Then down to floor level and over to the Carousel for shots of me with the strange animals moving round and round in the background. I spent most of the time trying not to look vaguely goofy. (This is my default mode in photographs. It’s not intentional. Some people tell me I take good photographs, and I have to explain that that’s only because they mostly don’t print the goofy ones. The infamous CBLDF iguana photo is a good example of the kind of photo that people usually don’t see. Goofy.)
The best part of spending 4 hours having your photo taken is often talking to the photographer. This was kind of out of the question here — the sheer volume of the music in the Carousel Room is initially almost unbearable; after about 20 minutes it becomes a sort of background noise and you kind of tune it out. . . but for the four hours of the shoot, Jeff and I communicated mostly by hand gestures of the “turn left,” and “chin up” variety, because the music was so loud you couldn’t hear anything, especially when all the kettle-drums started banging.
(And for the breaks Jeff was off setting up the next shot. I chatted to Dolores, his assistant, and signed her hardback of Sandman: THE WAKE. She hasn’t read it yet, as she says if she does then the story will be over.)
The carousel room is the hottest room in the House on the Rock. It’s the 20,000 lightbulbs from the carousel that keep it so warm, said Bill, the man on carousel duty (he’s been doing it for 16 years, making sure no-one vaults the fence and climbs onto any of the animals). I was cooking in the Jonathan Carroll leather jacket.
As the shoot wound down, Jeff and I got to chat a little. “How would you like me to make you look?” he asked. “Brooding, mysterious, scary, friendly — what kind of impression are you trying to give?”
I thought for a moment, and realised that I had no idea. “Could you make me look surprisingly fuckable for a writer, please?”
He laughed (and so did the rest of the crew) and said he’d do his best.
And we wrapped up the shoot, then I ate and drove another three hours back.
Actually, I’d settle for brooding.
Really, I’d settle for not very goofy.
posted by Neil Gaiman 11:11 PM
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Monday, May 28, 2001
I’m home. Hurrah. . . 22 Hours on planes and in airports, and it’s just nice to be in my own house, with kids all around, and I got to say things I haven’t had a
chance to say in two weeks, things like “What do you mean —you’re going out? You’ve still got two English essays to finish, and a hundred-question physics test, and all that homework’s due tomorrow. Of course you aren’t going out.”
I walked in the garden:the asparagus is high as an elephant’s eye, and for that matter, so is the rhubarb. (Which is rather unnerving, actually.)
So waiting for me, when I got home, was a finished copy of American Gods.
This made me very happy.
The first thing I thought when I saw it was how much thicker it was than I’d expected. (465 pages plus about 15 pages of front matter. Or to put it another way, it’s over an inch thick.) Also, how very much it looks like a real book.
The cover is lovely.
I opened it up very carefully. Black endpapers. Yum. . .
The first rule of new books is this: when your new book arrives, and you open it to a random page, and look at it, you will see a typo, and your heart will sink. It may be the only typo (er, typographical error) in the whole book, but you will see it immediately.
So I very carefully didn’t open it to a random page. I opened it to the first page (CAVEAT, AND WARNING FOR TRAVELERS) and read that instead. Half way down the page I noticed a comma that I could have sworn used to be a full stop. . .
But other than that, it looks lovely. Wonderful. Really cool. I checked the Icelandic, and that was now right, and all the weird copyediting things seem to be fine. The permissions are all there on the copyright page. Along with the weirdest little library of congress filing thing I’ve ever seen.
This is what it says:
American gods: a novel /by Neil Gaiman — 1st edp. cmISBN 0-380-97365-01.National characteristics, American — Fiction. 2. Spiritual warfare - Fiction. 3 Ex-prisoners - Fiction. 4. Bodyguards - Fiction 5. Widowers - Fiction I. Title
And I wonder, who picks these categories? What do they base them on? I mean, while it is undoubtedly true that Shadow, our more-or-less hero, is an ex-prisoner, and that his wife is killed in a car crash early in the book; but I feel deeply sorry for anyone who goes into it looking for fiction about widowers, ex-prisoners or bodyguards; while all the people looking for the things it has in abundance, like history and geography and mythology, like dreams and confidence tricks and sacrifice, Roadside Attractions and lakes and coin magic and funeral homes go by the wayside.
Still, I like “Spiritual warfare — Fiction.” And ‘National characteristics, American”. I like that, too, in a weird way.
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