American Gods Blog, Post 54

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

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

So, the new specifics:

FRIDAY, JUNE 29
7:00 PM

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

---

From American Gods, Chapter Five:

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

And then there was the carousel.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, I'd settle for brooding.

Really, I'd settle for not very goofy.

American Gods Blog, Post 54

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

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

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

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

American Gods Blog, Post 47

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Gods photo session was nowhere near that painful.

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

The photographer was a very nice lady named Sigrid Estrada.

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

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

She looked very disappointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. That’s a special effect too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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