On New Year's Eve Where I Am.

How on earth did that happen? I promised a blog tomorrow, and that was over a week ago. I wrote an essay, and I wrote a short story, and I went to Sydney and did a reading with a string quartet, but I didn't blog. And now I'm sitting backstage at Revolt in Melbourne preparing for a New Year's Eve Party- Masquerade-thing and I missed my blog. So while there is wireless, there is hope, and I am writing this.

Many exciting and wonderful things have happened in the time that I have been not-blogging. For example, I was quoted by Tom Stoppard.

My story "A Case of Death and Honey" from A Study in Sherlock and the upcoming Jonathan Strahan edited anthology Best SF and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6 was written about on the Tor.com website in a way that made me happy. Short story writing is a lot like Don Marquis's description of poetry writing as flinging rose petals into the Grand Canyon and listening for the boom. Normally there is silence, so even a little response to a short story is a good thing for an author. You can read the Tor.com piece, by Niall Alexander, at http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/12/the-adventure-of-the-devils-foot-neil-gaiman-and-the-great-detective.

The first volume of Les Klinger's remarkable four volume Annotated Sandman comes out in a couple of weeks: reserve your copies from your local comic store or bookshop now.

Here's a great article about Allegra Rosenberg, who makes Time Lord Rock in Chicago. She's sixteen, although I said she was fifteen when I introduced her from the stage when I was doing the Not My Job quiz on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me".

And you can listen to the Wait Wait interview at http://www.npr.org/2011/12/24/144146842/author-neil-gaiman-plays-not-my-job. (You can read it there, too. But listen to it, don't read it.) I can't embed it.

However, the recent Symphony Space SELECTED SHORTS is embeddable, and I have embedded it. It has me reading "Troll Bridge" along with one of my favourite Jorge Luis Borges stories, "The Circular Ruins".

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I was about to tell you about M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence being available on Neil Gaiman Presents as a beautiful audiobook. I want to do a whole post about that in the next couple of days, though. So for now, go and investigate if you wish to get ahead: www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L88VMY&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911
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I had a marvellous time with the FourPlay String Quartet in Sydney a few days ago. Flew home and went straight to the Melbourne City Library where Amanda and I read (me) and sang (her). We'd announced that we'd be there on Twitter just before my plane took off, and about four hundred people showed up.

Melbourne City Library is amazing. It has a piano, and librarians so nice and creative I wanted to take them on the road with me. We'd be Neil Gaiman and his posse of travelling librarians.

I love this photo of me, eyes closed, listening to Amanda play:

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Talking about good photographs...

It's from photographer  Rasmus Rasmussen's website at http://rasmusrasmussen.com/2011/12/29/webley-palmer-and-gaiman-aka-favorite-photo-of-2011/ 

He says,

Throughout any given year I shoot thousands of photos, so when I was recently asked which one was my personal favorite of 2011, I had a difficult time answering. However, when thinking about it over a couple of days, the one above kept jumping out at me.
On 11-11-11 I documented Jason Webley‘s concert at The Moore in Seattle. That was where I caught this moment in time. Webley is talking about the virtues of love, while Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer sit together behind him, listening. 

There is a love story there, and it starts with a look of genuine happiness on Jason Webley’s face, as he looks up into the light, sharing his joy with (and for) the audience. Amanda Palmer represents that audience to me, relaxed, attentive and having a good time, and Neil Gaiman ties the story together, looking down at his wife with complete adoration and a smile that says simply: “I Love You.” 

There is enough intimacy in this photo, that I felt a little like a peeping tom as I put it through post processing, like I was crashing a private party. I actually had to remind myself that it was taken at a public event. That is why this is my favorite photo of 2011. It makes me feel like giving my wife a kiss, putting on some good music and take pleasure in the little things in life.

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And for New Year's Messages... I have to write one for tonight in Melbourne as soon as I finish this.

It has to be as good as the ones I've written for this blog, over the years. Normally I don't stop and think. I just write what I'd want in the coming year, and hope that other people would want that too.

Someone just turned one of them into a poster:

And here's a mash-up of a couple of them, delivered from the stage in Boston, two years ago today...

