I should be writing and not blogging, so I will put up one panel of pencilled Andy Kubert art from the first part of the Batman two parter I'm doing, and hope nobody tells me to put it down again... Dear Mr Gaiman The black Coraline keys around, is it true that if you have one you can participate in a scavenger hunt? or are they just something cool you can collect?
I don't know. I'll ask. I suspect the "scavenger hunt" thing may have been made up by someone selling them on eBay, though, as no-one has mentioned it to me. The impression I get is that they are simply mysterious keys that sometimes appear on walls. Yup, I checked. The keys are just keys. No competition there.
There will, however, be a limited edition of 1000 pairs of Coraline Nike Dunks, winnable from watching the film and through the website, though, and they will look like this, with black buttons and stitching and such...
The fake Coraline box Other Mother doll was taken down from eBay, and the person selling it seems to have vanished too -- seeing that he had a few "he took my money and never sent me anything" complaints on eBay, I do not think he's a great loss to the world of online retailing, and will probably be back there soon enough under another name.
I don't mind people making their own dolls. I just mind when they do it to try and screw other people. I liked this one...
Hi Mr. Gaiman-
Huge fan of Coraline here. I didn't get a mystery box, unfortunately. But, I didn't want to miss out on the excitement, so I created my own handmade fully-articulated Coraline doll.
Lovingly hand-made with kitchen gloves for the raincoat and boots, do-rag for the skirt, beenie baby for the pink top, knit sock for the stockings, twist-ties for the boot bows, blue paper for the hair, lots of super glue and of course, buttons for the eyes and raincoat.
Where is the teacher's guide to Coraline that I keep reading about? I can't find it anywhere...I plan on having my students (9-10 year olds) read the book in Lit Circles and then see the movie. Will it be rated PG or PG-13? We have restrictions in our district. Also, if I order copies of the books for the kids do I want the regular version or the movie tie-in version? Thank you for the reply...just trying to prepared for the February release. Vickie Weiss
I am guessing that it is a Namiki Falcon and a Lamy Accent on the table.
It's seriously been plaguing me. Thanks a lot!!!
Spot on. For some reason, most of my pens skipped badly on The Graveyard Book, but the Namiki Falcons worked. That one held up valiantly and then the nib died after a heavy bout of signing in Chicago, and I never really replaced it.
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Oh, all right. Since you asked. Or you would have. Another four panels of Andy Kubert's pencils...
Someone sent me a link this morning to an eBay auction that claimed to be of the contents of a Coraline Box. And as far as I can tell right now, it's a fake thing (still waiting to hear back from the studio), in that it's not a costume from the film and it's very obviously a home-made doll. How odd.
Too many FAQ line questions stacking up: I'm getting close to the point where I'll do a massive answering of stuff, I think. You're more likely to get a question answered if it's actually a question, and if it's short, and if it's answerable, and if I feel like answering it.
Several people misread the last post, and assumed that I was saying that Paterson Joseph was the Doctor and I was somehow disappointed. No, I was saying that Matt Smith is the next Doctor and that Rich Johnston had somehow got it wrong.
I am convinced that it was taken at my comeback gig after I got out of prison.
Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash were hanging around backstage, playing Gin Rummy.
"Aren't you going to come and watch me sing?" I asked them.
"We've heard you sing," they said. "If you don't mind, we're playing a really exciting game of Gin Rummy here."
Only the fact that I do not sing in public and have not been in prison (other than as a visitor and novelist) makes me suspect that I'm making this up. I mean, the camera doesn't lie.
Admittedly the Mail printed their story after the BBC had announced the new Doctor.
I'm a teeny bit disappointed about Paterson Joseph. But still, now it means if I ever wrote a story where the Marquis de Carabas met the Doctor... no. That way lies madness.
Matt looks very at home in front of the TARDIS, though. And I trust Steven Moffat's judgment completely. So that's one less thing in the world to worry about.
