Zap, crackle and bop
posted by Neil 1/31/2004 12:03:58 PM

Fred the Unlucky Black Cat spends all of his spare time trying to remove the conical white plastic collar that the vet put on to stop him licking his stitches. He tries to remove the collar by rubbing it, continually, over and over, against the carpet, or against a blanket or the carpet-covered-cat-climbing-thing-I-got-him-to-keep-him-busy. Rub rub rub rub rub rub rub, over and over, in the dry air of a wintery bedroom. As he does this he builds up static charges which do not discharge, then wanders the room with all his fur on end, attracting hair, dust, small pieces of paper, fluff and lint, a black cat slowly going grey with dust. I am sitting here typing, and I just felt Fred go past, six inches away, like a prickly ghost of static wind. It occurs to me that if I actually reach down and touch him, the immediate result will be a lot like these images. Or these films.

This is possibly a pointless question, but i don't find the only answer i can come up with on my own to be at all satisfactory.

When introducing a character with a profession that i find horribly interesting which people may or may not have heard of (in this case, a Doula,) do you find that it's best to set the story aside for a few moments and take the time to explain it, create a conversation or situation within the story in which the character explains his/her profession, or to leave it alone and let the reader research it themselves if they're really all that curious.

Anyway, i get the feeling that it's probably best for a writer to do whatever it is they think feels the best. But, on the off chance that any of these options just don't work out well i decided to ask.

-benjamin

Well, you're writing to communicate. Unless part of what's important about the story is that the reader not understand something, if you're using a word or term that you know most people reading won't understand, then explaining it somewhere, somehow, not necessarily the first time you use it, is a wise idea.

As for how you do it, that's your call. If you do it with enough assurance, you can simply tell people things. Or you can have your characters tell people things. Or you can footnote. Or have a dancing paperclip leap in and explain, then fly out of the story never again to be seen. As you say, do what you think best: that's the joy of being a writer. You get to make your own rules and build your own worlds, and things happen the way you want, because you say so.
...

There are gorgeous Escher snakes in motion at
http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/snakes_htm/snakes_movie_index.htm (via the ever-impressive Shanmonster).

...

I heard from Jim Frenkel, packager of YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR (formerly the Datlow/Windling one, now the Datlow/Link-Grant book) that they're taking my story from SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET, "A Study in Emerald", which made me very happy. That story's also been taken for the new Strahan & Haber-edited SCIENCE FICTION: THE BEST OF 2003; and "Closing Time" (From Michael Chabon's McSWEENEY'S MAMMOTH BOOK OF THRILLING TALES) has been taken for the Steve Jones MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR anthology. Leading the casual reader to assume that there are an awful lot of stories about mammoths being written these days. All of these things make me very happy.

And demonstrating that this blog has a strange and far-reaching power, beyond what you or I would ever have dreamed, if you go to http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004636.html#004636 you will read about the intersection of Wodehouse, London, and A Certain Argentinean Author, by John M. Ford, inspired by something someone said here last week.
...

I tried to post this and discovered that the neilgaiman.com server is down. It's a weekend thing, I suppose. Still, it also allows me to throw in a little ray of happiness and sunshine, via Scott McCloud. -- who is now selling, amongst other things, Bucket Full O' Kittens desktop patterns through Bitpass. (You can read the story of the Bucket Full O' Kittens at http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi-24/mi-24.html)

Friday, January 30, 2004

Talking Volumes
posted by Neil 1/30/2004 01:16:24 AM

I'm writing about your Talking Volumes event on Feb. 15th. I'm assuming, and I could be wrong, that you will be available to sign copies of Coraline afterwards. Will you also be selling copies of Coraline? What about The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Traded My Dad for Two Goldfish? I'd like you to sign copies of them for my daughter, and I'll buy them there if possible. Otherwise, I"ll go out and get them beforehand.

If you don't have time to answer this (say by Saturday?), I'll just buy the books beforehand. (Saturday should give me two weeks to find them, which is why I picked that date. Not to put pressure on you, or anything.)


According to the Talking Volumes producer, Heather, "Yes, we have a local bookstore set up in the lobby, and they try to bring as big a selection as possible." I think you can be sure that there will be copies of CORALINE there, but no idea what else they'll have, so if there's something special you want to get signed, I'd suggest making sure you have it when you come.

And as far as I know, yes, I'll be signing stuff afterwards. How many things each person can have signed will probably depend on the number of people who want something signed and how much time we have there.

There's an article on Coraline and me done especially for the Talking Volumes event, by Eric Hanson, at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/stories/1437/4331125.html

(You have to sign up I'm afraid.)

