If this is thursday then where on earth did the last week go?

A blog post written this morning, one-fingered, on Amanda's iPad, while she slept, was eaten by the iPad or the ether.

Damn.
Here's my AMAZING LA assistant Cat's blog about World Fantasy Con and what happened while I was in LA. http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/2011/11/world-fantasy-con-late-late-show-neil.html
I'm backstage right now at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco.

Let's see..

First of all, a thousand thanks to everyone who gave anyone else a scary book, or encouraged other people to, for All Hallow's Read. Thank you!

Craig Ferguson and the Late Late Show was fun. Amanda was meant to record her bit at 4:20, my section around 5 ish, but a newly added dance number at the opening of the show meant we didn't leave until about 6:30pm... and the rest of the evening squirmed and coped as best it could...

My friend Mark Evanier served as haggis mule for the Late Late Show, and he writes entertainingly and accurately about the experience and the view from backstage at http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2011_10_31.html#021526

Left to right: Moby, Amanda Palmer, Stephin Merritt. Pay no attention to that toy pianist at the back.

The Haggis came from Macsweens via scottishfoodoverseas.com, ace haggis importers. My assistant Lorraine did all the hard work, at one point enlisting both Mark Evanier and Wil Wheaton in her secret haggis-importing clan, and sending around emails that said things like:


Hello all,

First of all, THANK YOU for be willing to accept our Haggis. And tend it. And keep it safe. True friends, indeed...

Sadly, Mark didn't copy me when he replied to Neil that he was a couple of blocks away, and Neil was in the cities at the time taping NPR and by the time I got Mark's note it was too late, the Haggis Shop is closed, the order set, and One Little Haggis is on its way from Scotland for Friday Delivery to Mr Wheaton.

If it is easier for all concerned, perhaps, Mark might acquire the Haggis from Wil, and deliver it Monday. If Wil would like to keep the Haggis and make the journey himself, well, that's just fine too. Mostly, whatever it easiest, I do not want our Haggis to disrupt lives and wreak havoc.

Again, my thanks to you,

Lorraine

Which I quote in full because I love the haggisy emails that were sent around. (Mark Evanier took delivery of the haggis in the end.)

Here's the song... 

And here's the interview...

Right. So the Wilshire Ebell Hallowe'en gig was wonderful, but chaos. We got to the theatre late, late from the Late Late Show, and the rehearsing time never happened, the costume contest and the us chatting took up much more time than we had thought, and we had to be offstage at exactly 10:30 or the tour would turn into a pumpkin, so the set list wound up becoming a peculiarly moveable feast... and it was wonderful. Nothing quite went as planned, but it felt like everyone, including us, was having the kind of evening that only ever happens once.

The scary rabbit twins in fezzes won the costume competition, with Roborina coming in second and Hester Prynne at the far left not winning, although her glowing A was often the only thing in the audience visible from the stage, so I always knew where she was. (Margaret Cho introduced us and helped with the costume competition. She is a very good thing.)


Amanda and I drove up the coast. We spent the night at the Madonna Inn (I am still trying to decide if it's a real American Gods place or not. I think probably it is) and then the next morning drove to San Francisco.

(It's now tomorrow, after the Brava show. Time to type has been tight.)

The Brava show was much tighter than the LA show. I read different things (I plan to read different things every night). We didn't have strict on-stage curfew, which meant that things could run a little long and no-one worried. The Jane Austen Argument debuted a new single, Holes, with lyrics by me and art by Mark Buckingham. (You can listen to it here.)

Amanda played me "Walk on the Wild Side" as an early birthday present, assisted by the Jane Austen Argument and Lance Horne.

And finally, for now (only because I have to stop writing this blog and sleep, despite all the things I meant to write about here) Absolute Sandman Volume 5, containing Endless Nights and Dream Hunters and more, comes out tomorrow. You can preorder it discounted at Amazon,  You can preorder it from Indiebound. (You can preorder it from Barnes and Noble, but they don't get a link until they put Sandman graphic novels back on the shelves of their shops.)

Or you can just go and buy a copy from your local comic shop.

Barnes and Noble have done something very wonderful recently, though. Last year, they recorded me reading the opening passage to James Thurber's book "The Thirteen Clocks", which is one of my favourite books. And now they've animated it. Here's a link to the Barnes and Noble blog where you can watch it.

Right. Sleep.

