A long catch up (and go and see Amanda Palmer's show)

I stopped blogging in April when my friend Gene Wolfe died. I wanted to write a blog about Gene, who he was, how we were friends, and it just made me too sad.

So I stopped writing that blog, and then felt bad writing about the other things that have happened, like Good Omens coming out as a TV series when I hadn't yet written about Gene.

I miss him still, and kept wanting to send him postcards over the last few months, just as I usually did when I travelled. And then I remember I can't send Gene things any longer.

So Gene went, before I could show him the TV adaptation we made of Good Omens, which had been a book he loved.

It came out on Prime Video May 31st, and people loved it. It broke several records for Amazon, in the US and the UK and around the world, which made me happy. We got three Emmy Nominations, and already started being nominated for and winning awards. Everyone wants us to make some more, and while Terry Pratchett and I had long ago plotted out a whole novel's worth of More, I'm still figuring out whether or not and if so how it could happen.

Then it was announced that Netflix had won the bidding war to be the company that brought Sandman to television. I'm Very Involved in making it -- I'll be cowriting the pilot episode, and working closely with Exec Producer David Goyer and Showrunner Allan Heinberg to make sure it's always Sandman, the one that people who read and loved the comics will recognise and love.

Meanwhile, I had stopped being a Good Omens showrunner, and started becoming a writer who stayed at home and looked after a small boy and also wrote, while his wife went off on tour.

And then we crossed the ocean, and are now based in the UK until the end of the year and are doing the same thing again.

I'm at home, Amanda is (mostly) on tour.

I get Ash dressed in the correct school uniform (PE or Formal) and onto the bus (we always go straight up to the top floor of the bus and he always tells me the rules of traffic lights), and I take him to school.

Occasionally I'll be doing things in public this year, and I'll try and announce them here:

The National Theatre's adaptation of The Ocean at the End of the Lane begins on Dec 3rd and runs until the 25th of January:

It's recommended for people aged 12 and over. Tickets are available here: https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-ocean-at-the-end-of-the-lane

And in one of those nice coincidences that make it look like I actually know what I'm doing, this year also brings the illustrated edition of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Elise Hurst is an Australian illustrator who passed me some of her work to look at after an event, and I was immediately impressed. Her work looks (or can look) like mid-20th century children's book illustration, but with a strange edge to it that seemed perfect for Ocean.

She and I will be in conversation on the 14th of November: here's the details, and how to get tickets -- https://membership.theguardian.com/event/an-evening-with-neil-gaiman-and-elise-hurst-69018926467

Here's a photo Amanda took of me telling a children's story that won't be published for about a year, at an event in Camden for her Patrons (from Patreon). Douglas Mackinnon, director of Good Omens, made it black and white and haunting. Ash is the one looking up at me at the front...

....

If you are in the UK, or Germany or Austria (Graz!), Paris or Prague, Luxembourg, Ireland or Denmark, I wanted to urge you to go and see Amanda in concert on this tour. (https://nointermission.amandapalmer.net/)  The show list: http://amandapalmer.net/shows/

This is a very special show. It's about life and otherwise. It contains a friend's illness and death. It contains three abortions (one on health grounds) and a Christmas Day miscarriage. It contains the arrival of Ash.

It's called There Will Be No Intermission. And normally, there's an intermission, because it's a long night.

It's important, it's beautiful, it's powerful, and it's even funny.

Labels: amanda palmer, Ash, Gene Wolfe, Good Omens, sandman tv, The Ocean At The End of the Lane, There WIll be No Intermission

How I cope with the social media cravings, and in which I begin to become a blogger once again...

It's my third Wedding Anniversary today. Amanda and I are in Boston, and there's a blizzard warning. We have our house in Cambridge for another five days. Amanda goes to Australia on Saturday morning.

Two days in to Neil off Social Media, and it's interesting. I've a novel I'm reading on my phone's Kindle app, and whenever I would have been tempted to go and look at my Twitter Feed or Tumblr or Facebook, I read Gene Wolfe's THE LAND ACROSS instead. This is a good thing because 1) it is a very good book, and 2) it reminds me of the joy and power of fiction and 3) it distracts me from what had become a very automatic thing to do.

