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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: The Moth, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 9 of 9
1. A huge thank you, and some life and some death...

posted by Neil Gaiman
Thank you all for taking part in the Humble Bundle, or just for putting up with me blogging, tweeting and facebooking about it. It's been over for a couple of days now: We just got a letter from the guys at Humble letting us know it was:
#1 on the Humble Book Tab
#1 Highest Overall Average for any Bundle.
#1 Media Coverage for a Book Bundle 
And they went on to say:
This bundle was particularly special since it elicited such a beautiful and positive reaction from both our fans and Humble newbies alike.   I talked with our Customer Service Manager yesterday and he reported that there wasn't a single negative comment.  (Except new customers not understanding how to redeem their bundles.  A very common complaint.)   This has never happened before either!
There was a tremendous amount of delighted energy at Humble HQ since the launch.    Everyone here was stoked to be involved.   Dare I say that it was almost in the realm of The Magical. 
 I was so happy how many friends, acquaintances and people I do not even know gave it a push.

John Scalzi went further -- he reviewed my 1985 Duran Duran book, and let the review become a gentle meditation on who we are and who we were and who we become. It's at http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/09/22/duran-duran-neil-gaiman-and-beginnings/ and you might enjoy it.
Here are the final results for your interest:
Humble Book Bundle: Neil Gaiman Rarities
https://www.humblebundle.com/books?view=pPpiWRbzesK-Launch Date:  September 9th 2015
End Date: September 23rd 2015
Avg. price per bundle: $19.63
32,294 bundles purchased
Total Revenue: $633,787.98
(Note the numbers might change ever so slightly over the next few weeks.)  
I'll post the actual numbers here, and how much money that actually makes and how much is going where, when I get the information from Humble.  Hurrah for transparency.

(Also, I commend to you the Banned Comics Humble Bundle that's going on right now: $231 of forbidden comics for Pay What You Like https://www.humblebundle.com/books )

...

Meanwhile, so many things. For example The Sleeper and the Spindle came out in the US on Tuesday. So did the new Sleeper and the Spindle Full Cast Audio. You can listen to it at https://soundcloud.com/harperaudio_us/sleeperandthespindle_gaiman or





And read a great interview with Chris Riddell (and see pictures from the book) at http://epicreads.tumblr.com/post/129147915806/books-for-keeps-window-into-illustration-with



The Moth put up a new radio show and weirdly, in a week a son is born, it includes me talking about my father and my son: http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1520 (This was actually recorded somewhere on the Unchained Bus Tour of 2012.)

I recorded a documentary for the BBC  Radio -- I'm presenting it -- on Orpheus: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06cw171  I'm really proud of it, and it has wonderful people, like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Carroll and Peter Blegvad in it. (And this is the poem I wrote for Kathy Acker that's extracted in it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5gmSz0PkBn6G81cdsySP8mJ/orphee-a-poem-by-neil-gaiman)

Miracleman, The Golden Age stories by me and Mark Buckingham is coming out right now on a weekly schedule. You really want to go to a comic shop and buy it. It's thrilling for me rereading it now, and really strange starting the process with Mark Buckingham of finishing the story we began so many years ago.

...

The baby is nine days old, happy and healthy and, slightly to my surprise, he makes amazing noises: squeaks like mice and gentle burbling like mourning doves and little chirrupping grunts like guinea pigs. I adore him. And his mother's doing really well too. In case you were wondering. 





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2. Taking A Story Out In Public...

posted by Neil
The Unchained Tour is over, and I will write a blog about it, when I get a moment.

It was amazing.  I feel like I'm learning a whole new skill.

I'm in San Diego today with Amanda, and talked her into letting me try something a bit odd: I want to tell one of the stories I told on the Unchained Tour at her gig tonight, before she hits the stage. I like the idea of seeing what happens if I do this without having the Unchained Team around me, without Edgar and Dawn and Peter telling stories, without Peter keeping the show running.

It's not a reading.

It'll be closer to this (from The Moth in 2007):




Not sure how it'll work out of context and at a rock club, but it might be fun.


If you want to come and see me, get there early. I'll probably sign afterwards with her and the band.

