The votes are in...

So...

http://www.neilgaiman.com/feedback/vote.php?issue=freebook&show=results

tells us that 26,500 of you voted. (Or at least, 26,551 votes from 26,551 individual computers came in.)

And, with 28% of the vote -- as it had from the first hour the voting went up (well, it had 29% of the vote on the first day, a lead that was whittled away as the next 26,400 votes came in) is American Gods.

So that's what we'll put up. Details and links to follow....

It was really interesting. I don't think I would have put up American Gods as a first choice for free book myself -- mostly because a) it's really long and b) it divides people. As far as I can tell, for every five people who read it, one loves it utterly, two or three like it to varying degrees, and one hates it, cannot see the point to it and needs convincing that it's a novel at all. (Quite often the last person really likes some of the other books I've written, if they ever pick up anything else by me ever again.) But that's the fun of democracy, and American Gods has won more awards than any other single thing I've written.

Thank you to everyone who voted. It was fun. (And a special thank you to the web-goblin, who did all the heavy lifting.)

American Gods Blog, Post 89

I did a wonderful gig -- two sets -- with the Magnetic Fields. I had a busy day meeting people about the DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH animated series, and then meeting HarperCollins people and getting to learn all sorts of cool stuff about e-books and soforth...

And in 50 minutes my book is officially published.

You probably won`t get a long and sensible entry here for a few more days, until I stop moving and can think or at least type in peace.

Scott McCloud sent me his Why I`m Not Neil Gaiman cartoon, and it made me laugh very loudly. You get it for free if you donate to his website. And his website is a wonderful thing.

See you at Borders World Trade Centre tomorrow, if you`re in the NY area. The Libretto is working fine but if the bloody thing has a real apostrophe I can`t find it. So I`m using these. ```

American Gods Blog, Post 84

Some days are instant Christmas. They put a smile on your face...

Today brought...

Tori's CD, Strange Little Girls. It's missing one track, but the other eleven are there. I knew what to expect this time, but my family are spellbound. It's just playing all the time in the background... as surprising and as wonderful the fifth time as it was the first...

The replacement Libretto. Working like a little dream -- I'm just transferring over files from my notebook, then I'll load up Word Perfect and Final Draft, and it'll be all ready for the road.

and... just as I thought the day had brought all the presents it could...

I opened an envelope to see the UK editions of American Gods.

So, first of all, I got to learn that there is indeed a huge trade paperback edition of American Gods in the UK, and a hardback. The hardback is seventeen pounds 99p, the paperback is 10 pounds. Amazon.co.uk has been erroneously listing it as hardback for 10 pounds... so if anyone out there thought that was they'd ordered, they may need to talk to Amazon, or to their local bookshop and make sure they are getting what they want.

(Incidentally, it's 500 pages long, not 352.)

The second thing I learned is that they're doing a very surprising promotion for the hardback, which caused me jaw to drop. I'm not sure I can say anything more about it until I've got an okay from Headline. It raised eyebrows and caused giggles in this house.

Normally the UK hardbacks wind up the most collectible of the editions, as they are printed in the smallest numbers. Looking at this edition, which is lovely, I suspect that may again be true, especially as people who think they've successfully ordered it may have problems getting it...

American Gods Blog, Post 82

My daughter Holly just came charging in. "Hey Dad!" she said. "You're at 82 on Amazon.com!" She had a huge smile on her face. "That's the highest it's been so far! And it's not even out yet!"

Then her face fell. "I'm away next week," she said. "I won't be here to check for you, while you're off on tour. You could get up really high on Amazon, and you'd never know."

Someone would tell me, I assured her.

"Have you put me in your journal thing again, yet?" she asked. "You know I read it. So far you've only told about the time I made your journal entry vanish. You should say something nice about me."

She is pretty wonderful, actually. Hi, Holly.

American Gods Blog, Post 81

I got a lovely e-mail today from a friend in the UK who'd read American Gods (actually, I got quite a few lovely e-mails today from people who'd read American Gods). This was a lovely letter from someone who'd just devoured it and really enjoyed it (to the point where she seemed almost embarrassed about it -- she knew how long it had taken me to write, and how hard some of it had been to get to work, and she compared herself to someone who just finished off a huge meal that a chef had taken a long time and pains to compare.) I assured her that the main thing for me is just that people enjoy it.

This is from my reply to her:

Remember to tell people about it... I figure word of mouth is my biggest ally
on this one... Try and work it into casual conversation:

"Ooh, I'll have five of those Granny Smiths. And American Gods is a really good book."
"Of course I'd love to write an article for you on 'What the Modern Woman Really Wants'. Read American Gods. When's the deadline?"
"I'm saying that you shouldn't be charging me for a letter telling me that I have an overdraft when the account was actually well in the black. By the way, there's a brilliant book called American Gods you may want to check out."

Which, on a marginally more serious note, seeing the book will be out in five days, and some of you will actually get a chance to read it yourselves, is really my only request to any of you. If you like the book, tell people. Spread the word.

