NEWS: Watchmen, Sandman, Chu, Russia and the Clown-Shoes of Cthulhu

I just wrote to Amanda confessing myself the most boring man in the world. My life right now seems to consist of writing and, once a day, jogging. The new iPod nano has decided to do the same thing that the one it replaced did, viz. reboot itself 2 minutes before the end of a timed run, which I've decided to outwit by not telling it how long I am going to run for, which works.
Pages of SANDMAN: Overture are coming in drawn from J.H. Williams, and different pages of Sandman are being written and going out from me to J.H. Williams. The ones coming in are the most beautiful mainstream comics I think I've ever seen. The ones going out are... well, all the characters feel like themselves. And, when we've met them before, they sound like themselves. And it's really strange when a character I've not written since 1995 turns up and all I seem to do for the dialogue is listen and write down what they say. I needed a story within the story at one point, so am telling a story I'd vaguely thought might one day be a giant miniseries as a three page story...
All the introductions I've agreed to write in the last 3 years are all needed now, so I am writing them. It's partly fun, because I get to tell people about things I love, and tell them why I love those books, but because they have all come together it feels a little like homework.
The most fun thing I did today was look at a rough sketch for the cover of the third book with Chu, the little Panda in it, and make a suggestion, and then, much later in the day, see Adam Rex's version of the sketch incorporating my suggestion, which headed straight into cuteness overload territory.
The second CHU book, which comes out in June, is going to be CHU'S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL in America but CHU'S FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL in the UK, because that's how the same thing is described in the different countries.
You can find out more about it via the Amazon US link at http://j.mp/Chus1st which is the only place I can find anything about it so far...

(The US cover via Amazon)

(The UK cover, courtesy of Bloomsbury)

And ironically, while I'm taking my social media sabbatical, I've been nominated for a SHORTY award.
Let's see...
...
Locus Magazine, the newspaper of the Science Fiction and Fantasy World, has put up its 2013 poll and survey online:
http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2014/PollAndSurvey.html
You can vote for the books and stories you read in 2013, and more, and you should. And fill out the survey: it tells them (and everyone) who reads SF. As long as you include your name, email and survey information, your votes will get counted.
And if you do not feel like filling out a survey it's also an excellent round up of the best of the year in novels and shorter work, art and non-fiction.
...
For the last 5 years I've been doing annual doodles for the National Doodle Day -- now Doodle 4 NF -- an annual fundraiser for the Neurofibromatosis Network. I've done two doodles. So far this year, I've only done one, "The Clown-Shoes of Cthulhu", which is up on their website, and which I drew in in an OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE signing tour book:

They do not get auctioned until May, by which time there will be another doodle to join it...
...
PEN International (the writer and artist's organisation, of which I'm a member) sent out a letter to the Russian Government protesting the "gay propaganda" laws, the criminal blasphemy laws and the laws that criminalise defamation, and I was one of the signatories.
I noticed people on the Guardian website wondering why PEN wasn't protesting about other bad things elsewhere: it does. Lots of them. Look: http://www.pen-international.org/
Mostly because, as you'll probably know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm a Free Speech absolutist. (Here's me explaining why: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html). And because I found myself remembering 1986 and protesting Clause 28 (later Section 28) with a comic...

This was the comic I did, drawn by Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham. Not exactly subtle, but it was agitprop and I was much younger and less subtle then. (For the complete comic, go to Bryan's website.)
It was in a comic called AARGH! (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) edited by Alan Moore, who has wandered into my life in two different ways this week. Firstly, Jackie Estrada is doing a Kickstarter to make a book of the photos she's taken at San Diego Comic-Con over the years, and includes this picture, in which the strangeness of perspective makes Jack Kirby and Alan Moore look even more different in height than they actually were. Sometimes I think this photo makes it look like Alan is the size of Gort, the eight-foot tall robot from The Day The Earth Stood Still, while Jack is normal-sized Klaatu, and sometimes I think that it looks like Alan is normal-sized and Jack looks like something Alan would have brought along to snack upon, were he not a vegetarian.

