mentioning lynd ward

Lots of interesting things going on today -- the first few pages of art came in from Dave McKean on CRAZY HAIR, I sent more rediscovered SANDMAN photocopies to Scott Nybakken, and Lorraine came down from the attic in glee having found a school project I did aged eight entitled ANTS - ANGELS IN DISGUISE...

There's a great TIME OUT interview with Dave McKean up at http://www.timeout.com/film/news/959.html

Something that has been bugging me for years... Why is it, that in the early run of Sandman, there was an attempt to integrate it in the DC Universe, with the JLA appearance, but later on in the series (admittedly, after Vertigo had been established), instead of using Bizarro Superman and Lois Lane, you made them Weirdzos, almost as if you couldn't use the official DC version?

That had more to do with it being sort of in the DC Universe than it not -- after all, it might have been odd if the Superman comics in the Sandman world talked about Bizarro Lois Lane and so forth. But as originally written and lettered I actually had it as Bizarros (and, I think, Superman comics and characters) and changed it at the request of editor Mike Carlin.

There's a terrific book by Hy Bender called The Sandman Companion, which is filled with all this sort of information, and which、although it's still in print, they should probably re-release into the world, because people don't know that it's out there any longer. (Here's a PDF of four random pages -- http://www.dccomics.com/media/excerpts/1692_x.pdf)

Mr. Gaiman, just a note to remind you that the Readerville discussion of Stardust opens tomorrow! We're looking forward to seeing you there.

That's http://www.readerville.com/, for the curious. A very nice, book-y sort of a place.


Hi Neil,
Looking forward massively to Wolves - just wanted to add that there's an interview with you up on the NTS website now (http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s3_1), and how nicely it all fits with the campaign to reintroduce extinct wild species (including wolves) into Scotland (here and elsewhere: http://www.bigcats.org/esa/wolves.html). So, "wolves in the walls" is less a pandemonium, and more of a prediction?
Also, are you coming back over to see it on stage for real? Though in the NTS brochure, it says that NTS/Improbable are aiming to take the show on tour internationally from spring 2007 as well as further round the UK in autumn 2006, so I guess there will be opportunities closer to you.
Hope you're getting a thaw in MN,

Louise


It's still below freezing, day in and day out, and the world is getting cabin fever. Or I am.
And I'll be in Glasgow to work on Wolves in the Walls at the Tramway during the preview period. I've loved writing the extra lyrics and words for it so far, and I wish I was over there with them all playing with wolf puppets right now... although that has rather more to do with the deeply chilly weather here than it ought to...

Hi Neil,

This seemed like something many of your blog readers might be interested in knowing about:
________________

Seeking Book Donations
The New Orleans Public Library
(New Orleans LA)
The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after Katrina. The staff will assess which titles will be designated for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. Please send your books to:

Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112

If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate.
_______________

This is from:

http://www.nyfa.org/opp_detail.asp?%20type=Opportunity&id=95&fid=1&sid=54&oppid=9591

The New Orleans Public Library site is:

http://nutrias.org/

Many thanks and best wishes,
Tami Kaplan

Thanks, Tami.

Hi, Neil
Very sorry to bother you with this, but I submitted a similar question to the "site query" a while ago and haven't heard back. I tried using the search function on the new blog to look for your original comments on M. John Harrison's Light. I'd found them once just before the changeover using the old google search function on the old blog. No results this time. Also tried keyword laptop to find the comment about your new laptop and the results were a series of photos of you at signing events over the years. Not at all what I was expecting.
Thanks for your help.
Anna

It's very frustrating, isn't it? When it was decided that I'd get to keep blogging in Blogger, apparently that meant the site's new search engine wouldn't find anything on the blog any longer. Then for a few days there was a Google search engine up on the Search page, but for some reason it went back to being the other search engine, and there's no kind of warning that it doesn't search the blog up there.

Searching the blog is still really easy -- just go to www.Google.com, or a google toolbar, and type site:neilgaiman.com and follow it with the word or words you're looking for -- Harrison Light or laptops or whatever.

I hope they fix it soon.

...

Just to clarify for people, just above the Ask Neil box, where you can ask things (or let me know things) it says that I won't do your homework. What this means is that I won't do your homework. It also means that I won't help you write your paper or answer questions for your thesis. (I only mention this because every second request coming in right now seems to be asking me to help with homework. Or a paper. Or a thesis.) (Sorry.)

