Personal Assistants and Why I am lucky

I have amazing assistants.

I really do. I'm lucky. First, foremost, and, I expect, forever, there's Lorraine, who has been my personal assistant now for about 18 years. This is Lorraine.

She arrived in 1992, a friend of some friends, just to help put the books on the shelves into alphabetical order, shortly after I moved to the US bringing my books with me, and she's never left. She's had to learn new skills, and face her fears (bees! airports! grumpy authors!), and is absolutely amazing.

Sometimes I listen to her on the phone, talking an airline into doing something they don't do, don't want to do, and if they did do it it would cost me thousands, and then she gets off the phone and says "all sorted. It'll cost you $25 for additional airport tax, but you're now re-routed round the world via Hobart..." It's like magic.

Somewhere in there she's filled her house with fostered Bengal cats, acquired a horse, played violin and sung in a variety of musical entities, garnered a fan-club, declined offers from other writers and organisations to go and run their lives, and, most recently, got herself fit. She says that what she's looking forward to most about the American Gods HOUSE ON THE ROCK gathering is practicing with roller derby girls.

And right now she's off on her first holiday in about 12 years. (It's not that I am an evil taskmaster, honest. She's hard to move. Her bengals get pissy, in all sorts of ways, if she vanishes, for a start.) But when I was invited to Octocon, the Dublin SF convention, and she was declining on my behalf, she happened to mention that she has wanted to visit Ireland for a very long time.

So next weekend, the Fabulous Lorraine will be a guest at Octocon. Prior to that, she will spent most of a week wandering around Ireland.

As a side-effect of getting fit, she's lost 25lb over the last few months, and none of her clothes fit her. This has not deterred her from going.

She and I discovered that if she flies out of Rochester rather than Minneapolis the price of her ticket plummeted. This is not a strange thing. The strange thing is that she is permitting Doctor Dan, our local Doctor, to fly her to Rochester in a small plane.

Small planes do not make Lorraine happy. When I go somewhere via small plane she is miserable, convinced that she needs to spend valuable working time mentally keeping the plane in the air.

That she is doing this, with enthusiasm, leaves me delighted and baffled. I think she will have a wonderful time in Ireland.

(Here's Lorraine's Blog on Going to Ireland: http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com/2010/09/ireland-well-cabal-and-ireland-ok.html

and her blog of Today: http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com/2010/10/did-i-mention-ireland.html)

If you're at Octocon, or just in Ireland next week, say hello to her for me.

My other assistant is Cat Mihos, AKA Kitty.

This is Cat. (After a quick Google Image search I snaffled this picture from her myspace thingummy. Whenever I have seen her she has been much more dressed than this.)


She's not full time. Mostly, she's not my assistant. On the whole she goes on the road with people like Lady Gaga or the Jonas Brothers, making things good for them and their crew. We made friends when she was working for Tori Amos, seven years ago, and she taught Maddy how to bowl with lemons.

Somewhere in there, Cat started the Neverwear.net website, selling stuff she does that's me-derived: limited edition prints and tee-shirts and mousepads and such, along with jewelry and magnet-pictures she makes herself. (It's a non-profit site for me, in case you were wondering, as what would be my royalty on the stuff she makes and sells there goes to the CBLDF.)

When I'm in LA and she is, she'll drive me around, come to meetings with me, make my life easier. Here's Kitty blogging about having me in LA for a few days: http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/2010/02/whirling-dervishes.html

She also tends to be point person for fan-mail to me and requests for signed photographs and that kind of stuff (and if she goes on the road with Lady Gaga for 6 months, it can get very backed up, alas).

She's wonderful. She's produced some small films, and will, I suspect, one day be a film producer more than she is anything else.

And she's getting married today.

She's marrying Drew. This is Drew:



This is Kitty and Drew.


I'm in Baltimore tonight for the wedding. I will wear my amazing black velvet and stripy thing that Kambriel made me (as seen at http://kambriel.livejournal.com/289161.html, which also contains mermaids, for those of you missing party photos from the last blog entry, and also in http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/622744.html, which has a wonderful photo of Kyle and me and my daughter the ineffable Holly Gaiman).

