Dream Dangerously
Posted by Ray @ 11:07 pmNeil Gaiman is in Singapore for a few days, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet with him in person.
For those of you not in the know - shame on you! - he’s the author of some of my favourite books, including Stardust, Coraline, and the monumental Sandman series. He blogs regularly and actually answers his reader’s e-mails. At book signings, like the one I went to, he makes an effort to make every fan’s signing different, or unique, in some way. Yesterday, at Comix Connection at Orchard Cineleisure, I heard he stayed until midnight so that all the people who came to get stuff signed would leave… with their stuff signed.
This, despite being jet-lagged and brain-dead from what must have been an exhausting flight from wherever it was he was coming.
So I brought along my copy of Endless Nights (along with Zeng’s), and queued up in Kinokuniya Orchard to meet one of the few people I truly admire and respect.
Met some interesting people in the line (A & C, I’m talking ’bout you!), all of them Gaiman fans. One other person produced a personal notebook of his own poems, and he was going to get the cover page of that notebook signed.
That got me thinking… what personal item of mine could I get Mr. Gaiman to sign?
My iBook, of course!
In concert with the “ooh!”s and “aah!”s of the crowd, Mr. Gaiman sat down to draw none other than Dream of the Endless… on my iBook!
[Right click here and select “Save as” for a 1600×1200 wallpaper]
I was so excited I was at a loss for words. You see, while in the queue I was thinking to myself: what should I say to this man? What can a humble fan like me say to a man who’s work and work ethic I admire so much? After much deliberation, I had it down to “Thank you for writing, Mr. Gaiman.”
But in the heat of the moment, all I could stammer out was: “I’m never washing that laptop again!”
Which prompted the bemused (or bewildered) author to respond, “Well, how often does anyone wash their laptops, anyway?”
And that would’ve been fine, except that I had to blurt-mumble out that the iBook is white, and actually does require me to keep it clean with alcohol and soft erasers, so that I never lose that pristine white shine… mumble… mumble.
So for the record, I’d like to say to Mr. Gaiman: thank you for writing. Never stop, for then the rest of us will have nothing to dream about.
And then… and then… he took out a silver pen, and on my copy of Endless Nights, he wrote the nicest thing that anyone’s ever written to me. So maybe he pulled it out of his ass bum, maybe he wrote the same thing for thousands of other fans, maybe his mind was so blank that that was all he could think of… but I liked it lots.
He wrote:
Ray,
Dream Dangerously
-Neil Gaiman