Maurice Sendak: "Cannibals and Psychotics"

I remember the first time I saw a Maurice Sendak book. It was In The Night Kitchen. I was eleven or twelve, and had been given a small allowance by my parents to buy my littlest sister, who did not read, books, if I would read them to her. I loved books and reading aloud. In The Night Kitchen was liberating, transgressive, and a dream come to life: I understood the nakedness, could not understand why all the chefs were Oliver Hardy but loved that all the chefs were Oliver Hardy. Years later I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland, and In The Night Kitchen came into focus.

As a parent, I read Where The Wild Things Are to my children, but Holly's favourite Sendak book was Outside Over There, and I must have read it to her hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, marvelling at Sendak's economy of words, his cruelty, his art.

What I loved, what I always responded to, was the feeling that Sendak owed nothing to anyone in the books that he made. His only obligation was to the book, to make it true. His lines could be cute, but there was an honesty that transcended the cuteness. 

I never met him, although I had friends who worked with him, and friends who were friends with him. I never wanted to meet him. I had read the books -- by that point I'd read all the books -- and read the interviews. He was so grumpy and so wise, so sensible and so very much at the service of each of the books. He made personal books that came out and were banned and challenged and then embraced by the children who had grown up with them. (In The Night Kitchen was the 24th most challenged US library book in the last decade.)

When I heard this morning that Maurice Sendak had died, I asked the New Yorker  over Twitter if they could unlock a two page comic: art spiegelman and Maurice Sendak in conversation in 1993, drawn by both of them. They did, and I am grateful to them.

Click on the small version of the first page to read the whole thing (and click on that to make it bigger).

And the strange thing about reading this, was that it was pretty much, I realised, what I'd been trying to say last week when I made my Zena Sutherland speech in Chicago. Only I took thirty-five minutes and almost five thousand words to say it, and art and Maurice did it in eleven panels.

An extremely exciting week

So, last year I recorded a piece for a This American Life episode about adventure. It's a little memoir about adventures, and how I mostly don't have them.

It wasn't the piece I originally wrote, though, which was a short story. Or rather, it was the piece I originally wrote. Ira Glass wasn't sure about the personal one, when I sent it over, and wanted a short story, so I wrote a short story instead, but the producers preferred the personal memoir, and outvoted him, so that was what I recorded.

Ira Glass still liked the short story, and mentioned to Dave Eggars that I had a short story that he liked that nobody had read, and Dave Eggars wrote to my agent and asked if he could read it for McSweeneys, and I was happy that it wasn't going to be completely forgotten forever (I'd already forgotten it existed, and hadn't given it to anyone or submitted it anywhere, so it was just sitting getting dusty on a hard drive somewhere). I wasn't sure if it was any good, and had to be nudged by Dave several times to send it. It was called Adventure Story.

Having emailled it to Dave I forgot about it again. And then, in the post, this arrived:

I opened it. And I thought, I've got  story in McSweeneys!

I read the story, a little nervously, now it was printed, and thought, and it's good.


It's a great issue of McSweeney's. The Jason Jagel comic insert, Topsy Turvy, is wonderful, the collected writing is, as always, excellent, varied, powerful (the book 2 account of a week in Rwanda; the writing that inspired the Egyptian uprising...). Beautiful production values.

You can get a copy of it at McSweeneys: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeneys-issue-40

I'm really happy and proud and thrilled to be in it. Thank you, Ira Glass.

...

The New York Times has a page of me talking about books and what I'm reading and suchlike on it.  (The blue picture is Jillian Tamaki's wonderful picture of me from it.) (They edited out the bit where I had President Obama talking about a hooker eating a man with her nether bits, which in retrospect might have been wise, but made that section less funny.)

Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

Yes.

Wait, do you think those things are exclusive? That books can only be one or the other? I would rather read a book with all of those things in it: a laughing, crying, educating, distracting book. And I would like more than that, the kind of book where the pages groan under the weight of keeping all such opposites apart.

You can read the rest of it at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html?_r=2&ref=books&pagewanted=all
...


Amanda's Kickstarter has been an enormous success -- currently it's the most successful music Kickstarter ever. In six days it has got over 10,000 supporters and has raised over $555,000 towards putting out the CD and book and taking the band on a world tour.

She wrote about it on techdirt..

There's a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that's visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren't shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we'd make it quickly, and hoping we'd surpass it by a long-shot. 

