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When I was a boy, I loved J. G. Ballard.  And when I was a teenager I loved J.G. Ballard. And as an adult I loved J.G. Ballard.   Different books, though, in each time -- as a boy I read and loved his disaster books, in which the world drowned or was blown away or slowly turned into crystal, and his Vermilion Sands short stories (particularly one called "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D"). As a teen I took weird cool challenging Ballard out of the library (I loved Concrete Island most of all, a Robinsonade about a man in a road accident stranded on the centre island in a busy motorway). As a young man I loved Empire of the Sun -- but I never stopped loving the old books, even as I discovered the new.

And somewhere around 1985, my friend Kathy Acker took me to a party/book launch/some kind of event somewhere in London and I met William Burroughs and Jim Ballard, stood there and chatted  as they reminisced about London in the 1960s. I don't know what or who I had been expecting, but Jim Ballard, then, and whenever I met him after that, was terrifying in his ordinariness, like the protagonists of his high-rises and drowned worlds, like the man on the motorway island. 

As the years continued, I remained fascinated with Ballard, and with the strange way that Ballard's most outre work from the late 60s and early 70s, odd un-stories with titles like "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan", or books like Crash, on the sexual festishism of car crashes and beautiful women who die in them, seemed to have somehow predicted the future that we were in, the world of postReagan image control and the psychofallout of a dead Diana, better than any of the SF writers who thought they really were predicting the future.

And I found myself hesitating on writing this one, as if, if I didn't write something for my blog, I would keep him alive just a little bit longer.

The photo is by Miriam Berkley, from about 1991.

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Over at Cat Mihos's Neverwear she threw open a competition for people to suggest t-shirts, and the results she got back are, frankly, amazing, and not easy to judge. If you would like to weigh in or vote for anything you would like to wear, head over to http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/2009/04/in-which-we-judge-another-contest.html. (And if you ever wondered what my mail looks like, she's started photographing it.)

And a quick one: Just heard from HarperChildrens that my audiobook of The Graveyard Book has been chosen as one of the three Audiobooks of the year. It's already nominated for two Audio Awards -- you can read the full list at http://www.audiopub.org/2009Finalistspressrelease.pdf and to have it picked a potential audio book of the year put a smile on my face nothing could shift. http://www.audiopub.org/2009ABOTY_DAPfinalistsrelease_final.pdf

This is what they said about it:

The Graveyard Book
By Neil Gaiman
Read by the author
Published by HarperAudio
Also a Finalist in the Thriller/Suspense and Children’s Titles for Ages 8-12 categories.

The Graveyard Book leaped into immortality with its Newbery Medal win, but the audiobook adds the author’s haunting performance, which strikes the perfect balance between a professional reader and the heart and soul of the author. Bela Fleck’s eerie and whimsical original musical composition for the audiobook sets the tone and punctuates the production. Gaiman’s unabashed enthusiasm for the audiobook format
found expression throughout his book tour and on his website. Gaiman’s and HarperAudio’s efforts have clearly won new fans through these recorded readings and effective social media marketing.

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And no. It's not Death.

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The Who Killed Amanda Palmer Book went on sale this morning, but it sounds like there were some problems with the robustness of the website you could order from, so I'm going to hold off on tweeting or blogging it until tomorrow, by which time I should be able to send people there without it immediately crashing and wasting everyone's time. If you wish to find the link yourself in the meantime, you are very welcome to.

But for now, here's a link to the anniversary issue of Mythic Delirium, a poetry publication in which I have a poem. It was inspired by the same strange event that made Amanda write her "Trout Heart Replica" song. I was going to call my poem "Trout Heart Replica" but when I told her that she said, "You can't. That's what I called my song, and I got there first." And she had. (The illustration in the first 350 issues is hand-coloured.)

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15 minutes before boarding in Porter Airport. (Here's the view from the airport ferry.) I'm in Toronto, en route to Montreal, where I think I'm just doing press stuff for the CORALINE movie.

 http://bit.ly/I47p is the start of the HBO CORALINE first look. (Thank you @Sarahdope.) My dog romps at 4:21.

First four pages of my Batman two parter are up on Myspace: http://bit.ly/OFiD 

the Coraline bag they gave me. http://phodroid.com/248cwp

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There is no cellphone signal where I am, which makes finding a mislaid cellphone more or less impossible. Sigh.

Phoned in all the lettering corrections on the final issue of BATMAN. I asked the impossible of Andy Kubert and Scott Williams, and I think they gave me what I asked for better than I could have dreamed. I can't wait to see the last issue of DETECTIVE.

I am now on a carry-an-80lb-dog-up-and-down-stairs-four-times-a-day Workout Plan, because I cannot persuade Dog that newspaper on a balcony is something that he could use as a toilet. He says it's grass or nothing. He's actually being remarkably affable about the being carried thing.

Right, back to work.

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I've got something that's probably only a bad cold that caught up with me after five months on the road, so I was asleep last night by about nine... and awake this morning at six.

I finished typing the Dying Earth story for Messrs Martin and Dozois, who were sitting on an otherwise completed book drumming their fingers against their tabletops in a worried manner and waiting for me to finish touring. It's an odd story but it made me happy, and, while I get to do some Jack Vance impressions (no-one but Vance can do Vance properly) I got to do me too.

Again, tabs to close and plenty of them.

Or in one case, tabs to keep open. I'm now hooked on http://www.oldbaileyonline.org , reading my way through the ancient legal cases, loving the details and the names, occasionally marvelling at the difference in times and moral codes and modes of justice. (Like this: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17140908-26&div=t17140908-26 which reminds us of the value of freedom of speech...)

