American Gods
Page 61
One reason I wanted the coin magic in American Gods to be good magic, was to ground the whole thing in reality, and to introduce a world in which nothing you are being told is necessarily reliable or true, while still playing fair with the readers.
I know what you mean about stage magic in fiction though: too often it seems to read as if the writer hasn’t done anything magical since getting the magic set aged 11 — [example removed]
I think part of the reason that fiction has problems with stage magic is that the compact the magician makes with the audience is twofold: “I will lie to you” and “I will show you miracles”, and fiction tends only to grasp the second half of that.
Now back to writing the jacket blurb. (Or at least, doing a draft of the plot bit that the publisher may or may not use. When it comes to the “Neil Gaiman writes good stuff” bits of the blurb they are on their own.)posted by Neil Gaiman 10:37 PM
* * *
MARCH
Friday, March 02, 2001
So the post today brought a copy of American Gods — a book, and a cover — from the UK. It’s the Hodder uncorrected proof, and it is lovely. I was completely thrilled, mostly I think by the bookness of it. I also really liked the back cover copy, although it doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to the book it describes, having been written from my original outline and not from the text. So some of the facts are off, but the mood and the pitch and the tone are just right.
All of a sudden, it’s starting to feel like something very real — a book, not just something I’ve been writing for a few years. posted by Neil Gaiman 3:05 PM
* * *
And the manuscript is safely at Harper Collins, and now I just have to figure out the best way of doing the UK copy edit for the Hodder edition (as I discovered when they sent me their list of queries, the biggest problem with sending electronic files of books around the world rather than printouts is that page numbers change depending on things like your default font size and the type of paper you’re using — so my sending them a list of changes of the “delete comma after the word of on page 16 line 12” variety would be somewhere beyond useless).
The strangest thing about doing a copyedit is how much you learn. About the world, and about writing. Before I start I grab a pile of dictionaries, English and American, and a bunch of books on usage — Fowler’s, and the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, and Bill Bryson’s lovely Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words — and the Chicago Manual of Style, and wade in.
Is blowjob one word or two? Judgement or judgment? Wintry or wintery? Why has the copy editor crossed out ‘hessian’ and replaced it with ‘burlap’? Aren’t they two different fabrics? — twenty minutes of research and I figure out that they may be two different fabrics in the UK, but they stopped using the word hessian for rough hairy sack-type jute or hemp cloth in the US about two hundred years ago. Good. . .
I’d written “none of the passengers were hurt” and the copy editor’s changed it to “none of the passengers was hurt” — Fowler’s English Usage, the American English Usage, Harpers and Bill Bryson all agree that the idea that ‘None’ is a singular noun is based on the misconception that it’s a contraction of no one, which it isn’t, and tell me it’s plural if I want it to be. Good. I do.
Now, when I write dialogue I try and punctuate it to give some kind of indication of the rhythms of speech. As far as I’m concerned “Hi, Mike” and “Hi Mike” are two different things. The copy editor likes the first, and assumes that wherever I’ve put the second, it’s because I’ve forgotten the comma. And I like to spell out “mister” if it occurs in dialogue. I just do. He’s replaced them all with “Mr.” and I stet each one back the way it was, and fix a few that I’ve forgotten. . .
He’s changed dumpster to Dumpster. Check. Yup, it’s a trade-mark. Good call. Okay. He’s changed the one occurrence of ‘whisky’ to ‘whiskey’. Nope, it’s a good scotch (Laphroaig), and that’s how they spell it. Leave it. And here’s Diet Coke changed to diet Coke. Is that right? Yup. Good man.
He’s changed a sixteen wheeler to an eighteen wheeler in a metaphor but not when there are a cluster of them parked outside a strip club. I add another two wheels to the ones parked outside the Best Peap Show In Town. . .
Why has the copy editor changed “it’s the objective case” to “it’s the dative case” in a (very) short conversation about ‘who’ vs ‘whom’? Do we even have a dative case in English? My schoolboy Latin, Greek and German are of little use, but none of the reference books seems to think that there’s anything other than subject and object going on here, and I write STET.
And on, and on, for six hundred and fifty pages. And if all this seems pedantic, on the copy editor’s part or on mine. . . well, yes. That’s the point. He’s paid not to see the wood for the trees. Actually he’s paid to look up at the wood now and again, but mostly to keep track of all the leaves, and especially to make sure that Missy Gunther on page 253 isn’t Missie Gunther when she returns on page 400.
(And as I type this, looking down to my assistant Lorraine’s Xena mouse pad, I’ve just noticed that the copy editor corrected Xena: Warrior Princess to Xena the Warrior Princess, and I let it pass as I assumed that was the official trademark, but nope, I was right originally — quick phone call to Harper Collins “in five, just before the bank robbery, there’s a Xena: Warrior Princess harem doll in the bankrupt stock store — can you fix it back the way it was?”)
