NEWS: Watchmen, Sandman, Chu, Russia and the Clown-Shoes of Cthulhu

I just wrote to Amanda confessing myself the most boring man in the world. My life right now seems to consist of writing and, once a day, jogging. The new iPod nano has decided to do the same thing that the one it replaced did, viz. reboot itself 2 minutes before the end of a timed run, which I've decided to outwit by not telling it how long I am going to run for, which works.
Pages of SANDMAN: Overture are coming in drawn from J.H. Williams, and different pages of Sandman are being written and going out from me to J.H. Williams. The ones coming in are the most beautiful mainstream comics I think I've ever seen. The ones going out are... well, all the characters feel like themselves. And, when we've met them before, they sound like themselves. And it's really strange when a character I've not written since 1995 turns up and all I seem to do for the dialogue is listen and write down what they say. I needed a story within the story at one point, so am telling a story I'd vaguely thought might one day be a giant miniseries as a three page story...
All the introductions I've agreed to write in the last 3 years are all needed now, so I am writing them. It's partly fun, because I get to tell people about things I love, and tell them why I love those books, but because they have all come together it feels a little like homework.
The most fun thing I did today was look at a rough sketch for the cover of the third book with Chu, the little Panda in it, and make a suggestion, and then, much later in the day, see Adam Rex's version of the sketch incorporating my suggestion, which headed straight into cuteness overload territory.
The second CHU book, which comes out in June, is going to be CHU'S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL in America but CHU'S FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL in the UK, because that's how the same thing is described in the different countries.
You can find out more about it via the Amazon US link at http://j.mp/Chus1st which is the only place I can find anything about it so far...

(The US cover via Amazon)

(The UK cover, courtesy of Bloomsbury)

And ironically, while I'm taking my social media sabbatical, I've been nominated for a SHORTY award.
Let's see...
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Locus Magazine, the newspaper of the Science Fiction and Fantasy World, has put up its 2013 poll and survey online:
http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2014/PollAndSurvey.html
You can vote for the books and stories you read in 2013, and more, and you should. And fill out the survey: it tells them (and everyone) who reads SF. As long as you include your name, email and survey information, your votes will get counted.
And if you do not feel like filling out a survey it's also an excellent round up of the best of the year in novels and shorter work, art and non-fiction.
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For the last 5 years I've been doing annual doodles for the National Doodle Day -- now Doodle 4 NF -- an annual fundraiser for the Neurofibromatosis Network. I've done two doodles. So far this year, I've only done one, "The Clown-Shoes of Cthulhu", which is up on their website, and which I drew in in an OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE signing tour book:

They do not get auctioned until May, by which time there will be another doodle to join it...
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PEN International (the writer and artist's organisation, of which I'm a member) sent out a letter to the Russian Government protesting the "gay propaganda" laws, the criminal blasphemy laws and the laws that criminalise defamation, and I was one of the signatories.
I noticed people on the Guardian website wondering why PEN wasn't protesting about other bad things elsewhere: it does. Lots of them. Look: http://www.pen-international.org/
Mostly because, as you'll probably know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm a Free Speech absolutist. (Here's me explaining why: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html). And because I found myself remembering 1986 and protesting Clause 28 (later Section 28) with a comic...

This was the comic I did, drawn by Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham. Not exactly subtle, but it was agitprop and I was much younger and less subtle then. (For the complete comic, go to Bryan's website.)
It was in a comic called AARGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) edited by Alan Moore, who has wandered into my life in two different ways this week. Firstly, Jackie Estrada is doing a Kickstarter to make a book of the photos she's taken at San Diego Comic-Con over the years, and includes this picture, in which the strangeness of perspective makes Jack Kirby and Alan Moore look even more different in height than they actually were. Sometimes I think this photo makes it look like Alan is the size of Gort, the eight-foot tall robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still, while Jack is normal-sized Klaatu, and sometimes I think that it looks like Alan is normal-sized and Jack looks like something Alan would have brought along to snack upon, were he not a vegetarian.