This is probably much too late notice for anyone not actually here in San Diego, but if you're here, come down to the House of Blues around 7 pm.


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3. In which I am Unchained...

posted by Neil

I am typing this on an old blue school-bus. There are eleven people on the bus, including me. Two of them are asleep. There are two musicians, a sound man, a PR-wrangler, a driver, a videographer, and six storytellers. We are a motley and disreputable bunch, a diverse mixture of genders and skin-colours, sizes, ages and body-shapes.

I am one of the storytellers.

The outside of the bus is hand-painted with scenes from stories.


Two of the storytellers in the bus have scenes from stories they have told painted on the outside of the bus. They are Edgar Oliver, and George Dawes Green. George's story picture shows him listening to stories as a boy, while the moths flutter into the porchlight. When George grew up he founded the storytelling movement/institution/ organisation called The Moth. This bus, and the tour, is George's idea too.









 Edgar Oliver's story shows Edgar and his mother and sister, and painted next to it, the opening of one of Edgar's stories about Savannah, and his childhood. Edgar is from Savannah, and he lives in New York, but his accent is unlike anyone else's, probably in the world: it is musical and it is theatrical and it is unplaceable, vowel sounds that are English or Eastern European.

The bus is a storytelling bus. Every day – sometimes twice in a day – the bus will come to rest and we will tell our stories.

I am here because George asked me to come, and it seemed like an interesting way to spend nine days of my life.

Last night I told a story about chains: about my dog, who spent the first three years of his life on four foot of chain, and about the chains that bind us, and about love, which, only after I told it, I realised was peculiarly appropriate, given the name of the tour. It's called Unchained.

I was really nervous: one reason I was nervous was that I hadn't told the story before, or even rehearsed it. (The rehearsing time had been eaten because the bus had blown a tyre on its way to Columbia, where I was connecting with it.) But once I started telling the story, it seemed to work. People listened.

I haven't done anything to promote that I'm on the tour so far, mostly because I didn't want to change the nature of the tour or the audiences too much by being here. It's not a Neil Gaiman show or a Neil Gaiman tour: it's the Unchained tour, and I'm just one of the storytellers, and that is the way I like it and was the reason I agreed to come out.

The tour has pretty much sold out without me saying anything. Right now there are only two venues with any real tickets left for sale (Charlotte SC and Charleston NC) and a couple of venues with a handful of tickets left.

http://theunchainedtour.org/events-calendar/ is the website with the venues on it.

(It may say Over 18 Only on the website, but they are fine with under 18s turning up - they just wanted to make it clear that this wasn't an event for kids.)

I am typing this as we chug down the freeway from Columbia to Spartanburg. I'm happy: there are nice people around, and a table in the bus I can type at. I have lots of things to write, and it's always good to write with people around you, all of them working on their own projects, or reading, or talking. There's a No Internet on The Bus rule too, which I may break in a moment, and put this up. Or I may enjoy the No Internet rule, and wait until we get to where we are going, and find a coffee-shop instead.

There is no air-conditioning. Instead we are driving through a hot day with the windows of the bus rolled down, and we are cool, and there is a breeze, and tonight we will sit in a room in Spartanburg (“It's called Sparkle City,” said someone this morning, "and Hub City".) and we will tell true stories about our lives, of our childhoods or our longings and desires, our fears, and there will be music, and we will feel human.

Someone came back to the Green Room last night after the show and handed me some comics he had written. “These are for you,” he said. “Because stories... I guess, stories are the nearest thing I have to a religion.”

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

If you are in the area, come on down to the shows, if they are not already sold out. Last night's was very sold out. Someone Twittered this photograph of a sign at the front of the line to get in. 




I promise you nothing except stories.

(This is me not working yet while Jose, who is driving the bus, does something that makes the bus go.)




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4. The Moth Expands to Louisville, Pittsburgh & Ann Arbor

The Moth StorySLAM Storytelling Series has expanded to Louisville, Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor.

