grave matters

I had a free credit from Audible.com, so I downloaded Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which was released on Tuesday. (On the book tour, he'll be reading a chapter a stop, which will then be posted here to listen to.)

I listened to the audiobook while working on thesis revisions. It's got a kooky, comically dark atmosphere that reminds me of Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, and oddly enough, the Addams family. I can totally see Tim Burton making a film of this story about ghosts who adopt a boy and give him the Freedom of the Graveyard. The Danse Macabre as performed on bango and cello is a nice touch.

It's done two things for my thesis. First, Neil Gaiman mentioned several times in his blog about how hard it was to write this book - it took him 25 years of stops and starts. I've had bits and pieces of my novel in my head for nearly 10, and only three years ago was able to put the majority of it down on paper. I don't feel so bad about that now (granted, he wrote a ton of other things in those 25 years, but let me have my moment of relief, okay?).

Second, it reminded me of something I had forgotten about the house I visited with my friend (I'm using her grandparents' house as the model for the interior scenes of my novel). One afternoon, we were bored, so my friend suggested a ramble. As I recall, she wouldn't tell me exactly where we were going. We walked down dirt paths and up hills, through dense trees and brush, and we finally emerged into a clearing...which turned out to be a forgotten graveyard. Unless you knew where you were going, you'd never find it. My friend called it "the pioneer cemetary." The dates on the headstones were quite old, some from the 1800s. Some of the headstones had sunk so low, you could barely see the tops of them in the tall grass and weeds. It was incredibly sunny and peaceful in that clearing, not one speck of the gloom one usually associates with graveyards.

It occurred to me that I've nothing in my story about where some of my characters are buried. Now I know where to put them, although how to get them there will be a challenge...

I fell asleep last night listening to the audiobook and dreamed of children running around headstones and hiding in hills that are really burial mounds and stone bowls with holes in the bottom that still magically fill with water and can be moved by cats, and my grandfather was sitting on a fallen tree looking on, amused.