A Fairly Humongous Doctor Who Q&A Mostly

I'm still at a friends' very empty borrowed house, working hard to get everything I have to get done written before I go on the book tour. I wish I had company. I used to do being alone better - now I pine after my wife, or my children, or even a dog. But I'm working, mostly undistracted, and that's a good thing.

The book tour is for the release in the US of my "preferred text" of AMERICAN GODS. It's the Tenth Anniversary Edition. It will be released on June 21st, a decade after the original was published, and it's about 20,000 words longer than the original, and has a couple of essays in it. If you get the ebook edition, it will also have a 17 minute long interview with me embedded in it, along with bits from the upcoming full cast audiobook.

Here is the photo of me we're using for the tour. It was done by photographer Allan Amato, and he made it look like an antique daguerreotype, because he is very clever like that.



This is the Tenth Anniversary Edition's cover. (It's a hardback. Did I mention that it was a hardback?)

Here's the Amazon link to pre-order a copy.

But better you should go to Indiebound at http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062059888 and see if there is an independent bookshop near you which sells it, or to buy it from an indie bookshop online.

Most, if not all of the bookshops who are sponsoring the tour events will have signed copies of this edition of American Gods for sale once their event has happened (I will be signing towering mountains of books for each stop on the way), and most of them encourage you to order signed copies from them now - check the websites. If you want a signed copy, contact them. (The list of stops and bookshops and links to websites is on this blog entry, http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/06/tour-dates-from-vanishing-author.html)


...or buy one from Greg Ketter at http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com/ in Minneapolis, because once the tour is done I will undoubtedly wind up going to Dreamhaven and signing my way through whatever he has for me.

...


So many Doctor Who questions.

Fortunately, lots of them are the same questions over and over. Even so, there are more than I can answer... But I'll see how many I can do in the next two hours.

There are going to be Spoilers, so stop reading here if you do not want to read them.

Dear Neil,

How much actual research did you have to do (if at all) to make sure that you referenced the classic Doctor Who series mythology just right? With all those nods to previous locations and concepts in "The Doctor's Wife", it surely seems extensive. And how much fun was it to actually remember it all and insert it into your script? Did you find yourself re-watching old episodes at all, even if just for nostalgia's sake?

Not an awful lot. I was lucky in having Steven Manfred available to answer my questions, because he knows all answers, but when Maddy and I had started watching Doctor Who together in 2005 I'd bought an awful lot of DVDs in order to re-experience things I'd liked and to introduce her to them, and to have some Doctor Who to watch during those many long months that there weren't new episodes of Doctor Who around. The joy of showing her (for example) An Unearthly Child, The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and City of Death was real joy for both of us. And I got to watch it and it brought it all back.

But most of the trivia and mythology was just sitting in the back of my head waiting to be pulled out. I like mythologies, and I knew what a Dalek was and what planet it came from, or what TARDIS stood for when I was five, before I knew who Thor or Anubis were.

And there was a lot of Doctor Who detritus that didn't get used in the final draft, stuff that went all the way back to the first Doctor and the David Whitaker Doctor Who and the Daleks book. (I was determined to get a mention of the TARDIS's Mercury Fluid Link in there, because it was the first bit of the TARDIS I ever knew the name of, along with the machine that made food that looked like Mars Bars but tasted like bacon and eggs, but neither of them got on screen.)

Which reminds me, I recently did an introduction for this reissue (it'll be out in August), which was where I learned of both of those things:



Is your bit of dialog between the Doctor and the TARDIS about her not taking him where he wanted to go a riff on Douglas Adams quote from Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul?

Not intentionally. There were several nods to Douglas in the script ("The junkyard at the end of the universe" being the most obvious) but that one was simply something that I'd thought since I was a kid. The TARDIS doesn't ever take the Doctor to a boring place where nothing's ever happened or is going to happen: it always dumps him somewhere at the right place or the right time for a story to happen. And given that most of the time he's not doing it, obviously she is.

Hi Neil,

Will there ever be a release of your script which will include all the parts which, for whatever reason, didn't make it onto the screen?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

I don't think that would be very practical,mostly because scenes replaced scenes. So the scene where they go and see the Beatles was replaced by the Planet of the Rain Gods, which was replaced by the "I've got Mail!" scene.

But if I do a novelisation I'll see how much of that stuff I can recover. (Also hard because the first few drafts were a story with only Amy in it for the end of the first Matt Smith season, the rest of them were a story with Amy and Rory in it for the start of Matt's second season...)

Hi Neil,

Just for the record, your episode was good. I mean, really bloody brilliant. I mean, well you know. Nice. Just so you know.

Now to my question. Is there like a "council" that reviews your basic script idea, and also follows up on your work as you write your script? Doctor Who is a huge story and it's obvious that the tolerance for contradictions is quite high but it I guess it still have to fit more or less, and also follow the storyline of the season. I always imagined there is six really old folks of undeterminable gender sitting in a house from the middle ages filled with strange contraptions, drinking tea and jelly babies, spending their days writing correspondence on old typewriters but I'd settle for a couple of expert senior advisors or something.


Regards
Anders Sjölander

No. There's Steven Moffat. I'd run things past him when I had questions, and he'd reply fast and sensibly., and his original note to me was "I want to see where you go with this, and not fence you in" and he stuck to that. There was Piers Wenger, executive producer and Beth Willis, also Executive Producer, and they'd normally have small suggestions but important ones. Beth is terrific at not being an SF person and making me explain things I thought everyone understood. There was Brian Minchin and Lindsey Alford (who replaced Brian, when he went off to do Sarah Jane) who were Script Bosses, who would get everyone's notes -- Steven's and Piers's and Beth's, add in their own and then come back to me with lists of suggestions on the scripts, or sad wise words about how much something would cost.

Draft after draft we'd try and figure out ways to say things faster, do things faster, tell the story in 42 minutes.

Let me try and think of an example.

Okay. The Corsair. The first time I started writing about him, back in the not-yet-even-first-draft, I wanted to make sure that the direction I was going was okay with Steven Moffat, so I dropped him an email with the following bit in it:

Doctor: He was called The Corsair. Didn't have a name. Just The Corsair. That was...and he used to travel off exploring the limits of Time and Space.


Amy: What happened to him?


Doctor: One day he never came back. Well, that's the trouble with Time and Space exploring. You never know if someone didn't come back, or if they just haven't come back yet. I daresay there are people still waiting for me...


(He sees Amy's expression. He just said the wrong thing...Tries to pick up the thread.)


I – I met him. He had a tattoo of a snake, an ouroboros on his arm. After every regeneration he'd get that tattoo. I spoke to him once.


