Death, and Free revisited.

Dr Sketchy's is, according to the New York Times, a "cross between a life drawing class and new-wave cabaret" which takes place in over a hundred cities around the world. It was founded by the glorious Molly Crabapple (who drew the "Desert Wind" print you can get from Neverwear). Last week the New York Dr Sketchy's did a very Endless sort of an evening, as Sandman characters Death, Delirium and Desire posed for the assembled sketchers.

Johnny Blazes made an amazing Desire.



Tess Aquarium played Delirium.



And Stoya made a Death that was, well, to die for.




The photos are by the amazingly talented Lauren Goldberg.

More photos and an account of the evening, not to mention photos of the people sketching, can be found at http://www.drsketchy.com/site/comments/endless_love, from where I also stole all the photos.

...


I'm a patron of the Open Rights Group.

Last year they did an interview with me in my hotel in London. An extract from it went up on this page, http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2011/video:-an-interview-with-neil-gaiman and up on YouTube.

In it I talk about copyright, misconceptions about copyright on the web, and my observation that piracy can be a promotional action.

It's been interesting seeing the YouTube video start to go viral over the last couple of days.

I'm not going to embed the video here - head over to Open Rights Group page and look at it there. As Patron I should be sending them traffic, after all.

And I thought I'd repost -- this is sort of fun, this reposting lark -- a few extracts from blogs on the subject of Giving It Away. You can read all of them, and more besides, at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/free%20book

The context is, for the blog's 7th birthday, we put up a book of mine online for a month for free. (There had been a vote, and American Gods won by a landslide.)

From Friday 29 Feb 2008: The Nature of Free http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/nature-of-free.html

I'm currently talking to Harpers about ways we can make the American Gods online reading experience a more pleasant one. And about ways to give American Gods away that would make Harper Collins happy while also making, say, Cory Doctorow happy too.

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away -- the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I'm devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

I like giving stuff away. I think it's sensible. I like that you can read Sandman #1 on the DC Comics site, for example. (It's at http://www.dccomics.com/media/excerpts/1696_1.pdf. (Although for reasons known only to DC, they have put the last two pages of the story in the wrong order.) We've got five short stories up at http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool%20Stuff/Short%20Stories, and I just realised on poking around that I've put more essays and things up over the years on this blog than have ever made it into the essays section, and a lot more audio than ever made it to the rather threadbare audio section (although there's lots of free audio now up at http://www.last.fm/music/Neil+Gaiman)


During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, "Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books," and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams' publisher, with a 'write in and get your free book' ad in Rolling Stone. They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the best tool for selling books.

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, "I've read this. It's good. I think you'd like it. Here, you can borrow it." Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn't have to pay for every book you read.

I'm one of those authors who is fortunate enough to make my living from the things I've written. If I thought that giving books away would make it so that I could no longer make my living from writing and be forced to go out and get a real job -- or that other authors would be less likely to be able to make a living -- I wouldn't do it.

As I tried to explain in the Guardian interview, the problem isn't that books are given away or that people read books they haven't paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don't read for pleasure.

From March 3 2008 More on free and suchlike http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/03/more-on-free-and-suchlike.html

This just came in, and I thought it deserved a long reply...

Hello Mr. Gaiman:
As a bookseller, I am a bit surprised by your recent comment about free books and the HarperCollins download. When you say, "the problem isn't that books are given away or that people read books they haven't paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don't read for pleasure," you seem to miss the point that all of us booksellers are hoping to sell your book to READERS as well as non-readers. Our situation improves as more non-readers become readers, but we can't survive when the readers go elsewhere. I am not at all against free literature--I firmly believe that the more people read the more people read--but somehow, if we independents are to survive, we need to be included somewhere in the formula. I also believe that we independents have no RIGHT to exist, that our time may have passed or be passing, but it would be nice if we could survive; I believe we can--and do--serve a very important purpose.Thanks. I don't sense that you have anything against booksellers--I do want to let you know how your comment might be interpreted by some.
Don Muller
Old Harbor Books
201 Lincoln Street
Sitka, Alaska 99835

Hi Don,

I don't see this as either they get it for free or they come and buy it from you. I see it as Where do you get the people who come in and buy the books that keep you in business from?

The books you sell have "pass-along" rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don't.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read -- for free! -- what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.

If readers find (for free -- in a library, or on-line, or by borrowing from a friend, or on a window-sill) an author they really like, and that author has a nice spanking new hardback coming out, they are quite likely to come in to your shop and buy the nice spanking new hardback. You want that to happen. You really want that to happen a lot, because you'll make more in profit on each of the nice spanking new hardbacks than you will on the paperbacks (or, probably, on anything else in the shop).

I don't believe that anybody out there who can afford a copy of American Gods is going to not buy it (or another of my books) because it's available out there on line for nothing. (Not at this point, anyway.) I think it's a lot more likely that some of the people who read it will find an author they like, and buy more books. Which is good news for people who run bookshops.

(Remember: one in four adults read no books last year. Among those who said they had read books, the median figure — with half reading more, half fewer — was nine books for women and five for men. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. Which means you need to find ways to get young readers to read books. And means that if someone likes American Gods and goes out and buys my entire backlist from you, that's more books than most Americans read in a year.)

