Maybe later.

Had a lovely day in Tasmania. Am now too tired to post about it. So it goes.

Woot.

Back from the ABC studios where I was interviewed for Triple J -- it'll be up as a podcast for those of you who were either asleep or not in Australia (which is most of you): http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/ is their website, and I'll put up a link when they send it to me.

I just discovered that Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union won the Nebula as Best SF novel of the year. As Maddy would say, Woot!

Congratulations to everyone else who won -- the complete list of winners and nominees is here (and I'm thrilled that Guillermo got the script Nebula for Pan's Labyrinth, just as I'm sorry that Stephen Moffat didn't get it for Blink, and that Gene Wolfe didn't get it for Memorare -- which you can read at http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/gw01.htm, and which I really, really hope gets the Hugo) (Gene Wolfe has never won a Hugo award. I'm just saying.)

I'm slowly catching up with things I've promised people, one thing at a time. Todd Klein asked if I would do the signed Todd-lettered print after the Alan Moore one, and there was no way I could say no. Then I kept him waiting on tenterhooks until I had an idea, and then I made him tenterhook longer while I worked on it, but eventually I finished something called Before You Read This, which begins

Before you read this familiarise yourself
with the text. Note the position of the escape hatches,
the candles that will light in the event of a forced landing
to show you the way out. The author will make an announcement.

and goes on from there. I'm looking forward to seeing whether it works when read aloud. Todd's got the work-in-progress version of the print up at

http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=1095.

Which I mention here as the first printing of the Alan Moore print sold out in three days. (You can get a second printing at http://kleinletters.com/BuyStuffTop.html).

Since you're travelling I'm willing to bet this message will get lost in the shuffle, but here goes.

So I'm reading the excellent "Lonely Werewolf Girl" which I'm loving, more than "Good Fairies of New York" I think, but I have a bone to pick. Once I started keeping track, I've counted six typos in the first 233 pages. Maybe this seems like a small number of typos but I find it five typos too many! Don't people get paid specifically to ensure that doesn't happen?! It's driving me bonkers...

Anyway, not meant to be any slight against this wonderful, whimsical, punk rock, wolfy book, but seriously; what's up with that?

-J.

Speaking as someone currently proofreading The Graveyard Book, who is only certain of one thing: that typos will lurk and creep and scuttle on the edges of the text and, despite my best efforts, jump out and wave furiously at everyone as soon as I'm done, all I can do is sympathise. But you know, the magic of the internet is that Martin Millar, author of both the above books, has his own blog. It's at http://martin-millar.blogspot.com/ and he has his own website at http://www.martinmillar.com/, where not only can you ask him what's up with the typos, but if you give him a list of them, he can pass them on to his publishers and then they won't be typos in the next edition. Such is the magic of the internet. (Also, you can buy signed books directly from the author at http://www.lonelywerewolfgirl.co.uk/. Which is very nice of him.)

...

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

These are some very simple questions: Do you ever listen to music when you work on something or does it distract you? Have you ever been influenced by a song or peice of music to write a scene?

And last but not least: What are you listening to these days?

Thank you much,

John

Yes, I often write with music on. It doesn't distract me. Anything that makes me more comfortable and keeps me writing is good. And occasionally I'll reread something I've written and know what I was listening to when I wrote it. (I think it's a good bet that Iggy Pop's song Passenger was on repeat a lot when I wrote Sandman 5, for example.) As for what I'm listening to these days, It's mostly up at http://www.last.fm/user/neilhimself/. Here are a couple of Last.fm widgets that might or might not work -- one of songs that seem to have been played more than other songs in the last month, and the other the Last.Fm "My Radio Station", of songs it knows I enjoy...

the weebleongdead switch

Not sure that my last blog entry made an awful lot of sense, but I had been up for a very long time. Am now awake much too early in the morning -- even allowing for the fact I have to leave the hotel to be on the radio at 6:50 am....

( I was travelling on the day itself and missed posting about http://www.tapirday.org/)

This is one of the occasional "introductions" I've been posting recently, but it wasn't actually an introduction -- it's actually an essay from the lovely Mark Morris-edited Cinema Macabre collection. Lots of writers talk about our favourite horror films. (For me it was between this film and "Night of the Demon", which Jeremy Dyson wrote his essay about.)

The Bride of Frankenstein

Films deliver their pleasures in different ways. Most films give you everything they have to offer the first time you see them, leaving you nothing for another viewing. Some deliver what they have grudgingly on first viewing, only to reveal their magic on subsequent occasions, when things become increasingly satisfying. Very few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think, you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows in the back of your head. The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those dream-films. It exists in the culture as a unique thing, magical and odd: a lurching story sequence as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.

It's a lot of people's favourite horror film. Dammit, it's my favourite horror film. And yet...

My daughter Maddy loves the idea of The Bride of Frankenstein: she's ten. Last year, captivated by the little statue of Elsa Lanchester in frightwig that stands, facing a statue of Groucho Marx, on a window ledge half-way up the stairs, she decided to be the Monster's Bride for Hallowe'en. I had to find her imagery of Karloff and his bride-to-be, e-mail her photos of them. Several weeks ago, finding myself in sole charge of Maddy and her friend Gala Avary, I made them hot chocolate and we watched Bride of Frankenstein.

They enjoyed it, wriggling and squealing in all the right places. But once it was done, the girls had an identical reaction. "Is it over?" asked one. "That was weird," said the other, flatly. They were as unsatisfied as an audience could be.

I felt vaguely guilty – I knew they would have enjoyed House – or is it Ghost? – of Frankenstein, the one with Karloff as a mad scientist, and John Carradine's Dracula, not to mention a Lon Chaney Jr. wolfman – so much more. It's a romp, after all. It may not be scary, but it feels like a horror film, and it would have delivered everything two ten year olds needed to be satisfying.

The Bride of Frankenstein doesn't romp. It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head. I've seen it I do not how many times since I was a boy, and I'm almost pleased to say that I still can't quite tell you the plot. Or rather, I can tell you the plot as it goes along. And then, when it's done, the film begins to scum over in my mind, to reconfigure like a dream does once you've wakened, and it all becomes much harder to explain.

The film begins with Mary Shelley, Elsa Lanchester, all sly smiles and period cleavage, talking to an intensely dull Byron and Shelley, introducing us to a sequel to the original Frankenstein story. And then it's moments after the first film, Frankenstein, and the story starts again. The monster survived. The status quo has been restored.

Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is getting married to the wimpy Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson). (The wimpy Elizabeth is the real bride of Frankenstein, and is, I suspect, given the film's title, one of the main factors responsible for the confusion in the popular mind between the scientist and his monster.)

Ernest Thesiger's Dr Pretorius, a far madder scientist than our Henry, strides into Henry Frankenstein's life, like a man bringing a bottle of absinthe to a reformed addict. Dr Pretorius, waspish, camp,unforgettable, trolls in from a world much more dangerous than Henry's. He's sharp and funny, steals scenes, and has a marvellous sequence with bottled homunculi – lovers, a king, a priest. This has something to do with his own alchemical researches into creating life, and, I find myself thinking whenever I watch it, nothing at all to do with the film at hand. It sits in the mind like a dream, inexplicable, a moment of movie magic. I find myself fancying director James Whale as Pretorius here, the homunculi his actors, ready to lust or lecture or die as he desires.

Henry Frankenstein himself is feverish, and strangely absent from the film that bears his name, emotionally and truly. The alcoholism (and perhaps the tuberculosis) that would soon enough carry off Colin Clive is already muting his vitality. All the monsters have more life in them than Henry Frankenstein does now, and watching the film I imagine that they will live longer, once the action is over.

Karloff plays the Monster. His face is part of the strange experience of the film: we have seen many people since Karloff who have portrayed Frankenstein's Monster, but none of them were the real thing: they looked too brutish, or too comical – Herman Munsters in waiting. Karloff is something else: sensitive, hurting, a former brute now learning language and longing and love. There is little in the monster to be frightened of. Instead we pity him, sympathise with him, care about him.

(The sequence with the blind hermit is subject to slippage in my mind with its parody in Young Frankenstein. I worry, when I see the blind man in Bride, that he will pour hot soup on the monster, or set light to him, and am always relieved when they survive the meal unscathed. Instead, unable to see the monster, the hermit is the only one who is able to look at the monster without prejudice.)

James Whale, directing the film with elegance and panache, builds lovely catacombs. There is a terrible beauty in each perfectly composed shot, just as there is wit and poetry in William Hurlbut's script.

Of course, it's hard to care a twopenny fig for either Henry or Elizabeth, and I suspect that Whale knew that: from being the tragic focus of the first movie, Henry Frankenstein now becomes the film's Zeppo, a bland lover in a cast of shambling zanies. It's one reason why the film feels so subversive, and so deeply surreal. In Bride of Frankenstein, all is prelude to the unwrapping of Elsa Lanchester, the revelation of the true Bride, the one that the movie's really named after. She is revealed; she hisses, screeches, is terrified, is wonderful, and once we have seen her there is nothing left for us. As Karloff's monster realises that she, too, fears him, he slips from joyful hope to despair with a look, and moves over to pull the now traditional blow-up-the-lab switch.

But Elsa and Karloff are the perfect couple, too vivid, too alive to have died in the final explosion. Even as Henry and Elizabeth fade from the imagination, the monster and his mate live on forever, icons of the perverse, in our dreams.

Am in Sydney. Where ought I to be?

"For the first time there are more mobile phones in use in Australia than there are people..." the man on the news just said, which means I'm in Sydney.

I got in this morning after 30 hours travel, determined not to sleep. I walked out to Harvey Norman and bought electrical stuff I'd forgotten to bring, most of which works, then stopped at Sushi-e for lunch (good, but overpriced). Then back to the hotel. More proofreading. Also a bath. I just met James Croll, an old school-friend who went into the Adventure Holiday trade, who moved to Sydney last year, and who is helping set up my Secret Travel Book Expedition.

"I think that if this works," he said cheerfully at the end, "We'll set up an 'In the footsteps of Neil Gaiman' expedition." (I think "If this works" probably means If I survive it. Um.)

Many people have written to point out that there is no U in Qantas, and almost as many of you have written to say that hawthorns can be bushes or trees (I knew that -- the problem is that in the text I refer to the same hawthorn as both things, and I sort of need to pick). You also have lots more examples of writers who have been in PR or publicity. But I am brain dead.

Entertainers All...

Life falls into patterns. Here I am once again, blogging from a lounge in Narita airport (Quantas, rather than Northwest, just to give the illusion of change). In about twelve days I'll be coming back this way, and I have to figure out what to do with nine hours in Japan. Too long to hang around the airport, not long enough to do anything with.

Life is good. I proofread the first 60 pages of the UK version of The Graveyard Book on the way out (is it a hawthorn tree or a hawthorn bush because I describe it as both? Can something I describe as spike-topped metal railings also be described as a fence?), and I slept. (Yesterday I found my iPod Nano, mysteriously missing for a year, in the pocket of a coat I last wore, er, a year ago, so went to sleep on the plane listening to 1941 Jack Benny shows.)

I seem to do a lot of proofreading in Australia. (There's those patterns again.) Last time I was in Australia, for the Sydney Literary Festival, I was proofreading Fragile Things. Tomorrow I'll try and wrap up the US and UK proofs of Graveyard Book.

If I hadn't slept I would have read -- I'm currently reading Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road. It's wonderful -- a [Chabonesque] [Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser]-ish story, filled with swordfights and intrigue and people in disguise. (I just edited that sentence -- I'd written "currently reading for pleasure" as if there was some other kind of reading -- the sort you endure, I imagine.) And there are those patterns again, as I read an essay by Michael in the LA Times that made me grin with delight.

Go read it. It's lovely (and not because it says something nice about Sandman). It's up at http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-chabon27apr27,1,909788.story

Mr. Gaiman,

I took photos of the newly-released stage adaptation of Neverwhere earlier this week in Chicago. I'm not sure if this is the right way to get these to you, but I wanted to send along a link to the pictures from the show since you weren't able to see it in person.

http://flickr.com/photos/foolscircle/sets/72157604719374602/
Best,

Mike Thompson

It looks amazing -- I have to try and get to it in May, before it ends.

Hi there!

Though I should be finishing up a paper for my English literature course, I couldn't help but procrastinate and ask you a question.

You see, I'm a college student as well as an aspiring author. However, I'm currently majoring in public relations. That's right, I'm one of those freaks who uses writing to make people money, doesn't mind public speaking and actually gets excited at the thought of a marketing plan.

My question to you is, is it common for business people to show up in the more creative side of the writing business? Have you ever met anyone who worked in advertising/PR/marketing for awhile then gave it up for novels?

Furthermore, do publishers like to see that an aspiring author has a business background?

