Published.

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas on this day in 1843.

The full text is HERE.

Neil Gaiman reads from Dickens' annotated text ... HERE.

Read.

Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling worlds into all the patterns of night.

Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

Rolling.

Arcimboldo, Autumn, 1573

“It’s fine,” said October. His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life. “September can go first. Let’s just get it rolling.”

Neil Gaiman, from “October in the Chair”

Published.

Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas on this day in 1843.

The full text is HERE.

Neil Gaiman reads from Dickens' annotated text ... HERE.

Good.

For years we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. You bring us things and then we make them. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered that they all read science fiction when they were teenagers. So we think maybe it’s a good thing.

Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

Escape.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As C.S. Lewis reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

Among.

Libraries are not childcare facilities but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.

Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

Aspire.

Some years ago a writer not much older than I am now told me (not bitterly, but matter-of-factly) that it was a good thing that I, as a young writer, did not have to face the darkness that he faced every day, the knowledge that his best work was behind him. And another, in his eighties, told me that what kept him going every day was the knowledge that his best work was still out there, the great work that he would one day do.

I aspire to the condition of the second of my friends, I like the idea that one day I'll do something that really works, even if I fear that I've been saying the same things for over thirty years. As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we've done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore.

Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

I don't agree, but Gaiman always makes me think.

Obligation.

Neil Gaiman, from "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading, and Daydreaming"

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Spirit.

Why.

Why there are 2 anti-homeless big spikes right by Aziraphale's bookshop entrance?

Matters.

With help from Salena Godden, Kae Tempest, and Neil Gaiman, John Higgs of British Museum explains why William Blake matters more now than ever ...

Unquestionably.

From last autumn, Nail Gaiman talks with Susanna Clarke to discuss her novel, Piranesi, which he calls "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years" ...

Ways.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Neil Gaiman, from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Thanks to my student, Phoebe, who sent me this quote.  She always finds ways and is really good at patiently reminding me that they're out there.

Navigate.

Maria Popova on the importance of being scared ...

Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.

CONNECT 

Neil Gaiman continues ...

The things that haunt us can be tiny things: a Web page; a voicemail message; an article in a newspaper, perhaps, by an English writer, remembering Halloweens long gone and skeletal trees and winding lanes and darkness. An article containing fragments of ghost stories, and which, nonsensical although the idea has to be, nobody ever remembers reading but you, and which simply isn’t there the next time you go and look for it.

CONNECT

From Algernon Blackwood's 1910 tale, "The Wendigo" ...

His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of time. Défago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought him—was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him, gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later, above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind, all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and distance—

CONNECT

Worlds.

I've never met anyone who was what he or she seemed;

or at least, ...

... was only what he or she seemed.

People carry worlds within them. 

Neil Gaiman

Intercessors.

In her series, Tea with B, historian Bettany Hughes discusses the need for superheroes with Neil Gaiman ...

Communal storytelling is one of the things that makes us human.  The acceptance of story, the delight in stories and, of course the idea that we can be better; that there are intercessors between us and the darkness.

Giving.

Neil Gaiman, "What You Need to be Warm"