argh. also oops.

We've gone over to the new version of Blogger, as of the last post. That's why we now have these odd little labels.

There's a small amount of fiddling going on behind the scenes, and as those with long memories may already know, sometimes LiveJournal and Blogger do not play well with each other. So if your inbox just got a month's worth of old blog posts reappearing in it, we're incredibly sorry. (The industrious web elf says that anyone who feels they need a personal apology can write to her at neilwebelf@gmail.com and she will cheerfully abase herself.)

Labels: argh, blogger, cockups, Livejournal

to be greeted by puddles of unusual size

Home. Up too early.

Outside it's raining, and raining and raining, which makes it feel so much more like coming back to England after a holiday than like coming back to the upper Midwest after Christmas, where a weather website tells me the average high temperature for today is about 20 F and the average low temperature is 0 F and everything is meant to be, and usually is, ridiculously cold. Today the online weather charts have lots of cheery messages about record high temperatures, and it's raining on a warmish grey day in the upper Midwest on the last day of December. The ground, however, is still frozen, so the water sits in huge grey improbable puddles across everything.

Right. I had better go and buy food and do all those other things one does on getting back from a week away, which today I think include pretending that the person-high mounds of mail on the kitchen table don't exist.

Labels: rain

indeterminacy

Heigh ho. Miles away from working internet, and the one time I try and get online I discover that Blogger has now updated itself out of Beta and my blog is still on "old blogger" and will be until the person who set it up at Authors on the Web returns and gets the emails asking him to please migrate it to New Blogger, so I'm trying to post this via email, having not a clue whether it'll work or not...

And the reason I'm trying to post is that when I did Internet Cafe my way online yesterday I discovered pretty much all of my FAQ messages were people asking whether I was really going to be writing the Silent Hill sequel with Roger Avary. I'm afraid that I don't think I am -- I mean, it's the first thing I've ever heard of it, and I'm sure that if they make a sequel Roger would want to write it himself.  I am writing Black Hole with Roger (we're one draft in right now), and we already wrote next year's Beowulf. If I get home to find an invitation to write Silent Hill 2 with Roger is waiting for me I'll let you all know, but for right now I think it's a discredited internet rumour.

There. I shall now send this off, and I wonder if it will post or not. Happies. Merries. Jollies. And love.

Ho, etc

Right. So I'm off on holiday today with the family. Back around New Year's. Not sure if I'll be near a web connection between here and there, so it's quite possible that you won't hear from me until then.

Have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukkah, a Delightful Kwanzaa, a Cool Yule, a Slinky Saturnalia, a Funky Midwinterfeast, a Late Solstice, and any other holiday you fancy.

And do not break the Internet while I'm away. Look, I am putting it just up here, on top of the wardrobe, where it will be nice and safe...

answers

This was the first of many... thanks to all of you who wrote in...


I'm sure you've been told by others, but Anansi Boys will be published in two parts in Japan. The character on the orange copy means "above" and is the first volume; the green copy has the character for "below" which indicates the second. (Books in three parts get "middle" for the second volume, and "below" means the third. Books in more than three parts, well, sometimes it varies--above 1, above 2, middle 1-3, etc.-- but usually they just number them.)

And in case you were curious, the title is "Ananshi no kechimyaku" (or "ketsumyaku") which would literally mean something like "the blood inherited from Anansi." For values of blood which are more metaphorical. A nice, slightly uncommon term.

and...

Hi Neil...

I'm sure a bazillion people have caught this (if you didn't!), in the third panel of the first page you posted for Coraline, the dialogue balloon says "CArOline" if I'm not mistaken.

Happy Holidays and thanks for the good stuff!

Mark Del Franco

It's meant to read "Caroline". Misses Spink and Forcible get her name wrong.

and on the subject of Coraline...

When I was in Portland last week, at the Laika Studios, I joked about putting one of the Coraline maquettes under my coat and taking it home with me. It wasn't much of a joke, really, more an expression of mingled admiration and longing.

