Yesterday was a bad writing day. I spent a lot of time staring at a screen. Lots of Tumblr replies. Lots of Twitter (the Netflix Sandman trailer going out didn’t help). Lots of being grumpy at myself and convinced I couldn’t do it any more. The script was a mess. I was doomed. This morning I printed out what I had to fix, picked up a pen, made a few notes and started typing. It was fun and easy and straightforward. I finished it and sent it to the people who needed to see it, and just got an amazed call from our script editor saying she was laughing while crying and couldn’t work out how I’d done everything in a day.
And I hadn’t done it all in a day. All of the being miserable yesterday was necessary for it to fly today. All of the knowing it was insoluble and awful made the work today relatively easy. I had to get out of my own way, and had to read it freshly, without being attached to anything. And then I just did the notes. And to make the thing that worked today, a lot of stuff that didn’t quite work or sort of worked had to be written too. It’s always easier to fix stuff that exists.
Anyway. Yesterday = bad writing day. Today = good writing day. I thought it was worth telling people, in case there was anyone else out there who was having a bad writing day too.
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Thanks to One, Sara Benincasa, Neil Gaiman Will Perform a Live Reading of The Cheesecake Factory Menu If $500K Is Raised for the United Nations Refugee Agency
1) This is real.
2) The idea for this did come from author/actress/comedian Sara Benincasa experiences of watching an episode of American Gods and going to Cheesecake Factory blending in her subconscious (via Eater)
3) They’ve already raised $68,707
4) Here’s Neil Gaiman performing a commencement speech in case you forgot how lovely his voice sounds.
5) Here’s the Cheesecake Factory menu in case you forgot how massive and indulgent it is.
6) They’re trying to reach the goal of $500,000 by June 20th, World Refugee Day.
7) Again, this is real.
8) Donate to this delightfully silly and great thing here on CrowdRise.
Click here to support Neil Gaiman Will Do A Reading Of The Cheesecake Factory Menu If We Raise $500K For Refugees by Sara Benincasa
I asked Neil Gaiman if he'd do a live reading of the Cheesecake Factory menu if I raised $500,000 for a charity of his choice. And because he's not just a great artist but a great person, he said yes. He chose UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. I want to hit this goal by World Refugee Day on June 20. You read that right. If we hit $500K, Neil has kindly agreed to do a live reading of the greatest restaurant menu of all time. It's about 8000 pages, last time I checked. Have you heard Neil's voice? Mellifluous, I tell you. There's a reason he won an award for audiobooks along with all the 18,000 other things he's won as an author/screenwriter/producer/raconteur/hero. FYI, the hashtag for this silliness is #neilcake. Why? Because it is silly and good. I'll arrange with Neil at his convenience to do the reading within the next year in a public setting, whether onstage or online. If it's onstage, I'll sell tickets and donate profits after costs to UNHCR. Regardless, I will make the event available to the general public via livestream or a lovely video you can watch later whilst weeping at the beauty of Neil Gaiman saying "avocado egg rolls." You think you loved "American Gods" or "Sandman" or "Good Omens" or his "Doctor Who" episodes or the other 18,000 great things he's written? This will almost certainly be better or at least ...
Help refugees. Make Neil Gaiman read the Cheesecake Factory menu.
This is completely full of win.
Madness. Pure madness.
idk if I’ve posted about this before but by far the strangest things that’s happened to me in retail was the time someone’s total came out to my birth-year and I said “hey! that’s the year I was born!” and then the next customer’s total came out to like $12.57 and just bc I’m a weirdo I said “hey! that’s the year I was born!” and without missing a fucking beat this like, 70+ year old man said
“Ah! Another like me! We’re few and far between these days, aren’t we?”
And I was like oh man this guy’s sense of humor really aligns with mine! And I laughed and made some other joke about being immortal and thought that was the end of it,
but this man.
He stood by the register for five more minutes. Maybe more. Which let me tell you is an EXCRUTIATING amount of time for something like this to happen.
And he just kept upping the ante!! He starting talking about some REALLY specific details regarding day-to-day life in the 1300s to the point I started getting worried that I’d misled a genuinely immortal being to believe I am also immortal.
He eventually politely left when I got too busy with other customers to awkwardly respond.
Who the fuck was that guy.
There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years or a thousand, to be an unusual span.
There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis.
There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards.
There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust.
How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Your lovers? Walk the streets of any city, and stare carefully at the people who pass you, and wonder and know this:
They are there too. The old ones.
- “The Sandman: Brief Lives” by Neil Gaiman
In this case, they were eating at a Cracker Barrel. @neil-gaiman could probably find a way to make country steak n’ eggs ominous though.
This guy was honestly just a total delight.
Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman.
I love Neil Gaiman so much.
Neil Gaiman.
Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
-Neil Gaiman on Coraline
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
In case you want it as a screenshot. (I just did one for Twitter, as it was Too Long To Tweet.)
From http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-neil-gaiman-20160616-snap-story.html
“I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on the pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak.”
juliamariesparrow: Hi! To learn to write better, I read and analyze really good author's novels, and I'm doing that with The Graveyard Book. In the first chapter, it looks like you used 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons, but I can't figure out why it worked. Because it did! And it's something that none of my writing teachers taught me how to do or talked about (except to say don't do it, which books say, too), so can you explain why it worked, please? I'm stumped. Thanks!
neil-gaiman:
I’m glad it worked for you. As I said, in the last and the most important of my eight rules for writing,
- The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.