Rumor patrol: Word has it a designer has done "extensive work" on seeing how CG versions of the Martian Ice Warriors would look — but it's not for any particular episode, necessarily, just so the show's producers can see what the Warriors would look like, for future reference. Or possibly, they're showing up soon. In related news, Neil Gaiman has denied his season five episode ("Faces In The Dust") will feature the Ice Warriors. Also, Mark Gatiss has an Ice Warrior story called "Cold" in the Doctor Who Storybook 2009 (and past storybooks have yielded stories that later became episodes, including "Blink.")
So no, it's just lies.
I haven't denied that my Doctor Who episode "Faces in the Dust" will have Ice Warriors in it, because I'm not writing a Doctor Who episode called "Faces in the Dust" (which is a pretty rubbish title, who makes this stuff up?) and I've been having much too much fun not denying anything about Doctor Who, other than admitting to having enjoyed some nice dinners with Mr Moffat, as chronicled on this blog. (If I'd denied it, I would have denied it here, and as you might have noticed, I didn't.)
But I'm denying this because it's said in that authoritative way that makes it look as if people know what they're talking about, when it's just people-making-stuff-up-bollocks.
Hi Neil, Happy New Year. Long time blog reader, first time blog asker. It seems that you are publishing a lot these days, and I buy everything you put out (oftentimes extra copies for my niece). Based upon your prodigious output, have you ever released any of your work pseudonymously? I think you have and I think I know the name you've used? Just wondering if I am way off base or not? Thanks for all you do. Sincerely, Eric
Not for about eighteen years, when I was writing for magazines, some of them competing, and wrote too many articles, so I was Gerry Musgrave and Richard Grey along with a couple of house names as well as being me. But I always wanted books by me to be by me, so even my Duran Duran biography had my name on it.
If there's anyone you suspect of being me as well these days, I'm happy to say that they are themselves.
In the 1970s and the early 1980s I used to buy imported American novels in London, things you couldn't buy in the UK. I'd get the train up to London, and wander from shop to shop.... Mostly SF and Fantasy, but also books by Donald Westlake. The Dortmunder books. Anything, really. If it had his name on it, I'd buy it. He was funny, he was smart, and he built novels like fine watches, never wasting a word.
He wrote as Donald Westlake: often funny, warm novels. He wrote colder novels as Richard Stark -- same author, but writing on the other side of the street, the one where the street lights are broken and there's no comfort in the shadows.
I never met him. But I was a fan. Still am.
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Thank you to all who made The Graveyard Book a finalist for a Cybil Award. I think that's the first thing that The Graveyard Book has been nominated for, and I'm thrilled that it's an award that comes from the blogging community.
I shall doff my cap the next time I see him. It will be the best-doffed cap in the land.
I shall buy a cap first, specially.
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I spent half an hour yesterday talking to a reporter who was working on the obituary of someone who is currently very much alive, even in good health, and it was, well, very odd. I'd always known that obituaries aren't just knocked up (or perhaps tossed off. Look, neither phrase sounds particularly wholesome) on the spur of the moment by some dusty but hard-working obituarist whenever someone kicks the bucket, but that they are written ahead of time, often rewritten many times over the years (The Daily Telegraph's are the best. I don't know why this is, but it's true. Here's their obituary for Eartha Kitt, and this is my favourite Telegraph obituary ever, because it contains the lines
Despite a brisk code of discipline, Singleton took a laissez-faire approach out of the classroom. Every November 5 the smallest boy in the school was sent down a tunnel to light the very core of the bonfire. None, so far as anyone can recall, was ever lost.)
But this was strange -- discussing a living person as if they were dead, talking about their influence with (I hoped) balance, such that, when they died, they quotes would paint a picture for people who knew nothing about the person of what they did and why it mattered.
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I thought I ought to say thank you to everyone who bought a copy of The Graveyard Book this year. It's been on the New York Times bestseller list since it came out, at the end of September. I'm astonishingly grateful, and so, in this time of economic scariness, is my publisher. Thirteen weeks on the New York Times list is a very long time.
