Here's things that people would
probably like to know...
This is the poster for TRUTH IS A CAVE
IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS Reading Event at the Carnegie Hall (and it
lists the other gigs too. I think there may still be a handful of
Barbican tickets available on July 4th and 5th,
I'm pretty sure the Warfield is Sold Out, although they may release a
few closer to the date, and right now Usher Hall in Edinburgh, which
was the last concert to go on sale, still has plenty of seats, and even has some in the Stalls).
Please feel free to spread it around...
If you can't afford to come, or feel
like chancing your luck, there is a Facebook competition where you can win
tickets, at the William Morrow Facebook page:
Enter for your chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to see Neil Gaiman live at Carnegie Hall with FourPlay String Quartet on June 27th! Prize package includes a meet & greet and photo opp with Neil himself.
The biggest publication news of recent
weeks is that Hayley Campbell's book THE ART OF NEIL GAIMAN is out.
You can learn who Hayley Campbell is, and all about the book and how
it came to be, in this delicious Comic Beat interview. It's filled
with glorious details. I like the bit about me and kids and Alan
Moore and kids and Custard Creams vs. Bourbon biscuits best. Here she explains the interviewing process:
He would give me all the answers I wanted plus loads of things that were entirely irrelevant because it was just me and him talking in a room and we do that all the time. It was a weird interview to do. I only noticed this was happening when I had to transcribe 17 hours of it back in London, and sat there listening to us trying to save a bumblebee who’d got caught in the fireplace. For half an hour. ‘Ooh he’s got soot on him. Look at his giant cardigan. Shall we put him outside on a flower?‘ Honestly I think I have to burn the tapes.
I read the book a few months ago, and
really liked it, as much as it's possible to like something where one
is too embarrassed properly to relax and enjoy it. I was reading it
to approve the text, but I loved the text and spent most of my time
trying to fix the dates on the picture captions.
Hayley is a really funny writer. She's
observant and interested. I'm really looking forward to her novel,
when she writes it, and am also a little bit scared.
And you can go and check it out at
Amazon.com, where the poor guy whose entire reason for living seems
to be giving everything on Amazon a one star review has already given
it one star review. http://amzn.to/1vxTAYK
Hayley's going to be taking over the
role of interviewer from her father, ace illustrator Eddie Campbell,
for the Barbican and Edinburgh TRUTH IS A CAVE gigs on July 4th and 5th.
Quite when I slipped into this parallel dimension in which I can be described as “stylish” without anyone in earshot actually sniggering, I do not know. But I am going to make the most of it while I'm here.
I'm back on social media from today. And my last class at Bard until Autumn is tomorrow night. I owe the world a big post on life and the things that go with it.
But first, this one is important:
There are many peculiar places in the
world, places that can hold your mind and your soul tightly and will
not let them go. Some of those places are exotic and unusual, some
are mundane. The strangest of all of them, at least for me, is the
Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. I know I am not alone
in this. There are people who discover Skye and will not leave, and
even for those of us who do leave, the misty island haunts us and
holds us in its own way. It is where I am happiest and where I am
most alone.
Otta F. Swire wrote books about the
Hebrides and about Skye in particular, and she filled her books with
strange and arcane knowledge. (Did you know May the 3rd
was the day that the Devil was cast out of Heaven, and thus the day
on which it is unpardonable to commit a crime? I learned that in her
book on the myths of the Hebrides.) And in one of her books, she
mentioned the cave in the black Cuillins, where you could go, if you
were brave, and get gold, with no cost, but each visit you paid to
the cave would make you more evil, would eat your soul.
And that cave, and its promise, began
to haunt me.
I took several true stories (or stories
that are said to be true, which is almost the same thing), and set
them in a world that was almost, but not quite, ours, and told a
story of revenge and of travel, of desire for gold and of secrets. Two men, one very small, are travelling west to find a cave said to be filled with gold.
I
wrote most of the tale on the Isle of Skye. When it was done it was
published in an anthology called STORIES, and it won the Shirley
Jackson Award for best Novelette, and the Locus Award for Best
Novelette, and I was very proud of it, my story.
Before it was published, I was set to
appear on the stage of the Sydney Opera House, and was asked if I
could do something with Australian string quartet FourPlay (they are
the rock band of string quartets, an amazing, versatile bunch with a
cult following): perhaps something with art that could be projected
onto the stage. I listened to FourPlay's music, and, possibly once I heard their take on the Doctor Who theme and the Simpsons Theme, and a cover of Cry Me A River I liked nearly as much as Julie London's (and I like that so very much), I knew wanted to work with them.
