Well, unless you are going to only write stories in which nice things happen to nice people, you are going to write stories in which people who do not believe what you believe show up, just like they do in the world. And in which bad things happen, just as they do in the world. And that’s hard.
And if you are going to write awful people, you are going to have to put yourself into their shoes and into their head, just as you do when you write the ones who believe what you believe. Which is also hard.
I think that knowing what you believe, writing fiction informed by what you believe, and knowing that your fiction has a moral grounding (if it does) is the best thing for an author. And not worrying about what readers think of you, any more than you’d worry about what your parents or lovers might think if they read your fiction.
It’s something that I thought a lot about a long time ago, when one young man killed his lover, and then killed himself, and tried to frame Sandman (and me) for it. And the conclusion I came to was that you have to be good in your heart with what you’ve written. And beyond that, you cannot worry.
(For the curious: http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/54466572210/rebloggable-by-request-on-responsibility Is a link to the time I wrote about it here on tumblr. And https://nothingbutcomics.net/2018/02/26/sandmanmurder/ is a blog entry by someone else that gives more background and news links.)
Tag Archives: neil gaiman
This needs to be framed on my wall!
Some real advice. Thanks for letting me know I’m on the right track, Neil!
I just rediscovered how glorious this image is so excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably every time I look at it again.
It was taken in Kensal Green Cemetery in February.
Terry borrowed the white jacket from our editor, Malcolm Edwards, and grumbled that it did nothing to keep him warm on a very cold day.
“Sometimes you have to be cold to look cool,” I told him.
“It’s all right for you,” he said. “You’re wearing a leather jacket.”
“You could wear a leather jacket too.”
“I’m wearing white,” said Terry, pointedly. “That way, when they come after us for writing a blasphemous book, they’ll know I’m the nice one.”
(After the photo was taken we noticed the bat-winged hourglass, which we hadn’t seen during the photo session, and requested bat-winged hourglasses as a design motif in the book.)
I should add that we already had winged hourglasses all the way through the book. We just has them change the wings from bird to bat.
Like blood magic?? Putting stuff from yourself into a character?
More like trying to create a version of the character in your head, using your memories and hopes and dreams and thoughts and imagination, and then seeing what happens if you ask that character a question or place them in a stressful situation. How they behave isn’t necessarily how you’d behave. But it’s based on parts of yourself.
Good Omens: a gentle reminder
Your headcanon is your headcanon. The characters in your mind are what they are, and nobody is trying to take them away from you. Think of the Good Omens TV series as a stage play: for six full hours, actors are going to be portraying the roles of Crowley and Aziraphale, Shadwell and Madame Tracy, Newt and Anathema, Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale and Brian and the rest. Will they look like the people in your head? The ones you’ve been drawing and writing about and imagining for (in some cases) almost 30 years?
Probably not. Which is fine.
The people in your head and your drawings are still there, and still real and still true. I’ve seen drawings of hundreds of different Aziraphales over the years, all with different faces and body-shapes, different hair and skin, and would never have thought to tell anyone who drew or loved them that that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like. (And a couple of years after we wrote it, I was amused to realise that the Aziraphale in my head looked nothing like the Aziraphale in Terry’s head.) I’ve loved every instance of Good Omens Cosplay I’ve seen, and in no case did I ever think anyone was doing it wrong: they were all Aziraphales and Crowleys, and it was always a delight.
Good Omens has been unillustrated for 27 years, which means that each of you gets to make up your own look for the characters, your own backstories, your own ideas about how they will behave.
The TV version is being made with love and with faithfulness to the story. It’s got material and characters in it that Terry and I had discussed over the years, (some of it from what we would have done it there had been a sequel). Writing it has taken up the greater part of my last three years. You might like it – I really hope you will – but you don’t have to. You can start watching it, decide that you prefer the thing in your head, and stop watching it. (I never saw the last Lord of the Rings movie, because I liked the thing in my head too much.)
Remember we are making this with love.
And that your own personal headCrowleys and headAziraphales and headFourHorsemen and headThem and headHastur and headLigur and headSisterMary and all the rest are yours, and safe, and nobody is ever going to take them away from you.
Yoshitaka Amano’s 2006 collaboration with Neil Gaiman and David Bowie – I wanted to make the story about David Bowie coming to the city of New York. Iman is the queen, and she’s waiting for the Duke to rescue her, and she’s been waiting for a thousand years. But when I told that to Iman, she said that in real life that would never happen. [Laughs] She’d never wait that long.
(Amano on The Return of the Thin White Duke, for V Magazine.)
Just out of curiosity, is there any books you recommend that have a similar humorous/ dark tone as VC?
Hey! Book reccs! Always a good topic.
It’s tough for me to answer bc I think it depends on every individual reader’s sense of humor,… even within “humorous/ dark tone as VC” there is a range*. So I can’t say definitively that these reccs are in line with what you’re looking for necessarily, but you can use this list as a starting point.
