| IT ARE MY BIRTHDAY |
[25 May 2012|09:13am] |
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mood |
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 happy |
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If you want to leave me good wishes, that would make me happy!
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| Quick Useful Sandman Slipcase post |
[25 May 2012|04:16am] |
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http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html posted by Neil
A hasty post... There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)
( Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.) DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase. According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/) (The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)  |
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| Family Man, Page 253 |
[25 May 2012|12:05am] |
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Originally published at Dylan Meconis. You can comment here or there. 
(permalink to this week’s page)
Mother knows best. Or does she? Maybe next week you’ll find out what that leather neck strap is for, at least…
This weekend I’ll be in beautiful British Columbia, at the first ever Vancouver Comic Arts Festival! You can’t miss me – I’ll be right by the entrance at Table 30. I love Vancouver and I’m really excited to finally have a comics convention that gives me an excuse to visit.
Admission to the Fest is FREE, so Vancouver residents, please come by and support the show!
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| i just know that i'm harder to console |
[23 May 2012|09:01pm] |
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 mellow |
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I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:
luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,
Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...
Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!
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| Right Side of History |
[23 May 2012|07:01pm] |
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The mail continues to bring treats, including a signed copy of Caitlín's The Drowning Girl. Very much looking forward to reading this one. Thank you, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) greygirlbeast! In your honor, I shall try to write something resembling a real entry. With, you know, thoughts and stuff. Not just random observations and eBay listings (though I do have some of those).
Life is ... sticky. I guess that's the best way to describe it. Not precisely bad, but difficult. Literally so, because the air conditioning in my house is broken and we're heading into another long, sweaty, tyrannical New Orleans summer. Most luxuries have fallen by the wayside, and necessities are starting to do so. Yet I live in interesting times, both personally, by being in a relationship that brings me joy and creative inspiration, and globally, by feeling -- as I seldom did growing up -- that we are living on the right side of history. The other day I sent Grey a text saying, basically, we may be old by the time it comes, but I think we'll live to see a day when today's last-gasp homophobes look as benighted as the news footage of rabid bigots screaming at black children integrating the public schools. (I didn't want to be a Negative Nancy, so I didn't add that I don't expect to live to see a day when transgender people are anywhere near as accepted.) Meanwhile, there are still "religious" nutjobs who want to put us all behind electric fences and courts that give evil little shitweasels thirty damn days in prison for hounding us to death, but society no longer seems to be in tacit agreement with those people as it did when I was younger.
One more paragraph for Caitlín. Christ, when you get out of the habit of writing, forcing yourself to do it starts to feel like weightlifting. I have little puny stringy 98-pound-weakling writing muscles. If I do any more reps, I'll make them sore. Clang.
So about those eBay auctions ... they are all crafty things, two more blank journals, a copy of Exquisite Corpse with a redesigned cover by me, and a "homoerotic botanic" treasure box. Please check 'em out.
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| Blues in a Suitcase |
[22 May 2012|11:07pm] |
Nothing gingers you up in the ever-onerous packing (for WisCon) like listening to WUMB's fabulous X-Stream Folk channel: All Blues All the Time! Hearing the 'plaints of those whose man done gone, or who cannot ride that last train home, makes trying to decide which shirts are too many seem a little less grave. A little.
And yes, I am burying the lead: Delia won the Norton Award at the Nebulas this weekend in D.C.!!! It was an amazing weekend, and I hope to do it justice here soon. Very happy, we are.
Now to pack up the luggage, la la la....
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| A Preamble to a photograph |
[21 May 2012|11:49pm] |
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http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/preamble-to-photograph.html posted by Neil
This is a very long preamble to a photograph.
When Amanda and I were first going out together we would spend a lot of time on the phone, talking about big real things. We don't talk on the phone anywhere nearly as much any more, and when we do talk on the phone we're more likely to be trying to figure out the logistics of where we are in the world and how we can warp space and time in order to be in the same place relatively soon than about our hearts or our lives. That's just the way things are, and when we're together, late at night, in bed, we still talk about all the big real things.
But we used to talk on the phone. One night I said something to Amanda about my life, and beds, and the sizes of beds, and she got very quiet. I thought she was crying on the phone, which seemed odd, as I'd not said anything (to my mind) about hearts.
A week or so later, she announced on Twitter that she was writing a song. She posted photos of herself after each verse. It seemed like the whole of Twitter was cheering her on.
