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The 2008 Cybils Awards were just announced. I had the honor of serving as a panelist in the graphic novel category and am excited to Artemis Fowl in the winners list.

You can view all the winners here.

Over the last 24-hours, we went from bitter cold to slush to cold rain in New York City. Who can write with weather like that? 

For today's writing wisdom, I went to sunny California, where the LA Times Jacket Copy reports on recent developments of literary import.

The Cohen brothers have picked up Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I really, really enjoyed that novel, but I couldn't manage to score an interview.

The Cohen brothers will rock that detective novel set in an imaginary Alaska. Check it out, and imagine a movie set in an even colder place than a frozen New York.

Secondly, half of this writing business is all about sending emails; to editors, to other writers, and to sources. Learn the email craft from the best. The Urban Muse has a post on email perfection, which include this nugget:

"The archives of Deb Ng's Cover Letter Clinic are filled with other writers'cover letters, as well as Deb's excellent feedback."

Finally, if you haven't checked out our interview with the Smith Magazine Editors ; well then, you are missing out. It's like writing encouragement sunshine in daily installments. 

I've resolved to do more book reviewing around here, if in smaller snippets.

Gentlemen of the Road
by Michael Chabon
(Del Rey, October 2007)
I spent the holiday weekend with Michael Chabon's brief novel Gentlemen of the Road, and it was the perfect curl-up-in-bad-weather sort of book: bloody and daring adventures in exotic lands are immensely appealing when you are avoiding bad weather and extremely comfortable and cozy yourself. Though I'm one of those few odd souls who has never read the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I've been a fan of Mr. Chabon since he edited the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and asserted that there's no shame and indeed some honor in literary writers working with genre fiction -- that is, with plot and action, as well as realism and character and all that stuff. He's also one of the few authors whose blurbs I trust -- every book he has bothered to endorse has become a favorite of mine (AND he gets David Mitchell, so he can't go wrong.)

As with all of my favorite books, this is one of those that totally absorbs you into the plot during the reading of it, but leaves you with a great deal to ponder afterward. The two heroes of the plot are an African Jew and a Frankish Jew, in the messy period between the Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages, in the messy region between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, in the messy (but classic!) position of being cheerfully self-serving con men who find themselves in the midst of an epic and moral struggle. At stake is Khazaria, a real-life Jewish kingdom that lasted 400 years -- and there are a lot of disguises, swordplay, grand speeches, bittersweet romance, elephants, surprising turns of fortune, blood and fire, colorful bit players, and witty remarks before it's all sorted out.

Much of my after-musing on this book has been about the overlaps and mixing of cultures we think of as separate, and about the great stretches of history before, say, the year 1500 that we almost never think about. Along with spending Thursday morning reorganizing the literature section at the bookstore, reading this irresistible story stoked an appetite for thinking about nationality, ethnicity, history, geography, and how infinitely complex the world is.

The book was serialized in the New York Times magazine all last year, and somehow I missed it -- it seems totally appropriate that it would come together in the same way as a Dickens novel. But I'm glad to have encountered it in book form, because it means I also got Chabon's afterword, which had some great meditations on Jewishness (as usual for him) and about the nature of adventure. Here's my favorite bit:

"Adventures are a logical and reliable result -- and have been since at least the time of Odysseus -- of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, at the keyboard, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen."

The extension of that thought, of course, is that the place to which one adventures can also become home -- for better or worse. As the ALP and I prepare to spend our first Christmas together in New York, away from our families, home and adventure and history have been on my mind. I think I might give this book to a lot of people as a Christmas gift -- everyone should have the chance to leave home so definitively as I did in traveling to Khazaria with the gentlemen of the road.

What about you, dear readers? What have you read lately that has been an adventure?

My review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union will appear in Strange Horizons next month. It will, I believe, be the first time an Israeli has reviewed the book (this is obviously your cue, loyal AtWQ readers, to point out the fourteen instances of reviews by Israelis which I have unaccountably missed), although I can't say that my reaction to it is primarily influenced by my

So, I'm home and writing this in bed before the day starts and the phone begins to ring. Am expecting the jet lag this week to be pretty hellacious, as it was last time I did one of these "nip across the Atlantic for a few days" jaunts.

Let's see...

The screening for 50 People on Sunday night was nerve-wracking (these were not people chosen for their diplomatic abilities -- if they'd disliked it, I would have known) not least because this was the first time I'd seen something close to a finished cut.

I put up some links to reviews in the last entry. I've noticed a few more: Here's big hairy Mitch Benn on his myspace blog, for example.

Monday morning I had breakfast with Michael Chabon, who had also been to Hay and was staying in my hotel, and then it was interviews, from early in the morning -- mostly magazine pieces with long lead times, but also some TV and radio, most of which will come out in the UK in October when the film does. Lunch was on Rotten Tomatoes UK, and was recorded in a Japanese restaurant for a podcast which will mostly consist of chewing noises I expect.