My favourite bit is from the very wise Daniel Handler, who articulates something that has always irritated me about journalists who ask about how "children" respond to something, as if all children are one huge amorphous jelly creature with one opinion, one set of likes and dislikes, one set of fears...


"I find his books more frightening than mine. But I don't necessarily find them inappropriately scary," Daniel Handler said. Under the pen-name Lemony Snicket, Handler is the author of the gothic and moody "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books. "One thing that always annoys me is when children are talked about in one large, broad category; it's like the last allowed bigotry in society. Clearly, Mr. Gaiman's books would be too scary for some readers and not scary enough for some readers. I would be hard-pressed to think of a story that didn't have at least some threat of something in it. And Neil Gaiman takes that threat very seriously, as do I."

Also, as you will observe from the Talking Volumes website, we seem to have accumulated a support band who are currently going "erk" at the idea of playing live for 60,000 MPR listeners.

Hey Neil,
Just wanted to let you and your readers know that if they are going to the Talking Volumes event in St. Paul and are not members of MPR or the Loft and are out of the area of St.Paul they will be better off just going to www.ticketmaster.com, or calling ticketmaster for tickets. That's where I ended up ordering my tickets.
Also, while I have your attention, can you just verify one more time that there will indeed be a signing at said event? Thanks for your time.
Troy

Which is dead helpful; although you can become a member of Talking Volumes for free at the Star Tribune Talking Volumes Website - http://www.startribune.com/talkingvolumes/, and get the ticket discounts and so forth that way.

Diamonds, bottled dragon, the Queen of Sheba's hairy legs, et cetera.
posted by Neil 1/30/2004 12:16:33 AM

The world is full of wonderful news: Jonathan Carroll sent me a link to this BBC news story about a cow that ate 2000 diamonds, and ...

The suspect cow was given a strict diet of dry fodder, and an all day vigil has been launched to see if the diamonds might appear from its' rear end.

It was not long before sparkling cow dung began to be seen.

The dung is now regularly diluted to make it easier and more hygienic for Mr Gohil and his workers to retrieve around 20 to 25 precious stones a day.

I suppose that the fact that we have 2000 diamonds, worth in all about $800, which is 40 cents each, means that these must be very small diamonds indeed...

Meanwhile several people wanted me to know about the pickled dragon found in an Oxfordshire garage:

Hey Neil,
thought you might get a kick out of this
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk article

there's a better picture at this page
http://www.gmskarka.blogspot.com
Imagine finding that in your garage. Good luck with the new book.

And I have almost nothing to say, except that it's very beautiful, and that if ever I saw a baby dragon, I'd want it to look like that. And that the idea of German Science Fraud to Make English Scientists Look Silly is an odd one -- as if the first thing an inquisitive biologist wouldn't do is open the jar. (Although it looks like the first thing they actually did was simply to make the embarrassing thing go away.)


yeah, i know it's a bit much to ask, but could you identify the gods in American Gods? I recognize a few, but...

You know, if you were Turkish, you'd be in luck, as the Turkish edition of American Gods has a 20 page glossary at the back, listing sundry American Things and most of the Gods. Which was something I thought about doing when I finished writing it, and then thought "no, people will have so much more fun finding all this stuff out on their own," thus proving that, as so often, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

In the meantime there's a good start over at http://www.frowl.org/gods/. It's not complete, but it gives you some basic information and places to look for more details. And, of course, Google is your friend, if you want to follow anything further. If you want to know more about Bilquis, and who she was, and why she had to keep shaving her legs, and why she recites the Song of Solomon on the streets, you could just google and find yourself on a page with a huge amount of lore on it, like http://www.dhushara.com/book/song/song.htm, or a picture of her monument at http://apollo5.bournemouth.ac.uk/consci/africanlegacy/sungbo_eredo.htm.


Other great god sites are

Pantheons at web.raex.com/~obsidian/PanIndex.html

And the Slavic Home Page www.geocities.com/cas111jd/slavs/index.htm

On this website -- neilgaiman.com for those of you with RSS feeds and LiveJournal thingies -- there are lots of oddities you have to really poke around to find, including the bibliography I started doing for American Gods. I got half way through, and never finished it, so the confidence trick, coin magic and prison entries remain unfinished to this day. But it gives you a number of good books and background and is at http://www.neilgaiman.com/books/amgods_bib.asp


Hello, Neil!

I had a quirky little question about novel-writing that I don't believe I've ever seen come up. Perhaps it's not something most people think of in-depth at all.

