#575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost)

Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do | Brought to you by Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement and 5-Bullet Friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship, my very own email newsletter. Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself https://twitter.com/neilhimself) is the bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film and television for all ages, including Neverwhere https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062459082/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Coraline https://www.amazon.com/Coraline-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0380977788/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The Graveyard Book https://www.amazon.com/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production/dp/B00LXHLS9Q/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The Ocean at the End of the Lane https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062255665/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, The View from the Cheap Seats https://www.amazon.com/View-Cheap-Seats-Selected-Nonfiction/dp/0062262270?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and the Sandman series of graphic novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo). His fiction has received Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Will Eisner Awards, among many other awards and honors. His novelistic retelling of Norse myths, Norse Mythology https://www.amazon.com/Norse-Mythology-Neil-Gaiman/dp/039360909X/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, has been a phenomenon, and an international bestseller, and won Gaiman his ninth Audie Award (for Best Narration by the Author). Recently Gaiman wrote all six episodes of, and has been the full-time showrunner, for the BBC/Amazon Prime mini-series adaptation https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Look-Good-Omens/dp/B07FMHTRFF?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 of Good Omens, based on the beloved 1990 book https://www.amazon.com/Good-Omens-Accurate-Prophecies-Nutter/dp/0060853964/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. Many of Gaiman’s books and comics have been adapted for film and television including Stardust https://www.amazon.com/Stardust-Charlie-Cox/dp/B0010Z32OA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=Stardust&qid=1553715785&s=gateway&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=c332fca208f250d116ffd1fb1c0199c5&language=en_US (starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), Coraline https://www.amazon.com/Coraline-Dakota-Fanning/dp/B002BWCJOA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=Coraline&qid=1553715828&s=instant-video&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=7e8ce95bba35364ae3788a5f6ee62951&language=en_US (an Academy Award nominee and the BAFTA winner for Best Animated Film), and How to Talk to Girls at Parties https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Girls-At-Parties/dp/B07DFX47Z1/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=How+to+Talk+to+Girls+at+Parties&qid=1553715852&s=instant-video&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=4cb591fbf49af8cf111bd61fbd0bbbe1&language=en_US, a movie based on Gaiman’s short story. The television series Lucifer https://www.amazon.com/Pilot/dp/B01AMXSQE6/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=Lucifer&qid=1553715882&s=instant-video&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=9514c96ba0261596e2a1055e4205b056&language=en_US is based on characters created by Gaiman in Sandman. His 2001 novel, American Gods https://www.amazon.com/American-Gods-Tenth-Anniversary-Novel/dp/0062059882/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated TV series, now entering its second season https://www.amazon.com/American-Gods/dp/B06XWLHDV4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=0ee975cadbfaccada3e7bffdd693911a&language=en_US. In 2017, Neil Gaiman became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR https://www.unhcr.org/, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States, where he is Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Please enjoy! * This episode originally aired in 2019. You can find the show notes here: https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/ * This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship, my very own email newsletter, which every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world. It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship. * How long has this interview been in the making? [09:37] An early interview failure that Neil resolved to never repeat. [10:47] On separating home life from work life and the writing habits of Maya Angelou and Ian Fleming. [15:55] Neil’s biggest rule for writing. [20:16] Neil’s process for writing first drafts. [23:35] What Neil aims to accomplish with his second drafts. [25:49] Something Neil noticed when he first started writing and editing with the use of computers. [26:28] What notebooks does Neil prefer for writing first drafts? [29:13] Fountain pens Neil has known and loved. [35:21] How many book signings does it take to get to the bottom of a Pilot 823’s structural capacity? How about Neil’s signing hand? How many such pens given in sacrifice by Neil’s three-year-old will appease his house gods? [39:39] Neil’s journey from manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer to notebook, and the power of trivializing weighty endeavors — whether they’re writing novels or going for gold medals. [41:49] How Coraline went from being an unpublishable labor of love for Neil’s children to an award-winning novella. [47:48] Does Neil tend to work on multiple projects at once? [53:22] Why does Neil take particular delight in writing introductions to other people’s work? [55:24] At what time of day does Neil prefer to work, and has this changed over the years? [56:50] Advice to aspiring novelists about finding a routine: The more you can be like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, the better. [59:35] The importance of understanding that just because we do something one way today doesn’t mean we’ll be doing it that way tomorrow. [1:01:28] How a touching post on Neil’s blog (which I recommend everyone read) inspired me to adopt my own dog, Molly. [1:03:16] What’s the genesis story of The Graveyard Book? [1:04:10] Neil makes the case for giving the ensemble version of The Graveyard Book a listen. [1:15:29] Who was Terry Pratchett, and how did he and Neil strike up a friendship? [1:16:24] On working with Douglas Adams and the germ of the idea that became Neil and Terry’s collaboration, Good Omens. [1:20:12] Neil shares his preposterous writing schedule from simultaneously working on Good Omens, Sandman, and The Books of Magic — something only someone very insane (or very young) could possibly handle. [1:23:08] Why, after so many misfires trying to get Good Omens on the screen, we’ll finally see an uncompromising television adaptation soon. [1:24:30] Where to find out more about Good Omens — the book and the series. [1:30:58] What does Neil feel he learned most from his “apprenticeship” with Terry? [1:32:40] How did Terry approach his own mortality when he learned he had Alzheimer’s disease? [1:34:45] Before he passed away, Terry opened up a controversial dialogue around the right to die for people with terminal diseases like Alzheimer’s. What is Neil’s view? [1:38:14] What would Terry think of the Good Omens series and its related fanfare? How might things have gone differently if he’d been directly involved in production? [1:39:50] Time flies when you’re interviewing Neil Gaiman. (For the record, I hope to fly again sooner than later.) [1:45:09] Parting thoughts. [1:46:03] * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since The Four Hour Body, which was, God, eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral, greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient-dense, proper meals. But sometimes you're busy, sometimes you're traveling, sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes, as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 2:02Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free,

• 2:46Tim Ferriss?

  it's always gonna be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog/friday. That's tim.blog/friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So, check it out, tim.blog/friday.

• 3:30Tim Ferriss?

  If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot, and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So, easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog/friday, and thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:09Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm so excited because I'm about to share with you an interview that I waited 20-plus years to do. Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman. Who's Neil Gaiman? Neil's been one of my favorite authors forever. I first became fascinated by his imagination with The Sandman comics, graphic novels in the 90s, so much so, in fact, that I imported Sandman versions from different countries to help me learn foreign languages. My love for his work grew from there, from Nancy Boys to The Graveyard Book, which happens to be my favorite audiobook of all time, read by Neil, to Neverwhere. I've never been disappointed.

• 4:52Tim Ferriss?

  And Neil has won just about every award in every genre he's tackled, including Nebula and Hugo Awards, and his voice, as you will hear, is radio-perfect hypnotic. Since my very first podcast episode, back when this show did not even have a name, friends have asked me, "Who is on your list of dream guests?" And Neil has always been in my top five. Oprah's another. We'll get to that another time. Sadly, Neil very rarely does interviews, but after close to a decade, I'm not making that up, of soft touches via Twitter and elsewhere, he finally agreed to sit down with me for around 90, 120 minutes, somewhere in there, and get into all the details I could have ever dreamed of, and more. I never thought it would actually happen, and it did. It's, it's, I'm still on cloud

• 5:37Tim Ferriss?

  nine and find it very surreal, to be honest. And in any case, if you listen to even a few minutes of this, you'll understand why I'm such a fan. And I'm going to read a bit more of his official bio, and then we're going to get right into it. But just listen to the range in this bio when it comes to creative fiction and nonfiction. Neil Gaiman is the bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film, and television for all ages, including Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats, and The Sandman series of graphic novels. His fiction has received Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Will Eisner Awards, among many other awards and honors. His

• 6:18Tim Ferriss?

  novelistic retelling of Norse myths, titled Norse Mythology, has been a phenomenon and an international bestseller, and he won his ninth Audi Award for that. That is for best narration by the author. Nine, nine audio awards and you'll, you'll get a taste of his voice and why people enjoy it so much. Recently, Gaiman wrote all six episodes of and has been the full-time showrunner for the forthcoming BBC, Amazon Prime mini-series adaptation of Good Omens, based on the beloved 1990 book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. Fantastic, fantastic book and I've set up a redirect so you guys can find the trailer for this really easily if you just go to tim.blog/omens.

