I stopped daydreaming about being a famous rock and roll star about thirty years ago, when I stopped being in a band. And it's not a daydream that's ever come back. But I spent the night with friends in Cornwall and got to stay at http://martianengineering.com/residential.html (in the bedroom on the top right of the photos, oddly enough), which is the part of the studio that visiting bands stay when they record music, and I found myself wishing that I was a band so that I could come and stay here for three or four weeks and use all the cool buttons and switches and jaccuzzis and everything.
I suppose I could always come and stay anyway, but it wouldn't be the same.
Hey Neil,
I love your audio books. Listening to you reading is like having my Dad read me a bedtime story. Will you be reading The Graveyard Book and if so when will it be available?
Looking forward to it...
Thanks
Claire
Definitely. I'm really looking forward to reading it out loud. In a studio. (Daydreams for a moment about a world in which audio books sell in the hundreds of thousands and I get to come to Martian Engineering for three days with a director... Nope. It'll be at K.N.O.W. in Minneapolis, or in Harper Collins's studio in New York.) It will be out in the US and the UK to coincide with publication (30 Sept in the US, around Hallowe'en in the UK).
Dear Neil,
I am a huge fan of audiobooks (due to some vision problems) and I think you're the single best narrator I've heard -- and the only author reading his own work with a real talent for it. I want to thank you, first of all, for the accessibility of your work to those of us who listen instead of read. But I also really want to know how you learned to read so well. Is it something you're just good at, or did you learn to do it?
As I once said here, I think I owe most of it to Miss Webster, my elocution teacher when I was a boy, who cured my nine-year-old lisp within a few months and then over the next six years took me to LAMDA Gold Medal in "speaking of verse and prose"; and the rest to reading to my kids every night when they were growing up.
And I love doing it.
(Alan Moore's much better than I am, but no-one's dragged him into studios to do audio books, which is a pity. I'd love to hear an Alan audiobook of "The Voice of the Fire".)
To Mr. Gaiman,
My English teacher says that all good sci-fi exists to comment on society and its problems. As an author and a reader of science fiction, do you agree with this?
Not unless you change the words "all good" to "some". It's one of the many things that SF can do, and it's one of the many things that good SF can do. But there are lots of other things it does, including simply tell good stories (a valid end in itself).
Hi Neil
Where (if possible) could I find your podcasted interview about the Ramayana? Just curious.
-Paul
as soon as the Brtish Library puts it up (to coincide with their Ramayana exhibition, I expect) I'll link to it here.
Hi. I'm eighteen years old and entering college. I've wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember, and I was wondering if you could recommend any specific classes to take in college that could help me grow and develop into a successful author? Hi Neil - congratulations on being included in Weird Tales magazine's list of the 85 weirdest storytellers of all time!
http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/the-85-weirdest/
ps. You're not nearly as weird as Cirque du Soleil - they scare me. A lot.
best,
Kathleen
When I get home, I will tell Maddy. It will make her happy to know her dad is officially weird, rather than just, you know, informally.
The Baker Street Irregular in me took great pleasure in learning about the Giant Rat of Papua, Indonesia. All right, it's not Sumatra. But it's still in Indonesia. Yes, Indonesia is a really big place, and Papua is a long way from Sumatra, especially for a rat.
But still.
A Giant Rat! Near Sumatra!
Ahhhh.
...
The cough is no better, although I am industriously trying every remedy people have suggested and am now awash in honey, lemon juice, cider vinegar, chocolate, cayenne, and Guaifenesin-based cough syrup. Also sundry waters and teas and suchlike.
And I'm trying to use a wireless keyboard that randomly forgets to send characters to the computer. This is dead irritating.
...
Hi Mr. Neil,
All of the vlogging nerdfighters from Brotherhood 2.0 (www.brotherhood2.com) are taking part in an attempt to seize all of YouTube today with videos designed to get people to donate to various charitable organizations. I chose the C.B.L.D.F. and I would appreciate it if you'd link to me on your blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRpmypcOv9E
Happy Monday,
Jane
Consider it linked.
...
