(Pumping some much needed blood back to this space after six whole years. Because...why not? And the first piece I am uploading is this, my interview with Neil Gaiman, which originally came out in the February 2008 issue of MANUAL magazine. Reading it now, I still think it's pretty good, even if I do say so myself). 

Me and Neil (Hey it was 2008!)

Neil and Pray

In which a cynical young realist meets and is transformed by the master wordsmith

By Paul John Caña

Neil: I liked being as famous as I was about six years ago. If I needed to talk to anybody, they would return my phone calls. And I was famous enough that if I was going to be interviewed…the editor of the magazine wouldn’t have heard of me, but there would be one journalist, quite possibly over in the gardening section or something who would go, ‘Oh my god! Neil Gaiman! He’s my favorite writer! Oh my God! I have to do this!’ And it would be fun.

In a sea of wide-eyed, book-wielding freaks, excuse me, fans, who converged at Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street that Sunday afternoon in November, there was at least one person who couldn’t relate to all the fanfare. I knew why they were there, and was familiar with the subject of all that adulation, but I could not in all honesty consider myself a full-fledged fan, especially since I’ve only read a couple of his works. So being surrounded by hundreds of eager ‘Gaimanians’ hoping to score that much-coveted autograph, or something more precious like a snapshot on their mobile phones, was a little surreal. I felt like I was in a rock concert. Then again, I should have realized that I probably was, only the arena was a bookstore, the music was set in print, and the rock star was a middle-aged, black-clad Englishman who answers to the name of Neil Gaiman.

Neil: To be honest, I would much rather be a writer worshipped like a rock star than a rock star being worshipped like a writer.

In the pantheon of contemporary literary gods, perhaps no one is more venerated and adored than Mr. Neil Richard Gaiman. Well not in these parts at least. The Sandman scribe was in town for the second time in as many years, and the battalion of bookworms that descended on Subic for the Philippine Advertising Congress, where he was the special guest, and for the awarding of the Second Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards in Bonifacio High Street was sizeable, to say the least. In fact, the only audience big enough to rival such a colossal show of devotion and adoration for a writer here in Manila was the one that gathered in July 2005. And whaddya know, they came together because of Neil, too.

Neil: It is impossible to complain about [being famous] when the most beautiful young ladies come up to you and ask if you’d mind if they pressed very close while having their photos taken. You cannot in all conscience complain about this.

From being worshipped exclusively by comics and fantasy aficionados, Neil has recently crossed over into more mainstream territory via the big screen adaptation of one of his more famous works, “Stardust,” and for co-writing the script for the epic adventure “Beowulf.” When I meet him in the offices of Fully Booked big boss Jaime Daez, he is warm and relaxed, quite different from the stressed and harassed Neil I met two years ago (when I stood in line for more than three hours to help out a couple of friends get their books signed, but that’s another story). Neil himself has acknowledged the disparity in his increasing level of fame over the years. “I think post-Beowulf and Stardust, I now seem to have broken some weird threshold, where people who haven’t read my work think they know what I do, which is a really odd place to be. In the past, people like Stephen King would live there. If you haven’t read a Stephen King book, you would think you know what Stephen King books are like. You could go, ‘yeah, he writes that sort of horror stuff, and John Grisham he writes that sort of legal-y stuff. With me, I’m now in that weird place where people go, oh yeah, Neil Gaiman, he’s something to do with fantasy. And I’m happy enough with that.”

Neil: Any scary thing that smokes a cigar is cool in my book. Anything with a horse’s head is cool in my book. And anything that splits itself in half is cool in my book. And I love the weirdness…I love the idea of long, snaky tongues sneaking, climbing up, going through things and going off to suck fetuses. It’s all really cool.

Only 47 years old (a mere adolescent in literary greatness standards) Gaiman has already amassed an extraordinary collection of novels, short stories and comics that has influenced and inspired an entire generation of readers. No other living fantasy writer in English, with the possible exception of fellow Brit JK Rowling, can claim to have such a considerable and rabid fan base all over the world. But ask him what he thinks it is exactly in his work that resonates so well with people and even he doesn’t have a clue. “The truth is, I don’t get to know what it is that makes it work in one culture and not work in others. It seems to depend partly on national temperament, and partly on the quality of the translation.” Indeed, Gaiman relates how he is “big” in the United States and his native England, as well as in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines, but is stumped why his work never really took off in a place like Germany. “I don’t know [if] it’s the German temperament,” he says. “In Italy, I’m a bestselling author. It obviously works for Italians, and I go, maybe I’m getting great translations in Italy and rubbish translations in Germany. Or maybe it’s just the way these things work, I don’t know.”

Gaiman also sounds off on rigid academics who pick at his work, attempting to dissect his processes and find significance and meaning in them. “Honestly, I don’t think it’s my job to worry about or even think about why I necessarily go and put a piece of fiction together in some way. Mostly what I worry about is try and do something completely new and different from the last thing I did. And then, all the academics come and they line it up and they explain that whatever you just did is exactly the same as everything else you already did.”

Neil: Way back in the beginning, people would come up to me and they say, ‘You write really, really good women, what is your secret for writing really good women?’ And I say, my secret is that I’ve figured they’re human beings. And I’ve never actually worried much about trying to write good women. I just worry about trying to write good human beings. And letting it go from there. I don’t know whether that’s much of a secret, but as a writer, I’d recommend it to anybody.

While Filipinos have put him on a pedestal as something of a literary icon, Gaiman has thrown that respect and adoration right back at us. From his growing up years when he was influenced by legendary Filipino comics artists like Nestor Redondo, Alfredo Alcala and Alex Niño, to the burgeoning talent he has discovered via Fully Booked’s Graphic Fiction Awards (which incidentally was his idea and which he funds out of his own pocket), Gaiman has been very vocal about his high regard for local writers and illustrators. “I think the competition for me came from wanting to say that look, you guys are really good and there’s absolutely nothing from stopping you from going out into the world and being world-class writers, doing science fiction, fantasy and horror.” So impressed is Gaiman with the quality of the entries in this year’s competition that he actually believes they can get published anywhere in the world. “And what’s great about them is they…have a uniquely Filipino attitude, slant, texture and taste. All of the short fiction particularly doesn’t read like anybody’s trying to be like anybody else.”

Neil: I actually don’t believe in writer’s block. I think it’s something that writers say to impress people. Writer’s block implies that the gods, who are normally kind to you, have lost patience with you and are being mean, so you are screwed, and now you’re just gonna have to wait, until they lift the writer’s block and allow you to drive on.

There is something strangely comforting about meeting a man brimming with so much imagination and creativity and finding out he is as human and real as the next guy. Then again, a person who can conjure up beings named Dream and Death, who can relocate modern-day superheroes into the 17^th century and assemble virtually all of the gods of history into one fantastic narrative, and who can imagine a world of falling stars in human form and next-door neighbors with creepy button eyes can’t be all human. Surely, some magic must be at work in the mind of this dreamweaver, some enchantment hidden under the folds of his ebon sleeves. Time will tell what else Neil Gaiman will offer up to his followers next, but for sure, at least one more person has been hopelessly put under his intoxicating spell.