September 27, 2008

A Geeky Interlude.

Today, I went to the National Book Festival and stood in line for 4 hours in light rain to get a book signed by Neil Gaiman, who is basically the God of Geeks.

It was a lot of fun for the first three hours or so - I love hanging out with geeks. They're always willing to ramble about geeky things, even with people they just met, so we had some really great conversation for hours. And then the staff told us that Neil Gaiman would be leaving at 5, when it was 4:40 and there were still more than 100 people in front of us.

Then the party-like geeking fell into an anxious hush, trying to figure out how many more people would let us through.

But of course, being the most awesome author ever, Neil Gaiman didn't let us down - he walked down the line of remaining people and signed everyone's book. No special messages, and only one book per person, but he was really friendly and chatted with us while he signed.

Since I could only pick one book, I asked him to sign Fragile Things, a collection of short stories. I read it last year, and set out to write my own story inspired by his style, and the resulting piece, Trains of Thought, won me a ton of really big awards and was published in both our school's literary magazine and a regional anthology. So I thanked him for being the inspiration, and he congratulated me and asked where it'd been published, and it made me a very happy fangirl!

In conclusion, writing people are awesome, and I'm going to go write some more kick-ass stories now!

I apologize for the fact that this was not remotely feminist, despite the fact that I pretend to be a feminist blog.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*GREEEN with envy*

Neil Gaiman is one of my all-time favourite authors. It's good to know he's a decent guy too!