California! Arizona! Seattle! Bard! Spend an Evening With Me.

I took 2016 off from all public engagements, in order to get a novel written.

I did a lot of things last year. I finished writing the Norse Mythology book (it comes out in February). I finished writing the six hour long Good Omens television series (the BBC will be making it this year).  I did a lot of baby-raising.  I endured a hurricane and a bad haircut. And I got the new novel started...

But I didn't get it finished.

So this year, I'll be madly writing a novel AND doing the public appearances and such I didn't do last year.

There's a West Coast tour in March/April, that starts in San Diego and finishes in Seattle, and goes to Costa Mesa (which is secretly Los Angeles) and Santa Rosa (north of the Bay Area).

I'll be at Bard College on the 15th of April, talking about American Gods and the American Gods TV series (and if possible, we'll be screening an episode or two).

In July I'll be in Texas (Austin, Dallas and Houston) and in Hartford CT.

There's another talk in a Library that isn't on here, but basically, that's about it.  (I'm not listing the New York or London Norse Mythology events in February as they are both sold out -- although there are still a few tickets on sale for Town Hall members.)

The brown links will take you to relevant place on the Where's Neil page.

29 Mar 2017

San Diego, CA

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

30 Mar 2017

Costa Mesa, CA (LA)

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

31 Mar 2017

Santa Rosa, CA

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

01 Apr 2017

Mesa, AZ

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

02 Apr 2017

Seattle, WA

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

15 Apr 2017

BARD COLLEGE: Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Neil Gaiman and American Gods

06 Jul 2017

Austin, TX

Long Center Presents Neil Gaiman

07 Jul 2017

Dallas, TX

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

08 Jul 2017

Houston, TX

Society for the Performing Arts presents Neil Gaiman

10 Jul 2017

Hartford, CT 

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

Some of the events have plenty of tickets left, some are almost sold out. You probably need to move fast if you want to get a ticket for Seattle. (Mostly the ones with lots of tickets left have only just gone onsale.) The "Evening With..." is me talking, and reading things published and things new, and answering questions.

Dallas is not yet available singly -- but you can get tickets if you wanted to see me and two other events. And they have Neil deGrasse Tyson and they have Fran Lebowitz and Garrison Keillor there for you to choose from, giving rise to one of my favourite Headlines of last year:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil Gaiman, Two People Not Named Neil to Speak in Dallas

(Up there with the New York Times's iconic headline "Neil Armstrong and Someone Not Named Neil Walk on the Moon"*)

*I understand they might have changed it in later editions.

...

I'm getting better. Fever is very over. Bronchitis is a pain in the chest but it is on the mend. Ash got very sick after I did, but now he's through the fever bit and is perking up, which bodes well for everyone getting a bit more sleep: his nose is running like a tap, though, which means that sometimes without even trying he blows snot-bubbles half the size of his head.

We're in Melbourne.  Amanda's going to be doing a residency here, while she also tours Australia. I am writing my novel, using as my office the same tiny flat that Amanda began to work on The Art of Asking. (I've read it reported online that we've moved to Australia now, but we haven't. We're here for a couple of months. We just have a different kind of visa. But 'they have a different kind of visa' isn't really newsworthy.)

And it was our sixth wedding anniversary. This is a photo of Amanda and Ash I took a week ago, on Hermosa Beach, when we got stranded for 24 hours in LA by a late plane. I am a lucky man to have so much love in my life.

Labels: An evening with Neil Gaiman, Neil Armstrong, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Touring, writing novels

I bet you thought I was dead...

I'm not really sure what it says about the last month and a half that the last actual blog post was the day before THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE was published, June the 17th.  Mostly it probably says that when I had any down time I was too tired to blog.

So I will do a brief recap of what happened.

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE was published. It went to #2 in the UK (beaten by Dan Brown) and to #1 in the US. It's still on both bestseller lists, six weeks later. (I think it's now at #7 in the US.)