 I've been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I've crashed on...all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.
 And they help because they know I'm good for it. Because they KNOW me.

...

I went to Chicago and delivered this year's annual Zena Sutherland lecture. Zena was an editor, a reviewer and an influential figure in the world of children's books. I wish I'd known her - everyone who had known her described her as "a pistol!" and they all talked about her in ways that made me so very proud to be this year's lecturer. (Here's an online obituary.)

(The first Zena Sutherland lecture was delivered by Maurice Sendak. The second by Lloyd Alexander. Yes, I was very intimidated.)

My lecture was called

“What the @#$%&*! Is a Children's Book, Anyway?”

which I mostly pronounced "What the [very bad swearword] is a children's book anyway?" when I read it onstage. I got to say things like...

Children are a relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them. Information is currency, and information that will allow you to decode the language, motivations and behaviour of the occupying forces, on whom you are uniquely dependent for food, for warmth, for happiness, is the most valuable information of all.

Children are extremely interested in adult behaviour. They want to know about us.

Their interest in the precise mechanics of peculiarly adult behaviour is limited. All too often it seems repellent, or dull. A drunk on the pavement is something you do not need to see, and part of a world you do not wish to be part of, so you look away.

Children are very good at looking away.

...along with the story of how I was very nearly expelled from school, at the age of eight, for telling a classmate a dirty joke I'd heard from some kids on the walk home, and a lot of pondering about what children read and why and how authors can figure out whether or not they are writing a book for children or adults.

It'll be published in The Horn Book in the autumn.

...

And by now you are undoubtedly thinking, what an exciting week. And you would be right. This was the most exciting week ever. Because...

I hived a swarm!


I walked the dogs in the woods. I heard something buzzing gently, and it seemed to be a tree. I looked closer... It was a swarm of bees high in a buckthorn tree...

Now, when a hive gets overcrowded, or just feels the time has come, the bees swarm. Three quarters of the hive, along with the queen, take off to find a new home, leaving the remaining bees behind to raise a new queen in the old location.

Swarms of bees are scary. You've probably seen one. They are also relatively harmless -- bees in swarming mode are not grumpy, not out to sting you, they've filled up on honey which actually makes it physically difficult for them to sting anyway, and mostly they just want to find somewhere new to live.

I prepared an empty hive. I put a couple of frames of honey into it from a hive that could afford to lost them.

Then, with two friends (Hans, who cut down the tree, after we decided it was just too high for ladders, and author Kelly McCullough, who saw me tweeting about it and decided that giving a swarm a home would be more fun than writing or revising that afternoon) we made it happen.

(This is Hans, He is like a midwestern, less Jewish, less orange-rocky Ben Grimm.) 

Hans cut down the tree (a good thing, because Buckthorn is a bad thing). Kelly helped and suggested I sing the Winnie the Pooh "I'm just a little black rain cloud" song, in case it helped. I did. It did. . I caught the swarm in a cardboard box as it fell, and Kelly and I transported it to its new home, poured in the bees.

While I was fairly certain we had not lost the queen when the tree fell, I also put a frame of brood from the Russian hive in, with a couple of queen cells (they are much bigger than usual bee-larva cells, and look like peanuts) ready to hatch on it. If a queen in a hive hears another queen about to hatch, she simply heads over and stings it. If she's not there to sting it, it hatches and the hive has a new queen.)

(Panoramic photo magic: here is Kelly on both sides of the swarm's new home at once.)

The dogs sat the whole thing out. They've had experiences with bees in the past. 

Happy Birthday Amanda, and the Future of Music

This makes me so happy:

It's such a sweet, funny video.  Even if you have no interest in my wife or what she does, you should click on it and watch it.

Her Kickstarter went live at 7 this morning, and it's already 93% funded, mostly so far by people who are using it to pre-order the limited edition version of the CD. (Given the number of people who seem sad that they did not use Kickstarter to order an EVENING WITH NEIL GAIMAN AND AMANDA PALMER CD - which turned out, given the amount of money the Kickstarter raised, to be a 3CD set with a special, will-never-be-for-sale bonus extra CD as well -- I am not at all surprised that people are buying. I love the way that Kickstarter allows people both to be patrons of the arts and to directly support the creation and manufacture of the thing they want, cutting out the middlemen.)

And it's her birthday today too.

