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...
NEILâS BLOG ENTRY ABOUT GOOD OMENS SEASON 2
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 didnât 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.
Iâd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, âWhat time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.â
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 wasnât ever a good time.
But we never forgot it.
Itâs been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means itâs 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 â thatâs where our angels came from.)
[Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.]
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 Jamesâ 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, thatâs not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglasâs 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, Â Rob Wilkins (Terryâs 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.
[Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.]
Iâd been a fan of John Finnemoreâs 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.
(Hereâs 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. Hereâs the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemoreâs bits too.)
I asked John if heâd 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 thatâs the plan. Weâve 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 weâre shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we canât 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 youâve 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 Aziraphaleâs bookshop.
(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying âLet there be Lightâ.)
this has been  on my computer since july and i finally colored it in order to avoid doing things i should be doing. the file was saved as âcompositional choicesâ for reasons that shall remain a mystery đ
I don't know why, but I feel like Aziraphale would decide to keep bees at some point and I'm just imagining him in a little beekeeper's outfit all decked out.
Aziraphale would love bees, youâre right and you should say it.
Also, what better way to help Crowleyâs garden along at their cottage than to put in a couple of hives? Free pollination, free honey, free bees. He definitely talks to them.
He doesnât even NEED the suit, he just thinks itâs cute.
we have all these posts about Crowleyâs gardening methods freaking out the neighbors, canât believe we have so severely underrated the freakiness potential of Aziraphale standing in the garden covered in bees, chatting cheerfully away with them, turning around to greet you just a second before you actually come into view and explaining, âoh, they told me you were coming!â
âOur Sideâ and âNew Accoutermentsâ - Digital Oil Paintings
Crowley undid the bow tie. ^_^ I like the idea of Aziraphale wearing things that show his allegiance to Crowley after the Notpocolypse, so he has tiger eye cufflinks that look like Crowleyâs snake eyes and heâs now wearing a snake ring with a canary diamond on his ring finger. I love how casually happy they look, Aziraphaleâs eyes are my favorite, I really wanted them to look ethereal.
Please see the notes for my links, bear in mind that reblogging the links version of this post is very important while Tumblr is excluding all links from searches.
To the story that has changed my life, Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, David and Michael, and all of the cast and crew of one of my all time favorite shows, HAPPY 30TH ANNIVERSARY GOOD OMENS!! đđđ
This fandom is truly something special. It's amazing to me how many incredible and talented people I have met and become friends with through the story of a kind demon and a bastard angel. I really can't express just how much Good Omens and all of you reading this mean to me. Thank you all for your support, kindness, and love. TO THE WORLD MY DARLINGS!! đđđ
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