Who is Jonathan Carroll and why should you care?

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. (See all earlier comments to this effect in the previous 2 million words on this journal.) The HBO pilot script is starting to feel like a real thing.

On the downside, I miss my dogs, my family, and, off in Australia where she is about to start making her next album, my wife. But the work is good.

And it is not snowy outside. This is the morning view from my bedroom window:

...

The news just came in on the nominations for Audies, the Audiobook awards. Three of them are for things I was involved in. (Here's a PDF of all the nominees.)

The Witches of Lublin was nominated. I acted in that. (Congratulations to Ellen Kushner and Sue Zizza and Simon Jones and all involved)

American Gods (10th Anniversary Full Cast Audio) was nominated. I narrated the Coming To America bits in that, and I wrote the book. (Congratulations to the wonderful cast - and to Nicole Quinn, the contest winner, who won a part in it.) (Which reminds me - someone asked me for the list of who played what in the Audio. I'll put it up here.)

And a book from the Audible Neil Gaiman Presents line is nominated: Jonathan Carroll's novel THE LAND OF LAUGHS.

I have loved LAND OF LAUGHS ever since I first read it, in 1983 or 1984. Was once asked to pitch it as a movie by the producer who controls it, and I did, and was sad it wasn't picked up. It's a magical, spooky novel for anyone who has ever wanted to go too deeply into a book they loved. It was one of my first choices for Neil Gaiman Presents. So huge congratulations to Jonathan and to narrator Edoardo Ballerini. And more congratulations to the ACX team at Audible.

If you've been following the Neil Gaiman Presents line at all, if you liked Land of Laughs, or if you want to try out an audiobook, the new Jonathan Carroll, WHITE APPLES, has just been released.

And if you haven't discovered Jonathan Carroll, and you are wondering who this writer is, and why you should be interested, this is what I wrote some years ago, for Jonathan's own website:

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"All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own."
                                                                            -Haniel Long, Notes Toward a New Mythology.

There are millions of competent writers out there. There are hundreds of thousands of good writers in the world, and there are a handful of great writers. And this is me, late at night, trying to figure out the difference for myself. That indefinable you-either-got-it-or-you-ain't spark that makes someone a great writer.


And then I realise that I'm asking myself the wrong question, because it's not good writers or great writers. What I'm really wondering is what makes some writers special. Like when I was a kid on the London Underground, I'd stare at the people around me. And every now and again I'd notice someone who had been drawn - a William Morris beauty, a Berni Wrightson grotesque - or someone who had been written - there are lots of Dickens characters in London, even today. It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again.


There are a few writers who are special. They make the world in their books; or rather, they open a window or a door or a magic casement, and they show you the world in which they live.


Ramsey Campbell, for example, writes short stories that, read in quantity, will re-form your world into a grey and ominous place in which strange shapes flicker at the corner of your eyes, and a patch of smoke or a blown plastic shopping bag takes on some kind of ghastly significance. Read enough R.A. Lafferty and you will find yourself living in a quirky tall-tale of a world in which the people have all stepped out of some cosmic joke, if it is not a dream.


Jonathan Carroll's a changer. He's one of the special ones, one of the few. He paints the world he sees. He opens a window you did not know was there and invites you to look through it. He gives you his eyes to see with, and he gives you the world all fresh and honest and new.


In a bookstore universe of bland and homogenised writers and fictions, the world that words from Carroll's fountain pen is as cool, as fine and as magical as a new lover, or cool water in the desert. Things matter. You can fall in love with his women, or his men, worry when they hurt, hate them when they betray or fall short, rejoice when they steal a moment of magic and of life from the face of death and eventual nothingness.


I had dinner with Jonathan Carroll, with Dave McKean and with some friends, about eight years ago: what I still remember is not the meal nor even the conversation (although I do recall Jonathan telling us some incidents of his life that I would later encounter in Kissing the Beehive): what I recall was the process of becoming a Jonathan Carroll character among Jonathan Carroll characters. We were witty and wise and lucent; intelligent and beautiful men and women; artists and creators and magicians, we were.


It was a couple of days before I noticed that I had become a mundane grey person once more.


Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry. But a new book by Jonathan Carroll is still, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, a cause for celebration.


His most successful books and tales defy genre categorisation. They've more life, more balls, are more true than pretty much anything else you'll encounter out there. They call some fantasies 'Magical Realism' to try and lend them respectability, like a whore who wishes to be known as a lady of the evening. Jonathan Carroll's work, however, has every right to parade under the banner of magical realism, if you have to call it something.