I am reminded of Geoff Ryman's lovely novel 253, which includes a woman whose job is to ride the tube train under london reading a paperback book with delight, occasionally exclaiming aloud on the brilliance and wonderfulness of the book she's reading. Cheap advertising.

American Gods Blog, Post 78

Spent a good part of yesterday trying to compile a bibliography of Books Consulted for American Gods for the not-yet-online neilgaiman.com -- a sort of astonishingly incomplete bibliography, because otherwise I would have had to try and catalogue half a library, so I'm trying just to list the books in the boxes I'd put in the boot of the car (that's the trunk, for americans) when I drove down to Florida to work on the novel, and the ones I tried to make sure were on the shelves in the cabin as I wrote the rest of the book... and the ones I filled my suitcase with when I went to spend two weeks writing in Las Vegas (an anecdote, it occurs to me, that I've not mentioned yet on this blogger. Oh well. Feel free to ask me about it if you are at one of the Q & A sessions between the reading and the signing.) I got down a lot of the myth and folklore books. Lots of mini-capsule reviews.Cannot for the life of me find the box of books on confidence tricks or coin magic.

.....

http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm has a review of American Gods up... (the version up earlier was an early draft of the review posted in error).

....

Spent a couple of hours today in the basement, pulling out foreign editions of books for neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure whether I was more amazed by the stuff I didn't know I had -- "Chivalry" and "Snow, Glass, Apples" in Japanese. A box of first editions of Angels and Visitations. A Large Print edition of Stardust. A folder of short stories and poems I wrote in my teens (didn't have the heart to burn them, but the idea of anyone ever actually reading them... ow!) -- or the stuff I knew I had but couldn't find -- The German Hardback of Good Omens, for example -- or the stuff I should have had but had never been sent -- like the swedish editions of Neverwhere, or the Spanish Smoke and Mirrors and Stardust.

American Gods Blog, Post 77

Strangely enough, I just realised that the last two posts haven't published, although Blogger obviously thinks they did. (note added later. They have now.)

Up early this morning to put comments on a zip disk filled with photos, going off to the neilgaiman.com site people. I don't yet have much of a sense of what they're doing or putting up, but we can modify it as we go. Yes, this journal will stay alive through the tour (for a start, it may be the easiest way to let people know what's happening in case of any sudden changes), and I expect it'll stay here and we'll link to it from neilgaiman.com...

Cheryl Morgan, who does a zine called Emerald City, e-mailed me her review of American Gods, which made me very happy, not because it was a good review (which it was, in both senses, favourable and well-written) but because Cheryl had clearly read the same book that I was trying to write. (As perhaps opposed to a recent interviewer, who kicked off with "Well, I've read your book. You must really hate America, huh?")

....

To summarise yesterday's lost annotation blog -- I want to make a space on neilgaiman.com where there can be, if people have any interest in doing it, annotations of American Gods. Partly because I'm sure that people will enjoy sharing knowledge ("Actually, both the Burma Shave ads Gaiman quotes are invented, and the Largest Carousel in the World does not play the Blue Danube Waltz..."), partly to help the Casual Reader ("Czernobog, also spelled Chernobog or Tcharnobog, was a dualistic slavic winter god now remembered chiefly for his appearance as the black winged thingie who appears in 'A Night on Bald Mountain' in the original Fantasia...") and partly as a help to translators around the world, who are good people with a thankless task, but who can sometimes get the wrong end of a stick, or just not know where to look for information.

(I saw a recent edition of Stardust -- and I will not embarrass anyone by saying from which country -- where "Redcap" was annotated as "Bow Street Runner, an early policeman" and "Unseelie Court" was demonstrated to be a nonsense word derived from the three English Words "Un" "See" and "Lie"; which showed me that the translator lacked a dictionary of fairies -- for a redcap is a rather nasty goblinish fellow, with teeth, while the Unseelie Court is the Court of all creatures of Faerie who are actively antipathetic to people, all the ogres and suchlike.)

Don't know whether we'll do it with a message board, an e-mail list, or an e-mail to a central e-mail address yet. I'll probably keep half an eye on it -- not to censor it (I have no problem with the 'Gaiman clearly has no idea how the internal combustion engine actually works, as what he describes here is impossible...' type posts) but just to make sure it doesn't contain information that is simply wrong. (Such things have been known. See "unseelie" above.)

Now to post this... and to hope it publishes...

American Gods Blog, Post 72

So I spent today, as I will spend tomorrow, working on writing a circus. Something I've always wanted to do, which is why I'm currently writing it. (The young lady who runs the circus in question spent a year or so not taking no for an answer from me, and her persistance seems to have paid off. I spent most of today saying things to her like "Can you do this...?" and "What about this...?" and at one point phoning an expert and getting a hasty lecture on the fluorescent qualities of laser beams for something I started wondering about.)

Seeing I plugged a lot of other people's stuff yesterday, I thought I'd point out that The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish makes a really cool Fathers Day present. (Yay! to Amazon.com for featuring it on their kids page.)

And yay! to Morrow for getting out the American Gods newsletter.

