An extremely exciting week

So, last year I recorded a piece for a This American Life episode about adventure. It's a little memoir about adventures, and how I mostly don't have them.

It wasn't the piece I originally wrote, though, which was a short story. Or rather, it was the piece I originally wrote. Ira Glass wasn't sure about the personal one, when I sent it over, and wanted a short story, so I wrote a short story instead, but the producers preferred the personal memoir, and outvoted him, so that was what I recorded.

Ira Glass still liked the short story, and mentioned to Dave Eggars that I had a short story that he liked that nobody had read, and Dave Eggars wrote to my agent and asked if he could read it for McSweeneys, and I was happy that it wasn't going to be completely forgotten forever (I'd already forgotten it existed, and hadn't given it to anyone or submitted it anywhere, so it was just sitting getting dusty on a hard drive somewhere). I wasn't sure if it was any good, and had to be nudged by Dave several times to send it. It was called Adventure Story.

Having emailled it to Dave I forgot about it again. And then, in the post, this arrived:

I opened it. And I thought, I've got  story in McSweeneys!

I read the story, a little nervously, now it was printed, and thought, and it's good.


It's a great issue of McSweeney's. The Jason Jagel comic insert, Topsy Turvy, is wonderful, the collected writing is, as always, excellent, varied, powerful (the book 2 account of a week in Rwanda; the writing that inspired the Egyptian uprising...). Beautiful production values.

You can get a copy of it at McSweeneys: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeneys-issue-40

I'm really happy and proud and thrilled to be in it. Thank you, Ira Glass.

...

The New York Times has a page of me talking about books and what I'm reading and suchlike on it.  (The blue picture is Jillian Tamaki's wonderful picture of me from it.) (They edited out the bit where I had President Obama talking about a hooker eating a man with her nether bits, which in retrospect might have been wise, but made that section less funny.)

Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

Yes.

Wait, do you think those things are exclusive? That books can only be one or the other? I would rather read a book with all of those things in it: a laughing, crying, educating, distracting book. And I would like more than that, the kind of book where the pages groan under the weight of keeping all such opposites apart.

You can read the rest of it at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html?_r=2&ref=books&pagewanted=all
...


Amanda's Kickstarter has been an enormous success -- currently it's the most successful music Kickstarter ever. In six days it has got over 10,000 supporters and has raised over $555,000 towards putting out the CD and book and taking the band on a world tour.

She wrote about it on techdirt..

There's a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that's visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren't shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we'd make it quickly, and hoping we'd surpass it by a long-shot. 

 I've been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I've crashed on...all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.
 And they help because they know I'm good for it. Because they KNOW me.

...

I went to Chicago and delivered this year's annual Zena Sutherland lecture. Zena was an editor, a reviewer and an influential figure in the world of children's books. I wish I'd known her - everyone who had known her described her as "a pistol!" and they all talked about her in ways that made me so very proud to be this year's lecturer. (Here's an online obituary.)

(The first Zena Sutherland lecture was delivered by Maurice Sendak. The second by Lloyd Alexander. Yes, I was very intimidated.)

My lecture was called

“What the @#$%&*! Is a Children's Book, Anyway?”

which I mostly pronounced "What the [very bad swearword] is a children's book anyway?" when I read it onstage. I got to say things like...

Children are a relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them. Information is currency, and information that will allow you to decode the language, motivations and behaviour of the occupying forces, on whom you are uniquely dependent for food, for warmth, for happiness, is the most valuable information of all.

Children are extremely interested in adult behaviour. They want to know about us.

Their interest in the precise mechanics of peculiarly adult behaviour is limited. All too often it seems repellent, or dull. A drunk on the pavement is something you do not need to see, and part of a world you do not wish to be part of, so you look away.

Children are very good at looking away.

...along with the story of how I was very nearly expelled from school, at the age of eight, for telling a classmate a dirty joke I'd heard from some kids on the walk home, and a lot of pondering about what children read and why and how authors can figure out whether or not they are writing a book for children or adults.

It'll be published in The Horn Book in the autumn.

...

And by now you are undoubtedly thinking, what an exciting week. And you would be right. This was the most exciting week ever. Because...

I hived a swarm!


I walked the dogs in the woods. I heard something buzzing gently, and it seemed to be a tree. I looked closer... It was a swarm of bees high in a buckthorn tree...

Now, when a hive gets overcrowded, or just feels the time has come, the bees swarm. Three quarters of the hive, along with the queen, take off to find a new home, leaving the remaining bees behind to raise a new queen in the old location.

Swarms of bees are scary. You've probably seen one. They are also relatively harmless -- bees in swarming mode are not grumpy, not out to sting you, they've filled up on honey which actually makes it physically difficult for them to sting anyway, and mostly they just want to find somewhere new to live.

I prepared an empty hive. I put a couple of frames of honey into it from a hive that could afford to lost them.

Then, with two friends (Hans, who cut down the tree, after we decided it was just too high for ladders, and author Kelly McCullough, who saw me tweeting about it and decided that giving a swarm a home would be more fun than writing or revising that afternoon) we made it happen.

(This is Hans, He is like a midwestern, less Jewish, less orange-rocky Ben Grimm.) 

