Lounging

The actual first day–and the actual date of the first year anniversary for The Wife and I–was spent not doing much of anything except lounging by the pool where I foolishly applied sunblock only to my shoulders and back, neglecting my arms and legs. If you think “He’s going to pay for that later” you’d be right, but that’s for tomorrow’s entry. This entry is about sitting by a pool in a sunny, tropical cove with blue, blue ocean water and Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys as reading material.

Being an aspiring novelist who worships Neil-O, I immediately was overcome with a terrific inferiority complex and a deep, abiding feeling of “Why bother,” but at the same time, the need to tell stories burns as brightly as ever.

It’s just incredibly humbled right now.

Just Like A Dream. Too Much Like One, In Fact.

It’s a strange thing how supposedly “irrelevant” artists in other fields such as comics are actually getting more and more prominence as Hollywood looks for more areas to mine in its ceaseless, never ending appetite for new properties to present on the screen. However, the genesis of Mirrormask is probably one of the happier circumstances as it’s not exactly a voracious Hollywood meat-grinder that came across Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean so much as the strangely comforting, felt covered embraced of the Muppet Factory, The Jim Henson Company.

But I think it’s a good thing–which of course is rife with the potential for abuse, just look at any video game based movie by Uwe Bolle to see what I mean–although I think it’s pretty clear that what there’s a reason most people aren’t Leonardo DaVinci; it’s extremely difficult to be that good at so many things, even when they’re interrelated.

That’s what I thought when I watched Mirrormask which is original and engaging in many, many ways, but trips up somewhat at the fundamental level of narrative in film. It is, all things considered, an amazing first effort by Dave McKean as director who up until this point had only directed his short films, so the fact that it comes off as enjoyable but flawed speaks much of his potential as a director; if he did this well when he was basically clueless and learning the ropes, his work will be much more powerful as he becomes an assured hand at it.

The visuals themselves… well, there’s no getting around it, this is like wandering around inside the cover of an issue of The Sandman. It’s a pretty safe bet that viewers will see things they have never seen or imagined every three minutes. The originality of McKean’s vision shines through and through. The same holds true to a lesser degree for the narrative, written of course, by Neil-O. For people who follow his writing faithfully, the are a few Neil-isms to be recognized here and there, but writing for film is a different beast from writing for comics or novels and I think the inexperience of Neil-O in this area shows somewhat.

There are many parallels between this and the Henson’s other famous “girl in another world” film, Labyrinth; both films feature a troubled girl, uncomfortable with her life and “normal” world, wishing to escape it, and, by thoughtlessly uttering a phrase, placing a loved in a peril that necessitates traveling to another world largely composed of objects familiar to the girl blown up into strange, dreamlike context, from which she learns more about herself and lessons about life even as she undertakes her quest with friends that end up betraying her and then redeeming themselves.

However, the predecessor, Labyrinth though no match for Mirrormask in the visuals department, edges it out slightly in terms of structure and pace. I think the chief problem for me is that although both Labyrinth and Mirrormask have “vignette” events–strange, unexpected situations and characters the show how off kilter the world is–Mirrormask seems almost too random in its events. It’s an odd thing to say, because while in both movies these random events do push the story forward, Labyrinth’s strangeness feels more organic, more natural, and the consequences that result from those encounters also feel logical within the context of the story. Mirrormask on the other hand seems to occasionally feel like the incredible sights and characters were thought of for their own sake, and then had narrative devices cobbled onto them to justify their existence in the film. It also feels sometimes like there’s much more to the film that we’re not seeing. The film flows for the most part, but occasionally, the cuts between events feels as if we’ve missed something as if in the journey from point A to B, there was an event we might have benefitted from that we missed out on.

In the end it almost feels as if Neil-O had gone a bit too overboard on the dream logic in the narrative and presented a series of events that, like a dream, dont’ necessarily connect to each other in a smooth and meaningful way, but when you’re talking a movie, especially one for children of all ages, that arbitrary, unexplained nature of dream events doesn’t always carry over so well.

Still, the performances were good, with not a single bad actor in the lot, though I hesitate to say that anyone was really amazing. The character of Valentine stole the show, though if I would have to pick out anyone/thing as a favorite, it would have to be Sphinxes and Griffens. All the winged, cat-like creatures with human faces were some of the most unsettling things I’ve seen in years, and the fact that they had varying levels of speaking ability made them that much creepier.

