Liz. Professional procrastinator. Caffeine addict. Lover of books and film. Expensive tastes, empty wallet.
for he was truly loved.
RIP Cabal, a better dog, there was none.
My lovely dog, Cabal, died last night, unexpectedly. I wrote a blog about it, here. About how I found him by the side of the road, and how we rescued each other.
me & neil at michael gaiman’s wedding. biltmore estate, asheville north carolina.
ceremony just ended.
i’ve never seen him cry in public before. i love him. and his kids are incredible. and now i have a stunning step-daughter in law. #life #surreal
Spent the weekend at Castle Gaiman relaxing gloriously and working on a Top Sekret art project. This is not the Top Sekret art project; this is Neil on a trampoline.
As promised.
Use it wisely.
I did not know I was being sneakily filmed. It was early in the morning and I was trying to wake myself up….
This is a good & beautiful thing.
I want to be an author when I grow up. Am I insane?Yes. Growing up is highly overrated.
Just be an author.
When the last living thing dies, my job is finished. I’ll put the chairs on tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.
(via ModCloth Blog » Blog Archive » Quote of the Day: Neil Gaiman on Mistakes)
November 2013 - J H Williams III + Neil Gaiman =
I think that all writing is useful for honing writing skills. I think you get better as a writer by writing, and whether that means that you’re writing a singularly deep and moving novel about the pain or pleasure of modern existence or you’re writing Smeagol-Gollum slash you’re still putting one damn word after another and learning as a writer.
(I just made that up. I imagine it would go something like: “Oh, the preciouss, we takes it our handssses and we rubs it and touchess it, gollum….no, Smeagol musst not touch the preciousss, the master said only he can touch the precioussss…. bad masster, he doess not know the precious like we does, no, gollum, and we wants it, we wants it hard in our handses, yesss…” etc etc)
—Neil Gaiman on fanfiction (via wibblywobblyotp)
BECAUSE THIS.
(via mycroftsmindtardis)
Neil Gaiman. Just wrote Smeagol/Gollum slash. Your argument is invalid.
(via roane72)
WHAA
WHAA
OMG
(via petiteneko)
Hello. I’m Neil Gaiman, I’m a multi-award-winning author of lots and lots and lots of different things, lots of awards. So when I heard that I won the SFX Screenwriting Award for Excellence for my Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife, my reaction was just…
Actually, what I was really just trying to say, was, Thank You. So much.
When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.
—Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)