Labels: amanda palmer, An Evening With Neil And Amanda., Craig Ferguson, haggis smuggling, halloween traditions, Stephin Merritt, The Thirteen Clocks

With Great Power comes, well, something...

Last year I linked to R.A. Lafferty's short story "Slow Tuesday Night" (The new syfy channel that replaced the old Sci-Fi channel no longer have it up on their website, but you can find it in internet archives here.) It's a story about a world in which things happen fast. You should read it.

Sometimes I think it was written about Twitter.

For example, last night, before bed, I noticed this: http://hidenseek.typepad.com/come_out_come_out/2010/02/cannot-chase-paperchase.html It looked like a pretty clearcut case of plagiarism by a large company from a small crafter. I linked to it in Twitter, with a post saying

Fascinating Paperchase plagiarism over at http://bit.ly/cdrzKZ . Bad Paperchase.

I went to bed.

When I woke up, it was to articles like this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-copied-artists-work-after-twitter-backlash-1896894.htm and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7215124/Paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-plagiarised-British-artists-work-after-Twitter-campaign.html and (slightly more balanced) http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/11/paperchase-design-hidden-eloise.

Now, the truth is, I didn't campaign, and I didn't mobilise 1.5 million people. I pointed a few to the link, they read the article, looked at the picture, went "No, you can't do that" and spread the word themselves. There's a community of crafters out there making small-run or handmade things who individually lack power, but together are a force to be reckoned with. And the mass of people are, on the whole, very good on the whole right and wrong thing...

But it's so strange. We're not quite in a world in which the established media have the power they used to, or at least, they are playing catch-up, and that's odd, and different, and sort of fun. And it's also a tremendous amount of responsibility. The first time this happened, about a year ago, I decided I had to use these Twitter powers only for good. And that's still the plan.

But you can't plan on it. And you can't second-guess what's going to happen. I suppose you try and do the right thing, and hope for the best.

Which applies as much to life as it does to Twitter.

...

Now, in case you weren't following, I won two SFX Readers Poll Awards, handed out at the SFX Weekender on Saturday. (The Full awards list is here.) These were my acceptance speeches (they'd told me which award would be handed out first, so I put the big news after the second award):

BEST NOVEL

Hullo.

I wish I could be with you, but I’m in LA, at the animation awards, waiting to see whether Coraline has won any Annies. I keep trying to master the whole bilocation thing but so far without any luck.

I came up with the idea for The Graveyard Book in 1985, sitting in a little English country graveyard, watching my son pedal his tricycle between the headstones. I put down the words from 2005 to 2008. Last night someone asked me how long the book took to write and I didn’t know if it was three years or 25 years. I’ve written a lot of books, but it’s one of my favourites, and it means a lot to me that it’s one of your favourites too. I want to thank Dave McKean and Chris Riddell, who illustrated it, and Sarah Odedina, my editor at Bloomsbury, because I don’t get to thank her enough. But mostly I want to thank you.


BEST COMIC

I love Batman. I’ve loved him for over 40 years now, and when I was offered the chance to write the “last” Batman comic, I jumped at it. Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader was really a kind of a love letter to everything I had loved about Batman, and at the same time it was fan letter to all the people who had, over the years, made the Batman I had loved – Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Neal Adams, Adam West and Frank Miller and the list goes on and on...
I was delighted that people enjoyed it. Nobody would have enjoyed it even a little bit if Andy Kubert was not an amazing genius of great brilliance, capable of drawing like Brian Bolland or Berni Wrightson whenever I’d ask him to, and equally as capable of drawing like himself. I was more than happy to have been asked to make it, I’m thrilled you liked it.

Oh, and there's something else.

Over the years SFX, and its readers and their votes in the polls, have always been very kind to me. I thought I’d return the favour with what used to be called, in journalistic circles when I was a boy, a scoop.

As anyone who’s read my blog knows, I’m a big fan of a certain long-running British SF TV series. One that started watching -- from behind the sofa -- when I was three. And while I know it’s cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now, which is to say, NOT in the upcoming season but early in the one after that, it’s quite possible that I might have written an episode. And if I had, it would originally have been called “The House of Nothing”. But it definitely isn’t called that any more.

Countdown. You’ve got about 14 months.