I think it's very likely that someone who reads American Gods online and likes it may decide, come the 30th of September, to go out to your shop or somewhere else like it and plonk down their $17.99 for The Graveyard Book in hardcover.

I don't see it as taking money from the pockets of booksellers.

(To steal a metaphor from Cory Doctorow, it's dandelion seeds rather than mammals. A mammal produces a few offspring that take a lot of resources. A dandelion produces an awful lot of seeds because the cost in resources to the dandelion is small, but those that sprout, sprout.)

Then again, I do not always understand the ways of booksellers.

Old Harbor Books looks marvellous -- http://litsite.alaska.edu/akbooksellers/oldharbor.html -- and looks like somewhere that's involved in creating readers and a reading community. My local bookshop (now deceased) was physically arranged so that finding a book and then buying it was harder than walking around around the shop and going back out again; the bookseller mostly sat at the cash register in the middle of the shop playing online chess, and he tended to be unhelpful, vaguely grumpy and to treat people who wanted to buy things as nuisances (he was nice to me, because I was me, but still); he didn't stock paperback bestsellers because "people could always go to Wal-Mart for those" and when the she shop closed its doors the final time they put up a note on the door saying that it was Amazon.com that had driven them out of business, when it manifestly wasn't -- it seemed to me that they didn't work to entice people into the bookshop (which is what those paperback bestsellers were for), and didn't give them a pleasant experience when they were there...

But I digress...

Anyway (it probably bears reiterating) this is an experiment. Harper Collins are going to be looking at the figures over the next month and longer. If sales of American Gods crash in bookshops -- or if sales of all my other books crash -- they won't be doing it again. If American Gods sells more, if my other titles sell more, on actual Bookscan sales, then I think we'll all agree that you and your fellow booksellers will be selling more books, and will thus have nothing to worry about.

Remember, publishers aren't making their money from free downloads or from free online books. Like you (and like me), they make their money from books sold.

What we all want to do is sell more books. To readers, to non-readers, to people who thought they didn't like that sort of thing.

Also, there are also a lot of posts coming in like this:

No question - just wanted to let you know, after getting your "American Gods" online for free and reading about 200 pages, I had to go out and buy the book. Great read!

which may make you feel a little better....

From the 5th of March 2008 Very Small Footnote to Free: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/03/very-small-footnote-to-free.html

Free books. I started thinking about times we've used this principle in paper books -- using the free thing to spread the author or the idea, and, if you ignore the five fingered discount (remember, in the UK you can add Terry Pratchett to the "four authors who are flying off the shelves and don't forget the graphic novels" list) then you still have things like Free Comic Book Day. And before there was ever Free Comic Book Day, there was Sandman 8.

It was 1989. I wrote Sandman #8, Mike Dringenberg drew it, and the editorial and marketing departments at DC Comics got enthusiastic about it. I went out and got three pages of quotes from fantasy and horror authors about Sandman, wrote a "The Story So Far". DC Comics overprinted Sandman #8 and sent each retailer an extra 25% above what they'd ordered, for free, and told them that they could do whatever they wanted with them.

Some stores simply sold them.

The smart stores gave them away. Some of the smart stores even went back to DC and asked for more. The stores that gave them away were the stores who, a year or so later, found it very easy to sell Sandman trade paperbacks to their customers. And then to sell Sandman hardcovers. And some of them are now selling the Absolute Sandmans.

(And a few people have written to let me know that ABSOLUTE SANDMAN Volume 3 is now up at Amazon, with the extra 5% discount for pre-ordering it bringing it to 42% off.)

Anyway. There weren't any grumbles that we were somehow devaluing other comics, or that this was Marxism in action, or that this was going to put comics retailers out of business or anything like that. It was about expanding the readership, about convincing people that it was safe to try something new.

(I just called Brian Hibbs at Comix Experience who put labels with his store's name and address on his free comics and then left them at barbers' shops and on buses and anywhere else he could, bookcrossing style -- he said he passed out about 400 copies of Sandman 8 and got 100 readers back, who bought every copy of Sandman, and the collected editions, and some of those people are buying Absolute Sandmans from him now -- and then he pointed out that it wasn't just Sandman that those people bought, but lots of them discovered comics and bought everything...)

The results of putting AMERICAN GODS up here for free that month came in in August. Sales of my titles -- all my titles -- in Independent Bookshops went up significantly while we had American Gods up here for free. We sold more copies of American Gods. And we sold more copies of everything else. And then, when we took AMERICAN GODS down, they dropped again, to pre-free book levels.

....

And if you've made it through the blog so far, I should mention that I decided that I should keep getting fitter and healthier, so I tried out the new Wii Yoga and Pilates, and really liked it. (I'd done the Yoga exercises on the Wii Fit, but they didn't actually ever feel like Going To Yoga With Amanda Palmer. And this one more or less does. "Did you sweat?" Amanda asked suspiciously, when I told her about it on the phone, and I told her that, Yes, I sweated.)

And I am now, much of the time, jogging, in snowboots, through the snow with the dogs instead of walking. They love it, and I'm starting to enjoy it too.