Hans cut down the tree (a good thing, because Buckthorn is a bad thing). Kelly helped and suggested I sing the Winnie the Pooh "I'm just a little black rain cloud" song, in case it helped. I did. It did. . I caught the swarm in a cardboard box as it fell, and Kelly and I transported it to its new home, poured in the bees.

While I was fairly certain we had not lost the queen when the tree fell, I also put a frame of brood from the Russian hive in, with a couple of queen cells (they are much bigger than usual bee-larva cells, and look like peanuts) ready to hatch on it. If a queen in a hive hears another queen about to hatch, she simply heads over and stings it. If she's not there to sting it, it hatches and the hive has a new queen.)

(Panoramic photo magic: here is Kelly on both sides of the swarm's new home at once.)

The dogs sat the whole thing out. They've had experiences with bees in the past. 

Labels: amanda palmer, bamboo, bees, in which the dogs are sensible for once, McSweeneys, new york times article, swarm

Slow Motion Bees...

I've been a very bad blogger recently. I promised myself that I would simply finish the thing I was working on and then blog again, but by the time I finished I had such a ridiculous backlog of things to post here that I've been putting it off...

So. I finished writing in Florida. I came home. I went to a wedding in Laguna Beach with Amanda, then to Dallas where Amanda was mixing her new album. We went to North Carolina to take Maddy to the college she's going to be attending (amazing. My little girl...) and I got home last night.

Lots of things to blog about... I'm thinking of putting the whole of the Stephen King interview I did for the Sunday Times up here on the blog, for a start.

Today, three packages of bees came in, to replace the three hives we lost this winter. (We were left with three - an Italian, a Russian, and a Carniolan hive.)

This is an amazing high speed film of me pouring bees into a hive this morning. It's 40 seconds long, and takes a few seconds of real time.

Labels: bees, finally home again

Of Introductions and Viriconium

Another day of record high temperatures. I am mostly happy because it's astonishingly pleasant walking the dogs without protective clothing and facemasks and such. Also, it means I have a better chance of bringing all the beehives through this winter. 

Which reminds me,

Hi, Neil,

I thought you might enjoy this article on bee keeping:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/01/beekeeping-and-the-ethical-vegan--will-curley/

Best,
Helana

...and I really did. (For the record, I think it's absolutely right for ethical vegans to stop eating almonds, cucumbers, cranberries and other nuts/fruits/vegetables that are pollinated by bees being trucked around the country, bees that are being, from my perspective, exploited and mistreated -- although I don't know of any vegans that have stopped eating such fruits etc. -- but cannot see why such vegans would stop eating honey from small local beekeepers.)

The mail on Friday brought many wonderful things, including a box of copies of  a new edition of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, to which I had written an introduction.

One reason I love writing introductions (or rather, I love having written introductions, because I don't love writing them. They feel like schoolwork, and they always take me so much longer to do than I ever think they will) is that I get to point to a work that I like,  usually like a lot, and explain why I like it. You can't explain or point out everything in an introduction, nor should you. If it's done well, an introduction is a bit like sending a friend to a city she's never visited before. You tell her about the restaurants she shouldn't miss, and the places and sights that made you happy the last time you were there, and a few things that perhaps only the locals know. 

I love M. John Harrison's prose and I love his books, and I find the Viriconium sequence fascinating and delightful, which was why I asked for it to be in my ACX audiobook line at Neil Gaiman Presents.

A few years ago, I wrote an introduction to the US edition of the book (the UK edition was introduced by Iain M. Banks, so even if you own the books, you might not have read it).

I said this:

On Viriconium: some Notes Toward an Introduction.

People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?

A Young Man's Journey Towards Viriconium

And I look at the Viriconium cycle of M. John Harrison and wonder whether The Pastel City knew it was pupating In Viriconium or the heartbreak of “A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium” inside its pages, whether it knew what it was going to become.

Some weeks ago and half-way around the world, I found myself in the centre of  Bologna, that sunset-coloured medieval towered city which waits in the centre of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the the Codex Seraphinianus to inspect.  The book, created by the artist Luigi Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object: there is text, but the alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry,  card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths)  bear only a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time:  in one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawls away; while the animals, plants and ideas are strange enough that one can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time from now, or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England.

Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s creation, the Pastel City in the Afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing is consistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street?

M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty years: in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more than just a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he moves from puckish  to possessed: I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on  the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain. It would be like trying to explain Harrison's fiction, something I am attempting to do in this introduction, and, in all probability, failing.

There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.

The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of unease from a long-forgotten English Roman City – English antiquaries have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium, and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient sources is somewhat confused, a historical website informs us – are fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the nature of art and magic, language and power. 

There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, or we have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and characters reappear, like Tarot cards being shuffled and redealt. 

The Pastel City states Harrison’s themes simply, in comparison to the tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a marching brass band: it’s far future SF at the point where SF transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of Michael Moorcock and, in its end of time ambience and weariness, of Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of the legendary Methven to protect Viriconium and its girl-queen from invaders to the North. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an inventor and a city under threat. Still, there is a bitter-sweetness to the story that one would not normally expect from such a novel.

A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it: the voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story.