Dear Neil,
Pending the upcoming release of Stardust on dvd (which I'm most assuredly buying on release day and forcing my family to watch Christmas day), I'm reminded of the videos you posted a bit back about the writer's strike and how you're all lobbying to get a pay increase from dvd and tv sales. That being said, since your name is well-marked all over Stardust, book to movie and all that, do you still only get a miserable $0.02 from each dvd we buy? (and if so, would it be possible for the company to just buy a bunch of wholesale copies, maybe slap a signature - or not!- on them and resell for a higher price off the website, thus making a little closer to the amount you deserve and also happier fans?)
- Dani
That's really kind of you to be concerned. The truth is, if lots of you buy the Stardust DVD it will be regarded as a good thing and success, and probably make my life easier, but Charles Vess and I really got our share of Stardust back when we sold the film rights; and while it might be a really good idea to sell signed DVDs, I'm happier in the authoring business than I would ever be in the selling signed DVDs business. (Having said that, it's really not a bad idea -- and it's one that Peter Beagle did for The Last Unicorn DVD. Which, if you want a copy, you should order from http://www.conlanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc where you will get it signed, and Peter Beagle will get half of what you pay. Such a bargain.)
I'll happily point people at DreamHaven Books' NEILGAIMAN.NET website, which they created because I got tired of answering the question of "Where can I get this thing that you did..." with "From DreamHaven". It's the best selection of stuff by me (and connected to me, and by people who worked with me, and so on) out there, and they are nice people and it's a good shop. (And no, I don't get a cut. I'm just happy that the stuff is out there and I have somewhere to send anyone who asks.)
The thing I'm proudest of that I made this year is probably this:
because I love audiobooks, and it's nice that the first version of the complete text edition to come out in the US is in audio format. The abridged version of Neverwhere that Gary Bakewell read was the reason I've never again said yes to permitting abridged audio books (it started out really well, then you could feel the abridger's desperation in the last half as huge chunks of plot were tossed overboard), but it took a long time until the rights were free and we were able to do this as a complete and unabridged audiobook, with me doing the voices the way I hear them in my head, chewing the scenery as Croup and Vandemar.
The only time I ever met Arthur C. Clarke was about 22 years ago, in Brown's Hotel, when he was in the UK to help promote the film of 2010. I'd been reading him since I was a nipper, and some of his stories -- "The Nine Billion Names of God", for one -- were the essence of pure SF for me. It was a story that, even as I read it when I was nine or ten, I wanted to have written. Sense of Wonder, from someone who really is a world treasure.
(And it makes me very happy to see a new edition of one of the books I loved when I was 12 has just been updated and reissued -- Brian Aldiss's A Science Fiction Omnibus is now out from Penguin Classics. It may not be Brian Aldiss's 90th birthday -- he's only 82 -- but he's still writing, and is a treasure too.)
I'm feeling like a particularly bad sort of striker. The WGA strike was called the day before I left LA for the UK, and I've not been within a thousand miles of anywhere that we're picketing since. I get nice emails every day telling me where in New York the pickets are going to be, but New York's a long way away -- for the time span of most of the emails, it's not even in the same country as I am. And now I'm starting to get a bit frantic about the last couple of chapters of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, I may go to ground to finish them and vanish completely.
But in case anyone had any questions (and judging from the FAQ line, a few people have), yes I wholeheartedly endorse and approve of the strike, and, for whatever it's worth, voted for the strike powers (along with about 95% of the WGA membership, so no surprise there).
The bit of this that puzzles me most is that elsewhere in the world, the idea that the writers get paid when the work is watched online is one that's been taken for granted. If I wrote a TV series for the UK, I'd get less money upfront (not much less) but I'd be well recompensed for repeats, DVDs, internet downloads and so forth. (For whatever it's worth, I get 125 times as much in royalties on a hardback novel as I'd get on an equivalently priced DVD.)
At the very end of this post -- in case they break the various RSS feeds -- I'll put two video summaries of the issues. Partisan, of course.
...