Labels: Dr Sketchy's, free book, Open Rights Group, What the Endless Look Like

Nasally Inserted Wake Up Kittens Redux

Lots of great suggestions coming in for bits of blog history I had forgotten about.

I'd completely forgotten about this one, which even inspired a Nice Hair comic (Nice Hair was a webcomic about someone who isn't quite me sharing a house with Tim and Fat Bob who are other people who have, er, hair a bit like mine.)

Hi Mister Neil,

I just want to give a suggestion for my favourite blog entry. It's gotta be the one titled 'Nasally inserted wake-up kittens' (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2003/08/nasally-inserted-wake-up-kittens.asp) - that phrase alone makes me smile every time I think of it. I've re-read that post quite a few times and it never fails to give me the giggles at the mental image.

Cheers and keep up the good work!
(Also, for what it's worth, I'm one of the 50 people putting in together to buy Amanda for an afternoon in Melbourne in March. Freaking excited)

Nathan

Here you go...

Nasally inserted wake-up kittens
POSTED BY NEIL AT 2:39 AM

It looks like everything's working again -- thanks to all of you who helped in identifying problems.

So a hasty late night post, being typed around an asleep-on-my-keyboard medium-sized tabby kitten who rejoices in the name of Captain Morgan. He looks a little like Buddy-who-vanished, being sort of brown and sort of stripy, and was found by Lorraine hanging hungrily and miserably around the house a month or so ago. He and Coconut, Maddy's kitten, immediately became inseparable. Captain Morgan is a sweet-natured kitten, who has only one failing.

He waits until you're asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.

It never works, a hefty kitten being much larger than the interior of a nostril, but he keeps trying until you open up an eye and pick him up and drop him onto the floor. And then he bounces back onto the bed and tries to stick his head into one of your nostrils again. So you sweep him unceremoniously onto the floor, and bury your face in your pillow; and he sneaks back onto the bed and waits patiently while you go back to sleep and roll over, or just come up for air, and all of a sudden there's a small brown cat patiently trying to push its head into your nose.

Sooner or later he'll wake you up enough that you'll get up, carry him into the hall, and shut the door firmly, with him on the other side of it, and go back to sleep for the rest of the night.

I commented on this peculiar habit to my assistant Lorraine today, in the casual way you do when you don't want someone to think you've gone mad. "Er, Captain Morgan the kitten keeps trying to push his way into my nose while I'm asleep," I told her. She looked relieved. "Yes, he does that to me as well," she said. "I think it's because he probably wasn't weaned properly."

It's possible, I suppose, although I thought that misweaning just meant they sucked and chewed on things, not that they had grandiose fantasies about being nasally insertable, small wet muzzle first.

Sometimes I worry that one night I won't wake up, and he'll succeed in his bizarre quest, and in the morning there'll be nothing but the tip of a kitten-tail sticking out of one nostril to tell me he was ever here at all.

Which wasn't what I meant to type when I sat down to do this -- I thought I'd just stick up a bunch of interesting links before bed...

And here's one of the comics in question.



I adored Captain Morgan. We just hit it off. I liked him and he liked me, and we were friends for a few years, and then he was hit by a car, and is buried in the Pet Semetery down by my gazebo, under a rock. I dug the hole and buried him and said something nice and honest about him and said goodbye.

Labels: Nice Hair

This is fun.

Revisiting many of our greatest hits in the anniversary of our tenth year. (Send in suggestions for your favourite past blog entries to me on the FAQ line. Or on Twitter, or on Facebook, but the FAQ line is far and away the most reliable. I see some of the stuff that comes in on Twitter, but never see all of it, and I'm really spotty about Facebook.)

So this is taken from http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/12/skippy-show.html. It's very different to most blog entries. Possibly the silliest blog entry of all... (I liked it, although I got a sad letter from someone whose girlfriend was a writer on the Disney show, and was a fan of mine.)

I see from USA Today that Christopher Robin is being replaced by a "tomboy girl" in order to appeal to the youth of today. http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2005-12-06-winnie-the-pooh_x.htm. Undoubtedly Disney have done lots of marketing research on this. As we learn from the article, "We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide," says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel.

Here at www.neilgaiman.com we're painfully aware that, after five years of me blogging, we're alienating a whole new generation of blog-readers for whom a middle-aged male author maundering on about writing stuff is, frankly, pretty stale. We need a breath of fresh air, just like Winnie the Pooh. Therefore the rest of this blog entry will be written by Skippy, a fictional six-year-old tomboy and computer genius, with a small number of endearing catchphrases.



Neil--Just a quick bit about prices for the 92Y event, specifically for the poor student types (myself included) among your readers. I called yesterday to inquire about the student price ($12.50) and was told that it is not possible to puchase tickets at the discounted rate in advance. The only way one can get the student rate is to go to the Y an hour before the show and buy them then. Thought your readers would appreciate the information. See you in January, Circus

Whoo gosharootie, Circus. Still, I think we've all learned something from that. Hugs!

