Slashdot Mirror

Writer and novelist Neil Gaiman and Amber Benson of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame have teamed up to star in a new vampire movie called, Blood Kiss. Kickstarted by ST:TNG and Emmy-winning writer Michael Reaves, Blood Kiss is a film noir vampire movie set in Golden Age Hollywood. Of his acting debut Gaiman says, "I'm willing to pretend that the prospect of acting doesn't terrify me in order to help Michael Reaves make his film." The trio have agreed to take a break from the blood and answer any questions you have about the new project or their past work. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Denial93 writes "Geek favorite author Neil Gaiman has just made his multi-award-winning bestselling novel 'American Gods' available online for free. It's a trial by the publisher, and runs for one month. Gaiman writes in his blog: 'If it works, and people read it, then a) we may be able to put up another book and b) sooner or later they'll simply let us give away the book in electronic form....' It's an excellent book and much deserving of the many prestigious awards it has been getting."

Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."

A reader writes: "It appears that Neil Gaiman released two of his books (Anansi Boys and American Gods) as books on CD. The interesting twist is that they are being released as MP3 - which for the world of audio books is something pretty new. ". Indeed; MP3 audio books, I think, have given the book publishers the willies because of the DRM issue - anyone else seen this before? And also worth noting that Mirrormask was released in motion picture form and rocks. I think to describe it would be equal parts The Dark Crystal and Myst, combine with Carnivale and a dash of The City of Lost Children.

John "Widgett" Robinson writes "IGN FilmForce tapped a bunch of folks who knew and worked with Douglas Adams, asking them to share some stories of their time with the man himself. They've posted the results as an article that includes responses from Pythoner Terry Jones, author Neil Gaiman, actor Stephen Fry, Rutle Neil Innes, zoologist Mark Carwardine, and Monkee Michael Nesmith. I've never heard any of these stories before, so the thing winds up being a unique tribute to a very cool frood."

nadyne writes "Recently, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund ran an auction for the naming rights for a cruise ship in Neil Gaiman's upcoming novel Anansi Boys. Today, Neil Gaiman reported in a post to his blog that Markus Gaelli won this auction. According to Neil, Markus will use his hard-won auction to promote Squeak. He didn't tell us what the name of the cruise ship will be, but promised to do so in the future. Neil linked to Squeakland, although it's not clear whether Markus is associated with that site or Neil was just using it as a convenient starting point for his readers who might not know anything about Squeak."

Embedded Geek writes "Neil Gaiman is auctioning the opportunity to help pick a name in his upcoming novel Anansi Boys. Proceeds will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. "I've got to name a currently unnamed cruise ship in Anansi Boys. I have no idea what to call it, and, a couple of days ago, realised that my utter lack of inspiration could do good things for the CBLDF. If you wish, you can bid to have the ship named after you, your loved one, your dog, or even your favourite word." As of 10AM PST the bidding is up to US $2,225.00, but surely some slashdotter who cashed out of the bubble at the right time can bid it up. Be warned, though - the auction indicates "Successful bidder agrees to pay actual shipping costs.""

trickofperspective writes "To defray the cost of this year's session, following budget cuts at host school Michigan State University, the famed Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop is holding an online auction of items donated by past alums. Bidding opens January 28th on items such as a signed limited edition of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a signed, homeade galley of Cory Doctorow's upcoming Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and more."

As most regular readers know, I/we are fans of the CBLDF and the EFF (Contribute to both!) The CBLDF is running a charity auction which is collaboration between Dave Sim of Cerebus fame and Neil Gaiman of Sandman amongst others. There's some good background online as well as the auction itself. The money raised will go to fighting censorship in the graphic arts. I'd also heartily recommend reading Neil's blog and taking Dave Sim up on his offer. His collected form letter are funny, thought provoking and great to read. Oh - and happy birthday, Neil.

There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done. 1) right to keep and bear code - by arashiakari

Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United States) under the second amendment?

Neal:

Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can't tell whether this is a troll. I'm going to assume it's not, and answer the question seriously.

I'm no constitutional scholar but I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say "No, anything that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government is covered by the Second Amendment." There might be something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court Justices to see it that way. I suspect the answer is no. It's just too easy for them to say "it is not a weapon." To me it seems a lot easier simply to invoke the First Amendment.

Also, remember that there might be unwanted side effects to classifying code as weapons. In the U.S., where the right to bear certain weapons is written into the Constitution, it might seem like a clever way to secure access to such code. But authorities in other countries might say "look, even the U.S. Government defines this string of bits as a weapon---so we are going to outlaw it."

