#366: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years To Do

This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute.

I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride. In my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day.

It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day, with more than 8,000 classes on-demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or, say, low impact versus high intensity or interval.

You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. In my case, I quite like Matt Wilper's, and I tend to do on-demand, and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City, with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for.

You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head.

It was very, very impressed with how motivating it was, and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me.

So, check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast, a limited time offer. Go to 1palaton.com. That's o-n-e-palaton-p-e-l-o-t-o-n.com, and enter the code Tim, all caps, at checkout, and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. If you get a great work out of home, anytime you want, check it out. Go to 1palaton.com, and use the code Tim to get started.

This episode of the Tim Ferris Show is brought to you by Hello Monday, a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team. When I'm facing, say, a challenge of work, considering new career moves, or just trying to sort through my life, of course, like a lot of people, I looked my friends, family, and mentors for support. The kind of advice that tends to stick, though, out of all the things they might say or ask, tends to be simple and powerful.

For example, I remember when Kyle Maynard, who's been on the podcast, echoed to me a lesson he learned from a very well-known CEO, and that was when you ask people to rank anything from 1 to 10, including yourself, ask them to remove the number 7. That means they have to choose between, in some cases, 6, which is a barely pass, so that's a no-go, or an 8, which is a strong endorsement.

You can use this when asking people to judge work, designs, give you feedback on writing, chapters, you can use it with waiters or waitresses in restaurants, when asking how much they would recommend a given entree. It's incredible how much clearer the signal becomes when you just make that one change and remove 7. So, along those lines, Hello Monday is a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team filled with this kind of advice, the kind that stays with you, the kind that you can actually use.

Each week, host Jesse Hempel sits down with featured guests, ranging from people like Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author, Eat, Pray, Love, to uncover lessons you can apply to your career and to your life. For example, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about relieving creative pressure to get more done, and the way she tells the story is much more detailed.

But, as she was approaching her follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, she tried to write, she realized after the fact, when she sat down with the first draft and started to cry, she realized she tried to write for 6 million people, and it just wasn't working, she felt overwhelmed.

And instead, she decided to focus on writing it to her 10 closest female friends. And she realized at the time she didn't know how to please millions of strangers, but she did know how to reach those specific 10 friends, which it turns out exactly what I did after throwing away 4 early chapter drafts for the 4-hour work week. I took a very similar approach and wrote literally an email draft to two of my closest friends, so this type of stuff really, really works. And you should check it out.

So find Elizabeth Gilbert's episode and other episodes from Hello Monday on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferrison, welcome to another episode of The Tip Ferris 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 anancy boys to the graveyard book, which happens to be my favorite audiobook of all time read by Neil to never where I've never been disappointed.

And Neil is one 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. And it's 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. I 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 I'm still on cloud 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 gaming is the best selling author and creator of books, graphic novel short stories film and television for all ages, including never wear, core line, the graveyard book, the ocean at the end of the lane, the view from the cheap seats and the sandman series of graphic novels. The ocean has received new berry and Carnegie metals and Hugo Nebula World Fantasy, Bram Stoker and Will Eisner Awards among many other awards and honors.

His novelistic retelling of Norse myths titled Norse mythology has been a phenomenon and an international bestseller and he won his ninth audio ward for that. That is for best narration by the author.

He's been nine audio wards and you'll get a taste of his voice and why people enjoy it so much. Recently, Game & Road 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.

The soundtrack is a fantastic book and I've set up a redirect so you can find the trailer for this really easily if you just go to Tim.BlogFordslashOmens.com Many of Game & books and comics have been adapted for film and television including Star Dust, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Fyfer, Coraline and Academy Award nominee and the BAFTA winner for best animated film and how to talk to girls at parties, a movie based on Game & Short Story.

The television series Lucifer is based on characters created by Game & Sandman. His 2001 novel, American Gods is a critically acclaimed Emmy nominated TV series now entering its second season. In 2017, Neil Gaim 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. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Neil himself, Facebook, forward slash Neil Gaimin and at Neil Gaimin.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 Gaimin. Neil, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you so much. I have been hoping to have this conversation for years and with I flashback for 10, 15, 20 plus years, I've been reading your work. I can't say that about many people I've ever met.

