American Gods

One of the joys of finishing American Gods is that there are books I can read, and books I can reread. John James’s Votan, for example. A book I read almost twenty years ago, and that I’ve wanted to reread for ages but didn’t dare to, as I knew it had a scene I was going to have to do in American Gods. And when I finally read it, last week, I was pleased that the two scenes didn’t resemble each other in any real way, and more pleased that twelve years spent getting as deeply into Norse stuff as anyone who doesn’t do it for a living had left me with an enormous appreciation for the brilliance of James’s novel. (It’s about a wily second century Greek trader in Germany who becomes Odin – Votan – and to whom all the Norse myths happen, or at least, the stories that will become the Norse Myths. Hilarious, moving and, along with its sequel, Not For all the Gold in Ireland, the best mythic-historical fiction out there, apart from Gene Wolfe’s Soldier in the Mist sequence, and maybe some Robert Graves.)

And now I’m reading a book I’ve wanted to read for five years, Martin Millar’s Good Fairies of New York. I read the back jacket copy when I bought the book, and ruled it off limits as it might have strayed into American Gods territory. Reading it in the bath today, it doesn’t. It’s just delightful Martin Millar, as funny and wise and solidly written as he gets at his best. posted by Neil Gaiman 7:15 PM

Let’s see . . . well, the old entries are dropping off the bottom of the site, so we’re setting up an archive. There are US quick&dirty proof copies of the book going out to booksellers and authors-for-blurbs right now; I’m doing as many cover letters as I can to them. (It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they start showing up on ebay, and how much they go for.) We’ve finalised the jacket copy in the US, and got permission to use a line from an e-mail as a blurb on the back of the book. (It was something Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, and a very fine writer in his own right, wrote to me, when he read it, which, I thought, described the book I was trying to write perfectly.)posted by Neil Gaiman 1:32 PM

Saturday, March 17, 2001

So, I was just starting to get up to speed on the DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING script when this morning brought with it from Harper Collins the US Galleys. So I rolled up my sleeves, took out my pen (the instructions they send say pencil, but I don’t have a pencil here) and started in on them. Now it’s just little things, and occasionally, fixing things I was too tired to fix the last time they went through (Harper Collins hyphenates or doesn’t hyphenate on a system all of their own. . . why, I wonder, would face up become one word faceup?) and sometimes fixing things I’m pretty sure I did fix last time around but that weren’t acted upon (dammit, I like blond for boys and blonde for girls). The scary point in

proofreading is that odd moment when suddenly, the marks on the paper become nothing more than marks on the paper. This is my cue to go and make a cup of tea. Normally they’ve fixed themselves and become marks that mean something when I get back. In this case, I decided that doing a journal entry (while the tea brews) might encourage them to head back into wordhood.

Changing the subject, I keep thinking about the Coen brothers who proudly announced when they released the directors cut of Blood Simple that far from adding any new material, they had managed to cut several minutes from it. I keep thinking about this in context of the book, this blogger journal, and the American Gods website. There is stuff I’m very happy to have cut from the manuscript. One story stands alone (I sent it out as a Christmas card this year) but there are some oddments that I cut out because they interrupted the flow of the story, and it was just a little leaner and worked a little better without them. I can imagine in ten years’ time rereading American Gods and proudly cutting out several paragraphs.

So I think I may post a few here and there. There’s one lecture from a character who never really even made it into the first draft, I keep meaning to transcribe from my notes and put up. The rest of them are full scenes or bits. . .

Here’s a little one.”I suppose I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to know all about thunderbirds.”