The reviews have been fantastic. Ones that made me particularly happy would include the New York Times review

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet,” Neil Gaiman writes in his slim, dark dream of a new novel, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” “But they are never lost for good.” Who we used to be sometimes seems like a faint shadow of who we are now, but Gaiman helps us remember the wonder and terror and powerlessness that owned us as children.(...)Gaiman is especially accomplished in navigating the cruel, uncertain dreamscape of childhood.
There is a moment, toward the end of this novel, when the narrator drops into the duck pond (or ocean, as the Hempstocks call it), and his mind melts and achieves a kind of transcendent understanding: “I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
Which replicates the experience I have whenever reading one of Gaiman’s books. His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.

And A.S. Byatt reviewing it in the Guardian (!), and, well, hundreds of reviews, actually, and I've lost all the links now. But people, on the whole, have liked it.

There have been lots of interviews with me. In some of them I say the same things, and in some I say different things. For example, here's the Financial Times asking rapid-fire questions.

I went on a tour. Sometimes I was on a bus, and sometimes I wasn't. I didn't get a lot of sleep, and I signed many many thousands of books for many thousands of really astonishingly nice and patient people.

(Photo by the invaluable Cat Mihos.)

I'll grab some accounts from people's blogs (thank you, denizens of Twitter for pointing me at some good ones): Here's an account of the Symphony Space evening, when I was interviewed by Erin Morgenstern.  Here's a beautiful account of the Chicago signing, from someone standing next to me making it all work. And here's another, with photo of lovely people who ran the event too.

After Portland, I went ot Seattle and had a magical break in order to teach 18 of the smartest writers I've ever encountered how to... well, I'm not sure what I taught them how to, actually. Mostly I learned from them. But they were students at Clarion West: I inherited them from Elizabeth Hand, and I passed them on to Joe Hill, and I think they all have a great future ahead of them. (Over 700 writers applied for the 18 places.)

You can see some of them (and me) if you click on this link, then go to extreme right of the third row: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/interactive/2013/aug/03/selfies-celebrity-instagram-twitter-photography

Then I went back on the road. It turns into a bit of blur again immediately, because a plane tragically crashed in San Francisco on landing, which threw all plans into disarray closed off a runway and meant that the following day I didn't get to Ann Arbor until two hours after the signing was meant to have started, and everyone was really nice...

My bag was lost and spent 4 days following me around the country.

The tour finished in Lexington, when John Scalzi introduced me and interrogated me while a rock band played loudly next door: Look, here is me in a Cyberman head backstage with Scalzi. And then it finished properly in Cambridge two days after that. And then it finished later that week at Comic-Con in San Diego.

By the time of Comic-Con I was VERY tired indeed.

Entertainment Weekly took a photo of me there. I looked like this:

I presented Eisners, avoided being snogged by my co-presenter Jonathan Ross (as a follow up to this 2007 moment)(Mr Ross kissed John Barrowman instead), although I made up for it by kissing Chip Kidd instead when he came up to collect Chris Ware's final Eisner Award. I was on a great Sandman panel with Sam Kieth, J. H, Williams III, Dave McKean, Todd Klein and Shelly Bond. I was on  panels about Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, and there was a Spotlight panel, where I was interviewed (and, unsurprisingly, embarrassed) by Jonathan Ross:

I went home. My wife came off tour. I picked her up at the airport with a handmade sign.

We went to the Newport Folk Festival. We painted a mural on an unborn baby's wall.




 We both recovered a bit more.

Yesterday, I started writing again.

Today I flew to Canada for the start of the next leg of the tour. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. All sold out, I'm afraid.

Next week I go to the Netherlands and sign in Rotterdam and Utrecht (Details on WHERE'S NEIL), and will be at the Lowlands Festival at 17:30 on Saturday afternoon. Then round two of the UK, and on to the Edinburgh Book Festival. The Edinburgh Book Festival events are sold out...

If you are in the South of England, and free on the evening of the 18th of August, come to Portsmouth and watch me do an EVENING WITH NEIL GAIMAN and a book signing in the Guildhall. That afternoon, there will be a naming ceremony as a small road by the Canoe Lake becomes "The Ocean at the End of the" Lane. It points at the Atlantic Ocean -- or at least at the English Channel...  (Details here.) If you think I'm delighted by this, you'd be right, but a lot of the delight has to do with all of my Portsmouth Relatives Who Have All Moved To Exotic Places Like Harrow coming back for the day to watch me beam delightedly at the lane-naming, and to tell me that my grandparents would have been proud.