Alpha, the SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers runs July 19 - 26, 2006 in Western Pennsylvania. The deadline for manuscripts is March 31, 2006. This year, author guests are Wen Spencer, Timothy Zahn, Dora Goss and Tamora Pierce along with a large staff of writers. Twenty students (ages 14 to 19) are accepted based only on the merit of their submission stories. If the $900 fee poses a hardship for some students, we try to arrange scholarships. This will be our fifth year. More details on our website at: http://alpha.spellcaster.org

Gee. If I wasn't six years old and completely fictional, I'd be there like a shot. Oh, bitchcakes.

I was at the Dreamhaven signing on the third and when someone asked "What's next?" you mentioned a lot of news that I hadn't heard of yet, but you left out your next book of short stories. I was wondering if there was any update on that?

Whoo. Mr Neil says it's going to be called Fragile Things and will be out late next year and he and Morrow editor Ms Jennifer Brehl are busy puttin' all the stories together and findin' all the ones that he forgot about and fussin' about the order they go in. Gosharootie, you should hear them argue about what goes where. I asked my cute computer, Blinky, and it put those stories into an order in milliseconds. But do they ever listen to me? Bitchcakes, no. Hugs!

Dear Neil,I followed the link in your FAQ to the Greater Talent Network. It reminded me of James Michener's comments in his autobiography about working as a speaker and how much he hated it (apparently he felt the Agency was tight fisted in practice). I wondered whether you enjoyed speaking engagements more and whether you got bored with repeating the same basic topics?Your Sincerely Paul Barnier Australia

The main reason Mr Neil signed up with Greater Talent Network is to have someone to charge ridiculously high prices for him to come and speak, so as people won't keep askin' him and he can stay home and spend more time writin' them funny ol' stories. But when he does give talks, gosharootie, they're always different, because he can't remember what he said last time. I wish I could get them folks at Greater Talent Network to sign me up, and make cute dolls and toys of me and Blinky the Computer.

Hey Neil, Just something that occurred to me. Looking at the pictures you posted on the 2nd. I don't mean you to take this the wrong way... but it looks like you're posing for a publicity shot :) Is that almost an instinctive thing by now? Pointed camera 12 o'clock... assume the position!Regards, Mick

I'm all bored of talking about Mr Neil. Let's talk about me. I'm funny and charmin' and cute, and not all like that ol' fusspot who always looks like he's posin' for a publisicity shot. You know who ought to be havin' her photo taken? That's right! Me! Skippy! Yay! Hugs!

Hi, Sorry to bother you with such a trivial question (I scrolled through the FAQ's to see if it was answered), but why live in Minnesota?I don't mean to be rude at all (and really don't expect a response) but do you find inspiration there? I always picture highly successful writers/artists as living in places that are always warm, sunny, and tropical. It's silly, I know.Thanks.Take care. Sincerely, Celeste

He just likes places that are out of the way. I tell him, go to Hollywood, I tell him. That's where the big bucks are. Or somewhere with palm trees anyway. He don't listen. He just sits in the cold and watches Doctor Who with Maddy (they're just watching the Boom Town episode right now). Gosharootie. What an old fusspot he is. Next week he'll be leaving and Blinky and I'll be taking over the Journal entirely, along with a whole new cast of characters, including Johnnie the Jolly Juicer, Minko the Magic Mink and Beppo the Popcorn Boy. Hugs!

...

There we go. Thank you, Skippy. I'm currently in an odd sort of limbo, waiting to find out whether I go to the UK tomorrow for some script meetings. How odd. And the thing that's puzzled me most about Sony putting dodgy software on their audio CDs that then went and hid itself on people's computers, was what were all the antivirus programs doing while this was happening? Glad someone else wondered about it too.

And tonight's good news is that CBGBs is keeping its lease for another year -- http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=55477 .

CBGBs lost its lease, but I'd got to read a story on the stage there - "How To Talk to Girls At Parties" - before it did. And a story filled with 70s music, at that.

And if you're wondering what happened to Christopher Robin's hipper replacement, for the curious, according to Wikipedia:

Darby
Darby is the 6-year-old red-haired girl in My Friends Tigger & Pooh. Darby is voiced by Chloë Moretz (US) and Kimberlea Berg (UK). Her catchphrases are "Time to slap my cap" and "Good sleuthin', everyone!" As revealed in the episode, "Christopher Froggin'," she is best friends with Christopher Robin.
[edit]

Labels: Beppo the Popcorn Boy, greatest hits, Skippy, tenth anniversary month

Now We Are TEN.

Happy Birthday to the blog. Thank you to all of you who read it, wherever and however you read it.

Technically, I suppose you could argue about whether it's the tenth birthday of this blog or not. When it started, on Februrary the 9th, 2001, it was the american.gods.com blog, and it didn't become the neilgaiman.com blog until September 2001, when I decided to make it sort of permanent, and Trevor Valle (who owned the neilgaiman.com domain name) gave it to me and I gave it to Harper Collins and we started building this site.

But on the 9th of February 2001 I wrote my first entry. It was entry # 2, because entry #1 was written by someone at Authors On The Web who were webmastering things back then. It was going to be a blog about the publishing of a book, and it started,

June the 19th 2001 is the publication date of American Gods, a book which despite the many shelves in this office filled with books with my name on the spine, feels an awful lot like a first novel. (Perhaps because it was the first long work I've done without any collaborative input from anyone, and that wasn't first something else.) And this, in case you were wondering, is the occasional journal on the americangods.com website. I thought the journal could count us down to publication, and see us through the US and the UK publication and tours for the book in June and July.

