I read James' Vance's work before I met the man. He was a playwright who had discovered comics and wrote a graphic novel called KINGS IN DISGUISE, set in the great depression. I loved it. Powerful, moving and smart. Years later, when I was creating a line of comics for Tekno Comics, I asked James to write "Mr Hero", because I suspected that someone who could go so deep could also do funny and light and sweet, and he could. We became friends.
James met another friend of mine, who was writing Tekno Comics: Kate Worley. They fell in love, they had two children together.
Go and read all about Jim and Kate and their lives and children at https://www.gofundme.com/vance-family-home-mortgage. If you're someone who was touched by their work, or by their friendship, please donate, even if it's a few dollars. I did.
She's an author and comedian and the sort of person who has strange ideas and acts upon them. So when she tweeted me the other night and asked me if I would read the Cheesecake Factory Menu live, if she raised half a million dollars for the charity, I did not ask any of the obvious questions (like, why would I read the Cheesecake Factory Menu aloud? or Who would want to hear this? or even How would you ever make that much money for something so unlikely?). Instead I said I'd like the money to go to Refugees, please, and sure. ( And I added, "If you get to a million dollars, I'll also read the entirety of Fox in Socks after the Cheesecake Factory menu.")
It's been up a couple of days since then, and we are (as I type this) 8% of the way to the target at over $42,000. It's started to be picked up by newspapers -- here's the LA Times, and the Boston Globe, and even the Guardian.
And I will do my own bit for it. I will put up something unique to this blog.
Probably you are thinking, will he write about his time on the Red Carpet at Cannes for HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES?
It is not that. (But here are costume designer Sandy Powell, channeling Ziggy Stardust, and star Elle Fanning eating colour-coordinated macaroons.)
Perhaps you are thinking, Will he perhaps post photographs of Gillian Anderson as Media in the next episode of American Gods incarnated as Ziggy Stardust also eating colour-coordinated macaroons?
I will not. I do not believe such photos exist.
Instead I will put up photos of my elf-child, Ash. I will see him on Saturday, and the Cannes red carpet would have been much more fun if he had been on it.
...
Whether or not I get to read the Cheesecake Factory Menu in public (or Dr Seuss's tonguetwisting Fox in Socks) I will be doing a few more readings and talks this year. Tickets are going fast:
Each of these should be links to the event -- all of them are solo me just reading and talking and answering your questions, except for the Hartford one, where I'll be interviewed by the NYPL's very own Paul Holdengraber.
(I wrote this on Tumblr. It's since been picked up and quoted all over the place, and I'm being asked a lot if it's actually something I said, and if it's true. It is, and it is. Here's the original.) duckswearhats asked: Hi, I read that you've dealt with with impostor syndrome in the past, and I'm really struggling with that right now. I'm in a good place and my friends are going through a lot, and I'm struggling to justify my success to myself when such amazing people are unhappy. I was wondering if you have any tips to feel less like this and maybe be kinder to myself, but without hurting anyone around me. It's a big ask, I know, but any help would make my life a lot less stressful
The best help I can offer is to point you to Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence. She talks about Imposter Syndrome (and interviews me in it) and offers helpful insight.
The second best help might be in the form of an anecdote. Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name*. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”
And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”
And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.
*(I remember being amused and flattered that he knew who I was, not because he'd read anything by me, but because the Google algorithm of the time had me down as Neil #1. If you just typed Neil, it would take you to neilgaiman.com. Many people, including me, felt that if there was a Neil #1, it was most definitely him.)
I am teaching Translation at the University of Nottingham, and every year I am running an extra-curricular programme on cultural translation. In one week of that programme, I have students analyse and translate the ending of the Graveyard Book, with particular emphasis on capturing the emotional development that runs through the pages.
Most of my students are quite young (21-25) and working into languages that are quite far away from English (e.g. Chinese, Slovene, Russian, Arabic), and some of them are very insecure about what liberties they can take in terms of syntax, word choice, collocation etc. when they translate literature. Especially the song that Mistress Owens sings for Bod poses a challenge, as recreating rhythm and rhyme, while sticking closely to the English words usually results in clumsy verse. Some of them opt for a recreation that entails replacing some of the original images, resulting in quite beautiful renditions that actually sound like, say, a Chinese lullaby, rhymes and all, while others choose to translate almost word for word, so as to not interefere with the original text.
I know that different authors have different opinions on the matter of what their translators should do/are allowed to do - Tolkien, was keen on retaining names, Eco was keen on retaining scenes and rhythm, but not necessarily the same items and cultural references he used; and I was wondering if you could comment on what you would tell a translator (or perhaps did tell translators) who translates your work, for instance to, as you once said in an interview, make the reader 'sniffly' at the end of the Graveyard Book.
