Sacheverell. Saccheveral. Sachevarall. Sod it.

Dear Neil,
If somebody does answer your question regarding nftcd will you post it on your journal please? It's messing with my mind and freaking me out a bit. The only thing that I can say, is that it reminds me of the once official donnie darko film site (which is sadly now defunct as I have just discovered) which explained the film by working through riddles in flash. Anybody who has visited it remembers it as peculiar. But certainly not as peculiar as this
Many thanks,
Anastasia

Yes, Anastasia. But are you sure you want to know...?

It is the mystery that lingers, and not the explanation, as I had Cain say, quoting Sacheverell Sitwell. I've probably misspelled Sacheverell, but frankly I think it's the kind of name that, if you make a good stab it it, you should be awarded points for effort, and it's not like all the Sacheverells in the world are immediately going to write in and complain...

Anyway, for Anastasia and for everyone else who wondered... I've often said that you lot know everything, and several people immediately wrote to me to say things like,

In answer to your question:

http://www.linesandcolors.com/2006/05/26/nfctd-caleb-johnston/

Which is a good explanation, but somehow less satisfying than my idea that by clicking on these things we were powering a hellish device made of owls and body parts in an alternate London....

Labels: Edith and Osbert's Sitwell's brother, Infernal Devices

Small ponder on mysteries...

What is http://www.nfctd.com/home.html ? Why did Hayley Campbell send it to me? I keep playing with it, and I am no nearer to answers, if such things can exist in this context, than I was when I started playing (if, indeed, it was playing, and not powering some diabolical and infernal device...)
...

Someone kindly sent me a graphical representation of what happened when you lot ganged up on and googlebombed Penn Jillette last month...

http://www.blogscope.net/tfcurve.jsp?q=penn%20jillette

...

There's lots of Stardust news over at FOEM -- http://www.foem.org.uk/ -- and you can write in and ask flame-haired scribe (and producer of The Big Fat Quiz of the Year) Jane Goldman your Stardust Movie questions.

Labels: blogscope, conkers, Jane Goldman, Stardust, strange victorian goats owls anatomical bits and people with moustaches

Year of the Pig

Happy Year of the Pig, to all of us.

Pigs, I learned as a boy, reading books, especially young pigs, are loveable, brave, noble and intelligent animals who have adventures.

I hope this year you get to be brave and noble and intelligent. But mostly I hope you get to have adventures.

(As G. K. Chesterton once said, An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered... )

Labels: G K Chesterton, Piglet, What adventures are, Wilbur, Year of the Pig

Cale. Mckean. Cat. Bag.

Dave McKean has just done the cover for the new John Cale boxed set. I feel vaguely paternal about this, because many years ago I got a phone call from John Cale, rather out of the blue, asking if I could suggest an artist for his autobiography, and after he listed all the things he wanted the artist to do, I said "You need Dave McKean" and gave him Dave's phone number. (I told him that if Dave couldn't do it, I'd figure out four or five different artists to do what he wanted done.) But Dave did it, and then John did the narration for Dave's film Neon, and now Dave's done the cover for the Cale boxed set -- a cover that contains references visually to John's entire magnificent career. (I am big John Cale fan, I should add, and Fragments of a Rainy Season would be one of my Desert Island CDs.)

In addition to painting the cover, Dave's also recorded a sort of artist's commentary on the painting and on John. If you head over to http://www.john-cale.com/ and you click on the painting (or just nip over to http://clients.onyro.com/emi/cale/) you will learn much about art, and Mr Cale, and Dave, and be amused besides because he's very funny. (And it's worth it, frankly, just to hear Dave McKean saying "Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather...")

Labels: Dave McKean, how do I get this thing to just put _me_ as a tag without it expanding it to _me looking grumpy_, John Cale, Venus in Furs

Worth waiting for...