And I mean, you've been asking me incredibly politely if I could do the podcast or anything vaguely, edging around it and giving me open invitations for a good decade now. That's true. And I love the fact that we've managed to do the occasional tiny goofy thing. I got to do read a page of your book. 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 Travel Mentors 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. I'm loving it. And I thought we could begin with the glorious beginnings and maybe for those people who can't see this, 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 M once bit in twice shy when it comes to audio.

And then you shared one of your early days stories. What happened? Well, 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. 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'm afraid to do.

And you know, our voices had broken. So over the phone, nobody knew that we were 15. And I remember interviewing Michael Morkock, who was an author whose work I loved with my friend Dave Dixon, who told me recently he just found the tape and is threatening 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 Morkock.

But the one that taught me my lesson was the, I think it was the second interview we did. Morkock 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 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 20th-year-old 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.

And I didn't like yes very much. In fact, I didn't really like much of the music that he'd done covers 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.

And at the end of the interview I noticed that the tape wasn't going round 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 the great thing about that was when seven years later I really was a journalist. I really was going round interviewing people. I was interviewing people for magazines that existed and had existed before. And we decided to do the interviews. And things. I always carried spare batteries. I always carried spare tapes. If I could, you know, the point where I could afford to I even carried a spare micro cassette recorder 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. Exactly. One good malfunction and you learn your lesson. It is that pain thing. 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 House, I suppose, firstly for me. And we're talking about this location downtown where we're sitting.

And I've decided in the last few years to use locations outside of my home for a lot of what I do because I found it that is it being sitting at my kitchen table doing a lot to sometimes produce a malaise. This is the 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.

So 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. And you read this article and you realize something which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing. I was always fascinated by the fact that several of rolled dolls, most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming would really, yeah he gave doll 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. So he is the one about the evil antique dealer who finds this amazing antique in 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.

I'll give you a 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 away. And those plots were both Ian Fleming's and you start realizing you really don't like writing when you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bond books.

You read 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 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 never where 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 for people who knew knew that Oxford Street was a big street with lots of shops on it you know it or whatever they 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.

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 I read.

That 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 after right that's my biggest rule could you speak to that yeah because. 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.

I'm allowed to sit up my desk I'm allowed to stare out at the world I'm allowed to do anything I like as long as it isn't anything not allowed to do a crossword not loud read a book. It's not allowed to phone a friend. Not allowed to make a claim model of something I all I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing or right. And what I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while.

You sit there and you've been staring at the window now for five minutes and it kind of loses its charm. Well actually. It's all right something and it's hard I'm as a writer I'm more easily you know I'm distractable.

I have a three year old son he is the epitome of cuteness and charm he's 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. But you don't have permission to do anything else.

It reminds me of another one of my favorite writers you being the one who's sitting in front of me. Non McFee 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 class with him a thousand years ago and his his role was very similarly it didn't state it explicitly it's sitting front of his first as a young man typewriter.

And you sit in front of the blank page and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming it was the blank page or writing this allowed from doing anything else. Are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process. Some of them are just things for me for example most of the time not always I will do my first draft in fountain pen.

Because I actually enjoy the process of writing with the fountain pen I like the um I like filling a fountain pen I like uncapping it I like the weight a bit in my hand I like that thing so I'll have a notebook. I'll have a fountain pen and I'll write if I'm doing anything 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 color links 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. Nine pages in blue and 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.

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 you can bring somebody dead back to life nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft is you telling the story to yourself and then I'll sit down and type and I'll put it onto a computer as far as I can sense. The second draft is where I try to make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

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. No I definitely that's my editing process I think that's my second draft is typing into the computer and also I love. So backing up a bit here.

When I was what was I 27 28 in the days when we were still in type writers and there was just a handful of people with word processes which were clunky things with disks which didn't hold very much and stuff I edited an anthology and enjoyed editing lines. Most of the stories that came in were about 3000 words long.

Move forward in time not much 5 6 7 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 and 9000 words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the 3000 words ones and I realized that what was happening is it's a sort of a computer thing is if you're typing putting stuff down is work.

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're 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. 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 page and a half I feel like there's a page and a half that just went away and that that's a page and a half sort 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 go I don't need this page and a half

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.

And you mentioned you mentioned distraction earlier and you're dangerously adorable son which which I certainly agree with I had read somewhere actually before I get to that this is might seem like a very very mundane question but what type of notebooks do you prefer they large like legal pants or they leather bound what type of notebooks.

