Celebrate Leap Year this February with special events planned at The Shores Resort & Spa. Plunge into romance at the Sip & Savor wine tasting and dinner event, featuring wines from Frog's Leap Winery; indulge in the Spa's Honey & Me Couples Massage with your sweetheart, and take advantage of the 29-hour sale on February 29 which will offer 29% off regular room rates.

VIP Vacay, a unique travel search engine, is finally here. Learn more about their services, membership levels, and the incredible savings you can look forward to when you join this exclusive club.

Tokyo International Airport (HANEDA), the 4th largest airport in the world, chose the German SBD provider to equip their self-service installation with the Materna IPS One ID journey.

Deutsche Hospitality and the Porsche Design Group are joining forces to present the Steigenberger Porsche Design Hotels brand, an innovative hotel concept in the Luxury Lifestyle Segment.

On Saturday 18 June, A-ROSA's ground-breaking new river cruise ship, A-ROSA SENA, departed from Cologne on her maiden voyage.

While existing travel websites primarily display the cheapest or fastest travel option, the new BookSmart24 app also finds the most CO2- and emission-efficient variant for the chosen route. The platform enables users to make smart and responsible booking decisions and to realize that traveling in an environmentally conscious manner does not necessarily have to be more expensive.

FOX Corporate Housing is certified as a Women's Business Enterprise (WBE) through the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the nation's largest third party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women in the US.

Every day, thousands of people roll their suitcases through Munich Airport. During Oktoberfest, they can now use them to create music. To celebrate Paulaner's special connection to Oktoberfest, the brewery and the creative agency thjnk Munich are ringing in Oktoberfest 2023 in a very special way – with the Paulaner SoundTrack.

AltamarCAM and Inbest-GPF, together with the Austrian Group Lanserhof, join forces to invest 100 million euros in the wellness sector.

The Gaffney House, a historic property on River Road at 4515 Upper River Road that features the designs of famous Louisville architect James J. Gaffney, has been renovated and restored as of 2023. The house is now listed for short-term rentals, hourly rentals, weddings, corporate retreats, and boat or boat slip rentals.

Choosing travel insurance is not for the faint-hearted. There are hundreds of providers, and increasingly numerous types of packages. A lot will depend upon your budget, and the type of things you want to cover against. Be careful when choosing any particular policy, and don’t presume anything (for example, check out these common reasons where […]

The post What different types of travel insurance are available? appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Media coverage of terrorist attacks in Europe and America (primarily) have increased the profile, and fear of terrorist attacks for travellers. What does or doesn’t travel insurance typically cover in the event of terrorist attacks? Obviously there are a myriad of travel insurance policies, so there’s no simple answer and you should always check your […]

The post Travel Insurance cover for Terrorist attacks appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Browse through the common complaints received by the insurance regulatory bodies (like the Financial Ombudsman in the UK), and one specific one keeps popping up. A traveller who has taken out insurance for a holiday, including cancellation coverage, cancels their holiday a couple of days before departure – for valid and covered reasons. They submit […]

The post Choose carefully the date for your travel insurance policy appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Great songs rise above ugly intentions, and Sweet Home Alabama deserves to be listened to with a critical and attentive ear. Beneath the redneck rumble and tumbling there's a slice of American History to be discovered.

The post Sweet Home Alabama – the twists and turns of a contested song appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

If you’re looking for a cheap flight to Bologna (or a cheap flight to Italy, for that matter), you have plenty of possibilities, as Bologna’s Marconi Airport has expanded greatly over the last ten years. This is in part because of the closer of smaller regional airports, and because Bologna is a strategic location, allowing […]

The post What Airlines fly in to Bologna’s Marconi Airport? appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Travel mistakes in Italy. Having travelled and lived in Italy for the last twenty years, it’s safe to say I’ve made plenty of these travel mistakes. Italy, on the whole, is one of the easiest and most pleasant countries in Europe to travel to, but there are many common travel mistakes travelling in Italy that […]

The post 15 Travel Mistakes on a trip to Italy appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Food tourism in Italy is a growing sector, notwithstanding the fact that Italians have been producing some of the best food in the world for centuries. Producing great food is one thing, making it accessible to visitors is another, and for many years it was not necessarily easy to plan your whole Italian holiday around […]

