Really bloody excellent omens...

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price. 

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.

On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room. 

I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.

I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”

Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.

And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.

But we never forgot it.

It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)

Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.

Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.

So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed. 

The crumbled chair.

So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy,  Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.

Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.

Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.

What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.

I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.

(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)

L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.

So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.

There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for. 

As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop. 

(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)

Labels: Good Omens, What time of the night do you call this then?

An Acceptance, in rough times

Last night, starting at at 1:00 in the morning, my time, was the Nebula Awards ceremony, held by the SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The first award they gave out was the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and it meant the world that it went to episode 3 of Good Omens, "Hard Times".

Exactly one year ago, Good Omens was released to the world, on Amazon's Prime Video service. Thirty years ago this month, Good Omens was published as a novel. It seems amazing that it still has so much life, and still feels so relevant to people's own lives. Especially now.

Here's the complete list of all the nominees and of the awards given out at the Nebulas last night. Congratulations to everyone nominated!

The entire proceedings existed in virtual space, via the magic of Zoom and other technological things.

This is what it looked like on my screen, just before we went live...

Here is the speech I gave. I wore a hat, because, even though Terry Pratchett loved pointing out that he was a hat person and I wasn't, not really, I thought it would have amused him.

I didn't intend to write the television adaptation of Good Omens. I did it because as he knew his own immeasurable light was dimming, Terry Pratchett wrote to me, telling me I had to do it. That no-one else had the passion for the “old girl” that the two of us had. And I was the one of us who had to make it happen, so he could see it before the lights went out.

I'm used to dealing with the problems of fictional people.  Now I found myself dealing with much harder problems, of real people and immutable budgets.  But I was even more determined to make something Terry would have been proud of. And I was part of an amazing team – Douglas Mackinnon, our director, Rob Wilkins, Chris Sussman and Simon Winstone and the folk from BBC Studios, the Amazon Studios team, and above us all the cast and the crew, who united and went over and above what anyone asked of them to tell, together, a kind of love story about protecting the world, about an angel who isn't as angelic as he ought to be, and a demon who likes people. And for them, I want to thank Michael Sheen and David Tennant.

Terry and I had written a book about averting the end of the world, about the power of not going to war, about an armageddon that didn't have to happen.

When I was a boy, I was told that there was a curse, “May you live in interesting times”. And that made me sad, because I wanted to live in interesting times. I thought I did.

And now, we are all of us living in Interesting Times. The Horsepeople are riding out, as they have ridden so many times before, and the world still needs saving – from plague, from racism, from foolishness and selfishness and pain. It says in Good Omens that we have to save ourselves, because nobody else is going to sort it out for us. And we do. 

It feels almost indecent to be accepting an award while so many people are hurting, but thank you, from me and from Douglas, who took the words and made them so brilliantly come to life. This is for Terry Pratchett.

You can watch the whole ceremony at: 

https://www.facebook.com/SFWA.org/videos/996082517476423/

or at this YouTube link:

(The Good Omens bit starts around 22:30)

Labels: Good Omens, Nebula Awards, Ray Bradbury Award, speech

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

That Was The 2018 That Was

It's been a strange year. I've only blogged a couple of times, mostly because I've not had anything to write about except one thing, the hugeness of making Good Omens. We wrapped the shooting part mostly in March, and so everything we've been doing since is "post-production".

This means we (and when I say "we" in this blog it's normally Douglas Mackinnon the director and me) edited the six episodes. Sometimes this was simple, but mostly it wasn't. Good Omens is complicated.  Episode 1 in its original shape was 75 minutes long and very confusing for people. Episode 1 now is about 52 minutes long and nobody watching it gets lost at all, even during the baby swap. Episode 5 wound up too short and episode 6 wound up too long, but that was okay, because we'd long ago realised that the only way to make something of this scale was a 6 hour long movie, so so we moved bits of Episode 6 earlier. Each episode was tightened and experimented with and worked on until it gleamed. (The editors we were working with were Will Oswald for the first three episodes and Emma Oxley for the second three)

And once it was edited and "locked", then the music could be written by David Arnold and recorded, then the team at MILK could begin to work on the Visual Effects, the big obvious ones like the M25 London orbital motorway turning into a flaming ring around London, or the huge floating head of Derek Jacobi filling Aziraphale's bookshop, and the less obvious ones, like the missing details of our Soho street.