And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrison’s prose became transparent, but it was a treacherous transparency. Like its predecessors, In Viriconium is a novel about a hero attempting to rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor and a threatened city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it has come closer to home than the previous stories – the disillusion and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis.

The short stories which weave around the three novels are stories about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations. 

The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art.

Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces since leaving Viriconium, in and out of genre: Climbers, his amazing novel of rock climbers and escapism takes the themes of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” into mainstream fiction; The Course of the Heart takes them into fantasy, perhaps even horror; Light, his transcendent twining SF novel, is another novel about failed escapes – from ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations. 

For me, the first experience of reading Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium was a revelation. I was a young man when I first encountered them, half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first experience of Harrison’s prose, as clear as mountain-water and as cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them – the Thatcher Years in England seem already to be retreating into myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and there's more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when Harrison retold the story of “The Luck in the Head” in graphic novel form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn as an avatar of Margaret Thatcher).

Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before – flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, and that the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it, or simply what you need.

M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces, and finds invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the shower of sparks...

Neil Gaiman

Narita Airport, July 25, 2005

....

There.

That's why I like it.

Those are some of the sights to see in Viriconium if you visit.

You can buy Viriconium from your local Indie Bookstore, or online: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780553383157

You can listen to the audiobook, the one of which I am so proud, at http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L88VMY&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911

Oh, and adumbrate means to sketch, outline or prefigure.

Labels: bees, m. john harrison, the absence of Viriconium, the Jungle Book, vegans

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

One of those slightly random too-long posts filled with peculiar stuff not to mention a recipe for Wil Wheaton

I'm delighted and really honoured to announce that I've been made a Patron of the BookEnd Trust in Tasmania. As they explain,

The Bookend program seeks to inspire students and the community with the potential of building positive and effective environmental careers and solutions.

We achieve this through a diverse range of projects, including scholarships, documentaries, school visits, public presentations, on-ground field courses and the award-winning Expedition Class adventure learning program.

I loved being made a part of it. I've been fascinated by Tasmanian wildlife since my first trip to Hobart in 1998.

You can read all about it at http://www.bookendtrust.com/index.php/newsletterfeb2011, learn about the BookEnd Trust and see some amazing photos. Here's a BookEndTrust YouTube video of me and Amanda getting close and personal with two echidnas named Eric.



People ask why this blog doesn't have comments enabled, and it goes back to how old it is. When I started blogging, blogger didn't do comments. And by the time it did, well, I liked it just how it was, and had no desire to change anything. Over on Facebook, there are comments, so I got to see something close to a flame war break out over whether, when I had posted a photo of me with an endangered Tasmanian Land Crayfish, I had meant "crawfish" or not. (I should have just said "Yabby.")

And I thought, yup, that's why I've never turned on comments here.

...


Sometimes I think that when I die, or perhaps as I am dying, I shall be confronted with my characters.

Not the ones you would expect, the ones who had their stories, but the other ones. The characters whose stories I planned to tell but never did. There was the girl who never made it into Season of Mists (was her name Carmen? I think it was) who talked about herself in the third person and described herself as "hard as effin nails", and the lonely journalist trying to investigate the Bender family in Kansas and elsewhere in the Michael Zulli Sweeney Todd story, and Jenny Kertin who is waiting for me to take her to the village of Wall and wishes I'd hurry it up...

Them, and a few dozen others, the people from the tales I never told, who have waited on the boundaries between the potential and the actual, in a ghostly limbo. They'll be so disappointed when I die. And I have no doubt I will feel guilty, for all the stories I'll never write.

Not that that'll be happening for some time to come. But I've been talking to friends of mine who are writers at the end of their lives, and it makes me think.

...

I mentioned on Twitter that I'd made a Sweet Potato/Tamarind/Tofu/Polenta casserole and that Maddy has astonished me by liking it, and Wil Wheaton promptly asked for the recipe. Which is much too long for Twitter:

What I like doing with recipes most is ignoring them. Or at least, going "Well, yes. Although I don't have any of those things. But I do have something a bit like it..."

The idea came from a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Appetite For Reduction. (Incidentally, I'm now comfortably wearing long-forgotten jeans from the size 31 tub, and do not plan to lose much more weight, because there are only two pairs of jeans in the 30 tub.)

So...

I'd learned from various books on making tofu less boring that you can slice it and put it in the freezer. It freezes, and also dries out a little. If you then drop slices of frozen tofu still frozen into cooking liquids, you get a slightly chewier tofu that tastes more like the cooking liquid and less like nothing very much at all than tofu normally does. (There is a reason why the expression "As tasty as tofu!" is not in everyday use.)

So I had a bag of slices of firm tofu in the freezer. (According to the place I found the info, it doesn't work for silken Tofu, BTW).

In the fridge I had some buckwheat-millet polenta. I'd cooked some buckwheat and millet the day before in the rice cooker with more water than I'd use for a grain, to get a porridge. Then I'd put it in the fridge and was slicing some off it as I needed it.

I had a large sweet potato and, oddly enough, in a mostly empty fridge, in the cheese drawer I had a block of tamarind paste...

1) Slice the sweet potato and put it aside. Slice some mushrooms...