Baffled, undoubtedly, but proud nonetheless.

Labels: San Diego Comic Con, signing as much as I can, The naming of lanes, The Ocean At The End of the Lane, Touring

OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE US TOUR DATES

Starred reviews, in the journals that publish reviews before books come out, are good. 

Publishers Weekly just gave THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE a starred review. It's a bit Spoilery, so I'm going to put a few sections of it white-on-white. Block to read.


★ The Ocean at the End of the
Lane
Neil Gaiman.William Morrow,$25.99 (192p)
ISBN 978-0-06-225565-5
“Childhood memories are sometimes
covered and obscured beneath the things
that come later... but they are never lost
for good”—and the most grim of those
memories, no matter how faint, can haunt
one forever, as they do the anonymous
narrator of Gaiman’s subtle and splendid
modern myth. The protagonist, an artist,
returns to his childhood home in the
English countryside to recover his memory of
events that nearly destroyed him and
his family when he was seven. The suicide
of a stranger opened the way for a deadly
spirit... who disguised herself as a housekeeper, 
won over the boy’s sister and
mother, seduced his father, and threatened
the boy if he told anyone the truth. He
had allies—a warm and welcoming family
of witches at the old farm up the road...

but defeating this evil demanded a sacrifice 
he was not prepared for. Gaiman
(Anansi Boys) has crafted a fresh story of
magic, humanity, loyalty, and memories
“waiting at the edges of things,” where
lost innocence can still be restored as long
as someone is willing to bear the cost.

The Kirkus review, also starred, said (spoilery bit also whited out):

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE [STARRED REVIEW!]
Author: Neil Gaiman

Publisher:Morrow/HarperCollins
Pages: 192
Price ( Hardcover ): $25.99
Publication Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-06-225565-5
Category: Fiction

From one of the great masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys (2005).

An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood dwelling no longer stands, at the end of the road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s drawn without knowing why. Memories begin to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family, with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duckpond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark, deadly and far distant heard his dying lament and swooped closer. As the past becomes the present, Lettie takes the boy’s hand and confidently sets off through unearthly landscapes to deal with the menace; but he’s only 7 years old, and he makes a mistake... Instead of banishing the predator, he brings it back into the familiar world, where it reappears as his family’s new housekeeper, the demonic Ursula Monkton. Terrified, he tries to flee back to the Hempstocks, but Ursula easily keeps him confined as she cruelly manipulates and torments his parents and sister. Despite his determination and well-developed sense of right and wrong, he’s also a scared little boy drawn into adventures beyond his understanding, forced into terrible mistakes through innocence. Yet, guided by a female wisdom beyond his ability to comprehend, he may one day find redemption.

Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are shaped by childhood experiences, what we gain from them and the price we pay.

And finally, Booklist gave us a starred review. And there aren't any spoilers to remove...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

In Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys(2005), the never-named fiftyish narrator is back in his childhood homeland, rural Sussex, England, where he’s just delivered the eulogy at a funeral. With “an hour or so to kill” afterward, he drives about—aimlessly, he thinks—until he’s at the crucible of his consciousness: a farmhouse with a duck pond. There, when he was seven, lived the Hempstocks, a crone, a housewife, and an 11-year-old girl, who said they were grandmother, mother, and daughter. Now, he finds the crone and, eventually, the housewife—the same ones, unchanged—while the girl is still gone, just as she was at the end of the childhood adventure he recalls in a reverie that lasts all afternoon. He remembers how he became the vector for a malign force attempting to invade and waste our world. The three Hempstocks are guardians, from time almost immemorial, situated to block such forces and, should that fail, fight them. Gaiman mines mythological typology—the three-fold goddess, the water of life (the pond, actually an ocean)—and his own childhood milieu to build the cosmology and the theater of a story he tells more gracefully than any he’s told since Stardust(1999). And don’t worry about that “for adults” designation: it’s a matter of tone. This lovely yarn is good for anyone who can read it.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: That this is the popular author’s first book for adults in eight years pretty much sums up why this will be in demand.