And while this was happening the Sound Wizards at Bang! listened to the sound and told us what they could use and what they needed a back-up of, and where we would need the actors to dub their voices (a process called ADR). Not to mention the technical challenges of the different voices that will be coming out of Miranda Richardson's mouth (she plays Madame Tracy, the medium): Johnny Vegas and Michael Sheen also provide voices that we will hear Miranda utter...

We have over 200 speaking parts. That's a lot of ADR.

And then there's Gareth Spensely at Molinare, who is credited as colourist, and who is a Warlock who makes it look even more beautiful than Gavin Finney did when he shot it, and sometimes makes scenes shot in the morning become scenes that happen at dusk, and does other things equally as odd. And there's Beren Croll doing the "online", working his own visual magic, and placing the astonishing visuals and the peculiarly handmade graphics that Peter Anderson Studios have made for us where they need to be...

And in all that, the last nine months have flown by. Here's the trailer we did, if you haven't seen it, or just want to see it again.


We aren't done yet. There's about a month to go before it's all wrapped up. We were hoping to have been done earlier, which is why my wife and small son and retiring nanny are off on our "Hurrah! Neil has finished Good Omens!" holiday in the Caribbean and I am rather obviously not on that holiday. I am on my way back to back to the UK (dividing my time between London's Soho, where our various post production studios are, and Cardiff, where Bang! are) and am stopping off in the friends' house where I wrote much of American Gods and Anansi Boys, and short stories like A Study In Emerald.  So many memories.

Two days ago we went to Sarasota, to visit my Cousin Helen. She will be 101 years old in a few weeks. She is as smart as she ever was. (This is a link to a recent piece about her on Brainpickings, and a letter she wrote about a story that helped:  https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/18/a-velocity-of-being-helen-fagin/ )

Helen is nearly 101. Ash is 3 and a 1/4. Amanda and I are somewhere in the middle.

It will be the first night in a long time that I haven't kissed my wife at midnight on New Year's Eve. The first year we won't get to celebrate our wedding anniversary together. I will miss them so very much.

My goals for 2019 are to get Good Omens finished, to send it out into the world, and then to retire from full-time showrunning and, in my retirement, to start writing again. I miss it.

If you enjoy Radio, you should check out:

With Great Pleasure: I pick some prose, poems and songs I love. Peter Capaldi, John Finnemore and Nina Sosanya read them, Mitch Benn and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain sing.

The Wild Wood -- one of the many things recorded for With Great Pleasure that didn't make it onto the air. But, as read by Mr Capaldi, too good to lose.

Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology -- a dramatisation by starring Diana Rigg and Derek Jacobi, Natalie Dormer and Colin Morgan. Lucy Catherine did the adaptation, and Allegra McIlroy directed it and made it happen.

You can listen to all of these anywhere in the world for the next 3 weeks...


If you have come here for New Year's Wishes, I don't have a new one.  But here are the ones that already exist. This is from 2014:

Fifteen Years ago, I wrote:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

And almost a decade ago I said,

...I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

Half a decade ago, I wrote:

And for this year, my wish for each of us is small and very simple.

And it's this.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

And here, from 2012 the last wish I posted, terrified but trying to be brave, from backstage at a concert:

It's a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. 

So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them. 

And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it's joy we're looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation. 

So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.

...

I meant, and mean them all. I wasn't going to write a new one this year. But...

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead. 

Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It's too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.

Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.

Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them. 

Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

Labels: Good Omens, Happy New Year, Helen Fagin

Ursula at 85

I was thrilled to be interviewed for a documentary on Ursula K. Le Guin on BBC Radio -- who are also going to be broadcasting their adaptations of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea Trilogy. I was even more thrilled to hear the finished programme -- not because it has me in it, and David Mitchell, and Karen Joy Fowler, and lovely Naomi Alderman asking the questions and doing the talking, but because it has so much Ursula K Le Guin in it. She reads from an essay. She answers questions. She explains how you balance a writing life with having a family. She talks about gender and about writing and about humanity.

