I'm still in New Zealand, and life is weird but good.
Amanda and I are raising our small boy, and I love being swept along in his enthusiasms. Zombies was mostly replaced by Star Wars while I was away. Since I've been back, Star Wars has mostly been replaced by Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters, and Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters appear to be slowly transmuting into Greek Mythology and Asterix and Obelix. This morning he ate breakfast in character as Obelix, complaining about the lack of Roast Boar, and then lecturing me on all the Greek Heroes who battled monsters (his list consisted of Theseus, Perseus and Herakles. He got very excited when I told him about Odysseus.)
Hair prior to recent haircut. I look like a bush.
Hair after haircut. I look less like a bush. Ash and I are poring over The Seven Crystal Balls. Photo by Amanda
I've done one public event since I've been here -- the Auckland Writers Festival. Here's the video of the first event, in which Lucy Lawless interviewed me and Amanda.
I did another talk -- just me -- and a six hour long signing the following day. It was wonderful to meet the people, but I'm definitely out of practice at doing marathon signings. I kept thinking about the nine months I spent on Skye, during which time I probably interacted with a dozen people who were there, and that includes trips to the little shop in Uig and socially distanced walks with archaeologists on the hills. New Zealand has definitely done right by its people, and that just makes the losses around the world even harder.
Amanda's already vaccinated. I'm due to get vaccinated in a couple of weeks.
The Netflix Sandman is taking up a lot of my time right now. (Today I received a first cut of episode 9, and a finished-except for music and VFX cut of episode 4 to watch.)
Here's the Sandman First Look Behind the Scenes release from Netflix.
(I saw an earlier version of this in which I could be seen marvelling at a copy of The Sun newspaper with the headline TUG OF LOVE BABY EATEN BY COWS, because the determination of the team to make it Sandman is astonishing -- to the point where I sent an email to Allan Heinberg, showrunning, last week, while I was watching the Dailies, and I told him of an error I'd spotted. He pointed out right back that the error was in the panel in Sandman 10 they'd used as their reference. I told them not to fix it. That kind of fidelity can only be applauded.)
And in the meantime, all of the writing time, and a lot of the meeting time (because the people I am meeting are in countries on the other side of the world it's either early in my morning or very late at night), has been taken up by two other projects I haven't talked about yet, although they've been 90% of what I've been doing for the last 18 months. But let's leave them for the next blog entry. It'll give me an incentive to write one.
I have an odd habit of humming songs that, later, I realise, have something to do with the situation I'm in. I first noticed it when, as a teenage boy, I realised I was both lost on the Paris Metro, and singing the Beatles song "Help".
These days I keep noticing that I'm singing something that begins, "The man from the television walked onto the train, I wondered who he's going to stick it in this time..." and it only just occurred to me that it's an Elvis Costello song called "Waiting For the End of the World".
So.
Life in Melbourne over the last couple months was pretty quiet, once the bush fires were done and the air became breathable. I was being a dad to a four year old (while his mother was on tour), and reading, and writing. I went to Perth and did a reading, I went to Adelaide and drank Penfolds Grange Hermitage 2008, saw my dog Lola and was given a Doctorate by the University of South Australia.
I was waiting for Amanda to return from New Zealand, when we would have a short end-of-Amanda's-14-month-long tour holiday and then go home to Woodstock. Amanda would rest after tour and I would ramp up and go back to work.
Then I got a phone call from Amanda, asking me to pack up the Melbourne house and fly out early the following morning, in order to get to Wellington before midnight the following night. If we got there after midnight, compulsory 14 day isolation would be needed. We flew to New Zealand (Marissa our nanny flew home to Woodstock, but fortunately Xanthea, who had been assisting me and Amanda, volunteered to come out with us -- an enormous relief as I had, with Amanda's bags, too many bags to get easily into and out of an airport with a small boy).
So we landed in Wellington.
Amanda did the final gig of her tour to an empty church, and I popped in and read The Masque of the Red Death from the pulpit and, later, Goodnight Moon. (The venue, St Peter's in Wellington, was really wonderful and the people were so kind and helpful.) (You can watch it all here.)
We drove to the house Amanda had rented (it was meant to be just her, and her old friend Kya and Kya's three daughters for a couple of days while Ash and I were in Melbourne. Now it was all of us for a week.) And then the request came in from the NZ government to self isolate if you'd flown in from abroad. So we've been isolating for the last five days. It's not hard: we are in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes we walk on the beach, keeping our distance from people if we see them.
