Amazing Audio Things, and Pictures. No Blood Anywhere.

For those of you who missed it, here's the NPR "Open Mike" piece I did on audiobooks... You can listen to it here, or download it, or email it...

And here, at closer to full length, are the interviews I did with Martin Jarvis and David Sedaris. If you enjoyed the piece, they are filled with wonderful bits that didn't make it in. And the Martin Jarvis interview is practically a masterclass in how to approach doing Audiobooks.

(The strangest moment for me in the Martin Jarvis interview is when he talks about remembering the voices of teachers, and names John Branston and Dick Glynne Jones. I went to Whitgift School in Croydon, which Martin had also attended twenty years before me, and I was taught by both of them. I was in John Branston's production of Julius Caesar at the Fairfield Halls -- and was taught O-level English by Dick Glynne Jones. As he said their names, I thought "He can't be talking about the same people..." but of course, he was.)

There's a sort of interview with me, and a gallery of snapshots, over at http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lomoamigos/2009/11/30/neil-gaiman-shoots-with-the-lc-a-plus. I love the low-tech magic of the camera, and the wonderful hodgepodge nature of the shots, particularly the ones that are a mixture of art and documentary, such as the moment when a collapsing shelf deposited the contents of a make-up bag into a toilet, Amanda's doomed attempts to make friends with sheep, or a photo that should not have come out (given the amount of available light) of my goddaughters watching the DVD of Coraline with their 3D specs on...

For me, the most exciting bit is that they gave Dave McKean a camera to play with. I can't wait to see what he did.

I've grabbed a few more shots from their gallery. Here's the Queen of Sheep herself...

Maddy's friend Claire, at San Diego airport...


And here's Ivy McCloud (almost invisible, far right) and my goddaughters and their friend...

...

I was reading the book "Coraline". I finished then told my parents about it. I was wondering if this book has any religouiseness to it. I tried, but only found what you've writen so i'm hoping you can tell. Just curiose

I don't think so. Although I think people bring religious points of view to books, and read them from those perspectives.

You sounded good on NPR this morning, so good you need your own radio show.

If I sound good, it's because Maeve McGoran, my producer, and Barry Gordemer, the editor, did such a sterling job. Finding the time to make this, to do the interviews and put it all together, took months. I'd love to do more radio, for NPR or for Radio Four in the UK, but I think it will always be little one-off projects. But I loved doing it.

...

Here's one that contains a Graveyard Book spoiler:

Dear Mr. Gaiman:

How is Silas erasing Scarlett’s memory of events preceding justified in The Graveyard Book? When the reason given isn’t satisfactory, and is it?, doesn’t it become the Problem of Scarlett? You know what I mean. I've just about read the Problem of Susan from Fragile Things which was so brave of you to write or, rather, re-write.

I thought it was so god-like of Silas to do what he did at the same time so unnatural of him to. It meant a reasonably strong character like her couldn't stare reality in its face bravely and overcome it which is what fairy-tales are about, be it children's, YA's, or adult's.

Your Sandman fan,
Ahimaz.

Silas did what he did because he thought it was for the best. Whether it was the wisest thing he could have done, in the circumstances, remains to be seen.

....

Hi Neil,
I live in Naperville, IL, and I just heard about your appearance in February for the Naperville Reads program. No one around town seems to have a whole lot of information about the events so far though. I was wondering if you had more information about what you'll be doing here, and if any of the events will be open to the public? Thanks!

I don't know yet. When I get a schedule, I'll put it here, and at Where's Neil.

Hi,
Before I book flights I was wondering if you could let us know if you're doing a signing at the NZ talk, or if you plan on doing a signing elsewhere in Wellington that weekend? I'd hate to have to get back on the plane only to discover later that I'd missed out on a signing op at Arty Bees Books by mere hours...
And your Captcha anti-spam thing just asked me to write down "$2-mil manistee". I thought you should know.

Mike

I think there's a signing or two involved, but it'll be organised by the Festival (tickets to the main event at http://www.nzfestival.nzpost.co.nz/writers-and-readers/town-hall-talk-neil-gaiman (The signings normally follow the events.) I plan to go to Amanda's gig, and will probably sign afterwards to keep her company.