Amy: Oh yes?


Doctor: I said, take me with you. I could go with you out there. I could be your assistant.


Amy: So that was how you got your start? Traveling with him?


Doctor: What? Oh, no. He laughed at me. I was twelve. Can't really blame him. So this was... aeons ago.

To which Steven replied,

Love the tattoo and the arm and the recycled monsters - but we can we make the Corsair sound less like the man the Doctor modeled himself on? Answers too many question that should be left alone. He's the Doctor, he does what he does for reasons too vast and terrible to relate.

Which when put like that was absolutely unarguable-with. So by the time I got to the first-version-with-Rory-in, the scene read like this:

The Tardis is in flight. The Doctor’s running around the console, pushing things, turning switches, preparing for a tricky journey. Still talking...

THE DOCTOR

...when we needed to get a message to the High Council, we wrapped our thoughts up in — that must have been why it came to me. Nowhere else for it to go. Whoo - There’s a living Time Lord still out there, team. One of the good ones. And he's in trouble.

The Tardis JOLTS, hard, and now it sounds as if the cosmic engines are PUSHING against something -- the sound is off... The Tardis engine makes a really bad sound. Amy is towelling off her hair.

RORY

It sounds like it’s going up a hill in the wrong gear...

THE DOCTOR

It sort of is. We're out at the edge of the universe right now so we're sort of bending a few laws here... Laws like the Conservation of Reality and... (To Tardis) Come on, old girl.

AMY

I thought you said there weren’t any other Time Lords. This just started blinking. Shall I push it?

THE DOCTOR

Not a good idea. Molecules might get all... unmoleculed. The Time Lords are all gone from this Universe. Which is why we’re leaving it.

AMY

This Time Lord. What’s he like? Or is it a Time Lady?

The Doctor keeps leaving the control panel to talk to her, then heading back to it to make an adjustment.

THE DOCTOR

He’s called The Corsair. Fantastic bloke. Hearts in both the right places. Time Lord High Council couldn’t stand him either...
(to Tardis)
You can do it. Push!

RORY

So what happened to him?

THE DOCTOR

Went off in a TARDIS, never came back. Problem unique to Time and Space exploring. You never know if someone never came back, or if they just haven't come back yet.

THE DOCTOR (cont’d)

Lovely man. And occasionally, lovely woman. He had a tattoo on his arm. A snake, eating its own tail. Incorporated it into every regeneration. Said he didn’t feel like himself unless he had the tattoo. We’re completely and utterly stuck here. She needs more thrust.

Which was probably half the length of the first version of it I'd written with Amy, and I still needed to get that information across in a fraction of the time...

Hi Neil,

One of the things which struck me the most was how well you'd written the Eleventh Doctor (as opposed to the Tenth). My question is this:

How different was the portrayal of the Doctor when it was originally written? Were there any lines that you would have had the Tenth Doctor say, which you removed or changed to be more in keeping with Matt's portrayal of the Eleventh Doctor?

Thanks,

Ben

Good question. I think my very first draft was for a sort of a neutral doctor who probably sounded a lot more like David Tennant's Doctor than anyone else because he was what I was used to (see the dialogue above) - but then, Matt hadn't been cast when I wrote it. So I just wrote it as best I could for "The Doctor" and tried not write it for any particular Doctor. By the time I got onto the second round of rewrites, putting Rory in, I'd seen a series of Matt and Karen and Arthur. I knew what they sounded like. So it was easy to imagine them as I wrote and revised. Some of the Doctor's lines changed a bit -- I wrote the "bunk beds are cool" stuff here for example, -- but not as much as you'd imagine. A lot of the Doctor's dialogue you saw on screen was there in the first draft.

As an exercise I'd try and imagine lines of the Doctor's dialogue said by Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker or Colin Baker or Christopher Eccleston (and the rest) and I felt happiest if I'd written a line I felt any of them could have delivered -- each in his own unique way. "Fear me, I killed all of them," for example.

Over the course of the entire run of Doctor Who, what do you think has been the most valuable moral/message that the show has offered the world?

You can think your way out of your difficulties.

Where did Idris come from, and why was she in a Victorian party dress?

She came through the Rift. And she'd been at a Victorian party.

There is clearly a possibility that some time, some writer will write another story where Idris comes back, either with Suranne Jones or someone else.

How would you feel if you found out it was going to happen for sure? How would you feel if you found out it was never going to happen?

If it happens that Suranne (or someone else) ever comes back as Idris/Sexy (and it's not very likely, but nothing is impossible) I hope it's done in a way that makes me proud and surprises me.

Dear Mr Gaiman,

thank you for your offer to answer questions on your Doctor Who episode.

What I did not quite understand: Why was it suddenly so easy to leave and re-enter the universe? And if this was so easy, why was it impossible to enter another? Why, actually, all this pining over Rose if it would have been enough to get rid of the swimming pool, as it were, to see her again?

I am sure I missed or misunderstood something and am looking forward to your explanation.

Many thanks,
Wibke

It wasn't easy getting in or --especially -- out of the bubble-universe. They burned up TARDIS rooms for thrust to get in and get out. But they made it.

However, there's a huge difference between a tiny bubble-universe stuck to this one, and an entire-alternate-universe-new-reality. One's still attached to this universe, with a rift-crack between them, the other's an entirely different order of created things.

It's actually nothing like that, of course, but I hope it makes things easier for you.

The Corsair is intriguing. Really, honestly utterly intriguing, with that name and the tattoo and anything, and I was wondering if you/the folk in charge of Doctor Who had plans for who he was - past exploits! what he did! what /she/ did! - or anything? Because otherwise I will probably have to end up writing fanfiction. Gods help us.

If I ever do a novelisation I'd love to write a few flashback scenes for the Corsair. I suspect that his Tardis looked like a small sailboat, wherever it could. And he laughed a lot.

In early drafts he was part of the Time Lords' Universal Survey Team ("Surveying the Universe?" "It's a big place. Someone has to keep track of it.").

Dear Neil

To what extent has your Doctor Who episode drawn on the rich tradition of Doctor Who material outside of the televised stuff – the audio dramas, the novels?

Many thanks

Jon

With the exception of the David Whitaker book, not at all*. I used to love the Dalek World books, and liked the "Dr Who Annuals", but they were far from continuity, and I knew that even as a small boy. I read a Telos book by Paul McAuley that I wrote an introduction for (it's mostly up at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/05/nature-of-infection.html) but the Big Finish Audio and the New Adventures etc were things I knew existed but never investigated.

