Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Neil-- One question regarding Terry Gilliam's e-mail:  at what point
did you suspect that he was less than 100% sincere?  Was there any
moment when you came close to breaking into a cold sweat?

(Obviously, I'm assuming-- nay, praying-- that he was kidding.)
  

    
Related to nothing...

Today has been one of those surreal "get to work in the dark, go home
in the dark" days. Got here at 6:15am, still looking at almost an
hour's work at 10pm. Good Lord.

That may have something to do with me snorting at your message, Len.
:)
  

    
Len -- I simply thought that Gilliam's e-mail was one of the funniest
things I'd ever got in e-mail and that it would be fun to post it.... 
I didn't think anyone would take it seriously (cattle drives and
Bollywood numbers?)
  

    
Neil--The Bollywood numbers didn't make me flinch-- there's lots of
Bollywood influence in Moulin Rouge and Gilliam's stuff is far weirder
than that.  I guess for me it was casting Woody Allen as Metatron. 
And, of course, the snuff film.

Bill-- Good god.  What do you do?
  

    
Neil-- I'm impressed that the Guardian article used the adjective
"pataphysical." The peevish part of me wants to point out that it ought
to be spelled, as Jarry spelled it, with an apostrophe at the front
('pataphysics), but a quick scan of a number of 'pataphysics sites
informs me that somewhere along the line, the apostrophe was dropped. 
Merdre!
  

    
I loved Terry's email; thanks for sharing it, Neil. ^_^
  

    
Len -- What I do is unrelated to what I was doing. What I was doing,
with about a dozen other people, was performing a nationwide
reconciliation of the physical inventory spreadsheets to our
brand-spankin'-new web-based inventory database. And it had to be done
by midnight yesterday. Which it was, barely, helped little to not at
all by the actual web interface itself, which I felt compelled at one
point in the evening to describe as "blows incontinent goats." And at
the time, I thought I was being charitable.

Neil -- My biggest concern with Good Omens is, as it is with almost
any production that A Major Studio gets involved with, are they going
to insist that the setting be moved to the States?
  

    
Terrific weekend in which I saw THE OTHERS (liked) and ILLUMINATA
(filmed two blocks from my apartment!  And with Christopher Walken! 
Not great, but those two alone made it worth watching).  I also
finished query letters and summaries and am submitting, so wish me
luck.
I picked up 14th YEAR'S BEST collection, and it has "Instructions" in
it, along with stories by Carroll and Crowley!  I was very excited, and
moreso that I picked up BLACK GATE, a new fantasy magazine.  It was
decent, but cool because it had a Gene Wolfe interview [and when asked
what current writers he admired, he said John M. Ford and Neil Gaiman,
among others [he mentioned you were "seriously ill"... I hope you're
feeling better or recovering well]).

JaNell- RE 911: It's *always* too much effort to act like an adult,
no?

Kelly- what a terrific Stevie Nicks story.  I hope with you that those
people were suitably ashamed.

Bill^2- "blows incontinent goats"... so laughing.  My friends and I
usually say "deepthroats a moose" when it all gets to that point.

Neil- thanks for sharing the Gilliam e-mail, and also for the link to
the Zadie Smith article.  Doesn't get you out of writing one yourself,
but still enjoyable.  And loved your comments on the Douglas
Adams/Lewis Carroll article.

There was something else I've forgotten, and a last thing I didn't...
http://hotel.inmyhead.net
This is a friend of mine's site.  With Tori, and Neil, and Kevyn
Aucoyn.  She asked me to pass it along to anyone else who might enjoy
it, and so I'm giving it to you guys.  Let her know what you think.
  

    
E-mail from Jennifer Walters:

I thought the Carroll/Adams bit was cute and funny, until I read what Neil
had to say about it.  Now it's just sad...what a big fact for someone not to
check!  They also got part of the book wrong...the ANSWER is 42, the Earth
was created to find the QUESTION. :)
  

    
Bill -- it's being funded by a UK based film company and no-one's ever
suggested moving it to the US.

Will -- I'm 'seriously ill?' Gosh, I wish someone would have told me.
I'd've taken a few days in bed.