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In Odd and the Frost Giants, a very small book I wrote, we meet a boy called Odd, in Norway, in Viking times.
I keep thinking that there are two more stories of similar length I want to tell, each with Odd in it. One where he goes to Jerusalem, on the same route they did in the Orkeyinga Saga, and set one a few years after that where he goes a great deal further East -- but I was never sure why any Vikings would go further East than Jerusalem. And then Cheryl Morgan linked to this article (and pointed out that the Vikings were smart enough to bury people with the rubbish swords), and I read:
The tests at the NPL have proved that the inferior swords were forged in northern Europe from locally worked iron. But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran.
And suddenly I knew an awful lot more about Odd, and his travels, and, more particularly, what the third Odd book would be.
I find myself moving from "those grasping Fox people" to being puzzled that Warners are even fighting the case (well, I'm not really -- Warners gave Paramount the right to distribute the movie in the rest of the world when they got the Watchmen option back from Paramount. If they lose the US too, they've paid for a big expensive movie and don't keep, well, anything). Fox had exercised an option on Watchmen, then returned the rights to the producer, reserving for themselves the right to distribute the movie, but leaving the producer the option to buy Fox out. The producer didn't buy them out, so they still own the rights to distribute it.
The bit that leaves me most puzzled about this is that in the world of movies, people are obsessive about rights, because if they aren't, things like this happen. Read the judgment -- it's in readable English.
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Dearest Author -
What with the new Christmas jumper and other assorted black clothing, how do you manage to keep them sparkly (or at least presentable) in the presence of assorted non-black petittude (most notably Dog)? As the owner of similar clothing/pet colour combinations, and cupboards full of just-cleaned-and-yet-still-furry garments, I'm intrigued. Are you spending an inordinate amount on laundry these days, or is there a small army of men&women-wot-do just out of shot in every photo standing ready to apply rolls of sticky-backed plastic and other anti-fluff devices to you after any pet contact? Mayhap a special fur-removing filter for the seemingly ever-present camera lenses? Hmmm. Anti-static personal force-field? Not so good for pet-snorgling that though. Ah well, the winter nights are long and enquiring minds wander..
Pondering, Karen L
I have family and an assistant who are very good about handing me those rolls of sticky stuff if they think I'm covered in too much white dog or cat hair.
That wasn't a very interesting answer, was it?
Trawling Youtube you can't fail to discover many interviews with writers usually on American TV. There's a positive dearth of such stuff in the UK. What does that tell us about the dumbing down of UK telly? I've yet to see an author of 'genre' fiction (sorry it's a hateful term) getting five minutes to promote a new novel. Doesn't it get you down?
Nope. I think that the US and the UK are equally bad at putting authors on TV, but then I'm not sure it does anyone any good to put authors on TV anyway. The UK occasionally comes up with a decent South Bank Show or BBC Four "Worlds of Fantasy" series, which is more than you get in the US. The UK has Radio 4, which is always good to authors, and the US has NPR, ditto.
Anyway, the UK and the US both fall short when we remember that mystical kingdom known to us today only as "Canada", long since taken by the seas and the sands, and that once there was Prisoners of Gravity.
(I cannot watch this. I just tried and I had to stop. The me in it is like a tadpole that's just shedding its tail. He seems really sweet; I just want to wait until he's cooked.)
Neil - I'm know you get a ton of these requests, but I figured it was worth a shot. Jason Webley is playing a free show in Philadelphia this Monday,1/5/09, at a small venue. Neither he nor the venue have any marketing it seems, and I don't think most of his Philly fans know about it. But they do know about you. So I was hopeful that you would link the info on your blog. The Venue: http://info.thesanctuaryarts.com/
Consider it posted. Jason is an amazing live performer.
Hi Neil, Can you offer any advice/thoughts or even threats to the would-be writers out here, who have a lot of ideas for stories, but can't decide which one to start? Thanks!