Labels: annotations, fourplay, I want a posse of Travelling Librarians, In Australia they run out of 2011 early, Jason Webley, Selected Shorts, Sherlock Holmesery, Tom Stoppard, Wait Wait

A story for which the world is not yet ready

The Baker Street Irregular in me took great pleasure in learning about the Giant Rat of Papua, Indonesia. All right, it's not Sumatra. But it's still in Indonesia. Yes, Indonesia is a really big place, and Papua is a long way from Sumatra, especially for a rat.

But still.

A Giant Rat! Near Sumatra!


Ahhhh.

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The cough is no better, although I am industriously trying every remedy people have suggested and am now awash in honey, lemon juice, cider vinegar, chocolate, cayenne, and Guaifenesin-based cough syrup. Also sundry waters and teas and suchlike.

And I'm trying to use a wireless keyboard that randomly forgets to send characters to the computer. This is dead irritating.

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Hi Mr. Neil,


All of the vlogging nerdfighters from Brotherhood 2.0 (www.brotherhood2.com) are taking part in an attempt to seize all of YouTube today with videos designed to get people to donate to various charitable organizations. I chose the C.B.L.D.F. and I would appreciate it if you'd link to me on your blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRpmypcOv9E


Happy Monday,


Jane





Consider it linked.





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Dear Neil,


Pending the upcoming release of Stardust on dvd (which I'm most assuredly buying on release day and forcing my family to watch Christmas day), I'm reminded of the videos you posted a bit back about the writer's strike and how you're all lobbying to get a pay increase from dvd and tv sales. That being said, since your name is well-marked all over Stardust, book to movie and all that, do you still only get a miserable $0.02 from each dvd we buy? (and if so, would it be possible for the company to just buy a bunch of wholesale copies, maybe slap a signature - or not!- on them and resell for a higher price off the website, thus making a little closer to the amount you deserve and also happier fans?)


- Dani





That's really kind of you to be concerned. The truth is, if lots of you buy the Stardust DVD it will be regarded as a good thing and success, and probably make my life easier, but Charles Vess and I really got our share of Stardust back when we sold the film rights; and while it might be a really good idea to sell signed DVDs, I'm happier in the authoring business than I would ever be in the selling signed DVDs business. (Having said that, it's really not a bad idea -- and it's one that Peter Beagle did for The Last Unicorn DVD. Which, if you want a copy, you should order from http://www.conlanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc where you will get it signed, and Peter Beagle will get half of what you pay. Such a bargain.)


I'll happily point people at DreamHaven Books' NEILGAIMAN.NET website, which they created because I got tired of answering the question of "Where can I get this thing that you did..." with "From DreamHaven". It's the best selection of stuff by me (and connected to me, and by people who worked with me, and so on) out there, and they are nice people and it's a good shop. (And no, I don't get a cut. I'm just happy that the stuff is out there and I have somewhere to send anyone who asks.)


The thing I'm proudest of that I made this year is probably this:

because I love audiobooks, and it's nice that the first version of the complete text edition to come out in the US is in audio format. The abridged version of Neverwhere that Gary Bakewell read was the reason I've never again said yes to permitting abridged audio books (it started out really well, then you could feel the abridger's desperation in the last half as huge chunks of plot were tossed overboard), but it took a long time until the rights were free and we were able to do this as a complete and unabridged audiobook, with me doing the voices the way I hear them in my head, chewing the scenery as Croup and Vandemar.

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And finally, Happy 90th Birthday to Arthur C. Clarke!

The only time I ever met Arthur C. Clarke was about 22 years ago, in Brown's Hotel, when he was in the UK to help promote the film of 2010. I'd been reading him since I was a nipper, and some of his stories -- "The Nine Billion Names of God", for one -- were the essence of pure SF for me. It was a story that, even as I read it when I was nine or ten, I wanted to have written. Sense of Wonder, from someone who really is a world treasure.

(And it makes me very happy to see a new edition of one of the books I loved when I was 12 has just been updated and reissued -- Brian Aldiss's A Science Fiction Omnibus is now out from Penguin Classics. It may not be Brian Aldiss's 90th birthday -- he's only 82 -- but he's still writing, and is a treasure too.)

