American Gods Blog, Post 25

Nothing exciting to report on American Gods today. I’m back writing the Death: The High Cost of Living movie, which is a) incredibly late – this is my fault, and the fault of American Gods being at least twice as long as I’d originally planned – and b) hard writing. In some ways the hardest thing I’ve had to write in an age.

The biggest problem I’m having with it is, I already wrote it once, as a comic. That was in the summer of 1992. One thing I knew that I’d do this time, was give the characters new dialogue – words you write to be read are not words you write to be spoken aloud. They do different things.

But the dialogue is really hard to write: I’ll squint, and I’ll squirm and I’ll rack my brains, and I’ll imagine, and then I’ll carefully type a line. And then, later, I’ll check, and find all too often I’ve just written the same line, often word for word, that I gave those characters in 1992.

So I’m worrying less about that, now, and more about just getting it onto the desks of the people who want to read it by the first of April.

Tonight, and until Sunday, I’ll be attending the international conference for the fantastic in the arts Wearing the kind of beard that caused friction between Bertie and Jeeves in the beginning of a Wodehouse novel ("But Jeeves, dash it, it makes me look distinguished!" "So you say, sir," etc), and was always shaved off following the return of the prize pig or the marriage of Bingo Little at the end of the last chapter, to everyone's relief.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, beards, Death, IA