Today a huge box arrived, inside which were thousands of foofs and a smaller, wooden box, screwed shut. I took out the smaller box, removed the screws and took off the lid, and found myself looking at a handpainted movie Coraline. She's sitting upstairs in the TV room right now, because I felt like it would be wrong to simply put her into a display case and lock her off from the world.

I'd post a picture, but I suspect that that might be a bit dodgy, so I shall wait until the official photos of my set visit surface, and you can see a little bit of what they're doing. Stylistically, the characters look a little like a mashup of early Ronald Searle and UPA cartoons. But you'll see...

Hello Neil, please forgive but permit me to say, that I am an exceedingly large fan, and that I greatly admire your work. Now then. I have been wondering for some time which books, or writers in particular, were some of your favorites when you were my age (that being the formidable age of fifteen), how you feel they influenced your later writing style, and if you had already begun to find an interest in writing as a medium at this particular age. This is just something that I have been curious about, and would be delighted to know. If the answer which I seek is already located within the deep annals of this webpage, please accept my humblest of apologies. Thank you for your time, I appreciate it greatly.-Matthew

Let's see. When I was fifteen my favourite authors were probably Samuel R. Delany, Mervyn Peake, Will Eisner, Michael Moorcock and Ursula K. LeGuin. My favourite book that year, mm. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I think.

the frozen world

We have an ice-storm going on right now. Maddy just arrived home from school an hour early. It's rain, mostly, when it falls, and then it encases everything in ice. I'm about to walk to the bottom of the garden and write...



Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out whether the Amazon.co.jp entries on Anansi Boys shows two different covers or a book that's being published in two parts...

For Your Enjoyment...

A couple of lettered pages from Craig's Coraline... One from near the beginning, one from nearer to the end. (Click on each to open a larger version of the image.)

On the interconnectedness of everything. Also, free stuff.

I haven't made much noise about it, because it's a sort of huge undertaking and I didn't know how long it was going to take or when it would be out, but for the last year and a bit P. Craig Russell has been quietly beavering away on a comics adaptation of Coraline, giving it the same amount of detail and respect and use of the original text as he did when he adapted Kipling stories or grand operas. Right now there are three pages (unlettered) up at http://www.pcraigrussell.net/. It's lovely stuff, and will be out later this year as a graphic novel from HarperChildrens...

And on the subject of Coraline, John Hodgman, who plays Coraline's father and other father in Henry Selick's Coraline movie (but is presently much better known for, among other things, being the PC in the Get a Mac ads) is giving away, for a limited time, free and clear, The Areas of My Expertise as an audiobook at iTunes. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/19/the_areas_of_my_expe.html has the iTunes link. You need this free audiobook. If you think you don't, you are wrong. Trust me. It's funny. Also, it's free.

Mailbags stuff and more librarythings

I love the Librarything unsuggester too! They also have a library suggester based upon your whole library. My question is, why are you NOT one of LibraryThing's list of Authors who Librarything?
http://www.librarything.com/librarything_author.php

Mostly because I've been on the road too much since I discovered LibraryThing, and haven't yet had time to join up and start logging the books. Of which there are rather a lot. However, there is finally librarystuff afoot in this house -- I've recently sighed and admitted there are too many thousands of books for the current basement library to hold, which means that as of today a large former bedroom has begun to transmute itself into a library extension, and I may take the opportunity to LibraryThing and organise. I did buy a Cue Cat scanner recently, anyway. Or I may just put all books of a similar size and colour into boxes and haul them upstairs. (I always liked Chris Cobb's colourful take on bookshop organisation -- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182224)


Neil,I think the unsuggester might be broken. I've tried multiple titles, including yours, and there is always at least one or two items from my library on the list. Either that, or my tastes are simply more varied than they allow for. I may actually use it as a suggester, as it generally is a more varied list than the other, though I won't like many things on each of those lists. Dune by Frank Herbert came the closest, and there's still one or two I've got on my to get to list.Byron Grimes

It's not broken, it's simply pointing out statistical anomalies -- it's not even talking about whether or not you'd like something (as some people have written to me, complaining they like books from both lists). It's simply saying that it ought to be able to find a certain number of copies of book Y for people who own Book X, and it can't. Statistically, people who have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves, for whatever reason, have fewer copies of Terry Pratchett books than might be expected. It may be that all the people with both Mein Kampf and Guards! Guards! just aren't on LibraryThing yet, and once they join the anomaly will vanish. Or it may be that there's something to be learned from that.