The oddest moment of the day was being interviewed by the BBC for a BBC4 documentary on Fantasy. They did the interview in an old church in Paddington, in the crypt, and as the car pulled up I had one of those feelings of deja vu that only get when you really have been somewhere before. And as I went down into the crypt, I knew. "We filmed Neverwhere here!" I told the interviewer. "This was the Black Friars' place." I was being interviewed where Richard Mayhew was given his nice cup of tea, before the ordeal.

Then back to Soho for food -- Ten Ten Tai in Brewer Street, which is my favourite unpretentious little Japanese restaurant in London, and is also the nearest eating establishment to Paramount London, so when I'd eaten I walked around the corner and went downstairs and was interviewed by The Man at the Crossroads, Paul Gravett, and answered questions for people who'd just seen Stardust.


Dear Neil,

I was lucky enough to be at the Stardust screening in London on Monday where you also talked about the process of writing the original story, and about your involvement in the film.

I wanted to ask you how it feels to see your original idea filtered through so many different people - going from you, through (in some regards at least) Charles Vess illustrating it, and then through Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn in production of the film's script. How does this process change your feelings about & connection to that original idea - if at all?

You see, I really did want to be intelligent and to ask this on Monday. But I was so excited at seeing the film that my brain went a little bit gloopy and wouldn't work properly. So instead I asked about your dog.....

Lou M


The expression on Paul Gravett's face when he realised that the first audience question was "How's your dog" was a wonderful one.

You always fall short of the original idea. Sometimes you make something else on the way. But I feel like Stardust, especially the illustrated one, is very similar to the thing I set out to make in the first place.

The film is a film (and a really good one) which squeezes and pushes and slides in order to tell the story as a movie, and, I think, succeeds beyond my dreams. I think I must like collaborating.

Anyway yesterday Holly and flew home. My dog was happy to see me. Maddy and Holly and Holly's friend Sarah and I watched the first part of the Dr Who two parter (how could I not like an episode which begins on my minus forty-seventh birthday? And has a little girl holding a red balloon?). I had a fight with Holly and Sarah about not watching the next episode without us, of the dammit this is a communal family TV watching experience variety, which I suspect in retrospect I only won because they didn't know where the second half DVD was, so we'll watch that today. Lovely stuff, Paul Cornell should be justly proud. And an enormous relief after the last couple of episodes.

And then bed and, with my sleep schedule all mixed up, not much sleep at all. Oh well.

Hi Neil,

BBC Radio 3 is repeating the documentary on HP Lovecraft you contributed to -- Sunday 10th June at 20:00 BST.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/pip/96knh/

Best wishes

Tom

Particularly good news as I missed it the first time.

Also, this coming Saturday the Times (the UK newspaper, which is just called the Times) will be publishing an article of me talking about H. G. Wells's short stories.

Which reminds me...

Why is your voice different when you're talking to some anonymous interviewer about Lovecraft from when you're talking to a con audience about Fragile Things? Your "I can't tell you why that is, other than that Lovecraft is Rock and Roll" voice is much lower than your "They're buying my books, just waiting to get sued" voice. Do you deliberately modulate the pitch of your voice to match the situation, or did you get your soul eaten along the way, rendering your voice higher for some unfathomable reason?

which just left me shaking my head in puzzlement. (Does your voice always sound the same, and not change with what you're talking about?)

I met Lynn Hacking from Final Draft at a trade show this weekend, and he told a very funny story about being caught between you and Roger Avery in an argument. So I have to ask: one space or two after the period?

You can actually tell from a script Roger and I have collaborated on, who wrote what, because I always put one space after a full stop, and he puts two. The reason you can tell now is because he has finally given up carefully going through anything I write and inserting that extra space, having given it up as a lost cause.

...

Friends of Amacker's (and those who worry) can follow her medical progress as they put her back together over at http://bullwinkle.org/amacker/, which is the blog her brother is keeping.

...

And I feel guilty I didn't mention this before, as some of the events have already happened, but go to http://www.wkrac.org/stardust/stardust.html to learn about the exhibition of Charles Vess Stardusty stuff at the William King Regional Arts Center "serving far Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee". They have amazing Charles Vess original art, along with the books I handwrote the story in and lots of other cool things.

Let's see -- Stardust stuff first:
There are more Stardust photos up at moviesonline.com -- here's Dunstan Thorn at the market, at the start of the film, meeting a young lady over a stall that sells glass flowers...



Click on the picture to see more photos...

Those of you in London or the UK might want to go and check http://www.forbiddenplanet.com/comp/stardust/ and investigate the competition for Forbidden Planet screening. The question is impossibly difficult, mind.

(I've heard that the Stardust screening at Hay on Wye probably won't be a full screening, given some technical limitations, and I'll instead be presenting some of my favourite sequences and answering questions.)

...

Dinner last night with Michael Chabon, and then I got to sit in the audience and watch the Talking Volumes interview at the Fitzgerald Theatre -- herewith a picture of us backstage trying to get the damnable cellphone to give us a decent photo, after several blurry failures. Michael is still smiling. I am glaring at my cellphone going "work, damn you".

I am holding his book as a prop -- but am really looking forward to reading it... (this is John Clute's review).