One Ordinary Day With Chris Riddell Doodles

I'm in a departure lounge, right now. First an automated message called from Delta to tell me my plane would take off on time and arrive an hour and a half late. Then it called back to tell me we were leaving an hour and a half late too, which made a little more sense.

 People have written and asked why I'm not posting about walking with my dog in the woods, and it's mostly because I haven't walked with my dog in the woods since the start of tour season, except for a couple of days in early August. I wish I had.

I borrowed Glen, next-door's working sheepdog, to go for walks with when I was in Scotland, though. He wasn't very good at going for walks. He was very aware that he ought to be working, and would shoot off home to move sheep around the moment I took I my attention off him.

I was meant to be writing when I was in Scotland. Mostly, I was recovering from the tour -- from the whole thing, from early June on. Recharging my batteries by walking and cooking things on the Aga and juicing and not really writing at all. And then I recharged and started writing once again.

2011, Seattle, "Makin' Whoopie".

So, it's been a wonderful, crazed few weeks. FORTUNATELY THE MILK came out in the US and the UK, and got some wonderful reviews (including this one, from Boing Boing), and went onto the Bestseller Lists on both sides of the Atlantic. I finished, yesterday morning, writing a Sekrit Thing that took me a month longer than I'd expected it to. I'll tell you all about it in another month, by which time it will be less sekrit.

Chris Riddell, illustrator of FORTUNATELY THE MILK in the UK has asked me to tell the world that he will be doing a signing for his wonderful Goth Girl book (but he will also sign your Fortunately The Milk!) in Brighton on the 12th of October (at 4 pm at the North St Branch of Waterstones, to be precise). Chris also sends me amazing doodles of his touring life. (Can I put some of them on my blog? I asked him. Of course, he said, they are my therapy.)

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Important things you should know:

1) BOSTON AREA: There are still tickets for the Becca Tribute night in Boston on Monday. The Dresden Dolls reunion! Me reading New Stuff I've Not Ever Read To Paying Audiences Before! Jason Webley nips out of retirement! Emilyn Brodsky is herself! A Cast of Thousands well hundreds well lots of amazing people... It's going to be wonderful. Get your tickets now at https://www.vendini.com/ticket-software.html?t=tix&e=a4e51df651ed159d57c8ee040f26e44d

2) NEW YORK AREA: The Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at the Town Hall in New York on Saturday the 23rd of November sold out very quickly, with a lot of disappointed people, so we added another night: Friday the 22nd of November. Now you can see us AND catch the 50th Anniversary Episode of Doctor Who too. (It's an all ages event but there is likely to be swearing or songs and stories not meant for children.)  You can get tickets at this ticketmaster link.)

3) EVERYWHERE IN THE WHOLE WORLD AREA: The Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer triple CD, recorded from the tour of 2011 due to the loveliness of Kickstarter supporters, will finally be released to the general public on November the 19th.   It's a different edition to the one that 3500 Kickstarter backers got. You can also order it as a double LP.

It's up for preorders now. 

And there is also stuff! you can get with the pre-order, with Cynthia Von Buhler's amazing paper cut-out of Amanda and me on it, said stuff including a teapot, a tea towel, a notebook and mugs (There is a theme here.) All of it should be delivered well in time for the holidays.

To preorder it, just go to http://amandapalmer.net

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And lastly, go and look at the TerraMar Project's website, if you haven't:  http://theterramarproject.org

The seas are our heritage, and we need to preserve and conserve them, for our children, for our planet, and for ourselves.

Labels: An Evening With Neil And Amanda., chris Riddell, dogless, stuff, teapots

A twittery sort of a Sunday...

So far I've resisted the siren lure of Twitter, but today was a very twittery sort of day:

NEIL has decided to hand in his Mini Convertible and get a Mini Clubman instead, and blames the dog.