I first suggested we do something like this to my editor, the redoubtable Jennifer Hershey, about a year ago, while the book was still being written (a process that continued until about 3 weeks ago). She preferred to wait until the book was on the conveyor belt to actual publication, thus sparing the reading world lots of entries like "Feb 13th: wrote some stuff. It was crap." and "Feb 14th: wrote some brilliant stuff. This is going to be such a good novel. Honest it is." followed by "Feb 15th. no, it's crap" and so on. It was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top. So you missed watching an author staring in bafflement as the manuscript got longer and longer, and the deadlines flew about like dry leaves in a gale, and the book remained unfinished.

You can read the rest over at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/02/american-gods-blog-post-2_09.html

While I'm not going to ever post a picture of me blogging in the nude, I suppose after ten years we know each other well enough for you to see what I mostly look like when I start writing a blog entry. Here's me a couple of hours ago, starting this blog entry, unshaven and pyjamaed...

And that was interrupted by several things (including a bunch of my blood being drawn for my annual medical*) so now, finishing it, shaved, showered and dressed, I look like this:

It's the office. Lots of email gets done here. Blogging sometimes, but almost no fiction gets written here. Behind me is Maddy's nook. Over to screen right is a desk where Lorraine sits and works and answers the phone and deals with things.

* I just got a call from my Doctor to tell me that my blood work is the best it's ever been. Rah, as my wife says, for diet and exercise.

So I have some plans for Tenth Blog Anniversary things. One thing I want to do this month is repost some of my favourite blog entries from a decade of doing things. And to find out what people's favourites have been from over the years.

It was written in October 2001, after a week away from the web. I think I was writing Sandman: Endless Nights at the time.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/10/this-is-kind-of-journal-entry-you-can.asp

This is the kind of journal entry you can only write at leisure; and at enforced leisure, at that, because I cannot get online, so this will be posted in a day or so. Truth to tell, I don't mind not being able to get online, just as I don't mind that my cellphone is out of service where I am right now. It's a good thing. My only contact with technology is a single phone call home each night, to read a chapter of Daniel Pinkwater's LIZARD MUSIC to my daughter Maddy.She has a copy of her own, at the other end of the phone, and fills in occasional paragraphs.

So.

Blam.

I was woken up this morning by the sound of artillary bombardment in my dreams. Blam. Blam.Blammety crash. Blam. I opened my eyes, and someone was dropping bricks from the sky. The bricks would crash onto the low roof of the cottage I'm staying in and then thud off the roof onto the grass. I got up, bleary-eyed, and stared out of the window.

Blam. That was the sound of someone dropping a brick onto my car.

The problem, I eventually concluded, was the walnuts. Not the nice, wrinkeldy brown nuts you get in Festive Nut Hampers, but the kind that fall from trees, like compact green cricket balls with the nut somewhere inside. The outer covering contains walnut juice, as I find when I pick one up. In fiction, as a boy, people were forever staining their skin with walnut juice in order to pass for Indians or Arabs, and I couldn't understand how the nut gave the juice. It doesn't. It's the yellow goop inside the green case.

So. I'm hiding out in a pretechnological world, with a wood-burning stove and lethal rains of noisy walnuts, getting some writing done between engagements (viz. an appearance at MIT with Messrs Harlan Ellison and Peter David, and the parents' weekend at my son Mike's college this coming weekend).

The MIT appearance was enjoyable. Harlan was Harlan, and Peter was Peter, and I was me; and I thought at the end that in while Peter and I had enjoyed ourselves we were not quite as in evidence as we might have been, and that someone should just book Harlan Ellison vs. MIT, the rematch. ("In this corner, one distinguished-looking gentleman with wearing a brown suit and orange shoes, who still uses a manual typewriter and who has not even begun to fight; in the far corner, 900 mildly outraged people who wish to further contest Mr Ellison's collective characterization of them as 'Dumb as bricks and a waste of good oxygen'...")

Harlan was the big star, but I think overall the three of us made an impressive sort of constellation.

Blam.

That was the sound of another exploding walnut crashing down from the heavens onto the roof and rattling down onto the ground.

Snuffle snuffle grurp munch.

That was the sound of a large pot-bellied pig eating walnuts. The pot-bellied pigs live on the farm next door. But they wander. And they like walnuts. I suspect the pig's mouth and chin are stained with Walnut Juice.(I just went and checked. They were.)

Me, I really enjoyed the MIT thing, and the company on and off stage, although I could have done without the signing at the end. I read a poem called CRAZY HAIR that I really do have to publish as a book because after I read it people ask me for it; and I read the House of Clocks segment of the story I'm writing with Gene Wolfe for World Horror. And then I drove south, and came eventually to rest in a tiny cottage with a wood burning stove, a spiral staircase, a well-stocked fridge and an antique telephone, for some peace and quiet and writing time.