Last night I saw some students at Harvard perform an immersive dance piece inspired by The Graveyard Book, and it was one of the sweetest, most haunting, life affirming things I've attended, and a wonderful way into her birthday.

Today, we're taking a quiet day together. In a few minutes we'll wander out and get some juice and walk in the sunshine.

I'm writing a speech I will be delivering in Chicago next week, with the working title of "What the [very bad swearword] is a Children's Book anyway?" It's about, well, what Children's fiction is, something the book I'm writing right now has me thinking about all the time. It has a seven year old hero, and magic, and terror, but it doesn't feel like a kids' book, and the attitudes and content are profoundly adult.

Anyway. So much to catch up on here. I hope you enjoyed the Stephen King interview.

Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview.

I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. The Times keeps its site paywalled, so I thought I'd post the original version of the interview here. (This is the raw copy, and it's somewhat longer than the interview as published.)

I don't do much journalism any more, and this was mostly an excuse to drive across Florida back in February and spend a day with some very nice people I do not get to see enough.

I hope you enjoy it.


Edit to add - the Sunday Times asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors' notes, and I wrote this: 

“I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time to write, like my children's novel Coraline.”

“Meeting Stephen King this time, the thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does. All the talk of retiring from writing, of quitting, the suggestions that maybe it's time to stop before he starts repeating himself, seems to be done. He likes writing, likes it more than anything else that he could be doing, and does not seem at all inclined to stop. Except perhaps at gunpoint.”

The first time I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame.

“If I had my life over again,” said King. “I'd've done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn't have done the American Express “Do You Know Me?” TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.”

He was tall and dark haired, and Joe and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out of the cloning vat.

The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots are Made For Walkin'”.

Afterwards we talked in the tiny toilet in the back of the theatre, the only place King could smoke a furtive cigarette. He seemed frail, then, and grey, only recently recovered a long hospitalisation from being hit by an idiot in a van, and the hospital-infections that had followed it. He grumbled about the pain of walking downstairs. I worried about him, then.

And now, another decade, and when King comes out of the parking bay in the Sarasota Key to greet me, he's looking good. He's no longer frail. He is 64 and he looks younger than he did a decade ago.

Stephen King's house in Bangor Maine is gothic and glorious. I know this although I have never been there. I have seen photographs on the internet. It looks like the sort of place that somebody like Stephen King ought to live and work. There are wrought iron bats and gargoyles on the gates.

Stephen King's house on a key in Florida near Sarasota, a strand of land on the edge of the sea, lined with big houses (“that one was John Gotti's,” I learn as we pass one huge white high-walled building. “We call it murder mansion”) is ugly. And not even endearingly ugly. It's a long block of concrete and glass, like an enormous shoebox, It was built, explains Tabby, by a man who built shopping malls, out of the materials of a shopping mall. It's like an Apple store's idea of a McMansion, and not pretty. But once you are inside the glass window-walls have a perfect view over the sand and the sea, and there's a gargantuan blue metal doorway that dissolves into nothingness and stars in one corner of the garden, and inside the building there are paintings and sculptures, and, most important, there's King's office. It has two desks in it. A nice desk, with a view, and an unimpressive desk with a computer on it, with a battered, much sat-upon chair facing away from the window.

That's the desk that King sits at every day, and it is where he writes. Right now he's writing a book called Joyland, about an amusement park serial killer. Below the window is a patch of well-fenced land, with an enormous African Spurred Tortoise nosing around in it, like a monstrous ambulatory rock.

My first encounter with Stephen King, long before I met him in the flesh, was on East Croydon station in about 1975. I was fourteen. I picked up a book with an all-black cover. It was called Salem's Lot. It was King's second novel; I'd missed the first, a short book called Carrie, about a teenage girl with psychic powers. I stayed up late finishing Salem's Lot, loving the Dickensian portrait of a small American town destroyed by the arrival of a vampire. Not a nice vampire, a proper vampire. Dracula meets Peyton Place. After that I bought everything King wrote as it came out. Some books were great, and some weren't. It was okay. I trusted him.

Carrie was the book that King started and abandoned, and which Tabbie King pulled out of the waste paper basket, read and encouraged him to finish. They were poor, and then King sold Carrie, and everything changed, and he kept writing.

Driving down to Florida I listened, for over thirty hours, to the audiobook of King's time travel novel, 11/22/63. It's about a High School English teacher (as King was, when he wrote Carrie) who goes back from 2011 to 1958, via a wormhole in time located in the stockroom of an ancient diner, with a mission to save John F. Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald.

