Having a happy day, thank you very much for asking. American Gods will be on the New York Times paperback List this week at #15 (up from 20, up from 31, up from 45), and I'm about half way through listening to some astonishing songs (which, due to a lack of a working CD player in the house we wound up listening to in a parked car, in the dark, which was amazingly appropriate).

Let's see... My old friend Mark Askwith is one of the secret masters of everything, and since that first day that we met in Gotham City (oh all right, Pinewood Studios) he has done his utmost, first through the much-missed PRISONERS OF GRAVITY TV show, and since then through his work on SPACE: THE IMAGINATION STATION, to ensure that I was kept abreast of cultural trends and plugged into the zeitgeist. So I'm still trying to figure out why he just sent me a link to http://www.elfpanties.com/flash/main.html. If any of you happen to run into Mark over the next year (it's more likely if you're Canadian, but given his ubiquity it might happen to any of you) please feel free to ask him.

And from Elfpanties to Sockmonkeys...

Neil, I did a search on Booksense under other items by Neil Gaiman, and it lists a book by the name of Monkey See! Monkey Who! I then went to Amazon.com to find more info about it, and saw that it was about sock monkeys. I remember reading something in your journal about it. If I remember correctly, you said you were going to do a short description about one of the photos. It lists you as one of the AUTHORS. How much writing did you can contribute to this? I don't want to purchase this book to find out that you had written two sentences for the book (My husband has been yelling at me for having too many books). - Cynister

It's more like around 300 words. The book is photos of sock monkeys. Various guest writers have done a description, essay, short story or poem for each monkey. Mine is a sort of rather odd narrative poem about a sock monkey who's led a Weekly World News sort of a life.

Dear Neil,
I am a huge Italian fan of you.
I got Neverwhere as it went out in the English edition, and was planning to buy American Gods.
But since I bought 'Nessundove' (i.e. Neverwhere) in the Italian version as a present to many friends of me, and verified myself it was very well translated, I would like to know if have notice of an upcoming Italian version of 'American Gods'.
If that's going to happen any soon, I imagine I'm going to spare me the economical and mental effort to buy the English version (we could discuss for hours discussing the value of a translation and how much it is an author's work). Could you help me with that?

Easily. It will be coming out in Italy within the next 6 months -- and in France also.


Could you please provide a brief etymology of the word "Shatnerian?" Is this a past-tense usage of an oblique British word, or just a universal adverb for over-emoting and/or bad acting? Just curious. Thanks.

Shatnerian (adj)... rising to the heights of, or at least, approaching the level of thespian artistry of one Wm. Shatner, a Canadian actor with a unique interpretive approach to line reading, dramatic emphasis, pauses and suchlike. (Etym. Coined in his journal by N. Gaiman, author, last night, although I can't have beeen the first one).

When I was at Book Expo in New York a few weeks ago I went looking for Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, and I found Gavin hiding out in a back room at the Booksense.com area, deep in the bowels of the Javitz Centre. "I'm glad you're here," he said, and produced a tape recorder. "Do you mind if I interview you? What would you like to talk about?"

I thought for a moment, and said, "Coraline, please," because no-one's really interviewed me much about Coraline, and it's fun to talk about. The interview is now up at BookSense.com

I suppose I could have talked about American Gods, but after last year I feel sort of interviewed out about it. I no longer know if the answers I give about American Gods are how I really feel or they're just the answers I give when asked the same set of questions.

Talking about American Gods, we seem to be hanging in there on all the paperback bestseller lists right now, up near the top of many of them.

Got some early copies of the Coraline CD today. If they give awards out for packaging, this will sweep them - it's so beautifully designed and put together, using lots of the Dave McKean artwork in the book. I listened to it tonight on the way to the airport, and loved the use of the Stephin Merritt/Gothic Archies song, which they've spread about, so one verse of it starts each CD, and the incidental music, which is haunting.

As for the reading.... well, it's okay, I guess. I kept listening to it and getting deeply grumpy with myself for sticking the stress on a weird word, or hesitating in the middle of a sentence for emphasis (or possibly just because I felt like it at the moment I read it) in a way that struck me as, a couple of times, practically Shatnerian. (And the trouble with having an English accent that's been in America too long is that I occasionally make some very strange vowel sounds indeed.) I listened to it and, all too often, just wanted to be allowed to record it again and make it better this time. But that's me.

