Wednesday, November 17, 2004
It just so happens that this move has come along at a time when, suddenly, lots of things are happening, careerwise, and right now I feel like I've been stretched about three molecules thin. Trying to think about work and dealing with all the packing. Gagh.
It seems there will be an Italian edition of Threshold. I'll post details when the deal is finalized. I've never been very agressive about seeing my work translated, as I'm just not sure how my prose will hold up in other languages. And it's not like I can check the results of whoever does the translation. In a way, it's like handing a book to another writer and saying, "Here, rewrite this." And the prose in Threshold is just unconventional enough that I can see it being a real headache for whoever gets the task. But. Regardless, I am glad of this development.
Today, I have to speak with Jenny Lee at Marvel and with someone else at a videogame company (which I cannot yet name) about various projects, and I have to speak with some people at Penguin. I hate the frelling telephone. And then I have to pack more books. It feels like all I did yesterday was pack books (and select more books for the mountain that's going to the used bookstores) and move boxes of books over to the new place. I'm getting rid of as many books as I can bear to part with. Sometimes it's kind of funny, like realizing we have five copies of Frankenstein, for example. No one on earth (or any other planet) needs more than two copies of Frankenstein. Trust me on this. I think it would be a very telling exercise to force myself to get rid of everything except what will fit on one bookshelf. That would be something like one hundred books. Could I get by with just one hundred books? Sure, I could. What would be the one hundred I would retain? Ah, there's the rub! Some authors are safe en toto — Ray Bradbury, James Joyce, Anne Sexton, John Steinbeck, Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, Dr. Seuss — but others would definitely have to fight for a space on the Ark. Writers accumulate books the way that knick-knacks accumulate dust. And writers accumulate knick-knacks, too. Or at least I do. They look good sitting on the shelves in front of all those goddamned books.
My thanks to Georgiana Lee for an eloquent and much-appreciated e-mail yesterday.
As promised, here are a few pictures from Fiddler's Green. Better late than never, right? Spooky's going to put all her photos up later on, but right now she's utterly consumed with the task of locating empty cardboard boxes:
Saturday: Neil and I script a two-page Sandman story in 1 hour, 6 minutes.
Saturday: Is "snow ball" one word or two?
Saturday: Me watching Charles Vess draw the page I scripted.
Sunday: The Last Panel, or The Five Hangovers of the Apocalypse (left to right: Jill Thompson, Charles Vess, Me, Himself, and Todd Klein...and my fang'd bunny there in the middle)
Anyway, I have all these boxes calling me with their crackly cardboard voices and these phone calls to make, so I should go now. I will not move again for a long, long time. I swear it. Again.
1:24 PM
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