I Love Neil Gaiman’s Brain

Someone on Facebook recommended this audio recording while I was on holidays. Internet service was inadequate to listen to it, and I’m so glad. Instead, I listened to it last week, just after finishing Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At the End Of The Lane.

The recording is an hour long discussion between Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman. I found it fascinating.

I discovered Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman both loved Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons when they were boys. It was one of my favorites, too. I laughed as they quoted, “Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.”

I wish I could have seen their faces as they discussed illustrations (it was amusingly inappropriate).

Then Pullman started reading at the same paragraph in The Ocean At The End Of The Land that caught my attention so thoroughly that I marked the page and planned to blog about it. I felt like Gaiman was trying to reach deeper than psychological or mythological – deeper still, into physics and creation and imagination. OMG I love his brain. Then they talked about imagination as a genuine way of exploring reality.

I’d strongly recommend listening to it, just after finishing The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.

Maureen

10 Things I’ve Learned As A Writer

1. Paper breeds. There is no other explanation for the neverending piles on my desk.

2. I’m obsessive about pens.

3. And I’m obsessive about editing. I want to see every editing change, in case I would chose to solve the problem a different way.

4. I understand the debate over the Oxford comma, and actually have an opinion about it.

5. There’s never enough solitude, until there’s way too much. I’m not sure how that works, but there it is.

6. I have good writing days and bad writing days, and while there are things I can do to encourage the one and discourage the other, mostly they come and go with some pattern I have no recognition of, or ability to control. So I just write, and try to flow with it.

7. There is little money in writing, and much panic in the industry. My job is to ignore all that, and to simply write.

8. There’s a hierarchy for writers, that some believe in very strongly and others not at all. I find it puzzling.

9. To people who say, “I don’t like fantasy,” I want to ask, “You don’t like Shakespeare’s The Tempest? A Midsummer’s Night Dream?”

10. For people who just really like good writing, I sigh with relief and agree. And if they also really like kids, and think kids deserve amazing stories, and that many kids books are wonderful, I am delighted.

Maureen

Lessons in Impermanence

Driving up to Jasper, we saw signs of flooding on the Icefields Parkway. There were dozens of spots where creeks carried rocks onto the road. We didn’t notice damage or repairs on the highway, but it would have needed a lot of plowing and cleaning, once the water subsided.

We also saw spots on the mountainsides where the rock looked raw, as if these were newly exposed layers. Perhaps these were the sources of all the rock brought down in the flooding.

We drove out to Mount Edith Cavell to see the glacier and the tiny icebergs floating in the lake, but the path up the valley had been wiped out a year ago, when a chunk of glacier fell into the lake and caused a tsunami of rock, mud and water. The flood zone of debris was uncomfortably familiar.

I think we’re getting a massive lesson in impermanence. And yet – it’s still all beautiful.

Maureen

No water damage up here.