I call them Jonathan Carroll stories, and leave it at that. He is one of the handful, and one of the brotherhood. If you don't believe me, pick up Outside the Dog Museum, or A Child Across the Sky, or Sleeping in Flame or The Panic Hand, or any of his other works (you'll find a list of them within, I have no doubt) and find out for yourself.


He'll lend you his eyes; and you will never see the world in quite the same way ever again.




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.... And now for something ever-so-slightly different. A wonderful Josh Ritter song, and a video made using 12,000 pieces of coloured construction paper.


 
Josh Ritter - Love Is Making Its Way Back Home from Josh Ritter on Vimeo.

Labels: ACX, Audie Awards, audio books, Jonathan Carroll, Josh Ritter

Audiobooks: A Cautionary Tale

I was talking to an author last night. Actually, we were sending text messages to each other, something I don't do a lot of, but it was sort of fun, texting. I'm not going to identify her, or the book.

She had a novel published recently by a major publisher. I read it. I really loved it.

I thought, Why not see if I can do it as a Neil Gaiman Presents Audiobook, through ACX?

I asked if there was an audiobook. She said, "No, no audiobook."

I asked who had the rights, and whether I could do it in ACX. She was thrilled and said of course, and she'd find out if she had the rights or if her publisher did. We talked about what kind of voice narrator she'd want, and whether a male or a female narrator would suit the book best.

And then I got a message from her saying "Oh. Bizarre. I just looked online and see there is an audiobook of (the novel) which no-one ever told me about. It apparently came out in November."

I went online and looked. There was indeed an audiobook, and it had a terrible cover. And this morning brought an email from the author saying, sadly "Don't listen to the (novel) audiobook. It might be the worst thing I have ever heard."

I felt so sorry for her.

It was the same stuff that I'd been talking about in the interview that Laura Miller did for me with Salon.com
(http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/neil_gaimans_audiobook_record_label/)

Why is there so much hesitation?

For me, the tragedy of audiobooks is that the physical limitations and impossibilities of putting out complete novels as audiobooks in the days of LPs and then pretty much in the days of cassettes, meant that the costs and the odds were always against you. Most books aren’t out as audiobooks. If you like a book, it’s probably not been done as an audiobook.

Publishers would take audio rights but then never do anything with them. ... That process is that you persuade your publisher to do an audiobook and then you have no control over who gets cast, or who reads it. You have no quality control over pronunciation or goofs or anything like that. And then your publisher brings it out and then your publisher remainders it.

That is the problem that ACX was created to solve — and for me it’s also the problem that it’s highlighting. I’m hitting it more and more. All I know is that there could be lots and lots of audiobooks out there that aren’t. For years it didn’t matter that the rights were held by people because nobody could do anything anyway. But we’re not in that world anymore.

Can you talk a bit about the importance of the right narrator, and how much that person can add to or subtract from the audiobook experience?

I remember once talking to a best selling author about audiobooks. He’d written a book that was narrated by a 20-something black male and the audiobook was read by a 50-something white female. He had no say in this and after listening to it for five minutes he stopped, feeling physically sick.

In some cases, when the author is alive and available, I cede that choice to the author. I become the production entity and I’ll cast a deciding vote if the author says it’s between three narrators he or she likes equally. If the author’s alive, I want the author happy. That’s the most important bit.

And I felt really extra sorry for my anonymous sad author, because I was SO happy about the release two days ago of Swordspoint -- mostly happy because of how amazingly happy author Ellen Kushner is. (See http://ellen-kushner.livejournal.com/tag/audiobook for proof and background.) Swordspoint's an audiobook narrated by the author, with additional soundscape and acting from such luminaries as Simon "Arthur Dent" Jones, and it's a thing of joy. She's happy, I'm happy, the people listening to it seem amazingly happy, the people at Audible.com are ridiculously happy because people are downloading it and the reviews are already coming in and they are happy reviews.

(Go and listen to the Swordspoint extract, or listen to me introducing it, or read more about it at http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B006FJJDBW&source_code=NGAR0002WS101911)




And I don't want to turn this into a big plug for Swordspoint, or a rant against publishers wasting or not using audio rights. I think what I want to say mostly is, if you are an author, Get Involved in Your Audiobooks Early. Get your agent involved and interested. Talk about them at contract stage. Find out if you're selling the rights, and if you are selling them then find out what control you have or whether you are going to be consulted or not about who the narrator is and how the audiobook is done.

