Quick Post and Run

I've got about 35 minutes till the end of tonight's Penn and Teller show, so I thought I'd blog for a bit. I'm not actually at the show -- I saw it last night, for a start, and I saw it twice when I was out here in February for the CBLDF meeting. You'd think I'd be sick of it by now, but seeing it last night was fascinating. If ever you're in Las Vegas you should check it out.

They're putting me up at the Rio, where the show is, and for the second day running Penn and I sat in the Mexican Restaurant and had lunch and chatted about the project and everything else in the world as well, and then when the music of the Rio's free entertainment started getting a bit loud, we went down to the Monkey Room, which is the duo's eccentrically decorated Green Room and carried on talking about stuff, until it was time for Penn to change for the show. (He starts playing bass at 8:00pm, accompanying Mike Jones, who plays amazing jazz piano. You can read about it here, and don't tell anyone that I told you it was him.)

And now we know what we're doing on our Project We Don't Have Time For. And I think it's going to be really fun.

I may have to nip back to the UK soon though; there were some questions I needed to get answered anyway, for the novel, and now there are a bunch of things I need to know on the Penn Project for which the answers are probably at the Imperial War Museum.

Then I went back to my room, and got back onto the phone with Jude Prest, who wrote the scripts for my 13 Nights of Fright. We'd started doing the scripts in the morning, and were already half-done. I'd read each script aloud, and we'd go over them, and I'd suggest ways of saying things that were closer to the way I'd actually say something, and we'd chew over gag ideas and things, bouncing me back and forth between being me, being a character sort of like me, and being a manically alliterative Horror Host. Occasionally the answer to "why is it worded like that?" was because "that's the way the network wants it" but most of the time we could find the happy medium. Thirteen scripts. All done.

Then I went down to the overpriced Japanese restaurant and ate Sushi, and wrote my novel while eating, and did a couple of pages, finally getting to the Bird Lady, although she hasn't said anything yet. Then I came up here and wrote this.

I've heard that your "dream" project was to do a stint on a Hal Jordan Green Lantern series.
#1 Have your heard that Hal was returning?
#2 What attracts you to the character?

I'd not heard that one (the "dream project" bit that is). I do like Hal Jordan -- I wouldn't have written the Action Comics story published as "Legends of the Green Flame" if I didn't. And I was asked if I'd like to help bring the character back, but I really only have so much time.

Not a FAQ, just a well done.
I'm opening a shop this weekend, which obviously would have me considerably excited. This excitement was considerably overshadowed by the Neil/Penn collaboration. Secret schmecret give up the info I'm bouncing on my chair and can't wait! :)
Holly

Congratulations. And no, not yet. I bet if you ask Penn, after one of the shows, he'll tell you about it. Or possibly not yet either.

Just saw (thank you Bookslut) this wonderful interview with Madeleine L'Engle.

Happy Mother's Day

Spent the day with Penn talking about the project we're working on. It's something we've been talking about doing for six years, and it's finally happening. Not that either of us now has the time to do it, but if we don't start it, it'll be another six years. Really enjoyable. And I just did one of those googles this evening on something Penn and I needed to know where you put the right two words together in the google and suddenly the information you needed falls out, and I Learned Something To My Advantage.

I am certain that this TV commercial for Soy sauce would be much less interesting if I could make sense out of it (cat-headed shrimps: why? the cat who hangs itself: why? the little girl who goes to bed with him at the end: why?) As it is, it becomes a zen cohen: what is the sound of one fish-headed soy-superhero clapping...?

...

Over at Strange Horizons they've got a Fiction Submission Guidelines, Stories We See Too Often page up, which is fascinating -- lots of plots they get in all the time and don't want to see again. I found myself pondering one of them, though... It's their Plot 2e, which is:

Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.

Which as many of you reading will know, was the story of Sandman #17, Calliope (May 1990)(It's collected in a book called DREAM COUNTRY). Now, I have a fairly good memory, and don't recall ever reading any captive-muse-for-someone-with-writer's-block stories before I wrote mine. (I'm not saying there couldn't have been any, just that it certainly wasn't around enough to have been any kind of meme, as far as I know.) So I wonder if it's a) Calliope just sort of edged out into popular consciousness, or, more likely, b) In Steam Engine Time People Build Steam Engines, and I just happened to build my particular steam engine first (I knew that if I didn't write a Serial Killer's Convention story someone would, for example; it was an idea whose time had come.)

From the Road...

