In Which Two Things Are Done For the First Time, and We Encounter Bats

Today I did two things I've never done before.

1) I worked out to Dickens.

I'd realised that one reason I tend not to work out is that I get bored. It's why things like the Wii work for me -- having someone on the TV saying things is more interesting than just doing stuff. I don't like reading while I do stuff though -- I slow down and turn pages. And I don't like watching TV. So this morning I went and signed up for an Audible account (which was pretty easy, as it's just your Amazon email and password) and downloaded Bleak House, a Dickens novel I've started several times, always enjoyed, and always mislaid long before finishing it.

The chapters are 16 minutes long in the version I'm listening to.

I did 32 hard-pounding minutes on the elliptical machine without even noticing that time was passing. This is a glorious thing.

I told my currently antipodean wife, who sounded like she badly wanted to mock me for working out to Dickens (as opposed to music), but she didn't, probably because I've pointed to her that me exercising is a fragile sort of thing and should only be encouraged.

2) I went to a Roller Derby bout.

This is because a conversation on Twitter about Author Coffees in Indonesia led to someone making a coffee named after me. Because of this, when I went to Indianapolis to receive the Kurt Vonnegut Jr Award for Literature, I took some of the Naptown Roller Girls and their loved ones out to dinner. (It was mostly my then-fiancee Amanda Palmer's fault. She had said something like, "You go to these things and you don't actually meet people." And I'd said something along the lines of, "Hah. Actually a whole Roller Derby team is coming to see me talk in Indianapolis." And she had said, "Yes, but you won't really get to meet them." Which was so true that when I got off the phone I told my assistant Lorraine to tell the Roller Derby team that I wanted to know if they would like to have dinner.)

And Lorraine beginning to talk to Joan of Dark (who had made the coffee, knitted the Coraline Octokitties the team had used for lucky charms, asked if I could get them seats at the Library Lecture that preceded the talk, and hosted the dinner) which led to Lorraine becoming friends with Joan and the Naptown Roller Girls, which led to Lorraine losing an amazing amount of weight, getting terrifyingly fit, and wanting to try out for a local team.

Joan of Dark came up this weekend to see Lorraine and to watch the bout -- the Naptown Roller Girls Third Alarm team vs. The Chippewa Valley Roller Girls.

And, at the last moment, I surprised myself by asking if I could come. Lorraine had been reading a book on derby when we were on a plane together and I'd run out of reading material, and I wanted to see how the thing I'd read about matched up to reality.

Joan of Dark gave me a sort of continual commentary of her own on what was happening and what the things that were going on in front of us actually meant, which helped transform it from lots of good-looking women skating and pushing each over into something that actually meant something.

We had a great time. I was impressed with the skill, smarts, tactics, and occasional brutality of the teams, with the always entertaining announcer Matt, and with the wonderful Miss Dee Lovely (who sang "The Star Spangled Banner").

Here's Lorraine (left) with Joan of Dark (right).



And here's the Naptown team and me. Photo by Kelly McCullough. A study in red-eye. (I wished I'd had a photo with the Chippewa Valley team as well, but by that point they were mostly surrounded by friends and well-wishers.)

I hope Lorraine passes her try-out.

...Actually, now I come to think of it, there were several other things I did today I've never done before, like assemble an inversion table, and make a passable polenta out of cold millet porridge. But the two things I've mentioned were the most fun.

...

As part of the tenth anniversary greatest hits set, what about some bats?

Squeaky says,

my favourite blog post is the one involving the lemon-scented sticky bat.
it still makes me laugh.
i have a random, dog-eared mini-post-it-note stuck to a file holder on my desk at work. it bears the legend "lemon-scented sticky bats" which will occasionally catch my eye and make me smile.

and

One of my favorite blog posts is about the lemony scent bat that got stuck on the fly paper... I wonder if you ever found/scanned Maddy's drawing.

Hi, by the way... Tori Bat!

I never did.

