Remembering Moebius

This was the art on the cover of the first Metal Hurlant I ever saw. I was — what — 14, and on a French Exchange to Paris with my class, and this beautiful magazine filled with comics opened my mind to what comics could be, and particularly to the art of Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius, who drew about half of the magazine in a way that seemed both familiar and completely alien, made it so powerful and perfect. He drew different stories in different styles, and the only thing they seemed to have in common was that they were beautiful. I bought a copy. I could only afford the one issue of the magazine, but one was enough.

I couldn't actually figure out what the Moebius stories were about, but I figured that was because my French wasn't up to it. (I could get the gist of the Richard Corben Den story, and loved that too, and not just because of the nakedness, but the Moebius stories were obviously so much deeper.)

I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing).

I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up.

I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren't actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn't matter. The damage had long since been done.

I met Jean Giraud on a couple of occasions over the years. He was sweet and gentle and really... I don't know. Spiritual is not a word I use much, mostly because it feels so very misused these days, but I'd go with it for him. I liked him enormously, and felt humbled around him. And in my 20s and 30s I didn't do humbled very much or very well.

(Moebius was pronounced in the French way, as a four syllable word. Mo-e-bi-us.)

During Sandman, we did several galleries where we would ask artists whose work we loved to draw a character for us.

I was a working writer, the money that came in fed my family, and although I looked with envy on the art that was being made, I did not buy any of it.

Except for one small painting. A Moebius study of Death. It cost me as much as I was paid to write an issue of Sandman, and I bought it without a qualm.

We wanted to work together. I wrote the Sandman: Endless Nights story DEATH IN VENICE for him to draw, but his health got bad, so P. Craig Russell drew it. Half a year later Moebius's health improved a little, and he asked if I could write him a very short story, perhaps 8 pages, and make them all single images, so I wrote the DESTINY story in Endless Nights for him. His health took a turn for the worse, once more, and Frank Quitely drew it. And both Craig and Frank made magic with their stories, but somewhere inside I was sad, because I'd hoped to work with Moebius.

And now I never shall.

RIP Jean Giraud, 8 May 1938 - 10 March 2012

Some thoughts on writing, and driving in fog, and the usual

It's a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk.

And that's wonderful.

Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.

And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that's magic.

...

My days are good right now. I've found my writing rhythm and I appear to have some kind of writing mojo back. I'm not writing the thing I thought I was going into hiding to write, but I'm loving what I am writing, am pretty sure I'll be able to make it all work when I get to the next draft, even though right now it has things in it that mean it's going to be harder to publish than normal. It's in that weird zone between children's fiction and adult fiction with children in it (think of the ghostly school story in the middle of Sandman:Season of Mists as an example of the kind of thing I mean).

I'm missing my wife, but missing her less and less with every good writing day, and I'm selfishly enjoying having a daily routine I've never really had before that includes a morning jog or workout (put together for me by a very kind fitness instructor who reads this blog and recorded some videos for me) and a long hard yoga session once or twice a week.

Mostly I wish Amanda could just teleport in every few days for dinner, and then zap herself back to Melbourne in the morning.

I've found a little cafe where they seem perfectly happy to have me in the corner scribbling away while people come and people go; and when I went in there this afternoon, the barrista smiled and asked if I was having the usual (viz. their "British Breakfast Tea") and I said yes, and realised I rather loved the idea of having a usual.

I like having short hair because I feel vaguely and comfortably incognito. So I am not posting photographs of myself right now. In all probability the incognito thing is entirely a placebo effect, and everybody in the town looks at me and goes, there goes that English writer. But it makes me happy, in the same way that Amanda wearing fake Clark Kent hipster glasses around Melbourne as a disguise makes her happy.

If you see this woman in Melbourne, Australia, it is obviously not my wife.

The most interesting thing I've done recently was drive across the middle of the state to go and spend a day with Stephen King: I'll be writing about it for the Times (the UK one, not the New York one).

This writing retreat only lasts another few days, in its current form.

But I am very happy. And writing. In case you were wondering.

It's Extra Magic Bonus Happy Leap Year Day!

Please celebrate Leap Year Day in the traditional manner by taking a writer out for dinner.

