It's been ages, and I kept promising myself I'd do a blog update, and then other stuff would happen, and somehow in there the blog never got updated.
So. Right. Lots of stuff has happened since the last time I posted. (OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE came out in paperback in the UK and US. It's still on the US bestseller lists. Please read it. I'm very proud of it. I did a tour for THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS, with Eddie Campbell and the FourPlay string quartet, and we sold out The Warfield and Carnegie Hall and the Barbican and we very nearly sold out Usher Hall in Edinburgh. CHU'S FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL came out for little kids. I helped Amanda edit in the last three days before she handed in her book, which was wonderful, and I handed in the manuscript for my next short story collection, TRIGGER WARNING... although I'm still finishing the last story in the book.)
(Backstage at Carnegie Hall, with Maddy.)
On Wednesday I went to LA for a few days of meetings and such. I learned what's happening with the AMERICAN GODS TV series (all good and on-track), with the John Cameron Mitchell movie of my story "How To Talk to Girls At Parties" (it's all looking wonderful. Elle Fanning will play Zan, the second of the girls that Enn meets at the party. The story continues after the short story is done, and is still set in 1977, in Croydon). Other things, just as good. I saw a preview of my old friend Cindy Shapiro's rock opera Psyche (http://www.psycherockopera.com/), and was really impressed by how powerful the music and staging of the myth were.
While I was talking to people, my wife Amanda (rock star, just wrote a book out in November) was working at Bard College with a director and some young actors.
Amanda's step brother Karl, a few years older than her, whom she idolised, died when he was in his mid-twenties, of ALS, so when Chris Anderson of TED challenged Amanda to do the ice-bucket challenge, she did. In a wonderful video.
And then she challenged me.
I thought about it. I was in LA (where the Californian water shortage is a very real thing. It's a drought). I wanted to be informative (because people sent me icebucket challenge videos to watch, and I had to go and google to figure out what was going on). I wanted to make it clear you could donate AND challenge. And I wanted it to me memorable.
Amanda gave me the key. She pointed out that she had done her challenge fully dressed. And not, as people might have imagined, naked or semi-naked.
I called Allan Amato and Olga Nunes, fresh off the Temple of Art Kickstarter, and they agreed to come and film me on the beach that afternoon.
And to bring Death. Because ALS is a fatal condition. So I packed my novelty bowtie, and headed out...
Please watch it. If you like it, share it...
(All of us post-bucketing, except for Best Boy Cat Mihos, who took the photo.)
One of the reasons I'm smiling so widely in this picture is I'd just been talking to the people in Azraq camp who run the child friendly space it was taken in. They were mostly from UNICEF.
They had explained that when the kids arrived in the camp, only the previous week, they didn't talk or make noise. They were subdued. When they drew pictures, the pictures were of explosions, of severed body parts, of weapons and dead people.
The camp had only been open two weeks. The kids I saw and spoke to were kids – noisy, happy, curious, hilarious, and they showed us their drawings, of butterflies and children and mountains and animals and hearts.
That's what I'm smiling about. That room full of noisy kids was the best place in the world.
I spoke to some of these children, who told me about their lives in Syria during the troubles, about their escape (“there were rocks in the desert, and we had to turn on the headlights to see, but when they turned on the headlights of the car people would shoot at us, and my parents were frightened, but I wasn't...”). For some of them it had been three years since they last went to school.
I made the mistake of reading some of the comments in the Guardian article, and on Twitter, who seemed convinced that me talking about the kids in the camps was a sentimental attempt to take their attention from the real business at hand, which was supporting whichever side in the conflict you already supported loudly and vocally. Obviously, a political crisis that's bad enough to produce refugees is only going to be sorted out politically. But pretending that people hurt, displaced and fleeing are just a vague sort of irritant, that lives wasted or destroyed don't matter, in order to prove your ideological point, whatever it happens to be, is, to my mind, both lazy and foolish and very, very wrong.
Here's things that people would
probably like to know...
This is the poster for TRUTH IS A CAVE
IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS Reading Event at the Carnegie Hall (and it
lists the other gigs too. I think there may still be a handful of
Barbican tickets available on July 4th and 5th,
I'm pretty sure the Warfield is Sold Out, although they may release a
few closer to the date, and right now Usher Hall in Edinburgh, which
was the last concert to go on sale, still has plenty of seats, and even has some in the Stalls).