The post Food Tourism in Italy – A Guide appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

Italy is an amazing country to visit, but it can be expensive – particularly if you’re travelling around from city to city trying to take in all the sites. Planning a trip to Italy on a budget isn’t as difficult as it may seem, though, and we’ve put some of our local writers onto the […]

The post Planning a trip to Italy on a budget – tips appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

They gave him a sound beating before sending him sprawling out of the dwelling – don’t let me catch you around here again – that was the father, of course. This was the ninth household he’d tried and things could not be going worse. That on top of the nausea and dizziness associated with coming […]

The post The Annunciation appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

The Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig was once among the most popular and most translated writers in the world. English Heritage's widely criticised refusal to commemorate his residence in London provides an entry point into a discussion on the role of the intellectual, Brexit, and the meaning of Europe.

The post Unseasonably Speaking – Stefan Zweig, Brexit and the meaning of Europe appeared first on Three Monkeys Online Magazine.

In 9 days, on the 15th of July, Audible will release the first of the SANDMAN audio adaptations. These are, well, full cast audiobooks of the first three SANDMAN graphic novels: Dirk Maggs gave me the role of the narrator, and I gave him the original scripts, so often what I'm saying as narrator is what I asked the artists to draw, over thirty years ago.

These are very straightforward adaptations. For the upcoming Netflix TV series, we're starting from now, and doing it as if it was being written, for the first time, in 2020. The audio adaptations are much closer to the original graphic novels, each episode being a comic in the original. Eleven hours of drama. The cast is amazing. The production and the music are glorious. I'm not sure about the narrator, but everything else is sparkling and exciting. I hope you all enjoy it...

For people who need it in a more tangible form, it will also be for sale as CDs.

Click on this, and you will hear James McAvoy as Morpheus...

 It's a beautiful day in mid-Autumn on Skye and I'm not sure where the year went. This house came with an enormous walled meadow, which my neighbours use to keep their sheep in, and an ancient orchard. About seven years ago the orchard was flooded, and we lost all the redcurrants and gooseberries and rhubarb and such, but most of the trees survived, and there are apples and plums and pears still growing on them.

I'm very aware that on Skye, beautiful weather can be replaced by weeks of rain and gale-force winds, so I went down to the orchard and clambered up a ladder, and picked all the pears I could reach, disturbing a tawny owl, who flapped off somewhere it wouldn't bothered by people randomly climbing its trees.

And now I'm sitting and writing this outside. It's too chilly really to write outside, but it's possible, and it won't be possible soon, and that means a lot.

There are two new books out -- one came out last week, one comes out this week.

PIRATE STEW was published first, illustrated by the genius Chris Riddell. Here's me reading the opening and talking about how the book came into existence...

It's 2021 in some places already, creeping around the planet. Pretty soon it will have reached Hawaii, and it'll be 2021 everywhere, and 2020 will be done.

Well, that was a year. Kind of a year, anyway.

When my Cousin Helen and her two sisters reached a displaced persons camp at the end of WW2, having survived the Holocaust by luck and bravery and the skin of their teeth, they had no documents, and the people who gave them their papers suggested to them that they put down their ages as five years younger than they were, because the Nazis had stolen five years from them, and this was their only chance to take it back. They didn't count the war years as part of their life.

I could almost do that with 2020. Just not count it as one of the years of my life. But I'd hate to throw the magic out with the bathwater: there were good things, some of them amazing, in with the awful.

The hardest moments, in retrospect, were the deaths, of friends or of family, because they simply happened. I'd hear about them, by text or by phone, and then they'd be in the past. Funerals I would have flown a long way to be at didn't happen and nobody went anywhere: the goodbyes and the mutual support,  the hugs and the tears and the trading stories about the deceased, none of that occurred.

The hardest moments personally were walking further into the darkness than I'd ever walked before, and knowing that I was alone, and that I had no option but to get through it all, a day at a time, or an hour at a time, or a minute at a time.

