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."
J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman are such a funny contrast to me, like
Rowling: Oh, and by the way, I put gay characters in my books.
People: Is there anything... showing that?
Rowling: No. Also trans women don't deserve respect
People: wtf
Gaiman: Here are some immortals that transcend all human concepts of gender and attraction who use a variety of pronouns, and also some clearly canon human queers.
People: Are the immortals queer?
Gaiman: That is an entirely valid way to view them.
Other people: Ugh, pushing a modern woke agenda. It used to be-
Gaiman: Fuck you
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”.
Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.
This is the highest compliment I can bestow, but Dungeon Meshi reads like it was written for, if not by, Terry Pratchett.
Oh, you have a dungeon with monsters and adventurers? How does it work? Who pays? How do you get enough supplies? People will eat anything when hungry; do they eat the monsters? People will cook feasts from rotten meat and weeds; what feasts can you make with monsters?
By the way, here is a terrible pun about soup.
You want heroes to have peril, but also to live? Easy! Just have a ressurection spell. Well how does it work? What's the point? What would people give to live forever? What would people give to die?
Here's a dwarf whose magical shield is a wok.
And if they come back, it still hurts right? Do people remember? What happens if they forget that, outside of the dungeon, they can't come back? What if the thing that brings them back also ties them to the dungeon more and more, changes them, makes them different without knowing why.
Whilst you were thinking about that, the halfling founded an adventurers guild. It's an actual union with dues etc. btw he's a deadbeat dad apart from this.
The dwarf from earlier carries familial trauma that will haunt you for the next decade. The protagonist holds his sister's skull as the first proof that there is anything left of her. The two female leads share a love so deep that giving it a name would pollute it. The protagonist's sword is a mollusc.
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?'