a few final copyright thoughts before we leave the subject entirely

I ought to be proofreading The Graveyard Book. I used to love proofreading, but that was many a year ago now, especially as I have both the US and the UK versions to proof, so anything one of them picks up I have to consider for the other, and I have to read both versions back to back, not because they are different but to see what the copy editors did on different sides of the Atlantic. (Shakes head, ruefully...)

The May event at MIT isn't sold out, it's just the tickets were offered to MIT students/staff first. This according to friends of mine at Pandemonium and The Million Year Picnic, both of which are now selling tickets.

A quick Google gave me http://community.livejournal.com/millionyear/33091.html
with lots of information on the MIT event.

If you want to call to reserve tickets (617-492-6763), you must pick them up within 48 hours. No call-in reservations for tickets after May 14th. Four tickets maximum.

I've noticed you're on the speakers' list for the Children's Book Council Australia's conference in May. I was just curious if you'll have time to do a signing in between your two gigs.

If not at the CBCA, do you have plans to do one while in Melbourne this time around at all?

Thanks in advance

-S

If you click on WHERE'S NEIL it will take you to http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/ and you will learn about the three Melbourne, two Sydney and one Hobart events next week. And to answer some other frequently received questions, I do know that it's been twelve years since I was in Perth and a decade since I signed any books in New Zealand, yes. I am also aware that it is unfair on the people in Brisbane and Adelaide that I'm not signing there, and it's even harder on the people in Canberra because, having only one body and two potential locations it could be in, I picked Hobart (where I had not been for a decade) rather than Canberra (where I was in July 2005).

I am compelled, after reading your thoughts on the JK Rowling Lexicon case, to try to sort out in my head if it bears resemblance to your dealings with certain characters you created for MacFarlane's Spawn series. Obviously the cases are different, but I see vague similarities.

While it (the lexicon) existed only on his website, and no one was profiting from it, then I see no issue naturally. The minute it gets published in book form, he stands to make oodles of money from it. Let's face facts here, people would buy it in droves. In that case I feel that he either HAS her permission to do so, or does not. If he does not (which clearly he doesn't), then does it not put him in the wrong? Does he not require her permission to make money with characters and places and ideas she created? Should he not have approached her perhaps to begin with?


I just saw these vague similarities. I realize he is not taking the created characters and making new stories with then (ALA MacFarlane was doing), and taking credit.......it just seems wrong to me. If it's a poorly done book, then that reflects on, not only her, but her world as well doesn't it?


They're similar only, I suspect in that at the end of the day they aren't about the things that people (including the people who were involved in the litigation) thought they were about. I thought the McFarlane case was all about Creators' Rights, and trying to make Todd keep his promises, and his copyright filings claiming that he'd written the issues that I'd written, and all sorts of suchlike things. I think in Todd's mind it was all about proving that He Made His Rules And Was Really Tricky And Everybody had To Do What He Said, or something like that.

But really, in the end, in the appeal court, after the trial jury had delivered their verdict and I'd won all 17 counts on the case, it all came down mostly to this: does the clock start ticking on a copyright breach case when the breach is committed or when it's discovered. There's a three year statute of limitations on copyright claims. In 1996 Todd had filed his copyright claims , claiming to have written Spawn 9 and the Angela series, then three years later, in 1999, he let me know he wasn't going to honour any agreements he'd made with me for the stuff I'd created. Had my clock already run out? His lawyers were certain it had, and even some of my lawyers thought I was on shaky ground.

And the Posner legal decision at the Appeal was, essentially, nobody is expected to patrol the copyright office looking for breaches, and the clock only started ticking the moment I found out about it. (The whole Posner decision is up at http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/CR1FGCDA.pdf and is really pretty interesting reading.)

In the Time-Warner-Rowling-Vander Ark case it's not about "is he making money from her ideas?" or "will this stop fan websites?" or any of that stuff that people are talking about on line. It doesn't matter from a legal perspective that Ms Rowling was doing or planning her own encyclopedia, or that the money is going to charity, or any of that stuff, although I'm sure Ms Rowling feels it does (because I would, if I were her).

As far as I can see it's only about a couple of really grey areas of copyright law -- I suspect, and I am SO not a lawyer, that it will come down to whether or not what Mr Vander Ark had done to Ms Rowling's work in his Lexicon was sufficiently "transformative" as to render it a new work.