While I do love having my course work during the day and unleashing my imagination at night, I do hope to one day combine the two of them when my novel gets published.

Anyway, thanks for your time. Once all this final exam business is done I can get around to reading AMERICAN GODS; I certainly enjoyed ANANSI BOYS and look forward to more books with deities gone wild.

To take your second question first, publishers don't care. If you're selling a novel they don't care if you have a business background or a nursing background or a carpentry background or a writing background. If they have a story about you that they can put in the press releases, that may make life easier for the publicist ("Author Maisy Green was raised by wolves in the jungles of India. Sold into a freakshow she taught herself to read from abandoned newspapers and a complete library of Agatha Christie novels stolen from Delores the bearded woman, a crime for which Maisy was subsequently imprisoned. Her talent was recognised when her first novel, WHO KILLED ROMULUS? was shortlisted for a Writers Behind Bars Award.) But they don't care about anything more than whether you can write and make them turn the pages, and whether they can sell your book.

And to take your first question second, yes, it's common for writers to also be business people. And doctors. And editors of Plant Engineering magazines. And all sorts of other professions and inclinations. I've known a number of publicists who were also writers -- Jack Womack at Harper Collins, who was my publicist for some years, is also Jack Womack the amazing author, and he's kept writing while working as a publicist.

I've also known some sales and marketing people who started out as writers and then became business people and hoped for the time to write, or wound up with a company policy that stopped them writing, and they normally aren't the happiest of people. (I've never had writers tell me, drunkenly, that they wished that they were in marketing, while I've definitely listened to marketing people drunkenly mourn their vanished writing careers.)

Pajamablog

Running for a plane....

Dear Neil,

I've been thinking about the Siegel & Shuster families regaining the rights to Superman, and it raised some questions to which I can't find ready answers and thought you might have.

(I'll use your works as illustrative points since you know what rights you have to your works.)

If a character is created by more than one artist (Superman by Siegel & Shuster, Tim Hunter by yourself & Mr. Bolton), do both artists or their estates have the right to separately sell licensing, merchandising rights, etc? Could the Siegel estate sell the rights to a Superman movie to Fox, the Shuster estate sell the rights to a Superman movie to Universal and DC still make films with Warner? Also, do you have the rights to just the characters, or do you have the rights to sell the stories you wrote for, say, "Sandman" or another serial owned by another person or company?


It bothers me that there might be a potential for a David Niven "Casino Royale" situation with other characters of whom I'm fond, especially the Man of Steel.


Cheers!

-Kerwin

I think you mean "Thunderball" not "Casino Royale" -- the problem with "Casino Royale" IIRC was simply that someone else owned the film rights,and used them to make a parody after the bond films had become successful. Thunderball was co-written (started out as a film treatment with someone else, which Fleming then novelised, and the someone else sued and established that they co-owned the copyright on the treatment) which allowed "Never Say Never Again", which has the same plot, to be made...

The short answer is, Yes you do. And it's not as simple as that, because there's trademarks and suchlike to consider, and most the comics examples you're pointing at are Work For Hire and owned by the company.

Look over the Posner decision (which is up at http://www.projectposner.org/case/2004/360F3d644/ -- the link from two days ago seems to have died.) If I feel like licensing out a Medieval Spawn comic -- or Medieval Spawn underpants -- I can. It's co-created, not work for hire, and co-owned.

If DC Comics wished to avoid future problems with Superman and the estates of the creators, I cannot help feeling that, seeing DC knew what the law said, they should have done a sensible deal with the Shuster family in 1999, rather than forcing them to fight a nine-year law case. That way the Shusters go, "Thanks for the money, of course everything will stay like it is," rather than, "Eww. You people are nasty. Why did you make us fight for something that was ours? We'll go and talk to Marvel and Twentieth Century Fox about licensing a Superman movie." It's what I would have done, if I was DC and Warners anyway.

My assistant has just pointed out that I am leaving for a plane to Australia in 40 minutes and am blogging in pajamas so will I kindly back away from the keyboard...?

Only time for a quick link to the Neverwhere circus-play at http://www.actorsgymnasium.com/site/epage/46772_314.htm If you get to it, send a review and I'll try and post it or link to it...

Off to airport. But first -- clothes!

...

Later. Five minutes until I leave the house. I seem to have just destroyed one cell phone and lost the other, which means I may be buying a new one in Narita airport. Argh. Meanwhile, if you want to learn too much about an author and his notebook...

http://www.spacecast.com/interview_5239.aspx

the copyright one after the last one...

Pondering transformative copyright, I found myself thinking about this: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009050.html#191539

It's Abi Sutherland's reworking/retelling/translation of my poem, The Day The Saucers Came, into LOLcat. I like it better than the original, but I'm not sure that it would work if it wasn't informed by the existence of the not-LOLcat one (if you see what I mean). (Here's me on YouTube reading the original at Yale: http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=JUkEPaN_BFY).

And two from the mailbag:

I am a lawyer. I co-authored an article on fair use that was published last summer in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the United States. A large section of it was a wordier version (punctuated by many many legal citations) of what you wrote in your journal today. In practice, the most important single factor in determining whether a fair use has occurred is not money, it is how transformative a work is. You have a good grasp of copyright.

Moreover, you have a good grasp of the trickiness of copyrighting derivative works. The legal answer regarding that King James concordance is that the person who owns the copyright owns a "weak" copyright. (The more original creativity in a work, the "stronger" the copyright. If this concordance is completely uncreative - if it is really just a list of words that a computer could generate - there is no copyright whatsoever. If, however, the author has organized the concordance in a way to show some creativity, there is a "weak" copyright.)

Unfortunately, in practice, a "weak" copyright is pretty strong when owned by a powerful company. For example, the woodcut illustrations in the original edition of Alice in Wonderland are in the public domain and have no copyright protection. Disney's depiction of Alice - clearly a cartoon version of the public domain woodcut Alice - is, however, copyrighted. Technically, this derivative work should be a "weak" copyright. However, when the video game Alice by American McGee came out, American McGee's Alice was a brunette who looked nothing like the Alice most people think of. American McGee should have been able to copy the public domain Alice, just like Disney did, but I assume that American McGee didn't want to risk taking on Disney. (That was probably not the only consideration that went into it - they probably also didn't want little kids buying the game by accident, either - but Disney's copyright in the derivative work must have been something they considered.)

I really appreciate the fact that, despite being a writer, you do not seem to have a rabid approach to copyright. I think many readers, who feel defensive on behalf of their favorite authors, don't understand the benefits of having copyrights that are not absolute and that expire. The creative sphere as a whole gains something from a public domain and fair use. (Author's heirs are often anything but open to creative reimaginings, or even creative criticisms, of a work - the highly litigious Margaret Mitchell estate comes to mind.) If our modern attitudes towards copyright had always existed, you would not have been able to freely quote Shakespeare (who never had copyright protection) in Sandman, and the story would have lost some of its richness. Similarly, it would be ridiculous if you had to have Rudyard Kipling's heirs sign off on The Graveyard Book. Copyrights should not be powerful to the point where they suppress new ideas or criticisms.

I very much look forward to The Graveyard Book.

- Anne

and also

Your latest blog entry about legal court cases inspired me to put up a bit of information on my personal blog that goes into aspects of the joint authorship elements of your case, and the transformative works issues that will be important in J.K. Rowlings'. If you are interested you can read it at: http://wise-old-sage.blog-city.com/gaiman_joint_authorship_and_transformative_works.htm

I did link to your posting so my readers could reference it. I hope you don't mind.

Christopher Schiller

http://www.christopherschiller.com

while Scrivener's Error pointed me at

http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2007/11/accio-lawsuit.html
and the hypothesis that this is primarily a trademark, not a copyright case.

Neil,

Considering your latest encounter with a large metal pole, I got to thinking about health insurance. As an author and one who is more or less self-employed (right?), how do you go about getting decent health insurance not only for yourself but for your family? Wouldn't it be much easier to move to Canada or back to the UK where they are reasonable enough to have universal health care?

Thanks,

Jon


How? I write movies.

True answer, even though it sounds silly. As long as I have a certain amount of income coming in from Hollywood, I'm covered by the Writer's Guild which had very good Health Insurance when I became a member, and has significantly less good health insurance these days, but it's still an awful lot better than having no insurance for me or my family.

(Occasionally friends ask why I'll write movies -- they're a huge drain on time and emotion, most of the scripts one writes simply do not get made, and when they do get made it's all-too-often nothing like the thing that you thought you were writing, and unlike novels you've given up control from the outset, you can find yourself being lied to or fired or cheated, and while I make a lot of money writing scripts I make a lot more money writing books, which I own and control for ever, and from which I get foreign income, and so on. And I say "Health Insurance," and if they're from America they normally get it, while people from countries that regard healthcare as a human right, like education, think I'm mad.)

Why not move? I like my house, and my youngest daughter loves her school and friends (my older daughter has already moved back to the UK) and I'm happy to write an occasional movie and get healthcare as a side-effect. (Also, I quite like writing film-scripts. It's everything that goes with them I put up with.)

(Incidentally, the pole was a heavy PVC pipe,and not metal, I'm glad to say. Otherwise my face would have been far more banged up than it was. Right now the black eye's mostly gone, the nose has mostly healed, and there's a cut on the lip that would heal better if I didn't keep talking...)

...

Mark Buckingham and Shelly Bond and I have been plotting and planning over the last month. We've been planning a Sandman 20th Anniversary poster, with as many of the pencillers and inkers who drew Sandman as possible coming back to draw a character or two. We pondered a couple of different ways of doing it, decided that a party would best, and Mark laid out a party and where everyone would be...

Most of the forty-something artists on Sandman who are still alive and drawing said yes -- a handful were simply too busy (alas, no Matt Wagner or Michael Zulli) and there are a couple that we're hunting for.

But the first piece of art came in. It's from Sam Kieth, and is the first time he's drawn Morpheus professionally in, well, twenty years. (And the first time he's drawn Daniel, ever.)



I think it's going to be a fabulous poster.

a few final copyright thoughts before we leave the subject entirely

I ought to be proofreading The Graveyard Book. I used to love proofreading, but that was many a year ago now, especially as I have both the US and the UK versions to proof, so anything one of them picks up I have to consider for the other, and I have to read both versions back to back, not because they are different but to see what the copy editors did on different sides of the Atlantic. (Shakes head, ruefully...)

The May event at MIT isn't sold out, it's just the tickets were offered to MIT students/staff first. This according to friends of mine at Pandemonium and The Million Year Picnic, both of which are now selling tickets.

A quick Google gave me http://community.livejournal.com/millionyear/33091.html
with lots of information on the MIT event.

If you want to call to reserve tickets (617-492-6763), you must pick them up within 48 hours. No call-in reservations for tickets after May 14th. Four tickets maximum.

I've noticed you're on the speakers' list for the Children's Book Council Australia's conference in May. I was just curious if you'll have time to do a signing in between your two gigs.

If not at the CBCA, do you have plans to do one while in Melbourne this time around at all?

Thanks in advance

-S

If you click on WHERE'S NEIL it will take you to http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/ and you will learn about the three Melbourne, two Sydney and one Hobart events next week. And to answer some other frequently received questions, I do know that it's been twelve years since I was in Perth and a decade since I signed any books in New Zealand, yes. I am also aware that it is unfair on the people in Brisbane and Adelaide that I'm not signing there, and it's even harder on the people in Canberra because, having only one body and two potential locations it could be in, I picked Hobart (where I had not been for a decade) rather than Canberra (where I was in July 2005).

I am compelled, after reading your thoughts on the JK Rowling Lexicon case, to try to sort out in my head if it bears resemblance to your dealings with certain characters you created for MacFarlane's Spawn series. Obviously the cases are different, but I see vague similarities.

While it (the lexicon) existed only on his website, and no one was profiting from it, then I see no issue naturally. The minute it gets published in book form, he stands to make oodles of money from it. Let's face facts here, people would buy it in droves. In that case I feel that he either HAS her permission to do so, or does not. If he does not (which clearly he doesn't), then does it not put him in the wrong? Does he not require her permission to make money with characters and places and ideas she created? Should he not have approached her perhaps to begin with?


I just saw these vague similarities. I realize he is not taking the created characters and making new stories with then (ALA MacFarlane was doing), and taking credit.......it just seems wrong to me. If it's a poorly done book, then that reflects on, not only her, but her world as well doesn't it?


They're similar only, I suspect in that at the end of the day they aren't about the things that people (including the people who were involved in the litigation) thought they were about. I thought the McFarlane case was all about Creators' Rights, and trying to make Todd keep his promises, and his copyright filings claiming that he'd written the issues that I'd written, and all sorts of suchlike things. I think in Todd's mind it was all about proving that He Made His Rules And Was Really Tricky And Everybody had To Do What He Said, or something like that.

