This in from Rick Mueller, about the film on Douglas Adams, which he made and I narrated:

The inaugural Garden State Film Festival has selected LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND
DOUGLAS ADAMS as a finalist in their Documentary Film competition category.
The film will be screened on April 12th at the historic Paramount Theater on
the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Tickets and showtimes are available at the festival's website www.gsff.org and more information about the film is available on
my website www.pointbreak-productions.com

I hope you can join us on the boardwalk in Asbury Park for an afternoon of
film and fun on April 12th.

Rick also tells me that the greenmanreview site awarded him one of their prestigious but unfortunately-named Greenies for it, along with ones for this website and Coraline.

Two boxes of books arrived today: the Hungarian edition of American Gods, a lovely-looking book, with an extensive (17 page) glossary at the back, defining and informing on everything from Odin to Laphroig to Louise Brooks. It was something I kept thinking about doing while I wrote the book, so was glad that someone had...

The other book was the UK schools edition of Coraline -- a thin hardback with a laminated cover that looked exactly like the books we'd get when I was a school -- sturdy little books, but cheaply enough produced that you could buy enough for a class, rather than one for the school library, and I felt bizarrely proud, and blinked, realising I was going to be taught in schools, and that unwary children are soon going to be picking it up and reading it...

Which reminds me:

Hi Neil,

I was wondering if you had seen this article (http://slate.msn.com/id/2079769/) about how British-made books (the physical books, that is, not the writing) don't hold up compared to their American counterparts. Do you agree and do you have any prime examples? Also, there's quite a suggestive misspelling on the where's Neil page:

Where's Neil:

Friday, March 7 Author Neil Gaiman
and Saturday March 8 Free to the pubic

Hehe! Thanks,
BP

Ah yes, but it was a typo from the website it was cut and pasted from. My favourite typo like that was in a Jeff Rovin biography of Joan Collins I had to review as a very young man. It told us at one point that "Joan was in New York at this time for some pubicity".

Yes, it's broadly true about the books. Not entirely, though, and not always. American mass market paperbacks seem to yellow and fall apart at pretty much the same rate that most UK mass market paperbacks do. But US trade paperbacks always seem to be printed on better paper (it tends to be whites, and possibly to have a higher fabric content in the pulp). UK hardbacks tend to be, but are not always, the paperback insides put between hardcovers, so you have the same paper quality as a paperback. This is because hardbacks are widely considered to be a dead market in the UK. I don't know why this is -- for lots of my books, Neverwhere for example, the publisher would explain that no-one bought hardbacks, and then grudgingly bring out 1500, which would be sold out within a week. Even Coraline was originally going to be a paperback original in the UK ... then it made it to hardback and paperback, then, when the sales reps came back with feedback, into hardback, and then it just kept selling in hardback. But that's not common, so publishers' economics tend to be centred around paperbacks.

Darren McKeenan from Gothic.net sends an e-mail to say...


I don't know if Caitlin told you, but we have a previously unpublished
short story by her up at http://www.gothic.net -- I thought your readers
might want to know. Also, Jilli Venters was picked to be a YAHOO PICK OF
THE WEEK for her http://www.gothicmissmanners.com site -- and of course, it
all started out on gothic.net too.

Which I'm happy to plug, if only because both Caitlin and Jillian are old friends. (Jillian adds a touch of class to all signings and events in the Seattle area by looking, well, perfect, and has, in the past, been the only bodyguard I've ever had with either a top hat or wings. So if I were you, I'd be inclined to take whatever gothic miss manners advice she wants to hand out...)

Also, of course, it's good advice... (I'll cut and paste a delightful sample.)

Rule the First: do not break up with someone over email. Tacky, tacky, tacky. However, even WORSE than that is to not bother breaking up with someone, but let them discover your affections are moving elsewhere via reading a web journal or blogger.

Now, Gothic Miss Manners is sure that ALL of you are horrified to find that she even has to spell that out. Goodness knows Gothic Miss Manners was horrified when she heard about this sort of thing happening. It is her very sorry duty to report that yes indeed, there are shallow and clueless people out there who obsessively update their web journal with their every thought and emotional whim, but seem to forget to tell others in their lives about the thoughts and emotional whims that might have an impact on those others.

Which brings us to Rule the Second: after the break-up, do not post personal details and habits about your ex on your on-line journal. Don�t. That sort of venting and carrying on should be strictly private, and only indulged in where various semi-acquaintences and bored strangers surfing the web won�t run across it. Catharsis is all well and good, but PUBLIC catharsis can be messy. After a romantic flame-out, both parties concerned should try to appear as calm and rational as possible (in public, that is. In private, feel free to vent your spleen, cry, denounce the other party as a loathsome cad. But ONLY do that IN PRIVATE, or in the company of friends who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut).