There's an online annotation of Sandman. If the people who did it -- or if someone else -- decided to publish it, I couldn't stop them even if I didn't want it to come out, even if Les Klinger had finally persuaded me to get DC Comics to let him do an official Annotated Sandman. (Someone asked when Les's Annotated Dracula comes out -- it'll be in October 2008.) That's because it's obviously a transformative work -- it's based on my work, but it springs off from it.

If someone did a website in which everything in Sandman is listed in alphabetical order, as a concordance or lexicon... whether or not I was going to do one doesn't matter. Whether or not someone else is making money off my work and words and ideas doesn't matter. Whether it's a good lexicon or a bad lexicon doesn't matter. Whether it quotes me extensively may or may not matter (how extensively I'm quoted is a matter of Fair Use, but paraphrase me and you are home and dry on that count). What matters is whether it sufficiently transforms what I've done into something else by taking those entries and putting them into alphabetical order. How much original work is being done? The King James Bible is in the public domain. If you made a lexicon or concordance of the King James Bible, listing every person and place mentioned in there, something that would take you a lot of time -- you could copyright it. If someone copied it -- simply took your King James Bible Lexicon book and put their name on it -- could you sue them? Should you?

And, personalities aside, and all the newspaper commentary and most of the bloggage and online opinions, that's the kind of thing that this case will come down to in the end.

Hi Neil,

Like yourself, I am a fan of Harlan Ellison. However, as a feminist, I get really sick and tired of Ellison's misogyny.

I was wondering how you reconcile the fact that Ellison is your friend and an awesome writer with the fact that he can be really sexist. I'm especially curious because you have two daughters. (And one that went to a women's college! I went to Mount Holyoke, myself.) What do you tell them when Ellison makes denigrating remarks about women? I sincerely hope that you do more than merely laugh it off and regard it as "Harlan being Harlan." Even though he's funny as Hell, his attitude is really damaging. Besides, relying on sexist humor is beneath him and I really don't understand why he does it. I dislike it when Ellison claims to use such humor in a reclaimatory way. He's a white man -- he cannot reclaim sexism on the behalf of women.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question.

Best,

Emily Neal


You know, in my presence over the years Harlan has made some astoundingly denigrating remarks about studio executives, the Walt Disney company, a number of restaurants we've eaten in, several eastern European publishers, food in England, the English (except -- possibly, sometimes -- for me and his wife), editors, other publishers, a (male) science fiction critic, television producers, Fantagraphics, friends of mine, movie producers... the list goes on and on. When Harlan's rude about my friends in my presence I tend to point out they're my friends and he's being a twit, and he either looks shamefaced or he tells me I'm an idiot for liking so many people. There are lots of people, and some classes of people, like studio accountants, that Harlan has been less than civil about. I don't ever remember "women" as a class being on the list. (I remember him once being extremely rude about a female studio head, but that was in her role as a studio head, not in her capacity as a woman.) Which means I read your letter and I'm as puzzled as if it were asking how I can stand Harlan's attacks on people of colour, or the left-handed, or jazz musicians.

As for "Harlan being Harlan," I'm reminded of what the producer of the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, Erik Nelson, said, when I told him that I thought the film was unbalanced, and he should interview some of Harlan's enemies. He said, "That's what Harlan said. I told him, 'Harlan, you're your own worst enemy'."

...

Off to Australia on Saturday...

American Gods Blog, Post 24

Hard work doing the US galleys. They were waiting for me when I got up Saturday morning, went off first thing this morning (Monday) and I didn’t do anything else over the weekend, except go and eat some nice sushi.

Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment.

None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler...

F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught.

Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me.

I changed the copyedited ‘vast hall of death’ back to ‘vasty hall of death’ which was what I’d originally written; it’s a quote from Matthew Arnold, which was in its turn quoted by Roger Zelazny, and I think that people can get the idea that vasty’s an archaic form of vast.

Not sure of the logic that has people talk about a “motel 6" or “drive down Highway 14" but also talk about “Comparative Religion One-oh-one”. But I just put a query next to it and left it.

I am, having read my book three times in three versions in the last three weeks, checking everything, finally feeling very done with it. Noticed some sloppy sentences this time through, ones that Fowler would have tutted at. If I could fix them with a word, I did; if they needed to be completely rewritten, I left them, figuring that perfection can wait. Maybe for the next book.
...