I got to Boston a few days later, and she played me her song, on the huge grand piano in her cramped apartment. She'd taken a tiny fragment of my life and made it into something else, a story about a couple, from joy to death, exhibited, as in a legal case or at an inquest, as a sequence of beds. I cried when she played it.
She asked me to give it a title, because I had inspired it, and I didn't want to give it a clever title, and so I called it "The Bed Song", and the name stuck.
It's one of the songs on her new album.
She's asked a number of artists to make art to go along with the book, asked if I would do something for "The Bed Song". I thought about what I wanted to make, realised it was a sequence of five photographs, mirroring the five verses/exhibits in the song. And that, while I love taking photographs (my lomo cameras are some of my favourite possessions) I did not know how I would take these photographs...
Fortunately, a few days later there was a gathering in Barrington Illinois to honour Gene Wolfe, and my friend Kyle Cassidy was there with his beautiful actress wife Trillian. I asked Kyle if he'd like to collaborate on making art: I'd write a script, describing the images, as I would have done if I was writing a comics script. He'd take the photos. Kyle said yes. Then I told him the deadline we were on...
And that we'd need people of all ages, willing to be photographed, in couples (all but one), naked in a bed.
Kyle set off, undaunted.
Kyle is an amazing photographer. We found volunteers through friends and through Twitter. It was relatively easy to find people to pose in their twenties and thirties and forties... finding older models was harder. I was hugely pleased when my friends Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff agreed to pose for the last photograph we needed.
Many of the people who had their photos taken told Kyle that it was a life-changing experience for them, and I can believe it.
The photographs were beautiful. The sequence of photographs worked as a story. We were happy, about everything except... Kyle had taken too many good photographs.
Each photograph was a piece of art. Amanda's doing an art book already, of the art that's been made for the album, but we desperately wanted to see Kyle's photos reproduced at the size and at the same quality as they'll be hung in the art galleries they'll be hanging in this summer, during Amanda's art tour. And we wanted the photos that weren't just part of the set of five, that would hang in the gallery and be part of the art book, to be seen.
So that's what we're doing. We're making a maximum of 666 of them (to commemorate the % by which the Evening With Neil and Amanda Kickstarter exceeded its level). If the demand is less, we may make significantly less. We want copies for our models, and a few for ourselves. You'll get one if you support the Kickstarter at the $1000 level or above (so each of the 35 people hosting a house party, for example, will get a copy), and you also get all the goodies from lower levels as well.
Right now we're just finalising the specs -- Kyle wants a lock on the box (or slipcase) it comes in, for example, but we need to decide what kind of lock...
There will be photographs, reproduced at the same size (HUGE -- the book is planned to be the same size as the recent oversized Little Nemo Sunday pages) and quality (amazing) as the actual prints. There will be an essay by me about the song, what inspired it and what it means to me. There will be the script for Kyle and the emails. There will be a reproduction of Amanda's handwritten lyrics. And we will sign it, and limit it, and I very much hope that each of the people who winds up with a copy is made very happy by it.
Of all of the things in the Kickstarter campaign, it's the most likely to ship last, because the production process of objects like this is always beset with nightmares. We want it fancy and beautiful and unique, but each fancy thing we add means there's something else that can go wrong or delay things, and that printers and bookbinders and boxmakers will simply not be able to do what we're asking, meaning we'll have to find someone who can, or wait, or send something back to be redone.
Right now, Kyle is taking the handful of last photographs for the book. And as we were talking about it, I realised, with a creeping horror, that the final photo had, inevitably, to be me and Amanda. Amanda has been in many photographs naked, has no nudity taboo that I've ever noticed. I'm English. I have a nudity taboo.
Kyle took several shots of us in Philadelphia last week, in our hotel room. Some of them we had the covers over us, in others (the scary ones -- well, scary for me) we didn't. I held Amanda and did my best to go to sleep and not to think about the camera on a stick far above us.
I've not seen any of the photos Kyle took of us without bedclothes, yet. I'm nervous as hell about seeing them, but also certain that we'll find the one to be the final image, and glad it will only be in a very limited edition book. But the photo that Kyle just sent over showing Amanda and me together, under the covers, with me mostly asleep, is beautiful. And this is it.
It's the only one of the photos that's in colour, too. I think we may use it as the image on the limitation page, the one we all sign.
And, with Kyle's permission, I'm putting it up here.  |
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| The unlikeliness of the long-distance golf-ball-headed chisel-wielder... |
[21 May 2012|08:49am] |
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http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/unlikeliness-of-long-distance-golf-ball.html posted by Neil
I've been thrilled how many people have watched and reblogged the commencement speech.