See all the October events here. Although the series already regularly hosts events in Chicago, the organizers will also double the series’ presence in that city. The storytelling slam already runs in New York City, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

Here’s more from the release: “Kicking off on September 27th, the monthly Louisville StorySLAM will take place at Headliners Music Hall on the last Tuesday of every month. Pittsburgh’s StorySLAMs will commence on October 11th and will be held on the second Tuesday of each month at Club Café. Ann Arbor’s StorySLAM series will be held on the third Tuesday of each month at Circus. Chicago’s existing StorySLAM series will be expanded with a new installment every third Monday of the month at the Haymaker Pub & Brewery.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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5. A Coffee Table Book and why reality is being replaced by small pieces of paper

posted by Neil
My scary goddaughter Hayley Campbell is here, working on a book of The Art Of Neil Gaiman or somesuch, and she has disappeared off to

...maddy gaiman is so cool.....

(I just stopped blogging and took the dogs for a walk. I'm sure it didn't say that when I left.)

(Just for that, a photo of Maddy Gaiman and Hayley Campbell from last week. Maddy is wearing Hayley's hat.)




Anyway. Hayley has disappeared off to the attic where she is scanning things and going through tubs of old artwork and faxes and wanting me to explain why I used to draw vampire bunnies and fax them to Steve Bissette back in the 80s.

Also, she is taking art from the walls to be scanned.

Where art used to be on the walls, there are now random PostIt notes, describing what should be there. I keep feeling like I'm in a Philip K Dick novel.



...

I wanted to plug a book here. I got my copy free, and was delighted, because it was a huge and impressive book. Then I read it and got much, much more delighted.

It's really heavy. It's also really good. Here is a photograph of it that amused me, because it is a coffee table book that takes up a whole coffee table..


The book is called 75 Years of DC Comics: the Art of Modern Mythmaking, and it's published by Taschen with production values that I've never seen from a comics publisher. Fold-out pages, amazing reproductions of old art, rarities, wonders, along with a history of DC Comics since the beginning. The majority of the text (although, probably not all -- there are captions, timelines and suchlike as well) is by Paul Levitz, who knows where the bodies are buried, and is too much of a gentleman to tell all, but tells more than I ever thought he would. It weighs 15lbs (7 kg) and comes with its own carrying case.

The production values, as I said, are amazing. They raise the bar for what any comics publisher can do in the future.

This is the Taschen Books website page for the book, where you can look at the first hundred pages of the book in a pop up window.

There's also a great photo on the Taschen site of Paul displaying the book, which makes Paul look a bit like a garden gnome holding a normal-sized book.
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6. Where I am and what I am doing. Also, Dogs.

posted by Neil
In case you are wondering where I am, which is something I often do, I am in New Orleans for a small birthday gathering for my 50th birthday, which is tomorrow, and for the Amanda Palmer Dresden Dolls gig on Friday (it's a special gig - a gulf oil spill relief-benefit for BTNEP , an organisation that is working to preserve, protect, and restore the Barataria and Terrebonne estuaries of Louisiana).

(Here is a link to a photo of me yesterday in my natural habitat.)
...

Given that my dogs are not here and I miss them today, I thought I should do a brief tutorial in dog recognition.

Cabal's on the left here, Lola's on the right.





There. That was easy, wasn't it? Mm, probably not. So...

Here are two photos by the Birdchick that I just went and stole from fuckyeahcabal.


Cabal looks sort of noble. A lot of the time he also looks serious, as if he is doing complicated long division problems in his head and does not want to be disturbed. He has a pink nose. He likes staying close to me and is still recovering from a couple of spinal operations, and a couple of leg operations, but is now walking again, and even running, sometimes. He's almost 8 years old, which means he's sort of my age in dog years.



Lola would not know noble if it sat on her head. She has a slightly pointy face, an embarrassed grin and a black nose. She bounds and is impossible to exhaust. She's about 9 months old, and seems like a teenager. If I leave things on the floor she may chew them. She likes leafpiles better than anything in the whole world.



They get on really well, and on the whole, Cabal seems much happier with Lola around, and Lola is settling down. She plays well with u

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7. A gallimaufry.

posted by Neil
Last year, the winner of the Moth auction of "tea with Neil Gaiman" met me for tea, and it all went a bit wrong.