Hi Neil, I went to see Beowulf as soon as it came out and I liked though it didn't quite match up to Stardust which blew me away. Anyway I thought I had found two mistakes in Beowulf.The first was the mountains of Denmark. This is something Denmark is famous for not having and is a major point for jokes by Icelanders as myself about the country which used to rule us. But then somebody pointed out on the imdb.com forums that though this does not conform to reality it does fit the poem which says: "'......sailors now could see the land, sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills, headlands broad.' "
Oral tradition does these things to poems. The version was probably not written down by anyone who had ever seen Denmark. Somewhere there might have been versions that speak of the great flatness of Denmark but those are forever lost to us. The other point might be a little harder to explain away by the poem. Iceland is mentioned at least twice in the movie which is out of place since it was probably not inhabited at that time nor is it likely that anyone who might have known of it would have called it by this name. Was it just your love of the country that made you mention it or are there other reasons? Or will you take the high road and blame your co-author? Icelanders will probably not be offended as they do like to hear the country mentioned. Anyway, thanks for writing this journal, it is especially fun for me since you tend to mention both folklore (I am a folklorist) and libraries (I am a library and information scientist) a lot and very favorably too. warm regards from Cork, Ireland, Óli Gneisti Sóleyjarson
Yes, the cliffs and high hills are from the poem.
In the script the line of dialogue was,
"They sing our shame from the middle sea to the ice-lands of the north."
I'm not sure whether that's what Anthony Hopkins actually says in the film, though. (And I have no idea where the just-as-anachronistic Vinland line from the Skylding's Watch came from, either. Wasn't in any draft by Roger or me.)
Incidentally, I thought I'd mention again that the Beowulf script book has a lot of the answers to this kind of thing in it, and that none of the descriptions of it currently online seem to explain what kind of thing the book is.
How does a script filled with guts and gore and f-bombs become PG-13 animated fare? Witness "Beowulf: The Script Book" (HarperCollins Entertainment, $16.95), which is actually two scripts, both by graphic novelist/author Neil Gaiman and Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary.
The first script is what you get when you combine the writer of "Pulp Fiction" (Avary) and the writer of "Sandman," "Stardust" and "American Gods" (Gaiman), with no rules or outside interference. The second is their draft of the final studio script.
Avary provides a Foreword and "Middleword" that describe his decades-long obsession with "Beowulf" -- a centuries-old, 3,000-line poem -- and his growing compulsion to re-create it onscreen. He eventually, wrenchingly, gives up on directing "Beowulf" in the face of Steven Bing's big bucks and director Robert Zemeckis' passion for the project. Gaiman gives the Afterword, in which he says of the introduction, "Roger Avary is much too honest about getting the script made. That's because Roger is a Holy Madman."
Gaiman and Avary first huddled in Mexico in 1997 to create the tequila-fueled first draft, in which the monster Grendel's penchant for human flesh knows no censorship. It does, however, follow the timeline of the original Old English poem.
Later, they have Zemeckis' input about taking cinematic liberties, along with his blessing to let their imaginations run wild, as his innovative Performance Capture animation process (as seen in "The Polar Express" film) knows no bounds.
The timeline and the setting is changed in the final draft -- instead of a story in two parts and in two countries, Beowulf begins and ends in King Hrothgar's court. Beowulf is awarded Hrothgar's throne rather than return home. Instead of meeting Beowulf as the strapping dragonslayer he becomes, we first meet old King Beowulf in his court ... and it's apparent you're in for a different experience than in the first script.
Just as intriguing as the script changes are those honest Avary moments. For instance, he finally finds peace with giving up his "baby" to Zemeckis when "Z." agrees to use Crispin Glover to portray the monster Grendel. The director had a contentious relationship with the eccentric actor during "Back to the Future 2," which resulted in Glover suing Zemeckis when the director inserted the actor's image into scenes. "To this day, the verdict protects actors from having their likeness used without their blessing," Avary writes.
Still, Glover got the job, and Zemeckis used his newfangled technology to make him into a monster onscreen, which may have been payback enough.
The book of "Beowulf" scripts also contains artist Stephen Norrington's renderings that were commissioned by Avary when he believed he would be directing his first version, further fueling the question asked by presenting two visions back-to-back: "What if ...?"
(The mention in the song, though, is completely my fault. Sorry.) ...
Hi Neil, I'm a Swedish fan who was hoping to buy some your books from Audible.com, but apparently Audible doesn't sell them to Swedish people. Can you tell me why this is? As there is no Swedish or even European reseller of your books in audio form, this mean nobody gets my money and I'm stuck listening to Orson Scott Card.