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 like I kind of liked how much I could see on the page those were the ones I wrote star dust and American gods in sort of big size but they weren't terribly portable.

I went over to the mall skins 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

written writing on the next page and Joe Hill about six or seven years ago Joe Hill the wonderful horror fantasy writer suggested the like term to me and so my usual notebook right now is a like term because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper and they're just like sort of mall skins but but the Porsche of mall skins they're just better and I also have been writing I wrote the graveyard book and I'm writing the current novel in a

these beautiful books that I bought in a stationary shop in Venice built into a bridge somewhere in Venice there's a little stationary shop on a bridge and they have these beautiful leather bound blank books that just look like hard back books but they're like paper 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 sent

home my house in Wisconsin which is where my stuff is you know I've got my we live in woodstock but I have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in in Wisconsin and it's become archives it's it's you know it's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive but waiting for me in that house is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago and before I die I plan to write a novel in it and it's an accounts book from the mid 19th century

it's 500 pages long every page is numbered it's lined 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 but 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 dekenzy and 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 a sort of old Victorian something slightly copper platy one of those old flex nip pens

that they stopped making when carbon paper came in just so I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting 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 going to be a good day it will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day I'll get to the end of the first page is oh no I have this pristine but it is it is the the thing that I tell young writers and by young writers and young

writing and be any age you just have to be starting out which is anything you do can be fixed what you cannot fix 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 that affects

you mentioned a word and it might be that I'm a little slow moving because I'm from Long Island but Leichton how do you spell that word leicch I think it's tt u-r-m and then 1917 I think is that the Twitter handle is definitely like to 1917 and I'll put that in the show notes for folks so you'll be able to find it since you gave me I'm not intending to turn this episode into a shopping list but I've never used fountain pens

really I have not and my my assistant my dear assistant 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 good pen you know the biggest criteria I would use in picking if you have the choice is go somewhere like New York's fountain pen hospital

it's a real place it's a real place it's called the fountain pen hospital they sell lots of new pens they reconditional pens they they look after pens for you and try them out because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal you you you you go no no no and then you find the one

I tend to suggest to people who are just nervously you know I've never used a fountain pen what should I do and I will point them at lummy 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 get into the idea of do I like doing this the let's see what am I using right now what am I going to do I've got so this one here is a pilot it's a nemeeky and it's a flexing nib ever so slightly when you put down weight on it the nibble spread it's a beautiful beautiful pen that one's a pilot I think this one here is the nemeeky and it's really weird because nemeeky is pilot so I don't quite understand it

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 of fountain pens and I will just you know I'll go and play there's a lovely Italian when I got my agent I did a thing some years ago when I realized that I was losing a lot of actual writing time to signing foreign contracts

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 90 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

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 what do you like and then and I got her a visconti which is just these lovely Italian pens

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 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 said what do you use and I you know I use pilot 823s for signing and I actually now I bought a pilot 823 because it's just a fantastic signing pen it's a work course it keeps going and I got one in 2012 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 and see footage of you icing your hand after signing that was the signing tool that I really got into icing my hand because and wrist and arm 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

which remained and I had to send it off to pilot at one point not because the nib was in trouble because 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 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 go in there

you can actually guarantee that nobody without disassembling the house I mean we actually have to take the entire house apart to one install a cast iron fireplace from 1913 to get up the pen so I've got that pen now has been given as a sacrifice in the house goods and I need to get a new one 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 act to make not writing unappealing or at least boring after five minutes and to

to enhance the act of writing to make it something that is enjoyable I don't know that that is true and 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 paralyses me when I started writing I had a typewriter it was a manual typewriter when I sold my first book I had the money to buy an electric typewriter

what was that first book? I actually don't remember whether I bought the electric typewriter with the money from a book called Garsley Beyond Belief book of science fiction and fantasy quotations I did with Kim Newman or whether I did it whether it was for the Durand Durand 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

and also so that I could get as many words on and paper was expensive and then so I could always do that 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 press print and that was absolutely not really liberating

