Before and After Science

Presenting Maddy Gaiman at 7:30 this morning...

and Maddy Gaiman at 9:30. Braces off. Proud parental smile as well as the happy Maddy smile...

Here's The Colbert Report interview: it will play in some countries, and not in others. Full blog report of New York trip to follow...

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Neil Gaiman

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Mark Sanford
NASA Name Contest

No, it wasn't rehearsed or scripted (people keep asking me), and it was much too much fun. I'm wearing a suit because that was what I had in the bag, post-funeral.

(And in re: Tom Bombadil, I suppose I feel about him the way that Lord Dunsany spoke of drains:

...the caretaker used to praise the house in the words that Nuth had suggested. "If it wasn't for the drains," she would say, "it's the finest house in London," and when they pounced on this remark and asked questions about the drains, she would answer them that the drains also were good, but not so good as the house.

I certainly don't hate him, but am of the opinion that he is not as good as the rest of the house.)

Labels: Stephen Colbert, teeth, what Maddy looks like

Colbert and me...

Hullo from a hotel room in which Mike Gaiman is reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography, Maddy Gaiman is reading Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle ("Dad! You're in this!") and I am not reading anything but am instead getting on the computer to say that I will be interviewed on The Colbert Report tonight, for those of you who want to set your TIVOs and also that I am wondering whether or not I should shave.

I guess I will.

Labels: Stephen Colbert

Long weekend

So it's been a week. Saturday I found out, this week was spent in the UK, with relatives, giving eulogies and hugging people and seeing old friends and relations... My parents' actual 50th wedding anniversary was the 1st of March, but the whole family had been meant to get together at the end of the month. And now we were all seeing each other too soon, and in the wrong way.

Every day felt like a Sunday. So odd. A week long weekend.

The easiest thing was standing up at the service and talking about him. The hardest was saying the kaddish at the evening service. The rest of it was a strange blur of people and of realising that the best thing about all the soap operas and tiny problems is that they are a wonderful distraction from the big things.

Maddy and I are now back in the US. We had had a week long spring break father-daughter adventure planned, and we are going to do it, although it may be rather more subdued than we had initially planned.

And the plane doors are closed...

intermission

I'm in the UK for a few days with the family for funeral stuff. I think I'm not going to blog for a bit: I'm reading all the condolences, and am touched and grateful. But it's all a bit immediate, and the world can carry on for a week without me.

another day

"Why didn't you say it was your dad?" asked a friend, after reading the last blog post.

Because when I wrote it, I didn't know if my mum had told the rest of the family, if the cousins and the aunts knew yet. And so many people read my blog, I did not want family learning it from here. But yes, it was my dad.

While it may not be true to say that he was never ill a day in his life, it would certainly be true to say that he was never ill as long as I knew him: yesterday he was in the middle of a business meeting, had (I guess) a heart attack and was dead by the time he got to hospital. He was brilliant, charismatic, affable, funny (funnier than me) and, by and large, a wonderful father.

My agent, Merrilee, told me last night that the first time she met him, at a signing in New York, she said to him, "Neil is doing so well. I bet you must always have known he'd be a success."

"Actually," he told her, "I thought I'd probably be supporting him for the rest of his life. Well... he wanted to be a writer."

And I thought, the best thing about that is I never knew.

...

Home from NY (writing this in the car on the way home. No I am not driving) and to the UK tomorrow with the family for the funeral. My assistant Lorraine has worked miracles making the airlines bend to her will in order to make this happen. (We were all meant to go over for my parents' golden wedding anniversary celebration at the end of the month.)

(1967: My grandfather, my father and me, in front of the azaleas.)

A Day.

A long, strange day. In the taxi downtown this morning I learned that there had been a sudden death in the family, and I went down to the sunshine of Union Square to phone people, and sort logistical things out, and breathe. Several people suggested that I cancel the signing, and I even thought about it for a moment, and realised that I couldn't: there were hundreds of people lined up outside Books of Wonder, and it gave me something to focus on. So I went and did the reading and Q&A, and Charles did his slide show, and apart from reading Blueberry Girl itself, where I found myself getting a bit shaky, everything was wonderful, and for the next six or seven hours I found that the rhythms of the signing, and the incredible niceness of the flow of people, made everything proper and bearable and good.

So this is a thank you, to everyone at the New York signing, all the people in the lines, all the staff, even the ones who gave up and went home. All of you, from me. You helped a lot. You probably didn't know it. But you did.

Labels: Blueberry Girl, books of wonder, songs, thanks

The Dark Truth of Bees

There. Up much too early, to accompany Stephin Merritt to the airport, so we only had to do one airport run and so I could use my magic flies-too-much powers to whisk Stephin through the special short lines.

Am now holed up in the Northwest Lounge, catching up on email and getting work done. The danger of doing this is that I can completely go into the Writing Stuff  headspace, and in two hours and 15 minutes from now utterly forget that I should be leaving the lounge and finding a gate and getting onto a plane. (So I wrote the last sentence as the equivalent of tying a knot in my handkerchief.) 

Let's see...

