Neil-O Speaketh

As promised, here is the article with the questions I managed to fire off to Neil-O when he came down to Singapore over the course of July 4th-6th. Since it’s a small, local Singapore publication, odds are you will never see this article outside of the island, so enjoy this semi-exclusive content, and thanks to GameAxis for not caring what I did with it after it went to print…

Neil Gaiman AKA The Geek King

If you’re ANY kind of comic book geek, I’m totally wasting this space, but just in case you’re not… Neil Gaiman is one of the breakthrough writers of comics. While some may argue that his work is not as “important” as Alan Moore or Frank Miller, there’s no denying that he has been far more commercially successful. His very weird and very literary Sandman comics grabbed the much coveted female readership that no one had been able to touch. Then he went off and started writing novels and won awards for that. Now he’s getting into films, so with all this stuff going on, what’s next for the guy?

When he came to Singapore over the course of July 4th-6th, here’s what was dug up…

GameAxis: What about your involvement in video games? Writers like Clive Barker and Orson Scott Card have contributed to stories for games, why not you?

Neil: I’m such a Typhoid Mary when it comes to games. All through the early to late 90’s, nice people would come to me and say, “Video game!” and I’d go, “Absolutely!” and they’d say, “Brilliant! Here are our wonderful new offices, here is your contract, here’s a brand new computer for you, and we’ll fly you somewhere for long conversations with sparkling water in designer bottles, and you will talk to our top geeks!” And I would fly out there and we would have these great conversations and I would go back and then… I’d phone them up a week later and say “Well, I’m ready to roll!” and they’d say, “Actually, they’ve just come in this morning to close us down.” And after that happened three or four times, I started feeling like maybe I just wasn’t meant to be doing video games. I still feel bad about several new companies run by very nice people… I have jackets with their logos on them… Maybe one day someone will do some E-Bay collection of out of business video game companies.

GameAxis: What about you as a gamer? Do you play?

Neil: I love video games, I love video gaming. I sort of reveal my grumpy old man colors when people ask what my favorite video game ever was. And I tell them it was the very, very first, original Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy text based game, because the graphics were best, being all in your head. But also I think because that was the first game I ever got absolutely addicted to. It was that moment of waking up one morning, realizing that I’d been playing it in my head all night, and I had just solved something. I was like “Whoa, I can do that…”

GameAxis: But then there’s all that Gee Whiz CG Wizardry in Beowulf…

Neil: Beowulf is a film I wrote in 1997, with Roger Avary, who did Killing Zoe, and Rules of Attraction and co-wrote Pulp Fiction. We wrote this as a live-action movie, and it’s gone through various vizzi, viccis… vicissitudes—not really a Monday morning word… and then it was just about to be made as this low budget, live action film, when Robert Zemeckis came along and said he’d always loved our script for Beowulf. And wanted to do an adult film, having done Polar Express, he’d done this sort of 3D motion capture technology, figured that it was time to try and take that on a level, and do something with it for adults. And so bought our script, and that goes into production… actually, it’s in production now, but they’ll capture the performances of Anthony Hopkins and all of those people in October. But one of the things that’s fun about that is because all the characters are digitized and all this, they actually will be creating the game at the same time. So there should be a Beowulf game at the same time as there’s a Beowulf movie, and with luck, my curse on video game companies will finally be ended, before someone else gets dragged down, [like] Electronic Arts going down with the ship…

That’s Outta’ The Way

Synopsis is finished. Managed to keep it to nine pages, even with the double spacing. It’s amazing how much you lose by squeezing into such a little area.

I sent it off to agent (See link to the bottom left, Sternig & Byrne? That’s him) to let him take a pass at it and see if there’s anything about it that needs changing. Potentially he might be able to just take the synopsis itself and shop that around first to see who bites with the promise “And this time, it’s SHORT!” At least that way he can build up some interest over the next few weeks while I nurse this book into something cleaner and a little bit shorter. And relatively free of typos, I hope.

That’s always been my big thing, typos. About 10% of the time my brain will assume I typed something, but my fingers never got the message. This is especially bad with definite and indefinite articles such as “a” or “the”. Tricksy little things they are…

Tomorrow:

More Neil-O goodness! The new issue of GameAxis is out, and they’ve given me permission to post my Neil-O interview here since it’s a free publication anyway. Neil-O fans take note, I only asked geeky gamer questions, so if you ever wanted to know how Neil Gaiman reacts to the video game industry, now is your opportunity to learn…

Your Novel: The Short Version

Which is the synopsis.

