American Gods Blog, Post 88

The Message board on neilgaiman.com should be working on Monday Morning.

Today's Mail brought a Dutch contract for American Gods (I'm always faintly pleased when the Dutch buy the rights to a book, as they all speak terrific English and import UK or US editions anyway).

Therese Littleton's review of American Gods is now up at Amazon.com ... someone else who understood it.

I'm on tour from tomorrow morning, for six weeks....

... wish me luck.

American Gods Blog, Post 81

I got a lovely e-mail today from a friend in the UK who'd read American Gods (actually, I got quite a few lovely e-mails today from people who'd read American Gods). This was a lovely letter from someone who'd just devoured it and really enjoyed it (to the point where she seemed almost embarrassed about it -- she knew how long it had taken me to write, and how hard some of it had been to get to work, and she compared herself to someone who just finished off a huge meal that a chef had taken a long time and pains to compare.) I assured her that the main thing for me is just that people enjoy it.

This is from my reply to her:

Remember to tell people about it... I figure word of mouth is my biggest ally
on this one... Try and work it into casual conversation:

"Ooh, I'll have five of those Granny Smiths. And American Gods is a really good book."
"Of course I'd love to write an article for you on 'What the Modern Woman Really Wants'. Read American Gods. When's the deadline?"
"I'm saying that you shouldn't be charging me for a letter telling me that I have an overdraft when the account was actually well in the black. By the way, there's a brilliant book called American Gods you may want to check out."

Which, on a marginally more serious note, seeing the book will be out in five days, and some of you will actually get a chance to read it yourselves, is really my only request to any of you. If you like the book, tell people. Spread the word.

I am reminded of Geoff Ryman's lovely novel 253, which includes a woman whose job is to ride the tube train under london reading a paperback book with delight, occasionally exclaiming aloud on the brilliance and wonderfulness of the book she's reading. Cheap advertising.

American Gods Blog, Post 78

Spent a good part of yesterday trying to compile a bibliography of Books Consulted for American Gods for the not-yet-online neilgaiman.com -- a sort of astonishingly incomplete bibliography, because otherwise I would have had to try and catalogue half a library, so I'm trying just to list the books in the boxes I'd put in the boot of the car (that's the trunk, for americans) when I drove down to Florida to work on the novel, and the ones I tried to make sure were on the shelves in the cabin as I wrote the rest of the book... and the ones I filled my suitcase with when I went to spend two weeks writing in Las Vegas (an anecdote, it occurs to me, that I've not mentioned yet on this blogger. Oh well. Feel free to ask me about it if you are at one of the Q & A sessions between the reading and the signing.) I got down a lot of the myth and folklore books. Lots of mini-capsule reviews.Cannot for the life of me find the box of books on confidence tricks or coin magic.

.....

http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm has a review of American Gods up... (the version up earlier was an early draft of the review posted in error).

....

Spent a couple of hours today in the basement, pulling out foreign editions of books for neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure whether I was more amazed by the stuff I didn't know I had -- "Chivalry" and "Snow, Glass, Apples" in Japanese. A box of first editions of Angels and Visitations. A Large Print edition of Stardust. A folder of short stories and poems I wrote in my teens (didn't have the heart to burn them, but the idea of anyone ever actually reading them... ow!) -- or the stuff I knew I had but couldn't find -- The German Hardback of Good Omens, for example -- or the stuff I should have had but had never been sent -- like the swedish editions of Neverwhere, or the Spanish Smoke and Mirrors and Stardust.

American Gods Blog, Post 77

Strangely enough, I just realised that the last two posts haven't published, although Blogger obviously thinks they did. (note added later. They have now.)

Up early this morning to put comments on a zip disk filled with photos, going off to the neilgaiman.com site people. I don't yet have much of a sense of what they're doing or putting up, but we can modify it as we go. Yes, this journal will stay alive through the tour (for a start, it may be the easiest way to let people know what's happening in case of any sudden changes), and I expect it'll stay here and we'll link to it from neilgaiman.com...

Cheryl Morgan, who does a zine called Emerald City, e-mailed me her review of American Gods, which made me very happy, not because it was a good review (which it was, in both senses, favourable and well-written) but because Cheryl had clearly read the same book that I was trying to write. (As perhaps opposed to a recent interviewer, who kicked off with "Well, I've read your book. You must really hate America, huh?")

....

