Father's Day

Maddy and I are going to the UK for a few days, on Graveyard Book movie matters. We just went for a father's day walk in the woods, where we were bitten by special father's day mosquitoes.

I'm confronting the hard facts of being the father of a thirteen-nearly-fourteen-year-old-daughter. For example, I learned today that we can no longer travel using carry-on luggage. We have to check luggage, something I don't like to do and avoid whenever I can, but that has become unavoidable. This is, I was told, because Maddy has liquid Hair Care products that have to come with us.

"We're going to England," I told her. "It's a country flowing with milk and honey and hair-care products. There's a Boots on every corner, or nearly, and there's definitely one in any airport we'll be flying into. Before we leave the airport I can buy you more haircare products than you can easily carry, all of them guaranteed to be just as hair-care-producty as anything you could get in WalMart."

"That's nice of you," she said firmly. "And you can get me them too if you like. But I'll have to bring my own haircare products as well."

"It's ENGLAND," I said. "Not Antarctica. Sixty million people! They wash their hair there. They put goopy stuff on it after they've washed it. There are more weird hair-care things that I don't know what they are on the shelves of Boots than there in the whole of the US. We wouldn't have to check luggage..."

I lost the argument. Everyone else seems to think I'm missing the point. Maddy's sister on the phone from the UK told me I'd lost. Even Maddy's mother does nothing more than smile. Sigh. I wish that the dog could talk. He's male. I bet he'd back me up. (Actually, if he could talk he'd just say, "You're going away? When there might be thunderstorms? You know no-one else can protect me from thunderstorms. Whoa...I forgot what we were just talking about. Can we go for a walk now?" because he's a dog.)

We'll be checking luggage. Did I mention that already?

Happy Father's Day. Did you know there's a Win A Copy Of The Dangerous Alphabet Competition going on? 50 copies to be won...
http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/harperchildrens/kids/gamesandcontests/contests/dangerousalphabet/

And did you know it's the neilgaiman.com World's End message board's Seventh Birthday? (I didn't, but the lovely Amy AKA Aitapata just told me.) Congratulations to all the board people and moderators!

Dear Neil,
I recently finished reading your (and John Romita Jr.'s) version of Eternals for the second time, and I was wondering (because I've already researched it and I can't find anything about it) if you'll continue it? It's an amazing comic, and I would like to know whether to expect more of it...Thank you, Jessica.

I'm glad you liked it. No, my brief on the Eternals was to get them working again in the Marvel Universe, so that other people could tell stories with them. The good news is that the whole of Jack Kirby's original Eternals series is coming out in two trade paperbacks, and that Marvel are releasing an ongoing Eternals series. (Available right now in your local comic shop.)

Dear Neil, I am sure you have probably answered this question before and are probably, therefore, very sick of it. But, I still must ask. I am an aspiring writer and am wondering how you stayed motivated during times of great failure. I understand what many writers mean when they say the love of the art drives them. What I am concerned with is how to deal with the inevitable denial of a piece of literature that you have invested everything in?

Write the next thing.

Maybe the world will catch up with your brilliance eventually, or maybe you'll look back in ten years and decide it wasn't that great really after all. Doesn't really matter. Times of great failure or times of great success, the problem is the same (how do you keep going?) and the solution is the same: You write the next thing.

more on introductions and contradictions

Time for another introduction, I think.

Introductions are such odd things. You write them and you never really know if they're doing any good at all. For example, a few weeks ago this arrived on the FAQ line,

What makes you feel that you are qualified to comment on Bob Kane when it is obvious that you know so little about him?

You ruined my opportunity to buy a Will Eisner book by your misinformed comments on Kane which you included in your intro. (Kane, not Jerry Robinson, drew the Batman stories from 1939-43.) If you need more info, rely on valid sources and not rumors or gossip. Either that or I can send you an outline. I do research.


And, puzzled, I wrote back:

Hello.

