what you can't help doing

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...


...

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 discovered that it may actually 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 start, 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 no-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 in 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, if 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. But the CBLDF Neil Gaiman store one has a pretty Mike Kaluta cover of me being dead on it. And it's cheap...)

Labels: absolute Sandman, Chengdu, eagle awards, inadvertently quoting oneself, Julie Schwartz memorial lecture, rice pudding, what style is

Long Post, I'm afraid....

I'll be signing books in Beijing at the Book Festival at 9:30 am this Friday, the 31st. It's at the China International Exhibition Centre. No details yet on the Bookworm event.

....

So the conference was terrific. 5000 Chinese SF fans, a host of Chinese authors, a Russian Cosmonaut, several Japanese writers and a clutch of Western authors – one English author (me) and Canadian author Rob Sawyer (who is probably the most famous and beloved foreign SF author in China), Nancy Kress and Michael Swanwick, not to mention David Brin for the first few days with his family en route to WorldCon in Japan, along with author David Hill and about a half dozen North American and Australian or New Zealand SF fans, academics, and people who thought it would be fun to go to Chengdu, and two Americans who already lived there.



And it was. Lots of fun, that is.

You can read about it here...

And the food...

The trouble with the food is that I really like it. Not just sort of like it, but really like it. After a couple of occasions when I stopped enjoying something after finding out what it was, I decided not to worry about what things were, or at least, not to ask. Mostly I'd just eat it and enjoy.

I remember in Singapore feeling like I was being fattened for the slaughter. In retrospect my time in Singapore was like a slimming week at a health farm. In Chengdu our Chinese hosts wanted to make sure that we were being fed and were happy, so every meal was, literally, a banquet. I can probably manage about one banquet a week in real life. One a day if I have to. Here I'd eat a large breakfast (because I do when I travel, because you're never sure when you'll eat next. Probably a big mistake in retrospect. But I loved the Chinese breakfasty things...) and then once the conference was over we'd find ourselves having a banquet for lunch. Followed, just at the point where I was beginning to feel no longer uncomfortably full, by a banquet for dinner.

Chengdu is in Sichuan province, where the Szechuan cuisine comes from. The food is great. I mean, I liked pretty much everything I put in my mouth. But it's now lunchtime on the following day and I am still feeling full from yesterday.

I'd met Rob Sawyer
before at the Hugo awards in Toronto, but we didn't know each other, met Nancy Kress with her late husband Charles Sheffield at ICFA in Florida, but didn't really know either of them, so enjoyed getting to know them (and Rob's wife Carolyn). I knew Michael Swanwick a little better because we share some enthusiasms -- James Branch Cabell and R.A. Lafferty and Hope Mirrlees for three -- and it was marvellous talking with Michael, who knows an awful lot about everything.

My view of the conference is sort of fragmented -- I signed a great many things for an awful lot of people. I talked and was translated as I talked. (I think my interpreter Heather was pretty good, because when she translated my jokes, people laughed.) There was an international forum on the future of SF or something like that.



The conference was about Science Fiction and about fantasy and about the future. My favourite bit of the conference was probably outside the conference – after it was over, a meeting in a teahouse between some of the Chinese authors and some of the foreign authors, just comparing notes and finding stuff out.



Let's see. Pandas. I knew about the Chengdu Panda reserve because I had a friend who worked there for a summer. Really, it was all I knew about Chengdu. It's lovely. And it's a wonderful thing being an honoured foreign guest somewhere like that -- you get shown all the cool stuff, get to see Pandas, red ones and giant ones, and then find yourself put in a blue disposable smock and gloves (to protect the pandas from you, asnd not the other way around) and you get a year-old Panda placed on your lap. Utter, utter happiness. Better than any number of awards. Makes being a writer completely worthwhile. I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months. Honest.



Then it rained. Real, monsoony rain. Nancy Kress told me that she couldn't get any wetter and I assured her she could, and it kept raining and she did. Lunch at the Panda refuge restaurant was a banquet, where the food just kept coming. (It would be easier if you knew how many dishes would arrive. But you never do. And when you think, Ah, that was all the food, you are surprised by the arrival of another five bowls.)

From the Pandas we went to a museum to learn about the Jinsha people and culture in that part of the world in what, in England, would be considered prehistoric times, only it wasn't prehistoric for them. The museum was fascinating. Unfortunately we weren't quite sure where we were or what we were seeing, and the Museum Guide wasn't up to giving us the five minutes of background that we needed to figure it all out, so we had to work it all out as we went along -- we were initially shown bones and excavations and had no idea who left the bones or even that there was a thriving city of 10,000 people there back in the dawn of time, and we only put it together on about the third or fourth museum room. Amazing stuff, though -- jade and gold workers from before what I would have thought of as history.