Neil-O Makes His Presence Known Once More

Though not in the way I expected.

I was trolling through his blog as usual, envying him and wishing I was Neil-O instead of just plain ol’ me, when I noticed that one of his posts was from Singapore. Apparently while he was here back in July, he also paid a visit to the Cat Welfare society and they got him to sign some shirts. Those shirts are now up for auction. After going through the links, I was pleasantly surprised to encounter this:




























The reason the shirt took me by surprise is because the illustration on it is done by none other than The Wife. When I showed it to her, we both kind of freaked out in a good way. Looks like she can now say she’s gotten two things signed by Neil-O…

Neil-O Speaketh

As promised, here is the article with the questions I managed to fire off to Neil-O when he came down to Singapore over the course of July 4th-6th. Since it’s a small, local Singapore publication, odds are you will never see this article outside of the island, so enjoy this semi-exclusive content, and thanks to GameAxis for not caring what I did with it after it went to print…

Neil Gaiman AKA The Geek King

If you’re ANY kind of comic book geek, I’m totally wasting this space, but just in case you’re not… Neil Gaiman is one of the breakthrough writers of comics. While some may argue that his work is not as “important” as Alan Moore or Frank Miller, there’s no denying that he has been far more commercially successful. His very weird and very literary Sandman comics grabbed the much coveted female readership that no one had been able to touch. Then he went off and started writing novels and won awards for that. Now he’s getting into films, so with all this stuff going on, what’s next for the guy?

When he came to Singapore over the course of July 4th-6th, here’s what was dug up…

GameAxis: What about your involvement in video games? Writers like Clive Barker and Orson Scott Card have contributed to stories for games, why not you?

Neil: I’m such a Typhoid Mary when it comes to games. All through the early to late 90’s, nice people would come to me and say, “Video game!” and I’d go, “Absolutely!” and they’d say, “Brilliant! Here are our wonderful new offices, here is your contract, here’s a brand new computer for you, and we’ll fly you somewhere for long conversations with sparkling water in designer bottles, and you will talk to our top geeks!” And I would fly out there and we would have these great conversations and I would go back and then… I’d phone them up a week later and say “Well, I’m ready to roll!” and they’d say, “Actually, they’ve just come in this morning to close us down.” And after that happened three or four times, I started feeling like maybe I just wasn’t meant to be doing video games. I still feel bad about several new companies run by very nice people… I have jackets with their logos on them… Maybe one day someone will do some E-Bay collection of out of business video game companies.

GameAxis: What about you as a gamer? Do you play?

Neil: I love video games, I love video gaming. I sort of reveal my grumpy old man colors when people ask what my favorite video game ever was. And I tell them it was the very, very first, original Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy text based game, because the graphics were best, being all in your head. But also I think because that was the first game I ever got absolutely addicted to. It was that moment of waking up one morning, realizing that I’d been playing it in my head all night, and I had just solved something. I was like “Whoa, I can do that…”

GameAxis: But then there’s all that Gee Whiz CG Wizardry in Beowulf…

Neil: Beowulf is a film I wrote in 1997, with Roger Avary, who did Killing Zoe, and Rules of Attraction and co-wrote Pulp Fiction. We wrote this as a live-action movie, and it’s gone through various vizzi, viccis… vicissitudes—not really a Monday morning word… and then it was just about to be made as this low budget, live action film, when Robert Zemeckis came along and said he’d always loved our script for Beowulf. And wanted to do an adult film, having done Polar Express, he’d done this sort of 3D motion capture technology, figured that it was time to try and take that on a level, and do something with it for adults. And so bought our script, and that goes into production… actually, it’s in production now, but they’ll capture the performances of Anthony Hopkins and all of those people in October. But one of the things that’s fun about that is because all the characters are digitized and all this, they actually will be creating the game at the same time. So there should be a Beowulf game at the same time as there’s a Beowulf movie, and with luck, my curse on video game companies will finally be ended, before someone else gets dragged down, [like] Electronic Arts going down with the ship…

Being Famous Means Repeating Yourself. Ad Nauseum.

I’ve been spending some minutes in between writing doing stuff like stalking Alan Moore and Neil-O on the internet again, doing stuff like reading their interviews. Neil-O is definitely the easier of the two to stalk since on his blog, he actually has links (Assuming you’re willing to slog through his archives) to websites and other places that have taken the time to compile the various articles and interviews he has given over the years.

