You know, the readers of this blog, between you all, know everything. Last year I posted about Joe Hill saying One of my favourite short stories from last year was called "Best New Horror" by an author I'd not previously heard of named Joe Hill, in PS publishing"s Postscripts #3. His website's http://www.joehillfiction.com/index.htm , and I just noticed that he has a collection out, 20th Century Ghosts. I don't have much time for reading currently, but I'm going to order a copy.and the next morning I got an email from someone named Jeff saying,Thanks for your post on Joe Hill yesterday. It happened to be the other half of a coincidence that gave me a fun few minutes of detective work on the web. Perhaps you knew this already and were being coy, but it turns out Hill is actually Joe Hill King and his parents are backwoods Maine hermits who have dabbled in the writing game themselves from time to time.See, I came home late with a copy of the new Entertainment Weekly and, working from the back, read Stephen King's latest essay wherein he gave a shout-out to a friend of his kids' named Shane Leonard. Good for him. Then I came upstairs to peruse a few blogs, clicked on the Hill link you provided and somewhere on there spotted a nod to Hill's web master -- a guy named Shane Leonard...Like I say, between you, you people know everything, or you figure it out. It was something that, now I knew it, I decided not to remember or to mention here -- mostly because I could see why Joe was doing it under his own steam, and I thought that was a good thing. I was pleased I'd liked the story first, before realising that the author was the nice young man I'd met at the Season of Mists signing in Boston, fourteen years earlier.Anyway, I loved Twentieth Century Ghosts, and was then very surprised by Heart-Shaped Box, which I had expected to be quiet and literary, like the short stories, and was instead a terrific roller coaster, almost impossible to stop reading. I loved it, took pleasure in blurbing it, and was extremely pleased to see this New York Times review by Janet Maslin who seems to have enjoyed it just as much as I did.I see from his website -- http://www.joehillfiction.com/ -- that he's now, as of yesterday -- on an author signing tour. Go and see him if he's coming near you. Tell him I said Hi.(So far this year, my favourite book is Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg. It's the nearest thing to a sequel to Charmed Lives she's written -- a Chrestomanci novel with Cat in it, and a lot more besides. The sort of book that makes you sad on page 400 because you only have a hundred pages to go and then it'll be done.)Dear Neil;Furtherto your comments on "The Land of Green Ginger", I remember seeing it televised in the late '50s. I searched the IMDB and it was Episode 6 of Season 1 of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" shown 18 April 1958. Each episode of the series dramatized a (usually) well known fairy/Arabian Nights/fantasy story. I really can't actually remember the episodes but I do remember the longing for the next episode in the series.Cheers,Paul BurrowsOddly enough, some years ago I bought the video from someone on eBay. It was an odd sort of thing, not really funny, not quite sure what it was, and I wondered if it was the experience of working on it that sent Langley back to the material for what became the 1965 edition of the book, which is much sharper and more knowing and odd. It is out there, and probably pretty soon it'll probably show up on YouTube....This came in from a very happy Elizabeth, the manager at DreamHaven...42 orders so far. Your fans rock! You can tell them I said so. Also that we will fill orders as fast as possible, but there may be some delay, because the manager is now teary-eyed and it slows down her typing.Love,ElizabethI'm as grateful as she is....and right now I find myself playing, over and over, "When My Ship Comes In" a piece of music I found on the Fabulist, by the North Atlantic Explorers.And over at http://polloxniner.blogs.com/polloxniner/2006/02/_having_lived_l.html, is the North Atlantic Explorers cover of Lloyd Cole's "I Will Not Leave You Alone", which is a perfect Valentine's Day sort of a song, if you wanted one. (My very favourite Valentine song is probably Thea Gilmore's "Holding Your Hand" but I couldn't find it up online, so I am not linking to it.)

I've been a fan of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis for over fifteen years, probably since Terry Pratchett and I did our first signing there for Good Omens (had I signed there before? I think so, but I can't remember. I first met owner Greg Ketter in 1987, on a train from Brighton to London, though). I like Greg Ketter and the staff, I love getting my books there (they have things I never see anywhere else that I WANT. I'm sure that lots of bookshops sell the annotated archy and mehitabel, but if I walk into DreamHaven something like that is the first thing I see. Happiness).A few years ago I gave them www.neilgaiman.net, which I had, as a storefront, mostly because I got tired of replying to people who wanted to know where they could buy something -- anything -- by me "DreamHaven Books." I sign stuff for them when I pass by.Some people think I have a stake in the shop or something, and I don't, other than a desire to still have it around as somewhere to do my shopping or to do signings or to phone and ask weird book-related questions. I've seen too many good bookshops go down in the last decade.Greg's published a few of my books and audio books. They've even functioned as a maildrop for me over the years. Good people, good bookshop (and comics shop, and toys, oddments and even, in the backroom, eye-watering reading matter for adults only shop). (I don't know of any other shop that has "Vintage Sleaze" as a category for used books.)I got an alarming email from Greg this morning...We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreakedterrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly butinsurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in currentbusiness, this really will hurt. I don't like charity but if you couldencourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months andI don't want to make it four.You can find them online at http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com. Their current catalogues are up there, for new and for used stuff. There's cool new stuff. There's stuff on sale.If you want stuff by me -- or by people like Charles Vess or Dave McKean, who've worked with me, go and explore their http://neilgaiman.net site. Lots of signed stuff, and things you really can't find elsewhere. (They have three audio CDs, for example -- one's a double CD -- with many stories and such not recorded anywhere else.)And if you're in the Minneapolis area, pop in. It's a big purple building. You can't miss it.Go buy books from them. And tell other people. This is me being selfish. I want to buy books at DreamHaven for a long time to come. Good things die when people forget.

