Not quite blog birthday...

My daughter Holly is producing The Vagina Monologues at Bryn Mawr this year. http://events.vday.org/2007/College/Bryn_Mawr_College. Which I would normally not have posted here, but I just discovered from a correspondent that -- in Atlantic Beach Florida -- the play in question has has just been renamed The Hoohaa Monologues, to avoid offending passers-by with small daughters who ask embarrassing questions... which seems, somehow to miss the point on a scale that's positively awesome.

Congratulations to Xeric Award winner Joshua Kemble. Many years ago Dave Sim, eyeing Kevin Eastman's publishing house Tundra and Peter Laird's nascent Xeric Foundation said, "There's a right way and wrong way to lose a million dollars". Tundra is long, long long forgotten, but since September 1992, the Xeric Foundation has given out almost 2 million dollars in grants to self-publishing comics creators. http://www.xericfoundation.com/


I'm on deadline right now, doing a final spit-and-polish on Interworld (very odd, reading and fixing seven year old manuscript), so I shall not tarry here. I'll just point out that tomorrow, the Ninth of February, is this blog's birthday.

And that Danguy and the Webelf have made it the best birthday toy ever. But that will have to wait until tomorrow...

Labels: Hoohah, Interworld, the anticipation of releasing the world's awesomest blog toy, Xeric

From the distant past

Before this blog ever existed, I inhabited other places you could only get to by modem. First Compuserve, then Genie, and then the Well, and answered questions and so on in each place, and hung around. I've no idea if there are any archives anywhere of the Compuserve stuff or the Genie topics, but The Well is still there, I'm glad to say, and every few years I go back and am interviewed and hang around the inkwell.vue area for a few weeks. It's a wonderful place, and accessible to anyone from the web: http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/

So, in context of the current Fragile Things interview, which has only just begun, I found myself reading a post from the 20th of June 2000, written while I was writing American Gods. Which I am reposting a bit of here because a) there's lots more cool stuff like this on the various Well topics I did (here's the first, the second, the third, -- and b) if ever a story was meant to be on this blog, it's this one.


...last week Maddy woke me up early in the morning.

"Daddy," she said, "There's a bat on the kitchen window."

"Grumphle," I said and went back to sleep.

Soon, she woke me up again. "I did a drawing of the bat on the kitchen
window," she said, and showed me her drawing. For a five year old
she's a very good artist. It was a schematic of the kitchen windows,
showing a bat on one of the windows.

"Very nice dear," I said. Then I went back to sleep.

When I went downstairs...

We have, instead of dangling fly papers, transparent strips of gluey
clear plastic, about six inches long and an inch high, stuck to the
windows on the ground floor. When they accumulate enough flies, you
peel them off the window and throw them away.

There was a bat stuck to one. He was facing out into the room. "I
think he's dead," said my assistant Lorraine.

I peeled the plastic off the window. The bat hissed at me.

"Nope," I said. "He's fine. Just stuck."

The question then became, how does one get a bat (skin and fur) off a
fly-strip. Luckily, I bethought me of the Bram Stoker award. After the
door had fallen off (see earler in this topic) I had bought some citrus
solvent to take the old glue to reglue the door on.

So I dripped citrus solvent onto the grumpy bat, edging him off the
plastic with a twig, until a lemon-scented sticky bat crawled onto a
newspaper. Which I put on the top of a high woodpile, and watched the
bat crawl into the logs. With any luck he was as right as rain the
following night...


Of course, if it was now, I'd scan in Maddy's bat drawing to go with it. (I wonder if it's anywhere findable.)

PS. A small, half-puzzled plug for the first corporate publisher blog I've seen that truly doesn't suck: http://olivereader.com/. Technically I suppose they're actually one of my publishers, but that's not why I'm plugging them. I think it's because it's now something I can point publishers at when I say "you could always do a blog..."

PPS: From Dan Guy and the Webelf, the silliest of fun website toys: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/dynamic_term_cloud.php
The new toy! Shows the top twenty terms from each month, growing and shrinking dynamically over time.
Give those two time and they really will make the Blog Post Magic Eightball.

Labels: Compuserve, lemon-scented sticky bats, lost Genie posts, The Well

"...hair that creeps off in the night and devours small animals..."

Susan Henderson's Hair-based interview is up. Copyright issues meant that the most embarrassing photos of all (from a 1996 Wired photoshoot) couldn't be posted, but there are twelve photos nobody's seen before up there, and some commentary. (And if Geoff Notkin finds a replacement punk period photo we'll swap out the one from The Kindly Ones that's up there now and it'll be a lucky thirteen.)
http://litpark.com/2007/02/07/neil-gaiman/

(or try feed://feeds.feedburner.com/litpark if that's too slow)

(By the way, our Googlebomb appears to have now worked -- this website's Penn Jillette rating is now up at #10 -- http://www.google.com/search?q=penn+jillette. Hah!)

