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I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. The Times keeps its site paywalled, so I thought I'd post the original version of the interview here. (This is the raw copy, and it's somewhat longer than the interview as published.) I don't do much journalism any more, and this was mostly an excuse to drive across Florida back in February and spend a day with some very nice people I do not get to see enough. I hope you enjoy it. Edit to add - the Sunday Times asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors' notes, and I wrote this: “I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time to write, like my children's novel Coraline.” “Meeting Stephen King this time, the thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does. All the talk of retiring from writing, of quitting, the suggestions that maybe it's time to stop before he starts repeating himself, seems to be done. He likes writing, likes it more than anything else that he could be doing, and does not seem at all inclined to stop. Except perhaps at gunpoint.” http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--2q-UhgiPKM/T5wqCwS0JzI/AAAAAAAAmTI/ItwtCcLNMzQ/s400/556560020.jpg The first time I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame. “If I had my life over again,” said King. “I'd've done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn't have done the American Express “Do You Know Me?” TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.” He was tall and dark haired, and Joe and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out of the cloning vat. The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots are Made For Walkin'”. Afterwards we talked in the tiny toilet in the back of the theatre, the only place King could smoke a furtive cigarette. He seemed frail, then, and grey, only recently recovered a long hospitalisation from being hit by an idiot in a van, and the hospital-infections that had followed it. He grumbled about the pain of walking downstairs. I worried about him, then. And now, another decade, and when King comes out of the parking bay in the Sarasota Key to greet me, he's looking good. He's no longer frail. He is 64 and he looks younger than he did a decade ago. Stephen King's house in Bangor Maine is gothic and glorious. I know this although I have never been there. I have seen photographs on the internet. It looks like the sort of place that somebody like Stephen King ought to live and work. There are wrought iron bats and gargoyles on the gates. Stephen King's house on a key in Florida near Sarasota, a strand of land on the edge of the sea, lined with big houses (“that one was John Gotti's,” I learn as we pass one huge white high-walled building. “We call it murder mansion”) is ugly. And not even endearingly ugly. It's a long block of concrete and glass, like an enormous shoebox, It was built, explains Tabby, by a man who built shopping malls, out of the materials of a shopping mall. It's like an Apple store's idea of a McMansion, and not pretty. But once you are inside the glass window-walls have a perfect view over the sand and the sea, and there's a gargantuan blue metal doorway that dissolves into nothingness and stars in one corner of the garden, and inside the building there are paintings and sculptures, and, most important, there's King's office. It has two desks in it. A nice desk, with a view, and an unimpressive desk with a computer on it, with a battered, much sat-upon chair facing away from the window. That's the desk that King sits at every day, and it is where he writes. Right now he's writing a book called Joyland, about an amusement park serial killer. Below the window is a patch of well-fenced land, with an enormous African Spurred Tortoise nosing around in it, like a monstrous ambulatory rock. My first encounter with Stephen King, long before I met him in the flesh, was on East Croydon station in about 1975. I was fourteen. I picked up a book with an all-black cover. It was called Salem's Lot. It was King's second novel; I'd missed the first, a short book called Carrie, about a teenage girl with psychic powers. I stayed up late finishing Salem's Lot, loving the Dickensian portrait of a small American town destroyed by the arrival of a vampire. Not a nice vampire, a proper vampire. Dracula meets Peyton Place. After that I bought everything King wrote as it came out. Some books were great, and some weren't. It was okay. I trusted him. Carrie was the book that King started and abandoned, and which Tabbie King pulled out of the waste paper basket, read and encouraged him to finish. They were poor, and then King sold Carrie, and everything changed, and he kept writing. Driving down to Florida I listened, for over thirty hours, to the audiobook of King's time travel novel, 11/22/63. It's about a High School English teacher (as King was, when he wrote Carrie) who goes back from 2011 to 1958, via a wormhole in time located in the stockroom of an ancient diner, with a mission to save John F. Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald. It is, as always with King, the kind of fiction that forces you to care what happens, page after page. It has elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for something that's partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly a love-story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past. Given the hugeness of King's career, it is difficult to describe anything he does as an anomaly. He exists on the border of popular fiction (and, on occasion, non-fiction). His career (writers do not have careers, most of us. We just write the next book) is peculiarly teflon. He's a popular novelist, which used to be, perhaps still is, a description of the author of a certain type of book: one that will repay you for reading it in pleasure and in plot, like John D. MacDonald (whom King tips his hat to in 11/22/63). But not just a popular novelist: It does not matter what he writes, it seems, he is always a horror writer. I wonder if that frustrates him. “No. No it doesn't. I have got my family, and they are all okay. We have enough money to buy food and have things. Yesterday, we had a meeting of the King Foundation (the private foundation King funds that gives to many charitable causes). My sister-in-law, Stephanie, she organises it and we all sit down and give away money. That’s frustrating. Every year we give away the same money to different people... it's like chucking money into a hole. That’s frustrating. I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That’s what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say “You're this”, as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time that anything like what you’re talking about happened, I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this there was prison story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and one based on my childhood called “The Body,” and there is a story of this kid who finds a Nazi, “Apt Pupil”. I sent them to Viking, who was my published my editor was John Williams – dead many long years - terrific editor – he always took the work dead level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons, and he said well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just written three. I wrote another one, “The Breathing Method” and that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn’t really a horror thing. I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.' “And I said, 'I wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn’t'. And she walked off and went on her way.” It happens, over and over. It happened when he published Misery, his chronicle of toxic fandom; it happened with Bag of Bones, his gothic ghost story about a novelist, with nods to Du Maurier's Rebecca;it happened when he was inducted into the National Book Foundation's Medal for Contribution to American Letters. We're not talking in the huge concrete shoebox house. We're sitting by the pool in a smaller house the Kings bought on the same street, as a guest house for their family. Joe King, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, is staying there. He still looks like his dad, although no longer a clonal teenage version, and now has a successful career of his own as a writer of books and graphic novels. He carries his iPad everywhere he goes. Joe and I are friends. In Bag of Bones, Stephen King has an author who stops writing but keeps publishing stockpiled books. I wonder how long his publishers could keep his death a secret? He grins. “I got the idea for the writer in Bag of Boneshaving books because somebody told me years ago that every year Danielle Steel wrote three books and published two, and I knew Agatha Christie had squirrelled a couple away, to put a final bow on her career. As of right now, if I died and everybody kept it a secret, it would go on until 2013. There's a new Dark Tower novel, The Wind in the Keyhole.That comes out soon, and Dr Sleepis done. So if I got hit by a taxi cab, like Margaret Mitchell, what wouldn’t be done, what would be done. Joylandwouldn’t be done but Joe could finish it, in a breeze. His style is almost indistinguishable from mine. His ideas are better than mine. Being around Joe is like being next to a catherine wheel throwing off sparks, all these ideas. I do want to slow down. My agent is dickering with the publishers about Dr Sleep, that's the sequel to The Shining, but I held off showing them the manuscript because I wanted time to breathe.” Why would he write a sequel to The Shining? I do not tell him how much that book scared me when I was sixteen, nor how much I loved and at the same time was disappointed by the Kubrick movie. “I did it because it was such a cheesed-off thing to do. To say you were going back to the book that was really popular and write the sequel People think of that book, they read it as kids. Kids read it and say it was a really scary book, and then as adults they might read the sequel and think, this isn’t as good. The challenge is, maybe it can be as good - or maybe it can be different. It gives you something to push up against. It's a challenge. “I wanted to write Dr Sleep because I wanted to see what would happen to Danny Torrence when he grew up. And I knew that he would be a drunk because his father was a drunk. One of the holes it seemed to me in The Shining is that Jack Torrance was this white-knuckle dry drunk who never tried one of the self-help groups, the like Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought, okay, I'll start with Danny Torrence at age forty. He is going to be one of those people who says 'I am never going to be like my father, I am never going to be abusive like my father was'. Then you wake up at 37 or 38 and you're a drunk. Then I thought, what kind of a life does that person like that have? He'll do a bunch of low-bottom jobs, he'll get canned, and now he works in a hospice as a janitor. I really want him to be in a hospice worker because he has the shining and he can help people get across as they die. They call him Dr Sleep, and they know to call for him when the cat goes into their room and sits on their bed. This was writing about guy who rides the bus, and he's eating in a McDonalds, or on a special night out maybe Red Lobster. We are not talking about a guy who goes to Sardi's.” Stephen and Tabitha met in the stacks of the University of Maine library in 1967, and they married in 1971. He couldn't get a teaching position when he graduated, so he worked in an industrial laundromat, and pumped gas, and worked as a janitor, supplementing his meagre income with occasional stories, mostly horror, sold to men's magazines with names like Cavalier. They were dirt poor. They lived in a trailer, and King wrote at a makeshift desk between the washer and the dryer. All that changed in 1974, with the paperback sale of Carrie for $200,000. I wonder how long it has been since King has stopped worrying about money. He thinks for a moment. “1985. For a long time Tabby understood that we didn’t have to worry about these things. I didn’t. I was convinced they would take all this away from me, and I was going to be living with three kids in a rental house again, that it was just too good to be true. Around about 1985 I started to relax and think ‘this is good, this is going to be okay’. “And even now this” (he gestures, taking in the swimming pool, the guest house, the Florida Key and all the many McMansions) “”is all very strange to me, even though it's only three months of the year. Where we live in Maine is one of the poorest counties. A lot of the people we see and hang with cut wood for a living, drive trash, that sort of thing. I don’t want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use. “Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for three fucking hours. You know and people will have drinks before, wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this crap. To me my idea of what’s good is to drive here and go to Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and waffle. When I see the first Waffle House, I know I’m in the South. That’s good. “They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “For something that I would do for free.”. Stephen King's father went out for cigarettes when King was four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian Minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is finishing his third novel. Owen's first novel is coming out in 2013. I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012? “It is definitely harder. When I wrote Carrie and Salem's Lot, I was one step away from manual labour. – but it’s like also true - Joe is going to find out this is true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time. “But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little twelve year old girl in Dr Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five year old Danny Torrence because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here’s the bottom line: if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in American Gods, and if I can imagine Magic Doors and everything then surely I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I imagine it's like to work a ten hour day in a blue collar job.” We're doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft, about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a vocation. His next book, The Wind in the Keyhole, is a Dark Tower novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years to finish, and he only finished spurred on my his assistants, Marsha and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the story would be completed. Now he's finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King is a character in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower books, and Stephen King the non-fictional author is wondering whether to take him out on the next draft. I told him about the peculiarity of researching the story I was working on, that everything I needed, fictionally, was waiting for me when I went looking for it. He nods in agreement. “Absolutely – you reach out and it's there. The time that it happened the clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me 'This is a bit crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a serialised novel like Dickens used to do?', and I had a story that was sort of struggling for air. That was The Green Mile. And I knew if I did this I had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because...” he hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn't sound foolish, “...every time I needed something that something was right there to hand. “When John Coffey goes to jail – he was going to be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn’t do it , but I didn’t know that the guy who did do it was going to be there, didn’t know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before. “I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...” King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. “I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about 1200 to 1500 words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hardcopy.” I start to tell King my theory, that when people in the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973 and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there, behind the monsters and the night, making them more real. King is sanguine. “You know what you can’t tell what is going to last, what’s not going to last. There’s Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. McDonald saying “200 years from now, when people want to know what the 20th century they ll go to John D. McDonald”, but I’m not sure that’s true – it seems like he’s almost been forgotten. But I try and reread a John D. McDonald novel whenever I come down here.” Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King. And, I realise, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions. “You know what's bizarre? I did the Savannah Book Fair last week.... This is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing ovation from all these people, and it's like a creepy thing... either you've become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that you are not dead yet.” I tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a try out tour of Victor/Victoria. It was not very good, but she got a standing ovation for being Julie Andrews. “That’s so dangerous though, for us. I want people to like the work, not me.” And the lifetime achievement awards? “It makes them happy to give they to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don't know that.” Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time for dinner, and, she adds, that back at the big house the gargantuan African Spurred Tortoise had just been discovered trying to rape a rock. View the full article