There are lots of rights issues around the world that mean that companies selling audio things like songs and books don't always sell everything everywhere. On the audio books, you can always buy the CDs and rip them yourself. And there are even some audio books that come with MP3 CDs so you don't have to rip them, just drag them to your MP3 player.
Neil, I was wondering what you thought about Philip Pullman's books and and the controversy in the united states about the new movie based on his first book. Jessica
I like Philip Pullman very much, I like his books ditto, and I think the controversy is stupid. Does that help?
Following on from yesterday's post, I was looking for a link, and wound up on a five year old post from this blog. And on rereading it it made me smile, enough that I thought I'd repost some bits of it here. All of my guesses were interestingly wrong.
(The unnamed Zemeckis project I refer to is The Fermata; the unnamed Dave McKean thing would have been the as-yet unwritten and untitled MirrorMask.)
Last night's e-mail brought Henry ("Nightmare Before Christmas") Selick's second draft script for CORALINE. Henry's first draft of the script was utterly faithful to the text of the book -- if anything, too faithful. This version was both looser and truer to the spirit of the book -- he'd added a character, made the beats in the first act slightly different, but the changes were the all kind of changes that need to exist when translating a book into a film, and the core characters -- Coraline, her parents, the Cat, the Other Mother -- and the story are still just the same. Very creepy and a great deal of fun. Apparently it was very well received by the studio.
It's weird -- there are so many movie projects out there based on stories or books of mine that I (a) lose track and (b) assume as a general rule for peace of mind that none of them will happen. But i think we're getting to the point where the probabilities are starting to suggest that something has to happen.
Really we need a tote board, with Coraline, Good Omens, Murder Mysteries, Stardust, Books of Magic, Neverwhere, Death, and (trailing way behind) Sandman on it, along with anything I've forgotten or intentionally not mentioned (like the Robert Zemeckis project, or the Dave McKean film), not to mention various of the odd projects I've collaborated on over the years, like Beowulf, or Interworld, which, just as I'm certain they're utterly dead, stir in their graves and yawn and blink and sit up and ask for coffee. I think Good Omens will probably come in first, but an outsider like Books of Magic or Murder Mysteries might come in and pip it at the post....
Proving that I was a very bad guesser. And five years later, Henry's Coraline is in production. (If you read this very technical blog entry you'll know a few things that haven't yet been widely announced.) Dave McKean's MirrorMask was the first film to come out. Stardust will be second, in August in the US, and Beowulf (which I'd assumed was dead back then) is third, in November.
Coraline will be fourth, around Hallowe'en 2008.
Books of Magic is currently in suspended animation -- as is, I guess, Good Omens, unless someone wants to give T. Gilliam 70 million dollars. Neverwhere, having been pretty much dead for years has recently pushed its way out of the grave and is currently lurching enthusiastically around the village terrorising villagers, or at least, I've just been asked to do a rewrite on a draft of the script I did in early 2000. And then, of course, there's still Death.
...
While this is a question that pertains to my "homework" (my Master's thesis, to be precise), I'm not asking you to do it for me. :) Mostly, I wanted to know, in your personal opinion (mostly for a quotable quote and another person besides Ursula K. Le Guin to cite on the subject, though she's wonderful in and of herself) whether you've noticed a difference in the reception of Fantasy in Britain and in America. Le Guin thinks there is (or was; that essay was written in the 70s), but you share your time with Britain and America enough that I figured you'd have a perception of the difference--if there is one.Thanks so much! Shiloh C.
I'm not sure which essay you're referring to, and I'm not really certain what you're asking. Are there differences between critics writing about fantasy in the US and the UK, or fans, or educated readers? Perhaps, but I don't really see enormous differences between them these days -- I suspect that the differences have been eroded somewhat in the last 30 years. I don't know if you surveyed Americans and got their favourite books, you'd get quite as much fantasy as you did when the BBC did it to the British(http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml) (I counted 37 fantasy titles. Your numbers may differ) but you might.