(Check out Jackie's Kickstarter. It has many more amazing photos on the Kickstarter page, and I cannot imagine how many photos that will delight comics lovers there will be in the book.)
The other Alan Moore-related news came about because I ran into Dave Gibbons in Las Vegas in early December, and he told me about a book they were putting together showcasing Watchmen original art. I reminded Dave that he and Alan had given me a page as a thank you when we were all much younger, and he suggested I might put it in the book.
As Dave says on this interview page...

I was talking to Neil Gaiman a couple of weeks ago — managed to have a catch-up with him over a cup of tea, which was great — and I mentioned this project to him and he’s got one particularly prime page that Alan (Moore) and I gave him back in the day when he used to help us with sourcing quotations and so on. He’s got the dream sequence — the Nite Owl dream sequence where there are, I think, like 20 panels on the page. So that’s a real iconic and favorite page.

You can see the page itself (and others) much larger than it is below at http://13thdimension.com/exclusive-first-look-at-watchmen-artifact-edition-from-idw/

And I only discovered when it came out of its frame, that when I'd had framed in 1987 I wasn't thinking about acid-free mounts and museum-quality glass and the kinds of things I think about when people give me art these days, and I should have.
(The story of what I did to help on Watchmen and why they gave me the page is here on the blog: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/08/please-stop-my-assistant-becoming-mad.html -- and the link to the 1989 Brian Hibbs interview with a me whom I barely recognise is at http://thedreaming.holycow.com/2008/08/05/gaiman-interview-with-brian-hibbs/)
...
So, signing the PEN Open Letter was something I did this week as a writer.
This video was something I did because it made me smile when I was asked. I suspect that Derren Brown, Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett and co. did it for the same reason. And they did it better than I did:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/video/2014/feb/07/learn-russian-protest-anti-gay-laws-sochi-winter-olympics-video

...
You have six days left to listen to Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle, a trimmed version of his Edinburgh Show, which I never saw, so I am glad I heard it on the radio. I've been listening to the Beatles while writing recently -- I'd call it comfort listening, except I've barely listened to them since I was in my early teens, so Mitch's history-rant-pontification-and-occasional-parodic-songs came along at just the right time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03szxdh
(That'll work on a computer for the next six days. If you follow the link on a tablet or phone, it won't work outside the UK. So use an app like TuneIn Radio and search for Mitch Benn, and it will come up instantly...)
...
And for Charles Dickens' Birthday (it's his 202nd Birthday today), I'm reposting the reading I did, in Dickensian beard and clobber, at the New York Public Library, just before Christmas: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/charles-dickens-christmas-carol-neil-gaiman-and-molly-oldfield
If you want to hear Molly Oldfield telling you interesting things about Dickens' reading tours and secret museums, followed by me reading the version of A Christmas Carol from Dickens' hand-annotated and edited prompt copy, now is your chance.

Labels: Aargh, Bryan Talbot, Dave Gibbons, Dickens, doodles, Locus awards, Mitch Benn, National Doodle Day, Watchmen, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

half a lifetime?

The editor at CBS Sunday Morning asked if I had any photos of my son Mike back at the period when I first had the idea for The Graveyard Book - late 1985. I looked. We really didn't have any. I wandered next door and asked Mary (his mum, my former wife and for these last five years my friend and next-door neighbour) if she had any photos from back then. "No," she said. Then, "Do you mean those transparencies? I have them in an envelope somewhere." She vanished and came back with a large manila envelope from a long time ago. "Here."

Half a lifetime ago -- literally -- I was nearly 25, and working for magazines. Henry Fikret, who photographed a lot of the interviews I did, volunteered to take some photos of me and my family, and he did.A week later the envelope arrived, and I realised that everything he shot was on colour transparencies -- like huge slides -- and I was never sure what do with them, other than being fairly sure I couldn't take them down to Boots the Chemist and have prints knocked out. So they stayed in their envelope, and they kept their secrets, and were forgotten.