I've been a very bad blogger recently. I promised myself that I would simply finish the thing I was working on and then blog again, but by the time I finished I had such a ridiculous backlog of things to post here that I've been putting it off... So. I finished writing in Florida. I came home. I went to a wedding in Laguna Beach with Amanda, then to Dallas where Amanda was mixing her new album. We went to North Carolina to take Maddy to the college she's going to be attending (amazing. My little girl...) and I got home last night. Lots of things to blog about... I'm thinking of putting the whole of the Stephen King interview I did for the Sunday Times up here on the blog, for a start. Today, three packages of bees came in, to replace the three hives we lost this winter. (We were left with three - an Italian, a Russian, and a Carniolan hive.) This is an amazing high speed film of me pouring bees into a hive this morning. It's 40 seconds long, and takes a few seconds of real time. View the full article

http://iheardin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Jean-Giraud-aka-Moebius-Hunter.jpeg This was the art on the cover of the first Metal Hurlant I ever saw. I was — what — 14, and on a French Exchange to Paris with my class, and this beautiful magazine filled with comics opened my mind to what comics could be, and particularly to the art of Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius, who drew about half of the magazine in a way that seemed both familiar and completely alien, made it so powerful and perfect. He drew different stories in different styles, and the only thing they seemed to have in common was that they were beautiful. I bought a copy. I could only afford the one issue of the magazine, but one was enough. I couldn’t actually figure out what the Moebius stories were about, but I figured that was because my French wasn’t up to it. (I could get the gist of the Richard Corben Den story, and loved that too, and not just because of the nakedness, but the Moebius stories were obviously so much deeper.) I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing). I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up. I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren’t actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn’t matter. The damage had long since been done. I met Jean Giraud on a couple of occasions over the years. He was sweet and gentle and really… I don’t know. Spiritual is not a word I use much, mostly because it feels so very misused these days, but I’d go with it for him. I liked him enormously, and felt humbled around him. And in my 20s and 30s I didn't do humbled very much or very well. (Moebius was pronounced in the French way, as a four syllable word. Mo-e-bi-us.) During Sandman, we did several galleries where we would ask artists whose work we loved to draw a character for us. I was a working writer, the money that came in fed my family, and although I looked with envy on the art that was being made, I did not buy any of it. Except for one small painting. A Moebius study of Death. It cost me as much as I was paid to write an issue of Sandman, and I bought it without a qualm. http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/snowce/12226729901/1/tumblr_lu0j02prfd1qz9b3k We wanted to work together. I wrote the Sandman: Endless Nights story DEATH IN VENICE for him to draw, but his health got bad, so P. Craig Russell drew it. Half a year later Moebius’s health improved a little, and he asked if I could write him a very short story, perhaps 8 pages, and make them all single images, so I wrote the DESTINY story in Endless Nights for him. His health took a turn for the worse, once more, and Frank Quitely drew it. And both Craig and Frank made magic with their stories, but somewhere inside I was sad, because I’d hoped to work with Moebius. And now I never shall. RIP Jean Giraud, 8 May 1938 - 10 March 2012 View the full article

It's a weird thing, writing. Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful. Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going. And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove. And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before. And that's magic. ... My days are good right now. I've found my writing rhythm and I appear to have some kind of writing mojo back. I'm not writing the thing I thought I was going into hiding to write, but I'm loving what I am writing, am pretty sure I'll be able to make it all work when I get to the next draft, even though right now it has things in it that mean it's going to be harder to publish than normal. It's in that weird zone between children's fiction and adult fiction with children in it (think of the ghostly school story in the middle of Sandman:Season of Mists as an example of the kind of thing I mean). I'm missing my wife, but missing her less and less with every good writing day, and I'm selfishly enjoying having a daily routine I've never really had before that includes a morning jog or workout (put together for me by a very kind fitness instructor who reads this blog and recorded some videos for me) and a long hard yoga session once or twice a week. Mostly I wish Amanda could just teleport in every few days for dinner, and then zap herself back to Melbourne in the morning. I've found a little cafe where they seem perfectly happy to have me in the corner scribbling away while people come and people go; and when I went in there this afternoon, the barrista smiled and asked if I was having the usual (viz. their "British Breakfast Tea") and I said yes, and realised I rather loved the idea of having a usual. I like having short hair because I feel vaguely and comfortably incognito. So I am not posting photographs of myself right now. In all probability the incognito thing is entirely a placebo effect, and everybody in the town looks at me and goes, there goes that English writer. But it makes me happy, in the same way that Amanda wearing fake Clark Kent hipster glasses around Melbourne as a disguise makes her happy. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-r0CoAuqJwnA/T1LvTtpOvGI/AAAAAAAAmJc/mewu2G_omCE/s400/glasseswife.jpeg If you see this woman in Melbourne, Australia, it is obviously not my wife. The most interesting thing I've done recently was drive across the middle of the state to go and spend a day with Stephen King: I'll be writing about it for the Times (the UK one, not the New York one). This writing retreat only lasts another few days, in its current form. But I am very happy. And writing. In case you were wondering. View the full article

Please celebrate Leap Year Day in the traditional manner by taking a writer out for dinner. It’s been four years since many authors had a good dinner. We are waiting. Many of us have our forks or chopsticks at the ready - some of us have had them ready for days. We will repay you by drifting off while the food is being served and then suddenly scribbling something down on a scrap of paper and asking whether or not you think “passionate” could validly be said to rhyme with “cash in it”, then absent-mindedly drinking too much and trying to recite the whole of Clive James’s “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” from memory. Feed us. View the full article

