on the concept of fiction

Let's see...

Mr. Gaiman,
I recently read your journal and the response you made to someone attacking your previous and future work on Batman. I saw this person as an average flamer who, for some reason, needed you to know that he didn't like your work. What surprised me was that you responded to his criticism in such an open forum. I figured it was a way to bring up the argument that all popular creators must bring up from time to time, "It's doesn't bother me that some people don't like my work." On the other hand, it could just as easily have been a way for you to point out this person's ignorance to your fans so that we could send bad thought his way. So I've decided to ask: Why did you post such a venomous remark and your response on your journal?

Feel free to edit this post in any way for your purposes.

Normally I pick emails to put up based on a unique and complex algorithm built around 1) How many people are asking similar things, 2) how interesting I think it is, 3) whether I get around to putting it up or whether it's swept away by the flood the following hour, day or week, 4) whim. In that case I'd got lots of people writing in to say that the news that I was writing Batman made them happy, which was nice but not really something I'd put up here, and a few people who seemed deeply hurt that I was writing Batman, which I found odd and a bit interesting. That was the best written of the lot. I probably should have edited it for language, but was worried that if I left F blanks it would look like I was messing with his words to make him look stupid, so didn't.

This next one I chose because of the four letters that came in objecting to yesterday's photos, one, from someone who wanted to let me know she would now never buy anything by me ever again, seemed to be a bit mad, and one was crass, and one was funny but I thought this was the most interesting:


Hi Neil, is that lady wearing a slip? It looks nasty. What does Maddy think about that picture? My mom says it's in bad taste. LOL Patti


I think Maddy's been around film sets and photo sets enough to know that film and photo sets are fictional. That was Amanda's costume for the photo shoot on the roof that preceded the photos you saw. (Below you can see three out of six of today's costumes in pictures that, I hope, will be more reassuring and family friendly. Except possibly for the first, now I come to think of it.) Kyle is shooting a book of photographs called "Who Killed Amanda Palmer". Amanda is in all the pictures -- which are a lot like scenes from movies -- and I'm writing very short stories to accompany them. I'm trying to do the majority of them while I'm here, as my plate is scarily full right now, and it seemed easier and faster just to come out while many of the photos were being taken and see what was going on and write.

The photos yesterday, and the ones below, were all taken by Kyle between actual shots, because the man does not put down his camera.

They are very long days -- we were still shooting stuff way past midnight, and I'm typing this at 3:30 am, but it's good work, and Kyle is producing some extraordinary images. (Except for the Oboe-and-Dirndl shots. Those are just wrong.) (And he's blogging in the other corner of the room.)

You can hear some of the WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER songs on YouTube: four videos have been put up so far at http://www.youtube.com/user/amandapalmer . Although my favourite, which is called OASIS, doesn't yet have a video.

...

Back in March The New Yorker ran a wonderful article on magic, magicians, and Jamy Ian Swiss (who, in addition to being all the cool things that they say he is in the article, read the manuscript of American Gods for me and told me when my coin magic was off). It's now available to read online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/17/080317fa_fact_gopnik?currentPage=all.

...

That was it for blogging tonight. If I owe you a letter, sorry...

M is for Mirrors you'll stare in forever/ N is for Night and for Nothing and Never

I just opened the mail, to find an advance copy of The Dangerous Alphabet, a picture book written by me and drawn by Gris Grimly. It began as a Christmas Card I sent out to friends, and one of them, Elise Howard, my editor at Harper Children's, phoned one day to say that she had it framed on her wall, and kept reading it, and what would I think about turning my Christmas Card into a book.

Many phone calls with Gris Grimly later, it's a book... (it won't be in bookshops in the US until the end of April, though).

If it works, it'll be a sort of interactive book. The pictures tell a story, the words amplify it, but really, what actually happens in the book will be something for each reader to decide. I hope.


Hi Neil,

I've been curious about this for a bit, and the recent event of your blog's birthday prompted me to actually ask it...

Do you maintain this blog purely for pleasure, or is it part of some sort of contractual obligation with your publisher? (Or are you compelled to blog for some altogether different reason?)

Please note: Your answer won't stop me from reading it obsessively either way-- the "why" really doesn't affect my interest in the output at all-- I'm just curious!