Please feel free to spread it around...
If you can't afford to come, or feel
like chancing your luck, there is a Facebook competition where you can win
tickets, at the William Morrow Facebook page:
Enter for your chance to win one of five pairs of tickets to see Neil Gaiman live at Carnegie Hall with FourPlay String Quartet on June 27th! Prize package includes a meet & greet and photo opp with Neil himself.
The biggest publication news of recent
weeks is that Hayley Campbell's book THE ART OF NEIL GAIMAN is out.
You can learn who Hayley Campbell is, and all about the book and how
it came to be, in this delicious Comic Beat interview. It's filled
with glorious details. I like the bit about me and kids and Alan
Moore and kids and Custard Creams vs. Bourbon biscuits best. Here she explains the interviewing process:
He would give me all the answers I wanted plus loads of things that were entirely irrelevant because it was just me and him talking in a room and we do that all the time. It was a weird interview to do. I only noticed this was happening when I had to transcribe 17 hours of it back in London, and sat there listening to us trying to save a bumblebee who’d got caught in the fireplace. For half an hour. ‘Ooh he’s got soot on him. Look at his giant cardigan. Shall we put him outside on a flower?‘ Honestly I think I have to burn the tapes.
I read the book a few months ago, and
really liked it, as much as it's possible to like something where one
is too embarrassed properly to relax and enjoy it. I was reading it
to approve the text, but I loved the text and spent most of my time
trying to fix the dates on the picture captions.
Hayley is a really funny writer. She's
observant and interested. I'm really looking forward to her novel,
when she writes it, and am also a little bit scared.
And you can go and check it out at
Amazon.com, where the poor guy whose entire reason for living seems
to be giving everything on Amazon a one star review has already given
it one star review. http://amzn.to/1vxTAYK
Hayley's going to be taking over the
role of interviewer from her father, ace illustrator Eddie Campbell,
for the Barbican and Edinburgh TRUTH IS A CAVE gigs on July 4th and 5th.
Quite when I slipped into this parallel dimension in which I can be described as “stylish” without anyone in earshot actually sniggering, I do not know. But I am going to make the most of it while I'm here.
I haven't blogged for a while. I
suspect that's partly because I'm back on Twitter, and I seem either
to blog or to tweet, and partly because I've been exhausted. Tweeting
time comes out of dead time, usually – time in taxis, or waiting in
corridors. Blogging time usually comes out of sleeping time.
I should be writing, now, writing
things people are waiting for. But I need to blog as well...
It's foggy where I am today, and I can't tell where
the sky ends and the sea begins. In a few days I go to Norway, to
Sweden and to Spain, for a slew of appearances and interviews.
Looking over the schedule, I suspect that some of the signings may be
hard, as very limited amounts of time are scheduled for them, and
immediately afterwards I'm due at the next event or interview or
thing.
Last week I was in Jordan, and then
landed, still shaken up, and went straight to the British Library,
where I talked about Sandman and Art and Life with Tori Amos, then
got up on the stage and read some stories to an audience, then
collapsed.
I went to Jordan, as I reported here, for the UNHCR, the
United Nations Refugee Agency, to visit the Syrian Refugee Camps and
report on what I found.
Last year I wrote a short film for Georgina
Chapman to direct, and we really liked each other, and she said yes when I
asked if she'd like to come with me to Jordan. We had both planned to
bring our spouses – I had expected that Amanda would be there but
that Harvey Weinstein (to whom Georgina is married) would just get
too busy, because Harvey is always busy. Instead, Amanda found
herself dealing with a perfect storm of things, including health
issues and, most importantly, an unfinished book, and could not come,
and Harvey was there, showing a side I've not seen in the 20-odd
years I've known him.
No Amanda made the Jordan trip easier,
as I didn't have any attention on anyone else at any time I was in
the camps, and much harder, as I really would have given the earth
for a hand to squeeze at some points in the camps, or for someone to
hold.
I would write about the Jordan trip
here, but I wrote what would have been my blog already.
And here's an interview I did with the
BBC World Service, while I was out there. If I sound a little shaken,
I am.
Everything is going to be collected at
http://donate.unhcr.org/neilandgeorgina,
which also gives information on the project and also on how to
donate to UNHCR.