Mr. Gaiman, one thing I have long since wondered about, but have never found an adequate answer. Maybe you can help. How many words comprise a "Novel"? I have asked this question to English professors, other writers, and just about everyone in between, and I have never received a satisfactory answer. Please help. And keep writing. Your work inspires me more than anyone else. Even Stephen King.

Sincerely,
Justin

A quick Google tells us that if you're talking Awards Categories, if it's a mystery and it's up for an Edgar, it's a novel if it's over 22,000 words, while if it's a Romance it's 25,000 words for a YA, and over 40,000 for most other categories. In SF and Fantasy it's over 40,000 words to get a Hugo or Nebula for Best Novel.

But if you're just talking novels, then it's probably zero... for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynd_Ward and http://www.bpib.com/lyndward.htm

Spear of Destiny -- now on eBay

Lorraine and I spent some of today going through various tubs and boxes in the attic and the basement, looking for Sandman stuff for the forthcoming Absolute Sandmans. Back when they shot the original art to make the black plate for the comics, sometimes it was over- or under- exposed, and either the blacks would join together and fill in, and we'd lose detail, or the finer lines would vanish completely, and we'd lose detail. Luckily, I kept everything I was ever sent -- or tried to. Lots of stuff has been sent back to DC Comics over the years for the various Companions and suchlike, and it hasn't always returned safely, so some things have disappeared. But the photocopies of the issues have mostly been kept, and they are, on the whole, good, clean, crisp black and white photocopies of the art, with clean black-on-white (as opposed to the white on black in the comics) Morpheus word balloons which means that we don't need to redo the ones that have closed up. But finding them, that's been the challenge.

Still,　there's a lot of serendipity about, when you go rummaging through old tubs of papers. Every now and again I'll run into something I thought lost forever -- comics pages I wrote and drew when I was about 14, for example, or the drawing lesson Dave McKean faxed me before I began my 24 hour comic -- and I'll be pleasantly amazed.

Mostly it makes me wish that I had a couple of months to do nothing but go through stuff.

I think I'm going to reprint a few stories that have never been reprinted for the 2007 short story collection for kids I'm planning (Ray Bradbury said that he didn't mind if I called it M is for Magic, which is my tip of the hat to R is for Rocket and S is for Space, bless him) and I know that it'll be back to the tubs again for that.

...

Over at Locus Online -- http://www.locusmag.com/ -- there's a few interesting links. There's the extract from their 1991 and their 2005 interviews with me and Terry Pratchett up, for example. There's the locus poll and survey and the online-only SF poetry poll.

And then there are the things you find out about from their sidebars, like this terrific interview with Poppy Z Brite.

Terry Gilliam has run off to join the circus, and you he talks about that and copyright and mentions reviving Good Omens in this article -- http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/686638.html

And, probably like many authors, I watch the reports of the current Da Vinci Code - Holy Blood, Holy Grail suit with interest. (Here's the Guardian on the first day in court.) I kept thinking there was something familiar about the case, and finally realised that it was similar in many ways to when my old friend James Herbert was sued by Trevor Ravenscroft, the author of (the sort of non-fiction) The Spear of Destiny over what Ravenscroft felt to be copyright infringements in Jim's novel The Spear. A Google showed the court case mentioned in this Bookseller article, and in this case summary.

In addition, you can find out about the mysterious histories of the Spear of Destiny in this Wikipedia article which begins The Spear of Destiny, sometimes known as the Holy Lance, Holy Spear, Lance of Longinus, or Spear of Longinus, is claimed to be the spear that pierced the side of Jesus when he was on the cross

and finishes up with the rather awesome claim,

Spear of destiny on eBay Spear of destiny for sale now on eBay. New Bidders Welcome! for-sale-now.com/eBay/


One of those hypothetical questions :-p If you had to choose between working on comics and working on straight forward literature, which would you choose? Do you feel like one is more effective than the other? Thanks.

I don't have an answer, I'm afraid -- it's one of those "If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life would it be cheese or apples?" sort of questions that makes my eyes cross just thinking about it. Luckily, nobody's ever going to make me choose. And no, I don't think one is more effective than the other: it's cheese and apples...