But really, in the end, in the appeal court, after the trial jury had delivered their verdict and I'd won all 17 counts on the case, it all came down mostly to this: does the clock start ticking on a copyright breach case when the breach is committed or when it's discovered. There's a three year statute of limitations on copyright claims. In 1996 Todd had filed his copyright claims , claiming to have written Spawn 9 and the Angela series, then three years later, in 1999, he let me know he wasn't going to honour any agreements he'd made with me for the stuff I'd created. Had my clock already run out? His lawyers were certain it had, and even some of my lawyers thought I was on shaky ground.

And the Posner legal decision at the Appeal was, essentially, nobody is expected to patrol the copyright office looking for breaches, and the clock only started ticking the moment I found out about it. (The whole Posner decision is up at http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/CR1FGCDA.pdf and is really pretty interesting reading.)

In the Time-Warner-Rowling-Vander Ark case it's not about "is he making money from her ideas?" or "will this stop fan websites?" or any of that stuff that people are talking about on line. It doesn't matter from a legal perspective that Ms Rowling was doing or planning her own encyclopedia, or that the money is going to charity, or any of that stuff, although I'm sure Ms Rowling feels it does (because I would, if I were her).

As far as I can see it's only about a couple of really grey areas of copyright law -- I suspect, and I am SO not a lawyer, that it will come down to whether or not what Mr Vander Ark had done to Ms Rowling's work in his Lexicon was sufficiently "transformative" as to render it a new work.

There's an online annotation of Sandman. If the people who did it -- or if someone else -- decided to publish it, I couldn't stop them even if I didn't want it to come out, even if Les Klinger had finally persuaded me to get DC Comics to let him do an official Annotated Sandman. (Someone asked when Les's Annotated Dracula comes out -- it'll be in October 2008.) That's because it's obviously a transformative work -- it's based on my work, but it springs off from it.

If someone did a website in which everything in Sandman is listed in alphabetical order, as a concordance or lexicon... whether or not I was going to do one doesn't matter. Whether or not someone else is making money off my work and words and ideas doesn't matter. Whether it's a good lexicon or a bad lexicon doesn't matter. Whether it quotes me extensively may or may not matter (how extensively I'm quoted is a matter of Fair Use, but paraphrase me and you are home and dry on that count). What matters is whether it sufficiently transforms what I've done into something else by taking those entries and putting them into alphabetical order. How much original work is being done? The King James Bible is in the public domain. If you made a lexicon or concordance of the King James Bible, listing every person and place mentioned in there, something that would take you a lot of time -- you could copyright it. If someone copied it -- simply took your King James Bible Lexicon book and put their name on it -- could you sue them? Should you?

And, personalities aside, and all the newspaper commentary and most of the bloggage and online opinions, that's the kind of thing that this case will come down to in the end.

Hi Neil,

Like yourself, I am a fan of Harlan Ellison. However, as a feminist, I get really sick and tired of Ellison's misogyny.

I was wondering how you reconcile the fact that Ellison is your friend and an awesome writer with the fact that he can be really sexist. I'm especially curious because you have two daughters. (And one that went to a women's college! I went to Mount Holyoke, myself.) What do you tell them when Ellison makes denigrating remarks about women? I sincerely hope that you do more than merely laugh it off and regard it as "Harlan being Harlan." Even though he's funny as Hell, his attitude is really damaging. Besides, relying on sexist humor is beneath him and I really don't understand why he does it. I dislike it when Ellison claims to use such humor in a reclaimatory way. He's a white man -- he cannot reclaim sexism on the behalf of women.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question.

Best,

Emily Neal


You know, in my presence over the years Harlan has made some astoundingly denigrating remarks about studio executives, the Walt Disney company, a number of restaurants we've eaten in, several eastern European publishers, food in England, the English (except -- possibly, sometimes -- for me and his wife), editors, other publishers, a (male) science fiction critic, television producers, Fantagraphics, friends of mine, movie producers... the list goes on and on. When Harlan's rude about my friends in my presence I tend to point out they're my friends and he's being a twit, and he either looks shamefaced or he tells me I'm an idiot for liking so many people. There are lots of people, and some classes of people, like studio accountants, that Harlan has been less than civil about. I don't ever remember "women" as a class being on the list. (I remember him once being extremely rude about a female studio head, but that was in her role as a studio head, not in her capacity as a woman.) Which means I read your letter and I'm as puzzled as if it were asking how I can stand Harlan's attacks on people of colour, or the left-handed, or jazz musicians.

As for "Harlan being Harlan," I'm reminded of what the producer of the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, Erik Nelson, said, when I told him that I thought the film was unbalanced, and he should interview some of Harlan's enemies. He said, "That's what Harlan said. I told him, 'Harlan, you're your own worst enemy'."

...

Off to Australia on Saturday...

Remembering Douglas #1

One of two or three Douglas Adams introductions I wrote. This was the introduction to M.J.Simpson's biography of Douglas, Hitchhiker.

Remembering Douglas


I met Douglas Adams toward the end of 1983. I had been asked to interview him for Penthouse. I was expecting someone sharp and smart and BBCish, someone who would sound like the voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was met at the door to his Islington flat by a very tall man, with a big smile and a big, slightly crooked, nose, all gawky and coltish, as if, despite his size, he was still growing. He had just returned to the UK from a miserable time in Hollywood, and he was happy to be back. He was kind, he was funny, and he talked. He showed me his things: he was very keen on computers, which barely existed at that point, and on guitars, and on giant inflatable crayons, which he had discovered in America, had shipped to England at enormous expense, before learning that they were, quite cheaply, available in Islington. He was clumsy: he would back into things, or trip over them, or sit down on them very suddenly and break them.

I learned that Douglas had died the morning after it happened, in May 2001, from the Internet (which had not existed in 1983). I was being interviewed on the phone by a journalist (the journalist was in Hong Kong), and something about Douglas Adams dying went across the computer screen. I snorted, unimpressed (only a couple of days before, Lou Reed had gone onto Saturday Night Live to put to rest a round of Internet rumours about his death). Then I clicked on the link. I found myself staring at a BBC news screen, and saw that Douglas was, quite definitely, dead.

“Are you all right?” said the journalist in Hong Kong.

“Douglas Adams is dead,” I said, stunned.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s been on the news here all day. Did you know him?”

“Yes,” I said. We carried on with the interview, and I don’t know what else was said. The journalist got back in touch several weeks later to say that there wasn’t anything coherent or at least usable on the tape after I learned that Douglas died, and would I mind doing the interview again.

Douglas was an incredibly kind man, phenomenally articulate and amazingly helpful. In 1986 I found myself knocking around his life an awful lot when I was working on Don’t Panic! I’d sit in corners of his office going through old filing cabinets, pulling out draft after draft of Hitchhiker’s in its various incarnations, long-forgotten comedy sketches, Dr Who scripts, press-clippings, always willing to answer questions and to explain. He put me in touch with dozens of people I needed to find and interview, people like Geoffrey Perkins and John Lloyd. He liked the finished book, or he said he did, and that helped too.

(A memory from that period: sitting in Douglas’s office, drinking tea, and waiting for him to get off the phone, so I could interview him some more. He was enjoying the phone conversation, about a project he was doing for the Comic Relief book. When he got off he apologised, and then explained that he had to take that call because it was John Cleese, in a way that made it clear that this was a delighted name dropping: John Cleese had just phoned him, and they’d talked professionally like grown-ups. Douglas must have known Cleese for nine years at that point, but still, his day had been made, and he wanted me to know. Douglas always had heroes.)

Douglas was unique. Which is true of all of us, of course, but it’s also true that people come in types and patterns, and there was only one Douglas Adams. No-one else I’ve ever encountered could elevate Not Writing to an art form. No-one else has seemed capable of being so cheerfully profoundly miserable. No-one else has had that easy smile and crooked nose, nor the faint aura of embarrassment that seemed like a protective force field.

After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas. I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist, not really, despite having been an internationally best-selling novelist who had written several books which are, a quarter of a century later, becoming seen as classics. Writing novels was a profession he had backed into, or stumbled over, or sat down on very suddenly and broken.

I think that perhaps what Douglas was was probably something we don’t even have a word for yet. A Futurologist, or an Explainer, or something. That one day they’ll realise that the most important job out there is for someone who can explain the world to itself in ways that the world won’t forget. Who can dramatise the plight of endangered species as easily (or at least, as astonishingly well, for nothing Douglas did was ever exactly easy) as he can explain to an analog race what it means to find yourself going digital. Someone whose dreams and ideas, practical or impractical, are always the size of a planet, and who is going to keep going forward, and taking the rest of us with him.

This is a book filled with facts about someone who dealt in dreams.


Neil Gaiman

Bologna May 15, 2003

advice

I'm fairly nervous about teaching at Clarion this year. I said no when asked for years, because I wasn't sure what I had to teach anyone about writing. Mostly I figure I'm still figuring it out myself. I finally said yes, and I still don't think I know enough to dare to actually teach anyone.

In the shower today I tried to think about the best advice I'd ever been given by another writer. There was something that someone said at my first Milford, about using style as a covering, but sooner or later you would have to walk naked down the street, that was useful...

And then I remembered. It was Harlan Ellison about a decade ago.

He said, "Hey. Gaiman. What's with the stubble? Every time I see you, you're stubbly. What is it? Some kind of English fashion statement?"

"Not really."

"Well? Don't they have razors in England for Chrissakes?"

"If you must know, I don't like shaving because I have a really tough beard and sensitive skin. So by the time I've finished shaving I've usually scraped my face a bit. So I do it as little as possible."

"Oh." He paused. "I've got that too. What you do is, you rub your stubble with hair conditioner. Leave it a couple of minutes, then wash it off. Then shave normally. Makes it really easy to shave. No scraping."

I tried it. It works like a charm. Best advice from a writer I've ever received.

..

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

are Bill Hader and Doug Jones really tall, or are you much (much) shorter than I've ever pictured?

Best wishes,

J.V


Bill Hader is a few inches taller than I am, but he's normal-human-being-tall (and in the photo, Bill's closer to the camera than Doug or me, too). Doug Jones, on the other hand, is inhumanly tall -- as Abe Sapiens he towered over Hellboy, as the Silver Surfer he towered over Ben Grimm, as the faun in Pan's Labyrinth he towered over, well, a little girl, but he's absolutely ridiculously gobsmackingly tall anyway. Also astoundingly nice.

Fair Use and other things

After the reading, Bill Hader and Doug Jones and I got together for some food. Behind us is Saint Mark's Bookshop, which I only mention because it is my favourite bookshop in New York. The photographer was a young Japanese lady who had previously come over to tell Bill she was a fan and to get her photo taken with him, which I figured made her much likely than any random New Yorker, when we spotted her on the street as we casme out, both to take the picture and give me my phone back afterwards.

I am no longer in New York during passover and a papal visit (which means the chance of my actually being able to say "Good yontiff, pontiff," has now dropped back from astonishingly faint to none).

The event last night raised a lot of money for the CBLDF, which was good. And we've won the Gordon Lee case, which is better.

And I thought it high time I reposted the link to the CBLDF membership page, for those of you who would like to join, or who need to renew. It's here. (www.cbldf.com takes you to the site that sells the memberships, signed prints and the rest.) (And don't forget that there are levels of membership all the way up to ANGEL at $1000 a year.)

Also lots of cool products, including this new T-shirt design, which I rather like...



...

Lots of emails from people asking me to comment on the JK Rowling/ Steve Vander Ark copyright case. My main reaction is, having read as much as I can about it, given the copyright grey zone it seems to exist in, is a "Well, if it was me, I'd probably be flattered", but that obviously isn't how J.K. Rowling feels. I can't imagine myself trying to stop any of the unauthorised books that have come out about me or about things I've created over the years, and where possible I've tried to help, and even when I haven't liked them I've shrugged and let it go.

Given the messy area that "fair use" exists in in copyright law I can understand the judge not wanting to rule, and assume that whatever he says the case will head off to the court of appeal.

My heart is on the side of the people doing the unauthorised books, probably because the first two books I did were unauthorised, and one of them, Ghastly Beyond Belief, would have been incredibly vulnerable had anyone wanted to sue Kim Newman and me on the grounds that what we did, in a book of quotations that people might not have wanted to find themselves in, went beyond Fair Use. (Which, I was told by my UK publishers, has now, as a concept, vanished from UK copyright law, although a moment's Google seemed to disprove this.)

Most commentary on the internet seems to break down into people picking sides based on personalities and opinions. As with most grey areas of law, it isn't cut and dried, and even when an appeals court-sized decision is handed down, it probably won't become cut and dried, because "Fair Use" is one of those things, like pornography, we are meant to know when we see them.