When you write (and if you know others' styles, perhaps you could offer that, too?), do you just write and let it take you, the characters, and the world wherever, only pausing to research something when the need arises? Or do you write out full dossiers on the characters, the world, religions, places, etc, along with plot points that you want to get to, research for those, etc?

In short: do you just write mostly, research when needed, or do a lot of research, then write?

~Leigh


Mostly what I do is research without knowing that's what I'm doing. I'll get obsessed with things and want to know all about them, without having much of a reason that I can articulate, then ten years later I'll realise that it's composted down into somewhere that a story is growing.

But I'll do both, often on the same project. I'll write until I need to find something out (how do you perform an autopsy?), then find it out. Or I'll go and find everything I can out ahead of time (I think my Egyptian gods will be in Cairo Il. -- I wonder it's like there?), and then forget it during the writing process. I never write out full dossiers on characters and so forth, because I'd rather put the time into writing them and find out that stuff that way, but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing the dossier method, it's just not for me. (I don't think there's anything wrong with any method of writing that gives you a book at the end of it.)

Hi, Neil. I was introduced to Sandman about six years ago, and since then have managed to get hold of pretty much all of them, not all that easy in South Africa :).
I had this sudden idea a while back, while I was reading through them, of documenting the characters and the relationships to each other. Who's who, and who's their father and their friend and the person who killed them etc etc.
So I sat down with preludes and nocturnes and started writing down the names of all characters I encountered, including people who only appear once, if they are named. I got distracted around the fifth or sixth book, but by that time the list had hit something like 300 distinct people. Quite scary.
I'm still keen to do this. I thought that it could include info on people who actually existed and all sorts of stuff. I do a lot of Flash actionscripting, and I thought that that might be an interesting way to do it.
What I'm wondering about now is if it'd be polite to ask for permission/blessing on this one. It'd need to include images from the books, which would be credited, and I'm not entirely sure how that all works.
Mm. Enough gabbling.
Cheers
Jen

It's certainly polite to ask, and you have my full permission, for whatever that's worth. Basically you make sure that you tell the world that the images you're using are copyright DC Comics a lot.

Came across this site, and it seemed like the kind of thing you would find amusing! http://www.humanclock.com

Clair
merialc.com

You're right. I do.

Recently I'd seen an interview that you had done for a Seattle t.v. station for the comic book defense fund. You had eluded to doing a "higher" budget version of Neverwhere:The Movie with Jim Henson Productions and Dave McKean. What is the status of this project? Also, please do not allow Hollywood to make a Sandman Movie. It would be like redoing the Mona Lisa in crayon.

The Neverwhere movie project seems to have got new life recently -- the last thing I heard from Lisa Henson was that they had a financier and were working out some details. I'll make an announcement or link to a press release as soon as something's a bit more solid.

I'm afraid I can neither allow or prevent Hollywood from making a Sandman movie -- DC Comics owns it, not me, and they've sold the rights to Warner Brothers. Which does not, of course, mean that a movie, good or bad, is going actually to be made.

Dear Neil,
Is Johnny Depp going to be in Good Omens?
Or is that just too good to be true?
Hope you are feeling much better.
-Lauralynn


He was going to be playing Crowley, when Terry Gilliam was going to be directing it. These days Terry's gone on to things that he was able to get the finances for, although he has left behind a script, and I doubt that any of the casting he did for Good Omens will come into play. Unless he comes back to it one day, of course.

...

Fred the Unlucky Black Cat is now home from the vet. He has a comical and conical white plastic collar around his neck, to stop him licking his wound. His belly is pink, discoloured, knobbly, hacked and stitched, and looks rather like something from an 80s horror movie.

Fred's tumour has gone off to the university for testing.

Fred seems perfectly cheerful, although he looks baffled by the collar-cone, which will remain on until he gets the stitches out, in a couple of weeks.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Fred the Unlucky Black Cat part The Next
posted by Neil 1/27/2004 10:53:48 PM

Still sick. Still grumpy. Or to put it another way:

Ow! I am purged till I am a wraith!
Wow! I am sick till I cannot see!
What is the sense of Religion and Faith?
Look how the Gods have afflicted me!

It's not that bad at all, really. I'm just in the final stages of the cold, the place where you have the headache and you're all clogged up and stuffy and the sides of your nostrils are red and raw, and you start pronouncing words like Mamba "Babba" (fortunately, I have had no cause to say "Mamba" to anyone today); also I am getting very tired of chicken soup.