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 to be sort of very antiquated rhythms and I thought I there's probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen 17th century writing 17th 18th century writing you notice tends to go in very very long sentences and long paragraphs and my theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you're using dip pens and if you pause 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 you're going for a very long sentence 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 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 so it's actually so much easier to just sort of think a little bit more you slow up a bit but you're thinking the sentence through to the end and then you start writing you write that and then you pause and then you write the next one

at least that was the way that I hypothesized I might be writing and I wanted start us to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s and I thought well to do that I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book and that was how I started writing that

and again what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated was like I'm not actually making words and not going down in phospha on a computer screen this trivializing is 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 with people I interview on the podcast and we're having conversations with Sean White in a 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 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 other 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 that you do that help to remove the sort of psychological performance anxiety you know 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 kid's author and it was an odd kind of thing to 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 here's a book nobody's waiting for about did you work on so you worked on that before anyone knew in other words you hadn't set expectations Coraline was written I thought Coraline was unpublishable in fact I was told it was initially and I started it for my kids my daughter in particular Holly I showed it to an English editor who told me it was completely unpublishable we moved to America 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 it was an amazing children's 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 you know this was just the first third of Coraline I hadn't even got bad yet and I put it away and then a few years on I looked around and realized 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

this book I started for Holly and now Holly is too old almost 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 Jennifer Hershey at Chandler remember were we at Harper Collins at the time or was it still Avon

I think it was still Avon it had been Avon got bought by Harper Collins which is how I became a Harper Collins author 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

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

and instead of reading three or four pages and then turning off the light and going to sleep I would write maybe 50 words of Caroline which doesn't seem much right before bed right before bed so I wasn't writing a reading before bed I was just writing before bed but I got a bed and I would reread what I'd written on Caroline and I would do you know five or six lines of Caroline but if you do it that way you know you've written a page a week

and so 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 and I was working on American Gods and I did not pack due to a packing era

the American Gods notebooks but I did have the Caroline book with me so on that cruise I got to write quite a bit more Caroline and then a couple of months later I was starting to despair of ever finishing American Gods because I've 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 Caroline and just finished 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 wait for American Gods do you tend to work on multiple projects at once? I used to be really good at working on multiple projects at once I think I have to start I think I have to start accepting that I'm not as good anymore at that what does that mean?

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 do one of the coming to America stories and then I go back to shadow again but these days I don't think I'm as good at that anymore 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 day 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 ABC and D all waiting for me what I do is look at them make a noise like Lurch from the Adam's family you know what those kind of noises like off and make a cup of tea and play with ash or something so I think actually it's one of those things where you just know that I self I think I now have to start going no just one thing at a time which also means I'm going to have to say no to more introductions and things and I love doing introductions I am

and you mean writing introductions 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 want to 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

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 it's 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 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 you mentioned writing right before bed so I'd love to talk about the 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 1 and 6 p.m. 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 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 distraction when I started out from from the age of about 20 to when I was a young journalist 26 27 starting out comics writer you know all through there I was a late late late night writer nothing really happened until the kids were in bed 9 o'clock I might have fathtered out a little bit during the day but now 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 but so that's what I did and and I was a smoker and a coffee drinker and it was great I moved to America in 92 gave up smoking 93 stop drinking coffee went over to tea 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 3,000 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 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

the closer you can come to just ground talk day you just repeat that day you you set up a day that works for yourself you know I I the last novel that I actually wrote I was at Torrey 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 on writing and I went down there and I would get up in the morning 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 and you know couple of months later looked up 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 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 my friend Jean Wolfe who is now in his late 80s and is one of you know the finest writers that America has 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 right for an hour

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 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

cottage I could absolutely come morning right in your dodej I think that's going to take a while I do want to ask you question related to a name that came up a little earlier and that is I think this of course I think I'm getting right because comes from a reliable source which is your blog and my blog is a pretty reliable I think it's very reliable and for those those who know your work outside of the blog I'd really encourage 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 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 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 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 middle man wouldn't it be interesting if dot dot dot and the the question I'm going to ask is a follow up 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 is I remember the exact moment when I finished the graveyard book in audio and there are multiple versions people who asked me I have not listened to the ensemble version and so I'm sure it's spectacular but not not to sound creepy I do find your voice very soothing

and I finished it as my plane was not my plan 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 in my mind where did that book come from and 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 which was which gave me an insight into stuff on it

so I was 25 years old it would have been 1984 85 maybe even into 86 I was living in Sussex and little town in a very tall house my dad owned the house actually what he owned was a shop underneath but the house sort of came came with it and because little English towns go back for a long time the house was at least 300 years old

