A gallimaufry.

Last year, the daughter of the winner of the Moth auction of "afternoon tea with Neil Gaiman" met me for afternoon tea, and it all went a bit wrong.

The winner was the mother of a very nice young lady, and she had paid $4,400 for her daughter to have tea with me (all the money goes to support The Moth, which is something I love and care about: people telling true stories about their lives. Check out their podcast). Unfortunately, when the nice young lady and I went to the tea place they explained that they'd never heard of us, and for that matter they didn't even serve tea, and it all went so wrong that I took the young lady in question up to DC Comics (she had told me that she loved comics, Vertigo in particular, and wanted to edit comics when she graduated) and then DC Publisher Paul Levitz, who was passing by, gave her an hour's masterclass in matters editorial and said something about a summer internship.

I saw her at the signing for the Year's Best American Comics last month and the young lady told me that she'd just done a summer's internship at DC Comics, and loved it, and that the failed tea had been a wonderful thing better than any actual tea could possibly have been, and she was incredibly happy and grateful..

I cannot guarantee you that the afternoon tea with me this year will go anywhere nearly as wrong as that. But the Moth are at it again. Also, you could be an "area man or woman" in the Onion.

https://www.biddingforgood.com/auction/item/Browse.action?auctionId=120612926

...

I don't do much journalism any more, and I do even less book reviewing (I think the last book I reviewed was the Annotated Grimm's Fairytales for the New York Times, six years ago), but if I'm not reviewing at all I feel guilty, as if I am no longer being part of the cultural dialogue, so I just reviewed Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars for the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/05/full-dark-stephen-king-review.

I'm happy to say that I liked it.

....

I turn fifty on Wednesday. Ivy Ratafia gets in there early, with a birthday LJ post for me.

And I am putting it up here because Ivy answers one of the great questions of the universe here, viz. Which were the nine true panels in this two-page comic? In 17 years, no-one has been able to guess it correctly.

You should probably read the comic first before you read Ivy's explanation. It comes from a 1993 "Roast" comic done for the Chicago Comic Convention, and was drawn by Scott McCloud and written by Scott and Ivy.

Read what Ivy has to say at: http://ivy-rat.livejournal.com/104712.html

...

I really don't do much journalism, and I'm amused to see that the only pieces I've done in so long are both being published-on-the-web on the same day. Since I typed that first paragraph, SPIN MAGAZINE just posted an article I wrote for them yesterday.

They asked me to review the Dresden Dolls Hallowe'en show.

I'm not sure that that was quite what I gave them, although it's that as well. I'm happy with it, and I'm not normally happy with my non-fiction writing. It's up at http://www.spin.com/articles/neil-gaiman-amanda-palmer-dresden-dolls

People like it, and I'm glad that they do.

...

And finally, All Hallow's Read appears, at least anecdotally, to have been a huge success. It's not too early to start thinking about what we ought to do next year. The website is up at http://www.allhallowsread.com/ - it's primitive, as it was thrown up in hours two days before Hallowe'en. I'd love to crowdsource this more - what kinds of things would people like to see on the website? What kinds of things would you like to see in real life? Posters? Suggestions? Should we enlist bookshops or publishers or libraries or all of the above? Should we start an online group?

And what did you do (or give, or receive) for All Hallows Read this year that you'd like to pass on to the world?

(I gave Joan of Dark a copy of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and I gave random strangers copies of Carrie.)

Use the "Leave a reply" form at the bottom of any of the AHR website pages. We'll start to plan next year's give-a-scary-book festival together.

...

Right. Now I'm off to the (very small) bonfire.

Here's a photo of Cabal today, when we went down to winterise the beehives.

Labels: All Hallow's Read, amanda palmer, bonfire night, book reviews, Ivy Ratafia, Moth, tea with me, The Dresden Dolls, The Moth

scents and sensibility

It's just after three in the morning and my dog has been sprayed by a skunk.