If you want to give Cat a wedding present, go and buy something cool from her Neverwear site. (She is going to be putting the prices up on some of the limited edition prints very soon, which she does when the stocks begin to dwindle and before they go out of print, so right now the Jim Lee print of my poem "100 Words" and the Molly Crabapple illustrated "Desert Wind" are probably the smartest things to buy.)

I'm going to read "Instructions" at Cat's wedding tonight. But before then, I need to put on the posh clobber.

And shave.

Actually, I should probably stop blogging and shave.

Labels: cat mihos, The Fabulous Lorraine

How I got to Boston

My son Mike had to be back at work at Google in San Francisco on the 30th. I had planned to get to Boston for Amanda’s New Year’s Eve concert on the 31st, and I had wanted a day in Boston to recover. We were both on 7.00 am flights from the highlands of Scotland – his flight to take him to Gatwick, where he would bus to Heathrow and take a San Francisco plane, mine to take me to Manchester, where I would fly to Amsterdam, and from there to Boston.

So I napped for a couple of hours and we left the house at 3:00 am. I drove for three hours, got us to the airport for 6:00am. Was sort of proud of myself. We checked in. We were on our way through the security line when a voice said “Due to snow, the airport is now closed. Nothing will be landing or taking off until 8:30.”

We ate breakfast. They called me to the ticket desk and changed my flight from Manchester to Gatwick, with the same get-to-Heathrow plan that Mike had, which I didn’t mind. At least we’re together, I thought. Then I noticed they’d made a complete mess of the actual reticketing, went back and pointed it out to the lady who’d done it. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t notice. Not to worry. I’ll make a phone call and tell them what it ought to be.”

My heart sank a little at this. (If it is not actually written in the system you can find yourself screwed as people squint at their screens at what’s written there, and the statement that “a lady said she’d make a phone call” can be met with indifference.) But Lorraine, my assistant, was still awake, and had just emailed me to see if there was anything she could do. And the tickets had been booked through a travel agent with a 24 hour helpline, so I asked Lorraine if she wouldn’t mind making sure that everything was okay.

Since the last time I was in that airport they’d moved and hidden all the plug sockets, but I found one anyway at an office desk and charged my computer. At 8:30 the Tannoy voice said they’d tell us what was happening at 9:30 and at 9:30 they said they’d tell us at 10:30, and I do not know what they told us at 10:30 because I went to sleep in my chair, and slept until midday, when the Tannoy voice told us that we were boarding. From the Twitter stream, it looked like Lorraine was still awake and locked in a hellish battle with the airlines.

“We will still make it,” I told Mike. “It’ll be a close thing, but we will make it.”

I tromped across the quarter of an inch of snow that had fallen, puzzling over how this could shut down an airport, knowing the kind of snow it takes to shut down Minneapolis-St Paul airport. But then, in MSP they expect snow.

We boarded the plane, found our seats. The pilot announced that the de-icing rigs weren’t working and I went back to sleep. My hopes had shrunk from getting to Boston today to just getting out of the airport. I woke up. We were still there.

I walked back into the plane, told Mike that we wouldn’t be getting out of the UK today. “Yeah,” he said. “But we’re together”. And I thought, He’s right. This would be awful on our own. Together it was just some kind of interesting adventure.

We took off at 2:15pm. We landed in Gatwick at 3.45pm

Lorraine called just after we landed, before we were even off the plane. “You’re on the 7:15pm flight from Heathrow,” she said, and did a rapid briefing on what it had taken to get my ticket and its value back from FlyBe and over to British Airways. She’d been up all night and worked miracles. She was ready for bed.

While we waited for our luggage, Mike talked on the phone to United, and got off very glum. “They’ll rebook me, but they’re charging $1900 to do it,” he said. He’d also used his airmiles to do it in business class, and was losing that.

Luggage arrived. Lorraine called to make sure our luggage had arrived. She sounded beyond exhausted. “Can you check Mike’s ticket?” I asked. “They want another $1900 to get him home.” She took the booking number, called back twenty minutes later having got the change fee down to $300 and having got him back into business class. An amazing lady, my assistant.