• 7:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's tim.blog/omens. It'll point right to the trailer for this, which you guys should check out. Many of Gaiman's books and comics have been adapted for film and television, including Stardust, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, Coraline, an Academy Award nominee, and the BAFTA winner for Best Animated Film, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a movie based on Gaiman's short story. The television series Lucifer is based on characters created by Gaiman and Sandman. His 2001 novel, American Gods, is a critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated TV series now entering its second season. In 2017, Neil Gaiman became a goodwill ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States where he is professor in the arts at Bard College.

• 7:46Tim Ferriss?

  You can find him on Twitter and Instagram, @neilhimself, Facebook, /neilgaiman, and at neilgaiman.com. And without further ado, my apologies for the long intro, but it's very warranted in this case, given the excitement on my part. Here is Neil Gaiman. Neil, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. I have been hoping to have this conversation for years and if I flashback for 10, 15, probably 20-plus years, I've been reading your work. I can't say that about many people I've ever met.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  And I mean, you've been asking me incredibly politely if I could do the podcast or anything vaguely, you know, sort of edging around it and giving me open invitations for a good decade now.

• 8:41Tim Ferriss?

  This is true.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  And I, you know, and I love the fact we've managed to do the occasional tiny goofy thing. I got to do, read a page of your book.

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. That's right. You read a page of the book, which was incredible because I find your voice, as many people do, rather hypnotic. And then we got to do a very short chapter in Tribe of Mentors, the last book. Thank you very much for answering those questions. And it's just such a thrill to be able to spend time with you.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  I'm loving it.

• 9:15Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we could begin with the glorious beginnings. And maybe for those people who can't see this, I'll give some context. I have not just one recorder, but two, three, four different sets of audio. And that's in part because I was, or am, once bitten, twice shy when it comes to audio. And then you shared one of your early days stories. What happened?

• 9:43Speaker 04

  So when I was 15, I really wanted to meet and talk to writers and artists I admired. And I couldn't figure out how you did this. I didn't know about conventions, if there were conventions back in 1975, 76. So I had a brilliant idea. I would start a magazine. The magazine, as far as I was concerned, didn't even have to exist. The fact that it went on to exist was really fun. And we called it Metro, which was a name I came up with because it sounded like a magazine.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  It didn't just sound like a magazine, it sounded like a magazine that you have heard of. And I love the fact that over the years, Metro magazines around the world actually do exist now. But in 1975, they didn't, but I could phone up and say, from Metro magazine, and people go, oh, yeah. I've heard of you. And, you know, our voices had broken. So over the phone, nobody knew that we were 15. And I remember interviewing Michael Morcock, who was an author whose work I loved, with my friend Dave Dixon, who told me recently, he'd just found the tape and is threatening

• 11:07Speaker 04

  to put it up as some kind of glorious podcast, which I really hope he does. 15-year-old Neil Gaiman and Dave Dixon interviewing Michael Morcock. But the one that taught me my lesson was the, I think it was the second interview we did. Morcock was the first. And it was Roger Dean. And Roger Dean is an artist and designer, most famous back then for the covers of Yes albums, this beautiful sort of calligraphy and these floating islands and things like

• 11:46Speaker 04

  that. And I got talking to some kid on the train who said, oh, yeah, you know, I know Roger Dean. And so we phoned up Roger Dean's publisher, which was basically Roger Dean, I think they were called Dragon's Dream, and said, you know, like to interview Roger. Went down to Brighton. I remember the sheer amazement and joy of these paintings that were, as far as I was concerned, iconic religious emblems. They were, you know, I didn't like Yes very much. In fact, I didn't really like much of the music that he'd done covers

• 12:30Speaker 04

  to. But I had a copy of his book, Views, and just loved it. There was a painting he did of some badges. There was just these things. It felt very Lord of the Rings. It felt very fantastical. And there were these amazing paintings covered in dust, propped up against walls. And we interviewed him.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  And at the end of the interview, I noticed that the tape wasn't going around and got home, played it, and you can hear there's 30 seconds of us talking, there's 30 seconds of us talking in higher and higher pitched voices, faster and faster, like mad chipmunks, and then it stops. And that was the Roger Dean interview. And I, and the great thing about that was when, seven years later, I really was a journalist. I really was going around interviewing people. I was interviewing people for magazines that existed and, you

• 13:36Speaker 04

  know, had existed before we decided to do the interviews and things. I always carried spare batteries. I always carried spare tapes. If I could, you know, at the point where I could afford to, I even carried a spare micro cassette recorder, just in case.

• 13:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just in case. Two is one and one is none, as they say sometimes. And so the gods, the gods gifted you with a malfunction early.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. One good malfunction and you learn your lesson. It is that pain thing.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  And we were chatting before we sat down to record, as I was gathering copious beverages, water and tea and so on for us. I'm using the Royal US, I suppose, mostly for me.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  I cut water too.

• 14:25Tim Ferriss?

  And we were talking about this location downtown where we're sitting. And I've, I've decided in the last few years to use locations outside of my home for a lot of what I do because I've, I've found it, that is, it being sitting at my kitchen table doing a lot to sometimes produce a malaise. This is this odd association or lack of dissociation between work and home. And I had read at one point that Maya Angelou, and I hope I'm getting that pronunciation right, would rent hotel rooms to work on a lot of her writing. And then you brought up another name.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  So, um, back in about 1997, I read an article by Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, about how he wrote the James Bond books.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And you read this article and you realise something, which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  I was always fascinated by the fact that that several of Roald Dahl's most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming would Really? Yeah, he gave Dahl No idea. The two best short story twists, which are Lamb to the Slaughter, where the woman kills her husband with a leg of lamb and then cooks it and feeds it to the detective who is going, I cannot figure out what he was hit with, is an Ian Fleming plot. And so is the one about the evil antique dealer who finds this amazing antique in,

• 16:12Speaker 04

  you know, on some farm and decides to cheat the farmers and explains that, well, the thing isn't worth any money, but the legs, the legs are worth some money, so I'll, I'll give you, you know, 20 quid for the legs. And is about to take away this million pound antique thing and the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away. It makes it easier for you. And, and those plots were both Ian Fleming's. And you start realising, ah, you really don't like writing when you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bond books.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  You write a James Bond book in two weeks. You check into a hotel. You have to check into a hotel somewhere that you don't want to be, otherwise you might go out and walk around and become a tourist. You have to check into a not terribly nice hotel room, otherwise you might luxuriate and enjoy it. And instead, what you want to be is focused on getting out.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  And then you, having nothing else to do in this town, in this place, you settle down and you write like a fiend and you get your James Bond book written in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room. And that was how he did it. And I have tried it a couple of times. I did it with the American draft of Neverwhere. That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire sort of American draft, which was a big second draft. The book had already been published in the UK, but my American editor wanted stuff done because she pointed out that the book as it existed was written

• 18:02Speaker 04

  for people who knew, knew that Oxford Street was a big street with lots of shops on it, you know, or whatever. It was written for Brits and Londoners. And she wanted something expanded. So I expanded it. And I was in a room with, as far as I remember, no windows in the, I think it was a Marriott in the World Trade Center. And which is no longer there. But writing in that hotel room, you just wanted to be out.

• 18:46Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems to me, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet. So I want you to certainly fact check me as needed, but that you also have or have had some internal rules. So you can, you can use your external environment to assist. But, but I read that, and again, feel free to correct, but making rules, the importance of making rules, rules like you can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can't sit here and do anything else. That, that was always, and still is when I go off to write. That's my biggest rule.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Could you speak to that?