This Minnesotan law reads as if it was written by two different people. And that it should be sung by a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque politician, with a chorus of lady lawmakers in the background. http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=631Also, it made me miss Mike Ford, who would have done it better....And the ORACULAR INSTRUMENT OF DIVINATION now has its own webpage, which should be more long-lasting and useful than the one in the blog a couple of entries ago: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/8ball/

I've mentioned on this blog how much I enjoyed, both as a boy and as an adult reading it aloud, Noel Langley's wry and delightful Arabian Nights fantasia The Land of Green Ginger, a book that Langley (best known, I think, for his work on the script of the film The Wizard of Oz) wrote and rewrote three times over a thirty year period. (My favourite is the second version from 1966, which has twelve and a half chapters.)This morning's post brought me a book and a letter, from Paul Durrant, an English publisher, explaining that my mentioning The Land of Green Ginger on my blog had caused him to find and reread it, and that he had gone on a quest for more Noel Langley books, the rarest of which was Desbarollda the Waltzing Mouse, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Which, when he found it, he liked so much, he got the rights to republish it, and did (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Desbarollda-Waltzing-Mouse-Noel-Langley/dp/1905946023/).The book was Desbarollda. I read the first paragraph and was hooked. A sixty-three page eighteenth century novel in the grand manner about a waltzing mouse. Of course.I found five pages up at Amazon, and am reposting the first two pages of the first chapter here. Click on them to see them large enough to read. If you're going to like it, you'll know pretty quickly:I'm already putting a list together of people I need to get copies for (let's see.... Susanna Clarke, Ellen Kushner...)

I think this was originally the Webelf's idea. She then enlisted Dan Guy into her web of madness. I agreed that if you were going to have a blog birthday toy that nothing could possibly be more appropriate, and then I played my part in its creation by a) suggesting that a Swami costume was much more appropriate than a wizard's hat and b) declining to take a day off work to rent a Swami costume and have my photo taken in it and c) finally saying "What, like you don't do wonders in Photoshop for a living? Fake it."So...First of all, THIS IS NOT A TOY. THIS IS A SERIOUS INSTRUMENT OF DIVINATION. It should only be used by those prepared to approach it with the proper sense of reverence and mystical awe, those among you who are emotionally and spiritually prepared to have the curtain drawn, and to come face to face with YOUR OWN FUTURE.To begin with, the quaestor must put himself, herself, itself or themselves in the right frame of mind. A fast is recommended, but not compulsory. Cleanse yourself of all impure thoughts. Tidy your room or perhaps polish the silverware.Then imagine your question. Frame it in your mind in general terms. Do not seek material gain (the Serious Instrument of Divination will frustrate all efforts to unlock the secrets of lottery numbers or the outcome of sporting events or higher level physics -- not because it does not know -- FOOLISH MORTALS, IT KNOWS ALL -- but because THE WORLD IS NOT YET READY). Seek spiritual enhancement. Seek divine enlightenment.Then shake the mystical ball of truth. Don't just click on it. Shake it. Honest. Only when it is shaken do the gates of the future swing open and allow information through.And then, mystically and magically, the information you need will be plucked from the 950,000 words of this blog, and will be placed before you.The words that you are given are guaranteed to be perfectly applicable to your situation, and will teach you how to react and what to do next. However, if they aren't, or if you don't like them, then shake again and new words will appear, perhaps more applicable, perhaps less so. Only you will know for certain -- only you, and the Oracle.DO NOT GET INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH THE MYSTICAL AND ORACULAR BALL OF ENLIGHTENMENT. It will win.There.Have you read these instructions carefully?Do you need to read them again?[For serious Seekers after Truth it is recommended that you print out this post and meditate upon it for several months before you first attempt to draw back the veil. Many true and dedicated Pilgrims on the Road of Oracular Enlightenment have had the contents of this post tattooed upside down upon their stomachs, so that they can read and study and contemplate it when in, for example, the bathtub, the shower or in certain Yogic positions.]Are you ready?THEN PREPARE TO BE AMAZED AND CONFOUNDED!(Please note that the mystical power of the Oracular Instrument of Divination is such that it can only be guaranteed to work here at www.neilgaiman.com and not at feeds, syndications or other such places. Far from being a drawback, this is in fact a TESTAMENT TO ITS EFFICACY! If you are reading this on a feed and you need to consult the oracle, do so at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/now-we-are-six.html)NOTE -- the Magical Journal 8 ball now has a permanent home at neilgaiman.com, at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/8ball/. and will always work there. Here (shrugs) it may or it may not.

