(EDIT: oh hey dumbass it's part 2, not 1. wake up.)
As a random note, noticing the icons I use on this journal... dear God my art has made some changes.
Anyway, hope those of you that did the turkey holiday thing had fun. Hope you're not fool enough to go out shopping on Friday.
- Shinga

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Photos of the week
We're so delighted with the immense talent of our growing, global
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Check out this week's photo poll and more fantastic user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
Thanks for joining us. To our American friends, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. To all of our international neighbors, we'll eat a little extra for you!

Good morning. I cannot stay long as deadlines are happening.
Cat Mihos, in association with the CBLDF, has made the most beautiful print of Jim Lee's glorious pencil-art to accompany my poem "100 Words". It'll be limited to 750 numbered prints, and is lettered by Todd Klein. (Click on it in order to actually see it at readable size.) She decided that the first 24 hours it was on sale at her neverwear.net site, it would be $35, going up to $45 the following day. I linked to it on Twitter and... crashed the site. (Or possibly, crashed the shopping cart. I'm not sure. Different reports from people who couldn't get in.)
So Cat is extending the sale (at http://www.neverwear.net/store/) until the end of Monday, when she gets home from her trip out here, to apologise to people who had problems, and to allow people to get to it. You can read all about it (and see lots of Cat's candid snaps, including one of me in a 20 foot long Tom Baker style Doctor Who scarf I was sent by a reader who knits and likes Doctor Who and thought I needed one) over at http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com
And on the subject of photos, KImberly Butler is out at the house right now to shoot photos of me, with her daughter Caitlin as a camera assistant. She is a remarkable photographer (http://www.kimberlybutler.com is her website). She's here because I am the Honorary Chair of National Library Week next year (details at this ALA website).
(Strangest twitter comment this morning was from the person who told me off for surgically trimming my dog's ears. Someone who, I assume, has never encountered a German Shepherd or has any idea what their ears do. His ears are fine -- he just sticks them up when he's interested or listening. )

During the shoot Lorraine brought me tea. I got happy. Kimberly kept shooting.

Princess the cat and deformed bunnies (and a two-headed teddy). Probably will not be a National Library Week poster. (Click to see it full-size.)
I go. Maddy's violin recital, a short story and an introduction are waiting. Zoom.
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.
Dear fine, noble sir, I wish to inquire as to your favorite Wodehouse novels. As I was looking upon journals of my exploits, strangely written in the third person, it occurred to me that my autobiographical tales always seemed to bear the most power. I was wondering if you felt the same.
Yours sincerely,
Some Ass
I do. My favourite Wodehouse novel is definitely Psmith Journalist. I think, because it was about something, in a way that most Wodehouse books aren't. (They're about themselves, in the same way that Agatha Christie novels are about themselves.)

Postcard winners!
We wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude for sending so much joy our way. Frank is still blushing with excitement over the love notes, proposals, propositions, and occasional intimate photos sent from his admirers around the world (China, Norway, Japan, and Poland just this week)! At his request, we blindfolded Justin, one of Frank's BFFs, spun him around in five dozen counterclockwise circles, and asked him to point to ten random postcards/envelopes pasted to the wall. After a brief trip to the bathroom, he chose the following lucky winners, to whom we will give a six-month paid account token (for paid, basic, and plus users) or, for our permanent account holders, a $15 voucher for the LiveJournal gift shop.

So, without further ado, the winners are:
seraphene
fotog
boykitten
seshat_6
anti_aol
lisalees
katrinkacat
mistyboston
_woody_lein
another_slender
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Photos of the week
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Check out this week's photos and more amazing user content after the jump!
( Read more... )Curtains
Thanks, again, for joining us. See you next week!
There's a terrific article/interview in the Guardian about it (I even like the photo, even though I cannot explain the hair) at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/1