• 19:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, because.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  I would go down to my lovely little gazebo, the bottom of the garden, sit down, and I'm absolutely allowed not to do anything.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  I'm allowed to sit at my desk, I'm allowed to stare out at the world, I'm allowed to do anything I like.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  As long as it isn't anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book, allowed to phone a friend, allowed to, you know, make a clay model of something. All I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing or write. And what I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  But writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. You know, you sort of sit there and you've been staring out the window now for five minutes and it kind of loses its charm. You're going, well, actually, might as well write something. And, um, and it's hard. I'm, as a writer, I'm more easily, you know, I'm distractable.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  I have a three-year-old son. He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. It's more fun playing with him than it is writing, which means if I'm going to be writing, I need to do it somewhere where I don't have a three-year-old son singing to me, asking me to read to him, demanding my attention. And I think that's, I think it's a really just a solid rule for writers. It's like, yeah, you don't have to write. You have permission to not write. That you don't have permission to do anything else.

• 21:21Tim Ferriss?

  That reminds me of another one of my favorite writers, you being the one who's sitting in front of me, John McPhee, nonfiction writer, who has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, but has written some incredible Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction. And I was lucky enough to take a class with him 1,000 years ago. And his, his role was very similar. He didn't state it explicitly. He would sit in front of his first, as a young man, typewriter. And he could sit in front of the blank page and from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming, it was the blank page or writing.

• 22:01Tim Ferriss?

  He was disallowed from doing anything else. Are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Ah, some of them are just things for me. For example, um, most of the time, not always, I will do my first draft in fountain pen. Um, because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen. I like the, um, I like filling a fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing. So I'll have a notebook. Um, I'll have a fountain pen and I'll write. If I'm doing anything

• 22:56Speaker 04

  long, if I'm working on a novel, for example, I will always have two fountain pens on the go, at least with two different colored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, look at that, five pages in brown. I wrote that. Half a page in black. That was not a good day.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Nine pages in blue. That was what a great day. And I, you can just sort of get a sense of, okay, are you, are you working? Are you making forward progress?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  What's actually happening? And I also love that because it emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails. Your first draft can absolutely go up in flames. It can, you can change the age, gender, number of a character.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  You can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know. Anything that happens in your first draft is you

• 24:16Speaker 04

  telling the story to yourself. And then I'll sit down and type and I'll put it onto a computer. And as far as I'm concerned, the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  Do you edit then as you're looking or translating from the first draft on the page to the computer or do you get it all down as is in the computer and then edit on the computer?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  No, I definitely, that's my editing process. I figure that's my second draft is typing into the computer. And also I love.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  So backing up a bit here.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  When I was,

• 25:01Speaker 04

  what was I, 27, 28? In the days when we were still in typewriters and there were just a handful of people with word processors, which were clunky things with discs which didn't hold very much and stuff. I edited an anthology.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  And enjoyed editing my anthology. And most of the stories that came in were about 3,000 words long.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Move forward in time, not much. Five, six, seven years. Mid 90s. Everybody is now on computer. And I edited another short story anthology. And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 words long.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  And they didn't really have much more story than the 3,000 word ones. And I realized that what was happening is it's a sort of a computery thing. Is if you're typing, putting stuff down is work.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  If you've got a computer, adding stuff is not work. Choosing is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought, okay, I have to not do that. Because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous and thin.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  So what I love, if I've written something on a computer and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I've lost work. If I delete a page and a half, I feel like there's a page and a half that just went away. And that's a page and a half's worth of work I've just lost. If I've been writing in a notebook and I'm typing it up and I can look at something and go, I don't need this page and a half.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  And I leave it out, I've just saved myself work. And it feels kind of like I'm treating myself. So I'm just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I'm somehow on some cosmic level paying somebody by the word in order to be allowed to write. That if they're there, they should matter, they should mean something. It's always important to me.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  And you mentioned, you mentioned distraction earlier. And your dangerously adorable son, which I certainly agree with.

• 27:55Tim Ferriss?

  I had read somewhere, actually, before I get to that, this might seem like a very, very mundane question, but what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large, like legal pads? Are they leather bound? What type of notebooks?

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Um, when they came out, I really liked, I've used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big. Well, I kind of liked how much I could see on the page. Those were the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in, sort of, you know, big size. But they weren't terribly portable.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  I went over to the Moleskines.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  And I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper quality. And dropping paper quality doesn't matter unless you're writing in fountain pen. Because all of a sudden, it's bleeding through and all of a sudden, you're writing on one page, leaving a page blank because it's bled through and writing on the next page. And Joe Hill, about

• 29:09Speaker 04

  six or seven years ago.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Suggested the Leuchtturm to me. And so my usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm because I really like the, the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper. And they're just like sort of Moleskines, but, but the Porsche of Moleskines, they're just better. And I also have been writing, I wrote the graveyard book. And I'm writing the current novel in a

• 29:53Speaker 04

  These beautiful books that I bought in a stationary shop in Venice,

• 30:04Speaker 04

  built into a bridge, somewhere in Venice, there's a, there's a little stationary shop on a bridge. And they have these beautiful leather bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they're blank pages. And I wrote the graveyard book in one of those, I bought four of them. And now I'm using the next one on the next novel. And it may well go into another one. I'm not sure. And then at home, in, I said at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is, you know, I've got my,

• 30:48Speaker 04

  we live in Woodstock, but I have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in, in Wisconsin. And it, it's become archives. It's, you know, it's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  But waiting for me in that house

• 31:11Speaker 04

  is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago. And before I die, I plan to write a novel in it.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  And it's an accounts book from the mid 19th century. It's 500 pages long, every page is, is numbered.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  It's lined with, with accounts lines, but very faint. So it'll be nice to write a book in it. And it is engineered so that every single page lies flat. And it's huge and it's heavy and it just looks like a book that, you know, Dickens or somebody would have written a novel in. And I've just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dickensian enough. And whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen, I'm not sure. But I definitely want to write it in, in a sort of old.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Victorian, something slightly copper platy, one of those old flex nib pens that they stopped making when carbon paper came in. Um, just so I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting.

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just imagining you putting pen to the first page, when you finish the first page, and what that will feel like. It's gonna be a good day.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  It will, it will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. I'll get to the end of the first page. It's, ah, now I have this pristine, but it is, it is the, the thing that I tell young writers, and by young writers, a young writer can be any age, you just have to be starting out, um, which is, anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is, is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, because there's nothing there to fix.

• 33:20Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned a word, and it might be that I'm a little slow moving because I'm from Long Island, but Leichturm, how do you spell that word?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Ah, L E I C H, I think it's T T U R M.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I got it, yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  And then 1917, I think, is the, uh, their Twitter handle is definitely Leichturm1917.

• 33:47Tim Ferriss?

  Leichturm, and I'll put that in the show notes for folks, so you'll be able to find it. Since you gave me, uh, and I'm not intending to turn this episode into a shopping list, but I've never used fountain pens.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Really?

• 34:00Tim Ferriss?

  I have not. And my, my assistant, my dear assistant, uh, does. She loves using fountain pens. She enjoys the act. I've, I've had a few sloppy false starts and then been rather impatient, but if I wanted to give it a shot, are there any particular fountain pens or criteria that you would use in picking a good pen?

• 34:21Speaker 04

  You know, the biggest criteria I would use in picking, um, if you have the choice, is go somewhere like.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  New York's Fountain Pen Hospital. Is that a real place? It's a real place. It's called the Fountain Pen Hospital. They sell lots of new pens. They recondition old pens. They they look after pens for you.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  And try them out because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal. You you you go, no, no, no. And then you find the one.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  I tend to suggest to people who are

• 35:01Speaker 04

  just nervously, you know, I I've never used a fountain pen. What should I do? And I will point them at Lamy, L A M Y, who have some fabulous starter pens and they're not very expensive and they're good. They do a pen called the the Safari, but they have a bunch of good, good starter pens. And they're just nice to

• 35:29Speaker 04

  to get into the idea of, do I like doing this?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  The

• 35:39Speaker 04

  let's see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? I've got, so

• 35:49Speaker 04

  this one here is a Pilot.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  It's a Namiki and it's a flexi nib ever so slightly. When you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It's a beautiful, beautiful pen.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  That one's a Pilot. I think this one here is the Namiki. And it's really weird because Namiki is Pilot. So I don't quite understand that. This is a Maybe it's a sort of Toyota Lexus thing? I think it is. It's that kind of thing. This one here is called a Falcon. And again, you put a little bit of weight on it and the line will just spread and thicken, which is part of the fun