It’s been four years since many authors had a good dinner. We are waiting. Many of us have our forks or chopsticks at the ready - some of us have had them ready for days. We will repay you by drifting off while the food is being served and then suddenly scribbling something down on a scrap of paper and asking whether or not you think “passionate” could validly be said to rhyme with “cash in it”, then absent-mindedly drinking too much and trying to recite the whole of Clive James’s “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” from memory. 

Feed us.

Who is Jonathan Carroll and why should you care?

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. (See all earlier comments to this effect in the previous 2 million words on this journal.) The HBO pilot script is starting to feel like a real thing.

On the downside, I miss my dogs, my family, and, off in Australia where she is about to start making her next album, my wife. But the work is good.

And it is not snowy outside. This is the morning view from my bedroom window:

...

The news just came in on the nominations for Audies, the Audiobook awards. Three of them are for things I was involved in. (Here's a PDF of all the nominees.)

The Witches of Lublin was nominated. I acted in that. (Congratulations to Ellen Kushner and Sue Zizza and Simon Jones and all involved)

American Gods (10th Anniversary Full Cast Audio) was nominated. I narrated the Coming To America bits in that, and I wrote the book. (Congratulations to the wonderful cast - and to Nicole Quinn, the contest winner, who won a part in it.) (Which reminds me - someone asked me for the list of who played what in the Audio. I'll put it up here.)

And a book from the Audible Neil Gaiman Presents line is nominated: Jonathan Carroll's novel THE LAND OF LAUGHS.

I have loved LAND OF LAUGHS ever since I first read it, in 1983 or 1984. Was once asked to pitch it as a movie by the producer who controls it, and I did, and was sad it wasn't picked up. It's a magical, spooky novel for anyone who has ever wanted to go too deeply into a book they loved. It was one of my first choices for Neil Gaiman Presents. So huge congratulations to Jonathan and to narrator Edoardo Ballerini. And more congratulations to the ACX team at Audible.

If you've been following the Neil Gaiman Presents line at all, if you liked Land of Laughs, or if you want to try out an audiobook, the new Jonathan Carroll, WHITE APPLES, has just been released.

And if you haven't discovered Jonathan Carroll, and you are wondering who this writer is, and why you should be interested, this is what I wrote some years ago, for Jonathan's own website:

........................................................................................................................................

"All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own."
                                                                            -Haniel Long, Notes Toward a New Mythology.

There are millions of competent writers out there. There are hundreds of thousands of good writers in the world, and there are a handful of great writers. And this is me, late at night, trying to figure out the difference for myself. That indefinable you-either-got-it-or-you-ain't spark that makes someone a great writer.


And then I realise that I'm asking myself the wrong question, because it's not good writers or great writers. What I'm really wondering is what makes some writers special. Like when I was a kid on the London Underground, I'd stare at the people around me. And every now and again I'd notice someone who had been drawn - a William Morris beauty, a Berni Wrightson grotesque - or someone who had been written - there are lots of Dickens characters in London, even today. It wasn't those writers or artists who accurately recorded life: the special ones were the ones who drew it or wrote it so personally that, in some sense it seemed as if they were creating life, or creating the world and bringing it back to you. And once you'd seen it through their eyes you could never un-see it, not ever again.


There are a few writers who are special. They make the world in their books; or rather, they open a window or a door or a magic casement, and they show you the world in which they live.


Ramsey Campbell, for example, writes short stories that, read in quantity, will re-form your world into a grey and ominous place in which strange shapes flicker at the corner of your eyes, and a patch of smoke or a blown plastic shopping bag takes on some kind of ghastly significance. Read enough R.A. Lafferty and you will find yourself living in a quirky tall-tale of a world in which the people have all stepped out of some cosmic joke, if it is not a dream.


Jonathan Carroll's a changer. He's one of the special ones, one of the few. He paints the world he sees. He opens a window you did not know was there and invites you to look through it. He gives you his eyes to see with, and he gives you the world all fresh and honest and new.


In a bookstore universe of bland and homogenised writers and fictions, the world that words from Carroll's fountain pen is as cool, as fine and as magical as a new lover, or cool water in the desert. Things matter. You can fall in love with his women, or his men, worry when they hurt, hate them when they betray or fall short, rejoice when they steal a moment of magic and of life from the face of death and eventual nothingness.