Having said that I'm fascinated by the "new rumour" that seems to have sprung up on this -- I noticed it on the Guardian comments page today, when someone began their comment with:

There is a story that Neil Gaimen was paid not to express criticism of Rowling for some of the similarities to his work.

I thought, "if there is, I haven't heard it". As far as I know the only person who ever claimed that was the mad muggles woman, Nancy Stouffer, at,

http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/01/author_stouffer032801.htm

WDC: I read somewhere that some of the details in Rowling's books could be seen as borrowing from The Sandman comic books--I believe owls carrying messages for wizards was one example. Asked about this, Sandman creator and author Neil Gaiman's response was basically so what? Storytellers pick up bits and pieces from here, there and everywhere all the time as they create original works. Why is this bothering you so much more than anyone else whose "bits and pieces" may have been borrowed (and note I say MAY)? Because you have so many examples? I've seen them on your site and think most of them are coincidental and lacking in substance, no more justifying this brouhaha than the owl messengers would be for Gaiman to throw up his arms and scream plagarism.

Nancy Stouffer: The fact is that initially Gaiman did throw up his arms and yell plagiarism. It wasn't until he had a movie deal that his comments began to change. Initially he was terribly annoyed.

(This is the Nancy Stouffer whose case, when it went to court, was thrown out and who was ordered to pay two million in attorney's fees and fined $50,000 for "submission of fraudulent documents and untruthful testimony". She lied a lot.)

Actually, what I said, on the Dreaming website, long before this place existed, back in 1998, when this nonsense first started, was,

Thursday, March 19, 1998
Neil on Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling
Posted by puck at 3:00 AM PST | Comments (3)
There's a rumour going around that Neil is upset about the Harry Potter books being too similar to The Books of Magic. Neil asked me to post this to clear things up:

"I was surprised to discover from yesterday's [Daily] MIRROR that I'm meant to have accused J.K. Rowling of ripping off BOOKS OF MAGIC for HARRY POTTER.

Simply isn't true -- and now it's on the public record it'll follow me around forever.

Back in November I was tracked down by a Scotsman journalist who had noticed the similarities between my Tim Hunter character and Harry Potter, and wanted a story. And I think I rather disappointed him by explaining that, no, I certainly *didn't* believe that Rowling had ripped off Books of Magic, that I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

(As I said to the Scotsman journalist, the only thing that was a mild bother was that in the BOOKS OF MAGIC movie Warners is planning, Tim Hunter can no longer be a bespectacled, 12 year old English kid. But given the movie world I'll just be pleased if he's not played by a middle-aged large-muscled Austrian.)

Not sure how this has transmuted into "Gaiman has accused Rowling of ripping him off." But I suppose it's a better story than the truth.


The Stouffer stuff was spun by sites like this -- http://www.geocities.com/versetrue/rowling.htm

Did Warner Brothers Pay off Neil Gaiman, Worst Witch and Melissa Joan Hart?
Warner owns the rights to Harry Potter. They later bought rights to Neil Gaiman's work, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and distribution rights to the "Worst Witch." They were the three main threats to the trademark.

After Neil Gaiman started squealing plagiarism, "Warner Brothers have optioned Sandman for a movie..." according to Neil Gaiman's website. When it looked like ABC was about to dump "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" Warner went and paid the most it ever did for a comedy. How often does a show a network is dumping switches networks, let alone pay a record amount for it? Was Gaiman and the Harts who own the Sabrina show paid off?

Which, given that I don't own Sandman or Books of Magic/Tim Hunter - they were both work for hire and are owned by DC Comics, a Time-Warner company, have been since they were created in the 80s -- have never "squealed plagiarism" except in Nancy Stouffer's sad mad mind and given that both Sandman and Books of Magic were first optioned for films by Warners some years before the first Harry Potter book was published, is not just astoundingly badly written lunatic conspiracy theory nonsense, but easily disproven creepy nonsense.

Very very sleepy post

This is the best news I've had in ages -- being able to announce it at the beginning of tonight's reading was an enormous thrill:
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=154204

And I want to say thank you to Gordon Lee for bearing up so well and hanging in there. It's hard for the people who think that the authorities are out to get them. It must be much harder when the authorities really are out to get you.

As I said when I made the announcement, the CBLDF has spent over $100,000 to make sure that this attempted miscarriage of justice didn't happen, all of that money raised a dollar at a time from fans and readers and professionals. So two nights ago we had an event for publishers, the kind who publish books (and who are now publishing graphic novels), in order to spread the idea that a) they needed to know what the CBLDF is -- they may need us, and b) we'd like them to take out corporate memberships.

There's a few photos of the event at the bottom of this blog entry...
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/04/18/icv2-conference-and-cbldf-reception

The CBLDF reading tonight was fun, and Bill Hader is hilarious. (His impression of me listening to Al Pacino pitching his interpretation of the Sandman movie would have been worth the price of admission, if I'd paid to get in, which I hadn't.)
...

Last Summer I was interviewed (or rather, Winterviewed) all over my house by Miss Winter McCloud -- it's just gone up at http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=16044

...

Last week, Sharon and Bill Stiteler came out and we took advantage of a warm Sunday to go and say hello to the bees, and do the spring inspection (and spring cleaning)of the hive. (We'll be putting in some new hives over the next few weeks.) Sharon blogged about the bee inspection over at

http://www.birdchick.com/2008/04/spring-bee-inspection.html

I was fascinated by this, in the way you can only be when you once wrote a book about something (actually I'd finished writing the book when most of this was happening. A small glimpse into what might have been on the sequel to the infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Computer Game... -- http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/

...

Last orders

My face is now an amazing bunch of colours. Yellow and purple predominate, but there are some delicate browns and greens in there too. Tomorrow afternoon, lots of on-camera interviews...

I just borrowed an office while waiting for a meeting on the Neverwhere movie, which has come back to life-- they want me to do a polish on the script I did in 1999 -- to check email, so I can't post another photo yet I'll try and do it later.

This just came in from Charles Brownstein at the CBLDF, about the event(s) tomorrow:


There are still a few tickets left for the general admission seating [That's the $20 one, Neil], which can be preordered at NYCC's site, or if supplies last, purchased from the CBLDF on Friday at the show.

There are also some spots left in the VIP Experience [that's the $500 one. Still Neil], which will include an incredible gift bag. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has created a beautiful pouch that includes Orange, a new fragrance made for the occasion of the reading, as well as a scent locket, and imps of three Gaiman perfumes. Neverwear is contributing shirts and a discount card, and a variety of goodies. And you'll also be signing for and also giving an original drawing to each VIP ticket holder. VIP tix are still available, but must be procured online.


Details for on-line tickets are here.

The Eyes Have It

Let's see. So Maddy read my blog post of yesterday and said, "No, Dad, what you told me to tell them was that I was swordfighting with Spiderman."

Spiderman? That left me puzzled.

I mean, D'Artagnan I could have understood. But Spiderman doesn't have a sword. So I puzzled over what I could have told a five year old that she would have heard or remembered eight years later as Spiderman, given the kind of thing I was likely to say. Such as, "Tell them it's a duelling scar. And you got it fighting a duel in..."

Heidelberg. Oh. Right. How cool.

...

I don't think I was very clear yesterday, so, yes, I did actually know about the quest to make coloured bubbles before I wrote Orange.
(http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/11/balancing-acts-and-mithras.html)

...

Over on Kitty's blog, she has photos up of people in their Neverwear tee-shirts. Which I mention here for the curious, who want to see what the site's Webgoblin looks like. He's the first tee shirt. (The now-retired-but-occasionally-nipping-out-of-retirement-to-fix-things WebElf looks like this.)

Q: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? A: No.

Hi Neil,

Go on, show us a picture. You know you want to ;-)

David

Here's a cameraphone pic I took for curious friends. It was taken yesterday, just after the doctor left, still a bit stunned. (In the strange way of these things, my doctor was just driving past, and called to see if I was around and could offer encouragement on his novel, just after the incident occurred. So I had a doctor there in minutes.)

Today I look much less stunned, the nose is even bigger, and there's emu oil and germoline on the cut to stop it scabbing and help with scarring. Opinions around here are divided on whether or not I'll have panda-eyes for New York. Opinions are also divided on whether I should try and cover the bruising up with make-up for the interviews on Friday, or whether I should use latex and a small bottle of Kensington Gore to make it look more interesting (my heart goes with the latter, my head for the former).

I drove Maddy to school this morning. She has an extremely cool crescent-shaped scar next to her eye, from when, as a small child, she ran into the corner of a table. She said,

"Will you get a scar?"

"Maybe."

"I like my scar. You know, I get people I've known since kindergarten asking me about it, these days, as if they've just noticed it."

"Really? What do you tell them."

"What you told me to tell people who asked."

I racked my brains. Nothing. "What was that?"

"I tell them I got it in a swordfight."

"Oh. Good."

Dear Neil

What is it like to live in a world where one can call up some famous movie producer (or was it a director) and chat? Is it nice? Or is it a little bit lonely sometimes? Or am I just being presumptuous?

Thanks for your time.

Ian


Not presumptuous, but it's just sort of irrelevant, at least the famousness bit. Friends are friends and people you work with are people you work with. If you're working with them it takes about 20 seconds to get over the feeling of, "Oh my god I'm in a room talking to X!" and to get on with whatever it is you're meant to be doing (if it's work). If they're your friends you only become aware of the famousness thing when someone else says "Excuse me, was that X?" or asks for an autograph or something.

I wouldn't phone up a famous film director or producer to chat. But I might phone a friend, who produced or directed, and was famous, to chat. Big difference.

I'm lucky in that I'm not a celebrity, and I'm not really famous. I'm well known for what I do among the sort of people who like what I do, and I wouldn't want to be more famous. And famous is, for pretty much all of the people I know who are, a side-effect or by-product of doing what they do, which is pretty much always what they love doing, and it's not a particularly desirable by-product at that.

(Not necessarily a bad one either -- you can do good things with it. Gillian Anderson's used hers to help push National Doodle Day -- a neurofibromatosis fund-raiser that raises money from celebrity doodles. http://doodledayusa.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=134 has doodles by lots of interesting people that will go up on eBay in a month. Although the ones I like best are from the less famous and the more draw-y, like Sergio Aragones, Gahan Wilson, and Kendra Stout (who did the "scary trousers" t- shirt, and just did a mouse pad for Cat Mihos's Neverwear.net) and Fred Hembeck. Also there are two by me.)

Lonely, when it happens and wherever in the world it happens, is lonely, and that has nothing to do with famousness (except as a sort of an occasional by-product of, Because I do what I do I'm sitting in a hotel-room in a country where I don't know anyone a long way from my family and friends. And authors don't have it bad compared to, say, stand-up comedians or truck drivers). But then, I'm also the kind of person who daydreams about booking a passenger cabin on a merchant ship and going off around the world for six months writing a book.

Dear Neil,

I have just discovered that brightly colored bubbles are available, and go by the name Zubbles (http://www.zubbles.com/index.asp). Considering the story you read in Helena last year, I thought you might want to know, although since the website has a 2005 copyright date, maybe you already do.

Speaking of the story, I'm really looking forward to "Orange," and the rest of The Starry Rift. It comes out right before my birthday, and it seems fitting that I could get it a year after I got to hear you read "Orange," which was a one-day-late birthday present from my parents (who bought the tickets) and my best friend. (She drove us from Missoula to Helena, even though she'd only seen Mirrormask and knew nothing else about you! She loves Stardust now, and she liked Good Omens, too.)

- anna

It's mortifying to discover you're the kind of SF writer who can imagine something futuristic after it's been invented, isn't it? Soon I shall imagine the "air-plane" -- a fixed-wing heavier than air flying machine!

This just came in from Jonathan Strahan, editor of The Starry Rift:

I've set up a website at www.thestarryrift.com which contains
information about the book, downloads of the cover art, short interviews
with some of you (they'll appear one a day over the coming week or so), and
as much relevant stuff as I can muster.

I've also arranged a chance for readers to win some copies of the book.
Thanks to Viking, I'm giving away a copy of The Starry Rift to the first
five readers who email me at thestarryrift@gmail.com and tell me the name of
the last science fiction novel they loved and why. The details are at
http://thestarryrift.com/win/

...

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

I was wondering if the techno-masters behind your website might be able to turn the countdown for the upcoming American release of The Graveyard Book, which appears on your homepage, into one of those iGoogle "gadget" thingies. That way I can put it on my 'iGoogle' homepage next the "gadget" I have for Frank Miller's "The Spirit" movie.

Most Sincerely, Daniel Crandall

I forwarded it to Dan Guy, the webgoblin, and he sent back, within a couple of minutes:

Here's an off-the-shelf countdown clock for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. I may try to create a most customized one as well.

Click here for the igoogle GRAVEYARD gadget.