So this afternoon, I showed Maddy Tim Hunkin's experiments website, and we did a number of them. The most successful were Changing the Queen's Expression (luckily I had a 5 pound note to hand, although it works on some US denominations, like the $20, as well, if less impressively), Russian Multiplication, how to Join Paperclips without touching them (one of those I kind of remembered from my boyhood), and the tremendously popular How to Get Someone's Feet Wet, which is one I wish I'd known when I was nine. I would have been handing people bottles with an innocent "can you open this?" all the time. Pulling a string through your neck looks quite impressive as well, but takes a little practice in front of a mirror to get smooth. It's undoubtedly worth it, though. I think Maddy's favourite was How to Make a Pencil jump, although once she had discovered the power of jumping pencils, I had to persuade her not to shoot pencils at people, which I did by uttering the time-worn phrase "you could put someone's eye out", and felt most grown-up.

Having said that, there was one sad message:

Neil,

I'm sorry to say that the onion experiment did not work in my case. I
placed an unpeeled onion in my microwave and waited and waited. I even
shut the lights off in the kitchen to make sure I wasn't missing anything,
though I couldn't do anything about the microwave light.

Anyway, the onion sat there until finally it boiled and spewed onion juice
all over my microwave. But it sadly did not glow. Your mileage may vary.

Cheers,
Kit

Which, on the basis that the web site mentions that every experiment except one works, makes me suspect the whole onion-in-a-microwave thing as being particularly dodgy. (later on edit: someone has pointed out the one that won't work to me, and it's not the onion. How mysterious.)

And now I am off on my travels for the next eleven days or thereabouts. For the next two days I'm working with Penn Jillette on a Secret Project. Then it's on to the next city to tape the Fox Movies 13 Nights of Fright stuff. It's all fun and interesting, but I'll miss the blossoming things, and the first asparagus of the year will be tall enough to eat tomorrow or Monday and I won't be there...

This just came in from someone who's been reading what I've been saying about writing, and she says it all -- and sums it up -- as well as I ever could, or better:


As someone who's been making things up since witches in the closet as a kid, and then writing them down since she...well since learned to write, and also as someone who's gotten a BA and almost has an MFA in creative writing (which was mostly good for having to consistently write and finish things, as well as develop a thick skin for criticism) reading the notes and questions sent by many of the writers who are readers of your journal makes me a little sad.
I think most of the problems beginning writers have are really about fear, self doubt. Everyone wants assurance, to know that they're doing the right thing with what they're writing and how they're writing it, but I don't know how you can ever know that for sure. If you have eight different people read one short story, a couple of them will like it, a couple of them won't, someone will want more about the mother, some won't like it because they don't like that kind of story, some will want you to write it how they'd write it if they were writing it. You're never going to make everyone happy. You have to write what you want to write. When you begin working on a story you have to write without worrying about if it's "good" or not, especially at first, it'll get better, you'll get better. Just keep at it. Just write it, get it out, and you can always play around with it later.
There was a time when every couple of weeks or so I'd go to the bookstore and basically ransack the books on writing, looking for something, I didn't know what, I stopped going when I realized what I was looking for was "the answer" - the book that was going to make me a wonderful writer who wrote wonderful books everybody loved and bought. Of course there is no such book. And anyway how much fun would it be if there were?

The best advice I've ever gotten on writing has been the simple "write" and "finish things" that you've said many times in your blog. And the most useful book I've ever read on writing, is Stephen King's. Full of simple, practical, and encouraging advice. The thing is there is no secret. There's work, sometimes agonizing, but there is nothing like finally finishing a short story or a novel, holding it in your hands, and for awhile being completely satisfied, enchanted, and euphoric.
The last thing I want to say, is that in reading books on writing and in writing classes and workshops you'll hear a lot of "things you shouldn't do" such as switching between different characters points of views, it's more important instead to listen to your story. Some techiques are tricky, but if you understand why they're tricky, and why your story needs them, then use them. There are so many books out there that are considered masterpieces or classics that would be ripped apart in a writing workshop, because of the risks they take, the conventions they break. You have to write like you, (because no one else does) and you have to find a way to be less afraid. Worry keeps you from writing. Stop thinking, start writing :-)

Carol

The Rudiments of Wisdom

A quick post from a me who read Anansi Boys for three and a half hours today, the whole of the book so far, over the phone, and discovered a) it does actually seem to be a book, and b) my editor likes it. Her editorial suggestions consisted of suggesting that I finish it, which frankly is the best editorial suggestion anyone can make.

My gut suspicion at this point -- half way through it, I hope -- is that people who liked American Gods, but didn't like Stardust or Neverwhere probably won't like it, while people who liked Neverwhere but didn't care for American Gods will like it a great deal. (People who liked Neverwhere and American Gods are on their own.) I don't think it will be one of the books that wins awards, but it may be one of those things that some people love more than anything. I could be wrong about all of this, mind you. I set out to write a Thorne Smith novel, and I have no idea how close I'll actually come. My editor, Jennifer, laughed at the funny bits, and that felt good.