Labels: Arthur C Clarke, audio books, Brian W Aldiss, DVDs, Neverwhere audio, Sherlock Holmesery

Valentine

You know, the readers of this blog, between you all, know everything. Last year I posted about Joe Hill saying
One of my favourite short stories from last year was called "Best New Horror" by an author I'd not previously heard of named Joe Hill, in PS publishing"s Postscripts #3. His website's http://www.joehillfiction.com/index.htm , and I just noticed that he has a collection out, 20th Century Ghosts. I don't have much time for reading currently, but I'm going to order a copy.
and the next morning I got an email from someone named Jeff saying,
Thanks for your post on Joe Hill yesterday. It happened to be the other half of a coincidence that gave me a fun few minutes of detective work on the web. Perhaps you knew this already and were being coy, but it turns out Hill is actually Joe Hill King and his parents are backwoods Maine hermits who have dabbled in the writing game themselves from time to time.

See, I came home late with a copy of the new Entertainment Weekly and, working from the back, read Stephen King's latest essay wherein he gave a shout-out to a friend of his kids' named Shane Leonard. Good for him. Then I came upstairs to peruse a few blogs, clicked on the Hill link you provided and somewhere on there spotted a nod to Hill's web master -- a guy named Shane Leonard...

Like I say, between you, you people know everything, or you figure it out. It was something that, now I knew it, I decided not to remember or to mention here -- mostly because I could see why Joe was doing it under his own steam, and I thought that was a good thing. I was pleased I'd liked the story first, before realising that the author was the nice young man I'd met at the Season of Mists signing in Boston, fourteen years earlier.

Anyway, I loved Twentieth Century Ghosts, and was then very surprised by Heart-Shaped Box, which I had expected to be quiet and literary, like the short stories, and was instead a terrific roller coaster, almost impossible to stop reading. I loved it, took pleasure in blurbing it, and was extremely pleased to see this New York Times review by Janet Maslin who seems to have enjoyed it just as much as I did.

I see from his website -- http://www.joehillfiction.com/ -- that he's now, as of yesterday -- on an author signing tour. Go and see him if he's coming near you. Tell him I said Hi.

(So far this year, my favourite book is Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg. It's the nearest thing to a sequel to Charmed Lives she's written -- a Chrestomanci novel with Cat in it, and a lot more besides. The sort of book that makes you sad on page 400 because you only have a hundred pages to go and then it'll be done.)


Dear Neil;

Furtherto your comments on "The Land of Green Ginger", I remember seeing it televised in the late '50s. I searched the IMDB and it was Episode 6 of Season 1 of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" shown 18 April 1958. Each episode of the series dramatized a (usually) well known fairy/Arabian Nights/fantasy story. I really can't actually remember the episodes but I do remember the longing for the next episode in the series.

Cheers,

Paul Burrows

Oddly enough, some years ago I bought the video from someone on eBay. It was an odd sort of thing, not really funny, not quite sure what it was, and I wondered if it was the experience of working on it that sent Langley back to the material for what became the 1965 edition of the book, which is much sharper and more knowing and odd. It is out there, and probably pretty soon it'll probably show up on YouTube.

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This came in from a very happy Elizabeth, the manager at DreamHaven...

42 orders so far. Your fans rock! You can tell them I said so. Also that we will fill orders as fast as possible, but there may be some delay, because the manager is now teary-eyed and it slows down her typing.

Love,
Elizabeth

I'm as grateful as she is.

...and right now I find myself playing, over and over, "When My Ship Comes In" a piece of music I found on the Fabulist, by the North Atlantic Explorers.

And over at http://polloxniner.blogs.com/polloxniner/2006/02/_having_lived_l.html, is the North Atlantic Explorers cover of Lloyd Cole's "I Will Not Leave You Alone", which is a perfect Valentine's Day sort of a song, if you wanted one. (My very favourite Valentine song is probably Thea Gilmore's "Holding Your Hand" but I couldn't find it up online, so I am not linking to it.)

Labels: A little Valentine's Wish, Joe Hill, North Atlantic Explorers, Sherlock Holmesery, The Land of Green Ginger, The Pinhoe Egg