Labels: American Gods Blog, blogger oddnesses
American Gods Blog, Post 50
Blogger is being very strange currently. I'm seeing all manner of interesting error messages, and am hoping that, sooner or later, I can get some of these posts to go up. (No luck yet, though I've graduated from the 'runtime 104' error messages to 'msxml3.dll error '80072f78' which seems like a step up.)
American Gods Blog, Post 49
I was doing a telephone interview about American Gods when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.
For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn't.
"Douglas Adams is dead," I said.
"Yes," said the interviewer. "I know. Did you ever meet him?"
I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.
After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don't remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)
I'd known Douglas fairly well in the 80s -- interviewed him originally for Penthouse then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote "Don't Panic -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion" for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.
Saw him at David Gilmour's 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the Neverwhere TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn't be the same experience he'd had with the Hitchhiker TV series, but it was.
Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the Starship Titanic game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn't get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He'd previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker's Books, and I'd said no as I didn't have the time.
We'd e-mail from time to time.
He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don't think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn't meant to be a writer. I'm not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it's something they don't have a concept for yet, let alone a name -- and if he'd been around when this thing was around (World Designer? Explainer?) he would have done it brilliantly.
(I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print.)
He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t.
Labels: American Gods Blog, Douglas Adams
American Gods Blog, Post 48
Got my hair cut by the wonderful Wendy from Hair Police (particularly wonderful as she didn't grumble that I was almost half an hour late), then stopped in to say hello to Greg Ketter at Dreamhaven Books, to discuss the new series of spoken word CDs. (Regular readers of this journal will have noticed me recording the material for the first two CDs last week.) We were trying to figureout how long it would be before they could be released, and it's going to be a little while -- probably not till the end of the year. Greg mentioned how frustrating it is that Warning: Contains Language now goes for $100 on e-bay, and I said "Well, could we just print up a few to tide us over until we can get the new ones out...?"
Greg made a phone call. "We can have some in two weeks," he said, mildly astonished. So we're doing a small print run -- about a thousand copies -- of Warning. It's a double CD, and I hope it will be for sale at the various stops on the signing tour, and through DreamHaven. I don't know if Greg's doing enough that he'll be offering it through Amazon.com, or into the comic stores through Diamond. We'll see.
But you will be able to get copies, for a little while. And then after that the CDs on there will become part of the new Audio CD series.
So that's news.
And yesterday I got an e-mail from my agent saying that Harper have just bought the electronic book rights to American Gods (no advance. The e-retailer takes half, and Harper and I split the remaining half). And then they asked if they could do the rest of the books in the same way, and we said yes.
(That's not really news. But it's interesting.)
And I got home to find an e-mail telling me that it's been announced that David Goyer is adapting and directing a movie based on my short story Murder Mysteries for Dimension films -- something that's been in the works for several years, and has just come to fruition.
I wish David much luck.... (Thinks: I hope they do Private Eye Angel toys.)
Labels: American Gods Blog, DreamHaven, Hair, Murder Mysteries, Warning: Contains Language
American Gods Blog, Post 47
So next week I get my photograph taken for Entertainment Weekly. It looks a lot like it will happen at the House on the Rock, after hours, so I may, like my characters, get to ride The World’s Largest Carousel.
Which, whatever happens or doesn’t happen will probably be more fun, or at least, significantly less smoky, than the author photograph session for American Gods, last December.
Now, every now and again I do something really stupid.
For example, when I started writing American Gods, I swore a mighty oath that I’d not cut my hair or shave my beard until I finished it. By March 2000 I was starting to look like a hassidic terrorist, and somewhere in there I said “Sod it,” and shaved off the beard.
But the hair kept growing. I wasn’t going to get a haircut until I’d finished writing American Gods.
When I tell people about this, they look at me as if I’m really weird, except for the Norwegians who tell me about one of their early kings who didn’t shave or cut his hair until he’d united Norway.( And he didn’t wash either. At least I still bathed.) So the Norwegians don’t think I’m weird.
Anyway, my hair grew and grew (it does that, and whenever I’m tempted to grumble I remember all the people of my generation who would be only too pleased to have hair that grows too fast, or any kind of hair really), and finally it was last October and people who didn’t know me were making Howard Stern jokes when they passed me in the street. And I was going to go on a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Reading Tour...
So I finished the book. In first draft, anyway. And I went and visited Wendy at Hair Police in Minneapolis, and got my first haircut in 18 months; and then I went off on the CBLDF reading tour and raised many tens of thousands for freedom of speech, and this was a good thing. (Somewhere in there I talked Chris Oarr from the defense fund out of auctioning off my cut-off hair for charity.)