And autumnal calm and sunlight and October-blue skies. The wind sighing in the maple trees and the high elms. Deer down at the pond, drinking. No cell phones, no noise, no nothing. Just a chance to collect my thoughts and work, in a three hundred and fifty year old cottage under a walnut tree.

Blam.Thud.

Snuffle munch.

Blam.

.................................................................................

Several days later...

I've left the perfect autumnal cottage. Normally on leaving somewhere that cool, I'd post its whereabouts, but then, if I did that it might be fully booked the next time I wanted to go back, and unspoilt and perfect places are few enough in the world.

The lady next door runs a home for pigs. I went down each morning to say my hellos to the pigs and the people: cute little wee black piglings and mighty great boars and snufflers. Not for eating:Vietnamese potbellied pigs, pet pigs, some being boarded, some for sale, some for adoption.

The lady who owns it took me around and introduced me to many of the pigs.

"Now this one," she said, pointing to one small and chirpy looking black fellow in a cage "was a pet pig. He was an ungelded boar, who was owned by people with Pomeranians. But they couldn't cope, and we're looking after him until he can be adopted."

"Why couldn't they cope?"

"Ah," she said. "Well, there's no way to put this delicately. I gelded him myself a couple of days ago. But an un-neutered boar needs to ejaculate at least twice a day to remain healthy. And this fellow, not being neutered, was trying to meet his ejaculatory needs with whatever came to hand. Mostly the Pomeranians. And the family, well, they really hadn't bargained for that."

I agreed that they probably hadn't. And then I shook my head, listening to the grunt and snuffle of the pigs, and contemplating the silence of the Pomeranians.

Labels: birthdays, blogging about the blog in a strange mirror-like pattern that leads into infinity, Pomeranians

It's nearly Ten

I've spent a lot of time since I got back from Australia getting healthy.

Eating very sensibly, lots of exercising, losing weight (it was the shots of me at the Sydney Opera House with my stomach bulging against the Kambriel waistcoat that did it. It brought home that even if my weight was only a little high, when you get into middle age, it's really not smart to let things get out of hand). I've moved from the tub of size 33 jeans in my closet to the tub of 32 jeans (32 jeans means my BMI is no longer where it shouldn't be), and today I noticed that the 31 jeans tub is filled with really nice jeans, most of which are almost unworn, so I've decided to get down to there, which is right in the weight-place I ought to be to make my doctor happy, and do my best to maintain it.

Which is easy to do when I'm feeding myself, really hard to do on the road.

(Do not expect frequent diet/weight etc. updates, although I'll let you know at the point where the tub of 31 jeans becomes wearable. Also, please do not write in on the FAQ line explaining to me why whatever I am doing is wrong for health or idealogical reasons, suggesting diets or exercise programs. I'm always grateful for the suggestions, which never actually accomplish anything other than to make me shrug, and carry on doing whatever it is I was doing in the first place. Right now it's mostly vegetables in abundance, and jogging through the snow with the dogs.)

...

Because it is February (when this blog was started) the Oracular Orb has, for the next 21 days, become me as a Swami.

And for those of you who were wondering what the Orb is, or why it exists, it all started here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/02/now-we-are-six.html as a sixth birthday present from the blog.

That was four years ago. The blog will turn ten on Wednesday. We're trying desperately to think what to do to celebrate. Suggestions from Twitter include selling to blog to AOL for $315 million and blogging in the nude. (I'm pretty sure I've done that a number of times in the past, I'm afraid.)

Sigh.

I took this photo for Cat Mihos, who sent me an "It was only a lime" sticker I thought was a bookmark and the Mighty Cabal sticker (which exists to support the Valley of the Kings animal sanctuary.

Cabal is doing a lot better.

The U of M were not sure what was wrong with him -- he was falling down a lot, seemed to be unable to coordinate his back legs, and was having trouble running, going up or down stairs, or walking on uncarpeted surfaces. Some days he'd be unable to get up after sleeping, and whimper with pain. They suggested it might be degenerative myelopathy - a sort of MS for German Shepherd Dogs. So I googled it, and found myself on this page... Initially learning about what DM was... and then learning about a diet that could bring it under control. And the site's from the University of Florida. So it's reputable...

The vet took him off the drug regime he was on. He went onto the diet.

And he's a lot better. A hundred percent better on the stuff that was scaring us (the not being able to get up, the cries of pain, the falling over) and about seventy-five percent better on the other stuff. And continuing to improve.

So I'm posting this, mostly to spread the link and the information. And to say it worked for us.


...

Sxip Shirey made the haunting music for Statuesque, the short wordless film I made starring Bill Nighy (Now available on DVD in the UK, Region 2 DVD format. I would have mentioned it here before, but I only just noticed.) He's brilliant. Sxip's band, The Luminescent Orchestrii, recently teamed up with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, to blend two very different types of music and make an EP.

I saw this film of them creating art -- four minutes of the two bands talking, figuring out what they're going to be doing, four minutes of glorious music, and have decided it's just pure joy. I love playing it, love watching them while I listen. It feels magical, like something that will only happen once and we were lucky to catch it.

Watch it. I'm not promising you'll like it -- the song starts at 4.00 -- but I think it's a very good bet that it will make you as happy as it made me.