NEIL (inspired by this) took Maddy (age 14 and a few months) for her first driving lesson today, up and down the drive, and taught her how to drive and how to reverse, in the Mini and in the 4-Runner, and we had fun.

NEIL cannot believe how it went from warm, wet and raining onto snow this morning down to the bitter minuses in the afternoon, and now the world is covered with ice.

NEIL really hopes they roll out an update that gets Google Maps working again on his G1 soon.

NEIL has just discovered that Momus is giving away his Creation era albums as MP3s via his LiveJournal (http://imomus.livejournal.com/)

NEIL is discovering that he really likes Chrome. Except for the badly-placed close tab Xs, which seem to mean I'm always closing tabs I wanted to click on.

NEIL thinks http://www.secrettechnology.com/madethis/enemy6.html is dead cool.

NEIL is more delighted than he can possibly say that The Graveyard Book is on so many Best of the Year Lists (and has decided not to link to them any more because it looks like I'm swanking). (Not this.)(Or even this.)

NEIL thinks that this* would have been the world's greatest Christmas song, if the Dalek voice had actually sounded like a Dalek, and if the song wasn't, you know, on every level, crap.

One of those sorts of days...

*song replaced with YouTube link (now fixed), due to bandwidth issues.

Labels: bestyworst Dalek Christmas pop song ever, stuff

stuff.

I'm trying to finish a book right now (it's a very short book called Odd and the Frost Giants and is due on Tuesday) so postings may be a bit erratic, or may vanish completely for a bit.

...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/1481245335/in/set-72157600296941365/
is really funny. I bet General Zod would post it on his blog too, if he had one.

Variety reviews The Wolves in the Walls -- "a thrilling, frequently beautiful stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's merrily creepy picture book." -- http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117935039.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

as does Theatermania http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/11767
and the New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/article/64257 which begins, Chalk it up to Americans' overly anxious views of parenting, but here's a phrase one tends not to hear in the States as the childrens' bedroom lights are switched off: "If the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over."

I want to make one of these. If I finish my book in time before the ground here freezes, I shall make one. If not it'll wait until spring...

Sharon Stiteler and I went out today and did what will probably be our penultimate beehive visit before the winter sets in (next time we'll be insulating the hives against the evil midwestern winter). Sharon has claimed for as long as I've known her that we have a Saw-Whet owl around here, and finally, yesterday, she saw it (and so did I).

I was fascinated by this article in the New York Times -- both by what it says about science, food and dieting, and even more, what it says about people.


Lisa Snellings-Clark is having a hallowe'en sale, which includes a Neil Rat with Glow in the Dark eyes. And she's interviewed here.

Gilbert Hernandez is profiled in the LA Times.

And from the Forbidden Planet blog I learned that the second volume of ABSOLUTE SANDMAN comes out, well, now. (And someone just wrote to tell me that if you preorder it from Amazon you get an additional 5% off, bringing it to 42% off. Which is not as good a deal as the 87% off they accidentally offered Volume 1 at, but it's not bad...)

Labels: bees, lisa snellings, one of those posts where I explain that I won't be posting as much for a bit which is normally followed by several long posts and lots of short ones, stuff, wolves in the walls

Trousers

A deluge of messages, many hundreds of them, and all of them are dog-name suggestions. Some of them I've tried, but they don't seem right -- they sound wrong coming out of my mouth, or, mostly, they are terrific names but don't quite fit him, or, in a few cases, Maddy doesn't like them. (I wanted to go Arthurian, but the front runner, a Maddy pick, currently seems to be Thor.)

(Dog update. Vet today: Dog weighs 78lb and still needs to put on a little weight; is now microchipped; is also on antibiotics to deal with early stage Lyme Disease, and got all the various shots he needed. Also taken into the vet at the same time: Fred the Cat, who, with half of his face shaved and drooling thick slobber from being car-sick, looked like something from a horror movie, the sort of movie that makes you shake your head and wonder whatever happened to subtlety in horror.)