Why is this such a big deal? Part of it is the Golden Rule of �treat others the way you would like to be treated.� In the event of the dissolution of a romance, would you want the other party to be posting things such as, �My ex was stupid, smelled funny, and laughed at only their own jokes?� Would you want that posted in a forum where anyone with a connection to the internet could run across it and read it?

(Wait, wait, Gothic Miss Manners can see one of you waving a hand. No, leaving out the person�s name doesn�t make it any better, and is a coward�s excuse. Or are you going to try and tell Gothic Miss Manners that you and your ex had no mutual acquaintances or friends who might read your webpage? Oh, you don�t care what they think? Then perhaps you shouldn�t be allowed to have romantic entanglements.)

Read and enjoy.


...

And it's astonishing the number of FAQs that have arrived in the last few minutes that began "I have a Dell Latitude as well, and...."

Other people's Problems with Computers stories are like other people's dreams. Your own are, of course, absolutely fascinating, while theirs are kind of dull, because they happened to them, not to you.

This one's mine. And even I don't think it's one of the really interesting ones.

My computer, a very nice, fairly new Dell Latitude, wouldn't turn on a couple of weeks ago, while I was sick. I phoned the Dell helpline, sat on hold (actually lay on hold) for an hour while an irritating voice told me they'd be with me momentarily and I thought a) momentarily means for a moment and not in a moment, and b) whatever it means, you're not so why do keep saying that? Eventually I got a person, who told me I should be phoning the Gold Support Line, not the normal line, and I pointed out they keep the Gold Support Line phone number super secret and don't post it anywhere just to prevent things like that happening. And I copied down the number and phoned the Gold line, and it was picked up immediately by someone who fixed the problem over the phone (I had to unplug the battery and the power and hold down the power button for 15 seconds, and then everything would be all right. And it was.)

"Is there anything else wrong?" he said.

I should have kept my mouth shut. Instead I said, "Well, there's a tiny hairline crack in the plastic case on the front. I mean, you can barely see it, but maybe it should be fixed while it's still under warranty..."

"Not a problem," he said. "We'll send someone over to fix it."

Several days later a nice man came over, and swapped the cracked case for an uncracked case. "That's odd," he said, when he had finished. "Did your keyboard used to work?"

"Oh yes," I said. "It worked like billy-oh."

"Well," he said. "It doesn't now. I'll need some more parts."

He came back a few days later with a new keyboard. "That's funny," he said, after a while. "You'd think it'd work now."

He came back a few days after that. "You know," he said, "you'd think that with a new motherboard and new keyboard, and well, pretty much everything except a new hard disk, that the keyboard would work. There's nothing I've not replaced. Had you noticed any other troubles with it, I mean before?"

"No," I said. "It had a little hairline crack in the case when it arrived, but you fixed that."

He phoned Dell, and got authorisation for them to replace the computer with another, just like it only with a working keyboard. And today, a bit late, it arrived, with a slightly off-putting scarlet refurbished label on the bottom. And now I have to roll up my sleeves and will spend tonight and tomorrow loading all the software and files on it.... which is just a bit frustrating, because I ought to be making things up and writing them down.

And the moral of this story eludes me, except it's probably safer, if you have a hairline crack in a case that's never going to be anything else but a hairline crack you can only see if you tip it on its side when the light is right, not to say anything to anybody about it at all ever in your whole life.

Also I had this dream in which I was escaping from a grapefruit farm, pursued by people with hypodermics filled with botox.


....

Hello Mr. Gaiman,
You were reading Wee Free Men to your daughter, and then you took sick. Did you finish reading it and what did you and she think about it? Could you give a review, without too many spoilers? (Although, I will be buying it and reading it no matter if you printed the whole dang book.) Thanks, Dave

Yes, we finished it as soon as I was up to it, at a chapter a night. It's a terrific book: it's funny, but it has tremendous gravitas. Tiffany Aching's little brother has been stolen by a Queen of Faerie, and now, armed with only a frying pan and several thousand small kilted blue pictsies, she's going to get him back. On the way she's going to make her peace with her dead grandmother, and find out what a real witch school is. She's a frighteningly smart nine year old, and is the heroine of a very scary, very grown-up book.

The Nac Mac Feegle talk phonetically in Glaswegian accents, which makes it a joy to read aloud, even without Terry's knack of finding the perfect word at the perfect time for it.

And for those who wondered, I'm back to reading Krabat (aka The Satanic Mill) to myself at night before sleep. I don't think it would work as a book to read aloud to Maddy, but it's really a chilling piece of work.

