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Hey Mr. Gaiman!

The University East Anglia have this fairly-famous and pretty reputable Creative Writing course, which was set up by Malcolm Bradbury. I have the option of attending this course, but being not being a British citizen, it requires obscene amounts of money. So my question to you is whether or not you think a workshop of that sort would be worth the investment in time and money. And please, this isn't an 'oh-my-god-if-neil-gaiman-says-it's-good-then-i-must-go-come-hell-or-herpes' (or vice versa) situation, it's just that, other than Malcolm Bradbury, I haven't read the work of any of the authors that came out of that sort of course (a similar one is taught at Warwick). And you're apparently rather big in the whole 'writing' business, so perhaps you might have an opinion or two to share.

So is a course like that, or lack thereof, going to make-or-break an aspiring writer?

Wishing you well,

Liam Kruger

No, of course not. (For proof, look at the careers of the many writers who have not attended Creative Writing Courses at the University of East Anglia. It's most of the writers you can think of. Statistically, it's pretty much all of them. They did fine, didn't they?)

I've never done any Creative Writing courses, but someone who had wrote in back in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/11/probably-not-gold-watch.asp and talked about them.

I thought you might like this interview with the God of Fountain Pens:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/interview_with_the_god_of.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

I'm probably not the only one to send you this link, but I couldn't take that chance ;-)

How cool! Here in the US we have Richard Binder of http://www.richardspens.com/ My Christmas present from Henry Selick was a Pelikan pen which Richard had turned into a flexinib, and which I'm waiting for the right thing to come along so i can write a story with it.



Silas is our hero's guardian and I'm a huge fan of his.


I've given it to my editors at Harpers in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. I've sent it to friends and I'm looking forward to finding out what they have to say. Any comments that strike me as wise or sensible get acted on, any that don't, don't.

Mostly I want it to be the best book it can possibly be. There isn't any bureaucracy. I think there's a general feeling that we're not going to go with the cover of The Graveyard Book that I posted in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/01/for-curious.html
though, because it looks too much like a book that's intended only for young readers, and now it's finished I think we're all realising that this is as much a book for adults as it's a book for younger readers, so I think Dave is going to play around with some different cover ideas... Read the rest of this post

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On Monday, I got an envelope from Clarion. I thought it was a poetry book, since I'm on the CYBILS nominating panel. But it was a copyedited manuscript of my poetry picture book, STAMPEDE! POEMS TO CELEBRATE THE WILD SIDE OF SCHOOL. 

My lovely editor, Jennifer Wingertzahn, had gone through with blue pencil (I think that was her first color) and made a few marks about punctuation. Then a Clarion copyeditor had gone through and marked the heck out of it. She (I don't know if it was a she, but I'm sticking with she to make it easy on me!) used a brown/red pencil and asked questions all over the place. She wanted to add punctuation, italicize certain words, and hyphenate some things. Then Jennifer had gone through it again, this time with green pencil, and responded to some of the copyeditor's marks. Then she sent the manuscript on to me for me to respond to the whole thing.

It was a bit of an internal debate for me over whether to use periods in a kind of prose way in this collection, which is what the copyeditor suggested and Jennifer also thought would work well. I read the ms several times and also opened up a bunch of the CYBILS-nominated books to study what kind of punctuation and with how much consistency it was used in excellent books for this same age range (1st-2nd grade). Jennifer and I emailed back and forth a couple of times. She's very open to hearing my side of things, and I'm very open to hearing hers, so this whole process is not contentious at all. It's just everyone trying to figure out what makes the best book.

And then there were other decisions. For instance, the copyeditor wanted to hyphenate hide and seek. But in the poem I used it in, I was describing the act of hiding and seeking, and I wanted the meter of HIDE and SEEK, DUM da DUM. But hyphenating it to hide-and-seek makes you say it faster and also changes the meter to hide-and-SEEK, da-da-DUM. So I rejected that change.

It was fun dealing with the minutae of words, hyphens, and periods for a little while. Especially as I'm immersed in overall, big picture structure questions with my work in progress. Periods and hyphens I could handle. It was a relief after asking myself about a different work: But what am I really trying to do here? What will serve this topic the best?

Anyway, I finished marking it up (in plain grey pencil), made a copy to keep, and overnighted it back to Clarion. The illustrator, whose name I think I can say now but I'm not positive, so I'll hold off a little longer, is ready to paint! The sketches, I assume, have all been approved, and Jennifer was eager to get the copyediting stage finished so the illustrator could get to work.

Hurray! It's really happening. It won't be out until spring 2009, but it's so fun to have it move through each stage!

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by Gregory Maguire Clarion 1983, Reissued by Houghton Mifflin 2002 A demon called the Blood Wolf will kill all in a small Russian town in order to gain access to a magic doll with powers to defeat the animal. Two small children see a vision of the Firebird and hunt down the Baba Yaga in order to learn the meaning of the omen. An old tale of a beautiul woman, a motherless girl and the

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I'm becoming a great fan of Cory Doctorow.

For those of you who frequent Boing Boing, as I do, you'll recognize Cory as one of the blog's four regular contributors. Boing Boing is my hands-down can't miss blog read every day, and it was through that site that I learned Cory Doctorow wrote fiction. Then last year, while I was visiting Florida schools, bookstores, and libraries to promote Samurai Shortstop, I picked up a copy of Cory's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and read it in various Sunshine State motel rooms. It seemed appropriate, as we were circling the land of Disney.

Long story short, I loved it.

So into the queue went another of Cory's books, Eastern Standard Tribe, which, to begin with, has a terrific title. It was great too.

So on a recent trip to Malaprop's in Asheville, they had Cory's latest book - a collection of short stories called Overclocked, and I nabbed it and read it. It was - you guessed it - fabulous.

Cory Doctorow is a writer of science fiction, and he really makes sure there is science in his fiction. Better put, you could say he is a writer of tech fiction, as his stories have the heavy hand of modern technology taken to near-future possibilities. Cory's stories are filled with 3-D printers (much like Star Trek's replicators) which can print on demand any item its user wishes, subcutaneous phones and PDAs which allow users to connect and share data in ways that seem just within our grasp, and - perhaps my favorite, and the advancement I ache for - the ability for humans to run "back-ups" and "download" their consciousnesses into new bodies as needed. Ah, immortality - I long for thee!

Doctorow also returns to favorite themes in his work, like the conflict between creative freedom and copyright, how the world will change when goods and services are so inexpensive that they're free, and changing attitudes toward community and government as we become more and more a world without physical borders. After reading both Down and Out and Eastern Standard Tribe, I worried that all his protagonists would be over-worked, paranoid, tech-zealots, but his short story collection reveals a much broader cast of characters and sensibilities - highlighted in the extreme by a sentient row boat in the Asimov-inspired tale I, Row-boat. (Seriously. And it's one of the best stories in the collection.)

Cory's got at least two more books out there that I know of that I haven't read. Yet. I will have all his books. Oh yes. I will have them. I'm so impressed by his plotting, his dialogue, his inventiveness, and of course his imagination. I'd love to be able to write with Doctorow's simultaneously breezy, funny, and erudite style, and it's one of my great regrets that I was unable to apply for this year's Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop where Cory will be teaching for a week. Attending Clarion is on my wish list of Things to Do to Become a Better Writer, but this wasn't the year I could do it.

I did read that Cory Doctorow is developing a young adult series (for Tor?) and I anxiously await those books as well. If you like really inventive, fun, and intelligent science fiction, give him a read - you won't be disappointed.

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