Meanwhile, there’s a list of queries in from the UK, only one of which is the same as the US copy edits (a twenty-five minute long half an hour I’d managed to create. Don’t ask.)
I decide to lose the quote from a Blur song (Magic America) (which doesn’t say very much, but which was in my head when I started the book, along with Elvis Costello’s American Without Tears) and replace it with a quote from Lord Carlisle written just after the War of Independence about the hugeness of America and the way even their losses and disasters occurred on a massive scale. . . .
And now it’s over and done. For three weeks, anyway, when the galleys will come back and I’ll read it through a microscope for the second time, making sure that every comma is where it’s meant to be. . .posted by Neil Gaiman 7:35 AM
* * *
Wednesday, March 07, 2001
One of the best things about finishing a book, is there are things you haven’t been able to read that now you are.
When I’m writing a book – or even, when I know that one day I’m going to be writing a book – any fiction in possibly a similar area becomes taboo.
If my next book were to be a fictional life of Marco Polo, I’d not read any fiction to do with Marco Polo or Kublai Khan (and would probably have stopped reading it about five years ago): partly because I don’t want to see how someone else did that idea, and partly because if someone did do the same thing that I was going to do, I don’t want that route closed off because someone else has taken it already. It just keeps things simple.
It doesn’t mean you won’t be accused of plagiarism. I’ve still never read Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld, although I love Chris Fowler as a writer, and have had a copy of Roofworld on my shelves since before it came out (they sent me a proof). But I knew I wanted to do a magic city under London novel, and Roofworld looked too close to what I planned to do for comfort. I left it unread, as I left Mike Moorcock’s Mother London, and several other good books. Books I know I’d like I haven’t read (and still haven’t, since I want to go back to London Below one day).
One of the joys of finishing American Gods is that there are books I can read, and books I can reread. John James’s Votan, for example. A book I read almost twenty years ago, and that I’ve wanted to reread for ages but didn’t dare to, as I knew it had a scene I was going to have to do in American Gods. And when I finally read it, last week, I was pleased that the two scenes didn’t resemble each other in any real way, and more pleased that twelve years spent getting as deeply into Norse stuff as anyone who doesn�
��t do it for a living had left me with an enormous appreciation for the brilliance of James’s novel. (It’s about a wily second century Greek trader in Germany who becomes Odin – Votan – and to whom all the Norse myths happen, or at least, the stories that will become the Norse Myths. Hilarious, moving and, along with its sequel, Not For all the Gold in Ireland, the best mythic-historical fiction out there, apart from Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mist sequence, and maybe some Robert Graves.)
And now I’m reading a book I’ve wanted to read for five years, Martin Millar’s Good Fairies of New York. I read the back jacket copy when I bought the book, and ruled it off limits as it might have strayed into AMERICAN Gods territory. Reading it in the bath today, it doesn’t. It’s just delightful Martin Millar, as funny and wise and solidly written as he gets at his best. posted by Neil Gaiman 7:15 PM
* * *
Let’s see . . . well, the old entries are dropping off the bottom of the site, so we’re setting up an archive. There are US quick&dirty proof copies of the book going out to booksellers and authors-for-blurbs right now; I’m doing as many cover letters as I can to them. (It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they start showing up on ebay, and how much they go for.) We’ve finalised the jacket copy in the US, and got permission to use a line from an e-mail as a blurb on the back of the book. (It was something Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, and a very fine writer in his own right, wrote to me, when he read it, which, I thought, described the book I was trying to write perfectly.)posted by Neil Gaiman 1:32 PM
* * *
Saturday, March 17, 2001
So, I was just starting to get up to speed on the DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING script when this morning brought with it from Harper Collins the US Galleys. So I rolled up my sleeves, took out my pen (the instructions they send say pencil, but I don’t have a pencil here) and started in on them. Now it’s just little things, and occasionally, fixing things I was too tired to fix the last time they went through (Harper Collins hyphenates or doesn’t hyphenate on a system all of their own. . . why, I wonder, would face up become one word faceup?) and sometimes fixing things I’m pretty sure I did fix last time around but that weren’t acted upon (dammit, I like blond for boys and blonde for girls). The scary point in
proofreading is that odd moment when suddenly, the marks on the paper become nothing more than marks on the paper. This is my cue to go and make a cup of tea. Normally they’ve fixed themselves and become marks that mean something when I get back. In this case, I decided that doing a journal entry (while the tea brews) might encourage them to head back into wordhood.
Changing the subject, I keep thinking about the Coen brothers who proudly announced when they released the directors cut of Blood Simple that far from adding any new material, they had managed to cut several minutes from it. I keep thinking about this in context of the book, this blogger journal, and the American Gods website. There is stuff I’m very happy to have cut from the manuscript. One story stands alone (I sent it out as a Christmas card this year) but there are some oddments that I cut out because they interrupted the flow of the story, and it was just a little leaner and worked a little better without them. I can imagine in ten years’ time rereading American Gods and proudly cutting out several paragraphs.