• 36:35Speaker 04

  of fountain pens. And I will just, you know, I'll I'll go and play. There's a lovely Italian one. I got my my agent.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  I did a thing some years ago when I realized that I was losing a lot of actual writing time to signing foreign contracts.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  And this is for books. This is for books. Or occasionally, you know, for stories or for things being reprinted around the world. And the contracts would come in and there would be big sheaves of them because I get printed all around the world and foreign contracts, a lot of them, you have to sign a lot, you have to do a lot of initialing and I would sit there going, I have just spent ninety minutes signing a pile of contracts and I love that I got to sign it, but so I contacted my agent, I said, can I give you like power of attorney, would you mind just, can you just sign these things for me? And she's like, absolutely. Great.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  So I got her, she'd never used a fountain pen and I got her a fountain pen. I actually went to the New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her and did the thing of showing her pens and going, what do you like? And then, and I got her a Visconti, which is just these lovely Italian pens.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  And mostly I love the sort of the slightly fetishistic bit of having bottles of beautifully colored ink. When you start talking to fountain pen people, they, they, they really, they pretend to be interested in what pen you like, but they don't care because they found their own pens that they love. And they say, what do you use? And I, you know, I use Pilot eight two threes for signing pen. And, and I actually now I bought a Pilot eight two three, um, cause it's just a fantastic signing pen. It's a work course, it keeps going. And I got one in twenty twelve.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  And it was my signing pen. I signed through Ocean at the end of the lane. You know, before the book had come out, I had already pre-signed, you know, written my signature 20,000 times with this pen.

• 39:03Tim Ferriss?

  I have seen footage of you icing your hand after such signings.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  That was the signing tour that I really got into icing my hand because and wrist and arm.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  And, you know, I did the numbers and as far as I can tell, I have signed about one and a half million signatures with that pen, uh, which remained. And I had to send it off to Pilot at one point, not because the nib was in trouble, but because the the plunger mechanism was starting to stick and they fixed it for me and sent it back. And then my three-year-old son found a place behind a cast iron fireplace, uh, in our house in Woodstock, where if you just insert your father's Pilot 823 pen, which you have found on the table, just to see if it would

• 39:56Speaker 04

  go in there, you can actually guarantee that nobody, without disassembling the house. I mean, we actually have to take the entire house apart, um, to uninstall a cast iron fireplace from 1913 to get at the pens. I've gone, that is, that pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods and I need to get a new one.

• 40:19Tim Ferriss?

  It strikes me, at least it seems as we're talking, that many of the decisions you've made, the tools you've found and enlisted, uh, act to make not writing unappealing, or at least boring after five minutes and to, and to sort of enhance the act of writing to make it something that is enjoyable. I don't, I don't know if that's true.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  That is true, but they also exist for another reason, which is kind of weird, which is to try and trivialize what I'm doing and not make it important and freighted down with weight because that paralyzes me.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  When I started writing, I had a typewriter. It's a manual typewriter.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  When I sold my first book, I had the money to buy an electric typewriter.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  What was that first book? Oh, gosh. I actually don't remember whether I bought the electric typewriter with the money from a book called Ghastly Beyond Belief, Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Quotations I did with Kim Newman, or whether I did it, whether it was

• 41:42Speaker 04

  for the Duran Duran biography that I did. Either way, I was just 23. And what I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, single spaced, so that it couldn't be used.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  And also so that I could get as many words on and, you know, paper was expensive.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  And then, so I could always do that.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  And I remember the joy of getting my first computer and just the idea that I wasn't making paper dirty. Nothing mattered until I pressed print. And that was absolutely and utterly liberating.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  And then, you know, a decade on, picking up a notebook. It was for Stardust, of which I decided that I wanted the rhythms of Stardust

• 42:45Speaker 04

  to be sort of very antiquated rhythms. And I thought, there's probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Seventeenth century writing, seventeenth, eighteenth century writing.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  You notice tends to go in very, very long sentences and long paragraphs. And I, my theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you're using dip pens. And if you pause, they, they dry up. So you just have to kind of keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writing where you're just going for a very long sentence. And you're going to go for a long paragraph and you're going to keep moving in this thing. And you're sort of thinking ahead.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  With, if you're writing on a computer, you'll think of the sort of thing that you mean and write that down and then look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you're writing in fountain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  So it's actually so much easier

• 44:13Speaker 04

  to just sort of think a little bit more. You, you, you slow up a bit, but you're thinking the sentence through to the end. And then, then you start writing. You write that and then you pause and then you write the next one.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  At least that was the way that I hypothesized I might be writing. And I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  And I thought, well, to do that, I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book. And that, so that was how I started writing that. And again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated. It was like, ah, I'm not actually making, words are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen.

• 45:02Tim Ferriss?

  This trivializing is.

• 45:08Tim Ferriss?

  I think very, very important, and I'd love to dig into it a little bit because this is something that's come up quite a bit, initially very unexpectedly with people I interview on the podcast. I remember having a conversation with Shaun White, legendary snowboarder, and I asked him what he said to himself, what was his internal monologue or dialogue right before the gate opened for the last run in the Olympics for the gold medal. And his answer was, who cares?

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Which surprised me. And he said, yeah, because if, in effect, if I apply an incredible amount of weight to myself, it's going to do nothing but handicap me. And you do see, or there are many examples of writers, of musicians who have sort of crumbled with sophomore syndrome after a success and had great difficulty putting out work. You've put out a lot of very, very good work. I've read and listened to and watched a lot of your work. What are other things you do to remove that weight, if anything? Are there things you say to yourself when you commit to writing a book, when you sign the agreement with the publisher for yet another novel? Is there any other advice that you would give or any other things

• 46:20Tim Ferriss?

  that you do that help to remove the psychological performance anxiety?

• 46:27Speaker 04

  Well, if you're me, you tend to do the things that are not actually financially sensible, but make life easier. I write, I like writing things that nobody's waiting for. It's much more stressful writing things that people actually are waiting for, that people care about. It's why it felt wonderful to follow American Gods up with Coraline. Nobody even knew that I wanted to be a kids' author. And it was an odd kind of thing to

• 47:10Speaker 04

  be. And I've just written this giant novel that's won all of the awards, and it's incredibly adult, and it's thick, and it's a proper book. And look, I got the Hugo, and look, I got the Nebula, and so on and so forth. And then...

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Um, here's a book nobody's waiting for about.

• 47:33Tim Ferriss?

  Did you work on, so you worked on that before? Anyone knew you, in other words, you hadn't set expectations?

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Caroline was written, I thought Caroline was unpublishable. In fact, I was told it was initially. Um, and I, I started it for my kids, my daughter in particular, Holly.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  I showed it to an English editor who told me it was completely unpublishable. Uh, we moved to America.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  The idea was that I was writing in my own time, but I didn't have any own time. Somewhere in there, I sent it to my friend Jane Yolan. I mentioned to Jane, who was an amazing children's um, author, but also at the time was editing a line of books and she showed it to, she wanted to buy it and the people upstairs at the publishing house said absolutely not. And, and you know, this was just the first third of Caroline. It hadn't even got bad yet. Um, and, uh, and I put it away and then

• 48:48Speaker 04

  a few years on, I looked around and realized that I now had another daughter. I now had Maddie and she was a baby. And she was getting bigger and if I didn't finish that book, you know, there's this book I started for Holly and now Holly's too old almost and, and I needed to finish it. So I sent it to my new editor, but I sent it to my adult editor. I didn't have a children's editor. Um, Jennifer Hershey at, uh, at, trying to remember, were we at Harper Collins at the time or was it still Avon? I think it was still Avon. It hadn't yet been, Avon got bought by Harper Collins, which is how I became a Harper Collins author. Um.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  And she read it and she called me up and she said, this is great. What happens next? And I said, send me a contract and we will both find out.