(Check out Jackie's Kickstarter. It has many more amazing photos on the Kickstarter page, and I cannot imagine how many photos that will delight comics lovers there will be in the book.)
The other Alan Moore-related news came about because I ran into Dave Gibbons in Las Vegas in early December, and he told me about a book they were putting together showcasing Watchmen original art. I reminded Dave that he and Alan had given me a page as a thank you when we were all much younger, and he suggested I might put it in the book.
As Dave says on this interview page...

I was talking to Neil Gaiman a couple of weeks ago — managed to have a catch-up with him over a cup of tea, which was great — and I mentioned this project to him and he’s got one particularly prime page that Alan (Moore) and I gave him back in the day when he used to help us with sourcing quotations and so on. He’s got the dream sequence — the Nite Owl dream sequence where there are, I think, like 20 panels on the page. So that’s a real iconic and favorite page.

You can see the page itself (and others) much larger than it is below at http://13thdimension.com/exclusive-first-look-at-watchmen-artifact-edition-from-idw/

And I only discovered when it came out of its frame, that when I'd had framed in 1987 I wasn't thinking about acid-free mounts and museum-quality glass and the kinds of things I think about when people give me art these days, and I should have.
(The story of what I did to help on Watchmen and why they gave me the page is here on the blog: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/08/please-stop-my-assistant-becoming-mad.html -- and the link to the 1989 Brian Hibbs interview with a me whom I barely recognise is at http://thedreaming.holycow.com/2008/08/05/gaiman-interview-with-brian-hibbs/)
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So, signing the PEN Open Letter was something I did this week as a writer.
This video was something I did because it made me smile when I was asked. I suspect that Derren Brown, Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett and co. did it for the same reason. And they did it better than I did:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2014/feb/07/learn-russian-protest-anti-gay-laws-sochi-winter-olympics-video

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You have six days left to listen to Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle, a trimmed version of his Edinburgh Show, which I never saw, so I am glad I heard it on the radio. I've been listening to the Beatles while writing recently -- I'd call it comfort listening, except I've barely listened to them since I was in my early teens, so Mitch's history-rant-pontification-and-occasional-parodic-songs came along at just the right time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03szxdh
(That'll work on a computer for the next six days. If you follow the link on a tablet or phone, it won't work outside the UK. So use an app like TuneIn Radio and search for Mitch Benn, and it will come up instantly...)
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And for Charles Dickens' Birthday (it's his 202nd Birthday today), I'm reposting the reading I did, in Dickensian beard and clobber, at the New York Public Library, just before Christmas: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/charles-dickens-christmas-carol-neil-gaiman-and-molly-oldfield
If you want to hear Molly Oldfield telling you interesting things about Dickens' reading tours and secret museums, followed by me reading the version of A Christmas Carol from Dickens' hand-annotated and edited prompt copy, now is your chance.

Labels: Aargh, Bryan Talbot, Dave Gibbons, Dickens, doodles, Locus awards, Mitch Benn, National Doodle Day, Watchmen, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

A Perfect Week

The tour started on about June 13^th, with an event and a signing in Bath. It went to the US and to Canada, then came back to England via Holland, and it finished in Scotland at the end of August. I signed about 75,000 books while I was on tour, most of them copies of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. Six weeks on, I came back to the UK and did a mini-tour for FORTUNATELY, THE MILK. It was the appendix of tours, the last bit. Even so, it had a few of my favourite moments of the year, in it and one of my favourite evenings ever.

My first day in the UK, I went to the opening night of THE LIGHT PRINCESS, Tori Amos's beautiful musical, at the National Theatre. It's a fairy tale, and is about feminism, ecology, and the importance of showing and having emotions. It contains some amazing performances, beautiful songs, and flying (and floating) effects that are jaw dropping. The audience loved it, and gave it a Standing Ovation. I came out certain that it would divide the critics, and the papers the next morning were mixed – the Daily Mail's reviewer gave it one star and described the audience who had loved it as “weak minded”, the Daily Express gave it five stars and said:

 With shades of panto, ballet, circus and opera as well as musical theatre, this bonkers but beautiful fantasy defies categorisation. Amos has said that any man taking a woman here on a date is guaranteed to get lucky afterwards. I’m not the best judge of that kind of thing. All I know is I’d go again tomorrow, and again the day after that.

I thought it was magic.

