3:00pm. That’s when I was scheduled to meet Neil Gaiman in the restaurant at the Park Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina. So there I was. Right on time. And waiting with a smile was the hostess. “Hello,” I said with the awkward presentation of someone walking into a restaurant with no intention of actually eating. “I’m here to meet Neil Gaiman.” Her professional smile became a look of minor concern. “Oh, he was just here. The interview’s been cancelled.” Now it was time for my professional smile to diminish a bit. “But,” she brightened, “he said to ring his room if anyone came by, so if you’ll wait here…”

She turned away, picked up the phone and I wasn’t moving. Neil on the phone was better than Neil nowhere, though the geek in me was starting to get nervous at the thought of actually holding a conversation. But when she looked back up, the phone was back on the receiver. “Mr Gaiman will be right down to apologize,” she said.

Apologize? Was she serious? I’d read his online journal for the week previous, as had thousands of other fans. Tens of thousands. Remember those days of getting no closer to your favorite author than the photo on the jacket? They’re gone. Neil’s journal has its shadowy origins with an author’s forum at The Well in April 2000. Since the months immediately preceding the release of American Gods in 2001, fans of Neil Gaiman have been able to turn to his personal journal at neilgaiman.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He writes about his writing, about his tours, about his cats, about his family, about things he knows and things he doesn’t know. And lately, he’d been writing about his health. The non-stop touring had finally caught up. Something unpleasant has came back with him from Frankfurt, and had taken residence in his throat, making it feel “like it was gently rubbed down with barbed wire in the night.”

Yet apologize he did. Before too long, a tired, but very pleasant, Neil Gaiman stepped off the elevator and said hello. He shook hands. The interview would have to be rescheduled. Of course. Sure. Neil was doing a reading at the Neighborhood Theatre that evening and needed his voice. His assistant, Lorraine, would be getting in touch with me about a phone interview. And then something remarkable happened.

Neil asked for a table, ordered some hot tea and invited me to sit for awhile.

That’s right. Tea with Neil. If you’ve read his work and imagined him to be a gentleman and a scholar, you’d be right. He knows a lot about frozen silent films, is fascinated by the narrow focus of local newspapers, and he does a hilarious impersonation of William Shatner. His favorite Doctor Who was Patrick Troughton. He takes honey with his tea. When he was writing American Gods, he visited Lookout Mountain’s Rock City not just once, but twice. Ruby Falls as well. This means nothing to most, but for a North Georgia native who grew up around those two tourist traps, the associative neato factor is immeasurable.

And those 45 minutes just might’ve been the coolest of my life thus far.

—————

4:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm. The faithful start arriving two hours earlier, and we’re watching them from the coffee house across the street. The couple at the next table over is dressed in Euro-trash black, drinking their lattes like martinis.

From the theatre parking lot come a group of four. Two couples. For a moment, they’re confused. There is one door under the marquee of the theatre and another is less than a block to the left. The foursome try their luck at both sets of doors, find them locked, then saunter away in search of something to pass the time. Some ten minutes later, four more do the same. One couple finishes their lattes and step confidently across the street, solving the two-door dilemma by planting themselves in front of the one on the left. Before long, the line is queueing behind and we join them. The door dilemma resurfaces when the line stretches from one door to the other, confusing the further assembling crowd who walk to the front of the line expecting the back and have to retrace their steps to the end.

Now I’ve been to a couple of readings before. They don’t feel like this. This is more like a concert and these readers are more like fans. Some of the cars in the parking lot are local, but most are from two or three states over. Who would’ve imagined that someone would come so far for an author?

Through the website, they track Neil’s life like someone else might follow a soap opera. They know he’s been ill and hope he doesn’t cancel. They’re also looking for a little moment of fame, hoping that tonight’s show will be a particularly good one. “Maybe he’ll write about us in his ‘blog,” beams a girl just ahead of me. She has a paperback novel in one hand and a stuffed sheep in the other. Many have seen him before and have the autographed novels, comics and leather jackets to prove it. They’re all biding their time with enough books to send a librarian into shock. Some are reading, some are showing off and others are sorting their stacks of books-to-be-signed-after. One young woman from Atlanta has brought something extra special to receive Neil’s autograph: a hand-made puppet of Morpheus, the Sandman.

By the time the doors open, the crowd has stretched down the sidewalk and around the side of the building.

