The Hangman Macabre

the pfps in your notes when ur post goes viral:

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Dear Neil

Heroism isn’t exactly my thing, so please just look at me as your fellow writer, OK? Two grunts in the great war of Art against Insentience, or something.

Anyhow, yes, I did have a question:

I’m told I have 3 to 5 minutes to say thanks. Having sat through 5-minute thankyou speeches that seemed to last 3 hours, I thought I’d enliven the gratitude with some very brief remarks about (for one thing) the big publishers’ practice of grossly overcharging public libraries for ebooks, limiting access, etc. I know you’re a true library lion. So I wanted to check if you’d welcome this, & if so we could maybe kind of strike the same note – or at least tell you, so that if I do say some things that our publishers will perceive as ungrateful, subversive, unladylike, etc., it won’t take you by surprise.

very best wishes

Ursula

(And because I suppose some people might want to know what I replied, I said,

Dear Ursula,

I’m very happy to be a fellow grunt in the war.

I think that anything you want to say is going to be good, because you mean it. I don’t think chiding publishers etc is out of place from a public platform - it may even change things - and the world of five (or is it four?) monstrous huge international publishers us not the one either of us grew up with. (I’m with one giant in the UK, another in the US, in each case because they engulfed and devoured my original publisher.)

And we neither of us got where we are, or indeed, anywhere, by toeing any party line.

Love

1. Find the thing the character wants to say, their deepest and most fundamental truth.

2. Congratulations! That’s the one thing they cannot, under any circumstances, say. Imagine they’re under a fairy curse if you have to.

My cartoon for yesterday’s @guardian

A teenager named Jirka took this photograph in the early 1980s during a severe lightning storm that left the majority of Czechoslovakia without power. The creature remained in place until the storm dissipated.

I just run across a book claiming to be a dark retelling.

And the. The fucking summary. Reads. 

“You can expect ‘touch her and I’ll unalive you’ vibes.”

"There's an old saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill, or around 400 days of constant practice. Ordinary that'd be impossible for a human being to achieve in a single year, but I started with skills I already had some proficiency in, and you'd be surprised what we mortals are capable of under the right pressure. So it wasn't easy, but I was able to perfect a skill to the point where I'd be sure to win my next challenge with 2 months to spare."

"I thought about taking a break, but then I realized one skill wasn't enough. I was lucky to win my first challenge. I'd eliminated luck this time, but I knew you'd eventually rule that it had to be a different challenge each time. So I started on my second skill."

"It was after my third challenge that you finally added that rule. By that time I'd been able to successfully master two extra skills. In other words, I had enough different abilities to buy me at least two more years."

"There's another thing about mastering skills that most people don't have time to appreciate: the more you do it, the easier it gets. There's a lot more overlap than you'd expect between most things, and of course I picked up a lot of good practice habits. In other words, after learning three skills, I was a very quick study for the forth, and fifth, and sixth. By the time my two-year buffer was up, I'd mastered 3 more skills. And by the time those three were spent, I'd mastered 6 more, and so on and so on. No matter how many years past, no matter how many different challenges we played, my assorted skills only ever increased."

"And so here we are. Year 513. A whole 513 challenges, and I'm already prepared for 513 more. I don't even have to pick up new skills anymore, I've got so much time that as long as I practice my current skills as to not fuck up challenges in the meantime, I'll just pick up new skills over the course of living for centuries on end. Quite frankly, I am confident that I will never die."

"So, God of Death, old friend, here is my chosen challenge this year. Not a contest, but a test. Should you succeed, I will gladly die: find someone that could call themselves my equal."

The God of Death laughed, and as the man gazed upon them, thinking back to all the challenges they played, all the times they nearly gave him a run for his money, he felt something he hadn't felt in centuries: the feeling of fear.

YES THANK YOU

Paintings by J-Edward-Neill