Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.
(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.
And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)
I am, as I said, really enjoying it.
Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.
The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)
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One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 books every child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.
People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macbook Airs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)
Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs (edited to add: and it comes with a DVD drive and a hard drive that's double the size of the current Mac air. On the down side it came with Vista, which is, so far, like Windows XP only slower).
Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.
I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened to my family in World War Two. It was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was pretty much reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.
Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.
"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."
The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.
"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.
"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."
The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."
And she's right. The worst part, for me as I said in American Gods, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.
Several hundred people wrote to let me know about Terry Pratchett being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers.
Yes, it's very upsetting and no, it's not a good thing. Also, and most importantly, as Terry points out, twice now, he's not dead yet(although you mightn't know it from the reaction on the web), and he has a few more books in him besides.
It's not time for wakes, or for mourning, or for "Terry Pratchett -- An Appreciation and Remembrance" or any of that stuff, not now and probably not for a long time. He's still here, he's still writing. He's not done yet.
The sore throat thing seems to have subsided to the point where I finally have a more or less functioning head back. (A good thing, as I can start writing again, rather more successfully.) On the down side I think someone crept in during the night and filled up my lungs with thick glue. (A bad thing.)
Sometimes making stuff up feels a lot like Coyote* running across the empty space between one rocky pinnacle and the next, and as long as you keep moving you're fine. When you stop and look down, it's suddenly all too apparent that there's absolutely nothing underneath and that you're keeping in the air by a peculiar effort of will.
And then a good day comes, and you start running through the air once again, and, if you're smart, you resolutely don't look down.
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It's nice to see the Stardust film turning up on end of the year Best Oflists.
I've had a few people ask how they should support the striking writers. I'm glad I can now point them somewhere which offers suggestions -- http://www.fans4writers.com/participate.shtml.
The trouble with snow is that you can't simply wander outside to walk your dog. You have to prepare. You have to bundle up, and put on gloves and big boots and all that sort of stuff. And then the dog romps and vanishes and reappears and romps again (being the same colour as the snow he vanishes easily) and you simply tromp after him, or ahead of him, or at least somewhere on the same continent as him, singing Jonathan Coulton's "Skullcrusher Mountain" to yourself while the snow settles on your hair and your face, and you can't even take proper phone-photos because the gloves are too thick, and when you do, your finger gets in the way, and you can't really see the screen either. But still, everything's white and wonderful, and even shovelling the path to the house four times a day can be fun, sort of...
Most photos wound up looking like this:
And even in the ones that didn't have fingers in, Cabal looks like an ice-weasel.
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Mark Buckingham just sent me his illustrations for Odd. Here's the one for Chapter Three...
(Someone wrote in wondering how we make a profit or a royalty or anything on a ten penny -- or even one pound -- book. And the answer is, we don't. World Book Day is a good cause, and we did it for nothing.)
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And finally, a Writers' Strike video with a message for all of us. Especially adorable animals.
(If you're on an RSS feed where you can't see it, click on the link to the actual blog entry or click here.)
I'm feeling like a particularly bad sort of striker. The WGA strike was called the day before I left LA for the UK, and I've not been within a thousand miles of anywhere that we're picketing since. I get nice emails every day telling me where in New York the pickets are going to be, but New York's a long way away -- for the time span of most of the emails, it's not even in the same country as I am. And now I'm starting to get a bit frantic about the last couple of chapters of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, I may go to ground to finish them and vanish completely.
But in case anyone had any questions (and judging from the FAQ line, a few people have), yes I wholeheartedly endorse and approve of the strike, and, for whatever it's worth, voted for the strike powers (along with about 95% of the WGA membership, so no surprise there).
The bit of this that puzzles me most is that elsewhere in the world, the idea that the writers get paid when the work is watched online is one that's been taken for granted. If I wrote a TV series for the UK, I'd get less money upfront (not much less) but I'd be well recompensed for repeats, DVDs, internet downloads and so forth. (For whatever it's worth, I get 125 times as much in royalties on a hardback novel as I'd get on an equivalently priced DVD.)
At the very end of this post -- in case they break the various RSS feeds -- I'll put two video summaries of the issues. Partisan, of course.