Incidentally, if you've received the newsletter with the extract from American Gods in it, I should point out that in that extract, in the phrase "the titter skin-crawling horror" the word "titter" should be "utter", and for that matter that the sentence "He practiced coin tricks from a book lie found in the wasteland of the prison library; and lie worked out;" reads better if you replace the word "lie" with the word "he".

(I hope when they put up the www.americangods.com/excerpt page that they'll put it up from a clean text.)

....

More reviews today -- an enthusiastic one from the Barnes and Noble Explorations magazine, a nice mention from the NY Post, and one from Booklist, where the reviewer, who had loved Neverwhere and Stardust, hated it -- the kind of complete and entire hate where the reviewer doesn't even stop to point out the things he liked about the book, if there were any. He just seemed to wish it was another book entirely, a kind of "this is spinach and I don't like spinach" review: I think Coraline (which comes out next May) will be to his taste.

...

Also brought home several boxes of books, notebooks and such from the office, to compile a sort of core of references I used writing American Gods for NeilGaiman.com. It'll be incomplete, but a good place to start. (The single most useful reference work was probably A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, by Rudolf Simek.)

And I copy-edited a poster of my poem INSTRUCTIONS with art by Brian and Wendy Froud, which will be coming out this summer in a signed, limited edition, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I think it's going to be popular, on the basis that my assistant and my daughter have both extracted a promise from me that they can get one when they come out, from the proof knocking around the office.

(if it's sucessful, we might do a poem I wrote for my goddaughter, as a benefit for RAINN...)

....

Ah, the Chapter One excerpt is up at www.americangods.com/excerpt.html (they left off the html on the newsletter). It's kind of odd -- all the italics have fallen out as well. I'll see if we can get a cleaner copy up...

American Gods Blog, Post 71

This morning brought the new Locus magazine, which is not the same as the online Locus, and had two reviews of American Gods, one by Gary Wolfe, which I enjoyed -- lot of very interesting points -- and one by Jonathan Strahan, which was pretty solid. Both were very positive.

I'm still very tempted to review the reviews, though.

The Writers Write website also has a review up, at
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm

....

My comment on hoping that they didn't dig out and print all the stuff Douglas Adams didn't want published while he was alive seems to have been an unfortunate foreshadowing of events to come. See this slashdot article and its referent.

I went browsing through my hard disk and found the last will I wrote -- which reminded me that I really need to write another will that reflects things like the country I currently live in and how many kids I have -- and checked what I'd written a decade ago on the subject of unfinished stuff etc.

At some point I'll need to figure out exactly what I want done with fragments, juvenilia, unpublished stuff, and so forth (when I do I'll codicil or amend this will). In the meantime on my death all computer back up tapes, disks, and hard disks are to be placed in a bank vault, along with any personal papers, letters, poems, and so forth; they aren't to be released for at least 50 years following my death, by which time I trust I'll be decently forgotten anyway. Anything recently completed should by assessed by my literary executors on its merits.

Which is more or less how I feel ten years on. Although I do need to get my finger out on assembling the material for Dreamhaven's "B-Sides and Rarities" book and the poetry collection. (Really, all I need is a week. Just a quiet week with nothing else to do. Maybe four days...?)

....

Still listening to American Gods the audio version. It's really good -- George Guidal manages an awesome array of voices, and is a magnificent reader. (I wish I could say that I''ve been listening with unmixed pride, but in fact a couple of times now I've pulled out a copy of the book and checked that a sentence was in fact that badly written, and have marked it to be fixed for the next edition.)

American Gods Blog, Post 67

Let's see. In no particular order...

1) Furball the cat is just fine. She turned out to have been asleep under my bed, and will be professionally shaved on Monday. Thank you for asking.

2) The second half of SNOW GLASS APPLES will go up on scifi.com on the 7th of June.

3) Today's mail brought the new paperback edition of Smoke and Mirrors, my short story collection. Which means it will turn up in the shops any time now.

4) Today also brought the audio book of American Gods. I started listening to it, as a quality check, and was swept up into it. George Guidal, who is one of the top people, if not the top person, in the world of audio books, reads it. it's a wonderful little package of about 14 cassettes. (The CD version will be out for the end of the year.) Harper Audio should be pleased with themselves. I'm thrilled... it's unabridged, and it made me very happy. It's not cheap, but I think I'll send some out as Xmas prezzies this year.

Now playing: I Am Kloot's "Natural History". Good band, but I keep thinking of John Clute, the preeminent SF critic, and wondering whether they're fans...

American Gods Blog, Post 64

I just got backstage at the the website for the first time, and have been fascinated by the statistics. For example, did you know that the most new people who've turned up here in a day is a hair over 1200? (mostly it's about 500 new people a day.) I didn't. Did you know that 238 Finns, and 227 Brazilians read it, but only 47 Belgians? Me neither. 4 people read this journal from the Cocos Islands. I didn't even know there WERE any Cocos Islands. See how cool statistics are?

Sean Abbott at Harper Collins ebooks tells me that they are going to be doing an eomnibus of my stuff, to promote the four ebooks that will be coming out in July. SMOKE & MIRRORS will get a couple of extra stories, as a bonus, while AMERICAN GODS will get a bunch of these journal entries as its bonus.