Those of you that write books for a living probably already have your own opinion on the synopsis. Myself, I just don’t like it very much. Those of you that don’t write books for a living, the quick and short explanation is that a synopsis is… the quick and short explanation of your novel. It comes in a couple of flavors, but the one I’ve been writing for the last couple of years is the slightly more comprehensive flavor, the one that tastes like 10 pages or less, and is double spaced.

The whole point of the exercise is to prove to an editor that you have a good idea, and at least some idea of structure. By giving a quick summary of every chapter, in present tense, a potential editor can decide whether or not you actually have something worth writing about in their eyes. It is, in the simplest terms, your novel’s first impression, a try out where it nervously steps up in front of the camera after submitting it’s resume and says, “Hi, I’m Kandee, I’m 24, I’m a student at UCLA, I love in-line skating on the beach, I love Thai food, and I’ve always wanted to be on TV! *Giggle*!”

If they’re sufficiently intrigued enough by that, then they open up your book to see if, now that they know you have a good idea, you actually know what to do with it.

The reason I’m not overly fond of the synopsis is because… well, it feels like a rehash, which it is. The story has been told, and it took however many pages to do that. When I sit down to write a synopsis, I have a little voice in my head that is spewing it out to me. As a result of childhood exposure to Micromachines commercials and Blur from Transformers: The Movie, that voice sounds like John Moschitta Jr., a former Guinness record holder for fastest talker on the planet:

Andthenthebigmonsterjumpsoutofthebushesandtheheroscreams”Ah!”buthe’sonlysurprisedforamoment, becausehehasamagicswordstuckinhispantsthathepullsoutandstabsthemonsterwith, butthemonsterisimpervioustosteel, butnottohamsandwichesonrye, whichtheherohasonhim, sohethrowsthatatthemonsteranditgetsareallybadrashanddies!

Of course, once you actually make it, then it’s really a matter of preference as to whether you need a synopsis quite as comprehensive. Often, once you’re known as a safe bet, all it takes is summing up the story in a paragraph, and editors will trust in the fact that since you’ve sold X number of books anyway, they’re probably safe enough just leaving it in your hands and seeing what you can cook up.

I’m really looking forward to that.

Oh well, someday…

Transitional States

I gots me some itchy writin’ fingers.

Now is that weird part. Almost a post-partum depression part. You spend every day going back to the keyboard and slugging away at some titanic thing that goes on for hundreds of pages. Eventually, to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed or depressed, you just stop thinking of how many pages there are left and keep your head down, concentrating on the particular thing you want to write Just That Day. And then gradually, it becomes an ingrained habit that of course you’re supposed to sit there and write.

And then one day it’s all over because you have finished it, and even though at the start, it felt like it would never get done, because it was, after all, hundreds and hundreds of pages, you are actually done. You’ve written a ton of story.

But at least for me, the part of my brain that I had to kick into gear in order to finish it, the one that drove back to the keyboard again and again everyday, has not yet wound down, and there’s an itch in the back of my head that feels like it should be writing more of the novel, even though every other part of the brain is saying, “The damn thing is done. There is no more new story, only rewrites.”

I think this is why a lot of writers reccommend not tackling anything–even the book itself–for a while once you’ve finished, to deny temptation the chance to simply write more things in just for the sake of writing. You need to get into a different mode for editing, because now you want to see what you can lose, see what you can sharpen, see what you can a little more nimble because you just wanted to get the idea out before you lost it, and the first pass was a clumsy, ungainly thing. Though writing a little more here and there definitely helps in that respect, going into a rewrite and finding your word count going up instead of down is a sure sign that something is wrong.

Time for more games. I think I’m going to tackle Haunting Ground again, since the Fiance has no desire to watch an extremely hot blonde teenager being chased by big ugly men…

Stick A Fork In Me

‘Cause I am done.

Novel three, first draft, completed at 2:30 am.

420 pages, 111,200+ words.

I started writing around May 28th, so this is the single fastest period I’ve spent writing a book in my life to date. I don’t expect it to repeat it anytime soon. If ever.

Wow. The Pale Summer is finished.

Now all I have to do is edit and rewrite the damn thing and mail it off.

The day after tomorrow. Tomorrow I am playing video games until my fingers fall off.

I’ve earned it, dammit…

The Final Push

No big post right now.

104,000+ words, still not done.

But I think I have it in me to finish it today.

So I guess it’s back into the fray…

Note The Complete Lack Of Surprise

Just passed the 100,000 word mark.

Annnd I’m still not done.

But I’m close to done. I think it’ll go on for a few thousand more, and then hopefully it’ll be all wrapped up.