For the next few weeks you can listen to it here, wherever you are in the world:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pkmyg

(If you are on a phone or tablet you'll need an app like TuneIn Radio to listen.)

Allegra, the producer, told me that the success on BBC Radio of Neverwhere and Good Omens were what gave the people who wanted to make Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness the clout they needed to get Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra to agree to make them. I've never been happier for an unintended consequence.

Here's a great recent interview with Ursula: http://www.denofgeek.us/books-comics/ursula-le-guin/245224/ursula-le-guin-talks-sci-fi-snobbery-adaptations-troublemaking
And here's a clip:

...

To honour Terry Pratchett, the BBC is rebroadcasting their adaptation of GOOD OMENS, too:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04knt4h is the BBC's Good Omens site, with lots of goodies, and links to the programs. If you are in the UK, it's going out at about 11:30pm each night, and the final episode will be on Saturday at 2:30 pm.

There's a new book by me out, with pictures by the amazing Mr Adam Rex: Chu's Day at the Beach

It's intended for readers a little older than the first Chu books (who are mostly 1-3). This one is for 4 and 5 year olds. It has a plot. It even has merpandas.

I'm really proud of it. It's my favourite of the Chu books, and once you look at it, you'll know why.

Labels: Chu's Day at the Beach, Good Omens, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Facts of Death

It is not a wise or a sensible thing to do, to fly from the US to the UK, getting in late on the Tuesday night, and flying back early on the Thursday morning, in order to go to a funeral on the Wednesday, but sometimes you do the wrong thing because it's the only right thing you can do, and because you have to say goodbye to a friend properly, and that was true this week.

We didn't always look like this. 24 years ago, on tour for Good Omens, we looked more like this:

It's a bookshop signing photo, which is a nice change. Back then, every newspaper interview we did they'd drive us to a graveyard. I'm not 100% certain why. But in ancient crumbling newspaper picture archives, there should be a host of photos of Terry and me holding Good Omens and looking not very scary at all.

It accompanies this:  http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/1991_Gaiman_Pratchett.html --  an interview with us both from 1991, in Locus Magazine, from back when we were very young and prone to finishing each other's sentences.

BBC Radio 4 is going to repeat GOOD OMENS as a tribute to Terry: it starts Monday the 6th, at 22:30 UK time. Details at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04knt4h If you missed it, you can listen to it from anywhere in the world, using the internet, or an app (if you have only a phone/tablet).

And Terry's death makes me think of Douglas Adams' death (I missed the memorial: it was the first day that planes were flying again after 9/11, and I gave my seat on the plane up so that someone could get home). 

On March 3rd I was in the UK to deliver the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, to help Save the Rhinos. You can watch the talk I gave here:

(The blog title is borrowed from a poem Terry wrote for an anthology called NOW WE ARE SICK, which I edited with Steve Jones in 1985. His poem began...


They don’t teach you the facts of death,

Your Mum and Dad. They give you pets.

We had a dog which went astray.

Got laminated to the motorway.

I cried. We had to post him to the vet’s.



You have to work it out yourself,

This dying thing. Death’s always due.

A goldfish swimming on a stall,

Two weeks later: cotton wool,

And sent to meet its Maker down the loo.)

Labels: Douglas Adams, Flights, Good Omens, Save the Rhinos, Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett

I woke up and my email was all condolences from friends, and requests for statements from journalists, and I knew it had happened. I'd been warned.

Thirty years and a month ago, a beginning author met a young journalist in a Chinese Restaurant, and the two men became friends, and they wrote a book, and they managed to stay friends despite everything. Last night, the author died.

There was nobody like him. I was fortunate to have written a book with him, when we were younger, which taught me so much.

This was the last thing I wrote about Terry. I knew his death was coming and it made it no easier:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman

I'll miss you, Terry.

I'm not up to writing anything yet. Maybe one day.

Labels: Good Omens, Terry Pratchett, The End of an Era

Day Four: Went to ring bell, but cat had stolen batteries.

