 Diolch yn fwy o'r hanfodd y byddai'n byddai y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell ac yn ddiddorol ar lefeloedd y byddai hynny yn yr un joc yng Nghaerdydd gyda'r Llyfrgell, ac allwn fwy y byddai'n ffferio gyda'r Llyfrgell Llif, ar y Y Unedig Ddawn Yng Nghaerdydd. Yna yma wedyn ein helyn gŵr y mae'r hynny yn ei hwy â unrhyw un o'r sgolwgr yma, oherwydd mae'n Principal Abertydd Pryddoedd Cymru a'r Fynggrifenol andriol, a'r cyffredinos hynny'n ei bod eich eu rhannu. Mae'r ffordd yn cyd-dweithio'r ffordd yn anodol iawn ar y Llyfrgell Prydysgol Llyfrgell, yn ymweld y maenigol yng Nghymru, Angela Carter, The Bronties, a Lewis Carroll, yn ymweld Llyfrgell, a'r ffordd yn ymweld i'r gweithio'r ffordd yn cyd-dweithio'r ffordd, yn ymweld Neil Gamanhw, yn ymweld i'r hynny'n gweithio'r llunarolol. Wrth hynny, dyma rwy'n bywyd i'r trefyn yn gyfêmeth o rhaglen yma o serteruiaeth. Rwy'n dechrau'n gell o'r amdano i'r ffordd yma yn ymweld. Mae'r amser yn ymdill werth iawn i'r Prydysgol Llyfrgell o'r Llyfrgell, a iddyn nhw'n as well yn ddechrau'r falch iawn i'r proses. Rwy'n dweud i fynd i'r ffordd i'r bwysig ar lawer o'r cyfrifnol ymdill. Argymraith o Gaelwyr, Gaelwyr, multiplayer, Ros was also on our advisory board for the exhibition, so great thanks to her as well. She's a poet and a novelist, perhaps best known for books on popular culture, including Reading the Vampire and her first translation of the poems of Catalyst and her lambda winning novel Tiny Pieces of Skull and she recently published the final instalment of her fantasy series Rhapsody of Blood. At the end of the conversation there will be a chance to put questions to Neil and those watching online can fill in the form which appears below the video window and we'll read out a selection of those as well. There will also be a bookstore in the foyer which you might have seen on your way in at the end of tonight's event and I really hope that as many of you will come and see the exhibition as can we're really proud of it and it's really exciting for people to be enjoying it after four years of planning. That's it from me anyway please welcome to the stage our speakers for this evening. So Neil. Hello Ros. This is a conversation we've been having for a lot of years. It is we've been talking about fantasy since about 1985. Yeah one of the things we ought to mention because she died earlier this year is that we were introduced by the wonderful activist, mystic and novelist Rachel Pollock. You'd been at Milford? I'd been at Milford with Rachel although I'd met her at a convention a few days before the Milford because I'd interviewed her for her book on Salvador Dali's terror right for somebody or other and and we met and liked each other and then we were at Milford together. Well when she came back to London from Milford she said I've met this young man called Neil. You and he will be friends. I remember I got a phone call from you saying hello my name is Ros cave me Rachel says we're going to be friends. My memory is that we bumped into each other a forbidden planet and after a bit I said hang on you're this Neil. Very probably yes and mostly what I remember is incredibly long walks. Yeah we used to you you were living out at. I was living in Sussex and I was getting the the train normally to Gatwick airport. I would leave my car at Gatwick so I would have to get to Victoria where late night every other train had stopped but the Gatwick airport train would run through the night. And I could pick up a night bus from Victoria back to Hackney and we just walked the streets talking about this stuff and about and the great thing about this is that it's a very good example of how real life gets turned into myth. In what way? In the fact that I would say one of the reasons we need fantasy is fantasy is a way of making things that are more real than the real. And you take something like late night walks of two younger people talking about this stuff and it becomes legendary. Well it will be now. It will be now yeah. We will make it legendary. Exactly I mean it's like I have a tendency to romanticise everything as everyone always complains. But that period of our lives when we were sitting in bars in the Cafe Monchon in the Mexican restaurant. I remember you being I mean there is a level on which we used to make fun of you particularly me to your face because you would say things like one day and you'd be pointing to the people in the Cafe Monchon at that time and you'd say one day people will look back on this era and they will not believe that Alan Moore and Ian Banks and Jeff Ryman and you and Dave McKean and Bill Sincovic over there and Frank Miller were all here just drinking and talking and I'm like Ross come on. And you were right. Yeah because I'm a poet. I remember and I think the thing that fascinates me most about those conversations is for both of us one of the things that was interesting is we both agreed on the role of a book by Hope Merleys called Ludd in the Mist and its place in fantasy literature and the fact that there were other works that we could that there were themes that occur really for the first time in Ludd in the Mist and you can see I got to see the hardback with its dust jacket for the first time today which actually was really thrilling. I'd never seen the dust jacket until I saw it in the exhibition here and the theme as expressed either by you or by me during one of those very late walks was the idea of a kind of fiction that seeks a reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous. Yes there are three great fantasy themes there's the reconciliation of the mundane and fairy there is the quest for the cure for the world's pain and there's the education of the king or queen or magistrate or person. And I just remember talking to you about the idea of reconciliation and then finding that theme in books that I loved books like Little Big by John Crowley and having that as a sort of interesting place to hold on to when I was writing my own fiction and I don't really feel like I've ever quite gone there I tend to be much more in the writing about change or death. One of them. But I mean stardust. Okay stardust well yeah stardust. Yeah stardust. Okay so I've done it once. Kind of the graveyard but kind of sort of that's the education motif as much as that motif because a lot of important fantasies chop and change those three things. Lightly. I mean for me the idea of fantasy and the thing that gets me I think most excited about fantasy is the idea of being able to make a metaphor concrete. Yeah. Make a metaphor real and suddenly be able to do something like never wear where I was talking to somebody the other day and they said that never wear changed them in that they were unable to walk past homeless people and pretend they didn't exist after reading never wear because of the idea of people becoming invisible and I'm like yeah that's the metaphor making it real and they're like okay because after that I had to make these people real I had to look at them I had to talk to them I'd give them money but mostly I'd say hello and it became a real thing and I'm like yeah that's one of the things that fantasy can do. Yeah and there is a dark side to that which is you can actually lose the person in the myth. I mean in Peter Ackroyd's book about London he talks about that woman who used to hang out in New York Street and says oh the spirit of St Charles's Rookery lives okay now now a whole load of us give her money when we come out of setting books in forbidden