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 and his favorite thing was his little tricycle 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

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 through the gravestones and I remember just the thought process I remember going he looks so happy he looks really comfortable there is something very sweet about a little kid riding a tricycle through a graveyard

and I thought I could do a story about it wouldn't it be fun to do a story about that you could do a story like it will be like you know a kid in a graveyard getting brought up by dead people and then I thought actually kippling 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

and I went up to my office my little office sat down at my typewriter and started to write now when I told people this in the past I've said I wrote a couple of pages and realized that it wasn't good enough 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 and it wasn't very good what was fascinating and delightful about it was the portrait of the kid

which was very obviously a really actually looking back at a 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 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 there's a demon in it I don't have who I think is the person who winds up being the person who kind of accepts him into the graveyard

you know nothing's quite right but there's a central idea there 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 and about a decade later I came back tried it again and this time you know at least according to memory it was only a couple of pages and again I went oh no still not good enough for this may I pass for once yeah you must have ideas for

potential stories all the time 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 and in fact you know I was interesting there was a point where I thought I wasn't going to do it and I kind of gave the idea to Terry Pratchett we've been we've had a photos taken in a graveyard and we were talking about graveyards and kids and I said well there's this book that I was going to write and this is what I was going to 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 but 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 in about 2003 I finished writing I think it was an Nancy boys

which I also listen to an audio Lenny Henry is the brilliant readable incredible such a great read and I got to the end of an Nancy boys and I thought you know I tell me I'm getting any better I think this is now as a writer I'm probably me it's probably it I may improve you know a tiny bit

but it's not going to 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 I'm going to start writing the middle and I wrote the first two pages of the witches headstone chapter four and did emotionally exactly the same thing I always do I had always done at that point with the graveyard

but which is 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 doing I said I'm writing a story

she says read it to me so I read her the first page and a half that I'd written and she said what happens next so I kept going and I think I would have 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 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 so lovely Silas and then I started at the beginning and I and 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 it's like I'd written it at some point in the previous 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 yeah I think you did you certainly delivered on the first few pages being very very terrifying I'm going to go back and listen to that again maybe I'll try ensemble this time around

the ensemble is real I mean you know I am and I'm not just saying this because for me you know listening to one of my own audiobooks 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

you the cast of people like Miriam Margoli's Reese Shear Smith just this fabulous cast so you mentioned a name that I was planning on bringing up anyway and that is Terry Pratchett yeah and I think many people who at least in the United States are less familiar with Terry than perhaps they should be

could you tell us who Terry is and how you first met Terry Pratchett later sir Terry Pratchett was an English writer who died in March 2015 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 when his first book first Discworld book the color of magic was due to come out in paper back

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 1985 I wonder which Chinese restaurant it was and it turned out we actually met on like the 28th of January and it was Bertor Relle's Italian restaurant in it's a Goode Street I think it was Goode Street

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 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 green was of occult books and Terry mentioned that he had come up with one called the Necro Telecom Nikon 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 Leaver Full Varam Pagan Aram the book of yellow colored pages

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 you know a floppy disk would arrive and it would have 30,000 words on it of a novel or my phone would ring and Terry would say oh it's me so which is funny and it'd just be writing and he wants somebody to talk to

so I had written a book called Don't Panic the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion which was great I got to work with Douglas Adams I got to rummage through Douglas's filing cabinets and obscurity staff 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 humour with funny footnotes and things like that that was something I could do and I had an idea for a book inspired really by reading the Jew of Malta

I've been reading Marlos 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 you know and that was the start so I wrote and I had this idea about a baby swap and kind of like the Omen but it all goes wrong and it becomes a nice kid

so I wrote 5,000 words of 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 didn't really think about it I knew that it was a thing and I knew I get to it one day and then I got a phone call from Terry how much leader was this?

maybe eight months nine months and he says here that thing you sent me you doing anything with it and I said well no I'm doing Sandman I'm doing what's magic he said well 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 I loved Terry's craft

Terry became somewhere in there before the arrival of JK Rowling the best selling novelist in the UK he tens of millions of copies millions upon millions of copies this was before that this was you know he just retired from the electricity board to become a full-time writer