Labels: googlebombs can be your friend, Hair

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. )

...

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

Stardusties

A couple of tiny bits of Stardust news.

I was thrilled to hear that Paramount moved the date of release to August 10 2007. Which means we're no longer up against the Simpsons Movie etc.

And Ben Barnes, who plays young Dunstan Thorne (and is thus, apart from Ian McKellen, the first speaking part in the film) was just cast as Prince Caspian. And may be sued by the National Theatre for jumping ship on The History Boys according to the Times.

Labels: Ben Barnes, not being crushed by The Simpsons, posting real actual bits of news without going off on any kind of interesting tangents, Stardust movies

clouds of witness and word

The Webelf wanted clouds made from the years of content on this journal. Dan Guy leapt to her assistance -- Robin to her Batman, Kato to her Green Hornet, Etta Candy to her Wonder Woman. Now you can see the results of his cloud-making work over at:

http://neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/example-words.php
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/term_cloud.html

And you will learn odd things about the blog. (I know I did.)

(The full version, including an extra 200,000 words of Questions and comments not by me is at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/word_cloud.html , but seems less informative the the other two.)

Thanks Elf. Thanks Dan Guy.

And they also tell the story of

Labels: clouds, Dan Guy, Etta Candy, Organon, Webelf Wonders

"...when you live in a godless universe of pain. If the universe was ordered, Neil Armstrong should be the first Neil on Google."

The quote is from Penn's radio show. You can also get it free from iTunes (here's the URL).

Over at Time Magazine they have a round up of the top ten comics/graphic novels of the year. All good choices, although I was surprised by the appearance on the list of some fine reprints (Kings in Disguise, for example.). Still, it was nice for me to see Absolute Sandman on there, mostly because when I wrote it, in 1987-1989, it would have been unthinkable for Time Magazine, or any real-world magazine, to have devoted any space at all to graphic novels or comics on a Best of the Year list. http://www.time.com/time/topten/2006/comics/10.html

Locus's Recommended list for 2006 is up at http://www.locusmag.com/2007/2006RecommendedReading.html


NEIL: JUST READ YOUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS - BUT I SEND YOU SOMETHING AT DREAMHAVEN -WILL THAT GET TO YOUOR DID I IS JUST WASTED MONEY SPEND ON MAILING? ALSO, ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO BE SPENDING SO MUCH TIME IN HOLLYWOOD? LUV YA- CLARE

It'll get to me, don't worry. It just tends not to be a very fast thing.

And no, I'm not going to be spending so much time in Hollywood, that's just where Cat and her office is. The joy of the modern world is that things can move around it very easily, and we decided that it's far better if letters and suchlike go to someone who can look at them that day and figure out what's meant to happen next, rather than be put in a box with my name on it under the counter at DreamHaven and wait for the next time I decide I need a haircut and go down to Hair Police and stop in at DreamHaven to sign stuff for them on the way home.

...

Lots of artists and possibly someone who isn't an artist drew Spider-Man covers for a good cause. Details and you can pick out the blogging not-an-artist at:
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=9528

...

In honor of National Gorilla Suit Day, I did an artist trading card and thought you might enjoy it, a bit.Here's the url: http://www.mcmatz.com/2007/01/ebay_auction_at_4.html I will now slowly back towards the exit and fade away...--Madeline

Oh Mark Evanier and Don Martin, what have you wrought?

Dear Mr Gaiman, I've just finished watching the recording of the Cody's Books readings and Q&A session. I'd never heard you read your work before. It's distressing to find out that not only are you a fantastic author but you are also an evocative oral story teller. Surely you're not allowed to be both? On to my question. (I searched and couldn't find anything specifically on this topic but my apologies if I missed it.) As a writer, do you get a similar feeling of closure/reward/enjoyment when you've created the final climax of a story that you hope your readers will experience when reading it or do you always have one eye on the technicalities of writing? Thank you.Regards, Clare Milner

You're too kind.

And the only answer I can give is neither. Because you're not experiencing it at the same speed. There's a relief at getting to the end, but it's also the relief of getting to the end of something you've been working on for, often, several years. Which doesn't mean you're not affected on an emotional level by scenes or by what happens to characters, or that you don't feel what's happening while you write it. But a reader will read something in a few hours that might have taken you a couple of years or more to write. And that big moment of closure may have been followed by another six months of writing.