plan. There's absolutely although I do love the the way that people in London have become strangely mythic over the years. There was Stanley whatever his name was who used to be the no sex uh no protein yes the less lust through protein through less protein man and he was a sandwich man and I walked around the sandwich board he had his sandwich board he would occasionally stand and harang and you would stand there and listen to him as he would explain to us his thoughts on lust and protein and sitting there was less less lust through less protein and less sitting and he he walked around and and occasionally you'd just see him on the tube or on the bus carrying his sandwich board and now he feels faintly legendary his time came his time went and but I mean so ho Fitzrovia that whole area is full of this stuff and always has been and it's partly because it's an interface because stuff happens at the margins and because fantasy is at the margins of the real it can do stuff that the that realism can't I'm I'm never quite sure what the boundary is on fantasy I get I mean I mean I love that on the one hand I'm I think it's so marvellous the British Library has a fantasy exhibition that makes me brings me absolute joy and on the other hand I I look at fantasy and for me I go where does fantasy start does it start when you invent a place does it start when you bend the rules but if you're creating people who haven't existed and you're putting them in places that don't exist even if it's a little English village that doesn't exist or a street that doesn't exist where where is your fantasy but it works when it's somehow specific and whether it's specific because you put real people as real as you can make them in things that they never did and that never happened or just make your imaginary person so real in your head that they feel like real you know that it's a matter of inhabiting those margins or making the reader inhabit those margins I think for me the time that I've I've sort of come closest to blurring the lines on what kind of book you're reading was probably ocean at the end of the lane where it's it's definitely not autobiography it's not memoir but it is it's not fantasy but it is it kind of has a children's book hidden inside it it's like if you read if you read enough of it suddenly there's this magical children's book that will open up for you and close again for you inside that book but it also has our old pain yeah I mean the first thing of yours I ever read was the short story version of violent cases and there's a throughput from violent cases to ocean in terms of writing about family yeah because you've always written about so much about family uh Sandman is about family I mean American gods is about find found family because shadow finds a sort of untrustworthy father in wednesday uh graveyard book is about family horror line oh god is about family is that lovely moment where you realize that you just say the same thing over and over and um but yeah there's I think there's absolutely a through line from violent cases violent cases is almost autobiographical I when I explain it to people I say that it's like a mosaic picture in which all of the red squares are true but the red squares aren't actually the picture but there's incredible amount of truth in there um mr punch is sort of the next one along in that sequence in that again it's basically even though a lot of the things in there didn't happen just as many of them and the unlikely ones especially did and that really is my family I mean there's you know there are conversations that I had while I was working on mr punch that wound up verbatim in in the book I remember so mr punch for those of you who haven't read it is a graphic novel that sort of intersects punch and judy the story of mr punch and um my a sort of family history and here is a kid who is sent to go and stay with his grandparents because um his mother's having a baby and the kid has just had one of the regular childhood diseases so strange things happened to him and I remember at the time I was obsessed with punch and judy and obsessed with the peculiar ways that punch and judy seemed to echo through my family history it had started uh when I you know I started getting obsessed by by mr punch punch and judy and I said to my dad you know what what you were you were in south sea what do you remember of punch and judy and he's like well you know you know your your grandfather had a punch and judy man in his arcade like my dad was a my grandfather was a grocer what he had an arcade he was like oh yeah you know luds fort um the lobs fort maybe it was it was this arcade he owned it for a few years and he had a a mermaid in it uh which was just a lady wearing a mermaid tailed swim around and there was a punch and judy man a few things and it didn't really work so you know I'm like okay this sounds like the thing that's in my story and then um I started asking more and more questions my my uncle monti like mr punch was a hunchback and uh in I I adored him because he was the first adult I could look in the eye it was great my uncle monti he was a bookmaker and um and I remember thinking a lot about the baby in in punch and judy there's a baby that gets thrown out of a window right in the beginning and which sort of starts off the story mr punch is left with the baby but the baby cries and he tries to sort of get it to stop crying by hitting it doesn't work so then he throws it out of the window and then his wife comes and complains and he batters her to death and then the policeman comes to arrest him and he kills the police you know just happy little puppet store is that entertain kids um but I just remember this conversation at a family some kind of family do and suddenly I'm surrounded by these elderly aunts and elderly cousins and I say to my aunt Janet I say so um monti uncle monti uh why was he a hunchback what happened and she said oh he had tuberculosis when he had a baby was a baby and another elderly cousin who's listening to that says monti didn't have tuberculosis he got thrown down the stairs when he was a baby and another cousin who's listening to this says no no no no no you're remembering it wrong wasn't monti got thrown down the stairs it was the it was one of the twins who was thrown down the stairs and he died and you're just going I cannot make this up I'm going to just put it straight in my book and what I've heard is going straight in and but eventually you wind up with something that is you hope is both biographical in the sense of it could not have been written if I was not me and did not remember being me as a kid and did not have my childhood and my life but also it's imaginary um because I'm going to play and I'm going to try and tell a story that isn't just this thing that happened to me I want to tell a story that gets bigger and weirder than anything that could have happened to me another thing apart from family is text it's you read your books that you read when you were young that you want to make your version of you know that good omens started off as William the Antichrist it did and uh the graveyard book is incredibly intertextual with Kipling it's sort of a conversation the idea of the graveyard book was I mean the idea turned up first but the train of thought that turned up with the idea and so I was um watching we lived in a very very tall house on which pretty much every room was um stairs away from every other room and I had a two year old son with a tricycle and I thought I cannot