Those are the reviews we've got so far. I think it's probably my best book, which is why I am very nervous about it, which is why I really want to do whatever I can to make sure that as many people as possible read it.

The William Morrow press office just sent me the dates and locations of the OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE tour.

This may be modified slightly as we go -- I'll add any additional information (there's nothing on ticket prices here, for example -- most stores will count your ticket cost toward the cost of the book.)

The current plan is that I'll sign any copies of The Ocean at the End of the Lane for you, and one or two other things, depending on lines and numbers. This may change.

I'll also plan to sign as much as possible of what the bookstore has of mine when I get to each new shop, including many copies of OCEAN. So you can watch me read and do a Q&A and then take off if you do not want to wait.

Many shops will have leftover signed books after the signing, or will take preorders for a book to be signed and sent out. I'll sign all the books that each store needs signed, but there's no guarantee that I'll be able to personalise phone/internet orders.

And yes, this will be my last US book-signing tour. And I'm going to try and do as much as possible of it in a bus, mostly so I can get more sleep than I did on the Anansi Boys tour.

Feel very free to spread the information around. (UK & Canada & the rest of the world signing information is not in this post.)

Neil Gaiman/OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE/Full Ticket Info Events

Tuesday, June 18/BROOKLYN, NY

Greenlight Bookstore w/ Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) @ Howard Gilman Opera House

7:00 PM

30 Lafayette Avenue

Brooklyn, NY  11217

Twitter:

@greenlightbklyn

@BAM_Brooklyn

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Greenlight-Bookstore/70922460961

https://www.facebook.com/BAMstage?ref=ts&fref=ts

Website:

www.greenlightbookstore.com

www.bam.org

Wednesday, June 19/NEW YORK, NY

Symphony Space “Thalia Book Club Series”

7:00 PM

2537 Broadway (@ 95^th Street)

New York, NY  10025

Box Office: 212-864-5400

Twitter:

@SymphonySpace

@SelectedShorts

Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/symphonyspace?ref=ts&fref=ts  

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Selected-Shorts/292001113864  

Website:

http://www.symphonyspace.org/genre/literature  

http://www.symphonyspace.org/series/72  

Thursday, June 20/SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY

Northshire Bookstore Saratoga @ Saratoga City Center

6:00 PM

522 Broadway

Saratoga Springs, NY  12866

Box Office: Tickets will be sold on the store’s website, or in the VT store (4869 Main Street Manchester Center, VT 05255)

Twitter: @NorthshireBooks

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Northshire-Bookstore/224327384223

Website: www.northshire.com

Friday, June 21/WASHINGTON, DC

Politics & Prose Bookstore @ George Washington University Lisner Auditorium

6:00 PM

730 21^st Street, NW

Washington, DC  20052

Twitter: @Politics_Prose

Facebook: www.facebook.com/politicsandprose

Website: www.politics-prose.com

Saturday, June 22/DECATUR, GA

Eagle Eye Book Shop @ Agnes Scott College Presser Hall

7:00 PM

141 East College Avenue

Decatur, GA  30030

Twitter: @eagleeyebooks

Facebook: www.facebook.com/eagleeyebooks

Website: www.eagleeyebooks.com

Sunday, June 23/CORAL GABLES, FL

Books & Books @ Temple Judea

2:00 PM

5500 Granada Boulevard

Coral Gables, FL  33146

Twitter: @booksandbooks

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/booksandbooks  

Instagram: Booksandbooks

Monday, June 24/DALLAS, TX

Dallas Museum of Art @ Majestic Theatre

7:00 PM

1925 Elm Street

Dallas, TX  75201

Box Office: 214-922-1818 or visit tickets.dma.org

Twitter: @DallasMuseumArt

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/DallasMuseumofArt?fref=ts

Tuesday, June 25/DENVER, CO

Tattered Cover Book Store (LoDo)