Wish I could go to the South By Southwest festival next week (I can't, because it is Maddy's spring break, and we have adventures planned). It seems like everyone I talk to is going to be there. Amanda Palmer is playing, Tori Amos is playing (an hour apart, in a vicious wossname for fans of both, or just people who want to see my friends in concert), and Duncan Jones's film MOON will be showing.

He was kind enough to slip me a DVD to watch the last time I was in London, and I really loved it. It was a hard science fiction film, like, say, Outland, the sort of film they seemed to stop making when Star Wars happened and movie SF became space opera and fantasy: MOON is hard SF, set on the far side of the moon, with Sam Rockwell as an astronaut who is looking forward to going home after three years and is about to get some nasty surprises. It's hard to be too enthusiastic about specific things without giving plot surprises away (Sam Rockwell's performance --performances-- is astonishing, but to explain why is already a spoiler). It feels real -- a good, solid, smart, hard SF movie of the kind they don't make any more.

Who made that wonderful chest of drawers for you? The one in the picture of Stephin Merrit getting dog affection. My first thought when I saw the picture was, "Wow, I've never seen that kind of lens distortion before." Then I saw all the other straight lines and realized the chest was built that way. What fun

I saw it in a furniture factory in Xi'an, in China, when I was there last year, and decided it was needed. They shipped it over. Neither the chest of drawers nor the shipping were particularly expensive, and if they had a website I'd happily point you to it. (I'll investigate.)

Do you know when the new printings of the Graveyard Book with the Newbery stamp will be out? Even though I have the American and English printings, I look forward to the new one.

Peter Esztelecky
Waterloo, On. Canada

It's out.

Hi Neil

Is there any updated information on Hill House? I found out today that the "definitive" Martian Chronicles (formerly due from Hill House) is now being published by Subterranean Press, so I wondered if you knew whether something similar might be likely to happen with "Neverwhere".

Thank you

Tom

We're certainly hoping so, although it's taking a lot longer than I had dreamed to sort this out. Right now, the best I can do is,

"For those of you who are wondering what's going on with the Hill House limited edition of NEVERWHERE, please direct your inquiries to Jennifer Brehl, Neil's editor at William Morrow. She may be contacted at jennifer.brehl (at) harpercollins.com."

...

The French Graveyard Book is not called The Graveyard Book.

...

Finally, this, from James Kennedy's blog, made me smile. (And also, made me want to read his book, The Order of Odd-Fish.) Did I write all that stuff they say I did? O but I did not. It was the bees.

Labels: bees, Duncan Jones, hill house, Spacing out in airports, Stephin Merritt

The perfect job

Sometimes people ask me what I would like to do, if I wasn't a writer. Normally, I do not know. There's not much that I'm good at apart from making things up. But today, I read about the other job I could do.

No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

I want to certify places as elf-free. Or, sometimes, not elf-free, just because I can.

...

And while I have you here, a reminder about the pre-show for those of you coming to the signing at Books of Wonder on Saturday, here cut and pasted for your delight in all its multicoloured glory from http://www.booksofwonder.com/events030709.asp:

Blueberry Girl Art Show

Private Preview Saturday 11:00 am - noon
Public Viewing Saturday  noon  -  Sunday March 29th 

To celebrate the publication of Blueberry Girl, Books of Wonder will also be hosting a show and sale of the stunning original art from this new book, as well as several signed prints of the art byCHARLES VESS. The art show will run from Saturday, March 7th through Sunday, March 29th. 10% from the sale of each painting will be donated to RAINN. 

A PRIVATE PREVIEW of the art show with the artist will be available to the first 100 people who make a $10 donation to RAINN. This PRIVATE PREVIEW will be from 11am to 12 noon on Saturday, March 7th and those attending will have the exclusive opportunity to purchase the artwork before anyone else has seen it. The show will then be open to the general public from 12 noon on. If you wish to make a donation and attend the PRIVATE PREVIEW, please contact the store at (212) 989-3270.

Rainn, incidentally is at http://rainn.org/

& so to bed. 

Labels: Rainn, where are the elves when you need them

Head Wounds for Men

As of 7:30 tonight, Stephin Merritt has luggage and a Bouzhouki, and is a happy, happy man.

(Picture of Mr Merritt shortly before his luggage arrived. He was pretty happy then, too.)

I don't really want to talk about the thing Stephin and I are working on yet -- it's early days. A strange sort of thing that's all our own little private project. When it's ready, I'll talk about it. Today was mostly spent filling out little cards of different colours with words like "Decapitation" and phrases like "Strangling is Cheap" . Tomorrow, Stephin starts writing songs...

The Graveyard Book is up for an LA Times Book Award and an ABA Indie World Award. I am up against friends in each case, and don't mind if I win or not but am happy just to be nominated, as any extra awards and nominations after the Newbery are just icing on a wonderful cake.

Hi Neil, I've seen so many of your posts lately showering your beautiful big white dog with love! Not that there's anything wrong with that, but with stories you've written like "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "The Price" I've always figured you for a cat person. I myself have a fondness for dogs but ultimately I'd consider myself a cat person, and whenever reading your "cat" stories I find myself thinking "Yes, he gets it! He understands cats!" (not that we humans can really ever understand cats). So, I must ask, do you consider yourself a cat person or dog person? And, by the way, your dog is very beautiful and looks to be quite a nice doggy according to your pictures. Thanks for your time on a silly question.