Which I decided to announce mostly because being coy was getting wearing after 18 months. (No, I've never lied about it, and the only things I've flat-out denied were made-up stories about Ice Warriors or episode placement.) I'd let Steven Moffat and co. know ahead of time. And it got fairly well reported -- accurately by SFX in http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=exclusive_neil_gaiman_confirms_doctor, picked up by papers like the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/08/neil-gaiman-dr-who - and then much more cautiously by the BBC itself in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8503737.stm with the headline Neil Gaiman 'has written Doctor Who episode' (as if it's a direct quote, which it isn't), with a line at the end saying A spokesman for Doctor Who would not confirm Gaiman's announcement. which left me scratching my head, wondering why I got the quotation marks and odd deniability, or the sense that they were poised to follow it up with Gaiman admits 'he made the whole Doctor Who thing up'. Oh, funny old BBC news website.

...

Dan Guy, webgoblin of this parish, and I, have put up a proper Facebook fan page to replace a couple of ones people had put up in the past that everyone seemed to think was actually me. Not a lot of content there, and there are no plans to put up anything you can't find here. It's at http://www.facebook.com/neilgaiman

(Thanks again to the magic of Twitter, where I complained that we couldn't figure out a way to make it happen, and were contacted by Facebook almost instantly.)

...

Hi, Neil - I am sure you will hear this many, many times... but I wanted to chime in and say that when I read "I don't really know how much longer this blog has to go," it was a bit of a shock. I know it's a little silly to have become attached to the blog of an author I've never met, but reading what you write here is a constant joy and entertainment, and I would be very sad to see it go. Please keep writing - here, and everywhere else.

Best,
-Megan

I think all good things end. When I started the blog, in February 2001, I planned to keep it going until September 2001. It's still going, and I'm certainly not planning to end it immediately. But it will end one day. Good things do.

Hi Neil. I don't know if you can answer this question. Since you're the best author who ever lived, you likely haven't encountered this problem. How do you deal with harsh criticism and bad reviews without wanting to slit your wrists? Some of us take our writing very seriously. Please tell me. I'd really like to know.
Thanks... and cheers, mate.

Well, for a start, never take seriously anyone telling you you're the best author who ever lived, because if you do you'd have to take seriously the person who announces that you're the worst author who ever lived.

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won't. You'll already have made that art, and when they're talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.

If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don't read them. It's not like you've signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.

Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they've made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It's their call. You get on with making art.

Hey Neil,

Just wanted to say a big thank you!! I saw you at the Con in Montreal in August and you talking about Gene Wolfe inspired me to get some of his writing...and now I can't stop! I wish I had found him before. Just read Peace...and reread it! Amazing! And gulping down his short stories now. Lots of jewels in "The Best of Gene Wolfe". Anyway, thanks!!

What's your favourite Gene Wolfe work?

Pi

It depends. Sometimes Peace, sometimes the Book of the New Sun, sometimes it's the last thing of Gene's I read.

Dear Neil I am 8 years old and in LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOve with your books so are my two little sisters and my dad. Cant wait to see you at Naperville reads!

Why, thank you. (I actually put this up so that I could remind people in the Chicago area about http://napervillereads.org/events.html and the events on the evenings of the 23rd and 24th of February
The 23rd is 7:00 p.m. Reading / Q&A event for Adult Fans held at Waubonsie Valley High School. This will be a ticketed event, with tickets available at Anderson’s and all 3 Naperville Public Library locations, Nichols Library, Naper Boulevard Library and 95th Street Library.

The 24th is very similar, but it's for families (which just means I'm going to read all-ages appropriate stuff on the 24th, but not necessarily on the 23rd). They are ticketed event, although the tickets are Free.

The Naperville Reads events look crazy busy, but I'm hoping my granddaughter & nephew can meet you at the Family Night on Feb.24 - will there be a signing and/or meet & greet?
Thanks much!
~Chris

I'm going to pre-sign about 3000 books, but not try and do signings each night, because each day is already packed from early in the morning with talks to school classes and groups and a 5 hour signing at the end of each long day will finish me off.

In terms of meet and greet, we'll see. If I can, I will.

Dear Neil,

Two questions:

1) Is the notion presented in American Gods that roadside attractions in America are built on places of power an original one of yours, or can one read more about this idea somewhere?

2) Have you ever driven down the Great River Road on the Wisconsin side? There are a number of unusual (and I think resonant) places along that route, the best of which is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine just south of La Crosse.

Love your work!

Regards,

Chris Ellison
The Netherlands (but originally from Cannon Falls)

1) It's mine, I'm afraid.

2) I did, the first time I drove to Florida, researching American Gods. It was so cold...