*Edit to add, and the Piccolo Books The Making Of Doctor Who, By Hulke and Dicks. I bought my copy in 1972 and must have read it a hundred times before my thirteenth birthday.

Hi, you asked for Doctor Who related questions, so: I'd heard that your episode was supposed to be part of series 5 and was shunted to series 6. Were any major changes required to make it work in the sixth series? And, rather cheekily, as I'm sure you get this kind of question all the time: What advice can you offer to an 8 year old boy who loves to write?

No major changes, but lots of minor changes. If it had been in series 5 it would have been scarier, I think, as it would have been Nephew playing a lethal game of Hide and Seek with Amy through the house-occupied TARDIS. And it would have had a much darker ending, as the Doctor and Amy buried Idris's body, and then talked about mortality and endings while the Doctor made a daisy chain.

(I'd advise him to read a lot, and also to have adventures, and to read books like http://www.dangerousbookforboys.com/ and put the things he reads into practice, because one day he will need things to write about, and experiences are the raw material from which the imagination builds.)

So why, really, was the name of your Doctor Who episode changed from "Bigger on the Inside" to "The Doctor's Wife"? It seemed a deeper, more meaningful title before. I read somewhere you saying it might be misread as "Bugger on the Inside", but I took it as a joke.
D.D.

If it's a joke, it's not one of mine. The very very VERY first title, before I ever set down to write it, when it was still just an idea and a pitch, was "The House of Nothing". And House really was going to be a house, with tubes and things running inside it. But I was told there were already some creepy houses in the series, and I liked the idea of a creepy intelligent planet more. And then for two years the title was "Bigger on the Inside" until we got to the point, about 6 weeks before it was shown, where we had to actually tell people what the title was. (I'd taken an enormous amount of Hide In Plain Sight pleasure in using the "Bigger on the Inside" label for this blog whenever I'd talked about the episode.)

The trouble was, in the last couple of months, we had started to worry that the "Bigger on the Inside" title simply gave too much away. We wanted people to have that first "Oh my god -- she's the TARDIS!" moment unspoiled, and worried that once they had the title and the cast too many people would simply figure it out.

"The Doctor's Wife" was a fake title used in the 80s by Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner to try and find if there were leaks in his office. And this was a story about someone who was married to his ship, and someone who was his wife and mother and girlfriend and best friend all in one, the only person who would always be there for him on all his adventures...

So we changed the title to that.

I loved the idea of the Corsair, and was a little disappointed to not getting to see him/her and sad that he died (which was surprising, in a good way, since I had only heard of him a few minutes before).
Anyway, the Q: since the Corsair died in the junkyard, we can assume he was not in the Time War, right? At least not when the Doctor locked everyone up and left. And the same goes for the other "hundreds of Time Lords" that House killed. So do you hope/plan/expect/think it's possible to see the Corsair or others showing up in the Doctor's future-their past?

(Bonus Q: will we ever be able to read what the Zero Room or the Swimming Pool scenes were like?)

They're dead. They died thousands and millions of years ago on an asteroid in a tiny bubble universe.

(Bonus Answer, if ever one day I novelise or novella-ise the story, then I expect so.)

While House was traumatizing Amy, what was happening to the real Rory?

Bad things.

I wrote some of them. There was the scene where Rory was trapped in the Zero Room, for example, with no way out, and knowing that human beings in closed Zero Rooms go mad, and the one where he thought that Amy was waiting around the corner trying to kill him, and House gave him a knife. Then there was the Hall of Mirrors, although that was a scene with both of them...

But Rory coped fairly well with House's head-messing. He's been around a long time and coped with a lot.

While in the end, time and budget and locations meant that it was easier and more practical to do what we did and show what we showed.

Did it still thrill you to see your name during the opening credits sequence or has that particular thrill been dulled by being a professional writer for so long?

It felt just as good seeing my name on that screen as you would imagine it did.

Which is to say, not as good as marrying Amanda or being there when my children were born, but about equal with winning my first Hugo Award.

G'day Neil.

I've heard that some people (although with all that twittering perhaps we should call them sparrows) have been giving you a hard time over the "PULL TO OPEN" issue.

When you think about what a *real* Police Box was used for, it's quite obvious that the doors needed to open outward. *Obvious*. Anyone who say otherwise has never used a tiny toilet cubicle where the door opens inward and you have to climb up on the bowl in order to open the door to let yourself out:-)

That said, I've always taken the "PULL TO OPEN" to refer to the little hatch containing the phone (which we saw the Doctor do in "The Empty Child" when the phone rang), rather than the whole door. After all, the public wouldn't have been trusted with unfettered access to the contents of the Police Box (they might steal the copper/bobby/peeler's lunch!), but they would have needed access to the phone to access the "ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY" promised on the notice.

Would you like to briefly speak (type?) about the issue, and have your final word on the subject, in your blog, so that the non-sparrows amongst us know what's going on?

Steve

"Pull to Open" obviously refers to the phone hatch, yes. But Idris was right: It IS an instruction, and Police Box doors did open outwards.

As someone who has only seen one episode of Dr.Who—and I absolutely loved "The Doctor's Wife"—I would love to get into the series, but I'm not sure of a solid jumping-off point. As you've drawn me into this universe of sentient machines that bear more than a passing-likeness to ex-Coronation Street characters, could you give me some advice on where to begin with the other canon material?

Sure.

Episodes I've shown people to lure them in:

BLINK

THE GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE

DALEK

THE EMPTY CHILD/ THE DOCTOR DANCES

HUMAN NATURE/THE FAMILY OF BLOOD

Classic Episodes like Douglas Adams' CITY OF DEATH.

Although you might just want to start with THE ELEVENTH HOUR and come forward. Or start with ROSE and come forward. (I don't think I'd recommend starting with THE UNEARTHLY CHILD and coming forward, but it more or less worked for me..)

Why an Ood? Didn't seem like it needed to be one. Did you just like them?

I really do like the Ood.

Originally Uncle, Auntie and Nephew were all patchwork monsters, with Nephew the least human of all them.

Last July we were at the Make Sure This Comes In On Budget draft, and Steven, Beth and Piers were determined to save all the CGI I'd put in and all the TARDIS stuff, so my original plan for Auntie and Uncle and Nephew to be three new different patchwork aliens got modified.

I made Auntie and Uncle look more human, and less obviously patchwork, and I was offered my choice of any existing monster in the costume department for Nephew. I picked the Ood because it was perfect for what I needed - they have a history of being mentally taken over, and I loved the idea of the eyes and translator ball glowing with green House-light, as opposed to the red possessed Ood eyes we'd seen on their first appearance. Nephew never spoke, so a silent, possessed Ood seemed perfect. And it was a shout-out to Russell Davies. And it seemed like it might be fun to make the Ood scary again...

