On the Topic of Imposters

Just so I don't end up disturbing any more of Neil's Facebook fans, I want to clear up the quasi-joke I made last post with a few... well... quotes. That's what I do here. It should at least explain the impetus behind the comment, if not the actual fact, which I'll address at the end.


Q: "Does Neil have an official myspace page? If so what is the adress?”
A: "No, I don't. There's an unofficial one, or more than one out there. I keep meaning to set up official myspaces and facebooks, but really tend to feel that keeping this place under control is more than enough for one author, and it never happens.” – Neil Gaiman 07/02/08


“A small, shamefaced and very nice apology came in... (Apology from guy posing as Neil on MySpace can be read HERE) Not actually a problem. It's just that it's the internet, and it has, like the night, a thousand eyes, the owners of which immediately write to me and each other to find whether something is really me or not. If anyone decides they need to role-play as me (shakes head, blinks, shrugs, mutters oh god why?) then it's probably best if you just announce right up front that you aren't me, to get that out of the way. (Several people have already sent me this one -- although not surprisingly none of them thought it was me at all.)” – Neil Gaiman 05/04/06

“There are lots of Neil Gaimans on Facebook, and a fan site that's nothing to do with me.” – Neil Gaiman (on Twitter) 01/25/10

Q:“Dear Neil, I was wondering if you read your fan page on facebook, (because most people seem to think that you do) but I couldn't find an answer on your site.”

A: “I'm afraid not. And Neil Gaiman Not the real Gaiman. An unofficial fan page. at Myspace... that's not me either. (Every now and again I (get) grumpy messages from friends and relatives who are convinced that it is.)
I'm me here at www.neilgaiman.com. I'm me at Last.fm -- http://www.last.fm/user/neilhimself.I'm me at Goodreads. Sooner or later I'll be me at librarything.” – Neil Gaiman 10/26/08

Q:“Hey, Neil. Facebook says that you're on the faculty of UChicago. Is that you or just someone else with the same name and using your picture?”

A:“Well, I suppose technically I'm a University of Chicago Presidential Fellow in the Arts from last year, but no, I don't have a Facebook account.” – Neil Gaiman 02/15/06

All of which are all good indicators that at various times in history, our dear Mr. Gaiman has been impersonated by various sundry individuals of dubious moral character. It's not been unheard of. The joke comes in because he has also recently posted (and because it's pretty obvious that the most recent Neil on Facebook has the kind of knowledge that only someone to access to his innermost thoughts, and hopes, and dreams, and worth-it-to-murder-a-relative type secrets would have) this:

“Dan Guy, webgoblin of this parish, and I, have put up a proper Facebook fan page to replace a couple of ones people had put up in the past that everyone seemed to think was actually me. Not a lot of content there, and there are no plans to put up anything you can't find here. It's at http://www.facebook.com/neilgaiman”

- Neil Gaiman 02/11/10

Raises His Head and Waves Feebly

Not sure why the older posts have all degraded into weird hypertext vomit, but I'll try to clean the place up a bit since Neil (or someone eerily like, but possibly NOT, him) has linked to this site from Facebook.

I've toyed around with the idea of picking up this blog again, and going on quote-hunts again now that a few years have gone by. There's one quote I certainly hope to never post here though: The one where Neil tells us he's finished with his blog.

On Writing (Again) and Weird Old Words

This post starts off as a fairly focused collection of on-writing quotes, and then degenerates into the ramblings of a madman on the english language. (Just kidding, I just decided to gather together a collection of quotes where Neil casts about for definitions or roots of old, oddball words, and the differences between Olde-English and American "english"... and tack them on the end of this post.) A short one this week, but still, enjoy!

“I just reread the pep talk I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, for authors who were at that point three-quarters of the way through the book when you just have to keep going, and it helped a bit. ("Hah!" I thought. "What do you know, foolish author-man?" But secretly I knew he had a point.)”
--Neil Gaiman 01/28/08

“There are things that you can do as an author in a narrative that are unfair to a reader. Ever read something really interesting that ended with a disappointing "And he woke up. It had all been a dream"? Normally it tends to be an incredibly irritating ending to a good book or short story, because it breaks part of the compact between reader and writer, that, in fiction, you're being told something that matters, and that you'll care about, and which will have consequences, and won't leave you feeling cheated. (I'm not saying that an author can't make "And then she woke up" work -- I loved using that as part of the ending of The Doll's House, and having it mean something very different. And it's the only way out of the Alice books that makes sense, but I've still not forgiven Masefield for the ending of the otherwise perfect The Box of Delights.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/05/04

“I don't think I've ever said there were no rules. I've definitely said that you can do a lot of interesting things by breaking them, and also by not knowing them. But overall, I tend to believe something that my old elocution teacher, Miss Webster, used to say, whenever I'd done what I considered a particularly interesting reading of something, which was, ‘Neil dear, please remember that before you can be properly eccentric, you must know where the circle is.’”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/05/04

“Given that art spiegelman's Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer prize, and is a, oddly enough, comic book about the Holocaust, I think that argument was settled 16 years ago. (Dave Sim's upcoming Secret Project is Holocaust-related, and is one of the most emotionally affecting things I've read in comic-book form.) I think any argument that states that comics (or radio or film or a musical or the novel or insert your favourite medium here...) by its nature trivialises its subject matter is foolish, shortsighted, dim, lazy and wrong. You can say "This is a bad comic." You can't say "This is bad because it's a comic."
--Neil Gaiman 02/21/08

