If there is no avoiding a moon then let it be a full one, a full one

a few minutes ago I read a thread of how a succession of unexpected events Butterfly effect style led to Michael Sheen as our favorite angel / librarian. So I start to think about what specific event led you to write this great work together with Mr Terry Pratchett. Maybe a burned out lightbulb in your study that made you rethink the little miracles of science and how an old witch could have predicted it?

PS: thank you very much for all your work. the world needs more series like goos ommens mr Gaiman ... it really needs them.

Hmm.

Well, in 1985 (I think) I spent 3 weeks doing a real job. I was the editor of Fitness Magazine between the leaving of an editor and the arrival of an editor. It was my job to write everything that the magazine needed that hadn't been written, and to organize all the things that had already been commissioned. (I was given the job because I'd been filling in for the assistant editor on a magazine at the next desk.) When the new editor turned up she was vaguely grateful and offered to buy anything I wrote for the magazine. Given that I had barely any interest in fitness at the best of times (although, in retrospect, I was probably at my fittest, not being able to afford a car or taxis, and walking and bussing everywhere in London) I wrote an article taking a whole load of literary works, including Winnie the Pooh and Lord of the Rings, and writing a short bit in their style about their fitness regimen. And one of them was Richmal Crompton's Just William character. The editor rejected the article suspecting (quite rightly) that the people who bought Fitness Magazine might feel the humour was aimed at them. And I never even tried to sell it to anyone else (who would I have sold it to?). But I remembered the pleasure of writing William fiction.

And then, the following year, I watched The Omen on late night TV. "Be funny if they got the baby swap wrong," I thought. "If the baby that the powers of Hell were keeping tabs on was a perfectly normal kid. And the Antichrist were growing up somewhere nice like the village in the William books..."

And that started to grow in my head. Then I was reading The Jew of Malta by Kit Marlowe, and it has a bit where the three (cartoonishly evil) Jews compare notes on all the well-poisoning and suchlike they'd done that day, and as a Jew who never quite gets his act together, it occurred to me that if I were the third Jew I'd just be apologizing for having failed to poison a well...

And suddenly I had the opening of a book. It would be called William the Antichrist. And it would begin with three Demons in a graveyard...