It's difficult to form an intelligent opinion on issues like this without doing a lot of work. One has to learn a lot about the issues and then think about them pretty hard. I haven't really done so, and so I'm inclined to trust people who have, like Matt Blaze. At crypto.com he has posted some interesting material that is germane to this topic.

See http://www.crypto.com/masterkey.html

and especially

http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html

To make a long argument short, what I have learned from Matt's writings on the topic is that (1) it's not a new issue, (2) it's a First Amendment issue, and (3) it's best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public.

2) The lack of respect... - by MosesJones

Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe" and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension by the "quality" press.

Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?

Neal:

OUCH!

(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)

First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.

To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition---which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called "literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings. Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's personality flaws---I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book "The System of the World" by one critic who found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher. And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me somewhat of the split between Christians and Faeries depicted in Susannah Clarke's wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." The faeries do whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as ludicrously irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve or appreciate their freedom.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.

In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on the Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with Neil Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his blog

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp

the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when viewed from the other side.

Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system I am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.

Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman publishes Anansi Boys, all of his readers are going to know about it through his site and most of them are going to buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in the New York Review of Books, or care what that review says.

So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.

What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews. For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of wildcat review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write about it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing apparatus. It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one of my books.

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as Slashdot is Exhibit A.

3) Singularity - by randalx

What are your thoughts on Vernor Vinge's Singularity prediction. Is it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by this new "species"?

Neal:

I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

I know Vernor. To know him is to respect him. He kicked my ass (as well as J. K. Rowling's and Greg Bear's and a few other people's) at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and on top of that he knows more physics than I ever will. So I don't for a moment think that he is peddling any such ideas with his prediction of a singularity. I am only telling you why I have a personal mental block as far as the Singularity prediction is concerned.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

5) What are you reading these days? - by IvyMike

Since you're Neal Stephenson, I suspect the answer could be something like "surveys of ancient Sumerian accounting systems".

If that's the case, please include a work of modern fiction or two in your list; something you think that a fan of your work might also enjoy. :)

Neal:

Fiction I have lately read and enjoyed:

Set this House in Order by Matt Ruff
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Iron Council by China Mieville
Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
The I Love Bees alternate reality game
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke
The Fool's Tale by Nicole Galland (in galleys; soon to be published)
Short story collections by Etgar Keret: The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God, and The Nimrod Flip-out. Last time I checked, The Nimrod Flip-out was only available from an Australian publisher named Picador, but this should pose only the most minor of challenges to Slashdot readers. Keret is a young Israeli writer who has also done some work in film and graphic novels.

Nonfiction:

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Lincoln's Cooper Union address
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

6) storygramming -by Doc Ruby

You programmed computers before you wrote novels. Greg Egan shares that hyphenated career, and continues to illustrate his stories with Java applets [netspace.net.au]. Do you still program, possibly targeting the same subjects with your word processor as your compiler?

As _Snow Crash_ was originally designed as an interactive game, and such landmarks as _Myst_ have regenerated as (usually bad) novels, do you see the arrival of a truly multimedia story, delivered simultaneously in multiple media, anytime soon? By whom, specifically or generally?

Neal:

It has already happened in the form of the I Love Bees alternate reality game, which, as many of you must know, is a promotional campaign for Halo 2. I know the people who did it, but I have lost track of what I promised not to reveal publicly, and so will shut up for now.

I still program, but I tend to do it as a diversion from writing, and so there is little crossover between it and fiction writing. Modern programming is hairy and difficult for me to get a grip on. This is because (1) there is so much user interface code, which kind of makes my eyes glaze over, and (2) GNU type code is crammed with macros, compiler directives and switches that make it very difficult for me to read the source files. Lately my platform of choice has been Mathematica, which is expensive (compared to gcc) but makes it easy to do anything with a few lines of code. Mathematica makes it easy to do proper documentation, in that you can mix narrative material freely with executable statements.

For Cryptonomicon I needed to generate some illustrations of a cutaway view of the mountain where Goto Dengo was building his tunnels. It needed to have a rough, natural-looking profile that maintained its roughness, but still had the same overall shape, when I zoomed in on it for more detailed illustrations. I did this with a Mathematica notebook that used the classic fractal technique of midpoint displacement.

For the Baroque Cycle books I needed to convert my manuscripts, which were all TeX files, into a Quark format used by the publisher. So I wrote an emacs lisp program that churned through the TeX files looking for TeX escape codes and converting them to their equivalents in Quark. This was nasty and tedious but, in the end, reasonably satisfying.

