The Graveyard Book
How lucky could I possibly get? Some of my favorite people (Matt, Steph, Kevin) go to UCLA, which is a convenient 11 minutes from Santa Monica Junior High, the only Southern California location on Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book Tour. Yes, Neil Gaiman!! Author of Stardust (yes, as in the movie) and so many more books, poems, short stories, and comics... Writer of my favorite NaNoWriMo pep talk from last year... and one of my favorite writers of all time, and I got to sit in an auditorium listening to him for hours! How many, I do not know, because I was too enthralled to keep track of time.
(Anyway, I'm jumping into the story, but since I'm tired, details may give way to quick and dirty descriptions.)
Steph and Matt agreed to go with me to the Graveyard Book event, even though neither one of them had read any of his books. Since it was announced on neilgaiman.com that he'd be reading part 1 of chapter 7 (by far, the longest chapter in the book), I decided to buy the book ahead of time and read up until that point.
However, since I was having WAAAAYY too much fun at UCLA (Yay!), I only got halfway through the fifth chapter by about 4 PM on Monday (the event started at 7). Someone had the brilliant idea, then, to read the remaining chapter and a half aloud, which we did (or started, anyway) on the beach next to Santa Monica Pier. Have I ever said that I love reading out loud? We agreed to read 3 pages each before passing it on, but I got carried away once and read six before stopping, then I volunteered to keep reading as we walked to Hot Dog on a Stick (big thanks to Steph and Matt for NOT letting me crash into anyone/thing). We ate, and then Matt picked up where I left off, reading in the car as we drove over to the junior high.
We weren't done yet, but we needed to find parking and seats, so Steph and I dropped Matt off and drove around the neighborhood, neither one of us very confident about the parking situation. But lo and behold! We found a tiny lot (Maybe ten or twelve spaces?) RIGHT next to the school, and because of my superb parking skills (seriously, ask Steph), we were calling Matt to ask where he was within 5 minutes of dropping him off.
After sitting and waiting (and waiting and waiting) and some slightly awkward but very awesome music (oh, also: I sped-read the last 3 pages and then explained them to Matt and Steph, so we were all caught up and ready to be read to), some man-who-was-not-Neil-Gaiman tried to entertain us for a moment before finally (actually, it wasn't that long) introducing Neil Gaiman. AHHHH!!!
He spent a while talking (AHHH! I'M LISTENING TO ACTUAL WORDS SAID BY NEIL GAIMAN! IN HIS BRITISH ACCENT!), laughing, joking, and explaining the brace on his finger (if I had to break a finger, I'd want it to be my middle one, too), before pulling out his new book, explaining the first six chapters in quick sentences (my favorite was chapter 6: "In chapter 6, Bod decides to try going to school, and that... doesn't work out very well."), and started to read.
"We might end at a bit of a cliffhanger, but it depends where halfway through chapter 7 is, so we'll see."
The rest of the book will stay the same in my mind, but every time I read the first 44 pages of chapter 7, the wonderful Mr. Gaiman's voice will be reading it, with his subtle differences in character dialogue, with his inflection and the words read the way he meant them to be. Every time he paused to take a sip of water, I held my breath, fearing the time was up, the spell was over, the reading was done... I wasn't the only one. And then, two seconds or ten minutes or an hour or a day or too short a time later, he stopped, at these words:
The hand that had been in the hole in the floor was holding a long, sharp knife.
"Now," said the man Jack. "Now, boy. Time to finish this."
I didn't hold my breath for long, because suddenly I was literally shouting, "No! No no no, not now! Not now!" The noise in the audience was a mix of laughter, yelling, frustration... the spell broke. Neil Gaiman's own words, posted just this morning on his online journal, describe it best: My favourite moment was the very end: applause is one thing, but the noise the audience made to indicate that they would rather that I hadn't stopped half-way through was amazing.
What followed were scenes from Coraline, an upcoming stop-motion movie based on a book of his (the DVD the scenes were from was burned just 5 days before, so they were remarkably recent), some Q & A (my two questions would have been: Will you write another pep talk for NaNoWriMo this year, and do you ever read something you've written and had published already aloud, and think 'oh darn, I wish I had written that sentence differently'?), and a special surprise: a reading of a poem that he'd written for Tori Amos' baby girl and was now having published as an illustrated version, with at least part of the royalties going to charities.
But then, sadly, it was over... He walked off the stage and we walked out (and then walked back in so I could buy a SIGNED copy of the book, once Matt suggested buying my copy from me because he's a genius.) and drove back.