My throat is a bit raw (probably from having read for 210 minutes) so I shall get an early night, and not answer any of the many waiting questions, or post any of the many waiting comments. Instead, I shall simply put in a plug for http://beautifulstuff.org/ -- without which I would never have known that I could watch Krazy Kat cartoons at the Library of Congress "Origins of Animation" site -- http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/oahtml/animatTitles01.html; read an hilarious account of what happened in Barnes and Noble a couple of months ago when Anton Chekov did a book signing, a hundred years after his death -- http://improveverywhere.csbl.net/chekov/; look at Heath Robinson's Uncle Lubin illustrations -- http://bugpowder.com/andy/k.robinson.heath_lubin.html; or spend much too much time learning from Tim Hunkin how to, for example, tell whether a piece of cutlery is real silver or not -- http://www.hunkinsexperiments.com/pages/fakes.htm : http://www.hunkinsexperiments.com/ is the most delightful website for inquisitive and tricky 12 year olds of pretty much any age (my inner 12 year old wants very much to go and put an unpeeled onion in the microwave to see if it will glow).

...

Quick plug for this ebay auction, because it's for a good cause (and ends soon). (And it's not just the signed and drawn on Coraline proof. It's the Vogelein too.)

regaining my marbles

The good news: I got a great haircut at Hair Police, then stopped in at DreamHaven, scribbled on stuff people had ordered from DreamHaven's neilgaiman.net site, and picked up a remarkably beautiful Nebula Award for Coraline. The Nebulas are lucite blocks with Nebulas in them, often made of copper filings, and other things, often appropriate to the book in question. Coraline's Nebula seems to have marbles in there, which made me really, really happy.

The bad news: traffic and interminable roadworks were bad enough that by the time I got home, I only had enough time to get about 800 words written on the novel. I may write a bit more in bed tonight though, if only because I want to meet the Bird Lady, in her cave. I've been waiting a very long time to write her. I wrote Lion today though. Lion was cool. I didn't expect Lion to be cool.

I think I'm now about half-way through the zeroth draft of Anansi Boys, so tomorrow morning I'm going to read the Story So Far over the phone to my editor at Morrow. Which is really weird (although she doesn't seem to mind) but I'm not going to inflict my handwriting on anyone, and I'm not quite ready to go to the keyboard on it yet. I'll report back.

Greg Ketter at Dreamhaven, who brought me back my Nebula, was sighing over the problems they have, as a small bookstore, getting the spoken word CDs I've done for them distributed and into the hands of customers (that's the double CD WARNING:CONTAINS LANGUAGE and the single one TELLING TALES). It's difficult for DreamHaven to get them into record shops and the book chains. I suggested that we try and get the CDs up and available, track by track, on services like iTunes and Audible.com, and went to the Audible.com website to show Greg Ketter American Gods and Coraline, to demonstrate how it works, only to discover that they've once more mysteriously vanished. Two Plays for Voices is still up on iTunes, though.

Let's see -- Time Magazine profiles Stephin Merritt and "i" at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,1101040510-632111,00.html.

Bounce, the new Sondheim, arrived on CD in the mail today, and I'm playing it right now. I don't dislike it, not even a little bit, which is a relief. I was worried I'd react to it as I did to Passion (which I disliked enormously on Broadway and then, just in case it was the production or the direction or something, I went to the London first night of, and heartily loathed. I just wanted to give everyone on the stage A Good Talking To, or possibly just gently push Fosca off a cliff at midnight somewhere early in act one) although I've not yet played it enough to have a favourite track or anything like that. Bounce reminds me oddly of Gypsy, and I do know Sondheim only wrote the lyrics of Gypsy. But it also sounds like it's somehow missing a song or two...

(Yes, I know there are people who like Passion. My wife is one of them. I'm perfectly happy being one of the people who Do Not Get Passion.)

I squirted the plum trees with Bee-Scent, fairly early this morning, on the basis that over the last couple of years we've had plenty of plum blossom, and practically no plums. It's a bee-pheremone that's meant to increase plum-production by 90%. I'll report back on whether or not it worked.

Okay, I've heard you're into (collecting) pens, and that sometimes folks send you website info they think you might be interested in. Well, a coworker clued me in to a site today, and I thought you might find the Anubis pen of interest. www.pushindaisies.com
Thanks,
Donna

The Anubis pen at http://www.pushindaisies.com/candypress/scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=263. It's lovely. I bought one at the World Horror Convention in Chicago, a couple of years ago, and gave it to Gene Wolfe, who started writing a horror novel set in ancient Egypt. Obviously these are very powerful pens.

I love the look of their chocolate hearts...

