Technical Difficulties…please stand by

I’m recording the audio book of “STARDUST” right now. It’s fun, although by the end of the day I am more exhausted than I would believe possible from something where I just sit in a studio and read something I’ve written.

What I learned yesterday: 1) Do not give a minor character a funny voice that’s hard on the throat but fine for a couple of sentences when that minor character is going to come back and talk his way through an entire chapter in a hundred pages’ time. 2) Take a break at the end of a chapter, whether I think I need it or not. I do.

…

Over at http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/1991_Gaiman_Pratchett.html is an interview with me and Terry Pratchett from 1990, about Good Omens and other things. And (gulp) a photo…

This morning’s post went straight to the beta-testing new version of this site, and I assume that whatever I write now will go there too an nobody will read it for a few days… I hope that things get sorted out soon, so that you can read this, and the last post. Still, it tells us that we’re cruising down the road toward the NEW IMPROVED easy to navigate Neil Gaiman.com with lots of cool stuff on it…

…

So I was reading Stardust aloud in a studio today and suddenly had one of those odd moments when you notice something utterly wrong in a book you’ve written and wonder why you’ve never noticed it before (and why apparently no-one else ever did either). There’s a scene where I have the witch queen sharpening her obsidian knives with a whetstone. And I thought, “That wouldn’t work, that’s not how you sharpen a volcanic glass blade”, and wondered how I’d comne to put that in — I think the knives had started out as metal in one draft (it was ten years ago, and I’ve forgotten) and then I’d changed them to obsidian because it would be more fun for Charles Vess to draw, and not noticed the whetstone, and almost a decade had passed until I came to read the sequence aloud, and then it hit me.

There’s a reissue of Stardust, with a new cover, coming in October from Harper Perennial. Now I have to decide whether to leave that scene as it is, or change it.

Just thought you might like to know that you’re the 5th “Most Owned Author” on mylibrary.com. Directly ahead of J.R.R. Tolkien and William Shakespeare. http://www.librarything.com/users.php

Which tells us lots of interesting things about mylibrary users. (Which I find, to be honest, an extremely attractive sort of website, and if I only had a month or so with nothing to do, I’d input my own books.) It’s a fascinating site — a couple of clicks and I was reading a discussion about race in Anansi Boys…

I thought you should know about this: http://www.livejournal.com/community/virgule/92396.html. It’s a call for papers for a conference on your work. Will you be writing one, perhaps?

Not on your nelly. Be like helping out at your own autopsy (as I just wrote to a friend in academia, who invited me to cowrite a paper).