1602, your most evocatively weird nightmares author explained that a previous appearance’s aphorism that “Writers need to find their way to boredom to inspire creativity,” only applies if you’re not actively terrified at the same time. Calling living under stifling COVID precautions like “being locked in the cellar with a bomb—and several poisonous snakes,” Gaiman said that he’d been talking more about being stuck on the tube when the world isn’t embroiled in self-devouring madness so that your creative mind can wander, happily untroubled that it might be killed at any moment. Advertisement Gaiman, asked about what it’s like for an author of the fantastical and fictional to live for a year in a world “that seems so beyond what anyone could have imagined,” Gaiman scoffed that he’d have never published anything as “unconvincing” as the current one. “It’s my job to be convincing,” clarified Gaiman, while bemoaning the fact that reality can do any crazy thing it wants without concern that all the ludicrous, violent, seditious, tragic things it tosses out will have to make sense in the end. (Gaiman rolls his eyes at the thought that he’d ever pen “that Trump character.”)