JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Sort Blog Posts
Sort Posts by:
Suggest a Blog
Enter a Blog's Feed URL below and click Submit:
Most Commented Posts
In the past 7 days
Recent Posts
(tagged with 'The Graveyard Book Halloween Party Competition')
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: The Graveyard Book Halloween Party Competition, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 7 of 7
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: The Graveyard Book Halloween Party Competition in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Hullo everyone. I took a week off from Blogging, then didn't have a second during the whirlwind of the last few days.
As a result of which I have dozens of open tabs and dozens of letters to the FAQ line that I've marked as things I should answer. I'm not going to try and do them all now (Maddy told me that I'm taking her to school at 6:30 am, as she's got her first period of Driver's Ed). But there are a few things I should say before I sleep...
The first one is to congratulate Henry Selick and all the Coraline team (and Laika, and Focus) on the wonderful way they are being recognised by Awards. Yesterday, for example, we learned that Coraline is nominated for a Golden Globe award.
I went to Winnipeg. It was cold outside and I signed for 869 people. Here's the Winnipeg Newspaper article. Just behind me, in the grey shirt, is the wonderful Elyse Marshall, publicist from HarperChildren's, who looked after me on the Graveyard Book Tour and who can now run a huge signing in her sleep, which is great, because it means I don't have to worry about any details or disasters. I just do my job and sign and meet everyone.
(How bad can it get? Well, there was the time Terry Pratchett and I were signing in, er, I think it was Leeds, when the people who worked at the shop saw all the people who had turned up for the signing and got scared enough that they locked themselves in the staff room at the back, leaving Terry and me to climb onto tables and shout at people until they formed some kind of a line. The staff didn't come out again until the people had all gone.)
Strangest moment in Winnipeg was getting back to the hotel room at 1:30 am to notice that, beside my bed, a framed photo of my children had mysteriously appeared. I assumed that this was a cool thing the hotel had done. Elyse, on the other hand, was convinced it was the action of a crazed stalker, and insisted I deadbolt and security chain my hotel room, and was enormously relieved, a few hours later, when she knocked on my door and I removed the chain and was obviously still alive.
Before we left the hotel I took the photo out of the frame and left a thank-you note in its place.
Flew back to Minneapolis. I stopped off at DreamHaven on the way back from the airport this afternoon, and signed more stock for Greg (
I'm happy to say that I've not won any more awards in the last 24 hours, or done anything particularly noteworthy. I've walked the dog. Written things. Listened to things on headphones. Eaten a bit. (I've lost weight in the last year. I'm about twenty pounds lighter than I was this time last year, without having done much more than eating smaller portions and a lot more sensibly. This makes me happy.) I spiced three different chilis (the Hot, the Mild and the Vegetarian) for the weekend visitors. (Lorraine, my assistant, traditionally makes the chili, and I come in at the end and spice them. Thus it has always been.) During any down moments I've read comics, for a project I don't know if I can talk about yet. Some astonishingly good ones, some not so good.
Maddy and I watched the antepenultimate Doctor Who special, The Water of Mars, which we both liked a lot more than the Bus-in-the-desert episode. Good, scary classic, monstery Doctor Who which felt predictable (in a good way - almost inevitable) until suddenly it wasn't, and it got interesting in different ways. I liked the plot and performances, and feel comfortably certain that David Tennant's Doctor is going to have a better exit from the stage than any of the other nine. (Do not write and tell me that Colin Baker never even got to regenerate, and neither did Paul McGann, so really that should have been seven, because I will not be properly sympathetic.)
Dear Mr.Gaiman, I am so excited that you are coming to my city, Winnipeg, for a book signing! I do have a tiny question though, how many books are you able to sign? Please write back! I'm looking forward to the book signing on December 15 2009! From your biggest fan, Shivani Hunter
It's going to depend on the numbers of people who turn up. Assuming that it's around a thousand people in each location (Winnipeg and Decatur) I'll probably pre-sign a load of books, so people who just want to hear me read or answer questions and don't want to stand in a long line can get a signed book and go home, and we'll do something along the lines of I'll sign one thing, but if you buy a book of mine from the store I'll sign two things, which allows people to get the Thing They Love Most signed, and get something signed for someone (as we're heading into the holidays then) or for themselves.