I've walked more in the last two days than I have in months.



I'm just going to go to close a bunch of tabs...

...

Scott McCloud has posted the first two parts of his on-line graphic novel "The Right Number" for free. Back when he originally posted the first part I signed up for the micropayment scheme, and gave them five dollars so I could pay Scott my 25 cents for the first part, and then, a year or so later, couldn't remember the email address, details or password when he posted the second part, so I'm glad they're both up for nothing now. It's a wonderful story. I can't wait for him to do the last part. http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/trn/intro.html
is the link.

The fabulous Fabulist has a streaming radio station option up. I've been getting so much of my new music from them it's silly, and this is a great way to find out what I like before I download, put on my iPod and buy the CD. http://www.fabulist.org/archives/2007/04/streaming_fabul.html

There's a great Michael Chabon interview over at Salon: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/05/04/chabon/index.html

The PEN World Voices Town Hall reading is up at http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1305/prmID/1376 -- you can listen to the whole thing or to individuals. For some reason, I've wound up with Nadine Gordimer's MP3 if you click on my name -- mine is actually at http://www.pen.org/audio_archive/2007_world_voices/home_away/Neil_Gaiman.mp3 but listen to the whole thing (http://www.pen.org/audio_archive/2007_world_voices/home_away/Town_Hall_Readings_HomeAway.mp3). It's worth it just for Steve Martin, or Kiran Desai or Salman Rushdie or... well, trust me and listen to it.

All of the PEN events should eventually be up in Audio. Keep an eye on this -- a link to the MOTH event -- http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1340/prmID/1412. (Here's Laila Lalami's take on it: http://www.lailalalami.com/blog/archives/004691.html.) Incidentally, I got an email complaining that we had obviously all "written our stories first and then learned them". Nope. We just told them -- one rehearsal the previous afternoon, when we talked them through to the director, who gave us notes, and then on with the show.

Lucy Anne's collection of links over at http://del.icio.us/thedreaming is now so efficient I no longer feel like I have to make sure I keep the world updated with links to news articles about me and the Stardust movie and everything. I've told Lucy Anne that she can go into the old pre-labels world of this blog and tag everything from the first six years, because she has a much more sober attitude towards tagging than I do.

Hey Neil,

My wife and I had a great time at your Helena appearance and we really appreciate you coming out to Montana. So, thanks for that.

Also, I wanted to let you know that you're a special guest star on Brotherhood 2.0 today. My brother (John Green who's also with Writer's House and has a couple of YA novels out) and I have a somewhat popular video blog at Brotherhood2.com. We've stopped emailing and instant messaging and, instead, are communicating through daily video blogs for all of 2007.

Since so many of our viewers are your fans, I figured I had to include you in the project. Which, if you were wondering, is why you said "Good Morning John it's Monday May 1st" into a camera last weekend.

Sorry I didn't take the time to explain fully then, but the line was quite long and I didn't want to take too much of your (and everyone else's) time.

If you want to see the video it's up at brotherhood2.com.

Thanks,
Hank Green

And the link to the actual entry is http://www.brotherhood2.com/?p=101.

It's the kind of thing that makes me reconsider my attitudes to video blogging (mostly I don't like it, because I lose, as reader, control of the time axis of the experience. But this I liked).

Hi Neil, did you hear about this weird story?

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/blog/?p=44

http://threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2007-04-30

The world's becoming curiouser and curiouser by the minute.

Greetings from Fernet country,
Jan.

(Shakes head ruefully.) Then again, this in a country in which you can be sued for $65 million for losing a pair of trousers...

...


Finally, I'm enjoying John Scalzi's book tour. (I am possibly enjoying it most because I'm not on it, if you see what I mean.)