—————

7:30pm. Neil’s nap has done him well. He steps to the podium and places two bottles filled with brown liquid next to his notes. As he sips from one, he says that they are filled with water, slippery elm and other homeopathic remedies for his throat. “This tastes like the medicine I took as a child, so it must be working.”

And it must’ve been, as his voice never really faltered. “When I grew up, I wanted to be a werewolf. Or a writer.” The audience was rapt and amused as topics roamed from his love of gardening (the process is important, the results are secondary), the power of stories and where they come from (myth is the compost where stories grow) to the art of storytelling (which is what The Sandman series was all about). From there he wandered through a few more bits and poems and even a story from twenty years ago that he’d been told not to publish. And if you liked this year’s Coraline, then you can look forward to next year’s Crazy Hair. Then there were questions and there were answers. And as the representative from the Novello Reading Festival thanked Neil for his time, the crowd rose in unison, turned to the aisles and flooded toward the awaiting autograph table. Those impatient to wait for the actual doors took a cue from the more athletic among them and vaulted a small wall into the lobby. I considered the immediate future, remembered an already pleasant afternoon and decided to take a polite leave through the back door to the parking lot.

—————

1:30pm. The interview happened three weeks later. Over the phone and during the lunchbreak at my day job. I was still nervous.

I wonder if he could tell.

JIVE: Hello.

Neil: How are you?

JIVE: I’m remarkably good for a day of work when it’s so nice outside.

Neil: I believe it’s snowing.

JIVE: That’s because you’re in Minnesota. So you’re feeling better?

Neil: I am. I’m a lot better. I got back from Charlotte and slept for about a week.

JIVE: As a British author living in the United States, do you ever feel suspended between the UK and the US?

Neil: Well, it’s very weird right now, because given the Internet there’s a level on which you can know, more than ever before, elect where you live intellectually. You may not be able to elect where you live literally, but … when I first came out to the states I had real problems, feeling completely cut off culturally from England. There was no English television, it took me ages to figure out how to get English newspapers, finding one newspaper that had a weekly thing that they published in the US. I’d be reading English news, but I’d be reading it a month later or whatever by the time it got to me. All that kind of stuff. And I felt very isolated, which isn’t necessarilly a bad thing for an author.

Now, before I go to bed at night, I tend to read the Guardian online, which is always my favorite newspaper when I’m in the UK, and now it’s become my newspaper of choice again. I love their coverage of cultural stuff, so I’ve got that going on. And I use the Paperboy newsite just to checkout the front covers of all the other English newspaper sites. I’ll listen to Radio 4 as my default radio station, the BBC Radio 4…

JIVE: Because American radio leaves a little something to be desired…

Neil: Exactly, which is one of the things I always really missed. Which is, you know… I’d listen to NPR, and NPR would always remind me — now this is a terrible thing to say, but also sadly true — it’s like English local radio without any kind of budget. And that’s always the hard part. The BBC, they still have those kind of antiquated license fees, which means that English radio, especially BBC Radio, has the budget to make programs. They have the budget to edit what they do. And NPR always reminds me of… well, you’re painfully aware that when they’re making a program, they can’t record five times as much material as they’d like to record, and then edit a program together over the next few weeks, because they don’t have the time, they don’t have the money, so you’re much more likely to get someone burbling for an hour and a half. And all the interesting things they would’ve said were probably… you know… they’re in there somewhere.

JIVE: For all that American radio lacks, you grew up with an appreciation for “American Comics” and I’ve read that you wanted to be a writer of American comics. What made American comics so different?

Neil: Have you ever read any English weekly comics? They’re these black & white humour things.

JIVE: I used to have a roommate with a subscription to Viz.

Neil: Well, Viz is a parody of… Viz manages the very interesting, admirable and post-modern technique of being the thing that it is while also being the thing it is parodying. But you have to imagine all of these comics about English characters and they’re all odd, one-page or two-page comics about people with really strange personalities. They only have one “personality thing.” They look through keyholes or they carry a fish around with them or something.

JIVE: They have their shtick.

Neil: They have their shtick. It’s an English comic tradition. Things like 2000AD came later. If I’d grown up… If I was ten years younger, well, I might’ve said, “Well, I want to be a 2000AD writer.”

JIVE: Moving on to Coraline and Wolves in the Walls, when your audience is children, do you have to make a conscious effort to write a children’s story? What changes? The story, or the way to tell the story?

