Neil, Thursday, April 10, 2008, 00:12 clock
discharges Things are so strange. You write it and never know whether they have brought anyone anything. I have received recently, for example this:
think Why are you qualified to comment on up to Bob Kane, if it is clear that you know nothing about him prktisch?
You have spoiled me with your ill-considered comments about Kane in your introduction, to buy a book by Will Eisner. (Kane, not Jerry Robinson, the Batman stories drawn from 1939-43.) If you need more information, lean not on rumors but on reliable sources. Either that, or I can also send a summary. I research namely.
confused And I wrote back:
Hello.
Your letter has confused me, so I have two introductions that I've written on books by Will Eisner, checked again and found a single mention of Bob Kane. I have written in Norton City Stories Collection:
I wanted to know why he went on, why he still made comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane - before he did Batman) already long had withdrawn and had stopped with the telling of stories and drawing, and the past were.
guess what makes me, you've probably read another introduction from someone else, and better write to that e-mails should irritated, not me. Happy
Neil
But the email address that was given was wrong and my answer came back. (I'm assuming it was an accident. - A brief Googling made me come across someone with the same name on Wikipedia, where he enthusiastically defended the reputation of Bob Kane) So I put it to talk purely in the hope that celled the grumpy Lord gets read.
But now and then you also get something like this:
Hey Neil,
As far as introductions I wanted to tell you that I came across years ago when rummaging through the pile at USC on a Robert Silverberg department and said to myself was, "Hmm, the name I know." I one of the paperbacks (The Man in the Maze) have taken and behold, you had written the introduction to it!
course, I borrowed it on your recommendation, and discovered an amazing authors that I might otherwise overlook, and of course have your blog searched and found out that it is indeed you were, where I have come across the name for the first time. So thank you! And write further discharges (and everything else!)
- Theresa B
Which reminds me that there's an introduction to Robert Silverberg, which I wrote with great joy (and is read by many with great joy ). So here it is, the introduction to
Bob Silverberg's The Man in the Maze
:
The wound that never heals: an introduction.
According to a few thousand years, the details a little insecure. But the core of the story is the following: Philoctetes attended the cremation of Hercules and Hercules, he was given quiver of poisoned arrows. And something happened - a snake bite, or perhaps one of the magic arrows he fell on his foot. Either way, Philoctetes injured his foot and it was a wound that would not heal. Sometimes they do not.
The Trojan War had just begun and Philoctetes went to fight with the Greeks who besieged Troy. There was a problem. The wound. They stank. A disturbing stench was all the people are sick to Philoctetes. They smelled of death. It smelled worse than death.
Philoctetes was exiled.
The siege of Troy took down another ten years.
And then someone dreamed a dream, an important dream, a prophetic dream: if the arrows of Hercules would be gerbacht to Troy, then Troy would fall. They sent a messenger to Philoctetes, and invited him to come back. But Philoctetes had no desire to return ...
And keep the good stories and can be told again and again (and perhaps have told
)
is also the wound of Philoctetes Muller, one of the grim trio again and again enter the stage in The Man in the Maze , Robert Silverberg novel of 1969, even if Muller's wound is not a physical vapor but a spiritual: a contagious despair, the terrible smell of the human condition. The Man in the Maze indicates
that it is a good thing that we of are isolated from each other: we are wounded by life, by our mere existence, and we could not stand the smell of our souls to each other. science fiction more than any other form of literature is an ongoing process, which is provided with a best before date. Some as SF may be unreadable. Many a reputation eroded over time. What appeals to us, although the expiry date has long expired, is art, and perhaps some truth.
It was Robert Silverberg, among other things, an author of fantasy, which has brought us a story dig, in which archaeologists texts of the 1960s and wonder about the lyrics of Bob Dylan, fill vacancies must. To some degree we are now in the same position when we look at the fantasy of the past. There are Texts that require context.