Yesterday I had the transparencies scanned, and finally got to see lots of pictures I had never actually seen before of Holly as a baby, Mike at the time that I would have watched him riding his tricycle around the graveyard, and me... at exactly half my age: A young journalist who had sold a very small handful of short stories and two non-fiction books, with dreams of writing fiction and comics. At the time I was dressing in grey, but was getting tired of the way that you would buy something grey and take it home and discover that it was a blueish grey or a brownish grey, and wondering if I'd have the same problem if I just started to dress in black.

And half a lifetime on, it seemed like it might be good to put one up here. I checked, and Mary didn't mind. What odd clothes we wore back then. What big glasses. And look, my hair is practically normal.





So long ago, and it went like the blink of an eye.

...

Birthday wishes are flooding in from around the globe. I wish I could reply to everyone personally, but it would take the next 365 days... so thank you. Thank you all.

And a particular thank you to Garrison Keillor, who announced my birthday on NPR and who also told me that on my thirteenth birthday they burned Slaughterhouse 5, and that on my ninth birthday Sesame Street was born. The Writers Almanac is a marvellous thing.

...

In January I will be part of a free concert for all ages on January 16, 2010, at 7pm, in the World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York. I'll be the narrator for the performance of Peter and the Wolf, performed by the http://www.knickerbocker-orchestra.org (whose website you should visit to get details).

Kissing is about spreading germs (and this is a good thing), a scientist says.

Alan Moore is leaping aboard the Underground magazine bandwagon. Following the success of IT and OZ, Alan's Dodgem Logic is coming out. There's a great interview with Alan at http://www.mustardweb.org/dodgemlogic/

(And enormous congratulations to Alan, who is now a grandfather, and to Leah and John, who are now parents, and Edward Alec Moore-Reppion, who is now, um, born. A Scorpio, like his grandfather and his whatever-exactly-I am, sort of honorary great-uncle or something. Not that we Scorpios believe in that sort of thing, of course.)

Again, thank you all for the birthday wishes...

Labels: birthdays, Dodgem Logic, Garrison Keillor, NPR, Peter and the Wolf, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

From Before He Was A Wizard...

Found it, in a box in the attic, filled with mid-80s softcore porn mags containing interviews, book or film reviews, or articles, all by me. (When asked why, back then, I would explain that I sold my first article to a "respectable magazine" who paid 80 pounds for it and never printed it, and my second, because the first wouldn't take it, to UK Penthouse, who paid 300 pounds and printed it in the next issue, and really, it was decided for me then.)

I don't like the title, and I do know how to spell Judge Dredd and Roscoe Moscow, but here's a nice pen-portrait of Alan Moore written at the end of 1985, published in the March 1986 issue of Knave, some months before the first issue of Watchmen was published. (I'd read the first three issues by then, in lovely Dave Gibbons photocopies.)

Again, click on the pictures for an oversized, readable version.

Also found in one copy of Knave, and scanned in, a long-lost Alan Moore short story called SAWDUST MEMORIES. But I don't think Alan would want it posted, so I won't.

And now it's found, I'll sign the Knave with the Alan interview in it, and donate it to the CBLDF, and someone else can explain to their loved ones that they bought it for the articles. (A moment of ruefully remembering the teenage heartbreak when I discovered that someone had thrown away the men's magazine -- SWANK -- with the Vaughn Bode/Berni Wrightson Purple Pictorial mermaid two-pager in it that I'd found in a Streatham grotty used bookshop when I was fourteen.)

(Edit to add, here's a lovely recent interview with Alan from Wired.)

Labels: 23 years ago, journalism, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

memo from jet lag town

Maddy and Holly and I had dinner last night with The Graveyard Book producer. Maddy and I were both a bit jet-lagged -- still are. Holly now has honey-coloured hair which would render her immune to jet lag. (Well, that and the fact she now lives in England and didn't actually have to fly anywhere.)

I'm reading Samuel R. Delany's About Writing right now, because I have a very short list of books I really learned about writing from when I was a young thing who wanted to be a writer, and Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw was about half of them (the other half was probably the Reginald Bretnor-edited book of essays by diverse hands, The Craft of Science Fiction). About Writing is a wonderful book that should be read by anyone who wants to be, or is already, a writer. It contains seven essays, four letters and five interviews.