The first of the blurbs is in. It’s from Peter Straub, who says, in an e-mail to my editor, Jennifer Hershey...

Dear Jennifer --

Many thanks to both you and Neil for sending me the early galley of
AMERICAN GODS. I think it is a terrific book, clearly Neil's best to
date, and am very happy to offer the following quote:

From his first collection of short stories, Neil Gaiman has always been
a remarkable, remarkably gifted writer, but AMERICAN GODS is the first
of his fictions to match, even surpass, the breathtaking imaginative
sweep and suggestiveness of his classic SANDMAN series of graphic
novels. Here we have poignancy, terror, nobility, magic, sacrifice,
wisdom, mystery, heartbreak, and a hardearned sense of resolution - a
real emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterful
storytelling.

Will that do? It's a wonderful novel, and I congratulate both you and
Neil for bringing it into being.

Peter Straub
...

Which has me happy as a sandboy. (What is a sandboy? Why are they so happy?) I guess because I really wanted American Gods to be a book that had the power and scale and resonance that Sandman did (and which, by their nature, and not necessarily to their detriment, neither Neverwhere nor Stardust could have had -- they were intrinsically smaller, lighter things). That it’s done that for one reader – and that that one reader is a writer of whose work I have been a fan since I read Shadowlands at about 16 – makes me feel like the last two years of hard writing really had a point.

...

The permission came in on the Tom Waits song Tango Till They’re Sore, and I got the first word from the Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood people, and I sent them the follow-up fax. Waiting on e.e. cummings still. But the permissions should be done VERY soon.

...

And an e-mail in from a correspondent who shall remain anonymous:

I've looked at some of your journal and I'd never realised the actual effort
and workload that goes into it AFTER the book is 'written'. Nor why it took
so long between concept and hardback appearance - until now that is. Is
your brain "American Godded Out' or still on an enthusiasm roll?

Dear Anonymous of New Zealand. I’m still enthusiastic. But I’m very pleased I don’t have to read it again this week.

And I’m pleased that some of the mechanics of taking a book to publication are coming out in the journal. People know that authors write books, and then books appear on the shelves. Some of them are bestsellers, and some aren’t. But that’s all most people know. One reason I liked the idea of doing this journal was being able to explain the stuff that happens between handing in the mss and publication. (That there are no authorial grumbles about either the UK or the US book covers is very unusual -- I’m happy with them both and they both look like covers for the book I wrote.)

Someone on The Well asked. Why don’t writers just edit their own books, kinda like musicians who produce themselves?

And the answer to that, Bill Clintonlike, is probably, it depends what you mean by Edit.
Edit means so many things. Editors do so many things.

In the US they like to get more involved. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. Michael Korda once told me it all dated back to Jacqueline Susanne, who wrote books that were readable, but all typed in upper case in something that didn’t have a lot to do with English; so editors began getting their feet wet and getting involved in the writing process, making suggestions for things to cut, rewriting where they had to, and so on.

It’s certainly true that UK editors tend much more to look at a manuscript, ask themselves “is this publishable?” and if the answer’s yes, they publish it.

(In my case, the best thing an editor can do while I’m writing something is to keep cheerful and encouraging, say nice things, and keep getting words out of me by hook or by crook. I’ll sort out the problems for the second draft.)

Then there are copyeditors. Most editors now are too busy to actually spend 30 plus hours reading a manuscript with a blue pencil scrutinising each wayward comma. But, they figure, somebody has to do it.

In each case, the main thing an editor is meant to do when they do their jobs is to make you look good. I think the analogy is much less a musician producing her own records, and a lot more like an actor doing his own make-up and wigs, or an actor in a one man show doing her own lighting. Sure, you can do it yourself, but it’s much easier, and you’ll get a better look, if you get another pair of eyes and hands in to do it.

Editors make you look good. That’s their job. Whether it’s by pointing out that the relationship between the lead character and his father was never satisfyingly resolved, or by pointing out you’ve changed the spelling of the name of the landlady between her two appearances. Like the lighting guy, they are another pair of eyes.

And I always like another pair of eyes. If I’m writing a short story I’ll send the first draft out to a bunch of friends for feedback; they may see things I’ve missed, or point out places I thought I’d got away with something that I hadn’t. Or tell me the title is crap. Or whatever. I listen, because it’s in my best interests to listen. I may listen and then decide that, no, I like my title, and the relationship between the protagonist and his father is just what I want it to be, or whatever, but I’ll still listen.