• 49:39Speaker 04

  So bless her, she did. And so I went back to writing it because now it was actually something that actually had a delivery date attached and I did not have the time to write it in. It wasn't like I had more time. And I remember what I did was I had a notebook by the side of my bed.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  And instead of reading three or four pages a night and then turning off the light and going to sleep, I would write maybe 50 words of Coraline, which doesn't seem much. Right before bed? Right before bed. So I wasn't writing, reading before bed. I was just writing before bed, but I got to bed and I would reread what I'd written on Coraline and I would do, you know, five or six lines of Coraline.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  But if you do it that way, you know, you've written a page a week. And so it, it, it kept moving forward. And then we went on a cruise, a fundraising cruise for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is a First Amendment thing.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  And I was working on American Gods and I did not pack, due to a packing error, the American Gods notebooks, but I did have the Coraline book with me. So on that cruise, I got to write quite a bit more Coraline. And then a couple of months later, I was starting to despair of ever finishing American Gods, because I'd been writing it by that point for at least 18 months and figured that I had about a year to go and just said, fuck it and wrote Coraline and just finished

• 51:41Speaker 04

  it and sent it off to my publisher and it's like, here is a book, you can publish this. And they're like, that's great, but we'll, we'll wait for American Gods.

• 51:52Tim Ferriss?

  Do you tend to work on multiple projects at once?

• 51:55Speaker 04

  I used to. I used to be really good at working on multiple projects at once. I think I have to start.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  I think I have to start accepting that I'm not as good anymore at that.

• 52:15Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 52:16Speaker 04

  It means that in the old days, when I was young, I would have at least three things on the go, which was great because if I got stuck on any one of them, I would do the other. Even when I was writing American Gods, I would always have the next of the sort of the Coming to America short stories in my head. So if I got stuck on Shadow, I would just take a week and I'd do one of the Coming to America stories. And then I go back to Shadow again.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  But these days, I don't think I'm as good at that anymore. I, I think I am. I think it's great to have three or four things going on, but there is that point where I start looking at myself and going, actually, I'm getting less done. I'm not doing that thing where I get stuck on project A. So I just immediately nip over to project B. It takes me a little ramping up time to get to the headspace now, project B. And at the point where I have project A, B, C, and D all waiting for me, what I do is look at them, make a noise like Lurch from The Addams Family, you know, one of those

• 53:37Speaker 04

  kind of noises. I go off and make a cup of tea and play with Ash or something.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  So I think actually I, it's one of those things where you just know thyself. I think I now have to start going, no, just, just one thing at a time. Which also means I'm, I'm gonna have to say no to more introductions and things. Cause and I love doing introductions. I, I, I.

• 54:05Tim Ferriss?

  Introductions, you mean writing introductions?

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Writing introductions, writing introductions to other people's work, writing introductions and essays and things where you go, here is a thing I love, I wanna, I can get it to the world. I can tell people why I love this thing and maybe they'll discover it. And every now and then, and you know, sometimes you know your introduction makes no real difference in the scheme of things.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  And then sometimes, you know, James Thurber, I was told I could bring, you know, that they would bring the 13 clocks back into print if I wrote an introduction to it. So I was like, yes, I'm writing an introduction to it. And then because it has an introduction by me, I've run into many hundreds of people who I assume are representatives of thousands of people over the years who've said, you know, I picked up that book because your name was on the cover and oh my God, it's become my favorite book. You know, I read it to my kids. It's amazing. And I go, good, that's, that's what it's for. That's why you do this.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned writing right before bed. So I'd love to talk about the,

• 55:27Tim Ferriss?

  maybe not the scheduling, but the timing of writing. So I was, was doing prep for this conversation and came across an interview in which you said that for, for nonfiction, you can kind of write wherever it happens to fall. If it's a script or something else, but that for novels, very often you tend to write between, say, one and six PM, where you'll handle email, maybe writing a blog post and so on in the morning. And I'd love to chat about that because

• 55:56Tim Ferriss?

  many of the writers I've spoken to, and I'm sure it's, it differs person to person, but tend to write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoid distractions.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  When I started out,

• 56:08Speaker 04

  from, from the age of about 22, when I was a young journalist, 26, 27, a starting out comics writer.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  You know, all through there, I was a late, late, late night writer. Nothing really happened until the kids were in bed. Nine o'clock, I might have faffed her out a little bit during the day, but now

• 56:43Speaker 04

  it's all done and now I'm getting down to work. And at two or three o'clock in the morning, and I'm writing in England at this point, I may phone a friend in America just to talk enough to make sure that I'm awake.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  But so that's what I did. And

• 57:09Speaker 04

  and I was a smoker and a coffee drinker and it was great.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  I moved to America in ninety two. Gave up smoking ninety three. Stopped drinking coffee, went over to tea.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  And tried being a late night writer, tried carrying on being a late night writer and gradually realized that I wasn't really anymore. What tended to happen was somewhere around one in the morning, I'd be writing away. And then I would lift my head from the keyboard at four o'clock in the morning and have three thousand pages of the letter M. And just go, okay, that, this doesn't really work anymore for me. And then I started rescheduling, trying different things out. Part of

• 58:07Speaker 04

  what I discovered particularly about being a novelist is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  The closer you can come to just Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You you've set up a day that works for yourself. You know, I I the last novel that I actually wrote. I was at Tori Amos's wonderful house in Florida. She has this lovely sort of house on the water that she's lent me many times to go and write in. And I went down there and I would get up in the morning.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  I would go for a jog, come back, do my yoga, get dressed. And and get in the car, drive down to a little cafe where there were just enough people around that I knew that other people existed, but nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to. And I would order myself cup of large cup of green tea, sit in a corner and just start writing. And I would do that day over and over and over and over.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  And, you know, a couple of months later, looked up and and I had the ocean at the end of the lane, which was only meant to have been a short story anyway. It just kept going. And I that I think works really, really well. I also think that the the most important thing for human beings is to be aware of the change. You know, the the biggest problem we run into is going, this is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is how I function.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  While failing to notice that you don't do that anymore. I'm perfectly aware that I may one day become one of those people who wakes up early in the morning and goes and writes.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  My friend Gene Wolfe, who is now in his late eighties and is one of,

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  you know, the finest writers that America has,

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  for years was a, an editor of a magazine about factories. I think it was called Plant Engineering. And so he'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and write for an hour

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  before anything else, before the day started, before he had to leave for work. And before anybody else was up. And that was how he did it.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  I cannot imagine getting up in the morning and just writing. That's not how my head works. I need a while to get here. But I can absolutely imagine that one day I'll, I'll have become one of those morning writers from having been a late night writer in my youth and an afternoon writer. In my, in my middle age, in my dotage, I could absolutely become a morning writer.

• 1:01:42Tim Ferriss?

  In your dotage, I think that's going to take a while. I do want to ask you a question related to a name that came up a little earlier. And that is, and this, of course, I think I'm getting right because it comes from a reliable source, which is your blog.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  My blog is a pretty reliable source.

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's very reliable. And for those, those who know your work outside of the blog, I'd really encourage to, to read some of your work on the blog. There's some really touching, personal work, one in particular about your gorgeous white dog, whose name I'm currently, just in such a beautiful piece that in fact, I owe you thanks for because it led in, in part, there are many factors, but to me getting my first dog as an adult, Molly, which I put off for decades. So thank you for that. But this question. Beautiful piece is related to Holly. And I'm going to use this as a very sneaky way to ask you a question that you'd probably dislike being asked.

• 1:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  And it involves 57 year olds. So my understanding is you're convinced to speak to your daughter's class about where ideas come from. And what I noted here, I'm not going to ask it that way, but the line that stuck out was you get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. What if, dot, dot, dot? What if you woke up with wings? If only, if only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. I wonder, dot, dot, dot. If this goes on, this is one I really liked. You know, if this goes on, telephones are going to start talking to each other and cut out the middleman. Wouldn't it be interesting if, dot, dot, dot?

• 1:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  And the question I'm going to ask is a follow up. It doesn't have to map perfectly to this, but I would love to hear the genesis story of the graveyard book. And the reason I ask about that book specifically is that it is my, my absolute favorite fiction audiobook of all time. And it is, I remember the exact moment when I finished the graveyard book in audio and there are multiple versions. People have asked me, I have not listened to the ensemble version. And I'm sure it's spectacular, but not, not to sound creepy. I do find your voice very soothing.

• 1:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  And I finished it as my plane was, not my plane, let me rephrase, as a plane was landing. And a few minutes before we landed and I thought about restarting the book. So it's, it's had a wonderful place in my heart and my mind. Where did that book come from?