--K.

I do it because I like it. There's no contract with anyone. Nobody pays me to do it. Nobody made me start, nobody but me gets to decide when I'm done. It's all owned by me. (The whole website, neilgaiman.com is paid for by Harper Collins, which is good, because the bandwidth is huge, but it keeps it all ad free, and gives them bragging rights over the kind of traffic the site gets.)

There are tangible things it's good for, obviously -- not doing signings to empty rooms, books going in at number one on bestseller lists, that sort of thing. I like that it can demystify the writing or the publishing process, sometimes, or that I can get questions about the most obscure things usefully answered in minutes. But that's all a sort of side-effect.

The bit that I find puzzling (as puzzling as the people who assume that I have People Who Write The Blog For Me) is the idea that I'd do this because I'm contracted to do it. There's not enough money in the world to make me do this for seven years unless I wanted to, trust me.

I do it because it's fun. I do it because writing is, like death, a lonely business. I do it because I've never managed to keep a diary, and because it's amazingly useful being able to search the blog and find out when I was last in Finland (say).

I really don't know how much longer it'll go on for, though. Mostly because I keep feeling that I'm starting to repeat myself. It's amazing how many of the things that come in on the FAQ line have been answered one way or another.

I'm definitely tempted by the publishers who've asked to do books collecting stuff from the blog. (So far the only one that exists is Adventures In The Dreamtrade, which contains, among other things, the whole of the "American Gods" blog, February to September 2001.) But don't, right now, have the time to spend thinking about what kind of book it would be.

It'll wait.

...

The poll is fascinating - partly, for me in the way that the results have held steady and consistent for the last 18,000 votes. Vote if you haven't...

Burbles

Chapter 7 of The Graveyard Book still isn't done, but that's fine. It's going really well. I think when it's finished this chapter will be twice as long as any of the other stories in the book. It ties them all together, too, to make a set of short stories into a novel.

Yesterday I reached the moment I'd been dreading for years, where you learn why the things that happened in the first chapter happened (which I hadn't known when I wrote them. I knew that they had happened, but not why) and as I started to write it, I realised that it was pretty obvious, so I wrote it, and learned a lot. This was an enormous relief. It does not always work out this way.

Chapter 6 is all typed and tidied and there's no evidence from what you'd read that it was a nightmare to write and that I had no idea what was happening paragraph to paragraph, or felt like I was making it up as I went along (a terrible thing for an author to feel).

Right. Here are three blogs you could be reading while I'm being mostly absent:

Hi Neil,

Someone has had the brilliant idea of setting up a blog to help reunite people with their lost cameras/memory cards/films by posting a couple of photos from said lost items. The blog is here: http://ifoundyourcamera.blogspot.com/

I think this is a great idea deserving of wide circulation (I know I'd be very upset if I lost my camera and delighted if it were returned, more for the photos than the camera itself). If you also like it, would you mind passing it on to your readership please?


Thanks! Regards, Camilla Brokking

and this one broke my heart...

Dear Neil,


I found a blog that was strange and sad and beautiful. A vegan veterinary technician records all the animals that she euthanizes.


http://whatikilledtoday.blogspot.com/


I think you should read it.


-Alex

and I found this a few months ago and meant to post it, and lost it again, and now Mistress Mousey says...


Kurt found this website. I've been shaking my head in shame while laughing
for pretty much the last 15 minutes straight.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Hope you're well. Can't wait to see how the Graveyard Book turns out. :D

Hugs,
michelle

...

Hi, Neil--

I've seen on your blog that you're a big fan of Joe Hill, too. We sent an advance copy of his new comic, LOCKE & KEY, to your attention. Hope you like it--the artist is Gabriel Rodriguez, the BEOWULF artist, too, and its just an amazing read.

We also put together a trailer for the comic that we're going to send around soon:

http://charliefoxtrotfilms.com/tom/

We're trying to push this book in a big way. Joe deserves it. It's such an assured and enthralling first issue.

Chris

I really enjoyed it, although I wished it had been double the length, or had come with a black and white preview of the next issue or something. I fear that I'm losing the periodical comics buzz, and have been conditioned to want graphic novel sized chunks of story. I no longer go "I CANNOT WAIT UNTIL NEXT ISSUE!". Now I go, "And then what?" But it was a great start...


