ajodasso

I've just gotten home to discover that my check from Strong Verse arrived. Did a dorky dance on the stairs.


He wore a silly hat, which I expected, seeing as all the photos I've ever seen of him seem to feature him wearing a silly hat, but the real shock was that he was dressed in black. Isn't that Neil's stunt, we murmured amongst ourselves? He started off talking mostly about the nature of touring and signing and the adventure of his career from its getting off the ground to present day, and I have to say, there's no other way of describing this man's style of speaking other than that he rambles. Incessantly. There's some kind of through-line, always, but one moment he's talking about his early days, and the next, he's talking about how apparently writing adult books will get you lots of money, but writing kids' books is what will win you awards. There's a mild, tongue-in-cheek smugness about him that I had sensed a little in interviews that I've read, and I had feared it might annoy me when it came down to actually hearing him speak, but it didn't. He's terribly funny; in fact, I think I was more amused by every word out of his mouth tonight than I was by the ten or so odd pages I managed to read from the first Discworld novel. When the time came for taking audience questions, the first few were related to Discworld and the new book, Thud!, but on the fourth go, he called on me, so I took a deep breath and said, "This is kind of obscure, but Neil, a couple months ago in his blog, he mentioned that you two had been discussing what Crowley and Aziraphale are up to at the moment, and he quoted that bit about the South Downs...um, what was it that they were doing on the South Downs, anyway?"

Terry promptly responded, "I don't remember!" And then went off into a kind of sputtery, but undeniably charming, ramble about how what they'd been discussing was the distant and not-so-likely prospect of a sequel, and how it's not just distance between them now, but the fact that it's been fifteen years since they really thought about this seriously, and that, yes, at that time, they'd had some idea of how a sequel might go, but now the world has changed and the dynamic of the worldview has of course shifted somewhat along with it. Also, there was this interesting side-trip on how Good Omens is, according to a Jesuit he spoke with, under the table "required reading" in the Jesuit community, and that there's a copy of GO in the Vatican Library! Oh, and people keep calling the Library of Congress asking if they have a copy of the Buggre Alle This Bible.

The very last question he took was, I thought, the best question asked: this girl in a red shirt wanted to know what the experience of collaborating on GO with Neil was like. This elicited a response that separated the GO fans in the audience from the Discworld fans like wheat from chaff: he said, well, we'd have these twenty-minute phone conversations where we'd be shouting at each other excitedly, and then one of us would go off and write 2,000 words on this thing called a floppy disk, and, see, we'd send each other the floppy disks, and I became the sort of official keeper of all the disks, and somewhere I have a hard drive with all the various drafts and... By that point, I think a third of us were hyperventilating, and you could hear it. All those disks somewhere...!

Inside my copy, he wrote, BURN THIS BOOK, and drew little devil-tails on the O's and a cross sticking out from the top of the B. I asked him if that's what he writes in every copy of GO, seeing as he wrote it in azureflight's, too, and he said, "No, we have a few different ones, but I think this one is the best."

ETA: jennaria has some added commentary here.