Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hmm. Interesting point, Neil... but I know it answered "why mythology"
quite satisfactorily for me, which was really what I cared about at
the time.  ;-)  I guess it seemed that mythologies are just the stories
we tell, and because they're timeless, we keep telling them... it's
the same reason why mythologies are so similar, even when they are many
cultures apart... and why there just aren't that many about giant
crabs...

I don't know. It made sense to me. I guess I should just be thankful
for that...

Yup. Food.
-Kelly
  

    
Well, we are asking Neil questions about AG, and he is answering, yes?

The author is not necessarily the best authority on what's going on in
something he wrote.  Even though Neil is very clever, and will do, I'm sure,
the best he can.  Writing is complicated!

Neil, I liked the character of dead Laura quite a bit.  And I liked that she
was complicated, though loving, when she was alive.  Can you talk a bit
about writing a dead person?
  

    
"Go," said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl.  "All is well, and
all is well, and all shall be well."
             --p. 192, AG

Whom is Wednesday quoting, or is he making an allusion I'm not
getting? Because all I could think of was Julian of Norwich ("All will
be well, and all will be well, all manner of things will be well.") And
it startled me rather a lot.

Hope your jet lag is better!

Mary
  

    
Neil- now that you're over in the UK, doing massive group scribblings
and such, are you starting to see how it's been received over there?  I
noticed that the reviewer in Entertainment Weekly did an awful job of
either reviewing or understanding the book (but a wonderful job of
completely giving away the ending; thank GOD I finished it before I
read it), and I was curious... if you've seen UK reviews of the book,
does the same problem exist?  I mean, obviously, there are going to be
reviewers who just Don't Get It, but is the fact that they're not
American, and this is a very American book, affecting its reception?  I
was thinking it could go one of two ways; either they would understand
it less, not knowing America so well, or they might get a better
appreciation of the book, because their experience of America is
largely what filters through the media...

I only ask because, well, I know things like that can really affect
understanding; slightly off topic, when reading Season of Mists, at the
very end, when someone asks Lucifer if he's a 'pom', I thought Lucifer
was being asked if he was gay.  Didn't change it all that much, but
when I finally learned what a pom was, it did change.  It made me
wonder if people from elsewhere are making strange assumptions to fill
in blanks, and if they're getting it in the first place.
  

    
Will, what "does* a "pom" mean? I thought Lucifer was being asked if
he was gay, too....

Martha, I remember a great story about Flannery O'Conner: she was
speaking at a college and was asked by one of the students there what
the significance was of a yellow hat in one of her stories. It seemed
that there had been a debate raging about what the symbolism of that
hat meant and the student was hoping that she could settle the matter.
Ms. O'Conner replied, "Well, she's just wearing a hat. That's all."

Neil - *grinning* I rather feel like a mouse being bapped about by a
cat that isn't really hungry but likes to see small furry things dance
about. Yes, the "aha" was pretty cool when I realized what the frame
story of Murder Mysteries was about (although it did give me the
willies since I had up to that point seen the Brit in America as
*you*).
I don't need to know exactly who or what Shadow is... and I'll assume
that the final scene with Sam *is* "something terribly important" and
will make more sense when I read it again.
  

    
Neil-thank you...?
  

    
Martha -- well, a lot of the time an author knows quite well what he
or she was doing. But I think on the whole readers should earn answers
from the text, rather than from asking the author. Especially if the
answers are there, and, more or less, clear. As with Murder Mysteries
-- it's a much more enjoyable reading experience if you figure it out
for yourself. If you were told it all up front it would barely be an
intellectual exercise.

kelly -- I think the answer to WHY mythology is because it's a swiss
army knife: it's a tool that can do a lot of things, and one I know how
to use to do those things. I'm not sure there's any real answer to why
I know how to use it, though.

Mary -- why would the Julius of Norwich thing surprise you?

Martha -- well, I wanted to make Laura work as a character, because I
liked her.

She came from a dream, in which my wife (who was not my wife) was
dead, kind of vampiric person who was still following me around. I lost
the vampire edge to her when I wrote her. I liked the fact they were
still a married couple, although separated, and with allt he strange
compromises of a married couple. And I liked the terrible honesty of a
dead person.

Will -- I'll tell you when the UK reviews start coming out.

