He wondered if he had his own pocket universe somewhere, hung with webs and scuttling, industrious, storytelling spiders. He did not know. He was not sure where to look for it, if he did have one. His father would have known, of course...

The sky was the colour of beaten copper, and the earth was sandy and grey, and everything smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg.There had to be a way out.That was obvious.Ways in, ways out. He picked a direction, and did not run. Instead, he strolled, but he covered a lot of ground like that. Spider strolled like some people zoomed.

There was a large bird on a bush looking at him. The bird said, "Spider.You know you're never going to escape from here."

Spider said, "I'll bet you all I own that I shall. And that you'll show me how to get away."

Birds can't smirk, they don't have the equipment, but this one almost managed it. "All you own?"

"Everything, if you don't show me the way out. So please, show me the way out of here."

"Never," said the bird.

"Close your eyes," said Spider, "And count to ten. I promise that by the time you've finished counting you'll have pointed me to the way out of here."

The bird closed its eyes. "One," it said. "Two.Three. Four."

With one twist, Spider broke its neck, and it stopped counting. "Still, I wouldn't want you to think me a liar," said Spider to the bird. He plucked it, and set the feathers to one side, then he made a small fire in the earth, roasted and ate the meat, cleaned off the bones, and, last of all, he cast the bones onto the sand.

They fell higgledy-piggledy, every which way. Spider scooped them up again. "Remember," he said, "You can't lie when you're dead."This time when he cast the bones they pointed unequivocally in one direction.

"That's what I like," said Spider. "Someone who honours his bets."

He put the bird's feathers on, and walked to the top of a hill. Ahead of him was a tear in the sky, a small rip in the coppery fabric of everything, and darkness spilled through it, and behind the darkness stars were twinkling. Spider no longer cared that it was uncool to run. Now he ran.

As he reached the bottom of the hill, birds descended around him.

"Stop!" they called.

He stopped. "I'm a bird," he told them. "Just like you." Even in the Bird Woman's universe, he was certain that he had enough conviction to make the things he said true for those that heard them.

"What manner of bird are you?" asked a heron, puzzled. "An emu? An ostrich? A moa?"

"Yeah. Sure. Something like that," said Spider. "Hey, have any of you seen Spider anywhere? I heard that he had escaped, and I was told to guard the way out of here."

"We're looking for him too," said an eagle. "Haven't seen him, though. Actually, we thought you might be him, when we saw you coming towards us."

"No, you didn't," said Spider. "You thought I was just another bird."

"Oh. Right.That was what we thought," agreed the heron.

"So.You lot all wait here, and guard the way out," said Spider. "And I'll just put my head through there and make sure that he hasn't got here ahead of us."

Spider walked forward. He walked through the rip in the sky.

Ahead of him he could see an island. He could see a small mountain in the centre of the island. He could see a pure blue sky, and swaying palm trees, a white gull high in the sky. But even as he saw it the world seemed to be receding. It was as if he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It shrank and slipped from him, and the more he ran towards it the further away it seemed to get.

The island was a reflection in a puddle of water, and then it was nothing at all.

He was in a cave.The edges of things were crisp-crisper and sharper than anywhere that Spider had ever been before. This was a different kind of place.The feather she had worn fell to the rocky floor. He turned to the daylight.

She was standing in the mouth of the cave, between him and the open air. She had stared into his face in a Greek Restaurant in South London, and birds had come from her mouth.

"You know," said Spider, "I was just in your world. And I have to say, you've got the strangest ideas about hospitality. You come to my world, I'd make you dinner, open a bottle of wine, put on some soft music, give you an evening you would never forget."

Her face was impassive; carved from black rock it was. The wind tugged at the edges of her old brown coat. She spoke then, her voice high and distant as the wrenching call of a distant gull.

"I took you," she said. "Now, you will call him."

"Call him? Call who?"

"You will bleat," she said."You will whimper.Your fear will excite him."

"Spider does not bleat," he said. He was not certain it was true.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his.They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

"If you kill me," said Spider, "my curse will be upon you." He wondered if he actually had a curse. He probably did.

"It will not be I that kills you," she said. She raised her hand, and it was not a hand but a raptor's talon. She raked her talon down his face, down his chest, her cruel claws sinking into his flesh, ripping his skin.

It did not hurt, although Spider knew that it would hurt soon enough.

Beads of blood crimsoned his chest and dripped down his face. His eyes stung. His blood touched his lips. He could taste it and smell the iron scent of it.

"Now," she said in the cries of distant birds. "Now your death begins."

Spider said, "We're both reasonable entities. Let me present you with a perhaps rather more feasible alternative scenario that might conceivably have benefits for both of us." He said it with an easy smile. He said it convincingly.

"You talk too much," she said. Then she reached into his mouth with her sharp talons, and with one wrenching movement she tore out his tongue.

"There," she said. And then she said, "Sleep."

E-BOOK EXTRA TWO HOW DARE YOU?

By Neil Gaiman NOBODY'S ASKED THE QUESTION I'VE BEEN DREADING,so far, the question I have been hoping that no-one would ask. So I'm going to ask it myself, and try to answer it myself.

And the question is this: How dare you?

Or, in its expanded form, How dare you, an Englishman, try and write a book about America, about American myths and the American soul? How dare you try and write about what makes America special, as a country, as a nation, as an idea?

And, being English, my immediate impulse is to shrug my shoulders and promise it won't happen again.

But then, I did dare, in my novelAmerican Gods , and it took an odd sort of hubris to write it.

As a young man, I wrote a comic-book about dreams and stories called Sandman (collected, and still in print, in ten graphic novels, and you should read it if you haven't). I got a similar question all the time, back then: "You live in England. How can you set so much of this story in America?"

