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The convention's over, and it was really good. Lots of wonderful people, a really nice atmosphere, and my main regret was all the conversations I never had -- I made China Mieville promise that we'd do a panel one day of us chatting, because we never manage to finish conversations and he knows so many cool things (and he seems to think that I do).

There were a lot of conversations I did have, though. Yesterday evening there was food with Mitch Benn, today there was food and talk with Farah Mendelsohn and Edward James, and Cory, Alice and Poesy Doctorow. And there were panels (my favourite today was either the one on the various incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes it's good just to be a fan. Or it was the one about darkness in Children's Fiction) and more signings and just running into good people...

And there was the party in honour of the upcoming Anticipation -- the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal . (http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home) I talked to the con chairman, and then to Farah (who is head of programming) and we're starting to come up with some ideas for things that would be really special and fun.

(It's a World Science Fiction Convention, and it's about 18 months away, and I hope you'll come. There's a map of where in the world the members are from, and right now there's no-one at all from Eastern Europe or China or even Brazil....)

Also I seem to be guardian of an enormous pink pig.

....

“It is my opinion,” Wertham told the senators and the cameras, “without any reasonable doubt and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.” The child most likely to be influenced by comic books, he said, is the normal child; morbid children are less affected, “because they are wrapped up in their own fantasies.” Comic books taught children racism and sadism—“Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” he said. In his book, he said that “Batman” comics were homoerotic and that “Wonder Woman” was about sadomasochism. He was even critical of “Superman” comics: “They arouse in children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune,” he testified. “We have called it the Superman complex.”

If you're interested in comics and their relation to America, or in censorship, or foolishness, you should read this: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/03/31/080331crbo_books_menand

...

Dave McKean sent over the cover to the Subterranean Press edition (and probably the Bloomsbury Adult edition) of The Graveyard Book.

This is the cover....



And this is the wraparound cover, with the front and back cover and the space for the dustflaps, but without the text.







Right. Bed now.

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Holly is here. She has been persuaded to take her coat off. She says she needs to be mentioned more in this blog. She says that I ruin the whole effect, however, if I actually point out that she just said that I should devote the spotlight to her here. She says she didn't actually say that and that my innocent paraphrase is in fact all hellish lies.

Holly would like to say something.

Maddy Gaiman has the best sister ever. Happy Easter, Maddy.

(Me: That's it? Her: Yup.)

So far today I've been interviewed by the French, done a Kaffeklatch (where 8 people who had their names drawn from a hat had coffee with me, although I drank tea) a Guest of Honour Reading and Talk, and another interview. Still to come today, a Wolves in the Walls reading for kids (and adults who have kidnapped kids and are using them as props to get in with) and another autographing.

Neil

I was interested in your throwaway remark on navigating the London Hotel. "It's a terrific convention (in a hotel the geography of which I cannot quite grasp)"

My wife and I spent our Silver Wedding anniversary in Vienna, and despite my reading up beforehand, I felt ill at ease using the underground trains as I couldn't get my bearings and felt terribly edgy for the first day and a half.

Once we walked around the inner ring of Vienna I had my bearings and was able to feel psychologically much better. Weird huh?

Have you read "The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton? His practical philosophy is so interesting and makes me realise I'm not alone in feeling edgy on arrival at a new place - not for fear of attack - but insecure in the geography.


Truth to tell, I quite like new places, and don't really mind unfamiliar geographies. This hotel, on the other hand is something else. I am used to sensible, Euclidean spaces, in which if you go through enough 90 degree angles you wind up where you started. Try that here and see where it gets you. It reminds me enough of the description of the convention hotel in Diana Wynne Jones's DEEP SECRET that I have to ask her if it was based on this hotel.

From the outside it seems almost normal. Then the corridors begin... Read the rest of this post

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It's a terrific convention.

My first Eastercon was Seacon in Brighton in 1984 -- a huge and wonderful affair. I was 23, wide-eyed and delighted by the convention. Bumptious, gawky, ransacking the dealer's room for Lionel Fanthorpe books for Ghastly Beyond Belief, occasionally mistaken for Clive Barker (why?) and starting to suspect that I might have found my tribe. And now, 24 years later, I'm some strange old-timery creature, at an Eastercon that's the biggest since, er, Seacon in 1984, and , despite the worries that friends have expressed to me about the greying of fandom, there seem to be a lot of people here the age I was at my first Eastercon or younger, an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a lot of people who are having their first convention, and who may even now be suspecting that they might have found their tribe.