...
Shaun Tan's story of Eric, the Foreign Exchange Student, from the Guardian, makes me toe-curlingly happy. It went up a while ago, and I've meant to post it here many times. Click on it, then click through the story, and you will not regret the time spent, I promise. Delicate, clever, gentle, strange and odd, in all the good ways. (It's possible I may have actually posted it here at some point. If so, smile indulgently, and read it again.)
...
Naperville, near Chicago, will be having its ninth annual "Naperville Reads" program this year, when everyone in the city is encouraged to read something by the same author. I'll be in Naperville toward the end of February, and "citywide events are planned". I do not know what they are either. Details at http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=338299
...
I started getting somewhat premature congratulations from people today
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
0 Comments on Revealed! The Rulers of the Darkness of This World as of 1/1/1900
I'm home (for a little bit), and, as of yesterday, down with vague travel crud - a sort of combination of somewhat-sore throat and chest and low-level headache, general ache and cold, none of which would be enough to bother me on their own, but all together have felled me - possibly just so that I can catch up on my sleep instead of getting back home and immediately trying to catch up on work. So I'm sleeping a lot and drinking lemon and honey (we have honey. See http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com/2009/09/beeing-with-boss.html for details) and slurping occasional soup.
I had a great time on the road (the most exciting bit was making my short film, the most upsetting bit was fearing my bag had been stolen while making my short film, while actually all that had happened was a helpful hotel person had put it into a hidden closet and closed the door, so the closet was hidden again). I went to Scotland and to Watford and to Berlin and Hamburg. I stayed in Imogen Heap's lovely flat in South London, and still have not met Imogen Heap. Saw an awful lot of my daughter Holly, who moved to the UK when she graduated, and who I miss.
Spent a lot of the time off the web, which was good, and something I'd been looking forward to. Wrote two longish short stories which I now have to type.
It got autumnal in the UK toward the end of our stay, and cold, wet and dark in Scotland. I had a couple of days of warm when I arrived back in the midwest, but it is now, today, officially, chilly Autumn. The trees are laden with apples, the grape-vines are covered with grapes, and the tomato plants are hung with very late tomatoes that need to be canned or salsaed or just cooked before they rot.
I landed in Minneapolis (after a massive 22 hour journey which began in Scotland), spent a night at home, saw my bees and went straight to the Midwestern Booksellers Association meeting, and was honoured with their Children's Literature Award (for The Graveyard Book). Also I chatted to a breakfast of booksellers about Odd and the Frost Giants.
I don't think I've said much about Odd here recently. It's out in the US now, in a shiny new hardback edition, with new illustrations by Brett Helquist. It's a book about using your head, I think. And about beauty. I talk about it at http://www.mousecircus.com/bookdetails.aspx?BookID=18
I learned this morning that The Graveyard Book Audiobook I recorded won the UK Children's Audiobook of the Year (Dawn French won UK Audiobook of the Year for Dear Fatty, although I was disappointed that the article from the Independent doesn't mention the talented Lisa Tarbuck, who actually read the audiobook).
Strangely enough, the most frequently asked of all the questions waiting for me when I got back was What do bees smell like? Honest. So picking one of those from the pile...
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
My 5-year-old son, Avi, asked me what bees smell like. I told him that I don't know and was sad not to be able to answer such an excellent question. Today it occurred to me that you might have smelled bees. If you have, would you be willing to answer Avi's question?
Thank you for your time!
Elizabeth Israel-Davis Portland, OR
Mostly bees, and bee-hives, smell honeyish, a thick sweet smell. If they get sick they can smell bad. But mostly they smell like honey.
Hey Neil, All Saint's Day is coming and I want to dance the macabray with my friends. Do you have any dance instructions other than "Step and turn, and walk and sway"?