Just in case I look like a Panda in New York

I was just hit in the face by a pipe propelled by 80lbs of leaping dog, knocked down and -- briefly -- knocked out.

My doctor established that my nose wasn't broken, decided not to stitch the side of the nose up, offered much sage advice, and then said, cheerfully, "You'll be fine. There's going to be a lot of bruising, though. I just hope you don't have any public appearances coming up."

I have a sneaking suspicion that I think this is actually funny. Although that might just be the concussion talking. Er, typing.

Right. Going to rest and ice-pack for a bit now.

Tulsa June 28 and suchlike

Details for the reading/talking/signing in Tulsa on June 28th is now up at http://www.roadworkok.com/gaiman.htm

I'm presenting a screening of Beowulf and talking about that (and I have no doubt, everything else). And I'm kind of excited as I have never been to Oklahoma, and I will, I hope, get to look at Lafferty stuff while I am there...

...

Lots of people have been writing in asking me for my opinion on the proposed Orphan Copyright legislation.

Currently I'm reading http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/orphan-report.pdf and I won't have an opinion until I've finished reading it. Then I'll read everything else I can find (like this http://lessig.org/blog/2007/02/copyright_policy_orphan_works.html and the mountains of stuff up at http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185). And then I'll probably put something up here, or point to the sanest place on the web I've run across.

The only thing that most of the emails coming in on it right now have in common is the conviction that common people are being disenfranchised, and that if the legislation goes through you will now be forced to pay to register copyright on something in order to seek damages – which has, I'm afraid, always been the case. You own your copyright at the moment of creation, but, at least in the US, you still have to register it and pay the registration in order to pursue damages for copyright infringement.

(The Copyright office FAQs on this at http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork are helpful and clear on it.)

[Edit to add: Hi Neil,

All the hoopla about orphan copyrights is just that -- hoopla. This post explains a lot:

http://maradydd.livejournal.com/374886.html

I found it on Boing-Boing.

Best,

Jess

I hadn't linked to the hysterical post at http://mag.awn.com/?ltype=pageone&article_no=3605
because it was obviously hysterical and, even from the little I know about copyright, it was ill-informed. But it's nice to see it taken apart. And just as nice to see http://ursulav.livejournal.com/758643.html]

...

Hey Neil,

I heard you were reading at Comic-Con New York. While that would be awesome, $500+ is very steep so keep us informed on other eastern US appearances, please!

There's a party/reception for VIPs (VIPs being defined here as "people who have bought $500 tickets") at which you get a gift bag, preferred seating and I sign stuff for you. But a ticket for the actual event itself is only $20, which is much cheaper -- plus $30 for a membership to the convention on Friday (or $45 for the whole weekend).

Here's the link to get tickets at the New York Comic-Con site.

I'm planning on reading Orange, and some of The Graveyard Book.

...


Dear Mr. Gaiman,

With all due respect, what on earth are you thinking!

You sir, are an Englishman. Nevermind that you have seen fit to galavant over to the colonies for an adventure or three, you seem to have been taken in by those New World types.

I refer sir, to the fact that you seem to have GIVEN UP TEA!! Have you, at some moment in this overlong winter, taken leave of your senses? Think it through man! The answer is not less tea but MORE!! I suggest Assam, or failing that a pint of gin.

Yours worriedly,

Spike,

Oxford.

ENGLAND (having a cuppa).

Obviously I'm still English. If I'd become American I would have stopped drinking coffee.

sunday morning

This just came in from my friend in Tasmania Dianna Graf (Clockwork Beehive is Dianna and Mark's company. Just in case you were wondering.)

Ooh.

I just got a message saying that tickets to your event in Hobart have completely sold out.

That was fast!

Could you perhaps mention this on your blog?

So many more people were planning to come. There are people flying in from other states and everything.

If enough people who missed out on tickets contact Ellison Hawker Bookshop quickly enough, they may be able to find you a bigger venue.

xx

Dianna

Consider it posted. I'd hate for someone to have go all the way to Tasmania for nothing (although if you did, you'd still be in Tasmania, which is pretty cool by itself. There's the museum, not to mention the extremely slim chance of seeing a thylacine...)

...

I normally avoid linking to favourite author surveys because it could skew them, but I don't think anything will affect the Tolkien and Pratchett lead over at SFX, and the results, as a snapshot of what people read and like, are fascinating.

http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=vote_for_your_favourite_sf

...

When I read this book review's headline -- Nick Johnstone's Amy Amy Amy is the first assessment of the troubled rise of a remarkable talent, says Nick Johnstone I thought that The Guardian had taken book reviewing into new places by allowing the author (of an Amy Winehouse bio) to review his book himself, so lines like

He is scrupulous about acknowledging his sources as he goes along in the text, which contributes to an impression of the book being a compendium of other people's cuttings, rather than the product of his own legwork.

were as much confessional as they were descriptive. (I can't imagine I would have been as honest about my Duran Duran biography-from-cuttings.) I was enormously impressed with this new trend in reviewing, and really disappointed when I got to the bottom of the review and read "David Sinclair is the author of Wannabe: The Spice Girls Revisited (Omnibus)" and realised it was just another Guardian typo.
...

A few weeks ago I was interviewed about the Ramayana by animator and film-maker Ravi Swami for the British Library. It's up as a podcast now on their site as part of the upcoming Ramayana exhibit:

http://www.bl.uk/ramayana

I can't wait to see the exhibition.
....

And, for those of you who were wondering, there's a little film of a thylacine on YouTube. Possibly the last thylacine, filmed in 1933. Look at that jaw open...

The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke

Seeing I was reminded of it yesterday, here is the introduction to Mark Chadbourn's Award-winning novella The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. ( And for the curious, And here's a link to the publisher's website. The book's sold out in paperback, but it looks like they have a few copies left in hardback.) (Click on the painting to see it much larger.)

Me and my Dadd and Mark Chadbourn.

Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the fold-out cover of a QUEEN album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That’s one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which hangs, mostly, when it isn’t travelling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court walking through the daisies, for it to become real. And when you see it several things will become apparent; some immediately, some eventually.

When I was in my early twenties I received a copy of a book to review, of photographs taken by a Victorian doctor named Diamond, of the inmates of Bedlam. Hopeless bedraggled lunatics who wring their hands as they squint at the camera, posing awkwardly for the period of time it took for the photographs to be exposed; their faces are frozen, although their hands often blur into things like the wings of doves. Portraits in madness and pain, and in only one of the photographs was a man, a lunatic like the others, actually doing something.

The madman in the photograph has a beard. He has an easel in front of him, on which he is executing an oval painting of remarkable intricacy. He stares craftily at the camera, and there is a small, fierce smile on his face. His eyes glitter. He looks squat and proud, and when, a year later, I saw for the first time in the flesh, his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, the first thing I realised was that the white-bearded sorrowful dwarf who dominates the centre of the painting, staring out at the watcher, is Richard Dadd grown old.

The people in the Tate Gallery who visit the Pre-Raphaelite rooms are there for their own reasons, and are responding to something distant and melodic. The Waterhouses and the Millaises and the Burne Joneses exert their own magic: spectators wander past the paintings, their lives enriched and made special. The Dadd, on the other hand, is a snare, and those people with a place in their soul for it are hooked. They can stand in front of that painting for, literally, hours, lost in it, puzzling over these fairies and goblins and men and women, trying to understand their size, their shape, their eccentricities (“Every time you looked you saw something new, “ as Mark Chadbourn’s narrator, Danny, unreliable on so many points, but reliable here and on this, informs us).

Dadd knew who they were, the people in the painting. He knew their lives. He knew what they were. You know that when you see them.

If you’ve ever seen the painting reproduced, if you’re on a journey specifically to see it, then the next thing that will surprise you is the size. It’s smaller than you imagined – smaller than seems possible. There is so much to fit in, after all. The authorised Tate Gallery reproduction of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke I bought after seeing it the first time was almost twice the size of the picture itself.

And the painting is not the reproduction. The thing itself, in its frame, has a magic – in the colour, in the detail -- that no photograph, no poster, no postcard, ever seems to begin to capture.

So, like Danny and his mother, you look at the painting, seeing every brush stroke.

And you can look at it for hours before you notice something else about the painting, something so big and strange and obvious you can’t understand why you didn’t see it at once, or why no-one else has commented upon it.

It’s not finished.

Much of the bottom of the painting, where the colour choices seem odd and washed out, are only outlined on the light brown of the undercoat of canvas. The fawn-coloured grass that pushes the eye up to the Feller himself is fawn because Dadd – who took many years to paint it – ran out of time. He gave it away before it was done.

And there’s one final thing you will know, without question, if you’ve seen that painting in the flesh, and it’s this: he knew what he was painting. He had seen it, through those crafty eyes. He had gone on the great journey, the grandest of grand tours, and this was what he was bringing back.

There was a sense that one of the great secrets of the universe would be revealed if one could only examine it long enough to divine the clues, says Danny, says Mark, and they’re right, of course.

Before his madness, before the murder of his father, before the ill-fated journey to France (he was arrested on a train, when he attacked a fellow passenger, on his way to Paris to kill the Emperor) Dadd’s paintings are quite pretty, and perfectly ordinary: forgettable chocolate box cover concoctions of fairy scenes from Shakespeare. Nothing special or magical about them. Nothing that would make them last. Nothing true.

And then he went mad. Not just a little bit mad, but quite spectacularly mad; a murderous patricidal madness of demons and Egyptian gods. He spent the rest of his life locked up – first in Bedlam, later one of the first prisoners in Broadmoor – and, after a while, he began to paint, trading his paintings for favours. Gone were the chocolate box fairies. Now there was an intensity to his paintings and drawings of fairy courts, of bible scenes, of his fellow inmates (real or imaginary), that makes those we have such treasures. They were worked on with an intensity and single-mindedness that is, quite simply, scary.

He spent the rest of his life behind bars, locked up with the dangerously insane, as dangerously insane as any of them, but with a message for us from, as it were, the other side. Apart from this, his life was wasted.

Still, he left us paintings, and riddles, and one unfinished painting (donated to the Tate by, if memory serves, Siegfried Sassoon) which continues to obsess. Angela Carter wrote an astonishing radio play, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, about the painting, Dadd’s life, Victorian art. I wrote a film treatment once in which the painting was a key, and came close once to organising an anthology in which each story would be about one of the witnesses to the Fairy Feller’s chestnut-smashing blow. And now Mark Chadbourn gives us a novella, in which the painting is a clue (perhaps), a murder-weapon (possibly), and above all, and unquestionably, a key: a key to a life, to a family, to mysteries, to solutions, to madness and to, above all, reality.

It’s a story of a life wasted, of love and of pain, and of a place in which Dadd’s painting and Dadd’s life become both a template and an excuse: a reason for living, and a reason for dying, and it is not until the very end that we understand what we have read.

Does Mark Chadbourn’s story provide an answer to the riddle of the Fairy Feller, and his master stroke? Danny’s mother certainly seems to think so, but Danny himself comes to realise that any answer is only a resting point upon the way. That the mystery, like the painting, like our understanding of the painter, will always remain unfinished. And that may be the greatest master stroke of all...


Neil Gaiman
April 6, 2002

Religiously interrupting your being since February 2001

I'm slightly brain-dead right now -- yesterday I flew to LA, had a late-afternoon meeting about a movie I'm going to be writing based on one of my books (I don't think I can be more specific until all the contracts are signed or at least I know that I've got an okay to talk about it) which was really good. My producer is a writer, and he and I sat and agreed with each other about what I was going to be doing. The worst thing in writing something for someone else, and I've found this several times over the years, especially in movies, is where you talk to an editor or an executive and you think that you're talking about the same thing. Then you go away and do what you thought you were talking about and hand it in and find that you were quite wrong, and while you were describing (say) a romantic comedy with ghosts in they were buying a scary ghost story with perhaps some love in, and nobody is happy and the project is doomed. Anyway, this one will I think be just fine -- I felt like we were talking about the same book and the same movie.

Then my cell phone rang, and I found myself heading out to an Emergency Room at a hospital to see an embarrassed friend who had just had been admitted to the ER and had no desire to be there. On the whole it wasn't as intense as ER nor as funny as Scrubs but I definitely felt like I had wandered into American TV Fiction Land. Back to the hotel late, and worked on an overdue article on Crossover Fiction for the UK Writers and Artists Yearbook, because they had asked me to write something for them, and because the 1983 edition of the yearbook was the single most important and useful thing I owned when I set out to become a journalist.

A five in the morning wake-up call and off to the airport to fly home. Finished the Yearbook article in the Northwest Lounge. Sent it off. I slept a bit on the plane. I'd heard that "crippling" snow was expected in Minneapolis, but it was actually rain and didn't turn into snow until I had got home safely. And it was vital that I made it back in time because I had to get back home for...

