Literally last minute doodle reminder

Just a reminder.... the National Doodle Day auction has an hour to go. Quick! Bid for a good cause!

(Last year, Barack Obama's doodle went for $2075... I hope we can get some of the high scoring doodles up to those kind of figures. Please don't make me run for president. Of anything.)

The National Doodle Day auction has begun. Proceeds will benefit Neurofibromatosis, Inc. (nfinc.org).

To immediately access the eBay auction --
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnfinccharity

Direct Links to Neil Gaiman's doodles plus his fave doodles on the auction block:

Ebay link to doodle #1

Ebay link to number 2

Kendra Stout: Ebay link here

Cat Mihos: Ebay link here

Fred Hembeck: Ebay link here

Sergio Aragones: Ebay link here

Gahan Wilson: ebay link here

Beware the wrath of an Angry Penguin

I got back from Australia and realised that the Waterstones story cards were meant to have been completed and returned by last Friday. They were sent out on April 14th, but, due to human error, mine didn't reach me until I was in Melbourne last week, and I didn't even look at the date, just read it hastily, went "Well, that can wait until I'm not touring Australia any longer and I'll have lots of time to think about it...".

But, I discovered, I didn't have lots of time. I have about 24 hours, as it has to be in London at the end of the week. I looked at the card, guessed that I could fit about 250 words on it, and wrote a 250 word story (using the Pelikan flexnib that Henry Selick gave me from http://www.richardspens.com/. I'd been waiting for something to write with it, and this seemed perfect). I have two more cards, in case of disaster, and I might do a second draft tomorrow before FedEx comes. Or I may not. But I find myself, for the first time, a bit envious of Margaret Atwood and her Long Pen...


In response to your bee picture, my eleven year-old daughter said "It looks like an angry penguin." (Me)"Are you sure it doesn't look like an angry bee?" (Her)"Nope, an angry penguin."

Take care!

Gina


I love my job.


Hi!

I have a question about writing. I read your advice, and the thing is, I don't do it like that at all.

For one thing, I don't write a first draft completely, then edit it several times. I work with scenes. I write a scene, I correct it, a re-correct it, I edit it and so on. I usually have a story planned out in my head entirely, so I end up writing the scenes in any order, really, although it's mostly chronological.

I'm guessing your advice would probably be "whatever works for you", but the thing is, I don't know if it works for me. I've never finished a novel yet. Actually, my first novel (which is uncomplete) is resting right now because I met my husband, who's Canadian and couldn't speak French, and I stopped writing in French. I just though, what's the point of writing if the person I love the most can't even read it? I want him to read it /before/ everyone else, not years later.

So I started writing in English, and man is it hard. You think you're fluent in a language, and next thing you know you're struggling to find synonyms or words that have the right connotation, and your characters all speak the same way, because that's they only way /you/ speak. So I'm extremely slow.

I'm just worried that my approach might just be plain wrong, and lead me to never finish anything. I don't know who to ask for advice so I'm turning to you.

I guess my question really is, should I make sure to finish a first draft as soon as possible, even if what I write is crap and has to be rewritten later, or can I polish each piece, put them all together, then polish the result? Is it very important to have a whole to work with, and can that whole be in your head rather than written? (I always spend several months just thinking about a story for hours every day before writing it. By which I mean, that's the way I did it for the only two "real" novels I've started)

Sorry I wrote that much. Feel free to take an aspirin.


The biggest problem I can see with the way you're doing it is that it doesn't seem to give you anything finished. (If it was working for you I'd have no suggestions. There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right, after all.) The second biggest problem is that if you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing together.

If you're being forced by the nature of what you're doing (episodic comics or serial television, or even writing a novel at 200 words a day online or in a newspaper) to just write and hope it all works out, that's one thing. But if you're writing a novel determined to make each scene perfect before you go on to the next, and you're writing the scenes out of order, then you're making something that's either going to work or not work when you put it all together. (That's still "write the first draft any which way".)