Altogether, a good thing.

Lots of old friends, and some new friends -- both China Mieville and Charles Stross are Guests of Honour as well, and I've known Charles for 20 years. (China for less than that.) I first signed in Fan Guest of Honour Rog Peyton's bookshop with Kim Newman in 1985 for "Ghastly Beyond Belief"... I keep running into people who I sort of recognise. Then I mentally subtract 25 pounds, make their hair dark and realise who they are.


Did an enjoyable, even if none of us were quite awake yet, panel on mythology in the morning, a wonderful panel on Fantastic London in the afternoon. Ate lunch with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, dinner with the astonishingly nice Paul Cornell -- who I am definitely supporting for a Hugo, at least until Steven Moffat comes through with the promised ice-cream, at which point I might waver. But until then it's Cornell all the way. We spent dinner in full Doctor Who nerd mode. It was much too much fun -- and I got to tell him an obscure Dr Who fact that he didn't know. Possibly one that not even Steven Manfred knows. Holly said we were very cute, and she enjoyed the conversation except possibly when we got onto the early stuff. Also somewhere in there was a lot of signing.

I met my Romanian publishers and was given Romanian copies of my books, and promised to think about coming to Romania...

Lots of fun things tomorrow -- I want to do a bit of a reading during my Guest of Honour time, because the only reading I'm down for is one for kids (a Wolves in the Walls reading) but I have to decide just what I want to read.

Mitch Benn plays at the convention tomorrow night. He just sent me a link to his latest video. It's a happy birthday song of a political nature. But the tune's nice and catchy...

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In the UK for Eastercon. It's nice to be home (and amazing how comfortingly home it still feels after 16 years away).

I noticed that Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE won the GLAAD award for Best Comic -- congratulations. Somewhere I have the beautiful GLAAD award that Sandman took for the same thing, about a decade ago. And then I read the small print of the Awards Press Release and realised with pleasure that STARDUST took the award for Outstanding Film (Wide Release) -- I was very pleased for Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (and Robert De Niro), but wish that I'd known that it was happening. I called Matthew and Jane and told them. I wonder who accepted the award -- someone at Paramount? It says on the press release the awards ceremony will be telecast on Bravo, so I'll set the TIVO and find out.

The Eastercon is at a hotel near Heathrow, and because I took Silverjet in to the UK (this is the second time I've flown them, and I'm really impressed. The tickets are cheap, every seat on the plane is business class, and you don't have to worry about checking in for an international flight many hours beforehand, as they have their own little check-in-lounges at the airports. I hesitate in plugging them because right now it's easy to get seat and to change flights) I landed in Luton, where I was picked up by a Taxi from the convention, which was a nice surprise (especially when I saw the lines of stopped traffic outside Heathrow).

I had a bath and then slept some more.

The con is, I am told, pretty full, but there are still memberships and day memberships.

I'm doing a signing on Saturday at 4.00, and my Guest of Honour speech/reading is Sunday at 2.00pm. There's another signing "on scooters" I am assured, on Sunday night at 8:15.

As a sort of general thing at the con, if you see me and I don't seem to be doing anything, and you have something with you you want signed, and you sidle over and mutter "It's for Norman" (if your name happens to be Norman) then I'll probably scribble on it for you.

Right. About to wander out into the world to see old friends and make new ones.

I have noticed that you look identically cool-writery in all your photos. I would like to know how this is done, please. When I'm in family photos whoever's taking it looks at the camera screen and gets a little frown and then they say "we'll just do that one again." I'll say sorry and then they say "That's alright, dear, you can't help it." and they take four or five and then just give up and email whichever one had my eyes most open and my mouth most closed.

Is there some trick?

Yes. You don't let anyone put the photos of you with your eyes shut, or with a goofy grin, or looking like you just dropped something, or drooling, on the back of a book or in a newspaper. Then people think that you always look like that.

Claire
I'll record it within the next month or so and it should be out in September when the book comes out.

I'm also planning to collect together all the live readings of chapters from the Graveyard Book as well... maybe make them downloadable or watchable from http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff.

So probably a thousand people have asked by now, but what does coffee which has been partially digested by a civet cat taste like? I've never quite been willing to shell out the extra money to find out. Is it worth it?