In 1985 or 1986, watching my son Mike wheel his tricycle around the graveyard next door to our house that we used because we didn't have a garden, I thought of an idea for a story about a small boy who wandered into a graveyard and was raised by dead people. Then, deciding I wasn't a good enough writer, I didn't write it.

Over the years I'd pick up a scrap of paper and try to write a scene from near the beginning, conclude I wasn't good enough yet, and put it aside.

Recently I came to the conclusion that I wasn't getting any better. So I wrote a short story called "The Witch's Headstone", which will probably be chapter 4 or 5 of the book.

And today I finished writing Chapter One of The Graveyard Book, and it's a real book. I know it's a real book because there are all sorts of things I don't quite know yet, and I can't wait to find them out.

Happiness.

Labels: finishing things, starting things, The Graveyard Book

Valentine

You know, the readers of this blog, between you all, know everything. Last year I posted about Joe Hill saying
One of my favourite short stories from last year was called "Best New Horror" by an author I'd not previously heard of named Joe Hill, in PS publishing"s Postscripts #3. His website's http://www.joehillfiction.com/index.htm , and I just noticed that he has a collection out, 20th Century Ghosts. I don't have much time for reading currently, but I'm going to order a copy.
and the next morning I got an email from someone named Jeff saying,
Thanks for your post on Joe Hill yesterday. It happened to be the other half of a coincidence that gave me a fun few minutes of detective work on the web. Perhaps you knew this already and were being coy, but it turns out Hill is actually Joe Hill King and his parents are backwoods Maine hermits who have dabbled in the writing game themselves from time to time.

See, I came home late with a copy of the new Entertainment Weekly and, working from the back, read Stephen King's latest essay wherein he gave a shout-out to a friend of his kids' named Shane Leonard. Good for him. Then I came upstairs to peruse a few blogs, clicked on the Hill link you provided and somewhere on there spotted a nod to Hill's web master -- a guy named Shane Leonard...

Like I say, between you, you people know everything, or you figure it out. It was something that, now I knew it, I decided not to remember or to mention here -- mostly because I could see why Joe was doing it under his own steam, and I thought that was a good thing. I was pleased I'd liked the story first, before realising that the author was the nice young man I'd met at the Season of Mists signing in Boston, fourteen years earlier.

Anyway, I loved Twentieth Century Ghosts, and was then very surprised by Heart-Shaped Box, which I had expected to be quiet and literary, like the short stories, and was instead a terrific roller coaster, almost impossible to stop reading. I loved it, took pleasure in blurbing it, and was extremely pleased to see this New York Times review by Janet Maslin who seems to have enjoyed it just as much as I did.

I see from his website -- http://www.joehillfiction.com/ -- that he's now, as of yesterday -- on an author signing tour. Go and see him if he's coming near you. Tell him I said Hi.

(So far this year, my favourite book is Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg. It's the nearest thing to a sequel to Charmed Lives she's written -- a Chrestomanci novel with Cat in it, and a lot more besides. The sort of book that makes you sad on page 400 because you only have a hundred pages to go and then it'll be done.)


Dear Neil;

Furtherto your comments on "The Land of Green Ginger", I remember seeing it televised in the late '50s. I searched the IMDB and it was Episode 6 of Season 1 of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" shown 18 April 1958. Each episode of the series dramatized a (usually) well known fairy/Arabian Nights/fantasy story. I really can't actually remember the episodes but I do remember the longing for the next episode in the series.

Cheers,

Paul Burrows

Oddly enough, some years ago I bought the video from someone on eBay. It was an odd sort of thing, not really funny, not quite sure what it was, and I wondered if it was the experience of working on it that sent Langley back to the material for what became the 1965 edition of the book, which is much sharper and more knowing and odd. It is out there, and probably pretty soon it'll probably show up on YouTube.

...

This came in from a very happy Elizabeth, the manager at DreamHaven...

42 orders so far. Your fans rock! You can tell them I said so. Also that we will fill orders as fast as possible, but there may be some delay, because the manager is now teary-eyed and it slows down her typing.