I just finished Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel and Working Days, which were amazing texts on the art of writing and a writers' struggles. In reading your journal it occurred to me that the updates on your progress through the Graveyard book and similar past entries could make for an interesting compilation reminiscent of these two books. Is this something you'd ever consider?

Oddly enough, I got an email a few weeks ago from a publisher wanting to know if they could make a book up from this blog. I imagine that it would be possible to go excavating the million and sixty-eight thousand words (according to the always fascinating http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/clouds/words/) and dig out enough stuff for a book or two, perhaps much in the way that the old http://quotableneil.blogspot.com/ did. But it'll have to wait until I have a bit more time to even think about it.

Meanwhile...

I understand that Hill House are sending out all the copies of the limited edition of ANANSI BOYS, and have a dedicated email address to confirm people's postal addresses -- details at http://hillhousepublishers.com/hh-update-28dec07-01.htm
and Lisa Snellings wants me to tell the world she has a sale on at http://stores.ebay.com/Poppet-Art-by-Lisa-Snellings-Clark

Next post: is Dr Who actually a Fennec Fox? You be the judge...

For Patry Francis...

Promoting a new book is hard, especially when you're a first time author. It doesn't matter how good the book is or how nice you are, you'll still wind up doing signings for empty rooms, if you're lucky enough to persuade someone to let you do the signings.

Still, all of that has to be easier than finding yourself in a world where your first novel is coming out and you are not in a position to promote it.

Sometimes the entire literary blogging community will gather around and make sure that, if you can't be out there promoting your book, they'll do whatever they can to help and point people to it.

And sometimes an author in the middle of a book will look up and go "Hang on. The 28th. That was yesterday? I thought it was.... oh bugger."

The book is called The Liar's Diary. The author is very apologetic.

bad blogger. no liver stories.

I am a dreadful blogger right now.

This is because

a) I'm writing.

I just reread the pep talk I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, for authors who were at that point three-quarters of the way through the book when you just have to keep going, and it helped a bit. ("Hah!" I thought. "What do you know, foolish author-man?" But secretly I knew he had a point.)

I'm still in Chapter Seven. Yesterday was very talky. Today stuff may happen.

b) I'm writing. So when I find interesting links, or people send me things to post, I go, "Yes, I should post that" and then forget to.

and of course the main reason I'm a dreadful blogger is that,

c) I'm writing.

When I'm not writing the novel I feel guilty. And even though blogworthy things turn up (I could write about the thaw right now, and the sunshine and the bees; three days ago a really funny entry on what to do when your assistant hands you twenty pounds of whole and uncut cow liver for your dog that she was given at the local meat packing plant didn't get written, and yesterday I composed an entire thing in my head I didn't write down about Why The People in Torchwood Season One Are All Too Stupid To Live -- including the astonishingly puzzling incident where someone in 1941 has written something down on paper with black ink (a medium that will last legibly for centuries if kept out of the sun), and, unaccountably worried that ink on paper will fade and become unreadable in time, first she takes a prototype Polaroid photo of it, and then writes some of it in blood and puts it in a coffee can in a damp cellar, because these media will still be readable seventy years later. Why she didn't make a model of it out of chocolate as well, I will never know.)

Oh, and despite having predicted that Blink would get the Hugo for best Dramatic wossname, this blog is now officially supporting Paul Cornell's Family of Blood/Human Nature two-parter for a Hugo. This is, obviously, because I have been gotten to.

Bugger. This was just meant to be a wave, and now I've started writing.

I'll answer a question. Just one. Then to work.

Good morning, Neil!

Since you've used fountain pens for so long, I was wondering if you could recommend a good fountain pen ink.

I just got my first fountain pen last night. I mentioned to a friend that I write all my rough drafts longhand because it's the best way to shut up my internal editor, but that I wanted to get a fountain pen so I could stop throwing so much plastic into landfills by burning through so many disposable pens. He disappeared into a back room of his house for a few minutes, and when he came back he handed me a fountain pen, complete with converter.