If you want to read it, there's a transcript up at the UArts website, here.
I went by train from Philadelphia to Arlington, where SFWA was holding the Nebula Awards weekend. I wasn't actually nominated for a Nebula: I was nominated, along with director Richard Clark, for a Ray Bradbury Award for the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife".
(I'd been nominated once before, in 1998, for writing the English language script to Princess Mononoke. And I lost.)
I hoped I had a chance, but didn't think it was a shoe-in: all the other things nominated were major Hollywood movies, including Midnight In Paris and Source Code. But I thought, seeing I was in the area, and that I had lots of friends I would see who would commiserate if I lost, and forgive me if I won, that it might be a fun trip.
I went. It was a wonderful ceremony. Connie Willis was made a Grand Master, and I kvelled.
The Bradbury Award is unique: a man dressed as a diver with an old IBM selectric "golf ball" for a head, holding a mallet and chisel to carve the happy and sad faces of drama out of a pyramid on top of a book. There's nothing like it.
And yes, Richard and I (and Doctor Who) won. I thanked everybody, Richard, the amazing cast and crew, Steven Moffat, and then I thanked Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman, who put a cranky old time-traveller into a police box almost half a century ago, and sent him off across time and space. Here is a photograph of me and John Scalzi dueling with Bradbury Awards:
I flew home this morning. I put the award above the desk beside my Jim Henson Creativity award, and surrounded it with poppets...
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| This Is A Drag |
[18 May 2012|12:36pm] |
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mood |
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cranky |
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Can I just say how sick I am of gorgeous actresses "dressing as men" and allegedly passing? Yeah, just put your hair up and wear a tie, and everyone's going to think you're a dude. It's that easy.
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| This is just to say.... |
[18 May 2012|12:11pm] |
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....that there's going to be an Annual Booksale when I get back from WisCon, as there are giant boxes of books all over my house again.
You have been forewarned!
Also, I will be doing an r/Fantasy (that's Reddit) Ask Me Anything on June 5th. Questions may be posted all day in the appropriate thread, and I will answer them in the evening.
Because y'all don't get enough of a chance to listen to me babble...
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| Family Man Update; Reviews from the Black Lagoon |
[18 May 2012|12:04am] |
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Originally published at Dylan Meconis. You can comment here or there.
(Permalink to this week’s page)
Family dynamics! There is nothing more fascinating for me to draw. Although trying to show refracted moonlight on water is a bit of a mind-bender, too.
On an unrelated note, I’m looking for examples of really atrocious comics criticism. Book reviews that are completely unhelpful, ignorant, condescending, or just plain confused about what on earth a comic book is.
If you’ve got a gem stashed away somewhere, or something that (as an intelligent reader of comic books) makes your blood boil, I would like to hear about it! The more prestigious the publication that whelped the horror, the better.
I’m aiming to create a wee document that, even if it doesn’t prevent dumb reviews on the first cycle, can be lobbed at lazy critics as a very polite form of shame grenade.
Send me your link (or a brief description of your general pet peeves) in the comments section on this post!
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| your brain works a lot faster than mine. |
[17 May 2012|01:14pm] |
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mood |
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 mostly quite pleased, really |
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Anything else I had to say about the Criminal Minds season finale is subsumed in ZOMG Reid knitted it himself!
He makes a pretty good Four.
Also, I'm glad they did the Emily thing the way they did the Emily thing; it's good to see Will but he should have known better; I'm pretty sure that UNSUB plan fails on usual the Evil Mastermind overclever subroutine of relying on a coincidence they could not have known about in advance; I bet that's Kevin's cousin; Penelope needs a Stern Talking To of the variety she just gave Morgan a few weeks back; I'm still the only person in this fandom who likes Strauss, but dammit I still like Strauss; and FASTER JJ KILL KILL!
Discussion in comments of parallels between JJ in Hit/Run and Hotch in 100 is open for business.
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| don't you wish there were another picture of che guevara? |
[17 May 2012|12:20pm] |
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The following contains discussion of fitness, health, and weight issues. If that is triggery for you, please page down now!
Ob. Disclaimer: I absolutely support anyone's right to live in their body as they choose, at any size they find comfortable. This is entirely about me, and my efforts to reclaim my health and strength after half a decade of abusing and neglecting my poor body.
Well, I'm wearing a pair of jeans that, based on the brand and cut, must date back to 1987 or so.