Love,
Elizabeth

I'm as grateful as she is.

...and right now I find myself playing, over and over, "When My Ship Comes In" a piece of music I found on the Fabulist, by the North Atlantic Explorers.

And over at http://polloxniner.blogs.com/polloxniner/2006/02/_having_lived_l.html, is the North Atlantic Explorers cover of Lloyd Cole's "I Will Not Leave You Alone", which is a perfect Valentine's Day sort of a song, if you wanted one. (My very favourite Valentine song is probably Thea Gilmore's "Holding Your Hand" but I couldn't find it up online, so I am not linking to it.)

Labels: A little Valentine's Wish, Joe Hill, North Atlantic Explorers, Sherlock Holmesery, The Land of Green Ginger, The Pinhoe Egg

Psst. Dreamhaven. Pass it on...

I've been a fan of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis for over fifteen years, probably since Terry Pratchett and I did our first signing there for Good Omens (had I signed there before? I think so, but I can't remember. I first met owner Greg Ketter in 1987, on a train from Brighton to London, though). I like Greg Ketter and the staff, I love getting my books there (they have things I never see anywhere else that I WANT. I'm sure that lots of bookshops sell the annotated archy and mehitabel, but if I walk into DreamHaven something like that is the first thing I see. Happiness).

A few years ago I gave them www.neilgaiman.net, which I had, as a storefront, mostly because I got tired of replying to people who wanted to know where they could buy something -- anything -- by me "DreamHaven Books." I sign stuff for them when I pass by.

Some people think I have a stake in the shop or something, and I don't, other than a desire to still have it around as somewhere to do my shopping or to do signings or to phone and ask weird book-related questions. I've seen too many good bookshops go down in the last decade.

Greg's published a few of my books and audio books. They've even functioned as a maildrop for me over the years. Good people, good bookshop (and comics shop, and toys, oddments and even, in the backroom, eye-watering reading matter for adults only shop). (I don't know of any other shop that has "Vintage Sleaze" as a category for used books.)

I got an alarming email from Greg this morning...

We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreaked
terrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly but
insurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in current
business, this really will hurt. I don't like charity but if you could
encourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.
Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months and
I don't want to make it four.

You can find them online at http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com. Their current catalogues are up there, for new and for used stuff. There's cool new stuff. There's stuff on sale.

If you want stuff by me -- or by people like Charles Vess or Dave McKean, who've worked with me, go and explore their http://neilgaiman.net site. Lots of signed stuff, and things you really can't find elsewhere. (They have three audio CDs, for example -- one's a double CD -- with many stories and such not recorded anywhere else.)

And if you're in the Minneapolis area, pop in. It's a big purple building. You can't miss it.

Go buy books from them. And tell other people. This is me being selfish. I want to buy books at DreamHaven for a long time to come. Good things die when people forget.

Labels: DreamHaven Books

Extremely Short Legal Entry

This Minnesotan law reads as if it was written by two different people. And that it should be sung by a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque politician, with a chorus of lady lawmakers in the background. http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=631

Also, it made me miss Mike Ford, who would have done it better.

...

And the ORACULAR INSTRUMENT OF DIVINATION now has its own webpage, which should be more long-lasting and useful than the one in the blog a couple of entries ago: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/8ball/

Labels: chorus of lady lawmakers, poet laureate

Something good...

I've mentioned on this blog how much I enjoyed, both as a boy and as an adult reading it aloud, Noel Langley's wry and delightful Arabian Nights fantasia The Land of Green Ginger, a book that Langley (best known, I think, for his work on the script of the film The Wizard of Oz) wrote and rewrote three times over a thirty year period. (My favourite is the second version from 1966, which has twelve and a half chapters.)

This morning's post brought me a book and a letter, from Paul Durrant, an English publisher, explaining that my mentioning The Land of Green Ginger on my blog had caused him to find and reread it, and that he had gone on a quest for more Noel Langley books, the rarest of which was Desbarollda the Waltzing Mouse, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Which, when he found it, he liked so much, he got the rights to republish it, and did (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Desbarollda-Waltzing-Mouse-Noel-Langley/dp/1905946023/).

