Neil Gaiman

fuckyeahgoodomens:

Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins at the British Library event The Worlds of Terry Pratchett: Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins 21.11.2023

Neil: The weirdest bit, the one moment that I remember as being the strangest, most quintessentially writing Good Omens together moment was when we had to copy edit it. And we copy edited it in the basement of Victor Gollancz, which at that point was in 14 Henrietta Street. And the basement was a basement. There were chairs down there, no tables or anything. So we’re sitting in these card chairs in this… my recollection is it did have a carpet. And the carpet was kind of damp. You know, beneath that carpet there was sort of strange puddles of… publishing. And Terry and I just sat there and we were both copy editing away. And then there was a point where Terry looked up and chuckled like anything. I said, ‘What are you chuckling about?’ He said, 'That joke you put in.’ I said, 'Which one?’ Because, you know, you want to hear which one. He read it out and I said, 'I didn’t write that one’. He said, 'Well, I didn’t write it’. And at that point you could tell from our eyes both of us had come to the conclusion that perhaps the manuscript was generating itself. And neither of us was prepared to say this out loud for fear of being thought a bit odd.

(you can watch the whole event here :))