Catch Up (and Entitlement Issues once again)

I just realised that I'd forgotten to do the February tenth anniversary repost for today.

And a few more things have come in...

So I'm home, and it's warmed up. The snow has gone soft, but almost none has melted. It looks like this right now out in the woods.

(Photos taken with a real camera for once, as opposed to the Nexus-S...)


Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs have some more amazing scents out as benefits for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

Lemon-Scented Sticky Bat
http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/stickybat.html

The Lovers Tee
http://www.blackphoenixtradingpost.com/teezoom-vtlovers.html

The Lovers Perfume
http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/vampiretarot.html

Bill Hader sent me a link to this Saturday Night Live short film, which reminded me of all the films Mark Evanier has on his blog of people talking in accents without actual language content. It made me smile.




...

There have been a lot of people asking me to repost one particular blog entry. This was the longest and most articulate of the requests...

Mr. Gaiman,

I'd like to submit my nomination for your "Tenth Blog Anniversary" thingy.

It's perhaps not one of the ones that sends me into giggle fits, or one of the ones that makes me just sit and reflect for a minute or five, and it was written only a scant couple of years ago, but it DOES have a valuable message for both rabid fans (well-meaning and not) and also the little, starving writer inside me. I refer, of course, to the post you named, "Entitlement issues..." (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html), but which most of the people I know who refer others to it call, simply, "George R R Martin is not your bitch."

This post was unique in that it not only stated -- bluntly, humorously, and well -- something that some of us kind of stumbled around the edges of while trying to answer rants from friends, customers, and random people who commented on our choice of reading material, it also said something important, but perhaps not consciously intended, to the little guy in my head...

You know who I'm talking about, right? The one with all the stories to tell who is always being terrorized by the monsters 'Other Stuff to Do' and 'It's Not Happening, Anyway'? That guy? He now yells at me whenever I don't sit down with him regularly to listen for his stories, since the most important part is not whether or not the Big Project is working or whether what we're telling is Good Enough to Share, just that we're doing SOMETHING and we're doing it because we love it.

So yes. Please, if you would, re-post that one for him, and for me. We both say thank you ... for that, and for the many, many other words you've shared with us.

Sincerely

-mathew

Fair enough. In order to put it up, I need to repost the question that prompted it as well. So, from May 12, 2009, Entitlement Issues:

Hi Neil,

I've recently subscribed to George RR Martin's blog (http://grrm.livejournal.com/) in the hopes of getting some inside information regarding when the next "Song of Ice and Fire" book is due to be released. I love the series but since subscribing to the blog I've become increasingly frustrated with Martin's lack of communication on the next novel's publication date. In fact, it's almost as though he is doing everything in his power to avoid working on his latest novel. Which poses a few questions:

1. With blogs and twitter and other forms of social media do you think the audience has too much input when it comes to scrutinising the actions of an artist? If you had announced a new book two years ago and were yet to deliver do you think avoiding the topic on your blog would lead readers to believe you were being "slack"? By blogging about your work and life do you have more of a responsibility to deliver on your commitments?

2. When writing a series of books, like Martin is with "A Song of Ice and Fire" what responsibility does he have to finish the story? Is it unrealistic to think that by not writing the next chapter Martin is letting me down, even though if and when the book gets written is completely up to him?

Would be very interested in your insight.

Cheers
Gareth

My opinion....

1) No.

2) Yes, it's unrealistic of you to think George is "letting you down".

Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.

People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines.

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

It seems to me that the biggest problem with series books is that either readers complain that the books used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a book every year the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the books, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.

Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a series, and make me even gladder that the decade that I did write series things, in Sandman, I was young, driven, a borderline workaholic, and very fortunate. (and even then, towards the end, I was taking five weeks to write a monthly comic, with all the knock-on problems in deadlines that you would expect from that).

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

I blew a deadline recently. Terminally blew it. First time in 25 years I've sighed and said, “I can't do this, and you won't get your story.” It was already late, I was under a bunch of deadline pressure, my father died, and suddenly the story, too, was dead on the page. I liked the voice it was in, but it wasn't working, and eventually, rather than drive the editors and publishers mad waiting for a story that wasn't going to come, I gave up on it and apologised, worried that I could no longer write fiction.

I turned my attention to the next deadline waiting – a script. It flowed easily and delightfully, was the most fun I've had writing anything in ages, all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do, and the story was better than I had dared to hope.

Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.

And sometimes, and it's as true of authors as it is of readers, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last book comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like writing another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

The economics of scale for a writer mean that very few of us can afford to write 5,000 page books and then break them up and publish them annually once they are done. So writers with huge stories, or ones that, as Sandman did, grow in the telling, are going to write them and have them published as they go along.

And if you are waiting for a new book in a long ongoing series, whether from George or from Pat Rothfuss or from someone else...

Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.

And Gareth, in the future, when you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you.

Hope that helps.

If you have any problems with the language here, I'd refer you to the second part of this post. http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/zoe.html. I'd repost it, but Zoe's death is still raw.

Labels: Bill Hader, BPAL, George R R Martin