In a couple of days Amanda and Ash and Xanthea and I move somewhere more houselike and continue to isolate, and Kya and her daughters go home and isolate there.
And I feel so lucky that I'm with my family and that the three of us (and Xanthea) are together. I had thought if I stayed in Melbourne, Amanda would be able to come back after her tour, but that wouldn't have happened. Countries are locking down borders and planes are being cancelled. So coming to New Zealand with Ash was indeed the wisest thing I could have done.
I'm not sure how long we are going to be here in New Zealand. I know I'm doing a lot of conference calls, and having a lot of Zoom conversations. I'm watching some things get delayed, and many of the readings or talks I was meant to be doing in the next few months are getting cancelled or postponed.
I'm worried about my friends -- the ones who aren't writers are all in jobs where they need to interact with large groups of people, which means they are all out of work now, with jobs suspended or cancelled, with income that's gone away. Amanda and I are putting four or five families up in our place in Woodstock -- mostly refugees from New York, with some refugees from Boston. I hope they are all right.
I've said that anyone who wants can use my books right now -- read them online, or post them, or entertain children or loved ones with them. It seems like a sensible thing.
I loved Moscow, except for the traffic. The people were wonderful, my publisher was bemused and delighted that hundreds of people showed up for every signing, talk and event. I want to come back.
I'm writing this in the Aeroflot First Class lounge. It has luxurious seats and fast wifi and absolutely bugger all else in the way of nice things for international passengers. This has cheered me up immensely: I'd asked to fly Aeroflot because I'd heard so many horror stories from people who had flown it, and always felt vaguely left out. And even though I am doing this leg on my publisher's dime and am thus doing international business class, which probably spoils the point of it, I thought I should definitely go Aeroflot.
It's 10:06 am and the men next to me are doing vodka shots.
I did more Vodka shots in the last three days than in the previous lifetime. Mostly because my Russian hosts were convinced that it was the cure for the flu-cold-thing I arrived with from Poland. I suspect that they would also have pitched Vodka as a cure for anything else I had arrived with, including broken limbs, heartbreak or psoriasis.
(Last night was Horseradish Vodka at a Russian Restaurant, which was guaranteed to clear my chest and sinuses. And it may well have done.)
For the record, the very best potato latkes I've ever had were in Poland.
I'm putting up the blog-translators photos here (one of me, one of me and them) to say thanks. This blog is intermittently translated into lots of different languages, always by volunteers, and I'm always grateful.
Not a proper blog -- just a wave. The NZ arts festival was great, everyone was so nice (I saw Guillermo Del Toro and I was shown around the amazingness of WETA and they gave me a Dalek! -- it's this one -- and I spent time with Audrey Niffenegger and with Margo Lanagan and Margo's partner Stephen and did a talk with Margo during a tornado and read a new poem at the Town Hall and signed and signed and signed and signed) and now I'm taking a day off now with Amanda: Hera is looking after us. Tomorrow I head off to Manila for two days, while she plays gigs in Christchurch and Auckland and flies to Melbourne to do a TV thing. Then we meet on Friday at midnight in Poland, spend a couple of days together there while she plays a festival in Wroclaw and I sign in Warsaw, and then she flies to the US to begin Evelyn Evelyn rehearsals and I fly to Moscow. (Still waiting on the details of the Moscow signings or events. If you know them, send them in to the FAQ line.)
Right now getting together with Amanda feels less like spending time together and more like two planes matching speed for a little while. But today is a real day off. She's asleep and I'm meant to be typing introductions, and when she wakes up I'll make her some food and we'll walk on the beach.
(When she's finished with the European leg of the Evelyn Evelyn tour, in mid-May, she has about a week off. I'll be in the UK writing. If anyone has any suggestions for places we could go to take a week together, anywhere in Europe (or even North Africa I suppose) that would be quiet and warm, where she could do some yoga, I would love to hear them. Neither of us have ever really done holidays before, and we're very aware that we don't even know where to start looking.)
Right. Back to introductions.
Also, do not ever ask me to write introductions. This morning's email brought three You Said You Would Maybe Introduce This A Long Time Ago emails. The last four things I wrote were introductions. The next four things I will write will be introductions. Whatever happened to making things up?
