junketty junk

I'm doing a sort of one man press junket right now (although Michelle Pfeiffer will be doing it as well tomorrow). Lots of interviews (MTV Movies, Time Out NY, NY Daily News, Time Magazine and the LA Times today, along with a "round table" interview with about ten journalists and a photo shoot (thank heavens they had a make-up lady for the shoot, who made me look less like a giant panda around the eyes than I really do right now). Tomorrow is the NY Times syndicate and the NY Times, and the NY Post. Then I get on a plane and do it some more.

I'm brain dead, partly from being interviewed out and partly because travel to NY yesterday afternoon proved really problematic -- my flight was cancelled, and I didn't get in until after midnight, on a different airline, on a delayed flight flying via Milwaukee (and at that, I did better than most of the other people on the flight, who had to stay overnight in Minneapolis).

I also decided that the thing you most don't want to hear from a check-in person is what the lady at Midwest Airlines said to me when I showed her the Northwest slip saying they'd put me on MidWest, after I'd made a mad taxi ride from one airport to another. She looked down at it and said "You have got to be kidding!" The flight they'd put me on was oversold and had standby passengers.

But they got me on it somehow, and all was well. I just wish I wasn't so tired.

Regarding raccoons getting through catflaps: a few years back someone set up a computer with image-recognition software to stop their cat bringing in small animals (and incidentally test their image-recognition software). It also stopped a skunk getting in; it should work on raccoons too:

http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm

I don't think it would do any good, seeing that it's all based around the same magnetic cat-door that our raccoons have already figured out how to jimmy. It's very clever, though.

...
And over here -- http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=11038 -- is a little of the Beowulf score.

Labels: junkets, masonic raccoon pictures, why I sometimes would rather jump off a small cliff then get on another plane

A band of bandits

The promotional world for Stardust is starting, which has a nervous author who was convinced that no-one in the world is going to know about the movie, or that it's good, starting to breathe a sigh of relief. There are free screenings starting to get the word out, and according to Google news, if you buy stuff at French Connection you can get free tickets...
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-shoptalk0713,0,2458209.column?coll=ny-entertainment-promo


And I got a phone picture from my friend Kelli Bickman in New York letting me know that new posters have been spotted in Manhattan. They take some elements from the original poster and rearrange them...

(And Kelli says -- Neil.. S.O.S. i've recently fallen prey to a real-estate con-artist who is trying to steal my rent stabilized apartment/studio of 12 years and I don't have the resources to fight the court battle. Is there anyone out there who can help find me a pro bono real estate attorney in Manhattan (or will barter art)? or if there is anyone out there who has considered buying my work or commissioning a painting but hasn't gone the distance, now is a Very Good Time. Help me save my home and squash this con artist. A court date has been set for July 23. Thank you ten billion times for your help. kelli bickman - www.kellibickman.net I've known Kelli for about 15 years, she's a great artist and a very nice, kind person, so I'm happy to post this. Any New York lawyers who like art out there?)

Anyway, here's the International version of the original poster, which is a bit more golden than the US version.

I just realized this morning that the weekend Stardust opens is also the weekend of the Perseids meteor shower, one of the most active times for "shooting stars" of the year; so it wouldn't be unheard of at all for people to see the movie, walk out of the theater, and actually see a shooting star themselves.

Was the opening planned that way (if it was, this is an incredibly cool bit of marketing that I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned yet), or was this just an amazing coincidence?

It's an amazing coincidence. But now I've told people, maybe it'll be a key wossname in the marketing strategy, in those parts of America where you can still see the stars.

...

It's all animal world here at the house. The last two cats came home from my assistant Lorraine's (she got a jungle kitten and decided she had too many cats in too small a house), while Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, who had vanished for several weeks, reappeared last night slightly the worse for wear -- he had an injury on his thigh that smelled like rancid cheese, which I washed with peroxide, and a new scar on his forehead, and he's now in the basement recovering and appreciating not being outside any longer. He now goes floppy whenever he gets picked up. I've gone from two and a half cats (the half being Fred outside in the garage) to six cats in a couple of weeks.