I hope you read this, and I hope you find the time to answer, and I'd like to share that every time we do this task, there are a lot of tissues emerging from pockets and bags, as the students read through Bod's departure.
Thank you for your work, Neil. It makes a difference. Klaus That's such a good question, and I'm not sure that it has a single answer. I'm not sure there are hard and fast rules: more like a set of "if... then..." questions. For Mistress Owens' song, I'd want it to feel, for the reader, like a cradle song, if the translator can manage that. If they can't, then they should probably go literal. What I want is for the reader, in whatever the reader's native language is, to get something close to the experience that a reader in of the original in English would have. The rhythms don't have to be my rhythms, nor the rhymes my rhymes, nor the words exactly my words, if it feels like a cradle song, and it means the same thing. (The hardest thing I've ever done as a writer -- or at least, the thing I spent the most time on for the least amount of words -- was Princess Mononoke, writing the English language lyrics for the theme song and for the Tatara Women's song. And I'm not even sure that you can hear the words of the Tatara Women's song in the film. The challenge was taking the Japanese lyrics and then making it work as English lyrics that you could sing to the Japanese tunes.) I figure a translator has a huge tool kit at his or her or their disposal. I've had translators decide to keep names of characters and translators change the names of books (The Graveyard Book's title in French is L'Etrange Vie de Nobody Owens -- the Strange Life of Nobody Owens); I've had translators change the names of characters while keeping the name of the book (Mr Wednesday in the French edition of American Gods -- which is called, in French, American Gods -- is called Voyageur, because Wednesday in French is Mercredi -- Mercury's Day, not Odin's). I don't want the translators inserting themselves between the reader and the book. (There wasn early French edition of Stardust, where the translator decided that the book was an allegory based on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, and added notes to make sure the reader understood this.) I don't want things mistranslated in ways that, in these days of Google, there is no excuse for. (That same French Stardust translator thought, and footnoted, that the Unseelie Court was a complex pun based around Un-, See and Lie, and not a division of fairies.) I never mind when translators send me questions. Sometimes they simply don't understand something, sometimes they want to know what part of something is important for me. Sometimes they have queries which turn out to be goofs on my part which they caught because they read the text so closely. I assume that for some languages and some translators there are things that will be easier and things that will be harder. Puns and things that are specific to the English language will always be hard -- my only advice to translators on that is to do the best you can, and know there are some things you can't do. But, if you can, get the flavour of what I was trying to do. Does that help?
I'm typing this on a
plane to Australia where I will hunker down and go back to being a
man writing a novel, and life will turn into a long-running battle
between man and blank page, between man and what happens next,
between man and the people in his book who have other ideas about
what they ought to be doing now.
I had a fascinating
time on the road, though. I was never not exhausted: Initially I knew that all I had to do
was keep going until the second weekend, and then by the time I got to that weekend plans had changed and now I was in Iceland for 36 hours, filming a mini-documentary
extra for American Gods. It was wonderful: I love Iceland. But I was
tired, and didn't really get to see much Iceland.
(My favourite moment
was one where the director asked if I would mind being filmed in an
alleyway reading American Gods. I suggested we wander into a bookshop
instead, if they didn't mind, and have me look at books in there. So I did, and took the opportunity to sign as many books as I could, in the time we had, racing before the last of the February light went.)
Iceland really is beautiful. And if it wasn't for Iceland, there wouldn't be an American Gods...
I had some really fun times. The BBC radio interviews were all so different and all so much fun. My Royal Festival Hall event was a delight to do, and that lunchtime I showed up as Children's Laureate Chris Riddell's secret guest on the same stage, and I got to meet Posy Simmonds and turned immediately into a starstruck teen.
Chris stayed and drew while I spoke and was interviewed that night:
\
...
Now I'm in Melbourne, Australia and it's two days later and I'm not really sure where the last 48 hours went. I caught up on my sleep (Amanda and Ash are in Adelaide, where she's performing), started to clamber up the email mountain that was waiting for me, spent time with a sick friend, and, today, actually started to write some more of the novel.
Norse Mythology came out on February the 7th and went straight in at Number One on the US, UK and Canadian bestseller lists; in its second week it dropped to Number Two in the US, and has somehow stayed at #1 in the UK and Canada, despite a lot of bookshops running out of copies. The phenomenon of it becoming an incendiary sell-out hit has left me delighted and a bit baffled -- my books always sell, but they usually sell sanely and normally and I'm a bestselling author because they keep on selling in healthy numbers for ever. It's not usual to see people online talking about visiting five bookshops and getting the last copy (or failing to find any) in whatever town or city they are in. People (friends, family, journalists, even Amanda) tell me that I and the publishers and the bookshops must have expected this sort of response, and I reply that if we'd expected this level of enthusiasm and sales, the publishers would have printed a lot more copies to begin with and the booksellers would all have ordered a lot more copies, and for that matter I wouldn't have taken over four years to write the book...