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. (See all earlier comments to this effect in the previous 2 million words on this journal.) The HBO pilot script is starting to feel like a real thing. On the downside, I miss my dogs, my family, and, off in Australia where she is about to start making her next album, my wife. But the work is good. And it is not snowy outside. This is the morning view from my bedroom window: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FB5i9kKeG-A/T0RA3V3EHgI/AAAAAAAAmIw/DR5K9GuA39M/s400/IMG_20120218_080051.jpg ... The news just came in on the nominations for Audies, the Audiobook awards. Three of them are for things I was involved in. (Here's a PDF of all the nominees.) The Witches of Lublin was nominated. I acted in that. (Congratulations to Ellen Kushner and Sue Zizza and Simon Jones and all involved) American Gods (10th Anniversary Full Cast Audio) was nominated. I narrated the Coming To America bits in that, and I wrote the book. (Congratulations to the wonderful cast - and to Nicole Quinn, the contest winner, who won a part in it.) (Which reminds me - someone asked me for the list of who played what in the Audio. I'll put it up here.) And a book from the Audible Neil Gaiman Presents line is nominated: Jonathan Carroll's novel THE LAND OF LAUGHS. I have loved LAND OF LAUGHS ever since I first read it, in 1983 or 1984. Was once asked to pitch it as a movie by the producer who controls it, and I did, and was sad it wasn't picked up. It's a magical, spooky novel for anyone who has ever wanted to go too deeply into a book they loved. It was one of my first choices for Neil Gaiman Presents. So huge congratulations to Jonathan and to narrator Edoardo Ballerini. And more congratulations to the ACX team at Audible. If you've been following the Neil Gaiman Presents line at all, if you liked Land of Laughs, or if you want to try out an audiobook, the new Jonathan Carroll, WHITE APPLES, has just been released. And if you haven't discovered Jonathan Carroll, and you are wondering who this writer is, and why you should be interested, this is what I wrote some years ago, for Jonathan's own website: ........................................................................................................................................ "All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own." -Haniel Long, Notes Toward a New Mythology. There are millions of competent writers out there. There are hundreds of thousands of good writers in the world, and there are a handful of great writers. And this is me, late at night, trying to figure out the difference for myself. That indefinable you-either-got-it-or-you-ain't spark that makes someone a great writer. And then I realise that I'm asking myself the wrong question, because it's not good writers or great writers. What I'm really wondering is what makes some writers special. Like when I was a kid on the London Underground, I'd stare at the people around me. And every now and again I'd notice someone who had been drawn - a William Morris beauty, a Berni Wrightson grotesque - or someone who had been written - there are lots of Dickens characters in London, even today. It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again. There are a few writers who are special. They make the world in their books; or rather, they open a window or a door or a magic casement, and they show you the world in which they live. Ramsey Campbell, for example, writes short stories that, read in quantity, will re-form your world into a grey and ominous place in which strange shapes flicker at the corner of your eyes, and a patch of smoke or a blown plastic shopping bag takes on some kind of ghastly significance. Read enough R.A. Lafferty and you will find yourself living in a quirky tall-tale of a world in which the people have all stepped out of some cosmic joke, if it is not a dream. Jonathan Carroll's a changer. He's one of the special ones, one of the few. He paints the world he sees. He opens a window you did not know was there and invites you to look through it. He gives you his eyes to see with, and he gives you the world all fresh and honest and new. In a bookstore universe of bland and homogenised writers and fictions, the world that words from Carroll's fountain pen is as cool, as fine and as magical as a new lover, or cool water in the desert. Things matter. You can fall in love with his women, or his men, worry when they hurt, hate them when they betray or fall short, rejoice when they steal a moment of magic and of life from the face of death and eventual nothingness. I had dinner with Jonathan Carroll, with Dave McKean and with some friends, about eight years ago: what I still remember is not the meal nor even the conversation (although I do recall Jonathan telling us some incidents of his life that I would later encounter in Kissing the Beehive): what I recall was the process of becoming a Jonathan Carroll character among Jonathan Carroll characters. We were witty and wise and lucent; intelligent and beautiful men and women; artists and creators and magicians, we were. It was a couple of days before I noticed that I had become a mundane grey person once more. Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry. But a new book by Jonathan Carroll is still, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, a cause for celebration. His most successful books and tales defy genre categorisation. They've more life, more balls, are more true than pretty much anything else you'll encounter out there. They call some fantasies 'Magical Realism' to try and lend them respectability, like a whore who wishes to be known as a lady of the evening. Jonathan Carroll's work, however, has every right to parade under the banner of magical realism, if you have to call it something. I call them Jonathan Carroll stories, and leave it at that. He is one of the handful, and one of the brotherhood. If you don't believe me, pick up Outside the Dog Museum, or A Child Across the Sky, or Sleeping in Flame or The Panic Hand, or any of his other works (you'll find a list of them within, I have no doubt) and find out for yourself. He'll lend you his eyes; and you will never see the world in quite the same way ever again. ........................................................................................................................................................ ....And now for something ever-so-slightly different.A wonderful Josh Ritter song, and a video made using 12,000 pieces of coloured construction paper. Josh Ritter - Love Is Making Its Way Back Home from Josh Ritter on Vimeo. View the full article

I started feeling last night that real work was happening. I could see it starting to mount. My morale is starting to improve, as it always does when writing happens, and I remember that I actually can do it after all. Currently I'm mostly writing the HBO American Gods first episode. I'm really enjoying it, partly because a lot of what I've written isn't in the book. It's implied in the book, or talked about generally, or referred to obliquely, but it's scenes I hadn't written. So I feel that I'm doing new work, even if it's not new. If you see what I mean. And, strangely, it seems to be feeding in to the next American Gods book, which is what I'm sort of working on right now. (Actually, I'm writing a short story that comes after Monarch of the Glen and before The Next Book. But it feels organically needed.) Other than that... I'm looking after myself. The main new thing I've been doing is actually jogging for 37 minutes a day. (It was 37 minutes the first day, and so I've kept it the same every other day to see how much further or faster I get, because my little iPod Nano keeps track of this stuff.) I will do a proper catch-up blog post later in the week, I suspect. There's stuff I should write about that's been interesting or fun. In the meantime, I was sent this press release last night. It had me doing a happy dance around the room, for my little bit of it. (Apart from anything else, it was wonderful seeing the other nominees in my category. Woody Allen! Duncan Jones!) And, because they asked if I'd spread it around, I have cut and pasted the whole of the nomination list. (Congratulations to all the Nominees!) 2011 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book. Novel Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor) Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press) Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books) God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books) Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books) The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Novella "Kiss Me Twice," Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011) "Silently and Very Fast," Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011) "The Ice Owl," Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,November/December 2011) "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Kij Johnson (Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011) "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing) "With Unclean Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011) Novelette "Fields of Gold," Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books) "Ray of Light," Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011) "Sauerkraut Station," Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011) "Six Months, Three Days," Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011) "The Migratory Pattern of Dancers," Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011) "The Old Equations," Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011) "What We Found," Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011) Short Story "Her Husband's Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011) "Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son," Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011) "Movement," Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2011) "Shipbirth," Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011) "The Axiom of Choice," David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011) "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011) "The Paper Menagerie," Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011) Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems) Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount) Doctor Who: “The Doctor's Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales) Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount) Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony) Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit) The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal) Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile) Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury) Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder &Stoughton) Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books) The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House) The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books) Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Books) The winners will be announced at SFWA's 47th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. As announced earlier this year, Connie Willis will be the recipient of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker. ... Hi Neil, I'm assuming you're at least marginally familiar with altered books. Someone linked to this in an art therapy forum I'm on, and I saw it and immediately thought of you. Specifically I was reminded of Mirrormask. I think it's a brilliant use of out of date reference books. http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi Enjoy! http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzo9kgtmwf1r3rsfmo1_500.jpgI did. View the full article

Small useful post: Right now B&N’s NOOK and Amazon’s KINDLE are both discounting Neverwhere. It’s at $2.99 — these discounts do not last for very long (normally 24-48 hours) so if you want an e-copy, grab it quickly. http://www.amazon.com/Neverwhere-ebook/dp/B000FC130E/?tag=arcadata-20 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/neverwhere-neil-gaiman/1100109136?ean=9780061793059&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-TnL5HPStwNw-_-10:1 It only applies to the US site. When this happened with American Gods, iBook also dropped the price. I haven’t checked… (Edit to add, I checked. They did too. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/neverwhere/id363686338?mt=11) .... And from TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2006 Small Valentine's Day Poem POSTED BY NEIL AT 11:15 AM Roses are red, Violets are purple, Which is a very hard word to rhyme And makes me happy that on February the 14th we don't traditionally have to give each other oranges. There. I'd write for longer, as I have tales to tell, or even to cut and paste, but guilt will eat me if I do not drive to a coffee shop and either type or scrawl. View the full article

Hullo everybody I'm off in hiding, writing. It's good. I did a road trip to get here - I stopped in New Orleans and got an extreme haircut and a hot towel shave. Last time I went off into hiding to write a novel I let my hair and beard grow, and I didn't want to repeat myself. I look... odd, I think. But I feel like I'm in disguise, which is an excellent feeling for an author to have. I got to my hideout, which is the house where I started writing American Gods a dozen years ago, then drove three and half hours to see my cousin Helen and her husband Sidney. (Helen's mother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister.) They are 94 and 90 respectively. (Helen told Sidney she was four years younger than she was, claiming back her years during World War II, where she survived the Warsaw Ghetto and worse, and only told him how old she really was forty years later, when her older sister, Wanda, died. If you have three hours, .) Then I drove home, to the place I'm staying. I spent yesterday not doing much of anything - recovering from the drive, getting settled in. Today, however, I'm writing. Do not expect much in the way of blogging while I'm writing. Here are two fun things... The first is an awards acceptance speech I filmed for SFX. They gave me an award for Screenwriting Excellence for my Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife. I tried to give the kind of measured and well-thought-out speech that an occasion like this demanded. The second is that if you go to this Audible link you can listen to the newest in my Neil Gaiman Presents audio series at Audible.com, The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Seventeen hours of glorious, funny, profound and delightful stories about Dr Englebert Eszterhazy, who Sherlocks his way through some remarkable stories in an Eastern European Balkan Empire. And this is something Amanda just sent me... it's the video done for her cover of Nirvana's "Polly", done for a Nevermind tribute album. Scary, grueling, ultimately triumphant, based on a true story. View the full article