Labels: Dog, Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, Lucy Anne, one of those posts that covers lots of things I can't be bothered to label, stuff

gubbins

Stone me, that was fast! Over at neilgaiman.info you will find http://neilgaiman.info/index.php?title=Academia
which is a place where papers on me-related stuff can be posted, with information on how to post papers, or where to email them if posting proves too problematic.

John Hodgman will not be hosting the Thursday PEN Moth event. Jonathan Ames will be.

People have written in to let me know that Kryptonite has been discovered and Army Wiccans can be buried.

And I had great fun reading at Bryn Mawr - I subjected a very patient audience to the whole of the second chapter of The Graveyard Book in handwritten first draft (well, I read it to them, I didn't force them to read it), and I got to learn where they laughed and what worked and what didn't quite.

Then I signed a book for each of them and stumbled away.

New York tomorrow. (Details of the four events I'm doing, and ticket info can be found at http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/36)

Labels: stuff

random ponders

Every now and again I find myself thinking the wrong thing. I mean, I was reading an article in Slate on whether or not Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned, as claimed in the urban legend, and I found myself thinking, inappropriately, "That's odd."

Odd, because when I crossed the Atlantic, about twenty years ago, I noticed that "to spit" was, in common American usage, no longer an irregular verb; that the past tense, at least in conversation, of "to spit" was, not "spat", but "spit". As in "I will never forget the day that this drunk guy spit at my best friend". It didn't seem to have much to do with education or region, either.

But in the Slate article all the "spits" and "spats" were in the right place and tense.

(A Google for "were spit on" gave me 10,500 articles, while for Googling "were spat on" gave me only 950 [and a "did I mean were spent on?"]. All the first pages were talking about Vietnam vets. )

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I remember about eight years ago the then Warner Brothers co-studio head Billy Gerber told me that he got weekly calls from people who wanted to make, direct or star in a Sandman film. "On Wednesday," he said, "Michael Jackson called about it." Given the comments some months ago from Alan Horn and Jeff Robinoff, who now run Warner Brothers, I don't believe the calls from people who want to make Sandman have decreased in the last eight years -- quite the reverse. Which I mention because I got a small deluge of letters from people asking me what I thought about Joel Shumacher saying in an interview that he'd love to direct a Sandman film and wondering if that meant that it was now about to happen, and of course it doesn't and it isn't. It simply puts Mr Schumacher in a very long line of people who want to make Sandman, some way ahead of Michael Jackson.

...

And on the subject of unlikely things, if someone had told me a book of mine would turn up on the Good Housekeeping list of "Ten Wonderful Romance Novels" I would have accused them of drunken tomfoolery and pulling an old man's leg. And yet, behold: http://magazines.ivillage.com/goodhousekeeping/view/babes/articles/0,,284607_707518,00.html

You want to read the first dozen or so pages of Eddie Campbell's new graphic novel? You know you do... http://www.firstsecondbooks.net/bdda/bddaGift01.html

My friend Dianna Graf from Tasmania just sent me link to http://www.workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Blue//http/www.neilgaiman.com//journal
which is this journal placed in an, um, workfriendly context.

...

Someone named Lynn wrote to tell me you could no longer right click and cut and paste on my journal from IE7. I checked and she's right: while you can do it fine with Firefox, neither IE7 nor Opera will let you cut and paste from anywhere in the www.neilgaiman.com website right now, on a PC. (Macs are fine.) This is mysterious. I'll put the webelf on to it and we'll get it fixed.

Labels: miscellaneous, oddments, spit or spat, stuff, things etc, very long line with Michael Jackson bringing up the rear

ice

Just had a rough couple of days -- some kind of virulent food poisoning, which was no fun. (I'm lucky in having the kind of doctor who makes house calls -- not the official kind, more the turning up during his lunch break to find out how I'm doing kind.) I'm over the worst of it but just getting better.