let him ride the tricycle in the house that way lies death so I would take him across the street this little lane that our house was next to every day and he would cycle his little tricycle around the graveyard and I just remember looking at him one day mostly when people say where did you get the idea for this book you don't remember um it sort of gets you sort of remember bits but that one I remember the exact moment I I just looked at him and I thought he's so happy in this graveyard um just tricycling around past all the gravestones and I thought you know I could write a book about a kid who's goes and lives in a graveyard and is raised in a graveyard by dead people and taught all the things that dead people know and then I thought it's an awful lot like the jungle book in which Mogley gets raised by animals and gets taught all the things that jungle animals know and I thought in which case if that's the jungle book this would be the graveyard book and from there I went oh okay then that gives me something to have a conversation with yeah it's like a wall that you can bounce on it's a very close conversation because um the gall chapter is very much a conversation with the bandalog chapter absolutely and other bits uh the conversation with some of the more obscure bits of the second jungle book yeah um so the point I want to make is it's not what makes the strength but it's the hard work you know you have the idea and then you actually think about it well with the graveyard book it was kind of hellish I had to do a lot more than think about it in that the first thing I did when I had the idea I was 25 and I had the idea and I went away and I wrote the first I didn't go away I went up to my room and wrote the first chapter and then I read the first chapter and I went this is a lot better idea than I am a writer I'm not good enough yet to do this thing I've just come up with justice one day I will be good enough and so I put that first chapter away um I actually found it I thought it was like lost forever and found it um about a year or so ago and read it and on the one hand it is terrible um which is fine that I mean I was I was a 25 year old writer I was young I was not yet me but I was but there are some good bits in it but the bits that are wonderful and incredibly well observed and actually in something their own little way are better than what I did in the graveyard book is the stuff for I'm writing about a hero as a two-year-old boy and what he's doing and thinking because I had a two-year-old boy in front of me and I and it was there and it was fresh by the time I actually came to write the first chapter of the graveyard book you know he was graduating from college so I had to remember much harder what it was like to have a small boy with me but what I would do is I would go back to that story in my head every 10 years try and write a chunk of it look at it go I'm not there yet and then finally after I wrote anancy boys I thought okay I'm not getting any better anymore so it doesn't matter if I'm good enough to write it um because I think I'm as good as I'm probably ever going to get so I have to write it now and and I did I but I cheated by starting in the middle this time because every other time I tried to start with the first chapter and and it had defeated me so I thought I'm I'll find the voice by starting in the middle I'll write the witch's headstone which basically was I think my retelling of a story called I think the king's anchors um and finished that and felt very very satisfied it's like okay now I know who my characters are I have a voice this is the thing it works I'm incredibly happy and then I went back and started um about it eight months later I tried writing the first chapter again and I was just at the point where I'd written a page and a half and was ready to give up and decide that I couldn't do it and my daughter Maddie came over and said what are you writing and I said oh it's this thing called the graveyard book that I've been trying to write for ages she said oh well read read me what you've written so I read her the first page and a half and she said oh this is great what happens next and now I was doomed because now I had I was not allowed to go oh I am defeated again because now she loved it and I had to say what happened next but it is that whole thing of slightly old joke about someone's lost in the middle of New York and someone says hey news boy how do I get to Carnegie Hall and they say practice practice um you've been an incredibly hard working and disciplined writer for all the time I've known you much more than some of us um I think I was a determined writer you were determined and also you got yourself a gig where you had to produce something every month yep that was important I think I was a firm believer from the beginning in the idea of getting better by doing what you were doing and the idea are the you know the the Chuck Jones line of you've got a million lousy drawings in your pencil so you have to get them out so the good ones can come out I firmly believed that it was my job as a writer to write to keep writing every now and then I'd write a lousy story and what I could normally do is just sweep them under the table and nobody would see them or try and forget about them but it was okay if I kept going there would be good ones Sandman I mean I remember being asked to write Sandman and being asked to write a monthly comic and sitting there going okay I have never had to write any a story a month before I know that if I try and come up with a scenario in which I have to tell basically a variant of the same story every month I will leave this job after a year I won't be able to do that so I have to be able to come up with something that I can go anywhere with so I need a lead character who has existed all through space and time so I can do any story anywhere and I don't think I can do superheroes but there was a thing that Roger Selasny did in his book Lord of Light where he had people taking on the aspects of the Hindu pantheon and of becoming Buddha and there it's a science fiction novel set in a far planet a long way away but it felt like science like comics it felt like superheroes in a weird kind of way or it sort of made me excited and happy in the way that superheroes made me excited and happy when they worked and I went well I can't do superheroes I can't I do not believe that anybody is right is more right than somebody else just because they can hit them through a wall more than the other guy can hit them through a wall I my mind does not work like that but I think I can do this thing with gods and I think I can make that thing work so taking those kind of ideas was really where Sandman began and it allowed me whatever I happened to be interested in or obsessed by that week as you knew because you'd hear about it would turn up in Sandman and if I and all the things you never actually got round to writing there were a lot of them too my name is Isabel Gunn and I'm orders nails I remember you never wrote her she would have shown up in yes she but I mean you've got that line it was there was there was more and I remember her but she never showed up in that story sometimes you wait for characters to come on stage and they don't and it's incredibly frustrating I remember Barbie from the game of you I kept expecting her to turn up again after the story everybody else in Sandman came back and she never came back on stage again I never knew why but I know I would never have written