I gave this speech in 2004, to the Mythopoeic Society. I thought it was already somewhere on this website, but it isn't, it's only up at the Mythopoeic Society website. I hope no-one there will mind if I put it up here (mostly for me, for ease of finding it later.) Mythcon 35 Guest of Honour Speech By Neil Gaiman I thought I’d talk about authors, and about three authors in particular, and the circumstances in which I met them. There are authors with whom one has a personal relationship and authors with whom one does not. There are the ones who change your life and the ones who don’t. That’s just the way of it. http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111025055155/narnia/images/e/e0/Aslan_-_1967_serial.png I was six years old when I saw an episode of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in black and white on television at my grandmother’s house in Portsmouth. I remember the beavers, and the first appearance of Aslan, an actor in an unconvincing lion costume, standing on his hind legs, from which I deduce that this was probably episode two or three. I went home to Sussex and saved my meagre pocket money until I was able to buy a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe of my own. I read it, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the other book I could find, over and over, and when my seventh birthday arrived I had dropped enough hints that my birthday present was a boxed set of the complete Narnia books. And I remember what I did on my seventh birthday — I lay on my bed and I read the books all through, from the first to the last. http://www.larsenbooks.com.au/pix/28446.jpg For the next four or five years I continued to read them. I would read other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read. For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself realising that there were Certain Parallels. Most people get it at the Stone Table; I got it when it suddenly occurred to me that the story of the events that occurred to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus was the dragoning of Eustace Scrubb all over again. I was personally offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda. I had nothing against religion, or religion in fiction — I had bought (in the school bookshop) and loved The Screwtape Letters, and was already dedicated to G.K. Chesterton. My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately still believe. The Pauline Baynes map of Narnia poster stayed up on my bedroom wall through my teenage years. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Fk2M10g_oZ4/TUDxt5b-Q6I/AAAAAAAAAmY/jY8kITqgO9U/s320/narnia-map.jpg I didn’t return to Narnia until I was a parent, first in 1988, then in 1999, each time reading all the books aloud to my children. I found that the things that I loved, I still loved — sometimes loved more — while the things that I had thought odd as a child (the awkwardness of the structure of Prince Caspian, and my dislike for most of The Last Battle, for example) had intensified; there were also some new things that made me really uncomfortable — for example the role of women in the Narnia books, culminating in the disposition of Susan. But what I found more interesting was how much of the Narnia books had crept inside me: as I would write there would be moment after moment of realising that I’d borrowed phrases, rhythms, the way that words were put together; for example, that I had a hedgehog and a hare, in The Books of Magic, speaking and agreeing with each other much as the Dufflepuds do. http://www.jaydinitto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cs-lewis-photo.jpg C.S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the way he used parentheses — the auctorial asides that were both wise and chatty, and I rejoiced in using such brackets in my own essays and compositions through the rest of my childhood. I think, perhaps, the genius of Lewis was that he made a world that was more real to me than the one I lived in; and if authors got to write the tales of Narnia, then I wanted to be an author. Now, if there is a wrong way to find Tolkien, I found Tolkien entirely the wrong way. Someone had left a copy of a paperback called The Tolkien Reader in my house. It contained an essay — “Tolkien’s Magic Ring” by Peter S. Beagle — some poetry, Leaf By Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham. In retrospect, I suspect I picked it up only because it was illustrated by Pauline Baynes. I would have been eight, maybe nine years old. What was important to me, reading that book, was the poetry, and the promise of a story. Now, when I was nine I changed schools, and I found, in the class library, a battered and extremely elderly copy of The Hobbit. I bought it from the school in a library sale for a penny, along with an ancient copy of the Plays of W.S. Gilbert, and I still have it. It would be another year or so before I was to discover the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, in the main school library. I read them. I read them over and over: I would finish The Two Towers and start again at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I never got to the end. This was not the hardship it may sound — I had already learned from the Peter S. Beagle essay in the Tolkien Reader that it would all come out more or less okay. Still, I really did want to read it for myself. When I was thirteen I won the school English Prize, and was allowed to choose a book. I chose The Return of the King. I still own it. I only read it once, however — thrilled to find out how the story ended — because around the same time I also bought the one-volume paperback edition. It was the most expensive thing I had bought with my own money, and it was that which I now read and re-read. I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably, the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a quandary. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (That’s not true: I wanted to be a writer then.) And I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it had already been written. http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/0/5/3247205.jpg I gave the matter a great deal of thought, and eventually came to the conclusion that the best thing would be if, while holding a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I slipped into a parallel universe in which Professor Tolkien had not existed. And then I would get someone to retype the book — I knew that if I sent a publisher a book that had already been published, even in a parallel universe, they’d get suspicious, just as I knew my own thirteen-year old typing skills were not going to be up to the job of typing it. And once the book was published I would, in this parallel universe, be the author of Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better thing. And I read Lord of the Rings until I no longer needed to read it any longer, because it was inside me. Years later, I dropped Christopher Tolkien a letter, explaining something that he found himself unable to footnote, and was profoundly gratified to find myself thanked in the Tolkien book The Return of the Shadow (for something I had learned from reading James Branch Cabell, no less). It was in the same school library that had the two volumes of Lord of the Rings that I discovered Chesterton. The library was next door to the school matron’s office, and I learned that, when faced with lessons that I disliked from teachers who terrified me, I could always go up to the matron’s office and plead a headache. A bitter-tasting aspirin would be dissolved in a glass of water, I would drink it down, trying not to make a face, and then be sent to sit in the library while I waited for it to work. The library was also where I went on wet afternoons, and whenever else I could. http://singlikenooneslistening.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/gk-chesterton.jpg The first Chesterton book I found there was The Complete Father Brown Stories. There were hundreds of other authors I encountered in that library for the first time — Edgar Wallace and Baroness Orczy and Dennis Wheatley and the rest of them. But Chesterton was important — as important to me in his way as C.S. Lewis had been. You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien’s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. Father Brown, that prince of humanity and empathy, was a gateway drug into the harder stuff, this being a one-volume collection of three novels: The Napoleon of Notting Hill (my favourite piece of predictive 1984 fiction, and one that hugely informed my own novel Neverwhere), The Man Who Was Thursday (the prototype of all Twentieth Century spy stories, as well as being a Nightmare, and a theological delight), and lastly The Flying Inn (which had some excellent poetry in it, but which struck me, as an eleven-year old, as being oddly small-minded. I suspected that Father Brown would have found it so as well.) Then there were the poems and the essays and the art. Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing. And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you. View the full article

It's been a bugger of a week: I left my Macbook Air on a plane on Sunday night, and have spent most of the rest of the week doing things like being on the phone to the backup service, learning that the tracking software I'd thought was on there was on there, but hadn't been activated, buying a new computer, etc. I didn't get the thing I was meant to be writing written. I was grumpy. But, I spent the wasted week getting healthy and in shape and juicing things. And I now have an iPad, with which I am starting to fall in love. (Weirdly, I much prefer my Nexus Android to the iPhone. But never liked the Xoom, and still don't - I have one, but mostly use it as an Audible player, and attempts to use it to write on, with a bluetooth keyboard, early this week were just painful. But I started falling for Amanda's iPad in Edinburgh in August, bought one for myself on impulse, and started writing on it, and discovering that writing on it was easy and pleasant.) And this morning I got an email telling me that the thing that I would have been working on all week, that I'd already lost 15 pages of... ...was now going to change so radically I would have wasted a week's work if I'd been working on it. So I am happy. And the thing I've been holding fire on for a week just sorted itself out, too. So I got a week off I would never have had in real life, even if it was a grumpy one, and all has worked out for the best. And I learned on Monday morning I was nominated for an Edgar Award, by the Mystery Writers of America, for my story "The Case of Death and Honey". I don't write many mysteries, and I've never been nominated for an Edgar Award before. So I was thrilled. (The story, from A Study in Sherlock, isn't online, but you can read about it here.) http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Edgar-300x90.jpg My friend Dr Dan just wandered by with a CD. "I see all these photos of you," he said, "that do not look like you at all. Here's a photo I took of you this summer that I like. It looks like you." http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jZmCGIOW760/TxyT74TJB6I/AAAAAAAAl6c/GoyKFi27AMo/s400/DSC09996-adobeRGB-smiling.JPG I liked it too, partly because you can actually see some of the grey on the side. There's stuff about getting older that I don't like - mostly having to do with eyesight - but I'm enjoying most of it. I like feeling that I have a face that looks like something; when I was young I was convinced I didn't look like anything, and wore dark glasses and big leather jackets so people would have something to remember. But these days I have a face that feels like mine, even if, sometimes, I catch myself in the mirror looking disconcertingly like my father. It's been really wintry here, but today it warmed up to not-actually-evil, and I was able to pull out my phone and, more importantly, take off my gloves to take shots of the dogs. Who are too often invisible against the snow. Cabal. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bdaU77phQAQ/TxyWwg-JPbI/AAAAAAAAl6s/8fwdYN4F_so/s400/1327260646955.jpg Lola, hoping a squirrel who ran up a tree will run down again, so that she can catch him and turn him into a squirrelly chew toy... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t1t5aywvqq4/TxyWwo13XbI/AAAAAAAAl60/vVDEiuzgdnU/s400/1327260962112.jpg Lola visiting a frozen river... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hqelSDSIhLk/TxyWw-Hq1uI/AAAAAAAAl7I/YdtBMnIHP6s/s400/1327260633431.jpg And some of the beehives, all wrapped up for the winter. The bees are inside, in football-sized clumps, vibrating and generating heat. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tkt4W4SBmzc/TxyWxXhMtpI/AAAAAAAAl7Q/JFwg0ueJHt8/s400/1327260289366.jpg ... It's the Chinese Year of the Dragon, so I just drew a wobbly dragon for my Chinese friends. He's based on a picture I saw of an ancient dragon who had three toes but was still Chinese... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uAq_qjKwOmA/Txya4XQ52rI/AAAAAAAAl7Y/xoGIxIFbRGc/s320/Photo+on+1-22-12+at+3.33+PM+%25235.jpg I don't know if anyone's going to be able to see this photo posted here, in China. Last time I was there, this blog was cut off by the Great Firewall, but I post for it anyone who can: 恭喜发财 View the full article