(You know, this would be much more fun if I could illustrate it with photos. Maybe when we put up the neilgaiman.com site I will.)
So I had short hair and nobody made Howard Stern jokes any more.
Now, author photos are weird things. For example, take the Good Omens photo session, in 1989, where Terry Pratchett and I were taken to a graveyard on the coldest day of the year. The expressions on our faces – variously described as brooding, intelligent, and mysterious, and by the Times of London no less, as sinister – are simply cold. (I was relatively okay. I had a leather jacket on. Terry wore an extremely lightweight jacket he’d borrowed from Malcolm Edwards, because the notion of the authors dressed respectively in black and in white. I was black.)
The easiest author photos have been the various Kelli Bickman photos taken over the years, including my favourite, the Smoke and Mirrors back cover photo, with its infinite regression of authors on a TV screen. But Kelli’s taking fewer photos these days, and is concentrating more on her artwork. (She’s MTV Featured Artist currently... you can see some of her artwork at www.kellibickman.net)
The hardest was the one in the UK in 1996 for Wired Magazine. The photo you may have seen from that session is the one of me holding a glowing book. The one you’ve not seen was the one of me, naked and wearing angel wings surrounded by candles. The one that I still remember with loathing was the one that wound up on the cover of Wired: it was me covered in sand. (A visual pun: Sandman. Yes?) And I would like to give a tip for young photographers who may want to attempt this shot.
Do not use builder’s sand. It may be cheap, but it burns the skin.
Trust me on this. I’ve been there. I know.
The American Gods photo session was nowhere near that painful.
I still think I may have messed everything up by having a haircut.
The photographer was a very nice lady named Sigrid Estrada.
(Kelly Notaras, my editor Jennifer Hershey’s right-hand woman took me down there. Jennifer herself, and my literary agent Merrilee Heifetz wandered along during the course of the afternoon.)
Sigrid took one look at me and said “I thought you were going to have longer hair.”
She looked very disappointed.
“No,” I said, apologetically. “I don’t.”
She sighed. She shook her head. I never quite found out why this messed things up as much as it obviously had.
Sigrid had a plan for a photo. The plan involved a lot of smoke. Her assistant held the smoke machine. Kelly Notaras was drafted in to hold a piece of cardboard to waft the smoke. And I stood there while Sigrid shouted “Smoke!” at the assistant holding the smoke machine, and the machine would belch huge gusts of white fog at me, and then she’d call “Waft!” at Kelly and Kelly would wave the paper and try to get the smoke off my face.
And that’s what we did for the next four or five hours. We did it with my leather jacket on. We did it with my leather jacket off. We did it with me standing up. We did it with me sitting down. We did it with me peering coyly from around the side of a huge sheet of paper. And all through this, the smoke was belched, and then the smoke was wafted. (Jennifer did some fine smoke wafting, too.)
Merrilee exerted an agent’s traditional prerogative and ran up between smoke belches and tried to tame the hair on my forehead. It didn’t tame, but she did her best.
And I began to understand what a kipper must feel like, at the precise moment it stops just being a herring, and realises that it has been smoked. For me that moment occurred at the point where Sigrid decided that it might be more... more whatever she was going for... if the smoke was splurted directly at my head, rather than just generally belched out around waist level.
I’d hold my breath and smile and be told that I shouldn’t smile, not for the kind of photo that Sigrid had in mind. So I’d stop smiling, and the smoke would splurt and Kelly or Jennifer would waft it and Sigrid would click away.
Days would pass before the taste of the smoke machine finally left the back of my throat. Still, it could have been much worse. There was no builder’s sand involved, nor was I being warned not to get too close to the candles or my wings would go up like tinder and burn my bare skin.
So a few weeks passed, and one day the contact sheets arrived. Lots and lots of photos of me. And smoke.
My son took one look at the contact sheet and said “Was your head on fire?”
“No,” I said.
“It just looked like it was, that was all.”
And he was right. All the smoke being let off at head level had managed to create a set of photos in which it was perfectly obvious that my head was indeed on fire.
Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) was staying with us over Christmas. I showed her the contact sheet.
“They make you look like your head’s on fire,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a special effect.”
“And all the ones of you not wearing the leather jacket make you look like David Copperfield.”
“Yes. That’s a special effect too.”
“You don’t want to look like David Copperfield, do you?”
“No, thank you. Let’s stick with the ones with me with a jacket on.”
We picked one black and white photo, and one colour picture. The best thing about the black and white photo was the smoke in the background, which, far from looking like my head (or indeed any part of me) was on fire, looked instead like a mysterious sort of background, which might be clouds or mountains or, well, anything really.