Fred's garage, which has a magnetic lock on the cat door, so only he can get in, has recently been invaded (which may be why he'd vanished, and also why he had a new leg injury). Birdseed was scattered everywhere. So the Birdchick set up a camera to find out who could be doing it, and how.

The conclusion -- not entirely unexpected -- is that a magnetically locked cat door is no obstacle to a family of determined raccoons...

(Overexposed photo tweaked by Bill Stiteler.)

Labels: birdchick, Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, masonic raccoon pictures, rescue Kelli Bickman from her predicament, Stardust movies

the circus drums in the distance...

This coming Monday the interview media circus for Stardust begins, or it does for me anyway. So I went in to Minneapolis yesterday and got a haircut from Wendy at Hair Police, so I will look less like a man with a honey badger growing on his head in the photographs, then I nipped down to DreamHaven and signed stacks of books for them (some that people had ordered and some so they could sell them over at their www.Neilgaiman.net shop). The circus starts Monday and then, with a few outbreaks of Beowulf on the way, it barely stops until about August the 3rd. Argh.

Let's see... Actor Doug Jones talks about me and Miss Maddy visiting the Hellboy set over at his blog, and the day the three of us went to Margaret Island. His blog is just like him. http://dougjones.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/i-think-im-still-alive/

(Here's Maddy and Doug -- sans Abe or Faun or Silver Surfer makeup -- on the bridge the Sunday of fountains and Viggo Mortenson, with Margaret Island in the background. The next time we saw Doug he had shaved off most of his hair, because it's more comfortable, and cooler, to have your head encased in latex if you look like a marine recruit.)

Film Ick reviews the script to Hellboy 2 at http://www.filmick.co.uk/2007/07/all-hellboy-2-you-can-handle-for-one.html.
From the bits they quote, it's obviously an earlier draft of the script than what's being shot currently in Budapest, but you definitely get the flavour. I enjoyed the first Hellboy film, but didn't think it was a major Guillermo Del Toro work. I'm pretty sure, from all I've seen and from reading the script, that the second film will be one of those sequels that improves and deepens and is seriously better than the first film in the sequence, rather than being one of those films that gets knocked out quickly to try and get people to buy tickets for something not quite as good as the thing they liked the first time around. Guillermo sees it as an upbeat, comic-book-based companion piece to Pan's Labyrinth, anyway.

...

I keep meaning to write about, or at least link to, Heather McDougal's Cabinet of Wonders

http://cabinet-of-wonders.blogspot.com/

which is fast becoming one of my favourite stopping off points on the web. It's a blog of essays and pictures of things I either know a bit about and wish I knew more, or about things I know nothing about and really really needed to. Everything from Ossuaries to astrolabes, automata, orreries and shadow-puppets, and even short films of stop motion beetles, like this one.

Start back in March and come forward, or just poke around the coolness...

And not far behind it for sheer interesting stuff, if a little more narrowly focussed, is

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/

yesterday's future, today.

The link stolen from Eddie Campbell's blog, 1947 comic artists drawing their most famous characters blindfolded... http://a-hole-in-the-head.blogspot.com/2007/07/eyes-wide-shut-in-1947-life-magazine.html

And finally, for when you need a complete trilogy of movies condensed into one tiny pill (like those retro-future "instant roast beef dinner" pills from Just Imagine):

http://xkcd.com/c254.html

Labels: cabinet of wonders, doug, hellboy, interviews, Maddy, yesterday's future today

Badger. Mushroom. Snake. Well, only badger really.

Stardust will be screening at the Edinburgh Festival -- http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/films/stardust/. No idea if I'll be there or not. Like so many things I found it at about the same time as the Stardust News Blog did, but Martyn finds so much other stuff I miss. http://www.stardustnews.info/ is the site, and it's worth bookmarking

Right.

I think this is the best news story today. It's better than the tree man one. Honest.

THE Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a scary rumour – giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans. The animals were allegedly released into the area by British forces...

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22056684-5001028,00.html

(I found a picture of the whoo scary scary badger in question.)