The Sleepover. At which I was going to be The Adult. Starring Maddy and five of her thirteen/fourteen year old friends, at which I get to serve as chauffeur (to cinema and back) adviser ("you could probably put more cheese on those nachos"), placer-of-things-into-oven, and most importantly, because they had all just seen Prom Night and were a bit skittish, offerer of helpful advice ("You'll all want to stick together this evening. It's a big old house after all, and given the people who've died here over the years... well, I've said too much already..."). It's going on as I type this.

...

An article on writers blogging from The Age, in which we learn that this blog has jumped the shark, and is no longer as good as once it was. Probably true, although over seven years I've noticed it tends to go through phases. Still, if I do go on these research expeditions this summer I'll probably take a break from blogging while I'm doing it, and put it all into notebooks.

Lovely article on fantasy in the Daily Telegraph by Mark Chadbourn. For whose book The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, I once wrote an introduction. I'll see if I can find it and put it up here. It's mostly about Richard Dadd, another of my obsessions.

...

Hi Neil,


I thought you might find this interesting: http://www.thedesignfiles.net/2008/04/interview-nicholas-jones.html


The idea of making such amazing sculptures out of books fascinates me (and makes me cringe a little bit--"no, not the books!"--but still, it's beautiful :)).

They are beautiful, aren't they?

You write great books. In fact, at one time you were my favorite writer, but then I picked up Viriconium by M. John Harrison only because in small black letters, near the bottom of the cover it says "With a Foreword by Neil Gaiman".

Now M. John Harrison is my favorite writer, and Viriconium is my bible. You knocked yourself out of the top spot. Introductions are like small bridges from author to author. Thank you for building so many.

Ironically yours,

Evan


P.S. The introduction is quite good.

You're very welcome. Mike Harrison is one of my favourite writers -- I'm delighted that he's now yours.

just wanted to tell you that your work religiously interrupts my being!!!!!

I hope that's good.

I'm a little forlorn at the moment. I had a wonderful talk with one of my professors today about how much we admire and enjoy your books. But that was following a very tough talk about how I have to rewrite my fiction piece for him. Again. Reason? Because he didn't believe character--due to the profession I labeled her with (Police officer)--think certain thoughts or be worried about things or would ever wish upon a star.

Police officers are humans too, right? They can still be disturbed by a rape case despite the fact that they're a seasoned officer? They still feel emotions?

[sigh] This rant was inspired by the fact that I read on your page that about 95% of what you write in your first draft ends up in your final product. Has that always been the case for you? Was there a time when someone refused your work because they point blank believed what you wrote is unrealistic? Or because you typically write in a magical fantasy world, do they give you certain allowances?

A student who knows her professor reads this page, and therefore remains nameless,

(despite the fact that she gave enough details that her professor will recognize her anyway...)

me.

Let's see. To answer the obvious questions first, was there a time someone turned down something I wrote because it was unrealistic? Probably, although nothing comes to mind. Normally they'd turn things down for just not being good enough.

You never have to convince a reader that Police Officers would wish on a star. You have to convince your readers that that police officer would wish on a star. You have to make someone rounded enough that the reader would half-expect the police officer in question to wish on a star.

Nobody gives you allowances for fantasy, just as nobody gives you allowances for romance or history or even non-fiction. It's called suspension of disbelief, and when you're writing it's what you're doing and what you're building, and it's soap-bubble thin. It pops easily. (I remember once being taken to task by Rachel Pollack for something in a short story I'd written. "But that's the only bit in the story that's true!" I told her. "It doesn't matter if it's true," she said. "What matters is if, in the context of the story, it's believable." And I knew that she was right.)

Incidentally, I've always found the police, in the US and the UK, tremendously helpful to writers, or at least to me. There's nothing like spending a day riding along with a cop, or being walked through a police station and getting to ask nosy questions for giving a writer confidence in what they're writing. And confidence is most of the battle.

The other day I was shopping in a used book store and suddenly realized that I don't know how authors get paid. I understand advances and royalties, etc. (at least well enough) but:

1. Do authors get royalties on new books and used? Sales numbers are only on new books, so...

2. And book clubs - anything from there?


I make enough to buy my books new, but haven't always - I'm not trying to disparage used books shops and libraries. If buying books new means more money for the writers (& illustrators), which leads to more books, then, well, I'll buy them new.


Thanks, looking forward to "The Graveyard Book" (although I wish it were out now to coincide with the dreary spring weather in the upper midwest)


ethan

No, authors don't get paid anything for books in used bookstores -- but then, we've already been paid for them. Someone bought them once, and I'm happy for them to be resold. (As I said in Wired (full reply by me here) and repeated in this journal,

If you buy one of my books (or are sent it to review) it's yours. You bought it (or were given it). You can sell it on. I don't have any more of a problem with Amazon listing the used copies than I do bookstores having used book sections. It's their store.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

As I said when I discussed this at length in the piece I put up on this journal that was quoted in Wired last month, books don't come with single-end-user licenses, and I think that's a good thing.

And six years on, I've not changed my mind.

Writers do fine from book clubs, too -- the book club isn't paying a royalty on each book. Usually they'll pay a fee to the publisher, which is split with the author, for permission to publish a book (often at a smaller size or on cheaper paper than the original) or they will contract with the publisher to overprint copies for them as part of the original print run (so the Book Club editions of the original Stardust hardcover are just like the DC edition, identical in size and binding and paper, they just ran off a few thousand at the end of the print run with the Book Club logo on).

Hi Neil!

I just read a book by a German author who borrowed some stuff from your novels, especially Neverwhere. The story takes place in (a) London Below and Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemaar show up as well (with different names), and some other details were terribly familiar.

I was just wondering what you think of somebody else using "your" ideas & characters. Is it something that annoys you? Do you feel honoured? Do you even care?

I hope you haven't answered this question already - if yes, I couldn't find it and would love a hint in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

L.


There's a saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the truth is that mostly I feel flattered when I hear about things like this. It's classier when the people doing it list you as an influence in interviews or thank you in the acknowledgments or whatever, but it doesn't bother me either way.

more on introductions and contradictions

Time for another introduction, I think.

Introductions are such odd things. You write them and you never really know if they're doing any good at all. For example, a few weeks ago this arrived on the FAQ line,

What makes you feel that you are qualified to comment on Bob Kane when it is obvious that you know so little about him?

You ruined my opportunity to buy a Will Eisner book by your misinformed comments on Kane which you included in your intro. (Kane, not Jerry Robinson, drew the Batman stories from 1939-43.) If you need more info, rely on valid sources and not rumors or gossip. Either that or I can send you an outline. I do research.


And, puzzled, I wrote back:

Hello.

I was puzzled by your letter, so went through both of the introductions I did to books by Will Eisner and found a grand total of one mention of Bob Kane. I said, in the Nortons' CITY STORIES collection,

I wanted to know why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman, remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.

Which leads me to suspect that possibly you read some other introduction by somebody else. Probably you should write irritated emails to them, instead.

best wishes

Neil

But it turned out the email given was wrong, and it came back. (I assume it was unintentionally wrong -- a quick Google showed a person out there with a name like the one on the email enthusiastically defending Bob Kane's reputation on Wikipedia.) So I'm putting it up here in the hopes that the grumpy gentleman gets to read it.

But every now and again you get something like this:

Hey Neil,


On the introduction theme I just wanted to tell you that once years ago, when perusing the stacks at USC, I came upon the Robert Silverberg section. "Hmm," I said to myself, "that name sounds familiar."


I picked up one of the paperbacks (The Man in the Maze), and lo! You'd written an introduction to it!


Of course I checked it out on your recommendation and discovered an amazing author I otherwise wouldn't have, and, of course, searched your blog and discovered that it was indeed you who had put the seed of his name into my head to begin with.


So, thanks! And keep on writing those intros (and everything else)!

- Theresa B

Which reminded me that there was a Robert Silverberg introduction out there that I'd rather enjoyed writing (and some people might enjoy reading). So here it is, the introduction to Bob Silverberg's The Man in the Maze :

The Wound that Never Heals: an Introduction.

Several thousand years on, no-one is quite certain of the details. But the meat of the story is this: Philoctetes was there at the cremation of Hercules, and was given Hercules’s quiver of poisoned arrows. And something happened – a snake bite, perhaps, or even a magical arrow dropped on his foot. Either way Philoctetes was injured on the foot, and it was a wound that would not heal. Sometimes they don’t.

The Trojan War had just begun, and Philoctetes went to fight with the Greeks, who were laying siege to Troy. There was a problem, though. The wound. It stank. A disturbing reek that made the people around Philoctetes sick to their stomachs. It smelled like the dead. It smelled worse than that.

Philoctetes was sent into exile.

The seige of Troy dragged on for another ten years.

And then someone dreamed a dream, an important dream, an oracular dream: if the arrows of Hercules were brought to Troy, then Troy would fall. They sent a messenger to Philoctetes, and invited him back. But Philoctetes had no wish to return...

And because the good stories last and can be (perhaps even must be) infinitely retold, Philoctetes’ wound is also Muller’s, one of the grim trio of men who cross and recross the stage in The Man in the Maze, Robert Silverberg’s 1969 novel, although Muller’s wound is not a physical stench but a spiritual one: a communicable despair, the terrible odour of the human condition.

It is a good thing, The Man in the Maze, will suggest, that we are insulated from each other: we are wounded by living, by mere existence, and we could not stand the stink of each other’s souls.

Science Fiction, more than any other form of literature, is a progress, and it comes with a sell-by date. Some old SF can become unreadable. Some reputations erode with time. What we respond to, once the sell-by date is past, is art and, perhaps, is also truth.

It was Robert Silverberg, an author of, amongst many other things, speculative fiction, who gave us a story in which archaeologists unearth the texts of the 1960s, fragments of Bob Dylan lyrics are puzzled over, lacunae to be filled. To some extent, we are in that position now with the speculative fiction of yesteryear. They are texts that cry out for context.

Silverberg has had a number of careers in his career as an author, and as a writer. Since his arrival in the world of SF he has displayed a wide-ranging intellect and a facility as a writer that gave him his early career as someone who could create a volume of competent fiction on demand. In the late sixties and early seventies he entered a period of remarkable fecundity and quality, half a decade where he cut deeper, grew honest and edgy as a writer, and made demands on himself as an artist that culminated in such novels as Dying Inside and The Stochastic Man. From there, Silverberg, exhausted, retired from fiction, then returned, using an SF writer’s perspective to take us into Elizabethan Africa in his historical novel Lord of Darkness, and out across the edges of fantasy in the Majipoor sequence.

The Man in the Maze is from the beginning of the edgiest period. I think of it as a bridge book, in that, while it is courageous, exploring new territory, with one foot in the New Wave camp, it is still mindful of its roots. From the past of SF we get the strains of Space Opera, replete with incomprehensible aliens and inexplicable artefacts.

We also get some strange glimpses into our present. Fiction that predicts and creates dates sometimes because it, of necessity, leaves itself out. In this novel, we find ourselves recognising the maze, in the way no reader could have done in 1969. The maze is an imaginative deathtrap – at the time an astonishing imaginative creation, one that is dulled today only in that it is instantly recognisable as the environment of a computer game – an exercise in reflexes and memory, judgement and imagination. The process of moving through the maze, using drones and volunteers willing to give up their lives is the process of navigating a game – get to the centre of the maze alive, avoid capture, achieve your goal.

It is too easy to take the maze for granted, now, to let it fade back into the landscape: but the maze, in all its incarnations, is one of the characters in this novel.

I pointed earlier to the story of Philoctetes not to give you a key to the novel you are holding (there are no easy keys to good fiction, nor should there be), but to demonstrate the tradition that Silverberg’s story is a part of.

The title is, I suspect, as important as anything else in grasping the shape beneath the tale. (It is the man in the maze, incidentally, not the woman, as a reader soon notices – the absence of women from the tale, except as courtesans and sexual memories, is one of the few things that makes it feel like something from our past.) As one begins to read, the identity of the man in the maze is obvious: it’s Muller -- who else could it be? But as the journey through the book continues and concludes, one finds oneself wondering who the man truly was, and what the maze: the candidates are Ned Rawlins, who has an honest name and an open face, our young innocent; Dick Muller, the book’s Philoctetes, the experienced diplomat and soldier and frontiersman, now in hiding and in exile; and Charles Boardman, the wily elderly eminence grise, manipulating events and people as best he can. They form a male triad, shading from honour and integrity to expedience and compromise: the male equivalent of a maiden, a mother and a crone – or, more fancifully, father, son, and a particularly shifty Holy Ghost.