“Sometimes it's nice to have an idea for a book or a story in the back of your head for years, accreting bits to it, growing and becoming bigger and more interesting, sometimes it's a worrying thing having a story you'd like to write and aren't getting to, for very occasionally, alone in the darkness, they die and rot and turn to mould and slime.It tends to be less intentional (except for The Graveyard Book, which was a better idea than I was a writer twenty years ago) than to do with how much I write and who's waiting for what.
Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/25/08

“At a guess, either you aren't writing enough, you aren't finishing things, you aren't getting them published, or, if you're doing all of those, you're worrying about the wrong things. Anyway, famousness is probably about as useful for an author as a large, well-appointed hiking backpack would be for a prima ballerina. Honest.
Right. Back to work.”
(When asked: “I read your site everyday, and STILL I'm not a famous author, what am I doing wrong?”)
-- Neil Gaiman 11/29/07

“I have lots of ideas already. I don't have enough time to write my stuff.
If your idea is good, then you should write it. If you're not a good enough writer to do it justice, then get better. Write other things until you're good enough.
If you really want to collaborate with someone, then find a friend who writes, and wants to write with you.
There is a hunted expression you can see on the faces of writers. All you ever have to do, if you want to see it, is to walk over to a writer of fiction and say, "You know, I have an idea for a story. I'll tell it to you and you can write it and we'll split the money fifty-fifty." You will watch their smiles glaze over and watch them back away. Because no matter how good the idea, the execution is everything. And the real work is done at the keyboard or huddled over the notebook, putting one word down after another.
All of my collaborations have come about because at some point I was talking to a friend, and the phrase, "Why don't we do it together then?" was used. At its best it made for something cooler than either of us could have done individually, at its worst it made for something that tasted sort of like the authors, but not really...
The only reason I can think of for collaborating these days, is for fun. I loved collaborating with Gene Wolfe on A Walking Tour of the Shambles because I couldn't wait to get the next envelope with the next four pages in it from him.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/05/08

“I think that rule number one for book reviewers should probably be Don't Spend The First Paragraph Slagging Off The Genre. Just don't. Don't start a review of romance books by saying that all romance books are rubbish but these are good (or just as bad as the rest). Don't start a review of SF by saying that you hate all off-planet tales or things set in the future and you don't like way SF writers do characters. Don't start a review of a University Adultery novel by explaining that mostly books about English professors having panicky academic sex bore you to tears but. Just don't. Any more than a restaurant reviewer would spend a paragraph explaining that she didn't normally like or eat -- or understand why other people would like or eat -- Chinese food, or French, or barbeque. It just makes people think you're not a very good reviewer.
One can assume that if a reviewer is reviewing a book then it's interesting enough to be reviewed. If you as a reviewer, begin by explaining why you don't like a genre, then you put up the backs of everyone who does, and is interested, and probably would be reading your review in the first place. And you lay yourself open to the cardinal sin of dim reviewers, which is excusing something from being part of a genre because it's good. Just assume that horror, or YA, or whatever it is, deserves the attention you're giving it, and then review it as best you can.(As a reviewer, you are probably allowed a couple of "I didn't think I liked these, but this [book/film/restaurant] changed my mind" reviews, but you had better know what you're talking about before embarking on them...)”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/05/08

“I've long known that Claptrap means rubbish or nonsense. I was browsing in a dictionary the other day, as one does, and learned that it came from things one could say on a stage or to an audience that meant very little, but were automatic applause-getters. (Things that literally trap, well, clapping.) And it's also the name of a machine they had once in old theatres that simulated the sound of applause. It's such a good word: anything declaimed from the stage that gets people clapping without thinking. Claptrap. And just as applicable to any side in a political debate...
The other word I've been pondering recently is cucking-stool, the original form of what later became called a ducking stool. Cuck is a word that remains on the fringes of colloquial English as cack (as in such phrases as "when the headmaster said 'now, empty out your pockets' I thought I was going to cack myself"). The OED seems to think that it was probably a cucking stool because people thus punished were tied to a privy seat and ducked into a pond. Knowing the robustness of old English, it's quite possible that the people so ducked were considered cuck, or, even more likely that they might soil themselves in the ducking...
(Which sounds much more like the sort of thing that scaryduck would post than I would really. Only he'd put it so much more robustly.)
Of course, E. Cobham Brewer thinks it was just a "chucking" stool (ie it was chucked into the water); while an 1897 account suggests, unconvincingly, it was a toilet seat used to display the ladies' posteriors in public, and that nobody got dipped in a pond at all.
I love language. It's such fun.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/18/04

“Hopples is indeed a wonderful word. I shall look it up in the big OED with the magnifying glass downstairs, because I can't find a useful definition for it online.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/22/04

“Just that ‘hopple’ is a synonym for ‘hobble’, and that ‘hopples’ might mean ‘hobble-bushes’. Dead unhelpful, and nothing at all about piles of stones.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/23/04

“Honestly, after 16 years out here, as Sherlock Holmes said when chided by Watson for an Americanism, "my well of English seems to be permanently defiled".
On Neverwhere (which I'd started writing before ever I came to America) I suspect the words that are a problem are either:
a) used mostly because they're words used in London too. Take "hooker". A quick google of the Guardian website threw up the following passage from The Guardian,