The best moments were moments of friendship, most of them from very far away, and a slow appreciation of land and sky and space and time. In February 2020 I'd been regretting that I knew where I would be and what I would be doing every day for the next three years. Now I'd been forced to embrace chaos and unpredictability, while at the same time, learning to appreciate the slow day to day transition that happens when you stay in the same place as the seasons change. I was seeing a different sunset every night.  I hadn't managed to be in the same place, or even the same country, for nine months since... well, probably when I was writing American Gods in 2000. And now I was, most definitely, in one place.

I had conversations with people I treasure. Some of them were over Zoom and were recorded. Here are the two conversations that I felt I learned the most from, and I put them up here because they may also teach you something or give you comfort. The first is a conversation with Nuclear Physicist and author Carlo Rovelli, moderated by Erica Wagner, about art and science, literature and life and death:

It took a lot of work, but I'm happy to say that, after 9 months of missing each other, Ash and I are reunited. Lots of happy tears. I'm humbled and grateful to be here.  Photo by Amanda Palmer

 I'm still in New Zealand, and life is weird but good. 

Amanda and I are raising our small boy, and I love being swept along in his enthusiasms. Zombies was mostly replaced by Star Wars while I was away. Since I've been back, Star Wars has mostly been replaced by Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters, and Tintin and Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters appear to be slowly transmuting into Greek Mythology and Asterix and Obelix. This morning he ate breakfast in character as Obelix, complaining about the lack of Roast Boar, and then lecturing me on all the Greek Heroes who battled monsters (his list consisted of Theseus, Perseus and Herakles. He got very excited when I told him about Odysseus.)

I've done one public event since I've been here -- the Auckland Writers Festival. Here's the video of the first event, in which Lucy Lawless interviewed me and Amanda.

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price. 

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.

On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room. 

I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.

I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”

Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.

And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.

But we never forgot it.

It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)

Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.

So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed. 

So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy,  Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.

I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.

(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.

So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.

There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for. 

As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop. 

(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)

I mentioned that making Good Omens two is half of what I've been working on, and will be working on for next eighteen months, and I said I'd tell you soon enough what the other secret project I've been working on is.

It's this.

And I cannot tell you how happy I am to be making it, and making it in the way that we're making it.

Anansi Boys started in about 1996. I was working on the original Neverwhere TV series for Lenny Henry's film company, Crucial Films.

I loved a lot of what we were doing in Neverwhere. 25 years ago, it felt like we were doing something ahead of its time. 

Lenny and I went for a walk. Lenny grumbled about horror films. “You'll never get people who look like me starring in horror films,” he said. “We're the hero's friend who dies third.”

And I thought and blinked. He was right. “I'll write you a horror movie you could star in,” I told him.

I plotted one. I tried writing the first half-dozen pages of the movie, but it didn't seem to be right as a movie. And I was beginning to suspect that the story I was imagining, about two brothers whose father had been a God, wasn't really horror, either.

I borrowed Mr Nancy from the story I had not yet told and I put him, or a version of him, into AMERICAN GODS. 

In 2002 I was having lunch with my editor, and I told her the story of Anansi Boys, and said it was probably a novella. She waved her fork at me. “That is a novel,” she said, very certain. I was impressed enough with her certainty that I wrote the novel.

The creation and publishing of the novel is documented here on this very blog. Here's a useful bit, explaining its relationship to American Gods, and also explaining what Anansi Boys is:

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/05/anansi-boys-question-of-day.asp

(For those of you who don't want to click, I talked about describing it thus:

My new novel is a scary, funny sort of story, which isn't exactly a thriller, and isn't really horror, and doesn't quite qualify as a ghost story (although it has at least one ghost in it), or a romantic comedy (although there are several romances in there, and it's certainly a comedy, except for the scary bits). If you have to classify it, it's probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food. 

Which, oddly enough, is still a pretty good description.)

The book came out and was my first New York Times Number One Bestseller. 

https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/09/theres-first-time-for-everything.html 

(This is the Ukranian cover.)

A top Hollywood director wanted to buy the rights to Anansi Boys, but when he told me that he planned to make all the characters white, I declined to sell it. It was going to be done properly or not at all.

