Chris Riddell's illustrations for the Bloomsbury edition of The Graveyard Book just came in. Here are three of my favourites. One from Chapter Three ("The Hounds of God"), one from Chapter Four ("The Witch's Headstone") and one from Chapter Seven ("Every Man Jack").
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Also a few people wrote in to ask how I feel about having three books in the LibraryThing Top 106 Unread Books Meme.... and I went and checked and was a bit disappointed to find that I'm no longer in there -- according to http://www.librarything.com/tag/unread I no longer have any books in the top 106. Bugger. Given that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the most unread Library Thing book I assumed it was a list of books people planned to read one day, not books they didn't plan to pick up....
Chris Riddell is an award-winning illustrator of Children's books in the UK.
Bloomsbury are very aware that there are two very different audiences for The Graveyard Book -- that it's a book that works as a children's book and it's also a book for adults. So Sarah, my editor, proposed that Chris illustrate the childrens' edition, and that the one illustrated by Dave McKean will be aimed at an adult readership. In the UK, Dave's babe-on-a-knife-edge cover will be for adults (and may also have a signed, limited edition). Chris's version will be for younger readers.
Here's Chris Riddell's wonderful cover -- the jacket flaps are at each side. The text on the cover is dummy text -- it'll have a different quote on the back, I expect, and there are several things that need fixing in the blurbs and the biographies and such. But the artwork is really lovely, and I thought people would like to see it...
(Reposted as the colours were strangely wrong on the last version I put up.)
The One From the Eastercon with the Dave McKean Subterranean Cover In It
The convention's over, and it was really good. Lots of wonderful people, a really nice atmosphere, and my main regret was all the conversations I never had -- I made China Mieville promise that we'd do a panel one day of us chatting, because we never manage to finish conversations and he knows so many cool things (and he seems to think that I do).
There were a lot of conversations I did have, though. Yesterday evening there was food with Mitch Benn, today there was food and talk with Farah Mendelsohn and Edward James, and Cory, Alice and Poesy Doctorow. And there were panels (my favourite today was either the one on the various incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes it's good just to be a fan. Or it was the one about darkness in Children's Fiction) and more signings and just running into good people...
And there was the party in honour of the upcoming Anticipation -- the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal . (http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Home) I talked to the con chairman, and then to Farah (who is head of programming) and we're starting to come up with some ideas for things that would be really special and fun.
(It's a World Science Fiction Convention, and it's about 18 months away, and I hope you'll come. There's a map of where in the world the members are from, and right now there's no-one at all from Eastern Europe or China or even Brazil....)
Also I seem to be guardian of an enormous pink pig.
....
“It is my opinion,” Wertham told the senators and the cameras, “without any reasonable doubt and without any reservation, that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.” The child most likely to be influenced by comic books, he said, is the normal child; morbid children are less affected, “because they are wrapped up in their own fantasies.” Comic books taught children racism and sadism—“Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” he said. In his book, he said that “Batman” comics were homoerotic and that “Wonder Woman” was about sadomasochism. He was even critical of “Superman” comics: “They arouse in children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune,” he testified. “We have called it the Superman complex.”
So Kurt Busiek wrote about Odd and the Frost Giants, and I linked to it here and he emailed me, and I needed to ask him if I could use a bit of something he and I plotted on a long car journey about 12 years ago for a mystery project, and he said yes, and I sent him The Graveyard Book as a thank you.
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK's title is an homage to THE JUNGLE BOOK, since TGB is about a boy whose family dies, and who winds up being raised in a graveyard, by ghosts, and the other things that lurk there.
The boy, named Nobody ("Bod" for short), learns many things, discovers odd places and curious people, deals hesitantly with the world outside the graveyard and eventually has to deal with the forces that killed the rest of his family, and who are still looking for him. I won't say much more about the plot, because hey, it's not going to be out for months.
But I think it's likely Neil's best novel yet. It has a great deal of warmth, whimsy, dark fantasy (verging on horror), adventure, charm, suspense, monsters, ghouls, a witch, school bullies, policemen, ancient burial mounds, knife-wielding killers, dancing, mystery, trouble, a dash of romance, life lessons, and a creature named Silas, who is both what he seems to be and not. And the most endearingly dangerous and threatening ancient terror you've ever met. The story's engaging, there's a real sense of menace, and it builds to a strong and satisfying climax.