...

PS: We just added a page to the website, here at www.neilgaiman.com : http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/About_Neil/Patronage I'm Patron of the Open Rights Group and one of the Patrons (with Ursula K LeGuin and space scientist Professor David Southwood) of the Science Fiction Foundation.

Here's me talking about the Open Rights Group. It is less joyful and glorious than the video above:

Labels: Cabal and me, eating right, No label can do this post justice so study it carefully and take wisdom from its teachings for entertainment only offer void where prohibited by law, sxip, tubs of jeans

Once you've got a lamppost...

Kelly McCullough likes my dogs. I think he likes me too, but it's the dogs he comes over to see, late in the afternoon most days, as his reward for making his daily word count. (Kelly is a writer, and he knows how important it is to make your word count.) Sometimes he puts on snowshoes, sometimes he doesn't. But either way, he takes the dogs and goes for a wander though my woods.

Sometimes Kelly's wife Laura comes with.

This means that ever since I put it in, Kelly has walked past my lamppost. It's a solar-powered Victorian-style lamppost which I put in the woods because they looked so very Narnian in the winter (and it was Christmas present from my children and their mother, for those of you who have forgotten).

A couple of days ago, Kelly was over, having walked around the woods with the dogs, and over tea he commented on the lamppost, and how it made him, you know, want to be a faun. And have his photo taken.

"You'd need horns," I pointed out.

He agreed that yes, he'd need horns, and I said that if he ever wanted to be a faun, he was welcome to hang around my lamppost...

I thought this was something that might be happening one day. But the weather today was perfect, for winter -- warm enough for a vague mist to scumble the world and make it feel like there wasn't anything but what you were seeing, and what you were seeing was trees and snow, mostly.

I took the dogs for a walk and reflected on how very imaginary everything felt. The world seemed like a huge strange stage-set or studio.

I pulled out my Nexus S and took some photos of the dogs and the snow.

I got home to find Kelly waiting, with Matt Kuchta, a photographer friend of his, Matt's wife ("We've heard a lot about you," she said. "Well, mostly it was about the dogs...") who was helping and Laura, who was getting changed into her white queen costume.

And then they went off into the cold. I'd just come back from walking through the woods, and was ready to be inside and warm up, so I waved them on their way. Kelly said something as he left about taking his top off, which I thought was rather unlikely because, well, it was cold...

How wrong I was.

I'm so glad I have a lamppost.







The dogs are wonderfully wolf-like in shape, but they really don't have the whole menace thing down, do they?

You can see the whole set as posted so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuchtam/sets/72157625860481709/with/5419998319/

Labels: Always winter and never Christmas, dogs, lamppost?

Sun!

The sun is out!

I'm typing this with frozen fingers to see if the new Android Blogger App works.

Labels: dogs, here comes the sun, i bet you thought i was dead

Vote for E.L. Wisty, or else invisible nudists will come along and smash you round the face

(Photo taken on Monday afternoon, just before the studio recording of THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS with FourPlay String Quartet. I am the one not holding a stringed instrument.)

I should be writing the thing that I'm going to read tonight at Sydney Opera House.

(You can, of course, point out, that I should have finished it before now. I will undoubtedly agree.)

So, because I am not yet posting anything, here is an account of what I did a week ago, with photos, from someone else's blog.

http://jacwabbit.blogspot.com/2011/01/neil-gaiman-amanda-palmer-some-tassie.html

And here's Amanda's blog entry on her last Wednesday in Tasmania: http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/2839942590/being-nick-cave-or-the-holy-prophecy-of-the


(No, the title of the blog doesn't actually have anything to do with anything. Although you can listen to the original here, and understand all.)

Labels: Blog titles that were just the words in my head when I titled the blog that are quotes from strange comedic routines, fourplay, Is Tasmania Secretly Cool?, Peter Cook

Feeling oddly ghostly

I've let the blog do that thing where I keep promising myself that as soon as strange and wonderful things stop happening for a day I'll update it. And meanwhile so many things keep happening.

I'm blogging now, not as a report on what I've been doing but because I wanted to remember this:

I'm in Sydney right now. Tomorrow, Amanda and friends and I are taking over Australia Day at the Opera House. I was sitting in the little apartment room the Festival gave us working on the thing I hope to finish and read tomorrow night, when my computer screen turned off. I realised the computer was unplugged, and that Amanda (who was back at the Opera House doing press) had borrowed the Australian adapter plug (we had more, but left them behind us as we travelled).

So I went out to buy a couple of new adapters, so I'd have one, and so I could leave her another spare one when I left.

I wandered past sushi shops and backpacker places and Thai takeways and tobacconists in the hot Sydney summer evening sun. Last night Amanda (who is vastly amused by my complete lack of hooker recognition skills) had pointed out the hookers to me, and I saw a couple of the ladies she had pointed out to me coming on duty, looking wary in the daylight.

There were a couple - a man and a woman, both in their twenties at a guess, both shorter than I am and dark-haired, looking into a shop window, with their backs to me. The woman had a tattoo on her shoulderblade - writing - and because I cannot pass writing without reading it, I glanced at it. Part of the writing was covered by a strap.