I wrote a rather sad email to friends yesterday, about not going to Australia, which is what I'd planned to do in January: accompany Amanda to Sydney, where she is playing in the Festival, and then on to Melbourne. I have people I was looking forward to spending time with, and things I was looking forward to doing... and then Amanda's book deadline moved (she's writing a book) and we both knew that if I went with her, she wouldn't make her deadline: when we're together we talk and we do things and we spend time together and are nice social human beings, when apart we are driven lunatics who make art.

My friend Kelly Fogarty wrote back from Melbourne and said, "If you're sad today you're only creating a memory of sadness for whenever you think of your last day with Amanda before she comes out here. People keep telling me that the way you spend January 01 is indicative of the rest of your year. If you spend it surrounded by sadness rather than excitement about both your upcoming adventures then where's the fun in that, or anything, for the rest of 2014?"


.... and I looked around. The contents of the house in Cambridge that's been our home together for 14 months is mostly in boxes right now, preparing to be moved out. But yesterday, the first of the year, our friends Rachel (from the Army of Broken Toys) and her partner Clare got married in the house: they decorated it with lights and string and repurposed ancient musical scores, and made it more beautiful in a day than we ever had when we were there.

The wedding was wonderful, the house was filled with happy people, the music was wonderful, I was having marvelous conversations with glorious folk dressed in their best clothes, and cocktails  and punch and mulled cider were being drunk, and you could feel the love and fellowship and joy in the air. I even danced with my wife. I thought about writing a wedding, one filled with love and joy. I think I will (although it is true that when I told Amanda the wedding plot that was in my head, a mysterious murder happens in the middle of it).

I couldn't think of a better way to start a year, surrounded by joy and warmth and love. I hope that 2014 is a gentle year -- many amazing things happened in my world in 2013, but there were too many deaths, too many small tragedies. I'll take love and fellowship and twinkly lights and brown-paper decorations.

...

It's been a while since I've answered questions from the FAQ line here, mostly because the things coming in mostly stopped being things that could be answered, while people were really good on Twitter or Tumblr about asking easily answerable questions. But for at least the first six months of this year, questions and answers are going to be here. And look, a question I can answer. So...

Is it true you are selling your Minneapolis home and buying a house in Cambridge? If yes, WHY?

Nope. The house in Cambridge was the one we moved into last November, mostly to be near to Amanda's friend Anthony while he went through chemotherapy. We rented it, and we're moving out in a few days.

We're planning on buying a house together in New York state right now.

I've no plans to sell the house near Minneapolis. It's such a happy place in my life and in my heart: it's where my children grew up. It has the best library ever. In the long term, I may well make it a Writers Retreat for writers who mostly aren't me.

I love it, and spent over 20 years making it somewhere I wanted to be and wanted to write, but had never planned to die there. That was my home. The new place will be my house and Amanda's house. I'm happy to have the adventure of building a life and a home together.

...

I just got a delighted email from Rosemary Brosnan, my editor at Harper Childrens, to tell me that FORTUNATELY, THE MILK is now is its 15th week on the various bestseller lists. I love that it seems now to have become one of those books that sells through word of mouth, through people telling each other they ought to read it, that it's funny, that kids are staying up late and reading it under the covers with flashlights, that adults have discovered it's funny if you're an adult, that kids are reading aloud to their parents, all that...

So, as a thank you to all of you who have bought it or read it or told each other about it, here's a picture nobody's ever seen in this form. The art that Skottie Young did to convince my publishers that he would be right to draw the book:

Which Skottie wound up colouring in and making into the cover. Because it was perfect.

...

And finally, here is the amazing Lady Rizo, singing a song by me (with chords by Amanda) on her first solo album. She has a remarkable voice, and if you ever get the chance to see her, you will not regret it...

Labels: A Wedding, Anniversary thoughts, Australia and my not being there, Fortunately the Milk, Gene Wolfe, Houses and why we live in them, lady Rizo, The first of the year

With Great Power comes, well, something...