I had dinner with Jonathan Carroll, with Dave McKean and with some friends, about eight years ago: what I still remember is not the meal nor even the conversation (although I do recall Jonathan telling us some incidents of his life that I would later encounter in Kissing the Beehive): what I recall was the process of becoming a Jonathan Carroll character among Jonathan Carroll characters. We were witty and wise and lucent; intelligent and beautiful men and women; artists and creators and magicians, we were.


It was a couple of days before I noticed that I had become a mundane grey person once more.


Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry. But a new book by Jonathan Carroll is still, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, a cause for celebration.


His most successful books and tales defy genre categorisation. They've more life, more balls, are more true than pretty much anything else you'll encounter out there. They call some fantasies 'Magical Realism' to try and lend them respectability, like a whore who wishes to be known as a lady of the evening. Jonathan Carroll's work, however, has every right to parade under the banner of magical realism, if you have to call it something.


I call them Jonathan Carroll stories, and leave it at that. He is one of the handful, and one of the brotherhood. If you don't believe me, pick up Outside the Dog Museum, or A Child Across the Sky, or Sleeping in Flame or The Panic Hand, or any of his other works (you'll find a list of them within, I have no doubt) and find out for yourself.


He'll lend you his eyes; and you will never see the world in quite the same way ever again.




........................................................................................................................................................

.... And now for something ever-so-slightly different. A wonderful Josh Ritter song, and a video made using 12,000 pieces of coloured construction paper.


 
Josh Ritter - Love Is Making Its Way Back Home from Josh Ritter on Vimeo.

One morning with Nebula Nominations

I started feeling last night that real work was happening. I could see it starting to mount. My morale is starting to improve, as it always does when writing happens, and I remember that I actually can do it after all.

Currently I'm mostly writing the HBO American Gods first episode. I'm really enjoying it, partly because a lot of what I've written isn't in the book. It's implied in the book, or talked about generally, or referred to obliquely, but it's scenes I hadn't written. So I feel that I'm doing new work, even if it's not new. If you see what I mean.

And, strangely, it seems to be feeding in to the next American Gods book, which is what I'm sort of working on right now. (Actually, I'm writing a short story that comes after Monarch of the Glen and before The Next Book. But it feels organically needed.) 

Other than that... I'm looking after myself. The main new thing I've been doing is actually jogging for 37 minutes a day. (It was 37 minutes the first day, and so I've kept it the same every other day to see how much further or faster I get, because my little iPod Nano keeps track of this stuff.)

I will do a proper catch-up blog post later in the week, I suspect. There's stuff I should write about that's been interesting or fun.

In the meantime, I was sent this press release last night. It had me doing a happy dance around the room, for my little bit of it. (Apart from anything else, it was wonderful seeing the other nominees in my category. Woody Allen! Duncan Jones!)

And, because they asked if I'd spread it around, I have cut and pasted the whole of the nomination list. (Congratulations to all the Nominees!)

2011 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Novel

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)

Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)

God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)

The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella

"Kiss Me Twice," Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011)

"Silently and Very Fast," Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)

"The Ice Owl," Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,November/December 2011)

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Kij Johnson (Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011)

"The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)

"With Unclean Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Novelette

"Fields of Gold," Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books)

"Ray of Light," Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011)

"Sauerkraut Station," Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011)

"Six Months, Three Days," Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)

"The Migratory Pattern of Dancers," Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011)

"The Old Equations," Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011)

"What We Found," Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)

Short Story

"Her Husband's Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011)

"Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son," Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011)

"Movement," Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2011)

"Shipbirth," Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011)  

"The Axiom of Choice," David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)    

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011)

"The Paper Menagerie," Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)

Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)

Doctor Who: “The Doctor's Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)

Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)

Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)

The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)

Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder &Stoughton)

Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)

The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)

Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Books)

The winners will be announced at SFWA's 47^th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. As announced earlier this year, Connie Willis will be the recipient of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker.

...

Hi Neil,

I'm assuming you're at least marginally familiar with altered books.

Someone linked to this in an art therapy forum I'm on, and I saw it and immediately thought of you. Specifically I was reminded of Mirrormask. I think it's a brilliant use of out of date reference books.

http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi

Enjoy!

I did.

Small useful post with additional poem

Small useful post:

Right now B&N’s NOOK and Amazon’s KINDLE are both discounting Neverwhere. It’s at $2.99 — these discounts do not last for very long (normally 24-48 hours) so if you want an e-copy, grab it quickly.

http://www.amazon.com/Neverwhere-ebook/dp/B000FC130E/?tag=arcadata-20

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/neverwhere-neil-gaiman/1100109136?ean=9780061793059&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-TnL5HPStwNw-_-10:1

It only applies to the US site.