It also gave us the whole fiddling with the Ood translator/hearing the Time Lords scene, which we didn't have before that, and made the episode much better.

Making television - and especially making Doctor Who, where you have to imagine a new world (in my case a new universe) with every episode - is always a negotiation between dream and reality. (That was the same email in which I learned that we weren't going to have the scene in the Tardis Swimming Pool because Karen Gillan couldn't swim.)

There's always a Make Sure This Comes In On Budget Draft, as the realities of "Anything You Can Imagine" come face to face with "This Is What We Can Do". In the case of Doctor Who, the producers found money in seat cushions and borrowed money from other episodes to make it as close to the thing I'd dreamed as they could.

And scenes were being rewritten and modified because we couldn't afford to do the thing I'd originally asked for until we were actually shooting. That's the way of television. It was true in Neverwhere. It's true in everything you watch.

And that's why an Ood.

Why didn't you make it so the old control room we saw was from the 1980s? I was so sure that was what it was going to be.

Because I did not have the ability to ask the producers back then to leave their sets up until I needed them. Whereas I did have that ability with the Ninth Doctor's Console Room. I could ask them to keep it for me until we needed it. And they did. They lied to anybody who asked why it hadn't been taken down, and they kept it up.

Did you have House destory the David Tennant Control Room to show you hated it? Now it doesn't exist.

Of course it exists. The TARDIS keeps it archived. House deleted it, but I have no doubt that, once they were in a place where that could happen, the TARDIS undeleted it, tidied it up and put it somewhere out of the way, along with the other things she keeps close to her chest.

And hated it? No, I loved it. Here is a photograph of me loving it.


...

I'm done. Work beckons, and so does bed.

But if you've made it this far...

Some of you may not know that there is a 2011 American Discworld Convention, with Terry Pratchett as Guest of Honour, next month in Madison. The Website is http://www.nadwcon.org/. They have a few memberships left, but they are almost gone...

Goodnight.

Labels: american gods tenth anniversary edition, bigger on the inside, Doctor Who

Useful stuff, mostly

I promised I'd tell you about Audiobooks, didn't I? It was The Master And Margerita and The Third Policeman (both of which I'd read before, but liked the idea of listening to) and then I tried The Man In The Iron Mask (gave up not that far in - the pace was just wrong for exercising to, and I kept wanting to point out to Dumas that yes, he was being paid by the word, but really...). I'm now listening to The Pickwick Papers, which I'm enjoying to a degree that surprised me. I read it as an 11 year old, but it's more fun 40 years on.

...

The 92nd Street Y, realising that they'd sold out and that people were still calling them for tickets to the event on the 21st of June, where Lev Grossman is interviewing me, have just got in more staff for the night and opened up their not-normally-opened balcony. Which frees up another 200 seats. You'll want to get in quickly, I suspect. But as of right now there are tickets.

http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-LC5AE34

If you're in LA on the 28th of June, you may already be going to see me being interviewed by Patton Oswalt at the Saban Theatre.

Remarkably, I might be appearing on the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson that same day. I am very nervous about this. I've not been on a chat show since I did the Colbert Report two years ago, where we wound up talking about Lord of the Rings. It's a pity that there isn't something like a recently revived beloved-in-childhood British SF TV show that both Craig and I had in common...

You can get free tickets for the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson at http://www.1iota.com/show/view/The_Late_Late_Show_with_Craig_Ferguson You want tickets for the 28th, easily spottable because it has a photo of me up on that day.

Seattle have put tickets on sale for the 26th, where I will be interviewed by Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Queen of Kings, a book I really enjoyed. Per the University Bookstore's website,

Two types of tickets are available for the Neil Gaiman event: Orange tickets cost $29.55, include one signed copy of American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition from the University Book Store, and grant admission to one person to the event. Signed books will be distributed at the event. Green tickets cost $5, and admit one person to the event. To purchase tickets, please call 1.800.335.READ or email steshab@uw.edu. Tickets available now.

...

I got an email this morning asking me about Doctor Who, in response to an article in the UK magazine Private Eye (Private Eye always makes you feel like an insider, but as with the few other Private Eye articles I've read over the years that I've actually known anything about what was being written, their Doctor Who one was a mix of true things, things that weren't actually not true, and solid-sounding gossippy things that were actually not true at all), and I thought, you know, The Doctor's Wife airs today in New Zealand, which is a good cue to put out a call for questions.

So next blog entry I'll spend answering your questions on my Doctor Who Episode. Ask questions here.

...

I tend to throw most of my Comic-Book Fundraising Support behind the CBLDF, because legal cases are expensive, and the First Amendment is vital. But there's another important charity too, The Hero Initiative. As described on their website,

The Hero Initiative is the first-ever federally chartered not-for-profit corporation dedicated strictly to helping comic book creators in need. Hero creates a financial safety net for yesterdays' creators who may need emergency medical aid, financial support for essentials of life, and an avenue back into paying work. It's a chance for all of us to give back something to the people who have given us so much enjoyment. For more information, visit www.HeroInitiative.org or call 818-776-1918.

And that's a really good cause: helping those who have themselves given so much pleasure, entertainment and magic to so many. As you'll read over at http://heroinitiative.blogspot.com/2011/06/putting-band-back-together-gaiman.html
we've made something special happen in the next Hero Comics Anthology. Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg and I get back together for the first time since Sandman 4, published in March 1989, 22 years ago.

Which is a bit like getting the Beatles back together for another song, while they were still alive anyway, and about as unlikely.

Sam and Mike make beautiful art around my creepy little tale of a seaside landlady and her unfortunate guest. Here's page 1.

Labels: american gods tenth anniversary edition, bigger on the inside, mike dringenberg, Sam Kieth, School Reunions

Adventures in the Screen Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPOILERS:











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

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

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

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

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

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

...


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodnight.

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

One book (Neverwhere) one city (Chicago)

I'm in Chicago right now on my way to go and see Gene Wolfe for lunch, and then over to the Harold Washington Library to presign a few thousand books.

Tonight Audrey Niffenegger and I are in conversation at the library. It starts at 6 pm. Details at WHERE'S NEIL.

Tomorrow I talk and do a reading Solo at 7 pm at Rockefeller Chapel. University of Chicago. Do come, if you are in the area.

The day after that - Thursday - I'm in New York doing a talk with Paul Levitz, former publisher of DC Comics. Details at Where's Neil and in the last blog post, and I'd link to them here but I am blogging on my phone.