Thus encouraged, the media have followed suit. Everywhere in the past week, reporters referred to "working girls" - that is, when they were not describing the women as simply "girls" or "vice girls" or "hookers", as in the Mirror's "Hooker No 2 Found Dead", or "tarts", courtesy of the Telegraph's Simon Heffer.

along with about 3000 other uses of the word "hooker" or "hookers" by Guardian writers, many of which were talking about Rugby players, some of which were talking about people named Hooker, and the rest of which were all using the word to describe sex workers (often foreign or at least exotic). It may be an Americanism, but it's one that successfully crossed the Atlantic.
or sometimes it may be that,
b) the Neverwhere audio edition was recorded by Harper Collins from the edition of their text, which contains "sidewalks" rather than "pavements" (a pavement in the US means something else, not the thing on the side of the road you walk along) and a few things like that. If you read the Hodder Headline UK edition of Neverwhere while listening to the audio recording you may well find a word here or there that's different, and they may, in some cases, be the words that trouble you.
(Oddly enough, I wrote Chapter One of The Graveyard Book using American idioms -- "cribs" and "diapers" rather than "cots" and "nappies" -- as it was going to be read by my US publisher first, and then felt weird, so in the following chapters I went back to writing it all in UK English as it's set in the UK, and we'll fix things in the copyedit.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/15/08

“The truth is that more than ninety percent of the changes that will get made are copyediting changes that are pretty much invisible to the reader, and are things I think of as House Style anyway. Whether you have double or single speech marks, for example. In the US edition colouru and towards will probably become toward. And I doubt that anybody will notice. Sometimes, if I have a sympathetic copy-editor, I'll go in and fight for specific UK spellings and usages when things are set in England (you may have noticed that grey is spelled like that, and not gray, in the US edition of Stardust).”
--Neil Gaiman 02/16/08

A Brief (Or Not So Brief) History of the Graveyard Book

Today, Feb. 24th on Neil's Blog, (here) he announced he was finally done writing the Graveyard book. To celebrate I present to you a reverse-engineered history of the Graveyard book as it has existed on Neil's Journal. Rejoice!

“The Graveyard Book is so close to being finished I can taste it. All the writing's been done and now it's a matter of typing it and reading it and fixing it. (Interestingly, and rather to my surprise, The Graveyard Book looks like it's going to come in at about 67,000 words. Which is a nice meaty read, and about 12,000 words longer than Stardust.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/20/08

“I wrote the end of Chapter 8 today. Then I went back and started writing a couple of scenes from Chapter 7 I skipped while I was writing it, so the book isn't quite finished. But it sort of almost is.”
--Neil Gaiman 02/17/08

“The Graveyard Book is in its very last pages. I might finish today or tomorrow. There's still revising and fixing to do, but it's so close to the end I can taste it.”
--Neil Gaiman 02/16/08

“Overall, I suspect that The Graveyard Book will stay pretty English in terms of vocabulary -- nothing as huge as changing the title of the book. Some words may change like nappie to diaper and cot to crib -- possibly the rubbish bins in the alleyway on the other side of the graveyard might become garbage cans, but really, it's a graveyard on a hill in an old English town. Nobody gets into elevators, and the fish and chip shop at the bottom of the hill will resolutely remain a fish and chip shop.”
--Neil Gaiman 02/16/08

“Normally when I finish a book, it's over. Maybe there are more stories, but it's done. I get letters from kids asking why I don't do another Coraline book, and maybe she's at school and the Other Mother could be pretending to be her teacher and... but I can't really imagine writing another Coraline book. It's done.
The Graveyard Book on the other hand, seems to be generating other stories in my head. I guess I'm really interested in what happens to Bod next. Interesting. I suppose it's understandable -- my model was The Jungle Book, and there was The Second Jungle Book. (Although The Graveyard Book also reminds me in odd ways of Kim. And I always wanted to know what happened to Kim next.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/13/08

“(The Graveyard Book) will be about twice the length of Coraline -- a novel, not a novella. It's eight stories, each more or less complete in itself, each different in tone, each story set about two years after the one that precedes it, that placed side by side make one big story. Or I hope they do. I think it's "all ages", whatever that means. It's a book I wish I'd had as a kid, and had always imagined as a children's book, but the reaction from the adults who've read it so far is scarily enthusiastic, and I'm not making any compromises in it. (Having said that, nobody has read any further than chapter six, except me, and Lorraine when she was typing it.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/13/08

“You can't get impatient with me until the book is finished. I still have to finish writing Chapter Eight (which will happen in the next few days), then do the second draft of Chapter Seven, then read the whole thing through and make sure that it's all the same book and that Mr Pennyworth doesn't become Mr Pennyweather somewhere in the middle.
But the book will be out by Hallowe'en. Come high water or Hell. Probably in the shops end of September.”
--Neil Gaiman 02/12/08

“I skipped out on seeing Hannah Montana 3D last week when I did chauffeur duty, and sat in the next door Starbucks and wrote The Graveyard Book instead.”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/08/08