Mr. G sends "a small treat" to help us pass the time in his absence. He writes:

A small treat for Good Omens fans and audio book fans and just people who like quality. This is the first scene in the Harper Audio version that'll be out on Nov 10th, read by Martin Jarvis. (Out of the US people will have to buy the CD version as it won't be on Audible or iTunes for them I'm afraid.)

Download.

---

There are currently twenty-seven independent book stores plotted on the Graveyard Book Halloween Parties map, and that number is still slowly growing. Check back periodically to find one near you, and then please go and support independent book sellers!

---

The Super Assistants Team-Up of Fabulous Lorraine and Beth have been saving cats. If you would like to help, you should follow them on Twitter (@fabulouslorrain / @bethofalltrades) and await the next SOS.

---

I'd happily go to the mailbag at this point, in hopes of prolonging my blogging stay by playing "Mr. Answer Goblin", but no one has written me recently.

Labels: all creatures great and smoke, Good Omens, what happened to the days when I did cute or funny or interesting labels then?, What Lorraine does in the evenings

"Hunting for rabbits again, Vicar?"

A few months ago my friend Harry Bliss (it's possibly more accurate to say my acquaintance Harry Bliss, as we mostly wave at each other in email and have so far failed to have dinner or save each other from drowning but I like him very much on the basis of not knowing each other very well) sent me a drawing that he'd done that needed a caption. It was a Jack Kirby Monster on the side of a building, with a cheerful Harry Bliss man on the phone inside.

I pondered it, and a month later sent him a suggestion, and he said it was funny but that the New Yorker had already bought the drawing for their caption contest.

I see from Mark Evanier's blog that the New York Post have run a piece accusing Harry of Plagiarism:

Thomas Lammers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, said he thought the cartoon looked familiar. He then dug out the original from his collection, which had the same monster as the New Yorker cartoon and the same background.

He said he e-mailed the magazine about the similarities two weeks ago, but never heard back. He said the editors "probably had no idea what the source" of the image was when they saw the cartoon, but the lack of any credit to Kirby in the piece stuck in his craw.

"This is a guy who was a very popular comic-book artist. He co-created the Fantastic Four and a lot of other things people made a lot of money off of, and never got proper credit then, and isn't getting proper credit now," he said.

And while I'm happy that it now says Drawing by Harry Bliss, after Jack Kirby at http://www.cartoonbank.com/CapContest/CaptionContest.aspx?id=145 it's hard not to feel that Prof. Lammers has sort of missed why it's funny -- it's because it's a Jack Kirby monster and a Harry Bliss man. That's the point. Like the New Yorker spokesman says,

"Harry did it with all good intentions. He thought it was an overt reference, and not an attempt to plagiarize. He thought it was a tribute," Cassanos said. "To people in the comic world, it's a recognizable image."

Which is the magic of Jack Kirby.

Ah well. Speaking of cartoons:

As you probably know, long ago and far away, Phil Foglio did two pages of art for a Good Omens comic he wanted to pitch to you.

That never quite went anywhere, but they still have the art. But not for long: Kaja just announced that they'll be auctioning the art off, with proceeds to go to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.

From memory, it mostly never went anywhere because nobody ever pitched it to us -- Phil showed the pages to me and I thought they were funny, and that was sort of as far as it ever went. Pity.

But glad they'll be going to a good cause.

...

A couple of questions:

1) Would anyone in the UK who hears "She's cooking a roast" be surprised if the thing that was roasted was a chicken?

and

2) is there an internet resource that collects book covers with pictures of ladies (often holding candelabras) running away from ominous houses with one light on in an attic room? Things like http://en.dcdatabaseproject.com/Dark_Mansion_of_Forbidden_Love/Covers

It just seems like there should be, and I can't find one.

...

Here's me being interviewed for the Book Expo America podcast (I'm half-asleep in Australia, the interviewer is not). We're talking about The Graveyard Book (which isn't out in the shops yet, but we're raising awareness of it among the people who will be at Book Expo America -- booksellers and librarians and the like.
http://www.mediumatlarge.net/2008/05/neil-gaiman-interview-get-your-bookexpo.html

(The breakfast I talked about stars Sherman Alexie, Judy Blume and me and will be MCed by Eoin Colfer. Introductory remarks by Jon Scieszka. It's cheap compared to the author lunches or teas but is only open to people who have registered for the Book Expo.)