And then, about ten years ago, two things happened at the same time. Hilary Bevan Jones, a producer who had made a short film I had directed (called Statuesque) mentioned she'd love to make Anansi Boys as a TV series, and a man named Richard Fee, who worked for a company called RED, spotted me eating noodles in a London noodle bar, waited outside so he didn't seem like a stalker, and told me how much he loved Anansi Boys and that he'd love to make it into television.

I loved the TV that RED had made, loved Hilary and her team at Endor, and, unable to decide between them, suggested that they might be willing to work together. They both thought this was a good idea. 

Work started. Somewhere around 2016 I agreed to work on it to help it get made, but we all knew that we would have to be patient as I was writing and making Good Omens. And when Good Omens was in post production we began to move forward.  Amazon had loved making Good Omens, and were blown away by the viewing figures and reaction to it, and wanted to make more things with me, so Endor and Red now had a place to make it for. We put together a fabulous team of writers -- Kara Smith and Racheal Ofori and Arvind Ethan David, not to mention Sir Lenny Henry, who came on board both as a writer and as an Executive Producer to make sure that the soul stayed in it. (I'm writing the first and the last episode). 

Douglas Mackinnon agreed to co-showrun it with me, because I knew I never wanted to be the sole showrunner of anything again and after the Good Omens experience I would trust Douglas with my life and (which actually may be more important) with my stories. We planned to shoot it all around the world...

Paul Frift had been the producer of Good Omens during the South African leg of the shoot, and was indomitable, so we were very happy when he agreed to come on board as our producer.

And then in 2020 Covid happened. The Prime Directive of making Big Budget International television suddenly became “Don't Travel and Especially Don't Travel All Around The World. We Mean It.”

Douglas came up with a Plan to bring Anansi Boys to the screen that was audacious, creative and brilliant. All we needed to make it work was the Biggest Studio in Europe and access to an awful lot of cutting edge technology. 

The biggest Studio in Europe happens to be in Leith, outside Edinburgh. 

Before Covid, the plan had been first to make Anansi Boys, then immediately to make Good Omens 2. (Good Omens 2 was going to be shot in Bathgate, outside Glasgow.) That was the plan we were working on through most of 2020. Then, in September 2020, Douglas and I got a call from Amazon. “We've got good news and complicated news for you,” they said. “The good news is we are greenlighting both Good Omens and Anansi Boys. The complicated news is... well, how do you feel about making them both at the same time?”

So...

Anansi Boys is coming.

Hang on. I want to do that again in a bigger font.

Anansi Boys is coming.

I'd loved the pilot episode of Star Trek Picard, and talked to Michael Chabon about the director, Hanelle M. Culpepper, and he gave her a rave recommendation as someone who could tell a story and stay in control of the technology. We reached out to her, sent her the scripts and the novel, and she loved the project. Hanelle is going to be our lead director, and will direct two episodes.

Hanelle, Sir Lenny Henry, Hilary Bevan Jones and Richard Fee are executive producers, as are Douglas and I.  Hanelle,  Jermain Julien and Azhur Saleem are our three directors.

We will start to announce the cast soon (it's thrilling).  (The crew are, to me, just as thrilling.)

(But I'll give you one clue: one of our cast members was on a public event with me at some point in the last five years. The first thing she said when we met backstage was that her favourite book was the audiobook of Anansi Boys, read by Lenny Henry. And when I told her that there was a part in the book I'd originally written with her in mind, she was overjoyed. So when it became a reality, she was the first person I asked, and the first to agree.)

(The Anansi Boys image above is by Michael Ralph, our amazing production designer.)

I really ought to blog about making Good Omens (we're in week 4 of shooting) and making Anansi Boys (starts shooting next week), and about the astonishing Ocean at the End of the Lane play at the Duke of York's Theatre in London (and now that I've said this, I know I will) but yesterday I spoke (via Zoom, because of Covid Protocols) at COP26, the Conference of the Parties on Climate Action, and I thought I ought to just put what I said up here. So it doesn't get lost.

 So, let's see.

I was the castaway on Desert Island Discs. This probably doesn't mean anything to anyone who isn't from the UK. (You can hear it at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00120cb.) 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in St Martin's Lane, with a press night on Nov 4th. I saw it (my father-in-law Jack was there as my family guest) and marvelled at how something I thought was as good as it could be when I saw it at the Dorfman Theatre had somehow managed to become bigger and better and more powerful. 

