Where's Maddy?

Neil - what's happened to Maddy? The last I heard she was with you in Scotland, and now you are in Singapore and Maddy has somehow disappeared from your journal. Which is a shame because I was enjoying her perspective on your trip. By the way, how old is she these days? - I lost count around 11.
Allie. Canada.

I left her behind in the UK, where she was happy to spend time with aunts and grandparents and things. (And a text message from my sister let me know that Maddy(and the rest of my family) are just fine, and were a long way away from today's bombings. Now I have to keep my fingers crossed for my friends.)

I offered her the chance to travel on round the world with me, and she decided not to, which I think, given my work schedule, was in retrospect far and away the most sensible thing to do.

She'll turn eleven in late August.

...

Off to Manila in the wee small hours of the morning.

More info on the Philippines signings seems to be emerging at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gaiman_fullybooked/message/31
and http://www.neilgaimanphilippines.tk/

It was a much quieter day today. Odd things that happened included looking up at lunchtime to find someone passing the restaurant was taking my photograph. Was given a pen, by a pen shop - Elephant and Coral - who feel that authors should get nice pens (this was a Pilot pen with the nib carved out of the barrel, and looks like it will be a lovely thing to write with).

A scribbling machine

Am told I signed for a thousand people tonight.

I'm going to get into a bath now. Afterwards I think I'll go to sleep.

Right.

Australian schedule...

This is the new, revised Australian tour schedule, which replaces the old, unrevised, Australian tour schedule. (I'll edit it on Where's Neil)

First of all, there's Continuum 3 -- http://www.continuum.org.au/ -- which is described on their website as,

Continuum is an annual Melbourne speculative fiction and pop culture convention celebrating creativity across genre and media. From hard-edge science fiction to high-flown fantasy, comic books to film noir, high culture to sub-culture � we sink our teeth into it all!

This year our convention will commence on Friday 15th July and conclude late on Sunday 17th July, 2005. Continuum 3 aims to provide a wide range of traditional SF convention activities as well some new ones, all complementing our theme: Creatures Natural and Unnatural. We are very pleased to have Neil Gaiman, Poppy Z Brite, Richard Harland and Robin Hobb as our Official Guests for 2005, who will feature along with numerous other speakers and panellists in a fabulous line up of panels, presentations and special activities.

And that's followed by,

Monday 18 July-Melbourne
Lecture, Q&A, Book signing:
The Australian Centre for Youth Literature
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Enquiries: Mike Shuttleworth, 03 8664 7014

Tuesday 19 July-Canberra
4-6pm Signing event:
Gaslight Books, Fyshwick
Unit 10/83 Wollongong St
Enquiries: Gayle Lovett, 02 6239 3633

7-10pm Lecture introduced by Colin Steele, Q&A, Signing:
Manning Clark Lecture Theatre 1
Union Court, Australian National University
Enquiries: Diane Whitehead, 02 6125 4144

Wednesday 20 July-Sydney
12.30-3pm Talk, Q&A, Signing
Galaxy Books
143 York Street
Enquiries: David Lynton, 02 9267 7222 or 02 9264 3260

5.30-7.30pm Talk, Q&A, Signing
Kinokuniya
Enquiries: Steve Jones, (02) 9262 7996

Thursday 21st July-Brisbane
6.30-10pm Talk, Q&A, Book Signing
Pulp Fiction
Anzac Square Arcade
265-269 Edward Street
Enquiries: Ron Serdiuk, 07 3236 2750

Another long day

Today was a lot like yesterday, although it started much earlier with morning television, and the last of the signing ended around 10:40, rather than after midnight.

In the meantime I signed lots of things, and have decided that the people of Singapore I've encountered so far are, on the whole, friendly, funny, smart, literate, culturally diverse, and extremely keen on making sure I've eaten. Eaten lots, and eaten well and eaten locally. (And incidentally, you have to try some of this. I've given you a bag of it for later.)

It's a bit of a marathon, but the people are making it fun.

"Took off to the Land of Nod"

Got up. Went to British Council. Did press conference. Did interviews. Stopped doing interviews at 4:30 and did MirrorMask presentation/talk and signing. Signing ended late, so we showed the next house "A Short Film About John Bolton" while I crammed down some food (a gross disservice to a chef who was trying to feed me like a visiting VIP, sigh), ran back, did another MirrorMask Presentation and Q&A, and then another signing which finished, somehow, a little after midnight.

I may have left something out.

The people in Singapore are very nice, the food is good, the author is braindead.

...

Also http://movies.aol.com/movie_exclusive_mirrormask_movie_clip is now up.

in a singapore sling...

I am a) in Singapore and b) already amazingly well-fed, thanks to Lena St George-Sweet of the British Council. This is all good. On the downside I've had four hours sleep and 13 hours of flying in the last 24, and the world is starting to feel like it's made out of some kind of thin gelatinous substance that wobbles.

Getting online is much easier than it was in the last hotel I was in, although it involves carrying my little computer into the hotel's business lounge, and my internal clock has simply stopped. It could be any time.

A few links: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gorillaz.html is the text of the interview with Gorillaz published in this month's Wired. (Seeing that the interview was much longer than what they had room for in Wired, and had lots more odd good bits besides -- the interview as printed is simply an extract by the Wired editors of a few bits of the transcription, I've asked my editor at Wired if we can put the whole thing up here, and we probably will, and then I can put the actual intro as I wrote it up as well, and feel a bit more comfortable about the whole thing.)