I was kind of curious about this, because on day two of Neil-O palooza one guy was telling me after his one on one interview with Neil-O that the guy never repeated himself, which completely floored me as I’d expected that this was impossible. It turns out it is.

This is not to defame Neil-O in any way, but it just seemed inhuman to me that someone could find a way to answer the same question differently every time it was asked, and I was grateful for confirmation that Neil-O is indeed mortal when I started noticing the same answers being given for various interviews over the years.

And really, I can’t blame the guy.

I mean, if you’re going to have different people over the course of your career always asking similar questions, it’s just logical that you’re going to start giving the same answer, because A) a well versed answer comes off as extremely clever once you’ve nailed down the phrasing and B) there are only so many ways you can fumble through “Where do you get your ideas from?” before it starts getting really, really old.

In the near-miraculous event that I ever find myself in a situation where I am interviewed and people are asking me questions, I’m not sure how I’m going to answer most of the questions, but I have this mean spirited idea in my head that the high-falutin’ literary questions will be answered with total agreement. IE:

Interview 1:

Interviewer: It seems that The Pale Summer your message is essentially an existentialist one, espousing themes of choice and control of one’s life.

Me: Yup, you got it. That’s good, I wasn’t sure anyone was going to see that.

Interview 2:

Interviewer: Face it, The Pale Summer was your ode to fatalism, wasn’t it? I could see it all over the plot.

Me: Yup, you got it! That’s good, I wasn’t sure anyone would notice that.

I figure after about 10 interviews someone is going to finally realize what I’m up to and sue me.

It has been another boring, yet remarkably productive day. Momentum continues to push the novel along, and it’s still coming out like I’d hoped, with the occasional surprise here and there.

55, 000+ words. Wow, only 45, 000 words left to spend. There’s a chance this thing might actually be done by the end of August.

And then the line edit and the rewriting.

Oh.

Joy.

You Know Your Priorities Are Seriously Out Of Whack When…

You wake up to start the day and make sure that before you get around to doing anything else, you finally get in a sufficiently big chunk of novel written to make sure you can rest easy thinking you finally did a decent amount for once.

While that may be admirable in the “Aw, he’s so dedicated to his craft, he really is a struggling novelist!” sort of way, it kind of puts me horribly behind schedule. To wit, I have:

1) Struggled with and only just now finished the latest revision to The Script That Wouldn’t End.

2) Been told I’ve been offered another article to write for GameAxis that is due on Friday, in addition to the the news article I give them normally every month.

3) Been told that I can also tack on 1 pager section to my Neil Gaiman article with reccommends on my five favorite Neil-O comics. And no, I’m not allowed to simply throw in the first or last five Sandman TPBs. I am dead sure, however, that at least two will be in there…

4) Have been told by the fiance that Maxim Singapore is now interested in having me write a couple of articles for them, so whee! Looks like I will soon be able to add Maxim to the list of rags I’ve shamelessly whored myself to.

5) Have a ONE FUCKING HOUR documentary script that is supposed to be done by Friday, and that is scariest of all, since I was supposed to have it done on Wednesday, but due to the Script That Wouldn’t Die, got pushed back more and more and more. My thinking now is I will just lay out a rough structure, throw in huge gaps everywhere with [To Be Researched In Detail] in all the empty spaces and then randomly jump from section to section filling out actual voice over sequences as best I can to give them an idea of general style and flow. Then just hope to hell that’ll be enough to buy me some time to flesh it out properly.

Oh, right, and make sure that I’ve written a blog entry for today, which I’ve now done.

And people wonder why my fingers dance like the wind over a keyboard…

Man. That’s a lotta’ work. Oh well, it’s all writing work, so while not necessarily a breeze, I know at least that I’m suited to the task…

But the most important thing of all is that the novel is really building up a good head of steam now, I can always feel it boiling in my head, even when I’m not writing it, and it’s sitting at 126 pages, or 33, 000+ words.

Yup, just 17, 000 more words and I’ll have used up half my supply. Ack…

And here are some fun facts about the novel so far:

Most Used Profanity: Fuck

Least Used Profantiy: Merde

Most popular product: Cigarettes.

Most popular drink: Coke.

Most Popular Pope: Pope Caius IV

Most popular car: The kind with four wheels plus one in the car that that driver guy uses to steer.

Most Requested Act of Hygiene: Washing Hands

Most popular body part for violence: The head.