wonder if I hadn't known you and Rachel and Mars yes but I didn't really know Mars well yeah but you knew Mars enough I knew Mars through your stories so which is a good way of and I met her absolutely she's terrified I mean there are things that are definitely in wonder that are definitely Mars and not me or Rachel oh absolutely and and also wonder was a made up person yeah which is the so I mean you know that's that's the joy of writing fiction is you don't take your friends and put them down on the page you steal occasional things from your friends and go I'm going to steal that thing and I'll steal that thing and I'll steal that thing from that other friend and I'll use them and then I will stir them together and add some sugar and put them in the oven for an hour and see what comes out and it's somebody else completely new but I you know I was talking this morning to some school kids about you know one of the questions was what are there things you would have done differently are there things you regret in your fiction are there things you would have changed and I had to say well there are definitely things I would do differently um but there's nothing I regret in the sense of writing wonder it was 1989 going into 1990 and I had trans friends and there were no trans characters in mainstream comics or if there were I'd never run into them and I was like these are no why aren't there people like Rose and Rachel in my comics I will I will create I'll put a trans character in and I will and a lot of it also was things that you were telling me you were telling me about I remember how profoundly shocked and upset I was when you told me that there were people that you knew women that you trans women you knew who had been buried as men and dead named on their tombstones and that I found so profoundly upsetting it's like okay that that thing that is making me upset and angry I want that to make other people upset and angry too and and I want somehow to be able to reply to that so all of that went in there and and over the years people have come up to me and told me that reading about wonder wonder was their first encounter with a trans character wonder changed things for them would I write wonder now I don't need to write wonder now there are so many fabulous trans writers out there writing there are trans characters in comics everywhere which is fabulous and they're being written by trans people I don't need to write them yeah um but I'm so glad I did that yeah of course you you'd read tiny pieces of skull I had um which actually is I mean Tiffany is in tiny pieces is much more like wonder I think yeah yeah the other thing about Sandman and story there's that wonderful bit which actually in the television show about the guy who was cursed with ideas and one of the things that's always impressed me about that story is that all of the ideas he's cursed with sound like good ideas that was the heart it was the hardest bit of writing that story was going okay if this is going to work I actually have to do the equivalent of sacrifice these things for the greater good because people have to look at them and go that's that I'd like that story that sounds like a good one that sounds like if that could be a real story that could and that um and I love the fact that people every now and then do write the sonnet write the cystina that I that I gave them with the keywords and that several times people have written to me and said can I can I write this idea from that sequence and I always say yes and I suspect that um my story how to talk to girls at parties was kind of one of the one of those stories um story ideas I talk about I just remember once it's you know I used to take a lot of trains I used to travel a lot by train I just remember the strangest train that I was ever on in that it was one of those trains where you wind up walking down from one end to the other it's one o'clock in the morning you're on your way on one of those trains that will stop at Gatwick airport and then go on to Brighton um and the only other people apart from me on this train were incredibly beautiful women and you'd have one and they weren't like altogether it wasn't like there was a model convention or something just one walked down halfway down the train there's another they're all staring out the window and it felt incredibly unreal and I remember I putting that one this sort of twilight train of beautiful women into the list of ideas that um he's cursed with the Rick Maddock is cursed with and that kind of in a weird way turned itself in 10 years later 15 years later when I needed it into how to talk to girls at parties where the uh you know our protagonist goes to a party where all of the women are aliens and because he is a 16 year old boy he is too stupid to realize this and he keeps having conversations with them where they explain exactly what's going on to him and he hasn't got a clue and basically walks out of the story numb the wiser yeah that's a good story um the other thing is that you know what's what I mean you know so rubbish no no no you know when things work I mostly yeah I mean you're one of the best people to go to for advice about how to make something work I mean I remember that moment which will live in him for me forever and a thousand school kids in at 100 years will will moan about it when you said I think you should write sonnets that was right yeah you were and uh once at a time I was stuck on on something and you said I said I think this is my way out of the whole I've written myself in and you said no that's the thing that sounds like a really good idea but doesn't work and that you need to think of the second thing you're good at advice I am good at that I I used to think that you know if if the whole writing thing fell through I could sort of offer an advice shop for writers where they could phone me up and say my story isn't working and I would say have you tried doing this um because I used to I mean that was how I started with Terry Pratchett that was how Terry and I became friends um we'd met and we'd sort of hit it off at a few convention initially I'd interviewed him for space voyage a magazine and we'd met at a convention or two and Terry wound up just every week or two my phone would ring and a voice would say hello it's me listen what's what's funnier and he'd offer me two things where he'd say look I'm stuck on this bit and I've got this thing but what if and I listen to him and normally what I wound up saying him is you know you can do both and he'd say how and I said well you can do this then you could do you can do both the gag where carrot um is the missing son of the king and you can do him being raised by dwarfs and you can have them both going on at the same time it's you don't just have to choose and go oh so I was fairly good at that kind of thing you are which was which was how come I you know by the point that Terry said do you want to co-write Good Omens I knew that we could do it and I knew that we could do it because we kind of um we'd co-plotted pyramids that's the only book of Terry's that I ever would actually say there's a lot of me in there um and was amused some years ago when somebody did one of these you know computer things where it tries to figure out who wrote what in Good Omens and stuff and they said yeah I've done this but it's also showing you as having show you're showing up in pyramids and I'm like how unlikely um but you know we've done the thing where we were doing that we were co-plotting together we