I came away from Jordan ashamed to be
part of a race that treats its members so very badly, and
simultaneously proud to be part of the same human race as it does its
best to help the people who are hurt, who need refuge, safety and
dignity. We are all part of a huge family, the family of humanity,
and we look after our family.
Please share the links, especially the
link to the main Guardian article at http://rfg.ee/x6Kon.
Share them aggressively. Make people read them. It's important, and
I'll be grateful. Thank you.
I landed in Jordan late this afternoon. I'm in my hotel right now. I'll be up for a 6 am pick-up -- I need to be at the camp for bread distribution, first thing in the morning.
Since the start of the Syrian warfare, over two and a half million people have fled the fighting and gone somewhere else. Half a million of them have come to Jordan. The population of Jordan is a little over 6 million. By percentage of the population, that's what would happen if twenty five million people arrived as refugees in the US over a couple of years, or five million people sought refuge in the UK. It means lots and lots of people here have Syrian families living with them. It means that there are refugee camps -- small cities built in the desert, all temporary structures.
I was invited to come out here by UNHCR - the United Nations Refugee Agency - with the purpose of making one or more short films, telling stories and writing articles that draw attention to what's going on in refugee camps.
I packed for myself on this trip and, for various reasons, did a terrible job of packing and remembering what to bring. And every time I start getting grumpy for not having something, it occurs to me that the people I'm seeing tomorrow brought with only what they could carry for often hundreds of miles - and that included carrying children...
I'm back on social media from today. And my last class at Bard until Autumn is tomorrow night. I owe the world a big post on life and the things that go with it.
But first, this one is important:
There are many peculiar places in the
world, places that can hold your mind and your soul tightly and will
not let them go. Some of those places are exotic and unusual, some
are mundane. The strangest of all of them, at least for me, is the
Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. I know I am not alone
in this. There are people who discover Skye and will not leave, and
even for those of us who do leave, the misty island haunts us and
holds us in its own way. It is where I am happiest and where I am
most alone.
Otta F. Swire wrote books about the
Hebrides and about Skye in particular, and she filled her books with
strange and arcane knowledge. (Did you know May the 3rd
was the day that the Devil was cast out of Heaven, and thus the day
on which it is unpardonable to commit a crime? I learned that in her
book on the myths of the Hebrides.) And in one of her books, she
mentioned the cave in the black Cuillins, where you could go, if you
were brave, and get gold, with no cost, but each visit you paid to
the cave would make you more evil, would eat your soul.
And that cave, and its promise, began
to haunt me.
I took several true stories (or stories
that are said to be true, which is almost the same thing), and set
them in a world that was almost, but not quite, ours, and told a
story of revenge and of travel, of desire for gold and of secrets. Two men, one very small, are travelling west to find a cave said to be filled with gold.
I
wrote most of the tale on the Isle of Skye. When it was done it was
published in an anthology called STORIES, and it won the Shirley
Jackson Award for best Novelette, and the Locus Award for Best
Novelette, and I was very proud of it, my story.
Before it was published, I was set to
appear on the stage of the Sydney Opera House, and was asked if I
could do something with Australian string quartet FourPlay (they are
the rock band of string quartets, an amazing, versatile bunch with a
cult following): perhaps something with art that could be projected
onto the stage. I listened to FourPlay's music, and, possibly once I heard their take on the Doctor Who theme and the Simpsons Theme, and a cover of Cry Me A River I liked nearly as much as Julie London's (and I like that so very much), I knew wanted to work with them.
I thought about “The Truth is a Cave
in the Black Mountains”: it would take about seventy minutes to
read. I wondered what it would would happen if a string quartet
created a moody and glorious soundtrack, as I told the story, as if
it were a movie? And what if Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, the man who drew Alan Moore's FROM HELL, writer and artist of ALEC, my favourite
comic, created illustrations for this most Scottish of my stories and
projected them above me while I read?
I was scared, going out onto the stage
of the Sydney Opera House, but the experience was amazing: the story
was received with a standing ovation, and we followed it with an
interview (artist Eddie Campbell was the interviewer) and a poem,
also with FourPlay.
Six months later, we performed it
again, with more paintings by Eddie, in Hobart, Tasmania, in front of
3,000 people, in a huge shed at a Festival, and again, they loved it;
again, a standing ovation.