7) Money - by querencia

One of the major themes in Cryptonomicon that carried over (in a big way) to The Baroque Cycle is money. You introduced some "futuristic" views of currency and of where money might be going in Cryptonomicon, and you skillfully managed to do the same thing, while explaining some of the history of modern monetary systems, in the most recent books.

You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems (barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess---and believe me, it is a wild guess---I'd say that money and the way it works is going to be a constant, not a variable.

8) BeOS - by Coryoth

When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line," you were very much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do you still use BeOS 5, or have you acquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or, instead have you embraced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?

Neal:

You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

9) Travel tips for modern primitives? - by timothy

Mr. Stephenson:

I greatly enjoy your travel stories, both non-fiction (Mother Earth, Motherboard) and in particular your descriptions of the Philippines in Cryptonomicon.

Can you share some of the ideas you've developed for savvy trav'lin? For instance, how do you deal with carrying sufficient technology (whatever level you deem this to be) while minimizing the risk of theft, breakage, or loss by other means? Do you dress native or carry your entire wardrobe? [And broader, do you travel with something close to nothing, picking up necessary items as the need arises? What do you not leave home without?]

Do you carry any sort of self-defense means in some places, and if so What and Where?

Neal:

I haven't done that much in the way of adventuresome travel lately. Even when I was doing so, I was never the sort of hardened third-world travel geek that you are imagining. The thing is that when you go to such countries you can typically get a room in a five-star hotel for less than a hundred bucks a night. At that rate, it's easy to be a sellout and wallow in luxury. Staying in a dive is more romantic, but makes it harder to write. My excuse (if I need one) is that typically I'm not writing about backpackers and rural people in those countries; I'm writing about well-heeled expats whose natural habitat is airport bars and Shangri-La hotels. So that's where I tend to end up.

Re "self-defense means:" I am reminded of a history book I read recently entitled "Skeletons on the Zahara" by Dean King. It is about some American sailors who get shipwrecked on the Atlantic Coast of Africa and go through hell. Eventually most of them make it back to freedom with the help of some Arab traders based in Morocco. These traders range across the Sahara on incredibly arduous journeys. They are just about the toughest and meanest hombres you can possibly imagine. They've been through all kinds of fights and ambushes, plagues of locusts, sandstorms, etc. and come out on top. Because of their success they have acquired camels, horses, and weapons: not only swords and daggers but rifles and shotguns too. After having rescued the Americans, these guys go out on another journey in the desert, and find themselves surrounded by a few dozen people who are wretched even by the standards of the Sahara: no animals, little in the way of clothing, and no weapons except for bags containing stones. A fight breaks out. The traders discharge their weapons and kill everyone they shoot at: maybe half a dozen. Then before they can reload they are all killed by flying stones.

The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you.

10) Confidential Proposal, Off shore data haven (Score:5, Funny) - by SlashDread

Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country Nigeria.

I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Barrister Leonardo Akume, lawyer to the late Dr. Koffi Abachus, a brilliant Nigerian mathematician.

My former client, late Dr. Koffi Abachus, died in a mysterious plane crash in the year 1994 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind.

He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on data storage. It is said the data storage device he had developed, would be roughly ten times more secure compared to the latest quantum excyption techniques. The device was about the size of a steamer trunk, and stored on a privately owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr Koffi Abachus is also the King of the local tribe by heritage...

Neal:

Your proposition sounds quite reasonable. In order for me to provide you with the support that you need, I will need for you to wire $100,000 into my Swiss bank account...

Oh well.. Should there BE a data haven? If so, where?

Neal:

At this point, that is probably a technical question that I might not be competent to answer. I can carry a gig of encrypted data on a thumb drive now, and it doesn't cost much. Soon it'll be smaller and cheaper. Millions of people in different countries carrying gigs of data on thumb drives, iPods, cellphones, etc. make for a pretty robust distributed data storage system. It is difficult to imagine how one could build a centralized, hardened facility that would be more robust than that. But perhaps there's some technical or regulatory angle that I'm failing to appreciate here. I have not kept up to speed on this since Cryptonomicon.

11) Blue Origin - by Concerned Onlooker

The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin [blueorigin.com], a company that is working to "develop a crewed, suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space flight?

Neal:

Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.

Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.