“(The oddest moment of today was finding a slip of paper in The Graveyard Book book I'm writing in, on stationary from the hotel I was in in Budapest in June, which listed everything that needed to happen in Chapter 7, including the climactic denouement which I was very proud of having come up with last week. Not sure whether this says something about my rubbish memory, or about the sometimes inevitable nature of storytelling. As in, "Of course it went there, because that was where it was going to go.")”
--Neil Gaiman, 02/07/08

“Chapter 7, so far 102 pages long and not quite done yet (probably tonight), will, I think, be more than twice as long as any of the other chapters/stories in the book. It also has some bits (written in the very small hours of last night) that are scarier than anything since the first couple of pages, and it does some very odd things with viewpoint, too. But I know that it's almost done since I've started worrying about the eighth and final chapter, and you don't do that until the one you're on is nearly done. "The Witch's Headstone” (which will be chapter 4 of The Graveyard Book) was picked by Locus as one of the year's best novelettes. This makes me happy.”
--Neil Gaiman, 02/05/08

“Chapter 7 of The Graveyard Book still isn't done, but that's fine. It's going really well. I think when it's finished this chapter will be twice as long as any of the other stories in the book. It ties them all together, too, to make a set of short stories into a novel.
Yesterday I reached the moment I'd been dreading for years, where you learn why the things that happened in the first chapter happened (which I hadn't known when I wrote them. I knew that they had happened, but not why) and as I started to write it, I realised that it was pretty obvious, so I wrote it, and learned a lot. This was an enormous relief. It does not always work out this way. Chapter 6 is all typed and tidied and there's no evidence from what you'd read that it was a nightmare to write and that I had no idea what was happening paragraph to paragraph, or felt like I was making it up as I went along (a terrible thing for an author to feel)”
--Neil Gaiman, 02/03/08

“There's an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you've known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn't happen like you thought it would...
It's as if there's a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it's there but me.
Still on Chapter Seven of The Graveyard Book, but I'm well into the last half of the chapter, and it no longer feels like I'm walking towards the horizon, with the horizon retreating as I advance... I've written about eleven easy pages today, and cannot wait to get back to it. If I'm still awake and writing I may pull an all-nighter.
It barely feels like I'm writing it. Mostly it feels like I'm the first one reading it.
Pretty soon now, Mr Ketch will fall down a hole. Mr Dandy, Mr Nimble and Mr Tar will have a gate opened for them, and the man Jack will get just what he always wanted...”
--Neil Gaiman 01/31/08

“Sorry. Writing Chapter Seven, still, and doing almost nothing else. (In the book, Scarlett Perkins has just arrived at the library to look at the microfiche files of old newspapers.) It's a bit of a wrench to go back from the fountain pen to the keyboard. Just received the sad news that the writing cabin in the woods I use sometimes -- mostly to type or proofread undisturbed -- now has wireless... (damn!) [further into the blog…] Truth to tell, I don't honestly think of The Graveyard Book as a children's book. It's a novel, and the protagonist grows from about 18 months to about 16 years during the course of it. I think some young readers will like it and I think that some older readers will like it (and some young readers, and some adults, will find it too scary or too morbid or too odd). It's not like anything else I've done, anyway...”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/25/08

“I just got sent the first version of the Dave McKean cover of the Harper edition of The Graveyard Book.
A book that is now three weeks late, and inside of which I'm somewhere hacking my way through the jungle of Chapter Seven.
There's nothing like being sent a book cover for the book you're currently writing to concentrate the mind wonderfully.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/23/08

“The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
Chapter Seven is being written right now, I'm enjoying writing it and I do sort of know where it's going (I have for years) but it seems to be willing to surprise me anyway. A dead poet that I wasn't expecting just showed up, named Nehemiah Trot, who has "Swans Sing Before They Die" on his tombstone, and, I hope, will never know why.
(It won't be explained in the text, so it's from a quote I'd heard attributed to Pope, but is actually from Coleridge, alluding to the belief that swans sing most loudly and beautifully just before they die, which goes,
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
And leads me to believe that Nehemiah Trot was not considered much of a poet by the people who buried him.)
I am, as I said, really enjoying it.
-- Neil Gaiman 01/21/08

“I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue -- I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/08/08

“I'm writing The Graveyard Book with a very antique Waterman flexnib, which makes it very pleasant to write but not the most legible manuscript you've ever seen.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/07/08

“I have to get unstuck on The Graveyard Book, so I am in the process of going off on my own to somewhere far away that probably doesn't have any internet connection. (Well, it may have dial-up. But I don't know that I can get dial-up working on this computer.) After 19 hours of travel I'm half way there.”

-- Neil Gaiman 12/08/07

“I'm starting to get a bit frantic about the last couple of chapters of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, I may go to ground to finish them and vanish completely.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/03/07

“I started typing The Graveyard Book today. I'm chugging my way through chapter one.”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/02/07

“I have almost -- almost, so close I can taste it -- finished the "Danse Macabre" story, which means I'm over half way through the Graveyard Book. Now the plot starts...”
-- Neil Gaiman 06/14/07

“I had great fun reading at Bryn Mawr - I subjected a very patient audience to the whole of the second chapter of The Graveyard Book in handwritten first draft (well, I read it to them, I didn't force them to read it), and I got to learn where they laughed and what worked and what didn't quite. Then I signed a book for each of them and stumbled away.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/24/07

