Neil Gaiman has revealed that a new collection of his non-fiction work, The View from the Cheap Seats, is set to be released at the end of May this year.
On his blog, Gaiman announced he had finished “a giant proofread” of the book. “It’s not every speech, introduction or article I’ve written, but it’s all the speeches that seemed important, all the articles I was still proud of, all the introductions that seemed to be about something bigger than just telling people about the book or author they were going to read,” Gaiman wrote.
In his first blog post since October 2015, titled “We thought you were dead, with baby photos”, Gaiman shared images of his wife, the musician Amanda Palmer, and their son, and described his plans for future work.
“I’m about three months behind right now, on everything. And I’m cooking a new novel in the back of my head, which I was meant to start next week, but may be as far as three months away while I finish things that people are waiting for,” he wrote.
Gaiman has a busy year ahead outside of books: the author recently announced he was personally approaching film studios to adapt the classic fantasy novel Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake into a feature film. A TV adaptation of his book American Gods is due to be broadcast at the end of 2016 on US network Starz, with Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies) and Michael Green (Heroes) as showrunners. Four of Gaiman’s short stories from his collection Likely Stories are also being adapted as a series for UK channel Sky Arts.
The View From the Cheap Seats takes its name from Gaiman’s essay about his experience at the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony, when the adaptation of his book Coraline was nominated for best animated feature film. It was first published by The Guardian as “A nobody’s guide to the Oscars” and was later included as a track on an album released by Gaiman and Palmer in 2013, An Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.
On a post on her Facebook page yesterday, Palmer said Gaiman had taken to “leaving his manuscripts in the linen closet” while looking after their child, as she returned to the recording studio for the first time since he was born.
“As a feminist, the fact that famous-ass Neil Gaiman is happy to spend his time, as a human being and father (along with me and the other official two recording studio babysitters), cuddling, singing and distracting and juggling a three-month old baby around and trying to keep him from crying and fussing while she-with-the-boobs is two rooms away maniacally back at work, pounding on a piano and talking with engineers and string-arrangers, when he could be, oh, writing a book or something, or generally sticking with the old paradigm and aghast at the idea of doing any kind of childcare, especially in his wife’s workplace... I’m gonna say this is a point for team feminism,” Palmer wrote.