OK, OK, so I'm only 20-some years late in asking, but I just found my box of Sandman comics and my son and I have been re-reading them at night, and my son asked: In the first issue, when Morpheus is trapped and Burgess (his captor) dies right in front of him, how come Death doesn't see her brother when she comes for Burgess? I know, I know, it was the first issue and seeing more of the Endless at that point would have been problematic, but still, I promised I'd ask (and now I'm kind of curious to hear what I know will be a creative answer). On a side note, I love how well even the early issues still hold up. I wish I was as good a writer now as you were at 28 (and a half). --Steve and Thomas

Oh, she saw him. They all knew where he was and what had happened to him. But it's not exactly the kind of family who would do anything about it, if you see what I mean.

Hi,
I went to the Magnetic Fields show here in DC tonight. It was, as expected, amazing. Just wanted to pass along word that they don't have the Coraline musical soundtrack at the shows yet, but they will have it later on. I failed to retain the dates given to me by the merchandise salesperson, though. He did say that it will be out in digital form soon too.
While I have your attention...
I was wondering why you chose Scotties as the dogs in Coraline, or if their is any reason behind it. My family has had Scotties since before I was born and I loved the use of them in Coraline, both book and film. Henry Selick's team nailed the way they jump up on you when you come to the door.
My apologies if this has been answered elsewhere. I'm a recent convert to your awesomeness (thanks to BPAL) and the search function gave me pages about people named Scott.
Thank you,
Shannon

I'll ask them when it will be out. [Edit to add, they have it for sale now.] In the meantime, you can catch up with the Magnetic Fields on the road at http://houseoftomorrow.com/calendar.php

And you can watch me (and Sarah Silverman, and Peter Gabriel and Lemony Snickett...) talking about Stephin in a trailer for STRANGE POWERS, a soon to be released documentary, at
http://strangepowersfilm.com/, and also up on YouTube:

And the Scotties came from Miss Webster, my elocution teacher when I was a boy. (I talk about it in this CORALINE conversation at the Well.)

Labels: Gene Wolfe, Naperville Reads, Stephin Merritt, the dangers of Twitter

The Dark Truth of Bees

There. Up much too early, to accompany Stephin Merritt to the airport, so we only had to do one airport run and so I could use my magic flies-too-much powers to whisk Stephin through the special short lines.

Am now holed up in the Northwest Lounge, catching up on email and getting work done. The danger of doing this is that I can completely go into the Writing Stuff  headspace, and in two hours and 15 minutes from now utterly forget that I should be leaving the lounge and finding a gate and getting onto a plane. (So I wrote the last sentence as the equivalent of tying a knot in my handkerchief.) 

Let's see...

Wish I could go to the South By Southwest festival next week (I can't, because it is Maddy's spring break, and we have adventures planned). It seems like everyone I talk to is going to be there. Amanda Palmer is playing, Tori Amos is playing (an hour apart, in a vicious wossname for fans of both, or just people who want to see my friends in concert), and Duncan Jones's film MOON will be showing.

He was kind enough to slip me a DVD to watch the last time I was in London, and I really loved it. It was a hard science fiction film, like, say, Outland, the sort of film they seemed to stop making when Star Wars happened and movie SF became space opera and fantasy: MOON is hard SF, set on the far side of the moon, with Sam Rockwell as an astronaut who is looking forward to going home after three years and is about to get some nasty surprises. It's hard to be too enthusiastic about specific things without giving plot surprises away (Sam Rockwell's performance --performances-- is astonishing, but to explain why is already a spoiler). It feels real -- a good, solid, smart, hard SF movie of the kind they don't make any more.

Who made that wonderful chest of drawers for you? The one in the picture of Stephin Merrit getting dog affection. My first thought when I saw the picture was, "Wow, I've never seen that kind of lens distortion before." Then I saw all the other straight lines and realized the chest was built that way. What fun

I saw it in a furniture factory in Xi'an, in China, when I was there last year, and decided it was needed. They shipped it over. Neither the chest of drawers nor the shipping were particularly expensive, and if they had a website I'd happily point you to it. (I'll investigate.)

Do you know when the new printings of the Graveyard Book with the Newbery stamp will be out? Even though I have the American and English printings, I look forward to the new one.

Peter Esztelecky
Waterloo, On. Canada

It's out.