But it won't excuse you from doing a second draft, because you'll get to the end, and put all the scenes together, and then you'll still have to do a second draft, if only because when you read it you notice that you've got two Wednesdays coming together, and someone's name or eye-colour changes between scenes. Or your heroine seems like a bitch, although that wasn't your intention, because you don't have a scene there that shows her humanity. Or a great scene you wrote and rewrote and honed and rewrote and polished till it shone just doesn't fit anywhere because the thing that's happening at the same time loses all vitality if you cut away from it.

I guess that's one reason I like things like NaNoWriMo -- it makes people write and finish things, helter-skelter and however. And once something's finished, you can always fix it. (The first draft of Good Omens took about 9 weeks. The second draft took MONTHS. And it wasn't until we came to rework it a little after that for the US edition that we realised that we had indeed, without noticing, created a week with two Wednesdays in it.)

Incidentally, I'm in awe of anyone who would even attempt to try to write fiction in a language not her own.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But -- and I wish it were otherwise -- books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

So think all you like, but don't mistake the thinking for the writing.


...


Remember the National Doodle Day doodles? (I talked about them at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/q-was-this-face-that-launched-thousand.html). This just came in...


The National Doodle Day auction has begun. Proceeds will benefit Neurofibromatosis, Inc. (nfinc.org). Gillian Anderson's (Scully of The X-Files) brother suffers from NF. Click here (http://www.gilliananderson.ws/charities/nf.shtml) to read about Gillian's involvement with the cause.

We have 175 doodles on the auction block including many from The X-Files "gang": David Duchovny, Chris Carter, Annabeth Gish, Mark Snow (composer of the well-known X-Files theme music), Mitch Pileggi, and various XF Alumni.

You can easily check out all the available doodles by looking at our Doodle Guide at:
www.gilliananderson.ws.

And it's a family affair for Gillian. We have doodles by her sister, Zoë, her 13 year old daughter, Piper, and Piper's Dad, Clyde Klotz who also used to work for The X-Files.

To immediately access the eBay auction --
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnfinccharity

Direct Links to Neil Gaiman's doodles plus his fave doodles on the auction block:

Ebay link to doodle #1

Ebay link to number 2

Kendra Stout: Ebay link here

Cat Mihos: Ebay link here

Fred Hembeck: Ebay link here

Sergio Aragones: Ebay link here

Gahan Wilson: ebay link here


There are some other pretty nifty ones as well I'd not seen the last time I posted about it (Simon Pegg! Robin Williams!). I was vaguely happy to notice that my first doodle, of something vaguely ifritish, seemed to be attracting more voters than the sort-of-Sandman I did next (thinking, they probably expect a Sandman).


...


This is cool, and I can't wait to read it: http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bios.cgi?entry=bk52


...


And finally, from the Sandman 20th anniversary poster, P. Craig Russell's Lucifer and Mazikeen...

Q: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? A: No.

Hi Neil,

Go on, show us a picture. You know you want to ;-)

David

Here's a cameraphone pic I took for curious friends. It was taken yesterday, just after the doctor left, still a bit stunned. (In the strange way of these things, my doctor was just driving past, and called to see if I was around and could offer encouragement on his novel, just after the incident occurred. So I had a doctor there in minutes.)

Today I look much less stunned, the nose is even bigger, and there's emu oil and germoline on the cut to stop it scabbing and help with scarring. Opinions around here are divided on whether or not I'll have panda-eyes for New York. Opinions are also divided on whether I should try and cover the bruising up with make-up for the interviews on Friday, or whether I should use latex and a small bottle of Kensington Gore to make it look more interesting (my heart goes with the latter, my head for the former).

I drove Maddy to school this morning. She has an extremely cool crescent-shaped scar next to her eye, from when, as a small child, she ran into the corner of a table. She said,

"Will you get a scar?"

"Maybe."

"I like my scar. You know, I get people I've known since kindergarten asking me about it, these days, as if they've just noticed it."

"Really? What do you tell them."

"What you told me to tell people who asked."

I racked my brains. Nothing. "What was that?"

"I tell them I got it in a swordfight."

"Oh. Good."

