American Gods Blog, Post 21

By the way, for those who read the archives (or just have good memories) and wondered what happened to the journal entry that turned into an essay on things like whether books have genders and how American Gods grew from a bean, I've tidied it up and given it to my editor at Harper Collins to pass on to Powells.com, who wanted an essay for their website. So, when it's up, you'll have to go there and read it.

Labels: American Gods Blog, Powells

American Gods Blog, Post 20

So I've spent the last two days doing the UK (Headline Books) galleys of American Gods. (Galleys are the output pages of what will be typeset to form the book that will be on sale. They are unbound, at this stage -- 500 numbered sheets of paper.) It was a strange and gently maddening experience as I got to discover how inconsistent I am when I write.

Aging AND ageing, 10:00 am AND 10:00am AND 10:00 a.m., jeweller and jeweler... and so on. And while I didn't mind my favourite version being in there I found it most trying that I hadn't been consistent. So I reminded myself that a something or other consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds and went back to the galleys.

I am getting faster, though.

And I was pleasantly suprised that the book seemed to hold my interest as a reader for the umpteenth time through it. Normally about this point in the equation I cannot even look at it again.

(There was one edition of one of my books, quite some years ago, where the galleys arrived for a paperback edition, and I looked at them and said "They had better be right, for I don't think I can read past page one without screaming". And for all I know, they were.)

So some time in the next few weeks it'll be time to do the US galleys. But for now the UK galleys have been inspected, corrected, several pages have been rescued from a swimming pool and dried out (it was windy), and I found a postal service place to UPS them -- all 7lbs of paper -- back to London.

The lady who ran the postal place was somewhat woozy. She spoke like Tracy Ullmann's Ruby Romaine character, and had a great deal of trouble focussing on things, like small print, or quite large print, or solid objects. She said she'd been an exotic dancer until her back got bad, but that was some years ago now. She told me it would cost $95 dollars to send the galleys to London. I said that she was looking at the wrong page, and that I was not trying to
import anything to the US collect. She moved the book around and squinted a lot. I asked if I could help, and took the book, and found the cost of sending the package and the price and everything. I gave it back to her. She decided that I had the wrong page. She phoned head office. They told her the price code. It was the one that I'd found for her. She came back to tell me
about it. An ant started sauntering across the counter top. She kept hitting it ("I know they're all god's creature's but that's a goddamn bug on my counter") and kept missing it, her fist always slamming down just behind where it had been. It wasn't walking that fast. Then the ant vanished entirely. She looked around for it, muttering, "Where the hell did it go?" I
picked it off her forearm, and dropped it into the bin. She told me that she'd be able to focus a lot better after her pharmaceutical break.

And I left her the galleys, hoping against hope that they will actually arrive at the offices of Headline Books on Monday, and that she won't absent-mindedly have sent them to India or somewhere.

Which reminds me...

Currently there's no real mechanism for sending questions about American Gods here yet. So if any of you do have questions for me about American Gods, go and take a look at the Well's inkwell.vue area (http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/). You can e-mail Linda or Jon or any of the guys who run the inkwell (there's a link to them at the bottom of that first page) and they'll post the questions on the inkwell topic -- 104 -- and I'll answer them there and here.

And the US part of the signing tour is more or less decided. I'll post it as soon as it's set in stone. It'll be June 19th -29th. Then there will be a UK tour in early July and a short Canadian tour in late July.

...

And the first American Gods proof has surfaced on Ebay. It's one of the UK proofs, so it has a nice cover and isn't missing the final chapter. But I was saddened to see that it's "unread" -- there aren't many of these proofs (they're few enough that Headline is having to say "no" to people who want them now), and the whole point of sending them out is so that people -- booksellers or journalists -- can read them, not so that they can make a quick buck off them.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, eBay, Galleys, The Well

American Gods Blog, Post 19

The good news is that a box of quick and dirty proof copies of AMERICAN GODS arrived today. The bad news is that the last chapter is missing. And all I can say is thank heavens it's just these early proofs, where we can make sure anyone who gets them also gets a print out of the last chapter rather than the finished book on the shelves missing its last chapter. (It's happened, and worse, and weirder. For that matter I have on my shelves the only extant copies of a UK printing of The Sandman: Book of Dreams with Stephen King's name on the cover as author of one of the stories. Luckily I got my author copies before they left the warehouse to go anywhere else. And I called HC UK and said "But he doesn't have a story in the book. You printed it in hardback last year and he didn't have a story in there." And they said "Oops," and trashed the print run.)

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, Proofs

American Gods Blog, Post 18

Hey. I'm nominated for a Nebula, for best screenplay. Isn't that fun?

http://www.sfwa.org/awards/

(I'm not sure that my part in Mononoke was screenplay-worthy, and if it did get it, Jack Fletcher, the English language voice director, deserves as much of it as I do. But still, it's always fun to be nominated for things.)