And each man, as the reader will learn, has been given his own maze by Silverberg – a maze that moves beyond the physical, beyond the video game deathtrap. It’s an invisible labyrinth he has to walk, and inside which he hides – a maze of morals, a maze of ethics, a maze, and ultimately, of humanity.

Neil Gaiman June 2002

.....

How wonderful that you linked to a Tim Minchin video! I saw his show in NY last Saturday and loved it. He's funny and talented and a very nice guy. I am a bit surprised, though, that you didn't note Mr. Minchin's last name nor tag the post with any part of his name. Not that you need to take up space in your blog to plug other people but I've noticed you typically do take the time to name the names of the worthy. (Last names also make for easier searches of your blog as it seems you know or write about a number of Tims.)

~Lexa

PS Minchin's show runs until the 12th of this month and, no, I don't work for him. Just a fan.

Quite right. The Inflatable You song was Tim Minchin's.

Hey Neil,


I have been writing stories for a while now, since I started reading your books, but I'm having a few problems. I have a story that is about 210 pages long now that I've been writing for about a year and a half, and I recently decided to revise it and edit a little.


The problem is; I have no idea where to start. I am beginning to forget some facts about the protagonist's past and whatnot, and it's starting to get very annoying. I want to move on, but I can't until I've straightened out the rest of the story. I feel like I'm lost!!


Has this ever happened to you, and if it has, how did you deal with it???


~your faithfully, Laura: a struggling 14 year old who enjoys scribbling random stories.


=]

First of all, well done! I couldn't have written 210 pages of a book when I was 14.

What you do is up to you. I can offer a few suggestions, but they're really only suggestions:

Normally, I'd say try and finish the book however you can, just making progress forward. Then, when you get to the end, put the book aside for a few weeks and then read the whole thing through at once, making notes as you go about what works, what doesn't, what needs fixing or changing or expanding or removing. Having done that, do your rewrite.

But you're fourteen. And you've been writing this for a year. That's an age at which you change really fast. Right now you're learning about writing, about making characters and listening to them talk, finding out what happens to them. Still, the stories you want to tell when you're 13 may not be the ones you wanted to tell when you're 15. (Or they may.)

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's not a bad thing if you want to move on to the next story. You should finish the one you're on, because you should learn how to finish telling a story. But you're learning so much, whatever you do next will be much better than anything you did a year ago...

Hi Neil,

When you're writing a novel, how many really good lines do you come up with during the first draft? How much of it needs to be rewritten later on? I realize at this point, you're probably so prolific that you don't throw away much.


I've been feeling awfully discouraged lately, worrying that my first draft is absolute garbage with very little worth keeping. (Though maybe it's because I tend to write my first draft as a stream of consciousness, so when I go back and read it, it makes little sense and I need to fix it up.)


Thanks,


Gary B. Phillips


Probably about 90% of what's in anything I write was there in the first draft. Maybe even 95%. But it's usually the final 5%, the tidies and tweaks and reorganisations that takes it, in my eyes, from just okay to something I can be proud of.

Four videos

(There are four embedded videos here, so if you're on a feed and it cuts off after the first video click on the direct link to the site at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/four-videos.html.)

I forgot to mention that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund event at the New York Comic Con, the one with me reading stuff and talking, is going to be Master-of-Ceremonied/introduced/ hosted by Bill Hader, who had to book time off from Saturday Night Live in order to be there. (I was thrilled that he said yes.)



Bill Hader does a wonderful Vincent Price, and is not to be confused with Adam Buxton, who was Quintus in Stardust, and who prompted someone to write in today to tell me:

I take it you've already seen this. Not sure if it's suitable for all of your readers though...

I hadn't, but I thought it was funny. It's an alternative ending to Stardust, and indeed, not suggested for children...



Hi, Neil. Saw this, thought it had some interesting resonances with MirrorMask as well as a poignancy of its own. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6hNj1uOkY



ciao

jon


(Beautiful. There's also sharper version of it up at http://www.andrewthomashuang.com/MOV_Doll_Face.htm)

And to close, a song I was sent by a friend who saw Tim play in New York...

Warning: low-flying introductions...

Expect occasional introductions to show up here -- it seems more fun to throw them up on the blog from time to time and let the Webgoblin start collecting them than it would be to just email him every introduction I can find and open a well-stocked new department in Cool Stuff (which is http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff for those of you reading this on feeds).

This is the introduction for Joe Sanders' collection of academic papers about The Sandman, The Sandman Papers, published by Fantagraphics a few years back.

There’s introductions and there’s introductions and there’s introductions, and then there’s ones like this where I’m introducing a book that has some kind of connection to me, and I have no idea what I can really add to the book in your hand. Still, I need to try.

I once – at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, in Florida, some years ago – went to a presentation of three papers on my work (one of which is reprinted here), and after each paper was presented, I was asked if I would like to make some reply, which is honestly a bit like asking someone who has just undergone an autopsy if he’d like to talk about the experience. (My replies varied, at least in memory, from “Er, thanks. That was very nice of you,” to an “Er, with respect, if you read the issue you’ve cited, I don’t believe it actually says what you think it does”. But possibly I just smiled and nodded.)

Those were, however – with the exception of pointing out the occasional objective mistake – simply my opinions, and I don’t consider them to be privileged. Once you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people, and they all have opinions about it, and every single one of those opinions is as correct as that of the author – more so, perhaps. Because those people have read the work as something perfectly new, and, barring amnesia, an author is never going to be able to do that. There will be too many ghost-versions of the story in the way, and besides, the author cannot read it for the first time, wondering what happens next, comparing it to other things that he or she has read.

So while I may, opinionated myself, disagree with some of the conclusions presented here, I am quite content for the opinions to exist; after all, the people who came to them read the work for the first time, which is more than I’ve ever managed. Sometimes I’ve had my eyes opened by papers on something I’d written, and noticed that there was something else there than I had intended. I’ve been praised for unintentional cleverness and damned for things I don’t actually think I did. And I’ve always enjoyed it, perhaps because I’ve always had a healthy respect for academia. Even when I'm puzzled by it, it treats art like it matters. And for those of us who make art, that’s a fine thing to experience.

I’m always particularly delighted by academic attention to comics – partly because I think we need the best critical minds to point to what we do and explain it to ourselves, and partly, even mostly, because it shows how much things are changing. (A decade ago I was invited to speak at one major American university by the art department, and was informed, apologetically, that the English department were, ah, boycotting my talk, because, after all, I did comics. These days the invitations come from the English departments...)

One thing I know that I can say is that Joe Sanders (there are two people of that name in this book, just to confuse you. I’m talking about the editor) is not only a fine and perspicacious critic, and an excellent teacher, but he has also proved quite indefatigable in bringing this book into the world. I hope this book will prove to be only the beginning of the printed and collected dialogue between those who do comics and those who tell us what we did.

Neil Gaiman
January 10, 2006

....

It is a terrible thing to read a series of Amazon book reviews and find yourself sniggering like a schoolboy. But I read this and sniggered.

Why Introductions?

Good morning.

Well, I'm now into the second week of off-tea and eating-lots-of-fruit-and-veg-when-I-get-hungry. Drinking lots of water, and juicing things, and occasional herb teas. Weight is starting to drop. Concentration, which went completely out the window when I stopped drinking tea, is returning, and sleep patterns are changing.

The weather was wonderful two days ago, then it rained yesterday, and today I woke up and watched big white flakes of snow drifting past my window and thought, Oh bugger, and decided to stay in bed for days or weeks until the weather became more sensible, a thought that lasted until the dog needed to go out, two or even three minutes later.

Starting to plan out the coming year. I wrote a proposal for a personal, non-fiction book about travel and myth, and my publisher wants to do it, so now I'm figuring out all the whens and the hows, especially of the travel bits. And I'm deciding whether I'll blog from the road or stop while I'm travelling, leave the computer at home, and put the effort into writing in notebooks, or what.

It's ten days until the CBLDF reading and Q&A that I'm doing in New York at the comic-con. This just turned up in my email from http://www.cbldf.org/ and I thought I'd post it here as a reminder to anyone in the New York area...

Neil Gaiman Benefit Reading at NYCC
Tickets Available Now!

April 18: Experience the magic of Neil Gaiman at an exclusive reading to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Neil Gaiman, the renowned author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, comics, and films will be presenting a live reading benefiting the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at the New York Comic-Con. The appearance, a paid ticketed reading event, will be called an "An Evening With Neil Gaiman" with 100% of the proceeds going to benefit the First Amendment legal work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

General admission tickets to the reading are available for $20, while supplies last. Tickets for the VIP reception are strictly limited to 100 pieces, and will include access to meet Mr. Gaiman and receive two signatures, plus a gift bag of exclusive Neil Gaiman oriented items from CBLDF, and preferred seating at the reading. VIP reception tickets are available for $500.

Seating is limited and going fast. Reserve your General Admission or VIP Ticket now! __._,_.

In addition to which, Jeff Smith is also doing an event for the CBLDF. With an open bar...

Toast the arrival of Jeff Smith's new comic book epic RASL! Come meet Jeff Smith in person at his only New York City appearance of the season, enjoy an open bar, and get a takeaway bag of tons of exclusive RASL goodies. Only 100 general admission tickets and 26 VIP tickets are available so get your ticket now! Tickets are available now! Get the Full Details here!

And then there's the Hellboy 2 team...



Why can't we give you fanart at the signings in Australia?

(Boggles for a moment.) Of course you can give me art. Or anything you like, short of body parts. If it's too much for me to carry, I'll smile sweetly at the people hosting the events and get them to post it back to me. (So a month after I get home I get a box filled with cool things I'd forgotten.)

recently, on my latest hunt for more books, i bought myself a nice fat copy of fantasy short storys by Rudyard Kipling. That night i made my mug of cocoa and got comfy to read a couple, when turning the first few pages i happened upon a quick little 'hello and welcome to the book' by a certain mr N Gaiman. ok, so not really strange. Writers write intoroductions, nothing odd about that. but this is by no means an isolated incedent! it seems like ever since i started to read your books(become aware of you etc), you've been popping up in introductions everywhere. it appears to me that you do a fare share of them.

is doing an introduction something you enjoy and so you take most of the chances given to you? (you like sticking your 'neil was ere' mark on books)

or as an artist who works and has worked over several different medias do you simply get alot of offers?

what do you enjoy most about writing one?


ps. sorry if this question is slightly untimely now that you are unofficialy/officialy banned from taking any on!

Writing an introduction is really fun and pleasurable -- it's like introducing a really good friend at a party to a lot of people who don't know him or her, but you know they'd be friends if they met. You want to go "This is Mr Poe. He's written some wonderful poems and stories -- they're especially good if you read them aloud," or "This is Doctor Who. He built my internal landscape." Or "This is The Thirteen Clocks. If you feel sad you should read this book and it will probably make you feel better."

I get asked to write a lot more introductions than I say yes to, and they take up much more time than I imagine they will when I say yes, but there are very few that I regret having done. Really, I ought to try and make a place on this website that collects them. (Those not collected in Adventures In The Dream Trade, anyway.)

my life in green and purple

Merrilee (who is, as she has been for the last 20 years, my literary agent) has gone away, leaving me with a huge sheet of paper on which pretty much everything I've agreed to write over the next 18 months is written down in purple and white (for books or articles or stories) and green and white (for film or TV scripts).

I'm now officially forbidden from agreeing to write any more introductions, or saying "Sure, I'd love to do that, that sounds fun," without consulting her first, so she can say "YOU WHAT? ARE YOU MAD? OF COURSE NOT!" At least until the current round of stuff is done.

...

Bob Miller, who was the publisher of Hyperion, is heading over to Harper Collins [NB: one of my publishers, and also the people who pay for this website] where he wants to set up an experimental publishing unit with no or low advances and with profit sharing for an author. It could be interesting -- I was particularly fascinated by the final line of the NYT coverage:

Mr. Miller said he was considering offering both e-book and audio editions of the hardcovers at no extra cost to the consumer.

Because it seems to me that giving away an e-Book with a hardback is an excellent way to grow the e-book world, and something that a publisher could do at little or no cost. And I like the idea of essentially having bought a HEART-SHAPED BOX license rather than a copy of HEART-SHAPED BOX -- of course buying the book would give you the audio and the text, not just the object.

The Guardian and the New York Times both write about Bob Miller's arrival at Harper Collins, and between the two articles you get a fairly good picture of what's being said.

I think the Times statement that Typically, authors earn royalties of 15 percent of profits after they have paid off their advances is very dodgy. Many Authors earn royalties of 15 percent on the cost of a hardback, which goes to repay an advance until the advance is earned back, and then continues on from there. It's not 15% of profits.

Publishers can be making healthy profits on books that have not earned back their royalties.