I was puzzled by your letter, so went through both of the introductions I did to books by Will Eisner and found a grand total of one mention of Bob Kane. I said, in the Nortons' CITY STORIES collection,

I wanted to know why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman, remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.

Which leads me to suspect that possibly you read some other introduction by somebody else. Probably you should write irritated emails to them, instead.

best wishes

Neil

But it turned out the email given was wrong, and it came back. (I assume it was unintentionally wrong -- a quick Google showed a person out there with a name like the one on the email enthusiastically defending Bob Kane's reputation on Wikipedia.) So I'm putting it up here in the hopes that the grumpy gentleman gets to read it.

But every now and again you get something like this:

Hey Neil,


On the introduction theme I just wanted to tell you that once years ago, when perusing the stacks at USC, I came upon the Robert Silverberg section. "Hmm," I said to myself, "that name sounds familiar."


I picked up one of the paperbacks (The Man in the Maze), and lo! You'd written an introduction to it!


Of course I checked it out on your recommendation and discovered an amazing author I otherwise wouldn't have, and, of course, searched your blog and discovered that it was indeed you who had put the seed of his name into my head to begin with.


So, thanks! And keep on writing those intros (and everything else)!

- Theresa B

Which reminded me that there was a Robert Silverberg introduction out there that I'd rather enjoyed writing (and some people might enjoy reading). So here it is, the introduction to Bob Silverberg's The Man in the Maze :

The Wound that Never Heals: an Introduction.

Several thousand years on, no-one is quite certain of the details. But the meat of the story is this: Philoctetes was there at the cremation of Hercules, and was given Hercules’s quiver of poisoned arrows. And something happened – a snake bite, perhaps, or even a magical arrow dropped on his foot. Either way Philoctetes was injured on the foot, and it was a wound that would not heal. Sometimes they don’t.

The Trojan War had just begun, and Philoctetes went to fight with the Greeks, who were laying siege to Troy. There was a problem, though. The wound. It stank. A disturbing reek that made the people around Philoctetes sick to their stomachs. It smelled like the dead. It smelled worse than that.

Philoctetes was sent into exile.

The seige of Troy dragged on for another ten years.

And then someone dreamed a dream, an important dream, an oracular dream: if the arrows of Hercules were brought to Troy, then Troy would fall. They sent a messenger to Philoctetes, and invited him back. But Philoctetes had no wish to return...

And because the good stories last and can be (perhaps even must be) infinitely retold, Philoctetes’ wound is also Muller’s, one of the grim trio of men who cross and recross the stage in The Man in the Maze, Robert Silverberg’s 1969 novel, although Muller’s wound is not a physical stench but a spiritual one: a communicable despair, the terrible odour of the human condition.

It is a good thing, The Man in the Maze, will suggest, that we are insulated from each other: we are wounded by living, by mere existence, and we could not stand the stink of each other’s souls.

Science Fiction, more than any other form of literature, is a progress, and it comes with a sell-by date. Some old SF can become unreadable. Some reputations erode with time. What we respond to, once the sell-by date is past, is art and, perhaps, is also truth.

It was Robert Silverberg, an author of, amongst many other things, speculative fiction, who gave us a story in which archaeologists unearth the texts of the 1960s, fragments of Bob Dylan lyrics are puzzled over, lacunae to be filled. To some extent, we are in that position now with the speculative fiction of yesteryear. They are texts that cry out for context.

Silverberg has had a number of careers in his career as an author, and as a writer. Since his arrival in the world of SF he has displayed a wide-ranging intellect and a facility as a writer that gave him his early career as someone who could create a volume of competent fiction on demand. In the late sixties and early seventies he entered a period of remarkable fecundity and quality, half a decade where he cut deeper, grew honest and edgy as a writer, and made demands on himself as an artist that culminated in such novels as Dying Inside and The Stochastic Man. From there, Silverberg, exhausted, retired from fiction, then returned, using an SF writer’s perspective to take us into Elizabethan Africa in his historical novel Lord of Darkness, and out across the edges of fantasy in the Majipoor sequence.