I saw the "Teen tie in" edition of Stardust at my local B&N. The cover was just blue with stars on it and the word Stardust. It looked really ugly and dull. Why do you let them put covers like this on your books?

Um. In this case, because I didn't get any say in it. Paramount didn't approve any of the covers that Harper Children's proposed, and the book had to have a cover, and finally -- and I think it was more or less at the point where the book was going to press -- Harpers offered the blue cover with the logo and Paramount accepted it. I was on the road while all this was going on, and not in a place where I could see email attachments, so I missed it all. Ah well. These things happen. There are many editions of Stardust with pretty covers on them. Like this one...

(I just stole this picture of the new Hardback illustrated edition from Charles Vess's blog over at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/181)

Labels: badger, Stardust movies

Jam stains

I tried hiding some Spoiler text yesterday, which worked for anyone reading actually my journal, but seems to have failed for anyone on the various feeds. Which means that I'm not going to answer a few more spoilery Dr Who comments that came in. But I also got told off for spoiling the identity of the character that John Simm plays for anyone in countries that have not yet got the new Season 3. And while I take the point of the people writing in to grumble, I have to point out that this is the internet, and honestly, it was difficult not to know it mid-season, for those of us who didn't figure out what the backstory in this season would be from the combination of the end of the Christmas episode and the last scene of the first Martha Jones episode ("How did you DO that?" said Maddy, "I mean, you just knew it back then?" and all I could say was I've watched TV and it's not hard. The last of the big three baddies had to come back, after all). And once something like that has been broadcast, written about in the UK newspapers, and become part of the wealth of universal knowledge, it's sort of hard to avoid.

Hello Neil,
There seem to be a lot more people dropping your name recently. Here it is in today's Working Daze in reference to the upcoming Comicon.
http://comics.com/comics/workingdaze/archive/workingdaze-20070711.html
Cheers,
Sam

That's so sweet.


Did you know you haven't used the word "parenting" at all? I'm looking for a little experienced advice on comics and young children. Recently my mother-in-law (normally a truly wonderfully helpful person) rearranged our bookshelves and put the comics down with the other picture books. I'm not paranoid about exposure to violence, but I'm not sure my 2-yr-old really needs to be flipping through The Watchmen instead of The Snowman. Do you have any words of wisdom?

I don't think it's a bad thing not to use the word "parenting", for I have no ideas at all about parenting, although I think I've figured out a few things about being a Dad in the last 24 years. (The main thing I've figured out is as long as you love them and treat them like you'd like to be treated, things mostly work themselves out. And that if you ever find yourself in an argument with a teenager, you've already lost.)

I can't see that Watchmen is going to be anything more than pictures to a two year old. And I'd worry a lot more about jam stains on your comics than exposure to violence. (They aren't being exposed to violence. They're being exposed to pictures.)

Most kids self-censor incredibly well. They reject things that they think look dull, or too scary or weird, or just too old for them. And often when they do get hold of stuff that's too old for them, they don't necessarily get what you're getting from it. (I've been accused of writing an explicit sex scene in Stardust and asked how I think that's okay for kids to read, and I have had to explain that the scene is only explicit if you bring yourself to it, not in the words used, and that it's significantly less explicit if you're a kid and you don't know what's being described.)

But a useful rule of thumb on what you give your kids access to is probably whether you're comfortable explaining it to them or not. If you don't feel comfortable answering the question of "What's that man with the splotchy face doing?" with "He's breaking that man's finger because he wants information about who pushed The Comedian out of the window and no-one in the bar is telling him anything," then probably you should move that stuff to a higher shelf, yes.

And then, as I said, there's the jam stains.

...

And look, you can see me pushing the new queen's cage into the honeycomb over at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/07/cant-stay-out-of-hives.html

Labels: rorschach blobs, spoilers

sorry

Every now and again, you read the news and wonder about the bits they leave out. I mean, when a man robs a bank disguised as a tree, and according to the Associated Press, "He really went out on a limb," police Sgt. Ernie Goodno said Sunday. There has to have been more to the police briefing than that. Probably at least a "We hope this will teach him to leaf banks alone," a "He had to bough before the might of the law," and "It was like an episode of Copse". The public has a right to know.