My daughter Holly is producing The Vagina Monologues at Bryn Mawr this year. http://events.vday.org/2007/College/Bryn_Mawr_College. Which I would normally not have posted here, but I just discovered from a correspondent that -- in Atlantic Beach Florida -- the play in question has has just been renamed The Hoohaa Monologues, to avoid offending passers-by with small daughters who ask embarrassing questions... which seems, somehow to miss the point on a scale that's positively awesome.Congratulations to Xeric Award winner Joshua Kemble. Many years ago Dave Sim, eyeing Kevin Eastman's publishing house Tundra and Peter Laird's nascent Xeric Foundation said, "There's a right way and wrong way to lose a million dollars". Tundra is long, long long forgotten, but since September 1992, the Xeric Foundation has given out almost 2 million dollars in grants to self-publishing comics creators. http://www.xericfoundation.com/I'm on deadline right now, doing a final spit-and-polish on Interworld (very odd, reading and fixing seven year old manuscript), so I shall not tarry here. I'll just point out that tomorrow, the Ninth of February, is this blog's birthday.And that Danguy and the Webelf have made it the best birthday toy ever. But that will have to wait until tomorrow...

Before this blog ever existed, I inhabited other places you could only get to by modem. First Compuserve, then Genie, and then the Well, and answered questions and so on in each place, and hung around. I've no idea if there are any archives anywhere of the Compuserve stuff or the Genie topics, but The Well is still there, I'm glad to say, and every few years I go back and am interviewed and hang around the inkwell.vue area for a few weeks. It's a wonderful place, and accessible to anyone from the web: http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/So, in context of the current Fragile Things interview, which has only just begun, I found myself reading a post from the 20th of June 2000, written while I was writing American Gods. Which I am reposting a bit of here because a) there's lots more cool stuff like this on the various Well topics I did (here's the first, the second, the third, -- and b) if ever a story was meant to be on this blog, it's this one....last week Maddy woke me up early in the morning."Daddy," she said, "There's a bat on the kitchen window.""Grumphle," I said and went back to sleep.Soon, she woke me up again. "I did a drawing of the bat on the kitchenwindow," she said, and showed me her drawing. For a five year oldshe's a very good artist. It was a schematic of the kitchen windows,showing a bat on one of the windows."Very nice dear," I said. Then I went back to sleep.When I went downstairs...We have, instead of dangling fly papers, transparent strips of glueyclear plastic, about six inches long and an inch high, stuck to thewindows on the ground floor. When they accumulate enough flies, youpeel them off the window and throw them away.There was a bat stuck to one. He was facing out into the room. "Ithink he's dead," said my assistant Lorraine.I peeled the plastic off the window. The bat hissed at me."Nope," I said. "He's fine. Just stuck."The question then became, how does one get a bat (skin and fur) off afly-strip. Luckily, I bethought me of the Bram Stoker award. After thedoor had fallen off (see earler in this topic) I had bought some citrussolvent to take the old glue to reglue the door on.So I dripped citrus solvent onto the grumpy bat, edging him off theplastic with a twig, until a lemon-scented sticky bat crawled onto anewspaper. Which I put on the top of a high woodpile, and watched thebat crawl into the logs. With any luck he was as right as rain thefollowing night...Of course, if it was now, I'd scan in Maddy's bat drawing to go with it. (I wonder if it's anywhere findable.)PS. A small, half-puzzled plug for the first corporate publisher blog I've seen that truly doesn't suck: http://olivereader.com/. Technically I suppose they're actually one of my publishers, but that's not why I'm plugging them. I think it's because it's now something I can point publishers at when I say "you could always do a blog..."PPS: From Dan Guy and the Webelf, the silliest of fun website toys: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/dynamic_term_cloud.phpThe new toy! Shows the top twenty terms from each month, growing and shrinking dynamically over time.Give those two time and they really will make the Blog Post Magic Eightball.

Susan Henderson's Hair-based interview is up. Copyright issues meant that the most embarrassing photos of all (from a 1996 Wired photoshoot) couldn't be posted, but there are twelve photos nobody's seen before up there, and some commentary. (And if Geoff Notkin finds a replacement punk period photo we'll swap out the one from The Kindly Ones that's up there now and it'll be a lucky thirteen.)http://litpark.com/2007/02/07/neil-gaiman/(or try feed://feeds.feedburner.com/litpark if that's too slow)(By the way, our Googlebomb appears to have now worked -- this website's Penn Jillette rating is now up at #10 -- http://www.google.com/search?q=penn+jillette. Hah!)