The Man in the Maze is from the beginning of the edgiest period. I think of it as a bridge book, in that, while it is courageous, exploring new territory, with one foot in the New Wave camp, it is still mindful of its roots. From the past of SF we get the strains of Space Opera, replete with incomprehensible aliens and inexplicable artefacts.

We also get some strange glimpses into our present. Fiction that predicts and creates dates sometimes because it, of necessity, leaves itself out. In this novel, we find ourselves recognising the maze, in the way no reader could have done in 1969. The maze is an imaginative deathtrap – at the time an astonishing imaginative creation, one that is dulled today only in that it is instantly recognisable as the environment of a computer game – an exercise in reflexes and memory, judgement and imagination. The process of moving through the maze, using drones and volunteers willing to give up their lives is the process of navigating a game – get to the centre of the maze alive, avoid capture, achieve your goal.

It is too easy to take the maze for granted, now, to let it fade back into the landscape: but the maze, in all its incarnations, is one of the characters in this novel.

I pointed earlier to the story of Philoctetes not to give you a key to the novel you are holding (there are no easy keys to good fiction, nor should there be), but to demonstrate the tradition that Silverberg’s story is a part of.

The title is, I suspect, as important as anything else in grasping the shape beneath the tale. (It is the man in the maze, incidentally, not the woman, as a reader soon notices – the absence of women from the tale, except as courtesans and sexual memories, is one of the few things that makes it feel like something from our past.) As one begins to read, the identity of the man in the maze is obvious: it’s Muller -- who else could it be? But as the journey through the book continues and concludes, one finds oneself wondering who the man truly was, and what the maze: the candidates are Ned Rawlins, who has an honest name and an open face, our young innocent; Dick Muller, the book’s Philoctetes, the experienced diplomat and soldier and frontiersman, now in hiding and in exile; and Charles Boardman, the wily elderly eminence grise, manipulating events and people as best he can. They form a male triad, shading from honour and integrity to expedience and compromise: the male equivalent of a maiden, a mother and a crone – or, more fancifully, father, son, and a particularly shifty Holy Ghost.

And each man, as the reader will learn, has been given his own maze by Silverberg – a maze that moves beyond the physical, beyond the video game deathtrap. It’s an invisible labyrinth he has to walk, and inside which he hides – a maze of morals, a maze of ethics, a maze, and ultimately, of humanity.

Neil Gaiman June 2002

.....

How wonderful that you linked to a Tim Minchin video! I saw his show in NY last Saturday and loved it. He's funny and talented and a very nice guy. I am a bit surprised, though, that you didn't note Mr. Minchin's last name nor tag the post with any part of his name. Not that you need to take up space in your blog to plug other people but I've noticed you typically do take the time to name the names of the worthy. (Last names also make for easier searches of your blog as it seems you know or write about a number of Tims.)

~Lexa

PS Minchin's show runs until the 12th of this month and, no, I don't work for him. Just a fan.

Quite right. The Inflatable You song was Tim Minchin's.

Hey Neil,


I have been writing stories for a while now, since I started reading your books, but I'm having a few problems. I have a story that is about 210 pages long now that I've been writing for about a year and a half, and I recently decided to revise it and edit a little.


The problem is; I have no idea where to start. I am beginning to forget some facts about the protagonist's past and whatnot, and it's starting to get very annoying. I want to move on, but I can't until I've straightened out the rest of the story. I feel like I'm lost!!


Has this ever happened to you, and if it has, how did you deal with it???


~your faithfully, Laura: a struggling 14 year old who enjoys scribbling random stories.


=]

First of all, well done! I couldn't have written 210 pages of a book when I was 14.

What you do is up to you. I can offer a few suggestions, but they're really only suggestions:

Normally, I'd say try and finish the book however you can, just making progress forward. Then, when you get to the end, put the book aside for a few weeks and then read the whole thing through at once, making notes as you go about what works, what doesn't, what needs fixing or changing or expanding or removing. Having done that, do your rewrite.