Actually planning to seriously cut back on all time spent not-writing
at this point, having realised that it's almost autumn and I've done
nothing in the way of real writing this year, although I've written a
lot of blogger entries, and written several thousand words of e-mail
replies every day, and done hundr3eds of interviews and so on; and I
have a number of film scripts, a great big comic, and several books
that aren't going to get written if I don't actually get my head down,
become an antisocial bastard, and start writing them.

I think e-mail will suffer even more than it is right now. But what
the hell. My friends will forgive me and understand...

Jennifer -- you're right. It's lazy journalism.

Ninave -- your Q from Neilgaiman.com about the 'where ideas come from'
piece; if you have the article, yes, please e-mail it to
Julia.onder@harpercollins.com...
  

    
     Neil -- re the "seriously ill" thing, I haven't (yet) read the
interview with Gene, but he may have been referring to me.  (I'm not
either, but the confusion seems more likely given the events of the
last few months.)  Need to check that out and send reassuring message
if so.

     The Fabulous Carrollian Connection seems to me to be a particular
sort of sloppy literary criticism: the hunt for "influences," as if
they were more meaningful than what the actual writer brought to the
party.  (There are, inevitably, people of whom this is true, but enough
about Terry Brooks.)  Since in this case the writer clearly hadn't
done any research in the appropriate places (i.e., asked Adams) it's
not even journalism.  It's going off by oneself and messing up some
paper.
     Hm.  I may not be seriously ill, but I don't seem to be very
pleasant, either.  It's likely a deep-rooted hostility to pseudohistory
of this sort, but enough about the Clute 'Patacyclopedia.

     Igor go lie down now.
  

    
er.  I'm sorry.  I *really* should have worded that sentence
differently.  You weren't the "seriously ill one," Neil.  Mike was.  My
fault.
  

    
Mike--  Somewhere, Alfred Jarry is thanking you.
  

    
Hrmm...I did something kinda funny and really stupid today.  I took on
a second job at Pizzera Uno as a server.  I had to take this enormous
test today to get through training.  I did okay, but everytime I meant
to write kale (3 or 4 times) I wrote KELP instead.  At least it got a
good laugh out of my co-workers...

I think that's very weird about the Douglas Adams article.  I wonder
if someone was just a fan of both and made some dumb assumptions...

Will-  I liked your friend's site.  Especially the Kevyn Aucoyn
section and their art section.  It was fun to see different ways Kevyn
made Tori up, and it is always nice to see good fan art.

Angelina (who is trying to kick the habit of ending paragraphs with
"...")
  

    
E-mail from Ninave Lake:
 
Hello!
 
Neil: 'Tis done.  Thanks again.  A long time ago you gave me some advice
on who to send comic scripts to.  I've taken it, and whether it works or
not - who cares?  At least I know I'm not wasting my time.  Not
completely, at least.  ;) 
 
Hm.  Gee.  Think I finally worked the fan girl junk out of my system.  I
think we're all relived, now.  :D  Sorry.  Goofy mood tonight.  Please,
no, "So what's your problem every other night...."  That incudes you,
Mme. Janell.
 
Mike:  I seem to have the pretty-covered version of "The Dragon
Waiting."  When you say that the text is corrupt, what do you mean?   I'm
not asking from the, "Oh no!  What do you mean, the text is corrupt? 
EEK!" way, but from the, "I'm a wanna be writer, and I always ask these
weird questions so I have  a better feel for the feild."  Kind of way.
 
Martha:  Do you have your own website?  I ask, not because I'm silly, but
because I want to point one of my friends to one, and I want to make sure
it's an approved site. 
 
Angelina:  Good luck on the second job!  Do people put kale on their
pizzas?  Is it any good?
 
Will:  Does Black Gate run fiction?
 
Take care all!!!
 
Ninave, who has the Martha Soukup poem stuck firmly in her head...
  

    
The notion of a pizza test is simultaneously charming and scary (well, scary
only because it brings back memories of my waitron days), and writing KELP
has me in delighted chortles. Thank you, Angelina! (I love the name
<velvetraisin>, by the way, in case I forgot to say before.)