I was just struck by this paragraph from one of the letters -- to someone who wishes he or she was a writer, but probably isn't. And I thought, I should put it up here for all the people who write to me convinced that they would be happy if only they were writers.

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing -- good writing -- does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder -- so eventually the writer must stall out into silence.The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death (if we're lucky the two may happen at the same time: but they are still two, and their coincidence is rare), the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying - and often drives us mad. (In a letter to Allen Tate, the poet Hart Crane once described writing as "dancing on dynamite.") So if you're not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.

(Hey, I thought when I read that, at least I'm not a drunk.)

Over at Waterstones there's an interview that I did with Terry Pratchett, filled with the kind of odd little edits and rewrites that remind me why I left journalism, but which won't be visible to anyone else.


Hi Neil,

I just saw a press release from D3Publisher announcing that they've got the publishing rights to...Coraline (The Game)! I've only seen the press release on a trade only site currently, but it implies it will be multiformat (including handheld) and that,

"Coraline (The Game) is a surrealistic adventure game that will enthrall gamers of all ages with its moody atmosphere, engaging narrative and cast of colorful characters. The console products are being developed by Papaya Studios, and the handheld products are being developed by ART."

From that it sounds like it could be in the same kind of style as American McGee's Alice (which was superb).

I can't find anything else about it (on the publisher's or either developer's sites), so is there anything else you can tell us about this please? When we can expect to see it released? And on what platforms? Any and all information gratefully received! Thanks in advance.

I saw an early proposal for the game, which looked intriguing, but that was the last thing I heard or saw. If and when I get more I'll happily post about it on the blog. There's a few quotes about it here.

Subterranean Press wanted me to mention that they're putting the names of anyone who preorders a copy of their edition of The Graveyard Book directly from them in the back of their book.


Hi Neil,

I followed the link to the UK Graveyard Book site and eagerly clicked on the signed hardcover slipcase thingy-whatsit preorder button, because I'm like that and get excited by people scribbling on my books. Unfortunately the Bloomsbury page for the book doesn't seem to have a preorder button. Do you know if it's sold out already, or if somebody at Bloomsbury just dropped the ball?

Cheers,
Chris

I went over to http://www.thegraveyardbook.co.uk/ section on the books, and the preorder buttons were there -- you had to linger on the book cover for a moment for the preorder button to appear. The limited one brought up:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/BookCatalog/ProductItem.asp?S=1&sku=22047563

Which seems to be a way to have Bloomsbury email you when it's ready to preorder. I'm not sure. If you're in the UK you could also just head down to your local bookshop and give them the ISBN and have them pre-order it for you... (I'll check with Bloomsbury and see if I'm not missing something.)

Remember when the e-petition to have Alan Moore honoured went up? The Prime Minister's office has responded -- although not with the proper response, which would have been "YES! WHAT A FINE IDEA! WE SHALL MAKE HIM OFFICIAL WIZARD OF ALL ENGLAND AND SET HIM TO TURNING LEAD INTO GOLD! WITH AN OFFICIAL POINTY HAT!" But at least they don't actually rule it out.

Right. Back to the day. Too many people to see, or at least, look at blearily...

Labels: Bloomsbury, Muels Aronlyde, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England, writing

Alan Moore knows the Score (as of half-time, anyway),

The Annotated Dracula introduction is finished and delivered, as is The 13 Clocks introduction. (Still to do: an introduction to Cabell's Jurgen and to Brian Aldiss's Hothouse, and then no more introductions for a long time.) Meanwhile, The Graveyard Book is in its very last pages. I might finish today or tomorrow. There's still revising and fixing to do, but it's so close to the end I can taste it.

Dear Mr. Neil,

In your last post, you said:

I went back to writing it all in UK English as it's set in the UK, and we'll fix things in the copyedit.

Wait wait wait wait! Don't fix things! It's fun to read UK English. American brains need the work, and we need to know that we're not the only English speakers in the world. UK English came first!