An open letter to Washington from Artists and Creators We, the undersigned, are musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers. We make our livelihoods with the artistic works we create. We are also Internet users. We are writing to express our serious concerns regarding the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works. We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services - artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result. We are deeply concerned that PIPA and SOPA's impact on piracy will be negligible compared to the potential damage that would be caused to legitimate Internet services. Online piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of censoring creativity, stifling innovation or preventing the creation of new, lawful digital distribution methods. We urge Congress to exercise extreme caution and ensure that the free and open Internet, upon which so many artists rely to promote and distribute their work, does not become collateral damage in the process. Respectfully, Aziz Ansari Kevin Devine, Musician Barry Eisler, Author Neil Gaiman, Author Lloyd Kaufman, Filmmaker Zoë Keating, Musician The Lonely Island Daniel Lorca, Musician (Nada Surf) Erin McKeown, Musician MGMT Samantha Murphy, Musician OK Go Amanda Palmer, Musician (The Dresden Dolls) Quiet Company Trent Reznor Adam Savage, Special Effects Artist (MythBusters) Hank Shocklee, Music Producer (Public Enemy, The Bomb Squad) Johnny Stimson, Musician From http://stopthewall.us/artists/ View the full article

Another day of record high temperatures. I am mostly happy because it's astonishingly pleasant walking the dogs without protective clothing and facemasks and such. Also, it means I have a better chance of bringing all the beehives through this winter. Which reminds me, Hi, Neil,I thought you might enjoy this article on bee keeping:http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/01/beekeeping-and-the-ethical-vegan--will-curley/Best,Helana ...and I really did. (For the record, I think it's absolutely right for ethical vegans to stop eating almonds, citrus fruits, avocados and other nuts/fruits/vegetables that are pollinated by bees being trucked around the country, bees that are being, from my perspective, exploited and mistreated, although I don't know of any vegans that have stopped eating such fruits etc, but cannot see why such vegans would stop eating honey from small local beekeepers.) The mail on Friday brought many wonderful things, including a box of copies of a new edition of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, to which I had written an introduction. http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxg3penu6h1r3rsfmo1_500.jpg One reason I love writing introductions (or rather, I love having written introductions, because I don't love writing them. They feel like schoolwork, and they always take me so much longer to do than I ever think they will) is that I get to point to a work that I like, usually like a lot, and explain why I like it. You can't explain or point out everything in an introduction, nor should you. If it's done well, an introduction is a bit like sending a friend to a city she's never visited before. You tell her about the restaurants she shouldn't miss, and the places and sights that made you happy the last time you were there, and a few things that perhaps only the locals know. I love M. John Harrison's prose and I love his books, and I find the Viriconium sequence fascinating and delightful, which was why I asked for it to be in my ACX audiobook line at Neil Gaiman Presents. A few years ago, I wrote an introduction to the US edition of the book (the UK edition was introduced by Iain M. Banks, so even if you own the books, you might not have read this). http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61hjHijeBdL._SS500_.jpg On Viriconium: some Notes Toward an Introduction. And I look at the Viriconium cycle of M. John Harrison and wonder whether The Pastel City knew it was pupating In Viriconium or the heartbreak of “A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium” inside its pages, whether it knew what it was going to become. Some weeks ago and half-way around the world, I found myself in the centre of Bologna, that sunset-coloured medieval towered city which waits in the centre of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the the Codex Seraphinianus to inspect. The book, created by the artist Luigi Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object: there is text, but the alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths) bear only a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time: in one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawls away; while the animals, plants and ideas are strange enough that one can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time from now, or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England. Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s creation, the Pastel City in the Afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing is consistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street? M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty years: in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more than just a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he moves from puckish to possessed: I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain. It would be like trying to explain Harrison's fiction, something I am attempting to do in this introduction, and, in all probability, failing. There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage. The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of unease from a long-forgotten English Roman City – English antiquaries have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium, and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient sources is somewhat confused, a historical website informs us – are fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the nature of art and magic, language and power. There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, or we have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and characters reappear, like Tarot cards being shuffled and redealt. The Pastel City states Harrison’s themes simply, in comparison to the tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a marching brass band: it’s far future SF at the point where SF transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of Michael Moorcock and, in its end of time ambience and weariness, of Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of the legendary Methven to protect Viriconium and its girl-queen from invaders to the North. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an inventor and a city under threat. Still, there is a bitter-sweetness to the story that one would not normally expect from such a novel. A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it: the voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story. And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrison’s prose became transparent, but it was a treacherous transparency. Like its predecessors, In Viriconium is a novel about a hero attempting to rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor and a threatened city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it has come closer to home than the previous stories – the disillusion and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis. The short stories which weave around the three novels are stories about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations. The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art. Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces since leaving Viriconium, in and out of genre: Climbers, his amazing novel of rock climbers and escapism takes the themes of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” into mainstream fiction; The Course of the Heart takes them into fantasy, perhaps even horror; Light, his transcendent twining SF novel, is another novel about failed escapes – from ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations. For me, the first experience of reading Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium was a revelation. I was a young man when I first encountered them, half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first experience of Harrison’s prose, as clear as mountain-water and as cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them – the Thatcher Years in England seem already to be retreating into myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and there's more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when Harrison retold the story of “The Luck in the Head” in graphic novel form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn as an avatar of Margaret Thatcher). Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before – flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, and that the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it, or simply what you need. M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces, and finds invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the shower of sparks... Neil Gaiman Narita Airport, July 25, 2005 .... There. That's why I like it. Those are some of the sights to see in Viriconium if you visit. You can buy Viriconium from your local Indie Bookstore, or online: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780553383157 You can listen to the audiobook, the one of which I am so proud, at http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L88VMY&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911 Oh, and adumbrate means to sketch, outline or prefigure. View the full article