And I don't laugh out loud very often at things I read on the web. I laughed at this, though, Saddam's interrogation logs...

Dear Mr. Gaiman/Neil/man whose work I love reading

So being a self confessed theatre geek, when I saw that the new Magnetic Fields album is called "i" I was greatly amused. This may more sense if I tell you that I recently finished a run of "Proof" by David Auburn, and the show happens to include an imaginary number joke about a song called "i". The show strikes me as something you might enjoy, considering the numerous references I've seen to theatre in your blog and considering how well written it is. This of course brought me to my next thought, which is really more of a question. Do you have a favorite play or show, and if so, what is it? I apologize if this has already been asked, and if it hasn't, then it has now. Thanks muchly, and I'm glad your new novel is starting to take shape, I'm looking forward to it!

Tara

The best thing I've ever seen in the theatre was Sondheim's Sweeney Todd at the National Theatre's tiny Cottesloe Theatre, in the summer of 1993, with Adrian Lester as Anthony, Alun Armstrong as Sweeney, Julia McKenzie as Mrs Lovett.


A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably my favourite play that I've seen. It makes me happy. My favourite play that I've never actually seen performed is probably Farquar's The Beaux' Stratagem.

Favourite "did I really just see that?" piece of perfectly funny live theatre would be the National Theatre of Brent's epic Complete Guide to Sex, in around 1984, with Patrick Barlow as impresario Desmond Olivier Dingle and Jim Broadbent as Wallace playing, well, everyone. Although Wallace had to play all the girls.

...

Nearly forgot: if you're in the Minneapolis area in August, Scott McCloud is reprising his amazing comics theory and practice workshop seminar. If you want to make comics (or if you already make comics and want to do better comics), you should seriously think about doing Scott's seminar.

You can sign up for the course at http://mcadart.com/mcart/index.cgi?task=show&cat=Scott+McCloud and read about what the course consists of at http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/speaking/teaching.html. Scott is a national treasure, he doesn't teach the course often. Personally, I'm hoping that enough people sign up that they make Scott do an extra week, as they did in 2002.

Scott also promises that I will really really like Flight Comics, and I believe him. I just need the time to browse, and prove it to myself...

No distinguishing marks or features

Let's see...

if you go to the ALA store for the poster at http://www.alastore.ala.org/SiteSolution.taf?_sn=catalog&_pn=product_detail&_op=1358 they've now posted the small print down the side in readable format. Click on recommendations to read it.

Talking about which, Libraries beat Google (mostly) in a recent Guardian test...

THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS was just awarded the English Association's award as one of the four best Children's Illustrated Books 2003. According to their website: the awards are presented to the best children's picture books of the year. The winning books are chosen by the editorial board of the English Association's journal for primary teachers, English 4-11, from a shortlist of 12-18 books selected by a panel of teachers.

Which reminds me: the US Wolves in the Walls website is here: http://www.mousecircus.com/witw/flash/witw_flash.html and has several posters and the "this computer guaranteed free of wolves" wallpaper.

While across the ocean (but still only a click away), Bloomsbury's website has the gorgeous Wolves in the Walls screensaver and ecards at http://www.bloomsbury.com/wolvesinthewalls/wolves.htm. I'd suggest giving it as Mother's Day present, except it probably isn't a very good one. Nor is Coraline, unless they start having Other Mother's Day.

Incidentally, you can see the new cover for THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH at Bloomsbury's http://www.bloomsbury.com/neilgaiman/. It comes out in August, in hardcover in the US (from harperchildrens) and the UK (from Bloomsbury). The US edition will come with a free CD of me reading the story on it, which I was sent to approve this afternoon, and it sounds pretty good, although I'm not sure about the music.

(And there are a bunch of odd questions and answers from me up at http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/Childrens/qanda.asp?id=81.)

Now that's not fair Mr Gaiman. You tempt us with morsels of 'Mirrormask' but so far we, the adoring public, have seen not a snippet. How about posting a frame or two online? Mr McKean wouldn't mind, would he?

I don't know. But I wouldn't do it without permission from him and from Henson's -- it'd be like me emailing him a few pages from a book in progress to find he'd put them up on his blog. (Not that he has one.)

I know there are plans to create a real mirrormask.com -- currently it just takes you to a sort of bookmark page -- and to put some images and material there. The only trouble is, right now, all the people who would be doing it are busy trying to finish the film.


Mr. Gaiman,
Thank you for a wonderful journal and for all of your fabulous writing. Your comments about MirrorMask, describing the 8 minutes of footage, have got me very excited for its eventual release. To think, a Gaiman/McKean comic come to life! Which leads me to my question: what kind of release will MirrorMask receive? Will it go the festival circuit route, or will it have one nationwide release date? Thanks a lot.
Kelly Shaw, Milwaukee, WI

Current plans are for some film festivals, then a limited theatrical release, then, some months later, a DVD release. Personally, I'm hoping it gets a real theatrical release, but that will depend on what happens when the powers that be at Sony see the actual film, and possibly on what happens at the film festivals. It also depends when the film gets finished.

