mostly written yesterday actually

I have Taken To My Bed, like a young lady with a bad case of the vapors in a Victorian novel, although during the waking bits I'm writing Batman in bed, which young ladies in Victorian novels rarely did. It's just for today. Tomorrow I'll be up and bouncing around, and Wednesday night I'll be flying out to Las Vegas for the festival. But today is a Day Off. I'm enjoying the not going anywhere at all of it all, and the not signing, and the not even trying to stay awake.


Dear Mr.Gaiman,

For the love of God, stop whinging about being tired.

Yours Sincerely,

Cillian Kelly

Good point. The trouble is, the blog is part journal, written in real time, and when I'm on tour time for blogging normally comes out of sleep time, and tired's the thing on my mind. So it gets blogged about. Go back through the blog, over the years, and you'll find it becomes a familiar refrain during touring season. If it bothers you, probably best to stop reading the blog while I'm on tour... but take heart: touring season is almost done.

It's like the way that when a new book comes out I'll always link to the more interesting reviews and the interviews and sometimes even the bestseller lists. Pretty soon people will start writing in to let me know me that they liked the blog when it wasn't shilling for something, but now it's just become an ongoing list of reviews and mentions of placings on bestseller lists and suchlike, which only means that it is Book Publication (or, worse,Film Release) Season, and it too shall pass and then I'll go back to wittering on about cooking or bees or the perils of filing books or bitchcakes or something: the story of The Graveyard Book goes from me burbling about this thing I'm writing, and showing pictures of the handwritten version, through to publication, how it's reviewed and the interviews are part of the blog for a while, and then are swept away by the whirligig of time. Or on the whirligig of time, if we think there's any chance they'll come around again.

***

Those asterisks indicate a break while I put on a bee suit over my pajamas, and went out, with an assistant and a Hans, to move a beehive in the dark. (A sensible time to move a beehive, as all the bees have come home for the night.) (Lorraine tells the story at http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2008/11/moving-hive-in-dark-one-evening.html
and she makes it funny and interesting. Also includes a handful of photographs I took of her and the dog, who helped too.)

Then Maddy and I watched the first episode of the new series of Sarah Jane Adventures. Several episodes arrived here yesterday, dropped off by my mysterious DVDealer, and as an unasked-for thank-you I gave him a copy of the Dave Gibbons book Watching The Watchmen. I'd been sent a box of them because I had a drawing in the book, a small joke I drew and gave to Dave Gibbons about 22 years ago. This tells me that Dave Gibbons is much more organised person than I am.

Watching the Watchmen is designed by Chip Kidd, who is brilliant, and who will be interviewing me at the Interview and Signing next Sunday at the 92nd St Y. (Details at http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-LC5AE04
-- and someone wrote in to point out that while streets are named in this event, there is no mention of what city this will occur in. I expect this means that New York is The City and needs no introduction or something. But it's New York.)

***

Right. Blogging downstairs still in pajamas but now minus the beekeeping suit.

This piece on Orson Welles's WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast made a lot of sense. One of the times that reality is better than the legend, because it means that people are saner than we were told they were, and that's a good thing.

Then again, a man in Japan wants the law changed in order to allow him to marry a fictional character.

...

You can see me being interviewed by Jessa Crispin, in Chicago a few weeks ago, over on Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_11_013672.php

A Graveyard Book review at The Financial Times:

a captivating piece of work, light as fresh grave dirt, haunting as the inscription on a tombstone.

Another over at The Spectator:

This is a beautifully constructed book, in which what appears to be a series of episodes in the boy’s life builds up to a structured plot with a satisfying denouement; and Bod is a charming hero, courageous, considerate and polite in the styles of many centuries. Most importantly, this is a book about growing up and about life.

More awesome than the Spectator or even the FT, comes a review from the immortal Scaryduck who even suggests his own back-of-the-book pull-quote:

18/20: Billie Piper riding a space-hopper down a cobbled street.

A nice article from MTV about Amanda Palmer & me, and then I clicked on the next link, read what Frank Miller said about his Spirit movie, and decided that given his description of it, I'd probably skip it, but am still happy that it will get a lot of people reading collections of The Spirit who would never have picked up or heard of Will Eisner's wonderful comic otherwise. (You can read about how I first encountered The Spirit in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/01/spirit-of-seventy-five.asp).