They're Chic, size 14 tall, and in high school they would have been baggy on me. Now, they fit loosely except for the waist, which is a bit snug--but then, that happened when I was sixteen, too, though the jeans were size 11 then. This is because eighties jeans were cut to fit absolutely nobody except a young Brooke Shields. They do, however, still make my ass look fantastic, a characteristic generally not shared by modern lower-rise jeans, which make nobody's ass look good. Not mine, not yours. Possibly Jessica Simpson's.
But they do let one bend at the middle without pinching one's ribcage on the waistband, which I suppose is a win.
I guess that means I am officially back in my high school clothes, generously speaking. As I also have a black bat-winged sheath dress from Chico's that I loved in high school, and have been hanging on to for sentimental reasons. I might dust it off for an eighties party later this year. If only I had some slouchy elf boots.
I suspect I will save the jeans for eighties nights at goth clubs. I think I still have one pair of slouchy socks hoarded away somewhere... ;-)
This is all prelude to saying that I'm hovering somewhere around 187, and have been for about a month now with the usual ups and downs--but I'm obviously building muscle, because I seem to be shrinking. At one point a month or so ago I noticed I had obliques, there under the slack middle-aged tummy. This week, I noticed the top set of ab muscles. Also, my thighs are no longer getting in my way during most of yoga--that stopped after scott_lynch and I walked somewhere around 40 miles in three days of NYC. I can do Hero's Pose and Lightning Pose without cheating now, and my body doesn't actually interfere with my ability to do a lunge anymore.
It's still getting in the way of twists, and my biceps interfere with Eagle Pose, but that's not new. I'm a solid girl.
I can also wear most of my beloved old corp-goth work clothes again, justifying my hoarding tendencies. Two suits are a bit tight, but they were always on the skinny end of the rack. I had to move the buttons back on a green suit I love, that I had expanded a bit when I was gaining weight. It's a size 12.
I am facing the surprising possibility of shrinking out of my wardrobe again. In any case, look for a much better-dressed Bear at conventions this summer, since I love these clothes and don't have a dayjob to wear them to anymore.
Curiously, I'm about 17 pounds heavier than the last time I fit in these clothes, which tells us about the power of rock-climbing. Muscle is heavy!
My current weight goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. Which should make the same size, roughly, as when I was in high school and weighed 150-ish. I was on track and field then, and at my most muscular before now, but I'm pretty sure my upper body now dwarfs what I had then. (Shoulders! They're awesome!) Also, um. Boobs. Some cup sizes have come to roost since then. Ahem.
So I'm less than thirty pounds from my goal, which is very pleasant. My body is behaving as it should; everything physical is so much easier than it was in 2004, when I couldn't walk a half-mile without agonizing pain (now I can run five 12-minute miles back to back); and I'm enjoying the reduction in back and joint pain and the ability to sleep comfortably on my side or back again without feeling like my own belly is crushing me.
I seem to be part of a coterie of SFF writers and fans on the "get healthy the old-fashioned way; move more and eat less crap" bandwagon, which pleases me. (personally, I have been following the efforts of Scalzi, Doctorow, Lynch, Sykes, Downum, Silverstein, Connolly, Buckell, and I'm sure a few others whose names are eluding me because it's time for lunch.) It pleases me because I'd like to see a lot of these people around for a damned long time.
I'm also noticing changes in appetite, which tell me my body is adapting to its new lower caloric demands. Two whole pieces of fruit is too much to eat with lunch now; I am contented with half of each (plus some protein and vegetables and brown carbs, of course). (I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, about ten servings most days; I've finally figured out how to reach my RDA minimum of potassium, and it goes like this: a cup of fortified cereal in the morning (Special K protein plus, since I can't find Total Protein around here anymore), half an orange, a small banana, eight ounces of green coconut water, and half a sweet potato. Some strawberries or mango don't hurt either, or some beans.))
For those who are curious about how I did it (my doctor was, and she laughed out loud when I said, "Counting calories, restricting sweets and saturated fat, and getting off my ass!" She then replied, "So doing all the boring shit we tell people to do, huh?"), here's my plan, fondly called The Discipline:
It's a refined version of the Hacker Diet, which relies on good old thermodynamics to make things happen. I'm keeping my caloric intake around 1700-1900 calories a day, exercising for about an hour a day on average, drinking lots of water and not too much caffeine, avoiding refined carbs (mostly: I get 100-200 calories of "treat" a day, which could be a glass of wine or a beer, or a brownie, or... PRO TIP: Guinness is lower in calories than most "lite" beers, and tastes a fuckload better. Now you know.), eating roughly twice as many vegetables as the FDA suggests, and trying to keep my protein intake around 20% and my fat intake around 25%--and also trying to keep my protein intake above 100g a day without too much reliance on red meat, or meat at all. (I do use protein supplements--whey and soy, mostly.) I eat a lot of high-protein dairy (skyr!) and I try to limit myself to 100-200 calories a day from refined sugar, which is roughly 20-40 grams. Or, well, half a can of non-diet Coke.