American Gods Blog, Post 63

So the reviews are now coming in: a trickle at first, then around publication date there should be a flood, and then that'll die back to a trickle again.

The last time I listened to a review (good or bad) was in 1987, and it was a review of Violent Cases, my first ever graphic novel (with Dave Mckean drawing). The review said it was a good book, but it was too expensive. Dave and I took that to heart, and we went to the publisher, showed him the review, and asked him to lower the price.

So for the next two or three printings, the book was cheaper. We made a lower royalty. And no-one ever noticed or said anything, nor did anyone ever say anything when, with the next edition, the price went back up again. Which, I decided, was reason enough not to listen to reviews.

So this morning brought two reviews. One (positive) from the Summer 2001 BookForum, by Anthony Miller, who liked all the stuff on the road with gods in it but feels the book

"loses momentum when Shadow leaves the road and Gaiman turns his attention to small-town life"

and one (mixed) from an anonymous Publishers Weekly reviewer which says

"Shadow's poignant personal moments and the tale's affectionate slices of smalltown life are much better developed than the aimless plot ".

Which is the other reason not to listen to reviews. You'd go mad.

(My favourite line from PW: "Mere mortals will enjoy the tale's wit, but puzzle over its strained mythopoeia". My favorite from BookForum "His at once comic and melancholic imagination, and his facility for navigating the nocturnal and supernatural realms, evoke some of the great writers of the fantastic, from James Branch Cabell to Jorge Luis Borges, along with flashes of Flann O'Brien and glimpses of G. K. Chesterton.")

American Gods Blog, Post 61

I'm home. Hurrah... 22 Hours on planes and in airports, and it's just nice to be in my own house, with kids all around, and I got to say things I haven't had a chance to say in two weeks, things like "What do you mean --you're going out? You've still got two English essays to finish, and a hundred-question physics test, and all that homework's due tomorrow. Of course you aren't going out."

I walked in the garden:the asparagus is high as an elephant's eye, and for that matter, so is the rhubarb. (Which is rather unnerving, actually.)

So waiting for me, when I got home, was a finished copy of American Gods.

This made me very happy.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was how much thicker it was than I'd expected. (465 pages plus about 15 pages of front matter. Or to put it another way, it's over an inch thick.) Also, how very much it looks like a real book.

The cover is lovely.

I opened it up very carefully. Black endpapers. Yum...

The first rule of new books is this: when your new book arrives, and you open it to a random page, and look at it, you will see a typo, and your heart will sink. It may be the only typo (er, typographical error) in the whole book, but you will see it immediately.

So I very carefully didn't open it to a random page. I opened it to the first page (CAVEAT, AND WARNING FOR TRAVELERS) and read that instead. Half way down the page I noticed a comma that I could have sworn used to be a full stop...

But other than that, it looks lovely. Wonderful. Really cool. I checked the Icelandic, and that was now right, and all the weird copyediting things seem to be fine. The permissions are all there on the copyright page. Along with the weirdest little library of congress filing thing I've ever seen.

This is what it says:

American gods: a novel /by Neil Gaiman -- 1st ed
p.cm
ISBN 0-380-97365-0
1.National characteristics, American -- Fiction. 2. Spiritual warfare - Fiction. 3 Ex-prisoners - Fiction. 4. Bodyguards - Fiction 5. Widowers - Fiction I. Title

And I wonder, who picks these categories? What do they base them on? I mean, while it is undoubtedly true that Shadow, our more-or-less hero, is an ex-prisoner, and that his wife is killed in a car crash early in the book; but I feel deeply sorry for anyone who goes into it looking for fiction about widowers, ex-prisoners or bodyguards; while all the people looking for the things it has in abundance, like history and geography and mythology, like dreams and confidence tricks and sacrifice, Roadside Attractions and lakes and coin magic and funeral homes go by the wayside.

Still, I like "Spiritual warfare -- Fiction." And 'National characteristics, American". I like that, too, in a weird way.

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

Also waiting for me were the finished covers for the Harper Perennial (large format paperback) editions of SMOKE AND MIRRORS (my short story collection) and STARDUST. Which are wonderful... Stardust in particular, as it looks... well, grown-up, like a fairy tale for adults and not like a generic fantasy. (I wonder how many people bought the mass market paperback edition of Stardust, and were disappointed because it really wasn't what the cover promised -- and how many were pleasantly surprised by what they read.)

Both published, interestingly, as "Fiction".

I think that both books are going to be out and in the stores for the signing tour. Fingers crossed...

....

If (like me) you've been waiting for the promised "first chapter" and the newsletter, I'm pretty sure that Harper are just gearing to send them out, because they just had me write something telling you how busy they've been getting neilgaiman.com into shape to go and meet the public, which will be going out to those of you who are signed up for the news option.

...

And, while I think of it, May 31st is when scifi.com's Seeing Ear Theatre launches "SNOW, GLASS, APPLES" -- the play for voices I wrote based on my short story (in Smoke and Mirrors), starring Bebe Neuwirth as the Queen. She is astonishing, and was a joy to work with, and I'm looking forward to the thing going live. Brian Smith, who produced and directed this (and my story "Murder Mysteries", which, starring Brian Dennehey, went up on the scifi.com site last year, and is still up in the archives section).

