If Neil Gaiman Isn't On Top of This, He Should Be

As quite a few folks noted yesterday (hey, I was writing!) the BBC passed word along of the Library of Unwritten Books, which sounds awfully damn neat.

In Portsmouth recently, one day saw the pair collect stories from a man with cerebral palsy about education, a man who went on an anti-Hitler pilgrimage to Austria, someone who had done children's illustrations of a family of conkers but not yet written the story, and an author of Chinese philosophical poetry... The following day included a story from an 80-year-old woman whose father was born in 1876 and served on HMS Terrible. In a story that has all the hallmarks of a bestseller, her mother was originally engaged to one man--who went to war and was thought to have been killed. So her mother married another man--only for the original fiance to come home alive from China with a Chinese wedding shoe.