Neil Gaiman's Blog, page 40

Time. It's waiting in the wings...

I'm behind on blogging right now, as I try and get ahead (well, catch up) on work.
One hasty thing for you lot to ponder: in about ten days, on the 9th of February, this blog will be nine years old. (It started on the americangods.com website, and then, when we were given the neilgaiman.com domain, transmigrated. This was the first actual post.) The webgoblin pointed this out to me, and we think we should do something to celebrate the blog's 9th birthday. I have absolutely no...

From the Department of Only In Fiction

Strange moments of juxtaposition that make you feel like you're living in a novel:
It had been the kind of day that meant I never quite got to look at the post. After dinner I opened the various packages on the kitchen table.

The first thing I opened was a secondhand copy of "The Inner Hebrides and their Legends" by Otta F. Swire, and I opened it to a random page and read,

"...the third of May, when the Devil and his angels were cast out of heaven (and therefore 3rd May is a day...

And in the End...

I slept with Zoe last night, in the attic. She would get down to throw up, then come back up on the bed. When I woke up she was down in her cat-bed, though.
The vet came at midday. Lorraine, and I, and Mary (my ex-wife) went up to the attic with her. We said our respective goodbyes to Zoe, stroked her, petted her, talked to her. The vet warned us what would happen, injected Zoe with a sleeping drug (she yelped and tried to get away), then, after she had calmed down, after she ha...

Olga's arrival

Early this morning I picked up Olga, who had flown all night to get here, from the airport. A diversion due to a traffic accident routed us through St. Paul, which we took as an omen (as we drove up to it and realised that we were both starving) that we were meant to eat breakfast in Mickey's Diner. So we did. Olga spent a lot of the time playing with the Nexus 1.

We drove home through fog and something that would have been an ice-storm if it had been two degrees colder, but was...

Zoe update

I slept in the attic bedroom again last night. Zoe seemed weak and listless when I went in, and was huddling on the floor by the heater. She smelled weird, like bile. She got out of bed a couple of times in the night, to throw up a couple of teaspoons of foam. Then I'd clean her up and bring her back to the bed, and she'd snuggle and purr.
When I woke up this morning, she was in her cat bed on the floor. I cleaned up the vomit-foam that had happened while I'd slept. Now I'm off t...

Where Are They Now?

Because I don't think I can do another Zoe post today, here's one that might make you smile.
From Dec 1976. A punk band, sort of. We grew up to be, left to right, an eminent artist, me, one of , (standing) a Meteorite Man, and, (bottom right) um, I have no idea, and not just because he left the band or vice versa shortly after. (His name is, or was, Simon Wilson, the last time I saw him it was 25 years ago and he had just stopped working in t...

Zoe, part two

So far, a profoundly odd day. I slept up in the attic bedroom with Zoe, much to the irritation of my dog. The above was the view when I woke up, captured on Nexus 1 camera (as was the accidental video, below). Weirdly, no allergy symptoms at all. Normally I have to wash my hands after touching her, or my eyes itch and swell and go red. No problems at all today. And I lay in bed with her while she did that kneading-dough thing that contented cats do, and checked my email and lear...

A SMALL CAT STORY, and tabs to close

About twelve years ago it became very apparent that my house was going to fall down unless Something was Done: the rear part of the house, built about 30 years after the main house (which is about 120 years old), had no foundation and was pulling away from the main house, but shared a roof with it. None of the things we could do to fix this was cheap, so we gritted our teeth and let builders demolish the rear of the house and put up four storeys of new-old house behind. We added...

Zoe.

There is a cat named Zoe who lives with us. It's like living with a fluffy bundle of love. Fourteen years ago, she was a barn kitten in a place my daughter used to ride. The farmer went down to the barn, threw a towel over the kittens, caught her, brought her to us and we went home with her. She was a barn cat, although there was definitely some Siamese in there somewhere.
She spent the first few years of her life loving us and avoiding strangers. A few years ago she went away...

Bela Fleck's Danse Macabre now out...

Over the last 15 months I've got dozens of messages like this (picks one):

Hello,
I recently heard your interview with NPR and just fell in love with the banjo version of Danse Macabre. I thought it was very clever and I wanted to be able to listen to it in it's entirety. I've looked and there doesn't seem to be a version that I can download via itunes or the like. If there are plans to release it, please let me know. Otherwise, I was hoping that I could get the track from...