Silverberg has made both as a writer and as a writer in many different ways career. Since then, he began writing SF, he has shown a broad intellect and skill as a writer, which provided him early in his career, the reputation of being able to deliver a volume of stories competent to order. In the late 60s and early 70s he began a period of astonishing fertility and quality - years in which he grazed in deep, honest and edgy wrote and put demands on themselves, to such novels as
Dying Inside and The Stochastic Man led. Then he had the SF exhausted behind, only to return to us and in his historical novel to lead Lord of Darkness with the perspective of SF writers in the Elizabethan Africa , and beyond the boundaries of fantasy Majipoor in the cycle. The Man in the Maze
from Anfagszeit its most angular period. I think it is a bridge book, because it is brave, explore new territory, with one foot in the corner is New Wave, but still not forgotten his roots. From led the development of the SF we have hints of space opera, complete with incomprehensible and inexplicable alien artifacts. We also get some strange insight into the present. Literature, and the times predicted can create itself, by necessity, left out. In this novel we erkenenn the maze like no reader could have done it in 1969. The maze is an imaginative death trap - then an amazingly imaginative creation, which now seems a little pale, because it is immediately recognized as a component of computer games - an exercise of reflection and memory, discernment and imagination. The path through the maze of using drones and volunteers who give their lives for it, the way through a game - find the center alive, avoid capture, to reach your goal.
It is now easy to keep the maze of course, to let him be the background: the maze but in all its forms is one of the characters in this novel.
I initially had highlighted the story of Philoctetes, not to give you a key to the novel in your hands (there is no simple key to good stories, and there should be no) but to show, in which tradition Silverberg's story is.
I suspect the title is as important as everything else, if you want to take a history. (It is the
man in a maze, not the woman, as the reader soon realizes
- the lack of women in history, apart from courtesans and memories of sexual experiences , makes the story seem like something from our past) is when we start reading the man's identity obvious: it is Muller - who else could it be.? But during the journey progresses through the book and the end comes, one wonders who the man really was and what the maze was really the candidate Ned Rawlins, has an honest name and an open face, our young innocents, Dick Muller, the Philoctetes of this book, the experienced diplomat and a soldier and warrior, now in exile, and Charles Boardman, the clever older eminence grise , events udn people as best he can manipulate. They form a group of three men, range from honor and integrity and calculation to compromise: the male counterpart to the maid, the mother and the old woman - or something wacky, to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit an exceptionally sly. And get any man, as the reader learns of Silverberg own maze - a maze that goes beyond the tangible, the video-game death case. There are invisible maze, they have to overcome them, and where they hide - a maze of morality, an ethics, and ultimately, a maze of humanity.
Neil Gaiman June 2002
's great that you've linked a Tim Minchin video! I saw his show last Saturday in NY and loved. He's funny and talented and a very nice guy. However, I am a little surprised you did not mention his last name or link in the labels. Norma enough, but do you call those who are worth it. (Last names make the search much easier, as you write seems to be Tim's.)
~ Lexa
Inflatable You
song was
Tim Minchin
.
Hey Neil, I write now for a while stories since I started reading your books, but I have a few problems. One of my stories is 210 pages long, since I write turn a half years, and I wanted to revise it now, but have no idea where to start. I forget already the first details from the background of the main character and so, and it's getting really annoying. I want to get, but can not until I've revised the rest. I feel lost! If that happens to you before, and if so, how did you come so clear? ~ Your faithful reader, Laura, a struggling 14 year old who like to write any stories.
=]
First of all: Good for you! I could have written a book with 14 of 210 pages.
What you do need to know yourself. I can make you a few suggestions, but there are really only suggestions:
Normally I would say try to write the book over, somehow, to get ahead. Then let the finished book a few weeks are left and then read it yet once completely through, and you make notes you what works well and what is not so good, what needs to be changed or added or deleted must. If you've done, working on your book.
But you're fourteen. And do you write for a year on it. This is an age at which you change really fast. Right now, you'll learn how to write, characters designs and they can talk finds out what happened to them. But the stories you want to tell with 13 may not be the stories you want to tell with 15 (or maybe.)
I guess, I will say that it is not a bad thing when you go to next story going to go. You should be the one that you write just to write an end to learn how to do it. But you learn so much about what you are doing well next, it will be much better than what you have done last year ...
Hi Neil,
how much your first drafts are actually usable when you write a story? Wieveil must be rewritten and revised? I realize now that you are so productive that you probably just throw away a little.
I'ch feel just a little discouraged right now, and worry that my first draft is complete rubbish, and the effort has not been successful. (Although perhaps because of the fact that I wrote my first draft always seamless, as it occurs to me, and always makes little sense when I go again by reading, and needs to be revised.)
Thank
Gary B. Phillips
are probably a good 90% of what I write in the first draft ok. Maybe even 95%. It is usually the last 5%, the orders, the little things that make the writing of only
ok
to something that I can be proud
.
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