It's $22.00 US and most of the online stores (and Booksense, who do it through your local bookstores) seem to be putting it out for $15-$18 ish.

Am off to Florida for a couple of days to see a friend and listen to some new music.

There is a website where comics artists (and even the occasional writer) have done "artistic interpetations of literary figures" -authors and literary characters...

Neil- I know you have probably gotten hundreds of these, and I am sorry, but I am really wondering about all of the new Tori Amos album rumours. For example, one source on ToriAmos.com claims she has been recording in Ireland on an album called "You Are In"; that is TOTALLY not Tori sounding. Please squelch these horrid rumours
Love, Adeline

What, again? Didn't I do this last week? Okay. She certainly didn't record it in Ireland (I suspect that one could have been disproved with a couple of minutes browsing the Dent news site) and it's not called "You Are In". Someone who doesn't know anything is pulling your leg.

Neil, You recently mentioned a book called 'My Friend Mr Leakey' that you were reading to Maddy. Does this book contain a Dragon named Pompey? If so I have been searching for it for years unable to remember the title.

That's the one.

Dear Mr. Gaiman, My friends and I were wondering if we could keep a likeness of you, or you yourself, on a pedestal sort of thing, kind of like an altar? ...your book, American Gods, scared us quite a bit and it's been a while since someone has done that and we enjoyed immensely, so we were just wondering if that would be okay? Yours Tessa

Not really, for it would be much too silly, but thank you for thinking of me. Would you like me to check around in the community of authors to see if there's anyone who'd like to be kept on a pedestal?

And slightly late...

Today (May 25) is Carry Your Towel Day. This is, of course, in memory of the late Douglas Adams. Please remember to carry your towels.

He didn't say you should carry it. He said you should know where it is. I'd be all in favour of Know Where Your Towel Is Day. Of course, you wouldn't get as many people coming up and asking you why you are carrying a towel, or just looking at you funny.

So half-way through Saturday I decided, on the spur of the moment, to take Maddy to a giant indoor swimming park called the Kalahari, in the Wisconsin Dells. The Dells is a natural beauty spot, in which the strangest assemblage of tourist tat imaginable has been assembled. Maddy strongly believes that the Kalahari is the most wonderful place on Earth. I'd never been there with her, and decided it was time. So I packed a bunch of audio tapes and off we went. On the way there and back we listened to Round the Horne tape 13, and Lemony Snicket Book 1 read by Tim Curry, and Every Tongue Wants to Confess by Zora Neale Hurston (which I'd read but wanted very much to hear, suspecting, as it turned out correctly, that a lot of the impact of the stories and folk tales and jokes would be in the telling).

Maddy loves waterparks, has been taken to the Kalahari several times before and is, as I said, of the opinion that it is the best place in the world. I'd never been there before. On due reflection, I think you need to be seven to feel that the Kalahari is the most wonderful place on Earth. But she was happy.

I also read her the first of the My Friend Mr Leakey short stories, "A Meal With a Magician", and she enjoyed it and so did I.

And then, once the tubing and zooming down slides in the darkness etc were over and done with, as it was really only just down the road, we drove down to Madison and popped into Wiscon to say hullo to people. I got hugged by Nalo Hopkinson. "I didn't know you were going to be here!" I said. "Well," she said, "I am Guest of Honour." I blushed.

Saw lots of old friends -- Charles and Karen Vess (I promised Charles I'd mention that you can still get the FALL OF STARDUST portfolio from him at Greenman Press) (and did you know there were Stardust fridge magnets?), artist-writer-editor Terri Windling (who really is an elf, and to whom I promised a short story in a year for an anthology), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, Maureen Speller Kincaid and Paul Kincaid ("This is Paul Kincaid," I said to Maddy. "He's a very, very old friend of mine. This is Maureen. I once mistook her for some luggage,"), and oh, too many fine people to list here. Also met Karen Joy Fowler for the first time, and managed more or less not to come across as a dribbling fanboy, and I met editorial demiurge Sharyn November from Viking Penguin who showed me a copy of the (Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow edited, Charles Vess illustrated) GREEN MAN anthology, which looks amazing. (I wrote a poem for it called "Going Wodwo".) I promised Sharyn I'd send her a list of great out-of-print children's books, and I shall, in the hopes that she may be able to bring at least a few of them back, or at least that she might enjoy them...