Loved the book.
Jane
I think that readers of The Graveyard Book who perform their own version of the macabray will always be right. And should put video footage of themselves performing it be put up, I will try to link to it.
Which reminds me -- around this Hallowe'en many independent bookshops in the "lower 48" of the US are going to be having The Graveyard Book parties, in a bid to lure me out to sign in their shops in December. If you want to dance the macabray, or just enjoy a particularly graveyardy night, you may want to check if your local bookshop is doing one, and when.
(And if the bookshops who ARE going to be holding a Graveyard Book party want to let us know about it, then email your shop's name, the location of the party, the date and the time to [email protected] and we will put a Master Graveyard Book Party list up here.) (Even if your party is in a location like Hawaii, Alaska, Manilla, Omsk or Edinburgh, places which do not qualify for win-a-Neil-Signing.)
Dear Neil,
I've been ogling over your bookshelves on Shelfari (of course) and noticed that you have the same bookcases that a lot of bookstores do, with the upslanted bottom shelf. I've been trying to figure out where to order these ever since I saw them in bookstores. Could you let me know where and about how much these are? Thank you!
I was -- Cory sent it to me -- and I'll be getting them files for the Children's books. But I'm happy to spread the word further.
Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.
I miss hearing about your books and writings.
I am tired of hearing about your girlfriend...
You know, I wasn't going to mention Amanda in this post, until you reminded me. But we just spent six weeks together, working on the film and travelling and going to each other's events, and this blog, even when it gets a bit sporadic (as it has done over the last couple of months) is mostly going to be about what's going on, and who I'm with, and what I'm doing. If I'm somewhere doing something with Amanda, she'll get mentioned. (It's probably just as bad for some of her fans, who are going "who is this Neil and why is she singing to him anyway?")
I wish that Blogger would get some apps for the android. I'm using a Mytouch as my phone right now, and while I like using it, it's frustrating how easy it is to Twitter, how hard to blog from it. I had discussions with people at Blogger when I started using the G1 about things that didn't work, which they agreed, after a short while, were actually bugs, and they suggested I try emailling things to the blog instead, which lasted one email, when it turned out that things a phone didn't think you needed to see in an email, like lots of people's email addresses, showed up in the blog version.
Worldcon is underway. (Here is an interview with me about it.) Today I went with Dave McKean to the Drawn and Quarterly shop where we saw my friend the lovely Peggy Burns. In this photo I am showing Dave one of the Bigfoot books, which I am very fond of.
Then was interviewed, had lunch with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Then I was interviewed by Jessica Langer and an audience. Met a bunch of people -- John Scalzi was the one I've been waiting the longest to meet in the flesh, and he was every bit as nice and smart as I'd expected. Then a panel on the life and work of John M Ford, after which I slipped off with Jon Singer and Beth Meacham. (Edit to add, there's a lovely photo and description of the panel here.)
I talked with Beth about the R. A. Lafferty Treasury that we want to do, where we'll assemble a big Best of Lafferty collection, with individual stories introduced by different authors, just as the Avram Davidson one was.
Then Opening Ceremonies, where I gave an off-the-cuff speech I had written 6 weeks ago, which very nearly came true (especially the hedgehogs), and I watched Charles Stross in conversation with Paul Krugman, which was fascinating from beginning to end.
Then I popped in to the TOR party, where Kyle Cassidy took photos of me and the Clarion alumni from last year who are here (in the party bathroom, with a fisheye lens camera), and gave me a book of astonishingly beautiful photos he had made for me in an edition of one. It took me by surprise and left me unspeakably happy. What a good friend.
This is a Kyle photo of me in beekeeper mode:
This is a Kyle photo of me in the green room today with Anne Murphy my minder at the con. She is amazing, and without her I would not be wherever I am meant to be whenever I am there; and she never gets flustered and she never gets bothered, and she's a joy to have around. I firmly believe that in real life she designs giant fighting robots, of the kind where you sit in their head and then they fly off to save Tokyo, even though she says that isn't quite what she does at all. Because if you did design giant fighting robots, you'd want to keep it a secret.
