Being named Victoria is also a guarantee of having heard of The Kinks.

REALLY BLOODY EXCELLENT OMENS...

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.

On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.

I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.

I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”

Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.

And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.

But we never forgot it.

It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)

Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.

So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.

So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.

Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.

What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.

I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.

(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.

So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.

There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for.

As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.

(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)

from https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2021/06/really-bloody-excellent-omens.html

Reblogging for people who have just woken up somewhere.

OH MY GOD!!

this could take a while

It me

WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT

YOU COULD BE A FUCKING BADASS DRAGON THAT’S THE POINT

“I AM A CREATURE OF DARKNESS” “oh hey sabrina.”

I guess the point is that you could shapeshift into the body you always thought you’d grow into when you were a kid

taller, shorter, slimmer, more muscular, purple hair, tattoos everywhere, tattoos nowhere, 

every single shoe would fit you every single time you tried it on, every single article of clothing would fit your perfectly, all you have to do is transform slightly, you’d never run out of ‘your size’ again

and you wouldn’t have to work for it at all, and you’d never be limitted by your bone structure or something. You could just transform at will.

I don’t see how this is much of a downside

When you turn into a sixty story tentacle demon and terrorize a city you want to get the credit you deserve

Oh man that would be so sweet. I could be an annoying fuck as an insect or something but you couldn’t kill me because everyone would know

That’s great but have you considered

~cosplay

~Halloween costumes

~acting

~cosplay

~stretching to reach stuff and shrinking to fit through spaces

~cosplay

~cosplay

~COSPLAY

imagine being at work minding your business and then suddenly you look out the window and see like a 50ft tall flamingo and then someone just says “oh, yeah, that’s just pete, he does this sometimes, don’t worry”

“BRB, gonna be a cat-sized dragon for a few hours. Might come home a foot taller with mood tattoos.”

“Don’t antagonize the fae.”

“I AM the fae, Susan.”

Also, consider— people will know it’s you, but it doesn’t say they’ll know what you are. “So is Pete a 50 foot flamingo who changes into a man, or the other way around?” “We.. we don’t know. Barbara asked him once, but he just grinned. She said they weren’t the teeth of a human OR flamingo and she didn’t want to talk about it.”

Iconic post

This is legendary

“I AM HERE FOR YOUR SOULS”

“George, did you forget your coffee?”

ok but like the only difference here is if you dont press it you cant shapeshift. theres no loss in pressing it

Look I can’t shapeshift now, at least after I’ll be able to shapeshift

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

mr gaiman I am with you 100% but.....no genitals....but yes nipples. where we at with this ?

You never know when you'll need to breastfeed one of the damned.

“I finally found the energy to come outside. It had been a long stretch of watching nice days go by. It’s easy to get into the prison of routine. But this morning my mom poured me a cup of orange juice. She had this song playing in the kitchen: ‘For The Good Times,’ by this old, southern artist named Al Green. Really old, even before your time. But I love it. It got me going. And by the time I finished my orange juice, I said: ‘I’m doing it. I’m going outside today.’ There was a moment of doubt when I was in the shower. There was some hair frustration. I was trying to detangle it, and it didn’t want to work with me. So I was about to give up. I was about to head back to bed. But I pushed through, and on the way out the door I grabbed my new skateboard. I just got it yesterday, $230, but worth it. Rides extra smooth. I caught the Q11 Bus to the Jamaica Avenue subway, and I didn’t even pay at the turnstile. I did this thing where the skateboard went under, and I jumped over. I did it in front of a bunch of people. And I felt like a boss: ‘yah, you saw me.’ There were some women there, and not a lot of women skateboard. So I put one on for the girls. Rode the E-train straight into the city. It’s a long ride, but at least I never had to switch trains. And now I’m here. There’s good music playing. Everyone is doing something different. And the weather is perfect. The wind is blowing, but not enough to mess up my hair. It’s completely clear. The sun is on my skin. There aren’t any clouds going over, trying to make me chilly for a few minutes. If I get too hot, I’m just gonna wander into the shade. It’s up to me. It’s one of those days I’m in complete control.”

Stunning Surreal Photography Collages by Hüseyin Şahin

Rationality versus irrationality, fantasy versus reality, logic as opposed to magic create constraints in our imagination as we grow up; we undergo a continuous struggle within ourselves, curbing our childlike curiosity and our desire to explore. However, Istanbul-based visual artist Hüseyin Şahin broke free of these limitations to compose surrealistic scenes.

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Luciano Costa giving Kaidan fans a treat on insta today in celebration of Mass Effect Legendary Edition 💖

OHMYGOD

This is insane to me. I grew up as a kid in the early 90s reading RL Stein (and not just Goosebumps but the more “grown-up” stuff) and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, etc. They were legit scary, and totally marketed towards kids. Kids horror was absolutely a thing and I would’ve LOVED Coraline then. I mean I loved it as an adult when it did come out, I’m just saying - your publisher didn’t know shit about what kids would read and I remember the market being there well before HP and such.

this is genuinely the funniest moment in all of Star Wars not out of comedy but nothing will make me scream laugh like this

CREDITS TO THE AUTHOR

А кто-то замечал эти отсылки? #Поболтаем #starwars ➰ Источник ВК

Soooo, it's technically grammatically wrong to use they/them? Ha! I've been using it to refer to people whose gender/pronouns I don't know for years. Every since I was small. Heck, my pronouns are even she/her and they/them. And when I always call a person they/them before I know their pronouns, I always feel like I'm living in 2080 where everyone's pronouns and right to live are respected. Lol.

No, it's technically right. It's how people speaking English have done it since English was English. But in the eighteenth century lots of rules were made up for Grammar, and some of them have stuck and many of them have nothing at all to do with how people speak. Many of those rules have been reinspected over the last fifty years, and some of them have been found wanting. Things that were wrong in 1976 are not necessarily wrong now.

The singular "they" is one of them. But then, language is a river. It flows. (The singular "you" was once considered an abomination.)

In a few weeks ramen? Why can’t I have ramen now?

Let me die amongst the plants

April 5, 2021: When people say, “we have made it through worse before”, Clint Smith

When people say, “we have made it through worse before” Clint Smith

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones of those who did not make it, those who did not survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street. I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us. Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left standing after the war has ended. Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

==

Today in:

2020: Untitled, James Baldwin 2019: To Yahweh, Tina Kelley 2018: from how many of us have them?, Danez Smith 2017: Sad Dictionary, Richard Siken 2016: Lucia, Ravi Shankar 2015: Overjoyed, Ada Limón 2014: Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing, Margaret Atwood 2013: Anniversary, Cecilia Woloch 2012: Poem for Jack Spicer, Matthew Zapruder 2011: Now comes the long blue cold, Mary Oliver 2010: Jackie Robinson, Lucille Clifton 2009: In the Nursing Home, Jane Kenyon 2008: To the Couple Lingering on the Doorstep, Deborah Landau 2007: White Apples, Donald Hall 2006: Late Confession, Gary Soto 2005: Steps, Frank O’Hara