Countries that have so far appeared in novel: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, England, the United States of America and Rome.

Countries in which people have died horribly: Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, England and the United States of America.

Countries in which people have thrown up: Thailand and Singapore.

Countries in which people have paid suitable homage to Robert Smith & The Cure while dancing around like Nancy Boys in a Fairy Ring: England.

Countries with greatest concentration of roadside diners attacked: The United States of America.

Countries in which pretentious gallery openings have occurred: The United States of America.

Countries with greatest concentration of really obnoxious advertising executives: Singapore

Countries in which people have chronically masturbated: Rome.

Trust me, it’ll all make sense. I hope…

Neil-O-Palooza Lives On In Spirit

Maybe I’m just addicted to the enthusiasm and near hysteria engendered by people who like Neil-O, but I’ve been tracking his progress now, reading the accounts on the message boards and sharing the love with my account right here on this very blog.

So if you’re one of the new folks that dropped in curious to see what people in other countries were doing about their fixation on All-Singing, All-Dancing Neil-O, then welcome, and I hope you stick around a while. There may yet still be hope that you, reading this very blog, will be able to say one day, “Oh yeah, I followed his career and cheered him on and got personal responses from him in his blog before he got too busy for that sort of thing and his phobia of popularity kicked in!”

Or maybe not.

Hell, I can dream, can’t I?

In the meantime, if you want yet another account from yet another writer who’s inspired by Neil-O, you can always check out this Filipino journalist’s account here. He got luckier than I did and managed to snag an interview. Lucky bastard…

Working Weekends

Despite the fact that it’s A) Saturday and B) I’m bereft of a full time job, I’m kind of hip deep in work.

Part of it is that even though the previous script I was working on is done, another has popped up to all-too-quickly replace it and there are lots of big gaps to fill in as more details start to pop up. The other thing is that someone wants to talk to me about writing a script for a one hour documentary that is supposed to start shooting on WEDNESDAY. That sort of makes me wonder about just how much these people know what they’re doing, but then so does the fact that they arranged a meeting for this afternoon and have yet to tell me where it actually is, even though they’ve had three days to do it…

And of course, there’s the “chore” of finishing video games for review. Plus playing the game I just got yesterday for fun (Haunting Ground! It’s like Friday the 13th with The Littlelest Hobo!) and all the usual things like shopping for groceries and such, but I am kind of surprised that what was initially looking like a quiet weekend has turned into me wondering if I’m even going to have time to write my novel at all.

And of course there’s the fallout from Neil-O-Palooza.

It’s a bit depressing to watch things suddenly become “normal” again. I mean, for the last four days since Neil-O showed up, it was neat to see the locals actually get excited about someone who was smart and creative rather than beautiful and rich. Almost made me wonder if perhaps there was some hope for the island and that it might not have an inevitable destiny as a mid-level manager factory. Of course as soon as Neil-O left, everything promptly returned to normal, so with the exception of a few people, I doubt the experience is going to have a lasting impact on anyone.

I also begin to realize he’s enjoying the Philippines a great deal more. I’m not terribly surprised by that. The country is half interesting, half insanity, so if you’re a writer, it’s a gold mine of material. There’s ALWAYS something to comment on, whether it’s the bizarre crowds at the airport, or stepping into a McDonald’s only to be greeted not by Ronald himself, but a security guard with an Uzi or an MP5.

Oh well, too much slacking and there’s too much writing (None of it novel related. Bah) to do.

Back to work…

And The Final Goodbye To Neil-O-Palooza

So here’s what I felt compelled to send to Neil-O on his blog. I don’t expect him to reply to it, and I don’t need him to.


Hi, Neil-O,

If that sounds familiar, I asked you a question last year or so on your blog about the obligations of a writer to their fans, and made a comment about Emily Dickinson being dragged out for David Letterman to hurl watermelons at Paul. You are true to your own advice, treating all the fans with generosity and gratitude.

I’m also the guy that showed up for your signing today, who was also present the night before and asked the question about sticking to the magic number of 100,000 words for publication, and I’m the guy that asked you the question at your first press conference about what games you liked and what your involvement with the industry is.

I’m not really expecting you to print this in your blog, since it’s just more something I wanted to tell you rather than have a question that would leave me squealing “He replied!” since you’ve replied enough over the last few days.

Mostly, I just want to say thank you.