6:00 PM

1628 16^th Street

Denver, CO  80202

Twitter: @tatteredcover

Facebook: www.facebook.com/tattered.cover

Website: www.tatteredcover.com

Wednesday, June 26/PHOENIX, AZ

Changing Hands Bookstore @ South Mountain High School Auditorium

6:00 PM

5401 South 7^th Street

Phoenix, AZ  85040

Twitter: @changinghands

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/changinghands

Website: http://www.changinghands.com/

Thursday, June 27/LOS ANGELES, CA

Live Talks Los Angeles w/ Barnes & Noble @ Alex Theatre

8:00 PM

216 North Brand Boulevard

Glendale, CA  91203

Tickets: www.livetalksla.org/events/upcoming-events

Twitter: @livetalksla

Facebook: www.facebook.com/livetalks

Friday, June 28/SAN FRANCISCO, CA

The Booksmith @ American Conservatory Theater (ACT) Geary Theater

7:00 PM

415 Geary Street

San Francisco, CA  94102

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/14616

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Booksmith

Facebook: www.facebook.com/booksmith

Website: www.booksmith.com  

Saturday, June 29/PORTLAND, OR

Powell’s Books @ Crystal Ballroom

3:00 PM

1332 West Burnside Street

Portland, OR  97209

Twitter: @Powells

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/powellsbooks

Website: http://www.powells.com/events

Tumblr: http://powells.tumblr.com/

Tuesday, July 2/SEATTLE, WA

University Book Store w/ Clarion West Writers Workshop @ Town Hall Seattle

7:00 PM

1119 8^th Avenue

Seattle, WA  98101

Twitter:

@ubs_events

@ClarionWest

Facebook:

www.facebook.com/pages/University-Book-Store/44262813758

Website:

www.ubookstore.com   

www.clarionwest.org

Saturday, July 6/SANTA ROSA, CA

Copperfield’s Books @ Santa Rosa Theater

8:00 PM

1235 Mendocino Avenue

Santa Rosa, CA  95401

Tickets: www.copperfieldsbooks.com/boxoffice

Twitter: @Copperfields

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/copperfieldsbooks?ref=hl

Website: www.copperfieldsbooks.com

Sunday, July 7/ANN ARBOR, MI

Nicola’s Books @ Michigan Theater

6:00 PM

603 East Liberty Street

Ann Arbor, MI  48104

Box Office: http://www.michtheater.org/   

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nicolas-Books-Ann-Arbors-Premier-Independent- Book-Store/322456060697

Website: www.nicolasbooks.com

Monday, July 8/BLOOMINGTON, MN

Barnes & Noble of Edina @ Jefferson High School Auditorium

6:00 PM

4001 West 102^nd Street

Bloomington, MN  55437

Website: http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/store/2514

Tuesday, July 9/CHICAGO, IL

Unabridged Bookstore @ Music Box Theater

7:00 PM

3733 North Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL  60613

Twitter: @unabridgedbooks

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unabridgedbookstore

Website: www.unabridgedbookstore.com 

Tumblr: http://unabridgedbookstore.tumblr.com/

Wednesday, July 10/NASHVILLE, TN

Parnassus Books @ Tennessee Performing Arts Council’s War Memorial Auditorium

6:00 PM

301 6^th Avenue North

Nashville, TN  37243

Box Office: http://www.wmarocks.com/events

Twitter: @parnassusbooks1

Facebook: www.facebook.com/parnassusbooks1

Website: www.parnassusbooks.net

Thursday, July 11/LEXINGTON, KY

Joseph-Beth Booksellers @ Grand Reserve Events Center

7:00 PM

903 Manchester Street

Lexington, KY  40508

Tickets: purchase at Joseph-Beth Lexington 800 248 6849 or 859 273 2911.

Twitter: @josephbethlex

Facebook: www.facebook.com/josephbethlex

Website: www.josephbeth.com

Saturday, July 13/CAMBRIDGE, MA

Porter Square Books @ First Parish Church

6:30 PM

1446 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA  02138

Twitter: @PorterSqBooks

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Porter-Square-Books/112608362085830

Labels: book reviews, early reviews of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I am so proud of my book, The Ocean At The End of the Lane, The Ocean Promotion, Touring