Every now and again journalists and people at signings ask me what my favourite medium is, and i tell them "Radio plays". They can do so much, inside your head...

American Gods Blog, Post 54

And an e-mail waiting for me on my return, from Rambling Jack Womack, the Harper Collins publicist... posting it as is for all the Los Angelenos out there...

Just talked to Jen Ramos at Book Soup in LA, and due to OVERWHELMING
RESPONSE they're changing the event venue on the 29th to their larger space,
and moving the time to an hour earlier (this works out fine within the rest
of your schedule). Books will of course be sold on-site.

So, the new specifics:

FRIDAY, JUNE 29
7:00 PM

BOOK SOUP
Speaking/Q & A/signing to take place at:
Beverly Hills Library
444 N. Rexford St.
Beverly Hills, CA
phone: 310-659-3684
(Store phone, as before)
posted by Neil Gaiman 11:45 PM

---

From American Gods, Chapter Five:

Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses, hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously from female store-window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts; some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness.

And then there was the carousel.

A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how much it weighed, how many thousand lightbulbs were to be found in the chandeliers that hung from it in gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from climbing on it or from riding on the animals.

And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself, at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the carousel. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different – he saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly coloured and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The carousel did not even slow down.

“What’s it for?” asked Shadow. “I mean, okay, world’s biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no-one ever rides it.”

“It’s not there to be ridden, not by people,” said Wednesday. “It’s there to be admired. It’s there to be.”

* * *

There is nowhere in the whole world quite as strange or as special as The House on the Rock. Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 of the novel take place there -- stuff happens, and some characters get to ride the World's Largest Carousel.

Nobody's allowed to ride the World's Largest Carousel in real life. It just goes round and round and round, like something from the Weisinger-era Fortress of Solitude.

I drove for 3 hours to get there. Jeff, the photographer, had a whole crew of people waiting. First, make-up. Then, the initial set up: a double-exposure picture of me and the strange nipple-revealing shop-window dummy mannequin angels that hang from the roof of the Carousel room. (One of the photos from today will illustrate the review in the Entertainment Weekly books section.)

Then down to floor level and over to the Carousel for shots of me with the strange animals moving round and round in the background. I spent most of the time trying not to look vaguely goofy. (This is my default mode in photographs. It's not intentional. Some people tell me I take good photographs, and I have to explain that that's only because they mostly don't print the goofy ones. The infamous CBLDF iguana photo is a good example of the kind of photo that people usually don't see. Goofy.)

The best part of spending 4 hours having your photo taken is often talking to the photographer. This was kind of out of the question here -- the sheer volume of the music in the Carousel Room is initially almost unbearable; after about 20 minutes it becomes a sort of background noise and you kind of tune it out... but for the four hours of the shoot, Jeff and I communicated mostly by hand gestures of the "turn left," and "chin up" variety, because the music was so loud you couldn't hear anything, especially when all the kettle-drums started banging.

(And for the breaks Jeff was off setting up the next shot. I chatted to Dolores, his assistant, and signed her hardback of Sandman: THE WAKE. She hasn't read it yet, as she says if she does then the story will be over.)

The carousel room is the hottest room in the House on the Rock. It's the 20,000 lightbulbs from the carousel that keep it so warm, said Bill, the man on carousel duty (he's been doing it for 16 years, making sure no-one vaults the fence and climbs onto any of the animals). I was cooking in the Jonathan Carroll leather jacket.

As the shoot wound down, Jeff and I got to chat a little. "How would you like me to make you look?" he asked. "Brooding, mysterious, scary, friendly -- what kind of impression are you trying to give?"

I thought for a moment, and realised that I had no idea. "Could you make me look surprisingly fuckable for a writer, please?"

He laughed (and so did the rest of the crew) and said he'd do his best.

And we wrapped up the shoot, then I ate and drove another three hours back.

Actually, I'd settle for brooding.

Really, I'd settle for not very goofy.

American Gods Blog, Post 54

So, today brought an envelope, and in it, the finished book cover for American Gods. It's lovely. Big lightning bolt on the cover, gold letters, and the back cover is covered with wonderful blurbs, many of them melted down from ones already posted here. Also photo of me, with smoke in background and messy hair. Author delighted. Finished books should arrive on the 31st of May. Author excited.

Also e-mail today saying American Gods has been sold to Czechoslavakia and to France, which gives us the first two foreign sales.

The most interesting American Gods call was from the editor of the e-book edition of American Gods, which will be published at the same time as the novel, asking about what kind of things we can add to the e-book: I suggested that we add this journal...

And because none of that is very interesting, I thought I'd put up a link to some wonderful photos... here. For anyone who, like me, tends to think of the past in sepia tones...

American Gods Blog, Post 47

So next week I get my photograph taken for Entertainment Weekly. It looks a lot like it will happen at the House on the Rock, after hours, so I may, like my characters, get to ride The World’s Largest Carousel.