I knew how good he was and I'm like this is a fabulous apprenticeship 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 230 and I would write good omens from 230 until about 6am 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 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 so that was that was the process of writing was very fast very mad that was the first draft second draft took us took us much longer but you know 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 really it really was that bad and then over the years Terry Gilliam tried to make it into a film which we love the idea of then we were going to do it as a TV series and we couldn't really find somebody to adapt it

and eventually 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 an understanding of the old girl that I have and I want to see it before the lights go out and then and I said okay and then Terry died which meant that now it had become the sort of last request and if the upcoming Good Omen series is good which I believe it is a lot of what makes it good a lot of what because I was the showrunner I wrote it and I show ran 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 where Agnes Nutter the Witch is taken out and burned and it's you know we have villages 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 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 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

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 stuff that we came up with 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 and just making it all all something that Terry would have been proud of and it's been really wonderful this South by Southwest has been the first time anybody has seen

anything from Good Owlons you know and we showed some clips and hearing audiences laugh it was kind of amazing and we were like oh it does work it is they're liking it they're loving it it does work you should 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 polybag comics that I refuse to get rid of and every time a comic book 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 return out and it was always very stressful for me because it's so much invested in many

different characters and just I'll give a thank you to Hugh Jackman for getting Logan and Wolverine Wright 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 lived up to my experience as a reader and a listener I think mostly we have and I think that is a lot of that is casting Michael Sheen and David Tellent were perfect and they've never really been anything anything before 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're like casting the same person you can look yeah 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 Omen's they would go on tour with it and alternate roles each that's really an 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 who have already heard in the introduction but where can people learn more about good on it that's a really good question well you know one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book good omen's the novel by Terry Pratchett in the old game 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 Omen's up the trailer you can go and watch that it's a lot talkier than the trailer the trailer 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 like the show but I think very wisely they put in you know giant walls of fire and heaven and hell and hellhounds and all of the glorious stuff you mentioned a word apprenticeship what are the types of

things that you learned from Terry or picked up 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 you're a grown up and you will figure it out you know the there's lots of metaphors for writing a novel and

George R.R. Martin for example divides writers into architects and gardeners and I can be an architect if I have to 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 bleach 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 so the joy of good omens really I mean the best thing about good omens was having Terry Pratchett as an audience because if I could make Terry laugh I knew you know that it's like hitting that bell and you know hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer if you being the bell at the top

that's what I did but I could make Terry laugh. 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 did he

how did he approach his own mortality? Terry made an astonishingly powerful I mean he faced it head on and he made two or three incredibly powerful documentaries one about Alzheimer's the one that ripped me up emotionally 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 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 you know he followed a man to Switzerland where he went through the end of life process they turned off the cameras while he did 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 that it was hidden away but that it was there for him when he was ready and I knew at that moment he was never going to 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 you know he couldn't see things he couldn't perceive object 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 this stuff you never you can't find it you can't get something from a hidden place nobody else is going to get something from a hidden place for you and also I thought and you've hit you're now actually beyond the point where you ever wanted to be you didn't want to be here you wanted to have stopped for a 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 a few months after that he stopped completely but it was inspiring it was inspiring watching Terry talk about Alzheimer's bringing Alzheimer's which everybody has to deal with one way or the other

into the public consciousness is something that was okay to talk about not as something slightly shameful that happens to grandpa and also just talk about the right to die talking about it as a human right and it you know I really 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 wouldn't right now they've got her in her home but you know they they would have killed her and announced that

she wanted to do it herself or whatever I get all that but also I get that the right not to be alive the right to end it all the right to go okay I've come as far as I can in this and and it's okay to stop before I become something that is a shallow shadow of who I once was

you know that that that has to be a right to how does it feel as such a close friend of his to be able to to share this work that you created together and really really with 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 activates some kind of Instagram filter 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 John Hamm and David Tennant and Michael Sheen and all my guys

from my lovely American God's cast come over and they're hanging out I'm getting to introduce it's like introducing your two families and I was kind of melancholy because and I knew that I should just be enjoying it I knew I should just be gone 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 exalting 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 just you know grumbling to me about tiny details and enjoying it 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 I know Terry well enough to also know that the way that Terry was built and who Terry was we probably would never have got to this point had Terry been alive because if you're doing something like making a big TV show or something

this big this complicated where things can go wrong sometimes when things are getting weird or things are going wrong or you know the BBC are going a bit mad or whatever 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 you know telling Jeff Bezos