2) Mix about 1/4 of a cup of lemon juice and about 3 tablespoons of tamarind paste up, and start to simmer, stirring. Add the sliced mushrooms. Add a pinch of turmeric and cumin and paprika. Add a tablespoon of maple syrup. Add about half a cup of vegetable stock. Keep stirring. When the tamarind has all dissolved into it, add the frozen tofu strips to the mixture. (They thaw and absorb moisture and flavour as they do so, becoming incredibly Tamarindy tofu strips.)

3) Non-stick-spray a casserole dish. Put the sweet potato in. Pour the tamarind sauce and tofu over it. Stir it until all the sweet potato is covered with the sauce. Put a lid on it. Put it in a 400 degree F oven for 25 minutes. Then take it out, stir it around to make sure that nothing's sticking to the bottom, put it back in the oven for a final 30 minutes.

4) The buckwheat/millet polenta? Slice it up. I heated it in the pan I'd cooked the tamarind up in a few minutes before the casserole was ready.

I added the Polenta at the end of cooking, stirred it all up and served it. Maddy wolfed it all down, although she wasn't a huge fan of the tofu, and she raved about it afterwards and today.

There you go, Wil. Let me know how it turns out.

...


I love this photo because I didn't mean to take it. I was trying to figure out if the camera was on on the phone, and it took it all by itself. It seems very unfair. I never take photos that look like that when I'm actually trying to.

The two photos below are for people complaining that the blog is turning into a white dogs in the snow tumblr. They are, of course, quite right. (Although it's not as doggy as the real thing.)

I love the way that Lola always sits or lies down for photos, the way that Cabal always stands.

Things are very sad in the world of bees. It finally warmed up here (ie got above freezing) and there were no bees out doing the things bees do as soon as they get warm days. Also the snow had not melted around the hives.

So we checked and all the bees were dead. Five hives, all gone. It looked like they died at the start of the winter, when temperatures plummeted into the minus 20s, as their honey stocks were pretty much untouched.

We're getting some Russian bees this year (finally), which are meant to be hardier, and we'll insulate the hives earlier in the autumn, but I don't actually think there was anything we could have done, which makes it better and which also makes it worse.

Hello there,

Having touched on the subject a few times in your blog, I thought you might be interested to know a number of Prisoners of Gravity episodes are now available on the TVO Archive web site, in what appears to be reasonably good quality: http://archive.tvo.org/program/119701

Cheers and good will!

Not just up, but in great quality too, which is a huge improvement over the ones that have crept up online so far. Here's the half-hour SANDMAN episode from 1993. Yes, we were all babies back then.

The one I would love to see again is the 1991ish episode of Prisoners of Gravity where they handed out awards. And they gave one to me for being their favourite guest. Dave McKean had too much fun directing a whole set of acceptance speeches for me. It was (the way that I remember it anyway) very funny.

Dear Neil,

I would like to reference something you said in one of you journal entries. Specifically,

"(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.)"

I would just like to let you know that if you wife is ever giving you grief about not actually meeting people, I would be happy to help you appease her. You are welcome to offer me dinner any time you happen to be in the Los Angeles area. I should warn you though, my girlfriend would definitely want to be invited too.

You don't need to thank me, it's really no trouble.

Sincerely,
Matt

P.S. The thought just crossed my mind that you might actually have some rather strange fans that would say what I just said and think that they were actually doing you a favor. I would just like to clarify that I sent this mostly in an attempt to be clever and mildly humorous. And since I'm being honest, because of the tiny chance that you would take me up on the offer. Which would be awesome.

That's very nice of you! It probably won't happen, only because my visits to the LA area are always too short, and I never get to see all the people I already know and miss.

But thank you.

...

And for our next February Trip Down Memory Lane...

Greetings Neil from the Santa Cruz Mountains!

I adore the blog post regarding Koumpounophobia. I am curious though, is that your canning jar full of buttons?


Jan 29 2008
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/01/heres-button-trailer.html


It is indeed. The film crew had arrived that day with a script that they had written about mothers, how people thought mothers were nice but really they could be creepy. I read it, and shook my head and said "This would work brilliantly if it was for Hitchcock to walk around the Psycho set with, but I think it's wrong for Coraline. I don't want kids to be scared of their mothers, after all. What about..." And then I saw a jar filled with buttons I'd been given a few weeks earlier by some fans. "What about something about being scared of buttons?"

"Great idea!" they said. "You'll need to have your script ready in 20 minutes."

And I said I'd hoped they would write it, and they said that, no, it was definitely going to be me. So I wrote it, and used the jar of buttons as a prop...

So from Thursday January 29th, 2009, Here's the Button Trailer.

And yes, this was shot in my house -- in the front room I don't use much, and in the downstairs library.

...

Actually, two years later, I'm using the front room as my bedroom most of the time -- I started doing it this time last year when Cabal couldn't climb stairs -- and using my real bedroom as a workout space.

Labels: bees, buttons of love and vice versa, dinner, Honestly I should have called it a Yabby

Big Blog on a train

Another strange week.

Not, by any means, a bad week. Just strange. Still behind on work, and shuttling between Boston and New York.