When this happened with American Gods, iBook also dropped the price. I haven’t checked…

(Edit to add, I checked. They did too. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/neverwhere/id363686338?mt=11)

....

And from

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2006

Small Valentine's Day Poem

Roses are red,
Violets are purple,
Which is a very hard word to rhyme
And makes me happy that on February the 14th we don't traditionally have to give each other oranges.

There.

I'd write for longer, as I have tales to tell, or even to cut and paste, but guilt will eat me if I do not drive to a coffee shop and either type or scrawl.

America Will Eat you

Hullo everybody

I'm off in hiding, writing. It's good. I did a road trip to get here - I stopped in New Orleans and got an extreme haircut and a hot towel shave.  Last time I went off into hiding to write a novel I let my hair and beard grow, and I didn't want to repeat myself. I look... odd, I think. But I feel like I'm in disguise, which is an excellent feeling for an author to have.

I got to my hideout, which is the house where I started writing American Gods a dozen years ago, then drove three and half hours to see my cousin Helen and her husband Sidney. (Helen's mother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister.) They are 94 and 90 respectively. (Helen told Sidney she was four years younger than she was, claiming back her years during World War II, where she survived the Warsaw Ghetto and worse, and only told him how old she really was forty years later, when her older sister, Wanda, died. If you have three hours, watch this YouTube video, done for the Shoah project.) Then I drove home, to the place I'm staying.

I spent yesterday not doing much of anything - recovering from the drive, getting settled in. Today, however, I'm writing.

Do not expect much in the way of blogging while I'm writing.

Here are two fun things...

The first is an awards acceptance speech I filmed for SFX. They gave me an award for Screenwriting Excellence for my Doctor Who episode The Doctor's Wife. I tried to give the kind of measured and well-thought-out speech that an occasion like this demanded.

The second is that if you go to this Audible link  you can listen to the newest in my Neil Gaiman Presents audio series at Audible.com,  The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Seventeen hours of glorious, funny, profound and delightful stories about Dr Englebert Eszterhazy, who Sherlocks his way through some remarkable stories in an Eastern European Balkan Empire.  

And this is something Amanda just sent me... it's the video done for her cover of Nirvana's "Polly", done for a  Nevermind tribute album. Scary, grueling, ultimately triumphant, based on a true story.

A speech I once gave: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton

I gave this speech in 2004, to the Mythopoeic Society. I thought it was already somewhere on this website, but it isn't, it's only up at the Mythopoeic Society website. I hope no-one there will mind if I put it up here (mostly for me, for ease of finding it later.)

 

Mythcon 35 Guest of Honour Speech

By Neil Gaiman

I thought I’d talk about authors, and about three authors in particular, and the circumstances in which I met them.

There are authors with whom one has a personal relationship and authors with whom one does not. There are the ones who change your life and the ones who don’t. That’s just the way of it.

I was six years old when I saw an episode of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in black and white on television at my grandmother’s house in Portsmouth. I remember the beavers, and the first appearance of Aslan, an actor in an unconvincing lion costume, standing on his hind legs, from which I deduce that this was probably episode two or three. I went home to Sussex and saved my meagre pocket money until I was able to buy a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe of my own. I read it, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the other book I could find, over and over, and when my seventh birthday arrived I had dropped enough hints that my birthday present was a boxed set of the complete Narnia books. And I remember what I did on my seventh birthday — I lay on my bed and I read the books all through, from the first to the last.

For the next four or five years I continued to read them. I would read other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read.

For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself realising that there were Certain Parallels. Most people get it at the Stone Table; I got it when it suddenly occurred to me that the story of the events that occurred to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus was the dragoning of Eustace Scrubb all over again. I was personally offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda. I had nothing against religion, or religion in fiction — I had bought (in the school bookshop) and loved The Screwtape Letters, and was already dedicated to G.K. Chesterton. My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately still believe.

The Pauline Baynes map of Narnia poster stayed up on my bedroom wall through my teenage years.