I can't even link to the photo of me, Suranne Jones and Matt Smith on the Doctor Who set that the BBC just released. But I will. You know I will.

Postscript. Hah! I figured out how to do it from the phone. Someone asked if I had shrunk and I had to explain that, no, the camera is tipped to one side for dramatic effect.

Labels: bigger on the inside, chicago, my kind of town, phoneblogging

Being Alive. Mostly about Diana.

I'm in the UK right now, in the middle of nowhere, working on Monkey, about to go offline for a few days.

I came over to do three things: to give the BBC a day to promote Episode Four of the next season of Doctor Who, which I have written; to see Hilary Bevan Jones, a wonderful producer with whom I've been working for years, about a couple of things; and to see Diana Wynne Jones.

Thursday I was interviewed about Doctor Who all day. Mostly the interviews would go like this:

Them: "So, can you tell us the title of the episode?"

Me: "No."

It was a fun but sometimes frustrating day.

(This is a photo of Diana Wynne Jones around the time I first got to know her.)

Diana's been my friend since about 1985, but I was a fan of hers since I read Charmed Life in about 1978, aged 17. I've loved being her friend, and I'm pretty sure she loved being my friend. She was the funniest, wisest, fiercest, sharpest person I've known, a witchy and wonderful woman, intensely practical, filled with opinions, who wrote the best books about magic, who wrote the finest and most perceptive letters, who hated the telephone but would still talk to me on it if I called, albeit, always, nervously, as if she expected the phone she was holding to explode.

She adopted me when I was a 24 year old writer for magazines of dubious respectability, and spent the next 25 years being proud of me as I made art that she liked (and, sometimes, I didn't. She'd tell me what she thought, and her opinions and criticism were brilliant and precise and honest, and if she said "Yee-ees. I thought you made a bit of a mess of that one," then I probably had, so when she really liked something it meant the world to me).

As an author she was astonishing. The most astonishing thing was the ease with which she'd do things (which may be the kind of thing that impresses other writers more than it does the public, who take it for granted that all writer are magicians.But those of us who write for a living know how hard it is to do what she did). The honest, often prickly characters, the inspired, often unlikely plots, the jaw-dropping resolutions.

(She's a wonderful author to read aloud, by the way, as I discovered when reading her books to my kids. Not only does she read aloud beautifully, but denouments which seemed baffling read alone are obvious and elegantly set up and constructed when read aloud. "Children are much more careful readers than adults," she'd say. "You don't have to repeat everything for children. You do with adults, because they aren't paying full attention.")

She dedicated her book Hexwood to me, telling me that it was inspired by something that I'd once said about the interior size of British Woods, and I wrote a doggerel poem to thank her.

(Hang on. I bet I can find it. There.)

There's a kitten curled up in Kilkenny was given a perfect pot of cream
And a princess asleep in a thornwrapped castle who's dreaming a perfect dream
There's a dog in Alaska who'll dance with delight on a pile of mastodon bones
But I've got a copy of Hexwood (dedicated to me) by Diana Wynne Jones

There's an actress who clutches her oscar (and sobs, with proper impromptu joy),
There's a machievellian villain who's hit on a wonderf'lly evil ploy,
There's wizards in crystal castles and kings on their golden thrones
But I've got a copy of Hexwood -- dedicated -- to me! -- by Diana Wynne Jones

There's a fisherman out on the sea today who just caught the perfect fish,
There's a child in Luton who opened a genie-filled bottle, and got a wish,
There are people who live in glass houses have managed to outlaw stones,
But I've got a copy of Hexwood, dedicated to me, by Diana Wynne Jones

I crop up, in semi-fictionalised form, in a book by Diana -- Deep Secret -- and she told me once that the young Chrestomanci in The Lives of Christopher Chant was sort of based on me too. I'm proud of both of those things, even if it does mean that people who have read Deep Secret sometimes ask whether I really ate two breakfasts while mostly asleep, and I tell them that yes, I did.

So. Diana, who smoked (with joy and delight and enthusiasm) got lung cancer. And so each time I would come to the UK, I'd go and have dinner with her and her husband John, and the dinner would be cooked and accompanied by Dave Devereux, who has been helping them, and somewhere in there I would see our mutual friend Tom Abba, as well. Each time, I'd take a few minutes at the end and I'd make sure that I'd said to Diana anything I wanted to be sure that I'd said, because I knew I might not see her again, and unsaid things are the hardest.

(Two photos of Diana from last September. She'd just stopped all chemotherapy, on the advice of her doctors, who said it wasn't doing any good. When I originally posted the second of them, it was with the caption Here is Diana Wynne Jones looking beatific in her kitchen today. The inexplicable notice is from about 1987.)

(Here's a photo of the two of us together from that September 2010 trip. I think the photo was actually taken by Robin McKinley)

I'd planned to see her yesterday, Saturday, to go down to Bristol with my daughter Holly. But on Friday morning I got a call from Dave Devereux telling me that it was time and I should come now. I called Hilary Bevan Jones, apologised (she was very understanding, as were the other people I was meant to see), and I went to Bristol.

I wrote a letter that night to a friend. I'll quote it here, if you don't mind.

She's at a hospice. It's beautiful there, and the staff were wonderful - helpful and nice and you never felt like you were bothering them, as one does at so many institutions.

I saw the family outside. They warned me that Diana was very frail and changed.

She was on morphine, breathing heavy and hard, as if she was fighting for every breath, and I sat by her bedside. I thought about the phrase "your last breath..." as every breath felt like it could be final. But she kept breathing. I told her you said goodbye. Her hair was whiter and she seemed thinner, but not really changed. but it seemed less like someone was actually there -- as if there was a distance between the person I'd known and the body breathing in the bed. Less of a distance than with a body -- but there was a sense that felt like a certainty that she wasn't going to open her eyes and talk again. This sleep was final, and soon the breathing would stop.

I went out and sat in the waiting room with Tom Abba, and we talked about Diana, and we both cried a bit.

Then I went back in with Tom and we sat some more.

I thought about Dogsbody, which I have to write an introduction to, and wondered what star Diana would be, if she was a star.

I said goodbye again.

Then I went out, and Mickey, her son, went in and sat with her, and I talked to the family. I met Diana's sisters for the first time, although I had heard much about them.

I spent the rest of the day with the family, with John and Diana's sister Isobel and Mickey (with whom I'd shared a room at World Fantasy Con in 1988), and we had a Bristolian Chinese meal, and talked about lots of things.

And I told John I'd come and see him whenever I come to Bristol, and I shall.