Labels: tree very bad jokes

orchids and hemlock

The dog training, since you asked, is going very well. Dog has figured out that if he sits next to me and persistently places his nose between my right hand and either the keyboard or the mouse, I will eventually stop attempting to type and take him for a walk, while I for my part can get him to sit, lie down, come, or shake paws three times out of five if I'm also holding something he likes to eat and if there's nothing interesting going on and if he feels like it. I think we're both making excellent progress.

I just took him for a walk down in the woods (he took off after a wild turkey. On every walk we've been on recently he's wound up flushing a turkey, who then flies off making lots of noise, so he'll chase her and ignore the chicks. This time she ran off until he was well away from them, and then took to the air, and he vanished off after her, coming back five minutes later soaking wet and with large bright grass-green patches all over him) and the woods are a strange mess of wildflowers and towering giant hemlocks, and every few feet a wild gooseberry bush flourishes, leaving me puzzled why tiny green caterpillars devour all the gooseberry plants I put in while the wild ones grow like nobody's business.

(Excuse me. The Birdchick and her husband, non-beekeeping Bill, have just arrived with a new Queen for the Kitty hive. I need to go and put white clothes on and walk in the woods once more.)

Dan Guy wrote to let me know that...

The word cloud hasn't been updated since the server migration two+
weeks ago. Now that you're on a host to which I have decent access
I'm rewriting the word cloud's back end to be much more efficient.
(The label cloud is still operating normally, though, and now is even
automatic.)

Which is to say, the word count quoted was incorrect. Here are the
right numbers:

1,000,951 words in the blog
4,082 words are by Maddy recently guestblogging
996,869 words by you
3,131 words to go until you reach the million word mark!

So it's closer than I thought. Tick. Tick.

There's a song on the new They Might Be Giants album called "Careful What You Pack." According to Flansburgh, it was written for a movie but wasn't used. There's been some speculation that the movie was Coraline. Can you confirm?

I can. Yes, it's a song they wrote for CORALINE. There were a few they did that didn't get used.

Did Maddy like the Doctor Who Season Finale?

She really did. She even cried a little when the master died (I thought the death was great but was still a bit grumpy that my prediction that the master would be shot by his wife had come true). She liked it more than I did, really. I thought it was a bit of a curate's egg (in the erroneous sense of Good In Parts, not in the actual sense of All Rotten) but I would forgive a lot for John Simm's performance as the Master, which I loved, especially following Derek Jacobi's, which I loved in a very different way. And if it wasn't Blink or Human Nature, it still had lots of things I liked, and Utopia and The Sound of Drums were both enormous fun. Even if the Toclafane plot was the Cybermen plot of the season two end, and was also the Dalek plot of the Season one end. I hope that season four won't end with the discovery that somehow human brains are fuelling the New Mechanoids. And the least said about the mini-Doctor in the cage and the magic saying of the name that makes it all better, the better...... .

Hi Neil,

Your journal entry regarding your plans for Comic Con reminded me of the interview you recently had with Quint from Ain't It Cool News, in which you mentioned that on that Wednesday, July 25th, you would be hosting a showing of Beowulf footage, with Roger Avary, for a theater of about 400. My question is whether this is still going to happen, and if it is, what I can do to take part in it. (This is my first Comic Con, and would love to start it off right.) I apologize if this information is forthcoming, or if I just missed something. I'm so excited, I can't wait. Thanks for listening. (Sorry if I accidentally sent this twice.)

-Ben

I'm not sure. If I find out about how people can get in to that -- or the Stardust event on the Thursday evening, or the event on the Saturday that I can't talk about yet, I'll post the details here.

I do know that the Beowulf panel and screening will be filmed and repeated, so if you miss the original panel you will still be able to see the 3D footage (and a film of me and Roger burbling about it) at some point during the convention. But I don't know if I'm allowed to say that yet. If I'm not, deny everything.

