Neil Gaiman’s limo driver got lost after arriving in Portsmouth on June 22, and so the English author received an impromptu tour of the city. That night, he told an adoring crowd at The Music Hall that he had been especially fascinated by “a large submarine parked in a ditch.” Gaiman was referring, of course, to the U.S.S. Albacore, the Navy vessel-turned-museum on Market Street. 

This was just the sort of bizarre cultural phenomenon that would have fit naturally in Gaiman’s 2001 fantasy-horror novel “American Gods.” The book is filled with colorful descriptions of strange American customs—like parking cars on a frozen pond and taking bets on when they will break through the ice. 

In the 10 years since “American Gods” was published, Gaiman has been keeping a mental list of other American curiosities, many of which will work their way into a planned sequel. The mere mention of a follow-up to “American Gods” was enough to make the audience giddy. But the idea that a local landmark could conceivably make it into the text was pure magic. 

“In my head and, to some extent, even in reality, there is a large box in which I’m putting stuff that’s going to go into ‘American Gods 2,’” Gaiman said. “I don’t know that the Albacore is going to go in there,” he added to hopeful applause.

Gaiman appeared in the Writers on a New England Stage series, The Music Hall’s collaboration with New Hampshire Public Radio, RiverRun Bookstore and Yankee Magazine. He read from the 10th anniversary edition of “American Gods,” which came out on June 21, before sitting down for an interview with NHPR’s Virginia Prescott.

Gaiman, coincidentally, is from the city of Portsmouth in Hampshire County, England. He moved to the United States in the early 1990s and rose to prominence with his long-running DC comic book series “The Sandman.” Among his other novels is “Coraline,” which was made into a stop-motion film in 2009.

“American Gods” captured the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards in 2002. It follows a man named Shadow who, after being released from prison, meets a mysterious man named Wednesday and agrees to become his bodyguard. Shadow and his new employer travel the country meeting with strange, mythological figures and ancient deities, as well as the new gods of modern amenities like computers and telephones. There is a war brewing between the new and old gods, and Shadow has an esoteric part to play in the battle.

At The Music Hall, Gaiman described working on the book in solitude at the Florida home of his friend Tori Amos. He recalled toiling through bouts of writer’s block—a term, he admitted, writers invented as an excuse for getting stuck (author Ann Patchett had given a remarkably similar assessment of writer’s block at The Music Hall less than two weeks earlier). 

Asked how he deals with writer’s block, Gaiman said he has two primary methods. One is to simply write through it, even if that means churning out just 200 words a day. The other is having plenty of different projects to keep him busy. 

“I like having something else, so that when I get stuck, I can go and work on the thing that I’m not stuck on,” he said.

One of Gaiman’s more recent projects was authoring an episode of “Doctor Who,” a sci-fi series he’s been watching devoutly since he was not quite 4 years old. He said talking with head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat about the episode left him “as happy as it was possible to be.” 

“The feeling of sheer power when I wrote that script, the first time I wrote the words ‘interior Tardis, control room,’ I thought, ‘This must be how God feels,’” he said to thunderous applause from the sci-friendly room.

Gaiman’s mania for all things divine and supernatural came across in just about every topic he addressed at The Music Hall—albeit with a deliberate sense of humor. He called the inter-library loan system “the ultimate power” and referred to librarians as “guardians of knowledge.” 

Named honorary chairman of National Library Week in 2010, Gaiman said he was repeatedly forced to defend the relevance of libraries in the digital age. One interviewer asked him why we still need libraries when we have the Internet.

“Look, Google will bring you back 100 million answers. A librarian will bring you back the correct one,” he answered.

Much has changed in the 10 years since “American Gods” first hit bookshelves. It was originally published on June 19, 2001, just a few months before the 9/11 attacks, and Gaiman did his first signing of the novel at a Borders bookstore inside the World Trade Center. Recent events have made the book seem even more prescient, he said, and new social media gods like Twitter have emerged. Gaiman, himself, has 1.6 million followers on Twitter, though he said the platform has its pros and cons.

“I think ‘American Gods 2’ is going to have a lot more about the new gods, a lot more about the weird, cutting-edge technology stuff,” he said. “I think I want to write about attention spans, shorter attention spans, the upside and the downside of things like Twitter.”

But, overall, the fantastical world portrayed in “American Gods” is still intact, Gaiman said. America is still a place that eschews magic in favor of practicality, and yet it’s brimming with all kinds of weird stuff, like submarines in ditches. 

“Truthfully, I think, the fundamental mythological and cultural underpinnings of ‘American Gods’ haven’t changed, particularly,” Gaiman said. “If they had, I don’t think it would be in print 10 years later. It wouldn’t be a book that’s getting its 10th anniversary issue, because it wouldn’t be as relevant.”