From the Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously 🥺❤ (you can watch it here in US or with US vpn :) <3) (or just this bit on youtube here :))
Neil Gaiman: I miss him most when I get stuck. You know, I'll just be
working on something and I'll go, "Oh, this isn't quite it," and all I want to do is just call Terry, tell him what's going on and have him say, "Ah, grasshopper, the answer is there in the question." And I'd go, "Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry, just tell me."
Sir Terry Pratchett: on writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman
I love the whole interview but this little snippet most of all:
Terry: “You can usually bet, and I’m sure Neil Gaiman would say the same thing, that, uh, if I go into a bookstore to do a signing and someone presents me with three books, the chances are that one of them is going to be a very battered copy of Good Omens; and it will smell as if it’s been dropped in parsnip soup or something in and it’s gone fluffy and crinkly around the edges and they’ll admit that it’s the fourth copy they’ve bought”.
"...You had to be able to show too much of yourself. You had to be just a little bit more honest than you were comfortable with. And if people judged you, if they felt they knew who you were, that was just something that you were going to have to live with. And what was strange is, once I started doing that, and I was expecting to be judged, or shunned, or people’s opinions or to have to deal with things, what I discovered was, actually, their opinions were, we really like this. We love this story. That’s a good story. It felt huge. It felt personal. And I realized that’s because I was being honest about me.“ —Neil Gaiman
andrew, when asked to comment on whether neil being captain of their pro team gets him any special treatment: neil does not like me well enough nor is he scared enough of me to exclude me from team punishments. i have run upwards of 11 miles in the past week. these rookies need to get their shit together or i will kick their ass.
From the Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously :) (you can watch here in US or with US vpn :) <3) (or just this bit on youtube here :))
Terry Pratchett: Neil once said, 'Your fans all look jolly. And my fans all look as if they're about to commit suicide. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get them to marry?'
Neil Gaiman does a podcast with David Tennant (2020)
The podcast is here, and there's a transcript of parts of it here. It's all really interesting!
Here's what really resonates for me. While talking about the opening flashbacks of s1e3 (emphasis is mine):
"Neil: It was utterly budget-busting and I also knew that it would make everything else work. And also it would make the scene I knew I was going to write in episode 3… it would turn that from a scene that was a bit sniffly into one that would break people’s hearts [yep, the bandstand scene], because you’d actually spent 28 minutes watching the ups and downs of these two on Earth for 6000 years becoming the only important thing in each other’s lives and here is this moment where there are actually… they have two utterly disparate philosophies of existing and Aziraphale cannot go off with Crowley and Crowley cannot leave without him but he has to, and you wind up with a ‘Have a nice doomsday’ line. But the excitement that I had of writing that stuff and the joy I had knowing that we’re going to watch the relationship open like a flower to us, ending in the 1960 with the hand-over of the holy water and there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house - and I knew that because it did that for me - them watching what you and Michael brought to it and it became the most most glorious tentative friendship over thousands of years, that then becomes sort of peculiar and flirty and weird and prickly and funny and glorious, and, you know, it was the one that won me the Nebula Award."
This absolutely frames season 2 for me, and in particular the final fifteen minutes, which are season 2's heartbreaking bandstand scene. During season 2, we watched their relationship once again open like a glorious, flirty flower, still the only important thing in each other's lives, until their utterly disparate philosophies of existing separated them and broke all of our hearts.
But they came back together after the bandstand, and they will again after season 2 🤞❤️
Did I ever tell you guys about the dream I had about Neil Cicierega being interviewed about how he solved a murder by literally just following what his own lyrics said and I think my brain made up a song because there are no songs of his that talk about going behind an Arby's and digging up a body