Labels: a million words, bees, Doctor Who, gooseberries, San Diego Comic Con, They Might Be Giants, turkeys

enchanted flowers

Hi Neil You've probably already seen this but just in case - you're mentioned in the latest Dog eat Doug.

http://www.comics.com/creators/dogeat/archive/dogeat-20070709.html

Enjoy!
Maria

Good lord. So I am. What a nice way to start a morning.

John Hudgens writes to tell me about about his film American Scary, the documentary on horror hosts (of which I am one), letting me know about a screening of the film at Comic-Con: The screening is at 7:30pm, Thursday July 26 in Room 26AB (south side of the Convention Center, above Hall H.

Because the con is so big and so much is happening, it's usually true that anything you want to see or do clashes with something else you also want to see or do, and in this case I think I'll be introducing a Stardust screening mostly for journalists that Paramount are doing that night. (The Will Eisner's Legacy panel, which was the only one I really wanted to be at, is opposite the Spotlight on Neil Gaiman panel. So it goes.)

In a recent Journal entry, Logan asked about novel word counts. Amazon.com has a feature for some books that gives text statistics in the "Inside this book" section. The American Gods trade paper has, according to this, 182,721 words, an average of 11.4 words per sentence and at their price you get 16,300 words per dollar, a bargain!

I like to think so. (Although priced per word, upcoming picture books like The Dangerous Alphabet, which Gris Grimly has illustrated, will work out at something nightmarish, like 10 words to a dollar or something... Then again, a picture is worth a thousand words, which adds about 30,000 words.)

The Comic Con schedule has been announced, although I know there are a few extra things that aren't up yet or decided, including a couple of Coraline-related happenings on the Saturday which Focus haven't yet announced so people won't know that I'm doing anything on the Saturday yet. (Or, if they don't get the information up quickly, ever. )

I wish I was on more comics or book-related events -- Thursday and Saturday it's basically just the giant movie presentations, which I tend to think of as something separate to real Comic-con, and movie-related events that may not be open to all or even to lots. (And a couple of events that were hoped for, one with me and Joss Whedon, and one with me and Dave McKean, had to go by the wayside, one because of scheduling problems and one because of Dave not actually coming to Comic-Con this year.)

I'm just glad that Mark Evanier invited me onto his Jack Kirby panel on the Sunday morning.

And talking about Coraline, I meant to post this earlier. It's a long article that gives background on Laika (the studio) and on Phil Knight, and on Travis Knight, who is the lead animator on Coraline and is really good http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-the-knights-tale.html

(Also I fixed the word counts in the last post.)

Right. Back to work.

Labels: American Scary, Coraline movie, Dog eat Doug, scheduling panels at Comic-Con

twelve thousand words to go

Went out to my writing cabin today for the first time in many months, having failed to notice that it was a day like an oven in the Midwest and having many optimistic but inaccurate memories about how effective the portable air-conditioning unit in there was. I cooked, but I hand-wrote about a thousand words of a short story for the BBC's Radio 4. (Who, after I agreed to do it, kept writing and pointing out that the money for a short story from the BBC is even worse than money from anywhere else and was I absolutely sure I still really wanted to write it? And of course I do.)

I took the dog with. And I stopped writing when the storm clouds rolled in and it all turned into night outside.

I just got a slightly nervous email from Evan Dorkin, who was surprised and, I think, a little worried by the response to his LJ rant about the scents in Diamond, so I wrote back and reassured him that I thought it was funny and honestly hadn't linked to it so that people would go and shout at him. This is Evan Dorkin, after all, the man behind Milk And Cheese and the Eltingville Club, and he rants really well. He's very funny.

Todd Klein is the best letterer I've ever worked with, and because I like working with him so much he's now statistically pretty much the only letterer I've ever worked with. He's a craftsman, and one of the nicest people in comics, and he was my unofficial editor on Sandman as well. He's just put up a website at http://kleinletters.com/, and if you're interested in the craft of lettering comics, or in the story of Sandman from the only other person to be there from Sandman #1 to Endless Nights... and a whole lot more besides, then you should wander over.