The ghosts are a delight, and the sense of magic and possibility and things happening in the shadows is compelling and attractive. The writing is quite good, but not showy -- the story and characters take first place, always.
It's a short novel, under 70,000 words, and it works as YA, provided you don't mind YA books starting with dead bodies (including a child), bloody knives and a toddler in jeopardy, but it's not limited to that -- it's a book that'll be as satisfying for an adult to read as for a young teen, but they'll get different things out of it.
It's more in company with STARDUST and NEVERWHERE, in that it's an occasionally-dark fantasy involving a world one step outside our own, than with AMERICAN GODS and ANANSI BOYS (which are more about stuff intruding from the beyonds into our own), but written by someone who's had that much more practice than any of those. I could say it's "like GOOD OMENS meets A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE" but, well, that's a facile and shallow comparison, so I won't.
In any case, this is a wholehearted recommendation. I like most of what Neil writes, but THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is very high up on the list, even so.
the one with the Dave McKean Graveyard Book cover sketches in
Lots of people wrote to tell me that X-Rays were needed for TB tests, and some people suggested that they were in hand-baggage as they might be fogged by X-Rays in checked baggage, but no-one explained why there seemed no mechanism for anyone ever to look at the (quite expensive, and carried over in hand-baggage), x-rays until this arrived from Mr Petit...
Having been a commanding officer in the UK -- meaning I had to supervise airmen and NCOs under my command when they wanted to bring their UK brides back to the US -- I had to chuckle when I saw the note about the x-ray.
It's not required by the immigration folks (either Division 6, or anyone else). Since it's a different federal agency, I'm not surprised that an INS employee wouldn't know about it. It's required by the US Public Health Service, for everyone, regardless of nationality, who is trying to immigrate.
And they do, on occasion, get checked, but only if there's advance reason to believe there's "a substantial risk of exposure." For example, you can bet that flights on foreign-flag carriers originating in, say, Nairobi get more scrutiny than would a BA or AA flight from Heathrow.
The relevant statute was passed in 1938 (there may have been a predecessor, but I doubt it) and hasn't been updated yet. What a surprise. And this came in from my editor Jennifer Brehl at Harper Collins about the free American Gods -- I'm putting it up because she says it better than I could paraphrase it:
First of all, the online edition has been optimized and the embedded pages are moving much faster. I’ve asked that the widget confusion be fixed – i.e., open up widget to full book rather than older partial version.
We’re wondering if you might have some time tomorrow that we could call you and we could have a conference call to discuss things? We want your fans to know that we are responsive to their concerns and, although it’s painful getting the criticism, it’s also a good learning opportunity.So there will be a conference call, and I'll report back on it.
Hello Neil, I am going to the Easter Con in Heathrow because I'd like to hear you. Could you recommend which day would have the most Neil-time or most Neil-events? I know I'm not made of the right stuff since I might have to be selective about the days at the con, and even though I'd love to build my own battle-ready space ship, I still would like to get two flies with one swat....being battle-ready an'all (Ahem!).
Dave McKean says he doesn't mind me putting up his sketches for The Graveyard Book cover...
So to bring you up to speed...
Dave did a cover while I was writing the book. As the book continued, it became sort of obvious that the cover was younger than the book was, and we needed a cover that told adults that this was a book for them too.
So I finished the book and Dave read the book and did a bunch of sketches, all of which made me happy, and all of which felt a lot more like the book I'd written...
All of these are sketches, it's worth pointing out -- roughs for me and the various editors and art departments to look at and choose from. It's not finished art, nor is it meant to be.
(The actual typeface is something Dave plans to scan in and create from photos of old gravestones.)
And in the next post I'll tell you what the response was, and which one we wound up going with and why.
Those of you who have been following the saga of The Bees over at the birdchick blog (http://www.birdchick.com/labels/beekeeping.html) will know that of the two hives we started out with, which we called Olga and Kitty, Olga has thrived, while Kitty did so well that she swarmed in late summer and took off to see the world. We got a new queen, but the remaining bees in Kitty never got her population back up in time for winter.