(Something I learned ages ago. When people tell you there’s something wrong with a story, they’re almost always right. When they tell what it is that’s wrong and how it can be fixed, they’re almost always wrong.)

Of course, there are authors out there who are not edited. This is not necessarily a good thing. I read a bestselling book by a bestselling one of them. He had a flashback scene in which one of the neighborhood kids was wandering around, twelve years before he was born. An editor would have put a pencil mark beside it and said “Do you mean this?” and the embarrassed author would have admitted that, no, he wasn’t thinking, he just mentally thought of the names of some of the kids and forgot that one of them would have been minus twelve in that scene, and fixed it. So I don’t plan to become one of the great unedited.

I would say that when you find a good editor, you stick with them; and when you find a good copyeditor you stick with them as best you can.

(Often, in the US, they won’t tell you who the copyeditor is. They are more anonymous than taxmen. Apparently, there have been too many occasions in the history of publishing of overstressed authors ringing up copyeditors at 2:00am and screaming “I’m going to kill you, you bastard – how dare you change my noble and beautiful forgot to an inspid and lustreless forgotten?” that you are actively discouraged from talking to them before, during or after the copyediting process. This makes it hard to know when you got a good one, and harder still to keep them when you did.)
...

We’re very close to posting the details on the signing tour. Honest.

And, whew.

American Gods Blog, Post 12

One longish, quite funny, entry on the mechanics of copy editing was eaten by Blogger a couple of days ago, and I was too busy copy editing the novel to re-enter it. And then February did that thing that February does, where it stops suddenly just as you were getting the hang of it, and the time alotted by the publisher to copy editing was done. I spent one last day trying to input all of the major and minor revisions to the computer, so I had a file that was more or less the same as the version that was to be printed, and then had to drive at silly speeds down icy country roads to make it to the FedEx drop-off in time, which (deep sigh of relief here) I did.

And the manuscript is safely at Harper Collins, and now I just have to figure out the best way of doing the UK copy edit for the Hodder edition (as I discovered when they sent me their list of queries, the biggest problem with sending electronic files of books around the world rather than printouts is that page numbers change depending on things like your default font size and the type of paper you're using -- so my sending them a list of changes of the "delete comma after the word of on page 16 line 12" variety would be somewhere beyond useless).

The strangest thing about doing a copyedit is how much you learn. About the world, and about writing. Before I start I grab a pile of dictionaries, English and American, and a bunch of books on usage -- Fowler's, and the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, and Bill Bryson's lovely Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words -- and the Chicago Manual of Style, and wade in.

Is blowjob one word or two? Judgement or judgment? Wintry or wintery? Why has the copy editor crossed out 'hessian' and replaced it with 'burlap'? Aren't they two different fabrics? -- twenty minutes of research and I figure out that they may be two different fabrics in the UK, but they stopped using the word hessian for rough hairy sack-type jute or hemp cloth in the US about two hundred years ago. Good...

I'd written "none of the passengers were hurt" and the copy editor's changed it to "none of the passengers was hurt" -- Fowler's English Usage, the American English Usage, Harpers and Bill Bryson all agree that the idea that 'None' is a singular noun is based on the misconception that it's a contraction of no one, which it isn't, and tell me it's plural if I want it to be. Good. I do.

Now, when I write dialogue I try and punctuate it to give some kind of indication of the rhythms of speech. As far as I'm concerned "Hi, Mike" and "Hi Mike" are two different things. The copy editor likes the first, and assumes that wherever I've put the second, it's because I've forgotten the comma. And I like to spell out "mister" if it occurs in dialogue. I just do. He's replaced them all with "Mr." and I stet each one back the way it was, and fix a few that I've forgotten...

He's changed dumpster to Dumpster. Check. Yup, it's a trade-mark. Good call. Okay. He's changed the one ocurrence of 'whisky' to 'whiskey'. Nope, it's a good scotch (Laphroaig), and that's how they spell it. Leave it. And here's Diet Coke changed to diet Coke. Is that right? Yup. Good man.

He's changed a sixteen wheeler to an eighteen wheeler in a metaphor but not when there are a cluster of them parked outside a strip club. I add another two wheels to the ones parked outside the Best Peap Show In Town...