It's hard. But I am glad I did it, and they said that Diana was pleased that I was coming, and perhaps somehow she heard me and knew I was there.

I stayed up late that night until I could talk to Amanda back in Boston about what had happened that day, and once I had talked to her I felt better.

In the morning I was woken by a phone call from Dave, telling me that Diana had passed away in the night.

The news was out -- someone had already changed her Wikipedia page to give it a date of death.

I posted this on Twitter:

Rest in Peace, Diana Wynne Jones. You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer & the finest friend. I miss you.

There are some wonderful reminiscences coming in -- I loved this one by Emma Bull. (My family travelled to Minneapolis on the same plane as Diana the time Emma is talking about. Diana used to tell me she had a travel jinx, something I only really started to believe when the plane door fell off.)

I felt sad, but also felt lucky. Lucky that I'd known her, lucky that I'd gone and said goodbye on the Friday and not tried to wait until the Saturday. Lucky to have had a friend like that.

I do miss her, very much. I have some wonderful friends. I have people in my life who are brilliant, and people who are colourful, and people who are absolutely wonderful, and who make the world better for their being in it. But there was only one Diana Wynne Jones, and the world was a finer one for having her in it.

Labels: bigger on the inside, Diana Wynne Jones

points of departure

• Mr. G is home. I expect we'll be hearing from him soon. Currently he's decompressing, surrounded by rollergirls.


• Over at NeverWear.net, there's a new print for sale, Mr. G's poem, IN RELIG ORAN, illustrated by Michael Zulli. Kitty also interviews Mr. Z.


• The sixth season on Doctor Who will premiere in one month, April 23rd, on BBC America. My understanding is that it premieres on that same day in the UK as well. My household is very excited.


• Speaking of premieres, six days prior, April 17th, HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's GAME OF THRONES premieres.


• Sir Terry Pratchett announced, on my birthday no less, that a GOOD OMENS television miniseries is in the works from Terry Jones.


• Pat Rothfuss has completed his reading tour for THE WISE MAN'S FEAR. I attended both his stops in the D.C. area, and was pleasantly not surprised to see a great many familiar faces from past readings by Mr. G. At the Library of Congress, I sat next to a young woman who, unbidden, told me that NEVERWHERE was her favorite book, and how the last time Mr. G had come to the National Book Festival she had sat on the ground in front of the first row. I didn't tell her that I remembered her sitting in front of me, or that I was Mr. G's unassuming web goblin.


• I tried to start a #hipstersandman meme but it hasn't gone anywhere. (Picture from a convention sketch by Michael L. Peters: Facebook / site), whom I callously failed to credit originally. Mea culpa.)
         
  I haven't the talent for it that Bill Stiteler has.


• Be seeing you.

Labels: bigger on the inside, Pat Rothfuss, posts that assure that the author is safe and has not been kidnapped by goblins at all

A Spectrum of Stuff

Let's see if this works...

When last heard from I was in Wales, for the Doctor Who table read. And then I was off the world picking plums.

I'm still off the edge of the world right now. I was exhausted when I got here -- more exhausted than even I knew, I think. Too much travel, too much nothing ever quite stopping, too many meals on the road. I felt old and creaky and tired.

I spent my first week catching up on my sleep, eating sensible meals that I made myself, mostly veggies and fruits and fresh-caught fish (courtesy of the neighbours, who would walk up the hill and tap on the window, and give me fresh-caught mackerel and such. I gave them bags of plums). I did a lot of walking. Then I got a bicycle, and started going on daily bike rides, two miles to start with, which turned into six to ten miles each day as soon as I started to get into it. I'd take photos of things I'd pass while bike-riding using my little Nexus 1 phone camera and then knit them together with a stitcher program called Hugin.

An interesting rock.

During the first of the ten mile bike rides, I realised I knew what the next big fictional prose story I wanted to tell is. And that I know the story, or enough of it, but not who tells it, who sees it, how it's told. It may have to go back and forth with different people telling different chapters, and bits in diaries and such. It's tremendously reassuring when that happens - an idea turns up and you know it's big and it has legs and nobody's told that story before. And that if you just get all the pieces into position before you start, the plot will take care of itself. Getting the pieces into place is going to be the hard bit.

It may be a while before I'm ready to start writing it. Lots of thinking to do first. But it's the next big story, I think.

And somewhere in there I lost about 8 pounds, stopped creaking and feeling old and travel-weary and started smiling, and wrote a couple of things that people were waiting for. Didn't write many more things people were waiting for, but I don't feel too bad about it: everything will get written eventually.

On Saturday I stop being a hermit and hit the road. Later in the week I'll arrive in Wales, to see the first couple of days of filming of my episode and be interviewed by Doctor Who Confidential.

News from home:

1) Cabal had an operation to uncompress parts of his spine, as he was having trouble walking. He's recovering. I am still worried. We chat on Skype. Or at least, I talk to him and he tries to figure out where my voice is coming from. Lorraine has done an amazing job of being there and keeping everything going, as has Woodsman Hans, and I am grateful. Now we wait. Lorraine's been keeping things updated on her blog, at http://blog.fabulouslorraine.com.

2) On October the 25th, I'll be on PBS's Arthur. I play a writer called Neil Gaiman.

I'm a writer who's a cat. You can be both.

You can read about it at http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/09/neil-gaiman-gets-animated-on-arthur/.

3) Maddy Gaiman passed her driving test. All of my children can now drive. Ulp.

4) There's an eBay auction going on through http://www.twitchange.com/, to raise money for a Haitian orphanage. Lots of people taking part who will mention/retweet/follow you on Twitter if you win the auction. I've also said I'll call the winner of the "megapack" auction for me and read them a poem or a short story. It seems an easy, sensible way to help raise money for a good cause. The complete list of people offering their services (including Stephen Fry and Nathan Fillion and Rainn Wilson) is up at http://bit.ly/twitchanges....

And you can bid on me, or see where bidding is at, at http://bit.ly/ebayneil

5) Matthew Cheney's been writing about Sandman, chapter by chapter, each week. Here are the links to the first 8 episodes - the whole of Preludes and Nocturnes: http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-preludes-and-nocturnes-cheat-sheet/ while The Doll's House begins with http://gestaltmash.com/2010/09/sandman-meditations-tales-in-the-sand/

6) Over at the TOR website, they've reprinted my story "Bitter Grounds", originally from Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, and later in Fragile Things: http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/09/bitter-grounds.

The illustration is a painting by Rick Berry, working into a painting that he, and I, and my friend SuperKate, were doing in his studio one night (he writes about it here, photos by me).