*Lestat dancing w/ Claudia’s mom’s corpse: Some ppl find this moment dark and hilarious and other ppl think it’s just disgusting, so… there is a range. Personally I find it pretty amusing.
(There are some duplicates on this list, sorry about that, but I wanted to list them by recc’er.) (And I added ** next to those that @gothiccharmschool just recc’d in two recent posts which I will reblog momentarily for you.)
In no special order:
- (Okay this is the first one bc it IS special, and the closest to the humor of VC I’ve seen in awhile) This is a mockumentary/movie but it sneaks onto the top of the list bc it is just SO good, courtesy of @theamazingdrunk for reminding me in a comment on an older rec post: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
- **Salem’s Lot – Stephen King, personally, I find several Stephen King books to be darkly humorous, this one is a good one. I find humor in the Shining and Firestarter, too, but less so.
- Vittorio – don’t forget Vittorio. Not sure if you read this one. It’s also by Anne Rice and technically not a VC book, he has a different origin story and is not part of the VC vampire group.
- Some short stories – @soyonscruels posted: those who dream only by night: the gothic short stories rec list – Not full-length books but still, short stories are good! There are 20 short stories listed, writers include @neil-gaiman, Roald Dahl, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, each of whom I’ve found to have some level of humor along w/ dark tones.
- More E. A. Poe is offered up here, from @keep-calm-and-heta-oni, which includes little capsules about each.
- @consultingcupcake said: “I really love the Cirque du Freak series, and **Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite. Both have teenage protagonists
- @fantasticfelicityfox said: The Historian is very good
- @stitcheskitty said: Sookie Stackhouse novels
- @riverofwhispers said: Carmilla is good
Anita Blake and Sookie Stackhouse books, but only the early ones.
the Rachel Morgan series but again starts out good gets weird later and it’s not about vampires so much as there are vampires in it. - @bluestockingcouture said: ‘The Angel’s Cut’, sequel to ‘The Vintner’s Luck’, is very atmospheric and well worth reading. Not quite as moving and intense, but there are some excellent new characters.
- @sanguinivora said: Also, as to voice: IWTV opens in the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. Don’t know about either a southern American or French hinterlands-with-a-gloss-of-Parisian dialect, but for the grammar and vocabulary, one cannot go too far wrong looking to the novels of Jane Austen and Patrick O’Brian.
- @dragontrainerdaenerys said: I just read Fevre Dream, George R.R Martin’s own vampire novel, and while I didn’t liked much his vampire mythology the main characters are charming! Besides, it’s set on the late 18XX and goes on the Mississipi River, so it has similar scenarios to IWTV!
- @baroquebat said: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, while futuristic, has a loooot of lovely gothic set pieces in the anime movie, plus its just gorgeous and has the rare treat of having a dhampir lead!
@annabellioncourt’s Recs, and these are mostly her descriptions, too, compiled from other recc posts:
- The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories – Angela Carter
- Carmilla – Bunch of adaptations of this.
- A Taste of Blood Wine – Freda Warrinton, for romance and decadence.
- **Blood Opera Sequence (or “Trilogy”?) – Tanith Lee’s vampire series was out when Lestat was playing rockstar
- Historian – Elizabeth Kostova, for its worldliness
- **Fevre Dream (yes its spelled fevre) by George R. R. Martin (yes, its THAT Martin, and his take on vampires is Very Good.)
- Sunshine by Robin McKinley
- **The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot, also for romance and decadence. (the recently-published edition from Valancourt Books has a foreword by @gothiccharmschool!)
- The Hunger by Whitley Scriber
- **Dracula – Bram Stoker, for its stereotype-setting content
- Lord Ruthven – Byronic vampire, Lestat doesn’t catch the irony of John Polidori’s mockery of the foppish, arrogant, and well…Lord-Byron-y vampire
>>>>Moar recs from @annabellioncourt under Spooky Book Recommendations
>>>>Moar recs from @gothiccharmschool: here, here, and in her #vampire books and #vampire novels tags.
>>>>My #VC adjacent recs tag
Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this with other VC-adjacent book recs!
@hyperbeeb (<– is very well-read and took one for the team to read Blood Vivicanti!), @gothiccharmschool, @fyeahgothicromance, @thebibliosphere, (@annabellioncourt, too, but you are technically off the hook as I’ve already posted your recs!), got any recs for books w/ similar humorous/ dark tone as VC?
do you have any advice for a hobbyist writer who’s made to feel that their output is worthless, inherently badly-written trash and constantly compares themself to better writers?
Only to avoid whoever makes you feel like that as much as humanly possible for the rest of your life.
(If it’s you doing it to you, stop it, now and be kinder to yourself and your writing. If it’s someone else, tell them to stop and, if they can’t, let them out of your life.)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman broadcast today on BBC Radio 4
Oh! I love these.
Be kind to yourself in the year ahead.
Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It’s too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.
Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them.
Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2014/12/new-years-wishes-and-gifts.html
This is from Last Year. It’s the one that doesn’t get passed around as much.
(via neil-gaiman)
I-want-my-IWTV 