It's collected a slew of five star and four star reviews, and a bunch of award nominations.

If you're in or near London, you should see it. It's special. https://www.oceanwestend.com/

It's on until May 14th 2022, when we lose the theatre to another show, and Ocean goes on tour around the UK.

(Remember, every day they release a limited number of £25 Rush tickets at https://www.todaytix.com/london/shows/21527-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane)

In October and November I was working on Good Omens 2 and on Anansi Boys, each on a different side of Edinburgh. Both astonishing casts and crew. Anansi Boys is shooting in one of the biggest studios there is. You won't believe Brixton...

I'm back in New Zealand currently to be with a small boy and his mother. (I got very lucky in the MIQ lottery.) I've been able to showrun remotely, because technology is amazing these days and lets you do that, but it's definitely easier to do while I'm in Scotland, and easier on everyone else to have me there.

Which reminds me... There's a piece of Good Omens news I've been keeping close to my chest, but I think as we prepare to go back to shooting, it's time to let this particular Cat out of the bag:

When I first started planning Good Omens 2, I thought it would be a good idea to have what I started referring to as "minisodes" -- stories that begin and end within a larger episode, ones that dive into history. And I thought it would be fun to invite some other people to write the minisodes. We have three of them.

We've announced that I'm co-writing the show with John Finnemore. We haven't told you that John has also written a solo-story set in biblical times, though. He has. It's thoughtful and funny and wise.

We haven't told you that novelist and screenwriter Cat Clarke wrote a story set in Victorian times in Edinburgh, have we? She did...

I asked Cat if she wanted to say something about it, and she replied,

 ‘When Neil kindly invited me to join Good Omens 2, I bit his hand off. (Terribly sorry about that, Neil. Hope you’re managing to type OK?) It’s been an absolute joy to play in the glorious sandbox that Neil and Terry created. I can’t wait for the world to see our favourite angel and demon get into a wee bit of a pickle in Edinburgh.’

And there's one other minisode, written by two people working together: Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman. Jeremy is a writer (and one of the members of the League of Gentlemen -- he was portrayed by one Michael Sheen in the League of Gentlemen movie) and Andy's a writer, a worker of strange miracles and an actor. They are best known as a collaborative team for writing Ghost Stories, as a play and a film. Their story is set in London during the blitz.

They sent me a message too: ‘We’ve had such a great time writing for Good Omens 2. It’s been a true privilege to be allowed to dive into Aziraphale and Crowley’s lives. We hope we’ve been able to bring laughs, magic and a few scares to this wonderful world.’ 

...

Sandman on Netflix is doing brilliantly. I can't wait for everyone else to see what I've been seeing.

And from 28th of April until the 26th of May, hitherto unknown strains of Covid permitting, I'll be on an American Tour, doing most of the cancelled and postponed Evenings With Neil Gaiman from 2020 and 2021. Details at https://www.neilgaiman.com/where/ and links to tickets on each entry. (Madison WI has already sold out.)

...

And I didn't get to write a New Year's Wish, because I've been sole parent for Ash while Amanda is away at a lovely Yoga and Hiking retreat in the South Island, and there wasn't the time to write one and stay up with a small boy to welcome in the New Year. Perhaps I'll write a belated one, perhaps not... (This blog is being brought to you by an iPad and Scooby Doo and Mystery Incorporated.)

I start touring 6 weeks from now. It's the first time I've done something like this since before Covid -- get out there every night, read stories and poems and suchlike, answer questions and generally try to interact with a living, breathing audience. I'm a bit nervous, to be honest. Still, the idea of interacting with living, breathing human beings seems wonderful.

Here's the list of places I'll be appearing, with links to get tickets. Right now there are tickets available to all of the venues except Madison Wisconsin. If you are sad I'm not going to be somewhere near to you, I also am probably sad about this too.

(There are different Covid regulations at different venues, please check your venue for their protocol.)

And I'll see you there, I hope...