What a lovely night with lovely people. :)
I'll leave you with some wonderful N.G. quotes from last night:
"The reason that The Graveyard Book is called The Graveyard Book is the same reason The Jungle Book is called The Jungle Book. One is about a little boy without a family who was raised by animals, and the other is about a little boy without a family raised by dead people."
"I don't know, but I guess The Dangerous Alphabet is for children... although it's for odd children... for the sort of children you want to watch."
(Anyway, I'm jumping into the story, but since I'm tired, details may give way to quick and dirty descriptions.)
Steph and Matt agreed to go with me to the Graveyard Book event, even though neither one of them had read any of his books. Since it was announced on neilgaiman.com that he'd be reading part 1 of chapter 7 (by far, the longest chapter in the book), I decided to buy the book ahead of time and read up until that point.
However, since I was having WAAAAYY too much fun at UCLA (Yay!), I only got halfway through the fifth chapter by about 4 PM on Monday (the event started at 7). Someone had the brilliant idea, then, to read the remaining chapter and a half aloud, which we did (or started, anyway) on the beach next to Santa Monica Pier. Have I ever said that I love reading out loud? We agreed to read 3 pages each before passing it on, but I got carried away once and read six before stopping, then I volunteered to keep reading as we walked to Hot Dog on a Stick (big thanks to Steph and Matt for NOT letting me crash into anyone/thing). We ate, and then Matt picked up where I left off, reading in the car as we drove over to the junior high.
We weren't done yet, but we needed to find parking and seats, so Steph and I dropped Matt off and drove around the neighborhood, neither one of us very confident about the parking situation. But lo and behold! We found a tiny lot (Maybe ten or twelve spaces?) RIGHT next to the school, and because of my superb parking skills (seriously, ask Steph), we were calling Matt to ask where he was within 5 minutes of dropping him off.
After sitting and waiting (and waiting and waiting) and some slightly awkward but very awesome music (oh, also: I sped-read the last 3 pages and then explained them to Matt and Steph, so we were all caught up and ready to be read to), some man-who-was-not-Neil-Gaiman tried to entertain us for a moment before finally (actually, it wasn't that long) introducing Neil Gaiman. AHHHH!!!
He spent a while talking (AHHH! I'M LISTENING TO ACTUAL WORDS SAID BY NEIL GAIMAN! IN HIS BRITISH ACCENT!), laughing, joking, and explaining the brace on his finger (if I had to break a finger, I'd want it to be my middle one, too), before pulling out his new book, explaining the first six chapters in quick sentences (my favorite was chapter 6: "In chapter 6, Bod decides to try going to school, and that... doesn't work out very well."), and started to read.
"We might end at a bit of a cliffhanger, but it depends where halfway through chapter 7 is, so we'll see."
The rest of the book will stay the same in my mind, but every time I read the first 44 pages of chapter 7, the wonderful Mr. Gaiman's voice will be reading it, with his subtle differences in character dialogue, with his inflection and the words read the way he meant them to be. Every time he paused to take a sip of water, I held my breath, fearing the time was up, the spell was over, the reading was done... I wasn't the only one. And then, two seconds or ten minutes or an hour or a day or too short a time later, he stopped, at these words:
The hand that had been in the hole in the floor was holding a long, sharp knife.
"Now," said the man Jack. "Now, boy. Time to finish this."
I didn't hold my breath for long, because suddenly I was literally shouting, "No! No no no, not now! Not now!" The noise in the audience was a mix of laughter, yelling, frustration... the spell broke. Neil Gaiman's own words, posted just this morning on his online journal, describe it best: My favourite moment was the very end: applause is one thing, but the noise the audience made to indicate that they would rather that I hadn't stopped half-way through was amazing.
What followed were scenes from Coraline, an upcoming stop-motion movie based on a book of his (the DVD the scenes were from was burned just 5 days before, so they were remarkably recent), some Q & A (my two questions would have been: Will you write another pep talk for NaNoWriMo this year, and do you ever read something you've written and had published already aloud, and think 'oh darn, I wish I had written that sentence differently'?), and a special surprise: a reading of a poem that he'd written for Tori Amos' baby girl and was now having published as an illustrated version, with at least part of the royalties going to charities.
But then, sadly, it was over... He walked off the stage and we walked out (and then walked back in so I could buy a SIGNED copy of the book, once Matt suggested buying my copy from me because he's a genius.) and drove back.
What a lovely night with lovely people. :)
I'll leave you with some wonderful N.G. quotes from last night:
"The reason that The Graveyard Book is called The Graveyard Book is the same reason The Jungle Book is called The Jungle Book. One is about a little boy without a family who was raised by animals, and the other is about a little boy without a family raised by dead people."
"I don't know, but I guess The Dangerous Alphabet is for children... although it's for odd children... for the sort of children you want to watch."