were bouncing ideas around yeah well I remember at one point you and I and Alex Stuart and Mary Gentile were doing some shared world I thought just for penguin in the early nineties and we took a load of proposals for shared worlds to them and there was one they completely hated so I made up a new one on the spot and they bought and we together completely improvised an anthology yeah I said something you said something I said something and before five minutes were up we actually had a really good scenario that we hadn't had when they asked us nope I like doing that it's I mean I could do it much more when I was younger now now I like to think I can do it but really I actually have to go away and think about things a lot more but occasionally I can do that thing we just sort of pull it out and you go well what about this nigga that is the thing we have been hunting for and that was that was fun I remember learning because as a sort of a weird kind of knock-on of those midnight rose anthologies um I now write in fountain pen because when we did the midnight rose anthologies people would send in stories and they were good stories and they tended to be about 3000 words long and they were really solid and the next time I came to edit an anthology it was about 1997 and when we'd done the midnight rose one everyone was writing on computer uh everyone was writing on typewriters now 1997-ish everyone is writing on computer and all of the stories that were coming in were seven to ten thousand words long and they all had as much story in them as those 3000 word stories that we'd done we'd found in the midnight rose days and I just thought it's like a gas you're getting a thing where because writing on a typewriter you have to make a lot of decisions and it's kind of work people are keeping work keeping everything concise um on a computer if you have a choice of doing two things you can do both and most people do and it just expands and I thought right I want I don't want to be one of those gaseous authors as it were I want to be I'd like to be tight I'd like to be constrained and I went out and bought myself a fountain pen I just restrict myself to 500 words a night that works too it does and you get a lot written that way yeah but also you don't because you're only writing 500 words they have to count I can yes I mean I I know that I'm just capable of letting my words continue to expand and expand and I don't want that to happen I I think I'm probably proudest of Ocean at the end of the lane because it is 56,000 words long and it's a whole novel and it's bigger on the inside yeah we haven't got much time left before the question so we need to talk very quickly about screenwriting okay what would you like to know well I mean what's the difference how do you learn to screenwriter um well the best bit for me of screenwriting is the thing where you're screenwriting more of because screenwriting in a vacuum is kind of it's interesting and it's fun but it always feels to me a little bit like a kind of a technical exercise you know I'm writing this thing but I don't know how it's going to be performed really how it's going to be shot and all that good omen season one was for me an exercise in adaptation I've taken something and I wanted to turn it into something else good omen season two on the other hand was just an absolute joy because now I knew I have John Ham and I can get him to do this stuff and he's going to be walking naked through Soho at the beginning and everybody is going to think they're going to hate him and instead he's going to be this marvellous goofy figure that they will all love but kind of hate themselves for loving but not know if he's a bad guy but they'll love him anyway and over here I will have my Crowley and I know that I can get David Tennant to do anything now there is nothing that he will not go for and so I can ask him to do things that are even more ridiculous and then over here I've got Michael Sheen and everybody in the whole world just wants to you know it is it is now forgotten by humanity that once upon a time Michael Sheen was thought of as that actor who plays the really creepy people yeah I saw him in Kingdom of Heaven the other night and thought oh god it's Michael Sheen that was Michael Sheen the evil priest that gets killed he used to play I mean he used to play creepy people and everybody knew that if you want a good slimy serial killer person you go for Michael Sheen currently I got a phone call from him the other day a little Marco Polo video message from him with the strangest haircut I've seen and I get strange mess you know hair um but this one and he's playing Prince Andrew so he's absolutely capable of of still bringing in the creep um but um you know Michael having just become this cuddly cinnamon roll creature of pure love and joy and knowing that everybody was just going to want to cuddle him for six episodes until I let him break their hearts um I'm sorry perhaps he will not even the tiniest one there is no sorrow in that um when I well I was in hospital when I saw Good Omens 2 and I took the moment I finished watching it I read I texted you and said you magnificent bastard you know I don't remember if it was you or John M Ford the late Mike Ford who pointed out to me first that there is a thing that I do that I was not aware of doing um and it was and I remember this being pointed out to me at the time of the publication of American Gods or possibly even before it was published when I sent it out a manuscript because it was pointed out to me that one way that you can tell that you're entering the third act of a Neil Gaiman story is there is always a kiss that sort of ends the second act and it's never a sort of romantic kiss it's always a kiss that is unexpected and a little bit wrong but it symbolizes where we're going to go next um that was Mike who's too smart for me that was Mike and I remember arguing with him and then in pointing out that I all the places I've done it and then I did it again in the Nancy Boys and didn't realize that I'd done it and then I but I forget about this thing and I saw somebody on Tumblr had found an interview with me from 2002 where I'm talking about this and the kiss and they're like still doing it then yeah Mike's one of those great great writers that no one knows enough about who died too soon he is John M Ford Mike Ford his stuff is starting to come back in a print and cannot over praise it I would recommend his novel the dragon waiting which is not a novel that you recommend to people who like dragons because the dragon in question is whales but if you can imagine an alternate history version of Richard the third with vampires in a world in which Christianity never quite caught on or at least is one of many hundreds of religions that were popular in the Roman Empire you will love it it's a fabulous book and he was an astonishing writer he wrote one of the best responses to 9 11 any of us have read I mean his death made me a poet in what way well because I had given up poetry when I was young because I wasn't very good and I was so moved by Mike's death that I wrote a poem for my first poem in years for his memorial service and people said that's really good and I said is it oh and so I started writing poetry again and it was partly that tremendous feeling of guilt that I was here and he wasn't and so we had a responsibility to do the things he couldn't do anymore I mean I've written several poems about Mike's legacy to me he was unique because he's one of the