(And look! Here is that man Matthew Cheney talking about "Bitter Grounds" at the Mumpsimus.)

7) No, that was all. Just six things. There isn't a seventh. It's like the rainbow, where they changed Purple to Indigo and Violet just to make it more interesting.

Labels: arbitrary spectrum composition thoughts, Arthur on PBS, bigger on the inside, do bactera wiggle?, Doctor Who, Dog, seven things, the composition of rainbows

It was pretty damn wonderful actually

Right to left, Richard Clark (director) Steven Moffat (showrunner/lead writer) Matt Smith (actor), me (writer of episode). I do not know why Matt's head and mine are dissolving into light.

What would you like to know?

Actually it doesn't matter what you'd like to know, all I'll say is that the table read was pretty amazing, the guest star or stars will be fabulous, Matt's great, Arthur's wonderful and I never got to say hullo to Karen (who was amazing).

I had a meeting after the readthrough with the producers and director, pinpointing stuff that needs fixing or clarifying ("So we need to change that without making it longer or spending any money. Right."). But nothing that needs rewriting is anything other than cosmetic, and I should get it done tomorrow or Thursday.

(Favourite quote from S. Moffat: "Look, you understand that, and I understand that, but we're Science Fiction people. The other 100% of the audience may not get it.")

The plan is still that it's the third episode of Next Season's Doctor Who. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Labels: bigger on the inside, Doctor Who, heads that dissolve into light without explanation, Steven Moffat

You're Sixteen, you're Beautiful, and You're Very Much Your Own Young Lady.

Today is my daughter Maddy's birthday. She was seven when I started this blog. She's about to turn sixteen. We went out this morning (well, technically yesterday morning) together looking for a car for her - she's spent the last month on the internet, hunting for cars in the price range I've given her than she wouldn't be ashamed to be seen driving. And she found one, and we test-drove it, and now she's going to be a girl with a car, and I feel just a bit older, because my youngest child is driving.

I wish she'd come and guest-blog some more, but she says she's self-conscious, as she meets strangers who tell her how much they like it when she blogs, and she would hate to disappoint them. She's the funniest person I know, has the sweetest disposition and the sunniest smile, and I love being with her, whether we're going around the world together having adventures or just watching The Big Bang Theory.

HAPPY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, MADDY GAIMAN

..........................................................................................................................................................................

I'm flying to the UK on Sunday for the Doctor Who table read on Tuesday. This morning I was sent the producers' "this is what we can afford" edited draft of my Doctor Who script. I'll do a polish on that. And then we're pretty much done. I think. I hope. I pray.

(Seeing a few people have asked, writing a Babylon 5 episode was much simpler: I think it was two drafts. But it was all existing sets and basically no special effects. My Doctor Who episode is Bigger in every way, inside and outside: I've asked them for the impossible, and they've knocked themselves out to give it to me, and when they can't they've managed to somehow give me the very improbable.)

...

Neil,
I am preparing to have about 12 super reluctant Jr High boys listen to a CD of the Graveyard Book, as they follow along in their books. I haven't been able to find any lesson plans on this book. Will you please take a minute to tell us a little about the background of this book, and maybe some additional graveyard ideas you left out. We are pretty excited to get started.
Thanks, Dianne the Librarian

I asked Elyse Marshall from Harper Childrens, and she said:

Here is a link to our reading guide: http://files.harpercollins.com/PDF/ReadingGuides/0060530928.pdf It has excellent discussion questions and extension activities – perfectly suitable for teachers. The guide was written by a middle school teacher with this audience in mind, actually.

Also look at the videos on Mousecircus.com, at http://mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx. In addition to the videos of me reading chapters, there are also edited highlights of the Q&As from the tour, in which many questions are answered.

...

Dear Neil,

I wrote a piano suite based on various tales from Fragile Things. You can hear it here:
http://www.tide-pool.ca/fractal/compositions/Thor_Kell_-_Fragile_Things.mp3.

It was played by my friend Jillian Hanks, who is fantastic. There fifteen (very) short movements:

I: These People Ought To Know Who We Are, And Tell That We Were Here
II: Mapmaker
III: Inventing Aladin
IV: A Study In Emerald
V: Closing Time
VI: Locks
VII: Instructions
VIII: Harlequin Valentine
IX: The Problem Of Susan
X: The Day The Saucers Came
XI: Pages From A Journal
XII: October In The Chair
XIII: Other People
XIV: How To Talk To Girls At Parties
XV: Sunbird

I hope you like it, and thank you for all the stories.

Best,
Thor

That was beautiful! Thank you.

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

I'm sure this email is, by now, a common refrain from your many journal readers, so I apologise in advance.

That said; please end your journal.

I understand, because of your recent grand successes (congratulations, by the way), that regular blogging might be either difficult to find time for or has been supplanted by the appealing immediacy of Twitter, so I think it is time for the journal to come to a natural end.

Look at Mr. Campbell's blog - 'frozen in time', your very own words. I think your journal, which has been one of the more impressive online blogging documents in the internet's relatively young history, deserves better than to stumble along like a ballplayer past his prime, occasionally swinging and hitting, mostly missing (in this analogy, a 'miss' is a day or event unblogged, and there's been a few of those recently).

Perhaps you can archive as a document of a time period for all to read and enjoy. Or perhaps that long hinted-at publication of sections of it might eventuate. Either way, the journal as it is has had its day. It's done its job. Its time is past.

(Gosh, how many more its / it's can I use?)

Please don't see this as an attack. I am, and always will be a fan, but I've loved coming to this journal over the years and to see it in its current state is a shame.

(Time was I checked it once, twice a day. Now it's once a week, at best. I've even removed it from my Mac Top Sites. Gasp!)

Evolve your website. Make Twitter the key element, and have the journal, along with stories, upcoming events, etc. a reading experience. A document of a part of your life and career, frozen in time, unchanging, perfect for its moments, for all to enjoy.

My best wishes and hopes for continued success,

Scott Dixon

I don't think anyone else has asked for me to stop it. But no, no plans to end it at this point.

The blog's on a sort of limping Hiatus until my work on Dr Who is actually done done. (As explained in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/07/normal-service-will-be-resumed-as-soon.html) and then it'll come back in some form or other. Not sure what. But I'll be working flat out on the next book, and blogging's fun when you're booking. It's a nice warm up exercise for the mind and the fingers.

