Radio Secrets

In the winter of 1983, I was alone in my parents' house. Even they weren't there. I was 22 going on 23, and writing things nobody wanted to buy, or even read, and feeling very lonely indeed. I was about to move up to a bedroom in Edgware at the start of 1984.

The nearest thing I had to company was BBC Radio 4. (I remember listening to an audio sequel to Cold Comfort Farm. Also that it was the only time I have ever managed to actually follow The Archers for long enough to know who was actually who and what they all wanted.) I would sit in my parents' empty dining room with the radio on while I wrote short stories nobody would ever read and nobody would ever buy.

But the radio helped. The radio really helped.

It's nice, and odd, to feel that I'm now part of the thing that kept me going then.

My short story "Chivalry" will be broadcast at 4:00pm to 4:30pm on the 25th of December. It's about an old woman who buys the Holy Grail in a charity shop.

There's a generation gap vast as an ocean between people who are excited that Glenda Jackson is both our narrator and Mrs Whitaker, and those who have no idea who Glenda Jackson is and why she matters (wasn't she a British politician once?) but are very excited about Kit Harington.

And as if that wasn't enough...

Playing in the Dark will be broadcast on Radio 3 on the 23rd of December from 7:30pm until 10 pm.  That's me and some guests reading things aloud, and also the BBC Symphony Orchestra (and some of the guests) making music.

Here's a video of me introducing our final reader, who read a chunk of GOOD OMENS...

(If the video below doesn't work for you, as I hear it's region-locked, you can watch it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bbcpress/status/1198926119388565504?s=20)

Playing in the Dark will also, in edited form, be going out really early on the morning of the 25th, on BBC Radio 4 from 6 am - 7 am.

If you are somewhere in the world where you cannot turn on the radio and hear Radio 3 or 4, you can still livestream it, and once it has been broadcast it will be up for a month. ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD YOU CAN ACCESS THE INTERNET, YOU CAN LISTEN TO THEM. FOR FREE.

This is a true thing.

Labels: Chivalry, radio, Radio 3, Radio four

A Perfect Week

The tour started on about June 13^th, with an event and a signing in Bath. It went to the US and to Canada, then came back to England via Holland, and it finished in Scotland at the end of August. I signed about 75,000 books while I was on tour, most of them copies of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. Six weeks on, I came back to the UK and did a mini-tour for FORTUNATELY, THE MILK. It was the appendix of tours, the last bit. Even so, it had a few of my favourite moments of the year, in it and one of my favourite evenings ever.

My first day in the UK, I went to the opening night of THE LIGHT PRINCESS, Tori Amos's beautiful musical, at the National Theatre. It's a fairy tale, and is about feminism, ecology, and the importance of showing and having emotions. It contains some amazing performances, beautiful songs, and flying (and floating) effects that are jaw dropping. The audience loved it, and gave it a Standing Ovation. I came out certain that it would divide the critics, and the papers the next morning were mixed – the Daily Mail's reviewer gave it one star and described the audience who had loved it as “weak minded”, the Daily Express gave it five stars and said:

 With shades of panto, ballet, circus and opera as well as musical theatre, this bonkers but beautiful fantasy defies categorisation. Amos has said that any man taking a woman here on a date is guaranteed to get lucky afterwards. I’m not the best judge of that kind of thing. All I know is I’d go again tomorrow, and again the day after that.

I thought it was magic.

Ian Lamb, Bloomsbury's Children's Books Publicity Honcho, had set up several really enjoyable events. They began with a literary lunch at the Savoy Hotel, which reopened in 2010 after a three year long remodel. The food was wonderful, and between courses I wandered around with a microphone, talking about the book, reading from it and answering questions. This was only the second of the lunches, and I don't think that any of the people there were Savoy regulars: the ones I recognised were all regulars from signings and events, most of them looking a bit nervous and intimidated. The Savoy staff were really nice.