When I was in university, I wasn’t–as most university students aren’t–a particularly happy camper, still finding myself, having a rather unpleasant family situation, and having this burning desire to be a writer and tell stories, majoring in English literature, taking all the creative writing classes I could, and sporadically reading individual issues of Sandman over the years. However, in university, one day, I finally got around to buying one of the early TPB compiliatons. It was The Doll’s House, and it was the copy you signed for me today. Or yesterday, since you’re likely reading this after waking up. That TPB has been with me all over the world since I left my home country of Canada. It came with me to Thailand, it came with me to Singapore, it came with me on working trips to Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and a few other countries, but it was a important to me, because when I finally read a complete story line of yours from start to finish, it left me breathless and amazed and hopeful because you taught me something very important about writing. You taught me that it really is okay to go where your imagination tells you, to do it knowing the risks, but willing to embrace the possibilities despite that, and it’s a story I go back to with regularity, whenever my own writing’s not going so well, or whenever I just have this need to look at something, marvel at it, and think “I want to do that,” and then go off and try.

So whether it means anything to you or not, (And judging from your gentle nature, it probably will mean something) I wanted to tell you of the new generation of writers that are striving to do something good, something they can be proud of that’s funny, or sad, or moving, or important to people in some way, at least one of those writers (or aspiring writers) looks to you as an inspiration and kind word of guidance and encouragement.

Seeing you in person and hearing you talk and having you listen to me–even if only momentarily–has reaffirmed that this is something I want and need to do. I want to be a novelist. I don’t presume to ever be as good as you, and let alone achieve the same level of success, but it would be nice to walk into a bookstore one day, and know that your name is in there somewhere, and mine is too, just twelve letters behind…

I know it’s ambitious, but I meant it when I said I hoped within the next five years we’d meet again, hopefully as peers and potential friends, rather than a novelist and his fan, but there will always be that bit of fan in me. What Alan Moore did for you, you are now doing with me in a small way, but it’s an important way, and it means a lot when someone you admire, someone who is one of the reasons you chose your path in life tells you, “Don’t give up. Keep going. I hope you make it. Good luck.”

And at least in the case of this particular hopeful novelist those are words that will resonate whenever I wonder if I should go on. And I will.

So thank you again for creating work that inspires, and thank you again for encouraging those that are inspired to soldier on. It’s a generous thing you have done, and it will always be remembered.

–Shoeless Wayne Santos, Stranded in Singapore

Neil-O-Palooza Day III:

FINALLY…

I feel tired and mostly hot and sticky because air conditioners take forever to kick in and finally cool down a room to a more reasonable 15 degrees celsius when you’ve been out of the apartment all day. The tiredness comes mostly from sitting for several hours, in the same way that you can be tired from flying on a plane, you can also be similarly tired from sitting on a floor and watching a crowd of Neil Gaiman fans finally realizing this is their last chance to get a book signed, and descending en masse to Borders, the former Mega-Bookstore before Kinokuniya cruelly snatched it from their hands. More vengeance for getting nuked in WWII, I suspect…

At first I was debating going straight down at noon, but then told myself, “Ah, most of the people who want their books signed probably got it done yesterday, this should be manageable.”

So I sat around and did work-ish things like send off resumes as requested and write a few more pages of the novel, which has now moved on to Bangkok. Then that niggling voice in my head said, “It IS the last day. Wouldn’t you rather feel foolish about showing up early than feel tortured about never getting your books signed?”

And so at some point after two, I made my way down to Borders which is again located in Orchard. When I first got there, there was very little evidence of any potential Neil-O manifestations. The store was about as crowded as usual, and there didn’t seem to be any seats or barricades or anything. I wandered around aimlessly and finally hit up one of the staff asking about what the deal was Neil-O today.

I was told that they had set up something near the front of the store (I’d come in through the rear) and that the people who were actually organizing the event weren’t here yet, Borders was merely hosting.

“Ah,” I said. “So I’m the first of the people pathetic enough to come early.”

“No, a few other people have already come, but I don’t know where they went.”

I had a pretty good idea, so I went out to the front of the store and there was a bunch of folks already camped out on the right side of the main store entrance.

“So… This is the informal line for the faithful?” I asked.

A few people said yes, and I plonked myself down behind a couple of guys who were talking.

“Hey,” one of them said. “I remember you, you were behind me in the line for the book signing yesterday.”

“I was? Okay,” I said, realizing he was probably right since I can’t remember people for crap.