Labels: American Gods Blog, Awards, Nebula Awards, Princess Mononoke

American Gods Blog, Post 17

One of the best things about finishing a book, is there are things you haven’t been able to read that now you are.

When I’m writing a book – or even, when I know that one day I’m going to be writing a book – any fiction in possibly a similar area becomes taboo.

If my next book were to be a fictional life of Marco Polo, I’d not read any fiction to do with Marco Polo or Kublai Khan (and would probably have stopped reading it about five years ago): partly because I don’t want to see how someone else did that idea, and partly because if someone did do the same thing that I was going to do, I don’t want that route closed off because someone else has taken it already. It just keeps things simple.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be accused of plagiarism. I’ve still never read Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld, although I love Chris Fowler as a writer, and have had a copy of Roofworld on my shelves since before it came out (they sent me a proof). But I knew I wanted to do a magic city under London novel, and Roofworld looked too close to what I planned to do for comfort. I left it unread, as I left Mike Moorcock’s Mother London, and several other good books. Books I know I’d like I haven’t read (and still haven’t, since I want to go back to London Below one day).

One of the joys of finishing American Gods is that there are books I can read, and books I can reread. John James’s Votan, for example. A book I read almost twenty years ago, and that I’ve wanted to reread for ages but didn’t dare to, as I knew it had a scene I was going to have to do in American Gods. And when I finally read it, last week, I was pleased that the two scenes didn’t resemble each other in any real way, and more pleased that twelve years spent getting as deeply into Norse stuff as anyone who doesn’t do it for a living had left me with an enormous appreciation for the brilliance of James’s novel. (It’s about a wily second century Greek trader in Germany who becomes Odin – Votan – and to whom all the Norse myths happen, or at least, the stories that will become the Norse Myths. Hilarious, moving and, along with its sequel, Not For all the Gold in Ireland, the best mythic-historical fiction out there, apart from Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mist sequence, and maybe some Robert Graves.)

And now I’m reading a book I’ve wanted to read for five years, Martin Millar’s Good Fairies of New York. I read the back jacket copy when I bought the book, and ruled it off limits as it might have strayed into American Gods territory. Reading it in the bath today, it doesn’t. It’s just delightful Martin Millar, as funny and wise and solidly written as he gets at his best.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, book reviews

American Gods Blog, Post 16

Let's see... well, the old entries are dropping off the bottom of the site, so we're setting up an archive. There are US quick&dirty proof copies of the book going out to booksellers and authors-for-blurbs right now; I'm doing as many cover letters as I can to them. (It'll be interesting to see how quickly they start showing up on ebay, and how much they go for.) We've finalised the jacket copy in the US, and got permission to use a line from an e-mail as a blurb on the back of the book. (It was something Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, and a very fine writer in his own right, wrote to me, when he read it, which, I thought, described the book I was trying to write perfectly.)

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, blurbs

American Gods Blog, Post 15

Permissions... well, good news, bad news. According to the copyright office website:

Therefore, the U. S. copyright in any work published or copyrighted prior to January 1, 1923, has expired by operation of law, and the work has permanently fallen into the public domain in the United States. For example, on January 1, 1997, copyrights in works first published or copyrighted before January 1, 1922, have expired; on January 1, 1998, copyrights in works first published or copyrighted before January 1, 1923, have expired. Unless the copyright law is changed again, no works under protection on January 1, 1999 will fall into the public domain in the United States until January 1, 2019.Which means that two of the poems I needed to quote from are public domain.

The third, unfortunately, isn't... and the request originally went to the wrong people. So I've just re-sent it to the right people. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

So, today, apart from Permissions emergencies, is trying to fix the UK and the US blurbs. The UK blurb feels just right, but is factually wonky; the US one has all its facts right, but doesn't quite feel like the book yet (as someone who read it said, "It could be about a war between rival clans of elves in the US" -- which, I hasten to add, it isn't). So I need to try and get the UK jacket copy closer to the events of the book, and the US jacket copy closer to the weirdness of the book. And I ought to do it before close of play today...

Labels: American Gods Blog, blurbs, copyright, quotes

American Gods Blog, Post 14

And in case you were wondering -- Permissions: still waiting to hear from Warner Chappell about Please Don't Let me Be Misunderstood, and from all the poets. Permissions in from Greg Brown (for his song In the Dark With You), agreement reached with Sondheim's people (for Old Friends)....

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, quotes

American Gods Blog, Post 13

So the post today brought a copy of American Gods -- a book, and a cover -- from the UK. It's the Hodder uncorrected proof, and it is lovely. I was completely thrilled, mostly I think by the bookness of it. I also really liked the back cover copy, although it doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to the book it describes, having been written from my original outline and not from the text. So some of the facts are off, but the mood and the pitch and the tone are just right.