Why has the copy editor changed "it's the objective case" to "it's the dative case" in a (very) short conversation about 'who' vs 'whom'? Do we even have a dative case in English? My schoolboy Latin, Greek and German are of little use, but none of the refence books seems to think that there's anything other than subject and object going on here, and I write STET.

And on, and on, for six hundred and fifty pages. And if all this seems pedantic, on the copy editor's part or on mine... well, yes. That's the point. He's paid not to see the wood for the trees. Actually he's paid to look up at the wood now and again, but mostly to keep track of all the leaves, and especially to make sure that Missy Gunther on page 253 isn't Missie Gunther when she returns on page 400.

(And as I type this, looking down to my assistant Lorraine's Xena mouse pad, I've just noticed that the copy editor corrected Xena: Warrior Princess to Xena the Warrior Princess, and I let it pass as I assumed that was the official trademark, but nope, I was right originally -- quick phone call to Harper Collins "in chapter five, just before the bank robbery, there's a Xena: Warrior Princess harem doll in the bankrupt stock store -- can you fix it back the way it was?")

Meanwhile, there's a list of queries in from the UK, only one of which is the same as the US copy edits (a twenty-five minute long half an hour I'd managed to create. Don't ask.)

I decide to lose the quote from a Blur song (Magic America) (which doesn't say very much, but which was in my head when I started the book, along with Elvis Costello's American Without Tears) and replace it with a quote from Lord Carlisle written just after the War of Independence about the hugeness of America and the way even their losses and disasters occurred on a massive scale....

And now it's over and done. For three weeks, anyway, when the galleys will come back and I'll read it through a microscope for the second time, making sure that every comma is where it's meant to be...

American Gods Blog, Post 11

I'd post more, but there's nothing in the world as dull as an author going over a copy-edited manuscript. I finished chapter eight today. The copy editor's done a very solid job. Occasionally I wish that he'd queried things instead of just fixed them (Mad Sweeney, for example, who claims when drunk to be Irish and a leprechaun, says "fucken" a lot. The copy editor has carefully gone through and carefully changed every "fucken" to "fuckin' ", figuring, I suppose, that I just didn't know how it was spelled.)

When you see things fixed that weren't broken, you write STET in the margin in green pencil. Mostly, you just nod and are happy that someone caught your goofs before it went to press. You'd be astonished at the number of different ways I'd managed to spell McDonald's in one small book. Well, one quite big book, actually, but the point holds.

American Gods Blog, Post 10

There's coin magic in AMERICAN GODS, of the conjuring kind. And just as I ran the medical parts (and the post mortem parts) past a doctor, I ran the coin magic past a top coin magician -- Jamy Ian Swiss, better known as a card magician. (I met him some years ago, at a Penn and Teller gig in Las Vegas I attended -- P&T had just guest-starred in the Babylon 5 episode I'd written, 'The Day of the Dead').

Jamy sent me a terrific professional's-eye critique of the coin magic, and I can make some subtle changes in the copy-editing (which I think will start tomorrow, Wednesday, at least on the US version -- I've been told I'll get the copy-edited manuscript by lunchtime). (And there's always a little nervousness in receiving a copy-edited mss. One never knows what kind of copy editor one will have got. On STARDUST I had a lovely one, who even made sure that the UK spelling grey rather than gray held throughout, because she thought it more appropriate. On the book before that I had a copy editor who, it seemed at the time, repunctuated practically every sentence for no good reason, leaving me muttering "Look, if I'd wanted a comma there I would have bloody well put a comma there" too often for comfort.)

But I was talking about coin magic, not copy editing. Sorry.

This is from my last e-mail to Jamy Ian Swiss, who was grumbling about the depiction of stage magic in most forms of fiction. And I thought it might be interesting for you, hypothetical journal reader.

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

One reason I wanted the coin magic in American Gods to be good magic, was to ground the whole thing in reality, and to introduce a world in which nothing you are being told is necessarily reliable or true, while still playing fair with the readers.

I know what you mean about stage magic in fiction though: too often it seems to read as if the writer hasn't done anything magical since getting the magic set aged 11 -- [example removed]

I think part of the reason that fiction has problems with stage magic is that the compact the magician makes with the audience is twofold: "I will lie to you" and "I will show you miracles", and fiction tends only to grasp the second half of that.

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

Now back to writing the jacket blurb. (Or at least, doing a draft of the plot bit that the publisher may or may not use. When it comes to the "Neil Gaiman writes good stuff" bits of the blurb they are on their own.)