Gobblin.net is currently on vacation for the month of July! Between a wedding, vacation and urgent deadlines, I won’t be able to update or moderate the site, so there will be no new posts and commenting will be disabled until August. If you’re new to the site, please enjoy the archives and the many fun discussion in the comments.
The first poll was quite a hit, and the results were clear — when in the Labyrinth, most folks want Moppet by their side, and I can’t blame them! She certainly knows her way around the twists and turns better than most, and unlike the Goblins, she is fluent in both nonsense AND logic. Poor Drumlin came in dead last. Fitting, I suppose, but she could perhaps her essence influenced a few people to vote Mizumi?
Anyway, for the second Poll, I thought I’d drag up the eternal question — Which 80s Fantasy Flic is your favorite. And no, you can’t vote Labyrinth! I had to go Neverending Story, but I can honestly say that every movie on that list has a special place in my heart. Vote in the poll and defend your choice in the comments should you so choose.
Today I want to test a new format on Gobblin.net – the “Gobblin Gab” post. In these posts, I’ll set up a topic for discussion related to Labyrinth the film or manga where readers can share their thoughts as a freeform conversation. In this way, we can keep the Labyrinth discussions alive without having a single thread grow ever more unwieldy, plus, by having a rotating topic, we can keep the discussions fresh. It will also help me to post more about Labyrinth without getting into volume 4 teasing too early or often. What do you think?
For the first installment of Gobblin Gab, let’s talk about the unsung heroes of the Labyrinth–the Goblins! While it is undoubtedly Jareth and Sarah who stir the most passions in Labyrinth fandom, there’s no doubt that the Goblin King wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without his subjects. I have three editions of the Goblins of Labyrinth art book/guide, which matches Terry Jones’ witty prose with Brian Froud’s gorgeous concept art, and while I don’t treat them as story bibles for Return to Labyrinth, they certain serve as inspiration for all things goblinesque. What wonderful creatures of illogic and grotesquerie goblins are! (And a little creepy at times, I must confess — especially the way their lower lips flap!)
To get the discussion started, I am curious, how to readers relate the Goblins of Labyrinth art books to the film? Do you consider Jones’ goblin history to be canon, or just a silly supplement with no real bearing on how you view the film? And when it comes to goblins, which ones are people’s favorites from the movie, manga or art book? Discuss!
Apologies to visitors looking for new posts this week. Things have gotten quite busy all of a sudden–many balls in movement, and unlike Jareth, I don’t have Michael Moschen’s magic hands to keep them aloft for me. To top it off, I’m presently packing for a trip south to visit with my trusty Tokyopop editors and other friends and colleagues.
In the meantime, check out Moon, the new sci-fi thriller from Bowie offspring Duncan Jones, opening this Friday. The trailer is super unsettling and the early reviews are quite glowing.
See you next week!
Reader Sierra has done Return to Labyrinth 3 the ultimate honor — she has composed piece of music to accompany “Shadows of a Dream,” Jareth’s Lament. There is no “official” music for this song– only the Jim Henson Company has the rights to orchestrate that — but for now, this is a beautiful piece that captures the heartbreak perfectly. Thank you so much for sharing, Sierra!
There’s a new feature on the Gobblin.net homepage — polls! The first poll launches today. It’s over there on the sidebar, just below the tag cloud–you can’t miss it! We’ll start with a pretty straight forward one:
“Which Return to Labyrinth chareter would you want by your side when trying to solve the Labyrinth?”
It’s a popularity contest…with a twist. Feel free to talk about why you picked who you picked in the comments below this post. For those of you waiting for answers on the Q&A, I’ll start answering tomorrow. Cheers!
China Miéville is one of those writers, like Neil Gaiman, whose can string together words like an Istari wields magic — that is, with the skill of a demigod. I’ve only seen the smooth-headed scribe once, at Comic-con five or six years ago, before he had become a fantasy fiction sex symbol, and when this fresh-faced brit handed me a free copy of Perdido Street Station , I almost wrote it off as another piece of unsolicited swag to toss in the bin back at the hotel. Thank goodness I didn’t follow that impulse, as that novel was a revelation! Very good stuff for fans of weird and urban fantasy (albeit decidedly more mature than Labyrinth).
Anyway, today sees the release of his newest book – The City & The City
…detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation.
Oh, you Brit writers of the fantastic with your haunting eyes, fancy jewelry and abilty to sum up genres in a perfect paragraph.
Let’s try something new on gobblin.net. There’s been a lot of intense discussions going on over the past two weeks concerning the mysteries of Return to Labyrinth, and as I don’t want to spoil the secrets or write off red herrings, I’m loathe to participate much. Maybe you have a Return to Labyrinth question or two of a less spoilery nature, a question about the writing process, or a question completely unrelated to all things goblinesque. Now’s your chance to ask!
Leave any questions you’d like to ask me in the column below and I’ll start answering them in a new blog post in a few days. Please do not use this post as a place for discussion — save that for the answer column. Even if another person’s questions seems obvious to you, don’t worry — i’ll try to answer in an interesting way. And for now, please try to limit your questions to one or two per person. If this goes well, we can always have a round 2!