I didn’t return to Narnia until I was a parent, first in 1988, then in 1999, each time reading all the books aloud to my children. I found that the things that I loved, I still loved — sometimes loved more — while the things that I had thought odd as a child (the awkwardness of the structure of Prince Caspian, and my dislike for most of The Last Battle, for example) had intensified; there were also some new things that made me really uncomfortable — for example the role of women in the Narnia books, culminating in the disposition of Susan. But what I found more interesting was how much of the Narnia books had crept inside me: as I would write there would be moment after moment of realising that I’d borrowed phrases, rhythms, the way that words were put together; for example, that I had a hedgehog and a hare, in The Books of Magic, speaking and agreeing with each other much as the Dufflepuds do.

C.S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the way he used parentheses — the auctorial asides that were both wise and chatty, and I rejoiced in using such brackets in my own essays and compositions through the rest of my childhood.

I think, perhaps, the genius of Lewis was that he made a world that was more real to me than the one I lived in; and if authors got to write the tales of Narnia, then I wanted to be an author.

Now, if there is a wrong way to find Tolkien, I found Tolkien entirely the wrong way. Someone had left a copy of a paperback called The Tolkien Reader in my house. It contained an essay — “Tolkien’s Magic Ring” by Peter S. Beagle — some poetry, Leaf By Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham. In retrospect, I suspect I picked it up only because it was illustrated by Pauline Baynes. I would have been eight, maybe nine years old.

What was important to me, reading that book, was the poetry, and the promise of a story.

Now, when I was nine I changed schools, and I found, in the class library, a battered and extremely elderly copy of The Hobbit. I bought it from the school in a library sale for a penny, along with an ancient copy of the Plays of W.S. Gilbert, and I still have it.

It would be another year or so before I was to discover the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, in the main school library. I read them. I read them over and over: I would finish The Two Towers and start again at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I never got to the end. This was not the hardship it may sound — I had already learned from the Peter S. Beagle essay in the Tolkien Reader that it would all come out more or less okay. Still, I really did want to read it for myself.

When I was thirteen I won the school English Prize, and was allowed to choose a book. I chose The Return of the King. I still own it. I only read it once, however — thrilled to find out how the story ended — because around the same time I also bought the one-volume paperback edition. It was the most expensive thing I had bought with my own money, and it was that which I now read and re-read.

I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably, the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a quandary. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (That’s not true: I wanted to be a writer then.) And I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it had already been written.

I gave the matter a great deal of thought, and eventually came to the conclusion that the best thing would be if, while holding a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I slipped into a parallel universe in which Professor Tolkien had not existed. And then I would get someone to retype the book — I knew that if I sent a publisher a book that had already been published, even in a parallel universe, they’d get suspicious, just as I knew my own thirteen-year old typing skills were not going to be up to the job of typing it. And once the book was published I would, in this parallel universe, be the author of Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better thing. And I read Lord of the Rings until I no longer needed to read it any longer, because it was inside me. Years later, I dropped Christopher Tolkien a letter, explaining something that he found himself unable to footnote, and was profoundly gratified to find myself thanked in the Tolkien book The War of the Ring (for something I had learned from reading James Branch Cabell, no less).

It was in the same school library that had the two volumes of Lord of the Rings that I discovered Chesterton. The library was next door to the school matron’s office, and I learned that, when faced with lessons that I disliked from teachers who terrified me, I could always go up to the matron’s office and plead a headache. A bitter-tasting aspirin would be dissolved in a glass of water, I would drink it down, trying not to make a face, and then be sent to sit in the library while I waited for it to work. The library was also where I went on wet afternoons, and whenever else I could.

The first Chesterton book I found there was The Complete Father Brown Stories. There were hundreds of other authors I encountered in that library for the first time — Edgar Wallace and Baroness Orczy and Dennis Wheatley and the rest of them. But Chesterton was important — as important to me in his way as C.S. Lewis had been.

You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien’s words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

Father Brown, that prince of humanity and empathy, was a gateway drug into the harder stuff, this being a one-volume collection of three novels: The Napoleon of Notting Hill (my favourite piece of predictive 1984 fiction, and one that hugely informed my own novel Neverwhere), The Man Who Was Thursday (the prototype of all Twentieth Century spy stories, as well as being a Nightmare, and a theological delight), and lastly The Flying Inn (which had some excellent poetry in it, but which struck me, as an eleven-year old, as being oddly small-minded. I suspected that Father Brown would have found it so as well.) Then there were the poems and the essays and the art.

Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.

And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.

An Edgar and an Ill Wind

It's been a bugger of a week: I left my Macbook Air on a plane on Sunday night, and have spent most of the rest of the week doing things like being on the phone to the backup service, learning that the tracking software I'd thought was on there was on there, but hadn't been activated, buying a new computer, etc. I didn't get the thing I was meant to be writing written. I was grumpy.

But, I spent the wasted week getting healthy and in shape and juicing things. And I now have an iPad, with which I am starting to fall in love. (Weirdly, I much prefer my Nexus Android to the iPhone. But never liked the Xoom, and still don't - I have one, but mostly use it as an Audible player, and attempts to use it to write on, with a bluetooth keyboard, early this week were just painful. But I started falling for Amanda's iPad in Edinburgh in August, bought one for myself on impulse, and started writing on it, and discovering that writing on it was easy and pleasant.)

And this morning I got an email telling me that the thing that I would have been working on all week, that I'd already lost 15 pages of...

...was now going to change so radically I would have wasted a week's work if I'd been working on it. So I am happy.

And the thing I've been holding fire on for a week just sorted itself out, too. So I got a week off I would never have had in real life, even if it was a grumpy one, and all has worked out for the best.

And I learned on Monday morning I was nominated for an Edgar Award, by the Mystery Writers of America, for my story "The Case of Death and Honey". I don't write many mysteries, and I've never been nominated for an Edgar Award before. So I was thrilled. (The story, from A Study in Sherlock, isn't online, but you can read about it here.)

My friend Dr Dan just wandered by with a CD. "I see all these photos of you," he said, "that do not look like you at all. Here's a photo I took of you this summer that I like. It looks like you."

I liked it too, partly because you can actually see some of the grey on the side. There's stuff about getting older that I don't like - mostly having to do with eyesight - but I'm enjoying most of it. I like feeling that I have a face that looks like something; when I was young I was convinced I didn't look like anything, and wore dark glasses and big leather jackets so people would have something to remember. But these days I have a face that feels like mine, even if, sometimes, I catch myself in the mirror looking disconcertingly like my father.

It's been really wintry here, but today it warmed up to not-actually-evil, and I was able to pull out my phone and, more importantly, take off my gloves to take shots of the dogs. Who are too often invisible against the snow.

Cabal.

Lola, hoping a squirrel who ran up a tree will run down again, so that she can catch him and turn him into a squirrelly chew toy...

Lola visiting a frozen river...

And some of the beehives, all wrapped up for the winter. The bees are inside, in football-sized clumps, vibrating and generating heat.

...

It's the Chinese Year of the Dragon, so I just drew a wobbly dragon for my Chinese friends. He's based on a picture I saw of an ancient dragon who had three toes but was still Chinese...

I don't know if anyone's going to be able to see this photo posted here, in China. Last time I was there, this blog was cut off by the Great Firewall, but I post for it anyone who can: 恭喜发财

An open letter to Washington from Artists and Creators

We, the undersigned, are musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers. We make our livelihoods with the artistic works we create. We are also Internet users.

We are writing to express our serious concerns regarding the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.

We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services - artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.

We are deeply concerned that PIPA and SOPA's impact on piracy will be negligible compared to the potential damage that would be caused to legitimate Internet services. Online piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of censoring creativity, stifling innovation or preventing the creation of new, lawful digital distribution methods.

We urge Congress to exercise extreme caution and ensure that the free and open Internet, upon which so many artists rely to promote and distribute their work, does not become collateral damage in the process.

Respectfully,

• Aziz Ansari
• Kevin Devine, Musician
• Barry Eisler, Author
• Neil Gaiman, Author
• Lloyd Kaufman, Filmmaker
• Zoë Keating, Musician
• The Lonely Island
• Daniel Lorca, Musician (Nada Surf)
• Erin McKeown, Musician
• MGMT
• Samantha Murphy, Musician
• OK Go
• Amanda Palmer, Musician (The Dresden Dolls)
• Quiet Company
• Trent Reznor
• Adam Savage, Special Effects Artist (MythBusters)
• Hank Shocklee, Music Producer (Public Enemy, The Bomb Squad)
• Johnny Stimson, Musician

From http://stopthewall.us/artists/