But then, I think it may be that this book happens to be ridiculously popular partly because it is now and this is the right time for it to have been published.
And I'm now realising that if I keep linking to reviews, interviews and such on either side of the Atlantic this blog will never end...
So here is the cover of a recent Australian Sunday supplement: do not let its 1977 cover date fool you.
....
On public events: If you go and look at Where's Neil you will see the public appearances I'm doing this year. Of the events in Spring, Seattle is sold out and so is Santa Rosa and Boston, Costa Mesa is almost sold out, Mesa AZ is going fast, and there are... still lots and lots of tickets in San Diego.
I don't know why this is. However, if you fancy coming to see me talk and read and answer questions and such, and you can't get in to any of the other evenings, San Diego is a two hour train ride from LA and they even have wifi on the train, andit's less than three hour's flying time from Seattle. And right now, there are seats. ("San Diego. It's not just for ComicCon.")
I have news on the only New York area event, too: it's on April 15th, at Bard College, where I am a professor. It's going to be all about American Gods, and I'm going to be interviewed by my special guest, American Gods' Executive Producer and co-showrunner Bryan Fuller. We are hoping to show you things on the big screen that night, too. After all, it will only be two weeks before the first episode of American Gods goes out.
AMERICAN GODS now has a broadcast date: the first episode of the first season will be broadcast on Starz on April 30th in the US, and be watchable digitally too, via Starz on Amazon Prime.
Outside of the US, you can watch American Gods on Amazon Prime Video, from May 1st.
...
And my biggest news of all, even bigger and more exciting than a Number One International Bestseller, or a glorious TV series adapted from my novel launching, is this: I've been appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees. I even have a certificate. (It is blue and the same size as a passport.) I'm not sure what this means in real terms: I'm going to keep doing the work I've been doing since 2013 to draw attention to refugees, to raise awareness and knowledge, and to help them.
I was disappointed to learn I won't get diplomatic immunity from parking tickets*.
Here's the Facebook Live interview announcement, in which I am interviewed by Jonathan Ross and answer questions from the people watching. The interview begins about 4 minutes and 30 seconds in.
A small thought on reading George W M Reynolds’ Wagner the Wehr-Wolf on a plane.
It was obvious, just as it was open to no doubt, no kind of doubt at all, oh reader, that the person, the fine, good hearted gentleman who had written this story, a man with the frosty hair of too many winters yet still with the apple-cheeked demeanour of a lad of no more than thirteen summers, a lad ready to clamber out on a spring morning his pockets filled with marbles, aye and perchance even stuffed with several of the miniature animals that comprise a Noah’s Ark as well: this individual of whom I speak, this person and this noble, fusty elderly and yet young person alone, was, there was no arguing with it or saying that it was not happening, for it was, it was and none could deny it with an honest heart and a clear conscience: this man and no other, I tell you, was being paid, recompensed and otherwise compensated by the word.
I'm on a plane to LA, where I change planes and fly to New York. My alarm went off in Hobart, Tasmania at 4 am this morning, the 8th of February. (I was at the MONA Museum, where Amanda will be playing a gig. There may be nicer places to stay than the pavilions at the MONA Museum, and better places to eat than the Source restaurant at MONA, and there may even be finer museum-gallery-James-Bond-Villain-Lairs than MONA, but I have not yet encountered them.) I will land in New York at 6pmish on the 8th of February, about 30 hours after I set off.
Yesterday, although it may still be today as I type this, was or is publication day for Norse Mythology. It seems to have gone straight to #1 on the Amazon book charts (it's www.bit.ly/NorseMythology) which has taken me rather by surprise. Not that I'm grumbling, mind. I just wish I was enjoying it with loved ones and friends instead of sitting on a plane in the dark.
I went with the family and with some of the Bookend Trust folk to the Bonorong Animal Sactuary in Tasmania. Go, if you are there. They take in injured birds and animals and rehabilitate them, then, if they can, they return them to the wild. We fed an echidna and tawny frogmouths and sugar gliders and a wombat and many, many kangaroos...
I took 2016 off from all public engagements, in order to get a novel written.
I did a lot of things last year. I finished writing the Norse Mythology book (it comes out in February). I finished writing the six hour long Good Omens television series (the BBC will be making it this year). I did a lot of baby-raising. I endured a hurricane and a bad haircut. And I got the new novel started...
But I didn't get it finished.
So this year, I'll be madly writing a novel AND doing the public appearances and such I didn't do last year.
There's a West Coast tour in March/April, that starts in San Diego and finishes in Seattle, and goes to Costa Mesa (which is secretly Los Angeles) and Santa Rosa (north of the Bay Area).
I'll be at Bard College on the 15th of April, talking about American Gods and the American Gods TV series (and if possible, we'll be screening an episode or two).
