Neil Gaiman on "Writing the Next Thing"

A Quote from Neil Gaiman's Journal (on his site:

Perhaps somewhat motivating...

Dear Neil, I am sure you have probably answered this question before and are probably, therefore, very sick of it. But, I still must ask. I am an aspiring writer and am wondering how you stayed motivated during times of great failure. I understand what many writers mean when they say the love of the art drives them. What I am concerned with is how to deal with the inevitable denial of a piece of literature that you have invested everything in?

Write the next thing.

Maybe the world will catch up with your brilliance eventually, or maybe you'll look back in ten years and decide it wasn't that great really after all. Doesn't really matter. Times of great failure or times of great success, the problem is the same (how do you keep going?) and the solution is the same: You write the next thing.

Dave bought The Sandman Book of Dreams, which is an anthology of stories inspired by The Sandman series, and edited by Gaiman and Ed Kramer.
One of the most interesting things about this anthology is reading his introductions at the beginning of each story; he talks about where he met each author and how - some of them in signing lines at readings.
It reminds me of his introduction to Ellen Klages' Portable Childhoods and his descriptions of Ellen.
What would it be like to have such an intro written about me someday?
This book has Lisa Goldstein, one of the Brazen Hussies, and Delia Sherman, whom I met at WisCon, and also Tad Williams. We met Tad at a convention here in the Bay Area, but can't remember which one.

Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages

I'm actually rereading Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell right now, but I wanted to write about Portable Childhoods since I realized I only need a quick spiel on the Facebook thing.

And of course this is just me writing reading notes. I'm sick right now also and am writing this in bed on the laptop (having just had some generic Nyquil like cold medicine). It's kind of comforting to have Portable Childhoods and Max Merriwell hanging around. Also I just reread Points of Departure, but I guess that is a different post.

My copy is paperback and is signed but I think I bought it from Amazon, so that is mysterious. I didn't remember having noticed that it was signed when I bought it on the site. Maybe I should have bought it locally (and could have had Ellen sign it too, I guess) --- but I wanted it pretty quickly.

I like Neil Gaiman's intro because he paints a pretty good picture of what Ellen seems to be like in person (he calls her "a force of nature" which is quite fun) and how that differs from her writing. It's also obviously quite cool to have him writing the intro at all. I blogged here earlier about when we first met Ellen at the Gaiman reading in Berkeley - she was sitting behind us and we heard "nebula award" and our ears perked up. Then Dave actually asked her who she was. I think she thought we were more than a little crazy.

Basement Magic
I loved this one, maybe partly because I share this fascination with basements and I kind of miss not having one here in California. That one house we saw that was quite crappy, almost sold itself to me on the strength of having a huge, albeit unfinished, basement.
I also think Dave would be interested in this story with the stepmother theme too .
motherless daughter, strong female role model in Ruby, magic that comes true...

Intelligent Design
God as being almost like a spoiled child, making the world by whim, while his grandmother is the one who's been there even longer...
I think overall I didn't like this one quite as much as the others, but still liked it.

Green Glass Sea
Doesn't need much more description other than that I love Dewey (and I wonder when her birthday is).
And where is my copy of Green Glass Sea?

Clip Art
Nice "documentary" of a young girl who collects paper clips. amazing amount of detail with the clips and their names, and the cutting between different scenes...

Mobius, Stripped of a Muse
Ever increasing layers of authorship -- a scene...it goes for a while, and then the unseen writer is like, "no that's not working" and the scene starts again....
It sounds like an improv game almost (and maybe it is).
I liked this one a lot. Good pre-nano story.

Time Gypsy
I love this one -- woman goes back in time to meet physics scholar she's admired all her life, and winds up falling in love..

I bought this as a chapbook when I was at borderlands. Maybe at the same time I bought Green Glass Sea..
Part of why I like this is just the fandom of finally meeting and getting to know, someone you've admired for a long time.

A Taste of Summer
This is probably my favorite story in here that I hadn't already read before. I just love the feeling of adventure when she actually crosses the street, looking for refuge, and the cool science-y role model type that Nan is. Really similar to my character in the Nano (and not suprisingly).
I also liked how Nan isn't conventionally dressed - showing Mattie that's it's ok to wear men's clothes....whcih she hadn't really seen before.

Portable Childhoods
This one, sometimes I see myself in the unnamed child and sometimes in the mother, who always seems a little bit amazed to have this person in her life, her daughter, who is her own little person - different from the mom, and she wonders if the two would have been friends.
Also please note on p158 - there's a whole thing about St. Elmo's Fire, interesting because of Pat's affinity for St. Elmo.

And all the stuff about shuffling cards -- how important it is to learn and what a milestone it is. I totally feel that way too. I learned to shuffle at my grandma's house because we were playing a lot of solitaire, and I wanted to shuffle better. Dr. Gammell wound up teaching me.

And last but not least
In the House of the Seven Librarians
Which i had already read in the Firebird anthology but I love so much. And here kari is going to be a librarian.

And the best part -- the afterwod for me..
" I didn't start writing, or at least writing seriously, until I was almost forty."
there's hope yet for me!
Jon Hassler had said the same thing.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things: Buy on Amazon

I just finished this a couple days ago and it is very wondrous indeed. It's been inspiring me to write more stuff of my own and just imagine (for example, the butternut squash that was sitting on our countertop for several days started to assume a sinister aspect in my mind - is it a visitor from the fairy world? An alien? Why aren't we eating it? What's up with that?).
Dave did bake it up yesterday and made a soup of it, it was delicious and hasn't harmed us (yet).

I'm not going to say anything about the stories themselves as they should be a surprise and Dave hasn't finished the book yet. Neil has a great intro in the beginning where he talks about each story/poem in the collection - his intro is much better than anything I could do.

Dave and I were lucky to see him reading in Berkeley, Monday, Oct 2. It was a surprise from me to Dave, and he was very surprised, although he had guessed it was Neil Gaiman that morning (of course I did not confirm and remained cagey. It was good that the event was at the Berkeley Rep instead of at Cody's, because I could honestly say when we were driving up there, "No, we're not going to Cody's!")

We didn't get to stand in line for a signing (and so didn't get our copy of Good Omens signed, as well as American Gods, etc) and didn't go to Kepler's the next day for the signing there, but I think it worked out well that we got our pre-signed copy.

FngKestral on Flickr went to both events, here's his/her pictures. The Kepler's event looked like a bit of a madhouse and Gaiman looked much more tired there. The above picture shows him exactly how he looked at the Berkeley reading we went to. We were in the front row!!!

Sitting behind us was Ellen Klages, whom we were eavesdropping on because she mentioned being a Nebula Award finalist. After Dave found out her name, we told her we would read her work, and when I googled her at home we discovered she is a friend of Pat's, and has co-written several of the Exploratorium science books with her and that Ellen has her first novel (The Green Glass Sea) coming out in the next couple weeks. (post to follow on that, although I did order her chapbook story "Time Gypsies" and can write about that). Ellen also has won a Nebula in 2005. I'm planning as well to get the Firebirds Rising anthology from the library, to read Ellen's story about a girl being raised by "feral librarians".