Over at Emerald City blog I saw the Locus Award results, and rediscovered that my story with the extremely long name had won the Locus Award for Best Short Story. This made me feel more guilty than happy, as I had meant to write a thank you speech and then what with the travelling everything got away from me, and I didn't. I think I would have mostly wanted to say thank you from the 22 year old me who started to write the first draft of this in pencil late one night on East Croydon Station, and who would have just been happy if it had been published (the forty-something year old who took that first draft from the box in the attic twenty years later and polished it into a publishable short story (as seen at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/08/forbidden-brides-of-faceless-slaves-in.asp) was also delighted, but not as much as the 22 year old). (Terrifying photos of the award ceremonies can be seen here.)

Which reminds me, for the next month you can read my short story "We can Get Them For you Wholesale" at http://www.shadow-writer.co.uk/wholesale.htm, the website of the man behind this calendar (filled with 100 word short stories, and paintings too. I did Death).

Tomorrow will be long with lots of interviews and some signings and a MirrorMask presentation or two. Good night.

ting tht alm wrk

If there is one thng worse than thngs that don't work it's things that almost work.

The internet connection in my hotel room won't let me get or send email. But if I type VERY sslowlyy onto the hotel tv screen it will let me post this. (That was about five minutes' typing, waiting to see if characters make it to the screen or not. The title of the post I simply typed - or as the hotel connection would have it ypd - and I will leave what it was meant to say as an exercise for the reader.

Really Maddy should be blogging this one...

Quick post -- I need to get to bed. Interviews and things ALL day tomorrow.

Maddy, transplanted across the Atlantic, has turned into a nocturnal creature, who glares and sighs her way through mornings, cheers up in the afternoons and comes to life in the evenings. This morning we went to the studio where Lenny Henry is recording the audio book for ANANSI BOYS, and she semi-somnolently met Lenny for the first time since she was a toddler, and barely noticed. This evening we went out to dinner with the amazing Derren Brown, following his west end show, and Maddy, now vivacious and sassy, got to meet Stephen Fry and has not yet stopped delightedly talking about it.

We also saw Theatre of Blood on Saturday Night at the National Theatre(another Improbable production) which she loved and I really liked. In it half a dozen critics are murdered most violently and imaginatively. Afterwards, I started grumbling to her that while Jim Broadbent's performance was hilarious, it wasn't quite what the play called for (he plays a very funnily bad Shakesperian actor, whereas he should be playing a BIG Shakesperian actor)and Maddy looked up and said "Quiet dad. You know what happens to critics..." Of course, that was late at night too.

Saww Dave McKean today and planned some things and plotted others, and I got to ooh and ah over THE ALCHEMY OF MIRRORMASK proofs.

blogging for joy

It occurs to me that blogging is really good at capturing some emotions, and not quite as good at capturing others. Joy is one of the ones it�s harder to pin down afterwards � it�s like sticking a pin through a captive butterfly and wondering why it isn�t as beautiful as when it was fluttering crookedly in the sunlight. I would like to go on record here as saying that there was a point yesterday afternoon when we had some extra time and our actors still there, so we told them they were now wolves and not the family, and we took the Jam Song and I scribbled down some new wolfish lyrics for the verses listing several things that wolves can do with jam, and then our actors (Paul and Calum and Ian and Heather and Cora) started to sing it, all of them deciding that wolves ought to sound more or less like Tom Waits, that I found myself laughing like mad with the pure unholy joy of knowing that it all worked and that it was, if only for a you-had-to-be-there-moment, one of the funniest things I�d ever seen. Happy.

There�s a lot to write and make and do before it�s a whole play, and most of it will be done by other people. But I can�t wait until it�s done.

And I really have to write something original for the stage.

A quick happy one

Spent today workshopping the Wolves in the Walls children's opera at the Tramway. In the morning it seemed like we had a few ideas for songs and a handful of finished things and some ideas. As the actors began to sing and Nick Powell started playing it transmuted into something rich and strange, and I realised that it was becoming a show that I'd really like to see. And this is before Julian Crouch starts to build puppets and masks. Tomorrow, we get to work with a tuba player.

Maddy was worried she'd be bored. By the end she turned and told me she was pleased she hadn't brought a book. Yep yep yep!! It's the truth!! ( Oh and by the way... everyone did a fantastic job and the songs were great!!) Hey.. I have just realized I am good at giving compliments. Ha ha :-)

....

PS: Dear "Neil number one",Those fortunate enough to be named Neil can rest assured that they have an able online spokesman, representative and all-around archetype. What about the rest of us? Who can we trust to shoulder that great responsibility?I checked out "Steve number one", and it's just some camera website. "That's no fun", I thought, "but Steve Jackson is in second place, and he's kind of cool. He's even been persecuted by the Secret Service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil). I wonder what it would take to get him up one place."

So I knocked off an incredibly quick webpage launching the Campaign For Better Namesakes ("cfubbun"). Since you're one of the very few people in the world with no interest whatsoever in the campaign, I though you might like to see it. The home page is at http://www.eschatonic.org/cfubbun/

Steve Jessop, Oxford, UK.