The official Neil Gaiman Tumblr, but honestly no better than the unofficial Neil Gaiman Tumblrs out there. Will sometimes have stuff about my books or my wife in it.
Hey Neil, I have this memory of hearing you reading a poem after explaining that "the poems are free... and its not as if anyone is forcing you to read them."
And I just wanted you to know that I have taken this into the rest of my life. Don't like a scene in a movie? I close my eyes. And it's been freeing. So thank you
So this is the reading. And I just want to say that - while no one forced me to enjoy this poem - I did. And as something of a creative myself, the fact that @neil-gaiman took the criticism in stride, turned around and continued writing poetry and even sharing it with us, is amazing to me.
But it was important for me, lo a decade or more ago, to hear that you could enjoy something even if you didn’t love all its parts. An album doesn’t need to have all the perfect songs. A movie doesn’t need to stop your breath with every scene. Not every episode of your favorite TV series need be your favorite. Your favorite painter or digital artist will paint pieces that just don’t speak to you.
What’s more, you don’t have to justify it. All you are obligated to do, really, is not be mean about it.
Hey Neil, I have this memory of hearing you reading a poem after explaining that "the poems are free... and its not as if anyone is forcing you to read them."
And I just wanted you to know that I have taken this into the rest of my life. Don't like a scene in a movie? I close my eyes. And it's been freeing. So thank you
Your anecdote about Terry splitting the hapless demon into Aziraphale and Crowley makes me super curious as to what your collaboration process was like when writing American Gods! I've read one other book that was (to my knowledge) a collaboration, but that was an action-romance between a romance author and an action author where they traded off chapters between the two leads and then tidied up for each other in further drafts. I realize that I've been projecting a similar idea of how the collaboration process works to other areas and forms of creating (being an rper who trades off posts probably also influenced this.)
I guess what I'm asking is, how did you and Terry split the work and collaborate, and do you have any other interesting collaboration methods or stories with other creators? Thank you so much! Even if you don't answer! You're wonderful for all your patience with your fans!
My collaboration process on American Gods was to ask myself what I wanted to write next and then to write that.
Hello. Just a small question about The Sandman behind the scenes video. When you're looking at the Jessamy animatronic, is she just an oddly colored raven or did they make her a magpie?
Jessamy in all her forms (actual bird, animatronic puppet, or CGI) is a raven with a white breast.
I’m not quite sure how a character can be a self insert when the things that make them like you were all inserted by someone else.
A Terry-insert :) ❤, as Neil said: Terry took the 5,000 words, and rewrote them, calling me to tell me what he was doing and what he was planning to do. The biggest thing he was going to do, he told me, was split the hapless demon into two characters - a would-be-cool demon in dark glasses (which was, I think, a Terry’s way of making fun of me, a never-actually-cool journalist in dark glasses) who had renamed himself Crowley, and a rare-book dealer and angel called Aziraphale, who would embody all the English awkwardness that either of us could conceive.
Regarding Aziraphale's bookshop, something like this? There is quite a lot more of it, but this is one of the best photos I have. I hand painted the figures. Crowley's eyes took three layers of paint and a lot of patience.
After reading several of your works I feel like you were The Book Kind in your childhood and The Rebellious Punk Teenager in your youth. Is that true?
(Sorry for suggesting, but it would be really interesting to know)
Pretty much. But I was also the Book Teenager. You can be both. Here, have two photos of me as a teenage punk in 1977. I’m second from left in the top one, second from right in the bottom one.
Second from left in the bottom one and second from right in the top one is my friend Geoff Notkin, who tells stories about what I was like at school in the Dream Dangerously documentary.