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Hi Neil, I went to see Beowulf as soon as it came out and I liked though it didn't quite match up to Stardust which blew me away. Anyway I thought I had found two mistakes in Beowulf.The first was the mountains of Denmark. This is something Denmark is famous for not having and is a major point for jokes by Icelanders as myself about the country which used to rule us. But then somebody pointed out on the imdb.com forums that though this does not conform to reality it does fit the poem which says: "'......sailors now could see the land, sea-cliffs shining, steep high hills, headlands broad.' "
Oral tradition does these things to poems. The version was probably not written down by anyone who had ever seen Denmark. Somewhere there might have been versions that speak of the great flatness of Denmark but those are forever lost to us. The other point might be a little harder to explain away by the poem. Iceland is mentioned at least twice in the movie which is out of place since it was probably not inhabited at that time nor is it likely that anyone who might have known of it would have called it by this name. Was it just your love of the country that made you mention it or are there other reasons? Or will you take the high road and blame your co-author? Icelanders will probably not be offended as they do like to hear the country mentioned. Anyway, thanks for writing this journal, it is especially fun for me since you tend to mention both folklore (I am a folklorist) and libraries (I am a library and information scientist) a lot and very favorably too. warm regards from Cork, Ireland, Óli Gneisti Sóleyjarson
Yes, the cliffs and high hills are from the poem.
In the script the line of dialogue was,
"They sing our shame from the middle sea to the ice-lands of the north."
I'm not sure whether that's what Anthony Hopkins actually says in the film, though. (And I have no idea where the just-as-anachronistic Vinland line from the Skylding's Watch came from, either. Wasn't in any draft by Roger or me.)
Incidentally, I thought I'd mention again that the Beowulf script book has a lot of the answers to this kind of thing in it, and that none of the descriptions of it currently online seem to explain what kind of thing the book is.
How does a script filled with guts and gore and f-bombs become PG-13 animated fare? Witness "Beowulf: The Script Book" (HarperCollins Entertainment, $16.95), which is actually two scripts, both by graphic novelist/author Neil Gaiman and Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary.
The first script is what you get when you combine the writer of "Pulp Fiction" (Avary) and the writer of "Sandman," "Stardust" and "American Gods" (Gaiman), with no rules or outside interference. The second is their draft of the final studio script.
Avary provides a Foreword and "Middleword" that describe his decades-long obsession with "Beowulf" -- a centuries-old, 3,000-line poem -- and his growing compulsion to re-create it onscreen. He eventually, wrenchingly, gives up on directing "Beowulf" in the face of Steven Bing's big bucks and director Robert Zemeckis' passion for the project. Gaiman gives the Afterword, in which he says of the introduction, "Roger Avary is much too honest about getting the script made. That's because Roger is a Holy Madman."
Gaiman and Avary first huddled in Mexico in 1997 to create the tequila-fueled first draft, in which the monster Grendel's penchant for human flesh knows no censorship. It does, however, follow the timeline of the original Old English poem.
Later, they have Zemeckis' input about taking cinematic liberties, along with his blessing to let their imaginations run wild, as his innovative Performance Capture animation process (as seen in "The Polar Express" film) knows no bounds.
The timeline and the setting is changed in the final draft -- instead of a story in two parts and in two countries, Beowulf begins and ends in King Hrothgar's court. Beowulf is awarded Hrothgar's throne rather than return home. Instead of meeting Beowulf as the strapping dragonslayer he becomes, we first meet old King Beowulf in his court ... and it's apparent you're in for a different experience than in the first script.
Just as intriguing as the script changes are those honest Avary moments. For instance, he finally finds peace with giving up his "baby" to Zemeckis when "Z." agrees to use Crispin Glover to portray the monster Grendel. The director had a contentious relationship with the eccentric actor during "Back to the Future 2," which resulted in Glover suing Zemeckis when the director inserted the actor's image into scenes. "To this day, the verdict protects actors from having their likeness used without their blessing," Avary writes.
Still, Glover got the job, and Zemeckis used his newfangled technology to make him into a monster onscreen, which may have been payback enough.
The book of "Beowulf" scripts also contains artist Stephen Norrington's renderings that were commissioned by Avary when he believed he would be directing his first version, further fueling the question asked by presenting two visions back-to-back: "What if ...?"
(The mention in the song, though, is completely my fault. Sorry.) ...
Hi Neil, I'm a Swedish fan who was hoping to buy some your books from Audible.com, but apparently Audible doesn't sell them to Swedish people. Can you tell me why this is? As there is no Swedish or even European reseller of your books in audio form, this mean nobody gets my money and I'm stuck listening to Orson Scott Card.
There are lots of rights issues around the world that mean that companies selling audio things like songs and books don't always sell everything everywhere. On the audio books, you can always buy the CDs and rip them yourself. And there are even some audio books that come with MP3 CDs so you don't have to rip them, just drag them to your MP3 player.