Hi Neil

Is there any updated information on Hill House? I found out today that the "definitive" Martian Chronicles (formerly due from Hill House) is now being published by Subterranean Press, so I wondered if you knew whether something similar might be likely to happen with "Neverwhere".

Thank you

Tom

We're certainly hoping so, although it's taking a lot longer than I had dreamed to sort this out. Right now, the best I can do is,

"For those of you who are wondering what's going on with the Hill House limited edition of NEVERWHERE, please direct your inquiries to Jennifer Brehl, Neil's editor at William Morrow. She may be contacted at jennifer.brehl (at) harpercollins.com."

...

The French Graveyard Book is not called The Graveyard Book.

...

Finally, this, from James Kennedy's blog, made me smile. (And also, made me want to read his book, The Order of Odd-Fish.) Did I write all that stuff they say I did? O but I did not. It was the bees.

Labels: bees, Duncan Jones, hill house, Spacing out in airports, Stephin Merritt

Head Wounds for Men

As of 7:30 tonight, Stephin Merritt has luggage and a Bouzhouki, and is a happy, happy man.

(Picture of Mr Merritt shortly before his luggage arrived. He was pretty happy then, too.)

I don't really want to talk about the thing Stephin and I are working on yet -- it's early days. A strange sort of thing that's all our own little private project. When it's ready, I'll talk about it. Today was mostly spent filling out little cards of different colours with words like "Decapitation" and phrases like "Strangling is Cheap" . Tomorrow, Stephin starts writing songs...

The Graveyard Book is up for an LA Times Book Award and an ABA Indie World Award. I am up against friends in each case, and don't mind if I win or not but am happy just to be nominated, as any extra awards and nominations after the Newbery are just icing on a wonderful cake.

Hi Neil, I've seen so many of your posts lately showering your beautiful big white dog with love! Not that there's anything wrong with that, but with stories you've written like "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "The Price" I've always figured you for a cat person. I myself have a fondness for dogs but ultimately I'd consider myself a cat person, and whenever reading your "cat" stories I find myself thinking "Yes, he gets it! He understands cats!" (not that we humans can really ever understand cats). So, I must ask, do you consider yourself a cat person or dog person? And, by the way, your dog is very beautiful and looks to be quite a nice doggy according to your pictures. Thanks for your time on a silly question.

-Andy Christensen

I'm a cat person who got adopted by a dog. Resistance is useless. I definitely didn't pick him. We just sort of found each other when we needed each other. And I carry on being a cat person.

I wish the cats and dog liked each other -- instead the house is now divided into Cat and Dog territory, by a dividing door:

Fred the Black Cat, who had been living out in the garage, abandoned the garage and moved grumpily further and further out into the woods. The rest of the cats just shrugged and got on with their lives. (It's actually easier during the Winter, when the cats tend to stay indoors. In summer Cabal will still tree a cat every few weeks.)

Neil, you say your only convention plans are for something in August. Does this mean you won't be at the ALA in Chicago to collect your Newbery Award in person? We librarians will be crushed if you aren't at the gala (and expensive!) dinner where all youth awards are presented.

Sorry -- I wasn't thinking of the ALA as a convention. Yes, I'll be there -- I'll be giving a Newbery Medal speech (which I have to write by the end of the month argh) and I will also be doing something on behalf of the CBLDF.

Hi, Neil,
A friend of ours just opened a comic book coffeeshop in San Francisco - Caffinated Comics (www.caffcom.com) and I was wondering if you might be willing to give this new venue a plug in the blog. Their grand opening was March 1st and we came home with a Sandman I didn't previously own and Charles Vess' illustrated version of Stardust. It'd be great if you could help them out with a shout out - San Francisco's first green comic book coffeeshop!
Thanks,Mira

Consider it plugged.

Which reminds me, at http://time-shark.livejournal.com/237449.html  and at http://www.mythicdelirium.com/#anniversary you will learn about the next issue of Mythic Delirium. Mike has been asking me for a poem for years, and finally he asked me when I'd written one. In this case, one about a trout heart.

Labels: Cats, Dog, Stephin Merritt

Waiting for Stephin

I'm working on something I can't talk about, while awaiting the arrival of Stephin Merritt, out to work on a project that I can't talk about (a different one). I feel like I should start putting my collar up and talking in code phrases.