We took a taxi in the rain from Gatwick to Heathrow, I checked in without problems, hugged Mike a lot. The plane was late taking off due to the new pat-down and bag-examine rules. I was patted down (the pat-down wouldn’t have found any explosives I’d hidden in my inner thigh, where the idiot on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight hid his, because the man was too polite to check there) and my backpack was opened and looked into (it has many compartments that weren’t opened or checked, and the man would have missed a syringe if I had had one, like the aforementioned idiot had). I wondered for whose benefit the pat-down and baggage rummage was, and decided it was to make everyone feel safer without actually being inconvenienced in the way you’d have to be if you wanted to make sure no-one actually brought something dangerous onto the plane.

I landed in Boston 28 hours after I left the house. Took a taxi to Amanda's apartment. I'd taken a hotel room nearby, as I knew she was going to be practising Tchaikovsky for the New Year's Eve gig until late, but was I asleep in her bed in minutes and the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire would not have woken me.

…

Yesterday was spent in the hotel, writing introductions and things. I went out for lunch with Chris Golden and Steve Bissette. Went back to the hotel. Wrote. Went with Amanda to watch her getting her hair done. Back to hotel.

What I am going to do today: write, (blog in bed which I am doing now), wear a tuxedo, do a brief reading at Amanda's show tonight, play an instrument. I am not looking forward to the latter bit.

...

Lots of interesting stuff creeping out at the end of the year. I'm probably proudest of this:

The theme of National Library Week is "Communities thrive at your library". Lots of details and a poster at http://www.ala.org/nlw.

AMERICAN GODS was named one of the ten best books of the decade by Time Magazine. This makes me happy -- American Gods tends to be a bit of a marmite book for people: they either love it or hate it. And the ones who hate it tend to be so vocal that I often forget how much the people who love it love it.

The Coraline film is turning up on Best of 2009 lists all over the world. But this one is particularly heartwarming.

My story I, Cthulhu is up on the Tor website. What's that you say? It's up at Neilgaiman.com? Well, yes, it is. But Tor have a wonderful illustration by Brian Elig (and some of his roughs up at Irene Gallo's blog).

Right. Time to stop blogging in bed and go and grab some breakfast.

Expect one more post, in a few hours, with a wish for 2010 in it...

Labels: Airplanes, airports, American Gods, Cthulhu Loves You, National Library Week, The Fabulous Lorraine, travel, What Lorraine does in the evenings

Artists are bizarre...

So, I'm recovering. And yes, I am recovering, thank you. The lovecraftian whiteness that covered most of my throat has been replaced by a vicious pink, and the feeling that invisible people were randomly stabbing my tonsils and throat with tiny, but extremely sharp steak-knives, has also gone away, replaced by a sort of dull deep ache, as if from one large invisible person with one large bread-knife.

I also look like I've lost about 15lb, now the swollen neck has gone down, and my head is on a normal-sized neck again.

This is what I've done since I got home: I've slept.

Sometimes I've growled at poor Lorraine.

Her: "What you do want to drink?"
Me (in the saintly tones of the soon-expiring): "Anything".
Her: "How about a lemon, ginger and honey drink?"
Me (even more saintly and further from this world): "Anything."
She goes off and makes a hot drink, carefully adds ice cubes to stop it being too hot, brings it upstairs.
Me (on the point of death, like a perfect Victorian child): "Thank... you..." (Takes one sip. Stops sounding saintly.) "Ow! That hurt! What the hell did you put in here? Lemons? Are you trying to kill me? Why didn't you warn me you were putting lemon in this nightmarish concoction? Oh you claim you did, you, you Lucrezia Borgia of assistants! Ow!" and so on.

For some reason, she hasn't murdered me yet.

The most exciting thing I've done since I've got home is -- because I wasn't up to reading aloud yesterday evening -- I found the video of Sunday in the Park With George. It's currently Maddy's favourite CD, and she knows much of it by heart, and walks around singing "artists are bizarre, fixed, cold, that's you George you're bizarre, fixed, cold, I like that in a man, fixed, cold..." which can be a bit disconcerting from a nine year old, although will be useful knowledge for her in case she ever meets any French pointillists when she grows up. So I put it on for us to watch. I ate some lukewarm tapioca and drank some lukewarm chicken soup, cuddled Maddy, and stayed awake for the next ten minutes, while Maddy explained who everyone was and what they were going to do next.

"Hang on," I said, thinking through cloudy layers. "You've only ever heard the CD. How do you know this stuff?"