It is, as always with King, the kind of fiction that forces you to care what happens, page after page. It has elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for something that's partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly a love-story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past.

Given the hugeness of King's career, it is difficult to describe anything he does as an anomaly. He exists on the border of popular fiction (and, on occasion, non-fiction). His career (writers do not have careers, most of us. We just write the next book) is peculiarly teflon. He's a popular novelist, which used to be, perhaps still is, a description of the author of a certain type of book: one that will repay you for reading it in pleasure and in plot, like John D. MacDonald (whom King tips his hat to in 11/22/63). But not just a popular novelist: It does not matter what he writes, it seems, he is always a horror writer. I wonder if that frustrates him.

“No. No it doesn't. I have got my family, and they are all okay. We have enough money to buy food and have things. Yesterday, we had a meeting of the King Foundation (the private foundation King funds that gives to many charitable causes). My sister-in-law, Stephanie, she organises it and we all sit down and give away money. That’s frustrating. Every year we give away the same money to different people... it's like chucking money into a hole. That’s frustrating.

I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That’s what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say “You're this”, as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time that anything like what you’re talking about happened, I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this there was prison story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and one based on my childhood called “The Body,” and there is a story of this kid who finds a Nazi, “Apt Pupil”. I sent them to Viking, who was my published my editor was John Williams – dead many long years - terrific editor – he always took the work dead level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons, and he said well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just written three. I wrote another one, “The Breathing Method” and that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn’t really a horror thing.

I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.'

“And I said, 'I wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn’t'. And she walked off and went on her way.”

It happens, over and over. It happened when he published Misery, his chronicle of toxic fandom; it happened with Bag of Bones, his gothic ghost story about a novelist, with nods to Du Maurier's Rebecca; it happened when he was inducted into the National Book Foundation's Medal for Contribution to American Letters.

We're not talking in the huge concrete shoebox house. We're sitting by the pool in a smaller house the Kings bought on the same street, as a guest house for their family. Joe King, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, is staying there. He still looks like his dad, although no longer a clonal teenage version, and now has a successful career of his own as a writer of books and graphic novels. He carries his iPad everywhere he goes. Joe and I are friends.

In Bag of Bones, Stephen King has an author who stops writing but keeps publishing stockpiled books. I wonder how long his publishers could keep his death a secret?

He grins. “I got the idea for the writer in Bag of Bones having books because somebody told me years ago that every year Danielle Steel wrote three books and published two, and I knew Agatha Christie had squirrelled a couple away, to put a final bow on her career. As of right now, if I died and everybody kept it a secret, it would go on until 2013. There's a new Dark Tower novel, The Wind in the Keyhole.That comes out soon, and Dr Sleep is done. So if I got hit by a taxi cab, like Margaret Mitchell, what wouldn’t be done, what would be done. Joyland wouldn’t be done but Joe could finish it, in a breeze. His style is almost indistinguishable from mine. His ideas are better than mine. Being around Joe is like being next to a catherine wheel throwing off sparks, all these ideas. I do want to slow down. My agent is dickering with the publishers about Dr Sleep, that's the sequel to The Shining, but I held off showing them the manuscript because I wanted time to breathe.”

Why would he write a sequel to The Shining? I do not tell him how much that book scared me when I was sixteen, nor how much I loved and at the same time was disappointed by the Kubrick movie.

“I did it because it was such a cheesed-off thing to do. To say you were going back to the book that was really popular and write the sequel People think of that book, they read it as kids. Kids read it and say it was a really scary book, and then as adults they might read the sequel and think, this isn’t as good. The challenge is, maybe it can be as good - or maybe it can be different. It gives you something to push up against. It's a challenge.

“I wanted to write Dr Sleep because I wanted to see what would happen to Danny Torrence when he grew up. And I knew that he would be a drunk because his father was a drunk. One of the holes it seemed to me in The Shining is that Jack Torrance was this white-knuckle dry drunk who never tried one of the self-help groups, the like Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought, okay, I'll start with Danny Torrence at age forty. He is going to be one of those people who says 'I am never going to be like my father, I am never going to be abusive like my father was'. Then you wake up at 37 or 38 and you're a drunk. Then I thought, what kind of a life does that person like that have? He'll do a bunch of low-bottom jobs, he'll get canned, and now he works in a hospice as a janitor. I really want him to be in a hospice worker because he has the shining and he can help people get across as they die. They call him Dr Sleep, and they know to call for him when the cat goes into their room and sits on their bed. This was writing about guy who rides the bus, and he's eating in a McDonalds, or on a special night out maybe Red Lobster. We are not talking about a guy who goes to Sardi's.”

