My roommate is obsessed with Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust, and Coraline.  He got really pissed when I confused Gaiman with yet another Neil, Neil Stephenson, author of Snowcrash (the favorite book of all my nerdy and punky friends in high school).

I apologized but didn’t take it to heart because I didn’t think Gaiman was all that big of a deal — not enough, at least, to warrant my roommate’s obsession.

I was wrong, apparently.

Sci-fi nerds on the internet are super excited this month because Gaiman partnered with the BBC to run an experiment in creative fiction — on Twitter.  We’ve written about Twitter fiction before (here, here, and here), but this is different.  Gaiman tweeted the first sentence of a story, and then readers and Twitter users make up continuations to the story by tweeting under the hashtag #bbcawdio. Read more »