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I don't know. You turn your (still extremely jet-lagged, just in the opposite direction) back for one moment and the tabs to be closed are already breeding...

First, the big sadness: Cody's Bookshop has closed completely. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/21/codys-books-of-berke.html
I've loved doing signings and events with Cody's over the years, thought they were special and will miss them very much. It makes me glad that Kepler's is still in business,

I'm a Hachette author in the UK and much of the Commonwealth. I see that, from an Amazon-selling point of view, this might not be a good thing to be.

I guess I'll start finding other places to link to when I want to point to books. Amazon is always the easiest way to link, so it tends to be the place I default to.

I got a bit puzzled last year when my name got left off the National Theatre of Scotland production of "The Wolves In The Walls" at the New Victory (it was there as writer of the book the thing was based on, but not as co-adapter or as writer of most of the extra lyrics). Still, I felt that things had swung a bit far the other way when I saw this article from Variety on The New Victory winning the National Award for Excellence...


Here's the second part of a two part interview with Alan Moore at the Forbidden Planet blog (where you can learn what he thinks about Gordon Brown being petitioned by the public for an honour on Alan's behalf ):



The door to Hell. It's in Darvaz in Uzbekistan.



Weird Tales is blogging an entry a day on its 85 weirdest storytellers of the last 85 years.



I was thrilled by Sandman, the whole thing, being on the Entertainment Weekly top 50 new classics of the last 25 years, and baffled why, when they did the entry on what the longest work on their list was, they only listed the first volume of Absolute Sandman, rather than the whole thing. And googled to make sure that my friend Marc Bernardin was still working there to ask him (not that it's anything to do with him of course) and found myself reading this:


I met Miriam Berkeley on a plane in late 1988, on my first professional trip to the US, I think. She's a photographer who photographs authors -- here's an interview with her, along with some of her great author photos:

http://goodbooksguide.blogspot.com/2008/04/eyes-of-miriam-berkley.html


Hi, Mr. Neil!

Thought you might enjoy this:


http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/07672/I_Believe...


--Julia


That's cool: Turning wordclouds into art. I have to go and play with Wordle, don't I?

why do the characters in your children's book "The Dangerous Alphabet" look so very similar in appearance (hair color, eyes, clothing - even, somewhat, the shapes of their faces) to Al Columbia's beloved underground cartoon characters, "Pim and Francie"? The similarities are pretty uncanny. Are you and your illustrator very big fans of Al Columbia, or is it simply a very big co-incidence?

thank you for your time.

regards,

brent higgins

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything Al Columbia's drawn, apart from a promo piece for Big Numbers about 18 years ago, but I googled Pim and Francie, found a picture, and can't figure out what they have in common with the brother and sister in The Dangerous Alphabet apart from being male and female children, and his hair being lighter than hers. So it's a mystery to me too.

Sent some pictures of me taken for Time Out Sydney...

And here's a scan of the Entertainment Weekly photo page with my top ten on it. A photo almost unique in the history of pictures of me in magazines, for actually looking like me...


In my head Eddie Campbell whispers, "Ah. Righht. Another picture from the Neil Gaiman School of Looking at You Sideways.")
...

STOP PRESS: "The Witch's Headstone" (which will, later this year, be Chapter 4 of The Graveyard Book) won the Locus Award for best novelette. Thank you to all who voted for it, and to Gardner Dozois who accepted the award on my behalf. It's a really terrific list of winners, too.

From Locus:

Locus Awards Winners

Winners of this year's Locus Awards, voted by readers of Locus Magazine in the annual Locus Poll, were were announced this afternoon at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Seattle, at an event led by Master of Ceremonies Connie Willis.

SF NOVEL

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL

Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

FIRST NOVEL

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)

NOVELLA

"After the Siege", Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)

NOVELETTE

"The Witch's Headstone", Neil Gaiman (Wizards)

SHORT STORY

"A Small Room in Koboldtown", Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)

COLLECTION

The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)

ANTHOLOGY

The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)

NON-FICTION

Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)

ART BOOK

The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)

EDITOR

Ellen Datlow

MAGAZINE

F&SF

PUBLISHER

Tor

ARTIST

Charles Vess

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Lots of people wrote to tell me that X-Rays were needed for TB tests, and some people suggested that they were in hand-baggage as they might be fogged by X-Rays in checked baggage, but no-one explained why there seemed no mechanism for anyone ever to look at the (quite expensive, and carried over in hand-baggage), x-rays until this arrived from Mr Petit...