Sure. You pick one. If you're me these days you pick the one that's most overdue and causing the greatest number of people the most headaches by its lateness, but I don't advise doing that when you're just starting out. (I'm not sure that I'd advise that when you've been doing this for ages.)
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Okay. I have to work now.
Thank you all for reading this, for writing to me, for being funny and sensible.
2008 was an odd year, with some great stuff in it, and some odd stuff in it. But I'm glad of all the fine things it brought into my life.
I'm lucky. I have good friends, and I have a fine family. I get to work with amazing people.
...I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
...to mark the passing of Edd Cartier (and the nearly-done-ness of 2008). Of all the pulp magazine artists of the 30s-50s, including such masters as Virgil Finlay and Kelly Freas, Cartier was my favourite, particularly his work in Unknown Worlds. Marvellous stuff. If I had known he was still alive, I suspect I would have written him a fan letter. Instead, I discovered the other day, from Locus, that he (and James Cawthorn, who was, with Mal Dean, the definitive Moorcock illustrator) had just died, and now I know that Mr Cartier was alive, it's too late.
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Michael Dirda is a wonderful essayist, and his appreciation of Hope Mirrlees' novel Lud In the Mist is up at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=20755255&cds2Pid=22560. I loved the essay, because, I think, the qualities that Michael is talking about are the same ones that are in the book when I read it. (I've had people complain to me that they've read it on my recommendation and that it was boring, or pointless, and I'm sure the version of the book they read was. But the book that I love, and Michael Dirda, and Michael Swanwick loves, is described in Dirda's essay. You bring yourself to a book, after all; every book is collaborative.)
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Today's mail brought a Wii, and a Wii fit: an evil white box that mocks me with its opinion of my distance from an ideal BMI and an unflattering opinion of my age. But it's cold and snowy outside, and I can't imagine anything else making me jog on the spot with apparent pleasure, and it should be a fine supplement to my trainer (who comes in a couple of times a week and makes me work much too hard to get back into shape).
And Maddy likes it.
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Someone sent me a question asking if there would be any Coraline toys or figurines. It looks like a yes. I found a link to them here...
...and it only seems a bit strange, in my head, that there should be Coraline toys.
Watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special with the kids on Boxing Day. I liked it, but kept expecting it to turn a corner and for me to love it, which it, and I, never did. Possibly because the clanky high tech Cybermen have no hold on my heart in the way the silent bacofoil ones did and do, and possibly because of spoilery reasons having to do with never really buying the David Morrisey plot to begin with. Loved the moments of David Tennant-as-companion though, and that Miss Hartigan can come to my funeral in a red dress any time she wishes.
The sun is out. The sky is blue. It's still a couple of degrees below freezing. Bugger. Let's see. A couple of Christmas Day photos -- here's one of me and my small but significant daughter collection. Yes, I have Christmas morning bed-hair, and yes, I am wearing my Christmas Sweater with the black Christmas trees on it.
I've left the hunting-season collar on Cabal because sometimes he vanishes in the snow, and a flash of orange is useful.
For those of you who worry about the blog getting Coraline-the-movied-out, there's only thirty-six days to go until the film comes out in the US. Then there will probably be a week or two where I blog about how it's doing, and then it will recede into the background, as is the way of all things.
In the meantime, expect updates -- mostly because I'm really enjoying what henry and his team are doing to promote the film: http://www.youtube.com/coralinethemovie is the YouTube channel for all the Coraline mini-films released so far, where you can watch how things are made, built and knitted. (I was half-amused and half-appalled to see people on the imdb Coraline chat forum and on the Aint it cool talkback thingummy confidently explaining, as if they knew what they were talking about, that this was actually cunningly disguised to look like stop motion CGI, or that Henry Selick had used computers to do the inbetweening, or something, while occasionally people who had actually worked on Coraline would go "No, it was all done by hand," and were mostly ignored in the squalling democracy of the internet. What's nice about the little films is that you can see how it's done; and it's done by people making things and moving them, a little bit at a time.)