Which meant that when it got really cold this year, Olga had enough bees to keep the hive warm and Kitty simply didn't. I went out in January and noticed that the snow had melted around Olga, she was removing her dead and, on warm days, bees were nipping out and pooping yellow in the snow, whereas Kitty was just a green box with nothing going on.
A couple of days ago I noticed that someone -- probably a raccoon -- had tried to get in to Kitty, and clean out the honey, which meant it was time to do something. I called Sharon, who was down with hellflu, and got the greenlight from her.
Lorraine and I moved the empty kitty hive into the garage.
And then I had to decide what to do with the honey in Kitty. I went onto the Internet to find out if there was anything I could do that didn't involve buying centrifugal honey extractors, and learned that if it was honey I wanted, a bucket and some cheesecloth would do just fine...
So I mashed up the leftover comb and honey into a bucket, tipped the resulting scary-looking gloop into the cheesecloth at the top of another bucket...
Then nipped out to the garage every three or four hours to add more gloop as the honey trickled through the cheescloth into the bottom bucket.
And this morning Lorraine came over and we took the cheesecloth off bucket #1 and poured the honey into jars. Astonishingly, the cheesecloth had done its job, and we had wax and crud on the outside of the bucket and clear honey on the inside.
There's probably the same amount again still in the garage right now trickling through the cheesecloth into buckets.
The honey is wonderful. It tastes like wildflowers and spring. I'd rather have Kitty out there filled with bees (although the Kitty hive that swarmed is undoubtedly fine, in a hollow tree somewhere), but the honey's good too.
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The Graveyard Book is pretty much ready to be copy-edited now. I was scared that my editors in the UK and the US would point out somewhere I'd messed up that would need a whole new chapter (much as Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury did when she read Coraline in manuscript and said, "It needs a chapter where she confronts the Other Father, who in what you've given me just goes offstage and stays off," and I said "oh Bugger it does, doesn't it?" and had to go and write it. I mean, I knew about the scene in the cellar. I just thought I could get away with not having written it.).
But nothing like that happened. Sarah's biggest concern was a scene where a fifteen-year old girl accepts a ride from a stranger (obviously, she shouldn't have, but Sarah wanted it to be convincing that she did) and Elise only had small points -- the biggest change was that she wanted a sentence removed that spelled out how ghouls got their names, which I'd put in slightly under protest because a few people had been confused as to whether the small, leathery corpse-eaters were the real Duke of Westminster, 35th President of the United States, Bishop of Bath and Wells, or not, and I was happy to see it go away again.
I got an email today from Diana Wynne Jones saying "It is FABULOUS, WONDERFUL, TRIFFIC. One of your best! I love it," which is better than gold and rubies (and if Diana doesn't like something, she tells me). Jon Levin at CAA, my long-suffering movie agent, is starting to fend off the phone calls as people call him wanting to see it, and we have to decide who we're showing it to, which is a good problem to have.
Everything's sort of accelerated right now. The book comes out in six months (30 Sept in the US, a month later in the UK), and there's not really much time for the normal routes of book promotion.
I'll see if we can get a countdown to publication date timer for the front page of the website. I don't think I've had one of those since American Gods.
Over the last few months people have written in and asked what kind of a book The Graveyard Book is, whether it's for kids or adults, all that sort of thing. And I haven't answered because it wasn't actually finished, and I figured I'd find out when it was done. And it's done now.
I think The Graveyard Book is a book for pretty much all ages, although I'm not sure how far down that actually starts. I think I would have loved it when I was eight, but I don't think that all eight-year olds were like me.
It has a protagonist who is about eighteen months old in the first chapter, four in the second chapter, six in the third, and so on, until, by chapter eight, he is all of sixteen years old. There's no sex in it and no swearing. There is some really scary stuff in there, and a few of the people (all adults) who have read it have written to tell me they cried in the last chapter.
But it's not a children's book. It's a book that I think children will enjoy, but there's also stuff that's there for adults too. It's a book about life and death and making families. It has ghouls in it, and the Hounds of God, and the Sleer, and the Indigo Man, and a lot of very dead people.
It's not that easy to describe. I'm reminded of Kim Newman's review of Anansi Boys, which began "Anansi Boys is one of Neil Gaiman's books for grown-ups, which means that it's a lot less ruthless than the material he produces for children", and it's a very true observation. From that perspective, it's definitely one of my children's books.