Here's the journal entry in question, from February 2007: FROM THE DISTANT PAST http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/02/from-distant-past.html

Before this blog ever existed, I inhabited other places you could only get to by modem. First Compuserve, then Genie, and then the Well, and answered questions and so on in each place, and hung around. I've no idea if there are any archives anywhere of the Compuserve stuff or the Genie topics, but The Well is still there, I'm glad to say, and every few years I go back and am interviewed and hang around the inkwell.vue area for a few weeks. It's a wonderful place, and accessible to anyone from the web: http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/

So, in context of the current Fragile Things interview, which has only just begun, I found myself reading a post from the 20th of June 2000, written while I was writing American Gods. Which I am reposting a bit of here because a) there's lots more cool stuff like this on the various Well topics I did (here's the first, the second, the third, -- and b) if ever a story was meant to be on this blog, it's this one.


...last week Maddy woke me up early in the morning.

"Daddy," she said, "There's a bat on the kitchen window."

"Grumphle," I said and went back to sleep.

Soon, she woke me up again. "I did a drawing of the bat on the kitchen
window," she said, and showed me her drawing. For a five year old
she's a very good artist. It was a schematic of the kitchen windows,
showing a bat on one of the windows.

"Very nice dear," I said. Then I went back to sleep.

When I went downstairs...

We have, instead of dangling fly papers, transparent strips of gluey
clear plastic, about six inches long and an inch high, stuck to the
windows on the ground floor. When they accumulate enough flies, you
peel them off the window and throw them away.

There was a bat stuck to one. He was facing out into the room. "I
think he's dead," said my assistant Lorraine.

I peeled the plastic off the window. The bat hissed at me.

"Nope," I said. "He's fine. Just stuck."

The question then became, how does one get a bat (skin and fur) off a
fly-strip. Luckily, I bethought me of the Bram Stoker award. After the
door had fallen off (see earler in this topic) I had bought some citrus
solvent to take the old glue to reglue the door on.

So I dripped citrus solvent onto the grumpy bat, edging him off the
plastic with a twig, until a lemon-scented sticky bat crawled onto a
newspaper. Which I put on the top of a high woodpile, and watched the
bat crawl into the logs. With any luck he was as right as rain the
following night...


Of course, if it was now, I'd scan in Maddy's bat drawing to go with it. (I wonder if it's anywhere findable.)

(There are rumours, by the way, of a possible upcoming Lemon Scented Sticky Bat scent from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. Keep an eye on their website...)

of course, that wasn't the only post about bats on the blog. There was one with this video in it, from May 2007 (called Sorry and a Short Fillum)...

And there was this one -- someone asked me for it on Twitter when I first mentioned reposting some favourites: THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2009 Underneath the Bats and the Stars

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/08/underneath-bats-and-stars.html

I know.

I've got so many tabs open I need to put up here and close, and so much going on, and I haven't even caught up telling you what I did at Worldcon on Monday, or how I then flew to Toronto and caught up with Tori Amos and saw her in concert for the first time since Budapest, or about her daughter Tash's epic Mustachio competition for the crew...

But instead of doing any of that I took Cabal and his best friend Freck (a dog who appears to be staying over) out to the bottom of the garden, and lay on my back and stared up at the cloudless sky. Just about the moment I thought, "You know, I don't have to see any meteors -- just peacefully getting a chance to stare at the stars is good enough," zoom and zoom, two beautiful, low meteors shot through the sky, trailing glittering tails behind them, and I went "oooh" as if it was a special, perfect, fireworks display put on just for me.

And the bats were out too: ragged patches of silent blackness against the deep night-purple star-bespattered sky.

Amanda's pointed out that I have a tendency always to be doing the next thing, or, while I'm doing something to be thinking about the next dozen things I need to be doing, and that I should enjoy and be in the moment more, and she's right. So I lay there and looked at the stars and the bats and I counted the falling stars.

I counted 28 altogether. About ten of them had tails. Some were just streaks of light, others zooming pinpoints. A couple of them were full-on magical golden-yellow special effects.

I thought I lay there for 20 minutes. It was, I realised when I came in, well over an hour.

And there are things I have to read tonight, and things I still have to watch: but I watched 28 stars fall, and I didn't mind that I couldn't think of anything to wish for, and the air was cool and the bats were silent and I could have stared up at the sky forever.

