Neil Gaiman

The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.

Archive You can ask things here. Sometimes I answer. It is possible that I have already answered your question.

September 9th, 2023 at 4:50PM

1-sided-dice asked:

Hello Neil, I've just finished "A game of you". It's a wonderful book (thank you), and it broke me utterly. I haven't cried myself to sleep over a story in years. The gravestone and the funeral were devastating on a very personal level (I'm trans, too, and I imagine my relatives would act exactly the same). A lot about Wanda hit home, but it also made it the hardest Sandman tale to stomach for me, so far.

I was curious if there was something specific that inspired or shaped her storyline? And in retrospective, is there something about it you would change or handle differently?

P.S. for fairness sake, I did make you a whale. Just a two-dimensional and rather awkward one

It began with my friend Roz Kaveney telling me about her friends who were being buried under their deadnames, hair cut, in male clothes, and my anger about that. I had no idea that happened, and it seemed wrong. Roz and the late Rachel Pollack were both good friends, and I realised that I wasn’t seeing any trans women in fiction in 1989, so I wrote my own.

I made a few changes for the Audible adaptation.

Thank you for the whale.