Hi, Neil! Are going to sign any books at UCLA on February 4th, 2010? If so,before or after the discussion? Or do can we buy signed books?

I don't believe there are signings at the UCSB or the UCLA talks. I know I've been asked to sign sheets to stick in books (or perhaps to presign books), so there will definitely be something available.

Hi Neil,

Don't know if anyone's pointed it out to you, but the postscript at the end of your article in The Writer's and Artist's Year Book has the films of Beowulf and Stardust being released in 1987!

Ooops!

Regards,

Mark

Yup. And the wonderful Chris Riddell is Paul Riddell in the text as well. Ah well. Mysterious goofs happen.

...

Finally, a message from Beth at Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs:

Would you please put up a little plug for the current Vampire sets and tees? I'd like people's winter money to go to a good cause, and we're getting to our cutoff date on orders that we can get out to people in time for Christmas. The perfume plus tarot card sets are at:

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/vampiretarot.html

And the tees are at:

http://www.blackphoenixtradingpost.com/vampiretarot-bptp.html

The Snow, Glass, Apples locket is at:

http://www.blackphoenixtradingpost.com/neilgaiman.html

We still have a few sets of Sunbird left:

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/sunbird.html

I'm happy to plug them here. They'll make great gifts. The Sunbird scent is amazing, comes with a chapbook, and is almost gone. The proceeds from the scents and tee shirts go to the CBLDF. The proceeds from the lockets and medallion go to Alzheimer's Research.

Labels: audio books, BPAL, David Sedaris, lomography, Martin Jarvis, NPR, old teachers, the queen of sheep, Where's Neil, Whitgift

ants and screencracks

Somehow in my sleep last night (fell asleep while working, on the sofa) I cracked my notebook computer's screen, and yesterday afternoon the new posh slick black internet router was discovered when I picked it up to try and work out why the internet was so very, very slow, to contain an ants' nest,  upsetting a very large number of little black ants in the process, most of whom ran off, carrying their eggs and probably grumbling about me in Ant.

What an odd world.

Let' s see: interview with yours truly up on BBC Radio 3's R3Arts podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r3arts/ and downloadable at http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio3/r3arts/r3arts_20090511-1800a.mp3

-- as with the Jonathan Ross one, it may only be up for a few more days, so if you want to hear me burbling, that's where.

Stephin Merritt is interviewed about the CORALINE musical in Vanity Fair, with a great selection of photographs from the stage production. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2009/05/13/stephin-merritts-new-musical-coraline.html

and these reviews came in from  the FAQ line:

Hi Neil,

I was able to get rush tickets to Coraline last night and it was simply...astonishing. There are no words to even describe the beauty that I witnessed on that stage. I was surprised at how well the story translated to the stage and how perfect the lighting, music, and disturbing, yet exciting, acting performed. I know you probably feel the same way as well. So thank you for writing the story that eventually made its way as a piece of fantastic, jaw dropping theater. Do you know if the show will be running again in the future. Or if the music will ever be released?

All my best,
Crystal

Neil,
I just got home from the Coraline musical- it was delightful, enchanting, and fantastic! It was even better than what I'd imagined and I dream lots. My fiancee and I talked about the show all the way home from New York (we live in Philadelphia) and we both are wondering if there will be a CD made of the wonderful music? We loved the alternative instrumentation and all the singing was pure perfection tonight. I don't know if we'll be able to swing a second pair of tickets for the show, but we'd love to hear those songs again! Please use your powers for good once again and make this happen!

kerplink, kerplunk, kerploonk,
Elizabeth Hahn

and (for reasons of fairness and balance)

Hi Neil,
Got to see the musical Coraline last night. LOVED the toy pianos! Not sure about bits of it: our lead requires a degree of suspension of disbelief that approaches stress! And not quite sure that everyone's laughing in the right places. Liked the Cat & Misses F & S. Always love Mr. Bobo! My daughter, a huge Stephin Merritt/Magnetic Fields fan, adored the music, and how delightful to see Stephin himself after the show! He signed a Playbill for my daughter & we went home v. happy.

...and the answer is, I don't know if there will be an original cast album or not. I know a lot of shows don't get them, for reasons too complex to go into here (ie it was all explained to me late one night some years ago but I have forgotten the details which had something to do with Actors Equity and suchlike)but, like you, I very much hope there will be.