Ian Lamb, Bloomsbury's Children's Books Publicity Honcho, had set up several really enjoyable events. They began with a literary lunch at the Savoy Hotel, which reopened in 2010 after a three year long remodel. The food was wonderful, and between courses I wandered around with a microphone, talking about the book, reading from it and answering questions. This was only the second of the lunches, and I don't think that any of the people there were Savoy regulars: the ones I recognised were all regulars from signings and events, most of them looking a bit nervous and intimidated. The Savoy staff were really nice.

I was on SATURDAY LIVE, the BBC Radio 4 Saturday morning show, along with a comics creator, a Rock Manager, Tori (and elks), and a former Yeti. It was a delightful 90 minutes of radio. I forgot to talk about FORTUNATELY, THE MILK.
(You can listen to it here.)

I went to Cheltenham, and talked and signed at the literary festival there: 400 people queued up afterwards, most of them in the rain, and I felt very guilty indeed. I met Marcus Brigstocke for dinner – the first time we'd talked properly since we did the commentary on the DVD of A SHORT FILM ABOUT JOHN BOLTON, my short film in 2002, which Marcus starred in. From Cheltenham to Manchester, where I did another book event and signing, less formal and significantly less rained on.

Up first thing the next morning to do the BBC Breakfast Show (the segment is up here, but you may need Tunnelbear or equivalent to watch outside the UK). Normally Breakfast TV book spots are an excuse for the interviewers to not talk about the book, but the presenters (and their children) had read and loved FORTUNATELY THE MILK, and asked me about it, and I made up for not having mentioned it on the radio. (The Amazon rating went up from about 240 to 12 in an hour, for the curious.)

That night was astonishing: I gave a speech on behalf of the Reading Agency. It's about reading, and about libraries, and about our obligations to the world and to the future. Before the speech, I sat in my seat, and I looked down at the words I'd written to say and was consumed by a strange form of stage fright in which none of the sentences that I looked at seemed to make any sense. In a kind of awkward terror I got up and delivered the speech, and somehow it all made sense and all the sentences were sentences after all: it worked.

It's been widely reported, and published in edited form in the Guardian, and people everywhere have started using it to explain to other people why books and libraries and such are to be protected and endorsed, which is a wonderful thing.

The next day was the best day of all. It began early when my wife, Amanda, flew in to the UK to surprise me. And, because she knows me, she texted me the day before to let me know she would be surprising me at that night's performance of the whole of FORTUNATELY, THE MILK at the Westminster Central Hall.

I had spent a few weeks gathering together a motley and wonderful band of performers to help with the night's entertainment. In addition, Chris Riddell was going to come on the stage with me: I would read, and he would draw.

It was amazing, and I was amazed.

About 2,500 people were there. The tickets had sold out immediately – we could have done an event twice the size. My only regret was that there could have been more kids in the audience.

Andrew O' Neill was our master of ceremonies. T.V. Smith and Tom Robinson played two acoustic songs (and played pirates and such); As the story started Chris Riddell quick-drew amazing illustrations; Siobhan Hewlett was a pirate queen and stole the show; Mitch Benn stole it back with a song about Lady Pirate Captains; Tasha Hawley and Niamh Walsh were ponies – and got a round of applause from the audience – and Niamh returned as a wumpire; Lenny Henry brought the house down as a special surprise Dinosaur Space Patrol T. Rex, and asked me twitter questions. Then Amanda came on and played her Ukulele Anthem with final lyrics rewritten to be about FORTUNATELY THE MILK. And then it was all done.

Chris Riddell draws...

TV Smith and Tom Robinson perform THE THIN GREEN LINE

Mitch Benn, Andrew O'Neill, TV Smith, Niamh Walsh, Tash Hawley, Siobhan Hewlett

Mitch, Tim and Andrew do a very important plot dance. Lenny Henry and I do not dance.

(All of these photos from this great photoset I found on Flickr.)

I cannot thank any of these people enough for a perfect night.

(In the background, making things work for us and for the 2500 people, were Andy Quinn from Foyles, Alex Rochford from Time Out, and their respective teams, the lovely and talented Holly Gaiman, and the extremely terrific Kelly Fogarty who helped make everything easier and took the following wonderful backstage photographs.)