Hi Neil ; I purchased the audio collection from itunes a while back. My son just loves listening to it. His favorite is the Wolves in the Walls. The interview Maddy did was very cute. I was wondering if you plan on continuing to publish audio books, both children's stories as well as novels ? I completely agree with you that there is something special about an author reading their stories. Take care and best wishes ~ william
Definitely. Actually today I got CDs of both M is for Magic (read by me) and Interworld (read by Christopher Evan Welch and I'm listening to it as I type this. He does a lovely job). Later this year the full audio of Neverwhere should come out.
Here's a taster for the Interworld audio. It's tracks 1 (which is the title and copyright), 2 3 and 4 of the audio CD, in MP3 format. It's the first couple of chapters...
The snow continues. It's been a lazy sort of blizzard, but I shovelled the path half a dozen times this afternoon. Driving was scary, school was cancelled. I took a few photos of the view from the back door but Blogger is being grumpy and won't upload them.
As many of you have seen, the Oracle (at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/8ball/) has mysteriously changed its appearance. The original shamanic and beturbanned wild-haired me will be back every February, and perhaps for special occasions, like my birthday. Other strange things will, I hope, appear in the 8-Ball for the appropriate season (will there be pumpkins in October? Little Interesting Skulls on National Little Interesting Skull Day? Snow at Christmas? Only the webelf knows for sure). (The current 8-Ball pictures a http://slaughterhousestudios.blogspot.com/ Lisa Snellings creation.)
Hi Neil, I just finished listening to the "Fragile Things" audio book. Do you have any further plans for Mr. Smith and Mr. Alice? They're two of the most fun (yeah, I feel guilty for saying that) characters I've run across in a long while. Hope this question hasn't been asked a zillion times before but I'll bet it has. Thanks, Brian Ford
I definitely expect to see them again, yes. If I write more of the stories of what happened to Shadow in the UK, Mr Smith will be in the background of that. But there's at least one story with both of them in it, and I really want to write that one as I know what it's about.
I should have mentioned here that FRAGILE THINGS got nominated for an Audie Award (given for audiobooks), as best short fiction collection. Which made me happy, although slightly uncomfortable as the Audiobook I did last year that I was really happy with was Stardust. But Fragile Things has me attempting a number of accents, and it has a much wider range of, er, things in it.
(http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/audio/stardust is the Stardust page, for the curious -- you can hear the first ten minutes or so of the first chapter there. I can't see an audio page for Fragile Things on neilgaiman.com yet, but when one appears I'll mention it here.)
no matter how much, or hard, i shake my computer the oracular message is must really shake it. should i take that as my oracular message at this point? ellen schinderman
I suppose you could try clicking on the oracular ball and dragging it back and forth very fast instead of picking up your --
No. Scrap that.
Actually I really like the idea of you shaking the computer. Keep it up. Maybe eventually something will happen...
dear neil: my mom & i are real big fans of yours! your blogs is the only one my mom allows me to read but those fangirls looked real scary!!!!!!! and that wasn;t a very nice photo of you sorry but does a girl have to wear only black and not smile to get your attention? i love you really !!!!!!! xxxPat
Thank you, Pat. I just checked with my daughters (both on the same couch I'm on, both on their computers), and Maddy says she wears mostly blues and Holly says she wears mostly greens and browns, and they both smile an awful lot, and they have my attention whenever they want it...
Good Sir,
Let us say that I have a name that while not bad, is not exactly fit to print. It is rather mumbly, and doesn't look quite right no matter how I arrange it.
Though I am fairly certain you don't use a pen name, I was wondering if you know anything about doing so.
Till again, Whatever Me I May Be
There's nothing wrong with pen names, and there are hundreds of reasons for deciding to use one.
Pick a name you like, avoiding on the way names like Stephen King or Charles Dickens, and put it on your manuscript. Let's say you choose "Gerry Musgrave" (which I think was the name I reviewed movies for Penthouse under, as I already had film review columns in other magazines.) You just type "Gerry Musgrave" on your cover sheet, and then send a cover letter telling the editor the name you want the cheques made out to. It's that easy.
Short and Sweet: Do you know when the other volumes of Absolute Sandman will be published? I can't find any info on them anywhere.
The next one will be out in October 2007. The third and fourth should I hope both be out in 2008.
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.)
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...