-Jake
In today’s New York Times, there’s an interesting article on e-reading consumers resistance to books priced above the $9.99 standard price point that Amazon has established. What surpised me is that in the case of new releases otherwise only in hardcover, Amazon is paying the same $13 price to publishers and is selling at a lost to encourage people to pick up readers. The idea of a $9.99 e-book, at least for new releaes, is NOT something publishers seem keen on:
“The concept that because a book is an e-book it should automatically be priced significantly lower than a paper book is one we don’t agree with,” said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “What a consumer is buying is the content, not necessarily the format.”
As a Kindle 2 owner, I confess that I balk a little when I see books priced above $9.99. Even that price seems high at times, as when buying a 150 page YA book that retails for half the cost of a standard hardcover. As a writer, however, the arguments against cheap e-books are all too compelling. After all, only 12.5% of a book’s cost goes into manufacturing the physical goods and distributing it. The rest goes into paying the writer, editors, marketing staff and the general overhead for keeping the publishing engine running.
Certainly much of that engine can run more efficiently in a digital age, whether its writers handling much of their own PR, or reforming the wasteful system of returns that sends countless books to landfills or shifts them between warehouses.
But putting aside the actual costs of producing a book, there is still the intangible concept of “value” that publishers can’t control. A book placed on a shelf is a form of self-expression; an e-book on a kindle is private. A book can be gifted, shared or sold; an e-book is a one-time license. Even if 99% of books are only read once (if that) by the original purchaser (I’m pulling that number out of my ass, but who knows, maybe i’ts close to accurate), that perception of value is hard to let go of.
This concept of persistant value isn’t just a monetary thing, either. A physical book will generally stay in print for as long as it is viable to keep up the costs of manufacturing and destributing to demand. When books lose their audience and fall out of print, they become scarce. Old books, even if demand is low, become “rare.” Each object has its own history. There’s no reason for rare e-books to exist. There’s no reason for e-books to go out of print! In this reality, every book has equal permanance. At the same time, the quality bar for what constitutes a thing worth of permanence is thrown out the window. This is a good thing! It is wonderful that forgotten authors can be rediscovered, reanalyzed and even remixed (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone?)
A year or two from now, I’ll probably have enough blog posts to fill a book or two. That content is free now, and theoretically will remain free and accessible for perpetuity (yikes, that’s scary when you think about it). In recent years, blogs migrating to print has been a lucrative publishing niche, whether it be dooce doing a biograpy, stuffwhitepeoplelike, or any number of webcomics turning traffic into print advance. What happens in a reading reality where ebooks are the norm? Let’s say I’m an aspiring genre author and I want to get some advice from a veteran.I could pay $10 for Stephen King’s On Writing, or read old blog entries by John Scalzi. Right now, King’s book is a self-contained unit of some 200 pages that isn’t likely to fall out of print physically or digitally anytime soon. Scalzi’s articles, however, have the benefit of a back-and-forth report with readers and the Z-axis of time to give them added value. I wonder, how would someone with no prior prejudice for print over digital equate the value of those works, and what will that mean for the future of publishing? It doesn’t seem that far-fetched to have blog archives (perhaps edited an annotated) start appearing alongside traditional “books.”
The obvious answer to all these questions most likely involves a tiered system. Whether the value is placed on time (read it first!), depth (read it ALL, ie bonus features), merit (read the BEST), duration (read it once or read it forever), or more likely, a combination of the above, will probably shake out in the next few years. It will also be interesting to see how much pricing and tier flexibility there will be.
In the meantime, I just have to believe that working as a writer, refining my craft and coming up with new stories that (hopefully) people will want to read, will continue to be a viable career… at least for the next 30 years. After that, it’s somebody else’s problem.
A year or two before starting Return to Labyrinth, I wrote the first couple chapters of a Labyrinth sequel novel, purely with no intent to do anything with it. This secret fan fic also starred Toby Williams, but in this version, he was only about 7 years old and living with Sarah (who was a grad student) after his parents died in a plane crash or some other tragedy. In this version, Sarah was having a hard time balancing being a single mother with pursuing her dreams. Goblins started stealing Toby’s toys and eventually tricked the boy into entering the Labyrinth. Presumably Sarah would have followed and many fantastic adventures would have ensued; I never got past the toy stealing.
In retrospect, I can see the foundation for a good story in that aborted fan fic with the Labyrinth offering a fantasy metaphor for dealing with loss and rebuilding family. At the time, I was still too easily distracted by “wouldn’t it be cool if…!” and was completely blind to the meaty human potential. So in 2005, when the opportunity came to pitch an original manga-style sequel to Labyrinth, the only aspect of my earlier scribblings to be preserved was having Toby as the protagonist.
The ch-ch-changes to story and character didn’t stop there, however. With each volume, I would guess that 50% of what I originally envisioned for the next volume stays more or less in tact with the other 50% emerging in the process, whether due to serendipitous discoveries in reviewing what came before (yes, even I get surprised by reading the finished books!), critical choices about how better to serve a character’s development, or based on feedback from the Jim Henson company.
As most of the changes are driven by character development, I find that the “unplanned” 50% ends up informing the next volume more than the originally drafted half. The events in volume 3 (and especially volume 4! Like that scene where…) are a far cry from the events at the end of my first series outline. At the same time, however, I think Toby is becoming more Toby-y, Moppet more Moppet-y and everyone else is more themselves than they ever were in the beginning. As RtL is the longest project I’ve ever been involved with creating, I don’t know how common this process is (versus a stricter adherence to an original outline) but I certainly enjoy working this way.
