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Neil Gaiman
I'm still trying to keep up the National Blog Posting thing, so today's post is about Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors.
I first came across his works when a friend loaned me a copy of one of the Sandman graphic novels (Season of Mists), and I immediately got hooked. Sandman is about a godlike being known as Dream or Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams. He and his siblings (Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and Destruction) are collectively known as the Endless, and are living embodiments of the concepts that their names represent. The characters are complex and compelling, as is the universe that they reside in.
Incidentally, Death makes a cameo in a couple of my Snupin stories, The Revenant (which can be found on Moonshadow or my website) and A Sort of Fairytale. She's actually my favorite character from the series, and reflects Gaiman's creativity: instead of being gloomy and forbidding, she's a cheerful and perky goth girl.
He's also written a number of fantasy novels and short story collections. I highly recommend anything that he's written, but my favorites are probably Coraline, Stardust, and Neverwhere. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Stardust, which I thought was a great movie, although it deviates a bit from the book. He seems to be an anime fan, or at least a Hayao Miyazaki fan: there's a Totoro-shaped soap bubble in the Sandman graphic novel Brief Lives, and he wrote the English adaptation for the Spirited Away script. (Both My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away are anime films from Studio Ghibli, which Miyazaki founded; he also wrote and directed both films.)
Gaiman's website is chock full of wonderful goodies. In addition to the usual biography and bibliography, it contains a blog and free "cool stuff"--short stories, essays, video and audio clips, and a few other extras. Which led to my decision to download the audiobook version of The Graveyard Book (Gaiman's latest novel) from iTunes.
Normally I prefer to read rather than listen to a book, because I feel like I have more freedom to imagine how the characters would speak and what they sound like. But after watching videos of Gaiman reading excerpts of his work, I fell in love with his voice. It's wonderfully expressive, and he often conveys a sense of dry British humor--but more of a gentle rather than a cutting kind of wit.
In his interviews, he comes across as thoughtful and articulate, as well as sensible and level-headed (see my earlier Lexion-related post on why Neil Gaiman rocks). He's soft-spoken, but passionate about causes that he believes in, particularly the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and free speech in general.
He's polite to fans even when they write to him to point out supposed "typos" in his books, as in this journal entry. (You can find it in his November journal entries; scroll down to the 11/06/08 entry "Remembering Coals to Newcastle".) The reader wrote:
While reading it though, I believe I came upon a small blunder, which you might want to fix:
On chapter 5 [of The Graveyard Book], when Bod is talking to the Lady on the Grey, she says:
'He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well'
Surely the words gentle and strong were switched? Unless the switch has some poetical meaning that I missed.
Instead of being offended, Gaiman took it in good humor, replying: "And that's not a typo, I'm afraid. It's what she said. You'll have to take it up with her, when you see her." He even thanked another reader who "did send me a terrific list of typos in the author's edition of Neverwhere".
On top of that, he looks more like a rock star than a writer: handsome, in a slightly scruffy sort of way; shaggy, longish dark hair; usually dresses in black. Seriously, I think I'd marry him if he wasn't already taken. ^_^
Hmm, as I was writing down that description, it occurred to me that it could also loosely resemble Sirius. (I'm not sure if he always wears black, but scruffy good looks and needing a haircut could be fugitive-Sirius.) Of course, he lacks Sirius's arrogance--maybe he could play Sirius in some AU world where Sirius wasn't such a git. ^_^
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Heh, and you're looking for more stories with Goth chicks, check out A Dirty Job, which is about a man who unwittingly becomes an agent of Death, and You Suck!, which is about young vampires in love, and is a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends. Both are by Christopher Moore, and I love his style of writing. You Suck! had me laughing out loud at least once every chapter.
I like books, can you tell?
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Thanks for the recs; they sound like fun. And I'm a bookworm, too! ^_^