Just out of curiosity, how many words were Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, and American Gods respectively? I'm working on a novel and, while I don't want to modify it for word count or even aim for any word count, I certainly don't want it to fall in that ackwardly middle novella-type length that you see published so infrequently. It's amazingly hard to find word counts for published novels... Thanks.
Logan

Anansi Boys is a hair under 100,000 words and Neverwhere is a few thousand words over 100,000. American Gods when originally handed in was about 200,000 words (and still is, if you get the "Author's preferred text edition" in the UK and was cut to somewhere a bit under 180,000 words. Stardust was 50,000 words. Coraline was 30,000 words. (I think that 60,000 words is probably a good minimum word count to aim for when you write an adult novel, 40,000 for a book for younger readers. But publishers go more for whether they like something than what the word count is.)

Hi Neil,
I noticed on the Comic Con sneak-peek schedule that you will be on a movie panel on Thursday 7/26 and the Jack Kirby tribute panel on Sunday 7/29; will you have your own session during the convention?
thanks!

Yup. I'm still waiting for final confirmation on the various other panels and presentations I'll be on, then I'll post them all here, but the solo one is:

Friday July 27th:
2-3:15 pm Spotlight on Neil Gaiman.
Room 6 CDEF
signing after from 3:15-4:15 pm

And talking about word counts, I notice from http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/clouds/words/ that I'm now a mere 12,000 words away from having written a million words on this blog in the last six and a half years. Blimey.

Labels: completely abandons the idea of writing lots of labels and goes to bed instead

Blueberry Girls

I took Maddy and her friends to the Mall of America today -- they had unspecified preeteenage things to buy and I needed to visit the Apple store to get Final Cut Studio -- stopping only to pick up my friend Les Klinger from his hotel and drag him along. Not content with having annotated all the Sherlock Holmes stories, he's spent the last few years annotating Dracula, and told me all about it while we ate lunch. The two thirteen year olds and one almost thirteen year old went shopping happily, and returned with several bags, including a bag with the Victoria's Secret logo. ("You really don't have to look like that, dad. We only bought sweatpants there.")

Then I dropped Les off at his hotel and spent too short a time with several old friends, including the Sherlockian Michael Whelan, the Roden family and Michael "Langdale Pike" Dirda, the best-read man in America. Then went home. Installed Final Cut Studio...

Charles Vess talks about BLUEBERRY GIRL, our book for mothers and daughters, and he shows some pictures -- pencils and finished art -- over at http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/185. It's a poem I wrote for Tori's daughter Tash, before she was born, and Charles is making it magical. The plan is to donate a percentage of the royalties to RAINN . We announced it a long time ago (in this post) but it's taken a while -- Charles has had so much on his plate, and the paintings have taken him so much longer to do than he expected. But they are astoundingly beautiful.

Talking about raising money for good causes, I got this astonishingly heartening email from Beth at Black Phoenix Alchemy lab...

I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know how the charity drive is doing. =) In the first five days that the Stardust and Good Omens scents were live, we generated $1500.00 for the Orangutan Foundation UK, and $5370.00 for the CBLDF. That brings us to a current total of $15,300.00 for the CBLDF to date!

Which, given the costs of the upcoming Gordon Lee trial (there's an excellent interview with Charles Brownstein about it at http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/features/118336212712690.htm), is a very good thing indeed. Diamond distributors have asked to be able to put a couple of the scents in their catalogue, which Evan Dorkin amusingly interprets as a sign of the oncoming apocalypse. Personally, I think that a better indication of the apocalypse is an entire article on Canadian Comics that manages not to mention Dave Sim or Cerebus. Bizarre. (Incidentally, for those of you who missed it the first time around, I believe Dave's offer at the end of http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/08/lewis-and-clarke-not-to-mention-snuff.asp still stands. Over two thousand people got free comics from him by simply writing in and asking, and I hope that many of them came back and bought the Cerebus collections...)

Labels: Black Phoenix Alchemy and Scents, Blueberry Girl, CBLDF, Cerebus, Dracula, Les Klinger