I thought about “The Truth is a Cave
in the Black Mountains”: it would take about seventy minutes to
read. I wondered what it would would happen if a string quartet
created a moody and glorious soundtrack, as I told the story, as if
it were a movie? And what if Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, the man who drew Alan Moore's FROM HELL, writer and artist of ALEC, my favourite
comic, created illustrations for this most Scottish of my stories and
projected them above me while I read?
I was scared, going out onto the stage
of the Sydney Opera House, but the experience was amazing: the story
was received with a standing ovation, and we followed it with an
interview (artist Eddie Campbell was the interviewer) and a poem,
also with FourPlay.
Six months later, we performed it
again, with more paintings by Eddie, in Hobart, Tasmania, in front of
3,000 people, in a huge shed at a Festival, and again, they loved it;
again, a standing ovation.
Now, we had a problem. The only people
who had ever seen the show were in Australia. It seemed unfair,
somehow. We needed an excuse to travel, to bring the FourPlay string
quartet across the world (pop culture literate and brilliant
musicians, they are: I fell in love with their work before I ever knew them).
Mysterious promoter Jordan Verzar, who had
put me and FourPlay together in the first place, saw his chance and
struck, rather like an amiable Australian cobra, and before we knew it, everything was happening.
So we are doing the smallest tour in
the world for this.
If you want to see me performing THE TRUTH IS A
CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS, with the amazing FourPlay string
quartet, and see Eddie Campbell's art projected, the words and the
music and the images combining in your head to make a movie that only
you will ever experience in that way, a night with special guests, I
wouldn't be surprised, and also surprises (including things nobody
has every heard read), then the only places you can see it are San
Francisco, at the Warfield, New York's Carnegie Hall on June 27th, then in London at The
Barbican (two nights) and it ends in Edinburgh, in Usher Hall on July 6th. And
then we'll be done.
Right now, the Warfield on June 25th is already SOLD OUT.
If you've read down this far and you're interested in seeing a unique and amazing evening, and you are anywhere in the US, the Carnegie Hall is the one to come to (unless you want to fly to the UK). New York is nice in June.
The Carnegie Hall night will have special guests. It will be the only place I'm also going to read the whole of the new HANSEL AND GRETEL before it's published. There will be a LOT of signed books there, even if we can't work out a signing (we're trying to but logistics are hard). And it's going to be a night to remember...
The two Barbican concerts on July 4th and 5th are almost sold out (they have just released some seats, so there are a few seats left).
Usher Hall in Edinburgh was only just added, and tickets only just went on sale. There are lots of seats there, and very much hope the Scots are kind to my Scottish tale.
Do come. I know it may seem odd, an author and a string quartet. But trust me, you do not want to miss it.
...
I wanted to put in a huge plug here for the anti-bullying website, Bystander Revolution. They've done some amazing interviews with people, and have advice. Here are their films talking to me.
..........
On Saturday, if you are in the UK, you can get a free copy of STARDUST with your Guardian newspaper, if you buy it from Sainsbury's. This is a good thing if you like Stardust and read the Guardian. More info at this link, along with a way to win one of the limited edition beautiful special copies of OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. http://www.theguardian.com/books/competition/2014/apr/26/neil-gaiman-competition
You may have noticed that I'm going to be reading THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS, accompanied by the FourPlay String Quartet and the paintings of Eddie Campbell, this summer. I've already announced the London dates here, at the Barbican, on the 4th and 5th of July: http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=16044. (UK people: there are still tickets, although they are going fast.)
Tomorrow, the US dates, in New York and San Francisco venues will be announced and go on sale. They will be at the end of June. The concert halls have asked us not to announce anything much ahead of time, but I'll put it up here tomorrow morning, and I'll do a timed announcement or two that'll go out to everyone on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook and even Google+, for 11 am New York time and 10 am San Francisco time.
So this is just to alert those of you who want good seats to know that you may want to be by your computers or phones tomorrow morning.
In June, Harper Collins will also be releasing THE TRUTH IS A CAVE as a book in its own right: Eddie has done many, many more illustrations to accompany it turning it into something that's almost a graphic novel. And the cover will look like this.
