(Photo credit from @neilhimself)
Neil Gaiman has always given the world much to think about: Do dogs understand when we’re trying to write and decide to impede us anyway? Is it all right to go next door for a pad of paper and a writing utensil upon being locked out? Armageddon…or tea? These are the important questions.
Though he’s surely the next Nostradamus, Gaiman is probably better known as a writer than as a Doomsday-Darjeeling soothsayer. To celebrate this sir on his birthday, and in light of NaNoWriMo, we scoured Gaiman’s tweet backlog for ages (and by ages we mean hours looking through Twitter’s advanced search function) finding the best tidbits on writing that this jovial tea-sipping nerd king has to offer.
We know a doomed character when we read one. Of course, we would never be dense enough to go down that dark alley alone looking for clues, or decide to take a shower right after being chased through an old hotel. But is surviving a muder mystery really that easy? Inspired by the new anthology, Manhattan Mayhem, edited by Mary Higgins Clark, here's a flowchart to test your sluething metal and measure your chance of survival in a gritty murder mystery.
"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
So Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. John Watson in A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first novel to introduce the famous characters. It was published 127 years ago today.
How should we celebrate the cob-pipe-smoking detective's debut? By taking advantage of the fact that, as of this November, all stories about Holmes prior to 1923 are officially in the public domain. The US Supreme Court refused to hear a copyright appeal by the Conan Doyle estate after a US Court struck down its wishes to maintain ownership over Holmes. As freely as one would rewrite Jane Austen's work, Conan Doyle's Holmes mysteries (save roughly eight) may be manipulated at will (are you getting my subtle hint, Quirk Books?)
You may be versed in the modern adaptations of Holmes—as portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr., Jonny Lee Miller, or Tumblr's #1 Boyfriend Bentobox Lumberjack—so you might know tales like The Hound of the Baskervilles and "The Final Problem". But since I know you're ever curious (and maybe need new fuel for your fanfic), I've decided to gather five of Conan Doyle's lesser-known stories (with links!) that may, true to their form, spur the inner detective and London recluse in you.
November, mostly known to Americans as That Time When the Family Gets Together at the End of the Month to Awkwardly Eat Lots of Food Revolving around a Mythical (and Most Likely Inaccurate) Meeting of Two Cultures, is also a season for writers. Yes, you're correct: along with raising awareness for not shaving, banana pudding lovers, and sweet potatoes, November is National Novel Writing Month.
Interested in writing a 50,000-word novel and you're intimidated by the time limit? You're not alone. Thousands will join you in the pursuit and feel as though their fingers cannot chitter-chatter at the keyboard quickly enough. It's nerve rending.
Unless, of course, you regard those writers among us that take a helluva long time on their work. With your permission, I'm going to explore some of the leisureliest (yep, that's a word) writers that decided to grace the page, either by pen or typing contraption.
Let's begin. Permission granted?
In most honest form, I recall to you an academic list, which I have fastidiously discovered through Plutonian nightmares that have defiled my fleeting knowledge of the earthly truths I once knew, of the six scariest words I have accounted in my life. Few have endured this maldictonox that was borne to pass under my visage.
I wake up in a graveyard. This sometimes happens. I spy an abstruse structure through the curtain of fog, and I come upon Your Humble Narrator's first abominable word.
The corpus of contemporary golf literature (All Fore Revenge and The Swinger being two notable players in this niche) attempts to fuse the masochistic game of inches with the human experience.
Whatever worth you might place on, for example, Golf in the Kingdom, know that it has literary links (hehe!) to works on par (hah!) with the green jackets (HA-HA!) of the canon. In honor of the summery pastime, here’s a list of some classics that feature the game of grass and iron.