I'm home, and it's... well, nowhere near as cold as it should be. It was (in case you are interested) the warmest January 5th on record in this part of the world. And I'm really enjoying the warm weather more than I feel I should. So, I last posted on New Year's Eve, in Melbourne. January the First was quiet and extremely hot. Amanda completed her blog about our wedding, which she'd started writing almost a year earlier. (You can read it at http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/15120706154/the-wedding-blog. When I finished reading it for the first time I got extremely sniffly. You have been warned.) For the curious, my own Wedding blog is here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/01/yes.html. It's much shorter than Amanda's, but was written closer to the event. It ends with a paraphrase of a line from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. By perfect coincidence, we celebrated our first wedding anniversary on January the Second in Melbourne watching The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell, seats thanks to actor Toby Schmitz, who played Jack Worthing, and had noticed me on Twitter asking for suggestions about what to do that night in Melbourne. Great cast, great production, beautifully designed and put on. It made me think a lot about surfaces and about Oscar Wilde, and what art means and what it does, and the tension between those things. Then, somewhat subdued, as if it had become real that I was flying away and Amanda wasn't, we had dinner and went to the posh hotel we were overnighting in, and, in the morning, I went to the airport. I won't see her now for about three months. Expect occasional wistful posts in the next three months. I stopped off in Los Angeles on my way home. I saw Scott and Ivy McCloud and their daughters, my fairy goddaughters, Sky and Winter. I don't see any of them enough. The best thing about being my age is knowing people for a Long Time. Long enough that they've had children. Long enough that the children are now adults, or young adults. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cBT4UqFkVgk/TwpvNod6W5I/AAAAAAAAl34/k47dK4LFzBI/s400/mcclouds.jpg I saw Harlan Ellison, and kvelled at his book of essential short stories and essays Encountering Ellison: Harlan 101, for which I'd written the introduction. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z0fH2zAAmsc/Twpv8akETbI/AAAAAAAAl4A/8rzRwF57lR4/s320/harlanpic.jpg (You can get your own copy of it at http://www.cafepress.com/harlanellison). I had a meeting at HBO about American Gods. Then I flew home. And it was unseasonably warm for January. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vVsikYKh2pc/Twp2cMLEyCI/AAAAAAAAl4I/S9wBVXpoYgU/s320/IMG_20120108_153458.jpg It is unseasonably warm, think the dogs. Not that we're complaining. Hunting season has stopped and Cabal's neckerchief is now only for show. I've been keeping a tumblr blog for a few months now, at http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/ and rather enjoying it, posting links to small things or odd things that caught my eye or made me smile. Yesterday was Charles Addams' Hundredth Birthday, so I posted this on Tumblr, the Addams Family cartoon I bought myself when I won the Newbery Medal. It was originally done as a British Telecom ad, and I saw it in the tube, in London in the late 80s. (Addams had lost the rights to the characters at the time, so only drew them when other people got the rights then hired him to draw). http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxh19vTwU31r3rsfmo1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ6IHWSU3BX3X7X3Q&Expires=1326172142&Signature=MOMev4KLRg4DWwzJiU7FZWzaNow%3D The captions read: “I do hope it’s who you think it is, Fester.” And then, “It’s all been wonderful, Grandma – and Fester has at last established his ancestry!” It was to tell people - Americans, mostly -that it was cheaper to phone America than they thought. ... And all that was just by way of prelude to posting about Viriconium by M. John Harrison, a book I introduced in 2005 and helped to bring out an audiobook of in 2011. But I think I'll put that off one more night. Viriconium deserves its own blog entry. (Also, in Neil Gaiman Presents: Anita has her first review, while Swordspoint just garnered its first award, an AudioFile "Earphones" Award, with a review that says: Congratulations to Ellen Kushner, author and narrator, and to the cast, and to Sue Zizza, who is not namechecked here, and who directed and conceived the production.) Incidentally, while I was in Australia I read Lift, by Rebecca K. O'Connor. I'd been curious about it ever since I saw that Rebecca saw me tweeting about ACX, decided to do an audiobook of her book using it, and Kickstartered the money to get into the studio and record it. It seemed a very creative way of using the world to make things happen. I hoped the book was good. It was, and now I'm really looking forward to the audiobook. ... I should go and write some more. View the full article

A decade ago, I wrote: May your coming year befilled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read somefine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don'tforget to makesome art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. And almost half a decade ago I said, ...I hope you will havea wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously,that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, thatyou will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will havepeople to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (becauseI think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the worldright now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that youwill always be kind. And for this year, mywish for each of us is small and very simple. And it's this. I hope that in this yearto come, you make mistakes. Because if you are makingmistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things,learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing yourworld. You're doing things you've never done before, and moreimportantly, you're Doing Something. So that's my wish for you,and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Makeglorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worrythat it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art,or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you'rescared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, nextyear and forever. View the full article

How on earth did that happen? I promised a blog tomorrow, and that was over a week ago. I wrote an essay, and I wrote a short story, and I went to Sydney and did a reading with a string quartet, but I didn't blog. And now I'm sitting backstage at Revolt in Melbourne preparing for a New Year's Eve Party- Masquerade-thing and I missed my blog. So while there is wireless, there is hope, and I am writing this. Many exciting and wonderful things have happened in the time that I have been not-blogging. For example, I was quoted by Tom Stoppard. My story "A Case of Death and Honey" from A Study in Sherlock and the upcoming Jonathan Strahan edited anthology Best SF and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6 was written about on the Tor.com website in a way that made me happy. Short story writing is a lot like Don Marquis's description of poetry writing as flinging rose petals into the Grand Canyon and listening for the boom. Normally there is silence, so even a little response to a short story is a good thing for an author. You can read the Tor.com piece, by Niall Alexander, at http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/12/the-adventure-of-the-devils-foot-neil-gaiman-and-the-great-detective. The first volume of Les Klinger's remarkable four volume Annotated Sandman comes out in a couple of weeks: reserve your copies from your local comic store or bookshop now. http://www.tor.com/images/stories/Comics/SandmanAnnotations/Annotated-Sandman-preview3.jpg http://www.tor.com/images/stories/Comics/SandmanAnnotations/annotated-sandman-cover.jpg Here's a great article about Allegra Rosenberg, who makes Time Lord Rock in Chicago. She's sixteen, although I said she was fifteen when I introduced her from the stage when I was doing the Not My Job quiz on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me". And you can listen to the Wait Wait interview at http://www.npr.org/2011/12/24/144146842/author-neil-gaiman-plays-not-my-job. (You can read it there, too. But listen to it, don't read it.) I can't embed it. However, the recent Symphony Space SELECTED SHORTS is embeddable, and I have embedded it. It has me reading "Troll Bridge" along with one of my favourite Jorge Luis Borges stories, "The Circular Ruins". ... I was about to tell you about M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence being available on Neil Gaiman Presents as a beautiful audiobook. I want to do a whole post about that in the next couple of days, though. So for now, go and investigate if you wish to get ahead: www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L88VMY&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911 ... I had a marvellous time with the FourPlay String Quartet in Sydney a few days ago. Flew home and went straight to the Melbourne City Library where Amanda and I read (me) and sang (her). We'd announced that we'd be there on Twitter just before my plane took off, and about four hundred people showed up. Melbourne City Library is amazing. It has a piano, and librarians so nice and creative I wanted to take them on the road with me. We'd be Neil Gaiman and his posse of travelling librarians. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7165/6593622175_584e503cb9_b.jpg I love this photo of me, eyes closed, listening to Amanda play: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6593621239_a90d15820d_b.jpg ... Talking about good photographs... http://rasmusrasmussen.com/wp-content/uploads/webley-palmer-gaiman-1024x682.jpg It's from photographer Rasmus Rasmussen's website at http://rasmusrasmussen.com/2011/12/29/webley-palmer-and-gaiman-aka-favorite-photo-of-2011/ He says, ... And for New Year's Messages... I have to write one for tonight in Melbourne as soon as I finish this. It has to be as good as the ones I've written for this blog, over the years. Normally I don't stop and think. I just write what I'd want in the coming year, and hope that other people would want that too. Someone just turned one of them into a poster: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwwcqboxan1qae1sko1_500.jpgAnd here's a mash-up of a couple of them, delivered from the stage in Boston, two years ago today... View the full article

In case you were wondering where I am - and I would not blame you if you were, for I frequently am unsure, and I keep tabs on me, -- I am in Melbourne, the one in Australia not the one in Florida. I am staying with my friends Peter Nicholls and Clare Coney, and am here with my wife, who is going to be doing all sorts of rock and roll things in Australia for the next few months. I got here last week and promptly did an event for the Wheeler Centre, at the Atheneum Theatre, which was, despite the jet-lag, enormous fun, and even more fun because I got to spend time with Tom Stoppard, who I met back in 2007 in Brazil, and like enormously. (Here's a photo taken in the Green Room beneath the stage, by Alison Croggan, who interviewed Tom.) http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg738/scaled.php?tn=0&server=738&filename=11eyg.jpg&xsize=640&ysize=640 And with that done, my work here (the bits that consist of turning up on a stage, anyway) was 1/3 over. On the 28th I'll be at the Factory Theatre in Sydney for a Sold Out show, and on New Year's Eve I'll be part of Amanda's rather astonishing-looking Party. It goes from 8 pm until 2 am, features Amanda and me and Meow Meow and the Jane Austen Argument and all sorts of amazing people, and I'm planning to write something new and New Year's Evey for it. It's a small venue and is, Amanda assures me, her way of making sure that she goes to a New Year's Eve party that she loves. There are a few tickets left at http://www.revoltproductions.com/melbourneevents/byevent/NYE1 The episode of Selected Shorts in which I read TROLL BRIDGE has gone up at http://www.selectedshorts.org/onair/, with a direct link to the audio here. It's lots of fun, and there's a Jorge Luis Borges story as well. Cat Mihos is doing something really nice over at Neverwear.net. She's giving something from the store away each day, to the person who has done something cool to deserve it. Some people are nominating themselves, some are nominating friends. You can read about it at http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/ In addition, she's giving $5 off each item in the store, with the code nice-kitty. ... It's the time of year when I like to link to this Independent article I did a few years ago. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/neil-gaiman-hanukkah-with-bells-on-1203307.html http://www.independent.co.uk/migration_catalog/article5114961.ece/ALTERNATES/w380/neil_gaiman.jpeg It begins, ... The "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" special goes out on the 23rd of December, on NPR and on TV. I'm told that there's a lot more of me on the radio than there will be on the telly. "I think once everybody got a look at it, they realized the throne thing we put you in was a terrible mistake," explained Peter Sagal. ... There are two new books up at Neil Gaiman presents, and I'm thrilled about both of them. ANITA was a book I remembered from my teenage years. It's a book about a young witch in the 1960s. It has the best grandmother in fiction in it, better even than the one in the Addams Family. It's funny and sweet and creepy and moving. There's a sample of it at http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006L7BA6O&source_code=NGAOR0002WS101911 - Nicola Barber reads it, and I think her reading is excellent. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yFePc8cVL._SS500_.jpg Spot the mysterious typo on the cover... If you loved the audiobook we did of Keith Roberts' Pavane... I'm afraid this is nothing like that at all. .. Oops. Out of time. You will have to wait to find out about the other book. (We are going to see The Terminativity tonight. More tomorrow.) View the full article