Which, whatever happens or doesn’t happen will probably be more fun, or at least, significantly less smoky, than the author photograph session for American Gods, last December.

Now, every now and again I do something really stupid.

For example, when I started writing American Gods, I swore a mighty oath that I’d not cut my hair or shave my beard until I finished it. By March 2000 I was starting to look like a hassidic terrorist, and somewhere in there I said “Sod it,” and shaved off the beard.

But the hair kept growing. I wasn’t going to get a haircut until I’d finished writing American Gods.

When I tell people about this, they look at me as if I’m really weird, except for the Norwegians who tell me about one of their early kings who didn’t shave or cut his hair until he’d united Norway.( And he didn’t wash either. At least I still bathed.) So the Norwegians don’t think I’m weird.

Anyway, my hair grew and grew (it does that, and whenever I’m tempted to grumble I remember all the people of my generation who would be only too pleased to have hair that grows too fast, or any kind of hair really), and finally it was last October and people who didn’t know me were making Howard Stern jokes when they passed me in the street. And I was going to go on a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Reading Tour...

So I finished the book. In first draft, anyway. And I went and visited Wendy at Hair Police in Minneapolis, and got my first haircut in 18 months; and then I went off on the CBLDF reading tour and raised many tens of thousands for freedom of speech, and this was a good thing. (Somewhere in there I talked Chris Oarr from the defense fund out of auctioning off my cut-off hair for charity.)

(You know, this would be much more fun if I could illustrate it with photos. Maybe when we put up the neilgaiman.com site I will.)

So I had short hair and nobody made Howard Stern jokes any more.

Now, author photos are weird things. For example, take the Good Omens photo session, in 1989, where Terry Pratchett and I were taken to a graveyard on the coldest day of the year. The expressions on our faces – variously described as brooding, intelligent, and mysterious, and by the Times of London no less, as sinister – are simply cold. (I was relatively okay. I had a leather jacket on. Terry wore an extremely lightweight jacket he’d borrowed from Malcolm Edwards, because the notion of the authors dressed respectively in black and in white. I was black.)

The easiest author photos have been the various Kelli Bickman photos taken over the years, including my favourite, the Smoke and Mirrors back cover photo, with its infinite regression of authors on a TV screen. But Kelli’s taking fewer photos these days, and is concentrating more on her artwork. (She’s MTV Featured Artist currently... you can see some of her artwork at www.kellibickman.net)

The hardest was the one in the UK in 1996 for Wired Magazine. The photo you may have seen from that session is the one of me holding a glowing book. The one you’ve not seen was the one of me, naked and wearing angel wings surrounded by candles. The one that I still remember with loathing was the one that wound up on the cover of Wired: it was me covered in sand. (A visual pun: Sandman. Yes?) And I would like to give a tip for young photographers who may want to attempt this shot.

Do not use builder’s sand. It may be cheap, but it burns the skin.

Trust me on this. I’ve been there. I know.

The American Gods photo session was nowhere near that painful.

I still think I may have messed everything up by having a haircut.

The photographer was a very nice lady named Sigrid Estrada.

(Kelly Notaras, my editor Jennifer Hershey’s right-hand woman took me down there. Jennifer herself, and my literary agent Merrilee Heifetz wandered along during the course of the afternoon.)

Sigrid took one look at me and said “I thought you were going to have longer hair.”

She looked very disappointed.

“No,” I said, apologetically. “I don’t.”

She sighed. She shook her head. I never quite found out why this messed things up as much as it obviously had.

Sigrid had a plan for a photo. The plan involved a lot of smoke. Her assistant held the smoke machine. Kelly Notaras was drafted in to hold a piece of cardboard to waft the smoke. And I stood there while Sigrid shouted “Smoke!” at the assistant holding the smoke machine, and the machine would belch huge gusts of white fog at me, and then she’d call “Waft!” at Kelly and Kelly would wave the paper and try to get the smoke off my face.

And that’s what we did for the next four or five hours. We did it with my leather jacket on. We did it with my leather jacket off. We did it with me standing up. We did it with me sitting down. We did it with me peering coyly from around the side of a huge sheet of paper. And all through this, the smoke was belched, and then the smoke was wafted. (Jennifer did some fine smoke wafting, too.)

Merrilee exerted an agent’s traditional prerogative and ran up between smoke belches and tried to tame the hair on my forehead. It didn’t tame, but she did her best.

And I began to understand what a kipper must feel like, at the precise moment it stops just being a herring, and realises that it has been smoked. For me that moment occurred at the point where Sigrid decided that it might be more... more whatever she was going for... if the smoke was splurted directly at my head, rather than just generally belched out around waist level.

I’d hold my breath and smile and be told that I shouldn’t smile, not for the kind of photo that Sigrid had in mind. So I’d stop smiling, and the smoke would splurt and Kelly or Jennifer would waft it and Sigrid would click away.

Days would pass before the taste of the smoke machine finally left the back of my throat. Still, it could have been much worse. There was no builder’s sand involved, nor was I being warned not to get too close to the candles or my wings would go up like tinder and burn my bare skin.