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  So actually I can give a slightly better answer to that now than I could have done a year ago, or I have done for previous years because I found something accidentally recently,

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  which was, which gave me an insight into Stefan. So.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  I was twenty five years old. Um, it would have been nineteen eighty four, eighty five, maybe even into eighty six.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  I was living in Sussex, in a little town, in a very tall house.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  My dad owned the house. Uh, actually, what he owned was a shop underneath, but the house sort of came, came with it. And because little old English towns go back for a long time, the house was at least three hundred years old.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  And it was across a little lane from a country graveyard. And the house was incredibly tall and incredibly thin. You get a couple of rooms and then you get stairs. And I had a son who at that point was two years old.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  And his favorite thing was his little tricycle.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  And the problem with little tricycles is you cannot ride them around houses like that. Otherwise you die. You hit the stairs and you die.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  So every day I would take him and his little tricycle over the road to this little churchyard. And he would pedal happily round and round the paths.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  Through the gravestones.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  And I remember just the, the thought process. I remember going, he looks so happy here. Looks really comfortable. There is something very sweet about a little kid riding a tricycle through a graveyard.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  And I thought I could do a story about, it wouldn't be fun to do a story about that. You could do a story like, it would be like, you know, a kid in a graveyard getting brought up by dead people.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  And then I thought, actually, Kipling already kind of did that once with The Jungle Book, which is a kid in a jungle being brought up by wild animals and teaching him the things that wild animals know. So I would have to have a kid in a graveyard being taught the things that dead people know.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  And I went up to my office, my little office, sat down at my typewriter

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  and started to write. Now, when I've told people this in the past, I've said I wrote a couple of pages and realized that it wasn't good enough.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  And I was wrong. I actually wrote an entire first chapter, I discovered. Because about a year ago, looking for something else, I found it.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  And it wasn't very good.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  What was fascinating and delightful about it was the portrait of the kid, which was very obviously a, really, actually, looking back on it, quite good pen portrait of my son Mike, who is now a- That you did. That, you know, I'm describing the baby and I only knew one, so it's Mike. And that was really interesting. But story doesn't work. And I think, I forget, I think I've got a,

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  there's a demon in it. I don't have, who I think is the person who

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  winds up being the person who kind of accepts him into the graveyard.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  You know, nothing's quite right, but there's a central idea there.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  But I wrote, I remember writing that and just going, okay, this is a better idea than I am a writer. So I need to put this off.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  And about

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  a decade later, I came back, tried it again. And this time,

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  you know.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  At least according to memory, it was only a couple of pages. And again, I went, oh, no, still not good enough for this.

• 1:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  May I pause for one second?

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Tim Ferriss?

  You must have ideas for potential stories all the time.

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, but this was different. This was one where I knew I knew it had legs and I knew it was real and I knew it was good.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  And in fact, you know, it was interesting. There was a point where I thought I wasn't gonna do it. And I kind of gave the idea to Terry Pratchett. We'd been, we'd had our photos taken in a graveyard and it would, we were talking about graveyards and kids. And I said, well, there's this book that I was gonna write and this is what I was gonna do in it. And what is lovely is Terry didn't do any of that exactly, but he took, he wrote a book called Johnny and the Dead, which was sort of taking some of the stuff, but it wasn't close enough that I couldn't then still do my story.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  What was great is I knew that this was still important and I still wanted to tell the story. And over the years, I would just let it accumulate. And finally,

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  in about 2003, I finished writing, I think it was Anansi Boys.

• 1:10:49Tim Ferriss?

  Which I also listened to on audio.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  Ah, Lenny Henry, isn't he brilliant?

• 1:10:53Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible, incredible.

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  Such a great read. And I got to the end of Anansi Boys. I thought, you know, I don't think I'm getting any better. I think this is now, as a writer, probably me. That's probably it. I may improve, you know, a tiny bit, but it's not gonna be the leaps and bounds that I know that I was. So I have absolutely no excuse for putting off the graveyard book. But when I've started the other two times and it didn't work, I started with chapter one.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  I'm gonna start right in the middle and I wrote

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  the first two pages of

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  of The Witch's Headstone,

• 1:11:46Speaker 04

  chapter four,

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  and did emotionally exactly the same thing I always do. I had always done at that point with the graveyard book, which is go, ah, it's just not good enough. It's not good enough. My daughter Maddie, because at this point, we're on, we're in the Cayman Islands on a small holiday. Me, Maddie and Holly. Maddie comes out the sea, wanders over to me and says, what are you, what are you doing? I said, I'm writing a story. She says, read it to me.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  So I read her the first page and a half that I'd written.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  And she said, what happens next?

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  So I kept going and I think I would, I would absolutely have been capable of giving up and failing at that point. Except Maddie wanted to know what happened next. So I kept writing and by the end of that,

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  I'd written a story that felt like it worked. I had the tone, I had the voice, I had Silas, I had all of that stuff. What a great character, by the way. He's so lovely. Silas. And then I started at the beginning and I, and the, the one thing that I have no idea where it came from, because it was just sitting in the notebook. When I came to start,

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  it's like I'd written it at some point in the previous

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  five years, knowing that it would be, you know, knowing that I would have to start at some point was just the line, there was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife. And knowing that that was the first line of the story. And feeling kind of, you know, having very mixed feelings about that because going well, on the whole, this story is going to be very loving. It's going to be very tender. It's going to be about growth. It's going to be about families. It's going to be about villages. It's going to be about people. But the first few pages are going to be absolutely terrifying. And that was the first line.

• 1:13:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think you you certainly delivered on the first few pages being very, very terrifying.

• 1:14:08Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to go back and listen to that again. Maybe I'll try ensemble this time around.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  The ensemble is real. I mean, you know, I

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  and I'm not just saying this because for me, you know, listening to one of my own audio books is a lot like back when you were young and we had answering machines and you would be listening to messages people had left for you and then you'd suddenly hit your own voice. And it's just like, no, I don't sound like that. But I but it's Derek Jacobi, who is one of England's greatest actors as the narrator. The cast of people like Miriam Margolis, Reese Shear Smith, just this fabulous cast. So.

• 1:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned a name that I was planning on bringing up anyway. And that is Terry Pratchett.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I think many people who, at least in the United States, are less familiar with Terry than perhaps they they should be. Could you tell us who Terry is and how you first met?

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Terry Pratchett, later Sir Terry Pratchett, was an English writer who died in March 2015.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  He was a humorist, a satirist, best known for the Discworld novels set on a flat earth, which is on the back of four elephants on the back of an enormous turtle swimming through space. And he was my friend. Terry and I met.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  When his first book, first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, was due to come out in paperback. And we met, for years and years, we would tell everybody that we met in a Chinese restaurant. And again, a few years ago, I found my desk diary from 1985. And I thought, ah, there's Terry and me, meeting in February, uh, 1985. I wonder which Chinese restaurant it was. It turned out we actually met on like the 28th of January, and it was Bertorelli's Italian Restaurant in, was it Gooch Street? I think it was Gooch Street.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Proving that memory is gloriously fallible. Embarrassingly so, since I'd actually filmed a piece to camera in a Chinese restaurant about Terry's passing. But it's, you know, I was a young journalist. Terry at the time was working as the press officer for the Central Electricity Board in the UK. And we hit it off in a way that's just that sort of thing.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  We go, oh, you have the same kind of mind that I have. Not exactly, but the Venn diagram of overlap is, it was the point where we got onto the subject of grimoires, of occult books. And Terry mentioned that he had come up with one called the Necrotelecomicon, The Book of the Telephone Numbers of the Dead. And I said, that's really weird. I've just come up with one called the Leverfulvarum Paganarum, The Book of Yellow Colored Pages.