IF YOU ARE IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: Tickets went on-sale for the EVENING WITH NEIL GAIMAN on December 28th about an hour ago. They are $35 each for the first 150 people to buy them, and then $45 thereafter. I'm appearing at the Factory Theatre. FourPlay are the support act, and will also be playing on stage during at least one of my readings, as they did when I was at the Sydney Opera House. They are wonderful. Use this link for information and to get tickets. It's a mirror to the Factory Theatre website, to avoid crushing it with too many people at once. If you are not in Sydney, Australia, here is a photo of my dog Lola, down by the gravestone by the gazebo, to make it up to you: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LwJotlfeHII/Tt3fD0hCNNI/AAAAAAAAlnM/zI4n-Mf0wjo/s400/IMG_20111204_144436.jpg View the full article

I went to Chicago on Friday and took part in the recording of the "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me... Royal Pain In The Year" 2011 Special. It airs on BBC America (TV) and on Public Radio on December the 23rd. I was the "Not my job" guest, and answered three questions. Whether or not I got any of them right, you will have to wait until the 23rd to find out. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Admin/BkFill/Default_image_group/2011/11/30/1322665768697/Neil-Gaiman-right-and-Sha-007.jpg There's a conversation between Shaun Tan and me in the Guardian right now, and it's fun. We talk about art and suchlike. In the photo above we were standing behind the Edinburgh Book Festival authors' yurt taking it in turns to point at imaginary interesting things. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/02/neil-gaiman-shaun-tan-interview ST : I don't know about you but when someone first mentions an adaptation, I have, probably a little bit inappropriately, a feeling of weariness at revisiting that work after I'd struggled with it for so many months or years. But then the second thought is "Wow, what a great opportunity to fix up all those dodgy bits." NG : It's so nice to hear you say that. Somebody asked me recently if I plot ahead of time. I said yes I do, but there is always so much room for surprise and definitely points where I don't know what's going to happen. They quoted somebody who had said: "All writers who say that they do not know what's going to happen are liars, would you believe someone who started an anecdote without knowing where it was going?" I thought, but I don't start an anecdote to find out what I think about something, I start an anecdote to say this interesting thing happened to me. Whereas I'll start any piece of art to find out what I think about something. ST : Exactly. NG : I'm going to learn something I didn't know when I began. I'm going to discover how I feel and what I think about it during the process. I will break off little bits of my head and they will become characters and things will happen and they will talk to each other. ST : Exactly, creating a character is like impersonating another being, so that you can find out what you think about something. You really find out what your style is when you diversify – setting something in a fictional landscape, the far future or distant past. A lot of people think of style or personality in terms of things you do often, but it's not really. It's what you do under duress, or outside of yourself. I don't feel I know myself really well because – again it's that emotional thing – sometimes I feel a little embarrassed by the amount of emotion that comes out in a story. I don't realise that there's so much of it locked up or in denial and then it comes out in the process of doing this conscious dreaming exercise. Big thumbs up on that. Baffled, however, by this article on Kurt Vonnegut at Guardian Books, which seems as wrongheaded as an article can be. In it we learn that a new biography of Kurt Vonnegut "undermines his warm, grandfatherly image". "A new biography of acclaimed American author Kurt Vonnegut, beloved by fans worldwide for his work's warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom, has shocked many with a portrayal of a bitter, angry man prone to depression and fits of temper. The book on Vonnegut, who died in 2007, lifts the lid on the writer's private life, revealing a man far removed from the grandfather-like public figure his millions of devotees adored." I read this and thought, I'm going mad. Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I'd never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to. "Warm humour and homespun Midwestern wisdom"? Bizarre. I bet it was either written from a press release, or by someone who'd never read any Vonnegut. Signed, the man who wrote the Introduction to Vonnegut's "God Bless You Dr Kevorkian" ... It snowed yesterday night, and today the world looks like it only looks here once a year. Fresh snow, for the first time, makes the world look like a Christmas Card. And I thought, Oh bugger. Holidays. Gifts. I should do a useful blog about that. So... Tomorrow is the cut off-deadline for the CBLDF's "Spirit of Giving" campaign. If you want a signed book from any one of 25 creators, order quickly: http://cbldf.org/homepage/cbldf-cyber-monday-25-amazing-graphic-novelists-personalize-your-gifts-in-the-spirit-of-giving/ It's also the last day for Amanda Palmer signed Xmas card for orders from http://postwartrade.com/ over $100, which I mention as they now have a page of stuff from the Evening With Neil and Amanda tour - a limited amount, as it's the leftover merchandise, and when it's gone it will be very gone. http://www.postwartrade.com/images/plm936.jpg It's at http://www.postwartrade.com/neil.html and consists of a T shirt, a poster, a beautiful huge arty high-end photograph, and a tote bag. If you buy over $100 worth Amanda will write thank you card to you, but today is the last day of Cards. ... Over at Kitty's Neverwear site, the cool NEW thing she has for the holidays is this: http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c32/kitty-9thlife/Conjunctions_B.jpg It's my Rhysling Award-nominated poem "Conjunctions", here illustrated by wonderful Finnish artist Jouni Koponen, who did the amazing "Day The Saucers Came" poster, and it is for sale at this page. (There's an article by Kitty there about the poem too.) Lots of other amazing treasures, posters, t-shirts, prints, and suchlike, at Neverwear: http://neverwear.net/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=4 will show you the prints that are currently available. ... You can give Audiobooks as a gift. Honest, go and visit Neil Gaiman Presents. because you might know someone who wants to listen to Swordspoint, or Land of Laughs, or Pavane... It's the green "Give as a gift" button over on the right. And of course, they're also available in iTunes. ... And, for person who has everything, I'm not sure that I've mentioned on this blog that Absolute Sandman Volume 5 is now out. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518XQLhhNLL._SS500_.jpg It contains Endless Nights, The Dream Hunters, the P. Craig Russell Dream Hunters, and strange small uncollected things that we'd forgotten about when we did the first four Absolutes that people then wrote here to remind me about. ... On December 28th, I'll be doing An Evening With Neil Gaiman in Sydney, NSW. Special Guests, the FourPlay string quartet. Date and venue and all information will be in the next blog. Keep the date free. ... And finally, on Dec 31st in Melbourne, Amanda Palmer is having a mammoth musical New Year's Party and Masquerade. I'm hosting it with her, and I will be reading things, and there will be music and guests -- including The Danger Ensemble, Marieke Hardy, The Jane Austen Argument, The Bedroom Philosopher, Mikelangelo and Saint Clare, Lyndon 'Flaming Violin' Chester, Lance Horne "and another special guest so special we can't even announce her yet." It's a limited ticket, one-off event, with regular tickets, VIP tickets (VIPs get STUFF) and all sorts of strangeness. Tickets are at http://revoltproductions.com/melbourneevents/byevent/NYE1 If you're in Melbourne and over 18, I hope I'll see you there. It should be unlike anything else. View the full article