Dan -- a pom is a person from the UK, to an australian.

I had one of those Flannery O Connor moments on stage at UCSB when a
lady asked me about the Sandman's Helm, and I explained it to her, and
I had obviously not just demolished her thesis but disappointed her
utterly.

Jesse -- you're welcome.

JaNell -- not quite sure why you hid your latest. Nor why you view it
as a defeat. 

You're just lucky you never had cause to ask questions about Sandman.
  

    
I read a silly review on the Southwest Airlines inflight magazine. No meat
to it, just annoying niggling.  But I sure was interested to see it
published there.

Do you collect all the odd reveiws from unexpected publications, or try to?
  

    
Neil - Terrible honesty is right. there were a few points where I
literally winced at the stuff that Laura was telling Shadow.. and then
followed with a "oh, I'm sorry, did that hurt you? I forget sometimes."

Here's a question. The first play I wrote I ended up directing as
well. As I went through the rehearsal process, several times I
discovered that I had written things that I hadn't realized I had
written. Not so much that I forgot I added a character, or anything
that obvious, but that I was making statements, or that I had written a
subtext or a motivation or intention into a character that I hadn't
been aware of.

Granted, my writing tends to be of the "first draft and then check for
obvious mistakes and grammatical issues" variety (although my most
recent play has gone through a fairly exhaustive rewriting of the last 
act), but I was wondering if you've made similar discoveries when
going over your own work after you've had some time to get distance
from it. If so, do any "oh my, did I write THAT?" memories come to
mind?
  

    
Neil- fair enough; I figured they'd be out already.  Just what are
they waiting for, anyway?  <grin>
And I hope things are well, with you, and you're not too jet-lagged,
and your hand doesn't hurt too badly, and that you find good sushi. 
Basically, general goodly wishes all around.
  

    
Book hangover.

Finished _AG_ last night and had wild, restless dreams, like those
storms that are blowing over so fast that they’re just a roil of
atmosphere streaming above your head too violently to touch down.

Got up this morning and walked into the office to write a Bob Dylan
line over an old artwork for no reason that I could discern for a
while:

“You could be known as the most beautiful woman who ever crawled
across cut glass to make a deal.”

Found myself standing dumbly in front of my closet, realizing that I
had just spent the past two minutes or so spacing all my clothes
hangers exactly one thumb-distance apart and thinking: “But Odin was
such a nice old grandpa.”  Which is nuts.

This book pissed me off.

I’m feeling raw: laid out, opened up and rearranged, like Anubis
didn’t put things back in quite the same place they were before.  The
geography’s been rearranged in there to include Rock City.  

Very nice, Mr. Gaiman.  Now kindly put that back the way you found it.

Bravo.  You got me.
  

    
There's a bit in one of the Words Conference banners.  I can't remember
which poet, possibly Robert Browning.  He was asked in some public setting
what a line in one of his poems meant.

Frowned a bit, thought, and said, "When I wrote that, God and I knew what it
meant.  Now only God does."

But I do think Neil is cleverer about his own work than a lot of writers
are.

And also that you don't turn to the answer of the crossword puzzle unless
you really, really need to.

Oh, hi, Neil.

American Gods is the longest thing you've written besides Sandman; but
Sandman was a serial, which is a different kind of thing to write.  What's
different about writing a book that long, from writing a story the length of
Neverwhere or Stardust?
  

    
Slipped by the previous post, which was a very nice one.
  

    
Thanks, Martha, if that was directed at me.  I consider it praise
indeed, from you.

Thanks also for that great quote by Browning.  It's so terrific I
think I'll go hunting to make sure the attribution is correct, if you
wouldn't mind pointing me in the general direction of the critter that
is a "Words Conference banner."

I want to put it into my quote box right next to the fabulous one Neil
just gave us:

"I’ve never felt that answers were the real province of the writer;
better questions, on the other hand, certainly are."
  

    
Yes, Pamela; I think that's the kind of response any writer would be pleased
to get.

The Well Words conference has an opening banner that changes every time you
enter the conference, through some complex programming the other conferences
don't use.  It has hundreds of opening banners.  But I was the one who
submitted that quote, and I might be able to find the book I got it from.
Or not.
  