I was on SATURDAY LIVE, the BBC Radio 4 Saturday morning show, along with a comics creator, a Rock Manager, Tori (and elks), and a former Yeti. It was a delightful 90 minutes of radio. I forgot to talk about FORTUNATELY, THE MILK.
(You can listen to it here.)

I went to Cheltenham, and talked and signed at the literary festival there: 400 people queued up afterwards, most of them in the rain, and I felt very guilty indeed. I met Marcus Brigstocke for dinner – the first time we'd talked properly since we did the commentary on the DVD of A SHORT FILM ABOUT JOHN BOLTON, my short film in 2002, which Marcus starred in. From Cheltenham to Manchester, where I did another book event and signing, less formal and significantly less rained on.

Up first thing the next morning to do the BBC Breakfast Show (the segment is up here, but you may need Tunnelbear or equivalent to watch outside the UK). Normally Breakfast TV book spots are an excuse for the interviewers to not talk about the book, but the presenters (and their children) had read and loved FORTUNATELY THE MILK, and asked me about it, and I made up for not having mentioned it on the radio. (The Amazon rating went up from about 240 to 12 in an hour, for the curious.)

That night was astonishing: I gave a speech on behalf of the Reading Agency. It's about reading, and about libraries, and about our obligations to the world and to the future. Before the speech, I sat in my seat, and I looked down at the words I'd written to say and was consumed by a strange form of stage fright in which none of the sentences that I looked at seemed to make any sense. In a kind of awkward terror I got up and delivered the speech, and somehow it all made sense and all the sentences were sentences after all: it worked.

It's been widely reported, and published in edited form in the Guardian, and people everywhere have started using it to explain to other people why books and libraries and such are to be protected and endorsed, which is a wonderful thing.

The next day was the best day of all. It began early when my wife, Amanda, flew in to the UK to surprise me. And, because she knows me, she texted me the day before to let me know she would be surprising me at that night's performance of the whole of FORTUNATELY, THE MILK at the Westminster Central Hall.

I had spent a few weeks gathering together a motley and wonderful band of performers to help with the night's entertainment. In addition, Chris Riddell was going to come on the stage with me: I would read, and he would draw.

It was amazing, and I was amazed.

About 2,500 people were there. The tickets had sold out immediately – we could have done an event twice the size. My only regret was that there could have been more kids in the audience.

Andrew O' Neill was our master of ceremonies. T.V. Smith and Tom Robinson played two acoustic songs (and played pirates and such); As the story started Chris Riddell quick-drew amazing illustrations; Siobhan Hewlett was a pirate queen and stole the show; Mitch Benn stole it back with a song about Lady Pirate Captains; Tasha Hawley and Niamh Walsh were ponies – and got a round of applause from the audience – and Niamh returned as a wumpire; Lenny Henry brought the house down as a special surprise Dinosaur Space Patrol T. Rex, and asked me twitter questions. Then Amanda came on and played her Ukulele Anthem with final lyrics rewritten to be about FORTUNATELY THE MILK. And then it was all done.

Chris Riddell draws...

TV Smith and Tom Robinson perform THE THIN GREEN LINE

Mitch Benn, Andrew O'Neill, TV Smith, Niamh Walsh, Tash Hawley, Siobhan Hewlett

Mitch, Tim and Andrew do a very important plot dance. Lenny Henry and I do not dance.

(All of these photos from this great photoset I found on Flickr.)

I cannot thank any of these people enough for a perfect night.

(In the background, making things work for us and for the 2500 people, were Andy Quinn from Foyles, Alex Rochford from Time Out, and their respective teams, the lovely and talented Holly Gaiman, and the extremely terrific Kelly Fogarty who helped make everything easier and took the following wonderful backstage photographs.)

Labels: breakfastry, Fortunately the Milk, Mitch Benn, nine photographs, photographs, radio, The Light Princess, Tom Robinson, TV Smith

Green and Pleasant World

A couple of years ago I wrote a short story for the BBC Radio 4 William Blake 250th anniversary celebrations. The idea was to write a story inspired by a poem or line of Blake's. I took the poem Jerusalem (you can read it here).