It's remarkable. I saw every take of this film that Dave shot, and I wrote the blasted thing, and I still never imagined it would be anything like what he's actually made. I want to be there for the cast and crew screening, when the actors find out what kind of film they were in.

I just checked out your author poster, and it scares me (the way clowns & ventriloquist dummies do). It's the part, combined with the goatee. I've always found facial hair vaguely menacing, and that paired with your unnaturally wrangled hair... just gives me the chills.
However, that's sort of a good thing. Maybe not what you were going for - but keep it in mind for the eventual horror hosting gig.
~Ann

You'll be pleased to hear then that I think I'll have something more or less like that look, only without the someone-else's hair, for the Horror Host gig -- which will shoot Very Soon -- and then once that's done I'll start looking like something else instead.
...

Wrote another 2000 words of Anansi Boys today. I've started Chapter 6, and suddenly the book isn't funny at all. It's become sort of disquieting. And I think it's going to get quite scary, which seems to be against the rules for something that is, fundamentally, at least for the first half of the book, a farce. Oh well. I shall not worry. I shall just keep writing it and see what happens.

I've got a writing and research question for you, if you have a moment. I know that most novels take a lot of research for various things, some of which are probably unexpected. I'm starting work on a story that might get to novel length (hopefully), and it is going to require a lot of time hitting the books. My question to you is if you use a lot of researched things in a novel do you have to cite them or make a sort of Bibliography page for them? I don't remember if I've seen that before, and I would hate to get neck high in this thing and not know the name of a book I took a chunk of imformation out of ten chapters ago.

Thanks for helping a hopeful future writer.
~Teresa

While it's not a bad idea to keep notes on what you found where for yourself -- mostly because you may want to check something -- no-one's going to make you keep a bibliography or cite your sources for a novel. That's why they call it fiction...

roll up for the ghost train, non-stop through the city

Yesterday brought a DVD from Hensons with eight and a half minutes of the Mirrormask film on it -- just footage, with Ian Ballamy's music in the background, but finished footage, as output from the render farm, and tweaked and played with by Dave. It's not like anything I've ever seen before. I don't think it's like anything anyone's seen before. Unbelievably beautiful, and magical.

Down at the back of the garden, the plum-trees are blossoming. They blossom first, before the apples or the cherries or the pear tree -- trees covered in white drifts of blossom that smell like honey. I put them in Endless Nights. They make me happy. Luckily, my what-makes-me-happy list is much longer than that of the lady in the Despair story.


When I was in Finland last year I read, and really enjoyed, Johanna Sinisalo's book TROLL (although when I read it it was called Not Before Sundown). It's a sharp, resonant, prickly book that exists on the slipstream of SF, fantasy, horror and gay fiction, set in a world exactly like our own, except for the trolls -- humanoid animals, almost extinct, found in places like northern Finland, and what happens when a gay photographer starts secretly looking after a baby troll, and becomes, himself, an object of lust. I was pleasantly surprised to see it reviewed in USA Today, this morning. The reviewer is fine on the plot summary, although she doesn't seem to know anything about fantasy, and appears to feel this is a virtue. The gratuitous mentions of Tolkien and the Hobbit seem like a good way to ensure that the people who would like the book don't read it, and that those who won't like it do. Sentences like Although it exploits the conventions of the (fantasy genre), it clearly transcends them I tend to view as lazy reviewer shorthand for I don't read (genre) because I don't think I like it but this is good.



Hey Neil,
I think i might have e-mailed you twice already and im desperate for a reply. i'm trying to write a scary story for children based around fairy tales and im stuck on how gruesome to actually make it. any tips? how much can children handle?
thanks
Julia x.

I don't know how much gruesomeness children can handle. I don't believe that "children", as a generality, has any more meaning than "people" would in the same sentence. Some can handle a lot, some can't handle any, just like adults. I think children are a bit better at enjoying the terrible and appropriate deaths of evildoers than adults are, though. Why don't you write the kind of book you would have liked to have read when younger, or write a book for a specific person you know who isn't very old yet? That tends to work for me.

...

I want to ride this ghost train: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1208758,00.html

And why did I never post the link to the story of the Monster Under the Old Church?

...

Quantum TV on New Scientist? How about a link? When I search on their site, I get nada

Thanks!

-peter

It's on page 24 of the 24 April 2004 copy of New Scientist. They don't put very much of the content of the magazine up on line.