Every now and again I find myself thinking the wrong thing. I mean, I was reading an article in Slate on whether or not Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned, as claimed in the urban legend, and I found myself thinking, inappropriately, "That's odd."Odd, because when I crossed the Atlantic, about twenty years ago, I noticed that "to spit" was, in common American usage, no longer an irregular verb; that the past tense, at least in conversation, of "to spit" was, not "spat", but "spit". As in "I will never forget the day that this drunk guy spit at my best friend". It didn't seem to have much to do with education or region, either.But in the Slate article all the "spits" and "spats" were in the right place and tense.(A Google for "were spit on" gave me 10,500 articles, while for Googling "were spat on" gave me only 950 [and a "did I mean were spent on?"]. All the first pages were talking about Vietnam vets. )...I remember about eight years ago the then Warner Brothers co-studio head Billy Gerber told me that he got weekly calls from people who wanted to make, direct or star in a Sandman film. "On Wednesday," he said, "Michael Jackson called about it." Given the comments some months ago from Alan Horn and Jeff Robinoff, who now run Warner Brothers, I don't believe the calls from people who want to make Sandman have decreased in the last eight years -- quite the reverse. Which I mention because I got a small deluge of letters from people asking me what I thought about Joel Shumacher saying in an interview that he'd love to direct a Sandman film and wondering if that meant that it was now about to happen, and of course it doesn't and it isn't. It simply puts Mr Schumacher in a very long line of people who want to make Sandman, some way ahead of Michael Jackson....And on the subject of unlikely things, if someone had told me a book of mine would turn up on the Good Housekeeping list of "Ten Wonderful Romance Novels" I would have accused them of drunken tomfoolery and pulling an old man's leg. And yet, behold: http://magazines.ivillage.com/goodhousekeeping/view/babes/articles/0,,284607_707518,00.htmlYou want to read the first dozen or so pages of Eddie Campbell's new graphic novel? You know you do... http://www.firstsecondbooks.net/bdda/bddaGift01.htmlMy friend Dianna Graf from Tasmania just sent me link to http://www.workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Blue//http/www.neilgaiman.com//journalwhich is this journal placed in an, um, workfriendly context....Someone named Lynn wrote to tell me you could no longer right click and cut and paste on my journal from IE7. I checked and she's right: while you can do it fine with Firefox, neither IE7 nor Opera will let you cut and paste from anywhere in the www.neilgaiman.com website right now, on a PC. (Macs are fine.) This is mysterious. I'll put the webelf on to it and we'll get it fixed.

Just had a rough couple of days -- some kind of virulent food poisoning, which was no fun. (I'm lucky in having the kind of doctor who makes house calls -- not the official kind, more the turning up during his lunch break to find out how I'm doing kind.) I'm over the worst of it but just getting better.It went down to minus 21 F last night (minus 29 C)and I discovered that a slightly improvised area in the corner of the office, where a bunch of wires and cables -- mostly TV from the satellite, the DSL line, and something that I think is probably a Russian spy cable -- come in, were now, inside the office, in a warm room, covered in thick ice. I figured that was why the house network had gone down (as it had), but today I unplugged everything, then plugged everything back in (right up there with Turn It Off And Wait For A Bit in the handy list of things you can do to fix it yourself) and suddenly it worked like a charm. When things warm up I'll get the ice-wire area properly fixed and insulated. (Right now it's warmed up to minus 19 F outside.) (I chipped some of the ice off, then took a photograph. Ick, and brrr.)Susan Henderson did an interesting interview with me, mostly about hair, decorated with many embarrassing photos from the photo albums over the years, all of me with unlikely hair. We're hoping to get one final photo before it goes live, of me as a teenage punk. (She announces it -- and has a couple of hitherto unseen and quite unlikely photos up -- at http://litpark.com/2007/02/05/question-of-the-week-hair).I found this Nerve essay fascinating and wryly amusing in equal measure: The Religious Right is correct on exactly two scores: virginity can be a bigdeal, properly exploited; and what you read, listen to or watch can make a hugedifference in how you live your life. Conservatives are smart to get sexy moviesbanned from Wal-Mart. I can believe kids shoot each other because of videogames. Wilco made me throw my live-in boyfriend out of the house when I wastwenty-two. And Sandman made me torture men for sport when I was fifteen.http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/calhoun/godsofnewyork/index.asp?page=1Talking about unintentional consequences, I recently spent an interested couple of hours browsing through my complementary copy of The Neil Gaiman Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Essays on things I've written, by a dozen different very smart people. I think it's probably a very good book of essays, but I am undoubtedly the last person on earth who can usefully comment on it, being, as I am, the least competent critic alive of the author in question. There were a few moments when I felt like the author being described had done something monstrously clever , but they always immediately balanced by moments where I sighed and thought "You may think I'm being very clever there, but I only wrote it like that because that was how it happened, and I wasn't being clever at all...".The only thing I found frustrating, which I hope will be fixed in the next edition , were the little errors of fact, mistakes of date (Smoke and Mirrors was published in 1998, not 2001 as one essay claims-- it's correctly cited several times elsewhere in the book) or of artist (Dave McKean didn't draw The Doll's House, nor did Clive Barker produce it), and little typos that render it less reliable than it might otherwise be as work of academic reference.Several people wrote to let me know that the Penn Jillette Googlebomb had worked as we were in the Google top ten, and several other people wrote to let me know that Google had changed their algorithm to stop Googlebombs... and given that the Google ranking of "Penn Jillette" here went up to #8 and then, within hours, vanished completely (and is apparently now down in the 300s -- although it's still riding really high on Yahoo) suggests that anti-Googlebomb activity might be the case. (I could always call My Son At Google, but he'd just take enormous pleasure in telling me that he's signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot possibly comment...) Be interesting to see if it climbs back up again now...(My enormous thanks to everyone who posted the link. You are all troupers, and I am very grateful.)I just learned that the audiobook of me reading FRAGILE THINGS was just nominated for an Audie Award (http://www.audiopub.org/files/public/Audies_Finalists_Release.pdf) which is extremely nice -- although I thought the audiobook of Stardust I recorded was better. Fat lot I know. (The unabridged audiobook I did of Neverwhere should come out in the autumn. Now, that one was work.)I really like the House of Lords when they say things like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6329851.stmAnd I keep meaning to mention that if you order a copy the new special edition Last Unicorn DVD from the Conlan Press site, half the money goes to Peter Beagle, and your copy will be signed, as opposed to ordering it from anywhere else in which case it won't be signed by anyone, and Peter won't see a penny. http://www.conlanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc

A couple of tiny bits of Stardust news.I was thrilled to hear that Paramount moved the date of release to August 10 2007. Which means we're no longer up against the Simpsons Movie etc. And Ben Barnes, who plays young Dunstan Thorne (and is thus, apart from Ian McKellen, the first speaking part in the film) was just cast as Prince Caspian. And may be sued by the National Theatre for jumping ship on The History Boys according to the Times.