Last year I linked to R.A. Lafferty's short story "Slow Tuesday Night" (The new syfy channel that replaced the old Sci-Fi channel no longer have it up on their website, but you can find it in internet archives here.) It's a story about a world in which things happen fast. You should read it.

Sometimes I think it was written about Twitter.

For example, last night, before bed, I noticed this: http://hidenseek.typepad.com/come_out_come_out/2010/02/cannot-chase-paperchase.html It looked like a pretty clearcut case of plagiarism by a large company from a small crafter. I linked to it in Twitter, with a post saying

Fascinating Paperchase plagiarism over at http://bit.ly/cdrzKZ . Bad Paperchase.

I went to bed.

When I woke up, it was to articles like this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-copied-artists-work-after-twitter-backlash-1896894.htm and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7215124/Paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-plagiarised-British-artists-work-after-Twitter-campaign.html and (slightly more balanced) http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/11/paperchase-design-hidden-eloise.

Now, the truth is, I didn't campaign, and I didn't mobilise 1.5 million people. I pointed a few to the link, they read the article, looked at the picture, went "No, you can't do that" and spread the word themselves. There's a community of crafters out there making small-run or handmade things who individually lack power, but together are a force to be reckoned with. And the mass of people are, on the whole, very good on the whole right and wrong thing...

But it's so strange. We're not quite in a world in which the established media have the power they used to, or at least, they are playing catch-up, and that's odd, and different, and sort of fun. And it's also a tremendous amount of responsibility. The first time this happened, about a year ago, I decided I had to use these Twitter powers only for good. And that's still the plan.

But you can't plan on it. And you can't second-guess what's going to happen. I suppose you try and do the right thing, and hope for the best.

Which applies as much to life as it does to Twitter.

...

Now, in case you weren't following, I won two SFX Readers Poll Awards, handed out at the SFX Weekender on Saturday. (The Full awards list is here.) These were my acceptance speeches (they'd told me which award would be handed out first, so I put the big news after the second award):

BEST NOVEL

Hullo.

I wish I could be with you, but I’m in LA, at the animation awards, waiting to see whether Coraline has won any Annies. I keep trying to master the whole bilocation thing but so far without any luck.

I came up with the idea for The Graveyard Book in 1985, sitting in a little English country graveyard, watching my son pedal his tricycle between the headstones. I put down the words from 2005 to 2008. Last night someone asked me how long the book took to write and I didn’t know if it was three years or 25 years. I’ve written a lot of books, but it’s one of my favourites, and it means a lot to me that it’s one of your favourites too. I want to thank Dave McKean and Chris Riddell, who illustrated it, and Sarah Odedina, my editor at Bloomsbury, because I don’t get to thank her enough. But mostly I want to thank you.


BEST COMIC

I love Batman. I’ve loved him for over 40 years now, and when I was offered the chance to write the “last” Batman comic, I jumped at it. Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader was really a kind of a love letter to everything I had loved about Batman, and at the same time it was fan letter to all the people who had, over the years, made the Batman I had loved – Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Neal Adams, Adam West and Frank Miller and the list goes on and on...
I was delighted that people enjoyed it. Nobody would have enjoyed it even a little bit if Andy Kubert was not an amazing genius of great brilliance, capable of drawing like Brian Bolland or Berni Wrightson whenever I’d ask him to, and equally as capable of drawing like himself. I was more than happy to have been asked to make it, I’m thrilled you liked it.

Oh, and there's something else.

Over the years SFX, and its readers and their votes in the polls, have always been very kind to me. I thought I’d return the favour with what used to be called, in journalistic circles when I was a boy, a scoop.

As anyone who’s read my blog knows, I’m a big fan of a certain long-running British SF TV series. One that started watching -- from behind the sofa -- when I was three. And while I know it’s cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now, which is to say, NOT in the upcoming season but early in the one after that, it’s quite possible that I might have written an episode. And if I had, it would originally have been called “The House of Nothing”. But it definitely isn’t called that any more.

Countdown. You’ve got about 14 months.

