American Gods

It’s a thriller, I suppose, although as many of the thrills occur in headspace as in real life, and it’s a murder mystery; it’s a travel guide, and it’s the story of a war. It’s a history. It’s funny, although the humour is pretty dark.

It’s the story of a man called Shadow and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison.

When I finish a project, I sometimes like to to go back and look at the original outline – see how far the project came from my first thoughts. When I finished American Gods, in January 2001, I looked, for the very first time in two and a half years, at the letter I wrote to the publisher describing the book I planned to write next. (I wrote it in a hotel room in Iceland in June 1998.) The outline ended like this:

If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It’s an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad.

American Gods will be a big book, I hope. A sort of weird, sprawling picaresque epic, which starts out relatively small and gets larger. Not horror, although I plan a few moments that are up there with anything I did in Sandman, and not strictly fantasy either. I see it as a distorting mirror; a book of danger and secrets, of romance and magic.

It’s about the soul of America, really. What people brought to America; what found them when they came; and the things that lie sleeping beneath it all. And, oddly enough, that seemed to describe the book I’d written pretty well.

And the other thing I’m doing (you’d think I’d have people who would do this for me, but no, it’s just me) is sending out the e-mails to music publishers telling them I’d like to quote their song at the start of a , and then waiting for their reply. There’s no commonly agreed scale of pricing on this — $150 is pretty usual (as the author is paying), but some publishers ask for a whole lot more. If they ask for too much more I say sod it and go and find a good public domain quote that does the same thing.

So, there. Journal entry #1 done. & now back to my day job (which currently mostly involves writing Death: The High Cost of Living.)posted by Neil Gaiman 12:45 PM

The journal is open.posted by Neil Gaiman 8:45 AM

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

There’s coin magic in AMERICAN GODS, of the conjuring kind. And just as I ran the medical parts (and the post mortem parts) past a doctor, I ran the coin magic past a top coin magician — Jamy Ian Swiss, better known as a card magician. (I met him some years ago, at a Penn and Teller gig in Las Vegas I attended — P&T had just guest-starred in the Babylon 5 episode I’d written, ‘The Day of the Dead’).