Stephen and Tabitha met in the stacks of the University of Maine library in 1967, and they married in 1971. He couldn't get a teaching position when he graduated, so he worked in an industrial laundromat, and pumped gas, and worked as a janitor, supplementing his meagre income with occasional stories, mostly horror, sold to men's magazines with names like Cavalier. They were dirt poor. They lived in a trailer, and King wrote at a makeshift desk between the washer and the dryer. All that changed in 1974, with the paperback sale of Carrie for $200,000. I wonder how long it has been since King has stopped worrying about money.

He thinks for a moment. “1985. For a long time Tabby understood that we didn’t have to worry about these things. I didn’t. I was convinced they would take all this away from me, and I was going to be living with three kids in a rental house again, that it was just too good to be true. Around about 1985 I started to relax and think ‘this is good, this is going to be okay’.

“And even now this” (he gestures, taking in the swimming pool, the guest house, the Florida Key and all the many McMansions) “”is all very strange to me, even though it's only three months of the year. Where we live in Maine is one of the poorest counties. A lot of the people we see and hang with cut wood for a living, drive trash, that sort of thing. I don’t want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use.

“Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for three fucking hours. You know and people will have drinks before, wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this crap. To me my idea of what’s good is to drive here and go to Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and waffle. When I see the first Waffle House, I know I’m in the South. That’s good.

“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “For something that I would do for free.”.


 Stephen King's father went out for cigarettes when King was four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian Minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is finishing his third novel. Owen's first novel is coming out in 2013.

I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012?

“It is definitely harder. When I wrote Carrie and Salem's Lot, I was one step away from manual labour. – but it’s like also true - Joe is going to find out this is true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time.

“But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little twelve year old girl in Dr Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five year old Danny Torrence because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here’s the bottom line: if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in American Gods, and if I can imagine Magic Doors and everything then surely I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I imagine it's like to work a ten hour day in a blue collar job.”

 We're doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft, about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a vocation. His next book, The Wind in the Keyhole, is a Dark Tower novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years to finish, and he only finished spurred on my his assistants, Marsha and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the story would be completed.

Now he's finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King is a character in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower books, and Stephen King the non-fictional author is wondering whether to take him out on the next draft.

I told him about the peculiarity of researching the story I was working on, that everything I needed, fictionally, was waiting for me when I went looking for it. He nods in agreement.

“Absolutely – you reach out and it's there. The time that it happened the clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me 'This is a bit crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a serialised novel like Dickens used to do?', and I had a story that was sort of struggling for air. That was The Green Mile. And I knew if I did this I had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because...” he hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn't sound foolish, “...every time I needed something that something was right there to hand.

“When John Coffey goes to jail – he was going to be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn’t do it , but I didn’t know that the guy who did do it was going to be there, didn’t know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before.

“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still,  on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...”

King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. “I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real.   And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about 1200 to 1500 words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hardcopy.”

I start to tell King my theory, that when people in the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973 and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there, behind the monsters and the night, making them more real.

King is sanguine. “You know what you can’t tell what is going to last, what’s not going to last. There’s Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. McDonald saying “200 years from now, when people want to know what the 20th century they ll go to John D. McDonald”, but I’m not sure that’s true – it seems like he’s almost been forgotten.  But I try and reread a John D. McDonald novel whenever I come down here.”

Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King. And, I realise, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions.

“You know what's bizarre? I did the Savannah Book Fair last week.... This is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing ovation from all these people, and it's like a creepy thing... either you've become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that you are not dead yet.”

I tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a try out tour of Victor/Victoria. It was not very good, but she got a standing ovation for being Julie Andrews.


 “That’s so dangerous though, for us. I want people to like the work, not me.”

And the lifetime achievement awards?

“It makes them happy to give they to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don't know that.”

Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time for dinner, and, she adds, that back at the big house the gargantuan African Spurred Tortoise had just been discovered trying to rape a rock.

Slow Motion Bees...

I've been a very bad blogger recently. I promised myself that I would simply finish the thing I was working on and then blog again, but by the time I finished I had such a ridiculous backlog of things to post here that I've been putting it off...