If you plugged your personal library into LibraryThing it might help smooth over the anomalies you've encountered.

Dear Mr. Gaiman:My name is Chloe Cole. I’m a junior at Marion High School, in Marion, Arkansas. I’m writing you this letter to tell you how I felt about your book Coraline, and ask you some questions.I really enjoyed your book Coraline. I enjoyed it so much, that I’ve read it more than once. I really wanted to ask you about the buttons. I loved how they were used as the other parent’s eyes. Do they symbolize anything for you personally? What do you try to symbolize when Coraline goes into the other world through the old door?I would like to thank you for taking time to read my letter. I hope you can find time to reply to me in an email. My email address is (removed).

Hello Chloe (although unless you're reading this blog you'll never know I replied). Just like it says on the FAQ form, I really don't do homework, so you'll have to decide on the symbolism of button eyes and doors and passages yourself -- but thought that it might be a good idea to point out
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/156/Neil-Gaiman-Coraline-page01.html and the following three pages, which are a conversation from the Well website about Coraline from 2002, and in which I answer an awful lot of Coraline-related questions. (It's practically a Coraline FAQ.)

Hey Neil, I'm doing a piece on how one can make money from blogging. Any comments to share?Happy day, Ariel

Well, this blog has certainly helped this author get onto the New York Times bestseller list, mostly by letting enough people know that I had new books coming out at the point where they came out. Which probably helped me make money in the long term, through increased royalties, but isn't what it exists for.

Beyond that, I've never put up advertising or made any of the kind of links to Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or wherever that pay you a referral fee. And while I'm happy to link to DreamHaven Books' www.neilgaiman.net shop site, I don't get a cut of anything they sell or anything like that -- I figure it helps a comparatively small local bookshop that I like enormously to stay in business, which is enough.

And seeing that I don't have any plans at present to sell www.neilgaiman.com to Google for millions, I'm probably the last person to have any useful ideas on making money from blogging.

(Mark Evanier's method seems like a perfectly sensible one to me... http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2003_06_22.html)

Mr. Gaiman, I sent this to you the other day, but I think I sent it to the wrong place. No offense, but did you know you look like the Corinthian with your sunglasses on? Thank you,Veronica

You know, on the cover of Sandman 14, I even look like the Corinthian with my glasses off. Or perhaps he looks suspiciously like a 28-year-old me with teeth for eyes.

Neil, the link on your webpage for the library unsuggester kept sending me to some internet crime reporting system, useful in it's own right but not the same thing. I was kind of disappointed. Have you been hacked by an over-zealous crime fighter?I absolutely love your books. Gaynel

I've checked the links and they work fine for me. I checked the LJ syndication and they seem to have worked fine for everyone on there. I wonder if your computer mistakenly thinks that LibraryThing is a fraud site or something.


Hi, Neil.
So this face recognition thing. Well. You, apparently, resemble yourself 66%.Please don't fall into an existential pit because of this.
http://andrewscottonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/myheritage-genealogy-software-with.html
Cheers,Andrew Scott

I've never been able to get it to recognise that I resemble me with photos of myself, so I'm very impressed you got 66%. Last time I tried it, it told me I looked like Barry Gibb, Placido Domingo and, er, Terri Hatcher, and at that point I gave up trying for good...

...

And finally, you might want to head over to http://greenmanpress.com/news/archives/98 to see what Stardust related sculpting Charles Vess has been up to recently...

Stardust Pictures!

This image is one of three from Stardust that's just turned up on Cinemablend. (The other two show Michelle Pfeiffer and goats, and young Master Thorne embracing Victoria Forester.)

http://www.cinemablend.com/gallery/previews/Stardust-1978.html?tid=8819