Neil,I would like to know how often you write, I am working on my novel at this time and I was just thinking about how often my own personal favorite writer's create a different life on page. Well, with that said how often do you write? When you're working on a novel, how much of the novel do you work on in a day? Do you write a chapter a day or do you perhaps write two or three chapters? Okay, just a simple thought. Thanks Neil for all the writing and powerful words. Jeff Buford

When I'm working on a novel I try and write every day, and I'm perfectly happy as long as I've done over about 1500 words.

NEIL

NEIL YOU FAT LOAD

YOU CRASHED OUR FORUM

WHAT THE HELL DUDE

HOWEVER: The Books of Magic was a pretty okay book I guess.

Okay fine it was rockin'.

I hate that I cannot bring myself to hate you, Neil.


That would be the non-speaking Garfield cartoons I linked to at www.truthandbeautybombs.com? Sorry about that -- I didn't mean to send people there to crash your forum.

In my defense, that's one of the advantages and disadvantages of the internet -- if something interesting gets discovered or linked to, it can go wider than anyone ever expected, and the next thing you know thousands of people who never knew that your site existed are stomping around, staring at interesting things on it, or downloading your song or your video, or whatever. And raging at people who point out that something's interesting and link to it isn't going to stop that happening again. Probably the best solution is never to post interesting things, and to stop other people doing it.

...

If you're in Manchester on Friday, there's a screening of MirrorMask with a Dave McKean Q&A afterwards.

And finally, thanks to all of you who sent me the link to me signing books, in Lego... http://www.flickr.com/photos/minifig/64851747/in/set-1195846/

Octavia Butler...

I didn't know Octavia Butler well -- we met at the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida and we ate together and talked, and she was incredibly tall and wise and imposing. We shared an agent, Merrilee Heifetz, but I loved her books and somehow thought of her as a permanent presence, although nobody ever is...

http://darkush.blogspot.com/2006/02/octavia-butler-died-saturday.html

A pack of interviews...

It's SUNDAY TELEGRAPH day, it seems. I just noticed S. F. Said has done a feature on Dave McKean and Mirrormask, with an interview with Dave McKean and a little sidebar on me -- you can read it here, while there's an interview with Julian Crouch about the Wolves in the Walls here.

Vicky Featherstone tells me that the first two days of WOLVES in Glasgow have already sold out, which I mention mostly to remind anyone reading the blog who wants to go and see it in Glasgow or in London, that it's probably wisest to book your tickets early if you want to go to a specific performance. http://www.improbable.co.uk/show_example.asp?item_id=14 is the Improbable Theatre link. And the National Theatre of Scotland has its own website (here's the WOLVES page -- http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/Show_Wolves.html) and it's the NTS website that the first pictures from the show will show up on, so keep an eye on it.

(It's also going to be in Perth, Stirling, Kirkcaldy and Ayr.)

The Lyric Hammersmith site has an interview with me at http://www.lyric.co.uk/images/event/NeilGaim.pdf and its page on the show is at http://www.lyric.co.uk/pl150.html (the captioned show, for the hard of hearing, is the 27th of April).

Steve McGinty, who is one of those journalists like Nick Hasted or Michael Bonner who I've now been chatting to, on and off, for the best part of 20 years, and so the interviews tend to feel like conversations strobed across the decades, has his interview in the Scotsman today, at http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=290282006.

Not a question, just a note that on Monday 27th February at 11:05pm BBC1 Film 2006 with Jonathon Ross will be reviewing Mirrormask for its UK cinema release.

Thanks. Fingers crossed he likes it.

Hi,my question could sound strange but i would like to know what laptop you use to write and if yuo choose it for a technical specification.Thank you for your reply

My default laptop is a Panasonic W4, and I chose it because it doesn't weigh anything much, which makes it great for travelling around the world carrying a computer. I got it from http://www.dynamism.com/ and I notice that there're now even lighter models out there.

Now that Marvel announced John Romita jr. as the artist of you "Eternals" mini-series, I wondered how far are you in the scripts and what have you seen from Romita already? Thanks from Brazil,Fábio Moon

I've seen some glorious character sketches and designs (JR talks about it here), and I'm writing it now. As we speak. This moment, doing that thing where you sort of just write down tons of dialogue and what happens, and hope that you can go in and turn it into scenes and panels afterwards. Mr Curry has just discovered that the noise out on his balcony isn't the missing cat.