But I could still read it. And I knew what the words covered by the strap were.

The tattoo was a lot like this (which is to say, the same content, and similar typeface, but probably not the same person. I'm already trying to remember if it was the left or the right shoulderblade):



(I took that photo from here.)(Thank you Google Image Search)

I read the tattoo, read words I had written to try and exorcise my own small demons eighteen years ago, and I felt like a ghost. As if, for a moment, under the hot Sydney sun, I was only an idea of a person and not a real person at all.

I didn't introduce myself to her or say anything (it didn't even occur to me to say hello, in all honesty). I just walked home, through a world that felt flimsier and infinitely stranger than it had that morning.

I don't know why it affected me like that. But it did.

Labels: ghosts, tattoos, the weirdness and small forgivenesses of time

I took my love to Hobart in the rain

Arrived in Hobart yesterday afternoon, and shortly after was reunited with Amanda.

We saw Amanda's Lexington friend (and, these days, my friend) Ron Nordin, and my Tasmanian friends (and, these days, Amanda's friends) Dianna and Mark for a drink.

They all drank wonderful things like honey martinis with honeycomb in them while I drank English Breakfast tea in the hope that it might keep me awake. Then Amanda and I went off and had the first meal together we'd had since we've been married, while I tried to stay awake and enjoy it all properly.

I woke at 6 am to the patter of rain on the hotel roof with a new wife fast asleep beside me, and I was amazingly happy. I let her sleep until I decided, a couple of hours later, that unless I had breakfast the world would end, and then I woke her.

Went for a walk together. I love Hobart. First came here in '98, for an Australian National Convention, and decided it was one of the fine, secret places of the Earth. And I'm still convinced that this is true. I came back in 2008, and loved it again. We got back to the hotel to hear Amanda being interviewed on Triple-J, and dedicating The Magnetic Fields song "The Book of Love" to me, because it was played, by Daniel Handler, at our wedding.

I know. It's all sort of sweet and a bit melty over here in my blog-land right now. It'll go back to normal soon enough, I expect.

Tonight Amanda plays a secret midnight practice gig as a rehearsal for her new Australian band (it's at the Brisbane Hotel. You didn't hear it from me), and she's invited me along to do something onstage, but I suspect that if I've been up since 6 am, I may not feel like performing or even feel like being awake at midnight. We'll see.

Tomorrow both Amanda and I play at the Mona Foma Main Stage (it's on the other side of the white building in the photo). I go on at 8 pm to read THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS, with FourPlay accompanying me, and Eddie Campbell paintings (and, I hope, Eddie Campbell there too, but am not yet certain about Eddie: he's coming from flooded Brisbane, after all).

Amanda goes on at 9:30pm.

We get to grab a couple of days of honeymoon, then to Melbourne for a couple of days to see friends, and then on to Sydney for a concert.

Amanda's playing Sydney Opera House Main Stage on the 26th of January, and she's decided she wants other people up on the stage, for guest spots, and, because I loved playing the Opera House last year, I've agreed to be one of them.

Not sure what I'll do yet -- either some "Best Of..." moments, or something completely new.

Either way, it's bound to be an extremely unlikely evening. Details and ticket info at http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/amanda_palmer_goes_down_under.aspx

Then I go home to the snow and to the dogs.

Amanda goes to work, once I've gone, and will play gigs in Brisbane, Melbourne, Byron Bay, Adelaide (at the Fringe, as herself and, with Jason Webley, an Evelyn Evelyn show), Perth, Canberra, Newcastle and, in New Zealand, Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland. http://www.amandapalmer.net/afp/upcoming-shows/

Hang on. I'll cut & Paste from an interview at The Vine.

01-26 Sydney, Australia - Sydney Opera House [w/Neil Gaiman]

02-01 Canberra, Australia - James O. Fairfax Theatre

02-04 Perth, Australia - Fly By Night

02-10 Byron Bay, Australia - Great Northern

02-12 Brisbane, Australia - The Old Museum

02-17-18 Wellington, New Zealand - Webstock

02-19 Wellington, New Zealand - Bodega

02-22 Christchurch, New Zealand - Al's Bar

02-23 Auckland, New Zealand - Kings Arms Tavern

02-26 Melbourne, Australia - The Forum Theatre

03-02-03 Adelaide, Australia - Adelaide Fringe Festival

(If you are in Australia and you are sad that I am not with her, your best bet is to make her feel very happy and loved. Then she will decide to come to Australia to live whenever it gets cold in the USA, and I'll come here with her.)

...

Interesting article over at Locus Online by Graham Sleight, and an extract from an interview they did with me about ebooks at http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/01/neil-gaiman-on-ebooks/

And there is a huge backlog of questions to answer on the FAQ line. I'll try and do some of them next blog.

Also, I'm writing a story about Lettie Hempstock. Who may be distantly related to Daisy Hempstock in Stardust and Liza Hempstock in The Graveyard Book.

Right. Off to rehearse with a string quartet. (You can buy their version of The Doctor Who theme over at http://shop.fourplay.com.au/Catgut.php)

Labels: amanda palmer, Is Tasmania Secretly Cool?, Sydney Opera House, Tasmania, The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains