Not just procrastinating on proofreading...

Good morning.

Happy Banned Books Week!

It's a grey, quiet Saturday here. Everyone's off doing stuff: it's just me and the dogs.

On Thursday, Sharon and Bill Stiteler came over and we checked the hives and started to feed them. We have six hives right now - two Italians (doing brilliantly in comparison with everyone else after a late start and a lousy year - we even had a super full of honey), two Carniolans (doing okay) and two Russian hives (one may or may not survive even a mild winter, one has a solid chance). We came back to the house.

Sharon Stiteler started making noises. Normally when Sharon makes noises, it means that something exciting has been spotted, and it's generally to do with birds.

It was.

A merlin had taken a red-bellied woodpecker from one of my birdfeeders, and was eating it in front of the house.

Here's a photo I took of the merlin. Sharon tells the whole story, with many photos and explanation of, among other things, how she knew it was a lady merlin over at her blog: http://www.birdchick.com/wp/2011/09/merlin-vs-red-bellied-woodpecker/

Yesterday I decided to get some beeswax from the buckets of slumgullion in the garage. It took three tries to figure out how to do it correctly, but I now have a pie-dish filled with clean, perfect, butter-yellow beeswax, smelling faintly of honey, and know how to get it right for next time.

No idea what to do with the wax, mind. But at least it won't get thrown out.

Today I'm proofreading. The Little Gold Book Of Ghastly Stuff for Borderlands Press comes out very soon, and they emailed me over the pdfs last night. It's a really sweet little collection, almost entirely from the last decade: two poems, four stories (including, for the first time anywhere, the complete version of my first ever published short story, "Featherquest", published in 1984, cut by half on its first appearance and never reprinted. Do not get overly excited: it isn't very good), two oddments, four articles, a couple of speeches, a few book reviews and suchlike. I signed the 500 limitation pages last week. Then Borderlands discovered that too many people had ordered the signed edition and asked me if I would give my permission for them to overrun the print-run and sell some unsigned, un-numbered copies, to make the people who ordered copies they didn't have happy, and I said yes.


The unsigned copies have not yet sold out, although they will probably go very soon after I put this up. There's only ever going to be one printing of this, so, if you want a copy, head over to http://www.borderlandspress.com/littlegold.html and order one now. Bizarrely, it costs more to mail it internationally than the book costs (four times as much if you want to internationally Fedex it).

I do not enjoy proofreading.

And I need to go back to it.

Before I do, here is a Bill Stiteler film of me shaking bees off a frame of honey or three on Thursday:

The Vanishing Bee Trick from Bill Stiteler on Vimeo.

And I need to close some tabs, so...

A link to the the Society of Authors website to explain a bit more about the short story tweet thingummy they are doing, and in which I am participating: http://www.societyofauthors.org/soa-news/society-authors-launch-short-story-tweet-thon-soatale. I wrote something that should have been a blog entry here for the Guardian and felt guilty about it, but suspected I might be reaching more Radio 4 listeners. Here is the link to me talking about why I love short stories and why:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/sep/16/neil-gaiman-tweetathon-society-of-authors-radio-four


The CBLDF has started this year's membership drive with some amazing donation incentives. You should still get your $25 membership, which will get you in to CBLDF events and help fund Free Speech in comics, but this year they are offering things like lunch with famous and important comics people, portfolio reviews and suchlike. (Lunch with me in New York has already gone. Two lunches to go...) Details at http://cbldf.org/homepage/be-counted/


P Craig Russell has written a blog about the creation of Sandman 50 at http://www.artofpcraigrussell.com/?p=588

My favourite photos are these from the Atlantic showing New York in the 1940s. They are in colour, which somehow changes everything. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/in-the-throes-of-creation-color-photos-of-new-york-in-the-1940s/244498/#slide1

Amanda Palmer talks to USA Today about her Evelyn Evelyn graphic novel, while Cynthia Von Buhler explains and demonstrates her art methods.

I saw Tori last week in LA for a wonderful happy-sad evening of red wine and catching up, and she gave me a copy of Night of Hunters, her new CD. It's become my favourite thing of hers in the last decade - I am playing it much too much. It's haunting, and her daughter, my fairy goddaughter Tash sings on several tracks, something that could have gone so very wrong and didn't. Here's a link to a Tori Interview, with a video for one of the songs (in which you will see the house in which I wrote much of Anansi Boys and in which I finished American Gods, and in which you will see Tash).

...

And finally, as anyone who has been on Google has noticed (have you puppetted the Google Doodle? No? Quick. Go and doodle with it) today would have been Jim Henson's Birthday.

(I've been given a lot of honours in my life, but I am not sure that there is anything I am prouder of than this one.

Honest.)

And here's a video about the Doodle in question...



Okay. Proofreading time. Wish me luck.

Labels: bees, bird eat bird, birdchick, CBLDF, Jim Henson, Merlin, save the short story, short stories, Tori Amos

Apparently if you just write BEAVER! people's minds head straight for the gutter

About a decade ago we had beavers in the creek (which, pronounced crick, is what they call something bigger than a stream and smaller than a full-sized river, where I am). And then the flood came, and the beavers, and their dam, were washed away.

I missed them. I even sort-of missed having to go down with a chainsaw to fix the trees they had dropped in the wrong places. (For nature's engineers, they were astonishingly rubbish about taking down trees in the places they needed them to be.)

So today, walking with the dog, I was thrilled to discover that they're back.

Down by the bridge the beavers have built a dam by an old telegraph pole (that used to be a bridge before the flood that washed away the last beavers washed away the bridge too).

Here's a very beaver-chewed and bark-stripped lump of wood...

And a dog who cannot work out why I stopped a perfectly good walk to take photographs of boring stuff.

...

My plans this Saturday Night are very simple: I am going to see Jason Webley, who I discovered in 2006 when I saw the video for Eleven Saints on the Fabulist, and linked to it here. Jason then sent me lots of music (including this song), I loved it, we met briefly in London, met again on stage at an Amanda Palmer show in Camden... and in all that time I have spectacularly failed to ever be home when he played in Minneapolis.

(Me on the left. Jason Webley with the guitar. Onstage with Miss Amanda at Koko's in Camden Town.)

And -- finally -- I'm home when Jason is playing here. So I will be there. http://www.bedlamtheatre.org/display.php?event=325

and Jason is all over the place this year. To see if he's coming to your town,http://www.jasonwebley.com/events.html

...

And on the subject of things I want to go to, there will be a Fourth Street Fantasy convention in Minneapolis this year, in June. It'll be a convention without a Guest of Honour, which just fine for a convention that is, after all, all about the conversations. At previous 4th Streets I've been to, panel discussions continue in hallways and conversations in hallways spill over to become panel discussions.

I've said I'm not going to any conventions as a guest this year, apart from Worldcon; but if I turn up at 4th Street, I'd not be a guest, I'd just be part of the conversation....
...

Neil,

I've come to realize that you haven't made mention of the Watchmen movie here or on Twitter. I know you and Alan Moore are chums and was wondering what you thought of the movie? Have you had a chance to see it?

Regards,
Shannon

Never saw it. Kept waiting for someone whose opinion I respected or at least who has the same tastes that I do to tell me "It's amazing, you have to see it, you'll love it!" but instead I kept hearing, "Well... it's got some good bits, the opening title thing, you'll like that, and actually, the end is pretty good, you don't miss the squid... and... well, the plot's a bit all over the place and... I mean, they really pay a lot of attention to recreating scenes from the comic, sometimes a bit pointlessly and...you know they're all superheroes now, not just Dr Manhattan, I mean they can all do super stuff... and, well, it's definitely got some good bits..." over and over. I'll probably catch it on HBO sooner or later. Maybe even be pleasantly surprised.

Hi, Neil,

I wasn't sure if you had seen this or not:

http://www.contrariwise.org/2009/04/02/theme-week-neil-gaiman-day-1/

Looks like you're a popular tattoo subject!

I love the contrariwise site -- there's something so cool about literary tattoos (except, as I've said, when they're misspelled). And am fascinated to see what this week brings.

Dear Neil,

A lot of schools are pushing for young adult literature, and especially graphic novels, to have a spot in the regular curriculum. As a writer of both yourself, can you see some of your own work being taught in a classroom setting? Do you see the validity for young adult lit as a gateway into more canonical literature, or more for an entertainment perspective?

I am curious as I enter into the teaching profession myself and would like to use such works in my English classes, but also understand that sometimes a book can just be for fun. Thanks!

Allison

Honestly, I'm the last person you should ask. I've never been convinced that there's any meaningful division between high culture and pop culture - I think there's good stuff out there, and there's stuff that's not much good, and that Sturgeon's Law applies to high culture and popular culture: 90% of it will be crap, which means that 10% of it will be amazing.

I'm always pleased and slightly caught off-guard when people tell me they're teaching my stuff, but am no longer surprised.

(Nor is Scott McCloud.)

In the early years of this blog, someone asked if there were any colleges that taught any of my books as part of the curriculum, and we got about 60 replies I think. It's probably a bit more than that now.

And as long as it doesn't ruin things for people that they might have otherwise enjoyed, it doesn't worry me at all. (I remember reading Matthew Cheney's piece on teaching "Bitter Grounds" with enormous pleasure, though.)

...

I really enjoyed this article by Tim Martin in the Telegraph about How Comics Became Part of the Literary Establishment (made, for me, slightly more amusing, because the person who prompted the "lady of the evening" quote was actually a long-retired Telegraph literary editor).

Tori's new song "Welcome to England" is up with glorious video at Pink Is The New Blog: http://www.pinkisthenewblog.com/2009/04/first-look-tori-amos-welcome-to-england/

I loved this review of Blueberry Girl:

The alchemy of collaboration makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts, wildly different from either part, and scorchingly beautiful. To read this book takes but a few minutes, but if you can't meditate, this book offers peace. It offers a bit of joy and redemption and is likely to make you forget for a few minutes the details that might draw you down. When you return, you'll feel refreshed. You'll feel rewarded. There's not a lot I need to say about this book. It will make a fine gift for any young girl you know, for any woman or family you know or indeed, for yourself. Turn away from the world, just for a moment of solace. When you look back, the world will look better...

Also, my assistant has a leopard.

Labels: Fourth Street, Jason Webley, teaching me, Tori Amos, Watchmen

This is a Prayer For A Blueberry Girl...

A video, put together by Brady Hall, using one of the readings I did during the Graveyard Book reading tour (I'll ask him which one), and the Charles Vess art from the book (out in ten days or less).



Over on Mousecircus.com, at the Blueberry Girl page, you can read the thing I wrote to explain what this book is.

But because not everyone is going to head over there, it says:

Hello.

You're probably wondering what kind of book this is.

This is the kind of book that comes about when a friend phones you and says, "I'll be having a baby in a month. Would you write her a poem? A sort of prayer, maybe? We call her the Blueberry. . . ." And you think, Yes, actually. I would.

I wrote the poem. When the baby was born, they stopped calling her the Blueberry and started calling her Natashya, but they pinned up the handwritten Blueberry girl poem beside her bed.

I kept a copy at my house, taped to a filing cabinet. And when friends read it, they said things like "Please, can I have a copy for my friend who is going to be giving birth to a daughter?" and I wound up copying it out for people, over and over.
I wasn't going to let it be published, not ever. It was private, and written for one person, even if I did seem to be spending more and more of my time handwriting or printing out nice copies for mothers-to-be and for babies.

Then artist Charles Vess (whom I had collaborated with on Stardust) read it.
And somehow, it all became simple. I made a few phone calls. We decided to make some donations to some charities. And Charles began to draw, and then to paint, taking the poem as a starting point and then making something universal and beautiful.

On his blog he said, "Taking Neil's lovely poetic meditation on the inherent joys of a mother-daughter relationship and developing a compelling narrative impulse without robbing the poem of its highly symbolic nature was an interesting conceptual journey." Which I think is Charles for "It wasn't easy to make that poem into a picture book.” He did an astonishing job, but I still worried. I stopped worrying the day the assistant editor at HarperChildrens, who was herself pregnant, called me to let me know that she'd got the artwork in, and read it, and then started crying in the office.

It's a book for mothers and for mothers-to-be. It's a book for anyone who has, or is, a daughter. It's a prayer and a poem, and now it's a beautiful book.

I hope you enjoy it. I'm really proud of it. And I hope this means I don't have to copy it out any longer….

Neil

Labels: Blueberry Girl, Tori Amos

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 117

Wrote a blogger post today in the library of this hotel, but the computer crashed utterly and terminally just as I finished. And all the sensible things I said at the time have been entirely forgotten.

(Jetlagged author tries to remember things he said, but he can only remember mentioning that the lyric version of New Age on Tori’s “Strange Little Girls” CD is not as reported the one from the Velvet Underground's LOADED but actually the version from the Live 1969 LP, and I can only remember that because it’s playing in the background as I type this.)

I think I warned people that on some of these stops the bookshop is selling tickets to the reading – you get the cost of the ticket back from the price of the book if you buy one, although you shouldn’t need a book to get into the line. Some stores do the tickets for the reading but let anyone into the signing line, whether you have a ticket or not. And most of them won’t do any of that stuff either way and you’ll just get to the bookshop, be read to or not depending mostly on whether it’s a lunch or evening signing, and shuffle along a line that will move much too slowly until everyone’s done.

Labels: American Gods Blog, Tori Amos, tour

American Gods Blog, Post 84

Some days are instant Christmas. They put a smile on your face...

Today brought...

Tori's CD, Strange Little Girls. It's missing one track, but the other eleven are there. I knew what to expect this time, but my family are spellbound. It's just playing all the time in the background... as surprising and as wonderful the fifth time as it was the first...

The replacement Libretto. Working like a little dream -- I'm just transferring over files from my notebook, then I'll load up Word Perfect and Final Draft, and it'll be all ready for the road.

and... just as I thought the day had brought all the presents it could...

I opened an envelope to see the UK editions of American Gods.

So, first of all, I got to learn that there is indeed a huge trade paperback edition of American Gods in the UK, and a hardback. The hardback is seventeen pounds 99p, the paperback is 10 pounds. Amazon.co.uk has been erroneously listing it as hardback for 10 pounds... so if anyone out there thought that was they'd ordered, they may need to talk to Amazon, or to their local bookshop and make sure they are getting what they want.

(Incidentally, it's 500 pages long, not 352.)

The second thing I learned is that they're doing a very surprising promotion for the hardback, which caused me jaw to drop. I'm not sure I can say anything more about it until I've got an okay from Headline. It raised eyebrows and caused giggles in this house.

Normally the UK hardbacks wind up the most collectible of the editions, as they are printed in the smallest numbers. Looking at this edition, which is lovely, I suspect that may again be true, especially as people who think they've successfully ordered it may have problems getting it...

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, computers and gadgets and things, lightweight computers, promotion, Tori Amos