Now, we had a problem. The only people
who had ever seen the show were in Australia. It seemed unfair,
somehow. We needed an excuse to travel, to bring the FourPlay string
quartet across the world (pop culture literate and brilliant
musicians, they are: I fell in love with their work before I ever knew them).
Mysterious promoter Jordan Verzar, who had
put me and FourPlay together in the first place, saw his chance and
struck, rather like an amiable Australian cobra, and before we knew it, everything was happening.
So we are doing the smallest tour in
the world for this.
If you want to see me performing THE TRUTH IS A
CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS, with the amazing FourPlay string
quartet, and see Eddie Campbell's art projected, the words and the
music and the images combining in your head to make a movie that only
you will ever experience in that way, a night with special guests, I
wouldn't be surprised, and also surprises (including things nobody
has every heard read), then the only places you can see it are San
Francisco, at the Warfield, New York's Carnegie Hall on June 27th, then in London at The
Barbican (two nights) and it ends in Edinburgh, in Usher Hall on July 6th. And
then we'll be done.
Right now, the Warfield on June 25th is already SOLD OUT.
If you've read down this far and you're interested in seeing a unique and amazing evening, and you are anywhere in the US, the Carnegie Hall is the one to come to (unless you want to fly to the UK). New York is nice in June.
The Carnegie Hall night will have special guests. It will be the only place I'm also going to read the whole of the new HANSEL AND GRETEL before it's published. There will be a LOT of signed books there, even if we can't work out a signing (we're trying to but logistics are hard). And it's going to be a night to remember...
The two Barbican concerts on July 4th and 5th are almost sold out (they have just released some seats, so there are a few seats left).
Usher Hall in Edinburgh was only just added, and tickets only just went on sale. There are lots of seats there, and very much hope the Scots are kind to my Scottish tale.
Do come. I know it may seem odd, an author and a string quartet. But trust me, you do not want to miss it.
...
I wanted to put in a huge plug here for the anti-bullying website, Bystander Revolution. They've done some amazing interviews with people, and have advice. Here are their films talking to me.
..........
On Saturday, if you are in the UK, you can get a free copy of STARDUST with your Guardian newspaper, if you buy it from Sainsbury's. This is a good thing if you like Stardust and read the Guardian. More info at this link, along with a way to win one of the limited edition beautiful special copies of OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. http://www.theguardian.com/books/competition/2014/apr/26/neil-gaiman-competition
I taught my first class at Bard on Tuesday night. It was slightly nerve wracking, but the 14 people who are listening to me burble about writing and fantasy seem very nice and relatively forgiving, and I'm looking forward to doing it again tomorrow night. Only, I hope, saying different things.
The Evening With Art Spiegelman and Me at Bard was wonderful. It was sold out, and became mostly an interview, with me asking Art things, although I read the first few pages of the version of Hansel and Gretel I've written that Lorenzo Mattotti has illustrated, which was rather wonderful. (You can see one of the marvelous Mattotti illustrations on the screen behind us in this photo by Gideon Lester.)
There aren't any more events in New York this year that there are tickets for, except for THE TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS at Carnegie Hall. (At which I think I will also do the first reading of the whole of Hansel and Gretel as well.) Lots of people are asking if there will be a signing there... and I'm definitely considering it. The Ocean at the End of the Lane will have just come out in paperback, and The Truth is a Cave In The Black Mountains graphic novel will just have come out.... It's definitely possible.
(And Where's Neil will tell you everywhere else I'll be until July, including San Francisco, London, Edinburgh, Barcelona and Madrid: http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/.)
Right now I'm in San Diego, just for the day, in order to see Amanda, who is out here where it is warm and she is working on her book. I'm not sure that spending a whole day flying out, and a day flying back, in order to spend a day together, makes the best sense, but I missed her and she missed me and I quite enjoy writing on planes...
The new house in the woods is wonderful, and I'm enjoying getting to know the whole new world of the Hudson Valley. And the old house back in the Midwest is still there, and it still has my books on the shelves and my art on the walls and my bed, and I suspect I'm going to wind up dividing my time between both places, as much as I succeed in living in any one place. I have a wife who also seems determined to have a bi-locational existence, only with Melbourne, Australia and New York City as her two places that she spends her life. We'll figure it out. As long as I get a desk to write at, and a view of trees, I'm happy.