I went to New York on Friday, got there in time to catch Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith reading at the New Yorker Festival, which had brought me in. I nearly disgraced myself by fainting during Michael's reading but managed not to (it was a close thing, and a long story). Here's a too-dark photo of Michael and Zadie afterwards.

The hotel that the New Yorker was putting me up in had the best view in the world, even if you were in the bath:



On Saturday, I went and had free ice cream with Daniel Handler (as announced on this blog). I would have liked to meet author Lemony Snicket, but unfortunately he was mysteriously detained and Mr Handler showed up as his representative.

This photograph commemorates the event. I am on the left. Mr Handler is holding the ice cream.

Since this photograph was taken I have had a haircut.

Then Holly and I went off with the lovely Claudia Gonson and her beautiful new baby Eve. We had sushi, except for Eve, and then went to the Evolution shop where I bought a replica Dodo Skull.



The dodo skull was a present for Countess Cynthia Von Buhler, whose birthday it was. She's an illustrator and artist who also throws parties, and that night was her birthday party, and she had also decided to celebrate Amanda's and my engagement.

There were dead mermaids, and there was a carousel on the roof.

I have never been to a party like it, nor do I ever expect to go to such a party again. If you can win at parties, Cynthia (who was a mermaid, first in a bathtub, and later carried around on a bed) won.

The next morning Dana Goodyear interviewed me for the New Yorker Festival, which was hugely enjoyable. (You can read an Entertainment Weekly summary at http://shelf-life.ew.com/2010/10/06/5584/).

And then back up to Boston. And now on the train back to New York again for an event to celebrate the Best American Comics 2010, which I've guest-edited.

...

This morning I learned that I am one of 175 nominees for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award: http://alma.se/en/Nominations/Candidates/2011-eng/

I don't know all the other 175 nominees, but the ones I do know make me feel both happy and profoundly unworthy to be on that list. (Quentin Blake is there. And David Almond.)

(Incidentally, Dave McKean gave me a copy of Slog's Dad, a story by David Almond he illustrated, and it's touching and beautiful and the kind of thing that just sits in your memory and makes you wonder. Here's a review at the FPI blog.)

(And Dave McKean is interviewed over at Bookslut about the reissue of Cages: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_10_016702.php)

...

The Graveyard Book is now out in the US in Paperback. I keep forgetting to mention that. Here's an AMAZON Link to prove it. And here's the Indiebound link, to help you buy it from an Indie Bookseller.

And here's the list of US public libraries, in case you just want to borrow it from your library and read it.

...

This came in this morning from the Hurricane Intermediate School.

WE are a 6th and 7th grade public school library. A student came to us with the book Stardust and showed to us on pg. 69 that the word F**K is in the story. If this is not what you want your students to read please do not purchase this book for your library or home.

Very wise advice. Although I am not sure why if you do not want your students to read it you should not buy a copy for your home. Also I have no idea why you sent that to me. But that's certainly one reason why Stardust isn't marketed for the 6th grade. It's an adult novel that was given the YALSA award for being an Adult book that teens like, and was republished as a Young Adult title in the US, but not as a children's book.

And on the subject of upsetting or offending people,

one sentence in Graveyard Book said “mass graves is a good place for munching a meal".it is insulting to Chinese！
I know you are just for fun, but I cannot bear it!

I wrote back and explained that

in English it says "Plague pits is good eating". Were there Chinese plague pits? And can you explain to me why it is insulting to Chinese people? I would hate unwittingly to insult the Chinese, and want to know why it is insulting.

This was the reply

I am sorry, for what book I have read was translated into Chinese, for the sentence that you wrote as "Plague pits is good eating" translated in Chinese means that "ten thousands of men were torture to dead and buried in pits" and it happened in 1910s to 1930s when Chinese Government at that time was very weak, and the country was colonized by some westen countries and Japan, our government could not protect his people, so the workers in factories that invested by foreign countries such as coal miners died many during that time!
By now I know it is translator's fault, not of yours.

Chinese translation shows below:
"Plague pits is good eating" in Chinese that I translate means “鼠疫坑很好吃”is not insulting.
and the translation in the book that the translator wrote "万人坑很好吃" is insulting

Ah. Apologies to any offended Chinese readers (although given that this blog is usually cut off behind the great firewall of China I do not know if anyone will read it.)

Over at http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-neil-gaiman-said.html Debbie Reese correctly called me out earlier this year on something particularly stupid and offensive I said last year when I was asked at ABA about why I hadn't set The Graveyard Book in the US. I think I mostly was trying to answer with my Author Head rather than my Being Interviewed Head -- trying to describe how I perceived my potential cast of characters in a European Style graveyard in a small US city (like the UK one in The Graveyard Book). I remember thinking at the time that it was a remarkably stupid thing to have said, but stupid things come out of your mouth when you're being interviewed, and you press on.

