put up new web pages. It's only for sale to UK addresses and is an astonishingly expensive, very limited, beautiful object. They only did 260 of them, and have a few for sale: https://www.headline.co.uk/Articles/Deluxe+Edition+The+Ocean+At+the+End+of+the+Lane+Neil+Gaiman.page will tell you all about them. (All the other limited editions, which were less limited than this, have long since sold out.)

...

Polish artist Dagmara Matuszak illustrated a poem I wrote once, called Melinda, and made it into one of the most beautiful of my books. (Also one of the rarest: the few copies out there that book dealers have for sale are very VERY expensive.) 

I'm writing another poem for her, but not writing it as fast as I should.

She's selling the Melinda original art: http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=7352837#Post7352837 (and it's pictured here: http://s568.photobucket.com/user/hadriana_photos/library/Melinda%20OA?sort=3&page=1)

...

Brad Meltzer just sent me some books he's ridiculously proud of, illustrated by Chris Eliopoulos.

He told me, "This series was born because I was tired of my daughter thinking that reality TV stars and loud-mouthed sports players were heroes.  I tell my kids all the time:  That’s fame.  Fame is different than being a hero.  I wanted my kids to see real heroes...and real people no different than themselves. For that reason, each book tells the story of the hero when THEY were a kid.  We see them as children.  So it's not just Amelia Earhart and Abraham Lincoln being famous--but them being just like us." 

They are funny, and readable and, yes, probably inspiring. For small kids, about real people.

...

I learned from Cory Doctorow that Michael De Larabeiti's Borribles are back in print as ebooks, with a China Mieville introduction. And Cory's article also included an astonishingly patronising and cowardly letter from Collins Publishers to Michael's agent, explaining why they had decided to renege on publishing the third Borrible Book, Across the Dark Metropolis. (It was published by Pan Books, and it was in a cafe over the road from Pan, shortly after this, that Michael and I met and had coffee, long ago, and I told him how much I loved the books.)

The Borribles -- pointy eared street children, battling the police and evil rodents in the alleys and underground of a mythic London -- were remarkable, and definitely were one of the streams that fed into Neverwhere.

Go and read Cory's article, if only for the Collins letter. http://boingboing.net/2014/01/16/the-borribles-are-back.html

...

Talking about the delay between things being mentioned and them happening, Hayley Campbell came out to my house over 3 years ago, and rummaged around in the attic and the basement, found things written on things, and drawings, and all sorts of stuff. She even took objects away with her, and left post-it-notes in their place. (You can read about it here: .http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/11/coffee-table-book-and-why-reality-is.html)

Then she interviewed me and other people, and she wrote a book. It's about the art and the stories. In some ways it's a lot like the book I wrote, long ago, about Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I read a draft of the book a couple of months ago. Hayley is a smart and funny writer. She's also honest and opinionated. I liked it....

Today I saw a cover. Apparently, it's not the final cover. But, look! Hayley's book is coming into existence.

PS: Stop press - Amanda has become an Agony Aunt for the Guardian in Australia. I suppose it's fair exchange for the Australians sending the UK Guardian Pamela Stephenson.

Labels: Borribles, chris Riddell, dagmara matuszak, Hayley Campbell, I have alluded to something secret, Michael de Larrabeiti