Hey, Neil--
Glad the Salt Lake City signing went well. The library comics store
where you signed is an offshoot of Mimi and Alan Carroll's Night Flight
Comics in Cottonwood Mall. I know Mimi has been working with the
libraries in the SLC area for quite some time now--I was there in
October for cartooning demonstrations that Mimi organized for Bill
Morrison and Batton Lash (my wonderful husband) at the new SLC Library
and the Park City Library; over 60 enthusiastic kids showed up for each
one. That's when I first heard about the library store, which as far as
I know is the only comics/graphics novel store of its kind in the U.S.
Mimi managed to put the store together in record time (opening last
month, two months earlier than originally planned). Batton and I wish
Mimi and Alan great success with the store, since it offers a great way
for the reading public to be exposed to comics--and maybe even buy some!

Jackie Estrada

According to Julie the librarian, Mimi made an amazing presentation to the Powers That Be that convinced them that comics and graphic novels make literate kids, and that the best possible thing to have in a library was a comics shop.

I just looked at the place in awe. I mean, a library, with a comics store, and food.... at a certain age, I would have gone there and simply never left. I would have slept in the giant beanbags -- lovesacs -- and read everything...

Anyway, thanks for making sure that Alan and Mimi got their credit, Jackie. (Jackie's husband, Batton Lash, does a great comic called SUPERNATURAL LAW, by the way.)

Neil,
I hate to cause trouble, but on your last entry on March 6th, you say that the Green Hand anecdote is in September 27th, 2002's entry. The problem is that this entry doesn't seem to exist, and I don't see the Green Hand anecdote in any of the nearby days, either. So am I just being stupid about something, or is something somewhere wrong?

Thanks,
Teddy

It was a typo -- now fixed. It was Sept 7th, not 27th. Sorry.

I'm quoting this from the US edition of "The Week" for March 14th 2003. It's from their "It must be true... I read it in the Tabloids" column -- although which tabloid ran the story we do not,alas, know.

Stephen King has a surefire cure for writer's block. He pulls a jar from his desk containing the pickled heart of a slave child from the early 1800s. After just one glimpse, says King, "I can get inspired to write truly terrifying prose no matter how blocked I was before." As effective as his muse is, King doesn't rely on it too heavily. "I only pull out the jar on rare occasions."

Originally, the joke was Bob Bloch's -- he said, more or less, "I may write disturbing stuff, but really I have the heart of a small boy... I keep it in a jar on my desk." Steve King would occasionally quote it, usually giving attribution, as in "As Robert Bloch said, I may seem scary, but I have the heart of a little child. I keep it in a jar on my desk."

I just wonder what kind of process happened here -- my guess is that a foreign newspaper found the "jar on the desk" quote, failed to understand it was a joke, and decided to expand upon it, and the story was picked up and repeated. (Although it's always possible that someone asked Steve what kind of heart it was, where he'd got it from and so on, and he decided to test their credulity, as Terry Pratchett and I once did when we realised we were being interviewed by a radio journalist who hadn't realised GOOD OMENS was a work of fiction, and wanted to know more about Agnes Nutter and her prophecies.) But somehow I don't think so...

There's always the Onion, isn't there?

Not a question - just a heads up - I was reading the blog last night to hear about the signing in UT (I very much wanted to drive up, but my spark plugs were, um, dead) and read your bit on lovesacs. Like many others, I'm sure, I checked their site, went, "Ooooh. Pretty. HOW MUCH?!" and went quickly away. But I noticed this morning that overstock.com is having a 54% off sale on them. Might wanna check it out.
Wende

Which is one of the many reasons I love this journal. One minute I'm gasping at the price of lovesacs, the next I'm ordering 'em online at 54% off. Thanks so much.

Mr. Gaiman,

I came across this quasi-interesting article about Google and Bloggers on CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/10/
bloggers.ap/index.html Personally I would rather not see you advertising "Raging Cow" or any other such products in your blog and for those reasons I rather hope blogging doesn't become "mainstream".
Also, if someone tells you that they have traveled far to see you, or that it is his/her birthday, try feeling flattered, I'm sure it's preferable to guilt.

Cheers,
Kathryn

I'll try, but there's always someone who drove down from Alaska or flew in from Hong Kong for a signing, and I'm afraid my reaction is never "How flattering, they came all this way to see me!" but more on the lines of "I wish I was a bit more exciting, I hope they aren't too disappointed". It's then that I resolve to learn to juggle or pick up some useful skills, but I never actually do.

Anyway, I would like to categorically announce that I think that using blogs and bloggers to try and advertise a Dr Pepper powdered milk drink is a disgrace and it undermines the entire spirit of blogging, livejournalling etc, and those who go along with it are unequivocally morally compromised. I hereby declare that this journal will never be used to promote anything as shady as powdered milk drinks in exchange for free samples.