I think I dreamed about Neil while I was in London, or maybe it would be
more accurate to say that Neil showed up in two ways in a dream. One was as
somebody who was present and amiable but not central to the plotline (I
think he nodded hello). I had been lying on Rob and Avedon's guest bed and
having a long convoluted dream about journeys and timing and connections and
luggage and Stuff, and at the very tail end of it, I got to this building
that turned out to be a whole lot bigger on the inside than it was on the
outside. There were some people in it, going about their business quietly;
it was all deep-cushioned, fraying, comfortable chairs, battered marble and
brass and wooden walls and railings, and amazing afternoon sunlight through
stained glass (when it had been morning in the rest of the dream). When I
got inside, I was told that it was the Refuge Library where every book ever
written goes. Given the scrolls on the shelves at the far side of the main
room, I believed them; Neil was looking at something over there which seemed
to have tiny golden birds attached to it by jeweled chains or something
roughly equivalent, and Mike was over there too, with some other folks I
know but can't remember. I was so happy about getting there when it was open
that I woke up with my eyes full of happy tears.

Tomorrow morning Mike and I go gallivanting off to Las Vegas to rendezvous
with my birthday twin Will Shetterly (same day, different year) and Emma
Bull and Debbie Notkin and Alan Bostick. Woo-hoo! I will play several
dollars ceremoniously in the name of the Mob from 104, and if I win big,
we'll have a party someplace where it'd be convenient, like somewhere that
Neil's reading or signing, maybe. (I wonder how big I'd have to win to pay
everybody's plane fare someplace cool?)
  

    

Let's hope we get a chance to find out!
  

    
     Ninave -- well, since you asked for How It Works, you get a
slightly more elaborate version: when the book was reset for paperback,
I was never sent proofs to correct.  The editor-in-chief at the time
(as distint from an editor who actually worked on books) was violently
opposed to letting authors correct proofs, on the principle that they
would rewrite, costing time and money. (This is not wholly untrue,
though most experienced authors know better, and many contracts provide
that the author can be charged if such rewriting exceeds a certain
cost.  And, of course, the publisher can simply refuse to make the
alterations.)
     Now, under "normal circumstances" this might not have mattered,
since someone in-house would have proofread, and the book didn't -need-
rewriting, just comparison with the clean hardcover text.  But from
what I've been able to determine, -nobody- ever corrected the proofs,
meaning inevitably that they are shot through with typos.  There's one
chapter in which it approaches an error per page.  Most of these are
not meaning-altering howlers, dropped paragraphs or the like, but that
doesn't mean I'm happy about it.  As I recall, there -is- a sentence in
which the word "not" was dropped.  It is rarely a good thing to omit
the word "not" where it was intended to appear, as GOOD OMENS points
out.
     The second Avon edition (with the green lizard on the cover) has
been corrected, which is a good and positive thing, but it would be
nice if one did not have to choose between the beautiful cover and the
right words.
  

    
Kelly - Funny you should mention the Stevie show. One of my friends
(Heather, a.k.a. "God") is the biggest Stevie fan I know. She had me
make a dress for her to wear to the gala record release party. And then
I had to make her another one for the concert last night because
people had seen her in the other one already (she's a silly little
God). After much running around frantically with fittings and
accessorizing (and having her drive out to SF to pick up the dress at
the door of the club I was working at), Stevie called in sick. Show
postponed. God crushed, and nearly sobbing into my machine. *sigh...
the replacement show better be damned good!

And I'm certain the non-believers in line at the show felt properly
ridiculous when they found out.

Neil - (And people wonder why I love Gilliam stuff) Thanks for posting
the email As for being an antisocial bastard, good luck, and get
things accomplished!

Angelina - Kelp pizza... I can picture it... I hear the Japanese do
some things to pizzas that make anchovies seem edible... Blondie's
Pizza (next door to my work) serves breakfast pizzas, and let me tell
you there's nothing quite so disgusting as the smell of eggs & uncooked
pizza dough wafting through the building as you're trying to wake up
for a long day by starting with an overdose of caffeine... (elipses
brought to you by...)

Elise - Win big for us, k?

Martha & Neil - I think the silly poem made for another Martha fan in
the world. Showed Margret the Aladdin video, handed her my copy of
'Walls to read and she managed to get several stories in before leaving
town. Now she'll have to get her own copy. :)

Mike - Do many editors not allow authors to correct the proofs? I can
understand the need for clauses in contracts to keep from going
over-budget, but it seems odd to me not to let the author have any
control over typos, an occasional phrase change, and left-out,
not-so-obvious apostrophes and the like. Just nosy.

squeaks, who is supposed to be asleep, but why ruin a perfect record
of not-enough-sleep-all-month?
  