“I don't know what page I'm on of the final printed book -- that will depend on the size of the type, illustrations, layout and many other things. I can tell what page I'm on of the book I'm writing in though.Hang on. I'll get out a cellphone and take some pictures. I'll include my hand for scale. (Although it's only an accurate scale if you know how big my hands are. Er, they're quite big.) I got the blank book in Venice and it is almost too beautiful to write in, but it's really solidly built and takes the amount of punishment that being hauled around the world by me tends to give. I have four of them -- two I bought, two were a gift. This was one of the gifts. I wrote The Graveyard Book and my name on the first page because it made me feel like I'd started something... I tend to write an average of a little under 200 words a page in this book. Depends on the pen-nib, really... go off and number the pages about 50 pages ahead of where I am, because otherwise I will absentmindedly misnumber them while I'm writing. And as I start a new page I circle the number. Putting the circle on the number makes me remarkably happy. Also drawing a small gravestone with a number on it at the end of each chapter. I'm writing less words to a page than will be in the printed book, of course. There's about 20,000 words in the notebook so far. The chapter I've already written, "The Witch's Headstone", is about 10,000 words long. And I think* the book itself will be around 60,000 words - twice as long as Coraline.
*Well, I hope. It's unlikely to be less. I tend to underestimate, though.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/18/07

“The best thing about going off and writing, and not having a phone or internets and things, just a tiny rented cottage, pen and paper and stories in your head, is that everything gets sort of simple and I remember why I do this writing thing and why I love it. When I got stuck, I'd change notebooks and write an introduction or something similar that someone was waiting for. Then I'd go back to the story. I never turned on the computer, except once to check a detail. Oddly enough the story that seemed the lesser of the two (most of the chapters of The Graveyard Book are also stories), which is called "The Friend" was easy and comfortable to write, while the one I was excited about, "The Hounds of God" (which I may retitle either "Miss Lupescu" or "The Ghoul Gate" on the next draft, or I may not) was sort of odd and lumpy and is going to need a lot of repainting and moving of heavy furniture when it gets typed up. Still, it has some really good bits in, and I love the ghouls, particularly the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the Duke of Westminster. I'm on page 98 of the book, and including "The Witch's Headstone" I think I'm actually half way through the book right now. Although some of the final chapter-stories are going to be long ones.
I'm writing a poem that runs through the next chapter, a P.L. Travers-like fantasia called "Danse Macabre", which I think is going to be chapter 5, after the already-written "The Witch's Headstone". Then I'm not sure. Then it's a chapter called "Every Man Jack". Then the last chapter, probably. Probably more than you really wanted to know, but I'm an author who's been writing a book, and mostly it's what my head is filled with, and it's interesting if you're me. (Most of the spare bits of head are filled with something that may eventually be called Lyonnesse.) The worst thing about going off to write for a bit is returning to civilisation and finding several thousand emails needing to be read, work mail, personal mail, Blog FAQ mail.... I'm not sure I'll ever catch up.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/17/07

“This is a message from your neighborhood Web Elf. Neil's dropped a line from his mysterious whereabouts to say he's finished chapter two of The Graveyard Book, entitled "The Friend," and is now sinking his wee teeth into chapter three, "The Hounds of God." (In the meantime, there's a snippet of video on YouTube where Neil talks about the origins of The Graveyard Book.)”
-- The Web Elf (Not Neil But Still an important quote!!!) 04/11/07

“I'm falling off the world for a bit to work on The Graveyard Book. I don't think there will be any internet where I'm going, so it may be a bit before I post again. Then again, I sometimes announce that I'm falling off the world, and then follow it up with lots of posts about random things, so you never know.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/06/07

“This morning I had my photograph taken in (among other places) a graveyard by photographer Phillipe Matsas, and I flashed back to GOOD OMENS, when Terry and I had our author photos taken in Kensal Green Cemetery, which meant that every second American newspaper that photographed us had arranged a trip to the local graveyard. And I thought "My next book is The Graveyard Book," and realised with a sinking feeling that too much of 2008 will be spent in graveyards trying to find an appropriate facial expression...”
-- Neil Gaiman 03/24/07

"In 1985 or 1986, watching my son Mike wheel his tricycle around the graveyard next door to our house that we used because we didn't have a garden, I thought of an idea for a story about a small boy who wandered into a graveyard and was raised by dead people. Then, deciding I wasn't a good enough writer, I didn't write it.
Over the years I'd pick up a scrap of paper and try to write a scene from near the beginning, conclude I wasn't good enough yet, and put it aside.
Recently I came to the conclusion that I wasn't getting any better. So I wrote a short story called "The Witch's Headstone", which will probably be chapter 4 or 5 of the book.
And today I finished writing Chapter One of The Graveyard Book, and it's a real book. I know it's a real book because there are all sorts of things I don't quite know yet, and I can't wait to find them out.
Happiness.”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/15/07

“I auctioned a name on a gravestone in the upcoming Graveyard Book, which went to the magnificently named Miss Liberty Roach, bid for on her behalf by a parental unit.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/08/06

“(I) wrote most of a Graveyard Book short story thanks to Maddy, who I read the first chunk to at the point where I was convinced it was rubbish, and she liked it and wanted to know what happened next, so I had to keep going.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/05

“I'm about to write a short story that may actually turn out to be a part of The Graveyard Book. It definitely feels like I'm home.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/20/05