(They are twitpic photos, so if you click on them they will get bigger and clearer.)
...
Mr. Gaiman, I work at an independent bookstore in New Orleans and we wanted to try to get you to come in. We all wanted to enter The Graveyard Book Hallowe'en party contest, but since you announced it, all of the staff have been trying to find specific rules and guidelines on how to enter, but can't find anything more on your site, or anything at all on Harper's sites. If you have any further information or could let us know how to get a hold of it, it'd be much appreciated... Thanks for your time! -Melanie Britt
HarperChildrens sent out an excellent ecard, but for some reason haven't put it up on their website, so I'll get it put up on this one.
I'll quote from the rules (at some length I'm afraid. Skip this if you aren't a bookseller, or if you don't want to talk your local bookseller into having a party):
ENTRY To enter the Contest, you must be an independent bookseller; you must host an in-store Halloween Party, with The Graveyard Book as the theme, between September 30, 2009 and November 1, 2009; and you must submit event photographs or a video, along with a brief paragraph describing the Party, to [email protected] by November 6, 2009 (9:00 p.m. PST). Contact your HarperCollins Sales Representative to discuss using cooperative advertising funds for the Party. Entries with photographs must include at least three (3) but no more than five (5) photographs. Photographs must be provided in .jpg format and as attachments to the entry email. Video entries may not exceed 120 seconds in length; must be provided in .mov or .flv format; and may not exceed a file size of 75 MB. Only one (1) entry per qualified bookseller is permitted. All entries must be accompanied by a brief paragraph (100 words max) highlighting the details of the Party: Name of store, location of store, number of attendees, overview of Party, special promotions or features. Paragraph may be included within the body of the entry email or attached as a separate Word document. PRIZES One (1) Grand Prize winner will be offered an opportunity to host an exclusive Appearance by author Neil Gaiman at the bookstore. The Appearance will most likely consist of a reading, book signing, question-and-answer session, etc. Specific details of the Appearance are to be determined, based upon the location, space limitations, and other requirements of the winning bookstore. The date, time, and duration of the Appearance depends upon the Author’s schedule. The Sponsor and Author currently project that he will be available in December 2009. If the Grand Prize winner cannot host the Appearance during that month, or if the Author cancels a scheduled Appearance, then the Sponsor and Author will endeavor to select and offer the Grand Prize winner a mutually acceptable alternate date for the Appearance. Five (5) First Prize winners will each receive five (5) signed copies of The Graveyard Book in hardcover and a customized video greeting from the Author. The specific details (content, length, delivery date, etc.) of the customized video greetings are to be determined by the Sponsor and Author. Five (5) Second Prize winners will each receive one (1) signed copy of The Graveyard Book in hardcover and a tagged video greeting from the Author. The specific details (content, length, delivery date, etc.) of the tagged video greetings are to be determined by the Sponsor and Author. All prizes will be awarded, provided there are at least eleven (11) qualified entrants. SELECTION AND NOTIFICATION OF WINNERS The Contest winners will be selected by the Sponsor and Author in their sole discretion based upon the following criteria: (i) Overall creativity of the Party, as demonstrated by the invitations, signage, decorations, activities, entertainment, and refreshments. (ii) Customer attendance and response (i.e., enthusiasm, costumes, participation). (iii) Ability to capture and represent the spirit of The Graveyard Book.
I'm requesting a little...clarification, I guess, on the Graveyard Book Halloween party contest. We have a few local businesses who heard that we're planning on doing it and who would like to be involved (because it sounds fun). Would it be disqualifying if we allowed that? Are there any actual rules beyond "have a party; document it; send in the stuff; wait and see"?
Thanks.