Things I would happily plug here in exchange for free samples, on the other hand, include but are not limited to:

New cars (I'd rather like a Mini, actually. It's a nostalgia thing, if you can be nostalgic for a car that looks sort of similar to, but isn't, a car you grew up with),

Really really nice fountain pens,

and

an island in the South Seas. Or the Caribbean, I suppose. I'm not fussy.

There. I'm glad we've got that cleared up.

A fascinating article at http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,911115,00.html by a documentary maker who wanted to film A.S. Byatt writing a novel. And did. For three and a half years. I felt for A. S. Byatt all the way through. (I said no, when people wanted to do a similar documentary on me a few years ago, and reading this article I'm glad I did.)

And I appear to have an "Author Page" at the Guardian.

Popped in to Dreamhaven books today, where I signed a pile of stuff for their neilgaiman.net website, and I picked up the latest copy of Locus, which contains a marvellous interview with Mike Moorcock. When I was about 15, my friend Dave Dickson and I turned up at Mike's house in Ladbroke Grove to interview him, and if he was taken aback by our age or school uniforms he managed not to show it. He talked for hours, was funny and fascinating and smart and set a chillingly high example of what to grow up to be if you wanted to grow up to be a writer.

Was sent, and read, a copy of Stephen Rauch's book Neil Gaiman's the Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of Modern Myth from Wildside Press. It was good, readable and intelligent, all three of which which came as a huge relief to me. You could probably teach a pretty good SANDMAN class using just that and Hy Bender's Sandman Companion.

I bought a few books at DreamHaven, and it was only when I pulled them out that I realised the titles form a sequence: OUT OF THE DARK, IN THE DARK, and THE DARKEST PART OF THE WOODS, although they're respectively short stories by Robert W Chambers, E. Nesbit, and a new novel by Ramsey Campbell. A PLEASING TERROR is the last book I got, a huge and definitive collection of the writings of M. R. James... (All links to the publishers pages on the books.)

I stole this link from Teresa Nielsen Hayden's marvellous blog: What They Didn't Teach Us In Library School. The most recent one is:

How to respond when a member of the public approaches the Reference Desk and makes the following statement:

"Excuse me, but there's a naked man prancing about in the gents' toilets."

and the one before that,


That a reader would come in and ask to borrow a shed. 'Because you are always so helpful I thought you might have one.' AND they wanted to take it away, not just store something in ours.

And they just keep going...

...

Hi Neil

Yesterday's Independent had a review of the Coraline audiobook:

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=384810


Best wishes

Tom
...

They're right -- Dawn's reading really is absolutely marvellous.
...

I guess you really can�t send a written reply to the address: "to the Swedish young Lady Anneli Holm who writes a completely no-logic adress the author Neil Gaiman and gets away with it" but does Neil ever personally reply on letters not sent by any other reason than to say "you ruined my writing dreams but go on and keep startle little Swedish gilrs because WE LIKE IT"...? Take good care now!/ Anneli

I always used to answer fan-mail. And I don't not answer fan-mail. There are several large boxes filled with fan-mail I really and truly plan to answer. Part of the problem is that my time is finite. There's only one of me, and if it gets written, I wrote it.

(It's probably also fair to say that this journal now exists in the time that I used to give to fan-mail. I send a lot fewer postcards, but answer a lot more questions.)

Anyway, sooner or later I'll get a quiet day or so, and I'll settle down and write a few hundred postcards.

Several "why aren't you coming to my country then?" messages in. This one really is a frequently asked question, and I've answered it a few times, but it's worth repeating.

Most often it's because I haven't been asked.

The European Tour was put together by my literary agent's foreign rights person talking to all the European publishers of Coraline last year and earlier this year about when they were publishing and whether they wanted me to come and promote the book. Lots of them said yes, some said no. (The Norwegians and Finns and Swedes asked if I could come back in the autumn, and we'll see if it's possible -- I hope so.) Sometimes a publisher doesn't want the expense involved in bringing me in, which is understandable.

Sometimes it's because, although I've been asked, I've already comitted to something else. (I was invited to two Australian Book Festivals this year, but invited at a point where I'd already agreed to be in other places, and I asked if they can invite me again for 2004.)

And sometimes I'll say no (or, quite often, Lorraine-my-assistant or Merrilee-my-agent will say no for me, and not even check with me) because I can't go to every convention that asks. If I did, I'd never be home, and I'd get precious little writing done, and then nobody would have any reason to invite me anywhere.

If you've asked and I've said no (or someone said no on my behalf), ask again, in good time, for the following year.

It's March 2003 right now, and 2004 is already starting to be locked down.
...

I always wondered what happened to the suitcases that airlines lost. It seems they get auctioned -- to people who can't open them to see what's inside. There's a lovely account of it here: http://www.observer.co.uk/travel/story/0,6903,910287,00.html