To summarise yesterday's lost annotation blog -- I want to make a space on neilgaiman.com where there can be, if people have any interest in doing it, annotations of American Gods. Partly because I'm sure that people will enjoy sharing knowledge ("Actually, both the Burma Shave ads Gaiman quotes are invented, and the Largest Carousel in the World does not play the Blue Danube Waltz..."), partly to help the Casual Reader ("Czernobog, also spelled Chernobog or Tcharnobog, was a dualistic slavic winter god now remembered chiefly for his appearance as the black winged thingie who appears in 'A Night on Bald Mountain' in the original Fantasia...") and partly as a help to translators around the world, who are good people with a thankless task, but who can sometimes get the wrong end of a stick, or just not know where to look for information.

(I saw a recent edition of Stardust -- and I will not embarrass anyone by saying from which country -- where "Redcap" was annotated as "Bow Street Runner, an early policeman" and "Unseelie Court" was demonstrated to be a nonsense word derived from the three English Words "Un" "See" and "Lie"; which showed me that the translator lacked a dictionary of fairies -- for a redcap is a rather nasty goblinish fellow, with teeth, while the Unseelie Court is the Court of all creatures of Faerie who are actively antipathetic to people, all the ogres and suchlike.)

Don't know whether we'll do it with a message board, an e-mail list, or an e-mail to a central e-mail address yet. I'll probably keep half an eye on it -- not to censor it (I have no problem with the 'Gaiman clearly has no idea how the internal combustion engine actually works, as what he describes here is impossible...' type posts) but just to make sure it doesn't contain information that is simply wrong. (Such things have been known. See "unseelie" above.)

Now to post this... and to hope it publishes...

American Gods Blog, Post 74

Let's see... First things first. The Beverly Hills Library just realised they'd double booked the evening of the 29th. So:

Due to scheduling conflicts at the Beverly Hills Library, the second of Neil Gaiman's two Los
Angeles-area events will be taking place at the originally-announced venue:

Friday, June 29, 2001 7:00 PM (PDT)

BOOK SOUP
8818 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90036
1-800-764-BOOK
.....

Also the Canadian signings at the bottom of the tour page are in Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria respectively.

And http://www.americangods.com/excerpt.html now has a real excerpt, with italics and everything.

The whole of Snow Glass Apples is now up at scifi.com -- http://www.scifi.com/set/playhouse/snowglassapples/ first and second parts...

...

Over at barnes and noble they've put up some very solid reviews, by Bill Sheehan and Sharon Bosley respectively.

"Like all such extravagant epics, American Gods is -- as Gaiman clearly acknowledges -- a vast, multi-colored metaphor that has much to say about our ongoing need for meaning and belief and about the astonishing creative power of the human imagination. The result is an elegant, important novel that illuminates our world -- and the various worlds that surround it -- with wit, style, and sympathetic intelligence, and stands as one of the benchmark achievements in a distinguished, constantly evolving career."

That's what Bill says. (He wrote a wonderful book about the fiction of Peter Straub, by the way.)

American Gods Blog, Post 72

So I spent today, as I will spend tomorrow, working on writing a circus. Something I've always wanted to do, which is why I'm currently writing it. (The young lady who runs the circus in question spent a year or so not taking no for an answer from me, and her persistance seems to have paid off. I spent most of today saying things to her like "Can you do this...?" and "What about this...?" and at one point phoning an expert and getting a hasty lecture on the fluorescent qualities of laser beams for something I started wondering about.)

Seeing I plugged a lot of other people's stuff yesterday, I thought I'd point out that The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish makes a really cool Fathers Day present. (Yay! to Amazon.com for featuring it on their kids page.)

And yay! to Morrow for getting out the American Gods newsletter.

Incidentally, if you've received the newsletter with the extract from American Gods in it, I should point out that in that extract, in the phrase "the titter skin-crawling horror" the word "titter" should be "utter", and for that matter that the sentence "He practiced coin tricks from a book lie found in the wasteland of the prison library; and lie worked out;" reads better if you replace the word "lie" with the word "he".

(I hope when they put up the www.americangods.com/excerpt page that they'll put it up from a clean text.)

....

More reviews today -- an enthusiastic one from the Barnes and Noble Explorations magazine, a nice mention from the NY Post, and one from Booklist, where the reviewer, who had loved Neverwhere and Stardust, hated it -- the kind of complete and entire hate where the reviewer doesn't even stop to point out the things he liked about the book, if there were any. He just seemed to wish it was another book entirely, a kind of "this is spinach and I don't like spinach" review: I think Coraline (which comes out next May) will be to his taste.

...

Also brought home several boxes of books, notebooks and such from the office, to compile a sort of core of references I used writing American Gods for NeilGaiman.com. It'll be incomplete, but a good place to start. (The single most useful reference work was probably A Dictionary of Northern Mythology, by Rudolf Simek.)

And I copy-edited a poster of my poem INSTRUCTIONS with art by Brian and Wendy Froud, which will be coming out this summer in a signed, limited edition, as a benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I think it's going to be popular, on the basis that my assistant and my daughter have both extracted a promise from me that they can get one when they come out, from the proof knocking around the office.