Which I decided to announce mostly because being coy was getting wearing after 18 months. (No, I've never lied about it, and the only things I've flat-out denied were made-up stories about Ice Warriors or episode placement.) I'd let Steven Moffat and co. know ahead of time. And it got fairly well reported -- accurately by SFX in http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=exclusive_neil_gaiman_confirms_doctor, picked up by papers like the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/08/neil-gaiman-dr-who - and then much more cautiously by the BBC itself in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8503737.stm with the headline Neil Gaiman 'has written Doctor Who episode' (as if it's a direct quote, which it isn't), with a line at the end saying A spokesman for Doctor Who would not confirm Gaiman's announcement. which left me scratching my head, wondering why I got the quotation marks and odd deniability, or the sense that they were poised to follow it up with Gaiman admits 'he made the whole Doctor Who thing up'. Oh, funny old BBC news website.

...

Dan Guy, webgoblin of this parish, and I, have put up a proper Facebook fan page to replace a couple of ones people had put up in the past that everyone seemed to think was actually me. Not a lot of content there, and there are no plans to put up anything you can't find here. It's at http://www.facebook.com/neilgaiman

(Thanks again to the magic of Twitter, where I complained that we couldn't figure out a way to make it happen, and were contacted by Facebook almost instantly.)

...

Hi, Neil - I am sure you will hear this many, many times... but I wanted to chime in and say that when I read "I don't really know how much longer this blog has to go," it was a bit of a shock. I know it's a little silly to have become attached to the blog of an author I've never met, but reading what you write here is a constant joy and entertainment, and I would be very sad to see it go. Please keep writing - here, and everywhere else.

Best,
-Megan

I think all good things end. When I started the blog, in February 2001, I planned to keep it going until September 2001. It's still going, and I'm certainly not planning to end it immediately. But it will end one day. Good things do.

Hi Neil. I don't know if you can answer this question. Since you're the best author who ever lived, you likely haven't encountered this problem. How do you deal with harsh criticism and bad reviews without wanting to slit your wrists? Some of us take our writing very seriously. Please tell me. I'd really like to know.
Thanks... and cheers, mate.

Well, for a start, never take seriously anyone telling you you're the best author who ever lived, because if you do you'd have to take seriously the person who announces that you're the worst author who ever lived.

If you make art, people will talk about it. Some of the things they say will be nice, some won't. You'll already have made that art, and when they're talking about the last thing you did, you should already be making the next thing.

If bad reviews (of whatever kind) upset you, just don't read them. It's not like you've signed an agreement with the person buying the book to exchange your book for their opinion.

Do whatever you have to do to keep making art. I know people who love bad reviews, because it means they've made something happen and made people talk; I know people who have never read any of their reviews. It's their call. You get on with making art.

Hey Neil,

Just wanted to say a big thank you!! I saw you at the Con in Montreal in August and you talking about Gene Wolfe inspired me to get some of his writing...and now I can't stop! I wish I had found him before. Just read Peace...and reread it! Amazing! And gulping down his short stories now. Lots of jewels in "The Best of Gene Wolfe". Anyway, thanks!!

What's your favourite Gene Wolfe work?

Pi

It depends. Sometimes Peace, sometimes the Book of the New Sun, sometimes it's the last thing of Gene's I read.

Dear Neil I am 8 years old and in LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOve with your books so are my two little sisters and my dad. Cant wait to see you at Naperville reads!

Why, thank you. (I actually put this up so that I could remind people in the Chicago area about http://napervillereads.org/events.html and the events on the evenings of the 23rd and 24th of February
The 23rd is 7:00 p.m. Reading / Q&A event for Adult Fans held at Waubonsie Valley High School. This will be a ticketed event, with tickets available at Anderson’s and all 3 Naperville Public Library locations, Nichols Library, Naper Boulevard Library and 95th Street Library.

The 24th is very similar, but it's for families (which just means I'm going to read all-ages appropriate stuff on the 24th, but not necessarily on the 23rd). They are ticketed event, although the tickets are Free.