I was put out of sorts by Deb's initial post (mostly because I was reading it going "but that OBVIOUSLY wasn't what I meant"), and was idiotically grumpy on Twitter, but when I was called on it (by Pam Noles), and finally looked at the actual words recorded, I realised that people were perfectly sensibly taking what I said to indicate that I thought that a) the US was pretty much unpopulated before the arrival of the white colonists in the 17th century, and/or that b) I was being dismissive of the slaughter of Native Americans, or simply that c) Native Americans were somehow inconsequential in the history of the Americas. (None of which was my intention. But intentions only take you so far.) And you don't use a phrase like "dead Indians" without summoning, wittingly or unwittingly, the shadow of the phrase "the only good Indian is a dead Indian".

People have asked how I would have felt about the phrase "a few dead Jews" in the same place in the interview, which made me feel additionally guilty, as one of the things I missed about The Graveyard Book was that I didn't actually put any Jews in my graveyard. I wanted to, but couldn't make the history and the burial customs work.

Probably I should write a Graveyard Book story with some secretly buried Jews in it, and some dead Native Americans a very long way from home.

Anyway, apologies to all concerned, particularly to Debbie Reese.


My sister sent me The Graveyard Book to read for Halloween. I just finished it. I enjoyed it until I got to the "extras" at the back of the book.
Why did you feel the need to mention Stephen Colbert in your Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech? Now it is forever in print at the back of the book. What a shame. Your stories will live on long after nobody knows or cares who he ever was. I think you should be much more far-thinking before you clog your speeches and especially your books with flash-in-the-pans.

Why. Er. Because I wanted to? Because it made my son happy that I was on his show, and there is nothing flash-in-the-pan about your children's happiness? Because it's a Newbery Acceptance Speech given in 2009, and it talks about 2009 things? Because Mr Colbert quotes J.R.R. Tolkien's description of Tom Bombadil?

Here's the link to the Colbert Report episode in question. See if it changes your mind, miffed correspondent. I'm in a slightly fragile state (wearing the suit I just wore through my Dad's funeral) and he is very kind.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

One of the things I particularly enjoy about your work is that it usually feels like you have a consistent and relatively complete world worked out around the story you're telling. I've been working on such a world in my head for months, and it's at the point where said head will explode if I don't write it down soon, but my problem is I don't know where to start. When you start working on a story set in a new universe, where do you find it easiest to begin?

Begin with the story. Always begin with the story. (Unless you're Lud in the Mist.) The world is there for the story to happen in. Here and now, you don't need to tell the history of the world before you start telling a story that happened on the Isle of Man. You tell the story and let the background and the history creep in where it's needed. The same goes for worlds you've built yourself.

Train is pulling in to Penn Station.

Which means there is just time to point out that the Big Best News of the day is that the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder in beehives may have been discovered:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html

Labels: bees, China, Chinese edition, Michael Chabon, offense given and taken, Stephen Colbert

Four Hives Of Bees and things on my kitchen table...

I'm home.

When I left, it was winter. I've come home to the kind of Spring that means that Summer is just rumbling around like someone shuffling his feet waiting to be invited into a room: temperatures in the 70s, everything green and warm and welcoming.

The best news is that all four hives of bees survived the winter. I wasn't sure that they would -- was pretty certain that the red hive (which swarmed last year) would be empty (it wasn't), but all the lessons from the previous year had been learned, and luck was with us. (Sharon Stiteler wrote about the bees here, while I was on the road.)

My dog and my daughter were both very happy to see me home again. One of them has started driver's ed. and has a driving permit.

(I didn't put up the picture of me and Neil Jordan far above London on Tuesday. Here it is...)

There were many amazing things waiting for me when I got home. I haven't even finished opening the mail from when I was away -- there are two large tubs sitting in the kitchen, not to mention random boxes, envelopes and just things. Things I have discovered in the mail so far include:

THE SORCERER'S HOUSE, by Gene Wolfe.

A proof copy of STORIES, edited by Al Sarrantonio and me. The US edition looks like this:

(I am so very proud of this book, from Tom Gauld's wonderful cover on. Contributors are, in story order, Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Mosley, Richard Adams, Jodi Picoult, Michael Swanwick, Peter Straub, Lawrence Block, Jeffrey Ford, Chuck Palahniuk, Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan, Gene Wolfe, Carolyn Parkhurst, Kat Howard, Jonathan Carroll, Jeffrey Deaver, Tim Powers, Al Sarrantonio, Kurt Andersen, Michael Moorcock, Elizabeth Hand, and Joe Hill. And the stories are remarkable.)

An advance copy of Instructions, my poem illustrated by Charles Vess.

My Dalek from WETA. Here seen in my kitchen, not entirely assembled:

And here seen with my dog, all assembled and plotting to take over the world.

More kitchen table things tomorrow...

....

Over at Neverwear, there's a 24 hour preorder on Molly Crabapple's print of my poem DESERT WIND, during which time it's on sale for $28 rather than $38. It's really lovely

Click on it to see it bigger:

Molly blogs about it at http://mollycrabapple.com/2010/04/01/my-poster-for-neil-gaiman/ while Nicola Black, who designed it, talks about the design process at http://nicolablack.com/2010/04/neil-gaiman-desert-wind-poster/.

Cat Mihos, who owns, runs and is the presiding genius of Neverwear.net, has the print up for sale, along with an interview with Molly, at http://neverwear.net/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=4&products_id=44. To repeat, it'll be $28 until 4.00pm PST tomorrow, when it goes up to $38. (And then, judging from previous prints, it will stay $38 until Cat notices they are running very low at which point it will go up to $75.)

