Journal

Saturday, February 23, 2002
I have a librarian in my attic.

This is something that I've wanted for a long time now. Unfortunately, she's not a permanent fixture. She's just here for the weekend.

Already she's discovered a plastic bag filled with Hitchhiker's Stuff that I can send to MJ Simpson for his book on Douglas Adams, and a bag filled with taped interviews with Alan Moore I did in the mid 80s which I had already promised to someone doing a book on Alan Moore.

Also huge quantities of manuscript pages, lost short stories ("Ohmygod -- this is the script to the lost Mr X story I wrote...!" "Really?" "Yes..." (Reads it with rapidly diminishing excitement.) "...It's not very good.") and piles of interviews, poems, notes and jottings.

There are backs of envelopes with ideas jotted down, old appointment diaries, piles of magazines I wrote for, carbons of articles under pennames I'd long-since forgotten Editors had given me.[Jim Crocker, anyone?)


Cardboard boxes are being replaced with plastic tubs, to deter mice, mud-wasps and suchlike.

I just found all the art Mike Allred did in 1990, the first time he tried out for Sandman -- I should ask him if he wants them back for his own files.

Anyway. I stopped and will now get down to work.

Having identified the Douglas Adams stuff and the Alan Moore stuff, I figured it was wisest to leave my assistant and her librarian up there on their own. Otherwise I'd still be sitting there, crosslegged, sneezing occasionally from the dust, reliving the 1980s.