American Gods

Jamy sent me a terrific professional’s-eye critique of the coin magic, and I can make some subtle changes in the copy-editing (which I think will start tomorrow, Wednesday, at least on the US version — I’ve been told I’ll get the copy-edited manuscript by lunchtime). (And there’s always a little nervousness in receiving a copy-edited mss. One never knows what kind of copy editor one will have got. On STARDUST I had a lovely one, who even made sure that the UK spelling grey rather than gray held throughout, because she thought it more appropriate. On the book before that I had a copy editor who, it seemed at the time, repunctuated practically every sentence for no good reason, leaving me muttering “Look, if I’d wanted a comma there I would have bloody well put a comma there” too often for comfort.)

But I was talking about coin magic, not copy editing. Sorry.

This is from my last e-mail to Jamy Ian Swiss, who was grumbling about the depiction of stage magic in most forms of fiction. And I thought it might be interesting for you, hypothetical journal reader.

One reason I wanted the coin magic in American Gods to be good magic, was to ground the whole thing in reality, and to introduce a world in which nothing you are being told is necessarily reliable or true, while still playing fair with the readers.

I know what you mean about stage magic in fiction though: too often it seems to read as if the writer hasn’t done anything magical since getting the magic set aged 11 — [example removed]

I think part of the reason that fiction has problems with stage magic is that the compact the magician makes with the audience is twofold: “I will lie to you” and “I will show you miracles”, and fiction tends only to grasp the second half of that.

Now back to writing the jacket blurb. (Or at least, doing a draft of the plot bit that the publisher may or may not use. When it comes to the “Neil Gaiman writes good stuff” bits of the blurb they are on their own.)posted by Neil Gaiman 10:37 PM

MARCH

Friday, March 02, 2001

So the post today brought a copy of American Gods — a book, and a cover — from the UK. It’s the Hodder uncorrected proof, and it is lovely. I was completely thrilled, mostly I think by the bookness of it. I also really liked the back cover copy, although it doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to the book it describes, having been written from my original outline and not from the text. So some of the facts are off, but the mood and the pitch and the tone are just right.

All of a sudden, it’s starting to feel like something very real — a book, not just something I’ve been writing for a few years.posted by Neil Gaiman 3:05 PM

And the manuscript is safely at Harper Collins, and now I just have to figure out the best way of doing the UK copy edit for the Hodder edition (as I discovered when they sent me their list of queries, the biggest problem with sending electronic files of books around the world rather than printouts is that page numbers change depending on things like your default font size and the type of paper you’re using — so my sending them a list of changes of the “delete comma after the word of on page 16 line 12” variety would be somewhere beyond useless).

The strangest thing about doing a copyedit is how much you learn. About the world, and about writing. Before I start I grab a pile of dictionaries, English and American, and a bunch of books on usage — Fowler’s, and the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, and Bill Bryson’s lovely Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words — and the Chicago Manual of Style, and wade in.

Is blowjob one word or two? Judgement or judgment? Wintry or wintery? Why has the copy editor crossed out ‘hessian’ and replaced it with ‘burlap’? Aren’t they two different fabrics? — twenty minutes of research and I figure out that they may be two different fabrics in the UK, but they stopped using the word hessian for rough hairy sack-type jute or hemp cloth in the US about two hundred years ago. Good. . .

I’d written “none of the passengers were hurt” and the copy editor’s changed it to “none of the passengers was hurt” — Fowler’s English Usage, the American English Usage, Harpers and Bill Bryson all agree that the idea that ‘None’ is a singular noun is based on the misconception that it’s a contraction of no one, which it isn’t, and tell me it’s plural if I want it to be. Good. I do.