Yesterday the sun shone. I made friends with the family next door and signed their copy of The Graveyard Book and patted their dogs. "Finally," I said. "It's finally warm here in Florida!" I think I must have said it too loud. Today the world went grey and chill and it rained and rained and rained. Which still puts me in a better position than people a few hundred miles north of me, stranded on iced-in traffic jams.
I'm missing Twitter, but mostly because I really want to use it to make me exercise. I love being able to tell nearly 2 million people I'm going to go and jog, and then I have to do it. It's not the same when I tell the walls.
Let's see. On the secrets revealed, front: You can expect a little smidge of news about two of my books being adapted into two TV series very soon, with a third to follow. Real news, very soon, promise.
THE TRUTH IS A CAVE... won the Locus Award for best Novelette, and the Shirley Jackson Award for best Novelette as well. Eddie Campbell is an amazing artist (and he co-hosts the evening with dry Scottishness) and the Four Play String Quartet are the most wonderful musicians.
I'll read the story, while Eddie Campbell's paintings are projected above me and the astonishing Four Play string quartet plays underscore music. We've done it twice before now, at a very sold out Sydney Opera House, where it was originally performed, and in Hobart to about 3,000 people at the MONA FOMA festival. Each time to very happy audiences.
Four Play did the Simpsons Theme and the Doctor Who theme that was our interval music during the last EVENING WITH... at the Town Hall. Probably you want to hear their Doctor Who theme. Here you go:
This will be its first ever performance in Europe. Two performances, I should say, as we are doing the Friday night and then the Saturday too.
Tickets go on sale to the general public (not Barbican members) on Friday morning at 10 am UK time. If the Fortunately The Milk* reading (which wound up like this) was anything to go by, the tickets will sell fast, so do not put off buying tickets until May.
The link to click on -- and I'll try and remember to do a timed WhoSay post to remind you all, when the tickets actually go on sale to the general public on Friday, will be... http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?id=16044.
Thank you so much to the The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) for choosing THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE as one of their Outstanding Audiobooks
Gaiman, as both author and narrator, immerses listeners in a modern fairy tale in which two stalwart children pit themselves against dark and relentless terrors. Through an exquisite management of pace and inflection, his voice becomes the story’s doorway just a surely as any rabbit hole or wardrobe.
And finally, here's a fun little article on Maps (including Maps of Mythical Places) from the New Yorker blog. I'm pretty sure the stuff in it about Pauline Baynes drawing the maps in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is tosh -- she drew beautiful maps of Middle Earth as posters, but the Pauline Baynes map for Lord of the Rings came out in 1969, long after the book was published with its map in it.
I also meant to get more sleep, jog, write and be a bit of a tourist. Almost none of these things happened.
Lots of other things happened, though.
I flew to Hobart, Tasmania. I have been saying for years that Hobart is one of the planet's secretly cool places, and people used to mock me for saying this. (Australian people would mock me. Other people would just stare at me blankly.) Over the last few years, however, the world has caught up a little with my opinions, and the MONA museum and the MONAFOMA (aka MOFO) Festival has a lot to do with it.
I rehearsed. I read a fairy story in the Theatre Royal Hobart. (I did other things there too: I sang "Psycho", and I did a reading of one of Amanda's songs, "The Bed Song", because she wasn't there.) Here's a video. Jherek Bischoff, Amanda's bass player and string arranger, made all the music happen. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra provided the lovely string quartet.
Somewhere shortly after arrival in Hobart, I joined forces with Polly Adams.
I'm a patron of Tasmania's Bookend Trust, and Polly has inherited her father's conservation mantle, if not his Rhino suit, and is a patron of Save the Rhino. We got up early the next morning, and were taken off on a journey by Niall Doran of the Bookend Trust. We saw the devastation of the bushfires on the Tasman peninsula, learned the natural history behind the bushfires (basically, Eucalypts like fires - they clear the brush and help the seeds to germinate), saw an echidna by the side of the road, went on a wonderful boat ride (thanks to http://www.tasmancruises.com.au/) and saw awe-inspiring cliffs, seals and penguins (and a dead weedy seadragon), not to mention a place where the sea tips on its side...
...or it feels like it has. (Photo by Polly Adams.)
And then we were shows some of the fire devastation in Dunalley, and presented books to the primary school.
The primary school at Dunalley is not there any more. It burned down in the bushfires. They are putting up temporary buildings to house a temporary school while they build a new one. (We were joined by lots of nice people, including Robert Pennicott and Andrew Hughes, Tasmanians of the Year in 2012 and 2013.)