I finished writing it a few nights ago -- although I'm currently obsessively reading it and fiddling with it, cleaning up typos and places where what's written simply isn't what I meant, or where sentences are clunky, or where it needs help, or where I contradict myself, or where continuity goes a bit odd (the graveyard's Egyptian Walk was the Egyptian Alley the first time we visited it; I just noticed a character who doesn't smile grinning widely, and I am painfully aware that I start too many sentences with "And then" so I'm searching for them and leaving the ones I like and rewriting the rest (or, more usually, just deleting 'And then' from the start of the sentence.)
This came in yesterday and made me smile...
Dear Neil,
I was completely captivated by your short story, "The Witch's Headstone." Is this a one-off, or is there a full-length book about Bod and Co. upcoming at some point? I really hope so, as the premise and characters are wonderful!
Thanks, Kate
'The Witch's Headstone' is actually chapter four of The Graveyard Book. So yes, the full length book about Bod and Silas and the rest of them is definitely on the way. 30 Sept 2008 in the US, a few weeks later in the UK.
And the next one was,
I was thinking the other day about the novel writing process. When you write a novel, do you start with chapter 1 and write all the way until the last chapter chronologically, or do you skip around. For instance, you're writing chapter 7, but you have a great idea for chapter 11, do you then go on and write your idea for chapter 11, eventually ending up in chapter 12 with the plan to eventually come back to chapter 7 and try to steer events toward that end?
Mostly I start at the beginning and keep going until the end, because it makes it easier to find out what happens next. Also I come from a comics tradition in which I can't skip ahead and write the last part because someone's waiting for me to write the first part right now so they can draw it.
The Graveyard Book, though, had a few false starts over the years, and didn't work. So I wrote Chapter Four first, to get a sense of what was happening in the middle (easier because each chapter is a self-contained story) and what Bod was like when he could talk, and what the voice of the book was (again, a bit odd, as each chapter has a slightly different voice, but it gave me a feeling for what I was doing that made starting at Chapter 1 easier).
If I have an idea for Chapter 11 while I'm writing Chapter 4 I'm likely to scribble down the idea (because I forget things) but less likely to write the whole scene. Some writers do. I don't.
The truth is, as the truth about so much is in writing, that there are no rules, and even a writer who normally does things one way doesn't have to be consistent. You do what produces pages. You keep moving forward. If I'm really stuck on a scene I'll sometimes skip to the next scene I DO know how to write, and often by the end, the solution to the one I was stuck on is obvious, or I can't even remember why it was a problem.
Neil,
I'm glad to KNOW for SURE that you are working on a new novel. But I have just one question. Is it going to be scary, funny, action, or drama?
Write me back,
Joseph Deane - #1 Fan
All of the above.
Lots of scary. Some funny (some of the funniest stuff is also the scariest, though). A fair amount of action. Some drama. No kissing. Late nights. Fish and chips. A werewolf, a vampire, an Assyrian mummy and a small pig. A knife in the dark.
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I just learned that my old friend Steve Whitaker is dead. Steve was a terrific artist and a good guy, kind, helpful, generous, all that -- he's best known in the US for his work colouring V for Vendetta.
He would have been the colourist on Sandman but he never turned in the sample pages he was given to colour, because they weren't quite perfect yet, and by the time he was nearly satisfied with them someone else already had the job. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about comics, about the history of comics, about strip cartoons, from Steve. I wish he'd been willing to draw more, to let it go, to feel more comfortable making mistakes in public. Mostly I wish he'd done more comics.
Oh, and frequenters of Amazon with purchase histories including your books should keep an eye on their Gold Box personalized section. Random stuff keeps popping up there at 10% off Amazon's normal price (5% off Gold Box discount + 5% off for pre-order), including Absolute Sandman Vol 3, The Dangerous Alphabet, and The Graveyard Book.
Bill^2
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And although it doesn't officially come out for another ten days, Odd and the Frost Giants is now out there in the UK, as I learned from this:
Hi Neil,
I just finished reading "Odd and the Frost Giants" and find it a nice little piece. Clearly structured for the younger readers and I am already looking forward to reading it to my 7 year old daughter. I just wanted to tell you that I did thoroughly enjoy it.
Greetings from Edinburgh Dietmar
Here's the Amazon Uk link. (The Amazon US listing is a mistake. It won't be out in the US this year.)
