Neil Gaiman's Journal

Back in June, I said, here, "Am currently, when I get a second to read, reading Pattern Recognition, the upcoming William Gibson novel. It's astonishingly good -- he's turned all his ability to extrapolate to the present, and creates a textured world which is completely imaginary while it's also perfectly true and exactly now. It's filled with moments of puzzled recognition, like browsing the Ebay of dreams. A pleasure to read, and if there's any justice in the world it'll take home its share of literary awards next year, and gain (and regain) Bill an awful lot of happy readers." And I meant it, too. Anyway, Bill Gibson has a website with a blog and everything on it.

It's interesting reading his first few posts, and it reminds me of when we started the first incarnation of this site, and the first days of this very journal -- it was very much a writer's monologue, and it was very focussed on American Gods.

That was before its slow devolution into shambolic post-it notes on the wall of my daily life. I hope he posts from his book tour. That's where it all begins to fray.

Many, many years ago, in one of the last pieces of journalism I did, I interviewed Bill Gibson for London's Time Out. In the interview that I'd handed in to my editor Bill had described himself, when young, as "a geek who couldn't play baseball". When that week's Time Out appeared it had been carefully copy-edited. Bill pointed it out to me, with laid-back glee, when we bumped into each other on the corner of Denmark Street. In print, it seemed, he was a Greek who couldn't play baseball...