Last night my husband and I took a brisk walk to the Orange Line, rode down to Chinatown, and had a delightful meal at Pho Pasteur. Boston is far more accessible now than it was when we lived at the end of a commuter line. I love train rides, but thankfully the time is shorter and options greater now that we only have to use the T. We don’t have to leave the car parked in a public lot, departure deadlines are more flexible—we don’t have to take the last train out an hour before we’d like, and there’s no more sitting in North Station terminal, shooing stunningly brave pigeons from snatching at leftovers.
Neither of us can tell whose birthday present it was—I thought they were his, he insists they were mine. But seeing that we’re almost halfway between the two, it’s not really a thing that matters. What matters is that he managed to find two tickets to A Conversation with Neil Gaiman at the Colonial Theatre on Emerson College campus, right across from the Central Burying Ground on Boston Common, which I found amusing, as I love The Graveyard Book. Well, I love most of his work, anyway.
The line for his books transcended what either of us thought reasonable—primarily because we’ve just had to downsize and still aren’t where we’re likely to end up staying. Why add when you know there’s more subtraction coming? So we muddled though the crowd, out of the lush red, gold-trimmed foyer and found our seats in the balcony. Dancers and musicians looked down on us: painted faces on the ceilings and walls, golden musicians awaited the proceedings above the boxes. Like many old theatres, the balcony seats were designed for the smaller people of another age, so we crowded in—a row of six couples, all strangers with less rom than eggs in a carton, perched in potentially vertiginous space. All well and good. Neil Gaiman was going to speak. Tom Waits, Nina Simone, and Johnny Cash serenaded us over the speakers in the run-up.
Gaiman came to the podium in all black—no surprises—and opened with an unpublished poem about Batman dedicated to Neal Adams, who had passed earlier in the day. He read “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”, “Click Clack the Rattlebag”, and closed with a poem for the Syrian refugees. He may have read one or two more pieces—I was fanboying, absorbing the moment, wherever the storyteller wanted to take me.
In between selections he answered from a stack of questions, humorously lamenting that the audience had had time to think about them, but he had not. Of particular interest to me was a question about writer’s block, which he strategically reframed as a bad writing day, which first we can own and second we can fix. The full answer was lengthy and beautiful, and I found that Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion ends with nearly identical advice, so I’m going to close—and make my point—by sharing it here:
“I just sit down and write, regardless of how bad the stuff I’m producing is. I can do that because I know I’ll wake up the next day, look at what I’ve done, and say, ‘Yes, that is indeed not very good; But it’s mainly because this sentence here is entirely superfluous, the paragraph following it is clunky, and the scene in the middle should be moved to the top.’ In other words, when my writing facilities are on the blink for a little while, I can still rely on the editor part of my head to read what I’ve done objectively—that is, as if someone else wrote it—and fix the problems” (Bender, 262).
And now you know why I work with an editor, and why I am not suffering a block.
Nicanor Abbott 