(if it's sucessful, we might do a poem I wrote for my goddaughter, as a benefit for RAINN...)

....

Ah, the Chapter One excerpt is up at www.americangods.com/excerpt.html (they left off the html on the newsletter). It's kind of odd -- all the italics have fallen out as well. I'll see if we can get a cleaner copy up...

American Gods Blog, Post 71

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.

The Writers Write website also has a review up, at
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm

....

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.)

American Gods Blog, Post 63

So the reviews are now coming in: a trickle at first, then around publication date there should be a flood, and then that'll die back to a trickle again.

The last time I listened to a review (good or bad) was in 1987, and it was a review of Violent Cases, my first ever graphic novel (with Dave Mckean drawing). The review said it was a good book, but it was too expensive. Dave and I took that to heart, and we went to the publisher, showed him the review, and asked him to lower the price.

So for the next two or three printings, the book was cheaper. We made a lower royalty. And no-one ever noticed or said anything, nor did anyone ever say anything when, with the next edition, the price went back up again. Which, I decided, was reason enough not to listen to reviews.

So this morning brought two reviews. One (positive) from the Summer 2001 BookForum, by Anthony Miller, who liked all the stuff on the road with gods in it but feels the book

"loses momentum when Shadow leaves the road and Gaiman turns his attention to small-town life"

and one (mixed) from an anonymous Publishers Weekly reviewer which says

"Shadow's poignant personal moments and the tale's affectionate slices of smalltown life are much better developed than the aimless plot ".

Which is the other reason not to listen to reviews. You'd go mad.

(My favourite line from PW: "Mere mortals will enjoy the tale's wit, but puzzle over its strained mythopoeia". My favorite from BookForum "His at once comic and melancholic imagination, and his facility for navigating the nocturnal and supernatural realms, evoke some of the great writers of the fantastic, from James Branch Cabell to Jorge Luis Borges, along with flashes of Flann O'Brien and glimpses of G. K. Chesterton.")

American Gods Blog, Post 41

There. I'm home again from all the travelling, and now it's time to recharge my batteries, as I'm pretty much spent. Tonight I holed up in a small recording studio, reading short pieces (and a long one) for the next spoken word CD. More recording tomorrow night. More Avalon tomorrow. And I think I may start the second draft of DEATH as soon as that's done: it'll be more fun than waiting to see if there's a strike coming or not.

And meanwhile, let's talk about the triumvirate of KIRKUS, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY and BOOKLIST reviews (and LIBRARY JOURNAL makes up a quartet).

Overall, I'm not sure how much influence reviews have in the real world. I've seen a publisher (Workmans) get scared by a bad review in the New York Times and more or less dump a book -- but the book itself - Good Omens - has gone on to become a perennial bestseller in paperback without them. (It's just about to be reissued in the US in a new cover.) And I don't know of any other publishers who have ever reacted to reviews at all, good or bad. (They send them to you, and I think they circulate them around in-house, and they are pleased by the good ones and try very hard to keep the bad ones from you. But they don't DO anything different when faced by bad reviews, if you see what I mean.)

More to the point, I've seen books with amazing reviews, not to mention awards and enthusiastic plaudits from enormously famous writers sell the same number of books, or less, as the ones that don't get the reviews etc.

(Are sales important? Not as such, but they're the only way authors and publishers have of keeping score and comparing things: without sales you'd not know that, for example, Neverwhere in mass-market paperback was much more successful than Stardust, although Stardust did slightly better in hardcover. I suspect that Stardust will be much happier in the forthcoming 'trade paperback', the larger format, with a cover that makes it look more like a fairy tale for adults -- which it is -- and less like a generic fantasy novel -- which it certainly isn't.)

Most reviews come out when the book comes out. This is sensible, and strongly encouraged by publishers (who warn reviewers on the slips that go out with review copies not to review the book before publication date) because otherwise people cannot read a good review and then nip immediately down to the bookstore and buy a copy of two of the book.

There are exceptions to the embargo, though. PW, Kirkus, and Booklist all print their reviews a good way before the books come out, because they are reviewing for the trade: for bookstores and for libraries and for insiders. And their reviews become the Early Word on the book. (On several occasions I've had a good Kirkus review of one of my books followed up by movie and TV people calling to get hold of it, so I assume that they read it too, as a good place to go hunting for what they call 'properties' and the rest of us call 'stories'.)