As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

12) Do new publishing models make sense? - by Infonaut

Have you contemplated using any sort of alternative to traditional copyright for your works of fiction, such as a flavor of Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license? Do you feel that making money as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term, or do you think that writers like Lessig who distribute electronically via CC are merely indulging in a short-lived fad?

Neal:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved on. My suspicion is that everything that's been going on lately will amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to making money for themselves and for authors.

You can use the brick-and-mortar bookstore as a way to think about this. There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there's no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it's true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you're going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that's only the smallest part of what publishers actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.

He says, "Sorry about how long this took to do. Blame it on a European Tour that took much more of my time than I have ever imagined..." No problem, Neil. We love you, and your answers to our questions were certainly worth the wait.

1) Mononoke's Disappointing Box Office - by RobertB-DC
Mr. Gaiman, after the time, effort, and research you put into the dub of Princess Mononoke, were you disappointed by the film's performance at the US box office? Do you feel that the film was mishandled by Miramax, or were US audiences not quite ready to have their expectations of animation stretched that far?

Neil:
Not particularly disappointed, but then I've never equated sales, good or bad, with quality, and Princess Mononoke was pretty much the first ever attempt to release something like that into movie theatres in the US. I took much more pleasure in seeing how close we got to 100% at RottenTomatoes.com than I was ever bothered by its box office.

Do I think Miramax could have handled it better? Probably, in a lot of ways -- for example, there was some silliness in the beginning where, once I'd written five drafts of the script, each word having to be approved each time by Ghibli and Miramax, they gave my final draft to someone to make sure that the mouth movements matched the script, and then cut me out of the loop for six months. The person who did the mouth-flap draft didn't like my script, and rewrote it. His version was what was recorded, initially. They screened it. It was a disaster. Then they called me back in and let me work with the director, Jack Fletcher, and he and I went back and put as much of my original dialogue back in as we could, but it all had to be recorded fairly fast at this point. I was proud of the final product, but wished that I'd been included during the period when everything went wrong: it would have made things a lot easier, and we could have been polishing at the end rather than desperately fixing things.

Harvey Weinstein really wanted to trim it. It's a long film. If Ghibli had let him trim, Miramax might have gone much wider with the film, and more movie theatres might have taken a chance on it -- but then, the audience would have been (rightly) complaining about not having been shown the whole film, as it was made, and I'd probably now be answering questions on Slashdot about whether the restoration of the missing minutes on the DVD made up for losing them in the cinemas...

Having said all that, Miramax didn't throw it away: they released it into the "ten major markets", and if the audiences had come out for it, then its theatrical release would have got much wider. Probably best simply to view it as a step on the way to something...

2) The Balance of Collaboration - by buckhead_buddy
Do you find solo work (such as American Gods) to be more productive or pleasant for you than collaborative work (such as Good Omens)?

The graphic novel medium relies strongly on collaboration. Not only with artists and editors, but also to a limited extent with marketers, trademark lawyers, and even the "past continuity" of what others before you have written. Your persistence in this field seems like it could get to be almost hellish unless you drew very solid boundaries with your collaborators or you really enjoyed such chaos.

As a freelance programmer I struggle trying to find the appropriate balance of collaboration to satisfy and motivate. While your work is in a completely different field, I'm curious what thoughts, anecdotes, or advice you might have on keeping collaboration in balance.

Neil:
I like being able to do both, really. The biggest difference is that I can enjoy the collaborative work, when it's done, more than I could ever enjoy, for example, a short story of mine. I'd never pick up a solo novel of mine to read for pleasure, whereas I've taken lots of pleasure from Sandman: ENDLESS NIGHTS.

There are tricks to collaboration, the biggest one of which is getting the best work from your collaborator by knowing what it is they do, and enjoying it, and bouncing off them.

In writing together, it's both of you having the same story or story voice in your heads. I'm a fairly good mimic, which also helps (it's still amusing to hear people tell me what parts of Good Omens I wrote or Terry wrote. Mostly, they're wrong.)

I suspect I learned more from writing American Gods, or from getting through solo screenplays, than I did from Good Omens or, say, the Beowulf I wrote with Roger Avary, because it's very easy to let your co-writer do a bit you're going to have problems with. But you learn more from getting through the bits you have problems with than you ever do sailing blithely across the parts that, for you, are easy.

Working with artists is a very different process to collaborating with other writers. It's a collaborative process, sure, but, for me anyway, knowing who's going to be drawing something is the first piece in the puzzle of what the story is going to be. I couldn't have made Stardust without Charles Vess, because it started as trying to think of something I wanted to see Charles draw. Given Charles's fondness for trees and faerie and the Victorian fairy illustrators, that was the way my mind went. It's not where my mind would have gone had I decided to do a project with, say, Geoff Darrow.