(You can see one at http://www.codysbooks.com/index.jsp, while the figure of me from that picture, much photoshopped, is up on the front page of this website.)
I think they’re pretty good photos. I still feel vaguely guilty about getting the haircut, though. I just wonder what Ingrid could have done, if my hair had been longer. And whether whatever it was would have required quite so much smoke.
............................
Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, author photos, beards, Best Of, CBLDF, Hair, Kelli Bickman photographs, Magnetic Fields, Wired
American Gods Blog, Post 46
And here are the three Canadian Dates, with information from Harper Collins Canada publicist Felicia Quon (isn't that a great name?):
Toronto, ON
Monday, July 23
The Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy
Toronto Public Library
239 College Street
'7:00 pm
For tickets contact: Merrill Collection 416.393.7748
Vancouver, BC
Tuesday, July 24
Virgin Record Megastore
788 Burrard Street
7:00 pm
For tickets contact Virgin Records 604.669.2289
Victoria, BC
Wednesday July 25
7:30 pm.
Bolens Books Event
held at Open Space Gallery, 510 Fort Street
For tickets contact: Bolen Books at 250.595.4232
I'm not quite certain what the 'for tickets' means in the case of a Virgin Megastore. My guess is that I'll be doing readings and Q&As in each place, as well as signing, but I may be wrong.
I don't quite know what'll be happening in Toronto, but for now I'd strongly suggest anyone who wants to come calls the Merrill collection people and gets a ticket ASAP: I've spoken at the Merrill Collection before, and I remember it as not seating more than about 400 people, and the inhabitants of Toronto tend to be among the most enthusiastic on the face of the planet (or at least, they turn up in astonishing numbers).
Picked up the latest LOCUS (April, I think -- good interview with John Crowley and he's on the cover) and was amused to discover several photos of me with (and without) the Florida Beard alluded to in earlier posts in it.
Next one of these will be about tour planning I think.
Labels: American Gods Blog, beards, tour
American Gods Blog, Post 45
The nice people at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego e-mailed me to tell me that their phone number is in fact
800-811-4747 and not whatever I posted here earlier.
Really what this web site needs is a page of tour dates. (I think the good people at Authors on the web are probably toiling day in and night to get Neilgaiman.com up and running before publication date. But I'll see if I can get it to happen.)
5,500 Limited signature pages have been signed (and many of them have been doodled on). This is an extra 10% to allow for spoilage, slippage, crashage, rippage and someone at the bindery spilling coffee on them. I don't know if they'll obsessively destroy the extra 500 if no coffee is spilled, or if they'll creep into the system. Possibly the latter -- but seeing that no-one's actually paying anything extra for the signed copies, which will (as I said yesterday) go out with the unsigned ones, I'm not going to give it another thought.
I asked my publishers today if they had any spare copies of American Gods in proof as I had a few people I wanted to get copies to, and they laughed at me. Hollowly. So at least in proof stage, it's proving popular.
Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, signing sheets of paper
American Gods Blog, Post 44
I'm starting to feel faintly cursed.
Tonight I thought, well, I've signed about 4,000 of these title pages -- decorating many of them with little drawings, doodles, staring eyes, portraits of Uncle Sam, and, following a slight accident this afternoon with a bottle of ink, fingerprints -- I'll stop and do a blogger entry. I'll tell the story of my day being photographed for the back cover shot.
So I turned on the notebook computer, and listened as the charging cord made an interesting sputtering sound and an even more interesting burning-electrical-things smell, and then died.
It left a half-charged battery, which may just be enough to get the various files I'll need tomorrow off the computer and onto another. But it kind of put paid to my plans to write a leisurely sort of journal entry. So I signed another few hundred cover sheets instead.
This is the deal on the 5,000 signed books: bookstores can order dumpbins or risers or whatever they call them of American Gods. Ten copies of the book, a couple of the audio books, and a couple of signed ones. If you have a bookstore that has a stand of American Gods, and you know I'm not going to be signing in your area, then take a look and see if there are any signed books in there.
At my most cynical, I imagine a bunch of people driving from Barnes and Noble to Borders across America buying up the signed copies and immediately offering them on E-Bay (or hoarding them and then selling them on E-Bay).
American Gods Blog, Post 43
I just got sent some of the UK signing dates. THIS ISN'T A COMPLETE LIST
(said in capitals) -- and I'll post the complete list as soon as we have
it -- but I'm posting it anyway, to let any of you in the UK who want to
come to a signing start making arrangements and plans....