...

Here's me at seven in the morning on Triple J breakfast radio in Sydney: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/breakfast/neilgaiman_pod.mp3

...


Here's me with a bruise on my face and a swollen nose (but the black eye is facing away from us) being interviewed at the New York Comic Con last month...

Labels: Good Omens, Harry Bliss, Here's me twice, jack kirby, podcasts

Just above the Bible, but just below Black Beauty

This morning in the Guardian I noticed that, just above the Bible on the list of the top twenty most re-read books in the UK, they listed Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Which is odd, because in the UK it is Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. But I was happy to see it there. (The full list.) And this on a day when a quote from me was on the front page of Google. (Beams foolishly.)

I just went to a small pre-birthday dinner tonight with friends, and it was one of the nicest evenings I've had in ages. Roger Avary saw Jonathan Ross's comics and original art collection and hungered for it, David Walliams apologised for telling me I looked like Lou Reed at the Stardust premiere ("I took it as a compliment," I said, and I did, and I told him the story of how I declined to interview Nico), the food was lovely, Matthew Vaughn told me that Stardust has now made about $118 million worldwide (over $20 million so far in the UK alone) and promised me one of the chandeliers from the witches' lair if I ever have anywhere to put it, and Holly hugged me a lot and told me I was a pretty good dad all things considered, which is as good as it gets.

Was just sent my avatar for the Second Life press conference thingie tomorrow. It looks exactly what I would look like if I was a lantern-jawed enforcer for a motorbike gang. Hurrah.

Sleep beckons. Also waves. Also makes threatening gestures and hops up and down until I notice.

Labels: Good Omens, Guardian article, No I am not doing any Bigger Than Jesus jokes

Smelling For Good

Just a little note to thank everyone who's bought any of the American Gods or Anansi Boys related scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy labs -- http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/neverwhere.html. Beth is sending off a cheque for over $6,000 to the CBLDF.

Terry Pratchett and I have just agreed to allow BPAL to do a set of Good Omens scents, the money to be divided between freedom of speech and orang utans. Terry also thinks the Agnes Nutter scent should have gunpowder in it...

Labels: Black Phoenix Alchemy and Scents, Good Omens, orang utans

American Gods Blog, Post 78

Spent a good part of yesterday trying to compile a bibliography of Books Consulted for American Gods for the not-yet-online neilgaiman.com -- a sort of astonishingly incomplete bibliography, because otherwise I would have had to try and catalogue half a library, so I'm trying just to list the books in the boxes I'd put in the boot of the car (that's the trunk, for americans) when I drove down to Florida to work on the novel, and the ones I tried to make sure were on the shelves in the cabin as I wrote the rest of the book... and the ones I filled my suitcase with when I went to spend two weeks writing in Las Vegas (an anecdote, it occurs to me, that I've not mentioned yet on this blogger. Oh well. Feel free to ask me about it if you are at one of the Q & A sessions between the reading and the signing.) I got down a lot of the myth and folklore books. Lots of mini-capsule reviews.Cannot for the life of me find the box of books on confidence tricks or coin magic.

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http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm has a review of American Gods up... (the version up earlier was an early draft of the review posted in error).

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Spent a couple of hours today in the basement, pulling out foreign editions of books for neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure whether I was more amazed by the stuff I didn't know I had -- "Chivalry" and "Snow, Glass, Apples" in Japanese. A box of first editions of Angels and Visitations. A Large Print edition of Stardust. A folder of short stories and poems I wrote in my teens (didn't have the heart to burn them, but the idea of anyone ever actually reading them... ow!) -- or the stuff I knew I had but couldn't find -- The German Hardback of Good Omens, for example -- or the stuff I should have had but had never been sent -- like the swedish editions of Neverwhere, or the Spanish Smoke and Mirrors and Stardust.

Labels: American Gods, bibliographies, book reviews, Chivalry, foreign editions, Good Omens, Neverwhere, smoke and mirrors, Snow Glass Apples, Stardust

American Gods Blog, Post 36

The whole process of getting and giving blurbs is an odd one.

