Excerpts from the interviews:
Neil
SEQUEL:
“We are actually just starting to think about beginning to ponder the idea of exploring the possibilities of perhaps someday writing a sequel together. It may happen, it may not. We spent years saying it would never happen. We spent years telling people, 'We did it, that was fun. That was it.' And the possibility that either of us could find time to do it, on the same continent....”
*
PROCESS:
“We had a disk that we would post backwards and forwards, and then right at the end, we both owned modems. They were these exciting new things that had just come in, they were 300/1200, or 300/75 baud, 75 going up and 300 going down, or something like that. I remember we actually linked our modems and Terry sent me some. It took so long he could have dictated it and I could have typed over the phone at the speed at which it came through.
“So we decided that was stupid, and for the next draft I went down to Terry's house, and I think there may have been a draft where Terry came up to my house, with the computers next door, going through things, going, 'Oh, hang on, have you noticed we've got two Wednesdays....' In the very first edition there were two Wednesdays, because we hadn't counted. It was a very odd book to write, but enormously fun.”
*
NAMES/COVER:
“It's funny because the marketing plan for the reissue is something I've wanted them to do since 1992, and Ace just didn't understand it and wouldn't do it. I've been saying for 13 years now that what they needed to do was an edition of two books -- one with a white cover, one with a black cover; one with Terry's name first, one with my name first. I get the white cover with the black demon on it; he gets the black cover with the white angel on it. White will be the new black.
“I remember trying to persuade Ace, who had the book for many years, that it would be a great way to do it; they never understood it really. When the rights reverted, Ace obviously wanted the book, but HarperCollins, which is a home to me and to Terry, were seriously going to outbid them no matter what, and they did. What was lovely was explaining to Jennifer Brehl -- Okay, a black cover and a white cover, and she says, 'Oh yes.' I even got to do one cool little thing on the covers, I saw the original drawings, and it had Crowley with a little glass of wine and Aziraphale with a book, and I said, 'Okay, let's have a little touch of red. So put red in the wine glass and red in the book.' So it's now black, white, and red.”
* *
Terry
SEQUEL:
“Neil and I thought about a sequel an awful lot initially. We talked about it on tour. And I think it was a big relief to both of us, when one day we looked one another in the eye and said, 'I thought you wanted to do a sequel.' We were just playing with some ideas, and we had a few vague outlines together, which, from my point of view, is all you really need to start writing a book. I think Larry Niven likes to plan it out on 156 postcards or something, but I'll go ahead on about half-a-dozen loosely linked ideas. But I think our careers just sort of took us away from it. We looked at Good Omens as an incredible stroke of luck, it took us about nine weeks on the first draft, we had an incredible amount of fun doing it, and nothing was riding on it. He was barely Neil Gaiman then, and I was only just Terry Pratchett. And so we had nothing to lose, we could take time off to do it, we thought of it as a kind of a holiday job.”
*
NAMES/COVERS:
“The only regret I have about Good Omens, which was otherwise a wonderful book to do, was that we decided that Neil's name would go first in the United States, and that mine would go first in the UK. Neil was much better known in the US then, and I was much better known in the UK. It made a lot of sense commercially to do it like that, but looking back at it, for both of us, it probably would have been better to do it the other way around. But then someone else pointed out that when a book has two names on it, you always assume that the guy whose name came second wrote most of the book.”