The Naperville Reads events look crazy busy, but I'm hoping my granddaughter & nephew can meet you at the Family Night on Feb.24 - will there be a signing and/or meet & greet?
Thanks much!
~Chris

I'm going to pre-sign about 3000 books, but not try and do signings each night, because each day is already packed from early in the morning with talks to school classes and groups and a 5 hour signing at the end of each long day will finish me off.

In terms of meet and greet, we'll see. If I can, I will.

Dear Neil,

Two questions:

1) Is the notion presented in American Gods that roadside attractions in America are built on places of power an original one of yours, or can one read more about this idea somewhere?

2) Have you ever driven down the Great River Road on the Wisconsin side? There are a number of unusual (and I think resonant) places along that route, the best of which is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine just south of La Crosse.

Love your work!

Regards,

Chris Ellison
The Netherlands (but originally from Cannon Falls)

1) It's mine, I'm afraid.

2) I did, the first time I drove to Florida, researching American Gods. It was so cold...

OK, OK, so I'm only 20-some years late in asking, but I just found my box of Sandman comics and my son and I have been re-reading them at night, and my son asked: In the first issue, when Morpheus is trapped and Burgess (his captor) dies right in front of him, how come Death doesn't see her brother when she comes for Burgess? I know, I know, it was the first issue and seeing more of the Endless at that point would have been problematic, but still, I promised I'd ask (and now I'm kind of curious to hear what I know will be a creative answer). On a side note, I love how well even the early issues still hold up. I wish I was as good a writer now as you were at 28 (and a half). --Steve and Thomas

Oh, she saw him. They all knew where he was and what had happened to him. But it's not exactly the kind of family who would do anything about it, if you see what I mean.

Hi,
I went to the Magnetic Fields show here in DC tonight. It was, as expected, amazing. Just wanted to pass along word that they don't have the Coraline musical soundtrack at the shows yet, but they will have it later on. I failed to retain the dates given to me by the merchandise salesperson, though. He did say that it will be out in digital form soon too.
While I have your attention...
I was wondering why you chose Scotties as the dogs in Coraline, or if their is any reason behind it. My family has had Scotties since before I was born and I loved the use of them in Coraline, both book and film. Henry Selick's team nailed the way they jump up on you when you come to the door.
My apologies if this has been answered elsewhere. I'm a recent convert to your awesomeness (thanks to BPAL) and the search function gave me pages about people named Scott.
Thank you,
Shannon

I'll ask them when it will be out. [Edit to add, they have it for sale now.] In the meantime, you can catch up with the Magnetic Fields on the road at http://houseoftomorrow.com/calendar.php

And you can watch me (and Sarah Silverman, and Peter Gabriel and Lemony Snickett...) talking about Stephin in a trailer for STRANGE POWERS, a soon to be released documentary, at
http://strangepowersfilm.com/, and also up on YouTube:

And the Scotties came from Miss Webster, my elocution teacher when I was a boy. (I talk about it in this CORALINE conversation at the Well.)

Labels: Gene Wolfe, Naperville Reads, Stephin Merritt, the dangers of Twitter

Thinking Out Loud Mostly

For the last week, a few chapters a night, because you don't want to eat it all at once, I've been reading Gene Wolfe's next novel AN EVIL GUEST. I think I need to read it again. (This is a perfectly valid way to feel on finishing a Gene Wolfe novel.) I'm going to write about it here by way of setting my thoughts in order. It's set about eighty years from now, sort of, although the future feels like a high tech 1930s (intentionally, I assume, because in Gene Wolfe fiction it is safe to assume that things are intentional), so much so that one finds oneself reading the book trying to find a key to open it. The obvious key is Lovecraft, whose initials are dropped early, and further inside the book we find Miskatonic University and Great Cthulhu Himself (although not quite by name) , although that still doesn't really help figure out what kind of thing it is one is reading.

