Neil Gaiman's Blog, page 55

posted by NeilThere. Up much too early, to accompany Stephin Merritt to the airport, so we only had to do one airport run and so I could use my magic flies-too-much powers to whisk Stephin through the special short lines.
Am now holed up in the Northwest Lounge, catching up on email and getting work done. The danger of doing this is that I can completely go into the Writing Stuff  headspace, and in two hours and 15 minutes from now utterly forget that I should be leaving the lounge and finding a

posted by NeilSometimes people ask me what I would like to do, if I wasn't a writer. Normally, I do not know. There's not much that I'm good at apart from making things up. But today, I read about the other job I could do.

No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smeltin

posted by NeilAs of 7:30 tonight, Stephin Merritt has luggage and a Bouzhouki, and is a happy, happy man.

(Picture of Mr Merritt shortly before his luggage arrived. He was pretty happy then, too.)

I don't really want to talk about the thing Stephin and I are working on yet -- it's early days. A strange sort of thing that's all our own little private project. When it's ready, I'll talk about it. Today was mostly spent filling out little cards of different colours with words like "Decapitation" and

posted by NeilI'm working on something I can't talk about, while awaiting the arrival of Stephin Merritt, out to work on a project that I can't talk about (a different one). I feel like I should start putting my collar up and talking in code phrases.

Neil,

I read your post today regarding "cashing in" on Blueberry Girl and Crazy Hair. It totally pisses me off when people can't be happy for the success of others when it's righfully due. I have seen this phenomenon on message boards of popular ban

posted by NeilI have a really high tolerance level for twits. I really do. I know how easy it is to ask a stupid question. But, people...
I'm not actually going to post the letter that just came in that informed me that publishing Blueberry Girl and Crazy Hair was a cheap attempt to cash in on winning the Newbery Medal, because if it was me that had sent it, I don't think I'd want to be held up to ridicule, and I keep promising myself to use this power only for good.
But look, whoever-you-are, htt

posted by NeilA video, put together by Brady Hall, using one of the readings I did during the Graveyard Book reading tour (I'll ask him which one), and the Charles Vess art from the book (out in ten days or less).



Over on Mousecircus.com, at the Blueberry Girl page, you can read the thing I wrote to explain what this book is.

But because not everyone is going to head over there, it says:

Hello.

You're probably wondering what kind of book this is.

This is the kind of book that comes about when a frie

posted by NeilJust a quick one, as a follow-up to http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/02/quick-argument-summary.html and http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/02/zoom-zzzzoom.html.
Right.

1) go and read Wil Wheaton's post http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/02/wil-wheaton-vs-text-2-speech.html

2) Listen, actually listen to Wil and "Alex" reading at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/files/wil_wheaton_vs_text_2_speech.mp3

3) Now imagine a world in which someone sits with a novel on the screen and ca

posted by NeilThe snow started to fall. Lorraine (my assistant) wanted a photo of herself in the snow, so I took some. She took some of me. (Cabal is wearing his gentle leader as he's still not really meant to go for wild runs. I am not wearing a coat as it's sort of warm and I am going back inside in a moment to write.)

And then the snow continued to fall, in a strange sort of whiteout. And I took some more photos of Lorraine, and in return, she took a few of me. (I am now wearing a coat. Stran

posted by NeilFound it, in a box in the attic, filled with mid-80s softcore porn mags containing interviews, book or film reviews, or articles, all by me. (When asked why, back then, I would explain that I sold my first article to a "respectable magazine" who paid 80 pounds for it and never printed it, and my second, because the first wouldn't take it, to UK Penthouse, who paid 300 pounds and printed it in the next issue, and really, it was decided for me then.)
I don't like the title, and I do

posted by NeilFrom September 1986 TIME OUT. I was a very proud 25-year-old journalist, because this was the first big article on comics to be published in the UK, in a "real" magazine. It's hard to communicate, in this golden age of geeks, how hard this was to make happen, or how important it was for a number of things, including morale. (They prepared a Dave Gibbons Watchmen cover, and, at the last moment, didn't use it and went with Michael Clark instead.)There are goofs in there (it wasn't Wa