So a few weeks passed, and one day the contact sheets arrived. Lots and lots of photos of me. And smoke.

My son took one look at the contact sheet and said “Was your head on fire?”

“No,” I said.

“It just looked like it was, that was all.”

And he was right. All the smoke being let off at head level had managed to create a set of photos in which it was perfectly obvious that my head was indeed on fire.

Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) was staying with us over Christmas. I showed her the contact sheet.

“They make you look like your head’s on fire,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a special effect.”

“And all the ones of you not wearing the leather jacket make you look like David Copperfield.”

“Yes. That’s a special effect too.”

“You don’t want to look like David Copperfield, do you?”

“No, thank you. Let’s stick with the ones with me with a jacket on.”

We picked one black and white photo, and one colour picture. The best thing about the black and white photo was the smoke in the background, which, far from looking like my head (or indeed any part of me) was on fire, looked instead like a mysterious sort of background, which might be clouds or mountains or, well, anything really.

(You can see one at http://www.codysbooks.com/index.jsp, while the figure of me from that picture, much photoshopped, is up on the front page of this website.)

I think they’re pretty good photos. I still feel vaguely guilty about getting the haircut, though. I just wonder what Ingrid could have done, if my hair had been longer. And whether whatever it was would have required quite so much smoke.

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

And I promised I'd post the info on the Neil Gaiman/ Magnetic Fields gig: it's all here -- http://www.bottomlinecabaret.com/ -- although I'll be reading from a lot more than American Gods.

American Gods Blog, Post 45

The nice people at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego e-mailed me to tell me that their phone number is in fact
800-811-4747 and not whatever I posted here earlier.

Really what this web site needs is a page of tour dates. (I think the good people at Authors on the web are probably toiling day in and night to get Neilgaiman.com up and running before publication date. But I'll see if I can get it to happen.)

5,500 Limited signature pages have been signed (and many of them have been doodled on). This is an extra 10% to allow for spoilage, slippage, crashage, rippage and someone at the bindery spilling coffee on them. I don't know if they'll obsessively destroy the extra 500 if no coffee is spilled, or if they'll creep into the system. Possibly the latter -- but seeing that no-one's actually paying anything extra for the signed copies, which will (as I said yesterday) go out with the unsigned ones, I'm not going to give it another thought.

I asked my publishers today if they had any spare copies of American Gods in proof as I had a few people I wanted to get copies to, and they laughed at me. Hollowly. So at least in proof stage, it's proving popular.

A couple of people who read this site asked at the Nebulas what the easiest way to get questions to me would be (if there were things I'd posted they wanted clarifed or whatever). Either e-mail to the nice people who run the inkwell.vue area of the Well, or if you have Compuserve access come and find me in the Literary Forum -- they've given me a whole little topic to myself there.

American Gods Blog, Post 41

There. I'm home again from all the travelling, and now it's time to recharge my batteries, as I'm pretty much spent. Tonight I holed up in a small recording studio, reading short pieces (and a long one) for the next spoken word CD. More recording tomorrow night. More Avalon tomorrow. And I think I may start the second draft of DEATH as soon as that's done: it'll be more fun than waiting to see if there's a strike coming or not.

And meanwhile, let's talk about the triumvirate of KIRKUS, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY and BOOKLIST reviews (and LIBRARY JOURNAL makes up a quartet).

Overall, I'm not sure how much influence reviews have in the real world. I've seen a publisher (Workmans) get scared by a bad review in the New York Times and more or less dump a book -- but the book itself - Good Omens - has gone on to become a perennial bestseller in paperback without them. (It's just about to be reissued in the US in a new cover.) And I don't know of any other publishers who have ever reacted to reviews at all, good or bad. (They send them to you, and I think they circulate them around in-house, and they are pleased by the good ones and try very hard to keep the bad ones from you. But they don't DO anything different when faced by bad reviews, if you see what I mean.)

More to the point, I've seen books with amazing reviews, not to mention awards and enthusiastic plaudits from enormously famous writers sell the same number of books, or less, as the ones that don't get the reviews etc.

(Are sales important? Not as such, but they're the only way authors and publishers have of keeping score and comparing things: without sales you'd not know that, for example, Neverwhere in mass-market paperback was much more successful than Stardust, although Stardust did slightly better in hardcover. I suspect that Stardust will be much happier in the forthcoming 'trade paperback', the larger format, with a cover that makes it look more like a fairy tale for adults -- which it is -- and less like a generic fantasy novel -- which it certainly isn't.)

Most reviews come out when the book comes out. This is sensible, and strongly encouraged by publishers (who warn reviewers on the slips that go out with review copies not to review the book before publication date) because otherwise people cannot read a good review and then nip immediately down to the bookstore and buy a copy of two of the book.

There are exceptions to the embargo, though. PW, Kirkus, and Booklist all print their reviews a good way before the books come out, because they are reviewing for the trade: for bookstores and for libraries and for insiders. And their reviews become the Early Word on the book. (On several occasions I've had a good Kirkus review of one of my books followed up by movie and TV people calling to get hold of it, so I assume that they read it too, as a good place to go hunting for what they call 'properties' and the rest of us call 'stories'.)