Occasionally it happens upside down -- I'll write something down and then need to find an illustrator. In this case I normally adopt Tactic #1, which is to say, ask Dave McKean if he wants to draw it. So far I've never had to figure out what Tactic #2 would be, as Dave drew the pictures for Coraline, for The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and for The Wolves in the Walls. And he will be illustrating a book called Crazy Hair, my next children's book, using the computers he's currently using to animate the creatures and world in Mirror-mask, our film for Hensons.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what you mean about collaborating in the graphic novel medium. Sure, you work with editors, letterers, publicists, agents, lawyers, publicity people, bookshop and comic shop owners, and, passively, with the people who were there before you. And yes, there's a certain amount of chaos, and yes, I do enjoy it.

But then, that's true for most people in any artistic field. You don't exist in a vacuum. Art's always a dialogue with those who went before, and with the other people out there in your field, and with those who make what you do happen (Composers need orchestras, and grants, and, sometimes, movies-or-games. And lawyers. And agents. Anyone involved in making a movie depends on hundreds of other people for -- well, everything, really.) You have to learn to play well with others, even if it's not your natural temperament. And, unless you're a dedicated hermit and mystery of the James Tiptree Jr persuasion, you will have to deal with practically as many people as a solo novelist -- copy editors and editors and publicists and agents and lawyers and Bookshop managers and so forth... Although you may have lots of down time while you're away and writing, during which people leave you alone.

3) I know I should be asking about you and your work - by rgoer
So I love every word I've read from your pen, but presently I'm in the middle of a dry spell--and the way I figure, if you're going to seek advice, seek advice from one you admire, right? So, are there any authors out there right now you can't get enough of? Anybody you're reading that you feel nobody should miss? Fiction, nonfiction, a decent biography you've read lately? Do you even have time to get a good read in with all the hustle and bustle of just being Neil Gaiman?

Neil:
I don't get as much reading time as I want, and I miss it very much.

But I still read.

When you start writing fiction, you start reading less fiction. Not sure why this is, but it's true.

Personally, I tend to read indiscriminately until I get obsessed by something. My current obsession, which may or may not turn into fiction at some point, is the Jack Benny radio show, so there's an awful lot of reading about that and about American Radio going on.

Books I've enjoyed over the last few months (off the top of my head, and from a quick glance to the shelf immediately to my right) would include:

The Power of Babel - A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter. Great book about Language, although every country I went to on my recent book tours I'd quote an interesting fact about their language from the book, and someone would say "Well, yes... but it's not quite like that..."

The Knight by Gene Wolfe. One of my favourite American authors just wrote a medeival fantasy with giants and dragons and suchlike, and made a genre I thought was dead clamber out of the grave. Lovely book.

Peter Straub -- Lost Boy Lost Girl. Straub writing horror fiction, or detective fiction, or serial killer fiction, or a ghost story. Or, quite possibly, a mainstream novel about wishfulfillment in the face of tragic loss.

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry

Wislawa Szymborska -- Nothing Twice: Selected Poems

No Sleep Till Canvey Island: The Great Pub Rock Revolution by Will Birch -- well-researched book about a period I sort-of knew about. Mostly enjoyable for the way it follows events: British Pub Rock (and Stiff Records, and perhaps the UK version of Punk) can be traced back to the meeting of a hippy film editor with plans for a "Pleasure Dome" and a con-man...

The Turk by Tom Standage -- I'd always wondered about the eighteenth century chess-playing automata...

Essential Acker -- the Selected Writings of Kathy Acker

Tragically I Was An Only Twin -- The Complete Peter Cook edited by William Cook

Things That Never Happen -- Short stores of M. John Harrison (incidentally, Mike Harrison's novel "LIGHT" was, to my mind, the best SF novel of the last five years. An astonishing piece of work.)

I'm looking forward to the new David Quammen book, The Monster of God -- his natural history writing is always enormously pleasurable, and to the new Martin Millar novel "The Lonely Werewolf Girl".

I try and mention books I enjoy on my journal at www.neilgaiman.com, although I've noticed that when I say nice things about books on my journal, they tend to turn up as blurbs on the back of the books some months later...