My son Mike is home for a couple of days, and we went walking in the blazing summery sunshine, which only got weird when we were tramping through still unmelted snow, talking about this stuff, and he asked how it could work. I tried to explain simply, with pretend numbers,

Me: Let's say you get a thousand dollar advance on a book, with a ten percent royalty, and the book sells for ten dollars. The publisher has to sell a thousand books before you have earned out. But the publisher is selling the book, which it costs them a dollar to make, to the retailer, for four dollars. So they'll earn money from five hundred copies on...

Mike: So fifty-fifty profit sharing would be really smart in that case.

Me: I imagine that's why Stephen King did it...

[Edit to add - At Making Light Patrick mocks the New York Times as well.]

Hi Neil,

I was looking through your site at the word counts you posted for your books, and I wondered how you arrived at that cont? I know most word processors have a word count function--is that what you used? I've also found a formula where you count characters in a line, divide by six, then multiply the answer by how many lines are in your document. Which way did you arrive at your counts?

Waiting patiently for "The Graveyard Book,"

~Karen


I just use the word counters on whatever word processing thing I'm using at the time. They may disagree a little.

In notebooks I laboriously count the words on a couple of pages, divide by two and use that as my What I'm Writing Per Page Average. Then when I type it I find out how wrong I was.

Hi Neil,


Have you seen this lovely awesome video of city lights at night made by my favorite astronaut, Don Pettit(who also happens to be married to my husband's sister)? While on the space station he figured out how to film the earth's lights without the blur of travel. It is so cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEiy4zepuVE


Enjoy,

Claudia Carlson

I hadn't, and it is extremely cool.

Hi,


I'm organising one of your events in Melbourne, and just wanted to let your readers know how they can book:


Neil Gaiman 1pm May 5.

Village Roadshow Theatrette

Entry 3, State Library of Victoria

La Trobe Street, Melbourne

free (or gold coin donation)


Bookings at learning@slv.vic.gov.au or 8664 7555

Was that where I spoke last time I was in Melbourne? If it's the one I'm thinking of, it is not huge, so book to guarantee a seat. Lots of people asking why I'm not going to New Zealand or Perth or Brisbane or Canberra or Adelaide on this trip (A: Because there is only one of me and time is not infinite... Sorry. )

...
This one's important...

Hi Neil,


You may remember Emru Townsend. He did this interview with you around the time you were promoting Princess Mononoke:


http://purpleplanetmedia.com/eye/inte/ngaiman.php


You may also remember his sister Tamu, who is one of the organizers for Anticipation SF, the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal where you will be guest of honor.



The reason I'm writing is that Emru is in need of a bone marrow transplant.

He has been diagnosed with leukemia and a condition called monosomy 7. Due to the monosomy 7, he has an increased risk of the leukemia coming back, no matter how successful chemotherapy may be. A bone marrow transplant is his best chance for survival. Unfortunately, his sister was not a match.


While anyone, anywhere can be a potential match, his best chance for a match comes from a donor who shares his ethnic background. As the son of two African Carribean parents, his chances are further diminished as blacks are underrepresented in bone marrow registries worldwide.


Emru is one of the nicest, coolest people I've had the good fortune to meet. He also runs fps Magazine, one of the best web sites around devoted to the art of animation.


Would you mind posting this message to get the word out and maybe get more people around the world to join the bone marrow registry?


Registration is quite simple, and usually requires a cheek swab or a small blood sample. If you end up being called in as a donor, the procedure itself is a simple, painless day surgery. Recovery involves mild discomfort in the pelvis and back for a few days. Your own bone marrow will replenish itself within six weeks.


The donation process is anonymous. You won't know if you're helping Emru or somebody else, but you will be helping to save a life. How cool is that?


For more information and links to bone marrow registries all over the world, please visit:


http://www.healemru.com/


--Jeff LeBlanc


Right. And my assistant Lorraine asked me to mention her blog, as she is campaigning to get people to read Martin Millar's book LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL, which has been her favourite book since she read it in manuscript, some years ago.
http://lorraineamalena.blogspot.com/2008/04/mostly-regarding-martin-millar.html

plan four....?

Merrilee, my literary agent, is out here for a couple of days, so that we can figure out what I have to do this year. We do this every eighteen months or so, and it helps both of us, I think. It got a bit confusing yesterday evening, after plan one was completed, when the phone rang and I suddenly found myself agreeing to write a couple of films I hadn't planned for earlier that afternoon. So now we're into plan two. (Plan three: lock me in a cupboard and let me out when everything is written.)

Over on John Scalzi's blog is a terrific piece about convention etiquette which should be spread around. I read it and just kept nodding, like one of those toy dogs in cars (do they still have those?): http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=581

Here's a remarkable little film clip about Leonardo da Vinci which Bob Morales just sent me, that left me going "Oh, of course," at the end.

Without tea surging through my system, how will I know what to call this post?

It's Spring. The mud-rivers surround the house, snow is melting, and the cheerful atmosphere of this morning's walk was sort of ruined when the dog shot off delightedly into the woods and came back a minute later with a large woodchuck who would now no longer be chucking wood clamped between its jaws.

(It was just-buried when the man grouting the kitchen floor said that really, he would have liked it for taxidermic purposes. An offer to dig it up was considered, but then turned down as, he said, his freezer was pretty full at present. I guess I'm back in the country, aren't I?)

I am On Diet. I am also Off Tea for now, because it seemed easier to keep track of what was going into my mouth if I stopped drinking tea and started drinking water instead. My uncaffeinated state is a lot mellower and blanker than I am used to and it apparently has a mild headache and the deep conviction that if I just head for the kettle everything will be okay...

The mail brought a copy of Dark Horse's long-promised Michael Zulli adaptation of THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH, with a post-it note from my editor, Diana Schutz on the top corner saying "Finally! A Print job I could approve." I assume it'll be in the comic shops in about a month or so, as the copies make their way from China.

Subterranean Press, who seem to be doing more and more of the limited editions of my stuff these days, have just announced that they are doing a very lovely-looking edition of INTERWORLD, by me and Michael Reaves. As they explain,

Michael Reaves has recently had considerable health problems related to Parkinson's disease, with one round of brain surgery completed, and another in near future. All of the profits from this limited edition will go to Mr. Reaves to help him with his medical and daily living expenses. Soon, we hope, he'll be feeling much better and back to bringing us wonderful novels such as The Shattered World and The Burning Realm, to name two personal favorites.

Which was a really nice gesture on Subterranean's part. Michael's not in great shape right now, and I'm sure it will help. The book is a very limited edition -- only 500 signed and numbered copies, so I think they'll go fast. (Subterranean's M Is For Magic has already sold out.) You can order it here.

Hullo Neil!

I am currently going through the lengthy process of getting my passport and other such things, before my husband and I move to Japan. I've been sort of asking all of my friends who've spent time outside of these United States these questions, and thought I'd ask you as well! What do you find most enjoyable about visiting other countries? Most overwhelming? Most intriguing? And do you know of any exceptionally delicious sushi spots in Tokyo? And what percentage of jeans in those tubs of yours would be black, out of rampant and strange curiosity?

Eagerly awaiting The Graveyard Book,

Amy

I love the difference in other countries, the way it makes me re-examine what I think of as normal, the tiny differences in culture and behaviour, the sound of people talking in foreign languages. I love the food (even in countries where I don't like the food, I like the difference of the food), and I love feeling slightly adrift.

Most overwhelming? That sinking feeling you get when you realise that something huge has just gone deeply wrong and you don't speak the language. Most intriguing? Not sure...

And all of the jeans are black, except for the ones that used to be black a long time ago and are now just a blackish sort of grey.

...

Lots of Vista advice (and an offer of memory, which I think is really kind of someone) which I'll do a round up on in a few days, for anyone else who might have bought a new computer and found it a bit less than they were expecting.

...

Jody Scott is dead -- she died on Christmas Eve. I only met her once, in the UK, in 1984, when she was over to promote the Women's Press edition of I, Vampire, and I liked her very much indeed -- partly because I liked her books, I, Vampire and Passing For Human. I thought it a pity that she had real trouble getting her other books published. On her website she says of herself,

Ms. Scott attended Daniel Boone grammar school, Senn High, North Park College, Northwestern U. and U.C. Berkeley before crying out in clear, ringing tones: "Enough of this crap. If you wanna be a writer never, NEVER go to college or you'll come out a brainwashed zombie who offends nobody but writes like everyone else or as Monty Python used to say: 'Dull, dull, dull!'--the L's sounding like W's." Our subject then worked as a sardine packer, orthopedist's office assistant, Circle Magazine editor (knew Henry Miller and Anais Nin), artist's model at Art Institute Chicago, factory hand, cabbage puller (in Texas where I was arrested with my buddy Don Scott for hitchhiking and slapped around then thrown in jail for eight days; how stupid can "The Law" be? Its reasoning was: my gay friend {close pal of Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams} had long hair, therefore we must be criminals), blue movie maker, headline writer for the Monterey Herald (that's where I got my spare, lean style), bookstore/art gallery owner, vacation land salesman and at many other fascinating trades, spent six months in Guatemala (in Antigua enjoyed a night alone with Gore Vidal at his house both madly talking) and now lives in Seattle in a falling-apart house choked with ivy and blackberry brambles a stone's throw from Puget Sound and is the winner of the America's Ugliest Couch contest upon which I write every day from 9 AM to 2 PM Pacific time. If you'd like more, send in that check in any amount but HURRY PLEASE! This offer, like its author, ends soon.

And she was right, and it did. Steve Jones and I used to send her occasional cheques for her poem in NOW WE ARE SICK, but I doubt they were enough. You can read the first chapter of I, Vampire here, and second-hand copies are easy to find.

Now I'm going to take the dog for his second walk of the day, and I really hope that nobody dies this time.

Snowdrops

My trip home was derailed (well, deplaned, but that seems to mean "getting off the plane" rather than the plane trip home turning into a little expedition to hades) by an extreme snowfall in Minneapolis. So the trip home took 36 hours and left me a bit out of sorts. Still, this was waiting for me when I finally got home -- snowdrops in the snow. A small perfect thing.


There's a reason why I made the magical flower in Stardust a snowdrop, after all.

My First Snowdrop resolutions -- I need to get back into shape (eat sensibly; find a new trainer; go for longer, more energetic walks with dog; do some nice stretchy yoga even). This last trip left me aching all over, and I've moved up a tub in jeans sizes (long term readers of this blog may remember that there are five tubs of jeans of different sizes in my closet. If ever I have to wear the ones in the tub at the far right -- mostly bought by accident or in fits of optimism -- I'll know I've got some kind of eating disorder or wasting disease, and when I only fit into the ones at the far left I know I've been not-moving for too long. And I've moved one tub to the left). It's time to slim down a little, but mostly it's just time to get fit again after a very, very long winter.

...

I sent Newly-Stoker-Award-Winning Author Joe Hill The Graveyard Book when I finished it, because he has small sons, and I was hoping he would read to them.

(He did. They liked it. He said, "It's a great one for reading aloud. You should really hear me call for help in NightGaunt sometime," and then when I said I would like to, he e-mailed me a sound file. I was impressed.)

And he talks about the book a little on his blog -- http://joehillfiction.com/?p=163 in terms that I would use as a blurb if I hadn't said nice things about Heart Shaped Box, and would fear accusations of log-rolling.

I'm really pleased he liked it. I'm pleased anyone likes it.
...

My assistant Lorraine just passed this on from the conference organisers in Melbourne --


Hi Lorraine,

It's good to see all the details of Neil's trip up on the website -
now I can finally believe it's happening! I wonder if you could
arrange for there to be a link to the conference website
http://www.iceaustralia.com/cbca2008/ on the Sunday date when Neil's
keynote is open to the general public so that people will find it easy to book.

Thanks, Sian

So there's the link, and we'll put another up at WHERE'S NEIL. Come and see me talk. Come and see Shaun Tan, who is nominated for a Hugo for The Arrival, a book I tend to force people to read. (This is a link to pages from The Arrival and an essay about it on Shaun's site.)

If I hadn't been on the road I would have remembered to post something about pre-selling tickets at MIT to the first Julie Schwartz Memorial Lecture, but it looks like the pre-sold tickets are now sold, and it's now going to be tickets on the day for people in the Boston area.

05.23.08 | 7-10 PM | Kresge Auditorium

Julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture: Neil Gaiman

New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter and comics luminary Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Beowulf, Stardust) is scheduled to present the first Julius Schwartz Lecture in Kresge Auditorium at 7PM on May 23rd, 2008. Doors will open at 6PM.

Pre-Ticket Sales will occur on March 31st and April 1st in Lobby 10 from 9AM until 4PM. Tickets are $8 apiece, no limit. CASH ONLY, GENERAL ADMISSION, NO RESERVATIONS. Tickets will also be available at the door the evening of the event