(I don't know if it's a limited print, like the Jim Lee 100 Words one, or the all but sold-out Jouni Koponen The Day The Saucers Came, or not.)

...

Just found that I am a contender on the ranking of influentialness on TIME Magazine Most Influential Person of 2010 list. I do not think I am very influential, but here's the link, to vote for me or for anyone else. Or, more importantly, just to see a picture of me with a TARDIS pin on the Time Magazine Website.

Labels: bees, I am a Dalek, Instructions, Stories collection, Time Magazine

Small Bee Blog

Today was warm -- warmer than it's been for weeks. I missed the hottest part of the day (I was taking my son Mike back to the airport) but got home while it was still daylight and slipped and slithered through the thick, half-melted snow, to inspect the hives. As I expected, there were lots of dead bees around, freshly dropped, and lots of small brown spots on the snow. The bees in the hive took advantage of the warm day to clean out the dead bees from the hive, and to, er, defecate.

The bees we can see here in the purple hive, in the square exit at the top of the hive are alive and wandering around. The bees hanging around further down are frozen and dead.

Three out of the four hives look healthy. The little red hive is, I suspect, dead. I won't check until it's warm enough that, if there is a cluster of bees hanging on inside there, I won't finish it off by opening the hive to inspect it.

Here's a slightly more close-up look at the green hive. Click on any of these for better, bigger photos. (All pictures taken on my Nexus 1. The one above, with the flash.)

Next May we hope to take shipment of three hives of Russian Bees, which are reputed to winter better than the Italian bees we already have (this is because they maintain lower populations into the winter months, so need less food, and keep Queens-in-Waiting ready to go at all times in case anything happens to their Queen. Not because they wear little fur hats and dance cossack dances to keep warm, as a number of people, many of whom were Russian, suggested last time I blogged about this).

Below is a photo of me, taken mostly because it's the first time in ages I've been outside while home and not wearing a hat and muffly face stuff, and I wanted to celebrate this.

Tomorrow, Alabama.

Then home.

Next week, Naperville, then to the UK for a couple of days, then off to LA for the Oscars, where I will be cheering on Henry Selick for Coraline.

(And in Manila, where I will be on the 17th and 18th of March, an art competition.)

Labels: bees, russian bees

It Snowed This Morning

It snowed this morning. I thought it had all melted by the time I went out walking with a camera, but here's a sprinkling of snow on a tree-fungus. It's just wrong. I am not ready for winter. Not yet.

And below is Cabal and some leaves (and Maddy). Many of you have written in to ask why he's not wearing his Go Away Hunters And Do Not Shoot At Me orange cape. It is because he dashed off into the woods the other night after a deer, and returned without it.

Probably the deer is now wearing it to bamboozle hunters.

I'm madly trying to finish things before I head out to China for a few weeks, to wrap up the research on my Journey to the West project (this trip was meant to have happened in Feb/March, but the one-two good-bad punch of winning the Newbery Medal and my father dying threw the whole planned shape of the year out of whack, and it's not back yet).

I finished a short story called "The Thing About Cassandra" and the editors accepted it (hurrah, especially because they were most gracious earlier this year when a story I was writing for them crumbled into dust and ash in my hands before it was done). I'm trying to finish a short story about a cave on the Misty Isle before I leave, and I'll be recording my stuff for my NPR Morning Edition piece. Sxip Shirey is working on the music for my short film soundtrack and every day he sends me bits of music and I play them, and send back a yes, or a no, or a why don't we try this?

We harvested the honey on Thursday, and Cat Mihos chronicled it all on her blog (http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/2009/10/bees-glorious-bees-title-suggested-by.html) including film footage of me shaking bees off a frame, so I refer you there for photos and an account of our day's Beeing. Strangely my favourite moment was when the bees from the Green hive got upset, and suddenly I found myself crouching by the hive in the middle of a storm of very angry bees... and found myself feeling very peaceful and placid, and didn't move and I let them stop being grumpy, and all was good. (Except for Hans and the Birdchick both being stung on their ankles and through their bee suits).

Let's see. Here's an account of the Toledo talk http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091006/ART02/910060367, and of the Cleveland talk (http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2009/10/05/a-geek-heros-welcome-for-author-gaiman).

Both were fun, and started giving me ideas for how to do the CBLDF Reading Tour next year.

Hi Neil,

I know Banned Book Week is over, but since you discussed it on your journal, I hope you won't mind one more question about it.

When is it OK to challenge a book? Should a book be challenged at all if it seems inappropriately placed? For example, I read a lot of young adult, and I found myself reading a book that was distasteful to me, as an adult. (I thought the language and sexual incidents were gratuitous to the story, and beyond what I would want a teenager reading.) I pointed this out to the children's librarian, and she said it would be reviewed. Afterward, I panicked a bit. Had I done something wrong, I wondered. Had I just banned a book?

In your opinion, is there ever a time to challenge a book's placement? For the record, I still don't believe in outright banning a book from a public library, but now I'm not sure how I feel about challenges to young adult sections.