The book is the story of Cassie, a minor stage actress who is just about to become a major Broadway star thanks to the wizardry of Mr Gideon Chase, a high tech mystery man and problem solver, and Cassie is also about to become involved with a multibillionaire named Bill Reis, who may be trying to murder her. (It also has Hanga, the shark god from Wolfe's chilling story "The Tree Is My Hat" in it, from the Wolfe collection Innocents Aboard.) The point that I felt I was getting a key to what kind of book this was was the point where the name Cranston was dropped. As in Lamont, and The Shadow. Which made sense of a few things, as both Gideon Chase and Bill Reis get to cloud mens' minds in their own ways, have high tech gadgets and adventures. And when I realised that then the book sort of shook and shifted in my head and it seemed right and sensible that the future was a sort of 1930s future, that the book moves from horror (sort of) to spy adventure (sort of, with FBI agents and competing government agencies) with a tech sometimes indistinguishable from magic, that Chthulhu's in there and a stage Musical called Bride of the Volcano God, that Cassie is a sort of actressy Margo Lane, that the very real Polynesians of "The Tree Is My Hat" have been replaced with larger than life characters who feel like they could have stepped down from a movie screen, that there is at least one werewolf (there are hidden wolves in most Wolfe books, perhaps all) and a zombie and things like huge bats that I'm still not sure what they were. It's a pulp thriller -- and that's a compliment, because Wolfe knows from pulp thrillers (he wrote a wonderful pastiche of one in "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories") and because here he's creating a strange sort of genre meltdown, a 21st century pulp adventure thriller with SF and horror elements that nobody else could possibly have written.


...

Hi Neil,
"A near death experience with a bumblebee"
An article on the questionable authorship of Footprints.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=180239
-G

As mentioned in Sandman 15, I think.

You know, I rather like the idea that it welled up out the collective unconsciousness and forced hundreds of people to write it whether they wanted to or not.

Hello!

I am studying Stylistics at the University of Nottingham and am doing a corpus linguistic study on the language used in the Beowulf screenplay to invoke a sense of Germanic/Scandinavian history.

I've purchased Beowulf: The Screenplay, but in order to do a good corpus study I need the text in an electronic format. I'm starting to scan in the pages, but it's tedious work. Could you tell me if there is an electronic copy of Beowulf: the Screenplay out on the web somewhere? I've checked google and the obvious sites, with no luck.

Thanks for taking your time to read this note. I very much appreciate any help you can provide.

It's not out there as far as I know, although you might be able to buy it as an ebook. Although this reminds me, I keep meaning to link to Karl Hagen's blog -- particularly http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/201
http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/202
http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/203 (there were versions of the script with lots of alliterations and kennings in, but none of them survived to the director's final draft)
http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/204 (which says that Roger and I relied heavily on the Seamus Heaney translation, which I am sure we would have done if it had been around in 1997, but it wasn't, so we didn't.)

Labels: Anglo Saxon Attitudes, Footsteps, Gene Wolfe, The Evil Guest

Gene wolves

LOOK AT Gene: a genial smile (the one they named for him), pixie-twinkle in his eyes, a reassuring mustache. Listen to that chuckle. Do not be lulled. He holds all the cards: he has five aces in his hand, and several more up his sleeve.

I once read him an account of a baffling murder, committed ninety years ago. "Oh," he said, "well, that's obvious," and proceeded off-handedly to offer a simple and likely explanation for both the murder and the clues the police were at a loss to explain. He has an engineer's mind that takes things apart to see how they work and then puts them back together...

My essay on How to Read Gene Wolfe (of which those are the first two paragraphs) is up at the F&SF website. And so is Michael Swanwick's essay. And so is Michael Andre-Driussi's. I recommend getting the magazine in question, of course. Meanwhile, I just got sent a proof of Gene's next book, called, I think, Pirate Freedom. (Gene Wolfe and Pirates. Two tastes that go great together.)

(It was the matches on the ground, by the railway tracks, that Gene pointed to, in the old press clipping murder case, that cracked it; but of course by then the tramp was ninety years dead...)

Here's the cover of A Walking Tour of the Shambles, which I post because it has a Gahan Wilson caricature of me and Gene on it. Gene is the one with the moustache. I am the one looking troubled.

Labels: A Walking Tour of the Shambles, Gene Wolfe, Yes it's still bloody snowing in case you were wondering