The Webelf wanted clouds made from the years of content on this journal. Dan Guy leapt to her assistance -- Robin to her Batman, Kato to her Green Hornet, Etta Candy to her Wonder Woman. Now you can see the results of his cloud-making work over at:http://neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/example-words.phphttp://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/term_cloud.htmlAnd you will learn odd things about the blog. (I know I did.)(The full version, including an extra 200,000 words of Questions and comments not by me is at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/clouds/word_cloud.html , but seems less informative the the other two.)Thanks Elf. Thanks Dan Guy.And they also tell the story of

The quote is from Penn's radio show. You can also get it free from iTunes (here's the URL).Over at Time Magazine they have a round up of the top ten comics/graphic novels of the year. All good choices, although I was surprised by the appearance on the list of some fine reprints (Kings in Disguise, for example.). Still, it was nice for me to see Absolute Sandman on there, mostly because when I wrote it, in 1987-1989, it would have been unthinkable for Time Magazine, or any real-world magazine, to have devoted any space at all to graphic novels or comics on a Best of the Year list. http://www.time.com/time/topten/2006/comics/10.htmlLocus's Recommended list for 2006 is up at http://www.locusmag.com/2007/2006RecommendedReading.htmlNEIL: JUST READ YOUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS - BUT I SEND YOU SOMETHING AT DREAMHAVEN -WILL THAT GET TO YOUOR DID I IS JUST WASTED MONEY SPEND ON MAILING? ALSO, ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO BE SPENDING SO MUCH TIME IN HOLLYWOOD? LUV YA- CLAREIt'll get to me, don't worry. It just tends not to be a very fast thing.And no, I'm not going to be spending so much time in Hollywood, that's just where Cat and her office is. The joy of the modern world is that things can move around it very easily, and we decided that it's far better if letters and suchlike go to someone who can look at them that day and figure out what's meant to happen next, rather than be put in a box with my name on it under the counter at DreamHaven and wait for the next time I decide I need a haircut and go down to Hair Police and stop in at DreamHaven to sign stuff for them on the way home....Lots of artists and possibly someone who isn't an artist drew Spider-Man covers for a good cause. Details and you can pick out the blogging not-an-artist at:http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=9528...In honor of National Gorilla Suit Day, I did an artist trading card and thought you might enjoy it, a bit.Here's the url: http://www.mcmatz.com/2007/01/ebay_auction_at_4.html I will now slowly back towards the exit and fade away...--MadelineOh Mark Evanier and Don Martin, what have you wrought?Dear Mr Gaiman, I've just finished watching the recording of the Cody's Books readings and Q&A session. I'd never heard you read your work before. It's distressing to find out that not only are you a fantastic author but you are also an evocative oral story teller. Surely you're not allowed to be both? On to my question. (I searched and couldn't find anything specifically on this topic but my apologies if I missed it.) As a writer, do you get a similar feeling of closure/reward/enjoyment when you've created the final climax of a story that you hope your readers will experience when reading it or do you always have one eye on the technicalities of writing? Thank you.Regards, Clare MilnerYou're too kind.And the only answer I can give is neither. Because you're not experiencing it at the same speed. There's a relief at getting to the end, but it's also the relief of getting to the end of something you've been working on for, often, several years. Which doesn't mean you're not affected on an emotional level by scenes or by what happens to characters, or that you don't feel what's happening while you write it. But a reader will read something in a few hours that might have taken you a couple of years or more to write. And that big moment of closure may have been followed by another six months of writing.Neil,In a post a little while ago you mentioned the reading list John Crowley compiled - which looks absolutely fascinating. You said a couple of the books on the list were your favourites in the world. So that would seem to me a good place to start! Which were they though? Sorry if the answer should be apparent from elsewhere on the site but I couldn't find it...Best wishesDominic HartleyThey are Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, a book I adore; and The Songlines by the brilliant Bruce Chatwin (do not write to me and point out that Songlines is factually dodgy sometimes. It's still an amazing book and Chatwin wrote astoundingly well)....Do you realise this blog will be six years old on February the Ninth? I've had some ideas of things that we could put up that would be fun and special to celebrate the birthday, but they may not be ready in time......g'day mr. gaiman. or night. or whatever it is, where you're at.i've been going through your blog for a couple of days now... (...) here are a couple of questions that i sincerely want to know the answers to.with all the fame and joy you've attained from writing, aren't you afraid to lose it all in an instant? i don't want to be morbid and all, but with all the hard work you've put in to your works, are you afraid to die?sorry... i wanted to ask j.r.r. tolkien the same thing but he isn't around... you see, i'm scared of dying and i'm poor... what is it like for you who has all the things you've achieved in life?I remember being scared of dying when I was on the plane from London to New York in mid 1988 with the first half of Dave McKean's Black Orchid art travelling in the plane cabin with me -- these were the painted originals, and there were no copies as Dave, barely out of art school, couldn't have afforded to get them all shot at that point. I was writing Sandman issue two or three back then.And I knew that if the plane went down Dave would never have redrawn the Black Orchid pages, and it would never come out, and that even if the first couple of Sandmans came out no-one would have known where it was going or what it was going to be. I crossed the Atlantic sweating, mentally keeping that plane in the air all the way.Nineteen years later, I'm remarkably sanguine about life and death. I'm really lucky, in that I've achieved an awful lot of the things I wanted to do, and some people noticed. If I died soon (something, I should add here, that I have no intention of doing; I like life and all the things that come with it), I'd leave a body of varied and interesting work and three amazing kids behind, and that's more than I ever set out to do or hoped for.Does that help?...I'd like to ask a small favour of those of you who have read down this far. Would anyone reading this, anyone with a blog or a website that is, mind linking to the last post -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/and-in-time-it-took-to-say-that-neil.html -- with the link text Penn Jillette? Given Penn's recent rant about the power and ubiquity of this blog on his radio show, I'd like to mess with his head just a little and see if we can actually google-bomb it so that that entry shows in the top few entries if you google Penn's name.And sshhh, don't anyone tell him. I want it to be a surprise.