Today, The Ocean at the End of the Lane came out in paperback in the UK. There's a moving version of the poster, which you can see here (needs Flash): http://www.teainteractive.com/clients/ocean/
And here are the Ocean posters that do not move, and I am extremely happy because I don't think I've ever had books that were posters before. They leave me faintly nervous: I hope that the kind of people who would like the book will find it, and that people who would simply not enjoy it do not succumb to the blandishments of advertising. (Goes and checks Amazon.co.uk to see if people are still enjoying it now it's out in paperback...) (And then puts up the Waterstones link, on noticing their name on the poster. Hello Waterstones!)
Biting Dog Press are releasing a limited print in June of 500 copies of my "8 Rules For Writing".
You can't buy them retail -- they will be going directly to bookshops -- but Dave of Biting Dog is releasing 50 of them to the public directly as incentives to fund his daughter Kayla's Elephant Sanctuary Volunteer Trip: details at http://www.bitingdogpress.com/Merchandise/orderpage.html.
Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy field, does an annual poll and survey: you have another five days to make your votes heard, and to tell them who you are. The poll closes on April 15th: http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2014/PollAndSurvey.html
A photo Amanda took of me last night. She calls it "Schrödinger's Door."
Finally, congratulations to Stephen Colbert on becoming the next David Letterman. I loved my time on the Colbert Report, rumpled funeral suit attire and all, but liked the man Colbert much more than the persona Colbert (and loved that he broke character while interviewing me). I'm really hoping that the Late Night show will be hosted by the man. (In case you missed it, here's the video of the interview from 2009.)
Bloomsbury just sent me the cover for their paperback of FORTUNATELY, THE MILK. It is coming out in the UK on June 5th, 2014. I love the cover, and was impressed by the Children's Book of the Year tag, as I had forgotten. (It's been a mad year. There are too many things to remember.)
And seeing I am posting that, I also thought I should post this:
...which is a photo I stole from Sam Eades's Twitter Feed. (So I think we can safely assume the aquamarine nail-varnished thumbnail is Sam's.) Sam was the publicist at Headline all through Ocean. She's amazing -- cheerful, sensible, a delight to be around, and the kind of person who can come up with a mad idea like getting a road named after a book and just make it happen while being on a signing tour like no other, and still getting the author fed.
(She's just left Headline for Pan MacMillan, and she will make authors there very happy and I miss her already.)
It's the UK paperback cover of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE. The paperback comes out in a week.
And it was only when I looked at them both, I realised I've got two books coming out in the UK with, actually and honestly, "Book of the Year" on the cover. And I thought, I'll probably never have that again. It's really unusual for me to have two books out, one for adults and one for all ages, in the same span of time. And lightning doesn't strike twice. For a moment I started feeling glum, finding myself worrying about backlashes and things that probably don't ever happen again and the nature of time and life...
And then I thought, I should remember what Stephen King told me, something I put into the Make Good Art talk and book. I should enjoy this.
So, contrary to my vaguely worried nature, I am doing my very best to enjoy it. Book of the Year, twice, for two books. That's pretty good, isn't it?
The coolest bit of all might be this Sunday Morning, when you get to see a stained glass mural...
Sunday, April 6th: PRIVATE VIEWING & BREAKFAST WITH ART SPIEGELMAN Manhattan, NY: A rare chance to join Art Spiegelman (class of '65) for coffee, carbs, and juice as he gives a personal guided tour of the 50' x 8' two-sided glass mural he designed for the school. Secrets-literally-behind the window will be revealed!
And he'll have special guest Joost Swarte on hand, showing slides of his own stained glass windows in the Netherlands!
The tour begins Sunday, April 6th, at 10:30 am, at the High School of Art and Design cafeteria, 5th floor. That's 245 East 56th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.Get your tickets here now! Tickets are $20, but $15 for those of you with a MoCCA pass, and free for current A&D students! Proceeds go to the Alumni Association to benefit the students of Art and Design.
...
St Mark's Bookshop in New York has slowly become one of my favourite bookshops around, I think because it's so well curated. I never walk in there and think "So many books are being published. Why don't people just stop making new books and read the ones that are already out there?" which I sometimes find myself thinking on walking into huge chain bookshops. Instead I just walk around going "I didn't know that existed. I'll have that, and that, and that, and I'll get that for a friend...".