From the museum we travelled to another part of Chengdu, and dinner in a courtyard. Which, apart from it being the second banquet of the day, was amazing, lots of tiny courses, each brought over, and mostly I just ate and sometimes asked what I'd just eaten ("That sweet course? the red things in the white stuff?" "Those are wolfberries in cloud-fungus." "Gosh.") A full moon.



Michael Swanwick and I looked at a pavement, where a pile of garbage, an old cassette tape, and what looked like an old videophone were to be found, and we said, at the same time, “It's a Bill Gibson moment,” because it was, so I took a picture.




And back to the hotel. Where I fell asleep sitting up in a chair trying to do email. Which was why I only posted a picture of me and my panda as a blog entry that night.



Yesterday we got into a bus which took us to the Leisure conference. Outside, Michael Swanwick sat on a dragon head and achieved enlightenment.

Truthfully, I'm not quite sure why we were there or what it was for, but it was enormously enjoyable: a presentation on Chengdu and the Sichuan area as a holiday destination, I guess, and the future of leisure in Chengdu. Whatever it was, we had a wonderful time: we watched twin girls demonstrating a tea ceremony, three girls playing amazing things on ancient native instruments,

songs were sung, talks were given, speeches were made, and at one somewhat surreal point the North American contingent were chivvied up on the stage to massacre “Oh Susanna”. I videoed the event, and have made it very clear to all involved that for a significant amount of money I will refrain from putting it up on YouTube.

The Russian cosmonaut, on the other hand, could sing.


My own share of surreality had occurred a few minutes earlier when a chef had expertly demonstrated a dessert called, I think, Three Cannon Shots, in which rice is balled and bounced off a drum-top into a container of powdered sugar and cinnamon (I think), and then I was called up to demonstrate the technique as performed by an amateur. I managed to get all the balls into the right place on the third attempt.


Some of the statistics were astonishing. You could eat in a different restaurant in Chengdu every day, and not repeat a restaurant in 80 years....

Then lunch. David Hill, author and former chef, had made a Jambalaya using local ingredients, which was the strangest fusion cuisine I think I've ever eaten.
It was great, unique, filling... and was thus immediately followed by a hotpot banquet.

On the bus and to a local high school, where we were presented with flowers and saluted, introduced and led out again, leaving only the Cosmonaut and David Hill to talk to the kids.

Then a short shopping trip – I bought Maddy's birthday present and some books of postcards.

From there we headed out of the town for the Grape Festival. I think I'd sort of imagined the Grape Festival as something that probably went back thousands of years to Jinsha times, and I kept on thinking that until I saw people selling grapes beside the road, beneath huge red umbrellas.

The grapes were huge mauve California-style grapes, at which point it occurred to me to ask. “How long have grapes been grown here?” Turned out that they were a very recent crop, that the festival was four years old, and the grape vines were indeed originally from California. The people used to sell watermelons beneath the red umbrellas.


From there to a banquet.



And the food just kept on coming...


I skipped breakfast this morning. Just packed, and flew to Beijing, and I wrote most of this on the plane.

...

Random observations: Chinese planes are, on the basis of the two I've taken so far, nicer than US planes. Better service, cleaner, more comfortable. They remind me of being on planes in America twenty years ago, when it was less unpleasant.

Random observation two: Chinese driving and road-crossing techniques seem to exist in a cheerful anarchy that would get you killed in most, perhaps all, other countries. I have watched five cars drive abreast on a three lane highway. I've not yet seen anyone using a seatbelt. Haven't yet seen any accidents, which is very odd.

Labels: banquets, Chengdu, chengdu panda centre, China, on the antique nature of grape festivals

mist in the morning

What do you think of Chengdu? asked the president of Science Fiction World as we came in from the airport yesterday.

I can't see very much of it through the mist, I said, which was probably the wrong answer.

It's a big city, and it feels like a big city. It looked amazing last night as we walked through it in the rain, all neon reflected in wet pavements. I just got up and looked out of my window. The mist is back, yellow in the morning light, and the world looks like a science fiction film...