Hey Neil, I'm thinking you've probably already seen this floating around someone's blog, but if not, I thought I'd bring it to your attention. Bill Joyce drew a cover and wrote an article for the New Yorker about post-Katrina Mardi Gras in New Orleans for this week's issue, and both got bumped because of the Vice-President's recent little adventure in hunting.
~Mary~

What a moving image.

2 "how did they get it back?" questions: DeCarabas's leather coat (Neverwhere mini-series) and Orpheus's gold ear ring- lost after Thermidor, back on in Brief Lives

The De Carabas one will be a story (called, oddly enough, How The Marquis Got His Coat Back) if ever I finish writing it. Orpheus's earring is an untold story that I never found room to tell. The earring found its own way home, though.

hey neil,this is just a quick note to tell you about this interactive comic blog i'm uploading from tokyo since the beginning of this year.to escape the navelgazing trap, the readers are asked to give me assignments (ride a roller coaster, meet a local dj, talk about tokyo-related topics). a week later, they can read a comic about my efforts. http://www.livejournal.com/users/tokyoblog hope you like it - your assignments always being welcome!all the best from tokyo to deadlinia,dirk

What a fun idea.


I've been reading your blog via LJ feed for a year or two now and when I saw the note about 'Stardust' filming at Pinewood and in Scotland I nearly fell out of my seat - having done degrees in Video Production and Dramatic Writing I keenly want to start getting practical experience on film and television sets as a runner or PA (with an eventual eye toward being a writer and producer). If you have the time to send me any information on where or who I could submit a CV to in hopes of finding work on 'Stardust,' that would be terrific - I've already contacted Scottish Screen in Glasgow but haven't had a response from them yet as to whether or not they have information on the production, and I'm about to go hunting for information on the production company now... Thanks for your time either way, and best luck with the film! -- Rachel

I wish I could help, but I'm the wrong person to ask -- the best I can do is point you at the Pinewood Studios site. When I was a young journalist SCREEN INTERNATIONAL would have a list of what was filming where in the UK in the back, with production office phone numbers and the rest. I don't know if it still does, but it's certainly worth checking.

I know you're probably not the biggest sports guy in the world, but this video could make Jabba the Hutt cry:
http://www.youtube.com/w/Autistic%20basketball%20player%20causes%20mayhem%20at%20game?v=UBYPaNc57Ik&eurl=

Point taken...

Small Stardust News

Just got off the phone with Matthew Vaughn.

As of last night, and pending the Deal Being Done, it looks like Yvaine has now been cast in Stardust ("Small world," I thought, when he told me who it was) alongside the actor playing Tristran, and the film starts shooting on location in Iceland for a couple of days in March, then starts shooting properly on the 21st of April at Pinewood Studios and on location in Scotland. Some big star names, some people you've never heard of...

I think my favourite thing about this, right now, is the sort of happy feeling that comes from knowing that it's unabashedly a fantasy film with a real budget, and it will be shot in the UK and that barring an unforeseen disaster, it's actually going to be made...

Don't tell a soul...

http://www.hiddenpassageway.com/ delights my inner 12 year old like nothing else I can imagine. But we must keep this one between ourselves...

Still in Deadline World

I'm still in Deadline World, which is getting old fast, and no nearer to seeing the end of it than I was a week ago. It feels like I'm clambering up a sandy cliff-face, of the kind where, when you're half-way up, you realise that you're going to have to keep climbing as fast as you can just to not end up sliding back down to the bottom.

In the meantime, lots of interesting emails and things coming in from people, most of which I'm not getting a chance to properly look at. Still, fascinated by this story of two Homeland Security officers getting a bit, er, overenthusiastic in a Maryland library -- http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060218/NATION/602180437/1020
The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

After the two men made their announcement, one of them challenged an Internet user's choice of viewing material and asked him to step outside...

--which arrived at the same time as several people sent me the link to http://savehuck.com/ one asking whether this made me want to give up my green card and British citizenship and apply for US Citizen status, just in case, and no, it doesn't (Not any more than this -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/07/actually-its-called-permanent-resident.asp
or its sequel,
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/08/and-i-shant-get-shirty-when-they-say-i.asp
did.)