A slightly odd Batman article in http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-11-17-batman-gaiman_N.htm -- I'm not exactly misquoted, but I'm not sure I'd entirely endorse any of their conclusions.

(I don't think I've ever had an Alex Ross cover on anything I've done, and it was lovely to see it...)



....and, now that it's been shown full size on the back of Previews, I don't think there's any harm in putting up Andy Kubert's cover, in its original uncoloured version. (which is the one I can find on my computer.) (If anyone grumbles I'll take it down.)



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I've been pondering the word prevaricate on and off for a number of years. I'd used it once in Sandman to mean someone not making up their minds, and Emma Bull, reading it, said "You mean procrastinate. Prevaricate means to lie." And I changed it before it saw print, realising that if she thought it was being misused, so would many other readers. Then, eighteen years later, I read an article on how to hang Rothkos which contained the sentence "Rothko was always prevaricating over how his art should be shown," said Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times, and decided to research.

I think it's a word with shades of meaning, and while in the US it tends to get used simply as "to lie" (as in "All politicians prevaricate"), in the UK it's more often used as a synonym for Equivocate -- i.e. to avoid giving a straight answer... even to tergiversarate. And it's the equivocation, with its implications of putting off a decision that then shades over into meanings that aren't simply "to lie".

And after writing that I just found some people arguing with each other about that on a French/English board, as if it's a new meaning that's just come along. The Big Oxford English Dictionary that I need a magnifying glass to read lists as Prevaricate definition #2 "To deviate from straightforwardness; to act or speak evasively; to quibble, shuffle, equivocate." And it gives examples going back to 1651. (Squints. Checks with magnifying glass. Nope, 1631.)

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Joe Gordon asked if I could mention this excellent Vertigo Encyclopedia interview up at the FPI blog, which I do, partly because I still feel guilty for not ever reading Alex's book A Scattering of Jades, copies of which were pressed on me in proof by friends, and which, like so many books people give me, never made it off the to-be-read pile.

Berkeley Breathed's favourite strips are up at http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/pages/favorite_strips.asp.

A few people have sent me links in to the Io9 article on How Sandman Changed the World. It's over at http://io9.com/5086663/5-ways-that-sandman-changed-the-world if you want to read it. I guess I have the same problem with it I do with a lot of Io9 stuff -- it's an article that reads like someone was assigned it, and sort of blogged it out in a bit of a hurry without any research or real thought. I don't think that Sandman actually did any of the five things he lists it as having done, and a lot of the things presented on the page as if they're facts are opinions, and dodgy ones at that. (Which sounds remarkably ungracious, considering it's a blog entry that says nice things about Sandman. If so, blame it on the author being in bed with a cold.) (And, before people write in asking about the "lost Sandman role playing supplement", and before it makes it into Wikipedia, the Mayfair Games Sandman someone talks about in the comments is more or less entirely fictional. I think I had a chat about a potential Sandman game with Dan Greenberg, who wrote the DC Magic supplement, but it went no further and Mayfair went down soon after -- I've never before encountered the idea that the two things were linked, and no Sandman game was ever written, made, solicited or cancelled.)

On the other hand someone sent me a link to this article on children's literature at http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6403. It's a fascinating essay which I agree with parts of, disagree with parts of (I really rate A.A.Milne as a humourist, children's writer and playwright, and my five-year-old love for the Winnie The Pooh books is all-consuming), but love his journey from premise to conclusion. If we are in a golden age of children's literature, it's probably mostly because of Sturgeon's Law. There are a lot of books being written right now, after all.

Also ran into this article by Roseanne Cash on songwriting (which I suspect applies equally to writing of all kinds) which I really enjoyed: so much of the magic is made by turning up and crafting something, simply by doing the work, and it's so hard to convince people of that, and it doesn't make the magic any less for it.

The Independent has its 50 best books for Winter up as a slideshow at http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/arts-books/the-50-best-winter-reads-1017075.html (click on the picture of the Ali Smith book to start it). The Graveyard Book is one of the books, I'm happy to say, and it's also on Amazon.co.uk's Years Best SF and Fantasy list.


And Meg Cabot says nice things about The Graveyard Book, and dispels rumours on her lovely chatty blog.

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About seventeen years ago the phone rang. "You're nominated for a World Fantasy Award for best short story," I was told.

"You should make sure that Charles Vess is nominated too," I said. "He drew it. And as a comic, it's not just the writer. It's both of us."

There were a couple of phone calls, and when the nominations were announced, Charles had been added to the list.

Which was something I found myself remembering when I read,

The Canada Council for the Arts won't add Canadian illustrator Jillian Tamaki's name to the official list of nominees in the text category for this year's Governor-General's Award for children's literature.

"We're a little bit late in the game" to either discuss the issue or make the addition, Melanie Rutledge, head of writing and publishing for the Canada Council, said Wednesday evening. But "we'll take it under consideration going forward. ... We're always wanting feedback like this."

It's for Skim, a graphic novel [Jillian] created with her cousin, author Mariko Tamaki. The book, published by Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, is one of five titles short-listed for the $25,000 G-G prize in children's literature (text), with Mariko Tamaki cited as the sole creator. If you give a writing award to a comic and ignore the art, you're being foolish, short-sighted and fundamentally failing to understand what comics are or what comics writing means.

And it's never too late to fix things.

Now, before I head off on some barking mad Jeremiad against short-sighted Canadians, I shall drink some chicken soup and go to sleep.

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