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Thank you so much to Henry Jenkins and his team, to the 1300 people who got tickets (and apologies to those of you who didn't get in) and to everyone who thought me burbling on about the nature of genre was interesting (or at least, didn't rustle sweetpapers or cough loudly to signal your lack of interest).

It was fun.

I understand that the Julie Schwartz lectures will be available on DVD, so if you weren't able to make it, sooner or later you will still be able to hear me explain how the relationship between hardcore pornography and the stage musical illuminates the relationship between genre fictions, and other suchlike thingummies.

I think Julie would have been pleased... I hope he would have liked it. Now we have to decide who gets to give next year's speech.

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Sorry about the font-mess of yesterday's post. I did it using Safari on a PC, and the result was hellish. Obviously these are not two things that work well together when playing with Blogger. And each attempt to clean it up on my part made it worse. (Thanks to the Web Goblin for fixing it.)

I did a second draft of the Waterstones "What's Your Story?" story (only a few words I wanted to change, but it meant handwriting the whole thing out again), and FedExed it off today.

My thanks to the Eagle Award voters -- I was thrilled that Absolute Sandman volume 2 won an Eagle Award for Best Reprint. (Last year it was Absolute Sandman volume 1. Next year the vote will probably be split between Absolute Sandman volumes 3 and 4, and something else entirely will win.)

(I was looking to see if there were covers for Absolute Sandmans 3 and 4 up yet at Amazon, and noticed that volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 are all on sale for $62.37 [and that they are going to weigh a grand total of 29 lb altogether] and the last two have 5% preorders discounts up as well. Which I mention mostly for those people who write to me and grumble about the Absolutes being $100 books.)

Not sure if the cover for Absolute 4 is a mock-up or the real thing. I suspect it's not the final, mostly because I'm pretty sure that face is from Sandman #1, and for Absolute 4 we'll be taking a cover portrait from somewhere in the last 20 issues.

...

Regarding the Julie Schwartz Memorial Talk at MIT on the 23rd of May: To reiterate from the other day -- over at http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/tickets.html we learn that Tickets to the event are $8.00 and will be available at the door, pending availability. There won't be any available on the door, because they have almost all sold out. The website has a list of places selling the tickets -- yesterday there were about 60 tickets still out there. So this is a sort of a last call -- you can try phoning the places at the website to see if they still have tickets...


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An ebay auction with a story... I've been rereading some old Batman comics recently, although I don't think I'd want these. But the story that comes with them is wonderful...

I'm worried and upset about the earthquake in China. From Nancy Kress's blog I learned that at least some of the friends we made in Chengdu last summer are okay -- and so are the pandas.

...

Rice pudding re-prompt! Once you get home to proper milk, of course. "Your general guidelines for a batch of rice pudding please, Mr. Gaiman!"Thank you!! ^_^b

I'm working on it, honest. Decided to figure out the proportions I'd used by a) finding a very similar recipe on the web and starting from there and then b) fiddling with it.

Two night's ago's rice pudding (the web recipe) was much too salty and wrong. I fiddled with the proportions and last night's was a lot better but now too sweet. Tonight's rice pudding would have been perfect I have no doubt but I forgot to buy more milk, so I didn't actually make one.

Dear Neil,

The press down here in Brazil have enthusiastically announced you'll be here for the Paraty International Book Fair, first week in July. But since you're also scheduled to lecture at Clarion, I'd like to ask if this is true. Or maybe you have a doppelganger. Or maybe the organizers here had a dream. Or maybe you're taking a weekend of from Clarion down here in Rio (if so, it'll be winter here, and rainy, not the best time to come...) Best regards,Eric

That sounds right, yes. (I teach Clarion the 3rd week in July.)

Hello hello hello,

To quote one of your other fans, “I have a question for you about writing”. I find that my own writing will echo the style of which ever author I am currently reading. Any idea how I might get around constantly mimicking others?