So, now I have the pen, but I need to get some ink. And I want to make sure that I get a good quality bottled ink -- preferrably something that won't smear since I prefer to write in spiral-bound notebooks, usually curled up on the couch with the notebook on my lap.

Based on what you just posted about the Noodler Polar Black, I probably won't be getting it. (I live in the South anyway, so I don't really have to worry about ink freezing.) What type of ink do you normally use or would recommend for a fountain pen neophyte like myself?

Thanks much!

Andi

In all fairness, I should say I got a note from someone who uses the Noodler Polar Blue to say that they hadn't had any smudging trouble with it.

There used to be a lot of information about ink (including what everything looked like) up at http://www.inksampler.com/
but alas, most of that has gone. Still, this is the internet, and there are people out there writing well and exhaustively about fountain pen ink and showing off their favourites.

Find a colour you like, and an ink you like. Try a few out. Parker's Quink is an old dependable. Private Reserve have some lovely colours (I like their Black Cherry and their Copper Burst). Waterman inks are always pretty good. Bottle design is also useful to consider -- Mont Blanc (I don't like their pens, and the ink isn't up to much but I love the bottle design) and Levenger have great bottles that allow for easy filling even when the level in the bottle is low.

Never use India inks, drafting inks or drawing inks inside a fountain pen. You will gum up the insides and worse. But if you're interested, there are places on the web that will tell you, for example, how to make your own ink to ancient recipes...

...

And finally, thank you to Dan Goodsell, who noticed his Mr Toast toy in the video of Maddy at Comic-Con, and sent her oodles of Mr Toast stuff. Hurrah for Mr Toast.

Failing to sleep in

There's nothing like a day when you can sleep in, especially when you are in a hotel a long way from home and you don't have to take anyone to school or take anyone for a walk. It almost never happens -- normally if I'm in a hotel I have to set alarm clocks. And the whole sleeping in bit is made even better when the day before was long and exhausting, and made better than that by the fact the clocks have gone back an hour so I can really sleep as long as I want to plus an hour...

But the front desk phoned at seven a.m. to let me know I had a driver I didn't want or need or order waiting to take me nowhere at all. And that was that on sleeping in for the morning. So I shall write a slightly sleepy morning blogpost instead.

It's weird. They call these things junkets. It's a word that means either "a sweet dessert", "a party" or "a trip made for pleasure at someone else's expense". And the pleasure trip aspect is certainly there for the journalists, who get flown to somewhere nice by the film company, put up in hotels, see the film and then spend a day or a few hours talking to the people who made it. When I was a journalist, getting on a junket was always considered a good thing -- a small amount of work for a fair amount of pleasure and adventure.

Having done a few of them now on the other side of the press conference table I think it's worth mentioning that they aren't really junkets for the people organising them or for the people being interviewed. They are work.

We assembled yesterday morning early in a hotel back room. A lady did hair and make up for the cameras (which means, in my case, a bit of powder, and then her looking at my hair and asking "Is it meant to be like that?" and me saying, um, yes, sorry). Then into a back room to be led onto the stage for a press conference. Ray Winstone and Crispin Glover had just seen the film and loved it (Crispin: "And mostly I don't like films I'm in,"), John Malkovitch, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie haven't yet seen it. Bob Zemeckis was there but decided some years ago not to do things like interviews and junkets and press conferences (very wise, and I rather wish I could do likewise).

I like Angelina. She's nice, very professional, and has a slightly goofy sense of humour. Last time I met her was November 2005, when she was doing the acting bit of Beowulf. Even then, it had already been reported in the papers that she had closed down production on Beowulf by walking off the set after a fight with Ray Winstone -- two weeks before her first day on set. I realised that where she was concerned the press were happy to simply make up stuff that sounded credible. It didn't need have to have any basis at all in reality.

It was obvious during the press conference that a large contingent of the press just wanted to talk to her and talk about her private life, something she declined to do and handled with grace and aplomb. Overall, the press conference went well (I think my favourite bit was the way Ray Winstone, answering questions, always refers to me and Roger Avary as "The Boys", as if we're a couple of writing hardcases who will come over to your house and beat you up with our typewriters.)

And then on to interviews. Round tables: a dozen journalists in each room, and Roger and I go in, talk for half an hour and are then moved to the next room, where another dozen journalists are waiting to ask the same questions, while Anthony Hopkins, always one room behind, is moved into the room we were in.