reasons for sonnets because he wrote a couple of really great sonnets he explained to me how to write a sustina yeah somewhere I still have the letter from Mike explaining how a sustina is written and how the form works which was what inspired me to try and to write a sustina they are awful anyway we should do questions we should do questions otherwise we'll just be self-indulgent for the rest of the evening is there somebody with a microphone who is running around or a people there there that is somebody with a microphone if any of you have wondered what somebody with a microphone looks like it is that person who will come to you sorry can you hear me oh thank you very much mr game and it really is a pleasure and honor and being so generous as well to stop and sign my sketchbook and pose for photograph apologies for that thank you very much I've tried to concentrate my questions so apologies this is a little lengthy my question concerns the nature of truth particularly as it relates to mythology I've witnessed how important this concept is to you and to your own work I thought that as subject matter it is pervasive potentially fundamental to what it means to be a human being although possibly what it means to be a conscious entity beyond that the ancient Greeks had an expression known as alithea and viritas of roman belief as a deity the personification of that which is evident factuality or reality and antithetical to lithi the spirit of forgetfulness of oblivion considering philosophy of truth as absurdity within the niche in justice of will to power and as discovery of the hydrogarean explanation of alithea as disclosure seemingly mythos or myth has since become an analogy synonymous with falsity and yet as didactical assumed a meaning amongst the ancients as truth itself authenticity intelligible epistemically noble beyond the readily evident when presented with the blue or red pill seemingly people would rather choose what is true and accept the price of pain that it entails what do you think one can learn from the idea of fantasy as being revelatory and the wisdom of mythos as truth I think that people will choose are either the way of truth or the way of comforting lies and you know I think we're living in a world right now in which people are kind of getting to choose their own truths and it's painful it's messy and it's not actually terribly good for the world because there are objective truths climate change is real killing people is bad and the things that people sometimes wind up electing to believe can get things messy on the other hand I am a huge believer in the right to believe things however stupid or however stupid they may seem to other people and on the basis that I know wonderful people who believe things that I find strange horrifying or incredibly unlikely and I suspect they would feel the same way about many of the things that I believe how these things fit into fantasy I cannot say sorry thank you very much I mean if story telly is a vehicle for information it's a high potency one thank you thank you so much should I hi I am fielding online questions so I thought we just hop to one of the online questions and this is from Amber and she says that the way you capture the genre of fantasy is truly unique why do you think you gravitate to fantasy writing compared to other genres um I love a world in which nobody gets to tell me what to do um I as a kid I thought I would grow up to be a science fiction writer it was one of the things I had in common with Terry Pratchett is Terry was a failed science fiction writer who had never actually written any science fiction room he just in his heart he knew he was a science fiction writer and somehow was failing by writing fantasy I hoped that maybe I was a science fiction writer um but I'm not sure why because the fiction that I loved was fantasy the authors I responded to were fantasy authors um the places in fiction that made me feel most alive were fantasy places um I remember the joy of discovering at the age of about 11 or 12 the pan ballantine adult fantasy series where they were reprinting all of these old books um and discovering authors like James Branch capital and Lord Dunsaney and all these people going I this is this is pure magic this is brilliant um so why I should have assumed that I was going to be a science fiction writer I don't know I would read new scientist every week you know virtuously going I wonder if that's the story and never finding any um but I'd still read it why do I write fantasy I don't know because I'm me and those are the kind of stories I make up a bunch of people there um many years ago I was watching the neverware tv series on my little black and white tv and I got the book afterwards um but ever since then the kind of characters there are so many characters in it that are really really memorable did you ever have kind of either then or now kind of a favorite one within them there's so many there are so many of those so I have to my my dark admission about neverware is I have a half finished neverware novel um it probably isn't going to get finished until after Good Omens 3 has been written I thought about starting it again during the writer's strike and then thought you know it's just going to hurt me too much to get into this book to bring it back to life to start getting deep into it and then be told no you have to stop now um but so and the truth is my favorite characters in neverware right now are the ones in there that you haven't met yet um so and you know that there are ones that you characters in there that you already know like the market of caribers and Richard and stuff but um my my favorites right now are the seven sisters and they're awful most of them um Victoria lives um I don't know if anybody here remembers there are there are there are there are a few people ancient like what I am so you may remember um a long time ago on Victoria station there was a cartoon cinema does anyone here remember that okay like three people going yes it was on um on Victoria station over near platform 16 there was a tiny sort of art deco cinema wasn't very big and it showed cartoons and newsreels on roughly an hour loop on the basis that nobody's going to be waiting for a train for probably more than about an hour and um and I went in it once or twice mostly just stared at it as this strange thing and so Victoria and because time in neverware is kind of strange and because places in neverware linger uh Victoria lives in that long demolished cartoon cinema on Victoria station hi this is 90% a question 10% a plea to your writing consultancy job um do you ever when you're writing feel that your characters are getting away from you and and sort of living a life on their own and they're doing things that you don't want them to do and that you you're trying to sort of wrangle them back into the story yes and no um I mean a perfectly if you're building your characters and you're building them with integrity and you're building them to be complete people you will occasionally wind up in places where you go the plot is meant to do this this this and this but the character that I have created will not do this so what what are they going to do um an example would be in a Nancy Boys when I remember getting about two thirds of the way through an Nancy Boys maybe halfway through and I had a plot and I was very comfortable with my plot and I knew what was going to happen and it was all very fluffy it was a it was a fluffy sort of plot it was very PG woodhouse and