"Daddy," she said, in that infinitely patient dealing-with-idiots tone of voice that children only use around their own parents, "the CD does have notes, you know."

"Right," I said, and fell asleep.

...

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of links and things I'm meant to put up, but it may take a while for me to catch up (particularly because, when I've finished posting this, I'm going back to bed). The only one that can't wait -- a huge congratulations to Brian, Tzipi and Ben at Comix Experience. http://www.comixexperience.com/ben.htm

And for the people worried that the LiveJournal feed at http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=officialgaiman is down, LiveJournal, in a burst of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" seem to now be checking syndicated feeds once a day.

On the other hand the unofficial feed (without the titles of these feeds) at http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=gaimanblog does seem to be having problems.

Sooner or later I have to fix things so the titles of these posts show up on the journal itself. They contain extra information, or something, after all (there was even one of them which contained some "Snow Cherries" lyrics).

....

And this came in from Rita Rouse (RRouse@plcmc.org), who ran the Charlotte event, and was passed on to me:


Hi, Lorraine. I have an odd problem that I 'm not even sure you can help me with, but I thought I'd ask. After Neil's presentation on Saturday (he was FANTASTIC, by the way), we found a beautiful leather-bound journal that belongs to an unnamed owner. There is writing in it but no name. Do you know of a Neil Gaiman chat room or message board where I might post that we found this? Or some other way to let folks know that we found this? So far, no one has contacted me, the library or the venue about it, But it's a beautiful book (with some very personal writings) so I know the owner would like to have it back. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thanks for any help you can give.

Rita

Labels: Best Of, comix ecsperience, Livejournal, Maddy, The Fabulous Lorraine, Tori Amos

American Gods Blog, Post 87

So Neilgaiman.com went live and ate most of americangods.com. I miss the old-style front page -- I was rather hoping to see what happened to the AMERICAN GODS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN ... counter as soon as we got past midnight on monday the 18th.

So, right now, if you're reading this, you probably have this page bookmarked, because you can't get to the working bloggerjournalthing from the main site.

As the cover note says on the home page, neilgaiman.com is, right now, very much a work in progress. Given another week, everything should actually work. Over the following few weeks it'll become much prettier and better organised, I'll try to get a few more things written for it, find fun archived stuff, we'll have more links to things, all that -- but for right now what you see is more or less what you get.

The message boards look like they may be fun. Feel very free to chip in -- and to use the AMERICAN GODS TOUR section for everything from seeing if you can get a ride to a signing, to, um, meeting up at signings.

webmaster@authorsontheweb.com is the webmaster, and julia.onder@harpercollins.com is the publisher's webperson. If something seems to be broken... tell them. They will want to know. They've moved mountains to get everything up before the 19th of June...

Let's see, what else...? Oh yes. My assistant, the Fabulous Lorraine, has a new CD out. She and writer Emma Bull are a band called The Flash Girls, and they've made their first new album in about five years. (They were geographically challenged.) It's called Play Each Morning, Wild Queen, and it's very cool. (Their last album, Maurice and I, was also very cool, is still available, and has Alan Moore's song "Me and Dorothy Parker" on it.) It has a cover by Michael Zulli, and three songs by me on. Please buy it and make her independently wealthy. You can order it from DreamHaven books in Minneapolis.

Labels: American Gods Blog, DreamHaven, The Fabulous Lorraine

American Gods Blog, Post 39

Also today I read Henry Selick's first draft of the CORALINE movie, which was really cool (and really faithful to the book, sometimes almost disconcertingly so).

And because I have this power (apparently there are currently about 19,000 of you reading this thing) I'll recommend a few things: while I was travelling I read and enjoyed Nalo Hopkinson's yummy MIDNIGHT ROBBER, M. John Harrison's magnificent short stories TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS, and the History of the Basque people by the guy that wrote COD. Also read Geoff Ryman's LUST on the plane home -- a powerful and odd book, about, it seemed to me, everything except lust.

And am currently playing Hamell on Trial's lovely CHOOCHTOWN a great deal, and because my assistant Lorraine left Lorraine Bowen's Bossy Nova CD in the car, I was getting very fond of the Bombay remix of the Crumble song before I came out to LA, bringing with me no music.