Labels: joan of dark, lemon-scented sticky bats, roller derby, stars, the sky at night, What Lorraine does in the evenings

Things that go Bump in the Night and other dangerous nighttime problems

Remember the power outage I talked about in my last blog? The one that made the power go on and off (and lost me a small chunk of bloggage) (and taught me that the black bricklike BLACKOUT BUSTER that the computer is plugged into is about as useful as plugging it into a brick when the power actually goes out). It turns out it was caused by a driver about a mile away crashing into a telephone pole and taking out a power line, which blew out a local transformer with a bang so loud that my assistant Lorraine, fast asleep in her house a couple of miles away, woke up to the explosion and banged her head on the bedpost.

I mention this mostly because Lorraine came in to work this morning, made sure I was awake, made me tea and porridge, got me off to the Twin Cities to spend a day in the radio studio, and only when I was actually driving to KNOW in St Paul did she nip off to a medic to find that her scalp needed to be glued back together and that she had concussion.

I do not expect her at work tomorrow (and if you're trying to get hold of me or you need me for something, and you're wondering why nobody's answering the phone, that's why). (And Lorraine, if you're reading this, go back to bed. I will make my own tea, and there's nothing that won't keep until Monday.)

Anyway. I went and did Talk of the Nation. You can read about it and listen to the interview at http://www.npr.org/2010/12/09/131937258/neil-gaiman-selects-top-american-comics-of-2010

Here's a link to the book on Amazon (which fascinates me by people's reaction to it, good and not-so, and what they liked, and what they didn't. With a collection like this, I'd be sad if everyone liked or disliked the same stories, but the likes and dislikes seem fairly well spread around).

(Here's the link to obtain the book from your local independent bookshop: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547241777

and to find your local comic shop: http://www.comicshoplocator.com/)

TALK OF THE NATION was followed by an abrupt change of gear, as I stayed in the same studio (News Studio 3) but instead of being interviewed, I... well, I acted.

Simon Jones (whose work I have loved since he was Arthur Dent in the original The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, and who is, as I am, an Honorary Lifetime Member of Hitchhker's Appreciation Society ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha - http://www.zz9.org/) plays my father in the play, co-written by the wonderful Ellen Kushner, and he and I got to act. He was in New York, with the director and Ellen, and I was in St Paul, but still, we were acting together. Simon was the absolute master of the accent we'd been asked to do -- a sort of 1940s mid-Atlantic accent you used to hear on American Radio and in movies. I was a lot less masterly.

There's a bit of cellphone of me recording my lines (taken through the glass of the studio, so you can't really hear what I'm saying, but you can hear Simon at the end) at http://www.whosay.com/neilgaiman/videos/6143 and it was only when I saw it that I discovered the shocking truth: I act with my hands.

I wonder if that happens when I do audio books.

Ellen writes about the afternoon (and the project, The Witches of Lublin, here: http://ellen-kushner.livejournal.com/333363.html)

...

Hi Neil,

You've said in the past that you wouldn't want to self-publish. Considering your established sales, I absolutely get that. But I wonder, if you were just starting out today, would you consider it? Or would the answer still be, "I like writing," and let someone else figure out the business aspect. It seems like more and more people are only succeeding if they wear many different hats. (or get extremely lucky and get a behemoth behind them).

Just wondered if you'd mind considering that for a minute. And then, maybe consider what you'd do in this era, with a number of rejections behind you. Would it become more appealing at that point?

It depends how you define self-publishing. If I wanted physical books to be sold in your local bookshop, no, I wouldn't self-publish. But given the rapid rise of e-books, the existence of the web, the rise of things like Lulu.com, there are lots of ways of self-publishing that don't actually involve printing books, storing them in your basement, advertising them and somehow getting them to people who want them.

I'm sure it's possible to make money self-publishing physical books, if you're willing to be all the different things that a publishing house contains, from sales and marketing to editorial and design to shipping and receiving. But I still don't think I'd want to do it.

I read your latest blog today (9.12.-10) about cold weather. Living at the arctic circle (though, thankfully in Finland, so it is not that extreme) means that I fully get how one gets fed up with the, say, two weeks of -25 C, 5 layers of clothing, only going out of necessity and so on. I walk 25 minutes to the university.

