Where Ideas Come From

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn't know who?)

Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?') are one of the places ideas come from.

Perhaps the most annoying question that authors get asked by those who would like to write themselves is - Where do you get your ideas?, and Neil Gaiman tackles it just beautifully on his blog.

Browsing Gaiman's Bookshelves

Thanks to Ted I spent a while browsing the shelves of Neil Gaiman's incredible home library, up on Shelfari. Couldn't you just lose yourself here? And there's even a library cat to complete the picture.

Gaiman Reads from The Graveyard Book

I mentioned Neil Gaiman's award-winning The Graveyard Book the other day, and quite a few fans happened along to leave comments. Now enjoy listening to the author reading from it :

Gaiman wins Hugo

Neil Gaiman has won a Hugo Award for The Graveyard Book it was announced at the fantasy convention Worldcon in Montreal on Sunday night. The novel has already won or been nominated for several other major awards. Patrick Ness heaps praise on the book here ... and yes, I think I have to read it.

More on the Hugos here.

Why Publishers Should Give Away E-Books

More musing on e-books, I'm afraid.

Kindle-owner Evan Schnittman on the OUP blog asks himself Do I Believe in E-Books? and the answer in this very well argued piece is a cautious yes, particularly when it comes to the question of portability:

... those who are passengers for hours on end in planes, trains and automobiles are the true growth audience for ebooks. Ebooks are about convenience and are what I read when it’s impractical to read in print.

But he also admits to missing the permanence and physicality of books.

He argues in a follow-up post that e-books are only likely to have a very limited market share:

The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform ...

and he therefore suggests that publishers:

... make them free with new book purchases.

And the idea isn't as stupid as it sounds:

Offering ebooks with print could create significant value-added marketing and merchandizing programs. Publishers, retailers, even wholesalers could dramatically benefit from such a plan as consumers could be asked to join affinity and membership programs, enroll in online ebook clubs, and register with publishers in order to download their books. Want your free ebook? Join our readers club and you can download it. Just a bit of info required – by the way, mind if we email you when a new title arrives?

Richard Lea in the Guardian reports on a couple of interesting publishing experiments.

HarperCollins is releasing complete texts from a small selection of authors for periods of a month to test how free access affects sales. One of the first to be selected for the experiment is Neil Gaiman who is asking his fans to vote on his blog for which book is selected. (I want Fragile Things!)

Gaiman reckons that it's about gaining an audience, and he says we usually get to know about a new author through a friend's recommendation, or by browsing in a library or a friend's bookshelves, but not usually by actually purchasing a book.*

Random House meanwhile has announced a pilot project to offer individual chapters of books for a small fee, which when you are talking about non-fiction titles and needing material for research, I reckon is a very good idea indeed.

But let's give the last word to Nicholas Clee on the Guardian blog:

It is 17 years since the creation of the world wide web, and still no publisher has any idea how to deal with it. Is it a threat? An opportunity? Will it be the medium for the spread of free, mostly pirated texts, or will it broaden the market for authors' works? How do you promote books on the internet? By giving them away? By giving them away in snippets? By charging small sums for snippets? We haven't got a clue.

* (Interesting point, don't you think? I have discovered a couple of favourite authors by taking a risk - William Gibson and Etgar Keret - but usually have a good idea of what I want to buy before I go to the bookshop.)

American Gods in Ampang

Last night, I courageously mastered the Middle Ringroad (for the first time!) to drive to Animah's house in Ampang near the zoo for our monthly book club meeting and brought a ratatouille as an offering. Would have arrived on time too if I hadn't somehow been sucked into the boondocks of Melawati.

Our book this month, Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

I must say, I very much liked the central conceit of the book - immigrants from all over the world came to America bringing their gods with them. Now most of these gods are fading away through lack of interest, and because America has created a new set of gods who draw their power from wired technology.

I felt that I was reading the book on behalf of a much younger self (15? 16?) who was still into superhero comics, read science fiction and fantasy and would have loved Gaiman's magic. It isn't so much that the desire for magic fades as you get older, but that as a reader you get a great deal more demanding. And while I found American Gods and enjoyable, light read to consume over lunch, I was resentful that it was taking time away from "meatier" reads that would have tickled the grey matter a bit more, and thus been more satisfying.

The central character, Shadow, is released from prison early after his wife is killed in a car crash and offered a job by the mysterious Wednesday, who as we learn later, is actually an incarnation of the Norse god Odin. There's an epic battle brewing between the old gods and the new, and Shadow and Wednesday begin a road-trip through the heart of America to rally the troops in preparation for it.

Gaiman himself says about the writing of the book:

I didn't really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself in Reykjavik, in Iceland. And it was then that fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure, came together in my head. Either way, the book came into focus. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed.

In our discussion last night it soon became apparent that none of us felt that the plot of the novel hangs together convincingly. You never really get a handle on the "badies" and the final battle, the climax of the book, turns out to be a damp squib rather than the anticipated firework display.

But there are some excellent episodes in the novel, and much of the talk last night was about our favourite bits. All of us enjoyed Gaiman's journey into the soul of America, and particularly the Lakeville subplot (very Twin Peaks!) where Shadow discovers the perfect small town, without crime or unemployment ... but why is it that young girls keep disappearing?

The night visits from Shadow's dead wife Laura were both chilling and darkly funny. The part where Zorya Poluchnaya (the strange sister who spends most of her life asleep) reaches into the night sky to pluck the moon and offer it as a coin to Shadow is truly moving.

I know that I won't be able to ever watch reruns of The Lucy Show without being afraid that Lucy will talk out of the TV set to me!

I loved the way that gods take human form and are forced into the seamier side of American life - the Queen of Sheeba is a prostitute, Egyptian gods Thoth and Anubis become undertakers, Bast the cat becomes a woman in Shadow's dream and seduces him (but the rough tongue is a dead giveaway!) ... and my very favourite story is that of the gay djinn taxi-driver!

The book evoked some pretty mixed reactions from the group, although most did enjoy it. (Thumb voting - 7 thumbs up, 3 thumbs down, 1 abstention.)

Would I recommend it? (Do I need to? Gaiman has an awful lot of fans, y'know!) Yes, but it will probably appeal to younger readers rather more than to cynical old fogeys like us. The style is very simple (though entirely effective) so it would be a good book to bridge the Harry Potter to more adult stuff divide for readers who haven't managed to move beyond yet.

I'm looking forward now to reading some of Gaiman's short stories.

Frantic Fanarchists

It's not often that an author's fans threaten destroying a bookshop if their copies aren't signed! But this is precisely what happened to Neil Gaiman when he visited Brazil ... and since there were 1,250 people in line, Gaiman ended up signing till 2 a.m.!

Tim Martin interviews the author in the Independent.

New word gleaned from the article:= fanarchists! (But has any other author ever needed the expression?)

I liked this:

I think writing is the coolest thing you can do and I think it's a craft. I think being a writer is magical, and it's like being someone who can make a table. I don't think those two things are contradictory, but I think you do people - especially people who want to be writers - no favours if you lead them to believe that what you do is unattainable. The writing that helped me become a writer was people like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock occasionally: these guys who would write about the nuts and bolts of becoming a writer, and let me understand that I could do that: all I had to do was write a really good short story.