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.
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 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
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/
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.
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.)
Okay. It was a Blogger problem. Which is good to know. In my naivety I thought I'd broken it.
Today was nightmarishly busy, and strange. And I think the Douglas thing shook me up a lot more than I had realised.
Too many e-mails asking for 'appreciations' on Douglas, or quotes on his death ("Why me?" "You wrote the book about him.") Most of the time I just sent them here, and told them to use what they wanted.
Wednesday, I drive down to the House on the Rock for the photo session for Entertainment Weekly.
Friday I go to Brazil -- I'll be at a book fair in Rio on Saturday and Sunday (signings), then to Sao Paulo -- Tuesday evening is a signing at FNAC. (What is FNAC? I do not know. See how exciting this is?)
Then to Buenos Aires (it's in Argentina. You knew that.) Details on what I'm doing there as they come. Then back to the US.
By the way, the UK tour dates (and the US dates) are on the May 4th blog entry -- you'll need to go to archives to see them.
Now we're getting nothing but Error 210s. It's making posting anything astonishingly frustrating. Not to mention time consuming and practically impossible.
Spent a large chunk of yesterday replying to fanmail. (I always try to answer it. It goes into a box, and three or four times a year I clean out the box, scrawling postcards that answer questions & say thank you as best I can in the room on the back of a postcard.) I don't do it as often as I should, and get a wholly disproportionate sense of accomplishment when it's all replied to, and the box is filled with postcards.
And I pulled out my copy of Don't Panic (the original Titan edition of 1987, not the reissue that Dave Dickson wrote extra chapters for at the end, nor the US Pocket Books edition where page 42 – which we’d left intentionally blank because the first time I’d printed out the book page 42 was [not on purpose, just a glitch from whatever computer program I was using to word process in those dim dark days] a blank piece of paper with “page 42” on it, and that seemed improbable enough to be some kind of a sign – on the US Pocket Books edition Page 42 was just part of the book... ) and I read the book I'd written fourteen years ago, and heard Douglas’s voice all the way through it, affable, baffled, warm and dry.
There are worse ways to say goodbye. And it may have been a strange one, but it worked, and we take our goodbyes where we can.
I was doing a telephone interview about American Gods when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.
For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn't.
"Douglas Adams is dead," I said.
"Yes," said the interviewer. "I know. Did you ever meet him?"
I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.
After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don't remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)
I'd known Douglas fairly well in the 80s -- interviewed him originally for Penthouse then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote "Don't Panic -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion" for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.
Saw him at David Gilmour's 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the Neverwhere TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn't be the same experience he'd had with the Hitchhiker TV series, but it was.
Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the Starship Titanic game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn't get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He'd previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker's Books, and I'd said no as I didn't have the time.
We'd e-mail from time to time.
He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don't think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn't meant to be a writer. I'm not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it's something they don't have a concept for yet, let alone a name -- and if he'd been around when this thing was around (World Designer? Explainer?) he would have done it brilliantly.
(I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print.)
He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t.