However, freezing at -18 C means that you're doing something wrong. Curiously, that does fit within a stereotype we Finns have with English people but that's a story for another day.

a) As I presume money is not an issue, you should consider a down jacket. Canada Goose is an excellent choice. Essentially, -18 C means a jacket and a t-shirt then. The thicker down jackets of many brands start being usable at around -30C.

b) Merino wool underwear, synthetic fleece or wool over it too.
For example Patagonia has rather environment aware clothes line.

Essentially, if you're freezing at -18 C you're doing it wrong. If you're uncomfortable at -18, you've bought the wrong clothes.

Snow is so much fun too, sometimes I do need reminding of in the dark moments, try buying cross country skis. ( Well, that was probably a too Finnish advice. )

Thank you for all you books and letting us see the worlds you create.

Tuomas Tähtinen.

ps.
Fireplace is the best insurance for electricity blackouts during winter...

I didn't say I was freezing at -18C. I didn't even say I was uncomfortable. What I said was, I get really really sick of having to dress in layers and dress up and undress in order to walk the dogs. It gets old.

And as I said in the post, or thought I had, the temperature as it gets colder is very different to the one you get on the way back up. After a few weeks at -30 and -40, I get all cheerful and cocky when it rises to levels that don't actually threaten your life, and I understand the people who, when it gets to freezing in the spring, walk around with just tee shirts, or even bare chested (I understand them. I do not join them).

But there is a reason why so many Finns and Scandinavians came to the American Midwest. It's because nothing would make you people think about moving to Australia...

Hi,
I just wanted to thank you about your resent journal post "The anatomy of Snowbirds". It really cheered up my day. Someone else is also out there in snow and cold, thinking of Caribbean.

I live in Finland and this year we have this nice Siberia-style winter with 0,5 meters of snow fall each week. My husband has been whining about the weather for the six years we have been together and now we are planning to move to Australia, for real this time :D I just found myself one night wondering how I'm going to pack my Sandman-collection and all the other books with me... Oh well. Maybe I come up with some brilliant idea before next year.

Best regards,
Anna the Snowqueen from Helsinki

...well, practically nothing.

...

Lots of Letters to Levi, but I think I will save them for tomorrow. I mean later today.

And finally, this just came in from David Lenander - if you're in the Twin Cities Area today (Friday the 10th) and fancy a free C.S. Lewis conference before the blizzard hits, then you're in luck:

Just wanted to tell you that we're having a little C.S, Lewis conference at the U of MN Children's Literature Collections later today, and your Mythcon 35 address and "The Problem of Susan" are important inspirations, along with Laura Miller's book, The Magician's Book. I'd had good intentions of writing and asking you to mention us in your blog, but things got done too late. Still, Thanks for your writing. And I'm about to bundle up and take the dog out for her walk, and I really have understood why people like Will & Emma probably moved south.

http://web.me.com/david_lenander/NarniaCon

Labels: cold [the extreme kind], completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead, Ellen Kushner, things that go bump in the night, What Lorraine does in the evenings

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

Day Four: Went to ring bell, but cat had stolen batteries.

Mr. G sends "a small treat" to help us pass the time in his absence. He writes:

A small treat for Good Omens fans and audio book fans and just people who like quality. This is the first scene in the Harper Audio version that'll be out on Nov 10th, read by Martin Jarvis. (Out of the US people will have to buy the CD version as it won't be on Audible or iTunes for them I'm afraid.)

Download.

---

There are currently twenty-seven independent book stores plotted on the Graveyard Book Halloween Parties map, and that number is still slowly growing. Check back periodically to find one near you, and then please go and support independent book sellers!

---

The Super Assistants Team-Up of Fabulous Lorraine and Beth have been saving cats. If you would like to help, you should follow them on Twitter (@fabulouslorrain / @bethofalltrades) and await the next SOS.

---

I'd happily go to the mailbag at this point, in hopes of prolonging my blogging stay by playing "Mr. Answer Goblin", but no one has written me recently.