Neil, I was wondering what you thought about Philip Pullman's books and and the controversy in the united states about the new movie based on his first book. Jessica
I like Philip Pullman very much, I like his books ditto, and I think the controversy is stupid. Does that help?
The chipmunk was still in my drainpipe. It made noises in the night. It threw wild chipmunk parties on the other side of the wall to the headboard of my bed. Something had to be done. There was a trail of birdseed leading in to the drainpipe, left by the chipmunk. I thought, right. Best thing to do is to catch him and then move him somewhere else, and while he was out to put something in the drainpipes like a metal grille or wire-wool or something a chimpunk cannot get through.
There's a live trap in the garage I've used over the years to relocate woodchucks. I got it and put it at the base of the drainpipe. I filled a bowl with sunflower seeds as bait and put it into the trap. I went inside to answer the phone.
"Any particular reason you're trapping squirrels?" asked my assistant Lorraine as she came in.
"You mean chipmunks," I said. And then, "Oh bugger."
I went out and freed the squirrel from the trap, who ran up into a tree and shouted rude things at me in Squirrel. Things so obviously rude and personally insulting that I was just relieved I don't speak squirrel.
The chipmunk is still, of course, in my drainpipe.
I do not care, because I am off for the Beowulf junket and premiere and will not sleep in my bed for a while. Maybe by the time I get home he'll have moved.
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More information on the Dave McKean "Luna" origami crabs at
a "Nice Hair" Hallowe'en treat from Miss Em -- a three page story in which her Neil character becomes... ah, but that would be telling... (I liked the way he was lured out by a cup of tea most of all...)
And yes, it impacts some of my projects. It means that the US TV network that wanted to option a book of mine to make into a TV series isn't going to be able to buy it (or anything else of mine) until the strike is done. It means that I'm not going to be able to do the rewrites and polishes on the 1999 NEVERWHERE movie script for Hensons and the Weinstein Company until the strike is done. It means that Roger Avary and I won't be able to rewrite or polish or work on BLACK HOLE. That I can't discuss or sign on to (MOVIE X) until the strike's done.
I also need to talk to the WGA and find out whether I can write a TV project for the BBC (I suspect the answer will be No, but I should ask).
It doesn't impact Beowulf, which was written in 1997 and rewritten in 2005, and Roger Avary and I will still be doing the press for it, because that's not a writing job. I don't know if it impacts Henry Selick's work (as a writer, not as a director) on Coraline or not -- probably not.
Truth to tell, I'm in a slightly better position than most WGA writers in that I can (and do) write books and things that aren't TV and films in addition to writing TV and films, so all it means is I'm now going to finish writing a book a would have finished writing anyway, and when that's done I'll raise my head above the parapet, blink, look around and figure out what I'm going to do next.
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I was talking a few days ago about having somewhere to put photos of all the Hallowe'en costumes based on stuff I'd written, and Emily rose to the challenge:
Calling all Neil fans:
A Flickr site has been created so that you can share photos of any Neil-inspired costumes, crafts, or other creations that you have made. The photo album can be viewed here:
We've already got a couple of submissions. Keep 'em coming!
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Hi Neil,
Just curious, how do you see this journal of yours, especially in relation to the newly rising blog culture that we have here, as well as your growing fame-itude? It seems that when you first started, no one really knew what to write in these internet thingies, and now even dogs have blogs. Where do you see yourself on the blog spectrum? Related to this, I remember you mentioning at a talk several years ago that you wanted to limit your fame-itude by not getting your photo into books and suchlike (citing Stephen King as an example, I think). And yet I can "see" you every day in my rss feed aggregator, along with images of Maddy and odd videos here and there. So my question is, what has changed over the last few years? Your view on fame-itude? Your blogging habits? The internet?
Many thanks,
~Sushu
I've never minded author photos on books -- the Stephen King thing I would have mentioned was Steve telling me that he wished he had never done the American Express "Do You Know Me?" ad, when suddenly people knew what he looked like. It moved his face into public consciousness. (I'm glad to say I don't think I'm there yet -- and I hope I never will be.)
I guess I'm more famous than I'm comfortable with, but that's just something that is, and I don't think there's much that can be done about it. I don't think it has much to do with the blog, or with the fact that you can watch videos of me on YouTube. And I've managed to go many years without seeing myself on the blog spectrum, but if I have to be anywhere I'd like to be at the point where the indigo shades into the violet, please.
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