It was read, well, by Alexander Morton, and broadcast in November 2007. I remember not liking it when I heard it, feeling mostly disappointed with how far it was from the thing in my head, uncomforable with the tiny edits needed to make it fit perfectly into its time slot. They've just repeated it, and yesterday I listened to it curiously, and, no longer quite remembering the thing in my head I had hoped it would turn into, enjoyed it much more than I had expected to.

You can hear it until Sunday on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008cnz8

...

Last year Holly and some of her friends had a pudding fight.

This year, with Maddy and her friends joining in, they had a battle that was about 20% UK jelly and 80% American Jell-O (the UK stuff won easily on taste tests, by the way). Next year she's talking about a proper custard-pie battle.

I love my daughters.







(More photos up at http://twitpic.com/photos/neilhimself)

Labels: Jelly and Jell-O, radio, the weirdness and small forgivenesses of time, William Blake

Quick ones...

It's been a long week, and I keep waiting for down time to do a proper blog entry in, to catch up. I have photos and everything.

This is just a very short one to say that

1) I'll be on the Jonathan Ross radio show on Radio 2 this morning. In a couple of hours.

2) I'll be on Blue Peter on Tuesday (already filmed, me and Henry Selick on the sofa).

Spent yesterday catching up with old friends. Right now I look wild-haired and bleary-eyed, and I will be extremely pleased when all this is over, as it will be by lunchtime.

Some wonderful articles out there about the Stephin Merritt & Co CORALINE Musical. Like this one: http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-05-06/theater/stephin-merritt-and-david-greenspan-conjure-an-unusual-tuner-for-coraline/1 (in which I think Stephin misestimates whether or not children will like it. They will, it's about imagining.) And this one, just as good, with David Greenspan.

(Edit to add, the Lortel is a very small theatre, because Stephin wanted this unmiked and acoustic; tickets are going very fast, between the Magnetic Fields fans, the Coraline fans, and the theatre fans, and it's a very limited season. If you put off getting tickets and then find you can't get them not even for ready money, do not send me grumpy emails.)

And here's me in the Guardian doing their Celebrity Squares: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/08/neil-gaiman

And the front desk just called up to say that Mitch Benn is now downstairs so I am signing off in haste.

Labels: coraline the musical, Jonathan Ross, Mitch Benn, radio, sorry about this

The Tivoli and the Hounds of God

Chicago was last night -- it was fantastic. What a wonderful place the Tivoli is. The reading is already up at http://mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx?VideoID=3 and at http://graveyardtour.blip.tv/#1324430.




Hello Neil,
I've been having trouble with the mouse circus video readings. They seem to stop about 4/5 the way through and won't play the last bit.
The one of chapter 2 you embedded in the journal worked fine.
I thought maybe I wasn't the only one having these problems and maybe some bright cookie out there had a fix for it.
I was using firefox (most recent update) on a pentium 4 machine with windows XP. (beggars can't be choosers, but at least it's not Vista).
I hope there's some help for this. I'm really enjoying watching you read. It's a great idea to post it for all who can't be there.
Thanks so much! Naomi.


The problem was at our end: mousecircus.com just wasn't set up for the astonishing numbers of people we've been getting to watch the videos. Harpers have been mirroring and spreading them about a bit (the embedded ones are from different servers and systems), and I got an email this morning to say they've now moved the mousecircus videos to dedicated video servers, so wherever they are, they should play without problems. (Let me know if problems continue.)

Hi Neil,

I like to sew things and whatnot and find that listening to audio of people reading a story or talking while I'm making something is a nice distraction. I started with the chapters of Graveyard Book that are up, and also listened to some of the Edgar Allan Poe read by Basil Rathbone (I love his old villain roles). Do you have any other favorite audio collections you'd recommend?

Well, there's the Gielgud-Richardson Sherlock Holmes series, and I love classic radio comedy, both English (Hancock's Half Hour, Round the Horne) and American (most of all The Jack Benny Show from around 1941 on, but also things like Burns and Allen). Let me point you at http://www.otr.net/, the Old Time Radio website, where you can listen to amazing amount of radio for free, or http://www.otrradio.com where you can pay a pretty nominal fee and buy CDs filled with MP3s.