“I saw Sarah Odedina, my editor at Bloomsbury, for lunch, and talked about the next book I'm writing, which is called The Graveyard Book, and which is for her.(I had the idea for the book in about 1985, when we lived just over the road from a graveyard, with blocked-off-tunnels beneath the house leading to the graveyard, and the graveyard was also where my two-year-old son used to go to play. And I thought at the time I'd put off writing the book until I was good enough to do it justice. Which, in retrospect, was probably partly silly -- you don't get a better book at different times, just a different book -- but probably in other ways sensible, because the idea of writing The Graveyard Book used to scare me, and now the idea of writing it just makes me inordinately happy.)”
--Neil Gaiman 04/26/05

“Once I've finished ANANSI BOYS (a novel for adults) I'll write THE GRAVEYARD BOOK (a novel for kids). The strange thing is that I suspect that THE GRAVEYARD BOOK (a kids book) will have much more sex, more death, and be deeply scarier on most levels than ANANSI BOYS (an adult book). ANANSI BOYS is, at least so far, a huge big funny enthusiastic puppy of a book that just wants to be loved, and will probably be pressed on kids by librarians. THE GRAVEYARD BOOK will be something else -- something really creepy and cool, I hope. The first few pages of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK (more or less all that exists) follows a serial killer called Jack around the empty house in which he's just killed everyone in the family but the baby. He's looking for the baby.”
--07/18/04

“My story is "October in the Chair", which was a sort of a test run for some of the themes in The Graveyard Book, the next childrens' novel.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/31/02

Planes Trains and Automobiles. My Triumphant return!

A QUICK NOTE FROM RRNN:

I have to apologize. I haven't maintained this blog for a very long time. The reason being I found that Internet Explorer somehow stopped being able to highlight text from Neil's blog. I couldn't get past this problem for a very long time until someone suggested that I try mozilla/firefox. I did, and it solved the problem, but by then I'd gotten out of the practice of keeping up on the wisdom of Neil. It's something I plan to correct in the near future. So stay tuned! Thanks!

Here's a collection of travel-themed quotes from Mr. Gaiman. Enjoy.

“The most exciting bit of yesterday was when the plane landed, and as soon as it stopped moving they turned the plane's electrics off. It was dark outside, and raining, and the passengers moved through the plane by the light of their mobile phones (not sure who had the idea first, but in a pitch-dark plane the phones gave enough light to see by). Climbing down, by the tail, I could smell burning and there were a number of airport firefighters pulling up, so I suspect the landing was much more exciting for the crew than for the passengers.
Anyway...”
-- Neil Gaiman 11/29/03

“I would like to go on record here as saying that I miss Concorde. I only flew it once, and that was only because of some stuff falling apart which meant I discovered I was going to have to use an obscene amount of air miles to cross the Atlantic, and when the lady on the other end of the phone said "Wow. For that many miles you might as well do it on Concorde" I took her up on it. And I know how wasteful of fuel it was, and was very aware while riding in it that I was in a thirty year old plane. But right now I could really do with a 3 hour trip across the Atlantic.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/08/06

“Set off on Sunday evening for the airport. Maddy and I flew to Amsterdam, then we waited in Amsterdam airport for a replacement plane to Venice (the one that we were meant to be travelling on having become whatever the air equivalent is of unseaworthy, due to an overeager baggage handler having rammed into the side of it. "It has a hole in the side," said the purser, in high Dutch dudgeon. "We shall get another plane.")”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/10/04

“Nearly didn't make it off the plane this morning at Gatwick. First the jetway didn't work, then the stairs they brought over for us to get off the plane with didn't go up high enough. I was just starting to worry that we'd be stuck there forever, and that within the week we'd be forced to eat the other passengers, and we were all eyeing each other to see who'd be first for some kind of improvised galley cookpot when they got the jetway working and we got off, grateful not to have been reduced to cannibalism.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/03/06

“Up and awake and about to stumble out of the hotel and off to the airport, wondering suddenly why I'm not going to Washington by train as I could sleep on the train rather than negotiate more airport hell, but ours is not to wonder why, ours is just to blink uncomprehendingly at the daylight and do what the schedule says… Right. Airport awaits.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/29/06

“I was chatting to my friend Doctor Dan last night, about what I was doing today, and being glum about the six hours of driving that I have to do to get to and from Madison when I need to get an article finished. And Dan said "It's only 45 minutes in a plane," and offered to fly me down in his plane. (Dan flew me all over Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin when I was researching American Gods.) So I shall be having a small adventure on my way to Peter Straub and Gary Wolfe and the Orpheum. ”If you blog about this," said my assistant Lorraine, "Can you say something about how your assistant Lorraine took this news remarkably well, all things considered?" By which she means, I think, that she has decided, after some discussion, not to form a human shield by lying on the driveway in order to stop me doing something so utterly foolish, and instead will spend the rest of the afternoon somehow magically keeping the plane in the air. Lorraine is unconvinced by planes at the best of times, and suspects that one day someone will discover that heavier-than-air travel is impossible… And she's not too sure about lighter-than-air travel, if it comes to that.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/22/06

“oops. they just called us to board. got to go.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/30/06

Well Hello There All you Happy People

Oh Poop. I have been a bad boy, and have not kept up with my Quotable Neil Blog in a very long while... I have skipped Christmas and New Years, and all tht sweet-sugary stuff that I am sure Neil Gaiman fans will want to have read about...