This is not a dog who likes being washed at the best of times, and three in the morning is not the best of times.

So here's a link to the Moth event: http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1340/prmID/1412. I'm the last one. They're all fun and interesting, all unwritten, unmemorised, spoken narratives performed before an audience. And if you only listen to one other, you should listen to Edgar's.

Now I'm going to wash a dog now, with peroxide and baking soda and soap...

Pray for me.

Labels: Moth, skunked

bees and stuff

I'm home again. (There wasn't a blog entry for the last two days because the hotel in Helena, Montana, had such an intermittently dodgy internet connection -- it would sort of work during the day and then stop working at night, just about the point I'd think "Time to write a blog entry". So I'd sleep instead.)

The Moth event on Thursday night (http://www.themoth.org/) was wonderful and scary -- Pico Iyer, Jonathan Ames, Edgar Oliver, Laila Lalami, and a terrified me telling the last story of the night (about my day on Liverpool Street Station in Easter 1977). A quick google found a review up at http://wordriotpress.blogspot.com/2007/04/moth.html.

I've come away from the PEN World Voices event with a real respect and a great deal more understanding of what PEN is and does. http://www.pen.org/ is their website, and I commend it to you.

Then I went to Helena. Got in late on Friday night. Saturday morning, I talked -- first to librarians about the history of comics and comics censorship and the CBLDF and what it does, then about digital stuff (acknowledging myself to be a pixel-stained technopeasant wretch), then for a lunch I talked to librarians about writing and how I became someone who does that sort of thing, and then I talked to an audience of people from Montana mostly. I read to them, then I answered questions, then I signed books for many extremely nice people, and had to confess to most of them that I hadn't really seen much of Montana, what with being in a hotel talking all day. I have to go back -- what I saw was lovely.

While I was signing books in Montana, Charles Vess was in New York, going to a screening of Stardust.

He writes about it over on his blog...

Posh seats for, at most, 50 people. Filling those seats were several of the
movie’s stars (Robert DeNiro, Clare Danes, Charlie Cox), producers (Lorenzo
DeBonaventura, etc.) and many faces both recognizable and not. Matthew Vaughan , the director, introduced the film and the lights went down. Nervous couldn’t half describe how I was feeling at that moment. What if I found myself cringing at what had been done to “my” story. What if everyone started walking out? What if, what if…

And you can find out what he thought of what he saw at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/153.

I don't think I'm going to see it until the beginning of June at a screening in the UK. By that point everything will be finished, and I'll see a completed print. Like Charles, I'm a bit nervous -- I last saw a test screening with lots of stuff not there and not finished, but Charles's blog entry and Harry Knowles's comments the other day on AICN are extremely reassuring. (The longer UK trailer for Stardust, with ghosts, is up at http://www.stardustmovie.com/intl/uk/).

Charles Vess is giving a lecture in New York on May 2nd at the Society of Illustrators, and signing the new hardcover of Stardust on May 4th -- details at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/152.

I have worn my white bee suit today and gone and met the bees. The plumtrees are in blossom. And I have to make Maddy's dinner now.

Labels: bees, Charles Vess, librarians, Montana LIbrary Thingummy, Moth, PEN world voices festival, Stardust movies, weirdly normal labels

A Quick One

I'm hoping I'll get the time to write about the MOTH last night. It was scary and wonderful, and in the end, I did okay.

But this is just a quick one to say that Harry Knowles writes about STARDUST over at http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32443.

And according to the Observer, In Neil Gaiman's short stories, fantasy and realism are old friends, keen to embellish each other's best anecdotes. Fragile Things confirms Gaiman's reputation as an ingenious teller of sinister tales, whose whimsical and fine writing, at its best, equals MR James and Edgar Allan Poe .

Labels: Aint it Cool News, Moth, Reviews that compare me to James (MR not Henry) and Poe (EA), the entries I mean to write but probably don't