It was a perfectly nice, fairly mild, not-at-all acidic coffee -- with an astonishing caffeine kick to it. But I'm a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker, and while I could probably describe different teas in ways that might communicate things to other tea drinkers, when it comes to coffee it was a very nice, not-bitter, not-acid, cup of coffee, and someone else will have to describe the underlying notes of cinnamon and vanilla and red wine in civet-coffee, for it will not be me.

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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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Today felt like a ghost day. It was warm enough that there was something that might have been a fine rain and might have been mist, and it hung over the snow, and it made the world unreal.



I wandered out with a camera and a dog to try and shoot the mist-world, and mostly I failed, because the camera was too good at compensating for the mistiness

Below is the barn. It was falling down when we moved here in August 1992. It's even older than the house -- probably about 150 years old. After fifteen years it's really falling down -- it's dangerous, and I'm probably going to have to bite the bullet and get it taken down this year. Sigh.

And Princess the cat has moved into a tree. She's up the tree right now.

I'd go out with a ladder and rescue her, except that she keeps coming down to eat and zooming back up her tree again. I'll leave finding her in the photo below as a task for the sharp-eyed. And yes, I know I need to do an update on all the cats, and I shall...

Hi Neil,

I live in the sunny UK, and am very much looking forward to EasterCon this year - my first convention, so approaching it with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation!

Any chance that you might be persuaded to fit in a preview reading of The Graveyard Book....? Not sure I can wait more than six months for a hint of it!! Perhaps it could clash with one of the bondage sessions, I wasn't intending to go to them! :-)

Cheers,

Sarah

I'm definitely doing a reading at Eastercon (and will be doing stuff every day of Eastercon, for those people who wanted to know what day I'd be there) although from checking the schedule, it looks like it's a Wolves in the Walls reading (following the Make Your Own Pig Puppet program item). The current version of the schedule is at http://www.orbital2008.org/programme.html. On Sunday afternoon I've got a 90 minute Guest of Honour spot to fill, and will probably do a reading as part of that, and really, I want to find out what some bits of The Graveyard Book sound like when you read them out loud. So I think it's extremely likely.

Hi Neil,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/desertislanddiscs.shtml

Record: Sailing By - BBC Concert Orchestra

Book: Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series

Luxury: Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc

Alex

That's terrific. The castaway is West End Star Michael Ball (who I saw in Sondheim's Passion). (I wish that Desert Island Discs was something you could hear on demand.)

Interesting reading the comments over at Boing Boing (two recent threads here and here) -- my favourite was the one from the person who was convinced that, because there was a busy Barnes and Noble near him, reading for pleasure had never been more popular.

Here's an article on the statistics of books that I recommend to anyone interested in book-buying, reading, fiction-reading and suchlike topics -- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-21-reading_N.htm.

Lots of you wrote to point out the article in this month's WIRED about Free...

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=1

...

And finally, I pinched this from the birdchick blog -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/28/wbird128.xml -- a strange version of Mowgli syndrome.

Russian care workers have rescued a seven-year-old “bird-boy” who can
communicate only by “chirping” after his mother raised him in a virtual aviary,
it has been reported.

Authorities say the neglected child was found
living in a tiny two-room apartment surrounded by cages containing dozens of
birds, bird feed and droppings.

Rochom was found wandering naked in
the Cambodian jungle in 2007
The so-called “bird-boy” does not understand any
human language and communicates instead by chirping and flapping his arms.

and I keep wondering what he's saying... Read the rest of this post

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I've finally managed (after lots of digging) to establish the full shortlist for the Branford Boase Award (you may recall I mentioned that Gideon The Cutpurse has been shortlisted).

Gideon the Cutpurse by Linda Buckley-Archer, Simon & Schuster
A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd, David Fickling
Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher, Hodder
Beast by Ally Kennen, Marion Lloyd/Scholastic
The Awful Tale of Agatha Bilke by Sian Pattenden, Short Books
You're a bad man, Mr Gum by Andy Stanton, Egmont
Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma, Random House

The judging panel includes Nicolette Jones (writer and critic), Claudia Mody (fiction buyer for Waterstones), Annie Everall (Derbyshire Libraries) and Frances Hardinge, who won last year for her debut novel, Fly by Night. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Thursday 28 June at Walker Books in London.

I confess I've only read two of the shortlisted books - and whilst I thoroughly enjoyed Stoneheart, I'm unashamedly rooting for Gideon the Cutpurse !

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