You write more.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying other people's styles -- it's a skill you'll need, after all. Many actors begin as mimics. You don't worry about it, and keep writing, and after a while you'll have written enough that you can't help sounding like yourself, whether you want to or not.

Style is what you get wrong, that makes what you do sound like you. Style is what you can't help doing. Style is what you're left with.

(I just googled "style is what you can't help doing" because it sounded half-familiar, and I wondered who said it originally, and it may have been me, as I found myself looking at an extract from a speech I gave to an audience of comics artists and writers in 1997 at ProCon in Oakland:

We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there’s a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.

I don’t want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. "Be you." "Be the best you that you can be." But this is really important. It’s something that we mostly lose track of when we starts, because when we start in comics we’re kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.

Young artists want to be Rob Leifeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont or, well, Frank Miller. You’ve seen their portfolios. You’ve read the scripts.

We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that one-one else could have done, but you. Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art-school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave’s paintings—"That’s a really good Bob Peake," he said. "But why would you I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peake."

You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Leifeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no-one wants a bargain basement Rob Leifeld clone any more. Learn to draw like you. And as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help but tell, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world. It’s the point I think of writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.

Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you’ll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don’t worry about whether you’re "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

If you believe in it, do it. If there’s a comic or a project you’ve always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you’ll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.

And it's still true. (That speech is, along with another speech about tulips and comics, and an essay on how to do successful signings, available in Gods And Tulips, illustrated by Chester Brown, price $3 from the CBLDF commercial website.)(And for those of you after instant webby gratification, the whole Procon speech is up at the Magian Line archives at http://www.woxberg.net/gaiman/magian/3-2.html.)

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So, this just came in from Geoffrey Long, Communications Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies :

Hey, Neil --


Just saw the note on your blog about the tickets to the Schwartz event:

It looks like tickets for the MIT talk on the 23rd are going fast -- http://community.livejournal.com/millionyear/34688.html -- although I believe that MIT are keeping tickets back to sell on the day.

Alas, no -- it doesn't look like there will be tickets available at the door after all, due to their selling like hotcakes at the local shops like Million Year Picnic. ...I'm afraid when the tickets are gone, they're gone, and many of the local shops are already sold out.

The microsite for the event is here: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/

Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you soon!
Cheers,
Geoff


Which seemed a bit daunting, given that the hall seats 1226 people but is nonetheless true, and I'm taking it as a good omen for the first Julie Schwartz Lecture (who was Julie Schwartz? you ask. You can read about him here and you can read what Alan Moore wrote and I read at Julie's memorial here).

I've asked Geoffrey to let me know where tickets are still to be found for any of you, at MIT or in the Boston area, who want to come.

The Birdchick and her team won the Birding World Series, which is good news, and "Platypus" Bill Stiteler blogs yesterday's bee stuff along with what he did today (while I slept like a large, moss-covered, jet-lagged log) over at http://www.birdchick.com/2008/05/simple-plan.html -- and because I'm rather proud of it, I'm putting up a dancing bee photo I took yesterday. (Bill put it up as well, but it's much bigger here, or it will be if you click on it, and I pushed the brightness up so you could see the expression on her little bee face as she waves her leg around. What good are bee photos if you can't see their expressions?)




Neil,

Thank you for signing my books after the literary dinner in Melbourne, I get a sense that you were tired, but I appreciate how generous you were with your time. It is always a treat to meet you (that was the second time I have met you the first was a few years ago at comics r us in Melbourne) though I get a bit nervous, don't know why but I do.

The episode of "I should be writing" where they list one of the three pieces of advice is to find Neil Gaiman and he will look into your soul and tell you what you need to hear is Episode dated 9/04/08 the third piece of advice.

Your advice was "keep doing what you are doing" and that was exactly what I needed cos I had not been writing very much up until a couple of weeks ago so that helped me keep faith.