My publishers, Bloomsbury and Hachette, gave the school lots of my books, and lots of other books that they could use to auction or sell or include in the library. Here I am with Chair of the School Association Elizabeth Knox, Principal Matt Kenny, and various students and community members.
Frankly, I think Polly has a future in showing books to people.
A mad dash to a quick rehearsal/soundcheck with Jherek and a string quartet, along with our special guests David Byrne and St Vincent, and an even madder dash back to the ABC studios to do another interview, this time with Triple J's The Doctor (You can read about it/listen to it at http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/thedoctor/blog/s3673304.htm). Then back to the Mona Festival. I got there at 7 minutes to 6. We were due on at 6, so I found a dressing room, changed clothes and went on stage to read "Click-Clack the Rattlebag", sing Psycho, and, my favourite moment of all, read my "Australia Day" poem with Brian Ritchie playing didgeridoo, and David Byrne making animal sounds on the guitar.
I listened to Kate Miller-Heidke singing wonderfully immediately after us (her cover of David Byrne's Psycho Killer was unbelievable. It was a bit like this:)
And then came the best bit of the whole night as Jherek and I had a close encounter with a guide dog puppy named Quinnell.
I nearly forgot to mention, a couple of days earlier Amanda had asked me on Twitter to recreate her famous Map of Tasmania photo from the last time she was there. So, with the aid of a Map of Tasmania apron and photographer Dianna Graf, I did. And then Polly did too.
and here is Quinnell the guide dog puppy in training with his coat on (he's not allowed to play and lick you when he has his coat on) along with Dianna Graf, who took many of the the above photos and, with Mark, her partner, is training Quinnell. We're in Hobart harbour and it is very windy.
And then Polly and I were getting up at 6 am again and we headed to Melbourne, where we stayed with my friends Peter and Clare. They have the best house in the world.
I'd a talk at the Atheneum Theatre, under the auspices of the Wheeler Centre. I signed lots of books for people, and then stumbled off for a late drink and dinner with lots of Melbournian friends, including Sxip Shirey, Meow Meow, and someone named Knibbs who can, like me, raise both eyebrows individually or set them scurrying across her forehead like startled caterpillars. ("Did you teach yourself in front of a mirror when you were a kid too?" "Yup.")
Four hours of sleep and I said goodbye to Peter and to Clare, and to Polly too (I'd pretty much adopted her by the time I left, so it was a sad goodbye made happier in the knowledge that I'd introduced her to lots of people who would be fun for her to know in Australia) and flew to Sydney, to the offices of Hachette, where I was interviewed, looked after by publicist Anna Hayward, had my photo taken by Tamara Dean (look at her beautiful photo art here and here) and then I had lunch with my Bloomsbury publishers and answered questions for them on video, and I ran to the Sydney Recital Hall where I met FourPlay String Quartet for a rehearsal.
I really love the guys from FourPlay -- it's such a delight doing stuff with them. We ran through the Fireball XL5 theme. We took the first fifteen minutes of FORTUNATELY, THE MILK and they created music and sound effects on the fly. They made glorious bush sounds for the Australia Day poem. Working with them now is so comfortable and easy.
During the evening I read the first 2 chapters of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. I did a Q&A and explained why secrets do not leak out of the Doctor Who office in Cardiff. I sang the Fireball XL5 theme because I had FourPlay with me and I wanted to hear what they did to it...
I read the first fifteen minutes of FORTUNATELY, THE MILK... (it is so silly. I love it so much).
And then I gave an acknowledgment of country, and read the Australia Day poem, and we were done. No signing -- it was a long event, there were about 1100 people there, and I was knackered, but I scribbled on things for the people at the stage door on the way out.
Production entity Jordan Verzar and Festival boss Ben Strout, Jemma Birrell (artistic director of the festival) and festival PR Ainslee Lenehan and I, along with my old Whitgift school friend James Croll, stumbled off for an exhausted drink and conversation after the show, winding up in the bar of the hotel I was staying in, the somewhat O.T.T. but beautiful "QT", where the people were so nice and helpful. And then I was sleepily packing and it was daylight again, and I went to see the people at Animal Logic, who had given up some of their Australia Day to show me the beautiful film work they had done...
I proofread the UK edition of OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE on the plane back to the US, and read Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. I breakfasted with my son and daughter in law and daughter in San Francisco airport. I got home to Amanda...