You can see the cover image at http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0747274231.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg Although they've now put a lot more silver on my name, and distressed the title letters, and the whole looks smashing.

All of a sudden, it's starting to feel like something very real -- a book, not just something I've been writing for a few years.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, covers

American Gods Blog, Post 12

One longish, quite funny, entry on the mechanics of copy editing was eaten by Blogger a couple of days ago, and I was too busy copy editing the novel to re-enter it. And then February did that thing that February does, where it stops suddenly just as you were getting the hang of it, and the time alotted by the publisher to copy editing was done. I spent one last day trying to input all of the major and minor revisions to the computer, so I had a file that was more or less the same as the version that was to be printed, and then had to drive at silly speeds down icy country roads to make it to the FedEx drop-off in time, which (deep sigh of relief here) I did.

And the manuscript is safely at Harper Collins, and now I just have to figure out the best way of doing the UK copy edit for the Hodder edition (as I discovered when they sent me their list of queries, the biggest problem with sending electronic files of books around the world rather than printouts is that page numbers change depending on things like your default font size and the type of paper you're using -- so my sending them a list of changes of the "delete comma after the word of on page 16 line 12" variety would be somewhere beyond useless).

The strangest thing about doing a copyedit is how much you learn. About the world, and about writing. Before I start I grab a pile of dictionaries, English and American, and a bunch of books on usage -- Fowler's, and the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, and Bill Bryson's lovely Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words -- and the Chicago Manual of Style, and wade in.

Is blowjob one word or two? Judgement or judgment? Wintry or wintery? Why has the copy editor crossed out 'hessian' and replaced it with 'burlap'? Aren't they two different fabrics? -- twenty minutes of research and I figure out that they may be two different fabrics in the UK, but they stopped using the word hessian for rough hairy sack-type jute or hemp cloth in the US about two hundred years ago. Good...

I'd written "none of the passengers were hurt" and the copy editor's changed it to "none of the passengers was hurt" -- Fowler's English Usage, the American English Usage, Harpers and Bill Bryson all agree that the idea that 'None' is a singular noun is based on the misconception that it's a contraction of no one, which it isn't, and tell me it's plural if I want it to be. Good. I do.

Now, when I write dialogue I try and punctuate it to give some kind of indication of the rhythms of speech. As far as I'm concerned "Hi, Mike" and "Hi Mike" are two different things. The copy editor likes the first, and assumes that wherever I've put the second, it's because I've forgotten the comma. And I like to spell out "mister" if it occurs in dialogue. I just do. He's replaced them all with "Mr." and I stet each one back the way it was, and fix a few that I've forgotten...

He's changed dumpster to Dumpster. Check. Yup, it's a trade-mark. Good call. Okay. He's changed the one ocurrence of 'whisky' to 'whiskey'. Nope, it's a good scotch (Laphroaig), and that's how they spell it. Leave it. And here's Diet Coke changed to diet Coke. Is that right? Yup. Good man.

He's changed a sixteen wheeler to an eighteen wheeler in a metaphor but not when there are a cluster of them parked outside a strip club. I add another two wheels to the ones parked outside the Best Peap Show In Town...

Why has the copy editor changed "it's the objective case" to "it's the dative case" in a (very) short conversation about 'who' vs 'whom'? Do we even have a dative case in English? My schoolboy Latin, Greek and German are of little use, but none of the refence books seems to think that there's anything other than subject and object going on here, and I write STET.

And on, and on, for six hundred and fifty pages. And if all this seems pedantic, on the copy editor's part or on mine... well, yes. That's the point. He's paid not to see the wood for the trees. Actually he's paid to look up at the wood now and again, but mostly to keep track of all the leaves, and especially to make sure that Missy Gunther on page 253 isn't Missie Gunther when she returns on page 400.

(And as I type this, looking down to my assistant Lorraine's Xena mouse pad, I've just noticed that the copy editor corrected Xena: Warrior Princess to Xena the Warrior Princess, and I let it pass as I assumed that was the official trademark, but nope, I was right originally -- quick phone call to Harper Collins "in chapter five, just before the bank robbery, there's a Xena: Warrior Princess harem doll in the bankrupt stock store -- can you fix it back the way it was?")

Meanwhile, there's a list of queries in from the UK, only one of which is the same as the US copy edits (a twenty-five minute long half an hour I'd managed to create. Don't ask.)

I decide to lose the quote from a Blur song (Magic America) (which doesn't say very much, but which was in my head when I started the book, along with Elvis Costello's American Without Tears) and replace it with a quote from Lord Carlisle written just after the War of Independence about the hugeness of America and the way even their losses and disasters occurred on a massive scale....

And now it's over and done. For three weeks, anyway, when the galleys will come back and I'll read it through a microscope for the second time, making sure that every comma is where it's meant to be...

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, copy editing, quotes