(Minor side note. If memory serves, BLURB as a word was created by American humorist Gelett Burgess (who also wrote the 'Purple Cow' poem). It means, basically, the puff stuff on the back of a book that tells you you ought to read it. The other word Gelett Burgess tried to introduce was "huzzlecoo" meaning, I think, to schmooze. It failed to catch on.)

I've met people who assumed that the whole blurb-giving process was one that authors were paid to do. Not so.

Generally blurbs mean one of two things; either the person giving the blurb really liked the book, or that complex networks of favour and obligation have been called into play.

It's seldom simple logrolling -- normally the reason why two authors say nice things about each other's stuff is that they like each other's stuff. But the process of getting something read, and of getting a quote can mean anything. It could mean that you have the same editor or agent or film producer as the book author, and they pressed you to read it. It could mean that the author is somone who did you a good turn once. And normally the favour is in getting the book read -- anything after that depends mostly on whether or not the reader liked the book.

A very few blurbs make a difference. Clive Barker's career was given a huge leg up by Stephen King's "I have seen the future of horror and it is Clive Barker" , and I think Sandman was given a huger boost than I ever realised from the Norman Mailer quote (although, oddly enough, DC has never run that on anything except SEASON OF MISTS). I doubt that they actually changed anything for either of us; they might have sped up processes that would have happened anyway, though.

Most of them probably don't do a thing. But in book publishing (as with movies) nobody knows anything. So they put them on the book jackets anyway and they hope.

Most successful authors could make a life's profession simply reading books and giving blurbs -- in any given week I get two or three books arriving with nice pleas from editors to read their book and say nice things about it. Also I get a couple of things from authors.

As to what I blurb... It depends a lot on what gets read, what I have time to read, whether it's something portable and booksized or a huge heap of paper, sometimes even if there's anything I have to say after reading something. It also depends a lot on whether or not I liked it once I have read it, if I did read it.

Sometimes I wind up reading something long after it's come out in paperback and just feeling faintly guilty, especially if I did like it a lot. But there is only so much time, and there's stuff I buy to read I never get time to settle down with...

It is good blurb etiquette, as an author, to say, if you cannot give a blurb, "I am sorry, I am too busy." This could mean that you are too busy to look at it, or that you looked at it and wish you hadn't.

It is not good blurb etiquette to do as an unnamed comics genius -- oh, what the hell, it was R. Crumb -- did when sent a reading copy of GOOD OMENS, over a decade ago, which is to write a several page letter to the publisher telling them not only how much you hated it but also imploring them not to publish it. (Or so my editor said. She didn't send me the letter, which I thought a pity, nor did she run it on the back cover, which I thought might have been fun.)

It is good blurb etiquette if you're hoping someone will blurb your book to send it to them (or have your editor send it to them) and then not to bug them, unless you're heading for the deadline and you want to politely point out to them that unless you get a blurb from them soon it won't be used even if they did like it.

It's lousy blurb etiquette to bug an author. Saying things like "Well, why don't you read a chapter and if that's okay write something nice -- one chapter, one lousy solitary chapter, is that asking so much?," and "Hey, no problem, if you're that busy I'll write the blurb, you can just put your name to it" are not usually ways to endear yourself to an author. (And yes, I've had both of them, and yes, I said no thank you.)

Because you're asking for two things -- you're asking for time, and you're asking for some kind of endorsement. Mostly in an attempt to try and tell people what kind of book something is, in a kind of abbreviated word of mouth -- "Gee. Maurice X. Boggs thinks this is an amazing book and Maurice X. Boggs is my favourite author, I should pick it up". This works best, I think, as a kind of positioning -- Stephen King tends mostly to give blurbs to things that adjectives like "Gripping. Relentless" can be applied to. He might enjoy reading a heartwarming novel about a funny skunk named Zonko and how he melts the heart of a crusty old widower... but publishers are unlikely to send him that book with a begging letter asking him to read it and to say something nice about it.

Some authors stop giving blurbs. Every now and again, I stop doing blurbs, and every now and again I stop writing introductions. (And last year I was extremely unimpressed when a blurb I had written was actually printed by someone as an introduction.) The hiatus lasts for a year or two, and then I feel guilty or someone asks me at the right time, and I relent.