The Graveyard Book is so close to being finished I can taste it. All the writing's been done and now it's a matter of typing it and reading it and fixing it. (Interestingly, and rather to my surprise, The Graveyard Book looks like it's going to come in at about 67,000 words. Which is a nice meaty read, and about 12,000 words longer than Stardust.)
I wasn't going to blog at all as right now the web is problematic and I am on deadline, but just as I put up the thing yesterday about free ebooks being better than soup I thought these two news items were worth mentioning...
I've uploaded much of the DreamHaven audio CDs to Last.FM, at http://www.last.fm/music/Neil+Gaiman. Some of the tracks are downloadable, others are playable but not downloadable, and of course you can buy the actual CDs from DreamHaven's online shop at www.neilgaiman.net . (Currently trying to figure out why Telling Tales keeps coming up as Unknown Album, but I'm sure it'll get fixed, sooner or later.)
Chapter 8 of The Graveyard Book is nearly written. He's got about 20 feet left to walk.
Normally when I finish a book, it's over. Maybe there are more stories, but it's done. I get letters from kids asking why I don't do another Coraline book, and maybe she's at school and the Other Mother could be pretending to be her teacher and... but I can't really imagine writing another Coraline book. It's done.
The Graveyard Book on the other hand, seems to be generating other stories in my head. I guess I'm really interested in what happens to Bod next. Interesting. I suppose it's understandable -- my model was The Jungle Book, and there was The Second Jungle Book. (Although The Graveyard Book also reminds me in odd ways of Kim. And I always wanted to know what happened to Kim next.)
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This made me smile:
Dear Neil,
I am just wondering if the Birthday Thing voting will include superdelegates? Perhaps other famous authors, some bigwigs at Harper Collins, etc. I mean, you wouldn't want to leave voting to the people, would you?
Thanks!
I'm happy to watch democracy in action here. It's one person-who-clicks, one vote.
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Hi Neil,
I hope all is going well with the new book, I am looking forward to reading it immensely when it is published.
I would be interested to know if you have kept any of the original art from The Sandman over the years. I know that the artists sell their work on after DC have finished with it and wondered if you requested certain pages or covers or were gifted them by artists, if so which page or pages do you cherish most.
Best Regards
Paul
I don't have much -- off the top of my head (and I'm sure to leave something important out) a couple of Dave McKean covers, a page from Colleen Doran's lovely Facade, a Shawn MacManus page from Three Septembers and a January, a Jill Thompson Brief Lives page, the double page of the amazing Michael Zulli sea serpent, the final Death and Dream spread from the Kindly Ones, and the first page of the last issue. I have a lovely Mike Dringenberg Sandman painting he did as an advert for a signing at Night Flight in Utah. A Jay Muth Dream pin-up. A Moebius Death I bought from a gallery. And, apart from an amazing page by Michael Zulli that was a test for the pencils effect of The Wake (which I should talk to DC about reproducing in the last of the Absolute Sandman volumes) I think that's about it.
And I treasure them all.
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It's Valentine's Day tomorrow. If you're stuck for a present, you could always get this for the object of your affection...
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What kind of book is The Graveyard Book? What type of audience is it for? Older? Younger? I know you're not finished with it yet, but will it be a novella a la Stardust or a novel a la American Gods?
It will be about twice the length of Coraline -- a novel, not a novella.
It's eight stories, each more or less complete in itself, each different in tone, each story set about two years after the one that precedes it, that placed side by side make one big story. Or I hope they do.
I think it's "all ages", whatever that means. It's a book I wish I'd had as a kid, and had always imagined as a children's book, but the reaction from the adults who've read it so far is scarily enthusiastic, and I'm not making any compromises in it. (Having said that, nobody has read any further than chapter six, except me, and Lorraine when she was typing it.)
Here's a youTube video of me reading Chapter Four in San Jose last year. You can make up your own mind.
And I can now, following a long phone call with Harper Childrens, answer yesterday's When Will The Graveyard Book Be Coming Out? question.
There will actually be a "One Day Laydown" in the US, which means that the book won't just wander into the shops over a couple of weeks. Instead there will be one day when it goes on sale everywhere. Probably bookshops doing on-sale-at-midnight, graveyard-themed, kick-off-Hallowe'en-month parties. All that sort of stuff.