Labels: breakfastry, Fortunately the Milk, Mitch Benn, nine photographs, photographs, radio, The Light Princess, Tom Robinson, TV Smith

Not Wearing My T-Shirt and vibrating ducks

Despite (possibly because of) not living in the UK for most of the year, I remain incredibly proud of the BBC.

It's facing a future of real-world budget cuts (of the kind that leaves me hoping that Doctor Who will not soon be about two people who live in a small flat in Cardiff having a tiddlywinks contest for the fate of the universe).

Mitch Benn is proud of it too. Watch this video to find out why and how...

Here's the story of how he made the video. He sent me my very own Proud of the BBC T-shirt which I would be wearing right now if it wasn't in the wash.

In lieu of me modelling it, I will simply point you to http://mitchbenn.com/proudofthebbc/

where you can get your own T-shirt. You can wear it all over the world to signify your pride in the BBC, or just show that you look wicked in a black T-shirt.

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My episode of ARTHUR went out today in the US. (There are parts of the US where it has't gone out yet. Check your local listings. It's called Falafelosophy.) PBS have said they plan to get it up online soon - I'll put up a link when it is.

And here's an interview done by the Ace Hotel in New York when I stayed there. The interview includes vibrating ducks and the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. Also a photograph of me playing the ukulele.

http://blog.acehotel.com/post/1384480881/ace-hotel-new-york-neil-gaiman-interview

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I loved this:

I have no idea whether this is the proper way to comment on blog entries. If it's wrong then just pretend that I didn't send it. :-)

A comment to the latest blog entry:

"You know, there aren't enough traditions that involve giving books."

When I and my husband moved in together, we joined our libraries. But we had one problem: all the books we both liked, and now had two copies of. In the beginning, we didn't do much about it. I mean - what if you decide you don't belong together anyway, then you want to take your books with you when you split, right? But after a while, we decided that we wanted to get rid of the duplicates - as a sign that we would live together forever, and not ever need two copies of Neverwhere again.

So we arranged our wedding according to this idea; we gave each of the guests one book (or cd) from our duplicates, so that they could share this decision with us. Also they got a good book - obviously it was a book that both me and my husband liked (Well - with the exception of The Sword of Shannara, which we would have given away both copies of if we had found anybody who wanted them. :-) and would have it as a memory of our wedding.

And yes, we've lived happily ever since (nine years now), I don't ever see the need of reacquiring any of the duplicates we gave away, and I like it as a ceremony; it had a lot more meaning to us than most kinds of wedding ceremonies.

Regards (and thanks for all those great books!)

Monika

and this:

Dear Mr Gaiman,

After reading your post about more book giving traditions I just wanted to point out (as I imagine a lot of other people will as well, but just in case they don't) that there is a Norwegian tradition of giving/reading detective/crime stories at Easter, known as påskekrim; this literally means 'Eastercrime'.

Best wishes
Solveig Felton -- Swedish, not Norwegian, just in case you actually read this far and wondered.

P.S. Thank you for writing! While I don't love everything you write (sorry!) I like most of it enough to always be willing to try a new book of yours and I love some of it to the point of plotting excuses to give the books to my friends.

And the idea of the All Hallow's Read has got some wonderful responses from bloggers. Monica Edinger talks about it over at the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monica-edinger/my-response-to-neil-gaima_b_772941.html

...while The Bloggess not only blogs about it but includes a photograph of herself in the bath in The Shining at http://thebloggess.com/?p=8787

And Joe Hill, who wrote one of the scariest books of recent times in Heart-Shaped Box, endorses it and makes some suggestions over at http://joehillfiction.com/?p=1678

(Lots of excellent scary book suggestions over at http://www.facebook.com/neilgaiman as well.)

To clarify, I'm not proposing that you give books or comics instead of chocolate bars or razor-stuffed apples (if you're in a country that hands out candies on Hallowe'en). (Although some some people do that, and with success -- I've already heard from people who have gone down to charity shops and walked out with boxes of vintage R.L. Stine books that they plan to hand to kids).

I'm proposing something slightly different.

That you give someone a scary book this Hallowe'en.

