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Tweaks and enhancements

1. In order to improve site security, we've temporarily suspended the ability to change passwords for old email addresses that haven't been used for over six months. For further information and support, please visit our customer care page.
2. We've launched a new mobile site with an enhanced UI at m.livejournal.com. View spotlights, post to your journal, read and post to friends pages, and more, no matter where you roam! Please let us know what you think, since this will eventually replace our existing mobile interface. You can update your mobile preferences on your account page.
3. We've upgraded from Beacon to Facebook Connect to improve dual posting. If you've already signed up for Facebook Beacon, you're good to go. If you wish to update your Facebook Connect setting, visit Account Privacy settings and scroll down to the option labeled: "Send information about my updates to Facebook." You can choose Always or Ask each time. Remember to save (on the bottom left corner of the page). To learn more, check out FAQ 249. While we're on the subject, if you happen to be visiting that side of town, please join our Facebook fan page for a touch of home away from home.
4. You'll now receive the Writer's Block Question of the Day in the body of email notifications. To sign up for Writer's Block notifications, visit writersblock and choose the Watch Community option. Next, update your Writer's Block notification settings by checking the box to the right of "Someone posts a new entry to writersblock."
5. Paid and permanent users can now view, add, and edit Notes of commenters. Notes will appear beside the username of comment posters (instead of stars) on S1-themed comment pages.

Send some lovin' thanks to your friends with our holiday vgifts!

Photos of the week

We're so delighted with the immense talent of our growing, global lj_photophile community that we've decided to introduce a poll. Each week, we'll choose a half-dozen photos (based on user comments and staff feedback) and ask you to select a photo of the week. The winning photo will be announced in the next newsletter. If possible, please limit photo size to 350x350 to ensure that images display properly on friends pages. We want to thank you again (and again!) for sharing your passion.

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!

officialgaiman

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/does-anyone-else-have-something-further.html

She's taking pictures of me to find one that could be used as a poster for National Library Week, and for press releases. Here are a few of the photos from yesterday, raw from her camera. I put up a selection at http://twitpic.com/photos/neilhimself. Here are four of my favourites. One of them is not of me.

(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.)

Does anyone else have something further to add?

officialgaiman

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/blood-blood-in-unimaginable-quantities.html

theljstaff
news

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:

1. seraphene
2. fotog
3. boykitten
4. seshat_6
5. anti_aol
6. lisalees
7. katrinkacat
8. mistyboston
9. _woody_lein
10. another_slender

Bugs, Tweaks, and Enhancements

1. We fixed a bug from the last release that was causing screened comments to become unscreened if they were edited
2. If you happen to be gaming around the corner, check us out on Facebook and be sure to spread the word!
3. We've added new vgifts to celebrate Thanksgiving! Check out our feathered friend, below!

Give more with charitable vgifts

In honor of national adoption month, we're offering a charitable vgift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that provides healthcare and adoption to orphans suffering from life-threatening diseases. LiveJournal will donate 100% of gross proceeds from the sale (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries vgifts in the Virtual Gift shop. We'll keep you posted on how much we raise!

Photos of the week

We're delighted to showcase yet more incredible photos from some of our brilliant LiveJournal photographers around the world. Keep posting (and tagging). And be sure to show some love by commenting on the awesome view at lj_photophile.

Check out this week's photos and more amazing user content after the jump!

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. See you next week!

officialgaiman

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/local-man-in-hate-mail-outrage-shock.html

The Headline for the Guardian article is

Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book buried under awards
As the fantasy world's renaissance man collects yet another award, he talks to Michelle Pauli

I 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.)

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.
"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?' "

but with the headline of

Coraline author Neil Gaiman received 'hate mail' for liking Rudyard Kipling
Neil Gaiman, the author behind the surprise film hit Coraline, received "hate mail" for professing that Rudyard Kipling was one of his literary heroes.

I 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."

...

Someone wrote to me recently asking,

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?

Raymond

I figured I'd wait until the facts were in before commenting. So, in brief:

Over in Kentucky, a library worker (not librarian) felt menaced by what she felt was the satanic sexualness of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, and kept it checked out for a year so no-one could read it. (Except her: and she had to be prayed over while she read it.) What worried this lady was,

She just didn't want this book in the Graphic Novel section, which is located next to Young Adult Fiction.

She wasn't trying to keep it from kids. She was keeping it from everyone.

Then a customer put it on order, and the computer would no longer keep it checked out to keep it off the shelves. She violated library policy by finding out who had it on order, discovered the person who wanted it was an 11 year old girl (no information has been given as to whether this was with or without parental knowledge, but I don't think that would have mattered to this lady) and she persuaded another library worker (also not a librarian) to help her stop anyone getting the book. Around this point their plan was exposed. They'd violated enough library rules and policies that they were dismissed. Strangely enough, even after they were fired, the original lady who took the book off the shelves still hasn't returned the book, which seems to me to have crossed the invisible line that separates "stopping people reading things you don't like" from "stealing".

(Incidentally, for those who haven't read it, LOEG: The Black Dossier is many things, but it isn't Lost Girls, and it certainly isn't pornography, although it has moments that comment on classic texts, including some pornographic ones. It has a couple of pin-up-y images. It's got comic-book violence in it and some realistic violence too. It has references in it to British children's fiction that an 11 year old girl in Kentucky is very unlikely to get. Pam Noles wrote an essay about race, minstrelsy and the problematic use of the Golliwogg in it. Is it a book I think an 11 year old would enjoy and get stuff out of? Depends on your 11 year old. I'm always surprised when I meet Sandman readers under the age of 13, but I've met some, and they were ready for it.)

The events are summarised at The Beat here, with a two page local newspaper article that presents a fairly balanced picture of the events here.

So my thoughts of a library in Kentucky firing two librarians who restricted reading materials to a child? I think the library did the right thing. And I think they should get their book back from the lady who stole it.

...

Over at Audiofile Magazine there's a celebration of the audiobooks of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (me): interviews with Martin Jarvis, Stephen Briggs, Nigel Planer and George Guidall talking about the ups and downs of reading us aloud. http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/epicks/1109_landingpage.html

...

Thank you to all the people who have submitted International Covers (here's the submission page) to the International Covers Page. I'll try and put a few covers here from time to time. Here's one from Russia:

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.]

And finally, someone on the NPR blog wrote about Sandman. It's meant to be a nice review of the P. Craig Russell Sandman: Dream Hunters, and I think it was probably meant to be funny, but if so the author seems to have misjudged the tone, and instead just turned out a series of patronising cliches about somebody's idea of Sandman readers.

Which puzzles me, because I've met hundreds of thousands of people who read Sandman all around the world, and they look just like everyone else: all they seem to have in common is that they are intelligent bipeds capable of understanding comics, who like Sandman. Probably a lot like the person who wrote the article.

[Edit to add, other people don't seem to find it funny either.]

officialgaiman

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/11/revealed-rulers-of-darkness-of-this.html

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 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.