EEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Okay, so fan girl squealing aside, I had a great time seeing Neil Gaiman at UCSB. Thanks again to Tim and Mag for letting us stay with them. The one sad thing is I lost the hat pictured here. It was my Denison hat so I was rather fond of it and it's a bit tricky to replace. But if I had to lose a hat to see Neil Gaiman, that's more than worth it (plus, I didn't really lose it while seeing Neil, but a few days later).

Highlights From Neil's Lecture:

He read 2 excellent unpublished stories: one about being murdered at sea and the other was called Cassandra and was a creepy story about about imaginary friends.

He answered MY question! I was thinking that it would be really unlikely because we wrote our questions on index cards and he had a huge stack and kept tossing half them aside without reading them. But he still did mine! I got so excited I started jiggling in my chair. My question was: "Did you base the graveyard in The Graveyard Book on any specific graveyard?" His answer was: Stoke-Newington, Glasgow Necropolis, and Highgate Cemetary.

He answered my sister's question which was "How many drafts do you usually write?" The answer was: as few as 1, and average of 2-3, and as many as 11.

Someone asked if he ever felt like his characters wrote themselves. He said no, but that would be awesome. He would just sit there and drink tea. Then he pointed and was like "You, write yourself faster!"

Someone said they were getting a PhD in super-herology. He didn't answer their question but said he "loved living in a world where you could get a PhD in super-herology."

When we got our books signed I thanked him for answering my question and when I told him which one it was, he said it was a good question and no one had ever asked him that before. Yay! Watching and reading every Neil Gaiman interview I can get my hands on has finally paid off! I know every question he's ever answered!

My sister mention she liked "Crowley's green-thumb" in Good Omens and he said he thinks he wrote that bit. I said how much I've always loved how Crowley "didn't so much as fall as vaguely saunter downwards." Neil says he think Terry wrote that bit.

All in all he was very nice and very gracious. Pretty much everything I had hoped for (aside from, unreasonable hopes like having his awesome radiate onto all of us making us into super-writers.) But everything else was great!

Here you see me groveling before the master as he draws an excellent mouse in the copy of Coraline I bought that night to be signed. I was a little sad he didn't look up in any of our pictures. I'm sure he probably would have since he was so nice, but I was too shy to ask him to. Some people went right up to him and put their arm around him, but I was too shy for that too. Still, he'd been looking into a lot of camera flashes, so I'm glad we could give him a break from that and not make him completely blind.

This is the signature in my book. Mouse drawn by Neil.

This is the signature in Chrissy's book. Excellent quote by Neil that summarizes Good Omens.