4) Abandoned ideas - by Anonymous Coward on 01:26 PM September 22nd, 2003
Neil, I vaguely recall from the Neverwhere DVD that the germ of the idea was the homeless of London, but that you were wary of glamorizing something that really is not glamorous. In your Talk of the Nation interview, the serial-killer convention was brought up, and I got the feeling you were uncomfortable with something so dark being glamorized.

I wonder if there have been any project ideas that you've left by the roadside because you felt the result would hold something unfortunate up for admiration.

Neil:
There was a Sandman story I wanted to write, which would have been a heartbreaker, and would have been about the dreams and hopes of an unborn baby, who was, for whatever reason, never going to be born. I didn't write it because I could imagine it being thrust in front of some pregnant teenager who didn't want to be pregnant to make her change her mind about what she was going to do.

The world of unplanned pregnancy is difficult enough in America; I didn't want to make it harder for someone having a hard time than it already is.

5) That forgotten god from American Gods - by Torinaga-Sama
Okay, this has been driving my wife and I CRAZY. The god in American Gods that you can't remember after you talk to him. Was that modeled after an existing god or did you make that up yourself?

I believe you even stumped the internet on that one.

Neil:
You'll have to remind me which character you're talking about.

Odd, I thought I remembered everyone in there. Ah well. Memory's a funny thing...

6) As a Brit living in the US I feel very aware of... - by exp(pi*sqrt(163))
....how you tailor your writing to which side of the Atlantic your intended audience is on. When I read Neverwhere it was the US edition and clearly contained language and explanations that would seem a little inappropriate to readers in the UK. Do you carry out your own 'translations' of your books? What differences do you see between American and British audiences to which you need to adapt? And how involved are you in the translations to other languages and hence cultures?

Neil:
I try to stay on top of the US and the UK editions of books (sometimes I fail). Neverwhere needed quite some work for the US readership, which I did 98% of, and the other 2% was done without my knowledge. (For example -- I kept the word "flat" for where Richard lived, in my US version. It's not a universally common US word, but it's comprehensible. The US editors unilaterally decided to change the word to "apartment" and did a universal find-and-replace, and in the bound galleys that were sent to reviewers there were people who believed the Earth was apartment and people started to say things apartmently.)

I'll happily change words when they mean different things -- a pavement in the UK is what an American would call the sidewalk, while the pavement in the US is what Brit would regard as the road. If I have a girl bleeding on the pavement in the US edition, the meaning has changed, so I'm happy to move her to the sidewalk.

A phrase like "It's all a bit of a pantomime," would mean something very different in the US to the UK -- and not in a way that would make a reader stop and realise that English Panto is a long way from "mime".

The first time it happened was with Terry Pratchett, when the US editor wanted us to explain things like Firelighters and English Currency in Good Omens, but we had so much fun with all the extra footnotes and things they crept back into the UK edition. So the Gollancz first edition hardback has fewer footnotes and a slightly darker plot than the current paperback versions on either side of the Atlantic. There were other differences -- Terry changed my Cheers joke to a Golden Girls joke, because he didn't watch Cheers but quite liked the Golden Girls, and I changed my demons dance like the English band in the Eurovision Song Contest line to one about demons dancing like a white band on Soul Train because I suspected Eurovision Song Contests gags might not play in Des Moines.

Stardust I worked hard to keep the same -- even down to the spelling of grey. The UK edition of American Gods isn't the same as the US edition -- partly because I got the galley proofs back a week apart and I was fairly punctilious about making sure that the US version contained as few anglicisms as possible, but much less bothered if the occasional stray "car park" instead of "parking lot" crept into the UK text.

As for other countries -- I'll answer questions from the translators, but with the exception of the French, I'm not up enough in any other language to have any idea of whether or not it's a decent translation, so I'll rely on reader feedback. (Mostly it's pretty good. I keep hearing that the Spanish version of American Gods is a fairly problematic book, though.)

A lot of the time the translators are the unsung heroes, as they take enormous pleasure in pointing out to me when I meet them in person and find myself apologising for hinging so much of American Gods on the several meanings of the word "trunk", or starting all the names of the Endless with D.

I can be fairly certain that when I win awards in other countries for the fiction I owe my translators a great deal.

7) Small Gods and American Gods - by brandonY
Neil, You and Terry Pratchett are two of my favorite authors, but aside from Good Omens, I never noticed much of a cross-over between any of your books. However, when American Gods came out, I couldn't help noticing that the portrayal of its gods and goddesses was very similar to Pratchett's portrayal of gods in Small Gods, another classic. Is this more than a coincidence?

