Gary flashed him a grin, lowered his voice and said, “That was just in the storage locker they found. They never found the garage in San Clemente with the really good stuff in it.”
Gary had died in prison, when what the infirmary had told him was just a malingering, feeling-lousy kind of day turned out to be a ruptured appendix. Now, here in the Lakeside library, Shadow found himself thinking about a garage in San Clemente with box after box of rare, strange and beautiful books in it rotting away, all of them browning and wilting and being eaten by mold and insects in the darkness, waiting for someone who would never come to set them free.
posted by Neil Gaiman 11:33 AM
* * *
Monday, March 19, 2001
Hard work doing the US galleys. They were waiting for me when I got up Saturday morning, went off first thing this morning (Monday) and I didn’t do anything else over the weekend, except go and eat some nice sushi.
Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces — NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment.
None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler. . .
F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformly become blond, and so blonder has become blonder; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught.
Little things – the icelandic ?ú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get — or indeed, give —instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me.
I changed the copyedited ‘vast hall of death’ back to ‘vasty hall of death’ which was what I’d originally written; it’s a quote from Matthew Arnold, which was in its turn quoted by Roger Zelazny, and I think that people can get the idea that vasty’s an archaic form of vast.
Not sure of the logic that has people talk about a “motel 6” or “drive down Highway 14” but also talk about “Comparative Religion One-oh-one”. But I just put a query next to it and left it.
I am, having read my book three times in three versions in the last three weeks, checking everything, finally feeling very done with it. Noticed some sloppy sentences this time through, ones that Fowler would have tutted at. If I could fix them with a word, I did; if they needed to be completely rewritten, I left them, figuring that perfection can wait. Maybe for the next book. . . .
The first of the blurbs is in. It’s from Peter Straub, who says, in an e-mail to my editor, Jennifer Hershey. . .
Dear Jennifer —
Many thanks to both you and Neil for sending me the early galley of AMERICAN GODS. I think it is a terrific book, clearly Neil’s best to date, and am very happy to offer the following quote:
From his first collection of short stories, Neil Gaiman has always been a remarkable, remarkably gifted writer, but AMERICAN GODS is the first of his fictions to match, even surpass, the breathtaking imaginative sweep and suggestiveness of his classic SANDMAN series of graphic novels. Here we have poignan
cy, terror, nobility, magic, sacrifice,wisdom, mystery, heartbreak, and a hardearned sense of resolution - areal emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterfulstorytelling.
Will that do? It’s a wonderful novel, and I congratulate both you and Neil for bringing it into being.
Peter Straub. . .
Which has me happy as a sandboy. (What is a sandboy? Why are they so happy?) I guess because I really wanted American Gods to be a book that had the power and scale and resonance that Sandman did (and which, by their nature, and not necessarily to their detriment, neither Neverwhere nor Stardust could have had — they were intrinsically smaller, lighter things). That it’s done that for one reader – and that that one reader is a writer of whose work I have been a fan since I read Shadowlands at about 16 – makes me feel like the last two years of hard writing really had a point.
. . .
And an e-mail in from a correspondent who shall remain anonymous:
I’ve looked at some of your journal and I’d never realised the actual effort and workload that goes into it AFTER the book is ‘written’. Nor why it took so long between concept and hardback appearance - until now that is. Is your brain “American Godded Out’ or still on an enthusiasm roll?
Dear Anonymous of New Zealand. I’m still enthusiastic. But I’m very pleased I don’t have to read it again this week.
And I’m pleased that some of the mechanics of taking a book to publication are coming out in the journal. People know that authors write books, and then books appear on the shelves. Some of them are bestsellers, and some aren’t. But that’s all most people know. One reason I liked the idea of doing this journal was being able to explain the stuff that happens between handing in the mss and publication. (That there are no authorial grumbles about either the UK or the US book covers is very unusual — I’m happy with them both and they both look like covers for the book I wrote.)
Someone on The Well asked. Why don’t writers just edit their own books, kinda like musicians who produce themselves?
And the answer to that, Bill Clintonlike, is probably, it depends what you mean by Edit. Edit means so many things. Editors do so many things.
In the US they like to get more involved. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. Michael Korda once told me it all dated back to Jacqueline Susanne, who wrote books that were readable, but all typed in upper case in something that didn’t have a lot to do with English; so editors began getting their feet wet and getting involved in the writing process, making suggestions for things to cut, rewriting where they had to, and so on.
It’s certainly true that UK editors tend much more to look at a manuscript, ask themselves “is this publishable?” and if the answer’s yes, they publish it.