The CORALINE musical has a VERY limited run, so if you want to see it, and you are in the New York area, book tickets now. I know I keep saying this, and it's mostly because the moment that all the tickets are sold out I will start getting the sad emails that ask why I didn't mention it.

Ticket details are at http://www.mcctheater.org/tickets.html and if you are under 30 or a student there are cheap seats available (if there are seats available) shortly before curtain-up.

And talking of limited ticketing, if you read http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/events/printersrow/ you will learn that

This year's Chicago Tribune Young Adult Book Prize will be awarded to Neil Gaiman. Join us in congratulating Neil at the Chicago Public Library at 12pm Saturday, June 6, 2009. This event will be free, but it is a ticketed event because space is limited. Check back May 18, 2009 for ticketing information.

Again, you may want to get into the website early on Monday to get a ticket. (Free tickets are the worst, as people do not feel obligated to use them once they have been bought, and it's a sad thing to talk to a three-quarters filled "sold out" room when you know there were people who wanted to come.) It looks like a wonderful festival, too.

My question is inspired by your answer to the question re George R R Martin. There, you mentioned a story whose deadline passed you by so spectacularly that you simply apologized and moved on to your next bit of writing (a script which I am quite curious to learn the name of). I got to wondering what the story was about, and I started wondering if it would ever reappear.

So my question is, do you ever feel like things you are working on go completely dead, and you more or less just bin them and forget about it, or do you feel more like stories go dormant, but still have the possibility to be finished/rewritten at a later time?

There are a handful of unfinished stories. And in my head none of them are really dead. Only sleeping.

...

Finally, a huge thank you to Adelle, from LUSH (the nice smelly bath-and-cosmetics-and-stuff-people), who decided that it would be a good thing, while I was in the UK last week, if I went to their King's Road spa and got a "synaesthesia" massage

I wanted to relax, and that was what I got.

It was both perfectly awesome and slightly silly (although nowhere near as silly as the YouTube video implies), and the silly somehow seemed to help the awesome along. An amazing massage from Morag, along with colours, scents, birdsong and suchlike. The sort of thing you'd do for a loved one on a special occasion.

[I should add, I don't think they gave me the spa thing because I was going to blog it - more that they are fans at LUSH (witness the Stardust bathbomb) and wanted to do something nice for me. But I was very happy to blog about it anyway.]

Right. Work.

Labels: coraline the musical, lush, short stories, Where's Neil

"I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful..."

Lots of nice messages from people letting me know about today's New York Times, of which this is an example:

Hi Neil,
Just in case no-one has made you aware of this or you haven't seen it yourself, your son is quoted in an article about Google's bus service. You can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html?ex=1331182800&en=272d04d67d29e1f4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Sounds like he's found himself an awesome place to work! Christopher

It does, doesn't it? (And the people at Google fixed the gmail bug for me, and did stuff to make up for it.) I have rather wonderful children.

Maddy, mind you, while still wonderful, has gone down with influenza, something that we've sort of been waiting for since her two best friends went down with it earlier this week. So we're watching Howl's Moving Castle on the sofa together right now, which is a sensible sort of thing to do when someone is sick and feverish.

Not really a question - I just saw your cuecat/readerware comment. I find for the older books that using the library of congress number works very well. You have to change from just the default amazon service, and you often have to muck with the edition more, but it's a great shortcut for getting author names and titles and whatnot in.Failing an LC number, Amazon also has a surprising number of old editions through their bookseller associates, as does ABE. I find trolling those sites a lot more productive (not to mention interesting) than hand-cataloging.

Good suggestion, and I was thrilled to discover it worked.

I'm finding entering books curiously addictive. I'll pick up a few books and nip into the library to scan them between doing other things.

I've got a sort of a theory about the library -- there are so many books downstairs and scattered around the house that the upstairs library won't really make much of a dent in them. So I've decided that the books I want in the upstairs library are simply ones that I (or someone else a lot like me) might want on shelves if I was just going to pick something up from the shelves and sit down somwhere comfortable and read for an hour. So right now I'm very aware that half the books we've brought up and scanned or entered will go back downstairs again.


