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Dear Diary

right. When last heard of I was putting on fancy clothes to go to the Newbery Caldecott Alcott Awards Dinner, and receive the Newbery Medal.

I wrote the speech back in April, and recorded it then, so that it could be given out to people at ALA as a CD and printed in The Hornbook. Then I didn't look at it again, figuring that way it would be new and interesting to me when I got to it at ALA.

This did nothing to decrease my nervousness; neither did wearing a suit.

Beth Krommes gave her acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal for her book The House in the Night, written by Susan Marie Swanson. I gave my speech and somehow wasn't nervous any more when I gave it. Then Ashley Bryan was given the Louisa May Alcott award, and had a thousand librarians singing and reciting poetry together. It was pretty wonderful.

Here's a Scripps report on the evening, my editor Elise Howard writing about the experience of getting The Graveyard Book a chapter at a time over three years; and at http://wowlit.web.arizona.edu/blog there is a multi-part interview with Nick Glass, who was on the Newbery Medal Committee.

So I won the Newbery Medal (or did I? At http://jameskennedy.com/2009/07/13/i-win-the-newbery/ James Kennedy tells a very different story.)

The following morning was a signing that went on for a very long time. As I walked away from it I got two phone calls: the first to tell me that a dear friend, Diana Wynne Jones would be going in for an operation. I called Diana, and I'm not sure whether we reassured each other (although the operation was a success, and by the time you read this she should be back at home). As I put down the phone on her the phone rang again, and I learned that my old friend Charles Brown of LOCUS Magazine had died, peacefully, asleep on the plane on his way back from Readercon, one of his favourite SF conventions.

Charles was irreverent, astonishingly well-read, opinionated, funny, and he knew where pretty much all the bodies were buried in the world of science fiction and fantasy, or fancied he did. I enjoyed his company from the first time I met him, in the UK, in around 1987, enjoyed and was frustrated in equal measure by his interviewing technique from about 1989 on (he would ask opinionated questions and make statements and really have a terrific conversation with you - then, when he wrote up the interview he would leave himself and everything he had said out, as if it was a long monologue). (Here's an extract from one of those with me in 2005.)

He had been expecting to die for a long time - his health was not great - and had put various mechanisms in place to make sure that Locus Magazine continued after his death. Having been dragooned into being part of one of these mechanisms, I wound up seeing Charles every few years at meetings which existed, as far as I could tell, solely so that he could see a bunch of his friends once a year and point out to them, with a delighted chortle, that he was not dead yet and had no need of their help: have a bagel.

(I suspect, by the way, that the Locus Special Offer for readers of this blog still applies, seeing the webpage is still up.)

This is his placeholder Obituary in Locus.

The last time I saw him we had brunch in the Hotel Claremont in Berkeley. He told me delighted stories about the 1968 Worldcon there, of the intersection at that con of the SF old guard and the (then) young hippies, told scandalous stories and named names. I have forgotten all the stories and all the names, except for the information that convention attendees used the laundry chutes as a quick way to get downstairs, which was the least scandalous thing I learned.

Then I did a CBLDF panel, during which I took pleasure in pointing out that the same Nick Bertozzi comic, The Salon that had almost got Gordon Lee imprisoned in Rome, Georgia, last year, was in this year's Lynda Barry edited Best American Comics 2008.

Home from Chicago. Signed hundreds of book jackets with Miss Amanda Palmer for her Who Killed Amanda Palmer book. Then, in company with Miss Maddy and Maddy's friend Claire, we set out on a mad adventure (which we are still on).

In San Francisco we stayed at the Hotel Union Square, which was amazingly convenient and nice. Visited Google, got to be backstage at the Fire Festival, dined with Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and their marvellous family (I suspect Michael and Ayelet of having acquired their children from some amazing Madeleine L'Engle-like Wrinkle in Time kit)(also they have a drumkit for their kids in the lounge), saw Wicked because the girls wanted to se it, and they loved it utterly (my mini-review? love Gregory Maguire's book, liked the book of the show, was sort of unmoved by the songs which seemed no better than they had to be), lunched with Daniel Handler and Lisa Brown, and generally tried to be on holiday, except for Sunday Morning.