Also, make sure that your publisher has worked out a way to give you free copies (obvious if it's out on CD, much less so if you're on download-only platform).

If you're an agent, notice that we are not living a decade ago, when audiobooks were expensive bells and whistles that meant very little, that normally wouldn't be done for anything outside of major bestsellers, when abridgments were often the order of the day: we're entering a golden age, in which there is no reason that any book shouldn't be available in professionally produced audio. Unless you know that the audio rights are going to be used and used well, keep them for your author. And if they are being sold with the book, then guard your author, and make sure that she or he gets rights of approval.

I love, am thrilled with, and am getting a huge kick out of the ACX way of doing it, where authors (or rightsholders), producers and voice talent sign up and get together and make audiobooks that Audible put up. It's there for you if you're an author, an agent, a publisher with lots of rights you don't know how to exploit, a director/producer/studio engineer, or an actor, and interested. (Right now, it's US only, but they are working on that.) (Find out more at http://www.acx.com/) (End of plug.)

But this isn't an ad for ACX, either. Honestly, you can do it on your own, if you want: Find a narrator or a studio; you can release it through the web; you can give it away as a promotional item, or because you can. Or you can make sure that if your publisher is putting out an audiobook that you have a say in it, and it's the book you want it to be.

Because otherwise it might be you writing to friends telling them not to listen to the audiobook of your book. And that would be a terrible thing indeed.

Labels: ACX, audio books, Ellen Kushner, swordspoint, the mysterious way the labels for this post keep vanishing and I have to keep writing them again

"Neil Gaiman Presents" is open for business!

This poor website's had quite a buffeting in the last 24 hours, what with the launch of All Hallows Read (the allhallowsread.com website is run off neilgaiman.com). Sorry if you've had trouble. The Webgoblin has upgraded everything, and it should be working again by now.

I just came back from Radio K.N.O.W. in St Paul, where I recorded a segment for NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED - they've started the Back Seat Book Club for kids, and picked The Graveyard Book as their lead title. Here's their article on the Book Club. More questions are still coming in, so I promised I'd answer some next week at their site.

I also recorded a couple of little things in the studio there for the introductions I've been doing to the Neil Gaiman Presents line at Audible.com.

This is something I'm really excited about. Don Katz at Audible.com knows how much I love audio books, and offered me the chance to have my own record label at Audible, getting books I loved and wanted to hear that had never been audiobooks made as audiobooks and out into the world, with the best readers I could find, using Audible's ACX platform. (The idea of ACX is that there are a lot more books out there than there are audiobooks, so ACX is a way of introducing authors and rights-holders to actor/performer/readers and producers/directors. It's very simple and sensible, and should, I hope, result in a lot more audiobooks out there in the world.)

It's been a year in the planning and now the first five books are out, with a lot more at various stages in the production process.

The first round of audiobooks consists of:

LAND OF LAUGHS by Jonathan Carroll read by Edoardo Ballerini.
YOU MUST GO AND WIN written and read by Alina Simone
PAVANE by Keith Roberts, read by Steven Crossley
 LIGHT by M. John Harrison, read by Julian Elfer
 THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK by Steven Sherrill, read by Holter Graham

Which is to say, one beautiful work of  magical realism about the dangers of having a favourite book, a collection of really funny essays about travel and Russia and being a musician, a collection of stories that become a moving alternate history, a strange and glorious space opera and a work of contemporary americana with a minotaur in it.

You could say "Why aren't these books all the same kind of thing?" and I would say "Because I like lots of different things. And so might you."

Coming up in the next round we will have Ellen Kushner reading SWORDSPOINT and John Hodgman reading Robert Sheckley's hilarious pre-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy galactic travel fantasia DIMENSION OF MIRACLES. And lots, lots more...

 I recorded introductions to each book, worked with Audible to acquire the rights, worked with the authors (when they were alive) to choose the readers. I'm ridiculously proud of the whole thing. (There's a lady at Audible.com named Christina Harcar who has done all the heavy lifting and I am very grateful to her, to everyone involved at Audible, and particularly to Don Katz for indulging my madness.)

If you've never tried Audible, it's amazingly easy - you can use your Amazon ID and password to log in and sign up. The full list of what "Neil Gaiman Presents" has coming out is at this link.

If you've never tried an audio book before, this might be a good time to find out if you enjoy them. They will go and live on your phone, your tablet, your computer, your iPod...