And I would point out that, in media terms, the UK was practically the 51st state.We get American films, watch American TV. "I might not write a Seattle that would satisfy an inhabitant," I used to say, "But I'll write one as good as a New Yorker who's never been to Seattle."

I was, of course, wrong. I didn't do that at all. What I did instead was, in retrospect, much more interesting: I created an America that was entirely imaginary, in which Sandman could take place. A delirious, unlikely place out beyond the edge of the real.

And that satisfied me until I came to live in America about eight years ago.

Slowly I realised both that the America I'd been writing was wholly fictional, and that the real America, the one underneath the what-you-see-is-what-you-get surface, was much more interesting than the fictions.

The immigrant experience is, I suspect, a universal one (even if you're the kind of immigrant, like me, who holds on tightly, almost superstitiously, to his UK citizenship). On the one hand, there's you, and on the other hand, there's America. It's bigger than you are. So you try and make sense of it.You try to figure it out-something which it resists. It's big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out.As a writer, all I could do was to describe a small part of the whole.

And it was too big to see.

I didn't really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself in Reykjavik, in Iceland. And it was then that fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure, came together in my head. Either way, the book came into focus. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed.

I wanted to write about America as a mythic place.

And I decided that, although there were many things in the novel I knew already, there were more I could find by going on the road and seeing what I found. So I drove, until I found a place to write, and then, in one place after another, sometimes at home, sometimes not, for nearly two years, I put one word after another, until I had a book. The story of a man called Shadow and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison. It tells the story of a small Midwestern town and the disappearances that occur there every winter. I discovered, as I wrote it, why roadside attractions are the most sacred places in America. I discovered many other strange by-ways and moments, scary and delightful and just plain weird.

When it was almost done, when all that remained was to pull together all the diverse strands, I left the country again, holed up in a huge, cold, old house in Ireland, and typed all that was left to type, shivering, beside a peat fire.

And then the book was done, and I stopped. Looking back on it, it wasn't really that I'd dared, rather that I had had no choice.

2005 Neil Gaiman.

E-BOOK EXTRA THREE WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

By Neil Gaiman EVERY PROFESSION HAS ITS PITFALLS.Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. And writers are asked where we get our ideas from.

In the beginning, I used to tell people the not very funny answers, the flip ones: "From the Idea-of-the-Month Club," I'd say, or "From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis," "From a dusty old book full of ideas in my basement," or even "From Pete Atkins." (The last is slightly esoteric, and may need a little explanation. Pete Atkins is a screenwriter and novelist friend of mine, and we decided a while ago that when asked, I would say that I got them from him, and he'd say he got them from me. It seemed to make sense at the time.) Then I got tired of the not very funny answers, and these days I tell people the truth: "I make them up," I tell them. "Out of my head."

People don't like this answer. I don't know why not.They look unhappy, as if I'm trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there's a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I'm not telling them how it's done.

And of course I'm not. Firstly, I don't know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they'll stop. Secondly, I doubt anyone who asks really wants a three hour lecture on the creative process. And thirdly, the ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Every published writer has had it-the people who come up to you and tell you that they've Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It's such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It.The proposal is always the same-they'll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

I'm reasonably gracious with these people. I tell them, truly, that I have far too many ideas for things as it is, and far too little time. And I wish them the best of luck.

The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder.And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

But still, it's the question people want to know. In my case, they also want to know if I get them from my dreams. (Answer: no. Dream logic isn't story logic. Transcribe a dream, and you'll see. Or better yet, tell someone an important dream-"Well, I was in this house that was also my old school, and there was this nurse and she was really an old witch and then she went away but there was a leaf and I couldn't look at it and I knew if I touched it then something dreadful would happen..."-and watch their eyes glaze over.) And I don't give straight answers. Until recently.

My daughter Holly, who is seven years of age, persuaded me to come in to give a talk to her class. Her teacher was really enthusiastic ("The children have all been making their own books recently, so perhaps you could come along and tell them about being a professional writer.And lots of little stories.They like the stories.") and in I came.

They sat on the floor, I had a chair, fifty seven-year-old-eyes gazed up at me. "When I was your age, people told me not to make things up," I told them. "These days, they give me money for it." For twenty minutes I talked, then they asked questions.

And eventually one of them asked it.

"Where do you get your ideas?"

And I realized I owed them an answer. They weren't old enough to know any better. And it's a perfectly reasonable question, if you aren't asked it weekly.

This is what I told them: You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just,What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term-but you didn't know who?) Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.) And then there are the others: I wonder... ("I wonder what she does when she's alone...") and If This Goes On... ("If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...") and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ("Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?")...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ("Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?") are one of the places ideas come from.

An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.

Sometimes an idea is a person ("There's a boy who wants to know about magic"). Sometimes it's a place ("There's a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is..."). Sometimes it's an image ("A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.") Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven't come together before. ("If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a were- wolf?") All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea-which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin-what then?

Well, then you write.You put one word after another until it's finished-whatever it is.

Sometimes it won't work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

I remember, some years ago, coming up with a perfect idea for a Sandman story. It was about a succubus who gave writers and artists and songwriters ideas in exchange for some of their lives. I called it "Sex and Violets."

It seemed a straightforward story, and it was only when I came to write it I discovered it was like trying to hold fine sand: every time I thought I'd got hold of it, it would trickle through my fingers and vanish.

I wrote at the time: I've started this story twice, now, and got about half-way through it each time, only to watch it die on the screen.

Sandman is, occasionally, a horror comic. But nothing I've written for it has ever gotten under my skin like this story I'm now going to have to wind up abandoning (with the deadline already a thing of the past). Probably because it cuts so close to home. It's the ideas-and the ability to put them down on paper, and turn them into stories-that make me a writer. That mean I don't have to get up early in the morning and sit on a train with people I don't know, going to a job I despise.

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn't been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.