More from Seattle tonight.

Labels: free book but this time in installments and filmed, radio

Jerusalem

Over at BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Readings -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_reading.shtml -- is a series of short stories inspired by the works of William Blake. I wrote a short story called Jerusalem for it, about the city and the syndrome and the song, which will be broadcast this coming Thursday, and you can listen to it again for a week after that. Truth to tell, I don't think it really works -- it sort of derailed half way through, and never got back on track. Maybe it wants to be something longer, or maybe it's the start of something else, or maybe it's just one of those times when the cake doesn't rise. I'm not sure, although I definitely want to revisit those people again. It was meant to have ghosts in, and they never quite made it, and I don't think the Blakean illumination I was going for really illuminated. But Sandy Morton does a lovely job reading it anyway.

Labels: radio, the kind of post in which I don't do anything cute in the labels, William Blake

puts you there where things are hollow

This came in from Lenny in email, labelled Fat Charlie and Rosie at the Wine Bar.



The Criterion Event was lovely, if short, and the signing that followed was pleasant, if long. And I am now braindead, so will sleep, pausing only to refer you to Stephen Fry blogging on the nature of fame.

(Today I walked past an old friend who happens to be famous. We've not seen each other in 25 years. I recognised him as he passed me, and saw him wince at the moment he noticed someone had realised who he was. Just a tiny wince, and he hadn't recognised that I was me, and I knew that if I'd called out and identified myself we would have had a very pleasant conversation and he would have been happy to see me, but after that wince it was easier to leave him alone, walking down the street, unbothered...)

And here's an extract from Shaun Tan's beautiful, haunting, dislocated book, The Arrival.

Labels: anansi boys, fame, radio

As Dr Johnson said...

I was meant to be on NPR's TALK OF THE NATION tomorrow. But their schedules have shifted and I'll be on the radio this afternoon -- Wednesday the 8th of August. I think that http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5
is their website. I'll be on towards the end of the second hour (the hour that some stations don't get).

John Scalzi writes wisely, as usual, over at his blog about Stardust and how he thinks it'll do:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/2007/08/07/stardusts_chances.html
and I couldn't see anything there to disagree with.

I have no doubt at all that Stardust will do brilliantly around the world, rock out on DVD, and become one of those films that is beloved. But how it will do this weekend... ah, that's a mystery. I was fascinated by this article about success and failure -- and, more importantly, the perception of success and failure -- in movie box office:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/hollywood-where-ignoran_b_59464.html
(link via.)

I remember the first time I went to Hollywood, with Terry Pratchett, in 1992 I learned that you could frame any conversation about something you wanted to do in a plot that Hollywood Execs didn't understand or had a problem with if you referred to another movie that they'd seen. ("So why don't they...?" "Because they forget about it, um -- just like at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK." "Oh. Got it.") And it was useful for talking about the feel of things -- you simply positioned what you were talking about against or with other films.

By 1996, when I went back to Hollywood, something had changed. I remember naming a movie in one of those conversations -- talking about look and feel or about lighting or about something like that -- and having the Exec look at me as if I had something unpleasant on my shoe, and he said, simply, "But that film didn't make any money." He couldn't understand why I would even have brought it up.

...

Over on Charles Vess's blog you can see a photo of us at the end of the premiere, me in a tuxedo and him not, because he forgot his shirt studs.

The birdchick does a honey from our hives taste test over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/08/go-see-stardust-and-little-about-our.html

Hi Neil, I was wondering if you knew what's up with Rich Horton's Fantasy: Best of the Year 2007 Edition. There are three authors touted prominently on the cover of the mass market paperback: you, Gene Wolfe, and Peter S. Beagle. Of the three of you, Beagle is the only one who actually has a story inside. What happened? Was there a story of yours that was supposed to be in it? And what about Gene Wolfe?