Last night I met my translator for today's talk. Saw my fellow authors (David Brin and family, Nancy Kress, Robert J. Sawyer and wife and others) we were fed (I was warned that the food here would be too spicy, but it was all great) and then went to the bookworm meeting.

Today I give a speech about The Nature of Fantasy.

...

Dear Neil, Rather than go through the whole thing again, I'd just like to direct you to Empire Magazine's rant about Beowulf: http://www.empireonline.com/empireblog/Post.asp?id=20

Notably, that people outside the US can't watch the trailer. Not the best PR in the world!

Ian

For some reason probably having mostly to do with being in China, most blogs don't come up on my computer and that's one that doesn't, so I can't see the rant. But as far as I know the Beowulf "red band trailer" is exactly the same as the European Trailer that's already been out for weeks.

Hi Neil,

Not so much a question but I thought you might be interested/could pimp it out far better than I ever could. I've just set up a group on Flickr for Sandman related body modification after getting one myself ('sometimes, when you fall, you fly.' from Fear of Falling, on my inner arm to be precise - my first tattoo too.) and what better way to get photos of all the wonderful mods inspired by Sandman together in one place?You can find it here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/sandman_bodyart/

rejoicing under the name 'green mouse icecream'. It's open to all submissions. I'll only step in if it's unrelated/spam.

Cheers! Meg.

Consider it, er, pimped.

Took my wife to see Stardust on opening weekend. She liked it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Well done by all, especially the character actor bits which added so much depth. On to the question, which I have never seen answered elsewhere: Stardust cost $70 million, and you projected it would gross $100 million worldwide. I know Hollywood regularly performs voodoo accounting, wherein they claim with a straight face that every movie ever made has lost money (except Titanic, which barely broke even), but what's the real story? How much of that $100 million goes to the studio and how much stays with the theaters? Does it vary substantially, and if so, based on what factors? Different regions of the world, different theater chains, different studios, what's the scoop?

Good question, and I don't actually know. I'll try to find out as best I can and answer you here. I've always assumed that voodoo accounting would mean that nothing would ever make money anyway, no matter what you make. I remember learning in 1990, the first time we sold GOOD OMENS that "net points" on a film are nice things in theory but nothing you're ever likely to take to a bank.

Stardust seems to be doing fine currently -- it came out in another three territories last week, according to Box Office Mojo, and "picked up $4.8 million from five markets for a $9.1 million total. The fantasy feature added two more impressive starts in South Korea ($2.3 million from 176 screens) and the Ukraine (a top-ranked $577,317 from 75 screens), but looked awful in the United Arab Emirates ($102,840 from 19 screens). In Russia, it fell 40 percent for a $6 million total. " I wonder why the United Arab Emirates didn't like it. But hurrah for Ukranians and the South Koreans. So after 14 days, it's made $31 million, with most of the world to go.

...

Here's the view from my window. And my reflection. The yellow morning mist has gone though. I'll try and be quicker with the camera tomorrow.

Labels: Chengdu, Stardust, studio accountancy, tattoos

Chengdu and elsewhere

I have a little Chengdu information:

On Aug 24th at 7.00pm at the Chengdu Bookworm there is some kind of meet-and-chat with the visiting authors (I think) and the public, and I expect some signing.

And on August the 25th at 3.00pm I'm going to give a talk on The Nature of Fantasy at the conference hall of the science and technology museum.

And here's a Daily Scans link to a two page comic that Mark Buckingham and I did to celebrate Alan Moore's 50th Birthday: http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/3895760.html

Neil- Sorry to waste your time, but as someone who is away from home frequently, I thought you might have some insight on the matter. I am starting a new job next month that will require me to be away for extended periods. How do you cope with doing this? My daughter is eight, and she is having a rough time with the idea of Daddy being away (and I am as well-and not taking the job is not really an option), and I'm hoping you can help. Please don't use my name if you post this.Thanks!

It's always hard. For years we never went on holiday, because I was always so glad to be home and Going Somewhere felt like work. Being home, with my books and my family, ah, that was a grand adventure....

When Maddy was that age and younger I went away for several months to work on American Gods, and I'd still read to her every night, over the phone (she'd have a copy of the book as well at her end), which somehow helped. She'd still get half an hour or forty minutes every night, and I'd read her a chapter and then we'd talk. We'd also write poems in email back and forth. It helped -- having a rhythm, having something predictable and time that was hers. And trying to make it as much of a game as we could. But it's not perfect. And it's never easy.

Labels: Chengdu, China, going away, why Alan Moore should be made Wizard of England