Audio & Images: Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

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Neil Gaiman is in Wellington as part of the NZ International Arts Festival's Writers and Readers Week. This afternoon he and his fiancée, musician Amanda Palmer, held a small press conference consisting mostly of media not potent enough to get an interview otherwise.

• Scoop Audio (right-click to download): - Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer's NZ Post Writers and Readers Week

Gaiman talked about seeing Amanda again after missing her Sydney Opera House gig to go to the Oscars, as well as that time he wore a vagrant's suit for their shared interview in a bath. He also described the human connection he gets as a writer from his Internet following, and how it – ominously for this report – brought down the Weta website yesterday.

On the wide range of forms of writing he has produced – from screenplays to prose to comics – he said that, "what they really have in common is the Alphabet". He also talked about the good and bad surprises involved in having films made of his work, including how pleased he was to find that the button eyes in the Oscar-nomiated Coraline really were as creepy as he'd imagined.

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Other topics included libraries ("as important as anything gets"), making references to other works, the experience of being annotated, and different collaboration processes – including getting emailed pictures of Amanda Palmer naked and dead without having phyically met her.

Palmer also discussed the potential perils of shopping for wedding dresses.

This afternoon (Friday 12 March) Gaiman is appear ing in a session on young adult literature with "the awesome" Margo Lanagan (chaired by Kate De Goldi). On Saturday he will be in conversation with De Goldi at the Town Hall, where he said he expects to try out some new writing on the audience.

In other Neil Gaiman news, one of his tweets reports meeting Guillermo Del Toro while in Wellington, with some discussion of the movie version of Gaiman's Death: The High Cost of Living.

Amanda Palmer is performing tonight at Bodega, as well as in Christchurch on Tuesday and Auckland on Wednesday. She expects to come back next year to release what she describes as "an album of Australia and New Zealand related songs".

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See Also:

Press releases:
Whales, Time Travel in Writers and Readers Week
The Festival within the Festival
Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls– NZ TOUR

Arts Festival Website:
Town Hall Talks: Neil Gaiman
Once Upon A Time

Scoop Full Coverage: Arts Festival 2010

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