Neil,

I read your post today regarding "cashing in" on Blueberry Girl and Crazy Hair. It totally pisses me off when people can't be happy for the success of others when it's righfully due. I have seen this phenomenon on message boards of popular bands. You'll have people that will love a band until said band starts getting out in the mainstream and starts selling CDs, then suddenly the band has "sold out" or "sucks." Anyways, glad you haven't let it get you down.

Quick question: Will you be attending San Diego Comic-Con this year? It will be my first "con" and it would rock to meet ya!

Peace,

Jonesy

You're too kind. I think I've sort of made that crossing over the last month, and it's okay. I liked it best when I felt like anyone who liked my stuff had me as a private thing the world didn't know about, and I'm not sure, post Newbery and Coraline film, that that'll be true again, or if it is it may take a little while to happen. It's always nice to discover someone and feel that, in some way, you own them, or a little bit of them, because they aren't public.

No plans to be at Comic-Con this year. My only real convention plans are to be Guest of Honour at WorldCon in Montreal in August. Here's the English website: http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home. Worldcons are wonderful things, and I have the fondest memories of my first one, 21 years ago -- meeting Julie Schwartz for the first time, being the last person left in the bar with William Gibson at 5.00 am, pitching George R R Martin on an idea for a Wild Cards character who like, lived in dreams...

Hiya, Neil!

My husband and I are both in the field of advertising here in Portland, OR (he's a motion graphics designer; I'm an interactive producer) so imagine my glee when I read in today's Oregonian that a little movie called "Coraline" was going to save Oregon's economy! I knew your books had changed my life metaphorically-speaking, but who'dathunk that one of your books would literally change my world?

http://blog.oregonlive.com/portlandarts/2009/03/in_the_coraline_economy_we_tru.html

Thanks from the bottom of the heart of the creative world here in Portland!

Mikki

That's rather marvellous. Thank you Mikki.

I, like a thousands of others, have been a fan of yours for a long time. It started with American Gods back in 2003 at a B&N and it sort of spiraled from there. Anyway, I was curious if you would ever be returning to the Adult Fiction side literature? I am a fan of your young readers books, but there is something even more fantastical to your novels.

Also, please find a place in comics and stay there, I miss you.

Best,

Jacob Kohl

As long as I'm alive and writing I expect I'll continue to do this peripatetic sort of dance, in which I wander from children's books to adult novels, from picture books to big non-fiction things, from TV to radio to short stories to movies, and sometimes take in things that happen on the stage on the way. So yes, I'll do more adult novels. And I'll do more comics. But I won't stay there.

...and Stephin Merritt just arrived. His luggage, however, did not arrive. Also not with him is his gate-checked bouzouki. I can set him up with spare pajamas and toothbrush and such, but I do not have a bouzouki here.

Labels: Stephin Merritt, the absence of bazoukis, the perils of famousness

Why Stephin Merritt wants to destroy the world...

It's scary. Last night's video is up before I had a chance to blog about the event it was filmed at (I slept on the plane this morning), so you can watch me reading Chapter Two at:

http://mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx?VideoID=2

And this is it embedded (I hope):



...

i saw you yesterday in nyc reading ur first chapter from your new book. no i'm not the girl you hugged, i watched you from above and it was brilliantly done. i haven't read all your stories, yet but i do hope you keep writing as its inspiring for us. Come back to new york, but don't go to the beauty bar. i thought you to be too cool for such a pretentious place, cosmo and a pedicure? lol...have fun on the tour!

Is that what the Beauty Bar is? I thought it was cool, because Stephin Merritt was DJing there, and I had a chance to talk to him about his Coraline Musical and other stuff, and any chance to talk to Stephin is a cool thing, and any place you can talk to Stephin is, by definition, a cool place.

The Magnetic Fields is, simply, my favourite band, witty and intelligent and wise, and The Gothic Archies is wonderful too, and so are the Future Bible Heroes and the Sixths (all of these are Stephin Merrit driven or co-driven musical entities). There's a marvellous interview with Stephin (about the new Magnetic Fields album, and the Coraline musical, and whether the French should send him some of the shoes they have named after him) I just noticed at http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2008/10/interview_magne.php , and I shall quote from the ending:

Have you seen the line of footwear supposedly inspired by you?

I've seen it online. I haven't actually obtained it in person. Because...Oh these French people, they haven't sent me anything! If I named an album after their shoe line, I would send them the album.

They haven't sent you a single pair of shoes?

They haven't sent me a single shoelace.

That's despicable.

Yeah. You know, I'm supposed to be honored that they named some shoes—a whole line of shoes—after me, but they don't send me anything? Nuke Europe!