    
Will -- oh, right. Wrong you. Got it.

Mike -- you should drop Gene a line and tell him about all your extra
kidneys. I sent him some harry Steven keeler books and am hoping he'll
forgive me...

squeaks --  I like that my martha intro sells copies of her book.
That's what they are meant to do but mostly they don't.
  

    

<miss-mousey>: Mike Ford's experience notwithstanding, most book publishing
contracts -- in Mike's and my field, anyway -- have clauses _requiring_ that
the author be given the opportunity to make corrections.  Twice, in fact:
once to the copyedited manuscript, and once to the typeset proofs.

If Mike is talking about THE DRAGON WAITING (I've kind of lost track of the
thread), I actually think the politics of that publisher at that time were
even weirder than he remembers, and that it wasn't the editor-in-chief who
was determined to minimize author corrections, but rather the (unusually
powerful) head of production.  This is _extremely_ strange, kind of like
finding that the United States government is being run by the Secretary of
Agriculture.

It's common to sneer at people with "editor" in their title whose jobs don't
actually entail donning the figurative green eyeshade and marking up
manuscripts, but in fact in my experience some of those people are
among the uncredited angels who keep publishing good, while some of
the old-fashioned hairy-chested would-be Max Perkinses are poison to
the cause of good writing and good books.  Publishing has lots of
structural problems, but "editors don't edit" is a way-oversimplified
narrative that, at this point, is about as useful as cocktail-party
observations that modern America is Just Like The Decline Of The Roman
Empire, Don't You See.
  

    
Ninave- yes, BLACK GATE does fiction (though, unfortunately, I don't
think mine quite fits. D'oh!).  You can check www.blackgate.com for
submission guidelines, and suchlike.

Mike- I picked up HMFJTP yesterday!  ROCK!  I also, however, picked up
Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett, and got thoroughly engrossed in it by
the second paragraph.  I'll read it next, though.  Promise.

Elise- Hell, win *HUGE*!

Angeline- Hope you get it.

Neil- I've had that problem too, recently.  Becoming anti-social, and
all, I mean.  I don't think anyone besides those at work saw me for a
good month there.  I felt bad.  But I guess the real friends
understand.

Oh, and, I think you've accidentally started an Internet rumor...
www.darkhorizons.com/news.htm, on Wednesday's posting, had Terry's
e-mail up, and treated it as both serious and legit.  Leave it to the
Internet, I guess.
  

    
Neil & Martha - I know of at least two people who have bought Martha's
book because of your intro (and a wee little push from me).

Patrick - Thanks for the info. That makes much more sense. 

squeaks, who wonders why people spread news on the internet that they
don't understand (though to be fair, the article did suggest Neil
thought Terry's email was a joke - they just weren't sure)
  

    
Next thing you know, Woody and Mel will be calling Terry up wanting to
know when they should show up for their scenes!

I'm glad to hear that the script is solid.



Lori and I both managed to forget, until an hour and a half after
they'd gone on sale, to buy tickets to see Tori when she's in the area.
 Alas, the only seats left were the back row of the furthest back
section.  (And yet there were at least 10 tickets to that show for sale
on eBay when I checked minutes later.  @#$%! scalpers.)  So now we're
thinking about trying to get tickets to a show that hasn't gone on sale
yet, which means either Ryman Auditorium in Nashville TN or the
Orpheum in Minneapolis MN.  The Orpheum sounds smaller, which would be
nice.
  

    
Neil- I so laughed when I read your journal this morning (I *loved*
the last line).  Said Inside Movie site has posted the fact that you
were joking, so perhaps we've seen both the birth and death of a rumor.
 And who was it who said that about the truth?  I know I've heard
it...

DanGuy- Where are you from?  A friend of mine got tickets, I think, to
the NYC show.  I'm still not sure whether I'm going or not.

Michelle- the bit about their thinking it was a joke was not the
original post; it came after I e-mailed the guy and told him it was a
joke, and Neil had said as much.  And about intros; I'll be buying
TAPOW because I'm interested, but I've been reading THE KING OF
ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER after buying it only because Neil did the intro.  It
is, as promised, good, but it's very flowery, and ornate, and, at
times, I find myself wishing he'd stop going on and get to it already.