-Andy Christensen

I'm a cat person who got adopted by a dog. Resistance is useless. I definitely didn't pick him. We just sort of found each other when we needed each other. And I carry on being a cat person.

I wish the cats and dog liked each other -- instead the house is now divided into Cat and Dog territory, by a dividing door:

Fred the Black Cat, who had been living out in the garage, abandoned the garage and moved grumpily further and further out into the woods. The rest of the cats just shrugged and got on with their lives. (It's actually easier during the Winter, when the cats tend to stay indoors. In summer Cabal will still tree a cat every few weeks.)

Neil, you say your only convention plans are for something in August. Does this mean you won't be at the ALA in Chicago to collect your Newbery Award in person? We librarians will be crushed if you aren't at the gala (and expensive!) dinner where all youth awards are presented.

Sorry -- I wasn't thinking of the ALA as a convention. Yes, I'll be there -- I'll be giving a Newbery Medal speech (which I have to write by the end of the month argh) and I will also be doing something on behalf of the CBLDF.

Hi, Neil,
A friend of ours just opened a comic book coffeeshop in San Francisco - Caffinated Comics (www.caffcom.com) and I was wondering if you might be willing to give this new venue a plug in the blog. Their grand opening was March 1st and we came home with a Sandman I didn't previously own and Charles Vess' illustrated version of Stardust. It'd be great if you could help them out with a shout out - San Francisco's first green comic book coffeeshop!
Thanks,Mira

Consider it plugged.

Which reminds me, at http://time-shark.livejournal.com/237449.html  and at http://www.mythicdelirium.com/#anniversary you will learn about the next issue of Mythic Delirium. Mike has been asking me for a poem for years, and finally he asked me when I'd written one. In this case, one about a trout heart.

Labels: Cats, Dog, Stephin Merritt

Waiting for Stephin

I'm working on something I can't talk about, while awaiting the arrival of Stephin Merritt, out to work on a project that I can't talk about (a different one). I feel like I should start putting my collar up and talking in code phrases.

Neil,

I read your post today regarding "cashing in" on Blueberry Girl and Crazy Hair. It totally pisses me off when people can't be happy for the success of others when it's righfully due. I have seen this phenomenon on message boards of popular bands. You'll have people that will love a band until said band starts getting out in the mainstream and starts selling CDs, then suddenly the band has "sold out" or "sucks." Anyways, glad you haven't let it get you down.

Quick question: Will you be attending San Diego Comic-Con this year? It will be my first "con" and it would rock to meet ya!

Peace,

Jonesy

You're too kind. I think I've sort of made that crossing over the last month, and it's okay. I liked it best when I felt like anyone who liked my stuff had me as a private thing the world didn't know about, and I'm not sure, post Newbery and Coraline film, that that'll be true again, or if it is it may take a little while to happen. It's always nice to discover someone and feel that, in some way, you own them, or a little bit of them, because they aren't public.

No plans to be at Comic-Con this year. My only real convention plans are to be Guest of Honour at WorldCon in Montreal in August. Here's the English website: http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home. Worldcons are wonderful things, and I have the fondest memories of my first one, 21 years ago -- meeting Julie Schwartz for the first time, being the last person left in the bar with William Gibson at 5.00 am, pitching George R R Martin on an idea for a Wild Cards character who like, lived in dreams...

Hiya, Neil!

My husband and I are both in the field of advertising here in Portland, OR (he's a motion graphics designer; I'm an interactive producer) so imagine my glee when I read in today's Oregonian that a little movie called "Coraline" was going to save Oregon's economy! I knew your books had changed my life metaphorically-speaking, but who'dathunk that one of your books would literally change my world?

http://blog.oregonlive.com/portlandarts/2009/03/in_the_coraline_economy_we_tru.html

Thanks from the bottom of the heart of the creative world here in Portland!

Mikki

That's rather marvellous. Thank you Mikki.

I, like a thousands of others, have been a fan of yours for a long time. It started with American Gods back in 2003 at a B&N and it sort of spiraled from there. Anyway, I was curious if you would ever be returning to the Adult Fiction side literature? I am a fan of your young readers books, but there is something even more fantastical to your novels.

Also, please find a place in comics and stay there, I miss you.

Best,

Jacob Kohl

As long as I'm alive and writing I expect I'll continue to do this peripatetic sort of dance, in which I wander from children's books to adult novels, from picture books to big non-fiction things, from TV to radio to short stories to movies, and sometimes take in things that happen on the stage on the way. So yes, I'll do more adult novels. And I'll do more comics. But I won't stay there.

...and Stephin Merritt just arrived. His luggage, however, did not arrive. Also not with him is his gate-checked bouzouki. I can set him up with spare pajamas and toothbrush and such, but I do not have a bouzouki here.

Labels: Stephin Merritt, the absence of bazoukis, the perils of famousness