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So this is the million words party post, and as with all good parties, I already feel faintly sick from devouring too many sweet things. (In this case, big lumps of honeycomb, the first from the hive. The Birdchick will tell you all about it. with photos, soon enough.)

(Celebratory Party Art above by the Wonderful Web Elf.)

But it's not just Million Words day. It's also Mike's Gaiman's 24th birthday. Mike, for the record, has a real job, at Google, and no longer looks like this:
He is also no longer anywhere near as impressed by monkey-pony monsters as he used to be.

That's pretty much the only change, and it actually dates back to the original 1998 hardback -- because the size -- and the ratio -- is different from the smaller version , the four double-page spreads, which are "full bleed" and go to the edge of the page each lost a little bit at the edge -- in three cases, you lost a little bit of tree or sky, but in the fourth you lost, er, me. So, to make up for it, you get the new drawing of the Fairy Market as endpapers with me (and Charles Vess, and even Maddy) in there.

why are you so concerned about your hair and makeup?
HELLO; you're a master artist! No one expects you to be pretty, witty and
wise, yes but not PRETTY! Besides you're a man, a manly man at that! And
even though you are now more mature, most women (not me - I'm a shallow
as dish water and a sucker for a pretty face) but most young women love
an older man! So stop fretting about your looks, you're on a press junket
not doing glamor shots!

If you do TV, you get made up for it. Otherwise you look washed out, and if you're me your hair covers one eye in a distracting sort of a way, or something similar. It's one of those sort of fact of life things that you just sort of get used to if you're on a junket, where the TV cameras are omnipresent, or if you're doing TV interviews in a studio. The make-up person doesn't care whether you're male or female, old or young; she cares about making you look human on screen. The hardest job in the last few days (for the make-up lady) was when I had to be interviewed in front of a green screen, and she had to make my hair lie down and behave, because otherwise it would have caused bizarre optical effects when they replaced the green screen with Stardust images. I don't fret about my looks. Mostly, I'm amused by them, and by the process of hair and make-up. It's one of those things you don't expect to have to deal with when you start out as a writer.


Circus

Good luck finding a home for him...


That's Ilan's score in the background.
...

I just got the galleys of my short story in a book called FOUR LETTER WORD:New Love Letters (Here's the Amazon Uk link) to proofread, and find it rather disturbing that I can't see anything wrong with it. (Rereads again. Okay. I found a gives that should be a give. Whew.)

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I'm home, and a bit exhausted. It was a beautiful day, and I took enormous pleasure in wandering around the garden in my dressing gown this morning while not being interviewed. Oh, how I love not being interviewed. I could spend several happy lifetimes not being interviewed, and between the not-interviews I think I could joyfully not get on planes. I could especially not get on the kind of planes that sit on the tarmac for three hours before taking off. I could not get on those planes with a smile on my face and a tip-tapping of my toes.

Anyway, everything here was as I left it on Sunday, more or less. Some small furry bandits (at a guess, but a good one) had completely stripped the pear tree of hundreds of unripe pears, and have started to invade the corn patch. Lots of raspberries, blueberries, carrots, onions and beets. And the apple tree is still laden with apples.

Then I got dressed and wandered down to the hives to see if the bees had missed me. And I promptly got stung on the back of the neck by a bee who obviously hadn't. Which was, I suppose, not a bad thing as a) I now know that I'm definitely not allergic to bee stings, and b) those of us who've been beekeeping had a pool for the first of us to get stung by a bee.

The first of the cluster of interviews to bear fruit is http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117968880.html?categoryid=2508&cs=1 which is a Variety article by Anne Thompson in which we learn that "Finally, after a long, painful gestation, 2007-08 is poised to be Gaiman's year at the movies." I don't honestly remember a lot of painfulness over the last fifteen years of dallying with movies -- mostly it was just interesting, occasionally amusing and often educational.

Anne Thompson's blog, over at http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/07/gaiman-king-of-.html is in some ways more interesting, as she talks about what she perceives as wrong with the Stardust marketing -- "First, I think it will appeal mainly to women, which makes studio marketers crazy. Paramount's selling this movie like an action adventure to get the boys. They're not capturing the charm and sweetness of the movie in their materials. They're making it look like everything else. I asked Nora what she thought of the Robert DeNiro flying pirates billboard and she said it was "dumb.""

Over at http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000322.shtml you can learn about a Stardust special Comic-Con thingummy that the CBLDF is doing --

Be among the first to experience the film magic of Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess' Stardust at Comic-Con! The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is offering 50 VIP packages filled with exclusive Stardust goodies, plus a special pass to attend a gala San Diego screening of the film to take place on Thursday, July 26.

The Fund's exclusive Stardust VIP package includes: an all-new Stardust print, limited to 50 pieces signed by Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess; a set of 5 Stardust fragrance imps from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and a ticket to the San Diego exclusive screening of Stardust. Stardust VIP packages are available for a donation of $100 to the CBLDF. The Stardust screening is on Thursday, July 26 at 9 PM, and features an introduction by Neil Gaiman, followed by a Q&A afterwards.

Pre-orders of this very limited package will be taken until Tuesday, July 24 at 10:00 PM Pacific Time. You can pre-order here:
If any packages remain, you may pick one up at the CBLDF's booth [1831] at Comic-Con. All Stardust VIP packages *must* be picked up from the CBLDF's booth on Wednesday evening, July 25, or on Thursday, July 26 before the convention closes at 7:00 PM.