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Schenectady, NY

Proctor’s Theatre. 7:30 PM

https://tickets.proctors.org/TheatreManager/95/tmEvent/tmEvent13763.html

Friday, April 29, 2022

Boston, MA

Emerson Colonial Theatre. 8 PM

https://www.emersoncolonialtheatre.com/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=D8EA3E70-5B3E-474C-949D-98ED0073B67E

Sunday, May 1, 2022

Seattle, WA

Venue: Benaroya Hall 7:30 PM

https://www.seattlesymphony.org/en/benaroyahall/bh-calendar/benaroya-hall-events/neil-gaiman

Monday, May 2, 2022

Eugene OR

Venue: Hult Center for the Performing Arts / 7:30 PM

Link: https://tickets.hultcenter.org/971/972?_ga=2.26526261.902947090.1628807551-307867051.1626909133

Tuesday, May 3, 2022  

San Francisco, CA

Sydney Goldstein Theater / City Arts & Lectures / 7:30 PM

Link: https://www.cityarts.net/event/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman/

Thursday, May 5, 2022  

San Diego, CA

Venue: Balboa Theatre   8:00 PM

https://artpower.ucsd.edu/event/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman/

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Austin, TX

Venue: Dell Hall, Long Center   7:30 PM

https://bit.ly/NeilGaimanAU

Monday, May 9, 2022

Denver, CO

Venue: Paramount Theatre   7:30 PM

https://www.ticketmaster.com/neil-gaiman-denver-colorado-05-09-2022/event/1E005B63DDA12DA5

Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Hartford CT

The Bushnell Performing Arts Center. 7:30 PM

https://bushnell.org/shows-concerts/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Philadelphia, PA

Merriam Theatre : 7:30 PM

https://www.kimmelculturalcampus.org/events-and-tickets/202122/kcp/neil-gaiman/

Friday, May 13, 2022   

Chicago IL

Auditorium Theatre 8 PM

https://mytickets.auditoriumtheatre.org/overview/3019?queueittoken=e_presaleneilgaiman~q_8f2b69c0-de3a-45c1-9688-d97522585888~ts_1636660722~ce_true~rt_safetynet~h_16adf9e6a35024c0d734c9c67136c1fc0c92bef38b10b630f2b0c7073fe03c25

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Madison, WI

Venue: Orpheum Theater 8PM

https://madisonorpheum.com/event/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman/

(This one is sold out, I'm afraid.)

Monday, May 16, 2022

Indianapolis IN

Clowes Auditorium at Butler University  7:30 PM

https://butlerartscenter.org/performance/neil-gaiman/

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Cleveland OH

Playhouse Square  7:30 PM

Link: https://tickets.playhousesquare.org/online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=ACAD824C-ED50-471B-8438-87A341A602C6

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Columbus OH 

Palace Theatre. 7:30 PM

https://my.cbusarts.com/3190

Friday, May 20, 2022 

Dallas, TX 

AT & T Performing Arts Center. 8:00PM

https://www.attpac.org/on-sale/2022/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman/

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Houston TX

Jones Hall / Society for the Performing Arts. 8 PM

https://spahouston.org/events/neil-gaiman/

Monday, May 23, 2022

Los Angeles CA

The Theatre at Ace Hotel. 8:00 PM

https://www.axs.com/events/403235/neil-gaiman-tickets

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Pittsburgh PA

Carnegie Music Hall   7:30 PM

https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/16005B64C93844CE

All the details are also over at https://www.neilgaiman.com/where/

Your humble web goblin here again, after a brief hiatus of eight and a half years. How time flies.

"Remember when you hosted 13 Nights of Fright and got to lie in a coffin?" I was nonchalantly decorating for spooky season.

Mr. G allowed that he did without looking up from his latest manuscript.

"That was fun." A pause. "Look what I found in a back corner of the basement, between the mummified shedu and Chabon's golem."

Like a cat with a box, so is Mr. G to a red velvet lined coffin; leave one in the middle of a room and he'll be laying in it the next time you turn your back. I was ready with a handful of box nails and a hammer. It won't hold him for long. We don't have long.

Twelve hours from now, something will premiere. Something seasonally fitting. Something fun. Secret for now, but the revelations begin there.