And then it was off to hotel rooms for individual interviews, and telephone interviews with journalists in Kansas and suchlike places. And then, brain dead, we were done.

The reaction to the film from the journalists and interviewers, who had seen it the previous night, seemed overwhelmingly positive, which was a relief.

It's nice that people have started to see the film, and are now actually talking about the thing they've seen. (I got a bit tired of reading online "reviews" of the film, which were always mash-ups of what people thought they'd seen in the trailers with what they imagined we were doing to the story, along with complaints about visuals they hadn't properly seen yet, which then normally concluded with the loud and proud announcement that as they knew they wouldn't like it, they wouldn't be seeing it, and it certainly wouldn't be Beowulf. Several of them were written by people who should, I thought, know better. I've never minded getting bad reviews, but in the past they've always come from people who had at least read or seen the thing they were complaining about.)

Anyway, now we've started screening it, real reactions are coming in.

Here's a letter Jeff Wells that he put up at his blog in advance of his review appearing, which he's posted I think partly because he was embarrassed by having said nasty things about Beowulf last week before seeing it http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2007/11/beowulf_2.php
Here's someone who saw a preview screening at UCLA - http://strstruckdreamr9.blogspot.com/2007/11/beowulf.html
and another early screening blog http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=43263288&blogID=325323587
Moriarty reviewed it over at aintitcool -- http://www.aintitcool.com/node/34678 -- and I'm sure that lots of other reviews are going to start surfacing now that people are seeing it. (It's not that we were playing the completed film close to our chest. It's just that it wasn't completed -- the film, in its final form, was only emitted from the computers this week. And the Imax 3D print people started seeing on Friday afternoon was only completed on Friday morning.)

...

Dear Neil,

About two or three months ago I was found a book in the New Release section by you and Micheal Reaves. Being a fan of yours, I bought the book, presuming it would be good. It was good.

However, it didn't seem to be your style exactly so I checked the release date: 2007.

I was surprised that I hadn't heard anything about this book on your blog since I have been reading it for about a year, maybe more.

I thought that maybe, albeit doubtfully, there was someone else in the world named Neil Gaiman.

Nope. Under OTHER NOVELS FOR YOUNG READERS BY NEIL GAIMAN, was Coraline.

The book is called Interworld.

Just asking why you havent mentioned it at all on your blog.

-Camille

I'm posting this to remind people that there is a SEARCH function on the www.neilgaiman.com pages. They take you to http://www.neilgaiman.com/search_form/. If you typed in Interworld it would give you about 15 hits from the website, first among them http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/Interworld.html which is all the times I've labelled a blog entry Interworld since I've been doing labelling on this blog (basically this year). And which would answer all your questions...

Hello, Neil!

Sorry if this is old news, but your journal has been nominated for Best Literature Blog on the 2007 Weblog Awards.

http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-literature-blog-1.php

The voting closes November 8 and you're currently in the lead!

Best of luck,

Leanne

Thank you! What fun. (Which left me suddenly wondering what happened to the "Bloggers Choice" awards -- looks like they get handed out next week in Las Vegas.)


...

Lots of people asking what's happening in the Philippines in a couple of weeks. I'm talking to an ad congress -- I don't think the event is open to the public -- and doing something with Fully Booked (I googled but only found http://www.fullybookedonline.com/adsdetail.php?id=53).

Anyway. Maddy is here -- I've told her she has to blog the Premiere please -- and I am going off to be a dad now. (In the interests of fairness, I should add that an apologetic fruit basket has just arrived from the people who sent the 7.00 am car and driver, putting me in mind of the Elvis Costello bit on the old Larry Sanders Show. And that Maddy has been eating the gummi bears out of it.)

the how of blogging

I read Neil Gaiman's blog nearly every day, and usually there's a few different topics addressed in each blog (with each topic being seperated by an ellipsis). I was wondering.. does Mr. Gaiman just write his almost-daily blog all at once, or does he leave some kind of blog-program running in the background and write to it when he comes across something he thinks is worth writing down? I suppose, in my mind, I have this idea of Neil being done with writing that day, and then he goes and writes a blog. But sometimes his blogs are almost schizophrenic, meaning there's (sometimes) many different subjects he addresses in each of them. So I was just wondering is all. :-) Keep up the good work on the site,-Paul.