Labels: bigger on the inside, blogging about the blog in a strange mirror-like pattern that leads into infinity, Doctor Who, Maddy, piano music based on short story collections, teaching the graveyard book

Turned up to Eleven

We're about ten days away from the Doctor Who table reading. I spoke to the Director for the first time yesterday. And the script is pretty much the script. (ie, I'm about to send off a script to the Script Editor that I hope will be, if not the last draft, then the one that we go into the table read with). Technically it's probably the tenth draft, but I'm not really counting any more. (The "Cut ten pages" draft of the trip to Australia was the last one that felt like major surgery.) Steven Moffat came to my rescue when I felt like I couldn't even pick it up again, and for that, he is a hero.

It hasn't really changed that much. It just gets tighter and, I hope, more like itself. Slowly, draft by draft, it's being turned up to eleven.

Anything that wasn't moving the plot forward has gone. Lots of interesting chatty background conversations in the TARDIS, gone. Lines of dialogue that were fun in themselves but weren't really needed? Gone. And the food scene? Very gone indeed. It's been gone since draft six. Given that it's not there any longer, and that that tells you absolutely nothing about the story except that it now doesn't have a scene with a bowl of food in it, I thought I'd borrow it back from Lucien's library.

The Doctor has just been given a bowl of something to eat. Something...possibly... alien...

AMY

Is it something people can eat?

(to Doctor)

Shouldn’t you scan it with your screwdriver or something?

THE DOCTOR

Why would I scan food with my screwdriver?

AMY

See if it’s safe?

The Doctor leans over, dips his finger into his bowl, tastes it.

THE DOCTOR

Some unusual trace elements, smidge too much background radiation, but, yeah, very yummy.

Amy is about to try some of his food... he stops her.

THE DOCTOR (cont’d)

No. Don’t put it in your mouth.

AMY

Not for humans?

THE DOCTOR

Not for you. Tastes like Marmite on socks.

Labels: bigger on the inside, Doctor Who, Marmite

Cutting stuff, watching parking meters, getting graphic in Sydney

As of 2:30 this morning I was certain I'd be blogging again today. I'd just sent off the finished draft of the Doctor Who script, and I was done.

Then I got up somewhat later this morning, and read an email from my script editor at the BBC a) giving me a thumbs up for all the new stuff [which I wrote for practical and budget reasons, but which will, I think, actually be much cooler than the stuff it replaced] and b) having formatted everything correctly according to BBC rules, letting me know that the script's actually a good ten pages too long.

So there will be another draft, over the next couple of days. By the end of it, all redundancies, slow bits, things that can be thrown overboard, or lines of dialogue that the author is particularly proud of will have gone, and it will be ten correctly formatted pages shorter.

And I will keep them in reserve in case they call to tell me that the episode's coming in short, and can I write three pages of sudden conversation?

...

This evening I got an email from my lawyers in the Todd McFarlane case (quick! If you have no idea what I am talking about, or if you are writing something about the case, read this first: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/06/despatches-from-alternate-universe.html. It's short and explains everything. Did you read it? Okay...) and attached to the email was this pdf file.

The PDF file is Judge Crabb's ruling on the matter that Todd wanted brought back before the court -- the question of accounting for the characters that Todd felt weren't even a bit derivative, and which I thought were not just derivative of the characters I had created for him, but in one case, actually was the same character I'd created with Todd originally. In her ruling Judge Crabb said, yes, she thought so too...

The two characters are similar enough to suggest that either Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn
is derivative of Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn or it is the same character to which plaintiff owns
the copyright.

Much as defendant tries to distinguish the two knight Hellspawn, he never explains
why, of all the universe of possible Hellspawn incarnations, he introduced two knights from
the same century. Not only does this break the Hellspawn “rule” that Malebolgia never
returns a Hellspawns to Earth more than once every 400 years (or possibly every 100 years,
as suggested in Spawn, No. 9, exh. #1, at 4), it suggests that what defendant really wanted to
do was exploit the possibilities of the knight introduced in issue no. 9. (This possibility is
supported by the odd timing of defendant’s letter to plaintiff on February 14, 1999, just
before publication of the first issue of Spawn The Dark Ages, to the effect that defendant was
rescinding their previous agreements and retaining all rights to Medieval (Gaiman) Spawn.)

If defendant really wanted to differentiate the new Hellspawn, why not make him a
Portuguese explorer in the 16th century; an officer of the Royal Navy in the 18th century, an
idealistic recruit of Simon Bolivar in the 19th century, a companion of Odysseus on his
voyages, a Roman gladiator, a younger brother of Emperor Nakamikado in the early 18th
century, a Spanish conquistador, an aristocrat in the Qing dynasty, an American Indian
warrior or a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I? It seems far more than coincidence
that Dark Ages (McFarlane) Spawn is a knight from the same century as Medieval (Gaiman)
Spawn.

Anyway. That's that round done with.

I wish I took some kind of joy in this, but I don't.

At this point all I hope is that Todd can do an accounting for all the comics I wrote for which he paid no royalties, and the rest of it; and that he'll settle up and I will make some comics charities very happy; that his comics company will finally come out of bankruptcy; and that I can forget this forever.

For the curious, there is an account of this round at Maggie Thompson's excellent blog, starting with http://www.maggiethompson.com/2010/06/june-15-in-madison-with-neil-gaiman.html and going on from there, an entry at a time.

And here's an article from 2002 that summarises the original round of findings against McFarlane and Image.

This is a photo from Maggie's blog of Todd McFarlane (right) and his witness Brian Holguin (left) after they'd testified.

...

Tomorrow Maddy and I go to Australia for the Graphic Festival at Sydney Opera House. (The overall link to the Festival is here: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/about/program_graphic.aspx).

I'm going to read my novelette "The Truth is a Cave In The Black Mountains" for the first -- and possibly only -- time in public there, next Saturday night. There will be accompanying music by the FourPlay String Quartet, something I find exciting and scary at the time, as I've never attempted an accompanied reading, and Eddie Campbell has painted about 40 illustrations, which will be projected while I read.

There will probably be some other stuff -- I'd love to do a Q&A there, for example, but need to check with the organisers if it's permitted.

There will be a signing afterwards.

If you don't yet have a ticket, they are at: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/neil_gaiman.aspx

Eddie Campbell used to blog. This is the blog, frozen in time: http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/

FourPlay can be found and heard at http://www.fourplay.com.au/ & http://www.myspace.com/fourplaystringquartet

And just to bring things all the way around to the beginning of this blog, http://shop.fourplay.com.au/Catgut.php is a link to FourPlay's online shop. And the first track (which you can hear a smattering of on the site) is the FourPlay version of the theme from Doctor Who.

Labels: bigger on the inside, Doctor Who, Don't follow leaders Watch the parkin' meters, sydney, Todd McFarlane