So I think I may post a few here and there. There’s one lecture from a character who never really even made it into the first draft, I keep meaning to transcribe from my notes and put up. The rest of them are full scenes or bits. . .
Here’s a little one.”I suppose I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to know all about thunderbirds.”
The woman had him fill out a form, then she told him it would take a week until he could be issued with his card. Shadow wondered if they spent the week sending out despatches to ensure that he was not wanted in any other libraries across America for failure to return library books.
He had known a man in prison who had been imprisoned for stealing library books.
“Sounds kind of rough,” said Shadow, when the man told him why he was inside.
“Half a million dollars worth of books,” said the man, proudly. His name was Gary McGuire. “Mostly rare and antique books from libraries and universities. They found a whole storage locker filled with books from floor to ceiling. Open and shut case.”
“Why did you take them?” asked Shadow.
“I wanted them,” said Gary.
“Jesus. Half a million dollars worth of books.”
Gary flashed him a grin, lowered his voice and said, “That was just in the storage locker they found. They never found the garage in San Clemente with the really good stuff in it.”
Gary had died in prison, when what the infirmary had told him was just a malingering, feeling-lousy kind of day turned out to be a ruptured appendix. Now, here in the Lakeside library, Shadow found himself thinking about a garage in San Clemente with box after box of rare, strange and beautiful books in it rotting away, all of them browning and wilting and being eaten by mold and insects in the darkness, waiting for someone who would never come to set them free.
posted by Neil Gaiman 11:33 AM
* * *
Monday, March 19, 2001
Hard work doing the US galleys. They were waiting for me when I got up Saturday morning, went off first thing this morning (Monday) and I didn’t do anything else over the weekend, except go and eat some nice sushi.
Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces — NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment.
None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler. . .
F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformly become blond, and so blonder has become blonder; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught.
Little things – the icelandic ?ú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get — or indeed, give —instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me.
I changed the copyedited ‘vast hall of death’ back to ‘vasty hall of death’ which was what I’d originally written; it’s a quote from Matthew Arnold, which was in its turn quoted by Roger Zelazny, and I think that people can get the idea that vasty’s an archaic form of vast.
Not sure of the logic that has people talk about a “motel 6” or “drive down Highway 14” but also talk about “Comparative Religion One-oh-one”. But I just put a query next to it and left it.
I am, having read my book three times in three versions in the last three weeks, checking everything, finally feeling very done with it. Noticed some sloppy sentences this time through, ones that Fowler would have tutted at. If I could fix them with a word, I did; if they needed to be completely rewritten, I left them, figuring that perfection can wait. Maybe for the next book. . . .
The first of the blurbs is in. It’s from Peter Straub, who says, in an e-mail to my editor, Jennifer Hershey. . .
Dear Jennifer —
Many thanks to both you and Neil for sending me the early galley of AMERICAN GODS. I think it is a terrific book, clearly Neil’s best to date, and am very happy to offer the following quote:
From his first collection of short stories, Neil Gaiman has always been a remarkable, remarkably gifted writer, but AMERICAN GODS is the first of his fictions to match, even surpass, the breathtaking imaginative sweep and suggestiveness of his classic SANDMAN series of graphic novels. Here we have poignan
cy, terror, nobility, magic, sacrifice,wisdom, mystery, heartbreak, and a hardearned sense of resolution - areal emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterfulstorytelling.
Will that do? It’s a wonderful novel, and I congratulate both you and Neil for bringing it into being.
Peter Straub. . .
Which has me happy as a sandboy. (What is a sandboy? Why are they so happy?) I guess because I really wanted American Gods to be a book that had the power and scale and resonance that Sandman did (and which, by their nature, and not necessarily to their detriment, neither Neverwhere nor Stardust could have had — they were intrinsically smaller, lighter things). That it’s done that for one reader – and that that one reader is a writer of whose work I have been a fan since I read Shadowlands at about 16 – makes me feel like the last two years of hard writing really had a point.
. . .
And an e-mail in from a correspondent who shall remain anonymous:
I’ve looked at some of your journal and I’d never realised the actual effort and workload that goes into it AFTER the book is ‘written’. Nor why it took so long between concept and hardback appearance - until now that is. Is your brain “American Godded Out’ or still on an enthusiasm roll?
Dear Anonymous of New Zealand. I’m still enthusiastic. But I’m very pleased I don’t have to read it again this week.
And I’m pleased that some of the mechanics of taking a book to publication are coming out in the journal. People know that authors write books, and then books appear on the shelves. Some of them are bestsellers, and some aren’t. But that’s all most people know. One reason I liked the idea of doing this journal was being able to explain the stuff that happens between handing in the mss and publication. (That there are no authorial grumbles about either the UK or the US book covers is very unusual — I’m happy with them both and they both look like covers for the book I wrote.)