It all depends. There's no real pattern -- sometimes I keep a blog entry going until it seems long enough. Sometimes I write them in the morning before work starts, sometimes at night on the couch, and sometimes, like right now, I just go onto blogger to post in order to let anyone who's likely to read this and also send me email know that due to gmail being tooth-grindingly irritating right now, anyone who's sending email to my gmail account is getting it bounced back.

But then I think "I can't just post that. There are lots of people out there who don't give a toss about my gmail. I should at least put something else up."

So then I put up a link to "Dylan Hears a Who" -- http://www.dylanhearsawho.com/home.htm -- where you can hear what sounds astonishingly like a mid 60s incarnation of Bob Dylan singing his way through the Dr Seuss catalogue, and it will probably make you happier.

American Gods Blog, Post 96

M. J. Rose has done an article in Wired online about this very blogger. And seeing that she has only a limited amount of space, and only quotes one sentence from the e-mail I sent her, I thought I`d post the whole thing here. The questions I was responding to were about marketing and the part an author plays in it...

Dear MJ

To be honest, I haven`t really thought of any of this as marketing. I`m not saying it`s not, and I`m not trying to be wilfully naive or disingenuous here, but I wouldn`t have done the journal if it was a marketing thing. I did it because I was really interested in the process of taking people behind the scenes in making a book. I`m the kind of person who never manages to keep a diary, but I enjoyed having a topic on Genie, when there was a Genie, where I could post what was happening. For the last year I`ve had a topic on the Well, again as a kind of diary and info and news source.

The Blogger seemed like a good way to take readers and the curious backstage. Part journal, part diary, part stream of consciousness. I really enjoyed the feeling of having someone to talk to.

I talked to Jennifer Hershey, my editor, about what I had in mind -- that I wanted americangods.com to be the most basic of sites, with nothing on it but the journal, tour info when we got it, a way to order the book, and that was all. And I didn`t want it to be publicised -- I liked the idea that anyone interested would hear about it and go and see it; it meant that I could start writing without any feeling that the world was looking over my shoulder. I think the first few posts may have been marketing posts, in that I was trying to announce and explain the book, but very quickly it turned into a way of explaining the process of taking a book from handing in the finished manuscript to the end of the author tour -- there`s even a kind of plot there, as the readers of the blog and I get to learn whether American Gods goes onto the bestseller lists or the remainder table.

I thought it astonishing how many unique hits we were getting and how "sticky" such a simple site was, and felt faintly justified in my theory that content is more important than delivery mechanisms.

I don`t think it takes time away from writing -- at least, not more than one normally winds up giving to the process of getting a book out there: it took a lot more time to write my name on 5000 pages (to be bound into the books) than it did to write a couple of blogger entries about signing 5000 pages. It was a good way to explain, to record what I thought, to let off steam.

As for surprises -- I think the biggest one was how many people were reading it. And how many of the people who were reading it weren`t necessarily Neil Gaiman fans or readers but were people who read and enjoyed the blogger - thjey read a little of it and got hooked. I liked that.I still do.

With neilgaiman.com I was a lot more nervous -- I`ve shied away from an official website for many years, feeling that fans did it much better than I ever could, and that they had a level of interest and curiousity in the author of Neverwhere and Sandman and his work that I could never aspire to. But HarperCollins wanted to do it, and I went and found a few things for them to put on there, and suggested some initial topics, areas and directions, and now it`s gone live I`m getting interested in it -- trying to make it cooler, better looking, containing more - I`m already starting to think about a few things I`ve written that that no-one`s ever seen that are sitting on a hard disk somewhere and might quite enjoy being read.And I`m trying to think of some ways of allowing the fans to contribute more -- given the volume of traffic on the message boards I think that may be a lot of fun.

Hope this is of use--

written in the car on the way to a signing in Champaign...

Neil Gaiman

Am now kind of tired after Seattle... off to San Francisco in half an hour. Must... get... dressed.... must... pack.... must... eat nice breakfast room service person brought... must... do something about hair.... anything...