Listen to my friend Penn Jillette, on his astounding radio show (http://www.pennradio.com/) having much too much fun at, er, my expense while doing a whole show about National Gorilla Suit day. I laughed until I couldn't breathe, but I freely acknowledge that it may be slightly less funny if you're not me.But it's still damn funny. You can download it at...http://penn.freefm.com/episode_download.php?contentType=36&contentId=258493

Right -- the Black Phoenix Alchemy page of scents for the CBLDF is now up athttp://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/neverwhere.htmlAnd I'm investigating whether we can do Stardust ones right now (as the Stardust scents that Beth sent were Maddy's favourites)....And -- we'll put this up on the FAQ page and so on -- there is now a real address to send stuff that you want to get to my attention, which should work much better than DreamHaven Books (where stuff would sit in a box until the next time I came by). It is,4470 Sunset Blvd. # 339Los Angeles, CA 90027USAAnd it's being run by the Mystery Aide. Who is actually (drum-roll) Cat Mihos (http://www.furrytiger.com/), who is going to try and make sure that less of my life falls through the cracks, that I have more time and so on. (Currently lots of the mail coming in through the FAQ line is people who want to interview me, or for me to answer a few questions for their book, dissertation or website, to the point that if I said yes to them all or even to half, I would never get any time to do or write anything else. So those kind of requests, along with anything else, can now be sent to Cat who can at least coordinate them.)And Cat is also Cat@gaiman.net, should any of you need to reach her directly. She'll be running the LA end of things, and dealing with some of the stuff I simply haven't had the time to get to. (The Fabulous Lorraine is still my PA.)If you want to send me a book to get signed along with return postage and packaging, though, or buy a signed book, or anything like that, you should still talk to DreamHaven, via their online shop of stuff by me at www.neilgaiman.net website.