You certainly don't have to give everyone you know a scary book. Just pick someone, or a few someones, you care about. Then give them a book this week that'll scare their hair white.

Labels: All Hallow's Read, Arthur on PBS, BBC, Mitch Benn

Quick ones...

It's been a long week, and I keep waiting for down time to do a proper blog entry in, to catch up. I have photos and everything.

This is just a very short one to say that

1) I'll be on the Jonathan Ross radio show on Radio 2 this morning. In a couple of hours.

2) I'll be on Blue Peter on Tuesday (already filmed, me and Henry Selick on the sofa).

Spent yesterday catching up with old friends. Right now I look wild-haired and bleary-eyed, and I will be extremely pleased when all this is over, as it will be by lunchtime.

Some wonderful articles out there about the Stephin Merritt & Co CORALINE Musical. Like this one: http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-05-06/theater/stephin-merritt-and-david-greenspan-conjure-an-unusual-tuner-for-coraline/1 (in which I think Stephin misestimates whether or not children will like it. They will, it's about imagining.) And this one, just as good, with David Greenspan.

(Edit to add, the Lortel is a very small theatre, because Stephin wanted this unmiked and acoustic; tickets are going very fast, between the Magnetic Fields fans, the Coraline fans, and the theatre fans, and it's a very limited season. If you put off getting tickets and then find you can't get them not even for ready money, do not send me grumpy emails.)

And here's me in the Guardian doing their Celebrity Squares: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/08/neil-gaiman

And the front desk just called up to say that Mitch Benn is now downstairs so I am signing off in haste.

Labels: coraline the musical, Jonathan Ross, Mitch Benn, radio, sorry about this

At Eastercon

It's a terrific convention (in a hotel the geography of which I cannot quite grasp).

My first Eastercon was Seacon in Brighton in 1984 -- a huge and wonderful affair. I was 23, wide-eyed and delighted by the convention. Bumptious, gawky, ransacking the dealer's room for Lionel Fanthorpe books for Ghastly Beyond Belief, occasionally mistaken for Clive Barker (why?) and starting to suspect that I might have found my tribe. And now, 24 years later, I'm some strange old-timery creature, at an Eastercon of 1300 people that's the biggest since, er, Seacon in 1984, and, despite the worries that friends have expressed to me about the greying of fandom, there seem to be an awful lot of people here the age I was at my first Eastercon or younger, an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a lot of people who are having their first convention, and who may even now be suspecting that they might have found their tribe.

Altogether, a good thing.

Lots of old friends, and some new friends -- both China Mieville and Charles Stross are Guests of Honour as well, and I've known Charles for 20 years. (China for less than that.) I first signed in Fan Guest of Honour Rog Peyton's bookshop with Kim Newman in 1985 for "Ghastly Beyond Belief"... I keep running into people whom I sort of recognise. Then I mentally subtract 25 pounds, make their hair dark and realise who they are.


Did an enjoyable, even if none of us were quite awake yet, panel on mythology in the morning, a wonderful panel on Fantastic London in the afternoon. Ate lunch with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, dinner with the astonishingly nice Paul Cornell -- who I am definitely supporting for a Hugo, at least until Steven Moffat comes through with the promised ice-cream, at which point I might waver. But until then it's Cornell all the way. We spent dinner in full Doctor Who nerd mode. It was much too much fun -- and I got to tell him an obscure Dr Who fact that he didn't know. Possibly one that not even Steven Manfred knows. Holly said we were very cute, and she enjoyed the conversation except possibly when we got onto the early stuff. Also somewhere in there was a lot of signing.

I met my Romanian publishers and was given Romanian copies of my books, and promised to think about coming to Romania...

Lots of fun things tomorrow -- I want to do a bit of a reading during my Guest of Honour time, because the only reading I'm down for is one for kids (a Wolves in the Walls reading) but I have to decide just what I want to read.

Mitch Benn plays at the convention tomorrow night. He just sent me a link to his latest video. It's a happy birthday song of a political nature. But the tune's nice and catchy...

Labels: eastercon, Hugo Awards, Mitch Benn, paul cornell, the odd way that people I've known for 24 years have of getting older