um and all of a sudden I've got Maeve Livingston going up in this lift to go and confront Graham Coates about financial irregularities and I thought hang on if you if you get into that office he's going to kill you I can't see any other thing that he's going to do he will murder you that's not part of my story that is not in my plot and furthermore this is a comedy and people do not murder each other in PG woodhouse kind of books they just don't it's one of the things they don't do it's how you know you're in a PG woodhouse novel you are going to live till the end unless maybe you're somebody's aunt you need a heart attack so that they can be a will but basically you are going to you're not going to get murdered um and I remember just grinding to a halt the novel writing process simply stopped and I spent probably about eight nine weeks thinking about my story thinking okay I think I need to do right by these characters I think this is what these characters that I've created would do that being said what what does that do to my plot what is my plot where is my plot going to go where am I going to take it and and what and is this am I now writing horror am I now writing a different genre I thought I was writing a comedy what makes this a comedy and eventually I came to the conclusion that in horror people get what is coming to them whereas in comedy people get what they need um and I thought okay well then I think I can allow that if in this story maybe a few characters do need to be dead but does that necessarily stop them and what will that do and I let the book I let that happen and then plot it on from there because I trusted my characters let's go back to another internet one let's um we have one from Emma and Emma says fantasy has such a rich literary history across the centuries but looking forward how do you see the genre evolving growing and shaping over the coming years or decades what I loved about going through the exhibition here going through the fantasy exhibition was feeling that it is exploding in all directions um I remember when there wasn't any fantasy really there weren't you didn't have a fantasy bookshelf in a bookshop you didn't have a fantasy section the fantasy shell novels were either shelved in the science fiction or they were shelved over in literature um there wasn't enough and there was a period where basically there was just Lord of the Rings and then there was Lord of the Rings and knock-offs of Lord of the Rings which was kind of weird and then there was Lord of the Rings knock-offs of Lord of the Rings books being published as trilogies that people hope you might think alike Lord of the Rings and the Ballantine adult fantasy series and then there were fantasy then then now suddenly we've got a genre and there were publishers like Alan and Amwyn who were actually going we are going to publish good fantasy and and everything changed and it felt like we were in a very new very different world of publishing what I love about what you get to see walking through the British Library fantasy exhibition is it goes in all directions it includes what's happening in graphic novels it includes what's happening in gaming it includes what's happening in video gaming um it includes television in weird ways you you go into you know the the black lodge of Twin Peaks and it's I don't know whose idea that was but I want them to be given a large bar of chocolate um so I and it's all my way of saying I have no idea where fantasy is going I don't think it's any of our jobs to see where fantasy is going our job as creators is just to explode um and other people can find out where the bits land and the damage that we do um we just have to explode and and be make things that feel true and may be beautiful and hope that other people are doing the same I would love the idea that 100 years from now the British Library fantasy exhibition would be filled with stuff that none of us could imagine and that will be amazing um just a very slightly self-interested question many many years ago I met Roscaveny in the first science fiction and comic book shop dark they were in golden eyed when she was a customer in the 80s I used to meet Neil Gaiman wandering around the bitten planet you also sold me books in dark they were in golden eyed but I was like 15 so you don't remember that I was in school uniform is it that book shops still exist instead of us all simply communicating and buying from online would you like to give a little shout out to the book shop absolutely absolutely I would make and um you know I think it's impossible just a big extrapolation it is impossible to imagine the world that that we're in right now without the likes of the book shops of the past without dark they were in golden eyed um first in Berwick street then is it Queen Anne's court or St Anne's court St Anne's court yeah and um it would be impossible to imagine the nexus of literature that Ros was talking about uh you know the reason why all of those people were hanging out in the cafe muncheon was we were doing signings and events in and around forbidden planet um and also we'd started hanging out there because it was easier to hang out there because we knew that the other ones would be around so it it you know a there was a golden age um that actually got created by forbidden planet at that time um that kind of ended once forbidden planet moved into new oxford street um I wish everybody here could watch watch awesome we're being my I'm being mine um but I think that you know the fact there is a an importance to physical places where you can go there is an importance to having informed people behind the counter who can tell you what's coming out and what's good um there are so many books that I have read that were incredibly important to me that without the likes of of dick jude or gamma or whoever was hanging around forbidden planet telling me you need to read this it's really good um I remember being basically being ordered to buy Neuromancer by them the week it was out as an ace whatever it was and so I bought it this new ace paperback Neuromancer and never looked back bookshops and the people who run bookshops are an invaluable resource and the likes of uh the amazons and the online places you may get books from them but you will not get soul you will not get spirit will never get the magic and they don't have that nice smell I mean seriously there were points in those shops where I'd pick up a book and I'd read a few pages from fairly on and also it would smell nice I mean I remember picking up Tim Powers the drawing of the dark and it smelled right and I you know and there was a sword fight on page three and I knew this was good stuff and this was the real thing in a way that you wouldn't just reading it on a screen this smell I mean I there's part of it that's almost it's on the one hand kind of funny that you can talk about the smell of books and on the other hand I remember the smell of Michael DeLarabettey's borrable books whatever the paper that they were printed on had those extra vanillins or whatever and it's like oh yes I am buying you you have an interesting smell yeah yep it's true it's true okay that got weird fast let's do something seeing as we live in an age now where there is so much poetry both contemporary and historical it's what do you think makes a truly unique poem putting the quality aside you know because everything's about love and war and what makes it unique I'm going to give that one to Ros to kick off with all the poems that's a