Neil Gaiman

Every now and again, like this morning, I get sad/upset/angry/frustrated asks from people whose previous asks I haven’t answered, and who think it’s because I do not like them or their questions.  And it’s not either of those things. So…

This is to reiterate:

1) I get about 100 asks in a day. Sometimes more. Never fewer than 50. I can’t answer 50 asks a day. It would be a full time job. I have lots of full time jobs already.

2) Right now I’ve got almost 20,000 of them sitting in the inbox. The way that Tumblr works, I can’t search old ones, can’t really do anything to archive them or even easily get to last week’s ones. If you sent in an ask when I was on the road and a lot came in I may not even have seen it, because I have only so much time to sit and scroll down. It’s unfair but that’s the way it is.

3) If I didn’t answer you it doesn’t ever mean anything more than, I didn’t answer you. I may not have seen it. I may have meant to answer and then a few hundred messages came in and I never saw it again. (This happens a lot.)

4) There are a lot of questions that come in that are very unlikely to get answered because they have been answered before. The possibility of my answering you, having read what you sent in, is much much lower if I answered the same thing yesterday. Or last week. 

5) The Archives of this Tumblr are your friend. So is the blog over at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/ and its archives. I’ve been answering questions for about 12 years. There are lots of answers out there. Someone has already asked me what I think of Fan Fiction (I think it is a good thing) or if I would ever want to be show runner for Doctor Who (I wouldn’t) and I have answered them, lots of times.

And that’s all I got. 

(Here is a photo taken by Kim Butler of me making my That’s All I Got face. I hope it helps. )