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"When I first heard about virtual reality I thought: is there any other kind?"

Yesterday, I posted my piece about Alan Moore's current work-in-progress, an epic prose novel called Jerusalem. As we talked for an hour, there was a huge amount of material I couldn't include in the magazine article, so here's the full Q&A. There are "spoilers" for Jerusalem in the first half, in so far as such a concept makes sense in this context. , when I'd passed the two-thirds mark, was already over half a million words. He said: "You know, that is bigger than the Bible." So I was quite pleased with that. I'm just hoping everybody else will confuse quantity with quality. It's undoubtedly a very big book.

So is it going to be a million when you're done?

Three-quarters, I'm guessing. This final section of the book, the third section - I decided that I wanted to push the narrative further, so that it didn't seem like it was getting tired.

These last chapters, they're all quite difficult in their way. Their length can vary but the Lucia Joyce chapter, that was the one that forced me to take up publishing Dodgem Logic for 18 months.

It's the longest chapter in the book, it ran to about 35 single spaced pages and it's all completely unfathomable. It's all written in a completely invented sub-Joycian text. I read it through again, and I can actually understand most of it . . . no, I can understand all of it. It is the only way that I could have written that stuff. It was an experiment.

The previous chapter that I just finished a little while ago was all in the form of a Samuel Beckett play. With Samuel Beckett himself as a character - and Thomas Becket, just make the narrative more confusing - [and] John Clare and John Bunyan and various other characters all appearing as ghosts.

It's a little play set under the portico of a gothic church in Northampton. There is actually relevance to that, Samuel Beckett was actually a visitor to Northampton. The first time he came here was when he played cricket against Northampton.

There's a cricket ground at the bottom of the road where I'm living - it's actually mentioned in Wisden's Almanac , that Samuel Beckett did play against Northampton, and on that particular night all of his team mates decided to go out visiting the numerous pubs and prostitutes, which Northampton (after the boots and shoes) was primarily famous for. Beckett didn't fancy that so he just decided to go out on a church crawl. I'm restaging that as part of my little play in chapter 29.