Neil:
Well, it's also very similar to my portrayal of gods and goddesses in Sandman, which predates Small Gods. But it's not coincidence, although Small Gods is one of the few Terry Pratchett books I've still not read (because I figured one day I'd write a book about gods, and I tend to avoid things in territory I plan to visit. It's easier that way).

Terry and I have very similar worldviews on a lot of things. When I lived in the UK we'd chat on the phone most days, whether we were writing Good Omens or not, talking about plot and about characters and about fiction. Often the conversations would begin with Terry asking "Which one of these two things is funnier...?" and me going "Well, you know, you could do both. What if you...?" While I was finishing American Gods I went to Sweden where Terry and I were guests at the Gothenberg book fair, and Terry wound up unravelling a knotty plot point in American Gods for me on the train, again by listening to me talk about the alternatives and then saying "But you could do both, you know..." and explaining how.

8) Coraline and the writing process for YA novels. - by A Big Gnu Thrush
What led you to write the young adult novel Coraline? Was the writing process for Coraline fundamentally different than some of your other works? How did you control the prose to achieve a balance between richness of language and accessibility to your younger audience?

Neil:
I have two daughters. I started Coraline for Holly, when she was about 6 years old, in 1991. (She's now 18.) Mostly I wanted to write a story I thought she'd enjoy.

I showed the first few chapters to an editor, Richard Evans, at Gollancz, who liked it but thought that it was unpublishable, as I was writing a book aimed at both children and adults. I was writing the book in my own time. Then, in 1992, I moved to America and ran out of "my own time". I wrote about 6 pages between 1992 and 1998, when I persuaded Jennifer Hershey at Avon Books to give me a contract to finish it. She didn't know what it was, no more than I did, but it wasn't a contract for a lot of money, and we figurted we'd sort out whether it would be published as an adult or a children's book when the book was finished.

I went back to it, but I still didn't have a lot of time, so I started writing it in a notebook, beside my bed, and instead of reading before I went to sleep, I'd write fifty or a hundred words of Coraline instead.

And then I wrote it in snatched moments here and there -- a bit on a railway train, a bit on the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund Cruise, and completed it about a decade after I'd started it.

In terms of style, I knew the style I wanted to write it in from page one, which was the only way it survived such an odd way of being written. It's a narrative voice I think of as Classic English Children's Book, although I'd be hard-pressed to find a specific book which sounds like it, except for Clement Freud's wonderful novel "Grimble", which I seem to keep failing to persuade publishers to bring back into print. I wanted a style that was very clean and straightforward, and in which there was room for things to mean more than they literally meant.

9) Sandman the Movie - by ajs
You commented at MIT (BTW: wonderful reading of a great short-story) that you didn't want to see Sandman the Movie made at this point because of the horrible treatment it had been given (I think the last draft script you had read contained, "Puny humans, your bullets cannot harm me!")

With the change in attitude toward comics in Hollywood, have you considered pressing the issue again? Also, have you considered talking to Hollywood's most successful comic book geek (Jess Whedon) about his getting behind the project? I would be stunned if he wasn't interested, though I'm sure the Firefly movie is sucking down a good chunk of his time....

Neil:
I love reading at MIT.

The good news on Sandman is that it's currently been taken out of the hands of the producers who've led it down the Road to Nowhere for the last 8 years. Currently Paul Levitz at DC Comics and I are trying to figure out what to do with it.

In a perfect world, a director who has the same kind of passion for the material that Peter Jackson had for LOTR, or Sam Raimi had for Spider-Man will come along and sweep everyone up in his wake.

I suspect that Joss Whedon's probably got his plate filled with his own projects.

10 & 10A) Journal - by greenfield
You have a journal online at www.neilgaiman.com. What kind of an impact has your journal had on your interactions with the public? What thoughts do you have regarding online journals (aka weblogs) in general?

Re: Journal - by burrows
William Gibson just stopped blogging [williamgibsonbooks.com], stating that informal blog/journal writing gets in the way of writing fiction.

Is there a conflict for you between maintaining your journal and writing fiction? How do you manage your time / ideas / approach, in order to stay active in both?

Neil:
I've enormously enjoyed the immediacy of having the blog. In some ways it sort of bypasses established promotional and advertising systems. It means that, for example, if I'm giving a talk or doing a signing, many of the people who would have wanted to know this, know it. So while Steve Martin and I were both headlining at New York Is Book Country, and his face was on the ad material, mine was the talk that sold out. And if he had a blog, and blog readers, and so on, like I do, his would have sold out as well. It also means that I have several hundred thousand people cheerfully being some kind of a knowledge pool, for when I need to know things (especially techie things, which are always very mysterious to me) and more questions always being sent in than I could ever answer.