(If you subscribe through their website you get the magazine at 80% off -- in the US it's $1 an issue. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And every so often, like this week, you get a Dave McKean cover image. End of unpaid New Scientist plug.)

...

Dear Mr Gaiman,

Not a question - sorry. So, long story short, time is money, etc: my friends made sock-puppets of the Endless.

Swing by the unwieldy URL http://neil.chrisfleming.org/personal/mt/archives/000119.html to my weblog if you fancy a gander.

With lashings of respect and May the fourth be with you,

- another Neil

Sock puppets. Of course they did.
...

Hi,
I just saw a copy of your author poster in ALA's newest catalog, but it's not on their on line catalog. Is there a place that a nonlibrarian can buy it?
Stacy

The poster is now online at http://www.alastore.ala.org/. The hair's a bit odd, as it was done by the hair-and-make-up man without me first getting to look in a mirror and then being able to say "but I don't have a parting. I just have a mop." But I like it, as it's got me both smiling and managing not to look really goofy, two things that, for me, normally go together in photos. And the text stuff (too small to read in the online one) is a lot of fun...

thought for today...

QUANTUM TV RIVALS PLASMA DISPLAYS said the headline in the New Scientist that I blinked at over my early morning cup of tea this morning. "Great," I thought sleepily. "A television you can either watch, or know where it is, but not both at once."

Pens, Rules, Finishing Things and Why Stephin Merritt is not Grouchy.

Hi Neil,

You may have seen it already, but Salon's got an interview up with (the apparently grouchy) Stephin Merritt at http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/05/01/
magnetic/index.html.

(Now may also be a good time to remind people that the Magnetic Fields' "i" is out Tuesday. I seem to recall you deeming it a masterpiece.)

Warmest regards,
Eric

I do think it's a masterpiece, and having played it over and over I think that there are a number of songs on it as good as anything Stephin's done, and then there's "It's Only Time", which is probably the best song he's ever written, which probably means it's one of the best songs anyone's ever written, and is completely heart-breaking and wonderful at the same time.

While the Salon Interview is a competent, if perhaps somewhat defensive interview (dunno what that stuff about Bjork was in aid of -- perhaps the interviewer was trying to say the things while writing up the interview he wished he'd said during the interview itself), I'm starting to get really irritated with interviews of Stephin. Not that I think that the journalists are particularly doing a bad job. (I felt very sorry for the Scotsman reporter Andrew Eaton in this article -- you may have to register to read it, I'm afraid) Most of them are, one suspects, doing the best they can. I'm just irritated with the whole thing. I've been a fan of Stephin's work for about 8 years now, and we've been friends since 1998, and I never see the person I'm friends with (very funny, very brilliant, rather shy, rarely even faintly grouchy) in the interviews, although I'll see him in the answers to questions. Instead he's mostly portrayed as a prickly grump, possibly, I suspect, because he actually tries to answer interviewer questions, rather than just having the things he says in interviews and saying them over and over again, or perhaps because he disagrees with interviewers' opinions from time to time...

Ah well.

The new Magnetic Fields album's called "i", and all the songs begin with the letter "i", and Stephin sings on all of them. It's out on Tuesday. It's about 55 songs shorter than "69 Love Songs", and "It's Only Time" creeps up on you and breaks your heart.

...

Kathy Li is my pen-pusher. She'll turn up at signings, and blithely and almost absent-mindedly hand me a 60 year old fountain pen she's reconditioned and thought I'd probably like. She read my last post:

Neil, take it from someone who knows--you're definitely a pen-junkie. :-) It's like being the comic book junkie who only wants to read the stories, not board, bag, and box the suckers, and boast of Overstreet prices. You're just judging by a different set of standards. Oh, and the model of your Waterman is "52". (Ideal is part of the brand name, Waterman stamped the model number on the butt end of the pen, for easy reference. Although maybe yours is a 12PSF. Can't remember.)

IMNSHO, the best bang for your buck writing-a-novel fountain pen right now is the $10 Pelikano. But if you can go vintage, nothing beats an old Parker 51. Except maybe a Waterman with a flex nib. [grin]

--Kathy.

It's a "52", I just checked. Meanwhile theatrical impressario Bill Stiteler, who, in his day job, sells the things, confirms my fears about the expensive pens:

You're right. Most of the "collector pens" are absolute
monsters to try and write with. They're heavy, and the
ornamentation digs into the hands. But they're not meant to
be written with--in fact, you'd look a right idiot if you
pulled one out of your pocket (assuming you could get it IN
your pocket, without ripping it out of your jacket) to
write with.

They're meant to be collected. The weird thing is, few of
them go up in value. Mostly they just maintain. The only
limited edition pen I know of that went up was the
Montblanc Hemmingway, which was unique for two reasons: it
was the first MB limited edition "Writers Series" pen, and
it was absolutely hideous. Safety orange and big, big, big.