And we sat, and I talked with him and other guy with him, and generally geeked out, talking about Neil, and comics, and genre literature, and writing, and how they were both engineers and I was not. Well, one was an engineer, the other was an engineer in training who had yet to construct his light saber and complete the trials to become a full engineer.

Eventually–far more rapidly than I had speculated–the line behind me grew. I think at this point the Borders people began to realize they were totally unprepared to handle this thing, as their security guards–following normal procedure–told people that sitting wasn’t allowed, implying that they expected everyone to stay on their feet for the next four hours. Eventually the line got to the point where people were having trouble getting into the store, so they decided to make an official line.

I was in with the first twenty or so people, and we got ushered to the inside of the store where more steel tubes (This time with ribbon barriers instead of string! Classy!) made the usual to-and-fro rows. We all got in and promptly sat down and this time no one stopped us. In front of us was the table that Neil-O was to sit and do his talk and signing. And on the left side of the entrance (We had been ushered in and were sitting at the right side, where Harry Potter was playing on a television) another similar barrier/ribbon system had been set up, and more people were stationed there. The rest were kept outside the store in the “main hall” of the building that led to the store itself. That filled up, and kept filling up, and eventually they were outside, and then they were lined up across the side of the building, and then they passed that point and bent around the building and were lined up out into the street.

I was profoundly thankful that this time I was paranoid enough to show up early.

Then 15 minutes before he was supposed to, Neil-O showed up.

He took the microphone, gave a little speech about how the Singaporeans weren’t quite as friendly as the Brazilians, but were less insane, so that counted for a lot, and then explained that he’d shown up early and that the talk was going to be brief since it was obvious that if the line didn’t start moving soon, traffic was going to start getting blocked.

He answered something like three questions, and then he got down to the business of signing. He explained that due to the insane numbers, there were some new rules. In addition to there only being three items allowed for the signing, only one could be personalized with a “To xxx” or “For xxxx” and the others would simply have his name on them. Also, no photos would be taken, since that tended to slow things up, but people were welcome to take photos, it’s just that no time would be taken to stop and pose for them. And then he was off.

I was kind of down about the whole personalizing thing since I’d brought two books, one was my Doll’s House trade paperback and the other was the Fiance’s Death: The High Cost Of Living hardcover. As I’ve mentioned before, my book was the first complete Sandman TPB I’d ever bought that made me think he was a damn genius and inspired to keep going with the writing through university. And of course, the Death book was one of those seminal works that inspired the Fiance to pursue art. But if those were the rules, then, oh well, c’est la guerre…

Of course what ended up happening was everything got upended anyway…

When I got to the table, I said, “Hey, Neil,” and Neil-O look
ed up at me and smiled and said, “I remember you! You were the one that asked the sensible question last night.”

Which somewhat floored me, but I kept on, while he attended to the books and said, “I’ve given myself another four or five years to meet up with you again, but as a peer, not a fan.”

“Yes, well, as I said yesterday, keep at it. And really, good luck to you. I hope you make it.”

Then he signed my book and wrote “In dreams, begin responsibilities…” saying, “That’s a quote I almost never use, but I think you should have it.”

Then he grabbed the other book and started personalizing it and I said, “Oh wait, that’s not for me, that was for my fiance, but with this one item thing-”

“What’s her name?”

I gave it. He signed it for her and wrote “Don’t die.”

And then he gave them back and said again, “Good luck. Keep going.”

And I walked away thinking, “Wowowowowowow…”

After that I parted with my fellow geeks who were waiting in line, after tossing out e-mail addresses to collect digital photos of the event and then met my friend Rachel (Who is also amazingly sophisticated and urbane. I really don’t know why these people hang out with me…) and she took one look at the amazing line up, and promptly gave up. She ended up buying some novels instead and at least managed to see the back of his head.

As we were leaving I got stopped by a couple of guys who said, “You’re the writer that asked Neil the first question last night, right?”

And I said yes, and they bombarded me with questions about how to get an agent and what the publishing standards are like now and all kinds of other things I forget now, and took my e-mail address saying that, for whatever reason, they would get in touch with me.

And that is the end of Neil-O-Palooza.

I think I’ll probably write him a question in his blog, only it won’t be a question, it’ll just be a thank you, and it doesn’t need to be printed or anything. It’s encouraging when someone you admire that much tells you to keep the faith, and hopefully that encouragment will prove to be well spent.

And now I am going to play more brainless video games…