I also like the oddness of the way it exists apart from me - that there are people who wouldn't dream of reading my fiction, but who know that the blog is mostly interesting and funny.

I'm fascinated by what I leave out. Some months ago a cat I'd had for a decade and raised from a kitten was killed, and I didn't put anything up about it on the journal, mostly because I was upset and really didn't want lots of friendly messages of sympathy at that point (it's not that I'll leave out bad things. But that thing felt private, so it stayed off the blog.)

I'm not sure that there's a conflict between journalling and writing fiction. (I'm not sure that there's not.) The big picture problems with doing the journal are more to do with writing in general. I'm a writer: time that I spend writing is time I know I'm working.

And that's not always true -- if I've spent a couple of hours on a journal entry it's probably increased the amount of happiness in the world, but it hasn't got any book written. So there's that. And there's the novel thing as well -- part of the oddness of writing a novel is the way that you start seeing the world through your novel, using the novel almost as a lens, so any observations, thoughts, ponderings, whatever, tend to be put into the novel, which is a good thing.

I'm often hesitant to re-use things I've already put into the journal (although sharp-eyed journal readers noticed some dancing paper dolls in Venice showing up in Sandman: Endless Nights).

It's quite possible that the next time I want to write a novel I'll stop blogging, or, more likely, cut back enormously -- possibly only allow myself to blog if I've I've made my word count, or only post on Sundays, or something equally as mundane. Because the journal's well over quarter of a million words long already. And that's not a book...

A very special "call for questions" today: Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman, a series whose long-awaited resurrection was -- not coincidentally -- announced last week. Neil is also winner of the uncoveted Roblimo's favorite book of the 21st Century so far award for American Gods, and a free speech activist who has concentrated -- again, not coincidentally -- on comic book and graphic novel authors' and vendors' freedoms. Please read this interview, listen to this NPR interview, and check other material about Neil before you ask questions, in order to avoid triteness. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Neil tomorrow, and post his answers when he gets them back to us.

A very special "call for questions" today: Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman, a series whose long-awaited resurrection was -- not coincidentally -- announced last week. Neil is also winner of the uncoveted Roblimo's favorite book of the 21st Century so far award for American Gods, and a free speech activist who has concentrated -- again, not coincidentally -- on comic book and graphic novel authors' and vendors' freedoms. Please read this interview, listen to this NPR interview, and check other material about Neil before you ask questions, in order to avoid triteness. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Neil tomorrow, and post his answers when he gets them back to us.

securitas writes "For those that follow these sorts of things, the 2003 Hugo Award Winners list has been released (PDF). Robert Sawyer's 'Homonids' won Best Novel, fan favorite Neil Gaiman won Best Novella for 'Coraline', Geoffery A. Landis won Best Short Story for 'Falling Onto Mars', Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Conversations with Dead People' won Best Short Form Dramatic Presentation and predictably 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' won Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation. You can get all the details at the Torcon 2003 Hugo Awards section."

I've been following the Jesus Castillo case for a while. The case itself is an obscenity charge for selling an adult comic to an adult undercover police officer in Dallas. Recently, the US Supreme Court denied his appeal, with the notion that obscenity is a state-level affair, despite the First Amendment being a Federal law. There's also an interview with the head of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and some good ruminations from Neil Gaiman on the subject. Bad precedents for free speech - the CBDLF donations and giving to the EFF are Good Things.

CBNobi writes "The 2002 Nebula Award winners have been announced this weekend. The winner for best novel was American Gods by Neil Gaiman (reviewed here at Slashdot), and the winner for best script was LotR:The Fellowship of the Ring. The nominees for the 2003 Hugo Awards have also been announced; Episodes of Enterprise, Firefly, and Buffy are all nominated for best short form dramatic presentation, and LotR and Spirited Away are among the nominees for best long form presentation."

In a recent e-mail exchange I had with Neil Gaiman he confirmed that Terry Gilliam is the director for the adapation of Good Omens to the screen. On a side note, Gaiman has been working on Coraline and will be doing a signing of the book in the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, NYC on Thursday the 11th. That's today. Update: 07/11 13:15 GMT by CT : I just wanted to say 'Curse Your Terry Gilliam'! Ever since I read Good Omens, I wished I was a film director just so I could direct that book. I guess Terry will do a good job too ;)