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  And it's going, oh, we have the same kind of head that goes to the same kind of places. And We became friendlier, friendlier. After a while, Terry would start sending me his books to read as he was writing them. Um, you know, a floppy disk would arrive and it would have

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  thirty thousand words on it of a novel, or my phone would ring and Terry would say, hello, it's me. So which is funnier? And he'd just be writing and he'd want somebody to talk to. So I had written um

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  a book called Don't Panic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, uh, which was great. I got to work with Douglas Adams. I got to rummage through Douglas's filing cabinets and obscurity stuff. I'd I'd written the whole book of who Douglas was and what Hitchhikers was. And I realized by the end of it that I could write in that style, classic English humor with funny footnotes and things like that. That was, it was something I could do. And I had an idea for a book

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  inspired really by um, reading The Jew of Malta. I'd been reading uh, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and there's just a line in it where these evil Jews meet and they compare evil that they've done. And I thought, you know, you could do that scene with demons. And it would be really nice if you got demon number one, who's done lots of evil, demon number two has done lots of evil, and evil demon number three, who just hasn't really,

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  you know? And that was the start. So I wrote, and I had this idea about a baby swap, um, kind of like the omen, but it all goes wrong and it becomes a nice kid. So I wrote

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  five thousand words of um, this thing. And I sent it to a few friends to look at. And then Sandman and Books of Magic took over my life and my time and

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  Didn't really think about it. I knew that it was a thing and I knew I'd get to it one day. And then I got a phone call from Terry. How much later was this? Maybe eight months, nine months.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  And he says, yeah, that, that thing you sent me, are you doing anything with it? And I said, well, no, I'm doing Sandman. I'm doing Books of Magic. He said, well,

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  I know what happens next. So either sell me the idea and what you've written so far, or we can write it together. Now, as far as I was concerned, that was a lot like Michelangelo ringing you up and saying, yeah, do you want to paint a ceiling together this weekend? You know, you going, I,

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  I loved Terry's craft. Terry became somewhere in there before the arrival of J K Rowling, the bestselling novelist in the UK. I mean, tens of millions of copies. Millions upon millions of copies.

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  This was before that. This was, you know, he just retired from

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  the, the electricity board to become a full-time writer. I knew how good he was. And I'm like, this is a fabulous apprenticeship.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  So even though I didn't have the time, I said, yes. And my life, you know, I look back on it. I'm just really glad that I was 27, 28 when I was doing this because I couldn't do it now. I mean, just physically and mentally couldn't do it now. But I would write Sandman until midnight. I would write the Books of Magic from midnight until about 2:30. And I would write Good Omens from 2:30 until about 6:00 AM. And then I would get up at one o'clock in the afternoon. And my answering, answering machine would have a little blinking light on it and I would press the button.

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  And the tape would rewind and then Terry Pratchett's voice would come out of it. And he'd go, get up, get up, you bastard. I've just written a good bit. And you know, that was, uh, so that was, that was the process of writing. It was very fast, very mad. Um, that was the first draft. Second draft took us, took us much longer.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  But you know, we, we had Good Omens. We had this wonderful, incredibly collaborative book. It was almost immediately bought by Hollywood and Terry and I went out and had one of those hellish, awful Hollywood experiences that you laugh at when other people tell you in their stories about them because you're like, it can't be that bad. And it's like, no, it really is that bad. And it really was that bad. Um, and then over the years, Terry Gilliam tried to make it into a film, which we, we loved the idea of. Uh, then we were gonna do it as a TV series and

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  we couldn't really find somebody to adapt it. And eventually Terry, Terry and I had a deal that we would never do anything individually on Good Omens. It had to be together or not at all. And then one day he emailed me and he said, look, you have to do this. You have to do this because you're the only other person who has the same amount of love for and understanding of the old girl that I have, and I want to see it before the lights go out. And then, and I said,

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  okay. And then Terry died, which meant that now it had become this sort of last request. And if the upcoming Good Omens series is good, which I believe it is.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  A lot of what makes it good, a lot of what, because I was the showrunner. I wrote it and I showran it. But I think what makes it good is I wasn't prepared to compromise on it. And I am normally very prepared to compromise. I'm encouraging when other people want to bring ideas to the table. I'm like, yeah, go do something fun with this. I've already done the book or whatever. But in this case, I had a Terry Pratchett in the back of my head, who I had to please. And, you know, the producers would say, well, Neil, I know you've written this sequence

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  where Agnes Nutter, the witch, is taken out and burned. And it's, you know, we have villagers and we have, it's the 1640s and you've got a giant bonfire and an explosion and all of this kind of stuff. And, um, we thought we could save a lot of money and do it just as well if we had woodcuts of what happened and the narrator telling the story. And I would be like, okay. And then I would stop and I would think, what would Terry think about that? I'm like, Terry would have nothing polite to say about any of these people.

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  And it's like, you know, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to do it the way I wrote it and the way it is in the book. We're not doing it with woodcuts. And, um, and it was like that all the way through. It was like, you know, just trying to hold the line and make this thing that Terry would have been proud of and using, using stuff that we came up with, um, in the book, using stuff that we'd come up with talking after the book, stuff that we would have put into the next book if there ever had been one, um, and just making it all.

• 1:27:01Speaker 04

  Or something that Terry would have been proud of.

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  And it's been really wonderful. This South by Southwest has been the first time anybody has seen anything from Good Omens. You know, and we showed some clips and hearing audiences laugh.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  It was kind of amazing. It was like, oh, this, it does work. It is, they're liking it. They're loving it.

• 1:27:28Tim Ferriss?

  It does work. You showed me only a very short clip, but I know the book and I'm familiar with it. And with, with the work you've done or any work or characters I deeply care about. I collect comics from my entire childhood. Still have probably 10,000 polybagged comics that I've refused to get rid of. And every time a comic book movie would be made in my younger years, because they were not done generally very well. I would sort of peek through a crack in my fingers to see how characters would turn out. And it was, it was always very stressful for me because I had so much invested in many different characters.

• 1:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  And just I'll give a, a thank you to Hugh Jackman for getting Logan and Wolverine right, which was a huge relief. And seeing this clip, it, it really gave me the feeling that you'd pulled it off. That it, that it, that it lived up to my experience as a reader and a listener.

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  I think mostly we have.

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  And I think that is, a lot of that is casting.

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  Michael Sheen and David Tennant were perfect. And they'd never really been any, anything before.

• 1:28:52Speaker 04

  Because they go up for the same parts. Because they are very similar actors and people were like, why would you cast them? Why don't you go, you know, they, it's like casting the same person. And you go, well, yeah, it kind of is actually. And it's one of the reasons why it works so well. They have joked about, and I'm not sure if they're joking about if ever I write a stage play version of Good Omens.

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  They would go on tour with it and alternate roles each.

• 1:29:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's a brilliant idea. Wow. I want to, well, first I should say, and we'll put this certainly in the show notes and everywhere else and in the people have already heard in the introduction, but where can people learn more about Good Omens?

• 1:29:40Speaker 04

  That's a really good question. Well, you know, one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book. Good Omens, the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

• 1:29:56Speaker 04

  And it won't spoil anything for you with the TV show. There's enough stuff in there that I put in for people who knew the book. I kind of, there are Easter eggs in there where only somebody who's read the book will know that something is funny or know why something's happened. But there's also things that people who read the book will not be expecting. So that's, that's the first thing. YouTube or any Amazon Prime ads have the ad for Good Omens up, the trailer. You can go and watch that. It's a lot talkier than the trailer. The trailer

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  is, a lot of it is things going bang, because that's what they like putting in trailers. You know, if it were me, I would, my trailer would have just been sort of like, you know, three minutes of two characters talking. It's like, here you go, here's the trailer. If you like this, you'll like the show. But I think very wisely, they put in, you know,

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  giant walls of fire and heaven and hell and hellhounds and all of the glorious stuff.

• 1:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned a word, apprenticeship. What are the types of things that you learned from Terry or picked up?

• 1:31:21Speaker 04

  The biggest thing, looking back on it, that I learned from Terry was a willingness to go forward without knowing what happens. You might know what happens next, but you don't know what happens after that. But it's okay because.

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  You're a grown up and you will figure it out.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  You know, the, the, there's lots of metaphors

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  for writing a novel.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  And George R R Martin, for example, divides writers into architects and gardeners.

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  And I can be an architect if I have to.