Sunday Morning I did a reading and a signing for Brian Hibbs (and a hundred people) at Comix Experience. It celebrated Brian's Twentieth Comix Experience Year. Brian describes the signing here. (He also describes the problem with Twitter and signings and suchlike in a fascinating essay here.)

On Tuesday evening, as I blogged at the time, we found ourselves in Las Vegas, where an improvisational Tarot comedy troupe had much fun interviewing me and then making comedic theatre, and a great time was had by all... ( my card was the three of cups)

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I woke up to an emailed warning that I might be about to have spammed LiveJournal again. As the Webelf explained, the good news was she'd fixed one of our Blogger problems, and turned off the Feed while she was doing it-- "The bad news is I'm fairly sure that when I turn it back on again, it will spam Livejournal and cause lots of hate mail for you. (And lots of happy letters to me about pink mink whips, if precedent holds.)I'm not entirely sure how to avoid that, at the moment.. should I offer myself up to send pre-emptive apologies?" but as far as I can tell, it's only randomly reposted one entry, and not even a long one at that.

So we're now on new Blogger and things should be working. Fingers crossed. Toes crossed. Touch wood. Not that I'm superstitious or anything but where Blogger is concerned (spits over left shoulder, flings salt on the lucky goat-talisman, does the good-luck jig, pockets his powdered imitation rhinoceros horn and a bottle of coloured sand from the Isle of Wight) you never know...

...


From issue 551 of Locus, "Locus Looks at Short Fiction", by Nick Gevers

In the '50s, there was a particularly enjoyable kind of SF in which present day people were abruptly confronted with beings whose enticing alienness threw contemporary society into goofy relief -- Henry Kuttner wrote this way a lot, sometimes with C.L. Moore, and William Tenn did a good job of it too. Neil Gaiman's brilliant story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", collected in Fragile Things and reprinted in F&SF in January, pleasurably recalls such tales, as its teenage male protagonist and friend, wandering London streets a few decades back on quests gregarious and hormonal, stumble on a party where foreign girls -- really foreign girls -- are to be found in numbers. The eerie confidences vouchsafed by these girls, masterfully weird, gradually impress on the testosteronized consciousnesses of the boys that something very odd is going on. Several sorts of longing are engaged here, all familiar to a genre audience. Gaiman knows his readers well, and depicts their younger selves heart and soul. A superb, disconcerting portrait.

which made me happy, not because it's a good review, but because the story got compared to Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore). I'm pretty sure their story "Vintage Season" was somewhere in the back of my mind for taste and texture when I was writing HTTTGAP. It's a story, like "All Mimsy Were the Borogroves", that is there in my head from when I was a boy, and that I've not gone back to for so long.

(That's interesting -- a google tells me that "All Mimsy..." has been filmed -- http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/thelastmimzy/ and the Best of Henry Kuttner is coming back into print as The Last Mimzy And Other Stories, which a small cause for celebration. (The back in printness, not the retitling.)

(And being compared to William Tenn (Phil Klass) makes me smile.)

Did you know that peoplw who are your characters can now get a tee shirt?
http://www.cafepress.com/wargorl.87826704
Dane

No, I didn't. But I'm glad they can. Only female people, though, obviously. Male characters would still have to write it on their hands in felt-pen.

Incidentally, I learned (via Mark Evanier) about Amazon's 30 Day Price Guarantee -- http://www.slate.com/id/2156900/ -- and was as thrilled to see a phone number for Amazon customer service (1-800-201-7575; to get a human right away, dial extension 7) in the article. I don't think I'm ever going to go and check the price of things I bought over a 30 day period, but there are now services that will do that for you... Read the rest of this post

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