A bit sad. But it ends with Toast.

I went to Boston and spent Thanksgiving with Amanda and her family. It was wonderful. I spent any spare moments reading comics for a book I am guest editing next year. (This is a photo of us on the pavement outside her house.)

Now I'm home. Typing a blog entry, listening to TV Smith's Live CD.

...

The saddest moment of the trip was lunchtime today, and a call from Roz Kaveney to let me know that our friend Rob Holdstock had died, of an e.coli infection. He was only 61. When I stumbled into the world of SF and Fantasy, over 25 years ago, as a young journalist, Rob, already a successful and award-winning author, was absolutely friendly, welcoming and encouraging. A big, affable man, with a knack for putting people at their ease, he was always one of the Good Things about the British SF world. His book Mythago Wood was one of my favourite novels of the 1980s. I saw him less and less since I've lived in the US; like too many UK friends, I'd see him mostly at publishing parties and book launches. He died too early. My condolences to Sarah, his partner.

...

Two NPR pieces I should point people to. One is my guest-spot on "Morning Edition", talking about, and interviewing people about, Audio Books, at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120769925.

The other is "On The Media" , at http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2009/11/27. I'm one of several people talking about the future of the book (or The Future of The Book).

Big congratulations to Henry Selick, to all at Laika and to Focus for the Coraline Film, which won the Children's Feature Film award at the BAFTAs last night (http://www.bafta.org/awards/childrens).

...

Tickets to the 14th Dec Decatur GA Little Shop of Stories event - reading, Q&A and signing - are available from tomorrow: details at http://littleshopofstories.blogspot.com/2009/11/details-of-neil-gaiman-event.html (basically, from Monday Nov 30th, you can pick up the tickets in Person; from Monday Dec 7th, you can reserve tickets over the phone.)

Here are the details for the Winnipeg event on Dec 15th: http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/editorial-1349/Master-Storyteller-Neil-Gaiman-Visits-on-December-15

...

The Green Goddess restaurant in New Orleans gets reviewed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Note that they do not tell you that if you oh-so-casually ask for the Meze of Destruction, they will make a fuss of you and bring you Something Nice, for this is something you would only learn here.

...

And finally, over at http://twitpic.com/rhg4t, @heydeletethat does portraits of me and Amanda. On Toast. I mean, that's art on Toast.

Labels: Henry Selick's Coraline, NPR, Rob Holdstock, thanksgiving, toast, TV Smith

public service announcements

Dave McKean, for too many years now a man without a website, wants me to tell you that things are finally stirring at the unusually-named http://davemckean.com/ (and that Allen Spiegel will be selling original art from The Graveyard Book at Comic-Con.)

Ah, the city with the most observant Jews (New York) gets you on Rosh Hashana. Alas.

Maybe next time. These events you just listed, including the Sep 30 event, aren't the official Graveyard Book Tour, right? Ordinarily I'd assume the Book Tour wouldn't be until the book has come out, but I know that this tour will be more of a reading/Q&A tour rather than a signing tour, and if it's not a signing, then the tour can start before the book is available.

It would be awesome if all publicity/scheduling people had a big calendar with every religion's holidays, along with demographic maps showing which places have a lot of which religion.

A few years ago Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket's ammanuensis) and I were grumbling together about the way that, probably thousands of years ago, it was decided that the Jewish High Holidays would fall in High Publishing Season, and how unfair this was to Jewish authors and their readers and, nu, what were you going to do about it?

To answer your question, No, the events I listed will be the US Graveyard Book Tour events. The US publication date is September the 30th. (The UK pub date is Hallowe'en, and I'll be signing and/or reading in Dublin and Scotland and elsewhere in the UK and London.)

But there is an event to make up for my being in New York on Rosh Hashana: On November the 9th, which is a Sunday, I'll be In Conversation With the amazing Chipp Kidd, at the 92nd St Y, talking about 20 years of Sandman. And I'll be signing stuff afterwards, if the last events I did at the Y are anything to go by.