It was a screw-up - the publisher reused the names from the previous year, by accident. They wrote to me and apologised, and I told them that somewhere in my basement I have a handful of copies of the UK edition of THE SANDMAN BOOK OF DREAMS in paperback, which proudly lists Stephen King on the cover as having written a story, for reasons no-one was ever able to explain. That time we were lucky, and we caught it in time to pulp the print-run. But sometimes you can't.

Hi Mr G,
Can I download the clip of Maddy's interview of you? I want to hear it over and over again to boost myself. It's just inspiring to listen to a daughter interviewing her dad. It makes me want to write more too, just like you; and just like you, you write for the people important to you.
Thanks,

JPB

PS. Please say HI to Maddy for me. :)

Easy (well, easy after a quick Google anyway). It's at the Harper Collins Digital Media cafe -- http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/ -- and the direct link to the free download is http://harpercollins.iamplify.com/product_details.jsp?productId=807

As you'll ultimately be getting one of the Coraline puppets, I thought you might like to see how they're being made: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/beginning-to-build-coraline/

That would be cool even if I wasn't getting one...

Wow. Hey! Why have you stopped putting a "stardust"/"stardust movie" label on posts that involve Stardust? (Of course the choice of labels is completely your prerogative, but it would make it a lot easier to find certain posts, and it seems like this would be an ideal time to make use of the label function - is there a particular reason you have stopped using the labels in this case?)

Ignorance, madam. Pure ignorance. Or at least, ineptitude when it comes to labelling.

Labels: Coraline, honey, John Scalzi, labels, more Stardust mostly, one of those posts that covers lots of things I can't be bothered to label, radio, Stardust, Stardust movies

American Gods Blog, Post 125

More from the Strange STuff People E-Mail Me Department: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-gaiman-neil.asp is an interview with me (you have to page down past the biography stuff). http://www.kiplinger.com/spending/ is -- right now anyway -- something that lists the best prices of "this week's bestselling book, CD, DVD and software." American Gods is the book (and Fatbrain is currently the best price, it says).

Did a signing in Bristol at lunchtime which was lovely. It should have been an evening signing with a reading and stuff, really. Saw Diana Wynne Jones and several other friends, albeit too briefly in every case. Biut I got to tell Diana of Maddy's addiction to WARLOCK AT THE WHEEL, finally... Then got the train back and did an AOL chat, then London Live radio, now back in the hotel.

Up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to go to Norwich for a lunchtime signing, then on to Canterbury where I shall see Dave McKean and his family, which I am looking forward to.

Sunday is the Giles Brandreth radio show on LBC, and a desperate attempt to see as many people as possible. Monday is editorial meetings, sign 300+ books in the Headline offices, and, in the evening, do some filming and reading and such with Tori for some album stuff. Tuesday morning I fly home.

Wish I had some trenchant and brilliant comments to make on the media or something, but mostly I'm just pooped. People have stopped assuming I'm American though, and my daughter Holly, when I phoned home last night, said "Dad! You sound so English!" which I shall take as a compliment, although I'm not entirely sure that was how she meant it. Really, my accent is just a universal sort of case of "you aren't from round here, are you?"

Labels: American Gods Blog, aol, Bristol, Dave McKean, Diana Wynne Jones, Holly, interviews, Maddy, radio, tour

American Gods Blog, Post 111

Just did the oddest radio show; suddenly found myself having to have opinions about Pyramid Selling, Legalizing Heroin, Foxhunting, Bullfighting and Right vs left wing libertarianism. Occasional nods to me being an author were made, by the host, after checking his press release -- "Neil, it says here you wrote Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett, a novel about the end of the world. Now if the world really were ending do we think that we'd start looting, or just be peaceful" etc. V. odd...

Ate more conveyor belt sushi for lunch, but I think that's it for me and conveyor belt sushi. (But surely, you must be sick of sushi by now? chorus the multitudes who have been reading this blogger. Er, no, not yet, says author.)

Labels: American Gods Blog, radio, sushi