Managing sodium intake is a killer. But I'm working on it.
Sleeping eight hours a night also pisses me off, but it seems to be necessary. I got six last night, and noticed the difference on my run this morning--I kept having to walk up hills I normally cruise up in second or third gear.
I also exercise six days a week--usually two days of climbing (with a little yoga); three days of running; one day of yoga. I also try to get in some vigorous outdoor time when possible--kayaking, hiking, walking the dog. Walking to the store. Picking up my jump rope for five minutes on an otherwise sedentary day.
As I said, one of the most successful weeks of the Discipline recently was when Scott and I were on Manhattan, eating every goddamned thing in sight. But we also made a point of walking two-thirds the length of the island at least once (Riverside to Chinatown, with side trips), and we walked as much as time permitted, otherwise. I know it sounds like my fitness routine is crushing, and seven or eight years ago, it would have crushed me. (Hell, I had the pleasant experience recently of putting in a Rodney Yee video that, in 2006, I could do maybe fifteen minutes of, and having the full hour workout be only just pleasantly challenging.)
But remember, when I started out, I weighed 285-290 pounds and could not walk a half mile. One good habit builds on another, it turns out--and I find myself drinking more green and herbal tea because black tea doesn't taste good after the first mug, and I find myself not hungry for seconds unless the food is exceptionally good, and even then not always. There's not actually a lot of privation; I just want more of what's healthy for me.
It's okay if I have a measured ounce of cheese on my beans and rice, instead of as much as I can fit in the bowl. It still tastes just as good! Better, since it's as easy to afford small quantities of really delicious food as it is large quantities of sort of icky food. And far more satisfying.
Who knew?
Which is so different from all my old pathological ways of dealing with food and drink that it's a little croggling.
Most of this, of course, is just basic health maintenance stuff, and not too hard once you get the hang of it. And it's not like I don't give myself days off: I will in fact have two or three drinks on a night out, for example. I'm fully planning on onion rings after archery tonight when I get dinner with the Thursday Night Shooters.
Just... not too damned often. And budget for it.
It's not the extremes that set one's level of health; it's the baseline.
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| half angel. half eagle. one eye on the world. |
[16 May 2012|06:14pm] |
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chipper |
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The first volume of Shadow Unit is now available as a proper paper book with a gorgeous Kyle Cassidy cover.
It will be available through Amazon within a week, and will slowly filter its way through the rest of the online distribution system.
 This volume contains the first half of Season 1. Volume 2 should be available in about a month, with other volumes to follow.
And of course, Shadow Unit in its entirety is available for free online, and as a modestly priced ebook through the usual sources.
The story began in 2007, and will end in 2013. It's not too late to discover one of the coolest collaborative serials in the genre internets!
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| Forest of Delusion |
[15 May 2012|06:14pm] |
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mood |
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busy |
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I've made a bunch of new stuff, but none of it is quite finished yet, so I've listed some regular books on eBay. This isn't just any old PZB auction week, though. No, this is Bidding Starts At $5 Week! The chapbooks Stay Awake and Crown of Thorns, as well as hardcover copies of Plastic Jesus, Wrong Things, Antediluvian Tales, and even the deluxe tenth anniversary edition of Lost Souls, are all available for opening bids of just $5.
Besides blank journals, treasure boxes, and new covers for old books, I've also been making captions. Grey takes a photograph and writes a piece of prose to go with it, and I turn the prose piece into a sort of artwork to accompany the photograph. You can see one of our pieces and read more about the process in his blog entry here.
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| Overhead on Riverside Drive |
[15 May 2012|06:21pm] |
Delia (to extremely sulky, broody EK): You are my darling one.
EK (sulkily): No, I'm not. I'm not anyone's darling anything.
Delia: So what am I, chopped liver?
EK: Oh..........OK.
Delia: Good; because I don't think there's any statute anywhere about marriage being between chopped liver and a woman.
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