But you're fourteen. And you've been writing this for a year. That's an age at which you change really fast. Right now you're learning about writing, about making characters and listening to them talk, finding out what happens to them. Still, the stories you want to tell when you're 13 may not be the ones you wanted to tell when you're 15. (Or they may.)

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's not a bad thing if you want to move on to the next story. You should finish the one you're on, because you should learn how to finish telling a story. But you're learning so much, whatever you do next will be much better than anything you did a year ago...

Hi Neil,

When you're writing a novel, how many really good lines do you come up with during the first draft? How much of it needs to be rewritten later on? I realize at this point, you're probably so prolific that you don't throw away much.


I've been feeling awfully discouraged lately, worrying that my first draft is absolute garbage with very little worth keeping. (Though maybe it's because I tend to write my first draft as a stream of consciousness, so when I go back and read it, it makes little sense and I need to fix it up.)


Thanks,


Gary B. Phillips


Probably about 90% of what's in anything I write was there in the first draft. Maybe even 95%. But it's usually the final 5%, the tidies and tweaks and reorganisations that takes it, in my eyes, from just okay to something I can be proud of.

electric blue

Sorry. Writing Chapter Seven, still, and doing almost nothing else. (In the book, Scarlett Perkins has just arrived at the library to look at the microfiche files of old newspapers.) It's a bit of a wrench to go back from the fountain pen to the keyboard. Just received the sad news that the writing cabin in the woods I use sometimes -- mostly to type or proofread undisturbed -- now has wireless... (damn!)

This came in a couple of weeks ago, but I've held off on answering it until I knew what was happening...

Whatever became of the annual Dave Sim/Neil Gaiman lithograph auction mentioned here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/11/on-table.asp ? I was one of many who didn't win the first one, and I was hoping to have another crack at it...

What happened was the US Post Office.

I got the second one in a year ago, painted and collaged on it, sent it off (insured) to the CBLDF. Then we waited. It didn't arrive. And then we discovered that simply insuring something for a value doesn't really matter if the Post Office doesn't want to pay... A saga that went on for a year.

Dave Sim just sent me a new 2007 lithograph -- I think this may be my personal one -- which I plan to art all over and give to the CBLDF to auction, to make up for the one the Post Office lost. And I think we'll send it FedEx, as well, just to be on the safe side. And the 2008 one should happen fairly soon -- possibly to coincide with the New York Comic-Con. We'll see.

Look, Neil!

I just thought that would be the kind of site you would like...

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Regards,
Richard.

It is! How wonderful.

Hi Neil

I've noticed on your blog that you often say the stories you write have been in your head for years. I was wondering, do you deliberately leave ideas gestating for years before doing anything with them, or is it simply because you have a large backlog of ideas? I've noticed with my own writing that for some reason, the older the idea, the more comfortable it feels to write. Do you find that?

Thanks!
Ben

A bit of both. Sometimes it's nice to have an idea for a book or a story in the back of your head for years, accreting bits to it, growing and becoming bigger and more interesting, sometimes it's a worrying thing having a story you'd like to write and aren't getting to, for very occasionally, alone in the darkness, they die and rot and turn to mould and slime.

It tends to be less intentional (except for The Graveyard Book, which was a better idea than I was a writer twenty years ago) than to do with how much I write and who's waiting for what.

Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.

Hello Neil,Is there any significant difference between Anansi Boys and Anansi Boys: a novel (P.S)? I have read Anansi Boys and want to buy my own copy, and Amazon has both editions/versions. When I was nine or ten my teacher read Anansi stories to the class. I've had a soft spot for him ever since.Thank you
Morag Gray

The (P.S.) editions of the books on Amazon.com are the large format "trade paperback" editions, with interviews in the back (and, in the case of Anansi Boys, an extract from American Gods) published by Harper Perennial. The (P.S.) edition of Anansi Boys has a cover that's electric blue and eye-burning yellow, and is unmissable. It's bigger than the "mass-market paperback", printed on better paper, but contains the same novel.