So. I finished writing in Florida. I came home. I went to a wedding in Laguna Beach with Amanda, then to Dallas where Amanda was mixing her new album. We went to North Carolina to take Maddy to the college she's going to be attending (amazing. My little girl...) and I got home last night.

Lots of things to blog about... I'm thinking of putting the whole of the Stephen King interview I did for the Sunday Times up here on the blog, for a start.

Today, three packages of bees came in, to replace the three hives we lost this winter. (We were left with three - an Italian, a Russian, and a Carniolan hive.)

This is an amazing high speed film of me pouring bees into a hive this morning. It's 40 seconds long, and takes a few seconds of real time.

Remembering Moebius

This was the art on the cover of the first Metal Hurlant I ever saw. I was — what — 14, and on a French Exchange to Paris with my class, and this beautiful magazine filled with comics opened my mind to what comics could be, and particularly to the art of Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius, who drew about half of the magazine in a way that seemed both familiar and completely alien, made it so powerful and perfect. He drew different stories in different styles, and the only thing they seemed to have in common was that they were beautiful. I bought a copy. I could only afford the one issue of the magazine, but one was enough.

I couldn't actually figure out what the Moebius stories were about, but I figured that was because my French wasn't up to it. (I could get the gist of the Richard Corben Den story, and loved that too, and not just because of the nakedness, but the Moebius stories were obviously so much deeper.)

I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing).

I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up.

I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren't actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn't matter. The damage had long since been done.

I met Jean Giraud on a couple of occasions over the years. He was sweet and gentle and really... I don't know. Spiritual is not a word I use much, mostly because it feels so very misused these days, but I'd go with it for him. I liked him enormously, and felt humbled around him. And in my 20s and 30s I didn't do humbled very much or very well.

(Moebius was pronounced in the French way, as a four syllable word. Mo-e-bi-us.)

During Sandman, we did several galleries where we would ask artists whose work we loved to draw a character for us.

I was a working writer, the money that came in fed my family, and although I looked with envy on the art that was being made, I did not buy any of it.

Except for one small painting. A Moebius study of Death. It cost me as much as I was paid to write an issue of Sandman, and I bought it without a qualm.

We wanted to work together. I wrote the Sandman: Endless Nights story DEATH IN VENICE for him to draw, but his health got bad, so P. Craig Russell drew it. Half a year later Moebius's health improved a little, and he asked if I could write him a very short story, perhaps 8 pages, and make them all single images, so I wrote the DESTINY story in Endless Nights for him. His health took a turn for the worse, once more, and Frank Quitely drew it. And both Craig and Frank made magic with their stories, but somewhere inside I was sad, because I'd hoped to work with Moebius.

And now I never shall.

RIP Jean Giraud, 8 May 1938 - 10 March 2012

Some thoughts on writing, and driving in fog, and the usual

It's a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk.

And that's wonderful.

Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.

And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that's magic.

...

My days are good right now. I've found my writing rhythm and I appear to have some kind of writing mojo back. I'm not writing the thing I thought I was going into hiding to write, but I'm loving what I am writing, am pretty sure I'll be able to make it all work when I get to the next draft, even though right now it has things in it that mean it's going to be harder to publish than normal. It's in that weird zone between children's fiction and adult fiction with children in it (think of the ghostly school story in the middle of Sandman:Season of Mists as an example of the kind of thing I mean).

I'm missing my wife, but missing her less and less with every good writing day, and I'm selfishly enjoying having a daily routine I've never really had before that includes a morning jog or workout (put together for me by a very kind fitness instructor who reads this blog and recorded some videos for me) and a long hard yoga session once or twice a week.

Mostly I wish Amanda could just teleport in every few days for dinner, and then zap herself back to Melbourne in the morning.

I've found a little cafe where they seem perfectly happy to have me in the corner scribbling away while people come and people go; and when I went in there this afternoon, the barrista smiled and asked if I was having the usual (viz. their "British Breakfast Tea") and I said yes, and realised I rather loved the idea of having a usual.

I like having short hair because I feel vaguely and comfortably incognito. So I am not posting photographs of myself right now. In all probability the incognito thing is entirely a placebo effect, and everybody in the town looks at me and goes, there goes that English writer. But it makes me happy, in the same way that Amanda wearing fake Clark Kent hipster glasses around Melbourne as a disguise makes her happy.