I was talking to an author last night. Actually, we were sending text messages to each other, something I don't do a lot of, but it was sort of fun, texting. I'm not going to identify her, or the book. She had a novel published recently by a major publisher. I read it. I really loved it. I thought, Why not see if I can do it as a Neil Gaiman Presents Audiobook, through ACX? I asked if there was an audiobook. She said, "No, no audiobook." I asked who had the rights, and whether I could do it in ACX. She was thrilled and said of course, and she'd find out if she had the rights or if her publisher did. We talked about what kind of voice narrator she'd want, and whether a male or a female narrator would suit the book best. And then I got a message from her saying "Oh. Bizarre. I just looked online and see there is an audiobook of (the novel) which no-one ever told me about. It apparently came out in November." I went online and looked. There was indeed an audiobook, and it had a terrible cover. And this morning brought an email from the author saying, sadly "Don't listen to the (novel) audiobook. It might be the worst thing I have ever heard." I felt so sorry for her. It was the same stuff that I'd been talking about in the interview that Laura Miller did for me with Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/neil_gaimans_audiobook_record_label/) Why is there so much hesitation? For me, the tragedy of audiobooks is that the physical limitations and impossibilities of putting out complete novels as audiobooks in the days of LPs and then pretty much in the days of cassettes, meant that the costs and the odds were always against you. Most books aren’t out as audiobooks. If you like a book, it’s probably not been done as an audiobook. Publishers would take audio rights but then never do anything with them. ... That process is that you persuade your publisher to do an audiobook and then you have no control over who gets cast, or who reads it. You have no quality control over pronunciation or goofs or anything like that. And then your publisher brings it out and then your publisher remainders it. That is the problem that ACX was created to solve — and for me it’s also the problem that it’s highlighting. I’m hitting it more and more. All I know is that there could be lots and lots of audiobooks out there that aren’t. For years it didn’t matter that the rights were held by people because nobody could do anything anyway. But we’re not in that world anymore. Can you talk a bit about the importance of the right narrator, and how much that person can add to or subtract from the audiobook experience? I remember once talking to a best selling author about audiobooks. He’d written a book that was narrated by a 20-something black male and the audiobook was read by a 50-something white female. He had no say in this and after listening to it for five minutes he stopped, feeling physically sick. In some cases, when the author is alive and available, I cede that choice to the author. I become the production entity and I’ll cast a deciding vote if the author says it’s between three narrators he or she likes equally. If the author’s alive, I want the author happy. That’s the most important bit. And I felt really extra sorry for my anonymous sad author, because I was SO happy about the release two days ago of Swordspoint -- mostly happy because of how amazingly happy author Ellen Kushner is. (See http://ellen-kushner.livejournal.com/tag/audiobook for proof and background.) Swordspoint's an audiobook narrated by the author, with additional soundscape and acting from such luminaries as Simon "Arthur Dent" Jones, and it's a thing of joy. She's happy, I'm happy, the people listening to it seem amazingly happy, the people at Audible.com are ridiculously happy because people are downloading it and the reviews are already coming in and they are happy reviews. (Go and listen to the Swordspoint extract, or listen to me introducing it, or read more about it at http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006FJJDBW&source_code=NGAR0002WS101911) http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61YFfk2SzyL._SL175_.jpg And I don't want to turn this into a big plug for Swordspoint, or a rant against publishers wasting or not using audio rights. I think what I want to say mostly is, if you are an author, Get Involved in Your Audiobooks Early. Get your agent involved and interested. Talk about them at contract stage. Find out if you're selling the rights, and if you are selling them then find out what control you have or whether you are going to be consulted or not about who the narrator is and how the audiobook is done. Also, make sure that your publisher has worked out a way to give you free copies (obvious if it's out on CD, much less so if you're on download-only platform). If you're an agent, notice that we are not living a decade ago, when audiobooks were expensive bells and whistles that meant very little, that normally wouldn't be done for anything outside of major bestsellers, when abridgments were often the order of the day: we're entering a golden age, in which there is no reason that any book shouldn't be available in professionally produced audio. Unless you know that the audio rights are going to be used and used well, keep them for your author. And if they are being sold with the book, then guard your author, and make sure that she or he gets rights of approval. I love, am thrilled with, and am getting a huge kick out of the ACX way of doing it, where authors (or rightsholders), producers and voice talent sign up and get together and make audiobooks that Audible put up. It's there for you if you're an author, an agent, a publisher with lots of rights you don't know how to exploit, a director/producer/studio engineer, or an actor, and interested. (Right now, it's US only, but they are working on that.) (Find out more at http://www.acx.com/) (End of plug.) But this isn't an ad for ACX, either. Honestly, you can do it on your own, if you want: Find a narrator or a studio; you can release it through the web; you can give it away as a promotional item, or because you can. Or you can make sure that if your publisher is putting out an audiobook that you have a say in it, and it's the book you want it to be. Because otherwise it might be you writing to friends telling them not to listen to the audiobook of your book. And that would be a terrible thing indeed. View the full article

Here's the SIMPSONS episode that I'm in. It's called THE BOOK JOB. I'm not sure how long it'll be up for. If you're not in the US and you want to watch it, I recommend Tunnelbear (downloadable from http://www.tunnelbear.com/). It's what I use to tell the internet I'm either in the US or the UK, depending on where it would like me to be. They have a free service, but I eventually signed up for the paid one. And, because it is good that you heard it here first, in the UK Bloomsbury are doing a special Tenth Anniversary edition of Coraline next year, illustrated by Chris Riddell. They just sent me his illustrations... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Umw0_A4PZik/TtQT13ca6EI/AAAAAAAAlmY/_DUch5TxWr0/s400/Chapter3.jpg ... Also http://cbldf.org/homepage/cbldf-cyber-monday-25-amazing-graphic-novelists-personalize-your-gifts-in-the-spirit-of-giving/ Fight censorship this Cyber Monday by getting your holiday gifts from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund! 25 of today’s most popular graphic novelists will personalize their books to the fans on your list in exchange for donations to the Fund! Best of all, every item supports the Fund’s First Amendment legal work, and a portion of each contribution is tax-deductible. http://cbldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SpiritV4jFULLwebready-e1321838830203.jpg As part of the CBLDF’s Spirit of Giving holiday gift drive, donations you make on Cyber Monday will be acknowledged by The Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation who will make a contribution of $1 for every donation and gift order placed on the CBLDF’s website. In addition, they will contribute $5 for each new, renewing or gift membership made from now until December 31! 25 legendary graphic novelists are personalizing books for the CBLDF, including some of the season’s best new gift books. Make your holiday comics giving a cinch by choosing from books by bestselling masters including Neil Gaiman, art spiegelman, Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, and Scott McCloud; Lit comics lions Chester Brown, Dan Clowes, Los Bros. Hernandez, Seth, and Adrian Tomine; Indy comics icons Jeff Smith, Evan Dorkin, Larry Marder, Carla Speed McNeil and Terry Moore; Superhero visionaries Ed Brubaker, Jonathan Hickman, and Paul Levitz; or Hard boiled thrill makers Robert Kirkman, Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughan, and Brian Wood! View the full article

The Simpsons episode aired in the US. I watched it with my daughter Maddy, her friends, and some of my friends. We had doughnuts (all kinds, but mostly the kind with sprinkles on them) and snacks and made it a proper TV watching party (I've always wanted to have one of those, but somehow never had before). I hadn't told the girls anything about the episode so the final twists and turns of the plot (which I am not telling here, because many of you haven't seen it yet) took them by surprise. When the episode was done, the girls went into the kitchen and giggled a lot, while Bill Stiteler and I watched the episode again, this time with the freeze frame on, to catch the many book title jokes hidden in the episode. The reviews for it have been wonderful, which is a testament to Exec Producer Matt Selman, writer Dan Vebber, and the crew of staff writers. And in some alternate universe where all the pink people are yellow, I like to think there's a version of me still sipping his drink on the beach at Shelbyville. ... Rachel Abrams at Harper Childrens emailed me last week to let me know the results of the All Hallow's Read poster competition. And I am a Very Bad Person and didn't blog it (because people were writing on Twitter to let us know that not all the posters were showing on Flickr, and I wanted to wait until they were all visible. And then I got caught up in Simpsons Madness, and didn't get to it. Apologies to all of you artists waiting on tenterhooks.) The contest is to design posters promoting All Hallow's Read. The winning poster design will become a limited-edition poster to be printed and distributed to participating booksellers for All Hallow’s Read in 2012 (printing and distribution sponsored by HarperCollinsPublishers). And Rachel says... We’ve put the posters to a vote and the Grand Prize Winner is… Sksletonkey for her bewitching depiction of All Hallows Read! http://www.flickr.com/photos/69222671@N02/6311248494/ http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6311248494_7b429929a7_b.jpg Tied at First Place are sfdavered http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6110/6286710123_2ae40e6a84.jpg and Sara Koncilja http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6044/6298462684_e41d82a58a.jpg In addition to her poster being printed and distributed to book stores in 2012, the Grand Prize Winner will receive a signed copy of the limited edition poster and a “Neil Gaiman Prize Pack.” The prize pack will include a signed first edition of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, a copy of CORALINE, and a copy of the CORALINE graphic novel. First place winners will both receive the prize pack. My congratulations to all the winners, and, more than that, my congratulations to everyone who took part. The posters submitted (you can see them up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/webgoblin/favorites/?view=lg -- go and look) are pretty much all wonderful. I was glad I wasn't judging the competition. I hope that people will use (link to, spread around) all of the posters people did next October -- they really are fantastic. Thank you SO much to everyone who took part. ... I learned last night that Anne McCaffrey had passed away. I met Anne for the first time as a teenager, in bed with glandular fever. A friend came over with a pile of books, because I could do nothing but read, and in the pile were books by Anne McCaffrey. I read the Dragonflight books, and The Ship Who Sang, and loved them. I met her as a person in the late 80s, when I was a young writer, at a convention, where she was the Guest of Honour. It was a small convention, and she decided that I needed to be taken under her wing and given advice I would need in later life, which she proceeded to do. It was all good advice: how to survive American signing tours was the bit that stuck the most (she wanted me to move to Ireland, and I came close). I liked her as a writer, and by the end of that convention I adored her as a person. Over the years I'd get occasional emails or messages from her, and they were always things where she was looking out for me -- letting me know about a foreign publisher who had money for me but no address to send it to, that kind of thing. The last time I saw her was in 2005, when I was toastmaster at the Nebula Awards. I was as happy to see her as she was to see me. It made me foolishly happy when I heard that she had passed away to realize that there are some photos of us together. So many times, it's not until people are gone I realise that there weren't any photos... http://www.midamericon.org/photoarchive/05neb085.jpg View the full article