Kirkus, PW and Booklist each put a star beside books they especially like. People pay a lot of attention to the stars. (If ever you've seen the phrase "Kirkus starred review" after a quote on the back of a bookjacket, that's what it meant. )

Obviously, the reviewers don't always agree. Neverwhere got a great review in Kirkus, I remember, and a stinker in PW (which said that it just showed I was a comics writer and the book would have been okay if only it had had pictures). But since then I've been very lucky with my early reviews in all the periodicals (and/or lucky with my reviewers -- BOOKLIST names its reviewers but Kirkus and (I think) PW reviewers are anonymous, and so get to utter pronouncements like the voice of God).

So today my editor, Jennifer Hershey, phoned. She was just on her way to an international book fair in Jerusalem, but wanted to call and read me something before she left the office.

It was the Kirkus Review of American Gods.

She read it to me, then she faxed me a copy.

I'll put the whole thing down here, because this is the first official review the book has got, and by this point, I hope, you're as curious as I was. Obviously, it's copyright Kirkus reviews (although I don't think they'd mind me putting it up here). It's from the May 15th edition...
....................................

An ex-convict is the wandering knight-errant who traverses the wasteland of middle America in this ambitious, gloriously funny, and oddly heartwarming latest from the popular fantasist. (STARDUST 1999, etc.)

Released from prison after serving a three-year term, Shadow is immediately rocked by the news that his beloved wife Laura has been killed in an automobile accident. While en route to Indiana for her funeral, Shadow meets an eccentric businessman who calls himself Wednesday ( a dead giveaway if you're up to speed on your Norse mythology), and passively accepts the latter's offer of an imprecisely defined job. The story skillfully glides onto and off the plane of reality, as a series of mysterious encounters suggest to Shadow that he may not be in Indiana anymore -- or indeed, anywhere on Earth he recognises. In dreams, he's visited by a grotesque figure with the head of a buffalo and the voice of a prophet -- as well as by Laura's rather alarmingly corporeal ghost. Gaiman layers in a horde of other stories whose relationship to Shadow's adventures are only gradually made clear, while putting his sturdy protagonist through a succession of tests that echo those of Arthurian hero Sir Gawain bound by honor to surrender his life to the malevolent Green Knight, Orpheus braving the terrors of Hades to find and rescue the woman he loves, and numerous other archetypal figures out of folklore and legend. Only an ogre would reveal much more about this big novel's agreeably intricate plot. Suffice it to say that this is the book that answers the question: When people emigrate to America, what happens to the gods they leave behind?

A magical mystery tour through the mythologies of all cultures, a unique and moving love story -- and another winner for the phenomenally gifted, consummately reader-friendly Gaiman. (Author Tour.)
.................................................................

And it has a star beside it.

American Gods Blog, Post 33

Oops. Thursday's not Mardi. Mardi is Tue's Day. Tew (also known as Tyr) is an almost forgotten god of war and justice, and a much nicer guy than Odin. His hand was bitten off by Fenris Wolf.

I'm off for a few days, taking my son to see the various colleges that have accepted him, to see which one he wants to attend.

And a photocopy of the American Gods book cover arrived this morning. And it has the photo of me, large on the back, which was going to be my cue to tell you all the story of the photo day, but I'm running for a plane, so you are just going to have to be patient a little longer.

American Gods Blog, Post 32

And the question comes in from places as far away and as far apart (except of course alphabetically) as France and Finland, “What is happening with foreign editions of American Gods? When will it come out in my country?” And the answer is...

It’ll be a while. (Except in Australia, where they’ll be importing the Headline edition from the UK.)

My literary agents, Writers House, are waiting for the bound galleys to come in from Harper Collins – they should be around any moment now. Then they will send out copies of those galleys to their sub-agents in various countries all around the world, who will show them to the publishers who will offer them money for the rights to publish the book.

(It’s probably worth mentioning here that at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the foreign publishers were all told that American Gods was coming. Really it was. So they are all prepared to read it. And, with luck, to like it and offer lots of yen, francs, marks, zloties and crumbulae.)

And then the foreign publishers will get translators in, who will try and figure out how to translate some things and still keep the spirit of the book, something that I do not envy them on. (A French example from Patrick Marcel, who translated Neverwhere and Smoke and Mirrors into French: Thursday in English translates as Thor’s Day, in French it’s Mardi – Mars’s Day. This apparently trivial fact can be quite important in a book with gods in it.)

And then, probably sometime in the following 12 - 24 months, the book will come out. Sometimes I get sent copies. Often I find out about them only when I sign one for someone, or hear about them from people who grumble about the Serbian translations of my books, and I say “I didn’t know I’d written any Serbian books”.

Sometimes the publishers bring me in to do signings for them, and sometimes they don’t (mostly they don’t, but it’s fun when they do). Sometimes the translations are good, and sometimes they aren’t (I normally find out from people telling me how much better it is to read the book in English). (I’m still waiting for someone to come up and tell me how much improved the book was by being translated into Japanese or Greek; it’s only a matter of time.)