Journal

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

America Will Eat you

Hullo everybody

I'm off in hiding, writing. It's good. I did a road trip to get here - I stopped in New Orleans and got an extreme haircut and a hot towel shave.  Last time I went off into hiding to write a novel I let my hair and beard grow, and I didn't want to repeat myself. I look... odd, I think. But I feel like I'm in disguise, which is an excellent feeling for an author to have.

I got to my hideout, which is the house where I started writing American Gods a dozen years ago, then drove three and half hours to see my cousin Helen and her husband Sidney. (Helen's mother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister.) They are 94 and 90 respectively. (Helen told Sidney she was four years younger than she was, claiming back her years during World War II, where she survived the Warsaw Ghetto and worse, and only told him how old she really was forty years later, when her older sister, Wanda, died. If you have three hours, watch this YouTube video, done for the Shoah project.) Then I drove home, to the place I'm staying.

I spent yesterday not doing much of anything - recovering from the drive, getting settled in. Today, however, I'm writing.

Do not expect much in the way of blogging while I'm writing.

Here are two fun things...

The first is an awards acceptance speech I filmed for SFX. They gave me an award for Screenwriting Excellence for my Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife. I tried to give the kind of measured and well-thought-out speech that an occasion like this demanded.



The second is that if you go to this Audible link  you can listen to the newest in my Neil Gaiman Presents audio series at Audible.com,  The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Seventeen hours of glorious, funny, profound and delightful stories about Dr Englebert Eszterhazy, who Sherlocks his way through some remarkable stories in an Eastern European Balkan Empire.  

And this is something Amanda just sent me... it's the video done for her cover of Nirvana's "Polly", done for a  Nevermind tribute album. Scary, grueling, ultimately triumphant, based on a true story.





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