(And if you're an author or an actor or a director/producer/engineer, you can get started using ACX at http://www.acx.com/help/learn-how-neil-uses-acx/200680340.)

I don't really have a good photo of an audiobook being recorded to round this out, so here is a photo of my wife chasing a chicken.

Labels: a photo of AMANDA chasing a CHICKEN, ACX, audible.com, audio books

Adventures in the Screen Trade

It’s a beautiful spring day: the cherry trees and the plum trees are covered with white blossom, and the apple trees are in scarlet bud; the bees are finally out and exploring; the trees have their spring leaves on, translucent green; the sky is as blue as it has been this year; the grass is no longer a sad wintry brown, but is now green, dotted with yellow dandelions and purple violets and pink and white wildflowers, and I’m down at the bottom of the garden writing. Birds are singing outside, Jason Webley and T.V Smith are playing on the ancient gazebo CD player.

I’m writing, but I thought I’d stop writing what I'm meant to be writing to put my thoughts down on paper (which is silly expression, as they are going to go from keyboard to computer to Blogger. But put my thoughts down on screen just looks wrong).

It’s been a strange few days. Not a bad strange.

My episode of Doctor Who (it’s called “The Doctor’s Wife”, and the title really isn’t a cheat, although it may not mean what you think it means) went out in the UK and in the US on Saturday. I stayed away from the Internet as much as I could, for my sanity, not knowing what people would think and not really wanting to know.

I checked in on Twitter while the BBC Broadcast was going out, though, and was amazed to see thousands of unread messages, and to see that Neil Gaiman was a trending topic in the UK, along with Suranne Jones and TARDIS, and that we were, at that point in the evening, out-trending the Eurovision Song Contest. (Briefly and oddly, enough people were arguing on Twitter about whether or not Suranne Jones reminded them of Helena Bonham Carter, that somehowHelena Bonham Carter was a trending topic on Twitter as well.) And later that evening I went back to see that TARDIS was trending in the US and Canada, and that over about eight hours I'd received or been mentioned in about 20,000 Twitter messages.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen that amount of concentrated enthusiasm for something I'd done. It felt like “The Doctor’s Wife” had touched some kind of nerve. Er, in a good way. A happy nerve. Not everybody loved it, and not everybody liked it, but it seemed that the overwhelming majority of people did. (I think it is a good thing that all people do not like all things equally, by the way. There is, as the Romans pointed out, no arguing with taste, and trying to convince someone that they should like something they don’t or not like something they do is pointless and foolish. We like different things, and it’s part of the joy of being human, and part of the reason that I can make a living making art.)

And then I spent the next 48 hours feeling like I was coming back from very far away. The nervousness didn’t evaporate when the episode had been broadcast, as I'd expected it to. It slowly ebbed as the messages came in from friends who’d seen it and liked it, and as I showed the finished episode (and the full Doctor Who Confidential, which is called “Bigger on the Inside” which was the episode’s original title, not to mention the label I’ve put on the blog for anything with a mention of my episode of Doctor Who in it since that first dinner with Steven Moffat) to Maddy and her friend Anna-Rose, and they liked it.

I answered a lot of questions on Monday morning on the Guardian Website (click on the shortened answers to see the full answers, or read the comments, and there's one at the end that isn't in the shortened list) and marveled as I answered the questions at how much of TV is a response to the limitations of budget and time – both time to shoot, and time to tell your tale. (The response to most questions of “Why didn’t we see…?” or “Why didn’t we learn why…?” is that, well, we did once, in one draft of the script or another, but either I cut it for pacing, or it was left on the cutting room floor after it was shot.)

And another day along and I got my equilibrium back, and the odd mood faded, and now the world feels normal again, and the thing that I’ve spent an astonishing amount of the last two years working on is done and out in the world, and it doesn’t only belong to me any longer.

And if you liked it (and yes, I liked it, very much) the credit goes to the amazing cast – Matt Smith, Suranne Jones, Arthur Darvill, Karen Gillan, Elizabeth Berrington (who I never met) and Adrian Schiller, Paul Kasey and the wonderful voice of Michael Sheen; to the director Richard Clark, the designer Michael Pickwoad, the script supervisors, first Brian Minchin and then Lindsey Alford, the W Producers, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis and Sanne Wohlenberg (it’s amazing how many of the most memorable lines in the script came out of Beth saying “Yes, but I don’t get it, WHY don’t they…?” and me realising I needed actually to say something I’d just assumed everybody would follow); and most of all to the Oodfather, Steven Moffatt, who encouraged me in my madness, rescued me when I told him I’d written too many drafts and couldn’t do it again, gave the script several of its best lines, and who even rapidly rewrote a couple of scenes at the last minute when locations vanished due to budget.