Sincerely,

Amanda R., Louisville, KY

I'm not a librarian or part of the ALA, so you're getting one author's opinion here.

I don't think drawing a librarian's attention to a book, or even suggestion that it's been mis-classified is in any way wrong, or an attempt to ban books. My collection M IS FOR MAGIC exists mostly because I'd noticed some middle schools had begun to buy Smoke and Mirrors and really wasn't comfortable with that book, which contains some stories that really were just intended for adults, being in middle school libraries. (I don't have a problem with it being in High School libraries.)

I think librarians make judgment calls all the time, judgment calls based on community standards, on what they believe about books, and about those books that exist in the grey areas between Children's Books and YA, between YA and Adult Fiction. (Occasionally, as when I hear about The Graveyard Book being kept under the counter, or away from kids under 14, I find it irritating. But, as I say, I also think that librarians are allowed to make judgment calls.)

At the end of the day, I don't think the problem is the people who want to figure out where books get shelved. It's people who want to remove the books entirely, and would very much like to burn them. It's people stealing books as a way of making sure that other people don't read them.

(Here's an excellent article from the School Library Journal about the dilemma of shelving The Graveyard Book - http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6635766.html?q=graveyard+book+children%27s+collection -

which concludes,

Are some libraries shelving Gaiman’s book in the YA section because of its disturbing opening scene? If so, then that “clearly smacks of self-censorship,” says Pat Scales, president of the Association of Library Services to Children. Scales, who says that although determining what materials belong in the children and young adult section is oftentimes difficult, “Anytime you keep something from its intended audience or make it difficult for them to find, that’s self-censorship.” And that’s against professional ethics.

Scales’s advice is to buy one copy for the children’s section and another for the YAs. “Kids have loved ghost stories from the beginning of time,” she says. “What are you going to do? You can’t keep all ghost stories out of the children’s room.”

but truthfully, I wouldn't blame any librarian who decided they wanted The Graveyard Book kept in YA. I would get grumpy if confronted with librarians who had decided not to get The Graveyard Book for their libraries, despite the Newbery Medal, because they thought kids should be protected from it.

Dear Neil,

I’m sure you get loads of nice mail from lots of people around the world. How much nasty mail do you get, though, and does it make you feel bad? If it does, how do you deal with that? I’m a beginning author and I just got my first piece of nasty mail, wherein the writer said she had an absolute “hate crush” on me. I consoled myself with cake and wine but the effects were predictably fleeting.

Thanks,
C.B.

There are mean and crazy people out there, and the relative anonymity of the Internet means that there are always those who will glory in their ability to do the online equivalent of pushing a dead rat through your mail box and running away. You just have to pay attention and you rapidly notice,

a) they're a bit mad.

b) they are very few in number and

c) it's only the internet.

I get well over ten thousand FAQ messages in on this site every year. Most of them don't get posted, because most of them are people saying, in various ways, thank you. Out of that ten thousand there will be a handful, no more than a dozen or so, of weird, poisonous, creepy or crazy ones that come in (from a distinctly smaller number of people than there are email addresses). Most of those get filtered before they reach me. And the ones that make it through normally leave me with a strange, joyous feeling that I must be doing something right if those people don't like me. I'm fascinated by how much more upset they get whenever I get a big award or something good happens.

(On Twitter, I learned very rapidly that any people who posted something nasty, to whom I gave a second chance, would then post something REALLY nasty. So I learned to block first offenders without any troubling of my conscience.)

My advice to you would be to do with creepy emails what Kingsley Amis used to say he did with bad reviews: he let them spoil his breakfast, but didn't let them spoil his lunch. Let the effects of the creepy people be fleeting too. And keep writing, and keep doing well, because it really seems to irritate them.

Which reminds me, The Graveyard Book was made a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honours book, this year, and you can see video footage of the awards ceremony at http://www.hbook.com/bghb/video09.asp, including my editor Elise Howard reading the actual speech I wrote, and the video I recorded for them just as I went down with the hell-flu of last week.

...

Right, more Tabs closing:

I was sorry to learn that Henry Selick and Laika, the director of and studio who made the Coraline movie, are parting company. They were an unstoppable combination, and I wish both of them extremely well in whatever they do in the future.

Why you should dress up as Delirium for Hallowe'en.

Was thrilled to see One and a Half books by me on the Australian Favourite Books of All Time list.

Was fascinated by this New Scientist article -- I've been interested in this ever since I read Ann Hubble talking about the experiment breeding Arctic Foxes for tameness, which, in a couple of decades, produced an animal profoundly doglike. (And the footage of the tame vs aggressive rats is a little chilling...)

...

I just noticed that to celebrate our Year On The Bestseller Lists, over at http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx, where you can still watch me read ALL of The Graveyard Book for free, new Q&A videos have started appearing.

(It looks like they've been going up for the last 5 weeks. I should have mentioned them here, sorry.)

If you head off to http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx?VideoID=16 you will see lots of me answering questions. It's surprising to me how tired I look in them -- I'd forgotten just how gruelling the schedule was, and now all I remember is how immensely enjoyable it was to read stories to and answer questions from so many people across the USA.

Labels: bees, Cabal and me, dog photograph, mad people, the unbearable whiteness of beeing, videos