***

Those asterisks were me sleeping, and then waking up with the sun in my face on a beautiful Novembery Election day. In a minute I'll get out of bed and, er, bounce around. Or at least take a shower, get dressed, and go downstairs to investigate the world. Last election day I was writing "Sunbird" to try and take my mind off things. This one, I'm interested, although not interested enough to, as an email from DirecTV just suggested, Watch 8 top networks at the same time on The Election Mix Channel, which in my universe is what they sentence you to an eternity of when hanging doesn't quite go far enough.

So. My movements this week...

I'm talking on Thursday Night at the Las Vegas Book Festival. Details at http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/events/2008/nov/06/3557/
Spend an evening with Neil Gaiman at the Clark County Library. Fantasy novelist and comic-book writer Gaiman has written about enough secret civilizations and alternate worlds that he probably has a pretty good idea of what to do in the event of global collapse. Hear his keynote address to open this year's Vegas Valley Book Festival, and then ask him afterward how to escape to Faerie when the stock market implodes.

For the benefit of anyone reading that in a year or so, that's a journalist trying to make a topical joke, I think.

Also, there's a signing on the Thursday as well...

The signing is happening at 1 p.m. at the 5th Street School (401 S. Fourth St). Attendees can bring one item from home and whatever is purchased on site.
If folks can't make it down, signed books will still be available at the door the night of the event.

The Vegas Valley festival also includes a comics festival on the Saturday. See http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/Publications/16668.htm
and its links for details.

Then on Saturday night there's a CBLDF event in New York. I've never attended one like this before: actors will be performing while huge Sandman panels appearing behind them. Only a hundred tickets... http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000374.shtml has details.

This very special evening will bring two of the series most beloved stories to life with a multimedia presentation that marries comics and live theater.

Which sounds interesting, anyway. "Three Septembers and a January" and "Golden Boy" (the Prez Story) are the Sandman stories. I'll be there, and will say a few words, but mainly I'm planning to be in the audience.

Then in New York on the Sunday night it's Sandman's Twentieth Birthday party. That's the one I mentioned above, with Chip Kidd interviewing me. At the 92nd Street Y. Which is in New York. (Both of the above events are ticketed.) This week at the Y: Roseanne Barr and Neil Gaiman.

Then I go home. And I will be completely done with travelling, just in time for the wonderful weather to turn cold, and I will finally get to interact with the RoboPanda...

Labels: Alchemy in Las Vegas, Chip Kidd, Mostly just me going on about a book nobody else has read yet that's still mostly in handwriting anyway, the nature of the blog, Will Eisner

Page Numbering Question

This might be a really stupid question, but, when you write by hand, as you seemingly did when you were in reclusion just now, how do you keep track of what 'page' you are on? You wrote that you are on page 96, and I assumed that is (at least roughly) the page of the final printed book. Or is it the page of the notebook?


I don't know what page I'm on of the final printed book -- that will depend on the size of the type, illustrations, layout and many other things. I can tell what page I'm on of the book I'm writing in though.

Hang on. I'll get out a cellphone and take some pictures. I'll include my hand for scale. (Although it's only an accurate scale if you know how big my hands are. Er, they're quite big.)

The book looks like this:

I got the blank book in Venice and it is almost too beautiful to write in, but it's really solidly built and takes the amount of punishment that being hauled around the world by me tends to give. I have four of them -- two I bought, two were a gift. This was one of the gifts.

I wrote The Graveyard Book and my name on the first page because it made me feel like I'd started something...

I tend to write an average of a little under 200 words a page in this book. Depends on the pen-nib, really...

I go off and number the pages about 50 pages ahead of where I am, because otherwise I will absentmindedly misnumber them while I'm writing. And as I start a new page I circle the number. Putting the circle on the number makes me remarkably happy. Also drawing a small gravestone with a number on it at the end of each chapter.




I'm writing less words to a page than will be in the printed book, of course. There's about 20,000 words in the notebook so far. The chapter I've already written, "The Witch's Headstone", is about 10,000 words long. And I think* the book itself will be around 60,000 words - twice as long as Coraline.




*Well, I hope. It's unlikely to be less. I tend to underestimate, though.