Neil: You work a little harder. You work harder in two different ways, one of which is you really want to make every word count, so that’s important. The other is that you become very, very aware of trying to… I become more aware when I’m writing for children of the fact that there are adults who are going to have to read this aloud. And they may not have to read this aloud once, but may very well have to read this aloud…

JIVE: Every night.

Neil: Every night, twice-a-night, for months. That is the terrifying nature of children’s fiction, that if a kid likes something, you don’t have to just read it to them once. So when you’re writing something like Wolves in The Walls, you’re trying to make it fun to read. You’re trying to make something adults can read every night for a month and enjoy.

JIVE: And having Dave McKean helps.

Neil: Oh, having Dave McKean always helps.

JIVE: Did you know Dave McKean prior to working with him on The Sandman at DC Comics?

Neil: Yes, I met Dave in 1986… when we were young.

JIVE: You’ve described your relationship as you handing a script to Dave and him handing it back the way you wanted it.

Neil: He’s not even handing it back the way I wanted it. It’s weirder than that. He brings me something better than I ever imagined, and cooler.

JIVE: Working with him on MirrorMask has to be good too.

Neil: Yes, although it was much more frustrating than anything else we’ve ever done together. Because we’d never written together before. I would always give him finished things, and after 17 years of collaborating we discovered that we had completely opposite working methods. Totally opposite working methods on a sort of cosmic level in that Dave liked to have everything figured out before he started writing a script, and I like to know enough that I’m not just writing blindly. After that… I don’t want to know everything, because otherwise it takes all the fun out of writing, making stuff up.

JIVE: According to your online journal, MirrorMask is going well, right?

Neil: Yes. Dave is doing the animation stuff now.

JIVE: So does this mean your opinion of Hollywood has improved? I’ve read the stories of you and Terry Pratchett shopping Good Omens around.

Neil: You have to understand that at that time it had already been bought by Hollywood, and we realized this might’ve been a mistake. Now, has my opinion of Hollywood improved because of MirrorMask? Not really, because MirrorMask was presented to both Dave and I as a trade-off at the beginning. And it really was a trade-off. And the trade-off was “You guys make us a $100 million fantasy film for $4 million, and we will stay out of your hair.”

JIVE: Sounds fair enough.

Neil: Which is completely fair enough. But one becomes painfully aware that it wouldn’t be like that if we’d been given $30 million to do this, or whatever. Dave got to cast all the actors he wanted. He probably wouldn’t have been able to cast all the actors he wanted if it’d been there. We would’ve had to undergo a lot more fighting with the studio system and such.

JIVE: From movies to music. I’ve noticed that music is never really missing from anything you do… do you have anything musical coming up, or do you have any plans to do anything musical?

Neil: I wrote lyrics for a marvelous band named One Ring Zero who did an “author album” — and album of songs by authors. I did that recently. I don’t know… music, I mean, it’s something that I love, something that I always like to keep in things.

JIVE: Any plans for a reunion tour of Chaos [Neil’s teenage punk band] anytime soon?

Neil: Not to the best of my knowledge, although sooner or later I will run into my friend, Jeff Notkin, who was our drummer, in New York… the sad thing actually is, that it’s the kind of thing that, you know, it would be absolutely wonderful and hilarious. A bunch of 40-something gentlemen who last played together as a school boy band getting out on the road again. You know the potential for comedy and disaster is in there.

On the other hand, unfortunately, it also has to be said that … it’s kind of … it’s like my daughter, Maddy. She just turned nine, and she’s discovered a capacity for embarrassment. When she was eight, she was playing very happily at the Minnesota Renn Fest. Actually going out there and playing violin. And we got her to play once this year, but it was very obviously a very miserable experience for her. One of deep shame and embarrassment, so forth. Because she’d learned a little bit of embarrassment. And it was a very sad and strange thing. I’m not quite sure that I could… although I’m pretty good at getting up there and talking to an audience of thousands of people, I don’t know that I could actually get up there with a band and sing in front of an audience of thousands of people. The only time I did that was once with the Rock Bottom Remainders, playing “Louie Louie” on kazoo. And it was hard.

JIVE: When you’re writing, do you keep a soundtrack running in your head, turn to your iPod for inspiration, or is silence better?

