Oct 06 2012
∞
“ People say: What was it like writing “Good Omens”?
And we say: We were just a couple of guys, okay? We still are. It was a summer job. We had a great time doing it, we split the money in half, and we swore never to do it again. We didn’t think it was important.
And, in a way, it still isn’t. “Good Omens” was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them. They weren’t even certain it would sell. They certainly didn’t know they were going to write the most repaired book in the world. (Believe us: We have signed a delightfully large number of paperbacks that have been dropped in the bath, gone a worrying brown color, got repaired with sticky tape and string, and, in one case, consisted entirely of loose pages in a plastic bag. On the other hand, there was the guy who’d had a special box made up of walnut and silver filigree, with the paperback nestling inside on black velvet. There were silver ruins on the lid. We didn’t ask.) Etiquette tip: It’s okay, more or less, to ask an author to sign your arm, but not good manners to then nip around to the tattoo parlor next door and return half an hour later to show them the inflamed result.
We didn’t know we’d do some signing tours that would be weird even by our generous standards, talking about humor in fifteen-second bursts in between newsflashes about the horrific hostage situation down at the local Burger King, being interviewed by an ill-prepared New York radio presenter who hadn’t got the message that “Good Omens” was a work of what we in the trade call “fiction,” and getting a stern pre-interview warning about swearing from the diminutive Director of Protocol of a public-service radio station “because you English use bad language all the time.”
In fact, neither of us swear much, especially not on the radio, but for the next hour we found ourselves automatically speaking in very short, carefully scanned sentences, while avoiding each other’s eyes.
And then there were the readers, Gawd bless them. We must have signed hundreds of thousands of copies for them by now. The books are often well read to the point of physical disintegration; if we run across a shiny new copy, it’s usually because the owner’s previous five have been stolen by friends, struck by lightning or eaten by giant termites in Sumatra. You have been warned. Oh, and we understand there’s a copy in the Vatican library. It’d be nice to think so.
It’s been fun. And it continues.
And we say: We were just a couple of guys, okay? We still are. It was a summer job. We had a great time doing it, we split the money in half, and we swore never to do it again. We didn’t think it was important.
And, in a way, it still isn’t. “Good Omens” was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them. They weren’t even certain it would sell. They certainly didn’t know they were going to write the most repaired book in the world. (Believe us: We have signed a delightfully large number of paperbacks that have been dropped in the bath, gone a worrying brown color, got repaired with sticky tape and string, and, in one case, consisted entirely of loose pages in a plastic bag. On the other hand, there was the guy who’d had a special box made up of walnut and silver filigree, with the paperback nestling inside on black velvet. There were silver ruins on the lid. We didn’t ask.) Etiquette tip: It’s okay, more or less, to ask an author to sign your arm, but not good manners to then nip around to the tattoo parlor next door and return half an hour later to show them the inflamed result.
We didn’t know we’d do some signing tours that would be weird even by our generous standards, talking about humor in fifteen-second bursts in between newsflashes about the horrific hostage situation down at the local Burger King, being interviewed by an ill-prepared New York radio presenter who hadn’t got the message that “Good Omens” was a work of what we in the trade call “fiction,” and getting a stern pre-interview warning about swearing from the diminutive Director of Protocol of a public-service radio station “because you English use bad language all the time.”
In fact, neither of us swear much, especially not on the radio, but for the next hour we found ourselves automatically speaking in very short, carefully scanned sentences, while avoiding each other’s eyes.
And then there were the readers, Gawd bless them. We must have signed hundreds of thousands of copies for them by now. The books are often well read to the point of physical disintegration; if we run across a shiny new copy, it’s usually because the owner’s previous five have been stolen by friends, struck by lightning or eaten by giant termites in Sumatra. You have been warned. Oh, and we understand there’s a copy in the Vatican library. It’d be nice to think so.
It’s been fun. And it continues.
— “Foreword.” Good Omens. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. 2006.