Labels: all creatures great and smoke, Good Omens, what happened to the days when I did cute or funny or interesting labels then?, What Lorraine does in the evenings

Absolute Mondays

Today was spent doing Absolute stuff. For the Absolute Stardust (which is technically not an Absolute Stardust but an oversized hardback Stardust with stuff in) I proofread all the extra material, added a postscript to the reprinting of the original "pitch document" to publishers from 1993 (did I really think that Croup and Vandemar belonged in Stardust?), and for the next volume of Absolute Sandman we dug out dozens of little thumbnail comics I'd drawn for Sandman over the years, found the still-unopened First Sandman Statue (#1 of 1800) in order to photograph the box for the book (which will also have the short story on the back of the box in it) and even found photocopies of the pencils of the first 8 pages of Sandman 23, which will probably be the script that gets published in the book.


Also mysterious boxes of stuff to do with beekeeping have arrived. I've always wanted bees in the garden, and it turned out that the birdchick has always wanted to be a beekeeper but didn't think that it would work, keeping bees in an apartment in Minneapolis, and anyway her rabbit would object, so we've agreed to join forces: she gets to keep bees in my garden, I get to help, and all our friends and loved ones get to keep their distance nervously and eat honey. What could possibly go wrong? In this way we shall make up for the vanishing of bees across America.



I've just heard that there will be a limited edition of M is for Magic, the story collection for young readers, from Subterranean Press. The copies in the bookshops will be illustrated by Teddy Kristiansen. The Subterranean edition will have illustrations by Gahan Wilson: one thousand numbered copies and 26 lettered copies -- details up at http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/2007/03/05/announcing-m-is-for-magic-by-neil-gaiman/

...


Hi Neil, random question. So does Lorraine live there? Because she seems to be around all the time.


No, she has her own house, and she's goes there in the afternoon when she finishes work, and at weekends. It's a very nice house, filled with paintings, dead things and even a small Hallowe'en village. (As Lorraine was off in LA Hallowe'en week last year I got to go to her house to feed the trick-or-treaters -- because nobody ever comes to my house on Hallowe'en, possibly because it's too far from everything or too spooky or something -- and the kids all looked around when they came to the door and were impressed that someone had made that much effort for Hallowe'en, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that Lorraine's house was like that the rest of the year as well.)

Lorraine will not, however, be there next Sunday night, March the 11th. This is because Hera is going to be coming in from New Zealand and the two of them will be playing together in Stillwater, MN. (Details at http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2007/03/hera-and-fabulous-lorraine.html) Lorraine has been learning lots of Hera songs in preparation. Lorraine says that I should make a point of plugging the gig on this blog because that way the whole of Minneapolis will turn out to see them.

This is a photograph of Hera. Lorraine is certain that if I post it, the gig will be completely full. If you're in this part of the world, you should go. After all, it's Sunday Night in Winter in Minnesota; you have perhaps something else are you going to be doing?

I recall that a while ago you mentioned your daughters' fascination with a web site where photos of models and celebrities were retouched, often substantially. Here's a consumer software package that offers to do the same. It's been on Boing Boing so a hundred other fans have probably also sent you this link, but here it is in the unlikely event you haven't seen it yet. http://www.portraitprofessional.com/

But, but that's horrible. I mean, I looked at their gallery, and it seems to be software that turns photos of human beings into photos of soulless androids, and they are proud of it. All of their befores have interesting human faces. Their afters just look wrong...

...

Lots and lots of emails coming in each day from people with lists of questions for me to answer for their papers or magazines or websites -- normally five questions, for some reason. I explain why I don't do them here http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/08/fair-and-balanced-well-fair-anyway.asp and here http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/06/hmg.html, and it's still true. I suppose it's probably time to amend the FAQ line thing to explain that not only do I not do homework for people, but alas, I don't answer lists of interview questions either. I might do if people would send in the time to answer them with the questions, mind you.

Were your high school english classes helpful to you as a writer, or were they a waste of time?Thanks, Amy

Probably more much helpful than a waste of time. I remember enjoying them, for the most part, although I sometimes suspect that if I'd come to Thomas Hardy on my own, when I was ready, I would have really enjoyed him, and instead I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

Truth to tell, when I became a writer I realised that a lot of stuff I had thought pointless at school was now desperately important, and I had to teach myself piles of history and geography and science that I hadn't bothered with, and which were now really interesting subjects because I had a use for them. Writing and English I always had a use for, and some fairly decent teachers so they were never boring.

Labels: absolute Sandman, English as a Waste of Time?, Hera, M is For Magic, Soulless Android Photos, Stardust, What Lorraine does in the evenings