Some authors don't relent. Harlan Ellison stopped doing blurbs years ago. If publishers start dunning him for blurbs he lets them know how much he charges by the hour as a readers fee to read the books, and makes sure they understand that there is no guarantee at the end of the reading he will feel moved to say anything at all, and in fact, he probably won't. I don't think any publishers have taken him up on this, which means that Harlan, as he takes great pleasure in telling people, doesn't give blurbs.

There are other problems with the whole blurb thing....

Once I was given a book by an editor I liked, by an author I liked. it was the editor's first major book. It was the author's first book in some years. It was a big deal for both of them. I didn't like the book. I wanted to, but I didn't. But I didn't want to let them down. So I wrote "When Thaddeus Q. Bliggins (not his real name) is writing at his best there's no-one in the field that can touch him" and felt that honour was satisfied.

My favourite how to blurb a book you don't like story was one my agent told me, about a writer she had at the start of her career, who was a good friend of A Famous Author, and was confident of his ability to get a blurb for his book -- and certain that with a blurb from a famous author his manuscript would immediately be snapped up by a publisher after a franzied auction. He handed over the manuscript to his friend, and the blurb came in. It was short, effective, enthusiastic... and entirely unusable, this being the early 80s, and the blurb being entirely composed of profanities, as enthusiastic as they were obscene. The book was never published.

For AMERICAN GODS, the books for blurbs went out to a fairly select band. Authors I thought would like it or respond to it who somehow seemed to map onto parts of the book.

For some of them I wrote personal notes to go with them. Partly because I know I respond well to notes from the author, and partly because it was fun to say some hellos. (In a couple of cases I even got to cheat and write a fan letter, or an "I've not seen you for ten years -- howthefuckareyou?" letter). For some I didn't. For a few people I sent e-mails. The others went out from Jennifer Hershey, my editor, or Jack Womack, the book's publicist at harpercollins (and a wonderful author in his own right).

And, as you've already seen if you're reading this journal, blurbs came in -- most of them accompanied by letters saying that they really really liked the book (just in case I was worried that they were only saying nice things about it from a sense of duty).

As the deadline for the book jacket to be finalised approached, we made a few calls to remind people. (I phoned Terry Gilliam, mostly because I like talking to Terry Gilliam, to discover that he was on holiday for two weeks somewhere far away from a telephone. So no luck there.)

(A minor anecdotal interruption here: in 1989 Gollancz sent Terry Gilliam a copy of Good Omens for a blurb. Somewhere the letter and the book got separated and Terry read the book assuming it was something he'd been sent as a possible movie... and now, twelve years later, he's gone on holiday having just finished the second draft of the Good Omens movie script. Proving that the world is an odd place, but not unpleasant.)

The blurb deadline has pretty much, I think, come and gone on American Gods -- if people say nice things about it now we can use it in the advertising, but they may have to wait for the paperback until people know that they liked it. However, one that I'll really try to get onto the hardback cover arrived out of the blue today, entirely unsolicited. Not just unsolicited but accompanied by a phone call reminding me that the party in question does not give blurbs.

"Gaiman's new novel walked in the door on Friday afternoon. By Saturday
evening I had eaten it in one gulp. AMERICAN GODS: alarming, charming,
even winsome; Gaiman: serially inventive, surprising, purely remarkable.
And, oh, is it well-written."

Harlan Ellison
16 April 2001
...........................................................................................................................

I signed the sheets of paper for the limited edition from the box of 750 sheets. I signed and I signed. Eventually I asked my poor assistant if she wouldn't mind counting them, because I was sure I'd signed a lot more than 750 sheets. Turns out the box contained 2,500 of the things. Mostly I'm just signing them. Sometimes I'm drawing eyes, too. Very occasionally I've started doodling and drawing, mostly so far drawings of a very crusty Uncle Sam. And most of the time I'm using other colour inks than black, so that the people who pick them up don't go "Oh, they just print those signatures". They don't. It's me.

Labels: American Gods Blog, Best Of, blurbs, Clive Barker, Good Omens, Harlan Ellison, R. Crumb, signing sheets of paper, Stephen King, The Fabulous Lorraine