Over dinner Charles showed me his lovely cover design for Diana Wynne Jones's DEEP SECRET. He'd noticed that I'm in the book (twice -- once as myself, on a panel at an SF convention, and once, at least in part, as one of the characters in the book: there's a breakfast in the book that happened to me) he had drawn someone sort of me-ish as part of a group of people on the cover. He's done some amazing work for a book with Charles deLint. Decided that I need to do something with Charles Vess in the next few years -- it feels odd not to have something we're doing together either happening or going to happen.

Then drove home, despite many pleas that I stay, figuring that way I'll get Monday as a quiet writing day, which I need.

Finished reading Grimble to Maddy last night. It was a huge success. I enjoyed it reading it and revisiting an old childhood favourite enough that I went back down to the basement library and found a copy of My Friend Mr Leakey by J.B.S. Haldane (the eminent scientist, the one who, when asked by a priest what one could learn about the Creator by studying nature, replied that one could tell that God had "an inordinate fondness for beetles"). I also pulled out the first three Margaret Storey 'Melinda' books "Timothy and Two Witches" "The Stone Sorcerer" (which, bizarrely, was retitled "The Stone Wizard" in the edition I own) and "The Dragon's Sister/Timothy Travels". I remember the first three or four of those books as being the real thing -- strange and magical and, above all, dangerous -- but that the series got more forced and cute and less vital as it went on.

Margaret Storey is more or less out of print these days, alas. I loved her when I was about seven or eight, and am looking forward to finding out how much of her stuff has wound up in mine. I know it's her fault that I plant rowan trees wherever I live.

A Walking Tour of The Shambles by Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe now has its own page up at American Fantasy. And a few people are apparently having trouble with the FAQ page coming up black on black -- although I can't reproduce this with Explorer or Opera or Netscape, so I shall just pass the information on to the powers that be.

And on the subject of Freedom of Speech, a little quote from John Milton.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Kelly Link arrived last night at around 11.00pm, on her way from a reading at the Ruminator. She did her laundry, then got back in the van and drove to Madison around 1.00am, leaving nothing behind except Shelley Jackson asleep in the basement library.

I answered some FAQs, which you may want to go and check out, including a particularly incoherent answer to a question about writing which contains a small chunk of an imaginary phrase book for tourists.

One thing the arrival of American Gods on the mass-market bestseller lists has shown me is how many newspapers no longer list mass-market paperback bestsellers, listing only the larger-sized, more expensive trade paperbacks. I like trade paperbacks, and I love hardbacks (only because I'm old enough that too many of my paperbacks cannot be read without the pages falling apart; hardbacks last longer), but I'm starting to feel nostalgic for mass-market paperbacks -- it seems like we're entering a world in the US where there's less and less intelligent stuff to read in mass-market form, and that has to be a bad thing. Good books should be cheap and accessible.

I fixed the archives so that May is now in there.

Neil,
Re: authors trying to figure out how to get the rights back to books they wrote. I'd recommend that American authors get in touch with The Authors Guild at http://www.authorsguild.org/.
Best, Damin

...

http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/2002/2002-05-23-summer-books.htm#mo is an article in USA Today about the most anticipated books of the summer, and I think, after reading it, that I owe Scott Werbin at the Tudor Bookshop and Cafe in Kingston, Pa. a drink, or at least a grateful postcard of thanks.

And we're up again on the USA Today bestseller list -- from #35 to #21.

We're up to #3 at Salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/bestsellers/2002/05/22/may22/index.html...

And we're in at #3 at Booksense.com http://www.booksense.com/bestsellers/index.jsp (Which also says there will be an interview with me up next Tuesday.)

I often grumble about the Internet. Still, anything that allows me to lie in bed in the middle of America, in the morning, listening to China Mieville and Paul Kinkaid chatting about the state of SF on BBC Radio 4 gives me a very warm fuzzy feeling.