I really wish that I could find more advice on second drafts I mean I got a lot information on how to complete a first draft and now I have to get a second draft finished.

What is the best advice can you give a writer about the second draft of a novel. I mean you spend months on the first draft and you finish it and let it lie for a while, and now you have to work with this thing that is a rough lump of clay, how do you form the book out of this mass of intention and thought.

Thank you for your time.

Karl

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before -- clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I'd suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. )

When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn't know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that's a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)

And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things. 1) You fix the things that didn't work as best you can (if you don't like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse). 2) You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes. 3) You worry about the title. 4) At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn't you get on with the next thing now?

Does that help?

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My trip home was derailed (well, deplaned, but that seems to mean "getting off the plane" rather than the plane trip home turning into a little expedition to hades) by an extreme snowfall in Minneapolis. So the trip home took 36 hours and left me a bit out of sorts. Still, this was waiting for me when I finally got home -- snowdrops in the snow. A small perfect thing.


There's a reason why I made the magical flower in Stardust a snowdrop, after all.

My first snowdrop resolutions -- I need to get back into shape (eat sensibly; find a new trainer; go for longer, more energetic walks with dog; do some nice stretchy yoga even). This last trip left me aching all over, and I've moved up a tub in jeans sizes (long term readers of this blog may remember that there are five tubs of jeans of different sizes in my closet. If ever I have to wear the ones in the tub at the far right -- mostly bought by accident or in fits of optimism -- I'll know I've got some kind of eating disorder or wasting disease, and when I only fit into the ones at the far left I know I've been not-moving for too long. And I've moved one tub to the left. It's time to slim down a little, but mostly it's just time to get fit again after a very, very long winter.

...

I sent Newly-Stoker-Award-Winning Author Joe Hill The Graveyard Book when I finished it, because he has small sons, and I was hoping he would read to them.

(He did. They liked it. He said, "It's a great one for reading aloud. You should really hear me call for help in NightGaunt sometime," and then when I said I would like to, he e-mailed me a sound file. I was impressed.)

And he talks about the book a little on his blog -- http://joehillfiction.com/?p=163 in terms that I would use as a blurb if I hadn't said nice things about Heart Shaped Box, and would fear accusations of log-rolling.
...

My assistant Lorraine just passed this on from the conference organisers in Melbourne --


Hi Lorraine,

It's good to see all the details of Neil's trip up on the website -
now I can finally believe it's happening! I wonder if you could
arrange for there to be a link to the conference website
http://www.iceaustralia.com/cbca2008/ on the Sunday date when Neil's
keynote is open to the general public so that people will find it easy to book.

Thanks, Sian

So there's the link, and we'll put another up at WHERE'S NEIL. Come and see me talk. Come and see Shaun Tan, who is nominated for a Hugo for The Arrival, a book I tend to force people to read. (This is a link to pages from The Arrival and an essay about it on Shaun's site.)

If I hadn't been on the road I would have remembered to post something about pre-selling tickets at MIT to the first Julie Schwartz Memorial Lecture, but it looks like the pre-sold tickets are now sold, and it's now going to be tickets on the day for people in the Boston area.

05.23.08 | 7-10 PM | Kresge Auditorium

Julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture: Neil Gaiman

New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter and comics luminary Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Beowulf, Stardust) is scheduled to present the first Julius Schwartz Lecture in Kresge Auditorium at 7PM on May 23rd, 2008. Doors will open at 6PM.

Pre-Ticket Sales will occur on March 31st and April 1st in Lobby 10 from 9AM until 4PM. Tickets are $8 apiece, no limit. CASH ONLY, GENERAL ADMISSION, NO RESERVATIONS. Tickets will also be available at the door the evening of the event

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next is baker and josh and jeffy in couture...maybe versace! :)
:)))

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tadpoles just rush right outta there...afraid of being stepped on, i guess.

oh OH! i flipped it. that ok or am i in trouble?

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