Why did it go up in value? For the same reason comic books
go up in value. Nobody wanted it at the time, so nobody
bought it, and now collectors are looking for it.

So, unless you find you desperately need a pen with the
crystallized DNA of Abraham Lincoln in it (true!), I'd
avoid the "limited editions" (many of which run into the
tens of thousands of pens, ["limited to the number we can
sell"]).

And a few writing questions have been coming in, so I thought I'd try and answer a few of the unanswerable ones:

Dear Neil,

I've been having a lot of trouble with the novel I'm working on, because I can't decide what the most appropriate viewpoint would be. Even though I am familiar with the several options available, I don't think I quite grasp where one ends and the other begins. Could you perhaps recommend me a good book on the subject that could answer my doubts?

Everywhere I look I find people saying that using several point of view characters and switching between them is bad and breaks the flow of the story. Is this always the case? What if it's a story that can only be told by showing different points of view?

And what of a story in which the world is shown through the characters' eyes, but where the narrator sometimes adds more information than what the characters have immediately available? Is that omniscient, or just badly handled third person?

Does omniscient mean that the events that happen in the story must always be told distantly, or can the characters eyes still be "borrowed"?

And what of a scene that is shown from the point of view of a group of characters instead of just one?

Best wishes,

Arianna

I really don't think that you need me to point you to any books. It sounds like you have much too much theory going on anyway, most of it just getting in the way of starting your book and telling the story.

There really aren't any rules. You can tell a story from one character's point of view. You can tell a story from the points of view of multiple characters. You can tell a story knowing everything. You can tell a story that's just dialogue, or just narrative, or that's journal entries, or anything you wish...

As for the rest of your questions, the easiest answer is just, yes, you can do all those things.

If you do it, you'll be able to answer most of your questions for yourself, anyway.

I'm not trying to make less of your questions. Who's telling this story and why? may be the most important question you can ask yourself before you start writing. Knowing where you're standing in each scene is a good thing to know. But beyond that, you're the one telling the story. You're God. You can tell an entire story from the point of view of the carpet that the people are standing on. You can zoom in and out of people's heads if you wish, or stand on the outside and tell what they do and what they say. (When I was writing Stardust, I decided it was being written in the 1920s. On the whole, if Tristran's awake, any scenes he's in are from his point of view. But there are lots of scenes he's not in, and if I didn't tell you them you'd have no idea what was going on in the story. Most of them are, I think, from the point of view of the person telling the story, unless they're not.) These are all tools, and toys. Play with them.

Don't get a book that tells you the rules. There aren't any rules. Why don't you pick up five favourite books by five favourite authors and see how they did it, instead?

(You might also want to try to write a few short stories playing with points of view, narrators, and suchlike, before you embark on a novel.)

Hi. My name is Jonny...
There is just one question for you, and if I dont receive a reply I'm not going to be all bent out of shape about it, but, how do I finish a story that I believe is going to be great? My problem is that I start what I belive is going to be a good story, and I can never finish it. I have dozens upon dozens of unfinished short stories that I know would be good reads, but I just cant seem to finish them. If you have any input for me, it would be greatly appreciated, and I would also be honored to hear back from you.

My best regards,
Jon Carpenter

How do you finish them? You finish them.

There's no magic answer, I'm afraid. This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Read the stories over that you've left unfinished, pick out the one where you know what happens next, and write that down, and keep writing until the story's finished. Then finish the next one, or start a new one and finish that.

You may find that you need to have more of an ending in mind before you start.

I always used to know I was finishing something because instead of worrying about how it was going to end I was now worrying about how the next thing was going to start.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable. Good luck.

...

I'm sure you know, but for all your readers who've been driven to distraction: at long last the Victoria Walker mystery has been solved thanks to Graeme Roberts at http://www.ibooknet.co.uk/archive/news_may04.htm

Sheila

It's much more exciting when you're getting the daily e-mails from Graeme, as he does the magic google, puts two and two together and e-mails someone who turns out to be Victoria's brother, and gets a reply, and then e-mails the lady herself.

I believe that Jayne Dearsley at SFX magazine will be doing a whole article about the rediscovery of Victoria Walker (who now writes for adults under her married name of Victoria Clayton, and was quite unaware that anyone was interested in her two children's books...)

Considering the odds...

On the one hand, I'm completely thrilled on Dave McKean's behalf that The Wolves in the Walls has been nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal for best illustrated book. It's wonderful news, after all. (The Greenaway Medal is the UK equivalent of the American Caldecott, and was named after Kate Greenaway, the illustrator whose work was once turned into a pornographic biscuit tin lid.)