I asked Elyse Marshall from HarperChildrens, who said,
Without knowing exactly how the local businesses would be involved (I'm guessing some kind of sponsorship or donations, i.e. bakery provides cupcakes, party store provides balloons) I think this sounds okay. However, the party must be held in-store. We included this in the rules to level the playing field a bit, so that those stores which might not be able to afford an off-site venue can still have a fair shot of winning.
If anyone has any questions they can email us directly at [email protected].
....
Dear Neil,
I would really like your bell jar of bees to work, and so I'm worried that you might have made a small blunder by gluing the strips flat to the glass. Turlough's strips appear to be perpendicular to the glass.
Here's the response: "Yes, the strips should be perpendicular to the jar. They aer "glued" in place by gently heating the wax strips to make them tacky.
I'm not sure what will happen with flat strips."
Which is not to say that your flat strips won't work too. If they don't work, give perpendicular strips a shot.
Best of luck to you--and congratulations for a well-deserved Hugo nomination. I love your writing and your imagination; the world would be less enjoyable without both.
Sincerely, Christian Moody Cincinnati, OH
Actually, the day after I put them in, curious as to bee behaviour, I twisted about half of them so they were perpendicular to the glass, and left half of them flat against it. So we'll find out.
...
I have five bottles of Jones Soda with my face on them, one from each appearance on the Fast Forward TV show from 1993 to 2006. (I look really rough in 1999. Which is Green Apple flavour. In case you were wondering.)
There. I was in Boston and now I am home (This is a Kyle Cassidy picture of me at home, although it is from last month. I put it up on a family website recently to let the extended family know, subtly, that I now had a girlfriend. None of the aunts or cousins noticed that bit. "You have a wonderful fridge," they all said in the comments. "We wish there were fridges like that in England."). (Lots of people who read the link to the SPIN article have been writing nice letters congratulating me on dating the wonderful Amanda Palmer. Many of you add that you've known it since last year, back in August when pictures of me on the roof with Amanda were posted here, which is very nice of you, and demonstrates that you are all much smarter than we are, because we didn't start this, rather nervously, until earlier this year. So far it's working like a charm.)
Right. I said I'd expand upon my Independent Bookshop Plan, didn't I? The one I announced at Book Expo America when I won the Indiebound award for The Graveyard Book, slightly to the shock (but immediate approval) of my publishers.
This is the plan.
(It's a North America plan, I'm afraid, open to the USA and Canada, but not to anywhere else in the world. If it works out perhaps we'll repeat it next year and open it up to the entire world, which might be fun.)
It's open to independent bookshops. I'm not going to try and define indies for this. Big chains (Borders, B&N, Chapters etc) are out, because you're much more likely to get me anyway when a book comes out. But this one goes from tiny one-person independent bookshops a long way from anywhere up to huge monstrous shops that occupy city blocks. What counts is Independence (and, for the competition, enthusiasm).
Independent bookshop owners look at me wistfully and ask "How can I get you to come to my bookstore in Vermont/New Orleans/Florida/New Brunswick/Nevada etc?" and I tell them I don't know, because I'm not going to take a couple of days off work (once you count the going and the coming back) to go and sign somewhere, no matter how nice the store and the people.
This is how.
You have a party. In your bookshop.
Better still. You have a Hallowe'en Party in your bookshop. You can have the Hallowe'en party anywhere in the month of October.
And you theme it around The Graveyard Book.
(How you do that is entirely up to you. Decorate with headstones, or give awards to people who come as characters from the book, or have competitions for making epitaphs, or make graves of cake, or... well, honestly, this is your call. It's your Graveyard Book party.)
And document the party. Photos, or video footage will, I suspect, prove more popular than watercolour paintings or stream of consciousness poetry, when it comes to proving that you had a party and what it was like.
Then you get your documentation off to Harper Collins fast, and they decide who threw the best party and whose customers were the most imaginative and enthusiastic, and what was the most in the spirit of The Graveyard Book, and judging the merits of the store that had the Silas lookalike competition against the store that made all of its staff Jacks and ghouls against the store that hired a real werewolf to play Miss Lupescu...
And a winner will be announced, no later than November 15th.