The book was Desbarollda. I read the first paragraph and was hooked. A sixty-three page eighteenth century novel in the grand manner about a waltzing mouse. Of course.

I found five pages up at Amazon, and am reposting the first two pages of the first chapter here. Click on them to see them large enough to read. If you're going to like it, you'll know pretty quickly:




I'm already putting a list together of people I need to get copies for (let's see.... Susanna Clarke, Ellen Kushner...)

Labels: Desbarollda the Waltzing Mouse, Doing Good, Noel Langley, The Land of Green Ginger

Now We Are Six

I think this was originally the Webelf's idea. She then enlisted Dan Guy into her web of madness. I agreed that if you were going to have a blog birthday toy that nothing could possibly be more appropriate, and then I played my part in its creation by a) suggesting that a Swami costume was much more appropriate than a wizard's hat and b) declining to take a day off work to rent a Swami costume and have my photo taken in it and c) finally saying "What, like you don't do wonders in Photoshop for a living? Fake it."

So...

First of all, THIS IS NOT A TOY. THIS IS A SERIOUS INSTRUMENT OF DIVINATION. It should only be used by those prepared to approach it with the proper sense of reverence and mystical awe, those among you who are emotionally and spiritually prepared to have the curtain drawn, and to come face to face with YOUR OWN FUTURE.

To begin with, the quaestor must put himself, herself, itself or themselves in the right frame of mind. A fast is recommended, but not compulsory. Cleanse yourself of all impure thoughts. Tidy your room or perhaps polish the silverware.

Then imagine your question. Frame it in your mind in general terms. Do not seek material gain (the Serious Instrument of Divination will frustrate all efforts to unlock the secrets of lottery numbers or the outcome of sporting events or higher level physics -- not because it does not know -- FOOLISH MORTALS, IT KNOWS ALL -- but because THE WORLD IS NOT YET READY). Seek spiritual enhancement. Seek divine enlightenment.

Then shake the mystical ball of truth. Don't just click on it. Shake it. Honest. Only when it is shaken do the gates of the future swing open and allow information through.

And then, mystically and magically, the information you need will be plucked from the 950,000 words of this blog, and will be placed before you.

The words that you are given are guaranteed to be perfectly applicable to your situation, and will teach you how to react and what to do next. However, if they aren't, or if you don't like them, then shake again and new words will appear, perhaps more applicable, perhaps less so. Only you will know for certain -- only you, and the Oracle.

DO NOT GET INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH THE MYSTICAL AND ORACULAR BALL OF ENLIGHTENMENT. It will win.

There.

Have you read these instructions carefully?

Do you need to read them again?

[For serious Seekers after Truth it is recommended that you print out this post and meditate upon it for several months before you first attempt to draw back the veil. Many true and dedicated Pilgrims on the Road of Oracular Enlightenment have had the contents of this post tattooed upside down upon their stomachs, so that they can read and study and contemplate it when in, for example, the bathtub, the shower or in certain Yogic positions.]

Are you ready?

THEN PREPARE TO BE AMAZED AND CONFOUNDED!

(Please note that the mystical power of the Oracular Instrument of Divination is such that it can only be guaranteed to work here at www.neilgaiman.com and not at feeds, syndications or other such places. Far from being a drawback, this is in fact a TESTAMENT TO ITS EFFICACY! If you are reading this on a feed and you need to consult the oracle, do so at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/now-we-are-six.html)


NOTE -- the Magical Journal 8 ball now has a permanent home at neilgaiman.com, at http://www.neilgaiman.com/oracle/ and will always work there. Here (shrugs) it may or it may not.

Labels: No label can do this post justice so study it carefully and take wisdom from its teachings for entertainment only offer void where prohibited by law