posted by Neil
I stood on the scales this morning, and saw numbers I've not seen for about 20 years. I'm now about 25-30lbs lighter than I was when I started. I saw Lorraine's trainer yesterday afternoon to get a new weights routine for home and on the road, and realised that I now have muscles that I haven't had since I was 22 and working on a building site. And I thought,
really, audiobooks do not get enough credit for being wonderful things.It sort of started back in January, when I saw the photos from Sydney Opera House, and I noticed something that I'd noticed from the other side, which was that I seemed to have developed a prosperous middle aged belly. My lovely Oscars waistcoat that Kambriel made me was straining to keep it in...
Author in January with straining waistcoat and glorious wife.
And I didn't really like that. I didn't like that I was starting to feel, well, my age. Authoring is a sedentary profession, and I was feeling pretty sedentary. (And, according to the
New York Times,
sedentary may be lethal.)
When I got back to the US I talked to Amanda's best friend Anthony about it, and about wanting to get myself into shape for the next thirty years, and he suggested a book he'd found really useful called
Younger Next Year, which I ordered and read with interest. I liked the book, and thought, I ought to put this into practice.
It said, among other sensible things, that I should exercise for 40 minutes a day, getting my heart rate up. And I should do weights...
And I thought, But Dear God I'll Be So Bored.
And that was when I had one of those ideas that ought to come with floating lightbulbs. I thought, Bleak House. A book I loved, but had never finished, due to always leaving it places.
I've been chatting to the Audible.com people about a mysterious thing I'll announce soon, and Don Katz from Audible had shown me the Audible app and mentioned that I could now use my Amazon account to log in and buy books on Audible. So I downloaded the Audible app to my phone and to my iPod touch. I listened to samples of a dozen Bleak Houses, then plumped for the top-rated, which sounded excellent. And from that point on, most days, I did 40 minutes a day of Bleak House. And if I couldn't do 40 minutes I'd do half an hour, or 20 minutes. I'd exercise, and I'd lose myself in Dickens, and the time would fly by.
It's a glorious book, and perfect for an audio book -- Hugh Dickson narrates it with skill and deftness, managing the varying voices of the enormous cast with ease and accuracy, coping with the two narrators (Miss Esther Summerson and a mysterious, all-seeing present tense narrative voice) into the bargain. A landscape I could get lost in, aided by the Audible software that always kept track of where in the book I was (I did not trust it at first, and would bookmark at the end of every session, but slowly learned to trust it). (
0 Comments on No. I will not write a diet book. But this worked for me... as of 1/1/1900
posted by Neil
I know. You thought I was dead. Or the blog was...
I hope you are doing well.
You don't need someone to write to you to tell you how busy you are... you are living it... but inquiring minds wish to know... is the blog dying? Is it gasping it's final breaths before giving up the ghost? Should we send flowers?
From a non-twitterer (non-twit?)
Just curious,
Kristinaand
Dear Neil,
We miss you.
Sincerely,
Your blog readers.I miss you too.
I promised myself I would get on top of the deadlines that are currently on top of me before I started blogging again. I thought it would be about ten days. It's now pushing six weeks. So much to blog...
Soon. Two scripts, one to finish and hand in, the other needing one more rewrite, with people sort of waiting and starting to hold their breath and tapping the tabletops with their fingertips and muttering about production schedules. Writing as fast as I can. Then I blog once more, as my reward to myself.
In the meantime, This is Lola. She's about 4 months old. A lot more about her, and where she comes from when the blog resumes:
...and since I'm here, if you're in New York on Tuesday June 15th, please come to this:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/details.php?id=88 and see me and Joe Hill, Kurt Andersen, Jeffrey Ford, Walter Mosley, and my co-editor Al Sarrantonio read from STORIES, and talk about fiction and such. Signed books will be available. It will be fun.
(Our first reviews for STORIES are in...
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-sirens-call-20100604,0,3929896.story and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/05/eric-brown-science-fiction-roundup)
posted by Neil
I'm home.
When I left, it was winter. I've come home to the kind of Spring that means that Summer is just rumbling around like someone shuffling his feet waiting to be invited into a room: temperatures in the 70s, everything green and warm and welcoming.
The best news is that all four hives of bees survived the winter. I wasn't sure that they would -- was pretty certain that the red hive (which swarmed last year) would be empty (it wasn't), but all the lessons from the previous year had been learned, and luck was with us. (
Sharon Stiteler wrote about the bees here, while I was on the road.)
My dog and my daughter were both very happy to see me home again. One of them has started driver's ed. and has a driving permit.
(I didn't put up the picture of me and Neil Jordan far above London on Tuesday. Here it is...)
There were many amazing things waiting for me when I got home. I haven't even finished opening the mail from when I was away -- there are two large tubs sitting in the kitchen, not to mention random boxes, envelopes and just things. Things I have discovered in the mail so far include:
A proof copy of
STORIES, edited by Al Sarrantonio and me. The US edition looks like this:
(I am so very proud of this book, from Tom Gauld's wonderful cover on. Contributors are, in story order, Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Mosley, Richard Adams, Jodi Picoult, Michael Swanwick, Peter Straub, Lawrence Block, Jeffrey Ford, Chuck Palahniuk, Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan, Gene Wolfe, Carolyn Parkhurst, Kat Howard, Jonathan Carroll, Jeffrey Deaver, Tim Powers, Al Sarrantonio, Kurt Andersen, Michael Moorcock, Elizabeth Hand, and Joe Hill. And the stories are remarkable.)
An advance copy of
Instructions, my poem illustrated by Charles Vess.