And that on-sale date in the US will be SEPTEMBER 30th 2008.
Now I go back to finishing writing the book, 'cos if I don't finish it, those graveyardy bookshop parties are going to be pretty sad affairs.
(Also discussed, the reinvention and redesign of http://www.mousecircus.com so it's no longer a giant flash animation thing, but is something that I could link to and that's really a resource for teachers, librarians and kids.)
At the end of each chapter of The Graveyard Book I've drawn a little headstone, with the number of the chapter on it.
I just drew the little headstone for Chapter 7. After one hundred and eleven handwritten pages. There's a lot wrong with it, there are bits that need to be expanded (or, in the case of one scene, written) bits that mean that I need to go and change or expand moments earlier in the book. The prose is a bit more pedestrian than most of the other chapters, and I'll need to play with it or leave it. But it's done -- and it's huge. Which, for something that, if this was a film, would be the entire Third Act, is not really surprising. As I said, it's done, and I got back to the house from the gazebo to find my assistant Lorraine still typing out from photocopies what I'd handwritten earlier in the week, an hour after she would normally have gone home, and only still typing because she wanted to know what happened next. She glared at me, and told me I had to keep writing...
Right. Now I have to think about Chapter 8 a bit. I think I may need to sit down and list everything that has to happen before the book can end. Plotting by list can sometimes be extremely useful.
(The oddest moment of today was finding a slip of paper in The Graveyard Book book I'm writing in, on stationary from the hotel I was in in Budapest in June, which listed everything that needed to happen in Chapter 7, including the climactic denouement which I was very proud of having come up with last week. Not sure whether this says something about my rubbish memory, or about the sometimes inevitable nature of storytelling. As in, "Of course it went there, because that was where it was going to go.")
There's an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you've known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn't happen like you thought it would...
It's as if there's a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it's there but me.
Still on Chapter Seven of The Graveyard Book, but I'm well into the last half of the chapter, and it no longer feels like I'm walking towards the horizon, with the horizon retreating as I advance... I've written about eleven easy pages today, and cannot wait to get back to it. If I'm still awake and writing I may pull an all-nighter.
It barely feels like I'm writing it. Mostly it feels like I'm the first one reading it.
Pretty soon now, Mr Ketch will fall down a hole. Mr Dandy, Mr Nimble and Mr Tar will have a gate opened for them, and the man Jack will get just what he always wanted...
(And hurrah, he's also plugging Joe Hill, Clive Barker and John Wyndham. But it's the Lafferty that put the smile on my face. I'm going to give a talk in Tulsa this summer, mostly because I want to visit the Lafferty manuscripts...) (And here is Lafferty's own short story, "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", for those of you who want something to read.)
Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.
(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.
And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)
I am, as I said, really enjoying it.
Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.
The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)
...
One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 books every child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.
People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macbook Airs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)
Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs (edited to add: and it comes with a DVD drive and a hard drive that's double the size of the current Mac air. On the down side it came with Vista, which is, so far, like Windows XP only slower).
Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.
I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened to my family in World War Two. It was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was pretty much reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.
Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.
"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."
The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.
"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.
"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."
The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."
And she's right. The worst part, for me as I said in American Gods, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.
I just got an email from Teller pointing me to http://www.pennandteller.com/03/coolstuff/tellersmacbethindex.html which is the part of the website which is just Macbeth. It also includes NPR interviews and details on the whens and wheres (Red Bank NJ and then Washington DC).
I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue -- I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.
It's so cold that when I went to refill my pen yesterday I discovered that the ink had gone solid. (It's dried out, I thought irrationally, before I realised, it's ice) and it took me half an hour to defrost it on a radiator.
It's so cold that when people (or large dogs) come inside from the outside, they radiate cold across the room. It's like opening a fridge door.
On the other hand, as of yesterday, the book is being written again, and this makes me happy.
Everyone else is at the official Beowulf Junket London hotel, but I'm not. I'm in the hotel I was in when I was in London for Stardust stuff, because in a year when you've travelled too much it's sort of nice to be able to walk through a familiar door and have someone say, "Hullo Mr Gaiman. Back again?"
