What's Your Story?

I asked Jon Howells, Waterstones National Press Officer, about the story card on which I wrote an original short story -- what would happen to it and when. There's some information at the Waterstones website , but he filled me in on the rest of it:

What's going to happen to your card? The original, along with those by all the other authors involved, will be auctioned on June 10th at Waterstone's Piccadilly, the largest bookshop in Europe. This is an invitation only event (your invite will be with your shortly - it would be lovely to see you there but, given where you live, we'll understand if you can't make it), and the auction will be run by a Sotheby's auctioneer. Margaret Atwood will be joining the proceedings live from Paris, and will write her story using her LongPen machine. All the money from the auction will go to English PEN and Dyslexia Action.

The following day, all the storycards will be available to read at Waterstones.com. Outsize facsimiles of the cards will also be on display in the windows of all our stores for people to read, and they will remain there for a month.

There's also a chance for our customers and the general public to get involved with writing a story for the What's Your Story? campaign. They can pick up a storycard in our stores to fill in and return, and online we've developed a nifty tool that allows people to write (and customise) their own stories - full details can be found at http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/navigate.do?pPageID=200000637. This has only been live since late last Thursday and already over 700 stories have been posted.

Three (2 adult and one child) of the best of the public's stories (and the best from a similar competition for our booksellers) will be published alongside all 13 of the author stories in a one-off print run Postcard Book, which will be available from the beginning of August at our stores and Waterstones.com - price is TBC. The winners of the public competition will also win a place on an Arvon Foundation writing course (if they are over 18), or £500 of Waterstone's vouchers (if under 18). All profits from the sale of the postcard book will go to English PEN and Dyslexia Action.

So now we all know. Sounds a wonderful project. (I assume the writing a story competition bit is only open to UK residents, but I may be wrong as it's not listed as such in the terms and conditions.) I don't know if I'll be able to get to the auction in person. But it sounds wonderful. And I need to find out how people can put in remote auction bids and suchlike for the cards (or, if they plan to bid in person, how they can get invitations to the event).

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I took this yesterday from the kitchen window. As a small child, I was convinced that all animals walked around on their hind legs when we couldn't see them, and spoke fluent English; sometimes they wore clothes and probably drove really tiny, brightly-coloured cars down hidden streets between the bushes. This raccoon did nothing to disabuse me of the idea:

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Michael Dirda wrote a lovely article about Charles Fort, and Jim Steinmeyer's biography of the man. When I read,

Steinmeyer views Fort as a representative 1920s figure, but to me he seems in a slightly earlier mode: The antiquary with a hobby horse. Fort and his 40,000 slips of paper recall Marx researching economics in the British Library, H.W. Fowler compiling his picky Modern English Usage, the editors of the Variorum Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary noting arcane interpretations and elaborate etymologies, J.G. Frazer tracing hanged gods and ancient ritual in The Golden Bough.

I remembered a long-abandoned idea for a short story I meant to write, probably called "Charlies", in which Karl Marx and Charles Fort, both working obsessively in the British Museum Reading Room Library sixty years apart, wound up with each others notes and books, so Marx published The Book of the Damned in 1867, prompting international revolution followed by a Russia organised on Fortean lines, with falls of fish and such everywhere, while Charles Fort published Das Kapital in the 1920s, and is still remembered today as a beloved crank, The Fortean Times a small press publication dedicated to economic theories about the eventual downfall of capitalism. (I gave up on it mostly because, whenever I'd tell communists about it, they'd look disapprovingly at me, which I figured took out half the potential audience for the story then and there.)

(On the other hand, the companion piece, "Kens" about Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Halliwell, may still get written one day. You never know.)

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Here's a review of The Dangerous Alphabet.

And finally, The Graveyard Book has its own dedicated website at http://www.thegraveyardbook.com/, courtesy of Subterranean Press. It has an interview with me on the front page, but it also has many exciting things up, such as Dave McKean illustrations -- http://www.thegraveyardbook.com/illustrations/...

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.


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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).


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


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