In July I'll be in Texas (Austin, Dallas and Houston) and in Hartford CT.
There's another talk in a Library that isn't on here, but basically, that's about it. (I'm not listing the New York or London Norse Mythology events in February as they are both sold out -- although there are still a few tickets on sale for Town Hall members.)
The brown links will take you to relevant place on the Where's Neil page.
Some of the events have plenty of tickets left, some are almost sold out. You probably need to move fast if you want to get a ticket for Seattle. (Mostly the ones with lots of tickets left have only just gone onsale.) The "Evening With..." is me talking, and reading things published and things new, and answering questions.
Dallas is not yet available singly -- but you can get tickets if you wanted to see me and two other events. And they have Neil deGrasse Tyson and they have Fran Lebowitz and Garrison Keillor there for you to choose from, giving rise to one of my favourite Headlines of last year:
*I understand they might have changed it in later editions.
...
I'm getting better. Fever is very over. Bronchitis is a pain in the chest but it is on the mend. Ash got very sick after I did, but now he's through the fever bit and is perking up, which bodes well for everyone getting a bit more sleep: his nose is running like a tap, though, which means that sometimes without even trying he blows snot-bubbles half the size of his head.
We're in Melbourne. Amanda's going to be doing a residency here, while she also tours Australia. I am writing my novel, using as my office the same tiny flat that Amanda began to work on The Art of Asking. (I've read it reported online that we've moved to Australia now, but we haven't. We're here for a couple of months. We just have a different kind of visa. But 'they have a different kind of visa' isn't really newsworthy.)
And it was our sixth wedding anniversary. This is a photo of Amanda and Ash I took a week ago, on Hermosa Beach, when we got stranded for 24 hours in LA by a late plane. I am a lucky man to have so much love in my life.
We landed in Brisbane 24 hours late, because a set of plane delays had made us miss the flight we were meant to be on, and I started fading away during the drive out here. (I wasn't driving. I was entertaining Ash, mostly.) By the time we got to the house I was gone. I need to sleep, I thought, and isn't it odd that in such a hot part of Australia in high summer it is so cold that I'm shivering...
And then I was mostly asleep for 3 days, with a fever caused by something that was probably a really nasty flu. Then it became a chest infection. During the short waking periods I would read volume 3 of Henry Mayhew's LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR.
Three days of fever dreams filled with Guy Fawkes Men and Penny Mousetrap makers was entertaining, but it wasn't getting better. So yesterday evening, I went in to the Woodford Festival to see the doctor there. By luck, I caught the song Amanda dedicated to me, then went home, took the medicine, slept, woke up, thought I really need to write a blog for the New Year, and went straight back to sleep...
Which is why I'm writing a New Year's wish on New Year's Day. Although it's New Year's Eve still in the US (and in the UK as I type this, but it will already be next year there by the time I post it).
It's been a strange, hard year for so many of us. I find myself thinking of the old Jack Benny radio shows. Particularly during World War Two they'd do a new year's sketch, where the old year (played by Jack, with an old man voice) would give advice to the new year (played by a child). They weren't funny: they were a mixture of hope and sentiment, optimism, realism and resilience.
We are going to need all of these things in 2017.
For this year, the words are Leonard Cohen's, someone that 2016 took from us.
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget tomake some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
...I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
And for this year, my wish for each of us is small and very simple.
And it's this.
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
It's a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world.
So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we're faking them.
And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it's joy we're looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation.
So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.
Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It's too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.
Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them.
Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.
.......
And, because Death took so much in 2016, I'll give her the final word. (It's from the 911 short story "The Wheel" with art by Chris Bachalo.)
We were in Toronto on November the 11th, the day after we heard Leonard Cohen died, and four days after the election. I was there as tour nanny, but Amanda asked if I would do something on her stage. I loved the spoken word version of Democracy Leonard Cohen had recorded, and so I went to YouTube, worked out what lines from the song he had dropped for the poem, and what he had moved, and read it on the stage.
And then I did it again in Chicago and Minneapolis.
We recorded it, me taking time from the recording of the audiobook of How The Marquis Got His Coat Back to record it, and email it to her, Amanda recording her piano accompaniment up a mountain in a snowstorm, then Jherek Bischoff and a string section doing glorious quiet things to make it sing. We gave it to PEN America as a gift, to draw attention to their sterling work and to help raise funds for them. Then David Mack painted many paintings (there's one below this), and Olga Nunes animated them into a video.
It was all funded by Amanda’s Patreon, and I thank all 9000-odd people who support her and it.
It’s a very beautiful video. I could post the YouTube video here, but I’d rather you went and watched it at the PEN America page, at https://pen.org/donate-democracy.
If you watch it, and it it moves you, reblog it. I hope people watch it. I hope they care.