American Gods (72 page)

Thursday, May 10, 2001

So next week I get my photograph taken for
Entertainment Weekly
. It looks a lot like it will happen at the House on the Rock, after hours, so I may, like my characters, get to ride The World's Largest Carousel.

Which, whatever happens or doesn't happen will probably be more fun, or at least, significantly less smoky, than the author photograph session for
American Gods
, last December.

Now, every now and again I do something really stupid. For example, when I started writing
American Gods
, I swore a mighty oath that I'd not cut my hair or shave my beard until I finished it. By March 2000 I was starting to look like a hasidic terrorist, and somewhere in there I said “Sod it,” and shaved off the beard.

But the hair kept growing. I wasn't going to get a haircut until I'd finished writing
American Gods.

When I tell people about this, they look at me as if I'm really weird, except for the Norwegians who tell me about one of their early kings who didn't shave or cut his hair until he'd united Norway.( And he didn't wash either. At least I still bathed.) So the Norwegians don't think I'm weird.

Anyway, my hair grew and grew (it does that, and whenever I'm tempted to grumble I remember all the people of my generation who would be only too pleased to have hair that grows too fast, or any kind of hair really), and finally it was last October and people who didn't know me were making Howard Stern jokes when they passed me in the street. And I was going to go on a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Reading Tour. . .

So I finished the book. In first draft, anyway. And I went and visited Wendy at
Hair Police
in Minneapolis, and got my first haircut in 18 months; and then I went off on the CBLDF reading tour and raised many tens of thousands for freedom of speech, and this was a good thing. (Somewhere in there I talked Chris Oarr from the defense fund out of auctioning off my cut-off hair for charity.)

(You know, this would be much more fun if I could illustrate it with photos. Maybe when we put up the neilgaiman.com site I will.)

So I had short hair and nobody made Howard Stern jokes any more.

Now, author photos are weird things. For example, take the
Good Omens
photo session, in 1989, where Terry Pratchett and I were taken to a graveyard on the coldest day of the year. The expressions on our faces – variously described as brooding, intelligent, and mysterious, and by the Times of London no less, as sinister – are simply cold. (I was relatively okay. I had a leather jacket on. Terry wore an extremely lightweight jacket he'd borrowed from Malcolm Edwards, because the notion of the authors dressed respectively in black and in white. I was black.)

The easiest author photos have been the various Kelli Bickman photos taken over the years, including my favourite, the
Smoke and Mirrors
back cover photo, with its infinite regression of authors on a TV screen. But Kelli's taking fewer photos these days, and is concentrating more on her artwork. (She's MTV Featured Artist currently. . .)

The hardest was the one in the UK in 1996 for
Wired
Magazine. The photo you may have seen from that session is the one of me holding a glowing book. The one you've not seen was the one of me, naked and wearing angel wings surrounded by candles. The one that I still remember with loathing was the one that wound up on the cover of
Wired
: it was me covered in sand. (A visual pun: Sandman. Yes?) And I would like to give a tip for young photographers who may want to attempt this shot.

Do not use builder's sand. It may be cheap, but it burns the skin.

Trust me on this. I've been there. I know.

The
American Gods
photo session was nowhere near that painful.

I still think I may have messed everything up by having a haircut.

The photographer was a very nice lady named Sigrid Estrada.

(Kelly Notaras, my editor Jennifer Hershey's right-hand woman took me down there. Jennifer herself, and my literary agent Merrilee Heifetz wandered along during the course of the afternoon.)

Sigrid took one look at me and said “I thought you were going to have longer hair.”posted by Neil Gaiman 10:33
PM

She looked very disappointed.

“No,” I said, apologetically. “I don't.”

She sighed. She shook her head. I never quite found out why this messed things up as much as it obviously had.

Sigrid had a plan for a photo. The plan involved a lot of smoke. Her assistant held the smoke machine. Kelly Notaras was drafted in to hold a piece of cardboard to waft the smoke. And I stood there while Sigrid shouted “Smoke!” at the assistant holding the smoke machine, and the machine would belch huge gusts of white fog at me, and then she'd call “Waft!” at Kelly and Kelly would wave the paper and try to get the smoke off my face.

And that's what we did for the next four or five hours. We did it with my leather jacket on. We did it with my leather jacket off. We did it with me standing up. We did it with me sitting down. We did it with me peering coyly from around the side of a huge sheet of paper. And all through this, the smoke was belched, and then the smoke was wafted. (Jennifer did some fine smoke wafting, too.)

Merrilee exerted an agent's traditional prerogative and ran up between smoke belches and tried to tame the hair on my forehead. It didn't tame, but she did her best.

And I began to understand what a kipper must feel like, at the precise moment it stops just being a herring, and realises that it has been smoked. For me that moment occurred at the point where Sigrid decided that it might be more. . . more whatever she was going for. . . if the smoke was splurted directly at my head, rather than just generally belched out around waist level.