Saturday, 7th July
1.00pm Forbidden Planet, New Oxford St., London, WC1
Monday, 9th July
1.00pm. Borders, 98 Buchanan St., Glasgow
6.30pm Waterstones, 128 Princes St., Edinburgh
Tuesday, 10th July
7.00pm Borders, 94-96 Briggate, Leeds
Wednesday, 11th July
7.00pm Waterstones, 91 Deansgate, Manchester
Thursday, 12th July
1.00pm Andromeda, 2-5 Suffolk St., Birmingham
7.00pm Ottakars, 3 Park St., Walsall, W.Midlands
-- Something I've encountered on my last few UK signings is stores selling
tickets to readings/signings, with the cost of the ticket coming off the
cost of the book (so you pay a pound for the reading and a pound less for
the book), and others give away tickets to limit the numbers of people
showing up. It's worth calling the shop if it's not one you know, or if
it's not local, and finding out how they do things, and if there's
anything you'll need to do to get to the signing.
And here, to save you all from paging through the archives, is the list of
US signings. (The Canadian signings, in Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria,
will be posted as soon as I get them.)
..............
6/19/01 6:00 PM New York, NY
BorderChurch & Vesey Sts.
New York City 10048
(212) 839-8049
6/20/01 8:00 PM Huntington, NY
Book Revue
313 New York Avenue
Huntington, NY 11743
(631) 271-1442
6/21/01 7:00 PM Champaign/Savoy, IL
Pages For All Ages
1201 Savoy Plaza
Savoy, IL 61874
(217) 351-7243
6/22/01 1:00 PM Evanston, IL
Stars Our Destination
705 Main St.
Evanston, IL 60202
(847) 570-5925
6/22/01 8:00 PM Skokie, IL
Barnes & Noble
55 Old Orchard Center,
Skokie, IL 60077
(847) 676-2230
6/23/01 1:00 PM Lexington, KY
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
Lexington Green
161 Lexington Green Circle
Lexington, KY 40503
(859) 271-5330
6/23/01 7:00 PM Dayton, OH
Books & Co.
350 E. Stroop St.
Dayton, OH 45429
(937) 297-6356
6/24/01 1:00 PM Cleveland, OH
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
The Shops at Shaker Square
13217 Shaker Square
Cleveland, OH 44120
(216) 751-3300
6/25/01 4:00 PM Seattle, WA
Third Place Booksellers
17171 Bothell Way N.E.
Lake Forest Park, WA 98155
(206)366-3333
6/25/01 7:00 PM Seattle, WA
University Booksellers
Keane Hall, Room 130
University of Washington Campus
Seattle, WA 98155
(206) 545-4363
6/26/01 7:30 PM Menlo Park, CA
Kepler1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(650) 324-4321
6/27/01 1:00 PM San Francisco, CA
The Booksmith
1644 Haight St.
San Francisco, CA 94117
(415) 863-8688
6/27/01 7:30 PM Berkeley, CA
Cody2454 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704
1-800-704-4336
6/28/01 12:30 PM San Diego, CA
Mysterious Galaxy
7051 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard
San Diego, CA 92111
1-800-704-4336
6/28/01 7:00 PM Los Angeles, CA
Vroman3405 Lake Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101
1-800-769-BOOK
6/29/01 8:00 PM Los Angeles, CA
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 659-3110
1-800-764-BOOK
7/1/01 2:00 PM Minneapolis, MN
DreamHaven
912 W. Lake St.
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 823-6161
Barnes & Noble
2100 N. Snelling Ave.
Rosedale, MN 55113
(651) 639-9256
Labels: American Gods Blog, tour
American Gods Blog, Post 42
Oh, and it looks like the 17th of June I'll be doing a reading, along with the Magnetic Fields (who will be making music, not reading) at the Bottom Line in New York. More details as they become available (including where you call for tickets).
I'm not sure how often authors and bands do gigs together out there, but it seems like something that should happen more often. I mean, I'd love to see Hubert Selby supporting Lou Reed... (And I did once see Nico supporting John Cooper Clarke.)
Labels: American Gods Blog, Greg Brown, Magnetic Fields, quotes
American Gods Blog, Post 41
There. I'm home again from all the travelling, and now it's time to recharge my batteries, as I'm pretty much spent. Tonight I holed up in a small recording studio, reading short pieces (and a long one) for the next spoken word CD. More recording tomorrow night. More Avalon tomorrow. And I think I may start the second draft of DEATH as soon as that's done: it'll be more fun than waiting to see if there's a strike coming or not.
And meanwhile, let's talk about the triumvirate of KIRKUS, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY and BOOKLIST reviews (and LIBRARY JOURNAL makes up a quartet).