...

I ran into this quote in the New Yorker, about reviewer Katherine White. The first paragraph is from the article, the second is a quote from White:

Then, as now, some of the best prose and poetry, not to mention the best
art, was to be found in books written for children—disciplined, inspired,
elevated, even, by the constraints of the form. Katharine White loved many books
for children; above all, she admired the beauty and lyricism of picture books
and readers for the under-twelve set. But she had her doubts about books aimed
at older kids:

It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt
begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every
book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good
ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder
how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely
announcing their works as “suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.” Their
implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows?
Suitability isn’t so simple.

The full article -- the birth of Stuart Little compared and contrasted with the rise and fall of the first influential children's librarian -- is wonderful. It starts at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=1

I was interviewed in Locus this month (the one with Garth Nix on the cover), and tried to say something very much the same about Young Adult fiction: that young adults (and older kids) should be reading everything, relentlessly. They should be reading outside their comfort zones, because the training wheels have come off, and that's the only way they'll find out where their comfort zones are, reading everything.

(Also learned from that Locus that Michael De Larrabeiti was dead. I interviewed him once, as a journalist, and loved his three Borrible books -- they were (especially the first two) hugely influential on Neverwhere.)

...

There's an article about the revised and retooled theatre production of Mister Punch in LA today at http://www.latimes.com/theguide/performing-arts/la-gd-perf17-2008jul17,0,4577290.story -- with a marvellous photo, which looks strangely McKeanish (see below). It's an interview done with me last week when I'd just got back from Brazil and was slightly under the weather, but the reporter has made it sound like I was still making sense.




WHERE: Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Fri., 4 and 8 p.m. Sat., 4 p.m. Sun.; ends Aug. 31. (no perf Aug 8-10).

PRICE: $25 ($50 opening night gala)

INFO: (800) 838-3006; www.rogueartists.org

...

And, because all questions posed on this blog are eventually answered:

ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha did a run of 50 black on black Disaster Area t-shirts in the late 1980s. There were also yellow on black and white on black versions but the last was sold around 2001, and they have not done a reprint since then.

Someone asked what sizes the various tee shirts are. They range from xxl down to the ones where I'm not sure how I used to get them on and am certain either the shirts have shrunk or I used to be a lot smaller. So from Too Huge For Me To Wear down to Really Bloody Small.

...

My friend Kelli Bickman has a mother named Connie. Last time I saw Connie she came over and gathered up all the accumulated bags I'd got from planes over the years, the ones with the mini toothbrush and the eye-shade in, that had built up into a small mound at the back of a cupboard, and she took them away to do something good and worthwhile with them for kids. Kelli wrote the other day to say,

My Mom is the volunteer creative director for Children's Culture Connection (CCC), a non-profit organization working with 12 international charities to help children in America, Haiti, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, India, Peru, Kenya, Nigeria, China, Bulgaria and Russia. CCC has raised thousands of dollars to help empower and connect the children of the world, built houses in Vietnam, installed water pipelines in Sri Lanka to bring clean water to orphanages, sent kids to school, helped with medical supplies in the Amazon jungles, organized art projects with children in seven countries. and more...it is really amazing.

Feeling very inspired by the lessons learned from my mother and her spirit of giving, I am working to help Children's Culture Connection raise awareness, as well as send art supplies to the children of the world. I've just re-developed my website (www.kellibickman.net) and will donate 20% of the sale of any works of art to buy art supplies for these children and help them to expand their imaginations and their world.

Can you put this link on your blog? It would be greatly appreciated...I am eager to spread the good news. Of course, if anyone is interested in getting involved or donating directly to the CCC, that is most welcome. www.childrenscultureconnection.org

...

And everything in this whole post pales into insignificance when placed beside...

Mr Toast as Sandman.

Labels: Age, Dave McKean, Kelli Bickman, Mister Punch, rosh hashana, toast

bad blogger. no liver stories.