    
        Er, Martha, the banners appear when you're in via telnet.  Engaged
users cannot see them.  I would suspect Ms. Basham is in the latter
category.
  

    
Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that.

You can however see the banners via some Engaged command or link I don't
remember, though, I think.
  

    
Neil--Because I did not expect to see a visionary of the Christian
church quoted in a book that I thought was avoiding the whole
Judeo-Christian thing.  Don't get me wrong--I was thrilled; just
surprised. 

Which leads me to another weird question--how do you feel about so
many reviewers comparing Shadow to Christ?  I thought you made it
painfully clear that Shadow was- "like father, like son"- hung on the
Tree because Odin was, long before Christ. Yet many reviewers seem to
think you put that scene in to draw a parallel.  I suppose it
illustrates the point beautifully, doesn't it?  Christianity stole so
many things lock, stock & altar from a lot of earlier religions.

Speaking of which, thanks for mentioning Mithras.  I hadn't seen him
since grad school...:-)

Mary (Who hopes this makes sense, at this hour of the night...)
  

    

Well, let me go run off and find out.  And, BTW, g crafts has a revolving
banner also, courtesy of my co-host <foggy> and also <bryan>, one of the
WELL's resident programming geniuses.

Pamela - that's a great post!

And now a question for Neil:  up there a ways you said, "And I liked the
terrible honesty of a dead person" in reference to Laura.  Which made me
wonder whether you thought that dead people would be honest as a matter of
course, when really, it seems to me, that they might just as well be
lying, since they have nothing to lose.
  

    

Mary slipped.  I was responding to Martha about Web-browser-based users
being able to see banners, somehow.
  

    
Neil -- I just finished AM and I loved it. It basically had my mind
spinning in about a hundred different directions and I have a million
questions to ask and even more things to ponder. 

But the one question that has been nagging me is: Who was the guy in
the back of Shadow's car? (Or was it the side?) The guy who he kept
forgetting his name or what he said. Argh! It's driving me crazy! I
need to know!

It was a lovely and perfect book, btw. I enjoyed it terribly. 
  

    
E-mail from Charles Quixote Choi:

Hi Neil,

You've expressed a fondness for G.K. Chesterton
before, and even based a Sandman character off him,
i.e. Fiddler's Green. When you named one of AG's
characters Wednesday -- while the name was a reference
to Woden's Day, was it also in part an homage to the
Chesterton book, "The Man Who Was Thursday" by any
chance?

Loved the book, btw.

=====
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the
night. -- Sarah Williams, "The Old Astronomer To His
Pupil."
  

    
Linda - maybe Neil was referring to Laura's ability to be emotionally
removed from what she was saying, and therefore didn't need to sugar
coat it...
Laura seemed to me to be somewhat manipulative (and therefore
dishonest, in my eyes) in life. 

Martha - I don't ever look at the crossword puzzle answers. But
sometimes I do trade it back and forth with someone else if I get
stuck.

Once again, I'm glad that you asked a question that you did, about the
serial. 
I think that AG could easily have been a few hundred pages longer, and
would have divided nicely into two or three books, and I'd have been
willing to wait for them. Of course, the whole promotional build-up
probably wouldn't have worked, though... and maybe Neil would have
gotten tired of the whole thing by the end.

Mary Roane - Christianity *is* the unofficial religion in America,
plus, the comparison makes for a good sound-bite (or 'pull', I guess)
in a review.
  

    

BTW, the programming genius himself, <bryan>, says that there is no way
that he knows of to see the banners via the Web interface.
  

    
Mmm...good question from Linda!

I got the impression that Laura was a little confused in her
non-living state - her comment about it being like looking at a
photo-album and not knowing what she had felt and what she had only
observed (or something along those lines, the spouse has absconded with
my book!!) made me feel really sorry for her.

Wouldn't her brutal honesty be a function of that confusion?  Or
perhaps loss of perception would be better than calling it confusion?
She seemed genuinely remorseful for hurting Shadow, and certainly went
above and beyond to make it up to him.

"So she showed him" still sends chills down my spine.  I like her,
she's no-nonsense.

I'm still baffled by the "forgettable" guy, too.  Can you give a clue,
please?  A little one that sends me on a long web hunt and gives me an
excuse to put off the laundry a little longer would be very much
appreciated! <*grin*>