Neil: Oh, no, I like music. Good music. Really good music I always like because I kind of lose it somewhere, it just incorporates into the back of my head. I try and find music that’s faintly appropriate for whatever I’m writing, just to help put me in the mood. When I was writing Stardust, there was lots and lots and lots of Steeleye Span, things like that being played.

JIVE: So what was appropriate for American Gods?

Neil: American Gods was lots and lots and lots of Greg Brown, lots and lots of [The Magnetic Fields] 69 Love Songs — which I had just discovered at that point — and it played more-or-less for the two years I wrote it. And for reasons that I cannot explain other than a lot of it is music from an English person who was in America, a fair amount of Al Stewart.

JIVE: In 1602, your knowledge is very impressive. Not only of the Marvel Comics universe, but of Elizabethan Europe as well. When you start working on something new do you do research then and there or are you just always studying and learning?

Neil: Most of the time you’re researching for stuff many years before you get there, if that makes any sense. A lot of it is before you get there. Right now, I’m reading obsessively about Jack Benny and maybe in five years time I’ll write a story about the Golden Age of American Radio, and people will go “Well, how did you research this?” and it will be hard to kind of explain that, well, I wasn’t specifically researching it, I just got obsessed with Jack Benny and there comes a point where you decide to just use all that stuff that you know.

JIVE: To find a use for your obsessions?

Neil: Exactly.

JIVE: In Charlotte, you said you were looking forward to writing again. Is it too soon to start talking about Anansi Boys?

Neil: Only in so far as, you know, I’m very much looking forward to starting it, and it will be … well, it’s meant to be funny, so we’ll see if it is. Fingers crossed.

JIVE: You said it wasn’t a sequel to American Gods.

Neil: It does have one character from American Gods, but he dies on page one.

JIVE: One of your first interviews in a previous life as a journalist was with Alan Moore. Alan says he plans to retire soon. Do you ever see yourself retiring from writing, or can an artist or writer ever truly retire?

Neil: I don’t actually believe that Alan Moore will retire, so … I think Alan will stop doing these … Alan is somebody who has retired several times from mainstream comics and this, that and the other, and eventually he comes back again.

JIVE: You’re known by your black leather jacket, black t-shirt and black jeans. Do you ever get up in the morning and feel like throwing on a bright yellow and orange Hawaiian shirt?

Neil: No, I don’t really. I was reading an article recently about how strange it was that Albert Einstein had, you know, eleven suits, all exactly the same, and eleven ties, all exactly the same. Twenty-five shirts, all exactly the same. And I thought, “How very sensible.” So… no, I think it’s just lack of imagination on my part. I pretty rarely get up and go, “Oh, I wish I were wearing something very, very different.” You know, I have several white t-shirts, a purple one, some blue ones, and on very hot summery days I’ll put them on. And my family took enormous pleasure when I was spending a lot of time writing in Florida of tracking down black Hawaiian shirts for me. Black Hawaiian shirts.

JIVE: In your bio, you say that Mr Punch is the best graphic novel you’ve ever written. Why?

Neil: I think because it was closest to the thing I had in my head. And it was absolutely uncompromised, it was just: this is my story. And it’s strangely … it’s sort of autobiographical and it’s sort of true and it’s very strange. Very odd.

JIVE: And that makes you happy.

Neil: Very much so.

JIVE: Okay. One last thing. When I saw you speak at Dragon*Con in 2000, you were on a panel with Lisa Snellings [a sculptor], and you said something about a contraption she had given you that sat in the stairwell and frightened the cats. Do you still have that?

Neil: I do, although it was made… she created this little electric eye thing so that any movement would activate it and the idea was that it would turn on, you know, four or five times a day when people went up and down the stairs. And it kind of ignored the fact that we had a bunch of mad cats who run up and down stairs all day, which meant that the little motor ran for several years without stopping, and then finally one day just smoked a little and stopped. So one day, Lisa has to come back out to the house and install a new little motor, so once again it will begin to do things.

JIVE: Thank you very much. Very gracious of you to reschedule.

Neil: Oh, you’re welcome. I’m just sorry that it didn’t work out the first time, but I was so sick.

JIVE: It’s fine. You got better and we had a nice afternoon of tea.

This article was posted originally on 11/10/2003 at JIVE Magazine, an Atlanta-based print/web magazine. And to this day, tea with Neil Gaiman remains the best celebrity encounter of my life …