The Playaway now has an online store -- http://store.playawaydigital.com/
and I think still has a challenge in either getting their price point down, or getting people, book-crossing style, to share their Playaways, but it's a great fun invention. Anansi Boys is at http://store.playawaydigital.com/s.nl/sc.10/category.-110/it.A/id.104/.f
while Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy read by Stephen Fry is at http://store.playawaydigital.com/s.nl/sc.10/category.-110/it.A/id.101/.f (and I note from the plot description that this is somehow an alternate universe version of the story with an extra passenger on the Heart of Gold, or that's how it reads...).

And this is cool. It's cool in a sort of "I'll never actually get around to using it, but had I a lot more time, and got out to see more live music, well, you never know" sort of way -- http://www.fabulist.org/archives/2006/02/podbop.html

MirrorMask should be out in the UK on March the 3rd. If you want to see the cool Dave McKean things on a Big Screen, your chance is coming...

And finally, if you've ever wanted to hear Zora Neale Hurston singing -- http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/folklife_cd.cfm.

Another One Down...

I've spent the last couple of days out at the cabin, writing stuff. Just finished a novelette (I think that's what they're called -- it's a 10,000 word short story) that's both a story for a story collection edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois called Wizards, and Chapter (I think) Four of a children's book called The Graveyard Book.

It mostly got finished because, when I'd written a little of it, and thought it was rubbish, I read some of it to Maddy, and she really liked it and wanted to know what happened next, so I had to keep going. Never underestimate the effect of daughters on literature.

I ought to go back to the cabin tonight and keep writing, but I've just been told that there's a conference call I have to be on tomorrow morning, and seeing one of the good things about the cabin is that cellphones almost don't work out there, I think I'll sleep in my own bed tonight.

I am now an author with a huge painting in his bedroom....

The painting in my bedroom is finished, and has been screwed onto the bedroom wall. I wanted something colourful and huge and filled with life and magic and peacefulness, and it's all of that.



And a couple of photos of me in front of it this morning, for scale. (Note facial scruffage became a beard last week.)




(Photos by the artist's mother -- http://homepage.mac.com/cbickman/Home/Menu3.html) 

Long Underwear Land

The weather in this part of the world can sometimes change the way you think in peculiar ways. Take, for example, your correspondent this morning, looking at the outside thermometer on the kitchen wall, and beaming. "It's nine degrees," I announced happily. "Brilliant. It's warming up." (That's minus 13 C).

Last night, according to the thermometer, it went down to minus twenty-one (-30C). When it's that cold outside the cold creeps into your bones, and going outside becomes more than a little problematic, and yesterday I didn't leave the house and crept off, with black long underwear beneath my jeans, to write in the attic.

Today, at nine degrees, it's almost springtime...

...

We won Best Weblog, and Lifetime Achievement, which is rather nice. Thanks to all who voted. (And some of the people I voted for won things too. Hurrah.)

...

An old friend of mine is currently serving in the US army in Iraq, and she wrote a personal letter in reply to the comments about Baghdad and Sandman 50 the other day...

I’d have to say that Baghdad isn’t exactly doing all that well. I’ve flown over the central city several times via Blackhawk……and I don’t think this city looked nearly this much like Detroit after a championship loss (or win, for that matter) twenty years ago. There doesn’t seem to be a single block w/out destruction visible from the air. It isn’t just the damage we’ve done (although we have done and continue to do our share)….

It’s the IEDs….the mortars….the destruction of water treatment plants by AQIZ so that people won’t have any potable water….the destruction or simply the overload of sewer lines, so that sewage runs in the streets—that is just as likely to have been caused by too many people having crammed into a small area as a terrorist blowing up a plant or by our tanks having driven over pipes.
.
The utter lack of garbage pickup…..which if someone suggests it, leads at best to twice-weekly neighborhood burns. Hence the phrase you may have seen elsewhere re Baghdad burning—one never knows if those plumes of black smoke are from the aforementioned IEDs, mortars….or mass garbage burnings. Things are burned for light, because there is only electricity a few hours out of 24 after the bad guys have taken out the power lines or even power station again. Burned for heat, because there isn’t enough kerosene during this cold (definitely below freezing at night!) weather.

Roads: overpasses crumbled, due to poor infrastructure to begin with (and no-one keeping it up) or a VBIED or (once again) tank traffic.

Walls: see above, except for the tanks. Unless one just has to go through “that wall, right there.”

And really, now—there are multiple explosions every day. These explosions usually kill or injure someone; they *always* cause physical damage where they are located.