More stuff keeps showing up at http://www.coraline.com/ -- it occasionally doesn't load for me, or gets stuck, but refreshing it seems to take care of that.
I loved the posters available for download in the living room. This is one of them. Click on it to see it full size.
When I mentioned that I was planning to get a Mini Clubman instead of a convertible, so I could move the dog around in it, I got this reply from a reader out there,
Don't blame the dog!!! My Great Dane LOVES my Mini convertible, and there's nothing like a big white dog head looking calmly around from the little blue car :)
Apparently Mini is coming out with a crossover next year, and we're going to look at that as an enclosed dog-transporting vehicle when it comes around.
...which just made me look out of the window at the ice and snow, and wonder when the temperature would get up to around freezing again. Once it gets up to freezing around here you can drive around with a car filled with twelve year old girls, with the top down and the heaters blasting if they all wear coats. I did it once at the request of Maddy and her friends, so I know.
But driving around at minus 10 with the top down would be a poor thing to do, to a dog or a driver.
Which is why today (almost exactly three years after getting it) I traded in my Mini Convertible for a Mini Clubman, and bade goodbye to the wild driving-with-the-top-down-for-three-weeks-in-the-middle-of-the-Midwestern- summer-when-it-wasn't-raining days of my youth.
Had a conversation with Paul Levitz the other day about Gaiman's Law of Superhero Movies*, which is: the closer the film is to the look and feel of what people like about the comic, the more successful it is (which is something that Warners tends singularly to miss, and Marvel tends singularly to get right) and the conversation went over to Watchmen, which had Paul explaining to me that the film is obsessive about how close it is to the comic, and me going "But they've changed the costumes. What about Nite Owl?" It'll be interesting to see whether it works or not...
And I wound up pondering that when I noticed that Frank Miller's The Spirit film had racked up a sad little 15% fresh over at Rotten Tomatoes.
The impression I get with Watchmen is that, with whatever changes they've made, and whether or not it works as an adaptation, if they manage to get it released it will do just fine, because there's a tremendous amount of attention that's gone into getting it as close as they can in a movie to the look and feel of Watchmen the comic.
There may be exceptions to Gaiman's law of comic-book inspired movies, but it's definitely the way to bet. The films that look and feel like what people liked about the original comic succeed. The ones that move away from that tend to have a rough time to the degree that they move away from it.
(It doesn't say anything about the quality of the film in question, I should point out. You could make a film you called Batman, in which Batman's costume is pink and green and he's a lawyer who works all day and into the early evening to save a small health-food franchise from being taken over by a big conglomerate, and at night he goes on a succession of dates with odd people... it might be a wonderful, amusing, strange film, but what people know they want in a Batman film is a Bat-costume and crime-fighting and evil villains and night and Bruce Wayne and the rest of it, and it would be a very bad Batman film and it would fail.)
(And for that matter it doesn't seem to matter if people have read the comics or not. If you get what makes the character work, if you get what people like about it in its platonic ideal, you have a successful movie -- Iron Man being a lovely case in point.)
Which, I suspect, is why Sin City and 300 worked. They were like having the comics happening up on the screen. The thing that people liked about it was there. With The Spirit, what the reader responded to is Eisner's lightness of touch and mastery of story, his humour and his humanity -- and a world that looks like Eisner drew it. The moment that it's obvious that that isn't there it almost doesn't matter what is there instead. According to Gaiman's Law, the more Sin City looked and felt like what people like about Frank Miller's work on Sin City, the more successful it was going to be with audiences, but the more The Spirit feels like Sin City and not like Will Eisner's The Spirit, the less successful it's going to be.
*Not to be confused with Gaiman's Law Of Being An Author, which states that on getting your first published copy of anything, and opening it to the bit you did, you'll see a typo.
