Neil Gaiman

We went to see Neil Gaiman ('gay-mun' instead of 'guy-mun'. People kept thinking I was saying 'Neil Diamond' when I mispronounced his name) this past weekend. The author of Stardust, the Sandman comics and Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett was in town to do a reading of his latest children's book, The Graveyard Book.


I'd never seen him before aside from his book jacket pictures and he was a very funny, engaging public speaker. We also received signed copies of The Graveyard Book with our tickets which was nice. He read Chapter 6 to us and now I'll have his accent in my head as I read the rest of the story. I envy him his imaginative story ideas. I wish my brain worked more like that. The Graveyard Book tells the story of a boy being brought up by dead people/ghosts/etc. in a graveyard. His family was killed by someone and is looking to kill him too. The chapter we got to hear was about the boy, Nobody Owens, aka, Bod, dealing with a couple of school bullies at school with his graveyard training ways. It was a pretty long chapter, especially read aloud like that, but it never felt boring. I was just worried he would leave us with a cliff-hanger and I would have to read the rest of the book on the way home. Thankfully, he did end the chapter with a mini-conclusion with only hints at the larger conflict ahead.

He's a very good public speaker. I'm sure the British accent helps. We got to preview clips of his next film from one of his books due out in February, Coraline. It's being done in stop motion animation by the same director that did Nightmare Before Christmas. I hadn't even heard about the book/film before then but I'm looking forward to it.

Then he answered some audience submitted questions. My favorite response he did was when he described the best advice someone had given him on the writing process. I don't remember who it was that had written it, but the suggestion was to have a room/place/mindset where you had a choice of either writing or doing absolutely nothing. That way you would still have a choice and avoid the automatic procrastination that comes with 'YOU MUST WRITE OR YOU FAIL' but if you do choose to do absolutely nothing, you'll get bored enough to start writing again. I think I'll have to adopt that mindset in our hobby room upstairs for this coming November.