Irony Alert

In an amazing turn of coincidence, it is now National Day in Singapore, where the locals get up and celebrate the acension of the island from former British colony (Which trusted its Imperial Overlords to protect them during WWII, then got promptly invaded from the north when the Japanese came via Malaysia. The British had set up all their defenses for a sea invasion from the south) to a city-state that has the highest standard of living in the region.

Today is also the day that the final events in my book begin to take place, and this also involves trashing much of the said island with a probably casualty rate in the millions.

I didn’t actually plan for this to happen, but looking at it now, I get a deliciously inappropriate warm n’ fuzzy feeling in my heart, knowing that in my own way, I too am providing some amazing fireworks to the place to contribute to this day of days.

I think I’ll start with the central business district. There are several advertising agencies there I’ve meaning to annihilate for a while…

Cheap Books, Weird Games, Little Sleep

My theory now is maybe the book is affecting my sleeping habits. Despite feeling both tired and sleepy, I barely got any sleep the night before, a couple of hours at best. I hoping once it’s done and the now impending final events are over and done with, my brain will finally shut down properly once I cut the juice off to keeping the story alive.

I still have some script work to do, but I’ll try and get what’s left out of the way done shortly.

It turns out there was a book sale at an art book store that was closing down in town. The fiance walked away with many, many books that were all half-price, and I ended up with American Greats which is a quick summary of defining moments in American personage/invention/history that represent America at its best. It’s good stuff if you’re into quick bites of non-fiction. The other one is an encyclopaedia of fantasy, which I am mighty curious about, but have yet to crack open.

We also finally got a hold of a copy of Psychonauts that our usual game store has been holding onto for us. I know it’s not the greatest game in the world, but the beginning is very amusing in a cute sort of way, the humor is sufficiently snarky that so far whatever deficiencies in actual game design it might have are easily forgiven, though at the moment, problems with the game itself have yet to surface.

Okay, busy! Back to work.

Hey, It’s That Time Of Year Again…

Here’s something you guys in countries without a pre-dominantly Chinese population don’t get to see. I’d almost forgotten about it myself until I was walking around and noticing there was a lot of stuff on fire; people burning things in barrels, people burning joss/incense sticks that were stuck into sidewalks, all kinds of people burning all kinds of things.

It’s called the Hungry Ghost Festival.

My second novel Broken Presences is actually based around this. It’s all about how all them Chinese hells that dead relatives go to decide to give some annual leave time to the deceased. And so, during the 7th lunar month (Which is around August, usually) the gates of hell open for 15 days, and the dead roam amongst the living. This is a kind of a mixed blessing as it means that theoretically, beloved spirits and relatives are released, which is good, and you want to pay proper respects to them. It also means a lot nasty spirits are set loose, which is bad, and you want to keep them from getting into too much trouble.

To make up for this, when the ghosts are all roaming around, the Chinese do all kinds of whacky things like avoid swimming. Apparently ghosts favor water as a comfortable medium to inhabit, and if they see anything kicking its legs around in a pool or ocean, their jaws reflex kicks in, and they will find themselves inexplicably drawn to the swimmer to do who knows what, so swimming during the festival period isn’t advised.

There’s also food. I mean, the festival is called “Hungry” for a reason and most of these poor dislocated spirits have gone for a long time in hell without a decent meal, so people will leave things out for them. During this time it’s not unusual to go walking down the street and see some soft drinks and fruit or rice & vegetables innocuously just sitting on the sidewalk with absolutely no one touching them. For entertainment, the Chinese also have their variant on opera called “Wayang” (Which, to me, anyway, sounds like the kind of sounds you’d get if you strung a cat up on a rack and applied a taser to it of varying voltage) and these are designed to give these ghosts something to enjoy while they’re on shore leave. The entertainment comes in traditional opera, and contemporary singing, which average, every day mortals are free to enjoy, but they make it a point to leave some seats empty for the intended audience.

Oh, and there’s hell merchandise.

This is primarily for relatives, and is probably the big reason that any self-respecting ghost would look forward to the festival if he or she has a big family that’s still alive. Families can buy all kinds of paper products, which, when burnt, are transmuted to spiritual form for the dead to use. The most common gift is hell money, which ghostly relatives can use to boost the economy of hell, through increased spending power. But for people that really go all the way, you can run the gamut from hell cars, hell houses to yes, even hell DVD players. All these wonderful gifts, transmuted into the ethereal plane so that you can show the ones you love that A) We really care, and B) Please don’t haunt or torment us.

Right. Back to the book. 89.000+ words and counting. So… close…