I am a dreadful blogger right now.

This is because

a) I'm writing.

I just reread the pep talk I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, for authors who were at that point three-quarters of the way through the book when you just have to keep going, and it helped a bit. ("Hah!" I thought. "What do you know, foolish author-man?" But secretly I knew he had a point.)

I'm still in Chapter Seven. Yesterday was very talky. Today stuff may happen.

b) I'm writing. So when I find interesting links, or people send me things to post, I go, "Yes, I should post that" and then forget to.

and of course the main reason I'm a dreadful blogger is that,

c) I'm writing.

When I'm not writing the novel I feel guilty. And even though blogworthy things turn up (I could write about the thaw right now, and the sunshine and the bees; three days ago a really funny entry on what to do when your assistant hands you twenty pounds of whole and uncut cow liver for your dog that she was given at the local meat packing plant didn't get written, and yesterday I composed an entire thing in my head I didn't write down about Why The People in Torchwood Season One Are All Too Stupid To Live -- including the astonishingly puzzling incident where someone in 1941 has written something down on paper with black ink (a medium that will last legibly for centuries if kept out of the sun), and, unaccountably worried that ink on paper will fade and become unreadable in time, first she takes a prototype Polaroid photo of it, and then writes some of it in blood and puts it in a coffee can in a damp cellar, because these media will still be readable seventy years later. Why she didn't make a model of it out of chocolate as well, I will never know.)

Oh, and despite having predicted that Blink would get the Hugo for best Dramatic wossname, this blog is now officially supporting Paul Cornell's Family of Blood/Human Nature two-parter for a Hugo. This is, obviously, because I have been gotten to.

Bugger. This was just meant to be a wave, and now I've started writing.

I'll answer a question. Just one. Then to work.

Good morning, Neil!

Since you've used fountain pens for so long, I was wondering if you could recommend a good fountain pen ink.

I just got my first fountain pen last night. I mentioned to a friend that I write all my rough drafts longhand because it's the best way to shut up my internal editor, but that I wanted to get a fountain pen so I could stop throwing so much plastic into landfills by burning through so many disposable pens. He disappeared into a back room of his house for a few minutes, and when he came back he handed me a fountain pen, complete with converter.

So, now I have the pen, but I need to get some ink. And I want to make sure that I get a good quality bottled ink -- preferrably something that won't smear since I prefer to write in spiral-bound notebooks, usually curled up on the couch with the notebook on my lap.

Based on what you just posted about the Noodler Polar Black, I probably won't be getting it. (I live in the South anyway, so I don't really have to worry about ink freezing.) What type of ink do you normally use or would recommend for a fountain pen neophyte like myself?

Thanks much!

Andi

In all fairness, I should say I got a note from someone who uses the Noodler Polar Blue to say that they hadn't had any smudging trouble with it.

There used to be a lot of information about ink (including what everything looked like) up at http://www.inksampler.com/
but alas, most of that has gone. Still, this is the internet, and there are people out there writing well and exhaustively about fountain pen ink and showing off their favourites.

Find a colour you like, and an ink you like. Try a few out. Parker's Quink is an old dependable. Private Reserve have some lovely colours (I like their Black Cherry and their Copper Burst). Waterman inks are always pretty good. Bottle design is also useful to consider -- Mont Blanc (I don't like their pens, and the ink isn't up to much but I love the bottle design) and Levenger have great bottles that allow for easy filling even when the level in the bottle is low.

Never use India inks, drafting inks or drawing inks inside a fountain pen. You will gum up the insides and worse. But if you're interested, there are places on the web that will tell you, for example, how to make your own ink to ancient recipes...

...

And finally, thank you to Dan Goodsell, who noticed his Mr Toast toy in the video of Maddy at Comic-Con, and sent her oodles of Mr Toast stuff. Hurrah for Mr Toast.

Labels: Blogging, dr who, Hugo Awards, ink, Maddy Gaiman TV, the internet is for livers, toast, torchwood