If you see this woman in Melbourne, Australia, it is obviously not my wife.

The most interesting thing I've done recently was drive across the middle of the state to go and spend a day with Stephen King: I'll be writing about it for the Times (the UK one, not the New York one).

This writing retreat only lasts another few days, in its current form.

But I am very happy. And writing. In case you were wondering.

It's Extra Magic Bonus Happy Leap Year Day!

Please celebrate Leap Year Day in the traditional manner by taking a writer out for dinner.

It’s been four years since many authors had a good dinner. We are waiting. Many of us have our forks or chopsticks at the ready - some of us have had them ready for days. We will repay you by drifting off while the food is being served and then suddenly scribbling something down on a scrap of paper and asking whether or not you think “passionate” could validly be said to rhyme with “cash in it”, then absent-mindedly drinking too much and trying to recite the whole of Clive James’s “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” from memory. 

Feed us.

Who is Jonathan Carroll and why should you care?

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. (See all earlier comments to this effect in the previous 2 million words on this journal.) The HBO pilot script is starting to feel like a real thing.

On the downside, I miss my dogs, my family, and, off in Australia where she is about to start making her next album, my wife. But the work is good.

And it is not snowy outside. This is the morning view from my bedroom window:

...

The news just came in on the nominations for Audies, the Audiobook awards. Three of them are for things I was involved in. (Here's a PDF of all the nominees.)

The Witches of Lublin was nominated. I acted in that. (Congratulations to Ellen Kushner and Sue Zizza and Simon Jones and all involved)

American Gods (10th Anniversary Full Cast Audio) was nominated. I narrated the Coming To America bits in that, and I wrote the book. (Congratulations to the wonderful cast - and to Nicole Quinn, the contest winner, who won a part in it.) (Which reminds me - someone asked me for the list of who played what in the Audio. I'll put it up here.)

And a book from the Audible Neil Gaiman Presents line is nominated: Jonathan Carroll's novel THE LAND OF LAUGHS.

I have loved LAND OF LAUGHS ever since I first read it, in 1983 or 1984. Was once asked to pitch it as a movie by the producer who controls it, and I did, and was sad it wasn't picked up. It's a magical, spooky novel for anyone who has ever wanted to go too deeply into a book they loved. It was one of my first choices for Neil Gaiman Presents. So huge congratulations to Jonathan and to narrator Edoardo Ballerini. And more congratulations to the ACX team at Audible.

If you've been following the Neil Gaiman Presents line at all, if you liked Land of Laughs, or if you want to try out an audiobook, the new Jonathan Carroll, WHITE APPLES, has just been released.

And if you haven't discovered Jonathan Carroll, and you are wondering who this writer is, and why you should be interested, this is what I wrote some years ago, for Jonathan's own website:

........................................................................................................................................

"All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own."
                                                                            -Haniel Long, Notes Toward a New Mythology.

There are millions of competent writers out there. There are hundreds of thousands of good writers in the world, and there are a handful of great writers. And this is me, late at night, trying to figure out the difference for myself. That indefinable you-either-got-it-or-you-ain't spark that makes someone a great writer.


And then I realise that I'm asking myself the wrong question, because it's not good writers or great writers. What I'm really wondering is what makes some writers special. Like when I was a kid on the London Underground, I'd stare at the people around me. And every now and again I'd notice someone who had been drawn - a William Morris beauty, a Berni Wrightson grotesque - or someone who had been written - there are lots of Dickens characters in London, even today. It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again.


There are a few writers who are special. They make the world in their books; or rather, they open a window or a door or a magic casement, and they show you the world in which they live.


Ramsey Campbell, for example, writes short stories that, read in quantity, will re-form your world into a grey and ominous place in which strange shapes flicker at the corner of your eyes, and a patch of smoke or a blown plastic shopping bag takes on some kind of ghastly significance. Read enough R.A. Lafferty and you will find yourself living in a quirky tall-tale of a world in which the people have all stepped out of some cosmic joke, if it is not a dream.


Jonathan Carroll's a changer. He's one of the special ones, one of the few. He paints the world he sees. He opens a window you did not know was there and invites you to look through it. He gives you his eyes to see with, and he gives you the world all fresh and honest and new.