(Given what you're getting, I tend to think that the $100 donation should be a minimum, and that if you want to put in more, you should, hint hint.)

http://cbldf.safeshopper.com/22/305.htm?778


I've now seen about 20 minutes of Beowulf in 3D. As soon as I figure out how to describe it without joyously stomping off into happy and impressed swearing, I will. In the meanwhile I'll simply mention that in addition to that footage -- which is reel two of the film -- being screened on Wednesday night at Comic Con (well, at the Horton Plaza), it (along with film of Roger Avary and me introducing it and answering questions) will be shown again twice on the following Thursday Afternoon so that another 800 people can see it. I don't yet know how people will get tickets to get in to those screenings, or to the Stardust screening on Thursday Night (except for the CBLDF ones) or the Coraline event with Henry Selick on Saturday Night that I'm not supposed to mention yet. But as soon as I know, I'll put the information up here.

Which reminds me -- there's another auction at http://cbldf.safeshopper.com/21/cat21.htm?882 -- this is the CBLDF Saturday Night Comic-con auction, although they will, as you'll see, accept bids from people not at the con. An amazing bunch of things from people, and they've got some interesting things from me that they've gathered over the years, including the fabled Stardust paperback covers from 2000 that were designed by Avon, and that Barnes and Noble killed at the last minute -- the idea was that the covers (which form a triptych) were respectively romantic, fantastic, and sort of respectable, and that the book would have three covers and would allow bookshops to rack it in different parts of the store. (When Barnes and Noble killed the idea by refusing to stock it if Avon did it, they took the middle cover and put a blue leather cover over it, with a little window through which you could see the man on the horse. I never really knew who the man on the horse was.) I may have another set somewhere, but I think these were my only ones, and unless they exist in the Harper Collins archives, this would probably be the only set around.

And there's more in the auction -- including what looks like a comic that I doodled during a CBLDF board meeting three or four years ago, which Charles Brownstein rescued from the yellow jotter on the table.

I have been examining the Comic-Con schedule, and I noticed the only autograph time for you (currently) is listed as "Limited - Drawing for a line ticket at 12:00 PM Friday" with the signing listed as being 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm on Friday. Do you know if you will be doing any signing on Preview Night? I would love to get my Absolute Sandman signed, but I fear I will haul it around all day Friday and then not get a line ticket.Thank you! Jeanine

There are a couple of other signings scheduled, so I'll do at least one signing on each Comic-con day (except for Sunday) -- one signing will be at Brian Froud's table, and one will be at the CBLDF booth. (And then there's the tee-shirts that we haven't announced yet.)

...

I wrote to Paul Cornell to tell him how much I loved the Dr Who Human Nature two parter, and wound up getting him to a Stardust screening -- which he writes about at http://paulcornell.blogspot.com/2007/07/stardust-and-faf.html

And from http://www.stardustnews.info/ I read Stardust reviews like
http://thetruthisoutwhere.blogspot.com/2007/07/stardust-movie.html
and discovered that you can ask Matthew Vaughn questions at
http://buzzsugar.com/410236 , although I don't think Martyn's quite found
http://www.mostlydamaged.com/movie-reviews/stardust-review-3.html or Dan Guy's Flickr accumulation of Stardust promotional pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/stardustpromo/ yet.

...

And as I reluctantly admit to a million words of blogging... http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/caught-in-the-blogjam/2007/07/19/1184559950812.html is a lovely article about authors and blogs, why we do it and whether we should or not. While blogs are criticised for being inaccurate, unedited, multifarious, narcissistic, having too many pictures of cats, and encouraging people who aren't experts to behave like experts, these issues don't overly concern me. Me neither.
...

So that's about a million words. Next post we ought to have a party. With balloons.

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I can. Yes, it's a song they wrote for CORALINE. There were a few they did that didn't get used.

Did Maddy like the Doctor Who Season Finale?

She really did. She even cried a little when the master died (I thought the death was great but was still a bit grumpy that my prediction that the master would be shot by his wife had come true). She liked it more than I did, really. I thought it was a bit of a curate's egg (in the erroneous sense of Good In Parts, not in the actual sense of All Rotten) but I would forgive a lot for John Simm's performance as the Master, which I loved, especially following Derek Jacobi's, which I loved in a very different way. And if it wasn't Blink or Human Nature, it still had lots of things I liked, and Utopia and The Sound of Drums were both enormous fun. Even if the Toclafane plot was the Cybermen plot of the season two end, and was also the Dalek plot of the Season one end. I hope that season four won't end with the discovery that somehow human brains are fuelling the New Mechanoids. And the least said about the mini-Doctor in the cage and the magic saying of the name that makes it all better, the better...... .

Hi Neil,

Your journal entry regarding your plans for Comic Con reminded me of the interview you recently had with Quint from Ain't It Cool News, in which you mentioned that on that Wednesday, July 25th, you would be hosting a showing of Beowulf footage, with Roger Avary, for a theater of about 400. My question is whether this is still going to happen, and if it is, what I can do to take part in it. (This is my first Comic Con, and would love to start it off right.) I apologize if this information is forthcoming, or if I just missed something. I'm so excited, I can't wait. Thanks for listening. (Sorry if I accidentally sent this twice.)

-Ben

I'm not sure. If I find out about how people can get in to that -- or the Stardust event on the Thursday evening, or the event on the Saturday that I can't talk about yet, I'll post the details here.

I do know that the Beowulf panel and screening will be filmed and repeated, so if you miss the original panel you will still be able to see the 3D footage (and a film of me and Roger burbling about it) at some point during the convention. But I don't know if I'm allowed to say that yet. If I'm not, deny everything.

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