I can't find a good image of it online, so here's the new cover of the P.S. trade paperback of Smoke and Mirrors, which comes out later this week, a vision in purple and green.

Why are you writing just kid's books? Why don't you write another adult novel?

Everything in its time. Truth to tell, I don't honestly think of The Graveyard Book as a children's book. It's a novel, and the protagonist grows from about 18 months to about 16 years during the course of it. I think some young readers will like it and I think that some older readers will like it (and some young readers, and some adults, will find it too scary or too morbid or too odd). It's not like anything else I've done, anyway...

Heading bookward

I'm writing The Graveyard Book right now. Or at least, trying to get back to the place where The Graveyard Book is. Yesterday I called in the colour and lettering corrections on Absolute Sandman Volume 3 -- finally, Dalmatians will be spelled correctly! -- and today I have to write an introduction to a script in it (for Sandman 50 -- the only Not Full Script in the whole 75 issue run) and an afterword to the volume as well. (Next year DC are bringing out Absolute Sandmans 3 and 4.) And today I'm also writing a foreword to a book of essays by the late Professor Frank McConnell, who wrote the introduction to THE KINDLY ONES and was a remarkable and fine man.


Hello! While I'm sure Mr. Gaiman himself won't read this, and from the look of a similar question in the FAQ section, he may not want to.

My friend and I are looking to write a short story and/or screenplay based off of the main plot elements in Sandman IV. We're not sure if if we need to go through any legal loopholes to do so, and thought you may be more helpful than emailing DC first.

Thank you very much,

Michael Garrity

Michael, it's a great big blog, filled with information. A quick site search shows that I first answered this question in October 2002, over five years ago. There's even an answer in the FAQ section, because it's a question that's frequently asked. (You comment on having read the answer in the FAQ at the beginning.) It's still the same answer, I'm afraid. If you want to do a Sandman thing, you would ask DC Comics or Warner Brothers, and they will almost certainly say no.

A question of nudity...

Almost every review of "Beowulf" has focused on the handling of Beowulf's nudity when he fights Grendel: many finding it unintentionally funny, one or two speculating that it was *intentionally* funny, but still, lots of people fixated on it. (By the way, I do like how Caitlin's novelization spells out that Grendel has no sex organs, so nothing to see there, literally...) It seems worth asking, how much was the treatment of Beowulf's nudity a decision you and Avary made, and how much was it a decision Zemeckis made? I wonder if there was a chat along the lines of "He's naked in the original poem, so how do we deal with that on film, where male nudity means an automatic R?"

(As a friend who saw and loved "Beowulf" said, "I was promised nudity! Angelina's naked, but she's covered! Beowulf's naked, but HE'S covered!")

Chris Walsh

P.S. To change the subject abruptly, thank you for mentioning Project Erin last month.

That sort of thing - how you shoot a naked fight, or indeed a clothed fight - is entirely a director's decision. (In a film like Beowulf, where every pixel is a decision, I think you can pretty much assume that everything is the director's decision).

If you're curious about what Roger and I had originally written in May 1997 (what I think of as the Jabberwocky Version) and then about what the final shooting script looked like (which was the Roger-and-Neil final draft as amended by Robert Zemeckis before he started shooting), with extensive amazingly honest introductory material by Roger on how it started and then how it came back to life, and why in the end Roger sold it to Steve Bing's company for Bob Zemeckis to direct rather than make it himself, then you might want to check out the Script Book -- http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061350160/Beowulf/index.aspx

Dear Neil,

I read your site everyday, and STILL I'm not a famous author, what am I doing wrong?

-mE.

At a guess, either you aren't writing enough, you aren't finishing things, you aren't getting them published, or, if you're doing all of those, you're worrying about the wrong things. Anyway, famousness is probably about as useful for an author as a large, well-appointed hiking backpack would be for a prima ballerina. Honest.

Right. Back to work.