That seems like a great place to stop. Thank you for talking to me...

Sure.

...Unless you care to clarify that latter comment?

Smash the European Union.

Great. Thank you Stephin.

I want my shoes. Destroy the world. Goodbye.

(If you're in the US and you want to see the Magnetic Fields, which, honestly, you should, check out http://houseoftomorrow.com/calendar.php for their October tour.)


There is a wonderful interview with and reading from Eddie Campbell up at http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_09_013473.php And if I'm going to get lunch I'm going to have to stop writing this now and do another post later about what happened in Philadelphia and seeing Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick and Kyle Cassidy and suchlike luminaries...

food. food good. right.

Labels: free book but this time in installments and filmed, Graveyard Book tour, Magnetic Fields, shoes????, Stephin Merritt

i bet you thought i was dead

Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.

The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.

Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.

(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)


I am, as I said, really enjoying it.

Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.

The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)

...

One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 books every child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.

...

There's an article on Stephin Merritt in the New York Times.

...

People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macbook Airs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)

Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs (edited to add: and it comes with a DVD drive and a hard drive that's double the size of the current Mac air. On the down side it came with Vista, which is, so far, like Windows XP only slower).

...

Neil, on 27 December, you said, There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family. Howcome you don't talk about that side of your family?

Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.

I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened to my family in World War Two. It was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was pretty much reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.

One of those sisters was my cousin, the remarkable Dr Helen Fagin, [she was my grandfather's first cousin -- my great-grandfather was her uncle], and has just been honoured by New College of Florida in Sarasota for her work in Holocaust Education.

Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."

And she's right. The worst part, for me as I said in American Gods, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.

Labels: books for young readers, computers and gadgets and things, Helen Fagin, lightweight computers, Neverwhere movie, quotes you always thought were by somebody else, Stephin Merritt, The Graveyard Book, writers' strike

Leftovers mostly

A closing of tabs sort of blogpost, this --

There are free preview tickets for Stardust in the UK at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/screen/article2590223.ece

I have no idea what this is: http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/29076/Enpocket-and-Paramount-find-love

At the Stardust afterparty I ran into someone who looked exactly like Mark Millar did the last time I saw him, only this gentleman was about, oh, 17 years older. He writes about the fun he had at http://forums.millarworld.tv/index.php?showtopic=73753&st=0

You'll have seen this -- Play-Doh bunnies invade New York -- already. But if you haven't, you should...
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/play-doh/sony-bravia-ad-showcases-mick-keef-and-a-tsunami-of-bunnies-306942.php?autoplay=true

Meanwhile, Stephin Merritt sings a nursery rhyme for Volvo as only he can, all gloomy and strange and odd:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/download/45600-stephin-merritt-the-wheels-on-the-car-volvo-ad , with an Stephin Merritt original song for Volvo "I'm in a Lonely Way" just released through iTunes, according to http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/

Over at http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/category/comics-in-context/ Peter Sanderson is now four essays in to his dissection of The Eternals. I think my favourite moments of these essays (as an author) are the bits where I read something Peter says and think "I didn't expect anyone ever to notice that." My second-favourite bits are the moments where I go, "Oh. I never thought of that. Bugger."

This is a piece of journalism I'd heard about years ago and wanted to read, and just found online. It's Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_

...

Oh, and a word from our sponsor: my short story collection Fragile Things is now out in paperback, with an Olive-and-dayglo-Orange-coloured cover.

(And on Amazon, I just noticed the Audiofile review of the Fragile Things audiobook I'd never seen before, which I am posting here because I'm much nervous about my reading than I am about my writing, and a review like this one made me grin.

Master storyteller Neil Gaiman begins this collection by introducing many of the stories, his introduction proving to be a story in its own right. Gaiman's performance aptitude matches his writing ability, as each tale resonates with subtlety and insight. Every character, no matter how brief his or her appearance, receives impeccable attention vocally and textually. And every word of narrative shines. Listeners new to Gaiman will be surprised by the variety of literary genres in this collection, from fairy tales to crime to romance and even science fiction. Gaiman steps nimbly through each, offering a shadow of meaning here, a barely perceptible nuance there, a punch of anger or a featherbed of sweetness where needed, leading his audience through 10 hours of the best listening of the year. R.L.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

There.)

Labels: a review that says nice things about an audiobook I read, Eternals, Stardust, Stephin Merritt, tabs