Dear Neil

What is it like to live in a world where one can call up some famous movie producer (or was it a director) and chat? Is it nice? Or is it a little bit lonely sometimes? Or am I just being presumptuous?

Thanks for your time.

Ian


Not presumptuous, but it's just sort of irrelevant, at least the famousness bit. Friends are friends and people you work with are people you work with. If you're working with them it takes about 20 seconds to get over the feeling of, "Oh my god I'm in a room talking to X!" and to get on with whatever it is you're meant to be doing (if it's work). If they're your friends you only become aware of the famousness thing when someone else says "Excuse me, was that X?" or asks for an autograph or something.

I wouldn't phone up a famous film director or producer to chat. But I might phone a friend, who produced or directed, and was famous, to chat. Big difference.

I'm lucky in that I'm not a celebrity, and I'm not really famous. I'm well known for what I do among the sort of people who like what I do, and I wouldn't want to be more famous. And famous is, for pretty much all of the people I know who are, a side-effect or by-product of doing what they do, which is pretty much always what they love doing, and it's not a particularly desirable by-product at that.

(Not necessarily a bad one either -- you can do good things with it. Gillian Anderson's used hers to help push National Doodle Day -- a neurofibromatosis fund-raiser that raises money from celebrity doodles. http://doodledayusa.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=134 has doodles by lots of interesting people that will go up on eBay in a month. Although the ones I like best are from the less famous and the more draw-y, like Sergio Aragones, Gahan Wilson, and Kendra Stout (who did the "scary trousers" t- shirt, and just did a mouse pad for Cat Mihos's Neverwear.net) and Fred Hembeck. Also there are two by me.)

Lonely, when it happens and wherever in the world it happens, is lonely, and that has nothing to do with famousness (except as a sort of an occasional by-product of, Because I do what I do I'm sitting in a hotel-room in a country where I don't know anyone a long way from my family and friends. And authors don't have it bad compared to, say, stand-up comedians or truck drivers). But then, I'm also the kind of person who daydreams about booking a passenger cabin on a merchant ship and going off around the world for six months writing a book.

Dear Neil,

I have just discovered that brightly colored bubbles are available, and go by the name Zubbles (http://www.zubbles.com/index.asp). Considering the story you read in Helena last year, I thought you might want to know, although since the website has a 2005 copyright date, maybe you already do.

Speaking of the story, I'm really looking forward to "Orange," and the rest of The Starry Rift. It comes out right before my birthday, and it seems fitting that I could get it a year after I got to hear you read "Orange," which was a one-day-late birthday present from my parents (who bought the tickets) and my best friend. (She drove us from Missoula to Helena, even though she'd only seen Mirrormask and knew nothing else about you! She loves Stardust now, and she liked Good Omens, too.)

- anna

It's mortifying to discover you're the kind of SF writer who can imagine something futuristic after it's been invented, isn't it? Soon I shall imagine the "air-plane" -- a fixed-wing heavier than air flying machine!

This just came in from Jonathan Strahan, editor of The Starry Rift:

I've set up a website at www.thestarryrift.com which contains
information about the book, downloads of the cover art, short interviews
with some of you (they'll appear one a day over the coming week or so), and
as much relevant stuff as I can muster.

I've also arranged a chance for readers to win some copies of the book.
Thanks to Viking, I'm giving away a copy of The Starry Rift to the first
five readers who email me at thestarryrift@gmail.com and tell me the name of
the last science fiction novel they loved and why. The details are at
http://thestarryrift.com/win/

...

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

I was wondering if the techno-masters behind your website might be able to turn the countdown for the upcoming American release of The Graveyard Book, which appears on your homepage, into one of those iGoogle "gadget" thingies. That way I can put it on my 'iGoogle' homepage next the "gadget" I have for Frank Miller's "The Spirit" movie.

Most Sincerely, Daniel Crandall

I forwarded it to Dan Guy, the webgoblin, and he sent back, within a couple of minutes:

Here's an off-the-shelf countdown clock for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. I may try to create a most customized one as well.

Click here for the igoogle GRAVEYARD gadget.