In case you’ve missed it, there’s a HUMBLE BUNDLE going on, for charity, of my rare and (in some cases) absolutely unobtainable books, at https://www.humblebundle.com/books. You can get them as ebooks, DRM free, in whatever format you want, for the next ten days. Then it’s done. Pay whatever you want (as little as a dollar) for 4 books, $15 for another 5 including my Duran Duran biography from 1983, and “Above the average” for about a dozen other things (9 are up on the screen now, but you’ll be able to access the others when they come out in a few days).
The average was expected to be, as with all other Humble Bundles, somewhere between almost nothing and the top level. Instead it’s above the average, and creeping up, because you people are so very cool.
It supports the cbldf and The Moth Educational Program (and all the money I get from it goes directly into the Gaiman Foundation, which Does Good). You can decide how much of the money you pay in goes where.
Ten days left. Then the stuff goes back into my basement, probably mostly for good. And the sooner you get in the lower the average is going to be.
If you’ve never read the book Good Omens, let me tell you what you’re missing
-An angel who is so goddamn lazy that he makes a deal with the demon he’s supposed to be thwarting so that neither of them have to do any work and he has more time to spend running his bookshop, and who wants to stop the Apocalypse because he loves sushi
-A demon who pretends to be suave and cool but who really just geeks out over his car and loves James Bond and listens to nothing but Queen and thinks gluing coins to the sidewalk is proper demonic activity
-This angel and demon are probably not gay for each other but I mean they’re holding hands on the cover art.
-This angel and demon try to stop the apocalypse but they fuck up so badly that they do literally nothing useful the whole book and somehow it’s still all about them.
-Technically it was the Satanic Nuns who fucked up, but we don’t really talk about that.
-Death (the horseperson) playing a trivia videogame in a diner.
-The four extra horsepersons that were never mentioned in Revelation.
-The antichrist who almost destroys the world because he wants to save the whales
-The only piece of fiction I have ever seen besides Supernatural that somehow manages to include both the Judeo-Christian apocalypse and space aliens.
-The context of the phrase “gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrous oxide.”
there are no lies in this post
Hello lovelies,
I just wanted to let you all know that, yes, I am aware of the list. Thank you to those who got in touch with me about it. If you would like to speak to me about it, I am more than happy to do so in private.
If you are uncomfortable with the content I produce, by all means, do what you must to feel safe and comfortable. I tag extensively both on Tumblr and on AO3 in order for you to avoid content you don’t wish to see.
I’ll direct you all to this post where I discuss the problematic content I enjoy.
It might also be worth reading Neil Gaiman’s blog post “Why Defend Icky Speech?” which discusses censorship, free speech, and art.
I would also like to remind everyone that both my blogs are flagged as having adult content, because I do not wish to expose young people to things they are not prepared for.
And finally, do not send hate to the poster of the list. They’re young and, “they
thought they were doing a good thing. They thought they were defending
other people from something they needed to be protected from“ (Gaiman), when in reality they are spreading misinformation and advocating censorship. .
If you read nothing else, read the Neil Gaiman.
Neil Gaiman: “We’re working on seeing how many smart-alec answers we can come up with when people ask us how we collaborated.”
Terry Pratchett: “I wrote all the words, and Neil assembled them into certain meaningful patterns… What it wasn’t was a case of one guy getting 2/3 of the money and the other guy doing ¾ of the work.”
NG: “It wasn’t, somebody writes a three-page synopsis, and then somebody else writes a whole novel and gets their name small on the bottom.”
TP: “That isn’t how we did it, mainly because our egos were fighting one another the whole time, and we were trying to grab the best bits from one another.”
NG: “We both have egos the size of planetary cores.”
TP: “Probably the most significant change which you must have noticed [between the British and American editions] is the names get the other way ‘round. They’re the wrong way ‘round on the American edition [where Gaiman is listed first] —”
NG: “They’re the wrong way ‘round on the English edition.”
TP: “Both of us are prepared to admit the other guy could tackle our subject. Neil could write a ‘Discworld’ book, I could do a ‘Sandman’ comic. He wouldn’t do a good ‘Discworld’ book and I wouldn’t do a good ‘Sandman’ comic, but —”
NG: “— we’re the only people we know who could even attempt it.”
TP: “I have to say there’s a rider there. I don’t think either of us has that particular bit of magic, if that’s what it is, that the other guy puts into the work, but in terms of understanding the mechanisms of how you do it, I think we do.”
NG: “There’s a level on which we seem to share a communal undermind, in terms of what we’ve read, what we bring to it.”
Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t…If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni (via poetsandwriters)
Mr. Gaiman, is it worth it to grind through writing a story you are not so passionate about for the sake of writing it? Also, could you please tell a story about Alan Moore? What is it like to hang out with such a fascinating – and creepy – person?
