Neil Himself

I went to a Rufus Wainwright concert once and didn't know anything about the opening act. He was a pianist like Rufus and he got onstage and sang and played and within five minutes had the whole audience in on it, singing and laughing with him. It was Ben Folds and by the time he was done, no one wanted him to leave. That's kind of what happened last night when I went to go see Neil Gaiman. He had an opening act, too, who had the audience in stitches within about 30 seconds. Chicago author James Kennedy warmed up the crowd, and by the time he was done introducing the guest of honor, he'd won everybody over, including Mr. Gaiman (himself) who said that he'd been introduced a lot of times, but that was "the best." I won't paraphrase the introduction besides mentioning that according to Mr. Kennedy, bees wrote all of Mr. Gaiman's stories. It's probably best just to watch it here.

The reading was at the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, a beautiful setting. Close to 1,000 people were there and I was lucky to be sitting up front and close to the pulpit where Mr. Gaiman spoke.

He has a lot of fans. I'm not sure how many authors have an actual fan base. They might have readers who like their writing, but having hard-core fans who want to know your every move just doesn't happen for most authors. This fan aspect of Mr. Gaiman's career is almost as interesting as his writing. He read excerpts from Neverwhere, the One Book, One Chicago selection, and then he answered a dozen questions, many about other projects and what's going to be turned into TV or films. I liked his answer to the question about the difference between writing fiction and writing a script: "This is what it's going to cost" is the response to a script, which leads to changes to fit a budget. Cost constraints aren't a problem for writing fiction or creating a graphic novel. It's only a matter of ink.

After the Q&A I introduced myself to James Kennedy, because as it turns out, he used to work where I work. He was extremely gracious. It's heartening how generous writers are in helping out other writers who are trying to get published. It's one of the reasons why I love going to events like this.