Point taken, and I didn't mean to come across quite that glibly. The truth is that more than ninety percent of the changes that will get made are copyediting changes that are pretty much invisible to the reader, and are things I think of as House Style anyway. Whether you have double or single speech marks, for example. In the US edition colour will, I have no doubt be spelled without a u and towards will probably become toward. And I doubt that anybody will notice. Sometimes, if I have a sympathetic copy-editor, I'll go in and fight for specific UK spellings and usages when things are set in England (you may have noticed that grey is spelled like that, and not gray, in the US edition of Stardust).

Overall, I suspect that The Graveyard Book will stay pretty English in terms of vocabulary -- nothing as huge as changing the title of the book. Some words may change like nappie to diaper and cot to crib -- possibly the rubbish bins in the alleyway on the other side of the graveyard might become garbage cans, but really, it's a graveyard on a hill in an old English town. Nobody gets into elevators, and the fish and chip shop at the bottom of the hill will resolutely remain a fish and chip shop.

It's normally not about insulting the intelligence of the reader. With something like Coraline or The Graveyard Book which is going to be given to kids in schools, it's often about making it easier on their teachers by not giving the American children the extra Us in Honor or Honour, and not taking them away from British children. (The Canadian children will, I'm afraid, continue to cope as best they can, and some of them will probably sensibly wait for the French edition anyway.)

Help! I'm in need of legal advice regarding ownership rights in collaborations, particularly an artist and writer. Is there a trustworthy online resource about such matters, either for free advice or to locate reputable counsel? Thank you.

-Kay

Not that I know of, but I'll post this in case someone has any suggestions. (The Scrivener's Error blog, over at http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/ is very useful and smart. But it is a blog.)

O.K I've looked it up in about four online American dictionarys and pavement seems to have pretty much the same definition as it does in Britain! Whats the definition that you have heard?

Keep up the good work!

Adam.

From http://www.answers.com/pavement&r=67

pave·ment (pāv'mənt)
n.

1. 1. A hard smooth surface, especially of a public area or thoroughfare, that will bear travel.
   2. The material with which such a surface is made.
2. Chiefly British. A sidewalk.

I mean definition one, as opposed to definition two.

Dear Neil,

I'm not sure if you've heard of FAWM (February Album Writing Month), but it's the musical equivalent of NaNoWriMo. This year over 1400 people have signed up to the challenge of writing 14 songs in 28 days... well, 14 1/2 in 29 days, this being a leap year and all...

One MJ Hibbet has written a song that caught my attention, and I thought you might enjoy it while you rest your writing hand and have a cuppa. It's called "Alan Moore" and you can find it at:

http://www.fawm.org/songs.php?id=78

Incidentally I also penned a little piece yesterday that I called "The Mouse Circus" (http://www.fawm.org/songs.php?id=465) because that's what it made me think of. It was then pointed out to me that you have links with Mr Bobo's Remarkable Mouse Circus. I'm not sure that they are the same circus. Maybe we've visited separate ones? I wonder how many there are in the world?

Best wishes

Peter

And now there is a video of the Alan Moore song. (Alan has always maintained that it is a wise thing to have a name that rhymes. As he once said, "'Alan Moore knows the score'. It's because it rhymes. What else were they going to say... 'Jamie Delano plays with Meccano'? Neil Gaiman... doesn't really rhyme with anything, does it?")

Labels: UK vs US words, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

permanently defiled

Lots and lots of you are sending me messages saying things like

I'm sure loads of people are sending you this link:

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02132008.shtml

about Alan Moore.

It made me smile!


Béatrice

And it made me smile too.

We'll close the polls on the Which Free Book Vote tomorrow, but the final results of the vote are, I think, at this stage, predictable, considering they took on this pattern by the time the first hundred people had voted, and have only wavered by a percentage point here and there since. As you can see here, we're now pushing 26,000 votes, and the pattern hasn't changed. American Gods sits in the lead with 28% of the vote, Neverwhere has 21% of the vote, the three short story collections have about 28% of the vote between them, trailed by Stardust at 9% and Anansi Boys and Coraline at 7% each.

(Interesting, as Harper Collins would have gone for Stardust, and I really didn't know which to put up but would have expected Smoke and Mirrors to be very high on the list.)

