AVC: In spite of all your projects and travel, you maintain a very active, audience-participatory online journal. What do you get out of that?
NG: I started my blog in February of 2001, which is a very long time ago in blog terms. It was basically just me and a handful of dinosaurs blogging at the time. You'd go on people's blogs and it would all be, "You wouldn't believe what Pteranodon did this week," or "I think Allosaurus is headed for extinction." My plan was to chronicle the process from handing in the finished manuscript of American Gods all the way through the publication and the tour, and finish in September 2001. By the time I finished the American Gods tour, two things happened, one of which was September 11. The blog became incredibly useful for staying in touch during that period. Also, I had 20,000 readers, and I thought, "This is so cool—there are 20,000 people reading this thing! I think I'm just going to keep it going for a bit." And I started really enjoying the immediacy of having a blog, particularly from a practical viewpoint.
If you talk to any author, even the best-known authors, they will tell you about going to signings: You go to one town and do a signing for 200 people, and you go to the next signing, maybe just up the road later that evening, and no one comes up to you but the lady who wants to know where the toilets are. I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street. Suddenly, if I had a signing, or something coming up, people would come, because they would know about it. I could do things for good, for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the First Amendment project and such.
Then I looked around one day and realized the blog had 600,000 monthly regular readers. At that point, I sort of went faintly into shock. Currently, we seem to be around the 1.2 to 1.3 million mark for unique visitors. Now I'm not sure why I'm doing it, but it's become this huge thing that I wind up posting to even if I'd rather go to bed. Because if I have 1.1 million people saying "The bastard hasn't written anything today..."
AVC: In our last interview with you, back in 1999, you discussed how you once thought book tours would be romantic and adventurous. You ended up saying, "It's like everything—once you actually get what you want, you don't really want it any more." That's a very cynical thought, and yet you seem like an overtly optimistic person.
NG: Oh I am. I say "Once you get what you want..." but I don't learn anything from it. But then again, I'm—I'm sounding like a greeting card—I'm somebody who considers happiness a journey, not a destination. Getting the Hugo Award was a wonderful, magical, gorgeous moment, and then it's just something to dust. And when I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts, and marvel that something I'd done was being printed in Bucharest, in this language I didn't know. And these days, the stuff comes in and it goes down to the box full of foreign books in the basement.
But I do still like the fact that if I get on a signing tour, people stop being abstract numbers and turn into people. And I love the fact that people get to say thank you. It seems to me that's mostly why people come to signings: They want to say "Thank you for the stories." But you can't really have a thank-you line, so you have a signing line, and that gives everybody an excuse. And that's nice, but. Doing a signing for 150 people is fun. Doing a signing for 200 people is fun. Doing a signing for 500, 600, 700, 800 people is a horrible physical nightmare.
AVC: So has there ever been anything that hasn't fit into that "once you have it, you don't want it" rubric? Has there ever been anything for you that was all it was cracked up to be, and you still want more?
NG: Kids. Though there's a lot of stuff—I don't want to sound deeply pessimistic. The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure. And the joy of making stuff never goes away. Which is completely contradictory to everything I'm happy to say about being the kind of writer who loves being about to write, and loves having written, but hates the process of writing. That is also true to some extent. But I love making things. I love building things. I love the idea that something's in the world that wasn't there before. And I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I'm not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, "But he was really good at that. Why isn't he still doing it?" I try to stop before I get bored. I try to keep doing stuff I don't know how to do, and I'm still willing to make a fool out of myself in public. I'm also willing to make those mistakes that you're going to make the first time you go out, so hopefully the next time it will be better.
AVC: Speaking of fans waiting around, after Anansi Boys, do you have any intention of writing more books in the American Gods world?
NG: Yes, but I want to do something else first. There's always that terror for me of not wanting to be pigeonholed. Because the moment you're pigeonholed, it becomes really difficult to do something outside of that pigeonhole, which is something I've been very aware of as long as I've been writing. As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.
AVC: Is there any particular method that you use to escape that?
NG: Being aware of it as a trap does help. The thing that gets frustrating is when you really think you're trying to do something different every time, and then people point out all of the similarities, and say "This is obviously Gaiman, because all these things are going on that were going on in Neverwhere, in Stardust, in Sandman." But there's definitely a level on which I keep trying to do new things.
AVC: Does the urge to direct the Death film yourself come more from a desire to escape pigeonholing, a desire to try something new, or a desire to handle that particular project yourself?
NG: It's mostly a desire—that story is one that I love, something close to my heart. And I don't want someone else screwing it up. If someone gets to screw it up, it should be me. But there's definitely—I loved doing A Short Film About John Bolton. though I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it now being commercially available. From a point of view of learning new skills, I'd love to do it again. I've discovered that I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head. I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes. And so it was absolutely fascinating seeing it all, being involved. And I loved the fact that I didn't quite know what I was doing. There was a desperate terror going on. I'm pretty much better when I'm not cocky.
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