I'd hold my breath and smile and be told that I shouldn't smile, not for the kind of photo that Sigrid had in mind. So I'd stop smiling, and the smoke would splurt and Kelly or Jennifer would waft it and Sigrid would click away.

Days would pass before the taste of the smoke machine finally left the back of my throat. Still, it could have been much worse. There was no builder's sand involved, nor was I being warned not to get too close to the candles or my wings would go up like tinder and burn my bare skin.

So a few weeks passed, and one day the contact sheets arrived. Lots and lots of photos of me. And smoke.

My son took one look at the contact sheet and said “Was your head on fire?”

“No,” I said.

“It just looked like it was, that was all.”

And he was right. All the smoke being let off at head level had managed to create a set of photos in which it was perfectly obvious that my head was indeed on fire.

Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) was staying with us over Christmas. I showed her the contact sheet.

“They make you look like your head's on fire,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It's a special effect.”

“And all the ones of you not wearing the leather jacket make you look like David Copperfield.”

“Yes. That's a special effect too.”

“You don't want to look like David Copperfield, do you?”

“No, thank you. Let's stick with the ones with me with a jacket on.”

We picked one black and white photo, and one colour picture. The best thing about the black and white photo was the smoke in the background, which, far from looking like my head (or indeed any part of me) was on fire, looked instead like a mysterious sort of background, which might be clouds or mountains or, well, anything really.

I think they're pretty good photos. I still feel vaguely guilty about getting the haircut, though. I just wonder what Ingrid could have done, if my hair had been longer. And whether whatever it was would have required quite so much smoke.

 

posted by Neil Gaiman 10:33
PM

Saturday, May 12, 2001

I was doing a telephone interview about
American Gods
when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.

For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn't.

“Douglas Adams is dead,” I said.

“Yes,” said the interviewer. “I know. Did you ever meet him?”

I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.

After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don't remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)

I'd known Douglas fairly well in the 80s — interviewed him originally for
Penthouse
then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote “
Don't Panic — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion
” for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.

Saw him at David Gilmour's 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the
Neverwhere
TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn't be the same experience he'd had with the
Hitchhiker
TV series, but it was.

Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the
Starship Titanic
game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn't get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He'd previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker's Books, and I'd said no as I didn't have the time.

We'd e-mail from time to time.

He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don't think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn't meant to be a writer. I'm not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it's something they don't have a concept for yet, let alone a name — and if he'd been around when this thing was around (
World Designer? Explainer?)
he would have done it brilliantly.

(I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print.)

He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don't.

& I'll miss him. posted by Neil Gaiman 3:08
PM

Sunday, May 13, 2001

Spent a large chunk of yesterday replying to fanmail. (I always try to answer it. It goes into a box, and three or four times a year I clean out the box, scrawling postcards that answer questions & say thank you as best I can in the room on the back of a postcard.) I don't do it as often as I should, and get a wholly disproportionate sense of accomplishment when it's all replied to, and the box is filled with postcards.

And I pulled out my copy of
Don't Panic
(the original Titan edition of 1987, not the reissue that Dave Dickson wrote extras for at the end, nor the US Pocket Books edition where page 42 – which we'd left intentionally blank because the first time I'd printed out the book page 42 was [not on purpose, just a glitch from whatever computer program I was using to word process in those dim dark days] a blank piece of paper with “page 42” on it, and that seemed improbable enough to be some kind of a sign – on the US Pocket Books edition Page 42 was just part of the book. . . ) and I read the book I'd written fourteen years ago, and heard Douglas's voice all the way through it, affable, baffled, warm and dry.

There are worse ways to say goodbye. And it may have been a strange one, but it worked, and we take our goodbyes where we can.posted by Neil Gaiman 8:40
AM

Tuesday, May 15, 2001

So, today brought an envelope, and in it, the finished book cover for
American Gods
. It's lovely. Big lightning bolt on the cover, gold letters, and the back cover is covered with wonderful blurbs, many of them melted down from ones already posted here. Also photo of me, with smoke in background and messy hair. Author delighted. Finished books should arrive on the 31st of May. Author excited.

Also e-mail today saying
American Gods
has been sold to Czechoslavakia and to France, which gives us the first two foreign sales.

The most interesting
American Gods
call was from the editor of the e-book edition of
American Gods
, which will be published at the same time as the novel, asking about what kind of things we can add to the e-book: I suggested that we add this journal. . .

posted by Neil Gaiman 8:29
PM

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

* * *

There is nowhere in the whole world quite as strange or as special as
The House on the Rock.
Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 of the novel take place there — stuff happens, and some characters get to ride the World's Largest Carousel.

Nobody's allowed to ride the World's Largest Carousel in real life. It just goes round and round and round, like something from the Weisinger-era Fortress of Solitude.

I drove for 3 hours to get there. Jeff, the photographer, had a whole crew of people waiting. First, make-up. Then, the initial set up: a double-exposure picture of me and the strange nipple-revealing shop-window dummy mannequin angels that hang from the roof of the Carousel room. (One of the photos from today will illustrate the review in the
Entertainment Weekly
books section.)

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