exactly what he thought of him what I was just like no that's just the wrong things do right now so there's also that sort of weirdness of going had Terry been around we probably would never have got here and getting but getting here was all about making this thing for Terry which he

also wasn't here for which is why I'm saying you know so so a giant into woven panoply of of strange emotions absolute joy in having made it joy and having made it for Terry because nothing else would have stopped me writing novels for three and a half or years but that did 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 will be impacted by the work 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 Owens the book and then they'll go and read this well books and that will make Terry even happier Neil this has been so much fun can't be 19 minutes already 90 minutes

that did that that flow it did it did and I certainly hope it's not the last time we have a chance to have to do it again we love to stop I would really love to and I know we have well let me not stay with that way many many of my fans of 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

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 you are so ridiculously welcome thank you and do you have any closing comments thoughts remarks anything you'd like

to say before we wrap up 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 thank you so much and for everybody listening we will include links to everything we've discussed including fountain pants including fountain pants this might be the time to buy some stock and everything that came up will be in the show notes as always at Tim

Dublog for slash podcast you need to search Neil or gay men 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 almonds and chat soon

hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is Fibolet Friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little more soul of fun before the weekend and Fibolet Friday is a very short

email or I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off

for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to 4ourworkweek.com that's 4ourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoy it.

This episode of the Tim Ferris Show is brought to you by Hello Monday a new podcast from Lincoln's editorial team when I'm facing say a challenge of work considering new career moves or just trying to sort through my life of course like a lot of people I looked my friends family and mentors for support the kind of advice that tends to stick though out of all things they might say or ask tends to be simple and powerful for example I remember when Kyle Maynard has

been on the podcast echoed to me a lesson he learned from a very well-known CEO and that was when you ask people to rank anything from one to ten including yourself ask them to remove the number seven and that means they have to choose between in some cases six which is barely past so that's a no go or an eight which is a strong and worse you can use this when asking people to judge work designs if you feedback on writing chapters you use it with waiters or waitresses

in restaurants but asking how much they'd recommend a given entree and it's incredible how much clearer the signal becomes when you just make that one change or move seven so along those lines hello Monday is a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team filled with this kind of advice the kind that stays with you the kind that you can actually use each week host Jesse Hemples it's down with featured guests ranging from people like Seth Myers host of late

night with Seth Myers and Elizabeth Gilbert that's not author E. Prey Love to uncover lessons you can apply to your career and to your life for example was with Gilbert talks about relieving creative pressure to get more done and the way she tells the story is much more detailed but as she was approaching her follow-up to E. Prey Love she tried to write she realized after the fact when she sat down with the first draft and started to try she realized she tried to

write for six million people it just wasn't working she felt overwhelmed and instead she decided to focus on writing it to her ten closest female friends and she realized that the time she didn't know how to please most strangers but she did know how to reach those specific ten friends which it turns out exactly what I did after throwing away four early chapter drafts for the four hour work I took a very similar approach literally an email draft to two

of my close friends so this type of stuff really really works and you just check it out so find Elizabeth Gilbert's episode and other episodes from hello monday on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts this episode is brought to you by peloton which I've been using probably for about a year now peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home you can also do on demand which is what I do we'll

come back to that so you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute I for instance have a peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home and it's one of the first things I do many mornings I wake up I meditate for a bit then I knock out a short 20 minute ride in my undies hard to do that at the gym take a shower and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day it's really

convenient it has become something that I look forward to so you have a lot of options for one if you like you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated there are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8000 classes on demand and you can pick based on length 45 minutes 20 minutes whatever music hip-hop rocket roll or save low impact versus high intensity or interval you can pick

the class structure and style that works for you and in my case I quite like Matt Wilper's and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors they have peloton an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City the whole range of styles and personalities so you can find what you're in the mood for you also get real-time metrics that

you can use to track your performance over time and that will help I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best now that all sounds good right gamification yada yada yada I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me but they really 100% hit the nail on the head I was very very impressed with how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing which quite honestly takes a fair amount I can get quite lazy

particularly with anything that edges on endurance which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me so check it out discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home peloton is

offering listeners this podcast a limited time offer go to one peloton dot com that's bo and e peloton p l o t o n dot com and enter the code Tim all caps at checkout and get one hundred dollars off of accessories with your peloton bike purchase so get a great work at home anytime you want check it out go to one peloton dot com and use the code Tim to get started