"I did Barbie's dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York. Still, that would've been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he'd been following my graphic novel --which was being serialized in magazine at the time--and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, . He concluded, "We're like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel." I wrote back and said, "I think you're right. What's more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading , but I keep thinking I ought to return to it." Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: "Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story." With that encouragement, I began creating ."