I would be feeling much more sorry for myself than I am if it weren't for Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, whose paw has healed nicely... just in time for him to spend tonight back at the vet's, having a tumourous lump removed from his chest. Poor thing. Let's hope it's not malignant, although with Fred's luck, I'm afraid it almost certainly will be. So I'm feeling sorry for Fred, and worried about him. He really is a very nice cat, and is very easily made happy, as long as you have the bottletop from some bottled water around for him to play with.

Got some writing done, but also spent all idle moments today (ie, whenever I was on the phone) signing the Certificates of Authenticity for the Diamond 1602 Dr Strange statue.
I'm not quite certain what I'm actually authenticating with my signature -- possibly that the statue is a statue, or that the certificate is indeed a certificate. I'm pretty sure that my signature isn't authenticating my signature, anyway.

Let's see: a strange homonymic moment today reading an account of the Angouleme festival on the Sequential site -- an excellent Canadian Comics blog I discovered via Journalista! I suspect someone taking notes over a telephone in the following sentence: Seth also talked about Schulz's impact on his work, and Osamu Tezuka was sighted as a pier by all. ("That thing! Sticking out into the sea! The thing that people are walking up and down on -- what is it? "Why... I think it must be famed cartoonist Osamu Tezuka.") [The words intended were cited and peer.]

Indyworld has an terrific article on Angouleme as well.

It'd be easy to fill an entire journal entry with things lifted from Journalista! Like an excellent interview with Seth and Eric Reynolds about Fantagraphics' upcoming complete Peanuts series (50 books to be published over 12.5 years).

Or the fact that Wally Wood's famous "22 Panels that always work" is up on line -- something pretty much every comics artist I've ever known has a fifteenth-generation photocopy of, pinned to a wall somewhere in the studio. And also Ivan Brunetti's own "22 Panels that always work*(*Sometimes)", which, interestingly, no artists I've ever known have ever had up on the walls of their studios. (Except possibly Ivan Brunetti, of course.) But which have a certain Oblique Strategies charm to them, and I seem to have used 13 out of 22 of them in 1602.

The quote at the top of this entry is from a favourite Kipling poem called "Natural Theology", by the way.

Next entry, I'll answer questions and things I expect. Now I think I'll stop writing and go and have a very hot bath, and there will probably be eucalyptus involved somewhere. And so to bed.

Monday, January 26, 2004

Just me and some Olbas Oil and a copy of !Limekiller!
posted by Neil 1/26/2004 12:35:58 AM

Having somehow managed to avoid actually getting sick for many months, I now have a cold, and am Officially Grumpy about it. (Although I've been almost getting a cold for a couple of weeks, so it's sort of a relief to actually have it now.)

Today I finished the adaptations for Dark Horse of my short stories from Smoke and Mirrors, THE PRICE and DAUGHTER OF OWLS, which will be coming out in one volume by Michael Zulli. Michael already did the art, basing it on the short stories. THE PRICE has the same sort of treatment that Harlequin Valentine had (ie, it's astonishingly faithful), but Michael took a sort of looser, funkier approach to DAUGHTER OF OWLS, partly in telling a three page short story over twenty pages -- but also moving it in time, from a narrative written in the 1640s to a narrative being written in the 1890s. So I rewrote it, to take it out of John Aubrey-speak and move it a couple of hundred years later, and to add in a nun that Michael had drawn, and so on. I came perilously close to bringing some of the Daughter of Owls poem out of mothballs, but it sounded too modern, so I didn't.

It's lovely stuff, but then, Michael Zulli does lovely stuff.

...

I had several sensible and literary links to put up, but I feel like my head is filled with cold porridge, except for my sinuses, which have carefully and delicately been packed with molten lead, so instead I will draw attention to the potential hypothetical danger to (probably endangered, and easily traumatised) tropical leeches of exploding giant minor celebrity breasts. Full details here. .

And I see that Bill Gates apparently thinks that the solution to Spam is a

"payment at risk" system - the electronic equivalent of a stamp - would mean the senders of e-mail would pay a fee if their mail was rejected as spam.

The system would not deter genuine e-mailers, such as friends and relatives, who would be confident their mail would be accepted.

These days I stop in at a webmail site once a day to check the "bulk mail" folder for real e-mails that haven't reached me. For almost a year my e-mails to people DC Comics would, for the most part, not reach them. Eventually we discovered that the word "Sandman" automatically triggered DC's spamtraps... I find myself much less confident that my mail would be accepted than Bill Gates is.

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=95142004 gives Chairman Bill's promise to eliminate Spam within the next two years unless he doesn't.