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

America Will Eat you

Hullo everybody

I'm off in hiding, writing. It's good. I did a road trip to get here - I stopped in New Orleans and got an extreme haircut and a hot towel shave.  Last time I went off into hiding to write a novel I let my hair and beard grow, and I didn't want to repeat myself. I look... odd, I think. But I feel like I'm in disguise, which is an excellent feeling for an author to have.

I got to my hideout, which is the house where I started writing American Gods a dozen years ago, then drove three and half hours to see my cousin Helen and her husband Sidney. (Helen's mother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister.) They are 94 and 90 respectively. (Helen told Sidney she was four years younger than she was, claiming back her years during World War II, where she survived the Warsaw Ghetto and worse, and only told him how old she really was forty years later, when her older sister, Wanda, died. If you have three hours, watch this YouTube video, done for the Shoah project.) Then I drove home, to the place I'm staying.

I spent yesterday not doing much of anything - recovering from the drive, getting settled in. Today, however, I'm writing.

Do not expect much in the way of blogging while I'm writing.

Here are two fun things...

The first is an awards acceptance speech I filmed for SFX. They gave me an award for Screenwriting Excellence for my Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife. I tried to give the kind of measured and well-thought-out speech that an occasion like this demanded.

The second is that if you go to this Audible link  you can listen to the newest in my Neil Gaiman Presents audio series at Audible.com,  The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Seventeen hours of glorious, funny, profound and delightful stories about Dr Englebert Eszterhazy, who Sherlocks his way through some remarkable stories in an Eastern European Balkan Empire.  

And this is something Amanda just sent me... it's the video done for her cover of Nirvana's "Polly", done for a  Nevermind tribute album. Scary, grueling, ultimately triumphant, based on a true story.

Labels: amanda palmer, Avram Davidson's Adventures In Unhistory, Doctor Eszterhazy, Helen Fagin, Hiding, running and screaming really loudly, Writing again

i bet you thought i was dead

Sorry about that -- I got so irritated with trying to blog by email that I stopped. Now all is well technically, and I thought the world deserved a proper blog entry, albeit a short one.

The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.

Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.

(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)


I am, as I said, really enjoying it.

Having said that, there are a bunch of introductions to things I agreed to write with end of January deadlines (as I was certain that I'd be done the The Graveyard Book by then) that are a bit of a distraction.

The Writer's Strike continues. I was delighted that the Weinstein Company has just made a deal with the WGA, agreeing to all the terms, as that means I can now go back to work on the Neverwhere movie. (A short history -- I wrote about eight drafts of Neverwhere-the-movie between 1997 and 2000, and then retired. Other people came in and wrote scripts, some of which were hated and some of which weren't, but it died. Last year my agents sent someone who asked about it the version of the script they had, which was the last draft script I did in 2000, and people read it, got excited and suddenly it came back to life, with the Hensons producing and doing it with the Weinstein Company. It needs to find a director, but at least I can work on it now.)

...

One very frequently asked question here is Can I Recommend a Book For A Young Reader? And the answer really is, no, I can't, not without knowing the Young Reader in question. Different people like different books, and age isn't much of a guide to that. But what I can now do is point anyone at this rather wonderful Daily Telegraph list of 100 books every child should read, broken into three sections (young, middle and older readers). It's a terrific list, and I say that as someone who's read to myself, or read aloud, many of the books they suggest, and not just because they've got Coraline on there.

...

There's an article on Stephin Merritt in the New York Times.

...

People have asked if I want to get one of the new lightweight Macbook Airs. And I shall, I expect, but I'll wait for them to have been around for a generation before I do. (It always seems the wisest course of action not to nip out and buy Mac stuff when they first release it. The travails of Holly's first generation MacBook is the most recent example in my family of ignoring that rule.)

Also, I'd like it to be a bit lighter still. I wish my new Panasonic W7 was lighter, and it's about 8 ounces less than the new Macs (edited to add: and it comes with a DVD drive and a hard drive that's double the size of the current Mac air. On the down side it came with Vista, which is, so far, like Windows XP only slower).

...

Neil, on 27 December, you said, There would be a lot more White German Shepherds around if the Nazis hadn't decided they were racially inferior and needed to be cleansed from the gene pool. Of course, the same could be said of my family. Howcome you don't talk about that side of your family?

Normally because it's not something I think about, nor something I'm comfortable with, and it rarely works its way into conversation.

I remember the first time I really became aware of what happened to my family in World War Two. It was when, aged about 11, I had to do a family tree as a school project. This was only twenty five years after the end of the war -- not a long time, not really, although to me it was an age, and WW2 was ancient history. I discovered as I drew the family tree and talked to relatives that, for the most part, my family, in Poland and Germany and all over Eastern Europe, went into concentration camps and didn't come out. On my paternal grandfather's side alone, a huge extended family was pretty much reduced to my great-grandfather and his children, who had come to England, and three sisters from Radomsko in Poland, who survived by fortune and their wits.

One of those sisters was my cousin, the remarkable Dr Helen Fagin, [she was my grandfather's first cousin -- my great-grandfather was her uncle], and has just been honoured by New College of Florida in Sarasota for her work in Holocaust Education.

Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."

And she's right. The worst part, for me as I said in American Gods, is that some, perhaps many of the people who killed my family and six million others had, I have no doubt, convinced themselves that they were good people doing the right thing.

Labels: books for young readers, computers and gadgets and things, Helen Fagin, lightweight computers, Neverwhere movie, quotes you always thought were by somebody else, Stephin Merritt, The Graveyard Book, writers' strike