So Dan Guy went back into his data cloud, redid it so it now only registered words that I've written on the blog, and excluded other people's questions and comments, and let me know that I've written, in the last six years of blogging, 873,905 words. (Excluding these.)(As soon as Dan's satisfied and we've got the cloud up at Neilgaiman.com I'll link to it. It's rather fun.)People are also fiddling in back rooms to speed up the video footage on the secret Stardust site. Apparently Neilgaiman.com is not currently set up to deliver streaming video in the quantity people wanted to see it.Dennis Kitchen wrote to tell me that there's now a dedicated Will Eisner website up at http://willeisner.com, including forums and a Will Eisner Wiki.Martin Roberts wrote to tell me you can see a video of me being gobsmacked and singularly unprepared when Anansi Boys won the August Derleth Award at http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1846991572 (and you can also see lots of other things much more fun than me fumfing, including Joe Hill winning two awards and Pete Crowther being Pete Crowther). When you are quite certain that funny books don't win awards, and that you don't win British Fantasy Awards, you don't even jot down on a bit of paper the list of people you should thank.When I saw the Locus link to "Novelist David Eddings burns down office" I thought yeah, I have days like that, but it turns out he didn't do it on purpose.My Chinese editor, or one of them, Ann Lin, wrote to send me a link to her blog, where she has the Chinese Anansi Boys cover up -- http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/linyao.Help, please!I vaguely recall you mentioning in your journal an author as witty and popular in (I think) the 20's, but now generally forgotten who had written a book about (again, I think) greek gods in a modern setting. Having found and loved Jonathan Carroll's novels through your mention, I looked at various books from this author on amazon, and they seemed the sort of thing I'd like to look into. However, after much use of the site's search function and mental anguish, I fail to recall the name.I hope I'm not making this up; it's been wriggling in my brain for the past year or so.Thanks for your time.RMCThat would have been Thorne Smith, and his Night Life of the Gods.Hi Neil.The billboards will soon be after you. (and all other Mini Cooper owners) Look at this URL to see what I mean: http://news.com.com/Via%2BRFID,%2Bthese%2Bbillboards%2Bknow%2Byou%2Bby%2Bname/2100-1024_3-6154185.html - Steve ManfredRiver Falls, WIYou know, really high on the list of things I don't want ever to see on a billboard as I drive by is "Hey Neil, I bet you drive faster than you write!" or something similar...Hi Neil,Since I plan on re-purchasing the Sandman series in it's Absolute form, I'm going to be giving my older TPB versions to a young friend I know would love them. My question is: Do you expect the Absolute collection to be limited to the 75-ish issues of the main Sandman series or will Endless Nights be included as well? I don't want to be asking for it back from the kid in a years time! Cheers!I don't think there are any plans to do an Absolute Edition of Endless Nights at this time. It was an oversized hardback anyway...Hi Neil, Aside from the statues and posters (being released by DC) and the various books (by Harper Collins) are there any plans for other Stardust merchandise to be released for the movie, such as action figures or clothing?Thanks.RobNot as far as I know. Which is a pity, because I'd really like to collect the set of dead princes. (Each of them is dead in a different interesting way.)It looks like there's going to be lots of Coraline stuff coming out in late 2008, if that's any consolation -- it's something Laika and Focus Films are planning to do and talking to people about already....Last year I got artist Kelli Bickman to paint a mural for the bedroom. It's something I look at each morning when I wake up and I'm not bored with it yet, and I always see something new. (http://kellibickman.net/pages/neilgaimanmural.html)Kelli asked if she could use the mural to do good things -- for the CBLDF and for the Tibetan Handicapped Children's Hospital, and I said sure. She's put it on lots of cool stuff, available through http://www.cafepress.com/gaiman.Another Good thing for the CBLDF is coming from the lovely people at Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs -- see http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/new.html for details, and I'll link to their actual page when they have it up. If you like scents and perfumes and books, then you should click on this. Seven scents, inspired by characters in books, with half of what you pay going straight to the CBLDF...And finally, a link to my pal Eddie Campbell's blog, containing a picture I took on my phone for him, in Foyles, the last time I was there. (And while it is true I thought it hilarious, it was more the entire concept of "Low-brow Art" as a category, with all sorts of marvellous stuff in it, that I found funny, than the appropriateness of that shelf for a book called The Fate of the Artist. But damn, that was funny too.)

[Edit to add -- right now if you click on the link you'll just get an Error message, as it wasn't ready to go public and it was running too slowly and so on and has been taken offline. I'll put something up as soon as it's back. Sorry.][Later Edit. It seems to be back up -- give the video a chance to load before playing, though, or it will be a bit stuttery...]I'm not quite sure how widely this is meant to be spread, but Paramount have decided to change direction on their Stardust website at www.stardustmovie.com. Which means the website will take a bit longer to come out, and be a bit different when it does.Meanwhile they've had a finished version of the early website ready to go for some weeks, containing a few video interviews with me, some answers to Stardust questions, Stardust wallpaper and even a do it yourself Charles Vess colouring thing (which is much too much fun). So we talked to them and they talked to us, and the webelf did webmagic, and if you just happened to click onhttp://neilgaiman.com/stardust/you might find yourself somewhere that looks very different and has Paramount copyright notices and things all over it, but is actually here on www.Neilgaiman.com.I'm not sure how long we're going to be allowed to keep this up, so if you're interested you should probably go and play with it now, and tell anyone who might be interested that it's here.

Jonathan Carroll just sent me a link to these haunting little photographic studies of age and time: http://www.bobbyneeladams.com/age.html and I stared at them and thought, I should pass this one on.Do authors, if ever, read their own work for pleasure? Especially you, Mister Neil Gaiman.I'm sure some of them do, just as some singers probably like listening to their own albums for pleasure and some filmmakers leave their films on. For the rest of us, by the time you've finished making something like that, you probably don't want to read it/hear it/watch it again.I was once stuck in a house where there was (literally) nothing to read but a battered and elderly paperback of American Gods, and rather than have a bath with nothing to read, I picked it up, opened it to the Cairo scene and had a long bath reading my own book, and found it not as mortifying an experience as I thought I would. But given that that's the only time that's happened in almost a quarter century as a writer, I think it's a no. (I don't listen to my audio books for pleasure, either.)Just to let you know, there is an English version of the Apple Mac adverts with the Mitchell and Webb guys from Radio 4 and Peepshow, have a look at http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/ - now will you get a Mac? all the best for the new year, peteBut I've got a Mac, honest. I've got a couple of them. And I got all my family Macbooks. I'm just not interested in using one as my main travelling and working computer until they weigh a lot less.Hiya, Neil:I thought you and your readers would find this amusing, if not downright fantastic. In Vegas, on October 5-7, there will be the first ever International Alchemy Conference: http://alchemyconference.com/ According to the site, it will be the largest gathering of alchemists in 500 Years. Made me think a bit of the Cereal Convention in The Doll's House, though this will, presumably, be a bit less threatening. Then again, maybe not. :-)Pam (http://www.phantasmaphile.com/)I just think it's really cool. I just wonder how Las Vegas will cope.i think the million words count is misleading. does it include faq line questions, emails, etc that you've posted?I'm sure it does. I can't see any way a word counter could figure out which words were mine and which were other people's, can you? I'm sure that wordcount also includes the occasional essays and speeches I've posted here, and, in all probability, the captions to photos. I suppose if you're worried about having been misled you could mentally change "I've written" to "I've written, reposted or cut and pasted".Dear Neil,Your mentioning of bangs vs. fringe was the tipping point of my curiosity and I finally had to look it up. The word "fringe" is fairly obvious visually, as that's what it looks like, but apparently "bangs" comes from "cut bang-off" which is a way of chopping the tail of a race horse so the hair is flat straight across. Or something.Being from North America I would rather my face did not reference the back-end of a horse, but I suppose there's nothing I can do about that. Especially since I've been known to wear ponytails now and again. CandaceI love it when I learn something.Incidentally, I am reading Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory (subtitled Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends. Actually the title page is much longer than that, but I'll leave it to you to find one) every spare second I can grab reading time, and can unhesitatingly recommend it to any of you who have ever thought about being authors, or wondered about the origins of such things as Dragons or Mandrakes or where Sindbad actually sailed to, or who have ever dreamed of being sat down and told wonderful cool arcane and true things from a brilliant, crusty old author who thinks you're just as smart as he is, or you will be, once he's finished telling you something, in his own way and in his own time and the journey is always the destination. It's a maze of delightful digressions and bizarre wanderings. Wonderful stuff.(If you're wondering if it's the sort of thing you'd like, here's the LA Times review.)