Unfortunately, something to do with either Neil's Blog or my computer makes it very hard for me to cut and paste text from his entries into mine, and I therefore have been lax in my duties, since so much more work is now required on my part. But I will do my best in the new year to adapt and put more quotes from everyone's favorite, shaggy englishman writer on this page.

Here's a fat juicy one with all kinds of comments on Neil's craft:
--RRNN


“I'm on deadline. Actually it's worse than that -- I'm on deadline on several things, which means I can't simply fall off the earth for a few days and wrap up whatever's late, because there are other things to do as well. (Deadlines sometimes run in packs, damn it.)
So I'm mostly working down at the bottom of the garden, not doing much email, my phone turned off. (This is being typed by me in bed before getting up in the morning, while also on the phone, and put together from an unfinished blog post from the last few days.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06


“I've been published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in Realms of Fantasy (who reprinted "Troll Bridge" in their early years). There are a few magazines that published me over the years that don't exist any longer. I haven't dealt with the others out there currently, because I don't write enough short stories, so cannot speak for popularity or respectedness or payment rates and speed of payment (most writers I know rate the latter two conditions before the former).As a general rule, though, a short story writer should probably send her work to anyone who will both pay for and publish it. Making a list of all possible places who would publish it, from most desirable to least, is always good. And then, when it comes back from the first one she sent it to she should send it to the second one on her list, and she should repeat the process, moving down the list, until someone sends her an acceptance letter and a cheque.”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06


“It's nice to learn that I'm a perverse romantic. Spread out all over the kitchen table in a drafty kitchen I was mostly worried that the collection of stories was all rather depressing.
Also nice to learn that I'm a neo-goth-pulp-noir author. Next time anyone asks me what kind of an author I am, I can finally tell them. I wonder if there are any other neo-goth-pulp-noir authors out there. We could form a society or something.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/11/06


“I wrote the words "The End" today, out in my little writing cabin (actually I wrote my name and the date) on page 306 of the leather-covered book in which I've been writing Anansi Boys. (Although I did 102 pages in another notebook when I was in Ireland.) Which doesn't mean the book is done -- more that, if this were a patchwork quilt, I've now cut out all the squares. Now I have to sew it all together -- there's around 42,000 words still untyped which now need to be typed and moved around and changed and polished and thrown away. But I know the shape of it, and I know it all ends on a beach, and with a song, and I know what happens in Basil Finnegan's meat cellar, and where Fat Charlie got the lime from. So that's all right.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/04


“I think I wrote most of Act 3 of the thing I'm doing with Penn Jillette in about two utterly mad days and nights. (I am very unshaven, and the white of one eye has gone bright red, so I look really scary and vaguely manic.)
"When we do Letterman," said Penn, today, "I'll tell him it took us eight years."
Of course, it sort of did. We had the idea for this shortly after we first met properly, on the Babylon 5 Episode I wrote, "Day of the Dead", in 1998. It then took us four years to track down who controlled the rights, and another four years to find the time to get together and do it. And our eventual solution was that we don't have time to do it so we may just as well put it on our calendars and do it anyway, which was what we did.
So today we took everything he wrote, everything I wrote and everything we wrote and we stitched it together, and were astounded that it came to about 128 pages of film script -- which is probably about 8 pages beyond where it should be, but I do no doubt that once it's been trimmed it'll run to about 120 pages.
Deadlines. One down. Five or six or seven to go.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/03/06


“I don't know that I can be objective. On the one hand, in a country of, what, nearly 300 million people, there are a few hundred novel writers, if that, who support themselves only though writing fiction, maybe another few hundred, at most a thousand, who completely support themselves scriptwriting for films and TV, and at a guess somewhere around 50 people who support themselves writing comics. And as someone who is earning more than a decent living wage from all three fields, I know I'm in a tiny, very very lucky minority.
On the other hand, it really is 90% just showing up and doing the work, and doing it as well as you can. (I remember one comics writer, now long gone from the field, telling me I was an idiot for spending 3-4 weeks on a Sandman script. She'd figured out how much her time was worth, and never took more than 24 hours to write a single issue of a comic. On the other hand, all the Sandmans have stayed in print, in trade paperback, for year after year, and have more than repaid the effort I put into them.) A certain, single-minded, idiot persistence in the face of all odds is certainly very useful.
So it's obviously not an impossible dream, as far as I'm concerned. And it probably is for a lot of other people. And some of them may find, as with any dream, that once you've got it, it's not what you want any longer.
And furthermore, when you take away the condition of "making a living" and add in those writers who teach, or doctor, or police, or do another kind of writing, or whatever, to make the money to supplement or to support their writing habits, you get a lot more "working writers" out there -- and a lot more varied author biographies.”
-- Neil Gaiman 06/18/03


“When I said "I love collaborating. And I love being in control too. As long as I get both I'm fine." I meant that I like the mixture, going back and forth from collaborating to doing things that were mine, and I did not mean that I only like collaborating if I'm in charge…”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/15/06


“I fell off the world for a couple of days, and finished up a bunch of incomplete things. The most overdue was the H. G. Wells introduction for a Penguin Modern Classics collection of his SF short stories, and that, along with a couple of other things, is now on the done side of the ledger, and I am so much happier. I'm going to fall back onto the world tonight, but in the meantime...”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/12/06


