Neil Gaiman Lost a Friend _ A sad tale

I got this from Neil Gaiman's blog and it is so beautifully written I was mush by the time i finished:

Being Alive. Mostly about Diana.

I'm in the UK right now, in the middle of nowhere, working on Monkey, about to go offline for a few days.

She's been my friend since about 1985, but I was a fan of hers since I read Charmed Life in about 1978, aged 18. I've loved being her friend, and I'm pretty sure she loved being my friend. She was the funniest, wisest, fiercest, sharpest person I've known, a witchy and wonderful woman, intensely practical, filled with opinions, who wrote the best books about magic, who wrote the finest and most perceptive letters, who hated the telephone but would still talk to me on it if I called, albeit, always, nervously, as if she expected the phone she was holding to explode.


I came over to do three things: to give the BBC a day to promote Episode Four of the next season of Doctor Who, which I have written; to see Hilary Bevan Jones, a wonderful producer with whom I've been working for years, about a couple of things; and to see Diana Wynne Jones.

Thursday I was interviewed about Doctor Who all day. Mostly the interviews would go like this:

Them: "So, can you tell us the title of the episode?" Me: "No."

It was a fun but sometimes frustrating day.

She adopted me when I was a 24 year old writer for magazines of dubious respectability, and spent the next 25 years being proud of me as I made art that she liked (and, sometimes, I didn't. She'd tell me what she thought, and her opinions and criticism were brilliant and precise and honest, and if she said "Yee-ees. I thought you made a bit of a mess of that one," then I probably had, so when she really liked something it meant the world to me).

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