Thank you as well to Steven Manfred, who for years has been my personal mysterious Doctor Who Dealer, and who, when I embarked on this madness, also became my personal Doctor Who Encyclopedia.

(And thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you, to Russell T. Davies, who brought Doctor Who back from the void and put it back together and sent it back into the future with its mission in place: to entertain, amaze and induce wonder in its audience while sending a certain number of them to watch from the relative safety of behind the sofa.)

The episode still hasn’t made it to Australia yet, so I’m not going to try not put up any real spoilers here on the blog, but I may link to places that will spoil it for you, so you click on anything at your own risk.

If you’re in the UK, the episode's up on iPlayer for the next five days. Here's the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011884d/Doctor_Who_Series_6_The_Doctors_Wife/

If you’re in the US, BBC America are repeating it on Saturdays, along with an awful lot of Doctor Who episodes. Check out their schedules or their Doctor Who pages.

If you're in Canada, it's streaming at http://watch.spacecast.com/doctor-who/doctor-who-season-6/doctor-who-the-doctors-wife/

The BBC Doctor Who pages have an interview with me up where I talk about two of the cut scenes from the episode (one that didn’t make it to shooting, one that was shot but then excised) and where I talk about writing short stories, and Doctor Who, for the competition the BBC is running for young writers.

SPOILERS:











And if you liked the episode, the full BBC Confidential is up on iPlayer for the next 3 weeks. I was thrilled by it – the Hot Chocolate “You Sexy Thing” montage made me nostalgic and delighted. It's a wonderful 45 minute documentary (and you get a crash course in film-set catering in the middle of it).

BBC America now has a cut-down 15 minute version of Doctor Who Confidential up on their website.

The only thing that made me a bit wistful is that Amanda wasn’t around for either the nervousness or the subsequent relief – she’s with her sister, at a Yoga retreat in Europe, off the web, phone and email, and getting all stretchy while, I hope, recovering from being arrested for playing the ukulele in public in Amsterdam.

Lots and lots of fanmail on the episode coming in. Thank you all. This is my favourite, from Michelle Springer:

Hello Mr. Gaiman! On behalf of the "Doctor Who" fans of McMurdo Station, Antarctica, I wanted to thank you for your amazing episode this past weekend! Of the 151 people wintering in isolation here, we have a small but very devoted group of "Who" fans, and your episode was definitely the best we've seen so far this season... in fact, it kept some of us up late, standing out in the cold and talking about what had happened, because we were too excited to go into our warm dorms! Thank you for such a fun episode, from the bottom of the world!

I think I loved that so much because 150 people in the Antarctic feels like the setting for a Doctor Who episode in its own right.

...


My weight and shape seem to have settled down, so I now need to buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes that fit me. Also, I got my blood tested this morning, and my cholesterol numbers have dropped from 221 in October (and, I expect, at the end of January, when I started taking care of myself) to 151 this morning. It's remarkable what eating vegetables and exercising will do when you get serious about it. Hurrah for vegetables.

I haven't actually settled on the Next Audio Book While Exercising yet, though. I've auditioned a couple of books so far, but not found one I like. I have learned that I don't like "rereading" - listening to books I've already read - while exercising. I definitely need an element of What Happens Next? to make myself want to go and exercise for 40 minutes.

Nicole Quinn won the American Gods Full Cast Audiobook contest -- she was the favourite voice of all three judges, and recorded her parts on Monday.

I loved the 20 finalists, and I've listened to a bunch of the other 1300 contestants now, and was so impressed at the quality of entries.

I talked before about the cool secret thing that I was planning concerning Audiobooks.

It's not secret any longer. http://www.acx.com/ The Audiobook Creation Exchange. I'm going to put together a line of audiobooks -- books I'd like to hear that do not exist as audiobooks yet -- using Audible's ACX system. I think it's going to be fun. If you're an author, an agent, a studio producer/engineer or an actor you should definitely check out the website.

I'm not down the bottom of the garden writing any longer. It's much later, I'm in bed, and I really ought to finish this blog entry and go to sleep.

Goodnight.

Labels: ACX, bigger on the inside, de gustibus, Doctor Who, honestly there's already a plum trees label on the blog, spring