Labels: cellphone photos, Mostly just me going on about a book nobody else has read yet that's still mostly in handwriting anyway, Pictures of a Book, relative hand-sizes, why don't I go and have breakfast

Bet you thought I was dead

The best thing about going off and writing, and not having a phone or internets and things, just a tiny rented cottage, pen and paper and stories in your head, is that everything gets sort of simple and I remember why I do this writing thing and why I love it.

When I got stuck, I'd change notebooks and write an introduction or something similar that someone was waiting for. Then I'd go back to the story. I never turned on the computer, except once to check a detail.

Oddly enough the story that seemed the lesser of the two (most of the chapters of The Graveyard Book are also stories), which is called "The Friend" was easy and comfortable to write, while the one I was excited about, "The Hounds of God" (which I may retitle either "Miss Lupescu" or "The Ghoul Gate" on the next draft, or I may not) was sort of odd and lumpy and is going to need a lot of repainting and moving of heavy furniture when it gets typed up. Still, it has some really good bits in, and I love the ghouls, particularly the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the Duke of Westminster.

I'm on page 98 of the book, and including "The Witch's Headstone" I think I'm actually half way through the book right now. Although some of the final chapter-stories are going to be long ones.
I'm writing a poem that runs through the next chapter, a P.L. Travers-like fantasia called "Danse Macabre", which I think is going to be chapter 5, after the already-written "The Witch's Headstone". Then I'm not sure. Then it's a chapter called "Every Man Jack". Then the last chapter, probably.

Probably more than you really wanted to know, but I'm an author who's been writing a book, and mostly it's what my head is filled with, and it's interesting if you're me.

(Most of the spare bits of head are filled with something that may eventually be called Lyonnesse.)

The worst thing about going off to write for a bit is returning to civilisation and finding several thousand emails needing to be read, work mail, personal mail, Blog FAQ mail.... I'm not sure I'll ever catch up.

Thanks so much to the webelf for having fun and posting links in my absence. It looks like she enjoyed herself, and she put stuff up I probably wouldn't have thought of, so that was good, and I am grateful. (I'm still trying to figure out where she got the Holly picture from, mind you.) Amused that she found, and hustled for votes for the blog awards (even more amused when I discovered that I was also nominated as Hottest Daddy Blogger [?]).

I think I've solved a mystery no one even knew was mysterious. The web elf is your wife, isn't she? Don't forget my no-prize if I'm right!

I think only Marvel can give out no-prizes. But no, you are wrong. The web elf is the web elf. I think she looks like Dave Sim's Regency Elf, only more webby, but I could be wrong, and often am.

Hello,I would like to ask you if you are planning to write comic-book series like "Sandman"?Regards - Paweł Deptuch, POLAND

No, I already did that.

Right now I don't think I'll ever do another 2000 page comic story, but as I said, I've been wrong before...

NEIL,

I'm trying to find my place in writing, and I am leaning towards the Screenplay format. Since you write in almost every format, Which is easier?

1. writing a comic

2. wirting a movie

3. writing a novel

Signed,Bob Castle.

I think it depends on which one I'm not doing at the time. When you aren't doing it, the other ones are always easier, and the kind of thing that you're writing is much too hard.

...

We've now overhauled http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/shortstories/partiesstory, the "How To Talk to Girls at Parties" main page, and it now has a bit more explanation of what it is, links to the text version and the audio version of the story, and links to the other Hugo nominated short stories.

http://www.nippon2007.us/hugo_nominees.php has all of the Hugo nominees up, and links to all but one of the novellas, novelettes and stories, and even one of the novels.

There's a small and valid-up-to-a-point controversy going on about not enough women being nominated for Hugos this year. (For example, this from Bookslut.) (The up-to-a point bit for me is where it's implied by some commentators that the Hugo nominations are imposed from outside, rather than simply voted for by fans and readers who are eligible to vote. They're the Hugos, you get to vote for them as a member or supporting member of the WorldCon, and if you want to see something on the list next year, vote for it. Tell your friends to vote for it. Look at the 2004 Nomination details: in 2004 it only took about 25 votes, sometimes less, to get anything shorter than a novel on the list.)

...

An interview in connection with the PEN World Voices Festival next week in New York -- http://www.wildriverreview.com/worldvoices-neilgaiman.php.

Labels: How to talk to girls at parties, Hugo Awards, Mostly just me going on about a book nobody else has read yet that's still mostly in handwriting anyway, PEN world voices festival, Webelf Wonders