More reasons why Neil Gaiman is cool...

[geri_chan]

Here's my first post for National Blog Posting Month!

I've been reading an excellent book called Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette.

It's part bibliography, part biography: it provides a comprehensive listing, discussion, and summarization of all Gaiman's works, not only the Sandman comics and his novels, but as far as I can tell, every short story, poem, and song that he's ever written. I was very impressed by the thoroughness of the authors, and reading the Sandman chapters especially made me want to go back and read the graphic novels again.

There's also an extensive interview with Gaiman at the end of the book, where he talks about his childhood (including his voracious love for reading), his family, and his career. He apparently was the kind of kid who loved reading and always had his nose stuck in a book, which I can totally relate to, since I was that way as a kid, too. One humorous anecdote he related was that he had always thought of himself as a normal kid until he raised three children of his own, and when none of the three ever carefully alphabetized their bookshelves, he thought, "You know, I might have been a weird child." (pp. 451-452) ^_^ I can't say that I ever went so far as to alphabetize my bookshelves, though it's mainly because of limited space--I have to shelve them two rows deep, so I keep the books that I read most out in front, and the ones that I'm less likely to re-read in the back. If I had enough room, though, I'd probably alphabetize everything! I have to sheepishly admit that my LP collection and most of my CD collection is alphabetized. I'm sure it comes as no surprise that the library was one of my favorite places to go to when I was a child.

(It surely would help if my book and manga collection was completely alphabetized--I was hunting all over for my copy of Gaiman's Death: the High Cost of Living. I packed it away the last time that I cleaned my room, and now I can't remember where the heck I put it!)

There's another great section where he's talking about ideas and the writing process, and how new ideas form each time that the plot branches off: "...'okay, I've got half a page to fill now before the bomb explodes, so I'm going to have to take them into a cafe,' and write about what happens to them in that cafe before the bomb can go off, and actually, what happens in that cafe turns out to be more interesting than the explosion of the bomb, but you don't know that before you've sat down and written it." (p. 504) I know that I tend to go off on tangents all the time when I'm writing, and even if I plan an outline ahead of time, the story rarely goes exactly as I had planned it. Of course, sometimes the tangent works and sometimes it doesn't, but I thought it was pretty cool that one of my favorite authors experiences the same thing when he's writing.

The last chapter is a very sweet and humorous true story about how Gaiman helped a fan propose to his girlfriend at a signing, by writing "Will you marry Jason?" in the copy of the Sandman book that he autographed for her. Gaiman is such a cool guy to have done this for his fan; the fan, Jason, admitted that he thought it was a long shot when he sent Gaiman an e-mail asking for his help with the proposal, expecting that it "would probably be discarded along with thousands of messages he gets every day." But his message was seen, and Gaiman did agree to help, and the proposal went off as planned--although it nearly went astray. The girlfriend was so excited to meet Gaiman and get his autograph that she didn't really take a good look at the inscription he wrote, and had to be urged to read it three times before the words finally registered, which I thought was really funny. (I know I'd probably be just as excited to meet Gaiman, so I can sympathize!) But she finally did read the proposal and said "Yes," so it all turned out well in the end. ^_^

Comments

[lawless523.livejournal.com]

Hee. I alphabetized my books and records and CDs until recently. Now it's too overwhelming, what with my stuff and my husband's stuff - my daughter's stuff is separate, but she has all the manga in her room, which is why a lot of Saiyuki and Gravitation live elsewhere.

I have the same experience when I write; something occurs to me, or a scene goes differently from the way I expected to write it in the first place. For example, I expected the 30_kisses piece I wrote about the lyrics Shuichi wrote ("Fence Around Your Heart") to be another angsty examination of how Eiri shuts him out, which I'd have to find some way to resolve, until it occurred to me to reverse it: Shuichi didn't leave the lyrics there deliberately, but by accident, making Eiri the one making assumptions, and Shuichi didn't realize how much it upset Eiri until later. So it was written from the point of view of Shuichi writing about a past, not a current, problem, upending the reader's (and Eiri's) expectations.

BTW, I found out our library does carry manga, just not much of it. There's no separate listing for them in the catalogue, so there's no way of knowing exactly what they have, and either they have a tiny collection or most of it's always checked out. I did see a volume of "Vampire Knight" there though. I may borrow it even though it's mid-series.

[geri-chan.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad that I'm not the only who alphabetizes their collection! ^_^

If your library doesn't have much manga, you might see if they're open to suggestions about additional titles. It might simply be a budget issue, or the librarians might not be familiar with many manga titles. My friend is a Young Adult Librarian, and since she didn't know much about manga when she first took the job, she used to ask me for suggestions about new titles to add to the collection.

I like Vampire Knight, and it's one of the series that I've been borrowing from the library.