“Mostly I just carry on. The bad stuff can mostly be fixed or thrown out. The most valuable thing is the period between finishing it and when you reread it pretending you've never read it before and definitely didn't write it, the few weeks when you allow yourself to forget it. Then when you read it as a new reader, sometimes it's obvious what to do to fix anything that needs fixing. I'll also send stuff out to people whose opinions I trust, explaining that until it's done they aren't really allowed to say much more than "Is there any more?" but once it's complete I'm happy to take all and any input onboard. Just as long as no-one minds me throwing it back overboard as soon as I start rewriting.
(Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/29/04

“Several people wanted to know my opinion on Anne Rice's recent outburst on Amazon.com.
I think that unless a reviewer gets their facts completely wrong, the author should shut up (and even then, the author should probably let it go -- although I'm a big fan of a letter that James Branch Cabell wrote to the New York Times pointing out that their review of FIGURES OF EARTH was bollocks*). As Kingsley Amis said, a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't let it spoil your lunch.
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately an Amazon.com reviews page for one of the author's books is the wrong place to go looking for this. Probably best just not to look.
(On the other hand, the statement "You read it wrong" is not an entirely meaningless one. When I first read Gene Wolfe's PEACE, aged 17, I thought it was a bucolic and sort of pointless set of reminiscences by a sweet old man. When I read it again, aged 26, having spent some years as a writer and critic, I found myself, rather to my surprise, reading a deeply chilling and murderous novel narrated by one of the darkest characters in literature, who was a ghost to boot. But Gene Wolfe isn't going to make people who didn't like or get PEACE suddenly like it by going on Amazon and telling them it was too good or too clever for them, even if it was.)
When you publish a book -- when you make art -- people are free to say what they want about it. You can't tell people they liked a book they didn't like, and there is, in the end, no arguing with personal taste. Different people like different things. Best to move on and make good art as best you can, instead of arguing.
I think Anne Rice going on Amazon and lambasting her critics was undoubtedly a very brave and satisfying thing for her to do, was every bit as sensible as kicking a tar baby, and, if ever I do something like that, please shoot me...
For most authors, not being James Branch Cabell, it's probably wisest after reading a particularly stupid or vicious or bad review to mentally compose your letter to the editor, fill it with your sharpest and most cutting and brilliant bon mots, and then, having made it up, to successfully resist the urge to put it to paper, and to return cheerfully to work.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/22/04


“Big Deadline is still a thing of madness. The other two little deadlines at its feet chivvy and squeak and grunt and bare their sharp little teeth. Several smaller deadlines howl impatiently from the bushes outside.
Argh.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/01/06

It's Baaaack...

A Satanic tomato will not be held down for long.
--RRNN


“I'm forever running across accounts of people who notice the faces of saints, gods, mothers of god, and the like, that turn up, as a Message from Above, on their grilled cheese sandwiches or their burritos or something, and until now, I have to admit, I have scoffed.
That, of course, was before I went out into the garden and found myself face to face with The Satanic Tomato. I picked it and brought it inside.
I do know that the appropriate religious response to these divine food manifestations is to put it on eBay and to rake in the cash; and yet I fear that if this tomato fell into the wrong hands, it'd be Armageddon, before you could say Demonic Salad Vegetable. ..”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/02/05


“Lots of people writing to ask me to eBay the satanic tomato for charity. My hesitation on this is simply that it's a tomato. They don't last long. By the time an auction would be done, I'd be sending someone a rotted, icky thing that would no longer resemble a tomato.
Having said that, if anyone can figure out a way to make money for Katrina relief out of a demonic one-horned tomato that's currently sitting in the fridge looking slightly less bouncy than it did yesterday, let me know. Er, relatively fast… In the photo, He was sitting in all His Infernal Awfulness on a copy of the new mass-market paperback edition of Smoke and Mirrors.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/03/05


“I need to sleep, so this is just a hasty post to say that you are an amazingly inventive lot, and while freeze-drying, lacquering or any of the other demonic tomato-based suggestions were really good, the overwhelming vote is for...
Demonic Salsa.
We'll figure out the details tomorrow.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/05/05


“Right. So we decided to do a label or two for the Salsa. There has already been one gratefully accepted offer of art for a cartoon label, and then I thought that, in addition to that, it might be fun to try potential photographic labels. Not sure whether I'll use one of them, all of them, or none of them... Two of them are me and the tomato in question. One is the kitten, planning total world domination. I shall leave it to you to figure out which is which. Frankly, I like to think that I could be the Paul Newman of Satanic Salsas. Or, failing that, at least the Tony the Tiger of Satanic Salsas. Having said that, of course, I think that, in their hunt for the face of Satanic Salsa, most focus groups would pick the kitten...”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/05/05


“Went off into the garden, picked many tomatoes, not to mention the last of the onions, and sorrell, basil, cilantro, jalapenos and other hot and sweet peppers, garlic and everything except limes (which I bought), and I made a large quantity of salsa.
The devil-tomato is in there, although I forgot to save the seeds. Lots of jars have been bought and prepared, and tomorrow while I'm off talking to press people, it'll all be canned. I haven't figured out the label bit yet, but whatever I do will probably also involve numbering each bottle. And then I expect we'll eBay them, or something.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/06/05