It went down to minus 21 F last night (minus 29 C)and I discovered that a slightly improvised area in the corner of the office, where a bunch of wires and cables -- mostly TV from the satellite, the DSL line, and something that I think is probably a Russian spy cable -- come in, were now, inside the office, in a warm room, covered in thick ice. I figured that was why the house network had gone down (as it had), but today I unplugged everything, then plugged everything back in (right up there with Turn It Off And Wait For A Bit in the handy list of things you can do to fix it yourself) and suddenly it worked like a charm. When things warm up I'll get the ice-wire area properly fixed and insulated. (Right now it's warmed up to minus 19 F outside.) (I chipped some of the ice off, then took a photograph. Ick, and brrr.)

Susan Henderson did an interesting interview with me, mostly about hair, decorated with many embarrassing photos from the photo albums over the years, all of me with unlikely hair. We're hoping to get one final photo before it goes live, of me as a teenage punk. (She announces it -- and has a couple of hitherto unseen and quite unlikely photos up -- at http://litpark.com/2007/02/05/question-of-the-week-hair).

I found this Nerve essay fascinating and wryly amusing in equal measure:

The Religious Right is correct on exactly two scores: virginity can be a big
deal, properly exploited; and what you read, listen to or watch can make a huge
difference in how you live your life. Conservatives are smart to get sexy movies
banned from Wal-Mart. I can believe kids shoot each other because of video
games. Wilco made me throw my live-in boyfriend out of the house when I was
twenty-two. And Sandman made me torture men for sport when I was fifteen.

http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/calhoun/godsofnewyork/index.asp?page=1

Talking about unintentional consequences, I recently spent an interested couple of hours browsing through my complementary copy of The Neil Gaiman Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Essays on things I've written, by a dozen different very smart people. I think it's probably a very good book of essays, but I am undoubtedly the last person on earth who can usefully comment on it, being, as I am, the least competent critic alive of the author in question. There were a few moments when I felt like the author being described had done something monstrously clever , but they always immediately balanced by moments where I sighed and thought "You may think I'm being very clever there, but I only wrote it like that because that was how it happened, and I wasn't being clever at all...".

The only thing I found frustrating, which I hope will be fixed in the next edition , were the little errors of fact, mistakes of date (Smoke and Mirrors was published in 1998, not 2001 as one essay claims-- it's correctly cited several times elsewhere in the book) or of artist (Dave McKean didn't draw The Doll's House, nor did Clive Barker produce it), and little typos that render it less reliable than it might otherwise be as work of academic reference.

Several people wrote to let me know that the Penn Jillette Googlebomb had worked as we were in the Google top ten, and several other people wrote to let me know that Google had changed their algorithm to stop Googlebombs... and given that the Google ranking of "Penn Jillette" here went up to #8 and then, within hours, vanished completely (and is apparently now down in the 300s -- although it's still riding really high on Yahoo) suggests that anti-Googlebomb activity might be the case. (I could always call My Son At Google, but he'd just take enormous pleasure in telling me that he's signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot possibly comment...) Be interesting to see if it climbs back up again now...

(My enormous thanks to everyone who posted the link. You are all troupers, and I am very grateful.)

I just learned that the audiobook of me reading FRAGILE THINGS was just nominated for an Audie Award (http://www.audiopub.org/files/public/Audies_Finalists_Release.pdf) which is extremely nice -- although I thought the audiobook of Stardust I recorded was better. Fat lot I know. (The unabridged audiobook I did of Neverwhere should come out in the autumn. Now, that one was work.)

I really like the House of Lords when they say things like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6329851.stm

And I keep meaning to mention that if you order a copy the new special edition Last Unicorn DVD from the Conlan Press site, half the money goes to Peter Beagle, and your copy will be signed, as opposed to ordering it from anywhere else in which case it won't be signed by anyone, and Peter won't see a penny. http://www.conlanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc

Labels: cold [the extreme kind], embarrassing hair, food poisoning, iced wires, Neil Gaiman reading the Neil Gaiman Reader, stuff, the pitfalls of googlebombs