I just found this...

This was over at Mousecircus.com, the junior site, on the front page. I'd heard that the whole site was going to get a makeover, and finally get out of Flash animation, but it hasn't happened quite yet. This counter was sitting there, below the Dave McKean mouse orchestra drawing, telling me that the Graveyard Book would be out in six days, six hours and eleven minutes. I thought about waiting another five minutes to post, then decided to test out the "Post it in blogger" function. Which what I'm doing right now.





(It seems to work on blogger. Not on any of the RSS feeds though. It's also about 30 seconds different from the counter on the sidebar. Clicking the Get & Share button at the bottom allows you to post it anywhere you want.)

(And my apologies for the practical nature of much of the current blogging.)

(I just figured out that you can actually also get it from http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/48765b515bcd6b33?p=48d9881e2fea74f1, where you get a larger number of ways to embed it into many more things. Although that doesn't have links to the google/yahoo widget version or many of the others.)

Labels: clock, mousecircus, The Graveyard Book, you know I'm starting to worry that the labels are all getting sort of normal these days

the view from Chapter 8

A little over 22,000 people have voted so far. If you haven't, go to http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/birthday-thing.html and click on the cover of the book you think should be available online for free.

And I can now, following a long phone call with Harper Childrens, answer yesterday's When Will The Graveyard Book Be Coming Out? question.

There will actually be a "One Day Laydown" in the US, which means that the book won't just wander into the shops over a couple of weeks. Instead there will be one day when it goes on sale everywhere. Probably bookshops doing on-sale-at-midnight, graveyard-themed, kick-off-Hallowe'en-month parties. All that sort of stuff.

And that on-sale date in the US will be SEPTEMBER 30th 2008.

Now I go back to finishing writing the book, 'cos if I don't finish it, those graveyardy bookshop parties are going to be pretty sad affairs.

(Also discussed, the reinvention and redesign of http://www.mousecircus.com so it's no longer a giant flash animation thing, but is something that I could link to and that's really a resource for teachers, librarians and kids.)

Labels: mousecircus, ornamental gravestones and cakes, The Graveyard Book