ETA: More here.

Just a note to say that this blog has become rather dusty and abandoned over the last two or three years. But I think it's time for me to use it a lot more. At least until Google notices that they still own Blogger, and close the whole thing down.

Hullo. Welcome back.

This is a good place, on the whole, this blog. I started it in February 2001, for American Gods. This was the first entry.)

Here is an Edward Gorey drawing called The Happy Ending, to celebrate the New Beginning.

The rumours are true. Well, the good ones are, anyway. Netflix is delighted and thrilled that so many of you, all over the world, have been watching and loving Sandman, which means that the thing we were all hoping would happen...?

It's happened.

And that's not all! You dared to Dream (and, y'know, kept asking me when and whether they were ever going to show up). And it's happening! The Sandman profile icons are coming to Netflix! Let joy be unconfined!

(I'm going to be Goldie. No, Matthew. No, Goldie.)

Hullo,

I just filmed a little unboxing-and-enthusing video. It's for the 25th Anniversary editions of Little, Big or, The Fairies' Parliament, by John Crowley. Illustrated (or rather, with Art by) Peter Milton. 

Thirteen years ago, I put on a Victorian Suit and a false beard and I read Dickens' prompt copy of A Christmas Carol at New York Public Library. It was a wonderful, sold out performance, introduced by Molly Oldfield, who told us all about Dickens's reading routine.

I looked a bit like this.

And the book looked a bit like this.

The reading of A Christmas Carol has become the most popular of the NYPL's audio downloads, and they repost it regularly. Here's the one from 2019:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/12/19/listen-neil-gaiman-reads-christmas-carol

For years people have been asking if I was ever going to do it again. This year, back while the writers of the WGA were on strike, my assistant Rachael asked if I'd do it, and if I did, could she document it? I said yes, and it's becoming a thing.

It's going to be a Christmas Extravaganza, with carol singers and suchlike, signed books for sale and all sorts of goodies planned. I'm hoping we can get Molly Oldfield over to New York to introduce it once again.

When I was a boy, I saw Welsh actor Emlyn Williams being Charles Dickens on stage, a one man show I've never forgotten.

Here's the town Hall page for the 18th: https://thetownhall.org/event/neil-gaiman-performs-a-christmas-carol-12-18

Here's the page for the 19th: https://thetownhall.org/event/neil-gaiman-performs-a-christmas-carol-12-19

The ticket presale starts on Thursday Nov 2nd at 12 pm, and regular tickets go on sale on Friday at 10:00 am.

 I spent yesterday in Dallas, at the Heritage Auction headquarters -- I had decided to auction off some artwork and memorabilia to benefit two charities (The Authors Literary Fund and the Hero Initiative, which help authors/writers and comics creators who have fallen on hard times or who need help), and, just as importantly, I wanted to give something back to the artists whose art I was entrusting to new custodians. 

It seems to me fundamentally wrong and inequitable that art that artists sold for $50 or a hundred dollars thirty or forty years ago now sells for hundreds or thousands of times that amount, but the artists, most of whom are old, some of whom are no longer working or not working as they were, never see another penny. I decided the best way to change that would be to set an example, and show people another way of doing it.

Here's the New York Times article before the auction: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/arts/design/neil-gaiman-auction-collectibles.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Xk0.5PkB.9iQtuvn6Bwof&smid=url-share

And here's me in Dallas two nights ago, walking around the exhibition before the auction with Robert Wilonsky from Heritage, with guest appearances by my oldest friend Geoff Notkin, whose fault this all is: 

April 25th. DEAD BOY DETECTIVES. It's really good -- it's funny, it's smart, it's scary, and it even has a few familiar faces...

I'm starting to hear that the money that came in from the Heritage Auction is going out to people and doing what I hoped it would do, which is make life easier for artists and writers.

Web Goblin here.

Two years and five blog posts ago, we were introduced to the 25th Anniversary edition of Little, Big or, The Fairies' Parliament, by John Crowley, with art by Peter Milton.

At the time, there were 300 numbered editions, all of which had been pre-sold some dozen years earlier. Deep Vellum has since managed to produce another 65 copies of which around 40 are available for purchase.