Having been a commanding officer in the UK -- meaning I had to supervise
airmen and NCOs under my command when they wanted to bring their UK brides
back to the US -- I had to chuckle when I saw the note about the x-ray.

It's not required by the immigration folks (either Division 6, or anyone
else). Since it's a different federal agency, I'm not surprised that an INS
employee wouldn't know about it. It's required by the US Public Health
Service, for everyone, regardless of nationality, who is trying to immigrate.

And they do, on occasion, get checked, but only if there's advance reason to
believe there's "a substantial risk of exposure." For example, you can bet
that flights on foreign-flag carriers originating in, say, Nairobi get more
scrutiny than would a BA or AA flight from Heathrow.

The relevant statute was passed in 1938 (there may have been a predecessor,
but I doubt it) and hasn't been updated yet. What a surprise.

And this came in from my editor Jennifer Brehl at Harper Collins about the free American Gods -- I'm putting it up because she says it better than I could paraphrase it:

First of all, the online edition has been optimized and the embedded pages are moving much faster. I’ve asked that the widget confusion be fixed – i.e., open up widget to full book rather than older partial version.

We’re wondering if you might have some time tomorrow that we could call you and we could have a conference call to discuss things? We want your fans to know that we are responsive to their concerns and, although it’s painful getting the criticism, it’s also a good learning opportunity.

So there will be a conference call, and I'll report back on it.

...



-Mike


Oh good.

(And I should mention, I loved this Michael Chabon New Yorker article about Superhero costumes.)


Henriette

From the schedule, it looks like it's definitely Sunday.
http://www.orbital2008.org/sunday.pdf
-- and you get a Mitch Benn concert into the bargain.

...


Dave McKean says he doesn't mind me putting up his sketches for The Graveyard Book cover...

So to bring you up to speed...

Dave did a cover while I was writing the book. As the book continued, it became sort of obvious that the cover was younger than the book was, and we needed a cover that told adults that this was a book for them too.

So I finished the book and Dave read the book and did a bunch of sketches, all of which made me happy, and all of which felt a lot more like the book I'd written...









All of these are sketches, it's worth pointing out -- roughs for me and the various editors and art departments to look at and choose from. It's not finished art, nor is it meant to be.

(The actual typeface is something Dave plans to scan in and create from photos of old gravestones.)

And in the next post I'll tell you what the response was, and which one we wound up going with and why.

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I really loved HipWriterMama's interview with Kirsten Miller (Kiki Strike) yesterday. If you haven't read it yet, head on over and do so now.

Have you been noticing the phrase GuysLitWire popping up here and there? Well, it's a project well on its way--a blog on books for the teen boys. Colleen Mondor and a gang of bloggers are behind the initiative, but we're still looking for a few good....to be blunt...men to participate in the project. Are you, well, a guy and a blogger, or writer, or illustrator, or graphic novelist, or artist, or publisher, or agent, and would look forward to talking books for guys once a month? Then head on over to Chasing Ray and send Colleen an e-mail. (Jules has a great round up post on GuysLitWire today at 7-Imp.)


Leila of Bookshelves of Doom asks if she is the only one skeeved out by the Digital Dr. Seuss project. Uh, no, Leila. You're not alone. This is what got me: "Content is downloaded on an à la carte basis, with fees ranging from $.99 to $10.00; content owners determine the prices." This is what I've noticed as a trend lately and it worries me. The only sites making money on the internet "on an a la carte basis" are sites that sell to kids and teens.

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While reading the news this morning, I ran across two items you might find interesting.

• Writers talk their favorite fonts over at Slate. I'm a Times New Roman girl myself. Courier just seems wrong to me. Which font is your favorite?
• An AP article that has been making the rounds: Hillel Italie talks to Mary Pope Osborne (Magic Tree House)

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I hope you're all having a beautiful Tuesday. When reading the news, blogs and listservs this morning, I came across three interesting, yet unrelated, items of interest. They include:

A Fair(y) Use Tale. A series of Disney clips spliced together to explain how copyright works. (Via Child_Lit)

Benedict Carey has written an fascinating article on narrative and psychology for The New York Times. Read especially page three on considering first- versus third-person retellings of one's life story.

The smartest and most eloquent voice on book vs. blog reviews anywhere? Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray. I'm sorry, but I haven't seen a piece in print that rivals what Colleen has to say and I'm not making this claim because I'm biased for blog reviews. I read them all--print and blog. I honestly believe they both can exist and readers are smart enough to rely on the ones they trust. Colleen's latest post is a tour de force.

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