13/06/2013 Meet the Author

then her maternity leave can begin. Now it is time for this week's Meet

the Author. Normally we've fixed interviews with

-- normally we fix interviews for Meet the Author a few weeks in

advance but this interview has been in the back since January. That is

an indication of how hard Neil Gaiman works. He made his name in

the 80s and 90s with the Sandman series of comic books, a comic book

for intellectuals, according to Norman Mailer. Since then he has

written more comics, adult books, a couple of episodes of Doctor Who and

film scripts. His latest adult novel is called The Ocean At The End Of

The Lane. It is commonly says, his most personal work yet. -- it is, he

says, his most personal book yet. This is a novel about childhood but

it is very definitely not a novel for children. That is incredibly

true. Although it did have to decide why was writing to it was for. And

whether this was a children's book. Obviously, I'm known for children's

and adult fiction. Writing something with a certain amount of magic and

menace meant that guy -- meant that I had a 7-year-old antagonist and I

had to decide if it was for adults or children. And the protagonist,

there is amount of you in him. A bookish little boy. How much of it

is autobiographical? It is absolutely not autobiographical in

the sense that it happens to me. That would be alarming if it had!

And it is not autobiographical in the sense that the family is not my

family. But it is very close. Very close to my point of view. I've

wrote to the book because my wife was making a record. -- I'm wrote.

She was in Melbourne working on an album. # I've never been too good at

this kind of thing. # And so I wrote what started out as a short story

for her, and then it did not stop. What had in mind was something that

alter what I was like when I was seven, but it was like to look at

the world through her eyes -- through my eyes and what the

landscape by grew up in was like, because that is not there any more.

You cannot go back and see it because people have built houses on

it. Why began describing this thing using elements of fantasy that I had

one was a small kids. Using an anecdote that occurred about when

was my 40s. I discovered that we had a lodger who killed himself using

our car. I never knew about that and a piece of information, I thought,

what would have happened if it had had strange reverberations. I've

created a story out of that. works as a full-length novel but it

seems surprising that something that finished could have developed out of

something that you originally thought was a short story. It is,

and it surprised me. Does it happen to you often? No. Normally have a

good idea of what I'm doing. When I wrote American gods, I knew what I

was writing. Now I am writing a big, thick novel. Writing the graveyard

book, I went in with structure. I knew there were going to be eight

short stories and they would take place two years apart and they would

have this and that. With The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, I started

writing a short story and I was unsure as to whether it was going.

But it was a short story so I did not need to worry. I knew would get

their fairly quickly. At the beginning, was it a book about

amnesiac? It is about that but it is largely about the inability that

adults have two remember what it is like to be a child and to see the

world as a child. Memory has fascinated me for years, childhood

memory. In this book, I also wanted to hold on to something that I'm

remembered as a kid, which was reading children's books. I would

read these books and I would think, you have no idea what it is like to

be a kid. How can you not remember? And I was promising myself that when

I grew up I would write children's books, and I would remember what it

was like to be a kid. But in this case, what started to fascinate me

more and more as I was writing it was, what did it mean to be a kid?

What was the difference? If you were talking to an audience of adults

about being a kid, there is a point in their at one point when I start

talking about the different ways that you travel. And I would stick

to pads, and I've would look for parts. Kids look for strange

alternative routes. They look for escape routes and more interesting

ways. You go onto the road Denver sent through the back. That is how

children travel. It is an enormous part of what I'd try to write about.

The lads give up the book is East Sussex Grimstead. Your father was

working for the Church of Scientology. Are you as much -- are

you or have you ever been a Scientologist? I know no that I'm

not. Did you lose the faith?I think I am a writer. For me, what

fascinates me most is possibilities. Ideas. Even as an idea, -- even as a

kid, I had so many... There were so many religious backgrounds going on.

I was at a Church of England school. I was a reader of science-fiction

fantasy, so everything became one glorious morass, Apple among niche

of police. -- a blancmanage of belief. You write a huge range of

work, work for children and adults, and have you ever thought of doing

what Iain Banks did and actually adopt a different persona, for

different genres, for serious writing like this, and then genre

writing? I could become Neil M Gaiman! I have always wanted

everything I do to have my name on it and to be made -- and to be me.

Even when in terms of marketing, it is the wrong thing to do. This

often, I have a book called Fortunately The Milk coming out,

which is a children's book about time travel. It is about a time

travelling stegosaurus in a hot-air balloon and it has aliens and

madness and it is the funniest in I have written. It is coming out in

the same year that The Ocean At The End Of The Lane comes out. It is the