• 1:32:14Speaker 04

  But I'd rather be a gardener. I would rather plant the seeds, water them, and figure out what I'm growing as they grow and then prune it and trim it and, you know, pleach it, whatever I need to do to make something beautiful that appears intentional. But at the end of the day, you have to allow for accidents and randomness and just what happens when things grow.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  So the joy of Good Omens really, I mean, the best thing about Good Omens was having Terry Pratchett as an audience. Cause if I could make Terry laugh, I knew, you know, that, that it's like hitting that bell in, in, you know, hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you bing the bell at the top, and that's what I did when I could make Terry laugh.

• 1:33:14Tim Ferriss?

  He is no longer with us and I'd be curious to know how he faced mortality. Because I, for instance, have Alzheimer's on both sides of my family. So I've had the opportunity to observe people with Alzheimer's, which is, can be very, very difficult. How, how did he, how did he approach his own mortality?

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  Terry made an astonishingly powerful, I mean, he, he faced it head on and he made.

• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  Two or three incredibly powerful documentaries. One about Alzheimer's. Um, the one that ripped me up emotionally. Um, was the one about assisted suicide. It was the one about the right to die. Which Terry became a very firm believer in. And made his film as a, as a piece of polemic about should you be, should you be allowed to turn off? Should you be allowed to go, okay, this is the situation I'm in and I'm in this body and I, I'm done. And, uh,

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  you know, he followed a man to Switzerland where he, he went through the end of life process and he turned off the cameras while he did. Um, and it was incredibly moving. Terry, the last time I saw him, confided in me very proudly that he did have the, the death cocktail. And, uh, that it was hidden away, but that it was there for him when he was ready.

• 1:35:16Speaker 04

  And I knew at that moment he was never gonna take it. Because Terry had a kind of rear brain Alzheimer's. Memory was basically okay, but, but shapes weren't. The physical world had fallen slightly apart on him. Um, you know, he couldn't see things. He couldn't perceive objects. He, he could still think straight, but, but all of your spatial recognition, all of your object recognition stuff was failing. And I thought, even if you've got the stuff, you never, you can't find it. You can't get something from a hidden place.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  Nobody else is gonna get something from a hidden place for you. And also.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  I thought, and you've hit, you're now actually beyond the point where you ever wanted to be.

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  You didn't want to be here. You wanted to have stopped. Four or five months ago. But now you're here. And if you're here, you're here to the end. And indeed, a few months later, he fell into unconsciousness and

• 1:36:36Speaker 04

  a few months after that, he stopped completely. Um. But it was inspiring. It was inspiring watching Terry

• 1:36:49Speaker 04

  talk about Alzheimer's, bringing Alzheimer's, which everybody has to deal with one way or the other, into the public consciousness as something that was okay to talk about, not as something slightly shameful that happens to grandpa.

• 1:37:06Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:37:09Speaker 04

  And also just talk about the right to die. Talking about it as a, as a human right. And it,

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  you know, I, I really,

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  and I understand, or you know, you can list out to me all of the reasons why it's a bad idea and look, you know, here's a creepy family and if they could kill mum for the money, they would. And right now they've got her in a home, but you know, they, they would have killed her and announced that she wanted to do it herself or, or whatever. I, I, I get all that. But also,

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  I get that, um,

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  the right not to be alive, the right to end it all, the right to go, okay, I've, I've come as far as I can in this and, and it's okay to stop before, before I become something that is a shallow shadow of who I once was. Um. You know, that, that, that has to be a right to.

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  How does it feel as such a close friend of his to be able to to share this work that you created together?

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  Weird, really, really weird. The the mostly it's wonderful and then sometimes it isn't. And Saturday night, Amazon had taken over a, you know, 19,000 square foot lot, turned it into the Garden of Earthly Delights. It has a bookshop in a corner and hairdressers and a giant tree in the middle that serves alcohol. It has wings that if you stand in front of them and activate some kind of Instagram filter,

• 1:39:13Speaker 04

  or maybe it was a Snapchat filter, will make the wings start to flap. Oh, you know, just filled with wonderfulness and I'm there and that we have singing nuns and then a Queen cover band come on and I'm looking around and there's Jon Hamm and David Tennant and Michael Sheen and all my guys from my lovely American Gods cast come over and they're hanging out. I'm getting to introduce, it's like introducing your two families and and I was kind of melancholy because

• 1:39:58Speaker 04

  and I knew that I should just be enjoying it. I knew I should just be going, this is, this is magical. This is, this is the kind of fun, wonderful thing that you, you don't get very often in your life and I should just be exulting in it. And instead, I'm just thinking, I wish Terry were here. He would have loved the nuns. He would have, he would have had a great time with the Queen cover band and he would have been.

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  Just, you know, grumbling to me about tiny details and enjoying it. Um, or, or taking enormous pleasure in tiny details and, you know, having, deciding which color wings you liked having best or whatever, he would have loved it. And he's not around. And then by the same token,

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  I know Terry well enough to also know the, the way that Terry was built and who Terry was. We probably would never have got to this point had Terry been alive. Because

• 1:41:13Speaker 04

  if you're doing something like making a big TV show or something, something this big and this complicated, where things can go wrong.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  Sometimes when things are getting weird or things are going wrong, or, you know, the BBC are going a bit mad, whatever.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  The only thing you can do is just focus on the outcome and just keep going and keep a steady course and so on and so forth. And I knew Terry well enough and worked with Terry long enough to know that he was absolutely constitutionally incapable of doing that. You know, at the point where things, any, any one of a dozen places where all we would have to have done is just keep on going and, you know, Terry would have been making the, the phone calls to the head of the BBC or the head of Amazon or, you know,

• 1:42:15Speaker 04

  you know, telling Jeff Bezos exactly what he thought of him or just like, no, that's just the wrong thing to do right now. So there's also that sort of weirdness of going,

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  had Terry been around, we probably would never have got here.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  And getting but getting here was all about making this thing for Terry,

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  which he also wasn't here for, which is why I'm sad, you know, so, so a giant interwoven panoply of of strange emotions, absolute joy in having made it, joy in having made it for Terry, because um, nothing else would have stopped me writing novels for three and a half, four years, um, but that did.

• 1:43:07Tim Ferriss?

  I think I have to imagine he'd be thrilled to see you in this amazing circus just before this piece of work is released to hopefully millions more people who will be impacted by the work.

• 1:43:21Speaker 04

  I think and I think he would have loved. I think he would have loved so much of this and also being Terry. He would have loved the fact that then people will come and pick up Good Omens, the book. And then they'll go and read Disquell books and that will make Terry even happier.

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Neil,

• 1:43:41Tim Ferriss?

  this has been so much fun.

• 1:43:43Speaker 04

  Can't be 90 minutes already.

• 1:43:44Tim Ferriss?

  90 minutes.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  That did that that flew.

• 1:43:48Tim Ferriss?

  It did, it did. And I certainly hope it's not the last time we have a chance to.

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  Have to do it again.

• 1:43:54Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to. I would really love to and

• 1:43:59Tim Ferriss?

  I know we have. Well, let me not state it that way. Many, many of my fans are your fans. And just as Terry shared his gifts with the world, you continue to share yours and it has an impact. It helped me through some very tough times, was able to transport me, delight me, shock me, scare me and take me through a whole range of emotions I didn't at the time, even though I had access to. So I want to thank you for making good art and sharing it with the world. You've done a great job.

• 1:44:29Speaker 04

  You are so ridiculously welcome. Thank you.

• 1:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  And do you have any?

• 1:44:37Tim Ferriss?

  Closing comments, thoughts, remarks, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up?

• 1:44:40Speaker 04

  No, not really. I, you know, I genuinely enjoyed, one of the great things about having you as a fan is the books arrive from you and they actually get read. And, you know, and I learn from them because you go off and explore parts of things that I'm never going to. And so I appreciate that too enormously.

• 1:45:12Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you so much. And for everybody listening, we will include links to everything we've discussed.

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  Including fountain pens.

• 1:45:21Tim Ferriss?

  Including fountain pens. This might be the time to buy some stock. And everything that came up will be in the show notes as always at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Neil or Gaiman and it will pop right up. And Neil, once again, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. And to everyone listening, until next time, read widely, check out good omens and chat soon. Bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe

• 1:46:06Tim Ferriss?

  to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you

• 1:46:47Tim Ferriss?

  head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:47:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:29Tim Ferriss?

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