Neil,In a post a little while ago you mentioned the reading list John Crowley compiled - which looks absolutely fascinating. You said a couple of the books on the list were your favourites in the world. So that would seem to me a good place to start! Which were they though? Sorry if the answer should be apparent from elsewhere on the site but I couldn't find it...Best wishes
Dominic Hartley

They are Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, a book I adore; and The Songlines by the brilliant Bruce Chatwin (do not write to me and point out that Songlines is factually dodgy sometimes. It's still an amazing book and Chatwin wrote astoundingly well).

...

Do you realise this blog will be six years old on February the Ninth? I've had some ideas of things that we could put up that would be fun and special to celebrate the birthday, but they may not be ready in time...

...

g'day mr. gaiman. or night. or whatever it is, where you're at.i've been going through your blog for a couple of days now... (...) here are a couple of questions that i sincerely want to know the answers to.with all the fame and joy you've attained from writing, aren't you afraid to lose it all in an instant? i don't want to be morbid and all, but with all the hard work you've put in to your works, are you afraid to die?sorry... i wanted to ask j.r.r. tolkien the same thing but he isn't around... you see, i'm scared of dying and i'm poor... what is it like for you who has all the things you've achieved in life?

I remember being scared of dying when I was on the plane from London to New York in mid 1988 with the first half of Dave McKean's Black Orchid art travelling in the plane cabin with me -- these were the painted originals, and there were no copies as Dave, barely out of art school, couldn't have afforded to get them all shot at that point. I was writing Sandman issue two or three back then.

And I knew that if the plane went down Dave would never have redrawn the Black Orchid pages, and it would never come out, and that even if the first couple of Sandmans came out no-one would have known where it was going or what it was going to be. I crossed the Atlantic sweating, mentally keeping that plane in the air all the way.

Nineteen years later, I'm remarkably sanguine about life and death. I'm really lucky, in that I've achieved an awful lot of the things I wanted to do, and some people noticed. If I died soon (something, I should add here, that I have no intention of doing; I like life and all the things that come with it), I'd leave a body of varied and interesting work and three amazing kids behind, and that's more than I ever set out to do or hoped for.

Does that help?
...

I'd like to ask a small favour of those of you who have read down this far. Would anyone reading this, anyone with a blog or a website that is, mind linking to the last post -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/and-in-time-it-took-to-say-that-neil.html -- with the link text Penn Jillette? Given Penn's recent rant about the power and ubiquity of this blog on his radio show, I'd like to mess with his head just a little and see if we can actually google-bomb it so that that entry shows in the top few entries if you google Penn's name.

And sshhh, don't anyone tell him. I want it to be a surprise.

Labels: birthdays, clouds, DreamHaven Books, dying and leaving things behind, finishing things, National Gorilla Suit Day, surprises, Time Magazine, two good books

"...and in the time it took to say that Neil Gaiman wrote another two movies..."

Listen to my friend Penn Jillette, on his astounding radio show (http://www.pennradio.com/) having much too much fun at, er, my expense while doing a whole show about National Gorilla Suit day. I laughed until I couldn't breathe, but I freely acknowledge that it may be slightly less funny if you're not me.

But it's still damn funny. You can download it at...

http://penn.freefm.com/episode_download.php?contentType=36&contentId=258493

Labels: National Gorilla Suit Day, Penn Jillette, times people made fun of me on the radio, You know I wonder if anyone actually reads these things?

A Quick One

Right -- the Black Phoenix Alchemy page of scents for the CBLDF is now up at

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/neverwhere.html

And I'm investigating whether we can do Stardust ones right now (as the Stardust scents that Beth sent were Maddy's favourites).

...

And -- we'll put this up on the FAQ page and so on -- there is now a real address to send stuff that you want to get to my attention, which should work much better than DreamHaven Books (where stuff would sit in a box until the next time I came by). It is,

4470 Sunset Blvd. # 339
Los Angeles, CA 90027
USA

And it's being run by the Mystery Aide. Who is actually (drum-roll) Cat Mihos (http://www.furrytiger.com/), who is going to try and make sure that less of my life falls through the cracks, that I have more time and so on. (Currently lots of the mail coming in through the FAQ line is people who want to interview me, or for me to answer a few questions for their book, dissertation or website, to the point that if I said yes to them all or even to half, I would never get any time to do or write anything else. So those kind of requests, along with anything else, can now be sent to Cat who can at least coordinate them.)

And Cat is also Cat@gaiman.net, should any of you need to reach her directly. She'll be running the LA end of things, and dealing with some of the stuff I simply haven't had the time to get to. (The Fabulous Lorraine is still my PA.)

If you want to send me a book to get signed along with return postage and packaging, though, or buy a signed book, or anything like that, you should still talk to DreamHaven, via their online shop of stuff by me at www.neilgaiman.net website.

Labels: Black Phoenix Alchemy and Scents, CBLDF, DreamHaven Books, neilgaiman.net, The final post about the Mystery Aide