Overall, I'm not sure how much influence reviews have in the real world. I've seen a publisher (Workmans) get scared by a bad review in the New York Times and more or less dump a book -- but the book itself - Good Omens - has gone on to become a perennial bestseller in paperback without them. (It's just about to be reissued in the US in a new cover.) And I don't know of any other publishers who have ever reacted to reviews at all, good or bad. (They send them to you, and I think they circulate them around in-house, and they are pleased by the good ones and try very hard to keep the bad ones from you. But they don't DO anything different when faced by bad reviews, if you see what I mean.)
More to the point, I've seen books with amazing reviews, not to mention awards and enthusiastic plaudits from enormously famous writers sell the same number of books, or less, as the ones that don't get the reviews etc.
(Are sales important? Not as such, but they're the only way authors and publishers have of keeping score and comparing things: without sales you'd not know that, for example, Neverwhere in mass-market paperback was much more successful than Stardust, although Stardust did slightly better in hardcover. I suspect that Stardust will be much happier in the forthcoming 'trade paperback', the larger format, with a cover that makes it look more like a fairy tale for adults -- which it is -- and less like a generic fantasy novel -- which it certainly isn't.)
Most reviews come out when the book comes out. This is sensible, and strongly encouraged by publishers (who warn reviewers on the slips that go out with review copies not to review the book before publication date) because otherwise people cannot read a good review and then nip immediately down to the bookstore and buy a copy of two of the book.
There are exceptions to the embargo, though. PW, Kirkus, and Booklist all print their reviews a good way before the books come out, because they are reviewing for the trade: for bookstores and for libraries and for insiders. And their reviews become the Early Word on the book. (On several occasions I've had a good Kirkus review of one of my books followed up by movie and TV people calling to get hold of it, so I assume that they read it too, as a good place to go hunting for what they call 'properties' and the rest of us call 'stories'.)
Kirkus, PW and Booklist each put a star beside books they especially like. People pay a lot of attention to the stars. (If ever you've seen the phrase "Kirkus starred review" after a quote on the back of a bookjacket, that's what it meant. )
Obviously, the reviewers don't always agree. Neverwhere got a great review in Kirkus, I remember, and a stinker in PW (which said that it just showed I was a comics writer and the book would have been okay if only it had had pictures). But since then I've been very lucky with my early reviews in all the periodicals (and/or lucky with my reviewers -- BOOKLIST names its reviewers but Kirkus and (I think) PW reviewers are anonymous, and so get to utter pronouncements like the voice of God).
So today my editor, Jennifer Hershey, phoned. She was just on her way to an international book fair in Jerusalem, but wanted to call and read me something before she left the office.
It was the Kirkus Review of American Gods.
She read it to me, then she faxed me a copy.
I'll put the whole thing down here, because this is the first official review the book has got, and by this point, I hope, you're as curious as I was. Obviously, it's copyright Kirkus reviews (although I don't think they'd mind me putting it up here). It's from the May 15th edition...
....................................
An ex-convict is the wandering knight-errant who traverses the wasteland of middle America in this ambitious, gloriously funny, and oddly heartwarming latest from the popular fantasist. (STARDUST 1999, etc.)
Released from prison after serving a three-year term, Shadow is immediately rocked by the news that his beloved wife Laura has been killed in an automobile accident. While en route to Indiana for her funeral, Shadow meets an eccentric businessman who calls himself Wednesday ( a dead giveaway if you're up to speed on your Norse mythology), and passively accepts the latter's offer of an imprecisely defined job. The story skillfully glides onto and off the plane of reality, as a series of mysterious encounters suggest to Shadow that he may not be in Indiana anymore -- or indeed, anywhere on Earth he recognises. In dreams, he's visited by a grotesque figure with the head of a buffalo and the voice of a prophet -- as well as by Laura's rather alarmingly corporeal ghost. Gaiman layers in a horde of other stories whose relationship to Shadow's adventures are only gradually made clear, while putting his sturdy protagonist through a succession of tests that echo those of Arthurian hero Sir Gawain bound by honor to surrender his life to the malevolent Green Knight, Orpheus braving the terrors of Hades to find and rescue the woman he loves, and numerous other archetypal figures out of folklore and legend. Only an ogre would reveal much more about this big novel's agreeably intricate plot. Suffice it to say that this is the book that answers the question: When people emigrate to America, what happens to the gods they leave behind?
A magical mystery tour through the mythologies of all cultures, a unique and moving love story -- and another winner for the phenomenally gifted, consummately reader-friendly Gaiman. (Author Tour.)
.................................................................
Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, book reviews, Death