I am enjoying the author's preferred text version of Neverwhere on my iPod. Here it is surrounded by British words and British accents from various BBC podcasts (including the Archers) so any Americanisms stand out, such as Richard Mayhew's use of the word "hooker". You are too good with words for this to be a mistake so what was the thinking in using Americanisms in a book that is otherwise very English, and proud of it?

You're too kind, but, honestly, after 16 years out here, as Sherlock Holmes said when chided by Watson for an Americanism, "my well of English seems to be permanently defiled".

On Neverwhere (which I'd started writing before ever I came to America) I suspect the words that are a problem are either:

a) used mostly because they're words used in London too. Take "hooker". A quick google of the Guardian website threw up the following passage from The Guardian,

Thus encouraged, the media have followed suit. Everywhere in the past week, reporters referred to "working girls" - that is, when they were not describing the women as simply "girls" or "vice girls" or "hookers", as in the Mirror's "Hooker No 2 Found Dead", or "tarts", courtesy of the Telegraph's Simon Heffer.

along with about 3000 other uses of the word "hooker" or "hookers" by Guardian writers, many of which were talking about Rugby players, some of which were talking about people named Hooker, and the rest of which were all using the word to describe sex workers (often foreign or at least exotic). It may be an Americanism, but it's one that successfully crossed the Atlantic.

or sometimes it may be that,

b) the Neverwhere audio edition was recorded by Harper Collins from the edition of their text, which contains "sidewalks" rather than "pavements" (a pavement in the US means something else, not the thing on the side of the road you walk along) and a few things like that. If you read the Hodder Headline UK edition of Neverwhere while listening to the audio recording you may well find a word here or there that's different, and they may, in some cases, be the words that trouble you.

(Oddly enough, I wrote Chapter One of The Graveyard Book using American idioms -- "cribs" and "diapers" rather than "cots" and "nappies" -- as it was going to be read by my US publisher first, and then felt weird, so in the following chapters I went back to writing it all in UK English as it's set in the UK, and we'll fix things in the copyedit.)

Labels: UK vs US words, voting, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

Kids! Save! Money!

It looks like Odd and the Frost Giants is on sale from Amazon.co.uk at 90% off. They're selling it for 10 pence... It might be a mistake, or it might be a loss leader, and it's not like it's expensive at a pound either. But I thought I ought to tell you, as Amazon tend to honour their mistakes. And remember, it's not out until March. (And it's being illustrated by Mark Buckingham. Hurrah!) (Depending on where you live, it may only be worth it if you get a few copies to spread around to friends.)

[Edit to add, I'm afraid they've just whacked on a 90p "sourcing fee" bringing it back to a pound.]

[[Later: And it's now back to a full pound again.]]


With the money you save you could nip over to Todd Klein's website at http://www.kleinletters.com/and buy a beautiful signed print that Alan Moore wrote and Todd lettered. You can read about it at http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=589

(And to add a little colour, here is a picture of the aforementioned Greatest Living Englishman drinking tea on my birthday.)

Labels: Todd Klein, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

Regaining solidity

I seem to have been asleep for most of the last 26 hours.

My world seems to have shrunk to, Slept. Got up. Went back to sleep again. Repeat. (Somewhere in there I blogged and even answered the phone, although I'm not sure who I spoke to or what I said.)

"You're looking a bit better," said Lorraine, my assistant, when I wandered downstairs just now, on her way to walk the dog. "You look less transparent."

I feel a bit less transparent, but not entirely solid yet. I think maybe I'll eat something, and then go back to sleep once more.

The weather when I arrived home was summer-hot, as if the colours of the changing leaves were some kind of mistake. Now it's autumn and rainy and chill...

...

Susanna Clarke has done a beautiful interview with Alan Moore for the Daily Telegraph.

I only just discovered that Terri Windling didn't know that Stardust started at her house, but it makes it even nicer that she was at the Premiere. Here's Matthew Vaughn having a surreal Stardust-and Thor week. My favourite bit was,

To Paris for the NRJ movie (the French equivalent of MTV) awards. I was with my wife, so the press line went berserk and I was literally pushed off the red carpet. Claudia was asked why she was there - to which she replied it was to support her husband and his film.
And where is he again? Getting soaked in the rain looking like a deranged fan. She then realises that I'm not next to her. She points to me and a disappointed security thug lets me on the red carpet.