Kirkus, PW and Booklist each put a star beside books they especially like. People pay a lot of attention to the stars. (If ever you've seen the phrase "Kirkus starred review" after a quote on the back of a bookjacket, that's what it meant. )

Obviously, the reviewers don't always agree. Neverwhere got a great review in Kirkus, I remember, and a stinker in PW (which said that it just showed I was a comics writer and the book would have been okay if only it had had pictures). But since then I've been very lucky with my early reviews in all the periodicals (and/or lucky with my reviewers -- BOOKLIST names its reviewers but Kirkus and (I think) PW reviewers are anonymous, and so get to utter pronouncements like the voice of God).

So today my editor, Jennifer Hershey, phoned. She was just on her way to an international book fair in Jerusalem, but wanted to call and read me something before she left the office.

It was the Kirkus Review of American Gods.

She read it to me, then she faxed me a copy.

I'll put the whole thing down here, because this is the first official review the book has got, and by this point, I hope, you're as curious as I was. Obviously, it's copyright Kirkus reviews (although I don't think they'd mind me putting it up here). It's from the May 15th edition...
....................................

An ex-convict is the wandering knight-errant who traverses the wasteland of middle America in this ambitious, gloriously funny, and oddly heartwarming latest from the popular fantasist. (STARDUST 1999, etc.)

Released from prison after serving a three-year term, Shadow is immediately rocked by the news that his beloved wife Laura has been killed in an automobile accident. While en route to Indiana for her funeral, Shadow meets an eccentric businessman who calls himself Wednesday ( a dead giveaway if you're up to speed on your Norse mythology), and passively accepts the latter's offer of an imprecisely defined job. The story skillfully glides onto and off the plane of reality, as a series of mysterious encounters suggest to Shadow that he may not be in Indiana anymore -- or indeed, anywhere on Earth he recognises. In dreams, he's visited by a grotesque figure with the head of a buffalo and the voice of a prophet -- as well as by Laura's rather alarmingly corporeal ghost. Gaiman layers in a horde of other stories whose relationship to Shadow's adventures are only gradually made clear, while putting his sturdy protagonist through a succession of tests that echo those of Arthurian hero Sir Gawain bound by honor to surrender his life to the malevolent Green Knight, Orpheus braving the terrors of Hades to find and rescue the woman he loves, and numerous other archetypal figures out of folklore and legend. Only an ogre would reveal much more about this big novel's agreeably intricate plot. Suffice it to say that this is the book that answers the question: When people emigrate to America, what happens to the gods they leave behind?

A magical mystery tour through the mythologies of all cultures, a unique and moving love story -- and another winner for the phenomenally gifted, consummately reader-friendly Gaiman. (Author Tour.)
.................................................................

And it has a star beside it.

American Gods Blog, Post 17

One of the best things about finishing a book, is there are things you haven’t been able to read that now you are.

When I’m writing a book – or even, when I know that one day I’m going to be writing a book – any fiction in possibly a similar area becomes taboo.

If my next book were to be a fictional life of Marco Polo, I’d not read any fiction to do with Marco Polo or Kublai Khan (and would probably have stopped reading it about five years ago): partly because I don’t want to see how someone else did that idea, and partly because if someone did do the same thing that I was going to do, I don’t want that route closed off because someone else has taken it already. It just keeps things simple.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be accused of plagiarism. I’ve still never read Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld, although I love Chris Fowler as a writer, and have had a copy of Roofworld on my shelves since before it came out (they sent me a proof). But I knew I wanted to do a magic city under London novel, and Roofworld looked too close to what I planned to do for comfort. I left it unread, as I left Mike Moorcock’s Mother London, and several other good books. Books I know I’d like I haven’t read (and still haven’t, since I want to go back to London Below one day).

One of the joys of finishing American Gods is that there are books I can read, and books I can reread. John James’s Votan, for example. A book I read almost twenty years ago, and that I’ve wanted to reread for ages but didn’t dare to, as I knew it had a scene I was going to have to do in American Gods. And when I finally read it, last week, I was pleased that the two scenes didn’t resemble each other in any real way, and more pleased that twelve years spent getting as deeply into Norse stuff as anyone who doesn’t do it for a living had left me with an enormous appreciation for the brilliance of James’s novel. (It’s about a wily second century Greek trader in Germany who becomes Odin – Votan – and to whom all the Norse myths happen, or at least, the stories that will become the Norse Myths. Hilarious, moving and, along with its sequel, Not For all the Gold in Ireland, the best mythic-historical fiction out there, apart from Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mist sequence, and maybe some Robert Graves.)

And now I’m reading a book I’ve wanted to read for five years, Martin Millar’s Good Fairies of New York. I read the back jacket copy when I bought the book, and ruled it off limits as it might have strayed into American Gods territory. Reading it in the bath today, it doesn’t. It’s just delightful Martin Millar, as funny and wise and solidly written as he gets at his best.