toughie because it's voice I mean you know you know it's it's the poem it's the poem that only that writer could write and no one else could write it's that sense I mean one of the reasons I stopped writing poetry for years was that I was at Oxford with a bunch of people who are really pretty good I was showing a flat with one with a couple of them and I just went oh god they're much better than and the answer was I was trying to write their poems not mine um you can only write your own poems and you know there is no there are nine and ninety ways of constructing a tribal laze and every single one of them is right is what as Mr Kipling said whom you a thing or two you know you just I think put your finger on it and it's there and it's right and it feels right it smells right um I think also in poetry as with everything else you have to be willing to write the lousy ones you have to and you can't just sit there waiting to write the perfect poem you have to write the poem isn't very good but maybe has a line that you'll rescue later or maybe just needed to be written in order to write a decent one I don't think of myself as a poet I think of myself as a writer who has written a lot of things and some of those things have been poems and some of those poems have whether by accident luck or design been fairly decent poems and have gone on to have a lifespan um I'll remember get read and all of that kind of thing but and I'm proudest right now of one called what you need to be warm because I wrote it to order I was requested by UNHCR the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to write a poem or do something with the idea of warmth we wanted to do something that would um basically motivate people to donate money for refugees because it was getting cold we were heading into winter and we had a lot of refugees who were going to be very cold and we didn't have the money um so I as an attention and fundraising thing went on to Twitter it's a thing that we used to have in the olden days that was good um and I said what you know ask people what they remembered about warmth what what what sums up warmth to you and read over a thousand replies and went okay that's a theme and that's a theme and a few people have pointed out that and tried to construct a poem using things that people said and then tried to take it somewhere and at the time it came out we had it woven into an incredibly long scarf and then a year or so later we made it into a short film um and a couple of years ago we decided to make it into a book and I gave the rights to the poem to UNHCR so it is the only book I'm incredibly proud and happy never to make a penny from um any money that would have gone to me or to the artists and there were over there were 13 artists um some of whom were refugees um and it's beautifully illustrated and it's about belonging and home and warmth and childhood and I love that every copy that gets sold makes you know £1.49 for refugees and I just think that's a good thing so that's the one I'm proud to stop right now it's quite hard to follow that so someone hi um it's been nice to hear your thoughts about the art of writing and fantasy but I'm curious um whether you could share any of your thoughts about the state of the industry or the profession of writing right now and how it's changed in the time that you've been doing it as a job I when I started I understood the profession of writing and I understood the pitfalls and I understood how you got published and I understood how it all worked um I'd say up to about 10 15 years ago I still understood it all and understood how it all worked and right now I'm feel like the entire industry not the art form but the industry of writing is in a state of flux um a lot of the gatekeepers and a lot of the barriers have gone a lot of the ways that people made money have gone a lot of the things that used to work no longer work a lot of the ways people found each other don't work some of them have been replaced by things that worked for a while um I think we're at the end of social media and I'm not sure what that is going to do because I think for there was a period when social media particularly Twitter allowed people to find each other allowed people to communicate with each other allowed groups to happen um and I think that thing is feels like it's coming to um an end and I'm not sure what's going to replace it um I don't know how long the economics of traditional publishing are going to work I don't know how the economics of self publishing and and the ways that you can self publish are actually going to work in the future I'm just standing here going I think we're in a state of flux I think that you know maybe five years from now we will all be able to go okay so this is how you get published this is how it works these are these are your outlets these are your places this is how you get an audience but right now I don't know and I consider myself privileged fortunate lucky um and even faintly guilty to have been writing at a time when the rules were fairly clear you could you could write short stories and if you wrote short stories and people liked the short stories and an editor liked your short stories maybe they trust you to write a novel and if the novel did okay then you'd get a contract for more novels maybe you'd get a contract for three books and you could do that and over in this corner we're doing comics and these are the rules for doing comics and how you could get a comics gig and stuff I don't feel like any of that stuff makes the the rules have kind of finished and I don't know what the new rules are and I wish I could give you an answer that was more helpful or optimistic but at least I but I but I also have no doubt that we're in a world in which people love stories and people bless their hearts will pay for stories even if we're reduced to being in the marketplace telling stories and stopping at an exciting bit until they throw us sandwiches or or fountain pens or whatever we need and then start again if I can stick in I read manuscripts for a living what I will say is that the proportion of blow me that's really good to oh for god's sake remains pretty constant I mean and the take this back and do it again better is getting better I mean I mean I am the death of hope but I mean god knows I've had enough problems publishing my own books but haha I am I am I am the death of hope for so many people and yet there are still good books and the trouble is that there are some people who think they know and there is no no you know I mean I've sat on panels with people who said oh well I'm a total professional this is how I write a book you go yes sunshine I'm reminded of back in about 2000 end of 2000 I was in Chicago and I had an event and Gene Gene Wolff the wonderful writer I cannot over praise Gene Wolff to any of you um and Gene Wolff one of my favorite novelists and short story writers is sitting in the audience and at the in the intermission I go over to him and I say Gene I've just finished the first draft of this book American Gods and I think I figured out how to write a novel and he looked at me with infinite pity and he said Neil you never figure out how to write a novel you just figure out how to write the novel you're on yes I think it's somewhere in that wonderful book pictures from an institution by Randall Gerald where someone says a novel is an extended piece of fiction with something wrong with it I've written some of those and with that yeah I think that's that that's a wrap