Reminder: the Symphony Space "Selected Shorts" evening has sold out.
The only remaining event on the East Coast this year is the Carnegie Hall TRUTH IS A CAVE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS reading, with the FourPlay String Quartet and Eddie Campbell paintings and all, on June 27th. It's happening at the same time that THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE is coming out in the US in paperback. (Amazing things will be happening on that that night: trust me. This is the big one...)
It's a very strange process, moving into a new house. In my case, the worst of the moving in has been done. Now all that remains is details, hundreds upon hundreds of details. Details and details and details and, occasionally, small disasters. Yesterday, the heating stopped working. The heating stopped working because there was two inches of water in the cellar, because a water treatment pump could not keep up with the combination of rain and snowmelt that was already filling all the drains, and so backed up. I have good friends and they made everything okay, with pumps and knowledge of fixing things.
(I do not really have a lot of fixing things knowledge. And while you may want to read a book by me, you do not want me to put up your shelves. Trust me on this.)
I went into New York overnight, finished writing a very much overdue introduction in my hotel room, emailed it off moments before I fell asleep, had a Really Cool Secret Meeting this morning, and am typing this on the train back, the Hudson river grey and, on the far bank, distant leafless hills and cliffs. I want Spring to begin.
I'm currently pondering whether or not to write a short story for a company. They've asked me to write one. I can write whatever I like, as long as I put their product in it and do not show their product killing people horribly, or even nicely. It would be a fun, interesting project that would pay well. To make things more interesting, I've already mentioned their product in a novel, I like their product, and I can see where the story would go.
But I'm not sure. I'm going back and forth on it.
I loved doing last year's project for BlackBerry, mostly because it felt like they were a patron of the arts. They gave me a very open brief ("What would you like to do on social media?") and let me go off and do it. They gave me a BlackBerry, and I promised I'd use it for a year. They made short films which I loved, about writing and inspiration and creation.
(And I just noticed that the BlackBerry Keep Moving videos have become unlisted on YouTube, so here they all are, in case anyone needs them. The fourth is my favourite.)
(As a note here: when the year was up, I wanted to stay with BlackBerry as a phone platform. I really liked it, and kept finding myself frustrated when I'd use iPhones or Android phones, but I was grumpy about the lack of apps. They gave me a Z30. It's a wonderful phone (here's the USA Today write up.) But y'know, like they said in the USA Today review, no Yelp and no Netflix.
But then, a couple of weeks after I got the Z30, they released the latest operating system, 10.2.1, which also now natively runs Android apps. I archived on my old Android phone any Android apps I wanted on the Z30, bluetoothed them over to the BlackBerry, installed them, and now use Yelp and Netflix and Audible and such on the BlackBerry with abandon.)
But the BlackBerry project, while it was done for and with the assistance of BlackBerry, never meant I had to put a BlackBerry into a story. Which made me happy. Now I'm trying to figure out why that would have felt like crossing a line in the way that the Nokia phone (which, if I were writing it today, would be an iPhone) in the first chapter of American Gods does not. And what that line is. And why it troubles me.
The Symphony Space "Selected Shorts" night on May 7th has now sold out. The only other event I'll be doing in New York this year is the Big One -- the Carnegie Hall event on June 27th. (You do not want to miss this: it's the same thing that sold out Sydney Opera House, with FourPlay String Quartet and me).
Which reminds me. One final TRUTH IS A CAVE.. night has been added to the world. Edinburgh, Sunday July 6th. As they say on their website:
Created for Sydney's renowned Graphic festival, this haunting tale of adventure, revenge and treasure, told as a hybrid between a storyteller, an artists and an Australian string quartet is playing five performances only - Carnegie Hall in New York, the Warfield in San Francisco, two sold-out shows at London's Barbican, all leading up to this very special night at Usher Hall.
Ayelet Waldman asked me if I could mention that she has a new book out, and I will, and not just because I have not yet written my speech for her daughter Rosie's Bat-Mitzvah: It is called Love and Treasure. That's the Amazon link, and here's the Indiebound.
...
oops. This sat on my computer for 36 hours. In the meantime, Spring has definitely sprung. Deer are frisking through the woods and platoons of wild turkeys are self-importantly strutwaddling up and down the drive. I hope Spring heard me grumbling, and decided it was time to turn up.
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