The winner was the mother of a very nice young lady, and she had paid $4,400 for her daughter to have tea with me (all the money goes to support The Moth, which is something I love and care about: people telling true stories about their lives. Check out their podcast). Unfortunately, when the nice young lady and I went to the tea place they explained that they'd never heard of us, and for that matter they didn't even serve tea, and it all went so wrong that I took the young lady in question up to DC Comics (she had told me that she loved comics, Vertigo in particular, and wanted to edit comics when she graduated) and then DC Publisher Paul Levitz, who was passing by, gave her an hour's masterclass in matters editorial and said something about a summer internship.

I saw her at the signing for the Year's Best American Comics last month and the young lady told me that she'd just done a summer's internship at DC Comics, and loved it, and that the failed tea had been a wonderful thing better than any actual tea could possibly have been, and she was incredibly happy and grateful..

I cannot guarantee you that the tea with me this year will go anywhere nearly as wrong as that. But the Moth are at it again. Also, you could be a "neighbourhood person" in the Onion.

https://www.biddingforgood.com/auction/item/Browse.action?auctionId=120612926

...

I don't do much journalism any more, and I do even less book reviewing (I think the last book I reviewed was the Annotated Grimm's Fairytales for the New York Times, six years ago), but if I'm not reviewing at all I feel guilty, as if I am no longer being part of the cultural dialogue, so I just reviewed Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars for the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/05/full-dark-stephen-king-review.

I'm happy to say that I liked it.

....

I turn fifty on Wednesday. Ivy Ratafia gets in there early, with a birthday LJ post for me.

And I am putting it up here because Ivy answers one of the great questions of the universe here, viz. Which were the nine true panels in this two-page comic? In 17 years, no-one has been able to guess it correctly.

You should probably read the comic first before you read Ivy's explanation. It comes from a 1993 "Roast" comic done for the Chicago Comic Convention, and was drawn by Scott McCloud and written by Scott and Ivy.

Read what Ivy has to say at: http://ivy-rat.livejournal.com/104712.html

...

I really don't do much journalism, and I'm amused to see that the only pieces I've done in so long are both being published-on-the-web on the same day. Since I typed that first paragraph, SPIN MAGAZINE just posted an article I wrote for them yesterday.

They asked me to review the Dresden Dolls Hallowe'en show.

I'm not sure that that was quite what I gave them, although it's that as well. I'm happy with it, and I'm not normally happy

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8. Revealed! The Rulers of the Darkness of This World

posted by Neil
So about 40 bookshops had Graveyard Book parties in the Hallowe'en period. The grand prize was to be a signing by me, in the Winter Holiday Season. One. One signing.

The people at Harper Collins winnowed it down to the final eleven stores -- it would be one grand winner and ten runners up -- and sent me eleven reports on eleven parties. Some of these were videos, some were photos and descriptions. There were big bookshops and small, and all sorts of different kinds of parties.

(And it can't have been easy getting it down to those eleven. I'd read on the web a description of 13 Graveyard Book Parties, all of which looked like they could have been finalists.)

I looked at the videos and read the reports and looked at the photos. The parties were amazing. I watched them again. And again. They got no less amazing. Still, two were ever-so-slightly out in the lead. I watched their videos over and over, trying to decide. I wondered if I could legitimately award points for climate, or for whether I actually wanted to go there or not, (suddenly throwing Octavia Books in New Orleans into the lead), or deduct points for it being probably rather cold in, say, Winnipeg, in the winter. No, I couldn't. It was all about the parties.

Then I called Elyse Marshall at Harper Childrens. "Look," I said. "I can't in all conscience pick one of these over the other. If you're willing to give two grand prizes, and fly me to two bookshops, I'm willing to give up another day to do another signing."

She said she'd check.

She checked, and reported back. They were willing. And so was I.

So here is the official announcement, along with the second and third prize winners. (And, truthfully, the 28-odd runners up were good enough that I need to figure out something nice for them too.)

I'll sign in Decatur on Monday the 14th at 6.00pm, and in Winnipeg on Tuesday the 15th at 6.00pm.

...