Having said all that, much is being rebuilt and/or built in the first place. The city wasn’t built so very solidly in the first place, and the population explosion (two thirds of the population of Fallujah came here, for example – does anyone really think they *all* went home afterwards?) combined w/ongoing damage makes it occasionally feel like the tide comes in on a regular basis and wipes out everyone’s efforts…..

So I guess I can understand where the good captain was coming from, I just don’t want people *underestimating* what the residents of Baghdad are facing. If he isn’t going out in the streets, and is passing judgement based on the buildings of Victory Base Camp…..well, he isn’t seeing their lives. I’m not outside the wire much, but I pay attention to what I can see and what people are saying.

That’s my rant, I’ll stop now. This will be a beautiful city and great tourist destination someday. Really it will! The most incredible full moons over sparkling waters, reeds lining the canals, glittering lights leading up to mosques…. And skies that can go on just forever, at night with stars so sharp they poke your eyes.

(I asked her if I could quote this, and she said yes, and added, Seriously, my concern at ever being quoted—and you are someone I trust re this issue—is that statements are kept in balance. This environment is created and sustained by such a multiplicity of factors; when I see stateside reporting focused purely on terrorist damage (a la Fox) OR damage we have done (say, truthout.org), especially when the reconstruction efforts by MNC-I (the coalition forces) and NGOs (non-governmental agencies) alike are ignored or disparaged, I just want to slap someone upside the head.)

Thanks, Lys.

Looking at the last page of Sandman 50, while the kid is clambering across a bomb-site, the intact buildings and power lines in the earlier panels was meant to indicate a city that was still standing, not a wasteland, but I can see how people might assume that the rubble he's climbing over in the last panel was meant to represent the city; it wasn't.

...

Mr. Gaiman, First off, thank you for continuing to update your wonderful blog (though, I do prefer the old design). My question, while not the most appropriate because it does not pertain to one of your books, is about Martin Millar's forthcoming novel, Lonely Werewolf Girl. The only place I have ever read about this novel is on your journal, and, when I search google for more info on this book, I only get directed back to you. Even Millar's website (martinmillar.com) does not have any info on this book. Can you tell me if and when this book will ever be published? And, if possible, where I can find more info on it? Thank you for your time. Kelly Shaw Milwaukee, WI

I definitely want to get more variety added to the site design. For now, we're still focussed on the content -- there's now a sitemap (at http://www.neilgaiman.com/sitemap), and more video content at http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/Video, but there are strange mysteries (I don't understand about the "Contests! Win Free Stuff Here!" part of the site.

And I don't know. It may never have found a publisher. Sometimes that happens. Right now I'm just glad that Soft Skull are going to be reprinting The Good Fairies of New York, and hoping that it works for them and they bring a lot more of Millar's work back into print.

...

The Quotable Neil site is filled with useful quotes for writers this week.

http://quotableneil.blogspot.com/2006/02/nice-meaty-one-for-writers-out-there.html

...

Some years ago I posted a link to a video made from 15 second camera films of a song by Fredo Viola, called Sad Song. ( In http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/07/in-which-author-is-briefly.asp). There was a brief aftermath, in which Fredo found himself with an unexpected bill for many thousands of dollars because of the web traffic, although on the good side he also wound up with some unexpected gigs making film music and suchlike because of it.

He's just done his first live gig, and has film footage of it up at http://www.fredoviola.com/dactyl.html.

Hey Neil,It's entirely possible I missed this, but I can't seem to find it, either on your site, or in any information from DC.Will the Absolute Sandman books also feature the 2 Death books, Dream Hunters, and Endless Nights (Dust Covers?), or will they be strictly the original series?Much thanks,-Kev.

Absolute Sandman won't include the things you've listed, but it may include stuff that hasn't been seen much before now. I suspect the Death books will wind up, along with some other content, like the Jeff Jones short story and the Death Gallery, in an Absolute Death, in a year or so.

...

Marcus at Blackwells sent me a tape of the Lenny & Me Event last November, along with a press-out TARDIS, which Maddy took great joy in assembling last night. We're starting to get serious about the podcast page, instead of just putting up links to audio stuff.

Michael Zulli let me know that he's revamped his website at http://www.michaelzulli.com/main.htm. He didn't as me to mention that he has three new oil paintings up on eBay, but I shall anyway -- click here to check them out.