Friends

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/from-exact-middle-of-nowhere.html

Waving from the Middle of Nowhere, where there's no TV, my cell phone doesn't work and the internet is slow and klunky enough that semaphore might be more efficient.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/why-all-lettering-is-getting-smaller.html

I'm flying out tonight to the UK. I'll hole up in the middle of nowhere with my children and ex-wife and my mother as well, and probably be off-the-internet the whole time. There will be no TV in the middle of nowhere, so I will miss Doctor Who and miss "Statuesque" on Sky1 (10 pm Christmas Day).

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/nakedly-commercial-post-sweetened-by.html

Just a quick post to let those interested know that both Amazon and Barnes and Noble are doing extreme Christmassy discounts on ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS. It's available for 50% of the cover price...

The Amazon.com link is http://www.amazon.com/Odd-Frost-Giants-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0061671738

The Barnes and Noble link is at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Odd-and-the-Frost-Giants/Neil-Gaiman/e/9780061671739I got to amaze and impress my daughter Maddy the other day, using http://us.akinator.com. You may enjoy impressing someone with it. Or perhaps just learn to demonstrate your telekinetic skill (I wish I'd known how to do this when I was twelve. I would have conquered the world with it).

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/xmas-roundup-with-some-good-links-and.html

How the hell did it get to be December the 18th? Ohhh. All the links I meant to post. Arghh.

For a start, I want to repost this little true thing I wrote, from last year's Independent: it's about being an eight year old Jewish kid who really wanted a Christmas tree...

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/late-night-mystery-post.html

Hullo everyone. I took a week off from Blogging, then didn't have a second during the whirlwind of the last few days.

As a result of which I have dozens of open tabs and dozens of letters to the FAQ line that I've marked as things I should answer. I'm not going to try and do them all now (Maddy told me that I'm taking her to school at 6:30 am, as she's got her first period of Driver's Ed). But there are a few things I should say before I sleep...

The first one is to congratulate Henry Selick and all the Coraline team (and Laika, and Focus) on the wonderful way they are being recognised by Awards. Yesterday, for example, we learned that Coraline is nominated for a Golden Globe award.

There's a great website at http://awards.filminfocus.com/#/coraline/awards which is a bit out of date right now. My favourite of the recent awards is that the Alliance of Women Journalists gave Coraline their Best Animated Character award, although the biggest honour is Coraline being on the American Film Institute's list of the ten most important films released in 2009.

I went to Atlanta. It was foggy and thunderstormy and I signed for 1,050 people. (Here's the Atlanta paper blog on the event. And Little Shop of Stories said Thank You so very nicely.)

I went to Winnipeg. It was cold outside and I signed for 869 people. Here's the Winnipeg Newspaper article. Just behind me, in the grey shirt, is the wonderful Elyse Marshall, publicist from HarperChildren's, who looked after me on the Graveyard Book Tour and who can now run a huge signing in her sleep, which is great, because it means I don't have to worry about any details or disasters. I just do my job and sign and meet everyone.

(How bad can it get? Well, there was the time Terry Pratchett and I were signing in, er, I think it was Leeds, when the people who worked at the shop saw all the people who had turned up for the signing and got scared enough that they locked themselves in the staff room at the back, leaving Terry and me to climb onto tables and shout at people until they formed some kind of a line. The staff didn't come out again until the people had all gone.)

Strangest moment in Winnipeg was getting back to the hotel room at 1:30 am to notice that, beside my bed, a framed photo of my children had mysteriously appeared. I assumed that this was a cool thing the hotel had done. Elyse, on the other hand, was convinced it was the action of a crazed stalker, and insisted I deadbolt and security chain my hotel room, and was enormously relieved, a few hours later, when she knocked on my door and I removed the chain and was obviously still alive.



Before we left the hotel I took the photo out of the frame and left a thank-you note in its place.



Flew back to Minneapolis. I stopped off at DreamHaven on the way back from the airport this afternoon, and signed more stock for Greg (http://neilgaiman.net/). Theoretically enough to see him through Xmas.

Several people wrote asking me to express my outrage at HarperCollins joining several other publishers in delaying the release of books on the Kindle or e-book format to some months after the hardback comes out, as detailed at http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/harpercollins-now-also-thumbing-nose-at-e-book-industry-with-dig/ but after I read the article I couldn't manage any outrage at all, no more than I could manage for people who demand that paperback books come out at the same time as hardbacks. It seemed a legitimate way to publish, anyway.

And, for those of you who want to learn exactly how an author should not respond to an Amazon One-Star review, we present an author named Candace Sams, who begins by pretending she's not the author, just someone defending a good book, then, when outed as the author, claims she's part of a noble group standing up against an evil one-star reviewer, and then informs everyone on the Amazon Comments thread that she's reported them all to the FBI. The Amazon Thread is here. Teresa Nielsen Hayden comments on it at Making Light, here. (Via Cleolinda's twitter.)

And yes, it's a horrible car crash, and I post it here not because it's funny in an Oh God Make It Stop kind of way, but because, if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning. (Also, if you're an American Games company, don't sue a British blogger in the Australian courts for a bad review.)

Oops. I have started blogging. I will stop now, and sleep for a little while.

...

Before I go: Sky has a website for the Ten Minute Tales series, which includes Statuesque, my film starring Bill Nighy (which goes out in the UK on Christmas Day) : http://sky1.sky.com/10-minute-tales. I wish I could have been at the screening in London on Sunday, more so when I saw my old friend Paterson Joseph stars in one of the films.