Hello Neil, I was wondering if you knew the for sure, official release dates for "Interworld" and "M is for Magic". Amazon is showing July 1st, while Barnes & Noble's website is showing last week of June. Both are listed in the current Diamond Previews which would suggest more like May.Thanks, Cal

I had no idea, but I asked Clarissa Hutton at HarperChildrens, and she said,

The PUBLICATION date for both is 7/1, while the on-sale date is 6/26. So both Amazon & B&N are sort of right, they're just using different bases. Our official pub dates are always the beginning of the month, while release (when the books ship from the warehouse) and on-sale (when the stores need to have the books on-shelf) vary depending on print dates.

Hope this helps.

And this came in recently too:

Hi Neil,

Hope all's well with you. You might be interested to know that The House Called Hadlows will be out next month and that we've added an excerpt from the first chapter to the website - there's a link on this page: http://www.fidrabooks.com/forthcoming.html. I know this is cheeky, but we have had lots of interest via your support for the books and if you were to mention it on your blog that would be fantastic. And you never know - if we sell enough I might be able to wrestle the unpublished third book from Victoria's grasp!!

Best wishes

Vanessa
www.fidrabooks.com

Consider it posted. (I talked about The House Called Hadlows at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/10/i-finished-reading-house-called.asp)

Several people wrote to alert me to this -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6430489.stm , and its consequences for various internet radio stations.

Hello, Mr. Neil Gaiman sir.
There are some rumors that on the 17th of March you will be at the 7th Warszawskie Spotkania Komiksowe (which translates to Warsaw Comics Festival or something similar) in, lo and behold, Warsaw. It's not listed in the "Where's Neil" section but it's been reported by some Polish comic book news portals. Any luck it's true? Izydor Ingwar I.

It's true -- and it should be up on Where's Neil soon -- I'll be there from 5-7 pm, I believe.

Hi Neil, I've seen you mention the new third-floor library in several posts. As someone who is slowly infiltrating every corner of his house with books, I'm always interested in seeing other people's libraries, bookcases and the like. Any chance we'll get a peek at the new library? Blu

Good idea. I'll take some pictures when I get a spare minute.

Labels: Flu, Howl's Moving Castle, library upstairs, Mike, Poland, The Google Bus, The House Called Hadlows, Where's Neil

Several dates. Also some places.

I'm starting to put together my movements on the German, Polish and French micro-tour in March. This is assembled from a few different emails, and obviously needs more data, but I thought it might be a good thing for Europeans if I got the word out early:

Cologne
March 16th, 7:30 pm
Toyota Autohaus Yvel, Raderberggürtel 4
Literature Festival "Lit.COLOGNE"
http://www.litcologne.de/va/160307/gaimankoester.php

KRAKOW
Sunday 18th. 16.00 -19.00 booksigning at EMPiK Rynek Główny

WARSAW
Monday 19th. 17.00-19.00 booksigning at EMPIK Nowy Swiat

Hamburg
March 21st, 8:15 pm
Thalia Bookstore, Europapassage, Ballindamm 40
http://www.service.thalia.de/thalia.vorort.php?vst=361&event=5335

Leipzig
March 22nd -
1:00pm - Book Fair
9:00 pm SPIZZ - Jazz & Music Club, Markt 9
http://www3.mdr.de/scripts/leipzig-liest-2007/suche.cfm?s4=name&value=7416

PARIS
Friday, March 23rd from 17h00 to 20h00
Saturday, March 24th from 17h00 to 20h00.

Signing at Salon du Livre, Porte de Versailles, 75015 Paris; Au Diable Vauvert stand #H148

When I'm sure that this is all there is, and I've got all the relevant phone numbers and so on, I'll put it up on Where's Neil (the amazing new, improved and plugged into Google Calendar version of Where's Neil).

...

Incidentally, Hera-from-Iceland is going to be playing at the SXSW Festival (http://2007.sxsw.com/music/showcases/band/33129.html). And then she's coming out here to play a gig with Lorraine at Charlie's in Stillwater, MN, on Sunday March 11th.(http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2007/02/spring-cds-laundry-and-hera.html for details). I'm hoping I'm in town and able to make it to see them.

Labels: France, Germany, Hera, Poland, unusual absence of strange tags, Where's Neil