In a bookstore universe of bland and homogenised writers and fictions, the world that words from Carroll's fountain pen is as cool, as fine and as magical as a new lover, or cool water in the desert. Things matter. You can fall in love with his women, or his men, worry when they hurt, hate them when they betray or fall short, rejoice when they steal a moment of magic and of life from the face of death and eventual nothingness.


I had dinner with Jonathan Carroll, with Dave McKean and with some friends, about eight years ago: what I still remember is not the meal nor even the conversation (although I do recall Jonathan telling us some incidents of his life that I would later encounter in Kissing the Beehive): what I recall was the process of becoming a Jonathan Carroll character among Jonathan Carroll characters. We were witty and wise and lucent; intelligent and beautiful men and women; artists and creators and magicians, we were.


It was a couple of days before I noticed that I had become a mundane grey person once more.


Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry. But a new book by Jonathan Carroll is still, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, a cause for celebration.


His most successful books and tales defy genre categorisation. They've more life, more balls, are more true than pretty much anything else you'll encounter out there. They call some fantasies 'Magical Realism' to try and lend them respectability, like a whore who wishes to be known as a lady of the evening. Jonathan Carroll's work, however, has every right to parade under the banner of magical realism, if you have to call it something.


I call them Jonathan Carroll stories, and leave it at that. He is one of the handful, and one of the brotherhood. If you don't believe me, pick up Outside the Dog Museum, or A Child Across the Sky, or Sleeping in Flame or The Panic Hand, or any of his other works (you'll find a list of them within, I have no doubt) and find out for yourself.


He'll lend you his eyes; and you will never see the world in quite the same way ever again.




........................................................................................................................................................

.... And now for something ever-so-slightly different. A wonderful Josh Ritter song, and a video made using 12,000 pieces of coloured construction paper.


 
Josh Ritter - Love Is Making Its Way Back Home from Josh Ritter on Vimeo.

One morning with Nebula Nominations

I started feeling last night that real work was happening. I could see it starting to mount. My morale is starting to improve, as it always does when writing happens, and I remember that I actually can do it after all.

Currently I'm mostly writing the HBO American Gods first episode. I'm really enjoying it, partly because a lot of what I've written isn't in the book. It's implied in the book, or talked about generally, or referred to obliquely, but it's scenes I hadn't written. So I feel that I'm doing new work, even if it's not new. If you see what I mean.

And, strangely, it seems to be feeding in to the next American Gods book, which is what I'm sort of working on right now. (Actually, I'm writing a short story that comes after Monarch of the Glen and before The Next Book. But it feels organically needed.) 

Other than that... I'm looking after myself. The main new thing I've been doing is actually jogging for 37 minutes a day. (It was 37 minutes the first day, and so I've kept it the same every other day to see how much further or faster I get, because my little iPod Nano keeps track of this stuff.)

I will do a proper catch-up blog post later in the week, I suspect. There's stuff I should write about that's been interesting or fun.

In the meantime, I was sent this press release last night. It had me doing a happy dance around the room, for my little bit of it. (Apart from anything else, it was wonderful seeing the other nominees in my category. Woody Allen! Duncan Jones!)

And, because they asked if I'd spread it around, I have cut and pasted the whole of the nomination list. (Congratulations to all the Nominees!)

2011 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Novel

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)

Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)

God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)

The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella

"Kiss Me Twice," Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011)

"Silently and Very Fast," Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)

"The Ice Owl," Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,November/December 2011)

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Kij Johnson (Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011)

"The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)

"With Unclean Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Novelette

"Fields of Gold," Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books)

"Ray of Light," Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011)

"Sauerkraut Station," Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011)

"Six Months, Three Days," Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)

"The Migratory Pattern of Dancers," Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011)

"The Old Equations," Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011)

"What We Found," Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)

Short Story

"Her Husband's Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011)

"Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son," Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011)

"Movement," Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2011)

"Shipbirth," Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011)  

"The Axiom of Choice," David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)    

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011)

"The Paper Menagerie," Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)

Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)

Doctor Who: “The Doctor's Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)

Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)

Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)

The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)

Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder &Stoughton)

Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)

The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)

Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Books)

The winners will be announced at SFWA's 47^th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. As announced earlier this year, Connie Willis will be the recipient of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker.

...

Hi Neil,

I'm assuming you're at least marginally familiar with altered books.

Someone linked to this in an art therapy forum I'm on, and I saw it and immediately thought of you. Specifically I was reminded of Mirrormask. I think it's a brilliant use of out of date reference books.

http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi

Enjoy!

I did.