Labels: American Gods Blog, Book Recommendations, c, Coraline movie, Hamell on Trial, Henry Selick, The Fabulous Lorraine

American Gods Blog, Post 36

The whole process of getting and giving blurbs is an odd one.

(Minor side note. If memory serves, BLURB as a word was created by American humorist Gelett Burgess (who also wrote the 'Purple Cow' poem). It means, basically, the puff stuff on the back of a book that tells you you ought to read it. The other word Gelett Burgess tried to introduce was "huzzlecoo" meaning, I think, to schmooze. It failed to catch on.)

I've met people who assumed that the whole blurb-giving process was one that authors were paid to do. Not so.

Generally blurbs mean one of two things; either the person giving the blurb really liked the book, or that complex networks of favour and obligation have been called into play.

It's seldom simple logrolling -- normally the reason why two authors say nice things about each other's stuff is that they like each other's stuff. But the process of getting something read, and of getting a quote can mean anything. It could mean that you have the same editor or agent or film producer as the book author, and they pressed you to read it. It could mean that the author is somone who did you a good turn once. And normally the favour is in getting the book read -- anything after that depends mostly on whether or not the reader liked the book.

A very few blurbs make a difference. Clive Barker's career was given a huge leg up by Stephen King's "I have seen the future of horror and it is Clive Barker" , and I think Sandman was given a huger boost than I ever realised from the Norman Mailer quote (although, oddly enough, DC has never run that on anything except SEASON OF MISTS). I doubt that they actually changed anything for either of us; they might have sped up processes that would have happened anyway, though.

Most of them probably don't do a thing. But in book publishing (as with movies) nobody knows anything. So they put them on the book jackets anyway and they hope.

Most successful authors could make a life's profession simply reading books and giving blurbs -- in any given week I get two or three books arriving with nice pleas from editors to read their book and say nice things about it. Also I get a couple of things from authors.

As to what I blurb... It depends a lot on what gets read, what I have time to read, whether it's something portable and booksized or a huge heap of paper, sometimes even if there's anything I have to say after reading something. It also depends a lot on whether or not I liked it once I have read it, if I did read it.

Sometimes I wind up reading something long after it's come out in paperback and just feeling faintly guilty, especially if I did like it a lot. But there is only so much time, and there's stuff I buy to read I never get time to settle down with...

It is good blurb etiquette, as an author, to say, if you cannot give a blurb, "I am sorry, I am too busy." This could mean that you are too busy to look at it, or that you looked at it and wish you hadn't.

It is not good blurb etiquette to do as an unnamed comics genius -- oh, what the hell, it was R. Crumb -- did when sent a reading copy of GOOD OMENS, over a decade ago, which is to write a several page letter to the publisher telling them not only how much you hated it but also imploring them not to publish it. (Or so my editor said. She didn't send me the letter, which I thought a pity, nor did she run it on the back cover, which I thought might have been fun.)

It is good blurb etiquette if you're hoping someone will blurb your book to send it to them (or have your editor send it to them) and then not to bug them, unless you're heading for the deadline and you want to politely point out to them that unless you get a blurb from them soon it won't be used even if they did like it.

It's lousy blurb etiquette to bug an author. Saying things like "Well, why don't you read a chapter and if that's okay write something nice -- one chapter, one lousy solitary chapter, is that asking so much?," and "Hey, no problem, if you're that busy I'll write the blurb, you can just put your name to it" are not usually ways to endear yourself to an author. (And yes, I've had both of them, and yes, I said no thank you.)

Because you're asking for two things -- you're asking for time, and you're asking for some kind of endorsement. Mostly in an attempt to try and tell people what kind of book something is, in a kind of abbreviated word of mouth -- "Gee. Maurice X. Boggs thinks this is an amazing book and Maurice X. Boggs is my favourite author, I should pick it up". This works best, I think, as a kind of positioning -- Stephen King tends mostly to give blurbs to things that adjectives like "Gripping. Relentless" can be applied to. He might enjoy reading a heartwarming novel about a funny skunk named Zonko and how he melts the heart of a crusty old widower... but publishers are unlikely to send him that book with a begging letter asking him to read it and to say something nice about it.

Some authors stop giving blurbs. Every now and again, I stop doing blurbs, and every now and again I stop writing introductions. (And last year I was extremely unimpressed when a blurb I had written was actually printed by someone as an introduction.) The hiatus lasts for a year or two, and then I feel guilty or someone asks me at the right time, and I relent.