I slept. I slept for three whole hours, and then the furnace in the basement belched out soot and smoke, the smoke alarms went off, the fire brigade arrived, and my hopes of catching up on my sleep were dashed. (Nothing was damaged. Nothing burned. And the Cambridge MA fire department are fast.)
The first of my episodes of SELECTED SHORTS went up on the radio. I got to select and introduce stories I loved -- in this case Ray Bradbury's chilling "The Veldt" read by Stephen Colbert, and James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" hilariously read by Leonard Nimoy.
(I'll be hosting for the next few weeks. Why don't you subscribe to the podcast? Information and links at http://www.selectedshorts.org/podcast/. There are some great stories on the way.)
No, I won't tell you what they are. Go and listen to it. It's fun.
(There were things on my list that we didn't have time to talk about: Doctor Who's Curse of the Fatal Death and the Magnetic Fields' Andrew In Drag video, for example...)
And I should stop writing this blog and go and write about weird stuff happening underneath London instead.
But if you've made it this far, the next week should be interesting. I'll be doing a really exciting (and quite goofy) Art Project, and you'll learn a bit about it in this film. (Along with seeing Cabal, alive and well and happy, three weeks ago.)
How on earth did that happen? I promised a blog tomorrow, and that was over a week ago. I wrote an essay, and I wrote a short story, and I went to Sydney and did a reading with a string quartet, but I didn't blog. And now I'm sitting backstage at Revolt in Melbourne preparing for a New Year's Eve Party- Masquerade-thing and I missed my blog. So while there is wireless, there is hope, and I am writing this.
Many exciting and wonderful things have happened in the time that I have been not-blogging. For example, I was quoted by Tom Stoppard.
The first volume of Les Klinger's remarkable four volume Annotated Sandman comes out in a couple of weeks: reserve your copies from your local comic store or bookshop now.
However, the recent Symphony Space SELECTED SHORTS is embeddable, and I have embedded it. It has me reading "Troll Bridge" along with one of my favourite Jorge Luis Borges stories, "The Circular Ruins".
...
I was about to tell you about M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence being available on Neil Gaiman Presents as a beautiful audiobook. I want to do a whole post about that in the next couple of days, though. So for now, go and investigate if you wish to get ahead: www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L88VMY&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911
...
I had a marvellous time with the FourPlay String Quartet in Sydney a few days ago. Flew home and went straight to the Melbourne City Library where Amanda and I read (me) and sang (her). We'd announced that we'd be there on Twitter just before my plane took off, and about four hundred people showed up.
Melbourne City Library is amazing. It has a piano, and librarians so nice and creative I wanted to take them on the road with me. We'd be Neil Gaiman and his posse of travelling librarians.
I love this photo of me, eyes closed, listening to Amanda play:
Throughout any given year I shoot thousands of photos, so when I was recently asked which one was my personal favorite of 2011, I had a difficult time answering. However, when thinking about it over a couple of days, the one above kept jumping out at me.
On 11-11-11 I documented Jason Webley‘s concert at The Moore in Seattle. That was where I caught this moment in time. Webley is talking about the virtues of love, while Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer sit together behind him, listening.
There is a love story there, and it starts with a look of genuine happiness on Jason Webley’s face, as he looks up into the light, sharing his joy with (and for) the audience. Amanda Palmer represents that audience to me, relaxed, attentive and having a good time, and Neil Gaiman ties the story together, looking down at his wife with complete adoration and a smile that says simply: “I Love You.”
There is enough intimacy in this photo, that I felt a little like a peeping tom as I put it through post processing, like I was crashing a private party. I actually had to remind myself that it was taken at a public event. That is why this is my favorite photo of 2011. It makes me feel like giving my wife a kiss, putting on some good music and take pleasure in the little things in life.
...
And for New Year's Messages... I have to write one for tonight in Melbourne as soon as I finish this.
It has to be as good as the ones I've written for this blog, over the years. Normally I don't stop and think. I just write what I'd want in the coming year, and hope that other people would want that too.
Someone just turned one of them into a poster:
And here's a mash-up of a couple of them, delivered from the stage in Boston, two years ago today...
(Photo taken on Monday afternoon, just before the studio recording of THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS with FourPlay String Quartet. I am the one not holding a stringed instrument.)
I should be writing the thing that I'm going to read tonight at Sydney Opera House.
(You can, of course, point out, that I should have finished it before now. I will undoubtedly agree.)
So, because I am not yet posting anything, here is an account of what I did a week ago, with photos, from someone else's blog.
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