I spent the last few days on the road with Amanda. It was mostly fun. I loved visiting Northhampton Ma - my first chance to wander the streets since I lived in The Old Bank on Main Street, writing the last two parts of A Game of You en route to Tucson, in 1991.

The venue, on Pearl Street, was run by the kind of people who save money and lose goodwill by not turning on the heat in the winter. Ever. There were two dressing rooms backstage, but only one had a little heater, so everyone crammed into that room (which did not ever make it to warm. It just wasn't cold) and read the sad graffiti from bands not (as is usual in these cases) bragging about their sexual conquests or drawing bits of their anatomy, or just writing the name of their band (size of band-name graffito is always in inverse proportion to whether you will ever have heard of them). No, the Pearl Street Ballroom dressing room wall was covered with mournful comments from bands about how much they hate the venue and the people who own it and how much they wish they could turn on the heating.

It was a wonderful gig, although I wore a sweater and a coat to watch it. We signed for people afterwards.

On Saturday Amanda and I drove through the rain to Brooklyn, which went fine until the car in front of us stopped suddenly, and we stopped suddenly, and the moment of triump

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9. Elfless in Gaza

I am, for the record, having one of those days where I really wish that I could get hundreds of tiny elves to come in the night and do the mountains of overdue writing for me, and more elves to sign the pile of 2000 sheets of UK Graveyard Book limited edition papers with my signature, and maybe a couple of tallish elves who look an awful lot like me to come in and take over all of my possible personal or professional commitments that might involve traveling anywhere in the world, and frankly while we're on the subject I'd like a handful of elves to deal with the email backlog, the towering piles of things I really need to read, and even someone to blog for me. And don't even get me started on things that want blurbs or introductions. (Looks around balefully.)

I was convinced that all was doom and despair and hopeless and I would never write my way out of this and there weren't enough hours in the day or days in the week or anything when I finally got out of the house and went down to the bottom of the garden to write, and discovered, on the way, masses of late and forgotten raspberries on the raspberry canes. So I stopped and ate raspberries, and you can't be properly miserable or grumpy eating sun-warmed raspberries you're picking and eating yourself.

I'm just saying. You can't.

.....

Tor.com has gone live. This is a really good thing. Lots of excellent writers blogging. Much stuff to read. I learned that illustrator Pauline Baynes was dead from Tor.com, and I was saddened. I read Jo Walton on Eric Frank Russell and found myself posting a reply. I suspect that Tor.com will become what Patrick Nielsen Hayden said he was hoping it could be about when he first mentioned it to me at Eastercon -- a social and professional hub for SF on the interwebs. The automatic place to go if you're interested in genre, immediately after you've checked Locus online -- http://www.locusmag.com/.

....

iTunes has the latest Best of The Moth Podcast up. You can hear me telling my story of my sixteen-year old self's travel trouble, and also, from the same event, you can hear Edgar Oliver telling what happened when he returned to Savannah, which was my favourite of all the stories told that night. The open iTunes instruction (the downloads are all free) is http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275699983. Sometimes these things do not work out of the US.

But here's some Edgar Oliver in conversation (and reading a poem) on YouTube. Yes, he really talks like that, his voice and accent musical and strange:



Hello
i went to Kyle Cassidy's live journal to see what was so objectionable with the photos (was it the t-shirt?...shrugs...they didn't look so evil to me) and i happened to see: NEIL FREAKING GAIMAN singing "i google you". Any chance of an audio clip of that being put up on your site? pretty please? i'm sure i'm not the only fan out there that would love to hear it!

Well, that was me actually singing while Kyle was blogging. Shortly after that Amanda went off and came back with a small recording device and said "Sing that again into this," so I did. And I don't think anyone will ever hear that recording except her. On the other hand, she apparently sang "I Google You" last night in LA... so I imagine that it'll be out on the internet soon enough, sung by someone who can sing much better than I can.

(Goes and looks on YouTube.)

It's up already. (Warning: It's a very dark film, more or less an audio track, and the last two words of the song are cut off.) I love what she's done with the chords...



...

Okay. I'm going back to the bottom of the garden to write about Selina Kyle and Joe Chill.

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