Then, in December, I'll turn up on a mutually-agreed day, pens at the ready, to do a reading and an Odd and the Frost Giants signing for the winning store.
The ten runners-up will get signed posters and books and Stuff.
And that's the plan.
I'll ask HarperChildrens to do a slightly more officially version, but that's the plan.
If you are the customer of an independent bookshop and you've always wanted to see me signing there
....
And now I get to turn the blog over to Cat Mihos. Cat (AKA Kitty) is my assistant when I am in LA, and the recipient of mail, and the person who asks me to please answer letters, especially ones from schools. She also runs the Neverwear.net website, with the various t-shirts, posters, and such on it.
And for a while I've been suggesting that she makes it better -- easier to navigate, prettier, all that. And she did. Over to you, Miss Kitty:
Kitty here, with a report from the Neverwear.net frontlines.
My patient Boss has been pulling at my shirtsleeves for almost two years now, telling me to please improve the website... Olga Nunes and Dan Guy spent the first half of this year shining up this gem of a site. I believe the end result is both beautiful and easily navigated. I am grateful to them all.
At Wondercon SF earlier this year, while volunteering for CBLDF, I met Camilla d'Errico and fell starry-eyed in love with her artwork. When I asked her if she might like to collaborate on a Neil print, she got a little weak in the knees...
Just look at what she came up with for HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES...
To celebrate the new site, we are offering a discount on this new print, $10 off if you order in the next 24 hours (midnight June 13th to midnight June 14th). Just enter this code when you order: GIRLSATPARTIES
If you twitter, you know that Neil's Twitter army is half a million strong, and announcement of the new print brought the site to the ground. We had to find a new server to handle our bandwidth needs; call it a case of #neilwebfail, but, really, it is not a bad problem to have.
We here at Neverwear are interested to hear what you have to say about the new site. Follow us on twitter.com @neverwear for giveaways every week, truly unpredictable what may happen...
There.
Today I typed up and sent off an odd piece of memories about the 1987 Worldcon, my first, for the Anticipation program booklet. As I wrote it, it seemed more and more unlikely. Was I really at that room party where the jewellery was reported stolen, and the police were called, and then Ian M. Banks (who had been climbing the side of the hotel in the small hours but was not a cat-burglar) clambered in through an open window...? Of course I was. It just doesn't seem very likely. I left out as many strange incidents as I included.
There is something very odd and special about your first Worldcon, especially when you are 26 and are determined not to miss a minute of it (most of which I achieved by not sleeping, until finally I did). It's strangely comforting to think that I will have a quieter con at Anticipation as Guest of Honour than I had back then, but that other people will be having mad and wonderful Worldcons.
Very quick version: CORALINE musical (http://www.mcctheater.org/currentseason.html)was a wonderful use of Theatre, very haunting and strange. I liked the second-half better, as it felt more and more dreamlike (although CORALINE isn't a dream story). I wonder what someone who had never encountered the story in any form would think, especially during the end when the Other Mother's hand is defeated? I love the songs, the ones I had heard before and the ones I had not, and look forward to the cast album.
And am really looking forward to the first night on Monday.
Was given an award today at BEA and I announced that my publishers would be running a competition for independent bookshops to get me for a signing in December from the podium, which came as a bit of a surprise to my publishers who knew nothing about it. Luckily they liked the idea, and so I will announce here in a day or so how the independent bookshop Neil Signing Competition will happen (a hint: it will involve having a party) (at hallowe'en) (themed around the Graveyard Book) (and the winner will get me to come to their shop and sign books in December). Details to follow.
I did a signing -- I had an hour to sign for 100 people, and somehow managed to sign for over 170 people in the hour, personalising books for most of them. Not sure how I did it, and was braindead when it was done. Saw lots of old friends, too, who all thought that me-signing time would be a great time to chat, and all of them were sadly disappointed.
Off now to Audie Awards. Do not expect to win any, because historically I am always nominated and never win. Still, I shall wear my three nominee medallions with pride.