Additionally, around 200 copies of the trade hardcover are still available. This is the "green edition" featuring a dust jacket containing an essay by Mr. G.

Deep Vellum is offering a 10% discount code, "littlebig40", which can be used for the trade edition, numbered edition, and/or for a poster between now and the equinox, September 21.

More details here.

Tags: travel memoirs pictures
My Life


It was on a Thursday evening when my boyfriend asked if I wanted to take the Traghetti (ferry) to Roma. We both had a long week and wanted to get away. We decided to leave early Saturday morning and return on Sunday.

Well, we started from the southern tip of Sicily in Comiso. We drove through the vineyards, nearby villages, and Catania until we were in Messina, Sicily.

The water was a dark blue and the sky was a beautiful blue with very few clouds. The ferry was approaching. Once in Italy, we drove through Reggio, Naples, and Pompeii Italia (Italy for us American folks). While in Reggio, we had to turn around. Someone a few cars in front of us had been shot while driving in traffic.

We eventually made it to Rome!!! I was so excited. Have you ever had a dog that stuck it's head out the window as his ears flopped in the wind? Well, that was me. I believe the whole time we drove in Rome, my head was out the window amazed at the fact I was in Rome. Good thing my boyfriend spoke fluent Italian. We were able to get around really good throughout Italy and Sicily. As for me, I only spoke present tense. At least the locals could understand me. Oh well, I was the African American two year old when it came to speaking the language. (But I got much better with time..trust me). Thank goodness I had a really good boyfriend. He taught me Italian, took me everywhere, and showed me a great time in Sicily and Italy. Back to the trip.

We visited the Colosseum and the nearby attractions. We stayed overnight and enjoyed the scenery and culture (as my memory serves me). On the way back to Sicily, we stopped in Reggio, Italia.

I recall going to a museum that had an exhibit of two African pirates. Their ship had sank hundreds of years ago because of the weight of treasure they had aboard their ship. The locals were selling replicas of their statues everywhere you went in Reggio.

Let me explain these enormous statues I saw in the museum. The statues were pure bronze and their teeth were made of silver. The anatomy and color of the statues clearly depicted they were of African descent. Can you imagine having so much gold, silver, and other treasures that your ship sank??? Talking about having a bad day. The statues were on high stands and the statues had to be at least seven feet tall.

Parts of the ship were in the museum. I was amazed at the size of the ship and tried to imagine having so much gold that I ship that size sunk from the weight of it.

Below are a few prints of the gorgeous sites I saw and some I wish I had seen. (Whatever you do, have Tortellini and a dish called Fruitti de Mare if you're in Sicily or Italy. Fruitti de Mare is similiar to Paella in Espana (Spain). The only difference is rice versus pasta). Enjoy!







Buy this Giclee Print at AllPosters.com








Buy this Giclee Print at AllPosters.com









Buy this Giclee Print at AllPosters.com








Buy this Giclee Print at AllPosters.com


Oh how I love Sicilia. Very down-to-earth, romantic culture. If there was one place that made me think twice about coming back to the United States, it was Sicily! Sicily has a huge part of my heart and always will. I miss you Sicilia! Grazie.

Travel Banter Blog
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*After being back in California, I mix Italian and Spanish together. At one time, I spoke Italian enough to only hang out with the Sicilians. They used to smile when I spoke. I had taken an Italian class and spoke very proper Italian. The dialects varied from township to township. All of the Sicilians I knew treated me like family. Pray all of you are well dear friends.

Tags: Movies memoirs pictures My Life
Banter
Star Wars







Now I know I have to go see Star Wars. There's so much I used to love about Star Wars as a kid. Here are some posters in honor of our Star Wars Fans. There's a search box to find the ones you want. Have fun! See below.






Drifter's Memoirs
Travel Banter Blog
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Take a look below for posters for recent movies:



Posters will rotate. Come back and see a different poster everytime!

Tags: humor
life
pictures
work


The Travel Banter Blog would like to wish all visitors a jammin week!

Travel Banter Blog
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Playtime
Buy this Art Print at AllPosters.com

Please tell me it's not Monday already!

Buy this Pre-Matted Print at AllPosters.com