On the other hand... I just read the Greenaway shortlist at http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/shortlst/sht_gree.html and while all the other books get described in glowing, heartwarming and entirely positive terms, The Wolves in the Walls seems to have troubled the person writing the descriptions no end. It is, we learn, "a scary, strange but highly imaginative picture book .... highly unsettling". Oh well. I don't know what the UK bookies odds on the Greenaway are (although I found the odds on the Orange with no problems), but I suspect that Dave will not be the odds-on favourite.


...

So last summer, there came a point where we couldn't go outside for the mosquitoes. They would descend in clouds, point first, like in the cartoons, and hit you and twang gently as they stabbed you. Something Would Have To Be Done. Eventually, won over by the various online reviews, I got a Mosquito Magnet Pro. (Thinking, well, yes it's expensive. But right now I have an outside-of-my-house I can't go out in. So if it works, I'm paying to get my garden back....) It worked. It worked incredibly well. Basically, if you've not run across one of these things, it wafts out a plume of warm wet carbon dioxide, mosquitoes think it's something large and blood-filled, they head over to it, get vacuumed up inside it and into a net, and rapidly expire. After a few weeks I found myself emptying out thousands of dessicated mosquito and midge corpses from the net inside, and I had my outdoors back.

I started the Mosqito Magnet again last week, as soon as the weather warmed up, and there are already mosquitoes in the net. My hope is that if I run it now, and catch enough early in the year, they may not actually ever get to breed in last year's numbers. (Given the zillions of eggs a female mosquito can lay, and the fact that the local species will apparently fly for twenty miles in search of a good meal, this may be a doomed hope. But I can dream.)

Lots and lots of people sent in links to expensive pens -- for example, Should someone decide to visit http://www.fountainpenhospital.com/ and click on the Limited Editions tab, they'll find pens worth far far more than $400. A random choice showed me the Caran D'Arche - La Gotica for $2,800 - on sale. A worthy site if you feel like spending a couple hours weeping.

Chandra
(pen addicted and proud of it)

And among the other links people sent me (and I was grateful for all of them), I discovered a Silver Dragon fountain pen with a Ruby Eye for similar money.

Which leave me faintly puzzled: I tend to look at the extremely expensive ones and think "That doesn't look much fun to write with". They're pretty, I suppose, but have all the allure for me of a diamond-encrusted casserole dish, or gold-and-ruby bootlaces. The expensiveness indicates to me simply that this object probably won't actually be used for the purpose it was made. So jade-and-emerald limited edition Pens may be investment items, but I suspect won't be used as a pen, to write with. Or at least, not by me. At which point I'd lose interest.

I'm a writer. All I'm really interested in is how the pen fits into my hand, whether it's weighted in a way that allows me to write for a long time, and what kind of marks the nib makes when I start writing, which may mean I'm probably not a proper pen-junkie at all.

OK, I'll bite. What are the characteristics of a "writing-a-novel sort of pen" as opposed to a "signing-your-name pen"?

I didn't think anyone would be interested. Signing pens need to flow easily, and they need not to mind that your hand is moving across the paper at high speed, over and over and over and over. They need to be comfortable, and a bit heavier than writing-a-book-pens. No skips, no blobs. The Lamy 2000 is a poor signing pen, it skips and scratches when you go fast, but it's fine if I've slowed up enough to write words rather than to do a signature.

One reason I like writing by hand is it slows me down a little, but it also forces me to keep going: I'm never going to spend half a day noodling with a sentence to try and get it just right, if I'm using a pen. I'll do all that when I start typing.

(The main reason I like doing first drafts on paper though is it's somehow fooling myself into thinking it's not real, and I don't mean it, until it starts getting typed. On the other hand, all screenplays happen directly on the screen, and I'd feel almost silly trying to handwrite them first. It's why I'll use Final Draft -- I like to be able to get screenplay dialogue down without thinking or pausing, and then fix it later.)

Hello,

Hope this is OK.
Someone asked about a Greek edition of 'Coraline' so that she can translate it, she might find this link helpful; it's an online Greek bookstore although I'm not sure if they take international orders. The link is: http://www.oxy.gr/shop/details.cfm?ID=410

Now why they translate it as 'The House in the Fog', instead of leaving the title unharmed is some sort of a mystery.

And a mystery for me as well.

Over at IGN filmforce, Peter Sanderson has been doing a study of 1602 since it started. His two-part examination of #8 is at http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/508/508695p1.html and at http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/510/510381p1.html. It's a fascinating analysis of the project, even for me. And I forgot to put up a link to Jason Pomerantz's Q&A with me on 1602, which is at http://www.comicworldnews.com/index.cgi?column=mysteries&page=11.