Let's see. Dinner with daughter, scary goddaughter and the webelf (retired) in Kikuchi's in Hanway Street, which I've meant to try for ages and which is every bit as good as I'd heard it was. (Over at Mark Evanier's blog you can see a photo from a couple of nights ago's dinner of two comics icons and a bloke in a leather jacket who needs a shave.)
Flew over on British Airways and it was brilliant. Much more impressive than Virgin Upper Class. (Ah well. Soon the movie world will be done and it'll be back to travelling NorthWest as per usual.)
So, Neil...when a lovely person like yourself, who has adapted a story into a screenplay, shows up at red carpet events...what's that like? Meaning, do all the A-listers like Angelina say, "oh, hey! Neil Gaiman - script writer!" or do they go, "oh, hey! Who are you again?" I can't imagine what that would be like. I don't know what would be more nerve-racking: people like John Malkovich saying, "hey, I know you!" or people like him saying, "hmm...not sure I know you, but hello." I think probably the former is a bit scarier, but that's just me.
Stay well,
Andrea the Demonic Ice Cube
I think this may be a redundant thing to say, but it depends on whether they know who I am or not, and they would know who I am either because we've physically worked together and met before or some other way. (The some other way can be anything from reading Sandman to reading this blog, or just being the parent of someone who does -- something that I was reminded of at the premiere when I was introduced to Kathlyn Beatty's mum and dad.)
The people who know who I am know who I am. The ones that don't, don't. But I think that's true for whoever you are or whatever you do in life, and it isn't just about red carpets.
This isn't really a question, but didn't see any other contact info -- I ran across this item tonight for people who play Second Life: a free Beowulf avatar that looks pretty cool. Info here:
The webgoblin is going to be moving us from the ancient version of Blogger we're on to something newer, which should avoid some of the problems of recent days. It may create some new problems, so bear with us in the week to come, but we are hopeful that all will be well.
...
Since you are now on strike and cannot write or rewrite anything for movies or television, would it not be a wonderful time to write some comics?
Be a better time to finish a 5/8ths finished novel.
Where will I buy Odd and The Frost Giants since I live in the US? Will there be a distributor here? How long do I have to wait? Also, how long do I have to wait for The Graveyard Book? I'm aching to read new Gaiman.
Thank you, Mr. Neil.
Siri
You're welcome. Let's see... I don't know if Odd and the Frost Giantswill be published in the US. No plans for it at present, anyway.
As to how you'd get a copy if you aren't in the UK, I'd suggest either get someone in the UK to buy one for you, or simply order one from an online retailer. You'll be paying postage but it's still a 14,500 word book for $2 (that's about half the length of CORALINE) so it's not going to set you back much.
If you decide to use Amazon.co.uk -- which anyone with an Amazon account in any other country can use -- you want to use this link to the one pound copy of the book. They have -- and do not use -- another link up to a discounted twenty-five pound version of the book -- which is, I assume, and unless I hear otherwise, some kind of Amazon screw-up, although possibly they're discounting packs of 25 copies. [edit to add, guess confirmed. That's what it is -- a pack of 25 for retailers.]
Now I've finished writing Odd..., I've an essay on Jeff Smith's Bone to do and an introduction to a book about Frank McConnell, then I'm back full-time onto The Graveyard Book until it's done. Will probably fall off the earth in December to finish it.
I think The Graveyard Book will come out in about a year. Maybe a little less.
This is a message from your neighborhood Web Elf. Neil's dropped a line from his mysterious whereabouts to say he's finished chapter two of The Graveyard Book, entitled "The Friend," and is now sinking his wee teeth into chapter three, "The Hounds of God." (In the meantime, there's a snippet of video on YouTube where Neil talks about the origins of The Graveyard Book.)
There are some new Stardust stills over at Film Ick.
And here is a painting of Maddy. Because, really, you can never have enough paintings of Maddy.
This is a message from your neighborhood Web Elf. Neil is off waging a great battle against a pile of blank paper, and he has asked me to tell you he is Alive and Well. (For the curious, there's some rogue footage of Neil reading a chapter of The Graveyard Book on YouTube that may tide you over till he returns.)
For those who have been eagerly awaiting the audio for the Hugo-nominated How To Talk To Girls At Parties, you need wait no longer. Neil can be found reading it over in the land of Cool Stuff & Things, in mp3 format.