The Headline for the Guardian article is
Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book buried under awardsI quite like the "buried under awards" joke. (Although The Graveyard Book definitely hasn't won all, or even most, of the awards it's been nominated for. Margo Lanagan's wonderful Tender Morsels and Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year [which may be wonderful but which I haven't read yet] beat it to the World Fantasy Award, just as Graham Joyce's Memoirs of a Master Forger beat it to the August Derleth award, for example.)
As the fantasy world's renaissance man collects yet another award, he talks to Michelle Pauli
When I was a journalist, one of the things that stopped me wanting to spend the rest of my life journalisting was sub-editors who made me feel embarrassed by carefully introducing mistakes or slight distortions into things I'd written, or into headlines. So I felt a twinge when I read the Daily Telegraph interview, in which I was quoted pretty accurately,
Gaiman, 49, said: "I definitely don't write like Kipling but he was a literary hero as a kid.but with the headline of
"I was fascinated when I first started mentioning that I thought Kipling was an amazing writer.
"I started getting – not exactly hate mail – it was more disappointed mail.
"People would tell me, 'How could a writer like you – that we like – like a fascist, an imperialist dog?' "
Coraline author Neil Gaiman received 'hate mail' for liking Rudyard KiplingI keep forgetting about the new-style sensationalist Daily Telegraph. I like the way that "not exactly hate mail... disappointed mail" in the body of the article turns into "hate mail" in the headline. And was Coraline really a surprise hit? And is mentioning the Coraline film really how the Telegraph audience would go from "Who...?" to "Oh, right, him."
Neil Gaiman, the author behind the surprise film hit Coraline, received "hate mail" for professing that Rudyard Kipling was one of his literary heroes.
Dear Mr. Gaiman,
You've often talked about the rights for readers to choose the books they want to read without censorship. What are your thoughts of a library in Kentucky firing two librarians who restricted reading materials to a child?
She just didn't want this book in the Graphic Novel section, which is located next to Young Adult Fiction.
This is the cover to the Russian Edition of FRAGILE THINGS, which I suppose might contain "The Witch's Headstone", or is just a very Graveyard Booky sort of a cover. [Edit to add, I just clicked on it, saw it full-size and realised they're both boys, and it's an "October in the Chair" cover.]
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.
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 triumph as we didn't hit the car in front of us was slightly spoiled when a car slammed into us from behind. We got to the side of the road, did all the things you do in circumstances like that, traded information, waited for the police to arrive, worried that Amanda might miss the gig (this may just have been the people in my car, which was me and Amanda), and were generally shaken. I wouldn't have wanted to perform after that (and in fact I declined to, when Amanda asked if I'd like to read a story from the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book that night) but she did an amazing gig that night - one of my favourites ever. Her backing group (who are also the support act), The Nervous Cabaret, are incredible, and they sound fantastic as a team. I've only ever really known her as a girl with a keyboard alone on a stage, before. Other highlights (for me) included the Brel song "Amsterdam" (which I knew as Bowie B-side, as a teenager) and a "Pirate Jenny", which always makes me think of Watchmen, and, for Maddy (who was originally meant to be there, but wasn't, so will see it onYouTube) a Ting Tings cover. And we did a signing afterward.
That was not the most exciting thing. The most exciting thing was that up in the dressing room beforehand (which was warm and nice and carpeted and had no sad graffiti at all) Sxip Shirey and I listened to the last of the music tracks that Sxip had done for my silent movie as we watched it in Quicktime on Sxip's powerbook, I chose the strings instead of the piano for the scene in the car when Bill Nighy is driving away from the pub, and we watched it all through, with Sxip starting each bit of music at the right place, making it the first ever play-through of the film with finished music.
The film (which is called STATUESQUE) will be broadcast in the UK over Christmas, on Sky 1 and (I think) Sky Arts. I am not sure which day yet, as there are eleven of these films, and the running order has not yet been decided. I'll post it when I find out.
http://never-travelled.blogspot.com/2009/1
Those who made "Coraline" are also likely to endorse the evils of abortion and homosexual marriage, and given a chance, could easily change America into a Soviet-style hell on earth. That is - if you will - Mother Hulda shows the soul of the Right, and Coraline, the tormented soul of the Left....but because of the way it mis-described and omits important things from the Grimms' fairy tale it opens with (and ineptly compares Coraline to). Here's a link to the actual story: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/diamo
A side-by-side comparison of the two stories reveals that ours is much more than a political struggle. Ours is truly "a battle against principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places.*"