Labels: sleep, Susanna Clarke on the Newspaper, too much globetrotting and not enough staying at home with the dog, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

Chengdu and elsewhere

I have a little Chengdu information:

On Aug 24th at 7.00pm at the Chengdu Bookworm there is some kind of meet-and-chat with the visiting authors (I think) and the public, and I expect some signing.

And on August the 25th at 3.00pm I'm going to give a talk on The Nature of Fantasy at the conference hall of the science and technology museum.

And here's a Daily Scans link to a two page comic that Mark Buckingham and I did to celebrate Alan Moore's 50th Birthday: http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/3895760.html

Neil- Sorry to waste your time, but as someone who is away from home frequently, I thought you might have some insight on the matter. I am starting a new job next month that will require me to be away for extended periods. How do you cope with doing this? My daughter is eight, and she is having a rough time with the idea of Daddy being away (and I am as well-and not taking the job is not really an option), and I'm hoping you can help. Please don't use my name if you post this.Thanks!

It's always hard. For years we never went on holiday, because I was always so glad to be home and Going Somewhere felt like work. Being home, with my books and my family, ah, that was a grand adventure....

When Maddy was that age and younger I went away for several months to work on American Gods, and I'd still read to her every night, over the phone (she'd have a copy of the book as well at her end), which somehow helped. She'd still get half an hour or forty minutes every night, and I'd read her a chapter and then we'd talk. We'd also write poems in email back and forth. It helped -- having a rhythm, having something predictable and time that was hers. And trying to make it as much of a game as we could. But it's not perfect. And it's never easy.

Labels: Chengdu, China, going away, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England

This is not a blog post

I'm still proofreading the second volume of ABSOLUTE SANDMAN. It's not just proofreading the comics -- I just finished going through the script for Sandman 23 -- the first time I'd read it since I wrote it back in 1989...


Which means I'm not writing the story of how "Ivory Bill" Stiteler and I figured out what was wrong with the house network (unsurprisingly it sort of had something to do with the photo back in this icy entry), and I'm barely blogging about the Cornish Tamworth Racing Pigs and my puzzlement over the animal rights spokesperson's quote at the end of the article, which seems to come down in favour of killing the pigs as long as they don't have to race. If I was a pig, I can confidently assert that I'd rather race than be eaten. And I'm not going to blog about the campaign to get Northampton's Finest Son an honour of some kind (http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AlanMoore/) which seems very sweet, but frankly I'm not interested unless they make him Official Wizard of England. Now that would be an honour. An MBE, on the other hand doesn't seem the sort of thing that Alan needs. He'd just put it down somewhere and it would wind up under the sofa. But if they made him Official Wizard he would wear a hat.

Over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/05/memorial-day-bee-update.html you can see photos and even some videos of Bill, Sharon, Lorraine and Cabal-the-wonderdog a bee-ing on Saturday in my absence. That's a proper blog entry. (This isn't.) And Sharon was so impressed by Clan Apis that she's decided to write a graphic novel about Peregrine Falcons, and is looking for an artist -- learn more at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/05/seeking-comic-book-artist.html.


I know you're fond of the Web Elf, and we're all fond of the Web Elf for doing such a great job with the site -- but if things ever get tough, and you've got to let her/him/them go, you could always be your own webmaster, like this author:


http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/


I've never heard of her, have no idea if her writing's any good, but that's a great idea for a site -- if I wasn't poor and all, I'd run out and buy her book right now. And thanks many times over for your own site, it's the best!-- Teresa C.


Yup. That's the kind of website that makes you want to buy the book and give chocolates to the author. How cool.



How did you get ahold of so many Jack Benny recordings?-Ticia



I think I got them at http://www.otrcat.com/jackbenny.htm.

...


Now back to proofreading (and colour-checking, and obsessing over details on) A Game of You...

Labels: facts about pigs, the hell of proofreading, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England