Right. Maddy has a whole new hairdo consisting of a fringe (which Americans inexplicably call bangs), or bangs (which the English mysteriously call a fringe), and she looks oddly like the Coraline puppet from the Henry Selick film, while I have, er, not quite as much hair in my eyes as I did this morning. Stopped off at DreamHaven (http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com/) after the haircut and signed a pile of stuff for them (it'll be up on www.Neilgaiman.net soon enough).Also bought a few books, which considering how much time I've had recently to read, and how much I have sitting in piles waiting to be read (I seem to be reading everything I can find about Bert Williams right now) is madness. Still, I picked up, with joyful expectation, Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory, Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg, and Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club. It's nice to have books on the To Be Read Pile you know will be good. A Charles Vess cover drew my eye, and I found myself getting the paperback of Herminie Kavanagh's Darby O'Gill, and I wrapped up the shopping expedition with a copy of M. John Harrison's Viriconium (not to read, just so I had a copy with my introduction in).And I just got to see some site statistics (courtesy of Dan Guy who has made the Webelf her Clouds -- the first is up at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/ and is really rather fun. Hurrah for you helpful people out there reading this) and I learned that as of the last post, I'd written One Million and Fourteen Thousand, Two Hundred and Sixty One words on this blog.I wish I'd known that 14,261 words ago. We would have had a party. With balloons.

One of the many delights for me in making Sandman: Endless Nights was in helping to bring artist Barron Storey to another audience. Barron is a genius: an amazing artist, a teacher and thinker about art, astonishingly creative, enormously influential (I remember my wry amusement when one reviewer referred to Barron as being a Bill Sienkiewicz imitator, for Bill, along with countless other important artists, is someone who acknowledges being influenced by Barron) and I still remember how overwhelming it was to seeOne of the treasures of my bookshelf is the Barron Storey Marat-Sade Journal, published by Tundra about fifteen years ago, long since out of print and prized by collectors (Dennis Kitchen used to have a few copies left selling for $90, but he's sold out and the only one on Amazon is selling for $275.) Now the first new Barron Storey journal in 15 years, Life After Black, will be coming out in Spring, and its progress is being tracked at the Graphic Novel Art site blog: http://graphicnovelart.blogspot.com/search/label/Barron%20Storey (There -- I just used someone else's label.) You can see more Life After Black pages at http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=1927...We're finding all sorts of video stuff and putting it up over at the Exlusive New and Improved Cool Things section (http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive). The one that follows, however, we have to link to. It's a recording of me, last October, doing the lovely Cody's event in Berkeley, when I got to get up in front of an audience and read and answer questions and have Much Too Much Fun Doing It.http://fora.tv/fora/fora_clip.php?cid=303#Hi Neil,Love the new Cool Stuff & Things section. Compliments to the Webelf! May she have many scuttling tasties.Noticed your notebook pages from American Gods and it reminded me of a few doctors I know. I had tried to read some stuff they had written but couldn't make it out. I asked them and they couldn't decipher it either (thankfully it was all non-medical)! Has that ever happened to you after moments of frantic scribbling?No offense meant though, I actually could make out about 80% of what you wrote in the pages which is much more than I can say for those doctors.Cheers!AloysiusWhile it would be true to say that I never really have a problem with my handwriting (although other people do) I would also have to admit that every now and again, typing up a story, I'll find myself glaring at a word that doesn't freely divulge what it was originally meant to signify.The American Gods notebook pages are a lot smaller than the originals, though, which also doesn't help. I recently found the handwritten STARDUST books, and was planning to scan a few pages in from them for the upcoming DC Comics ABSOLUTE STARDUST hardcover....Right. Miss Maddy and I are off to get our hair cut. And she would like to dictate a message: "My hair will be totally sweet y'all. Hahaha. I crack myself up. Hey. You aren't supposed to write that -- HEY! You aren't... Daa-aad. (=sigh=. And then, ominously,) You're a funny one..."