Some authors don't relent. Harlan Ellison stopped doing blurbs years ago. If publishers start dunning him for blurbs he lets them know how much he charges by the hour as a readers fee to read the books, and makes sure they understand that there is no guarantee at the end of the reading he will feel moved to say anything at all, and in fact, he probably won't. I don't think any publishers have taken him up on this, which means that Harlan, as he takes great pleasure in telling people, doesn't give blurbs.

There are other problems with the whole blurb thing....

Once I was given a book by an editor I liked, by an author I liked. it was the editor's first major book. It was the author's first book in some years. It was a big deal for both of them. I didn't like the book. I wanted to, but I didn't. But I didn't want to let them down. So I wrote "When Thaddeus Q. Bliggins (not his real name) is writing at his best there's no-one in the field that can touch him" and felt that honour was satisfied.

My favourite how to blurb a book you don't like story was one my agent told me, about a writer she had at the start of her career, who was a good friend of A Famous Author, and was confident of his ability to get a blurb for his book -- and certain that with a blurb from a famous author his manuscript would immediately be snapped up by a publisher after a franzied auction. He handed over the manuscript to his friend, and the blurb came in. It was short, effective, enthusiastic... and entirely unusable, this being the early 80s, and the blurb being entirely composed of profanities, as enthusiastic as they were obscene. The book was never published.

For AMERICAN GODS, the books for blurbs went out to a fairly select band. Authors I thought would like it or respond to it who somehow seemed to map onto parts of the book.

For some of them I wrote personal notes to go with them. Partly because I know I respond well to notes from the author, and partly because it was fun to say some hellos. (In a couple of cases I even got to cheat and write a fan letter, or an "I've not seen you for ten years -- howthefuckareyou?" letter). For some I didn't. For a few people I sent e-mails. The others went out from Jennifer Hershey, my editor, or Jack Womack, the book's publicist at harpercollins (and a wonderful author in his own right).

And, as you've already seen if you're reading this journal, blurbs came in -- most of them accompanied by letters saying that they really really liked the book (just in case I was worried that they were only saying nice things about it from a sense of duty).

As the deadline for the book jacket to be finalised approached, we made a few calls to remind people. (I phoned Terry Gilliam, mostly because I like talking to Terry Gilliam, to discover that he was on holiday for two weeks somewhere far away from a telephone. So no luck there.)

(A minor anecdotal interruption here: in 1989 Gollancz sent Terry Gilliam a copy of Good Omens for a blurb. Somewhere the letter and the book got separated and Terry read the book assuming it was something he'd been sent as a possible movie... and now, twelve years later, he's gone on holiday having just finished the second draft of the Good Omens movie script. Proving that the world is an odd place, but not unpleasant.)

The blurb deadline has pretty much, I think, come and gone on American Gods -- if people say nice things about it now we can use it in the advertising, but they may have to wait for the paperback until people know that they liked it. However, one that I'll really try to get onto the hardback cover arrived out of the blue today, entirely unsolicited. Not just unsolicited but accompanied by a phone call reminding me that the party in question does not give blurbs.

"Gaiman's new novel walked in the door on Friday afternoon. By Saturday
evening I had eaten it in one gulp. AMERICAN GODS: alarming, charming,
even winsome; Gaiman: serially inventive, surprising, purely remarkable.
And, oh, is it well-written."

Harlan Ellison
16 April 2001
...........................................................................................................................

I signed the sheets of paper for the limited edition from the box of 750 sheets. I signed and I signed. Eventually I asked my poor assistant if she wouldn't mind counting them, because I was sure I'd signed a lot more than 750 sheets. Turns out the box contained 2,500 of the things. Mostly I'm just signing them. Sometimes I'm drawing eyes, too. Very occasionally I've started doodling and drawing, mostly so far drawings of a very crusty Uncle Sam. And most of the time I'm using other colour inks than black, so that the people who pick them up don't go "Oh, they just print those signatures". They don't. It's me.

Labels: American Gods Blog, Best Of, blurbs, Clive Barker, Good Omens, Harlan Ellison, R. Crumb, signing sheets of paper, Stephen King, The Fabulous Lorraine